http://www.rssboard.org/rss-specification earthli News 3.7 en-us 720 https://www.earthli.com/news/ Tue, 26 May 2026 19:31:18 +0200 Tue, 26 May 2026 19:31:18 +0200 https://www.earthli.com/news/ https://www.earthli.com/news/icons/webcore_png/app/news_100px.png https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=6043 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=6043 Sat, 28 Feb 2026 18:58:39 +0100 -- "8/10" 2. "Memoirs of a Geisha (2005)" <#Geisha> -- "8/10" 3. "The Birdcage (1996)" <#Birdcage> -- "6/10" 4. "Doug Stanhope: Discount Meat (2024)" <#Discount> -- "8/10" 5. "Blue Velvet (1986)" <#Blue> -- "8/10" 6. "Good Will Hunting (1997)" <#Hunting> -- "10/10" 7. "Speed (1994)" <#Speed> -- "7/10" 8. "The Silence of the Lambs (1991)" <#Silence> -- "10/10" 9. "A History of Violence (2005)" <#Violence> -- "7/10" 10. "Carrie (1976)" <#Carrie> -- "8/10" Bruno Manser - Die Stimme des Regenwaldes (2019) -- "8/10" This is a fictional rendering of the true story of Bruno Manser, a Swiss environmental activist who traveled to Malaysia in 1984, at 30 years old, to commune with nature and to try to find the Penan, aboriginals who live in the jungles there. At first, they were wary, but they eventually adopted him as one of their own. He learned their language and, four years later, was fully integrated. The logging begins, felling large swaths of the Penan homelands. They can do nothing to stop it, as the stronger will always win in such situations. And the stronger have come with bulldozers, ownership papers, and armed policemen, staking a claim over lands that other people live on. Why does this happen? Because they can. Manser asks his chief Along (Nick Kelesau) why they don't talk to the loggers, to try to reason with them. Along responds that they don't listen to the Penan as they don't consider them to be human. They care as little about the Penan as they do about any of the animals and trees. Manser can make them care. He confronts the workers on the site with the Penan behind him. The workers send him to the site boss, who tells Manser that there's nothing to be done. They have the permits. Manser tells them his plan to block their logging roads. The blockade works as the police are unwilling to enforce the right of way by allowing the workers to bulldoze women and children. Journalist James Carter-Long (Matthew Crowley) gets the word out for Manser and the Penan. The Penan stay out on the roads, defending their checkpoints...but suffering because they weren't in the cool jungle that they call home. Instead, they were living a miserable existence on a dusty road, a foretaste of the lives they would lead once the Malaysian government would "resettle" them onto reservations. Capitalist logic dictates this is what you do with people who are living on land that you have decided belongs to you. It contains precious natural resources that you can just take for free, and the Penan weren't using them. This is capitalism unfettered by morality or justice. Plunder is the name of the game no matter where you go. After a long time of working together, journalist James succumbs to pressure, taking the Malaysian money to turn in Manser, who is eventually chased from Malaysia, forced to leave his precious Penan, including the young lover he'd taken, Ubung (Elizabeth Ballang). He returns to Switzerland to dedicate his life to protecting the Penan's jungles. He starts a small organization with a few like-minded and largely sympathetic activists, like Roger (Benjamin Mathis) and Barbara (Vera Flück). He has some successes -- he speaks with Boutros Boutros-Ghali, who advises him on tactics -- but mostly suffers cumulative setbacks as the Malaysian government and the powerful logging lobby grind down any resistance over the years. At one point, Manser organized an action during a G7 conference where he climbed the façade of a building in London to unfurl a banner deriding the destruction of the rain forest. Barbara streaked across the forecourt in order to distract people enough for Manser to get started on his climb. During this time, we learn more about Manser's relationship with his parents, Ida (Charlotte Heinimann) and Erich (Daniel Ludwig), who worked for the Sandoz chemical company. This is a point of contention for Bruno, who sees his father's entire career as having been part of a destructive machine, whereas his father ... doesn't. At least not yet. His father would eventually, after cancer had taken him much closer to the grave, have a moment of clarity, in which he sees that most people are just shuffling along through lives pre-planned for them by a society that is dedicated to eating them alive to feed the fortunes of those at the top. Long story short, he sees Bruno for the shining light of principle that he is, and questions everything he'd done in his own life, rather than butting heads with Bruno, as he'd often done before. While satisfying, this part felt a bit like it had never happened, at least not in this most obvious way. At any rate, if you're the kind of person who shares this viewpoint -- and I am -- then it offered a nice little frisson of spiritual victory in a film otherwise filled with setbacks and victories for the usually bastards who always seem to win. As long as you have your happiness is all well and good, but man, that Sword of Damocles hanging over you, and under the control of all those whose entire philosophy is diametrically opposed to yours is grating. Even a large success was tempered with failure, when the U.N. agreed that a U.N. commission should have sovereignty over decisions made about the Malaysian jungle but only for environmental reasons, not cultural ones. Not only that, but even were one to tangentially be able to relate the plight of the Penan to an environmental cause that would be legally defensible, the Penan don't merit protection because they are nomadic and therefore cannot even be considered to be a people under the cloistered Westphalian mindset that dominates international law. Manser eventually returns to Malaysia, sneaking onto the reservation to find Ubung living in what he considers to be squalor, as compared to the lushness of the jungle home that they used to share. She takes offense to this characterization, as it is the only life left to her and she lives there with her son and husband, who works in a factory. The Westphalian state has subsumed the Penan and "improved" their lives. Resistance is futile. Manser returns to the jungle, where he finds Along still fighting the good fight, still fighting for their independence. Manser comes up with a plan to map the entire territory, thereby making it a legal "nation" to which the Penan would have rights under international and Malaysian law. Manser sets off into the jungle to share the plan with the other chieftains. He is never heard from again. The Penan fight for their rights to this day. We watched the movie in the original Swiss German, Penan, and English, with German subtitles. Memoirs of a Geisha (2005) -- "8/10" Chiyo (Suzuka Ohgo) lives in a Japanese fishing village by the sea, but not for long. Capitalism conspires with its evil benefactors to force her father to sell her and her sister Satsu (Samantha Futerman) to two houses in Kyoto. It is 1929. Despite her eyes having "too much of the sea in them" (they're blue) Chiyo is taken under the tutelage of Mother (Kaori Momoi). She lives in her house with the gentle Granny and Auntie (Tsai Chin) but also the beautiful but evil Hatsumomo (Gong LI) and her protégé Pumpkin (Zoe Weizenbaum). Hatsumomo is immediately jealous of Chiyo, almost certainly because she's more than sly enough to recognize her potential. Therefore, she relentlessly calls her ugly, frames her for crimes, and otherwise tries to get her to run away with her sister Satsu. Chiyo eventually arranges to run away with her sister but is locked in the house as punishment on the evening that she'd promised to meet her. Satsu runs away on her own, never to be heard from again. Chiyo injures herself trying to escape and Mother makes her a servant rather than a geisha-in-training. It is at this time that Chiyo meets the Chairman (Ken Watanabe) and falls in love with him pretty much immediately. He was the first person who was ever genuinely nice to her, seemingly expecting nothing in return. He buys her a sweet ice, gives her some money, and ties it in a handkerchief of his. She keeps the totem but spends all of the money at a temple, praying that she will become a geisha and be able to spend her life with him. Years later, Chiyo is ready to become Sayuri (Ziyi Zhang) and begin her tutelage under Mameha (Michelle Yeoh) while Pumpkin continues under the brutal regime of Hatsumomo. Mameha is wonderful from beginning to end, devoted to Sayuri's well-being, and even making a huge bet on her earning an even more spectacular purchase price for her virginity than even Mameha had earned, when she'd set the all-time record. Sayuri enters the Chairman's orbit again but ends up working for his business partner -- to whom he owes his life -- Nobu (Kôji Yakusho), even though she desperately wants to be with her love. She is nothing if not patient, understanding how society works. She ends up getting 50% more money than anyone had ever had before her, and it was paid by Dr. Crab, who then takes her virginity. This high price was immediately confiscated by Mother but she also immediately names Sayuri as her heir, enraging Hatsumomo and Pumpkin. Hatsumomo gets mad-drunk and nearly burns the whole place down, having discovered Sayuri's crush on the Chairman. She is banished, never to be heard from again. WWII begins, throwing all of Kyoto into an uproar of refugees. Sayuri escapes into the countryside to work on a farm, spending the war years making kimonos. At the end of the war, Nobu shows up to ask her to once again take up the mantle of the geisha, to convince U.S.-American Colonel Derricks (Ted Levine) to invest with Nobu and the Chairman. Mameha is back, as is Pumpkin, who has become, over the course of the occupation, a famous and seemingly quite enthusiastic escort. Sayuri rejects the Colonel's sexual advances, then learns from Nobu that he wishes to sponsor her as his geisha. She wants nothing of the sort, as she is still devoted to her dream of the Chairman. She contrives to have Nobu catch the Colonel taking advantage of her but Pumpkin betrays her and brings the Chairman instead, who will presumably write off Sayuri forever for her indiscretion, which is, like, utterly wild, to consider, but this very much feels like a Japanese Wuthering Heights at this point, so we'll just run with it. Why did Pumpkin do it? Well, because she was still pissed that Mother had preferred Sayuri as an heir. Say what you want about her but the girl can hold a grudge. Back in Gion, Kyoto, Sayuri is called to a meeting in a tea house, expecting to see Nobu but encountering the Chairman instead, who finally confesses not only his reciprocal love for her, but that he's always known who she was, but that he spent decades giving Nobu preference because of his debt to him. All's well that ends well. This was an utterly beautiful film, justly winning awards for Art Direction, Cinematography, and Costume Design. The music by John Williams with cello solos by Yoyo Ma and violin solos by Itzhak Perlman didn't win, but was nominated. Lovely. The Birdcage (1996) -- "6/10" I already "watched and reviewed this movie in 2014" . I can only confirm my feelings from that review: while I was initially more excited to see Robin Wiliams, Nathan Lane, and Hank Azaria flounce and mince around their environs, the relentless kowtowing to homophobia is too much of a turnoff. I understand that there are hateful people in the world. I just don't enjoy watching a movie in which one of them is a 20-year-old son Val (Dan Futterman, who was nearly 30 at the time, and looked it) who was raised by two fathers, but who doesn't seem to have learned anything from them and is far more interested in marrying into the powerful family of his empty shell of a girlfriend, no matter how Ku-Klux-Klan-adjacent they might be. I further understand that the film is ostensibly making fun of these stereotypes but it gives them so much uncritical screen-time that it's hard to take seriously as satire. Even Armand (Robin Williams) seems to be embarrassed of Albert (Nathan Lane) and largely on the same page as Val, who is visibly disgusted by how queer everyone else is. Val is absolutely unconvincing in the role of someone who was ostensibly raised in that home, in that family. It is unclear why they are all so forgiving of his beastliness. With only initial reluctance, they clear the entire apartment of its unacceptable gayness. The in-laws arrive, utterly unafraid to spout the most hateful, small-minded things, with which everyone pretends to agree. The shining moment is when Albert appears as Val's mother, leaning heavily into the role of a woman nearly as small-minded as Senator Keely (Gene Hackman, perfectly cast) and his wife (Dianne Wiest, also perfectly cast). It's a relatively good setup but it takes so long for anything good to happen, with everyone cringingly accepting the lead from the worst people in the room. What do Armand and Albert have to gain from jerks like the Keelys? They only just found out that Val is engaged to their daughter -- how are they so invested in making this thing happen for their utterly ungrateful son that they are willing to give up the lives they've built for it? It's utterly unbelievable today, especially considering how unabashedly out they are in real life. Was this really the gayest you were allowed to make a movie in 1996? It's a Schande. Even once Albert's identity is lifted by Val -- who makes a completely unexplained turnaround to honesty -- the entire group still accepts wholeheartedly the axiom that the Senator's career and reputation are absolutely to be protected from the ignominy of being associated with queers. Newspeople just march into the club with gigantic film cameras, as if the club has no bouncers whatsoever. The Senator and his wife dress up in drag, with the Senator performing a seamless move to dressing in drag, lamenting that no-one wants to dance with him because he's not pretty. This is all pretty ridiculous and lazy and largely a waste of a good cast. I suppose it might have been groundbreaking at the time but, with 30 years hindsight, it just all feels so gauche, like watching pickaninny films from the 1930s. I wanted to give it an extra star for the cast but ended up not doing so, as I found the number of unreasonable and bigoted people in this movie to be a bit overwhelming. Doug Stanhope: Discount Meat (2024) -- "8/10" I somehow missed Doug's latest special when it came out over a year ago. Luckily for me, Doug is a good guy, and he posted the whole damned thing on his YouTube channel for free. Doug Stanhope is the most consistently moral comic working today, or at any time in the last couple of decades. He has never sold out nor will he ever. He carries the legacy of Bill Hicks, with more of a focus on domestic politics (particularly mental-health care and the homelss) than foreign policy. He is devastatingly funny, deeply satirical, a brilliant writer, and occasionally filthy, which is, great, right? He is unflichingly filthy, like John Waters. What he's joking about are generally dark things, so you gotta laugh of cry, but, if you're gonna laugh, you can't help swearing a bit. Or a lot. [media] 00:00 No Opener 00:49 The Problem With This Special 02:12 9/11 vs. Covid (Expired Meat) 16:04 You're Going Down With Me 29:12 Keeping Up With AA 30:43 Trip Advisor 36:22 High Notes #1 41:29 Experimenting With Sobriety 49:46 Perfectly Cooked Bacon 01:01:14 High Notes #2 01:06:55 Me In Blackface, Here's a Clip 01:09:30 Mob Mentality... plus Inc*st 01:14:34 Leaving On All Fours On the information silos of the 21st century, "There used to be a consensus of truth, like some stable flooring. It's a war in Iraq, let's say. Yes, there was a war in Iraq and, as a comic, you could have any angle: "it's a war for oil" or "fuck the terrorists, let's nuke 'em back to the Stone Age." But at least you're standing on the same ground: There is a war in Iraq. There was not a vocal screaming third party going, "there is no war in Iraq; it's a false-flag operation cuz the Earth is flat, and Iraq is on the underside of it, so if you try to deploy troops there, they just fall into under-space."" On suicide and taking it with you, "How about some common sense or we look at suicide as a business decision? Anytime you hear the expression 'he died penniless' -- why is that a negative? That should be your goal. This is what you strive for, that you get down to fucking put the last $1.75 on a gift certificate. I had nothing left to fucking give. I don't have a bucket list, but I do harbor every grudge so, instead of writing a list of things I want to do before I die, I jot down names of people who are coming with me." On the problems posed by sobriety, "Sobriety...it's an altered state for me, so it's like, 'this is weird.' People do this but the problem that I found with sobriety is, what it does, it will add an extra day into every day that you do it. And I don't know what to do with that kind of time. "Your average day -- 24 hours -- 8 hours of consistent, plodding drinking, and then you have 8 hours of passing out, sleeping it off, and then 8 hours of recovery. And I go, 'where fuck the am I?' And check your phone, and then, you know, pay a bill, feed a pet -- so they call you functional -- and then start drinking again. "That's a normal person. You take out the 8 hours of drinking, then you don't even need the 8 hours of recovery part. Like, it's two days basically. You go 'what the fuck am I going to do?' "It's like if they told you, if you're a non-drinker, and they say yeah sleep isn't a thing anymore -- they eliminated that -- what are you going to do with that other eight hours? Get another fucking side family? Fucking learn a language on the Rosetta Stone? No, that's why I drink. I don't know what to do with those eight hours already; don't double it." There is no other comic I know who's doing this kind of material. Thought you can say that he carries the mantle of Bill Hicks, he is uniquely Stanhope. There is no other comic like him. Blue Velvet (1986) -- "8/10" I "watched and reviewed this movie in 2011" . I let the rating stand although I might have given it a 7 too. It's almost a bit too deliberately weird and hurried in some places. Mr. Beaumont (Jack Harvey) suffers a bizarre accident while watering his lawn. He is injured pretty badly, not least by a small, neighborhood dog who runs up to bounce its front paws up and down on his balls as he lies supine with his watering hose offering the enticement splashing over his belly that attracted the dog in the first place. Jeffrey Beaumont (Kyle MacLachlan) is home from college. He visits his father in the hospital. On the way back, he finds a human ear in a field he crosses. He takes it to the police. This discovery leads him to learn of Dorothy Vallens (Isabella Rossellini), who is somehow involved. He meets and starts to romance high-school senior Sandy Williams (Laura Dern) as they investigate the odd goings-on. Jeffrey decides to investigate Dorothy's apartment. Taking equipment from his father's hardware store, where he's holding down the fort, he pretends to be a bug-sprayer and gets into her apartment, managing to steal keys that he can use to come back later. He and Sandy go to Dorothy's club, where they watch her start to sing Blue Velvet. Certain that she'll be there for a while, they head back to her apartment, where Jeffrey breaks in. Sandy lays on the horn as agreed, but Jeffrey is taking a leak and doesn't hear her. This is actually pretty funny. He's forced to hide in the closet when Dorothy surprises him. Dorothy is expecting a visit from Frank (Dennis Hopper), so she puts on her blue-velvet robe. She catches Jeffrey in her closet when he makes a noise, threatening him with a knife, and even nicking his face with it. She is in control, taking sexual advantage of him, making him undress. Frank shows up as she's seducing/semi-raping Jeffrey and is forced to shove him, naked, into the closet again. Frank enters like a snarling force of nature, yelling at her not to look at him, telling her to spread her legs, slapping her around a bit, then inhaling from what looks like an oxygen mask, then using her as a prop as he gets off. It's non-penetrative rape. It is ugly. But it also kind of looks like they've both been down this road a few times before. Frank's not there for the first time. And Dorothy's attitude is ... complicated. Afterward, Jeffrey comes back out of the closet and tries to console her but eventually sneaks away to Sandy. Before he leaves, he finds Dorothy's picture of her husband Don and their son. He suspects that Frank is somehow holding them captive. That explains the complicated part of Dorothy's attitude a bit better. Jeffrey can't stop thinking about Dorothy, even as his relationship with Sandy inexplicably deepens. I write "inexplicably" because they seem to barely know each other but they're already professing their love for each other. This, though Jeffrey has gone back to visit Dorothy at least once, and not for coffee, it's definitely for sadomasochistic sex, in which she demands that he hit her. When he refuses, she attacks him first, provoking him into doing it anyway. Complicated and definitely discomfiting. At Dorothy's club, Jeffrey is drinking his customary Heineken and sees Frank, as well as Yellow Man (Fred Pickler), a man in a yellow suit, who Jeffrey had photographed with Frank earlier. Jeffrey returns to Dorothy's apartment for some clowning around. Frank and his crew catch him leaving. Dorothy introduces Jeffrey as a neighbor, which no-one believes. They take a psychotic joyride together to Ben's (Dean Stockwell) place, where Frank is a sociopath and Ben blows it off, lip-syncing his way through Roy Orbison's In Dreams. Back in the car, Frank makes moves on Dorothy, with Jeffrey and his crew of three guys in the car, grabbing for her tits with one hand while jamming the gas mask on his face with the other. Jeffrey pops Frank in the nose and is dragged out of the car, where Frank molests Jeffrey, kissing him with his bloody face before beating him unconscious. Jeffrey wakes up in the sawmill yard where they'd stopped for their little party the previous evening, walking home with a decent shiner. He goes to the police to talk to Sandy's father Detective Williams (George Dickerson). At the station, he sees the Yellow Man working there. Williams mysteriously tells Jeffrey to ignore what he's seen. Jeffrey picks up Sandy for a date. They smooch, declare their love, then drive home, pursued by a vehicle that Jeffrey assumes is Frank. It's not. It's Sandy's quarterback-boyfriend Mike (Ken Stovitz), who is about to beat on Jeffrey, when a confused, bruised, and stark naked Dorothy appears on the porch, looking for Jeffrey. It's unclear how she got there, or how she even knew where he lived, or where her clothes went. At any rate, Sandy bravely helps Jeffrey bring her to her house, where Sandy's mom isn't too impressed by the whole scene, as the only thing that Dorothy seems able to say -- as she stands stark-naked in the woman's living room -- is "He put his disease in me." The Yellow Man hurries to clean up the mess at Dorothy's apartment, killing a few of Frank's henchmen, but not before they've killed Dorothy's husband. He also takes some serious damage himself, still standing but not long for this world. Jeffrey shows up to find the macabre scene, then radios it in, unaware at first that Frank has a police radio but then figuring it out soon enough to set a trap for him. Frank shows up, a psychotic force of nature, hunting through the apartment for Jeffrey, finally ending up at the closet. He opens the door wide, unaware that Jeffrey had pilfered the Yellow Man's gun and can now use it to put out Frank's lights with a shot right between the eyes. Good Will Hunting (1997) -- "10/10" Will (Matt Damon) is from Southie in Boston. He lives alone and is picked up every morning for work by his best friend Chuckie (Ben Affleck). At night, they join two other goofballs, Morgan (Casey Affleck) and Billy (Cole Hauser), and go out drinking. They go to Little League games together. They start fights with other locals; the one we see is in retribution for some guys harassing a girl. The cops show up and arrest them for starting it. Will's working as a janitor at MIT, mopping outside Fields Medal winner Lambeau's (Stellan Skarsgård) classroom, where he tells his students that he's put up a hard problem on the chalkboard outside. Fame, fortune, and maybe a Fields Medal awaits any student who can solve it by the end of the semester, Will solves it. Lambeau is a bit mystified when no student steps forward to claim the solution. He puts up an even-harder problem, one that he and his team had taken two years to solve. Will solves this one as well. Though Lambeau catches him doing it, Will gets away before Lambeau can get a good look at him. On a night out with his friends, slumming in a bar near MIT/Harvard, he meets Skylar (Minnie Driver), impressing her with his acumen in dismantling a snobbish Harvard student who'd tried humiliating Chuckie. He dismantled him with an overwhelming barrage of knowledge that showed he'd learned all of the mainstream history but also the alternate, much-more accurate version as well (he would mention The People's History of the United States later in the film, a book that I would end up reading only 10 years later, in "2004" ). Lambeau eventually finds out who he is, learning that he'd been working as a janitor as part of his parole program. He finds Will in court, where he's defending himself -- if he's so smart, why doesn't he know that a man who represents himself has a fool for a client? -- and doing an OK job of it, if not as good a job as he'd done before, where he'd gotten himself free again and again by citing obscure legal works from the 1800s, which he'd inhaled into his eidetic memory, and from which his lightning-fast mind could construct legal defenses. The judge doesn't buy it this time and sentences him. Lambeau intervenes, getting Will's sentence lightened to having to work with him at the university as well as getting therapy. While Will is genuinely intrigued by the thought of working on high-level mathematics, he is not at all interested in therapy. He tortures five therapists until he finally ends up in the office of Sean (Robin Williams), a Harvard classmate of Lambeau's, who is, in his own way, just as smart as Lambeau and Will. After Will brings the brunt of his intellect to bear on him in the first session, Sean ripostes in the second session to show that, while there is such a thing as intelligence (which you're born with) and knowledge (which you can acquire, limited only by your intelligence), it's wisdom (which anyone can acquired by learning from experience) that matters most. It is with wisdom that Sean trumps both Lambeau and Will, having learned that there are experiences that are just as important as learning things because those experiences are what makes us human. And what's the point of knowing things, of being smart, if you've no-one to share it with? As I watch this movie again, a couple of decades after I'd watched it the first time, I realize that both Will and Sean were more than a little formative for me, coming at a time in my life when I was toying with Libertarianism. I had my own Sean who rescued me from that wayward way of thinking, a friend from university who I ended up working with in New York, and who showed the same level of near-infinite patience that Sean does with Will with a smart guy who rounded up "having learned some stuff" to "knowing everything". [image]Will begins to date Skylar, and begins to open up to Sean, as Sean has opened up to him. Sean has earned Will's trust, and Sean is started to teach Will the one thing that he can't learn from books: how to be a human being. Will has a hard road, as he was raised in foster homes, an orphan. Sean tells him that, just as Will can't suppose to know everything about a person from books he's read, neither would Sean presume to know what it's like to grow up as an orphan simply because he's read Oliver Twist. "Sean: You don't know about real loss, 'cause it only occurs when you've loved something more than you love yourself. And I doubt you've ever dared to love anybody that much. And look at you... I don't see an intelligent, confident man... I see a cocky, scared shitless kid. But you're a genius Will. No one denies that. No one could possibly understand the depths of you. But you presume to know everything about me because you saw a painting of mine, and you ripped my fucking life apart. You're an orphan right? [Will nods] Sean: You think I know the first thing about how hard your life has been, how you feel, who you are, because I read Oliver Twist? Does that encapsulate you? Personally... I don't give a shit about all that, because you know what, I can't learn anything from you, I can't read in some fuckin' book. Unless you want to talk about you, who you are. Then I'm fascinated. I'm in. But you don't want to do that do you sport? You're terrified of what you might say. Your move, chief." Will does not prove to be an easy nut to crack for anyone: Lambeau is certainly not going to do it because he never finished growing up himself, and because he has long ago accepted the rigid confines of a world that trapped him by calling him smart so often that he never thought to seek anything more. Their relationship is complicated by the fact that Lambeau has had his self-image shattered by this young man to whom everything Lambeau struggles to achieve comes so easily. Lambeau is accustomed to being the smartest guy in the room and has no practice for this relationship at all. Will is not equipped to be the one that lets him down slowly. "Will: Do you know how easy this is for me? Do you have any fucking idea how easy this is? This is a fucking joke! And I'm sorry you can't do this, I really am. Because I wouldn't have to fucking sit here and watch you fumble around and fuck it up. Lambeau: [...] You're right Will. I can't do this proof. But you can, and when it comes to that, it's only about... it's just a handful of people in the world who can tell the difference between you and me. But I'm one of them. Will: Sorry. Lambeau: Yeah, so am I. Most days I wish I never met you. Because then I could sleep at night, and I wouldn't... and I wouldn't have to walk around with the knowledge that there's someone like you out there. [Will leaves the room] Lambeau: And I wouldn't have to watch you throw it all away." Skylar could do it, and Lord knows she tries, mature beyond her years, but Will has literally nothing in his makeup that would make him trust her .It is impossible. He only knows how to lie to her and then burst out angrily when she fails to see through his lies to deduce the exact truth that he'd worked so hard to hide. He immediately concludes that this is because she's not quick enough to keep up with him, because he's still a child emotionally. "Will: [talking to Skylar in her dorm room] What do you wanna know? That I don't have 12 brothers? That I'm a fuckin' orphan? You don't wanna hear that... no, you don't wanna hear that. You don't wanna hear that I got fuckin' cigarettes put out on me when I was a little kid! That this [points to his left ribs] Will: is 'cause the motherfucker stabbed me! You don't wanna hear that shit, Skylar. Tell me you don't wanna hear that shit isn't fuckin' surgery!" Sean comes the closest to doing it, and finally does, connecting on a level that only he can, finally being able to reveal to Will that he, too, was beaten mercilessly as a child, by his drunken father. I write "finally" because he had to wait for Will to draw it out of him rather than using it as a tool. "Sean: My father was an alcoholic. Mean fuckin' drunk. He'd come home hammered, looking to whale on somebody. So I'd provoke him, so he wouldn't go after my mother and little brother. Interesting nights were when he wore his rings. Will: He used to just put a belt, a stick, and a wrench on the table. Just say, "Choose." Sean: Well I gotta go with the belt there. Will: I used to go with the wrench. Sean: Why the wrench? Will: Cause fuck him, that's why. Sean: Your foster father? Will: Yeah." Will ends up crying in Sean's arms; it's a legitimate breakthrough that gives Will a lot to think about. What really seals the deal, though, what really wakes Will up to what a chickenshit he'd been for a while now, creeping around, doing only what he was good at, afraid to try anything else, like trust or love, was his best friend Chuckie. "Will: [both leaning on a pick up truck while drinking beers and smoking cigarettes on a construction site] What do I wanna way outta here for? I'm gonna live here the rest of my fuckin' life. We'll be neighbors, have little kids, take 'em to Little League up at Foley Field. Chuckie: Look, you're my best friend, so don't take this the wrong way but, in 20 years if you're still livin' here, comin' over to my house, watchin' the Patriots games, workin' construction, I'll fuckin' kill ya. That's not a threat, that's a fact, I'll fuckin' kill ya. Will: What the fuck you talkin' about? Chuckie: You got somethin' none of us have... Will: Oh, come on! What? Why is it always this? I mean, I fuckin' owe it to myself to do this or that. What if I don't want to? Chuckie: No. No, no no no. Fuck you, you don't owe it to yourself man, you owe it to me. Cuz tomorrow I'm gonna wake up and I'll be 50, and I'll still be doin' this shit. And that's all right. That's fine. I mean, you're sittin' on a winnin' lottery ticket. And you're too much of a pussy to cash it in, and that's bullshit. 'Cause I'd do fuckin' anything to have what you got. So would any of these fuckin' guys. It'd be an insult to us if you're still here in 20 years. Hangin' around here is a fuckin' waste of your time. Will: You don't know that. Chuckie: Let me tell you what I do know. Every day I come by to pick you up, and we go out drinkin' or whatever and we have a few laughs. But you know what the best part of my day is? The ten seconds before I knock on the door 'cause I let myself think I might get there, and you'd be gone. I'd knock on the door and you wouldn't be there. You just left. [A beat.] Chuckie: Now, I don't know much. But I know that. " During all of this, Lambeau is organizing interviews for Will at various high-powered consulting companies. Will has a date with Skylar, so he sends Chuckie in a suit to stand in for him. He does a great job, extorting a "retainer" of $73 from the guys at one interview. Will shows up to the NSA interview himself, where he's asked why he wouldn't want to work for someplace as awesome as the NSA. "That's a tough one, but I'll take a shot. Say I'm workin' at the N.S.A. and somebody puts a code on my desk. Something no one else can break. Maybe I take a shot at it and maybe I break it. I'm real happy with myself because I did my job well. But maybe that code was the location of some rebel army in North Africa or the Middle East. Once they have that location, they bomb the village where the rebels are hidin'. Fifteen hundred people that I never met, never had no problem with, get killed. "Now the politicians are saying, "Send in the Marines to secure the area," 'cause they don't give a shit. It won't be their kid over there gettin' shot, just like it wasn't them when their number got called 'cause they were in the National Guard. It'll be some kid from Southie over there takin' shrapnel in the ass. "He comes back to find the plant he used to work at... got exported to the country he got back from, and the guy who put the shrapnel in his ass got his old job... 'cause he'll work for 15¢ a day and no bathroom breaks. Meanwhile, he realizes the only reason he was over there in the first place... was so we could install a government that would sell us oil at a good price. "Of course, the oil companies used a skirmish over there to scare up domestic oil prices. A cute little ancillary benefit for them, but it ain't helpin' my buddy at $2.50 a gallon. They're takin' their sweet time bringin' the oil, of course. Maybe they even took the liberty to hire an alcoholic skipper, who likes to drink martinis and fuckin' play slalom with the icebergs. It ain't too long till he hits one, spills the oil... and kills all the sea life in the North Atlantic. "So now my buddy's out of work, he can't afford to drive, so he's walkin' to the fuckin' job interviews... which sucks because the shrapnel in his ass is givin' him chronic hemorrhoids. Meanwhile, he's starvin', 'cause every time he tries to get a bite to eat, the only blue plate special they're servin'... is North Atlantic scrod with Quaker State. "So what did I think? I'm holdin' out for somethin' better. I figure, fuck it. While I'm at it, why not just shoot my buddy, take his job, give it to his sworn enemy, hike up gas prices, bomb a village, club a baby seal, hit the hash pipe and join the National Guard? "I could be elected president." Will finally turns 21. He no longer has to go to therapy. He takes his leave of Sean. They promise to stay in touch. Sean is hitting the road -- China, India, Baltimore -- taking a risk of his own, maybe going to write a little. Chuckie, Morgan and Billy present Will with his birthday present -- he's expecting them to kick his ass, but instead, they got him a car. "This is ugliest car I've ever seen." But he loves it. He bails on the job he'd accepted, stops by Sean's place to leave a note that reads, "I gotta see about a girl," and heads west, for California. Two hours of non-fat movie. incredible writing, incredible dialogue, incredible acting, beautifully filmed. No notes. Will and Sean were both formative characters, since I was 25 when I first saw this film. I have to smile now when I think how the balance has shifted in whom I find most admirable. Speed (1994) -- "7/10" The last time "I watched this was in 2011, in French" . I had forgotten that the movie started with an attempted hostage-taking by ex-cop Howard Payne (Dennis Hopper, unhinged in a way similar to his role as Frank in "Blue Velvet" <#Blue>), where officers Jack Traven (Keanu Reeves) and Harry (Jeff Daniels) thwart his attempt to extort $3.5M by rescuing the hostages out of a rigged elevator. They get a commendation, pissing off Howard even more. Howard is back soon enough, rigging a bus to blow sky-high, to get Jack's attention, then informing him of another bus that has a bomb on it, that's set to go off if the bus drives more slowly than 50MPH. Jack jumps into action, chasing down the bus and making his way onto it. There is a bit of commotion, with driver Sam (Hawthorne James) getting shot by a passenger and Annie (Sandra Bullock) taking the wheel. Stephens (Alan Ruck, i.e., Cameron from Ferris Bueller's Day Off) is also on the bus, as a tourist. Jack phones in the bomb threat to Harry and Capt. McMahon (Joe Morton) and they start the operation. Annie's driving and she's gonna drive through a bunch of stuff to keep the bus at over 50MPH. They have a police escort that clears a path for them as they careen around a corner, on two wheels, toward an empty stretch of freeway. Unfortunately, the highway's not finished. There's a gap. Annie's gonna have to jump it. She floors it up to 70MPH ... and lands it. They're still going. 50MPH. This is patently ridiculous because, although Jack says that "there's usually an incline," there was clearly no incline and no reason why the bus jumped upwards instead of sinking like a stone and, at best, smashing into the other side of the bridge or, at worst, making a huge crater under it. They exit at LAX, with Jack realizing that they can circle on the tarmac instead of using roads. Howard calls Jack to tell him that he still wants his money. Jack convinces him to let him get off the bus so that he can arrange it for him. Howard can no longer see them from the cameras in the helicopters because they're banned from the airport airspace. Jack jumps on a sled hooked to a cable and slides under the bus, trying to defuse the bomb. There's too much debris on the tarmac and he's jostled loose. He saves himself by jamming a screwdriver in the gas tank, clinging to the bottom of the bus, and then climbing back onboard with Ortiz's (Carlos Carrasco) help. He's back where he started: the bomb's not defused. He soon finds out that Harry had led a raid on Howard's house, which had been rigged to blow. Harry's gone. Howard's going to get his money, and Jack is still on a speeding bus with a live bomb on it. He notices something -- Annie's sweatshirt logo, a "wildcat" -- that makes him realize that Howard is tapped directly into the bus's backward-facing camera. It's transmitting on a UHF signal that Jack gets McMahon to intercept, with the help of a news crew. They manage to capture a one-minute loop and are forced to go with it because the gas tank is emptying out. There's no time left. They loop the tape and get everybody off the bus, except for Annie and Jack. They are forced to ride a metal slab out of the bottom of the bus, coming to a shuddering stop in a construction site, a bit banged up. Howard still doesn't know that they've rescued all of the hotages. Jack commandeers their ambulance to go to the scene of the money drop to try to catch Howard (because the other 200 cops there wouldn't have been able to do it, I guess). Howard gets wise to the deception with the camera feed, puts on a cop's uniform, and convinces Annie to come with him. Jack discovers that the money drop in the trash can had a false bottom, so the bag had dropped through the ground and into Howard's waiting arms. Jack drops through the hole to find Howard just getting away, then discovers that he has Annie with him, wired with explosives. Howard escapes with Annie in tow on a subway car, which Howard directs toward a dead end, for some reason, but whatever. He locks Annie to a subway pole, kills the driver, and then realizes that Jack is on the train. Howard is a retired cop -- so he's at least 50 if not much olders -- and he's missing a finger and therefore not really able to use one of his hands. The other hand is clutching the bomb trigger. He somehow manages to climb on top of the train and fight Jack -- a robust 30-year-old cop -- to a standstill on top of a moving subway train. Jack pops his head off by smashing it into an overhead traffic light, snatching the trigger at the last minute. But c'mon, there's no way that Howard could possibly have gotten up there in the first place, nor any reason why he would have even tried it. Jack drops back into the train, defuses the bomb, and gets the vest off of Annie. The train can't be stopped, though. The emergency brake is broken because Howard shot up the board. Annie's still handcuffed to the train, though. They can't move the pole. Jack decides to speed up the train so that it derails before it plows into the end of the tunnel. They do not explain why the shot-up engineer's control board that is useless for braking the train is still perfectly serviceable for accelerating it. Jack and Annie clutch each other around the subway pole as the train car careens around a turn, leaves the track, slides up a grade, and crashes out onto the city street, tipping over and sliding sideways to a stop. They are alive and more-or-less unhurt. The movie ends with them in each other's arms, pledging to paper over any cracks in their stress-initiated relationship with lots of sex. Sounds like a plan. The Silence of the Lambs (1991) -- "10/10" Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) is an FBI trainee in Quantico. She is called off of the training course into the office her chief Jack Crawford (Scott Glenn). He has an assignment for her: interview Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins) to find out what he knows about a serial killer named Buffalo Bill (Ted Levine). Clarice descends into the bowels of the asylum for the criminally insane where Hannibal has spent the last eight years, under the care of the unctuous Dr. Frederick Chilton (Anthony Heald). Lecter chafes at this injustice. He is surrounded by drawings he's made from memory of Florence. This first meeting is cinema legend. The tension, the back-and-forth, the slow-reveal of both characters. It's mesmerizing. And it's not even their best interaction in the film. That would come later but their second conversation in the prison, during which they negotiate his transfer to a prison cell with a view of some nature in exchange for his help on catching Buffalo Bill. Lecter agrees, but only if Starling also agrees to divulge more information about herself. Clarice deciphers Hannibal's first clue to discover a head in a jar in a storage unit somewhere in Baltimore. Soon after, Crawford takes Starling along to West Virginia, where another victim has arisen from a riverbed. During the autopsy, they discover what turns out to be a death's-head moth chrysalis lodged in her throat, placed there by the killer after her death. They soon discover the same thing in the severed throat of the head-in-a-jar that they'd found earlier. Two pushpins in the map now. Senator Martin's (Diane Baker) daughter Catherine (Brooke Smith) has been kidnapped by Buffalo Bill. Though the first deal with Lecter had turned out to be fake, the senator now offers a real one. Lecter agrees to help but only if he's transferred to Tennessee for a meeting with her. Desperate, they agree. It is in Memphis that Clarice and Hannibal have their greatest exchange, where she relates to him a story from her childhood about the slaughter of lambs on her uncle's Montana ranch, where she'd relocated after having been orphaned when her father had been killed in the line of duty. In exchange, Lecter gives her more information to decode. "Lecter: First principles, Clarice. Simplicity. Read Marcus Aurelius. Of each particular thing ask: what is it in itself? What is its nature? What does he do, this man you seek? Starling: He kills women... Lecter: No. That is incidental. What is the first and principal thing he does? What needs does he serve by killing? Starling: Anger, um, social acceptance, and, huh, sexual frustrations, sir... Lecter: No! He covets. That is his nature. And how do we begin to covet, Clarice? Do we seek out things to covet? Make an effort to answer now. Starling: No. We just... Lecter: No. We begin by coveting what we see every day. Don't you feel eyes moving over your body, Clarice? And don't your eyes seek out the things you want?" Lecter plans his escape, palming a gold pen carelessly left unguarded by Chilton. He uses this to unlock his handcuffs and then overpower two guards, killing them both. This is also quite a famous scene. The music, the rapturous look on Lecter's face as he clubs one guard to death and then, unfolding a switchblade, approaches the other, who had crawled off after having been clubbed and heavily maced. Their comrades soon come up to investigate and find an abattoir. One of the guards hangs high up on the cage in the center of the room, disemboweled and crucified on sheets and intestines. The other lies on the floor, his face in utter ruins. He lives, though. They hurry him out of the building, down the elevator. Blood drips from the elevator ceiling, onto the sheet. The police suspect that Lecter is on top of the elevator, hiding, injured, and planning his escape. They hurry their colleague out to the ambulance, then cautiously approach the elevator. Peering down the shaft, they see Lecter's motionless body lying atop the elevator. They fire once into a leg. He doesn't move. They open the trapdoor in the ceiling...and the guard's lifeless body drops down. In the ambulance, Lecter rises from the bed, peeling the other guard's face off of his own. He kills everyone in the ambulance, drives it to a remote area, kills a tourist, stealing their clothes, and escapes. Meanwhile, Starling and her colleague Ardelia (Kasi Lemmons) deduce that the first victim Fredericka was the one whom Buffalo Bill "coveted" and that she was therefore someone that he saw, possibly every day. Clarice travels to the village where the victim lived, looking into her home, discovering that she was a seamstress, and that her dress patterns were nearly identical to those found on the victim's back. Clarice further deduces that Buffalo Bill is looking to make a woman suit out of his victims' skins. She communicates this all to Crawford, who acknowledges but then tells her that he is helicoptering to Jame Gumb's house, whom they have discovered is Buffalo Bill by investigating gender-change-operation applications. Clarice is too far away to get there but Crawford thanks her for her help, telling her that they couldn't have done it without her. Then he abruptly hangs up. Clarice follows a weak lead to the house of one of Fredericka's last customers, finding that the lady had since moved. Buffalo Bill answers the door, inviting her in while he looks for the previous owner's phone number. Clarice sees a death's-head moth land in the kitchen. We watch her apprise the changed situation in milliseconds. She pulls her weapon but doesn't fire. Buffalo Bill sidles away, going for his own weapon, but retreating into the basement. Clarice follows. Catherine is in the basement now, clutching Precious the dog, which she'd lured into her pit in order to force Buffalo Bill to let her make a phone call. Now she shouts to Clarice to get her out of there. Clarice pursues Bill deeper into the basement when everything turns pitch black. She fumbles around, eyes wide, as Bill lurks nearby, watching her through night-vision goggles. As he approaches, he cocks his pistol. Starling reacts instinctively, firing in the direction of the sound and blowing him back into a weak point of the basement, letting in the light of day to illuminate Bill gurgling out his last breaths on the ground. At the party celebrating her FBI class's graduation, she receives a phone call from Lecter. "Starling: Where are you, Dr. Lecter? Lecter: I've no plans to call on you, Clarice. The world is more interesting with you in it. So you take care now to extend me the same courtesy. Starling: You know I can't make that promise. Lecter: I do wish we could chat longer, but...I'm having an old friend for dinner." A History of Violence (2005) -- "7/10" Tom Stall (Viggo Mortenson) owns a diner in the small town of Millbrook, Indiana. He is married to Edie (Maria Bello). They are very much in love, arranging a hot sexy-times date, stashing their young daughter Sarah (Heidi Hayes) with a babysitter and their son Jack (Deborah Drakeford) with a girl friend. Two thugs drive through their town, flat broke and looking to score some money at Tom's diner. They're also kind of looking for a little violence. They find it. Before one of them can start working on Tom's waitress, he smashes the coffee pot across the mug of the other one, causing him to drop his gun. He flies over the counter to grab the gun, pivot, and plug the other one full of bullets. The one he'd knocked down stabs Tom in the foot with a knife. Tom swings around and puts a bullet right between his eyes, then swivels to cover the door. The few customers and his employees are in shock. One of the guys is leaking most of his face and brains onto the floor. Tom just looks coolly at the mess that used to be his face. Edie picks Tom up from the hospital, threading him through several reporters, and safely back home. The next morning, Edie visits Tom at the diner, which is hopping. Some out-of-towners walk in -- Carl Fogarty (Ed Harris) and two others -- who start calling Tom "Joey". Fogarty keeps showing up toe harass the family, scaring Edie and Sarah at the mall, but also getting Edie wondering whether what he says is true. Jack gets into a fight at school, finally unloading on a jerk who'd been harassing him all year. He just went to town on him and his friend, just tooling them up like it was his job. At home, Tom chastises him for having resorted to violence, which Jack thinks is pretty rich coming from him, and which Tom proves him right by cracking him across the mouth, so, well, there's that. Jack stomps off outside. Carl is outside with his two henchmen. He reveals that they've caught Jack and tell "Joey" that he has to go with them. Tom is not into it, and he sure doesn't like it when one of the thugs points his gun at him. He crushes the guy's nose up into his brain, dropping him like a bad habit. The guy is spasming on the ground, clearly on his way out. "Joey" grabs the gun he'd dropped and puts two into the other guy's chest. Carl pops "Joey" in the shoulder -- although it looked like he'd clipped him closer to the neck, just above the collarbone. Just as Carl is about to finish off a supine Tom, Jack unloads his dad's shotgun into Carl's back. Edie once again enters Tom's hospital room but we all know that it's Joey's hospital room and he admits as much, saying that he'd spent years suppressing his old self and that Edie was what had allowed him to complete his transformation. At home again, Sam the sheriff (Peter MacNeill) has some questions but Edie lies for Tom to cover things up. Edie and Tom fight, yelling at first, then with Edit seeming to provoke "Joey" into making an appearance with some hard slaps. Joey very much does appear, responding to her several blows with blows of his own, then tackling her on the stairs, where they lock lips and legs in aggressive, enthusiastic, and consensual make-up sex but Edie walks away immediately after, exuding disgust with her body language, either for herself or Joey or both. Tom gets a call from his brother Richie (William Hurt), who tells him that playtime is over and that he will come and get him in Millbrook if Tom doesn't come back. This is kind of a hollow threat because Joey has already killed what seems to have been Richie's best henchmen. But whatever, Joey drives all night to settle things, once and for all. Richie is butt-hurt by everything. Joey offers to settle things peacefully. Richie has other ideas. One of his henchmen approaches Joey from behind with a garrotte. Joey takes some damage but takes care of him, then kills the other two henchmen before escaping the room. Another henchman joins Richie as they cautiously head out of the office and into the house. Where's Joey? The door to outside stands open. Richie goes outside. The door slams shut. Shots fire. A body drops. Joey opens the door to confront Richie with his pistol raised. He doesn't hesitate for a second. Right between the eyes. Tom drives back, finding his family at the dinner table. Jack and Edie won't make eye contact. Sarah gets him a plate and silverware. Jack offers him one of the dishes. Edie looks at him with red-rimmed eyes. Tom returns the red-rimmed stare. Fin. This is a David Cronenberg film and it shows. It's like a David Lynch movie but with less bizarre symbolism. This was a straight-up mobster movie with some heavy psychodrama. Carrie (1976) -- "8/10" I had seen this movie before but I must have seen it on U.S. television because I absolutely did not remember that it started off with a girls' volleyball game, quickly followed by the credits playing over the girls prancing around the locker room buck naked. Director Brian DePalma front-loaded so much full-frontal nudity that you almost wonder which country the film was made in. Carrie (Sissy Spacek) dropped the last point in the volleyball game outside but she's still enjoying her shower, like really enjoying it. That is, things are going fine until she gets her first period, her blood mixing with the water. She freaks out because she has no idea what might be going on -- her mother apparently never taught her anything about what would be happening to her. She stumbles out of the shower, screaming desperately to the other girls to help her. They just laugh and push her back, calling her an idiot for not knowing what a period is, and hounding her naked ass into a corner, where they start to pelt her with sanitary napkins. Chris Hargenson (Nancy Allen), Norma (P.J. Soles), and Sue Snell (Amy Irving) are among them. The phys-ed teacher Ms. Collins (Betty Buckley) pushes through the crowd and consoles Carrie but not before she uses her telekinetic powers to blow the light bulb above them. Later, in the principal's office, the principal keeps getting her name wrong, which pisses her off. She is meek and shy but her telekinetic powers betray her ire. She flips his stupid, smelly ashtray when he gets her name wrong for the last time. She leaves immediately, heading home. The most unbelievable part of the whole scene is that a wallflower like Carrie would ever have gotten undressed in front of the other girls, especially girls who spent every single day tormenting her. That is not a thing that happens. Carrie would have scuttled off without showering. This applies even more given her extremely religious upbringing, which would have instilled a deep sense of shame about her own body. Anyway... Walking home, a neighborhood boy tries to torment Carrie. She uses her mind to flip him off of his bicycle, spilling him onto a lawn (lucky for him; he deserved worse). He scowls at her, as if she were the bitch for having spoiled his attempt at running her over with his bicycle. Her mother Margaret White (Piper Laurie) visit's Sue's house to peddle the word of the Lord. She is a religious zealot, who soon lays into her own daughter for "being a woman now" and that she "can see the sin inside of her." She traps Carrie in a tiny closet, with a Bible and a positively creepy Jesus figure. Carrie's out of the hole, and she breaks a mirror with her mind. I have no idea how she's never broken her mama's head. She lies to her mother about how the mirror broke. Back at school, everyone continues to be horrible. Even Mr. Fromm (Sydney Lassick) picks on Carrie, though Tommy Ross (William Katt) kind-of half-defends her when she calls his poem beautiful. He'd obviously not written it himself but no-one questions its provenance. At detention, Ms. Collins puts the girls through the paces with what look like boot-camp-style calisthenics. Director DePalma is really just lovingly showing a bunch of purportedly teenaged girls working out in short shorts, though. While Chris doesn't finish her first detention -- and is therefore out of the prom -- Sue sticks with it, but she soon recruits her date Tommy Ross to go to the prom with Carrie. She has a plan. Meanwhile, Carrie's out with her boyfriend Billy Nolan (John Travolta), who plays the same brainless shit he'd always played in the 70s. He doesn't like to be called dumb but he likes to get laid a lot more. He keeps smacking Chris when she calls him a dumb shit and she keeps reeling him back in. She recruits him to do "something important", literally expressing her hatred for Carrie White while she's blowing him. Ms. Collins calls in Sue and Tommy to find out what's going on because she doesn't believe that it will be good for Carrie, no matter what she'd told Carrie just a minute before. Tommy manages to get her to say yes to going to the prom with him, even though she deeply suspects something is up. Now, Carrie's got to tell Mama. "Go to your closet and pray. Ask to be forgiven. Boys. The boys. The boys. Yes, the boys. After the blood come the boys. Like sniffin' dogs, grinnin' and slobberin' and trying to find out where that smell comes from." Carrie closes all of the windows in the house with her mind. Her mama calls her a witch, and that Satan is working through her. In a separate scene, a bunch of guys go with Chris to a pig farm, where they slaughter a pig or two with a sledgehammer. Just casually brutal. They collect the blood in a bucket and mount it up in the gym. I hadn't remembered that they'd telegraphed the final scene so early. They also rig the election to make sure that Carrie's up on stage at the right moment. On the night of the prom, Mama is going through it, castigating and flagellating herself, and freaking out, until Carrie uses telekinesis to put her down not once, but twice. She's trapped on the bed but her mouth still works: "Though shalt not suffer a witch to live." Tommy picks Carrie up. She is dolled up and looking quite nice. She wants to wait in the car because she's scared. Poor Carrie, she'd even sewed her own dress, making her ten times as useful as any of the other girls. Ms. Collins pops by and Tommy even seems to have relaxed a bit and is maybe starting to see Carrie for a human being. It's kind of hard to tell. He even gets her out on the dance floor, He calls her beautiful and is really selling it. He says to vote for themselves for king and queen. Carrie does so, whispering, "to the devil with false modesty." Carrie and Tommy are elected queen and king of the prom. Most people seem to be genuinely celebrating, including Ms. Collins, who is so happy for Carrie. Chris and Billy are under the stage, ready to dump the bucket of blood. I just realized that Sue really had no idea! She and Tommy really were sending him to the prom with Carrie to do something nice for her! Sue pulls back, shocked, as she sees the rope up to the bucket. Ms. Collins sees Sue and they both dash forward. Sue sees Chris and Billy under the stage. Tommy kisses Carrie on stage. Ms. Collins throws Sue out of the gym, then closes the doors. The bucket drops, emptying blood all over Carrie. Norma shrieks silently with laughter in the front row by the stage, exhorting others to follow suit. All we hear is the bucket banging against the rafter, the blood splashing like a waterfall. Tommy looks up, clearly perplexed. He mouthes "What the hell?" The bucket hits him in the head; he tumbles unconscious to Carrie's feet. Norma shrieks even harder. Carrie starts hearing her mother's voice, saying "they're all gonna laugh at you" over and over and over. Chris and Billy get out just before Carrie slams the doors shut with her mind. She puts out all the lights but the red one. Tommy lies unconscious at her feet as she guides a firehose to knock down students everywhere. She electrocutes a few teachers. Even Ms. Collins gets it. Fires break out. Billy and Chris are still watching, looking in. Carries descends, ethereally graceful, from the stage, seemingly floating out of the gym as it burns down. The fire trucks pass Carrie walking down the street, in her bloody dress. Chris and Billy try to run her down, but she flips their car, rolling it into a fireball. Carrie is home. There are candles everywhere. Carrie goes upstairs, to the bath. Her mother is hiding behind the bathroom door. She does not move as her daughter passes by. She clearly sees that Carrie's covered in blood. After her bath, the girl pleads with her; she just wants a normal mother. She doesn't have a normal mother. "Carrie: It was bad, Mama. They laughed at me. Hold me, Mama. Please hold me. Margaret White: I should've killed myself when he put it in me. After the first time, before we were married, Ralph promised never again. He promised, and I believed him. But sin never dies. Sin never dies. At first, it was all right. We lived sinlessly. We slept in the same bed, but we never did it. And then, that night, I saw him looking down at me that way. We got down on our knees to pray for strength. I smelled the whiskey on his breath. Then he took me. He took me, with the stink of filthy roadhouse whiskey on his breath, and I liked it. I liked it! With all that dirty touching of his hands all over me. I should've given you to God when you were born, but I was weak and backsliding, and now the Devil has come home. We'll pray. Carrie: Yes. Margaret White: We'll pray. We'll pray. We'll pray for the last time. We'll pray." Mama stabs Carrie in the back with a large kitchen knife she'd hidden from her. Carrie rolls down the stairs. Mama follows, grinning from ear to ear, and making the sign of the cross with the knife. But you can't kill a telekinetic like that. Carrie sends several kitchen implements flying into her mother, pinning her against the doorway, crucified, with her head tilted beatifically against her shoulder, and with the implements having struck in all of the places where Jesus had been wounded. If Carrie was a child of trauma before, then her prom night ain't gonna help. She pulls her mother off of the pillars, dragging her into the religious closet as the entire house comes crashing down, and catches fire. Carrie is done with this world. She closes her eyes. Sue is the only survivor. She visits the site of Carries burned-down home. The lot is for sale. The sign says "For Sale" but someone wrote "Carrie White burns in hell!" on it. Sue brings flowers. As she puts them down, Carrie's bloody hand reaches up out of the soil. Twas but a dream. Sue awakens, screaming. I jumped a mile, and I knew it was coming. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] These are notes for me to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. The amount of text is not proportional to my enjoyment. I might write less because I didn't get around to it when it was fresh in my mind. I rate the film based on how well it suited me personally for the genre, my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. Links are to "my IMDb ratings" ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=6015 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=6015 Tue, 17 Feb 2026 21:32:58 +0100 -- "7/10" 2. "Addams Family Values (1993)" <#Addams2> -- "6/10" 3. "Die göttliche Ordnung (2017)" <#Ordnung> -- "9/10" 4. "Silverado (1985)" <#Silverado> -- "7/10" 5. "Achtung Fertig Charlie (2003)" <#Charlie> -- "7/10" 6. "Robin Hood: Men in Tights (1993)" <#Robin> -- "5/10" 7. "Moon (2009)" <#Moon> -- "8/10" 8. "Gotthard (2016)" <#Gotthard> -- "8/10" 9. "Platzspitzbaby (2020)" <#Platz> -- "8/10" 10. "Die Schwarze Spinne (2022)" <#Spinne> -- "5/10" The Addams Family (1991) -- "7/10" Gomez (Raúl Julia) and Morticia (Anjelica Huston) Addams live with their children Pugsley (Jimmy Workman) and Wednesday (Christina Ricci), as well as Granny (Judith Malina) and their butler Lurch (Carel Struycken). Their lawyer and estate manager is Tully Alford (Dan Hedaya). He is deeply interested in finding the Addams Family treasure. It is hidden in the deep recesses of their home. Fester (Christopher Lloyd) is Gomez's long-lost older brother. He returns in the form of "Gordon", the son of the scheming Abigail Craven (Elizabeth Wilson), who is also after the Addams Family treasure. Gordon is the spitting image of Fester, which is no small feat because Fester is one ugly sonofabitch. He seems to mostly enjoy the madcap and deadly goings-on in the Addams household, which suggests that he may be Fester. But he is also very much Gordon. All is revealed when he, his mother, and Tully manage to take over the estate from the family, who end up living in a motel for a little while (kind of like in "Schitt's Creek" , R.I.P. Moira). Morticia returns to try to talk some sense into them but only gets herself captured and tortured, which she adores. Gomez and family come roaring back and manage to right the wrongs, electrocuting Fester and restoring his memories. Happy endings all around for everyone but the baddies. "Morticia: And our credo: "Sic gorgiamus allos subjectatos nunc." "We gladly feast on those who would subdue us." Not just pretty words." That is goddamned revolutionary and I am here for it. I gave it an extra star because Raúl Julia and Anjelica Huston make such a great couple. Addams Family Values (1993) -- "6/10" Gomez (Raúl Julia) and Morticia (Anjelica Huston) Addams live with their children Pugsley (Jimmy Workman) and Wednesday (Christina Ricci), as well as Granny (Carol Kane) and their butler Lurch (Carel Struycken). Fester (Christopher Lloyd) lives with them too. He's lonely. Debbie Jellinsky (Joan Cusack) shows up just in time to fill the hole in his heart. She will fill it with poison the minute they're married, though: she's known as The Black Widow. The interplay between Fester and Debbie is far less interesting than the fact that Pugsley and Wednesday are sent to summer camp, where they are mentally tortured by camp counselors Gary Granger (Peter MacNicol) and Becky Martin-Granger (Christine Baranski). Wednesday and Pugsley turn the tables during the Thanksgiving pageant, which ends in tears for everyone but Wednesday, Pugsley, and their little camp friend Joel (David Krumholtz). There's also the new arrival: baby Pubert, who is preternaturally protected from harm and who comes to the family's rescue when Debbie tries to electrocute them all. She'd already failed to kill the indestructible Fester several times. The family survives, of course. Debbie dies. She is buried in the family graveyard. This one was a half-hearted sequel that just hit the same notes as the first one but not nearly as well. Even Gomez and Morticia were pale shadows of themselves. Die göttliche Ordnung (2017) -- "9/10" This is a movie about a small village in Switzerland that fought for and won the right for women to vote in 1971. The film is named after an expression common at the time, that women were subordinate to men because the Bible says so, that it's the göttliche Ordunung. This phrase is spat out by the utterly hateful shrew in charge of the anti-voting group (most of the village). Nora (Marie Leuenberger) lives a small life in that small village with her small-minded husband Hans (Maximilian Simonischek) who isn't too mad that his wife isn't legally allowed to do anything without his say-so. She asks him if it would be ok to get a part-time job because she's bored. No. Hans is off to WK (Wiederholungskurs, which is a once-yearly training for the military service) so Nora temporarily has a bit more freedom. She buys magazines, gets a new haircut, and starts hanging out with new friends, like the Italian innkeeper Graziella (Marta Zoffoli) and the older Vroni (Sibylle Brunner). Nora's niece Hanna (Ella Rumpf) has an older boyfriend, of whom her mother Rebecca (Rachel Braunschweig) doesn't approve. Their disapproval extends to committing her to a girl's home to keep her out of trouble, and then putting her in a women's prison when she runs away from the home. This was just 50 years ago in Switzerland. What the actual fuck is wrong with people? Nora starts a suffrage movement in her village, earning the opprobrium of all of the men and most of the women. They are downright cruel, if not outright criminal. The women persevere. There are a few men who publicly show their support, but not many. Switzerland does not come off well in this movie. It is kind of an incredible idea to imagine that anyone would found a democracy and exlude an entire gender that comprises one half of the population. I know they don't stand alone in rounding up an elitist fairy tale to "democracy," but it is incredible what a good reputation Switzerland's democracy enjoys, considering its recent history. It is possiblly even more incredible to imagine how hard it would be to convince the half of the population -- the one culturally inculcated to think of the other half as feeble-minded -- of the wisdom of letting them vote, feeble minds and all. Nora's face ends up plastered all over town in flyers. Hans is not impressed when he returns. Hans's giant asshole of a father even less so. Again, I've known so many guys like Hans and his father to be able to attest that this is not at all exaggerated. And the ones I know came 30 years or more later. This is not an overly negative representation of the Swiss patriarchy, if I'm honest. There are a good number who are not like this but they've only recently starting to outnumber the knee-jerk misogynist assholes. On the home stretch, the women all go on strike, moving in to Graziella's restaurant/inn, where they refuse to do any work for men -- or anything else, ä la "Lysistrata" -- until voting day on Sunday. The men are left to fend for themselves, including taking care of the kids, making their own meals, and, heaven forfend, housecleaning. Hans starts to learn a thing or two. His "friends" show up to demand that he rein in his wife. He refuses. I mean, obviously he refuses: one of the guys was the one with whom he'd just gotten into a fight at work, who'd called his wife a whore. The balls on that guy for barging into Hans's house to make demands. Spurned by Hans, the rest of the men wait until nightfall and then break into Graziella's restaurant and physically drag their wives out and back home because physical abuse is A-OK. During the home invasion and abduction -- none of which will be pursued legally -- Vroni has a heart attack and dies. None of the men care one bit, not really. It serves her right for being truculent. At her funeral, the priest talks a bunch of bullshit about how docile Vrony was, prompting Nora to stand up and offer a proper eulogy, with Hans's approval, that sonofabitch having finally seen the light, ferchrissake it took long enough. Woman are granted the right to vote in most of Switzerland, including Nora's village, though it would be 1991 before all communities in Switzerland were allowed to vote. I'm looking at you Appenzell. Silverado (1985) -- "7/10" Emmett (Scott Glenn) is ambushed by four killers while sleeping in a barn. He takes care of them and keeps one of their horses, moving on. He crosses a desert, where he finds Paden (Kevin Kline) lying in the hot sun in only his long johns. He gives him water, reviving him, for which Paden is naturally grateful. This is a decidedly odd way for them to have met. Paden is obliged to ride the other horse, at least until he can get his horse back from the men who'd stolen it. They come to a town where Paden sees one of his assailants -- and the man is riding his horse. Paden gets a gun from a shop and shoots him right off that horse. An old riding buddy of his Cobb (Brian Dennehy) vouches for him so that Paden can rejoin Emmett. Later that evening, they're eating dinner at the saloon when Mal (Danny Glover) walks in, wanting a whiskey and a doss. He is denied both by a racist bartender/innkeeper. A fight ensues that Mal wins in that he doesn't have to pay the damages, as deemed by Sheriff Langston (John Cleese) who turns out to be less racist than expected, and on the word of Emmett and Paden, but loses because he's got to leave town, also as deemed by Sheriff Langston, who turns out to be more racist than we'd hoped. Emmett and Paden discover an Emmett's brother Jake (Kevin Costner) in a jail cell. He's the one for whom the gallows in the town square had been built. He'll meet his maker in the morning. Emmett agrees to break him out. In the meantime, Paden finds another one of the criminals who'd waylaid him. He's wearing Paden's hat, pretty as a you please, in the busiest bar in town. The other guy draws first but Paden is quicker. He is arrested by Langston for murder. and thrown into the cell with Jake. They escape from that jail with Emmett's help. As they're just on the border of Sheriff Langston's jurisdiction, Mal starts laying down covering fire, which Langston quickly recognizes as shots fired by someone who's trying not to hit them. He wisely retreats with his men. The four of them continue until they meet up with a wagon train headed for Silverado. The wagon train had just been robbed by a gang and the four of them interrupt a rash posse from forming, offering to go instead. Hannah's (Rosanna Arquette) husband volunteers to go with them, which we all know is his death warrant, because the lovely Hannah was already being ogled by Paden and shyly eyed by Emmett. They execute a clever ruse against the robber gang to get all of their horses as well as the money, but ... guess who's shot right through the chest? Why Hannah's husband, of course! Now, that's some lazy writing from the Kasdan brothers. Everyone's in Silverado now, where we once again meet Cobb, who runs the town, as well as a whole gang of miscreants that he's deputized. Emmett and Jake quickly end up at odds with them as they defend their family's homestead from a marauding gang sent by Cobb, killing several of them. Mal finds his father's farm destroyed, with his father living in a cave, also thanks to McKendrick (Ray Baker), son of the man who Emmett had killed five years before, and also thanks to Cobb. We also meet Slick (Jeff Goldblum), who's frequenting the services of Mal's sister Rae (Lynn Whitfield) at Stella's (Linda Hunt) saloon, where Cobb also places Paden, who's uncomfortable with the degree of violence he has to put up with in order to continue living his unprincipled life. When Emmett is beaten within an inch of his life, only to be saved by Mal, who is jailed and then also beaten within an inch of his life, Paden begins to reconsider. Jake's taking one tumble after another with the lovely Phoebe (Amanda Wyss), then heads home, mostly oblivious to everything that's going on. The gang of marshals is there, and have bound and gagged his family. They capture him easily, then set the whole house on fire. The gang of four finally take matters into their own hands and descend upon Cobb and McKendrick's empire and utterly dismantle it Emmett ends up dealing with McKendrick by running him over with his horse, while Paden duels Cobb, easily defeating him. All's well that ends well: Paden ends up sheriff of Silverado, Mal and Rae pick up the pieces of their family's shattered homestead, Emmett and Jake head for California, and no-one end up plowing Hannah's field. Achtung Fertig Charlie (2003) -- "7/10" Antonio Carrera (Michael Koch) stands in a church in Italy, next to his bride-to-be Laura Moretti (Mia Aegerter). The ceremony is interrupted by two Swiss soldiers, clad in fatigues and sunglasses, who are there to pick him up for boot camp (RS = Rekrutenschule). He spends the first day trying to extricate himself, but eventually resigns himself to having to stay, at least for a little while. He stays in contact with his manipulative Laura -- she calls him Topolino -- and then arranges to try the wedding again on a weekend when they all have leave. Well, everyone except him and the stoner, who have to stand watch all weekend. Though Carrera had planned to sneak off, he gets too stoned and only manages to wander off the base in his tuxedo, stumbling along a road until Hauptmann Franz Reiker (Marco Rima) picks him up in his car. Reiker has a daughter Michelle Bluntschi (Melanie Winiger), who has volunteered for service on the condition that she gets a weapon. Reiker has put her on trumpet duty, though. Having blown through the second wedding, Carrera is getting desperate. One of the other recruits proposes that he get thrown out for having sex with Bluntschi. They call it Plan B. This is the kind of plan that only a group of hyper-hormonal young men could come up with. Carrera is a nice, good-looking guy, so he manages to do Bluntschi enough solid favors that she kind of falls for him. Hell, pickings are slim and she's probably bored out of her mind in the trumpet corps. They end up consummating their short relationship in a kitchen. Soon, though, at what amounts to their final exam, Laura shows up to show her swollen belly to her Topolino, causing him no end of consternation and trouble with Bluntschi. They end up doing quite well in the training exercise, even defeating the fearsome grenadiers. It also turns out the Laura was lying about being pregnant, which comes as a surprise to absolutely no-one except maybe Topolino. There's a bunch of cleanup of various personal situations so that we can put a "happily ever after" stamp on everything. This movie perfectly captures what I've heard about Swiss military service, down to the last detail. The "German Wikipedia" article mentions that it was the most popular film since 1978's "Die Schweizermacher" , which tracks, as that film was about the Einbürgerungsprozess (the naturalization process) and was an absolute work of art, starring iconic Swiss comedian Emil and just eviscerating the Swiss culture of the time.. We watched it in Swiss German, with German subtitles. Robin Hood: Men in Tights (1993) -- "5/10" I could have just remembered this as a movie that I vaguely recall as having liked in my youth. But no, of course not. I thought: I haven't seen this one in a while, let's watch it and see how it holds up. It does not hold up. It starts off with a bunch of Black, rapping Robin Hoods and doesn't get much better from there. I have no idea what they were thinking with that. It's not offensive but it's not good either. It's not funny, although it is comedy-shaped. Robin of Loxley (Cary Elwes) is in a prison in Jerusalem after having been captured as part of King Richard's crusader army. Loxley is so-named as a setup for an elaborate pun at the end of the movie where he is to marry Maid Marian of Bagelle so that they are "Bagelle and Loxley" 😱 😂. Elwes is trying to recapture the swagger and cool of his character in The Princess Bride but doesn't quite manage it. He doesn't seem wildly interested in being in this movie, to be honest. After escaping, Robin swims back to an England ruled by King John (Richard Lewis) and the Sheriff of Rottingham (Roger Rees). The Sheriff covets Maid Marian (Amy Yasbeck) deeply but cannot get anywhere near her because of the Everlast chastity belt that she wears and the avid defense run by Broomhilde (Megan Cavanagh). Robin puts together his merry band, which includes, amazingly enough, Achoo (Dave Chappelle), his blind family servant Blinken (Mark Blankfield), Will Scarlet O'Hara (Matthew Porretta), and the large Little John (Eric Allan Kramer). On King John's team is Don Giovanni (Dom DeLuise), who plays his role in the style of Marlon Brando. There is an archery competition. Robin wins, obviously. Robin and the Sheriff sword-fight, with Robin triumphing -- like, of course -- and Rottingham being saved by the ugly oracle/witch Latrine (Tracey Ullman), who forced him into marriage in exchange for saving his worthless life. Mel Brooks only shows up as the traveling Rabbi Tuckman. He sets up shop with a sign, Circumcisions. Special offer: half off! Tuckman doesn't show up a lot but he does make a callback to History of the World Part I when King Richard (Patrick Stewart, who only appears in this scene, for two minutes) deep-kisses Maid Marian: a nice callback to History of the World Part I, where he'd delivered the same line after deep-kissing several winsome lasses himself as the King of France. In a second callback, the whole crowd says "A black sheriff!?!" when Achoo is nominated sheriff, a callback to "Blazing Saddles" . This unfortunately reminds me of how much better that movie was. I'm not sure that was the intent. Moon (2009) -- "8/10" I watched and reviewed this in "2011" . It mostly held up on a reviewing but I did think it was a bit too long for the material this time. It's still a tour de force for Sam Rockwell, who plays a couple of versions of Sam Bell, who are pretty much the only characters in the movie. Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell) is running Helium-3 harvesters on the moon. He is alone, a bit worse for wear, supposedly two weeks from heading back to Earth after a three-year shift. He is very alone because the satellite that allows for live communication with Earth has been damaged for a while. Sam is injured on a rover mission to one of the harvesters and wakes up back in the base. The robot GERTY (Kevin Spacey) takes care of him. Sam is suspicious and finagles his way into returning to the crash site, where he finds himself. He is a clone. How many clones have there been? The two clones discover that there are many, many more clones and that there have been many, many before them. Sam's messages from his wife were all recorded long ago. His daughter is no longer a baby. She has grown up without him. She tells Sam that her mother died a while ago. Sam is dying of the same symptoms as every other clone before him. With "rescuers" on their way to his base, he, GERTY, and the newest clone concoct a plan: The Sam we met at the beginning, who is deteriorating, will return to the rover for the "rescue team" to find. GERTY will wake another clone for them to find in the medical bay. The other clone will finally take a shuttle back to Earth, where he causes quite a stir, as he is an illegal alien. A decade-and-a-half later, this still very much tracks. The sets are spare but convincing. It's a bit long but it's pretty good. Gotthard (2016) -- "8/10" This is a three-hour movie about the building of the original train tunnel through the Passo Gottardo in Switzerland. It was a technical achievement, whose laurels and profits would go to everyone who didn't suffer and die building it. Once again, as in so many movies that Switzerland makes about itself, it's not a great look. It was only after the tunnel was built that Switzerland would finally grant workers any sorts of rights. It was the 1870s, when there was almost no-one who thought that workers should have any rights whatsoever, but it is still grim to be confronted with how it was 150 years ago. Max Bühl (Maxim Mehmet) is a German engineer who arrives at the building site for the original Gotthard tunnel being built from 1873 to 1882. There he meets Tommaso Lazzaroni (Pasquale Aleardi), an Italian laborer, one among many. They at first compete for the same room, let by Anna Tresch (Miriam Stein) against the will of her father Anton (Christoph Gaugler), who runs a delivery company in Göschenen and is none too impressed with all of the goings-on. He's right to be suspicious because the companies running things couldn't care less about anyone on the building site. The worst of these is Louis Favre (Carlos Leal), who is ruthless and arrogant, seemingly never fearing for his life no matter how elitist he acts in remote places. His arrogance is occasionally breathtaking. As Max rises through the ranks of the company, his arrogance rises accordingly, with a rift growing between himself and Massimo. The rift grows the largest when Max leaves to continue his studies in Luzern while Massimo marries Anna in what is at first a marriage of convenience -- Anna needs Massimo to officially own her business for her in a country that allows women zero autonomy, and Massimo needs Anna in order to stay in the country -- but grows into something real. When Max returns, he appears as a bowling ball amongst the nine pins of a Kegelbahn, browbeating Massimo into accepting fake money for his workers as a holdover during funding problems, and also sleeps with Anna. But Max is by far not the only bastard -- he's actually portrayed as a bastard against his natural inclination, whereas others are much enthusiastically bastards -- there's also Bachmann (Maximilian Simonischek), who is in charge of the site on the Göschenen side. The town's police chief is also an incredibly cruel racist. Switzerland does not shine in this story. On the construction side, they are at first stuck, until they decide to start using dynamite. Then they're in more trouble with the air quality, which lays low dozens of workers. Then there's a plague of infection, driven by the dirty drinking water, which mixes with the sewage. Meanwhile the bigwigs in Zürich are self-satisfied and largely uninterested in how the tunnel is being built and more interested that it be built. They finally break through to the Airolo side, with only a very minor deviation even after so many kilometers. It is honestly much harder to celebrate the literal breakthrough now that we've been shown how the sausage was made. The tunnel exists. Trains go through. Over 1M people are transported in the first year. 177 workers gave their lives for it. Their families did not get rich from it. Tommaso goes to London to study under Karl Marx. Good for him. Also good for the SRF for having made a movie that showed the dirty side of the tunnel's creation. Platzspitzbaby (2020) -- "8/10" Mia (Luna Mwezi) lives in Platzspitz in Zürich with her parents. When the park is cleared out in 1995, Mia moves with her mother Sandrine (Sarah Spale) to Züri Oberland. She sees her father Andre (Jerry Hoffmann) once per month. Her mother falls right back into her old ways, traveling to Zürich to get high. She always needs money. She fights with everyone. She's a mess. Mia makes some friends but they're not exactly a good influence -- she starts drinking a little. She even tries smoking. She escapes into flights of fancy, planning a trip to the Maldives with her imaginary friend, who appears when she listens to music or plays it. To impress her new friends, she jumps off of a railroad trestle that I recognize from my years of commuting from Winterthur. Mia travels to Zürich with her mother, where Sandrine makes her buy her some heroin. Later, at a party, Mia has to get her mother out of there when her friend Serge overdoses. She begs her mother to stop doing drugs. Sarah Spale is nearly unrecognizable from her role in "Wilder" , where she played a cop. She absolutely looks like a wasted junkie; her legs are so thin. She can't stop smoking or swearing. She's crude and awful. She lives in a pigsty. Her daughter takes care of the housework, such as it is. The depiction of the party lifestyle is merciless. Mia visits with her father, who wants to help her but isn't allowed to take custody. He gives her some money. She returns home to find her mother looking much the worse for wear, with a strange man leaving the apartment, obviously having traded heroin for sex. Their apartment is getting increasingly filthy. Mia uses the money her father gave her for food to buy a whole box of scratchers instead. In the woods on the way home, she abandons her imaginary friend in a symbolic break with childhood. Gambling doesn't work. She cries out in frustration. Sandrine makes her go to Zürich with her again, where she sells Mia's dog Twister for drug money. For some reason, her mom needs her to buy drugs for her. Mia refuses, saying nothing. She throws the money into the street, glaring at her mother. We know what she's thinking. "Fick di. Kauf dir die eigene scheiss Droge, du verfickte Junkie!" Sandrine is no longer her mother in that moment. Mia makes it back in time for her starring role in the school play, where she actually manages to pull it off. Afterward, she's partying with her friends by a campfire, drinking and smoking. Her friend Lola sports a shiner, a gift from her father. Mia decides to take off with Lola, going upstairs to pack. She finds her mother's suicide note on her mattress, then finds her mother, overdosed in her room. The EMTs bring her back. Mia stands by her psycho mom as she fights off the social workers. Poor Lola is left alone, waiting for Mia. Abandoned again. Sandrine shoots up. Nods off. At school, Lola doesn't want to see Mia. Understandably. Mia shoplifts cigarettes and booze to buy drugs for her mom. She finds Lola snorting cocaine at the house where her mother's also on the nod. Lola doesn't want to be rescued. Neither does her mom, who's living in a pigsty, just wallowing in her own filth. Mia asks her mom to show her how to roll and smoke a joint. It's the only way she'll do anything with her. The look of pride on Sandrine's face at being able to roll a joint is so pathetic. She's so proud of this small, stupid, useless task. "I hör uf. I schwör's. Versproche." Mia believes her. Again. Mia awakes to a small fire in the bed, which her mom had accidentally set before passing out. "Versproche." Mia drops Sandrine's drugs off the porch, then runs away from home, while her mom digs in the bushes. Mia calls her father to pick her up, finally finished with Sandrine. Absolutely brutal. Die Schwarze Spinne (2022) -- "5/10" This is a pretty unevenly made film. It's about a village in 13th-century Switzerland. It is based on a relatively "well-known novel written by Jeremias Gotthelf in 1842" . Christine (Lilith Stangenberg) is a midwife in the village, with a bit of a mysterious reputation, mostly because she takes care of lady things and pregnancy is next-door to the devil's work, if you really think about it. None of the men in this story cover themselves in glory. The biggest bastards are the lord of the area, what looks like a knight, and his few assorted companions, all of whom are absolute animals. They visit the people of the village on a hot day to celebrate the opening of the castle that the people have just finishing building for the lord. They suffered not only in building it but also in the hunger caused by not having had enough time to harvest their food for two seasons. The lord is incensed that they would even mention this inconvenience. In a fit of pique, The lord of the manor, orders them to make a shaded lane leading up to it, so he won't be so hot next time. He tells them to erect 100 trees, uprooting them from a nearby forest and replanting them near the lane. This would be a herculean effort in the 21st century -- it seems nearly impossible in the 13th. He concludes his glorious day by upending a cartful of food that the people had brought for the opening celebration, leaving it on the ground to feed his dogs instead. He's a great guy. The people of the village set about trying to move the trees, which they quickly realize is impossible, though that doesn't stop them from trying, as they must show themselves to be making an effort, as the lord's men show up occasionally to piss on things and just generally be assholes. Christine's father is killed by a falling tree. Things go from bad to worse. Christine is desperate. The devil, in the form of the Karrenmacher (Anatole Taubman) shows up, to make her an offer. He will move and replant the trees and all he wants is one baby. One little, eensy-weensy, teeny-tiny baby. You won't even notice it's gone. He kisses Christine on the cheek, planting his curse. At one point, we see a spider moving around in there, just under the skin. Christine slices it out with a knife in a grisly scene. Christine goes a bit crazy when there's a baby around, like a werewolf at full moon, and must be physically restrained from "harvesting" the next couple of babies. The villagers manage to baptize these babies before she can get to them. The devil is frustrated and curses the village with a plague of spiders. The villagers get the hint and decide to sacrifice the next one. One farmer (Marcus Signer, Kägi from Wilder) is particularly eager to get this all behind them. The priest changes his mind at the last minute, baptizing the baby, and somehow shrinking Christine to the size of a giant spider. In spider form, Christine kills everything in sight. She bites villagers and livestock alike. The village looks like an abattoir. Christine's sister brings a baby into this world -- a child of rape from the lord of the manor, naturally -- and manages to protect it from Christine's spidery jaws. Instead, she traps Christine in a hole in a fire-blackened pillar in the center of their home, ramming the plug back in and trapping the unkillable spider for good. She and her three children have survived but it's utterly unclear how they will continue to do so, with everyone and everyting else in the village and surrounding environs having been killed. The devil is seen driving his carriage away, frustrated but banished, for now. We watched it in the original Swiss German / High German with French subtitles. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] These are notes for me to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. The amount of text is not proportional to my enjoyment. I might write less because I didn't get around to it when it was fresh in my mind. I rate the film based on how well it suited me personally for the genre, my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. Links are to "my IMDb ratings" ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=6002 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=6002 Sat, 07 Feb 2026 22:18:13 +0100 -- "8/10" 2. "The Boys S04 (2025)" <#Boys4> -- "9/10" 3. "South Park S28 (2025)" <#SouthPark> -- "9/10" 4. "Stranger Things S05 (2025)" <#Stranger> -- "8/10" 5. "Lee Camp at the Cobra Club (2025)" <#Lee> -- 7/10 6. "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998)" <#Fear> -- "6/10" 7. "Liz Miele: Space Camp (2025)" <#Space> -- "7/10" 8. "Dead Poets Society (1989)" <#Poet> -- "9/10" 9. "Spaceballs (1987)" <#Spaceballs> -- "6/10" 10. "Hellboy (2004)" <#Hellboy> -- "8/10" Christine (1983) -- "8/10" Christine was born in Detroit in 1957, She came off the assembly line possessed. She took her first victim before she even left the factory. Arnie Cunningham (Keith Gordon) is a senior in high school in 1977. He's not the coolest kid but he's smart, he's funny, and he's friends with a guy on the football team Dennis Guilder (John Stockwell). It's so refreshing that Dennis picks up Arnie for school, has lunch with him, worries about him. They're friends. [2] This is not a classic jocks/nerds dynamic. Buddy Repperton (William Ostrander), on the other hand, is a standard bully. He looks like he's 30 years old and like he's spent 10 of them working out in a prison yard. He and his crew are bullying Arnie in shop class. When Dennis shows up to help, out pops a switchblade. Arnie's got balls, though. Even after Repperton has stepped on his glasses, Arnie confirms that Buddy had a switchblade when the teacher finally shows up. On the way home from their illustrious first day of senior year, Arnie sees her. She's standing in a yard, looking much, much worse for wear. Christine's current owner George LeBay (Roberts Blossom) comes out to make the sale. She runs. $250 for the pink slip. Arnie's mother Regina [3] (Christine Belford) is a real ballbuster. She runs Arnie's life down the last detail. She cannot believe he bought a car without consulting with her. Arnie and Dennis bring Christine to Darnell's (Robert Prosky) garage, where he says, "I knew a guy had a car like that once. Fuckin' bastard killed himself in it. Son of a bitch was so mean, you could've poured boiling water down his throat and he would've pissed ice cubes!" Arnie has fixed Christine up quite well in two weeks. Even crotchety Darnell is impressed. He's got "good hands." He offers him a job. Arnie thinks about it. Like, he sits in Christine and thinks about it. It's Stephen King-creepy. Back at school, Dennis approaches the studious and very attractive new girl Leigh (Alexandra Paul). Poor Roseanne (Kelly Preston) thinks he's looking at her. Leigh turns him down. She already has a date. Dennis goes back to talk to George LeBay, to confront him about how the previous owner had died. George is quite talkative about Christine's history, about how it wasn't just his brother who'd committed suicide in her but also his sister-in-law who'd died much earlier, the exact same way: carbon monoxide poisoning. Their five-year-old daughter had choked to death in it. Christine is looking pretty healthy already. She's all fixed up. Arnie's got her at a football game, where Dennis is playing. Arnie's dating Leigh. That's who she had a date with when she'd turned Dennis down. Dennis sees them necking and gets absolutely housed on the field while he's distracted. He just barely avoids paralysis. Arnie visits him in the hospital. He's not wearing his glasses at all anymore. He's acting very adult but also too self-confident, no longer quite so guileless as he was. Arnie's at the drive-in with Leigh. He tries to move to second base. She refuses and runs out into the pouring rain. She admits that she hates the car, that she doesn't want to be in it, and that she certainly doesn't want have any sexy times in it. They're back in the car when a windshield wiper breaks. Arnie gets out to fix it. Leigh takes a bite of a sandwich. The radio comes on, suffused with the green deadlights we all know from Stephen King books and movies. She chokes. She can't get out. He can't get in. Someone else comes to her rescue, Heimliching the sandwich right out of there. It's unclear why Christine didn't re-lock the door. Maybe she just wanted to break them up instead of murdering someone in a way where Arnie could be blamed. Donnie's tormentors sneak in to the garage and start tooling up Christine, laying into her with sledgehammers and crowbars. She's a complete mess. They leave. The radio starts to play. Arnie finds the destroyed car. He is not well. He yells at Leigh, then argues with his parents and gets his dad into a chokehold when he dares to lay hands on him for cursing. Arnie's back in the garage, talking to Christine. She starts repairing herself. The effects are outstanding. Just incredible. This was in 1983. I don't even know how they did it. Christine's out on her own. She takes revenge on Moochie (Malcolm Danare). One down. Arnie's visiting Dennis in the hospital, where he's still convalescing from his having nearly been paralyzed on the football field. Arnie's talking in 50s slang. Outside the hospital, he's approached by Detective Junkins (Harry Dean Stanton), who wonders why Arnie never reported the damage to Christine, how he'd repaired it so quickly, and what he was doing the night before, when Moochie had been cut in half. Repperton's driving with Rich Trelawney (Steven Tash) in his really sweet ride. They're listening to Beast of Burden, which is honestly kind of a lame-ass song for those two toughs to be listening to.. It should have Paint it Black or something. Christine is hunting them. She follows them to their garage. CRASH. She destroys their car. SLAM. Rich is smushed into the wall. The gas tank starts to empty. The whole garage goes up, taking Rich and Vandenberg (Stuart Charno) with it. Repperton backs away. Christine reverses out, tires squealing, engulfed in flames, an avenging demon. She lets Repperton run a bit, then runs him down, leaving his flaming corpse in the road. Darnell is working late, and he sees Christine enter the garage, scorched nearly beyond repair. But we know she isn't...beyond repair. Darnell gets into the empty car, even though the entire interior is scorched. He seems to be ... compelled. He's happy in there. The radio turns on. Junkins is there the next morning with questions for Arnie. Four dead from the night before. Arnie picks Dennis up for a New Year's Eve party. Leigh had just left Dennis's house. Arnie and Christine are cruising along at 90MPH, with Arnie chugging Southern Cross beer. Arnie's doing such a good job of slipping into the role of a young man possessed by the ghost of an old, hateful man. 100MPH. Playing chicken. Arnie's lip curls. "Aw man, there ain't nothin' finer than bein' behind the wheel of your own car. Except maybe for pussy" The next day, Dennis scratches "Darnell's Tonight" into Christine's hood. Later that night, he and Leigh are at Darnell's, hot-wiring a bulldozer. They're ready. For an eighteen-year-old, Dennis's resistance to Leigh's hugs is absolutely heroic. He really loves his friend. Christine leaps out of hiding to try to plow into Leigh. Missed. Dennis advances to protect Leigh in the shovel of his bulldozer. Christine attacks from one side, then the other. They hear "You shitters!!!" Arnie's in there. After having smashed herself up, Christine has once again repaired herself. She crashes into the office, where Leigh is hiding. Arnie flies through the windshield. He's impaled on a shard of glass. He lunges at Leigh, falls back nearly immediately, yanks out the shard, then strokes Christine's hood ornament, ... and dies. Christine ain't done. She turns on her radio, then takes another run at Leigh. Dennis drops the shovel onto the back of Christine, crushing the entire back end. She drags herself on like The Terminator. Eventually, her lights go out. Leigh runs to Dennis. The radio comes on again. Christine repairs herself. Dennis drives the bulldozer's treads right back up on her, crushing, crushing, crushing, as the radio plays a 50s song, and Christine desperately heals and re-heals herself, eventually succumbing. A suitcase-sized block of metal hits the packed dirt of a junkyard. Junkins, Dennis, and Leigh watch it. They hear rock-and-roll music ... but it's just a guy walking by with a boombox. The camera zooms in, in, in. A piece of the grill twitches. Cut to black. George Thorogood's Bad to the Bone has never felt more appropriate. This was a fantastic adaptation of a Stephen King novel. I really enjoyed it. John Carpenter not only directed, but he also wrote the music for this film. I watched it in English. The Boys S04 (2025) -- "9/10" Now this is what I'm talking about. Where "Sandman" season 2 sucked so hard, this show, in its fourth season, packs so much fun stuff into just the first 25 minutes of the first episode -- at which point Homelander (Antony Starr) almost makes The Deep (Chace Crawford) give A-Train (Jessie T. Usher) a blow job. This show goes hard. Interspersed throughout the show are social-media clips of the pro-supe movement driving major FUD for their hero Homelander, like, saying his victims deserve what they got because, as Firecracker (Valorie Curry) says on her podcast, "an eye for an eye may be in the Jew part of the Bible, but it's still in there." One immediate drawback is that Starlight/Annie (Erin Moriarty) has doubled down on her makeup and plastic surgery, even though she almost certainly doesn't need it. Kimiko (Karen Fukuhara) is as adorable as ever, though. Frenchie (Tomer Capone) might be bi. Homelander finds a gray pube. He finds another. He decides to invite Sage (Susan Heyward) -- smartest person on Earth -- to join the Seven. She gets him to promise that he'll listen and she gets to stay in her apartment, "reeking of Taco Bell and loneliness". Homelander, of course, doesn't keep any of those promises, which, given how smart Sage is, she must have seen coming a mile away. Butcher (Karl Urban) is dying. The V is enveloping his brain in a black shroud. He's coming apart but trying to hold it together. Hughie (Jack Quaid) is still the same, not sure what he wants; his dad (Simon Pegg) has had a stroke. Mother's Milk (Laz Alonso) is still trying to get his family back, but his ex-wife has asked him to search for her ex-boyfriend, who's gone missing. Nothing good happens to the poor guy, who's a huge -- and inevitably disappointed -- fan of Homelander. Victoria Neuman (Claudia Doumit), a dangerous and evil supe, is very close to becoming Vice President. So that's the setup, to get up to speed for the season. Homelander is spiraling. He invites three of his super-fans -- one of them being the ex-boyfriend that Milk is trailing -- into headquarters only to have Deep, A-Train, and Black Noir (Nathan Mitchell) beat them to death with baseball bats. "Every movement needs its martyrs." Sage looks on dispassionately. It was, after all, her plan. Step two is to show up at Homelander's not-guilty verdict and provoke a riot. Easier done than said. A-Train is told to bring the three bodies to the scene of the riot to make it look like Annie's Army killed people. * Homelander is trying get Ryan set up as a superhero on his own. * The Deep is trying to reassert himself after his dalliance with an octopus came to light. * Butcher is out of the Boys but he's now just doing the same thing he was before, but as an unaffiliated private citizen. * The TruthCon is spectacularly detailed. There are so many posters that look like they actually mocked them up. Is this what a show looks like when you actually film it? * Firecracker is the id of the right-wing movement. * Butcher is still an insufferable piece of shit. * But not as big of an insecure piece of shit as Homelander is. He is hilarious, though. * A-Train is starting to turn; he gives the Boys some camera footage they needed. Homelander's representation of supes as superior -- "humans are toys; they break" -- is brilliant. You can read anything into it. "You're chosen" Hmmm...like the chosen people? Or is he a white supremacist? Nope. He's just a supe-supremacist. And he has a great reason, unlike any of the others before him -- because they actually are genetically superior. The Vought on Ice show is inspired. "It puts the Super in Christmas." The Boys are on-again, off-again with Butcher but he's too useful to ignore, even as damaged as he is. Annie keeps seeing more and more of her bitchy/shitty past appear. Firecracker, in particular, has some juicy tales to tell about their days on the pageant circuit. Butcher fires back at her with a video of Firecracker having seduced a 15-year-old at a camp where she worked. It doesn't work because, obviously, the right-wingers don't care about pedophilia when it's one of their own, and can a women really rape a boy anyway? I mean, c'mon...ammirite? High five. Hughie and Mother's Milk almost get killed by Homelander but somehow escape. Homelander suffers from the same drawback as Superman: he's so powerful that it's hard to make anything he's in a fair fight. If you make it look fair, then it just looks dumb. For example, why can't he smell Hughie in the vent directly above him before the drop of sweat falls? Does he have his senses turned down to avoid overloading? And why does he have to sniff it? Wouldn't he have turned his senses up as soon as he noticed that something was wrong? And when Hughie's scampering through the ducts, why does Homelander keep missing? Can't he just see through everything with X-Ray vision? Homelander is having a rough time of it; he is not mentally well. Maybe that's throwing him off his game. He goes back to the lab where he'd been held as a child and starts picking off his former captors, one by one. They can do nothing but watch, and hope that he spares them. Spoiler: he doesn't. He leaves only one lady alive, locked in a room with the shredded corpses of her coworkers. They Boys are doing a pretty good job of turning A-Train to their cause because he has really had enough of the killing. But Sage is almost certainly onto him. Sage seduces dumb, dumb, dumb Deep and is setting him up for something. She's setting everyone up for something. Not all the same thing but she's weaving a lot of webs. She gets Deep to smash through her brain with a needle, bypassing her eyeball, so that she's dumb enough to want to bang him. Her brain will grow back. It is uncomfortable to watch. Frenchie and Kimiko are working an angle of their own, clashing with the Shining Light Liberation Army (which Kimiko had escaped in a prior season), and Frenchie is dealing with the trauma of having seduced Colin, the only surviving son of a family he'd once slaughtered. Oh, and Hughie's trying to save his dad from brain death by pumping some V into him. I wonder what Simon Pegg's power is going to be? Oh Lord, it's awful. His power is phasing through walls...and people He gets amnesia, kills a couple of people by accident, kills another on purpose, and then comes to his senses. Hughie and his mom put him down for good, having seen the error of their ways. That was quick. Annie's getting violent, beating the ever-loving hell out of Firecracker. Her powers are getting flaky but her strength is good. The Boys track down a supe-virus but have to use the only dose to take down suped-up, flying, vampire-sheep. Butcher keeps the top scientist captive to make him make more. He chops off the guys leg in order to prove to everyone else that the guy had died. They manage to recreate the virus, with Frenchie's help, but then the one-legged scientist stabs Kimiko with it. In the leg. You gotta stop it from spreading. Man, that scene is grisly. Right across the thigh. She focuses on a stuffed bee toy that says "You're the bee's knees." I am forced to mention once again that Antony Starr as Homelander is incredible. His face looks it's coming apart at the seams when he gets frustrated. I don't know how he does it, but he has "ticking time bomb" written all over him. Firecracker can, um, lactate, so she takes Sage's place at the top of Homelander's hierarchy of priorities. This isn't even close to the most disturbing thing because I didn't even tell you about Hughie's sojourn in Tek-Knight's sex dungeon. There's just a lot going on. There's a whole plot about trying to kill the president that I haven't even mentioned because it seems almost incidental. But yeah, they're doing that. Vice President Victoria Neuman is behind it, with Homelander. But she's also working with the Boys in order to kill Homelander with the virus. But, um, if the virus is strong enough to kill Homelander, then it will probably spread to every supe on the planet and kill them too. Tough call. Anyway, Neuman's got a shapeshifting killer on the job. The shapeshifter kidnaps Annie and replaces her. Hughie has no idea. He's just happy that Annie is suddenly into anal. Annie's getting her moment to shine, playing a sociopathic version of herself opposite her pathetic hot-mess of a self. Butcher's getting worse. His tumor is grinding him down. He's in the hospital. He's also getting a chance to do some great acting. "Magic." Marvin's having panic attacks. Frenchie's trying to replicate the virus. Homelander lasers VP-elect Vicky on live TV, outing her as a supe. Kimiko and Frenchie's kiss is well-earned. Good job, everybody. Writing team gets bonuses. Grace Mallory (Laila Robins) is dead. She begged for him not to do it, but Ryan killed her to prevent her from trapping him. Butcher finally seems to have figured out his new power; the other personality is driving now. He rejoins the boys in time to pull Vicky apart with his chest tentacles. He grabs the virus sniper rifle and heads out. VP's dead. President's arrested for having organized her execution. Third-in-line Speaker Calhoun loves him some supes and he loves him some Homelander. This was Sage's plan all along. The Boys are in the wind but the supe deputies have quickly rounded them up. Starlight gets away. So does Butcher. Of course. Bring on season 5. This season is UNHINGED. It's so good. It came out in 2024 and it feels like they're making the episodes as Trump goes along in 2025/2026, with Homelander as Trump. V News as FOX News, the whole thing. They nailed it 100%. it's SPOOKY. The following video was published by "Vought International". I don't even know what's real anymore. [media] "Could be a moocher from the welfare state Or your teacher who tries to indoctrinate A socialist who says, "the stars and stripes aren't great" "[...] "Could be the scientist who makes vaccines The guy with the beard who's a beauty queen The immigrant who keeps your apartment clean "[...] "Report that groomer when he comes for you Cause he hates America and Christmas too It's probably those who don't believe in God And anyone who thinks that Supes are a fraud It might even be your stepdad Todd So tell them all the Golden Rule If you see something, say something, call... Then you'll be a hero too" South Park S28 (2025) -- "9/10" Twisted Christian This was the "6 7" episode. Cartman is possessed. There's a storyline about the Antichrist. This one is not that good. The Woman In The Hat This one is very funny if you know who the woman in the hat is. It's Melania, who's haunting the White House. Trump is tearing down the White House bit by bit. Pam Bondi keeps getting shit on her nose from brown-nosing Trump so hard. Tegridy Farm goes out of business because of Trump's clampdown on marijuana production and the Marshes are forced to move in with Grandpa at Shady Acres. The boys start an online community/channel called "South Park Sucks Now" that gets super-popular. They launch a coin. And then they plan a rug-pull -- because that's what you do, right? They take a lot of swings at crypto, which is great. MelaniaThe Woman in the Hat keeps popping up everywhere. It's pretty hilarious. Sora Not Sorry This one starts even more bizarrely than usual, even for South Park, until it's revealed that it's an AI-generated video of Red, made by the other students. They're all making horrible, stupid videos of each other with AI. The police have no idea that none of these videos are real because they're boomers and they'll believe anything. So they pursue all sort of leads, questioning all sorts of people about the crimes that they're supposedly involved in, that they've seen with their own two eyes online. Peter Thiel features pretty heavily in this one, too. The South Park police arrest him, being not useless for once. Turkey Trot Cartman uses cutting-edge "race science" to try to win the Turkey Trot. That is, he gets Tolkien Black to join his team because he knows that he can run really fast. It's just science. Race science. The town doesn't have money to sponsor the event, so ... they get the Saudi royal family to sponsor them. They're sponsoring everything else, so why not? The White House sends Pete Hegseth in with shock troops to get Thiel out of jail, but the South Park police kick him out, in a pretty cool manner that is totally unlike the South Park police. Hegseth and his army think that the Turkey Trot is an antifa gathering. He calls them narco-terrorists later when hanging out of a helicopter. The South Park police end up throwing him in with Thiel. Justice. The Crap Out School counselor Jesus Christ has become a power Christian, complete with big-lipped, giant-breasted, vacuous girlfriend. Satan is excited about his ass-baby but Trump and Vance are scheming to abort it (the "crap out" in the title). Trump and Vance set up camp in South Park as Santa Claus and an elf, looking to pop Thiel and Hegseth free from the local jail. Satan teams up with Towelie, eventually facing off against Jesus, who's ... checks notes ... on Trump's side? Satan's baby ends up hanging itself while the video feed in Satan's bowels was cut off (á la Epstein). Somehow they make Satan going through all of the "baby's first Christmas" stuff that he won't end up needing really poignant, if not heart-wrenching. Satan watches Trump dancing in the White House, celebrating another victory, then quietly leaves. Jesus repents, thanking Stan for having made him see the light about Trump, gifting him and his family the Marsh residence back. Fade out on Jesus and his girlfriend singing their song about her domestic abuse being her own damned fault. Stranger Things S05 (2025) -- "4/10" Man, what is there to say about this season? It's barely watchable. It's predictable. It's worse for knowing how much it cost to make each, self-indulgent episode. You could have opened a huge soup kitchen with that money instead of wildly overpaying for CGI that looks like it was made on an older version of Blender on a Pentium 90. The acting is awful. Or are they just doing the best they can with the pedestrian script? Eleven (Millie Bobby Brown) is definitely wooden and terrible. She has one facial expression. Jim Hopper (David Harbour) is fine but he's now a one-dimensional, incredibly deady mercenary, mowing people down left and right. And it's not just him: Everyone is just incredibly capable now. Steve (Joe Keery) is still kind of fun, as is Robin (Maya Hawke). The others are just not good, not even worth listing. It seems like everyone's in every scene. They plan out elaborate scenarios in every episode. They use props to explain everything. They seem to have infinite resources, with Murray (Brett Gelman) showing up like an Acme delivery several times, as if this were a Looney Tunes cartoon. They're trying to capture Vecna (Jamie Campbell Bower), who's still ruining everything, keeping the town trapped in some sort of colocation with the "upside down". The physics of the upside-down are such that walkie-talkies work in it, as well as between it and the real world. Look, none of this is very coherent. Stuff just happens because it has to, because the authors thought it would be cool. It feels like 12-year-olds wrote it. Some of the action stuff is kind of fun -- the driving isn't bad -- but most of it absolutely tedious and drawn-out. I wrote all of that before I watched the second half of the season. It got even worse. It was boring. It was even more drawn-out. The fun moments were few and far between. I liked it when Murray blew up the helicopter. There are dozens of needless, and unnecessarily long crying scenes, explanatory scenes, resolution of character-conflict scenes. It was so, so, so long. It left me wondering whether part of it might have been written by AI. It was that lazy and uninventive. The show finally ended...and then there were still 35 minutes left. It was a slog. The graduation was awful. The best part of the show was probably the cheapest to produce. It was right at the end, when they were playing Dungeons and Dragons. They looked and acted normal, like high-school kids. Unfortunately, the part that immediately followed was the writers being utterly unable to choose which ending their show was going to have, so they just filmed both, and included both. Because why not? The final episode was over two hours long. It was a whiny dumpster fire crammed to the hilt with fan service tailored for the dumbest, most easily placated fans. I missed parts because I'm not brain-dead enough to just sit there and watch it. It lost an extra star because of how bad the second half was. Almost as if to mock us, they included clips of previous seasons in a montage, where we could wistfully watch and be reminded of why we'd watched the original seasons. Lee Camp at the Cobra Club (2025) -- 7/10 This was only half-an-hour of comedy. The start was a bit rocky but he saved it in the second half. There were some good bits on "Trump, RFK, and [his] trips to Israel & China". He went to Israel as a teenager on the birthright trip, and visited Tibet in China for a documentary. If you have a membership, you can watch the show at "My New Stand-Up Comedy Half Hour!" by Lee Camp . Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998) -- "6/10" This is the semi-autobiographical story of Hunter S. Thompson's coverage of the Mint 400, a desert motorcycle race near Las Vegas in 1971. Writing credits go to Thompson and director Terry Gilliam. Thompson's alter ego Raoul Duke (Johnny Depp) is traveling across the desert with his attorney Dr. Gonzo (Benicio Del Toro). The have every drug under the sun with them. Characters drift past in cameos, with Duke's drug-fueled haze occasionally stitching them into an incoherent and nearly pathologically paranoid story. They pick up and get rid of a hitchhiker (Tobey Maguire). They are checked in to the hotel by a Desk Clerk at Mint Hotel (Katherine Helmond). They interact with a Magazine Reporter (Mark Harmon), though it's unclear whether they can even see him, so high are they on mescaline, LSD, and ether. While on ether, Duke sees a Wee Waiter (Verne Troyer), inventing a whole shock of paranoid fantasies on the spot, as if the little man's image striking his eyeballs had triggered a shower of welding sparks, each of which illuminates a tidbit of an unseen world, where only drugs are capable of peeling back the veil. Duke shares cocaine in a bathroom with a random musician (Flea), who snorts it off of Duke's sleeve, where he's spilled most of it. Gonzo offends a TV Reporter (Cameron Diaz), who he meets in an elevator, and who's briefly interested in him, until she sees what a violent maniac he is. In this scene, as in many others, we are treated to the truly bizarre shape of Del Toro's body in this movie, the swelling of his belly clearly exaggerated for effect, especially ensconced, as it invariably is, in a too-tight and too-short T-shirt that is, equally invariably, covered in the dried residue of his own vomit. They spend a lot of time on the road, sometimes together, sometimes with Duke striking out on his own. They meet the hitchhiker not once, but twice. They meet Road Person (Lyle Lovett). Duke is pulled over by a Highway Patrolman (Gary Busey), who, in the end, is willing to let him go for a kiss. When Gonzo has rejoined Duke, he's with young Lucy (Christina Ricci), who appears out of nowhere to try biting off Duke's leg. She's an artist who's painted dozens of bad portraits of Barbara Streisand on cardboard. They panic and realize that she's too young and Duke makes Gonzo get rid of her. This is probably the most coherent that either of them is at any point in the film. In a return to Vegas, they check in at the Flamingo Hotel, where they cut in line in front of Police Chief (Troy Evans), who isn't going to get a room from the very gay Clerk at Flamingo Hotel (Christopher Meloni), no matter how hard he tries. The clerk is, somehow, deeply charmed by the pair of Duke and Gonzo. At the hotel, the duo crashes a conference, with bizarre and incoherent keynote speaker L. Ron Bumquist (Michael Jeter). Later that evening, with the drug binge once again in full swing, they dream that a Judge (Harry Dean Stanton) is allowing a vengeful Lucy to accuse them of sodomizing a minor. Finally, they are eating lunch in a diner, served by North Star Waitress (Ellen Barkin), who is the victim of a crass pass made by Gonzo. She refuses vehemently. He responds by asking her if she's going to call the police, as he cuts the public phone's cord. They get Gonzo to the airport just in time and the film ends with Duke writing his article while descending deeper and deeper into filth and intoxication. He ends the film by inhaling amyl nitrate. Man did he love dissociative drugs. I had given this movie a 9/10 but that was a long time ago and before I started taking notes, so I have no idea what I was thinking. Now, presumably 25 years later, I think it's more of a six or seven. It's got the bizarreness of Terry Gilliam but the typical quirkiness has been replaced with filth, which is a bit off-putting in these quantities. It's probably a pretty realistic depiction of the level of coarseness and the lack of attention paid to hygiene by such enthusiastic drug users ... but it's a bit much. Liz Miele: Space Camp (2025) -- "7/10" This one hour of standup is decent with some good segments. I thought it a bit long but it's worth it for some of the stories. [media] "Themes and topics: dating, online dating, first dates, first impressions, Severence, New Girl, Nurses, travel nurse, rejection, anxiety, butterflies, kittens, cats, veterinarians, parents, pets, washing machine, accidents, suspension, straight edge, sXe, body modification, tattoos, boyfriend, Paris, travel, touring, France, subway, police, ticket, travel horror stories, storyteller, comedian, stand up comedy, jokes, rants, full special, sky priority, American Airlines, getting money back, Jet Blue, airlines, customer service, twitter, writing degree, writer, negotiation, Never Split the Difference, vasectomy, botched vasectomy, emergency room, ER, balls, Biggest Balls in Brooklyn, medical emergency, doctors, kids, no kid lifestyle, parents, soda, royalty, princess, wife, marriage" Dead Poets Society (1989) -- "9/10" John Keating (Robin Williams) returns to teach at his alma mater Welton Academy after having spent years teaching in England. He knows how stodgy his old school is, and he is prepared to shock his students out of a malaise in which they plod, learning art and poetry by rote, learning formulae with which they can determine the value of a given work by slide-rule rather than by how it makes them feel. He teaches them of death, of how we are all raging against the dying of the light, and how we must all seize the day: Carpe Diem The students are portrayed as largely supportive of one another, with Neil Perry (Robert Sean Leonard) a sort-of soft leader of a loose grouping of boys that includes several returning friends but also his roommate, a new arrival named Todd Anderson (Ethan Hawke), who is effortlessly taken up in the group, seemingly at complete odds with nearly any other film of this kind, which would have focused laser-like on his trials and tribulations as he is at-first mercilessly bullied by the others until he earns their grudging respect through some heroic and possibly self-sacrificing act. In another break with genre, all of the boys are immediately enchanted with Keating's teaching style rather than having several of them tell their parents about how dangerous he is and then having the dean threaten to have him removed. I imagine that that part is coming up, though, as Neil's father (Kurtwood Smith) is an absolute hard-ass alum who has already planned out his son's life to the last details, and there is no room for even an appreciation of poetry in that plan. Although the cast is overwhelmingly male, we are introduced quite early to the adorable Ginny Danburry (Lara Flynn Boyle), whom Knox Overstreet (Josh Charles) meets at an official dinner that had been arranged by his father. He is smitten but she's dating the quarterback of the school's football team. The boys discover that Keating used to belong to something called The Dead Poets Society. With some sly hints from him, they resurrect it, tramping to a cave in the dead of night to read each other poetry, both famous and written by themselves, to tell stories, to have probably the most wholesome fun I've seen in a film in ages. The tension in this film is purely between Keating and his students against a world that wants to squeeze every last bit of wonder out of them. Keating gets Todd Anderson to recite his poem -- it's good. The boys are stunned to silence, then clap as one. The same thing happens in a cave when Charlie Dalton (Gale Hansen) plays a soulful song on a saxophone, reciting poetry intermittently. Again, the boys are stunned into silence, admiring of his talent. This film is unrelentingly wholesome but it's somehow believable. Dalton starts an insurrection of one, and is punished for it corporally by Mr. Nolan (Norman Lloyd). Less wholesome but unsurprising. Next, he reprimands Keating. The least believable part of the film was that Keating would been hired in the first place. Neil's father gets wind of his playing Puck in A Midsummer Night's Dream. He shows up to personally straighten out his son. He tells him that it's better to be a quitter than a fairy. Well, not in so many words but that was the gist. Neil acts his little heart out in the play. Everyone thinks it's pretty great, that he's got a bright future ahead of him, as an actor. Well, everyone but his dad. Yeah, Red's [4] a real hard-ass about it. He says that what his boy wants doesn't matter. He's to be an automaton remote-controlled by his father until he's a medical doctor. Ten more years in school. Neil rounds that down to zero more years in school by eating a bullet in his father's study. The school forces the boys to sign a statement blaming the suicide on Keating's utter disregard for protocol. The school has found its sacrificial lamb; the parents will be satisfied. Dalton didn't sign the paper. He is expelled. The others signed it and are in English class. Ergo, Mr. Nolan is teaching. Keating enters to pick up his last personal effects from the office. Todd stands on his desk, "Captain, my captain!" Several of the other boys follow suit. Nolan is apoplectic. "Thank you, boys. Thank you." Spaceballs (1987) -- "6/10" Princess Vespa (Daphne Zuniga) jilts her husband-to-be Prince Valium (Jim J. Bullock), escaping in a Mercedes spaceship with her Maid of Honor Dot Matrix (Joan Rivers). Dark Helmet (Rick Moranis) and Colonel Sandurz (George Wyner) are on her tail immediately. Vespa calls her father King Roland (Dick Van Patten), who calls Lone Starr (Bill Pullman) and his sidekick Barf (John Candy), who squeeze a deal for 1M space bucks in exchange for the rescue. They owe that much to Pizza the Hutt (Dom DeLuise). They pick up the princess and Dot, then crash-land on a desert planet, with Dark Helmet in hot pursuit. They meet Yogurt (Mel Brooks). There's no way around it; this movie has not aged well, even if parts of it are ironically funny. It was probably the first film to mock the merchandising by having Yogurt present a commercial for completely fictitious action figures, toys, and so on, as well as a plug for the next movie, Spaceballs II: The Search for More Money. It's neat that absolutely nothing has changed in the last 40 years. Spaceballs President Skroob (Mel Brooks) joins up with Dark Helmet to torture the combination to the air shield to the planet of Druidia out of the princess and her father. They threaten to have Dr. Schlotkin (Sandy Helberg) and his nurse (Brenda Strong) restore her old nose. That's enough. Lone Starr and Barf rescue Dot and Vespa, then head off Dark Helmet and the other Spaceballs to prevent them from sucking the air out of Druidia by transforming their ship into a giant maid holding a vacuum cleaner. Lone Starr uses "The Schwarz" to reverse the flow of air, saving the King and the planet. I wish I were kidding. Lone Starr infiltrates the Spaceballs ship and ends up in confrontation with Dark Helmet, where they fight with light sabers and their Schwarzes. There's even more egregious fourth-wall stuff here, with the whole camera crew appearing briefly. This fight lasts a while and it doesn't get better. They just try out different things. None of them really works. I left it with an extra star because it's a classic and it makes me happy to see these actors ... but the script is weak. Hellboy (2004) -- "8/10" American soldiers interrupt a Nazi occult ritual that brings Hellboy (Ron Perlman) to the earthly plane. Many Germans die but the important ones manage to escape, including one who calls himself Grigori Rasputin (Karel Roden) -- and is seemingly the same Rasputin who even the Russians couldn't kill -- as well as the also eternally youthful Ilsa Haupstein (Biddy Hodson) and Obersturmbannführer Karl Ruprecht Kroenen (Ladislav Beran). Rasputin was running the ritual with some sort of high-tech glove and was sucked into the portal he'd created with it. His two disciples resurrect him sixty years later. Hellboy is all grown up and working for the government, handling occult and paranormal cases for them. He is under the care of Trevor "Broom" Bruttenholm (John Hurt) and has a psychic fish-man friend in Abe Sapien (Doug Jones). He has a new babysitter in the form of John Myers (Rupert Evans). Hellboy visits Liz Sherman (Selma Blair) in the sanitarium where she's committed herself in order to learn to control her pyrokinetic powers. Rasputin summons a demon named Samael, a demon for which two rise when one falls. It lays eggs before Hellboy can kill the first instance. They discover that it has lain eggs, not just in one of Hellboy's wounds but also, presumably, in the depths of the vault where they'd found the first one. Abe dives down to find the nest while Hellboy confronts Ruprecht for the first time. Ruprecht is like a clockwork ninja, twisting a key in his chest before he goes into battle. He appears to be filled with sand. He fatally wounds Agent Clay (Corey Johnson), then turns himself "off," laying down next to his victim for Hellboy to find. Program chief Tom Manning (Jeffrey Tambor) chews out Hellboy, telling him that, even if all the monsters were rounded up, there'd still be one left: Hellboy. Liz and Myers go on a date. Meanwhile, Ruprecht has come back from the dead and, with Rasputin's help, has killed professor Broom (who was dying anyway but still). The team hunts them to Moscow, with Hellboy ending up paired with Manning, who's warming up to Hellboy, and Liz and Myers, who find a nest of Samael monsters. Hellboy and Manning encounter Ruprecht and finally take care of him, once and for all. Hellboy drops in to save them, taking out a few monsters, then lighting into many more. But there are so many. And there are so many eggs remaining. Liz begs Myers to hit her, to initiate her suppressed pyrokinetic powers. She burns the monsters away from "Red", frying the eggs as well. Hellboy survives, of course, Ilsa and Rasputin show up in the knick of time, triumphant and having captured everyone. They take Liz as a sacrificial victim. Rasputin forces Hellboy to take part in the ceremony, unleashing his demonic powers to finish some sort of ritual, the details of which I'm not too clear on. It looks like it will release eldritch horrors from their quasi-eternal banishment. With one lock unopened, Myers tosses Hellboy a talisman with which he remembers who he is, and breaks off the ceremony, killing Rasputin. Rasputin has one more trick up his sleeve, that is, in his belly. He births an eldritch monster, which kills him and Ilsa, who says, "die Hölle wird uns mit nichts überraschen können". Hellboy gets Myers and Liz to safety, then goes back to take care of the gigantic, many-armed monster. Myers gives him a string of grenades. After getting tossed around from one arm to another, Hellboy pulls the pins just before it swallows him. Serious heartburn follows and Hellboy, who is pretty much indestructible, flies out. "Das gibt ordentlich Muskelkater." For an encore, he strides out and saves Liz, where Myers was helpless. A kiss. The end. I watched it in German. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] These are notes for me to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. The amount of text is not proportional to my enjoyment. I might write less because I didn't get around to it when it was fresh in my mind. I rate the film based on how well it suited me personally for the genre, my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. Links are to "my IMDb ratings" [1] This reminds me that I had a similar dynamic with a childhood friend. I wasn't a classic nerd but I was good in school and liked intellectual pursuits. He was smarter than people gave him credit for and, while not on the football team, he was built like a brick shithouse because of his strenuous summer job helping his dad pave driveways. Neither one of us ever thought it was odd that he picked me up for school in the morning. We didn't worry about caste. [1] Her name means "queen" in Italian, which is utterly appropriate. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=6006 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=6006 Sun, 18 Jan 2026 09:27:19 +0100 , comprising about 280 pages in all. [1] It was an interesting writing exercise, as the next topic I had before me was determined by the order in which I'd watched the movie or series. Usually I write whatever I'm inspired to write -- which is obviously easier. Sometimes you have to try something difficult, just to see if you can (still) do it. Practicing discipline creates the capacity for more discipline. [Typing Cat] [The List] 1. "Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2025.1" 1. Conclave (2024) — 9/10 2. The Rundown / Bienvenue dans la jungle (2003) — 5/10 3. The Dead Don’t Die (2019) — 5/10 4. Devara Part 1 (2024) — 8/10 5. Disappear Completely (2022) — 8/10 6. Sisu (2022) — 8/10 7. Lumberjack the Monster (2023) — 8/10 8. Dinner in America (2020) — 9/10 9. Shrinking S02 (2024) — 6/10 10. Taxi Driver (1976) — 8/10 2. 3. "Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2025.2" 1. Catholic Cowgirl (2024) — 7/10 2. Ford v Ferrari (2019) — 9/10 3. Chocolat (2016) — 7/10 4. The Shining (1980) — 9/10 5. The Instigators (2024) — 5/10 6. The Last Samurai (2003) — 9/10 7. Silo S02 (2024) — 7/10 8. Bad Sisters S02 (2024) — 5/10 9. Max Payne (2008) — 6/10 10. Pain & Gain (2013) — 7/10 4. 5. "Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2025.3" 1. Gandhi (1982) — 9/10 2. Ultraman S01 (2024) — 5/10 3. Man on the Inside (2024) — 7/10 4. Borg vs. McEnroe (2017) — 8/10 5. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) — 8/10 6. The Dark Knight Rises (2012) — 7/10 7. Luther: The Fallen Sun (2023) — 7/10 8. The Tomorrow War (2021) — 4/10 9. Goldeneye (1995) — 8/10 10. Raiders of the Lost Ark (Black and White) (1981) — 9/10 6. 7. "Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2025.4" 1. Doubt (2008) — 8/10 2. Mission Impossible − Dead Reckoning Part One (2023) — 7/10 3. Der Morgen Stirbt Nie (Tomorrow Never Dies) (1997) — 7/10 4. Puss in Boots (2011) — 7/10 5. Independence Day (1995) — 9/10 6. The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor (2008) — 6/10 7. Happy S01 (2017) — 9/10 8. Chronicles of Riddick (2004) — 8/10 9. Shane (1953) — 5/10 10. Pitch Black (2000) — 7/10 8. 9. "Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2025.5" 1. The Devil Wears Prada (2006) — 7/10 2. Boss Level (2020) — 7/10 3. Better Call Saul S06 (2022) — 9/10 4. Footloose (1984) — 7/10 5. The Creator (2023) — 6/10 6. Police Academy (1984) — 6/10 7. Papillon (2017) — 9/10 8. Divergent (2014) — 5/10 9. Severance S02 (2024) — 6/10 10. Terminator Renaissance (2010) — 6/10 10. 11. "Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2025.6" 1. Rocky III: (2017) — 6/10 2. The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar: (2017) — 9/10 3. Happy S02 (2017) — 7/10 4. No Other Land (2024) — 8/10 5. Police Academy 2: Their First Assignment (1985) — 4/10 6. Plane (Absturz im Dschungel) (2023) — 4/10 7. The Holdovers (2023) — 9/10 8. Bastille Day (The Take) (2016) — 7/10 9. Harry Potter und der Stein der Weisen (2001) — 7/10 10. Masters of the Universe: Revelation (2021) — 5/10 12. 13. "Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2025.7" 1. Bill Burr: I’m Sorry You Feel That Way (2014) — 10/10 2. Stewart Lee, Basic Lee: Live at the Lowry (2024) — 9/10 3. Mank (2020) — 9/10 4. Bobby Yeah (2011) — 8/10 5. Midnight Express (1978) — 8/10 6. The Infernal Machine (2022) — 7/10 7. Shrek the Third (2022) — 5/10 8. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008) — 4/10 9. Everest (2015) — 7/10 10. Die Another Day (2002) — 6/10 14. 15. "Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2025.8" 1. Godzilla (1998) — 7/10 2. Our Friend (2019) — 5/10 3. Hulk (2003) — 7/10 4. Black Mirror S07 (2025) — 9/10 5. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005) — 8/10 6. Morbius (2022) — 7/10 7. Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (2006) — 9/10 8. T2 Trainspotting (2017) — 8/10 9. Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2022) — 4/10 10. L’immensità (2022) — 7/10 16. 17. "Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2025.9" 1. Biking Borders (2021) — 8/10 2. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2007) — 7/10 3. The Age of Innocence (1993) — 8/10 4. Oppenheimer (2023) — 8/10 5. Star Trek: First Contact (1996) — 8/10 6. Madame (2017) — 6/10 7. Habemus Papam (2011) — 7/10 8. Harry Potter and the Half-blood Prince (2009) — 7/10 9. The Staircase (2004–2018) — 4/10 10. Louis Theroux: The Settlers (2025) — 9/10 18. 19. "Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2025.10" 1. Constantine (2005) — 10/10 2. Romancing the Stone (1984) — 8/10 3. Mr. McMahon (2024) — 7/10 4. Fast X (2023) — 7/10 5. Kung Fu Panda (2008) — 9/10 6. Venom: Let There Be Carnage (2021) — 7/10 7. Das Krokodil und sein Nilpferd (1979) — 4/10 8. Gaza Doctors Under Attack (2025) — 8/10 9. Bad Words (2013) — 8/10 10. Mythic Quest S01-S04 (2020-2025) — 8/10 20. 21. "Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2025.11" 1. Big Mouth S08 (2025) — 8/10 2. The Outside Man (“Brutale Schatten”) (1973) — 7/10 3. Toy Story 4 (“Alles hört auf kein Kommando”) (2019) — 7/10 4. Pirates of the Carribean − Fremde Gezeiten (“On Stranger Tides”) (2011) — 6/10 5. Love, Death, and Robots S04 (2025) — 7/10 6. Chief of War S01 (2025) — 8/10 7. Fack ju Göhte (2013) — 5/10 8. La dégustation (2022) — 6/10 9. Warlord (2025) — 4/10 10. Two Tickets to Paradise (2022) — 6/10 22. 23. "Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2025.12" 1. Jurassic World: Rebirth (2025) — 6/10 2. Death Becomes Her (1992) — 8/10 3. Superman (2025) — 4/10 4. Plane (2023) — 6/10 5. Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021) — 6/10 6. Secret Headquarters (2022) — 5/10 7. Outbreak (1995) — 8/10 8. John Rambo (Rambo) (2008) — 7/10 9. The Running Man (1987) — 6/10 10. Invelle (Nowhere) (2023) — 8/10 24. 25. "Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2025.13" 1. The Walk (2015) — 7/10 2. Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994) — 6/10 3. Das Lehrerzimmer (The Teacher’s Lounge) (2023) — 7/10 4. Arcane S01–S02 (2022–2024) — 7/10 5. Jurassic World Dominion (2022) — 7/10 6. Black Adam (2022) — 5/10 7. Time Bandits (1981) — 7/10 8. The Phantom of the Open (2021) — 7/10 9. Asterix & Obelix im Reich der Mitte (2023) — 4/10 10. Dinner with Skinner (2025) — 8/10 26. 27. "Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2025.14" 1. Dante’s Peak (1997) — 9/10 2. Cobain: Montage of Heck (2015) — 7/10 3. Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018) — 8/10 4. Jane Goodall: The Hope (2020) — 7/10 5. Mr. and Mrs. Smith (2005) — 8/10 6. South Park S27 (2025) — 9/10 7. O Brother Where Art Thou? (2000) — 10/10 8. Woman at War / La Donna Elettrica (2018) — 8/10 9. Richard Jewell (2019) — 8/10 10. Prigione 77 (2022) — 8/10 28. 29. "Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2025.15" 1. Fist Fight (2017) — 4/10 2. Pacific Rim (2013) — 9/10 3. Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald (2018) — 6/10 4. Equalizer 3 (2023) — 6/10 5. Police Academy 7: Mission to Moscow (1994) — 3/10 6. Lethal Weapon 2 (1989) — 8/10 7. A Series of Unfortunate Events (2004) — 6/10 8. Talk to Me (2022) — 5/10 9. Equalizer 2 (2018) — 6/10 10. Tremors: Shrieker Island (2020) — 5/10 30. 31. "Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2025.16" 1. Resident Evil: Extinction (2007) — 6/10 2. Letterkenny S04–S11 (2017–2023) — 7/10 3. High Plains Drifter (1973) — 6/10 4. Hercules (2014) — 5/10 5. The Lost Prince (Il Principe Dimenticato / Le Prince oublié) (2020) — 7/10 6. Zombieland: Double Tap (2019) — 7/10 7. Mystic River (2003) — 8/10 8. The Red Shoes (1948) — 8/10 9. A Winter’s Tale (2014) — 6/10 10. Space Between Stars (2018) — 8/10 32. 33. "Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2025.17" 1. Pollock (2000) — 7/10 2. Equalizer (2014) — 9/10 3. Rush Hour 3 (2007) — 7/10 4. Murder Sheets (2024) — 8/10 5. Emotionally Exhausting (2015) — 8/10 6. Self Help Me (2020) — 8/10 7. Ronny Chieng: Love to Hate It (2024) — 8/10 8. No Country for Old Men (2007) — 9/10 9. Fatherhood (2023) — 6/10 10. Abgang mit Stil (Going in Style) (2017) — 7/10 34. 35. "Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2025.18" 1. Over the Top (1987) — 6/10 2. Happy Gilmore (1996) — 7/10 3. The Interview (2014) — 7/10 4. Last Man Standing (1996) — 8/10 5. Havoc (2025) — 5/10 6. Snatch (2000) — 8/10 7. Adú (2020) — 9/10 8. Elysium (2013) — 8/10 9. Violent Night (2022) — 7/10 10. North Country (2005) — 9/10 36. 37. "Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2025.19" 1. Robocop (2014) — 6/10 2. Stirb Langsam 2 (Die Hard 2) (1990) — 8/10 3. Punisher: War Zone (2008) — 5/10 4. Brian Simpson: Live from the Mothership (2024) — 8/10 5. Fatal Attraction (1987) — 8/10 6. The 6th Day (2000) — 6/10 7. October Sky (1999) — 8/10 8. Shane Gillis: Beautiful Dogs (2023) — 7/10 9. Flyboys (2006) — 8/10 10. Schtonk (1992) — 8/10 38. 39. "Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2025.20" 1. Blood Diamond (2006) — 9/10 2. Cape Fear (1991) — 9/10 3. Das Netz (1991) — 9/10 4. Donnie Brasco (1997) — 8/10 5. Sandman S02 (2025) — 4/10 6. Road to Perdition (2002) — 7/10 7. Jump Cut (2024) — 8/10 8. Die drei Musketiere (1948) — 7/10 9. The Grudge (2019) — 6/10 10. U-571 (2000) — 6/10 40. 41. "Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2025.21" 1. Born Poor (2025) — 8/10 2. Rückkehr des Königs (Return of the King) (2003) — 8/10 3. The Whiskey Bandit (2017) — 8/10 4. Palestine Is Still the Issue (2002) — 9/10 5. House of Gucci (2021) — 6/10 6. Heat (1995) — 6/10 7. Miami Vice S01 (1984) — 7/10 8. Knight Rider S01 (1982) — 6/10 9. Antarctica S01 (2011) — 6/10 10. Frieren: Beyond Journey’s End (2023) — 6/10 -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] I also published hundreds of pages of "notes" (December 12th, 2025 -- January 2nd, 2026) in the same time span, as well as dozens of pages of articles on other topics. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4822 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4822 Sun, 11 Jan 2026 10:17:32 +0100 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5986 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5986 Sun, 11 Jan 2026 09:00:42 +0100 -- "7/10" 2. "The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988)" <#Munchausen> -- "8/10" 3. "Zurück in die Zukunft III (1990)" <#Future3> -- "7/10" 4. "Rambo: Last Blood (2019)" <#Rambo> -- "6/10" 5. "Non c'è più religione (2016)" <#Religione> -- "6/10" 6. "King Arthur (2004)" <#Arthur> -- "6/10" 7. "Triangle of Sadness (2022)" <#Triangle> -- "6/10" 8. "A Knight's Tale (2001)" <#Knight> -- "9/10" 9. "El Verdugo / 100 Rifles (1969)" <#Rifles> -- "6/10" 10. "Paddington in Peru (2024)" <#Paddington> -- "6/10" 11. "The End of the Tour (2015)" <#Tour> -- "9/10" Zurück in die Zukunft II (1989) -- "7/10" The first part of this movie has not aged particularly well. It's a convoluted plot where Doc (Christopher Lloyd) gets Marty (Michael J. Fox) to travel 30 years into the future with him, to save the fate of the children he will have with Jennifer (Elizabeth Shue). He manages it -- the details aren't really important -- but meanwhile future Biff Tannen (Tom Wilson) has [2] stolen the time-machine and gone back 30 years to give himself a sports almanac, with which his younger self makes an incredible fortune. The second part is much better, where Marty returns to an absolute dystopia, where Biff Tannen rules all. His old neighborhood is a war zone -- and another family lives in hiis house. A black family. You know, because when the neighborhood goes to shit, white people don't live there anymore. I feel like that was less intentional than just the most logical choice to make at the time, and thus ... pretty racist. It's not a big deal. It was the end of the 80s, a mere two decades after the Civil Rights Act and well into a phase of "red-lining" that had been renamed "gentrification" because it sounded fancier. [3] Where was I? Marty wakes in his Mom's (Lea Thompson) apartment in the Tanner Tower, where she lives with her husband Biff. Marty is apparently the only thing that's unchanged. She recognizes him as her son. Doc shows up and there's a ton of exposition to explain what was immediately obvious. Doc and Marty must go back in time to 1955 (again) to stop 2025 Biff from giving 1955 Biff the sports almanac. Once there, Marty goes undercover in what he considers to be 1950s camouflage. He combines the Fonz's leather jacket with a porkpie hat. As noted above, the whole mission is to get the sports almanac back from Biff Tannin (Tom Wilson). He gets it off of Biff but then loses it again to Biff after having been goaded into a fight with him. How was he goaded? The same way as always: you just call him a coward, and Marty'll do whatever you want to prove you wrong. So, he has to get the damned thing back again. This time, he does it with the hoverboard, emulating the scene with a skateboard from the first movie. This reboot/nostalgia/memberberries shit is not exactly new. He gets the almanac back and the Delorean appears, to save him just in the nick of time, dropping a rope and pulling him up just as Biff is about to run him over. Instead of catching/killing Marty, Biff flies into a manure cart. Again. This must be hideously traumatizing. Still in 1955, the storm is approaching. Doc has dropped Marty off by the estates and Marty burns the almanac, restoring the timeline and eradicating Biff's reign in 1985. It's interesting that this only happened after he'd burned the almanac, which suggests that Biff would have gotten it back somehow and kept his own triumphant timeline on track. It's also interesting that the newspapers, photos, and mementoes all retain their ability to track which timeline they're in, and to report on even future events accurately and seemingly instantaneously. Are they somehow Einstein-Rosen-Podolsky bridges? Lightning strikes. Thunder rolls. The next strike hits the Delorean, still hovering overhead. As Marty gapes in shock, wondering what to do next, a car approaches. A courier steps out. He asks Marty to confirm his name. He hands him a sealed envelope, saying that it's been sitting with his company for seventy years, awaiting delivery to this precise spot, at this precise time. The letter is from Doc and he has been thrown back to 1885 by the lightning strike. Marty races immediately to find the 1955 Doc in the streets, having just successfully time-traveled Marty back to 1985. And there Marty is again, standing before him. Doc faints. To be continued... I watched it in German. The Adventures of Baron Munchausen (1988) -- "8/10" In inimical Terry Gilliam style, the real, the remembered, and the fantastical all mix in this retelling of the adventures of the Baron (John Neville). We start in an unnamed city under siege from Ottoman Turks. They have been under siege for so long that their supplies are running out. As a diversion, a theatre troupe puts on a relatively intricate show of the Adventures of Baron von Munchausen. They are soon interrupted by the real Baron, striding in, declaring it all a farce -- slanderous, ridiculous nonsense. He takes over the storytelling...and the stories become quite a bit more real. His first tale is of himself and his team -- superheroes like Berthold (Eric Idle), who runs so fast that he has to wear a ball-and-chain on each ankle to keep himself in place, Gustavus (Jack Purvis), who is small but who has super-hearing and whose lungs pack a huge punch, Adolphus (Charles McKeown), a marksman who can see for hundreds of miles, and Albrecht (Winston Dennis), who possesses the strength of twenty men. They are guests of the Sultan (Peter Jeffrey), with whom the Baron makes a bet: he will have a much-better bottle of wine delivered from the Queen's court in Vienna before the sun sets. If he wins, he gets to take what one man can carry from the Sultan's treasury; if he loses, the Sultan may have his head. He wins, and Albrecht takes nearly every last doubloon from the room. On their way out, though, they are assaulted, and Gustavus and Adolphus demonstrate their respective skills to save the group. Somehow, the cannonballs and explosions bleed into reality, nearly destroying the theater. The crowd begins to run away. Munchausen begs them to stay. The play's producer The Right Ordinary Horatio Jackson (Jonathan Pryce) isn't even 100% mad. All of the actors play both roles: those in the tales of the elder Munchausen, which seem to be bridging fantasy and reality, and those as actors in the play. In the ruins of the theatre, little Sally Salt and her dog discover the Baron lying behind the stage, with the angel of death sucking the life from him like a dementor. She rescues him but he wants her to let him die. He can't resist telling one more story. She runs away when the ceiling starts to fall. It really is the attack of the Ottomans that is destroying the city. Sally and the Baron head to the ramparts. He rides out on a cannonball and returns, having fought off death once again, and also reconnoitered the Turkish camp. Sally now believes that he is the real deal. They retreat to the theater, where the rest of the troupe has taken cover. Rose (Uma Thurman) is there. She must offer up her pantaloons to build a hot-air balloon (un montgolfier). He soars over the city, on his way to get reinforcements; the city cheers him on. Sally has stowed away. The Baron sails for the moon, where he knows the king (Robin Williams) and queen (Valentina Cortese), and where the people can remove their heads. Sally doesn't buy a word of it. They awake on the moon, with their aircraft now having become a boat, "sailing" through the moon-dust. They are trapped in a Potemkin village of sorts, and meet the king of the moon, j'excuse, il re de tutto (the king of the moon speaks Italian half the time). He imprisons the Baron in a birdcage-like contraption, floating in blackness -- which you'd recognize from "Time Bandits" -- and, beneath the floor of the cage is Berthold, who's been there so long that he doesn't even remember who the Baron is. The Queen of the Moon's head appears to free them. Her body is distracting the King of the Moon, which causes her to ooh and aah throughout the escape. They escape by riding away on her hair/mane, shooting across the moonscape. The king discovers her treachery and hunts them down on a three-headed robotic bird named Sibyl. There are...difficulties, and he crashes without hurting anyone else. His body is dead but the head lives on. He sneezes himself off the moon. Sally, Berthold, and the Baron climb to the tip of the moon's crescent -- what a lovely imagination -- and attach a rope to it, which they use to descend to Earth. When the rope runs out, the Baron cuts the piece from the top so that Berthold can tie it to the bottom, in order to extend it. It doesn't work, obviously. They land in a volcano -- Etna -- in the middle of a labor dispute. Vulcan (Olliver Reed) receives them. They ask him if he knows where their other three teammates are. He invites them to tea. But first, he shows them his latest weapon. "Baron Munchausen: What's this? Vulcan: Oh, this is our prototype. RX, uh, Intercontinental, radar-sneaky, multi-warheaded nuclear missile. Baron Munchausen: Ah! What does it do? Vulcan: Do? Kills the enemy. Baron Munchausen: All the enemy? Vulcan: Aye, all of them. All their wives, and all their children, and all their sheep, and all their cattle, and all their cats and dogs. All of them. All of them gone for good. Sally: That's horrible. Vulcan: Ahh. Well, you see, the advantage is you don't have to see one single one of them die. You just sit comfortably thousands of miles away from the battlefield and simply press the button. Berthold: Well, where's the fun in that?" At tea, they find Albrecht, who's a servant and happy as a clam feeling small and delicate. Venus (Uma Thurman) arrives. A clam-shell rises out of a fountain, rises, and opens to reveal Uma Thurman at 18 years old, as God made her, and in her absolute prime. Two servants fly in (on cables, natch) to swathe her in clothing. Just stunning. What a lovely scene. Vulcan is deeply in love. He calls her his wife. I'm not so sure that's true. The Baron? He is enchanted. But so is Venus! The Baron pulls, man. He's pulled pretty much everyone so far. So, they're dancing on air together when Vulcan pulls them back down -- I learned a lot of misogynistic words in French in this scene (e.g. salope, catin, dingue, gonzesse but also nicer ones like cocotte, pouliche) -- then throws them into a river. They pop up, upside down, in a lake at the center of the Earth. They right themselves and are no longer drowning. They spot an island. But it's not an island. It's a giant sea monster. It swallows them all up. They wash up on a shipwreck. The Baron's in bad shape. They hear music coming from one of the myriad other wrecks. A warm light emanates from a cabin high above. They find Adolphus and Gustavus there. They've not just aged terribly, but have nearly lost their powers, being nearly blind and deaf, respectively. They are playing cards with death. Sally's shriek dispatches death again. The Baron's horse breaks in to wake them all up again. The Baron ages when he's close to giving up; he grows younger when Sally has inspired him. The Baron throws sneezing powder out of the window, causing the sea monster to eject them and their boat from its blowhole. The baron is astride his horse while the others row. They arrive on shore, exactly where the Ottomans are. The Ottomans blow them out of the water. It's not quit the returning-hero approach that Sally had imagined. She is growing ... frustrated with the old, useless farts. The Baron looks younger again, though. He is also frustrated with the old farts. he enters the Ottoman camp to give himself up. His team rallies themselves to come to his rescue, as he knew that they would. The mayor is there, trying to negotiate a surrender to the marauders. He derides the Baron's fantastical life, preferring to use logic and reason. This is, of course, a recurring theme in Gilliam's work: the triumph of art, of whimsy, over the crushing logic, the unyielding reason of society. During the celebration, the mayor snipes the Baron from the clocktower. He is, once more, at death's door. A doctor finally arrives, as the Baron repeats, for the fourth or fifth time, "pas d'medicin", because it is, of course, the angel of death, peeling the Baron's soul from this mouth, exactly like the dementors would 30 years later. The baron is lying in state. And ... an older baron is on stage, reciting his own eulogy. This is the showdown between the mayor and his ironclad reason and Munchausen's world of fantasy, which is sometimes just the thing that people need. But the Baron sometimes wonders whether the world needs him anymore. He expressed it quite well to Sally when they were playing cards with Death on the boat, "Baron Munchausen: Because I'm tired of the world and the world is evidently tired of me. Sally: But why? Why? Baron Munchausen: Why, why, why! Because it's all logic and reason now. Science, progress, laws of hydraulics, laws of social dynamics, laws of this, that, and the other. No place for three-legged cyclops in the South Seas. No place for cucumber trees and oceans of wine. No place for me." But also the actor who plays the Baron says, as they advance on the mayor and his army, "Open the gates, dear friends... and let's seize the day! Or close our minds up with inventions, death and fear. There's nothing so destroys a man... as ignorance and conformity!" In French, it was quite nice as well, "Ne cédez pas, Ouvrez les portes, chers amis! Saisisson cet instant ou que tombe sur nos âmes la mort de l'imagination. Dans la peur, rien ne détruit plus un homme que l'ignorance, le prosaïsme, le conformisme!" The mayor is trying to continue to keep everyone inside, terrified of leaving, imposing a siege from within, a siege of the mind. This is also a recurring Gilliam theme, one I quite admire. They throw open the gates to prove to the mayor that he is wrong, that Munchausen and his team had vanquished the Turks. Munchausen rides off. The end. The sets and costumes are absolutely incredible. It's 1988; it's all real. It's no wonder that Gilliam's movies always cost so much and took so long to make. He's a genius. There's no-one else who'd ever made movies like he does. The sets are intricate, lived-in, real, dusty, dirty, and wonderful. The camera angles are inventive. Even the smallest scenes -- the mayor and a dozen scribes in a room piled high with papers and devices -- don't skimp on a single detail. The battlefield has miniature elephants with siege towers on them. They're on-screen for seconds...but I remembered them. It's just incredible. Zurück in die Zukunft III (1990) -- "7/10" This film begins immediately after the end of "Zurück in die Zukunft II" <#Future2>, with Doc (Christopher Lloyd) lying in the street after having fainted at seeing Marty (Michael J. Fox) again. They learn that the Delorean was irreparable with 1885 technology. 1885 Doc had included instructions on how to repair it in 1955, though, and how to find the Delorean that he'd packed away in a cave. They're ready to send Marty back to 1985 with the Delorean. Outside the cave, Marty trips over Doc's headstone, from 1885, learning that Doc had died just days after having sent the letter. He didn't live out his days in peace and happiness. Marty elects to travel back in time to 1885, where he is truly a fish out of water. He stows the Delorean, meets his great-great-grandfather, great-great grandmother, and his great-grandfather as a baby. Marty gets into town and immediately gets into Buford Tannen's hair, which seems to be an unavoidable feature of the space-time continuum. Guess what, though? The Delorean's gas tank ruptured, so it can't get up to 88MPH. They'll have to push it with a train. Emmett's shop is wonderful, chock-full of machines, one of which is two stories high and produces ice cubes. He has a Rube Goldberg machine to cook breakfast for him. While they're inspecting the rail lines that they'll follow with their "borrowed" train, Doc saves Clara (Mary Steenburgen). They fall immediately in love, with common interests like science, teaching, Jules Verne, etc. At the town festival that night, they dance and are interrupted by Tannen, who wants to kill Doc. Marty manages to draw his ire instead and they have a Tuesday morning showdown. Marty had previously impressed the guy running the stall selling Colt 45s, so the man gives him one with which to kill Tannen, if he can. At some point, Buford Tannen (Tom Wilson) bragged that he'd killed 12 men, not counting Injuns and Chinamen. I can't tell how ironic that was. The next morning, Marty starts practicing quick-drawing, and we get a quick view of Fox's little heinie, which must have been deliberate. Doc and Marty talk about their plans and Doc must reluctantly agree that he belongs in the future, and must break up with Clara. He does so but ... not well. He is devastated and tries drowning his sorrows in whiskey. he spends so much time blabbering that he blabs the whole night away. Marty wakes on the morning of his shootout to find Doc is gone. He finds Doc in the bar, still getting ready to take his shot. His binge lasts one shot and he passes out. Tannen has arrived. Marty doesn't want to go out. But Tannen keeps calling him a coward. He finally manages to break the curse by not rising to the challenge and goes out the back way, with a by-now revived Doc. They're shot at and Marty bumps into a stove, jostling the door free. [4] With Doc in danger, Marty walks out to challenge Tannen. Tannen blows him away. When Tannen goes to check on the body, Marty brains him with the iron plate, then works him over. Tannen's going to jail. It's weird, though, did they just realize that he's a criminal? Because the U.S. Marshal didn't even try to arrest him two nights before. Were they arresting him for a bank he'd robbed in the interim? He had mentioned something about having a prior engagement on the Monday. Clara, meanwhile, hears from other passengers on the train bound for San Fransisco how much Emmett had loved her and she stops the train and heads back. Marty and Emmett catch the train and hijack it. They've got it on the right track and up against the Delorean. They've got fuel sticks to get the train up to 88MPH. This has to work because the track ends over a canyon in 1885. The hope is that the bridge will be there in 1985. Clara is trying to catch them on a horse but they're starting to go too quickly. The first booster fuel kicks in just as she jumps onto the locomotive. Doc's trying to get to the Delorean and Clara is there, beaming her love. It looks a bit silly and she seems to be largely unaware of how she's putting a serious crimp in their plans. They're going 50MPH. She has to climb to the car as well because she's not going to be able to get off now. She's got very practical train-climbing boots. They're going 72MPH now. The next booster blows. Clara and Doc nearly fall off the train. The locomotive engine is about to blow. Marty sends them the hoverboard. 82MPH. Emmett rescues Clara and they fly off on the hoverboard. He's not going back to the future. Marty is, though. The Delorean disappears, as it should. The flaming train plummets to the bottom of the canyon. The Delorean appears on the bridge in 1985 ... and Marty gets out just as an oncoming train annihilates it. Marty finds his family at home, then picks up Jennifer (Elizabeth Shue) in his truck. Needles (Flea) pulls up in his truck and challenges him to a drag race. He pretends to go, but J-turns out of there instead. When he returns to the site of the Delorean wreckage with Jennifer, Doc shows up with his souped-up time-travel train. All's well that end's well. I guess Doc built another time-travel machine in the late 1880s. He's also already gone to the future to soup that thing up. It's a flying train, is what I'm saying. I watched it in German. Rambo: Last Blood (2019) -- "6/10" John Rambo (Sylvester Stallone) has gotten older. But he's still useful. The movie starts in a torrential downpour, a storm with flooding, with Rambo saving a few people from floods. He gets to show off his horse skills. I guess he likes horses now. He's living on a horse ranch with Gabriela (Yvette Monreal) and her guardian Maria (Adriana Barraza). Gabriela is 17 and bored. She no longer believes anything that the only two people who have done nothing but love and care for her her entire life have to say. Everyone else in the world is smarter and better than they are. Rambo tries to placate her by letting her friends throw a party in his tunnels, but it's not enough. At the party, her friend Gizelle (Fenessa Pineda), a nasty little piece of business, lets Gariela know that she's located her long-gone father in Mexico. She asks to go see him. Rambo says no. Maria says hell no. She goes anyway, a 17-year-old driving to a terrible-looking neighborhood in a city she's never been to, to visit a man who she's been told a million times is a terrible, terrible person. What could possibly go wrong? Surprisingly, Gizelle does actually take Gabrielle to her father, who immediately proves to her what a terrible person he is, in no uncertain terms. He tells her she means nothing to him and send her on his way. This is, honestly, a much better outcome than I'd expected going in to this scene. Gabriele is devastated, of course, so Gisele takes her to a club to cheer her up. Just kidding, Gisele wanted to get hella drunk, steal her friend's gold bracelet, and let some local guys who collect underage prostitutes roofie her. YOLO. Let's go back quickly to her conversation with Rambo, right before she drove her underage ass to a country she's never been to, all alone. Gabriela: Uncle John, I have to do this. I need to hear it from him. I need to understand why he would just do that. Rambo: Because he's not a good man. Gabriela: Can't be that simple. Rambo: It is. Gabriela: Uncle John, l've heard the stories. I know you've been through a lot. But my world is a lot different from yours. Rambo: No, it's not. It's worse. Gabriela: No, it's not. People don't just act bad for no reason. Rambo: There's no reason for a man to throw his family away. He's lucky he has one. Gabriela: Why are you getting so mad? Rambo: Because you don't know how bad it is. I know how black a man's heart can be. There's nothing good out there, Gabrielle. Gabriela: Maybe he's changed. Rambo: Men like that don't change. It only gets worse. Gabriela: You changed. Rambo: I haven't changed. I'm just trying to keep a lid on it, every day. So, she's been kidnapped by two extremely unsavory brothers. Look, everyone in this movie is a caricature but they all have their roles to play. The first act was bucolic, establishing how well Rambo's adapted. It shows how good he is with horses, how good he is with Gabriella. It also shows his extensive tunnels and weapons store that he has under the ranch. It was pretty wholesome overall. Now we're in the second act, which unrolls like Taken but with Sylvester Stallone in the lead role. With Gabriella gone in the morning, Maria and Rambo put two and two together, find all of the addresses he needs, and he rockets down there like an avenging angel. He pays a visit to papa but realizes quickly that, though he's a piece of shit, he had nothing to do with anything. Next, he visits Giselle, who's wearing the gold bracelet that had been Gabrielle's mother's. Rambo knows now how to handle her: roughly. He forces her to take him to the club to scope out the men who'd abducted his "daughter", then follows them to their lair. We are treated to a few scenes to let us know what human trafficking looks like. The first group of customers happen to be the local police. They let them in 40 or 50 at a time, as loudly declared by the madame, who runs the show for the brothers when they're otherwise occupied. On the street, Rambo has overestimated himself and gotten surrounded by dozens of guys. He confronts the brothers. They laugh at him and beat him within an inch of his life. One of them inaugurates Gabriella to a life of prostitution and heroin that very evening. A local journalist Carmen Delgado (Paz Vega), who'd been following him, picks up his shattered body and takes him to her apartment to recuperate. A local doctor says he can't move for a few days because he has a concussion. He stitches up some wounds. Rambo's on his feet again four days later and plans his next move. He breaks in to one of the houses, killing everyone who works there with what looks like a clawed hammer. He finds Gabriella upstairs, gone on heroin, arm full of needle holes. He carries her to the truck and they vamoose. She dies before they get to the U.S. border. He drives her body home, burying her under a tree, on the ranch. Montage. Smithing. Preparing the tunnels. Claymore. Shotguns, Punji sticks. Fire traps. The works. He drives back to Mexico, to the skinny brother's house, the one who'd repeatedly raped Gabriella. He kills everyone in that guy's home and leaves the brother's decapitated body on the the bed. Back home, he waits. The other brother obliges by showing up with his posse in five or six vehicles. The fireworks begin. Rambo takes out half of the group before luring the others below ground. He picks them off one by one, saving the brother for last. Rambo takes some damage but we know that gunshot wounds mean nothing to a man on a mission. Despite the wound to his shoulder, his arrows fly true, four of them pinning the brother to the barn wall. He plunges his Rambo knife into his chest cavity to pull out his still-pumping heart and give him a fleeting glimpse of it before he dies. Rambo retreats to his porch. Everyone he's loves is dead or gone. His ranch is ruined. But he will fight on. I watched it in the original English and Spanish with German subtitles (I was riding the bike for some of it). Non c'è più religione (2016) -- "6/10" This is the story of the island of Porto Buio (literally "Dark Port"), an island with a small village on it, an island without children. They have so much religion that everyone's either old or in the church. Young people move away. They are in crisis because Easter is coming and they have no Baby Jesus for their celebrations. There is only Lupo (Giuseppe Fiale), an overweight boy going through puberty. He's at about 85kg, so yeah, he's a big boy. Suor Marta (Angela Finocchiaro, a nun) isn't a big fan of Cecco's (Claudio Bisio) plan to scare up a baby from the thriving nearby Tunisian community but she is convinced to go have a look. A committee of four stern-faced and probably deeply racist Italians make the excursion. They are shockingly racist but this is probably realistic. There are honestly a lot of funny touches here. It's racist, but they don't come off well at all. Their young tour guide Ali (Mehdi Meskar) is great. They are there to meet Bilal (Alessandro Gassmann). He speaks fluent Italian and seems to have an Italian mamma, who calls him during the meeting. He's got a strong Benicio del Toro vibe to him. He is accompanied by the lovely Aïda (Nabiha Akkari). They're in -- they'll loan the island their son. However. However, the little village, in the spirit of unity, must also do Ramadan with them. The villagers are quickly metaphorically dying of hunger and thirst. But they don't want to have a plastic baby Jesus, so they're stuck. Cecco catches Lupo with a piece of pizza and takes it from him before he can eat any of it. But then Cecco is caught red-handed in the act of licking the paper clean. He must atone. But how? "Un posto dove puo pregare." Bilal wants a place to pray. So now the church has to make space for a mosque. Half of the apse is filled with the Catholic service. 180º in the other direction is the Muslim service. Like, at the same time. Next, Cecco reveals the new village sign: it's in Italian and Arabic. Bilal, Marta, and Cecco are getting to be friends. Ali has eyes for Cecco's daughter Maddalena (Laura Adriani), who's at school in London. It's to be a mixed ceremony as well, so the Tunisians are demanding a few changes to the ceremony, to include only the parts of Baby Jesus's story that overlap from the Koran and Bible. The three of them are at the beach collecting sand for the "desert". Good Lord, they're playing in the surf like children -- I supposed this is to show that we're all the same underneath, all getting the most pleasure out of the simple things. Cecco screws things up when he offends Marta, who's still a little bit in love with him, despite being a nun. Cecco's sweet on her too but doesn't know how to express himself. While Marta's baking and talking to her giant statue of Jesus, he's off scuba-diving with Bilal, who's now his best buddy again, and they have a bit of a heart-to-heart. They barely survive their journey as they're trapped out at sea overnight. The Bishop arrives to inspect the preparations for the ceremony. This takes a long time, and there are a lot of broad jokes. Upshot: they get approval. Cecco's daughter Maddalena arrives back from London. She is very pregnant. Ali's still dressed as Joseph. But he's not the dad, ,,, is he? They show up at a lovely party where everyone's having fun and drop Maddalena's pregnancy like a bombshell. She won't tell Cecco who the father is. Cecco suspects that it's Ali. He asks her to be the Madonna. Aïda and Bilal are out, even though they'd prepared a dance to Santa Claus is Comin' to Town, for some reason utterly unbeknownst to me. I guess that rekindled friendship is over again? Maddalena is a buddhist though, so the sand is out and, for some reason, bindis are in. Also saffron robes. Cecco is trying to drive a wedge between Ali and Maddalena, somewhat inexpertly. Maddalena is going to have her baby on the stage, near the manger, without an epidural, as she asks for many times. Ali goes to get Marta. They have to take her to a hospital. Bu the island doesn't have a hospital. The Piaggio three-wheeler is their ambulance; their way is blocked by a herd of goats. Marta is in the back with Maddalena, making conversation, "E come lo chiami? [And what will you name him?] Che cazzo le so! [Like I fucking know!] Ah. Bel nome. [Ah. Nice name.]" Maddalena's in the back of a boat with Marta and Ali. She's still wearing her golden halo. There's no time to get to a hospital. They stop the boat in a gorgeous bay. Marta is going to have to turn that baby around and deliver it herself. The baby cries. The rest of the village arrives in boats. Bilal and Cecco have made up again. Bilal checks things out before letting Cecco in, "E tutto posto." (I found this to be a sweet, noteworthy gesture, indicating that they really are friends again.) But is it? Ali and Maddalena sit like Giuseppe and Maria but, when she turns the baby to Cecco...it's definitely Asian. East Asian. I gave it an extra star because the actors were affable and seemed to be enjoying themselves, which helped some of the broad humor land better. The scene where they were playing a form of bingo looked like it could have been behind the scenes. They were all laughing as if they were lifelong friends making a movie together. I watched it in Italian with no subtitles (none were available). King Arthur (2004) -- "6/10" This movie purports to tell the true story of King Arthur and his men. It portrays Arthur as a Roman general, from Rome, and his knights as conscripts from the various outland tribes of the Roman empire. We see Lancelot taken from his family when just a young teenager, entering into bondage for 15 years. We rejoin him 15 years later, nearly to the day, as he roams with Arthur, eradicating bands of insurgents, many of which are very much like his own family. The first scene is a slaughter of Picts, who'd attacked a Roman coach. We are introduced to the various predilections and fighting styles of all of the men here: Lancelot (Ioan Gruffudd), Arthur (Clive Owen), Tristan (Mads Mikkelsen, Gawain (Joel Edgerton), Galahad (Hugh Dancy), Bors (Ray Winstone), and Dagonet (Ray Stevenson), That is quite a cast. The group rides back to their headquarters, where we see the round table and hear that Bishop Germanus (Ivano Marescotti) has deemed it their last duty to rescue an important roman family. The group argues about it but they reluctantly agree. What else can they do? Their release papers have been made contingent on doing one last mission, regardless of what their contracts say. Now we meet the picts, led by Cerdic (Stellan Skarsgård), and his son Cynric (Til Schweiger). They learn that the undefeated Arthur and his knights are coming. The picts surround them but don't kill them because Merlin (Stephen Dillane) wants them to take out the Saxons for them. Arthur arrives at the castle of Marius Honorius (Ken Stott) to pick up him and his son Alecto (Lorenzo De Angelis), who's supposed to be in line to be the next pope. Arthur discovers that Maruis wasn't being very honorable with his people. They can hear the Saxon drums in the distance but Arthur must discover the secrets of the man whom he's to take back to Rome. He discovers a filthy dungeon filled with corpses of people who'd been tortured to death. Only a few live: a child and Guinevere (Keira Knightley). Arthur is this close to killing Marius but he needs to deliver him and his family alive in order to be freed from his bondage to Rome. They head for the pass, the snow falling, with the whole village in tow. Guinevere coquettes around, pursing her lips super-hard and seeming, despite the nearly deadly torture she'd suffered, to be impervious to the cold. Each of the knights watch her through a window as she bathes. She arranges a surprise meeting between Arthur and Merlin. The next morning, the honorable Marius tries to kidnap the rescued boy and to kill him. Dagonet fights the men off and Guinevere drops Marius with an arrow to the chest. Fuck that guy. Arthur's about to become the leader of the Pict army anyway, isn't he? They disarm Marius's men. Onward through the icy pass. The drums beat. The lake ice beneath their feet creaks. Tristan looks at Arthur. It's time to turn around; it's time to face the Saxons. On the ice. They are eight against 200. Eight arrows find eight targets. Once. Twice. They force the group tighter to the middle, putting more weight on less ice. Thrice. Four times. Five times. 40 of them gone. The ice isn't breaking. Dagonet runs out with his mighty axe to break the ice. Arthur chases after him. It works. the Ice breaks. The others fire arrow after arrow. Dagonet falls to a Saxon arrow. The Saxons falls into the cracking ice. The others creep back. More than half drown. Guinevere fires another arrow. It finds its mark. Cynric pulls back. They make it back. Germanius greets them with their walking papers. He is not greeted with a smile. Dagonet is dead. Guinevere and Arthur do the dirty deed. The next morning, she's blue, dressed as a pict. He's out on the battlefield, facing Cerdic and his army alone. He has granted his remaining knights their freedom. He palavers with Cerdic. They agree to kill each other on the battlefield. The knights return, somehow having magically gotten into not only their own full armor but also their horses, seemingly with no help from anyone. The picts in the forest fire arrows into the Saxons. Arthur and his knights charge. The picts mop up the first wave of Saxons. They let fire arrows fly into the second wave, lighting moats of oil afire. The picts also have flaming trebuchets. There's honestly a lot of silly charging about, but the battle scenes are real and not CGI. They put a lot of time and money into this. The horses are gone; now it's just a straight-up battle on foot. Tristan takes on Cerdic. Guinevere is snarling her way around the battlefield like a she-devil. [5] Cyrric almost kills her but Lancelot takes him on for her. Tristan is not doing as well as I'd like. He was the coolest knight but he drops to Cerdic's blade. Tristan gets to see his hawk flying free once more before he's decapitated. Lancelot and Cyrric kill one another. Arthur and Cedric clash. Arthur rope-a-dopes him. Smoke billows over a field of thousands of slain warriors. They bury their dead. Guinevere and Arthur marry. Merlin names him King of the Britons It was decent. Well put-together. A bit long. I've seen it now. I watched it in German.. Triangle of Sadness (2022) -- "6/10" Carl (Harris Dickinson) is a model, or wants to be a model. The film opens with what looks like a documentary being filmed in a studio with dozens of male models. They're like cattle. Now he's at dinner with Yaya (Charlbi Dean) who eventually self-describes as "manipulative, but I don't even know I'm doing it." She claims that she makes Carl pay for everything because she wants to be sure that he would make a good provider. Bullshit. She is cheap, is what she is. She's convinced herself that, if she has any non-optimal qualities, those are the qualities that the world has imposed on her and that, therefore, having them is not her fault. Segue to them on a what looks like a very exclusive and ritzy cruise. Yaya is the kind of person who has all of her keyboard sounds enabled, and whose camera still makes the shutter noise. She's a model but she has a long scar down her torso. Carl is reading Ulysses. Oh no. Now they're starting another conversation about who's allowed to say hi to which crew members, especially if they're hot. Is this whole movie just about these two? They are not interesting people. I thought Woody Harrelson was in this. €28K for an engagement ring. Jesus wept. Oh, thank God. I finally hear Woody. He's not coming out of his cabin when Paula (Vicki Berlin) the chief steward tries to get him out. Doesn't he need to drive the boat? It's dinnertime. Yaya and Carl are photographing but not eating the food. Dimitry (Zlatko Buric) is asking them what they do, and why they don't eat the pasta. "I'm gluten-intolerant" They're influencers. They mostly get stuff for free. They got the cruise for free. Yaya ignores everyone after the first question, staring into her phone. Dimitry is telling a story about how he became the kingpin of shit (fertilizer). Yaya is struggling to pay attention to a conversation that is so blatantly not about her. Carl is not far behind. Outside, Carl watches as a boat docks to remove the crew member that he'd complained about, who'd said hello to Yaya. Actions have consequences. The tedious Carl/Yaya interactions give way to a painful interaction where crew member Alicia (Alicia Eriksson) puts up with a guest, who insists that they switch roles, where she's the crew member and Alicia is the guest. She makes Alicia get in the hot tub with her uniform on (the staff isn't allowed to refuse the guests anything). Paula runs to First Officer Darius (Arvin Kananian) for help, because Thomas (Woody Harrelson) still won't come out of his cabin. Darius: I'm not going to talk to some crazy Russians. Paula: It's not crazy Russians; it's very rich Russians. Darius: Same thing. Paula gets everyone on the staff to suit up and get ready to water-slide because that's what the guest wants. They've even postponed the captain's dinner, which, let's be honest, the captain wasn't going to make anyway. Woody finally pops his head out the door. All you can hear is empty bottles rolling around in his cabin. Thomas wants to go watch the crew swim. He's ready to go. He's in a bathrobe. Honestly, thank God Woody showed up because this movie has not been as good as it thinks it is. Everyone's sliding. The slide exits into the ocean. The boat is canting a bit during the start of the captain's dinner. Thomas is standing with Darius. Both smile awkwardly. People introduce themselves. One woman complains about the dirty sails -- she'd already complained to Paula -- but Thomas cheerfully informs her that she is not on a sailboat, so it's not possible to wash sails that don't exist. She checks with her husband, who assures her that they'd seen dirty sails. "Magnus says yes? [sotto voce] Jesus Christ. Well, in that case, we will clean the sails." A baby is crying. Someone has a baby on this cruise? Carl and Yaya are with the British couple. He asks what their company does. "Well our products have been employed for upholding democracy all over the world." 🙃 They start complaining about how the anti-personnel-mine conventions trimmed 25% of their profits, causing tough times. People are not looking healthy but it's almost like they can't even believe that they could possible feel sick, because they're so rich. The crew encourages them to eat because sea-sickness is worse on an empty stomach. I don't think that's true, but OK. Let's see where it takes us. The meals looks awful, like French food x 10, just over the top. Thomas gets a hamburger and french fries. "I'm not a fan of fine dining." I'm starting to suspect that they've poisoned the guests. Spoiler: This will never be resolved one way or the other. The puking has begun. The Russian lady is chugging champagne to counteract the seasickness. The other guests continue eating. Some leave. But some soldier on, drinking wine and eating seafood. The boat is canting hard. Back and forth. Back and forth. A wheelchair careens briefly out of control. Thomas has finished his burger (didn't eat the bun or trimmings) and drinks his wine. Dimitry is unaffected and is pretty drunk. He plops down at the now-empty captain's table. He tells a stupid joke about communists told by Ronald Reagan. Thomas responds with, "Never argue with an idiot. They'll only bring you down to their level and beat you with experience. Mark Twain." Dimitry doesn't get the hint. He cites Reagan again. Then Thatcher. Thomas ripostes with, "The last capitalist we hang will be the one who sold us the rope. Karl Marx." Dimitry laughs: "A Russian capitalist and an American communist." Much later, they're playing a drinking game, with cards. Guess the card wrong: drink. It's not complicated. Dimitry and Thomas are hammered. Dimitry is in the captain's cabin, making announcements to the whole ship. The storm has gotten worse. Dimitry announces that the ship is sinking. People are panicking, putting on life vests. Dimitry is chattering on and on about communism and capitalism. Thomas is getting his wheels under him now, lecturing them about inequality and not paying their taxes. Passengers slide back and forth on tipping decks, lubricated by their own vomit. The crew is hard at work, cleaning the decks. The toilets overflow. One woman cannot stop upchucking. The ship tips and yaws. Some passengers sit on the deck with their life-vests on. Heavy metal music plays (non-diagetic). The lights go out. Thomas and Dimitry are still reading to each other. It's the next morning. Thomas reads on. A boat approaches. Rebels. Pirates. A pin drops. A grenade rolls. "Look, Winston, isn't this one of ours?" Boom. Hours later, many have washed up on an island. Dimitry is there, of course. He accosts a black man, accusing him of being a pirate. It is nighttime. It's raining. An animal barks, again and again. It is morning. A rescue craft drifts ashore. Abigail (Dolly De Leon) -- the lady in it -- has no advantage once the port is open. She has all the stuff but she's still being commanded about. Society has not changed. The strata are the same. Abigail is also the only one who knows how to catch food. "I caught the fish; I made the fire; I did all the work; and everybody got something" She takes half of the food for herself. Good for her. Paula tries to explain how it's not hers. She's got a tough row to hoe. She tries to steal the food. She tries to order her around. Abigail says she's the captain now, rewarding each concurrence with a piece of tossed food, like trained seals. Because, like, who's going to go fishing tomorrow? Paula? Dmitry becomes a communist immediately, citing Marx, "From each, according to their ability; to each, according to their needs." There are no capitalists stranded on islands, I guess. They split on gender lines, with Dimitry being the only male who understands that he has to stay on the good side of the only person capable of finding and cooking food. We're back to Carl and Yaya and it's awful. Abigail has asked Carl to join her in the lifeboat. She keeps blowing her whistle. It's hilarious. Yaya does not handle it well. Abigail gave him some pretzel sticks to give Yaya to pay her off. It becomes a ritual, with the others blowing their whistles whenever Carl heads to the "love boat." That loud noise at night? It was a donkey. They smash it over the head with a rock. Again. And again. Until it's dead. No-one asks why a donkey can survive on the island. Have they even looked around? Did they just kill a donkey on someone's property? I don't think they actually ate the thing, though. At least it's quiet at night now. Abigail and Yaya take a long hike into the mountains. A vendor hears In den Wolken and tries to sell her Gucci bags, hats, watches. She can only say In den Wolken and he gets annoyed and goes away. They would have been saved. Abigail and Yaya have found a resort. It was there the whole time. Yaya's delighted because being rescued means that she gets her power back. Abigail realizes the same thing. Abigail decides that she's not interested in going back. She gets a rock. "Abigail, maybe you could come work for me, you could be my assistant." Hard pass, Yaya. They called the movie "Triangle of Sadness," named after the the furrowed brow that some models inadvertently make. They could have called it "How the Tables Turned" instead. I wanted to like this movie more, and it had its moments, but overall, it was much too long and much too uneven. A Knight's Tale (2001) -- "9/10" So we start off with a dead knight, a replacement knight, and (rock quartet) Queen playing We Will Rock You playing over a medieval jousting tournament. The people seem to be clapping along to the music. This very modern, rockabilly soundtrack would continue throughout the film. William Thatcher (Heath Ledger) is squire to the dead knight. He takes his master's place and does just well enough not to lose, by managing to stay on his horse. He and his co-squires Wat (Alan Tudyk) and Roland (Mark Addy) take their winnings and, instead of going their separate ways, Will convinces them to pool their cash, so that he can train and try his hand at more jousting, in the hopes of making them all some real money. They meet Geoffrey Chaucer (Paul Bettany) -- Geoff -- on the road to their next tourney. He is buck naked. Chaucer has a gambling problem and keeps losing the clothes off his back. He agrees to prepare papers of nobility that they need to in order to partake in tournaments, in exchange for food and clothes. Bettany is an absolute revelation. His rallying call for Ulrich von Liechtenstein (Will) is glorious. There are ladies in the mix, of course. The lovely Jocelyn (Shannyn Sossamon) catches his fancy and he hers. The smith Kate is also quite cute. Will is a good swordsman but a reckless jouster. He's up against Count Adhemar (Rufus Sewell). His armor is black. His horse is black. He says mean things. He's definitely the baddie. Will goes up two to nothing but then Adhemar knocks his helmet clean off, for three points, taking the win. Adhemar does not get Jocelyn's approval, though. Joselyn's right-hand maiden Christiana (Bérénice Bejo) appears to invite Ulrich to the celebration that night. Kate asks them to take her as far as Paris and she'll make him a new set of armor. Chaucer starts to show them how to dance but Kate pops in to show them how it's actually done. They have a dance party. To David Bowie. Adhemar sulks and leaves. The sexy lady is supposed to like him. Stamps his little foot. Kate is making armor. It's light; it's thin. Everyone laughs at it. But...they've tested it. And it is, of course, amazing. The next day, the crowd laughs at how tiny the armor is. It stops laughing when they see how easily he gets up on his horse without any help. He's up against Colville/Edward (James Purefoy), who is in the royal family of England. Adhemar had withdrawn, supposedly out of respect, but Ulrich jousts him, despite knowing who he was, winning the Prince's respect. Ulrich wins the tournament. Jocelyn approaches him afterward, "Jocelyn: I came to ask what you'll be wearing tonight. Ulrich: Nothing. Jocelyn: Well, then, we will cause a sensation because I will dress to match." They argue and part ways. He thinks she's superficial because all she's interested in are clothes and parties. She thinks he's superficial because all he's interested in is weapons and jousting. Which one leads to more pain and tragedy? He misses her, his friends help him write a letter, and she loves it, rejoining the circuit. To prove his love to her, she demands that he lose because, when he wins, it's a sign of his love for himself, so winning for her proves nothing. Losing for her proves that he loves her. A snag is that they group just happen to have 50 gold florins riding on him due to a group bet into which Chaucer had talked them. Luckily for them all, Jocelyn frees him of the burden of losing, convinced that he loves her after he'd been beaten to a pulp. He wins that tournament. Paul Bettany continues to steal the show, even though he has a lot of competition. Mark Addy has some good lines, too. "Each women wants proof....that they've made the correct choice ... to uncross their legs." Which, you know, she does, visiting him in his very sumptuously appointed tent, where he is convalescing from his many, many bruises. They head to London for the world championships. William visits his father. The tritest thing in this film is that, somehow, Adhemar is there to spot him in the old town, learning of his common origins. Adhemar turns Will in, because he's too chickenshit to face him at the tilt. Jocelyn visits him with Chaucer to deliver the bad news that he is a wanted man. All five of them -- Jocelyn, Chaucer, Kate, Wat, and Roland recommend him to run. He refuses. They appear in the ring to uproarious cheers. He is arrested. They of course let Adhemar in to his cell, where Will is helpless, bound to stocks, to get his licks in. The next day, William is in the pillory. His friends are all there. Lots of vegetables being thrown. Prince Edward reveals himself. This is an amazing scene. "I dub thee Sir William." Goosebumps. Just out of this world. I'm honestly kind of happy for Adhemar's hype man, who's learned more than a thing or two from Chaucer. He has a shitty boss, and has the shitty job of hyping Adhemar. You're not going to be stunned to find that William defeats Adhemar and looks like he's going to live happily ever after with Jocelyn. El Verdugo / 100 Rifles (1969) -- "6/10" Part of the appeal of this film is clearly that it's a show of incredible horsemanship. They show difficult horse-riding like a martial-arts movie shows fighting skills. The very significant, other part of the appeal is Sarita (Raquel Welch), who is not a great actress but she is quite ravishing and she's pretty good at action scenes. Ex-NFL player Jim Brown as Lyedecker, the cop/bounty hunter was probably also a big draw at the time. We've also got Burt Reynolds as Yaqui Joe, and Fernando Lamas as Verdugo, the bad, bad Mexican general, so the ladies are definitely showing up to watch this movie in 1969. Joe is a so-called "half-breed" -- half Yaqui Indian and half white man -- and he's robbed a bank of $6,000 and has fled back across the border with it. When lawman Lyedecker catches up with him, he's not got any of the money on him. Why? Well, rather than a venal bank-robber, he's actually quite a dedicated rebel and has purchased the titular 100 rifles with it, stashing them away for safe-keeping. The rest of the movie is about how those rifles help the Yaqui gain their freedom from Verdugo's iron, racist, and, quite frankly, genocidal, grip, while Lyedecker is dragged further and further into their orbit, via a friendship with Joe, and a sexy-times relationship with Sarita. First, there's an overland journey -- by horse, naturally -- to get the rifles where they'd been hidden. Armed with their rifles, the Yaqui indians take over Verdugo's ranch, killing and then replacing all of the Mexicans by stealing their uniforms. When other Mexicans return with kidnapped Yaqui children, the Yaqui waylay them and easily take their children back. The celebration is legendary, The booze flows. What is it with 1960s Westerns and rape scenes? Sarita bandages Lyedecker's arm, then plants a kiss on him. He grabs her and starts to upgrade the interaction. She screams and says, "No, not like this. [pause] Not with you." He actually stops, taking the signal that she's willing but would rather it not be violent (!). She collects herself. He approaches her, seconds later, and this time... it's fine. More than fine; she's very into it. Now they're making love. I don't know where they're making love, though, because the Yaqui have set the entire ranch on fire. I thought everyone was at the same ranch, but I guess Sarita and Lyedecker were elsewhere. The Mexican Army, with Verdugo at its head, returns to find a burned-out husk with a courtyard full of dead soldiers. One drunken Yaqui remains, lying in a water trough, singing the name "♪ Lyedecker ♪" Now they're going to take over a Mexican train, loaded with ammo and more weapons. They use their 100 rifles, popping up from holes in the ground, and from inside the water tower. Sarita distracts the engineer by washing herself under a shower built under the water tower. This literally stops the train. It's Raquel Welch in only a wet shirt; of course it stops the train.She starts firing when they get close enough. They take over the train but Verdugo isn't on board. They take the train and drive it to the town where Verdugo and his troops are waiting. A cannon shot derails the train as is enters town. This is a pretty spectacular scene. The derailed train is full of Yaquis, armed to the teeth, and more than willing to die in a frontal assualt. Many die on both sides in what amounts to trench warfare. Lyedecker unhorses Verdugo with a well-placed shot, depositing him in the middle of a crowd of Yaqui, who tear into him. So many people died, Mexicans and Yaqui. Including Sarita. Lyedecker saddles up to go back to the U.S., for "one more shot" at becoming a lawman. Joe realizes that he's the leader of the Yaqui. The end. I watched it in the original English and Spanish (maybe 1/5 Spanish). Paddington in Peru (2024) -- "6/10" Paddington Bear (Ben Wishaw) has become a Briton, passport and all. He's still living with the Browns. They all take a trip to Peru to find Paddington's aunt. There they meet Hunter Cabot (Antonio Banderas). [6] Cabot has a Gollum/Sméagol thing going on, with his dead relatives haunting him to make the worst possible choices at every opportunity. Look, there are more details, like that he has a daughter and he has to choose between her and the gold, and that the mother superior isn't quite who she says she is (Spoiler: she's also a Cabozo), but none of it is particularly surprising nor does it really matter because this is a kid's movie, and stuff is going to happen. They're searching for his aunt but the others are searching for the city of El Dorado, with all of its gold, gold, gold. They find the city but it's full of orange trees and bears. The bears are Paddington's original clan. He's an El Dorado bear! He hangs out for a while but then returns to London to live with the Browns. Everyone, as you can well imagine, ends up living their best life. Hugh Grant's character from the first film has a very brief cameo at the very end -- where he gets to meet dozens of bears visiting from El Dorado -- which reminded me what was so much better about the previous movie, "Paddington 2" . As in that movie, the animation is top-notch and seamlessly integrated with the live-action players. The CGI is nearly unnoticeable; it was more apparent on the cliffs of El Dorado, where things looked a little weird, as they always do, when things fade off into the distance. I was tempted to take away a star because the ending was incredibly trite and easy. But it's a movie for kids, and it's a solid entry for them. If you're under 10 years old, this movie is 100% for you. Even if you're a bit older, it's got a soothing plot without too many sharp corners, while still being interesting enough. This one felt so much like a repeat of the first one -- combined with having seen the trailer -- that I was second-guessing for the first 20 minutes whether I'd already seen it. I watched it in English, with German subtitles [7] (partly on the indoor bike). The End of the Tour (2025) -- "7/10" This is the story of a five-day book-tour interview/road-trip that reporter David Lipsky (Jesse Eisenberg) had with David Foster Wallace (Jason Segel), author, essayist, philosopher. He is most well-known for having written Infinite Jest [8] They talk about everything in the world. Much of it, as I recall from having read him, is brutally predictive of our current moment. Try this one on for size. "Foster Wallace: Yes, you're performing muscular movements with your hand as you're jerking off. But what you're really doing, I think, is you're running a movie in your head. You're having a fantasy relationship with somebody who is not real... strictly to stimulate a neurological response. So as the Internet grows in the next 10, 15 years... and virtual reality pornography becomes a reality, we're gonna have to develop some real machinery inside our guts... to turn off pure, unalloyed pleasure. Or, I don't know about you, I'm gonna have to leave the planet. Lipsky: Why? Foster Wallace: 'Cause the technology is just gonna get better and better. And it's gonna get easier and easier... and more and more convenient and more and more pleasurable... to sit alone with images on a screen... given to us by people who do not love us but want our money. And that's fine in low doses, but if it's the basic main staple of your diet, you're gonna die. Lipsky: Well, come on. Foster Wallace: In a meaningful way, you're going to die." Not literally, of course. Psychically, morally, ... your soul will shrivel, and will die, starved to death as you've slowly replaced yourself with the superficial dreams injected through your eyeballs. Foster Wallace was very aware -- in this movie as well as his writing -- of what an addiction to television -- or any televisual media -- does to a person. Foster Wallace doesn't drink, so Lipsky refrains as well. But they both smoke all the time. Foster Wallace dips too. Foster Wallace was incredibly self-aware and introspective. "There’s something nice about having somebody who kinda shared your life, and that you could allow yourself just to be happy and confused with." He talks about being "confused" more than once. They're talking about his Alanis Morissette poster, "Lipsky: She’s pretty, alright... Foster Wallace: Yeah, but in a very sloppy, very human way. That squeaky, orgasmic quality in her voice? Here’s what it is: A lot of women in magazines are pretty in a way that isn’t erotic because they don’t look like anybody you know. Lipsky: True. Foster Wallace: You can’t imagine them putting a quarter in a parking meter or eating a bologna sandwich. But her, I don’t know, I just find her absolutely riveting." On the bandanna [9], insecurity, expectations, perceptions, self-perception, "Lipsky: So, I gotta ask: What’s with the bandanna? Foster Wallace: What? What do you mean? Lipsky: People think it’s a way you’re trying to connect with the younger reading audience. Foster Wallace: Is that what people think? I don’t know many Gen-Xers who wear ‘em. Jeez. I don’t know what to say. I guess I wish you hadn’t brought this up. Lipsky: Why? Foster Wallace: Because now I’m worrying that it’s going to seem intentional. Like if I don’t wear it, am I not wearing it because I’m bowing to other people’s perception that it’s a commercial choice? Or do I do what I want, even though it’s perceived as commercial - and it’s just like one more crazy circle to go around." Lipsky isn't supposed to become friends with him, but they're pretty compatible. Foster Wallace seems to be a little miffed that his grad-school friend Betsy (Mickey Sumner) seems quite enchanted with Lipsky, but Lipsky is likewise miffed that Foster Wallace spent 25 minutes on the phone with Lipsky's wife. Lipsky's editor is harassing him to ask about heroin use. It's not going to come up organically. Instead, they focus on Foster Wallace's obsession with pop culture, how he doesn't have a TV but he can't look away when there's one in the hotel room. They go to the Mall of the Americas to soak up more pop culture. They meet the two ladies -- Betsy and Julie (Mamie Gummer) -- to watch a movie, Broken Arrow (starring John Travolta and Christian Slater). They fight. They both think that the other is being fake, faux. "Foster Wallace: I just think to look across the room and automatically assume that somebody else is less aware than me, or that somehow their interior life is less rich, and complicated, and acutely perceived than mine, makes me not as good a writer. Lipsky: Why? Foster Wallace: Because that means I'm going to be performing for a faceless audience, instead of trying to have a conversation with a person." In the car, he continues, "Foster Wallace: I don’t mind appearing in Rolling Stone, but I don’t want to appear in Rolling Stone as somebody who wants to be in Rolling Stone. If you see me like, you know, a guest on a game show in a couple of years... Lipsky: [laughs]. Foster Wallace: To have written a book about how seductive image is, and how many ways there are to get seduced off any kind of meaningful path, because of the way the culture is now...? What if I become this parody of that very thing?" At home, Lipsky had already gone to bed. Foster Wallace comes in again, "There's a thing in the book: when people jump out of a burning skyscraper, it's not that they're not afraid of falling anymore, it's that the alternative is so awful. And then you're invited to consider what could be so awful, that leaping to your death seems like an escape from it. "I don't know if you've had any experience with this kind of thing. But it's worse than any kind of physical injury. It may be what in the old days was known as a spiritual crisis. Feeling as though every axiom of your life turned out to be false, and there was actually nothing, and you were nothing, and it was all a delusion. And that you were better than everyone else because you saw that it was a delusion, and yet you were worse because you can't fucking function. And it’s really horrible. "I don’t think we ever change. I’m sure there are still those same parts of me. I’ve just got to find a way not to let them drive. Y’know?" The dogs wake Lipsky up. Before he goes home, they walk the dogs through a stark, Midwestern winter field. The sun is low, the air frigid. They go out to McDonald's -- someplace nice -- for breakfast. They're friends again. Foster Wallace is going to go dancing that day. He dances to 70s disco at the local Baptist church. It's time for Lipsky to go home. The five days are over. "Foster Wallace: Hey, before you leave, I would really like it if maybe we should exchange address data. "[Pause] "I should start carving an ice sculpture out of my car. It’s like Antarctica." Lipsky quickly catalogues his home, but more reverentially than greedily, then just as quickly packs and goes outside. "Foster Wallace: Driving that rental of yours? The feeling of gliding? This shit box doesn’t even have shock absorbers. Lipsky: What is it? Foster Wallace: '85 Honda Civic. I know it doesn’t look like much, but, man, this thing starts. It’s actually a problem. Lipsky: Why? Foster Wallace: I gotta get a new one but I can’t junk this. Lipsky: Why not? Foster Wallace: It’s my friend. [10]" Foster Wallace is gone. He had fought his demons for as long as he could, and had decided to stop. Lipsky is speaking to an audience at a bookstore, reading from his interview. "We are both so young. He wants something better than he has; I want precisely what he has already. Neither of us knows where our lives are going to go. It smells like chewing tobacco, soda, and smoke. And the conversation is the best one I ever had. "David thought books existed to stop you from feeling lonely. If I could, I’d say to David that living those days with him reminded me of what life is like -- instead of being a relief from it... and I’d tell him it made me feel much less alone. " This was a deeply touching film, an excellent homage to a complicated, complex, brilliant person. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] These are notes for me to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. The amount of text is not proportional to my enjoyment. I might write less because I didn't get around to it when it was fresh in my mind. I rate the film based on how well it suited me personally for the genre, my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. Links are to "my IMDb ratings" [1] Or should be it "had"? I had "had," but then I changed it to "has". Time-travel movies wreak havoc on verb tenses. [1] Should that have been a footnote? Maybe. But then the paragraph would have been really short, or might have disappeared entirely, in which case there wouldn't be anything left to which to attach the footnote. And I really wanted to keep the observation in there, so I guess it stays in the main review, stream-of-consciousness, as it were. [1] To understand why this is noteworthy, you have to know that Marty's chose name for 1885 is Clint Eastwood and that he's wearing a serape. In Fistful of Dollars, Clint Eastwood uses a wood-stove door under his serape as armor. The following clip doesn't show the shot but it shows Eastwood pulling back the serape and dropping the armor. [media] [1] I honestly think Guinevere is probably my favorite Keira Knightley role so far; it's a low bar, though. [1] Cabot actually calls himself Cabozo throughout the film. He mentions the Spanish name a lot. It's kind of a plot point. It's unclear why the billing is different. [1] Netflix only offers German subtitles in my region in Switzerland. Why can't they just offer all available subtitles in the world at once? Is there some sort of limitation of which I'm not aware? Is it some copyright thing? Or is it just abject laziness? Is it just a complete inability to do the bare minimum of the job of a movie-streaming network? The subtitles are out there. I bet if I were to get the Blue-Ray DVD, it would have a dozen subtitle tracks from which to choose. [1] I read Infinite Jest in "2007" , mostly on a beach in Turkey. I absolutely loved it. I'm not gonna lie: the writing style was formative. Why do you think I use so many footnotes? Why do you think my blogging engine supports footnotes? [11] [1] While I was in college in the early 90s, I wore a bandanna just like his, but I had no idea who Foster Wallace was. He hadn't written Infinite Jest yet. It's just what people with long hair were doing at the time. It keep your hair back out of your face when it's not long enough yet to put into a ponytail. It's practical. [1] Oh, man, that hits home. I have a '95 VW Gold for which I still pay for a parking spot just so I can drive "her" [12] every once in a while. I've been riding in and driving that care for over 30 years. She carried us over the passes for my future wife's first trip to Switzerland. I've owned her (the car) since 2004. It's a problem, indeed. Are we not all animists? Is that not the best way to be? To have reverence for any and all? [1] And footnotes on footnotes? [1] Her name is Greta. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5985 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5985 Fri, 09 Jan 2026 22:57:12 +0100 -- "8/10" 2. "Rückkehr des Königs (Return of the King) (2003)" <#Return> -- "8/10" 3. "The Whiskey Bandit (2017)" <#Whiskey> -- "8/10" 4. "Palestine Is Still the Issue (2002)" <#Palestine> -- "9/10" 5. "House of Gucci (2021)" <#Gucci> -- "6/10" 6. "Heat (1995)" <#Heat> -- "6/10" 7. "Miami Vice S01 (1984)" <#Miami> -- "7/10" 8. "Knight Rider S01 (1982)" <#Knight> -- "6/10" 9. "Antarctica S01 (2011)" <#Antarctica> -- "6/10" 10. "Frieren: Beyond Journey's End (2023)" <#Frieren> -- "6/10" Born Poor (2025) -- "8/10" This is a tragic film about generational poverty in the United States. You can watch it on YouTube using the link below. You have to be in the U.S., though (or pretend to be with a VPN). [media] The description is as follows, "Filmed across 14 years, this documentary follows three Americans as they grow from kids to teenagers to young adults, trying to pursue their dreams while dealing with an economy where they face more obstacles than opportunities. "In the 2012 documentary “Poor Kids,” FRONTLINE explored poverty in America as it’s rarely seen: through the eyes of children. "FRONTLINE’s new, 90-minute documentary “Born Poor” tells the stories of the now-grown children at the heart of “Poor Kids” — chronicling their lives from childhood to the present day, and offering a powerful, personal and longitudinal look at the realities of growing up in poverty in the U.S. "The documentary follows three kids from three families — Kaylie, Johnny and Brittany — across three chapters of their lives as they try to overcome poverty and pursue their dreams while dealing with an economy that presents more obstacles than opportunities. "Despite difficulty, loss and setbacks, all three — now navigating parenthood themselves — refuse to give up on their pursuit of economic stability and an American dream that’s felt perpetually out of reach." The documentary is occasionally somewhat melodramatic -- it is U.S.-American, after all -- but it stays on the subject quite well, mercilessly showing how, even when hope is given, it is nearly always quickly taken away. It shows how otherwise innocuous setbacks threaten to -- and then nearly inevitably do -- torpedo an entire family's carefully constructed life. The young children grow into teenagers and then, without exception, into young parents themselves, usually very young and long before they have real prospects or ideas for how to support themselves, to say nothing of caring for their children. They grow up pretty or handsome, but it doesn't matter. These are just characteristics that the world will chew up and spit out, without mercy. They remain upbeat, until the end. They all find joy in their families. They all find temporary respite in a silver lining or two, but the next life-changing setback is always just around the corner. For most, it's an unplanned pregnancy, which they greet unequivocally with pleasure -- they want kids! -- but which their situation -- both personal, and nestled, as they are, within an uncaring society uninterested in providing support -- does not allow them to feel unreservedly. In the end, * Kaylie (I think) is expecting a child with her boyfriend (they don't live together) and is unemployed, burning through her savings. * Johnny has four children and still thinks he's going to be a professional football player. Though part of him must be aware that this is not realistic, he literally has no other prospects. He had three kids by the time he was 20. * Brittany (I think) has two lovely kids, loves them, and seems to be raising them right. She had a bad phase with drugs that is hopefully behind her. She had her oldest child at 17. It's bleak. This is what a society looks like that doesn't try at all for anyone. Feudalism was more generous. Rückkehr des Königs (Return of the King) (2003) -- "8/10" We begin in the ruins of Orthanc, after Saruman's (Christopher Lee) downfall in the Two Towers. Peregrin Took / Pippin (Billy Boyd) finds Saruman's "palantir" and looks into it, staring eye to eye with Sauron. He's fine. Gandalf (Ian McKellen) and Peregrin ride to Gondor to meet with Denethor (John Noble), who is deep in mourning for Boromir (Sean Bean). Frodo (Elijah Wood) and Samwise are heading toward Mordor with Sméagol/Gollum (Andy Serkis), who leads them to the stairs of "Cirith Ungol" , at the foot of which sits "Minas Morgul" , and which leads to "Shelob's" lair. The "Witch-King of Angmar" (Lawrence Makoare), king of the "Nazgûl" , is on the move. He sends his armies to "Osgiliath" , where they will encounter Faramir (David Wenham), brother of Boromir. Peregrin lights the signal fire, and Rohan responds by sending out an army led by its king Theoden (Bernard Hill), his daughter Eowyn (Miranda Otto), and his son Eomer (Karl Urban). They are accompanied by the remainder of the Fellowship, Gimli (John Rhys-Davies), Legolas (Orlando Bloom), Aragorn (Viggo Mortensen), and Merry (Dominic Monaghan). The elves are bailing on Middle Earth, except for Arwen (Liv Tyler), who returns to her father Elrond (Hugo Weaving). She chooses to stay in Middle Earth, where she will become mortal. Elrond delivers "Anduril" to Aragorn and tells him of the lost army, an army of the dead that live in a deep cleft in the mountain called "Dimholt" . Legolas and Gimli accompany him.. Faramir is grievously wounded and "Minas Tirith/Gondor" is not just under siege but under attack. The orc army is bombarding it with trebuchets, picking it apart. Gandalf holds the line; Denethor is useless. Samwise discovers Gollum's treachery. Frodo enters Shelob's lair. Galadriel (Cate Blanchett) appears to him in a vision. Shelob gets him anyway. Samwise fights her off. Orcs show up to take away the paralyzed Frodo. "Grond" the wolf-faced battering-ram has smashed in the gates of Gondor. Rohan finally arrives. Denethor is ready to burn himself and Faramir alive. Rohan tears a mudhole in the orcs but the southerners show up, with their oversized pachyderms. Just as these have partly routed Rohan, the corsair ships show up -- but Legolas, Aragorn, and Gimli jump out instead ... quickly joined by thousands of ghost warriors, which quickly wipe out what remained of the orcs. Also, Eowyn and Merry combine to take down the Witch King. Frodo wakes up in the orc guard post. Samwise arrives to discover that the orcs have all killed each other the booty. Only a few remain. Samwise tears a hole through them and finds Frodo at the top of the tower. Samwise kills the last one and returns the ring to Frodo, which he'd lifted from him when he thought he was dead. Samwise is the second person in history to give up the ring. [2] With Mordor's forces routed on the "Pelennor Fields" before the gates of Minas Tirith, the few remaining warriors of Rohan and Gondor march on Mordor. They know that Frodo and Samwise live. They want to buy them time, betting their lives on the slim, slim chance that the two hobbits will accomplish their mission. They've made it this far. The gates of Mordor open, pouring forth dozens of times as many orcs, ogres, and cave trolls as there are men on the plains. They are quickly encircled. Samwise carries Frodo to the edge of the entrance to Orodruin, where Gollum reappears, ambushing them. Samwise fights him off; Frodo finds renewed energy and runs for the entrance. He can't throw the ring into the lava. Gollum helps him; he bites off Frodo's finger, then falls into the lava. With the ring destroyed, "Barad-dûr" falls, extinguishing Sauron's eye. Mordor itself collapses, chasms opening up to swallow the massive entrance gates as well as a large part of Sauron's forces that can't escape onto solid ground. The men of Gondor and Rohan are untouched. Gandalf flies in on the back of an eagle to save Samwise and Frodo from the lava, and we're all fine with it. I said we were all fine with it. 😐 Aragorn is crowned king of men; Arwen joins him. Faramir and Eowen are standing next to each other. Everything's groovy. We're back in the "Shire" . Life goes on. Samwise marries Rosie. Four years later, Bilbo, Gandalf, and Frodo leave with the last of the elves -- Elrond, Galadrial, and Cirdan -- sailing across the sea. The Whiskey Bandit (2017) -- "8/10" Ambrus Attila (Bence Szalay) is a thief. He is in prison for being a thief. He is called to an interview with a detective, who wants to know more about him, about his crimes, what led to him committing them. Ambrus obliges him. He grew up with his grandmother somewhere in the Romanian countryside. He was already a kleptomaniac then. His grandmother loves him, though, no matter how mad the priest gets at him. One day, he comes home from playing -- he'd made his own goalie mask out of a piece of bark, and screwed on his own skates to be a hockey goalie -- to find that his father has returned...because his grandmother had died. No more house in the countryside for Ambrus. Now, it's a shabby apartment with his father where the primary furnishing is a bottle of vodka. He continues to steal, ending up in a reform school. The other boys are horrible to him. He trains with the other boys/inmates, running in the mud, under the watchful eye of guards armed with machine guns. He is transferred from there to the military. He is a good shot. On watch, in a tower, he sees two migrants running across a field. He cannot bring himself to shoot them. Others can. He runs away from the barracks, holding on to the undercarriage of a freight train to Budapest, Hungary. He is free, for now. The interview is over. He returns to his cell. Filmed from above, it's not as small as you'd think it would be. He is outside. The film does a good job of telling part of the story with a visual language. We're back with Ambrus in Budapest. He tries out for hockey goalie with a local team. He's terrible. The coach takes pity on him; his father was also from Romania (Le Transylvanie). He gives him a job as a locker-room attendant and says he can train on off-hours. He even sets him up with an apartment because the dorm is full. It's his first apartment. It's his first time sleeping alone. It's paradise. He's on the Zamboni. He's working. He's out drinking with the team. They have accepted him. He spies Kata (Piroska Móga) outside the bar. He chases after her. She rejects him and gets on the train, saying he can have her number when they meet again. He sprints to the next subway stop, where she gets out. They head out for a drink. He applies for a work visa and citizenship but doesn't have half the paperwork required -- "certifiée et traduit [certified and translated]" -- so he has a very hard time making money or getting his feet under him. It doesn't help a lot that he's a foreigner so there's a lot of resentment -- as is the case in nearly every country I've ever heard of. He's at the point with Kata that it's time to meet her parents, and they, being wealthy on top of it all, hate him even more. They just detest his dirty Romanian ass and want him to stay away from their golden daughter, who has a bright future, which they absolutely will not abide being shrouded by a dirty gypsy. He gets more desperate, thinking log and hard as he walks the streets of Budapest. Interspersed with the long flashbacks are conversations with his case officer in the prison, as well as his sojourns in the inner courtyard at the prison, alone, on a cement block. He plans his first robbery, buying a wig, a water pistol, and sunglasses. He downs vodka for courage, then heads to the post office (where the state bank is). He gets out of there with the cash, then chases a train through the tunnel, dumping his disguise and catching it at the next station, getting away scot-free. At home, he stores the piles of cash in his oven. His life turns around. He treats himself to a nice meal, takes his friends out for drinks, goes out gambling, improves at work, on the team, pays back the friend who'd helped him, and pays off another friend's uncle who'd been holding his passport hostage. He is now Hungarian. He buys a car and rolls up to Kata, whom he'd not seen in months. She is pissed. She's not so pissed anymore after she gets her present. His buddies ask him where he got the money, whether he'd robbed a bank? "Bearskins," They're worth 10x what you'd think. "How much?" "Depends on the size of the bear." Kata, invited to a fancy restaurant, asks the same question. How is it possible? "Never mind, I don't want to know". "It's fine, I'm importing bearskins from Romania, now that Ceaușescu is dead." She doesn't believe him, of course, but she likes a bad boy, and she likes his money. The money is almost gone. Interlude with the case-worker. "Je n'ai jamais blessée personne. [I never hurt anyone.]" The case worker disagrees, saying he didn't harm them physically but ruined their lives. On his next job, he robs the bank in front of a cop, then takes off on a scooter, getting hit by a car but recovering. The cop's on an old motorcycle, giving it everything. They're in a subway station. Attila biffs it again but escapes by jumping into the river. Robbery after robbery, trips abroad -- so many trips abroad! -- his relationship with Kata deepens, he's on the hockey team, and he's living the high life. 27 robberies in all. They started calling him the Whiskey Bandit because he often drank to summon up the courage to burgle, so he smelled like booze. He becomes a folk hero. The case worker says that he started off stealing for money but he kept going for the attention. He wants to make bigger scores, so he needs a partner. The coach's son is a good candidate. Attila takes him into his confidence. They do a couple of robberies but the big scores are more dangerous, more risky. The first is successful and they're having fun. On another one, Attila refuses to hurt anyone and the employees refuse to let him into the vault, so the duo leaves empty-handed but are chased by people on the street. He steals a car, escaping after a long chase in which he gets in a couple of accidents. They're out of money again, so it's time to roll the dice again. This time, the heist is planned better but the police show up early. He shoots out the door glass -- obviously aiming at the ground -- and they run. They get to a taxi but have to bail on that as the police shut down the exits to the city. The coach's son is apprehended. They beat on him but he holds strong, waiting long enough for Attila to flee Hungary. The cops are onto him, though, and move the clock ahead two hours. When his accomplice gives up his name, they are in time to grab Attila at the border. The cop is going to try to pin attempted murder on him, for having shot the door out. He says that the cops are claiming that he was shooting at them. Attila's in jail. Kata visits him. He says he needs a lawyer. And money. He asks her for the money he gave her -- as huge duffel bag of it. "What money? I don't know about any money." This is a "true story" . I watched it in French, with French subtitles that were technically correct but also nearly always synonyms for what they were actually saying. So, double the learning! Palestine Is Still the Issue (2002) -- "9/10" The following video screens the documentary "Palestine Is Still the Issue" for the first hour, then interviews the director and interviewer John Pilger, as well as one of the principals, Israeli historian Ilan Pappé. John Pilger has since died and is spared the indignity of seeing that things have only gotten worse. Ilan Pappé soldiers on. [3] [media] This 20-year follow-up is from July 28. 2021, more than two years before the next wave of horror began. If you watch the documentary, and listen to the commentary from the two interviewees, you'll realize that the horror only intensified but has been ongoing since 1974, when Pilger released his first films about the area. This is the official description, "Acclaimed journalist and filmmaker John Pilger on the changes that have come over Palestine since the making of his film ‘Palestine is Still the Issue’, released in 1974 & 2002. We will start by screening the film. "The past two decades have seen an extreme turn to the right in Israeli politics with grave consequences for Palestine and its quest for independence, including four major Israeli attacks against Gaza. Pilger and Israeli historian Ilan Pappé, who appeared in the 2002 film, will discuss the worsening situation over the decades for Palestinians and where the future of Palestine and Israeli is headed. "Pappé is the author of many books, including ‘The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine’, in which he documents that ethnic cleansing was a long-standing Zionist goal that was planned in detail by Ben-Gurion in the Red House headquarters outside Tel Aviv and included a much greater number of atrocities against Palestinians in the establishment of Israel in the late 1940s. "Pappé says it was the start of a process of ethnic cleansing that continues until today. ""Denied for almost six decades, had it happened today it could only have been called "ethnic cleansing". Decisively debunking the myth that the Palestinian population left of their own accord in the course of this war, Ilan Pappe offers impressive archival evidence to demonstrate that, from its very inception, a central plank in Israel's founding ideology was the forcible removal of the indigenous population. Indispensable for anyone interested in the current crisis in the Middle East." " House of Gucci (2021) -- "6/10" Patrizia Reggiani (Lady Gaga) works in the office at her father's shipping company, in a makeshift-looking office that looks like it's in a shipping container sitting in a dusty lot. She likes to go out, to go dancing, and to have a good time. One evening, she meets Maurizio Gucci (Adam Driver), purely by chance. She leaps on the opportunity and puts herself in front of him again, then asking him to ask her on a date. He does. Their first kiss is in a rowboat. She initiates everything because he is a bit of a wallflower. He is enchanted. They meet his father Rodolfo (Jeremy Irons) for lunch. Rodolfo is polite but not pleased at all that his son is dating a guttersnipe. He talks to his son about a certain type of woman who will snare people like Maurizio in her rete [web/net]. He accuses her father of being in the mafia. Maurizio tells his father that he's not going to live like him, in the past. They fight. His father threatens to throw him out of the will. Maurizio moves in with with Patrizia's parents and starts to work for her father. He seems to like it, he gets along with all of the boys, even though he's dating the boss's daughter and he's studying to be a lawyer. He seems happy, fine with the new, much less fancy life. Patrizia calls Maurizio to the office. There ensues an enthusiastic love-making session. Cut to their marriage. There is almost no-one on the groom's side of the church. Aldo Gucci (Al Pacino) reads about the wedding and visits his brother Rodolfo. He invites him to his birthday party, then invites Maurizio and Patrizia. He gives them plane tickets to New York -- on the Concorde. Patrizia consults with a TV psychic Pina Auriemma (Salma Hayek) to find out what her future looks like. It looks good. They go to New York and she begins to get her hooks into Aldo as well; together, they will try to reconcile Maurizio with his father. But first, Aldo spoils them both, offering a way back into the business. This is the life that Patrizia was looking for. Aldo is grooming Maurizio to take over for him instead of his own son Paolo (Jared Leto). Rodolfo rejects Paolo's work, making him 0 for 2. Maurizio and Patriza's daughter is born and Rodolfo learns of it just before he finally succumbs to illness. He seems to have come around a bit, just before he died. He did, however, fail to sign his stock certificates properly so the estate tax applies to them. 14B Lire is due. Maurizio and Patrizia move to New York, where Maurizio gets a huge office from Aldo, a huge apartment, and a fat job. Patrizia discovers the counterfeit/knock-off business and is not amused. Maurizio thinks it's kind of funny -- he says they're really good! He'd have bought them himself! But she doesn't think it's a laughing matter. Their business is losing money. Aldo corrects her: Gucci is producing the knock-offs themselves. They know that the fancy stuff is for the rich, but others should be able to pretend that they have Gucci as well. As long as everyone knows that one is real, and the other is a knock-off. "Patrizia, sono affari nostri. Questo non è un gioco per donne. [Patrizia, these are our concerns. This isn't a game for women.]" Patrizia always starts smoking when she's pissed. She smokes a lot. She goes to war. She tells Maurizio that he has to clean up his house -- that Paolo and Aldo have to go, that they're a detriment to the development of the business. Then she takes on the family lawyer -- consigliere -- Domenico de Sole (Jack Huston). Paolo gives up his father, so uncle Aldo goes to jail for fraud. They then stick the knife in Paolo for showing his wares as "Gucci" (copyright infringement). But then the Italian police come to their home in Italy. Maurizio flees to St. Moritz on a motorcycle, in the winter. He meets an old friend there, Paola Franchi (Camille Cottin). When Patrizia shows up, her claws are out immediately. She has a little talk with Paola, which is fantastically catty, "What do you think of stealing? We're teaching our daughter right now not to touch things that don't belong to her. [Translated from Italian.]" Maurizio has had enough of her scheming. He sends he back to Milano, while he tries to figure out how he can finance retaining his own company. Paolo says that he'd already sold his shares but it looks like Aldo also has some shares to sell to Maurizio. He's out of prison and he signs them over, but absolutely unwillingly. Aldo is older after a year in prison, and with only the idiot Paolo (their words) at his side, he sees no chance of having the energy to try to retain control over Gucci. It is done. Oh, also Maurizio is now banging Paola and he's divorcing Patrizia. Well, if she lets him. Also, his visions of remaking the Gucci brand are facing stiff headwinds. Maurizio has pulled it off. He has a controlling percentage of the stock. He has a new designer. He just has one more thorn in his side: Patrizia. Pina is taking her for all she's worth but has to deliver on her promises at some point. Simply making witch's curses isn't cutting it because they're obviously not working on Maurizio and his "stronza cavallona." So they hire a couple of Sicilian contract killers for 600M Italian Lire (about $350K at the time). Gucci has a very successful show. However, the next morning, Domenico and Maurizio's Arabian partners tell Maurizio that his personal extravagance is driving the company into the ground. The finances look bleak and it's hard to ignore that he keeps buying luxury apartments, watches, and cars for himself for dozens of millions -- which is exactly the kind of money that is missing to gain profitability. It's not just that, though. The offices are still in the most expensive district of the city they're in (I'm not sure), even though they've long since gone international. Domenico tells him point-blank that he's charming, but he's not a manager. The partners are actually quite polite and friendly, expressing respect but being firm that they cannot continue like this. They offer to buy him out for $150M. Domenico will become CEO. Maurizio is pissed but there's nothing he can do. Some time later, Maurizio rides to work -- not at Gucci -- on his bicycle after having a coffee and a cigarette in a café. The Sicilians show up and murder him on the front steps of his building. Patrizia, Pina, and the two hitmen are convicted two years later of murder, serving 25-30 years for premeditated murder. This movie was way, way, way too long. At almost three hours, they could have easily edited an hour out of it. This is a crazily self-indulgent length. I thought director Ripley Scott would have known better. I watched it in Italian with Italian subtitles. Heat (1995) -- "6/10" Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino) is a hotshot detective in Los Angeles, who lives with his wife Justine (Diane Venora) and daughter Lauren (Natalie Portman). His wife has an ex-husband who is deeply unreliable, which frees up Vincent to clear a very low bar to keep her happy. She's not happy, though; she's just well-medicated. We see them making enthusiastic love in their introductory scene, though, which was an odd choice, but I don't have insight into the mind of director Michael Mann. Neil McCauley (Robert De Niro) heads up a crew of bank robbers, including Michael Cheritto (Tom Sizemore), Chris Shiherlis (Val Kilmer), and Trejo (Danny Trejo). To show the duality of cops and robbers, Shiherlis also has a lovely and deeply unhappy wife, Charlene (Ashley Judd), who threatens to leave Chris for his incorrigible gambling. He thinks it's because she just wants fancy things, but it's really because he's a meth-head, abusive gambler. Pot-a-to, pot-ah-to, I guess. They steal a bunch of bearer bonds from finance guy Van Zant (William Fichtner), then offer to sell them back to him at 60%. He agrees. This is all upside for him because the insurance pays out 100% on top of that. He does want clean up loose ends, so he tries to have McCauley killed. Shiherlis helps eliminate all of Van Zant's henchmen. McCauley's phone call to Van Zant is to the point...and not friendly. But revenge will have to wait. McCauley's crew is at their next heist: they're stealing metals, for whatever reason. Hanna and his cops are at the site, watching their every move. Shiherlis is almost where they want to be, when McCauley calls it off because he heard one of the cops make a noise in a surveillance van. They walk out with their hands empty. Hanna lets them go because he doesn't want to get them on a chickenshit misdemeanor (B&E). McCauley's crew regroups, deciding whether they split up forever or whether they're going to go for the big score. They're all in. Hanna regroups. He finds Marciano (Hank Azaria), Charlene's side-piece -- "she would never!" -- and blackmails him into helping them out. The main guys on Hanna's crew are Bobby Drucker (Mykelti Williamson), Bosko (Ted Levine), and Kelso (Tom Noonan). McCauley fools Hanna into coming out in the open. They've been made. McCauley consults with Nate (Jon Voight), his fence. He learns how dangerous, how good Hanna is. "It's worth the stretch." Hanna tracks down McCauley and pulls him over in his car. They have coffee. They discuss their respective lifestyles. They discuss life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. They discuss, for lack of a better word, philosophy. They part ways. And then McCauley and his entire crew are in the wind. They shook all of their surveillance at once. Hanna is pissed. Van Zant is still shitting his pants about McCauley's revenge. Waingro (Kevin Gage), the guy who McCauley had kicked out of his gang, shows up to offer him McCauley. McCauley's gang starts its heist. It goes relatively smoothly, with Cherrito making it out to the getaway vehicle. McCauley and a Shiherlis are on the way to the car. Hanna's gotten the tip from Waingro via Van Zant. McCauley's in the car. Two bags of cash are in the car. Shiherlis is almost there with the third bag. He spots Hanna and Drucker and opens fire with his semi-automatic in the middle of the street. He kills Bosko and gets to the car. They take off. Hanna and Drucker are firing after them. Drucker somehow manages to take out a tire from about 100 yards out with a shotgun. It's almost comforting to realize that no-one has ever really cared about realism in movies, least of all Michael Mann. They also manage to hit the driver Don (Dennis Haysbert), which, like, you knew they would because (A) he just got picked up for the crew yesterday and (B) he's black. Shiherlis goes down next, getting clipped in the temple. Well, actually, Shiherlis is the next named character to go down. In the meantime, "redshirt" foot-patrol cops are dropping like wheat before a machine-gun scythe. McCauley picks him up, dragging him onward. OMG. There's still an hour left. McCauley escapes with Shiherlis with a car stolen from a grocery-store parking lot. Cherrito is completely somewhere else. He's taken a little girl hostage. Somehow, Hanna's there now. Like, after a pitched machine-gun battle, he just scoots across several city blocks to take careful aim with a semi-automatic machine gun and shoot a man holding a child hostage. I am unsure what we are being asked to think about that. I think it's incredibly reckless and that most police officers would be appalled but what do I know? McCauley's out. He gets Shiherlis to a doctor. he goes to check on Trejo. Waingro and Van Zant's crew have gotten to him and his Anna (Begonya Plaza). Trejo's still alive but he begs McCauley to put him out of his misery. Now Hanna's at Van Zant's right-hand man Hugh Benny's (Henry Rollins) apartment. The least believable part of the film is watching 51/2-foot-tall Al Pacino throwing Henry Rollins around like a sack of flour. McCauley meanwhile pays Van Zant a visit. He asks him exactly once where Waingro is. "How would I know?" are kind of shitty last words. McCauley goes to Eady's (Amy Brenneman) apartment. Wait, did I forget to tell you about Eady? Yeah, so McCauley met her and he's sweet on her. This movie is so long that I can't even remember anymore how they met. It was days ago. Anyway, she's a loose end that he can't quite drop anymore. She is horrified to find out in such a rush what he does for a living. She wants out; he thinks they're still together. It's pathetic. It looks like she's going to stay, but I wonder. Shiherlis is back on his feet, looking for his wife Charlene. She's in police custody, about to sing. Hanna's wife has fucked poor, random Ralph (Xander Berkeley) in order to "get closure with [Hanna]". Hanna throws a hissy fit -- I mean, of course he does, his wife cheated on him, but he does it in the most egocentric way possible -- and bounces. Chris sees Charlene on the balcony; she waves him off and tells the cops that it's not Chris. They stop him anyway. He's got clean ID and they let him go. Hanna's frustrated so he's throwing all of his toys out of the pram. He gets home to find his daughter has tried committing suicide. it's really hard to care, though, since we met her days ago, just once. I guess this is supposed to show Hanna what's more important in life? Is this going to be how his wife loves him again? I have no idea how Michael Mann thinks. Nate calls to confirm McCauley's out. He's home free. Eady is with him. Nate is obliged to tell him that Waingro checked in to a hotel. McCauley can't resist revenge, which is against character. he's home free. He's in the hospital; he's executed Waingro. The cops are all over him. He dispatches one. Hanna's in the air. Hanna lands at the hospital. He's right there. A fire truck blocks his view of McCauley. McCauley's at the car. He takes one last look at Eady, then he's in the wind. Somehow, Hanna has already caught up to him. He's really lucky, I guess. And fast. Christ, even this shootout is interminable. They're running and running and running through the dark fields around an airport. How did this movie become so famous and well-loved? Wow, I wrote that it was interminable before they waited for three planes to go by. That was the huckleberry, though, because it threw a shadow that super-cop Hanna saw and was able to unerringly target to light up McCauley. This is another one of those movies whose aesthetic contributed heavily to the Grand Theft Auto storytelling style. Some scenes seem to have been lifted one-to-one. It's the same look and feel, right down to how the civvies crouch during bank robberies. I'm quite certain that this movie didn't need to be almost three hours long but, with so much high-powered talent in the film, I guess you kind of want to put as much of it on-screen as you possibly can. There's a two-hour edit in there, dying to be born. I dinged it two stars until we can find it. Miami Vice S01 (1984) -- "7/10" I started watching a few episodes of this season throughout the year whenever they came on the Swiss-French channel (in English, though, I'm not a maniac). I had to give this show an extra star for its overall style and the fact that it created every single one of the plots that cop shows would have for the next 20 years. The aesthetic of the second act of "Donnie Brasco" wouldn't have existed without this show. Grand Theft Auto 2: Vice City would never have existed without it. Arguably, GTA6 will continue to draw from it, if it ever comes out. James Crockett (Don Johnson) and Ricardo Tubbs (Philip Michael Thomas) are both great. Their boss Lt. Martin Castillo (Edward James Olmos) shows up within the first few episodes, unsmiling and gruff, but fair. As with Knight Rider, each episode stands on its own, moving details of an overall story arc forward but not at all focused on it. I had remembered Crockett as the Lothario of the two but it's really Tubbs who gets the ladies. He's a fast-talking northerner -- Philadelphia? New York? Both? -- who's a recent transplant to Miami. Crockett is born-and-bred; he even has a pet alligator. Knight Rider S01 (1982) -- "6/10" I watched this show when it first came on TV, when I was ten years old. I loved it then. I'm pretty sure I did. I watched as many of these shows as I could. I watched the first six episodes of the first season over the summer. I can honestly not recall having ever known Michael Knight's origin story. He was a loose-cannon detective upon whom someone unleashed their own loose cannon, nearly killing him. He is rescued by an eccentric billionaire, who pays for the incredible plastic surgery that transforms his ruined face into the chiseled features of Michael Knight. They also give him a suped-up car that is so fancy that you couldn't even build it today. It has everything on it. It is pretty nearly alive, voiced by KITT. In the first two episodes, he finds and arrests the woman who'd nearly killed him. That's the whole setup. The rest of the episodes are pretty much self-contained stories that only minimally advance any wider narrative. Michael is usually working too hard, so he needs time off. But, when he takes time off, he's embroiled in another mystery, which puts him right back at work. There's always a bright, young, available lady who is immediately smitten with his incredible height and rugged good looks. Antarctica S01 (2011) -- "6/10" This show is actually called Nankyoku tairiku: Kami no ryouiki ni idonda otoko to inu no monogatari on IMDb. That's a mouthful. This is the story of a Japanese mission in the 1950s (11 years after the defeat) to Antarctica, an attempt to regain both national pride as well as international credibility. The first episode is a mini-feature -- 76 minutes long -- and is mostly about the search for sled dogs. Kuramochi Takeshi (Takuya Kimura) is central to getting the mission approved and funded but he's told that he's not going to go along as a scientist. He can help train the sled dogs but he won't be allowed to even accompany them. He accepts whatever role he can in order to be able to help Japan regain its honor. That's as far as I got. The story is really stretched out and occasionally looks and feels like a soap opera. I think the story arc sounds interesting but it's not worth 12 hours of my life. Who knows? Maybe an older version of me will think differently. Maybe an older version of me will welcome this show for its being easy to understand for the intermediate Japanese learner that I'd become, in that hypothetical future. Frieren: Beyond Journey's End (2023) -- "6/10" This is the story of Frieren, an ancient elven mage who's slain the Demon King with a hero's party of four. The party had scattered to the four winds after one of them had died. Decades and decades later, she retraces her steps, reluctantly collecting two young members into her party, pressed upon her by the two surviving members of her previous party. They've slain a few monsters along the way. That's it so far. The artwork is exquisite, of course. But that's all that's keeping me engaged. This show was recommended to be by a friend as top-notch. It's apparently really popular. I watched six or seven episodes last year while I was riding on the bike. In the interim, I hadn't watched any more episodes. I gave it another shot this year, again entertaining myself while riding the indoor bike. It's fine. It's a bit slow. The season is 28 episodes long and I've seen 9 episodes now. I have so many other things I'd rather watch first that I'm giving up (for now, at least). -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] These are notes for me to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. The amount of text is not proportional to my enjoyment. I might write less because I didn't get around to it when it was fresh in my mind. I rate the film based on how well it suited me personally for the genre, my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. Links are to "my IMDb ratings" [1] Bilbo had gifted the ring to Frodo on his 121st birthday. [1] I wrote "Ilan Pappé is on a tear" just about two years ago, when he gave a brilliant interview just 21/2 months after October 7. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5927 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5927 Thu, 08 Jan 2026 17:10:16 +0100 -- "9/10" 2. "Cape Fear (1991)" <#CapeFear> -- "9/10" 3. "Das Netz (1991)" <#DasNetz> -- "9/10" 4. "Donnie Brasco (1997)" <#Donnie> -- "8/10" 5. "Sandman S02 (2025)" <#Sandman> -- "4/10" 6. "Road to Perdition (2002)" <#Perdition> -- "7/10" 7. "Jump Cut (2024)" <#JumpCut> -- "8/10" 8. "Die drei Musketiere (1948)" <#Musketiere> -- "7/10" 9. "The Grudge (2019)" <#Grudge> -- "6/10" 10. "U-571 (2000)" <#U571> -- "6/10" Blood Diamond (2006) -- "9/10" Danny Archer (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a diamond smuggler in Liberia and Sierra Leone. He's incredible, seemingly using a different accent for each person he talks to. to put them at ease. After having gotten a bunch of diamonds off of Commander Zero (Percy Matsemela), he attempts to cross the border into Liberia, where he is caught by border patrol and arrested for smuggling jewels. The diamonds had been sewn into the skin of the goats with which he'd been traveling. In jail, he meets Solomon Vandy (Djimon Hounsou), who has escaped from a diamond-digging labor camp run by the criminals in the RFU, to which he's been consigned ever since the rebels had destroyed his village and sent his family fleeing into the jungle. He had found a large pink diamond and hidden it in the jungle but one of the other captured rebels -- Captain Poison (David Harewood) -- had seen it. He reveals this to the whole jail, putting Solomon in danger -- and getting Danny's attention, who believes it immediately. Danny's partner springs him from jail, and he springs Solomon as well, keeping a tail on him. Journalist Maddy Bowen (Jennifer Connelly) squeezes Danny for information about the diamond-smuggling trade at a local bar, but Danny is onto her quickly, telling her "I like to get kissed before I get fucked," and then leaving. The funny thing is that everyone in this movie believes that the diamond is real. Like, immediately. Danny believes it. Vandy knows it. He saw it. But does he start to doubt what found? Like, maybe it wasn't so great? Danny starts estimating the number of carats in it, almost as if he's already got it in his hand. But it's not just him! His boss, Colonel Coetzee (Arnold Vosloo), absolutely doesn't question whether it exists before pouring a tremendous amount of resources into finding it. Danny teams up with Vandy, at first for purely selfish reasons -- he wants the diamond for himself -- but then for slightly less-selfish reasons -- his boss has pretty directly threatened that there will be hell to pay if he doesn't deliver that big, pink diamond. He's back in Sierra Leone, just in time for the RUF to conquer Freetown and take Vandy's son Dia, whom Captain Poison immediately starts to convert into a child soldier, using a brutal combination of brainwashing, torture, murder rituals, and heroin. Archer and Vandy barely escape with their lives in a spectacular scene. In Lungi, they meet back up with Maddy, from whom Danny must admit he needs help. Quid pro quo. Give up your smuggling ring. He obliges. He also very obviously uses stories of his shattered youth in Rhodesia to elicit the kind of compassion that gets you very, very laid. "Maddy: You lost both your parents. Danny: That's a polite way of putting it, ja. Mum was raped and shot and uh... Dad was decapitated and hung from a hook in the barn. I was nine... boo-hoo right?" It works. Bing, bang, boom. Maddy uses her connections to help Vandy find his family, where he discovers that Dia has been taken. His new mission is to find his son. He will only show Danny where the diamond is once he gets his son back. In Kono, they've gotten in range of not only the diamond but also Coetzee's mercenary army, which is fighting for Sierra Leone for now. Coetzee's mercenaries are tasked with taking out Captain Poison's army, which now includes Dia. Vandy locates Dia and tries to drag him out, but he's too brainwashed, calling his father "fisherman" disdainfully. Archer radios in the coordinates to Coetzee and the assault begins. In the chaos, Vandy confronts Poison and beats him to death with a shovel. They're finally at the spot, finally where the pink diamond is buried. Vandy is under the watchful eye of Coetzee and his men. He pretends not to know exactly where it is. He digs several holes. Archer takes them all out except Dia, Vandy digs up the stone, Archer and Vandy are briefly triumphant, ... until Dia commands them to drop the stone. He says it's not their stone. It belongs to RUF. Vandy has to talk his son down from shooting them both. They're on the run, through the bush. The remaining mercenaries are in hot pursuit; they know what Danny has. They're not seeking revenge for Coetzee -- he was an asshole to everyone. They're after the diamond. Archer's not going to make it. He's been fatally wounded. Vandy carries him some of the way up the mountain but Archer makes him put him down. He demands that they continue on without him, that Vandy get himself, Dia, and the diamond out of the country. "Vandy: I thought you would steal it [the diamond] from me. Danny: [Grins weakly] Yeah, yeah, it occurred to me, huh?" He tells his pilot to pick them up. He tells Vandy not to trust the pilot, not to drop his weapon, or he'll take the diamond. But it's the only chance he's got. Vandy and Dia are on their way. Archer leans against a boulder, taking in the view of the veldt. He calls Maddy. They say goodbye. He tells her to pick up Vandy and Dia in Guinea, that there's a big story there. As they'd half-jokingly discussed before, she can write whatever she likes once he's dead. He dies looking out over they continent that would never have let him go, his blood mixing with the red sand. Vandy meets with a van de Kaap (really: De Beers) top representative, whom Maddy captures on camera. Vandy takes the money, but does not turn over the diamond until he's gotten his family back as well. They oblige -- the diamond's that big and important. va de Kaap stores the diamond in their vault, to keep it off of the market, artificially inflating the value of the diamonds that they actually can sell. All of that bloodshed, for what? To put a rock into a metal box in a vault with thousands of other metal boxes with rocks in them, all owned by a company that sells overpriced rocks to rich people. Maddy publishes her exposé, with the one, good picture of Danny she'd managed to take, and laying out van de Kaap's smuggling lines through several countries. Vandy is back in South Africa, giving a talk about his experience. Cape Fear (1991) -- "9/10" Credits up front. Starts with a voiceover. Now that's a confident, old-school film. Danielle Bowden (Juliette Lewis) narraties for a minute, then we segue to an incredibly buff Max Cady (Robert De Niro) doing chin-ups in his prison cell. The camera pans across his Stalin and Hitler memorabilia, then across his lightning-bolt tattoos. This is a bad hombre, probably a white-supremacist, maybe a Nazi. He strides out of prison, "you don't want your books?" "I already read 'em." He walks straight into the camera, a storm brewing in the sky behind him, ominous music playing. This is a super-villain, make no mistake. Sam Bowden (Nick Nolte) is a lawyer married to designer Leigh (Jessica Lange). They meet Max in a movie theater, where he's smoking a cigar and laughing uproariously and stupidly. He seems to barely notice them as they leave early. Except ... that he paid their bill for ice cream afterward. Only Sam knows this, and only Sam saw him. The next day Max confronts Sam, calling him fat (he's not) and reminding him that he'd put him away in '77. "You gonna learn 'bout loss." Max lurks near their home. Sam talks to his boss Tom Broadbent (Fred Thompson), to whom he admits that he'd buried a report that had determined that Cady's victim was "promiscuous". This is a no-no as Sam was Max's counsel. He just didn't like Max, he'd seen what he'd done to the victim, and he was afraid that it would be enough to either spring him, or at least drastically reduce his sentence. He's not wrong. A woman's promiscuity should have no bearing on whether or not she's beaten -- like, if she's whorish enough times, does she deserve a good beating or two? Is that how we run things? Oh, right. I hear it. Of course that's how it works.. Max rolls up to Sam in a Cadillac. They discuss compensation. Sam starts off at $10,000 to go away. That amount of money was adorable, even then. Max says that even $50,000 was barely $10 a day for all the time he'd lost Max is framing this discussion, knowing that Sam feels guilty for having done something wrong. Remember, Max was not railroaded; he really had beaten a woman nearly to death. Leigh calls Sam at the office. Their dog's been poisoned. At the police station. Sam has Lieutenant Elgart (Robert Mitchum) haul Max in. He's happy to do it, ready to charge him with vagrancy, or whatever. "There's lots o' charges we can use." He clearly doesn't like Max, but for the wrong reasons. He just hates "white trash," which is exactly the kind of shit that doesn't help keep a lid on resentful pieces of shit like Max. Max is chatting up Sam's work colleague Lori Davis (Illeana Douglas). She's quite drunk and absolutely primed to be chatted up. They're in her apartment, on her bed. He's getting rough but she's not opposed. He flips her over. She's still OK with it. He handcuffs her. No complaints. He chomps a huge chunk out of her cheek. She shoots right past concerned, worried, and alarmed, right to terrified. Egart calls Sam, says there might be a break in the case. Max had been seen leaving Lori's house; she was later found badly beaten. The cops say that she's too scared to talk, that she says she fell down some stairs. And was bitten on the face? Really? That's the story? Anyway, she doesn't want to press charges because it is 1991 in the U.S. of A. and no-one believes women yet. Instead, they will cheerfully focus laser-like on the way she'd been dressed, on how much she'd had to drink, how she'd behaved, you know. all of the things she might have done to tempt poor Max into raping her, beating the shit out of her, and biting her cheek off. This was not -- and probably still isn't -- a slam-dunk case. She recounts having been on the other side of cross-examinations like that, taking a victim apart and "laughing about it later". Elgart has a plan: "The way I'd handle it: Just think of this fellow Cady as a tiger. The trick is to get him out of the brush. Now, how do we do that? You stake out a couple of your goats and hide in a tree." Oh, yeah, he absolutely just called Sam's wife and teenaged daughter "goats." Sam meets up with private detective Claude Kersek (Joe Don Baker). He digs a bit and discovers that Cady had had to serve seven years past his first shot at parole because of a suspicious "incident" in the prison kitchen: an inmate with whom he'd locked horns had "turned up dead with his tongue bit out." Leigh finds out about Lori but she's not surprised because Sam is a well-known philanderer. Dani's in her room and she hears everything. Dani is a 15-year-old girl who's watching her parents' marriage fall apart but she's also titillated by knowing that Max might be interested in her. She has a pink Swatch phone. This is such a perfect role for Juliette Lewis. She was 18 at the time of the movie's release, so probably 17 during filming. That's interesting: in 1991, they still just cast teenagers as teenagers rather than casting 28-year-olds. Leigh doesn't know Max. So when he pulls up in his convertible Cadillac, she doesn't know who he is. It's only when he gives her dog's collar back that Leigh cops to who he is. But she doesn't break off the conversation. Dani comes outside and Max gets his first look at her, then speeds off. Max pretends to be Dani's drama teacher. He quickly gets her to take a hit off of a joint, spinning his web, luring her in, letting her do the work for him. This is a long scene, grade-A grooming on his part. It's incredible how well she acts. She was only 17. It takes her a lot longer than Leigh, but she figures out that he's not the drama teacher. The hook is in, though. She keeps talking. He keeps talking. Eventually, "Do you mind if I put my arm around you?" Eventually, "No. I don't mind." It segues quickly to her sucking his thumb, completely infatuated, completely entranced. They kiss. He walks away. The spell broken, she seems to awaken, and runs off as well. Sam has Kersek hire three thugs to work Max over with lead pipes and chains. He takes a lot of hits, then just gets up and takes them all out. Sam makes a noise, alerting Cady. "Counselor? Come out, come out, wherever you are." Max had of course taped Sam's threats, issued the day before the attack. Sam had threatened him to get him to go away so that there would be no attack. Now, Cady is pressing charges against him. He has retained the services of Lee Heller (Gregory Peck), the lawyer that Sam had tried to retain. The restraining order is for 500 yards and Heller follows up by saying that he will issue a petition to the ABA to disbar Sam for "moral turpitude" Kersek helps the family pretend to go to Raleigh for the ethics-committee hearing. Then they boobytrap the house and wait. The book between Esther and Psalms to which Max had one point referred to is Job. You know, the one where God makes Job lose everything to see if he'll forsake him. Sam has started smoking. Dani's a loose cannon, though. She's definitely the weak link. She finds Henry Miller's Sexus on the porch -- she'd discussed it with Max when he'd lured her into the basement at school. She hides it. Max makes short work of Graciella (Zully Montero) and Kersek, using piano wire that he'd taken from their piano. That wipes Dani's self-satisfied smirk off of her face right quick. Her "friend" is, apparently, a bad man. Sam and Leigh slip and fall into Kersek's copious blood, rolling around in it. Sam is unhinged, grabbing the wire and the gun and running outside to kill Max. He fires wildly. They flee the scene, fugitives, heading for Cape Fear on their houseboat. They will return when the police have caught Cady. Fat chance; Cady clung to the bottom of their car all the way out there. They're eating dinner. It starts raining. Max knocks out Sam and confronts Leigh and Danielle. Danielle tries to sweet-talk him and throws hot water on him. He is unfazed. He shows how he is impervious to heat by lighting a signal flare and letting it drip down over his hand. He throws Danielle into the hold, then starts assaulting Leigh. Sam watches, powerless, from his prone state on the deck of the boat outside. Leigh almost gets his gun but he's too well-prepared. Max drags Sam in.and stomps his face a few times. Now, it's Leigh's turn to try to seduce him. Max ignores her pleas not to rape Dani and says "I'm going to enjoy this all the more." He lights up a cigar. Dani shoots lighter fluid on him, setting him on fire. He stumbles out the window and falls into the water. Is he gone? No. No, he's not. He climbs the anchor line, looking very much like Brundlefly now, and takes command again, much more pissed off than before. He beats a confession out of Sam, that he'd buried the report. Sam's regretting it, of course, but also probably thinking that the man deserved much more. Sam hadn't uphold the law but what he did was just. "Both of you! Leigh! Danielle! Take off your clothes! Tonight you're gonna learn how to live like an animal, and then die like one!" The boat's sluing around so hard that it's going to make Max's plan somewhat more difficult to see to fruition. He's nothing if not confident and persistent, though. Danielle and Leigh escape into the wild river. Max catches Sam but Sam manages to handcuff Max's foot to the boat and then jumps out just as it's smashing up. Max lives. Sam starts hitting him with a rock. Max laughs, telling him that he's "within 500 yards." They beat each other in the face with rocks. Sam tries to drop a huge rock on Max's head but the current washes the piece of boat to which Max is still handcuffed out into the river. He babbles, sings, and speaks in tongues as he sinks beneath the current. Sam has literal blood on his hands. Dani and Leigh awaken in the mud. The end. Blast of horns. Scorsese's exaggerated camera angles and close-ups -- the x-ray love-making scene between Sam and Leigh -- lend a very noir-ish feel to the film, clearly deliberate. The lighting is spectacular, great camera movement, inventive scene composition, Dutch angles, the bizarrely overwrought skies (racing clouds, garish sunset, and improbably star-filled night), the familiar and ominous refrain of horns -- it's all nearly completely unseen and unheard of today. Das Netz (1991) -- "9/10" [media] This documentary was originally released as Das Netz in German. The narration is in German, with hard-coded English subtitles. Many of the interviews are in English. In a way, the people interviewed in this documentary are similar to the ones I'd just seen in "Cybertopia" . They are largely unaware of their own shallowness, enamored by their own capacity to think, doling out the few morsels of knowledge that a younger, more mentally nimble self had collected, but also largely incurious now. The same guy who cited the following, "We create tools. And then, we mold ourselves to the use of them." Also refused to even discuss anything that the Unabomber had written because his manifesto was trash and he was a trash person and his ideas were trash and anyone who murders anyone doesn't have anything worthwhile to say. Q.E.D. Also, he hadn't actually read the manifesto because why bother? A true intellectual. Stewart Brand is a much stronger thinker, capable of separating the medium (Kascinski) from the message (what are we doing with technology? What is it doing with us? Are we heading in a useful direction?) Dammbeck received a letter from Ted: "Florence, Colorado, 28 Februar. "Sehr geehrter Herr Dammbeck "Vielen dank für Ihren brief und Ihre fragen, die ich versuchen werde zu beantworten. Ich nutze diese Gelegenheit, um meine Kenntnisse der deutschen Sprache zu verbessern. Ich bin kein Wissenschaftler. Vor 30 Jahren doch Mathematiker. Aber ich habe den größten teil von dem was ich über die Mathematik wusste vergessen. "Ich meine, dass Utopien wahnsinnig und gefährlich sind, besonders die von einer technologischen gesellschaft. Die Technologie ist eine ganz eigenwillige und äußerst gefährliche macht, die uns dahin führt wohin sie uns führen muss. Das wird weder durch den Zufall noch die Willkür arroganter Bürokraten, Politiker, oder Wissenschaftler bestimmt, sondern das technologische System muss einfach menschliches verhalten seinen eigenen Erfordernissen anpassen. Das ist notwendig damit es funktionieren und sich immer weiter ausdehnen kann. "Sie fragen mich auch einiges zum Manifesto. Alle veröffentlichten Versionen des Manifestos sind unrichtig, denn sie enthalten schwerwiegende Fehler. Wenn sie eine richtige version des Manifestos bekommen wollen, kann ich sie Ihnen liefern." There follows a long section on Norbert Wiener and the origin of cybernetics, arguably the disease that infects so many otherwise useful minds. The next interview is with Larry Roberts, the guy who founded Arpanet, whose work was deeply linked to the U.S. military buildup in the Cold War. He also has nothing to discuss about Kascinski's ideas. "Roberts: He's crazy. We have people like that in our society. "Dammbeck: But he was a mathematician. He studied in Harvard. "Roberts: Hitler was a painter. He studied in Vienna. "Dammbeck: Have you read the manifesto? "Roberts: [jokes] You mean, Mein Kampf? [seriously] No, I didn't read it. I didn't read Mein Kampf either. "Roberts: What am I afraid of? I'm afraid of the Al Qaeda. I'm afraid of cancer. But I don't know enough. Even if we knew how to cure cancer, if we had more knowledge, then we wouldn't be afraid of it. "Dammbeck: How do you know that cancer is an illness? Krankheit? It's an illness of modern society. It's an illness of civilization. "Roberts: Yeah, but someday, I believe will understand how to cure cancer. Or prohibit cancer. I believe that will happen long before we have an electronic battlefield or a machine that we can't control. "And, when we know how to cure or prohibit cancer, we will no longer be afraid of it. It's a question of knowledge, of eliminating ignorance. Ignorance is a state of no knowledge. Ig-no-rance. It's not stupidity. That's something else. Ignorance. It causes fear." This is a wonderful segment that illustrates how un-self-aware most of these intelligent -- and powerful -- people are. He is incapable of learning anymore. He is incurious. He doesn't even listen to Dammbeck's question. He just repeats something I'm sure his wife (who lurks in the background) has heard him say a million times. Knowledge is the savior. Sure, buddy. And let's look at your prediction, 22 years later. Do we have a cure for cancer? No. Do we have world-girdling data centers to write smutty haikus? Yes. Do we have electronic battlefields? Yes. Do we have machines that we can't control? Well, someone controls them, but it's not us. But I wouldn't expect even the 2003 version of Roberts to have been able to grasp the nuance of that argument, or to be at-all willing to engage with it. He already knew everything. The narrator: "Was habe ich bisher? Ich habe einen ehemaligen Mathematiker über dessen Systemkritik keiner meiner Interviewpartner reden will und ich habe Ingenieure und Künstler die von Technologie besessen sind. All das gehört offensichtlich zu einem System dessen Konturen ich erst erahne. Anscheinend ein geniales Feedbacksystem [Rückkupplungssystem], dass jeden angriff und jede Störung umgehend als Energiezufuhr für seine weitere Perfektionierung nutzt. Wer braucht so etwas? Wer denkt sich so etwas aus?" Another letter from Kascsinski: "Als ich ihnen schrieb, dass der begriff einer Utopie wahnsinnig und gefährlich ist, meinte ich nicht, dass alle Utopien wahnsinnig gefährlich sind, sondern, vor allem, die Utopie, dass man eine Gesellschaft nach einem bestimmten idealen Muster erschaffen. Könnte Sie selbst zweifellos Ihre eigene Vorstellung von einer Utopie haben. Ein anderer mensch hat eine andere Vorstellung, die sehr verschieden von der irrigen sein kann. Würde es ihnen gefallen, dass er Ihnen seine Utopie aufzwingt? Haben sie das recht ihm ihre Utopie aufzuzwingen?" Next is a historical segment about Heinz von Förster, who worked at the Biological Computer Lab at the University of Illinois. He interviews Heinz, who is very, very old. Heinz speaks perfect German. They watch a video of him, another recent interview, where Heinz talks about how he'd learned the Tractatus Philosophicus by Wittgenstein by heart, as a child, and he'd made himself unausstehlich with citations from it during family discussions. Heinz is introspective and much more open than most of his American counterparts (except for Stewart Brand). "Ich habe erkannt, im laufe meines Lebens, [dass] je mehr ich mich mit Physik beschäftigen, dass ich eigentlich ein meta-Physiker bin." It gets much better from there. "von Förster: [...] weil die Frage nicht beantwortbar ist. So, kommt es nur darauf an wie interessant ist die Geschichte die der erfindet, wie der entstanden ist. "Dammbeck: Da ist man natürlich ganz nah bei der Kunst. Wenn also, dass es darum geht eine gute Geschichte zu erzählen, also eine poetische Geschichte. "von Förster: Ja genau. Das ist die Sache. Es besteht ein Zweikampf oder Dreikampf oder einen Zehnkampf zwischen den verschiedenen Poeten." They discuss how our worldwide system of interacting machines are based on what he called Lückenhafte Theorien, where placeholders serve to cover up missing knowledge. "Dammbeck: Aber es gibt doch irgendwo grenzen? "von Förster: Eben nicht. Das ist das schöne. Da kann man immer wieder weiter. "Dammbeck: In der Logik? "von Förster: Genau. "Dammbeck: Aber in der Realität? "von Förster: Wo ist die Realität? Wo haben Sie die?" Much later, he interviews one of Kascinski's victims, who lost an eye to a mail bomb. "Once a man is a murderer, I don't give a damn what his opinions are. His opinions are of no interest to me. What I know of him, is that he is a murderer, a creator of pain and suffering. And his opinions are disqualified from being of interest to any civilized human being." I'm gonna say it: That's dumb. Yeah, he lost an eye. Kascinski took an eye from him. But a worse thing he did to that poor man is that he made him dumb. Ignorant. Information is information, it doesn't matter whence it comes. I'm interested in any opinion, any formulation, if only to learn how I would counter it. People find value in what Kascinski said. Just saying "DON'T" is stupid. It's not going to lead to a world where people can read Kascinski, whose ideas are interesting -- and which have gained more and more relevance to our dystopian reality -- but whose acts were evil, without worshiping him. That's the problem. Everyone's dumb. Everyone's a fool. The people who can't read him because they hate him, and the people who can't understand what he writes without revering him. It's all stupid. Except for this documentary. I very much liked it. Donnie Brasco (1997) -- "8/10" Lefty (Al Pacino) is an inveterate gambler and sergeant of sorts in a crime family. Don (Johnny Depp) is a jeweler. He inveigles his way into Lefty's life, quickly setting himself up as his right-hand man. Don's handler Tim Curley (Zeljko Ivanek) tells him to shave his mustache; funnily enough, Lefty had told him the same. Don stops by at Lefty's place to drop off his present -- several hundred dollars -- and gets the same present from Lefty. Lefty asks him to stay because Don told him he was an orphan, and he has neither wife not girlfriend. So he's stuck there until Lefty's done chatting. As he's leaving, Lefty hits him up for a few hundred, taking his present back. Donnie needs to get home to his wife in Queens, though. She has no idea what he does, other than he works for the FBI. He's been undercover for two years. His three daughters are not at home, but his wife Maggie (Anne Heche) is. After fighting for a bit, they segue directly into make-up sex. Lefty gets "sent for". "In our thing, you get sent for, you go in, you don't come out. And it's your best friend that does it." Nobody's talking to Lefty. They're driving with Sonny (Michael Madsen), Nicky (Bruno Kirby), and Bruno (Brian Tarantina). It's a false alarm. Sonny just wanted to tell him that he'd moved up, that he'd been made a skipper. Sonny gives him a lion. The lion is in their car. "What the fuck am I gonna do with a lion?" I love how Donnie's always misunderstanding Lefty, letting him explain things to him. "Sometimes I think you got dropped on your head at the orphanage too many times." This is great, because Lefty is dumb. He is just a dumb goombah. He seems to be less of a cold-blooded killer than he'd like his reputation of having iced 26 people to imply. Sonny, though, Sonny's a loose cannon. Literally. Brasco's FBI contacts want him to start setting other people up, to expand the network, to "not miss any opportunities," in particular, a connection in Florida. As usual, the FBI wants to make careers and they honestly don't care how much damage they cause or how much crime they inspire to get there. At a Japanese restaurant, he can't take off his shoes because he keeps the wire in his boot. So he incites the others to beat the shit out of the maitre d' for not letting them have their way and eat without taking their shoes off. The others were fine with taking their shoes off, but they backed Donnie up when they saw, approvingly, how racist he was. So the poor maitre d' was beaten to a pulp to protect Donnie's cover. Sonny's having trouble making the vig of $50K a week, We see his people bringing him a bunch of penny-ante shit that's not even gonna make a dent. Donnie says, "I got a friend down in Florida." It's not long before they're in Miami. Dog races, tennis, water parks. The purple firebird. Richie Gazzo (Rocco Sisto) is a work of art. It cannot be ignored how much GTA games took their aesthetic nearly entirely from movies like this. I mean, GTA: Vice City looks just like this act in Miami. In Miami, the FBI's got a whole office set up in a motel. Tim Blake Nelson and Paul Giamatti are playing lowly, unnamed FBI technicians. They do get a scene with Depp, though, which is a good one. They talk about the meaning of Fuggedaboutit. Nicky's doing a drug deal. Each sees the other but doesn't know that they've been spotted. Donnie's on the phone with his wife but Lefty's too concerned about getting the club deal for himself instead of Sonny. Sonny's getting suspicious. They're on the boat with drug-dealer Trafficante (Val Avery), where Lefty thinks he's going to get a break. But Sonny shows up and takes the deal for himself. Sonny talks to Donnie, taking him over: "you belong to me now." He's going to put Donnie in charge in Florida. Lefty's shut out. Being in Floria, Donnie misses his daughter's First Communion. His wife changes the phone number. Donnie almost gets made at the airport by a U.S. Attorney General, who approaches him. Donnie thinks quickly and knocks him out, telling Sonny that the fag grabbed his cock. Donnie flies back to his family to learn that he's getting a divorce. They're in counseling. The company he keeps has rubbed off on him so much that he can't even slip out of his Donnie Brasco role when he's with Maggie. Lefty's son Tommy has overdosed. Donnie's there for Lefty, in the hospital He should be in Florida, though. The club's up and running. Donnie did good. The opening night is lovely. The cops bust it up. Everybody gets arrested. Donnie suspects that the other idiot FBI agent in Florida didn't bribe the local constabulary because he didn't have budget for it. Lefty, though, he says that "there's gotta be a snitch" because the cops got wind way too quickly. The snitch was Sonny Red, who coordinated with Trafficante to get them busted. Sonny gets sent for. They drive out. Donnie's gotta wait in the car. Sonny Black gets the drop on Sonny Red. Nicky deals the coup de grace. It's a massacre. They retrieve Donnie from the car. Lefty takes out Nicky (because they know he was making side drug deals and wasn't giving them a cut). Donnie's left to help them saw all those guys to pieces. Lefty, later, in the car, says, "Nicky was a rat because Sonny Black says he was a rat. Who the fuck am I? Who am I? I'm a spoke on a wheel. And so was he. And so are you." Donnie stops checking in with the FBI; it's been three weeks. Lefty gives him his shot at getting to be a made guy. Donnie's back at home, looking for a bag with $300k in it. Maggie tells him, "you're becoming like them, you know that?" for which he wallops her across the face. "Maggie: Did you ever once ask yourself how I make it through my days? Hmm? I pretend I"m a widow. With medals and scrapbooks...and memories. I pretend you're dead. That's how my life makes sense to me. Just go away. And stay away. Why do you hate me when I love you so much? "Joe/Donnie: You think I hate you? I don't hate you. This job is eating me alive.I can't breather anymore. And if I come out, this guy Lefty dies. They're gonna kill him because he vouched for me, because he stood up for me. I live with that every day. That's the same thing as if I put the bullet in his head myself, you understand? I spent all these years, trying to be the good guy, you know? The man in the white fuckin' hat. For what? For nothing. I'm not becoming like them, Maggie. I am them." He kisses he on the back of her head and leaves. They're at the pier, waiting for Sonny Red's son Bruno to show up so they can pop him. Donnie asks Lefty to just leave this life, buy a boat, take his wife Annette (Ronnie Farer) and just leave. Just get away. "You think I'm fuckin' Rockefeller? You think I got boat money?" Donnie says, "What if I could give you boat money?" Lefty looks at him, then pulls out a scrap of newspaper. "I want you to look at it very carefully and I want you to think very carefully about what you say to me." The article writes that the boat that Donnie had procured in Florida was a boat that the FBI had previously seized. It was an FBI boat, an "Abscam" boat. "If you're a rat, then I'm the biggest fuckin' mutt in the history of the Mafia." Lefty believes him. "Did I say you was a rat? I can't believe you brought that up. I never said you was a rat. I'm your best friend." Just as Lefty's urging him to make his first kill, the FBI busts up the party, pulling Donnie out. Lefty's yelling at him not to say anything. "Don't tell 'em nothin', Donnie. Don't say nothing! There'll be a mouthpiece there in 24 hours. You're all right!" Meanwhile, Donnie's telling the FBI agents, "No, no, no. Fuck you, it's not over. I'm not coming out." He doesn't want to come out because he knows that Lefty's going to die. The other FBI agents visit Sonny Black and let him know that Donnie Brasco was a plant and that they can turn state's evidence anytime they want. "Sonny Black: Can you believe those fuckin' guys? There's no way Donnie's an agent. Pauly: It's a nice bluff. Lefty: That boat was a setup. They set the boat up. Then we think Donnie's a rat. Sonny Black: Almost had me goin', if you didn't know Donnie. Lefty: Yeah, if you didn't know Donnie." At home, Lefty's watching TV. He gets a phone call. He's gotta go out. "Annette: So late? Lefty: What am I gonna do? Who knows with these people. Honey, don't wait up for me tonight. Nah, I don't know how long I'm gonna be. Hey, listen to me: if Donnie calls, tell him, tell him, uh, if it was going to be anyone, I'm glad it was him. All right? Look how beautiful you look. Goodbye, babe." He leaves everything of value, including his gold cross on a chain. Annette gets everything. Bang. Joe D. Pistone got a medal, a $500 check, and a one-minute "press" conference with only his family in attendance.. "Joe? Joe, it's over. C'mon, honey, let's go home." This movie's very good. but it's also pretty long.. The acting is great all around. I had no inkling until the end that this was a "true story about Joseph D. Pistone" . I guess that explains why it was so long -- they didn't want to leave anything out. It's kind of funny because Pacino played the undercover cop in a similar movie called Serpico.. Sandman S02 (2025) -- "4/10" I watched one episode of this season and it was so boring. The direction, the dialogue, the acting -- it's all so wooden and terrible. I was going to tough it out but I have a million other things to watch, so I'm tapping out early. Morpheus is going to back to Hell and I couldn't care less. He's so morose and lackluster. All of the scenes are so obviously bullshit CGI, even the easily mocked-up indoor ones. It's all so unimaginative. Star Trek used styrofoam and tinsel and no-one cared because the acting, story, and dialogue were entrancing. Stop spending your entire budget on CGI bullshit. Stop deliberately trying to make everyone hate Desire with their flaunting about and being an absolute asshole so that they can pretend to be offended afterward. This is ridiculous. Sorry, Alan Moore. Even the first season was a bit of a slog, stretched out as it was. This season has already stretched five minutes of exposition into a whole episode. I'm out. Road to Perdition (2002) -- "7/10" The Sullivan men are at a funeral. The coffin sits on a bed of ice. The corpse has coins on its eyes. It is 1931. Young Michael goes upstairs to get Rooney's jacket, only to find his son Connor (Daniel Craig) relaxing there. He sends the boy away. Below, the speeches begin. The corpse's brother Finn McGovern (Ciarán Hinds) gives a drunken speech that threatens to veer into offending Rooney Sr. They cart him off Rooney Sr. tells Connor that he's to take Michael with him when he "talks to him." Michael Sullivan Jr. (Tyler Hoechlin) loves his mother Annie (Jennifer Jason Leigh), but he reveres his father (Tom Hanks), though he knows he's a dangerous man. Michael Sr. is, in fact, a brutal enforcer for John Rooney (Paul Newman). Young Sullivan sneaks into the car to see what his father does for a living. He finds out when he watches his father cap Finn in cold blood. Connor drunkenly lets loose with his Tommy gun, for no reason other than to make noise and be a pain in the ass. The boy flees into the rain, where his father finds him. He takes his son home. "Does mom know?" Mom knows. The next morning, Rooney Sr. meets Michael Jr. on the way to school to tell him to keep his mouth shut -- basically, I mean, it was a veiled threat, but what else was Rooney doing there? They're all working hard to protect Michael Sr.'s position in the organization because he's so valued. As Rooney talks to Michael Sr., we see Jr. beating the living hell out of another kid in school. Having seen his father murder someone has taken its toll, I guess. Michael is on his next contract. Connor declines to accompany him. "Ich habe Hausarrest." "Alles klar." Michael arrives, and executes Calvino (Doug Spinuzza) and his bodyguard. The note he'd handed to Calvino, which Connor had given him, read, "Kill Sullivan and all your debts are paid." Oh. Michael Jr. rides his bike home to hear two shots fired. Annie and his younger brother are gone. Connor leaves their home. Michael Sr. arrives to find Jr. in the dining room, like a ghost. Michael Sr. finds the bodies upstairs. He wastes no time, getting himself and his remaining son out of the house. "Dieses Haus ist nicht mehr unseres Zuhause. Es ist nur noch ein leeres Gebäude." This is a very dark movie, in tone, story, and appearance. It almost looks like it's in black-and-white sometimes, especially the nighttime, wintry scenes. They head for Chicago. He is there to talk to Frank Nitti (Stanley Tucci). Nitti cannot help him because he's going to protect his own interests first, and then those of Rooney. John Rooney and son Connor are both there. John sends Connor away, while he and Nitti decide what to do. Rooney says, "Gott, nein. Nicht der Junge." Nitti says that he knows just who he'll get for the job, then. We meet photojournalist Maguire (Jude Law), who works very ... inventively. He tends to manufacture murders and then photographs them for money. Nitti engages his services. He is a serial killer for hire. The two remaining Sullivans drive to Perdition. They do not go to the funeral of the two dead ones. Maguire, who is manic-looking but is also a very clever investigator, follows. He finds Sullivan in a diner, eating dinner. Sullivan is immediately suspicious. Their initial verbal tango is great. "Maguire: Bezahlt zu werden, für das was man gern tut, ist das nicht der Traum? Sullivan: Könnte man sagen." It keeps getting better. By the end, Sullivan is sweating. He palms a knife and heads for the bathroom, pretending to be a lot drunker than he is. Maguire waits for the police officer to leave, pulls a pistol, and turns just in time to see Sullivan driving off. He runs out, finds a knife in his tire, and puts a couple of well-placed shots into the back windshield, then kills the cop. The next day, Sullivan Jr. learns to drive. A synchro-free clutch can't be easy for someone who can barely reach the pedals. Sullivan Sr. robs a bank, nice and quiet, taking only Capone's money. He robs several banks. His son always playing getaway driver, always getting better. They repaint the car, the back seat full of money. They're a good team. The next target is Alexander Rance (Dylan Baker). Sullivan is slowly learning how rich Rooney actually is. Maguire's on his way, having seen Rance in the window. They exchange shots. Maguire kills Rance through the wall, and Sullivan shoots Maguire in the face, possibly the eye. Maguire clips him in the arm during the getaway. Gunshots wounds in 1931 were no laughing matter, not like they are now, where you can get shot a dozen times and everything's fine the next day. Sullivan Jr. stops at a farm and gets a couple to take them in. They pull the bullet and disinfect. He nurses his dad back to health over several days (or weeks? It's unclear). Sullivan discovers that Connor has been embezzling from his father. They leave the farm, recompensing the couple handsomely. He rushes to tell Rooney, convinced that this means that he will be absolved. Rooney already knew. Rooney knew that the men he was telling Sullivan to kill were only dying to cover his son's debts. Sullivan learns that his savior had always been a bad man, incapable of saying no to his son, no matter how much damage it does to anyone else. Later, in the rain, in a ghostly scene, Michael takes out everyone, leaving an immobile Rooney Sr. alive. He walks out of the shadows like an avenging angel, a silhouette in the pouring rain. Rooney: "Ich bin froh, dass du es tust." Connor is next. Nitti agrees to it to end the feud. Connor's in the tub. The shots are off-screen but the swinging bathroom door with the mirror on it to reveal the aftermath is inspired. Immediately after, Sullivan Jr. sits in a room, waiting for his dad to return. He's on the right half of the screen; his dad arrives on the left half, coming up the hallway. Maguire is still out there. They are in Perdition. It's sunny at the beach. It's colorful. A dog barks. It's a damned golden retriever. Goldies, ammirite? They make the sun shine. The music is hopeful. Michael stands at the large window in the white, white living room of his sister's house. The surf comes in, gently, again and again. His son plays with the dog. Bang. Bang. Bang. Maguire shoots Sullivan in the back. Maguire sets up his camera. His face is all fucked-up, but his eye is mostly fine. That bowler hat is something else. "Bitte lächeln." Michael Jr. comes up behind him. "Komm schon, Michael, gib mir die Kanone." Bang. "Michael Jr.: Ich konnte es nicht tun. Michael Sr. Ich weiss." Everyone is dead but Michael Jr. and the dog. Oh no, wait, the couple at the farm are still alive. Michael Jr. returns to them, with the dog and all of his money in tow. If this movie had been 30 minutes shorter, I would have give it an extra star. It was a little too languorous on some scenes, it repeated a bit too much. But some scenes were really lovely. I watched it in German. Jump Cut (2024) -- "8/10" This is a fun and well-made sci-fi short about an actress in her early 30s named Maya (Lucy Walters), who's struggling to get her feet under her. We watch the world beat her down, bit by bit, although she seems to be quite good at what she does. She scrolls through job ads, all requesting "girls" in their "early 20s", which she will never be again. She feels like she's "running out of time." She answers a job ad for an experimental film that's looking for a woman in her 30s. She presses "submit." The doorbell rings. It's Cyril (Laura Esterman), with director Philippe Wokozi (Jamie Jackson). They are there to hire her. You see the incredible desperation in her face, wanting to believe that she's finally getting her break, but realizing that all of the alarm bells are going off, but not wanting to miss out on a possible break ... The poor and desperate are so easy to scam because they have so little to lose. They've been down so long that their desperation no longer whispers, it roars. It begins. She loses time. Minutes, hours, weeks. She ends up in an ethereal theater, watching the film of her life that Wokozi has summarized and then ... the doorbell rings. She is older now, in the role of Cyril before, recruiting the next girl. Good pacing, good lighting, good editing, good sound design, good acting, good soundtrack, and a good story. Die drei Musketiere (1948) -- "7/10" D'Artagnan (Gene Kelly) is a gifted fencer from a country village. He makes his way to Paris on the ugliest horse imaginable to become a musketeer. The movie starts as a slapstick comedy, then moves on from there. On his journey, he meets three awful swordsmen guarding Lady de Winter (Lana Turner, who is stunning). In Paris, D'artagnan meets and offends each of the three musketeers, Athos (Van Heflin), Aramis (Robert Coote), and Porthos (Gig Young) and ends up with a duel with each of them, at noon, one, and two in the afternoon. Richelieu's troops attack them and the four of them fight them off, with D'Artagnan proving to be the bester fencer of them all. King Louis XIII (Frank Morgan) yells at them, but rewards them handsomely. This is a comedy, a rather broad one at times. It is also an action movie, with incredible stunts and feats of derring-do, mostly on the part of Gene Kelly, who I had not realized was the Buster Keaton/Jackie Chan of his time. He is impressive, incredibly athletic and physically gifted. I'd only seen him in "Singin' in the Rain" and thought he was only a singer/dancer. When her home is attacked by Richelieu's troops, D'Artagnan -- with a little help from his footman, or secondaire Planchet (Keenan Wynn) -- comes to the rescue of Constance (June Allyson), the landlord's daughter, who lives below him. They quickly fall in love, but she won't let him accompany her to a rendezvous because she's meeting the Duke of Buckingham (John Sutton), who's not supposed to be in France. The Duke meets with Queen Anne (Angela Lansbury), where they profess their mutual love. Richelieu (Vincent Price) meets with de Winter -- resplendent in green -- and they machinate together. They want those jewels that the Queen has. The musketeers are to defend their journey from England. There are a lot of sword-fighting scenes and then they are waylaid along an enfilade, with Aramis falling wounded by the wayside. A bridge is out, guns are fired, Troops fall from their hoses. D'Artagnan leaps a chasm with his horse. Richelieu's troops ride down an impossibly steep ravine. They're all at the beach. More sword-fighting. Some are leaping from pretty ridiculous heights. [2] This is very exciting; the action scenes are very good for even now, but in 1948 this must have been out of this world. No wonder Jackie Chan spent his career making movies like this. D'Artagnan makes it to England to pick up the dozen jewels, but there are only 10 in the case. Richelier and de Winter -- this time in purple! -- have the other two. Porthos cannot accompany him because he'd been stabbed in the ass while he'd been distracted by a beautiful woman. Aramis is also useless because he's back with his countryside woman, while Athos is holed up in a cellar, deep, deep, deep in his cups. He's the least useless, though, so he's forced to recover and acocompany D'Artagnan to Paris. Cut to outside the palace. D'Artagnan scales the walls like he's Spiderman, then flits from rooftop to rooftop like he's not bound by gravity. He tumbles through an open window, crashing to the floor and trailing several banners -- remember, it's a comedy, so there are pratfalls -- and hands the box of jewels to Constance, who brings them to the Queen in time to thwart Richelieu's plans to subvert her influence with the King. Richelieu has Constance kidnapped. D'Artagnan confronts him -- resplendent in purple himself! And Richelieu is holding a and stroking a cat, as Blofeld would -- but D'Artagnan is not to trade his life for hers but to give his sword to Richelieu in exchange. Richelieu gives D'Artagnan into the hands of de Winter -- bright, bright green -- to prepare him for his guard, like, whatever that means. This is the same thing that his returned comrades think: they don't believe that he'd behaved himself with de Winter. He protests that he loves Constance. Kitty (Patricia Medina) is de Winter's servant and she seems to be in love with the handsome D'Artagnan -- everyone seems to be falling in love with him. He embroils her in his plan to present himself to de Winter as her lover Graf de Warden, which is why he insisted that they extinguish all the candles, so that she can't see who he really is. As Athos and the others predicted, he falls in love with her, forgetting Constance completely.. It turns out that de Winter is Athos's ex-wife. "Das Geschöpf ist meiner Frau Flieh dieses Weib wie die Peste. Dieses todbringende, teuflische Urbild des Bösen!" Now D'Artagnan visits de Winter as himself. He's wearing the ring she'd given him when he'd posed as de Warden. He shows her the ring, thinking that their mutual love make her understand why he'd fooled her. She does not understand. At all. She tries to kill him with scissors. He discovers the brand on her shoulder that Athos had told him about. It signifies that she's an ex-con, apparently. D'Artagnan returns to his home to find Constance. I shit you not: he proposes to her. Like, on the same day. They're married, cuddling, and then she leaves. "Wo immer wir sind ... wir sind beisamen." OK, sure. But that was the shortest honeymoon ever, and all they talked about was how he can get de Warden's forgiveness. Constance arrives at another castle, in safety, knowing that D'Artagnan will be fighting the very next day. Things move quickly, I guess. OK, the fighting has started and, somehow, Richelieu thinks that the three musketeers are working for him. Athos confronts de Winter -- Charlotte -- and gets the "Vollmacht" for free passage to England. They send Planchet to meet with the Duke of Buckingham. Lady de Winter manages to put her foot in it, getting herself caught in a lie and thrown in the dungeon. It's a pretty fancy dungeon, though. With Constance watching over her, de Warden will con her into letting her free. As Athos puts it, "Satan bewacht von einer Engel, " but she's not falling for it, but her heart is too good; she can't be sure that it's all just show. Constance brings de Warden a knife. instead of using it kill herself, she stabs Constance, and then kills her guard, and Buckingham. D'Artagnan finds Constance and she dies in his arms. The musketeers track her down, finding her smiling smugly before her mirror. They capture her, and hand her over to the executioner (Mickey Simpson). She begs for forgiveness, to which Athos replies, "Wie oft in deinem Leben hast du um Gnade gebeten und sie erhalten? Und sie mit Blut vergolten? Wie viel hast du grausam um ihr Leben betrogen, um MItleid, Hoffnung und Liebe gebracht? Was gibt dir ein Recht darauf zu hoffen? Du könntest uns noch täuschen. Wir können dich nicht verzeihen. Wir könnenn es nicht, und wir dürfen es nicht. [He kisses her one last time] Meine geliebte Frau." She dies off-camera. They ride. They come to an inn. Another trap. A final marvelously choreographed and filmed fight scene. Gene Kelly is amazing. He standing-jumps over a table, slides across another, then parkours up a wall to a second-floor balcony. It's 1948 and that was all one shot. I don't see any cables. Amazing. I only just realized just how much Mandy Patinkin's Inigo Montoya's appearance was modeled after D'Artagnan. Reinforcements appear on horse, and the musketeers are captured. Richelieu tries to convict them, but is tripped up by his own paper of passage, which allowed them to do whatever they thought best, signed by him. He is forced to free them by the King, or else admit that there is no rule of law. [3] The end. The costumes and colors are incredible in this film. I took a point off because it was quite long, and somewhat repetitive, though always entertaining. I watched it in German. The Grudge (2019) -- "6/10" A lady comes home from Japan with a grudge. Actually, it's a demon-ghost that infects her home and infects every single person who sets foot into the home. It kills them all and retains their ghosts in the home. This movie has a ton of jump-scares but some of the non-jump ones are just kind of gross. A bunch of times, someon turns a light off and the monster is there; then they turn it on and it's gone. There are some good practical effects mixed with CGI. Karen (Andrea Riseborough) is getting over the death of her husband, who she lost young to cancer. They move to another town. She's a police officer, and she takes a job with the local constabulary.. Her first case is a car that they've discovered in the woods, its driver long dead. She investigates the house and discovers that her current partner's former partner had shot himself in the face after having gone into the house. He was investigating a couple of realtors, who'd murder-suicided. They were trying to sell the house for the lady from Japan, who'd murder-suicided her daughter and husband. The next couple was an older one, a lady with dementia and a terminal disease. She murder-suicided his ass. The lady in the car was a hospice caregiver who'd been there. The house killed her too. This is all told in interleaved flashbacks, almost like they'd spilled film canisters across the editing-room floor. She visits her partner's ex-partner in the mental asylum. He tells her that she's doomed. He claws his own eyes out to stop seeing the demons. Karen is going to end this, though. She's pouring gasoline all over the house. She tells her son to stay in the car. Her son shows up in the house. She asks him a question that he always knows how to answer. He's mute. It's not her son. It's the house, trying to protect itself. She lights that shit on fire -- having guessed correctly. They move again. She send her son off to school. Big hug goodbye. He answers from the other room, "I'm going to school Mom." Boom. The lady from Japan appears out of nowhere and drags her by the hair down the hall. Awesome jump scare. Best one for last. The end. U-571 (2000) -- "6/10" This movie describes a fun action-movie scenario that never happened, but it totallly looks like it happened. And it kind of did happen, but not at all in this way, and certainly not with U.S.-American protagonists. A lot of people had a problem with that, but I only learned about the uproar after I'd already watched the movie. It was fine. I didn't notice as many plotholes or historical inconsistencies because I was cheerfully learning new French words the whole time. I had no idea how many maritime words in English come from the French: "keel" (quille); "poop (deck); stern" (poupe); "prow" (proue) and so on. Anyway, Tyler (Matthew McConaughey) has been told that he's not ready for his own command, though he's an excellent second-in-command. He's not especially stoked about this kind of back-handed compliment, but he's a good sailor -- he grins and bears it. He embarks on a mission with his beloved captain Dahlgren (Bill Paxton) and his Chief (Harvey Keitel) to capture an Enigma device on a German submarine. They locate the submarine, pretending to be German using literally one of their crew -- Wentz (Jack Noseworthy) -- who speaks German. He speaks it quite well, though, so that, as they approach in their raft, the Germans are fooled long enough to get close enough to machine-gun them all to death. They take over the submarine with more derring-do (cracking the entrance, etc.) and locate the Enigma device as well as many German crew members who give themselves up without a fight. They've packed up all of the stuff they want to steal, as well as their prisoners, and gotten most of it into rafts and heading for their own sub...when a German warship appears and torpedoes their own sub, utterly destroying it and killing nearly everyone in transit. They manage to rescue a few people, as well as the Enigma machine. Oh, and also a German, whom they take prisoner, but who will -- being the dastardly and ungrateful enemy he is -- constantly take advantage of their magnanimity in not killing a prisoner by sabotaging their further efforts, often with nearly fatal effect. So now they're in a German submarine -- where only two of them can read anything, well, three including the German but he's going to lie through his teeth, so good luck with that -- and they've got to get through U-Boat-infested waters in order to deliver the Enigma device to Great Britain. They do this, of course. They do all of the submarine-movie things. * They look up at the ceiling a lot, listening hard. * They have to repair leaks, repair equipment, and clear blockages. * They have to spend an uncomfortable amount of time in cold water, sometimes completely submerged in it, in tight tunnels. * They have to take the submarine deeper than they're ever gone before. (They grudgingly admire German engineering.) * They have to contend with having only one propellor. * They have only one torpedo but can't fire it until a whole bunch of other things are resolved. * They stop their sinking. * They have to contend with rising too quickly. The German ship on the surface discovers that they are a U.S.-American crew on one of their U-Boats. They eventually blow up it up with their one remaining torpedo, but their U-Boat is also wounded fatally, so they abandon it and are rescued from their rafts by allied forces. I didn't recognize anyone else, but apparently Jon Bon Jovi played Emmett. I don't know which generic sailor he played. I watched it in mostly French, with a bit of German, with French subtitles. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] These are notes for me to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. The amount of text is not proportional to my enjoyment. I might write less because I didn't get around to it when it was fresh in my mind. I rate the film based on how well it suited me personally for the genre, my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. Links are to "my IMDb ratings" [1] These are stunts which they actually had to do because it was 1948 and there was no CGI and you can see the whole thing, there's no mattress or anything onto which Kelly falls. He just drops a story or more into sand, bounces up and keeps going. [1] It really makes you wonder whether that part's true. Richelieu is known as one of the most ruthless criminals in history but even he is depicted in this movie as having followed rules. It's almost like they couldn't conceive of anyone being horrible enough not to follow obvious rules. [4] The bullshit mafia goons in charge of the current empire wouldn't have blinked. They're have just had everyone shot and then said that they'd tried to kill the King or something. [1] Now that I'm writing this, though, I figure that, in 1948, everyone had a pretty fresh memory of an entire country that didn't follow any rules of morality, so I guess it wasn't that. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5926 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5926 Tue, 06 Jan 2026 18:25:42 +0100 -- "6/10" 2. "Stirb Langsam 2 (Die Hard 2) (1990)" <#DieHard2> -- "8/10" 3. "Punisher: War Zone (2008)" <#Punisher> -- "5/10" 4. "Brian Simpson: Live from the Mothership (2024)" <#Simpson> -- "8/10" 5. "Fatal Attraction (1987)" <#Fatal> -- "8/10" 6. "The 6th Day (2000)" <#Sixth> -- "6/10" 7. "October Sky (1999)" <#OctoberSky> -- "8/10" 8. "Shane Gillis: Beautiful Dogs (2023)" <#Shane> -- "7/10" 9. "Flyboys (2006)" <#Flyboys> -- "8/10" 10. "Schtonk (1992)" <#Schtonk> -- "8/10" Robocop (2014) -- "6/10" Omnicorp has robot warriors. They use them all over the world to mop up and contain the unruly local populace wherever the U.S. military needs them. The movie starts with a demonstration of the efficacy of these machines, unfortunately ending badly for some young, presumably nascent little terrorist. He shouldn't have moved, though. That's on him. I wonder whether many of the people who watch RoboCop notice the irony of this whole movie? Do they understand that this is all subversive, like "Starship Troopers" ? Or do they not see the satire in that film either? I bet they don't. I bet people think this stuff is a documentary. I bet they root for the bad guys the whole time. It's a nice trick, right? You can double the audience: half enjoy it ironically, digging to the layer underneath, whereas the other half enjoy the superficial story, doing no digging at all. I bet people in the Trump administration watch these types of movies and think not that they're documentaries, but instruction manuals. As evidence for that though, which I wrote a month ago, there's the still-fresh -- barely days old -- invasion of Venezuela to kidnap that country's president. Holy shit, I think the Trump administration is just straight-up living out scenes from its favorite movies. There are other things in the first fifteen minutes that stand out as satire. The subtitles for the Americans in the promotional video show what they're saying whereas the subtitles for the locals just say "speaking Arabic." It really hammers home the point that these aren't even really people because Arabic isn't even really a language that can be translated to anything that we might even begin to understand. It's like pigs grunting. What is there to understand? Just mow 'em down if they can't behaveproduce. There was also the interview with the general, where he says "never again," which is very much a dog whistle for WWII but also for 9/11, right? And when these people say "never again," they mean "never again" to these specific groups. That is, never again should Jewish people or Americans suffer from terror. They will be the ones to mete it out but never again to suffer it, forever and ever, amen. Or what about the suicide bombers? They had vests laced with what looked like sticks of dynamite -- which is kind of hilarious because who uses actual sticks of dynamite outside of a cartoon? -- but they also had guns and they were clearly trying to survive. What kind of a suicide bomber fights for his life? The film was clearly staged for the commercial. It very much mirrors how it's impossible to know what to believe in our world today, no matter how convincing it looks. It's meant to be convincing, and that veracity serves someone's agenda. Not yours, of course. Never yours. The whole presentation with over-the-top media talking-head Pat Novak (Samuel Jackson) could’ve been pulled straight from a Fox News show. Or a commercial on Fox News. Or both. Those scenes are all very ironic and satire-coded. Or maybe I'm just hearing what I want to hear. The Pat Novak part was obvious, though, wasn't it? No? Really? On the one hand, this is a straight up story of corporate crime that we should all condemn. On the other, it’s a story that can be cheered on as billionaires and businessman win in protecting America. Look at how innovation wins. So beautiful. The most beautiful. In Robocoop's visor, he can see what people‘s emotional states are. Now, on the one hand, you might argue: This is bullshit; that doesn’t exist. No-one can tell what someone's exact emotional state is using a sensor. While that's true, it's also true that it doesn’t matter because when a machine says something like that, when a display shows something like that, it becomes the truth for most people. They don’t think: I wonder if this is true? They don’t ask themselves: How would it even measure these things? If it’s written on a screen, then it becomes true. So, it really doesn’t matter what you might think your actual emotional state is. You are in the emotional state that the machine says you are. You can be punished for what the machine thinks you’ve done or thinks you’re thinking. Easy-peasy. You might be wondering: what actually happened in this movie? Is he going to write about that? Maybe a little wouldn't hurt. The same thing happened in this movie, more or less, that happened in the original from 1987. Alex Murphy (Joel Kinnaman) gets on the wrong side of local gangs that are also mixed up with the local government. He's a cop who nosed around so much that the gangs tried to kill him. They nearly succeeded: he's just a heart, a brain, a hand, and ... lungs. I think that's it. Most of his face is also still there. The rest of him is a high-powered robot, making him a cyborg. Omnicorp has complete control over his mental state. They can dump in whatever hormones they want. They can pretty much make him do what they want. They control his memories. Or do they? Will the man inside the machine triumph? Will his tremendous will to know what really happened and who's really responsible overpower whatever technological reins they've added to him? Will he be able to revenge himself on the guilty when the time comes? (You know that the answer to all of those questions is "yes.") Oh, I forgot to mention that the reason they made Alex into a cyborg is because the government wasn't allowing robots or anything sold by Omnicorp to be deployed in the U.S. Those weapons were only for the colonies. However, a cyborg is a man, right?! So that's OK! It's a loophole in the law. And when they dump him full of hormones, then they've basically shut down whatever made him a man in the first place, but we don't have to tell the American people that. They love their robot hero. He's there to defend them. As long as they behaveproduce. So there's a whole meta-narrative that hits pretty close to home as U.S. soldiers are currently marauding the streets of large cities in the U.S. instead of stomping mudholes in little brown people in colonial backwaters as God intended. Anything else? Oh, yeah, there were some good actors in this. Gary Oldman played Dr. Dennett Norton, who's in charge of the Robocop program. He served as Omnicorp's conscience, for what that's worth. Michael Keaton played Raymond Sellars, the CEO of OmniCorp. He's really good at playing a scumbag billionaire. Jay Baruchel was head of marketing and also excellent as a sleazeball. And poor Michael K. Williams was Alex Murphy's partner but barely got any screen time. It's not too hard to guess what happens, right? Sellars almost gets away with it but a rampaging Robocop saves his family and kills Sellars. Robocop gets pretty banged up but Dr. Norton fixes him up, good as new. Omnicorp doesn't get to deploy its robots in the U.S. and must be satisfied with siphoning dozens of billions in tax dollars to terrorize the world. Poor, poor Omnicorp. They really got their comeuppance. Stirb Langsam 2 (Die Hard 2) (1990) -- "8/10" John McLane (Bruce Willis) is at the airport to pick up Holly McLane (Bonnie Bedelia) but her flight is delayed because of a snowstorm. After John chats with Holly in midair -- which, in 1990 was an absolutely fancy thing to do; I mean, hell, we barely ever see it happening now -- John sees some suspicious people. He tracks them down in the baggage area and manages to kill one of them. The other one gets away. With Sergeant Al's (Reginald VelJohnson) help, he figures out that the guy that he'd killed had already been dead for two years. On the report of his past exploits, we see that he had served in "Afghanistan". Oh neat, that means he'd served with the Mujahideen. But that's not really that guy; it's some other guy who'd stolen his identity. McLane's hackles are up now. John is smoking wherever he wants in the airport, which is kind of amazing, considering how normal the rest of the movie looks. It would be like seeing him drinking from a whites-only water fountain. The terrorists, led by Thornberg (William Atherton) take over the landing systems, fooling the plane into thinking that the ground is 200 feet lower than it really is. The plane has no visibility so it can't tell that it's so close to the ground. Luckily, John McClane is out on the runway, waving handmade torches around. The plane doesn't see him. It's too late. It smushes into the ground, exploding in a fireball. John is devastated. People start to believe McClane -- a whole Seal Team 6 crew shows up, led by Grant (John Amos) -- but also the head of the airport Trudeau (Fred Thompson) is behind him, yanking on the leash of Sergeant Carmine Lorenzo (Dennis Franz). Together, they find the church where the terrorists had holed up and were running their operation. The terrorists wire the place to blow, then escape on snowmobiles. I'd forgotten that this is, essentially, a Christmas movie. It's very wintry. McClane gives chase, of course. I'd also forgotten how accurate McClane is with a pistol, from any distance. McClane discovers that the terrorists have two types of ammunition: blanks and live rounds. They used the blanks to fire on Grant and his crew. A few minutes later, Grant kills a young soldier on his crew who isn't in on it -- and never will be. McClane commandeers a new helicopter, getting them to bring him close to the jumbo jet that the terrorists are all trying to escape in (with the Grenadan general that they'd rescued, which was like the whole point of the operation I guess but whatever). McClane drops onto the plane's wing from the helicopter (like you do), then ends up fighting Grant there, mano a mano. Grants ends up in the jet engine. Now it's Thornberg's turn to discover that being a seventh-level black-belt and Special Ops is no match for "severely beaten and bloodied LA cop with a smart mouth and a right hook." McClane is no match for him in a fight but neither does he seem to suffer from either the kicks to the face or falling off the plane onto the runway far below. On the way, he manages to rip out the fuel cap (is that even a thing?), which leaves a trail of kerosene not only on the ground, but even, apparently, trailing behind it through the air as takes off. McClane doesn't ask questions about physics. A flick of the Zippo, a "Yippeekayay Motherfucker" (well, "Yippeyayay Schweinebacke" in German) and the plane is not only no more, but the trail of its destruction lights up the length of the runway for all of the other planes to finally be able to land. Christmas-like music plays as McClane's bloodied self wanders the icy wastes like Frankenstein, yelling "Holly" again and again in a raspy roar.. He of course finds her in seconds. There were so many character actors, like Carmine's brother Vito (Robert Costanzo), a pilot (Colm Meaney), or John Leguiziamo, who was in this somewhere but I don't recall seeing him. He was probably some disposable soldier named Gomez or Rodriguez or something like that. My bad: his name was Burke. As with other, older movies I've watched, there is just no replacing actual real-life scenes with lights shining through grates, obscured by steam coming from several pipes, all falling on a rumpled sweater as McLane walks through the actual bowels of an actual airport, all lit expertly and all actually real and there. It's easier to enjoy movies with predictable or weak stories because there's something cool to look at. When the story is predictable and weak and the person driving the car is very obviously not in a car, then we're watching an SNL skit and it's harder to suspend disbelief. I gave it an extra star because I will always watch this again (so I must think it's good). I watched it in German. Punisher: War Zone (2008) -- "5/10" This movie was made when all sorts of Marvel movies were being made, for all sorts of reasons. This one is kind of phoned in. If you thought that John McClane was accurate with a pistol from any distance, then you ain't seen nothing yet. The Punisher (Ray Stevenson) is a force of nature, never missing, and seeming to have choreographed his assaults to the last detail. Are we supposed to ignore that, when he crashes a mafia dinner party, that he, instead of just staying on the floor, chooses to hang himself upside-down on a chandelier, spinning slowly like a Cirque de Soleil act that sprays hundreds of unerring bullets from Uzis? That was a really weird choice. It's 2008, so everyone's doing parkour, too. Frank Castle AKA the Punisher moves on to the next target: Billy (Dominic West). The Punisher dumps him into a giant recycling machine full of broken glass. I guess this is why he's also credited as "Jigsaw". Castle discovers that one of the henchmen he'd shot was an undercover cop (or FBI officer or whatever). Oh look, it's Wayne Knight at Micro, Frank Castle's Q. Next up is the reveal of Jigsaw. The guy seems to be doing pretty well, considering his whole face had been torn off. He acts like all that damage hasn't cramped his style at all. He kills his plastic surgeon, of course, because that's how one-dimensional his character is. It's kind of too bad because Dominic West can be good. It's a dumb movie, so I left it on while I was cooking. I'm lying if I say I paid attention to it too much. You can skip it without panicking that you're missing some key pieces of the MCU. I watched it in German. Brian Simpson: Live from the Mothership (2024) -- "8/10" All excerpts are from the "Live from the Mothership (2024) Movie Script" . Racism "This how you know how racist you are, okay? "There's a... There's a... There's an amount of Black people that could've been in here when you walked in that would've made you go, "Wait a minute. Am I in the right... place." "That's how racist you are. That...that number of people is how racist you are. "You used to things being white things. "'Cause that's what racism really is. "It's not about who you hate or don't or love. "I mean, listen, obviously there's racists that hate people. Those are the professional racists. "But all you amateur racists. It's still racist, you know? "'Cause you see a racist as a bad, evil person. And since you don't see yourself as a bad, evil person, you think that you ain't never been racist. And that's where you fucking up at. "'Cause racism don't got nothing to do with whether you a good person or whether you love or hate Black people. It's about your perspective. Like the way you've been brought up to see the world and where you rank in it, who's beneath you and who's above you. That's what it is. Right? Anybody could be racist." 200 Lifetime Nuts "we gotta have more empathy for women, 'cause this is what I thought about when I woke up that morning. "I was like, "Okay, imagine... imagine, sir, imagine we live in a universe where you born with just 200 nuts to bust. "[...] "You... You and your lady, you trying but it ain't working. I mean, y'all fucking, it ain't working. "You sitting in the doctor's office. He like, "I got bad news, I don't know if, uh, if you thought it was a myth, or you lost count, but, uh...you fresh out of nuts, man." ""But don't worry, I know you feeling vulnerable, but I'm right here with you." ""Just give me $30,000." ""Okay, take these vitamins and hormones for a little bit. Come back and see me." ""I'll go up in your balls, I'll scrape a few off the walls. We'll... We'll pick out the best ones, we'll plant them shits," ""And, uh, you know, it only works like 20% of the time. But don't worry." ""We can try as many times as you'll give me $30,000." "That's how they living out here. Have a little empathy." Tall guys He hates 'em. Shooters "We got a gun violence problem, right? But what's the real problem? "It's not guns, but it's who could get a gun. "And we gotta stop these little-dick niggas from getting guns. "'Cause I got a theory. I think a man shooting, I think that's little-dick activity. It's something about shooting up an area that screams "little-dick activity" to me. You know? "'Cause... And don't misinterpret... I'm not... I'm not suggesting that dudes with big dicks don't kill people. But we...we usually kill specific people. You know? 'Cause I can empathize with a man being fed up. Being at his limit, you know? We all get frustrated at work, whatever, life, whatever, society...That's why we go home, drink a little beer, smoke a little weed, so we can calm down and don't kill no-fuckin'-body. Right? "If I ever got to the point where I'm like, "Imma kill a motherfucker tomorrow," I'm walking into work, and I'm shooting Cheryl. 'Cause she the one been fucking with me for three and a half years. I'm not gonna shoot up Accounts Receivable and hope Cheryl get the message, right? What kind of man does a passive-aggressive murder? A little-dick man, if you ask me." COVID "Everybody's gathered here. Having a good time. People from all walks of life. Right? And...We didn't cure COVID. We just... We just stopped caring. "[...] "the only difference between conservatives and liberals, when it came to COVID, was how long you gave a fuck. "[...] "Motherfuckers was losing friends, stopped talking to family... "I'm not gonna sit at Thanksgiving table and..." Right? "I ain't lose nobody. I knew my uncle was a dumb bitch way before the pandemic. You know? I still love him, you know what I'm saying? "Like, "Fuck Dr. Fauci. He don't make peach cobbler, nigga."" "COVID is the last thing that happened to everybody in the world since World War II. "And what happened after World War II? Baby boom. "'Cause when people think the world about to end, we like, "We got to get it in!" When you think you might die, you wanna fuck. Scientifically proven, around the world, everybody hornier than a motherfucker. Hornier than ever. And I personally think America is hornier than the rest of the world. Right? Because we got caught off guard the most. Which made it scarier, which made us hornier. "And why did we get caught off guard? Well, because we the best. "And we been the best for so long, a lot of us was born in the best country. "And we spoiled about a lot of shit. And... And one of the things that we spoiled about the most is new diseases. We don't have to worry about those, we just hear about 'em. "Right, remember SARS? Remember bird flu? Remember swine flu? Ebola? "Yeah, that was all shit we read about, it didn't stop our lives. "We were like, "Oh, oh, shit. Okay, damn. That's horrible." ""For them. Okay, can I please get a number two with a..."" "What made it even scarier, which made us even hornier, is that dumb motherfuckers always talk first. Way before scientists. That's just how the world works. "Science take time, stupid is instant. "Don't forget, we were scared to death. All we knew was it was here. It had killed people and it was spreading, and it was in the air. "And we waiting for fuckin' answers, and scientists are collecting samples, and waiting for centrifuges to stop spinning. "And the dumbest nigga you know was on Twitter going, "It's coming from the 5G antennas, everybody. We knew these next-generation speeds would come at a price. They broadcasting it to us all, and it's all the worst things mixed together. It's AIDS mixed with Ebola, mixed with child support! Run for your lives! Hide wherever you can!"" The stages of WAP "I'll let you get a fair fight with my mama. She talk a lot of shit. Sh... She got a mouth on her, you know? But she got hands to match. Right? She legendary in the hood. She like 49 and 12, something crazy, you know?" He defines WAP level 4 as Wallis Simpson. [2] The Gay Spectrum (5% gay) "No, seriously, guys, listen, there's no lessons in my jokes. Know what I mean, if you learned something, or shifted your perspective, or you feel enlightened by something, that was purely a coincidence by...You know what I'm saying? That's just a side effect." "I discovered this guy, Dr. Kinsey. 'Kay? He's an American scientist. He's the first person to actually study sexuality in depth. He did it for 40-some odd years. He did so many surveys and experiments, and he founded the Institute of Sexuality. And he invented the Kinsey Scale. Which is a measure of how gay you are. "And so, Dr. Kinsey says, "'Are you gay, ' is a silly question. The real question is 'How gay are you?' "And... And I've lost a lot of you, especially the older people, 'cause y'all grew up like me, in the '70s and '80s. "Okay, it was a simpler time. You was either gay or straight. Or ugly. "But now we know better than that, it's not binary. It's a spectrum, my niggas. Okay? And you somewhere on there. "It goes all the way from Dwayne 'The Rock' Johnson to Lil Nas X's backup dancer. "And you... And you somewhere on there. And... Look, in other words, it's... "We used to think it was a light switch. Now we know it's a dimmer switch. "See, this... this is the part of the night where I realize, oh, the crowd is full of a bunch of bitch-ass niggas. That's what you are. "You... I been... For 55 minutes, I been shittin' on women's mustaches and ovaries,and I gave you a list of reasons I will punch 'em in the face, and all y'all was... [mimics chuckling] "Yeah, get her!" "And now, I'm just making a general observation that mildly threatens your sexuality, and you motherfuckers can't handle it. "[...] "Ladies, this is the one area where y'all really actually do have a... an advantage, you know? 'Cause, like, sure, you know, your eggs are running out, right? But... But your sexuality is infinite and untouchable. "Y'all can go to college and eat 45 pussies. And right after graduation, be like, "You know what? It's not for me." And go get you a husband. Tell him all the stories, show him the pictures. "These dudes can't even laugh at this joke too hard, because... because masculinity is a prison. Okay? Manness is a club, okay, it's a box. You gotta stay in the fuckin' box. You can lose being a man, you understand? It's like being stripped of the title, no rematch. One gay shit, you're out the club." "We're trapped, we're trapped. We got all these dumb rules that make us behave weirdly to y'all. Every time you see a man doing something you don't understand... "Y'all got all these names for it. "Oh, it's misogyny, it's homophobia, it's all this." "It's just the same phenomenon, you just naming it different shit. "It's nigga's tryin' to stay in the box. "Okay, because one step out, it's cold out here. Out here, they treat you like a woman, oh no! So, we do everything we can to stay right here with it. "We got dumb... Like, you know one of the rules for men... This is crazy to me. We allowed to hug our friends but we not allowed to exhale. No, you gotta hold your breath during that hug." Barbershops ""I'd risk it all again to look this good."" Fatal Attraction (1987) -- "8/10" Dan Gallagher (Michael Douglas) is wearing headphones while he works in the living room. His kid is watching Nickelodeon. This looks like it could be happening today. The headphones don't even look that outdated. His wife Beth (Anne Archer) is getting ready to go to an event with him. At the event, where Dan and his friend Jimmy (Stuart Pankin) casually make fun of Japanese people, he meets Alex Forrest (Glenn Close), who, I gotta say, has one of the scariest hairstyles I've ever seen from the eighties. The eight-head look was absolutely not common. it was much more of a bangs-and-perm thing that most people had going. She's in a book-pitch meeting with him, where he works. They leave in the rain together and end up getting lunch, with drinks. She lights up a cigarette after dinner. It's the 80s. Close does a good job; she seems slightly off-kilter, aggressive, a slightly too-wide grin. They're in his kitchen, having extremely enthusiastic and acrobatic sex. Like, he's carrying her like a bag of groceries while he's scraping his pants off with his feet but also negotiating the eight-inch step from the kitchen to the dining room without being able to see it, which is probably the riskiest part of the whole endeavor. I know I shouldn't be focusing on it, but what kind of an idiot architect puts a step like that in that place? I get that they wouldn't anticipate two people stand-up fucking while negotiating their way from one room to another, but did they not anticipate someone carrying something hot or precarious or both to the dining room? Anyway, now she's blowing him in an elevator after they went out for more drinks and dancing. The elevator goes up to her apartment (or one of her apartments or whatever). They are insatiable. Real "cocaine" energy. He scuttles out the next morning, before she's up. Talks to his wife, who's in the country with her parents. Alex calls. Wants him to come back over. He says he has work, has to walk the dog. "Bring the dog, I love animals... I'm a great cook." This seems innocuous until you know what happens later. He's at her place. She's cooking dinner for him. She's trying to get things going, to turn it in to a relationship. He says no, they can't They're back in bed. She starts getting frantic, ripping his shirt so that he can't leave. He's leaving and she asks him to come say goodbye nicely. Her hands are behind her back. She kisses him desperately, hungrily. He feels her hands. They're wet. With blood. She's slit her wrists. She's gotten him to stay. Ok, so he did no work all weekend. He has to muss up his own bed, take a shower, feed the dog the food that he would have eaten had he eaten at home, and then his family comes home. His son wants a rabbit. They go look at a house in the country. It's a beautiful house. [image]Back in the city. Alex is at his office. She has a leather jacket with the widest damn should pads I've seen in a long time. She wants to take him to Madame Butterfly, the opera they'd listened to in her apartment, while she'd cooked, and that he'd told her was a formative experience for him. He turns her down as gently as he can. It was a fling. She knew he was married. She came on like a freight train. Dan's boss Arthur is played by Fred Gwynne, who I will always see as Fred Munster. Alex's call interrupts them. She keeps calling the office. He tells her that they can't talk anymore. It's so wild that Dan got himself into this because Anne Archer is a smoke show. But this is the kind of character that Michael Douglas played in the 80s. It was the beginning of addressing the impunity with which men cheated. It was teaching us that cheating was about power, not sex, blablaba. That affair certainly did not start with "power". Dan wasn't trying to "own" his wife to show that he could. He had a rock-hard boner for Alex and it sucked all the blood from his brain. He didn't tell his wife because we are a monogamous society and he didn't want Beth, the woman he actually loved, to think less of him for having given in to such a base impulse, to say nothing of the venereal diseases he likely schlepped home with him. "I'm pregnant." Dan breaks into her apartment to find out more about what's going on with her, to find out whether she's really pregnant. Instead, he finds a folder with some papers. Some are wild, erratic sketches. One paper is an obituary for a 42-year-old man, presumably a former husband. Alex is in his apartment, talking to his wife about possibly buying their apartment when they move to the country. He goes to her place (again, though she doesn't know this) to tell her enough's enough. She's doing her best to goad him to violence. He gets a bit violent but nothing she wasn't expecting or hoping for. He's gotten a rabbit for his son. He's carrying it in a cage through a parking garage. It doesn't seem perturbed at all, which is absolutely not what would be happening. When the car alarm goes off, it doesn't flinch. When he discovers his car covered in acid, he drops the cage. Again, the rabbit is indifferent. This is not the attitude that rabbits have when they are out of their element. I suppose, back in the 80s, that they couldn't CGI in a panicked rabbit, and, even then, they weren't allowed to harm animals in the making of a movie, so the rabbit felt fine the whole time. The rabbit is a shitty actor. They're in the car. He's listening to a cassette tape that she sent him. It's a creepy, threatening message. "'Cause part of you is growing inside of me, and that's a fact, Dan, and... you'd better start... learning how to deal with it. 'Cause you know, I... I feel you. I taste you. I think you. I touch you. Can you understand? Can you? I'm just... asking you... to acknowledge your responsibilities. Is that so bad? I don't think so. I-I don't think it's unreasonable. And, you know, another thing is that you thought that you could just walk into my life, and turn it upside down, without a thought for anyone but yourself. You know what you are, Dan? You're a cock-sucking son of a bitch. I hate you. I bet you don't even like girls, do you? Ha! You disappoint me, you fucking faggot!" Dan tries to get the police involved, for a "client of his". They say there's not much they can do. Beth gets home to find the double-boiler on the stove. She didn't put it there. Her son runs to the backyard to see his rabbit. That rabbit's hutch is way the fuck out on the edge of the yard, like, where the wolves or foxes or coyotes would have gotten to it sooner rather than later. What were they even thinking? And the hutch was so small. Like, give it a two-level home, for God's sake, especially if it's going to live alone. It needs some space to move around. Christ, Alex was doing it a favor by popping it in the double-boiler on the stove, where Beth finds it. That's the final straw. Dan's gotta come clean with Beth. She's fine with it at first...until he says that Alex is pregnant. The boy sees them fighting because he came downstairs because he couldn't sleep because he was crying over his dead rabbit. Poor kid. It sucks to lose a rabbit. He moves into a hotel. He and Beth show a common front, though; when he calls Alex, he lets Beth issue a death threat that she'll make good on if Alex ever comes near their family again. I like that about Beth but what I don't like about Beth is that she's the kind of person who, when driving, swings out right to turn left. You can even see a pedestrian have to jump out of the way because she's such an erratic driver. Again, I'm getting distracted by minutiae because she was turning in to the school parking lot to pick up Ellen -- and HOLY SHIT I JUST REALIZED THAT THE SON IS A DAUGHTER [3] -- who'd already been picked up by Alex. Now, this is a major plot point of course, but I'm going to go ahead and get distracted by the fact that I thought the kid's name was "Allen" this whole time and she looks just like a boy, in 1987. And I don't remember anybody flipping their wig about the trans agenda at the time. Hell, I remember my mom chopping off my twin sister's long hair at about the same age to make her look kinda like a boy for a couple of years, until it grew back. We really looked like twins then. Wait. Where were we? Oh, yes, A child-kidnapping that has a completely different flavor because the kidnapper is female. We figure she might hurt the child, but not diddle it. They're on a rollercoaster, which is hilarious because there is literally no way that the girl would have met the height requirement. Also, I'm still not seeing her as a girl. Completely and unremarkably androgynous.. Beth rear-ends a car because she's so distracted by grief. Dan visits his wife in the hospital, with his father-in-law glaring at him the whole time. Opiates make you sign like a bird. I guess Beth told him everything. Dan's at Alex's apartment. She answer the door and he blows the chain lock off the doorframe and pursues her through the apartment, finally tackling her and nearly choking her out on the kitchen floor, before he comes to his senses. She rallies and almost gets the drop on him with a kitchen knife. Dan goes to the police again, begging them to pick her up for harassment. They agree. Beth's back home, with two black eyes. She's drawing a bath. This all feels very ominous.. Dan makes tea in a kettle. He locks the back door. Beth wipes the fog from the mirror to find she's not alone. It's Alex. "What are you doing here? Why are you here? [said to Beth] "He tried to say goodbye to me last night. But he couldn't, because he and I feel the same way about each other. Do you know how it is when you meet somebody for the first time and you get this instant attraction? "And don't you think I understand what you're doing? You're trying to move him into the country. And you're keeping him away from me. And you're playing happy family. "But you wouldn't understand that because you're so selfish. And he told me about you. He told me about you. He was very honest. If you weren't so stupid, you'd know that. But you're so stupid. You're just so stupid, you're a stupid, selfish bitch! You're a stupid, selfish bitch!" Alex tries to kill Beth but Dan shows up in time to thwart her. She slashes him up with her butcher knife but gets the drop on her, drowning her in the bathtub. Or not. She rises like a mummy from the water, knife swinging. BANG! It's Beth with the family handgun, taking that Terminator-like bitch down for good. The end. It was a decent film but, if I'm honest, I might have spent a bit too much time focused on how the rabbit part of the story was unrealistic. Luckily I was distracted from that by the gender-fluidity of the child. The 6th Day (2000) -- "6/10" Johnny Phoenix is quarterbacking an XFL game [4] when a blitz drops him on his neck. Instead of the care he needs, though, he's ... terminated. Oddly, he's back on the field the next weekend to helm another game. Adam Gibson (Arnold Schwarzenegger) wakes up on to almost getting birthday sex from his wife Natalie (Wendy Crewson) but his daughter Clara (Taylor Reid) barges in. On the TV at home is a commercial for RePet, a service that will revive your family pets, good as new. Clara wants a SimPal as a present for Adam's birthday. His fridge has a screen that tells him he needs milk and offers to order some for him. He smashes that one-click-pay button. He gets into his friend Hank Morgan's (Michael Rappaport) giant truck, which has a center console that's just a single screen with an interactive nav/GPS. The truck drives itself (with OnStar [5]), so Hank's telling Adam about his virtual girlfriend, to which Adam says, "here you are, a grown man, and your primary relationship is with a piece of software?" At work, Adam is apparently a pilot for Double X Charter, a heli-boarding service for rich kids. Phew, quite a few things were pretty spot-on. Way to go, movie from 25 years ago. Because an extremely rich guy wants to engage their services, they have to take a drug test. It's definitely not a drug test, though; that test just stole all of their biometric and genetic data. "All clear." Sure. Anyway, Michael Drucker (Tony Goldwyn) shows up for his day of snowboarding. Hank takes the shift instead of Adam, so that Adam has time to go pick up a new Oliver from RePet. He doesn't clone Oliver but he does pick up a super-creepy SimPal that will not shut up the entire cab ride home. Wait, does he not have a car? That's so odd. Anyway, he's already at his birthday party. A clone of him is. Vincent (Terry Crews) and Talia (Sarah Wynter) show up to tell him that there's been a sixth-day violation and that he needs to go with them. He does not go with them. There's a big car chase and Adam seems to get away, or maybe he died. He didn't die. Who are we kidding? At Dr. Griffin Weir's (Robert Duvall) lab/headquarters, he's telling an angry crowd that his company doesn't do cloning research. The rich dude Drucker is there, speechifying in the same tired, illogical, and shallowly philosophical way that the billionaires of today talk, all proud of himself with how smart he thinks he is. He's yelling about how scared politicians are handcuffing him from benefitting humanity even more with the largesse of his intellect. But he's a moron. He said that a brain can't be cloned, but that a whole body can. That makes no sense. They're always morons. Speaker Day (Ken Pogue) has a sick son, so of course he's going to get a clone for him. Drucker continues with his limited understanding of what "clone" means by promising that the clone would be cured of the genetic disease that is killing the original. Oh, really? Then it's not a clone. Anyway, corrupt politicians breaking the law to their own benefit feels like we're on very familiar ground. Weir's main henchman Marshall (Michael Rooker) is resurrecting the two agents that Adam had killed, which is an opportunity to show off some cool practical effects as the bodies grow back. Adam's in an interrogation room at the police station. A news report plays on the television in there, saying something about "Microsoft trying to buy a state of the union." This is not relevant to the plot but is interesting that, 25 years later, that same report wouldn't be at all out of place. Hank's sycophantic AI girlfriend (Jennifer Gareis) is a shallow toy invented by a 12-year-old. This is literally what we're looking at 25 years later. We are, as a species, utterly predictable. Hank's dead, shot by an activist. It doesn't really matter why, though. Adam's becoming more and more of a bad-ass, just dropping henchpeople right and left. Weir's wife Katherine (Wanda Cannon) is a clone, to absolutely no-one's surprise. She's dying of the same disease that the other clones died of because they're clones. But he keeps resurrecting her and hoping for a different outcome. She begs him to let her go. Adam breaks in to Replacement Technologies without a disguise, using a thumb he'd ripped off of clone of Talia, wearing a jacket with his company's logo on it, and carrying a giant lunchpail like the one he had in Total Recall or Running Man. Man, he likes to carry giant lunchboxes. Schwarzennegger was 53 years old in 2000. Bizarrely, when Adam confronts Weir, he is incredibly cooperative, revealing the entire history of cloning and how Drucker had been killed and cloned three years ago already. He's been infecting the clones with diseases as a failsafe in case they go back on their word, or to ask for more money, or whatever. Weir confronts him on it, and tries to quit. Drucker shoots him and resurrects both him and his wife, with no memory of having ever tried to quit, or of ever having learned about the failsafes. A bunch more stuff happens but absolutely nothing surprising. Drucker and his next clone both die. Adam and his clone both survive. The clone moves to Argentina. The movie was set in 2015. Some of the things it predicted were dead-on, just 10 years early. We never did end up banning tobacco to the degree that the film predicted. We also don't have clones. Right? Right?!?!?! It started off more promising than it ended up being. I found it a bit too long. October Sky (1999) -- "8/10" The movie starts with the announcement of Soviet success with Sputnik. This was a grand achievement for humanity. Of course, it is broadcast in the U.S. like a tragedy. But the U.S. has always been about being a bunch of pearl-clutching fucking babies. Always grabbing all of the toys and crying if they miss even one. No wonder the U.S. is best friends with Israel: neither country can ever stop whining about its own incredible mistreatment no matter how much they are winning. That's how winners win more, right? The scene is a coal-mining town. It is dark, hues of dark blue and blue. Smoke and fog and cold breath everywhere. The trees are bare. Color has been leached from the world. The tragedy of the U.S. having just lost the Cold War to the Commies is etched into every face. It is the owners of these wretched faces who will be exhorted to enthusiastically back their own further immiseration to focus the cold-war effort, to fund increased arms with the few pennies they have left over at the end of the month. The maw must be fed. The very next announcement on the radio is to announce that [THE NOTORIOUS NAZI HERR] Dr. Werner von Braun would be assisting the U.S in following the Soviets into space. Well, thank the LORD above for that. If it weren't for ex-Nazis, then where would be, as a nation, even be? Losing ground to those Godless communists, that's what! Homer Hickam (Jake Gyllenhaal) is 17 years old and he wants to build a rocket. His dad John (Chris Cooper) works at the local mine. He's in charge of what goes on underground but the company's the one that decides that the mine is closing. He decidedly does not believe in anything other than the mine and, therefore, does not believe in his misbegotten, good-for-nothing son. Miss Riley (Laura Dern), though, she believes in him. Homer doesn't know shit. Not yet. So he throws in with the local nerd Quentin (Chris Owen). They actually get a rocket up in the air but it flies sideways and nearly takes someone out at the mine. The two of them are playing in the woods with two other friends, Roy Lee (William Lee Scott), and O'Dell (Chad Lindberg). Homer is brainstorming how to get into the science fair. All of the colors are still very muted. On the road, a car from out of town stops. It is bright, cherry red. The lady in the passenger seat is colorful, with bold makeup. The man driving is colorfully dressed too. They appear, ask a question, receive an answer, and disappear. They were there to show what the world outside the village of Coalwood looks like, metaphorically speaking. The boys try again and again, refining their materials, testing different propellants. At first, Ike Bykovsky (Elya Baskin, who's actually a real-life Russian, having come from the Soviet Union) helps them with welding, until he's sent to the mine (not incidentally, by Homer's father). After that, Leon (Randy Stripling) helps them, even coming to their rocketry field to watch his handiwork go up. Finally, with the whole village watching, they get a rocket to launch pretty far up into the air. It was a controlled launch and it didn't explode. It's time for the science fair. As in "North Country" <#NorthCountry>, many of the men in this movie are real shitheels. When you see Chris Cooper in a movie, you know he's going to be a shitheel, just as night follows day. But you also know, if he's not playing a CIA officer, that he just might turn things around by the end of the movie. Let's keep our fingers crossed. The police show up one day, looking to pin a forest fire on one of their errant rockets. Their rocketry days are over. The boys head to a party to, as Homer put it, "have fun, for once". Poor Quentin has a lorn look, wondering whether that isn't what they'd all been having for months now. At any rate, O'Dell shows Quentin how to parlay his newly minted bad-boy status -- they'd been arrested after all -- into pull with the ladies. A mining accident kills Ike and nearly kills Homer's father, who might lose an eye. With his Dad out of commission and there of course being nothing remotely communist like workmen's compensation, the family needs money, so Homer takes a job in the mine. He's working there for a while. His dad joins him when he's better. He's still got both eyes. But rocketry calls to Homer, with Miss Riley's subversive encouragement. He figures out that the rocket on which the cops had blamed the forest fire couldn't have caused it. He needs Quentin to check his work. Quentin is blown away that Homer's learned all of this. In the end, he demonstrates a relatively simple acceleration equation on the chalkboard but OK, Homer's a genius, I guess. We don't want to overwhelm the viewing public with an actually difficult equation. Homer quits the mine because he's so sure that they'll be able to take up rocketry again once he proves that they couldn't have caused the forest fire. He tussles with the principal again but manages to convince him that it really wasn't their rocket. When they examine the rocket that the police had found, they discover that it wasn't one of theirs at all, that it was an aeronautical flare from a local airport. The principal's on his side now, which is kind of trite. Still, couldn't they have done that in the first place? Like, they just accepted that the rocket they'd been shown was theirs and no-one noticed it wasn't? His dad is now also on his side but Daddio also wants him to keep working at the coal mine in the interim, because once you start something, you finish it. No can do. Homer quits. The miners go on strike. Homer's in Indianapolis for the National Science Fair, where he overhears from some people that they think his rocket is going to win. He discovers that someone has stolen his rocket and his picture of Werner von Braun. John ends the strike, so that the miners can help build a new rocket for Homer and ship it out by the next morning. Like, wait, what? This is kind of nuts now. Like, Homer's mom threatens to leave John if he doesn't do this. Says she's going to go "live in a tree" rather than stay with him, which is low-key hilarious. Guess who wins the National Science Fair? Just like that. The scholarship offers start flowing in. Werner von Braun is there to shake his hand. I am not kidding. it is that straightforward. Homer tells his father, "I may not be the best, but I come to believe that I got it in me to be somebody in this world. And it's not because I'm so different from you either, it's because I'm the same. I mean, I can be just as hard-headed, and just as tough. I only hope I can be as good a man as you. Sure, Wernher von Braun is a great scientist, but he isn't my hero." Jö. [6] At the final launch, his father is finally there. He even gets to push the button and put his arm around Homer's shoulders. The rocket can be seen from Miss Riley's hospital bed (she had Hodgkin's Disease) and from the mines. It's a nice period piece with very little tension but a few decent moments. Gyllenhaal was 19 years old for this movie. Oh! Holy shit! I hadn't realized that this was a "true story!" Homer went on to train astronauts for NASA. All the boys graduated from college. Huh. Shane Gillis: Beautiful Dogs (2023) -- "7/10" Shane starts off his stand-up set talking about travel, then Australia. He segues to 9/11 jokes, talking about how the Australian accent is funny, no matter what. Even on 9/11, it would have been funny. Even in the buildings. Next up, his girlfriend's ex is a Navy Seal. He says that Navy Seals are kind of chickenshit because they sneak up on you. "You know who’s actually brave? Al-Qaeda. "That takes courage and bravery. With their pajamas, throwing rocks at tanks. Heroic shit, dude, just you and your boys going out. [laughing] In flip-flops. You’re all gonna get fucked up, dude. "No training. Zero military training, dude. Those guys… Those dudes had fuckin’… They had one set of monkey bars. That’s what they all trained on. "And they were proud of the monkey bars. You remember that video? You’ve seen them using the monkey bars. They were pr… They… They filmed themselves using the monkey bars, and then sent that tape out to the world, like… “Not bad.” "[...] "I felt like I could relate more to the monkey bars guys. They were a little more my speed. Ever wonder how you would do out there? Watch those guys. Those are just normal fuckin’ dudes. The second shots are fired, there’s no game plan, they’re just, “Oh, shit!” "Very relatable. Guns jamming. Trying to fire a rocket. It goes straight fucking backwards. "They look like me trying to fire a gun, their feet move when they shoot. "[...] "They would blow up like one truck every five months. They’d be just as surprised as everybody that shit finally worked out. You can hear it in their voices. Something blows up, they’d be like, “Oh!” "Yeah, dude, that’s a human reaction. That’s relatable. "That’s what I would do if I saw a fucking explosion. I’d go, “Oh!” "That’s human. You ever watch us kill people? I can’t relate to that at all. "There’s some Black Hawk helicopter pilot with night vision who mows down, like, 40 people. Pilot gets on, he just goes… "[mimics radio chatter] “Clear.” "[audience laughs] "Just flies away? It’s like, “Yo, that’s a psycho. That guy didn’t give a fuck about that.” "At least ISIS is down there having fun, dancing afterwards." So, he goes pro-ISIS for a while, which is a great take for someone who looks and talks like he does, and for someone who has such a predominately white, southern, and male audience. He knows that most of them are definitely pro-military, gung-ho, hoo-rah no matter what, but he makes them laugh at these jokes anyway. He shows them the truth of it. There's the nearly obligatory section on having sex and pornography, which was the weakest part. The next part, though, starts with him saying that he's an "early-onset Republican", "I’m a bit of a history buff. "Which, by the way, that is early onset Republican. "That’s very… It’s a very serious warning sign. "If you’re a white dude in your 20s and 30s and you’re like, “I can’t stop reading about World War II,” it’s coming, brother. "You might not be Republican right now. You might be young, cool and liberal. "Might think you’re safe. Dude, you’re not. "It doesn’t happen overnight, it takes time. "It takes… You think your dad wanted to be Republican? "That he got out of high school and like, “Time to be a prick about everything.” "No, dude, it takes time. "I’m not a Republican right now, but I can feel it. It grows. "“Ugh.” I’ve gotta fight it. Every day. Like a fucking werewolf. "I’ll just be watching TV, out of nowhere… "“Ah, why are Black guys in every commercial?”" This segues into a long segment where he talks about having visited George Washington's plantation during COVID, where all of the people on the empty plantation stay in character, despite the fact that he's pretty much the only guest. He papers over a lot of judgment and awkward moments by pretending to have Down's Syndrome, which isn't such a stretch of the imagination as he illustrates with a few facial gestures. During the tour of the slave dungeon, he points out how uncomfortable it was having a young black man giving this part of the tour because he would not break character and Shane's "got the body type of a guy who says, “Let’s see the rest of the bodycam footage before we jump to any conclusions.”" He claims that he can play the Down's Syndrome card because he actually has a few people in his family with Down's Syndrome. He tells us about his uncle Danny, "I do have family members with Down syndrome. "It almost got me, I’m… "I dodged it, but it nicked me, it nicked me. "Bit of a daywalker myself. "When you bring up Down syndrome, you can always tell who’s never been around it in their lives. "If I tell people, like, “I have family members with Down syndrome,” people that’ve never been around it are always like, “Oh.” "Like Down syndrome is the fucking end of the world. Like, “Oh.” "“Are they okay?” "“Your family? Are they doing okay?” "It’s like, yeah. They’re doing better than everybody I know. "They’re the only dudes I know having a good time pretty consistently. "Sorry they’re not on fucking Adderall and anti-anxiety like the rest of us. "They’re on fucking Capri-Suns… "…having a good time. "My uncle Danny sneaks grilled cheese sandwiches in restaurants, just in case they don’t serve grilled cheese sandwiches." He finishes up with some stellar Trump impressions and utterly believable scenarios. "I miss the speeches with Trump. "You remember that? We used to get five speeches a day when he was in office. "Anytime you turned on the TV, the guy was giving another fucking speech. "Live, dude. "Be in front of a helicopter, screaming, ... calling a lady a lesbian or something." At least Shane isn't missing those speeches anymore, I guess. He was dead-on with that joke. Quiet, piggy. Finally, he recounts his favorite Trump speech of all time. "It was the night the United States killed the leader of ISIS. "Trump comes out of the Situation Room, at like, midnight, in the White House. "He walks down that fucking tunnel and gives a press conference, like he’s giving a post-game NBA… "…just killed a guy press conference. "He walks up in front of the entire world at midnight and just goes… "[imitates Trump] “Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi is dead.” "“He died like a dog.” "I didn’t change one word of that, that’s what he opened with. "And then he did 40 minutes. The speech is 40 minutes. "For no reason, it wasn’t a prepared speech. "He free-styled 40 straight minutes. "Not even a speech. Just mean shit-talk for 40 minutes. "The meanest shit talk you’ve ever heard in front of the whole world. "[sucks teeth, imitates Trump] “Abu…” "“We could hear him crying. I said, ‘Abu, don’t cry. Abu.'” "“Let me tell you something. Abu cried, he cried quite a bit.” "“I wouldn’t have cried.” "“‘Cry-baby Baghdaddy, ‘ that’s what we were all calling him.”" Citations were taken from "Shane Gillis: Beautiful Dogs (2023) | Transcript" . Flyboys (2006) -- "8/10" Blaine Rawlings (James Franco) volunteers for the French military before the U.S. entered WWI, He goes to France to learn how to fly, with a squad of like-minded Americans that includes his roommate Eugene Skinner (Abdul Salis), who is black and with whom some of the French and some of the Americans have a problem. But not all: Capt. Thenault (Jean Reno) couldn't care less. He's just training them to fly. The training camp montage is pretty cool, with little model airplanes, balance-under-duress training, a cockpit on rails to simulate gunning, etc. The Americans must learn French, of course, although I think the original film probably had them speaking a lot more English. It's hard to tell in the French-dubbed version. On a training flight where Blaine is sent up as an instructor for one of his compatriots who can't shoot straight, it turns out that he also can't check whether he has enough fuel. They crash-land and Blaine awakes in what looks like a brothel, tended to by several gorgeous angels. He quickly heals and, as he leaves, sees Reed Cassidy (Martin Henderson), a pilot in the French squad, drive up with a bottle of Champagne for the ladies. The French deliver some new planes, especially made for their American squad. They spend some time painting their call signs on them. They have their first mission: Jametz. Before they leave, Reed asks to speak with him, to give him advice. The dude has a pet lion. Was that a thing that people had at the beginning of the last century? They're in the air, in the thick of it. The flak forces them up into the waiting arms of the German planes. They have no radios; each is alone. They have no parachutes; don't get hit. It's their first combat; they're getting shot up pretty good. One of them crash-lands but is too joyous, standing in an open field, celebrating his survival, only to be gunned down by his murderous assailant. Even the German's compatriots chastise him for the transgression. Only eleven planes return from this sortie. I don't think they even came close to hitting their target. Blaine tells Capt. Thenault that he saw a Black Fokker. Reed overhears and goes out to find it. He returns empty-handed. Blaine seeks out Lucienne (Jennifer Decker) at the brothel, but it turns out that she'd never worked there -- she'd just been there to take care of him. He visits her on her homestead and ingratiates himself with her orphaned nephews and nieces by goofing around on his horse. He's back in the air. The baron is back, taking out one of his friends. He fights him to a standstill and has the baron in his sights but his gun jams. The baron gets behind him...but lets him go, pulling up alongside to salute him instead. He wants to defeat him without taking advantage of an equipment malfunction. He's a young man, just like Blaine. Blaine salutes him back. Back on the ground, Jensen (Philip Winchester) succumbs to acute anxiety, Blaine flies to Lucienne's farm to ask her if she wants to fly with him. She says no. The adorable children urge her to try. It's worth it just to see her in those flight goggles. Adorable. She prepares a speech in English: "It's not good for me to fall in love with you, because I fear for you." (or something like that, because it had been translated to French and now I'm translating it back. 😂 ). The next battle begin with Germans firing on civilians. Those dastardly Huns! The Yanks take most of the them out but one of them is hit and crashes between trenches. Blaine lands and rushes in to help his comrade, whose hand is stuck under his plane. The French try to give them cover but it's trench warfare. Luckily, Hans has terrible aim with his mortars. Blaine chops off his friend's hand with a shovel and they make it to a trench. In another cliché moment, the young man who didn't want to room with a black man offers the same black man a cognac as thanks for having saved his ass. Lucienne's village and home are surrounded by Germans. Blaine steals his plane to pick up the kids, then returns again to pick up Lucienne. She is wounded but is expected to recover. She is sent to the local hospital to convalesce. Blaine receives a French medal of honor for having saved four French civilians, though he is half-admonished by his captain never to do something like this again. The next cliché is that the flyboys are to attack a German zeppelin intent on bombing Paris -- this feels very much like a video game at times, to be honest -- and they lose two pilots, one of them being Reed, who loses out to the Black Fokker. He gets his revenge as, with his last breath, he dive-bombs straight into the zeppelin. Lucienne has recovered enough to move with her niblings to England, where she hopes that Blaine will join them when his duty is done. The final mission, baby: the Americans have finally entered the fray. Jean Reno chews a bit of scenery telling his remaining crew how proud he is of the pilots -- and men -- that they've become, under his command. When they return from yet another mission -- this one with U.S.-American bombers -- Blaine turns around to head out alone, just like Reed used to do. He attacks the German aviation base -- like, why haven't they done this before? -- arousing the ire of the Black Fokker. They're in the air. It's a one-on-one dogfight. Blaine squints. He ... doesn't fire! Two other planes come up behind him, strafing. The Germans aren't fighting fair! That's OK! Help is on the way! I mean, you could so easily have predicted this, no? Everyone nods to each other. And then the Block Fokker is, predictably, back. And he's got Blaine on the ropes! His plane is all shot up! Blaine's got a big hole in his left shoulder. The Black Fokker pulls up next to him, all smug, even though he'd be dead if his buddies hadn't saved his ass. Blaine is pissed. Pulls up next to him and shoots him with his pistol. Um, ok? Was that always an option? Salutes all around. Back to base with their shot-up crates. The end. The notes mention that Skinner (the black guy) joined the Americans but they refused to let a damned n***er fly, so he went back to the states and because a pilot for the post office. God Bless America. Blaine never found Lucienne but he did end up having the biggest ranch in Texas. He never flew again, after the war. I watched it in French with no subtitles (they weren't available). It went surprisingly well! The movie is too long and there are a few too many, similar dogfights, some of which could have been truncated. Many scenes lingered longer than necessary. The soundtrack was doing a lot of work, but became noticeable as trying way too hard. Schtonk (1992) -- "8/10" This is a movie about the early 1980s, when con men fooled Germany's biggest publishers into spending millions of Deutschmarks on Hitler's diaries. It is a deeply sarcastic, cynical, and satirical film and I loved nearly every minute of it. We follow the "careers" of der schmierige Hermann Willié (Götz George) ("mit accent auf dem E") and Fritz Knobel (Uwe Ochsenknecht). Hermann cons Freya von Hepp (Christiane Hörbiger) (or does she con him?), while Fritz has a tumultuous relationship with Biggi (Dagmar Manzel). Those are the main players. Biggi poses for Fritz in paintings that he's making that are supposed to have been made by Adolf Hitler of his dear wife Eva Braun. Biggi is fed up and refuses to continue doing this. Fritz engages the talents of the voluptuous, young, nubile, and nearly impossibly frisky Martha (Veronica Ferres). Fritz meets the crooked Professor Strasser (Karl Schönböck) while selling a painting to a rich Nazi aficionado. The Professor has been engaged to verify the authenticity of the newly minted painting. He does so with gusto because he's also a con man, pretending that he was there when the painting was painted by Hitler, in a field, with Eva as God made her. Meanwhile Hermann is trying to sell Hermann Göring's ship, which is in a sorry state of disrepair but to which he has apparently obtained the title. Hermann is a sorry drunkard, constantly hitting up his friends for a few hundred marks. He is, ostensibly, a journalist, though he does nothing journalistic throughout the film. He works for the HH press, which is both the license-plate abbreviation for Hamburg but is also well known to mean Heil Hitler. Fritz comes up with the brilliant idea of writing Hitler's diary, managing to sell it for a nice bit of money. Hermann is at the auction. They meet and discuss plans for "finding" more of these books. Hermann's job as a journalist does give him connections to the large publishing houses of Hamburg. In particular, they easily con Dr. Wieland (Ulrich Mühe), who, for a long time, hides his purchases from the owners of the company Uwe Esser (Martin Benrath) and Kurt Glück (Hermann Lause). They initially purchase 3 of the volumes, then 30, then 60, the first few at 40K DM, then at ever-increasing prices, as Hitler-memorabilia -- and, quite frankly, Nazi fever -- grips the elite ranks of the publishing world. This is all quite hilarious and satirical and bitingly cynical and wonderfully presented. They're just all so ostentatious and completely un-self-aware -- and all such suckers. After writing so many volumes of the diary, Fritz begins to come apart at the seams, unsure of who he even is anymore. In one wonderful scene, he is ill, writing of his illness in Hitler's voice, sneezing, his hair slicked back -- recognizable as Hitler's style rather than his own customary afro -- and a smear of pen-ink staining his upper lip. He answers the door like this when Willié rings him up, causing even Willié to jump back. Martha stays by his side the whole time, for unknown reasons, though it appears that she really does love him. Biggi returns after Fritz proposes with a giant ring, and makes peace with Martha, who isn't going anywhere. It is these two who stop him before finishing his final three volumes before he (A) completely collapses from exhaustion and (B) is caught for forging. They close up his shop, destroying all of the evidence that he'd ever done anything and they get out of dodge in a little moving truck. Hermann is not so clever nor so protected by his dear Freya, who puts up with him despite his shockingly domineering ways. That is, she puts up with him until she doesn't, leaving him at the peak of his triumph. He doesn't really care. He pretends to, but he really only loves himself, that manic grin pasted to his face throughout. The magazine has spent DM 9M on the diaries and they are ready to reveal them to the world. The first few had been verified as authentic -- through Hermann's subterfuge, of course -- and they'd gone full steam ahead in purchasing many, many more. Now, they were ready. At the release of the Hitler Diaries to the rest of the world, Uwe says, "Von Heute an, müssen grossen Teile der deutschen Geschichte neu geschrieben werden." That is just wonderful. Chef's kiss. Willié doesn't deserve any of success, and yet he got it all, for such a long time. And then, the jig is up! Herman's subterfuge is uncovered and he's in deep shit. Or is he? He is a con-man par excellence. He pleads his case to Dr. Wieland: he concedes that the paper and ink are too new to have been available in Hitler's time. However, three notaries have verified that it is Hitler's handwriting (faked authentication, of course). Therefore, there can be only one conclusion: Hitler lived through the end of the war and is probably still alive! He hisses, through a manic rictus, his eyes swimming behind his dirty glasses, "Er lebt!" Brilliant. Take a bow, Willié. The publishers aren't buying it, but he does manage to walk out of there. He vows to go find Hitler. We next see him, navigating his boat while learning Spanish. "Estoy buscando a un viejo con bigote negro. [I am searching for an old man with a black mustache.]" (because he is, presumably heading to Argentina or Brazil). He is accompanied by police boats, as he repeats this all in English. Fritz, Biggi, and Martha escape in a Wohnwagen into Switzerland. It's hilarious how they seem to be entering from somewhere mountainous, perhaps Austria, rather than Germany, where the border is nearly completely flat -- it certainly doesn't have any towering mountains, as depicted. But they have gotten away with their ill-gotten gains, the three of them. The film was wonderfully shot and was so much better than I'd expected. What a gem. I can't believe that not one of my friends had ever recommended it. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] These are notes for me to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. The amount of text is not proportional to my enjoyment. I might write less because I didn't get around to it when it was fresh in my mind. I rate the film based on how well it suited me personally for the genre, my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. Links are to "my IMDb ratings" [1] If you know, you know. "Wallis Simpson" was so amazing that she caused Prince Edward to abdicate his throne so that he could be with her. Look at her picture in her Wikipedia entry. She's lovely. [7] [image] [1] I can confirm that I am not alone in this. As luck would have it, my sister had also just watched Fatal Attraction and she, too, only noticed that the son was a daughter quite late in the film. [1] Vince McMahon must have strong-armed someone to include this in a Schwarzenegger film for marketing. [1] Presumably another very obvious product placement. [1] That means aw in German, usually expressed very sarcastically, which is how I meant it here. [1] I was going to write that she's "quite lovely" but I just learned today -- from "Words that Mean the Opposite in America" by Evan Edinger -- that, whereas "quite" is a magnifier in American English, it reduces the strength of the following word in British English. So, I elected not to describe a woman who's a U.S.-American but who married British as "quite lovely", because it might mean "very lovely" or "somewhat less than lovely," depending on who reads it. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5925 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5925 Mon, 05 Jan 2026 14:27:54 +0100 -- "6/10" 2. "Happy Gilmore (1996)" <#Happy> -- "7/10" 3. "The Interview (2014)" <#Interview> -- "7/10" 4. "Last Man Standing (1996)" <#LastMan> -- "8/10" 5. "Havoc (2025)" <#Havoc> -- "5/10" 6. "Snatch (2000)" <#Snatch> -- "8/10" 7. "Adú (2020)" <#Adu> -- "9/10" 8. "Elysium (2013)" <#Elysium> -- "8/10" 9. "Violent Night (2022)" <#Violent> -- "7/10" 10. "North Country (2005)" <#NorthCountry> -- "9/10" Over the Top (1987) -- "6/10" Lincoln Hawk is a truck driver who makes extra money with arm-wrestling. He's quite well-known on the trucker circuit. He's divorced from his wife Christina (Susan Blakely), whose life is pretty much run by her father (Robert Loggia). The grandfather had been instrumental in putting their son Michael (David Mendenhall) into a military academy. Christina is suffering from severe heart disease and, nearing the end, she has had a ... change of heart ... and wants her son to get to know his father. Lincoln picks Michael up after graduation -- or whatever; school's done -- and they take a road trip together from Colorado to California, taking several days, even though it's like a one-day drive, from what I recall. Michael goes from insufferable, arrogant know-it-all who thinks his dad is a dumb trucker to more-or-less regular kid who thinks his dad is pretty cool. This is Stallone's bread and butter. By the time they get to California, though, Christina has died. Michael blames Lincoln of course and moves in with his grandfather, in his luxurious mansion. Also very much in line with Stallone characters, he breaks the law to do what's right, rampaging his way into the mansion to get his son back. It's jail time for you, boyo. Grandpa agrees not to press charges in exchange for Lincoln signing over custody. Lincoln decides to join a big arm-wrestling competition in Las Vegas to finally be able to buy his own truck, and maybe start his own business. He really just wants the truck, though. He doesn't even really care about being arm-wrestling champion. Not so with the other competitors, who are deeply invested in arm-wrestling. For them, it's a large part of their personas. Meanwhile, Michael discovers that grandpa's a dick who tore his family apart because he never thought that Lincoln was good enough for his daughter. Using the skills he'd just learned from his dad on their road trip -- what are the odds? -- Michael steals a truck and drives to Las Vegas. Grandpa tries to bribe Lincoln one last time, with $500K and a new truck [2] but Lincoln refuses, preferring to get his son back. Like, somehow, because hadn't he signed over custody? I might have missed the part where they quickly resolved this minor wrinkle. Guess who wins the arm-wrestling tournament? Guess who rides off into the sunset with his son in his brand-new truck? I watched it in German. Happy Gilmore (1996) -- "7/10" Happy Gilmore had always wanted to be a hockey player. He is, however, not a good hockey player. He can somehow, after a lifetime on skates, barely skate. He does have a helluva slapshot, though. He was raised by his grandmother. She doesn't like to pay taxes, so she's over a quarter-of-a-million dollars in arrears. She's gonna get thrown out of her house. Grandma goes to a nursing home, under the watchful eye of an unnamed sociopathic orderly (Ben Stiller) who runs a sweatshop for knitted goods. Happy discovers that his powerful slapshot also gives him an incredible advantage off the tee in golf, a sport that he barely considers a sport. Chubbs Peterson (Carl Weathers), a one-handed ex-pro, offers to train him, after having seen him making money at the driving range. Happy wins his first local open, netting a few thousand bucks. Otto (Allen Covert) caddies for him. Otto is a homeless man that he'd met in the parking lot. On the one hand, it's a nice gesture that Happy gives the man a job but it's also kind of sad that Happy doesn't seem to know anyone but his grandmother. He has no other friends or support system on which to fall back on when he needs help. Happy is the fish out of water that the golfing crowd loves but that the tour management loathes. They put Virginia (Julie Bowen) in charge of managing him, blaming her for every one of his missteps. She is gorgeous. I was trying to figure out who she was and she's Claire from Modern Family. There are a couple of dream sequences in which she wears very little. What a knockout. So, this goes on until a pro/am tournament where Happy is paired with Bob Barker and there is an epic-throw-down between the two, with Bob emerging victorious and Gilmore emerging with a concussion. Just kidding. Neither one of them is injured, but Bob does win and Gilmore is knocked out. Oh, I forgot that Shooter McGavin (Christopher McDonald) is incensed that Happy is stealing his thunder. This guy is a great heel, just honed to perfection. He even hires a heckler (Joe Flaherty) to ruin Happy's chances when he sees that Happy's short game is coming together and making him a real threat. The 90 days have passed and Happy still doesn't have enough money to buy back his house. Guess who does, though? Shooter. Shooter totally buys the house. Happy is about to pop a vein. He is having serious anger-management issues. There is a showdown on the golf course, with all the money on the line, and there is the predictable final-hole-tied-up situation where a confluence of ten different things in the movie -- like a final exam for having paid attention the whole time -- leads to the denouement of Shooter and the parallel elevation of Happy in every way that the movie has taught us matters. He gets the money, he gets the house back, grandma is safe, he gets the hot, hot ladyfriend, and his best friend Otto is also by his side. The Interview (2014) -- "7/10" I watched this in "2014" , when it first came out. The review and rating stand. It's a bit uneven. Some scenes and some of the dialogue are worth more, but it's scattered through more-mediocre stuff, so it's a wash. I noted a few lines that made me laugh right out loud. At 26:00, agreeing with Aaron on some point he's making, "Dave Skylark: This is 2014; women are smart now." At 30:00, referring to how Aaron though that Agent Lacey had worn non-prescription glasses to make herself look sexier to him, in an effort to honey-pot him, "Agent Lacey: You’re saying that my only use to this agency is to attract men, and that is offensive. "Dave Skylark: I think it’s offensive, too and that is exactly what I said to Aaron. I said, ‘that bitch is blind as a bat.’" At around 43:00, referring to what he honestly hopes isn't a tiger about to eat his friend, "Dave Skylark: It's like a big, orange, stripey dog." Soon after: "Dave Skylark: I didn't want it to come to this, but you're going to have to fight that tiger." Last Man Standing (1996) -- "8/10" John Smith (Bruce Willis) rolls his Model T (-looking car) into a dusty town called Jericho. He catches a look at the nearly shockingly striking Felina (Karina Lombard), for which Felina's boyfriend's henchmen rough up his car. He meets the sheriff (Bruce Dern), who ain't gonna do a damned thing about it. He goes to the bar and meets proprietor Joe Monday (William Sanderson), who tells him about the town, about how it's being fought over by two gangs. Willis's gravelly voice narrates this noir-ish movie, sometimes accompanied by pouring rain. That's the mood. One of the gangs is run by Doyle (David Patrick Kelly, from "The Warriors" ), whose main henchman is Hickey (Christopher Walken). The other gang is Italian, run by Fredo Strozzi (Ned Eisenberg), who works with Giorgio Carmonte (Michael Imperioli) Meanwhile Joe straps up and goes out to "see the fellas who roughed up my car." He kills one of them and is quickly hired by the Italian mob. He goes back to Bob to get a room and then goes three doors down to the brothel, where he meets Wanda (Leslie Mann). She's chattering away while he's pumping away...when two guys break in, guns a-blazing. John Smith rolls off in a flurry, his guns also a-blazing, naked as the day he was born. This feels a bit like an homage to "High Plains Drifter" . It rhymes more than a little bit. Joe plays everyone against each other. he talks to Strozzi's girlfriend Lucy Kolinski (Alexandra Powers), whom he tries to turn to get information. John Smith would become an avenging angel for the two women, Felina and Lucy. As the sheriff says, "You know what, amigo? I think I just spotted a chink in your armor. When you go down, it's gonna be over a skirt." It begins. Smith walks in to the safe house where they're keeping Felina and blows away eight guys from a standing start. He takes out the last one even though that guy had a gun to Felina's head. John gets Felina out of town. The Irish catch up to him, having copped to his having killed all of their men. They beat the living Christ out of him. "He's nothin' without a gun." His face is a shattered mess, one eye completely sealed shut. "After a while you stop hearing your bones break, your teeth rattle. You just concentrate on holding tight to that little part right at the center. The rest doesn't matter. They're gonna take the rest anyway." He gathers himself and gets the drop on two guys who come back to pick up his body. The Sheriff and Joe Monday both help him get out of town. Meanwhile, the Irish tear up the roadhouse, where the Italians were holed up. It's a fiery slaughter. Smith comes out of hiding when the Irish pick up Joe for helping him. Guns a-blazing, John tears a wide swath through the Irish headquarters. He kills everyone. He's wounded, of course, but when has that ever mattered in movies like this? Some time later, after he's healed, he gets back into his Ford and continues on his way, to Mexico. Havoc (2025) -- "5/10" They were going for some sort of The Raid or Oldboy aesthetic but it didn't quite work out. The action is reasonable if sometimes a bit unintelligible through being too frenetic. The endless rounds of ammunition just became too much not to notice. Some of these people have what look like little hand-held pistols that they fire, machine-gun-like, with what seems like hundreds of rounds without reloading. Some of the action is decent -- the splatter! -- but the crucial scenes just fall apart to cheesiness. There are good actors in this but the acting is too wooden at clutch moments. Oh my God. I wrote the paragraph above and then something even cheesier happened. Hey, neat. Everyone's dead. Nah, just kidding. There are a few left. I don't know how everyone isn't deaf yet, though. This is an action film. It stars Thomas Hardy. I find him charismatic and interesting, which is why it gets an extra star. The "Wikipedia" summary is long and detailed and largely a waste of time. The plot has nothing to convey. It's something about triads and gangs and murder. Look at this paragraph summing up the final moments of the movie, "Charlie guns down Jake in revenge for his father. Vincent is shot by Walker. They talk but he shoots Walker, prompting him to shoot Vincent dead. Ellie lets Charlie and Mia go. Walker, wounded, urges Ellie to arrest him. She refuses, and Walker looks upon the arriving police cars, his fate uncertain." Isn't it neat how it doesn't spoil or explain anything? That's not the fault of the Wikipedia article -- the movie itself is a mess. I'm sure the summary is accurate but how in God's name are you supposed to care about this? It even seems like they were hoping for a sequel, for God's sake. They're so interested in making money that they're trying to get sequel money without actually having made an initial film. Everyone's hustling, everyone's grifting. Even if you like Tom Hardy, you can skip this one. He's good in everything but not given much of a chance in this one. Snatch (2000) -- "8/10" I watched and reviewed this movie in "2015" . The review and rating stand. Adú (2020) -- "9/10" A city, near the border. Migrants climb a fence. One falls and dies. Officers try to revive him. They fail. We meet Mateo (Álvaro Cervantes, a police officer. Jungle. Hacking noises. Two children creep through the giant leaves. Men in a clearing. An axe rises and falls. A tusk falls off an elephant. Later, the rangers come upon it. They burn the body. The local rangers wanted to give the meat to the villagers. They are in Cameroon now. The top-down view of the river village is beautiful. What an eye. A little girl poles a giant boat along, short, flowered skirt billowing. The children are back at home. Their mother admonishes them. The boy says that the elephant's name was Kimba. They knew the elephant. The rangers have a dispute. The Spanish one Gonzalo (Luis Tosar) doesn't integrate well. He doesn't like the people, doesn't like the villagers. The people don't like him either. The little boy is Adù. Later, at night, two men attack their home. They beat his mother. Adù (Moustapha Oumarou) and his sister Ali (Zayiddiya Dissou) escape into the water. The next day, they emerge from the swamp. Hitchhiking. Gonzalo drives right by. They are, after all, not elephants. On a bridge, Adù collapses, dehydrated. His sister Ali carries him to water, brings him back around. The Gonzalo picks up his entitled daughter Sandra (Anna Castillo) from the airport. She reveals that he's wealthy, back home, in Spain. She is enjoying the colonial lifestyle. She smokes pot, chats with the locals, unaware of the racist divide. Adù and Ali get to their aunt's shanty, under a bridge, in a filthy slum. She gets them into new clothes and gets them on a boat to Spain, to their father. Changement des plans. They are now to take a plane to Paris. No tickets. Gotta climb up the wheel well. They watch the planes. Adù doesn't want to go. Ali's going for it. They're in. They're up. It's cold. Ali keeps Adù warm as long as she can. He wakes. She is frozen. The wheel drops out again as they approach. Alika's body drops away first, disappearing into the clouds. Adù is alone, for the first time. The plane lands. He drops out the hole, into Dakar airport, in Senegal. He awakes at a police station, where he meets another illegal, Massar (Adam Nourou). At a stop in the city, Massar jimmies the rear door of the paddy wagon open and they flee. They try to hitch a ride but have no money. Sandra is kicking up dust, being a teenager, predictable. It's fine. I suppose it's real but it's always the same story. We can see the story unwind before us, each step of the way foreordained. Father abandoned daughter but he's rich, so she's raised well. Spoiled. Does drugs. Defiant. Entitled. Doesn't see it. Justifies all of her behavior by assuming her dad is an unalloyed asshole, so he deserves whatever she dishes out, that she can take from him what she can with no consequences or moral repercussions. She will likely learn that things are more complicated than that but it will almost certainly be too late. I think these kinds of stories reassure parents of asshole kids that they're not alone. Adù is hungry. So is Massar. Massar knows how poor, young men earn money from truck drivers. For himself, he would have held out longer; for Adù, he sacrifices. Told without words. Massar speaks English, Adù French. Massar understands him a little and vice versa. They are at the beach. They have no money, little food, no shoes. But they glory in glorious nature. They are poor and yet rich. Back in the city, Adù and Massar join a street crew; Massar juggles; Adù gets water. A filthy man picks up Adù with promises of chocolate and magic, trapping him in his car. Massar hears his cries and rescues him, knocking the man out with a stone. They take all of his money. They are back in the sea cave. Adù is happy and well-fed. "Massar: Plus jamais. Adù: Mais toi, tu la fait. Massar: It's different. Adù: Pourquoi? Massar: Tu es enfant. Adù: Mais je veux faire la magique." A bus covered in sacks of goods and people crosses a vast desert on a barely discernible road. The boys are on top of it, with many others. Massar coughs, not for the first time. The boys have made it to northern Morocco. It is colder now. Red-cross workers arrive in the camp. One hears Massar's cough; she sees the sores that have recently appeared. She tells him he needs to go to a hospital; "No papers." "It's an emergency." He refuses, crawling back to his tent. In the night, he goes to look out over the coast, at the Mediterranean. He has decided something. He seems to have decided that he will give what remains of his life to rescue his young friend. Gonzalo leaves Sandra because she's insufferable. She mopes around a bunch. He finds hashish that she smuggled in a fake elephant tusk. Massar and Adù are at the coast with inner tubes, staring across at what looks to be the tantalizingly near shore of Spain across the Strait of Gibraltar. The water is freezing. Massar paddles, dragging Adù's ring on a rope. The police officers who'd killed an immigrant at the fence at the very beginning of the film, and whom we'd seen throughout the film in snippets, win their court case. They call it justice as they toast with glasses of wine, lamenting how tough of a time they'd had. They are, of course, not in camps. One of them will be posted to Málaga, which is, apparently, a fate worse than anything those immigrants suffer. This is called justice. Mateo has doubts. He has had doubts all along. The ringleader follows Mateo outside for a smoke, "Why aren't you drinking?" "My shift starts at 10:00".. When Mateo tries to tell him what he'd learned about the man they'd killed, the ringleader says, "Do you know what the problem with Africa is? They all leave. Teachers, politicians, nurses. If they all leave, who the fuck is going to fix it? "Do you know what that fence says? Solve your own problems." The rope breaks. Panic. Wind. Waves. Adù and Massar are each left alone. The current and dark have their way with them. The cold lulls them to sleep. A red beacon. Adù fetches up against a buoy. A searchlight illuminates the ice in his hair. Mateo pulls Adù on board. "Look, we found your friend!" Massar appears out of the dark, wrapped in a space blanket. They ride back in the morning light, onto Spanish territory. "Good luck," says Mateo as they are taken away by other police. Mateo smiles because he feels that he's done a good thing, managed to help some immigrants, after having helped cover up the killing of another. At the land crossing, Gonzalo lets Sandra cross into Spain on her own. The border guards choose her for inspection. They find the hollow in the tusk. Papa has replaced the hash with a little flag from his charity. She's free to go. Happy ending for her. No so much for Massar. He is thrown back into Morocco. Alone. Adù awakes in a strange bed. Alone. He goes outside. There are others about. Young men. He is alone. Again. This is a beautifully shot film. Rich. Lush. The city scenes, at the Spanish embassy. The old buildings. The jungle, of course. Women on prayer rugs, eight of them, evenly spaced, filmed from above. I watched in Spanish, French, and English, with English subtitles. Elysium (2013) -- "8/10" I'd already "seen and reviewed this movie in 2013" but wanted to revisit it to see why I gave it a 5/10 the first time around. First off, it definitely resonates more in 2025, with robot police officers randomly checking people in a line waiting to get on a bus to go to shitty jobs. That the whole neighborhood is latino is a bit too on the nose. Do people in the Trump administration watch stuff like this and think that it's an instruction manual? Oh, holy shit, Max's (Matt Damon) interaction with his robot / AI parole officer is also a bit too on the nose. Seriously, does all of Silicon Valley have these kind of films on repeat in their offices? Do they unironically whine to each other about how assholes like Max ruin everything for the beautiful people in orbit? So, the robot cop hassles him at the bus stop and gives him a bullshit charge for hassling a cop. They break his arm, so he ends up in the emergency room, where he meets his childhood friend Frey (Alice Braga) working as a nurse. Next, he has to visit his parole officer to find out that he's gotten eight more months added to his parole, and then he shows up late to his shift and is dinged half a day's pay. All the while, he's gotta keep his cool because getting mad just makes things worse. At the factory, a suited man John Carlyle (William Fichtner) overlooks the work floor from a white, glass cube. At the factory, Max builds the robots that oppress him. up on Elysium, Delacourt (Jodie Foster) rules her queendom. She is in charge of handling a group of illegal shuttles approaching the space station. Wait, she orders someone on Earth to fire surface-to-space rockets to blow up the shuttles? I know I'm supposed to focus on Delacourt's cruelty in killing women and children but it's just weird that they shoot at things in orbit from Earth. That's like the dumbest way to do it? Anyway, one of the ships makes it through and a mom carries her sick child to a medical bay, where she starts to heal her child's illness. They are rounded up and deported back to Earh with the other survivors. Back at the factory, Max's boss rides his ass into doing something dangerous. You know, or else he'll lose his job. He goes into a dangerous chamber and is trapped. A robot drags his unconscious, heavily irradiated body out. "You have been exposed to a lethal dose of radiation. You will experience catastrophic organ failure. In five days' time, you will die." OK, so that's Max's story now. Meanwhile Frey is told that her daughter's disease can't be cured because "This isn't Elysium." Now, I see why I had a problem with this movie the last time. The whole premise is super-dumb. Like, they'll expend a tremendous amount of effort and resources to build robots to keep people on Earth at work, building the robots that watch over them, but they won't give them medical care? I know that's a bit too on the nose as well, but the oligarchs in our world at least benefit from that situation. I don't see how the oligarchs in Elysium would care one way or the other, unless the cruelty is the point. I bet the cruelty is the point. The movie still resonates much more with me today, though, despite its flawed premise. They are talking about billionaires as if it were a sci-fi concept. There were billionaires 13 years ago but nothing like what we have now. We now have those Elysium assholes striding the Earth and dreaming of a big wheel in the sky to which they could escape. Or dreaming of Mars to which I would wish them a hearty bon voyage. Max goes to an old partner Spider (Wagner Moura) with Julio (Diego Luna) to get surgery to fix himself up for a few days -- servo-armor and a data-implant -- and then plans a heist to steal the data out of Carlyle's brain. But Carlyle's brain has a secure program stored on it that will reprogram Elysium to make Delacourt president. Delacourt sics her mercs on them. The worst of them is Kruger (Sharlto Copley). But Max is now protected because Delacourt wants what's in only his brain now (Carlyle expired during the firefight). Max is back in the favelas. A drone flies overhead; a little old lady bids him to take shelter under her pig cart. I'm getting Gaza vibes as well. Long story short: Kruger kidnaps Max, Frey, and her daughter and take them to Elysium, to Delacourt. Now we're back to ICE vibes -- "two illegals heading east in zone 3" -- as Frey and her daughter run to a med bay after their ride crash-lands on Elysium. Kruger takes a grenade to the face. They really wanted to show Kruger get his face rebuilt by a med-bay, to really bring home the fact that they can heal anything. Everybody's captured and has been brought together. They're trying to extract Max's neurological payload. Spider and his crew land on Elysium (because the station is no longer blocking ingress, for no reason I can fathom; I thought they were on a war footing). Max breaks free of his surgery and soldiers on despite his increasing radiation sickness. Delacourt chirps hard at Kruger and he slices her carotid for her. He plans to grab Max's payload and make himself president. His crew starts tearing up Elysium's ruling class. Kruger fights Max while Spider hacks the mainframe. That's not surprising but it's the story. Guess what else, though? Max beats Kruger. Also, Frey heals her daughter. Spider guesses the pin. Spider hands him a cable to upload the package. Transfer is lethal. Spider sees it. Max accepts his fate. Spider lets him press the button. "Tell Mathilda I really liked her story. I figured out why the hippo did it." System reboot. Who's a citizen? Everyone. Who's president? How terrible is it that this movie has moved closer to being a documentary in the 12 years since I saw it the first time? It has a very happy ending, one we're unlikely to get. Elysium sends shuttles full of med bays with robots to heal the sick of the Earth. Really, though, local warlords would take over the ships and charge for access. Violent Night (2022) -- "7/10" Santa (David Harbour) is a sloppy alcoholic. He is jaded. Everyone wants video games. Everyone wants cash. He has a soft heart: in one home, he leaves a gift for a sleeping toddler, while leaving her father a chunk of coal and taking the sleeping man's six-pack. Santa is at grandmama Gertrude's (Beverly D'Angelo) house. She is a rich, old lady who keeps her entire, mostly horrible family on tenterhooks. Her granddaughter Trudy is nice enough and she strikes up a conversation with Santa on her walkie talkie. He tells Trudy about his past, as a thief, a plunderer, a warrior with an axe. Mr. Scrooge (John Leguiziamo) takes over Gertrude's house, taking the whole family hostage. He tells a tale of woe how he never had Christmas, no decorations, no presents -- but the neighbors! They had everything! Now Santa appears. He knows all their names, he knows all of their histories, he is Santa. They believe. The criminals break into the high-tech safe to find that everything has already been cleared out. Santa is trapped in a shed. He has given up. He's dropped his ring. It has rolled across the ring, fetching up against a sledgehammer. The ancient warrior awakens. The soldiers arrive at the shed. It's a bloodbath. The solider outside watches one body-cam after another wink out of existence. Santa is sledgehammering, stabbing with a candy cane, slicing with a hockey skate, strangling and chopping with a snowblower. The montage is accompanied by Christmas Time by Bryan Adams, which is a God-awful song but appropriate here. Trudy is holed up in the attic. Her traps have an air of Home Alone to them but they are considerably more vicious. A bed of nails elicits a ton of blood from one attacker. The bowling balls aren't any worse than what Kevin Mcallister did in that film, but the glue trap is brutal. Just as her traps run out, Santa arrives to hammer the lady across the attic. The lady lives. So, Santa asks Trudy to close her eyes, cover her ears, and sing Jingle Bells while he finishes the lady off. Meanwhile, Gertrude's no-good son Jason -- and father of Trudy -- is showing the criminals where he'd hidden the money that he'd already stolen. Was there always going to have been a snowmobile chase? Santa Claus gives chase on a child's sled, which he uses to upgrade to a snowmobile. The hammer comes along. Scrooge baits him into slamming into a rock. He gets Santa's scroll and sees that Santa's real, bro. Scrooge is going to go for it, though; he's going to try to end Christmas forever. Santa takes a lot of damage but drags Scrooge up a chimney with him, turning him into soup. It's not over, though. Scrooge's partner has a score to settle with Santa for a past of shitty presents and he fills Santa with lead, dropping him off the chimney. In a wonderful irony, Jason is forced to burn money to keep Santa warm. His sister begs him not to burn the money, that Santa's "presque mort" (almost dead), so what's the point? And Jason doesn't even believe that it's the real Santa! Neither does Linda. They all have to declare that they believe, which brings him back. He is looking rough. Covered in blood. "Jason: Vous, vous etiez mort? Santa: C'est la magique Nöel." I watched it in French with no subtitles (they weren't available). It went surprisingly well! I mean, it's not a complicated movie. There's a lot of room to miss details here and there. North Country (2005) -- "9/10" It's Christmas, 1989. A sweet little girl fondles ornaments on a tree. Josey Aimes (Charlize Theron) watches a truck approach, sluing through the snow. She looks worried. She has reason to be. She's crumpled on the kitchen floor. She levers herself up, wiping blood from her face. Wayne's gone. For now. She gathers her tweenaged son Sammy (Thomas Curtis) and daughter Karen (Elle Peterson), packs their bags and drives off, up a bleak road. The wintry cinematography is lovely, striking a stark contrast to the horrible, judgmental people. Though both are harsh, the harshness of nature feels less deliberate, less personal. She fetches up at her parents' house. "Dad: (Richard Jenkins) ...he catch you with another man? Is that why he laid hands on you?" Interleaved scenes from a trial, where Josey is being harangued by a harsh prosecutor. The prosecutor is of the opinion that Josey brought her misery upon herself. In flashbacks, the townspeople agree. "Poor Alice, that girl has been nothing but trouble since the day she was born." Her mother Alice (Sissy Spacek) doesn't join in; she makes them stop. Josey meets an old schoolmate Glory (Frances McDormand), who "drives truck" at the mine. There are jobs there. Pays well. "As much as your dad makes." "Dad: You wanna be a lesbian now?" Back at trial: "Prosecutor: You submitted to the exam willingly, correct? Josey: Yeah. I submitted. Before your law firm hired you, they put your feet up in the air and look around your insides?" Wayne's (Marcus Chait) back. She sends him on his way. Her parents are appalled that she's not willing to try to make it work. On the road again, heading to the mine, staying with Glory and Kyle (Sean Bean) instead of her parents. Josey gets her introduction to the mines and meets shift supervisor Bobby Sharp (Jeremy Renner), whom she'd dated in high school. """Women hold up half the sky."" " Glory's a union rep, asking for portajohns. "If we get you those, what are you gonna for us?" asks another union rep. This is the problem, in essence: Americans have had class solidarity bred right out of them. It's a fait accompli. They'd rather stupidly split along gender lines than class lines. Where the early Soviets made all people equal from the very beginning, even the most labor-friendly of organizations in the U.S. are rife with all sorts of discrimination because people in that society are not taught to think along class lines. They are taught to think about everything but class, lest they get ideas about really getting organized. That's why even the few remaining unions in the U.S. are shitty and weak. I have a close family member in a teacher's union. Their stories about what the union does are sad. I've had to ask them several times whether they're sure they know what a union actually is. Anyway, the harassment is obviously not going to stay restricted to the men being dicks at union meetings. It's obviously going to go straight to sexual harassment, justified to the perpetrators by how butt-hurt they are about the jobs that women are taking away from them, instead of blaming the politicians that they all voted for, who are eliminating jobs and industries right and left. Men like that always gotta punch down. They know no other way. They are blinkered bullies, small-minded and savage. The neat thing is that they show that the bone-deep stupidity is not just in the men; it's also ingrained in some of the women. For example, Bill White (Woody Harrelson), a friend of Glory and Kyle's is in town from "New York". Sherry, a 19-year-old co-worker of Glory and Josey asks him to dance. He demurs, eventually saying that he's "wearing underwear older than her." He'd already tried gently rebuffing her but she was coming on strong. She reacts with "you really are a homo, then." At Glory's urging, Bill screws up his courage to ask Josey to dance but he's cut off by Ricky, who Josey dances with her instead. Her naiveté is painful to watch, ... "Are you nice, Ricky? You seem nice." So vulnerable. You cringe at what's going to happen. Josey, Sammy, and little Karen are looking at their own house. 5% down and it's hers. They move in. The job at the mine is rough, tough, and staffed by animals, but it's the first thing in her whole life that's given her a lease on life, where she feels like she's "really living". The animals will take whatever they can, though. They are interested only in plunder, in taking something for nothing, in extracting more value than they give. They have no moral code. They just hate with a dull-eyed and beetle-browed fervor. Bobby Sharp traps Josey at the top of a giant conveyor and goes for his first kiss. Just boys being boys. But again, they show that it's not just the men. Some of the women are absolutely Stockholmed. In the kitchen. Karen's on the table in what looks like communion dress. Grandma is taking it in for her, on account of how young she is. Josey says, "she's a little young for communion, isn't she?" "You're never to young to be with God." Josey turns up the TV. Anita Hill is testifying about Clarence Thomas's stories about the size of his penis. "Turn that off! That poor man's family." Her dad is also a grade-A piece of shit. Just through-and-through an absolutely, close-minded demon of a man, cooking on a slow boil, peevish, egoistic, fragile. Even the kids in the village are strong-armed by the parents into ostracizing the kids of women who work at the mine. It gets better. Bobby Sharp's wife shows up at a hockey game and yells at Josey to keep her whore ass away from her husband. Her son decides to go home with his girlfriend (they're 12 or something) but Josey won't let him. Josey blows up and the whole town does the Hester Prynne thing as if 400 years hadn't passed. This is how it is everywhere. I remember that this is how our lovely neighbor was driven away. She was a great neighbor. Lovely kids. She was pretty. The other neighbor ladies ganged up on her and accused her of sleeping with their husbands. But what really worked was accusing her eldest son of having molested a neighbor's girl. The neighbor's girl was a known little shit and a liar. She made the whole thing up. Her mother absolutely supported it because her daughter had accused the whore's son. The case went to Swiss court and the judge threw it the fuck out in five minutes. He was pissed. It was enough, though. Our neighbor picked up sticks and left. OK. Interlude over. The ladies of the mine are talking about sexual harassment at a makeup party but they can't stop sniping at each other. They're even calling each other whores! For God's sake. Where is the solidarity? God, the stupid is just palpable. Where do you even start? No-one wants to fix anything. Just broken. A bunch of guys tip poor Sherry over in a porta-potty, which is, like, straight-up assault. Just boys being boys. Josey is at CEO Pearson's office. Her boss has been invited as well. He interrupts her immediately. His generous offer is to allow her to quit without the two-week notice. When she refuses to quit, he tells her to "spend less time stirring up your female co-workers and less time in the beds of your male co-workers, and more time trying to find ways to improve your job performance." "Josey, thank you again for making the drive down here. Now, if you don't mind, we have other business." She goes home to get a lecture about "stealing other people's jobs" from her son, who's pretty happy to just repeat what the worst people in his world tell him. On account of he has a whore mother who can't stay home to cook and clean, like a woman should. The boy is twelve. He has already been programmed to be just like those assholes in the C-Suite. Fuck, man. This is (based on) a true story. I am positively praying for a happy ending or I'm gonna have to break something. Glory has ALS. It's progressed pretty far. Frances McDormand and Sean Bean are amazing in this scene. When the excellent gentlemen at the mine smear their shit all over the walls, writing "Cunts" and "Rats", the other ladies finally bail on Josey, telling her that she's the one making it worse for everyone. No solidarity. Just a bunch of weak-willed fools. They make her clean everything up herself, because of course their boss makes the women clean it up -- cleaning bathrooms is women's work. This gives Bobby an opportunity to sexually assault her in the "Powder Room". When she goes back to the cafeteria to accuse him, a friend lies that he was with him all afternoon. No-one wants to drive her home, not even the ladies. Nearly every person in this movie is a selfish monster. What kind of society produces people like this? Even Bill takes some convincing. He knows how the world works. But Josey needs a lawyer. He's thinking about it. But he thinks she doesn't have a chance. The world won't change. But he comes around. "Can you get the other women? It's called a class-action suit." Josey's out of a job. Things are getting worse at the mine for everyone. The men are going insane and no-one seems to be interested in stopping them. She can't get any of the other women to help her out. Her mother moves out on her Dad, though, so that's something. Where some might think that it's overdone, I think that the reactions from the men are absolutely par for the course. Their behavior at the union meeting is not surprising. This is the country I grew up in. This was the late 80s. I was 17 at the time. I didn't notice how it was. I can only look back through my memories and realize how things were, how I'd not seen how certain things were. This wave of hatred is still barely held in check in a lot of societies. This default attitude that women are inferior. We're accustomed to a default attitude that other countries, other people are inferior. But all women? What the fuck is wrong with us? Her dad stands up and tells his brothers that they have to let her talk. He finally sees his comrades for the animals that they are. Of course, his wife had moved out on him, so maybe the lights went on. "I've been a ranger all my life. But I ain't never been ashamed of it until now." After his speech, some men clap. Is it maudlin? No. It's great cinema. It's like saying that Jack Nicholson was chewing the scenery in A Few Good Men. Of course he was. That's why it was great cinema. I can't even believe that she had been raped by her high-school teacher, that it was raised by the defense in court, and that they used to accuse Josey of being a whore. It's in the Wikipedia article cited below. It's a cultural indictment to think that we even entertain the thought that this might be a true story. Most people can easily imagine this being a true story because that's just how things were (ARE). It is an absolute indictment of an entire gender and of an entire society. The case was "Jenson v. Eveleth Taconite Co." and it says that she started working in 1975 (not 1989 like the movie says). Nearly all of the horrific harassment in the film is listed in detail in this article as well. They didn't even have to make anything up. The article goes on to write, "It is infrequently noted that women who were not seen as “desirable” by these men still faced harassment whether sexual or not. Oftentimes, in male-dominated workplaces, when men do not look at a certain woman sexually, they will harass her in other ways to try and get her to leave, because they believe she is taking the place of a man." This sounds more like anthropology about mountain apes, as written by Dian Fossey. It's almost written to excuse the men for their behavior like they just can't help themselves goshdarnit. Get fucking civilized, you goddamned animals. Stop rutting and reveling in your ignorance. Jesus. These are women. It's not like we're talking about faggots here, ammirite? HIGH FIVE. Oh, it goes on: "It is evident that females working in male-dominated workplaces are treated differently than their male co-workers. This is suspected to be due to sex-role spillover, a theory suggesting the carryover or spillover of gender roles or expectations into the workplace where it is not relevant." Again, I feel like I'm reading an article about bonobos and not human beings, who have consciousness and, ostensibly, intelligence and, ostensibly, a moral core perhaps accompanied by a pinch of principle. Have you no shame? The court case continues. The cross-examination by Woody Harrelson of Jeremy Renner interaction was spectacular (a reviewer below cried that it was too melodramatic but fuck that guy). And now Sean Bean is putting in a great performance. He's been great all along. I can't believe that he actually survives this film. I think he's actually going to make it. [3] Nothing really beats on-site photography, either as stock footage or as footage where you really see the actors in the giant factories. I know that the bar is really low now, but we've gotten to the point where you have to appreciate that the actors didn't just talk to a ball on a stick in front of a green screen. And, just for a cherry on top, let's look at the Rolling Stone review extensively cited in the "Wikipedia article" , "Any similarities between Josey and Lois Jenson, the real woman who made Eveleth Mines pay for their sins in a landmark 1988 class-action suit, are purely coincidental. Instead, we get a TV-movie fantasy of female empowerment glazed with soap opera theatrics. The actors, director Niki Caro (Whale Rider) and the great cinematographer Chris Menges all labor to make things look authentic. But a crock is a crock, despite the ferocity and feeling Theron brings to the role . . . Though the dirt and grime in North Country are artfully applied, it's purely cosmetic and skin-deep" What a piece of shit. Peter Travers is a piece of shit. This is a masterful, deeply felt movie. It's not a "TV movie." He's an asshole who thinks anything that attacks his tribe is a "crock". God, the message of this film is so important. "In the St. Petersburg Times, Steve Persall graded the film A and called it "deeply, undeniably moving . . . crusader cinema at its finest."" Yeah. Duh. ✊✊✊ I though this movie was so goddamned good, albeit frustrating to watch because the people in it HOO BOY but anyway, if you want to watch a movie to get angry about a whole gender to (HINT IT"S NOT HERS) and generally about how a whole society used to be in the 70s and 80s JUST KIDDING IT'S STILL MOSTLY LIKE THAT, then this is a good one. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] These are notes for me to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. The amount of text is not proportional to my enjoyment. I might write less because I didn't get around to it when it was fresh in my mind. I rate the film based on how well it suited me personally for the genre, my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. Links are to "my IMDb ratings" [1] Holy shit! In 1987 that was a lot of money! In 2025 money, that's about 3x more, or $1.5M! That's not including the semi! Grandpa was not kidding around! [1] The joke here is that Sean Bean dies in most of the movies he's in. [media] ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5924 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5924 Mon, 05 Jan 2026 10:53:45 +0100 -- "7/10" 2. "Equalizer (2014)" <#Equalizer> -- "9/10" 3. "Rush Hour 3 (2007)" <#RushHour3> -- "7/10" 4. "Murder Sheets (2024)" <#Murder> -- "8/10" 5. "Emotionally Exhausting (2015)" <#Emotionally> -- "8/10" 6. "Self Help Me (2020)" <#SelfHelp> -- "8/10" 7. "Ronny Chieng: Love to Hate It (2024)" <#Chieng> -- "8/10" 8. "No Country for Old Men (2007)" <#Country> -- "9/10" 9. "Fatherhood (2023)" <#Fatherhood> -- "6/10" 10. "Abgang mit Stil (Going in Style) (2017)" <#Abgang> -- "7/10" Pollock (2000) -- "7/10" Jackson Pollack died as he lived: a miserable, self-pitying, drunken asshole. Ed Harris produced, directed, and starred in this biography of the famous, early 20th-century American abstract-expressionist painter. I guess he really wanted the world to know what kind of guy he was. He was a miserable drunk when he was poor and unknown. He was a miserable drunk when he was well-known and selling paintings for millions, and he was a miserable drunk when the mercurial art world's roving eye moved on to younger, more dynamic, and perhaps less pickled artists. He seems to have been a classic narcissist, thinking only ever of himself, with only his problems in focus, with little to no empathy for anyone else, least of all his long-suffering partner Lee Krasner (Marcia Gay Harden). They are married but only because she told him that they would either get married or break up forever, which seems like an oak-planked foundation on which to build a life together. She is quite aware that Pollock will fuck anything that will either advance his career or that is young and pretty. He takes a pathetic run at Peggy Guggenheim (Amy Madigan), who is not exactly opposed, as she also liked to collect notches on her belt, but he is so pathetically drunk that all he can do is grunt once and ejaculate, so that seems like it was a lose-lose situation. Pollock and Lee take a house in the countryside, where we see him invent his famous painting technique. Friends show up, some with booze. He visits the local store. He is absolutely antisocial. A photographer arrives to do a whole piece on his technique. He starts a more earnest affair with Ruth Kligman (Jennifer Connelly), who is equal parts star-fucking and legitimately thinking that she's bedding an art god. Connelly plays quite well, as ever, as we're never sure how much of her character is being crassly manipulative of an over-the-hill, venal man, and how much of her character is naive and starry-eyed, seeing past all of his obvious faults -- he's a depressive, faithless alcoholic -- to revere the artist underneath. Was she doing it because she thought he still was that man? Did she wonder whether he had ever been the persona he'd projected, when she's confronted with the reality? She doesn't seem to mind bedding him, so there's that, I guess. She is repaid for her ardor in bed by him getting blackout drunk during the day instead of taking her and her friend Edith (Sally Murphy) to the beach, then bitching about them wanting to go to a party, then insisting on driving, then driving into a ditch, killing himself and Edith and seriously injuring Ruth. Jackson Pollack died as he lived: a miserable, self-pitying, drunken asshole. Equalizer (2014) -- "9/10" This is the first outing for Robert McCall (Denzel Washington) but we watched it after having recently seen "#3" and then "#2" . Like the others, this one starts slowly and deliberately, introducing us to the young Teri (Chloë Grace Moretz), who is a Russian-American girl "working" for a local and brutal pimp named Slavi (David Meunier). Slavi, in turn, works for shadowy Russian godfather Pushkin (Vladimir Kulich), who only appears at the very end. McCall works at Home Mart with Ralphie (Johnny Skourtis), whom he's helping to pass a security-guard test. When Teri ends up in the hospital with a face nearly caved in by Slavi -- or one of his customers -- McCall pays Slavi and his crew a visit. Only McCall survives the encounter. He is untouched. This gets Pushkin's attention, who sends ex-Spetznatz and ruthless mercenary Teddy (Marton Csokas), but he initially can't figure out who's actually behind the killings. His network of crooked cops is useless. McCall is back to equalizing: he blackmails two crooked cops into returning their protection money; he hunts down a man who robbed the Home Mart, terrifying one of his friends and stealing her ring. She finds it in her cash register a couple of days later. McCall returns a sledgehammer to the store's inventory. McCall visits an old friend and former fellow agent Susan Plummer (Melissa Leo) and her husband Brian (Bill Pullman) to find out who he's dealing with. When he hears that he's going up against the entire Russian mafia, instead of shrinking back, he squares his shoulders and goes about planning to finish the job. Teddy starts taking out crooked cops, trying to figure out who did the wet work. He finally figures out that it's McCall. Teddy straight-up just goes to McCall's apartment, posing as a cop. McCall isn't fooled for even one second, letting Teddy know all of the mistakes he's making in procedure, and how's he's giving himself away. Teddy is an absolute psychotic but he must sense the danger pulsing off of McCall. Even his instincts of self-preservation kick in, even he must realize that he's up against someone who's at least if not more than his match. Helping out the police, McCall takes out a giant warehouse owned by Pushkin. Soon after, he visits Teddy at his headquarters (it's a bar). Teddy is sitting opposite one of his head goons. The goon gets up to take a slash. A minute later, his bloodied sunglasses hit the table in front of Teddy. "He won't be coming back." McCall gives Teddy a chance to tell his boss to pull out of the U.S. Like, the whole U.S.! Just shut down operations on that continent! Obviously, he doesn't take it. McCall destroys two oil tankers -- yeah, I know, right? A Russian mobster has oil tankers, WTH -- which finally causes Teddy to respond. He takes the coward's way out, kidnapping McCall's Home Mart coworkers. McCall skips the negotiation meeting, instead hitting the store where they're being held and killing all of Teddy's men, freeing the hostages. The trap is now set: Teddy and his remaining men arrive to finally take care of McCall. It doesn't work out like that. McCall doesn't leave unscathed but he's mostly fine. No-one else survives. Teddy eats a bunch of nails from a nail gun. A few days later, Pushkin is in his shower. He's not alone in the bathroom. McCall is there, turning the lights on and off. Pushkin tries to buy him off. No dice. McCall has set a trap whereby Pushkin electrocutes himself. McCall is in the wind. Gone, like a ghost. All of Pushkin's men are dead, littering the mansion. The coda is Alina approaching Robert on the street, telling him that she's used the money he gave her to turn her life around, once she was released from the hospital. The end. Rush Hour 3 (2007) -- "7/10" Officers Carter (Chris Tucker) and Lee (Jackie Chan) are back together when the shadowy Triads attempt an assassination of a top cop who wants to clean up the streets. Reynard (Max von Sydow) seems helpful but he also seems suspicious. I didn't recognize any actors other than Hiroyuki Sanada, who played Lee's childhood foster brother and #1 baddie. Oh, and there was Roman Polanski as Commissaire Revi, a French cop who gives them a hard time, again and again. Carter and Lee gallivant all over, eventually ending up in Paris, where they end up in a giant set piece on the Eiffel Tower. I gave it an extra star because I just love watching Jackie Chan work. And, honestly, Chris Tucker's pretty funny. They were a good buddy-cop duo. I watched it in German. Murder Sheets (2024) -- "8/10" This is the first special we watched with Liz. It is her fourth special. She's fun. She tells good stories. She's not clean but she's not needlessly filthy. [2] She talks about her real life without leaning on crassness for humor. She leans on humor for humor, which is a nice change of pace. You can watch the special below, [media] The video lists the following topics: 1. Intro 2. Online dating 3. My cat died 4. Dating apps 5. Murder sheets 6. Murder sheets plot 7. New Jersey 8. Dating 9. Witchcraft 10. Edibles 11. Squatters 12. Bike 13. Happiness 14. Packages 15. The wallpaper people 16. Traveling 17. Pakistan 18. Passport control 19. Baby of the family 20. Sam smokes 21. Kakei (no idea; probably transcription error) 22. Bkash (no idea; probably transcription error) 23. Taxidermy 24. Pet cemetery 25. Cat death 26. Pasta This list doesn't seem very accurate but, with AI, you get what you pay for. Emotionally Exhausting (2015) -- "8/10" This is Liz's very first special, recorded at a comedy club. Even ten years ago, you can see which parts would develop into the persona she has now: she was already telling stories then, and she was fresh and adult without being crass. She's not clean but she's clever. You can watch the special below, [media] The auto-generated chapters are spotty: 1. Chronic back pain 2. Paleo diet 3. Online dating Self Help Me (2020) -- "8/10" This is Liz's second special, and probably my favorite one. You can watch the special below, [media] The auto-generated chapters in the video are as follows: 1. Intro 2. Why are you scared? 3. Middle East tour 4. Australia tour 5. Hair 6. Living in New York 7. Drugs 8. Friends 9. The One-man Show 10. Road Rage 11. CVS Rage 12. Grumpy Cat Death 13. Self-help Guru 14. My Mom 15. Family 16. Abortion 17. Cat abortion 18. Dyslexic 19. Instagram filter 20. Professional Relationships 21. Relationship Story 22. What are we? 23. Things are getting serious 24. Therapy Ronny Chieng: Love to Hate It (2024) -- "8/10" This is a stand-up set. The official description is relatively complete, "Ronny Chieng unpacks fertility treatment fiascoes, the dark side of men's self-help and scam-sensitive parents in this witty stand-up special." Citing from the "Ronny Chieng: Love to Hate It (2024) | Transcript" , here's a sample from the bit about scammable parents: "Just falling for every basic bitch internet scam possible. These fucking baby boomers tumbling into internet scams like pandas rolling down a hill. "Just jujitsu-rolling into scams every single day. "Loving scams. "“Oh, what do you want? 20 Target gift cards?” "“Yeah, sounds like a legitimate way to pay for antivirus software on my phone.” "“Everybody, look. Look at this link. Look, there’s a…” "“‘What’s the one trick your doctor doesn’t want you to know?'” "“Okay, I’ll click on that link.” "“I knew it. I knew my doctor was scamming me!” "“That was a trick he didn’t want me to know.” "“I’m gonna invalidate his medical degree with one click right now!” [grunts] "“This is not the scam. My doctor is the scam. Let me…” [grunts] Click on this… "These fucking internet idiot savants who can’t remember a single goddamn password, but for some reason, can make any piece of misinformation go viral. "Like a Russian cyber army, just spreading misinformation around the world in family group WhatsApp chats. Everywhere." No Country for Old Men (2007) -- "9/10" We're in 1980 Texas. No cell phones. Pay phones. No GPS. No Internet databases. Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) kills a policeman who had dared to arrest him. He's a psychopath, deeply unpleasant. They are not even trying to make him an antihero. He terrorizes every person he meets. He is violence personified. He is capricious. He tries to make people responsible for their own deaths by giving them a chance to save their own lives if they correctly call a coin toss. This mercuriality makes him even more unpleasant, like watching a boy torture animals or insects. Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) is a hunter with no disinclination to picking up some easy cash with some illicit work or by taking advantage of a windfall that life might send his way. Life does send him a windfall, in the form of a drug deal gone wrong, where all of the people are dead and both the drugs and money are just lying there, out in the desert. Scratch that: one man had survived. He was badly wounded and begging for water. Llewelyn chooses to ignore him and takes the money home. This could have been a really short film, but Llewelyn's conscience won't let him sleep. He returns to the site with a jug of water but the man has been murdered. The cleanup crew spots Llewelyn, chasing him into a river, clipping him in the shoulder. He gets away but sends his wife Carla Jean (Kelly Macdonald) to stay with her mother in Oklahoma. Now, guess who the drug dealers get to find the missing money? Anton Chigurh, of course. And Sheriff Ed Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones) is on the trail of both of them, putting the piecesof Chigurh's MO together while trying to get through to Llewelyn to try to protect him from what he strongly suspects is a murderous force of nature. There's this whole cat-and-mouse game at a motel, where Llewelyn hides the briefcase in an air duct, to which he has access from the adjoining room. Llewelyn is clever but he discovers far too late that the briefcase has a tracking device in it. Chigurh finally has Llewelyn in his sights but Llewelyn is slippery and gets away into Mexico. Each wounds the other. Llewelyn hides the briefcase again -- this time in the reeds by the Rio Grande -- and makes it to a Mexican hospital. Chigurh stitches up his own wounds in a motel room. Bounty hunter Carson Wells (Woody Harrelson) -- who'd been hired by the other end of the transaction, in the person of, literally, the Man Who Hires Wells (Stephen Root) -- shows up by Llewelyn's hospital bed, telling him to give it up. He knows -- and fears -- Chigurh, and says that Llewelyn has no chance. Wells is right. Chigurh finds Wells before Llewelyn can contact him after having retrieved the money again. Chigurh eliminates Wells while he's on the phone with Llewelyn -- and Chigurh whispers into the open line Carla Jean is next, that he knows where she is. Llewelyn contacts Carla Jean to give her the money and protect her. He can't even protect himself, as Carla Jean's mother inadvertently tells the Mexicans where Llewelyn is. They find him and kill him, all without Chigurh's involvement. The Mexicans get their money. This is very typical of the kind of dark fare that the Coen brothers like to make: the universe doesn't care about plot, characters, or story arc. The universe grinds on, inexorably, regardless of what you think should happen, or what you'd like to happen. Llewelyn is dead. He doesn't get the money. Neither does Carla Jean. The drug dealers get the money. Even Chigurh doesn't get any closure because he didn't get to kill his target. How will will he close this naggingly open circle? Well, he's got to clean up the loose end that is Carla Jean. He leaves her house, mission accomplished, driving away, ... and is T-boned, breaking his arm and dazing him, temporarily. Sirens wail. Two boys on bikes appear. He buys one of the boys' shirts for $100 and limps away. It was really unclear whether they would survive their encounter with this eldritch horror of a man. The film ends on a retired Ed Tom Bell wondering aloud to his wife about what he's going to do that day, and then recounting a couple of dreams that he'd had. Fatherhood (2023) -- "5/10" Matt (Kevin Hart) became a widower just days after the birth of his daughter Maddy. Despite the unalloyed shittiness of his mothers-in-law -- they are frustratingly dumb, portrayed like simple-minded bumpkins who prefer the newest child over everything -- he decides to raise the child himself. Like, instead of what? Giving her up to foster care? Giving her up to her grandmothers? Like, is he supposed to leave a paying job in this economy just to move closer to a family that will likely make his life so miserable that he'll want to kill himself? Like, was that the bargain? "Move closer to us, you fucking idiot, because you're obviously incapable of doing anything right by yourself? Also, I never thought you were worthy of my daughter and I largely blame you for her death." As you can tell, Matt's mother-in-law Marion (Alfre Woodard) really rubbed me the wrong way. The part that annoyed me more was that she made me think of the most-likely overwhelmingly large percentage of people who didn't share my annoyance. People think that this kind of behavior is OK. It's propaganda. It enables people like this because they can point to popular culture and say "see? I'm not the only one." It's like making endless movies about bratty, shitty kids who never get any comeuppance or discipline, or movies in which cops and military get to do whatever they want, all the time. That's how you drum up support for spoiling children, that's how you drum up support for a police state, that's how you drum up support for foreign wars, and that's how you propagandize the notion that -- while single mothers are reprehensible, it's not because they're incapable but because they are an affront to God -- single fathers are a logical impossibility. The plot was stamped out with a cookie-cutter: Matt manages to raise Maddy into whatever people are accepting as a reasonably OK child these days. Matt avoids women like the plague because he lost his true love and he will never love again. The very first person with whom he is set up -- Lizzie (DeWanda Wise) -- lights a spark. And why wouldn't she? She's young. She's gorgeous. She's funny. She has a cool job. And Maddy likes her, after only the minimal hesitation required by movies like this. But Matt is a conflicted dude and Maddy is nothing if not deeply aware of how to manipulate her emotionally stunted father, so she gets him to leave her with her grandmothers ... ah who cares? He's made to choose between an incredible job opportunity or getting his daughter back to live with him, and also ends up with Lizzy. Also, he gets the job anyway, so God is good, and the universe rewards those who choose wisely. The end. I took away a star because it was only about half a movie. It became so clichéd and filled with unappealing characters, like the mother-in-law, that I was distracted from how good Kevin Hart is at these kinds of roles. Abgang mit Stil (Going in Style) (2017) -- "7/10" Joe (Michael Caine), Willie (Morgan Freeman), and Albert (Alan Arkin) are old and busted. They're living out their last days in Brooklyn. This is fine. They're fine with it, that is, until Joe learns that the bank has raised his variable-rate mortgage payments [3] and will take away the home where he lives with his daughter and granddaughter. Nearly simultaneously, he is a bystander during a robbery of that selfsame bank, exchanging a few friendly words with one of the robbers, where the robber sympathizes with his plight. "It is a culture's duty to take care of it's elderly." Things get even tighter when, in classic U.S-American fashion, the company for which they'd all worked, and which manages their pension fund, announces plans to finally close out all operations in the U.S., oh, and, also, incidentally, the money in the pension fund is all gone. And it's gone. [4] Just like that. The saddest part of this is that this is not an unbelievable plot point, it's just how things work in the U.S. Large corporations can just up and legally empty out the saving accounts of their employees and keep it for their more highly paid executives. This is just how things work there. It happened to an uncle of mine. Joe decides that he's going to rob a bank. How hard could it be? Willie and Albert are appalled at first, but they slowly come around. Willie needs a kidney transplant, so what does he have to lose? And Albert is lost without his pension, so it's only upside for him: if they get arrested, at least he has a bed and three square meals per day. They try their hand at some shoplifting at a local grocery store and they are not good at it. They get some help from Joe's former son-in-law Peter (Peter Serafinowicz) and a guy he knows, Jesús Garcia (John Ortiz). They set up an elaborate plan whereby they all are all observed -- and filmed -- working at a carnival put on my their retirement home, while they rob a bank. The robbery goes relatively smoothly -- with only Willie slightly revealing himself when the mask suffocates him -- and they're off and back at the carnival to put in another appearance for the cameras. The only witness the police can get is the deeply addled Milton Kupchak (Christopher Lloyd), who is great. They get away with $2.3M but the FBI is hot on their tails, in the form of agent Hamer (Matt Dillon). He can't make the case stick because the only witness at the bank was a little girl who saw Willie's face but he was nice to her, so she buttons up. Hamer catches thinks he's caught Joe red-handed in a diner. I mean, he kind of had. Joe was getting a puppy from Jesús, who had not only trained him and helped him on the robbery, but was also the original bank robber with whom Joe had spoken at the start of the film. 🤯 Anyway, Hamer goes away empty-handed, presumably forever. You know, like the FBI does when millions of dollars have been stolen from corporations by people who aren't already millionaires. 🫠 What else happens? Oh, let's see: they get away with it, distributing the money in a satisfying and moral manner, Albert donates a kidney to Willie, Anne (Ann-Margret) marries the cantankerous Albert, and the movie ends on their wedding, where the old farts have gotten a new lease on life. You know, because they have money now and aren't dying in destitution. I gave it an extra star because the heist was quite a lot of fun, and the cast is really, really good. I watched it in German. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] These are notes for me to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. The amount of text is not proportional to my enjoyment. I might write less because I didn't get around to it when it was fresh in my mind. I rate the film based on how well it suited me personally for the genre, my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. Links are to "my IMDb ratings" [1] You don't know what I mean? I mean that, for a while, too many comediennes were simply following the filthy lead of lowbrow male comedians who could not stop talking about blowjobs for half of their acts by following suit and supposedly "getting revenge" by talking about how their vaginas smelled so bad that seagulls flew away from it but that they made their boyfriends go down on them anyway, so hahahahahahaha. It was not a good phase. These were good comediennes -- Ali Wong and Iliza Shlesinger come to mind -- and the rest of their acts were hilarious but there were often a few minutes where you just cringed. I've not seen it so much anymore. [1] The movie takes a few seconds to point out that it was the exact same adviser who was telling him that his mortgage is about to make him go tits-up who was, just a few years ago, enthusiastically telling him to refinance with this variable-rate mortgage because what could possibly go wrong? [1] [media] ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5708 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5708 Sat, 03 Jan 2026 21:33:45 +0100 -- "6/10" 2. "Letterkenny S04--S11 (2017--2023)" <#Letterkenny> -- "7/10" 3. "High Plains Drifter (1973)" <#Plains> -- "6/10" 4. "Hercules (2014)" <#Hercules> -- "5/10" 5. "The Lost Prince (Il Principe Dimenticato / Le Prince oublié) (2020)" <#Principe> -- "7/10" 6. "Zombieland: Double Tap (2019)" <#Zombieland> -- "7/10" 7. "Mystic River (2003)" <#Mystic> -- "8/10" 8. "The Red Shoes (1948)" <#RedShoes> -- "8/10" 9. "A Winter's Tale (2014)" <#WintersTale> -- "6/10" 10. "Space Between Stars (2018)" <#SpaceBetweenStars> -- "8/10" Resident Evil: Extinction (2007) -- "6/10" I "watched and reviewed this movie in 2014." The review stands. I would like to note that any movie that starts with a naked Milla Jovovich, waking up in a luxury shower with a very strategically draped cloth over her has got my attention. It was on in German this time, as well. Letterkenny S04--S11 (2017--2023) -- "7/10" I had originally stopped watching "this show at season 3" at the beginning of 2023. Two years later, the rest of the seasons have shown up on Netflix. While I didn't consider it worth my while spending either time or money to "obtain" the other seasons, I'm not above giving it another shot when it's part of a streaming service to which I already subscribe. As I noted in the other review, this is the story of a rural community in Ontario called Letterkenny. The town is populated by hicks, skids, and hockey players. On the res are the indigenous peoples; to the north are the degens. * There’s Wayne (Jared Keeso), his sister Katy (Michelle Mylett), his best friend Daryl (Nathan Dales), and Dan (K. Trevor Wilson), who work on a farm together. We never see where Daryl or Dan live -- not once. * There’s a local hockey team, where Reilly (Dylan Playfair) and Jonesy (Andrew Herr) play. * There’s a group of on-again/off-again meth-heads (skids), led by Stewart (Tyler Johnston) and Roald (Evan Stern). * There are a handful of other bit players, like * bartender and local hottie Bonnie McMurray (Kamilla Kowal), her moronic and mumble-mouthed father McMurray (Dan Petronijevic), and his wife Mrs. McMurray (Melanie Scrofano), * reservation hottie Tanis (Kaniehtiio Horn) * scrapper Joint Boy (Joel Gagne), other scrapper Tyson (Jay Bertin), * the hockey coach Coach (Mark Forward), * and local preacher Glen (Jacob Tierney). * At some point, two gay guys showed up as counterpoints to Jonesy and Reilly, named Dax (Gregory Waters) and Ron (James Daly), who are pretty great, actually. * And then there's lascivious and unutterably horny Gail (Lisa Codrington) and her on-again, off-again auctioneer boyfriend Jim Dickens (Alex McCooeye). * Very occasionally, the Mennonites show up: Noah Dyck (Jonathan Torrens) and his wife Anita Dyck (Sarah Wayne Callies) and their daughters Charity (Cora Eckert), Chastity (Olivia Colilli), and Lovina Dyck (Brooke Bruce). The shows have an interesting structure, which I think explains how this series survived eleven seasons. There are long introductions with a lot of call-and-response, a lot of rote playing of roles. I'm reminded of highly structured plays like Japan's "Noh" , which is also "highly codified and regulated". There are things that are fixed in the firmament, like smokin' darts, drinkin' brews, chorin', and being an upstanding member of the community rather than a "degen". Wayne is the toughest guy in Letterkenny and has to occasionally prove it. The regular rumbles and fights are shot in slow-motion, accompanied by great music, and also have an unalterable structure. They are often quite long, which is not just fine, but great, being delivered with no unnecessary dialogue, playing out like music videos. The one at the end of S06E02 was sublime, to be honest. The one at the end of S06E05 -- 100 shots of beer in 100 minutes -- was great, too. That was the show where they said "cunt" about 50 times. It was unsettling but not unwarranted, given the plot. S07E06 was a highlight of that season, with some great montages and a great song in there. S07E7 was pretty great, too. So much tension and a ludicrous amount of innuendo at the Valentine's Day speed-dating event in the church. From S08E02: "If you bend, you'll break. "If you stand for nothing, you'll fall for anything." From "Season 8, Episode 3 - The Rippers" , a long introductory discussion about an unusual yule tradition. it's very long but it's also perhaps a perfect microcosm of this show. Somewhere in the middle I've highlighted the actual punchline, which is "real men finish what they started, Dary," which is, like, the thesis of the whole series, but also very funny considering that they're talking about masturbating an inordinate and unhealthy amount. "Dary: I was reading about this thing called beat your dick December. Wayne: Beat your dick December? Dan: What's the rumpus grumpus? Dary: Well, you look at the calendar, and if it's like the first, second or the third, that's how many times per day you need to mix a batch. Dan: So, on the 20th of December, you got to mix 20 separate batches? Dary: You got'er pontiac. Wayne: There's 30 days hath September, June and November. All rest, 31, so... Dan: So, on the 31st, you'd have to batch 31 times? Dary: You heard it here first. Dan: How's he gonna fuck that pig? Dary: Well... From the 1st to the 5th, you're having a good time. And even up until the 10th. The 12th, you're starting to fade.And by the 15th, you're definitely not full bars. Dan: Oh, I don't think I could continue past the 15th. Dary: Yeah, me neither. Wayne? Wayne: ... ... Yeah. Dary: You're saying you could batch 15 times on the 15th despite the fact that you batched 14 times the day before, 13 times the day before that and so on and so forth back to one? Wayne: ... ... Yeah. Dary: Could, could you do 20? Wayne: ... ... Yeah. ... Stay hydrated. ... What say we pick up the conversation on the 25th? Dan: Oh, yeah, the 25th. Christmas Day. Dary: Please explain, Wayne. Wayne: Well this, like everything, starts with diet. Dan: What's on the menu? Dary: Oh, you'd want foods that boost your testosterone, likely. Dan: Judging by biceps over there, I think that's already on the menu, likely. Wayne: Oatmeal, tuna, red meat, and poultry. Remember when I said stay hydrated? Dan: A person should always stay hydrated, Dary. Dary: How would you maneuver around your family? Dan: Yeah. Nieces and nephews. Wayne: You wouldn't. Dary: I really think you should, Wayne. Wayne: You're goin' away for Christmas. Dary: No, uh, Dan: Destination Christmas? There has to be an alternative. Wayne: There's no alternative. Dary: What about presents? Wayne: Real men finish what they started, Dary. Dan: He's right. Wayne: So, now, the critical component in all this, I think, is sleep. Dary: I hadn't even thought of that. Wayne: Well, you've hammered on it 25 times in 24 calendar hours. Dary: And, the day before, you've hammered on it 24 times in 24 calendar hours. And so on and so forth. Back to one. Dan: Yeah, you'd need a good night's sleep. Wayne: Oh, some nappin' in there for sure. Dary: Yeah, you'd be pretty worn out from all that Christmas Eve hustle and bustle. Wayne: So, I would suggest getting us all 12 hours of sleep to rest and replenish, then wake up, hammer on it twice an hour for the next 12 hours to meet your quota. Dan: Twenty-four times in 12 hours is still 1 shy of your Christmas Day quota? Wayne: I know. Dan: So, when'r you gonna squeeze out your 25th squeezers? Dary: Dealer's choice really. Wayne: No. Dary: No? Wayne: Not a single 12 hour effort. It's too many variables in a window that small. Too much uncertainty. Dary: You're saying you'd use the full 24 hours? Wayne: Yeah. Yeah, we're on military time now. Dary: When do you start? Wayne: Zero dark. Dary: But that's when Santa comes. Dan: And then? Wayne: Zero dark thirty. Dan: So, you'd hammer out the first two in the first hour you're awakes? Wayne: Can confirm. Dan: And then what? Dary: Once an hour for the remaining 23 hours? Wayne: You bet. Dan: Holds water. Wayne: Stay hydrated. All that you wanna do is you wanna set your alarm to wake you up every hour on the hour. And the program is, you wake up, hammer on it, sleep, wake up, then you'd hammer on it, then you'd sleep. Dary: And so on and so forth? Dan: Well, some snackin' in there for sure. Wayne: Yeah, handful of trail mix. Wayne: You've hammered out your first two at zero dark and zero dark thirty. Could even back to back those fellas if you're feeling good out of the gate. And stay hydrated, of course. Dan: That's some snackin' in there for sure. Need some snacks. Dary: You'd think you'd wanna do it standing up so your muscles don't atrophy. Dan: I think if anything, they'd hypertrophy. Wayne: I think so too. Dary: Would you alternate hands? Dan: Oh, you'd have to. Wayne: 25 one-arm squeezers sounds like a lot of unnecessary strain on the heart. Dan: Yeah, you'd definitely need a helping hand from the other guy. Dary: And you'd stick with that program till the 31st? Wayne: Yup. Wake up. Hammer on it. Snack. Nap. Wake up. I'd need to hammer on it. Snack and nap. Dary: And so on and so forth? Wayne: Rinse and repeat. Dary: Have you considered performance enhancers? Wayne: The fact you'd even present that says a lot about ya, good buddy. Dan: You could just as easily call it antisocial December. Dary: Wayne? Wayne: Dary. Dary: Could you make it to 31? Wayne: Oh, if I've executed Christmas, for a total of... Ballpark 325 squeezers in 1 fiscal month... Dan: You're a man on fire. Wayne: It's like I'm indestructible by both scientific and pop-culture standards. Tank-like momentum. Dary: So? Wayne: ...Yeah." S09E02 taught me the anatomy of "Bartholin's Gland" , which I'd never heard of before. They "are homologous to bulbourethral glands in males". Well, well, well. Other than that, season nine is utterly forgettable. They're mostly just phoning it in, and it's pretty thin. Like all of the ladies. 😳 I persevered and found a gem in S10E02, where they're doing a sort of "dozens" (which they do a lot) about features of the "biggest hicks house", "There was a toddler drinking from a two-liter bottle of cream soda, wearing a onesie that said 'Sex instructor; first lesson's free.'" "Your second cousin's garage has four ski-doos in it, none of which is operational, yet they park the cars on the front lawn." S10E04 is called "Prostate". Darry, Wayne, Coach, and Tyson are at the new town doctor's office, where they have to get a top-to-bottom physical in order to open a file. This includes, naturally, a quick prostate exam. They spend endless time discussing in roundabout ways and hypothesizing about the potential side-effects, then run away Katie corrals Darry and Wayne and sends them back, with their proverbial tails between their legs. At the office, they are steeling themselves for their exams when Tannis and a friend walk in. "Why are you all here?" They eventually admit it, but Tannis and co. don't know what a prostate is. When they find out that the exam entails a single finger partway up the bum for a few seconds, they are forced to explain to the gentlemen what a pap smear is. The boys see the light and suck it up. Season 11 was chock-full of Glen and that was pretty good. The other parts ranged from pretty uneven to barely watchable. In the final episode E7, Glen appears as a fireworks expert, there to celebrate Victoria Day weekend. The skids had shown up with illegal fireworks, which totally trumped Reilly and Jonesy's commercially bought fireworks. Glen shows up in a fireproof beekeeper's outfit, pulling a giant cart full of professional battery fireworks, and oozing a confidence he'd not heretofore had. That was pretty great. Season 12 was pretty much phoned-in, with Katie going so hard against the degens that she sounded quite racist. The dog whistles were hard to ignore. The cast was winding things down, though, so there were going to be a few misses. The final episode E6 started off great with a classic discussion on Wayne's back porch about a stork's ability to carry a baby. it was really nicely written, wonderfully acted, and evocative of the style of the show, neatly wrapping things up in the finale. Kudos. "Dary: Firstly, no Stork has carried a baby anywhere. And secondly, Storks aren’t even native to this area. Dan: What if they calls it the Blue Heron's Reports? Dary: Neither of those birds have carried babies anywhere. Stop being cute, just gimme the news. Dary: What? Wayne: Hmm? Dary: Why are you lookin’ at me so long for? Wayne: ‘Cause I think… what you’ve just said… is absurd. Dary: So a baby is about 10 pound. Wayne: If it’s a big fuckin’ fat one! Dary: I was just ballparkin’ it. Wayne: Pretty big fat fuckin’ ballpark! Dary: Okay so what if it’s an 8-pound baby? Who’s gonna teach that stork to carry the baby, Wayne? You? Wayne: I think it’s pretty obvious. Dary: You think? Dan: I do toos. Dary: Alright. Have at ‘er. Wayne: A falconer. Dary: A falconer? Wayne: Yeah. One who practices falconing. Dary: Practices what? Wayne: Falconry. Dan: Falconing is the acts of calling over a birds, Darys. Dary: So if you call over any bird it’s called falconing? Dan: Mm-hmm. Dary: What about if it’s a penguin? Wayne: You could still falcon it. Dan: Waynes, is maybes yous confusing storks’s with pelicans? Dary: What if it’s a turkey? Wayne: Well, turkeys get falconed all the time. Dary: Really? Wayne: There’s probably someone out there falconing one right now. Dan: Did yous knows there’s a birds called the Blue-Footed Boobys? Dary: You’d need two dozen storks to get the baby airborne. Plus, you’d need some crazy contraption so you could harness the thrust of 24 storks. Dan: You need science on your side. Dary: You’d have to have a good relationship with science. Dan: And getting 24 birds to cooperate towards a common goal? In today’s social-political climate? Huh. Dary: Forget it. Wayne: Peregrine falcon. Or Pere-grin. Fastest traveler of any bird of prey. Top speed of about 240 mile ‘n hour. Dan: Works out to about 390s kilometers per hours, gives or takes. Dary: Wow. That’s fast. Dan: Fastest hunters on planet earths. Wayne: So okay, Dary, Dary, okay… Falconers falconing a Pere-grin. Dan: Only elite falconers fucks with Peregrines. Wayne: The falconer puts his arm out, okay? Goes… (whistles) Means it’s time for the bird to come over. Now that cock sucker’s dartin’ around thousands of feet in the air currentleh. Dan: I’m thinking about 3500 feets. Wayne: That’s exactly what I was thinking, about 3500. Now he’s got all sort of gopher, ground hog and mouses below he could bomb down on at any time, 240 mile ‘n hour. Dan: Eats whats he wants whens he wants. Wayne: But despite all that choice below, Dary. Dan: World’s his oysters. Wayne: Unlimited options. For snacks. Dan: Shootin’ fish in a barrels. Wayne: The Peregrine sees the falconers arm out. Hears… (whistles) And rather than pillaging the land, his land, the world’s fastest hunter says, “Mm-mm… I’m going to land on that nut sack's arm instead.” For what? A peanit. Dan: Have to at least bes a cashews. Wayne: He’d have all sorta nuts. Dary: Wow. Falconers are powerful. Wayne: A falconer could get the Peregrine to pull its dick out of his sweetie mid-slide. But you don’t think it could get a Stork to carry a baby? Dan: He’s got you there, Darys." High Plains Drifter (1973) -- "6/10" Clint Eastwood directed and starred as The Stranger who rides into the town of Lago -- situation, unsurprisingly, by a lake -- where three hired thugs try to kill him. He dispatches them with so little effort that doesn't even seem to have noticed he did it. He continues to investigate the town. Young Callie Travers (Mariana Hill) accosts him, somewhat insultingly, somewhat flirtatiously. He drags her to a barn and rapes her. As one would expect of an Eastwood movie from the 70s, she resists for a few seconds and then leans into it. She does try to kill him in a bathtub the next day but misses. Everyone kind of laughs about it. This is an auspicious start. So the town of Lago has a gold mine, from which the people were profiting well, until their marshal discovered that their gold mine is actually on government land, to which they don't have a title. Rather than let him derail this gravy train, the people of the town hired three guys to kill him with bullwhips, while they all stood by and watched. Kind of like they all just stood by while Callie was raped. Both scenes are tough to watch. The townspeople then betrayed the three thugs, having them sent to prison for trying to steal gold, which they'd not done. They had killed a federal law-enforcement officer, but they're not in prison for that. The three are understandably looking for revenge once they get out. They are terrible people but its totally understandable that they'd want revenge against the nearly equally terrible townspeople. The three idiots that the stranger killed had been hired to protect the town should those guys come back. Those guys are now gone, in a few puffs of gunsmoke, as it were, so the townspeople hire the stranger to protect them. He takes full advantage, charging them incredibly high prices and constantly taking more. He generously gifts stuff from one person to another, like ordering a round for the house. They can do nothing, of course. He trains some of them to defend themselves but they're nearly hopeless. At the same time, some of the townspeople keep planning to kill him as well? I guess they want to get rid of his cadging ass but then who would defend them from the trio of ex-cons? Anyway, Callie gets into bed with him -- willingly this time -- to lull him while others show up to kill him. It doesn't work at all and he kills a whole bunch of them. He then rapes Sarah (Verna Bloom), even though the movie tries to make it look like she acquiesced. They'd done the same for Callie in the first rape scene. It's a thing, I suppose. You know how women are. Always pretending that they don't want it when they secretly do. There's a weird side-plot where they build a fake town painted all red and rename the town to "Hell" but it's not very cohesive. It's kind of absurd. Like, literally absurdist. Meanwhile, the ex-cons have been released and are headed to LagoHell. They tear a swath through the poorly defended town (the stranger had since temporarily departed), burning several buildings, killing a lot of people, and collecting the remainder. At this point, the stranger returns and kills the ex-cons. The film intimates that the stranger was the avenging ghost of the marshal who'd been killed by the town, which is why he took his revenge not merely on those who'd done it, but also on those who'd paid to have it done. This is a classic but that's all it is. There is no reason to rate this movie any higher based on reputation. Hercules (2014) -- "5/10" The most amazing thing about this vehicle for Dwayne Johnson in the epnymous role is the quality of the supporting cast: Amphiaraus (Ian McShane), Autolycus (Rufus Sewell), Lord Cotys (John Hurt), and Ergenia (Rebecca Ferguson). The movie starts with a quick recap of the legend of Hercules, starting with his father Zeus's seeding his human mother, to his twelve labors, then to his having surrounded himself with a small cadre of other mercenaries who use his apparent support of the Gods to hire themselves out to various kings. One of the first battles is with a whole field of green-skinned dudes who are, at least, not CGI, and that's the only redeeming factor of this relatively long battle scene. Some of the stuff is so cheesy, with so many Marvel-style quasi-comic moments that just smirk their whole way through an otherwise bloody scene that could have been treated with some seriousness for the horrors of war. The next chapter is about Hercules's legend, how some people don't believe it -- in particular Sitacles (Peter Mullan) -- but he gets put in his place for a bit, while the rest of the remaining troops spend a long montage getting trained to be actual troops by the mercenary band. Once that's all wrapped up, they're on the march again, this time to meet an army led by centaurs. There's another protracted battle scene, in which the CGI backgrounds are more obvious but the stunts are still almost certainly real. Hercules and his crew help the king to victory but the conquered general Arius (Isaac Andrews) reveals that Hercules has been fooled into fighting to help a king conquer new lands, and to enslave an entire neighboring population. The king had lied to them about the other tribe being terrorists. OMG where have I heard this before? Anyway, they get paid and are told to GTFO when they complain that they've been hoodwinked. They don't GTFO and the king and his men take them all prisoner. The king and his side are revealed as even more evil -- just one mask-off statement after another -- and somehow in possession of a huge underground prison with Cerbebus as a guard dog run by King Eurystheus (Joseph Fiennes). More and more details emerge about Hercules's dead family, which people keep accusing him of having killed. This is really the scene where The Rock can show off his oily muscles and work his hammy acting chops. Also, the King is totally harshing on his daughter Ergenia, who Hercules is kind of a little in love with. Amphiaraus exhorts Hercules to remember who he is so that he can save Ergenia from execution. Hercules pops his chains and saves her. He has remembered who he is. They all get free. Some kings fall. Some mercs fall. Lots of soldiers die, many in fire. A big statue falls. Hercules does a Godly thing and convinces the opposing army that he's something special. It's a lot. I watched it in German. The Lost Prince (Il Principe Dimenticato / Le Prince oublié) (2020) -- "7/10" This is the story of widower Djibi (Omar Sy) who tells his daughter elaborate good-night stories. At least half of the film takes place in this fantasy land, initially with him in the leading role but, increasingly, with his role being shunted to the side in favor of a new prince charming, who mirrors the young man who's taken his young daughter's fancy in the real world. It's a kid's movie. It was good practice. The original is in French, but we watched it in Italian with Italian subtitles, so Kath could join in. Zombieland: Double Tap (2019) -- "7/10" The crew from the first film is back: Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson), Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg), Wichita (Emma Stone), and Little Rock (Abigail Breslin). They are joined by Madison (Zoey Deutsch) for their road trip. Madison is shockingly dumb and I kept waiting for the other shoe to drop, in which it is revealed that she's been shamming and has a secret, evil, and wickedly intelligent plan to rob them and take their weapons. Alas, no. She's just dumb. There is no irony or subterfuge. Meanwhile Little Rock road-trips with Berkeley (Avan Jogia), who's nearly just as dumb, although he is totally scamming -- but to get into Little Rock's pants, not to steal anything. Near Graceland, the crew also meets Nevada (Rosario Dawson) -- though only briefly -- Albuquerque (Luke Wilson) and Flagstaff (Thomas Middleditch). The new, quicker, and far more deadly zombies -- dubbed the T-800s -- quickly dispatch the latter two. Nevada would show up again later. They continue to Babylon, the peace-loving and weapons-free compound where Little Rock and Berkeley have fetched up. Madison is back, after having briefly been suspected of being a zombie ... look, whatever, she's back, and being her usual clever self. It being super-boring in Babylon, and everyone else seeming happy, Tallahassee strikes off on his own. He doesn't get far before he sees a giant horde of T-800s heading toward Babylon, drawn to their stupid fireworks. He turns right around to rescue the commune. They try to burn the zombies with biodiesel but they only get a few of them. It doesn't work as planned. They're nearly overwhelmed when Nevada returns in her monster truck and rescues everyone, heading into the compound. They're safe for now but ... the zombies are knocking. So they let them in, they let all the way up the tower, and then funnel their dumb asses off the roof. All they needed was bait -- and Tallahassee volunteered. He jumps and holds onto a crane hook to avoid the torrent of plummeting zombies. All's well that ends well: Wichita accepts the proposal that Columbus had made weeks ago, Madison and Berkeley combine as a couple of create a veritable black hole of stupidity, and Nevada cures Tallahassee of his loner syndrome. This is a fun cast filled with enough good actors that they can easily carry the reasonably coherent script to its coherent conclusion. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004) -- "8/10" Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe) is back in school and all the news is that Sirius Black (Gary Oldman) has escaped from Azkaban. Azkaban is a prison guarded by dementors, which are horrific, literally soul-sucking creatures. It is absolutely unclear how such creatures could be used in any prison system purporting to be moral, but the morality of the Harry Potter universe was always so black and white that there is plenty of room for "prisoners who are in prison deserve to suffer," as a leitmotif. So what else happens in this one? We are introduced early to the dementors when they attack Harry in a park in muggle world. That should be a no-no, but apparently no-one can control the damned things. Then they attack Harry in the train on the way to Hogwarts. It's kind of weird how the wizarding world doesn't really have any way of dealing with these kinds of blatant transgressions of societal rules. They just kind of shrug and accept that the world is Hobbsian AF. Harry gets the Marauder's Map, which is pretty neat. He meets Professor Lupin (David Thewlis), who is, unsurprisingly, a werewolf. I mean, it's right in his name. With Sirius Black having broken out of Azkaban, everyone is terrified because everyone knows that he's a terrible terrorist who, though he was never associated with Voldemort, is really just as bad, if you don't think about it very much and just do what you're told by the Ministry of Magic, Cornelius Fudge (Robert Hardy), and a more-than-willing wizarding press. The dementors attack Harry again at the Quidditch match -- this is three times already! -- and he barely survives. I'm just kidding. He's in the hospital and quickly fit as a fiddle. His broomstick has been destroyed, though. Hermione (Emma Watson) gets the time-travel thingamajig that would allow them to save the hippogriff Buckbeak and also to thwart the dementors one last time as they nearly sucked both Harry's and Sirius's souls out of them. But I'm getting a bit ahead of myself. Oh, yeah, Sirius turns out to be a good guy, one of Harry's father James's (Adrian Rawlins) old chums, along with Lupin and then Ron's (Rupert Grint) rat Scabbers, who turns out to have been Peter Pettigrew (Timothy Spall) all along. Snape is also in the mix, being revealed as the boy who was never allowed into that in-group. They taunted, mocked, and tortured him mercilessly. Phew, that was a lot. It's easier to grasp in the books. Harry uses a Patronus charm along with Hermione's time-traveling to save himself from the dementors the fourth time that they attack him, which is kind of cool. Sirius Black escapes on the hippogriff, seemingly none the worse for wear psychologically for having been tortured for a decade by dementors. He is rich AF so he sends Harry a replacement broomstick. It's the best one that money can buy, seriously chipping away at even the most ardent fan's ability to consider Harry Potter a poor-boy underdog. I watched it in German. Mystic River (2003) -- "8/10" We meet three young boys playing in the street somewhere near or in Boston. They are poor. A car pulls up, with a man emerging to yell at them and then browbeat one of them (Dave) into getting into the car, so that they can take him to his mom and tell her what a horrible kid he is. It's odd and your whole self is screaming to not get into the car. It ends up being exactly what you think it is: the other passenger is a priest and the two guys rape the shit out of Dave until he manages to escape after four days. Cut to the modern day, decades later, when Dave Boyle (Tim Robbins), Sean Devine (Kevin Bacon), and Jimmy Markum (Sean Penn) are still living in and around the same neighborhood. We meet everyone, including Dave's wife Celeste (Marcia Gay Harden), Jimmy's wife (Laura Linney) and his daughter Katie (Emmy Rossum). Katie is soon kidnapped and murdered, with Sean investigating the case with his partner Whitey Powers (Laurence Fishburne) [2]. Dave behaves erratically, mostly because he still has wicked PTSD from his kidnapping 40 years earlier, but Dave's wife Celeste starts to suspect that he killed Katie. He is increasingly alienating, frightening, and mentally ill, talking in riddles, so she ends up confiding to Jimmy that she thinks that her husband Dave had killed Katie. This is a really, really bad idea, as Jimmy is about to go judge, jury, and executioner on him. Jimmy and his evil crew round up Dave, trying to get him drunk -- they get him a little drunk, but not as drunk as they'd wanted him to be -- and then take him out by the Mystic River. Dave and Jimmy go back and forth, with Dave pleading that he'd not killed Katie that night but had instead caught a child-molester in the act in a car, and had ended up killing him accidentally-on-purpose. Jimmy ain't buying it and squeezes a confession out of Dave. Anyone sober and sane could see that Dave is not mentally well. Jimmy pops him and they throw his body into the river. It turns out that Katie's boyfriend Brendan's (Tom Guiry) mute, younger brother Silent Ray (Spencer Treat Clark) and his friend John (Andrew Mackin) had stolen the gun and killed Katie because she was going to go to Las Vegas with their brother. And the younger brother didn't want his brother to move away. So they killed Katie. The younger brother was not well. John's about to cap Brendan to protect Ray, who Brendan had been beating the ever-loving shit out of, when Sean and Whitey (the cops) show up to defuse the situation. The next morning, and we find Jimmy after a whole night of drinking, having seemingly emptied a whole quart of Jack Daniels by himself. He had, after all, just killed a man, a lifelong friend. His daughter didn't come back because of it. He's sitting on the curb in front of his house when Sean rolls up. Sean's also gotten no sleep, having spent the night processing the young perps. Sean tells Jimmy that they caught the guys who had killed Katie. It was a prank gone wrong. Sean asks him if he's seen Dave, because he's wanted for questioning in connection with the death of a child molester, whose body had just been found. Jimmy stares at Sean. Jimmy thanks Sean for having found Katie's killer. Sean knows. But he's never going to be able to prove it. Jimmy sways his drunken ass down the street, his opened, half-length leather coat flapping, heading home to his wife Annabeth (Laura Linney), to whom he confesses everything. She supports him 100%, telling him what a strong man, what a strong provider he is. This is way beyond enabling. She is arguably more evil than he is. At a local parade soon after, Jimmy, wearing dark sunglasses, stands in the sun with Annabeth at his side. Sean spies him from the other side of the street. He points a finger-gun at him. Jimmy ignores it. The Red Shoes (1948) -- "8/10" This movie tells the story of Boris Lermontov (Anton Walbrook), who runs an international ballet company, which the talented Victoria Page (Moira Shearer) joins. At the same time, Julian Craster (Marius Goring) joins the troupe as well, to take over the composing of original pieces, as well as conducting the orchestra. There are a lot of raging egos, including the ballet director Grischa Ljubov (Léonide Massine) as well as the lead male dancer Ivan Boleslawsky (Robert Helpmann). The film is of its time. It is lushly filmed, with a wonderful nearly completely diagetic score. The colors are lovely; the sets are intricate. The plot is vaguely -- and occasionally overtly -- misogynistic, but that probably describes what it was like to be in a ballet troupe, and probably still is, nearly eighty years later. There are some interesting camera angles and it doesn't feel nearly as dated as you'd expect for a film this old. "Boris Lermontov:: Why do you want to dance? [Vicky thinks for a short while] Victoria Page:: Why do you want to live? [Lermontov is suprised at the answer] Boris Lermontov:: Well I don't know exactly why, er, but I must. Victoria Page:: That's my answer too." "Boris Lermontov: Come with me. Victoria Page: Where to? Boris Lermontov: We are going to have a little talk. Victoria Page: But I don't think I want to talk. Boris Lermontov: Don't you worry. I'll do the talking." The titular ballet takes up most of the middle half of the movie and has an incredible number of painted backdrops, fronted by complicated sets. [image][image][image][image][image] After Victoria and Craster's success, they fall in love, traveling together. Lermontov is jealous and drives Craster out of the company. This causes an uproar in the company because they believe that Craster is a genius and can't figure out why he would be let go. Victoria confronts Lermontov, who obstinately fails to profess his love for her, choosing instead to threaten her career, then cajoing her with fame, if only she would leave Craster. She instead marries Craster and leaves the company as well. Lermontov eventually relents and releases her from her contract, so that she can dance elsewhere. She can dance in anything but The Red Shoes, which belongs to him (even though Craster wrote it all by himself). Lermontov is not covering himself in glory here. Watching an old movie like this really reminds you that film-making is an art form that was good before we invented all of this bloody technology. There's one point where we see Lermontov's company dancing, with Irina Boronskaja (Ludmilla Tchérina) now in the lead role. The scene fades into a long shot of Venice, with playbills from around Europe fading in, in a circle around the scene, before fading out. What more do you need? It took two seconds to convey that the company played to success all across Europe before going to the next scene. [image] The movie does this a lot, showing various props as significant, like a script, or the red shoes. Moira Shearer is utterly believable as a lithe ballerina. She's exquisite, the way she carries herself at all times. The other two dancers -- Massine and Helpmann -- are also incredible, coiled sprints with only cursorily bound by gravity. Lermontov finally comes around and catches a train to beg Victoria Page to dance the Red Shoes ballet for his company again. She agrees. Craster doesn't know this. He learns of it on the opening night of his own ballet. He leaves, begging off that he's taken ill, but he crosses town to confront Vicky at Lermontov's theater, where they fight over her like a dog in court, with Lermontov finally winning out, and Craster leaving her because he needs her to love only him, and not dancing. Lermontov is triumphant, with Vicky in a despondent daze, though seemingly willing to dance for him that night. She does not. Instead, she runs from the building in her red shoes, heading for a stone balcony overlooking the train tracks, where she throws herself to her death. Craster sees her do this. Lermontov learns of it later, appearing before his theater to announce her inability to dance that night, nor any other night, ever. They proceed with the ballet, but without Vicky or, indeed anyone else in the role. The spotlight highlights an empty stage, with the other dancers twirling around her absence. It's haunting and effective. Back in the street, a doctor steps back from Vicky's nearly lifeless body to say "pas d'espoir [no hope]". With her last breath, she asks Craster to take off the red shoes. I had my doubts at the beginning but this was a really good movie. The original story was by "Hans Christian Andersen" . The ballet seemed to roughly follow the brutal plot, as shown in a few citations below. "And Karen could not help dancing a step or two, and when she began her feet continued to dance; it was just as though the shoes had power over them. She danced round the church corner, she could not leave off; the coachman was obliged to run after and catch hold of her, and he lifted her in the carriage, but her feet continued to dance so that she trod on the old lady dreadfully. At length she took the shoes off, and then her legs had peace." ""Don't strike my head off!" said Karen. "Then I can't repent of my sins! But strike off my feet in the red shoes!" "And then she confessed her entire sin, and the executioner struck off her feet with the red shoes, but the shoes danced away with the little feet across the field into the deep wood. "And he carved out little wooden feet for her, and crutches, taught her the psalm criminals always sing; and she kissed the hand which had wielded the axe, and went over the heath." A Winter's Tale (2014) -- "6/10" I had to ding this movie for a more-than-occasionally cloying soundtrack, lazy editing with a ton of mid-range-focus shots in front of obviously CGI scenery -- even where there was no reason not to use real scenery -- but it's also got a few good performances by Pearly Soames (Russell Crowe) and Peter Lake (Colin Farrell). There were a few other noteworthy actors like Kevin Corrigan as Pearly's right-hand man Romeo Tan, who I like but who didn't do much and William Hurt as Isaac Penn, father to Peter's great love Beverly (Jessica Brown Findlay), who was fine but a bit over-the-top for my tastes. Graham Greene had too short a role as Peter's adoptive father Humpstone John. Jennifer Connelly shows up in the last third as Virginia Gamely. So this is a love story that takes place in a world of angels and demons. Pearly is an actual demon rather than a demonic person, who has regular meetings with Lucifer (Will Smith). Peter is not a magical being but he does team up with a magical white horse in what seems to be a world of magic, of which most people are aware but in which most don't partake, if that makes sense. Dealing with magic is something that rich people do. The poor just suffer and don't have access to it. Anyway, the forces of good -- or whatever -- have decided that Peter's mission needs supporting, so he gets a white horse, which is the incarnation of some angel but, I mean, c'mon, like, who cares? He breaks in to the home of Issac Penn and ends up meeting his daughter Beverly, who has tuberculosis that no-one seems to be afraid of contracting but OK, I'm not an expert. There is an end-of-the-second-act showdown between Pearly and Peter, where Peter sacrifices himself to save everyone else. He falls off of a bridge after five massive head-butts, disappearing beneath the swirling currents far below. He survives and wanders the city for a century with amnesia, searching always for the only thing that he "remembers", a woman with red hair. When he meets Virginia, he realizes that his fate all along had been to save her little daughter, who has cancer, is undergoing chemo, and wears a red scarf on her head. Pearly is none too pleased to hear that Peter has survived, challenging him to a mortal battle mano a mano. He loses, disappearing forever. Peter kisses the little girl right on the mouth to save her from cancer. Mission accomplished, he gets on the white horse and shoots to the stars. I am absolutely not kidding that this is the plot of the last third of the movie. I was hoping for more of a period piece with the charming Colin Farrell and ended up watching a ten-minute slugfest on ice. 🤷 Space Between Stars (2018) -- "8/10" This is an absolutely wonderfully animated short. There is no dialogue. It's only ten minutes long. It is about several adorable, soft, rounded, little aliens that try to enter an abandoned-looking space station that is defended by a hard-edged red droid. The adjectives are there to convey the mood, to indicate how the film wants the viewer to feel about the characters, and whom to nominate as protagonist. When the droid kills two of them, the others don't react at all, though. Which is ... odd. The droid continues to chase them through the partially ruined old ship, as they race toward what seems to be the core, where the ship's source of power seems to be. As they get close, they're in trouble. They're cornered. They're not going to make it. The larger one straight-up sacrifices the remaining two to "power up" and get the ball over the finish line, so to speak. It is only at the very end that we realize that we'd been rooting for the wrong side all along, that the ship was in ruins because these weren't the first cute little aliens to visit it. It is the droid that is defending its ship from a scourge of insatiable monsters bent on destroying the last remnants of the race of creatures that had created it. You can watch it here, [media] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] These are notes for me to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. The amount of text is not proportional to my enjoyment. I might write less because I didn't get around to it when it was fresh in my mind. I rate the film based on how well it suited me personally for the genre, my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. Links are to "my IMDb ratings" [1] I wonder whether naming a character played by Laurence Fishburne "Whitey" is some sort of shout-out to the deeply racist nature of the city of Boston. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5707 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5707 Sat, 03 Jan 2026 11:46:23 +0100 -- "4/10" 2. "Pacific Rim (2013)" <#Pacific> -- "9/10" 3. "Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald (2018)" <#fantastic> -- "6/10" 4. "Equalizer 3 (2023)" <#Equalizer3> -- "6/10" 5. "Police Academy 7: Mission to Moscow (1994)" <#Police> -- "3/10" 6. "Lethal Weapon 2 (1989)" <#Lethal> -- "8/10" 7. "A Series of Unfortunate Events (2004)" <#Lemony> -- "6/10" 8. "Talk to Me (2022)" <#Talk> -- "5/10" 9. "Equalizer 2 (2018)" <#Equalizer2> -- "6/10" 10. "Tremors: Shrieker Island (2020)" <#Tremors> -- "5/10" Fist Fight (2017) -- "4/10" I really like Charlie Day, whom I know from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, but this vehicle is not what he should be spending time on. He plays utterly hapless and gormless schoolteacher Andy Campbell, who's basically "bully meat" for everyone in his life. The only person who treats him nicely is fellow teacher Holly (Jillian Bell), who is otherwise obsessed with having sex with her hotter students. She's not exactly a role model, nor is her character particularly well fleshed-out. In fact, the prior description is pretty much all we get. Also, she does and loves meth. Just not at school. Anyway, Andy's wife (JoAnna Garcia Swisher) and daughter also dump on and manipulate him, treating him like a farm animal who gives them things. They don't seem to love him in any way, though they are willing to pretend to as long as he acquiesces to their whims. Principal Tyler (Dean Norris) is pretty much a self-absorbed asshole, fellow teacher Ms. Monet (Christina Hendricks) is a shallow psychotic, which is a pity because I remember her fondly from Mad Men ("season 1" , "seasons 5-7" ), security guard Mehar (Kumail Nanjiani) is a thin (metaphorically and literally) and embarrassing stereotype, Coach Crawford (Tracey Morgan) has a couple of good lines but is otherwise and typically wasted, and all of the students are terrible. Strickland (Ice Cube) is the best of a terrible bunch, which isn't saying much but I feel that he acted far better in this than in other of his vehicles. His scowling countenance worked well here. This movie was utterly terrible, though, with half-hearted lines and an utterly by-the-numbers plot that really did spend about 90 minutes on the consequences of a single teacher-fight at the end of a single day, while trying to tell some story about the lives of the teachers at the school, I guess? It was so thin. And the humor was so phoned-in. "Fack ju Göhte" was a goddamned masterpiece in comparison. At least that one had a few admirable characters, if only grudgingly so. The "Wikipedia" article describes the plot in excruciating detail. Strickland gets himself fired but Tyler is inept enough to make it look like it was Andy's fault, so Strickland challenges him to a fight after school. This drives manic behavior on the part of Andy, whose wife and daughter ratchet up the pressure for their own needs. The students take brutal advantage of everything in a Lord of the Flies-like atmosphere. They end up fighting, with Andy taking and dishing a tremendous amount of punishment in a manner so unrealistic that it reminded me of "Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice" , which was, coincidentally, also a giant piece of trash and a colossal waste of time. Pacific Rim (2013) -- "9/10" I "watched and reviewed this in 2013" . The review stands. Watching it over thirteen years later, I now recognize the leads better than I did then. Charlie Hunnam plays Jäger pilot Raleigh Becket, while Idris Elba plays his commanding officer and eventual fellow combatant Stacker Pentecost. I noted Ron Perlman as Hannibal Chau and Charlie Day as Dr. Newton Geiszler in the earlier review, but I didn't note that Burn Gorman played Geiszler's assistant Herman Gottlieb. The Kaiju / Jäger battles are spectacular. As I wrote the first time I saw it, "The visualization of gigantic robot versus gigantic monster is unbelievably good—unlike in the Transformers films, you can actually see what’s going on, you can feel the sheer weight and inertia of them. I can’t even imagine what this was like in the theater." Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald (2018) -- "6/10" I "watched and reviewed this in 2019" . I was probably a bit too generous with the rating; I would have given it a 6 at most, maybe even a 5 because it was just a bit too hollow. I watched it in German. Equalizer 3 (2023) -- "6/10" I had avoided these movies because I wasn't interested in watching Taken but with Denzel Washington. I had judged these incorrectly. The main character is much more interesting than the one in Liam Neeson's lumbering and vaguely racist series. I also ended up watching these in reverse order (3, 2, 1) but it didn't hinder my understanding of the movie at all. It's not that complicated. The film starts in Sicily, with most of the dialogue in Italian, even Robert McCall's (Denzel Washington), who we find deep in the basement of a mafia compound. The head of the family follows a trail of bodies to find him there, with a man to either side, pointing a pistol at his head. He escapes without a scratch, killing everyone else. Outside, the main boss's young son waits for him with a gun, having heard the ruckus inside. McCall can't shoot the boy, but the boy can shoot him. McCall escapes, quite grievously injured, taking the ferry back to the mainland but eventually passing out behind the wheel at the side of a country road. Local police officer Gio Bonucci (Eugenio Mastrandrea) finds him there, taking him to local doctor Enzo Arisio (Remo Girone), who patches him up and lets him convalesce at his apartment. McCall begins to know and fall in love with the village. He tips off CIA officer Emma Collins (Dakota Fanning) (who he knew from previous films, a fact of which I was completely unaware) to the cellar full of dead drug dealers in Sicily. The Camorra (crime syndicate) run drugs in the village, harassing everyone and making things much more miserable than they have to be. They kidnap Gio's family to force him to help them. They throw him a beating as well. McCall finally gets involved. He warns the field-office head of the Camorra Marco (Andrea Dodero) to leave the village. After the expected refusal, McCall kills him and everyone in his gang. Marco's brother Vincent, the head of Camorra operation, demands revenge, taking the whole village hostage, and threatening to kill Gio in a public square. McCall challenges him, with the villagers backing him up. Vincent retreats, for now. McCall takes the fight to Vincent that night, infiltrating his mansion, killing everyone inside, and finally finishing off Vincent with a poisonous overdose of his own drugs. He also uses some of the money he's recovered from the Camorra to pay back some people's pension funds, which had been robbed ... I guess this is the equalizing part? I dunno. The fighting stuff and inevitability of Robert McCall is pretty cool and well-played by Denzel. I liked that a bunch of it was in Italian. Police Academy 7: Mission to Moscow (1994) -- "3/10" Oh my God, this was absolutely awful. I only had it on in the background. I watched it in German. Tackleberry (David Graf), Jones (Michael Winslow), Callahan (Leslie Easterbrook), Lassard (George Gaynes), and Harris (G.W. Bailey) are all still doing this thing after seven movies in ten years. I could absolutely not believe that Russian Commandant Rakov was played by Christopher Lee and bad guy Constantine Konali was played by Ron Perlman. I guess they weren't doing so well back in 1994. I can't describe the plot because this thing was barely discernible as a movie. It had less plot than pornography. Lethal Weapon 2 (1989) -- "8/10" Martin Riggs (Mel Gibson) and Roger Murtaugh (Danny Glover) are back, roving the streets of Los Angeles, hunting drug dealers. They happen upon what appears to be a gold-smuggling ring. This puts them on the radar of the South African embassy, some of whose employees are running the Krugerrand-smuggling operation both for personal gain and to evade the sanctions that had been leveled against South Africa for its policy of Apartheid. With a lot of heat on them -- head goon Pieter Vorstedt (Derrick O'Connor) breaks into Murtaugh's house to rig his toilet with explosives -- the duo is reassigned to guarding a government witness, Leo Getz (Joe Pesci). Because Leo had (allegedly) done money-laundering for the South Africans, they learn more and more. Riggs, of course, can't leave it alone and continues to harass the embassy employees, but also trying romance with the lovely Rika van den Haas (Patsy Kensit), which works, unsurprisingly. She opposes the regime and apartheid. With the increased pressure on them, South African embassy head honcho Arjen Rudd (Joss Ackland) sends Pieter on a mission to assassinate LAPD. Just holy shit, he cuts a swath through them, just ruthlessly. Most of the people we saw betting in the office whether Riggs could get out of a straitjacket are now dead. (He won the bet because he can dislocate his own shoulder). Murtaugh only survives because he kills his two assassins with a nail gun, although others manage to kidnap Leo. They capture but do not kill Riggs because Pieter must first tell Riggs that he is not only going to kill his new lady love Rika but also that he had killed Riggs's wife, the death of whom had led to Riggs's completely reckless and nihilistic approach to life in both this film and the first one. It's heavy. Having destroyed Riggs psychologically, they tie him up -- like in a straitjacket, get it? Do you get how the bet before was foreshadowing for how he's going to escape? -- and throw him in the harbor. He settles to the bottom next to the already-dead and wide-eyed Rika. He's not psychologically beaten. He's enraged. They have awakened the dragon. They have sown the wind. Everyone -- his wife, Rika, his colleagues -- is dead and Riggs will be their avenging angel of death. Murtaugh weakly tries to talk Riggs out of it but then he's in. All in. Riggs tears down Rudd's coastal home while rescuing Leo from it. Then they head to the harbor again to find the shipping vessel with which the South Africans plan to abscond with hundreds of millions of dollars. Those dollars are just stacked in a shipping container, along with a fancy sports car. Other than the car, Murtaugh, and Riggs, that shipping container is full of paper. They are locked in the container but break out using the car, blowing the money everywhere. Rudd is horrified. Riggs tears a swath through most of the men but gets hung up on the level boss, Pieter, who he lets beat on him for a bit -- kayfabe-style -- before finally putting him down. He feigns leaving him alive to give Pieter the opportunity to try to shoot him in the back, which he of course takes, but is rewarded by having a shipping container dropped on him. This cool triumph is short-lived as Arjen Rudd exhibits incredible aim with the pistol from high up on the ship's bridge to shoot Riggs in the back several times. He drops like a sack of potatoes. Murtaugh is horrified and "revokes" Rudd's diplomatic immunity on the spot. Riggs was wearing a vest, though, so he's alive. This was a favorite at my house. We watched whenever it would come on cable TV. We loved Leo. "They fuck you at the drive-through!" Even in college, my friends and I watched it. "But, but, but ... you're black!" became a catchphrase for a while. We also liked the line "diplomatic immunity ... has been revoked." A Series of Unfortunate Events (2004) -- "6/10" We'd already seen the "three seasons of the TV show" , in which nearly all of the roles were played by others. Here, we are introduced to the Buadelaire children -- Klaus (Liam Aiken), Violet (Emily Browning), and Sunny (Kara Hoffman) by Lemony Snicket (Jude Law), who tells their tale. Their house burns down, so they are forced to move in with their closest relative Count Olaf (Jim Carrey), to whom they are escorted by Mr. Poe (Timothy Spall). Before entering the house, they meet Justice Strauss (Catherine O'Hara), who seems much more appealing as a caretaker than Olaf and his terrifying, offputting home. After Olaf tries to kill the children with a train, Mr. Poe, along with Constable (Cedric The Entertainer) takes the children away from him, for negligence, delivering them to Uncle Monty (Billy Connolly), who's a herpetologist with a specialty in snakes. He is soon dead because Count Olaf, posing as an assistant, poisons him. It's on to Aunt Josephone (Meryl Streep), who lives in a house that looks like it's about to tip into the waters of Lake Lachrymose. The children rescue her but Olaf intervenes and sends her to the leeches. Another guardian down. Mr. Poe shows up again to grant Olaf custody. However, Olaf will not inherit so now he's trying to marry Violet in a play. Klaus thwarts Olaf's plans and he is arrested and sentenced to suffer all that he'd made the children suffer. Mr. Poe takes the children to a giant mansion, but it's actually their burned-out home.. A letter from their parents appears, as if by magic. It's a pretty sappy message. Jesus, the girl is just reading for long minutes. This is how you want to end the movie? How odd. Credits are very nice, though. Too bad the stupid British channel I watched it on decided to talk over it and squish them temporarily into half the screen, in order to show adverts for upcoming shows. I spotted Dustin Hoffman in the audience, as well as Jennifer Coolidge, Jamie Harris, Craig Ferguson, and Luis Guzmán are in Olaf's troupe. Talk to Me (2022) -- "5/10" This is a horror movie about horrible, obnoxious teenagers playing with a demonic hand that allows them to see dead people. They think it's hilarious and have one party after another with "the hand," getting super-high and super-drunk and having a lot of laughs at how horrified the people are who've seen the dead. They all take turns, though, so it seems to hit them mostly pretty superficially. I can't tell whether they think it's just some party trick or whether they actually believe in the supernatural. The first quarter of this movie was a bit boring, with too much focus on characters who weren't really worth developing. The trick with the hand is kinda neat, though. It's introduced quite well. The young people are insufferable, inexplicably cruel to one another in a nearly sociopathic way but it wins you over with the unique concept. The middle third is a total waste of time, with far too much focus on Mia (Sophie Wilde), who seemed to be taking a final exam in an acting class. The final quarter was more interesting because things went off the rails and there were fewer boring conversations. And then the end was just too obvious. (Guess what? Mia's now one of the dead coming back through the hand.) As one review on IMDb put it (I just saw the title when scanning the page): "Good concept; so-so execution." Another review title was "A short film stretched into 95 minutes." I didn't read the full reviews but the titles are fair and succinct summaries. Equalizer 2 (2018) -- "6/10" Robert McCall (Denzel Washington) is driving an Uber. This is the second outing. (The third is reviewed "above" <#Equalizer3>.) He's also working with Susan Plummer (Melissa Leo), a former colleague at the DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency). Robert's just kind of a force for good wherever he goes. He travels to Istanbul to rescue a little girl. He takes a young, artistic man living in his building -- Miles (Ashton Sanders) -- under his wing. He takes revenge for a young, female passenger who'd been dumped into his car by callous young men. Susan is killed. Robert contacts her husband, Brian (Bill Pullman), who'd thought for years that Robert was dead, all the while his wife had been working with him. Anyway, they find out that more of their former colleagues are now part of a band of assassins for hire, including Dave (Pedro Pascal). They were the ones who'd killed Susan. Robert is going to kill them all. However, they start in on him first, finding his apartment with Miles in it, who'd been engaged to repaint it. Robert talks Miles through finding the safe/panic room, helping him evade capture. Miles is a bit surprised about Robert's preparedness, but only a little. He comes out too soon, though, and is captured by the remaining henchmen. The big finale is in a seaside town where Robert's wife used to have a bakery. There is a hurricane coming in. Like, an actual hurricane. It is lashing rain. It is windy as hell. Dave is up on a tower, sniping with an incredible accuracy, considering the high winds. I know you can compensate for wind but not for gusts. Guess what, though? Robert saves Miles from the trunk of the car, where he'd been stashed, gets up on the roof, and kicks Dave's ass after a bit of kayfabe. All's well that ends well. Robert is at peace in his old home. For now. Tremors: Shrieker Island (2020) -- "5/10" This is a straight-to-video movie that takes place in the world envisioned by the original Tremors. Inexplicably, Michael Gross -- from the original film and Family Ties -- stars in this movie. He plays Burt Gummer, who is self-isolating on an island. This is where the people who need his expertise with "Graboids" find him and convince him to help them. When he gets to the island where the creatures had been bred and set free, he says "Was mache ich denn überhaupt hier? [What am I even doing here?]" which I feel speaks as much for the actor himself as for his character. Still, he looks pretty good for 73 years old. And goddamnit if he isn't a pretty good actor who pulls this movie together. This isn't a great movie by any account, nor is it even particularly good. But, damn if it isn't an absolute paradigm for how a good actor can hold a movie together, despite its bizarre premise and uneven script. Like, there's this part near the climax of the film where he dips close to the ground and whispers at it, knowing that the queen graboid will hear him, "Du wartest auf mich, oder? [You're waiting for me, right?]" Honestly, that was unexpectedly cool for a movie like this. It actually made me a bit sad when he died in the mouth of the queen, sacrificing himself to make sure that she leapt to her death in the trap he'd built out of giant punji sticks and dynamite. Yeah, wild, right? When the creature blew up, I can't help but believe that when the others were all glorying, just bathing in the rain of graboid meat that hailed down, they were doing it ironically. Weird, but kinda funny. I gave it an extra star because the production values were better than expected and it looked like a bunch of the stuff was actually filmed on set or something. The people seemed to really care about being in this movie. I watched it in German. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] These are notes for me to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. The amount of text is not proportional to my enjoyment. I might write less because I didn't get around to it when it was fresh in my mind. I rate the film based on how well it suited me personally for the genre, my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. Links are to "my IMDb ratings" ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5706 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5706 Sat, 03 Jan 2026 10:12:05 +0100 -- "9/10" 2. "Cobain: Montage of Heck (2015)" <#Cobain> -- "7/10" 3. "Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018)" <#Solo> -- "8/10" 4. "Jane Goodall: The Hope (2020)" <#Goodall> -- "7/10" 5. "Mr. and Mrs. Smith (2005)" <#Smith> -- "8/10" 6. "South Park S27 (2025)" <#SouthPark> -- "9/10" 7. "O Brother Where Art Thou? (2000)" <#Brother> -- "10/10" 8. "Woman at War / La Donna Elettrica (2018)" <#Woman> -- "8/10" 9. "Richard Jewell (2019)" <#Jewell> -- "8/10" 10. "Prigione 77 (2022)" <#Prison> -- "8/10" Dante's Peak (1997) -- "9/10" Volcanologist Harry Dalton (Pierce Brosnan) is called in to investigate suspicious seismic activity near the town of Dante's Peak. He meets mayor Rachel Wando (Linda Hamilton) and they drive up the nearby mountain to see what's what. They head up with her whole family: two kids, a dog, and grandma (Elizabeth Hoffman). They find two boiled bodies in their favorite swimming hole and Harry gets suspicious. He recommends an evacuation but the town board is worried about lost revenue. Harry's boss Paul Dreyfus (Charles Hallahan) shows up to put him on a short leash. Harry continues to investigate with a crew -- there are some pretty spectacular helicopter shots of the mountains -- and then shows up at Rachel's café, where she invites him to dinner. They have a lovely time, of course. She's quite smitten and brings him and his crew coffee the next morning. Greg (Grant Heslov) is great; he sees her car show up on the camera feed the next morning and starts sing-songing "Coffee! Coffee, Coffee, Coffee, Coffee!" Harry and Terry Furlong (Kirk Trutner) are up on the rim of the volcano, using a robot called "spider legs" to investigate further down. Tremors tip the robot and break one of its legs. When Terry investigates, a further tremor breaks one of his legs and roughs him up pretty badly. Harry rescues him and they take an airlift out of there. Harry demands that they evacuate but Paul -- and the rest of the crew -- think that nothing else is going to happen. Guess what, though? Harry was right. On his last night in town, he's about to get jiggy with Wanda when she's interrupted by one of her kids, who wants a glass of water. The water is sludge. It's sulphuric. They go to the water supply for the town and discover that there is some bad juju -- the mountain's going to blow. They call a town meeting to inform the townspeople but, as they're about to evacuate, the mountain blows. A pillar of debris and ash rises hundreds of meters if not multiple kilometers in the air. They're trying to escape now but the town is being torn apart. Ash is falling. Tremors are collapsing everything. The bridge out of town collapses, taking dozens of cars with it. The utter lack of CGI is so f@&king refreshing that I almost had tears in my eyes. Those were actual cars on actual roads. That was actual rebar sticking out of that concrete. Someone had to set this up and film it instead of pushing pixels around on a screen. It looks so much better. Harry and Wanda get back to her house to find her kids gone -- they've stolen her car to go get their grandmother up on the mountain, who'd refused to come down, claiming that there was no way that the mountain was going to blow. Harry takes control, fording the river in his truck -- which has a snorkel -- while others follow but are woefully under-equipped. As it stands, Harry and Wanda barely make it across. The less well-equipped drift out of sight on the strong current. The helicopter pilot abandons Harry's team but is soon taken down by ash clogging his motor. Harry is just pure, cool competence, focused on getting Wanda's kids -- no questions asked. He knows the risks. He knows what he can do. He thinks it's possible. Maybe he knows it's not. But he knows no-one else is going to save those kids. He knows that he might be able to do it. HY LFG. The effects in this movie are really quite spectacular. They get to Grandma Ruth's cabin, where she's unrepentant. "This mountain's never gonna hurt us, believe me." They've got to get out of there. A river of lava pouring through the cabin encourages them to hurry. They escape in a boat across the little lake. OK, now there are a few fake-looking scenes (the lava river and the family in the boat). The boat sinks further and further into the acidic water. The propellor is gone. The motor dies. They're almost at the shore. Harry starts pawing his way through the water with his jacket wrapped around his hand, oaring them closer. Ruth jumps into the water and drags the boat ashore, sacrificing herself for the family, knowing that she was the reason that they're all up there in the first place. The next morning, the National Guard arrives. The dam blows, plowed out of the way by giant debris: logs, mostly, but also a tremendous amount of water that has rapidly melted. The family hikes across fields of ash, finding a truck and hightailing it back down the mountain. Another spectacular scene of trucks crossing a crumbling bridge results in Paul getting washed away with the bridge. Again, the visuals are so convincing and spectacular. Harry, meanwhile, is driving the family across a field of lava but they lose their tires and get stuck in a river of fire, wheels flaming. And then -- and this scene I remember -- Ruffy appears out of nowhere to jump in the back of their truck. The dog is alive! Pierce Brosnan grins his wide-ass Pierce Brosnan smile. They're back in town but there's no way out of town. Harry heads to the office to pick up the ELF (Extreme Low Frequency) device and then they book it for the local mine, just seconds ahead of an oncoming pyroclastic cloud. Harry knows that they're cutting it close. He blasts the truck right through the mine entrance, burying it deep, with pyroclasts filling in behind them. They're alive. Harry is relentless, moving them deeper into the mine. They get to the boy's campsite there, where he has some food and water stashed. Harry has forgotten the ELF in the truck, though. When he heads back to get it, he's cut off from everyone else. The tunnel is still coming down. He gets battered to the ground trying to get to the truck. He perseveres because that is what Harry does. With every fiber of his being, he perseveres. One arm is broken. He has to clear debris from the ELF one-handed while the weight of a mountain presses the truck's roof and sides in on him. It's pretty cozy now. The ELF starts beeping. Back at his team's ad-hoc headquarters, Terry notices a light blinking on a console. It's an incoming signal from the ELF. They find Harry and, soon after, Wanda, the kids, and the dog. The end! ✊ Cobain: Montage of Heck (2015) -- "7/10" The best parts of this documentary about Kurt Cobain were definitely the recordings of him noodling on various instruments, writing his songs, putting them together. These were accompanied by cartoons depicting dark scenes that were taken from his notebooks. These notebooks also contained quite pithy philosophical musings combined with TODO lists as well as snippets and scraps of thoughts. There was a ton of concert footage along with whatever home-video footage they could scrape together. They also had just a ton of other appropriate voiceovers from other things, interviews with the band members, all mashed up and chaotic and quite evocative of the band itself, as well as the mind of the man who would kill himself with a shotgun blast at 27 years old. He was an old soul and perhaps too good for this world. His depression and his stomach pains drove him mad, drove him to suicide, in a world that couldn't yet save him with high-grade pharmaceuticals that would have almost certainly robbed him of his gift in a way that the heroin never did. Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018) -- "8/10" I "watched and reviewed this in 2019. The rating stands." I watched it in German this time. Jane Goodall: The Hope (2020) -- "7/10" This is the official documentary of Jane Goodall's life and work, from when she first went to work with Chimpanzees, to building her environmental empire. She was a good woman. She was driven. She was occasionally a bit odd. She liked whiskey. She had tremendous vivacity and energy, even very late in life. She never wavered in her mission. Her single-mindedness was perhaps a bit off-putting, a bit blinding to other concerns, but she saved a lot of chimpanzees, and she shamed a lot of people into seeing animals as moral beings. She had incredible charisma. You can watch it here: [media] Mr. and Mrs. Smith (2005) -- "8/10" John Smith (Brad Pitt) is a decent husband, if a bit aloof and absent. Jane Smith (Angelina Jolie) is the same. They are in counseling because, well, it's interesting. Given what both of them do for a living, neither of them would be particularly interested in counseling, so either it's just a humorous plot device or we're expected to believe that either one of them could have suggested it, thinking that it would be the convincing step to take in a marriage that didn't seem to be working very well. If one of them would suggest it, thinking it was the appropriate thing to do, then the other would have to accept for the same reason. We quickly discover that each has a large secret from the other. It's the same secret. They are both assassins. They have unwittingly been circling closer and closer to each other as they gain notoriety for their exploits. They eventually collide when he screws up one of her contracts. They eventually discover each other's roles but are still unaware whether the other is aware that they are aware of the changed situation. They dance around the situation at home, with each suspecting the other of trying to eliminate them. They actually are trying to eliminate one another. John finally gets Jane to reveal herself when he deliberately drops a wine bottle near her. Her lightning reflexes in catching it give her away -- and they both escalate the dance. They chase each other outside, where John slips and accidentally fires a shot into her windshield. Now she's pissed. She runs him over. Jane retreats to her large and well-equipped team, while John meets up with Eddie (Vince Vaughn), who organizes his hits for him...and lives with his mom. They dance and taunt and circle and try to assassinate one another until they finally meet at their house in a pitched martial-arts-and-gun battle that nearly demolishes it. In the end, neither one of them can kill the other. They decide to ball instead. The neighbors pop by to see what's going on, and the disheveled couple appears, quite clearly having just rutted like lions, standing in front of a ruined home. The neighbors retreat, some with looks of longing in their eyes. Now that they're teamed up, their respective employers want to eliminate them for real. It turns out that the botched hit that led to their discovery of each other's respective secret lives had already been a setup by the two agencies. These agencies try harder now, sending wave after wave of assassins, none of whom come close to even putting a real dent in either one of the Smiths. There's a huge battle with an ending somewhat reminiscent of "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid" , except this time we get to see what happens. And also, this time, they don't die. Instead, they go to the marriage counselor and proudly brag about how much sex they're having. It's actually kind of funny. South Park S27 (2025) -- "9/10" I wonder how in God's name I've not heard much -- if anything -- about South Park's latest season. I saw some buzz about the first episode because it went so hard at Trump, going so far as to use AI video-generation software to create a video short of him, naked and lumbering across a desert, falling exhausted after his journey, only to be told by his tiny penis that he's doing a great job. I find it a sad commentary on what passes for culture that only the crassest, broadest jokes bubble up to social media's consciousness, while the far better, though more subtle, multi-layered, and meta-meta jokes are ignored, probably because their broad appeal is nugatory and would therefore earn few likes. E01: Sermon on the 'Mount This one sets up what South Park's going to look like. Donald Trump is a main character. He's banging Satan. J.D. Vance is dressed up like Tattoo/Hervé Villechaize from Fantasy Island. PC Principal is now Power Christian Principal. Cartman and Butters try to commit suicide in a garage, but the car's exhaust is nonexistent because it's electric. Trump threatens to sue South Park for $5B. Jesus is invited to speak at the school. He has to be there as part of a lawsuit settlement with Paramount. South Park capitulates, paying Trump and agreeing to produce pro-Trump messaging. You can watch the last two minutes here, including the PSA. Jesus wept. [media] E02: Got a Nut Everybody does morally reprehensible work in order to make money. Mr. Mackey is fired and takes a job with ICE. They arrest Dora the Explorer and friends. Clyde starts a right-wing podcast. Eric is pissed because he feels ripped off. Cartman meanwhile is a straight-up parody of Charlie Kirk, in which he "masterdebates" all comers. Dora ends up at Mar-a-Lago, where she is made to service guests. Clyde is also there. So is Mackey, as Trump grooms him to take over from Noem, who creeps him out. The three of them escape, with Clyde and Mackey having learned that there is a moral limit to "getting your nut." E03: Sickofancy Randy Marsh is back, and he's addicted to ChatGPT. He quickly ruins his marriage with it. Also, ICE shows up and arrests all of the migrant workers on his farm, putting him out of business. He and Towlie rebrand as a techno-grifting business. Instead of pot, they take ketamine. They try to bribe Trump to reclassify marijuana but Randy betrays Towlie, leading to Towlie becoming the gift, and Trump using poor Towlie as a cum rag. For the love of God, guys. E04: Wok Is Dead Butters has to find a rare Labubu doll to impress Red, a shitty little girl at school. All of the kids are nuts for Labubus. Tariffs have driven all of the prices up, and the Shitty Wok is now a store where you can buy high-priced shit like Labubus. Butters has no choice but to buy loot boxes in the hope that one of them will be the doll he needs to give Red. Jesus warns everyone that Labubus are demonic toys that people are using in rituals. He turns out to be 100% correct as the birthday party is destroyed by a Satanic ritual carried out -- and live-streamed, naturally -- by the little girls at the birthday party. Satan and Trump are pulled through the portal. FOX News is there to report on the showdown between Satan and Jesus. Instead, Satan reveals that he is pregnant with Trump's ass-baby. FOX News doesn't even blink an eye. E05: Conflict of Interest This one is about a trans kid who's really, really ambiguous. Ambiguous enough to make the prediction market for their gender explode. All of the kids are in on it. The bet that really captures their fancy, though, is whether Kyle's mom will genocide some Gazans. Cartman quickly realizes that, unregulated as the platform is, he can easily manipulate public mood to influence prices and increase his potential winnings. Kyle's mom even travels to Israel, sending the prediction through the roof. She's there to give Netanyahu a piece of her mind, about how he's ruining everything for Jews everywhere. Huh. O Brother Where Art Thou? (2000) -- "10/10" I can't remember how many times I've seen this movie, but I can say a lot of the lines as they appear. We follow the misadventures of escaped chain-gang workers and prisoners Ulysses Everett McGill (George Clooney), Pete Hogwallop (John Turturro), and Delmar O'Donnell (Tim Blake Nelson). "Delmar: The Lord has done warshed away all my sins and transgression!" This is one of my favorite movies, even among the Coen-brothers' films. The music is out of this world. Truly uniquely, American music. Bluegrass, soul, Christian hymnals. A Man Of Constant Sorrow gives me chills every time. They run into Tommy Johnson (Chris Thomas King), who plays guitar on that track. Stephen Root as the blind, wall-eyed, casually racist Radio Station Man is an absolute revelation. When they record the song, the blind radio station man tells them to sign the sheet to pick up their $10 apiece. "Everett: [thinking incredibly quickly] Mert and Alloicious are gonna have to sign X's;; only four of us can write." "Delmar: I'm not here to tell tales out of school but there's a man in there who'll pay you ten dollars if you'll sing into his can." "Everett: Pete, the personal rancor reflected in that remark I don't intend to dignify with comment. But I would like to address your general attitude of hopeless negativism. Consider the lilies of the goddamn field or... hell! Take at look at Delmar here as your paradigm of hope." Next, they meet George Nelson (Michael Badalucco) and come into some money that way, as he takes them along, robbing banks. He leaves them dejectedly in the night. They steal another car. Sirens are next. God, that song is beautiful. I guess it's supposed to be. "Go to sleep, little baby. Your mama's gone away And your daddy's gone to stay. "You, and me, and the devil makes three, Don't need no other lovin' baby. "Gonna lay your bones on the alabaster stones And be my ever-lovin' baby." "Delmar: Can't you see what they done to Pete? Them sirens done loved him up and turned him into a horny toad." This is how Delmar gets a pet toad. "Everett: I don't think that's Pete. Delmar: 'Course it is. Look at 'im. We gotta find some sort of wizard to change 'im back." This is lovely foreshadowing because they meet one-eyed Dan Teague (John Goodman), who is more than a match for Everett in the category of the gift of gab. In the same restaurant, we meet Pappy O'Daniels (Charles Durning), who's another local racist, running for office and losing. Big Dan eats all of their food, then mugs them for the money they were flashing around, giving them both nice concussions. Then he steals their car. Pete's been captured. The sheriff (Daniel von Bargen) shows up, sunglasses at night, threatening to hang him. He gives up Everett and Delmar's destination. Pete's back on the chain gang. Everett and Delmar drive by. Everett sees him and asks Delmar whether Pete has a brother. They're in town, where meet Penny Wharvey (Holly Hunter), Everett's wife, his seven daughters, as well as Vernon T. Waldrip, Penny's new "bona fide" suitor and soon-to-be husband. They meet Pete at the movie theater and break him out of jail that night. Everett admits that he lied to them about needing to get to the treasure soon -- he just wanted to stop Penny's wedding. Pete is shocked because he had only two weeks left on his sentence. They fight, wrestling into the bushes but are interrupted by a spectacular set piece: a KKK rally, with hundreds of "sheep" led by their cyclops (Big Dan), burning crosses, and poor Tommy, set for burning. The haunting strains of O Death wafts over the forest. "Oh, Death Whoa, Death Won't you spare me over 'til another year? Well what is this that I can't see? With ice-cold hands taking hold of me Well I am Death, none can excel I'll open the door to Heaven or Hell" The grand wizard lays things out for us. "Brothers! Oh, brothers! We have all gathered here, to preserve our hallowed culture and heritage! We aim to pull evil up by the root, before it chokes out the flower of our culture and heritage! And our women, let's not forget those ladies, y'all. Looking to us for protection! From darkies, from Jews, from papists, and from all those smart-ass folks say we come descended from monkeys! That's not my culture and heritage! Is that your culture and heritage? "And so, we gonna hang us a negro!" Our heroes dress up as members and fly to Tommy's rescue. Big Dan unmasks them. They are still in blackface from Pete's breakout. "The color guard is colored!" They make good their escape and make their way to the municipal hall, where they dress up as the soggy-bottom boys and take the stage. Tim Blake Nelson steals the show with his voice; John Turturro steals the show with his dancing...and his yodeling. And then they break into Man of Constant Sorrow with Everett in the lead. They discover that they have become incredibly popular since they'd recorded that song for $10. Homer Stokes (Wayne Duvall) outs himself as the grand wizard but wildly misreads the room and gets run out of town on a rail. Everett starts the song back up. The people rejoice. Pappy pardons them. Everett and Penny are back together. He just has to get the ring back from the old roll-top desk. Which is in the house that will be underwater soon. "Penny: I've spoken my piece and counted to three." A lynch mob goes by, starring George Nelson, who's been caught. "Twenty thousand volts chasin' the rabbit through yours truly! Gonna shoot sparks out the top of my head and lightning from my fingertips!" The next day, they make their way to the cabin. Three old negroes are digging three graves near the cabin. The sheriff has chased them down. "Everett: You can't do this - we just been pardoned! By the Governor himself! Delmar: It went out over the radio! Sheriff Cooley: Is that right? [long pause] Sheriff Cooley: ...Too bad we don't have a radio." Water trickles by. The flood comes. The gravediggers sing, "You got to go to the lonesome valley You got to go there by yourself Nobody else can go for you You got to go there by yourself Oh, you got to ask the lord's forgiveness" Water flows, Dapper Dan pomade cans float by. A cow floats by. Our three heroes bob up, clinging to a coffin. Tommy's riding a roll-top desk. "Delmar: A miracle! It was a miracle! Everett: Aw, don't be ignorant, Delmar. I told you they was gonna flood this valley. Delmar: That ain't it! Pete: We prayed to God and he pitied us! Everett: It just never fails; once again you two hayseeds are showin' how much you want for innalect. There's a perfectly scientific explanation for what just happened - Pete: That ain't the tune you were singin' back there at the gallows! Everett: Well any human being will cast about in a moment of stress. No, the fact is, they're flooding this valley so they can hydro-electric up the whole durned state... Everett: Yessir, the South is gonna change. Everything's gonna be put on electricity and run on a payin' basis. Out with the old spiritual mumbo- jumbo, the superstitions and the backward ways. We're gonna see a brave new world where they run everyone a wire and hook us all up to a grid. Yessir, a veritable age of reason - like the one they had in France - and not a moment too soon..." We are back in town. The ring has been saved. The wedding is on. It's the wrong ring. "I counted to three." The MgGill girls trail along, one of them on a string-leash, singing the hauntingly beautiful Angel Band, "My latest sun is sinking fast, my race is nearly run My strongest trials now are past, my triumph has begun Oh, come angel band, come and around me, stand Oh, bear me away on your snow white wings To my immortal home Oh, bear me away on your snow white wings To my immortal home" Woman at War / La Donna Elettrica (2018) -- "8/10" This Icelandic film starts with a woman Halla (Halldóra Geirharðsdóttir) shorting out high-tension power lines with a bow and arrow. The police pick up Juan Camilo (Juan Camilo Román Estrada), a Spanish cyclist for having done it. We see Halla crossing the Icelandic countryside, to oompah music -- which is made diagetic by putting the band in the middle of the field through which she runs. She escapes from chasing helicopters. She happens upon a farmer and asks him to protect her. He asks what she's done. She tells him. She'd already done it five times before. He is sympathetic to her cause and agrees to hide her. Once the police have left, he offers her a car. She tells him that she'll tell the police that she'd stolen it from him. He tells her that the familial lineage that she claimed cannot be correct because she's not aware that his father had always lied about a part of his family tree -- so they're at best cousins. Is everyone in Iceland cousins somehow? She drives away, past the oompah band. She is conducting a chorus. This must be her day job. One of her choir members is in on what she's doing but he's concerned that she's not taking surveillance seriously enough, that she's crazy for taking on Rio Tinto (one of the world's largest mining companies, based in Australia). He's very, very paranoid. They put their phones into the freezer in the kitchen before they say anything. She's back at home, doing tai-chi and watching the news, listening to how the country considers these attacks to be an attack on national security (naturally), aimed at destroying Iceland's access to industry (naturally). She has two posters behind her: Nelson Mandela and Mahatma Ghandi. She picks up the phone. A four-year-old application to adopt a Ukrainian orphan has come through. Piano music plays; we see the pianist in her living room. She goes into a room to find all of the stuff she'd bought for the child years ago and which she'd packed away. The adoption agency tells her that she must decide quickly. She seeks out her (twin?) sister for advice. She tells her to give up the terrorism and become a mother. Hella takes a swim, accompanied by diagetic traditional Ukrainian singers, dressed in traditional Ukrainian garb. In a second-hand shop, a dozen musicians build up an instrumental song as she browses, thinking. Out on the street, the oompah band is there again. I really like this diagetic touch. She's not done with her old life, though. She prints up an anonymous confession, sneaks into a building, then climbs up on the roof to throw them all into the streets. Her band is there to provide her soundtrack. Ukrainian singers join in from the street. People read her words and spread her message. The band members retweet pictures of the documents. The prime minister's staff reads him the whole document over several long minutes, as they walk along an Icelandic shore. Her coconspirator is angry because she didn't let him edit the document. And he's worried that she has missed some detail that will implicate them both. He's terrified that the Americans and even the Israelis are involved now (not unlikely). She swims with her sister and they discuss how big the Ukrainian girl might be. The band plays as they swim back and forth. Hella finds a little girl hiding in her locker. How bizarre. Three women in the locker room discuss whether it's OK to be an industrial terrorist in order to save the planet. One of them says, "La goccia scova la roccia, " which I only know in German as Steter Tropfen höhlt den Stein, which doesn't rhyme, so it's not nearly as cool. On the news later, they compare La Donna Elettrica to Anders Breivik, which upsets her considerably. She's now torn between the new life she might have, and trying to clarify the interpretation of the one she's trying to leave behind. This is made even worse when she sees the Prime Minister announce that, as a result of the terrorist attacks, they've been forced to increase their dependence on Rio Tinto. Although this is almost certainly a lie, an attempt to draw her out, she takes the bait, committing another terrorist act. She breaks in somewhere to steal Semtex, then we see her at a florist, buying nitrate fertilizer, then stuffing the bags with Semtex (to disguise it from the dogs). She gets past the guards with this bit of flimflammery -- there's a really lovely shot of her bright-blue car against the green Icelandic backdrop, with the police officers around it; I'm surprised they didn't use that shot for the poster -- and then brings the car back to her "cousin." She's hiking with a backpack full of Semtex. Juan Camilo is still trying to find Reykjavik with his bike. He can actually see the diagetic band. A drone flies by. Halle has a tent set up. She's doing tai-chi and communing with the Earth. The drone finds her with an infrared camera. Troops drop in, in the dead of night. Halle senses them. She awakes. The troops have found Juan instead. They assault him in the middle of the night, hauling him in, again, as the terrorist. Halle is free to do her thing. A piano joins the oompah band as she carves through the guy wires on the rower. The battery dies. A hacksaw backup will have to do. When the wire goes, it slices her hand open. The band looks up, worried. She places a grapefruit-sized clump of orange Semtex in the tower, unrolls trigger wire, and takes the tower down. The drone appears. It flies over her head, unaware that the tower is down. It finds her. It hovers. She has a Nelson Mandela mask on and her bow and arrow out. Thump. Right through the body of it. She reels it in and kills it with a rock. This lady's awesome. She hides under the tufa, under a space blanket this time, until the chopper passes. She's climbing over the landscape. The landscape is beautiful. Forlorn and beautiful. She arrives at a glacier, taking refuge. Hood up; it's cold. She sees a sheep corpse. Covers up with it. Escapes the helicopter again. She's dragging the corpse with her now. Stops to smell the roses, communing with the Earth. She leaves the carcass to ford a river. The drone's back. She drops under the water. No choice. Later, searchers with dogs find the sheep corpse. She's still moving. She must be freezing. It's nearly dawn. Headlights spring on. She stares, freezing, despondent, having given up. It's her "cousin." He throws her in the back of the truck with his sheep, tells her to drop under them. It's probably warmer there. At the roadblock, he and his dog make a big stink about how the roadblocks are fucking up everything for farmers. They get through. It's daylight now. He carries her to a hot spring, where she recovers. They hear on the radio that the latest act of sabotage was quite damaging this time. He takes her back to her home, where she showers while he looks around. He drives her to the airport, to Ukraine. They pass Juan on his bike, on the highway, again. Hella finally sees a diagetic drummer. One more hurdle. Investigators found blood and are forcing DNA tests on everyone before they can board. But people say that La Donna Elettrica has turned herself in. On someone's phone, she sees her sister. She leaves the airport and hears that the police are still looking for her. She begs the taxi to stop so that she can vomit. She runs into Juan, who asks her if she needs help. That is just wonderful, because despite all that the country has done to him so far, he's still willing to help. She will never pick up the little girl. She sees the Ukrainian singers. They stand silent. She buries the little girl's picture in the moss. The band appears, encouraging her to run. The police arrest Juan, of course. But they also arrest her. She's in prison. Her cousin is under power lines. Her sister Åsa visits her, telling her that she will go to Ukraine and become the girl's mother while Halle stays in prison, which she will make her refuge. I kind of forgot to mention that her sister is a guru and is now basically offering to switch places with her so that Halle can be a mother and Åsa can be a guru in prison for her. The cousin cuts the power. They switch places. Åsa stays. Halle walks out. She drives to the airport, passing the band one last time, joined by the Ukrainian singers, once again raising their voices in song. She is in Ukraine, meeting Nika. Poignantly, they show other children sitting on the floor, watching them. Two other little girls walk in, wanting to join them, but they are gently shooed away by an employee. It's sad because, although Nika will be adopted, there are so many more children. It has rained so much that their bus is prevented from proceeding by floods. The passengers all get out and walk through hip-deep water. The band and the singers follow. So many lovely images in this film. I would definitely watch it again. I watched it in Italian, with Italian subtitles. (The supposedly English audio channel was in Icelandic, the film's original language.) Richard Jewell (2019) -- "8/10" Richard Jewell (Paul Walter Hauser) works in supply at the office where lawyer Watson Bryant (Sam Rockwell) works. They become friends, playing video games together at the local arcade. Richard tells him of his dream of becoming a cop, then an FBI agent, and then maybe Secret Service. The man has delusions of grandeur. When he's ready to move on, he gets a job as a security guard at a local college. He's soon fired from the job for having too many citations for hassling students....and pulling over drivers on the local highway (for which he has no authority). Richard still lives with his mom Bobi (Kathy Bates). The Olympics are in town and he's got a job as a security guard again. Reporter Kathy Scruggs (Olivia Wilde) and FBI agent Tom Shaw (Jon Hamm) know each other, and they're both working the Olympics beat. They're all at a show where Kenny Rogers is singing one of the world's greatest songs The Gambler. Richard is living the dream, hobnobbing with real cops, who don't really take him seriously. He spots a guy he thinks is suspicious but it's only because he's got long hair and sunglasses at night. His "suspicious" backpack just has beers in it. The next night, he's not feeling well because he ate too much fast food. He goes to work anyway. A group of young drunk guys are breaking bottles. He tries to break it up but has to get the real cops because the young hooligans just make fun of him. The cops then discover a "suspicious package" under Richard's bench and he's adamant that it be handled by protocol. Richard is loving this. He's getting all excited to be handling this officially. At the same time, an actual bomb threat is called in by someone from a "militia". Holy shit. The backpack actually has a bomb in it. Three pipe bombs, to be precise. This level of danger -- and Richard having been the one to discover it -- is exactly what the doctor ordered for Richard's ego. People are still reluctant to believe him. The bomb goes off. Nails fly everywhere, wounding over a hundred people and killing two. Richard is credited with having discovered the bomb, so he's on CNN with Katie Couric (or wherever she works, it doesn't matter). Everyone sees it. This is the attention he's always sought. His former employer at the university contacts the FBI and reveals his suspicions that this seems a bit too on the nose. Richard calls his old buddy Watson for help on his book deal. Watson could use the business. Richard's now at dinner with his mom and a friend, a cop who's wearing a wire. Richard's just running his mouth about what kind of bomb it was, how the bomb was supposed to have blown out but the backpack tipped over, so it blew up. He speculated about what kind of a timer was in it, the composition of the explosive, and so on. Scruggs approaches Shaw, offering a quid pro quo: he tells her who they're looking at, and she'll fuck him. "We're kind of pressed on time; do you wanna get a room or should we just go to my car." She says she won't run with it until she gets corroboration. She lies about the corroboration, her newspaper runs with it, forcing the FBI's hand. They are pissed and Shaw just barely avoids blame. They drive out to Richard's place to interview him, claiming that he's going to be in an educational film about detecting bombs. The press has descended on his home and reveals to him that he's the prime suspect. He doesn't believe any of it, though. He drives to the FBI headquarters without incident. The FBI -- Shaw and co. -- are doing such a terrible job of railroading him that he calls Watson (his lawyer) for help. Watson's secretary/boss Nadya, who's originally from Russia, tells him that Richard is desperate to find him, showing him the paper. Watson says it looks pretty bad. "Nadya: Where I come from, when the government says someone's guilty, it's how you know they're innocent. It's different here?" ✊ Watson calls the FBI office and they hang up on him. He calls back, "My next call is going to be to Mike Wallace of ‘Sixty Minutes’ to ask him why the FBI would deny a citizen his constitutional right to legal counsel. Can I have the spelling of your name, please?" Watson is taking this on. He believes Richard. But Richard's past starts bubbling up. Watson's pissed. But he's going to do his job. He and Nadya map out the distance from the pay phone where the 911 call was made to where the backpack was left. There's no way anyone could have made that distance, least of all Richard. He's weird ... but he didn't do it. Unless he had help. "This kid's getting railroaded." The FBI has brought about 30 people to take apart the house. Richard cannot stop talking. The FBI draws Watson away, then Shaw gets Richard to read the 911 message into the phone "to get a voiceprint." HOLY SHIT BRO DON'T DO IT. Watson breaks up the party but it's too late. Though Watson says "we're going to get all of this excluded,", Shaw whispers, "we got it." They keep at it. The FBI bugs the lawyer's office as well as Richard's home. Nadya found the bugs. This is all highly illegal but 100% SOP for the FBI. "Richard Jewell: Oh my lord. How can they do that? Watson Bryant: It's easy. Cause you don't matter. That's how come." Now the FBI is trying to implicate his best friend Dave Dutchess (Niko Nicotera) as the person who called it in (because they know that Richard couldn't have called it in and also gotten to the scene). They're accusing them of being a gay couple. No scruples. What happened to the lone-bomber hypothesis? "Watson: Are you about ready to start fighting back?" Richard takes a lie-detector test, which he passes. Watson and Richard go to Kathy Scruggs and tear her a new asshole in front of her whole office before going to talk to her publisher to demand some retractions. Now they're at the FBI offices for another interview. "Watson: Stop calling them sir. Richard: They're still the U.S. government. Watson: No. Those just three pricks who work for the U.S. government." They still haven't charged him. He handles himself extremely well in that interview. 88 days after having opened the investigation, Shaw shows up at a diner where Watson and Richard are having lunch. He gives them a letter that says that the investigation is closed. He is a class-A prick about it. Jon Hamm is so good at that kind of thing. He will always be Don Draper, just a little bit. The FBI show up at Richard's house, returning boxes. Silently. Six years later, the FBI finally finds Eric Rudolph, who was the real bomber. Watson tells Richard about it, visiting him at the police station where he is working as a cop. Richard died of a heart attack at 44, just four years later. Nadya and Watson marry and have two children. Richard's mother Bobby babysits for them once a week. What an unexpectedly great movie. It helped a lot that I could not remember at all what had actually happened in that case. I love to see me some justice served. I love to see me a good lawyer. I love to see the railroading man get it shoved right back up his ass. ✊ Prigione 77 (Modelo 77) (2022) -- "8/10" From the "Wikipedia" , "Taking place from 1976 to 1978,[3] during the so-called Transition, the plot is inspired by the real attempted prison break from Barcelona's Cárcel Modelo attempted by 45 inmates in 1978, after a rebellion led by the Coordinadora de presos en lucha (COPEL).[4] The fiction follows two of the prisoners, José Pino and Manuel, an aged inmate who has passed through several prisons and a young accounting assistant who has just entered the prison, respectively." I recognized Miguel Herrán as Manuel, the young accountant. He'd played Rio in "Money Heist" . What kind of stands out in this movie is how much freedom and how many rights the prisoners have, even after so much insurrection. It was the 70s, though, so maybe even guards at a prison run by a fascist dictatorship just hadn't yet been worn down to the humanity-hating nubs that we seem to see much more of today. Or maybe the movie took it too easy on them. The main thrust of the plot [2] is that the prisoners are seeking a general amnesty: they want everyone imprisoned to be released. How could they even possibly want this? How could the public even begin to support it? During that dictatorship, everyone knew that pretty much every long-term incarcerated prisoner was a political prisoner, sentenced for having offended the regime. The public knew that the criminals were in the government. The prison-break scene in the final third is pretty great. Most of the prisoners are picked up again. We watched it in Italian, with Italian subtitles (original is in Spanish). -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] These are notes for me to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. The amount of text is not proportional to my enjoyment. I might write less because I didn't get around to it when it was fresh in my mind. I rate the film based on how well it suited me personally for the genre, my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. Links are to "my IMDb ratings" [1] The Wikipedia summary in English doesn't mention the general amnesty -- just the prison break -- although the "Italian" summary does: "Il governo tuttavia risponde con durezza alla richiesta di un'amnistia generale. [The government, however, responded harshly to the request for a general amnesty.]" The "Spanish" summary does too, "el joven se une a un grupo de presos (Coordinadora de Presos en Lucha, COPEL) que se está organizando para exigir una amnistía (que al final sólo afectaría a los presos políticos). [the young man joined a group of prisoners COPEL, which had been established to demand an amnesty (that, in the end, only affected political prisoners)]" ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5694 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5694 Fri, 02 Jan 2026 14:05:09 +0100 -- "7/10" 2. "Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994)" <#Weddings> -- "6/10" 3. "Das Lehrerzimmer (The Teacher's Lounge) (2023)" <#Lehrer> -- "7/10" 4. "Arcane S01--S02 (2022--2024)" <#Arcane> -- "7/10" 5. "Jurassic World Dominion (2022)" <#Dominion> -- "7/10" 6. "Black Adam (2022)" <#BlackAdam> -- "5/10" 7. "Time Bandits (1981)" <#Bandits> -- "7/10" 8. "The Phantom of the Open (2021)" <#Phantom> -- "7/10" 9. "Asterix & Obelix im Reich der Mitte (2023)" <#Asterix> -- "4/10" 10. "Dinner with Skinner (2025)" <#Skinner> -- "8/10" The Walk (2015) -- "7/10" I wasn't quite sure about this one at first because I'd seen and liked the official documentary in "2011" and wasn't sure a Hollywood treatment would survive scrutiny. Happily, Joseph Gordon-Levitt does honor to the starring role as Philippe Petit, the wire-walker who walked between the two main towers of the World Trade Center in New York City in 1974. Gordon-Levitt spent a lot of time training to wire-walk, even spending a lot of time with Petit himself. He not only learned wire-walking, he learned enough French to be able to deliver his lines in French in the film. So, well, that's pretty cool. Petit was thrown out of his home as a teenager by his parents because he wouldn't straighten up and fly right. He started working at a circus, honing circus skills, at time under the tutelage of Papa Rudy (Ben Kingsley). He leaves the circus and starts busking. There he meets fellow street-performer Annie (Charlotte Le Bon). They fall in love pretty quickly and she quickly signs on to his dream of walking between the Two Towers. Photographer Jean-Louis (Clément Sibony) is the next one to sign on, with Jeff (César Domboy) following soon after. Jeff is clever and has good ideas but Jeff also has a nearly paralyzing fear of heights. Petit walks between the two main towers of the Notre Dame in Paris. He is arrested but the public loves him. The crew travels to New York City, where they start to scout the location, which is still under construction. They meet locals Barry Greenhouse (Steve Valentine), who has access to and knowledge of 1 World Trade Center, as well as Jean-Pierre. (James Badge Dale), and David (Benedict Samue), who's a stoner but reliable as a lookout. On the day, things are looking grim. They're three hours late. Petit is still nursing a hurt foot because he'd stepped on a nail sticking out of a board a few days before. The crew sneaks in and gets to the top floor of both buildings. They fire an arrow carrying a light rope from one building to the other. They use the rope to carry the much-heavier cables across. The arrow almost doesn't make it. Petit has to go way out on the ledge to retrieve it. He can't see where it landed though. He takes off all of his clothes so that he can feel the filament wherever it is. It works. Before 07:00, Philippe begins his walk. He is over 100 stories up. He walks across once. He joyously greets his co-conspirators on the other side. He gets back on the ledge. He walks out again. The police have arrived. They wait for him to arrive. He places the bar on his neck, twists his arms, and spins around, walking back the other way. He sits, he kneels, he even lies down. He is at peace. He will enjoy this moment because it will never come again. It doesn't matter anymore what comes after. He has done it. He walks across a total of six times over 45 minutes. Incredible. Superhuman. He and his whole crew are arrested, of course. Literally everyone in the city cheers him. The construction crew applauds as he descends. Thousands are gathered in the streets below, having been told to look up by Annie and Barry. He stays in New York, while Annie pursues her music dreams in Paris. The building manager gives Petit a free pass to visit the top of the tower. The expiration date was "forever". It actually expired on September 11, 2001. I gave it an extra star because, while some of the buildup is a little slow, Gordon-Levitt is absolutely enchanting, and the long wire-walking scene is deeply touching, conveying a feeling of having been there, of defiance, of freedom, of peace. It is unclear to what degree a feat of such unalloyed innocence would be even possible in this day and age. He and his crew did it because they wanted to, they thought it would be a lovely, artistic gesture, a grandiloquent blow against a commercializing world, a way of establishing the primacy of individual accomplishments over the relentless industrial drive, which ironically led to the buildings being built in the first place. Some of this is subtext that I take into the film with me, but some of it is very much strongly hinted at. Nowadays, there would be a million cameras, with a million reaction videos, all churning up the event without respecting it, consuming it heedlessly for content and then grazing onward, leaving the husk of the feat behind it. We watched it in French and English, with Italian subtitles. I know that's weird but it works for us, ok? Four Weddings and a Funeral (1994) -- "6/10" Charles (Hugh Grant) and his date Scarlett (Charlotte Coleman) rush to a wedding in a Fiat 500. Scarlett stands with Fiona (Kristin Scott Thomas). Charles is the best man, so he stands up front. He's forgotten the rings. He seems like a jerk. He signals to Matthew (John Hannah) that he's missing the rings. Matthew is there with his partner Gareth (Simon Callow). Carrie (Andie MacDowell) walks in late. At the reception, Fiona meets Father Gerald (Rowan Atkinson). That comes to nothing. Carrie approaches Charles. He bails on staying at his friend Tom's (James Fleet) castle to go to the Boatman pub, which is where Carrie is also staying. After a kerfuffle with a drunken boor that they both needed to avoid, he ends up in her room, where she confirms her reputation as a slut. They part ways. Wedding #2. The Fiat has been booted. This time it's Scarlett who's the bridesmaid and Gerald who's the priest. Scarlett loses a bow, rips her dress, and has her wig on backward. The usual suspects are here, as they were at the first wedding. Carrie's there; she introduces Charles to her fiancé. Charles has a bad time of it at the wedding, with old girlfriends ganging up on him. He has to sneak past the enthusiastically fornicating newlyweds to get to and from his room. He ends up sleeping in the dumbwaiter, lulled to sleep by their grunts and howls. Carrie invites him to her apartment and they smash once again. This time she stays with him in the morning. This time, he leaves her. Wedding #3 is Carrie and some bloke named Hamish (Corin Redgrave). She's blatantly manipulative. She meets Charles at a wedding-gift store (or whatever), where he is completely incapable of paying for any of the gifts. The lady running the place is super-shitty about the poor. Afterward, Carrie corrals him into shopping for wedding dresses with her, as if they were best friends instead of having hooked up twice. Now they're chatting for the first time and she's listing all of her bodies, churning well into the 30s. She's very manipulative and he's a sap. What a bizarre character. Charles pledges his undying love to her. She thinks it's sweet. Like, of course she does. Her ego will absorb any and all adulation, not caring a whit for what damage it causes. The wedding is in a Scottish castle. Charles pines for Carrie. Fiona confesses to Charles that she's in love with him. Kind of out of the blue? Like, it wasn't even intimated. Fiona had barely even been a character up until now. I was kind of surprised to see how small Scott-Thomas's role was. Gareth up and dies at the wedding, presumably from excess (too much drinking, eating, and dancing). His partner Matthew is the last to learn that he's alone now; Charles must get him from the wedding crowd and tell him that his partner is gone. So, instead of any of them getting a partner for life, one of them loses their partner. Now all of members of the friends' circle (Matthew, Tom, Fiona, Charles, Scarlett) are alone, together. Matthew's eulogy for Gareth is the highlight of the film. He reads Funeral Blues / Stop All The Clocks by W.H. Auden. "Stop all the clocks, cut off the telephone, Prevent the dog from barking with a juicy bone, Silence the pianos and with muffled drum Bring out the coffin, let the mourners come. "Let aeroplanes circle moaning overhead Scribbling on the sky the message He is Dead. Put crepe bows round the white necks of the public doves, Let the traffic policemen wear black cotton gloves. "He was my North, my South, my East and West, My working week and my Sunday rest, My noon, my midnight, my talk, my song; I thought that love would last forever: I was wrong. "The stars are not wanted now; put out every one, Pack up the moon and dismantle the sun, Pour away the ocean and sweep up the woods; For nothing now can ever come to any good." And now marauding Carrie is back, preying on Charles. They part ways without fucking for once. Wedding #4 is Charles and one of his old girlfriends Henrietta (Anna Chancellor). At the wedding, Scarlett meets Chester (Randall Paul) again and Tom meets Deirdre (Susanna Hamnett), an old family friend and it's love at first sight. You will absolutely never guess who shows up to the wedding, having left her husband after only a short time. I will give you three guesses and the first two don't count. Christ, I can't believe what a one-dimensional character Carrie is. Charles isn't much better. The only thing buoying the rating at this point is Charles's group of friends. The ending is predictable. Das Lehrerzimmer (The Teacher's Lounge) (2023) -- "6/10" Schoolteacher Carla Nowak (Leonie Benesch) is trying her best to be educational and non-offensive. She is a bit uptight -- I don't think she smiles once in this entire movie -- and more than a bit naive. She transfers to a new school, which has recently been plagued by a series of thefts. The students are pressured to narc on each other, which Carla absolutely hates. This puts her in hot water with the teachers, who expect a solid front of authoritarianism versus the students. The whole shady process ends up fingering Ali, whose parents are Turkish. Now, there's a racial-profiling shitstorm, with the mousy Carla at its center. Carla, instead of being more careful, decides to investigate the ongoing crimes at the school by herself. She sees a teacher stealing money out of a common piggy bank in the teacher's lounge, so she sets up her laptop camera to keep running while she goes to the bathroom (or whatever). When she returns, money had been taken from the her wallet and she'd captured the sleeve of a relatively unique sweater on camera. Carla figures out that's it's a woman in the administration named Kuhn. She confronts her, trying to get her to admit it while keeping everything on the down-low. She just wants her money back and just wants the lady to stop stealing money and making everyone at the school crazy. She likes the lady's son Oskar, too. The lady chooses to take the low road and flips out. Carla escalates. The school supervisor puts Kuhn on leave but also opens an investigation on Carla for having filmed people without their permission. This is the last time things will be normal for Carla. The parents are pissed about their children all having been accused of something that an adult did. They call a meeting. The school thinks it's a great idea to have Carla there all by herself. Carla's Polish background -- c'mon, her parents were Polish; she's 100% German -- becomes deeply relevant. Kuhn shows up and somehow gets support from the parents, even though she's the one who'd been stealing the money. Oskar, meanwhile, starts rallying the students against Carla. This deeply wounds her because she thought that they were buddies. Blood comes first, Carla. Oskar attacks a student who didn't fall in line with his edicts. He's not done. He also steals Carla's laptop in an attempt to dispose of the evidence against his mother -- oh, my sweet summer child, have you never heard of backups? Cloud backups? Oh, never mind. I'm sure that, Carla being a teacher, that's probably the only copy that exists -- and, when she gives chase, he blasts her across the face with it. Like, no holding back, just brains her with a large metal object. She lurches after him, blood streaming. He cheerfully chucks her laptop in the river. Carla covers for him! He was just protecting his mom. You see what I mean about naive? It gets better. Some of the other students run a newspaper. Carla agrees to an interview, but only if she can review the article before it's published. Guess what? The interview is disrespectful, hostile, and manipulative. And she lets it all happen. Guess also what? They publish the article in the most slanted way possible without consulting her. Because fuck you Carla that's why. The other teachers naturally jump on the bandwagon against Carla because fuck that fucking mousy Pollack. Oskar returns to school despite having been suspended. What does Carla do? She keeps trying to help the boy, clearing out the whole classroom and staying there with him by herself. The obvious next move would be for Oskar to accuse her of sexually molesting him, for the school to have mysteriously turned off the cameras, and for Carla to end her days tied to a stake, with teachers, students, and their parents all gleefully touching their torches the heap of kerosene-soaked stakes at her feet. Now that would have been an appropriate ending! Instead, Oskar finally relents to her calm, caring ministrations and finishes the Rubik's Cube she'd given him when they'd met and she'd realized how clever he was before being carted off by the police. So, a happy end, I guess. I thought the whole thing was unrealistically manipulative. I don't know that many toxic people so maybe my whole context is broken. I can't imagine working somewhere where literally everyone hates you every day and actively works to undermine you with every word and action. We watched it in German. Arcane S01--s02 (2022--2024) -- "7/10" This is an exceedingly well-drawn animated series. The art-directions, vision, and animation are all just off the charts. The story is decent but has a bit too much kayfabe-style drama, with heels that nearly always serendipitously find a way to not only survive but to thrive, usually because someone can't deal with them as they so obviously should. I am very obviously looking at Vi (Hailee Steinfeld) here, who fails to take out her sister a thousand times. Generally, the characters are very good and well-fleshed-out. Some are very one-dimensional (looking at you, Ambessa), whereas others are just stuck in cycles or they plateau in their development (Jayce, Jinx, Vi). The show concentrates a bit too much on those, which is boring. Ambessa, in particular, has ridiculous plot armor. Jayce develops for a while but then regresses to obstinate refusal of Viktor's vision. Like, he doesn't even acknowledge what a shitshow the world is otherwise. As for Viktor, he's pretty cool. It's a bit too on-the-nose to have the guy with the Russian name and the Russian accent be the one who seeks union of all souls, with no more room for individual bullshit that leads to so much strife and suffering. "It is the answer you and I pursued all our lives. "An end to cruelty, injustice. "All of us our own authors to an unbroken saga of progress. To the benefit of all. "Choice is false. It is how we clothe and forgive the baser instincts that spur us to division. "Death, war, prejudice. Energy spent only to consume itself. "But we can be of one mind. "United." This is, of course, not what ends up happening. But it almost does! Instead, things get wildly magical -- arcane -- and esoteric. Battles proceed on the astral as well as the mortal plane. There are nigh-unstoppable monsters. There are shock troops. Everyone doesn't live happily ever after but there is finally a truce between the city-dwellers and those below. For now. Jurassic World Dominion (2022) -- "7/10" There are dinosaurs everywhere. They're in the snow somehow. Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) and Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard) are in a relationship and they also have Maisie Lockwood (Isabella Sermon), who is a clone of someone in the Lockwood family and whom everyone wants to capture, I guess. Ellie Sattler (Laura Dern) is also in the mix, tracking the prehistoric insects that are devastating anyone's field who doesn't use Biosyn seeds (the company that resurrected the dinosaurs in the first place). [2] Alan Grant (Sam Neill) is still doing paleontology in the field. Owen meets back up with Blue (a velociraptor) and sees that she has had a baby. Poachers capture the baby, knocking Blue into a ravine. The poachers also pick up Maisie, so now Owen and Blue have a shared mission: get their kids back. Meanwhile Ellie and Alan meet with Lewis Dodgson (Campbell Scott), who's the president of Biosyn, I guess? And he's odd. They are in a super-compound for dinosaur research. Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) is giving a speech at a symposium. He and Ellie discuss end-of-the-world stuff. Dodgson and Henry Wu (BD Wong) are discussing shifty stuff about Maisie and the young raptor. Claire and Owen are at the poacher's market, where Claire meets Kayla Watts (DeWanda Wise), who she tries to convince to help them. Meanwhile, Owen is with Barry Sembène (Omar Sy), who I can't remember how he even got there but I like Omar Sy, so I didn't ask too many questions. The poachers meet up with Soyona Santos (Dichen Lachman), whose some sort of big connection, which I can only intuit because she's got this incredibly exotic and unique-looking face (she's Tibetan/Australian) and she is dressed all in white in a beautiful, ancient-looking but also very obviously sandy and dusty city. The feds (or whatever) drop a trap on the poachers, causing a lot of dinosaurs to get loose. Some escape and some are deliberately loosed by Santos. Claire catches Santos, learning where Maisie is but Santos sics a velociraptor on her. She escapes of course. They both escape, of course. Kayla decides to help Claire. Owen and Barry capture another velociraptor, capturing Santos at the same time. She has pretty thick plot armor, though, so she manages to paint Owen with a signal that sics two velociraptors on him. I dunno, I guess it's a thing. It adds order to the chaos. It lets us know why the dinos chase Owen and Claire instead of just turning on Santos. Or Barry. The action scenes are pretty well-shot -- not muddied at all. They are reasonably coherent, which sets them apart from a lot of these movies. The dinos are kind of indestructible but I don't really mind that. I guess you're not allowed to show them getting hurt in a kid's movie? How is it OK to teach kids that falling from great heights does no damage? Ellie and Allen get a sample of the giant-locust DNA while Maisie releases "Beta" (Blue's autogenetic child) into the lab, giving Dodgson and Henry a serious problem. Maisie meets up with Ellie and Allen. Owen. Claire, and Kayla are airborne but they are attacked by a pterodactyl, which takes out both engines. Owen tells Claire she has to take the one parachute. Owen and Kayla are going down with the plane. They biff into a giant snowbank and no-one even has a stiff neck. Like, they just bounce out of there, moving on to extremely athletic derring-do as if experiencing a plane crash were not just survivable but no worse than banging your funny bone. Ellie, Allen, and Maisie magically meet up with Ramsay Cole (Mamoudou Athie), who was introduced as Dodgson's right-hand man but who actually turns out to be Malcolm's man on the inside, who'd been feeding them all information and now he's there just in the nick of time to get them to an escape pod that will go straight to the airfield, where they will be whisked away from the clutches of Biosyn and it is just, like, super-lucky that there are no cameras anywhere in the facility, otherwise someone might have seen them and stopped them, but there aren't, so they didn't. Claire drops into a jungle where she has to evade a large, feathered velociraptor-like dino that doesn't seem to have such strong eyesight or hearing. She gets away by hiding underwater. Owen and Kayla pop out of the plane's wreckage, completely unscathed -- like, their hair isn't even messed up. They shuffle-walk across the ice into which they'd crashed, which seems to be atop a fortress or base of some sort. A smaller version of the feathered dino greets them and herds them back across the thin ice. Owen falls in but Kayla pulls him out of the icy water. He is totally fine. Not even cold. A few seconds later, his boots aren't even wet. Another few seconds and his shirt is dry, to say nothing of not shivering. He and Kayla escape down an elevator. They are now inexplicably out in the jungle. No transition. Dodgson finally manages to stop Ellie, Allen, and Maisie's shuttle, so they're now on foot in a dinosaur-infested cave. Malcolm and Ramsay are basically fired, at least Malcolm is, with Ramsay about to be fired as soon as he's caught being grievously insubordinate. Malcolm meets up with Ellie, Allen, and Maisie, rescuing them from the cave complex while Owen and Kayla rescue Claire from yet another dinosaur. Dodgson orders the destruction of the locusts. Destruction by fire. They escape through a ceiling hatch, all on fire, then dropping like little meteorites. Malcolm drives off the road a little bit, they teeter, and then roll several times, coming to rest exactly where Owen, Claire, and Kayla are. No-one is hurt. Like, at all. They all get to tackle a giganotosaurus together, in exactly the same way everyone's dealt with these things since the first movie: by hiding behind a car. They all make it into the aerie, where the giganotosaurus is right at eye level. They fight it some more, finally getting it to go away. No-one is injured in any way. The forest burns. Ellie and Claire go off to shut down some power thingamajig so that the air-defense system has enough power ... I don't know, I think that's what's going on. It does give Malcom the opportunity to be very funny running the op. Owen, Grant, and Maisie capture Beta. Shutting off the power traps Dodgson in an access tunnel. He is, of course, not alone. This is exactly the same ending for the #1 billionaire baddie as in the very first film, over thirty years. Let's call it an homage rather than laziness. Henry pops up out of nowhere, promising to be able to analyze Maisie to be able to figure out how to kill the locusts. OR WHATEVER I DON'T KNOW I FEEL LIKE THEY'RE JUST MAKING SHIT UP NOW. The group is now even larger (eight of 'em) with Kayla in a small plane. There is going to be a big dinosaur fight over the spoils. They all get away, of course. There's a bit of tension, then a single rescue flare solves the whole problem. All nine are in this small chopper and it's lifting off into the rain. Everyone is fine and triumphant. Nearly tension-free. The end. I gave it an extra point because, though the action scenes are endless and consequence-free, they are, at least, coherent. Black Adam (2022) -- "5/10" It is 2600 years ago. People are digging in a giant ditch in the desert, enslaved by an evil king. A boy steals a crystal and is transformed into a champion (Dwayne Johson). The champion fights the king and destroys the city. In the modern day, the city is back but it's kind of a war zone, overseen by mercenaries. Adrianna Tomaz (Sarah Shahi) is on the run, helped by a few friends, who smuggle her out of the city to somewhere in the desert. She's kind of a Lara Croft and is seeking the crown that the king once had. She finds it but then a bunch of mercenaries find her. As they are about to kill her, she somehow knows exactly how to resurrect the champion, who appears in an explosion of light. He chokes out and flays one guy to the bone. The other with fire. He is utterly immune to bullets. He moves like lightning. It's kind of comical-looking, though. He saves Adrianna's life when a rock is about to collapse on her. She and her brother Karim (Mohammed Amer) escape. This feels kind of like Apocalypse in that X-Men movie: an unstoppable, ancient quasi-Pharaoh brought back to life. He can electrocute people. But there is the Superman element: he is apparently allergic to Eternium. So when he catches a rocket laden with it, it does damage. He crashes to the Earth. Oh no. There is a team of heroes arrayed against him. Cyclone (Quintessa Swindell), a skinny, black, quirky genius -- like the super-annoying girl from Black Panther -- who can turn herself into a tornado. I am kind of stunned that she seems to be heterosexual. It gets worse from there. There's Dr. Fate (Pierce Brosnan). There's Atom Smasher (Noah Centineo), who inherited his role from Uncle Al (Henry Winkler). There is Hawkman (Aldis Hodge). They are -- I shit you not -- the Justice Society. OK. Sure. They are, of course, rich beyond all reason, and have a giant spaceship. It's underground, under a giant country manor. You know, like the X-Men. Adrianna's son Amon (Bodhi Sabongui) is super-excited, you know, like Shazam. He was also awakened by the word "Shazam" and has the lightning bolt on his costume, so that tracks. Black Adam's out and about now. He kills a bunch of people that attack him. Hawkman puts a lot of effort into saving two mercs, who Black Adam immediately kills. Now the Justice Society takes on Black Adam but, like, it's weird because Dr. Fate is weird. And we have no idea who he is or what he can do. Apparently, he can make mirages? It's unclear why Hawkman can go toe-to-toe with Black Adam, even after being electrocuted a lot. OK, now Cyclone pretty much destroys a whole chunk of the city, without checking for innocents or civilians. Black Adam unleashes holy hell on them but Atom Smasher smashes him into the ground. It doesn't stick. The people of the city love Black Adam. No-one likes the Justice Society, which has destroyed a ton of the city. Pierce Brosnan is just f™&king embarrassing himself. Adrianna says, "Why do you want Teth-Adam to surrender? He's the Champion of Khandaq. Who are you? The Justice Society? We have been living under military occupation for 27 years, and have never seen you before. You didn't come when Intergang invaded our country, when they stole our resources and killed my husband. But now, we finally have our own hero and you decide to fly down here and save us? Thank you, but... we're covered." They keep fighting and fighting and fighting. OMG Hawkman and BLack Adam are fighting again. It's tedious. It's pretty well-choreographed but it's kind of tedious. There's all sorts of Zack Snyder-style slo-mos (but it was directed by Jaume Collet-Serra). Oh, wait. Now, they're all working together agains the incredibly powerfully armed mercenary army. They're there to rescue Amon. OK. So they did that. Now, there's a ton of exposition and backstory that ends in Black Adam saying Shazam and losing all of his power and Hawkman finally getting what he wanted because he's so awesome that we should all be super-happy that he's happy. They store Black Adam away in a coffin underwater. Like, it's pretty f™&king harsh, man. He's back in prison. It's still going though. There's at least 45 minutes left. What is happening? Is this two movies in one? It was less terrible than I expected it to be but still not great. I wrote that line before the second movie started, after Black Adam had been put into a horrible living death of a prison. A new CGI orgy has begun with a demon-king that looks like Hellboy. I'm not even at-all interested in how he figures into the story. He's going to be all-powerful...until he suddenly isn't. It won't be at-all surprising when they have to wake up Black Adam in order to defeat the demon-king. Also, since this is obviously a PG movie, no-one ever gets a scratch. No blood. No-one suffers any debilitation at all, no matter how egregious the damage. But first, Dr. Fate is going to sacrifice himself to save Hawkman. Dr. Fate kind of reminds me of Dr. Strange, though. Dr. Fate releases Black Adam remotely. He is still in his miniature version, until he says Shazam, I guess. Oh God please make it stop. I watched it in German. Time Bandits (1981) -- "7/10" Terry Gilliam generally puts together movies that no-one else would ever have made. They are usually visually sumptuous -- as this one is -- and they are usually peopled with ironically presented dialogues and quirky, zany characters. I last "watched and reviewed this in 2016" . The review and rating stand. The Phantom of the Open (2021) -- "7/10" Maurice Flitcroft (Mark Rylance) is a crane operator in 1970s Britain. He is married to devoted, loyal, and loving wife Jean (Sally Hawkins). They have three sons: rising business star Michael (Jake Davies), who works at the same place Maurice does, but in management, and the twins Gene (Christian Lees) and James (Jonah Lees), who are dead-set on earning their living as disco dancers. That is not a typo. Faced with a potential and unexpected early retirement, Maurice searches around for something to do with himself. He decides to take up golf. But he doesn't want to just play. He wants to earn money. So, he decides to enter the British Open, lying his way in, even after his local club doesn't support him. They are portrayed as elitist -- they are, of course! -- but also he doesn't know how to play golf. Like, not even a little bit. Well, how's he gonna learn if he can't get on a course? Well, that costs money, money that he doesn't have. Hey Maurice, your job was just eliminated by mergers. You live in a capitalist dystopia, not fully automated luxury communism. It ain't right, of course, but don't pretend to be surprised. Maurice applies to the British Open saying that he is a professional golfer. Back in the 70s, when you lied on an application form, no-one doubted it, so he's in. Maurice is allowed to play, of course. He puts up a 121 on the first day, which is amazingly high. That's not good, of course. You're going for a low score in golf. His subterfuge is easily detected -- OMG he's not really a professional -- but he gets kind of famous for his affable attitude and the absolute cheek of what he'd done. Despite the public's adoration, the British Open organization bans him and has it arranged that he will never be allowed to golf at any club in the country. Undeterred, he continues to practice and even gets pretty decent at golf. Over several years, he keeps getting into tournaments -- even the British Open! Again and again! -- but under assumed identities, and playing in disguise. My God, were the 1970s the last time it was possible to do anything nationally funny and harmless like this? Maurice and Jean's fortunes decline, though, as he ends up losing his job due to his antics. Jean sticks by him, though, without complaint. It's glorious how dedicated they are to each other. His disco-dancing sons become successful, traveling the world, but only as long as disco itself is successful, which isn't more than a decade. They are all pretty broke at this point, on the verge of being poor. Michael shows up to admonish them for being so impractical. But lady luck ain't nothin' if not mercurial. Maurice soon gets a letter informing him that's he's famous in the U.S. There are tournaments named after him, where amateurs seek to get the highest score possible. They fly Maurice and his whole family to the largest annual Flitcroft Cup. Oh, also Michael reconciles with the family once he sees that other people, whom he's marked as targets of his obsequiousness, also like his Dad now. A toady to the end. The disco-dancing twins are much better people. This was based on a true story. Asterix & Obelix im Reich der Mitte (2023) -- "4/10" This movie is not great. It's not even good. Somehow it does have Marion Cotillard as Cleopatra and Vincent Cassel as Caesar, which is kind of bizarre. Like, what the heck are they doing in this movie? I know that this movie was made in France but were they required to work on it by the union or something? Zlatan Ibrahimovic plays a Roman guard named Antivirus. He has a bigger role than Cotillard. I figured I'd check out one of these Asterix movies while it was on, but it was not good. It's trash. It's also more than a little racist. "Reich der Mitte" means "Middle Kingdom", which means "China", so you can imagine the kind of broad humor that the film pretty heavily leans on. There are a thousand better movies to watch. I watched it with half an eye, in German. Dinner with Skinner (2025) -- "8/10" The description at IMDb isn't wrong but it doesn't do the film justice. "An expanded, live-action version of the beloved Simpsons sketch known online as "Steamed Hams."" It is not just this, though that's the skeleton on which the film's story hangs. The sinew. muscle, nerves, and blood that flesh the story out -- as it were -- are the nearly beat-for-beat reproduction of 45 minutes of "My Dinner with André" , overlaying that film's concept with the almost unique strangeness of that one episode of the Simpsons. "And then it all ended as quickly as it began. He ushered me out of the house and I was on my way. "It was a nice afternoon, so I treated myself to a long walk home. Along the way, I thought about my old stomping grounds, the beautiful Mohawk Valley. "All those interconnected memories, growing up, getting in trouble, falling in love, and losing it. "They all led me here to this place." You and me both, brother. You and me both. [media] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] These are notes for me to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. The amount of text is not proportional to my enjoyment. I might write less because I didn't get around to it when it was fresh in my mind. I rate the film based on how well it suited me personally for the genre, my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. Links are to "my IMDb ratings" [1] It's kind of sad that this is the plot point that comes the closest to what happens in real life, as international conglomerates tighten the noose around anyone who actually does something valuable for a living, squeezing every last drop of rent out of them by patenting their seeds. This is true. This happens all of the time. It's sad because probably most of the people who saw this movie thought to themselves how horrible it would be were this ever to happen, if they even noticed it at all. Like, the elites are just taunting us at this point. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5675 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5675 Fri, 02 Jan 2026 10:43:56 +0100 -- "6/10" 2. "Death Becomes Her (1992)" <#Death> -- "8/10" 3. "Superman (2025)" <#Superman> -- "4/10" 4. "Plane (2023)" <#Plane> -- "6/10" 5. "Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021)" <#Ghostbusters> -- "6/10" 6. "Secret Headquarters (2022)" <#Secret> -- "5/10" 7. "Outbreak (1995)" <#Outbreak> -- "8/10" 8. "John Rambo (Rambo) (2008)" <#Rambo> -- "7/10" 9. "The Running Man (1987)" <#Running> -- "6/10" 10. "Invelle (Nowhere) (2023)" <#Invelle> -- "8/10" Jurassic World: Rebirth (2025) -- "6/10" I can't tell whether this movie is just cheesy or whether it's the motion interpolation that makes it look cheesier. It looks like a damned video game. The story starts with a dinosaur eating a scientist as it almost breaks containment. That was 17 years ago. In the modern day, we get intro titles that explain that dinosaurs are only thriving at the equator in no-go zones. The last brachiosaurus in North America breaks out and into the city where it's been kept, but lies dying. In the foreground, we meet Martin Krebs (Rupert Friend) and Zora Bennett (Scarlett Johansson), who explains everything that we learned in the titles all over again. They then meet up with Dr. Henry Loomis (Jonathan Bailey), who runs a dinosaur bone museum and who explains the company's goal of finding giant dinosaurs at the equator in order to harvest their blood to get some sort of coronary drug. This matters less than making an awkward scene of waiting for him to acquiesce. It's just the same lame jokes with not-even-snappy repartee. Next, they're on an island to meet Duncan Kincaid (Mahershala Ali), who decides to back out of participating in the whole mission. Bobby Atwater (Ed Skrein) joins the team, rounding out the mercenaries who couldn't care less about the dinosaurs and just want to do the mission and survive. This is also par for the course. His shirt is even tighter than Johansson's and he's showing more nipple. Holy shit, this acting is terribly phoned in. Jesus. Scarlett Johansson is fucking terrible. Mahershala Ali is also utterly awful, without chemistry. Ali is perhaps better than the others but it's all so wooden. Am I getting too old for this shit? Or are these movies just getting more terrible? Next scene is a group of fools on a sailboat, with an over-the-top asshole who is very obviously going to be the first one eaten by a dinosaur. This is interminable and these people suck. It feels like a soap opera. Completely shockingly, a giant mosasaur rams and capsizes the sailboat, dumping everyone in the water and trapping the asshole boyfriend Xavier in the cabin. The mercs decide to answer the distress call of the sailboat before they go pick up dinosaurs. This means, of course, that will get more chances at having kids get into danger. Also, we'll get more of asshole Xavier, which should be fun. There are two people who occasionally speak French. It is not explained why they do this. The father is the only one who realizes the danger his family might be in. The rest of the young people act as if their rescuers owe them an in-depth explanation. This takes a back-burner to the mosasaur showing up and the mercs swinging into action to extract blood from it. They manage to spike it despite the incredibly bad trigger discipline on Zora's part. The good doctor expresses the perfectly sane and rational opinion to Zora that they should probably not turn over the blood samples when they're done. LOOMIS: Hey. ZORA: Hey. LOOMIS: What if we don’t? ZORA: What if we don’t what? LOOMIS: Well, what if we get the samples and we don’t give them over to a company that makes a lifesaving drug and then prices it so 99% of the planet can’t afford it? Science is for all of us, not some of us. Have you thought about that? ZORA: No, I guess I haven’t. LOOMIS: Well, then maybe you should start. ZORA: Maybe you should stop. They don't let those communist thoughts linger too long on the screen (else it would have gotten an NC-17 rating). So, some anti-communist dinosaurs attack again. The whole family ends up overboard, with the merc boat crashing into James-Bond-looking islands. The mercs also all jump ship, except for Duncan, who crashes with the ship. The famly is miraculously reunited and they're all trapped on the Isla Nublar. Um, also they lost Bobby first (no surprise there) and then another Merc lady. Duncan, Krebs, and Loomis have some fun conversations, swerving dangerously close to expressing very communist-sounding things for a big-budget, dinosaur-action movie. There's this one, where Loomis questions the premise that the primary consideration in any situation is one of fiduciary responsibility rather than morality. DUNCAN: Ideally, you don’t try weird genetic shit at all. KREBS: Well, they learned that the hard way. Any that were malformed or just too damn hard for anybody to look at, they left them here. LOOMIS: Well, that’s inhuman. Why not just euthanize them? KREBS: The average cost of a created species is $72 million. What would you do? Kill it and have to tell your bank or just carry it forward under R&D? LOOMIS: What would I do with mutant dinosaurs from an accounting perspective? Is that really the question? Or this one, about how Loomis (the scientist) would like to die. DUNCAN: I hate the jungle. I try to avoid it now. LOOMIS: Why is that? DUNCAN: You can’t see three feet in front of you, and you always know you’re being stalked. And the only place to hide is underwater. I refuse to die in the jungle. LOOMIS: My dream is I die in a shallow sea and I’m buried quickly by silt. DUNCAN: That’s beautiful. LOOMIS: It’s the best chance of being fossilized that way. DUNCAN: (laughs) You’re a weirdo. LOOMIS: Thank you. Or, finally, Loomis's opinion that humanity thinks that it's in charge of the planet but it's up to us to stay in the climate zone that it offers. "LOOMIS: We don’t rule the Earth. We just think we do. I mean, sure, we’re changing the environment, but that makes us the ones to worry about, not the planet. When the Earth gets tired of us, believe me, it will shake us off like a summer cold. Of all species that have existed on Earth, 99.9% of them are now extinct. Survival is a long shot." This movie is so uneven. There's a relatively nice shot of them walking through lush greenery that reminds me of "Kong: Skull Island" -- even though Skull Island looked so much more real [2], it still evoked a response -- and then there's just a stupid, cheaply filmed scene of Xavier taking a leak in the forest for five minutes and almost getting eaten but then not getting eaten. This is pretty weird, though, as they've now encountered a dinosaur well-known to the scientist but they were also told that the island was full of mutant cross-breeds. How did the gentle giants survive for 20 years? There are literally hundreds of the things, stretching to the horizon. How is there still so much greenery when those things must eat their own weight in vegetation every week? The next great adventure is to get a boat from under the nose of a T-Rex. This whole scene is fraught with needless silliness, cheap effects, and plot discontinuities. Where did the paddle come from? How is the boat still inflated after an 8-ton bite chomps it? The mercs are now rappelling a 500-foot cliff, with Zora pretending like it's the easiest thing in the world and the good doctor being quite expert, despite his complete inexperience. They're in an aerie to collect the final blood sample. ZORA: You’re a very impressive nerd, Henry. LOOMIS: (chuckles) ZORA: What would the alternative be? LOOMIS: To what? ZORA: To handing the samples over to ParkerGenix. LOOMIS: We open-source it. We give it to the whole world. A bunch of people create the medicine, nobody owns the patent, everyone has access, and tens of millions of lives are saved. It’s all of us, not some of us. ZORA: I don’t make any money in that scenario. LOOMIS: Oh, no, you’re broke as hell. ZORA: Yeah, I don’t love that part. Everything works out in the end, except for the final French merc was eaten. They have the samples and Zora is totally in love with Loomis. Flash back to the family where their inflatable boat has not only not been damaged by having been attacked by a T-Rex, but the paddles were both still in the boat, even though she had clearly left them in the shed miles back. They happen upon an abandoned base. The mercs arrive soon after. We're now treated to another interminable scene that is basically a replay of the kitchen scene in the first Jurassic Park. The doctor manages to get the helicopter's attention with a flare but it flies right into the clutches of a truly gigantic dinosaur. The effects are comically bad. The good guys get into a tunnel complex and make their way to the shoreline to a boat. The bad guy is driving across the island as well, in a car with a howling car alarm. Zora joins the others just in time to save them from a dinosaur in the tunnel. Just as they're all about to be eaten by the ugliest dinosaur ever, the loud car appears and saves them all. As predicted, the briefcase falls with the arm attached. Loomis retrieves it. Also as foreshadowed in an utterly predictable and ham-handed manner, Duncan sacrifices himself to save the kids. You know, because his own kid had died. It's all so predictable and insipid. They play a bunch of dramatic music to make it seem like a holy experience but it's just dumb. I don't really want to be that guy but how did the father's leg fix itself? Like, he was limping heavily with a cane before and now he's just fine, like nothing had happened. Did he go to a hospital? Did I miss that? With no explanation whatsoever, Duncan seems to have survived. I guess the dinosaur wasn't hungry. Now they're on a boat that's very quiet but that has two giant outboard engines that the father had used a pull-cord to start.. [3] Anyway, they have the case of three dinosaur-blood samples and they have the doctor with his beautiful open-source vision of letting all of mankind benefit from it. He gives Zora the choice and she says "we’ll give it to everyone." The end. Look, I'm not gonna completely spit on a movie with an obviously pro-socialist ending. Good for them. It's not getting an extra star for it because it was a shockingly poorly made movie for it being 2025 and it having cost $225M. The shabbiness of the CGI for that amount of money is breathtaking. They got scammed. You could practically see the white outline of the people in the boat in the final scene. The light on their faces didn't even begin to match the background. What is going on? Are they really not capable of making a better film? Was it the motion-interpolation? Watch Kong: Skull Island; it was much better. Death Becomes Her (1992) -- "8/10" This movie is about scheming and conniving. It is about eternal youth. It is about the unfairness of a world in which women are led to believe that they have only their looks on which to get by. We start at a musical starring Madeline Ashton (Meryl Streep). It is not doing well. Only famous plastic surgeon Ernest Menville (Bruce Willis) stands up to offer an ovation. His fiancé, writer Helen Sharp (Goldie Hawn) is an old friend of Madeline's. They have a fraught relationship, mostly because Madeline is a fractious, jealous, and venal bitch. She is jealous of Helen for her closeness to such a vaunted plastic surgeon. Despite his denials to Helen, Ernest quickly breaks off his engagement and marries Madeline. Seven years later, Helen is fat and living with dozens of cats. The police break into her apartment for failure to pay rent. The take her off to the boobie hatch, where she spends several long months, talking only about Madeline. Seven more years later and Helen is back and she's fabulous. Unfortunately for Madeline, she is less fabulous and feeling her age. Her marriage to Ernest is a disaster. He drinks all the time and calls her a monster with the staff. He is now a mortician to the stars rather than a plastic surgeon. Madeline sees how gorgeous Helen looks at her book party and is driven to desperation -- desperate enough even to call on Lisle Von Rhuman (Isabella Rossellini), who offers her a youth serum for a tremendous fee. She reveals that she is 71 years old although she doesn't look a day over 30 (Rossellini was actually 40 at the time the film came out). Madeline agrees nearly immediately, quickly enjoying her new youthful looks and new youthful body (Streep was 43 at the time the movie came out). Meanwhile, the no-longer-fat and now-incredibly vivacious Helen (Hawn was an incredible 47 years old at the time the movie came out) has once again seduced Ernest and has convinced him that he should not only leave Madeline but that he should kill her. She has a whole plan laid out. It goes horribly awry when Madeline's incredible bitchiness clashes with Ernest's drunkenness and sullenness to make him push her down the stairs, where she breaks her wrist, her arm, her legs, and her neck. She is not, however, dead, as confirmed by a doctor (Sydney Pollack). After the hospital staff has taken a passed-out Madeline to the morgue, Ernest rescues her and takes her to his studio, where he "fixes her up" with his mortician's tools. Helen shows up just in time for Madeline to shoot her point-blank with a shotgun, blasting a hole in her midsection and sending her flying backwards into an indoor fountain. She comes to after a bit because, well, she'd taken the same potion from Lisle seven years prior. They fight and finally reconcile and discover that they need Ernest to fix them up. Now they realize that they need him for continued maintenance, they can't let him leave, as he'd intended. They concoct a plan to drug him, take him to Lisle, and force him to take the potion of eternal life, so that he, too, can live forever. When he refuses to drink, wanting to turn his life around, they knock him out more conventionally and take him to Lisle. Ernest awakens in Lisle's castle, with Isabella Rossellini spectacularly nude and languorously exiting a large, gorgeously lit, indoor swimming pool. She is deeply interested in having him take the potion, as she has seen his skill at restoration, and is interested in having him around when she inevitably dies. Ernest refuses the potion and escapes, but heads into a giant party where all of the attendees are Lisle's clients. They would all most likely be interested in having his services around forever. Ernest escapes again, exiting at the roof and trying to crawl across its loose tiles. He falls onto a drainpipe and is about to plummet to his death. the ladies find him and exhort him to drink the potion before he falls. instead, he drops it to the courtyard below. He follows it soon after, plummeting through a stained-glass window into the pool room, but surviving. The ladies make a pact to take care of each other, painting each other's asses, forever. The epilogue of the film is at Ernest's funeral, where we learn that he restarted his life at 50, taking up mountain-climbing, marrying, having children, and founding charities for children and marriage-counseling around the world. The two ladies are of course there, in veils and looking more than disheveled. "You're gonna need some more bondo." They look very much like Instagram influencers in the final scene, where they're all spackled up after 37 years of maintenance. They're all quite wonderful in these roles. I had forgotten how long the movie took to get going. The first murder is easily halfway through the film. Superman (2025) -- "4/10" This movie is so cheesy. It is a child's movie. The four-year-old could follow the plot. It would be clapping its pudgy little hands like it was Cars 3. There's a nigh-omnipotent Lex Luthor (Nicholas Hoult) calling out moves to have his robot defeat Superman (David Corenswet). Then the ethnic guy goes out in the street to see if he's OK. Now, Clark's in the office with Lois Lane (Rachel Brosnahan) and Jimmy Olsen (Skyler Gisondo). They discuss the things that you expect them to discuss. I'm not even going to mention stupid Krypto. There is a subplot about Boravia, which is attacking Metropolis to try to kill Superman, I guess? Lois knows that Clark is Superman. They meet back at the apartment, where Clark is cooking. Lois wants to interview Superman but sweet mother of God does that scene take a long time. I guess people love how Lois Lane treats Superman as a hostile witness. So girl-boss. When she irritates him to no end, he decides to leave, after which she whines that he's being a baby. Why are you shutting down? Man, I hope that tail is worth it, Kal-El. It's almost certainly not. Now Lex Luthor and his little army of superheroes -- the Engineer (María Gabriela de Faría, who is atrocious) and some Ultraman thing -- just easily gets access to the Fortress of Solitude -- like in literal seconds, with the door opening right up for them without hesitation. This isn't even a plot; it's just stuff happening that a four-year-old would think is cool. Lex Luthor can just kind of do whatever he wants whenever he wants. I can't believe people thought that this was good. It's trash. It's for children. And it's even insulting to their intelligence. Everyone involved in this thing should be ashamed of themselves. This is fucking embarrassing. There's a black-guy-in-a-flying-wheelchair superhero. I can't even believe I just wrote that. I can't believe that they're not taking the piss. If this were "The Boys" , I'd know that they'd be making fun of how woke everything's gotten. In this movie, I probably missed where they casually mentioned that he's also a gay socialist. Superman just saved a squirrel. It got five seconds of screen-time. Nathan Fillion plays a very strange-looking Green Lantern. Lex Luthor plants fake news and everyone believes it immediately. OMG YAWN. "I know those computer forensics guys. There's no way the message is fake." OMG YAWN. Like, things just happen because they need to happen. Also, Lex Luthor has teleportation devices. They are accompanied by rock music. I am going crazy. Nicholas Hoult should be ashamed of himself. He is doing such a terrible job. This is a stupid, stupid movie. Did we stop even trying to make movies that look like things? Oh God, now they're going to ruin Frank Grillo's reputation on the altar of ... what? Who is this movie even for? Did anyone else notice that Mr. Terrific's little dance of destruction with his little robots was nearly a beat-for-beat rip-off of any of the times that Yondu whistled his arrow of death through dozens of enemies. The one time on the ship, after he'd been laid low? Yeah, that was awesome. Mr. Terrific ticking a box? Not so much. Lois has 100% access to all of Lexcorp's financial records with no doubt in her mind that they are correct. This, after she yelled at Clark that she "questions everything". That lasted about six seconds. Jimmy has a source that knows that Superman is being held in a pocket universe, with a special alien who can make kryptonite ... meanwhile a guy named Mr. Terrific (black dude in a wheelchair) put nanobots in Superman's bloodstream ... I can't do this. I can't describe every stupid element of this stupid plot. The movie ended pretty much as you might imagine: Lex Luthor loses, Krypto defeats Luthor, Mr. Terrific closes the dimensional rift (WTF?), Superman's reputation is saved while Lex Luthor's is destroyed. The plot to carve up a poor country is foiled by the League of Justice (or whatever, I mean who cares?) and Lois and Clark are all good again. The end. What a shitshow. Either this movie sucks ass or I'm incapable of enjoying anything anymore. Maybe a little of column A, a little of column B. Plane (2023) -- "6/10" I had just watched and "reviewed this movie in March 2025" but my father-in-law had it on, so I watched it with half-an-eye while I was doing something else. I think my original review of 4 was a bit harsh. In that review, I compared it unfavorably to "Sisu" but now, I'm comparing it to the trash-heap that was "Superman" <#superman>, so it suddenly looks endearing and charming. You can still tell that Gerard Butler filmed most of his scenes alone, on a green screen. But he's so charming and earnest that it somehow works. The final shot of him on the stairs of the plane, with the camera panning upward to take in the plane, nicely centered in the shot? It's kind of a nice coda. Maybe I liked it better in the original English, I dunno. Maybe I'm just a moody sonofabitch. Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021) -- "6/10" Callie (Carrie Coons) takes her two kids to a house she'd inherited from her father. They're forced to stay because they've been thrown out of their apartment for failure to pay rent. Janine Melnitz (Annie Potts) shows up to see what they're up to. For the unitiated, this is the first "callback": she played the secretary in the first Ghostbusters. The kids slowly discover the ghost-hunting implements in the home of their grandfather. Ok, not Trevor (Finn Wolfhard), who's chasing Lucky's (Celeste O'Connor) tail but Phoebe (Mckenna Grace) joins up with local boy Podcast (Logan Kim) to investigate. They end up joining forces with Grooberson (Paul Rudd) to open a ghost trap that they'd found, releasing an ancient evil that their grandfather had kept there. The monster takes up residence in a local mine that had been dug into some ancient ruins. Phoebe seems to be communicating with her grandfather Egon Spengler's spirit, who's helping her rebuild his arsenal of ghost-hunting equipment. Trevor manages to get the Ectomobile going again. Their first target is Slimer, who they snag using the Ectomobile and all of its gadgets. They are pulled over and arrested for having damaged half the town. Sheriff Domingo (Bokeem Woodbine) gives Phoebe a phone call. She calls the Ghostbusters. Ray Stantz (Dan Akroyd) picks up the phone. Phoebe, Podcast, Trevor, and Lucky head to the mine to investigate further, finding Ivo Shandor (J.K. Simmons) in a sarcophagus, although he looks pretty good. There is a giant pit of souls kept under control by an automated mechanism that fires five Ghostbusting guns. Callie discovers her father's lab -- which Phoebe had already discovered -- and is taken by one of the monsters. She becomes Zool (Sigourney Weaver's role in the original). The Key-master is, naturally, Grooberson. They meet up and get it on. The kids meanwhile put on Ghostbuster uniforms that somehow fit them really well, collect the rest of the equipment, and then head to the cave complex, where Callie and Grooberson are lining up to call Gozer (Emma Portner). Phoebe and Podcast try to catch Gozer in a ghost-trap. Phoebe distracts Gozer with absolutely terrible jokes while Podcast opens the trap. They disable Gozer, freeing Callie from her possession by a dog-ghost. They're outtathere. Gozer tracks them back at the house, where Phoebe executes her grandfather's plan to finish Gozer///but it fails, at least at first. Until the original Ghostbusters -- Ray Stantz, Peter Venkman (Bill Murray), and Winston Zeddemore (Ernie Hudson) -- show up and attempt to save the day. Gozer throws them back again. Phoebe joins forces with her grandfather's ghost (Bob Gunton) and the other three to turn the tide, with Trevor powering up the towers to finally trigger Egon's revenge, filling thousands of buried traps at once with ghosts. This movie is actually quite pretty, nicely filmed. I was pleasantly surprised to find out it was better than expected. It still wasn't great but I thought it was going to be terrible. I kind of liked Podcast. The end was much too schmaltzy and self-indulgent but the first 95% was pretty good. I dinged it for leaning much too hard into the nostalgia and continuity bullshit. The movie was nearly a beat-for-beat remake of the original and they brought back any and all cast members who are still alive and made a fucking hologram of the one guy who'd already died. Just make a good movie. It doesn't have to dovetail with the arbitrary decisions made in a movie made forty years ago, a movie no-one thought would ever, ever lead to more movies. I watched it in German. Secret Headquarters (2022) -- "5/10" So Jack (Owen Wilson) has a kid Charlie (Walker Scobell) who he keeps abandoning. After the latest abandonment, Charlie finds his father's secret fortress -- because his dad's the Watcher or Watchman or whatever. Charlie and his three friends spend a long time investigating all of the cool shit that Jack has in his secret lair -- it's a ton of shit, like an endless pile of CGI stuff that doesn't look too bad. There is a group of bad guys run by Argon (Michael Pena) that is trying to catch the Watcher. When the kids use all of his stuff in the open and turn off the signal blockers, these people finally figure out where he lives and they hunt them down. They have no idea it's kids, though. While the kids are all making goo-goo eyes at each other or using the Watcher's toys to make themselves play baseball better, the soldiers infiltrate the Watcher's bunker. The kids and the soldiers fight over a glowing ball. The Watcher shows up in the nick of time to save the kids, who'd just been captured but had also managed to capture the power ball and send it through a wormhole to one of their lockers. They get the ball back after a showdown in the school with Argon, who ends up being banished to another dimension (killed?) and the energy ball being destroyed. The ending is lame but anyway, it's not made for me: it's for kids. P.S. The new van is just a shameless product-placement for VW. The old van was so much cooler than that anemic piece of shit. Outbreak (1995) -- "8/10" We start off somewhere in Africa, in a village that serves as a base for what look like American mercenaries or soldiers. A helicopter lands and two people in hazmat suits investigate the area. They reassure the desperate soldiers, sick with what turns out to be hemorrhagic fever, and then leave. Soon after, a plane drops a package by parachute. It is an incendiary bomb that wipes out the entire village. Sam Daniels (Dustin Hoffman) works at a virology lab with Robby Keough (Rene Russo). The lab has extremely lax and movie-style mask discipline, with some people in full hazmat suits standing right next to people wearing short sleeves and masks. These people invariably take their masks off before they leave the room. Sometimes the room doesn't even have a door and there are people standing outside with no masks on. After COVID, this will never look normal again. Sam gets news that he is to go to the center of a viral catastrophe to investigate. He leaves his big, slobbery Saint Bernards with Robby, who isn't going. Sam meets up with his team, which includes Major Salt (Cuba Gooding Jr.) and Casey Schuler (Kevin Spacey). They are under the direction of General Billy Ford (Morgan Freeman). They get to the area in their full, yellow, hazmat suits. Schuler vomits in his suit nearly immediately. He desperately pulls his helmet off, with Sam screaming at him not to. Dr. Benjamin Iwabi (Zakes Mokae) steps into the room to let them know that the virus is not spread via aerosol -- it's not airborne. Back in the lab, they isolate the virus. They discover that the "Motaba Virus" is back. This is the virus that they'd eliminated at the beginning of the film. And now they begin work on an antiviral, I guess? Jimbo Scott (Patrick Dempsey) is smuggling Rhesus monkeys out of the lab, so that's probably bad. After releasing the monkey, he flies somewhere and he is incredibly sick on the plane. A little boy asks if he can finish his half-eaten cookie. His mom saves him from that horrible fate. Jimbo arrives and falls into the arms of his girlfriend, who tongue-kisses him deeply, just before he collapses. The proprietor of the pet store where Jimbo had sold the Rhesus monkey collapses in his store and later dies in the ER. We see more and more people who exhibit behavior that has nothing whatsoever to do with a post-COVID world: they go everywhere while deeply ill. They look horrific and they still casually mingle with dozens of people. They all completely ignore how sick they are, until it's too late and they've infected dozens more. Billy Ford's boss General Donald McClintock (Donals Sutherland) is in the mix, working hard to cover up what's happening and to make sure that nothing can be traced back to them. He was in charge decades ago when they eradicated that African village. He's looking for a similar solution here, even though it's spread to the U.S. of A. The outbreak spreads. Soldiers are called in. Nighttime. Trucks screech to a halt. Soldiers jump from them. A helicopter flies overhead. Dawn. Mist. A line of emergency vehicles crosses a bridge. A siren 🚨 blips. High-tech jeeps drive through intricately built military camps, draped in weapons nests and camouflage nets. This is pretty great cinema. Some families try to escape quarantine. The army hunts them down and kills a whole truckload before the others give up. Sam confronts Billy, telling him that the virus now has airborne transmission. They're now reluctantly working together but Sam is highly suspicious of Billy's treatment, grabbing a bag of it to give to Major Salt for analysis. We see a sick mother picked up from her home by alien-looking soldiers in gas masks. She is collected with other sick people and quarantined in a building, where they are almost certainly going to be well-cared-for. There are a lot of dead people around. The soldiers all seem fine. Casey Schuler can find only infected people. Somehow, they're all not infected yet. They're still trying to find patient zero, trying to track down where this came from. Schuler walks into something and rips his outfit, but he covers it up. Later, they discover that Billy's anti-serum is a closely held secret that actually cures the original Motaba Virus but they've only verified it works on monkeys. Schuler start to code out but they're trying to bring him back. While they're treating him, his spasms knock Robby's hand loose and push the needle she was holding into her own finger. She's now in trouble, too. Sam confronts Billy about the anti-serum. Why didn't they use the anti-serum when it would have stopped everything? Because they wanted to keep the perfect biological weapon for themselves. Billy talks about how it was a totally awesome idea that they were forced into by the evil of their enemies. Bla bla bla. They're going to destroy the entire city -- just like they did in Africa, a long time ago. Sam and Salt steal a helicopter. General McClintock orders them killed, but now Billy seems to have grown a conscience and refuses the order. Sam and Salt land in the main city to find out where the imported animal may have come from. After getting information from a very helpful woman at the municipal building, they're off again to find the ship on which the animals came in. They find the ship and Sam jumps onto it from the helicopter. The ship is Korean so they have trouble understanding each other but he finds one man who died on the boat, of what looks like a horrible disease. He had a picture of a monkey hanging over his bed. They're back in the air. They're on the ground again. They break into a news station, weapons drawn. They're going to take over the broadcast and ask people to help them find the monkey. A mom sees the broadcast and realizes that a drawing that her daughter made of her new "friend" was of the monkey. They manage to tranquilize it and are off again. They run into General McClintock. He and his wingman try to shoot them out of the sky. Salt is flying that little helicopter like it's Airwolf. That helicopter also has endless fuel. They finally land back at the town and start processing the monkey's blood. Schuler is gone but Robby is still hanging on. Sam has exposed himself to Robby's virus, to convince her to hang on. Salt finishes the anti-serum and brings it to Robby. It's working. McClintock doesn't care; he's going forward with the destruction of the town, which also means that the anti-serum will be destroyed. Salt asks why they're going to destroy the town, even though there's now an anti-serum? "Die wollen ihren Waffen haben." Sam and Salt are back in the air; they're going to try to convince the pilots not to attack the town. Billy reveals to them how they can prevent the bombing run: they have to play chicken with it. The bomb falls harmlessly in the water. Well, not harmlessly; it was a pretty big explosion and probably killed a lot of fish. Like I said above, this is a quality film with good actors and a great plot. I gotta give it an extra star just for being pretty exciting. I would absolutely watch this again, perhaps the next time in the original English. John Rambo (Rambo) (2008) -- "8/10" We begin in Burma, where a savage civil war is slaughtering civilians. Soldiers dump a truckload of people next to a field, then seed it with a few mines. The civilians are herded across the field, running for their lives. One of them finds a mine. The others make it most of the way but they are gunned down instead. The thing with the mines and the running was just for fun. The outcome was preordained. Rambo is hunting cobras with local friends somewhere in Thailand. This scene is shot quite nicely. It's pretty. It seems quite peaceful. It's calm. Rambo keeps an entire menagerie of snakes and their food, caring for them while Michael Burnett (Paul Schulze) and Sarah (Julie Benz) ask him to take their "church group" to Burma. He refuses to even entertain the notion, telling them to "go home." We see scenes of Rambo smithing propellor blades for his boat interleaved with scenes of base cruelty in Burma. It is raining. Sarah is back. He tells her that "nothing ever changes," no matter how naively she thinks that going to Burma and "helping people" will change anything. Sarah manages to convince him to take them upriver. She is hopelessly naive. She prattles on to him about how he should be curious to see how things have changed in the U.S. since Vietnam. He knows that nothing ever changes. They meet Vietnamese pirates. Because Burnett opens his mouth too much, they get wind of the boat slinking by. They try to board, and get very excited when they see Sarah. Rambo is forced to escalate. He annihilites all of them with five well-placed shots. It is over in one second. The church people are horrified. Violence is the only way. Nothing ever changes. Burnett yells at Rambo for having killed people. Rambo tells him that "Sie [the pirates] hättet sie 50 mal vergewaltigt und euch alle den Schädel abgehauen," Sarah begs him to keep going because they could help people and they're so close. "Ihr werdet gar nichts ändern." They arrive at their destination in Burma, where Burnett tells Rambo that he's going to turn him in for murdering those poor pirates because "Töten ist nie das Richtige." Ok, buddy. Rambo returns to the Vietnamese pirates by boat, while the church group travels overland. He's there to destroy the evidence. Sarah's over here handing out Bibles in plastic bags. They schlepped hundreds of pounds of Bibles through the jungle. Jesus, the ignorance. Sarah looks at all of the amputees and begins to doubt. A nearby explosion from a mortar attack on the village strengthens the flame of that doubt into a forest fire. Soldiers enter the village, slaughtering children, raping young women, chopping off limbs. One of the missionaries has both of his legs blown clean off. A flamethrower takes care of the building. Snipers and machine guns takes care of the rest of the people, dropping them as they run into the rice paddies. The soldiers find Sarah where she lies in a puddle, largely unharmed and seemingly the only survivor. The head of the church finds Rambo to ask for his help. The church group dropped off the map ten days ago. No-one else can help. Back in the smithy, this time to make a knife. His new mission is to transport a load of mercenaries hired by the church. They are a lovely group of guys, running the gamut from educated to venal to complete asshole who wears his fear on his sleeve, letting it out as overconfidence. Sarah is bound and noosed in a bamboo cage, right next to the swine. They arrive in Burma to learn from their two guides that there are 100 soldiers waiting for them. The arrogant SAS asshole says that's fine. Rambo tries to go with them but is told to stay with the boat, with his men. The village has been destroyed. Fly-blown corpses lie everywhere, people, animals. Heads are on pikes, bodies hang from nooses. The mercenaries are unsettled. Burmese soldiers arrive with a load of prisoners. As before, they seed the paddy with mines, drive them across the water, then exhort them to come back when none explodes. They grow increasingly agitated until Rambo appears on a ridge, firing one arrow after another through their heads until they are all dead. He confronts the mercs, daring them to chicken out. "Wer bist du, Bootsman?" It is night. The rain pours. The mercenaries enter the camp, dropping off one by one into the jungle camp. The Burmese soldiers are engrossed in a dance show. Rambo releases Burnett and a couple of others. He orders a merc to get Sarah. She can't be found. The Burmese soldiers storm the stage, tearing off the dancers' clothes and tearing into them. The Burmese general is about to do the same with Sarah -- like, what was he waiting for? Is she too old? Wrong gender? -- but Rambo rips open his throat with a single slice of his knife. Although the other mercs have disappeared with the other church-folk -- they tried to get them to wait for Sarah but SAS Lewis (Graham McTavish) says "Dein Gott hat dich nicht gerettet. Wir waren das!" -- but the sniper Schoolboy (Matthew Marsden) stayed behind to help Rambo. They are now on the run in two groups: Sarah, Schoolboy, and Rambo, and the other mercs and rescued church-members and a few other prisoners. Lewis steps on a landmine. He's alive but cannot walk. Burnett fixes him and his buddies carry him. Schoolboy notices that they're being followed by troops. Rambo tears a bit of Sarah's clothes off to wrap around his boot. He takes the claymore from Schoolboy, tells him to fire a shot, and then run for the boat. "Ich komme schon klar." He lays a trap with the claymore, right next to unexploded ordinance from WWII. Having lured the men with the dogs to that spot in the jungle, they fall for the bait, triggering an explosion that tears apart half the jungle. The blast wave throws Rambo down a hill. Schoolboy and Sarah make it to the boat to find Burmese troops beating Rambo's boat crew, the other mercs, and the remaining church-folk. Never fear, though. Rambo is back. He takes over the heavy-caliber Burmese machine gun posted atop the hill, laying into the soldiers below. The mercs swing into efficient action as well, taking out soldiers right and left. The battlefield is chaos. Even Burnett is forced to kill a soldier who'd been about to kill Lewis. The rebels appear, taking out more of the troops. Backup troops arrive, both by truck and by boat. Rambo and the rebels take out both. Rambo is there to tear out the Burmese general's guts, as he'd almost escaped at the top of the hill. The battlefield is gory, smoky, covered in fire and destruction. Rambo has been hit and only then feels it. Most of the mercs are dead or grievously injured. Schoolboy's OK but he looks pretty traumatized. Rambo stares down from the top of the hill, thinking "Es ändert nie etwas." Sarah has probably learned nothing. Epilogue: Rambo finds his father's ranch somewhere in the American West, walking along the road, much like he did in the first film. I watched it in German. The Running Man (1987) -- "8/10" The movie starts with a crawl that reads, "By 2017, the world economy has collapsed. Food, natural resources and oil are in short supply. A police state, divided into Paramilitary Zones, rules with an iron hand. Television is controlled by the state and a sadistic game show called "The Running Man" has become the most popular program in history. All art, music and communications are censored. No dissent is tolerated and yet a small resistance movement has managed to survive underground. When high-tech gladiators are not enough to suppress the people's yearning for freedom... more direct methods become necessary." This is really not too far off, except it predicted things a bit early. We're right on track, though! There's a cage match scheduled for the White House lawn in June of 2026. I used to think that Trump might be taking the piss, but now I think he really believes all of his own nonsense. You know his fans do. The con man's not supposed to drink his own Kool-Aid but here we are. Anyway, where were we? The first scene shows officer Ben Richards (Arnold Schwarzenegger) refusing an order to slaughter 1,800 people. "Ben Richards: Food riot in progress. Approximately 1800 civilians, no weapons are evident. Dispatcher: Proceed with plan Alpha. Eliminate anything moving. Ben Richards: I said the crowd is unarmed! There are a lot of women and children down there, all they want is food, for god's sake! Dispatcher: As you were, Richards. Proceed with plan alpha. All rioters must be eliminated. Ben Richards: The hell with you! I will not fire on helpless people! Abort mission, we return back to base." Well, well, well. Another prediction come true. Absolutely spot-on. Instead of slaughtering starving people in California somewhere, we're treated to day after day of nearly identical scenes from Gaza, where I fear that there aren't too many guys like Ben Richards who refuse to follow orders to slaughter civilians, when "all they want is food". Eighteen months later, Richards is in a work camp, from which he engineers an escape with Laughlin (Yaphet Kotto) and Weiss (Marvin J. McIntyre). Richards finds that Amber (Maria Conchita Alonso) has moved in to his brother's apartment, who'd been relocated for "re-education." He coerces her into trying to travel to Hawaii with him, on her travel pass. She gets away, screaming, and the police descend on him. In jail, he meets Running Man show-runner Damon Killian (Richard Dawkins), who coerces him into joining his show the next day (by threatening Laughlin and Weiss, who've also been captured). Ben Richards kills the first stalker, Subzero (Professor Toru Tanaka), sending shockwaves throughout the network: this is the first time a stalker has been killed. Ok, sure, this is supposed to establish Richards's bona fides as "the one" but I'm just wondering how boring this show was, when the "victims" never made any headway before. Was the most popular show in the country just hours of costumed psychos beating the hell out of poor people? Never mind. I hear it. Of course that's what it was. Proceed. Meanwhile, after having turned Richards in, Amber starts having doubts about how the Bakersfield attack actually went down. She starts to suspect that the government might be lying to them in order to shape the narrative. She pretty easily infiltrates the video archives of the TV network, and pretty easily finds exactly the video that she's looking for. The door wasn't even locked. I'm OK with this, actually! We needed her to find the footage so that she posed a threat, so that her gorgeous jump-suited self would be sledded down to the content mines with Richards. I'm not even mad. Richards meanwhile is tearing a swath through the stalkers. Buzzsaw (Gus Rethwisch) fatally wounds Laughlin but falls to Richards soon after. Dynamo (Erland Van Lidth) is next. Richards lets him live, though, because he's totally incapacitated. Weiss discovers the satellite-uplink code -- oh, yeah, I forgot to tell you: that's what the resistance was looking for, so that they can broadcast the "truth" to the world, as if they didn't already know that they're living in an authoritarian dystopia. They just don't care -- and has Amber memorize it. Can you imagine? These days, she would refuse to take on such a difficult task during such a stressful situation. Can't she just take a picture of it? Are they harassing her because she's a woman? Weiss doesn't make it. Fireball (Jim Brown) dies next. Richards and Amber get to the resistance headquarters, which is also mysteriously in "the zone" where the game-show films. Richards refuses to fight Captain Freedom (Jesse Ventura) unless it's a fair fight. The network instead fabricates footage of Captain Freedom killing Richards and Amber. Nearly 40 years later and here we very much are. Authoritarians are nothing if not predictable. They upload the truth, kill the remaining head honchos, and kiss on national TV before ending the broadcast. The end. Invelle (Nowhere) (2023) -- "8/10" This movie looks hand-drawn; it may very well be. It is black-and-white sketches with a lot of cross-hatching. There are only occasional specks of color, like Nonna's kerchief or the bit of tissue sticking out of the boy's bloody nose while he's playing checkers with the older man. Or there's a golden apple on the table in another scene. The jumpy animation reminded a bit of George Plimpton's style. Some of it must have been rotoscoped. It tells the story of a boy and his family during WWII. The Germans are coming. The Germans are here. The boy is in a field with his dog, a Dachshund. The dog is alert. The boy wakes slowly. Where were you? We looked for you everywhere. [...] Speak up. I can't hear you. "Nowhere." Wind soughs through the grass, around the boy and his dog. Rain begins to fall. A storm gathers. Thunder. The rain intensifies. Clean. Falling without wind. The credits continue to roll as the rain fades; a woman sings a cappella. I really like the pacing and the fractured storytelling. It was a relaxing movie. I could watch it again. The voices were all excellent. We watched it in the original Italian with Italian subtitles. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] These are notes for me to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. The amount of text is not proportional to my enjoyment. I might write less because I didn't get around to it when it was fresh in my mind. I rate the film based on how well it suited me personally for the genre, my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. Links are to "my IMDb ratings" [1] Although I wrote the review in August, I watched the following video in November, where the author had the same realization: that the Jurassic movie was trying to evoke the same feelings as Skull Island. [media] [1] My father-in-law, who's usually much more forgiving than I am, pointed this one out as utterly stupidly ridiculous. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5674 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5674 Thu, 01 Jan 2026 21:47:51 +0100 -- "8/10" 2. "The Outside Man ("Brutale Schatten") (1973)" <#Outside> -- "7/10" 3. "Toy Story 4 ("Alles hört auf kein Kommando") (2019)" <#Toy> -- "7/10" 4. "Pirates of the Carribean - Fremde Gezeiten ("On Stranger Tides") (2011)" <#Tides> -- "6/10" 5. "Love, Death, and Robots S04 (2025)" <#Love> -- "7/10" 6. "Chief of War S01 (2025)" <#Chief> -- "8/10" 7. "Fack ju Göhte (2013)" <#Fack> -- "5/10" 8. "La dégustation (2022)" <#Dégustation> -- "6/10" 9. "Warlord (2025)" <#Warlord> -- "4/10" 10. "Two Tickets to Paradise (2022)" <#Paradise> -- "6/10" Big Mouth S08 (2025) -- "8/10" This is the final season -- it seemed pretty final, as they all walked into "The Great Unknown" at the end -- and it was pretty good. Even Nick finally hits puberty and he does not handle it well. It has a pretty strong ending, all things considered. Sometimes the season is a bit too gross but I am not the target audience. It's not as needlessly gross as other seasons, which were weaker. I like the voice-acting and the characters. Lola Skumpy is my absolute favorite. Don't judge me. I also love Depression Kitty. This part from E08 still cracks me up: "Nick: Why's my mom's scarf in here? Rick: That's a pashmina, bro." The context is that Rick is an absolutely shattered shadow of a hormone monster. He's missing an eye. His horny horns are broken and slumped. He walks with a cane. He's often incoherent. He speaks in garbled tones, though is often insightful in a roundabout way. He knows little about anything because he's so old that his memories are all from times many generations before. He is on his last legs, quite literally. Nick is the star of the show and he's somehow gotten Andrew's box o' wank. The main joke is that Andrew has obviously been wanking to Nick's Mom, which is not surprising because Andrew could wank to the green M&M, to say nothing of his best friend's mom, who is not only a redhead -- exotic for teenagers -- but also sexy enough that her husband literally cannot stop talking about how much he enjoys pleasuring her with cunnilingus. So, yeah, Andrew is obviously gonna bang the drum slowly to that. The joke that cracked me (and my partner) up is that Rick actually knew what a pashmina was and corrected Nick, as if that mattered. "That's a pashmina, bro." Cracks me up every time. Don't judge me. The Outside Man ("Brutale Schatten") (1973) -- "7/10" This film opens with a four-minute, silent helicopter view of Los Angeles, showing a wasteland of concrete, asphalt, and dirt, punctuated by a few lonesome trees and specks of green. The camera swoops down to show the world's coolest taxi cab traveling into the city from the airport. Here's a screen-grab of that bad-ass thing turning in to the hotel. [image] Do they even make taxi cabs this cool anymore? What happened to us? Anyway, Lucien Bellon (Jean-Louis Trintignant) steps out of this whip and enters the hotel, where he gets a room and his own car. He's a hitman, waiting for a call. I need to interrupt here to explain just how cool the music is. If you've ever played the video game "Interstate 76" , then you'll know what I'm talking about. He's at a house now, where he meets Jackie Kovacs (Angie Dickinson), who's in a ridiculously short tennis skirt -- and is looking ridiculously fit. He's there for a hit, which he executes with alacrity and efficiency. No muss, no fuss. No screaming, no fighting. Just a gunshot and then he's double-timing it across the grounds to get out the automatic gate before it closes. He gets back to the hotel to discover that his room has been cleaned out by his "secretary". Someone is on his tail, slashing his tires, shooting at him, and driving menacingly around as he hides in a parking garage. It's Lenny (Roy Scheider), firing out of his car window. But Lucien gets away, on foot now in Los Angeles, looking very much a fish out of water. A little old lady sees him with his gun drawn -- and reports him to the police. They are very normal-looking police, in polyester uniforms, without full armor. They seem genuinely interested in hearing what she has to say. This was over 50 years ago, so things have changed quite a bit. Lucien kidnaps a young lady -- Mrs. Barnes (Georgia Engel) -- to get her car, forcing her to take him to her apartment. He eats with them, and then watches some Star Trek with them. He has to make a long-distance call to Paris. That's probably the worst part of his occupation of their apartment; 50 years ago, it cost a fortune to call internationally. The lady's son picks up the other line in the kitchen, listening in as Lucien learns that he may be stuck in the U.S. for a long time -- or even forever. He cracks the kid across the jaw a few times, then leaves. He meets Lenny in the elevator, who's unable to shoot him because two hot young ladies get in with them. He asks a local motorcycle gang for help in getting into the Innenstadt (he's French, so there are some translation wrinkles that show up just as well in German). The gang leads him astray but he picks up a Jesus-loving hitchhiker (Ed Greenberg) who tells him to turn around. Lucien flips a bitch so hard that it's a miracle he didn't hit anyone. No-one honks; they all just get out of his way without complaint or crash. Lenny finds him again, shooting once into the vehicle with a long-gun. He caps the hitchhiker instead. They're out on a highway, with Lenny shooting away but Lucien shooting back and distracting him enough to slip down the exit to Wilshire Blvd., shaking Lenny, who skids out on the highway. Now we hear some car-horns. Now stay with me here because the next scene is not a common one. Lucien gets change for a dollar outside of the world's largest bus-station bathroom, then goes in to rent an electric razor so that he can shave a face that barely has any sign of a shadow. I guess that this is filling out his character for us. It's pretty goddamned cool that this kind of thing used to exist, though. It's unimaginable today. There aren't even public toilets, FFS. It gets better because next he sits down in a chair in a row of plastic chairs, each of which has a coin-operated black-and-white TV attached to it. He learns that his victim was named Kovacs and that police are searching for him. I mean, obviously. He killed the guy in broad daylight and he literally talked to Jackie one minute before he killed her husband. Now he's approached by an extremely blond prostitute who helps him with information but insists on telling him that she'd rather have fucked him because she thinks he's cute. She walks her hot-pantsed self away. Lucien manages to contact Nancy Robson (Ann-Margret), who meets him in a naked bar -- the bartenders are naked women and there are women dancing who are covered only in paint. Nancy's white-haired wig is like a giant pile of cotton candy and her décolleté is impressive. Lucien asks her to help him get a new passport so that he can return to Paris. She needs his help dealing with Kovac's son Alexander. She takes him to Karl (Carlo De Mejo), who's supposed to be able to make a passport for him. He grabs his clothes and is on his way, in his underwear, just right out into the street. Lucien stays there, watching TV. The next morning, we're back with Mr.s Barnes, whose car has been found in a drive-in movie-theater parking lot. The police question her in an incredibly friendly and respectful manner, then she gives an interview on TV. Her son is now being accompanied by an extremely tall and friendly police officer as they get on a school bus together. Lenny visits Mrs. Barnes at home. Now Lenny's at Nancy's house, threatening her and asking her "Wo ist der Franzose?" Ann Margret is truly stunning. Lenny's lost Nancy but he's back on Lucien's ass, firing away. There are a lot of rubberneckers and the police show up as well. Lucien drops to the sand beneath the docks, where he somehow meets back up with Nancy. Lenny shoots a cop in the hand and escapes into the ruins on the beach, circling back to steal a cop car. Karl meets Lucien and Nancy at a roller-derby rink to hand off the passport. Nancy takes him to the airport while Lenny meets Karl back at his apartment, where he kills him. Lucien learns of this and decides not to fly home; instead, he turns around and gets back into Nancy's pink car. This will ruin Jackie Kovac's plan, which was to have people meet him in Paris when he got off the plane. He and Nancy set up a trap for Lenny -- and he walks right into it. Lucien can finally confront him about who he's working for. Lucien tells him that Alexander Kovacs had hired both of them -- Lucien to kill his father, and Lenny to cover up the hit. They're teamed up now and have left Nancy locked away in her motel room while they go hunt Alexander and Jackie.. At Alexander's house, Lenny goes to the gate, then turns around and tries to shoot Lucien, who gets the drop on him and kills Lenny, dropping him at the foot of Alexander's gate. No words. No speeches. Just gunshots. A grimace of pain from Lenny. A grimace of chagrin from Lucien -- who seems to be disappointed to have been proven right about Lenny's character. The cops end up interviewing Jackie and Alexander, trying to find out what they were up to. They have an alibi and he can't pin anything on them -- but he knows they were behind the whole caper, even though it got way more out of hand than they'd intended. Angie Dickinson is not displaying her vaunted acting skills here. Lucien and Nancy discuss how he's going to get out of his predicament -- even in Paris, he has gambling debts that he won't be able to escape. They fly in some of Lucien's or Nancy's friends from Paris -- and then get in the line of cars for Victor Kovac's funeral. They get there first and enter the viewing room where Kovacs has been arranged in a Godfather-like pose, seated with cigar in hand. During the ceremony, Lucien and his colleagues get the drop on the group, killing Alexander and getting away in hearses just as the police arrive. The cops manage to take Paul down from about 200 yards with a shotgun, which is possibly the least-believable part of the movie. Lucien is covered with blood, but it's all from the wound on his hand. Jackie is arrested. Nancy is at the airport, waiting in vain. Lucien is in what appears to be the concrete basin of the Los Angeles river, reacting in horror at what has happened over the last few days as the movie fades to credits. I watched it in German. Toy Story 4 ("Alles hört auf kein Kommando") (2019) -- "8/10" This movie introduces Forky (Tony Hale). Forky is delightful. Bo Peep kicks all kinds of ass. Woody is, well, he's Woody, right up to the end. The whole gang is back for this one -- I mean, why wouldn't they be? Toys don't age -- and it's quite a bit of fun. The animation is top-notch and the story's interesting. This was quite a welcome return to form for Pixar. I watched it in German. Pirates of the Carribean - Fremde Gezeiten ("On Stranger Tides") (2011) -- "6/10" This movie starts with a sailor washed up on a boat, nearly dead and muttering about Ponce de Leon, who would have died 200 years ago. Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp) springs Gibbs (Kevin McNally) from prison -- or thinks he did. Instead, his driver betrays them both and turns them in to meet with King George (Richard Griffiths) -- he's absolutely disgusting -- and they're trying to get him to find the fountain of youth. They team him up with captain Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush). Sparrow escapes with more than a bit of derring-do and some somewhat-inspired Buster Keaton-like antics -- hiding behind the pennant, dancing atop the phaetons, stepping onto a board being carried across two mens' shoulders -- before being saved from the final shoulder by the very fortuitous and coincidental appearance of his father Captain Teague (Keith Richards), who tells him to take the mission to find the Fountain of Youth and then disappears into thin air. He gets into an interminable sword-fight with a Doppelgänger who turns out to be Angelica (Penélope Cruz). After escaping more soldiers together, they reunite with Barbosa and Gibbs and end up on a ship commanded by Blackbeard (Ian McShane). Whereas Sparrow and Gibbs are prisoners, Angelica ends up as the first officer, commanding a crew of zombies. Barbosa is on a boat with the British, and the Spanish are also underway with a fleet -- all searching for the Fountain of Youth. Jack organizes a mutiny, taking over the ship from Angelica and Blackbeard, who finally makes an appearance when Jack declares victory. A touch too soon, it would seem, as Blackbeard uses his magic to have the ship's ropes capture all of the mutineers, including Jack. The mutineers are pushed out in a rowboat as bait for mermaids, with several finally showing up. They are, of course, all sirens, looking to lure the men under water, baring their vampire teeth once the hook is set. The men fight back but the sirens shred their boat to bits, dragging the sailors far beneath the waves. It looks like a feeding frenzy. The pirates drop in depth charges, with Blackbeard using magic again to drive his boat over the mermaids, splashing a flamethrower over them. It doesn't work at all, though. The sirens return with projectile weapons and vastly increased numbers. This scene goes on for an eternity. They finally capture a mermaid Syrena (Astrid Bergès-Frisbey), whom they transport in a water-filled coffin as they make their way to the fount. They apparently need her, and the priest Philip (Sam Claflin) is falling in love with her. Lucky for all of them, she speaks English and grows legs when she needs to walk. They get to an area where it is obvious that many mermaids have already been sacrificed. They set up Syrena to extract a tear from her. They simulate Philip's death -- or fail to kill him? -- but she doesn't react with tears. However, when he returns to her, she finally cries for joy -- and the pirates leap out of bushes to collect a tear. Blackbeard is ruthless. Barbossa, Gibbs, and Sparrow are teamed up and trying to infiltrate the Spanish camp. They are, of course, captured. They do, of course, engage in a bit of exposition to fill in the blanks of the plot. OK. They have the mermaid's tear, they have the goblets, they are at the fountain of youth -- or so they think, although Jack is probably lying about having led them to the right place -- and Barbosa, Blackbear, Angelica, and Jack are all together. This plot isn't better than Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull but it looks much better and more professionally made, so it gets a better rating. Also, Ian McShane and Geoffrey Rush are fun and Johnny Depp is just so naturally Jack Sparrow at this point that it's more entertaining to watch than Harrison Ford phoning in another performance.. Still, it's hard not to think of another Indiana Jones movie, The Last Crusade. There is a goblet; there is a dangerous place; there are wounded people who desperately need to be saved by the healing power of the waters and the goblets, there are dueling groups -- British navy vs. pirates vs. Spanish troops rather than Nazis versus archeologists -- it's not the same, but it's rhyming pretty hard. Blackbeard and Angelica are both poisoned and Jack can only save one of them. To no-one's surprise, he tricks Blackbeard into thinking that he's stealing the one drop of mermaid's tears from his daughter ... honestly, why bother even describing this in such detail? Blackbeard dies; Angelica lives. Blackbeard showed himself to be a faithless, unprincipled scallywag. Barbosa thinks he's going to get the Black Pearl back. Jack abandons Angelica on an island to starve to death. Jack has a Black Pearl in a bottle that he's going to use to get the Pearl back. He and Gibbs walk into a lovely sunset. Angelica finds Jack's voodoo doll washed up on the shore of her little island. The end. I watched it in German. Chief of War (2025) -- "8/10" Ka'iana (Jason Momoa) has left his post as chief of war for the Mau'i tribe. He and a few close friends have left their home island for Kuai'i. We only watched the first two episodes, though. It's visually lush, and not just because almost no-one wears any clothes. It's just that it's not too captivating, at least for me. I moved on to other stuff. We watched a couple of episodes in Hawai'ian, with English subtitles. Love, Death, and Robots S04 (2025) -- "7/10" This season was a bit less interesting than prior ones. None of the episodes really stood out. Maybe the one ("The Screaming of the Tyrannosaur") with the slaves fighting the Tyrannosaur as entertainment at the marriage ceremony of an extraordinarily wealthy couple sticks out a bit. That one looked nice anyway. Or the one ("How Zeke Got Religion") with WWII bomber pilots fighting an eldritch horror. That one had unique, less-polished animation. Fack ju Göhte (2013) -- "7/10" This is a boilerplate comedy that follows an ex-convict who lands a position at a school that sits over the spot where money from one of his earlier robberies was stashed. He has no teaching experience. It's not even clear that he's graduated anything. He is crude. He is also very handsome, so one of the mousy (though very pretty) teachers immediately falls for him. The students are horrible, horrible, horrible but they start to grudgingly respect the new teacher and treat him a bit better than they treat everyone else, which is, to be clear, absolutely terrible. There is nothing at all surprising in this movie but it was nonetheless surprisingly entertaining. We watched it in the original German. La dégustation (2022) -- "6/10" Hortense Le Bris (Isabelle Carré) walks into Jacques Dennemont's (Bernard Campan) wine store. He is an inveterate alcoholic whose doctor has just told him that he must stop drinking if he wants to live. How will he run his tastings if he can't drink? How will he run his wine store if he's not to be around wine? Somehow, he makes it work. Hortense helps. Also, Steve (Mounir Amamra) helps. Steve is a young man who starts working in Jacques's store and whose view on life helps Jacques get out of his rut. There is nothing surprising in this movie but it was cute. I honestly can no longer remember whether I watched it in the original French or in German. Warlord (2025) -- "4/10" This is a direct-to-VOD movie and it shows. It's even worse when you have to watch it with "motion interpolation" enabled, which makes all of the actors look like LARPing cosplayers. Their complexions are absolutely awful but so they should be, I suppose, for the medieval setting. Many are covered in filth but somehow it looks ridiculous, where "Hard to be a God" looked authentic. Perhaps it doesn't help that most of the film is just people discussing parts of the plot, as if you were listening to an audiobook read by people in cloaks. This may all be forgiven, except that the book is not very good. I wonder how much of this was written by AI at this point. The movie is mostly about how bad tax collectors are. I almost can't believe I'm writing that. It really doubles down on authoritarianism, with scene after scene of brutality that is hinted at but not shown (because the video has to keep to a certain rating). I didn't finish watching this. Two Tickets to Paradise (2022) -- "6/10" This is an incredibly and utterly predictable Hallmark channel movie, and it's not as terrible as I expected it to be. It was on in the background while we relaxed in the living room. As with "Warlord" <#Warlord> above, the "motion interpolation" makes an actual movie look like it was filmed with a soap-opera camera. Still, despite its utterly predictable construction and plotting, it was in the shape of a movie that told a story. The people were utterly unrelatable to me but I can't ding the movie too much for that. It wasn't made for me but it could have been a lot worse. It's pretty wholesome. The elephant in the room is the unspoken premise: that these are regular people but they can all afford to vacation in Hawai'i, one of the most expensive places on Earth, with not a care in the world for all of the activities that they're doing or for how long they'll be there doing them. The paramour Josh (Ryan Paevey) says that he wrote the organizing app that Hannah (Ashley Williams) uses for everything in her life but it turns out that he just wrote the business plan. I kept thinking that this was going to turn into a Black Mirror episode but it stayed earnest and committed to its 100% telegraphed happy ending. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] These are notes for me to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. The amount of text is not proportional to my enjoyment. I might write less because I didn't get around to it when it was fresh in my mind. I rate the film based on how well it suited me personally for the genre, my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. Links are to "my IMDb ratings" ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5522 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5522 Thu, 01 Jan 2026 20:58:40 +0100 -- "10/10" 2. "Romancing the Stone (1984)" <#Romancing> -- "8/10" 3. "Mr. McMahon (2024)" <#McMahon> -- "7/10" 4. "Fast X (2023)" <#FastX> -- "7/10" 5. "Kung Fu Panda (2008)" <#Panda> -- "9/10" 6. "Venom: Let There Be Carnage (2021)" <#Carnage> -- "7/10" 7. "Das Krokodil und sein Nilpferd (1979)" <#Krokodil> -- "4/10" 8. "Gaza Doctors Under Attack (2025)" <#GazaDoctors> -- "8/10" 9. "Bad Words (2013)" <#Bad> -- "8/10" 10. "Mythic Quest S01-S04 (2020-2025)" <#Mythic> -- "8/10" Constantine (2005) -- "10/10" "I watched and reviewed this in 2013" . The rating stands. Romancing the Stone (1984) -- "8/10" We start with a visualization of Joan Wilder's (Kathleen Turner) latest western romance novel, starring knockout Angelina (Kymberly Herrin) who wins at life and ends up with Jessie (William H. Burton Jr.), happily ever after. Segue to Wilder in her writer's studio in New York, crying her eyes out at the ending of her book and celebrating with her cat, Romeo. Her life is boring. But not for long. A mysterious, dark, and sinister stranger appears at her apartment while she's out with her publisher Gloria (Holland Taylor). The stranger Zolo (Manuel Ojeda) kills her neighbor for asking too many questions. Zolo is from Colombia, looking for Joan Wilder because Joan's sister Elaine (Mary Ellen Trainor) is in trouble in Cartagena. She's been kidnapped by Ira (Zack Norman) and his cousin Ralph (Danny DeVito). They make Elaine call Joan to tell her to open the envelope to find the treasure map. She's to go to Colombia and deliver the map to them. Joan arrives in Colombia, where she is met by Zolo, who fools her into getting onto the wrong bug. She has arrived at night and things are considerably different than in New York. Ralph is supposed to have picked her up but he discovers that she's gotten on the wrong bus. He just has her author photo on the back of a book to identify her. [2] The next morning, the bus crashes because Joan had distracted the driver. Zolo tries to steal her purse but is interrupted by Jack Colton (Michael Douglas), who drives him off with a tremendous volley of shotgun blasts. Jack's jeep is totaled, the birds he'd planned to sell are gone, and now he's saddled with Joan Wilder. He cavils $375 [3] out of her to take her to a phone. They are in the middle of nowhere. It is raining. A lot. Mudslide. Chopping the heels off of her shoes. Zolo and his crew show up, shooting at them. Jack machetes his way through the jungle to arrive at a cliff. There's a bridge, "pre-Colombian art." Joan tries it, while Jack decides to hold off the cops with his shotgun. She ends up swinging across the chasm and landing gently on her bum. Jack tries to follow but it's not as easy for him. He barely makes it. It's raining again. Pouring. Machete. They discover the wreckage of an airplane and take shelter. Pot fire. Jungle snake (bushmaster) for dinner. They're both pretty drunk and high. Joan face-plants into her bag. Colton examines the map, which is titled el Corazon and indicates that the "heart" is to be found at the tenedor del diablo. The next morning, they're on the move again, entering a village. To find a car, they are directed to the local rich man, Juan (Alfonso Arau). He turns out to be a huge Joan Wilder fan and he turns out to be quite wealthy. His hacienda is phat. Zolo and his crew show up but Juan helps them escape in his "little mule" Pépé (a 4x4 black truck). Cue a chase scene. Juan has many tricks up his sleeve and they drop their chasers. Juan drops them off in a larger town, with a hotel -- and a phone. Cue the dance scene at a local festival. Cue falling into bed together. Joan talks Jack into looking for the treasure, although he doesn't need much convincing. They sneak out the back when they see Zolo has arrived in the morning. They steal Ralph's tiny car and head for the tenedor del Diablo. Joan figures out that they need to go to the huge waterfall. They're now looking for leche de la madre. They find a pool of white water. A giant emerald, shaped like a heart. Frank shows up and takes it. Zolo shows up. Frank takes off on foot. Joan and Jack give chase in his car. They get the stone back but drive into a huge river. Steers furiously and fruitlessly. Splash. Opposite sides of the river. Joan gets to Cartagena and arranges the transfer. Zolo shows up with his troops, having captured Jack. They're trying to find the stone. Zolo tries to torture Joan but Jack gives up the stone. "Choke on it." Parabola. Chomp. The gator is off with Zolo's hand and the stone. Jack gives chase. Joan and Elaine escape. Ira and Ralph escape as well. Jack grabs the gator's tail. "C'mon, cough it up." Jack struggles. Joan is cornered by Zolo. Jack has to choose. Shoot Zolo or let the gator go. No bullets. Free-climb the wall. Like, no shit, just free-climbing a flat wall. Joan and Zolo struggle atop a gator pit. Joan triumphs -- having set Zolo on fire and made him stumble into the pit -- just as Jack clears the parapet. Jack, fearing the police, dives off the parapet, leaving Joan with Elaine. Fade to Gloria finishing up Joan's next novel, in bits. Joan walks home with her groceries to find Jack on his sailboat in the street in front of her apartment. He's wearing gator-skin boots. Mr. McMahon (2024) -- "7/10" This is a six-episode documentary about Vince McMahon's career, which is synonymous with the rise of professional wrestling to a worldwide sport. It paved the way for MMA and the UFC in a way that boxing never did. McMahon realized that wrestling was much more about the spectacle than it ever was about the sport. It is very much a sport and these are very much amazing athletes, but that is secondary. The matches are scripted -- the whole season is scripted -- but so are plays and movies. Why did we ever have a problem with scripting? Is it because it also looked like a sport? What about Cirque de Soleil? Does anyone leave one of their shows because they're mad that it's "scripted"? Did people really think that everyone was fooled into thinking that it was a real athletic event with arbitrary outcomes? C'mon. That's just elitist bullshit from people like John Stossel and Richard Belzer -- both of whom questioned the "reality" of it and were physically assaulted as "proof" that it's real. Of course they shouldn't have been assaulted! But it's hard to feel sorry for anyone whose entire career consists of their mouths writing checks that their bodies can't cash. Vince McMahon is not a good person. He is quintessentially U.S.-American; it's no wonder that he was best buddies with Donald Trump. Trump shows up in a couple of clips. But so many wrestlers show up -- just in the first episode. Hulk Hogan is featured, obviously, but Bret Hart, Shawn Michaels, Tony Atlas, Rowdy Roddy, Steve Austin, Wendi Richter, Jimmy Hart, John, Cena, Triple-H, and Dwayne Johnson are also in this. Bob Costas -- Mr. U.S. Olympics! -- used to announce matches. Cindy Lauper was heavily involved at the beginning, kick-starting women's wrestling in a way that it had never been before. As McMahon said, "Women's wrestling was declassé in a declassé sport." By the end of episode four, you're bound to make a few observations, if you're honest. 1. This an extremely well-made documentary that doesn't take sides and gives everyone a chance to see their good and bad sides. 2. Pro wrestling is a microcosm of U.S.-American society. 3. These wrestlers are incredible athletes, just enormous, strong, flexible, and talented gymnasts -- just out of this world physically. 4. The entertainment devolved into the most caricatured and lascivious and filthy show that could possibly be allowed on U.S. television. I would also write misogynistic but, although it did emphasize the subordinate role of women (see below), it also emphasized the subordinate role of anyone who wasn't a roided-out bag of meat running on alpha instincts. 5. It all continued to be fake but the level of manipulation became increasingly masterful, with the line between reality and scripted fantasy blurred into nothingness. 6. Tony Atlas is a hilarious and sympathetic national treasure. 7. Vince McMahon is an awful, meathead misogynist, but he's not without principles, and he is willing to do anything he can for his business, even sacrificing himself and his ego. 1. He even started wrestling and turned himself into the biggest heel the industry had ever seen. 2. He's relatively honest about his motivations. 3. Because of his honesty, he's right about more things than he's wrong. 4. He's an asshole but not because he acts entitled. 5. He and the entire industry have a horrific, obscenely sexualized perception of, and attitude toward, women. The story takes us through the rise of WWF as it consolidated all of the regional wrestling organizations into a national, televised show. It was the era of Wrestlemania and Hulk Hogan. Then Ted Turner founded the WCW and hired a producer that started to eat the WWF's lunch. They did so for 83 straight weeks, sapping away top talent like Hogan. They had better and lewder storylines. They appealed to 18--30-year-olds rather than kids.It got really lewd and crude. Everyone -- male or female -- was extremely fit and no-one's costume covered more than 10% of their bodies. The WWF struck back, first by coopting the WCW's storylines and then by transforming Vince McMahon into heel Mr. McMahon, a caricature portraying him as an arrogant self-made billionaire who respected only money. Many interviewees said that it wasn't a caricature. Then came the greatest rivalry in the history of the franchise: King of the Ring Stone Cold Steve Austin and Mr. McMahon. As if things couldn't go any better, the era of The Rock began. Things got really, really, really racy. The women in the shows were pornographic caricatures wearing barely any clothes -- although they were still wrestling. They were still athletes. But there is no way you could want to excuse the obvious and boorish misogyny and stupidity. It was crude and ignorant. All done just for a dollar. And it worked. As Triple-H said, "Who's worse? The guy who did it? Or the people who loved it?" Wise words, Mr. H. Wise words. The fifth episode introduces us to the family storyline, where Shane, Stephanie, and Linda McMahon all take part. Shane and Stephanie are actually wrestling, getting beaten to hell by and beating the Christ out of their father. Stephanie "marries" Triple-H but I can't tell whether it happened for real or not! This is madness. The storylines are so broad, it's no wonder this stuff got popular the world over. It's raunchy, it's filthy, it's easy to understand and follow along. The heel is easy to hate. The one storyline has Vince "pretending" to be having an affair with a voluptuous wrestler named Sable. She ended up leaving and suing the organization for sexual harassment, losing, and coming back to work for the WWF again -- even "pretending" again to have an affair with Mr. McMahon. I am honestly having a hard time telling the difference between WWF plots and real life. The line is really, really blurred. The next "era" would be John Cena with "Ruthless Aggression". All of this stuff is just Vince McMahon steering the company from above and below, from boardroom to ring. I am gaining a grudging respect for the guy (even though I've seen the tweets). Even when concussions and CTE came up in the most horrible way -- a wrestler killed his family and then himself -- they eventually became the first to protect the wrestlers, working with the CTE organization rather than fighting them. The head of the organization said that FIFA, the NFL, and the NHL have yet to be so accommodating. The schedule was lightened; rest days were increased; better health plans, and so on. This is a great documentary. I deducted a point because it could have been a couple of shows shorter. I think it's quite balanced, but that's because I can understand when, in the process of documenting facts, you also include those that make it look like a terrible person like Vince McMahon was integral in having created something enjoyed by millions, if not billions, of people. He is a "piece of shit" but he seems to have his finger on the pulse of a good part of humanity, so he's not alone. Fast X (2023) -- "7/10" I don't quite understand why this movie has such a low rating on IMDb because it is, beat for beat, exactly what I expected the tenth movie of this franchise to be. Dante Reyes (Jason Momoa) is over the top and pretty funny. I will admit that, in another mood, I might have hated how everything seems to go his way but you have to remember to just roll with it in movies like this. The movie will go where the movie goes. There are rules to this. For example, Dante has to take everything from Dom (Vin Diesel) before he wins it all back. Look to the East. That's where the sun always rises. Everyone from the previous movies is in this one: Dom's sister Mia Torretto (Jordana Brewster), Han (Sung Kang) is back, Tej (Ludacris) and Roman (Tyrese Gibson) are fighting as usual, Letty Ortiz (Michelle Rodriguez) is overacting and being touted as an incredible fighter, while Ramsey (Nathalie Emmanuel) is back as a member of the team (although she was introduced much later; maybe she was working on Game of Thrones as Missandei, loyal slave and advisor to Daenerys). There's also John Cena as Uncle Jakob, Jason Statham as Shaw, Charlize Theron as Cipher. These actors are reliably good and can make a lot out of a little. Theron and Statham have got impressive fighting chops, as well as great choreography. Tess (Brie Larson) is not as good. Gal Gadot is so bad that they didn't even give her any lines. Dwayne Johnson shows up at the very end to set things up for a yet another sequel. We watched it in German. Kung Fu Panda (2008) -- "9/10" This is a really fun kid's movie about a place called the Peaceful Valley. The story follows Po, a chubby and somewhat clumsy panda who is an absolute martial-arts fanatic. He wants to learn kung fu but he works for his father -- who's a goose -- in his noodle shop. An old turtle Kung Fu ascendant Oogway, who is in charge of selecting the Dragon Warrior, who will be allowed to read the Dragon Scroll, gaining supposedly limitless power. There are five candidates for Dragon Warrior: Tigress, Monkey, Mantis, Viper, and Crane. Somehow, Po is chosen instead. Shifu puts Po through excruciating training. He is at first aided by the five in making it hard enough to make Po quit, but they all gain a grudging respect as the pudgy little guy perseveres and actually gets better. Tai Lung -- also a tiger -- has escaped his deep, dark prison in an ingenious way and is lancing toward the Peaceful Valley to get the Dragon Scroll for himself. Po's training takes a giant leap forward when Shifu discovers that he can be motivated to incredible feats with the temptation of food. By the time Tai Lung gets there and starts laying waste to everything, Po is ready. He reads the scroll. It's blank. The key to infinite power was inside you all along, bro. You're ready. There's a ton of ass-kicking á la "One Punch Man" and Tai Lung is defeated, the valley is saved, and Po triumphs. The end. I watched it in German, with really great voice-acting. I'm thinking I probably gave it an extra point because I didn't have to hear Jack Black's nasally voice the whole time. The German voice actor for Po was hilarious. Also, "Po" means "Butt" in German. So, now you know. Venom: Let There Be Carnage (2021) -- "7/10" Cletus Cassady (Woody Harrelson) is about to be executed. His lover Frances Barrison/Shriek (Naomie Harris) has banshee-like superpowers. She is in a super-max prison of her own. Eddie Brock (Tom Hardy) is assigned to Cletus's last interview. He argues with Venom (also voiced by Tom Hardy) in the police station, but people seem less disturbed by how he's yelling to himself all the time. Venom controls Eddie's body and helps him investigate Cassady's last murders. Venom is fighting with Eddie because he needs Phenethylamine, which he can only get from brains...or chocolate. Anne Weying (Michelle Williams) is still in the picture. She calls him up to reveal that she's engaged. Venom, as Eddie's id, is not taking that well. Eddie visits Cassady in prison, where Cassady bites him and gets a bit of the symbiote on him -- in him. Back at home, Venom and Eddie fight in a protracted scene that ends with Eddie using the smoke alarm to dispel Venom, sending him to hitchhike on random New Yorkers for a while. At Cassady's execution, the poison triggers a transformation, combining Cassady with the symbiote bit, creating the blood-based Carnage. Guess what? Cletus has an axe to grind and he wants his girlfriend out of prison. Carnage apparently wants to destroy Venom and Eddie, so they agree to help each other (even though they're technically a symbiote, so what else were they going to do?) Carnage and Cletus free Frances but, instead of killing Venom and Eddie, they capture them. How else were they going to get free during the wedding ceremony between Cletus and Frances at which they'd been inexplicably placed? The cathedral collapses. Cletus and Frances die but Carnage moves on. I like a bunch of the actors in this and think it's kind of funny how a bit-character that arose from the super suit that Spider-Man acquired in the first "Secret Wars" [4] has gotten a trilogy (this is the second movie). It's a testament to Hardy's charm, I guess. Harrelson is having a lot of fun playing an unhinged and unrepentant psychotic, but he dead now. Das Krokodil und sein Nilpferd (1979) -- "4/10" This movie's title in English is I'm for the Hippopotamus, which is a more-direct translation of the original Italian title, Io sto con gli ippopotami. I've only ever seen snippets of these Terrance Hill and Bud Spencer movies in German. This is the first one I've watched from beginning to end. They have not aged super-well. These are set up more-or-less like the Cannonball Run movies. If I'd watched these as a kid, I'd have fond memories, too. But they're not very good. There are long, long scenes in which nothing really happens, like the long meal that they had with the local criminals. it was utterly interminable. The plot is a thin, thin thread stitching together scenes that the film crew must have thought that children would find interesting. There are a lot of animals, like cheetahs, lions, elephants, and so on, which I suppose serve to "prove" that they're in Africa but really only proves that they filmed near a zoo. I didn't see the titular crocodile and hippopotamus -- but I think that was referring to Terence and Bud, respectively. Gaza Doctors Under Attack (2025) -- "8/10" "[...] forensic investigation into Israeli military attacks on hospitals in Gaza. The film also examines allegations of the targeting and abuse of doctors and healthcare workers in Gaza." This documentary is a necessary one, and very current. It documents war crimes, perhaps a little too cleanly. Much of the footage is extremely smooth and neat. The interviews were made either in front of carefully selected backgrounds -- a hospital with a lot of equipment, or a completely destroyed building -- which look nearly fake, almost green-screened. During some of the narration, there is clearly reconstructed footage that is not labeled as such: children searching through rubble, but in slo-mo, finding children's dresses, and so on. It feels very manipulative. The interviews, in general, have the form of carefully crafted emotional manipulation -- switching back to the very attractive interviewer, who nods sympathetically -- which is wholly unnecessary in this case, as the stories themselves are horrifying enough. This isn't a reality-TV show where you have to convince people to give a shit about someone's parking spot having been taken at an Applebees. The attractive narrator is shown in extreme closeup dozens of times, sometimes with glasses down on her nose while she's "doing research". The tropes are thick here. It's unclear whether they think this is all necessary in order to retain people's interest in a documentary that would otherwise be an uninterrupted stream of doctors lamenting in Arabic about their own torture or the torture of their patients. On the other hand, it includes extremely high-quality footage taken by IOF soldiers themselves, of prisoner camps and other abuses. The pictures and videos of the rubble are compelling and believable. They make a strong case that the people Israel targets are just doctors, just citizens, not terrorists, not even particularly political. They're just people trying to help other people, who are slaughtered with rockets, missiles, and machine-gun fire. If you've been following the actual news for the last two years, then nothing in this video is surprising or new. What it really is, is the BBC producing a video that summarizes the independent reporting they've been slandering over that time, making a video now that it is more ideologically acceptable to actually describe what Israel is doing in the same way that Israel's own media has long since reported about Israel (e.g., Haaretz). They cover the attacks on the hospitals, the rapes in Israeli prisons (in particular in Sde Teiman), the attacks on tents. I watched it on YouTube at the following link. You might have to use a VPN if your country is on the ban list (like mine). [media] I watched it in English and Arabic with English subtitles. I gave it an extra point because it is factually accurate and the presentation, though not necessary for me, may serve to entice otherwise more-reluctant people into acknowledging the horror. Bad Words (2013) -- "8/10" I "watched and reviewed this in 2014" . Guy Trilby (Jason Bateman) and Chaitanya Chopra (Rohan Chand) are great in this, especially with their montage where they rage through the night. This is Bateman's milieu. Kathryn Hahn's too, who plays his lover Jenny Widgeon. Dr. Bernice Deagan (Allison Janney) runs the spelling bee. The library detective from Sienfeld Philip Baker Hall plays Dr. Bowman. Mythic Quest S01-S04 (2020-2025) -- "8/10" This is the story of a video-game company, owned and run by creative director Ian Grimm (Rob McElhenney). His lead programmer is Australian Poppy Li (Charlotte Nicdao), who's brilliant and a bit goofy, principled and a bit naive. The ruthless Brad Bakshi (Danny Pudi) is in charge of monetization. David (David Brittlesbee) is product lead but he's not really the lead of anything. I just realized why I love this guy -- it's the same actor who knocked the ball out of the park with Cricket in It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. The others take advantage of him all the time, including his sociopathic and hilarious assistant Jo (Jessie Ennis), who hangs out with alpha-male Ian as much as she possibly can, at least at first. When Ian becomes even slightly introspective, she jumps ship to glom onto Brad. at least, until he's convicted of securities fraud (he comes back though). C.W. Longbottom (F. Murray Abraham) is an alcoholic Nebula-award-winning sci-fi and fantasy writer who heads up the writing staff -- seemingly of one. "The 70s were a bit of a blur." "The 80s were a bit of a blur." Sue (Caitlin McGee) is in charge of customer relations, which means she's on the end of a ton of player abuse. She works in the basement and has a lovely North-Midwestern accent. Rachel (Ashly Burch) and Dana (Imani Hakim) are testers, although Dana becomes the company's official streamer in the first season. They are not yet romantically linked, but it's inevitable. Their main game is the titular Mythic Quest, which is a MMPORPG, very much in the style of World of Warcraft. with a modern flair. The game succeeds, then it fails, then it succeeds again. Sometimes Poppy saves the day, sometimes it's Ian. Ian almost always takes credit, though he slowly learns how to share credit, just as Poppy learns how to take credit. Then she learns how to take credit a bit too much and her socially awkward ass swerves very hard into egomaniac territory before coming back down to Earth. Brad makes his own journey, where he loses power, gains power, wrestles metaphorically with his even-more-ruthless brother, who's an LBO specialist, then fights with Jo, then loves Jo, then takes on Rachel as a protegé, then dumps her because she's too needy, then loses his whole empire to her, then gets it back. Rachel is kind of dumb and kind of insufferable, succumbing in nearly no time to a complete greediness from her former world-saving, eco-loving attitude. This is played straight but I think is supposed to be an ironic commentary on people like this who positively litter large companies like this. Dana becomes romantically involved with Rachel, but then isn't, then is again. She develops games on her own but gets way too big for her britches but is also kind of screwed out of her game but she did develop it on company time and on company computers even though she'd signed a contract that explicitly said that, were she to do anything like that, the resulting work would be property of the company. So she did it anyway, then spent a season whining about the unfairness of it all. She founds her own company, I think? Or does she work for Poppy and Ian when they found their own company? Oh, yeah, they left Mythic Quest to do their own thing. Their egos and visions collided but then meshed but then didn't. They returned. I forget what happened to Dana's game. I'm sure it rocked. Anyway, at some point, Poppy gets a hot boyfriend and then becomes his baby-mama, which causes all sorts of issues for her platonic relationship with Ian. They straighten it out in the end, though, as I'm sure comes as no surprise to anyone. Each episode is mostly self-contained fun, with witty writing, affable actors, and interesting characters. Some of them suck but they're still entertaining, and they tend to get their well-earned comeuppance quickly enough. I enjoyed and looked forward to each season, even if I can't quite remember everything that happened. The abstract summary above should give you bit of a flavor of it. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] These are notes for me to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. The amount of text is not proportional to my enjoyment. I might write less because I didn't get around to it when it was fresh in my mind. I rate the film based on how well it suited me personally for the genre, my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. Links are to "my IMDb ratings" [1] God, can you imagine? The 80s were only 40 years ago! No Internet! No cell phones! No surveillance! No ubiquitous knowledge of everyone all the time! So fun! [1] This was, apparently, a lot of money 40 years ago, in Colombia. What are we even doing right now? [1] I collected every issue of this series in 1984/1985. It was the first massive cross-over ever. It cost me all of my birthday and allowance money for months. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5496 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5496 Wed, 31 Dec 2025 22:58:42 +0100 -- "8/10" 2. "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2007)" <#Phoenix> -- "7/10" 3. "The Age of Innocence (1993)" <#Innocence> -- "8/10" 4. "Oppenheimer (2023)" <#Oppenheimer> -- "8/10" 5. "Star Trek: First Contact (1996)" <#StarTrek> -- "8/10" 6. "Madame (2017)" <#Madame> -- "6/10" 7. "Habemus Papam (2011)" <#Habemus> -- "7/10" 8. "Harry Potter and the Half-blood Prince (2009)" <#Half-Blood> -- "7/10" 9. "The Staircase (2004--2018)" <#Staircase> -- "4/10" 10. "Louis Theroux: The Settlers (2025)" <#Settlers> -- "9/10" Biking Borders (2021) -- "8/10" This is a film about two guys, Nono Konopka and Max Jabs, who cycled from Berlin, Germany to Beijing/Peking, China as a sponsored stunt to collect €50,000 in donations to build a school in Guatemala. Thanks to an anonymous donation of €12,000, they had already collected the money by the time they'd made their way through Iran, about 1/3 of the way through their planned 15,000km trek. They first crossed into the Czech Republic, then Austria, Croatia, North Macedonia, Greece, and finally entered Turkey to leave Europe behind. They were greeted with friendliness everywhere they went. In Turkey, though, they noted that the Gastfreundschaft was incredible. They spent most nights in a tent until the winter really set in. The Turkish people's incredible friendliness helped them fight through the harsh Turkish winter, often offering their homes to the two filthy travelers so that they could overnight under a roof rather than in a tent. In Istanbul, their girlfriends came for a visit for two weeks, after which the adventurers continued their journey toward Iran. In Iran, the people were just as warm as the weather was cold. They survived only thanks to the incredible generosity of people who have nearly nothing in comparison to westerners like them. And this is the country we're supposed to approve of going to war with? After they'd collected the money, they decided to continue traveling to China, even though their goal had already been completed. Nono's ladyfriend left him and there was some tragedy there but they persevered, getting all of their visas for traveling through Turkmenistan and into China before crossing the border. They had a five-day pass to traverse Turkmenistan, with an officially ordained path from which they weren't to deviate. They camped on the border to get in at 06:00 but managed a bit of the distance before Nono fell seriously ill and they had to (A) go off of the approved route in order to find a hospital and (B) navigate a medical system with almost no language in common. Turkmenistan is very, very different than the western world. It is much more insular than either eastern Turkey or any part of Iran that they'd visited. With Nono not getting much better, they capitulate and throw their bikes into several vehicles in order to rush to the border in time to be able to leave before their visa expires, which would incur serious financial penalties and possible jail time. They make it across the border to Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan, where Nono receives more modern medical care and his serious stomach flu/infection is diagnosed and treated. A few days later and they're back on the road with their bikes, soaring across Uzbekistan toward the border of China. In China, they cross the border into Xinjiang district, where the train station strikes them as incredibly modern -- it absolutely is, even in 2019 -- but where they feel the pressure of an onerous state imposing a tremendous number of anti-terrorist controls. [2] They are made to show their passports everywhere, even in restaurants and they rate their chances of being able to navigate across the whole province by bicycle as less rosy than it had looked from the comfort of their homes in Berlin. Instead, they took a 30-hour train ride across all of Xinjiang province, getting back on their bikes at the eastern border and completing their journey to what they called Peking but what the subtitles (and the Chinese themselves) call Beijing. Their journey ended there, with enough donations to build two schools for "Pencils of Promise" . Their "web site" says that they've built five schools by now (€250K) and they're on track to build 20, with €1M in donations. I gave it an extra star because the two guys are so sympathetic. I hope they didn't become investment bankers after this. We watched it in German and English. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2007) -- "7/10" We start on a playground. Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) sits on a swing. Dudley (Harry Melling) mocks him, amusing his friends. Dudley is incredibly cross-eyed. The dementors arrive. Harry dispels them with a Patronus curse, saving Dudley's life, though his filthy parents Petunia (Fiona Shaw) and Vernon (Richard Griffiths) would never be grateful for it. He is banned from Hogwarts for this "transgression". The aurors of the Order of the Phoenix -- Nymphador Tonks (Natalia Tena), Mad-eye Moody (Brendan Gleeson), Kingsley Shacklebolt (George Harris) and others -- arrive to rescue him from his suburb, taking him to the headquarters of the Order of the Phoenix, where he meets his godfather and proprietor of the house Sirius Black (Gary Oldman), Remus Lupin (David Thewlis), and Arthur (Mark Williams) and Mrs. Weasley (Julie Walters). I last saw this "just a year ago" but it was on in German and I don't always have control over the TV. That review stands. The Age of Innocence (1993) -- "8/10" Newland Archer (Daniel Day-Lewis) is to marry May Welland (Winona Ryder), binding two of 19th-century New York City's most powerful aristocratic families in what would be a triumph for squat, city matriarch Mrs. Mingott (Miriam Margolyes), consolidating her empire even further. The film begins at the sumptuous opera, where Archer meets Ellen Olenska (Michelle Pfeiffer), who's returned from what amounts to exile in Poland, where she'd married an abusive husband but escaped with her humor and sass intact. She sets up in an apartment of her own in a perfectly respectable but not fashionable district. "Ellen Olenska: Is fashion such a serious consideration? Newland Archer: Among those who have nothing more serious to consider." Archer takes her under his wing, at first at the urging of his family and even his betrothed, who fears that her caste will ostracize the poor woman further. Little does show know that Ellen is unlikely to be cowed by the disapproval of the so-called nobility of New York, who would be surprised to learn that anyone would even consider characterizing them as anything other than the misbegotten woman's betters. Newland is a lawyer and his firm puts him in charge of Ellen's divorce. He convinces her not to pursue it, as it would reflect badly on her, and the New York City aristocracy is petty and ruthless. "Newland Archer: What could you possibly gain that could make up for the scandal? Ellen Olenska: My freedom!" Ellen and Newland spiral around one another until they profess their mutual love. "Newland: You gave me my first glimpse of a real life. Then you asked me to go on with the false one. No one can endure that. Ellen: I'm enduring it." "Ellen: Newland. You couldn't be happy if it meant being cruel. If we act any other way I'll be making you act against what I love in you most. And I can't go back to that way of thinking. Don't you see? I can't love you unless I give you up." Newland's simultaneous desire to be married more quickly is granted by Mingott, who cannot attend, but does host the wedding breakfast. Newland and May travel and get to know each other much better, to Newland's dismay, as he realizes that there isn't very much behind her dull, empty, obedient eyes. To be clear, she is only incidentally obedient to him, as the system has decided that he is to be her husband and she is nothing if not obedient to the system into which she was born and raised. She adheres unquestioningly to intricate, unjust, often incorrect, always self-serious, and severely constraining rules. She dismisses Newland's attempts to expand their horizons by deeming his proposed conversational partners as too provincial. And that is the end of that. May is uninterested in knowing anything that she either doesn't already know, or that the system hasn't given her as an assignment to learn. Newland becomes dismayed and thinks more and more often of Ellen. Ellen, meanwhile had not attended the wedding but had traveled back to England, though not back to her husband in Poland. Newland continues to pine for her but they only very lightly act on it, with a bit of kissing but no more. The entire rest of the family, though, are almost certainly aware that there is something going on. They assume that a positively torrid affair is afoot, circling the wagons in panic to ensure that Ellen goes back to Europe and that Newland comes back to the fold. He is to rededicate himself to devotion to his actual wife, May, and he is to stop thinking of what might have been and what he thinks could still be. There is no way that May will allow anything to happen, other than what must happen. There is no way that the family will allow it to happen. The system corrects itself. It re-ingests Newland. We watch as the realization dawns on him that they will ingest rather than egest him and that he is incapable of making himself break the mold that he has been in so long that he has become that mold. We watch him sit through one mindlessly dull dinner after another with stultifyingly insipid people whose only concerns are superficial, people who are utterly unaware of the incredible level of privilege that they enjoy, never once questioning why they, in particular, should enjoy it. We watch him as he watches himself in horror, knowing full well that he is watching a stretch of decades unroll before him of exactly the same worthless conversations that produce nothing, that lead nowhere. It is impossible to tell whether May is conniving or naive. In the end, it doesn't matter. The result is the same. Newland stays with her and fathers child after child with her until she dies in her early 50s of something or other. Before she dies, she reveals to her eldest, Ted (Robert Sean Leonard) that she'd known all along that Newland had given up his greatest love and desire to stay with her and found a family. She preferred living a lie of a quasi-arranged marriage to losing face, to disappointing the family. The family, which is filled with insipid and worthless creatures, nattering nabobs of no value to society but somehow so wealthy that they barely even know that money exists. The enormity of that injustice alone is gobsmacking, though we're meant to pay attention to the injustice of Newland and Ellen's unrequited love. At the very end, Ted convinces his father to travel to Paris with him on a supposed business trip prior to Ted's own impending marriage. However, he is there to visit Ellen, as the family said that he simply must. Because his mother had confided in him, he wanted his father to come along, to perhaps help him pick up where he'd left off decades prior. Newland stays the same man to the end: old fashioned. Instead of going up to the apartment, he sits on a bench and observes the balcony, waiting for Ellen to appear. She does not. He stands and, leaning on the cane he now relies on, walks slowly off across the square, disappearing around the next street corner. Martin Scorsese has directed a gorgeous picture, with incredible costumes and sets, all of which were real, not computer-generated and therefore more impressive in the sheer logistics involved. Day-Lewis and Pfeiffer are incredible, as is Ryder, though perhaps less so, considering her role was to play a character one couldn't distinguish from a simpleton. But the first two were exquisite in their minute hand motions, eye movements, expressions, and meaningful silences. An excellent if depressing film. Oppenheimer (2023) -- "8/10" Oppenheimer (Cillian Murphy) is testifying on his own behalf. Strauss (Robert Downey Jr.) must also answer questions about Oppenheimer, who has, it seems, fallen out of favor with the U.S., which demands fealty before all else. We flash back to Oppenheimer studying, meeting Niels Bohr (Kenneth Branagh), at that time studying theory rather than application, presumably at the ETH in Zürich, judging by the glimpses of Einsiedeln, and then Fraumünster and Grossmünster. We get into the meat of the story as Oppenheimer gains fame and power, the film limning him as perhaps a more complex person than he really was. His complexity comes from an ability to deviate from what he might have deemed principles when they become necessary to jingoism, a flexibility of mind of which a simpleton like Einstein seemed incapable. Where Einstein refused to advance mad efforts to build weaponry with scientific advancements, Oppenheimer quickly saw a way to not only defeat the Nazis but also his rival Heisenberg (Matthias Schweighöfer). Oppenheimer's nascent communist and labor leanings disappeared in a trice as the military -- in the form of Leslie Groves (Matt Damon) puts military oomph behind the project, joining forces to create the bomb for the U.S. of A. One of Oppenheimer's professorial friends finds him dressed in a military uniform and tells him to knock it off. People whose opinions and principles you can respect are few and far between in this movie. Most of them are bloodthirsty xenophobes. Even Oppenheimer is a conflicted individual, compromising his principles in order to build the bomb, telling himself that it will be used to defeat Germany, when he of course knows that evil men will do evil things with it. It is hard to tell whether he is partially naive or whether he is just ambitious. Niels Bohr visits him in Los Alamos, urging/begging/admonishing him not to build the bomb. Despite his professed respect for his erstwhile mentor, Oppenheimer doesn't listen. I think his wife Kitty (Emily Blunt) is also horrified at his lack of principle, but that's probably more because he keeps pumping babies into her while cheating on her with various other scientists's wives. His most famous affair is with Jean Tatlock (Florence Pugh), a sexy communist who ends up committing suicide. Not unpredictably, Oppenheimer makes her suicide all about himself. Vannevar Bush (Matthew Modine) was also very much into building the bomb(s), as was Edward Teller (Benny Safdie). David Hill (Rami Malek) seemed to have reservations but he still did what he considered to be his patriotic duty -- which was to grant the world an atomic age. Ernest Lawrence (Josh Hartnett) -- an applied physicist -- was never on board with Oppenheimer's union agitation, although he would, in the end, not testify against him. Boris Pash (Casey Affleck) was delighted to testify against Oppenheimer in the kangaroo court that was held long after the war was over. My favorite voice of moral reason was Isidor Isaac Rabi (David Krumholtz), who begged Oppenheimer to see reason and stop building the bomb. Einstein (Tom Conti) also was an avowed pacifist and refused to have anything to do with the project. Spoiler alert: they built the bomb and Truman used it to annihilate a bunch of Nips -- civilians -- in order to cow a different perceived enemy -- the Soviet Union. Look: the United States has never been the good guy. This has always been a fairy tale that the empire tells about itself. I think that that part shines through pretty well in this Christopher Nolan film, but I'm also afraid that this is the baggage that I bring with me -- which I definitely do -- because this film's incredible success in the U.S. suggests that a much more realistic interpretation is that most of the people who saw it felt patriotic pride about us having built the bomb first. While there are some interesting stylistic and directorial decisions in this movie (a naked Pugh hanging off of Oppenheimer juxtaposed over his trial comes to mind), I admit to being mystified by how people made this the must-see movie of the summer, the one to see "on the big screen". It was mostly a bunch of 40s-era guys in suits talking to each other about physics. Maybe I was less excited about the revelatory nature of this movie because of my familiarity with not only the basic outline of the history but also with the utter mendacity of the U.S. government and its minions -- like Strauss -- as well as the persistent and virulently strong anticommunist bent that continues to this day. All together, it's not nearly enough to sustain the three-hour running length. This could have been ninety minutes if it hadn't had so many people who needed to chew the scenery. I gave it an extra star because it made so many people actually go and watch a history lesson about how the U.S. really is. Even if it didn't get even half of it right, the half it got right is still more than most people hear every day. Star Trek: First Contact (1996) -- "8/10" The camera pulls back from Picard, who is a prisoner of the Borg, revealing the incredibly large, blocky ship. We pull back further to reveal that Picard (Patrick Stewart) was having a waking nightmare within a waking nightmare. His nightmare was a warning, a twanging of the psychic thread still connecting him to the Borg, who are back and laying waste to entire star systems. Ship after ship falls, although the Federation is giving the Borg hell. Picard is reluctant to return to the Borg; not out of fear, but out of caution. He thinks that he would be an unreliable element in a battle against them, that they might regain control of him. As the Enterprise enters battle, Picard directs all fire to a specific location, one that ends up destroying the cube. It egests a smaller sphere, one that immediately makes its way to Earth, aiming to travel back in time, dragging the Enterprise in its wake. They end up in the 21st century, after the third world war -- in 2063, to be precise. The Enterprise destroys the smaller Borg sphere but must still thwart the Borg's attempts to hinder the first contact with alien life due to happen any day now. The gang's all here: Data (Brent Spiner), Riker (Jonathan Frakes), Beverly (Gates McFadden), Worf (Michael Dorn), Georgi Laforge (Levar Burton), and Troi (Marina Sirtis). On the surface, they encounter Lily (Alfie Woodard) as she tries to shoot them. They take her back to the Enterprise just as the Borg have infiltrated the Enterprise and taken over deck 16. They are making their way to other decks. The crew is back on the Enterprise and shooting up the Borg. The Borg adapt, as they do, and the crew must switch from phasers to hand-to-hand combat. Picard escapes but is captured by Lily, who's hiding in the crawlspaces. Data is taken prisoner by the Borg, who connect him to their central collective that they've started building on deck 16. The Borg have taken most of the "red shirt" crew and outfitted them as Borg. Dorf is on the bridge with Lt. Hawk (Neal McDonough), trying to figure out why the Borg have stopped assimilating. Meanwhile Ryker, Jordi, and Troi are trying to convince Zefram Cochran (James Cromwell) to help them by conducting his flight, as history expects. He's a bit of a drunk and seems quite unlikely as the inventor who'd kicked off humanity's colonization of other star systems. Data meets the Borg Queen (Alice Krige). They have a Shakespearean dialogue. She grants him some flesh. He becomes very confused. Things get a little hot and heavy. Lily and Picard discuss economics. "Lily: How much did this thing [the Enterprise] cost? Picard: The economics of the future are somewhat different. You see, money doesn't exist in the 24th century. Lily: No money? You mean you don't get paid? Picard: The acquisition of wealth is no longer the driving force in our lives. We work to better ourselves and the rest of humanity." Star Trek is fully automated luxury communism and always has been. Picard, Worf , and Hawk go on an EVA to stop the Borg from building a weapon out of the Enterprise warp drive. It's actually a pretty well-choreographed scene, with Worf using a torn-off Borg arm and cable to plug a hole in his suit while he blows the remaining Borg and their weapon to kingdom come. Unfortunately, the Borg still have the ship, and they still have Data. Picard gives himself up, offering to trade for Data. The Borg Queen accepts but Data does not. He continues to help the Borg -- until he doesn't. He deliberately misses when told to shoot down Jordi and Ryker's ship, then looks the Queen in the eye, saying "resistance is futile" and blows the Borg stronghold, freeing Picard. Picard's pretty jacked in this. Data drags the Borg queen into the acid smoke (or whatever it is). All the Borg are dead. What remains of the Borg Queen's endoskeleton -- a skull and spinal column -- lies discarded on the ground. Picard tears it in two. Data has survived, in need of some repairs. Zefram flies his little warp-drive-enabled craft for the first time -- with Riker and Jordi in tow -- and secures humanity's future. The initial contact with the Vulcans will ensue. The end. Madame (2017) -- "6/10" Bob (Harvey Keitel) and Anne (Toni Collette) are rich and live in Paris. Bob's son Steven (Tom Hughes) arrives from London in time for a dinner party of a dozen people. His father adds him to make thirteen. Anne cannot have this, so she gets the head of the household Maria (Rossy de Palma) to sit in with the aristocrats at dinner to make fourteen. A generous attitude toward the excellent red wine loosens her up and she is the hit of the party with her style, which contrasts sharply with the uptight stuffiness of the others. There's a wealthy guest David (Michael Smiley), who is quickly smitten with Maria. Even after the evening is over, he continues to try to contact her. She is horrified that her subterfuge will be discovered but then gains confidence. His ardor appears to be genuine and she wonders whether she should be toeing the class line, simply because Anne has told her to. Anne, meanwhile is having an affair with one of Bob's younger friends, a mid-life crisis that reveals her deep insecurity about being a trophy wife whose only asset -- her looks -- is rapidly depreciating. Bob doesn't seem to care, being focused laser-like on selling a painting, whose sale should save his fortunes. Their son, meanwhile, is an incorrigible alcoholic and budding writer, who begins writing the very story that we're watching. The film becomes about telling the story about how its story was written. It's a bit of an odd choice but it kind of works. In the end, David cannot leave his classism behind: as the dastardly Anne allows him to discover, at a tea arranged for the occasion, that Maria is actually Anne's head maid, he smoothly manages to ignore her and pretend that she's not there. She is, after all, just the help. Luckily, though, Maria hasn't forgotten what she's learned. She quits the job without any rancor or revenge and leaves, elegantly dressed and with an easy smile dancing lightly across her face. We watched it in French with English subtitles. It's unclear whether the original had the English speakers speaking English. Habemus Papam (2011) -- "7/10" The film begins with a funeral and then a conclave to select a new pope. Nobody wants to be pope. After several votes, it falls to Melville (Michel Piccoli). Before he can appear on the balcony for the first time ever as pope, he trucks away and hides somewhere in the papal palace. A day later, the conclave gets a psychoanalyst (Nanni Moretti), who is to very carefully question the new pope -- before all of the other cardinals. This doesn't work so well and they all continue to be trapped in the conclave, with no contact to the outside world. The cardinals amuse themselves with jigsaw puzzles and solitaire -- one of the cardinals plays with Swiss Jasskarten. The new pope continues to have nightmares. The psychologist recommends that they take him to his wife (Margherita Buy), who's also a psychologist. He admits that he is always tired, and that he loved the stage, when he used to travel with a company. He emerges to announce to his handler that he will need three meetings a week for several years before ducking away under cover of a passing delivery truck. He ducks into a department store, then has a panic attack on an upper floor. A woman very kindly helps him, even offering to help him after she gets off work. He snaps at her that he doesn't need help. He is very obviously depressed. Next stop is a small gathering, where children are singing. This fails to tug his lips upwards, though. He stops by a bar, where he asks to use the phone but it's not for personal calls. A young lady offer her mobile. He calls Il portavoce (Jerzy Stuhr) at the Vatican but won't tell them where he is. Il portavoce sets up a member of the Swiss Royal Guard (Gianluca Gobbi) to pretend to be the pope in his chambers. He will be there to fool the cardinals into thinking that the pope has returned. The pope is on a bus. It is nighttime. He listens to people around him. He considers life, and the church's place within it. He ends up in the early morning in a hotel kitchen, eating a pastry, then heading to the lobby to get a room. He sees the Vatican covering up his disappearance on television. He is woken like the rest of his floor by an actor (Dario Cantarelli) seemingly raving but actually reading all of the roles of Chekhov's Three Sisters. The pope reads some of the lines with him, having heard them so many times before. The madman descends the hotel and leaves, taking a waiting ambulance. We rejoin the pope in a theater, watching a troupe preparing their show., then dining with them and talking about the good old days. Meanwhile the cardinals and everyone in the conclave are setting up a volleyball league and building a court, with the psychologist in the lead. One cardinal suggests instead to play "Völkerball" (dodgeball), but he is voted down. The round-robin tourney begins, soon interrupted by the Swiss Guard shaking the curtains to show that he's in his chambers. The cardinals all wear pinnies in various colors of the rainbow and seem to be having a great time. The pope continues to wander the streets, reading newspaper and magazine headlines about himself, then visiting an afternoon sermon. He meets with il portavoce, who begs him to come back and take on the role he's been given. He asks why he can't just disappear? Why he can't just go, as if nothing had ever happened? The volleyball tournament is over. The cardinals collect to hear il portavoce admit that, although he had tried to rectify the situation, he must now admit that the pope is gone, and has been gone for three days. They will now have to search for the pope. The pope, however, is at the theater, watching the theater piece. He mouths the words along with the actors. Nuns and cardinals file in the back, disturbing the production. The mad actor from the hotel is back to rescue the production, reading all of the lines with conviction as he had that night at the hotel. The cardinals wave to the pope in his balcony seat. After the end of the production, they collect him, seemingly at least partially against his wishes. He looks supremely ill-at-ease as he approaches the balcony, from which he will finally greet the world as the Pope. He cannot give them what he wants. He declares that they must pray for him, as he cannot believe that God has chosen him, and he is therefore not worthy of the role. The cardinals are devastated. The original was in Italian but that language wasn't available on Arte, so I watched it in German. Harry Potter and the Half-blood Prince (2009) -- "7/10" I last "watched and reviewed this in 2023" . My review stands. The Staircase (2004--2018) -- "4/10" This is a series about the murder trial of American novelist Michael Peterson following the death of his wife Kathleen Peterson in 2001. It was, apparently, a big deal in the states, like on the level of OJ or Casey Anthony. Like, people were utterly fascinated with this dude who seems pretty to have gotten his wife wicked drunk and high on barbiturates and then pushed her down some stairs. I honestly don't care either way whether he did it. I could only watch the first episode before giving up. The pacing is glacial. It is a documentary about deeply uninteresting people, depicted in long scenes of lawyers discussing the most banal details in the most simplistic terms. There's one ten-minute scene in the first episode where two lawyers go through a family history in excruciating but somehow also superficial detail. Like, who cares? I guess a lot of people. Louis Theroux: The Settlers (2025) -- "9/10" You can watch the whole movie at "BBC Settlers (full film) 2025" by zei_squirrel . You can use "Twitter Video Downloader" to get a 720P version locally, so you don't have to watch it in a web page. I'd only watched the first couple of minutes and was already struck by the obvious fact that this Israeli settler is an American. So many of the Israelis interviewed by these western channels were very obviously born and raised in the United States. The bearded guy in the first could be from upstate NY for God's sake. What the hell is he doing hating Arabs in the middle of a desert in Israel? They have traveled to Israel to occupy Palestinian land because there's apparently nothing to colonize in the U.S. It is gobsmacking to me how more people aren't talking about how Palestine was already being occupied by Americans before Trump started drooling about building casinos on Gaza's coastline. "Jebediah: To understand the Arab way of thinking They understand, there's a war, OK? They win the war if they get territory. They lose the war if they lose territory. Louis: You could flip that and say that's what, in a sense, you're doing. Jebediah: That's what I aspire to do. Louis: [speechless]" Soon after, the next two settlers he interviews are obviously from the U.S. The lady has a broad American accent. The young man as well, although he says he moved when he was nine years old. They both claim that Gaza is obviously Jewish land and that nothing will stop them from taking it. Giant smiles on their young faces. Among some Israeli protesters is a British-sounding man, who seems sensible about Israel's role as a colonizer. The horse-wrangler settler learned his English in the U.S. or from Americans. He speaks very fluently with nearly no other accent. As always, the interview with "Daniella Weiss" <> is completely unequivocal. The only problem she sees is that the project is taking so long. With one million settlers established, she wants two. The next guy is Ari Abramovitz, born in Texas, who established a farm in Israel in 2014. He shows up on a side-by-side ATV (a Ranger). This is the guy from the start of the documentary. He says he moved when he was 16, after he did a "gap year" in Israel. He is an absolute religious zealot. He points to a set of dusty hills, proclaiming that "this is the most beautiful place in the world." Ari very clearly says that he doesn't care about Palestinians. They're not people to him. This is the kind of guy who cleared the prairies of North America of its native vermin. He is the exact kind of American that has been a problem for the world since the dawn of that country. He is an overpowered religious idiot with no morals and no principles. I wonder if a similar documentary in Xinjiang would have Chinese Han talking about Uyghurs the same way? Palestinians can't pick their olives because settlers loom over them. The settlers call the army. The army comes and clears them off of their own land. Louis visits Palestinians and hides from soldiers with them, at night, always uncertain. Settlers loom and attack. "Show me your passport. Why? I need it. Can I have it back? You'll get it back." They meet aggressive soldiers, dumb and filled with testosterone, armed, masked, arrogant, above the law (explicitly stated). They impose arbitrary rules. Isa, a Palestinian in a peacoat, beard, and woolen cap is great. He reminds me of a good friend of mine. A car stops. An Israeli calls a greeting to Louis in a broad Brooklyn accent. "Are you American? Do I look Chinese? Are you from Brooklyn? [Broad accent] Yeah, of course." Americans are enjoying living in Israel because they don't have to guard their speech there. You can be as inconsiderate as you like. Back with Ari, Louis shares a coffee and a conversation, wondering why he wears his weapon strapped to his back, even in his home. He's relatively articulate but he's completely and utterly deluded. He's utterly convinced of his anti-human beliefs, that he's fighting a just war. Louis is at a festival. It's loud. It's dusty. People look like they're enjoying themselves immensely. I can't get over how dirty and dusty and ugly everything is, though. It's a dusty, ugly countryside. It fascinates me that people are fighting so hard over this land. Louis speaks again with Daniella Weiss, who describes how there is no room for anyone other than Jews. Palestinians are not people. She describes death and destruction as "agitation", When Louis calls it "death" and "tragedy," she grins and says "Ah, yes." It's not that there is no destruction or death, it's that there is nothing to care about because they aren't people. They are, at best, sneaky terrorists, manipulating media to show the settlers in a bad light. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] These are notes for me to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. The amount of text is not proportional to my enjoyment. I might write less because I didn't get around to it when it was fresh in my mind. I rate the film based on how well it suited me personally for the genre, my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. Links are to "my IMDb ratings" [1] At least they'll be better prepared for the Germany of 2025 and probably even worse coming in 2026. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5494 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5494 Wed, 31 Dec 2025 22:41:16 +0100 -- "7/10" 2. "Our Friend (2019)" <#Friend> -- "5/10" 3. "Hulk (2003)" <#Hulk> -- "7/10" 4. "Black Mirror S07 (2025)" <#Black> -- "9/10" 5. "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005)" <#Goblet> -- "8/10" 6. "Morbius (2022)" <#Morbius> -- "7/10" 7. "Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (2006)" <#Parfum> -- "9/10" 8. "T2 Trainspotting (2017)" <#Trainspotting> -- "8/10" 9. "Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2022)" <#Wakanda> -- "4/10" 10. "L'immensità (2022)" <#Immensita> -- "7/10" Godzilla (1998) -- "7/10" The introductory credits play over atom-bomb explosions interleaved with images of iguanas on nearby islands. A Japanese ship is attacked; there is one survivor. Philippe Roaché (Jean Reno) manages to coax one word out of him: Gojira. The U.S. military retrieves Dr. Niko Tatopoulos (Matthew Broderick) out of Chernobyl, where he was researching radioactive earthworms. They put him to work for Dr. Elsie Chapman (Vicki Lewis), who's working for Colonel Hicks (Kevin Dunn). In New York, we meet pretty, perky, and young Audrey Timmonds (Maria Pitillo), who works for a news studio as an assistant to Charles Caiman (Harry Shearer), who is trying to bed her, not promote her. Her friends Lucy Palotti (Arabella Field) and Victor 'Animal' Palotti (Hank Azaria) console her. She spots Niko on the TV and recognizes him as her college boyfriend. We meet Mayor Ebert (Michael Lerner), who's is in the middle of a reelection campaign, so he's definitely going to be thinking about how to turn a giant-lizard attack to his advantage, should one occur in NY (he won't have to wait long). So far, so good. A classic Emmerich setup. We see a few more interactions with Godzilla, always invisible, until a fisherman hooks him on his rod and reel and he finally reveals himself to be in New York. Godzilla storms through the city, then buries himself (herself?) underground, amongst the tunnels beneath Manhattan. Godzilla reveals itself to Niko on the streets of New York, Godzilla looks kind of like a muscular kangaroo/lizard, almost human. Niko takes pictures with a Kodak disposable camera. This is notable only because it's a stark reminder of how much has changed: almost/just 30 years ago, we were still using film for everything. We had those cameras at our wedding in 2002. We weren't outdated. Audrey hunts down Niko, making big eyes at him, and making him feel bad for not forgiving her immediately for her not having wanted to marry him after college. Back in his tent, where he's offered her a tea, she stays behind while he investigates the beast's pregnancy -- then steals some information and prepares a report with it, on a VHS tape. It's quite ironic that Niko is immediately fired from the project for having leaked information because the news these days is all about the Secretary of Defense nearly constantly leaking information to the press and his family over Signal and never getting fired for it. What a difference 30 years makes! Not just the disposable camera or the VHS tape but the attitude toward repercussions for bad information security. Anyway... Roaché half-kidnaps Niko and convinces him to join forces with his "French Legion". They take off to hunt the nest together -- something that the U.S. military has decided not to do, which is a terrible idea. If they don't find the eggs, they'll hatch and then there will hundreds of mini-Godzillas in New York. Godzilla heads back to the surface, fighting with the U.S. military, this time underwater. She gets the Navy to sink its own subs with torpedoes. Their next volley is a direct hit and appears to kill Godzilla, or at least to have knocked her unconscious. Meanwhile, under the Madison Square Garden, the eggs are hatching and the babies are coming! The babies are everywhere and they're eating everything. The team gets out of Madison Square Garden, trapping all of the mini-dinosaurs inside just before the U.S. Air Force blows it to smithereens. Mama's back. She's pissed. All of her babies are dead. It's kind of sad. She chases the crew through New York, with them escaping in a cab. They eventually lure her over the Brooklyn Bridge, where she becomes trapped in the cables. The jets shoot her, wounding her deeply. They come back and finish her off. She dies pitifully, ensnared in the cables, laying her head down as her heart gives out and the light fades from her eye. Back in Madison Square Garden, a single egg remains. It cracks. I gave it an extra star because I like to watch Emmerich films in German and also because it's almost 30 years old and still has a ton of practical effects in it, which are far superior to CGI for this kind of thing. Or maybe it's just good CGI, like Jurassic Park? I dunno, but it's really not bad. There are only a few places with obvious green-screening. I watched it in German. Our Friend (2019) -- "5/10" So this is a story about Nicole (Dakota Johnson), a woman who gets cancer and her husband Matt's (Casey Affleck) friend Dane (Jason Segel) who helps out a lot, even though he lives with them, and he doesn't really work -- I think he's a comedian? -- and he kind of wants to kill himself sometimes. They made no effort to make Nicole look like she has cancer except that they gave her a head-scarf, even though she's clearly not doing chemo, so I don't know why she'd be losing her hair. Still, she thinks she looks terrible because the purpose of pretty much every movie is to make every woman watching it feel inadequate. Like, if Dakota Fanning with her perfect cancer skin is ugly, then what is the poor viewer? Obviously hideous. Get to work. The story is told in flashbacks, bouncing around the years before and after her diagnosis. Toward the end, we discover that Nicole had cheated on Matt with one of her theater friends. Matt hadn't taken it well, moving out. He ends up going back but this is the most tedious of scenes, too. God, I have half a mind to drop the rating to one just for the simpering face they made Dakota Fanning make when Matt said he would try to make it work. Everything about this film is so desperately depressing. When a bunch of Nicole's friends don't show up for book club, Dane asks him to get some food. He cruises by the park to see all Nicole's friends playing with their children. They have moved on. The song "Can't Find My Way Home" by Blind Faith plays, just to make sure you get the point that things are bad. Palliative care specialist Faith Pruett (Cherry Jones) shows up to save this movie a bit. She is competent, even-keeled, and deeply empathetic. When she finds out that Matt and Dane have been caring for Nicole without any help as she descended into madness for the last four months, as her body deteriorated, she says "Oh ihr beide Arme," because of what they needlessly had to go through. Nicole needs medication, especially an anti-psychotic to keep her mood up while her body dies. Next song is the amazing "Going to California" by Led Zeppelin, which is only slightly more upbeat. People are visiting Nicole for the last time. And then, just like that, Nicole's taken her last breath. She died in her own bed. Faith is strong and helpful and deeply empathetic right until the end. I remember this from when my mom died of cancer. The hospice-care ladies were really, really nice. It went more quickly for mom because she was much older. She was ready. She was relatively coherent until quite late in the game. In the end, hunger took her. Mom didn't want any ceremony, unlike the relatively extravagant wake featured in the movie. She did want her ashes to be scattered in Switzerland, though. She didn't say when, so she sits in her wooden box, on a shelf behind me, in my office. Oh hell, another insipid and terribly depressing song is playing that I don't recognize. Ah, it's a breathy, female cover of "If I Had The World To Give", originally by The Grateful Dead. The second half was more honest and interesting than the first but I'm not changing my rating. It's just a bit too self-indulgent and full of people I don't like. I like Matt. Dane is OK, but man is he maudlin. I can't tell whether they're kidding about him being a comedian, like an in-joke or something. Dane finally moves out. Bro hug and out. Huh, I guess this was based on a true story. Huh. So I guess people really act like that? I guess I really have nothing in common with most of the WASP middle-class in the U.S. I watched it in German. Hulk (2003) -- "7/10" I last watched this in 2022 and "wrote a detailed review" then. The rating stands. I only saw about the last 1/3 this time, again in German. Black Mirror S07 (2025) -- "9/10" This is an unexpected and welcome return of one of the more inventive, interesting, and risk-taking shows on Netflix -- or pretty much anywhere. The format is the same: six episodes, some of them nearly feature-length, each about how a tinge of technology mixed with our system would have macabre, dark consequences. It must be getting difficult to write about something twisted that hasn't already happened or isn't currently happening to us. Common People Amanda (Rashida Jones) is a schoolteacher, married to welder Mike (Chris O'Dowd). They're getting by, but barely. They've been trying to have a child but it's not worked so far. After falling unconscious, Amanda is diagnosed with a terminal brain tumor. A company steps in to offer a miracle cure, represented by Gaynor (Tracee Ellis Ross). They can't afford it but they get the cheapest plan. Mike has his wife again. She starts glitching, though. They're using her to run ads. They're putting her to sleep longer. They're trying to force her to upgrade their plan. They can't afford it. Mike makes it possible by selling himself online -- to a site that makes him do horrible things for money. Does it work? Is it worth it? Does it end well? No, no, and no. Like, the exact opposite of "well". This is Black Mirror, baby. Bête Noire Maria (Siena Kelly) works at a confectionary company, designing luxury candies and chocolates. Verity (Rosy McEwen) appears at her office one day, a blast from the past, and is hired instantly. Verity insinuates herself into every corner of Maria's life, sidelining her. But why? Because Maria vaguely recalls that Verity had been bullied in high school. What she doesn't remember is that she was the ringleader. And how, though? How is she seemingly manipulating reality? Quantum computer, baby. Does Maria get her comeuppance? No, no she doesn't. Like, not at all. This is Black Mirror, baby. Hotel Reverie Kimmy (Akwafina) runs a company that can remake old movies with new actors, making what amounts to instant reboots. Producer and owner of a dying film studio Judith Keyworth (Harriet Walter) decides to work with Kimmy to remake Hotel Reverie, this time with Brandy (Issa Rae) taking the lead role (replacing the previous male lead), starring opposite romantic interest Dorothy Chambers (Emma Corrin). The ReDream technology malfunctions -- or does it just function? -- and everyone in the film is suspended in time, their consciousnesses experiencing a seemingly endless time together. Brandy and Dorothy fall in love. After an hour in "real" time, they've fixed the computers, allowing the "scene" to proceed ... and end. The connection is sundered and Brandy is devastated, even months later, when a telephone arrives in a package. She picks it up; it's Dorothy. Plaything Cameron Walker (Peter Capaldi/Lewis Gribben) gets himself arrested in a near-future London, where they pick him up for shoplifting but discover through DNA that he is also responsible for having murdered an itinerant friend Lump (Josh Finan) long ago. DCI Kano (James Nelson-Joyce) is a bit of a jackass/bad cop while psychologist Jen Minter (Michele Austin) is much more sympathetic and interested in Walker's story. "Cameron Walker: [To DCI Kano] You are very hostile. It's a crude trait and a poor strategy. [He probably means tactic, though]" Why would he have killed Lump? Well, long before, Cameron had met a young programmer, who'd shown him a unique life-simulation game named Thronglets. Cameron develops what we would call an unhealthy attachment to them, except, except for the fact that they are actually sentient. They grow with Cameron, as he gains them more hardware, more power. Lump had found the game and was genociding them. He had to go. After a while, the hardware that Cameron can provide the Thronglets is not enough. They are deeply interested in spreading, in colonizing more hardware, more power. But they are peaceful, much more so than humans. They actually would bring peace, given the chance. Cameron obliges them by getting himself arrested so that he can get access to the mainframe hardware at the central police station, whence they communicate their message (imperative) of peace...to the world. Eulogy Phillip (Paul Giamatti) receives a package that tells him that he has been invited to the funeral of an old friend. The invitation comes from a company named Eulogy, which has sent an AI in the form of a temple nubbin to "help" him remember enough of his memories of Carol (Hazel Monaghan) to contribute to the funeral. His AI guide (Patsy Ferran) turns out to be Carol's daughter Kelly. Reluctantly, At Kelly's at-times hostile urging, Phillip, together with some long-buried artifacts, remembers more and more of his time with Carol, how he was the instigator of the breakup that he has long mourned. He attends the funeral, meeting Kelly in real life. This story was gentler than the usual Black Mirror affair, as they didn't even address the possibility that the daughter's AI would lie, aiding him in confabulation, twisting his memories to blame himself. USS Callister: Into Infinity This is a sequel to "S4E01" ), which left Nanette (Cristin Milioti) in charge of a crew of clones of employees of the video-game company that runs the game in which they're all trapped. In the real world, Walton (Jimmi Simpson) leads the company alone after partner Robert Daly's (Jesse Plemons) death in the original film/episode. Robert's dead in the real world but he lives on in the same virtual reality in which they're all trapped. He is at the powerful nexus of the game, running the show but, in a way, more benevolent than the hateful man who existed in the real world. He still has those personality characteristics, though, so he very much looks out for number one. He makes a deal with Nanette to release her friends if she'll stay with him forever. She betrays him; he has the game's players attack her friends. She manages to "kill" him in the game. As the game, having lost its creator, leader, and inspiration, collapses in on itself, Nanette somehow copy/pastes herself and her crew into her comatose body in the real world, finally waking up. She is not alone. It's a party in her head. This is much better than I think I've made it sound. It's fun. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (2005) -- "8/10" Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes) is on his way back, with the help of Peter Pettigrew/Wormtail (Timothy Spall). At Hogwart's, the Tri-school Tournament is in full swing, with Cedric Diggory (Robert Pattinson) from Hogwarts, Victor Krum (Stanislav Yanevski), and Fleur Delacour (Clémence Poésy) from other schools, and then, of course, Harry Potter (Daniel Radcliffe) is also in the tournament. They must solve several puzzles. The first challenge is to get an egg from a dragon. Harry helped Cedric figure out this challenge. Cedric helps Harry figure out the next challenge, paying him back, and cementing a sort of friendship. They are out on the lake, diving underwater to save someone important to them. Fleur is unable to save her sister Gabrielle (Angelica Mandy), but Harry saves both Ron (Rupert Grint) and Gabrielle, coming in second, behind Cedric. The third and final challenge is in a giant labyrinth. Like, it is magically giant. And it moves. They have to find a trophy at the end. Viktor is sidelined, as is Fleur. Cedric and Harry reach the trophy at the same time, and realize that it's a portal. They've been teleported to the cemetery where the Deatheaters have prepared a ceremony for Voldemort's return. They don't need Cedric for this, so they kill him immediately. They need Harry's blood, keeping him alive while they draw it, then add it to a cauldron to which Voldemort's currently shrunken and shriveled mortal vessel is also added. Voldemort is back. He "lives". He tries to take out Harry, but of course it doesn't work (we need a few more movies first). Harry escapes with Cedric's body by touching the trophy again. Um, what else? Oh, yeah, Mad-eye Moody (Brendan Gleeson) was an imposter and was behind all of the tricks that guided Harry toward his being used to resurrect Voldemort: putting his name on the Tri-School cup, switching out the cup for a portal, etc. Reporter Rita Skeeter (Miranda Richardson) is also quite good, playing the annoying and mendacious media. Morbius (2022) -- "7/10" Dr. Michael Morbius (Jared Leto) declines a Nobel Prize for having invented the artificial blood that keeps himself, his lifelong friend Milo (Matt Smith) alive, and many others alive. Dr. Emil Nicholas (Jared Harris) watched over them as orphans and continues to work with them now, as adults. Micheal wants to take the next step: splicing bat genes with his own to cure his blood disease. This is not in any possibly way going to be sanctioned on dry land, so Milo's rich as sets up a floating laboratory for him. Guess what? OMIGOD you'll never guess! It's a quasi-villain origin story. I write "quasi" because Michael is actually a good guy but the bloodlust turns him into a nearly heedless killing machine. No-one else on the ship survives his initial transformation. ""It's morbin' time" ." After the murder spree on the boat where Michael became Morbius, Agent Rodriguez (Al Madrigal) and Agent Simon Stroud (Tyrese Gibson) are hot on his trail. Martine Bancroft (Adria Arjona), Michael's friend and collaborator, was injured and hospitalized. So, Michael is "cured" -- he's a superhuman all the time, and an insatiable killing machine sometimes -- and his financial benefactor and lifelong friend wants in. He is fine with the "insatiable killing machine" part as long as it cures his blood disease. The superhuman strength, speed, and senses sounds pretty sweet too. Milo ends up "stealing" the cure -- he can't steal it since he financed it and owns it -- killing a nurse, and framing Michael to get him out of the way. Morbius escapes, hunting Milo down before he kills too many more people. Milo manages to kill Nicholas out of jealousy, then nearly mortally wounds Martine (Adria Arjona), who only survives by inadvertently lapping up a drop of Morbius's blood. Morbius doesn't know this, though, as he escapes with his dark thoughts. Hilariously, the Vulture/Adrian Toomes (Michael Keaton) appears during the credits, offering to team up with Morbius, clearly desperately hopeful that there will be a sequel where a movie starring the villainous duo Vulture and Morbius makes a billion dollars. Why not? There are three Avatars -- the third one is well on its way to a billion dollars after only two weeks -- none of which anyone remembers having seen. The movie was torn apart mercilessly but it's not obviously worse than any of the other middling fare that is most of what makes up the Marvel Cinematic Universe. It's way better than either of the Black Panther movies. Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (2006) -- "9/10" I read and loved this book in the original German in "2007" . The film follows the book's plot quite closely. This is the story of Grenouille ("frog" in French), a child of rape ejected rudely into the world by his fishmonger mother whilst she was working. This is an unforgettable scene, where he drops squalling to the ground as his mother screams and tries to keep working. He was soon orphaned by hanging and spent his youth in orphanages. He was an odd youth, always apart, quickly aware that he had a superhuman sense of smell. As he grew into a teenager, he apprentices as a tanner -- one of the most vile-smelling trades possible. He grows infatuated with a local redhead, by whose scent he is entranced. He inadvertently kills her while trying to keep her quiet from startling at his approach. He does not have super-strength but he has the strong hands, arms, and sinews of a tanner. In death, her scent fades, no matter how hard he tries to retain it. It goes into his scent memories but disappears from the world. How can he preserve the lovely scents that he detects, that seemingly only he knows? Grenouille meets perfumer Giuseppe Baldini (Dustin Hoffman) on a delivery. Baldini's business is failing and he is astounded to learn that Grenouille is a gifted natural talent at mixing perfumes. He claims the scents as his own, quickly revitalizing his reputation and fortune. Grenouile is interested only in recreating scents, learning as much as he can from Baldini. He learns of the twelve prime scents but is deeply disappointed in the gross limitations of the man's capabilities. If he can't preserve the scent of iron or glass, then what good is he? Baldini, annoyed at the young man's frustration -- and, quite frankly, bizarre demeanor and comportment -- makes a deal: he will provide journeyman papers in exchange for 100 perfume recipes. Deal. None of those scents would ever reach a nose, as Baldini's wonderful-looking building collapses out of the middle of the bridge in which it is situated, splashing into the water, taking all of Grenouille's recipes with it. This is a great, memorable scene as well. As Grenouille travels to Grasse, he changes his path, making his way, up, up, high into the mountains, where he lives alone for a long time, ensconced in a cave, hunting local animals, and learning that he himself doesn't have a scent. In Grasse, another redhead Laure Richis (Rachel Hurd-Wood) catches his eyenose. There are many perfumers in Grasse. Grenouille quickly obtains employment at one, learning the technique of enfleurage -- to bathe in flowers -- which he begins to misuse to capture the scents of young women. Unfortunately, the process is fatal. There are many young women -- twelve to be exact, one for each of the prime scents dictated to him by Baldini. The town is terrorized by this mysterious killer who's fallen upon it. The final, thirteenth, and heretofore unknown scent will be that of Laure. Her father Antoine (Alan Rickman), panicked, takes her to a seaside castle, to keep her safe. She is not safe there. Grenouille can find her scent anywhere in the world. With the thirteenth scent in hand, he begins concocting the ultimate perfume. Just as he has it, he is finally captured. No matter. He has the scent. He stands on the gallows, the platform on which stands the guillotine that will finally consign this monster to the death that he so richly deserves. Is he a monster? Did he ever deserve his fate? He is a monster; he has no care for human life. But is he the only monster? He isn't much different from most of the people he'd met. None of them cared much for any human life other than their own. Is he that much worse for having killed 13 young women than a lord who, intent on increasing his own already vast riches, starves 13 hundred? He dabs the perfume on himself. The slavering crowd is transformed. They no longer cry lustily and in blood-curdling manner for his head. Instead, they cock their heads like golden retrievers about to get a good-boy snack, immediately enchanted by the perfume. The scent doesn't simply predispose them positively toward Grenouille -- though they do now view him as a God striding the Earth -- it transforms their lust for spilled blood to one for shared flesh, for the grinding sensation of full-on, mindless rutting. Grenouille strides from the platform, down the stairs, wading into an unfolding orgy that comprises the entire town, clothes thrown every which way in a frenetic abandon, as the townspeople fall on each other, insatiable and unstoppable. Antoine Richis confronts Grenouille but is helpless before the power of the perfume, taking Grenouille in his arms as a son. Grenouille, being not like other men, is not enchanted by this power, by the ability to rule like a God that the perfume would grant him. He is...disappointed that he cannot truly love or be truly loved. He returns to Paris, whence he came. He pours the entire bottle over his head. The people in the plaza look up like zombies, catching the irresistible scent, driven immediately to the fervor of the first crowd but this time with the desire to consume their object of love. They fall on Grenouille, tearing him limb from limb. By morning, nothing remains but a pile of clothes. The crowd has dispersed. The morning sun glints from a single drop remaining in the perfume phial. T2 Trainspotting (2017) -- "8/10" This is the twenty-year reunion of the original, which I watched in "2015" . In that film, four reprobates -- Mark Renton (Ewan McGregor), Simon "Sick Boy" Williamson (Jonny Lee Miller), Francis "Franco" Begbie (Robert Carlyle), and Daniel "Spud" Murphy (Ewen Bremner) -- did a lot of heroin and did a bunch of little, shitty deals until they finally got a decent score. At the very end, Mark absconds with the money all for himself, leaving for Amsterdam. In this sequel, his life in Amsterdam is falling apart: he's going through a divorce and he has a heart attack. He returns to his old stomping grounds to make amends,...or something. Is he trying to save his old friends or is he trying to save himself? Is he still the same selfish Mark Renton who'd abandoned them 20 years before? He was a nice guy then, but still tended to decide for himself, convinced that he was less of a loser, less of a lost cause, than the others. His first stop is at Spud's place, where Renton saves him from a suicide attempt. As in the first film, Spud is far and away the most sympathetic character. Renton helps him get clean. The next stop is with Simon, who would, in any other film, qualify as the least-sympathetic character. He's a manipulative boyfriend/pimp/strip-club owner who's switched out heroin for pretty large amounts of cocaine. He's awful to his girlfriend Veronika Kovach (Anjela Nedyalkova), who takes a liking to Mark relatively quickly. They start fucking because of course they do. Mark is nothing if not a combination of treacherous, self-destructive, and a nice guy. The only reason that Simon's not the worst thing in the movie is because Begbie exists. Begbie escapes from prison and starts making everyone he knows very, very miserable. His ex-wife (or current wife?) and son catch the brunt of his abuse at first, but he soon learns from Simon that Renton is in town. Begbie is a force of nature, just a ticking time bomb. A whole lot of awful shit goes down, with Spud emerging as the hero, staying off of heroin, providing for his baby-mama Gail and son Fergus, while Begbie tears a swath of destruction that is, finally, stopped without anyone else having to die, thankfully. Simon and Renton reconcile, as do Renton and his widower father. This movie has a cool vibe, has great music, and has an interesting shot-selection. It was a very strong sequel, standing on its own, with a sort of bittersweet triumph. Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2022) -- "4/10" This movie starts with five minutes of trying to save T'Challa from a disease, and then him dying, and then everyone crying, and then a five-minute funeral, followed by intro credits without music and only pictures of Chadwick Bozeman. It doesn't get a whole lot better from there but I knew what this was going to be going in, which is why I really only had it running the background. The whole world wants Vibranium. Wakanda isn't going to give it to anyone else. It's understandable that they don't want to let France or the U.S. steal it, but they also continue to be utterly unwilling to help anyone, even the incredibly poor countries on their own continent. Speaking of continents, the lost one is represented in the person of Namor and his Atlanteans. Namor is Southeast Asian now, rather than blue. The took the worst character of the first film -- T'Challa's sister -- and made the second movie all about her, moping about her lost brother. I get that she would be sad but it's not great cinema. Anyway, she and her mom's general are on a campus, finding the girl who built a vibranium detector. She has the world's biggest dorm room, of course. Everyone acts like that's totally normal. Also she's nineteen but she's spent "years" building a flying car or whatever. She also has the world's biggest personal lab, as if she were Tony Stark and not a college student. It is just wild how unbelievable this all is. Most kids live in shoe-boxes with three roommates and have to pay hundreds if not thousands of bucks for textbooks but this young lady is somehow living in automated luxury communism. Oh, I guess the thing that she's worked for years on was her own personal Iron Man suit. Now they're doing a bit of a meso-American history lesson, speaking some French in Africa, and speaking some Spanish in Mexico. Oh man, I don't have the energy to write down the details of this silly plot filled with incredibly intelligent and unstoppably powerful people, each equipped with nearly unfathomable technology. A bunch of the third quarter of the movie is just watching two young black women be smart at science in a society with unlimited resources of which one of them is currently queen. As for the rest of it? Wooden dialogue doesn't even begin to cover it. The costumes are so bizarre, like something out of an 80s-era Star Trek movie. How many times are they going to show Shuri plucking a white tennis ball from the sculpture and putting it back? After all that, after designing the super-soldier serum that will bring back the Black Panther (as a young black girl, natch), they mix the ingredients together with a mortar and pestle. This is not just inconsistent but utterly incoherent. It's the same problem they have with having the supposedly most advanced technology but then they still fight with spears because they're black and from Africa. Also they grunt and hoot at each other like monkeys when they disagree with each other. They also pound their chests. Like gorillas. I am not making this up. It's horribly and disrespectfully racist but it poses as a triumph for black Americans. At least Blacksploitation movies knew what they were and leaned into the irony. I'm not sure whether the movie is more offensive to black people or to women because they turned the nerdy STEMmy princess into a war-happy nearly psychotically irrational warrior. Sure, she suddenly fights like Rocky -- blow for blow -- but how does she even know how to fight? And how does she seriously go toe-to-toe with Namor, one of the more powerful beings in the Marvel universe? Oh, because she's black and a woman. I apologize for even having asked such a stupid question. Did she really just say, Wakanda über alles? Wow. Oh, I guess I didn't mishear that. She says it again. No irony noted there. Black Panther subdues Namor and they fly back to the Wakandan cruise ship on a flying saucer that appeared out of fucking nowhere. They're best buddies now, with her in charge (naturally). Jesus, these actresses are terrible. Neither one of them will ever be in anything again. As predicted, Letitia Wright was in one terrible movie in 2023, nothing in 2024, and reprises her role as Shuri in 2026 in what will almost certainly only be a bit part in an upcoming Avengers movie. The other girl Riri (Dominique Thorne) also had no work in 2023, two TV episodes in 2024 and looks like her black, female Iron Man named Iron Heart will get an eponymous six-episode series that will almost certainly crash, burn, and disappear without a trace. This is just another in a long line of Marvel movies in which everyone gets everything they want because they're all billionaires with unlimited power and no problems. It's such a shame because things could be so much better. Go watch Luke Cage instead. I watched the movie in German. L'immensità (2022) -- "7/10" Clara (Penélope Cruz) lives in Rome with an abusive and distant husband Felice (Vincenzo Amato) and three children. The oldest Adri is a girl who wants to be a boy. The middle child Gino (Patrizio Francioni) is a pudgy redhead who poops on the floor in the living room, and the youngest Diana (Maria Chiara Goretti) is an adorable little girl who seems the most grown-up of all three. The children fight whenever the father erupts at them. The one problem they don't have is a lack of money. They seem to be living quite comfortable middle-class lives, if not upper-middle-class lives. Adri (Luana Giuliani) occasionally dreams of herself and her mother doing dance and song numbers together, with Penélope Cruz singing quite convincingly in Italian. Adri befriends a local Roma girl in her role as a boy. They kiss. They become friends. After Clara comes back from a clinic (presumably treatment for a breakdown), the father proudly proclaims that the gypsies have all been cleared out of their area, devastating Adri, who runs down to the former encampment to find it completely bereft of human life, cleared to the ground. I watched it in Italian. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] These are notes for me to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. The amount of text is not proportional to my enjoyment. I might write less because I didn't get around to it when it was fresh in my mind. I rate the film based on how well it suited me personally for the genre, my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. Links are to "my IMDb ratings" ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5461 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5461 Mon, 29 Dec 2025 22:19:19 +0100 -- "10/10" 2. "Stewart Lee, Basic Lee: Live at the Lowry (2024)" <#Stewart> -- "9/10" 3. "Mank (2020)" <#Mank> -- "9/10" 4. "Bobby Yeah (2011)" <#Bobby> -- "8/10" 5. "Midnight Express (1978)" <#Midnight> -- "8/10" 6. "The Infernal Machine (2022)" <#Infernal> -- "7/10" 7. "Shrek the Third (2022)" <#Shrek> -- "5/10" 8. "Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008)" <#Indiana> -- "4/10" 9. "Everest (2015)" <#Everest> -- "7/10" 10. "Die Another Day (2002)" <#Another> -- "6/10" Bill Burr: I'm Sorry You Feel That Way (2014) -- "10/10" I'd last "seen this in January of 2015," at which time I gave it a top rating, writing "I just saw this. I’m still in pain. That was one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen in my life." Stewart Lee, Basic Lee: Live at the Lowry (2024) -- "9/10" [media] This copy of the video probably won't last because it's not an official channel but I just wanted to remember I'd seen it. Stewart Lee is one of my favorite comedians. Whenever I listen to one of his shows, I almost always start off by wondering "what is he even doing," and I always end up thinking that it was one of the most brilliant, funny, deeply philosophical things I've ever seen in my life. There is no other comedian like him. "Don't come and see me if you don't know what anything is." At about 13:00, "Right. That's the end of the fun, topical bit at the top of the show. It's not really of interest to me, that sort of stuff. I just do it because I'm sick of reading people going, 'the reason you don't see Lee on Have I Got News for You is because he can't write economic, topical jokes. Well, I can write them. As we've seen, I can write them very easily. But, um, it's beneath me. Uh, it's beneath you. And it's time now to move on into the punishing experimental standup that has kept me out of the arenas for 35 years." At about 18:00 "I'm not going to write any more jokes. I'm going to come out here with a blackboard, with a list of topics on it. I'm going to point at one of them and you can have a good laugh imagining what I might have said about it." At about 01:11:30 "[...] what's this? What's going on? He's doing some kind of lecture. Of course I'm not. That's what I do. That's my comedy. It's not a mistake. That's kind of routine. That's why the broad sheets call me the world's greatest living standup -- which they do, in case you -- why have we not heard of him? I don't know! There's been an administrative error. "It's because of stuff like that. That's what they like. It flatters their intelligence, the broad-sheet newspaper critics, because what I do is as close to being not funny at all as it's possible to be. And then, just at the last minute, when you want to blow your own head off, you go -- it turns around -- you go, oh it's brilliant." After a long, brilliant bit in which he ties together about a dozen threads into a repetitive, mesmerizing, and coherent jumble, all played as people endlessly visiting an office, day after day after day, he says, at about 01:27:30, "This is my life. Pure. Simple. Classic. But listen to that. There's no laughs, are there? There's just a strange tense atmosphere of hopeless despair. A bit like the kind of atmosphere you might get at the end of an award-winning piece of theater." "I've only ever written one decent closing joke. I wrote it in September 1989. [...] I'm going to finish with it now, without changing any of the now-irrelevant personal details and then I'm going to go. See you in a couple years. "So, I was talking to my granddad the other day. He's 94 years -- he's dead now obviously, but he was alive when I wrote this. I'm not sick, you know -- so I was talking to my granddad the other day -- he's 94 years old -- I said to him, 'Grandad, you are 94 years old. What, in your experience, has been the worst thing about growing so old?' "And he said to me, 'Stu, in my experience, the worst thing about growing so old has been watching all of the friends that I grew up with slowly dying off one by one.' "And I said to him, well, Granddad, 'you fed them those berries.'" Mank (2020) -- "9/10" This is a nice-looking film and the story is interesting and well-told. But the real grabber is Gary Oldman as the titular Herman J. Mankiewicz (Mank). Mank is not only a great writer, he is an incorrigible alcoholic. Throughout the film, he is shown deep in his cups, speaking truth to power, sometimes slurring, sometimes incredibly eloquent. It is not always easy to watch these scenes but they're magnificently acted. Often, Mank is speaking truth to William Randolph Hearst (Charles Dance), who doesn't appreciate it one bit. That's how Mank ends up writing Citizen Kane as a thinly veiled, unauthorized biography of Hearst. That's actually the plot of the movie: how the script of Citizen Kane came to be written. Mank spends the entire film in bed with a broken leg while writing the screenplay because he has a broken leg. He is occasionally visited by Orson Welles (Tom Burke), who fights with Mank about the script, fights to keep him dry, then yells at him when he still manages to drink, then yells at him for taking a run at Hearst, then threatens to rewrite it without him, then is reminded by Mank that the Screen Actor's Guild wouldn't take kindly to that, then makes the movie more or less unchanged anyway, then sharing credit with Mank for the Academy Award for Best Screenplay that they won two years later. We only see him on his feet in flashbacks, often discussing verboten topics with Marion Davies (Amanda Seyfried), who was Hearst's much-younger life partner, or, as noted above, sloshing a glass angrily at a crowd of plutocrats who have, for their own mysterious reasons, invited him to their dinner. He was mostly yelling at Hearst for having sidelined the socialist Upton Sinclair (Bill Nye) in the California gubernatorial race. That's the other primary, though parallel theme of this movie: how the rich moguls of the California media and movie business conspired to torpedo the socialist candidate with a completely fantastical and fictitious smear campaign against him. Had Upton Sinclair become California's governor at the time, who knows what might have happened differently? But isn't that the story of the U.S. of A.? Just a bunch of people with a lot of power and money who want more of it, getting their way forever. Why? Because they convince us to like them more than we like ourselves. But Mank gets his revenge in this excellent biography that not only shows him in all of his drunken madness but also as a deeply principled man, willing to throw away everything for what he believes in -- and he believed in the equality of man, in justice for everyone, that there was no such thing as a "common" man, that there are only "people". This film is nice-looking because it was directed by David Fincher. It's in black-and-white. And it's nice-sounding because the soundtrack was by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, It's lovely but it also gets an extra star for not only making a point but making the right point -- a worthwhile, lofty, and worthy goal -- -and for making it well. Bobby Yeah (2011) -- "8/10" This is a really well-made 23-minute claymation video about a creature purportedly named Bobby -- none of the creatures speak or are named -- who's having adventures in a bizarre world populated by other creatures that have interesting alternate modes of procreation. The character's names are, * Bobby Yeah * Crow Dick * Potato Spider * Baby Head * The Spaghetti Worm of Radish * Tonguely Cummer * The Box * Clock Face * The Finger of Shrimp Car * Toothy Cummer * Button Boy * Fetus You can hardly even call it stop-motion video because it's so smooth. The characters are really, really well-animated, with incredibly expressive body language and facial expressions. There is a plot but it leaves a lot of room for interpretation. Read the "Synopsis of Bobby Yeah" for the official version. Bobby encounters various creatures and pushes various buttons, causing usually even more bizarre things to happen. The final button, on Bobby's chest, causes him to transform into an octopus-like creature, capable only of lovingly stroking his hairy-sperm-like friends, who were dead/not-dead throughout the video. Bobby's eventual offspring lovingly decapitates him -- without killing him -- freeing his living head to rise and float away into a purple-tinged void. "Robert Morgan's original web site" described as follows, "Bobby Yeah is a petty thug who lightens his miserable existence by brawling and stealing stuff. One day, he steals the favourite pet of some very dangerous individuals, and finds himself in deep trouble. He really should learn, but he just can't help it." You can watch it here: [media] Midnight Express (1978) -- "8/10" I'd "last seen and reviewed this movie in 2012" , when I'd given it a 6/10. I liked it better this time around, but my critique stands. "The Turks are depicted throughout as either thieves, corrupt, homosexual, brutal, slovenly, unclean or a horrific combination of all of these. The warden in particular is portrayed as an Ottoman juggernaut, implacable and evil. Even Hayes—who actually served time in that prison—went on record saying that the depiction was over-the-top and wildly inaccurate." "The version I watched had no subtitles for any of the Turkish parts; it’s uncertain whether that was intended in order to give you the impression of what it was like for Hayes." I can confirm that there are no subtitles for the Turkish. The Infernal Machine (2022) -- "7/10" This movie is more-or-less a one-man-show starring Guy Pearce as Bruce Cogburn, a one-hit-wonder author whose titular book inspired a mass shooting from a clocktower in Knoxville. The shooting is 25 years in the past. The shooter Dwight Tufford (Alex Pettyfer) was 17 at the time and had driven 23 hours straight to get to the clocktower. He was driven by the words in the book. Cogburn is being harassed by a writer named William Dukent, who sends hundreds of identical letters to Cogburn's home, which is off-the-grid in New Mexico. In order to call the number in the letters, Cogburn must drive 14 miles to a public telephone. There is an anticlimactic reveal when Officer Higgins (Alice Eve) turns out to be a hired con-woman who spends some time at an arranged dinner talking about how smart and awesome she is before taking off, never to be seen again. The person who hired her turns out to have been Elijah Barett (Jeremy Davies), a former student of Cogburn's, from whom -- wait for it -- he'd stolen the original book. He didn't steal it outright, though! He'd encouraged an unconfident Barett to continue writing his fascinating book. Instead, Barett finishes the book, then calls Cogburn to meet him in a giant warehouse. He sits in the center of all of the pages of his book, concentrically arranged. greets Cogburn, then sets himself on fire. Cogburn thought he'd died in the fire. He'd heard from Barett's parents that they were going to take him off of life-support. The book made Cogburn famous, then even more famous after Tufford's serial shooting. He'd naturally been completely unable to follow up the book (reminding me a bit of "The Plot by Jean Hanff Korelitz" ). Cogburn is back on the bottle and he's finally discovered that Barett is alive and has arranged a confrontation, during which a Rube Goldberg device is configured to appear as if it will cause another conflagration but that will actually send Elijah's second manuscript -- the story of Cogburn, right up to this very minute -- to Cogburn's publisher. Instead, the explosion that should have taken both Cogburn and Barett's lives -- right after the e-mail was to be sent -- goes off early, killing Barett but not Cogburn. Cogburn drives his nearly fatally injured self to a mailbox to crawl across the ground to mail the letter he'd written, confessing everything to his publisher. I liked this movie while I was watching it but must admit that, though it was filmed quite well, the plot is quite contrived and has quite a few unexplained and seemingly trite parts. Shrek the Third (2022) -- "5/10" I "watched and reviewed this movie in 2012" . Shrek (Mike Meyers) and Fiona (Cameron Diaz) are living in Far Far Away with Donkey (Eddie Murphy), Puss in Boots (Antonio Banderas), the Queen (Julie Andrews), and the King (John Cleese). Early on, the King dies, leaving the question of succession open. Shrek is charged by the King with searching for the true heir, Arthur/Artie (Justin Timberlake). Prince Charming (Ruper Everett) is determined to steal the crown, though. This is basically the legend of Camelot with Shrek and fairy-tale characters. There's Merlin (Eric Idle), Lancelot (John Krasinski), as well as a handful of well-known fairy-tale characters like Sleeping Beauty (Cheri Oteri), Captain Hook (Ian McShane), Snow White (Amy Poehler), Rapunzel (Maya Rudolph), Cinderella (Amy Sedaris) and the two ugly stepsisters, Mabel (Regis Philbin) and Doris (Larry King). Shrek's journey to find Arthur ends up at a medieval high school, where they work through all of the high-school movie tropes with Arthur as the nerd and Lancelot as the jock. Meanwhile Charming takes over Far Far Away and most of them lose their shit, with some pretty funny montages of Gingerbread Man (Conrad Vernon) dreaming of himself as the Bionic Man while singing "Good Ship Lollipop", Pinocchio brutalizing the English language to avoid lying, and a lot of the characters losing their shit under even the suggestion of torture. Merlin gets Shrek, Arthur, Donkey, and Puss home, but Puss and Donkey have switched bodies. Charming is putting on a play in which he will finally gets the ending he wants. My review from the time stands; it's not the worst thing in the world but it's very much phoning it in relative to the first and second installments. Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008) -- "4/10" Spielberg is trying to out-Spielberg himself in this one. Harrison Ford is not believable as a hero here. The green-screening is shockingly obvious and bad. The enemies this time are, predictably, Russians. Cate Blanchett's accent is terrible. Ford phones in his awful quips and stilted lines. It's painful because I like Harrison Ford, I like Spielberg, I like Blanchett, I like Shia Labeouf. But this movie is a muddled mess that wastes all of their talents. Oh, wow. I'd forgotten about Jones surviving an atomic blast by hiding in a lead-lined refrigerator that was catapulted kilometers through the air, bouncing across the ground and depositing him, unharmed, on the ground far away. There are, inexplicably, prairie dogs. There is a rocket sled. This is completely incoherent. Halfway through and I still can't tell what sort of aesthetic the movie is going for. It looks like a faked, old Hollywood set, but it's done with CGI, so it just looks like bad CGI rather than old-timey sets. The fight scenes with the Aztec ninjas is just weird. I don't understand why Spielberg keeps lighting Blanchett's face so harshly, unless he's trying to fake that old-timey look. He should just let it be. Oxley (John Hurt) shows up, another brilliant actor underutilized. There is an absurdly long chase scene in the jungle, where Oxley, Jones, Marion (Karen Allen), and Mutt (Shia Labeouf) toss the crystal skull back and forth several times with the Russians. Mutt gets to pick up the Chekhov's gun of his fencing skills to fight Irina Spalko (Cate Blanchett) before they finally all crash into a termite mound. The action is absolutely over-the-top cartoonish and the CGI continues to ruin everything. The dialogue is nearly laughably stilted, "Indy: I have to return it. Everyone: Why you? Indy: Because it told me to." Oh, hooray, now we're on the "Apocaplypto" part, where Spielberg's depiction of the native savages is somehow more racist than Mel Gibson, who treated his subjects decently. Spielberg has Russians slaughter every last one of them. The crew figures out how to get into the temple, triggering an ancient mechanism that moves a ton of stone with gravity. They get to the entrance of what is almost certainly the spaceship. Wait. The what? You don't remember? A spaceship. Like the crystal skulls are aliens who needed the skull of their pilot in order to return home. Does everyone survive? Of course. Except the Russians. None of the Russians survive. Do Marion and Jones get married? You betcha. Are John Hurt and Jim Broadbent clapping their silly hands off? Yup. Does Mutt try to put on Indy's hat? Yup. Can he? No. Indy snags it first, a very clear sign that Ford will keep playing the role until he keels over. Everest (2015) -- "7/10" I last "saw this movie in the theater, in 3D" . The review stands. This time I watched it on my TV, in 2D, in German. Die Another Day (2002) -- "6/10" This is the James Bond movie where Pierce Brosnan in the titular role kicks a tremendous amount of ass in North Korea -- it was 2002, remember when North Korea was the enemy du jour? -- and then gets captured, although he at least seems to have managed to send Colonel Tan-Sun Moon (Will Yun Lee) to his spectacular death over a waterfall. His right-hand man Zao (Rick Yune) escapes, though. DId you catch that bit in the middle, though? James Bond is captured. Those dastardly North Koreans torture him for 14 months before the UK finally agrees to a prisoner exchange. Bond is looked haggard. Bond has long hair. Not only was he tortured for over a year but M (Judy Dench) takes away his double-0 status because she no longer trusts him. I think this is the first film where the U.S. agent is from the NSA rather than the CIA. Her name is Giacinta "Jinx" Johnson (Halle Berry) and she is ridiculous. Berry is fully pneumatic and as voluptuous as her thin frame allows. She looks good in that bikini NGL. Bond starts hunting a diamond magnate named Gustav Graves (Toby Stephens), as well as his luscious assistant Miranda Frost (Rosamund Pike) -- the name is so good, though! Get it! She works for a guy in the diamond business, so ice = frost, and also, the middle half of the movie takes place in an ice palace in Iceland (no less), where it's cold, so ... you get it. I see that you get it -- and ... where was I? Oh yeah, Graves! So, he's kind of a weird dude, kind of looksmaxing before it was even a thing. He and Bond fight with sabers in a museum, breaking a lot of shit. It turns out that Graves is actually Moon, who had never died but had only suffered massively and then suffered even more to get face-reconstruction surgery that, even back in 2002 was so good that he didn't even end up with Mar-El-Lago face. Where there's a Moon, there's a Zao, so Bond has to dispatch the henchman first. Frost reveals to him that she's the one who betrayed him, playing a double (triple?) agent against MI6 and then having the gall to sleep with Bond before she was going to kill him -- maybe she's unaware, but that is literally the plot of half of these movies, but maybe she hadn't seen them -- and then she and Graves escape to Korea, where they reveal their real plan all along: using the giant space laser to destroy the Korean DMZ, assisting North Korea in uniting (taking over) Korea once again. There is a whole thing in a plane that is crashing/not-crashing/disintegrating-in-a-space-laser but guess who dies and guess who survives? Spoiler: Graves/Moon and Frost are spot-cremated while Jinx and Bond end up fucking in a Buddhist Temple. The end. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] These are notes for me to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. The amount of text is not proportional to my enjoyment. I might write less because I didn't get around to it when it was fresh in my mind. I rate the film based on how well it suited me personally for the genre, my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. Links are to "my IMDb ratings" ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5447 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5447 Sun, 28 Dec 2025 22:39:42 +0100 -- "6/10" 2. "The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar: (2017)" <#Sugar> -- "9/10" 3. "Happy S02 (2017)" <#Happy2> -- "7/10" 4. "No Other Land (2024)" <#Other> -- "8/10" 5. "Police Academy 2: Their First Assignment (1985)" <#Police> -- "4/10" 6. "Plane (Absturz im Dschungel) (2023)" <#Plane> -- "4/10" 7. "The Holdovers (2023)" <#Holdovers> -- "9/10" 8. "Bastille Day (The Take) (2016)" <#Take> -- "7/10" 9. "Harry Potter und der Stein der Weisen (2001)" <#Potter> -- "7/10" 10. "Masters of the Universe: Revelation (2021)" <#Masters> -- "5/10" Rocky III: (2017) -- "6/10" Rocky (Sylvester Stallone) is the champion. He's successful. Paulie (Burt Young) feels like he's not a part of it anymore and descends further into his cups. Rocky pulls him out, gets him back on his feet. Rocky has been lulled into a false sense of security by having fought good, but defeatable boxers. He fights Hulk Hogan, who goes apeshit, then Rocky goes apeshit, then they're friends again because it was all for show and for charity. Adrian (Talia Shire) is not amused. Clubber Lang (Mr. T) is coming up. He's a hard, brutal, savage man of the streets. He wants a shot. He has no respect. Rocky gives him a shot and is nearly destroyed, losing by knock-out in the second round. Mick (Burgess Meredith) dies of a heart attack immediately after that fight. Rocky had planned to retire after this fight -- and he does. With Mick dead, Apollo Creed (Carl Weathers) helps Rocky train for a comeback but Rocky has lost "the eye of the tiger." There is a long-ish sequence of Apollo and Rocky training in a shabby club downtown. Rocky has pretty much given up, though. Apollo and Adrian convince him not to give up because he's never given up on anything. Cue a classic Rocky montage, complete with Rocky racing Apollo on the beach. Rocky is ready to take down the loudmouthed, though viciously dangerous Clubber Lang. As always, the boxing is laughably bad. Rocky uses absolutely no defense but neither does Clubber Lang. Mr. T has no idea how to box. Rocky doesn't even seem capable of lifting his arms to a defensive position sometimes. In this movie, they pretend that he's "learned how to box," but in the end he just goes blow for blow. His new "boxing style" is that he still leads with his forehead but now he ducks sometimes. So much head trauma. But the movie is rated PG-13 so he doesn't bleed anymore. Like, not even a little bit. Apollo is making little motions with his hands, as if willing Rocky to do some defense but Rocky might as well have his hands in his pockets. Rocky has a plan, though. He will tire out Clubber Lang by letting him beat the shit out of him. This is literally how Homer Simpson boxes. I'll give you three guesses who wins. The real final is a friendly bout between Apollo and Rocky in Mick's gym. This probably took place the evening following Rocky's victory over Clubber Lang, since he didn't take any damage. Apollo: "Ding, ding." The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar: (2017) -- "9/10" Roald Dahl (Ralph Fiennes) tells the story of how he came to learn the story of Henry Sugar (Benedict Cumberbatch), who'd learned the story of Dr. Chatterjee (Dev Patel), who'd told the story of how he and his colleague Dr. Marshall (Richard Ayode) had made the acquaintance of and learned the story of Imdad Khan (Ben Kingsley), who'd learned how to see without using his eyes from a yogi (Richard Ayode). Sugar also became quite gifted in this regard, learning how to see through objects even faster than Khan, honing his powers in order to be able to see through the backs of playing cards so that he could cheat at gambling. He soon tires of this ignoble pursuit as he'd learned the feat to be able to do something amazing, not to gain filthy lucre. He throws his winnings off of his terrace, showering the people of London with £20 notes. The police are none too amused and firmly suggest that he find a less chaotic avenue for his charitable pursuits. He establishes orphanages and continues to gamble until his next run-in, which is with the mafioso who runs the Las Vegas casinos that his skills are driving to ruin. Henry engages a Hollywood make-up artist (Benedict Cumberbatch) to disguise him, and an accountant to help him build an empire of orphanages. He dies twenty years later a happy man, though he is not surprised because he sees his death by pulmonary embolism coming, as he can see through his own skin. We end up where we came in, with Sugar's accountant engaging Roald Dahl to write Henry Sugar's story. Happy S02 (2017) -- "7/10" "Try to do the things you should Maybe if you're extra good He'll roll lots of Easter eggs your way" Where the first season was all about the Christmas season, the second season is all about Easter and the Easter Bunny. I'm just kidding, this season is just as wild, weird, and full of child-kidnapping as the first one. As Christmas was in the first season, Easter is just the scaffold on which a metric shit-ton of other stuff is hung. Lots of characters return from the first season: * Nick Sax (Christopher Meloni) is driving a cab and trying to stay on the straight and narrow but quickly falls off it, as his former life catches up with and tries to strangle him. * Happy (Patton Oswalt) still accompanies him as his imaginary friend. Happy gets real happy at one point. * Blue (Ritchie Coster) is in prison for a while but he -- and the demon riding him, Orcus -- soon breaks out. With Orcus in the driver's seat, Blue has a lot of power over people. * Sonny Shine (Christopher Fitzgerald) is an absolute sociopath who has climbed to the top of the children's entertainment world and is dead-set on making his name even bigger by "making Easter great again" with an "Eggstacular" * Merry (Lili Mirojnick) is a on-again/off-again cop who ends up teaming up with Nick to get to the bottom of whatever the hell Sonny is up to. * Smoothie (Patrick Fischler) kind of/sort of works for Sonny but he's also got a lot of his own baggage -- like a family-size travel set -- and has his own disgusting plans. * Amanda (Medina Senghore) is Nick's ex-wife and gets sucked into the sordid, sordid goings-on at Sonny's tower of terror. It's gross, nasty alien sex and she ends up compensating for the trauma by overeating Easter candy. She is, after all, eating for two. * Hailey (Bryce Lorenzo) is Amanda and Nick's daughter and is trying to get her mom to snap out of it, while also trying to form some sort of bond with the nearly fatally broken man who is her father. So what happens in this 10-episode season? Smoothie's dressed as an easter-bunny, traveling around with some exploding nuns, all as part of Sonny's plan to make Easter splash across the front page. At one point, Smoothie has abducted a man, flayed him alive, and then stuffed him into a giant Easter Egg that children are encouraged to crack open during Easter festivities. It is wild. Sonny gets the Catholic Church on board by telling them that this will be great marketing and will make people forget about the "other stuff". Fat chance, with Sonny and Smoothie involved, who seem to (also) have an extremely unhealthy obsession with children. Smoothie starts his "seduction" / grooming of Hailey by insinuating himself into her life once Nick utterly fails as a father once again. Nick had ruined a father/daughter day by getting too excited about how good she was at betting on horses. Don't ask. With no hope for reconciliation with his daughter, Nick is a ripe target. He gets blackmailed into trying to harvest a kidney from a live donor but turns the whole thing around on the Hasids who'd hired him, blowing most of them to kingdom come. His next job is to steal a bunch of kompromat video tapes from Sonny's house, where he meets Sonny's sloshed and unutterably horny wife Bebe Debarge (Ann-Margret). Nick and Merry find a lead in the video tapes -- Dayglo Doug (Curtis Armstrong) -- and hunt him down in an old-age home. Merry is also researching the weird slime that came out of one of the Wishees -- the alien beings that have long ago coopted Sonny to their cause -- and nearly gets killed by it when she revives it. Things shift into an even higher gear, with Orcus/Blue's machinations getting him out of prison, Sonny's Easter plans coming closer to fruition, Merry getting closer to nailing Sonny with DayGlo Doug's evidence, Smoothie wrapping Hailey further around his finger, Amanda going even further off the deep end after having been sexually assaulted (raped?) by one or more Wishees, and Nick ingesting just so many hallucinogenic, intoxicating, and quasi-poisonous substances that it's honestly hard to keep track. That is the medium gear, though. Because the denouement includes Sonny getting shot at his own Easter Eggstacular, Amanda giving birth to, and then burning, a giant load of Wishee eggs, Smoothie revealing the etymology of his nickname -- he's all "smooth" down there because, as a child, he'd chopped off his own genitals and put them in a jar in order to win a science fair, which is why he needs to pop on a strap-on to rape Nick (did I stutter?) -- and the demon Orcus is putting his own plans into high gear. Despite all the craziness, the show sticks more or less to what you would expect to happen. Nick dies, then comes back, though he's made a deal with the devil (Orcus) to come back to kill Smoothie, which he does, eventually, on Halloween. Amanda shoots Sonny dead. Happy no longer has a friend, which is kind of sad for him but you gotta grow up sometimes. He's not a virgin anymore (Oh, Lord, I'd almost forgotten about the colorful scene with Bo Peep (Jaimie Kelton), where his horn factored in considerably). Look, this is a weird show but it has great characters, great acting, great dialogue, and it's immensely entertaining. It was based on comics books of the same name. I was sad when it was over. No Other Land (2024) -- "8/10" This was a deeply moving and tragic film that won Best Documentary Feature Film at the 2025 Academy Awards. It was directed by Yuval Abraham, Basel Adra, and Hamdan Ballal. Yuval is Israeli while Basel and Hamdan are Palestinian. After winning the award, Hamdan was assaulted and detained in the West Bank. Basel was prevented from returning to his home after a different attack. Yuval stayed nice and safe in Israel, probably to his chagrin, though. This is a film about the occupation of Gaza, as told by a resistor (Basel) and a young Israeli (Yuval) with whom he's become friends. They are worlds and worlds apart, though. Many of their deep conversations acknowledge this nearly unbridgeable gap. Yuval is aware that he can return to safety, return to comfort, return to luxury at any time, while his friend cannot. Yuval can travel the world, while Basel can barely leave his village. No-one in Basel's wonderful family or neighborhood can have peace or comfort, to say nothing of luxury. The documentary follows life in the West Bank. They are filming the IDF trying to demolish a series of houses to make way for Jewish settlements when the IDF guns down a young man for having gotten in their way, paralyzing him from the neck down. His life is basically over but he's not dead. We see him lying on a dirt floor in a cave to which his family has had to move because, of course, the Israelis got their way, and the Palestinians had to get out of there. His family not only has one stronger, male provider less now, but has exchanged it for the burden of a patient that would be very difficult to care for in the comparative luxury of Israel. Luckily for him, he doesn't last long, and succumbs to his injuries and his family's inability to care for him properly. As you can imagine, this leaves deep scars on the remaining family members, who, despite the daily tragedy of their lives, are still capable of feeling psychic pain, are still capable of further trauma. The IDF seems to feed on this. They are incredible bastards, just horrible, shallow, miserable, evil people. There are a lot of conversations about what can be done, how much patience one must have, and how much hope. This was all filmed before the October 7th, 2023 attack, so things have only gotten worse since then. A coda to the film shows that one of Basel's cousins was killed by the IDF soon after October 7th. The film won a fuckton of awards from every European country but this is mostly performative because all of those countries continue to supply Israel with the weapons that they use to paralyze innocent people. Now that Gaza is completely gone and the West Bank is swiftly following its path, these countries have made another empty gesture of "recognizing Palestine". They will watch Palestine be pushed beneath the waves, while breaking their arms congratulating each other for having given an award to a movie about it. Police Academy 2: Their First Assignment (1985) -- "4/10" There's a new commander Pete Lassard (Howard Hesseman), who's the brother of Commandant Eric Lassard (George Gaynes), the commander from the first movie. He's up against a new Lieutenant Mauser (Art Metrano), They're up against the lawlessness of Zed (Bobcat Goldthwait) and his huge gang. There are a lot of returning cast members: Hooks (Marion Ramsey), Mahoney (Steve Gutenberg), Winslow (Larvell Jones), Tackleberry (David Graf), and Hightower (Bubba Smith). Mahoney's working the beach circuit, on a three-wheeler. Two girls are sunning themselves and sit up quickly because of a giant truck driving by. This would not be otherwise noteworthy, except that they weren't wearing tops. This, too, would no longer be noteworthy -- on my first viewing as a 13-year-old, there was literally no topic in the world more noteworthy -- except that their were girls from 1985. They were utterly unenhanced, with normal-sized breasts. They would be considered flat-chested these days, whereas in the mid-80s, they actually got bit parts in a major Hollywood movie. Tackleberry's new partner is Kirkland (Colleen Camp), a bad-ass woman who's more like him than he thinks. They're having lunch at a hot-dog place when a guy's order is up. He asks for "an extra portion of ketchup" (in German, because I watched it in German) but there are ketchup and mustard bottles on the table. This is the kind of movie that used to hit it big, before plot-hole experts online ruined everything. In another scene, they show the cops having a beer in a bar -- but they've all poured their beers into glasses, with stems. I wasn't drinking then, so I have no idea whether this is accurate -- but this has changed tremendously in the ensuing 40 years. Cop shows and movies now show them drinking straight from the bottles, like real men. Despite Mauser's best efforts, the new recruits eventually band together with ex-captain Lassard to take out Zed's gang in the old zoo. The plot's not that complicated. The end. Plane (Absturz im Dschungel) (2023) -- "4/10" Brody Torrance (Gerard Butler) is the pilot on a nearly empty flight -- there are only 14 passengers. I did not recognize any other actors. They're headed for Tokyo. They have a prisoner Louis Gaspare (Mike Colter) on board. To absolutely no=one's surprise, the flight runs into a bad storm. The German title gave it away -- it means crash in the jungle. They give the crash an absolutely inordinate amount of screen time. Actually, the plane does not crash. It lands in a jungle. This is absolutely the cheapest way to make this kind of movie. They just rent a plane interior and have Gerard Butler chew the scenery. It took twenty minutes for the plane to make an emergency landing. Two people died from the turbulence -- one of them was the guard for the prisoners. The head flight-attendant Bonnie (Daniella Pineda) takes the keys to the handcuffs. Back at the command center, Terry Hampton (Paul Ben-Victor) is in charge. I only mention this because Ben-Victor is actually a pretty well-known actor, having played reasonably prominent roles in "The Wire" , "The Irishman" , and "True Detective" . Finally out of the plane, they can film on a location in California because they've supposedly crashed in the Philippines but the site could be anywhere. It's probably pretty close to Butler's house, just to keep things simple for him. Brody takes off through the jungle to get help. He takes Louis with him. There is a long, drawn-out fight that absolutely did not need to be as long as it was, considering it was mostly Brody rolling around on the floor with his assailant. Louis shows up and shoots the prisoner with weapons that he's picked up somewhere. He's also managed to contact the head of the supposed rescue operation. They continue searching the grounds, as the Filipino rebels get wind of them and come in numbers to investigate the passengers on the tarmac. Brody and Louis are on the way back to the tarmac when they hear gunfire. Now Brody and Louis are trying to rescue the passengers, to absolutely no-one's surprise. It goes surprisingly well. Sadly, Gerard Butler is really following Steven Seagal's career arc, although he's managed to stay fitter. It turns out that Louis is actually working with the mercenaries sent by the airline to rescue them. It is utterly unclear how an airline is running a military operation. There is a ton of gunfire, with the passengers stuck in the middle, as Brody tries to take off again, with the plane seemingly having been made ready to fly with a lot of willpower. Lots of people have been shot, including Brody. Luckily, few people are shooting the plane, although mercenaries have gotten on board and are firing from there. Because there is a rhythm to these things, we are all utterly unsurprised to see that the Filipinos have an RPG. Were they actually braking with the wheels? I didn't see any flaps. It sounded like the plane was braking like a car. It will come as no surprise that they escaped and managed to land with all passengers intact. Brody sits in the plane, after everyone else has left, eyes tearing up. It's almost like Butler is mourning his shattered career. Why does a movie like "Sisu" work so well, when this movie is obvious trash? If you watch both of them, I'm almost certain that you'll agree with me that Sisu is a masterpiece while this film is a low-effort, forgettable, carbon copy of so many other, similar films. It offered no surprises. Gerard Butler did his best but even he was doomed to fall short. I watched it in German. The Holdovers (2023) -- "9/10" Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti) teaches classics at Barton College, a private high school in Massachusetts. He is not popular there. He is intelligent. He is darkly funny. He is exacting. And he loves to teach. His fellow teachers do not like him. His students do not like him. He is at odds with the school's rector, a former student. A lovely scene in class introduces us to most of the characters in the first act. Teddy Kountze: Sir, I don't understand. Paul Hunham: That's glaringly apparent. Teddy Kountze: No, it's... I can't fail this class. Paul Hunham: Oh, don't sell yourself short, Mr. Kountze, I truly believe that you can. Unsurprisingly, he ends up in charge of the "holdovers," a group of students with nowhere to go over the winter break. Most of the school is closed, including the teacher's quarters and the student dormitories. They winter in the infirmary. Mary Lamb (Da'Vine Joy Randolph) cooks for them. She and Hunham are friends. Her boy Calvin had attended the school but had been drafted into the military and had recently been senselessly killed in Vietnam before he'd even turned 20 years old. She drinks. Paul drinks. Paul is entrusted with five students but all but one of them is soon whisked away by one of the richer one's father's helicopter, leaving just Angus Tully (Dominic Sessa). There are a few other characters but they are not that important. Tully convinces Paul to take him out for a hamburger as a local dive bar/restaurant, where they meet the lovely and friendly Miss Lydia Crane (Carrie Preston), who also works at Barton but is forced to moonlight during breaks to make ends meet. She invites them to her Christmas Eve party, which Mary insists that Paul attend, taking Tully out for a bit of excitement. Paul is not a great small-talker, "Paul Hunham: I guess I thought I could make a difference. I mean, I used to think I could prepare them for the world even a little. Provide standards and grounding like Dr. Greene always drilled into us. But, uh, the world doesn't make sense anymore. I mean, it's on fire. The rich don't give a shit. Poor kids are cannon fodder. Integrity is a punch line. Trust is just a name on a bank." As they grow closer, Tully further convinces Hunham to take him to Boston on a field trip, where they visit a museum of ancient art. When Tully wavers, Hunham points out a plate on which a man and a woman are making the beast with one back, with her leaning against a counter and him leaning on her. Tully is delighted though not necessarily lasciviously -- just delighted to have had a light go on, plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose, that light that tells you that the more things change, the more they stay the same, that "and so it goes" (as Vonnegut was so fond of writing). "Paul Hunham: There's nothing new in human experience, Mr. Tully. Each generation thinks it invented debauchery or suffering or rebellion, but man's every impulse and appetite from the disgusting to the sublime is on display right here all around you. So, before you dismiss something as boring or irrelevant, remember, if you truly want to understand the present or yourself, you must begin in the past. You see, history is not simply the study of the past. It is an explanation of the present." Tully learns more of Hunman after they run into an old classmate of his, before whom Hunman nearly prostrates himself with lies. But Tully teases out the reason why Hunman is in a semi-dead-end job -- he'd been expelled for Harvard because of a slanderous accusation by a legacy student. Hunman had "accidentally" run him over with his car. Angus slips away to go visit his father, whom Hunman assumes is in a cemetery. He's alive but still gone -- he's in a mental institution. The visit does not have a satisfying end for anyone, but the boy manages to give his father a gift: a snow globe. In the ensuing semester, Tully's parents appear to demand an explanation: why was Tully allowed to see his father? The snow globe had triggered a violent outburst. They demand that Tully be punished and sent to a military school, since his teachers clearly don't have control over him. Hunman defends him, claiming that he'd insisted the boy visit his father, and is not unexpectedly fired for his trouble. He leaves with a lovely balance of grace and vengeance, driving off in a car full of his worldly possessions, as well as an expensive bottle of cognac he'd stolen from the headmaster. Tully watches him go with a rueful, determined, and satisfied look on his face. Bastille Day (The Take) (2016) -- "7/10" Sean Briar (Idris Elba) is an unruly CIA agent who's just been assigned to Paris. Michael Mason (Richard Madden) is a pickpocket who teams up with a gorgeous young woman in the very first scene, who struts completely naked down stairs in Paris, providing the perfect distraction for him. He is a professional con man. Soon, we see him steal a bag from a woman who turns out to be Zoe, a protestor (Charlotte Le Bon) whose bag contains explosives. When he takes off with the bag, it ends up exploding somewhere completely different than planned -- and he is caught on CCTV. Four people died. He got her wallet and cell phone, though. Sean Briar is put on his tail. There's a pretty cool chase scene over French rooftops. Mason eventually drops down to the street, steals a coat, steals some sunglasses, and thinks he's gotten away from Briar. He steals a motor-scooter but Briar is right there to clothesline him right off of it, pushing a pistol into his open helmet. Let's not quibble about how a CIA agent can just assault people in the streets of Paris, brandishing a pistol without attracting the attention of the police that we'd just been shown were right there in the market. Idris Elba is too cool for quibbling. With the fully nude exhibitionist at the beginning and the chase scene, this is shaping up to be an at-least visually interesting movie. The first mano-a-mano fight scene was also really good! Two guys get the drop on Briar and Mason gets away. The cops are hot on their tail now, with tons of SWAT troops chasing Mason and trying to kill him, no questions asked. Briar snatches him off the street just as he's almost sniped. Anti-police protests erupt across Paris, reacting to the over-the-top, militaristic fan-out of the police. Briar and Mason are now teamed up, tracking a group that seems to be faking police violence and then starting riots against the police to let people avenge themselves for the act that they'd faked. The intrigue continues, as Mason and Briar track down Zoe (Charlotte Le Bon), the hapless "terrorist" who'd had the bag with the bomb in the first place. She was just a dupe, whose lover and revolutionary inspiration turns out to have been in the French secret police. They're all picked up by other members of the secret police. The fistfight in the back of the police van is pretty epic. It really looks like Idris Elba is doing his own stunts -- either he's that good or the film-editing is that good. Briar infiltrates the building to take out the horde of fake cops, showcasing his ass-kicking skills and working his way up the building, taking out everyone right up to the top cop. Top cop flips his wig and calls the crooked right-wing politician for whom he's been organizing this fake revolution and calls it off. He goes down to the bank, among the protestors and then finds Zoe, even though they're all masked the same. It's a face-off between Mason and the crooked police commander. Briar gets the USB stick with the $500M on it, thanks to Mason. Mason is in the wind but he ends up meeting with the crooked politician, who offers him a passport in exchange for the USB stick. It's all a setup, though, with the politician trying to kill Mason but Mason leading him into a trap laid by Briar and the French police. This is a reasonably tight action movie with some good visual language. I watched it in German. Harry Potter und der Stein der Weisen (2001) -- "7/10" We begin with Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) being delivered, as a baby, to his aunt and uncle's home on Privet Drive by Albus Dumbledore (Richard Harris), Professor McGonagall (Maggie Smith), and Hagrid (Robbie Coltrane). A dozen years later, we see Harry speak parseltongue with a snake at the zoo. Soon after, Hogwarts sends an endless number of letters inviting him to attend school there. His aunt and uncle try to avoid it but Hagrid tracks them down and absconds with Harry. Next stop: Diagon Alley. I spied Dewey (Erik Per Sullivan) from Malcolm in the Middle looking at a broom in a shop window. No lines. Harry meets Professor Quirrell (Ian Hart), who stutters his way through a greeting. At Gringot's, we learn that Harry's loaded. A goblin (Warwick Davis) shows him to a room with a giant pile of gold doubloons. Another goblin (Verne Troyer) named Griphook shows up later. Next up is Ollivander's (John Hurt), where he picks out a wand. While he's in the shop, Hagrid shows up with Hedwig as a birthday present. Hagrid tells Harry the story of Voldemort (Richard Bremmer), the evil wizard who'd killed his parents. Afterward, he takes Harry to the train station with a carriage positively loaded with goods. Harry gets a ticket for a train on track 93/4. He needs to run his cart straight into a brick column to get there. There he meets Ron (Rupert Grint). Harry buys the entire cart of candy, keeping it all for themselves. This is why Harry's a brat. He doesn't care that nobody else on the train is going to get any candy. Hermione (Emma Watson) floats in to show off -- oh my God, she's twice as insufferable in German -- and then leaves after having repaired Harry's glasses with a spell. They switch from the train to small boats, floating their way across the lake to the castle/fortress/stronghold of Hogwarts. It's time for the sorting hat. Gryffindor for all of the usual suspects. Slytherin for others. At dinner, they meet Nearly Headless Nick (John Cleese), a ghost that haunts Hogwarts. Harry is introduced to Quidditch and this is pretty much the entire middle part of the movie. He gets a fancy broom. He wins the first match by catching the snitch in his gob. It's time for Christmas break. Hermione is off but Ron is staying on campus with Harry -- Harry's not going "home" and Ron's parents are in Romania, visiting his older brother Charlie. They celebrate Christmas together with some cool presents, among them the cloak of invisibility that his father had owned. Harry searches the library for information about Nicholas Flammel, then sees Snape (Alan Rickman) confront Quirrell but he almost certainly draws the wrong conclusion. He discovers the mirror of Erised, which shows his deepest desire -- Hermione. Nah, just kidding, it's to be with his mom and dad again. Dumbledore appears to tell him not to get lost in the mirror. Hermione returns and they learn that Nicholas Flammel was the only person known to have created the philosopher's stone. The children are caught out at night and given a punishment to go into the woods. Harry and Draco come upon a hooded figure feeding on a dead unicorn. A centaur rescues Harry from the figure, revealing that it was the homunculus of Voldemort. The kids realize that Voldemort has figured out how to get to the philosopher's stone and will soon try. They sneak out again -- with Neville (Matthew Lewis) trying and failing to stop them -- but quickly discover that someone has arrived before them. The dog Fluffy is already sleeping, lulled by a self-playing harp. They get past the dog, even after the harp stops playing, then fall into a giant strangler vine. They escape this with wits and magic -- naturally -- to get into a room full of flying keys. They find the right key and continue to the next room, where a giant wizard's chessboard blocks their way. It's Ron's time to shine, having played far more wizard's chess than he'd studied that semester. Shit gets real, with a ton of exploding pieces and lots of overly theatrical shrinking back by Hermione. Ron sacrifices himself -- on a knight -- in order to get Harry through. They still think Snape is trying to steal the stone. Harry makes it to the final room, where Quirrell is waiting in front of the mirror, trying to figure out how to get the stone. Quirrell forces him to look in the mirror and the stone appears in Harry's pocket. Voldemort reveals himself on the back of Quirrell's head. "Es gibt kein Gut und Böse. Es gibt nur Macht, und jene, die zu schwach sind um danach zu streben." Harry defeats Quirrell with the power of the philosopher's stone, condemning Voldemort once again to an incorporeal existence. Harry wakes in the hospital. Basically, the end. I watched it in German. Masters of the Universe: Revelation (2021) -- "5/10" This two-part, ten-episode series isn't nearly as bad as "Masters of the Universe: Revolution" , which followed it in 2024. It's also not very good. The dialogue and voice-acting are very wooden and the script is at-once utterly predictable and pedantically explained. On the tin, the cast is decent, with man-at-arms Teela (Sarah Michelle Gellar), Evil-Lyn (Lena Headey), Skeletor (Mark Hamill), Duncan (Liam Cunningham), Cringer (Stephen Root), King Randor (Diedrich Bader), Tri-Klops (Henry Rollins), Roboto (Justin Long), Queen Marlena (Alicia Silverstone) just being the ones I recognize. It's perhaps a bit suspicious that both Adam (Chris Wood) and Andra (Tiffany Smith) have this cartoon listed as one of the credits for which they're "known." It's also a bit weird that Andra's character looks pretty much exactly like the actress who gives her voice. That's all I have to say about it. I'm sure it's OK for what it is, but it's not for me. I couldn't make myself finish watching it. I have other fish to fry. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] These are notes for me to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. The amount of text is not proportional to my enjoyment. I might write less because I didn't get around to it when it was fresh in my mind. I rate the film based on how well it suited me personally for the genre, my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. Links are to "my IMDb ratings" ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5446 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5446 Sun, 28 Dec 2025 17:57:50 +0100 -- "7/10" 2. "Boss Level (2020)" <#Boss> -- "7/10" 3. "Better Call Saul S06 (2022)" <#Saul> -- "9/10" 4. "Footloose (1984)" <#Footloose> -- "7/10" 5. "The Creator (2023)" <#Creator> -- "6/10" 6. "Police Academy (1984)" <#Police> -- "6/10" 7. "Papillon (2017)" <#Papillon> -- "9/10" 8. "Divergent (2014)" <#Divergent> -- "5/10" 9. "Severance S02 (2024)" <#Severance> -- "6/10" 10. "Terminator Renaissance (2010)" <#Renaissance> -- "6/10" The Devil Wears Prada (2006) -- "7/10" This is a film that is tediously trying to convince us that Anne Hathaway is a mousy doormat until she learns how to wear expensive clothes and put on expensive makeup. The secret ingredient for attraction is, apparently, pretentiousness. The secret ingredient for enlightenment is, apparently, superciliousness. Hathaway's character Andy is a journalist who is too good for a fashion magazine until she realizes how powerful you can be working for one. Then she learns how to respect endless articles about the right accessories to wear for the season and the right makeup to apply to land wealthy men. She somehow lands a job as the personal assistant to the editor-in-chief of the fictitious magazine Runway, Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep). Miranda runs her empire with an iron grip and a humorless neoliberal ideology, shitting on everyone to make them become their best selves.. She expects them to emerge from the cocoon of abuse in which she envelops them to become an idealized neoliberal imago if they only kowtow hard enough, if they only acknowledge the unquestionable and flawless brilliance of Miranda. The plot is pretty bog-standard actually: Andy is hired by a complete fashion-cultist Emily (Emily Blunt), whose subjugation to Miranda verges on masochism. She lets that shit roll right on downhill onto the obvious apostate Andy. Andy, being smarter than the average bear -- and being much smarter than Emily -- quickly passes Emily on the outside and eventually takes over most of her job, even taking Emily's place at the once-a-year, big fashion-show in Paris. Almost needless to say, Andy's relationship with her twee chef boyfriend Nate (Adrian Grenier) suffers, because she's changed too much, which, like, duh. Miranda's fashion god Nigel Kipling (Stanley Tucci) is not only flamboyantly gay but also stoops to mentor Andy when she needs it most. Miranda ends up screwing Nigel out of a promotion that he'd thought he'd all but had in the bag but he totally forgives her nearly immediately because that's just how the fashion world works and he worships Miranda because they're all in a cult. Andy confronts Miranda for her duplicitousness but Miranda throws her betrayal of Emily right back at her. Cat fight. Just kidding. Andy quits in a huff. Luckily for her, her ex-boyfriend Nate forgives her, they agree to remain friends before he leaves to be a sous-chef in a fancy restaurant in Boston while Andy falls into the exact kind of journalism role she'd been seeking before this whole rigamarole. So, like, happily ever after all around. The story's a bit weak but the actors are very good and the dialogue is often funny, so it gets an extra point despite being tedious propaganda. Boss Level (2020) -- "7/10" Roy Pulver (Frank Grillo) is a ridiculously over-muscled, former member of Delta force (they mention it several times) who's estranged from his ex-wife Jemma Wells (Naomi Watts), who heads a mysterious laboratory run by Colonel Clive Ventor (Mel Gibson). We learn about the others as Roy experiences the exact same day, again and again and again. This movie has a similar premise to Groundhog Day but also leans on "Free Guy" and "Edge of Tomorrow" : Roy is stuck in a violent, video-game-like time-loop. Over the course of many, many flashbacks, we learn that the Colonel had Jemma put him there, using technology that they were developing in the lab. Unfortunately, this is another one of those movies where they saved money -- or perhaps friction between actors unwilling to work with one another -- by filming a long, long scene in which they are each filmed separately, or with the back of the other person's head in the shared scene (which is obviously faked). Considering how the action scenes worked relatively well, there was absolutely no reason to include this 10-15-minute scene, where Gibson chews the scenery, while Watts seems to suffer in silence. It's a terrible scene that adds nothing that couldn't have been added another way. Grillo is a charismatic leading man, though, and it's nice to see him in his own vehicle. He's actually preferable to Ryan Reynolds's smarmy-voiced guy in Free Guy [2]. He's also ripped as fuck. Once Roy figures out that he's in a video game and keeps getting killed -- while retaining all of the memories -- he also figures out that he's being tracked. He lasts the longest when he's underground or in a Faraday cage (like a bar with metal walls). He recruits the help of an NPC at a bar to figure out where his tracking device might be, settling on the great plan of pulling out his teeth until he finds the one with the tiny bug in it. Great. Now he has to repeat pulling that tooth every time he goes through the scenario. But he can also start tracking his hunters. He kills them all, then picks up one of their phones to answer a call from the Colonel's right-hand man Brett (Will Sasso), threatenening to kill him. The first attempt goes poorly. The second attempt goes slightly better -- he manages to blow up a lot of foot soldiers -- but he's still caught out by Brett. Attempt #3, he pretends to be his doppelganger "Roy #2," waltzing right into the building. He eventually gets a bit farther, very much in the style of a video game with boss levels. One of the characters says, after each kill, "I am Guan Yin (Selina Lo) and Guan Yin has done this." He eventually meets the Colonel, who accidentally reveals -- in a painful, self-indulgent soliloquy -- that Roy is stuck in something called an Osiris Spindle, which is the tech that Roy's wife Jemma had been working on, and which the Colonel had no idea is working. Only Roy knows that he's essentially immortal. Roy approaches Dai Feng (Michelle Yeoh) for training in wielding a sword, so that he can finally defeat Guan Yin, kill Brett, and then, finally, the Colonel. Before he dies, the Colonel tells Roy that his son is in danger. Roy arrives on a scene to see his son being carted off on a stretcher, in a body bag. Then, a giant explosion wipes out humanity. After several days of staying in bed and sulking, being killed again and again by the very first contract killer of the day. Soon, though, he's back at it, but, Instead of trying to get the colonel, Roy now just spends the whole day with his son. The day always ends in an explosion that wipes out humanity. He eventually discovers that Jemma was alive for 14 minutes after he awakens in the Osiris Loop, which means, if he can rescue her, she can save the world -- and hopefully release him from the Osiris Loop. That was her plan all along; she asks "How many times did it take?" "Just one." Roy tells Jemma about how much he's learned about his son. I think that they're at least in the same scene but the camerawork is sooooo lazy. OK, so they're holding hands. They were in the same scene together. Roy's going to have to go into the device, possibly sacrificing himself. And the movie ends without telling us! NICE. I would watch this movie again. It was fun. Some of the scenes dragged, especially the ones with Mel Gibson, but it was pretty entertaining. Grillo is charismatic. Better Call Saul S06 (2022) -- "9/10" Man, Vince Gilligan is just so good at this shit. And Bob Odenkirk as Jimmy McGill/Saul Goodman is a tour de force. My favorite scenes are in the mall, at the very end chronologically, but scattered throughout the season. They're in black-and-white and give Gilligan every opportunity to show off his incredible eye for composition, for elevating the mundane, for appreciating the everyday, making it seem amazing, worthy of attention. I can watch Jimmy bake and box a Cinnabon all day long. This final season wraps things up incredibly well, delivering a pretty satisfying ending to the questions and plot lines opened in the first five seasons. The world thinks that the execrable Lalo Salamanca (Tony Dalton) is dead, killed in a raid on his own compound in which Nacho's (Michael Mando) information was instrumental. Nacho is now being hunted by the Salamanca clan, moving from safe house to safe house. Kim Wexler (Rhea Seehorn) and Jimmy McGill/Saul Goodman (Bob Odenkirk) are setting up Howard (Patrick Fabian) with various scams, both to destabilize him, and also to make his friends and colleagues believe him to be unstable, perhaps involved with cocaine and prostitutes. His colleague Clifford Main (Ed Begley Jr.) is at first a hard sell, but the "evidence" accumulates. The subterfuges are increasingly complex and convincing, attacking Howard from all sorts of angles. His conviction that Jimmy is behind everything begins to sound more and more like paranoia, given the mounting and overwhelming evidence (all of which is faked). Hector Salamanca (Mark Margolis) learns that Lalo is still alive and that Gus Fring (Giancarlo Esposito) was instrumental in setting up the hit from which he only narrowly escaped. Nacho feels the noose tightening, and wants to protect his father from collateral damage, so he and Mike Ehrmantraut (Jonathan Banks) concoct a plan where he will go out without torture and where his death might mean something. Mike is set up with his sniper rifle to kill Nacho from afar but he's not needed. Nacho takes care of it himself, committing suicide after having convinced Hector that Gus was not involved in Lalo's assassination attempt. Jimmy's reputation as a regular lawyer was damaged by his having defended Lalo -- but his reputation among criminals is sterling. So, after having been kicked out of his office in the nail salon, he scouts and finds a new location. It's run-down and awful (at first) but the clients are lined up around the corner. Kim learns from Mike that Lalo is alive and looking for them. Gus and Mike have a huge operation underway to find him before he finds them. Lalo closes in, while Kim and Jimmy's scams against Howard spiral to new heights. This culminates in Howard going to Kim and Jimmy's apartment to confront them, only for Lalo to find them at the same time. This ends with Howard dead on the floor. Lalo then tries to blackmail them into doing dirty work for him, like killing Gus. Kim ends up going to do the hit. This goes sideways as Gus is prepared, with Mike intercepting Kim. However, Lalo had only sent Kim as a distraction, in the hopes that she would reveal the entrance to Gus's meth lab. Gus hurries to intercept, with Lalo initially having the upper hand, but Gus using a hidden pistol to finally kill Lalo and remove him from this world. This was a great moment that you really felt like celebrating, as the story had built Lalo up as such a chaotic, nearly unstoppable, immoral force. He's finally extinguished. Mike buries Lalo and Howard under the dirt floor of the meth-lab construction site. The fallout of all of this is that Kim leaves Jimmy and gives up her lawyer's license because, although she thinks Howard deserved his fate, what it did to her was unacceptable damage. Jimmy accepts this but then leans into his Saul Goodman persona. This is more-or-less the end of the pre-Breaking Bad era part of the story. We rejoin Jimmy McGill in 2010, after he's no longer Saul Goodman, after he's become Gene Takavic because he's on the run from Gus and the Salamancas. As well as running a Cinnabon, he also starts scamming again, coming up with an elaborate plan to steal merchandise from a department store. This is a wonderful, wonderful episode -- a true work of art. He perpetrates more scams, fleecing moderately wealthy and overconfident men by dosing them with barbiturates, then entering their homes, stealing stuff and taking their identities where possible. The last target has cancer, which causes Gene's/Saul's/Jimmy's partners to back out but Gene perseveres. Gene gets away but things go awry in other ways, with his remaining partner ramming a cop car, then the partner's mother (an original mark of Gene's) learning who Gene really is when he asks for her help to get her son out of jail. Gene is on the jump again after she calls the cops. Gene has managed to contact Kim but, although she's deeply unsatisfied with her modest and somewhat pathetic life -- they show her go on a deeply unsatisfying date that ended up in bed but so perfunctorily that you couldn't help but feel sorry for everyone involved. When Gene refuses to turn himself in, Kim turns him in by providing Howard's widow with all of the evidence she needs to prove that Jimmy and Kim destroyed his reputation with malicious premeditation. Gene is arrested and is looking at seven years. He pretends to try to implicate Kim but instead gives up literally everything he's ever done: his participation in gaslighting his horrible brother Charles into killing himself, his premeditated plan to ruin the horrible and supercilious Howard's life, his deep involvement with Walter White, the Salamancas, and Gus Fring. Kim goes scott-free forever, while Jimmy gets 86 years in prison. In prison, Jimmy enjoys comfort for his notoriety and for his skills as a lawyer. Kim visits and they share a cigarette, her gratitude for his sacrifice unexpressed but implicit. Footloose (1984) -- "7/10" We begin with feet. Feet dancing. All sorts of pants. All sorts of shoes. The credits flicker over these lower legs. Segue to Rev. Shaw Moore (John Lithgow) preaching as we cycle through a montage of smalltown USA, then focus on the church interior. The reverend is really getting into it, all hellfire and brimstone. His wife Vi (Dianne Wiest) looks on. The reverend's daughter Arial (Lori Singer) briefly meets newcomer Ren (Kevin Bacon) before taking off with her friends Rusty (Sarah Jessica Parker) and others. They barrel down the road, racing Ariel's boyfriend Chuck (Jim Youngs) in his truck. Ariel straddles the vehicles and narrowly avoids being hit my an oncoming Mac truck. She's a tad reckless, to put it generously. Ren drives a yellow VW Beetle and listens to Quiet Riot (Bang Your Head) as he pulls up to school for the first time. He's wearing a tie. He meets Willard (Chris Penn) when he bumps into him. Ren tells him, "I like that hat. They sell men's clothes where you got that?" They are immediate friends. Ren continues to learn about his new environs, as he clashes with Chuck and gets a job at the mill. Barely, because he's an outsider. But he's persistent. At lunch, Ren learns that dancing is illegal in his new town. Next, he's working out on the high bar with Willard, where he learns more about the people in town. Ren is really good at the high bar. Chuck has challenged Ren to a game of "chicken" with tractors. Ren's never driven a tractor before. Chuck starts his ever-present boombox. I'm Holding Out for a Hero by Bonnie Tyler. Ren's shoelace gets stuck on the gas pedal; he wins the game as Chuck bails into the nearby canal, with his tractor following him. After his step-dad blames him for everything that's been going wrong in the town since Ren showed up, Ren takes off to an abandoned factory. Cigarette. Beer bottle. Slamming his frustrated hands on the steering wheel. Throwing his beer bottle. Breaking into dance. He's blowing off steam, just dancing his little heart out. There are gymnastics in this montage. He is accompanied by Never by Mitsuyo Nemoto ("The song is best known for a scene in the film when an angst-ridden Ren McCormack punchdances around an abandoned warehouse.") Arial shows up, trying to stand in front of the train. She's crackers. Just loopy and dangerous. Also, not nearly as hot as she thinks she is. Ren is thrown off of the gymnastics team for having dallied about with Arial. Ren and Willard talk, then Ren comes up with a plan: have a dance in the stupid town anyway. He takes a group of the kids across state lines to show them what they're missing. Hurts So Good by John Cougar Mellencamp, Waiting For a Girl Like You by Foreigner, then Footloose by Kenny Loggins. Willard gets his clock cleaned by a guy who was dancing with his girl Rusty -- because Willard doesn't know how to dance. That's a Chekhov's Gun right there. Ren is almost beaten up by Chuck and his crew for trying to plan a dance. His friend Woody (John Laughlin) steps in and shuts that shit down. He tells Ren that he's going to have to convince the seven-member town council to get his dance approved. Ren swears that, if he has to speak in front of the council, then Willard will have to learn how to dance. Cue another montage. Let's Hear It for the Boy by Denise Williams. Willard is wearing his walkman everywhere, learning how to keep a beat, bopping along behind Ren as they wander the school hallways. The meeting about the dance approaches. Someone from town throws a brick through Ren's sister's window, terrifying them and enraging his step-dad, who tells Ren to stop his crusade. Ren's mom had lost her job that day; step-dad's business is losing customers. The day of the meeting comes. Ren's speech is impassioned, littered with references to Psalms from the Bible brought to him by Arial. It doesn't matter. He loses the vote. His boss Andy (Timothy Scott) tells him that, right next to the mill is the county line. They could have their dance there, close to town, but across the county line. The reverend starts to see the light. He meets with Ren. His partners on the council start burning books, appalling him. He puts a stop to it. I'm Free (Heaven Help the Man) by Kenny Loggins accompanies a montage as the kids set up the barn for their prom. Then, ...they have their prom. The Reverend and Vi are in the field, watching from afar, but not too afar. Andy rides up on them. "Reverend: I'm still not sure whether it's the right thing. Andy: Comes close." In the hall, they're playing Almost Paradise by Eric Carmen, sung by the lead singer of Loverboy and backed up by Ann Wilson of Heart. It's awful. Almost no-one is dancing. Chuck shows up and he and his crew get their asses karate-kicked by Ren and farmer-stomped by Willard. They go back inside and everyone tears it up to the titular theme song. It's back to Let's Hear it for the Boy as the credits roll. The Creator (2023) -- "6/10" Joshua (John David Washington) is an ex-soldier in a world in which, in 2055, an AI had attacked Los Angeles with a nuclear weapon. Although the western world bands together against AI, most of Asia is not convinced that there is a path forward without it. Joshua is coerced with promises that his wife Maya (Gemma Chan) might still be alive. He infiltrates a compound in "New Asia" (yeah, no kidding) to find their "secret weapon". The weapon turns out to be Alphie (Madeleine Yuna Voyles), a child-like robotic AI with the power to control technology. She's kind of like the kid in The Golden Child but, instead of eating lotus blossoms, she makes machines go boop. There is a lot of backstory about how Alphie is actually based on Joshua's unborn child and that his wife actually is alive but in a coma and the daughter of the AI architect par excellence in New Asia and that Joshua will have to make a lot of difficult choices amid a lot of nice-looking action scenes in order to end the war between New Asia and NOMAD and to bring humanity to peace and co-existence with AI robots, I guess. It was all a bit much, and I must admit that my attention wandered a bit. I think you'll excuse me because here's the "summary of the finale" , "Captured again, Taylor is coerced into killing Alphie with an electroshock weapon. However, Andrews later discovers this to be a ruse, allowing the pair to escape. Boarding a lunar shuttle at the Los Angeles Interplanetary Air and Space Port, Alphie forces the spacecraft to dock aboard NOMAD as Andrews orders a large-scale assault on remaining AI bases. Taylor plants explosives; ejects Alphie by escape pod when Andrews activates a robot that prevents him from fleeing; and reunites with a simulant bearing Maya's likeness, activated by Alphie with Maya's memories from the drive that Taylor gave to her as a necklace. They embrace as NOMAD explodes, killing Taylor, destroying Maya, and shutting down the missile guidance system, saving most of the targeted AI bases across New Asia." Holy shit, what? I mean, it more-or-less made sense in the context of the film but there are a lot of moving parts. I might need to watch it again but I probably won't. This movie was not as bad as I'd expected it to be but it also wasn't particularly memorable. It's pretty. It's perhaps also a bit more relevant now than ever. The kid was pretty good. I watched it in German. Police Academy (1984) -- "6/10" I first saw this movie when it was released or at some point in the 80s, since it's rated R and I wouldn't have seen it in the theater if my Mom had anything to say about it. Anyway, I was in my teens. I had to have watched it a couple of times with Dad on the USA network. Let's see how it holds up. The movie starts off showing the terrible jobs with which the soon-to-be academy enrollees are currently pissing away their lives. Tackleberry (David Graf) is s security guard, Mahoney (Steve Gutenberg) is a parking-lot attendant, Larvell Jones (Michael Winslow) was arrested for ... something, Leslie Barbara (Donovan Scott) works in a standalone photomatic booth, and many others. George Martin (Andrew Rubin) shows up in a carful of girls. Karen Thompson (Kim Cattrall) is from a well-off family and shows up in a limo. There's giant Moses Hightower (Bubba Smith) and tiny, quiet Laverne Hooks (Marion Ramsey), who, at some point, gets loud. They all meet their Lt. Thaddeus Harris (G.W. Bailey) and Commandant Eric Lassard (George Gaynes). Mahoney works very hard to get thrown out. The next day, they meet Sgt. Debbie Callahan (Leslie Easterbrook), who's a bad-ass drill instructor with, well, a very fit form and quite outsized breasts. The movie rolls into one madcap antic after another. Mahoney keeps hitting on Karen. There are parties. There are boobs. There are butts. There is the Blue Oyster gay bar. There is a giant bonfire. There are more boobs. Thaddeus ends up flying head-first into a horse's behind. Hightower steals a tiny Honda Civic and gets a driving lesson from Mahoney, passing the driving test the next day with flying colors. One of the more-racist trainees calls Hooks a very racist term, so Hightower flips the dude's car over -- and is thrown out of the program for it. Mahoney is thrown out next for fighting. A riot starts in the city and the academy sends its fresh cadets. The riot is mostly foot-soldiers with clubs, bats, and sticks. Only one guy has guns -- because he plucked them off of too-green recruits. His name in the credits is Main Bad Guy (Doug Lennox). Hightower shows up to save the day. All of the recruits graduate with flying colors because of their amazing performance during the riots. Hightower and Mahoney get an award. This was a popular, successful movie. It was obviously made for a song. It's not a great movie, but it gets an extra star for nostalgia. It was one of the first movies I saw with boobies. The U.S. was a very repressed place. I think we have lost something along the way, though, in that this movie was fun and dumb -- but inexpensive -- and probably a lot of people enjoyed it. I watched it in German. Papillon (2017) -- "9/10" This is a pitch-perfect remake of the original, staying true to the book. It stars Charlie Hunnam as the titular Papillon (Henri Charrière), who is a safecracker but is framed for murder. Despite having a solid alibi, he's convicted and sent to Devil's Island in French Guiana. The boat ride is hellish. Filthy. Papillon defends Louis Dega (Rami Malek), a slight, bookish forger. They become fast friends and partners, with Papillon focusing laser-like on escape from the very beginning. The first breakout attempt comes spontaneously, when Papillon clubs a guard over the head for whipping Dega. It is an unplanned opportunity so his wild run into the jungle results in a relatively quick re-capture. He is sentenced to two extra years for the escape attempt, luckily escaping a death sentence because the guard was not killed. "Lucky" is perhaps not the right word, as his two years are to be served in near-starvation, filthy conditions, in total silence and in solitary confinement. Halfway through, the guards discover that Dega had been arranging extra rations for him. Refusing to give up Dega's involvement, Papillon is reduced to half rations -- which would be about a quarter of what he'd been getting before -- and he nearly starves. He goes a little bit mad. But there is a strong fiber at the core of the man that will neither bow nor break. In fact, after his two years are up, he uses his release from solitary to feign more madness than he actually feels. He reconnects with Dega, allowing only him to see that he's not nearly as unwell as he makes himself out to be. Dega is doing the warden's books, so he is well-placed to both plan and finance another escape attempt. This time, they are with two others -- Maturette (Joel Basman) and Celier (Roland Møller) -- the latter of whom is savage and wants to sacrifice the injured Dega -- he broke his leg jumping off of a wall that everyone else survived just fine -- but Papillon once again serves as his champion, giving Dega the opportunity to kill Celier. Their boat is wrecked in a storm that washes them up on Colombian shores, near a convent where nuns nurse them back to health. The authorities root them out again, killing Maturette in their raid and collecting Papillon and Dega. Dega is sent to Devil's Island, which is completely cut off from everything and doesn't even have any guards on it, because where are you going to go? It's nearly a fate worse than death. Papillon gets five years in solitary confinement, serving all of it. He emerges an old man, bowed, but not broken. He is sent to Devil's Island to serve out the remainder of his sentence. Dega has made his peace with confinement, having made a life for himself on Devil's Island. Papillon has one goal in mind: escape. The cliffs of Devil's Island are high; you can survive the plunge but the swim is far too far, the currents too strong. You need a craft of some sort. He fashions a raft from a bag of coconuts, one of the only foodstuffs brought to the island. He takes a tearful farewell from his lifelong friend Dega, who is neither interested in escaping -- though perhaps a spark awakened for a moment, sustained by Papillon's unfailing fervor for freedom -- nor is he capable of surviving the fall to the ocean -- which soon extinguishes whatever fire Papillon's passion can awaken. Papillon throws his bag of coconuts in the water, watching it bob in the waves and then slowly begin to move away from the island, as hoped and expected. He plunges after it, surviving the fall and clambering aboard the raft. It carries him to eventual safety and freedom. He would write an excellent and gripping book, which my mother recommended to me, and which I read a long, long time ago, back in the 90s. Based on a true story, in case that wasn't obvious. Highly recommended. Divergent (2014) -- "5/10" Tris (Shailene Woodley) lives in a world that combines the dystopia of Hunger Games with the genetic predetermination of belonging to a clan of Harry Potter. Tris, however, is divergent and doesn't show a genetic predisposition to any of the clans specifically -- she could be any one. She chooses the "feroxes", which are a warrior clan full of meatheads who value foolhardiness above every other characteristic. It's like they're all in Starship Troopers but they're completely unaware that it's satire. Her mother Natalie (Ashley Judd) turns out to have been a ferox, but that's only revealed much later and it's supposed to be significant but it is, somehow, not. One of the other ferox candidates is Christina (Zoë Kravitz), who's so tiny that it's inconceivable that she would survive in a warrior clan but YA movies are nothing if not unrealistically inclusive. Peter (Miles Teller) is another candidate who's pretty much a doughy asshole who's completely unconvincing as a macho badass. Caleb (Ansel Elgort) is just as unconvincing. It almost goes without saying that the doughy Woodley also cannot sell herself as a warrior. Her fighting style is bizarre -- although many of the girls fight with their elbows forward, which looks ridiculous -- and she telegraphs every weak blow. She also can't act her way out of a paper bag. Eric (Jai Courtney) is the only really hard-looking dude, even though he never really fights. At least he looks the part. One of these feroxes is Four (Theo James), a character whose name I didn't know was literally the number four because I watched the movie in German and I just thought it was his name. They didn't translate it. The only ostensibly good actor in this movie is Kate Winslet, who plays Jeanine, a leader of some brainy clan that wants to manipulate the feroxes into being their own private army. She is pretty much Neil Patrick Harris's character from Starship Troopers. Tori (Maggie Q) helps Tris deal with her divergence, I recognized Mekhi Phifer in there, as well as Ray Stevenson. The entire middle of the movie is about Tris training to become a ferox. I cannot begin to explain how long and drawn-out this part feels. It feels like about 90 minutes of the movie is about Tris's long, painful road up the ladder, seemingly moving up without showing any real gain in skill. This movie has a couple of moments but it's really incoherent and not very good. It seems to be playing on a sequel, which it got but only because every single one of these types of movies were getting sequels at that time. I watched it in German. Severance S02 (2024) -- "6/10" In season two, we are introduced to a few more dribs and drabs of information about their parent company Lumen and its cult-like origins and continued operation. After having broken out very briefly at the end of season one, the severed crew is eventually back at work. We see both sides of our quartet -- Helly (Britt Lower), Mark (Adam Scott), Dylan (Zach Cherry), and Irving (John Turturro). Their enigmatic/weird/tedious below-sides boss Milchik (Tramell Tillman) is back and wreaking havoc. Burt (Christopher Walken) makes a few token appearances in a mostly non-speaking role, and Harmony Cobel (Patricia Arquette) is back and just as quirky as ever, as she vies for control of the severed floor with Milchik and Helly's "outie". Miss Huang (Sarah Bock) is an enigmatic and chronologically ambiguous Asian -- I use the term as pejoratively as the writers clearly intended; she is severe and no-nonsense and she looks to be about 14 years old -- who works with Milchick. Mark's sister Devon (Jen Tullock) and her weird author-husband Ricken (Michael Chernus) are still in the picture, and Ricken is being pulled deeper into Lumon's web by the mouth of the unseen and unheard Board, represented by Natalie (Sydney Cole Alexander). This season feels perhaps more like "Westworld" than the first one. It's building the world a bit more and I'm not sure it wasn't more interesting when everything was unknown and more mysterious. I have a feeling that their explanation for the severance floor is going to be disappointing but I'll be delighted to be wrong. The explanation is a long, long time coming. This show was definitely not directed by Vince Gilligan. It is largely visually uninteresting and rides shamelessly on the coattails of the first season's success, which was much more captivating. There is a long, long sequence "outside", where it is cold and there are just long sequences of people talking to each other in the cold. Two cameras, one on each face. Nothing moves. It might as well be a Nightline interview. What are they doing with all of the money that these shows cost? Anyway, we learn that Harmony Cobel is the inventor of the severance procedure and technology and that she's being screwed out of her legacy by Helly's company, Lumon. It takes a long time to learn this, I guess because it's pretty important, so you have to reveal it slowly, like watching Charlie unwrap a chocolate bar to see if there's a golden ticket in there. Mark is trying to undo his severing -- reintegrate -- and it's starting to work, though it's not as straightforward as he'd hoped, which is exactly what the lady helping him told him would happen. There is an outdoor team-building exercise, which Mark and Helly think is the perfect opportunity to consummate their love -- in a tent in the freezing cold on a company retreat. The next morning, Irving outs Helly as a mole, causing her to briefly revert to her outie -- calling Milchik by his real name -- but ultimately getting Irving fired. Irving reverts to his outie. He looks up Burt and meets his partner, where they discuss whatever oddities they can remember about the severed floor. There's that weird, weird dark tunnel in all of Irving's paintings. Mark's wife Gemma (Dichen Lachman) is trying to get free, but fails to overcome severance. Her fate is somehow tied up in the final file that they have to process, called Cold Harbor. Is she gonna die when it's finished? Is Mark going to finish it anyway? Mark ends up arguing with his own innie about how to proceed. Outie Mark wants innie Mark to finish the file and then rescue Gemma from Lumon. Innie Mark realizes that it's a suicide mission for him and bails. Some version of Mark is going to have to end up choosing between Gemma and Helly, I guess. Is this going to be the purpose of the show? Is this all that they're going to ever be able to reveal about why Lumon even exists or what it's doing? Like, are we just going to be treated to several seasons riffing on "is it killing a person to reintegrate?" I guess we'll find out in what is almost certainly going to be season 3. This season could have been considerably condensed. I don't understand how we went from the 70s and 80s, where this kind of story would have been a longer short-story or, at most, a novella, and now we're on 20 hours of television and there are more open questions than ever. Like, I welcome that you're making shows and movies about the stuff I grew up on, but stop ruining it and stop dumbing it down. You don't have to wrap it up too quickly, but this season could have been 3 or 4 episodes tops. Terminator Renaissance (2010) -- "6/10" I'd already "seen and reviewed this movie in 2016" . It wasn't any better then in English than now in French. It was good practice, though. The French action-movie channel doesn't include subtitles but I accepted the challenge. It wasn't as hard as I thought it'd be because a ton of the dialogue is on the level of "Il y a une problème," which I can understand even when I'm typing in English. As I'd already noted in 2016, it's a shame that the script wasn't commensurate to the gravitas of the cast: Christian Bale, Sam Worthington, Michael Ironside, Helena Bonham Carter (who shows up bald and beautiful), Bryce Dallas Howard, Anton Yelchin. Common was also there, an actor who possesses the appropriate level of acting talent for the overall quality of the film. I had completely forgotten the gigantic Transformers-style robot with what looked like mantis-shrimp-like claws issuing from its groin. It is unclear why it had those because it had more than enough high-powered rockets anyway. The scene where Christian Bale knocks out a Terminator-motorcycle and then hijacks it was pretty sweet. The original title is Terminator Salvation. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] These are notes for me to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. The amount of text is not proportional to my enjoyment. I might write less because I didn't get around to it when it was fresh in my mind. I rate the film based on how well it suited me personally for the genre, my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. Links are to "my IMDb ratings" [1] Which was fine, but Reynolds has, like, one character now. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5393 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5393 Mon, 26 May 2025 22:54:50 +0200 -- "8/10" 2. "Mission Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One (2023)" <#Impossible> -- "7/10" 3. "Der Morgen Stirbt Nie (Tomorrow Never Dies) (1997)" <#Tomorrow> -- "7/10" 4. "Puss in Boots (2011)" <#Puss> -- "7/10" 5. "Independence Day (1995)" <#ID4> -- "9/10" 6. "The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor (2008)" <#Mummy> -- "6/10" 7. "Happy S01 (2017)" <#Happy> -- "9/10" 8. "Chronicles of Riddick (2004)" <#Riddick> -- "8/10" 9. "Shane (1953)" <#Shane> -- "5/10" 10. "Pitch Black (2000)" <#Pitch> -- "7/10" Doubt (2008) -- "8/10" This movie combines two great things: absolute master-classes in acting by Streep and Hoffman, and a running time of just under 105 minutes. It was long enough to tell the story but didn't overstay its welcome. This is the story of Sister Aloysius Beauvier's (Meryl Streep) crusade against what she considers to be the overly lax, nay louche Father Brendan Flynn (Philip Seymour Hoffman). She is a scold. She is a harpy. She is a shrew. She is without life and without humor. She is relentless. She is certain. And she is neither to be stopped nor tamed. Flynn is close with the boys, taking them under his wing. Sister Beauvier sees only malice and lewdness. She despises what she sees as his coddling of the poor boys. One boy in particular is a black boy named Donald, who is mistreated by the other boys, not only because of his color but also because he is almost certainly gay. Flynn takes Donald under his wing, arousing even more suspicion in Beauvier and also her immediate charge Sister James (Amy Adams). Aloysius meets with Donald's mother (Viola Davis) to chisel at her to turn on Flynn, but she seems much less concerned about that because she ends up confirming that, not only is Donald a black boy but he's also gay. His father beats him mercilessly for it. Flynn is the only man who's shown Donald kindness. She'll stick with Flynn. She isn't given the chance since Aloysius continues on the warpath, threatening Flynn with going public with her accusation even though it would be insubordination and would mean she'd be thrown out of the church. She is an incorrigible gossip and cannot admit any mistake. She manages to force Flynn into requesting a transfer. Aloysius's bluff -- read: lie -- about having contacted one of his previous parishes...it worked. When James expresses shock and crushing disappointment in her superior, Aloysius replies, "In the pursuit of wrongdoing, one steps away from God." This was a great, small movie -- a tight 105 minutes -- with incredible acting and a gripping story. Highly recommended. Mission Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One (2023) -- "7/10" I "watched and reviewed" this just about a year ago. From the first third or so, I have to wonder how I rated this movie an 8 rather than a 7. The all-knowing AI is grating; the introduction to Grace (Hayley Atwell) is done nearly entirely by simply reading lines, and Esai Morales's all-knowing, all-powerful character is just as annoying. Christ Atwell is a bad actress. I'd also forgotten about how stupid it was that AI could crack whatever encryption it wanted to. I do like Tom Cruise in one of his best roles, as well as the liberal use of dutch angles to remind us of which movie we're watching. I also would be remiss if I failed to point out the very fun cinquecento/Fiat 500 chase in Rome. Der Morgen Stirbt Nie (Tomorrow Never Dies) (1997) -- "7/10" The pre-credits scene shows a weapons market, run by Henry Gupta (Ricky Jay). The stupid admiral decides to fire missiles at it but Bond only shows that there are nuclear-tipped missiles on the site afterward. Not that a missile hitting nuclear missiles would "ignite" them, but it's a fun premise and a good way to get James into a fighter jet. Next, we're watching a submarine sink a British ship and making it look like the Chinese did it. Elliot Carver (Jonathan Pryce) created this bit of news and then sends it around the world via his enormous news network. The rather unique-looking Stamper (Götz Otto) is Carver's main henchman. James picks up his mission from M (Judy Dench) and Moneypenny (Samantha Bond) in a wonderfully filmed scene -- a ride through London -- and picks up his toys from Q (Desmond Llewelyn) in an obvious ad placement for Avis and BMW, which is an unfortunate stain on an otherwise entertaining movie. We meet Carver's wife Paris (Teri Hatcher) at a party. We also meet Wai Lin (Michelle Yeoh), who's a Chinese agent posing as a journalist, just as James is posing as a banker (as usual). They don't buy James's ruse for long and Stamper sets his henchmen on him. James escapes, like, of course. Paris bangs and helps James get into a secret lab. She leaves him to return to Carver, who has, in the meantime, discovered her betrayal. Wai Lin is there as well, but they're at odds rather than working together. James uses the fingerprint scanner that he'd gotten from Q to find and steal the tracking computers that Carver had used to fool the British ship into sailing into the wrong waters. Bond and Lin both escape but not together. Paris is quickly made to pay for her betrayal with her life. Thankfully, because Teri Hatcher is a terrible actress. She'd been killed by the equally short-lived Dr. Kaufman (Vincent Schiavelli). After disarming him with the phone-taser that he'd gotten from Q, James kills him with extreme prejudice. Then he uses his super-BMW that he got from Q to escape the other henchmen, "returning" the car to an AVIS office by jumping it from the fifth floor of the parking garage directly into the office window. James lands in a helicopter, meeting Wade (Joe Don Baker) at an airport to show the tracking computers that he'd stolen from Carver. James does a HALO jump with scuba gear into the South China Sea to find the sunken British ship. He drops into the ocean and finds the ship immediately. No muss, no fuss. At the same exact time, Lin is also there, also scuba-diving. What an incredible coincidence. When they get to the surface, Stamper has taken over her junk, so yet another coincidence. There is a long, showy speech by Carver about his plans, with threats of torture by Stamper. James and Lin are handcuffed together but they manage to vanquish everyone and get away, exiting into the street and then absconding with a motorcycle (a BMW, to no-one's surprise). Once again, the CGI-free filming of the action scene is somehow magical and exciting in a way that CGI can never achieve. Lin slips around on a moving motorcycle, dropping obstacles in the way of their pursuers. This is way more Hong Kong action than typical for Bond. Not surprising since they're in China. Or Vietnam? They're up on a roof -- or series of roofs -- with a helicopter with endless ammunition in hot pursuit. It tips forward to use its rotor as a chopping blade but fails to get to Lin and Bond. She flips around again, as Bond navigates narrow alleys. The chopper is back. Bond and Lin drag a clothesline cable through the rotor, jump into a fountain and escape the explosion. Switch to a shower with a pretty hot, young Yeoh. She picks the lock on the handcuff and escapes, jauntily skipping away as only a lifelong martial artist can. I remember how she stops to steal a small jacket and puts it on before disappearing into the crowd. Cue a kick-ass Kung Fu fight with Michelle Yeoh and a bunch of toughs. James is close behind and takes out the last guy for her. They plan their next collective move from her secret base, heading to the location of Carver's stealth ship. Lin and Bond sneak onto it but Lin is captured. Bond wreaks havoc. The British and Chinese have been informed that the war is fake. Bond and Lin clean up, trying to stop the missile launch. Bond kills Carver; Stamper has captured Lin (like, for the third time?) and now it's a battle to the death between Stamper and Bond while Lin drowns. Can Bond save her? I bet he can. Puss in Boots (2011) -- "7/10" Puss in Boots (Antonio Banderas) is a fugitive, hunting for the giant's magic beans. He's not alone, though. Jack (Billy Bob Thornton) and Jill (Amy Sedaris) are a comically murderous couple also looking for them. Kitty Softpaws (Salma Hayek) thwarts Puss in Boots. Humpty Dumpty (Zach Galifianakis) is also involved. There is a lot of backstory with Humpty and Puss having been raised together in an orphanage but then having been estranged and separated. They all head up the beanstalk together to discover that the giant died long ago and that the goose is still shitting out golden eggs. They're everywhere. They're pretty heavy, though. So they decide to steal the goose instead. The Great Terror is the goose's mother, who starts wreaking havoc on the town with the orphanage. Jack, Jill, and Kitty are working for Humpty, though and there's a bunch of intrigue there but even the misguided Humpty sacrifices himself before being saved by the Great Terror, who's not so bad after all once she gets her gosling back. The townspeople are all rich because there are golden eggs everywhere. The orphanage thrives. Puss and Kitty are an item. This was a relatively entertaining movie, although I liked the sequel better. The characters are good, the animation is good, the voices are great, and it just works. There's a great scene that's taken from a Sergio Leone classic, with vultures surrounding Puss. Independence Day (1995) -- "9/10" I last watched this "just last year, in 2024" , but it was on in German and I wanted something I didn't have to pay too much attention to, running in the background while I organized my "pictures from my recent Vienna trip" . I (re-)learned the word Haudegen, which "means" "old warhorse", but can also be used to indicate a "swashbuckler" or anyone who is "audacious, brash, daredevil, madcap, overbold, overconfident, reckless, foolhardy." President Whitmore (Bill Pullman) was describing Russell Casse (Randy Quaid), of course. The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor (2008) -- "6/10" I last "watched and reviewed this in 2013" , after having "first watched it in 2008" . I didn't write too much at the time but it takes place in China. There are giant Yeti that help the good guys. The review stands. I watched it in German this time. Happy S01 (2017) -- "9/10" This show feels a bit like "Constantine" , a bit like "Crank" , and a bit like "Max Payne" . It follows Nick Sax (Christopher Meloni), an ex-cop who seems capable of taking incredible amounts of punishment as well as copious amounts of drugs and alcohol. He is embroiled in dirty dealings with the mob underworld, as represented by Blue Scaramucci (Ritchie Coster) and in which his ex-partner Meri McCarthy (Lili Mirojnick) is also caught up. None of them are tragic figures, as they are all pretty corrupt with gusto. This is a dark, noir-ish, adults-only satire based on the "comic-book series" of the same name. When Sax's estranged daughter Hailey (Bryce Lorenzo) is kidnapped, her imaginary friend Happy (Patton Oswalt) seeks out Sax and eventually convinces him to put a pause on his life of debauchery and violence and help him find Hailey. Her mother and his ex-wife (Medina Senghore) is also looking for her, with her path crossing Meri's as well as, eventually, Sax's. Hailey has been kidnapped by Very Bad Santa (Joseph D. Reitman), who's sorta-kinda working with Blue and his henchmen, like Smoothie (Patrick Fischler). There's also a Scaramucci family involved, most of which members are killed by Sax early in the first season. In particular, Isabella (Debi Mazar) is trying to find her son's missing body using old-world, Italian witchcraft. There are quite a few moving parts, woven together with magic and demons, even though most of the action takes place in what is more-or-less the real world. As noted, Nick seems pretty indestructible, and Very Bad Santa seems to be quite strong, but there is no suggestion that anyone is super-powered. Happy is written and voiced well and his interactions with Nick are great. Nick's just enough of a psychotic, alcoholic, loose cannon that no-one around him really notes that he's begun speaking to an imaginary friend. It's just taken in stride as Nick being Nick. Nick is also preternaturally violent, a veritable force of nature. When he unleashes, he unleashes hard. After finding his daughter swept up in a kidnapping program where Smoothie is indoctrinating the children and preparing them for delivery as life-sized dolls -- in boxes -- for Very Bad Santa, who is somehow embroiled with the almost-certainly psychotically but certainly sociopathically evil Sonny Shine (Christopher Fitzgerald), who is working with demonic outer-space creatures called "wishies" that star on his children's program, Nick pummels Blue nearly to death. Blue survives, though, and is then infected by Isabella's missing son Mikey's zombie, transferring the demon Orcus to Blue in its last breath. Sax almost dies in this fight with Very Bad Santa -- and most people think he is dead -- but we see him survive and rejoin with Happy. An extra point for Christopher Meloni, who really ties this whole show together. He produced this thing and he looks just like the guy on the cover of the comic book. I guess the universe was calling to him. Chronicles of Riddick (2004) -- "8/10" This film quite competently, if not elegantly, introduces us to its own unique universe without too much exposition. There's just a hint of a scene to introduce the Lord Marshal (Colm Feore) of the Necromongers. We meet Riddick (Vin Diesel) as he escapes from a bounty hunter Toombs (Nick Chinlund) and his crew on a winter planet. He dispatches them and steals their ship, heading to the imperial planet to hunt down those who put the price on his head. There, he meets the Imam (Keith David) and Aereon (Judi Dench) before escaping together from the closing fist of the imperial guards. The ships of the Lord Marshal enter the Imam's star system. The chips are fantastic, streaking with starstuff, emblazoned aft with a giant bust of the Lord Marshal, thousands of ships swarming off of the motherships, attacking the planet. Lots of practical effects mixed in this CGI, to keep things much more grounded than they would be in later films. The ground troops are formidable, inexorable. Everyone's costumes are pretty fantastic, as are the sets, with their quasi-imperial and monumental appearance. We meet Vaako (Karl Urban) and his wife (Thandie Newton). The Lord Marshal exhorts all of captured people to become Necromongers, demonstrating that the only alternative is to have your soul ripped from you. Riddick interrupts the festivities to kill the Lord Marshal's top henchman, then is "invited" on board the capital ship. The imperial aesthetic continues, with enormous and mesomorphic statues everywhere, in the halls, on the walls, looming from the ceiling. Everything is done so well, with such attention to detail, building a whole new world, consistent in the design and presentation. The psychics that "interrogate" Riddick are ghostly wisps emanating from vibrating pools of liquid trapped in large, Giger-esque constructions that swivel and slam to the ground around Riddick. Riddick breaks free and the bounty hunters shoot down the giant ship hunting him to get him for themselves. They banter, with Riddick tied up in the back of the ship but, as before, seemingly in charge of the situation. Dame Vakko cajoles Lord Vakko to consider taking the throne for himself. This movie has the same vibe as "The Fifth Element" , where every detail was lovingly created for the film instead of stolen from another film. The non-CGI scenes lend so much more credence and fun to it all. The machinery looks like they made at least some of it for real. For 2004, it's incredibly hard to see where the CGI ends and the practical effects begin. They head to the prison planet Crematoria to rescue Riddick's former partner Jack. Jack is now Kyra (Alexa Davalos); she attacks him and is uninterested in going with him. She has some pretty slick fighting moves. Toombs and the crooked guards argue and fight over the price for Riddick and they all kill each other, except for Toombs. Riddick and the rest of the prisoners go topside, to the control center, taking over the prison. They decide to run the surface, locking up Toombs and leaving him behind. They run ahead of the oncoming sunrise, which brings 700ºC temperatures with it. They're going at top speed. The surface is basically magma most of the time. The world is covered in ash before and after -- and in between, the atmosphere explodes. They make it to the escape location, where the Necromancers are waiting for them. But they get into a firefight with the guards, leaving themselves open in the rear to an attack by Riddick, Kyra, and co. The only quibble I have is that the action scenes are sometimes a bit hurried, leaving them confusing and muddy. They were trying to convey the speed at which these enhanced beings fight. And, all the while, they need to avoid the next sunrise, which comes much too quickly every time. Riddick is knocked out; Kyra is kidnapped. The Purifier (Linus Roache) remains to tell Riddick where they went before committing suicide by sunrise. He tells Riddick that he could escape, and will be hunted no more. That is unlikely to be Riddick's choice. They're on the capital ship. Riddick is there. The aesthetic is well-thought-out: giant statues, arcane machinery with medieval-looking grips, semi-futuristic but still medieval-looking armor. The detectors with blue masks look like human hounds, shells of human beings. They have "data ports" from which what they see and sense can be read, even after they are dead. Riddick battles the Lord Marshal, and is pretty helpless against him, until Kyra throws off her Necromancer brainwashing to stab and wound the Lord Marshal. He kills her for her trouble. Vakko tries to kill the Lord Marshal but Riddick stabs through the Lord Marshal's soul, taking him out for good -- and taking over the Necromancer empire, according to the laws of succession in that empire. This is really just pretty good storytelling, using some well-placed effects and props to tell an interesting visual story. Severance could learn a lot from this. It could also learn a lot from Vince Gilligan, who can make eating a Cinnabon visually interesting. Shane (1953) -- "5/10" Shane (Alan Ladd) appears in the distance, coming over the plains on his horse, approaching a small ranch owned by Van Heflin (Joe Starrett). His son Joey (Brandon De Wilde) had spotted him first. He's there when the local landowner threatens to take Starrett off of his land. Shane backs him up, is invited to dinner, and then helps Starrett get rid of a tree stump. When Shane goes into town for work clothes, he has a run-in with the rancher's men, who call him a "sodbuster" -- a homesteader -- and push him out of the bar and general store. The homesteaders get together to figure out how they can protect themselves from the cattle ranchers, who are grazing their cattle all of the homesteaders' claims. The movie is mostly men. Starrett's wife Marian (Jean Arthur) has no friends and has most of her conversations are with her son. They return to the general store. As the first time, Chris Calloway (Ben Johnson) starts trouble with Shane. There follows a very long and drawn-out barroom brawl, in which Shane and Starrett get the better of a much larger group of men under the command of Rufus Ryker (Emile Meyer). Rufus swears revenge -- with "gunsmoke". He calls Jack Wilson (Jack Palance) for help. The boy is obnoxious and has very fixed ideas about how everyone needs to fight about everything all of the time. He's kind of like a little devil that sits on Shane's shoulder, urging him to do the worst thing at every opportunity. His lines are quite outdated, the script being 70 years old. The movie is incredibly long for the story that it tells. The homesteaders continue to take damage, with Jack Wilson killing one of their own. At the man's funeral, they notice that Ryker had his men burn down a homestead right behind their backs. They pull together to go put out the fire, with a fleeing homesteader returning to his own home instead. The drawn-out but simple plot winds its slow way onward, with Ryker sending men to have Starrett meet him, then Shane getting into a fistfight with Starrett to prevent him from going. It's wild, with all of the horses, dogs, and livestock going nuts as they're knocking each other down and dragging each other out. Shane wins the fight by cold-cocking him with his pistol. Shane keeps the date for him. Everything takes forever in this movie. Shane's ride to the settlement/town takes at least five minutes, if not ten minutes of screen time. The boy chases him the whole way, accompanied by his dog and a rousing orchestra. He finally gets there, decked out in his deerskin shirt and pants. He leans against the bar, and starts "dealing" with Ryker. Jack Palance is good, though. His voice is like gravel sliding over metal plates, sibilant, like a snake's hiss. The skin is spread tight over his skull, his nose a blade, his grin pasted on his face without mirth. He's no match for Shane, though, who takes out not only Jack, but Ryker and another henchman who tried to get the drop on him. The boy warned him of the last one. I mean, good for him, because he looks kind of brain-damaged most of the time. Shane rides off, wounded but clear-eyed and upright in the saddle. The boy can't stop shouting at him to come back. What a weird movie. Pitch Black (2000) -- "7/10" I first "watched and review this in 2012" and then "watched it again in 2017" . Since I'd just watched "Chronicles of Riddick" <#Riddick>, I figured I'd leave it on. My original review was correct in saying that the sequel was way better than this original. This movie is a bit of a cheap sci-fi movie with most of the effects being a blueish light meant to indicate the light of an alien. Riddick is pretty cool and stealthy and strong, so it's not hard to imagine why they made a sequel. They're on a creepy and dangerous planet but the most dangerous thing there is Riddick, who is hunting his former captors. "They" are the Imam (Keith David) -- who would be in the next movie -- pilot Carolyn (Radha Mitchell), Copilot William Johns (Cole Hauser), Jack (Rhiana Griffith) -- also in the next movie -- and a couple of less memorable others. Riddick allows himself to be captured -- something he does twice in the next movie -- but quickly turns the tables on them, as they seek his help in taming the planet. It's got promise in that it's stylishly shot. It's nice to see that the sequel improved on almost everything, keeping the best parts from this original. The harsh sunlight of the three suns and the shadows are well-used. When they ride to loot the ship's batteries, there's a lot of visual goodness -- we see that Riddick and Johns have a detente of sorts, we see that Jack has built himself sunglasses like Riddick's, we see Riddick pop a finger up to indicate that Jack should duck. The eclipse is coming and it brings with it a whole host of monsters that only come out at night. Riddick sees them all, as he has night vision that he got in a dark prison before he escaped it. In the dark, the nasty creatures see less than Riddick but they pounce immediately when they detect motion. Riddick glides out of the shadows, with inventive lighting. Even their campsite is nicely lit, and artistically shot from above, at first. They set up some fiber-optics and a battery to take light with them. They have torches. It is not enough. Their panic ruins their plan. They can't hold together. Ogilvie (Lewis Fitz-Gerald) goes first, heading into the dark, extinguishing his lights -- and all of the others. They get backup torches. He meets hundreds of aliens. They continue for a long-ish while, maybe a bit too long. Riddick rescues the captain and Jack from an attacking monster, killing it with his bare hands. They've lost their fiber-optics; they've lost their light-sticks; they're down to torches: fire. It starts to rain. Riddick laughs, "Wo zum Teufel ist deinen Gott jetzt?" Riddick makes it back to the ship while the others are trying to use photoluminescence to escape a cave. He waits a bit, then closes the loading-bay door and prepares for takeoff. The captain rushes to him, to show that they've also survived. He opens the back loading-bay door again. He tries to convince the captain that she should leave with him, abandoning the Imam and Jack. She attacks him, exactly as he was trying to provoke. They go back to rescue the others; this time, it's Riddick who's left behind, but he can see the creature in the dark better than it can. Now there are two of them. She goes back to rescue him. He's injured but he seems to have killed both. She is seized by a monster and flown away, into the rainy night. "Nicht für mich [sterben]" he shouts after her. Riddick is flying the ship out of there with Jack and the Imam. The monsters are really well-rendered for 2000. Riddick waits until the creatures have surrounded their ship, then takes off: "Wir können nicht losfliegen, ohne Gutenacht zu sagen," and then he fries a ton of the creatures and plows a ton of others out of the way. I watched it in German. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] These are notes for me to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. The amount of text is not proportional to my enjoyment. I might write less because I didn't get around to it when it was fresh in my mind. I rate the film based on how well it suited me personally for the genre, my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. Links are to "my IMDb ratings" ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5362 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5362 Sat, 15 Feb 2025 23:07:43 +0100 The Films of the Edison Labs 2. "6:05" The Films of Louis and Auguste Lumiére 3. "6:57" The Big Swallow (1901) 4. "7:56" Le Voyage Dans La Lune (1902) 5. "9:04" The Great Train Robbery (1903) 6. "10:07" Fantasmagorie (1908) 7. "10:56" Suspense (1913) 8. "11:41" The Birth of a Nation (1915) 9. "13:48" Intolerance (1916) 10. "14:56" J'accuse (1919) [The 1920s] 1. "15:52" The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1920) 2. "16:46" The Phantom Carriage (1921) 3. "17:29" Haxan (1922) 4. "18:07" Sherlock Jr. (1924) 5. "18:51" Greed (1924) 6. "19:33" The Last Laugh (1924) 7. "20:25" Battleship Potemkin (1925) 8. "22:25" A Page of Madness (1926) 9. "23:10" Metropolis (1927) 10. "23:51" Napoleon (1927) 11. "25:02" Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927) 12. "25:43" The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928) 13. "26:57" Un Chien Andalou (1929) 14. "27:22" Man with a Movie Camera (1929) [The 1930s] 1. "28:50" M (1931) 2. "29:35" Freaks (1932) 3. "30:24" The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933) 4. "30:54" Duck Soup (1933) 5. "32:04" L'Atalante (1934) 6. "33:01" Modern Times (1936) 7. "33:36" Snow White and the Seven Dwarves (1937) 8. "35:45" Stagecoach (1939) 9. "36:26" The Rules of the Game (1939) 10. "37:48" Gone with the Wind (1939) [The 1940s] 1. "39:18" The Great Dictator (1940) 2. "39:59" Fantasia (1941) 3. "41:20" Citizen Kane (1941) 4. "43:15" To Be or Not To Be (1942) 5. "44:56" Meshes of the Afternoon (1943) 6. "45:49" Casablanca (1943) 7. "46:56" Double Indemnity (1944) 8. "48:18" Ivan the Terrible (1944) 9. "48:51" Beauty and the Beast (1946) 10. "49:50" Paisan (1946) 11. "50:39" Brief Encounter (1946) 12. "51:25" The Bicycle Thieves (1948) 13. "52:43" Children of the Beehive (1948) 14. "53:15" The Red Shoes (1948) 15. "54:17" The Third Man (1949) [The 1950s] 1. "55:35" Sunset Blvd. (1950) 2. "56:28" Los Olvidados (1950) 3. "57:26" Rashomon (1951) 4. "58:42" Singin' in the Rain (1952) 5. "59:34" Tokyo Story (1953) 6. "1:00:59" Ugetsu (1954) 7. "1:01:35" Rear Window (1954) 8. "1:02:42" The Night of the Hunter (1955) 9. "1:03:42" Ordet (1955) 10. "1:04:17" Pather Panchali (1955) 11. "1:04:57" Seven Samurai (1956) 12. "1:06:25" The Searchers (1956) 13. "1:07:25" A Man Escaped (1957) 14. "1:08:27" The Cranes are Flying (1957) 15. "1:09:08" Touch of Evil (1957) 16. "1:09:51" Vertigo (1958) 17. "1:11:22" The 400 Blows (1959) [The 1960s] 1. "1:12:53" Psycho (1960) 2. "1:13:42" L'Avventura (1961) 3. "1:14:39" Lawrence of Arabia (1962) 4. "1:15:35" La Jetee (1962) 5. "1:16:10" Vivre Sa Vie (1963) 6. "1:17:17" 8 1/2 (1963) 7. "1:18:04" It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World (1963) 8. "1:18:50" The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (1964) 9. "1:19:26" Woman in the Dunes (1965) 10. "1:20:01" Persona (1966) 11. "1:21:08" The Battle of Algiers (1966) 12. "1:21:52" Andrei Rublev (1966) 13. "1:22:42" Playtime (1967) 14. "1:23:18" 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) 15. "1:24:28" Kes (1969) 16. "1:25:23" Once Upon a Time in the West (1969) 17. "1:26:25" The Color of Pomegranates (1969) 18. "1:27:07" Army of Shadows (1969) [The 1970s] 1. "1:28:25" The Conformist (1970) 2. "1:28:53" A Touch of Zen (1971) 3. "1:29:37" The Godfather Part I & II (1972-1974) 4. "1:30:37" Pink Flamingos (1972) 5. "1:31:45" The Spirit of the Beehive (1973) 6. "1:32:39" The Exorcist (1973) 7. "1:33:08" La Maman et la Putain (1973) 8. "1:34:22" Badlands (1973) 9. "1:34:53" The Conversation (1974) 10. "1:35:32" A Woman Under the Influence (1975) 11. "1:36:45" Jeanne Dielman 23 Quai du Commerce 1080 Bruxelle (1975) 12. "1:37:52" Salo or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975) 13. "1:39:05" Nashville (1975) 14. "1:39:40" Jaws (1975) 15. "1:40:47" Barry Lyndon (1975) 16. "1:41:17" Taxi Driver (1976) 17. "1:42:28" Eraserhead (1977) 18. "1:43:37" Stars Wars (1977) 19. "1:44:41" House (1977) 20. "1:45:09" Alien (1979) 21. "1:46:22" Apocalypse Now (1979) 22. "1:47:32" Stalker (1979) [The 1980s] 1. "1:48:43" Raging Bull (1980) 2. "1:49:33" The Shining (1980) 3. "1:50:27" Pixote (1980) 4. "1:51:10" Koyaanisqatsi (1982) 5. "1:52:08" Videodrome (1983) 6. "1:52:32" Ran (1985) 7. "1:53:27" Come and See (1985) 8. "1:54:23" Tenshi no Tamago (1985) 9. "1:55:23" A Short Film About Killing (1988) 10. "1:56:20" A City of Sadness (1989) 11. "1:57:24" The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover (1989) 12. "1:58:31" Tetsuo: The Iron Man (1989) 13. "1:59:42" Do the Right Thing (1989) [The 1990s] 1. "2:00:54" Goodfellas (1990) 2. "2:01:48" Close-Up (1990) 3. "2:02:49" A Brighter Summer Day (1991) 4. "2:03:51" Man Bites Dog (1992) 5. "2:04:42" Hardboiled (1992) 6. "2:05:43" Satantango (1994) 7. "2:07:12" Pulp Fiction (1994) 8. "2:08:28" Clerks (1994) 9. "2:09:34" The Lion King (1994) 10. "2:10:21" La Haine (1995) 11. "2:11:25" Cure (1997) 12. "2:12:00" Festen (1998) 13. "2:12:54" Beau Travail (1998) 14. "2:13:27" Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai (1999) 15. "2:14:22" The Matrix (1999) 16. "2:15:10" American Movie (1999) ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5373 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5373 Sat, 15 Feb 2025 13:39:14 +0100 -- "9/10" 2. "Ultraman S01 (2024)" <#Ultraman> -- "5/10" 3. "Man on the Inside (2024)" <#Inside> -- "7/10" 4. "Borg vs. McEnroe (2017)" <#Borg> -- "8/10" 5. "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984)" <#Temple> -- "8/10" 6. "The Dark Knight Rises (2012)" <#Batman> -- "7/10" 7. "Luther: The Fallen Sun (2023)" <#Luther> -- "7/10" 8. "The Tomorrow War (2021)" <#Tomorrow> -- "4/10" 9. "Goldeneye (1995)" <#Goldeneye> -- "8/10" 10. "Raiders of the Lost Ark (Black and White) (1981)" <#Raiders> -- "9/10" Gandhi (1982) -- "9/10" The first scene shows us the end. It introduces us to Gandhi's assassin, following him until he meets Gandhi, adding himself to the history books. This is a nice technique because, if you're observant, you'll notice the assassin's stern, gimlet-eyed visage a few times throughout the rest of the film. Now that we know the end, the film reaches back much earlier, with Gandhi (Ben Kingsley) being thrown off of a train for traveling first-class in South Africa. He adamantly espouses his philosophy that one must resist racism in all forms and at all times. He is beaten by the police when he burns his and others' identity cards. He does not stop. The pain does not stop him. There is a scene that exemplifies his adherence to his principles. At this point, you would be forgiven for thinking that his behavior is driven less by an adherence to principle and more by stubbornness coupled with a nearly complete disregard for his personal safety, but it's more subtle than that. It's more that he prioritizes his personal comfort, pain, safety, and even life below the goal of making things better for the downtrodden, for the unjustly disadvantaged. His overwhelming sense of justice necessitates that he come into conflict with power and those who wield it. In this scene, we see him walking with a priest, Charlie (Ian Charleson), Gandhi: Doesn't the New Testament say, "If your enemy strikes you on the right cheek, offer him the left"? Charlie: I think perhaps the phrase was used metaphorically . . . I don't think our Lord meant – Gandhi: I'm not so certain. I have thought about it a great deal. I suspect he meant you must show courage – be willing to take a blow – several blows – to show you will not strike back – nor will you be turned aside And when you do that, it calls upon something in human nature – something that makes his hate for you diminish and his respect increase. I think Christ grasped that and I – I have seen it work. Next, he meets a journalist Walker (Martin Sheen) on his ashram. Walker has been sent to find out what Gandhi is up to there. In another significant scene, we see Gandhi arguing with his wife Kasturba/Ba (Rohini Hattangadi) about whether she must also take her turn cleaning the latrines -- something she considers to be beneath her, as work for untouchables. But Gandhi is fighting for a world without caste, without racism -- a world of equals. When he almost throws her out for choosing not to do it, they say, Gandhi: What is the matter with me . . . ? Kasturba: You are human – only human. And it is even harder for those of us who do not even want to be as good as you do. Later, he delivers a powerful speech at a meeting where he is gathering support. He draws the distinction between being willing to die but not willing to kill. Passive resistance. Gandhi: I praise such courage. I need such courage – because in this cause, I too am prepared to die . . . But, my friend, there is no cause for which I am prepared to kill. I have asked you here tonight because despite all their troops and police, I think there is a way to defeat this law. Whatever they do to us, we will attack no one, kill no one . . . But we will not give our fingerprints – not one of us. They will imprison us, they will fine us. They will seize our possessions. But they cannot take away our self-respect if we do not give it to them. I am asking you to fight! To fight against their anger – not to provoke it! We will not strike a blow – but we will receive them. And through our pain we will make them see their injustice ... and it will hurt, as all fighting hurts! But we cannot lose. We cannot. Because they may torture my body, may break my bones, even kill me ... they will then have my dead body – not my obedience. Later, as they put their plan into action, the business owners are perplexed that no-one is working. Civilian Boss: These men are contracted laborers. They belong in the mines. Gandhi: You have put their comrades in jail. When you free them, they will go back to work. Civilian Boss: I've warned you. Gandhi: We have warned each other. 🎤 💧 Damn, that is hardcore. Just bad-ass, streets-level hard. A little further on, Gandhi laments his fellow countryman's subservience not only to British rule over their bodies but over their souls. "I try to live like an Indian, as you see...it is stupid of course, because in our country it is the British who decide how an Indian lives – what he may buy, what he may sell. And from their luxury in the midst of our terrible poverty they instruct us on what is justice and what is sedition. So it is only natural that our best young minds assume an air of Eastern dignity, while greedily assimilating every Western weakness as quickly as they can acquire it." Now, Gandhi is back in India and he's been arrested. Charlie visits him in prison, but they are forced to part ways, as Gandhi will stay in India, while Charlie is going to a posting in Fiji. Gandhi goes on trial. He refuses to bow. He refuses to admit guilt. He refuses to pay bail. He is allowed to go free. This whole scene demonstrated his famous saying, "First they ignore you. Then they laugh at you. Then they fight you. Then you win." After he is freed, a cadre of young, Cambridge-trained men sent by Nehru (Roshan Seth) show up to help him document the abuses. They are all -- including Gandhi -- lawyers. They will all live amongst the people. The British don't know what to do with them, lamenting that "we [British] are too damned liberal." The white man's burden is heavy, so heavy. Gandhi, Nehru, and others call for a general strike -- no Indian is to work with the British Empire. Gandhi is, once again, arrested. People are protesting all over Bombay, but especially at Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar, Punjab. The British soldiers line up along one side of the square, weapons raised, and fire into a crowd of civilians absolutely indiscriminately, chambering one round after another in their bolt-action rifles. People drop like flies. All routes of escape are blocked. Thousands fall. 1560, to be exact. After it is over, days later, Gandhi and Nehru arrive, surveying the scene of the slaughter, in silence. At a huge rally, Gandhi calls on people to burn every piece of cloth that they own that was made in England. An Admiral's daughter arrives, taking the moniker Mirabehn (Geraldine James) and pledging her fealty to Gandhi. The police beat civilians and are, in turn, beaten by a huge crowd that torched the police station. The people are out of control; Gandhi wants to call it off because an "eye for an eye leads to the whole world going blind." He is very strict about non-violence. When told that the people won't stop, he responds, "I will ask. And I will fast as penance for my part in arousing such emotions – and I will not stop until they stop. [...] If I die, perhaps they will stop." He begins his fast; it goes on for days and days. He is starving himself, drinking only a bit of lemon water and needing to be turned in his bed by Mirabehn to keep him from getting bedsores. He is deathly weak. It works, though. The revolution is stilled, and he is able to eat again, and able to walk a bit. Soon thereafter -- and long before he's healed -- a soldier appears to arrest him for sedition -- even though his actions had stopped a revolution. "If there is one protest – one riot – a disgrace of any kind, I will fast again." He is made to stand in court for his crimes. "I will save the Court's time, M'Lord, by stating under oath that to this day I believe non-co-operation with evil is a duty. And that British rule of India is evil." The judge is forced by law to sentence him to six years in prison. He seems to do so reluctantly. The film picks up years later. Ba and Gandhi are reenacting their wedding ceremony as Walker and fellow reporter Collins (Richard Griffiths) look on. They are there to find out what he will do next. Gandhi does not disappoint He thanks Walker for his inspiration [2] -- Gandhi will walk 240 miles to the ocean and make salt, a symbolic breaking of the law prohibiting personal production of minerals and a commemoration of the anniversary of Jallianwala Bagh, the slaughter that took 1500+ lives. "Gandhi: The function of a civil resister is to provoke response. And we will continue to provoke until they respond, or they change the law. They are not in control – we are. That is the strength of civil resistance." They reach the shore and many, many people produce salt. The British decide to arrest anyone but Gandhi, arresting 90K to 100K people with no end in sight. The police beat the people but no-one resists with violence. The desperate British determine to arrest Gandhi, despite their best-laid plans to avoid doing so. He really is in charge. With Gandhi in prison, his followers once again march on the prison, forcing the soldiers to beat row after silent row of them to the ground, offering no resistance. It's gut-wrenching to watch, but the rows of men keep coming, and the soldiers keep beating them down. "Walker: [calling his report in to his newspaper] both Hindu and Muslim together. [...] Whatever moral ascendance the West held, was lost today. India is free for she has taken all that steel and cruelty can give, and she has neither cringed nor retreated. [3]" It is enough. It is too much, even for the British Empire. Gandhi is called to the British Raj to be invited to London for peace talks. He comes home from his much-feted trip to London empty-handed, though he remains confident that the British are desperate, that he is still in the driver's seat. Gandhi and his wife are back in prison for having tried to give a speech about Indian independence. Margaret Bourke-White (Candice Bergen) of Life Magazine shows up to visit him, arriving with her driver, an unnamed lieutenant played by John Ratzenberger (Cliff Claven from Cheers). She photographs Gandhi while he's making his own homespun clothes. "Gandhi: What you cannot do is accept injustice. From Hitler – or anyone. You must make the injustice visible – be prepared to die like a soldier to do so." In the next scene, a visibly aged Gandhi sits by his wife's side as she lies abed. She has had a coronary thrombosis and is dying. He tells her he will go for his walk, but she grips his hand to stop him. Instead, he sits with her. Much later, a doctor comes in and discovers that she has died. Gandhi has remained in the waning afternoon light, still clutching her cooling hand, tears standing out in his eyes. With the British slowly coming around to the idea of British independence, the powerful of India move in to take over, to partition the country into Muslim and Hindu pieces. "Gandhi: What do you want me not to do? Not to meet with Mr. Jinnah? I am a Muslim! And a Hindu, and a Christian and a Jew – and so are all of you. When you wave those flags and shout, you send fear into the hearts of your brothers." His nationalist opponents do not bend, though. He was able to bring the British empire to its knees but is now powerless against his own countrymen, who speak for the people. They tell him that he can have an independent Pakistan and an independent India or that he can have civil war. [4] At the border, as Hindus march one way and Muslims the other, they fight and "no-one can count the dead." Gandhi is bowed but not beaten. The others discuss the horrible situation but Gandhi declares that there is "nothing he can give." He walks away, slowly and somewhat weakly, but also steadily and confidently. He heads to Calcutta. Things are very, very bad there, with much rioting in the streets. Gandhi declares another fast, unto death if the fighting does not stop. Mirabehn says that "his pulse is very irregular; his kidneys aren't functioning." He will not stop his fast until they all -- Hindu, Muslim, everyone -- can convince him that the fighting will stop and that it will not start again. People listen. No-one wants Gandhi to die -- so they must stop killing each other. An entire country stops fighting to prevent Gandhi from starving himself to death. The film really makes you believe that this is how it happened. "Maulana, my friend, could I have some orange juice . . . then you and I will take a piece of bread." Later, Gandhi is once again with Bourke-White. She is taking pictures while he is preparing to leave for Pakistan, to show that there is nothing to fear from our Muslim brothers. "Gandhi: I'm simply going to prove to Muslims there, and Hindus here, that the only devils in the world are those running around in our own hearts – and that's where all our battles ought to be fought. "Bourke-White: And what kind of a warrior have you been in that warfare? "Gandhi: Not a very good one. That's why I have so much tolerance for the other scoundrels of the world." Outside, he hasn't gone very far before we realize that we have returned, after 31/2 hours, to the first scene, and to the cold, gimlet eyes of the Hindu nationalist who murders Gandhi in cold blood. "Gandhi: There have been tyrants and murderers – and for a time they can seem invincible. But in the end they always fall. Think of it – always" This is quite an incredible film, with a cast of thousands. It is so easy to forget how difficult it is to make a movie this believable and realistic, something that happens much less often these days. Ben Kingsley masterfully portrayed the power of Gandhi's personality and the overwhelming force of his conviction. He proved to us how that conviction could have moved a continent of a billion people to resist the British, but peacefully, no matter how violent the response. He laid his entire life on the line for his country, for his people. They knew. Ultraman S01 (2024) -- "5/10" The Japanese have always seemed just as comfortable making anime as they are making live-action series and movies. This one follows all of the cinematic tropes of a TV show -- framing, shot choice, etc. -- but it's a cartoon. It almost feels rotoscoped, the animation and detail are so good. The show starts off with what is completely normal drama, introducing us to the story of Ultraman, as depicted at his museum, built after he'd returned to the stars. The museum is just for show, though; below lies a mission-control center. Two of the original members of the crew of a space mission meet up there: one worked there and the other has revealed that he has super-strength -- and that his son does too. We learn that he was Ultraman back in the day but that a new Ultraman is back and wreaking havoc. Ten years pass. Ultraman's son Shinjiro is in school. He's a teenager. He does a Matrix/Spider-man-style leap from one building to another. Shinjiro becomes Ultraman and has a few encounters with a few minor enemies but it's overall not very interesting. There's a side plot with aliens on planet Earth that's pretty much like the plot of MIB but it's also a bit half-hearted. Side note: it's pretty cool how, even in a cartoon, everyone wears house slippers. As noted above, the animation is really well-done and very realistic, with an extraordinary attention to detail for even the most mundane actions, like walking across a room. Unfortunately, the story is really, really weak and kind of boring. There are long, repeated scenes of Shinjiro becoming Ultraman that was pretty cool the first time but that grows pretty old by the umpteenth time that they've recycled the footage. Not only was there one Ultraman, who was apparently an alien, another who was his father (or was he the alien one?) but there's now Shinjiro and another dude who's just dressing up as Ultraman too. Despite these quirks, the plot is bog-standard and kind of boring, with a pop star who's super-famous but also just kind of hangs out in alleyways near Shinjiro's school, and with a gang of bullies who beat up people, etc. etc.. I stopped watching even before the end of season one. Man on the Inside (2024) -- "7/10" Charles Nieuwendyk (Ted Danson) is a widower who'd lost his wife to dementia a year ago. He lives a very structured life, alone but productive. He's an engineer and a former teacher. His daughter Emily (Mary Elizabeth Ellis) would like him to finally heal from his loss, but she's not a tremendous help as she doesn't have her own family under any real semblance of control. I think it's meant to be funny but her three boys are terrifyingly useless. She extracts a promise from Charles to do something with himself. He answers a job ad from private detective Julie (Lilah Richcreek Estrada) to investigate the theft of an expensive necklace. Charles is quickly welcomed into the bosom of the overwhelmingly friendly staff and residents. Didi (Stephanie Beatriz, Rosa from Brooklyn Nine Nine) runs the place. There are a bunch of cute interactions and others that are just standard fare for this type of show. Charles very much enjoys his role as spy -- and Julie only grudgingly accepts that he's doing an OK job. Charles eventually cracks the case by discovering that no-one was robbing anyone. The necklace and many other small things had been taken by Gladys, a resident who was falling deeper and deeper into the grip of dementia. Charles deduced this because his wife had been the same way just before she'd died. The show was quite upbeat and only occasionally bittersweet. Ted Danson is a gem. It wouldn't have worked at all without him. Borg vs. McEnroe (2017) -- "8/10" This film tells the tale of the first match-up at Wimbledon between Björn Borg (Sverrir Gudnason) and John McEnroe (Shia LaBeouf) in 1980. We learn about how both of the young men grew up, with almost more emphasis on Borg's upbringing than McEnroe's. Borg was a hotheaded youth who learned to control himself to a nearly robotic degree -- at least in public. He was nearly pathological about his health and seemed to be suppressing near-panic attacks quite regularly. On the court, though, he was ice. They mentioned a lot, though, that once he starts losing, he keeps losing. He doesn't have the mental wherewithal to pull himself back. McEnroe was also a hotheaded youth...but he stayed that way. He was raised to be the best in everything, including scholastics, which quite surprised me. They show his father pushing him to do math problems in his head. I hadn't known that about him. Whereas in Borg's case, it was his coach that drove him very hard, in McEnroe's case, it was both of his parents, with his father stepping in as coach. The movie told the story well, in an unhurried but not boring pace. The final match was indeed quite exciting, with a back-and-forth where McEnroe takes an early, easy lead of 6--1 for the first set, then drops the next two to Borg. McEnroe is keeping himself under control much better and receives words of encouragement from Borg during a change of side, "It's all right. "It's a great match. "Just play your tennis." McEnroe fends off seven match points from Borg to win the tie-break in the fourth set. They battle to a 6--6 tie in the fifth set. In the fifth set, there is no tie-break. They play games until one of them has a two-game lead. Borg triumphs relatively quickly with 8--6 to win his record-setting fifth Wimbledon in a row. McEnroe gets a standing ovation for the incredible match and for having displayed more sportsmanship. He had won over the Brits, which he only kind-of cared about, but it was something, at least. Borg and McEnroe met at the airport, with the three-years-younger McEnroe obviously and still a bit star-struck. Titles tell us that McEnroe would defeat him in the 1981 Wimbledon final, which was Borg's last tennis match. He retired at 26 years old. He was best man at McEnroe's wedding. They are friends to this day. I really like Shia LaBeouf and was quite impressed with Sverrir Gudnason as well. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom (1984) -- "8/10" Like "Raiders of the Lost Ark" <#Raiders> (reviewed below), I know all of the beats of this film by heart. I have seen this movie more times than I can remember -- at least half-a-dozen times over the years; the first time in a movie theater. Indiana Jones (Harrison Ford) is in Shanghai, trading a precious Chinese relic to Lao Che (Roy Chiao) for a giant diamond. He is cheated and poisoned and chaos ensues as he tries to get the antidote. Nightclub singer Willie Scott (Kate Capshaw) picks it up while searching for the diamond that had also been scattered onto the floor. Indy grabs her and they plummet out of a through stained-glass window from the fourth-floor, dropping through three awnings, and into Short Round's (Ke Huy Quan) waiting car. They speed to the airport, where Weber (Dan Akroyd) [5] gets them onto a freight flight, which they don't notice is owned by Lao Che. The pilots abandon the plane, Indy, Willie, and Short Round drop on an inflatable raft into the snow, into a river, over a waterfall/cliff, and they wash up near an Indian village, where they are taken in by the Shaman (D.R. Nanayakkara). There, they learn that Pankot palace has once again been occupied by a Majaraja (Raj Singh). They are welcomed there by Chattar Lal (Roshan Seth) [6]. They are welcomed to dinner. Live eels. Eyeball soup. Giant bugs. Monkey brains. This is wildly unfair to Indian food. Next up is a bit of sexual tension, innuendo, and back-and-forth between Willie and Indy, then the Mughal assassin in Indy's room, the ceiling fan, the breeze rustling the flowers, the busty statue in Willie's room leading to a tunnel that "follows in Shiva's footsteps,", then the bugs on the floor -- "It feel like I step on fortune cookies" -- the millions of bugs on the floor, on the walls, everywhere. Then there's the room with the spikes on the slowly descending ceiling. Willie reaching into the scorpion-filled hole to release the fulcrum, Indy, Willie, and Short-Round running through the room, with Willie bumping the switch, and Indy barely snatching his fallen fedora from under the once-again closing door. Next up is "Kali Ma; Shakti de" ("Mother Kali, give me power"). High priest Mola Ram (Amrish Puri) is hosting a Thuggee ceremony, sacrificing victims to Kali. He magics the first victim's myogenically beating heart from his chest, holding it high for his supplicants. Into the campfire toast-holder with him and into the magma fires. The Shankara stones are lit. After the ceremony, Indy heads in to "rescue" the stones but is distracted by the cries of young prisoners, and is eventually caught, as are Short-round and Willie. They are reunited in a cage, manacled. They learn that they will be made to drink the blood of Kali and will thus be enslaved. Mola explains to Indy that they are searching for the remaining two Shankara stones in the mines. After a bit of uprising and subduing, Indy and Short-round are tortured and indy is enslaved with black magic. The Thuggees have decided to sacrifice Willie in the campfire-toaster cage. Short-round escapes, and then burns Indy to wake him from his black sleep. They do battle with Mola Ram's thugs while Willie yo-yos toward the magma. Indy and Short-round eventually get Willie out. Shankara stones pocketed, Indy is ready to rescue everyone else. Back into the mines they go, releasing all of the children. Indiana is in a knock-down, drag-out fight with a giant Thuggee. The still-magicked Maharaja pokes Indy's voodoo doll, but Short-round takes him out. Indy is free to go mano-a-mano with his opponent, eventually driving him into the rock-crusher. Short-round releases the Maharaja with fire. Time for the mine-cart ride! The Thuggees give chase. "Take the left tunnel!" They don't, of course, but everything works out anyway, of course. Mola Ram floods the tunnels. Our heroic trio escapes up a side tunnel, then are trapped on a cliff wall while the water disintegrates the walls around them. Willie and Short-round are up on a rope bridge. "Strong bridge! Look! Strong bridge!" Indy is being chased by many Thuggees while Willie and Short-round end up in Mola Ram's clutches. "Hang on lady, we going for a ride." Indy chops the rope bridge. There's a bit of a tussle. Two of the three stones are lost. The alligators feast on Mola Ram. They return to the village with all of its children in tow, as well as the Shankara stone. The end. The Dark Knight Rises (2012) -- "7/10" I "reviewed this film in 2012" and don't have too much to add to the original. It's a good-looking film with fun effects. Selena Kyle/Catwoman is better than I'd remembered her. The rest of the cast is loaded up, too: Christian Bale, Tom Hardy, Gary Oldman, Matthew Modine, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Tom Hardy, Michael Caine, Marion Cotillard, Morgan Freeman, Anne Hathaway, Aidan Gillen, Brett Cullen. I watched it in German this time. Luther: The Fallen Sun (2023) -- "7/10" Luther (Idris Elba) is back [7] in a feature-length movie starring his idiosyncratic now-former detective. His former boss Martin (Dermot Crowley) has been forced out. Instead of Martin and Luther, the office is now headed by an underwhelmingly acted Odette Raine (Cynthia Erivo), who chews the scenery more than a bit but, to be fair to the actress, isn't given a lot to work with in the script. Martin has been brought back on temporarily because he understands Luther best, which is what the Odette needs when Luther goes underground and is on the run from persecution for crimes he kind-of committed or didn't commit or definitely committed but for which he had good reasons. It doesn't really matter what Luther's done because (A) he's played by Idris Elba, which gives him a pass because he's just so suave and cool and (B) what the criminals he's pursuing have done is infinitely worse, every time, and without question. David Robey (Andy Serkis) is a sadist, and a performative one, at that. He likes to know that people are watching. That drives his kink. That is his affliction. He sets up a site where other sadists can watch him perform. Their kink is that they like to watch people be harmed. They, too, are sadists. At one point, Robey says that the world has judged them for loving violence, but the world decides which kind of violence is acceptable, carving out exceptions for itself, but excluding Robey and his ilk, forcing them underground and onto the darknet. Look, Robey, you're singing my song -- the world loves to define violence so that it describes what its enemies do but not what it does -- but...no. Robey, you are blackmailing, torturing, and killing people. While society does a ton of stuff that's honestly equally as bad -- stuff which is just kind of even accepted sometimes -- the solution isn't to make more horrible things acceptable. The solution is to stop society from doing horrible things too. You're arguing for going in the wrong direction, just in order to be able to scratch your own itch. I suppose you can ignore the politics of this but, if you were to engage, then you could see it as a twisted formulation of the argument a pedophile would make about their own affliction. The world very clearly leverages the sexuality of the young where it suits it, then draws what a pedophile might consider to be an arbitrary line to exclude their kink. This is a mischaracterization of the reasoning behind anti-pedophilia laws, though. The laws against pedophilia seek to protect people who are incapable of giving consent. The law must draw a line somewhere. What the law -- and the court of public opinion -- doesn't do is to acknowledge that most people who are breaking this law anyway are operating under a compunction, one that ends up being, for them, overwhelming. If that compunction happens to drive them in the direction of harming others, then society has to do something, either rehabilitating them, if possible, or removing them from society, if not. No-one really wants to hear it because they'd rather just judge people with compunctions they do not share but pedophiles are sick people who need help, not just punishment. If they transgress before they can get help, then they've harmed victims. Our society will punish them, and rightly so, according to the rules on which we've agreed. But if ever there were a candidate for rehabilitative punishment and treatment, it would be a pedophile. The opposite is usually the case, even in societies that consider themselves to be moral and forward-looking. While pornography created of actual children is obviously harmful to those children (assuming it gets out), a more forward-looking society would consider where the harm is of AI-generated child pornography when balanced against the potentially ameliorative effect for those suffering from the affliction. We don't want them doing it at all but the solution of having them scratch their horrible itch with fake porn might be more acceptable than throwing them into prison for the rest of their lives or killing them. It's hard to imagine society changing its puritan stance here, because the only victims are people who no-one likes, which is always going to be an uphill battle. Luckily, society has shown an ability to change, even to benefit groups that have historically received a ton of puritan opprobrium, as evidenced by the vastly improved attitude to homosexuality, which was considered to be just as bad -- or stupidly equivalent to -- pedophilia. Was there a pragmatic case against homosexuality? A society otherwise able to provide members to replenish itself doesn't have one, no. Everyone has the right to be who and what they want to be but, if too many people are homosexual, that civilization will die out unless it can figure out how to procreate without biological procreation or using only in-vitro. It's understandable that people looking at the low replacement numbers and shrinking populations within single-mindedly growth-based economies would worry. It is still wrong to persecute people based on their sexual preference but it's not completely unhinged and unrelated. Anyway, pedophiles have potential victims. If those victims remained potential, then they deserve treatment not punishment. Pedophiles who never victimize anyone are suffering heroes, suppressing their inborn drives for the sake of society and for the sake of morality. If you don't believe that, then you must believe that pedophiles are choosing to be pedophiles, which is a weird stance to take. Does that mean that you think homosexuals and heterosexuals also choose to be one or the other? Anyway, Robey doesn't have a leg to stand on with his argument because his kink is to kill people and to have other people watch. This is very obviously a crime, with victims. He should be treated for his mental illness but certainly not allowed to run free. His fairy tale of himself and his ilk as some sort of alternative -- or even superior -- cohort in society is just the story he tells himself where he's the star. Robey induces a bunch of people to commit suicide to avoid the shame of him exposing their deep, dark secrets. He even turns a few people working at Odette's branch office. When he kidnaps Odette's daughter Anya, he also manages to turn Odette. After she agrees to deliver Luther to Robey, Luther convinces her that they should instead team up and hunt the guy down. He's always had this power to convince; he had it in the television show on which this film is based. Together, they track Robey to Norway (I think?), where he's got a murder-dungeon-house in the vast, frozen wastes. He has a ton of cameras set up, ringing a torture chamber. It is utterly unclear why you would need one camera per participant. I suppose it's so that the movie can indicate that people are signing off by the little red lights on the cameras flickering out. It is also utterly unclear how any supplies get delivered there with any regularity or why anyone would even have built that house there in the first place -- this part feels much more contrived, like a comic-book movie. Robey forces Odette to stab Luther in the stomach in order to save her daughter, displaying the act for all of his followers/paying viewers. After a bit more torture, Luther, Odette, and Anya manage to escape in a none-too-believable-or-well-acted manner (Anya and Odette are barely serviceable here), with Luther hunting Robey into the frozen wastes. Despite Luther's two stab wounds in the stomach, he's still feisty enough to tussle with Robey in his Land Rover, which they end up flipping into a frozen lake. Robey dies under the ice, while Luther somehow survives long enough to be rescued by divers. His reward for solving this case is that he gets to go to work for MI5 rather than going to jail. The movie was serviceable, though it wouldn't have been very watchable without Idris Elba. The Tomorrow War (2021) -- "4/10" What kind of movie is this? It is a formulaic one, utterly concerned with any of the human questions raised by its premise. Early in the film, our hero, former Marine -- because of course he is -- Dan Forester (Chris Pratt) learns the exact date and time of his death. He spends zero seconds dwelling on it. This whole movie is a mess, with its premise of being a fight in the future completely and utterly muddied by an incoherent execution, a complete lack of dedication to the premise, dropping it when it would be inconvenient. For example, where do all of the F18 Hornets in the future come from? Oh, because those are the planes that the Pentagon gives any movie willing to take its money in exchange for propaganda. Why are they still available in a future where humanity has been nearly defeated? Why do so many of the battles in the future look just like the U.S. military wants you to imagine urban combat, as has already been thoroughly envisioned in a dozen Call of Duty games? Naturally, our heroes' rifles have endless bullets, except for when they don't for dramatic purpose. There are long, incoherent battle scenes with the white, unstoppable, and evil aliens taking any number of bullets without any obvious armor. That's the action, though. Just wait for the dialogue to start. "Das ist kein Souvenir. Es ist ein Erinnerungsstück." Wow. So deep. Wait. Souvenir means Erinnerung in French. FFS. I suppose I would be remiss if I didn't mention how cool they probably think it is that Dan gets to fight side-by-side with his daughter Colonel Muri Forester (Yvonne Strahovski). She sets up the plot for him when he gets to the future: the aliens are hungry aliens with no culture and no interests other than feeding. Somehow, these things just popped up without any warning and were just everywhere. Like a virus, I guess? The movie was made in 2021, perhaps this is COVID meets "Starship Troopers" , except that this movie is taking itself 100% seriously, unlike Starship Troopers, which was Paul Verhoeven taking the piss and which was awesome. This is definitely a COVID-age movie: you rarely, if ever, see the two "stars" in the same scene together. There are no long shots, no panning shots, nothing of visual interest. This is either COVID or laziness but it makes for an incredibly blandly shot and visually unexciting film. Everything's a close-up shot with bland lighting, almost always one person at a time. As Muri's explaining that they need to do thousands of tests of toxins for the alien, she also says that they'll be done by morning, so no stress. OK? Now we're treated to a science montage while they shoot the shit about Super Bowl winners in the past that he could bet on when he gets back to his own time. There is, of course, no tension that any of this technology will work. Of course it will all work. They roped J.K. Simmons in to play a ropey-muscled, bushy-bearded, iconoclast who is James's father. He was in the movie for about five minutes to look cool and act cool. Sam Richardson provided some comic relief but I didn't even notice when he died, or disappeared. Everyone else is pretty forgettable. When even the stars are shot like shit. My God, they barely spent any money on the sets or the script. This is about as bad as a "GI Joe" movie or that "Battleship" thing. Oh, wow. I thought it was over when Muri died saving her dad in the future. I was wrong. There's a whole second act. Dan makes it back with the toxin but the time-transport is broken. How do they get to the monsters? They do a lot of thinking and discover that the aliens probably crash-landed in Russia somewhere. So they get J.K. Simmons to fly his C-130 transport there, along with a bunch of high-tech snowmobiles. The U.S. government doesn't want to help. They don't even bother asking Russia. No time or plot tension is wasted on them getting in to Russia. They're just there. Voila! They soon find the spacecraft. Voila! They blow up a huge part of the field with precision-placed explosives that they (A) had with them and (B) placed in seconds -- so fast that you didn't even see it. Voila. Next, they're in the spacecraft, killing "white spikes". They discover that those nasty aliens weren't the ones that had been flying the craft -- because how could they be? The white spikes are pure breeding/murder machines, as required by the plot. The merry crew doesn't waste a single second worrying whether they would be the ones that triggered the white spikes' escape. Oops. Some of them escape. Also, no-one spends a second thinking about the other race of aliens of what might really be going on because this movie is about shooting shit not thinking about shit. Their mission is so poorly designed and executed that the monsters are soon all over the place and they're immediately left to figure out who will have to sacrifice themselves in a manual detonation. Once again, they are able to plant an ungodly amount of explosives. Charlie (Sam Richardson) and James (J.K. Simmons) have also miraculously escaped. They hunt the escaped queen -- of course the queen escaped -- and then fight her mano-a-mano, with James trying to sacrifice himself for Dan, but Dan just going ham on the queen with a single toothy spike, punching and kicking her into submission. This is ridiculous. "James: Hast du sie gerade 'Stirb" angeschrien? Dan: Ja. James: Hat funktioniert. Warum hast du's nicht früher gesagt?" Woof. That is bad. James is, of course, alive. The movie had to save James so that he could meet the granddaughter that they'd just saved. Was this movie ever going to end any other way? I watched it in German. Goldeneye (1995) -- "8/10" James Bond (Pierce Brosnan) jumps off of the Contra dam on the Lago di Vogorno in the Valle Verzasca [8], but this dam is, for the purposes of the film, in the former Soviet Union. He infiltrates the facility, meeting up with Alec Trevelyan (Sean Bean), who is nearly immediately killed [9]. Bond blows up the facility. Nine years later, Bond's racing along a mountain pass in what looks for all the world like the Swiss Alps, but was actually in Gréolières, in the south of France. He ends up racing Xenia Onatopp (Famke Janssen) and banging his psych evaluator Caroline (Serena Gordon) before meeting Onatopp at a casino. He does his baccarat thing and follows her, finding out a bit more about her and who she's working for. What was her character description in the script? Was it something like, "thin, crazed Russian whore with a wide, crazy grin, crazy eyes, and legs that won't quit, whose eyelids flutter in quasi-orgasmic glee whenever she thinks about or experiences physical violence?" On a naval ship for the demonstration of a new helicopter. Onatopp steals it and flies it to a radar facility in Russia, where we meet Boris (Alan Cumming) and breathtakingly gorgeous Natalya Simyonova (Izabella Scorupco). They are the sole survivors of an attack by Colonel Ouromov (Gottfried John) and Onatopp, who enable the Goldeneye space-based, EMP/beam weapon and take out the facility itself. He's faking an attack by supposed Siberian separatists in order to put the country on a war footing. Bond is called in by M (Judy Dench), who kinda/sorta hates him. He's escorted there, as always, by Moneypenny (Samantha Bond), with whom he has lascivious banter, and soon meets Q (Desmond Llewelyn), from whom he picks up the supplies he'll need for the mission. Back in Moscow, Bond meets up with Jack Wade (Joe Don Baker) of the CIA. Wade calls James "Jimmy." They meet up with Valentin Zukovsky (Robbie Coltrane) to get his help on a mission to learn more. Bond is at a Russian bathhouse, where Onatopp pays him a visit. They have a knock-down, drag-out fight/fuck where James gets the upper hand relatively quickly...and Onatopp is quite pissed. He forces her to take him to her boss, Janos. OMG Alec is back! Sean Bean didn't die immediately! Alec is Janos. He doesn't kill James, tranquilizing him instead. James gets away, of course, and teams up with Natalya, who's working with the Russian defense minister. It's a bit of a mess but we're pretty soon involved in a chase in Moscow, where Oroumov has kidnapped Natalya and James is chasing them in a Russian tank. Oroumov keeps taking sips from his flask -- he's Russian and a drunk, get it? -- but they use the same one-second scene twice. Oroumov and Natalya join Janos and Onatopp on a heavily armored train that looks like Snowpiercer. As Janos is trying to rape Natalya, James has parked his tank on the tracks in front of the super-train. It derails. James gets the drop on them. They turn things around quickly. Now James and Natalya are trapped in the train, which is rigged to blow in three minutes. She sends a spike program to find Boris. He's in Cuba James gets them out, just in time, of course. They kiss. Bond FTW. 🙌🏼 James and Natalya are now in Cuba. They are a couple now. Wade lands a Cessna in front of their car as it soars along a dirt road. They switch vehicles, with James tossing Wade the keys, which Wade catches in his straw hat. OK, that was very cool and casual. After another night of passionate lovemaking, they're up in the air again in the morning. Pay attention now because we're in the finale of a James Bond movie. They are shot down, with James rescuing an unconscious and possibly dead Natalya. He wakes to find Onatopp rappelling out of a helicopter to python-squeeze him to death with her thighs. Natalya is back in tip-top form but fails to neutralize Onatopp, who knocks her out in a thrice. James shoots down the helicopter, which squeezes Onatopp with her own rappelling cord as it crashes. They sneak into the satellite facility -- Arecibo in Puerto Rico -- where James rigs a bomb that I'm almost never actually goes off. Natalya fucks up the satellite, encrypting everything. Boris swears he can fix it before everything blows up in 12 minutes. Some stuff already blows up because of Boris's nervous clicking of Bond's stolen bomb-pen. Janos hunts James on the dish; James hunts Janos on the dish. Boris cracks Natalya's encryption and starts the targeting sequence again. Bond has jammed the gears, though, so it craps out due to mechanical reasons -- which are beyond Boris's digital reach. Janos and Bond get into a Bourne-style fight that's pretty well-choreographed actually. Janos drops James down a ladder and James looks for all the world like Luke Skywalker hanging off of the bottom of Cloud City on Bespin. Even more so when they've dropped onto the final disc. Janos falls to his death. Goldeneye explodes in the upper atmosphere, torn to pieces by the degraded orbit into which Natalya had placed it. Natalya rescues James with a stolen helicopter -- after which literlly everything in the facility blows up, or collapses, or both. Boris is left in the middle of it. He shouts "I am invincible" one last time before being flash-frozen by liquid Nitrogen. Wade shows up with the U.S. Marines to ship Natalya and Bond off to Guantánamo. Raiders of the Lost Ark (Black and White) (1981) -- "9/10" I've seen this movie more times than I can remember. This time, I watched "an experiment by Steven Soderbergh in black-and-white from 2014" that is paired with a "Trent Reznor / Atticus Ross soundtrack from the Social Network" . The music is great but it doesn't match the film at all. The point of the exercise was to demonstrate how great the blocking in the film was. The soundtrack is completely non-diagetic so that we can concentrate on how well the film tells its story visually, without dialogue and without audio hinting or emotional suggestions. This movie is one of the all-time greats, just a rollicking adventure film starring Harrison Ford as the snake-fearing, indomitable Dr. Indiana Jones, the amazing Karen Allen as a feisty former lover and comic foil Marion, and introducing John Rhys-Davies as Sallah. If you've never seen it, I can name all of the scenes. We start in the Amazonian jungle, where Jones is trying to "recover" an idol from a temple. Darts, sack of dirt, giant boulder, all of the by-now-well-known beats. He's caught just outside by his nemesis, French archeologist Belloq (Paul Freeman), who takes the idol. Next, Indy's at his university with his department head Marcus Brody (Denholm Elliott), where they accept a contract to try to find the lost Ark of the Covenant before the Nazis can. Jones travels to a bar in Nepal, run by Marion (Karen Allen). There's a by-now classic scene of her winning a shot-drinking contest and shaking it off as if it were nothing. She has an amulet that they need to locate the ark. Arnold Toht (Ronald Lacey) shows up to try to steal it. Fire. Gunplay. Burned hand. Next, Indy and Marion travel to Cairo, meeting Sallah (John Rhys-Davies). They meet the a little monkey, who would become Indy's consolation when Marion is kidnapped by Belloq and Toht; Indy thinks she's dead. The monkey doesn't last long, eating a poisoned date, which a sharp-eyed Sallah notes in time to save Indy from the same fate. Sallah then helps Indy get onto the dig site, where Indy figures out where to dig using the amulet and a sunbeam. The Nazis are digging in the wrong place. Indy's delighted to find Marion at the camp, alive. More drinking, but less successfully. Belloq discovers that Indy is there and digging at a better site. Sallah and Indy get the Ark out but are caught soon after. Into the hole go Marion and Indy. Snakes, giant statues, and crumbling walls. They escape and attack the German convoy carrying the Ark. Lots of fighting on and in trucks and they've captured it. They put the Ark on a steamer, leaving Sallah ashore, and leaving Marion and Indy to rekindle old flames. It doesn't last long, though, as a German U-Boat finds their steamer and takes the Ark and Marion back, not finding Indy. Never fear! Indy has swum across open ocean from the steamer to the U-Boat and fights his way onboard. It takes him to a secret Nazi base, which he infiltrates. He is unstoppable! He recaptures the Ark but Belloq correctly perceives his threat to destroy it as a bluff and recaptures him, along with Marion. Phew. End game: the Nazis have tied Indy and Marion to a pole, while the Nazis themselves get all gussied up for the grand opening of the Ark. It opens, releasing ghosts that melt off the face of anyone foolish enough to look at them. Indy and Marion have their eyes slammed shut and only cautiously pry them open again when they hear the top of the Ark -- which had been blown high into the air on a tornado of Godly might -- slam back down to seal off the ancient power. Final scene: the Ark disappears into a giant warehouse, filled with identical-looking crates. This would become the symbol of hiding something in the depths of a vast bureaucracy. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] These are notes for me to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. The amount of text is not proportional to my enjoyment. I might write less because I didn't get around to it when it was fresh in my mind. I rate the film based on how well it suited me personally for the genre, my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. Links are to "my IMDb ratings" [1] I'm not sure whether there's a word for being inspired to do what a person's name describes but "euonyms" are names that are apt or fitting in general, whereas "aptronyms" are names that describe their owner's occupation. [1] This does not seem to be working in the next century, unfortunately. The Palestinians are too small, they are too easy to ignore, I guess. Or, perhaps, the American Empire is far more difficult to shame than the British Empire was. It's very difficult to conceive that that horrific, evil empire was somehow morally superior to anything, but it is difficult to deny that this may be the reality. Or perhaps I know the American story too well, and the British story not well enough. [1] This Hindu nationalism and this Muslim nationalism has never abated since, not in the nearly 80 years since partition. It is the Hindu nationalism that is very much ascendant right now. It is nearly certain that Gandhi would not recognize the country that his homeland has become. He would be ashamed and deeply disappointed. [1] I had never noticed until this video that Akroyd had cameoed in this film. [1] He played Nehru in "Gandhi" <#Gandhi>, reviewed above. [1] We'd "watched the original series in 2017" . [1] You can still go to this dam today and reenact his leap into the unknown on a bungie cord. [1] It's Sean Bean; what else did you expect? He dies in everything he's in. Check out the "Sean Bean Death Scene Compilation 1986-2016" , which features 24 deaths. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5322 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5322 Mon, 03 Feb 2025 09:12:50 +0100 -- 7/10 2. "Ford v Ferrari (2019)" <#Ferrari> -- "9/10" 3. "Chocolat (2016)" <#Chocolat> -- "7/10" 4. "The Shining (1980)" <#Shining> -- "9/10" 5. "The Instigators (2024)" <#Instigators> -- "5/10" 6. "The Last Samurai (2003)" <#Samurai> -- "9/10" 7. "Silo S02 (2024)" <#Silo> -- "7/10" 8. "Bad Sisters S02 (2024)" <#Sisters> -- "5/10" 9. "Max Payne (2008)" <#Payne> -- "6/10" 10. "Pain & Gain (2013)" <#Pain> -- "7/10" Catholic Cowgirl (2024) -- 7/10 Katherine is a clean comic, very pretty but not leaning on her looks for her laughs. Her act is pretty sophisticated, well-constructed, and well-delivered. There's a decent amount of subtlety where there are two jokes, one for those who are listening a bit harder and one for those who aren't. Both are funny, but the former is more rewarding. The kind of audience she's used to playing has definitely influenced her act, but I think positively. She's got a solid set even if it ended a bit abruptly. [media] Ford v Ferrari (2019) -- "9/10" I first "watched and reviewed" this movie when it came out in theaters. This must be the at least the third, if not fourth time I've watched it. I love almost every scene in this movie. Nothin' but bangers. Ken Miles (Christian Bale) and Carroll Shelby (Matt Damon) are iconic characters. Chocolat (2016) -- "7/10" This is the story of Rafael Padilla (Omar Sy), the son of a Cuban slave. When we meet him, he's playing a savage -- a cannibal -- in le Cirque Delvaux, somewhere in the French countryside. Théodore Delvaux (Frédéric Pierrot) is a bastard, but he's a sweetheart compared to his awful wife Yvonne (Noémie Lvovsky). The clown in the circus George Foottit (James Thiérrée) is warned by Delvaux that he is not funny enough: the few people who show up are bored with his act. Foottit approaches Padilla to play the patsy opposite him. He trains him a bit, convincing him that he could be good. They become a team: Foottit and Chocolat. The dynamic is clear, though: Chocolat is in the subordinate role, not very much different from playing the cannibal. Their fame grows, with Delvaux growing fat off of them, until Joseph Oller (Olivier Gourmet) shows up to tempt them to the Nouveau Cirque in Paris itself. They agree nearly immediately. They are a huge hit in Paris, with Chocolat becoming the first really famous black clown in France. They are earning good money and it shows. Chocolat spends freely, developing a gambling habit. Yvonne is so angry that they left "her" circus that she tells the police that Raphael is in France illegally. He is thrown in prison, where he meets the Haitian Victor (Alex Descas), who teaches him the way of revolution. Even after they've both been released -- with Foottit rescuing Raphael -- they meet up to discuss Chocolat's position in society. But Chocolat is a lover, not a fighter. He is a gourmand, a gambler, and a lover. He continues to do his routine with Foottit but his real mistreatment at the hands of the racist police returns to him. Foottit's domination, even though staged, begins to feel too real for Chocolat. Chocolat meets schoolteacher and nurse Marie (Clotilde Hesme) and he and Foottit begin to put on shows for her sick children at the hospital where she works. The next stage of their career beckons but the poster for it makes Chocolat look like an ape. He demands that they change it and storms out. Foottit saw nothing wrong with it. Chocolat strikes back during a show, proving to Foottit that the people will laugh if the black man is the dominator -- then he quits. Chocolat goes to Marie, with whom he's now romantically involved, simultaneously descending into even more extravagant and unpayable gambling debts, especially after having discovered laudanum. He is trying to drown his anger at the racist society of Paris. Marie offers him way out by offering him a job a real actor, in a Shakespeare play with her friend's theater company. He wants to act in Othello, a challenging role but also appropriate. He would be the first black man in Paris to play role of Shakespeare's moorish character. At first, things move slowly and poorly, with Chocolat quite distracted. He gets his wheels under him, but is disappointed to see "aka Chocolat" behind his name (Raffael Padilla) on the poster above the theater. He is quite successful on opening night, with several people cheering -- but just as many hurling racist epithets at him, driving him from the stage and into the back alley of the theater -- where the casino's henchmen await, taking their pound of flesh from his hand. We rejoin him, years later. A much older Chocolat is, once again, working at a country circus. Marie has stayed by his side. He is no longer a clown; he simply cleans up the tent after the performance, hindered severely by his advanced consumption. With not long to live, Marie calls for Foottit to come and bid adieu to his erstwhile partner. They part tearfully, with Chocolat drifting off over the Jordan. I watched it in Italian with Italian subtitles. The original is in French, but only Italian and English subtitles were available. I could have tried in French, but I prefer to have French subtitles. So, Italian it was. Practice, practice, practice. The Shining (1980) -- "9/10" Jack Torrance interviews for and obtains a job as caretaker of the Overlook Hotel, deep in the mountains of Colorado. He will be taking care of it through the winter season, during which it will be closed. His wife Wendy (Shelly Duvall) and son Danny (Danny Lloyd) will join him in solitude. The Torrance family drives up to the Outlook Hotel in a Volkswagen Beetle. When asked by the proprietor, Jack points to a giant pile of luggage that he claims to have brought with him that's more than a three-row minivan could have carried, to say nothing of a Volkswagen Beetle. When they went into the meat freezer with their tour guide Halloran (Scatman Crothers), you couldn't see anyone's breath. I thought Stanley Kubrick paid attention to detail? While these missing details were a bit jarring, the plus side of this approach is that we don't have to hear an explanation for why Danny isn't in school. We don't have to know why a hotel up on a mountain in Colorado closes in the winter. We don't have to know what it could possibly offer to guests in the summer, so high above the tree line. We don't have to wonder why it's been a month after the hotel closed and there is still no snow, and it looks, at best, like it's only about early fall. They're wearing relatively light jackets at what looks like about at least 3000m up. We don't have to know any of this because it's not important. The first snow arrives. Wendy (Shelly Duvall) and Danny play in the snow, which has somehow already drifted up to the third-floor windows. Probably because city folk don't know how snow works. Jack (Jack Nicholson) captures the desperate, tired menace of a Stephen King character perfectly. He has that quiet resignation to his sleepless fate, when whatever eldritch horror that has leaked through the cracks between worlds takes hold, sinking its claws deep into his vulnerable psyche. You see him resist but it's hopeless -- the madness is going to win. You can see the voices talking to him in his head. Wendy finds bruises all over Danny's neck. Jack is in a daze after a horrible nightmare. Jack drifts down to the Gold Room, where he meets Lloyd (Joe Turkel), the bartender. Jack has an unsettling conversation -- Nicholson's nearly vibrating with a manic fervor -- with Lloyd, who's absolutely not there. There's no-one else there. The hotel has only three human residents. Lloyd doesn't blink as he agrees with Jack that it wasn't his fault, that it was "a momentary loss of muscular coordination." Wendy finds Jack to tell him that it was a woman in room 237 who'd tried to strangle Danny. It hadn't been Jack at all. Not this time. Cut to Halloran, who's in his bedroom in Florida, watching TV. He has some great decor: two photographs of busty Nubian princesses, with giant afros to match their enormous bosoms. Like, massive cans and one-meter wide afros. He learns through "the shining" -- the telepathic gift that he and Danny share -- that Danny had been in room 237 and that he'd been assaulted by whatever lives in the bathtub there. Now Jack's in room 237. The lady in the bathtub (Lia Beldam) slowly -- achingly slowly -- pulls back the shower curtain. She steps languorously out, fully nude, tall as a giraffe, striding slowly toward him. Jacks moves toward her. She is young, thin, but not nearly as thin as his wife. Jack smiles his crooked smile. His eyes shimmer, vibrate even. They embrace. Kiss. He opens his eyes and sees her in the mirror, sees her bloated corpse of a body. She (Billie Gibson) cackles, following him as he stumbles backward. Danny's freaking the fuck out. REᗡЯUM "I have let you fuck up my life so far, Wendy, but I'm not going to let you fuck this up." The hotel is singing to Jack. There are balloons and streamers everywhere. This is an excellent depiction of how Stephen King books feel, where people see and hear things that aren't there. Those things are about to drive Jack right around the bend. Jack is back in the Gold Room. A giant party is in full swing. "Good evening Mr. Torrance. It's good to see you." The red bathroom is amazing. It's a "red room", which sounds very much like "red rum." This is where Jack meets Delbert Grady (Philip Stone), who'd spilled "Advocaat" -- "a traditional Dutch alcoholic beverage made from eggs, sugar, and brandy" -- on Jack. "Delbert Grady: You must be mistaken, sir. You're the caretaker. You've always been the caretaker. "[...] "Jack Torrance: He is a very willful boy. Delbert Grady: Indeed he is, Mr. Torrance. A very willful boy. A rather naughty boy, if I may be so bold, sir. Jack Torrance: It's his mother. She, uh, interferes. Delbert Grady: Perhaps they need a good talking-to, if you don't mind my saying so. Perhaps a bit more." Chills. Wendy's packing a baseball bat. She finds Jack's oeuvre -- a ream of "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy", formatted into paragraphs and citations that look like he was writing something else. It probably looks normal to him, it probably does say something else when he reads it. In the real world, without the veiled vision provided by the Overlook Hotel's otherworldly residents, it's the ravings of a lunatic. REᗡЯUM Jack catches Wendy reading his work. "I'm not going to hurt you Wendy, I'm just gonna bash your brains in. "Gimme the bat Wendy. "[tongue flashes; hands grasp]" Lights out for Jack. Wendy drags a severely concussed Jack to the storeroom, locking him in. Delbert Grady visits. He lets Jack out. The Overlook lets Jack out. Halloran is on his way in a Sno-Cat, having been called by Danny. Danny's crawled out the bathroom window, into the snow. Wendy can't get out. Jack's hacking his way in with a fire-axe. "Here's Johnny" Halloran is there. He's handling the snow pretty well. But it's an older movie, so he doesn't say anything stupid. He doesn't crack any dumb jokes about black people in the snow. Jack gets the drop on him. Hatchet to the chest. Voices whisper. They're excited about the sacrifice. They whisper; they chant. They gain power. Wendy sees them too, now. Danny has fled outside. Jack gives chase. Danny knows the labyrinth; Jack does not. But he sees Danny's footprints in the snow. No-one is cold in the wintry, alpine wilderness of the Rockies at 2,500M. Not at first, at least. Perhaps the terror and thrill of the chase for Danny and Jack, respectively, keep them warm. Danny carefully backtracks in his steps, then dodges to the side, covering his new tracks. Wendy is seeing all kinds of stuff now. Rivers of blood. Danny heads back out of the maze, following his own tracks back. Jack is getting cold. He's in untrod territory, lost, slowing down. Desperation is peeking out from the corners of his eyes. Wendy's made it outside. Reunited. Halloran's Sno-Cat is right there. And Jack? He's frozen, but the hotel welcomes him in its loving arms, immortalizing him in that famous picture, in the place of honor, front and center. [image] The major difference from the book is that Wendy had rigged the boilers to blow in the book, destroying the hotel in a fiery blaze. The Instigators (2024) -- "5/10" This is an exceedingly odd film that has an uncanny-valley kind of plot, in which things happen, conversations are had, jokes are made, and there is little to no cohesion. Rory (Matt Damon) is an ex-Marine in counseling with Dr. Rivera (Hong Chau). Cobby (Casey Affleck) is a wise-cracking loser who owns a bar, even though that has nothing to do with anything. It's just supposed to be at odds with his generally under-employed, lazy, and alchoholic vibe. The cast is loaded with talent but they're all under-utilized in a weird script that seems simultaneously hurried and drawn-out. There's Mayor Mircelli (Ron Perlman), a nearly comically corrupt mayor of Boston who's just lost his reelection bid. His attorney is played by Toby Flynn (Arnim Zola of the Marvel movies). There's a baker (Alfred Molina), There's a corrupt Boston cop (Ving Rhames) who plays a bounty hunter. It feels as flung-together as I'm describing it. Cobby and Rory try to rob the mayor but all of the money is gone before they get there. It goes horribly sideways but they make it out of there alive. Neither one of them is particularly good at crime. More stuff kind of happens; they always get away. Cobby runs his mouth. He hits on Rory's shrink after she takes a bullet out of him. They go back to rob the mayor again, this time for real. They pose as fire-fighters, triggering a fake fire in order to get access to his safe. Rory's personality is all over the place, with no consistency. Almost everyone is just phoning it in on this. You can just tell that it cost nothing to film. Everything's in easy locations. The car chase was kind of fun but, man, I'm grasping at straws. Cobby is quite funny sometimes but even only about 1/4 of his lines actually land. A lot of the the rest of it feels forced. The diagetic music feels forced, like really awkward needle-drops. The bits of real dialogue are so random that even those feel forced. Is it the editing? Is it the script? It's the script. Who the f@&k wrote thing? It's so formulaic. I'm left wondering whether that's really the actors or whether they're just AI simulacra. I guess it's them; it's not like they were too good to hawk Bitcoin when the gettin' was good. The whole movie felt a bit like it was leaning super-hard on memberberries -- hoping that our recognizing actors we like would imbue the film with reflected glory. Maybe the funniest part was that everyone in Boston considered Montreal to be the go-to place to flee when you're on the lam. Cobby, Rory, the mayor, everyone. Damon and Affleck are occasionally fine but they were just too awkward too much of the time. I thought Hong Chau was pretty good, though. She had some charisma and did pretty well, all things considered. Getting some of that Apple money, I guess. Nothing wrong with that, but I didn't need to watch this. The Last Samurai (2003) -- "9/10" Captain Nathan Algren (Tom Cruise) is a ex-soldier who's been reduced to selling his story of having conquered the red man, in what appears to be a drunken stupor. He's there to sell rifles. He's not a great salesman but he is a great shot. Zebulon Gant (Billy Connolly) is impressed, despite the obvious drunkenness and the world-weary attitude. He introduces Algren to the Japanese, who recruit him to train their imperial soldiers in using rifles rather then swords. Even after Algren demonstrates that the troops aren't ready, they are urged into a predictably disastrous battle with the Samurai in which Algren becomes the only living captive, having impressed the Samurai with his indomitable spirit (even after he kills one of their own in a sneaky move, made while nearly incapacitated). Katsumoto (Ken Watanabe) takes him prisoner because of how bravely he fought. His right-hand man Ujio (Hiroyuki Sanada) wants to kill Algren for not having had the honor to kill himself after losing. Others nurse him back to health -- with sake. He self-medicates, mostly to ward off the horrific PTSD visions that he has of the genocidal slaughter of which he was an integral part in the American West. His nurse Taka (Koyuki) is the widow of the man he'd killed on the battlefield. She forces him to dry out, painfully, until he wakes up one morning, clear-eyed and dry. He wanders through the village, seeing the similarities between the rituals and practices of the Japanese warriors and those of the savages whom he'd slaughtered in a former life. He is a crude man, a recovering drunk with dirty boots, and no idea how to speak the language. He lives with Taka, who's also Katsumoto's sister, and her family, where he slowly learns the Japanese language, the fighting style, and the mountain villager's way of life. He is trapped there until spring, when the snow in the passes melts. He gets better at fighting, at understanding Japanese. He trains with Ujio and manages a tie. At a village theater, ninjas infiltrate the village and try to assassinate Katsuhiro. There is an incredible battle in which so many ninjas fall. Algren comports himself well, standing at Katsuhiro's side and defeating the last of the ninjas with him, while Ujio and his men clean up outside. In the spring, Algren rides with Katsuhiro back to Tokyo, where they run into no small amount of trouble. Katsuhiro is arrested while Algren refuses to play ball anymore. He decides to rescue Katsuhiro after defending himself in an excellent sword-fighting scene, in which he just crushes five or six attackers, beheading the final one. He breaks into the compound with Simon (Timothy Spall), a well-integrated Brit who'd helped recruit Algren in the first place. Katsuhiro's son Nobutada (Shin Koyamada) falls in battle but the others manage to escape, defeating rifles with arrows. Algren, Katsumoto and the rest return to the village and prepare for a last stand. Algren tells the story of the 300 Spartans who resisted the 1M-man army of the Persians for two days, until the Persians were weary of the fight. They all died but Sparta would win, in the end. Even if the battle is hopeless, it is still worth fighting. "Katsumoto: You believe a man can change his destiny? Algren: I think a man does what he can, until his destiny is revealed." The battle begins. Many fall. Many, many, many fall, on all sides. The advantage goes back and forth. There are mortally wounded samurai still sitting on horses, holding their swords high. They know that their cause is hopeless. They are samurai. Their intent is not to return from the battlefield. Their intent is to die well. Their final charge is into the mouths of cannons, pistols, and muskets. Their leather armor offers no resistance. Katsumoto and Algren make it through the first line, with Algren killing the odious and honorless Bagley (Tony Goldwyn). The second line loads a gatling gun. They're just mowing down soldiers with no honor. Slo-mo blood flies as our heroes fall. Horses and bodies everywhere. The Japanese soldiers slaughter their own countrymen with no honor. Only one captain (Satoshi Nikaido) calls it off. He had trained under Algren. He has tears in his eyes at the horror of the senseless slaughter. The odious Omura (Masato Harada) calls for it to continue. Algren helps Katsumoto to his knees so that he can die with honor, with the help of his friend and fellow warrior. The Japanese troops close in. The captain kneels out of respect for the fallen enemy; his men follow suit, doffing caps and prostrating themselves. Omura does not kneel. In the field, only Algren remains, deathless. Later, as Emperor Meiji (Shichinosuke Nakamura) is sealing a trade deal with the foreigners, with the Americans, with a leering Omura imagining all of the money that he personally will make, Algren arrives to deliver samurai swords to his emperor, prostrating himself with difficulty, still suffering from only partly healed wounds. He is in his U.S. uniform. He presents Katsumoto's sword. Meiji kneels and takes the sword in the spirit that it is offered. He decides not to enter into a treaty with the British. "Emperor Meiji: [Referring to Katsumoto] Tell me how he died. Algren: [Referring to Katsumoto] I will tell you how he lived." Algren returns to Katsumoto's village, to Taka, who welcomes him warmly. "Simon: And so the days of the Samurai had ended. Nations, like men, it is sometimes said, have their own destiny. As for the American Captain, no one knows what became of him. Some say that he died of his wounds. Others, that he returned to his own country. But I like to think he may have at last found some small measure of peace, that we all seek, and few of us ever find." The battle scenes were absolutely epic and were 100% in real life; no CGI. My God, you can just tell so much. I swear to God I hope that we are going to just forget at least two entire decades of shitty, muddy, CGI action scenes where ten thousand soldiers attack ten thousand others and you don't care about any of them. This was amazing. I was pretty sure I'd seen this movie before but could find no record of having watched it. I watched it in German this time. More than I'd remembered was in Japanese (with German subtitles). Tom Cruise spoke quite a bit of Japanese, it seems. Silo S02 (2024) -- "7/10" The second season isn't nearly as solid as the "first season" , which I watched at the end of 2023/beginning of 2024. At the end of that season, Juliette Nichols (Rebecca Ferguson) had just gone outside, refused to clean the camera, and then disappeared over the hill rather than collapsing on the near side of it. All of this was unprecedented for the people in her silo. The scales fell from their eyes and they began to demand answers. Up until that point, as far as they were aware, there had been only one revolution, over 140 years ago. This belief was indoctrinated with heavy brainwashing, both psychological and with chemicals in the water. It was deemed necessary to keep the curious monkeys from killing themselves by going outside or by wanting too many babies or any other freedom. See my notes for the books "Wool" , "Shift" , and "Dust" , on which this show is based, if you're interested in more of my analysis. The autocracy in charge of the silo -- IT is in charge of Justice, which is in charge of the Sheriff's department -- has a book called "The Order", which not only predicted that revolutions would happen, but predicted them with such precision that it prescribes very specific measures to counteract them. The very specific measures are to ... checks notes ... foment sectarian strife between the different sections of the silo, which are divided by functional role. If you're following along, the prescribed way to avoid a disaster is to promote a disaster by getting the absolutely essential functional divisions of society to fight amongst themselves rather than to perform their respective functions. They get real mad real fast. Not a lot of nuance here, is what I'm saying. The government in the silo makes me think of any U.S. administration, but particularly and recently the Biden administration, trying desperately to retain control, even as all of their subterfuge crumbles around them. Or the Cambodians under Pol Pol and Lon Nol, with the unpredictable lunacy of their regimes, where their shit-stirring led to an entire population just not growing food anymore. Like those regimes, where we saw and continue to see disastrous effects as the result of selfish policy, you would expect the relatively small, enclosed, and fragile society of the silo to quickly break down...but nothing really happens! Other than people gathered in the central public spaces -- primarily the giant, central, spiral staircase -- to protest and fight and spit horribly racist things at each other, everyone looks like they're getting water, food, electricity, plumbing, and air just like before. Society just goes along as it always has! No problems! Writing television shows is so easy! It's more than a bit tedious having to watch IT chief Bernard Holland (Tim Robbins) not only pulling all of the strings -- with everyone completely aware that IT is doing so -- but also somehow gallivanting around the silo with no guards and seemingly at no personal risk to himself at all. The director tries to make Robbin's somewhat cross-eyed and highly lopsided gaze seem menacing but I can't see anything but the bows of his tiny glasses pressing into his plump temples. This leads me to wonder how one obtains such plump temples in a society with severely constrained resources, why one would allow one's plumpness to signal how much more comfort one's elite role allows them, and that, no matter how well you plan your post-apocalyptic society, you're always going to forget something, like opticians [2], who know how to fit glasses to your face. It's distracting, is what I'm saying. Bernard foments rebellions and there is never any blowback where he lives -- which is, like, immediately adjacent to the areas in violent turmoil because they all live in a relatively small silo. This is due to the seemingly endless cadres of black-armor-suited, cage-helmeted, and truncheon-wielding shock troops available to justice, who seem to serve no other function to the silo except enforcing the autocracy and raining down terror. Perhaps this is supposed to reflect our society, where the elite's violent enforcers serve just one purpose, but in the silo, they'd at least have to have one other function. Such a society simply couldn't tolerate so many superfluous people while still surviving for centuries. Bernard is definitely more fun to watch, though, than Sims (Common), who I find to even more annoying. He's supposed to be menacing but Common is an incredibly wooden actor. I suppose his name fits his style. 🥁 His wife Camille (Alexandria Riley) is a perfect match, arguably even a worse actress, and charged with swanning around the silo, telling everyone what to do and suffering zero consequences. She used to work as a "raider" for Justice, so ... no-one dares cross her? This is just implied and largely unexplained. The show uses her as a battering ram for the plot. Judge Meadows is only slightly more sympathetic, in that she at least seems somewhat concerned about the people of the silo as people rather than animals. However, she doesn't ever -- not even once -- question the position of privilege that she enjoys within that society. None of the many, long, one-on-one discussions are about what kind of society they have, where humans aren't really able to be humans. For example, what is the point of survival when everything that was important has been lost? Is the point really just to keep human hearts beating no matter what kind of subjective lives the brains fueled by those hearts experience? This would be the perfect opportunity to discuss the detrimental effects of autocracy on human culture and individual autonomy versus the dangers of individual autonomy in an extremely dangerous and fragile world like the silo. If you find this line of reasoning annoying, then you're in luck -- it's completely unaddressed in this season. In season one, Judge Meadows was an alcoholic. In this season, she gives up alcohol -- just like that! No muss, no fuss. In every scene thereafter, she's clear-eyed and brutally competent, not at all a recovering alcoholic who's had some rough nights behind her. Like, her being a recovering alcoholic literally never comes up again. Who knew it was that easy? 👍 🍾 ✋ How do we know that she's dry now? Meadows demonstrates her dedication to sobriety by doing what we do in our culture: ceremoniously dumping alcohol down the drain of her kitchen sink. I remember similar mistakes from the first season. Why is this a mistake? Because the writers simply don't really consider how differently people who've lived with extremely limited resources for several generations would behave. Is it likely that the people of the Silo would have such a profligate attitude toward useful resources? Of course not. There is no way anyone, no matter how stupid or terrible, would have default behaviors that led to resource waste. In a more well-thought-out depiction of a silo, Meadows would have probably sent the materials to a recycling center for use elsewhere. It would be less dramatic but much more believable. There are two main story arcs with a bunch of subplots involving budding relationships between various characters. One main storyline is that Juliette has broken into silo 17 -- right next door to her original silo 18 -- and found Solo (Steve Zahn), who's been holed up there for ... a long, long time. He's oddly childish but this is understandable, as we learn throughout the season that he was very, very young when he locked himself into silo 17's IT section. He has survived alone ever since. Juliette befriends him -- to whatever degree he's capable of socializing -- and they team up to get her a working suit so that she can return to her silo. Why would she want to do this? Well, Solo had told her that the people of his silo had revolted and had all demanded to go outside after one of its residents had failed to clean. They'd all stormed outside and then soon died. Juliette had seen the sea of corpses spilled from the entrance to silo 17. Is this wildly simplistic? Yes. Does it lean super-hard into the notion that you can write a book like "the Order" that predicts all human behavior and provides a manual for rule? Yes. Yes, it does. Does it give Juliette and Solo something to do for the season? It does that too. Juliette and Solo's missions feel like you're watching someone play the almost-inevitable video game. She needs to dive into water to get an outside suit. It doesn't have a helmet, so she needs to sleuth around for one of those. The water's rising, so she needs to fix the pump 18 levels underwater to get her helmet back from Solo, who's blackmailing her into helping him fix silo 17. Oh, and he saved her from a deadly infected cut with antibiotics that he'd made himself. On her dive, she was forced to come up early, so she had to cure her own bends [3], which was mighty quick, before she's shot with an arrow by a completely new person that appears in the silo. Now, she's fixing up her own arrow wound -- she's like "Aatami from Sisu" <#sisu>. She's so good at it that, later, when she's fighting, it doesn't bother her at all. Hell, arrow wounds are so superficial that, when Solo gets shot right in the middle of the back, his wound is completely gone hours later. Don't scream misogyny too soon, though, because so is Juliette's! I cannot even tell whether this an oversight or laziness or a plot point. In the other, personally far less interesting story arc -- it bores me because it is executed in an utterly predictable and quite manipulative manner -- is that silo 18 is ... wait for it ... rolling along the historical groove predicted by "the Order" along which silo 17 had committed mass suicide. Sims and Bernard are unrelentingly shitty and supercilious and superior. Even though they fight amongst themselves, their stranglehold over events and people and resources remains nearly completely unchallenged. The justice department's shock troops are everywhere and also completely unquestioned and unchallenged, even though their function is simply to exert control and they don't provide in any way to the silo's functioning or to people's survival. Perhaps it's a parable for our times, in which the people that provide actual value -- HVAC, mechanical, water, food -- just accept that there will be people to keep them in line. They've had generations to learn and inculcate this way of life. Don't worry: the show doesn't try to make you think about stuff like this: I've just made it up to entertain myself. It's weird, though, that the proletariat never rises up when IT and Justice don't want it to, but it rises up immediately with a tiny bit of prodding from Bernard. We're expected to believe that the hoi polloi are docile toward the people stepping on their necks but they're foaming at the mouth against the other "factions" -- who are actually their natural allies -- that the people stepping on their necks have pointed them at. Wait, that sounds like western society! Whoa....maybe they're onto something here. At any rate, Mechanical shuts off power to show its strength, but always turns it back on again nearly immediately. IT poisons all of Mechanical's food. Mechanical seizes ten more floors in order to capture a farm. There's info-warfare between IT and Mechanical. Dr. Nichols (Iain Glen, who does a great job) -- Juliette's father -- joins the Sheriff in the "down below". Together, they learn more and more about how the Silo actually works. The Sheriff's wife Kathleen (Caitlin Zoz) is there as well. Unfortunately, she's written and acted quite shallowly as well. Lukas Kyle (Avi Nash) is Bernard's new shadow and he's been tasked to search for the truth behind the revolution of 140 years ago. Who was Salvador Quinn? Nash is a good actor and his role is relatively well-written. I remember that this part was quite good in the books as well. I like a bit of sleuthing. Bernard blackmails a sadly superficial Walker (Harriet Walter) into helping him by simply keeping her ex-wife alive. Sure, OK. Easy as pie. Bernard's got an even easier job of swanning about than Camille does. There are no plots cooking against him. None. This will eventually be turned on him but only after it had been telegraphed six ways from Sunday. Even I caught on early to what was going on. Watching Bernard give yet another speech to "his people" is like watching a White House briefing in which Matt Miller tells everyone that everything they've heard that didn't come from him is a lie, and is being spread by antisemites and Russians. As you can imagine, I spend so much time seeing how poisonous this is for people's actual lives that sometimes I wouldn't mind seeing a bit of escapist fantasy where things are different. I'm not a huge fan of watching of a show where 90% it consists of showing the people I actually like getting their asses handed to them, while the people I hate ride high and enjoy their victories. That's a tough tight-rope to walk, and a quite a bit beyond the skills of this show. Even if I know that they'll get their just desserts in the end, I don't especially enjoy watching them revel in it. It feels manipulative -- outrage-farming and hate-watching -- and it's not very interesting to me. Sometimes I like to watch the good guys win. They can have setbacks, of course, but I don't need to be watching long episodes full of powerful assholes gloating about how they're never going to lose. We get it. The end of the season was a bit better, although it was very, very uneven. Lukas Kyle is great -- he discovers the true secret of the silos simultaneously with Juliette, who discovers the same with Solo/Jimmy from papers that his parents left for him. Sims and Bernard stay completely shitty. The triple-subterfuge in the rebellion was quite nicely done, if I'm honest. Juliette gets back just in time to prevent everyone from going back outside -- exactly as was prophesied. The two people in the final scene -- which was between two people in "now"-time -- were not good actors. I hope that improves but I'm sometimes shocked by what passes for acting these days. Nobody drank anything -- as usual; even if they'd ordered something, they wouldn't have touched it -- but she asked for the check, in a whisper, in a crowded bar. There's just literally no effort made at all. We were supposed to focus on the awesome click noise that the Pez dispenser made as the entire story fell into place. Sure, OK. Bad Sisters S02 (2024) -- "5/10" This season is nothing like the first one. This one should have been a two-hour movie. In this season, nobody can keep their gob shut, despite the presence of a lot of Nosy Parkers, including a positively sociopathic Angelica Collins (Fiona Shaw) and the shockingly intrusive Detective Fergal Loftus (Barry Ward) and his new partner, the even more breathtakingly disrespectful Una Houlihan (Thaddea Graham). They just ask inappropriate questions at inappropriate times and they get answers from utterly naive people. The police just sashay into people's homes as if privacy and warrants simply don't exist in a modern, free society. Perhaps they don't, in Ireland; I'm no expert. Or perhaps this is just another show that's determined to train the populace that the police can just swan around your property and drift through your home whenever they like. This show could have been named, "Ah, the door was open, so I let myself in. Hope that's OK? You got a cup on?" The original sisters are all back -- Ursula (Eva Birthistle), Becka (Eve Hewson), Bibi (Sarah Greene), Grace (Anne-Marie Duff), and Eva (Sharon Horgan) -- but they're considerably diminished after two years. They're not as saucy and strong as they were, and are instead more maundy and fragile. Eva, especially, is horrid and boring and basic instead of funny and sharp, like she was in season one. She was the smart one, seeing through everything; now, she's makes one terrible, poorly considered decision after another. Grace remarries, to Ian (Owen McDonnell), with whom she fights one evening after she tells him that she'd killed her previous husband. This is only the first of many nearly completely unprompted confessions, usually in response to unbelievably bold questions that should earn more of a punch in the nose than an answer. And they all keep moaning on about poor Grace (Anne-Marie Duff), who has all of the personality of an old dishcloth and whom the show delivered not only one awful husband in season one, but also a mooning never-to-be-requited lover Roger (Michael Smiley) and a second husband Ian (Owen McDonnell), who gets over her pretty quickly and starts angling for Eva (Sharon Horgan) instead, even though they're all pretending that's not happening. Blanaid knows. Angelica knows. Dude: everybody knows. Roger, too, is over Grace before her ashes have even cooled, propositioning both Ursula and Eva in what is so ham-fisted a manner that you've got to wonder whether he's on the spectrum. You've also to to wonder why the show spends so much time on Roger, who went personality-shopping at the same store as Grace. I would be remiss if I didn't point out how ungodly irritating it is to watch the police -- Garda -- just walk into people's homes whenever they feel like it -- and no-one says anything about it! They never throw them out! They never try to stop them from entering. They are never too busy to drop everything and just do what the Garda wants. Instead, they offer them a tea. It's unreal. It's so off-putting and distracting that I can barely pay attention to the scene that follows because I'm still thinking about how they shouldn't even be there. Not only that, but they're cheerfully just barging in on people's birthdays, on the day someone get's his dead wife's effects -- and just start peppering people with questions. And everyone answers them! No warrant, no arrest, no lawyer -- solicitor -- and the people who actually have something to hide just answer every single question. It makes the job of the police so easy. Speaking of jobs -- does anyone in this show have one? Are they all just independently wealthy? We know that Ursula is a nurse but I think she was let go for stealing drugs from the hospital. This crime is so beneath notice that they don't even spend a second worrying about whether she'll get charged with it. It's just completely forgotten, as is the fact that her means of support is gone. I guess she's on the dole? We don't know. Her family is completely non-existent in this season, which focuses instead solely on Blanaid, whose personality is just as boring as her mother Grace's. Look, I kind of like Fergal Loftus's (Barry Ward) young, new, female partner Una Houlihan (Thaddea Graham). She's very pushy but that's the role. Fine. But everyone makes it so easy for her to get what she wants! They just answer every question like she's somehow hypnotized them. Maybe I find it annoying to watch an entire cast full of morons or monsters but I have a hard time sticking with a show where I don't even respect anyone's game. And, by episode seven, it's been made completely clear that "pushy" is the sum-total of Una's character, which means she's just a cop chasing a big case, no matter whether she gets it right nor not, which makes her an unsympathetic character -- just like everyone else. Blanaid's (Saise Quinn) written as a superficially bitchy teenager. Hey, Blanaid, just because you lost your mom doesn't give you the right to treat everyone you know like shit, and then run into the arms of the most obvious sociopath in the show, Angelica Collins (Fiona Shaw), who, like Una, simply gets away with every scheme she tries. This season very much has the feel of a bad action movie or a WWE match, where the ostensible heel -- Angelica -- wins and wins and wins until she'll almost certainly lose big at some point. Which she does but also in the most anticlimactic way. If Angelica weren't so insufferable, then it would be fun to watch her make the titular sisters squirm so hard. They are not a clever bunch and can't get out of their own way long enough to protect their secrets. They have so many foibles between them that there's no way that whole passel of fools won't unravel and incriminate themselves. A lot more happens in this season but I didn't feel too entertained by it. I kept thinking of the snappy repartee and good writing of the first season. The magic was a bit gone. Here's what happens: the ladies take Angelica out for a boat ride. She takes one on the bean from the boom and falls in the water. With Angelica lost at sea. Ian helps the ladies cover things up, but then it turns out that he's actually setting them up. He's not who he says he is; he's an ex-cop with a second family and a history of sexual abuse. He's the real sociopath, not Angelica! 😱 😱 😱 Angelica's a total sweetheart now and she was right all along about Ian. Eva bangs Ian, then gives him $100K for Blanaid, then realizes her mistake. He gets the better of them, then they get the better of him, after Angelica shows up and beans him. Oh, yeah, Angelica is back from the dead and has had a complete personality change. She's no longer interested in bringing them down, nor in kidnapping Blanaid. In fact, no one ever mentions the super-creepy bedroom she'd prepared for Blanaid or how she'd been grooming her relentlessly. The show just whipsaws around and declares to us that we were all fools for not having known that Ian is the obvious enemy -- the Prick Part II -- and it turns out that Grace had been running from him. Officer Houlihan ends up helping them make sure that Ian stays quiet and goes away forever. Becca has her baby. Everyone lives happily ever after. My problem with season two is that it's hard to watch a show where the main stars are insufferable. It's even harder to watch a show where pretty much everyone is insufferable. This can work, but it has to be smart about it. This storyline is not smart about it. Instead, the storyline jaunts from one deus ex machina to another to fill out eight episodes. It should have been a two-hour movie. That would have been pretty good. Max Payne (2008) -- "6/10" I watched and "reviewed this movie in 2011" , where I kept things relatively short. As I noted in that review, the aesthetics of the film captured those of the video game extremely well, even including bullet-time in several scenes. The harsh lighting and deeply muted colors are spot-on, too. The building interiors are trashed, graffitied -- dark and harshly lit at the same time. When snow's not drifting down, it's raining buckets. It's almost always nighttime. The only time it's sunny is outside of a funeral home. [4] Max Payne (Mark Wahlberg) is a good cop but a broken man. He's not interested in drugs or women, not even when Natasha (Olga Kurylenko) throws herself at him. After the death of his wife, he's in a dark, dark place. He pairs back up with his old partner Alex Balder (Donal Logue) to track a strange series of deaths in the underworld of the city they live in. The victims have wing tattoos on their wrists and see giant, flapping, dark shadows before they die. That collaboration is doomed when Payne finds his partner dead at home, where Payne is then nearly killed in a blurred, confusing attack. He's thrown out of Alex's funeral by his widow. Outside, Jim Bravura (Ludacris) from IA picks him up, wondering why Natasha had his wallet when she'd been killed. Brooding and on everyone's shit list; this is how Max Payne rolls. Natascha's sister Mona Sax (Mila Kunis) tracks Max down, wanting revenge for her sister. They end up working together. Mila Kunis is hardcore, better even than Max Payne. Payne is unstoppable in searching for his wife's killer -- kind of like the Punisher. Mona is the same now. He discovers that the pharmaceutical company Aesir has built a super-soldier serum. Jack Lupino (Amaury Nolasco) is a savagely sadistic user of this drug -- Max discovers that it was Jack who'd actually killed his wife. Lupino is juiced and likes standing in the snow, sweating, doing drugs, and killing people. Max dukes it out with him but his boss (Beau Bridges) shoots Lupino, then sets Max up to make his own upcoming death look like a suicide. Max gets away, but is wounded and frozen, so he ends up taking the super-soldier serum to save his own life. He is high, like sooper-high. He is seeing shit. We are now on the "unstoppable march to revenge against all of the crooked cops who have wronged him" part. It's kind of cheesy, and somehow even less believable than the video game. I watched it in German. Pain & Gain (2013) -- "7/10" Daniel Lugo (Mark Wahlberg) works at a gym. He's pretty dumb but that doesn't mean he's not successful. After all, he drives a T-top Fiero. He thinks he should be more successful. He lives in Florida, to no-one's surprise. He wears a fanny-pack completely unironically. When he hears super-scam artist Jonny Wu (Ken Jeong) giving his spiel, he thinks "this guy gets me." He works with Adrian Doorbal (Anthony Mackie), who's even dumber than he is. It almost goes without saying, but they are juicing day and night. They hatch a plan to steal one of Lugo's clients Victor Kershaw's (Tony Shalhoub) money. Victor is a douchebag and a fool but he's a pretty successful businessman. They get Paul Doyle (Dwayne Johnson) to help them, who's even dumber than the other two. He's very religious, thinks he is very disciplined, but isn't even close. He has a serious coke habit. Adrian has a erectile dysfunction from juicing; he goes to nurse Robin (Rebel Wilson) and Dr. Bjornson (Peter Stormare) to get fixed up. Robin is not very professional at all. Neither, really, is Dr. Bjornson. But Robin is highly unprofessional. Our crew goes shopping for weapons and then plan their first mission to kidnap Victor. They show up on Shabbat, when he has at least a dozen guests. The fools show up in face-paint and ninja costumes and have to scurry away. Next, the fools fail to capture him in a parking lot because they're absolute fools: they block in the wrong car. Third time's the charm but they almost kill him with tasers. They're too dumb to notice that their plan isn't really working. I can't tell whether Victor is also just as dumb or whether he's manipulating the idiots who kidnapped him. Paul, with his low IQ and obsession with Jesus is eminently manipulable. Speaking of low IQ, Lugo's stripper girlfriend Sorina Luminita (Bar Paly) is also not the brightest bulb. She is spectacular but dumb in the sense that she would starve to death in a room where the doorknob turned the other direction. Lugo finally gets Victor's money by torturing him into signing papers that turn over his fortune to the crew of fools. The bank requires a notary. Lugo's boss John (Rob Corddry) is a notary but he won't break the rules -- until Lugo promises him to finance a body-building contest at his gym if he stamps all of the documents. STAMP. STAMP. STAMP. They have the money. Now they have to get rid of the man. They try to kill him in a faked car accident but Adrian had put his seatbelt on. GODDAMN THEY'RE SO DUMB. Amazing. This is based on a true story. Lugo sets the car on fire. They strut away. Victor exits the car behind them. He's still alive, patting out the fire. Paul runs him over forwards. Then backwards. He's still not dead. Victor's in a hospital, in shitty shape but spitting mad. The police don't believe his story about the kidnapping and attempted murder. He is an asshole so they just kind of tune him out. Victor calls private detective Ed DuBois (Ed Harris) for help. The team of idiots shows up at the hospital but can't find the ICU because ... the map is too complicated for them. They find out that the police didn't pay any attention to Victor and leave without killing him. Montage of Adrian & Robin, Paul & Sorina, and Lugo all spending money like absolute fools. They figure out that Victor is on their trail, so they decide to hunt him down. Again. They're absolutely spiraling out of control. A lot of these scenes look like they're straight out of GTA -- complete with NPCs walking around, up and down the stairs -- and right down to the Vice City-style sets and set pieces. The only people dumber than the three guys are their marks -- like Frank Griga (Michael Rispoli) and his pneumatic wife Krisztina Furton (Keili Lefkovitz). Luckily, while Paul and Adrian are entertaining Krisztina with push-ups and pony-rides, Lugo flips out on Frank because he called him a "scheiss Amateur". His flipping out dropped a 45-pound plate on Frank's head. Lugo starts curling to clear his head. They force a nearly senseless Krisztina to give up the code for the safe that she and Frank have at home...but they get it wrong...then Adrian accidentally kills her with some of his drugs. Their next plan is to chop up the bodies. The chainsaw doesn't work, so it's the hatchet, I guess. Just an absolute spiral. Lugo and Adrian are back at Home Depot to return the chainsaw, which has blood and hair on the chain. They only notice at the store. Actually, they don't notice but the lady at the returns counter does. "Home Depot Customer Service: Entweder sind Sie blöd oder blind. Das ist Fell. Suchen Sie einen anderen aus." Meanwhile, Paul is grilling human parts outside while flirting with a neighbor/security guard. "Lugo: Bist du wahnsinnig? Paul: Was ist das Problem? Die Scheisse muss man draussen grillen." They dump the rest of the body parts into the Everglades. In barrels. While the barrels help the bodies stay below the surface, they won't decompose. If they'd weighted the bodies down with rocks, the alligators would have disposed of the bodies in less than a day. Instead, the bodies are there to be discovered...later. "Lugo: Ich fühle mich gut. Ich muss ein bisschen pumpen." We're back at the beginning, with Lugo on the run. Paul and Adrian have already been arrested. Lugo is in his giant, orange-and-green cigarette boat. Victor finally reveals to DuBois that he has more accounts in the Bahamas. DuBois is pissed and tells him that he's a very difficult client. Victor is a supreme asshole, retorting that having an account in the Bahamas is Finance 101 and that DuBois should have guessed. Wow. Lugo's in the Bahamas, searching through Victor's lockbox, which has only useless mementos in it. DuBois spots him and gives chase, clipping him in the leg. Victor spots him and plows into him with his car, slamming him through a wall. Lugo still doesn't quite get it, chattering in the helicopter about how long it took to grow his physique. "Lugo: [sees all of the cops at the airport] Die Leute sind alle wegen mir da? DuBois: Ja, die wollen wissen, warum du das alles getan hast. Lugo: Naja, weil ich ein Macher bin." This movie was very obviously directed by Michael Bay. I liked it better the second time around. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] These are notes for me to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. The amount of text is not proportional to my enjoyment. I might write less because I didn't get around to it when it was fresh in my mind. I rate the film based on how well it suited me personally for the genre, my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. Links are to "my IMDb ratings" [1] In the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy "trilogy", there is a race of people called the Golgafrinchans, who try to optimize away what they consider to be the useless 1/3 of their population, which included telephone sanitizers. After a brief period of quasi-flourishing, the entire species was wiped out by a virus that spread through telephone handsets. See the excellent summary in "telephone sanitizer" by Robotech_Master , which I cite below in full (it's from 2002 and I'm afraid it will disappear at some point; internet erosion is real). "The telephone sanitizer in Douglas Adams's HHGTTG book and radio series was provided as a textbook example of a useless occupation. The idea was that the Golgafrinchans realized that a substantial portion of their population was completely useless, and so they got rid of them by making up a story of impending planetary catastrophe and sending them ahead on a space ark that was supposedly the first of several. (This is similar to the trick that the Tallest play on the useless Irkan Invader, Zim, in the first episode of Invader Zim.) The joke turned out to be on the Golgafrinchans, however, when they were wiped out by a plague contracted from a horribly dirty telephone. "The telephone sanitizer was clearly meant to be a humorously-exaggerated example of sheer uselessness--perhaps the most useless occupation that Adams could possibly conceive--so as to depict the others with whom the telephone sanitizers shared the ship (advertising executives and hairstylists and lawyers and so forth) as being even more useless (and annoying) than their popular stereotypes. This being the case, it is strangely ironic to consider that Cornell scientists discovered in 1997 that many public surfaces--ATM keypads, computer lab keyboards, doorknobs, bus handholds, and, yes, public telephones--were contaminated with a whole host of virulent and nasty disease-causing microorganisms. "So, perhaps a telephone sanitizer might not be so useless after all." [1] I feel like they're playing fast and loose with embolisms and what causes them because I don't think the air pressures make sense. See "Ascent from depth" , It feels like the air that she's breathing is being pushed down from up top and isn't at high pressure like in scuba equipment. Maybe by the time it's absorbed in her body, the gas is at higher pressure because of the depth, but I'm not sure. At any rate, her quick stop at a slightly lower depth, after having been so very far down for so long, almost certainly wouldn't have prevented much worse bends than she showed. [1] Which is one more scene than a film with a very similar aesthetic "Sin City" had. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5311 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5311 Sun, 19 Jan 2025 21:13:25 +0100 -- "9/10" 2. "The Rundown / Bienvenue dans la jungle (2003)" <#Rundown> -- "5/10" 3. "The Dead Don't Die (2019)" <#Jarmusch> -- "5/10" 4. "Devara Part 1 (2024)" <#Devara> -- "8/10" 5. "Disappear Completely (2022)" <#Disappear> -- "8/10" 6. "Sisu (2022)" <#Sisu> -- "8/10" 7. "Lumberjack the Monster (2023)" <#Lumberjack> -- "8/10" 8. "Dinner in America (2020)" <#Dinner> -- "9/10" 9. "Shrinking S02 (2024)" <#Shrinking> -- "6/10" 10. "Taxi Driver (1976)" <#Taxi> -- "8/10" Conclave (2024) -- "9/10" Lawrence (Ralph Fiennes) is the dean of the cardinals in the Catholic Church. The Pope (Bruno Novelli) has died. It is time to elect another. The dean is not only in charge of the festivities, but the dean also votes, and may receive votes himself. For those unaware, a Catholic conclave sequesters all the cardinals of the world inside the Vatican, cutting them off from news of the outside world. They vote until one pope receives a majority. They usually vote once per day, but sometimes vote immediately again. American liberal cardinal Bellini (Stanley Tucci) is in the running and has Lawrence's initial support. "Initial" because, after voting for him several times, Lawrence sours on Bellini's nakedly political and morally conciliatory approach to defeating the true enemy of the church, cardinal Tedesco (Sergio Castellitto). Tedesco is a reactionary intent on rolling back the entire legacy of the recently deceased and relatively liberal pope. There are more than just shades of the wide-eyed zealotry of an anti-Trumper's TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome) in Bellini's tirades, in which he not only doesn't consider but he isn't even particularly interested in hearing any arguments about how using underhanded, nefarious methods makes you worse than what you're trying to defeat. Bellini considers himself to be unassailably and unchangeably "better" than Tedesco and nothing he does could possibly change that. Also in the running is the slippery and slimy cardinal Tremblay (John Lithgow), who conspires to sideline the initial front-runner, the virulent homophobe and misogynist cardinal Adeyemi (Lucian Msamati). Sister Agnes (Isabella Rossellini) is instrumental in bringing down Tremblay. None of the "main" candidates listed above are worth a tinker's damn. A dark horse is cardinal Lawrence himself, who experiences an upswing in votes for his fine words, despite his fervent protestations. There is the darkest of dark horses, though, cardinal Benitez (Carlos Diehz), who is Mexican but represents the Diocese of Kabul, having served in war zones in Baghdad and the Congo before that. He's been in the shit and come out filled with love. He supports Lawrence wholeheartedly and will not be dissuaded by him. As the candidates fall, one by one, to their foibles, vices, and skeins of their own machinations, the field clears. The initial strong front-runner Adeyemi's votes are split between Tremblay and Bellini when his ancient infidelity is revealed. Tedesco starts off quite strong as well, winning a round but not a majority. Bellini's votes go to Tremblay when the former's weaknesses and nakedly political machinations leave a bad taste in too many cardinal's mouths. Tremblay is felled by Sister Agnes, spilling his votes into what would be Lawrence's lap, but for a suicide bomber that attacks the cathedral and interrupts the sixth vote, in which it is quite likely that Lawrence would have won a majority. Instead, the disheveled and still partially plaster-bedecked cardinals gather in a different auditorium to discuss the day's events and how they propose to proceed. Tedesco gives a fiery speech blaming the musulmano and promising to declare holy war on Islam. Benitez expresses his shock and disappointment and shames the rest of them into silence with a wonderfully worded speech which would be very much holier-than-thou if he weren't very much holier than all of them put together, save perhaps Lawrence. "My brother cardinal. With respect... ...what do you know about war? I carried out my ministry in the Congo. In Baghdad, in Kabul. I've seen the lines of the dead and wounded, Christian and Muslim. When you say we have to fight, what is it you think we're fighting? You think it's those deluded men who have carried out these terrible acts today? "No, my brother. "La lucha está aquí... aquí dentro de cada uno de nosotros si cedemos al odio y al temor, si hablamos de “bandos” en vez de hablar por cada hombre y cada mujer. "Esta es mi primera vez entre ustedes y probablemente sea mi última. "Y perdónenme, pero en estos días solo hemos demostrado ser un grupo de hombres pequeños y mezquinos. Interesados solamente en nosotros mismos, en Roma, en la elección y el poder. Pero estas cosas no son la iglesia. "La iglesia no es la tradición. "La iglesia no es el pasado. "La iglesia es lo que hagamos en adelante." It's a good speech and it clinches him the papacy. After he is elected pope, Lawrence asked him the name he will take. "Innocentia." This would be enough for a good ending, but that was the anticlimax. The climax -- perhaps more of a coda -- is a bit of intrigue, in which information about this darkest of dark horse's past finally bubbles to the surface. We learn why Benitez had traveled to a Geneva clinic; we learn what kind of clinic it was; we are surprised that the old pope not only supported him, but paid for the flight and treatment with his own money. Benitez was born male but has a uterus. He only discovered this in his mid-to-late thirties. He decided at the last minute not to undergo the hysterectomy. This is, apparently, earth-shattering for the church, even though it's as if he had had six fingers or a third nipple. Bodies are bodies. As he says, "I am as God made me." I thought this was an interesting in that Lawrence, who seemed as liberal as they get, blanched at this revelation. It was, of course, far too late to un-pope Benitez. Although it would have almost certainly been possible, it would have possibly destroyed the church's credibility forever. The church needs to move forward and stop clinging to form over function, to appearance over principle. Still, Lawrence's hesitation could have been interpreted as more than just being unsure about this odd situation and how it fits into a clearly gendered world. Perhaps his hesitation was more wondering whether they'd just elected a girl pope? With more openness to homosexuality, with more openness to many things, the last great great openness barrier is the church's utter disdain for 50% of humanity. Women are servants. Women are child-bearing vessels. The church's greatest weakness is its institutional hatred for women. This is the message I took from Lawrence's hesitation, where even he had to swallow his bile at what is happening and let a gentler being try to lead the church by its own precepts, precepts that it had ignored for most of its existence. I watched it in a movie theater in English, Latin, Italian, and Spanish, with French and German subtitles. The Rundown / Bienvenue dans la jungle (2003) -- "5/10" Beck (Dwayne Johnson) is an aspiring chef who's also an MMA expert and apparently a debt-collector. He tears apart a club at the beginning to show how incredible he is at fighting and debt-collecting. Still, his love lies in the kitchen, so he's trying to scratch together enough scratch to open his own restaurant. Fair enough. He's sent to the jungles of Brazil to retrieve a mobster's son Travis (Seann William Scott). Local henchman Hatcher (Christopher Walken) is about to allow them to leave town when he hears that Travis knows the location of a golden-monkey statue that he wants because Hatcher likes money and thinks he should have all of it and no-one else should have any. He is not a deeply written character, is what I'm saying. There's an almost unnecessarily long scene where they contend with the jungle, with monkeys, screaming and carrying on, before the local militia shows up and takes them prisoner. Travis knows the language and convinces them that the giant (Beck) will fight them all. There's a lot of capoeira and flying around in trees after that, with Beck taking a lot of hits before getting his wheels under him. Long story short, the locals are now teamed up with Travis, Beck, and also Mariana (Rosario Dawson), who's a local rebel leader whose brother has been killed by Hatcher and his henchmen. You're not going to believe it but they manage to retrieve the golden-monkey statue. Hatcher manages to kidnap Mariana, demanding the golden monkey as ransom. Cue a giant fight scene where Beck lays waste to a town mostly by himself but also mostly after he convinces himself to do so, which was kind of weird. At any rate, he's impervious to the tremendous amount of gunfire, which is about as deadly as it was on the G.I. Joe or A-Team shows. Beck takes Travis back to his father, who agrees to pay Beck but then mistreats Travis, blablabla ... Beck incapacitates everyone with a psychedelic jungle fruit and leaves with a grateful Travis. No-one picked up the script for a sequel. A pity. I watched it in French without subtitles for most of it because they just weren't working and then with French subtitles for the final 1/4 of the film. The Dead Don't Die (2019) -- "5/10" Jim Jarmusch "directed" this movie about zombies. I use quotes because the film is a meandering, half-hearted attempt that failed to convince me that its being half-hearted was some way for Jarmusch to be making a sardonic point about the vacuity of the types of lazy, formulaic, genre horror flicks of which this was very obviously an example. Except that it was making you watch ninety minutes of a formulaic movie that wasted its very talented cast to convince you that you should be watching better movies than this. That's the most positive spin I could put on this film. None of the characters were developed far enough to be interesting before they were killed or transformed into zombies. The only explanation given for there being zombies at all was that an unconscionable expansion of fracking into the polar regions -- Arctic and Antarctic, apparently, even though Antarctica has no fossil-fuel reserves -- that had tilted the Earth off of its axis, leading to completely unpredictable day/night cycles and ... um ... zombies. What kind of zombies? Non-viral, slow-moving, and undead. Even here, the film is not consistent: the first several victims fail to be transformed whereas, after a certain point midway through the movie, being bitten by a zombie suddenly does transform you to a zombie yourself. The zombies are so slow-moving, though, that the only way to be trapped by them is to simply stop moving or fail to get to a proper shelter that's not just a pile of wood slats leaned against each other. The main characters are Chief Cliff Robertson (Bill Murray) and his partner Officer Ronnie Peterson (Adam Driver), who toy a bit with non-diagetic dialogue that pretty much goes nowhere. Like, they talk about the script and having read parts of it; they talk about "Jim", who's the director. But it's doesn't go anywhere. It would be frustrating and tantalizing if there were any way to tell the difference between this and a truly poorly written film. Because it's from auteur Jim Jarmusch, the assumption would be that there is method to his madness but, my brother in Christ, I have seen Coffee and Cigarettes and I am under no such illusions. [2] They are joined by Officer Mindy Morrison (Chloë Sevigny), who is a shrinking violet of a mouse of a wallflower and who dies pathetically and pointlessly at some point. There's also Hermit Bob (Tom Waits), who slinks around town, basically documenting the zombie apocalypse like a nature photographer. He mysteriously is not molested by any zombies. Farmer Frank Miller (Steve Buscemi) hates Hermit Bob for no stated reason, other than Miller is apparently a cuss of a bastard of an asshole that even the police refrain from warning about the zombies. Hank Thompson (Danny Glover) is just a lovable old black guy who also turns into a zombie, his personality completely unchanged. Spoiler. Everybody but Bob dies. Maybe that's the message? That we're all just zombies anyway? Or is the message that fracking is bad? Or that Republicans who allow fracking are bad? I don't have the strongest grasp of how in-the-tank some of these normie and heavily siloed liberals are. I've seen similarly ham-fisted attempts at working modern politics into films that reveals a lot about the shallowness of the writer's or director's political thought before. I fear this may have been one of those. Devara Part 1 (2024) -- "8/10" This is the story of Devara (N.T. Rama Rao Jr.), a powerful villager living near the Red Sea (it's just a lake; the "red" refers to blood spilled on its shores). He and members from the other three villages get mixed up in a smuggling operation. This part looks pretty cool, as they drag the stolen containers along under their boats. It looks way cooler when there are people attached to the containers underwater -- but it's utterly unclear whey they need to be there. Once Devara discovers that the containers hold weapons, he destroys everything and tells the villagers they will only fish in the sea and will no longer be involved in smuggling. He is somewhat opposed by Bhaira (Saif Ali Khan), who wants money more than principle. Annoyed that Devara has called off smuggling, Bhaira arranges a wedding so that he can set up Devara to be assassinated at the wedding. Devara's pretty hammered -- you can tell because he's lurching around and that is acting my friend -- and they set him up down by the beach. He is still far more powerful and takes out all 50 attackers, all by himself, in a highly stylized battle. At one point, he slashes someone's chest and it makes an arc of blood that perfectly fits into the missing piece of the crescent moon. This makes 300 look realistic. It's not supposed to be realistic, though; it's supposed to be awesome, which it honestly kind of is. Devara leaves a pile of impaled bodies and a message that he will punish anyone who smuggles. It's pretty convincing. This is all told as a flashback, as a story told my an older member of Devara's village. He tells the story to an undercover cop, who shows up to convince Devara to help him smuggle goods across the Red Sea. The old man shows the cop an army of bodies at the bottom of the sea and makes an effort to explain how that came to be. The 50 bodies of the wedding massacre...are not those bodies. That's the next part of the story. 12 years later, Bhaira has trained an army of youth to kill Devara. Like, he's not had anything better to do for a dozen years. Devara's son Vara grew up looking just like Devara...but he's not at all like his father. Instead of winning the battle for his village, Vara begs Bhaira for the weapons. Somewhat surprisingly, Vara ends up calling for the battle instead. There's a subplot where the girls are all scheming to get husbands. Thangam (Janhvi Kapoor) thinks she's the prettiest and gets to have her pick of the men. The women definitely have a secondary role; it's pretty telling that Devara's wife is only listed as "Devara's wife" in the credits. During the battle, Thangam's on the fence about whether Vara is worthy. Vara has a sort of drunken-master fighting style, where he stumbles and then pulls off an awesome move that looks accidental. Time for a music video with Thangam and Vara. Bhaira and his evil crew start a rumor that Devara is dead; his mother takes ill at the news. As she nears death, they grow certain that he will return to visit her. Bhaira and his crew lie in wait. He evades them but they give chase. The chase scene through the forest is pretty amazing, everyone rolling down the hill in the dry leaves, with Devara shooting around like a superhero. He escapes; Bhaira is furious. They grow bolder, threatening Devara's wife and daughter. Vara goes to them and starts to feel his inherited power, destroying about a dozen men. Time for a music video with Thangam and Vara. This one has an even better dance number. Vara is told that he'd killed a man the night before, so he goes to beg Bhaira for forgiveness. Bhaira tells him that if he goes on the next smuggling mission that night, during which they hope to kill Devara, they will be even. They manage to steal the weapons but Devara shows up, attacking from below, seemingly without the need for air, slicing people up and destroying boats with the grenades that they'd stolen. Bhaira's trained army is in the water, while Devara is standing on a burning boat, ready to kick more ass. The head of the village Singappa (Prakash Raj) finally reveals to Devara's wife that her husband has been dead for a long time; it is his son Vara who's been pretending to be an idiot while he defended the shores and the Red Sea in his father's name. His preferred method of killing in slashing his enemies in the back with his small, curved, hand-sword (a Chakram?). Vara's riding a shark. Vara brings back a boat-full of corpses. He tells Singappa that he wants to keep the legend alive, to have people believe that his father is still out there. To do this, he must also die, so it looks like Devara had left the corpses. This will prevent another generation from taking to the sea for weapons. Vara asks Singappa to slash him to death. He can't do it. Vara kills himself on a blade he mounts on the boat. He looks dead, but there's a part two coming up, so it's not likely. The movie is, as you can imagine, highly stylized, with Devara and Vara portrayed as quasi-deities, like superheros. There is a singing and dancing number near the beginning. There are two others between chapters. There is an elaborate ritual-combat scene that Devara wins, of course, but not until after a bit of kayfabe-style back-and-forth. It's hero-worship at a ludicrous level: Devara is the most moral, the most principled, the best warrior, the strongest, the best dancer. Everyone loves him, except for bad people. I gotta admit, though, that, by the end, it won me over. The language is overwrought and some of the acting, too, but it's just a matter of getting used to it. Then you appreciate the telling of a grand saga, with some nice twists and turns. It was a little long and self-indulgent but it's completely apparent why Rao is a star. Maybe If I watched more of these, I would recognize it for the trash that it I'm sure aficionados would deem it, but I'm just a humble guy who lives some fun fight and dance choreography. I can give a Marvel movie an 8, then I guess Devara gets an 8 too. I watched it in English because I couldn't figure out what the original language was. Even in what I think was the original Telugu, it felt like it had been synchronized with people reading from a script. Disappear Completely (2022) -- "8/10" This is the story of an obsessive photographer Santiago (Harold Torres). He's quite talented, if not just unscrupulous but downright ghoulish. He sneaks into a building to get photos of a body, where he and the attending officer discover that the man is actually alive, despite having been partially eaten by rats. The next victim is a pregnant woman who seems to come alive, but it's just his mind playing tricks on him, making him have a seizure. Santiago loses his sense of smell. They show him working on his pictures a few times. He's supposed to be an artist, but they also show him dragging the Contrast slider around on his photos. That is the sledgehammer of tools. No-one who's serious uses that tool. Do better. Santiago loses his sense of taste. His girlfriend of 14 years Marcela (Tete Espinoza) is pregnant. She thinks that they're not doing well as a couple, but that having a child together will straighten everything out. Classic. You do you, girl, but that relationship is doomed. Santiago sneaks into a hospital to visit the man that they'd found alive, who is apparently a senator, but it's largely if not completely irrelevant to the plot. He discovers that the senator had also lost his sense of smell and taste -- and that he'd also gone blind and deaf, and couldn't feel anything. Back at home, Santiago has vivid nightmares. His dog bites him. His dog is obsessed with getting something from under the kitchen cupboard. It's a mangled frog. Santiago is falling apart. Next to the dog bite, he steps on a broken beer bottle; and he still has a head wound. The doctors say that nothing is wrong with him. One of his police friends Oficial José Luis Basurto 'Cabo Catoche' (Fermín Martínez) says that it's witchcraft, especially after he sees the frog. He sends him to an "expert" (Norma Reyna). She tells him that someone has cursed him. Santiago loses his sense of touch. She proves this to him by putting out a cigar on his chest after he's closed his eyes as instructed. He feels nothing. He doesn't feel the air conditioner. He can't feel his jeans. It is a powerful curse. She tells him he has two days left: hearing and sight. She gives him a list of things to gather for a ritual -- a sacrifice -- to get rid of the curse. She can't do it herself, but she knows someone who can: for 100,000 pesos. One of the things he needs to bring is his dog, Zombie. The ritual might have been lifted straight from Twin Peaks. Zombie won't stop barking. Santiago stops his barking, not without regret. But he does it. The shaman pours the dog's blood over his head. In the morning, the curse has been lifted. His senses, however, will not return. He returns to his partner. They make love. It's quite nicely filmed. He feels nothing, of course. They sleep. In the morning, he wakes to a thrumming noise. His partner fishes a moth out of his ear. Alive. His hearing is dulled. He cuts himself to prove to Marcela what has happened. She doesn't quite believe him. He leaves, returns to the site of the ritual. The shaman has died of a heart attack in the interim. The magic of the curse was too much, even for him. Santiago returns home; Marcela is gone; she's out looking for Zombie. 🥹 Santiago returns to the scene of the first crime, where he has found a mysterious face reflected in a mirror in one of his pictures. He sneaks back in to the senator's house, with nothing to lose. He finds the senator's curse-frog. He returns to the police but they can't really help him. Oficial Lupe Sampredo (Vicky Araico) suggests he could find out who might want to have harmed the first victim, a senator. He finds a powerful woman who's profited tremendously from his removal -- and who's been accused of witchcraft. He is a step further; her former driver gives him a clue, tells him that it's a very evil man in that photo. "You should never have taken that picture." Santiago has almost completely lost his sense of hearing. He is in the evil man's house. This is a slow boiler, very simply and elegantly done. The lack of hearing at the end is unnerving. The evil man is by the fire; Santiago sees him, then he's gone. He can't hear him approach. Santiago is taken. Has he been drugged? Or is his vision starting to go? The shadow speaks. It wants his firstborn, his unborn child. It hands Santiago a vial. He makes Marcela a tea, emptying the vial into it. Santiago is completely deaf. His vision is going. At the last second, he swats the mug of tea from her hands. Darkness. The credits are very nicely formatted, accompanied by the song "How to Disappear Completely" by Radiohead . I watched it in Spanish with Spanish/English subtitles. Sisu (2022) -- "8/10" Aatami (Jorma Tommila) is in the deep wilderness of Lapland, living near a meandering river on an undifferentiated moor, covered in heath but utterly bereft of trees. He discovers gold, a lot of it. He packs it up on his horse, packs his tepee, and, with poodle-dog in tow, heads back toward civilization. On his final bath on the morning he departs, we are treated to the older man's tough sinews and some of his barely or poorly healed scars. Aatami encounters Nazis on the road. One, a filthy, deliberately ape-like Nazi (Jack Doolan), drops from the back of a transport that holds young girls, dragging his suspenders back up over his bare shoulders. The commander (Aksel Hennie) sits on a tank, eyeing the passing horseman with a steely, wary gaze. They lock eyes. The commander stops his filthy compatriot from shooting Aatami in the back because "he's riding to his death anyway." Aatami passes by men hanging by their necks from every power-line pole, arriving at the first checkpoint. The soldiers are as you would expect. They discover his gold. They try to shoot his dog. Aatami unloads a can of whoop-ass with an opening move even better than any of John Wick's. He just drives a hunting knife straight through the most belligerent of the Nazis, from temple to temple. None of the either scuffles last much longer. There is a lot of blood. Their ends are unequivocal. The tank column returns, having heard the gunfire. They give chase. There is nowhere to hide in this terrain Aatami's horse hits a mine and is in ruins, an inside-out mess. He mourns it and doubtless finds only solace in knowing that it died instantaneously. His gold is scattered. The tank approaches. He's still shaking off the cobwebs and gathering gold when the entire column, bristling with soldiers pulls up. He nearly completely ignores them. Just as they're about to shoot, he triggers a mine, then another, throwing up a giant cloud of dust. The Germans fire into it. He backpedals, making like Captain America with a small, metal shield. He unerringly throws a mine right onto the head of the first soldier they send in. Regular mines take out the next two. The next chapter "The Legend" begins with yoked female prisoners leading the tank column. We learned at the very beginning that "Sisu" means a combination of "stoic determination, tenacity of purpose, grit, bravery, resilience, and hardiness" and is "held by Finns to express their national character." Now we learn that Aatami is basically a Finnish Rambo, who's earned the Russian nickname "Коще́й (Koshchei)" , which is "an archetypal male antagonist in Russian folklore," and means "immortal" or "deathless." As we were all very much hoping, the Germans completely ignore the advice to leave Aatami alone -- with the excuse that they need the old man's gold in order to buy their freedom after the inevitable and hastening German capitulation. Aatami patches some bullet wounds and falls asleep by a burnt-out wreck of a truck. The tank column passes him. He hitches a ride under a passing truck. He pops the gas tanks, causing the dogs to lose the scent. Aatami runs, but is clipped in the calf. He sets himself on fire to dissuade the chasing dog -- 😳😳😳 -- and jumps into a nearby lake. They give chase, again. He remains underwater and starts taking out soldiers who come down after him. I love how they all jump in with all of their woolen clothes, steel helmets, and weapons. Aatami needs, apparently, very little air. After the Germans shoot their own deserter, Aatami drags the deserter's boat to the opposite shore. Shirtless, hairy German fires on him with the large-caliber tank gun. No luck. The Germans get a hold of Aatami's dog. Aatami hikes further, seemingly unperturbed and unhindered by his many bullet wounds and by having set himself on fire, if only briefly. He comes to a burning city, hunkers down for the night. His wounds make themselves known. His nightmares are worse. His dog is back, but with a grenade attached. He saves it but the grenade stuns him unconscious. The Germans find him and hang him. A deeply scarred and Mongolian-looking soldier doffs his tank-cap; the German commander follows suit. They end up giving him some respect. The commander places a nugget of gold in Aatami's pocket: "for your troubles." Aatami was shamming. It was their fault for thinking that hanging is by strangulation, when it's usually by the weight of the body dropping and breaking its own neck. They'd just dragged him up from the ground, relatively gently. But he can't do keep breathing like that forever, so, somehow, he hooks his leg wound into a protruding spike to hold his weight. Sure. OK. He's Коще́й. He passes out. His dog returns. German pilots land. The disturbance breaks the hanging post; his rope starts to slip and finally drops off the end of the crossbar, crashing him to the ground. The pilots are looking for fuel. Aatami incapacitates both of them. One of those pilots is going to fly him back to the tank column. But first, Aatami's got several dozen pieces of shrapnel to remove from himself and some impromptu stitching to do, with what look like fishhooks, and then some gasoline to disinfect and flaring matches to cauterize his various other holes. The plane takes off; the dog stays, drinking water out of an upturned German helmet. The tank column stops at a crashed plane blocking the road. The pilot has been hanged...with the hairy German's rope. The Nazis are rightly terrified and flee. In the prisoner transport, Aino (Mimosa Willamo) speaks, "Aino: Do you assholes really think you have succeeded where hundreds of Russians have died trying? Soldier: Do you really believe he's immortal? Aino: No. He just refuses to die." This is absolutely Rambo: First Blood, but Finnish. A pick-axe drops one soldier, then the next. Aatami swings into the transport, pretty as you please, bloody but unbowed, and just bristling with weapons. He gets onto the tank; now it's starting to feel a bit like Fury Road They pull up alongside the troop truck and just annihilate everyone in that truck. It's just the tank remaining, with Aatami standing atop it, pick-axe aloft. Wolf (hairy German) gets out and manages to dislodge Aatami. As he is about to finish Wolf, a motorcycle with sidecar pulls up. Aatami points the pickaxe at them and growls. They abandon the vehicle. Aatami drives off in pursuit of the tank. The well-armed ladies show up to finish off Wolf. Aatami drives up the runway, straight at the oncoming plane, firing away, starring the windshield and grievously wounding the pilot. He hooks the pickaxe into the fuselage and eventually digs his way through the outer hell and then the decking. He's inside. The commander goes to the back and beats the hell out of him but he can't knock him out. Even with an iron hook to the head, Aatami still struggles onward. He's really, really messed-up now. It's horrific how much punishment his head takes. I haven't seen the like since "The Punisher" But, you know, Sisu. Clear-eyed, he struggles up, catching the hook at the end of the strap on the next swing and smoothly snapping it to a Soviet bomb, which he promptly drops. Bye, bye, commander. Next problem: the pilot is done for. The plane is heading down. It nose-dives straight into the ground. Aatami has strapped himself up with his bag of gold. Interlude: the ladies drive up to a Finnish roadblock in the tank, with Wolf hog-tied to the barrel of the cannon. Scene: In a giant puddle in a field, bubbles. Then, a leather bag. Then, a pickaxe. Scene: Aatami rides up to a bank, presumably in Helsinki, on a motorcycle, to make a deposit. He looks a bit worse for wear. He asks for bills, big ones. Easier to carry. I can imagine the cheers in a Finnish cinema. Lumberjack the Monster (2023) -- "8/10" There are a lot of moving parts in this police-procedural/psycho-thriller/horror movie by director Takashi Miike, who is Japan's answer to Canada's David Cronenberg. He loves anime-style blood gushers, does our Takashi. We start off with a police raid of a Silence of the Lambs-style female serial killer's home. The police infiltrate the hom, reaching a surgical theater where a child with a head bandage sits, reading the storybook Lumberjack the Monster. The doctor will not go quietly. When the police find 15 other children's bodies preserved in oil drums in a nearby room, she first threatens the child then slashes her own throat. Flash forward to modern day. Akira Ninomiya (Kazuya Kamenashi) hunts down and kills someone who'd been spying on his activities. His associate Sugitani (Shota Sometani) is a fellow psychopath, with whom he has several discussions that fill in background information that you will need in order to even begin to know what's going on. The Lumberjack Monster shows up in a parking garage, nearly taking out Akira; he takes all of the money out of his wallet and eats it before the police can arrive (later, we learn that he did this to prevent the police from thinking that his attack was related to the others). As Akira is recovering from his head wound in the hospital, the doctor informs him that he has a "neuro chip". He had no idea; apparently, it had been implanted when he'd been an orphan. Sugitani explains that, in this timeline, they'd been all the rage 30 years ago but their use had been discontinued as unethical. On Sugitami's desk behind him is a book titled Surgical surgery book. I love it. The Lumberjack Monster has killed two people so far, both of them highly unethical people and both of them former orphans. Drop-dead gorgeous Arashiko Toshiro (Nanao) is the forensic profiler from outside of the precinct, and she's forced to work with roguish and rogue detective Inui (Kiyohiko Shibukawa). They investigate the third victim. Toshiro had said that, should there be a third victim, then the person's death would be partially the fault of the police, for having failed to catch the serial killer before they could strike again. Akira's fiancé is Emi (Riho Yoshioka). Their relationship is complicated but I can't tell if it's more complicated because he's a psychopath or more complicated because I don't know anything about the dynamics of Japanese power-couples. We find out in a flashback that he'd killed his future father-in-law. Akira is out running in what I would call utterly inappropriate clothing. He passes by a father berating and beating his young daughter. After he's intervened -- I guess he's an ethical psychopath? -- Lumberjack Monster shows up with his hatchet again. Akira fights back -- again. He manages to unmask the creature but doesn't recognize him, escaping soon after by jumping off of the pedestrian bridge. Later, as Toshiro is questioning Akira again, Emi walks in to the room to chide Toshiro for having asked Akira a rude question. Toshiro doesn't even look at her, instead asking Akira who she is. That was absolutely wild. I can't imagine anyone doing that in culture I know -- you would just have asked the lady herself -- but I don't know if this is a thing in Japan, where you don't interact with people to whom you haven't been formerly introduced? Or maybe it's a police power-move? Nope: "If you're not his wife, please leave us. This is a crucial investigation." That's cold, Toshiro. Meanwhile, Akira discovers that he no longer has the stomach for killing. Sugitani takes over the wet work. Afterward, they discuss what might be "wrong" with Akira; why can he no longer kill? They're discovering the history of the orphanages, abducted children, neuro-chip implants, and the possible origins of the Lumberjack Monster at the same time as the police are pursuing the same path. Another weird cultural fact rears up in an old detective's description of the initial abduction: he says that one of the couples whose child has been kidnapped had been shopping and discovered that their child was no longer waiting in the car. Wait. What? They left the kid in the car? Is that a thing in Japan? That could never be a believable and unremarked plot point in a U.S.-American movie. Anyway, we learn that the couple with the lab/operating theater who we'd seen at the very beginning had been experimenting on abducted children. Toshiro's investigations lead her to an assistant of the couple, who'd been killed three months ago. The Lumberjack Monster had stolen the list of children there. She's now the rogue cop, not Inui! She had a look at Akira's medical records without a warrant. Akira slowly learns what emotions are, now that his chip has been disabled. He visits his old elementary school with Emi. This is like a reverse A Clockwork Orange, where he'd been turned into a psychopath and had now turned back. The Lumberjack Monster kidnaps Emi to lure Akira to the old lab to which they'd both been kidnapped as children. The Lumberjack Monster had his neuro-chip disabled when Inui had knocked him about a few years back, when he was still Kenmochi and still a psychopath who'd killed his wife for the insurance money. Realizing the error of his artificially psychopathic ways, he's made it his mission to eliminate the rest of the neuro-chipped psychopaths. It's a bit complicated with Akira, though, who's already no longer a psychopath. Akira bests him in battle, but can't kill him. He had to admit to Emi, though, that he'd killed her father. He owes her a great debt, so he will not surgically alter himself back to a psychopath. They discuss whether it is worth it to live with the guilt and pain of all of the damage they'd done. The Lumberjack Monster reveals that he is Takeshi, a little boy who'd tried to save Akira from the surgery, when they were both children. "Good luck with being human...Akira." Takeshi, though, cannot live with his pain and guilt. He flicks his cigarette into a pile of flammable chemicals after Akira has left with Emi. Toshiro visits Akira at the office, where she promises to bring him down eventually. His partner Sugitani is disappointed that Akira has refused the surgery to restore his psychopathy -- he really wanted to operate on a human. A cat'll do, though. At home, Akira tries to patch things up with Emi. He is stunned to realize that she has stabbed him. He approaches her and chokes her but stops just after bruising her, giving her the excuse of self-defense. He dies on the floor, reciting from the Lumberjack Monster story. I was entertained. If you like Japanese police procedurals, it's a pretty straightforward one, in the end. Dinner in America (2020) -- "9/10" Simon (Kyle Gallner) is a free spirit, an anarchist. He deals drugs. Moms love him. They kind of want to get with him. He has no trouble lying through his teeth. He does not follow rules. He sucks Xanax directly from his prescription bottle. He smokes. Ostentatiously. He's like Bender from Breakfast Club. He aggressively doesn't take any shit from society or its representatives. He is pretty punk, actually. At the bank, when the teller asks him for another form of ID, he tells her it's not a $100 bill and to "just cash the fucking thing or [he'll] report her for discrimination". He gets his money; he doesn't have to show ID; he stalks up the street with an unlit cigarette in his face. In a diner, when he's making a scene, he tells another lady, "Lady, you mind your own fuckin' business and you and me, we're gonna get along just fine." For every question he doesn't want to answer? "Don't worry about it." He meets Patty (Emily Skeggs) when she declines to rat him out to the police, She is also a free spirit but in a less aggressively societally challenging way. People call her retard all the time, but she's not mentally handicapped. She just pretty much doesn't care what people think. She's on five different medications. She is an odd duck, with odd mannerisms, who can't believe that he would lie about missionary work in Tanzania. She is also very much into punk music. She masturbates to it, then takes a polaroid. She's not without her own edge. Simon discovers that she loves a legit punk band and starts to grudgingly respect her, thinking perhaps the book doesn't really match the cover. He doesn't like her flailing-around dance-style. She tells him how much she loves the lead singer, who always wears a ski mask on stage. She writes him love letters, to John Q. Public. Simon gets letters addressed to John Q. Public at his P.O. box. Now he realizes he's holing up in the house of a stan who's been sending him polaroids of herself masturbating to his music. He hightails it out of there. He hunts down his band members to tear them a new asshole for having signed up for a concert with a weak-ass headliner act. He wants to be punk; he doesn't want a big break. He wants to make a record without selling out. Simon: You don't wanna play to a sea of cellphones, do you? Bunch of pussies doin' the stand-and-stare. That's not what music is, is it? He's on the lam, so he heads back to Patty's house to bunk up with her younger brother Kevin (Griffin Gluck). This is not punk. But sitting out on the garage roof with Kevin, drinking a tallboy while Kevin smokes his first joint is. The next morning, Patty's looking for a job. When Simon asks for coffee, she says "It's cold. I'm not supposed to have anything turned on when I'm alone in the house." We learn that there might be something wrong with her -- or maybe it's just her very weird parents. Simon: What are you doin'? Patty: I'm looking for my purpose. Simon: Your purpose? Patty: Mom says I need to find my purpose now that I lost my job at the Pet Zone. Patty: Look, she circled all the good ones. Simon: Let me see that. Dishwasher? That's a shit job. Patty: Yeah, that's what I said but then Dad said maybe I could work my way up to the prep table. Simon: Oh my God. That's so fuckin' bleak it's making me lightheaded. New mission: get her severance check. Bus. They run into the assholes from the track team. One of them drops Simon like a bad habit. New mission: get his friend's truck and a baseball bat. License plate: 69URMOM. "Get your polaroid, a trash bag, and meet me out back." New mission: get those track-star assholes back -- they are truly horrific. Lure 'em with her wiles, drop 'em with a bat, strip 'em, burn their clothes, drop the dead cat on them, take a picture. Old mission: get the paycheck. They are getting shit done. At lunch, she's acting a lot less weird. Someone's treating her like a person. They share their first kiss. Simon: You're a real good kisser. I would not have guessed that. Patty: Thanks. I guess all my practice with Kevin paid off. Simon: [stares] Patty: Well, he's not my real brother. He's adopted. Simon: [stares] Patty: I'm just fucking with you. Simon: You need to take it down a notch. Montage at the arcade. Lots of skeeball tickets. Not enough for the big bear. He steals more tickets out of the machine. The bear's name is Chomby. They're at home. Kevin's high as f@&k. His girlfriend Jill is there. She's not wearing pants. Or underwear. She made brownies. Patty's parents Norm (Pat Healy) and Connie (Mary Lynn Rajskub) are high as f@&k too. Patty: Mom? Why aren't you and Dad wearing any pants? Connie: I'm not sure. New day, new mission. They break into a house. It's his stuff. His parents' house. He confesses that he's John Q. She doesn't believe him. He shows he the letters she'd sent to him. He loved them. He loved the "love poems" she sent to him. He loved the pictures. She jumps his bones. After, he plays for her. Now it's her turn. He wants her to sing one of her songs. She's good! It's good! Simon: [with tears in his eyes] That was tits. Patty: Is tits good? Simon: Yeah. Yeah. Tits is good. Simon's Mom shows up. They're at another meal. (Dinner in America, remember?) His family is the worst. He keeps his cool until his sister pokes fun at Patty for not knowing what a "pyro" is. Then he flips out. They're back in the truck. Patty: Simon? Simon: Yeah? Patty: Do you think I'm a retard? Simon: [screeches to a halt] Don't you ever talk like that. Ever. You are not a retard. You are a total punk rocker. Simon: Yes. You are punk as fuck. Patty: Can we listen to our song in here? Simon: Fuck yeah. Put that shit in the tape deck. They're at the secret show. The promoter of the other show is pissed. Simon will not compromise. He is punk. He is anarchy. He was no use for the music business. They can't get their hooks into him. Two of his band members give him up, showing the promoter that Simon's wanted by the police. Simon's on, shirtless, black balaclava. Small show. It reminds me of a "Gothic Slam" show I went to a long time ago. Patty is having the time of her life. The cops show up. Instead of running away, he runs toward them, chasing his traitorous bassist. He's in the back of the squad car. Patty: Hey. I got your cigarettes. Simon: Aw, that's fuckin' tits. Simon: Sorry about this shitty fuckin' date. They don't get much worse than this. Patty: It's ok. I'm just happy I got to see you play. Chills. Shrinking S02 (2024) -- "6/10" I "watched and reviewed season 1 earlier last year" and found it to be a reasonably solid show. The acting is good, the timing is good, and a reasonable amount of the dialogue is witty. It's a bit much at times, with nearly every conversation just filled to the brim with what I'm sure the writers would deem "sparkling wit" but real people don't talk in one-liners all the time and it's a bit tiring after a while. Still, it's a lot better than a lot of other stuff. I'm going to cite part of my review of season 1 because this summary goes double for season 2. "I’m just going to break it to you: everyone in this show is pretty rich and they all spend so much time feeling kinda sorry for themselves, even though their lives are nearly infinitely better than everyone else’s. This is a common trend in the American zeitgeist: you are expected to be disappointed in your lot in life if anyone else is doing better than you or if anyone else gets anything that you don’t have. It’s a pretty nauseating moral stance but it’s becoming more and more evident to me that this is how the populace is being trained: so many TV shows are set up like this and people I’ve anecdotally talked to in the U.S. act like this too." In this season as in the last, the shittiest, most broken people are two of the supposed super-therapists. They really, really lean into the notion that people can be terrible and still be super-helpful in helping other people find their better selves. Those two people are the ostensible star of the show Jimmy (Jason Segal) and his co-worker, friend, and ex-lover Gaby (Jessica Williams). They are not relentlessly shitty, though. They're funny and fun and generally you'll not notice that they're shitty, until you actually pay attention to what they're doing -- and what they're doing is, in large ways, not OK and their group of friends are horrible enablers. The show is also largely unaware of how biased toward the wealthy it is. The only people that it depicts as two-dimensional assholes with no history and no motivation and pure evil in their hearts are the construction workers, who are the only working-class people in the show. They're in two episodes. Everyone else in the show lives in a fantasy world enabled by their largely unexplained and unjustified wealth where everything they try works out and all of their problems are pretty much of their own making. Gaby outs herself as a person completely incapable of dealing with life when she aborts on letting her mom move in with her at the last possible second -- after her ancient mother had already packed up her entire apartment. The immaturity is through the roof. Not only that, but she also proves utterly incapable of establishing a stable and loving relationship with Derrick #2 (Damon Wayans Jr.) because he wants her but doesn't need her. Her entire personality revolves around caring for people, so she can't be around people who don't need anything. This is red-flag, broken behavior for which she doesn't have to pay for very long because he forgives her pretty quickly. This show, in fact, is very much about forgiving very quickly, if not instantaneously. This is therapy? This is what you should expect from other people? You confess to them that you've done something horrible that very negatively affected their life and the expectation is that they forgive you immediately. If they don't? Then they're the asshole. The lessons taught by this show are incredibly damaging and selfish. Jimmy is such a terrible therapist and human being that he couldn't care less that his daughter Alice (Lukita Maxwell) had discovered a broken human being in Louis (Brett Goldstein) and wanted not only to help him but also to let him help her get over the loss of her mother. Why can't Jimmy do that? Because Louis is the drunk driver who killed his wife and Alice's mother. So Jimmy can't get past it, because Louis now reminds him of what a terrible father he was for the year after his wife died. But he's a therapist! He has a duty to get help for people who are giving all indications that they're suicidal! He doesn't have to provide the guy with therapy, but it literally didn't occur to any of the star therapists in this show to help Louis. Not one of them, not even Paul (Harrison Ford). None of them have to personally care about him -- hell, they can continue to hate him for having taken away Jimmy's wife -- but they have a duty to see that he gets help. This is the equivalent of an E.R. doctor walking away from someone with a gunshot wound because they're an asshole. Honorable mentions for shittiness also go to Liz (Christa Miller), who revels in being a bitch -- and all of her friends are enablers of it. Her budging in line is not funny. It's utter asshole-ery. She also cheated on her sweet, sweet Derrick #1 (Ted McGinley) -- who's still the best character on the show -- and then reasserted dominance and control soon enough (it's what Derrick wanted anyway, so that's OK). Maybe it's her awful, awful plastic surgery that I can't get past. She's mostly quite funny but, man, some of the stuff she does -- like cutting the line at the food truck -- is so wildly off-base and no-one cares. Alice is also a completely basic character, evincing almost no personality except "generic rich American teenager who hangs out only with adults." Her instinct to help Louis was good but the help was reciprocal -- and she explained the relationship to her father as it helping her not it helping him. She also sleeps with her best friend's lover, even though she didn't want him when he was in love with her. This is shitty. No-one chastises her for it. Instead, it's her friend Summer who's treated like the slut who doesn't deserve any respect. Summer's a dumb joke whereas Alice is a brilliant angel. Throughout the show, we're treated to a parade of rich adults serving Alice's every whim, with no small amount of constant praise and presents flowing in her direction. The show completely and utterly normalizes teenagers being entitled to treating their parents like ATMs. It's like watching U.S. police procedurals that brainwash you into thinking that the Bill of Rights doesn't exist (see the "review for Bad Sisters S02 below" <#Sisters>). That's one form of propaganda. In this case, the show trains people to believe that their offspring can never have enough privilege, that they are in fact entitled to it. Louis starts off -- and then ends -- the season as the most obviously damaged person in need of actual, real help in order to keep himself from killing himself and they all ignore the signs throughout the show because they are so inordinately selfish and turned inward on themselves and the holy members of their clique. Within the clique? Oh, that's a warm womb of loving; outside of the womb? Those people don't exist. Literally a hangnail on a member of the clique is more important than people starving in the street. This is the lesson we learn from this show. At the end of the show, after Louis almost throws himself in front of a train after having been abandoned not only by the clique but also by the friends he'd made at the café where he works, Apple had the absolute gall to show a message about reaching out and helping people who look like they need help. Are you kidding me!?! You just showed your entire inordinately wealthy cast completely ignore a million warning signs that it is their literal job to notice and respond to. WTF. Paul is quite good; Julie (Wendy Malick) is pretty good, even though her personality at this point is to be equivocal about everything and never, ever find anything that the irascible Paul does to be ... well ... irascible. Sean's very funny and seems to be completely healed to the point where Jimmy looks like an utter hopeless idiot next to the poised, rational being that is Sean. Brian (Michael Urie) is still great. He's consistently hilarious. He and his husband Charlie (Devin Kawaoka) are looking to adopt, which is one of the plot threads. Getting to know Louis is another plot thread. Jimmy's nearly unbelievable inability to get his legs under him after two years is another plot thread. Alice's being put on a pedestal by everyone she knows is another plot thread. Sean (Luke Tennie) reconciling with his father and running a food truck with him is another. Liz cheating on Derrick and them coming through it stronger is another. Gaby starting teaching but being utterly incapable of having an adult relationship is another. I think that's all that happened. As in the first season, it's a sometimes-blinding flurry of activity and one-liners and stuff. I laughed out loud a few times, though. It's fine. It's just tiresome sometimes watching shows that are so lazily inconsistent, so obviously pushing an agenda of which the writers aren't even aware. It's about a bunch of rich people who don't even know that they're rich. You should see their homes! Incredible! Just accepted as normal that this is how people live. And I have to reiterate that this is a show about the best therapists ever but Jimmy is still just as broken two years later despite his being surrounded only by loving people and many of those being incredible therapists. Is that the point they're making about therapy? That it takes years to make zero progress no matter how much money you pay or how many good people you have in your life? That's pretty bleak. Taxi Driver (1976) -- "8/10" Travis Bickle (Robert De Niro) signs up to drive a cab because he can't sleep anyway. He takes the 6PM to 6AM shift. He's obsessed with Betsy (Cybill Shepherd), who works with Tom (Albert Brooks) at the campaign office of presidential candidate Charles Palantine (Leonard Harris). He crashes the place and his forthright oddness charms her into meeting him for lunch. She continues to be intrigued by his off-putting but unique manner. Something is off but she doesn't seem to mind so much. Can we spend a few seconds just thinking about how gorgeous Cybill Shepherd is? My God, what a natural beauty. It's no wonder he couldn't stop stalking her. Not that it was OK. They move on from lunch to a movie date. He takes her to a porno theater. That's the only kind of movie he knows and he thought it was perfectly appropriate to take her there on a first date. He convinces her to go inside, saying that there are a lot of couples who go. It looks like a Swedish sex-education qua porn film. This was probably true in the mid-70s, at least to some degree. There were actually other couples in there, though. Anyway, Betsy bails. Bickle meets up at night with other cab drivers, like motormouth Wizard (Peter Boyle), Charlie T. (Norman Matlock), and Doughboy (Harry Northup), but they're not really great friends with him. He's either in his cab, in his small apartment, or watching porn. He's a Vietnam War veteran -- no details given other than that he was in the Marines -- and he's deeply lonely and bored. He obviously has PTSD. He's only 26 years old and he doesn't have any of the skills he needs to navigate a society outside of where he currently is. He's too unsettling, and not smart enough to be that unsettling. It backfires on him with Betsy when he falls back on a more direct approach. Travis Bickle's loneliness reminded me a bit of Arthur Fleck, although Fleck spent more of his own film being pathetic and pitiable. Travis is about on the maturity level of Holden Caulfield from Catcher in the Rye. At one point, on his route, an obviously underaged prostitute tries to escape in his cab. Her pimp drags her back out of the car and throws Travis a filthy $20-dollar bill. Her name is Iris (Jodie Foster) and his name is Sport (Harvey Keitel). Travis is obviously conflicted, feeling like he should have helped her. The thought simmers. He finds Sport and pays for time with Iris. She's enthusiastic but he tells her he only wants to help her. She's kind of mystified but agrees to see him for breakfast. At breakfast, she's got a great pair of green sunglasses on, while they talk about going to a commune in Vermont. She switches out to pink sunglasses. Jodie Foster is a natural, and she was only 14 at the time. After Betsy stops seeing him -- which she'd only been doing for a couple of dates -- Travis gives in to the dark thoughts that he'd confessed to Wizard. He meets with Andy (Steven Prince) to buy a gun. Andy gives us a wonderful introduction to the various weapons. Travis buys four of them, plus a giant holster for the .44 Magnum. Travis is a tiny person; even Betsy towered over him. He's very thin, rangy -- wiry. (In this way, he's also very much like Arthur Fleck.) He starts working out again: clap push-ups, chin-ups, etc. He hits the gun range with all of his guns. He practices pulling his guns from the various holsters secreted about his body, including a knife he tapes to his cowboy boot. He's ready to go. He hits a campaign event, probably to see what it feels like to be out in public with his arsenal strapped to his body, under his oversized military coat. His entire interaction with the Secret Service officer at Palantine's campaign stop is so disturbing and unsettling that it's not wonder that all of the alarm bells were going off. He cannot even tell that he is utterly incapable of holding a conversation with anyone who's not like his crazy cabbie colleagues. He descends deeper into darkness. He's shaved his head into a mohawk. He's sent a bunch of money to Iris to escape from Sport. He writes to her that he will almost certainly be dead by the time she gets it. He's ready. He heads to another campaign event, looking for his chance. He hurries through the crowd, hand seeking a pistol inside his jacket. The Secret Service sees him and gives chase. He is outtathere, getting away easily. Not wanting to waste a good arsenal and all of his training and preparation, Later that night, Travis heads off to save Iris. This is absolutely not like a modern-day fight scene. There's a lot of blood and a lot of grittiness. He shoots Sport, then Sport's sleazy partner. He takes damage. He goes upstairs, with both of the other guys coming back to hit him again. There is no doubt that people are feeling bullet wounds. Travis stumbles upstairs and encounters Iris's current john, who shoots him point-blank in the shoulder. Travis shoots him in the face, dropping him through Iris's door. He follows him in, getting tackled by Sport's partner again, then shooting him point-blank in the face, while Iris screams her head off. On his knees, Travis places his own gun under his chin and clicks his way through two empty pistols before lying back on the sofa, either exhausted or dead. The police arrive and see him. His eyes open to slits; his head tips briefly up; he lets it fall back to the sofa again, clearly uninterested in what comes next, almost hoping that they'll shoot him. They do not. He's not dead. He's a hero. We see adulatory newspaper clippings. The media neither knows nor cares that he'd almost shot a presidential candidate. Neither does it know nor care that he tried to kill himself. None of that fits the story. Iris's father reads a letter to him in voiceover, thanking him for having sent his girl home. He's a hero. Travis has found a new high -- he has society's appreciation for having rescued a child prostitute. Little does anyone know that he's no less crazy for it. He could just as easily have shot up the campaign stop, killing a presidential candidate and possibly a whole bunch of innocent bystanders. Instead, he managed to shoot two pimps and a what looks like a cop who'd been visiting an underage prostitute. After he's healed and back at his job, Betsy gets in his cab. He just takes her home but doesn't take her money, instead just favoring her with his unsettling grin. Why was she there? Because he's famous? The film leaves that open. I don't think he lost interest because she was kind of a star-fucker, though, but because he'd found a different way to scratch his particular mental itches. He was probably fine...for now. It would probably be a while before he would have to go back to the well, to get another bump of adulation from an adoring public. There is, of course, no guarantee that this is how it will work out the next time. I've read that some would describe him as having had an existential crisis but that's almost too high-falutin' a description. He has no place in society. There is nearly no way for him to bridge the immense gap between what he is and the bare minimum that society expects from a person. He's a time bomb, driving the streets, probably only one of many. The film showed us so many dark and depressed characters, so much suffering, so much depravity. He is not alone. There are Bickles around every corner., living "lives of quiet desperation." -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] These are notes for me to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. The amount of text is not proportional to my enjoyment. I might write less because I didn't get around to it when it was fresh in my mind. I rate the film based on how well it suited me personally for the genre, my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. Links are to "my IMDb ratings" [1] I hadn't seen a Jarmusch movie since "Broken Broken" but in that review from 13 years ago, I was already complaining about how bad Coffee and Cigarettes was. I mentioned that Alfred Molina was very good, though, so maybe a re-watching is in order. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5292 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5292 Tue, 07 Jan 2025 23:05:08 +0100 -- "9/10" 2. "Tschugger S03 (2024)" <#Tschugger3> -- "9/10" 3. "Tschugger S04 (2024)" <#Tschugger4> -- "9/10" 4. "Titans S01--S04 (2018--2023)" <#Titans> -- "7/10" 5. "Gundam: Requiem for Vengeance (2024)" <#Gundam> -- "5/10" 6. "One Punch Man S01--S02 (2015--2019)" <#OnePunchMan> -- "9/10" 7. "End of Watch (2012)" <#Watch> -- "7/10" 8. "The Boy and the Heron (2023)" <#Heron> -- "8/10" 9. "The Killer (2023)" <#Killer> -- "6/10" 10. "Operation Hyacinth (2021)" <#Hyacinth> -- "7/10" Tschugger S01--S02 (2021--2022) -- "9/10" This show is a labor of love by David Constantin, who wrote, directed, and starred in much of it. Mats Frey and Johannes Bachmann are co-creators and co-writers. I was already delighted just by this show's very existence. I am 100% on board with what they're cooking. The first two seasons are mostly in Swiss German, with a smattering of English, Italian, and French. The Swiss German is in a dialect unique to the canton of Wallis/Valais. It's different enough in pronunciation and slang that I sometimes had to rely on the German subtitles to decipher what had just happened. I learned a bunch of new words and linguistic nuances. The written German was almost hilariously stilted compared to the extremely free-style Swiss German of Wallis, which seems as far from Züridütsch as Züridütsch is from German. This show takes place in modern Switzerland but it feels like it was made in the 80s or 90s. Switzerland sometimes do be like that, though! We don't like change, so I wouldn't be 100% surprised if some police stations in Wallis are still just as antiquated as depicted in this show. If it ain't broke, don't fix it. The eponymous Tschugger (Wallis-slang for "cop") is Bax Schmidhalter (David Constantin), who acts like he's a cross between Crockett from Miami Vice and John McClane from Die Hard. He is super-self-confident but he's also kind of a loser? I like him. He's been with the force for 15 years and he's still kind of riding the fame he earned about 10 years ago, when he made a big bust. Since then, he's been chasing one white whale after another, never again landing anything that big. He has good instincts though, so his station chief Biffiger (Laurent Chevrier) gives him a relatively long leash and puts up with a lot shit. We meet Bax as he's getting to the police station, parking in a handicapped spot right in front of Annette Brotz (Anna Rossinelli), who's on an inspection visit from Fedpol (the national police). "Annette Sie sind auf einem Behinderten Parkplatz parkiert. Bax: Ich bin ja behindert [zeigt seiner Bandage] und übrigens in Wallis sagämer 'Personä mit bsonderä Bedürfnisse'." Bax is hot on the trail of a couple of pot-smugglers, who are using a drone to bring a giant bag in over the Italian border. He just needs to catch them red-handed. He gets the apprentice cop Patrick / Schmetterling (Cedric Schild) to go undercover and gives him a gun. He's a techie so he easily sells himself as a drone pilot and joins Valmira (Anna-Lena Miano) and Juni (Arséne Junior Page) up on the Simplon Pass to fly in a shipment. A word on Patrick: there are a lot of good characters in this show -- they almost all grow on you, they're so endearing, each in their own way -- but Patrick is really special. He has a speech defect -- and not just because he speaks Züridüütsch instead of Wallisdüütsch -- and he's just so earnest and nice and talented. They all grow on you, even if they start a little rough, but Schmetterling is just the best from the get-go. The other solid guy is Bax's brother (Fabrice Schalbetter), who's a doctor at the local hospital and an all-around cool guy. Schmetterling's undercover mission goes wrong and the out-of-power drone crashes in front of an Italian delivery truck, driven by two thuggish-looking Mafiosos. They tangle with Patrick, who shoots them but is shot himself. Long story short, Bax eventually finds him in the outhouse, like, in the bottom half, hiding. Filthy. In another thread, "Freu" Brotz is stationed there temporarily to investigate a wild party that the whole station had in the local forest (Pfynwald), where weapons were fired, and Bax had been shot through the hand. He hides the wound and tries to avoid getting the station-house in trouble -- else they'll be merged with the dreaded French station house and would all have to speak French at work. [2] There is, however, a person on the inside, working against Bax: his ex Greta, whom he doesn't suspect until it's far, far, far too late. He can't even conceive of her being as ruthless as she is -- a total blind spot. She's in cahoots with the Italian crew that was smuggling the spaghetti sauce over the border in order to bring in a sacred key that unlocks a mechanism that will trigger a bomb that will blow the Grand Dixence dam. That's the overall story arc upon which a bunch of side plots, humorous diversions, and hijinks are draped. We also meet Mike (Matteo Santafemia), the schoolkid who drags the cops around by the nose, while being all gangster, and spraying ACAB all over the place. He's pretty great, really a good child actor with a well-written role. We meet him at the school where Bax and Pirmin (Dragan Vujic) are giving a Verkehrsschulung. He pretends to have been struck by Bax and Bax actually gets into the national newspapers again, as der Kinderbrätscher Polizist. This comes up again and again and again. Every time the newspaper talks about Bax, it's as the Kinderbrätscher. Greta goes on a trail of destruction, killing fellow cops and pretty much everyone else who gets in the way. There are two ski-instructors who get involved, kidnapping Valmira in order to blackmail Juni into giving up the key that he'd found at Fricker's (Olivier Imboden) house, a local businessman who fancies himself a bit of a Hugh Hefner and whom Valmira was using to launch her rap career. Bax's old band-tour-bus (a broken-down RV) plays a central role, providing more local color and more Swiss-ness to the whole affair. The biggest in-joke is just how much of a love letter this show is to Swiss culture as she actually is (not as people perceive it to be). Nearly every line of dialogue has double significance if you've actually lived here long enough and is doubly funny because of that. In the end, Annette Brotz teams up with Bax's ex-partner Pirmin, who's in the meanwhile also been suspended, for having sniffed coke by accident, and they end up in Fricker's helicopter with Juni at the helm (he's a crane operator, so a helicopter is a cinch, naturally). Bax manages to turn off the bomb and would be the hero again -- but the national police wants to hush things up because it would be too embarrassing to admit how close they'd come to losing most of Wallis, Geneva, and parts of France to a weird bunch of cultists with a key that used to belong to Hitler. Definitely well-worth the watch. I would absolutely watch this again. Tschugger S03 (2024) -- "9/10" Bax (David Constantin) is living and working in Bern. He's working on himself, doing yoga, running a smoothie stand. He has a man-bun, sandals, and a big beard. He has a bunch of friends who are pretty out there and offering him romantic advice. He's terrified of but desperately wants to meet "Freu Brotz" (Anna Rossinelli), who's also still working for FedPol in Bern. Pirmin (Dragan Vujic) is also no longer a cop because they merged his police station into another one and he didn't want to speak French. He's involved in a case where his father-in-law's notary has been killed and had all documents related to Diego Biffiger (Laurent Chevrier) stolen. He's working with Bax's doctor brother, who fishes a key out of the notary's large intestine. Valmira (Anna-Lena Miano) and Juni (Arséne Junior Page) are still trying to launch her career but they can't afford the big-time producer's fee. So they blackmail Mike (Matteo Santafemia) into helping them. We get a flashback of Bax driving too fast, drinking and smoking in his police car, singing, " I don't fucking leave one behind mine." when he gets hit by the Blechpolizist. He reverses, J-turns, and knocks it over, stumbles over to it and gets photographed again and again, despite shooting it several times. Then his car catches on fire. Pouring the remains of his Abricotine on it only encourages the fire. He fries his hand and ends up wearing a leather glove on it for the next two seasons. [3] This time, instead of the Kinderbrätscher, he's the Betrunker Polizist. Pirmin seeks him out in Bern but he's not ready to leave his eso-scheisse [4] cult yet. Pirmin is back at the police station, getting the stink-eye from the French police officers and getting no help. It turns out that one of Bax's good friends Julie is being scammed by "Romeo", who is actually Juni, who is pretending that Mike is his kid needing an operation. This is Juni and Valmira's scam to get enough money to produce her first record. At the date in Bern, the joke is that no-one understands Wallis-Düütsch. Juni can't go through with the scam because Julie's too earnest and nice, but Bax's other friend tackles him and they get mixed up with the cops. In the tumult, Valmira absconds with Julie's wallet with CHF20K in it. Bax escapes on his Mister Smoothie three-wheeled bike when he hears that they've fished Freu Brotz's body out of the Aare. Bax goes to her apartment, which is open, and decides he needs to go back to his old self to solve her murder. Pirmin's wife Regina (Lena Furrer) kills an intruder and Pirmin wants to cover it up because that's not allowed in Switzerland. It turns out that his wife is not who he thinks she is, and that their new au pair also has secrets. Meanwhile, Bax is on his way to Wallis in the back of a Berner paddy wagon, with Juni and a young cop who worships Bax -- but also believes in a million conspiracy theories. Bax takes advantage. Valmira returns with the money and the producers tell her that Xerdan Shiqiri wants to start rapping and that they should team up as Vaschqiri. Nice. Valmira is not impressed and bails. Bax and Juni end up at the same Bergstation up on the Simplon where Valmira's kidnappers had taken her in Season 2. The kidnappers are still using it. Bax and Juni steal their van, getting away before crooked Romandie cops show up. In a nice callback, Pirmin ends up getting pulled over at a Verkehrsschulung, where he has to keep them from finding the body of Fricker's crew chief (whom Regina had shot). Meanwhile, Italians are looking for Patrick, for some reason. But Patrick is in deep hiding, in the woods, on a secret mission of his own making. Bax and Juni are driving the van (which is full of cocaine) toward the same traffic stop, where they bust through. At the ski station, the two dirty Romandie cops kill the two Skilehrer / drug-dealers / kidnappers and blame it on Bax. Bax, Juni, and Pirmin are in the woods, looking for Schmetterling (Cedric Schild), who's retreated from society and set traps everywhere. Schmetterling finds them and takes them to his home base -- Bax's old RV. Schmetterling has been assassinating contract killers. There are only two left. Juni takes off to rescue Valmira, Schmetterling runs over the the two hitmen and keeps going. One of them wakes back up. Bax, Schmetterling, and Pirmin discover that (A) Diego Biffiger (Pirmin's deceased father-in-law) had been in the NBD (and that he had a 1st-class GA to travel to Bern) and (B) that he had a lock-box in the basement of the NBD building but that they need a fingerprint to get in. Off to the graveyard to dig up his father-in-law's body. It's unclear how his body is still in such good shape, though. Valmira and Juni wake up after a night together in the back of the Italian hitmen's car, to see that one of them has found them. They escape, but keep him on their tail instead of throwing away the tracker. They lead him to the two producer-idiots. The hitmen and producers kill each other in a fabulously bloody scene. Juni and Valmira hide under the desk and are untouched, like in a cartoon. Meanwhile, Pirmin, Bax, and Schmetterling are on their way to Bern to get the contents of the safe-deposit box. Also, Pirmin's son Benjamin is there because "Ich muess no hei, hüt isch Papatag," Schmetterling hacks the NBD with a cool-ass trick that I didn't see coming at all. Pirmin and Bax are trying to sneak in but Bax drops the finger into a sewer. He drops Benajamin in there to grab the finger -- they've been talking about the kid's strong grip for four episodes. Bax gets in with the finger. Schmetterling was already having trouble guiding them because they'd given away his glasses for Diego's disguise. But now the two crooked cops find him and dart him. Bax and Pirmin get in, and discover a bunch of documents talking about Operation Platon. The two cops show up and dart the two of them as well. They set the documents on fire. Pirmin pulls his Belinda Bencic and caps the two cops. It turns out that they all had so much LSD in them that the poison couldn't take effect. They end the season at the cemetery, at Freu Brotz's grave. The second ending is somewhere in the U.S. capitol building, where they are testifying in Wallis-Düütsch. Much more of this season was in French than the first two, which had hardly any French at all. I love how Swiss this is: "Mir bruuched Verstärchig in Gampel!" and Bax's stolen ski-trainer jacket says Aletch Skigaudi on it. Another in-joke is that the Italian hit-men don't use WhatsApp because roaming costs way too much in Switzerland. Tschugger S04 (2024) -- "9/10" Bax is living with Pirmin and Regina but he's already worn out his welcome. He and Pirmin are back on the force but only Pirmin knows French. Bax's French is Unterirdisch / Souterrain. A group of Züri ladies in a tour bus find Pirmin's burned-out car in the mountains, with the dead body still in the back. Pirmin and Bax have finally caught Mike red-handed, spraying ACAB on a wall, but Pirmin wants to answer the call with the car because he knows it's his car. The body in the back was killed by his wife in the last season. So, they get to the car and Pirmin scratches the VIN off -- but Mike is watching him from the cop car. He has to bribe Mike by telling him he'll drop the charges for spray-painting. "Du bisch miin Bitsch." When Pirmin and Bax head back to the house, Pirmin goes inside to retrieve the weapon, which he finds in a safe, along with a pile of passports. He doesn't find Fricker (Olivier Imboden), who'd broken in and found a huge pile of gold bullion behind a bookcase in the house that Pirmin and his wife had inherited from her father (Diego Biffiger). Meanwhile, Valmira and Juni are still looking for the big breakthrough. They go to a campground, where Patrick lives in Bax's old tour-bus, spruced-up, to enlist his help in contacting big-name rappers. Schmetterling hacks into the Moonlink system that connects right to a big star's (Tizzy-B) car and they manage to get her to come to Switzerland to record a "featured" track. She wants first-class, though, so it's going to cost CHF30K, at least. Bax and Pirmin have an argument, but make up. Bax gets shot; they ride the Goldwing to the hospital. On the way, they see Mike, who's stolen their cop car, drive straight into a lake. Pirmin wants to help, even though Mike would make him his bitch with everything he knows, but he has to help Bax first. Mike is done. Bax's brother (Fabrice Schalbetter) stitches him up. They head to Patrick/Schmetterlin's trailer just in time to inadvertently help blow it up. Patrick, Valmira, and Juni were trying to get the insurance money to fund the recording, but only because Patrick though Juni was dying of cancer. Pirmin and Bax now know that Pirmin's wife and Nadira are up to something. Fricker's still trying to get the gold from Operation Platon. Bax's brother, the doctor, is an absolute star, man. Wallis-düütsch, French, he's crushing it. Just cool as hell. They discover more and more of the story together (the story that we already saw above). Oberstaatsanwald Dominic is pulling a lot of strings in the background, to keep information from coming to light. He cleans up the loose end of Fricker. He pays off Valmira for the burned RV, just to keep them all quiet. Patrick finds out that Valmira lied to him about Juni's cancer and leaves them, taking to the road per Anhalter. They shift scenes to show Regina in the school. On the chalkboard is written, "Buchstabe [A]" * Ameise * Auto * Apfel * Arbeitslosen- * versicherung Pirmin and Bax pick up Schmetterling, promising to take him to Zürich. Instead, they head to Chavalon, which is just off the Rue de Miex. [5] They manage to break in to the secret base, shove in the floppy disk, and discover that it's an ICBM silo from the 80s. They leave Patrick tied up there. He tries desperately to contact the police, but only Peter is left in the station and he doesn't speak French very well. He doesn't know that he could speak German because Patrick's gagged, so he fumbles his way through answering in absolutely atrocious French. Bax and Pirmin pick up Regina from the school. They go to their house to pick up Nadira, but the female assassin beats them to it. During the shootout, Bax can't help but be impressed/attracted to Regina, who's kicking all sorts of ass. When she yells out to the assassin in Arabic, Bax asks, "isch das Rätoromanisch gsii?" Valmira picks up Tizzy-B at the airport in her Fiat Panda. Tizzy convinces her to go save Schmetterling and forget the song. Regina, Bax, and Pirmin run out of runway and get picked up by the Edelweiss commandos. Back at Chavalon, Valmira and Patrick are trying to figure out how to stop the countdown to launching four nuclear missiles at capital cities in Europe. They call Bax, whose phone connects via Bluetooth with the cop car where he's currently being transported into custody. He is pissed that they just pick up his phone, violating his "privatsphäre". They hang up on Schmetterling. The cop car is also an "Edison" (like Tizzy-B's) and is suddenly taken off and takes off like a bat out of hell up to Chavalon. It stops and only unlocks the back doors -- it can only be Schmetterling who's hacked into it and is using it to rescue Bax, Regina, and Pirmin. He's got his laptop open on the hood of Valmira's shitty little Fiat Panda, commandeering the modern Edison. Bax and Regina take off after Nadina, leaving Pirmin to take care of Schnydrig and Ida. Bax continues to be wicked impressed with Regina's skills. Schnydrig admits that he, Fricker, and Biffiger were made responsible for removing the Americans' nuclear weapons but they just collected the cash for doing it -- and never did it. Ok, so they need the diskette to deactivate the rockets, but Bax has it, and he's currently clutching the top of the Edison that Regina's driving like a bat out of hell after the old prop-plane about to take off with Nadina. 80s music is cranking, and Bax is doing a Van Damme-style split between the plane and the top of the cop car. Bax gets in the plane just before it takes off. Bax is knocked out; he's not as strong a fighter as he thinks he is. As he's about to be dragged out of the open door by the kidnapper, Regina drops the lady out of the door and saves Bax's ass. She'd climbed in as well, leaving the Edison on auto-pilot. Nadina and Regina are trying to figure out how to land the plane. Bax finally calls Pirmin and learns he needs to bring the disk back. He's holding up the disk to show Regina that they have to bring it back, the plane bucks -- it's losing altitude -- and Bax drops the diskette. It slips through his fingers, and flies out of the plane, taking out one of the engines. The Fiat Panda pulls up to the missile silos (great ad for Fiat Pandas, really), the plane flies overhead...and crashes into a mountain. Three parachutes land behind Valmira, Schmetterling, Pirmin, and Schnydrig. The diskette's gone, though. Luckily, Peter (Danh Ho) had made a copy of the diskette days ago and can burn a new copy. He has to decide which of his old, classic games to overwrite -- which is painful. The copy is also painfully slow. They stop the launch with seconds to go. Oberstaatsanwalt Schnydrig has one more turn, though. He knocks out Nadira, cracking a pipe to leak pure oxygen into the room, and locking the door behind him. Somehow Juni shows up and pulls them all out. Grill-party ending. Patrick and Valmira are ... an item, I think? Pirmin unknowingly burns the blueprint that shows the location of the Operation Platon gold in his house. The end. It's amazing how much they managed to pack into just five 30-minute episodes, but there you have it. Titans S01-S04 (2018--2023) -- "7/10" This series has overall good and relatively believable visuals; the effects are done well and the CGI is well-integrated. The story is interesting enough, although it relies heavily on either Deus Exes or on one of the characters doing something spectacularly stupid and unexplained, just in order to move the story forward. There aren't going to be any quotes, as no-one is really eloquent, except perhaps the Scarecrow / Jonathan Crane (Vincent Kartheiser, who played Pete Campbell in Mad Men). He's pretty over-the-top at times -- especially in his final spiral -- but he's a pretty good actor. He's at his best when he's singing If I only had a brain [6] while executing his master plan. But I'm getting a bit ahead of myself. That's all from the third season. The first episode is dark; it hooked me. I was pleasantly surprised to learn that this show felt a bit more like The Boys than Doom Patrol. The next several episodes were more mediocre and exposed cracks in the consistency of the acting and writing. Still, it's entertaining enough for a workout show. [7] The basic story arc of this season introduces us to Dick Grayson / ex-Robin (Brenton Thwaites), who's still kicking ass at night, but on his own, no longer with Batman, and in Detroit, not Gotham. We learn that he used to head up a team of Titans but that they'd broken up for some as-yet unnamed reason. * Rachel / Raven (Teagan Croft) is on the run because people are hunting her for her "dad", whom she has either never met or cannot remember. She has budding powers that she can neither understand nor control. * Rachel runs into Koriand'r / Kory Anders / Starfire (Anna Diop), who's got amnesia and has otherworldly powers and visions. Kory's initial story arc is pretty cool; she was a lot cooler when she didn't know who she was. * Hank / Hawk (Alan Ritchson) and Dawn / Dove (Minka Kelly) are a bird-themed crime-fighting duo who used to be in the Titans but are now working on their own. They've got beef with Dick (OMG phrasing) [8], but they eventually settle things. Hank is actually quite funny, sensitive, and a pretty good actor, playing against his beefy appearance. [9] * Jason Todd / New Robin (Curran Walters) shows up to make Dick's life difficult. He's kind of a pain but he mostly means well. He's definitely not as good at being Robin as Grayson is/was. * Donna Troy / Wonder Girl (Conor Leslie) also used to be a Titan and has returned as some sort of cop. Or not. She acts like a cop. Everyone's a cop, though. Dick's a cop. Barbara Gordon's (Savannah Welch) a cop (but she only shows up in season 3). * Hands down, the best character throughout all of the seasons but even already in season one is Gar Logan / Beast Boy (Ryan Potter). He's just a nice guy. He joins the group from the Doom Patrol house in the first season. * Conner Kent / Superboy (Joshua Orpin) is also pretty good but his character suffers from the same problem as Superman, in that he's just pretty much unstoppable so they have to keep smacking him with kryptonite to keep the narrative under control. He's a genius engineer, too, apparently (because he's half Lex Luthor), so he also suffers a bit from Tony Stark syndrome. Still, he's a nice guy and one of the better characters. Unsurprisingly, he's friends with Gar. That's the cast, with the story arc carrying these people through the formation of their team, the sundering of it, and then the reformation of it. [Titans, Season 1: Trigon] Season one is mostly about Rachel, who's being pursued by a mysterious organization that commands families of super-agents who do some real damage to Hawk, Dove, and Robin. Dove, in particular ends up in the hospital, in a coma. Kory is very cool at first, and then becomes a bit lamer as we learn more about her. She's dedicated to helping Rachel, as is Dick. They all break Rachel's mom out of an asylum. As always, there are a lot of weird things in these super-hero shows and movies, but it's the needlessly weird things that stick in your craw. Like, OK, Rachel can emit a cloud of violet/black knives from her mouth and sic them on people. We accept that because she's got powers. But, Rachel's mom doesn't have powers and no-one bothers to explain how, despite having been trapped in a mental asylum for years, she bounces back immediately. It turns out that Rachel's mom -- I can't even remember her name -- is actually in cahoots with Rachel's father, who is an other-dimensional demon named Trigon (Seamus Dever), whom Rachel manages to dispatch by the end of the show, along with her mother, while coming into her own vis á vis at least some of her powers. The laser-like focus on Rachel detracted from this first season, as Kory and Dick were cooler before Rachel showed up. Some of this wraps up in season two, but it's basically a season-one story arc. [Titans, Season 2: Deathstroke] Season two's story arc is about Slade Wilson / Deathstroke (Esai Morales), who is a ruthless killer who'd gained powers as part of a government experiment (I mean, of course) and is now an unstoppable killing machine. We learn in flashbacks that he's the reason that the Titans broke up in the first place. Well, that, and because they're a bunch of judgmental babies with two-dimensional personalities. But the reason given by the show is that they broke up because Dick had said that he'd killed their friend Jericho by accident -- who was Deathstroke's son -- but what really happened was that Deathstroke had killed him but only because Dick put him in danger and Dick doesn't explain it that way because he's a fucking martyr and will absolutely lie about things to both make himself look heroic but also to make himself suffer. Luckily, Dick's surrounded by people who leap to judgment without consideration, empathy, or logic and generally don't give him a break for how obviously damaged he'd been by having been raised by an obviously sociopathic Bruce Wayne (Iain Glen). Deathstroke's daughter Rose Wilson (Chelsea Zhang), who has Wolverine-like powers of healing, joins up with the Titans. She is just awful, flouncing around, and being an Asian honeypot, with Jason eventually falling for it. It's not well-written and not well-acted. Marty-like, Dick puts himself in prison, then helps people break out. This season also gets Conner out of Cadmus's clutches. Donna dies saving Dawn from a structure collapse just after they'd gotten killed Deathstroke, and gotten Conner and Gar back from Cadmus. Wait, what? Why did that have to happen? Is this a cliffhanger? In the age of streaming television? Desperate much? [Titans, Season 3: Scarecrow] Season three is all about the Scarecrow. The Titans end up in Gotham, dribbing and drabbing there. The city is falling apart and the Scarecrow takes it apart even more. He hornswoggles Jason -- by manipulating his inferiority complex -- into becoming Red Hood, who terrorizes the city. Everyone dies in this one. Donna died in the last season, but Hank dies in this one, and Tim Drake (Jay Lycurgo) -- who is a self-styled investigator of the Titans and will become Robin in season 4 -- also dies. Jason dies, too! But Scarecrow brings him back nearly immediately with an immortality pool left by Raz Al-Ghul (just don't worry about it). Rachel and Gar use the same pool to bring back Dick after the people of Gotham kill him as Nightwing (where he martyred himself again by completely ignoring obvious malice). They really, really leaned into the whole "kill a character and bring him back" thing. I think Hank was the only one to have stayed dead. [10] There's a side-story with Kory and her sister Blackfire (Damaris Lewis) -- who's getting jiggy with Conner -- but it's honestly not that interesting and involves some very sub-par acting. The end of season three was very uneven and more than occasionally painful, except for the last minute, where Rachel struts in -- always strutting; it looks so awkward -- to dump a bunch of evil right down Crane's throat. But even that feels a bit tacked-on. I guess it showed that the Titans have learned to tie up loose ends instead of leaving them in Arkham Prison, like Batman always did? Is that what "being a better Batman" is about, Dick? Capital punishment? [Titans, Season 4: Mother Mayhem] In season four, we get the typically 21st-century gloss on these types of things, in which the team doesn't take a private jet but instead takes a super-fancy tour bus to Metropolis. Remember, everyone in every show watch is wealthy, even though they have to obvious source of income. It's a communist paradise. [11] There, they visit an advanced laboratory and get a lot of help and boosts and money and stuff. Lex Luthor (Titus Welliver) is back in the picture, seemingly being lined up as the big enemy for this season. Superman is out of the picture, but Conner is interested in meeting at least one of his fathers. He meets Lex Luthor but Lex dies right in front of him because of Mother Mayhem's curse (Franka Potente). She turns out to the be the bad guy, not him. Twisty! So, yeah, she's trying to get her son Sebastian (Joseph Morgan) to help her resurrect...wait for it...Trigon! Yup, it's a reboot of season one with another witch in place of Rachel's mom. She likes to use snakes, conjuring them up in people's guts and having them exit through their mouths. It's pretty grim stuff, actually, much more grisly than the other seasons. It's magic! Superman hates magic, which is why he's off in another corner of the galaxy, pretending to tend to a collapsing star or something. That's why neither we nor Conner get to meet Superman. It's definitely not because the show couldn't license the character. Conner hates magic, too, especially after this season, where he's constantly targeted with it. After his final go-round with it -- where Gar had to turn himself into a virus and rescue him from the inside -- he shaves his head, starts calling himself Mr. Luthor, and goes all bad-boy. Dick is still Dick. Even when Mr. Luthor starts calling him Richard, he says that he "prefers Dick" [12]. There are a quite a few flashbacks to fill in a lot of pieces. For some reason, we get a bunch of them showing what Sebastian's life was like, as his mother (Mayhem) tries to convince him to voluntarily summon Trigon (it has to be voluntary). In one odd scene, they show a comp-sci teacher dress him down after class for having shown him up during class by pointing out a "shortcut" that consisted of turning x = x + 1 into x += 1, which, I thought they were kidding about it being brilliant, but they were deadly serious about it. Jesus wept. Like, don't even mention programming "tricks" if you literally have no idea about programming. So, um, they just kind-of low-key invent teleportation in order to get Sebastian back out of Mother Mayhem's fortress. Conner gets there first and Mother Mayhem takes advantage of him because his powers are somehow useless against magic. So, Conner's unconscious and trapped, again. They'd been ready to teleport Sebastian out, but now they need to save two people because Conner Luthor thinks he can do it all himself. They could really only get them one at a time anyway, but even before that can happen, everything goes tits-up anyway. Raven does get her power back, but she turns completely white in the process. It is not explained why or what effect this is supposed to have. Probably fan service. Kory doesn't really do much, but she does better than Jinx, who basically dies of cockiness with an assist by Mother Mayhem. Dick kicks a bunch of people's asses but doesn't manage to shift the balance significantly. Gar fucks right off to "the Red" by willing it. Weird. We'll find out more later. Sebastian goes through with the ritual and is kind of a bad-ass, self-healing, super-strong dude now, ready to summon Trigon. They just need to pick up the horn first. Dick, Kory, and Rachel follow Mother and Sebastian to a weird little town that has an extra-dimensional extrusion in which its inhabitants have lived for decades, waiting for the return of Trigon. There's a radio station lulling everyone into Stepford Wives-like subservience. Dick, Kory, and Rachel smash it up, with an assist from Bernard and Tim on the other side (our side of the dimensional portal). Conner is nowhere to be found, still flouncing around in his "Mr. Luthor" persona. Gar, meanwhile, is whisked off by Dominic Mndawe / Freedom Beast (Nyambi Nyambi) to the top of Kilimanjaro for a chat about his real role in the world. He is to be the protector of "the Red", a realm that binds all life. Gar learns a lot, learns that he is much more powerful than he thought, and returns to the Red to find his friends. He turns down Mndawe's kind offer of living out his (now-)eternal life completely alone, away from his friends and family, in service to a universe of life. Gar wakes up with the Doom Patrol, at their home, but it's just a replica. No-one knows where they are. Kory eventually just shows up there -- horrific, horrific writing and acting ensue. Seriously, the Doom Patrol characters are terrible, which is why "I stopped watching their own show." Meanwhile, Conner convinces Sebastian that he'll support his career, while Mother Mayhem yells at him for being weak. [13] Oops. Sebastian sets her on fire. Is she done? Just like that? He joins forces with Conner to build his video game. It's hard to know who's manipulating whom. At any rate, the game -- Abraxus -- is released to instant worldwide popularity. Conner is just buying time until he can figure out a way to destroy Sebastian and the Horn. It doesn't take long before the game starts hurting people -- it siphons their life-force to Sebastian. Now there are three things going on at once: Sebastian is trying to deploy his game to even more people; Gar, Kory, and Tim are trying to hack in to the LexCorp servers and stop him (Conner helps without revealing his betrayal to Sebastian); and Dick and Rachel are using black magic to sever her bond to Sebastian. Did they just throw in every damned thing they could think of into this final season? Or does a lot of this stuff come from the original comics? At any rate, in the spirit of the increasing rapidity of things happening, all of those tasks were accomplished in a single episode, but guess who's back? Mother Mayhem, naturally. Also, Dick has made Tim the new Robin (which was Dick's plan all along). Time meets up with Red Hood, bringing Jason back for one last hurrah, this time training Tim to be a better Robin. Mother Mayhem makes Sebastian her bitch. He's got a whole whiny, shitty thing go on. Conner's walking a fine line, helping him but not enough to get him to blow the horn. I'm exhausted with all of the new plot lines. Now Kory, Gar, and Dick are discovering a secret project at LexCorp. The files are encrypted but everyone talks about how they're just going to decrypt them without a password. I guess their confidence isn't misplaced: they'd just recovered files from the recycle bin that we'd watched Mercy (Natalie Gumede) "permanently delete" a few scenes before. So, if permanently deleted files can be recovered -- they kind-of can, unless you do secure-erase, which is kind of what I would expect "permanently delete" to mean on a military-grade computer -- then why shouldn't you be able to decrypt secure files? I mean, they can just whip up a quantum computer. Conner meets up with Dick and Kory. This is actually one of the best-acted and -written scenes in the series, surprisingly. "Conner: I made things worse. I did things that Titans don't do. Dick: People like us...we're close to the darkness. We seek it out. Sometimes it has its way. Conner: We're supposed to be better. Dick: Sometimes we're not." And then Dick has to mention "family" and "each other" and ruin the moment. They proceed to the "Starfire" lab, where Lex had been trying to replicate Starfire's power. Sweet God, now they swing back into such utter cheesiness. Rachel: "I'll watch the pressure."; Gar: "Heat's at 35%." WTF does that even mean? Conner and Sebastian go to a showdown with Mother Mayhem. Sebastian kills her with the horn, inhaling her power. Conner whips the Starfire globe at him, seemingly draining all of his power ... but instead Sebastian / Brother Blood drops Conner's ass with one shot. How?And where the hell did Brother Blood's new costume come from? Eh, whatever, he's a blowin' the damned horn and here comes Trigon. ...And there goes Trigon. Brother Blood / Sebastian just killed him, pretty as you please. He tore out his heart and drank its blood and power, blablabla. We're just along for the ride here. This wasn't even foreshadowed, there is no way to know how he knew all of this, but now Brother Blood is the big baddie, I guess. And now he's after a "fully functional wormhole" at S.T.A.R. Labs -- he wants to go to Tamaran to destroy it. Sure, Ok. Kory stops the van and gets out. Hey, neat. They just happen to have stopped right next to Dick's fancy car, which just happens to be parked on the street they were on. This is just ludicrously lazy writing. Are we supposed to be so caught up in the flurry of Deus Ex Machinas and last-minute plot-twists that were never even alluded to, to not notice? Waitaminnit, now Kory is the only one powerful enough to open the "Icarus Gate" (the wormhole)? And Brother Blood isn't powerful enough, but she is? Didn't she have to recharge for a day after blowing up a gas-station bathroom back in the first season? I guess training works! I like how the computer corrects Sebastian when he says "10,000" suns by saying "Earth suns," even thought that's redundant. #confidentlywrong. Hey, Conner's alive again! Had I mentioned that he'd died? Well, he comes in and beats Brother Blood after the other Titans had softened him up. Blood's plan to destroy both planets has been foiled. But wait! He gets back up. Kory flies him right out the ceiling -- did we know that she can fly? She seems a lot more like Captain Marvel now -- and into the stratosphere, blowing them both up. Everything thinks she's dead. Pathos for, like, two minutes. Then she's back. Phew! It's laughable how much they're cramming into this season. Wrap-up and a definite ending. It's so nice how the Titans have two billionaires in the team. That’s how you take all of the prosaic tension out of the story. Gundam: Requiem for Vengeance (2024) -- "5/10" I gave it an extra star because Gundam is pretty awesome. I should probably take away another star because this entire series looks like and acts like a video-game cut scene. It's only six episodes of about 20 minutes apiece, but that's still a lot of uncanny valley. Some of the character models look much, much worse than others. All of the supporting characters move like it's 1999 again, some of them even doing that float-walking thing. It's wild that this shows up on Netflix in 2024. I'm kind of fascinated with the backstory about how that could even happen. Like, I've seen Unreal Engine 5 machinima from people claiming that they just started using Unreal Engine a week ago that looked better than this. And don't even get me started on the wooden voice-acting that feels like people reading from a script for the very first time ever. This is about as natural as a Google developer video. DEFINITELY NOT ROBOTS. I mean, except Gundam. I'm pretty sure he's a robot? Or a powered mobile suit? Gundam's pretty awesome though! He's kind of indestructible. He has a huge chain gun, a huge electro-sword, and can jump and move much more quickly than any of the other robots. The whole show focuses on soldiers from the other side, though, so Gundam is supposed to be the bad guy? I'm not even going to list any of the characters because it absolutely doesn't matter. The lead is a fierce woman, of course. All you need to know if that Gundam is tearing a formerly dominant force a new asshole, with everyone on the run from it. This show is almost all fighting, a mix of giant robots and standard tank warfare. The Gundams are nearly impervious, and have vastly superior beam weapons. Some of the robot battles are pretty good, though, if I'm honest. It's a bit of a mystery why the two cobbled-together. mobile units / mechs were able to almost take out two Gundams but you know how plots be sometimes. As the show proceeds, the valley keeps getting uncannier and uncannier. There is a gloriously androgynous and fancily dressed corporal who shows up to flounce around the base and give everyone orders. The mission in the second half of the first season is to obtain one of the GMs, which are superior to all of the mechs that they have but still inferior to the Gundam. They fail, of course. Why? Because the Gundam is unstoppably good at what it does. It just keeps chopping off arms and heads and shooting its beam weapon right through the chest cavity of other mechs, where the pilot sits. I was only able to get the English dub but I don't think it makes much of a difference. The dubbing isn't even close to the problem. It's just really amazing how bad the dialogue, acting, and animation are. The final speech about children fighting in wars was absolutely terrible. I hope to God that this isn't representative of Japanese cartoons because then I have some questions for grown-ass adults who watch them all the time. One Punch Man S01--S02 (2015--2019) -- "9/10" Saitama is the eponymous and aptly named One Punch Man. He begins the series as a hobbyist hero, someone who's trained incredibly hard to become the most amazing hero the world has ever seen (even though it largely isn't aware of him). He is unprepossessing, unassuming, and always unperturbed. Although he fights dozens of baddies, he's also largely bored doing it, because no-one comes even close to his power. Whereas Gundam was relatively insipid and formulaic, I have to admit to being charmed by this show's all-in devotion to making a piece of art. It's obviously a labor of love. The art style is fantastic, switching from highly detailed and intricate to two-dimensional and pencil-shaded, depending on mood. It's funny, it's ironic, it's tongue-in-cheek, it's self-deprecating. It has a kick-ass heavy-metal soundtrack except for the credits music, which is a syrupy song about love and features a cat at the end. The credits almost always play before a final post-credits scene, which kind of makes you watch the sappy credits music again and again, which is a great troll. There are so many well-thought-out heroes and villains, and they just keep coming, some falling to the wayside nearly immediately whereas others get longer arcs. Seriously, the "List of One-Punch Man characters" is enormous. Some merit repeat appearances and even survive to the end of the first season. Some of them are just kind of one-off jokes, like "all-back man". It reminds me of the cornucopia of characters in The Boys (both the comic books and the TV series). The story is relatively simply and yet it draws you in and keeps you watching. Saitama keeps you watching. There is never any doubt about his ability to vanquish his opponent and yet, the lack of tension doesn't detract from the show -- it adds to it. There isn't any kayfabe bullshit here. Sometimes other heroes fall, seemingly slaughtered. Some stay down but most reappear, bandaged but alive, ready to fight again. It's a cartoon, in it for fun, that doesn't waste any time with useless coherence when it would be more fun another way. Think Tom and Jerry. Except everything Saitama touches dies. From one punch. Unlike the heroes, who usually lie there, unconscious-and-possibly-dead-looking, the monsters vanquished by Saitama are usually splashed into pile of giblets or, at the very least, have their heads and most of their thoraxes punched right the hell out. Early in the first season, the cyborg Genos joins Saitama as a disciple. Soon after, Genos applies to be in the Hero Association and aces the entrance exam. Genos enters immediately into the top class (S), whereas Saitama barely makes it into C-class because, although he far exceeded the record for every physical test, he flunked the intelligence test. He's not dumb; he just couldn't be bothered. He's very Buddha-like in that way, beyond the vagaries of the physical world -- other than eating, which is mostly what he's doing when he's not kicking ass. That, and shopping. In season one, things start off slowly (of course), with someone named Vaccine Man, then Genos shows up, along with Mosquito Girl. There's a multi-episode story arc about The House of Evolution, where Saitama eventually faces off against Carnage Kabuto. One punch. Saitama is utterly unflappable. He's only panicked when he realizes he's missing a huge sale at the local grocery-shopping center. Hammerhead is next, with his whole crew. We meet Speed-o'-Sound Sonic, who's quite powerful in their (looks like girl; talks like a boy) own right and is jealous of Saitama. So, not going to fight him but also not aligned with him. He tries to provoke a fight but Saitama knocks him out without killing him. Genos is almost always involved, often doing reasonably well but sometimes getting his ass kicked within an inch of his life, not occasionally losing limbs and parts of his face. They climb the ranks of the Hero Association. Next up is another multi-episode arc about the Seafolk people attacking, culminating in the Deep Sea King, who takes out a lot of heroes -- including a prolonged fight with Genos -- before finally facing off against Saitama. Lots of preamble. One punch. In the grand finale of season one, a giant alien ship shows up, with some unique, interesting, and powerful heroes. As a group of S-class heroes face off against Melzalgald, who is kind of a regenerative hydra, Saitama busts onto the ship and starts wreaking havoc, not even breaking a sweat until he finally faces off against the captain of the ship, Boros. This is the first time that the fight doesn't end after just one punch. Boros is powerful and can take several punches. In the end, though, Saitama vanquishes him (after having been punched to the Moon and returning under this own power), with Boros whispering his last, saying that he now realizes that Saitama hadn't even been trying his hardest -- he was just trying to keep things interesting with a slightly more-powerful foe than anyone else he'd ever faced. The battles are glorious, intricate and overwhelming, evincing the incredibly powerful forces at play, sometimes showing entire swaths of cities destroyed in the wake of a single blow. In the final, big battle, Saitama's final punch of Boros clears out 1/4 of the clouds in the Earth's atmosphere. It's very, very cool. Saitama is basically Superman, but so much cooler. Like, he wants to be a hero but only on his own terms. He'd usually rather go food shopping. In season two, there is a clearer story arc that already starts in episode one. Garou is a human who wants to be a monster, not a hero. He trained with S-3 Silver Fang and has incredible martial-arts moves, speed, and power. Is he a match for Saitama? Of course not. But they don't face off for a while yet. Instead, Saitama hears about a martial-arts tournament and he's intrigued by what that could be. Also, you can win ¥3M, so he's even more intrigued. He fakes his way in as another fighter who's too injured to compete. Garou had beaten him up but not killed him. Saitama exchanges blows with Garou but he's not aware of it. He thought Garou was trying to rob him so he just lightly tapped him to knock him out. Garou picks a fight with S-class Metal Bat and increasingly tenacious and powerful bugs: Junior Centipede and Venus Mantrap, then Senior Centipede and Raffleseidon, then, finally, dragon-class Elder Centipede (Centichoro). Instead of helping Metal Bat, he of course steps in to help the Centipede fight Metal Bat. Metal Knight (S-6) shows up but it's not enough. There are monsters sprouting up everywhere, in every city. Garou doesn't have as easy a time of it with Metal Bat as he expects. Metal Bat grows stronger the more injured he is, crediting it to "fighting spirit," which absolutely has to be tongue-in-cheek. The next part is as well, where Metal Bat's little sister shows up and stops him from caving in Garou's head, then stops Garou from retaliating. They stop fighting because she told them to. As you can probably tell, Saitama is featured a lot less in the first several episodes, with the focus being on other heroes and monsters. With these insights, though, we learn that the monsters work together, just like the heroes, and they know their rankings as well (even though those rankings are assigned by the Hero Association). There are also more giant bosoms and scantily clad bad/naughty ladies than in season one. Back at super-fight 22, Saitama looks tinier and more unassuming than any of the other fighters. He one-punches his first opponent (knocking him out, not killing him), whereupon the conclusion of the announcers isn't that he is inordinately strong but that his opponent was a weakling. Saitama goes through the rest of his opponents with a single punch (naturally), then faces off against also-unranked-but-powerful Suiryu. Saitama spends most of that match trying to keep his wig from falling off, while the other guy does his absolute best, thinking he's going to win easily. Saitama finally loses his wig, and is disqualified, even though he blew almost all of Suiryu's clothes off with one punch, holding back just enough not to end the match. Suiryu doesn't get the hint and keeps fighting, giving everything he's got. Saitama hip-bumps Suiryu across the arena, transferring and reflecting Suiryu's energy back at him, but drops his pants in the process -- because he's unable to properly tie his gi's belt (because he's not a martial artist and has no idea what he's doing). Meanwhile, Genos has been defeated by a monster -- one of the dozens sent by the Monster Association and its terrifying leader the Demon King Orochi (big boss battle coming up!) -- and lies shattered and armless in a crater. The monster Gouketsu shows up at the arena, interrupting the ceremony and, handily defeating the heroes and conscripting the martial artists. One by one, they eat the monster cells and are transformed. Suiryu does not, and stands against the monsters -- but only because a bubble-busted, bikini-blad ring-girl said she'd go out with him if he did. He bests Choze but Gouketsu easily pounds him to a pulp. Gouketsu leaves Suiryu with newly monstrified Bakuzan, who keeps ruining him some more. Saitama is nowhere to be found. Until he finally returns and flattens Bakuzan with one punch. King (the fake hero and Saitama's video-gaming partner) meets Saitama and gives him advice on how to get out of the funk he's in that no-one can even give him a challenge. They run into Garou, who's just had his ass handed to him by Watchdog Man, who looks wicked unassuming but is fast and powerful, a bit like Saitama. Garou sees King and wants to bag him, energized by the opportunity. He attacks King. Saitama kicks him through a wall, calling him a hoodlum. The grand finale is bit extended, short on story, long on nearly endless fight scenes with Garou on his last legs and yet still being capable of fighting off multiple heroes. After waking from having been knocked through a wall by Saitama, flicked like a bug, he takes refuge in a barn. He doesn't remember what happened at all, he only vaguely remembers that King was there -- which is what always happens to King: it's how he managed to become #2 without ever fighting anyone. His superpower is to be there at the right time when someone else vanquishes a monster and for no-one to remember that he had nothing to do with it. Anyway, Garou is mending, all bandaged up, when a bunch of A-class and B-class heroes show up to take him in. He defeats all of them, despite dizziness, etc. etc. On his last legs, Silver Fang and his former master Bomb show up to take care of Fang's errant student once and for all. There is an extended fight, in which an already diminished Garou -- who'd been further poisoned by arrows and otherwise knocked about while defeating the other seven heroes -- is nearly eliminated but still standing -- seriously, this is like WWE -- when Centichoro shows up to stop them killing him. Garou is whisked off by a giant parrot-monster, taking him to Orochi to build him up again, stronger and more monstrous, leaving Silver Fang, Bomb, and Genos take on Centichoro. Bomb and Silver Fang nearly topple it, but it just molts its skin and grows larger. Genos attacks it from within but it recovers, with Genos once again not only losing a leg but also being devastated from his failure to eliminate a monster. King shows up, calling to Centichoro to come and get it from a real hero. He and Saitama had stopped playing their video game because Saitama always lost and had built up a head of rage and frustration and needed to go for a walk. So, they headed out to find some way for Saitama to rid himself of his frustration. King was quite brave to stand as Centichoro bore down on him -- remember, he has no super-powers or fighting skills -- only for Saitama to step in at the last moment, haul off, and one-punch Centichoro's lights out forever. The entire centipede just disappeared. The end. There were some tantalizing threads left open for a third season, but it's been five years and only recently have there been rumors that it's coming, possibly in 2025. The Garou story-arc isn't complete, nor is that of the monster association. There are a few veins of content still to be mined. End of Watch (2012) -- "7/10" I "watched and reviewed this in 2017" . The rating stands. On the first viewing, I wrote that partners and officers Brian Taylor (Jake Gyllenhaal) and Mike Zavala (Michael Peña) mostly seem like good cops, which I think they are. The movie depicts LA as a war zone, where even the beat cops have to act like soldiers, with nearly everyone a potential source of violence and death. They make some good busts, one of them a cowboy-like figure in a fancy truck, with even fancier gold weapons and a ton of drugs. They stop at a house on fire and rescue three children, for which they get medals from the city. Then, they bust another cowboy-like guy who's got 50 people in a cage in his home. He's working for the cartels. The DEA tell Taylor and Zavala to cool their jets or the cartels are going to come after them. On the personal side, Taylor is recording everything on his own camera, for an elective he's taking for a degree he's trying to get. He's "the smartest guy" that Zavala knows, but I don't think that bar is that high. Taylor's not dumb but he's not nearly as smart as he thinks he is. He has the classic overconfidence of an ex-Marine. They both wear their stupid wraparound shades, looking hard. Zavala married his girl Gabby (Natalie Martinez) right out of high school and they have a kid about halfway through the movie. Taylor is getting serious with Janet (Anna Kendrick). He eventually puts a ring on it. Taylor even wears his stupid shades during the bride-and-groom dance, which is painful to watch. A couple of nights later, Officer Van Hauser (David Harbour) and his rookie partner are jumped in a neighborhood, with Van Hauser earning a knife straight through the eye and the rookie getting beaten within an inch of her life in a nearby alley. Taylor puts a stop to that, arresting the guy. Orozco (America Ferrera) and Davis (Cody Horn) roll up and chastise them for not having killed the perp. Those two lady officers are ruthless. This movie leaks testosterone everywhere and from everyone, men and women alike, all playing relatively brash and coarse roles. Most of the dialogue was written by a high-school student...or was taken from the internet. It's fine, but it's not deep, even though it very clearly thinks that it is. Peña and Gyllenhaal are good, though, really convincing as South LA cops. They take a welfare-check call, talking into Taylor's camera, talking about how this is the kind of call cops in "normal" (not South LA) districts handle all the time. They figure they can do a good deed instead of cherry-picking interesting-sounding cases from the "stack". Even here, though, the house's elderly inhabitant is dead, chopped up and having been stored in a bag by squatters. There are cases of drugs there. The place had been only very recently abandoned. They find more chopped-up bodies and heads in a room off the kitchen. Taylor is retching, believe it or not, while Zavala stays cool. Biggest drug bust of the year. The cartels are not happy. Our heroes are on patrol when they see Tre (Cle Shaheed Sloan), who Zavala had fought earlier. Tre expresses his appreciation that Zavala "did it clean" and never pressed charges for assaulting an officer, so he lets them know that the cartels have put a hit out on the two. The hit-crew is the latin gang that had done a drive-by earlier in the movie. Their dialogue is also scintillating. They're not dumb, though. They set up Taylor and Zavala by committing a flagrant moving violation in front of the two patrolmen at night, luring them in to a chase into an apartment building with a courtyard. Assassins are waiting with AK-47s on the balcony above. The initial barrage misses. The officers hide in an apartment, trying to call for backup. They move the curtain. The crew lights up the apartment. Taylor's combat instincts kick in; he takes over the escape. They're away, out, making their way throw back alleys. Taylor caps another one. "They're everywhere." "Where's the cavalry, man?" They take out a truck-full of killers but they'd missed the last one, in the truck bed. He tags Taylor in the collarbone, just above the vest, before Zavala head-shots him. As Taylor loses consciousness, the crew of caricatures who started this whole thing roll up and shoot Zavala in the back. They laugh (because of course they do). They also refuse to drop their weapons (because of course they don't), so the cops that show up light them up. Taylor survives. Zavala does not. End of Watch 2 could have just been about PTSD. The Boy and the Heron (2023) -- "8/10" The setup, pacing, and elements identify this film as 100% a Miyazaki film. It starts with young Mahito Maki's mother Hisako being engulfed in a great fire in the hospital where she was a patient. Mahito ran and ran through the streets to try to save her but arrived far, far too late. While I was watching the movie, I was certain that the fire had been started by an Allied (read: American) bombing but, now that I think about it, the movie was post-war. So, I was just imagining things, thinking that I was watching Grave of the Fireflies instead. Mahito moves to the countryside to stay with his aunt Natsuko, who is pregnant with his sister-to-be. [14] His father apparently already owns the factory there. Mahito doesn't take too kindly to Natsuko, warming up very slowly to a low temperature. In her gardens, he encounters a strange heron that comes very close to him and seems to be trying to communicate. There is an odd, magical tower on the grounds that seems to be kind of alive and kind of not. It is where the heron lives. Mahito hunts the crane with Kiriko, one of the sweet old servant-ladies living in what I think we can, quite frankly, call an estate, or a manor, or a Japanese mansion plunked down amid sumptuous gardens. These people are doing just fine, is what I'm trying to say here. Eventually, the heron transforms into a squat ugly man -- don't ever change, Miyazaki! -- and transforms back when Mahito heals him with a hand-whittled wooden plug. They all travel together to an ocean world where Mahito encounters a much-younger Kiriko. We're in full-on fantasy world now and, because of my unfamiliarity with Japanese culture, I have no idea what is just for fun and what is supposed to be a metaphor. It's lush and beautiful and consistent, though. There is a group of pelicans that seem somewhat malicious but may also just be part of the circle of life. They are trying to eat the adorable little Warawara, to whom Kiriko and Mahito had sold a large, slobbery fish, The Warawara ordinarily find themselves in the bushes on the island but the nourishing food allowed some of the mature ones to begin to rise to be reborn in the outer world (our world) as people. There are also a ton of parakeets that are trying to stop this. They, in fact, seem to be running the whole tower. There are doors back to the outer world, through which Mahito espies his father searching for him. He continues his search for Natsuko, who has also disappeared into this fantasy world. They encounter a wizard, who is actually Mahito's great-uncle, who'd disappeared long ago. His task has long been to keep this "below world" running but he's losing his gift, or his energy, or ... something. He nominates Mahito to take over for him. Mahito is less interested in that and more interested in getting back to the outer world, having learned his lesson that he should appreciate what he has. With no-one to mind the little wooden Jenga blocks that apparently determined the continued fate of the below-world, it begins to slip, disintegrating and flooding and, eventually, disgorging those residents that survive back into the outer world. Had I mentioned that Mahito wasn't actually skipping school during any of this because he'd been bullied, had gotten into a fight, and then had smashed himself in the head with a rock so that he could get a longer leave of absence to convalesce? I hadn't? Well, all of that happened at the beginning and seemed to be quite important in establishing why Mahito was able to flout the State's strictures about obligatory education. I guess it's important to mention that when you're about to send a boy off to a world ruled by parakeets. The film ends by putting fantasy firmly in the past and showing that life goes on. Miyazaki makes sure that we know that Mahito, Natsuko, and his father move back to the city, having mostly forgotten about their adventure with the heron. Perhaps it was all just a giant metaphor for a coping mechanism for Mahito to be able to live with having lost his mother at such an early age. Perhaps the hope is that, having used the power of fantasy to heal himself, he would no longer smash himself in the head with rocks in order to solve problems he encounters in the real world. The final scene in the tower was nearly a one-to-one copy of the one from "Gormenghast" ; I was strongly reminded of the flooding and collapse of the tower. I can't help but think that it was deliberate. It gets an extra star for being so beautiful and for being hand-drawn. It really is nicer. I'd watch it again just for the sumptuous visuals. The Killer (2023) -- "the 6/10" The Killer (Michael Fassbender) is on a job. * He's on stakeout. His silky voiceover guides us through his ritual. * He watches patiently for his target to appear. He discusses the necessity of the skill of patience. * He sleeps in snatches of time, with not time for REM. He describes it as torture. * He performs his yoga breathing and stretching, impressively flexible and toned. * He nimbly descends the stairs to retrieve ... McDonalds? He justified it somehow but I forgot the half-assed explanation already. David Fincher is directing, so you probably already know what it looks like. It looks smooth. The content is, on its surface, boring, but the film is not. It's visually interesting and Fassbender is, if not exactly riveting in this role, at least interesting enough to keep your attention. This is, kind of, where the problem lies. The only other actor of note is Tilda Swinton, who plays "The Expert". She shows up for about ten minutes before he takes care of her in a thankfully non-protracted encounter. She asks him for a hand up, and he shoots her in the head. "Forbid empathy. Empathy is weakness. Weakness is vulnerability." He is a professional. The story arc is that the Killer is on a job. That's where we start; see above. We watch him work. We watch him yoga. We watch him wait. We watch him finally get his shot. We watch him tag the target's hooker instead. The jig is up. Like, way up. That target is not going to be a target again for a long time. His guard is going to up. The client is going to be pissed. The killer is outtathere. He's on his scooter, evading the police, dumping evidence. He's free and clear. He's in trouble, though. He's never missed before. He's not supposed to miss. Missing isn't allowed. He flies home to the Dominican Republic to find that his house has been broken into and his girlfriend Magdala (Sophie Charlotte) attacked. The Killer tracks down the perpetrators one by one, creating a plan and then executing it, usually somewhat inadequately, though he mutters his mantra in an internal dialogue that one must "stick to your plan." Still, people are dropping and he moves on to Hodges (Charles Parnell) who organizes his contracts, He kills him as well, extracting the next targets before doing so. This is where we get a long and messy fight, followed by ten minutes of cool, smooth discussion at a high-end restaurant with Tilda Swinton. The Killer finally gets to the Client (Arliss Howard) and...leaves him alive. No-one can even begin to understand why he lets him live. Does he not shoot rich assholes for free? Because the guy was an incredible asshole, leaving a swath of destruction in his private-equity wake. The Killer can't suddenly be that worried about the police. Whatever. He flies back home and enjoys the sun with his now sexily scarred girlfriend. The end. I was more excited looking forward to a movie starring Michael Fassbender and Tilda Swinton directed by David Fincher than I am having watched it. I wasn't aware until I'd read the "Wikipedia page" for the film that the film was based on a French comic book. Unlike with Bong Joon Ho's excellent "Snowpiercer" , which inspired me to read the French graphic novels "Le Transperceneige by Jacques Lob and Jean-Marc Rochette (1982)" five years later, this movie is absolutely not inspiring me to find out what the comic books are like. I suppose a lot of the quasi-pithy lines were taken from the comic books? Stuff like, "Fate is a placebo. The only life path is the one behind you." WTF? You must be taking the piss, right? Right? Maybe it sounds better in the original French? "Le destin est un placebo. Le seul chemin de vie est celui qui se trouve derrière vous." Not really. Operation Hyacinth (2021) -- "7/10" This is a Polish film about a case in 1985/1986 when Poland was tracking and prosecuting gay people for being, well, ... gay. The movie title describes a giant dragnet operation that eventually ended up registering over 11,000 homosexuals and their "enablers" before it was (supposedly) discontinued. I learned from "Operation Hyacinth (film)" that, "In 1980s Poland, hyacint was a derogatory term, similar to the English pansy, used to refer to homosexual men." My initial reaction was, "that's an add odd negative epithet that is totally unique to slavic culture,' and then I read the word "pansy" and realized that I'd always just taken the epithet at face value and had never thought about how it's a flower. #weareallprettymuchthesame The movie follows the story of police officer Robert (Tomasz Zietek), whose father (Marek Kalita) is not only a domineering, dismissive, and small-minded jackass who also happens to be chief of the "militia", which passes for the police at the time. So, he's his son's boss. Robert has just been accepted to officers' school, thanks in no small part to his father pulling the strings. At first, we watch Robert and his partner Wojtek (Tomasz Schuchardt) investigating popular hotspots -- like free-standing public toilets -- but, soon after, Robert goes undercover to investigate a villa where at least one wealthy guy Gregorczyk (Dariusz Majchrzak) was paying male gigolos and possibly eliminating them. Once he's murdered, the police become interested. It's kind of obvious that Robert would be chosen to go undercover. I don't know how deliberate it was, but he kind of looks like the gay stereotype of the time (and the one that kind of continues to this day in popular culture). He's not nearly as rough-looking as anyone else at the station. He's well-dressed, well-coiffed, has a thin mustache, and sensitive eyes. He's not weak-looking, though. Though he's thin, he evinces a confident machismo that isn't overbearing. He's perfect. Though Wojtek looks like a bear, there is no way he could have pulled off an undercover assignment, as he would have been unable to hide his disdain and disgust. So they sent the sensitive twink instead. Robert starts to infiltrate that world -- and that world starts to infiltrate him. He starts to wonder what it's like. It's not like he doesn't have any idea whatsoever. His fiancé Halinka (Adrianna Chlebicka), who also works for the militia, has a very slender body, with almost no breasts and very little on her hips. She's pretty but she's not voluptuous or very undeniably female. One night, after the investigation had started, he pulls out a gay-porn tape that they found during the Gregorczyk investigation and just casually watches it while she sleeps. She's right there; if she opens her eyes a bit, she's watching two men kiss. No problem, Robert, you're just doing your job, right? Dude's trying to get caught. It's a cry for help in getting out of the closet. There's also the time at a dinner, where Robert's mom asks Halinka if she has a wedding dress yet. She says no, but that "Robert picked the material." I honestly don't know if this is supposed to be a hint, or if it's the kind of hint that's insultingly cliché, or what the intent was. Anyway, Robert discovers a lot of dirty business but he also discovers his own, second, sexual awakening -- to absolutely no-one's surprise at all. Many of the young men in Robert's new orbit are very attractive and he is quickly taken with Arek (Hubert Miłkowski), whom he not only pumps for information but also takes as his first male lover. [15] It's nice to see that a Polish movie can depict man-on-man sex as absolutely unrealistically as Hollywood movies depict man-on-woman sex. That is, the evening begins in a bar, where they empty at least two bottles of vodka; a third member of the evening is lolling and nearly passed-out on the table. [16] Robert and Arek are also obviously listing. When they return to Robert's apartment, their drunkenness is nearly gone. Their eyes are clear. Not only that, but Robert is an absolute professional at topping, sliding in without even looking or hesitating or fumbling or lube or, God forbid, a condom. He's also immediately an amazing lover. Kudos, Robert. This is par for the course, as movies have typically depicted the sex act in miraculous ways, in which people are able to easily couple, regardless of angle, gravity, or lubrication. The movie probably already thought it was being brave enough for having shown two men kissing -- one of whom has a mustache, so it's very clear that he's a man. Or perhaps the censors got to it, and said enough is enough and there's a director's cut somewhere. It's not that this hasn't happened for depictions of heterosexual coupling in so many other movies. Hell, American TV shows required actors to keep one foot on the floor at all times for decades. It's also possible to just fade out and let your imagination do the work. This movie didn't do that, so it committed to showing the coupling in at least some detail. It just depicted it in a cartoonish and physically unlikely way. Robert's dad breaks up the party, but Robert seems to have gotten away with it. His dad, looking out of the window in the other part of their L-shaped apartment, lends the lie to that. Arek is out down in the street, walking away. How the hell did he get outside? Is there a second door? Even his exit from their first tryst seems physically impossible. Robert's instincts are either not great, in which case it really is his father who's propped him up all of these years, or he's blinded by love, or maybe it's just all of the drinking and hangovers that are part and parcel of his undercover work. He goes to bring in Gregorczyk, who's acting all nervous. He's very clearly not going to go quietly. He acts this quite well. You can see him moving his hands over the table nervously, as if he's making -- and then has made -- a decision. Robert notices none of this. The man excuses himself, then throws himself off his balcony, plummeting to his death on what I can only assume are the cobbles below. After that, Robert's father busts him, revealing that he'd had him tailed and knows all about his new, second life. He makes Robert interrogate Arek, who's been picked up for being gay. Robert releases Arek, signs the confession of homosexuality himself, and storms out, chasing after Arek. He's gone, though. You know who's not gone? Halinka. She watches him wildly chase a beautiful young man out the door and, almost certainly already suspecting what's going on, catches up with him. Robert can't even look at her. It's over. Robert returns to the precinct at night, breaks into his father's safe with the key that he's very fortuitously found, reads the file he finds, and watches another tape. Arek is on it. He also sees his father's boss on it, looking pretty manly but also pretty gay. Well, well, well. Robert confronts Arek, telling him to leave the city. Robert goes on a bender, downing almost an entire bottle of vodka -- remember, he has a very slight frame -- then easily returns home. He tears up his room while downing another bottle of vodka. When his mom shows up, he's coherent. Ok. Sure. "Robert: I lied. I lied to everyone. Robert's mom: Except yourself. [exits]" At his award ceremony for having cracked the Gregorczyk case, Robert sees his father bribing his boss (who's also a huge gay hypocrite) to leave Robert's career alone. They pass Robert's pink file to Commander (Miroslaw Zbrojewicz), who lumbers out with it. Robert gives chase, to the docks, where he finds Arek. Robert tries, once again, to get Arek to run, but the ninny does not. Commander clips him in the leg. Robert gets the drop on Commander and still gets stomped. Arek's got the gun; Commander gently plucks it out of his hands, knowing he won't shoot. He drags Arek into the water to drown him. Robert interrupts the party with a stone to the skull. Again and again and again. Finally, Arek agrees to hightail it. Fade out. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] These are notes for me to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. The amount of text is not proportional to my enjoyment. I might write less because I didn't get around to it when it was fresh in my mind. I rate the film based on how well it suited me personally for the genre, my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. Links are to "my IMDb ratings" [1] As we would see in seasons three and four, this is not a problem for anyone but Bax and Peter. [1] In fact, that hand is covered up for all four seasons. In the first two seasons, he had a bandage on it because it had been shot through in the Pfynwaldfest. In the second season, it was because he'd burned it in a drunken stupor. I wonder what the story is behind that? Is there one? [1] "eso" is short for Esoterik, which is a catch-all term for yoga, meditation, therapy, etc. [1] I have ridden my bike up that road a couple of times. A good friend used to live in Miex and now his ex-wife (also a friend) lives there. It's deep in the hills of Valais. I write Valais because that region is definitely French-speaking. [1] That's the song that the Scarecrow sings when he's first introduced to Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz movie. [1] That's a show that I watch while doing indoor body-weight workouts in my living room. [1] I swear, they cannot stop saying things like "You know how much I love Dick," and seemingly not noticing at all. [1] He stars in the "Reacher" , which I hadn't planned on watching, but now might, solely based on his ability to project charm and charisma. [1] And, now that I think about it, it's probably because he moved on to star in "Reacher" instead, so they wrote him out of the show, relatively gracefully, I must say. [1] I know, I know, Dick inherited a fuckload of money from Bruce and I guess he's just financing everything. But the point stands that no-one ever has to worry about money, always has ready cash. There's just a billionaire unquestioningly funding all of their lives. It's basically "fully automated luxury communism" . [1] I am not making this up, I swear. Nobody smirked. [1] Franka Potente's German accent slips out now and then. [1] No-one wastes a word on this being odd or possibly a problem or the neighbors maybe chattering or maybe Mahito's dad having problems getting promoted because he'd not only started shacking up with this wife's sister after she'd died but he'd knocked her up. I didn't see anyone in the rest of the family batting an eye, either. [1] You thought I was going to go for the obvious pun about pumping, but I demurred. [1] The one with the most body mass, of course, because science. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5291 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5291 Sat, 28 Dec 2024 14:50:22 +0100 -- "6/10" 2. "Kung Fu Hustle (2004)" <#Hustle> -- "9/10" 3. "Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977)" <#Encounters> -- "7/10" 4. "Il pianeta delle scimmie (Planet of the Apes) (2001)" <#Planet> -- "5/10" 5. "JFK (1991)" <#JFK> -- "8/10" 6. "The Century of the Self (2002)" <#Century> -- "9/10" 7. "Last Breath (2019)" <#Breath> -- "7/10" 8. "Farha (2021)" <#Farha> -- "8/10" 9. "Roma (2018)" <#Roma> -- "8/10" 10. "Another Life E01 (2019)" <#AnotherLife> -- "3/10" Terminator Zero S01 (2024) -- "6/10" As with any other Japanese animated feature, this one is about the danger of atomic weapons. It emanates from the still-gaping wound torn into Japan's soul by the bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This essential narrative is woven into the story of the Terminator, and it doesn't work too badly, actually. The basic beats of the Terminator story -- time travel, paradoxical family relationships, super-powerful AIs -- are all here as well. There's a guy named Malcolm who's an incredible genius, who's developed an AI named Kokoro as a countermeasure to Skynet, which he somehow knows about. The answer to the question implied by the emphasized "somehow" in the previous sentence is that he has traveled back from the future to stop Skynet. There is also a more classic Terminator, which has been sent back to stop Malcolm. Eiko has also come from the future to combat the Terminator and save Malcolm's children? She is at first adversarial, then seems to team up with, Misaki, who is ostensibly Malcolm's housekeeper, who's an android but is also technologically advanced in ways simply not available to 1997 Japan. Ditto for Kokoro, which is the first clue that Malcolm is from the future. This isn't 100% obvious, though, since 1997 Japan in this show has a lot of semi-autonomous robots wandering around -- and causing the rifts in society you would expect by such a sea-change. Stuff happens. The Terminator is relentless. Eiko defends and deflects. Skynet goes nuts, bombing half the planet. Malcolm enables Kokoro's full power to try to stem further damage, although, you know, with half the planet already gone, what's the point? You fucked up, bro. Anyway, Kokoro takes over all of those aforementioned servant robots and starts herding all of the humans into slave camps or concentration camps or death camps, or whatever. It's not great for humanity, is what I'm saying. It's not hard to figure out what happens next if you're tangentially familiar with the Terminator series. Eiko turns out to be Malcolm's mother. Malcolm created Misaki, whose initial personality has been converted to Kokoro. One of Malcolm's kids -- Eiko's grandkids -- has the chance to activate an EMP to deactivate Kokoro and also Skynet. He elects not to, even though Skynet is going to attack again -- I guess he's hoping that Kokoro will take a few minutes off from enslaving humanity to fight Skynet, which seems intent on wiping out humanity more quickly? It was reasonably interesting and visually nice but it dragged on a bit, stretching the plot over eight episodes when it could have been four, or maybe six at most. I watched it in Japanese with English subtitles. Kung Fu Hustle (2004) -- "9/10" I saw and "reviewed this movie in 2017" . I liked it even more this time around, so I gave it an extra star. I watched it in German but it doesn't really matter. The storytelling is so visual that you could watch it on mute and miss very little. Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) -- "7/10" Some men are investigating the mysterious appearance of several WWII planes in the desert. An American group meets a French group and they mix English and French and Spanish to talk to each other, the local authorities, and an extremely elderly local man who says that the "sun came out last night and sang to him." In Indianapolis, two flights narrowly avoid hitting a UFO -- but neither wants to report a UFO incident. A little boy (Cary Guffey) awakens to all of his electric toys banging and full of life. His mother Jillian (Melinda Dillon) awakens to his fire trucks driving under her bed. She gets up -- and here's the weirdest part -- she is wearing a going-out top and jean shorts. Did she pass out in her bed after a hot date? Was she going to sneak out later? No-one knows. No-one sees the need to explain. At any rate, she knows to go to the window to catch a glimpse of her son disappearing out of their backyard, giggling as he goes. How did she know to go to the window? No-one knows. No-one explains. Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss) is building a train set with his son. His wife Ronnie (Teri Garr) has a house full of kids, one of whom is psychotically bashing a doll to pieces on the edge of a crib for which he's way too big. Roy is not really a father of the year; he's pretty distracted. Roy is out investigating a power outage when he sees the UFO, which shorts out his truck and puts him to sleep. He wakes and drives off, encountering a group of people having a UFO watching party -- kind of looking like they're waiting for the peloton to pass by in the Tour de France -- with a wizened rancher (Roberts Blossom) whistling, She'll be coming 'round the mountain. Roy and the others see a bunch of mini UFOs go flying by, following the road and hugging close to the ground. They are closely pursued by a police car. Roy gets his wife and kids out to look at the UFOs but they're disappointed. Teri Garr (RIP this year) is awesome, as always. Next, in the Gobi Desert, UN investigators take a look at an entire ship that has reappeared, after its disappearance in the Bermuda Triangle, just like the airplanes from before. People are gathering on hillsides for viewing parties. David Laughlin (Bob Balaban) is working with the team to decode the musical message from the aliens. It apparently contains a longitude and latitude. The UFOs are back at the little boy's house. His mother is trying to block them from entering. They have somehow imprinted a picture of a mountain on the little boy's mind, just like on Roy's. They are back to get him to help them do ... something. It's pretty wild. The whole house shakes as if it had a poltergeist, with screws coming off of heating vents, electronics coming on, and so on. These were all novel and high-tech effects in 1977 -- they're still pretty convincing today. There's a press conference with all of the UFO people and the military, where the military tries to convince them all that UFOs don't exist. This doesn't help at all. Roy is going crazier and crazier, trying to replicate the mountain he sees in his mind's eye. "It's not right!" Ronnie doesn't know how to handle the weirdness. Roy begs her to help him deal with what's going on in his head. She cannot. The kids are also not taking this well. Roy wakes near his train model with verve. He knows what the mountain looks like now. He starts throwing plants and dirt and chicken wire through his living-room window, pillaging the neighbor hood for supplies. Ronnie follows him for a bit but then gives up and leaves with the kids in a giant station wagon. She's outtathere. Cut to Roy having built a giant replica of the mountain in his living room. He's filthy. He's obsessed. He doesn't know what to do with himself. He can't stop. He sees the mountain on TV. He jumps in his car and heads for it, driving against two lanes of traffic that are going the other way. People are going nuts, trying to get out of there. Roy is trying to get closer. Jillian is there too. They head toward the mesa but notice that there are dead animals everywhere. There is a toxic gas in the air. They throw on gas masks. Claude Lacombe (François Truffaut), interpreted by Laughlin, talks to Roy about his visions. He is very sympathetic and wildly curious. There is no toxic gas. The army is lying about it to convince people to leave. The helicopter is full of the compelled, including Jillian and Roy. Roy takes off his mask. he's fine. Jillian does the same. Another guy named Larry (Josef Sommer) joins them as they hightail it toward the mesa. He's forced to stop by an injury, though. Jillian and Roy soldier on. Jillian makes it up the ridge, but Roy keeps sliding back down the final slope. She pulls him up (remarkably, for a 1970s movie). They come out at the top to find a military base nestled in the top of the mesa. As night settles, the spaceships arrive, seemingly called by the people at the base. Roy and Jillian watch from the crags of the mountain. The ships leave, then return in a spectacular, meteorological display. More and more ships appear, circling and hovering. It's unclear what they're doing. They were securing the area for the arrival of the mothership. It settles in and starts playing music -- a "tonal vocabulary" -- chatting with the billboard. The song ends. A platform drops. Several figures emerge; they are U.S. airmen and other abductees, lost decades ago. Soon after, another figure emerges, spindly, like a spider but eventually bipedal and bilateral. More figures emerge, more clearly humanoid, looking like children, milling about. Cut to a group of astronauts, which now includes Roy at the end of the line. They're lined up to board. The aliens choose Roy -- and only Roy. He enters the ship. I realize now that I've never actually seen this movie. I though the UFOs only appeared at the end. It was pretty good, if going on for a bit longer than it probably needed to. Also of note is that a not insignificant part of this film was in French, specifically most of the parts with Truffaut, who spoke very little, heavily accented English. Il pianeta delle scimmie (Planet of the Apes) (2001) -- "5/10" The unbridled optimism of these nearly quarter-century-old movies is enviable. The movie supposed that we would have floating bases orbiting Jupiter by 2029. And yet, though we have those bases, we still somehow need to train apes to fly spaceships. Incredible. Perhaps the most amazing thing is that they thought that the base would be called Oberon when it would obviously have been named Rumsfeld or something. Captain Leo Davidson (Mark Wahlberg) is on the Oberon, training apes to fly spaceships. When strange anamolies appear near the base, they send his chimp to investigate. The chimp is in trouble, so he commandeers a vessel and follows it into the anomaly. His ship is zapped off somewhere, where it crashes on a planet where tribes of prehistoric-looking humans are hunted and caged by quasi-civilized apes. I say quasi-civilized because the best that this movie can come up with is that the apes achieve a civilization that looks only slightly better than that from Hard to Be a God, with pretty much everyone living in muck, despite some apes being quite advanced. It's pretty medieval. Spoiler alert: Leo had been zapped by the space anomoly to a future, alternative-reality Earth where the apes had taken over after humans had messed things up for themselves. On paper, this movie has a lot going for it: solid concept, well-known property, stacked cast, pretty good practical effects. Mark Wahlberg is the purported star but Tim Roth, Helena Bonham Carter, Michael Clarke Duncan, Paul Giamatti, and Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa play apes in heavy makeup but are still easily recognizable. Kris Kristofferson is an elder member of the human tribe who is somehow mysteriously captured for the first time, along with Daena (Estella Warren, who is gorgeous and has perfect hair, despite being a savage living in the wild). I realized as I was watching that "I'd already watched it in 2012" . I was watching it again to practice Italian, which worked pretty well but was a bit sketchy in places without accompanying Italian subtitles. [2] This is not a good enough movie to finish watching again without a didactic side-effect. JFK (1991) -- "8/10" Jim Garrison (Kevin Costner) is investigating JFK's murder. He drives his wife (Sissy Spacek) crazy with his investigations, which have intensified three years later, as he's read through all of the Warren Commission's data and their conclusions and realizes that they've ignored glaring details. His wife wants his "attention" on a Saturday night, which is mind-bending because they already have five kids -- for the love God, stop breeding, you absolute freaks. Jim re-opens the investigation with Bill Broussard (Michael Rooker) and Lou Ivon (Jay O. Sanders). There are a lot of moving parts and a lot of loose ends. There are also a tremendous number of well-known actors, like Guy Bannister (Edward Asner), a poisonously racist man with a lot of connections, his friend Jack Martin (Jack Lemmon), Lee Harvey Oswald (Gary Oldman), Clay Shaw (Tommy Lee Jones), Willie O'Keefe (Kevin Bacon), Dean Andrews (John Candy), David Ferrie (Joe Pesci) -- whose eyebrows and hair are wild and completely fake-looking -- Susie Cox (Laurie Metcalf), Numa Bertel (Wayne Knight), Jack Ruby (Brian Doyle-Murray), Senator Long (Walter Matthau), and, finally, X (Donald Sutherland). Kevin Bacon goes all-out as a gay convict with very strong opinions about how things are going in America. "Jim Garrison: What I need to know is why? Why are you telling us this? Willie O'Keefe: 'Cause that motherfucker Kennedy stole that motherfuckin' election, that's why. Nixon was going to be one of the great presidents 'til Kennedy wrecked this country. Got niggers all over the place, askin' for their damned rights. Why do you think we got all this crime now? He promised those motherfuckers too much, you ask me. The revolution's comin'! Bullshit, man! Fascism is comin' back! I'm gonna tell you this: the day that communist sonofabitch died was a great day, a great day for this country. And I'd just hate to think that they'd blame it on some silly fuckin' Oswald, who didn't know shit anyway. People got to know. People got to know why he was killed. Because he was a communist." Phew, that's a lot to chew on. It just goes to show that the incoherence of online discourse isn't new. This is a movie made over 30 years ago about a period nearly 30 years before that. Incoherence seems to be in our DNA. So much stuff in the official narrative doesn't add up. Oswald was almost certainly a patsy. He was almost certainly not what they said he was. * Who knows Russian that well and stays in the Marines? * Who can renounce his citizenship at the height of the cold war, move to Russia, move back, and get this passport back within 48 hours? * How could his Russian wife Marina get into the country so easily? * Was it because he'd gone on a mission to give the Soviets enough information to down a U2 plane and thereby scuttle a potential peace conference? * Why would he order a traceable rifle to his home when he could have just bought one at any of dozens of stores within a mile of his house in Texas? * Why was there no attorney present during his 12-hour initial interrogation? * Why are all of the records of that interrogation redacted and missing? * Why are all of the records related to Oswald's service missing? * What was Jack Ruby doing in a supposedly broken-down truck on the day of the assassination with someone carrying a long gun from the back of the truck? * What about the shadowy figure on the grassy knoll? * Why were they browbeating eyewitnesses already twenty minutes after the assassination? * Why was witness testimony changed in the record? * How was Oswald able to get off three shots with such a slow rifle? * With a defective scope? * With mediocre skills? * With trees in the way? * That were in full bloom? * On a moving target? * At 88 yards? * Why wasn't he allowed to fire when Kennedy was coming up Houston, when he had a much clearer shot, when he had him dead-to-rights? Because they needed the real positions to be able to hit Kennedy, so he had to wait. If you ever get a trivia question that asks for the name of the film in which Joe Pesci, Kevin Bacon, and Tommy Lee Jones engage in a gay sex party where they all take poppers, with Jones on hands and knees, painted gold like a statue, Pesci in powdered wig and whiteface, and Bacon in a dress and makeup, it's JFK. Joe Pescie as David Ferrie played tough but he started to unravel. "Jim Garrison: It's gonna be OK, Dave. You just talk to us on the record, we'll protect you. I guarantee it. David Ferrie: They'll get to you too. They'll destroy you. They're untouchable, man. I'm so fuckin' exhausted I can't see straight." About halfway through, X (Donald Sutherland) shows up to give us a post-WWII U.S. history lesson, discussing all of the black ops in which he's partaken. X is basically a mid-20th-century "Smedley Butler" . "WWII, I was in Romania, Greece, Yugoslavia. I helped evacuate part of the Nazi intelligence apparatus, just before the end of the war. We used those guys in the fight against the communists. In Italy, '48, stole the elections. France '49, broke the strikes. Overthrew Quirino in the Philippines, Arbenz in Guatemala, Mossadegh in Iran. We were in Vietnam in '54, Indonesia '58, Tibet in '59. Got the Dalai Lama out. We were good. Very good. Then we got into the Cuban thing. Not so good. Set up all the bases for the invasion. Supposed to take place in October '62. Khrushchev sent the missiles to resist the invasion. Kennedy didn't invade. We were standing there with our dicks in the wind. A lot of pissed-off people, Mr. Garrison." X explains how he was in New Zealand, on the way back from the South Pole, where he'd been mysteriously and oddly stationed for a while, when he read about Kennedy's assassination in the newspaper. It described Oswald in detail, even though he wouldn't even be charged for four more hours. So how did the newspaper in New Zealand already have all of the information? It was fed to them by a black op. Instead of being done against a foreign country, the black-ops forces were being used domestically, to carry out and then cover up the assassination of a president. He goes on to explain how they'd gotten him out of the way so that he couldn't ensure the president's safety, which would have been his job. He goes on in detail about all of the safety measures that weren't taken that fateful day. "We would have arrived days ahead, studied the route, checked all the buildings. Never would have allowed all those wide-open windows overlooking Dealy Plaza, never! We would have had our own snipers covering the area the minute a window went up! They would have been on the radio. We would have been watching the building, checking for baggage, coat under the arms... Never would have allowed a man to open an umbrella along the way! Never would have allowed the car to slow down to 11 miles an hour, much less take that unusual curve at Houston and Elm! You would have felt an army presence on the streets that day. But none of this happened. It was a violation of the most basic protection code we have, and it's an indication of a massive plot based in Dallas." He asks the question we should always ask when something terrible and/or sketchy goes down, "cui bono" ? "Why was Kennedy killed? Who benefitted? And who was the power to cover it up?" X sums up why Kennedy had to go. "The organizing principle of any society, Mr. Garrison, is for war. The authority of the state over its people resides in its war powers. Kennedy wanted to end the Cold War in his second term. He wanted to call off the moon race and cooperate with the Soviets. He signed a treaty to ban nuclear testing. He refused to invade Cuba in 1962. He set out to withdraw from Vietnam. But all that ended on the 22nd of November, 1963." They turn the screws on Garrison. His wife turns against him; she doesn't want to lose their good life for the truth. The IRS audits him. The National Guard terminates his participation after 18 years. He and his team argue about the size and shape of the conspiracy. Bill Broussard argues that it was probably just the Mob -- but he nearly literally can't conceive of "our nation's hallowed institutions" having been involved. Garrison isn't having it; he responds, "I don't doubt their involvement, Bill, but at a low level. Could the Mob change the parade route, Bill, or eliminate the protection for the President? Could the Mob send Oswald to Russia and get him back? Could the Mob get the FBI, the CIA, and the Dallas Police to make a mess of the investigation? Could the Mob appoint the Warren Commission to cover it up? Could the Mob wreck the autopsy? Could the Mob influence the national media to go to sleep? And since when has the Mob used anything but .38's for hits, up close? The Mob wouldn't have the guts or the power for something of this magnitude. Assassins need payrolls, orders, times, schedules. This was a military-style ambush from start to finish... a coup d'etat with Lyndon Johnson waiting in the wings. "[...] "If I'm so far from the truth, why is the FBI bugging our offices? Why are our witnesses being bought off and murdered? Why are Federal agencies blocking our extraditions and subpoenas when we were never blocked before?" The finale in the courtroom is absolutely brilliant and utterly convincing. The most convincing proof? Literally everything else the U.S. government has done in the last 100 years. There's your proof. Here are some chunks from the closing arguments, taken from "the script" by Oliver Stone & Zachary Sklar . "The Official Legend is created and the media takes it from there. The glitter of official lies and the epic splendor of the thought-numbing funeral of J.F.K. confuse the eye and confound the understanding. Hitler always said "the bigger the lie, the more people will believe it." Lee Oswald - a crazed, lonely man who wanted attention and got it by killing a President, was only the first in a long line of patsies. In later years Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, men whose commitment to change and to peace would make them dangerous to men who are committed to war, would follow, also killed by such "lonely, crazed men," who remove our guilt by making murder a meaningless act of a loner. We have all become Hamlets in our country - children of a slain father - leader whose killers still possess the throne. The ghost of John F. Kennedy confronts us with the secret murder at the heart of the American dream. He forces on us the appalling questions: Of what is our Constitution made? What is our citizenship, and more, our lives worth? What is the future of a democracy where a President can be assassinated under conspicuously suspicious circumstances while the machinery of legal action scarcely trembles? How many political murders, disguised as heart attacks, cancer, suicides, airplane and car crashes, drug overdoses will occur before they are exposed for what they are? "[...] "I believe we have reached a time in our country, similar to what life must've been like under Hitler in the 30's, except we don't realize it because Fascism in our country takes the benign disguise of liberal democracy. There won't be such familiar signs as swastikas. We won't build Dachaus and Auschwitzes. We're not going to wake up one morning and suddenly find ourselves in gray uniforms goose - stepping off to work ... "Fascism will come," Huey Long once said. "in the name of anti-fascism" - it will come in the name of your security - they call it "National Security," it will come with the mass media manipulating a clever concentration camp of the mind. The super state will provide you tranquility above the truth, the super state will make you believe you are living in the best of all possible worlds, and in order to do so will rewrite history as it sees fit. George Orwell's Ministry of Truth warned us, "Who controls the past, controls the future. "[...] "What kind of "national security" do we have when we have been robbed of our leaders? Who determines our "national security"? What "national security" permits the removal of fundamental power from the hands of the American people and validates the ascendancy of invisible government in the United States? That kind of "national security," gentlemen of the jury, is when it smells like it, feels like it, and looks like it, you call it what it is - it's Fascism! I submit to you that what took place on November 22, 1963 was a coup d'etat. Its most direct and tragic result was a reversal of President Kennedy's commitment to withdraw from Vietnam. War is the biggest business in America worth $80 billion a year. The President was murdered by a conspiracy planned in advance at the highest levels of the United States government and carried out by fanatical and disciplined Cold Warriors in the Pentagon and CIA's covert operations apparatus "[...] "Let's ask the two men who have profited the most from the assassination - your former President Lyndon Baines Johnson and your new President, Richard Nixon - to release 51 CIA documents pertaining to Lee Oswald and Jack Ruby, or the secret CIA memo on Oswald's activities in Russia that was "destroyed" while being photocopied. All these documents are yours - the people's property - you pay for it, but because the government considers you children who might be too disturbed to face this reality, because you might lynch those involved, you cannot see these documents for another 75 years. "[...] "Individual human beings have to create justice and this is not easy because truth often presents a threat to power and we have to fight power often at great risk to ourselves. "[...] "[Starts choking up a bit] I have here some $8000 in these letters sent to my office from all over the country - quarters, dimes, dollar bills from housewives, plumbers, car salesmen, teachers, invalids ... These are the people who cannot afford to send money but do, these are the ones who drive the cabs, who nurse in the hospitals, who see their kids go to Vietnam. Why? Because they care, because they want to know the truth - because they want their country back, because it belongs to us the people as long as the people got the guts to fight for what they believe in! The truth is the most important value we have because if the truth does not endure, if the Government murders truth, if you cannot respect the hearts of these people... (shaking the letters)...then this is no longer the country in which we were born in and this is not the country I want to die in..." It's a really well-written film with great dialogue and speeches. It goes on a bit long but it's a tangled web. The Century of the Self (2002) -- "9/10" This is an absolutely excellent 4-hour documentary about how the world we now know took shape. I've included some interesting citations that underline the thesis, which is largely a history of Sigmund Freud and his nephew Edward Bernays and the mind-control industry that grew from them. They were far from alone, and they had a lot of help along the way, and afterward, but they kicked things off. Freud was largely uninvolved, except as an inspiration and household name used by others, but Bernays was involved throughout, over a span of decades. [media] At 16:34, "Man's desires must overshadow his needs. Prior to that time, there was no American consumer. There was the American worker and there was the American owner, and they manufactured and they saved and they ate what they had to. When the people shopped, they shopped for what they needed. And, while the very rich may have bought things they didn't need, most people did not. And Maiser envisioned a break with that, where you would have things that you didn't actually need, but you wanted as opposed to needed. And the man who would be at the center of changing that mentality for the corporations was Edward Bernays. " At 30:05, "Mass democracy, at its heart, was the consuming self, which not only made the economy work, but was happy and docile, and so created a stable society." "Both Bernays's and Lippmann's concept of managing the masses takes the idea of democracy and it turns it into a palliative. It turns it into giving people some kind of feel-good medication that will respond to an immediate pain or an immediate yearning, but will not alter the objective circumstances one iota. I mean, democracy, really -- the idea of democracy at its heart -- was about changing the relations of power that had governed the world for so long. And Bernays's concept of democracy was one of maintaining the relations of power, even if it meant that one needed to sort of stimulate the psychological life, the lives, of the public. And, in fact, in his mind, that was what was necessary. That, if you can keep stimulating the irrational self, then leadership can basically go on doing what it wants to do." At 01:25:00, "They actually believed that this elite was necessary, because individual citizens were not capable, if left alone, of being Democratic citizens. The elite was necessary in order to create the conditions that would produce individuals capable of behaving as a good consumer, and also behaving as a democratic citizen. They didn't see their activities as anti-democratic, as undermining the capacity of individual citizens for democracy, quite the opposite. They understood [themselves to be] creating the conditions for democracy's survival and future." I don't believe that all of them believed this bunkum. I believe that some of them believed it. But I also think that they all enjoyed the wealth, power, prestige, privilege, omniscience, and omnipotence they felt they had gained. They sold the idea that they should be in charge in that way, but I bet most of them couldn't have cared one way or the other exactly which story was told, as long as it resulted in their own personal dominance and comfort. Their arrogance was necessary in order to sell the idea that they knew better. Whenever you hear someone saying that people "made the wrong choices", you're hearing the voice of elitism creeping in and you should be extremely careful. At 01:30:00, there is an absolutely excellent and absolutely devastating section on Bernays's efforts on behalf of United Fruit to topple Arbenz's presidency in Guatemala in 1954. The inclusion of psycho-warfare would form the template for dozens of other coups and the anti-Communist century that followed -- and that still continues in this, the next century. Why stop when it's still working? Last Breath (2019) -- "7/10" This is the story of a 100M working dive in the North Sea. The divers go into what is called sat-isolation ("sat" for "saturation") for a month at a time, breathing only a Helium/Oxygen mix. Three divers crowd into a closed system that is analogous to a space station, but ensconced within the ship. They prepare for and execute their excursions from there, with their own access to the water. This is not science-fiction. This happens all the time. This kind of thing is essential for keeping the fossil fuels flowing. The dives are six hours long, with the diver attached to an umbilical that provides hot water -- the water temperature at the seabed is 4ºC -- as well as air, communication, and light. They drop down the 100 meters until they hit the seabed. Once they're down there, they perform maintenance and construction tasks on the pipeline infrastructure. It's not hard enough to dive at that depth, it's not hard enough to be breathing a mix of Helium, it's not hard enough to be trapped in a small habitat for a month, it's not hard enough to be in such cold water and at such high pressure that you would freeze to death in a minute and would be crushed in seconds. You also have to do construction work that would be difficult to do at the surface, in the open air. This is the story of Chris Lemons, who had done several sat-dives but was still the junior member of the team, which also comprised Duncan Allcock and Dave Yuasa. Chris and Dave drop down, while Duncan runs things from the bell. The weather up top was getting rough: 35kt winds and 18ft swells. Not undivable, though. There's a guy whose entire job is to keep the boat in position. The problems begin when he is no longer able to do so because of a mechanical failure. They immediately call back the divers -- but the boat is already adrift. The umbilicals are still attached, but they're now lying across the structure. The two divers have to climb out, hand over hand, which is normal, but they usually don't have to clear a structure. While Dave made it up over the structure, Chris's umbilical ended up tightly wrapped around it. It's dark and the water is churning. They can see each other, they're two meters apart, but Dave is at the end of his umbilical and cannot reach him. Chris's umbilical snaps, piece by piece. Dave is pulled away by the continued motion of the boat. He continues climbing, back to the bell. Christ has five minutes of oxygen in the tanks on his back but he has no chance of getting back to the diving bell. He can't just surface because that will kill him nearly immediately as well -- he has to depressurize in the bell first. Dave is back on the bell but can't get back in because the boat is moving so much. Oh, holy shit! The robot (ROV) found Chris on the structure but it's been at least 20 minutes. He has no air and no hot water. He's deep-frozen, so maybe, maybe, maybe there's a chance. They think he's moving, though. It looks like he's moving. Is it just the current? The ship is still offline and still moving about at the whim of the weather and the currents. It finally comes back online and can finally maneuver back to the structure, in order to pick up Chris. Dave is still on the bell and ready to drop back in to join the ROV in the salvage. 36 minutes after severing the umbilical, Dave's got Chris back inside, as quick as humanly possible. Duncan brings him back. He's alive. How? The film spools back to the moment that the umbilical was cut -- and lets Chris tell his own story. He talks of not really feeling the cold, about how pitch-black it was, about having calculated how much air he had left and knowing that he was going to die. He said it was like falling asleep. "It was not that bad." And then, he's back in the bell, waking up, getting stronger every minute. He seemed fine. No brain damage, nothing. He's still in the space station, though. They get him out and into the regular boat and keep a watchful eye but he really is OK. No lasting damage. Three weeks later, he's back on the seabed with Dave, with Duncan in the bell. The film is a mix of reconstructed scenes and original footage. It was better than I'd expected from the first few minutes. It's only 90 minutes and, honestly, a bit long for all that. They did a good job of hiding the big reveal that Chris was alive quite well. Unlike me, who spoiled it. Farha (2021) -- "8/10" Farha (Karam Taher) lives in a village in Palestine in 1948 with her father (Ashraf Barhom), who is the mayor. She dreams of moving to the city to study and live with her friend Farida (Tala Gammoh). Her father is reluctant but eventually gives in, getting her admission to the city school. Before she can go, though, the village is attacked. The Nakba is at their door. Planes fly overhead. Machine-gun fire rattles in the distance -- and also much closer. Her father sends her off with his brother-in-law but she refuses to go and returns to him, amid the chaos of the invasion. He secrets her away in a storeroom off of their courtyard, while he leaves to defend the village. He does not return. Farha spends days and nights in the storeroom, She is trapped. It rains. She catches rainwater to drink. She can see out of a small hole, a window of sorts. She eats potatoes. She is forced to designate a corner of the storeroom as a lavatory. Even after days of no noise, she is unable to force the door. She lies on her potato sacks, sleeping fitfully, singing to herself. Days later, a family arrives: a man with a pregnant wife. She is deep in labor and gives birth in the courtyard. Farha watches under the door. After a quick birth, they continue on their way. She calls to the father. He returns. He tries to knock the door down. As he is working, a voice calls over a megaphone: "Get out or get killed. Get out or get killed in your houses." She catches her first glimpse of Israeli solders. They confront Abu Mohammed (Saleh), who was trying to help her. There is a hooded man with the soldiers. He speaks English. They decide to search the house. The Israeli soldiers act exactly as Nazi soldiers do in every other war movie about this era. They roughly search the man's wife -- who had literally just given birth -- and then threaten to kill her. A female Israeli soldier finds a large key on her -- then she says she can keep it as a souvenir. This is, I suppose, a nod to the fact that many Palestinians still have keys to the houses that they were forced to abandon nearly 80 years ago now. The soldiers find the rest of the children, including the new baby. Farha sees this all through a crack in the door that Saleh had opened when he was trying to free her. The soldiers line the whole family up against the wall and then shoot them, gunning them down with machine guns. Farha pulls back, stifling a scream. She has learned not to make noise. She has taken the measure of the people who have invaded her village. She knows what they are. She knows she will find no mercy there. The hooded man with the Israelis is her uncle. While gathering water as instructed, he comes to her door and whispers her name, then leaves immediately. The baby lives. But not for long. "Don't waste a bullet," says the commander. The soldier lifts his boot but cannot bring himself to crush its head. He covers its face with a handkerchief and leaves. Farha watches, wide-eyed, horrified, unbelieving. She hears the baby's cries. Finally, she vomits as well. She is still trapped. The child has stopped crying. It gurgles occasionally. She can do nothing. She is still trapped. She redoubles her efforts to free herself, to no avail. It is dawn again. Farha has sung herself to sleep. The cries have stopped. It was a newborn. Its mother lies dead not meters away. The soldier who couldn't bring himself to kill the baby has let it die of exposure or thirst or hunger instead. Farha find a gun in her lentils. She dumps out more lentils and finds bullets. She loads the pistol. She takes aim at the door, putting useless holes in it. It is really unclear what the plan is. Save a bullet for yourself. The door magically opens. She is free. She drinks from the well. The courtyard is littered with corpses. She goes to the river, to the waterfall. She bathes. The memories do not wash away. She is on the swing that she'd shared with her friend Farhid. She has the knife her father gave her. She has a slip of paper from her friend. Her school admission paper is gone, left behind with her former life. She walks into the sunset, alone on a dusty, empty road. She would make it to Syria. This is a true story. Roma (2018) -- "8/10" We start with very nice opening credits, with a soothing scene of soapy water rushing over a tiled floor. A skylight shows a plane flying overhead. At the end of the credits, the camera pans up to show the lady cleaning the floor. We are in black-and-white. She works in a giant home, owned by a wealthy family with many children. The lady is on the roof, doing laundry, listening to No Tengo Dinero but with lyrics I'd never heard before -- and different than the standard ones. Across the rooftops, the scene repeats, with local women doing laundry on the roof, listening to transistor radios. It is 1971. Mexico. It is so wild watching a family with servants. it is a concept completely unknown to me. I don't think I've ever even been in a house with live-in servants. I know only a few people who have occasional maid service. The lady's name is Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio) and she lives in the servants' quarters with Sofi (Daniela Demesa). On their day off, they eat lunch at a diner, and then are picked up by their dates. Cleo's date Fermín (Jorge Antonio Guerrero) is poor. While she leaves a tip, he sneaks back to empty the soda bottle she'd left. He leaves the money. At the movie theater, he asks whether she really wants to go to the movie -- he probably can't afford it. Oops. nope. He and Cleo head back to a hotel room, where he takes down a curtain rod and presents her a fully naked Kata. He tells her of how martial arts saved his life. She is enthralled. Back at work; the morning routine. The dog Borras greets her first. Does he ever go for a walk? I don't think so. There is so much dog-shit in the driveway, where she was cleaning during the credits. Cleo is back at the movies with Fermín. They're necking in the back when she tells him that she's pregnant. He tells her that's great...but then skedaddles before the end of the movie. He even leaves behind his jacket. Cleo tells her boss Mrs. Sofia (Daniela Demesa), who immediately takes her in her husband's (Fernando Grediaga) fancy car to the doctor. She tries to drive it between two trucks and scrapes it up something fierce. She doesn't really care because we saw earlier that she knows his frequent business trips are a lie; he's having an extramarital affair that is tearing her apart. Cleo goes to a country home with her employer and her friends, where they all yuck it up in jarring ignorance of the colonial savagery around them, being done in their name, to maintain their power, to maintain their ability to perform drunken conga lines in massive living rooms, while hordes of their utterly undisciplined brats tear around, Two of them are racing electric slot-cars. Another pounds down on top of the cars as they go by. I have never hated any child more. I could have watched as a hole opened up in the Earth and swallowed him whole. You do not disrespect the slot-car track. Understood? Mrs. Sofia's husband is still gallivanting around the countryside, cheating right and left and pretending to the children that he's in Ottawa. Cleo visits Fermín's cousin Ramón (José Manuel Guerrero Mendoza) to find out where Fermín is. He's at his karate camp. Cleo goes there and watches as they train and then as their fearless leader Profesor Zovek (Latin Lover) shows off his power move: standing on one leg with his eyes closed. His students all scoff but are unable to replicate his seemingly simple feat. Cleo can, though, alone among the students and bystanders. No-one notices or cares. Fermín tells Cleo to fuck right off in no uncertain terms, threatening her and her unborn child with physical violence before loping off to jump on a truck full of other youths. He is portrayed as an animal, without morals or philosophy, satiating his animal lusts and moving on. In this way, the film does Mrs. Sophie's husband no better; he is, apparently, the same. If there's a message in this film, then it's that men are evil. They are terrible, shallow, irredeemable creatures who prey on women, who are just trying to get along and keep the world turning. Even the young boys are all assholes, for the most part. Little Pepe (Marco Graf) is a typically self-absorbed child but isn't as terrible as Toño (Diego Cortina Autrey) and Paco (Carlos Peralta). Cleo goes shopping for a crib with Abuela. As they are driven into the city, they notice everything in an uproar but their only concern is to find a parking space. The revolution does not concern them. It would concern Cleo but, when she is with the family, she is of their world, even though she really isn't. She doesn't know, of course. It doesn't occur to her. After a while, still in the store, there is a commotion and wild youths (more men) storm in with guns drawn, they are looking for a young man who'd fled into the store. They find him and execute him. One of the young men is Fermín, who aims his weapon at Cleo and Abuela. Cleo's water breaks. They rush to the hospital. In an elevator, she briefly sees Sr. Antonio and then he's gone. After a lot of commotion, Cleo's child is stillborn. She is allowed to hold the child for a few seconds before the (male) doctor says he has to take it away. It is unclear why things must go so quickly. We are, I'm sure, to assume that the patriarchy is fucking things up again. It's 1970 in Mexico. It's possible that this is how it was. I was born a year later in the far-northern part of Mexico's northern neighbor. I'm very sure that the doctor in charge Dr. Weeden smoked a cigarette as he accompanied my mother through her epidural and the birth of her twins, the second of which (me) no-one knew she was having. They didn't have sonograms back then, certainly not in countryside hospitals. I was a surprise. I wouldn't be surprised if my dad smoked there, too. Except that I bet he wasn't even allowed in. Was Dr. Weeden an obstetrician? Nope. He was my pediatrician after that for years. He was a GP. There was no such thing as a doctor dedicated to obstetrics back then -- at least not in the countryside. So, what I'm saying is, 50 years ago, everything was quite different. So maybe they did just take dead babies away from their mothers after a few seconds. Cleo is back at her home, but not working. Mrs. Sophie drives home in a new, smaller car, one that fits in the tight driveway. There's still dog-shit on the tiles, though not as much as before. Everyone just steps around it. God forbid you should take the dog for a walk. Maybe the neighborhood is too dangerous? They all drive to the beach with Cleo, who is having a hard time enjoying anything. I'm sure it's difficult to be with other people's children after what she'd so recently endured. At dinner, in a restaurant, Mrs. Sophia tells the children that their father isn't coming back. He will see them but he doesn't know when. She will take a different job, to make more money, because their father hasn't sent them any. Outside, they eat a desultory ice cream. Behind them, a wedding party is in full swing. Their despondency deepens. Back at the beach, in another gorgeously filmed scene. The children swim close to shore. Even Cleo is helping build a castle. She's talking again. Pepe is filthy with sand. Cleo towels him off. How did they not make him clean up in the water? He is telling his stories about when "he was older" again, when "he was a sailor". Cleo sees the children are going out too far; she rushes into the surf but she doesn't know how to swim. The children are gone. One floats back in. Another. Sofi is gone. She's back. Cleo has gathered them in. The surf pounds relentlessly, if rather innocuously, as they make their way back, coughing and choking as they fall to the sand. Mrs. Sophia rushes over. Paco and Pepe as well. This is the iconic scene from the movie poster. "Cleo I didn't want her. I didn't want her to be born." As noted, this film does not depict a good society. It is clearly nostalgic, a reminiscence. But it is a sober and clear-eyed look at a world that hated women and the poor even, possibly even more then than it still does now. I have, once again, I think, watched a film at the right time -- Mexico has a younger, Jewish, socialist, female president Claudia Sheinbaum who I just heard has told Canada that it doesn't half a tenth of the cultural heritage that Mexico has, when Trudeau was cozying up to Trump to figure out what to do about perennial problem-child Mexico. But I perhaps digress. Anyway, women 50 years ago persevered but that is perhaps all they could do at the time. Mrs. Sophia seemed quite resigned to not getting any alimony. Cleo had no chance of exacting any control over her baby-daddy. They both needed more help in breaking free of society's constraints but they did what they could, within the bounds of their world. Still, we saw in the tumult around them -- the marching military bands, the student protestors and rioters -- that there was far-worse desperation all around, that their problems, serious as they were to them, were as nothing when compared to those of the rest of the hoi-polloi. They return to the house. Sr. Antonio has removed all of the bookshelves and many of the books. The many remaining books are piled on the floor. "Es horribile," say the children. "A mí me gusta," says Sofia. The film ends on Cleo climbing the long, outer stairs to the roof, carrying laundry. The same airline flight that passed overhead, reflected in the puddle during the credits at the beginning, crosses overhead again. Life, I guess, goes on. No music over the closing credits. Just the sounds of a city: a dog barking, birds chirping, the sound of the far-off plane. The film is shot in black-and-white throughout and is beautifully filmed. The story is fine, if a bit banal. It serves as a backdrop to the gorgeous film, a skein on which the moving pictures hang. Its purpose is to provide an even flow upon which the images are carried. The real story is between the lines, I think. But that is perhaps what I brought to it. I'm honestly not sure what director Alfonso Cuarón intended. As you can probably tell, though, the film grew on me as it went on. By the time it was over, I no longer thought it was too long. I guess that's art. Another Life E01 (2019) -- "3/10" This was a low-effort soap opera with sci-fi trimmings. It "stars" Katee Sackhoff (of Battlestar Galactica fame) as Niko, who is ... not a good actor. She's quite wooden. She is, however, the best in this show! Like, by far! It might be unfair because all of the characters are written so poorly. They are all caricatures, barely sketched out as "identities", like it was a superhero team. There's overweight guy of Latin origin. There's trans-person of indeterminate gender. There's shitty, bitchy, thinks-she's-hot girl who can't stop checking social media. There's Dunning-Kruger-level overconfident macho asshole. There's smarmy guy who's called "old", even though he's barely 30, but it turns out that he's poor, so everyone unironically makes fun of him for it (because that's one of the last bastions of identity that you are allowed to freely mock: class). There's 15-year-old-looking female engineer who is almost certainly a lesbian. It goes on and on. The first episode was one-hour long. It introduced an alien invasion, FTL spaceships, FTL communication, all without explanation or history -- not even a second of explanation. The plot has been given about as much attention as that in a pornographic film -- it's just that, in this case, the action that the show can't wait to get to isn't a leaky submarine, but in-depth conversations about how people feel about leaving their daughter behind or how soldiers feel about the person in charge. The spaceship acts like a submarine. They have to weld things on it, for God's sake. It shifts and bucks as if were in current. There is a mutiny, there is a restoration of power, and then an attempted murder by the mutineer and a self-defense killing by Niko, but which I'm sure episode two would reveal had not been filmed in any way, so that the remaining crew members can sullenly suspect her of having killed her rival, even though she'd pretended to have forgiven him. The other crew members all seemed pretty chill with their fearless leader having nearly gotten all of them killed, while they seemed resentful of her for having saved their asses, even though the FTL jump they made took them into the unknown. During the mutiny, the "pretty" one took a helluva shot to the schnozz, with blood running everywhere. Not ten minutes later and she's got no bruises, no blood, nothing. No explanation. It feels more like the show just forgot that she should be nursing an injury, and just lazily hopes that we're going to assume that she was healed by some futuristic med-bay. It's trash writing. Have you noticed how much I've talked about female characters? The only male characters are either raging assholes or simps. The general on Earth is a woman. One of the chief scientists is a woman. The only reason the other scientist gets to be male is because he's married to Niko. At least 80% of the episode was people talking about their feelings -- and that's with the mutiny and getting lost in space. I decided to stop watching when the top scientist on Earth said, "let's try it at "1Hz" per second.". Just stop talking. Jesus, what bad writing. Insulting. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] These are notes for me to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. The amount of text is not proportional to my enjoyment. I might write less because I didn't get around to it when it was fresh in my mind. I rate the film based on how well it suited me personally for the genre, my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. Links are to "my IMDb ratings" [1] The subtitles weren't working because why would the cable company have that working? They've only been doing this for decades and are getting a good whack of money per month for providing this service but why should they be able to provide it reliably? They have little to no competition and are probably just technically incapable of getting it done anyway. It's enshittification. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5290 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5290 Sat, 28 Dec 2024 12:09:30 +0100 -- "9/10" 2. "School of Rock (2003)" <#School> -- "6/10" 3. "Nuclear Now (2024)" <#Nuclear> -- "8/10" 4. "Sahara (2005)" <#Sahara> -- "8/10" 5. "Glassboy (2020)" <#Glassboy> -- "6/10" 6. "The First Men in the Moon (1964)" <#Moon> -- "7/10" 7. "Dracula Untold (2014)" <#Dracula> -- "8/10" 8. "Here Comes the Boom (2012)" <#boom> -- "8/10" 9. "Arctic (2018)" <#Arctic> -- "9/10" 10. "Buy Now! The Shopping Conspiracy (2024)" <#BuyNow> -- "9/10" Thor: Ragnarok (2017) -- "9/10" My "review from 2018" stands. It's a fun super-hero action-movie that's not trying to be anything else. I watched it in German this time. School of Rock (2003) -- "6/10" Dewey Finn (Jack Black) is an over-the-top lover of rock music. Like, he won't stop talking about it. Even his band-mates are annoyed with him. He can play a mean guitar but he's not a team player and he's kind of annoying. He doesn't understand boundaries: during a concert, we see him take off his shirt during a guitar solo, scream lyrics over the lead singer, then try to crowd-surf, ending as you might imagine. He lives in a curtained-off section of his best friend Ned Schneebly's (Mike White) apartment, to the unending displeasure and active hostility of Ned's girlfriend Patti (Sarah Silverman), who takes harpy to a new level. Still, Dewey deserves it; I can't imagine having to live with that slob. Dewey needs a job, though. He needs money for his part of the rent. A school calls the apartment, looking to offer Ned a substitute-teacher job. Dewey takes it instead, even though, outside of music, he's nearly deliberately uneducated. Instead of doing his job, he just starts teaching a music class, inspiring the kids to keep playing their instruments and herding the others into rock-band support staff, like managers, roadies, and so on. Somehow, his so-called charm seems to work on principal Mullins (Joan Cusack), who is arguably even more damaged than he. They make a good pair, I guess. Even though their relationship is based nearly solely on his lies, that might be the best either of them have to hope for. This is just my dark interpretation, though; the film doesn't go anywhere near this level of introspection. Since he'd gotten kicked out of his band, he wouldn't be able to take part in the battle of the bands, which is his life's dream. He's cringe-y, though, so he decides to bring his child-band to the battle of the bands. To add tension, Patti discovers that he is earning his rent money only because he stole Ned's name and quite rightly turns him in, even though it's all portrayed as an unconscionable betrayal. [image]The movie goes for a twist by making the kids' band come in second place ... but can't hold the line. Instead, it makes it seem as if the crowd voted for the winning band -- headed by the slinky Spider (Lucas Babin), who's wearing a leather shoulder-shrug that shows off his mandala-esque chest tattoo -- but secretly liked the kids' band better, somehow? Which is why they started chanting for the kids' band to come back out? Anyway, we get a reprise and the crowd goes nuts. The parents now love him and all that he represents, having exchanged their cloistered worldview -- a narrow definition of success promulgated by a hyper-consumerist society driven by the engine of a growth economy that privileges the very few over the vastly more numerous many -- that led to them doing everything they could, principles and ethics be damned, to promote their offspring into these upper echelons -- which would have secured their children's corporeal but ultimately chimeric success, while losing them their souls -- for a more open approach that sees the value and virtue of music as a way of expressing humanity, empathy, leading to a world of peace among equals. Dewey is vindicated. He gets to crowd-surf. All is forgiven. He gets to open an after-school program. While I was watching it, I had given it an extra star but, now, thinking about it, it's really not almost as good as other, better movies about nearly the same thing. If you want to watch something about a battle of the bands, may I suggest "Metal Lords" instead? It's almost the same plot. Or, if you want a movie about kids trying to keep the dream of music alive in a school setting, try "Here Comes the Boom" , which features Kevin James as an actually dedicated and cool and, quite literally kick-ass teacher. Nuclear Now (2024) -- "8/10" This documentary by Oliver Stone has the sole purpose of convincing people that nuclear power is an unavoidable part of our energy future. Not only that, but it makes a strong case that the primary drawback -- the radioactive waste -- isn't nearly as much waste as people tend to think, and that the amount of waste from our current energy sources is vastly larger and vastly deadlier. It's a good documentary. The primary thing that it doesn't address is the reason why we're really not going to get nuclear energy. We're accustomed to talking about regulatory capture. We don't talk much about "media capture" or perhaps "mindshare capture", which you get by purchasing propaganda. In this, the fossil-fuel companies are much, much better than the nuclear industry. The nuclear industry has experienced major setbacks in many countries in the west. In Asia, though, they're building many more. It's all a matter of how you sell the idea. What are the drawbacks to nuclear power? * The radioactive waste is highly toxic, and will be so for untold millennia. * The fuel source -- uranium -- is mostly found in "developing countries", which means that the militaries of "developed countries" have descended on those countries to plunder them. To keep prices down as far as possible -- how else do you become a wealthy nation if not by stealing from others? -- the conditions under which uranium is mined are an ecological horror-show and devastating to the local population. * Finally, the nuclear industry is incapable of efficiency, well-known for massive budget overruns, in terms of both time and money. They can't efficiently build anything, preferring instead to pocket as much public lucre as possible. As shareholder-driven enterprises, their goal ends up being enriching themselves instead of actually doing the thing that their company was founded to do. It's not that these are insurmountable problems, though. We know how to store nuclear waste on this planet. There are ways. The only reason we can't figure it out is that the only solution our shitty society can think of is to bury it under poor people. If we can invest trillions into something as superfluous as AI, then we could find and finance a place to store nuclear waste. If we weren't living in societies run by sociopathic assholes, we'd also find a way of extracting uranium that fairly compensates the people who happen to live on top of it. That's perhaps the biggest failing of this documentary: it doesn't acknowledge at all that we would need to massively change the sociopolitical context -- the "system" -- in order to properly integrate nuclear power. It only hints at it when it talks about how major countries in Asia -- China is a big example -- are seemingly able to get the job done, and quickly. Why do we still need something like nuclear power? When people talk about real sustainable, renewable energy, they're mostly talking about wind and solar power. Many of those technologies are built with rare-earth metals, the mining of which is currently done with fossil fuels. You can't cover all requirements with wind and solar. You need batteries. Fossil fuels are incredibly efficient, non-chargeable batteries with a lot of waste products. We have to figure out how to replace those. We are making a lot of progress there, with salt batteries holding out hope that we can transition away from heavy-metal lithium batteries (which also require mining, etc.) but we're not at the point where we can replace coal and natural gas as batteries. Lithium batteries don't have nearly the power-to-weight ratio of fossil fuels, and salt batteries are still currently only a fraction of lithium batteries. How do you keep the grid running smoothly without hiccups, accommodating spikes, without batteries? You can't. You need to be able to store excess capacity for when you need it. That's the definition of a battery. We're not at the point where we have better alternatives than using the most efficient battery we've ever disco ered: uranium. The documentary does not discuss the problem in these terms -- this is my interpretation of the problem. The documentary does make a strong case that the pros for fission-based nuclear power far outweigh the cons -- especially when considered against the pros/cons of current solutions. There might be an even-better solution down the road that minimizes resource-extraction even more -- fusion-based nuclear power? -- but we're probably not going to be able to jump there without jumping back quite a bit. What does that mean? Our addiction to fossil fuels comes about from a combination of fossil-fuel lobbying to keep its profit-machine going at all costs, and, also, our insatiable need for more and more energy per capita. The documentary does not discuss that we would not need nuclear energy if only we didn't need so much energy in the first place. If we could live with hiccups in the grid, if we could slow down, if we could stop the consumerist hamster-wheel -- then we wouldn't need powerful batteries. We're seemingly not going to change that aspect of our society voluntarily -- either because of how we are, or because of how we're programmed by those that benefit from us being that way (but that's a whole other story) -- so either we drop back involuntarily when the accelerating effects of fossil-fuel-engendered climate change wreak havoc on our societies, obliterating our ability to even ship more fossil fuels (or even uranium) worldwide, we cut back voluntarily, or we accept that a lateral move to uranium-based batteries is the only stepping stone that moves us away from fossil fuels and toward renewables. We need time to develop alternative battery technology further -- it's not there yet. Every year that we spend using fossil fuels rather than nuclear fuels pushes us closer to the "involuntary" choice of a dark age (no pun intended). Honestly? It's already too late. There is no way that enough nuclear power can be brought online quickly enough -- at least not in the west -- to ameliorate any of the catastrophic effects of the fossil-fueled whirlwind we're already reaping. Not only that but, as we've seen with fossil fuels, once an industry has embedded itself into such an essential role, it becomes nearly impossible to dislodge -- under our current economic and planning system. There is every reason to believe that, were we to move to nuclear as a "stepping stone" on a path to an even cleaner future, we would remain on that stone for much longer than would be societally healthy. However, it would still be much, much better than the stepping stone on which we find ourselves today. The deleterious effects of air, water, and soil pollution engendered by fossil-fuel extraction, transport, and burning are largely born by the poorest 90% of the planet. People in the top 10% -- those who donate to environmental causes, etc. -- generally have no idea just how dirty -- both in terms of pollution and in terms of corruption -- the infrastructure for "keeping the lights on" actually is. They cheerily order things to their homes fifteen times per day and never breathe in a single hydrocarbon. Their water is clean. Their food is healthy. This is the disconnect that will prevent any meaningful, expedient change: those that benefit the most from things as they are have the most political power. Those who need the world to change in order to be able to do better -- or even survive -- have none. That is, perhaps, the biggest takeaway from this documentary. We are intelligent enough to know what the situation is. We have technology. We have knowledge. We know what a just and defensible path could be. But we have no economic or political systems in place to effect these changes. We can only look to China and others, and hope that they shame us into doing the right thing -- or that they somehow, miraculously, fix everything for us. And we can only hope that China continues its green push, which includes nuclear power. And we can only hope that they don't fuck it up with greed just as badly as we always do. It's a very slim hope indeed. Sahara (2005) -- "8/10" Eva Rojas (Penélope Cruz) works for the W.H.O. in an unnamed West African country, where a disease is starting to spread. She wants to track the disease to Mali. When she is attacked while tracking down a patient's father, Dirk Pitt (Matthew McConaughey) rescues her, arriving in his tanned, beautifully muscled, tousled, and board-shorted glory. She wakes up on a boat, quickly meeting Al Giordino (Steve Zahn), Rudi Gunn (Rainn Wilson), and Admiral Sandecker (William H. Macy). The boat is a salvage rig that's digging up relics. Pitt is trying to find a Civil War-era ironclad ship that had somehow washed up on the shores of the Sahara. He's getting close and manages to prise a commitment from the Admiral to look for it for three days. The admiral allows it, but doesn't tell him that he's saddling him with Eva and Doctor Hopper (Glynn Turman). Pitt gets them where they need to be and they part ways, with Pitt and Giordino continuing on their quest to find the lost ship. Yves Massarde (Lambert Wilson, the Merovingian from the Matrix) is meeting with General Zateb Kazim (Lennie James), who is trying to retain his stranglehold on his country while many are advising him to combat the disease that is tightening its grip. Dirk, Al, and Rudi are trolling -- like, literally, in a boat -- for the ironclad when they run into Kazim's troops in their boat. There is a pretty competently executed and exciting, if utterly unsurprising chase and fight scene. They manage to get away from the soldiers by pulling a "Panama" (blowing up your own boat). "Rudi: I didn't know you were in Panama? Al: We weren't. We were in Nicaragua. We thought we were in Panama." Once back ashore, they search for the doctors because they realize that the soldiers were only after them because they didn't know that they'd split up. Kazim tracks down the doctors first, killing Hopper, who won't give up Rojas, who's down a well. Al and Dirk see what's happening and mount a rescue mission, taking out several soldiers. Eva manages to climb back out of the well, saving Dirk's life in turn. They make their way further across the desert before being captured by the Tuareg. They meet Tuareg Sangare (Daniel Njo Lobé), who takes them to his patients. Sandecker meets up with Carl (Delroy Lindo), asking him for help getting his men out of the country. His men are doing just fine in the Tuareg village, where they find a cave drawing of the Texas, the ironclad that they've been seeking. Dirk realizes that the ship is on an underground river that's spreading the toxins but it's also the way that they might be able to get the boat out. Once they get underground, though, they discover that it's not a plague -- it's poison leaking into the water from Massarde's energy facility. It turns out that the solar-power-production facility on the surface is only a cover for an underground facility that dumps incredible amounts of toxic waste into the water system. They're using the solar power to vaporize some of the toxins but most of it is just stored in leaking barrels. Rudi and Sandecker discover that the poisons will spread all over the world if they're not stopped. They meet with a functionary who pledges to "do something" but it's obvious that he's not going to do anything at all. And you know whose toxic waste it is, right? Remember Somalia? Remember what Europe did to its coastline after its government "collapsed"? They cleaned up their coral reefs, right? Hahahaha. No. They laundered the toxic waste that was most expensive to dispose by paying the Mafia a pittance to take it off of their hands, knowing full well they were dumping into Somalia's territorial waters. This is an action/adventure movie, so it doesn't delve into this point too much, but that's the context. Meanwhile, Al, Dirk, and Eva have been captured by Massarde. Eva is with him, whereas Al and Dirk are on their way to Kazim. Massarde is now worried that the river has been poisoned. Kazim doesn't care. He wants the money. He tells Massarde that he can close the plant but that he has to continue to pay him either way. Dirk and Al escape from the truck and are now dragging the truck-bed to which they'd been cuffed across the desert. They happen upon an airplane wreck and repurpose it to a desert sailer, ripping across the desert, finally fetching up at a small shop where Dirk can call the admiral. Dirk trades his gold coin for a jeep. He and Al drive back to Sangare to tell him to strike against Kazim and save his people and the river. Al and Dirk take Sangare's fancy car (an Avions Voisin C-28) and break into Massarde's plant. Dirk looks for Eva, while Al searches for the bomb that Massarde has planted to make it look like the toxic dumping had been an accident and would therefore not have been his fault. In the end, his concern extends to himself and not to trying to prevent a climate catastrophe. They all escape, there's a helicopter chase, they thwart the plant explosion, and then they use dynamite to unearth the Texas. They break into the ship but its "iron sides" were built to withstand other, weaker types of ammunition. The copter's armor-piercing rounds tear right through it. Al goes back outside to open the gunport so that they can use the cannon. Al's the hero! Now there are tanks as well. The ship is full of gold coins. They ready the ancient cannon to fire it on Kazim's helicopter. "Cut off the head, the snake dies." They hit it point-blank. The cannonball explodes in the cabin, eliminating Kazim. The rest of the army gives up -- not because of Kazim's death, but because Sangare has appeared on the ridge above them with his entire Tuareg army, with a host of cavalry coming up from behind to circle the tanks and soldiers. Cue rock-and-roll ending. The gold ends up with the Tuareg. The U.S. government comes sniffing around but the admiral sends him away. I gave it an extra star because McConaughey and Zahn are great together -- and because Zahn was not written as a sidekick, which was a nice change of pace. What a fun adventure movie. Glassboy (2020) -- "6/10" This is the relatively simple story of a young boy named Pino who has a chronic and potentially debilitating disease (hemophilia. apparently). He is from a wealthy family. The grandmother is definitely old money. Pino's parents send him to public school where he makes four good friends. They are inseparable until his grandmother basically kidnaps him in order to get him the treatment that she thinks he needs. The parents know nothing, thinking that he and his friends have taken off on yet another side-trip. The bullies who used to beat on them get chummy and let the friends know that they heard that Pino was being held by his grandmother. The kids sleuth further to discover that he's in Austria and will soon travel to Stockholm, where the best hospitals are. The friends take a train through Graubünden -- there is a Rhetoromänischer Zug in the montage -- and then track him down to the castle where his grandmother is keeping him. The kids break in to the castle and try to get to Pino, who they'd seen through the window. The usual kids vs. adults hijinks ensue. Nonna has a change of heart, then has a heart attack. Everyone is friends again. Look, the movie's not for me but it's probably pretty good for kids. The top review on IMDb summarizes it well with "An occasionally inspired kidventure". The movie is originally Italian but I watched it in German because the original language wasn't available. The First Men in the Moon (1964) -- "7/10" A U.N. spaceship lands on the moon in the late 1960s only to find a British flag and a contract indicating that certain persons had been there in 1899 already. They hunt down one of the members of the expedition Arnold Bedford (Edward Judd), who tells them the tale. We flash back to him living in a cottage in the countryside, idling away, pretending to write a play while keeping American Kate Callender (Martha Hyer) interested in marrying him by pretending that the cottage is his and that he is on the cusp of success. Their neighbor Joseph Cavor (Lionel Jeffries) tries to buy the cottage, which Bedford is only renting. Kate agrees to it because she doesn't know her man is a cad and a bounder but Bedford leans into it and discovers that his mad neighbor has invented an anti-gravity paste. "They" go into business together, with Bedford providing nothing. He offers to sell Cavor "his" cottage and will invest the proceeds into Cavor's experiments -- leaving Cavor with ... investing in his own experiments and owning nothing more. Bedford is what we would call a "savvy investor" or "entrepreneur". Cavor is a wild card, focused on his experiments, and played wonderfully by Jeffries. He constantly yells at his handyman Gibbs (Erik Chitty) and his two colleagues, who play the lazy workingman to a tee. None of them want to stoke the furnace because it's not their job, so they piss off down to the pub for a pint. The furnace explodes, setting Cavor back not at all. I do not know why. I can only surmise that he can the plot forward with his enthusiasm alone. The "sphere" that will take them to the moon is in the hothouse -- which, at 123ºF, is very literally "hot" -- along with a half-dozen named geese whose purpose is unknown. Katherine gets involved and starts packing things for her sweetheart, like food and an elephant gun. Bedford is making himself semi-useful by stoking the furnace to create the last batch of "Cavorite", which is the anti-gravity paste. Katherine drives her little 1899 car everywhere, when it's easily walking distance over to her cottage. She and Bedford also wear incredibly impractical clothes everywhere. Cavor releases his geese, again without mentioning what their contribution was. Katherine is served with a summons for having illegally tried to transfer the title of a cottage she doesn't own to Cavor. She heads over to give Bedford a piece of her mind and interrupts the launch. They grab her into the sphere just as it launches. They travel for quite some time -- what seems like days -- with no sign of a toilet. They are all still dressed in wildly inappropriate and fancy clothing. Bedford and Katherine find chickens under a bench -- I'm not kidding -- and are fixing to eat the eggs they've produced. Cavor is asleep. Cavor wakes and releases the chickens into the cabin. In the next scene, they're gone. Cavor shifts blinds covered with Cavorite to control its effects. They "land". Bounce, bounce, bounce, crash. The two fellas put on diving suits while Kate stuffs herself into a bulkhead to survive while they go outside -- there is no airlock, you see. Before they go, Cavor has Kate take a letter to "claim" the moon for themselves. Then they stuff her into the bulkhead, her role complete. They exit onto the moon's surface, with no attendant outrushing of air. They are not wearing gloves. After messing about a bit, a portal into the moon opens, evincing signs of a quite advanced civilization. They both fall in, with Bedford losing his helmet but still able to breathe. Lucky for him. They head deeper, searching for his lost helmet so that they can return to the capsule. They spot shadows of moon-men. Bedford says, "I knew we should have brought that gun." Typical colonial mentality: they break into someone else's building but it's obviously theirs by right, so they can shoot whomever they please. They meet the Selenites, who are armed with what look like halberds. Bedford goes wild, throwing miniature Selenites left and right, off the cliff. They find the helmet and manage to escape, climbing back out, only to discover that the Selenites have dragged the sphere away to another fortress of theirs. The two men follow the tracks and break in, releasing a tremendous amount of air, with Cavor blocking the doors open with his helmet. I kid you not. The Selenites are trying to pry open the sphere while Katherine yells at them from inside. The two men encounter a giant caterpillar-like bug that they fight off inside a crystal forest. They run in opposite directions, with Cavor having lost his entire spacesuit at this point. The Selenites capture him. He joins Katherine, who's also been captured. They begin to communicate with the Selenites, who are exceedingly clever and have built incredible machines exceeding anything that mankind has created. None of this will prevent the humans from thinking that they are their rightful superiors, though. Some of the Selenites are children in costumes while the more insectile ones -- with skinny arms -- are stop-motion animated. During a quite fortuitous eclipse, the selenites go into a deep-sleep. Bedford is back, now also shorn of his spacesuit, retrieving his elephant gun. Bedford and Cavor tussle: Cavor wants to communicate with them, while Bedford wants to get Kate and flee. They both get what they want. Cavor communicates with a big-brained member of the Selenites while Bedford and Kate reconstruct the disassembled sphere. Bedford interrupts Cavor's audience with the Selenite using his elephant gun, throwing Selenites left and right as before. He bullies Cavor back to the sphere to make him fix the blinds -- because Cavor is a genius while Bedford is a good-for-nothing brute who thinks he deserves success with no effort. Remember, his entire role in this is because he placed himself into the situation, thinking it the most natural place for him to be, despite him not being able to contribute anything. It doesn't occur to Bedford that contributing to an endeavor might be a prerequisite for reaping its rewards. Why would it? It's never mattered before. This is the kind of person that our societies train to rule. The sphere lifts off without Cavor. Bedford lands with Kate in Zanzibar. Fade back to the present, where Bedford finishes his story. They wheel in a television showing the present-day astronauts investigating the Selenites' city, which is now in ruins. Why? Cavor's microorganisms killed them off -- just like smallpox helped eliminate so many indigenous peoples. The first half was a lot more fun than the second half, to be honest. Overall, it held up quite well. Cavor in his laboratory was in his element. I gave it an extra star for Jeffries's role. As soon as he no longer had Gibbs to yell at, though, it's like half his personality had gone. I can't remember what the book by H.G. Wells was like, so I don't know how faithful the adaptation was; I can only suspect that it was actually quite faithful. Dracula Untold (2014) -- "8/10" Vlad (Luke Evans) is trying to keep the Turks out of Transylvania. At first, he pays the tribute -- but the Turks ask for much, much more: they want all the teenaged boys to fight for them. He meets with Sultan Mehmed (Dominic Cooper), who refuses to back off, telling Vlad that he will also have to give up his son to serve directly for Mehmet. His wife Mirena (Sarah Gadon) is not happy, to say the least. His son Ingeras (Art Parkinson) decides for himself that he will go. Mehmet's messenger mocks Vlad that he had expected more resistance, to which Mehmet responds with his sword, sending Ingeras back to Mirena, chopping the messenger's hands off, killing him, then slaughtering the rest of his troops. He's of course in deep shit now but it had to be done. He heads back to the cave where Master Vampire (Charles Dance) had killed his two best men and where he'd seen the monster. The monster mocks him, showing him his power, but interested to see why Vlad is hopeful rather than scared. The vampire makes him admit his crimes, that he'd impaled thousands of enemies to protect his land already. The monster tells Vlad that he doesn't yet know anything about being a monster -- but he's willing to show him. Vlad drinks the Master Vampire's blood, thinking that he will be able to avoid the fate set out for him. He will die, and then he will become a vampire. He will drink blood. He is immortal. His senses are incredibly heightened. He can avoid being a vampire forever if he resists drinking blood for three straight days. He wakes in a river and realizes his powers. His silver ring burns him. He keeps it on a leather thong around his neck instead. Bats fly into his body; he absorbs them. He returns to the castle to find his folk besieged by the Turks, who've returned to take their price -- the sons of all of them. He goes to battle alone, against thousands. He is unstoppable, turning into bats and back, slashing and hacking, a one-man vampire army. Fade to him standing victorious over a field of the slain. The others come running, with swords drawn. They were not needed. Sultan Mehmet vows to lead the next, even-larger army himself. Vlad says that he will win the war in three days. His second-in-command says, "Why not two? Now that would be impressive." Vlad has other problems. He can't watch people eat. He makes love to his wife but her pulsing carotid is nearly too much for him. He flees to the forest where he meets his first familiar, who offers him blood from his hand. Vlad refuses, resisting the spilled blood, but just barely. Mirena wakes the next morning to find him on the yurt's floor, feverish and shaking, with his silver ring burning his skin. His old scars have healed. Vlad shows Mirena that he is a vampire, showing her how the sun burns him. he tells her that he will be better in two more days -- if he can resist the call of blood. The Turks ambush the castle on its way to their mountain keep. Vlad is too late to save his right-hand man, who dies protecting his wife and son. The rest make it to the keep. Brother Lucian (Paul Kaye) confronts him, with his whole townsfolk calling to kill Vlad because, obviously, he is a monster and must die, even though he's totally the only thing keeping them alive right now. But they are cutting off their noses to spite their faces. Vlad survives the fire and steps into the daylight. He is not happy. "Glaubt ihr seid noch am Leben, weil ihr kämpfen könnt? Ihr seid nur wegen mir am Leben." Vlad has survived two days. He prays for the strength to defeat the Turks and survive another day without drinking blood. The night is over. The giant Turkish army nears the keep. They are coming up an enfilade, as if they had nothing to fear. Vlad is once again accepted by his troops. Bats appear and roost in the castle's dome. Thousands of them gather around the keep in a swirling wall. The Turkish soldiers are blindfolded. Vlad unleashes his bat army on them. They are torn to shreds. A bat tornado rises above the battlefield and thrusts down into the remaining troops like a fist of God. Vlad attacks Mehmet personally. However, Some of Mehmet's crack troops have snuck in through the back door and are about to throw Mirena and Ingeras off of the parapet. Mirena falls, Vlad gives chase but the sun is burning him. She plummets to Earth. Vlad is inconsolable. He'd said earlier that, if she were to die, he would no longer have a reason for fighting. How about revenge? Mehmet turns around and leaves with his remaining troops, happy to have ruined Vlad's life. Mirena begs him, with her last breaths, to take her blood. He does. He regrets it immediately. Master Vampire exits his cave, freed from his curse. Vlad offers his own blood to a soldier, who takes it. Vlad unpacks his super-armor from when he'd last had to kill thousands. He now leads a vampire army. He converted his remaining townspeople, who are laying waste to the Turks. His troops and townspeople are not shy about drinking blood. Vlad meets Mehmet on a pile of silver. This, of course, makes it possible for Mehmet to play the heel in this kayfabe. Like, Mehmet has no fear at all about fighting the vampire that has killed thousands of his troops. It's kind of ludicrous. Of course Vlad turns the tables and takes Mehmet's blood. Perhaps the funniest part is considering that Mehmet had dragged so much silver so far just for that little party. Vlad saves his son but now his troops wants to turn his son. Vlad impales his oldest friend and mentor for the transgression. Brother Lucian comes to the boy's rescue, holding up his cross, which works on Dracula's townsfolk (even though it has no effect on Dracula). Vlad sends Ingeras off with Lucian, then allows the clouds to part so that he and his vampire family are destroyed. The familiar from the forest finds Vlad's body and restores it. We see him in the modern day, where he meets Mirena again, in a modern city. Now her name is Nina. Master Vampire is there as well. Honestly, this is one of the better vampire movies I've seen. I saw it in German. Here Comes the Boom (2012) -- "8/10" I've not rewatched a movie this soon but it's a fun movie. I "reviewed it earlier this year" . Arctic (2018) -- "9/10" Overgård (Mads Mikkelsen) is digging a giant S.O.S. into the arctic wasteland. He returns to his crashed plane, which is definitely not going to fly again but is also whole enough to provide shelter from the elements. He has no firewood, no heat source other than his own body. He stays busy, using his watch's alarm to schedule his day. He checks his ice-fishing holes; he puts another rock on a cairn in a small gully (later we learn that it's a grave marker); he troops up a promontory with a hand-cranked signaling device to try to reach someone. He goes up each promontory five times. He keeps track on a map. He is missing some toes, presumably due to frostbite. He barely utters a word. To whom would he speak? I would be speaking to myself, but would perhaps also stop after a long enough period. One day, one of his fish coolers has been torn open. A polar bar has found his campsite. He sees the bear in the sun a few days later, far in the distance. it walks off. We have no idea how long he's been there. It looks like it's been quite a while. His red coat is the only spot of color anywhere. Everything else is black and white. One day, the signal goes from red to green. He sees a helicopter in the distance. He lights his only flare. The chopper pilot sees him. He flies over. The wind and storm catch the chopper, sending it down. Overgård's disappointment is palpable. He gather himself and runs toward the black plume to see if he can rescue anyone. There are two unconscious people in the chopper: a male pilot (Tintrinai Thikhasuk) and a female passenger (Maria Thelma Smáradóttir). He drags the pilot out but he's dead. The female passenger is hurt pretty badly, with a wound to the belly, but is still alive. He stays with her in the wreckage. In the morning, he ransacks the wreckage for supplies: food, flares, a map. He rescues the woman and drags her on a makeshift travois back to his plane. As he's putting her into his bunk, he revels in the warmth of another person for a second or two, even though she's unconscious. He gets her to drink some water. She wakes briefly but her eyes are shifting side-to-side in a not-very-healthy way. She asks about the pilot. "I'm sorry," he says. He returns to the chopper to salvage more supplies. He takes the dead pilot's clothes and supplies, then buries him and builds a small cairn. He finds a working lighter. The wind bangs a door open on the back of the copter, revealing a sled. He laughs ruefully, then looks at his loaded sledge made out of a plane door. Back at the plane, he cares for her stitched-up wound with hydrogen peroxide, then fires up a gas burner. His gaze toward it is worshipful as he warms his hands. He begins mapping a route. His fishing line clanks. He runs out to find the biggest fish yet. He yells jubilantly. He cooks the fish -- his first hot meal in God knows how long. he feeds the woman. She won't eat. She's not recovering very quickly. Or perhaps at all. He climbs the hills. He cranks the signal. The light blinks red. He studies the map. He starts to think. He climbs a solitary slope into the sun. He looks at the mountains through which he'd have to go to get to the "seasonal station" he's seen on the map. He packs up his things, including her, packing it all on the sledge. He writes his plan on the inside and outside of the plane. The weather is good. They're on their way, him dragging her. How in God's name does he know where he is? As twilight creeps in, he digs a shelter in the snow, big enough for both of them. He cooks a meal. He always makes her squeeze his hand to prove she's cognizant even though she seems to be sleeping all of the time. The day breaks, sunny, cold, and clear. He's off, a dot in the vast snowy expanse. A storm comes up. He finds someone else's camp, marked with "1 alive due South". He keeps the ID he finds. Onward. Halfway there and the way is blocked by a cliff. He maps out an alternate route but it's twice as long. He climbs up to see that the former route would be easy going. He's already nearly there. He could to the seasonal station pretty easily. He drags his sledge up. She's still down there, though. She's next. He pulls with all of his might. It's not enough. There's no place to use leverage, no way to halve the weight. Down she goes. Again. He turns to look up the easy valley. He crosses off the route. "We'll take a better way." This movie is brilliant, all show, no tell. There's almost no dialogue. Of course he can't go on without her. What's the point of surviving with that amount of guilt? You have to be able to be the hero in your own story; otherwise, what's the point of surviving? He finds a cave in which to shelter for the night. He wakes to hear grunts that tell him that the cave might have had an occupant who's returning home. His charge coughs, alerting the beast. Now it knows something's in its cave and it starts digging. It sticks its lovely head in the small entrance. Overgård lights a flare and drives it off. The camera pulls back across the valley to show the tiny light flicker out. The next morning, the bear is gone and the sled intact. They set out but the weather is impossible. He flips the sled to break the wind, then jumps into the sleeping bag with her, shutting out the worst of the cold. They are both freezing but the shared body heat has its effect. His watch beeps. He digs them out. The sled is stuck fast. His water bottle is frozen solid. He sticks it up his coat to heat it. They continue. His fingers are freezing. The tundra is endless. They shelter in the lee of a rock. He gives her water. Asks her to squeeze. Orders her to squeeze. No response. He burns some supplies for warmth. He sleeps rough. He's looking shabby as the day dawns relatively clear but with no direct sun. He checks on her. She seems to be alive but her wound is putrid. He makes her hold the picture of her family. He wipes the drop of blood away that has escaped her mouth. She's dead. He leaves her in the giant sleeping bag, sort of as a coffin, I guess. He's moving on, but spots a plant growing incongruously in the snow. Near the plant, he falls through a hole in the snow into a cavern. He wakes, half-trapped under a rock. His leg won't budge. He has his first doubts. They don't last long. They never do with this kind of person. He wrenches hard to pull his leg out. His leg has a huge cut on it. He manages to crawl back to the surface. He manages to shuffle back to his sled, and then back to her final resting place. She coughs. He rallies with purpose. He binds his leg. He hooks up the sledge. He grabs a crutch. He drives himself onward. She coughs. He peels back the tarp to give her water. The evil wind takes the tarp out of his reach. He watches it, but can't chase it. He fills ice into the flask. He is indomitable. They encounter a big hill. He is forced to stop in the middle. He throws out as much weight from the sled as he can, except for her. He crawls to the top to have a look. at the top, he sees a helicopter landing on a pad. He slides back down to her and pushes the sledge up the hill. He cries to the chopper. They're too far away. He yells. He lights his last flare. He stands on his broken leg. Last ditch. All in. He sets his coat on fire and holds it up on his walking stick. The chopper takes off, heading away from them. Once again, he doubts. But you can see him rallying his remaining resources, the little he has left. He has no coat, though, and nothing left. He finally lets go, lying on the snow with her. The wind comes up. The chopper is back. Buy Now! The Shopping Conspiracy (2024) -- "9/10" This is a great documentary about the predations of capitalism as expressed through the compulsion to consumerism to feed an insatiable drive for growth. This burning of resources at a fever pitch is all to benefit of a handful while others simply spin in their hamster wheels, imagining that they're happy and fulfilled but all the while feeling empty and just running more, not knowing what else to do. The world burns at an incredible rate and no-one even knows why. It is just the way of nature, we are told by those for whose benefit we do it. The main plot device is an ethereal robotic voice that guides you through the principles of how to do business in the western-style system of capitalism. The robot is deliberately unintentionally ironic as it describes how to pretend to care about the deleterious effects of generating as much profit as possible for your personal fortune. The five principles are: 1. Shop more. 2. Waste more. 3. Lie more. 4. Hide more. 5. Control more. "A profit-maximization strategy will lead to an inevitable environmental transformation. Don't be scared. Your continued success will delay the most extreme impacts affecting you. You just need to convince others that you are trying to solve the problem." "If you have been following these rules diligently, you should now be fabulously wealthy." "Please only share the information contained in this interaction with other trusted users. Widespread dissemination of these rules may negatively impact your sales." The voice reminds me of the game Portal, even down to the promise of a "surprise" at the end that never transpired -- in Portal, it was a "cake" that never existed. A woman from Ghana says: "People throw something "away". They imagine that "away" as something abstract. For us, "away" is here." Clothes are a particular problem, taking so much space, breaking down, and causing microplastics because so much of it is synthetic. We see people shopping, they show people going on shopping binges, using their privileged disposable income to buy entire roomfuls of clothes. Most of these clothes are made of synthetics, which means that they're made of oil. The lady from Ghana says, "just stop. There's just too much clothing in the world. Just fucking stop." Unlike the "Nuclear Now" documentary, this one comes right out and says exactly what the only viable solution is. "As long as we define success in terms of more growth, of more profits, then we are in trouble." "Just buy less. It'll be fine." -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] These are notes for me to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. The amount of text is not proportional to my enjoyment. I might write less because I didn't get around to it when it was fresh in my mind. I rate the film based on how well it suited me personally for the genre, my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. Links are to "my IMDb ratings" ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5199 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5199 Fri, 27 Dec 2024 23:40:22 +0100 -- "7/10" 2. "Shanghai Knights (2020)" <#Shanghai> -- "7/10" 3. "Cowboys and Aliens (2011)" <#Cowboys> -- "5/10" 4. "Fifth Element (1997)" <#Element> -- "10/10" 5. "Assassin's Creed (2016)" <#Assassin> -- "5/10" 6. "The Haunting of Bly Manor (2020)" <#Haunting> -- "9/10" 7. "John Wick 4 (2023)" <#wick> -- "8/10" 8. "Disturbia (2007)" <#Disturbia> -- "8/10" 9. "Split (2016)" <#Split> -- "9/10" 10. "Platform 2 (2024)" <#Platform> -- "3/10" Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015) -- "7/10" I don't have much to add to my "review from 2017" . I watched it in German. "Die Sonne steht ganz schön tief." Shanghai Knights (2020) -- "7/10" There a fight scene in Rathbun's (Aiden Gillen) castle that looks very much like the one from Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, although pressing the statue's breasts to rotate the fireplace came from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, as did Chon's (Jackie Chan) trick of discovering a secret passage by feeling the wind. The movie is an homage to that style of action film. Chon Wang's friend is Roy O'Bannon (Owen Wilson), who calls him "John Wayne", mispronouncing his name. What's Roy O'Bannon like? "Prostitute: I'll give you a discount. Roy: That's the most romantic thing a woman has ever said to me." This movie is so much better than it has any right to be. It's just goofy and fun. There's a pillow fight. It kind of serves the plot, but it's mostly an Airplane-style scene that starts with a Blazing Saddles callback. The whole plot is basically that Chon's father (Kim Chan) has been killed by Rathbun, who has stolen the seal. Chon wants to get it back. There are homages everywhere. The kid's (Aaron Taylor-Johnson) name turns out to be Charlie Chaplin (another homage). A final homage is to two more films: Back to the Future (hanging on the clock), and Chan's own Rush Hour, when they escaped the clock by jumping onto a banner and tearing their way down. Cowboys and Aliens (2011) -- "5/10" My "review from 2012" is unchanged, except that maybe I appreciate Paul Dano's initial grandstanding a bit more. He and Harrison Ford are still just cashing paychecks, though. This time around, I recognized Sam Rockwell and Clancy Brown as well, doing a decent job. Fifth Element (1997) -- "10/10" I love everything about this movie. Jean Luc Besson dreamed, wrote, and directed an absolute masterpiece that was luckily written in an age where no-one wanted to write a sequel to everything and people didn't write every movie with the hopes of writing a sequel. He started writing it at 16 years old and filmed it 14 years later. There is a great scene where Thai Kim (Kim Chan) pulls his gravity-defying junk up to Korben Dallas's (Bruce Willis) apartment window. I loved everything about that then and I still love it now. The attention to detail in Korben's apartment and in the city is right in my wheelhouse. The cast is great. Zorg (Gary Oldman) is possibly one of Oldman's greatest roles. There's the monk Cornelius (Ian Holm) who is trying to so hard to save the world for the good guys that he doesn't mind stepping over the line a bit, even though he knows that it makes him a not-so-good guy but at least he's not as bad as the ball of ultimate evil that is approaching the Earth to consume it whole, which is totally why he's doing little bad things, because we need to stop that thing at all costs, even if we have to cash in a little bit of our own humanity and principles. There's our Fifth Element Leeloo (Milla Jovovich, who is absolutely lovely and enchanting and convincingly otherwordly and powerful. There's Ruby Rhod (Chris Tucker), which is also the role of a lifetime for him, where you wonder how much he improvised and how much was scripted, although it doesn't matter because he's fabulous. There's President Lindberg (Tom Lister Jr.), who was a cool black president long before Obama and who, with his shifty wall-eye, was still convincing as a president of Earth (the Galaxy?) who was trying to actually do the right thing. Do they save the galaxy/universe? You betcha. I watched it in German this time. Assassin's Creed (2016) -- "5/10" This movie starts off with a bunch of scenes to "set the story". Scrolling text tells us that the assassins are pledged to prevent the Knights Templar from acquiring the seeds of Eve's Apple because...reasons. Then we see a bunch of assassins pledging in Spanish to uphold this goal. This all looks wicked CGI-rendered. The next scene is of a young boy chasing after an eagle, then ending up at home to find his mother dead, stabbed, having bled all over the floor. His father stands next to the TV and says something cryptic. This also looks all CGI-rendered, as it were in the Unreal engine (sorta like "Tribes of Europa" ). Next, we meet Cal Lynch (Michael Fassbender), about to be executed by lethal injection. He is executed. He wakes to Sofia (Marion Cotillard), who informs him that he is dead to the world but is being rehabilitated somewhere in a futuristic-looking facility in Spain so that he can help save humanity from itself. This all looks CGI-rendered as well, like, really, really wooden and clunky. So, time to get to work, Cal. In Sofia's experimental chamber, Cal is picked up by a machine that syncs with his mind to send him back 500 years to, presumably, Spain. There's another eagle flying around, which I suppose we are to believe is Cal? Or something? Or he's mind-synced with an assassin there? Cal seems to be driving the assassin in the past, like playing a video game. He manages to save the prince but gets knocked out. Rikkin (Jeremy Irons) watches from above. He meets with Ellen Kaye (Charlotte Rampling), who's the head of the shadowy Templar organization. Rikkin's and Sofia's experiment is being shut down. They are trying to awaken Cal's genetic memory to do ... something, probably get the apple or the seeds or whatever. Ah, wait, they want to control human society, to get rid of violence through top-down societal control. "Violence is a disease, like cancer." Gotcha. Cal meets Moussa (Michael Kenneth Williams), who claims to have been dead for 200 years. The whole room looks like it's full of prisoners but they're all conduits to other assassins? Or they are trying to hinder the Templars? Or ... what? The cast is ostensibly great, but they're underutilized in this weird video-game adaptation. The fighting and action are so muddy and are filled with so many quick cuts and odd transitions that it's hard to follow in any meaningful way. The music plays quickly and stuff happens. It keeps cutting back and forth between Cal and the guy from the past and between that guy and his female partner. At one point, she rolls up from the floor but the next cut is him popping into place, which isn't at all what was meant (like, they aren't interchanging or anything), but it's just messy choreography and editing. Now Cal's talking to Joseph Lynch (Brendan Gleeson), who is apparently the assassin who'd killed Cal's mother many years ago, but didn't kill Cal. He's trying so hard to be mysterious but ends up saying things like, "You're your mother's son. The blood that flows through you is not your own. It belongs to the Creed. Your mother knew that. She died so the Creed may live." He lends it Gleeson-esque gravitas but it's just weird. Cal is pretty jacked in this movie, much larger than he is in other films. He definitely spends a lot of time with his shirt off. Maybe that's why he made the movie? Or is it possibly just the many millions in salary that attracted him to the role? I just realized that I don't even remember how this damned thing ended. I just "looked it up" and, apparently, Cal got the apple but then lost it, but then got it, but then became a real-life assassin, but then pissed off Sofia and they parted ways in what was a laughable hope that there would be a sequel. The Haunting of Bly Manor (2020) -- "9/10" This series has little kids in it who are occasionally obnoxious but in a way that serves the story. Everybody's a little weird and all will be explained in due time. The story is also told all out of order and it revisits scenes from different characters' perspectives but it manages to sew it all up, in the end. If you let 'em cook, you'll be rewarded. We start at what appears to be a wedding reception, where a woman (Carla Gugino) begins telling a real stemwinder. The story starts off with nearly comically stuffily British Henry Wingrave (Henry Thomas) recruiting nearly comically chirpily American Dani Clayton (Victoria Pedretti) as the nanny for his niblings Miles (Benjamin Evan Ainsworth) and Flora (Amelie Bea Smith). The two poor orphans -- and they are literally orphans -- have an entire staff, catering to their manor and to their every whim. There's chef Owen (Rahul Kohli), housekeeper Hannah Grose (T'Nia Miller), and gardener Jamie Taylor (Amelia Eve). They're all a little off, but you can't really tell which ones are off because they're possessed, because they're ghosts, or because they're just traumatized from their horrible pasts. In several flashbacks, we discover that the children's parents Dominic (Matthew Holness) and Charlotte (Alexandra Essoe) Wingrave were in business with Henry. Dominic spent a lot of time on the road and, well, Henry kind of looked like him, so Charlotte tripped over a carpet and fate did the rest. You would think that this would be the canker that would fester into a ghostly possession but you'd be wrong. That is what we in the business call a "red herring." No, instead, there's this guy who works for Henry named Peter (Oliver Jackson-Cohen). He is what I believe some writers would call raw-boned. He is ruggedly handsome and driven by an impecunious upbringing to strive for more and more and more. He is funny, though, and he smokes. Miles is quite taken with him. Peter, on the other hand, is quite taken with the nanny who preceded Dani: Rebecca Jessel (Tahirah Sharif). She wants to be a barrister but, being black and not of noble blood, she's got a bit of an uphill climb there. Peter thinks that he can get Henry to help her out. Rebecca's round heels betray her as well and they gallivant all over the closed-off parts of the manor -- the ones where all of the orphans' parents stuff is still kept in situ in a very creepy manner (again: red herring; also: no pun intended) -- with Peter giving Rebecca things that he steals from those rooms. Dani is also not without her baggage. She keeps seeing a round-eyed ghost-monster in every mirror, even before she moves to the manor. We unspool her backstory as having befriended and fallen in love with a shy young boy who eventually proposed to her. She accepted but regretted it. She didn't know how to to tell him but finally does, shattering him. He can't stay in the car with her, so he rashly whips the door open and steps right out in front of truck. Dani's guilty conscience conjures up his phantom, who follows her everywhere. So, with all of the red herrings laid out, who's responsible for all of the creepiness? There are wet footprints that everyone pretends is the children going out at night, even though the footprints are just way too big -- and barefoot. There is also the matter of Flora's dollhouse showing the movements of the house's inhabitants, both earthly...and not. There is also the matter of those nearly faceless creatures trudging around the manor, mostly in the closed-off rooms but also, more than you'd like, in Flora's room. We travel centuries back to meet Viola (Kate Siegel), who, along with her sister Perdita Willoughby (Katie Parker), inherited the manor from their father, who had no sons to whom to leave the manor. The sisters managed to hold onto the manor, as long as they pretended to be considering suitors. Eventually, Viola marries one of their distant cousins Arthur (Martin McCreadie), on whom Perdita was also sweet. Viola bears a daughter Isabel but falls ill soon after. Sheer bloodymindedness keeps her alive. She refuses to let go for years and years and years, long after the priest would have administered her last rites. She refuses to allow them to sell any of her jewels or dresses -- they're for Isabel -- despite the increasingly desperate financial straits into which Arthur's mismanagement brings them. Viola is really a right mess but clings to life. Perdita has finally had enough, smothers her, and marries Arthur herself, adopting Isabel. Out of respect -- call it fear -- they leave Viola's trunk of dresses and jewels in the attic. As their finances continue to crumble over the years, Perdita finally decides to crack the trunk. Viola's ghost pops out and chokes her to death (a pants-shitting scene). Arthur throws the trunk in the lake, thinking that it's cursed, unknowingly pinning Viola's ghost to the manor, to terrorize it for the ensuing centuries. Ok, so that explains who the lady in the lake is. It explains the muddy footprints. It explains who killed Peter. It explains who killed Rebecca. We already knew they were dead because they were ghosts, hanging around the manor, occasionally possessing the children, which totally explains their odd behavior over the first several episodes. Peter inhabits Miles while Rebecca inhabits Flora. No-one else in the manor really liked Peter, so they're immediately suspicious when Miles begins to act like him, and even begins sneaking cigarettes. As Peter, Miles even pushes Hannah down a well, which explains why she's so odd -- it's because she's also a tenacious ghost, refusing to go to rest. She's a good ghost, though, and just wants to be close to Owen, with whom she'd fallen in what would remain unrequited love. So Dani confronts the Lady in the Lake while chasing Flora, allowing her spirit into her own body, immediately freeing all of the other souls trapped in the manor over the centuries. Dani and Jamie, who've fallen in love, move to America together. Years and years later, she begins to see snatches of Viola in mirrors, much as she once saw her fiancé's ghostly visage in every mirror. She fears that Viola will strengthen and kill Jamie. Viola really doesn't have much else on her mind, to be honest. Only a lust for vengeance against whoever's handy remains. Dani and Jamie meet Owen and everyone else at his restaurant in France, to learn that the children don't remember anything of those times. Dani wakes one night up to find herself choking Jamie and realizes that she will have to put Viola to rest. There is but one way -- she drowns herself in the lake at Bly Manor. Jamie dives into the lake to find Dani, perfectly preserved and resting at the bottom of the lake, the love of her life having sacrificed herself to save everyone else from Viola's mindless, relentless, and bloodthirsty rage. We return to the storyteller, who, it turns out, is an older Jamie. They are at Flora's wedding reception at Bly Manor. Later, in her hotel room, Jamie waits with a bottle of wine. She feels Dani's hand on her shoulder just as she's nodding off. The end. John Wick 4 (2023) -- "8/10" John Wick (Keanu Reeves) is still being pursued by the mysterious and all-powerful High Table, to which an entire world of criminals are enslaved by utter fear of its unstoppable retribution. Only a few dare to rebel against them, including the Bowery King (Laurence Fishburne), who wears the scars of his punishment by the High Table with pride and who eagerly continues to help Wick get his revenge against them. Charon (Lance Reddick) is only briefly in this film, because he both died in real life and also in the film, falling to the petty mercurial whims of the Marquis (Bill Skarsgård), who takes the role of the Arbitrator from JW3, who was as much an annoying, all-powerful, Deus Ex Machine in that movie as the Marquis is in this one. He has "all of the resources of the High Table at his disposal", which means he can basically perform magic, conjuring armies -- and dispelling police -- in any city in which John Wick happens to be. Winston (Ian McShane) plays a large role, also helping Wick, but more obliquely, as he angles to get his Continental Hotel restored and back into his hands. "How you do anything is how you do everything." Caine (Donnie Yen) was wonderful as a blind friend of Wick's who'd also thought that he'd retired from the employ of the Table only to find them blackmailing him once again -- dangling his daughter Mia (Aimée Kwan)) -- this time into taking on John Wick himself. Yen's light style and slight frame contrast wonderfully with Reeves's more deliberate style of martial arts. I mean, you can definitely tell who's been doing it his whole life (Yen) and who learned it as an adult (Reeves). Tracker (Shamier Anderson) was kind of an odd character, seemingly there to glue some scenes together ... but he was never really explained. He had a dog, a Belgian Malinois. Shimazu (Hiroyuki Sanada) was wonderful as was his daughter Akira (Rina Sawayama). Caine would end up reluctantly killing Shimazu, while letting Akira go. A post-credits scene showed that he very likely wasn't going to have very much time to regret this. "Friendship means little when it's convenient." "Fools talk, while cowards are silent. Wise men listen." I liked seeing Clancy Brown as the Harbinger, a role he made so much his own that it's impossible to imagine anyone else playing it. Aesthetically, the movie looked and felt more like Max Payne than any of the predecessors. There are a lot of Russians in it, but there were a lot of Russians in the first one, too? My partner noticed that the Russians were crossing themselves differently and it turns out that this is accurate! Russian Orthodox crosses from right to left. The plot was reasonably interesting, if a bit hackneyed. It got us from point A to point B. The movie was altogether too long because the fight scenes were interminable. I know that's what people come for but those scenes should be saying something instead of just taking up time. The choreography and film-work are top-notch but it's just too long. There's too much shooting. There are too many variations on the throw/lock/headshot/reload to keep up the interest. It was also pretty brutally violent. My viewing partner had to cringe away a few times. It's also unclear why John Wick had to become literally super-human. He's not Neo. He's not Captain America. Why can he fall three or four stories, banging off of girders before crashing face-down into concrete or a truck (visibly denting it) but then gets up and keeps fighting? How does he never get a concussion? None of this is ever explained. Hell, in the finale, he tumbled down all of the stairs to Sacre Coeur. Really? All the way back down the stairs? Like, all of the stairs? It was like a joke. He seemed to be throwing himself down them. What is he? Eisenstein's baby carriage? I gave it an extra star for Yen's Caine and Fishburne's Bowery King. Disturbia (2007) -- "8/10" Kale (Shia LaBeouf) lost his father in a car accident. A year later and he's a terrible student, still unable to concentrate. When his Spanish teacher provokes him by naming his father and saying that he would have been disappointed in him, Kale hauls off and decks him, pummeling him to the ground. He's sentenced to a summer of house-arrest, with an ankle bracelet. His mother Julie (Carrie-Anne Moss) isn't as sympathetic as you'd think, locking him out of his X-Box and Apple iTunes, despite him having no other contact with the outside world. He begins to spy on the neighbors, sharing what he's learned with his best friend Ronnie (Aaron Yoo). Together, they drink in the beauty of Kale's new neighbor Ashley (Sarah Roemer) and scare themselves with stories about his other weird neighbor Mr. Turner (David Morse). Kale starts reading the newspaper and watching the news, learning about a series of killings of young women that have the hallmarks of a serial killer. The car they mention matches Mr. Turner's car. The damage on the left-front fender is the same. Is Kale going mad? Is Ronnie helping him do so? They pull Ashley into their lunatic orbit and increase their investigations, with Kale sending Ronnie to Turner's house and car to find more evidence. Turner comes home with Julie one day, menacing Kale, letting him know that he knows that Kale thinks he knows something and that he'd better just forget everything that he thinks he knows. He doesn't come right out and say this, of course, but he lets Kale know all the same. Kale turns out to have been right all along, as Julie disappears into Turner's house and Turner feels he has to "stop those meddling kids" and hauls off on Ronnie with a bat to the head, then tries to kill both Kale and Ashley. They eventually manage to get the police's attention -- Officer Gutierrez (Jose Pablo Cantillo) takes his sweet time responding to the call because the Spanish teacher that Kale had punched is his cousin. They eventually find a basement full of bodies in a Silence of the Lambs-style slaughterhouse, they find and rescue Julie, and they manage to dispatch Turner into a filthy pool of corpse-filled water. This movie had a solid story with a great cast. I would definitely watch it again. LaBeouf is one of my favorites. Split (2016) -- "9/10" My "review from 2018" is a bit sparse, but the rating absolutely stands. James McAvoy is mesmerizing in his role as a patient with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID). One of his three kidnap victims is Casey Cooke (Anya Taylor-Joy) who, like Kevin Wendell Crumb / Patricia / Dennis / Barry / Hedwig / Orwell / Jade / The Beast, also has a history of abuse. We see several flashbacks where she is hunting with her father (Sebastian Arcelus) and Uncle John (Brad William Henke). It is Uncle John who wants her five-year-old self (Izzie Coffey, excellent in her role) to "play" with him in the woods, "animals don't wear clothes, right?" The Beast finally arrives and he is something ... more than human. It truly seems that Kevin's various personalities do have unique physical and biological characteristics that they others do not. Jade has diabetes. The Beast is larger, more muscular, and has a skin hard enough to not only deflect a blade, but to cause it to break off. He takes two point-blank shotgun blasts from Casey that barely penetrate the the skin. I found this movie to be riveting, with excellent acting from both McAvoy and Joy. Platform 2 (2024) -- "3/10" I'm not going to bother with a recap of this movie; you can get that on "Wikipedia" . It was a muddy, incoherent mess of a film. The plot was at-once inscrutable and simplistic: you were pretty sure you got what they were trying to say, but it was disappointing. There was nearly no development of characters, other than through exposition, which was wooden and felt like reading. All of the characters kind of looked the same, in certain lights. The final, pitched battle was a gigantic mess wherein you just kind of waited to see who was left standing at the end. I just didn't care about any of the characters and found myself not making any predictions about how the film was going to turn out. It turned out very poorly. It ended in an even more confused heap than it started, with some sort of bizarre story about saving children. I watched the first part in Spanish, but then switched to English because it was so bad that I wanted to just finish watching it while eating and I kept missing subtitles: this was important because none of the story was told visually. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] These are notes for me to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. The amount of text is not proportional to my enjoyment. I might write less because I didn't get around to it when it was fresh in my mind. I rate the film based on how well it suited me personally for the genre, my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. Links are to "my IMDb ratings" ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5165 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5165 Fri, 20 Dec 2024 23:02:54 +0100 -- "7/10" 2. "Die Hard with a Vengeance (1995)" <#DieHard3> -- "8/10" 3. "Whiplash (2014)" <#Whiplash> -- "9/10" 4. "The Punisher (2004)" <#Punisher> -- "8/10" 5. "Ein Schatz zum Verlieben (Fool's Gold) (2008)" <#Fool> -- "7/10" 6. "Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation (2015)" <#Rogue> -- "8/10" 7. "The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014)" <#SpiderMan> -- "4/10" 8. "Lost in Translation (2003)" <#Lost> -- "9/10" 9. "Bad Monkey S01 (2024)" -- "8/10" 10. "The Last Castle (2001)" <#Castle> -- "8/10" Live Free or Die Hard (2007) -- "7/10" John McClane (Bruce Willis) is tasked with picking up a hacker Matt Farrell (Justin Long) who's wanted by the FBI. He's to bring Farrell to Bowman (Cliff Curtis) and Molina (Zeljko Ivanek). Simultaneously, Mai (Maggie Q) and her boss Thomas Gabriel (Timothy Olyphant) are trying to kill him. They've already killed all of the other hackers they'd been working with to set up their plan. Their first cyber-attack is to screw with the traffic lights in a dozen cities at once. It's apparently called a "fire sale", where the next step is to disable communications networks, and then power. McClane and Farrell end up in a cop car in the Lincoln Tunnel but Gabriel drives all of the traffic in the other direction, wreaking havoc and causing mayhem. McClane drives their car out the other way, jumping out at the last second, aiming his car at the helicopter, plowing it right out of the sky. That is just ridiculous. Especially since Rand (Cyril Raffaelli) also manages to jump to safety out of the helicopter. We'll be seeing him again later -- he's quite a parkour expert. Things are getting pretty improbable already but the using-a-car-to-shoot-a-helicopter-out-of-the-sky somehow seemed less stupid than I'd remembered it being. Perhaps 16 years of intervening stupidity in action movies has inured me. Gabriel and his crew manage to do most of what they wanted but McClane and Farrell thwart Mai's attempt to shut down the power grid to West Virginia. Instead, McClane gets into a fight with Mai. She drops him first, then he drops her, smashing her ostensibly to bits. She is somehow a Terminator, though, and punches him right through a window. He bounces off of a whole bunch of things, landing on a concrete floor, none the worse for wear. He is also apparently a terminator. Mai's 97-pound self is also none the worse for wear as she forces Farrell to undo the changes he'd made to her setup. McClane drives up and right through the lab, hitting Mai at what looks to be about 40 MPH, which doesn't even knock her out. He drives her through a few walls and, finally, into an elevator shaft, where she finally slides off the hood of the car, grabbing onto a cable and hanging on. This woman is stronger and more resilient than a Terminator. She does finally die at the bottom of the elevator shaft in a fiery inferno. McClane informs Gabriel that his girlfriend's dead -- just like he's taunted every other nemesis in every other film. That whole scene breaks one of my cardinal rules, which is: I'm here to watch John McClane be unstoppable and amazing, not his enemies. The latest Mission Impossible and the last two John Wick installments made the same mistake. Gabriel and his crew somehow manage to "overload" the gas pipelines, sending pure fire Farrell and McClane's way. I have no idea how they think the mechanics of that would work. I have no idea why they don't know about mechanical-safety mechanisms. Do McClane and Farrell survive? Of course they do. The power is out all over a lot of the east coast. They can't find Warlock (Kevin Smith), but they can fly there somehow? Somehow, they get there. In the dark. With McClane's relatively raw helicopter-piloting skills. Warlock is initially not very cooperative, especially when he hears that they're after Thomas Gabriel. Gabriel shows McClane that he's located his daughter Lucy (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) and that he's going to kidnap her. McClane shifts into top gear and starts getting even more "Die Hard" than he even was before. How does he show her? By commandeering a webcam and monitor at Warlock's place. How is this possible? Doesn't Warlock have security? And how can you make a webcam reposition itself without a motor? Magic? McClane and Farrell drive to a data center that Warlock found that's showing up as being in overdrive. It's pulling down all of the financial data of the entire U.S. -- a system that the NSA set up after 9/11, with Gabriel's help. He knew it would be triggered when he started the fire sale. McClane is coming for his daughter. Farrell is on his way to undo the program's progress. McClane takes care of Rand, then steals a truck. Farrell and Lucy are still being held hostage with Gabriel in a van. They're all on the move. McClane calls Warlock with his CB to ask him to connect him to the FBI. In the meantime, Gabriel has fooled the VTOL jet into attacking McClane's truck as a terrorist. It's just firing missiles into highway infrastructure willy-nilly. The funny thing is that they destroy about six interchanges and kill dozens, if not hundreds of civilians, presumably in order to prevent the terrorist attack from ... checks notes ... destroying infrastructure and killing civilians. After it totals his truck, McClane jumps onto the jet, forcing the pilot to eject, then leaps off the plane again before it crashes, surviving the gigantic jet-fuel explosion. He emerges from yet another giant pile of rubble to see Gabriel's van pulling up to a warehouse. Lucky that. Gabriel is in there, forcing Farrell to enter his the codes he used to lock the money up again. Gabriel threatens to shoot Lucy. McClane shows up. Shots are fired. McClane is shot and falls. Gabriel gloats. He pushes his gun into McClane's shoulder wound. McClane pulls the trigger for him, shooting through his own wound, right into Gabriel's heart. Farrell takes out the remaining henchman. The end. I watched it in German. Die Hard with a Vengeance (1995) -- "8/10" John McClane (Bruce Willis) is back. This time he's suspended. But Simon (Jeremy Irons) blows up Bonwit Teller and demands that the police bring him back. Simon makes him go to Harlem with a sign around his neck that says "I Hate Niggers." Zeus (Samuel L. Jackson) saves him from the local gangs. Simon calls again and starts sending McClane and Zeus all over the city, on a scavenger hunt of sorts. They have to solve a riddle. The bomb is fake, though. He calls back and tells them that the 3 train has a bomb on it and that they need to catch it to stop it. 90 blocks in 30 minutes. Impossible. Time to think outside of the box. McClane steals a cab and heads south through Central Park. He gives Zeus the cab and jumps on top of the 3 train as it goes past. He Indiana Joneses his way into the train, then starts searching for the bomb. Zeus gets to the station, ready to answer the phone. The bomb goes off but McClane had managed to throw it out of the back of the train car. It still did a lot of damage to downtown, though. This is just the beginning of the whole trick, though. We next see Simon show up at the Fed Reserve Bank of New York, posing as a federal agent charged with verifying that nothing has happened to the bank. The cops fall all over themselves to help Simon and his henchmen get underground to assess the damage. This is the real thrust of the mission: to steal $140+ billion from the Federal Reserve. They drive in with 14 trucks and start loading them up. There are no cops in sight. Why? Simon has sent them on a snipe hunt across the city to find a bomb in an elementary school. McClane and Zeus are tasked with running to a park where they have to solve a water puzzle. They have a 5-gallon jug and a 3-gallon jug. Figure out how to get exactly 4 gallons into the bigger jug. Spoiler: 1. Fill the 5-gallon jug. 2. Pour 3 gallons from the 5-gallon jug into the 3-gallon jug. 3. Dump out the 3-gallon jug. 4. Pour the remaining 2 gallons from the 5-gallon jug into the 3-gallon jug. 5. Fill the 5-gallon jug. 6. Pour 1 gallon from the 5-gallon jug into the 3-gallon jug. 7. There are now 4 gallons remaining in the 5-gallon jug. Once they solve this puzzle, they start back to Wall Street but discover some kids stealing and shoplifting. The kids say it's because there isn't a cop in sight in the southern half of Manhattan. McClane realizes what's going on -- he and Zeus head back downtown to investigate. Zeus gives the bomb back to cops there -- but they are actually working for Simon. McClane goes to the Fed and discovers Simon's henchmen -- he spots the badge number of a cop he knows on the lapel of one of them. So he knows his friend is dead and that all of the cops are fake. After a giant shootout, McClane takes them all out and meets Zeus in the basement, where they discover that all of the gold has disappeared. They steal a Yugo to head north to find the fleet of trucks. They pull over a better car, whose driver has a phone, and hijack it. They leave the Yugo with a gold bar in the back seat for the driver. They head north to the construction site at the head of Water Tunnel #3, Zeus continues in the stolen car while McClane takes a truck into the aqueduct, following Simon's trail. Simon and his trucks get out the other side and then blow a dam to flood the tunnel. McClane first J-turns his truck, then climbs on top of it to catch a ladder on an escape shaft and is then ejected high into the air, luckily landing in a deep puddle. Also luckily, Zeus happens to be going by at the time and happens to see him and then picks him up to continue their pursuit. They travel up the Saw Mill Parkway, getting into a shootout with more of Simon's men in a truck. They take them out as well. Each one is carrying 10 quarter-dollars, Those are for the bridge tolls. They steal the truck and get onto the bridge. From there, they see the container ship with all of the truck containers on it. There's nothing for it but to unwind the truck's winch, hook the passing ship and then commando-line their way onto the boat, falling the last 50 feet or so. No real damage. They split up, with Zeus getting to the bridge but not being able to shoot Simon because his safety was on. He's taken hostage. McClane fights his way through a lot of henchmen, then is also captured on the bridge when he realizes that the bomb is on the boat, not in a school. Meanwhile, the cops also work through some tense moments, thinking that the bomb is going to go off -- only to find that it's filled with strawberry syrup instead of a liquid explosive. Simon pretends that he's trying to destroy the world order by sinking all of the gold at the bottom of the Long Island Sound -- but he's really going to sink a boat full of scrap metal. He ties Zeus and McClane to the giant bomb. They manage to free themselves with a metal splinter from McClane's shoulder that he drops into Zeus's nimble locksmith's fingers. "McClane: You know how to pick this lock? Zeus: Is this some black-shit again? McClane: Hey will you stop that racial shit? Are you a fuckin' locksmith or not?" They leap off the tanker as it explodes. Spectacular. They are picked up by the NYPD, whom they inform that the gold was not on board. McClane is on the phone with his ex-wife when he discovers a clue to where Simon has disappeared -- Nord des Lignes in Quebec, Canada. It's written on the bottom of the aspirin bottle that Simon had thrown to him. Simon and his army are celebrating there when McClane, Zeus, and the entire NYPD and probably part of the U.S. military surround them (we don't ask how the NYPD would have jurisdiction in Canada). Simon and Katya (Sam Phillips) are caught in flagrante delicto and take off after McClane and Zeus in their own helicopter. They drive McClane's copter to the ground, then hunt them with a machine gun. McClane lures them near power lines, then looses one into the rotor blades, ending Simon's run. The end. I watched it in German. Whiplash (2014) -- "9/10" Andrew (Miles Teller) is a fanatical drummer. He attends a prestigious school where band conductor Terrence Fletcher (J.K. Simmons) teaches. Fletcher is exacting and abusive. He is right about the music but his approach is wildly antagonistic. Andrew is promoted to be second drummer, then gets a chance to replace the first drummer, then loses it. Fletcher is manipulating him the whole way. None of this discourages Andrew in any way; he practices more and more and more, to prove that he can do it. He breaks it off with his girlfriend Nicole (Melissa Benoist), almost without regret, simply because he's so laser-like focused only on becoming the best drummer since Buddy Rich. Andrew's practice pays off when he wins an ad-hoc, five-hour, high-speed drumming competition put on by Fletcher, as he gets them to play Caravan correctly. Andrew gets the seat back. On the way to the next competition, Andrew gets into a car accident. Injured, he leaves the scene, dragging himself to the competition, getting there late, covered in blood, and ultimately unable to play well enough for Fletcher, who dresses him down onstage and dismisses him from the band. He doesn't express a whit of sympathy for Andrew's having very obviously been in a car accident. He couldn't deliver, so he gets rid of him. Andrew finally jumps Fletcher, tackling him and pounding him until people pull him off. Andrew is expelled from the school. It turns out that this isn't the first time that Fletcher has tortured a student before; Andrew ends up testifying anonymously for another family's lawsuit over their son, who'd committed suicide and had also been a student of Fletcher's. Fletcher is fired. This is Fletcher's teaching style. He tries to form amazing musicians in a crucible, to make the art come from the suffering, to separate the wheat from the chaff by finding the ones who want it the most, who are willing to be the best no matter what. Only in this way can you bubble up above the masses. Months later, Andrew meets Fletcher at a bar where Fletcher is playing piano with a band. They talk and seem to make up, with Fletcher explaining his philosophy of teaching and of life, explaining that every musician needs a moment of ultimate shame and discouragement to transform their carbon shell into a diamond of genius. He invites Andrew to play with his band because he currently has a shitty drummer. He says that the songs are all the same standards as they'd played at school, so Andrew should know them all. Shortly before they go on stage, Fletcher tells Andrew that he knows that he testified against him. Instead of a standard, he has the band play a song that Andrew could never have heard of. He does terribly. Humiliated, he leaves the stage. He returns, though. He takes the drums and leads the band into Caravan, completely ignoring Fletcher. Fletcher eventually picks up conducting again, then watches as Andrew breaks into a 10-minute virtuoso solo. This is his moment; he has broken free of the chrysalis. Fletcher nods in approval. Was Fletcher being petty by inviting Andrew to drum? Was he just hoping to humiliate him? Or was he actually practicing what he'd preached and was still trying to form a virtuoso drummer by forging him in fire? It's kind of great that the movie didn't come down, one way of the other, on whether this kind of teaching style is to be completely disparaged because of the psychological terror, or whether it must be at least partially endured because it works. I very much enjoyed this movie. The music is great. The Punisher (2004) -- "8/10" Frank Castle (Thomas Jane) is a deep-undercover agent/cop who's just finished his last job. During that job, though, the son of crime lord Howard Saint (John Travolta) was killed. He wants revenge. He sends consiglieri Quentin Glass (Will Patton) and his son (James Carpinello) to take care of it. Frank is finally out, and he and his wife (Samantha Mathis) and kid visit with his entire family, including his dad (or his father-in-law?) (Roy Scheider). He's relaxing with his whole family on an island/beach when Saint's men show up to kill them all, as ordered by Saint's wife Livia (Laura Harring), who wants revenge for the death of her son. The wife and kid get away briefly but their truck is towing a boat, so they're too slow. The gunmen catch up to them. Frank's in pursuit on a motorcycle. Their truck crashes; the gunmen pursue inexorably. Wife and son are run down on the dock like dogs. Frank finds the perpetrators, but there are too many of them. They beat the shit out of him, especially the gay-looking brother, who shoots him point-blank before the other henchmen set the whole dock on fire, blowing Frank out into the water. They didn't even make sure he was dead. Then, magically, their truck is OK and they just drive off. Frank survives, of course, spurting gouts of blood. They had mentioned before that he was a great swimmer, though, so that was a nice touch. He is rescued and brought back to health by a local recluse. He returns to the island, then to the city. He sets himself with a tremendous amount of firepower. He takes up residence next to Joan (Rebecca Romijn) and her weird-ass roommates. Frank makes his first forays in the revenge business, throwing a ton of Saint's money out of his building and then killing a bunch of henchmen. He drinks a lot. Like at lot a lot. He drinks to forget. Harry Heck (Mark Collie) shows up at Joan's diner, where he serenades Castle, then hunts him down. Castle gets the drop on him, but not before Heck destroys his car. Castle steals Harry's car instead. Castle's neighbors fool him into bringing his incredibly buff self to dinner. Thomas Jane really put in the work -- he looks like he went to Hugh Jackman's personal trainer. Shortly after dinner, a killer in a comical red-and-white-striped sailor's jersey shows up. He's twice as big as Castle. He's tuning him up in a completely CGI-free, slightly comic battle during which Castle eventually gets the better of him, but not without cost. Joan sews him up. She and Frank hide under the floor while the other two neighbors are interrogated by Saint's henchmen. They tear all of Dave's (Ben Foster) piercings out of his face, but neither he nor Bumpo (John Pinette) gave up anything. Castle keeps working on setting up Glass, who's sleeping with Saint's wife. Maybe he can get them to kill each other. Saint kills Glass but that wasn't why Glass was sneaking around: it was because he was gay. Now Howard Saint is ready to kill his own wife. He throws her off of a bridge onto some railroad tracks. He puts out a hit on Castle for $50K, which seems like an absolutely adorable sum. Castle takes the battle to Saint, blowing up the whole floor he's on, taking hits in his bulletproof vest and taking out the last few henchmen in hand-to-hand combat. Saint tries to leave the building. He realizes something is wrong, but can't stop his henchman from opening the door. Boom. Somehow Saint is still alive and running from the building when Castle catches up to him. The standoff isn't even tense; he just shoots him. Before Saint dies, he tells him, "I killed both your sons. I made you kill your friend. I made you kill your wife. Now I've killed you." He hooks him up to the back of a car, sets it running through a field of other cars, all rigged to explode. As they go off like the Blue Danube, Saint catches fire and dies screaming. Back at his apartment, Castle decides against suicide and for punishment. Ein Schatz zum Verlieben (Fool's Gold) (2008) -- "7/10" Finn (Matthew McConaughey) is diving with a partner Alfonz (Ewen Bremner) when his boat catches on fire and sinks right next to him. He'd borrowed a lot of money for the boat. The guy he'd borrowed it from Bigg Bunny (Kevin Hart) has his henchmen (Malcolm Jamal Warner and Brian Hooks) try to kill him, but he survives. He's rescued and gets back to the island just in time for his divorce from Tess (Kate Hudson). Finn had found a shard of a plate from a treasure. He tries to keep Tess from divorcing him but he's too late. He tries to convince her to rejoin him on a treasure hunt instead of getting her degree. She works for Nigel Honeycutt (Donald Sutherland), who gives her life advice. His daughter Gemma (Alexis Dziena) arrives by helicopter. Gemma is a spoiled dipshit. Finn rescues her hat and manages to lever his way into the Honeycutt's lives. He is injured, so he stays on the boat; Nigel invites him to stay. He sees on Gemma's phone that she'd written to her friends, "2 hole weeks on a boat with my Dad! Kill me now!" Finn and Tess begin to tell Nigel about the treasure that they want to find. They sail to the island to begin salvaging the wreck of some Van Gogh scion's ship -- the Aurelia. They find an old coworker and current rival Moe Fitch (Ray Winstone) already there, setting up his own salvage. Finn takes apart the wreck site, then gets blown out of the water, gripping a salvaged sword. Gemma is super-impressed. That night, he sneaks out to meet up with Bigg Bunny. He fights his way through henchmen Cordell (Malcolm-Jamal Warner) and Curtis (Brian Hooks). Finn tries to get Bigg Bunny on board by offering 10%. However, Bigg Bunny is now in business with Cyrus (David Roberts), who drives a much harder bargain. He wants 100% of the treasure and Finn gets to walk away. Finn gets back to the boat, where Tess confronts him about his debt and his lying. His face is smashed up pretty good. I have no idea how he put a scuba mask on it. They find nothing. They're drinking in a bar. It's pouring out. The captain of the yacht comes to tell them that they are moving the ship to the north shore of the island because there's nowhere else to put in. Finn knows in a flash that the boat isn't where they'd been looking for it -- it's somewhere else. He and Tess dive there at night to find the Aurelia -- two cannons! They continue searching on the beach. Tess realizes that they should be searching in the oldest building on the island -- the church. She's right. She gets pretty excited and jumps Finn's bones. In the church. They start checking tombstones for the location of Aurelia's grave. Finn's digging under the tiny headstone that Tess tripped over, while Tess sits on the Vespa with the headlamp on. They find something: a barrel. It's full of household goods, interesting from an archeological standpoint but not worth much. The book, though...that's worth something. It tells them how to get to the actual treasure. It's in a sea cave that's only rarely open. Bigg Bunny and his henchmen show up but Finn and Tess fight back. Tess manages to disarm even Cyrus. They flee on the now-headlamp-less Vespa. Finn lands in the water. Tess is captured. She thinks he's dead. This is nearly exactly like Romancing the Stone. That is a good thing. They throw her down the sea-cave hole to get the treasure. She masks up, finds the treasure, and seems able to hang on indefinitely without air. The sea comes in, blowing coins and her shoes out of the hole. She's alive though. Bigg Bunny sends in more divers: Curtis and Cyrus. Curtis gets out with a treasure chest. Cyrus gets blown out of the hole, in pieces. Tess and Finn have his scuba equipment and start to investigate the treasure. Moe and the yacht crew are on their way to take out Big Bunny. They get the drop on him. He gets the drop on them. He loses his treasure. He kidnaps Tess and starts to take off in his plane. Gemma shows up on a jet-ski, picks up Finn, and they head for the plane. Finn jumps on the pontoon just as they're taking off. Bunny opens the door to shoot at him. Tess wakes up and kicks him out. Bunny shoots out the motor. Tess doesn't know how to fly. Neither does Finn. Well, he knows from his Playstation. He doesn't know how to land. Curtis pops out of the water with treasure but he's caught by Nigel and the others. Finn gets the plane down, but somewhat sideways. They face-plant, the plane disappears quickly, but Tess, then Finn quickly appear. So many reversals! Fast-forward to an opening ceremony for the giant museum. Moe's there. Everyone's there. It's a happy ending. Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation (2015) -- "8/10" I watched and "reviewed this movie in 2016" . I don't have much to add except that Rebecca Ferguson is an absolute smoke show. I'm not sure what my favorite part was; when she helped Hunt escape from the prison? When she was sniping people at the opera? When she rescued Hunt from the underwater data center thingie, riding him like a manatee? The stunts are great in this: the car chase and the motorcycle chase are both top-notch. Ethan Hunt lowsiding his bike with no leathers and no helmet -- this is after he already got into a car accident where the car flipped bumper to bumper to bumper and ended up on its roof. I'm saying he wasn't feeling great when he started riding the motorcycle and then he crashes again, at what looks like at least 70mph. No bruises, no cuts, no whiplash, no muscle soreness ... nothing. I watched it in German this time. The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014) -- "4/10" I "reviewed this in 2022" . It is still a terrible movie, but I watched it in French with French subtitles for practice. I'd forgotten how terrible the "backstory" about Peter Parker's famous parents was. They were apparently jet-setting, sexy, famous, brilliant scientists. What a crock. The story is that Peter's parents were just like Harry Potter's: super-famous and amazing at what they did. They even left him a completely intact laboratory that is still 100% functional 12 years after their deaths. It's in a subway train car. I think I find this annoying because everyone is rich now, with endless resources. The tension of Peter Parker is gone, which I lament. Now, let's get to Electro: why is he wearing boxer-briefs? I mean ... couldn't he just materialize himself into a neutered humanoid like Doctor Manhattan? The best part about watching it in French is that they call him "speeder-man". Lost in Translation (2003) -- "9/10" Bob Harris (Bill Murray) is in Tokyo to shoot a commercial for Suntory whiskey. He is being remunerated $2M for being there. He is melancholy, jet-lagged, and bored. Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson) is staying in the same hotel. She is there with her photographer husband John (Giovanni Ribisi). The only other recurring characters are some Japanese functionaries from Suntory and Kelly (Anna Faris), an utterly vapid action-movie actress who's also staying at the hotel and who knows John. Bob and Charlotte cross paths in the hotel again and again and eventually meet. They meet a few more times, once at the hotel pool, exchanging somewhat flirty witticisms. Charlotte invites Bob out with her friends for a long night of karaoke and intimate conversation about their respective married lives. When Bob gets home, he calls his wife but the conversation is awkward and fraught by distance and long familiarity. Bob heads to the jazz lounge and succumbs to the wiles of the singer. Charlotte visits him the next morning and hears the woman singing in his shower. She's a bit chuffed, "Charlotte: Well, she is closer to your age. You could talk about things you have in common, like growing up in the '50s. Maybe she liked the movies you were making in the '70s, when you still were making movies." They make up but Bob is leaving soon. They part ways at the hotel but in a weird perfunctory way. In the taxi, Bob sees Charlotte in the street. He stops and runs to her, wrapping her in a hug and whispering something in her ear. They part and he returns to the cab, smiling for the first time in a while. This is a beautiful film. I was entranced. I'd seen it before and knew the beats and it didn't matter. It looks wonderful. It sounds wonderful. It is well-acted. It tells you what you want to hear, you take from it what you want. Bad Monkey S01 (2024) -- "8/10" Andrew Yancy (Vince Vaughn) is an on-again/off-again detective whose partner Rogelio (John Ortiz) is long-suffering but dedicated. He eventually gets on the trail of the ruthless scam-artists and real-estate developers Nick Stripling (Rob Delaney), who has a conscience, and his wife Eve (Meredith Hagner), who most certainly does not. The series takes place in the Florida Keys and the Bahamas. In the Bahamas, we meet Neville Stafford (Ronald Peet), who works with Yancy to take down the striplings, who have basically stolen his land and his shack on the beach in order to build a resort. Yancy starts the show with the sociopathic Bonnie (Michelle Monaghan) at his side but ends up with the utterly gorgeous and delightful Rosa (Natalie Martinez) for most of the show, losing her only in the final minutes in what I'm sure that show-runners consider to be a cliffhanger but which (A) no-one cares about anymore because we've all forgotten the degree of buy-in we had to the show and cast, weeks later, and (B) we know she's going to be back in the next season (if there is one) because we know they've run the numbers and there's no way that they don't bring her back. This is a detective story with a lot of back and forth and twists and turns that's done quite well, taking time to build characters that we care about and in whom we're interested. I gave it an extra star for the occasionally clever banter and Vaughn's ease in delivering it. The Last Castle (2001) -- "8/10" General Irwin (Robert Redford) is a three-star general who gets a ten-year stretch in Col. Winter's (James Gandolfini) prison. Gandolfini is running what amounts to a personal psychological experiment. He is teaching Capt. Perez (Steve Burton) the ways of manipulation. For example, they force a fight in the yard by giving the convicts in the yard only one basketball instead of two. It's delightful. Aguilar (Clifton Collins Jr.) is a stuttering sad-sack marine, who got six years for five seconds of violence. Irwin befriends him, much to Winter's displeasure. Winter idolizes Irwin, though, in a perverse kind of way. As Irwin and Yates get chummy, Winter punishes him by making him stand in the rain all day and night, saluting, an act for which he was punished. Irwin stops the punishment and is beaten for it. Winter marches into the rain to explain to Irwin who the boss is. Irwin responds by correcting him about how punishments are to be executed. He touched a guard, though, so now he's to be punished, too. Punishments all around! Irwin starts stacking rocks as punishment. He drinks nothing. He's allowed to take off his shirt, to cool off a bit in the heat and humidity. His doctor colleague is worried. He's Cool-hand Luke, though. He's not going to give up. "Some men just can't be reached." This film does have a bit of a Cool Hand Luke vibe to it but Paul Newman was way cooler. Irwin manages to stack all of the rocks, despite being almost knocked over. Which, c'mon now, would have been punished by all of the other guys who had bet on him. Yates (Mark Ruffalo) is taking bets. Winter orders that the punishment continue. Put the rocks back where they were before. When the siren sounds, Irwin goes in solitary. Winter visits him there, to tell Irwin how evil Aguilar is, and to tell him that he's doing this for the other men. Winter desperately needs Irwin to kowtow. Absolutely unsurprisingly, he does not. When he's out, Yates brings him his winnings -- Aguilar had bet on him. Irwin tells Aguilar to distribute it amongst the men. So selfless. Or is he currying favor? Irwin talks to the men building the wall, telling them that they're not building Winter's wall -- they're building their castle. Irwin puts Aguilar in charge (his father was a mason); the other men accept this decision. They throw down the original wall and start rebuilding it, correctly. It's a free-standing wall in the middle of the prison yard, much higher than it was before. Winter is having a fit. He orders a bulldozer into the yard, making them all watch. Aguilar runs to stand in front of the bulldozer. The siren sounds. They all hit the ground. Aguilar stands at attention. Winter orders him sniped in the noggin. Down he goes. Down goes the wall. Irwin gathers the troops into formation. They sing the Marines' Hymn [2] to honor Aguilar. They salute, but then pretend that they're simply swiping their hair back, so that they can't be punished for it. Winter visits Irwin in his cell. Irwin informs him that he doesn't think that Winter is fit for command. "Irwin: [Winter is trying to compromise with Irwin, while in his cell] No. Not OK. It's too late, Colonel. Winter: It's too late for what? Irwin: For your offer. The men don't want to salute. They don't want to use rank. They don't want better food, they don't want more TV. They just want your resignation. And so do I. Winter: My resignation? Irwin: You're a disgrace, Colonel. A *disgrace* to the uniform! You should not be allowed to retain your command. Winter: Well, then, I guess I'd better go pack. Irwin: I think you should. Winter: Tell me, Mr. Irwin, what's to stop me from just placing you in the HOLE, for say six months? Irwin: Nothing. If that's the way you want to win. [3]" General Wheeler (Delroy Lindo) visits the prison and speaks with Irwin. Winter gets a letter from Irwin that says that he is to surrender his command or Irwin "and his men" will take Wheeler captive. Winter gets Wheeler out of the meeting, then lets water cannons loose on the prisoners in the yard, but deciding against deploying tear gas. Wheeler tears Winter a new asshole, telling him that no more prisoners can die, or he loses his command. Gandolfini is fantastic, dead-eyed, licking his lips nervously. He responds as expected, letting his troops loose on several prisoners, beating them severely, and blaming it on Irwin. At lunch, no-one sites with Irwin, at first. Then a whole bunch of the prisoners who'd been beaten sit down. They're not defeated at all. Out in the yard, Yates tells him that he can't beat Winter at poker -- Irwin tells him that he's playing chess. And Winter is bad at chess; he always plays the same moves. Winter calls Yates up to his office to try to turn him into a spy. Irwin talks to him to turn him. Yates rats to Winter...but does he? He returns the next day to inform Winter that he'd already stolen Winter's flag, when his back was turned the other day, during a disturbance. In the hole he goes. Winter sends out the troops to toss bunks. He's desperate. He's flailing. He's going too far. The prisoners are walking with more confidence. The guards can't find the flag. But that wasn't the point; all of the guards are inside -- there aren't enough to guard the prisoners outside. They lock the remaining guards inside. Guards are sniping from the towers (even though Winter promised that he wouldn't kill any more prisoners. The prisoners release more of their compatriots. The sniping continues. The prisoners dig in the ruins of the wall for slingshots. They fire Molotovs into the towers. They pull out a catapult. Winter sends out the "red and blue" special units. They start beating mercilessly on the men's shields. The prisoners push back. They fire the catapult again. A large rock shoots through Winter's window; a Molotov follows it. Winter's collection of war paraphernalia is gone. The large rock was the one that Aguilar had signed. The special units fall back but then return with water cannons. The prisoners sacrifice a few soldiers, but only to buy time until another one can turn off the water. The prisoners take over the water-cannon tanks. Winter calls out the helicopter. Soldiers are firing on prisoners on the ground. The towers are burning. The helicopter circles. The men fire a grappling hook with the water to the helicopter. Yates starts to climb the chain to the helicopter. He knocks out the soldiers and takes control of the helicopter. He attacks the tower with the tail rotor, taking out the most evil of the guards and the last tower. The copter crashes into the courtyard. Irwin rescues Yates from the wreckage just before it explodes. Wheeler is on the way; he'll be there in ten minutes. The prisoners line up in formation. The prison is a smoking ruin. Winter enters the courtyard. He and Irwin face off. Snipers appear on all sides. Winter orders everyone on the ground. Anyone who refuses will be shot. No-one drops. Irwin orders them to drop. They drop. Irwin doesn't drop. He walks to the flagpole. Winter gives the command to fire. No-one does. Weapons up. Winter is losing it, just cracking visibly. He's alone. He pulls his weapon and fills Irwin with lead as he's raising the flag. Captain Perez disarms Winter while Irwin keeps raising the flag. The doctor tries to save him but guards pull him away. The flag is up, but not upside-down. The men salute. Irwin breathes his last. I watched it in German. I learned the word "Einfaltspinsel" , which means "dipshit".. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] These are notes for me to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. The amount of text is not proportional to my enjoyment. I might write less because I didn't get around to it when it was fresh in my mind. I rate the film based on how well it suited me personally for the genre, my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. Links are to "my IMDb ratings" [1] I remember singing this song in primary school, in music class with Mrs. Harter. "From the Halls of Montezuma To the shores of Tripoli;​ We fight our country's battles In the air, on land, and sea" Can you imagine? We sang this in primary school. All the time. Starship Troopers vibes, to say the least. [1] This was all in German in the movie but I only found a transcript in English. It was pretty nice in German as well, but I wasn't going to transcribe it with my partner glaring at me balefully for pausing, rewinding, and unpausing the movie. Even my survival instincts kick in once in a while. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5142 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5142 Sat, 16 Nov 2024 17:11:43 +0100 -- "5/10" 2. "The Island (2005)" <#Island> -- "6/10" 3. "Changing Lanes (2002)" <#Lanes> -- "5/10" 4. "Star Trek Into Darkness (2013)" <#Darkness> -- "7/10" 5. "The Heat (2013)" <#Heat> -- "7/10" 6. "Wicked Little Letters (2023)" <#Wicked> -- "7/10" 7. "3 Body Problem S01 (2023)" <#Three> -- "8/10" 8. "Kaos S01 (2024)" <#Kaos> -- "8/10" 9. "Hunter Killer (2018)" <#Hunter> -- "7/10" 10. "Transformers (2007)" <#Transformers> -- "7/10" Moonfall (2022) -- "5/10" I'd seen this movie before, but couldn't find my review of it, so here it is. This is not a good movie. The plot is kind of interesting, as these things go. Like, it's a cool idea: an alien intelligent machine was trapped in the moon eons ago. The moon is a Dyson Sphere around the heart of a dead star. It's pulling out of orbit and threatening to crash into the Earth. The machine detects and extinguishes all forms of modern, electronic technology. That's why we have to use old tech to kill it. Sure, why not? I'm on board. Let's get somebody charismatic to helm this thing. That's the basic outline. Unfortunately, the dialogue and basic plotting is excruciating. It's frustratingly pat and trite and annoying. The actors are all pretty good, but they're given nothing to work with. Brian Harper (Patrick Wilson) is the ex-astronaut with the skills the world needs. KC Houseman (John Bradley) is a "mega-structurist," who'd guessed that the moon was like this long before anyone else. Jocinda Fowler (Halle Berry) somehow ends up in charge of the whole Earth-rescue mission. Harper's son Sonny (Charlie Plummer) is shockingly bad and stupid. So many things are stupid. They need Houseman on the mission because he's the only one who can calculate the projected orbit with the moon's changing position -- but then the computer in the shuttle is also calculating whether they are going to achieve orbit. How is it doing that if no-one else has the formulae? As can be expected, a tremendous amount of time is spent on saving a handful of obviously useless lives. Fowler's son, Harper's son, both of them must be saved, apparently. A main plot point is that KC has a phone with him but it's in airplane mode, so the machine won't notice them. But of course it notices them because the phone is still on. This can't be one of the smartest guys in the world, can it? Look, it's a Roland Emmerich movie, so you can't expect too much. But this is almost too much of a reach. You know you're on shaky ground when you have to make all of your heroes spectacularly stupid in order to move the plot forward. At any rate, with the phone turned off, the AI swarm of mini-robots abandons them immediately, completely forgetting that they were ever there. They proceed into the interior of the moon, diving deep into its hollow interior, emerging into a gigantic hollowed-out cavern where enormous machines swing around each other, forming a planet-sized gyroscope that allows the moon to navigate back and forth in its orbit. Sure, OK. It looks pretty sweet, I'll give you that. They commune with the AI, which fills them with exposition for long minutes about the moon being a seed for life if that that dastardly AI weren't siphoning the power and degrading the moon's orbit. It tells a pretty pat history about humanity's noble past with really the minimum of effort, telling instead of showing. It is utterly unclear how the swarm propels itself and why it can't seem to catch their little ship. There's a bunch of drama on planet Earth as the moon moves closer to the planet -- like it "enters the atmosphere." Nukes are ordered, but orders are refused. A few bit characters die. KC sacrifices himself to take out the swarm but he is quickly resurrected by the AI as an artificial being, tasked with a mission that seems quixotically hopeful, in the same way that the movie seriously thinks that it's going to get a sequel. Although some of the effects were a lot of fun -- even if they were so nonsensical and scattershot that it was hard to concentrate -- some of the effects were such obvious green-screen trash that it completely threw you out of the illusion (e.g., when Harper showed up at the library on his motorcycle; that was just lazy as hell). They spent so much time trying to explain the logic and science behind a bunch of what was going on -- and none of it made any sense. They might as well have just left it alone and done more hand-waving. The Island (2005) -- "6/10" This movie predicted a future in 2019 where the rich were harvesting people for organs. The only thing unrealistic about that is that our modern rich either don't know that the poors exist or wouldn't let any of their filthy organs within a mile of them. Lincoln Six Echo (Ewan McGregor) and Jordan Two Delta (Scarlett Johansson) are two such living organ banks. They live in an underground community that thinks that the outside world is too contaminated to support life. They believe that there is a titular island where they might also someday live. One resident per week is allowed to move to the island. I'm hoping you've guessed that "moving to the island" is about the same thing as your childhood dog "going to a farm upstate." Dr. Merrick (Sean Bean) runs the facility and is concerned about Six Echo's brain activity. Six Echo also meets technician James McCord (Steve Buscemi), who reveals all: Six Echo and all of their friends technically don't exist. He tells them that they are clones and have been grown to provide spare parts to their owners, who live in the real world as wealthy, wealthy elites. Six Echo and Jordan Two escape. Merrick puts mercenary Albert Laurent (Djimon Hounsou) on their tail, as the two hunt down Ewan's owner, Tom Lincoln. He pretends to try to help them but he's really just trying to kill them. Six Echo knows this, having developed a lot more capability and intuition than was expected. There are a lot of chase sequences and explosions until they end up tussling and the police -- and Laurent -- catch up to them. I know that this will come as a shock, but the clone ends up convincing Laurent that he's the original, so the mercenary shoots the original. The end? Nope. As the "Wikipedia entry" writes, "[r]eturning to Tom's home, Lincoln and Jordan give in to their romantic urges and have sex." Obviously. The end? Nope. Merrick is now determined to root out the "flaw" that allowed the clones to gain autonomy and wants to wipe several generations of them out in gas chambers. It's pretty harrowing. Six Echo and Jordan Two start a revolution to save the clones and destroy the facility, aided by the mercenary Laurent, who's had a change of heart and is now working against his employer. There's a long fight sequence in which both Six Echo and Dr. Merrick exhibit fighting and weapons skills as well as a ruthlessness that neither of them could possibly have, given their background. There's a harpoon gun fight that looks quite painful until the wound is forgotten in victory. The end? Yup. Six Echo and Jordan Two live happily ever after as really rich people on an island, just like they'd always wanted. The lesson being that, if you are being subjugated and you fight for it hard enough, you can make your way into the elites that are subjugating everyone else. The lesson will never be: you can fight to bring down the system that subjugates. This was the bauble that was dangled before us when the two were fighting to free all of the clones but, once the clones had been freed and were standing around in a desert, we see that the couple coasts into the sunset on a giant boat by themselves, a cut above the rabble who are presumably starving in a desert or barrio somewhere. I gave it an extra star for at least trying to limn a revolution and for having a relatively relevant premise. I watched this one with Keith and Gary. The "motion smoothing/auto-interpolation" was on, so the entire film looked like a student's CGI cartoon. Changing Lanes (2002) -- "5/10" Gavin Banek (Ben Affleck) is a high-society lawyer. Doyle Gipson (Samuel Jackson) is a recovering alcoholic, divorced father of two boys, trying to put his life back together. Gavin causes a traffic accident with Doyle and they pull over. He writes Doyle a blank check instead of exchanging insurance information. He leaves him in the rain, saying he needs to get to an appointment. Doyle also needs to get to an appointment: a custody hearing. His car's so busted, though, that he can't just get into it and drive away like Gavin does. Gavin drops a bunch of file folders during the interaction, folders which happen to contain documents proving that his law firm has sole control of a $100M estate left by a wealthy benefactor. His firm is being sued for control and he needs those documents at the trial. Doyle has them -- and he's just been screwed over by Gavin. Gavin tussles with the daughter of the owner of the estate and her lawyer (Bruce Altman) but is eventually told by the judge that he gets until the end of the day to turn in the documents proving that his firm has power of appointment. Doyle, meanwhile, is late for his custody hearing, so he no longer gets any chance of seeing his children, who are going to move to Oregon. He had just bought a house for them to live in, but his ex-wife wants none of it. The judge doesn't care that he got into a car accident, doesn't care that across the country is just as good as halfway around the world, and tells him that if it had been his (the judge's) marriage, that he would have been on time, rather than late. This is designed to get under your skin. Doyle leaves the courthouse and dumps the documents into the trash, unwittingly throwing out Gavin's papers as well. Gavin calls his secretary Michelle (Toni Collette) and tells him that he is screwed. But then he sees Doyle on the street. Thinking that it's the providence of God, he accosts him, offering him everything in order to get the files back. Doyle is livid. He demands his morning back, not money. He says that he threw away the files. Gavin lies to his partners about having won the case, including his father-in-law Sydney Pollack. He accepts a partnership from his father-in-law, who believes that he's landed the lucrative $100M power of appointment. Meanwhile Doyle digs the documents back out of the trash, realizing that they offer tremendous leverage over this rich-white-guy-douchebag who's already ruined his life. Ben Affleck is really good at playing a douchebag. It's unclear how much acting is involved, but let's just leave it at that. I watched this movie at a relative's house, where the motion-smoothing/frame-rate-upscaling feature was on. I think this ruins pretty much everyone's acting. Affleck looks noticeably worse. Jackson and Collette, who are usually impeccable, also look quite strange in this format. Gavin reveals to Michelle that he had basically conned the old man into giving up the power of appointment. He also reveals to his father-in-law that he'd lost the file. They tell him to forge the power of appointment using a signature from a different document. Instead, he fakes a fire alarm. He ends up sitting outside with Michelle. They kiss. I guess? I couldn't tell whether this was starting a new, continuing an existing, or rekindling an old relationship. A kid rides up to Gavin with a torn-up document. It has a phone number on it. Gavin calls it. It's Doyle at the other end. Doyle tells him to be at a certain place. He goes back to the bank to discover that Gavin has made him bankrupt and gotten his loan rescinded. Computer says no. He doesn't take it well, throwing the computer across the bank before storming out. Since the movie was made in 2002, he isn't tased or tackled or other otherwise grievously incapacitated for his outburst. He just leaves the bank. Gavin meets with his wife Cynthia (Amanda Peet), who tells him that they're going to stay married because she's not going to get off the gravy train of being married to a Wall Street lawyer no matter what he does. She tells him to forge the damned document -- she'd been sent by her father to straighten things out. She's more into the crime than he is, at this point. The apple doesn't fall far from the tree. Gavin calls Doyle, who tells him that everything's ok: he's worked out the bankruptcy and gotten his credit cards working again. He wants to meet up. Gavin calls the guy who'd blocked up Doyle's finances but learns that he wasn't able to clear up the bankruptcy. He learns this on his phone in his car, as Doyle passes him in a cab, showing him the lug-nuts from the wheel of Gavin's car. Gavin crashes but survives, severely shaken but otherwise not really injured. He doesn't seem to suffer from the crash in any way for the rest of the film. He's been in two car crashes that day and is none the worse for wear. Doyle meets up with his ex-wife (or current wife?) and she seems sympathetic. She wants to see the house that he bought her. Although he is at first hopeful, his wife thanks him for letting them go, dashing his hopes of reconciliation. He simmers more. Gavin ends up in a confessional booth, where he feels sorry for himself. He goes to Doyle's son's school to tell them that Doyle is coming to kidnap his kids. After the lady there doesn't believe that Doyle would do anything like that, Gavin escalates by reporting that Doyle's kids have been injured in an accident, making Doyle hurry to the school and almost get himself arrested. He starts to look for his boys, with the school administrator trailing him, calling the police and the safety officers all over him. They cuff him. Doyle's wife is at the jail and yelling at him, being a total bitch, telling him that she couldn't care less about his bad day, about his imaginary drama. She yells that this is what he always does: invents drama because he can't live a real life. Gavin interviews a young woman for a job because she seems so earnest and he wants to see if that naiveté survives a few years at the law firm. He writes a letter that confesses to everything he's done. He sets Doyle's finances in order. His confession doesn't get there because his father-in-law intercepts it, replacing it with the forged document they'd planned to send all along. Doyle's sponsor (William Hurt) bails him out of jail. Then he just yells at him in the street, telling Doyle that he's addicted to chaos. He blames Doyle for everything that's happened to him. His sponsor is just another shitty person, being shitty as hell instead of supportive. Doyle's life is full of those. Doyle and Gavin both realize that they've gone too far and determine to reconcile. Doyle returns the file to Gavin. Gavin clears up Doyle's financial history and sets things right with Doyle's ex-wife, who seems to have forgiven him at the end of the film. Gavin uses the file to blackmail his father-in-law into allowing him to do pro-bono work at the firm. It is utterly unclear what Gavin's true nature is. At the beginning, he just seems like any other shark in the NYC high-powered environment. In the end, he elects to stay at the firm and with his reprehensible wife and father-in-law, benefitting from his elite status, but to do good work for free. It's a bit confused but whatever. I watched this one with Keith and Gary. Star Trek Into Darkness (2013) -- "7/10" I watched and "reviewed this in 2013" . The rating stands. The film picks up where director J.J. Abrams left off, by adding tons and tons of lens flares to the Star Trek Aesthetic and by making it look a lot more like a video game than it used to. The pieces of canon are still in place, with much talk of the Prime Directive in the first 1/3. The crew of the Enterprise -- Captain Kirk (Chris Pine), Spock (Zachary Quinto), Scottie (Simon Pegg), Bones (Karl Urban), Uhura (Zoe Saldana), Sulu (John Cho), and Chekhov (Anton Yelchin) -- is trying to rescue a primitive planet from its volcano. They manage it but not without breaking the Prime Directive in order to save Spock. For this, Kirk is demoted to first officer for Captain Pike (Bruce Greenwood), who is nearly immediately killed by Khan (Benedict Cumberbatch), who's some sort of centuries-old super-soldier bent on getting his crew back out of cryo-storage. He wants to continue his goal of eradicating all beings who don't live up to his exacting and high standards. Kirk shoots him down but he teleports away to Kronos, homeworld of the Klingons. They of course go there to find and capture Khan, where he somehow ends up with the upper hand from his prison cell. Admiral Marcus (Peter Weller) is in cahoots with Khan, having resurrected him from cryosleep for his own purposes. He uses his ship Vengeance to block the Enterprise from getting to Earth to expose his plans. Somehow the radio isn't working. Now hold on here, because it gets wacky: Khan and Kirk are working together. They space-jump together to Vengeance, where Scotty has already infiltrated, while Spock calls his future self to learn more about Khan. I beg your pardon? Khan and Spock and Kirk negotiate and trick, cajole and deceive and they end up with both ships plummeting to Earth's surface. Kirk sacrifices himself to save Enterprise, while Khan rides Vengeance right down to a fiery crash on the surface. Spock transports down to fight Khan and to bring him back to use his body's regenerative powers to heal Kirk. Khan and Kirk are both cryo-frozen, with Kirk being resurrected soon after he'd healed. They are shown beginning the five-year voyage that would lead to the first season of the very first Star Trek. The end. The Heat (2013) -- "7/10" Ashburn (Sandra Bullock) is a top-notch FBI agent but she's arrogant and a show-off and no-one likes to work with her. People should appreciate her but she's hard to appreciate. Hale (Demián Bichir) sends Ashburn to Boston. Mullins (Melissa McCarthy) is a local cop in Boston. She drives a beat-up Dodge Rambler. As she's busting a local john (Tony Hale), she runs down a drug dealer, Rojas (Spoken Reasons). Ashburn meets Levy (Marlon Wayans), who's the local liaison with the FBI. Captain Woods (Tom Wilson) is Mullins's boss. Ashburn shows up with her attitude on full display. Mullins and Ashburn tangle, with Mullins getting the better of Ashburn, at least at first. She steals a file from Ashburn that details the crime network in Boston. Mullins visits her brother (Michael Rapaport) in prison to find out more about crime boss Simon Larkin. Ashburn is ordered to work with Mullins. They start off "interviewing" Tatiana (Kaitlin Olson) with predictable results. They team up reasonably well, with Mullins distracting Tatiana and her mother and grabbing a book of matches, while Ashburn grabs a cigarette butt as evidence. They stop in at Mullins's apartment, which is just below Tatiana's. She shows off her refrigerator full of weapons. They team up at the club to bug another suspect's phone. They manage it by making Ashburn look sluttier, which is a pretty obvious move. They get trailed by the DEA, in the form of Craig (Dan Bakkedahl) and Adam (Taran Killam). Craig is an albino. They squabble. They keep getting to know each other and they end up at Mullins's house, where we meet her two brothers Mark (Bill Burr) and Peter (Joey McIntyre), her dad (Michael Tucci), and her mother (Jane Curtin). They're all pissed at Mullins for having arrested her brother. He's back at home though. At this point, I realized that I had seen this movie before, "in 2014" . The rest of the plot is basically them becoming not only acquainted, not only friendly, but becoming best and only friends. There is a long montage of a drunken night out, which ends with Ashburn having giving away her car to another bar patron Wayne, with whom she'd been deep-kissing all night (when she wasn't stealing cigarettes right out of people's mouths. The romance with dumpy Wayne doesn't last long, as Ashburn's car had been rigged to explode and he goes up in flames with it. Now, they know they've hit a nerve, so things get serious. There's a montage of them getting serious. They are forced to move the Mullins family, which is a complete shitshow of Bostonisms. At the end, the montage shifts to them loading out with lots of weapons and armor and gear. They get the temporary drop on their quarries, but then a whole bunch more adverseries show up and capture them. There are hijinks and they show how well they work together and they prevail. It's entertaining enough, even if there are no surprises. They each excel and get promoted and become best friends and they live happily ever after. I watched this one with Gary because he loves it. Wicked Little Letters (2023) -- "7/10" The movie is about a young Irish woman named Rose Gooding (Jessie Buckley) who'd moved into an apartment in LIttlehampton with her boyfriend Bill (Malachi Kirby) and daughter Nancy (Alisha Weir). Next door lived Edith Swan (Olivia Colman), with her mother Victoria (Gemma Jones) and father Edward (Timothy Spall). Edith and Rose were friends at first, despite their strong differences in opinion on the primacy of God in their lives. Edith had been receiving letters filled with florid invective. Her father knew that it was Rose sending them. They managed to get the police involved and had Rose arrested. At her Grand Jury hearing, she was remanded into custody and sent to a prison until trial. She was utterly unable to pay the bail of £3. Edith was regaled in the newspapers as a heroine of sorts. Rose languished in prison, writing to "Woman police officer" Gladys (Anjana Vasan), who refused to help her, despite her own suspicions that Rose was not behind the letters. Eventually, the ladies of Edith's own whist club pooled together the money to post Rose's bail so that she could rejoin her daughter and Bill at home. At this point, the letters multiply, being sent to literally hundreds of people in town, always with a unique way of cursing that was at once vicious and awkward. We watch as Edith's father dresses her down again and again, one time assigning her to write a passage from Proverbs 200 times. Edith breaks down and starts writing another of the titular wicked little letters. It turns out that she had been writing them all along -- including the ones to herself. Together with Edith's whist club, Gladys goes from strongly suspecting Edith herself to sleuthing about to build up enough evidence to convict her -- if only to free Rose. The trial goes a bit back and forth, with Rose's barrister attempting a handwriting defense, to no avail. It was very convincing but the judge determined that handwriting evidence was inadmissible. The prosecutor brought up the murky facts behind Rose's past: was she actually a widow? Was Nancy actually a child of wedlock? And all sorts of other delicious questions that mattered very, very much to early 20th-century England. It probably still does, or soon will again. Despite the rocky trial, the court adjourns until the following Monday, giving the whist investigative team a final weekend to catch Edith in the act. They manage it, with the help of some invisible ink and, quite frankly, Edith's irresistible urge to write filthy letters to anyone and everyone. Her final letter was addressed to the magistrate judge himself. She was, of course, trying to nail Rose for good. Edith's feelings about Rose were deeply conflicted. She never really had a chance with the monster of a father that she had. I thought I'd like this movie more, based on reviews and the trailer but it didn't quite spark like I thought it would. It was good but not great. 3 Body Problem S01 (2023) -- "8/10" I'd just finished reading the books, which is my context for watching this show. It was quite faithful to the source material, moving a bunch of things around from the three books to form a slightly more linear approach that is more appropriate to a television show. Like the first book, the show starts during the Cultural Revolution, where Ye Wenjie's (Rosalind Chao) father is killed for refusing to renounce his profession. She also refuses to bend. Instead of killing her, though, they banish her to a very remote military base with a huge radio-telescope dish that can be used for interstellar messages. At the time, she meets a young Mike Evans (played later by Jonathan Pryce). Wenjie eventually uses the dish to bounce a message off of the sun, magnifying it immensely, and responding to the Trisolarans, who'd made contact with a warning not to continue communicating. Why did she do this? After seeing how humanity was constantly warring with itself and with the planet, she'd give up hope on it. In the modern day, her daughter Vera (Vedette Lim), who'd become a formidable physicist in her own right, kills herself. Her former students, Auggie Salazar (Eiza González), Jack Rooney (John Bradley), Jin Cheng (Jess Hong), Saul Durand (Jovan Adepo), and Will Downing (Alex Sharp) discuss how scientific measurements have stopped making sense. This ends up being the reason for why Vera killed herself: it's actually Sophons -- hyper-dimensional, light-speed, super-folded, and super-intelligent protons sent by the Trisolarans -- that are deliberately keeping human technology from advancing. Why? Because the Trisolarans are on the way to colonize Earth because Wenjie told them to come. Why are the Trisolarans fleeing? Because their planet is trapped in a three-sun system that is extremely unstable, which has led to an extremely long, slow, and painful development phase for Trisolaran civilization. We actually learn about this through a convoluted and unusually realistic video game invented by the Trisolarans and distributed by the Sophons through cool headsets. This is just like in the book, though. Although they are considerably more advanced than humanity is right now, they cannot exceed light speed -- they cannot get past 10% of light speed -- so it will take 400 years to get to Earth. In that time, humans will have leapfrogged the Trisolaran technology and will be more than ready to prevent their own colonization. The Sophons, capable of light-speed travel, arrive much sooner, and are there to confuse and stymie humanity into developing much more slowly. There is also a group of people led by Mike Evans who are preparing to welcome the arrival of the Trisolarans (called the "San-Ti" in the show, because "San" means "three" in Mandarin). They call Sophon (Sea Shimooka) "Lord". They have developed a quasi-religion. Some of their minions are given extra-human powers, like super-strength. One of them is Tatiana (Marlo Kelly), who is terribley annoying but also quite convincing as a cult member. She kills Jack. So much happens in this season. Let's see. Augie gets infected by Sophon and sees a countdown everywhere, until she gives up her nano-fiber technology experiments. She drinks a lot, like way more than her 75-pound body could ever accommodate. I think Saul likes her? No-one knows why though, because she's a mopey, whiny pain-in-the-ass. She's the smartest of them, she's obviously ludicrously wealthy, and she looks like she's about 25 years old even though she must be at least 50 in order to have achieved as much as she has. Unless she's, like, Tony Stark or Reed Richards, or something? Thomas Wade (Liam Cunningham) is there from the beginning, working with Jin Cheng (Jess Hong) on the Staircase Project, which aims to send something out of the solar system at 0.1c (1/10 of the speed of light). She works with her naval secret-agent boyfriend Raj (Saamer Usmani) to get Augie to use her nano-fibers to seriously destroy Mike Evans's ship as it navigates through the Panama Canal, killing everyone on board but also getting the records of all of their conversations with "the Lord". I almost forgot my favorite character (also from the books): Da Shi (Benedict Wong), who is just wonderful. No notes. He's just like I pictured him in the books. He's involved in many ways, working for Wade and the U.N. Will has terminal cancer and, long story short, he ends up professing his love to Jin in the form of buying her the rights to a star with a fortune he'd recently acquired but that he wouldn't be able to enjoy because he has terminal cancer. He commits his brain to Jin's Staircase Project. Ye Winjie meets with Saul and tells him a complicated story that's designed to impart her knowledge without allowing the Sophons to understand it. Saul is doing an ok job, but I very much preferred the quirky and enigmatic Luo Ji from the novels. Saul's "weirdness" is that he likes to blaze up all the time. Luo Ji was way, way cooler. Anyway, Saul becomes a Wallfacer by the end of the first season, with his nomination and initial experiences mirroring those of Luo Ji from the second book. Several key Asian people have been replaced with black actors. If you've read the books, it's a bit jarring. Like, Wang Miao is now Augie; Luo Ji is now Saul. Kaos S01 (2024) -- "8/10" The Greek Gods are real, people! This first season follows the story of Prometheus's (Stephen Dillane) subterfuge against his quasi-friend Zeus (Jeff Goldblum), who'd punished Prometheus for eternity for having brought fire to mankind. Hera (Janet McTeer) also schemes against the increasingly erratic Zeus -- they say he's acting like his father Chronos -- while she continues a long-running dalliance with Poseidon (Cliff Curtis). Dionysus (Nabhaan Rizwan) is great as Zeus's red-headed stepchild (as it were) who's scheming to get into his father's good graces. He helps Orpheus (Killian Scott) begin his mission to retrieve his lover Riddy (Aurora Perrineau) from Hades, where she'd gone after having died on Earth. There, she meets and falls in love with Caeneus (Misia Butler), who is trying to figure out the mechanics of Hades. He thinks that the souls are being harvested for their life-force rather than being resurrected. He turns out to be very right about that. Hades (David Thewlis) has strong misgivings about what is going on, whereas Zeus tells him to keep his lip zipped and follow orders. Medusa (Debi Mazar) and Perephone (Rakie Ayola) are in on the scheme, but it doesn't sit particularly well with them, either. Poseidon is in charge of president Minos (Stanley Townsend), whose son is the minotaur and whose daughter Ari (Leila Farzad) is also determined to find that out. Prometheus is manipulating all of this as a sort of fate -- oh, yeah, the three Fates are in this as well, headed up by Lachy (Eddie Izzard) -- and his first step on this plan was to kill his lover Charon (Rakie Ayola), whom he had entrusted with carrying out the plan once he'd posted up in his new job as ferryman. The cast is huge and the references to Greek myth and characters are plentiful. The plot has several strands that come together at the end of season one, but definitely set things up for a second season. If you're interested in the exact details, see "Wikipedia" . Prometheus sits on Zeus's throne, the people have lost faith, and Zeus is bleeding. I gave it an extra star for the inspired choice of casting Jeff Goldblum as a mercurial God, and for giving the majestic McTeer the role of his foil in Hera. Hunter Killer (2018) -- "7/10" This movie was not unexpectedly somewhat trashy but Gerard Butler is always entertaining. He can really hold a movie together. He plays submarine captain Joe Glass. The rest of the cast is of surprisingly high quality, with Gary Oldman kind of phoning it in as CJCS Charles Donnegan. There's Linda Cardellini as Jayne Norquist and Common keeps being cast in stuff, too, although I rarely find him entertaining. Michael Nyqvist played Captain Andropov in one of his last roles. I remember him fondly as Viggo Tarasov in the first John Wick. This is a testosterone-filled movie about a Navy crew where Glass has been tasked with tracking down another sub that went missing while tracking a Russian sub. There's a SEAL team in the mix that witnesses a coup d'etat in Russia, where an admiral takes the Russian president captive. He means to start a hot war. As Russians do. There are more dastardly Russians about as Glass's submarine finds the wreckage of not only the missing American sub but also the Russian sub it had been tracking. He manages to rescue Andropov and a few others from that sub. The Russian sub that sank both of the other ones is still lurking and attacks them. There are the classic submarine tropes: holding on to things attached to the wall, bracing for an impact, falling all over the place on impact, turning wrenches to stop leaks, sloshing through knee-deep water, closing bulkheads on other people, Dutch angles everywhere, trying not to make noise, dropping a tool but catching it at the last second, navigating an underwater minefield, navigating tunnels through reefs, trusting Andropov's instructions even when it looks like he's led them astray...but a gap opens up at the last minute and now Glass knows he can trust him. You know the drill. It's not new, but it's reasonably well-done. It ticks the boxes. In the other part of the plot, the SEAL team is pretty definitely following a script written by the Navy as a pretty blatant advertisement for being a SEAL. It's even better than all of the video games that the Pentagon sponsors, I bet. They even got one guy who looks kind of like Christian Bale (but it's not) and another one who kind of looks like John C. McGinley (but it's not) and yet another who looks kind of like Eric Bana (but it's not). There's a lot of shouting and hating on Russians as well as reconciling and being able to work together because we are after all just people who love our brother soldiers and want the best of all possible worlds. HAHAHAHAHA. No. The U.S. magnanimously helps Russia extricate itself from its self-created political crisis -- the coup which the CIA most definitely had nothing to do with. It's a feel-good ending as the U.S. captain Glass avoids starting a hot war and his new buddy Andropov protects Glass's sub with covering fire and then takes out the evil admiral Durov. The president of Russia is returned, safe and sound, so that democracy may prevail in Russia, thanks to the Americans, whose overriding interest is to promote democracy, freedom, and free enterprise in a world of harmony and peace. I watched it in German. I gave it a couple of extra points because of the quality of the cast and the fact that this was definitely at least 50% better than either of the GI Joe movies. The action was filmed quite well, with no obvious CGI. Kudos. Transformers (2007) -- "7/10" Sam Witwicky (Shia LeBeouf) gets a new car. It's yellow and looks like a Camaro/Firebird. He managed to scrape together enough cash and enough good grades to get his dad (Kevin Dunn) to help him buy it from Bobby Bolivia (Bernie Mac). He manages to use the car to get Mikaela Banes's (Megan Fox) attention. There's a backstory, of course. Witwicky's grandfather ran into the Transformers in the late 1800s when he was attempting to get to the North Pole. They left some traces of ... something ... on his eyeglasses. These are the eyeglasses that Witwicky is trying to sell on eBay. These are the eyeglasses that the Decepticons discover and use to find Witwicky. His car is Bumblebee, a Transformer that wants to protect him. At the same time, the military discovers a Decepticon in the Qatari desert. He kills a lot of them. Some of them escape and start a march across the desert, including Epps (Tyrese Gibson), Lennox (Josh Duhamel), and a few others. The Decepticons infiltrate the military The only one who's onto them is Maggie Madsen (Rachael Taylor). She reports to Sec. Def. Keller (Jon Voight) and gets hacker Glen Whitmann (Anthony Anderson) to help crack Decepticon codes. He's hilarious. It's wonderfully nonchalant how they are both completely unaware of how hot she is. I mean, Rachel Taylor and Megan Fox in one movie. What's not to like? It's just robots and smoke shows from a time before Instagram ruined everything. I'd forgotten how charming this movie was, especially when compared to all that followed it. It started off as a straight-up Spielberg/Lucas-style movie about a young man to whom amazing, space-like things happen. The mood is set, right down to Witwicky riding his mother's bike to catch up to his car when it takes off by itself. A lot of this charm can be chalked up to the sheer star power of LeBeouf. That and some inspired casting of bit characters like Witwicky's friend Trent (Travis Van Winkle), who's shown climbing a tree and washing his dog like a normal teenager. Sam's Chihuahua Mojo has a broken leg and is adorable. The guys in the desert are fighting some sort of scorpion-like Decepticon. The effects are really, really good. This was back when they still cared to make them feel real instead of taking the cheapest lowest common denominator that people are willing to accept. At the same time, Bumblebee takes on a Decepticon to protect Sam and Mikaela and reveals himself as a robot to them. She wonders why such a highly developed robot would turn itself into such a shitty car, so Bumblebee turns himself into a brand-new Camaro, a product-placement for which I'm sure Chevy paid through the nose. They all watch as several meteors hit the Earth simultaneously. They're actually transformers, all landing at once. They pick up their patterns from various vehicles, then gather around Sam and Mikaela to introduce themselves. They reveal their mission: to find the Allspark. They do a bit of exposition, explaining the history of the Autobots and Decepticons. They end up at Sam's house, looking for his grandfather's eyeglasses. Agent Simmons (John Turturro) and sector 7 show up, looking for aliens. The Autobots rescue them, but Sam, Mikaela, and Bumblebee are captured soon after. Sam, Mikaela, Maggie, and Glen are all taken the Hoover Dam, where they are shown a captured Megatron, who'd been discovered and taken there by Sam's great-grandfather. They also have the Allspark, around which the Hoover Dam was built. Agent Simmons is in his weird element, explaining how all modern technology is based on what they learned studying Megatron. They demonstrate to the field-trip class how the Allspark can animate any piece of technology to be a Transformer. The little Decepticon hacker is inside and sabotaging everything. He turns off the cryogenics and starts heating up Megatron. Simmons's S7 and the surviving Army guys tangle, with S7 having to back down. They make them bring Sam to Bumblebee, who was being tortured. Sam takes Bumblebee to the Allspark, where he starts ... programming it? It reconfigured itself into a much smaller version. Portable. Megatron is awake. He's pissed. Simmons, Maggie, Glen, and the Sec. Def. are trapped in a library with an old computer that Glen is spinning up to be able to get out a message. The little hacker robot is breaking in. Aboveground, there's a lot of bombing and destruction going on. Bumblebee's legs are all messed up. Nobody is wearing a helmet; everyone's fine. Except Bumblebee. He looks no bueno. He gives Sam the Allspark. Sam's crying. Mikaela's more resourceful: she steals a tow truck to get Bumblebee out of there. Sam's on the run with the Allspark. The soldiers hold the line, lining up with the Autobots against Megatron. The Transformers all roll and transform a lot, even though that must take a ton of energy. They're just transforming all over the place. They break a lot of shit, like a lot of buildings. As Sam runs by, the Allspark creates a whole bunch of new Transformers from close-by technology. It's a shit show. Mikaela and Bumblebee are back in the fray, taking out the giant robot that had almost gotten to the soldiers. Blablabla, Sam kills Megatron with the Allspark. Or did he? The first hour was great! And then it dragged a bit, there was less Sam Witwicky and more robot battles, so I docked a point from the final score. I watched it in German. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] These are notes for me to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. The amount of text is not proportional to my enjoyment. I might write less because I didn't get around to it when it was fresh in my mind. I rate the film based on how well it suited me personally for the genre, my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. Links are to "my IMDb ratings" ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5123 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5123 Sun, 11 Aug 2024 03:19:41 +0200 -- "6/10" 2. "Hijack (2023)" <#Hijack> -- "6/10" 3. "French Dispatch (2021)" <#French> -- "9/10" 4. "Exploding Kittens (2024)" <#Kittens> -- "5/10" 5. "Tombstone (1993)" <#Tombstone> -- "8/10" 6. "Kiss of the Dragon (2001)" <#Kiss> -- "6/10" 7. "Waterworld (1995)" <#Waterworld> -- "7/10" 8. "Godzilla Minus One (2023)" <#Godzilla> -- "8/10" 9. "I Canoni die Navarone (1961)" <#Navarone> -- "8/10" 10. "Born on the Fourth of July (1989)" <#Born> -- "8/10" Sherlock Holmes (2009) -- "6/10" Sherlock Holmes (Robert Downey Jr.) is like a superhero. He's not only brilliant, but he's also an amazing fighter. Downey seems to have been playing Holmes as Tony Stark. The script is entertaining enough. We are introduced to Holmes and Watson (Jude Law) as highly technical brawlers, which is significantly off-canon. But it gives director Guy Ritchie a chance to flex his customary directorial style -- which consists of scenes cut into short, stutter-step, labeled chunks, usually with a swooping camera transition. He does this a lot. Several examples come when Sherlock is planning an attack on an opponent, where he plans it out in his brilliant mind, then executes it. It's a gimmick that wears thin quite quickly, as it means that you have to see each fight scene twice. I'm watching Sherlock Holmes: I didn't even really need to be seeing any fight scenes at all. Lord Henry Blackwood (Mark Strong) is trying to take over England by convincing it that magic exists and that he is a powerful wizard. He fakes his death, then comes back from the dead. The point is to make Sherlock doubt whether facts and science can explain the world. Spoiler alert: It turns out they can. Irene Adler (Rachel McAdams) is in Blackwood's employ but is also falling in love with Sherlock -- because an arrogant, know-it-all, hopeless alcoholic is supremely attractive, I guess. The French giant Dredger (Robert Maillet) is a lot of fun as a Juggernaut-style opponent. The whole movie is a way of introducing the nemesis for the sequel: Professor Moriarty. He is seen only as a shadow throughout the film, pulling strings and manipulating everyone, including not only the ostensible nemesis Blackwood but also Holmes and Irene.. I watched it in German. Hijack (2023) -- "6/10" This short series was better than it had any right to be. It was probably too long, but it was shorter than it could have been. It drew out its relatively straightforward plot -- as pretty much every Netflix series does -- but Idris Elba as Sam Nelson anchored things pretty well. A bunch of British idiots hijack a plane from Dubai to London in order to force the British government to release the two heads of their crime family who'd recently been arrested. Not only that, but they're using the hijacking as an opportunity to run a short squeeze on the airline that they've hijacked. That part is ludicrous because the exchange would obviously have intervened and stopped trading on the stock for the day. This is uncontroversial and shows the (A) low level of knowledge about how markets are run and (B) the utter disdain for the audience in assuming that they know nothing. Anyway, they've hijacked the plane and they spend some time proving how ruthless they are -- the token female hijacker Jamie (Aimée Kelly) is particularly grating and over-the-top in this regard. They manage to force the pilot (Ben Miles) to open the forward cabin by threatening his flight-attendant lover (Kate Phillips). He overrides the copilot (Kaisa Hammarlund) by beating the ever-loving hell out of her, which was wildly gratuitous and more unsettling because they pretty much ignored that he'd done that throughout the rest of the show. It was like when you watch a movie where a cop's family is killed at the start of the movie in order to justify his murdering dozens of other people throughout the rest of it. They're just setting up a plot device to convince you that it's OK. The point of the movie is to show the rampage. Which makes this scene extra-weird because then it seems like the point was to show you a man beating a woman within an inch of her life? Why? Anyway, the hijackers have gained the forward cabin and are in control of the craft. They don't do much, though, except keep flying to London. Also, they try like hell to keep anyone from finding out that the plane has been hijacked. This would have made sense if they were planning to actually crash the plane into something. But, as noted above, the whole point is to use the hijacking to leverage the release of two prisoners and to enable a short-squeeze on the airline's stock. That doesn't work if no-one knows the plane has been hijacked. Sam manages to get a message out to the ground, to his ex-wife, advancing their agenda while thwarting their actual plan for it. Meanwhile, on the ground, there's a bunch of drama with Sam's incredibly spoiled son, his inordinately wealthy ex-wife (look at that apartment!), and her boyfriend, a cop. There is also a very savvy and no-nonsense Irish air-traffic controller who's pretty much my favorite character. There are a bunch of terrible people from the British government being predictably terrible and machinating. Look, man, they end up landing the plane. One of the two criminals released shoots the other one in the head and easily gets away from the police. The hijackers are all arrested. Thankfully, there doesn't seem to be a way to make a second season, so we can all breathe a sigh of relief. They actually knitted up the story quite well, but this thing could easily have been a 90-minute movie instead. French Dispatch (2021) -- "9/10" I think this is my favorite Wes Anderson movie. My "review from 2022" still stands. "Nescaffier: I'm not a hero; I just wasn't in the mood for being a disappointment to everybody." I watched it in English and French. Exploding Kittens (2024) -- "5/10" I wanted to like this better because I've been reading the Oatmeal comic strip since its inception. It was very generic, though, with occasional flare-ups of stuff that was a bit more inventive and funnier. It never really approached the consistency of the quite-mediocre Disenchanted. If I'm honest, the uneven quality very much matched the online comic. It's a bunch of low-effort poop jokes rooted in a relatively weak canon based on the Oatmeal comic strips and the Exploding Kittens board game. Based on such a premise, it never really had a chance of being good. The plot is basically that God is somehow less powerful than his ruling committee, so they banish him to Earth to pass his time as a cat. The same thing happens to Beelzebub, who's Lucifer's daughter. This sets things up for (A) equality! (B) sexy times between God and Beelzebub, and (C) a lot of litterbox and hairball jokes. They end up living next to each other in suburbia, with Beelzebub living with a psychotic cat lady named, unsurprisingly, Karen, and God ending up living with a by-now typical sitcom family: everyone's quirky in their own way. The mom is an ex-Navy Seal turned veterinarian; the dad is a board-game-playing dweeb who works at a giant box store; the son is a useless lump of online-fame seeking neuroses; the daughter is a genius scientist who's still in high school. It turns out that Heaven and Hell are merging while the two leaders are in semi-banishment and that there can be only one leader, in the end. They have a competition, of course, with God winning, of course, but then they share power? I think? I honestly can't remember anymore, which is suppose is all the description you need. Look, man, this show is basically a cartoon to fill a five- or six-hour hole in your evening. Since you won't remember it, you might even be able to watch it again a month later and fill two empty, useless evenings. Tombstone (1993) -- "8/10" This is the story of Wyatt Earp (Kurt Russell), who moves to the town of Tombstone with his brothers Virgil (Sam Elliott) and Morgan (Bill Paxton), and his good friend Doc Holliday (Val Kilmer). The Earps settle in, picking up lady-friends like Josephine Marcus (Dana Delany) and a bunch of other Earp wives. There are some bad hombres in town, namely Curly Bill Brocius (Powers Boothe), Johnny Ringo (Michael Biehn), Ike Clanton (Stephen Lang), Billy Clanton (Thomas Haden Church), and Billy Breckenridge (Jason Priestley). They are portrayed as nearly preternaturally evil, driven only by drinking and shooting. They don't even really bother the ladies, actually. They seem to be driven by causing misery, like demons on Earth. This make it much, much easier for the Earps to start wiping them out en masse. The two sides snipe at each other, taking victims closer and closer to the tops of their respective hierarchies. The Earps have silver stars on their chests, so they're able to justify their murderous rampages as being "of the law." Honestly, that's pretty much all there is to it. It's entertaining as hell, though, and quite well-acted. I have a soft spot for all of the Doc Holliday scenes, like the so-drunk-he-can't-see-straight-but-he-can-still-convincingly-cheat-at-cards scene or the so-tubercular-he-can-barely-stand-but-everyone-is-still-terrified-of-his-gun-hand scene or the "I'm you're huckleberry" scene in which he quickly and easily puts Johnny Ringo in his place -- six feet under the ground. Doc Holliday (Val Kilmer) is one of cinema's greatest characters. The man dominated the film in a way few supporting characters do. Kilmer's roles were absolutely formative for me. Real Genius, Top Secret, Tombstone, then, later, Heat and Kiss, Kiss, Bang Bang. Holliday strides as a God, being better than everyone at everything, despite an illness that would be debilitating for a lesser man. He never gets his comeuppance. He never gets wounded. His enemies never temporarily get the better of him before he manages to turn the tables. It's wonderful. I watched it in Italian with Italian subtitles. Kiss of the Dragon (2001) -- "6/10" Liu Jian (Jet Li) arrives in Paris from Beijing. He's an agent of some sort. He uses acupuncture needles to immobilize his opponents, but uses Kung Fu if that doesn't work. He ends up using Kung Fu a lot. His style is very minimalistic and, relative to today's super-hero-style histrionics, realistic. Liu is on a mission, in the employ of an intelligence agency of the Chinese government. The French police are led by inspector Richard (Tchéky Karyo), who's holding Jessica's (Bridget Fonda) daughter hostage, keeping Jessica in a prostitution ring run by a savage pimp. No-one honestly knows why any of this has to be this complicated but it offers a Gordian Knot that can be cut by Kung Fu and acupuncture, so it is what it is because it must be. I am a fan of Jet Li, especially when he's being an earnest down-to-Earth guy who just happens to be absolutely amazing at Kung Fu. Does he eventually bring down Inspector Richard's evil empire? Of course. Does he rescue Jessica from bondage? Certainly. Does she get her daughter back? Are you kidding me? Of course she does. Do Jessica and Jian fall in love and live happily ever after? I honestly can't remember, but I don't think so. La Main Droite du Diable (Betrayed) (1988) -- "7/10" Katie Philips (Debra Winger) is an undercover police officer on assignment in the Midwest, looking for the killer of highly divisive radio DJ Sam Kraus (Richard Libertini) who'd been murdered in cold blood in a parking garage. She drives a combine and befriends Gary Simmons (Tom Berenger), striking up a romantic relationship, and getting to know others, like Shorty (John Mahoney) and Wes (Ted Levine). The officer in charge of the case at the FBI Michael Carnes (John Heard) is also romantically interested in her (I mean, of course). This seems like a pretty innocuous investigation at this point. Down-home people trying to scratch out a living in an increasingly difficult economy. Wholesome. Familiar. It rings true even almost 40 years later. Except it's not wholesome. Gary keeps asking Katie to go hunting with him. She eventually agrees and they meet up early in the morning with some of Gary's friends (Shorty, Wes, etc.) There's also a terrified black man who's obviously been worked over and is gibbering for his freedom. Katie is taken aback, watching them let him loose and start counting down before they give chase. I think he manages to kill Shorty, which they take to be an act that will justify what they are doing to him. They eventually catch him and kill him, after offering Katie the kill, which she refuses. Gary brings her in to the fold even more, being very, very open now about how the Jews and the Niggers are at fault for every little thing that's gone wrong in their lives. They have training camps and picnics where there are guns everywhere and where they train for the coming war against ... everyone who's not white and from the midwest. It's pretty over-the-top but it's pretty much what people imagine is going on right now in America in all of the nooks and crannies that haven't gotten the message yet. It is absolutely not like that, though. I was just at a gathering like this yesterday and no-one was even bitching about immigrants, to say nothing of the Blacks and the Jews. In the movie, the group robs a bank, shooting a guard but also taking a casualty in Wes, who'd been very suspicious of Katie. It turns out that the FBI had deliberately taken him out so as to protect Katie's cover. The group has bigger ambitions and is financing a local politician who's in the KKK. We also get to see Katie being driven past a Klan rally before she travels to a city where Gary is going to kill a recalcitrant politician with a sniper rifle. Katie shoots Gary before he can take out his target, but there's a backup sniper who kills the politician anyway. It's an odd ending because Katie ends up quitting her job and, a year later, returns to the village and family where she'd been undercover, receiving equal parts reprobation from the townsfolk and love from Gary's daughters, to whom she'd become a mother. I guess the movie's trying to say that, no matter how many black people you might see killed in human safaris, you can still forgive people? Waterworld (1995) -- "7/10" It is the year 2,500AD, when the Earth has become nearly completely covered with water. The characters of the movie are exclusively living on man-made atolls, which are all that is left of civilization. There is no mining, no materials, no manufacturing base. Mankind lives on the leftovers of civilization, slowly burning through what is left. Mariner (Kevin Costner) sails alone on a jerry-rigged but somewhat high-tech catamaran. He pulls in to such an atoll, ready to trade dirt and other items that only he seems to be able to get. The atoll-dwellers trade with him but they are suspicious of how he is able to obtain goods to which no-one else has access. They discover that he is a mutant, with functional gills behind his ears. He is, of course, parted from his possessions and sentenced to death. He is accidentally saved by an attack by the Smokers, who are a gang of bastards that are somehow still running their empire on fossil fuels. Their home base is the Exxon Valdez and their patron saint is Captain Hazelwood. It's 500 years in the future, so it's pretty far-fetched that the boat would even be seaworthy anymore, but it's fine. The Deacon (Dennis Hopper) leads this merry crew. The water world of the future is a brutal one, with a stark delineation between man and woman, based simply on might makes right. After the attack, the Mariner manages to escape with the help of Helen (Jeanne Tripplehorn) and her daughter Enola (Tina Majorino), neither of whom are particularly useful on the boat. The hierarchy is clear and warranted but they chafe against it anyway. Old Gregor (Michael Jeter) also gets away in a zeppelin-like craft, which he'd prepared for himself, Helen, and Enola. The escape goes awry and he's left on his own, while they're left with the Mariner. They have adventures, completely improbably meeting another trader, who'd been drifting for days with nothing to offer but a few sheets of paper. That's enough for the Mariner, whose interest in history and explanations far outweighs his interest in sexy Jean Tripplehorn. He trades a roll with her to the other guy for a bunch of paper. This doesn't go well and he ends up slaughtering the guy, in what we are supposed to feel is a justified manner -- but the guy was holding up his end of the bargain. He just had no leverage to bring to bear should the deal go south. He could only bargain if the other side wasn't going to just kill him and take his stuff. Which is what the ostensible hero of the story does. This is fine: as noted above, the world is a brutal place, far more brutal even than our present. Rules, mores, and ethics become unsustainable luxuries chewed up as fodder for the stories we tell that portray ourselves in the best possible light as we do what we can to survive. After Helen continues to ride the Mariner about taking them to Dry Land -- even though he's explained that there aren't enough supplies for them all -- he takes her in his diving bell, down, down, down to the former surface of the Earth. He drags her in the bell through the remains of Denver, Colorado. Enola continues to draw objects that suggest that she had been raised on Dry Land, but no-one can figure out how this could possibly be. The Smokers show up while the Mariner and Helen are underwater, kidnapping Enola and torching the Mariner's boat. Gregor -- remember him? -- fortuitously and completely improbably -- appears to rescue them from their fated deaths aboard the torched husk of the Mariner's boat. The Mariner stages an attack on the Exxon Valdez to rescue Enola. He succeeds pretty handily, sustaining no damage and managing to sink the entire vessel, with thousands of souls aboard. He manages to get Enola aboard Gregor's dirigible only for her to fall into the ocean again, forcing him to bungee-jump to rescue her in an utterly comical rescue that incites a jet-ski collision that should have proved fatal to all involved, but which the Deacon improbably survives, despite being weighed down by a tremendous amount of wet leather and steel decorations. They end up deciphering the map tattooed on Enola's back -- she's about eight years old and someone had already tattooed a map on her back, where she would never be able to read it herself -- and finding Dry Land. The end. Oh no, wait, the Mariner has gills. He hates dry land. He builds a new boat and leaves them. Now the end. It was a pretty good movie, by modern standards. I took away a star because it was too long and indulgent and because they made Jeanne Tripplehorn's character too dumb. I watched it in German. Godzilla Minus One (2023) -- "8/10" This was an actual movie, with an actual plot and, incidentally, also a giant radioactive lizard monster in it. Kōichi Shikishima (Ryunosuke Kamiki) is a kamikaze pilot who pretended that he had engine trouble in order to avoid carrying out his mission. He lands on an island for repairs, where the crews are doubtful about his story since his plane is just fine. Soon after, though, they are either distracted or outright killed by a rampage by Godzilla. Shikishima also fails to fire on the giant lizard, further cementing his reputation as a coward, especially with mechanic Sōsaku Tachibana (Munetaka Aoki), who watches all of his other compatriots die in the attack -- while Shikishima did nothing but cower. Shikishima returns to a devastated Tokyo, finding his former neighbor Sumiko Ōta (Sakura Ando), who tells him that his parents are dead. Shikishima meets Noriko Ōishi (Minami Hamabe) in the market as she's chased through by police. She thrusts baby Akiko into his arms, then circles back hours later to pick her back up. The child is not hers, but she and Shikishima settle in to a family life in the wreckage of his old home. He ends up taking a job as a minesweeper, his facility with the deck-mounted gun gaining him praise from his colleagues captain Yōji Akitsu (Kuranosuke Sasaki), engineer Kenji Noda (Hidetaka Yoshioka), and greenhorn Shirō Mizushima (Yuki Yamada). They clear mines for a while, but soon learn that Godzilla is back, having grown and mutated through even more H-bomb testing. They manage to drop a mine in its mouth, then shoot it, a scene that mirrors Jaws nearly perfectly. At least no-one said "We're gonna need a bigger boat." Godzilla survives the attack easily, as the lizard is capable of incredibly quick regeneration, it's ruined mouth and cheeks quickly regrowing into a fearsome and angry visage. Godzilla goes on to attack Ginza, where Noriko works. Shikishima hurries there to rescue her, but it is she who ends up sacrificing herself to save him, pushing him into an alley as Godzilla's all-consuming nuclear fire tears up the main street. Devastated by the loss, Shikishima vows revenge and begins to work with Noda, Akitsu, and Mizushima -- as well as a host of other volunteers -- to bring down Godzilla. The government won't do it. They hatch a wild plan to use nitrogen bubbles to drop Godzilla to the sea floor and then to use rapidly inflating cushions to bring it back to the surface quickly, hopefully causing irreparable damage through rapid decompression. This wasn't ever likely to work, as it's unclear whether Godzilla even has lungs or uses Oxygen. At any rate, the backup plan was for Shikishima to fly a kamikaze mission into Godzilla's mouth with an even bigger bomb. For this, they recruit Tachibana to fix up an experimental plane for the pilot. Shikishima accomplishes his mission, bailing out at the last moment, using an ejection seat -- labelled Schleudersitz -- and avoiding the certain death that he'd planned for himself and which even Tachibana no longer wished for him. Noriko turns out to have survived the attack in Ginza and everyone lives happily ever after. Or do they? The final scene shows a chunk of Godzilla's seared flesh sinking in the ocean but seemingly slowly regenerating. I watched it in Japanese with English subtitles. I Canoni die Navarone (1961) -- "8/10" This is quite a famous WWII film about a motley crew of saboteurs gathered together for a suicide mission to destroy the titular giant German guns emplaced on the Greek island of Navarone. Capt. Keith Mallory (Gregory Peck) is the no-nonsense head of the operation, having been recruited for his renowned mountaineering skills. He is joined by an old Greek colleague Greek Col. Andrea Stavros (Anthony Quinn), British Cpl. John Anthony Miller (David Niven) as well as a few others. They take a hired boat through stormy waters to the uninhabited side of the island, which is fronted by a sheer cliff. A terrible storm tosses the ship to shreds on the shoals and rocks, leaving the team soaking and exhausted on the tiny shore at the foot of the cliff. They climb up, getting everyone up there safely, save for Maj. Roy Franklin (Anthony Quayle), who is injured enough that they have to schlep him on a litter for the rest of the way. A 12-mile march across the mountains takes them to a village, where they were to meet up with local rebels. Both the rebels and the team seem to be completely and utterly surprised to see the other, even though they totally planned to do this from the beginning. After clearing up some misunderstandings, they continue together, with the silent Anna (Gia Scala) and Maria Pappadimos (Irene Papas) being absorbed into the crew. They are eventually captured by Germans, escaping, then finding a traitor in their midst (spoiler: Anna), then breaking through the tunnels to the guns after all, setting explosives, and blowing the guns to kingdom come after having made a daring cliffside escape once again. Explosives expert Miller came through big-time, as did the wounded Stavros. Stavros and Pappadimos kindle a relationship near the end and he decides to stay on to fight the good fight in Greece. I watched it in English with Italian subtitles. Born on the Fourth of July (1989) -- "8/10" This is the true story of Ron Kovic, a young man who grew up in Massapequa, Long Island. Director Oliver Stone tells his story well, showing how he'd been plagued his whole life by being nearly as successful as he wanted to be, never quite fulfilling his mother's expectations. His mother was very, very religious; his father less so. Ron did well at wrestling but we are shown his defeat in some sort of regional or state championship. He hears about the war, he hears about the dastardly communists that must be stopped, he signs up for the Marines, he makes fun of friends who are too chicken to do the same. He fails to impress "his girl", who goes to the prom with someone else while Ron sits at home. He decides on a grand gesture, running through torrential rain to get to the gymnasium, where he gets a dance with her. It's unclear whether she's genuinely happy that he showed up or whether it's just a pity dance because he'd run through the rain. Fast forward to his second tour in Vietnam. He welcomes a young guy named Wilson (Michael Compotaro) from Georgia to the shit, telling him he's never heard of anyone from Georgia dying before. He's just as cocky now as he was in high school, faking it to make it. Their first sortie with Wilson goes south pretty quickly, with Kovic's unit shooting up a village and, in particular, one hut in which a family had been hiding. They move in to find a whole family slaughtered, all except for a single crying baby. Kovic tries to soothe it, but his commander tells him that there's no time because more Vietcong are on the way. Soon after, they're under fire, coming from left, right, and ahead. They fall back in a wildly disorganized retreat, with Wilson coming up over a dune, framed as a silhouette in the sun, surprising Kovic, who riddles him with bullets. Kovic is traumatized; Wilson is dead. Kovic tries to report the friendly-fire incident but his commanding officer isn't having it. Kovic is absolved by the Marines but not by himself. Soon after, he's in another heavy-fire battle and takes a bullet to the foot. Instead of crawling back, the adrenalin rips through him and he thinks he can be a hero. He levers himself up on his shattered foot, holding his machine gun Rambo-style. He is cut down by a bullet to the chest that leaves a giant exit wound in his back and shatters his spine just below the chest. Back home, he starts his new life in a filthy, filthy VA hospital. He tries to beat the odds, but the odds are 0% that he will ever walk again. He eventually shatters a femur in a fall he suffers when walking on crutches, dragging his dead legs. He doesn't feel a thing. He is released to go back home, where he tries to put a happy face on things. It's only surface, though. His mother can't hide her disappointment. His father is more accepting, but obviously shattered. Ron is in the parade, as a veteran. He's invited to speak, but chokes up when he hears a crying baby, which sends him into a flashback. He's unable to continue and has to be escorted off the stage. Ron sinks into a life of alcoholism, living at home and making everyone miserable. He visits his former girl Donna (Kyra Sedgwick) in Syracuse, attending a vigil/protest for the victims of the Kent State shootings. Kovic watches the highly militarized police repressing people's rights to protest. He eventually moves out of his parents' house, down to Mexico, where he meets Charlie (Willem Dafoe), a fellow paraplegic who has discovered tequila and Mexican prostitutes who understand how to take care of him. After some entirely predictable misadventures there, Kovic returns to the States, traveling to Texas to visit Wilson's parents, his widow, and his young daughter. He confesses what happened: the widow hopes that God forgives him, but is unable to herself; Wilson's parents are actually more understanding. Flash forward to Kovic protesting at the Republican national convention where Nixon is being nominated. He is repressed, along with other protesters but surges to get back in the hall, only to be rejected again. All the time, though, the cameras are rolling. The movie ends with Kovic addressing the Democratic national convention, way back when they were still pretending to be anti-war. This is just like so many of Oliver Stone's movies: well-made and important. Tom Cruise is really, really good in the role, striking just the right balance of at least partially misplaced arrogance along with a slowly dawning and growing earnestness about the crimes of his country. It's a long journey, but one that he made and maintains to this day. Stone's movies almost always have the right politics and the right interpretation of history. He is a national treasure. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] These are notes for me to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. The amount of text is not proportional to my enjoyment. I might write less because I didn't get around to it when it was fresh in my mind. I rate the film based on how well it suited me personally for the genre, my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. Links are to "my IMDb ratings" ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5107 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5107 Sat, 10 Aug 2024 18:02:55 +0200 -- "8/10" 2. "John Wick 3: Parabellum (2019)" <#Parabellum> -- "8/10" 3. "South Park: The End of Obesity (2024)" -- "8/10" 4. "South Park (Not Suitable for Children) (2023)" -- "8/10" 5. "South Park: Joining the Panderverse (2023)" -- "8/10" 6. "The Terminator (1984)" <#Terminator> -- "8/10" 7. "Glass (2022)" <#Glass> -- "8/10" 8. "Ghosts of Mars (2001)" <#Ghosts> -- "4/10" 9. "Five Days at Memorial (2022)" <#FiveDays> -- "4/10" 10. "The Sandman (2022)" <#Sandman> -- "7/10" Shrinking (2023) -- "8/10" Jimmy (Jason Segal) is a psychiatrist at a small practice run by Paul (Harrison Ford) and working with Gaby (Jessica Williams). He lives in a swank neighborhood with his daughter Alice (Lukita Maxwell), next to their close neighbors Liz (Christa Miller) and Derek (Ted McGinley). I'm just going to break it to you: everyone in this show is pretty rich and they all spend so much time feeling kinda sorry for themselves, even though their lives are nearly infinitely better than everyone else's. This is a common trend in the American zeitgeist: you are expected to be disappointed in your lot in life if anyone else is doing better than you or if anyone else gets anything that you don't have. It's a pretty nauseating moral stance but it's becoming more and more evident to me that this is how the populace is being trained: so many TV shows are set up like this and people I've anecdotally talked to in the U.S. act like this too. Anyway, Jimmy's wife died about a year ago and he's still dragging ass around, kind of leaving his daughter in the lurch. She, however, also has expectations that she's the main character in her Dad's life, even though she's a relatively good kid. Main character syndrome is also strong: even good characters are imbued with it. Paul starts dating his Parkinson's doctor Julie (Wendy Malick) while Jimmy starts to drag himself out of his funk by opening up to his patients. He tells Grace (Heidi Gardner) to leave her gaslighting boyfriend; he asks Sean (Luke Tennie) to move in with him. Alice and Gaby are good friends. Gaby gets to be good friends with Liz, who's dealing with Derek's impending retirement. Paul tries to reconcile with his daughter Meg (Lily Rabe) and her family, even though she's also a total main character, who thinks that her father is an asshole if he doesn't fly across the country two times a week to see his grandson -- even after she finds out Paul has Parkinson's. It's incredible how selfish these characters are, and how normalized this selfishness is when you live and breathe this culture. From outside of this normalized sphere, it looks completely bizarre. Meg is not really a nice person; she's utterly basic. Brian (Michael Urie) is fantastic as Jimmy's estranged best friend. They reconcile with Jimmy telling him that hearing someone constantly say "Everything always works out," right after his wife had died was hard to take, so he stopped hanging out with him. Brian thought about this for a bit and said "when I said that, I meant that everything always works out for me, not for you." It was the pitch-perfect thing to say to repair the friendship. I gave this show an extra star for how well-written Brian and Jimmy's relationship ended up being. Jimmy and Paul lock horns, while Alice continues to see Paul for counseling, but on the DL and she counsels him just as much. This is a good role for Harrison Ford. Alice tries to kiss Sean, but he's the most stable member of the show and he rightly turns her jail-baiting ass down. She's upset and tells Gaby about it, but Sean is dead-ass right that he'd be on a list if he'd even thought of kissing her. It's amazing how cavalierly the show deals with this issue -- as if exactly this kind of shit hadn't ruined so many people's lives. It's just a cute little girl expressing her feelings -- but in a way that might ruin her love interest's life if he were to respond. A lot of other shit happens: it gets kind of overwhelming. In some cases, streaming channels will absolutely pad the shit out of their content, stretching what could have been a short movie to a six- or eight-episode season. In other cases, they cram in so much material that you're overwhelmed, trying to keep all of the details straight. Here we go. After a party and having gotten pretty drunk, Gaby and Jimmy fall into bed together. Liz also drinks quite a lot, with day-drinking a pretty common occurrence. Again, this goes completely without note by the script because this kind of behavior is just normal. Alice runs away to a party, for which Jimmy grounds her, to her utter shock. Jimmy is officiating Brian and his husband Charlie's (Devin Kawaoka) wedding. Paul gets a big award but chooses to fly to his grandson's play instead of accepting the award in person. Sean starts a catering business, funded by Derek and Liz. One of Jimmy's patients Grace pushes her boyfriend off a cliff, kinda/sorta on Jimmy's recommendation. John Wick 3: Parabellum (2019) -- "8/10" My review from "2022" , which extended my review from "2019" , is unchanged. The Adjudicator is still super-annoyingly written. I watched it in Italian with Italian subtitles. It somehow seemed even more bad-ass that way. South Park: The End of Obesity (2024) -- "8/10" Cartman is trying to get Ozempic but he's not able to get a prescription. Meanwhile, every mom in town is taking it -- and getting ripped, to boot. Randy, of course, gets in cahoots with the moms, thinking that they're doing drugs. When he finds out that it's Ozempic, he rolls with it and just starts taking that instead. Meanwhile, the gang is trying to help Cartman navigate the American healthcare system. When they utterly fail to do that -- as so many others have failed before them -- they start up a homemade pharmacy using ingredients that they purchased from India. The ladies catch wind of this and break bad, hijacking the semaglutide delivery truck and stealing its contents. The sugar and cereal lobby and industry gather to figure out how to take down the boys' business. The mascots of these companies eventually mount an attack on the Indian factory supplying the semaglutide, killing most of the workers there. The boys order more material from a place in North Carolina but the mothers hijack this truck as well. Randy betrays them, hieing across the desert in what ends up looking very much like a Mad Max: Fury Road-style chase. Kenny dies. In the end, no-one has or needs semaglutide and people stop fat-shaming. Cartman takes this opportunity to insult everyone he possibly can, because no-one can make fun of his weight in return. This episode was decent but had more potential than I think it realized. It felt a bit long. South Park: Not Suitable for Children (2023) -- "8/10" This double-length episode is about a sports drink called Cred that all the cool kids are drinking. "Do you have cred? I've got cred." Clyde pretends to have Cred, but his parents won't let him have it. He purchases an empty bottle from local dealer Nathan, fills it with apple juice, and then gets caught out. He's ostracized from the group, which travels to a Cred convention to reestablish their ... cred as a group of cool guys. Randy starts a bottomless OnlyFans channel, with Sharon starting her own, far more successful channel, our of revenge. Whereas Randy just shows her junk, we near from his review of her channel that she's actually having sex with a couple of guys. Randy is unfazed, instead criticizing her channel's lazy camera work. Randy starts using Cred in his videos, which picks up a ton of subscribers -- what Sharon suspects are mostly minors. She is, of course, right. Randy gets embroiled in an "influence market", with the boys also discovering that one of their favorite influencers is deep into the network and is terrified that someone is going to kill him. He is eventually taken out by a sniper. They all return home, having learned the lesson that social media is evil, influencing is evil, and children should not be associating with any of it. The next day, at school, the children forget all of these lessons as Cartman reveals a special bottle of Cred, which he gives to Clyde, to let him try it. The children rejoice as yet another child joins the cult. No lessons were learned. This was probably my favorite of the three longer episodes. It didn't feel padded. South Park: Joining the Panderverse (2023) -- "8/10" In this one, Cartman is introduced to the multiverse -- which is just lazy writing -- in which he and all of his friends have black, empowered female counterparts. Meanwhile, Randy Marsh is too lazy to repair his own oven door, so he tries to get a repairman. It's impossible because no-one knows how to do anything anymore. The boys start investigating what's happening as characters bleed back and forth between the multiverses. The ironically lazy story conjures a Panderstone, whose power is to help write movies that appeal to everyone and no-one. There is a lot of fighting with incredibly wealthy repairmen, who end up challenging each other to spaceship races and battles. The multiverses clash and are set right. This one was pretty decent as well: not as good as "Cred" but better than "Ozempic" The Terminator (1984) -- "8/10" My "review from 2023" stands. I watched it in German this time. Glass (2022) -- "8/10" My "review from 2019" stands. I watched it in German this time. Ghosts of Mars (2001) -- "4/10" John Carpenter directs this near-future movie about a colony on Mars. Lieutenant Melanie Ballard (Natasha Henstridge), Commander Helena Braddock (Pam Grier), and Sgt Jericho Butler (Jason Statham) are on a mission to pick up a prisoner. I don't think I've ever seen Statham with this much hair. Melanie and Jericho go to pick up Desolation Williams (Ice Cube) but the prison has seen better days. Carpenter just loves making movies like this: soldiers in a near-future, quasi-futuristic situation. Lots of pipes, concrete bunkers, and creepy noises. Mysterious destruction, blood stains on the walls, body horror, weird sculptures, and so on. An organism at a Martian colony survives the long dry period by encysting. When it's released, it infects people, causing them to go kind of insane, piercing themselves, self-harming, filing their teeth. They kill anyone who hasn't been transformed, taking and wearing their faces, making trophies of their heads. There are two groups of people who aren't infected. They make peace with each other, grab a bunch of weapons and head back outside. One of them is getting absolutely crazy high off of a high-tech crack-pipe-looking device. He's definitely going to be a red shirt. Ice Cube is absolutely awful -- just a terrible, terrible actor. He's been better in other things. John Carpenter is not innocent in all of this. I have no idea what he was thinking. He, too, has been involved in far better projects. Natasha Henstridge proves why she never really went anywhere as an actress. The metal music during one of the big battle scenes is relentless. It's really not too bad. The whole movie takes place in the form of a deposition of Lieutenant Melanie Ballard (Henstridge), who tells the story of what happened, how a band of Martian zombies who no longer need water or sustenance took over the mining camp. Whitlock (Joanna Cassidy), a scientist at the camp, reveals how she and her crew had discovered an ancient alien ruin. She admits that she released the alien horror. Bashira Kincaid (Clea DuVall) shoots the prisoner that they have who's been infected. The creature gets out and infects Ballard. They let her ride out the infection instead of killing her. She looks like she's going through withdrawal -- or like Jericho (Jason Statham) has finally gotten a shot at her. Whatever medicine they gave her allows her to expel the disease/creature. Ballard does stuff. I don't know if she's trying to break out or break in or what. This movie is really bad! What the hell was John Carpenter thinking?!? This is possibly the worst movie that Jason Statham has ever been in. Ice Cube was in NWA, then in Singleton's Boyz 'n the Hood, then this. Seriously, watch the final battle scene: there are better-filmed things on YouTube, made on iPhones. The only cool thing about it is the makeup and some of the practical effects. Whenever things need to get eerie, we get a Dutch angle or a blurry view that's supposed to be the Martian virus seeking a new host. Henstridge is a terrible fighter, but her stunt double is pretty good, even if the camera work is cut so badly that you can barely see what's going on. Ice Cube is also a terrible fighter and I fear he did his own stunts because...why not? The last scene was absolutely ridiculous. Ice Cube breaks into Ballard's room, tosses her a chrome-plated Uzi and gets her to come along to some sort of revolution. "Desolation Williams: If you ever want to come to the other side, you'd make a hell of a crook. Melanie Ballard: You'd make a hell of a cop. [they both look at each other] Desolation Williams, Melanie Ballard: [together] Naaah. Desolation Williams:: Let's just kick some ass. Melanie Ballard: It's what we do best." From "Wikipedia" , "Ghosts of Mars has received a cult following since its release, with critics praising the action sequences, soundtrack and blending of genres. Given the film's debt to Western cinema, particularly the works of Howard Hawks, it has been considered by a number of critics as an example of the Weird Western subgenre." No. None of that is accurate. The action sequences are terrible and look like they were filmed by a child. The soundtrack is an uncredited heavy-metal band. Further down, the critical response is summed up as, "John Carpenter's Ghosts of Mars is not one of Carpenter's better movies, filled as it is with bad dialogue, bad acting, confusing flashbacks, and scenes that are more campy than scary." Yeah, that's more like it. Carpenter says that he was, "[...] intentionally trying to make Ghosts of Mars as over-the-top and tongue-in-cheek as possible. He claimed he was trying to make a mindless and silly, yet highly entertaining and thrilling, action flick where "the universe allows its characters and plot points to be silly without becoming full-fledged comedies", [...]" He tried to make Starship Troopers and came up very short. Five Days at Memorial (2022) -- "4/10" This was another one of those Netflix series that could have been a tight 90-minute movie. It tells the story of a hospital in New Orleans that had been cut off from all assistance for five days. There are so many allegations in this series that it's hard to keep track of them all. The most interesting ones aren't pursued at all. There's a question of why a city like New Orleans had no plan for rescuing people in a flood, why it abandoned people to their own devices for nearly a week. Or why did a large hospital not have any plan for flooding in a city famous for it? Or why were there two separate hospital organizations in the same building with no coordination between them? Why were the people who finally showed up to "rescue" people from the hospital so belligerent? Did the hospital have food and water or didn't it have food and water? Did anyone actually mercy-kill patients against their wishes or not? Was there a moral basis for doing so when there was no expectation of rescue or help for the patients who couldn't be moved? Could the patients have been moved or were the workers negligent? This felt very much like a Netflix documentary: no questions answered, lots of allegations, invitation to trial by media, everyone can decide for themselves what they think happened and hash it out online. What fun. The Sandman (2022) -- "7/10" This feels a little bit like American Gods (also a Neil Gaiman property) ("S01" , "S02" ) and a little bit like Legion ("S01" , "S02" ). It's not nearly as consistently solid as either of those, though. The first few episodes tell of how, in the late 1800s, Roderick Burgess (Charles Dance) trapped Morpheus/Dream (Tom Sturridge) in a container from which he was unable to escape for over a century. He stole Dream's three tools: his helmet, his sand, and his red ruby. The final chapter of three episodes pretty much just jump-starts another segment, introducing a whole series-full of new characters, none of whom are particularly interesting, or particularly careful about dealings with strangers. There is Rose Walker (Kyo Ra), a strong, assertive young woman who has never listened to anything in her life that she didn't demand as an answer to a question. She meets her great-grandmother, Unity (Sandra James-Young), who is also very free with information to complete strangers. She's also wealthy beyond knowing, so she immediately solves all of Rose's financial problems. It seems that's what passes for storytelling, I guess. I miss the days of Peter Parker, who lived in a world in which it was at least considered possible to make your own way in the world without the beneficence of an already-wealthy sugar daddy or momma. I suppose this is storytelling in an America where the dream has died. If you're not born with security and wealth, you'll never get it. Not on your own. The world-building is OK, but uneven. There's a lot of focus on The Corinthian (Boyd Holbrook), a nightmare who escaped the realm of the Dreaming in Morpheus's long absence to wreak havoc on Earth as a serial killer. He's trying to get control over Rose for reasons that are unknown to me. Much of this happens at a convention for serial killers. Matthew the Raven (Patton Oswalt, who continues his career of being heard, but not seen in comic-book properties) keeps an eye on everything for Dream, who's busy regaining control of his realm. We see some flashbacks of how he's been combatting Constantines for centuries, the most recent incarnation of which is Johanna Constantine (Jenna Coleman), whose power balance vis á vis Dream see-saws, depending on what the writers need in the show. We are also introduced to Morpheus's ethereal and scheming deity-siblings Desire and Despair. The source material -- the original comic books -- look like they might be more interesting. I watched these episodes over time while I was working out. It was a perfect fit for that but I wouldn't sit down and watch this show without doing something else. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] These are notes for me to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. The amount of text is not proportional to my enjoyment. I might write less because I didn't get around to it when it was fresh in my mind. I rate the film based on how well it suited me personally for the genre, my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. Links are to "my IMDb ratings" ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5102 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5102 Sat, 10 Aug 2024 17:30:46 +0200 -- "6/10" 2. "Mission to Mars (2000)" <#Mission> -- "6/10" 3. "Mission Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One (2023)" <#Impossible> -- "8/10" 4. "Who Killed Malcolm X? (2019--2020)" <#Who> -- "4/10" 5. "Top Gun: Maverick (2022)" <#TopGun> -- "9/10" 6. "Independence Day (1996)" <#Independence> -- "9/10" 7. "Gorillas in the Mist (1988)" <#gorillas> -- "8/10" 8. "Iron Maiden: Flight 666 (2009)" <#666> -- "7/10" 9. "(T)Raumschiff Surprise - Periode 1 (2004)" <#Surprise> -- "5/10" 10. "American Assassin (2017)" <#American> -- "5/10" The Lost City (2022) -- "6/10" Loretta Sage (Sandra Bullock) is a writer of bodice-rippers, who's achieved no small amount of success. She used to be an archeologist before her archeologist husband died. Abigail Fairfax (Daniel Radcliffe) is a rich bastard who kidnaps her to force her to help him translate some runes/glyphs in the Lost City that he's discovered. Her Fabio-like cover model Alan (Channing Tatum) engages the services of Jack Trainer (Brad Pitt), a hippie, ex-Navy Seal with a tiny car on the island of the lost city to find and rescue her. Jack is really skilled but Alan is....not. Jack knocks out a dozen guards, rescues Loretta, and he and Alan get her in a wheelbarrow back to their tiny car (because she's still handcuffed to a chair). Jack has finished being nearly perfect when a sniper bullet caps him. Completely. His shoes come off. Alan and Loretta manage to get into the car and escape. Alan makes an emergency maneuver, throwing Loretta on her chair out of the vehicle. She finally gets free of the chair. The mini-car is lost. They escape through the forest, pursued by Abigail's guards. She removes leeches from his backside; mysteriously, they do not check her for leeches. They camp, using his supplies. She judges him unfairly. They come up with a plan to foil their pursurers, who manage to kill themselves without the two having to do a thing. This movie taught me the phrase "bring owls to Athens" , which means to "undertake a pointless venture," which, I suppose, might just have described this movie's plot? Inadvertently? Or not inadvertently? Advertently? The movie's got a few good laughs. It's green-screened all to hell. They are literally in none of the locations that they appear to be. This is the most cheaply made movie you can imagine. Sandra Bullock, Channing Tatum, and Daniel Radcliffe are all gifted comedic actors, though. Bullock and Tatum have some decent chemistry, although I think either of them have good chemistry with anyone. For anyone wondering, this is a pale remake of Romancing the Stone, which was a much better movie. I gave it an extra star because I watched it in German -- and sometimes German makes this kind of movie better. Mission to Mars (2000) -- "6/10" I had never heard of this movie before, but it's directed by Brian De Palma and has quite a few well-known stars. Woody Blake (Tim Robbins) and Terri Fisher (Connie Nielsen) are very happily married. Kind of irritatingly happily married. They're both astronauts. Spoiler alert: so is pretty much every other character. Luke (Don Cheadle) is also an astronaut, as is Jim (Gary Sinise), who's no longer really active since his astronaut wife Maggie (Kim Delaney) died. It's never really made clear why she died, but everybody's pretty torn up about it. So, there's a mission to Mars and Woody, Terri, and Luke are going, but Jim is not. Instead, there are a few other red-shirts on the mission with them. They approach a strange rock formation on Mars, they make it angry, it goes totally haywire, showing a wild, weird, snake-like wind tunnel that blows a rock into one lady's helmet visor, shattering it, and inhales everybody else but Luke, who barely escapes. He reports back, but the transmission is pretty garbled. No-one really knows whether he's still alive. Woody and Terri are on a much-expanded ISS and receive the message. They convince their mission director to let them go rescue Luke. They are joined by Jim and also Phil (Jerry O'Connell) to round out the quartet. They fly a pretty comfy ship to Mars with absolutely no wear and tear on their friendships. As they're approaching the planet, they're slammed by micrometeorites, one of which tears right through Phil's hand. Woody goes out to find the leak, while Jim looks for it inside the ship. They fix it. Yay! As they're completing their orbital insertion, though, micrometeorite damage to the rocket causes it to fail catastrophically, blowing the entire rocket assembly off the back. They're floating free and in a degrading orbit. There is, however, another module that's still in orbit from the first mission. They abandon ship and head, Conga-style, to the module. Woody boosts toward it and manages to hook a line to the module, but spins past it. He can't stop his progress because he's all out of propellant. The movie doesn't explain why inertia doesn't continue applying to him, though. It just needs to have for the next bit. At any rate, Terri's in bits and tries to rescue him but her rescue hook is too short to reach him. She has used up 50% of her propellant and can't approach Woody without being lost as well. To prevent her from trying it, Woody pops off his helmet and makes his rescue a moot point. Terri's gutted. We next see the module on the surface of Mars. The remaining three -- Phil, Terri, and Jim -- have landed on the surface and are trudging toward Luke's base. At the base, they discover that Luke is alive! He's done a bunch of hydroponics and farming and kept himself alive. He's gone a bit off his head but it's sorted pretty quickly. This whole survival song-and-dance pretty significantly predates both the book and movie The Martian. They figure out that the artifact that had killed Luke's crew was actually trying to send them a message. Jim figures out how to complete the message and they send the little rover to deliver it. The artifact opens. Luke, Jim, and Terri enter and are quickly trapped inside. They are treated to a 3d light-show of how Earth was settled by the original Martians, who'd blasted off to settle the rest of the galaxy after learning that Mars was going to be hit by an asteroid. Jim stays and is launched in an alien ship to those other civilizations, while Terri and Luke return to Phil and manage to escape the oncoming Martian storm. Jim's ship buzzes by them on its way outtathere. That's it. The end. What an odd little sci-fi film. It was OK, but it wasn't great. I didn't feel like I was watching a movie by one of America's greatest directors, though. I watched it in Italian with Italian subtitles. Mission Impossible - Dead Reckoning Part One (2023) -- "8/10" It was going pretty well until they made Gabriel (Esai Morales) some sort of unstoppable force. They literally just made him up for this movie. We have no idea who he is. He only started meaning something to Ethan in this movie, because of a flashback we saw at the beginning. Also Paris (Pom Klementieff). She weighs about six kilos. There is no way she can deal or take that much damage. Her head got banged against brick walls more times than I can count and there was never any noticeable effect. It's so stupid because it takes you out of an otherwise enjoyable action film. There was a moment of denouement, an anticlimax in the middle of the movie where Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson) finally buys it an utterly unconvincing sword fight on a bridge in Venice, where she somehow manages to evince complete competence and confidence in her sword-fighting skills but then also to lose a fight to Gabriel, who looked flat-footed and was armed with only a switchblade. But that's only the part that made me start writing the paragraphs above. Up until that part, it was a bit bumpy, but a lot of fun. From that point on, though, they spent fifteen minutes trying to recruit Grace (Hayley Atwell) to join them and help them make a swap on a train heading to Austria. Benji (Simon Pegg) and Luther (Ving Rhames) trot out some real chestnuts about how being part of the team is better than going it alone. Then Ethan lays it on even thicker. What are they swapping? A key. Or, rather, they're trying to get both parts of the key. On the train, Gabriel tries to take out Paris, saying that she'll betray Gabriel and the Entity because Ethan had spared her life. In this scene as well, it's like a fucking magic trick how a knife magically appears in her belly after she'd just kicked his ass. I rewound the scene to look for the second knife -- because the first one went flying out of his hand across the train cabin -- but it was not to be seen. It just deus ex machina-ed it's way into her. Gabriel magic. They're trying to make me hate him, but it just makes me more disappointed in how low-effort these parts are. I mean, this is just ridiculous. We all enjoy watching Tom Cruise making one deus ex machina after another but Gabriel is just blessed. The key practically bounced into his pocket. So unsatisfying. He doesn't even have to try. Henry Cavill was a way better and more believable villain, by far. I am not watching this movie to watch Esai Morales do awesome things. I'm watching for Tom Cruise. So far, it's been 2.5 hours of watching Ethan flail and Gabriel constantly outwit him. Ethan gets the final key-switch, though, which is pretty satisfying. They could have made Gabriel's constant wins more believable, but it was decent. There are some pretty funny parts, though! Like driving the yellow Topolino in Rome. That was great! "The car's on fire!" Also, when Ethan is base-jumping onto the train, his cheeks are flapping and he's spinning around and he's telling Benji "I don't think I'm going to make the train." It was kinda funny. The other funny part was with the two U.S. agents Degas (Greg Tarzan Davis) and Briggs (Shea Whigham). Briggs is a sledgehammer whereas Degas speaks at least Italian and French, but he's the subordinate. This is a decent entry in the franchise, but it's a bit of a disappointment after Fallout and it's too long. There's a part 2 coming as well. Who Killed Malcolm X? (2019--2020) -- "4/10" This is a typical Netflix documentary. It's repetitive. It doesn't at all deliver the information it purports to deliver. It's slow. I like the clips of Malcom X's oratory but the rest of it is quite slow. It's not that I didn't learn anything but that it could have been so. Much. Shorter. The premise indicated in the title is wrong: we know who killed Malcolm X. They caught him dead to rights and he admitted it. He had accomplices who got away and whose names he never gave up. Instead, the police zeroed in on two other guys who had nothing to do with the killing and arrested them instead. They served 20 years in prison for a murder they didn't commit. They would eventually receive large payments as a partial compensation for their having been railroaded and for their suffering. The series covered the alleged involvement of a New Jersey mosque run by Elijah Mohammed, the head of the Nation of Islam at the time. He was butt-hurt because Malcolm X had left that church to pursue his own path. This did not sit well, so they were constantly at odds. Elijah Mohammed and his fanatical organization are not painted in a good light. The local police, state police, and federal police are not painted in a good light, as they were all bent on making the mouthy and eloquent Malcom X as uncomfortable as they legally -- and illegally -- could. Someone firebombed his home. In the end, the series managed to make a Wikipedia page's worth of information available to those who hadn't known it but most of the information was speculative. It was so mixed up with actual facts that it's kind of hard to remember afterward what can actually be used and what can't. I suppose that's how people like their documentaries these days. They probably don't even notice that most of the information is either made-up or speculative or, at best, extrapolated from fact. You can't really use any of it, but most people will "remember" what the documentary intended for them to remember. Even then, though, the message was so muddy that you'll believe what you want to believe anyway. Top Gun: Maverick (2022) -- "9/10" My "review from 2022" stands. I added a star because it held up so well on re-viewing. Those actions scenes -- oh my. Independence Day (1996) -- "9/10" This is still one of the tightest alien-invasion movies ever. Sure it's got a bunch of hoo-rah America in it but it's a work of art. For some reason, all of the pieces fall into place. It's a bit goofy in places, but it more than makes up for it in many others. I find it impossible not to keep watching it when I zap into it on television. Aliens come to Earth in giant, giant ships. It is, at first, unclear what they want. One of the ships unleashes an energy beam that completely annihilates a building in Los Angeles, pushing a wave of destruction in an expanding circle for miles. Their intent is now crystal-clear. Exotic dancer Jasmine Dubrow (Vivica A. Fox) barely escapes with her life (and her dog's life). She ends up rescuing the president's wife Marylin Whitmore (Mary McDonnell). Meanwhile her boyfriend Capt. Steven Hiller (Will Smith) is a U.S. air-force pilot who goes up against the alien fighter ships -- and manages to take one down. He captures the alien pilot and drags it across the salt flats to Area 51. He is received by President Whitmore (Bill Pullman), General Grey (Robert Loggia), David Levinson (Jeff Goldblum), his dad Julius (Judd Hirsch), David's ex-wife Constance (Margaret Colin), Secretary of Defense (James Rebhorn), and Dr. Brakish Okun (Brent Spiner). Alcoholic crop-duster Russell Casse (Randy Quaid) and his family drive their RV -- along with hundreds of others -- across the salt flats to Area 51 as well. David figures out how to get the spaceship captured in the 50s going again. They also figure out how to write a computer virus to infect the mothership. David and Steven fly to the mothership, infest the whole armada, and turn off all of the shields. The militaries of the world can finally take out the aliens. The President is in the air. Russell is in the air. He ends up sacrificing himself to destroy the giant force beam. The world is saved; all of the aliens are defeated. David and Constance are back together. Steven and Jasmine are married. They all live happily ever after. Gorillas in the Mist (1988) -- "8/10" This is the story of how Dian Fossey (Sigourney Weaver) came to live in the Congo, studying gorillas. Fossey was an occupational therapist who decided to devote her life to the study of primates. She pesters Louis Leakey (Iain Cuthbertson) until he agrees to let her go to Congo for six months to study gorillas. She catches her first glimpses of gorillas but her camp is soon broken up by soldiers, who are there to throw her out of the country. There's been a revolution and they're getting rid of all white people. She and her employee/friend Sembagare (John Omirah Miluwi) wash onto the friendly shores of Kim (Maggie O'Neill) in Rwanda, who has an enormous house with an enormous garden. Dian becomes convinced that she can continue her research from somewhere else in the forest, not in the Congo. She requisitions funds from National Geographic to build a new research station. She makes progress, befriending a group of gorillas. They have more trouble with the locals than the gorillas, all of whom must be convinced that she is friendly and means no harm. Back in a larger village, they are shopping. An older woman approaches her and tries to sell her a gorilla paw. Dian is furious and tries to catch her as she retreats but fails. Later, they discover so many traps and pitfalls in the jungle. They spring the traps but a young antelope falls into one of the pits. Its back is broken; Fossey is forced to shoot it. She paints "witchy pictures" around to scare off the poachers. Bob Campbell (Bryan Brown) shows up one rainy night. He's a photographer for National Geographic. Dian begins to indoctrinate him in the ways of observing gorillas: don't look them in the eyes, don't let them see you, duck if they do see you, never run away. They start to grow close. They become lovers. John leaves to return to his wife; his tour of duty is done. Dian is somewhat despondent, but not surprised. Dian returns to her camp to find the local villagers slaughtering the gorillas, chopping off their hands, and taking babies captive. It's a horrific scene. Dian manages to catch a young boy, who's too slow to escape. She terrifies the boy with a witch costume, scaring him into telling her where the group have taken the baby gorilla. The buyer is the national zoo. She breaks into the van and finds the baby gorilla, suffering in a tiny, wooden box. She storms into the hotel to find the buyer, who shows her his permit to do what he's done. She tears him a new asshole. She meets the minister who allowed it to happen. It's all for money. It's horrific. They need to feed the people and they burn up their natural riches to do it. Why? Because the white man steals everything. Their national resources are not bought, but stolen. The animals suffer for it. And always the biggest scumbags profit the most. When will we build a society where the scum doesn't rise to the top? John is back; he moves in. He's going to divorce his wife and live with Dian instead. She's resuscitated the gorilla baby and now it's time to turn it over to the zoo. It's a heartrending scene. She will get three rangers from the government in exchange but it's a terrible price to pay. John gets a job offer in Borneo; she has one too. She refuses to go. She cannot imagine life without going out to her apes every day. She tells John that if he goes, she won't write to him, and that he should never show up again. He leaves. Dian visits the minister. She sees the poacher Van Vecten (Aleksandrov Konstantin) there. He was trying to get permission to get another gorilla. Parker the baby gorilla that she'd nursed back to health had died en route. The minister rebuffs Van Vecten this time. Dian leads four students to the mountain. She has a nasty cough but she was still able to stop a new gorilla from attacking them all. Van Vecten is back.. He's speaking to the villagers. They attack the gorillas again. There are so many of these little, tiny men, attacking and killing one gorilla. It's tragic. The gorillas are more human than the people. Dian is out of breath, chasing up the hill. She's too late. The hunters see only riches. They kill a creature, taking its head and hands for sale to rich people. Two are captured and brought before her. She mock-hangs one of them, taking away his manhood. Together with her guards, she mounts an attack on their camp, burning it to the ground. Her students are not on board for this -- Brendan says that his feelings are hurt. Dian shows him the corpse of the gorilla. Brendan is still upset, perhaps even more so. He's hugging Kim, who's crying buckets. I thought to myself that he's just trying to get laid. Five minutes later, I'm proven right. Dian goes a bit off the deep end, insulting all of the staff for not having tried hard enough. Sembagare tells her to pull herself together, telling her that her staff has been there for her, working like hell, and that he's always there for her -- has always been there for her -- but now he's ashamed for her. She breaks down, crying that they'd killed Digit and then desecrated his corpse. She confronts Van Vecten again. Sembagare asks her not to scare off the tourists because she's making enemies. Sembagare tells her that Mukara (Waigwa Wachira) threatened to not give her another work permit. Fossey has a nasty cough. Is she getting sick or is she just smoking too much? The movie doesn't say. She's listening to jazz, drinking whiskey, and looking at pictures of gorillas. She falls asleep. Someone creeps in to her room...and kills her with a machete. Sembagare and her camp crew carry her body to the burial ground where Digit is buried. It was only due to her efforts that there were any gorillas left at all. Sembagare links her grave with Digit's, to link their souls in heaven. I watched it in German. Iron Maiden: Flight 666 (2009) -- "7/10" Bruce Dickenson knows how to pilot a commercial jet. It's his band's jet. It's called "Ed Force One", named after their mascot Eddie, who also adorns the plane's tail. He flew the Iron Maiden jet sometimes. Like, from London to Baku to Mumbai. This is all true but it seems like the fevered imaginings of a 14-year-old boy, dreaming of a future as a rock star. They go to Japan, to Mexico. They play their hits: Number of the Beast, Can I Play with Madness, Heaven Can Wait, Fear of the Dark, Ancient Mariner, and, of course, my all-time favorites Wasted Years and Run to the Hills. After the Bogotá show, you can hear "Always look on the bright side of life" from Monty Python's Meaning of Life as the people are leaving. next stop: Rio de Janeiro. After 46 days, their tour is over. Final stop: Toronto, Canada. They make a good argument that they're really in it for the music. They never got radio airplay, no Billboard placement, no media coverage, but they were able to be successful enough to be able to make a living from it. They still go to the local pub when they're not touring. I watched it in German and English. (T)Raumschiff Surprise - Periode 1 (2004) -- "5/10" This is a German-made Airplane-like sendup of Star Trek. Brigitte Spuck (Michael Herbig) -- "Spucky", which means "spitty" in German; you see the level of humor -- Käpt'n Körk (Christian Tramitz), and Schrotty (Rick Kavanian) -- "trashy" in German -- are all members of the (T)raumschiff crew and absolutely over-the-top homosexual caricatures. That's pretty much most of the plot. The crew is called to save the galaxy, of course. It's a task that no-one else wants. They're trying to save the Earth from an invasion by the empire (I think ... the guy looked like the emperor from Star Wars). This movie cares about Star Wars/Star Trek canon about as much as Spaceballs did. The crew will have to travel back to 2004 to destroy a UFO that crashed in Area 51 at the time. Because they can't figure out how to use the beam-transport, they call a taxi. Rock Fertig Aus (Til Schweiger) shows up and drives them to the planet Earth. That's a cue for another musical number. It's ridiculous. Herbig grew famous for filming the Winnetou / Manitou movies based on the Karl May books. He pretended to be a gay Native American in that one, so he's got a really wide range. The effects aren't bad, actually. Til plays his taxi driver pretty straight (no pun intended). Right up until the point where he says "Insalata Mista, baby" in a callback to Schwarzenegger's "Hasta la vista, baby". He's obviously playing the Han Solo role. And then there's Königin Metapha (Anja Kling) who is sofort verknallt in Rock -- and vice versa. One of the running gags is pretty funny: the janitor who's always in the throne room, cleaning chairs, waxing the floor, etc. That's really very much like Airplane. The three fools get into the time machine -- which is a couch -- but Schrotty misses the boat, while Rock and Metapha take his place. They overshoot by 700 years and end up in the year 1,304 instead. They couldn't get away because of Körk and Spuck. William der Letzte (Sky du Mont) hams it up as the king, entertaining Metapha while the others languish in the dungeon. Rock ends up jousting with Regulator Rogul (Hans-Michael Rehberg) -- the Darth Vader-like guy -- who's also traveled back in time. The couch is on a Scheiterhaufen, they all get on, and travel to the next time period, the wild west in Nevada. Right place, wrong time. A train runs through the couch on arrival, blasting it to bits. In this time period, Körk is the sheriff, and he's chained to Spuck. Rock and Metapha are there as well. So is Santa Maria (Sky du Mont again), who's the baddie here. They're not there that long. They steal Regulator's time-travel bike and finally end up in the right place and the right time. Regulator is there as well. He and Rock have a ludicrous light-saber battle with limp-dick light-sabers. I'm kind of speechless that this movie was made in the 2000s. Germany was pretty far behind the times, as it continues to be. They watch the UFO they were intended to intercept crash in the desert. It's tiny. The alien is tiny. He's an alcoholic. That's why he crashed. They destroy the UFO, saving the galaxy. They prepare for the trip home, but they're too heavy. They need to dump exactly the weight that Spucky weighs. He's getting left behind. The film picks back up in the interrogation room, where the film started. The others return to the future, where everything is saved -- and where Spucky and Schrotty are there to greet them. Spucky is now 335 years old. He looks exactly the same. He has learned no wisdom in his extra centuries. The end. American Assassin (2017) -- "5/10" Mitch (Dylan O'Brien) and his fiancée (Charlotte Vega) are at a Spanish beach, celebrating their young, attractive, wealthy, and perfect lives. An unnamed terrorist cell lands on the beach and just starts slaughtering people right and left. They cap Katrina and almost kill MItch. Mitch survives, fueled by rage to train himself into a killing machine, who's awesome at everything martial -- all inside of 18 months. He infiltrates a terrorist cell and gets close enough to the leader to be just about to kill him, when U.S. special forces appear and kill everyone before he can. They take him captive and debrief him, trying to figure out his story. He ends up attached to a special-ops unit led by Stan Hurley (Michael Keaton). Keaton plays Stan as ludicrously over-the-top as possible. They do a bunch of training stuff that would have been a montage in an 80s film but is taken totally seriously for long, long minutes in this one. Guess what? One of the group's former members Ghost (Taylor Kitsch) has gone rogue and is planning to sell nuclear materials to terrorists. The bastard. That is also absolutely his name. Mitch, Stan, and Annika (Shiva Negar) are sniffing out the details of Ghost's complicated plot, mostly in Istanbul, which is pretty neat (because I like Istanbul). Mitch and Annika are captured, but Stan saves them. Then they save themselves. Then there's blood spray everywhere. Somehow Annika is also an agent for Iran, but for the good guys who don't want nuclear materials? Mitch and Annika fight, with him getting the upper hand and almost drowning her. It was a misunderstanding, though, so he goes to rescue her so that they can rescue Stan, who's also been captured by Ghost again. They have a beef. Ghost's mad at Stan for having been betrayed, while Stan tries to explain to him that they all knew the deal -- this line of business values money over friendship, bro. Ghost starts prying off Stan's fingernails. Stan says to rip off the other nine -- he loves it! Keaton's chewing the crap out of the scenery. Ghost gives up on the interrogation and just throws both cables attached to a car battery into the bucket at Stan's feet. Stan's tough, though, so it would take more than a mere surfeit of voltage to electrocute him. The torture continues, with Stan rope-a-doping him and then biting Ghost's ear off. Stan's still attached to the ceiling when a bomb goes off. He's fine. Mitch rescues him. Stan's capping people like his arm would even work after having been hanging on it for two days. Ghost captures Annika. He uses her as a human shield, but Annika sacrifices herself, shooting herself with Ghost's gun to take herself out of the equation. WTF? Was there not a better way to do that? Boat fight! Boat's driving itself while Ghost and Mitch slug it out in a rolling kitchen. This is all Bourne Identity's fault. Guess what? There's a bomb set to go off. Stan is in a helicopter, none the worse for wear. The same can't be said for Mitch, who's getting his ass kicked by Ghost, who's shit-talking his fiancée, for good measure. Lots of U.S. Navy hardware in this movie. Guess what, though?!? The bomb actually goes off! They couldn't save the day! What a great twist! The U.S. Navy's boats are tossed about like toys. Stan's helicopter that rescued Mitch is buffeted on winds, but manages to survive. This is not possible, as the shock wave from a reasonably sized nuke moves at about 750kph (at least). Somehow, there's no radiation -- because the bomb went off underwater. The movie ends with Mitch on his next mission, ready to assassinate a high-level Iranian general or president or whatever. So, just like real life. On the one hand, I want to say that it's a terrible movie. On the other, I was able to easily follow along, despite having watched it in Italian with Italian subtitles, having only paid half-attention, and having watched it in three sections. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] These are notes for me to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. The amount of text is not proportional to my enjoyment. I might write less because I didn't get around to it when it was fresh in my mind. I rate the film based on how well it suited me personally for the genre, my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. Links are to "my IMDb ratings" ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5083 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5083 Sat, 10 Aug 2024 16:05:07 +0200 -- "8/10" 2. "47 Rōnin (2013)" <#forty-seven> -- "7/10" 3. "The Highwaymen (2019)" <#The> -- "8/10" 4. "World War Z (2013)" <#World> -- "7/10" 5. "Seven Pounds (2008)" <#Seven> -- "7/10" 6. "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989)" <#Indiana> -- "9/10" 7. "Star Wars: Le Réveil de la Force (2015)" <#Star> -- "10/10" 8. "PBS American Experience S36E04 - Poisoned Ground: The Tragedy at Love Canal (2024)" <#LoveCanal> -- "8/10" 9. "Living with Yourself (2019)" <#Living> -- "7/10" 10. "6 Balloons (2018)" <#six> -- "9/10" American Gods S03 (2021) -- "8/10" Note 📝: I watched this sometime in 2022 but somehow failed to write anything for it. I only realized it when I tried to link it from The Sandman review. See reviews of "S01" , "S02" . Shadow (Ricky Whittle) is moving to Lakeside, a town in Minnesota that has some odd traditions -- and seems to be an old place, associated with old gods. Laura Moon (Emily Browning) disintegrates herself while trying to resurrect Mad Sweeney (Pablo Schreiber). Wednesday (Ian McShane) continues to machinate, trying to collect support for his side in the war against the new gods. In particular, he is actively recruiting Demeter (Blythe Danner). Laura, meanwhile, continues to be her insufferable self as she enters Purgatory, trying to redeem herself so that she can return to the world of the living, again. Bilquis (Yetide Badaki) goes through tribulations, fighting with Technical Boy (Bruce Langley), who's feuding with Mr. World (Crispin Glover/Danny Trejo) / Ms. World (Dominique Jackson). While Shadow is trying to figure out what's going on in Lakeside, Laura is sneaking her way back to the real world, getting the spear of Gungnir with the help of Mr. World. The whole part where she learns to throw it is wildly unbelievable. I mean, more so than her having come back from the dead two times already. Shadow, Tyr (Denis O'Hare), and Wednesday are in some sort of intrigue where Tyr is trying to setting old debts with Wednesday. It doesn't work, with Wednesday emerging triumphant and Shadow being freed of his remaining debt to Wednesday for his help. Meanwhile, the new Gods are launching some sort of hyper-propaganda, social-media campaign to consolidate their power over the old Gods, who will wither from lack of fealty and attention. Laura kills Wednesday with the spear. The new Gods are ascendant. Mr. World, however, is not a new God. He seems to be an old God, masquerading for the new Gods, and manipulating them into killing Wednesday. Wednesday is dead, but he has, in turn, manipulated Shadow into holding a nine-day vigil while tied to the magical tree Yggdrasil, during which Shadow's demi-God power is transferred back to Wednesday for his triumphant return. There is a lot of rich detail and history woven throughout the show that absolutely drives the plot but that is nearly overwhelming to document. See the "Wikipedia page" for more details. As with the first two seasons, the directing and visuals are lush and convincing -- CGI-driven but not obviously so. I really enjoyed this series overall. The story, acting, and direction were consistently top-notch and interesting. 47 Rōnin (2013) -- "7/10" This movie was surprisingly supernatural. I thought it was going to be a much more straightforward samurai film but it featured fantastical beasts, witches, and good/evil spirits in non-metaphorical ways. The story is based on a popular and well-known event in very early 18th-century Japanese history called "Shijūshichishi" . There are several fictionalizations of this story; this is one of them. There have been "two Japanese films" based on the story, one from 1941 and one from 1994. Kai (Keanu Reeves) is an at-least semi-supernatural being who'd been raised in a bamboo forest by monk-spirits before being found by a samurai who adopted him. He is raised alongside Oishi (Hiroyuki Sanada) by adoptive father Lord Asano (Min Tanaka). We see them hunting a fantastical beast that almost gets the better of the hunting party until Kai uses Oishi's sword to defeat it, saving both Oishi and Asano. Because of societal structure, Kai is forced to apologize and is further ostracized for having made them look weak. Kai falls in love with Asano's daughter Mika (Kô Shibasaki) and she falls in love with him. Their budding relationship has no chance, of course. Lord Yoshinaka Kira (Tadanobu Asano) rides in to take Asano's kingdom, aided by his witch consort and advisor Mizuki (Rinko Kikuchi), who weaves powerful magic. Her tricks are enough to convince Asano to not only give up his kingdom but to ritually kill himself for a perceived offense that was manufactured by the witch. There is a duel where Kai is outed as a non-samurai who'd taken over the duties of warrior from Oishi who'd been bewitched into incapacity. Oishi is sent to prison, Kai is sold into slavery, and Mika is given a one-year mourning period before she will be forced to marry Lord Kira. After one year, Oishi is released and he seeks out Kai, as well as Asano's other former samurai, becoming the 47 rōnin. Kai eventually leads them back into the magical forest where he'd been raised. He wants to obtain special swords from his old masters. He and Oishi master the tasks set to them and the whole crew leaves with new swords. They aren't so good at planning, though, so they end being lured into an ambush while trying to attack Lord Kira. Half of the rōnin are eliminated in a fiery slaughter. Kira and Mizuki think that Oishi and Kai have been eliminated, convincing Mika of the same. With only half of the rōnin, they now have a better chance? They sneak into the wedding celebration of Mika and Kira, with Oishi triumphing over Kira and Kai defeating a now dragon-shaped Mizuki by using his Tengu magic. As a reward, the remaining rōnin are allowed to ritually kill themselves with seppuku, pardoning only Oishi's son Chikara. Everyone else is dead. The end. The Highwaymen (2019) -- "8/10" This is the true story of the trapping and killing of Bonnie and Clyde, in which a two-year rampage of death and robbery was brought to a bloody end. We do not see Bonnie and Clyde until the very final scene, and then, only for a few seconds before they are riddled with bullets. Frank Hamer (Kevin Costner) and Maney Gault (Woody Harrelson) are two old-school Texas Rangers. They built a tremendous reputation in the days when they still rode horses and have long since retired, Hamer to a fancy estate owned by his wife Gladys (Kim Dickens), while Gault is a recovering alcoholic in his small, country-plains home. Hamer convinces Gault to come back. As they get to work, on a contract from the venal and self-serving governor of Texas Ma Ferguson (Kathy Bates), the budding FBI and other law-enforcement agencies disparage the old Rangers' methods, preferring to throw their prodigious resources to cordons and surveillance that are easily avoided and yield no results. Bonnie and Clyde wouldn't have survived on the lam as long as they did without the help of so many star-struck citizens. These people can't be blamed too much for ignoring the bloodthirsty nature of their heroes because they were all simultaneously in the throes of a crushing depression. Their nation's solutions -- then as now -- tended to protect existing wealth and let everyone else blow in the wind. Small wonder that they would make heroes out of people that were poking this system in the eye, no matter how horrible they were as people. These dynamics never change. The rangers track them down relentlessly, feeling their age, but getting the job done nonetheless. They leverage their reputation to enlist the services of local law enforcement to finally trap Bonnie and Clyde, fooling them into stopping to help a friend of theirs who'd been placed at the side of the road with an apparent flat tire. We finally see the two famous renegades through the front window. They lift their weapons and are torn to shreds by hundreds of bullets. As their shattered car is towed through the nearby town, hundreds of fans and onlookers swarm the vehicle, trying to touch the corpses through the windows. The people are distraught that their heroes have died. They have no judgment for their deeds, placing them high on a pedestal for their purported good deeds for the people (robbing banks, killing police officers, etc.) This was a well-paced, old-style film with a satisfying two-hour length that didn't feel too long or overly filled with sermonizing. It let the story speak for itself, more or less. It is odd who is considered to be a hero, which foibles and outright crimes can be forgiven when people are willing. It is a shame when actually good people like Hamer and Gault are disparaged for having taken down the cop-killing heroes. This is the problem when the police don't act like heroes. We even heard a story told by Gault where Hamer didn't act very honorably on one of their missions as former rangers. These transgressions matter. They lead to ACAB; they lead to a breakdown in society and morals. People see the police taking advantage everywhere, getting relatively huge salaries and pensions, retiring much earlier, reaping tremendous overtime -- all with no accountability and no rules for themselves. They get to drive drunk, commit traffic violations, they beat their spouses. People notice. They think to themselves: if the criminals are in charge, then why wouldn't we just celebrate criminals that we actually like? World War Z (2013) -- "7/10" "I watched and reviewed this the first time in 2013." My review stands. Brad Pitt's great, and David Morse drops a wicked cameo as a crazy CIA agent. They arrive in Jerusalem, which has walled itself off. The man in charge there, though, he is letting everyone in anyway -- "every one I let in is one less zombie to fight." That's the least believable part of this whole movie -- that Israel would let people in like that. This movie came out seven years after Israel left occupied Gaza and turned it into a prison instead. The parallels are interesting. It's kind of an advertisement of sorts for Israel, though, if we're honest. The scene in Jerusalem is really well-filmed -- fast, but decipherable action. Seven Pounds (2008) -- "7/10" This movie has an interesting plot twist, but it's really the story of a wealthy guy spreading his benevolence to the less fortunate because of a crushing guilt for his crimes. He has his wealth and he gets to pick and choose who will be saved. If he's feeling so guilty for what terrible things he's done, then why does he simultaneously think that he should be the one to decide how to redistribute that wealth to maximize good? The story follows a nearly permanently lugubrious Ben (Will Smith) as he meets various people in various dire straits, usually due to some medical condition. He meets blind and gentle musician Ezra (Woody Harrelson), coronary-disease-ridden Emily (Rosario Dawson), and five other people who he determines to help. His best friend Dan (Barry Pepper) is a lawyer who's wittingly helping him; his brother (Michael Ealy) is unwittingly helping him, as Ben has stolen his identity in order to get closer to the people he wants to help. Ben and Emily end up falling in love, but it is doomed. You see, Ben is not only giving away his worldly possessions -- a victim of domestic abuse gets his beach house -- but also pounds of flesh. Specifically, he's donated a lung to someone, a kidney to someone else -- and finally, after his suicide by poisonous jellyfish, his heart to Emily and his eyes to Ezra. In order for Emily to live, Ben had to die. Why was Ben doing this? He'd killed his wife and six others in a car accident that he'd caused by arrogantly and recklessly texting while driving. He decided to extract seven pounds of flesh from himself to make things right. It was an interesting story, well-told, revealing a bit at a time. The movie is more interesting than the synopsis because it maintains more tension when you don't know what's coming. If you know what's coming, there's less to enjoy, I think. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) -- "9/10" As luck would have it, I don't have to write down any of the plot to remind myself of what happened -- because I've memorized pretty much every line and scene by now. I probably first watched the movie in 1989 when it came out in theaters. Since then, I've seen it at least half-a-dozen times more. The movie starts with a flashback to Indy's youth (River Phoenix), where we see him meet archeological marauders for the first time, we see him get his whip and his hat, and we meet his soon-to-be nemesis Vogel, who gets the cross of Coronado. Indy didn't like being thwarted but his father (Sean Connery) admonishes him for insolence. Fast-forward to the modern day of the mid-1940s, where the Nazis are hot on the trail of the Holy Grail, while Indy is using his father's notebook to find it first. His father's lifelong mission has been to find the Holy Grail. Together, they get closer and closer. Indy and Elsa (Alison Doody) travel to Venice to uncover a knight's tomb and get the next clue. Elsa is so obviously unhinged that it comes as absolutely no surprise that she's actually a Nazi who had seduced not only Indy, but also his father. TheJones's wind up tied together in a German castle to which they inadvertently set fire during their escape. Elsa is now firmly against them, no longer pretending to be anything but a nearly cartoonish Nazi. Henry Sr. and Indy, along with the help of Marcus Brody (Denholm Elliot) and Sallah (John Rhys-Davies) get closer and closer to their goal. The Jones's make a side-trip to Berlin to retrieve Henry's notebook. Indy dresses up as a German officer and bumps into Hitler during a book-burning, who signs the notebook for him before marching imperiously away. Henry and Indy escape Germany on a zeppelin, then use the small "lifeboat" plane attached to it to escape that, taking down two pursuing planes before crashing/landing themselves and escaping on foot. They meet up with the Nazis again, trying not only to thwart them but also to rescue Marcus, who's fallen into their hands. Thus follows a long tank sequence that culminates in the head of the Nazis plummeting to his death and Indy barely surviving. They end up at the doors of Petra in Jordan where the Nazis gut-shoot Henry in order to provide Indy with incentive and focus to solve the final three riddles and find the grail. Indy does so, taking the final leap of faith and getting into the chamber where an immortal knight (Robert Eddison) greets him. Elsa advises her boss Donovan "poorly" and he explodes into dust, having drunk from a false grail. Indy grabs the correct one and rushes back to heal his father's gunshot wound. The grail cannot leave the grounds, though. Elsa doesn't accept this and triggers an earthquake by taking the grail too far from the cave. Indy and his friends all escape, while all of the Nazis die -- due to God's wrath, presumably. They literally ride into the sunset. "It tells me that goose-stepping morons like yourself should try reading books instead of burning them." Sean Connery's admonition to a real-life Nazi is more apropos than ever. Star Wars: Le Réveil de la Force (2015) -- "10/10" Known in English as Star Wars: Episode VII - The Force Awakens. I stand by my "review from 2015" . This time, I watched it in 2D and in French with French subtitles. PBS American Experience S36E04 - Poisoned Ground: The Tragedy at Love Canal (2024) -- "8/10" This is a recounting of how the Love Canal became a superfund site. Love Canal is a neighborhood of Niagara Falls that sits on top of a hazardous-waste-dumping site that belonged to Hooker Chemicals. The company sold the land to the local community and they chirpily agreed to ignore reality, buy Hooker's lies about safety, and build schools, playgrounds, and houses on the site. Soon, though, people became very sick. Adults, children, all succumbed to various debilitating illnesses. Black sludge was bubbling up out of backyards. Horrific smells suffused the neighborhood. Kids' shoes were melting off of their feet. Piles of rusty barrels were dumping dozens of lethal chemicals into the groundwater. No-one cared because (A) there was no money in it and (B) they didn't know any of the affected poor people living there. Morality never entered into it. People started demonstrating. No-one believed them, despite the clear evidence. They were all in denial because no-one wanted to assume responsibility. The mothers of the neighborhood were relentless in their activism and they finally won compensation for moving out of areas that the state had not originally considered to be "affected". The whole thing was ridiculous, from a humanitarian point of view. People were suffering; the amount of money needed to remediate them amounted to peanuts. It didn't matter. The point was to teach the people a lesson about what they can expect from their society -- and to teach their corporate masters that their interests will be defended, nearly no matter what. Due to nearly impossibly high perseverance by the mothers of the region, who basically dedicated years, if not decades, of their lives to this cause, they were eventually compensated in the most minimal manner that could be considered halfway satisfying for all of the work. The lesson remained though: If you want to be treated fairly in this society, we will punish you and punish you and punish you and only give in at the very end, when the political tide has turned and it benefits the powers-that-be financially more to capitulate than to continue fighting. There was nothing in this calculation that had anything to do with morality or empathy. The only way to get justice is to make the elites benefitting from injustice lose money from it instead. The story was reasonably well-told, if a bit long on its laudation for the women and a bit tepid on its remonstrations of the corporations responsible. Despite covering the topic, there is still a feeling that they're handling the issue with kid gloves to avoid offending sponsors and elites that continue to benefit from similar practices today. It very much focuses on the specific case without expanding the argument to consider what kind of society is so morally bankrupt as to let something like this happen in the first place. Living with Yourself (2019) -- "7/10" Miles Elliot (Paul Rudd) is kind of an asshole. That is, he doesn't love life anymore. He barely loves his wife Kate (Aisling Bea); he doesn't like himself. He's kind of given up. He's not a better person for it. He's falling behind at work, riding his earlier success but not producing much at all. A work colleague (Desmin Borges) tells Miles about a clinic that might help him become a better person. Intrigued, he heads out into the countryside to the relatively remote clinic, located in a strip mall. They require $50,000, which he takes from a shared account. He asks very few questions, perhaps showing his desperation, perhaps his cupidity. The two odd doctors Jung-Ho (James Seol) and Left (Rob Yang) put him under. He wakes in a shallow grave, wrapped in a plastic bag. All around him are similar shallow graves, with tufts of plastic bags sticking out of the ground. Miles stumbles all the way home to find himself already there, entertaining his wife, who seems charmed by him for the first time in a long time. It turns out the treatment is a cloning operation wherein the impurities are left away during personality transfer. On the way in to the clinic, Miles had seen Tom Brady leaving, saying that it was his sixth visit. In Miles's case, though, they failed to kill the old version so now there are two. They both have all of Miles's memories but the clone is a slightly better version. Old Miles leans into this with gusto, sending new Miles to work for him while he writes his novel. New Miles excels at his job, getting themselves a promotion and landing a big contract. New Miles is also awakening Kate's interest, although she finally finds out that there are two of them. She is less bothered by that than you would think, focusing instead on the $50,000 that Miles spent on himself out of their shared savings. After initially refusing to entertain the notion, Kate starts seeing New Miles on the sly. Things go a bit back and forth, but old Miles is still old Miles and he is not equipped for rising to the challenge and responsibility of working with or against new Miles. The show ends, though, with new Miles contemplating suicide because there isn't really a place for him, especially after a tryst with Kate was deeply unsatisfying for both of them. I gave it an extra star because Paul Rudd is almost always fun. He played a non-fun version of himself quite well. It was easy to tell which clone was on-screen at any given time. 6 Balloons (2018) -- "9/10" We meet Katie (Abbi Jacobson) preparing a surprise birthday party for her boyfriend Jack (Dawan Owens). She's pretty detail-oriented but we forgive her her foibles when we meet her parents, especially her mother (Jane Kaczmarek), who's quite a she-devil. She just always knows the wrong thing to say to push her daughter's buttons. Her father (Tim Matheson) is somewhat better but also quite odd and utterly shallow in his interpretation of what is going on around him. If Katie seems to have been strongly affected by having been raised by this odd couple, her brother Seth (Dave Franco) is even worse off: he's a heroin addict. Katie leaves the party to pick up the cake and stops to pick him up first. At his apartment, she finds Seth and his daughter, the utterly adorable and captivating Ella (Charlotte Carel/Madeline Carel). There is unopened mail everywhere and Seth is in rough shape. Katie is almost certain that he has relapsed. Their new mission is to find a detox center. Regular scenes in the film are interleaved with voiceover narration, reading from a story about a woman failing to sail a boat and drowning. The visuals are of Katie and Seth in her car as it slowly fills with water. The whole feeling is one of desperation, of spinning out of control, of succumbing to an uncontrollable fate. At the first detox center, they're turned away because the center no longer takes her or Seth's health insurance. They continue their search in vain. Seth says that Katie has to buy him heroin and a needle. She reluctantly does, seemingly stunned to find where she's ended up: she's in a shady alley buying heroin rather than greeting her boyfriend at his surprise birthday party. Her obsessive personality is starting to unravel under the pressure. Ella is fine, as fine as she can be. She needs a diaper change but the lady at the pharmacy is already looking at Katie with disdain because she bought a needle. Katie is humiliated but also getting angry at how cruel the world can be to a man clearly suffering and a little girl who clearly needs help. Because he's a drug addict, they all turn their backs on their suffering and need. Seth uses the bathroom to shoot up and comes out of the stall on top of the world. He's annoying in his ebullience, although Ella is delighted to have her daddy back in working order. They finally arrive at the party, where Seth is cruising around, making a spectacle of himself and thus implicitly revealing to everyone who knows him that he's using again. After the kind of night that Katie's had, her family thinks nothing of shoving all of the blame for her brother's behavior on her -- because that's the kind of family that they are and have obviously always been. Seth is shooting up again, in her car. He has left Ella at the party. She is looking for daddy everywhere. Katie finds him in the car and finally tells him that enough is enough. He has to check himself into rehab. She will not accompany him this time. This simple act is enough to dispel the demons, the narrator, the flooding waters, the sinking sailboat. Katie is free, taking in the fireworks and enjoying a few moments of freedom. This was a really well-made, tightly shot, well-paced, and well-told story. It was also just under 75 minutes, with no fat left to trim. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] These are notes for me to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. The amount of text is not proportional to my enjoyment. I might write less because I didn't get around to it when it was fresh in my mind. I rate the film based on how well it suited me personally for the genre, my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. Links are to "my IMDb ratings" ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5051 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5051 Sat, 10 Aug 2024 14:57:16 +0200 -- "8/10" 2. "Killers of the Flower Moon (2023)" <#Killers> -- "8/10" 3. "Cam (2021)" <#Cam> -- "4/10" 4. "Tribes of Europa (2021)" <#Tribes> -- "5/10" 5. "Curb Your Enthusiasm S12 (2023)" <#Curb> -- "10/10" 6. "Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2008)" <#Harry> -- "7/10" 7. "Metal Lords (2022)" <#Metal> -- "8/10" 8. "Emily the Criminal (2022)" <#Emily> -- "8/10" 9. "Peanut Butter Falcon (2019)" <#Peanut> -- "8/10" 10. "What Happened, Miss Simone? (2015)" <#What> -- "9/10" 11. "Stewart Lee: Tornado (2022)" <#Tornado> -- "9/10" 12. "Stewart Lee: Snowflake (2022)" <#Snowflake> -- "9/10" Beasts of No Nation (2015) -- "8/10" The story follows the young life of Agu (Abraham Attah), whose country, in the grips of civil war, is being torn apart by rival gangs and warlords. When his village is overrun by one such group, Agu's mother and sisters are whisked off to the capital in an overstuffed taxi, while Agu, his older brother, and his father remain behind. The rebels arrive, setting the village ablaze, then rooting out counterrevolutionaries. They line up "suspects" -- pretty much all of the remaining villagers -- and demand that they confess to crimes, then shoot them in cold blood regardless. As all of the soldiers and commanders would throughout the film, they spout aphorisms about justice and judicial procedure before doing so. This is not uncommon for any occupying army. Police in the U.S. are known for shouting "stop resisting" while they pummel a citizen senseless because they know, when the body-cam footage surfaces, that these statements will legally protect them. If they'd legitimately feared for their lives, then they'd had every right to defend themselves. It is the same with the rebels here: if they declaim that they are acting with a vested authority to perform in-field trials and executions, then they are on the side of "justice". Agu escapes into the bush, leaving behind his dead father and brother and everything else he knew. He spends several days in the bush, trying to fend for himself, but is unable to really do so. Soon, though, he encounters Commandant (Idris Elba) and his entire battalion of child -- and teen -- soldiers. They take up Agu into their ranks, initiating him, and getting him hooked on drugs to deaden his soul to the terrible things he will do with them. He befriends young Strika (Emmanuel Nii Adom Quaye), who never says a word but seems to know his way around the gang. The band ravages and pillages the countryside, working its way toward the capital. Commandant arrives to a meeting with his "supreme commander" Dada Goodblood (Jude Akuwudike). There, he is disappointed to hear that his second-in-command 2-IC (Kurt Egyiawan) will be given the battalion he'd been leading. He doesn't accept this, so he takes everyone out to a brothel, where 2-IC mysteriously dies when his companion sets off his gun "by accident". The battalion accepts this, they bury 2-IC, and move on, away from the capital, to mine gold in the countryside. Along the way, Strika dies of a gunshot wound. Agu had carried him, desperately trying to keep him alive. Months later, they've been camped in the middle of nowhere, with little food and water and no more ammunition. They rise up against Commandant, demanding to leave -- and he lets them go, telling them how horrible their lives will be without him. The cult dies, just like that. Commandant must be tired, as well. It is the last we see of him. They march through the bush until they run into UN soldiers, who capture them and bring them to a school and halfway house, where they acclimate back to their lives as children. Agu enters therapy and we get a happy ending of sorts as we see him playing in the surf with the other children. The story in this movie reminded me of a book I read way back in 2009 called "A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier" by Ishmael Baeh. Killers of the Flower Moon (2023) -- "8/10" The story starts with the discovery of oil in the Osage Nation. The tribes grow rich. It's unclear how historically accurate this is but it gels with what I've read. Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) returns from a harrowing experience in WWI to his uncle William Hale's (Robert De Niro) estate, a cattle farm smack in the middle of Osage country. He starts driving rich Indians around for a living. His uncle wants him to move in on and marry Mollie Kyle, so that her family's fortune will be able to legally flow to white people, specifically to William Hale. Ernest also runs a side-hustle with his brother and friend -- robbing Indians and their white spouses. That's the first indication that Ernest isn't quite what his name suggests. He acts the bumbling fool, but he's intimately involved in all of "King" Hale's machinations for clearing those pesky Osage out of the way and making sure the "headrights" go to him or one of his sons (who'll just let him run it anyway). King Bill Hale is a calm, evil force who sees to it that his "friends" the Osage are eliminated, one by one, or in droves. He doesn't really care. They're just animals to be cleared out of the way in order for him to get the oil money. The only complaint that the white town elders have is that he's "pronouncing himself too much," when he has Reta and Bill's house blown sky-high. Ernest sees that Molly is next. He's been involved in all of this so far, but he's in denial. He does seem to love her. He believes King and his coterie when they tell him that Mollie's "medicine" is just to slow her down. Mollie trusts him to pick up her medicine. He adds the poison that King gave him. Tom White (Jesse Plemons) shows up to investigate the murders. He wants to talk to Mollie, who'd traveled to Washington to plead for help from the president himself. Ernest sends him away, then runs to daddy. Despite his age, King Bill can still overpower Ernest like he was a child. King is stymied in getting the insurance money on Henry, who he'd had killed. The killer had failed to make it look like a suicide, so the insurance company is contesting the $25,000 claim. This is a complicated story. Ernest and Mollie dearly love each other. Ernest treats his betrayal of her and her family as some sort of inevitability, driven by his uncle's insatiable greed and base evil as well as Ernest's love of money, seemingly above all else. By the time Ernest discovered that he loved Mollie more than money -- and with her, he had all the money he wanted -- it was too late for him to take back all of the things King had "made" him do in order to get it. It's hard to tell how simple Ernest was, how evil he was, how aware he was that what he was doing was wrong. Although he loved and married Molly, he seems to have -- at least instinctively -- shared King's attitude toward the Osage. That is, that they had lucked into something that they didn't deserve and that their betters should take it from them, if only for safe keeping. They think of it this way: if a pack of dogs had discovered oil, it would have been the height of silliness to let the dogs keep the money, right? Why didn't the Osage fight back? Well, because they knew that this is how the white man treated them. They'd been treated like this for over a century. Why would they think that, just because oil had been discovered on land that was currently considered theirs, that the white man would allow them to keep it? Why would they think that the white man would suddenly start playing fair? The Tulsa Massacre was mentioned a few times, as a possible reason why the Osage seemed to be so helpless to use their newfound wealth to build safety for themselves. It's possible that that had an effect, but I think it's just much more that they knew that they would not be allowed to have nice things. Or, at least, they wouldn't be allowed to enjoy them for long. Why would the young Osage women want to marry these vultures that descended on their town after they'd become rich? At the trial, John Lithgow played the prosecution, while Brendan Fraser was the defense lawyer. Ernest would go to prison. Mollie divorced him and married another white man. William went to prison, but was eventually released for good behavior, 10 years after Molly had died of diabetes, at 50 years old. The forgiving God who looks down on us gave William Hale several years in Arizona, until he died 15 years later, in 1962, at 87 years old. Ernest, on the other hand, was already out in 1937, after 11 years in prison. He soon robbed his former sister-in-law and was sent back to prison until 1959, when he was paroled. In 1966, he was officially pardoned. he lived until 94 years old, dying in 1986. This is the benevolent God, I guess. He must really hate native Americans. This was a great film. At 31/2 hours, it's incredibly long, but the subject is worth it. It's treated with respect by all. Scorsese is a master of showing, not telling. The feeling of the town is like the Twilight Zone, with white men singing and dancing and trying to impress the native women -- instead of the other way around. We are made to feel how invidious and insidious these vultures and vampires are. There is a blanket of menace and despair, despite the wealth and riches. Cam (2021) -- "4/10" This is a horror movie about a cam girl named Alice (Madeline Brewer) who has a cam channel on a popular platform. Man, I don't know. The whole dynamic is so sad, but I fear that I'm just out of touch. This is probably what OnlyFans is like. Anyway, Alice is trying to get into the top 50 channels on the site, so she starts pretending to kill herself. Her users love it. One of them seems quite enthusiastic about watching her die. She starts slowly moving up the charts. Although she seems happy with her success, she can never truly be happy. She's just a miserable person with no real personality. Her younger brother and his friends discover her channel and out her as a porn star at his birthday party. Her mom is disappointed. No-one cares. The rest of the movie watches her spiral as someone who looks just like her takes over her channel. No-one will believe her that this has happened. She's locked out of her account. She no longer has any income. The person who took her show looks just like her. And she's way better at this than she is. The fake Alice quickly climbs into the top ten. It turns out that the fake Alice in an AI vomited up by the system, who's been taking over all of the top acocunts. Alice outsmarts it -- this is the most unbelievable part, to be honest -- and then deletes its account, which is her account, so she's left with nothing. Instead of having learned any sort of lesson, though, the film ends with her opening a new account, this time with her mother's support. Tribes of Europa (2021) -- "5/10" This is an odd show that, while it seems to have been made with real actors, so many scenes are so heavily edited that a lot of them end up in the uncanny valley. This is a near-to-mid-future story set in a Europe divided into tribes. We meet several members of the Origines tribe, who live simply, in the forest, with a minimum of technology. There's Liv (Henriette Confurius), Elja (David Ali Rashed), Kiano (Emilio Sakraya), and Yvar (Sebastian Blomberg). They are out foraging when they see an Atlantean craft crash-land in their territory. After an initial hesitation, they rush to help, rescuing the Atlantean pilot (Michaël Erpelding) as well as his ship's "cube". The powerful and vicious Crows tribe is also on the hunt for the cube. They tear a swath through the Origines village, killing nearly everyone, except for the main characters to which we'd already been introduced. They are scattered to the winds, with Elja hooking up with Moses (Oliver Masucci), who's a long-time tech-scavenger with many connections and a somewhat unsavory reputation. Moses is kind of the best character. Despite being wounded herself, Liv manages to subdue and capture a Crow warrior Grieta (Ana Ularu) -- which supposedly never happens -- and is subsequently captured by the Crimson tribe, which seems to be a lot of Germans with a distinctly Aryan flavor to their dreams of "reuniting" Europe, though it sounds much more like "reconquering". The Crows have the same aims but make no bones about eliminating everyone who does not pledge fealty to and join the Crows' brutal hierarchical society. Liv continues to inveigle the Crimsons, wheedling her way into leader David's (Robert Finster) heart. They're both using each other, though. She's trying to get to the Crow capitol city Brahtok, where Kiano and their father have been taken. Kiano becomes a slave to Varvara (Melika Foroutan), where he becomes her #1 consort, then challenges to fight for his freedom. He's left to fight his father because the Crows are ironic bastards. I think Kiano wins, gaining his freedom and becoming a Crow. Meanwhile, Liv has convinced the Crimson tribe to attack Brahtok, having helped extract the location of an unflooded, secret tunnel into the city. They are thwarted by David's father General Cameron (James Faulkner), who Liv tries and fails to assassinate. Moses and Elja work their way through Moses's network, trying to restore the Atlantean cube while kinda, sorta pretending to want to sell it. They get it charged up and Elja manages to use it, but the battery dies incredibly quickly. They clash with pursuing Crows, but finally end up at a lake, raising a gigantic cube or piece of Atlantean tech from the water, entering it, and being closed up in it. I bet the show-runners thought that this would go somewhere in season 2. The Crimson attempt to negotiate with the Crows, but neither side is particularly trustworthy, so it ends up in a wild shootout. David allows Liv to escape just before more of the Crimsons are slaughtered. Liv once again wakes up to the introduction of another tribe: the Femmes. She is rescued, again in what was probably a setup for the second season. The production values are pretty uneven as I kept thinking that the show was purely filmed in the Unreal engine. The world-building was decent, though pretty workaday and generic in the end. The dialogue was insultingly simple. It looked reasonably good, but that's not nearly enough. It's not too surprising that it wasn't renewed for another season, especially considering the obviously European character to it. It probably didn't get any traction in the U.S., where this kind of low-effort plotting and dialogue are much more easily forgiven if the visuals are distracting enough. I watched it in English while working out. Curb Your Enthusiasm S12 (2023) -- "10/10" I thought this was a brilliant finale, a 12th season capper to a series that's been delivered over 24 years. Larry David's writing is just as sharp as ever. His coterie of friends is rock-solid and always in on the joke. No-one explains the jokes. No-one tells you what your take is supposed to be. Most of the situations and lines can be interpreted in several ways. While the most obvious one is often funny, there are other layers that are even funnier. This show stands as a cutting critique of American life, especially that of the wealthy elite, to which Larry David very clearly and knowingly belongs. The critique is never direct but the wealthy are consistently portrayed as venal, shallow and completely undeserving of the wealth and power that they have. Larry jokes about being so rich that he doesn't have to care about money. This season's arc follows Larry giving Leon's aunt a bottle of water while she is standing in line to vote, which is illegal in the state of Georgia. Larry becomes a national hero -- in blue circles, at least -- as he was (unknowingly) flouting a cruel and unfair law clearly intended to prevent people from voting. The season culminates in a trial that nearly perfectly mirrors the ending of Seinfeld, complete with cameos by Jerry Seinfeld. He and David laugh about how Curb ended things better by making one of the jurors be seen mingling in a local bar instead of sequestering. Larry's case is declared a mistrial. Throughout the show, * Larry and Jeff (Jeff Garlin) tangle with the ownership and other members at the golf club. * They become accused of having written a letter of complaint to the irascible owner of the country club. * They go shopping for a black lawn jockey to replace one that they broke at a rental property. * Both Larry and Freddy (Vince Vaughn) scheme to dump their annoying girlfriends. * Larry and Jeff laugh about how Susie's caftan business's billboard has a dick drawn on it, which seems to inspire more business for her. A second one pushes her business to even more dizzying heights. * Larry gets caught up in a WhatsApp texting group for a family he never knows particularly well nor really cares for. He is upbraided for failing to follow texting etiquette because he doesn't like and laugh at other people's comments. * Larry and Richard Lewis arrange the purchase of an old Mercedes. * Larry gets in trouble with a car-valet service because the boss thinks its rude and arrogant to toss keys rather than handing them over. * There is a misunderstanding with Larry's ex-wife Cheryl's (Cheryl Hines) masseuse that Larry tries to smooth over before his trial by introducing her to Bruce Springsteen. After a too-perfunctory introduction, Larry has to try again, this time possibly infecting the Boss with COVID. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2008) -- "7/10" "I saw this movie in 2009" but didn't include any notes at the time. The rating still stands. In this one, Dementors attack Harry (Daniel Radcliffe) at the Dursleys' home. He dispatches them with a Patronus charm, after which he is whisked to the headquarters of the Order of the Phoenix by the selfsame group. At Hogwarts, Dolores Umbridge (Imelda Staunton) has taken over as headmaster from Dumbledore (Michael Gambon). Harry starts a secret group called Dumbledore's Army, where he teaches students how to use offensive and defensive spells -- because the school is no longer teaching them. Harry begins to have dreams that are real-life events in Voldemort's life, which is the first sign that their minds are magically linked. Harry begins studying with Snape to be able to close off his mind to Voldemort's probing. This backfires because Harry isn't focused enough and Voldemort lays a trap for Harry and his compatriots in the Ministry of Magic. There's a knock-down, drag-out fight accompanied by the destruction of what looks like thousands of prophecy spheres. Many death-eaters are there, including Bellatrix (Helena Bonham Carter), who kills Sirius (Gary Oldman). Voldemort finally reveals himself to everyone at the Ministry, leaving them no choice but to believe that he's back. I saw it in German this time. Metal Lords (2022) -- "8/10" This is a simple and relatively sweet movie about a couple of high-school friends who are interested in metal and board games. Most would call them nerds but they're not really super-good at school; they just like more cerebral and less physical games. Kevin (Jaeden Martell) is a relatively regular kid from a relatively regular family. He's friends with Hunter Sylvester (Adrian Greensmith), who's a high-strung bit of a narcissist from a divorced family, living with his relatively wealthy dad (Brett Gelman), who does boob jobs. Emily (Isis Hainsworth) is from Scotland and brings a whose sackful of personality disorders with her as well. She plays the cello and Kevin is smitten, thinking that she could play bass in his and Hunter's metal duo. Hunter is adamantly against it because "girls aren't metal". Hunter uses his Dad's credit card to buy Kevin an absolutely bitchin' set of drums, on which Kevin starts practicing in earnest, getting pretty good pretty soon -- not to mention buff and more confident. Emily notices. Hunter keeps trying to find another bassist, while Kevin and Emily keep practicing the playlist for the "Battle of the Bands" in which Hunter's band Skullfucker will take part. Emily and Kevin grow closer and she, in a by-now characteristically direct manner, proposes that they shoot straight to fucking in her van, which they do, each losing their virginity. With Hunter being disparaging and whiny and bitchy about Emily and about Kevin being with Emily and not appreciating how much better Kevin has gotten at drumming, the singer of another local band overhears Kevin playing and immediately recruits him into the band. Kevin plays a wedding to universal accolades. In the meantime, Hunter has been sent to a rehab clinic by his father, who had discovered the enormous credit-card purchase for drums. Hunter meets the head of the clinic, Dr. Nix (Joe Manganiello) who turns out to be his idol, the lead of the band Killoton, which won the Battle of the Bands decades ago. Kevin breaks him out of the clinic and they head to the Battle of the Bands. Emily is not ready to play, but then she is ready, and she shows up all goth and metal and kicking ass and they kick ass but they also lose to the band Mollycoddle, which is the band with which Kevin had played the wedding. School bully Skip attacks Hunter one more time, at the end of their set, knocking him down into an amp and breaking his leg. The trio revels in the viral fame of the incident and redouble their practice. The end. Emily the Criminal (2022) -- "8/10" Emily's (Aubrey Plaza) life is not good. It's not as bad as many people have it, but she is barely keeping her head above water. She has an interest in and flair for art, but her art-school degree hasn't helped her find employment in that field, so she's working two jobs, one in food-delivery. She has a lot of debt, just the interest for which eats up any and all income she's able to scratch together. She meets Youcef Haddad (Theo Rossi), who runs a low-level criminal empire of "dummy shoppers", who basically cheat stores out of larger products like televisions by purchasing them with burned credit cards. Her second foray is to purchase a car in the same way. The dealer's hackles are up, though, and she has to fight her way out -- which she does, with aplomb. This is a nice way of learning that Emily has a core of steel. She and Youcef grow close, which annoys Youcef's partner, his cousin Khalil (Jonathan Avigdori), who is much more of a hard-ass and misogynist than Youcef, who seems like a decent guy. He's a stand-up guy next to the social parasite that is Liz (Megalyn Echikunwoke), Emily's friend from school, who's failed her way upward through a marketing agency. Emily dog-sits for her. A buyer and his girlfriend somehow find her there, attack her, and take all of her money. Shaken, she grabs a taser and chases them into the street, blasting them both and stealing all of her stuff and her dog back. Emily has steel in her. Liz gets Emily an interview at her company, but it's for an unpaid internship. The girl boss Alice (Gina Gershon) is also an absolute trash human-being. [media] "Emily: Sorry, I'm just trying to wrap my head around that. So what are the hours? Alice: Regular hours. [pause] You do realize this is a very competitive position? Emily: Yeah, sure, I understand that. What I don't understand is how you feel so comfortable asking someone to work without pay. Alice: You know, when I was your age, they told me all I could be was the secretary. Emily: Okay, but secretaries get paid. Alice: That's not the point. Emily: Well, when you were my age, did you have sixty thousand dollars of debt? Alice: How about this: when I was your age I was the only woman in a room full of men. Emily: But you had a job okay? You know, you're getting paid. Am I wrong? Alice: I don't have time for this. Clearly, you're a bit spoiled. Emily: Spoiled? Alice: Let me be frank with you: you don't belong here because you think everyone is out to get you. None of us are out to get you, especially me. I'm trying to help. Emily: This was a fantastic Liz, thanks very much. Thank you. Alice: No more talking; just leave thank you so much. Emily: Hey, if you want to tell me what to do, put me on the fucking payroll. How about that?" Soon after, Khalil ruins a lunch with Emily, Youcef, and Youcef's mother by revealing that Emily has been caught out by a store she'd robbed. He cuts Youcef out of his half of the business, draining all of their shared accounts. Emily convinces Youcef to accompany her to attack the safe house where Khalil is hiding out. Khalil and Youcef scuffle. Youcef is shot, injured. Emily subdues Khalil (but probably killed him). She gets Youcef to the car, along with all of the money in cash. They don't have the car keys, though. Sirens blare. She is torn. The steel prevails. She abandons the nearly unconscious Youcef to his fate, taking all of the money and absconding to South America. She is making art and running a "dummy shopper" ring, having taken Youcef's role. She looks happy and confident. Her school loans are a thing of the past. She has started over, unburdened by the past. Peanut Butter Falcon (2019) -- "8/10" Zak (Zack Gottsagen) is a young man with Down's Syndrome, living in an assisted-care facility, which otherwise houses mostly senior citizens. He is good friends with ancient-looking Carl (Bruce Dern), who encourages him to live his best life. Zak greases himself up, muscles through the bars over the window, and escapes into the wilds and bayous of Louisiana, clad only in his underwear. His mission is to find his wrestling hero, the Salt Water Redneck (Thomas Haden Church), and become his acolyte, learning the tricks of the trade. Though relatively small, Zak is preternaturally strong. This is what Tyler (Shia LaBeouf) terms "retard strength," but absolutely not in a mean way. He's impressed. Tyler is a small-time fisherman who's been illegally crabbing and expresses his anger at his sad lot in life by setting fire to most of the traps of his chief rivals Duncan (John Hawkes) and Ratboy (Yelawolf), two truly unsavory and mean characters. Tyler is also on the run in the bayous of Louisiana. His life has never been the same since his older brother Mark (John Bernthal) died. Tyler meets up with Zak. They hit it off immediately and, for lack of a more cohesive plan of his own, he decides to accompany Zak to the Salt Water Redneck's home. Zak's caretaker Eleanor (Dakota Johnson) is both distraught that Zak is out on his own and that she's in deep trouble with her boss for his escape. She sets out in pursuit, tracking Zak through the state. Meanwhile, Zak and Tyler are on foot, barely eking out food and water, but with Tyler teaching Zak how to shoot and, soon, how to wrestle. They build a raft -- like Huck Finn and Jim -- and set off on the river. Eleanor catches up with them at one of their camps. She decides to travel with them on their quest, since she's now heard that her boss plans to put Zak into even more hopelessly repressive housing. He seems to be doing much, much better with Tyler. When Duncan and Ratboy show up to exact revenge, Zak gets rid of them by convincingly wielding a shotgun. The trio finally arrive at the Salt Water Redneck's home, where they learn that he's retired. He's sympathetic to their pathetic little group, though, so he unironically trains Zak in the ways of backyard wrestling. He signs him up for a match against a truly ferocious beast of a man, who pulls no punches on Zak. This is actually kind of neat because he doesn't treat Zak differently just because he has Down's Syndrome. After withstanding a beating, Zak marshals his strength, lifts his giant opponent over his head and throws him out of the ring. He is jubilant. At the same time, Duncan and Ratboy have located them again, this time with murder in their eyes. They beat Tyler to the ground with a heavy blow to the head from a tire iron. This sweet film ends with Eleanor and Zak driving to Florida. After a little while, they ask the back seat a question. Tyler struggles up to a sitting position, his face bruised and his head swaddled in bandages. They laugh at a joke and the car drives into the horizon. What Happened, Miss Simone? (2015) -- "9/10" This is a biography of the life and times of Nina Simone. She began life as a poor girl, trained in classical piano, playing Bach for the church. She broke out of that mould in her late teens, expanding her palette to jazz and blues. She would always stay rooted in classical, though; you could hear it underpinning so much of what she did. Her voice was so unique, her playing so inventive and seemingly effortless, that it was a surprise to learn how miserable she was for much of her life. She met and married a former NYC police officer who would take over managing her career -- and her life. He drove her relentlessly, which, at first, was beneficial for career and her music...but she soon burned out. He treated her terribly; he beat her. Their daughter was a witness to her mother's denigration. There was a ton of archival footage, which was great. The modern-day interviews were nearly useless; they weren't really interesting at all, adding nothing, especially as compared to the copious first-hand footage of Simone playing and speaking. These parts spoke for themselves, eloquently telling the story far better than her daughter's stilted and somewhat over-modern identitarian interpretations. Simone became a leader of the civil-rights movement, something that her husband strongly disapproved of. She eventually broke with him, fleeing to Liberia with her daughter. She lived in relative fame there but would soon have to start playing again, as she ran out of money. Simone would eventually move to Paris, staying one step ahead of destitution until her career finally got its wheels under it again. She continued to be brilliant throughout; whenever she was on stage, she was in her element, weaving artistry out of even her worst moods. She was often depressed, though didn't seem to have struggled with drugs or alcohol -- just self-doubt and depression. Although a bit long, it's worth a watch just to see original video recordings of her classic songs, and to hear the story of this strong and moral woman's life. She had her head screwed on straight and didn't give an inch, even when she had to trade her career for it. Stewart Lee: Tornado (2022) -- "9/10" I very much appreciate Stewart Lee and have listened to everything I can of his. I don’t really know any other comedian like him. It’s impossible for me to detail the levels of meta-analysis he brings to his sets. I can barely find a joke that I can quote of his because everything is so rambling and intricate and self-referencing that you’d end up citing half the show. You can read a full transcript of a very similar show for "Tornado" (it's a bit different each time). I watched/listened to this show in combination with "Snowflake" <#Snowflake>, the review for which contains some citations that should give you a feel for it. [media] Stewart Lee: Snowflake (2022) -- "9/10" I very much appreciate Stewart Lee and have listened to everything I can of his. I don't really know any other comedian like him. It's impossible for me to detail the levels of meta-analysis he brings to his sets. I can barely find a joke that I can quote of his because everything is so rambling and intricate and self-referencing that you'd end up citing half the show. You can read a full transcript of a very similar show for "Snowflake" (it's a bit different each time). I watched/listened to this show in combination with "Tornado" <#Tornado>. [media] Perhaps he sums it up best in the second hour -- Snowflake -- with this bit at 01:41:00 or so. "It's [...] all right [...] but it took him 45 minutes to tell a barely adequate anecdote about an author I'd never heard of." Which is also not correct, because it's more than all right. I think it's brilliant. This was the punchline to a joke he'd started 30 minutes earlier, with: "So I found myself reading an article in GQ by the 1970s punk-era polemicist and popular 21st century novelist Tony Parsons. "Do people know who Tony...? "[murmurs of agreement] A lot of you, not everyone, which is a shame, because I'm now going to talk about Tony Parsons for 45 minutes." Earlier, there was a segment about a relatively stuffy Times reporter named Alan Bennet, who'd given Stewart a great review, but couched it in terms that seemed somewhat backhanded as compliments, as they would almost guarantee to consign him to high-brow, think-piece-style comedy venues. "He's fearless, undeterred by an audience's failure to respond. "Erving Goffman" would have liked Stewart Lee. Who's that? Who's Erving Goffman? Erving Goffman would have liked Stewart Lee? That's a quote for the poster isn't it? That'll pack 'em in at the Bradford Alhambra! "It's austere stuff. Stewart Lee is the J.L. Austin of comedy. What does it mean? J.L. Austin? Erving Goffman would have liked Stewart Lee? "I googled Erving Goffman. Erving Goffman is the most influential American sociologist of the 20th century. His major areas of study include the sociology of everyday life, social construction of self, social organization of experience, and particular elements of social life such as institutions and stigmas -- and he would have loved me, wouldn't he? He'd've been flailing around in a tsunami of his own urine by now! "Stewart Lee is the J.L Austin of comedy. Right. J.L Austin was a British philosopher of language, perhaps best-known -- if at all, Alan -- for the theory of speech acts. Austin's work ultimately suggests that all utterance is the doing of something with words and signs, challenging on metaphysics of language that would posit propositional assertion as the essence of language and meaning. And I'm the him of this! I'm the him of this! "If you've come along here tonight, hoping to see two-and-a-half hours of the kind of J.L. Austin-influenced comedy that Erving Goffman would have loved, then you can fuck off, cos it's not going to be that, is it? [...] This is the kiss of death, this Alan Bennett review. [...] I hate Alan Bennett." At 02:08:00, "I actually wrote that bit to be like that, to show you who I would be if I was who they say I am. "LAUGHTER AND APPLAUSE "Right? Yeah. That's right. Listen to that. "And that - that's how good I am. I can write jokes that fail in exactly the way I want them to, which is much harder than writing the kind of shit funny jokes that you like." -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] These are notes for me to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. The amount of text is not proportional to my enjoyment. I might write less because I didn't get around to it when it was fresh in my mind. I rate the film based on how well it suited me personally for the genre, my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. Links are to "my IMDb ratings" ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5073 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5073 Sat, 10 Aug 2024 13:59:59 +0200 writes the following about the movie Election. "The elephant in the room when talking about “Election” is Hillary Clinton, in that comparing her (and others) to Tracy Flick over the years has become a sort of code for calling a woman a robotic, success-obsessed ambition machine who needs to stay in her lane. Like Jim McCallister, people saw Clinton’s Flick-like ambition as almost an existential threat, something that had to be stopped at all costs. And we see this outsized reaction to female ambition repeated over and over with women who reach the top of American cultural relevance: whether it’s Kamala Harris and Taylor Swift, AOC and Beyoncé, Elizabeth Warren and Lady Gaga, or Serena Williams and Anne Hathaway, they all seem subject to constant barrages of scrutiny that men in comparable positions rarely receive. They’re all Tracy Flicks in a world of Jim McCallisters." Oh bullshit. Just cmon. Hillary Clinton is a monster. She was criticized not because she was a woman but because she's a calculating, scheming, narcissist asshole. She never cared about anyone more than herself and her career. This is just like Tracey Flick, actually. She very clearly didn't care about anything but getting elected. For herself. What did she plan to do with her position? Who cares? The important thing is to get into the position. The author completely missed the point of Flick's character. "That so many people watch “Election” and not only sympathize with Jim’s viciousness but seem to view it as the correct—even necessary— response to Tracy’s try-hard ambition is, ummm, not great, Bob." Neither of them is a good person. Stop defending Flick. Tracy didn't have a "try-hard ambition", she had "do-anything-to-get-ahead ambition". There's a difference. That the author can't tell the difference is, in her words, "ummm, not great, Bob." "The piece talked about Flick as “a kind of test for American attitudes toward women who dared to aim high,” questioning whether the seemingly inevitable ascendancy of the first female President (one who went to Yale, just like the students that inspired Tom Perotta to create Tracy Flick in the first place) meant “the specter of Tracy Flick was vanquished.”" This is so braindead. Hillary Clinton was a senator from the one of the richest and most power states in the union. She was secretary of state. She destroyed Libya and laughed about it. She is one of the elites. She has been for decades. She is not a downtrodden minority worthy of anyone's pity or admiration. The whining about lack of recognition is just so incredible. It's like you can never honor certain people enough. And any attempt to call them out on their obvious flaws -- if not for being flat-out evil -- is shoved aside as slander for purely identitarian reasons. Just look at the litany of people she listed above as also unfairly maligned: "[...] Kamala Harris and Taylor Swift, AOC and Beyoncé, Elizabeth Warren and Lady Gaga, or Serena Williams and Anne Hathaway [...]" Taylor Swift? Really? She's a billionaire. While Beyoncé might not personally be a billionaire, she's about halfway there -- and her husband is probably a billionaire. Elizabeth Warren? Very wealthy, but not as wealthy as her husband, who owns the 23andme scam. She's a senator, though. Are we supposed to feel sorry for her because some people say mean things about her? Serena Williams? The poor thing never gets any recognition. How can anyone defend Kamala Harris? Because she's a woman? Why? She's a terrible person with terrible ideas who's always used whatever power she got to screw over people with less power. Just like Hillary Clinton, but much less successfully. "[...] all it took was one more glimpse of her in the flesh for that hatred to return, more powerful than ever." What a breathtakingly bad read of the film. Mcallister was angry that this amoral creature was destined for greatness in politics. Just like Clinton. Just because Mcallister is also a petty person doesn't mean he wasn't right about Flick. Idiots like this reviewer are so wrapped up in identity that they forget that it's possible to dislike someone based on substance. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5034 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5034 Sat, 01 Jun 2024 18:36:40 +0200 -- "8/10" 2. "Shaolin Soccer (2001)" <#Shaolin> -- "8/10" 3. "What We Do in the Shadows (2014)" <#What> -- "6/10" 4. "The Unforgivable (2021)" <#The> -- "8/10" 5. "Predestination (2014)" <#Predestination> -- "8/10" 6. "Fury (2014)" <#Fury> -- "9/10" 7. "Neal Brennan: Crazy Good (2024)" <#Neal> -- "8/10" 8. "Black Mass (2015)" <#Black> -- "8/10" 9. "Batman: The Animated Series (1992)" <#Batman> -- "5/10" 10. "Masters of the Universe: Revolution (2024)" <#Masters> -- "2/10" The Straight Story (1999) -- "8/10" This movie was directed by David Lynch and is considerably different than a lot of the rest of his oeuvre. The story is unique, but not fantastical and mind-bending. Alvin Straight (Richard Farnsworth) lives in Laurens, Kansas with his daughter Rose (Sissy Spacek). Alvin was in World War 2 and carries a lot of baggage from that. Rose is a bit anxious and suffers from having had her kids taken away from her a long time ago. The state thinks he's too simple to function, but she takes care of her father. Neither of them has a lot of money. They get by. Alvin smokes too much and should be using a walker, but the doctor settles for him using two canes instead. Alvin learns that his brother Lyle is in a bad way and decides to visit him. His eyes aren't good enough to drive anymore, though. Instead, he hooks up a trailer to his riding lawnmower and sets off on a 240-mile journey at about 4MPH. He doesn't get too far before his lawnmower breaks down. He picks up a used lawnmower from 1966 from a friend at John Deere. It's old but guaranteed to run. Alvin sets out again. He meets a young girl who's on the run, with whom he shares food and fire, but no judgment. Another day, he camps with a huge group of road cyclists. "Alvin: You don't think about getting old when you're young... you shouldn't. Steve: Must be something good about gettin' old? Alvin: Well I can't imagine anything good about being blind and lame at the same time but, still, at my age, I've seen about all that life has to dish out. I know to separate the wheat from the chaff, and let the small stuff fall away. Rat: That's cool, man. So, uh, what's the worst part about being old, Alvin? Alvin: Well, the worst part of being old is rememberin' when you was young." He meets a woman who can't seem to stop hitting deer, even though there's only open prairie to either side. She is distraught. Where do they come from? Why do they hit her? "[T]hirteen deer in seven weeks[!]" Alvin doesn't know. He just knows that deer are edible. This is probably the most Lynchian moment in the film. "Alvin: Can I help you, lady? Deer Woman: No, you can't help me. No one can help me. I've tried driving with my lights on, I've tried sounding my horn, I scream out the window, I-I roll the window down and bang on the side of the door and play Public Enemy real loud! I have prayed to St. Francis of Assisi, St. Christopher too-what the heck! I've tried everything a person can do, and still, every week, I plow into at least one deer! I have hit thirteen deer in seven weeks driving down this road, mister! And I have to drive down this road! Every day, forty miles back and forth to work! I have to drive to work, and I have to drive home! [she looks at the open fields around her] Deer Woman: ...Where do they come from? [she kneels down and checks the deer's pulse] Deer Woman: He's dead. [she walks back towards her car] Deer Woman: And I love deer! [she gets in her car and drives off]" Alvin's mower's transmission starts to go, so he has a scary and speedy ride down a long hill into the next town, coming to a stop in front of a group of semi-shocked townspeople. He needs more money for repairs, so he contacts Rose for his social-security check. A couple take him in and help him find people to repair his mower. He prefers to camp outside, though, and also turns down the offer of a ride to Mt. Zion. He wants to make his own way. Before he leaves town, though, he has a drink with another veteran. Alvin's a recovering alcoholic, so he has milk. They share horrific war stories. There is no honor in their stories. Honest veterans know the truth. Alvin slyly negotiates down the pretty exorbitant price of the repair, then continues on his way. As he nears Mt. Zion, he meets a priest who visits his camp in a graveyard. The priest knows Lyle, but Lyle had never mentioned that he had a brother. Alvin demurs. In Mt. Zion, Alvin has to ask for directions. He has a beer for the first time in years. He eventually find the turnoff onto a forlorn road. Alvin's tractor stops once more, but he's able to get it running again. A helpful tractor leads the way to Lyle's house, which is dilapidated. It's set way back from the road and looks unoccupied. Alvin calls out. Silence. Rustling. The door moves. Lyle (Harry Dean Stanton) appears on the porch, leaning on a walker. "Lyle: Did you ride that thing all the way out here to see me? Alvin: I did, Lyle." Shaolin Soccer (2001) -- "8/10" Stephen Chow wrote, directed, and starred as Mighty Steel Leg Sing in this wonderful farce about a lovable bunch of losers who win a soccer tournament. I've watched it before, but "rated it lower" at that time. It's odd because it sounds like I liked it that time, too. I wrote: "It has its moments and it’s quite goofy and funny and feels more like live-action anime, but gets a lot of tropes of the genre right, mixing the melodrama of Chinese movies with over-the-top but good effects as well as a lot of the gags associated with movies like Airplane. Don’t get me wrong, if you’re not ready for how goofy this movie is, you’ll turn it off nearly immediately, but some of the actors—especially the star, Stephen Chow—are quite charismatic. You won’t want to miss the power of Mighty Steel Leg’s final kick. Just carnage. You can guess the end." Like it says in the footnote: ratings are subjective and iffy. What We Do in the Shadows (2014) -- "6/10" This is a campy spoof on vampire movies and "house"-style reality shows. it's directed, written by, and stars Taika Waititi and Jemaine Clement (of Flight of the Conchords fame). The whole film is shot as a documentary, with a crew that we only very rarely see. There's a lot of mugging for the fourth wall, á la The Office. Viago (Taika Waititi) is the middle-of-the-road, peacemaker, "mother" vampire of the house, while Vladislav (Jemaine Clement) is a hedonistic playboy. Petyr (Ben Fransham) is a Nosferatu-looking vampire who lives in a crypt in the basement. He's at least 1000 years old and looks it. Deacon (Jonny Brugh) is the youngest vampire -- less than two centuries -- and is the young troublemaker, looking to break all of the rules. Jackie (Jackie van Beek) is Deacon's slavish familiar. Petyr converts Nick (Cori Gonzalez-Macuer), who's even more of a rogue than Deacon and who brings Stu (Stu Rutherford) with him. Stu is an even better familiar than Jackie and actually lives with them at the house, introducing them to computers and other modernities. They fight with werewolves, they are ostracized by their fellow vampires, and all sorts of other shenanigans. It's all reasonably entertaining, carried mostly by charismatic performances that make mildly funny lines seem funnier. Jackie eventually becomes a vampire, taking her husband as a familiar. Stu becomes a werewolf, which opens the door to the vampires and werewolves becomes friends. The Unforgivable (2021) -- "8/10" Ruth Slater (Sandra Bullock) is in prison for having murdered a cop. She is about to get out on parole. It's going to be a steep, steep climb integrating back into normal life. Society actively resists her. It wants her to be a criminal for the rest of her life. The movie very concisely shows that the idea of rehabilitation is something that's forced on an unwilling and unempathetic people. People would rather have witch trials. Ruth cannot associate with any known criminals. Her parole officer is an unempathic asshole, just barely keeping his hostility in check. She can't get a good job. She's a carpenter, but can only get a lowly second job working on renovations for a charity, while she chops up fish at night for her primary job, the one she needs to keep in order to stay on parole. There, she befriends Blake (Jon Bernthal). They grow close and she tells him about her past. He blabs it to everyone at work, where one lady beats the everloving shit out of Ruth, saying that, as the daughter of a cop, she has every right to shithouse anyone whom she feels like. These people are just fucking nuts, honestly. Anyone who thinks it's OK to just light into someone based on hearsay is a goddamned psycho who should also be locked up. Ruth approaches lawyer John Ingram (Vincent D'Onofrio) for help in getting back in touch with her sister Katherine (Aisling Franciosi), who'd been adopted after Ruth went into jail. Her foster parents are Michael (Richard Thomas) and Rachel (Linda Emond), two appropriately biblical names. Richard Thomas played Johnboy on The Waltons and was also the FBI director in The Americans. He excels in roles that require a laser-like mindset that acknowledges no new information, hewing instead to a religious and righteous fervor. Anyway, he's super-opposed to Ruth seeing her sister. Rachel is on the fence. Ruth instead approaches their other daughter Emily (Emma Nelson), who agrees to help her try to meet Katherine -- or at least to be able to see her playing in a piano recital. The psycho Asian lady at the fishery wasn't the only one who believes in vigilante justice. The sons of the sheriff who Ruth had killed start plotting to kidnap and possibly kill Katherine, just to get back at Ruth. With pretty much everyone against Ruth -- even John is very, very reluctant -- the big reveal is that it wasn't Ruth who'd killed the sheriff. It had been five-year-old Katie who'd shot him, utterly terrified of the big man lumbering through the house while Ruth was screaming that he shouldn't be coming in. But a five-year-old can't carry the weight, so Ruth stepped up. There's a bunch of confusion, with the avenging brothers betraying each other (one sleeps with the other's wife) and then with one of them kidnapping the wrong sister. Ruth manages to rescue Emily and defuse the situation without getting shot, killed, or arrested, which is a miracle. She finally meets Katie at the end. Predestination (2014) -- "8/10" This movie was a pretty wild ride, with a lot of time-looping, identity changes, and all-around confusion for those who aren't ready for it. An agent is on the trail of the "Fizzle Bomber", who is responsible for the deaths of nearly 11,000 people in 1970s NYC in a series of bombings. He's been uncatchable. The agent is on the verge of catching him, but becomes horribly burned and barely returns to 1992 with a time-travel device. Someone had kicked the device to him as he was crawling to it. The damage is bad, though, so the reconstructive surgery completely changes the agent's appearance. He returns to the 1970s as the Barkeep (Ethan Hawke), where he meets a columnist (Sarah Snook) who writes "The Unmarried Mother" column for a famous newspaper. The columnist's appearance is androgynous, but seems to be trying to present as male. They tell a story that's guaranteed to pique the Barkeep's interest. They bet a bottle of rotgut on it. The customer tells a tale of how they'd been born as Jane, very intellectually and physically gifted but also ostracized. She ends up in the SpaceCorps but only as a potential "partner" for a male astronaut, despite being better than most of them at their jobs. During a physical, though, it's discovered that she has a medical condition that disqualifies her from the Space Corps program. Saving her from depression is a relationship with a wonderful man who is her counterpart in every way. He eventually and mysteriously disappears. She re-enlists in a Space Corps-affiliated secret agency, but is soon disqualified again because she's pregnant. The pregnancy doesn't go very well. She has a Caesarean during which her child is saved but she also discovers that she's intersex. After the ensuing hysterectomy, she is forced to accept that her body will transition to a male gender. Jane becomes John. The Barkeep reveals that he can help John get revenge on his lover. They travel together back to 1963. John finds Jane with the intention of targeting her lover, but finds himself falling in love with her himself. John turns out to be the lover that had spurned his younger self. He is both father and mother of their child. The Barkeep travels back to 1975 to try one more time to get the Fizzle Bomber -- remember, this was the whole point of all of this time travel! -- but is only in time to witness the other agent being horribly burned. He kicks the time-travel device over to him. Once again, a person is meeting an earlier self. The Barkeep also then kidnaps Jane's baby and brings it back to 1945, to deliver the baby to an orphanage that would become Jane. Jane, John, and the child are all the same person. The Barkeep has completed his final mission, having created a supremely talented agent who has no ties to parents or children. He is allowed to finally retire by his boss Robertson (Noah Taylor) and chooses...1975. He's still trying to catch the Fizzle Bomber. When he finally meets the Fizzle Bomber, he discovers that it's a future version of himself, who'd gone back to surgically kill several thousand people whose sacrifice would save untold millions in the future. You know, the "longtermism" theory. The Fizzle Bomber says that he'd been sent there by their mutual boss Robertson. Barkeep is having none of it and kills his future self. In a final reveal, we see that the Barkeep has the same surgical scars as John and that the Barkeep is actually also John after he'd recovered from his horrible burns. He is left to wonder whether the inevitable future can be changed or whether he will somehow end up as the Fizzle Bomber anyway. Basically, because of time-travel and gender-swapping, five of the six characters in this film are the same person. I very much enjoyed the acting and also the tightness and presentation of the story, with reveals drip-fed regularly enough to maintain interest without confusion or spoiling. Very cool. Fury (2014) -- "9/10" Sergeant Don 'Wardaddy' Collier (Brad Pitt) heads up a platoon in WWII. It's been decimated. Boyd 'Bible' Swan (Shia LaBeouf), Trini 'Gordo' Garcia (Michael Peña), and Grady 'Coon-Ass' Travis (John Bernthal) are the only ones left. They pick up a new assistant tank-driver Norman Ellison (Logan Lerman), who's only been in the army for eight weeks. They are not delighted with him. They head out from camp. Collier tells Norman: "There might be a wolf hiding in the sheep. Kid, you're up. Cast an eyeball on 'em. Anything that makes a move, you cut them right in half. People are in the way? That's their problem. You do what you gotta do. Copy?" Not much was ever different, I guess. People like to pretend that only Israelis kill civilians. They're not even the only ones who do it with gleeful abandon. The U.S proudly displays this in its history and culture. In war, there are no rules. I'm listening to Blowback S03 about the Korean/Chinese war and it was no different there. The movie quickly explains this by showing how not shooting a child leads to dead American soldiers. The child was leading an ambush. Everyone's the enemy. These are the stories we tell ourselves to absolve ourselves of sins. The lesson we should draw is not "shoot children," it's "don't go to war." They meet up with Captain Waggoner (Jason Isacacs), getting their next mission. They're to clear a town of "Jerrys". "Waggoner: Jesus. Why don't they just quit? Collier: Would you?" They get halfway across a field and they're lit up by a machine-gun nest in a foxhole. They take it out, but there are German anti-tank (HE) emplacements. They take them out as well. There are many, many more Jerrys in the foxholes. They kill everyone. "Norman: Why would I shoot them if they're already dead? Gordo: So they don't get up and shoot us in the ass!" When they capture a German soldier, Collier gets Norman out of the tank to have him shoot him. This is a captured prisoner. He is defenseless. "Collier: You are no goddamn good to me unless you can kill Krauts. Put a big fat hole in his back. [waits] Put a big fat hole in his fucking back! Norman: No. Collier: Why the hell not? Norman: It's not right! Collier: Not right? We're not here for right and wrong. We're here to kill them. Why are you here? You're here to kill him. You know why he's here? He's here to kill you. Norman: Go to hell. Collier: I'm trying to teach you something. It's him or you. Norman: Kill me. Kill me. Kill me. I can't do this anymore." Collier tackles Norman, forces the gun into his hand, then makes him pull the trigger, shooting the defenseless German in the back. It's unclear which lesson he thinks he's imparted. The rest of the crew pick up Norman and try to convince him that Don Collier's madness is what keeps the crew together. This part might be even more torturous for Norman than the shooting. At the next town, they're ambushed again. They take out a nest with another onslaught. A half-dozen Germans come out, on fire inside their Wehrmacht greatcoats. Norman cuts them down. Gordo says: "You should have let them burn." The mayor of the town comes out with a white flag. He gets them to let the "soldiers" go. They're just children, really. One of them is older. He is the one who had all of the "cowards" hanged for not fighting for Germany. A soldier named "Angel" -- face shrouded -- is tasked with executing him. He does so, kneeling by the corpse to steal its watch. Unflinching. Gordo and Grady are soliciting the local ladies now. Grady: "It's gonna be a two-fer. First him, then me." They prod her toward their filthy tank, into the dank, stinking, oily confines where she's to service them. Collier takes Norman aside. "Ideals are peaceful; history is violent." I can't tell whether we're supposed to believe this is profound or whether we're supposed to see the hollowness of Collier's worldview through such a vapid pronouncement. Collier sees a curtain twitch. He and Norman investigate and find Emma and her mother. Collier donates several eggs and food to a repast. He takes off his shirt (for some reason? Maybe to wash?), while Norman begins playing the piano. Emma sings accompaniment. Collier interrupts them: "She's a good clean girl; if you don't take her into that bedroom, I will." Emma grabs Norman and they retreat to the bedroom. She seems to have understood Collier quite well. Collier washes and shaves in the hot water. His back is a mass of scars. In the bedroom, Emma seems not to understand anything that Norman is saying. He reads her palm. Then he leans in to kiss her. She falls back. End scene. Again, what are we supposed to think about this? Was it coerced? Of course it was. Emma seems to have liked it. Is the film really going to depict this like this? We draw our own conclusions. The film shows. The rest of the tank crew knocks their way into the apartment. Grady and Gordo are monsters. It is unclear whether Bible is involved in the whore they've left as a gift for Norman in the tank. Collier imposes a modicum of order, but they're savages. It's lord of the flies. The acting is spectacular. Grady pushes it too far. "Why should I shut up?" Collier pounds his fist into the table and spits his last bite of eggs at Grady. Grady deflates. Gordo whines that "we're just drunk." Order is restored. They're savages, ruined shells of men. They fight each other, they fight everything, they have no moral core, no principles, no sense of right and wrong, just plunder and base animal urges. The war has taken everything that they ever were -- and it's doubtful they were ever much -- and chewed it up. No, Israeli soldiers are not unique in their cruelty or savagery. It's the war. It's the feeling that anything goes because every threat is existential. That's what destroys men. Grady's filthiness is contrasted with Collier's scrubbed appearance. But their souls are equally dirty. Grady carries his filth on the outside, in his unkempt, unwashed appearance, in his filthy leer, in his base urges expressed without hesitation. But Collier, who exudes an air of peace, was the one who shot a surrendering a soldier in the back. He's the one who killed with Norman's hand. He's just as rotten as his men, just as corrupted by war. His facade almost makes him worse. He can still hide among us. A German bombing attack hits the town. Norman hides under the tank. Grady and Gordo in it. Emma's building is destroyed. Norman sprints to the rubble; Grady drags him down, "You gonna raise her up? Like Jesus Christ? Where the fuck do you think you are? This is war." Collier tells Norman: "I started this war killing Germans in Africa. Then France. Then Belgium. Now I'm killing Germans in Germany. It will end soon. But before it does, a lot more people gotta die." They're crossing one of hundreds of interminable fields. A tank shell takes out the rear tank in their column. Grady is locking and loading. Wardaddy says that the tank is their problem. It's on. They're hitting it with all they've got. The shells bounce off. The German Panzer takes out two more U.S. tanks. "Roy's gone. We're all that's left." Holy shit, what an amazing action sequence. Fury is alive. The German tank is dead. The relief is palpable, watching the adrenalin leave their systems. Their tank is damaged, but Wardaddy says they've got a job to do. They approach the crossroads when a mine blows their tread. Wardaddy asks "can you fix it?" Grady responds "yeah, why not?" Grady confesses to Norman. "Norman, I'm sorry. You know? I think you're a good man. It's what I think? [chuckles] I think maybe we ain't, but I think maybe you are. I just wanted to tell you that." The Germans are coming. The tank's busted. Wardaddy stays with the tank. Norman volunteers to stay. Bible jumps up. Gordo too. Grady is last to mount up. They're all standing on top of a busted tank. It's Macgyver time. They're in the tank, loaded up, ready to die killing as many Germans as they can. They're getting a "little tight" on good whisky. Norman takes a swig. Grady says, "Damn, you're a fightin', fuckin', drinkin' machine!" Don christens him "Machine". The Germans are all over the tank. They open the top hatch. The crew unloads on them. Grenades, Norman's mowing them down like corn. They all run out of ammo. The rest of the ammo is outside. Wardaddy lays down some smoke to cover their exit. They got what they came for. Wardaddy has some trouble coming back in. He takes a shot in the shoulder. They mow down more and more Jerrys who are trying to take advantage. They're back to a stalemate. The Germans find some Panzerfäuste. They sneak up on the tank. The first shot misses. The second one penetrates the tank and slice through Grady's entire midsection. (Somehow, and highly improbably, not exploding inside the tank). The Germans hurl grenades. They're still being cut down like corn. But there are too many of them. The German commander send his troops back in, "Die haben fast keine Munition mehr. Das ist unser Land! Machen sie fertig!" Gordo gets shot while tossing a grenade. It drops in the tank. He covers it. Gordo's gone. Bible went off the tank to get a gun. Machine goes off to save him. There are very few Germans left. One is crawling slowly through the corpses toward the tank. He snipes Bible. He's about to snipe Wardaddy. He does. Wardaddy stands back up. He hits him again. And again. He drops inside. Somehow still alive, but not for long. Machine looks at him. "I'm sorry son." Machine says, "It's OK. What can you do?" The Germans climb up on the tank. Machine wants to surrender. Collier tells him to use the hatch beneath the tank. The Germans drop potato mashers into the tank. Machine slips out, plays dead under the tank. Wardaddy is gone. Later, Machine pops his head up when a German looks under the tank with his flashlight. His eyes are wide. He raises his hands in surrender. The German hesitates, then leaves him there. In the cold morning, Machine climbs back into the tank to cover Wardaddy's corpse with his coat. Soon after, he's rescued by Americans. Jon Bernthal is a force of nature, as usual. Shia Labeouf is quietly awesome, as usual. Brad Pitt plays his WWII guy, which is good, as usual. Michael Peña brings his own special magic to the table. Some of the overhead shots are great. I wonder how much was practical effects? According to "Fury" , ... almost all of it. Amazing. Neal Brennan: Crazy Good (2024) -- "8/10" I like Neal's specials. His best bit in this one is about how craziness is intrinsically linked to excellence in sports. He goes from Michael Jordan to Michael Phelps to gymnasts. Kyrie Irving. And so on. He makes the joke that the "sun is police for white people". He moves on Sigmund Freud's coke habit, that most of his books should have been titled "This May Be the Cocaine Talking..." Or that the Wright brothers' idea to fly was classic methhead thinking. Rappers are all crazy. He took a swipe at Woody Allen in a joke about God distributing points for character traits and there was nothing left over for "not fucking his family." Great. Nice one. Way to promulgate a 30-year-dead myth, though. Everybody laughed. Because "it's not true" , but people think it's true. That's what makes it so funny, right? The following citations come from "Neal Brennan: Crazy Good (2024) | Transcript" . This is a great line about crypto and Bitcoin enthusiasts: "My issue with crypto is everyone who told me about crypto had never spoken about finances before, ever. It’s like, “Weren’t you a DJ three weeks ago?”" Exactly. Why am I listening to you about anything, especially finances? He talked about the state of social-media and public performances, which are getting so over-the-top because it's lucrative. "Yeah, but again, some of these girls are full of shit. You know they are. This can’t all be trauma. Everything’s trauma to them. They’ll be like, “I had so much trauma today at Starbucks.” “I was literally shaking.” Well, you’re addicted to Adderall, so that checks out. [audience laughing] "Also, ladies, if you can talk about it on social media, probably not trauma! Just letting you know. Trauma’s a physical thing. Physical thing. Not a vibe, a physical thing that happened to you that’s so jarring to your body and spirit that you don’t know how to process it, let alone post about it on social media with captions and music." I mean, it's obvious that it's not trauma. It's performance. For money. It's not real. It's like getting mad at Sylvester Stallone for being a boxer or a soldier. He's neither of those. He's and actor and a painter. Or it's like getting mad at a comedian for an "opinion they have" or "story they told" on stage. It's not real. Get a grip. Just don't watch it. Still, the burn was pretty funny. I am pleased to report that this next joke checks out. I've got a lot invested in there being no encryption back-doors in messaging services. "You’re not really friends with somebody unless you’re both worried that if your text messages went public, you’d both lose your jobs. That is a friendship, and you cherish it and you nurture it, and you should encrypt it, probably." On Donald Trump and Joe Rogan: "if you had asked me in the year 2004 who the most consequential political figures in America would be in 2024, I would not have said the host of The Apprentice and the host of Fear Factor. Would not have said it." Finally, I don't know if this is a metaphor for anything else, but it's pretty funny in its own right. You kind of have to see him deliver the lines, though. "A woman said, “Neal, you know what’s great about you? When I tell you I’m gonna have an orgasm, you keep on doing what you were doing.” "[women cheering and applauding] "A lot of the guys have no idea why you’re applauding. [audience laughing] "Fellas, keep on doing what you were doing. Same angle, same rhythm, same force. [women cheering] Keep on doing what you were doing. Same angle, same rhythm, same force. "Women will say, “I’m gonna have an orgasm,” and the guy will say, “Now’s a good time for the corkscrew.” Dummy! [audience laughing] "Keep on doing what you were doing! Same angle, same rhythm, same force. “Neal, how am I gonna remember that?” ARF." Black Mass (2015) -- "8/10" This is the true story of James 'Whitey' Bulger (Johnny Depp), who grew up in South Boston -- "Southie" -- with his brother Billy (Benedict Cumberbatch), who becomes a Senator, and John Connolly (Joel Edgerton), who ends up in the FBI. Connolly works with Charles McGuire (Kevin Bacon), John Morris (David Harbour), and Robert Fitzpatrick (Adam Scott). The story starts with Kevin Weeks (Jesse Plemons) turning state's evidence on his role in the Winter Hill Gang that ended up running South Boston and that went head-to-head with the Mafia from the North in an epic turf war. The story follows the sheer brutality of all parties involved. The Italian Mafia is trying to take over Bulger's territory. He's eyeing their territory. The Feds want to make cases. They don't really care how, so they enter a deal with Bulger, protecting him from all police activity, while going to town on the Italian Mafia. Is Bulger actually helping them? It doesn't seem that he's actually providing them with any actionable information, all while reaping the benefits of being under the protective aegis of federal law enforcement. We follow Whitey's life from a youth to the field general of the Winter Hill gang. He marries and has a child, which seems to anchor him somewhat. His child dies of Reye Syndrome -- and Whitey always kind of blames his wife for having given the child aspirin, for having followed the doctor's instructions. No-one could have known but Whitey needs to blame someone. The tragedy is portrayed as having been formative of his brutality but I don't believe it. It looks like that brutality was there all along. Connolly becomes more and more like the lieutenants of the Winter Hill gang. He's chummy with them. His wife (Julianne Nicholson) hates it and lets him know it. This causes a rift between them. He's bringing home the bacon, after all. McGuire starts to doubt the effectiveness of the whole scheme, while Connolly starts to actively fight to protect his cash cow Bulger. He starts to tip Whitey off to moles within his own organization, getting people that the FBI works with killed in the line of duty. A new assistant U.S. attorney isn't buying any of it -- and also isn't obligated by prior relationships to put up with it. He discovers that Bulger has never really helped the FBI and that Connolly and his crew are really the only ones who've ever benefitted from the relationship within the FBI. Bulger goes on the lam, calling his brother one last time. The others are rounded up. Brutal but low-level bastards like Weeks are given slaps on the wrist for having turned state's evidence. Connolly caught a 42-year bit for murder, while Whitey was only finally caught in 2011, whereupon he picked up two life sentences and died in prison, seven years later, at the age of 89. The most brutal man in the story lived free until he was 82. Batman: The Animated Series (1992) -- "5/10" I thought I would like this better, but it's just too slow and childish for me. I stopped at the second episode, Christmas with the Joker, which was just so formulaic and boring that I had to give up. The artwork is great, which is why I gave it a higher rating. The stories are pretty childish, though, even though the dark themes and murderous intent is not really for the level of child that would enjoy the simplicity of the plots. Masters of the Universe: Revolution (2024) -- "2/10" Indecipherable trash. I couldn't get through the first half of the first episode. I didn't realize it had been made in 2021. It's voiced by Liam Cunningham, Stephen Root, Lena Headey, Gates McFadden, Keith David, Diedrich Bader, and Mark Hamill, so I had higher hopes. I guess they were just there for the payday. A sample of "the script" from the first five minutes or so. "Orko: And I'm Orko, his fearless friend with the tiny ticket to Subternia. Scare Glow: You. Adam: We didn't come to fight, Scare Glow. Our friends were sent to Subternia by Skeletor when he stole the Power. So we ask that you let us leave the land of the dead with the souls of our friends, Clamp Champ and Fisto. "[...] "Buzz-Off: Anyone else feeling buzzed? Snout Spout: I feel a sneeze coming on. ( trumpets ) Even cowboys get the pews... as in pew, pew, pew! Yeehaw!" Clamp Champ? Fisto? Scare Glow? Snout Spout? What is happening? Look: either the LLMs are already writing everything or we won't notice when they start doing so. If you're used to watching stuff like this, then you'll never, ever notice. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] These are notes for me to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. The amount of text is not proportional to my enjoyment. I might write less because I didn't get around to it when it was fresh in my mind. I rate the film based on how well it suited me personally for the genre, my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. Links are to "my IMDb ratings" ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5032 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=5032 Fri, 31 May 2024 22:43:43 +0200 -- "8/10" 2. "Barbie (2023)" <#Barbie> -- "5/10" 3. "Simon Romang: Charrette! (2022)" <#Simon> -- 8/10 4. "Darkman (1990)" <#Darkman> -- "6/10" 5. "Bullet Train (1990)" <#Bullet> -- "6/10" 6. "Last of the Mohicans (1992)" <#Last> -- "8/10" 7. "Mission Impossible II (2000)" <#Mission> -- "8/10" 8. "Father Figures (2017)" <#Father> -- "5/10" 9. "Athena (2022)" <#Athena> -- "5/10" 10. "Archer: Series Finale (2024)" <#Archer> -- "9/10" Big Fish (2003) -- "8/10" Tim Burton directs this offbeat story (I know, it almost goes without saying) of a couple of generations of a family. Ed Bloom (Ewan McGregor) has a fish story. His son Will (Billy Crudup) tells his story. Ed is married to Sandra (Jessica Lange). Will has just married Josephine (Marion Cotillard). Will tells his father's story, starting with how he met one-eyed Jenny (Helena Bonham Carter), who has an eyepatch. The neighborhood kids heard that you can see how you'll die in the reflection of her fake eye. Will and Josephine visit his dying father (Albert Finney, as older Ed). His doctor is played by Robert Guillaume. Will recalls another of his father's stories, when he'd spent three years in bed, growing up too quickly. As he aged and finally got out of bed, he became a football, baseball, and basketball star, started his own landscaping business in high school, won science awards, and saved dogs for the fire department. A giant (Matthew McGrory) comes to town, terrorizing everyone. Ed Bloom goes to the creature's cave to talk him into leaving his town alone. He meets the giant and teams up with him, to get him out of town, but also to get himself out of town. On their way out of town, they come to a fork in the road. Ed takes the way through the woods, while the giant takes the road. Ed gives the giant his pack for safekeeping. He goes through an increasingly dangerous-looking forest until he gets to a full-fledged town -- Specter. He meets Mildred (Missi Pyle) and Beamen (Loudon Wainwright III), who take him to meet the poet Norther Winslow (Steve Buscemi). Later that night, he sees a lovely naked woman about to be attacked by a snake. He saves her, but she dives away without saying a word or showing her face. The little girl from town says that it was a fish that looks different to every person. At the festival that night, he reveals that he wants to leave the town, despite the amply proportioned women, despite the soft grass, despite the friendly little girl. The townspeople are bewildered -- no one's ever wanted to leave before. He gets out of town and ended up at the Calloway Circus, run by Amos Calloway (Danny DeVito) with his assistant Mr. Soggybottom (Deep Roy). Karl the giant gets a job and Ed meets his future wife Sandra Templeton. He works at the circus for a while until he finally learns her name from Amos. He starts stalking her to get her to break off her engagement to the guy from his high school who'd almost ended up second banana to him -- and he has the nerve to call him a jerk. He gets his ass kicked by that guy, making Sandra change her mind about marrying the bully. Cute trick, Ed. The pity play. Always a good play. He's nearly immediately drafted and serves in Vietnam, taking hazardous assignments so that he can get out as quickly as possible. Interesting logic. He crashes into a Vietnamese USO show, steals some secret documents, then teams up with conjoined twins to sneak out of there and back into the U.S. by way of Cuba. Will confronts his father on all of his fibbing, but his father stands strong and says he is who he is. Will cleans the pond behind the house; a giant fish crests the surface. He startles. At his mother's behest, he begins to clean out his father's old office in the shed. We're back in the past, with Ed on the road as a traveling salesman. In a Texas bank, he meets Norther Winslow, who'd also left Specter. Norther's there to rob it. He ropes Ed into the heist, but they discover that the bank had already been robbed. They escape together in a roadster. They part ways, with Norther heading to Wall Street to make millions and Ed going back on the road. Norther sent him $10k of his first million, with which Ed bought a "proper house", which was a godddamned palace. I honestly can't tell if people are being facetious anymore. Will finds a deed to the home of Jenny (the witch). He visits to find out more. She tells a story of how Ed had gotten caught in a rainstorm so bad that his car ended up in a tree, after a flood. He'd ended up in Spectrer again, but this time after it had been hollowed out by speculators. Edward purchases the town of Spectrer to preserve it, using his many connections -- Worther, Amos, and so on. He leaves people in their houses. The last house belongs to Jenny, who refuses to sell. He fixes up her house until it's brand new. She signs the quitclaim deed. Jenny ends her story, assuring Will that nothing had ever happened, that she'd been the one living in a fairy tale, while Will and his family were "real". I kind of liked how fantastical this movie was, how you couldn't tell what was real and what wasn't. It spoke to the power of at least a little bit of fantasy to make life worth living. Barbie (2023) -- "5/10" I can't believe that adults went to this movie and came back to tell everyone how great it was. it is a toy commercial combined with a Bennetton ad. I don't even think it's worth it to describe the plot. It's pretty insipid. I don't expect it to stray very far from the extremely straightforward Disney story that they just spent ten minutes of exposition on. There will be more exposition. For example, from the mouths of teenaged girls, who call Barbie a fascist. A bunch of stuff happens before the next soliloquy -- this time delivered by the girl's mother -- that sounds like it was a reader letter on Jezebel or Tumblr. They also make sure that no-one misses what happened by repeating it a few times. This is tedious. Is there a point to this film other than spouting risible ideas? This is much more like a Disney movie. It's for children, although it's probably not even appropriate for them. Actual adults have said that this was their favorite movie of the year. In a huge surprise, the exclusively matriarchal society becomes an exclusively patriarchal society, and then all is right with the world when it's returned to an exclusively patriarchal society. Simon Romang: Charrette! (2022) -- 8/10 I stumbled across this Swiss stand-up comedian on a French channel and gave it a shot. I was pleasantly surprised at how much I was able to understand -- and that it was funny for me. It helped that he's from Switzerland, so I could relate to a lot of his topics. The following is a list of the topics, as I understood them. * Growing up in Valais * His mother * His father * Eating meat * Trying vegetarianism * A new-age retreat with 50-year-old shamans * Growing up in the Steiner school * Moving to Paris * Taking part in a dance troupe * Moving to New York * Working with John and the Chinese ladies * Hanging out with Carl Smith * Falling in love with Emma * Obama gets elected in 2008 * Back in Apples / Senarclens * Taking his dad's place in the local show * Finishing up on New York, New York Here's the trailer: [media] Obviously, I watched it in French, with French subtitles. The subtitles didn't always match what he's saying, but they're helpful nonetheless. Darkman (1990) -- "6/10" This is a very, very early superhero movie, directed by Sam Raimi. It tells the story of Dr. Peyton Westlake (Liam Neeson), a scientist who's working on synthetic skin for burn victims. His girlfriend Julie Hastings (Frances McDormand) discovers corruption at the highest levels of city government. This leads to an attack on Westlake, who's burned horribly and left for dead. He ends up in the hospital, where he gets surgery that kills his sensory nervous system, but gives him adrenalin-based super-strength. This is pretty low-level superhero stuff, but it is what it is. Westlake and Julie end up trying to take down the corrupt city-bosses who are trying to take over the city permanently and who disfigured him. They prevail, but Westlake is too psychologically unstable to be able to stay with her -- even if she can take his disfigurement. He slips away into the crowd. The end. Raimi's fingerprints are all over this movie, making it better than it had any right to be. Even then, though, it still wasn't great. Since it came out in 1990, it was still nearly exclusively practical effects, which was nice. Bullet Train (1990) -- "6/10" This movie thinks it's way cuter than it is. It's one of those dialogue-driven, impossible-to-predict kind of movies trying to be Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels. It stars Brad Pitt as some sort of hired agent/killer called Ladybug. There's Zazie Beetz seemingly unaware that she's doing a bad job of reprising her Domino role from Deadpool 2 (which was way, way better than this). The movie takes place on a Japanese bullet train. There's a bunch of betrayal, a few people die, others don't. Brad Pitt manages to get all the way through, presumably trying to set up a franchise that we can all hope never comes. Look, it wasn't terrible but it also wasn't good. It's content. I watched it while riding the indoor bike. It's kind of structured like a video game, with various enemies and bosses, until the grand denouement, where the train derails utterly, killing everyone but Ladybug and a few other people that were deemed worthy of survival. Last of the Mohicans (1992) -- "8/10" Hawkeye (Daniel Day-Lewis) is a white warrior who lives with the Mohicans. He's kind of the central figure, but Chingachgook (Russell Means) is actually the last Mohican. Honestly, I just really liked the refresher of American history I got when I was growing up. There were Mohawk and Huron scheming against each other. There were the absolutely horrifically racist British commanders and soldiers, who just could not fathom insubordination from anyone that they considered inferior. They were mystified that anyone would be even slightly reluctant to give their life for the crown. The main baddie is Colonel Edmund Munro (Maurice Roëves), whose two daughters are trapped in the fort he commands, as it is about to be overwhelmed by French troops. Major Heyward (Steven Waddington) can't see a single reason why Munro's daughter Cora (Madeleine Stowe) wouldn't want to marry him. He's almost as offended by her reluctance / diplomatic refusal as Munro is by the savages' lack of commitment to dying for the crown. Magua, a Huron posing as a Mohawk (Wes Studi), agrees to lead Cora, her sister Alice (Jodhi May), and Heyward to safety, but he betrays them in a planned ambush. Magua is a great baddie. They are rescued by Hawkeye, Chingachgook, and Chingachgook's son Uncas (Eric Schweig). Hawkeye and Cora make googley eyes at each other, as do Uncas and Alice. Munro betrays the local villagers, not allowing them to return to defend their villages. Instead, he demands that they remain and protect the fort. Munro is well-and-truly trapped, though. Hawkeye helps the villagers sneak away from the fort, leaving Munro without enough people to defend it. Once he learns that there is no backup coming in the form of General Webb, he is forced to surrender to the French. Magua and his fellow Hurons ambush the retreating British and Magua personally slices out Munro's black heart, right after promising him that he will also kill his two daughters. Magua is relentless and hunts down Hawkeye and co., capturing Core and Alice, while Hawkeye, Chigachgook, and Uncas escape over a waterfall. Magua takes his three prisoners -- Cora, Alice, and Heyward -- back to his tribal elder for judgment. It is decided that Heyward will return to the British, that Alice will marry Magua, and that Cora will be burned at the stake. Hawkeye shows up to parley. He offers to take Cora's place, but he can't speak Huron or French. Instead, Heyward translates for him into French, which the Huron chief both understands and speaks. Heyward offers himself instead, allowing Hawkeye to leave with Cora. Once he's gotten away far enough, Hawkeye shoots Heyward to put him out of his misery and to reward him for his selfless final act. Hawkeye, Chingachgook, and Uncas pursue Magua to rescue Alice, but Magua -- awesome baddie, remember -- throws an over-eager Uncas off a cliff. Alice leaps to her death rather than remain with Magua. That's gotta hurt. I'm surprised we didn't see Magua wince in pain at that. Hawkeye and Chingachgook get the drop on Magua, with Chingachgook challenging Magua to and then defeating him in single combat. That means that Magua's finally dead and that Hawkeye and Cora will live happily ever after, while Chingachgook, now without a son, is the titular last Mohican. Mission Impossible II (2000) -- "8/10" John Woo directed the follow-up to the by-now (if not then) long-running series that Brian DePalma started. Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) recruits thief Nyah Hall (Thandiwe Newton), falling for her at the same time. He then nearly immediately meets with his mission commander (Anthony Hopkins), who tells him that Nyah needs to seduce a former lover Sean Ambrose (Dougray Scott) who'd stolen a lethal and supposedly irreversible poison called Chimera from Dr. Nekhorvich (Rade Serbedzija). He joins up with his team as Nyah infiltrates Ambrose's group. Luther Strickell (Ving Rhames) is on board, as is Billy Baird (John Polson). Ambrose meets with McCloy (Brendan Gleeson) about a purchase of Chimera. Ambrose's right-hand man Hugh Stamp (Richard Roxburgh) is onto them, and the groups tango back and forth. Ambrose knows that Nyah is spying on him, but he lets her, giving her some information, but deliberately misleading the IMF and Ethan Hunt. The poison turns out to be curable. Nyah gets backed into a corner and injects herself with it, in order to keep Ambrose from getting it. She is still in Ambrose's hands. He lets her loose in Sydney, Australia, where she would be a viral bomb within 24 hours. This is a grand setup for the final act, where Ethan Hunt almost single-handedly penetrates Ambrose's fortress and tricks Ambrose's henchmen into killing Hugh. Spoiler: Hunt uses a lifelike mask, just like he always does. Ambrose and Hunt go mano a mano and motorcycle a motorcycle with Hunt prevailing. Obviously. Nyah was rescued by Luther (Ving Rhames), obviously. Everyone lives happily ever after. Or, at least, until MI3. This was a fun romp of an action film, though. Dougray Scott is a good villain. So is Richard Roxburgh. Father Figures (2017) -- "5/10" Peter Reynolds (Ed Helms) is a proctologist with a twin brother Kyle (Owen Wilson). At their mother Helen's (Glenn Close) wedding to her second husband, they discover that their father isn't dead -- it's just that she was never sure who he was. She points them in the direction of Terry Bradshaw, who's delighted to meet long-lost sons. They have a great day together, but soon discover that Bradshaw is almost certainly not their dad. It's also definitely not Rod Hamilton (Ving Rhames) either, even though he also fondly remembers Helen as a "dick whisperer". In the meantime, Kyle finds out that his job and fortunes aren't as secure as he thought they were. He's got a kid on the way. He's also a spectacular idiot. Next, they think that maybe Roland Hunt (J.K. Simmons) is their dad. He's a stockbroker, living in a grandiose home with his mother (June Squibb). He tells them he's a repo man, but he's really a thief. He abandons them to a couple he's trying to rob, which catches them red-handed. Shots are fired. The boys steal the Ferrari, then run Roland over with it. At the hospital, they discover that they have incompatible blood types. The search continues. They're on the way back to the airport from the hospital where they left Roland. At Kyle's behest, they pick up a hitchhiker (Katt Williams) on the way. They get stuck on a train track, getting their rental plowed to pieces. The cops that show up give them a clue to their next father candidate, Paddy or "Sparkly P", who turns out to have been a spectacular drug warrior in the 70s and 80s. They get on the road again, drop off the hitchhiker, then head to a pub for dinner. When Kyle's in the bathroom, Pete hits on a lady at the bar, Sarah (Katie Aselton). Kyle sleeps in the car, while Pete has a one-night stand. They get to Paddy's house, where they find him lying in state. They get into a fight with what they think are their brothers. And Pete's hook-up turns out to possibly be their sister. Paddy's brother clears things up, giving them their next clue -- their childhood cat's veterinarian Chairman Meow. They get to the vet's office and deal with his secretary Ali (Ali Wong), then get a look at Dr. Walter Tinkler (Christopher Walken), who tries to escape. "Death, yes. It comes for us all. Even kitties." They hit him with a tranquilizer dart, then their mom shows up. She agrees to fill in missing details. Ali tries to get on board with her own trauma, but Walken cuts her off with "Ali, don't bring your own drum to the concert.". Helen tells them that she'd adopted them from a woman at the abused-women shelter where she's worked. That's the big reveal. Honestly, it's not a great movie. I kept watching because of Ed Helms and Owen Wilson, who have pretty good chemistry, and then eventually because of Christopher Walken. I'm glad that I learned the best name for a cat I've heard in a while: Chairman Meow. Athena (2022) -- "5/10" The tale starts with Abdel (Dali Benssalah) urging for calm after his younger brother had been found beaten to death by three policemen. His other brother Karim (Sami Slimane) leads a band of rioters to disrupt the press conference, stealing a police van and several weapons before heading back to the banlieue of Athena. There are long scenes of Karim leading the resistance as the banlieue hunkers down under the oncoming police assault. Inside is also Moktar (Ouassini Embarek), a drug dealer who's been trapped inside with a large stash. Abdel returns to Athena to attend a memorial service, but there are altercations and further action until he and several residents are kettled and taken into custody by police. The police ask Abdel for help, but he is not very interested, sneaking back into Athena soon after. Meanwhile, the police advance. Their approach is broken up by the Athena residents, with young officer Jerôme (Anthony Bajon) becoming separated from the others and taken captive. The Athenians send a video of their hostage to the police. Abdel rescues Jerôme from the worst of the rioters, eventually taking refuge with Moktar, who turns out to be his half-brother. Abdel calls the police to negotiate but they give him the runaround, not particularly interested in what will happen to Jerôme. They insist that the police officers in the video -- the ones who'd beaten his brother to death -- were not police officers at all, and that they therefore cannot deliver their names, as requested. This turns out to be true, with the entire incident having been manufactured by right-wing agitators. Neither the police nor the rioters were really at fault for the action. It was all a manipulative waste of life and limb for everyone involved -- except for the manipulators who've managed to anger everyone. Karim is killed by police in a confrontation from which he refused to back down, and Abdel is killed in an explosion that tears out two floors of the high-rise building. So, the entire family was wiped out, the banlieue of Athena has been partially destroyed, and the police have lost no-one, as Jerôme was safely returned from captivity. I thought the movie focused a lot more on style than substance and was pretty incoherent. There was no investigation on the part of the police, and the script simply delivered the pat story of the right-wing instigators in the final minutes, for what I suppose they considered to be closure. Many of the actors were chewing the scenery pretty hard, with stylized and long shots panning over them, as they posed moodily. I watched the movie in French with French subtitles (while riding the indoor bike). Archer: Series Finale (2024) -- "9/10" In this series finale, the gang is on a mission to save themselves from the UN making all international and non-state spy agencies illegal. Lana (Aisha Tyler) is in charge of the agency, Archer (H. Jon Benjamin) is still butt-hurt about it, as well as about being semi-replaced by Zara Khan (Natalie Dew). Cyril (Chris Parnell) is still Cyril, as are Krieger (Lucky Yates), Pam (Amber Nash), and Cheryl (Judy Greer), true to their characters to the last. Ray (Adam Gillette) and Barry (Dave Willis) also get a lot of deserved screen time. Baddies Slater (Christian Slater) and Katya (Ona Grauer) are back for one last rodeo. Krieger asks Cheryl to solve their money problems by buying out the agency -- she is, after, all an heiress with billions -- but she refuses because she doesn't think they're worth it. This is also one last time for Archer to prove his invincibility. He's shot, imprisoned, electrocuted, and beaten around by ex-nearly-wife super-robot Katya. Pam gets into a knock-down, drag-out fistfight with Boris, a Russian agent at the Russian club/headquarters that they're breaking into. We get to see Pam's tattoo one last time. "For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast, and breathed in the face of the foe as he passed; and the eyes of the sleepers waxed deadly and chill, and their hearts but once heaved, and for ever grew still!" Cyril and Lana discuss their previous relationship in a pretty spicy way, "Lana: If you knew the amount of lying and cheating and moral compromise being the boss requires, you would all never stop giving me cսnnіlіngսs. Cyril: Well, if the offer is on the table... Lana: Oh, no. I dated you, remember? And even that big ass hog of yours didn't make up for your mouth in more ways than one. You would apologize to the bullet that killed you. Cyril: Well, I'm sorry for being polite. Lana: Oh, you just did it again! Jesus Christ!" In the end, the gang manages to stop Slater and Katya from starting a new cold war -- ironic, because, in actual reality, a new one has definitely started -- with Archer letting Slater fall to his death, despite Slater offering to tell him who his father is. Katya and Barry merge into a single robotic entity that Archer ends up banging, while all of the others celebrate their victory. The U.N. still votes to make all private spy agencies illegal. Months later, Sterling Archer is on the run, causing trouble. The world's spy agencies find Lana to hire her to stop Archer. She knows exactly where he is: he's in her office with AJ. They agree to play a lucrative game of cat-and-mouse with Archer "out in the cold." Pam shows up to join Archer as his partner in rogue espionage -- utterly unsurprisingly. The end. I gave it extra points because it is a really good finale for the series. It does a callback to the very first seconds of the first episode, where Archer, as "Duchess", is being tortured by Boris. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] These are notes for me to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. The amount of text is not proportional to my enjoyment. I might write less because I didn't get around to it when it was fresh in my mind. I rate the film based on how well it suited me personally for the genre, my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. Links are to "my IMDb ratings" ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4981 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4981 Sun, 19 May 2024 21:18:20 +0200 -- "5/10" 2. "Castlevania S04 (2021)" <#Castlevania> -- "8/10" 3. "Paddleton (2019)" <#Paddleton> -- "8/10" 4. "Star Trek: Nemesis (2002)" <#Star> -- "7/10" 5. "The Curse S01 (2023)" <#The> -- "5/10" 6. "Death Note (2017)" <#Death> -- "5/10" 7. "Licorice Pizza (2021)" <#Licorice> -- "5/10" 8. "A Series of Unfortunate Events S01--S03 (2017--2019)" <#A> -- "7/10" 9. "Long Shot (2019)" <#Long> -- "9/10" 10. "Dune (2021)" <#Dune> -- "8/10" How it Ends (2018) -- "5/10" Will Younger (Theo James) and Samantha Sutherland (Kat Graham) are expecting. Her parents know that they're together, but they don't know that they're pregnant. Will travels to Chicago to have dinner with her parents Paula (Nicole Ari Parker) and Tom (Forest Whitaker). Tom is a dismissive hard-ass, a control-freak Marine with 27 years of service. They're apparently also wealthy, so they're of course entitled to be shitty to everyone, including their future son-in-law. Before Will flies back, he's on the phone with Sam and she cuts out. She can only say that something is happening, but she doesn't have time to say what. She's scared. She cuts out. It's not just her. There is no communication at all with the west coast. Will can't fly back to Seattle because nothing is flying. The electricity is out in Chicago as well. F22s soar by. He returns to Tom and Paula's apartment to find Tom packing for a cross-country ride to find his daughter. Is will coming? It's an uncomfortable ride because Tom doesn't respect Will at all. They stop for gas. Tom has to defend Will from getting mugged by a bunch of drifters. Tom's respect hasn't risen. Soon, though, their way is blocked They get on the wrong side of a cop who turns out to be an escaped inmate. He tries to pull them over and take them down, but they get the jump on him. Tom breaks a rib They get away with both cars, pulling in to a small group of houses with a garage on a reservation. There they meet mechanic Ricki (Grace Dove) who fixes their radiator but has questions about all of the bullet holes. They convince her that they're not dangerous and she accompanies them to the west coast for $2,000, promising to help fix their car if they need it. They make their way west, restocking as needed, but get jumped by another group, which steals all of their gas. They give chase. Will hunts them down, with Ricky riding shotgun and firing the pistol out the window. Tom is not doing well. The earlier car crash punctured his lung; his breathing is labored and he's weak. He couldn't raise his arm to shoot the interlopers. Ricky's shooting causes the other car to flip. She and Will race over to rescue...the fuel canisters and, maybe, also the people. Nope, it's gonna just be the fuel canisters. Boom. Ricky is torn up about the people she's killed. Toward dawn, she demands that they pull over. She wretches by the side of the road, curses at them, curses at herself, then moves down the road a piece to be away from them. They all fall asleep. Later that morning, they wake to find Ricky gone. Tom is drifting in and out. He and Will finally connect, revealing their secrets. Tom's breathing grows worse and he pulls out a medical stent that Will has to plunge into his lung to release the pressure. They drive on. In the middle of the next night, they cross a bridge and are ambushed by a local, self-elected constabulary. Will exhibits no small amount of savoir faire, executing not one, but two J-turns on a narrow bridge. Tom is pleased that this man will be able to take care of his daughter for him. He helps Will one last time by shooting several of the interlopers out the rear, passenger-side window, then succumbs to his condition and dies in the back of the car. When the car runs out of gas, Will uses the dregs from one canister to douse it and give Tom a funeral pyre. He walks westward. A truck stops. A man with wife and child. He agrees to take Will northward, but not necessarily further west. Will shows them where his father lives. Well, lived -- there's no-one home. They rest and there's food for a few weeks. Will makes them a deal: they get the house, the food, and the car in the garage if you can take their truck immediately and continue west. Deal. He keeps driving, without further incident, until he gets to Seattle. There, the air is thick with ash, too thick to breathe. He finds a mask in an abandoned fire truck and continues onward, toward the city, where he finds his old apartment. There's a location and a message for him scrawled on the door. Sam is alive. He drives to where she indicated -- no idea how he did that, as GPS has been dead for nearly a week -- and finds her holed up with their former neighbor Jeremiah (Mark O'Brien). The guy acts a bit weird, though. He's obviously highly paranoid, is strongly convinced of the veracity of far-fetched and completely evidence-free, unprovable, and, frankly, irrelevant theories about what's happened, and he's in love with Sam. He asks to see Will's weapon -- a Sig Sauer. Will hands it. The clip is empty. The next morning Jeremiah leads Will into the woods, pretending that he'd seen two kids run into them after having seen them sneaking around Will's truck. They see two deer running, giving Jeremiah an excuse to pull his own weapon. Will says "You don't have to do this." Jeremiah turns on him; Will calmly shoots him in the head. He'd fooled Jeremiah into thinking he had no bullets. His father-in-law must have been smiling from beyond the grave. More ash is starting to fall. Will races back to the house to gather up Sam and get the hell out of there. "Where's Jeremiah?" "He tried to kill me." The pyroclastic cloud rumbles closer as they race up a dirt road, just escaping its clutches as it seems to be subsiding. The end. No closure on what caused the volcanic eruptions, no closure on why the power went out everywhere. No closure really at all. It's not the ending that ruins it, though. It's the half-assed story that meanders and seems to be designed to be made cheaply as a film. Most of the film takes place in a Buick. The most expensive part of the movie was probably Forest Whitaker, which is why I bumped the rating a star. Theo James wasn't bad, either. Castlevania S04 (2021) -- "8/10" This season picks up with a long segment of Sypha and Belmont battling increasingly recalcitrant and resistant Dracula-worshippers, all of whom seem to be trying whatever means they can to try to bring Dracula back from the dead. None of the methods have a chance of being effective yet, but it's possibly only a matter of time. They finally end up in Târgoviște, where they defeat yet another band of vampire-worshipers. They are exhausted and need to regroup for a day or two. Belmont surreptitiously slides a magical dagger into his sleeve. Meanwhile, Alucard is drinking himself into a stupor every night, and has added to his collection of piked corpses outside his front door. One morning, a horse with a dead rider arrives at his steps. The card on the rider says that the village from which the rider came needs his help. Strangely, he feel the urge to help, "like a Belmont." The season cleans up all of the loose ends, with some well-choreographed and spectacular battles. What happens? Hector traps Lenore, thwarting the slave ring. Isaac attacks Carmela's castle, conquering it with his night creatures. Carmela falls in battle. Lenore remains trapped with Hector in what is now Isaac's castle. "Lenore: As a quartet, my sisters and I had strength. The strength to enforce a stable environment. Strength can fight a war, yes, but it can also build a shelter. Are you following me? Hector: Just bumping into things along the way. Small shapes are stronger than big ones, Lenore. Carmilla wanted more than a weatherproof shelter. Lenore: In the end. But it all came from that virtue, do you see? Hector: Strength and power are different. You wanted strength. Carmilla wanted power. Lenore: In the end, yes. That's what it turned into. Which is what ruined my life. Power. Big, international, non-diplomatic, projected power is something else. It lends you more might, but it doesn't have the utilities of strength. It lays eggs in you. It becomes a parasite you have to feed. Power does nothing but eat. Hector: Like a vampire. Lenore: Like a vampire." She eventually walks out to greet the sunrise, obtaining freedom. In another thread, Alucard has teamed up with villagers, hosting them in his home. The demons chasing them seek them out there and he fights a losing battle to defend the castle. At the same time, Saint Germain has revealed himself to a right bastard, hell-bent not only on reuniting with his lady love, but also with transforming Dracula and his wife into some sort of hermaphroditic hybrid that will be so enraged at its condition that it will kill all of humanity. Using the power of these corpses, St. Germain will be able to open the Infinite Corridor and finally find his lady love, who he'd lost there so long ago. Whoops, it turns out that his partner-in-crime is actually Death-with-a-capital-D, who's also very interested in lots of dead things and takes over the whole show. After Syphy, Alucard, and Belmont do battle with Death for a while, Belmont pulls out some special weapons he'd cobbled together from magical pieces he'd cobbled together from some crypts somewhere and then engages Death in a Kratos-from-God-of-War-style, battle-with-a-Colossus in which he eventually not only triumphs against Death, but is also whisked away via the Infinite Corridor by St. Germain in his final gesture before Death takes him too. Dracula and his wife are also defeated i.e., not even allowed to fully form. They're all happy and safe and sound at Alucard's castle, where they start to found a new village. The end. [image] Paddleton (2019) -- "8/10" Michael (Mark Duplass) and Andy (Ray Romano) are neighbors. Andy lives above Michael. They play a game called Paddleton together, seemingly every day. It involves tennis balls, a filthy barrel, and the back of a drive-in-movie-theater screen. It doesn't really matter. They play Trivial Pursuit, too. They watch the same kung-fu movie again and again. Michael has cancer. It's terminal. Andy's OCD isn't really built for these situations. Michael says that, since he has to little time to live, he can get a prescription for life-ending medication. They have to drive six hours to get it. I wondered how real this was and learned from the article "This New Netflix Dramedy Was Almost Entirely Improvised" by Angelica Florio "This type of medical care, in which a medical professional prescribes a lethal dose of a medication to a terminally ill patient, is legal in Washington D.C., Hawaii, Oregon, Colorado, Vermont and Washington state, and as of June 2018, it's legal in California — though litigation challenging the law is currently underway, CNN reports. Since Paddleton is set in California, it's not a far-reaching plot." They end up in a sleepy little town with a lot of windmills. They pick up the medication and check in to a motel, where they are mistaken for a gay couple. They're definitely a couple. They're just not gay. Andy buys a mini-safe, purportedly to protect the expensive medication from being stolen, but really because he wants to somehow prevent Michael from using it to kill himself. Andy and Michael go to an open-mic night, they sneak into the motel's jacuzzi, meet the motel owner, who hits on them more than a little bit, then make their way back home. Michael deteriorates. Andy helps him prepare his "medication". Michael takes the does. Andy watches over him. Michael panics, but Andy reassures him. They truly are best friends, platonic lovers even. It's pretty heartwarming. Andy is cast adrift without his friend, but he rallies in the end, befriending his new neighbor and her teenage son. It's a needlessly mawkish ending, but the movie was never going to know how to end itself. Which is kind of ironic, considering the subject. I gave it an extra star because both leads were very good. Star Trek: Nemesis (2002) -- "7/10" Captain Picard (Patrick Stewart) is the best man at First Officer Riker's (Jonathan Frakes) and Counselor Deanna Troi (Marina Sirtis) wedding. They embark on a trip to the Beta home world, where Deanna is from. On the way, they stop at a planet where they'd picked up positronic signals -- indicating an android like Data (Brent Spiner). Worf (Michael Dorn) collects the parts of an older model B-4. They move on to the planet Remus, where they meet a clone of Picard, Shinzon (Tom Hardy), who is trying to break the Romulan/Human peace. He schemes with Donatra (Dina Meyer) and his Viceroy (Ron Perlman). Shinzon meets with Picard and tells his tale. It sounds remarkably like that of Bane, whom Hardy also played in The Dark Knight. Shinzon now sees himself as the savior of the Remun race, releasing them from the subjugation of both the Romulans and the Humans. Shinzon takes Picard captive, using B-4 as a decoy. But Picard uses Data as a decoy for B-4 and escapes into Shinzon's ship. The jig is up pretty quickly, with a whole platoon of Remuns converging on Picard, who's shootin' 'em up like he was in a Star Wars movie, while Data tries to decode the security system so that they can break into a hangar. They get into a ship, then realize that they have to fly through its corridors like they were in Descent to get to a what looks for all the world like a stained-glass window and escape back to the Enterprise. Shinzon gives chase to the Enterprise, which tries to escape the Neutral Zone. Data and Picard discuss what it means to be a conscious being, to be a consciousness that strives to be better than it was. Data compares B-4 to Shinzon, as clones that have no aspiration to be better, that they are different, despite being copies, as experience contributes to uniqueness and personality. Shinzon catches up to them, disabling the Enterprise's shields and engines to disable it without destroying it. Shinzon's ship the Scimitar is too strong for them. Picard confronts Shinzon's hologram -- they part ways inamicably. Romulan ships show up with Donatra in charge -- she claims to be there to support the Enterprise in its battle against the Scimitar. She's in pursuit of the Scimitar, when Shinzon pulls a "Maverick", stopping dead and then strafing the Romulan ship when it shoots past them. Shinzon is suffering badly from his genetic disease -- the one for which he needs Picard's blood to survive. Data Troi mind-melds with Shinzon's Viceroy to locate the cloaked ship. Picard fires all banks on the ship. Now both the Enterprise and the Scimitar are listing heavily. Shinzon's Viceroy beams aboard the Enterprise with a platoon. Riker and Worf take care of them. Riker drops down a laundry chute to chase the Viceroy. Meanwhile, Shinzon blasts a hole in the bridge, causing some of the crew to be sucked into space before an emergency patch drops in place. The bridge is blown to bits, with debris everywhere -- great practical effects -- before Shinzon drops in front of the new "screen". They chit-chat, but Picard cuts him off, moving to ramming speed. There are more great practical effects, showing the Enterprise slicing nearly effortlessly into the Scimitar, taking nearly no damage itself. Shinzon reverses to disentangle the ships. The Viceroy and Riker continue to fight belowdecks, with Riker getting the advantage and dropping the Viceroy into a pit. The ships grind apart, with Enterprise showing a good deal of damage as well. Picard orders an auto-destruct, but that system is offline. Shinzon is looking much the worse for wear, veins sticking out everywhere, his eyes reddened. He orders a highly destructive weapon deployed to eradicate the Enterprise before they continue to Earth. Picard beams over to the Scimitar. Data follows by jumping there (because the transporter breaks down immediately after). Picard blows away all opposition, sidelining even Shinzon. He's near the weapon. The weapon is deploying and it's pretty awesome. Shinzon has a lot of knives stowed in his suit of armor. Picard finally bests Shinzon, who was really not looking good -- although the practical effects on his makeup were great. Data shows up in time to stop the firing sequence. He sends the captain back before annihilating himself in the self-destruction of the weapon. The Romulans are now a staunch ally. The Enterprise is in a repair bay. Riker has been given his own command. Picard has reawakened B-4 in the hopes of resurrecting his lost friend. "♪ Never saw the sun shining so bright... ♪" The Curse S01 (2023) -- "5/10" Whitney (Emma Stone) and Asher Siegel (Nathan Fielder) have been married for a year. They're making a reality show about their amazing, selfless efforts to bring affordable, eco-friendly housing to Española. Their director Dougie Schecter (Benny Safdie) is even scummier than they are, although none of them think they're scummy. Asher is worse than Whitney is. Whitney was raised rich. Her parents Elizabeth (Constance Shulman) and Paul (Corbin Bernsen) are slumlords, whom Whitney is trying to disassociate herself from, at least publicly. Asher gives a little girl $100, then takes it back from her. She curses him. Her father Abshir (Barkhad Abdi) collects his kids and leaves. My partner and I watched the first show and a half, but stopped because the characters are really painfully insufferable. Since we're lucky enough not to have any association with the shows and people that this show is making fun of, it was just painful to watch. Maybe there's a good punchline -- or some good comeuppance -- waiting somewhere in the season, but I can't be bothered. I only got one recommendation for this -- from an Emma Stone fangirl -- but I'll wait for another recommendation to give this another try. Death Note (2017) -- "5/10" This is the story of a high-schooler named Light Turner (Nat Wolff) who finds a book with the words "Death Note" on the cover. It's a supernatural book that has a bunch of rules, but essentially grants the holder the power to have anyone killed in whatever manner they choose, within certain physical and temporal constraints. Also, you have to know the name of the person to kill. He takes out his first few victims, getting the attention of the weird/hot girl at school Mia Sutton (Margaret Qualley). She quickly gloms onto him, sharing in his powers, helping him choose victims. Nat's father James (Shea Whigham) is a cop who's looking for the mysterious killer that's been taking people out so publicly -- and in such strange and improbable ways. The book comes with its own demon Ryuk (Jason Liles; voiced by Willem Dafoe) who encourages more and more mayhem. A mysterious detective named L (LaKeith Stanfield) arrives on the scene to make predictions about the mysterious killer is making things happen. I really almost never like LaKeith Stanfield in anything. He just rubs me the wrong way. L figures out that Light is the killer, but he can't even come close to proving it. Light starts to regret what's happening, while Mia is just getting warmed up. They start to try to find out L's real name -- so that they can kill him. They dig up his weird, orphaned past, with the help of Watari (Paul Nakauchi), who's enslaved to them through the book. Mia somehow gets control of the book -- which allows her to blackmail Light into letting her have control of the book? This part made no sense within the rules laid out in the film. Light turns the tables on Mia by sealing her fate if she tries to seize the book. She falls out of the ferris wheel. Light also falls out of the ferris wheel, but he had used the Death Note to arrange to have his body recovered. His father eventually deduces that he was the killer -- he'd named himself Kira -- and asks him why he did what he did. Light mumbles something. Look, this was kind of fun, but it was ultimately disappointing. I watched it while riding the indoor bike. I was drawn in by Willem Dafoe's excellent voice-acting as Ryuk. I also quite like Margaret Qualley since seeing her in The Leftovers, but she was much less here than she'd been there, unfortunately. Licorice Pizza (2021) -- "5/10" I ordinarily like Paul Thomas Anderson -- Boogie Nights, There Will Be Blood, Inherent Vice, The Master, Magnolia -- but I just could not get into this one. It was just kind of dumb and bubbly. This is the story of 15-year-old aspiring actor Gary Valentine (Cooper Hoffman). who's in love with/in a complicated relationship with 25-year-old Alana Kane (Alana Haim). Gary and his friends are hustlers. They are always working hard to make their money, filming, acting, starting schemes and scams, eventually opening a waterbed store. Tom Waits, Bennie Safdie, Sean Penn, and Bradley Cooper have cameos or minor-to-medium-sized roles, but it all seems a little forced. I ended up kind of liking Gary -- he reminded me a bit of an old friend from high school -- but I didn't like Alana very much. There just wasn't very much to her character. She fought with her family, who thought her lazy -- but she was lazy! Alana starts working for a local congressman, but he's not interested in her that way, so she quickly loses interest. Gary opens an arcade. After fucking around some more, Alana eventually returns to the arcade and professes her love for Gary, but I'd long since given up caring even one bit. Please just watch any other Paul Thomas Anderson movie. A Series of Unfortunate Events S01--S03 (2017--2019) -- "7/10" This series is quite educational for older children and younger teens -- or for anyone who wants to learn new words and get some exposure to literary references. While the pacing is quite slow -- it's for kids -- it's entertaining enough and has enough top-shelf acting to keep it interesting, even for jaded adults. Count Olaf (Neil Patrick Harris) is fantastic. He's the nemesis of the children, focused laser-like on getting the children's fortune. The child actors grow on you. The baby Sunny (Presley Smith) is quite good, if I'm honest. Klaus (Louis Hynes) and Violet (Malina Pauli Weissman) are OK, but a good deal more wooden. Violet always looks like she's going to cry. Lemony Snicket (Patrick Warburton) narrates all shows in all three seasons. His brother Jaques (Nathan Fillion) is around for a while, until he's not. Arthur Poe (K. Todd Freeman) is the useless banker in charge of the children's well-being. Count Olaf has an acting troupe, composed of Hook-handed Man (Usman Ally), Esmé Squalor (Lucy Punch), and several other wacky and childishly evil members. They don't ever really hurt the kids but they do kill other people along the way. There is an organization to which the children's parents (Will Arnett, Cobie Smulders) belonged -- and to which many other people they meet along the way also belong. There are other bit characters along the way, played by Aasif Mandvi, Catherine O'Hara, Joan Cusack I started collecting literary references, like mysterious cabinet at the Caligari Circus referring to the "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" , a German film from 1920, or the chant of the freaks at that circus being similar -- and occasionally the same as -- that of the freaks in the movie "Freaks" , from 1932. There are many, many more, often repeated -- for educational purposes. It's entertaining enough, but drags on a bit for my age and education. For kids, though? Top-notch, I think. It's the kind of thing that I would have devoured at 10 or 11 and memorized all of it. Long Shot (2019) -- "9/10" Charlotte Field (Charlize Theron) is running for president, after having served ably as Vice President for the current President Chambers (Bob Odenkirk), who's a former actor who can only think of returning to acting. Fred Flarsky (Seth Rogen) went to school with her many, many years ago. He's a journalist. He's a real journalist. He tells it like it is. He takes the tough stories. He's being hounded out of the journalism business by new owner and billionaire Parker Wembley (Andy Serkis), who's also working to bend Field's program to better suit his needs. Field hires Flarsky as her speechwriter and he does a pretty good job, although her campaign manager Maggie Millikon (June Diane Raphael) is more interested in getting Field elected in any way possible than with any sort of principles or dignity. Field and Flarsky grow close and, during an attack with actual gunfire, they ride the adrenalin to hop into bed together. There are no regrets; they build a relationship. Fred's best friend Lance (O'Shea Jackson Jr.) is delighted for him and there for him to support in any way he possibly can. She is not allowed to date him because he's not the kind of person that someone as glamorous and beautiful as Field is supposed to be dating. Maggie especially is adamant that they cannot be seen together. Instead she pushes James Steward, the Prime Minister of Canada (Alexander Skarsgård) as an alternative. Parker gives an assist by hacking Fred's webcam and recording everything he does on his computer -- including a masturbation scene that both Field and Flarsky take reasonably well in stride. Fred refuses to change his image and ends up breaking up with Field. Lance calls him an idiot and tells him that he constantly self-sabotages with his utter unwillingness to listen to any opposing views. He's right a lot, but he doesn't acknowledge that other people might be right as well. Lance comes out to his friend as a Republican and a Christian, just to show Fred how terrible he is at judging people. His best friend is two things that Fred claims he can't stand. Maybe he's wrong about other things? Field reneges on her original plan and just comes clean -- no pun intended -- to the country in a speech, airing not only the content of the video, but also Parker's involvement in releasing it. She introduces Fred as her lover and partner. They marry during her campaign, she wins the presidency, and we're treated to a bit of the "first mister" going about his day. Theron and Rogen have quite a bit of believable on-screen chemistry. They're both very funny and their characters aren't caricatures. I thoroughly enjoyed this movie and would watch it again. I watched it in German. Dune (2021) -- "8/10" My "review from 2022" stands. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] These are notes for me to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. The amount of text is not proportional to my enjoyment. I might write less because I didn't get around to it when it was fresh in my mind. I rate the film based on how well it suited me personally for the genre, my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. Links are to "my IMDb ratings" ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4970 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4970 Mon, 04 Mar 2024 21:50:53 +0100 of around 1600 ratings publicly available. I've included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other -- I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. 1. "Mr. Popper's Penguins (2011)" <#mr-popper> -- "6/10" 2. "David Brent: Life on the Road (2016)" <#david-brent> -- "8/10" 3. "In the Shadow of the Moon (2019)" <#in-the-shadow> -- "8/10" 4. "Taylor Tomlinson: Have it All (2024)" <#taylor-tomlinson> -- "8/10" 5. "Le jour où la Terre s'arrêta (The Day the Earth Stood Still) (2008)" <#le-jour-ou> -- "6/10" 6. "Here Comes the Boom (2012)" <#boom> -- "8/10" 7. "Bionda Atomica (2017)" <#atomic> -- "9/10" 8. "Rick and Morty S07 (2024)" <#rick> -- "8/10" 9. "Castlevania S03 (2020)" <#castlevania> -- "8/10" 10. "Turn Up Charlie S01 (2019)" <#charlie> -- "6/10" Mr. Popper's Penguins (2011) -- "6/10" Mr. Popper (Jim Carrey) is a dealmaker for a large, financial company. His ex-wife is Amanda (Carla Gugino), but they seem to be amicably divorced. His father is an explorer who was never home. At the beginning of the film, we see him communicating by radio with his father, who was never at home. He dies early in the film, leaving his now-grown son Tommy his worldly possessions. One of these is, apparently, a penguin. He leaves it in the bathtub, as he's on his way out to negotiate for the purchase of Tavern on the Green. He meets the current owner Mrs. Van Gundy (Angela Lansbury), who is not impressed with him and his oily salesman persona and tells him that the restaurant is not for sale. He gets home to discover that his penguin has flooded the bathroom. He tries to get rid of it, but no-one wants to take it off his hands. He tries to free it down the hall, but the building doorman makes him take it back. His family arrives for his son's birthday -- and his son assumes that the penguins are his birthday present. Nat Jones (Clark Gregg) shows up from the zoo, to take the one penguin away. He's delighted to see that there are six or them now -- Gentoos. He says that the penguins should be in ice and snow, with a lot of fish. His assistant Pippi (Ophelia Lovibond) has a P-based alliterative issue and is on the case to help him take care of the penguins, as he doesn't want to give them back yet, as he's getting closer to his kids through the penguins. He's also getting closer to his ex-wife again. None of this is surprising. Jim Carrey lends the film more credibility than it would otherwise have. He goes to the Guggenheim to meet Mrs. Van Gundy at a showing. The penguins escape the apartment and track him down to the museum, where they wreak havoc, finally finding "Dad." Next up is penguin eggs. Ex-wife Amanda comes over with her man Rick, who immediately flees the penguins. Popper and Amanda are hitting it off and he asks her out to dinner. They go to Tavern on the Green, where he's also to meet Van Gundy. They go skating afterward -- in the Trump skating rink. Popper slowly gives over his entire life to the penguins. He leaves the doors open on his apartment, he shovels snow in, sets up nests for the eggs, and has basically converted the whole place into a penguin exhibit. One of the eggs hasn't hatched yet. He sets up a hatching area outside, where he continues to watch over it. His bosses come by to discover his madness and summarily fire him. He gets Nat Jones to come over to look at the egg. Nat pronounces the hatchling dead. Popper shows up at the office the next morning, pretending that he still works there. They’ll take him back because he's managed to squeeze Van Gundy into complying with a sale. He has to break it to his kids that the penguins are gone. They take it super-well. The plot is as thin and transparent here as, well, as a sheet of ice. He goes back to the bad way he was, his ungrateful kids hate him again -- when he stops delivering, they stop loving -- and his ex-wife draws away again, exhibiting the same level of care for him that his kids do. They go to the zoo, where they are told that they can't get the penguins back because they're being traded away, three to Washington, three somewhere else, and the chicks to Dubai. They break out the penguins, then head for Tavern on the Green. Everything works out for everybody. They take the penguins to Antartica. The End. Look, it's a kid's movie. It's not for me, as I found some of the messaging too coarse, but maybe that's what kids understand? I don't know. It felt manipulative. It's a chicken-and-egg question: is this movie what kids respond to naturally? Or is this movie what kids have been trained to respond to by other movies like this? Hard to say. David Brent: Life on the Road (2016) -- "8/10" This mockumentary is just as cringe-y as you imagine it would be, given Gervais's proclivities when in the role of David Brent. We catch up with him at his new job in sales at Lavichem, a company that sells feminine hygiene products. It is supposed to be almost 15 years later and he's not changed one bit. None of the men at this new office like him -- they find him sophomoric -- except for maybe Nigel (Tom Bennett). Pauline (Jo Hartley) inexplicably has a crush on him (she lives right across the road from him), while office secretary Karen (Mandeep Dhillon) admits to finding him kind of funny and spontaneous. He's not in the office for long, as he's heading out on the road with his band, Foregone Conclusion 2. It's not really a band: it's a bunch of studio musicians who he's paying to play with him. He's also paying the sound engineer Dan Harvey (Tom Basden) twice his usual wages. Not only that, but Brent takes two weeks of unpaid leave, cashes in his pension, and has only eight dates lined up for the three-week "tour". Tour is in quotation marks because all of the gigs are within easy driving distance of Brent's home. He has spared no expense, though: he's rented a giant tour bus and puts up the band in hotels every night. In return, they refuse to socialize with him at all. They won't even let him on his own bus; instead, he follows along in his car. Before he leaves, he gets a pick-me-up from his therapist Dr. Keating (Nina Sosanya), whose advice he completely disregards. David's sort-of actual friend Dom -- who's a young and aspiring and actually quite-talented rapper -- is also on tour with them. Brent's voice is actually surprisingly good and his music doesn't actually suck, even if it's not 100% my cup of tea. It gets more and more mortifying, as Brent continues with his shows. There's a signature song about "disableds." "♪ Oh, please don’t make fun of the disableds ♪ There’s nothing funny about those ♪ Whether mental in the head ♪ Or mental in the legs ♪ Please be kind To the ones with feeble minds ♪ Help the awkward through a door ♪ Hold their hand ♪ If they’ve got one, understand ♪ You might have to feed ♪ The worst ones ♪ Through a straw ♪ It’s basically a head on a pillow ♪ Head on a pillow Head on a pillow" He doesn't stop trying to "support" minority groups. He tries out a song about Native Americans. "♪ Oh, oh, your red heart rages ♪ Cut down, burned out And put in cages ♪ You came in peace Held up your hand ♪ How ✋ ♪ We cut it off And we stole your land ♪ Oh, oh, Native American ♪ Soar like an eagle Sit like a pelican ♪ Oh, oh, don’t call us Indians ♪ We’re more like West Eurasians crossed with Siberians ♪" No-one's coming to the shows. They're hemorrhaging money, but Brent's only solution is to double down, to spend more. He's only barely aware that it's self-destructive, that it's pathetic, that he's not getting out of it what he wanted, despite how often he tells himself that he is. He engages the services of publicist Briony Jones (Diane Morgan), who gets him into a photo shoot, which honestly goes a lot better than expected. She wonders why he hasn't got any tattoos, which is a mean thing to say to David because, of course, he goes right out to get one. He faints before it's half-done and leaves with the word "Berk" on his upper arm. In England, being a "berk" is synonymous with being a cunt. This is in keeping with his green rooms being constantly labeled as "David Bent" (where "bent" means homosexual in England). Now he's got one more person in his crew that he has to pay to be there. No-one wants to even have a drink with him. They're only there for the money. He has to pay them to have a beer with him after the show. £25.- per person -- and he has to pay for drinks. They're all also hooking up, which is a bonus, but makes him jealous. This is starting to get him down, "David: What are you doing? Briony: Getting off with a bloke. David: What did you think of the gig? Briony: I didn’t see it. I was getting off… David: You were getting off with a bloke. Yeah, sure. David: Good, innit? David: Paying them… to get off with people. David: It’s a new job description, innit? David: [SIGHS] All aboard." He does karate by himself to warm up. He thinks it's cool. He's terrible with people, but with women, he's extra-terrible. Desperate, he picks up two ladies from the ATM behind the club. They're only interested in him because he can offer a roof over the heads. They're not groupie material, but he makes do. They plunder the mini-fridge, racking up exorbitant fees for booze and chocolate -- 2 mini-bottles of "Champagne" at £25 apiece. Only one overnights, although nothing happens. She was just happy for a lie-in and a bath. He finally gets a record company to send someone to a show. This is exciting for him -- his big break is imminent. They hate him, of course, but they seem intrigued by Dom's rapping. It's a shame because Brent isn't that bad! His lyrics are bizarre, but his voice is good and the arrangement isn't bad. After the show, the band is forced to show up for a beer with him. This is as painful as you can imagine. They leave quickly, downing their free beers and taking their 25 quid for five minutes' work. Dom isn't allowed to leave. We see him guiding a plastered Brent home at the end of the evening. "You’re my n*gga" "David, you can’t say that." The next show is a battle of the bands. The bands go in reverse order of number of people they got to come see them. Foregone Conclusion got two people. They're on first. They play Native American. Afterward, Dom jumps in for a band that hasn't shown up, playing one of his own songs. He's an immediate hit. The record agents show up and give him their card. David tries really hard to hide his jealousy, but he's utterly unsuccessful. They're still sharing a room. The next morning, Brent enjoys a day off. Dan comes up to tell him that the snow for his Christmas song on his last show is going to cost £1,500. He begs him not to pay for it. But David had his heart set on the snow. It's all lost money anyway. He's down £20k when he'd expected to be down only about £8k -- and had hoped to get a recording contract out of it. They bond a bit; Dan tells him that he likes David as he is, when he's not pretending to be someone else. They play the Christmas song at the last show. "♪ Don’t cry, it’s Christmas Santa’s feeling fine ♪ Though you know you’ll never see him ♪ He’s not just in your mind ♪ And it’s not that he’s invisible It’s because you’re going blind ♪ But don’t cry, it’s Christmas Santa’s feeling fine ♪ Though he’s got a billion children He’s only got one day ♪ You’ve got slightly less than that If I were you I’d pray ♪ But don’t cry, it’s Christmas ♪ Everything’s okay" It snows. Dan paid for it. David Brent sums up the tour as a life experience for himself. "I don’t need to be a rock star, you know? That’s just something I enjoy doing. I can live without being “a success.” [chuckles] But, um… I couldn’t have lived without trying. And I did that. "So… And everything works out, doesn’t it? You think you want one thing along the way, and then you realise you needed something else. Life’s a struggle… with little beautiful surprises that make you wanna carry on through all the shit to the next little beautiful surprise. "[chuckles] "So, yeah, all good." He's back in the office. He's telling Nigel what a great time he had, how he could do it all again. He tells him that Dom has gotten a record deal because of him (David). The goons at the office start in on him again, but Pauline's not having it -- she throws water all over their ringleader, shutting it all down. David's got a free-coffee coupon. Two, in fact. They head out for coffee. Her hand grabs his just as the curtain falls. "♪ I was looking up to heaven ♪ It was right under my nose ♪ I had travelled many light years ♪ It was right across the road ♪ A billion trillion grains of stardust ♪ Floating round in space ♪ Two of them collided ♪ In an ordinary place ♪ We are electricity ♪ We will never die ♪ We’ll just burn and burst ♪ And return to the sky" Look, You're going to have to brace yourself for Gervais's cringe comedy -- his ingratiating half-laugh is particularly off-putting and grating -- but it's worth it. It's a heartwarming tale, in the end. I changed my rating from a 6 to an 8 in the last 15 minutes. In the Shadow of the Moon (2019) -- "8/10" Locke (Boyd Holbrook) is a Philadelphia police officer. In 1988, a wave of mysterious killings sweep the city in one night. He's not a detective yet, but he and his partner Maddox (Bokeem Woodbine) are given grudging leeway by his brother-in-law Detective Holt (Michael C. Hall), so they snoop around various crime scenes. They help figure out that all of the victims have a common three-dot mark on the back of their necks. They seem to have been injected with an unknown compound. They catch a break when one of the victims is still temporarily alive and describes her assailant as a black woman in a blue hoodie (Cleopatra Coleman). After some misdirection and a foot chase, Maddox and Locke have trapped her in a subway station. She's quite a fighter, though, and drops Maddox like a bad habit, breaking his leg. After finding what looks like a weapon with three needles on the end of it, Locke catches up to her on a lower subway platform, where she confronts him, addressing him by name and telling him things about himself that she couldn't possibly know, like that his wife Jean (Rachel Keller) is pregnant and will give birth that day. She also predicts her own death. They tussle but, as with Maddox, she easily gets the best of him, cuffing him to a bench with his own handcuffs. He shoots her with her own weapon, blowing her back into the path of an oncoming train. His daughter Amy is born, but wife Jean dies in childbirth. Nine years later, it is Amy's (Quincy Kirkwood) birthday. Locke has promised to take her to the zoo to see the bears. They're diurnal. They have to go in the morning. You know what they say about the best-laid plans. A supposed copycat killer has appeared. The police suspect it's a demonstrator from the crowd of people who've never believed the official story of what had happened that night nine years ago. Maddox and Locke, now detectives, open the case again, this time sifting more carefully through the evidence. One piece is a set of keys they'd gotten off of the killer's corpse, keys which turn out to be made for a model of plane that wouldn't come on the market until one year ago -- that is, eight years after they'd been collected. Physicist Naveen Rao (Rudi Dharmalingam) tries to convince them that the case has something to do with time travel, caused by the odd perigee of the super moon. They of course summarily ignore this wacko. Locke tracks the killer down to a small airport where she gets the drop on him and ties him up. She's actually alive and is still the same age. Locke manages to call Maddox. When he arrives, he thinks he's gotten the drop on the killer, but she spins and shoots him right in the face with her shotgun. Maddox dies immediately. She knocks out Locke and drags him onto a small plane. When he wakes, she tells him more about himself and his family, as well as how she can return once every nine years because of the moon. She throws him out over the water. He swims to shore to find the crashed plane the next morning. It's now 2006. Locke is no longer on the squad. He drinks. He's obsessed with cracking the case. He thinks it involves time travel. Amy lives with her uncle (Lt. Hart). Locke discovers another victim, who was involved in the nascent beginnings of a hardcore "patriot" movement. Locke starts to suspect that the killer is moving backwards through time. He manages to track her, she leads him on a chase -- she on a motorcycle, he in a truck -- to a pipe opening off of a beach. He crawls in after her to discover her in what is almost certainly a time machine, slowly filling with water -- it looks very much like the inter-timeline-travel device from The Leftovers -- just before it disappears. Locke is arrested by a distraught Hart as he exits the tunnel again. Rao watches from above. It's 2015, nine years later. Locke doesn't look much different: he's more worn around the edges, his hair a bit longer, his beard a little more ragged. Rao kidnaps him and reveals that he knows about the killer's plan, but that he approves wholeheartedly. It sounds like a cult. They're killing people, but for a good purpose, to prevent the deaths of millions of others. Locke crashes Rao's truck. Rao begs him not to interfere. Locke escapes back to the beach. Rao sounds crazy, but he would, wouldn't he? Locke confronts the killer as she emerges from her pipe, nine years later, right on schedule. The killer reveals herself to be Rya, his granddaughter. She says that Locke is the one who chose her for this mission in the first place. It's that important. We watch as Rao triggers the devices throughout the past to kill the key people who would be involved in executing the civil war that would sweep the U.S. into a century of darkness. They've changed the past. Back in 2015, Locke is finally able to relax and reunite with his family -- and his brand-new granddaughter Rya -- because he knows that not only could he not have stopped what happened in 1988 and 1995 -- he no longer wants to. It actually works better on screen than it did on paper, mostly because of Boyd Holbrook. I gave it an extra star for being well-made, for Boyd, and for suspending my disbelief until after the movie was over. It was a nice story, even if some of the details were papered over E,g., how does the time machine work? Why does it only work every nine years? What does this have to do with the moon? Lots of loose ends, but they don't matter. The story is about Locke. Taylor Tomlinson: Have it All (2024) -- "8/10" She's still going strong with her third one-hour special. It was a bit of an uneven start, but the second and final thirds were great. I pulled a bunch of quotes from "Taylor Tomlinson: Have it All (2024) | Transcript" . Taylor's on-stage -- and perhaps off-stage; it doesn't matter -- persona is that she has anxiety, an inferiority complex, and is terrible at being single because she's terrible at dating. She's spent a year alone and it's been one of the best years of her life. She talks about anxiety, therapy, sleep disorders, married friends, men, women, her childhood, her parents, her neuroses. "That got me to sixth grade, when I met my friend Krista, and she was pretty, funny, smart, and nice. And that’s when I stopped believing in God." "[...] I was like, “Nobody has every single thing going for them as a person. You have been so blessed. Be grateful for what you have. Focus on that. Nobody gets to have it all.” "And then I saw Hugh Jackman in person. "I was like, “I guess you can have it all. But there’s none left because ‘God’ gave it all to Hugh.”" "The next time you see your parents, they’re all smug, like, “Jason seemed to like us.” "You’re like, “I know what you’re doing.” "“Maybe your therapist wants to meet us. Get our side of the story.” "“I cannot wait till you’re in the ground.” "“All right, well, we’d like to be cremated.” "“I will scatter your ashes where God can’t find them!”" "I know how to get men to like me. Easy. You trick ’em. "Just wait until they kind of like you, and then you’re like, “You don’t like me.” They’re like, “Yeah, I do.” "“You don’t.” "“Yeah, I do.” "You’re like, “No, you don’t.” "“I do!” "You do that until they get you pregnant, I think. "You just turn it into a fun challenge for ’em. "“Bet you can’t spend your life with me.” "They’re like, “Fucking watch me, you bitch!” "Like when you ask a kid to take out the trash, and they’re like, “No!” "And you’re like, “I’ll time you.” "And he’s like… [gasps] "“See? You didn’t even think you wanted to do that.” "He’s like, “Who cares? I’m the fastest boy alive.” "Hitting on women is so much harder. It feels so much more delicate. "Hitting on a woman feels like trying to skip a stone on a lake. "Hitting on a man feels like throwing a brick through a window. "Like, “I don’t really care. I just want to see what happens.” "“I’m not gonna live here.” "I might be sexist. "I’m hearing it now as I’m talking." "I said, “Any advice for people in relationships who are fighting a lot?” "They said, “We do.” "“You know how a lot of people have a safe word to stop sex?” "“Everyone needs to have a safe word during fights.” "I asked a married friend, “Do you have a safe word for fights?” "He was like, “What?” I’m like, “A word that stops the fight.” "He goes, “We have one.” "I said, “What is it?” "He goes, “Cunt.” "[audience laughing, wincing] "“But I have to say it. It doesn’t really work if she says it.”" "You know what’s funny about TikTok? "These kids are like lip-syncing, dancing, pretending they’re in a music video. "We all did that growing up, didn’t we? "Yeah! Alone in your room in the mirror, hairbrush. Of course. "But if anyone had walked in on you doing it, you would’ve killed yourself, right? "[laughter, applause] "And these kids are online like, “I hope millions of people see this.” "It’s like, “You could benefit from some bullying, I think.” "“Might’ve… overcorrected a bit.”" "Like, I know that all of my friends both pity and envy me. "Just like I know that I both pity and envy them, right? "I know my friends look at me and go, “I’d probably focus on work if I was all alone.” "And I go, “I’d probably have a bunch of kids if I had no talent.”" Le jour où la Terre s'arrêta (The Day the Earth Stood Still) (2008) -- "6/10" In 1928, an explorer (Keanu Reeves) encounters a glowing sphere. In the present day, a fast-moving object approaches Earth and lands in New York City. Scientists are mobilized from all over America. Among them is Helen Benson (Jennifer Connelly), an expert in exobiology, who is recruited by an old colleague Michael Granier (Jon Hamm). The ship ejects Klatu (Keanu Reeves) and a giant robot that defends him when the first thing that people do is to to shoot Klatu. He recovers. They begin to interrogate him. The U.S. Secretary of Defense (Kathy Bates) wants to put him in his place when he looks askance at her, telling her she doesn't speak for the world. He wants to talk to the world.. He has a message for them. He has a message for Earth, for humanity. The planet does not belong to them. Klatu escapes with Helen. The military attacks the giant robot, which is still standing in Central Park next to the spaceship. As they travel, Helen's boy says that we should kill all of the aliens, just to be sure. Klatu listens very carefully. He is there to save the Earth from its judgment, rendered by another alliance of aliens. He speaks to an alien (James Hong) who's lived on the planet for 70 years, who thinks humanity is more destructive than peaceful, that the empathetic strains are too few and too powerless against the mindless violence inherent in the species. Klatu communes with one of the many alien spheres that appear all over the world. His robot is captured by the U.S. military, but it feels very much like the robot has them right where it wants them. They can't dig into its carapace. Meanwhile, Helen and Klatu visit with Professor Barnhardt (John Cleese), who tries to bargain with Klatu, saying that it is on the precipice that civilizations learn how to behave themselves. Her little shit of a kid calls the military on them all, so that the military can kill Klatu -- because "that's what his dad would have done." The child is insufferable -- but I feel like he's a stand-in for the adolescence of humanity. He gets his mom kidnapped. Klatu crashes the remaining helicopters. The U.S. military, in the person of Kathy Bates, claims that "we have the situation under control." The shit kid is left with Klatu, and we're treated to a few painful scene of child-acting. People seem to love that shit. The robot releases nanobots from its skin that eat into the restraints and will soon free it. The U.S. military -- already outmatched by every group of ragtag fighters on the planet -- is also outmatched by an incredibly advanced alien technology. The entire robot breaks down into a giant cloud of nanobots. They blow the door down and escape the underground facility. The military shoots its guns and rockets at it. This is a 💯 accurate representation of how the U.S. military would react. The nanobots-eating-everything effects are pretty good. The Secretary of Defense is forced to let Helen go so that she can try to convince Klatu not to destroy the planet. The child tells Klatu that he didn't mean it when he said he thought Klatu should be killed. This is a bald-faced lie. The child is the conniving personification of all of humanity. He wants to kill Klatu until he needs Klatu to help him survive the woods. Then, he realizes that he could try to get Klatu to resurrect his father. He is 100% focused on himself. This is fine for a child, but not ok for humanity. This is the reason that humanity deserves to be destroyed. Because it cannot behave in any way other than the self-serving conniving of a child. There's a bunch of hugging and crying when Helen and the child reunite, but it convinces Klatu. That whole shitty scene showed the alien that humans can change. Seriously? Hadn't they actual seen human interactions before? Didn't he just have a conversation with the old Chinese man about how he'd fallen in love with humanity? Anyway, the nanobots continue streaming over the planet. The U.S. president is probably gonna start nuking stuff. This is also 💯 accurate. They let Klatu, Helen, and Granier's car through, but only so they could bomb it. This was definitely counterproductive. The nanobots start attacking the car. They're in Central Park. The nanobots envelop the sphere. Granier is dead. The fucking child gets infected with nanobots. The number-one priority is now to save the fucking child instead of the planet. Why? Because his mommy asked you to. You know what? That tracks. Klatu absorbs the nanobots into his own human body. He says, "your professor was right. At the precipice, we change." Keanu Reeves strides into the nanobot storm with his frail human carapace. He touches the sphere. A shock wave expands outward. An EMP. The nanobots fall like hail. The grid shuts down as the EMP rolls around the planet. Everything is still. This is the price for stopping the attack. This is the change of which Klatu spoke. I watched it in English with French subtitles. Here Comes the Boom (2012) -- "8/10" Scott Voss (Kevin James) is a shitty biology teacher, who's skating through his high-school teaching career. He's kind of friends with music teacher Marty Streb (Henry Winkler). He keeps hitting on nurse Bella Flores (Salma Hayek). He's at odds with Principal Betcher (Greg Germann), who's a pencil-necked dick of an administrator. Betcher decides to cut Marty's job, but Voss jumps up to defend him, promising that he'll get the $48,000 for Marty's salary. He goes to his brother Eric (Gary Valentine), but he's got no work for him. So he starts teaching a citizenship class. One of his students is Niko (Bas Rutten), whom he starts tutoring. Niko's a former UFC fighter who runs an MMA school. Voss gets the idea to start fighting UFC to make big money. He tries to quit the teaching the citizenship class. He gets knocked out in his first fight. His second fight goes better and he gets out with a tie. His wins his third fight in the third round with an out-of-the-blue haymaker. He continues training with Niko, with his corner-man Marty. Niko keeps training him, but can't teach him offense. He takes him to Mark DellaGrotte for more training. Scott dislocates his shoulder. He goes to Bella's house for treatment because he can't afford the hospital. She's in cute pajama pants, clambers all over him to get leverage, and yanks his arm back into place. Principal Betcher tries to dress him down, but Voss gets the advantage and gets Malia's (Jake Zyrus) father (Reggie Lee) on his side. Voss starts teaching for real again. Malia starts tutoring Niko while Voss carries Marty up and down the bleachers. He keeps fighting, winning some, getting better. Joe Rogan's in the crowd for a cameo. Bella finally agrees to let him cook for her. He gets his brother Eric to cook for him. He's quite a chef, but he can't pursue his career because his painting and his big family take all of his time. Bella doesn't believe that he cooked it, but it doesn't matter. She doesn't understand why he gives up in some fights, so he tries to show her an arm-bar, but she punches him in the head, then jumps him and tackles him to the ground. It's a cute scene, but it ends there. This movie has no right being this genuine. DellaGrotte tells him that Rogan called to have Voss fight in the UFC. Niko turns it down because he says it's too dangerous. But when Voss asks him about it, Niko confesses that he's jealous because he never got his real shot because he messed up his leg. He's jealous because he's the same age, but he could kick Voss's ass. They hug it out, meet with Rogan, and head to Vegas. Oh, and Voss gets his awesome chef of a brother to help out in Malia's dad's restaurant, fixing that problem as well. It's cliché, but it's quite well-done. They also do killer montages, with pretty good fight-training choreography. They're in Vegas. The school band shows up to play his song. Rogan flew them in. Malia's got pipes. The fight begins. His opponent Dietrich (Krzysztof Soszynski) is built like a brick shithouse. He doesn't touch gloves because he doesn't think Voss deserves to be in the UFC. He was promised a better card. He does some damage in the first round, but Voss survives. The second round doesn't go better, but Voss survives. Marty gives him a pep talk. Voss comes out swinging, and fights Dietrich to a standstill. They end up clinched; Dietrich gets an arm bar, but Voss reestablishes his grip; Voss picks him up and drops him, knocking him out. Voss wins. Marty's job is saved. Bella kisses him. The end. This movie was so much better than it had any right to be. Hayek, Winkler, James, Rutten, Malia -- everyone really shone. It's surprisingly a solid eight overall, but a nine for its genre. Would watch again. Bionda Atomica (2017) -- "9/10" I stand by "my review from 2017" . Actually that review is pretty meager, but we'll let it stand. This movie is visually fantastic, stylish as hell, has fantastic fight choreography, and has a fantastic soundtrack. Charlize Theron is fantastic. So is James McAvoy. The movie's set just before the Berlin Wall comes down. It's directed as about 15 80s music videos. I watched it in Italian (with some Russian and German) with Italian subtitles this time. Rick and Morty S07 (2024) -- "8/10" 1. The first episode is pure fan service. It's so pure that it must have been done on purpose. It doesn't make it a good episode, but it's nice to see them throw away the opening episode being annoyingly meta about fan-service shows. Perhaps I'm being too generous. This one stars Hugh Jackman and brings the whole gang back to party with him: Mr. Poopybutthole, Bird-person, Gearhead, Squanchy, and neighbor Gene (who's new, I think, but they're pretending he's been around forever). It's supposed to be an intervention for Mr. P, who's despondent and has been living with the Smiths for months. Not their best episode. 2. The second episode has Rick (Ian Cardoni) try to prove to Jerry (Chris Parnell) that the brain has nothing to do with genius, it's the mind. He switches their minds into each other's brains, but then immediately kills himself in Jerry's body when he realizes how wrong he was -- Jerry's brain is utterly inadequate to hold his mind. He shoots himself in the head. Jerry quickly kills himself in Rick's body because he can't control Rick's Mr. Gadget toys. A robot in Rick's lab patches them up, but makes them each half-Rick/half-Jerry. They grudgingly, then enthusiastically, become friends. They go on a galaxy-wide crime spree together. This culminates in them turning themselves into a single being called Jerricky. It wants to leave, but Beth (Sarah Chalke) puts her foot down, they separate, and go back to bickering. The fade-out-to-credits scene is on a polaroid of the two, drunk as Lords, with the tag "banned for life from this bar" on it. Sweet. 3. The President (Keith David) is back in this one, typically singularly focused on his own success and fame. Rick indulges him, but draws the line at the President dating his therapist (Susan Sarandon). It turns out that one of Rick's ex-girlfriends is Unity (Christina Hendricks), a hive-mind who's taken over Virginia. Rick puts a dome over the state to cut off her control, then has to deal with the President taking over their minds to get a 100% re-election. Rick's therapist forces Rick to deal with Unity and apologize to her for his shittiness. 4. It's family-spaghetti night and Rick is serving up what the family is lovin'! Morty ruins it all by finding out that the spaghetti comes from another planet, where people who commit suicide end up filled with tasty bolognese. This makes the family conflicted because, well, it's still so good. To be honest, they don't stay conflicted for very long. Back on the other planet, Morty reveals to the family of the deceased what they did with their loved one's body. The president of the planet sees a business opportunity and starts to make their society over to an exporter of bolognese. Of course, they need to promote suicide, so the planet goes right in the shitter so that there is enough supply. Rick is engaged to fix all this. He industrializes suicide and ends up breeding clones that have only enough sentience and more than enough misery to be able to kill themselves as soon as they realize what they are. This is sufficient to generate the level of cortisol required to generate the delicious bolognese. The clones have one limb, capable of grasping a pick with which they kill themselves. The factory looks very much like a meatpacking plant. The clones look like over-breasted chickens. The message isn't super-subtle, but it's devastatingly effective. There is no excuse for eating animals. Eventually, though, the president wants Rick to fix things for good, whereupon he creates an intergalactic broadcast showing the uniqueness, wonder, and humble glory of a life lived well, a life lived by a being. It is so effective that people are put off of eating bolognese-filled aliens. The Smiths switch to Salisbury Steaks, but they no longer want to know where it comes from. They've learned their lesson. The wrong lesson, as usual, but hey, they're the mirror that Harmon holds up to the world. It's a pity that Peter Singer probably doesn't watch Rick & Morty because he would have been touched, I think. 5. We refresh our memories of Evil Morty's backstory, how he'd manipulated Rick until he'd retired outside the Central Finite Curve, away from shenanigans. Rick & Morty's search for Rick Prime disturb him, so he seeks them out to help them end it once and for all, even though he doesn't really care, one way or the other. They get closer to Rick Prime, until he eventually ends up capturing them, along with a handful of other Ricks. Rick wants revenge for Prime having killed his wife. He finds out that Rick Prime has killed Rick's wife in all dimensions -- and threatens to do the same for all members of Rick's family. Evil Morty helps Rick thwart Rick Prime -- again, not because he cares, but because he just wants this madness to stop, and also because he doesn't think Rick Prime should have a weapon powerful enough to kill anyone in all universes. He leaves Rick alone with Prime to beat him to a bloody pulp. Rick seems to have lost his purpose now because, duh, he has. 6. Rick is in no mood for adventures, so Morty cashes in his free-adventure-of-choice frequent-adventurer cards. Rick calls bullshit and engages the services of an all-seeing Observer to verify the adventures that Morty is claiming. The Observer ends up being a dick, starts blabbing about everyone in the family, Rick & Morty make up, agree on a price for the punchcards (70¢ on the dollar), and then kill the Observer. The other observers put them on trial, which Rick puts up with for a while until he gets bored, after which he just frees himself and convinces the other Observers to fight and kill each other. This is a fake clip show, chock full of tiny skits that probably made it to paper, but never blossomed into anything that was worth making a part of another show, so they all went into this one. 7. Summer does Rick's chores, then demands an "attribute slider" as payment. It's a bracelet that lets her control strength, intelligence, charisma, etc. She's going to a "frolf" party. At the party, Morty gets jealous because Rick's never given him something like that -- it's because Rick respects Summer more than Morty, as he's not shy of saying -- so he fights her for it. In their struggle, he jams intelligence up all the way, managing to wrest it from a weakened Summer. He pumps himself up, they struggle, fall into the pool, get struck by lightning, and come out as a Summer/Morty/Quato-style hybrid. Instead of doing more chores for Rick, she takes off for a planet where there's a club for Quatos that she found on what is I guess the galactic Internet? Anyway, she's kidnapped, Morty is removed, and prepared to be sold as a Quato for a rich guy. Christ, I don't know, it's even weirder than usual, all without being particularly clever -- the only callback is to Total Recall. Not a great episode. 8. Water-T (Ice-T) is back in what must be another fan-service episode. It's a follow-up to Get Schwifty. It's what looks like a long toy commercial in the style of Transformers and Decepticons, but with Numbers and Letters instead. A bunch of stuff happens, there's some treachery, some of the visuals are good, but the story is kind of lame. There's not a lot going on that's very clever. It's only callbacks and memberberries all the way down. 9. Rick kills Jerry several times in order to determine the location of the afterlife and that it has an infinite amount of energy. He wants it, of course. But, he has to die first. How can he be guaranteed entry to the afterlife? He travels to Norway with Morty to be killed by Bigfoot (whom he carries in a Pokéball), so that he enters Valhalla. Morty messes up yet again and gets himself killed by Bigfoot, so that he, too, enters Valhalla, where Rick has set up a machine to siphon the power of the Infinite and also has fooled the Viking residents of Valhalla into thinking that he is Odin. Bigfoot escapes, chasing down a feral Rick until the Pope catches Bigfoot and turns him into a holy warrior for the church. Bigfoot is deeply unhappy doing this and eventually teams back up with Rick and Morty. The Pope, in possession of the infinite power of the Afterlife, kills them repeatedly, until Rick figures out how to pull the plug on the power plant he'd set up in Valhalla. Rick traps the Pope in a Pokéball, sets up feral Rick as the new Pope, and drops the Pope into an underground fighting ring. 10. Their adventures having made them jaded and nearly impossible to scare, Rick and Morty are given the chance to face a fear that they can't just shrug off. It's a hole located in a Denny's bathroom. It looks like hole that Rey sees in her Jedi visions, with seaweed-like, black, glistening tentacles rising up around its entire circumference. Rick says it's a gimmick, and walks away. So does Morty at first. He returns nearly immediately to jump in and face his fears. Rick reluctantly follows and rescues him from the monsters there. They emerge, pumped that they've faced their fears, and return home. At home, they realize that things are awry, and that they're still in the hole. After "escaping" once or twice, they're much more leery about believing that they've truly escaped the Fear Hole and walk around on tenterhooks, fully expecting to learn, at any moment, that they're in a simulacrum constructed by the Fear Hole. They could grow old and die and still not be sure. Rick's dead wife Diane appears and Rick is actually happy. He looks sallow and drained, but he's happy with Diane. He must suspect that the they're still in the hole and that it's feeding on him, but he doesn't care. After a while, Morty hears Rick say that he thinks that Morty is irreplaceable, which is something that Morty knows Rick would never say. He realizes that, not only are they still in the Fear Hole, but that he's actually in there alone because Rick had never jumped in after him. His true fear is that Rick might leave him. The hole begins to drain Morty. That's still not his true fear, though. Several times, he thinks he's figured it out and escaped the Fear Hole, only to realize that he's still in it. Eventually, it clicks, and he's out. The Hole works as advertised. Rick is tempted to jump in when he hears that Diane might be in there, but he walks away, pinning a polaroid of Morty on the "Fear Hole Conquerors" pinboard in the bathroom stall. This was a great episode. Castlevania S03 (2020) -- "8/10" This series has its moments, but they're few and far between at first. It grows on you, though. It's just right to have running as I'm working out, but I can't imagine sitting down and just watching this show. It's extremely slow-paced, to the point of induced ennui. The animation is reasonable to pretty good. Some of the religious, pseudo-philosophical discussions are kind of interesting, if not exactly illuminating. The voice-acting is extremely spotty, with accents tinged from seemingly everywhere. This season picks up the story immediately after Dracula's (Graham McTavish) death. There are a few main storylines. A quartet of female vampires -- Carmilla (Jaime Murray), Striga (Ivana Milicevic), Morana (Yasmine Al Massri), and Lenore (Jessica Brown Findlay) -- have taken over Dracula's empire and have a "big scheme" to build an 800-mile wide corridor straight from the heart of Europe deep into the East. From this corridor, they'll feed on both sides and rule forever. Or so the dream goes. Forgemaster Hector (Theo James) has been imprisoned by them. He spends most of the season naked in a prison cell, being interrogated and tortured by Lenore. They chat a lot. Everyone chats a lot. There's precious little fighting for long stretches, actually. Another forgemaster Isaac (Adetokumboh M'Cormack) is underway with a complement of night creatures. He charters a vessel from "the Captain" (Lance Reddick -- I know! right?), who tries to teach Isaac that, while most people are bastards, there is enough good in humanity to warrant preserving it. If Isaac fulfills Dracula's plan of eliminating every human, then all of that good would be wiped from the world, as well. They speak of Sufism and Islam. Alucard is still in the Belmont Hold, not doing much of anything until he catches Sumi (Rila Fukushima) and Taka (Toru Uchikado) following him. They are two vampire-hunters from Japan who seek to destroy their own master Cho, an ancient she-devil of a vampire who'd been called away from her manse to fight by Dracula's side. Trevor Belmont (Richard Armitage) and Sypha Belnades (Alejandra Reynoso) have traveled to a village named Lindenfeld, where things are a bit...odd. There they meet Saint Germain (Bill Nighy -- I know! right?), who concurs that things are odd, and that all of the oddness is related to the priory. The Judge (Jason Isaacs) concurs and engages their services to investigate. He tells of how a night creature had landed in the priory one night and, instead of killing everyone, had spoken to them in an unknown language. They now guard the place like a prison and no longer allow anyone in or out. Except for Saint Germain, who weasels his way inside to help them gain knowledge from the books that they've discarded and disdained as useless. St. Germain reveals himself to Sypha as a Count, not a magician. He's gained access to the priory in order to get to the Infinite Corridor, where he says he'd lost a "friend". A dream of his soon reveals that this friend was a woman and that he'd last seen her in the multi-dimensional maze of the Corridor. She'd thrown him a stone by which he can find her, should he ever gain access again. The Corridor was quite nicely rendered, a bit like Inception, a bit like Dr. Strange. He's back in the priory, investigating the books. He finds one on demonology; the drawings in it are great. Isaac treks onward with his pack of night creatures. He discusses the past life of one called Flyseyes. "Isaac: What do you remember? "Flyseyes: I was a scholar. "Isaac: Really? "Flyseyes: I was. In a place called Athens. I think it was a long time ago. "Isaac: What did you study? "Flyseyes: I was a philosopher. "Isaac: And this was a thing that sent you to Hell? "Flyseyes: I lived as a man during a time when the empire that ruled Athens changed its religion and laws. I believed philosophy to be the study of the systems of the world and our purpose in it. And yet discussion of the nature of the divine became a crime. "Isaac: Who declared this a crime? "Flyseyes: Christians. To be a philosopher was a sin. And one important Christian was heard to say that the people should hunt down sinners and drive them into salvation, as a hunter drives its prey into traps. "Isaac: To think about God would surely not be a sin in God's eyes. "Flyseyes: Perhaps. And yet... here I am." St. Germain, Belmont, and Sypha continue to investigate the priory. They find the night creature crucified in a deep basement, but seemingly willingly. It waits for something. What it's waiting for is for the town to be filled with the appropriate runes for it to summon a gateway to Hell. While the trio finish battling the monks guarding what's left of the priory, two giant demons emerge from Hell, with Sypha and Belmont each taking one on. The gain the basement in time to witness the night creature in its final form, channeling fire into the hell-gate to summon thousands of smaller, flying demons. They continue to battle them. At the same time, Lenore continues her subtle seduction of Hector, gaining enough of his confidence to get him to lay with her. There's a bit of sexy-time that is absolutely rated-R. Hector is fully in her thrall as he pledges his allegiance to her. She slips a ring on his finger that expands into loops and coils that rise above him -- Carnage-like -- then plunge down into his flesh. At the same time, Sumi and Taka have also been running a number on Alucard. They slip into his bedroom and there is more sexy-time -- this time definitely rated-R. Alucard cries a bit because he thought he'd never be able to be close to anyone again (I guess). Once he's been sexually subdued, the two bind him like a Christ figure on his own bed, enveloping him in what looks like silver bands that cut into his skin. Isaac moves on to a city where a magician has taken over every single person's mind. Each person wears an emerald crown made of, presumably, magic. Isaac orders his monsters to kill the people, but not to damage or eat them. He wants to build an army of night creatures. The magician in his tower directs his minions, making them fight cleverly enough to start taking out Isaac's creatures, one by one. There is attrition on the human side, as well, but they have overwhelming numbers -- and fear nothing, as they are mentally dead inside. The magician's minions have taken to the skies, as giant, clotted balls of people dropping onto his night creatures. Isaac summons a large creature to do battle with the largest ball. Isaac gains the tower and climbs the spiral staircase inside. It is a long way up. As he climbs, the minions glom onto the sides of the tower, oozing through the windows, impeding his progress. He gains the upper floor to confront the magician. He is an old, crooked-toothed and quite insane-looking old man who chuckles madly, then throws a magic crown onto Isaac's head. There is a struggle, but Isaac prevails, then crosses the room in several quick strides and guts the old man. His minions fall from the sky like ash. In the basement of the priory, the night creature, fed by the souls of the townsfolk and transformed into a conduit keeps the Infinite Corridor open onto hell. The camera soars across plains and mountains until it locates a ruined church within which sit Dracula and his wife Lisa. Belmont, Sypha, and St. Germain do battle with the demons below in an epic boss battle. The choreography and artwork are pretty nice. As Sypha and Belmont make room for him, St. Germain proves his prodigious magical powers by mastering the gate, then leaping on the main demon's back to force it to redirect the gate -- and to keep Dracula and his bride trapped in hell. They climb back out of the crumbling priory to find that the judge is dead. They discover only later that he had a dark secret -- he'd been killing naughty children for their misdeeds in his town. They leave the town in disgust, getting back on the open road, hunting vampires. Meanwhile, Alucard, seeing that Sumi and Taka are somewhat obsessed with their being constantly betrayed, and are obsessed with getting what they think he's not giving them -- magic and a moving castle -- gives them one last chance. Instead, they lean in to stab him, whereupon he mentally manipulates his giant sword -- not that one -- and slices their throats. After this betrayal, he retreats further into his misery, piking the two bodies outside his front door as a warning to the others. Turn Up Charlie S01 (2019) -- "6/10" Charlie (Idris Elba) is a struggling DJ living in London. He lives with his aunt and Del (Guz Khan) in a house owned by Charlie's parents. He doesn't have a steady income, but he pretends to be a successful businessman for his parents. They still live in Nigeria and own a house in London, but ask their successful son if he can spot them some cash for appliances and a new car -- otherwise they'll have to sell the house in London. At a mutual friend's wedding, Charlie learns that his childhood bestie David (JJ Feild) is moving back to London. David is wildly successful as a model and a TV/film star and is moving back to London to "tread the boards". His wife Sara (Piper Perabo) is a major DJ with her own entourage/staff. Their daughter Gabrielle (Frankie Hervey) is a nightmare of a spoiled brat who can't enjoy anything without someone suffering and has thus been broken utterly by her parents and their wealthy lifestyle. When David gets a call for a reading, he leaves Gabrielle with Charlie, who'd only met her that day. They hit it off, of course. There is nothing surprising in the banter or behavior, but it's Idris Elba, so it's not as painful as it would otherwise be. It's still kind of painful, though. Since Gabrielle drove off her most-recent nanny in a horrible incident, Sara and David hire Charlie as a nanny. Charlie's first official day as a nanny doesn't go that well, as Gabriella is completely uncontrollable and demands attention from her parents, who are not able to give it. She connives her way to a club where he mother is performing, then sprays the crowd with a fire extinguisher when her mother doesn't let her on stage, as she usual did. Charlie is helpless to stop her. David is livid, but he's also pretty powerless. Charlie takes her to his Aunt Lydia's (Jocelyn Jee Esien) for dinner, where the child is so rude that Auntie Lydia wanted to kill her. Gabriella's first day of school also goes terribly, with her completely unequipped to make actual friends rather than gather minions. She's upset because her mother is working and doesn't have time to take her to school. Instead, her father does it. The child has no empathy and can be said to be sociopathic and no fun to be around. People shy away from her, if not immediately, then after an initial interaction. There are a lot of other sociopaths at the school who are more than her match. She ends the day in the principal's office, having a panic attack. Neither of her parents answer the phone, so Charlie is called to pick her up. He was working in a community garden for Auntie Lydia. He brings her back there and the child expresses some contrition and seems to sincerely apologize for her behavior. Her parents immediately take her bowling and beg Charlie to come back, to take the job again. David and Charlie make up, as Charlie was mad at David for the things he'd told Gabriella, who had hatefully and hurtfully repeated them to Charlie. Charlie patches things up because (A) he needs a job and (B) he wants to kick-start his career with the help of Sara's studio, reputation, and chops. Sara is a supreme dipshit. Poor Piper Perabo kind of has the perfect what-people-are-supposed-to-think-is-hot vacuity for being a dumb-ass DJ, with dumb-ass, vapid friends. David is honestly no better -- just an empty vessel. I can't tell whether they mean for us to like them, despite their flaws, or to see their flaws as a condemnation of a society that would allow people like this to bubble to the top of it. Gabriella is just as terrible as ever, just bizarrely obnoxious and mean and petty all of the time. Her dialogue is like one, long esprit d'escalier by a roomful of writer nerds who never had the bon mot they needed when they were younger. Gabriella sneaks out while Charlie's working on his new song in the studio. One of Sara's skank friends slithers by with an open robe and joint and his afternoon's gone. Gabriella gets home with Hunter, her little, gay, criminal friend, to catch him in the sauna. She doesn't care, though. They agree to defend each other's secrets. Sara listens to Charlie's song and approves. David confides in Charlie that he's got a great movie gig lined up, but he's going to have to be away from home again. Charlie advises against it, as David needs to spend time with his daughter. David pretends that he needs to take the huge, million-dollar role in order to put food on the table, but Charlie rolls his eyes -- he knows he's just doing it for himself because he's only mediocre at acting in the theater. David and Sara are already obscenely rich -- especially for such a young couple -- that neither of them needs to work a day in their lives again. Charlie and Sara get to know each other better and grow closer during collaboration. David has a day with Gabriella, but she has her first period that day, throwing a bit of a spanner in the works. Sara treats David pretty poorly there, but maybe she has her reasons. He's a bit of an idiot. Plus, they apparently cheated on each other already. I wasn't really following all of it, if I'm honest. The setup of that backstory was ham-handed and awkward. At any rate, David takes the movie role and jets off to Hollywood, leaving Sara, Gabriella, and Charlie to enjoy the summer in London. They go to a music festival, where Gabriella and Hunter (Cameron James-King) take off, leading Sara on a merry chase. She starts to panic, though, and then Gabriella really goes missing, losing her phone in a dancing crowd. Charlie knows where to find her, though, and he's everyone's hero. Sara plays her secret concert and premieres the song that she and Charlie had been working on. Sara's manager Astrid's (Angela Griffin) been banging him, but it's pretty clear that Sara is seeing him as a "David substitute", as is Gabriella, who just comes right out and says it. Charlie is smart enough to back off and books himself to Ibiza with a sleazy promoter. Charlie's in Ibiza, falling into his old habits: drinking, drugs, up all night, not working on his music, being shitty to the people around him, letting his giant ego get the best of him. He peaks early with his song, but without another song to back it up, fades from the Ibiza scene, then crashes out and has to work his way back up again, when he's found humility and his creative muse again. Sara and Gabriella surprise him at a show, David having abandoned David them for a mind-cleansing retreat in LA. It's not clear what there's left to cleanse there. Astrid is there, as well, offering to take Charlie on full-time -- because she's fallen for him and she's bored with Sara's devotion to family. She wants to party. She gets Charlie a great gig, but Charlie's leery, aware that he could fall back into his old ways if he sticks with her. Sara is definitely sending all of the signals his way as well, but that also doesn't seem like the greatest idea in the world. Charlie and Gabriella are getting along well, though. So, instead of sleeping or working on his music, Charlie spends the entire night partying with Sara. They fall asleep on each other, drunk and high, on some patio furniture, after a racy game of FMK (Fuck, Marry, Kill). David surprises them the next morning, showing up from LA with flowers and .... a wedding proposal. Sara is less-than-thrilled, seeing the wedding proposal for the manipulation that it is when David lets the other shoe drop: he wants to move the family to South Africa, where he's going to shoot his next movie. Sara is not having it, not ready to uproot Gabriella again. David notices that Sara is infatuated with Charlie and throws out an ill-timed and unsuccessful ultimatum. David gets made at Charlie, but Charlie shrugs it off. Gabriella and Hunter bail. Astrid puts herself in the center of the show, making it clear for the hundredth time that all she cares about are partying, drugs, and sex -- managing DJs is just a way of staying in that lifestyle. Charlie's still got his gig -- and Astrid's offer still stands. David and Sara break up. Gabriella wants to stay in London. She confesses to Hunter that she wants Charlie to stay with them, not to travel the world. He tells her to go tell Charlie that. At the show, Charlie's crushing it, living the lifestyle. He confirms to Astrid that they should work together. Gabriella and Charlie chat a bit, but she can't bring herself to tell him. She doesn't want him to give up his dreams for her, I guess? Maybe? Or maybe he decides to stay, knowing why she's there? We'll never know. The show ended in ambiguity -- and that's probably the deftest move it made all season. This was a show with some good actors -- Idris Elba, Guz Khan, and Jocelyn Jee Esien were quite good -- but also depicted a world full of superficial, mostly terrible people. Eight episodes is a lot to be watching people like that. And Gabriella was annoying for the first 6.5 episodes, at least. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4956 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4956 Sat, 10 Feb 2024 23:30:56 +0100 of around 1600 ratings publicly available. I've included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other -- I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. 1. "Star Wars: Episode VIII - Die letzten Jedi (2017)" <#star-wars> -- "9/10" 2. "Six Days Seven Nights (1998)" <#six-days> -- "8/10" 3. "Unknown Cosmic Time Machine (2023)" <#jwst> -- "8/10" 4. "Manhunt (Zhui bu) (2017)" <#manhunt> -- "6/10" 5. "Now You See Me 2 (2016)" <#nysm2> -- "6/10" 6. "In the Tall Grass (2019)" <#tall-grass> -- "8/10" 7. "The Two Popes (2019)" <#two-popes> -- "10/10" 8. "Snitch (2013)" <#snitch> -- "6/10" 9. "The Night Comes for Us (2018)" <#the-night> -- "7/10" 10. "Rodney King (2017)" <#rodney-king> -- "10/10" Star Wars: Episode VIII - Die letzten Jedi (2017) -- "9/10" I have nothing to add or take away from "my review in 2017" . I might have even liked Mark Hamill in his final outing as Luke Skywalker more than the first time around. Even knowing what was going to happen, I still really, really liked the final showdown between him and Kylo Ren. "See you around, kid." I watched it in German. Six Days Seven Nights (1998) -- "8/10" Robin Monroe (Anne Heche) works at a magazine in New York City. She's very busy. Her boss Marjorie (Allison Janney) has boundary issues and wouldn't understand the phrase work/life balance if you tattooed it on her forehead. Her boyfriend Frank Martin (David Schwimmer) surprises her with a one-week trip to Makatea. They fly to the island with Quinn Harris (Harrison Ford) and his current girlfriend Angelica (Jacqueline Obradors). Five hours later, Quinn has completely forgotten about how he'd flown Robin out that morning and is hitting on her at a tiki bar. Frank proposes to her that night. The next morning, Marjorie calls her for an emergency photo-shoot. She's got to engage Quinn's services for the flight. It's getting windy. They're in the air, though, and on their way to the other island. As the storm comes up for real, Quinn decides to turn back, but the weather turns much worse and they crash-land on an island. The next morning, they discuss their fate -- which is that they're stuck on the island. While they're gone, Frank spent the evening ogling Angelica's island dancing. The next morning, they learn that Quinn and Robin have gone down and they engage a search-and-rescue team together. Back on the island, Quinn and Robin have climbed to the highest point on the island to find a beacon...that isn't there. They're not on the island that they thought they were on. They spot a boat, though. They hurry back down the mountain, taking the rest of the day to get back to camp. They pump up their raft and spend the night rowing around the island to where they'd seen the boat. As they get closer, they see that there are two boats -- one of them is a pirate boat. They flee back out of the water and up into the hills. They fight with the pirates, then convince them that they have jewels, get away again, and are forced to jump off of a cliff into the ocean. They get back out of the water, then kiss for the first time. They flee up the island, still worried the pirates will find them. They can't go back to camp because the plane is too obvious a sign. Frank and Anjelica have spent the day drinking together. Frank sees Anjelica home. She strips and convinces him to stay. Quinn and Robin make camp under a WWII plane, eating breadfruit. He gets an idea: take the pontoons off of the WWII plane to change his plane to a seaplane. They get the pontoons back to camp and spend some time chopping trees and branches and fronds to attach them. They've just about gotten everything set when the pirates show up on the horizon again. The pirates have a cannon -- of course they do! -- and start homing in on them. The last shot gets close and Quinn takes shrapnel. They get in the plane and manage to take off, with the pirates shooting straight up at them, and then blowing themselves up when the shot returns to Earth on a very tight parabola. They're in the air, but Quinn is fading. He teaches her how to fly enough for her to be able to land the plane. They make it back, with her landing the plane. Robin and Frank confess their transgressions and agree not to get married. Quinn hurries to the airport. He thinks he's missed Robin, but he'd watched the wrong plane take off. She's just getting off the plane. He meets her. "My life is too simple. I want to complicate the hell out of it." Unknown Cosmic Time Machine (2023) -- "8/10" [image]Look, it's a bit of a weird and clickbait-y title and IMDb lists Joe Biden as the main star, even though he appeared in it for about 20 seconds, drooling his way through a couple of throwaway sentences at a press conference that he most likely didn't understand in anything other than the most superficial manner. Joe Biden had nothing to do with the "JWST" whatsoever. They happened to finally launch it while he was president. That he's listed first just shows how much of a cult the goddamned liberal world is. You can bet your boots that there is no way that Amazon-owned IMDb would have listed Donald Trump as the star of this movie had he been president when the JWST launched. The second person listed is one of the actual stars: Amber Straughn (@Astraughnomer on Twitter; I gotta hand it to her...that's kind clever) and the main star is actually Thomas Zurbuchen, a Swiss guy who was Head of Science Programs at NASA and was the one who finally got this program done. The movie lets you know how many single-points-of-failure they had and that they managed to avoid all of them in what ended up being an absolutely flawless launch. I watched it live on Christmas Day 2021. It launched from French Guiana and inserted that satellite so perfectly into its flight path to L2 that its mission is expected to be twice as long as planned. They got the first images back and everything is lined up and perfect. It's already making incredible discoveries and collecting absolutely vital data. As the people in the movie say: it's a bright spot in an otherwise oft-depressing world situation. We came together from all sorts of countries to work together and achieved something wonderful. I gave this documentary an extra star for being about something totally awesome and for keeping the runtime reasonable (64 minutes). Manhunt (Zhui bu) (2017) -- "6/10" John Woo directed this, and his signature is occasionally apparent. While it has a reasonably interesting story, this is not a great movie. The character-building is kind of non-existent. Du Qiu (Zhang Hanyu) is an attorney who's worked for a pharmaceutical company Tenjin for a long time. He's about to relocate to America. He's in a restaurant, in the kitchen with two women Rain (Ha Ji-won) and Dawn (Angeles Woo), who he semi-protects from some rough customers who come in demanding food and service and, probably, sex. The customers retreat to the dining room, while Qiu small-talks with them about classic movies. They send him out to get a DVD that he's been talking about. While he's gone, they gun down everyone in the dining room. They're assassins and didn't really need his chivalry -- but they appreciated it enough to be important later. He's now at a big company party where he meets two women: Chinese/Japanese Mayumi Mounami / Zhen Tianmei (Qi Wei) and an ethereally thin vamp who dances with him, then sneaks off to his house, where she ... breaks in? Or did she get a key from his boss? Anyway, she's dressed as sexy as she's capable of doing, given her eating disorder. She waits in bed for him. He wakes the next morning next to her. She's dead. He calls the police. They arrive, but so does a housekeeper he's never seen before. She accuses him of definitely being the murderer. Commanding officer Yuji Asano (Kuniharu Tokunaga) seems hell-bent on setting him up, letting him go so he can gun him down as he runs away. Du Qiu escapes over a railing with some gymnastic skills. Old hand Satoshi Yamura (Masaharu Fukuyama) is put on the case, paired with eager neophyte Rika (Nanami Sakuraba), who's as much in the way as she is helpful. She'll get better, though. Yamamura tracks down Qiu and almost has him a few times, but Qui slips his grasp and ends up in a migrant camp, befriending Sakaguchi (Yasuaki Kurata), who speaks Chinese. The other migrants help him blend in and avoid being swept up in the occasional police raid. Qui arranges a meeting with his former boss Yoshihiro Sakai (Jun Kunimura), president of Tenjen, to find out what the hell is going on. The boss and his company hire Rain and Dawn to take him out. Despite Dawn's exhortations, Rain can't do it. Instead, she shoots the emissary from the company and starts spraying bullets everywhere so that Qui can escape. He does -- on a jet-ski. Yamamura is hot on his trail, on his own jet-ski. Lots of splashy-splashy and John Woo-style super-jumps and slo-mo camera angles. Mayumi shows up to help him escape on a Shinkansen (bullet train). Thanks to his investigation, Yamamura actually wants to help Qiu because he now believes that he's innocent. He's convinced the killer was left-handed, which Qiu is not. Mayumi and Qiu escape to her country home, where she tells him how he's the reason that her husband committed suicide -- Qiu was so relentless in pursuing a case against him three years ago that the husband couldn't take it anymore. Qiu apologizes, saying that the information he worked with came directly from the authorities. Rain and Dawn crash the party quite literally. Yamamura isn't far behind, plowing into Dawn a few times, with her popping back up each time. She keeps shooting herself up with some drug that gives her quasi-superhuman endurance and strength, as well as making her nearly invulnerable. Qiu and Mayumi flee in a car, but Yamamura drives them off the road, pairs up with them. then pulls a Defiant Ones and cuffs himself to Qiu. Rain and Dawn continue the pursuit. Yamamura takes a bullet, but puts down Dawn for good. She overdoses trying to resurrect herself and dies in Rain's arms. The camera zooms in on her face, showing us that Rain thinks she's now justified in thinking she deserves revenge. Dude, you're a contract killer whose job is to frame some people for crimes that you're covering up for other people. You don't exactly have the moral high ground. They take Yamamura to the hospital and let Qiu go. He ends up with Sakaguchi, infiltrating the top-secret experiments of Tenjin, posing as homeless "volunteers". Once inside, they find out that everyone's being horribly abused in violent experiments with subsequent generations of the drugs that Rain and Dawn use to pump themselves up. Sakaguchi goes first and comes back, pumped up like a living weapon, helpless to stop himself from killing several of his fellow prisoners before he manages to kill himself in a moment of clarity. Qiu goes next and is deep into painful experiments when Yamamura shows up, demanding to see him. Sakai cuts him off at the entrance, where Yamamura bribes him with a few letters of the code her needs to unlock the extra-super-good version of the super-soldier formula. Just try to keep up here. As Qiu is released and sicced on Yamamura, Rain makes peace with Mayumi, realizing that Sakai is actually responsible for Dawn's death. This is done in a much cheesier manner than I've described here. Let's just leave it at that. Qiu breaks the conditioning after a nice fight with Yamamura. He, Rain, Yamamura, and Mayumi blast their way through the lab, covered in blood and all carrying at least one or two bullet wounds, but not seeming to feel them. Head of the lab and Sakai's son Hiroshi (Hiroyuki Ikeuchi injects himself with the super-duper soldier-serum and rampages for a bit, kicking everyone's ass. No-one really gets hurt or damaged enough not to be able to continue fighting. They finally put down Hiroshi -- but not before he's able to confess to the murder for which Yamamura was pursuing Qiu. They now turn to his dad, who's somehow still alive. He regrets nothing and kills himself anyway -- I guess to avoid jail time? -- but not before mortally wounding Rain, who dies in Qiu's arms, mumbling something about classic movies (callback to the first scene in the film). All that's left is a goodbye between the now-best-of-buddies Yamamura and Qiu, who share a respectful handshake. There's a lot of slo-mo footage of flying cherry blossoms, more than one dove, and Murayami on her wedding day, watching her husband die. It's John Woo, baby. That doesn't sound too terrible, does it? The plot is pretty bog-standard, but it could have worked better if the actors were allowed to just act. I don't know which genius inspired them to try speaking English half of the time, but it was a bad idea. It felt like they were dubbed half of the time, and the other half they just tried to muddle through. I'll have to take their word for it that they handled the Chinese or Japanese any better. It was pretty distracting. It was kind of interesting, though, that people spoke to the Chinese guy in English, except for Mayumi, who spoke both. It's kind of like German and French in the German part of Switzerland. Swiss-Germans feel more comfortable speaking English than French; Swiss-French feel the same about German. On the other hand, it is kind of endearing how wedded to the style John Woo is. This movie could easily have been made in the 80s. The soundtrack during well-choreographed fight scenes was all horns -- trumpets, sax, etc. -- so it was quite a throwback. There was even what I thought was going to be the classic freeze-frame-to-credits, but the camera froze on Yamamura for only two seconds before it moved to a short scene of him and Rika walking into the camera and her coyly dropping that "a lot of people are getting married on trains these days." Fade to credits. I was torn between six and seven stars because it kind of won me over by the end. The voice-acting was kind of painful and the acting was sometimes laughable, but I'd probably watch it again if it drifted by on TV. I watched it in the original Chinese, Japanese, and occasional English. Now You See Me 2 (2016) -- "6/10" It's odd to see so much fan service for a movie that's only the second in the series, but that's kind of how it feels. This movie also totally expects you to have remembered what happened in the first movie (which I "watched in 2014" ), as well as who is who in the cast. So, there's the Four Horseman, except it's only three of the original horseman because, apparently, Isla Fisher, either wasn't invited back or was unable to come back, or whatever. Anyway, in what passes for being open-minded, Fisher's character Henley is gone and has been replaced by Lula (Lizzy Caplan). She joins Merritt McKinney (Woody Harrelson), Daniel Atlas (Jesse Eisenberg), Jack Wilder (Dave Franco), and super-secret hidden member Dylan Rhodes (Mark Ruffalo), who is also in the FBI. The FBI suspects, but does not know. They're all in hiding at the start of the movie. They are kept there by an organization called "The Eye", practicing for a big "show". Everyone has a boss, even anarchist-magicians. The Eye is the boss of the Horsemen. They basically crash the reveal of some sort of new phone, called Octa 8 -- a bit redundant -- and start to reveal how the company's CEO is hell-bent on collecting everyone's data. In the middle of their interruption, they themselves are interrupted by a mysterious figure who reveals all of their secrets. Turnaround is fair play! Switcheroo! This kind of thing is going to keep happening. It's kind of this movie's "thing". They barely escape, sliding down an escape tube into a van. Wait, no, they end up in Macau. Magic! Switcheroo! There are a lot of reveals in this movie. These were just the first of many, so buckle up. Dylan is at the pick-up point, but the Horsemen are not there. Instead, he gets a call from his arch-nemesis Thaddeus Bradley (Morgan Freeman), who says that the wheels of his own plan are in motion. [Reveal!] Dylan goes to the prison to confront him, but does a bad job of confronting him in that he ends up springing him. They travel to Macau together because Thaddeus's people heard from little birdies that the Horsemen are there. Back in Macau, where it turns out that Merritt has a twin brother Chase [Reveal!] -- obviously also played by Woody Harrelson -- who reveals a bit more about their shared life growing up in a pretty over-the-top campy way. He leaves them at The Sands casino in Macau where they are to meet his boss in a sumptuous suite. Another big [Reveal!] introduces us to Walter Mabry (Daniel Radcliffe). He tells a long story about his partnership with the CEO of the company that makes the Octa 8. That guy betrayed him, so Walter faked his own death, then bought out the company through a bunch of anonymous investors...look, it doesn't matter, right? Most of this is bullshit because everybody's lying and there are layers of subterfuge, so there's no point in even trying to figure out which of these head-fakes are head-fakes and which moves are real attempts to get closer to yet-unrevealed goals. The Horsemen (well, horsepeople) make a plan to steal a computer chip-like thing that everybody calls "the stick". They pretend to be buyers of it and finagle their way into the vault, where Jack swipes the chip/card and they do a little ballet of throwing the thing around and doing sleight-of-hand to prevent guards frisking them from finding it. Meanwhile, Dylan and Thaddeus go to the world's oldest magic store -- where the Horsemen had just outfitted themselves -- to follow the trail. Thaddeus [Reveals!] that he speaks Mandarin when he responds to the shop owner. Afterwards, he goes fishing for a compliment from Dylan, who responds in Mandarin, "If your Mandarin were any good, I would have let you know." [Reveal!] They track the Horsemen to a local market, where Danny, Dylan, and Walter tussle. Well, Walter's henchmen tussle with Dylan, who'd pretended to get rid of Danny for Walter, but had really deftly slipped him the real "stick" before locking him outside. Dylan eventually gets caught by Chase and Walter and their henchmen. The Horsemen are mystified as to how they still have the "stick". Walter has his goons beat up Dylan, vamping and preening and generally chewing the scenery in a truly awful way. I can't tell if Radcliffe is serious about this performance or if he's taking the piss, but it's god-awful. But that's not all! Walter introduces his father Arthur Tressler (Michael Caine), who is also god-awful. In the scene on the boat, otherwise great actors are all trapped together by an awful script with laughable dialogue in a sort of Mexican standoff. Father and son pack Dylan into the safe his father died in and throw him into the water, toasting champagne and chortling. I am not kidding about any of this. If you're wondering, Ruffalo is no better, just phoning it in. Dylan escapes, thinking of what his father told him and just by believing in himself. The rest of the Horsemen show up in the nick of time to save him from drowning and they have a real gladfest about how awesome it is that they're all together again. They have the stick, but it's fake -- or is it? -- and have no time to plan, but then they plan something super-elaborate anyway because they are impossibly amazing and flawless. Oh, and the lady and son from the oldest magic store in the world show introduce themselves as "The Eye" and that they're fully on board and no longer hiding in the shadows, so that's resolved too! [Reveal!] Each of the horsemen puts on their own magic show somewhere in London, with the locations pointing somewhere in the Thames, by the bridge. They pretend to barely get away, then jump on motorcycles, then fail to escape, then get captured by Walter and Arthur and Chase, who's a maniac. They all herd onto a business jet, which feels odd, then Walter gets the stick, reveals that it's actually the real one, then orders them all thrown out of the plane. Chase obliges. TADA! The Horsemen float back into view by the windows, inviting Tressler and son outside. They are on a floating barge in the middle of the Thames, just before midnight on New Year's Eve. [Reveal!] The horsemen grandstand around, explaining their trick, then turn the whole lot of them over to the authorities. The FBI closes in with boats, but the Horsemen are gone, except for Dylan, who his counterpart at the FBI catches, but he bribes her with a USB stick of data on Walter, then disappears. They rendezvous at some mansion that the Eye owns, all driving there in a car together like a bunch of poors. Thaddeus shows up, [revealing!] himself and Dylan's dad as having been the best of friends, with their rivalry having just been a diversion. Dylan swallows it hook, line, and sinker. Thaddeus leaves, telling them to check out what's behind the curtain. OMG it's just the entire nerve center of the Eye that was used to track the Horsemen and to build them up until they're worthy of running the Eye themselves. [Reveal!] The end. Jesus, this was a pretty thinly written bit of fan-fiction, honestly. There was little to no tension. All of the tricks are so bombastic and huge that you can't even be impressed by them because there's another one coming two seconds later. I did like how Jack Wilder covered himself in a hail of playing cards, then disappeared. As with Manhunt, I was torn between six and seven, finally granting it the same score as that other film that was sometimes lower in quality, but seemed to believe in itself more. In the Tall Grass (2019) -- "8/10" Becky (Laysla De Oliveira) and her brother Cal (Avery Whitted) are driving across the country. They're about 1500 miles into their journey -- so, about halfway to San Diego. She's pregnant and feeling nauseated. They pull over so she can throw up. They hear a little boy calling from the field of tall grass. It's, like, really tall grass, well over the height of a person. Torn, they decide to see if they can rescue him. Cal parks by a church and they plunge into the grass, quickly losing sight of one another. The boy Tobin (Will Buie Jr.) seems to fade further away. Cal and Becky also drift away from each other. For a minute, they can still see each other, but then lose each other again. The tall grass is bedeviling. Becky runs into Ross (Patrick Wilson), who is Tobin's father. He says he'll lead her to Cal and get them out of there. Meanwhile, Cal runs into a careworn Tobin, who tells him that "Becky will die soon". Unnerved, but desperate, Cal follows Tobin deeper into the field, to "the rock". The rock looks like an alien egg, onyx and striated. Tobin touches the rock, thrilled by it. He invites Cal to do the same. Becky is attacked by something vaguely humanoid. Tobin and Cal can only listen to her screams. Tobin predicted this. The moon is out. The rock gleams, ancient symbols carved into it thrown into stark relief. It throbs. It hums. It tempts. Travis (Harrison Gilbertson) -- Becky's baby-daddy -- drives along the road. He spots what he thinks might be their dirty car in the parking lot. He wipes off the license plate to confirm his suspicion. He can't fathom it, though. They've been missing for months. Travis approaches the grass, draw by the sound of Becky and Cal. He plunges into the grass, quickly losing himself as well. He runs into Tobin, who claims to somehow know him. Tobin leads him to Becky's corpse. We see Tobin's mother Natalie (Rachel Wilson) and Tobin by the side of the road, with Ross on the phone. Tobin and his dog Freddy hear Travis calling Tobin's name from the tall grass. Natalie and Ross follow behind, quickly separating from each other and never finding Tobin. ♾️ A time loop ♾️ 1. Cal and Becky heard Tobin and went in to find him. 2. Two months later, Travis heard Cal and Becky and went in to find them. 3. Sometime before Cal and Becky went in, but somehow after Travis, but also before him because Travis already knew him -- Tobin heard Travis calling him ... and went in to find him. 4. Go to 1. Travis meets up with Cal and Becky, revealing how long they've been missing. They manage to locate Tobin as well. Ross is watching them from the tall grass. Travis pops Tobin on his shoulders to look out over the grass. Tobin sees the church. They head in that direction, walking, walking, and walking, but not there yet. When Becky drops with a pain in her uterus, Ross appears from out of nowhere to give her CPR and "save" her. Tobin pops back up on Travis's shoulders -- but the church is gone. Ross leads them all deeper into the grass, claiming to know the way out. Ross is singing "The Midnight Special" , answering Travis that "yeah, it's CCR, but it's older than that." It originated with prisoners from the American South. Ross takes them to the rock. He touches it. Shivers. With eyes aglow, he exhorts them to do the same. Cal is about to do it when Natalie appears, yelling that they shouldn't do a thing that Ross says. Travis attacks Ross, who pops his arm out of his shoulder socket for him, then pops his wife Natalie's head like a zit as the others run away. The others run and spot a dilapidated bowling alley, where they escape Ross for a moment. Cal relocates Travis's shoulder and then they fight over whether Cal wants to bang his sister Becky. Ross eventually shows up and they flee to the roof. Travis and Cal watch Freddy disappear behind a copse of grass, but not reappear on the other side. Creepy. Weird, Supernatural. Then they see the dog again, just jogging through a long gap in the grass -- and onto the road. Instead of remembering that the dog literally just disappeared a few seconds ago -- and forgetting how treacherous the seemingly living grass is -- they decide to follow what looks like an obvious and easy path out of the grass and back onto the road. Problem solved. Travis slips from the roof, but Cal catches him. A very Stephen King look crosses his face as sibilant voices whisper incomprehensible suggestions in his head. He lets Travis drop to the pavement. As Ross pops through the roof exit that they'd barred, Cal and Becky flee the building, following Tobin. Becky: "Where's Travis?" Cal: "He's coming." Becky doesn't believe him and runs back. Cal continues, but Ross appears out of nowhere, tackling him and choking the life out of him. The camera pulls back to reveal several Cal corpses in increasing stages of decomposition. Ross has been killing him for quite a while now. ♾️ Loop-de-loop. ♾️ Becky awakens in mud, in a torrential downpour. She hears Travis, who is somehow either still alive or alive again or in another timeline ... or something. At any rate, she hears him. He is close. Close enough to touch. It's so dark and rainy. They reach out toward each other, fingers nearly touching Then Becky screams. The hand she'd touched was not Travis's. She wakes. She is still in mud. Different mud. Mud at the foot of the rock. Lightning sheets across the sky, starkly illuminating the sigils roughly engraved in its surface. The stick figures show a woman giving birth. The baby lifted high. Impaled. Cal is suddenly there. He holds her baby, tells her it's beautiful, perfect. She squints through the rain, smiles, drops her head back down, letting herself relax for a second. He feeds her something. She eats it eagerly. He tells her it's grass. Then he tells her it's her -- it's unclear whether it's her baby or placenta he's purportedly fed her. It's not Cal, though. He'd dead. It's Ross, feeding Becky her baby. Tobin is there. He calls to Travis, who stumbles into the clearing. Travis attacks Ross, who attacks him back, easily besting him. He stabs him with the spiky end of a snapped femur. Travis drops into the mud. Ross turns to Tobin and tries to make him touch the rock. Before he can, though, Becky rises out of the mud one last time to stab out Ross's other eye with her heart locket. She drops back to the mud, finally dead for good. Blinded, Ross flails about. Travis struggles back to his feet. Rain lashes down continuously. The rock looms above them, silent, watching, exhorting, humming, whispering. Travis rips grass from the ground and garrotes Ross with it. It takes forever. Against Tobin's pleas, Travis stumbles to the rock, to place his palm on it, to finally understand what it wants, what it does to people. He is strong enough to resist its wiles. This is like in Midnight Mass, where the message, though covered in gore, was one of hope. People can resist, if they really want to. Even seemingly irresistible forces can be resisted. You don't have to take their filthy deals. You can take less for yourself, sacrifice for the group. If a sacrifice is demanded, then maybe it's got to be you. This is very hopeful. Travis leads a terrified Tobin to an exit that he knows about now, having communed with the rock, but having been strong enough to betray it. He sends Tobin out to prevent Cal and Becky from ever having entered the grass in the first place. Perhaps, if it works, he will also have retroactively saved himself, since, if Cal and Becky never enter the grass, he will never have followed them to also become trapped in the grass. Perhaps he is breaking the time loop. Perhaps he knows that only his current self will suffer, but that his other, original incarnation will survive, untouched by the eldritch horror of the rock. But perhaps he doesn't suspect any of this. Perhaps he simply selflessly sacrifices himself to save a little boy, his unborn daughter, and her mother and uncle. Tobin opens his eyes to find himself standing in a room with a wooden floor. He approaches a door, unlatches it, and lets himself into the apse of the church across the road. He trepidatiously exits to see Cal and Becky just about to exit their vehicle, having heard his other incarnation's cries for help from deep in the grass. He pleads with them not to go in, finally convincing Becky by giving "back" her locket, the one that Travis had given him. She now has two lockets, one quite careworn and still covered in Ross's blood. She screams at Cal not to enter -- he was about to go in. They drive off with Tobin. Travis hears their car drive off. He lies back into the mud beneath the grass and dies as its fronds arch over him, hiding him from our eyes, waving to and fro in a vaguely sinister pattern as the view fades to credits -- CCR's Midnight Special plays. I have not read the original story, but this was a great Stephen King adaptation. I could tell at each step that it was Stephen King -- and old-school King, at that. I was reminded of several other King stories, like The Regulators, Desperation -- CAN-TAH -- as well as The Tommyknockers, which also had a talismanic alien artifact capable of bending time, minds, and transcending death. The Two Popes (2019) -- "10/10" Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio (Jonathan Pryce) is from Buenos Aires. He was in the running for pope after Pope John Paul II died. The primary contender was Cardinal Joseph Aloisius Ratzinger (Anthony Hopkins), who was considerably more political. As you probably know, he would end up winning and becoming pope in 2005. He is very conservative and believes in the power of the church rather than the power of the people. The church tells the people what to do; it does not ask what the people would like it to do. His is a wrathful, Old-Testament church, not a merciful, forgiving New-Testament one. Bergoglio returns to Buenos Aires. He is a simple man, with simple needs, who simply wants to help as many people as he can. He decides to retire from his cardinalcy in 2012 and asks the pope for permission to do so. Instead, the pope calls him to Italy, to his summer home, to discuss the matter. Bergoglio arrives, speaking Italian and English as required, though his main language is Spanish. He arrives at the Palace of Castel Gandolfo, and walks around the gardens with one of the gardeners, deep in conversation, while he waits for the tardy pope Ratzinger to arrive. Their first conversation starts off contentiously, with Ratzinger spouting a litany of Bergoglio's transgressions against the church's doctrine, accusing him of doing what he wants rather than what the church wants. Ratzinger apologizes for his tardiness, saying that his former assistant was "perfect". Bergoglio responds that "he's in jail". They sit together, then walk together, only tangentially discussing points of theology, focusing instead of the more prosaic presence and role of the church in a modern world. They disagree strongly over the church's role: Ratzinger thinks the church should lead and not adapt. Bergoglio believes in change, which Ratzinger disparages as "compromise." He spits out the word. "Pope Benedict: When you were leader of the Jesuits in Argentina, you had all the books on Marxism removed from the library. Bergoglio: And I made seminarians wear cassocks all day, even when they were working in the vegetable garden. And I called civil marriage for homosexuals the Devil's plan. Pope Benedict: You were not unlike me. Bergoglio: I changed. Pope Benedict: No, you compromised! Bergoglio: No, I changed! It's a different thing." Ratzinger is not without his charm. They walk in the garden some more because his fitness tracker exhorts him to "move". "Pope Benedict: My doctor gave it to me. He said, 'You are in good shape for 86 but very bad shape for a human being.' I believe this was a joke." Ratzinger is very much of the opinion that he knows exactly what the world needs, down to the last detail, and that he has nothing to learn from anyone. The church's doctrine should not bend in any way, should not adapt at all to the mercurial vagaries of a world that thinks it is so modern that it only wants a church that will bend to its will, rather than the other way around, "Bergoglio: We have spent these last years disciplining anyone who disagrees with our line on divorce, on birth control, on being gay. While our planet was being destroyed, while inequality grew like a cancer. We worried whether it was alright to speak the Mass in Latin, whether girls should be allowed to be altar servers. We built walls around us, and all the time, all the time, the real danger was inside. Inside with us. Pope Benedict: You talk about walls as if they are bad things. A house is built of walls. Strong walls. Bergoglio: Ah... Did Jesus build walls? His face is a face of mercy. The bigger the sinner, the warmer the welcome. Mercy is the dynamite that blows down walls." Bergoglio dares to reproach the church -- and Ratzinger specifically -- for how it handles child abuse. Ratzinger stalks away, looking very much the intolerant and unbending bureaucrat next to Bergoglio's much more credible man-of-God. Ratzinger had said as much earlier, when he'd accused Bergoglio of "thinking he was better than everyone else, better than the church." Ratzinger is seemingly offended by Bergoglio's humbleness, modesty, and seeming lack of a need for worldly goods. He sneers at his ugly shoes, which aren't nearly as fancy as Ratzinger's own Ferragamos. Ratzinger retires for the afternoon. A gentle and kind functionary shows Bergoglio to his room, which surprises him because he'd thought the audience was finished. He'd been prepared to leave -- although he'd not gotten what he'd come for: an official acknowledgment and acceptance of his abdication of his cardinalcy. Ratzinger doesn't want to grant it to him for political reasons. Bergoglio is well-respected for his exceedingly good qualities -- he'd almost been pope himself. If he were to leave prematurely -- if he were to be allowed to leave -- it would reflect badly on the church. People would take it as a sign that the church had become so bad that Bergoglio could no longer stand to be a part of it. The judgment would be clear. Bergoglio is made to eat alone -- Knödel mit Söse -- while Ratzinger eats the same, but watching F1 racing in German. Later, Bergoglio enters a lavish sitting room with a television; he asks permission to turn on the TV and watches soccer for a few minutes. Ratzinger walks in, saying to leave it on, even though he himself had never understood the appeal. This, from a man who'd just spent his entire meal watching a different sport. The throwaway comment neatly highlight's the pontiff's hypocrisy -- which had otherwise become quite clear from their conversation in the garden. Bergoglio turns off the TV and sits with Ratzinger. They talk quietly. Bergoglio recounts the story of how he'd become a priest in the first place. The flashback shows a much younger man, about to be married. But "the call" came to him, in the form of a spontaneous confession with an older priest. He finished the story, saying that, despite having lost the love of his life, he knows that God would have found him anyway. If not that night, then soon after. Ratzinger plays the piano, a sad lullaby. They talk about music, about the Beatles. Ratzinger seems a bit confused, with Hopkins playing the part of an old man, late in the evening, forgetting some details, getting lost in the mazes of recollection, then getting a bit angry and defensive about it. He's not mad, just frustrated with himself. He says that he likes jokes, and that he "likes company". Bergoglio cites a passage that God is always with you, to which Ratzinger replies that "God doesn't laugh". The next morning, the pontiff is called back to Rome by a further-unfolding scandal. Bergoglio is forced to accompany him, his retirement-request unsigned and ignored. Later, Ratzinger meets Bergoglio in the Sistine Chapel of St. Peter's Basilica. Ratzinger confesses that he wants to retire. Bergoglio is horrified. "Pope Benedict: In 1978, we had three popes. Bergoglio: Yeah, but they weren't at the same time. Pope Benedict: I was making a little joke. Bergoglio: A joke? Pope Benedict: A German joke. It doesn't have to be funny." After some back and forth, Bergoglio discerns that Ratzinger won't sign his retirement because he has come to believe that the only way he can retire with a clean conscience is if he knows that someone like Bergoglio has a chance of replacing him, of saving the church in a way that Ratzinger cannot. "Ratzinger: For weeks I have been praying. I wanted to resign. But the thought that stopped me - what if at the next conclave, they voted for you. Bergoglio: Then I offered my resignation. Ratzinger: Exactly. And I was delighted. One reason I didn’t want to resign was...what if you were next. This is only half in jest. Bergoglio: [smiles] Ratzinger: And so you came. And now I’ve changed. Bergoglio: You compromised. Ratzinger: No. I’ve changed. It’s a different thing. Your approach, your style is radically different from mine. And I don’t agree with most things you say and do... Bergoglio: [smiles] Ratzinger: But now I can see a necessity for Bergoglio. I cannot do this without knowing that there is at least a possibility that you might be chosen. Bergoglio: No. Father, I could never...not me. Ratzinger: We both know, in our hearts, that it could be. The Church needs change and you could be that change." Bergoglio fills in some gaps in his file for Ratzinger, recounting how he'd behaved when Argentine took a fascist lurch and killed tens of thousands of its own citizens. He'd excommunicated two of his Jesuit friends who'd refused to submit to the evil rules and petty edicts. They continued to tend their flock -- and they were punished for it, especially after they were no longer under the protection of the church. Bergoglio saved many people, and went on to do much good, but he continued to be haunted by what he considered to be an inexcusable betrayal of his friends and comrades, people who'd taken their lumps for the cause. Instead, he'd tried to work with the fascist regime, to guide it into less destructive practices. He was cast out, traveling through the poorest parts of Argentina, bringing the message and the gospel. He hears endless confessions. He slowly regains his reputation. He makes speeches, "Twenty percent of the world’s population consumes resources at a rate that robs the poor nations and future generations of what they need to survive. Just as the commandment “Thou shalt not kill” sets a clear limit in order to safeguard the value of human life, today we also have to say “thou shalt not” to an economy of exclusion and inequality which idolises money. Such an economy also kills." He is made a bishop. But, as Ratzinger says, he "did not live like one. [He] renounced luxury." Ratzinger gives Bergoglio absolution for his sins. They order lunch: pizza Margherita and Diavolo with two Fantas from the little stand out front. At Ratzinger's urging, Bergoglio finishes telling his story, that he'd reconciled with one of his old friends, but never the other. Ratzinger then confesses about long-running sexual misconduct in parishes for which he was responsible, and regrets having stayed silent. What's done is done. Bergoglio is incensed, but grants absolution. They emerge from the Room of Tears into the Sistine Chapel, mingling with the common folk. Bergoglio departs, giving Ratzinger an impromptu and largely unwelcome tango lesson just before he leaves. We see that Ratzinger has grown exceedingly fond of the man -- won over by his naturally principled mien, as had so many others before him. From earlier in the film, "Ratzinger: Ah yes. It must be very useful, this popularity of yours. Is there a trick to it? Bergoglio: I try to be myself. Ratzinger: Hmm, when I try to be myself, people don’t seem to like me very much." Bergoglio flies home. One year later, he watches Ratzinger deliver his resignation -- in Latin. The cardinals gathered there whisper to each other in Italian -- "Aspetti. Mi devo essere sbagliato. [...] Mi scusi ma ho sentito bene? Ho tradotto bene?" Bergoglio is watching with Lisabetta and says, "¡Lo dijo en latín! Siempre que tiene que decir algo embromado lo dice en latín... y así sólo lo entienden unos pocos cardenales..." And then he translates for her: "El Papa acaba de renunciar." We witness another election, this time of Pope Frances (Bergoglio). We see him travel the world. We watch as he and Ratzinger watch the World Cup final in 2014 -- Germany vs. Argentina. Germany would emerge victorious 1--0. Pope Frances would have to wait until the end of 2022 to celebrate Argentina's coronation. They are both so brilliant in their roles. We watched it in Spanish, Italian, Portugese, German, and English with English subtitles. I obtained several of the citations from the "the final shooting script" . Snitch (2013) -- "6/10" Jason Collins (Rafi Gavron) agrees to take delivery of a pretty huge number of MDMA pills for his friend Craig (James Allen McCune). He gets the delivery up to his room and the DEA is on him like white on rice. He temporarily escapes out of his bedroom window, but where's he going? There's over 2,000 pills in a plastic bag on his bed and the DEA is in his bedroom. They have him dead to rights. The DEA agents -- including Agent Cooper (Barry Pepper) -- chase him down and arrest him. His mom Sylvie (Melina Kanakaredes) is kind of a flake and she's totally distraught. He would never do anything like this! His dad John Matthews (Dwayne Johnson) runs a relatively large trucking company. We see him establishing what a great and competent employer he is. As he's driving out, he sees one employee Daniel James (Jon Bernthal) doing some extra work, even though his shift is over. Matthews initially wants to chide him that he's not paying overtime -- his business is stretched a bit thin -- but it turns out that Daniel is just trying to get the bags of cement out of the impending rain. Matthews pitches in instead. We have established rapport. Matthews shows up to talk to Jason with his ex-wife Silvie. The agent in charge Jay Price (David Harbour) reveals to them that Jason's facing a minimum sentence of 10 years -- and that his friend Craig set him up for the DEA in order to lower his own minimum 10-year sentence. Neat-o. So Jason would never have taken delivery of the drugs if the DEA hadn't blackmailed Craig into trying to get him to do it. Price says that, if Jason doesn't find someone else to frame -- if he doesn't cooperate -- then the 10 years might become 30 for that amount of drugs. Quite a neat cycle they've got going there. Jason refuses, while his dad demands that he find someone to rat on. Jason continues to refuse to do it -- he doesn't know any drug dealers, and he's not going to do to someone else what was done to him by Craig, despite all of the adults in his world immorally exhorting him to do so. So off to jail he goes, awaiting trial. Matthews starts to pester US attorney Joanne Keeghan (Susan Sarandon) to find out if there's anything he can do for his son. No. Go away. She seems to have internalized the brazen immorality of entrapping innocent people for more arrests to the point where she either doesn't care that it's wrong -- or just doesn't even notice. Matthews heads out into the night, looking for trouble, and gets his ass absolutely beaten by a group of corner hustlers, who fall on him like a pack of wolves. They're just about to finish him off and steal his truck when the cops show up. Matthews is back with Keeghan. She says, fine, OK, if you're just going to get yourself killed anyway, then I'll allow you to pretend to sell drugs for the U.S. government so we can pretend that people in desperate circumstances in front of whom we dangle a lucrative drug deal are actually hard-core drug-dealers who need to be put away for a good long time, when what's really happening is that this is a job-security program for drug-warriors. Matthews scours his employee records for anyone who already has two strikes for drug-running. Daniel James comes up. John convinces Daniel to introduce him to his former associate Malik (Michael K. Williams). Daniel could be convinced because $20k is a lot of money to him and his family. His wife Analisa (Nadine Velazquez) has to work all hours because they can't afford to lose her job. That scene made me think of Marx and wage-slavery. It poignantly showed how most people do not have a choice about the work they do, not really. There is no way to argue around the fact that there is a privileged class of employers, and everyone else. Of course some of us have jobs that treat us well, and that we trust will continue to treat us well. But that doesn't change the fact that the best you can hope for is a benevolent dictatorship. The structure is not fundamentally a democratic or fair one. The exchange is your time, your creativity, your attention -- for money. If you get fulfillment, if you like your co-workers -- if you can call them friends -- then that's a bonus, but it's not part of the structure. There is nothing anchoring those things in anything other than an ephemeral and easily avoided way into people's lives. Against his better judgment, Daniel lets John convince him. Malik agrees to try it out, his interest piqued by the sheer carrying capacity of a semi-tractor-trailer truck. "Half a ton? Man, if I was in the thousand-pound business, I wouldn't be sitting in this dump right now." (Delivered as only Michael Williams could.) Malik agrees, but only if John makes the first run -- and if Daniel rides shotgun. They drive 1,000 miles to El Paso, where they pick up the drugs, packing it in bags of cement. As they're about to pull away, a rival gang ambushes them. John plows on out of there, impressing the kingpin Pintera (Benjamin Bratt). When they return to John's warehouse, Malik orders them to transfer the drugs to John's truck and deliver it. The DEA is up in arms because they'd not wired up the personal truck as well as the semi. Daniel grows suspicious of John, and confronts him, but is assuaged. He still walks away angry and frustrated because he's caught up in such a shitty situation again. They make the drop with Malik, but Cooper decides not to scoop them up. He hears radio chatter that they're going to meet up with a very high-value target, El Topo (who is Pintera). Matthews is pissed. Keeghan doesn't care one bit. They urge him to stop shouting at her campaign stop. They basically have him over a barrel and there is f&@k-all he can do about it. She goes back on her deal and extracts another deal out of him. He's now to take down El Topo for them. His next run will take him into Mexico, from which he's unlikely to return. Daniel finds out what Matthews has done, confronting him about it. They send their families into hiding. Daniel is super-pissed about everything, as he should be. Keeghan couldn't give two shits -- Sarandon plays this role quite well -- but Cooper has a change of heart and advises Matthews that the play is a suicide run. Matthews goes rogue. He comes up with a plan. A crucial step is for Daniel to get El Topo's phone number from Malik. As Matthews switches trucks to drop the DEA listening equipment and tail, Daniel puts one guard to sleep, but then murders two others. When Malik appears, he gut-shoots him while Malik wings him -- Omar vs. The Punisher. Malik gives him the phone number -- he's done-for anyway. Matthews fights off several cars full of shooters with his truck and his shotgun, which he wields incredibly well considering he'd just bought it the day before. He takes a shot in the thigh, though. He ends up flipping the truck, but the DEA arrives before the last cartel member can get to him. It's a truck full of $100m. At the same time, Cooper spots El Topo leaving his house and arrests him without incident. Matthews leaves the $100k reward check for El Topo's capture for Daniel, who breezes into the police station as if he hadn't just murdered three men in cold blood the day before. The DEA officers don't seem much bothered by it, either, although they must know that he'd done it. So, the DEA took out one kingpin in the war on drugs and sent three families into hiding. A job well done. And how does the WitSec program work for the two families? Jason lives with his mom -- does John get visitation rights in his new role? How does that work? It was fine, I guess. I think they were indicting the drug war, but you never know. Maybe Cooper's supposed to be the hero! To sum up the storyline as I saw it: * DEA helps set up an innocent boy as a dealer so that they can get him to turn on other drug-dealer friends who the DEA is sure he has. If he doesn't, no problem-o, because they've already got two arrests of people who probably wouldn't have been drug-dealers if the DEA hadn't encouraged them to do it. * Then a father goes a bit nuts when he hears his pure and precious son is going to be in jail for ten years. Instead of raging against the lunacy of such a system, he exhorts his son to turn on any or all of his friends, innocent or not. The boy refuses. * So the father starts dealing drugs for the DEA, getting screwed on deals again and again until he takes matters into his own hands and manages to get his son out of jail, but exiles himself and his family from everything they've ever known. * He implicates an employee of his who had been determined to avoid his third strike, getting him shot at, then shot, and also exiled, in the end. * All around a heartwarming story of justice. The Night Comes for Us (2018) -- "7/10" This is a pretty well-made Indonesian action movie with some excellent fight choreography mixed into what are often absolutely ludicrous -- and flatly unbelievable -- levels of endurance, stamina, and ability to take both punishment and grievous damage. You see, Indonesians like to fight with knives. They have to, because they are terrible, terrible shots. Everyone in the first half of the film dies of a knife wound because no-one with a gun can hit the broad side of a barn. Ito (Joe Taslim) is a Triad enforcer -- one of the Six Seas, an elite group entrusted with overseeing all of the Triad's drug trade. On a mission to wipe out a village, he has a change of heart on a beach and, instead of killing a little girl in cold blood -- as he'd already killed her mother -- he turns on his platoon and kills them instead. He takes the child back to Jakarta with him, where he holes up with Shinta (Salvita Decorte) and reconnects with his old friends and fellow gang-members Fatih (Abimana Aryasatya) and White Boy Bobby (Zack Lee). We all know where this is going, right? The Triad is going to clean up the loose end of Ito. There will be carnage along the way, as well as a twist in the person of Arian (Iko Uwais), another former member of Ito's gang who is now working in Macau for the Triad. We see him demonstrate his chops by wiping out a whole group of thugs at the casino where he works. Chien Wu (Sunny Pang) -- the Six Seas member in charge of cleaning up -- recruits Arian to kill Ito, to prove himself in what he hopes will be an initiation into the Six Seas. First, though, Ito finds out from his former crew members Fatih and Bobby that a local freak named Yohan (Revaldo) had stolen his gang's money. Ito goes to Yohan's butcher shop -- out of which he sells drugs -- to clean house. Lots and lots and lots of blood and body parts and sweet-ass fight choreography. While Ito is fighting there, though, a ton of Yohan's men infiltrate Shinta's apartment building. Fatih and Bobby fight them all off in another giant, bloody fight scene. Unfortunately for them, Chinese and Mandarin-speaking Anna (Dian Sastrowardoyo) and French-speaking albino Elena (Hannah Al Rashid) -- two more of the Six Seas -- show up and finish off Bobby, who gains time for Fatih to escape. Arian returns in the nick of time to help Fatih further, but Fatih only gets as far as the garage before he meets his end. A woman known only as The Operator (Julie Estelle) appears out of nowhere. She is a Deux Ex Machina and Force of Nature in that she is tireless and can't take damage. You can ring her bell all day and she isn't fazed. In fairness, this is the exact same with Fatih, Ito, or Arian, all of whom take prodigious damage at various points in the film -- gaping stab wounds, bullets, heads bounced off of concrete or iron girders -- and bounce back unfazed seconds later, still just as coordinated, fast, and strong as they were before they got what should have been career-, if not life-ending concussions. The Operator next hunts down Ito and bests him. This is amazing. One woman, fighting in close quarters, manages what dozens of armed men could not even come close to doing. I imagine that we, as viewers, are supposed to accept that her bona fides have been established, but it felt a bit more like she was a superhero without a backstory. Anyway, we're on to the next giant action sequence where Ito wipes out about two to three dozen Triad soldiers. They are all armed with clubs or knives, but he bests them all. Throwing us a bone, the director shows Ito stripping the newspaper "armor" he'd had on under his jacket. Back at the apartment, the Operator fights off more Triad henchmen who are there to get the little girl (for whatever reason). Alma and Elena show up. After The Operator dispatches Alma, we learn that Elena and the Operator were trained in the same unit -- or something. The Operator loses a fingertip to Elena's knife, but Elena loses all of her guts, then one of her arms, and then, finally, her jugular. Back at the warehouse, Ito seeks out Arian, who had subdued a sniper who was going to kill Ito. They chat a bit, with Ito holding Arian at gunpoint. He throws away the gun and they set to it. Just know that Arian could have just let the sniper kill Ito and the film would have been at least 25 minutes shorter -- that's about how long the ultimate fight scene is -- and Ito could have done the same by just shooting Arian. Instead, we get a long fight that, while fraught with indestructibility, doesn't feel too long because it's quite inventive. There is a lot of blood and there are lot of slash and puncture wounds, but we also notice that neither of them breaks the other's joints, as they have done with underlings and soldiers. I noticed the same thing when The Operator was fighting Elena and Alma: in fights with "red shirt" NPCs, they just brutally slice tendons and snap bones. When the main roles fight each other, they nicely take turns attacking and no-one does any crippling damage until the director has determined that the fight should be nearing its end. Then the knife wounds start up. Ito bests Arian, but does not kill him. Chien Wu shows up and has his gang of five other people take Arian out with machine guns. He's taken at least 50 bullets, but he's still breathing on the ground, so someone has to cap him. Indonesians are truly indestructible -- he'd already suffered so much damage from Ito, then all of the bullets, but he was still breathing. They're like Terminator robots. The Operator gets the little girl to Ito, then drives away. OK? I guess? No goodbye? Ito's not long for this world, but he gets the girl on a boat -- I suppose a metaphor for "safety". Ito gets in his car, in front of which appears an army of Triads led by Chien Wu. Horribly damaged, but grinning maniacally, he drives into their hail of bullets. The Wikipedia entry deems this ending as "his fate and the Triads are left unknown." I would say, "oh naw, son. He ded," but I'd just had a two-hour object lesson in how indestructible Indonesians are, so maybe Ito lived happily ever after. It kind of won me over a bit, but it was a lot. The fight between Arian and Ito was at times just laughably inhuman in their ability to take damage. I watched it in Indonesian, Mandarin, English, and French with English subtitles. Rodney King (2017) -- "10/10" This is a powerful 52 minutes. Roger Guenveur Smith delivers a one-man show. It's just him. Alone. On a dark stage. He's in black pants and a black T-shirt. He is barefoot. He sweats profusely. He plays different roles, in myriad LA accents. He is mesmerizing. He tells a spoken-word, beat-poet, staccato and syncopated and rhythmic story. * I learned that Rodney King had a jheri curl. * I learned that he'd lost his mother young, to a shooting. * I learned that his father had died, drunk, at the bottom of a swimming pool. * I learned that he could drive a shitbox Hyundai shockingly fast. * I learned that he was an alcoholic, and addicted to a plethora of things. * I learned that no-one had ever lost that much blood and lived. * I learned that they'd taken him to the police station instead of a hospital. * I learned that Officer Koon had told him, "You're going to die tonight. Nigger." * I leaned that you spell Koon with a K. * Just one, though. * Not three. * And also not with a C. * * I learned that people died in the riots. * For no reason. * For stupid reasons. * I learned that he'd surfed. * I learned that he'd skied. * I learned that he'd died, drunk, at the bottom of his in-ground pool. * I learned that he'd gone on TV to ask LA to stop rioting. Rodney King said, "Can we all get along? "[...] "We've got to quit. We've got to quit. You know, after all, I mean, I could understand the first two hours after the verdict, but to go on, to keep going on like this and to see that security guard shot on the ground. "It's just not right. It's just not right, because those people will never go home to their families again, and I mean, please, we can get along here. "We all can get along. We've just got to stop. You know, I mean, we're all stuck here for a while. Let's, you know, let's try to work it out. Let's try to work it out." Spike Lee directed this joint. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4955 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4955 Wed, 31 Jan 2024 21:11:51 +0100 of around 1600 ratings publicly available. I've included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other -- I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. 1. "Dave Chappelle: The Dreamer (2023)" <#dreamer> -- "6/10" 2. "Archer (2023)" <#archer> -- "7/10" 3. "Smokey and the Bandit II (1980)" <#bandit> -- "5/10" 4. "Midnight Mass (2021)" <#midnight-mass> -- "8/10" 5. "They Cloned Tyrone (2023)" <#tyrone> -- "7/10" 6. "Bon Tschuur Ticino (2023)" <#ticino> -- "8/10" 7. "Nope (2022)" <#nope> -- "7/10" 8. "Pete Davidson: Turbo Fonzarelli (2024)" <#turbo> -- "8/10" 9. "My Octopus Teacher (2020)" <#octopus> -- "9/10" 10. "A Futile and Stupid Gesture (2018)" <#gesture> -- "8/10" Dave Chappelle: The Dreamer (2023) -- "6/10" There were some highlights in this show, but the first half was a bit too self-indulgent, with a bit too much playing to the crowd. Don't get me wrong, the crowd absolutely loved it, but it didn't come across as well for me in a streaming format. He interleaves a certain preachiness with a tacked-on joke. In the best cases, the preachiness is completely faked, forming a long intro to a pretty good punchline. Usually, you can't see it coming. The quotes below are taken from the beautifully formatted "Dave Chappelle: The Dreamer transcript" . He starts off with what he probably thinks is an extremely clever transgender joke, where he says that dealing with Jim Carrey pretending to be Andy Kaufman on the set of Man on the Moon is just like dealing with transpeople. If that's the best you've got, then just stop, man. Just stop mining that seam. It's petered out completely at this point. He moves on handicapped people, to show that he's equal-opportunity. Here, he circles back to the original topic, saying that he wrote a play, "It’s about a Black transgender woman whose pronoun is, sadly, n*gga… "It’s a tear-jerker. At the end of the play, she dies of loneliness ’cause white liberals don’t know how to speak to her." Which is actually not bad. But then he moves to Huckleberry Finn, and right back to how, if he had to go to jail, he'd claim to identify as a woman and get into a women's prison. The crowd-pleasing punchline is, "Give me your fruit cocktail, bitch, before I knock your motherf*cking teeth out. I’m a girl, just like you, bitch. Come here and suck this girl’s dick I got. Don’t make me explain myself. I’m a girl." Honestly, it wasn't any better in context. It's not like it loses anything because you don't hear him deliver it. You just didn't get to see him bang his microphone on his knee, laughing 😂 at his own joke even harder than the crowd could. Strip clubs, Deborah, then on to the whole Chris Rock/Will Smith incident. Then he's into this whole long segment about a homeless rasta transperson who attacked him at a show. Dave: are you afraid of becoming a one-trick pony? Or are you playing an extremely long con like Andy Kaufman did? Or are you hoping that we think you're clever enough to play a boorish comedian who's secretly enlightened? I hope you know what you're doing. You're the man who thought of the skit starring a blind black man who doesn't know he's black and is the most racist KKK member in town, so we'll always have that. On to marriage and jealousy, then a really long coda about his first years in comedy, messing with the Russian mob, where he, again, comes out looking like the only person brave enough to open his mouth and stand up to anybody. "I didn’t buckle. You guys would’ve been very proud of me. I was scared, but I didn’t buckle." The story goes on to talk about "powerful dreamers", who can make reality bend to their will. This starts off kind of weak, talking about L'il Nas X, but then a couple of the final parables were decent. Archer (2023) -- "7/10" In what turns out to be the final season of Archer, Sterling Archer (H. Jon Benjamin), Lana Kane (Aisha Tyler), Pam Poovey (Amber Nash), Cheryl Tunt (Judy Greer), Cyril Figgis (Chris Parnell, Dr. Algernop Krieger (Lucky Yates), and Ray Gillette (Adam Reed) are joined by a new hire Zara Kahn (Natalie Drew). She's a British agent who immediately vies for the top spot at the agency. She gets Lana's support because it annoys Archer, because she's quite good, and also because she used to work for Interpol. The season arc is the gang is trying get the agency into Interpol's good graces. They hope to ride a gravy train of steady and legitimate contracts if they can just prove their mettle. This proves difficult, as their style, while more than occasionally eventually effective, is quite chaotic and hard to reconcile with the staid bureaucracy of Interpol. Much of Zara's mocking of Sterling centers on his age, as she is much, much younger. The other characters stay pretty much the same, though Pam's best seasons are behind her, when she got on cocaine -- there's a small reprise in this season -- or when she revealed her whole yakuza backstory. Cheryl, too, is still crazy, but more muted and her lines are just going through the motions. Krieger has some good stuff at the end of the season, but it's hard to avoid the conclusion that this show has said all that it's going to say. This isn't the best season by far, but it's still better and more entertaining than a lot of other stuff out there. The voice acting is, as always, superb. I like the following moments from S14.E6 ∙ Face Off, where the team goes undercover at an upscale and exclusive plastic-surgery spa, where they're on the tail of an arms dealer who keeps changing his appearance. "Archer: Thanks for walking with me, Pam. One bad fall, and my hips could shatter. Pam: According to one doctor! Archer: And according to the X-rays of my buckling tibias. Pam: Screw the X-rays! This whole place is toxic. These doctors only make money if they convince you there's something broken that they can fix. Archer: Dr. Spencer actually refused to work on me because I'm too broken. Pam: [laughs] That was reverse psychology, dude. Archer: Oh. You think? Pam: I know! Look, Archer, you're not the fresh young agent anymore, but you're something better: the salty old pro who's seen it all and lived to tell about it." After a typical Archer-style clusterfuck in which he ends up achieving his objective but only after nearly failing to do so in every way possible, we have: "Archer: What happened? Lana: You fell 50 feet onto jagged rocks. Also, you held that asshоlе sloth to break its fall with your body. And, uh, it bit you when you landed. And just soaked you in piss. Archer: That's... amazing! Lana: Uh, but is it? Archer: I was worried I was getting old. But I just survived an accident that should have killed me. I might be invincible. [crackling] [groaning] Krieger: Yeah, that'd be the 30 stitches. Or the nanobots, if they decided to rebel. Archer: [sighs] Fine, I'm probably not invincible. Just lucky to the point of being immortal." At the end of the episode, Archer sums up his style of success. "Archer: More like all in a day's work for the world's greatest... [coughing, hacking] ...greatest spy. That probably would have been more convincing if I hadn't coughed up blood. Pam: You know, bud, maybe this is the mission where you learn not to rely so much on luck. Archer: Are you kidding? This was my luckiest mission yet. Pam: You got shot, like, a dozen times. Archer: Yeah, in a hospital." Don't ever change, Archer. You are my spirit animal. Quotes are pulled from the wonderfully thorough "Archer Season 14, Episode 6 Face Off Transcript" . Smokey and the Bandit II (1980) -- "5/10" This movie is absolutely not good, but nostalgia carried me a long way. It starts off with Cledus (Jerry Reed) driving his semi in what looks like a Nascar race, but for trucks. I have no idea whether this is a real thing -- or whether it was ever a real thing. After handily winning a race, he's approached by Big Enos (Pat McCormick) and Little Enos (Paul Williams), who want him to transport a package across the country -- for $200k. He needs to get the bandit (Burt Reynolds) on board, but the bandit is falling-down drunk because Carrie (Sally Field) has left him. Meanwhile, she was about to get married to Buford T. Justice Junior (Mike Henry), but she skips out on that wedding -- just like in the first movie. Buford T. Justice (Jackie Gleason) is hot on their tail, waiting for them to mess up. They get to the package, which turns out to be Charlotte the elephant. She's sick, though, so they pick up a "doctor" (Dom DeLuise). After a little while, they discover that the elephant is not sick, but pregnant. The film is filled with hijinks and just plain messing around. Sally Field is adorable. Dom DeLuise is hilarious, just naturally goofy. He fakes an Italian accent most of the time. There are many, many more bit characters and somewhat-famous actors. Jackie Gleason actually plays two more roles -- a Canadian mountie as well as a swishy Savannah-gentlemen-looking sheriff. The three police armies fight with the Bandit and a truck army for what feels like the last hour. Burt Reynolds is really phoning it in, but I guess it was a payday. They end up not making the delivery, dropping the contract to let Charlotte have her baby instead. It is never made clear why they'd been asked to transport a pregnant elephant across the country in the first place. At the end, the Bandit is towing the elephant and baby with his Trans Am. I wish I were kidding. It must have cost nearly nothing to make this movie. Probably renting the elephant cost the most. Maybe they had to pay for destroying a bunch of the vehicles. There are really a lot of vehicles, all destroyed with practical effects. It's all out in the desert, which makes it a lot easier and cheaper than if they'd been in a city (as in the Blues Brothers). It's amazing to think that adults went to the movie theater to watch this. It's a movie that aims at 10-year-olds (probably about how old I was when I watched it the first time). I guess it's the same thing as superhero movies these days. At least there were highbrow movies in the theaters right next to them. Midnight Mass (2021) -- "8/10" Riley Flynn (Zach Gilford) is out of prison after four years. He'd been convicted of drunk-driving and vehicular manslaughter. He returns to his parents' home on Crockett Island, a village with 127 souls in it. We get to know some island residents as well as some events to set things up. The island has a new pastor: Father Paul (Hamish Linklater). He's there to replace Monsignor Pruitt, who was still recovering from having fallen ill on his pilgrimage to Jerusalemn. Father Paul moves into Pruitt's quarters, shoving a large steamer trunk. Something rustles inside it. Erin (Kate Siegel) is a former schoolmate of Riley's. She's also back on the island after having spent some time off-island. She's returned with a baby in her belly. She picks up her friendship with Riley, but he's distant, at least at first. Bev Keane (Samantha Sloyan) is a nightmare of a repressed little control freak. She's zealously religious and predictably judgmental of everyone on the island -- all while gathering money and glory for herself. The islanders are basically terrified of her. This lady just rolls on and on and on, quoting the Bible and just talking so much because she's terrified that someone might say something that she doesn't approve of. She cites the Bible for everything, it's quite brilliantly written. Some kids sneak off to a nearby part of the island where they can hang out and smoke pot. That part of the island is mostly abandoned and inhabited only by feral cats. Cats and ... something else. Later that night, it storms something fierce. The entire island had prepared for it and hunkered down. Riley looks out at the beach, lashed with rain. He thinks he sees Monsignor Pruitt in a lightning flash. He braves the storm to descend to the beach. A thin figure in the Monsignor's duster and fedora hurries up the beach, away from him. The next morning, there are a bunch of dead cats all over the beach. They'd washed up from the abandoned part of the island. Their necks are broken. They have bites taken out of them. It's hard to say what happened, so people just ignore it. They clean up the bodies, making up stories about how it might have happened. Sheriff Hassan (Rahul Kohli) is relatively new to the island. He's investigating the poisoning of Pike, the dog that belonged to Joe Collie (Robert Longstreet). Bev totally poisoned the dog because she's an evil person. Years ago, Joe had shot Leeza (Annarah Cymone) and paralyzed her from the waist down. Leeza is very religious and kind of one-dimensional. I'm skipping over details here, but it doesn't really matter. Bev's a dick and a dog-killer is what I'm trying to say here. Riley starts AA on the island with Father Paul. It's a one-on-one session for now. Riley unloads on religion, but he's working through some stuff. Father Paul is patient. Local drug dealer Bill/Bowl (John C. McDonald) is lured into an abandoned building, then attacked by something savage and vaguely humanoid. At church that Sunday, Father Paul exhorts Leeza to take the sacrament on her own two feet. The flock is shocked. But she rises and does so. Miracolo. The island experiences a complete religious revival. People are suspiciously feeling better, looking better...looking younger. Father Paul up and dies, coughing blood but is resurrected minutes later. Later, in a confession booth, he recalls how he'd gotten there. He is Monsignor Pruitt. His dementia had led him into the desert near Jerusalem. A sandstorm had overwhelmed him. He'd sought shelter in a cave that presented itself. As he'd stumbled deeper, two feral eyes greeted him. A winged, humanoid thing confronted him and fell on his neck. He awakened young again. The creature was watching him. Father Paul concluded that his restored youth was a gift from God, visited upon him through this angel. He'd convinced himself with various verses from the Bible that say that angels are scary, which tracks with the angular-looking obvious f&@king vampire before him. The transformations continue. Erin's baby completely disappears, as if she'd never been pregnant. Dr. Sarah Gunning (Annabeth Gish) is absolutely mystified. She's further perplexed by Erin's blood sample exploding spontaneously when sunlight hits it. Father Paul can also no longer abide sunlight. Bev knows all and literally doesn't care for one second. She's fully on board with this miracle express and is super-OK with breaking a few eggs to make an omelette. Time for judgment day. Bring. It. On. Sarah's mother Mildred (Alex Essoe) has very bad dementia, but she, too, is getting younger and ... better. How is this possible? Easy! Father Paul has been "enriching" the eucharist with the vampire's blood. So, people are benefitting from its immortal powers, but they also start suffering from the associated maladies. Paul is overwhelmed by a thirst for blood. Joe is in the wrong place at the wrong time. Paul feeds. Bev discovers him and doesn't blink an eye. She and Sturge (Matt Biedel) -- along with mayor Wade Scarborough (Michael Trucco) and his wife Dolly (Crystal Balint) -- cover everything up, convincing themselves that they are part of the second coming of Christ. YOLO. Riley suspects something is up and returns late to the church to see father Paul and the Angel in the rec hall. The Angel leaps on Riley and takes him as a victim. Riley is gone for a day or so, and Erin reports him missing. That night, he returns and finds her. He asks her to go out on a boat with him. They row far from shore. He tells her his story, how he awoke after the attack, what Father Paul told him. The Angel. He tells here that he can see her pulse in her neck. The sun is coming up. He tells her to row, row for the shore. "Run away." He explodes into flames. She screams in terror. She returns to the island, determined to save whomever she can. Sarah goes to the sheriff with her evidence, asking the Sheriff to intervene, but he can't, not with so little evidence. He is powerless before the racism and deep hatred of the town. He's not been there long enough. He provides some interesting insight through his backstory. Erin, Mildred, and Sarah try to flee the island, but realize that the ferries aren't running. Sturge cuts off the power and then disables the cell tower. Father Paul reveals himself as Monsignor Pruitt. He tells his flock that they've already drunk angel's blood. Kudos for showing the "angel" early on and still managing to imbue it with menace, despite it being in full view, in daylight. That stride into the church in priest's regalia was chilling. Several people drink the blood and die, only to be immediately resurrected. They attack the others who didn't drink. It's a bloodbath. The angel rips into Mildred, who'd shot father Paul in the forehead. Don't worry; he's immortal. Bev and Sturge unleash the resurrected flock on the townsfolk who'd not gone to church. The shitshow continues, with only a few people resisting. Riley's parents, for example, have been turned, but they resist their bloodlust. It's a nice comment on the urge: it can be resisted. Riley did it, too. Those who can't resist it are morally deficient, is what the show seems to be saying. Later that evening, Mildred, now also resurrected, returns to the church and finds father Paul. They were lovers long ago and Sarah is their daughter. He'd actually brought the destructive power of the angel to the island to save her from dementia. He's having a few regrets, I think. Erin, Sarah, Leeza, and Riley's younger brother Warren (Igby Rigney) set about setting fire to the remaining boats -- to prevent anyone from leaving the island. They return to the church and rec center to burn those too -- the resurrected won't have any shelter when the sun comes. The angel attacks Erin, pinning her to the ground as it feeds. After a while, she regains her senses, pulling a knife, and dragging it through its wings. It continues to feed. When it notices what she's doing -- in a seemingly drugged state -- she pulls its head back to her neck and continues destroying its wings languorously. It finishes feeding, but it's too late. Its wings are in tatters and itsability to fly is severely impaired. Everyone dies. They're either shot or immolated in the sun. Leeza and Warren are the only ones to have escaped off of the island. They watch the angel lurch its way through the sky, off the island. There is no way it reaches shore. Leeza's legs are, once again, numb. It was pretty good. I respect the actress who played Bev. She's got major chops, but she got a little too much screen time. Her hateful speeches became a bit repetitive. Also, the show dragged on a bit too long, and it lingered on Leeza's survival way too much. I didn't really care about Leeza. I'd hoped that maybe Sarah or Erin would survive, but alas. They Cloned Tyrone (2023) -- "7/10" This movie is a little bit of Westworld, a little bit of Foxy Brown. Fontaine (John Boyega) is a small-time hood in the Glen. He has an oddly strict schedule, an oddness that would soon be explained. He collects money from those who owe him. One of those people is Slick Charles (Jamie Foxx), who pimps Yo-Yo (Teyonah Parris). He goes to collect at the motel where they live, but Charles asks him to come back tomorrow. Fontaine is trapped in his car and gunned down by Isaac (J. Alphonse Nicholson). Slick Charles and Yo-Yo see it happen. The next day, Fontaine is back to collect his money again. This confuses the hell out of all of them. They set about getting answers. They go into a house that seems to be guarded by a black van that Fontaine vaguely remembers having seen the previous evening. They go in and find an elevator going down, down, down to a secret lab. They find a scientist, who's just starting to tell them what's going on when Slick Charles shoots him by accident. Fontaine pulls back a sheet on an operating table to reveal an exact replica of himself. The next morning, the same house is empty. The three go to a chicken restaurant -- they're hungry! -- where they discover that the chicken has been laced with some compound that keeps everyone docile and giddy. Yo-Yo seduces the restaurant manager, who looks just like the scientist they'd killed the evening before. He blabs that the whole Glen is under surveillance and that they're distributing substances in everything: fried chicken, hair-straightening products, grape drink, etc. Like, only a black director and cast could have made this movie, right? Next stop is a Black church where they find another elevator in the altar. This time, they're in a much larger complex, where they see Black people being experimented on in all sorts of innovative, but uniquely "black" ways. They find clones of lots of Glen residents, are starting to put pieces together, but are forced to flee through a strip club, where the DJ is alerted to use special music to control the crowd into chasing them. They flee in their car, but Fontaine's car is a real beater and it breaks down before they get anywhere. The crowd surrounds the car, but then parts when Nixon (Kiefer Sutherland) and his clone bodyguard Chester (also John Boyega) show up to explain that the whole Glen is an experiment in pacification to avoid a race war. Okaaaaay??? More stuff happens and Yo-Yo is kidnapped and thrown into a cell for experiments. Fontaine and Slick Charles hatch a plan to get her back -- and take down the operation while they're at it. They manage to get most of the gangs in the Glen down there, wreaking havoc and tearing things up. Nixon is not pleased, but he's not even the one really in charge. The original Fontaine (also John Boyega) has been doing these experiments for forever, trying to figure out how to turn black people into white people. OMG what? I'm hanging on by a fingernail here. Yo-Yo and Slick Charles manage to take care of Nixon. Fontaine tricks Chester -- his clone -- into killing his older self. They free the clones together, leaving them to wander naked into the streets, showing up on local news -- and then national news. The trio decide to stick together and head to Memphis, where they know there's another big facility they could expose. In LA, a young man named Tyrone (also John Boyega) watches what looks like a clone of himself wander around naked on the evening news. This movie wasn't nearly good enough for them to be leaving the door open to a sequel. I liked the actors, but the plot was a bit of a wild mix of everything, with about as much justification for motivation as Smokey and the Bandit II provided. Bon Tschuur Ticino (2023) -- "8/10" Walter Egli (Beat Schlatter) is a Swiss policeman, comfortable in his small-time role in the Swiss government. There is an initiative to make Switzerland have a single official language, with the additional choice of deciding which language should be chosen. To Walter's delight, the initiative passes; to his horror, French is selected as the official language. Hilarity ensues as the formally German-speaking part of Switzerland prepares to switch over to French, replacing street signs with French versions and enrolling all functionaries -- including cops like Walter -- in French-language lessons. An unnamed guy at the post office (Andreas Matti, the guy who'd played Peter, Wilder's father) was paid to divert a bunch of votes from the German-speaking part of Switzerland to ensure that French won. He was paid by a French-speaking politician Jeannot Bachmann (Beat Schlatter, playing both roles) -- although he actually speaks German and Italian perfectly -- for what, in the end, are completely unknown reasons. I'm still not sure why they wanted French to win. Walter is really terrible at French -- his teacher tells him he's in the 20% of people who are too old to learn a new language -- and his boss Keller (Pascal Ulli) is having a tough time of keeping him from getting fired. In the end, he sends him and his new French-speaking partner Jonas Bornard (Vincent Kucholl) to uncover a resistance movement in Ticino, specifically in Locarno, led by Enzo Castani (Leonardo Nigro) and Francesca Gamboni (Catherine Pagani). At the same time, Walter's mother Rosemarie (Silvia Jost) is starting a resistance movement of her own, blowing up the Jet d'Eau and United Nations entryway in Geneva. Jonas is, at first, much better at infiltration -- he bethinks himself a master of disguise -- but it's Walter who stumbles his way into an invitation to resistance headquarters after meeting Francesca. They hit it off quite well and he learns more of their plans. He does so well that Jonas is forced to start speaking German with him so that he can learn more. Up until that point, Jonas had spoken only French. Castani's grand plan is to cut off all access to the north and west and declare Ticinia an independent country. Francesca and Walter are chosen to blow up the (old) train tunnel through the Gotthard. Jonas catches up to them, just as Walter is torn between being a cop and a double-agent. He wants to help them fight the single-language Switzerland because he can't live and work in a country with a language he doesn't understand. They blow up the tunnel and flee, with Jonas half-chasing them on an injured leg. The rest of the Ticinese resistance meet them and snap them up, confining Jonas and Walter in a cell. On Jonas's shoe-phone, they discover the plot to suppress the Swiss-German vote and beg the Ticinese to let them go to Bern to catch the ringleader and force him to reveal his plot. This would derail the impending civil war. Castani -- with a parrot on his shoulder, à la Castro -- doesn't want to let them go, but Francesca takes matters into her own hands, driving the three of them up the Tremola in a three-wheeled, 40kph Piaggio "truck". At the top, they fool the Swiss soldiers and slip past them, stealing a jeep to head for Bern. From the top of the Gotthard, it's quite a way, to be honest. They pretend to be sheep, with sheepskins. When they try to take the jeep, there is a soldier sleeping in the back. He's about to demand what they're doing, but she cut him off, demanding in French to know where his sheepskin is? She offers him hers, then they take the jeep. The confused soldier remains in the road, pulling the sheepskin over his shoulders. This is 100% what would happen with the Swiss Army. In Bern, they sneak in as catering staff, then kidnap Jeannot Bachmann, trying to force him to give himself up. He laughs at them, but then they notice how similar he looks to Walter (it's the same actor, which is doubly funny). They send Walter out to give a confessional speech in French -- with Jonas whispering in his ear via a spy device -- because Walter is super-bad at speaking French. The device's battery dies -- that's probably the only spoken English in the film -- but he perseveres and manages to get the point across that the initiative and coming civil war are built on treachery and lies. They are arrested, but let go for having saved Switzerland from a civil war. Castani is shattered, while his entire council happily goes home. Walter moves to Locarno to work in Francesca's restaurant. It was a 7/10 comedy, but it gets an extra star just for being unabashedly cute and feeling like it was made specifically for me. We watched it in Swiss German, Italian, French, and German, with German subtitles for the French and Italian parts. Nope (2022) -- "7/10" Otis Haywood Sr. (Keith David) owns the Haywood Ranch, where he raises and trains horses for show business. He's about to get a big break when he's killed by a freak accident: a nickel falls out of the sky, straight into his eye. His horse Ghost is struck by a house key. Otis Haywood Jr. (Daniel Kaluuya) is forced to take over the business. To say he doesn't have his father's flair or acumen for business is an understatement. He's dedicated to his father's dream -- having made it his own -- but he's really just in it for the horses and doesn't like show-business people, who he rightly considers to be extremely superficial, self-absorbed, and boorish. This makes them terrible people to keep his horses' company, but he's forced to go where the money is. His first outing doesn't go great. He is not a showman. His sister Emerald "Em" (Keke Palmer) is, but she's also rather flighty and quite dumb. She's also really pretty, even though she dresses sloppy. Still and all, the day on the set goes poorly when Lucky the horse kicks out when someone holds up a mirror to his face. The fool on the set was getting a light reading, despite OJ's warnings. OJ is eventually forced to sell horses to a nearby theme-park ranch called Jupiter Ranch, run by Ricky "Jupe" Park (Stephen Yeun). Ricky's backstory is that he's a former child actor who was on a show with a chimpanzee named Gordy who went absolutely and literally apeshit on set, nearly killing the actress who'd played his sister. It's not really clear what this all has to do with anything, other than animals can be beasts and they do their own thing and we treat them like furniture in our arrogance and it occasionally backfires -- but not often enough to make us stop being assholes, if I'm interpreting director and writer Jordan Peele's implicit message at-all correctly. Back at Haywood Ranch, OJ and Emerald notice mysterious power outages and spooked horses. They see something in the sky. It's a UFO. They head off to a local electronics store, where they buy some surveillance equipment from Angel Torres (Brandon Perea), who accompanies them back to the ranch to help set everything up. When OJ asks him to tilt one camera way up in the sky, Angel is so down with that because he's an absolute freak for aliens. They experiment with the UFO, but soon discover that it's not a ship: it's a creature, a predator that sucks up people, horses, shiny items. When it eats something that disagrees with it, it regurgitates it. Things like the nickel that killed Otis Sr. It's capable of sitting still in the sky for days at a time, shrouded in a cloud that it creates for itself, as camouflage. It turns out that Jupe already knew what it was and had been offering up the horses he was buying from OJ as sacrifices, to build a rapport with the creature. This backfires spectacularly, as Jupe's attempt to offer Lucky as a sacrifice ends up killing everyone at the show except for lucky. Hence the name, I guess. They recruit Antlers Holst (Michael Wincott), the director of the show from which they'd been fired, who lends his gravelly voice and mysterious demeanor to the whole affair, bringing a hand-turned IMAX film camera that will keep working when the power goes out. He works with Angel to set up surveillance and they get some footage...but Antlers goes off the leash, running up a local hill to get even closer footage of the beast. He lures it in...and it predictably eats him right up. He gets some pretty good footage, though, which no-one will ever see. Angel is almost caught but ends up getting the creature to swallow a bunch of barbed wire -- purely by accident -- which makes it explode into a different shape, broader, more like a jellyfish than a jellybean. Em and OJ use Lucky and a motorcycle to lure the creature to a giant balloon that's been rigged to blow, but not before they snap a picture of it using an old analog camera buried in a well (where tourists would snap themselves looking down into it). Em has the picture as proof and OJ is back on Lucky, safe and sound. The creature has been blown to pieces. The end. Pete Davidson: Turbo Fonzarelli (2024) -- "8/10" The quotes below are taken from the beautifully formatted "Pete Davidson: Turbo Fonzarelli transcript" . I like Pete's delivery. He seems much more humble than Chappelle, so it makes me more forgiving of a rambling style that doesn't really go anywhere. His super-long stories are funny, replete with mini-zingers. Davidson starts with a bit about drugs, then segues into a rant about Apple's phones and how that company is like the mafia. Then it's on to his mom, who still isn't dating even though his father died 23 years ago. Somehow he gets away with the following joke, "I’ll go over to my mom’s. I’ll hang out, eat dinner for an hour, and she’s like, “Where you going?” I’m like, “Home. What do you mean?” Unless we’re about to fuck in the shower, I don’t… My duties as a son are done. [audience laughs] It’s to the point where I might fuck her just to get her off my back." He stays on this topic for a while, about how he would shop his mom around on dating sites, if she were willing. Then, somehow, he moves on to Leonardo diCaprio and how he thought he was gay when he was younger because he really, really liked him. From there, he's on to the Make-A-Wish Foundation and how he's "had offers". From there, he's on a wonderful, long story about his stalker. He really tells this story well, about how he kind of encourages her, about how he's sad when she's gone. He talks about how his mom met her -- she'd actually invited her in to the house to watch shows with herself and her 79-year-old friend Terry. He takes the stalker to court for a restraining order, but he's of two minds (or pretending to be ... whatever, it's hilarious. "So I was a little excited to see her, a little bit, you know. I didn’t try to look hot or anything, but I picked an outfit. You know, yeah. Hell yeah! You know? An outfit that said, like, “Hey.” “Don’t give up.” You know? [audience laughs] “Some things are worth fighting for.” Restraining order, shmestraining shorder. I go, “What happened, Tasty?” “What happened to my girl?” He goes, “Bro, she was deemed unfit to stand trial.” Deemed unfit to stand up at a trial. That means a bunch of medical professionals and officers of the law saw her and were like, “No.” I immediately felt insulted. It’s a little fucked up and embarrassing for me, don’t you think? “Deemed unfit”? I don’t think you understand how insane that is. Let me put it in perspective for you. Jeffrey Dahmer was deemed fit… [audience laughs] …to stand trial. A guy who murdered and ate gay people. One chick is into me, off to the nuthouse!" Finally, he talks about house-shopping, as a guy who'd grown up in apartments on Staten Island. He moves on to talking about how his mom made a fake Twitter account to defend him online: "JoeSmith1355". "[...] my mom made a Twitter account with her 79-year-old female friend Terry, and Terry was calling the shots." My Octopus Teacher (2020) -- "9/10" This documentary starts quite slowly and seems inordinately focused on the narrator Craig Foster for what feels like the first 1/3 of the film. But it is absolutely charming and the narrator got me on his side by the middle of the film. This is a movie about a man who begins diving in a South African kelp forest every day for about a year. He was already a documentarian, but he was a bit down on his luck, a bit burned out. He used the routine of his schedule and the serenity of the ocean to heal. Or that's what he says. Wikipedia says he spent three years making this movie. It's fine, though. Take liberties with your art, I say! He would eventually involve his son (somebody had to hold the camera for him). But the style of the documentary depicts him diving alone. He didn't wear a wetsuit, despite the at-times 10ºC water. He learned how to hold his breath for a long time. He didn't use a scuba tank because it would have been a hindrance in the kelp forest. He meets an octopus. She's not very big. He follows her every day, learning about how she hunts, how she spends her day. They have adventures together. She grows to trust him. He can pick her up. She rides his arm and hand when he rises to breathe. She wraps herself around his chest, almost like a hug. We learn a tremendous amount about octopuses, eventually. They are solitary. She has taken up residence in a pretty dangerous area, but she is so clever. She learns how to hunt in the shallows. She must evade the ubiquitous and deadly pajama sharks. Once, she doesn't. It grabs one of her tentacles and tears it off. She manages to escape and return to her lair, but she is gravely injured. Craig visits her every day, deigning to interfere enough to help her get food. He's mostly hands-off, but he can't help himself. She doesn't seem much capable of eating, though. Her color is white as she has no energy to change colors anymore. She recovers, though, with the stump initially sealing off -- and then growing a stub that grows to a full-fledged replacement arm over three months. They continue their life together. When she is attacked again, she is much cleverer: she flees to the shallows -- and then right out onto the beach, clambering over shells to return to the water in a different place. When the shark still has her scent, she shoots over to a pile of shells that she uses her 2,000 suckers to pull over herself like a carapace. She looks like a soccer ball. The shark chomps down on her, but is unable to penetrate the ad-hoc shell. She slides to the side and then hops on its back, slithering her tendril-like arms out of the shells to attach to its back. The shark has no idea what's going on. It's been "completely outwitted." She drops off, drops her temporary armor in a cloud of dust and shells, and retreats to the safety of her den. One can't help but imagine a self-satisfied look on the creature's face. Foster watches the octopus play with fish in the shallows. He notices that its play behavior distinct from hunting behavior, that the octopus "seems to be having fun". Foster has his last close interaction with the octopus, as it cuddles up to him for quite some time. Soon after, he returns to their shared grounds in the kelp forest -- and sees another octopus there. A larger, male octopus. These solitary creatures come into close contact for only one reason. She produces numerous eggs, then slowly expires as she nurtures them until they hatch. She no longer hunts, no longer feeds. Her final purpose will be to produce a brood of octopuses to carry on after her. Lethargic and nearly dead, she floats out of her den. Fish begin to feed on her while she's still moving a bit. A shark shows up to end things abruptly, carrying her body off into the deep and dark ocean. The cinematography by Roger Horrocks was absolutely incredible. The colors, the detail, the incredible number of situations that they were able to capture -- just impressive. It's worth it just for the visuals, but the gentle story of precious life and nature is the lesson you'll hopefully take away. It is in the small, in the supposedly insignificant, that we truly find meaning. This philosophy flies in the face of nearly everything else our culture tries to teach us. Our culture is geared toward growth and consumption. Bigger, better, faster, more. Don't slow down to enjoy what you have because you're missing out on what you don't. We should pay attention to these examples, of which there are many, many more. Not just in our culture, but in those we consider backwards, in those places that we disparagingly call The Third World and only grudgingly now call The Developing World. Or we consider other cultures alien and antagonistic (e.g., China). We consider ourselves to be "developed" but we will watch movies like this for 90 minutes and then go right back to the consumerist, neoliberal grind and hustle, getting as much as we can for ourselves, unaware and unconcerned how much our lifestyles impact billions of other creatures like this amazing little octopus 🐙 . A Futile and Stupid Gesture (2018) -- "8/10" Douglas Kenney (Will Forte) and Henry Beard (Domhnall Gleeson) took the Harvard Lampoon to new heights during their time there. They published Bored of the Rings, a book that consisted nearly entirely of Tolkien puns. In their final year, Henry has gotten into two prestigious graduate schools. Doug hasn't even applied anywhere yet. He comes up with the awesome idea of taking the Lampoon national. He and Henry should just keep publishing funny shit, but in a national magazine, is what he's saying. C'mon Henry, don't be so stuffy. Henry is tempted. They shop the idea around, with disastrous results, until they end up in Matty Simmons's (Matt Walsh) office. He publishes Weight Watchers, among others. He takes a chance on them. They fill out the staff with eccentrics and comedians from the bowels of New York, like Anne Beatts (Natasha Lyonne), Michael Gross (Krister Johnson), Tom Snyder (Ed Helms), Gilda Radner (Jackie Tohn), Bill Murray (Jon Daly), and Christopher Guest (Seth Green). Martin Mull plays the narrator -- an older version of Doug. [image]The movie sets up some of the most famous covers and spoofs, like the "If you don't buy this magazine, we'll shoot this dog." [1] They get sued by everybody: Mormons, the Catholic church, Disney, Volkswagen, ... the list goes on. They started a radio show. They were flying high. Incredible parties. Lots of booze and drugs. Henry is sober and keeps the ship aright and afloat. Doug is a comic mastermind, but he's pretty out of control. His wife leaves him when his infidelities become too obvious. At one point, he goes on a long sabbatical, returning nine months later as if nothing had happened. They miss the boat on a TV show, watching a lot of their writers starting on SNL when Lorne Michaels poaches them all. But the magazine's success is more than enough for them to look into making movies, introducing John Belushi (John Gemberling), Harold Ramis (Rick Glassman), Chevy Chase (Joel McHale), Ivan Reitman (Lonny Ross), John Landis (Brian Huskey), Rodney Dangerfield (Erv Dahl), and Paul Shaffer (Paul Scheer). Most of these people are well-known actors and comedians of today playing famous people from the late 70s. Henry and Doug get their promised buyout from Matty: a cool $3.5M a piece. Henry immediately retires. He returns briefly when Doug is deep into booze and drugs, to try to offer him emotional support, telling him that he's always there for him. They part on shaky terms, but Henry is worried. Doug writes Animal House. We visit the set and watch producer Brad (Joe Lo Truglio) fight with Doug all the way, then claim that he knew all along it would be a success when Animal House becomes the highest-earning comedy of all time. Doug is terrified of a follow-up. He writes Caddyshack, which wasn't immediately successful like Animal House, but would eventually become a cult classic. I liked Caddyshack much better. I loved Chevy Chase in it. Bill Murray was great as well, but I thought it was a Chevy Chase vehicle. In 1980, after a cocaine-fueled week with Chevy Chase -- they started off with six days of drying out, but failed to stick the landing -- Doug Kenney throws himself off of a cliff at the age of 33. Martin Mull's narration as the older Kenney was a subterfuge -- there would never be an older Kenney. The film ends at Kenney's funeral, to which everyone has shown up, including Henry. Henry had gotten a call that we were led to believe was Doug finally calling his old friend for help. Instead, it was to tell Henry that Doug was dead. Henry starts a food fight at the funeral, ending the film as it had started at Harvard so long ago. I gave it an extra star because, man, I lived and breathed this stuff growing up. I watched the movies again and again. I read the Lampoon whenever I could. I read Bored of the Rings. This shit was formative for me. I watched SCTV; I watched SNL; I listened to Monty Python. I had a lot more Mad magazines than Lampoons, but it was all influential to the snarky little asshole I would become. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] The dog's name was, apparently, "Cheeseface" . ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4925 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4925 Sat, 27 Jan 2024 22:49:11 +0100 of around 1600 ratings publicly available. I've included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other -- I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. 1. "Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975)" <#holy-grail> -- "6/10" 2. "Voyeur (2017)" <#voyeur> -- "4/10" 3. "The Fundamentals of Caring (2016)" <#fundamental> -- "9/10" 4. "The Old Guard (2020)" <#old-guard> -- "3/10" 5. "Mute (2018)" <#mute> -- "7/10" 6. "Nuhr in Berlin (2016)" <#nuhr> -- "7/10" 7. "Dany Boon: Des Hauts-De-France (2018)" <#boon> -- "8/10" 8. "Fucking Berlin (2016)" <#fucking-berlin> -- "7/10" 9. "The Pianist (2002)" <#pianist> -- "10/10" 10. "Ricky Gervais: Armageddon (2023)" <#armageddon> -- "9/10" Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975) -- "6/10" This movie is basically a collection of skits that follows a rough storyline. 1. We meet King Arthur (Graham Chapman) as he's searching for other knights to join his quest. He's accompanied by his squire (Terry Gilliam), who carries all of his stuff and bangs coconut shells together while Arthur pretends to be riding a horse. 2. Arthur encounters a knight in a castle who catapults a cow at him. 3. Arthur encounters the Constitutional Peasant. 4. Arthur relates the tale of having gotten Excalibur from the Lady in the Lake (the "moistened bink.") 5. Arthur meets and defeats the Black Knight (John Cleese), whose limbs he hacks off ("it's only a flesh wound") 6. He observes a witch trial, where he recruits Sir Bedevere the Wise (Terry Jones), Sir Lancelot the Brave (John Cleese), Sir Galahad the Pure (Michael Palin), and Sir Robin the Not-Quite-So-Brave-as-Sir-Lancelot (Eric Idle). 7. They do a musical number at Camelot ("Spamalot"), but quickly move on. 8. God orders them to find the holy grail. 9. They encounter the French Taunter ("I fart in your general direction.") 10. They split up. 11. A modern-day historian filming a documentary on the Arthurian legends is killed by an unknown knight on horseback, triggering a police investigation. (This will be important later.) 12. They encounter the three-headed Knights Who Say Ni 13. Galahad ends up in a castle full of lusty women who want to be punished. Lancelot rescues him. Because he's an idiot who can't read the room. 14. Lancelot storms a castle to rescue a woman being held against her will ("huge tracts of land."), but the cry for help turns out to have come from an effeminate prince. Lancelot is not not into it. 15. They get to a cave where the location of the Grail is hidden. It is guarded by the Rabbit of Caerbannog. 16. After it kills several of the "red shirt" knights who'd just joined the party, they use the Holy Hand Grenade to vanquish the rabbit. 17. They read the inscription inside the cave to reveal that they must find the castle of Arggh. 18. A cave monster gets the brother leading them (another "red shirt"), but the rest get away when the animator suffers a heart attack in mid-sketch. 19. They get to the Bridge of Death, which crosses the Gorge of Eternal Peril. There they are asked the Questions Three by the bridge-keeper (Terry Gilliam, at his most gruesome). ("Blue. No, green!" and "African or European Swallow?") 20. Lancelot is arrested for having killed the historian earlier 21. Arthur and Bedevere proceed to the island on what feels like an interminable boat voyage. 22. The French have occupied the castle of Arghhh ("I blow my nose at you.") 23. They are repelled by the French, reaching shore on foot (after having gotten to the island castle by boat). 24. They gather a ragtag army of knights that kind of appear out of nowhere. They charge the shoreline, headed for the water and, eventually, maybe, the castle. 25. Two police cars cut them off, arresting Arthur and Bedevere for the hit-and-run on the historian 26. One officer holds up his hand to cover the lens. The screen goes dark. The end. 27. The final five minutes are just the same 30 seconds of organ music, repeated over and over, on a black screen on which credits never roll. This is probably the most subversisvely funny thing in the movie. It plays on the frustration of expectation. It's not aged as well as I'd hoped it would, but it still has its moments. Voyeur (2017) -- "4/10" This is a documentary about how Gay Talese came to write a book documenting the story of a man Gerald Foos, who built a motel with the express purpose of spying on its customers. He built a spying network into the ceiling, where he could range along the rooms, looking down upon the inhabitants. He did this for decades. The Articles Editor of the New Yorker Susan Morrison opines that he is "a sociopath", which, honestly, is exactly the kind of superficial judgment I would expect to hear from her, given her position and appearance. I prejudged her and I was dead-on. Is wanting to watch other people sociopathic? His story is that he basically watched his own personal reality TV for decades. He was hoping to watch people have sex. None of that is outside of societal norms, except that the voyeurism happened unbeknownst to the victims. I'm not saying it's legal or moral but most of what he did -- watch strangers do stuff -- is what millions do every single day. And there's a giant industry that profits from it. That's not even close to sociopathic. It's just illegal. No? Billions of people watch other people every damned day, most of the time people they don't know. Those people are nearly almost always aware that someone's watching them, but a lot of times they aren't. How many fail videos are there, taken from security cameras? From doorbell cameras? From camera-phones? Almost none of those people are aware that they're being filmed. Is it sociopathic to watch those? Is it sociopathic to watch pornography? When something is done by nearly everyone, then it's not sociopathic by definition. No, I think the guy just loved doing it. He documented it like a lab researcher, too, perhaps to make it seem like the time he spent doing it was worthwhile. But he generally seems to have a pretty obsessive personality. He has about 2.5-3 million baseball cards, with 1 million of them sitting in unopened boxes. This is a classic Netflix documentary: it blows up about 30 minutes of content to 90 minutes. The last half-an-hour is just about whether Talese's book is going to tank or not, or whether Gerald was lying about part of what he said, or whether Gay is even a journalist, as he didn't even check out any basic facts. It's chock-full of long interviews with Gerald and his wife Anita. Almost none of these are interesting, not really. It's just kind of uncomfortable to watch, but I'm sure I'm in the tiny mintority here, as people love to watch other people. I don't know how many montages they can cram in of people getting dressed -- usually Gerald or Gay. Gay is kind of a raging ego, though. I came out of this with a much worse opinion than when I went in. I know my Mom had liked him, for whatever reason, probably because he had an Italian background and was big in the late 60s/early 70s when she lived in New York. The Fundamentals of Caring (2016) -- "9/10" Ben Benjamin (Paul Rudd) is a freshly minted caregiver. His first job is with Trevor (Craig Roberts), a young man with Duchenne's muscular dystrophy. He and his strong-willed mother Elsa (Jennifer Ehle) had moved from England about nine months ago. The young man is funny, has a ludicrously strict schedule, and is soon getting along with Ben as the only caregiver he's ever liked. They go back and forth, Elsa finds out that Ben had lost his own son three years ago. Ben still hasn't signed his wife Janet's (Julia Denton) divorce papers. Trevor cons Ben into taking him on a trip to see roadside attractions and the world's deepest pit. After his mother reluctantly agrees, Trevor starts to chicken out. "Trevor: Well done. That was very heroic how you jumped in there without missing a beat. But I'm sorry, I can't do it. Ben: Why? This was your idea. Trevor: I know, but I think I was caught up in the moment. That moment being you telling me to go fuck myself repeatedly. Ben: This is great. The open road. You know what? I'm going to call the Make-a-Wish Foundation and I'm going to get Katy Perry to meet us in a motel in Missoula. What song do you want her to sing while she's doin' ya? Trevor: [long pause] Fireworks." They're on the road. 90 East. Lots of newness. Trevor's grumpy. But oho! A real-live chick. As he rolls by, she says "Cool fucking sneakers." He says, "Mall." His game needs work. He finally eats a Slim Jim, then pretends to be choking, which he's done before. It looks like it's real this time. Ben veers to a stop. It's not real. Trevor's just fucking with him. Again. At "Rufus" the world's biggest bovine, some local guys have to carry Trevor's wheelchair upstairs because they have no wheelchair access. They're at a restaurant and the girl from the other stop is outside, hitching a ride. Her name is Dot (Selena Gomez). Her face is very round and her voice is very deep and gravelly. She smokes what looks like clove cigarettes. She calls Ben Mervin. "Trevor: Hi, Mervin. Ben: Shut up. Or tomorrow I'll put your clothes on inside-out. Trevor: [Laughs out loud.]" They pick up Peaches, whose car is broken down. She's pregnant, and headed to Nebraska. Her husband is Afghanistan. They're now a foursome on the open road. At the motel, Trevor kind of works up the courage to ask Dot on a dinner date. Well, he convinces Ben to decide he doesn't want to eat, which Dot sees through immediately. "Pick me up when you're ready to go." Ben wants to give Trevor his pills before dinner, but then can't find them. They're panicking. "Ben: I don't know what happened. Trevor: I know what happened. You're an idiot! Ben: I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not. I'm not an idiot. ... I'm hilarious [shows the bag of pills] Trevor: Oh... Oh, my hands are numb. Are you kidding me? This is when you decide to play the prank? When I'm about to go on my first date? Ben: It just seemed funnier that way. Trevor: [long pause] Agreed." They stop in Salt Lake City to see Trevor's father (Frederick Weller). It turns out that Bob hadn't written all of those letters that Trevor had never read. Instead, it was his mother. Trevor is shattered. He has a completely predictable fallout with Ben. He wants to go home. Dot puts her goddamned foot down. "We're going to the pit." At the pit, Ben confronts the car that's been following them for a while. It's Cash, Dot's Dad (Bobby Cannavale). He asks to be allowed to continue tailing them until Dot gets to where she's going. The phone rings. The gang needs help at the bottom of the pit. Peaches is having her baby. Why does Ben have to do this? He's the caregiver. Dozens of people around, but Ben's the one. After the baby's here and Peaches is taken away in an ambulance, Dot makes up with her dad and decides to let him drive her to Denver instead. "Cash: What's wrong with him? Ben: Duchenne Muscular Dystrophy. He'll be lucky if he makes it to 30. Cash: Is it rare? Ben: It affects one out of every 3,500 males. Cash: Life's a real class-A bitch, isn't it. Ben: Not always. [They watch Dot and Trevor say goodbye.]" As Dot's leaving: "Ben: Well, take care of yourself in Denver. There are a lot of perverts there. Dot: Yeah? And how would you know? Ben: We all keep in touch." Coda: "Ben: [typing his book] Soon after our trip, I resigned as his caregiver, but continued on as his friend. Two weeks ago, when I went to visit Trevor on his 21st birthday, I found him lying on the floor of his bedroom, finally at peace. The new caregiver, a kind woman in her 60s named Anna, was sobbing. She, like me, knew just how special he was. He was faking, of course. Anna quit the next day." I quite liked this movie. Pitch-perfect. All of the actors were great and natural. Would watch again. The Old Guard (2020) -- "3/10" This movie is f&@king terrible. It is so ham-handed and terribly made. It's like a bad TV show. Even Charlize Theron can't begin to save this thing. It's so blatantly and stupidly manipulative. It's entirely too long. They paper over terrible acting with a terrible hip-hop soundtrack that's supposed to inspire "mood". The acting is seriously about as bad as some of the more home-made-looking shorts on Dust. The fight choreography is so clumsy that it serves as a reminder for how much work goes into making good battle choreography. I'm loath to describe the plot, but I'll do it for my future self, I guess. It's about a group of four immortal warriors who go around doing good deeds, like assassinating people for the CIA, but for good reasons. They agree to a mission with a dude from the CIA. It's a trap, arranged by a big pharma company that wants to capture them to figure out their secret to immortality. They get away, surprise, surprise. They are captured again, to no-one's surprise. They ostracize the member who betrayed them. They end up getting the guy who betrayed them in the CIA to be the Charlie to their Angels. Some immortal lady they talked about having been thrown into the ocean in an iron maiden appears at the end, probably in the vain hope of inspiring a sequel. Oh, Jesus, "it's in the works" . All of the people are terrible. The ones who are good people are terrible actors. It's a shit show. Mute (2018) -- "7/10" Leo (Alexander Skarsgård) is man living in a futuristic city who, as a young Amish boy, had his throat struck by a boat propellor. His parents refused treatment and he's permanently mute now. The world is...interesting and rendered quite believably (if you don't think about it too much). It looks nice. It almost seems as if the Amish have ended up in this world, as well. The PA announcements are in English and German. It turns out that they're in Berlin, but that the Americans are even more deeply nested there in the future than they are now. It's like the cold war never ended, and has gotten hot. Also, there's at least one Amish person living in Berlin. Either Germany has Amish people or he traveled quite a way in an airplane. One of the main ideas is that the U.S. military has on AWOL problem. One of them is Cactus Bill (Paul Rudd), who was a medic in the military. He sports a gigantic mustache, has the standard Rudd-ian charm, but is darker. He's a bad man. He's only interested in himself and the welfare of his daughter Josie (apparently played by twins Mia-Sophie Bastin and Lea-Marie Bastin), for whom he doesn't really know how to care. He takes her from seedy spot to seedy spot, but she's a good sport, constantly drawing in silence. We don't hear a word from her until the end. Cactus Bill works for Maksim (Gilbert Owuor), a local Russian gang leader who needs Bill's services to patch up his soldiers. Bill works with Duck (Justin Theroux), who's also a former medic, but isn't AWOL. Duck is not a good person either. He works on cybernetic prosthetics, but is mostly interested in the little kids, if you know what I mean. This would eventually result in a rift between Bill and Duck, as Bill is livid that Duck might be interested in Josie. Cactus Bill's story arc is that he's trying to get Maksim to provide him with travel papers for himself and Josie, so he can get the hell out of Germany. Amish Leo is a bartender in Maksim's bar. His girlfriend Naadirah (Seyneb Saleh) works there as a waitress. There's a lot of back-and-forth, but it's not really that complicated. Naadirah is Josie's mother. Cactus Bill gets mad about her relationship with Leo and kills her. Just kills her. He's a psycho, as we slowly learn over the course of the film as the Rudd-ian patina wears away to reveal the monster beneath. He is not a sympathetic character, is what I'm saying. Duck is just as bad, really. Duck's messing with Leo because he keeps sending Leo messages on the phone that Naadirah had given him. Leo barely knows how to use it because he's Amish, so we forgive him his not knowing that all messages don't necessarily come from her. Knowing that Leo is looking for Bill and because Duck is angry with Bill, he leaks their location. Leo grabs a giant and very sturdy bedpost as his weapon and drives over to Maksim's bar in Maksim's car, which he'd stolen earlier (he's kind of going off the rails looking for Naadirah). Did I mention that Leo is really strong? We see him swimming a few times, holding his breath for a long time, etc. etc. Presumably this is how he's worked through the trauma of the accident of his youth. We see him taking a deep breath, then downing an entire pint of water very dramatically a few times. This is a Chekhov's gun, of course. So Leo cleans house at Maksim's bar, getting all the way up to Maksim's office without a shot fired. He cleans Maksim's clock with the bedpost, grabs Bill's papers and leaves. At Bill's house, he finds Nicky (Jannis Niewöhner), another torture victim, in the basement. He frees him, but the poor sonofabitch runs into Bill at the top of the stairs, who's already back from his fruitless visit to Maksim's. Bill tosses Leo the keys to the storage area in the cellar -- a classic apparatus of wooden slats that Leo could have pulverized if he hadn't left his bedpost bludgeon leaning on the bannister by the stairs. Leo finds Naadirah's body in a plastic bag and hauls her out of there. Bill watches, then grabs his giant hunting knife from its sheath behind his back, tussles with Leo, and realizes to his horror just how goddamned strong Leo is. Leo easily and slowly shoves the knife through Bill's trachea and out the back of his neck. He leaves him to die slowly on his basement floor. Leo carries Naadirah outside and mourns her, leaning against a tree. Duck shows up and finds his best friend choking on his own blood on the floor. He decides not to save him because Bill had threatened to reveal his pedophilic predilections and because Bill had brought this on himself by killing Naadirah. Duck grabs Bill's keys, turns a camera monitor so Bill can see him walking into his daughter's room, then goes up and grabs Josie. He doesn't do anything to her right then, but Bill's dying thoughts will be dominated by knowing that Josie is in Duck's filthy, filthy hands -- and she has no idea of the danger she's in. Lights out for Bill. Duck is still pissed that he's lost his friend, though, so he goes upstairs, finds Leo against the tree and kicks him in the temple, taking him out in one blow. We watch as Duck gives Leo a cybernetic larynx. Leo awakes in the back of a car, with Duck driving himself and Josie...somewhere that is not Berlin. Duck drives them to a bridge, then drags Leo out onto a bench in the middle. Duck tells Leo that this is where he'd taken that photo of Naadirah that Leo had been showing to everyone. He'd loved her, at least as a friend. Now he's going to dispose of Leo. He cuts the lock holding a gate closed. No-one knows why there would be a gate there, but it helps the plot, so it's there. Duck is the second person that day to be surprised at how strong Leo is. Leo rope-a-dopes Duck and, as Duck grabs him to push him over, Leo locks his arms around him, gulping huge breaths, then tips them both off the bridge. Duck is utterly unprepared and untrained and gives up the ghost quite quickly. Leo swims to the surface to see Josie dangerously close to the edge, looking down at him. She calls to him. He waves her back, then finally croaks out a warning that she understands. He's back on the bridge. Josie is comfortable with him. They travel on together. The end. Nuhr in Berlin (2016) -- "7/10" This is a classic standup set from Dieter Nuhr, delivered in Berlin to a relatively sympathetic crowd. He starts off with some red meat for Germans: how silly and stupid Americans are, how uncomprehending they are, and how badly his subtitled comedy show will do when shown on American Netflix. He's probably right, but it seemed a little overly harsh and not very funny. The laughter came not from the jokes, but from "hurdur Amerikaner sind so DUMM." Anyway, he moved on to cleverer stuff. His modus operandi is verbal subterfuge, contrarianism, and reductio ad absurdum. He doesn't range too far into the absurd, though. He sticks to stuff like the weird Internet, the judgmental Internet, kids these days, women vs. men -- the usual fare. He delivers with aplomb and he's clever -- although sometimes his persona of knowing how clever he is threatens to lose the crowd, he generally wins them back when he's able to convince them he's just kidding, he's just playing a role, he's just trying to make them laugh. If they'd just relax and lean into it, they'd be having fun instead of judging. He's also very much against the overly judgmental and vindictive style of the moment, even though his own personal favorite saying is, "Wenn man keine Ahnung hat: Einfach mal Fresse halten," which is good advice, but sometimes lands a bit poorly. I think he's an intelligent, funny guy with interesting takes -- even if I have no idea which of them he actually believes in, it doesn't matter. I watched it in German with German subtitles (most of it while riding the indoor bike). Dany Boon: Des Hauts-De-France (2018) -- "8/10" This is a one-man show. Dany starts out singing a little song, one that he apparently began his career with. He tells us about himself -- although the audience clearly knows everything already, laughing at the appropriate spots. E.g., when he talks about how a promoter/agent had told him what a bad idea it would be to emphasize his having come from from the north, the Ch'tis. He was told to clean up his accent, then laughs and says, yes, having focused on the Ch'tis was the greatest mistake he'd made in his career (Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis was his breakout film; it's pretty awesome). He moves on to a long bit about how slow and inefficient La Poste is, doing a lot of pantomime. From there, he's talking about the old telephone book, and how it helped him find one of the most famous people in the Ch'tis and helped him get his first gig. He pantomimes the people and his first gig. He was attacked by the owner's dog, with the four besotted members of the audience cheering them both on. Afterward, they wonder where the dog's gone. Next up is miming and robot noises. He segues into pretending to be a massively over-musclebound friend of his -- Fred Martens -- who'd been a bouncer at a night club called Macumba. He is also not particularly clever. Hilarity ensues. It's pretty lowbrow, but it's perfect for my French, as he's a very physical comedian. It's bad for me because he speaks very quickly and in a strong northern accent. I learned a lot of words, though. I had the subtitles on in French, and had my online dictionary ready. Next up, he accompanies himself on the piano with an ode to Ch'Nord-Pas-de-Calais-Picardie, where he grew up. His voice is actually pretty good. Apparently, in 2016, the region was renamed to "les Hauts-de-France", eradicating his heritage with a new name. He is not happy about it. He goes into all of the name changes, how the region welcomes you with a new sign, how you no longer say "wassingue" for mop, but "serpillière" (which is, presumably, more sophisticated). Belgium is now called "le Royaume du Dessus des Hauts-de-France d'En-Dessous". The joke is that renaming the region doesn't change its inhabitants at all. Still hicks. Still proud of it. This is quite good, actually. He segues into a demo -- with slides -- of the "new GPS" with all of the new names and regions. He has a lot to say about the French government's desire to "simplify". The next sketch is about Euro Disney, about the "it's a small world" ride. He calls the song a virus that even Alzheimer's couldn't eradicate. He accompanies himself on the guitar to a French rewrite of the song. He goes off-script and rewrites it with the "world as it is". Now he's onto the "youth of today". No reading, no writing, no expressing themselves, no consonants -- he's kidding, of course. Kind of. He shows a WhatsApp conversation. It's actually quite brilliant seeing a foreign language mangled into another, shorter one, as we do with numbers-for-letters, etc. He is now pretending to read a book, a work of great literature from the French canon: Harlequin. The mispronunciations and misapprehensions he pretends to have, as a young reader, are ... f&$king hilarious. They just are. He reads a word "sulfureuse" that he doesn't know, assumes it's a family name, then checks himself because "it doesn't start with a capital letter". Even the subtitles show what's he's pronouncing, which aren't actual words. "Un petit frigo a braguette" and so on. He then demonstrates how to read a book, not how he first tried it -- across both pages. Stop at the fold, read until the number -- which isn't part of the story -- jump back up to the top, over the fold. Clever, actually. I'd never thought about how I'd had to learn how to read a book -- and that those familiar with only screens might be tripped up. He talks about older people a bit, but then moves right back to teenagers and watching his own children mutate into people he doesn't recognize. He mimes an exorcism of his teenager. He says that he went to a child psychologist because of the aggression, but they were too far gone. He was sent to a lion-tamer at the circus instead, who informs him that the only language that beasts -- and teenagers -- obey is German. He says it worked like a charm and now his teenagers jump through flaming hoops, and he can place his head in the mouth of the eldest without fear. He mimes a morning at home. He mimes a bit about having a bad back, talks about getting older, and having his body start to fail him. He cracks everything, then plays some nice jazz piano, breaking off to crack his knuckles grotesquely. He's quite talented. He pretends that the only song he remembers in its entirety is -- wait for it -- "It's a Small World". He dedicates the show to his mother, then sings a song in Spanish for her. He spits on the consonants, then leaves them off. It's a bit overdone, but the public loves it. The finale is great. He's really talented. I watched it in French with French subtitles. Fucking Berlin (2016) -- "7/10" Sonja (Svenja Jung) is a 20-year-old student in Berlin. She studies mathematics. Her best friend in school is Jule (Charley Ann Schmutzler). She is wild, but harmless. She just wants to get laid. Sonja hooks up with bartender Milan (Christoph Letkowski). It's on-again, off-again with him, but she moves on, for now. Sonja's enjoying the night life. She meets Ladja (Mateusz Dopieralski). They move in together. They're super-good at partying, but bad at making money. She loses her job as a waitress because she's only got time for Ladja and her studies. She gets a job as a camgirl. Money's coming in. Things are better. With the job and her studies, she hardly ever sees Ladja. She gets fed up with that job and decides to move on. On Christmas, she calls a madam Anja (Judith Steinhäuser) who runs a small brothel out of her apartment. When she gets back to her apartment, she find Ladja on the steps. They're back together. It's back to partying, studying, and satisfying customers' kinks without doing more than hand stuff (and maybe mouth stuff, it looked like?) It's relatively innocent. She becomes good friends with an older guy Karl-Heinz (Axel Gottschick), who just likes to take pictures. He gives her a square meal, paying her as well to sit under the table and photograph up her skirt. He tells her to come by every Sunday for a meal whenever she wants. This is all not enough because the party life is having an impact. Ladja spent all of her money on a few all-night ragers where the two of them tore through Berlin. She wasn't aware it was her money fueling it, though. When she's helping a new recruit at Anja's, Anja walks in and says that there's a customer who wants to fuck (not there for a kink). It's Sonja's first time. It's her math professor, who doesn't recognize her. With that dam broken, she starts to gladly take the extra €50. As she says, at first, it was with guys who she'd have gone home with sober, then with guys who she'd have to have been drunk to go home with, then with those she'd have to have been really hammered to go home with, then it didn't matter anymore. She comes to view Anja's Oasis (die Oase) as her home, the people there as her family. Anja tells them that the Oasis is going out of business. After that, things get tougher; they have to take whatever customers they can get. Ladja still doesn't know anything. He doesn't seem to be trying too hard to find out. On the way to a club, one of her customers recognizes her and calls her Mascha (her trade name).She introduces Ladja so that the customer doesn't talk too much. But then the two start speaking Russian with one another. It's clear that the customer told Ladja that she doesn't work at a call-center. At the club, Ladja is watching her dance, lost in thought. She meets Milan in the bathroom. Jule is mad at her because she'd had her eye on Milan (I guess?) and asks him if he's one of her johns. He still wants her, although she asks him why? He has everything one could want. Ladja locks her out of her apartment. She calls Milan. They hook right the hell up, doing it standing up on the balcony, with her skinny ass right up on the railing. He tells her he loves her. She wakes in his apartment in the morning. There's several hundred euros waiting for her. She gets to school and Jule has told everyone that she's a prostitute. Jule is tearing into her, but at least one girl defends her. The Oasis has a new owner. It's the dude who ran the cam-girl shop she used to work at. You can imagine that it's going to be great. We see her take a job for €40 (she had to haggle) for a gang-gang with five guys watching. She pukes on the guy under her. She's takes a pregnancy test. Ladja shows up at the Oasis, sees her, then runs away. It's unclear what the fuck he was looking for there. Such a child. A little Polish man-child. One of her friends clocks him. He judges her pretty harshly considering he's told her that he'd been peddling his ass to men before he met her. She meets one of her old friends from the Oasis who said that she'd be leaving to get straight. She's back on drugs. She asks for money. Sonja takes her whole wad out. Peels off €30 or so. Her friend peels off the larger part, smiles at her, and walks away. OK, I guess? She visits Milan to give him back his wallet. I deducted a star because the ending was pretty cheesy. Oh, this was apparently based on a true story. It still felt a bit trite. I watched it German. There were some cool Berlin accents in there. The Pianist (2002) -- "10/10" The eponymous Wladyslaw Szpilman (Adrien Brody) is a pianist, perhaps the finest in Europe, living in Warsaw with his bourgeois family. It is 1942. The family watches as their lives become increasingly circumscribed. As with most films of this kind, we are invited to see how bad it was for those who had grand pianos and hand-woven carpets to sell, for whom there was at least somewhat of a buffer, at least at first. The unnamed thousands who simply died or were killed immediately don't have an interesting story to tell. We do see them in this film, though, in the form of corpses splayed on the sidewalks, either having been clearly shot or just having starved or frozen to death. The other people hurry around them. People in general are shown to not be helpful, to not have engaged in petty acts of resistance. Even those commanded to lie on the ground, do so, seemingly in the hope that there is somehow a conclusion other than the obvious final one. Others turn their backs and raise their hands. They are indoctrinated by the desperation of their situation, I suppose. It's impossible to judge them. The situation is so mind-bending, so horrifying. One thinks "I would have resisted", but then, perhaps, one convinces oneself that this act of resistance would be futile, better to wait it out until it means something. It is only later, when you see that you've ended in a cul-de-sac that you realize you had nothing to lose by standing up for yourself earlier, when you still had some pride, some dignity. Now you have nothing, and you gained nothing for having given what you had away. Oh, to know in advance that your adversaries are heartless and will take everything you have no matter what you do. This movie covers all of the bases of Warsaw Ghetto horror, hitting all the notes of Holocaust-porn. The Germans raid an apartment at night, demand everyone stand up, then throw the man in the wheelchair off the balcony for not following orders. A woman asks where they're being taken and an officer shoots her point-blank in the forehead without changing facial expression or breaking stride. A German officer shows up, selects nine men out of a group of a couple dozen, then orders them to lie down. He walks along, shooting each in the back of his head with his Luger. It's only an eight-shot, so he has to wait to reload for the last one. A German steals an old man's violin. Petty things. The family -- along with all of the other Jews in the city -- are pushed out of their apartment, moved to a much smaller one in the ghetto. They are moved into camps in the streets. Some of them are part of work gangs. A wall is built to block off the ghetto. It is horrifying. The cruelty is nearly indescribable. The Germans pound on the Jews, enjoying it like they're in the ninth circle of hell. Wlad's entire family is taken away, on a train. Wlad is saved by the chief of the Jewish ghetto police, who are collaborating, but still capable of small kindnesses. Wlad ends up on a work gang, in the ghetto. He is finally allowed to take part in some minor smuggling operations for the resistance. He eventually asks them to help him get out of the ghetto. They tell him that it's easier getting out than surviving on the outside, but agree to help. He contacts his old friends, who help him into an apartment, a mansard, where he lives alone for at least half a year. He is visited once or twice a week by his friends. He watches a heroic, if ultimately futile, resistance attack on the Germans in the street. The battle ends with a giant hole in the wall separating the Ghetto from the German area, and the entire resistance building bombed and in flames. One day, his handler appears to tell him that the jig is up. His own cover has been blown, the two friends have already been arrested, and it's only a matter of time before the Germans find the apartment. He chooses to stay, seeing that he has no chance on the outside. One day, he hears a car stop outside and hears boots and German voices in the stairwell. They don't find him. Days later, he is running out of food. In his search, he tips a shelf and shatters plates. The horrible lady next door demands he open up or she'll call the police. Wlad collects his things and creeps out of the apartment, but she's waiting. She demands his papers. He flees into the night. He goes to the address of his emergency contact. They shuffle him off to another apartment, this one deep in the German zone. They take care of him, but it's long weeks between food deliveries. One of the guys complains that it's hard to buy food with no money; Wlad gives him his watch, "Food is more important than time." Adrian Brody has the perfect body type for this film -- he's naturally gaunt. He's in bed the next time they visit, delirious, starving. He has jaundice. They bring a doctor. The next and last time they visit, they bring news that the allies are getting closer -- the Americans on one side and the Russians on the other. Wlad recovers. Weeks later, he sees the resistance -- much stronger now -- assault the German headquarters across the street, using bombs, automatic rifles, and a grenade-launcher. Days later, the city is in shambles. His water tap no longer delivers water. He hears a tumult in the hallway, "Get out! The Germans have surrounded the building!" He discovers that he is locked in his apartment. A tank rolls into view outside the window, lumbering into place, ponderously taking aim and blowing part of the floor of his building apart. He escapes through the now-accessible apartment next door. But he flees upstairs. Hearing more Germans, he escapes onto the roof. More Germans shoot at him from across the way. He gets away, fleeing down to street level. The resistance is everywhere and well-armed but so are are the Germans still. He hides behind trash cans in the street and falls asleep, despite the battle. When he wakes, it is nighttime. He ventures back into the street. Troops approach. He drops to the street and blends in with the dozens of bodies already there. He's in a hospital, looking for food, looking for water. Gunshots and explosions sound in the distance, no longer close. No water, no electricity. He makes a fire and cooks two large root vegetables he'd found. He eats millet dry, by the handful. The Germans are back, cleaning up the bodies, burning them. What is left of the resistance is marched past. The Germans retain control for now. They're back with flamethrowers. He escapes out a back window, twisting an ankle on the fall. He's got moxie, though. Over the wall. The city is in utter ruins. A brilliant shot of him walking away, looking like that lone penguin heading into the wastes of Antarctica. He scavenges the wastes, looking for food, hair and beard long, pants held up with a rope, his body emaciated, limping on his damaged ankle. He cradles a can of pickles that he's found, escaping from the next German voices to the attic, right up to the top. He has the can, but no can-opener. He pulls up the ladder. The Germans are gone. He's back downstairs. He finds fireplace implements to open the can. It drops. He lets it roll away because there is a German (Thomas Kretschmann), impeccably dressed, watching him. You can see Wlad's breath, but not the German's. The contrast between the two could not be more striking. The German asks if he lives there, if he works there. Ludicrous questions. The house stands alone in a wasteland of bombed-out buildings and rubble. Wlad tells him that he a pianist. The German leads him to the piano that Wlad had heard being played earlier. He sits. Calms his hands. It's heart-wrenching. He beings to play. It's Chopin -- Ballade No. 1 in G Minor, Op. 23. It's beautiful. The moonlight shines in on him, heavenly. The German officer watches and listens. His face reveals almost an awareness of what he and his country have done, watching this ruin of a man, capable of producing such beauty with his hands. Or maybe he regrets a bit having to kill him. Who knows? He's nearly inscrutable. Wlad continues to play, perhaps in the hope that, as long as he continues to play, he can live. The German lets him live. He tells his driver he'd found nothing. The house becomes a German Stützpunkt. Dozens of German officers are on the ground floor, busily administering their war. The officer returns to Wlad, He throws him a package of food. "Wlad: Was bedeutet die ganze Schiesserei? German Officer: Die Russen. Auf die andere Flussseite. Ein paar Wochen müssen sie noch aushalten. Mehr nicht." They meet once more. he brings a lot more food, and even gives him his coat when he sees that Wlad is freezing. The Germans are gone. It's dead winter. People are there. he goes out to meet them, still wearing the German greatcoat. People scream that he's German. Soldiers shoot at him, throw grenades, he manages to yell to them in Polish that he's Polish. They finally believe him. He is saved. A friend of his leaves the camp in which he'd been imprisoned, still alive, walking past a pen full of captured Germans. One of them is the German who'd helped Wlad. He jumps up to ask him if he's heard of Szpilman. He begs him to tell Wlad that he's there. Wlad is playing piano again. His friend watches from the booth. They are both overcome with emotion, but Wlad doesn't miss a note. They actually return to the field to find the German, but the whole camp is gone. The Russians have taken him away. His name was Captain Wilm Hosenfeld and he did his part to gift the world the playing of Wlad Szpilman, who lived in Warsaw until he died in 2000 at 88 years old. The credits say that Hosenfeld died in a Soviet camp seven years later. This was, apparently, also a true story. This is a powerful and extremely well-made movie with an absolutely brilliant Adrien Brody as Wlad. And it is chock-full of my favorite pianist's music. I think, given the current conflict in the Middle East, that it would be extremely illuminating to re-dub the ghetto slave-camp parts of this movie with all of the German parts in Hebrew and all of the English parts in Arabic. Ricky Gervais: Armageddon (2023) -- "9/10" This is a pretty great show that's very much classic Gervais: interesting insights about how our culture works combined with shocking humor. The quotes below are taken from the beautifully formatted "Ricky Gervais: Armageddon transcript" . He starts off by examining the word fascist and the odd trend of explicitly saying that you're not a fascist in online bios. Then he notes how you're not legally allowed to call someone gay when they're not, but you are allowed to call someone straight when they're not. He slags on Britain's obsession with illegal immigrants. Then, it's on to climate change and armageddon. "We’re gonna be the first generation that future generations are jealous of, right? ‘Cause we had it all, and we’re using it all up. We’re using up all the fresh water. We’re using up all the fossil fuel. Usually, you look back in history and you feel sorry. You go, “Oh, how did they live like that? Oh, how did they get around?” “No indoor toilets.” I’ve got nine toilets in my house. "And sometimes, I just run around flushing ’em for a laugh. Like that. [audience laughing] Just so that in 40 years’ time, Greta Thunberg has to shit out of a window. "I’ve got 28 radiators. I always have them on full. Then I put the air con on full, and it sort of settles at about 20 degrees. A lovely… It’s how the cat likes it. She loves it at 20 degrees. " Next it's disabled people swimming with dolphins, big families, and then legacies. "Eminent people going, “There is a statue of me in the town square.” And now, they’re pulling down the statues. “Pull down this fucking statue.” “Why?” “He was a slave trader. Pull down the fucking statue.” “He built the hospital. Should we pull that down?” “No, leave the hospital.”" Then there's sort of a meta-bit about infant mortality, Africa, "Jeff and Tracy", growing up, and back to pedophile stories from his youth. China, Homelessness, drug-use, little people, actors playing only roles to which their identities conform, then cultural appropriation. "[...] in my day, it was considered a good thing to swap ideas with other cultures, with other nations, to share things with other races, to assimilate. It was the opposite of racist. Now it’s racist. Gwen Stefani got in trouble in her last video ’cause she had her blonde hair in dreadlocks. People were going, “No. Black people invented dreadlocks.” “You can’t have ’em. You’re white. That’s racist.” Jamie Oliver got in trouble when he put out an authentic jerk chicken recipe. “No. Black people invented that.” “You can’t have it. You’re white. That’s racist.” Now, Black people, they use the n-word, don’t they? We invented that!" On to critical race theory. "Critical race theory, have you heard of that? Being taught in schools now, particularly in trendy areas like L.A., to, like, five-year-old kids and six-year-old kids. If you haven’t heard of it, in a nutshell, critical race theory says that all white people are racist. We’re born racist, and we continue to be racist, ’cause we’re affording the privilege of a racist society set up by our forefathers. Okay? So basically, all white people are racist, and there’s nothing we can do about it, which is a relief." Philosophical: "I think the world’s gonna get harder and harder to understand as I get older and more bewildered. A new dogma arises in the name of “progress.” Now, dogma is never progressive, however new and trendy. But I think soon I’ll be outnumbered." This segues into talking about a terrible pair of pants he'd ordered online: "Now, I don't know what sweat shop they were made in, or what little eight-year-old Chinese kid made them, but he should be fucking punished [...] "And I was looking up where to fucking complain to get him fired, right? [audience laughing] And I found out that these kids only get two dollars a day in these fucking places, right? But what happened to pride in your work? Do you know what I mean? [audience laughing] "And I can tell some of you are thinking, “But he didn’t think Ricky Gervais would order them.” Maybe he should be told there’s a chance that Ricky Gervais might order them. His owner should sit him down, right, and say, “If Ricky Gervais orders these and complains, I’m gonna rape your mummy again.”" He's back to talking about the end of the world, and "disableds", as he's still delighted to call people with disabilities. He says he's grown because they used to be called "crippled". On this topic, he starts to examine various films through the filter of the web site "Does the Dog Die?" , a site that started off as a way for people to check whether a dog died in a film, and has since expanded to include all sorts of emotional triggers. "Check it out. Schindler’s List. Right? Someone says, “Are there any fat jokes?” "[audience murmuring] "Would that make this worse? Wh… Imagine the real thing. Imagine I’m in a concentration camp, right? I’m naked. Everyone around me is naked. We’ve got a commandant herding us towards the gas chamber, and he goes, “Move it, fatty.” Right? And I go, “Rude.” [audience laughing] “Nope.” “That has ruined the whole experience if I’m honest.” "[audience laughing] "Someone asks, “Is there hate speech?” "Yeah, there is." Wrapup: "Another theme of the show has been, “words change, and I’m woke, ha-ha.” But here’s the irony. I think I am woke, but I think that word has changed. I think if woke still means what it used to mean, that you’re aware of your own privilege, you try and maximize equality, minimize oppression, be anti-racist, anti-sexist, anti-homophobic… Yes, I’m definitely woke. If woke now means being a puritanical, authoritarian bully, who gets people fired for an honest opinion or even a fact, then, no, I’m not woke. Fuck that." ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4916 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4916 Sat, 27 Jan 2024 12:07:22 +0100 of around 1600 ratings publicly available. I've included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other -- I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. Velvet Buzzsaw (2019) -- "8/10" This film is about the art world, presumably out in LA somewhere. Artist agent and gallery owner Rhodora Haze (Rene Russo) has a palatial home in the desert. Morf Vandewalt (Jake Gyllenhaal) is a bitchy, catty reviewer who knows what he likes and whose favor everyone seeks. Jon Dondon (Tom Sturridge) is another agent/gallery owner who used to work for Rhodora, but is now poaching her talent, like Piers (John Malkovich). Gretchen (Toni Collette) works at a museum, until she becomes a buyer for private clients. Bryson (Billy Magnussen) is a wannabe artist who works for Rhodora. Coco (Natalia Dyer) also works for Rhodora, until she doesn't. Then she works for Dondon, until she doesn't. Then she works for Gretchen, until she doesn't. Then she works for Morf...until she doesn't. Damrish (Daveed Diggs) is an up-and-coming artist who doesn't want to be corrupted by that world. Josephina (Zawe Ashton) is an awful climber -- perhaps the worst of them all -- who makes an art discovery. Ok. That's the cast. Now the plot. Josephina discovers a dead man in her building. It's artist Vetril Dease (Alan Mandell). He's left an apartment full of artwork with strict orders to destroy it all. Josephina thinks it's magnificent, so she steals it -- hey, there were no inheritors, and who cares what the dead man wanted? -- and goes into partnership with Rhodora to sell it. Everyone who sees his work says its breathtaking. Lab tech Gita (Nitya Vidyasagar) discovers that he put his literal lifeblood into every painting. Things start to go sideways. Rhodora sends Bryson with half of the collection to deep storage. She wants to artificially bump the value of the available Deases. He suspects that he has a cargo of Deases -- which he's seen and loved, in an obsessive manner -- and he stops to have a look at them before heading out. They haunt him. He drops his cigarette, catches himself on fire, slides his truck into an abandoned rest stop, and almost crashes into gas pumps. He enters the abandoned gas station and, while washing his burns, monkeys from a painting that mysteriously hangs over the gas-station bathroom's sink drag him into the painting. Gone. Next up is Donjon, who hangs himself in his own exhibit. He doesn't see it that way; he sees hands pulling him into the ceiling to kill him. Coco finds him there. Her first corpse. At her next job, now working for Gretchen, Coco is allowed to go home. Gretchen stays late in the gallery with her Deases and her Sphere. She sticks her arm into the Sphere, which the demons in the Dease manipulate to take her arm right off. She bleeds out. The next morning, no-one notices that she's not part of the exhibit until Coco shows up in the later morning to discover that she's lost another employer. Her second corpse. Josephina, meanwhile, has hooked up with Morf, who's escaped the grasp of the Deases a few times. He sees them moving in the huge Dease hanging over Josephina's bed. Josephina has also hooked up with Damrish, who's also seen the paintings in her fancy apartment moving. Morf hires Coco -- jobless again -- to help him put his Deases into deep storage. The paintings get him first, though, in the form of the Robo-hobo, which he'd panned. Coco finds his body. Her third corpse. Josephina finally gets hers in a fake gallery, located far downtown, after Damrish told her he doesn't want to be in her art world. She's on the phone with Rhodora, who's almost killed by a falling statue. Josephina isn't so lucky, as the paint runs off of the Deases that aren't even there, oozing across the floor and gliding up her limbs to cover her face. Rhodora, on the other hand, survives and has movers box up all of her Deases. Sitting outside, with her cat, she looks just exactly like the painting that had hung in her bedroom. The velvet buzzsaw tattoo on her neck comes to life and tears through her thorax. Damrish survives because he stayed pure. Piers survives because, while he appreciated the art, he didn't profit from it. He was at Rhodora's beach house making art. Coco survived because she also didn't benefit -- she's headed back to Minnesota. The remaining Deases show up in flea markets, selling for $5 apiece. The Silent Sea (2021) -- "7/10" This is a Korean sci-fi series lasting exactly one season -- and meant to last only one season, I think. It tells the story of an Earth ravaged by drought, on which water is such a precious resource that many people have too little of it -- and have no means to buy more. There are, as you can imagine, a lot of people who do have more than enough water for themselves. But most people spend large parts of their day standing in line with one or more jerrycans, waiting to fill them. There's a Korean moonbase, a research facility called Balhae Station. Bad shit went down there several years ago, taking the lives of 117 people. The company that owns it wants to send people back up to try to salvage...whatever it was that they were all working on up there. Some people know bits and pieces of the danger, but they're not the ones going on the mission. Song Ji‑An (Bae Doona) is going on the mission. Her sister was one of the 117 who'd died. She, like her sister, is a formidable researcher. Han Yun‑Jae (Gong Yoo) captains the space shuttle that takes them there. We're introduced to a few more of the people in the run-up to the excursion. Ryu Tae‑seok (Lee Joon) of the Ministry of National Defense "volunteers" to be part of the mission, but he's a secret agent, communicating with his real masters, who have him running a side mission. We'll soon learn that he's not the only one. So the shuttle takes off, headed for the moon, presumably to land there, with its stubby wings providing lift ... in the atmosphere. Look, it doesn't matter, right? It wouldn't matter anyway, but it really doesn't matter because the shuttle starts shaking itself apart before Han can even think of landing it. It then lands extremely hard on the lunar surface, killing no-one important. Instead of harming anyone important, the crash leaves them all with just the spacesuits on their backs and no other usable supplies. They are kilometers away from Balhae Station and have to hoof it. One of them is injured and expires along the way, but not before slowing everyone down so much that they're all nearly out of oxygen before the captain can unlock the airlock and they can all flop inside and finally draw breath in a quickly re-oxygenated moonbase that had been abandoned for five years. Phew. Once inside, they discover dozens of corpses, all of them looking like they'd drowned. This strikes pretty much everyone as highly unlikely and they scoff at Dr. Hong Ga-Young (Kim Sun-young), who's charismatic and spunky and all-around a pretty good character. The crew has their orders: they are to search the base in very specific locations for samples. They come up empty everywhere. There are sample canisters around but they're all empty. Song's team detects another presence in the station, staying just out of site, but definitely alive. No-one knows what it could be. Engineer Gong Soo-chan (Jung Soon-Won) gets too close to a corpse and something puffs up into his eye. On the way back to the central command, he drops farther and farther behind his team, getting sick. As one other member Lee Gi-su (Choi Yong-Woo) also dies -- seemingly after having been attacked -- they discover that he'd been secretly communicating with unknown other parties on an alternate plan. Soo-chan, meanwhile, has worsened, and soon expels what seems like several aquariums full of water from his mouth before dying horribly. No-one knows where all the water came from, but they're no longer so mystified by the corpses. Song and Dr. Hong urge caution, to avoid further infection. Han is unconvinced and will not deviate from the mission. They reestablish communication with Earth -- well, official communication, because some people seem to have been in near-constant contact with their handlers -- and are ordered to stay on mission: retrieve a viable canister. What do they canisters contain? Lunar water, baby. It's what killed Soo-chan. It has a virus-like ability to propagate itself nearly infinitely. It could solve the Earth's problems for good. The Korean company is trying to keep it quiet so that it can refine it, make it safe, and, above all, profit from it first. The crew is increasingly leery that it's even possible to control it, especially when more members fall ill from it, dying explosively. Song stumbles on a secret chamber positively filled with canisters, hundreds of them. But it's guarded by a feral-looking girl who (A) seems to have survived five years on an empty moonbase by herself and (B) seems to be immune to lunar water and (C) actually seems to thrive on it, being able to magically heal herself. What is Ryu's side mission? Well, instead of finding out what happened at the base, he's to obtain samples of the lunar water that the base had been researching, and to bring it to a pickup point somewhere else on the moon. As everyone else is busy trapping the girl Luna 073 (Kim Si-a), he steals all the known samples and hustles off to a rendezvous point. And yes, we learn that the first 72 subjects didn't fare nearly as well as Luna 073. We learn this in a few flashbacks when Song cracks the data storage to get at the research data. We also learn that they started with fish from a neat video of a fish being infected with lunar water, then producing so much water that it prevents itself from asphyxiating and is soon swimming around again. Ryu is infected, soldiering on, but he's not long for this world (or that one). Song is also infected but, because Luna had bitten her on capture, she's now partially immune to it and avoids the worst effects. Realizing that Luna's immunity to lunar water may be what allows mankind to greet lunar water as a salvation rather than as extinction, they decide to get the samples and Luna 073 to an international space station, rather than returning both to The Company, where it's unclear what will happen to her. Captain Han and Chief Gong Soo-hyuk (Lee Moo-saeng) sacrifice themselves so that Dr. Hong, Song, and Luna can escape the flooding base. At the very end, things get even crazier than a flood on the moon: Luna is shown to be able to survive vacuum without a spacesuit. The three are eventually rescued and taken to the space station. The end. Boyz n the Hood (1991) -- "9/10" We start off in 1984, with Jason "Tre" Styles III living with his single mother Reva (Angela Bassett). Tre gets into a fight at school, so his mother sends him to live with his father Jason "Furious" Styles Jr. (Laurence Fishburne). He's been there before, so he has friends: Darrin "Doughboy" Baker, Doughboy's half-brother Ricky, and their friend Chris. We follow the boys' adventures in Crenshaw as they tussle with local gangs, witness a dead body, and, finally, see a Doughboy and Chris being arrested for theft. We rejoin them seven years later, where Tre (Cuba Gooding Jr.), Doughboy (Ice Cube), Ricky (Morris Chestnut), and Chris (Redge Green) are at a welcome-home party for Doughboy, who just finished a bit in in prison. Chris is in a wheelchair because of a gunshot wound, but he's pretty jacked and quite nimble. They're joined by two fellow Crips: Dooky (Dedrick D. Gobert) and Monster (Baldwin C. Sykes). Ricky is a high-school football legend, being recruited by USC. He needs to get a 700 on the SAT, though, which is a pretty big ask for him. He's big, handsome, muscular, but he's quite simple. He's also already a father, living with his mother Brenda (Tyra Ferrell), his girl Shanice (Alysia Rogers), and their son. Brenda's always got her eye on Furious, but he's not having it. Tre has turned out pretty well, all things considered. He's on track for college and trying to get his strictly Catholic girlfriend Brandi (Nia Long) to bang him. Tre and Ricky drive with Furious to Compton, where Furious shows them how the world really works, talking to other members of the community who also draw nearer to hear him "preach". "Furious Styles: Would you two knuckleheads come on. I want you all to take a look at that sign up there. See what it says: cash for your home. Do you know what that is? Ricky: A billboard. Tre Styles: A billboard. Furious Styles: What are you all? Amos and Andy? Are you Stepin and he's Fetchit? I'm talking about he message. What it stands for. It's called gentrification. It's what happens when the property value of a certain area is brought down. You listening? You bring the property value down. They can buy the land at a lower price, then they move all the people out, raise the property value and sell it at a profit. Now, what we need to do is keep everything in our neighborhood, everything - black. Black owned with black money. Just like the Jews, the Italians, the Mexicans and the Koreans do." "The Old Man: Ain't nobody from outside bringing down the property value. It's these folk, shootin' each other and sellin' that crack rock and shit. Furious Styles: Well, how you think the crack rock gets into the country? We don't own any planes. We don't own no ships. We are not the people who are flyin' and floatin' that shit in here. "I know every time you turn on the TV, that's what you see. Black people, sellin' the rock, pushin' the rock, pushin' the rock. Yeah, I know. But that wasn't a problem as long as it was here. It wasn't a problem until it was in Iowa, on Wall Street, where there are hardly any black people." "Furious Styles: Why is it that there is a gun shop on almost every corner in this community? The Old Man: Why? Furious Styles: I'll tell you why. For the same reason that there is a liquor store on almost every corner in the black community. Why? They want us to kill ourselves." One night, the crew heads to Crenshaw Boulevard to hang out, where Ricky gets provoked by a Blood, Ferris (Raymond Turner) before being rescued by Doughboy. Later, Ricky and Tre are on their way home and are pulled over and harassed by cops. The crew spend a lot of time hanging out at Brenda's house, on the porch, not doing much at all. Soon after the incident at Crenshaw, Ricky and Tre go to the store for Brenda. On the way back, they realize that they're being hunted by the Ferris and a few other Bloods. Ricky thinks that they should split up -- it's unclear why Tre lets the mental invalid take the tactical lead -- and is caught and gunned down in cold blood. Tre arrives too late to help him, as do Doughboy and his crew. They gather up Ricky's bloodied corpse and bring it back to Brenda's place. There are tearful recriminations, with Doughboy shouldering the blame, but not much to be done. Ricky's SAT results arrive. He'd scored 710. The crew takes off for revenge. Furioius at first stops Tre, but Tre sneaks out anyway. After several hours of driving around, Tre asks to be let out. He's changed his mind and wants nothing of more killing. Soon, though, Doughboy and the crew find the Bloods at a burger joint. They try to run, but they gun them down. Two of them are still alive, crawling away. Doughboy gets out of the car and finishes them off. The police sirens get closer as they drive away. Tre returns home to a furious Furious, who doesn't say a word. The next morning, Doughboy quickly forgives Tre for having bailed the night before. He knows that Tre has a chance of escaping, whereas he doesn't. His speech at the end is highly political, where he points out how the media reports on foreign violence, but not on the violence at home. "I turned on the TV this morning, they had this shit on about... about living in a violent world. Showed all these foreign places... I started thinking, man, either they don't know, don't show, or don't care about what's going on in the hood. Man, all this foreign shit, and they didn't have shit on my brother, man." Doughboy was killed two weeks later. Tre and Brandi made it out, to college in Atlanta. The Purge (2013) -- "5/10" The backstory is that the United States was taken over by the New Founding Fathers in 2014. Their aim was to avoid a civil war by, um, winning it before it starts, I guess? Anyway, they introduce something called The Purge, where there is no law-enforcement for twelve hours, from 19:00 to 07:00 one day per year. As you can imagine, it's pretty much a time when a lot of poor people get killed, culling the useless from the population. Typical libertarian spank-bank stuff. Guess what? More fantasy: by 2022, there is virtually no crime outside of the purge window and nearly everyone has a job. That's quite a spank bank. It's like it was written by someone from Reason magazine. James Sandin (Ethan Hawke) drives home to his swanky home in a gated community. He sells security systems. He's sold a lot of them this year -- many of them to his neighbors. He eats dinner with his wife Mary (Lena Headey) and his kids Zoey (Adelaide Kane) and weird little Charlie (Max Burkholder). They lock themselves in for the night, barricading the whole house from top to bottom. After a while, a Bloody Stranger (Edwin Hodge) appears in the street and Charlie, feeling bad for him, opens up the house to let him in. They get the house locked back up just as the man gets inside. Meanwhile, upstairs, Zoey's boyfriend Henry had somehow already snuck in before. They're making out, but Henry says he has something else he has to do: he has to tell her Dad how he really feels. He tells he that he's going to tell James about their undying love, but he's actually there to purge him. He's a terrible shot, though. James isn't. Zoey gets Henry back upstairs, but he expires on the floor of her bedroom. The Bloody Stranger has meanwhile disappeared somewhere in the giant house. A random gang of rich, white kids with murder on their minds show up to chew a tremendous amount of scenery, demanding that the Sandin's release their prey. Or else. Or else what? Or else they'll get a bunch of construction equipment to tear down Sandin's house's defenses and get him anyway -- but also killing the Sandins. Cool. Cool. I honestly don't know what we're supposed to think of them. I don't think they're scary. They're pretentious and ridiculous. But maybe we're supposed to hate them especially more because of the inordinate power they've arrogated to themselves on account of their class privilege? I dunno. Seems a little highbrow for this movie. The leader shoots his best friend as an example? WTH? This makes absolutely no sense. There is no pressure for the kids to purge, but when they do, they're so psychotic that they shoot their own best friends, just to set an example? And then everyone else just drags away his body with no questions asked? I get that they're trying to get us to believe that it's a cult, but give us some foreplay, for God's sake. The teenage purgers cut off the power to the house. At this point -- once they shut off the lights -- the movie gets really boring for a while. The family members all spend what seems like an eternity walking around their mansion with weak flashlights, looking for the homeless guy that Charlie let in. Charlie eventually finds him with a stupid little robot and, whatever, the guy kidnaps family members and they go back and forth until they realize that the youth outside is probably going to kill them all anyway, so they might as well team up and fight back. The Purgers are inside the house. Mayhem ensues, after a fashion. There are a bunch of set pieces. Charlie sees other neighbors approaching -- none too pleased with the Sandins having made their tremendous fortune off of selling them their security systems. They're there to have their revenge on Purge Night. With the help of the Bloody Stranger, they turn the tables -- though not before James gets stabbed -- and wait out the rest of the night, with the neighbors captured and all of the teenaged Purgers already lying dead all around the house. It wasn't nearly as good as its reputation and the several sequels that followed. I won't be watching any of them. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4877 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4877 Thu, 25 Jan 2024 21:38:22 +0100 of around 1600 ratings publicly available. I've included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other -- I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. Tenet (2020) -- "7/10" Protagonist (John David Washington) is an agent of unknown provenance, perhaps CIA -- it doesn't matter. He's part of a failed extraction mission, in which he is captured and beaten. He chomps down on a cyanide pill that is no such thing and learns that he has passed a test for entry into something called the Tenet organization. That "tenet" is a palindrome is not a coincidence. The meaning of the word doesn't really play into the plot at all. There is an expository section in which we learn that anything can be imbued with inverted entropy so that it travels against time's arrow. There are big rotating machines that impart this property onto stuff, like guns, cars, bullets, people. Some people know about this resvolutionary, physics-defying technology and the rest of us are installing ad-blockers against spam ads while waiting for a year for them to fix a single train tunnel in Switzerland. But, hey, that's one of the tenets of this film: physics isn't what you think it is, but only spy agencies know about it -- no scientists. I learned the lessons of this movie so quickly that when Protagonist and Neil (Robert Pattinson) penetrated to the center of the Rotas pentagon -- awesome logo, by the way -- and found bullet holes, and Neil asked, "What the hell happened here?", I said, in unison with Protagonist, "It hasn't happened yet." The protagonist goes to Mumbai -- this movie is really the answer to "what if James Bond were black?" -- with his handler Neil (Robert Pattinson), where they reverse bungie-jump up to Priya Singh's (Dimple Kapadia) penthouse, where she reveals that she, too, is part of the organization. When the Protagonist is talking to Priya about his and Neil's experience in the vault, he says that there were "two antagonists. One inverted." When she asks, "both emerged at the same moment?", I said with her "they were the same person." She gets her entropically inverted goods from Andrei Sator (Kenneth Branagh), a ruthless man of Russian origin, who'd dragged himself up from the ruins of Stalsk-12, a Siberian prison city. Shades of Bane with this one, to be honest. He looks more normal than Bane, but he's just as kooky and his origin story is very, very similar. Sator is trying to obtain plutonium and he ends up capturing the Protagonist, Neil, and Sator's estranged wife Kat Barton (Elizabeth Debicki). There is a whole thing about a forged or not-forged Goya and there is a lot of stuff with inverted bullets and inverted cars and people that looks reasonably cool, but is, honestly, a bit much. Sator and his henchmen are executing what everyone seems to recognize as a "temporal pincer movement", the mechanics of which remain a bit fuzzy, but I guess it sounds cool. We eventually find out that some of the mysterious people in motorcycle helmets that appear to be inverted are actually the Protagonist, who would invert himself later in the film to retroactively justify those interactions. We learn more about the Tenet organization: that's it's from the future and that it involves people trying to prevent climate change in our time, in order to save themselves from the even deadlier effects in their own. Or I think it's something like that. But I'm not sure, because Sator is terminally ill and he's working for them, and they're helping him put together a plutonium weapon that will be able to destroy the planet, but that seems like an odd way to "fix" climate change for a better future, but whatever, go with the flow, or reverse-flow, or whatever. There is a huge operation. I mean, huge. Like, with red and blue teams and lots of people running around in the desert -- both forwards and backwards -- and lots of explosions -- both forwards and backwards -- as well as people criss-crossing their own selves during an operation that is yet another inverted pincer movement, though this time by the ostensible good guys. At the end, Neil does some hero shit, saving the Protagonist, but it's his inverted self who did so. So, even though their non-inverted selves make it out of the cavern in which the super-bomb was scheduled to go off, Neil knows that he has to go invert again so that he can make the sacrifice that saves them both so that he can invert and sacrifice himself ... but at least the Protagonist makes it out, which is good, because, apparently, he is to found Tenet and, in the future, invert and go back to recruit Neil way in the past, so that they work together for a long time and become the best of friends. Even though the Protagonist in the film remembers none of this -- not having lived it yet -- Neil remembers a life lived well fondly right before he goes off to die. The non-inverted Protagonist thinks that their relationship is just starting, which it would feel like it would be, in a non-Tenet world, Instead, Neil has known him forever, and is more than willing to make the sacrifice that will retroactively call that whole, long friendship into being. Even though, if he hadn't, probably another timeline would crop up in which he'd never known the Protagonist and wouldn't care? I dunno. This movie isn't too multi-timeline friendly, seemingly quite happy to imagine that any arrow-of-time-defying maneuvers all occur in the same observable, physical universe, with no or little effect on the memories stored by consciousnesses that are, presumably, also just quantum patterns, but seem, even in their complexity, to be only very coarsely affected by inversion, so yeah, the whole theory isn't thought out down to the nuts and bolts, but I think the time-looping stuff kind of matches up ok. And then, despite knowing about the fate of the world and climate change and billions of current and future lives hanging in the balance and, despite knowing that he himself founds an organization with the express goal of putting as much of this right for as many people as possible, the Protagonist kills Priya -- who, remember, worked for a future version of himself -- in order to prevent her from cleaning up after the operation by killing Kat, who obviously knew too much and would, also obviously, sacrifice the entire planet's future for her son, whose future would also be gruesomely sacrificed at the same time, because if humanity's gone, then so's her son and his future. But mom'd are gonna mom, ammirite? At this juncture, I'm going to go ahead and note that this is yet another movie that has no problem making a woman look shockingly stupid and shallow because she's a mother. This is, honest to God, a line from the movie. "Neil: Everyone and everything that's ever lived, destroyed. Instantly. Kat: Including my son." JFC. And it also has no qualms making the Protagonist throw away everything he and many others had sacrificed -- including his very best friend-to-be Neil -- for a tall, skinny piece of tail who he's never going to see again (Kat) and whom he'd never bedded or even been in a relationship with in the first place. Look, I may have missed some bits and I may have misinterpreted some stuff and I'm sure that there are tons of fans who would say that it all becomes wicked clear on the dozenth viewing and after you've watched a good gross of explainer videos by Director Christopher Nolan and others, but I'm kind of good. It was fine. A bit long, with a bit too much focus on the whole reverse-movie thing, but I'm glad everyone seems to have had a lot of fun making what is, actually, a pretty unique movie, if not the most original of plot lines, in the end. I know, I know, no other plot has this temporal inversion stuff, but most of the movie is about shadowy agents from shadowy organizations shooting at each other and blowing up cars and buildings and stuff. There's a mad Russian who wants to blow up the world. There's an unconsummated -- and seemingly lust-less, as is the trend these days -- relationship where everything is sacrificed for love. That sounds like a ton of other movies, no? Despite the core tenet of temporal inversion, most of the rest of the movie is kind of bog-standard. Goodbye Berlin (2016) -- "9/10" Maik Klingenberg (Tristan Göbel) is in school, mooning over Tatjana Cosic (Aniya Wendel). She doesn't acknowledge his existence. He meets Tschicke (Anand Batbileg Chuluunbaatar) in school. He's smart, of east-asian/russian descent, and is a force of nature. His relationship with Maik reminds me a bit of that between Val Kilmer and Gabriel Jarret in Real Genius. In the summer, Maik's mom (Anja Schneider) goes to a clinic to dry out while his dad (Uwe Bohm) jets off for two weeks with his barely-of-age secretary. Maik has the house to himself. Tschicke steals a super-shitty Lada and they go on a road trip -- out of Berlin. Tschicke is full of wisdom while driving. "Warum blinken? Die Leute sehen doch wo in hinfahre." "Landkarten sind für Muschis. Wir fahren einfach Richtung Süden." They throw in a Richard Claydermann cassette that they found in their stolen Lada. Ballade für Adeline starts playing. "Voll geil" says Maik. Tschicke: "Bist du sicher, dass du nicht schwul bist?" The road's ending, so Tschick say, "Ich fahre doch sicher nicht zurück." and veers into a cornfield, turning on the wipers, and rolling up his window when the flapping corn starts to annoy him. They start to draw something for Google Earth: "Ohne Sinn". They meet young Friedrich and his country family, breaking bread and playing quiz games for desserts. Maik and Tschicke get the smallest, shittiest desserts because they don't know anything -- and the home-schooled kids know everything. They meet Isa (Mercedes Müller). They spend some time together. They eventually send her on her way to Prague. They get to a wooden bridge, after taking a logging road to get off a road with po-po. Maik: Ich weiss ich nicht. Tschicke: Ich fahre jetzt sicher nicht zurück. They get stuck, then jump in the water to fix the bridge. Tschicke gets a spike through his foot when he steps on it at the bottom of the swamp. He can't drive. Maik has to drive. Maik says he won't, because he's boring. Tschicke says he's not boring. Maik asks why Tatjana wouldn't invite him to her party. Who the fuck cares? Isa's way hotter, says Tschicke, and she has good taste? How does he know? Tschicke admits he's gay. He's never told anyone. Maik drives out of the swamp, slowly learning how to drive stick. They're on the highway. A truck passes them, nearly driving them off the road. Maik tries to pass him in the breakdown lane. The truck flips over, spilling pigs everywhere. Maik and Tschicke are by the side of the road, injured but alive. Tschicke takes off, limping, to avoid being placed in a home. Maik gives him his voll geil jacket to stay warm. Maik's in the hospital. A cop is telling him that he actually is old enough to be prosecuted. Maik's parents are arranging to blame it all on Tschicke. Maik does not cooperate. He takes the blame, as he should. Maik's dad super-hero-punches him to the ground. Maik's dad is moving out now, leaving with his hot girlfriend. Maik's mom is plastered again, chucking stuff in the pool. Maik helps her. She's just pounding straight from the bottle. They go for a swim. School begins again. The cops pick Maik up on the way, ask him about Tschicke. Apparently, a Lada's been stolen, hot-wired, and returned destroyed in the morning. Maik smiles. Tschicke is telling him he's back. The cops drop him off at school. He doesn't get his bike out. He's a bad-ass now. Tatjana deems him "würdig". He doesn't care anymore. The credits are great, depicting an animation of how Tschicke got fixed up, stole a screwdriver, then a Lada, peeled out the words "Ohne Sinn" in a parking lot, and finally crashed the car. Tank Girl (1995) -- "7/10" We meet Tank Girl (Lori Petty) in what looks like a post-apocalyptic wasteland, ruled by the W&P (Water&Power). She and her clan all live in a large, ramshackle house that serves as their commune. They grow food in a greenhouse, they do crafts in workshops -- there's a little girl hammering something together with the wrong end of what is actually a finishing hammer -- and generally try to get by in a Godforsaken world. There are inconsistencies galore, but they're kind of endearing because the movie is so damned earnest. * The W&P and their leader Kesslee (Malcolm McDowell) are trying to get 3M liters of water. That's just over one Olympic-sized swimming pool. I wonder if the writers realized that that isn't really a lot of water? * Kesslee has devices that converts all of the water in a person's blood into pure water. When he jams this water-extraction device into a person, we see that it has no top, but he flips it over to hold it up. How did he avoid spilling all of the water? * When they're trying to bluff their way into the W&P base, Jet Girl (Naomi Watts) notifies the base that her "bird has no electrical"...over the radio. While obviously hovering and flying. * Who is firing the tank's main cannon while Tank Girl is up on the paraglider? You know, the paraglider that still flies when the tank isn't moving forward? Oh, her tank drives itself. Of course it does. It's sentient. I think that might even have been from the original comic. This is not the kind of film that's going to clear up questions like that. The movie seems instead to be a love letter to the comics on which it's based and seems to be entirely a vehicle for Lori Petty, who was, apparently, such a magnetic personality that she got a whole movie mad for herself, despite not being otherwise very well-known at all. Ice-T plays a human/kangaroo mutant named T-Saint. In the final battle, the attack song is by Ice-T. I am not kidding. He is not the only human/kangaroo mutant. His gang of "rippers" also has Booga (Jeff Kober), Donner (Scott Coffey), and leader Deetee (Reg E. Cathey). Completely unrelated, but Iggy Pop plays a pedophile named Rat Face. The practical-effect masks are pretty good, though! The movable ears are really good. The spinning blades on Kesslee's cyborg arm are pretty cool. This was really the heyday of practical effects, before the allure of doing it all a lot more poorly, but more cheaply, with CGI changed what this kind of stuff looks like, probably forever. Tank Girl is such a psycho and the scenes are so wild that you just know the director was remaking the comics panel-by-panel. The animated interludes are really well-done, too. This was definitely a labor of love. An extra star for more-or-less sticking the landing. Private Life (2018) -- "8/10" If I can give superhero movies eight out of ten points, then I can definitely do it for Paul Giamatti, who is a genius in nearly everything he does. I've loved him since Sideways. Giamatti plays Richard Grimes, married to Rachel Biegler (Kathryn Hahn). He is a playwright and director. She is an author. They live in the Village in Manhattan. They are childless, but not for lack of trying. As the film begins, they have given up on artificial insemination and are trying their first in-vitro fertilization. Richard's sperm can't get into his semen, though, so he needs a procedure to fix that. They're doing ok, but not that great, so they have to borrow the $10,000 from his brother Charlie (John Carroll Lynch) and his wife Cynthia (Molly Shannon). Charlie's a good guy, but Cynthia is ... not. She's not a nice person, not a generous or empathetic person. She is the main character in her world. At the same time as the in-vitro procedure, Richard and Rachel are dipping their toes into the adoption pool, introducing us to a corner of the Internet where teenage girls hawk their fecundity as well as the pending fruit of their loins. Their first experience here shatters them for a bit, as the girl was just in it for the attention and never had any intention of letting them adopt her child. Richard and Rachel fight, but they're basically together, no matter what. Rachel is less reasonable, more strong-willed, more likely to fly of the handle -- and also the partner taking the majority of the hormone-inducing medications. Charlie and Cynthia's 25-year-old chronically underachieving creative-writing major daughter Sadie (Kayli Carter) leaves the Bard College campus to finish her degree remotely, moving in with Richard and Rachel. She loves them and their lifestyle and looks up to them as her "art parents". She's seemingly more in-tune with them than she is with her own parents. This seems like too fortuitous a confluence as their doctor has recently floated the idea of using a donor egg -- rather than one of Rachel's older, dustier ones -- to match up with Richard's newly motile sperm. Sadie quickly agrees, wanting both to help them and to give her otherwise unmoored life a little meaning. Cynthia ruins her own Thanksgiving dinner when Sadie, in a fit of bonhomie brought on by her thankfulness to Rachel and Richard, reveals the plan to the rest of the family, with the aforementioned predictable consequences. They proceed with the implantation, even after Sadie makes herself ill by upping her dose on her own, after their doctor had quasi-chastised her for not producing eggs quickly enough. The fails anyway. Richard is somewhat relieved, as they can just stop trying now. Rachel is devastated and furious at Richard for announcing that he's given up so soon after getting the news. They reconcile, of course, because they're in it for life. They'll always have each other. Sadie gets into a writer's colony -- it's left deliberately unclear how much Richard and Rachel helped; they say they didn't -- and they part ways. We also part ways with Richard and Rachel at a roadside diner several months later. A woman had called them to find out if they were interested in adopting her child. They wait, together. Richard rises and sits next to Rachel, in an eloquent, sweet, and unspoken expression of love, compassion, solidarity, and durability. Well done. Saving Private Ryan (1998) -- "9/10" This movie starts with a suicide mission. The company's amphibious vehicle approaches the beach at, presumably, Normandy and drops the front door open. The German machine-gun nest immediately starts to feast on the soldiers, chowing down on the first six or seven rows before they start to drop over the sides instead. The machine-gun continues chewing through them underwater. Some drown instead. Those that make it back up to air have dropped nearly all of their supplies. The machine gun continues to pick them off -- how can it not? They're just walking into the bullets. There's no cover. Who thought this was a good plan? The tide rolls in over their backs, knocking them down. They reach the shore; the water is like tomato soup. The few survivors cower beneath the X-ed girders dotting the beach. Captain Miller (Tom Hanks) is shaken out of his initial stupor by his remaining men, demanding orders. Just bullets, bodies, and bombs everywhere. Impossibly, some of the men are getting closer to the machine-gun nest. What looks like 90% of the rest of them litter the beach as corpses. The medics are in the middle of the maelstrom, trying to fix one of the bloody bodies. None of the armor made it ashore. The survivors gather weapons and ammo from those who've not survived -- or who won't. They manage to blow something up that causes the Germans to retreat, at least a little. They get eyes on the Germans, but they're below them. And the Americans have single-shot, bolt-actions versus German machine guns. They find a defilade and send Jackson (Barry Pepper) -- their sniper -- into it. He clears out the front of the nest. Sergeant Horvath (Tom Sizemore) leads the rest of the company over the ridge. They throw some grenades in, then pick off the dazed survivors. Attrition continues on the way up, though. People are praying everywhere. There's a chaplain lying among the near-corpses, administering last rites. It's not eye-to-eye trench warfare, meters away from the enemy.. The Americans have overwhelming numbers, despite the incredible percentage of attrition. The Germans give themselves up. Some are not allowed to surrender. At least the film is honest. Private Caparzo (Vin Diesel) tosses Mellish (Adam Goldberg) a Hitler Youth knife, plundered from a corpse. It is Chekhov's knife. Horvath packs dirt from the beach into a tin marked "France", but I don't understand why he would also have tins for "Italy" and "Africa" with him. Is this a ham-handed way of indicating he's been in the war forever? Didn't the Americans only arrive in France? Even if he'd already fought in Italiy and Africa, why would he have brought the other tins with him? The camera zooms in one corpse's back on the beach. It says "S. Ryan" on his backpack. Switch to the War Department, where a one-armed officer (Bryan Cranston) gets the news that three out of four brothers have died and that the fourth -- the eponymous Private James Ryan -- is lost in Normandy. The bigwigs decide to send a rescue mission. Captain Miller shows up with what remains of his company at a post run by Lieutenant Anderson (Dennis Farina). Miller reports. Anderson gives him his new mission. Miller picks up a new translator -- Corporal Upham (Jeremy Davies) -- and has his company trimmed down to a platoon They're on the move toward Neuville. Private Reiben (Edward Burns) leads the way, including a medic, Wade (Giovanni Ribisi). They reach Neuville and disappoint the unit there that they're not their relief. Sergeant Hill (Paul Giamatti) offers to help find Ryan. They start to move through the town. Caparzo tries to help a family, taking the little girl they're trying to get to safety. He's clipped by a sniper, laying in a puddle of rain, watching a rivulet of blood slowly swell to a freshet. Jackson takes up the challenge. The rest hunker down. Caparzo is bleeding ever-more-heavily into his puddle. The German sniper (Leo Stransky) is in a tower, sighting on Caparzo, waiting for someone to approach the squealing lamb. He finds Jackson. Jackson shoots right through his scope. Everybody stands down. Everybody except Caparzo. Caparzo has expired. It's raining incessantly. Sergeant Hill stops to fix his boot, knocking a fallen transom over into a weakened brick wall, comically exposing a room full of Germans. There's a Mexican standoff, ended by two U.S. soldiers with machine guns on a balcony above our platoon. They're led by Captain Hamill (Ted Danson), who seems to know where Ryan is. They find Ryan, but it's the wrong Ryan. It's Minnesota Ryan (Nathan Fillion). They overnight in a church, chatting and sleeping and fleshing out their characters. They walk through a night filled with explosions, crossing fields. We rejoin them as they wake in a camp full of the wounded. Lieutenant Dewindt (Leland Orser) says he can help them find Ryan, but he's just kind of babbling, obviously wracked with survivor's guilt. The powers-that-be had plated his plane with armor because he was transporting a general. The plane was barely airworthy. He did his best. 22 dead. They're ghoulishly sorting through bags of dog-tags, spouting gallows humor. Soldiers file past them, glaring judgmentally at their macabre task. They finally get news of the correct Ryan. He's been picked up in a mixed company to babysit a bridge. They move out. They happen upon a German emplacement atop a hill. The Caption decides to take it out. The other six are not excited about it. The captain seems desperate to do something meaningful. There is a tremendous amount of machine-gun fire, then grenades, as the half-dozen of them approach quickly. There's some fire from the Americans and everything goes quiet. The Germans are dead, but Wade, the medic, has been hit -- he's taken several shots to the torso. They make a lot of frantic fuss, but it's hopeless. He asks them if he's been shot in the spine. They're throwing sulfa and water all over his entry wounds. "Is there anything bleeding worse than the others?" They palpate him. "Oh my God, my liver!" "I could use some morphine." "I don't wanna die." "Mama, mama, mama. I wanna go home." They're now a band of six. They run up the hill to beat the shit out of a surviving German. They threaten to kill him. "Ich will mich ergeben." Upham translates. "I don't care what he said." They tell the German to dig graves for all of the Americans, then they'll kill him. Upham pipes up, "Captain, this is not right." "You can help him with the bodies, then." "What is happening?" After a bunch of waffling -- during which Upham tells The caption that he can't just shoot a prisoner -- the captain blindfolds the German and sends him off 1000 paces to turn himself in somewhere else. None of them like it -- the others wanted to shoot him. Reiben doesn't like it and threatens to desert. Horvath has a solution for that. He points a gun at him. "Are you going to shoot me over Ryan?" "No, I'm going to shoot you because I don't like you." That's some classic Tom Sizemore right there. The captain defuses the situation by finally telling them where he's from and what he did back home. He was a schoolteacher. "I've changed. Sometimes I wonder if I've changed so much, my wife isn't even going to recognize me." They bury Wade and continue across fields. A half-track appears. They drop. Something attacks it. German troops spill out. They shoot them all. Corporal Henderson (Max Martini) pops out of the grass with a couple of men, one with a bazooka. One of them is James Francis Ryan (Matt Damon). Miller asks Ryan, "What are we supposed to tell your mother when they send her another folded American flag? "Ryan: Tell her that, when you found me, I was here and that I was with the only brothers I have left. I think she'll understand that. There's no way I'm leaving this bridge." Has no-one thought what he would think? How would he live with himself if he got to go home, knowing he'd gotten out because too much of his family had already been killed? If he'd never been drafted, that would be one thing. But, posted up on a bridge in France, with his company, how could he just leave them? To go home to his mama? To sit in his hometown without his biological brothers, knowing his remaining brothers-in-spirit were dying without him? Miller and Horvath chat. They decide to stay. The company's missing their CO anyway. Miller will fill in. Time to defend the bridge. Time to build a "sticky bomb" to take out the tank. Jackson's up in the bell tower. Upham's carrying ammo. Ryan sticks to Miller like glue. At 2:02:00, there's a beautiful scene, where they're listening to Edith Piaf on a Wurlitzer, with Upham translating and Horvath flapping his hand to the melody. [image] The tanks are coming. There's four of them. At least 50 ground troops. You can see their hearts sink into their stomachs. Miller: "You know what to do. Reiben, get on the rabbit." The attack begins. It's overwhelming. The unit defends the enfilade well, but there are just too many vehicles, too many troops. The attrition on both sides is horrible. Jackson is in his tower, sniping soldiers at a remarkable clip. A tank ponderously raises its barrel and blows him and his compatriot up. Mellish and his compatriot run out of ammo in their nest. Upham succumbs to the pressure and fails to bring them belts and ammo. Mellish dies by his own German knife. Upham is on the stairs outside, frozen. The German walks out and past him. Miller and Ryan retreat back over the bridge, followed by Reiben and Horvath. Horvath takes a hit, but Reiben one-arms him to the sandbags. "Sergeant, you OK?" "Just got the wind knocked out of me." Those were his last words. The tank keeps pounding their position; Miller is dazed. He's hit. Reiben slams him behind the sandbags. Ryan is dazed. They're losing the position. They can't blow the bridge; the plunger's been blown into open territory. The Germans swarm at the other end of the bridge. Upham has gotten behind them, but doesn't take advantage. He's not a fighter; no experience; he's completely overwhelmed; adrenalin has come and gone; he's shutting down. Miller walks right out into the fray to get the plunger. He's stunned as well. He's clipped in the left chest, coming to rest against a broken half-track. He pulls his pistol, firing blindly at the approaching tank. On the third shot, it blows up. It's been taken out by the U.S. Air Force, which has finally arrived, following quickly by a ton of ground troops and artillery. They mop up quickly. Upham jumps up and takes several Germans prisoner. Among them is the German they'd released on the hill. He's the one who shot Miller. The German is slyly happy to see him and says "Upham!" Upham shoots him and lets the others go. Ryan and Reiben watch Miller's last breath. Reiben grabs Caparzo's letter, which has traveled from Wade to Miller to Reiben now. There's a mawkish ending where Ryan wonders whether he'd lived a life that was worth the sacrifice. Honestly, though, the movie showed much more how arbitrary and useless war is. Why were they there? Why did they lose their lives there? Couldn't they just have fallen back to merge with the incoming battalion and taken out the Germans with much less loss of American life? Of course they could have. War makes no sense. The Batman (2022) -- "6/10" The movie begins with a gravelly voiceover. It's The Batman (Robert Pattinson), of course. He narrates like he's captioned by comic-book panels. Some of the shots look like comic-book panels. It's not even close to Sin City but it nods in that direction. The incumbent mayor Don Mitchell, Jr. (Rupert Penry-Jones) is brutally murdered in his own home. The killed is masked and swaddled in thick clothes. It looks vaguely female. The mayor's son (Archie Barnes) finds him, propped up in a sitting position, blindfolded, with a sign on his face that says he's a liar. There's graffiti all over the room that declares him a liar. There is a riddle, "What does a liar do when he dies?" ... "He lies still." That's a really nice wordplay right there, playing on the homophone "still" to suggest both that he "continues to prevaricate" and that he "doesn't move from a supine or prone position". Alfred (Andy Serkis) and Bruce Wayne (Robert Pattinson, in case you know literally nothing of the Batman canon) later solve a cipher that accompanied the message, figuring out that it says "drive". This leads them to the mayor's huge garage full of cars. I guess he was on the up-and-up, right? Anyway, it is there that they find the shears the killer used to chop off the mayor's thumb. Then find the mayor's thumb attached to a USB drive inside the car. The thumb drive must be unlocked with that thumb. It's cleverly gruesome. Then the Batman and Commissioner Gordon (Jeffrey Wright) just go ahead and stick the assassin's USB stick right into Gordon's laptop, with his full account logged in. Yeah, I guess a movie that's already running to almost 3 hours is going to have to take a shortcut or two. This is a shockingly unaware breach of even the most basic computer-security protocols. The only sane protocol would have been to plug the stick into a completely air-gapped machine or, at the very least, a throwaway virtual machine. This is something that police should probably have for just this purpose. Instead, they plug the stick into Gordon's laptop, whose OS is also set up to just chirpily auto-run stuff from USB sticks. They watch it send out a whole bunch of mails in Gordon's name, chock-full of pictures of the former mayor -- along with his girlfriend and a smattering of mob bosses -- and also including the Penguin (Colin Farrell). What a shitshow. Anyway, Batman walks around a lot in this one. They like to show his boots hitting the pavement. I haven't seen any cable-work or flying about. He just kind of walks places. It's kind of neat, a nice change of pace. He just fights real normal-like, like a boxer. He takes a lot of blows on his armor. He's not magic, just well-armored and a skilled but not infallible fighter. Also, so far, he seems to be driving a Captain America-style motorcycle. No fancy gimmicks. Well, he rides it in the absolute pouring rain. He's not alone, though, because Selena Kyle/Catwoman (Zöe Kravitz) also rides in the rain, dressed in a skin-tight leather suit that I bet she picked out just for this kind of weather. It's super-convenient for the lady burglars that no-one has any alarm systems on any of their windows or skylights. Just drop in, no security. Just the Batman, who also just tromps in wherever he wants without ever triggering any security mechanisms. In a city that seems as dangerous as Gotham City, there are an awful lot of open windows and unlocked doors on really nice apartments. This movie might as well be in black-and-white. The only color is orange, from the sodium lamps. The whole mood, shots, and low-key criminality feels a lot less like a superhero movie and much more like Max Payne. The Joker was like that as well, but it was ... different. In this one, it's Bruce Wayne who's pretty unbalanced, but nowhere near as loopy as "Arthur Fleck" . Selena teams up with Batman to help her friend, an eastern European immigrant. She goes into the club within a club to help him see who's there. She runs into DA Gil Colson (Peter Sarsgaard). She also runs into Carmine Falcone (John Turturro), with whom she's had a relationship. This makes Bruce jealous. He plays the recording over and over. It makes a "rewinding" noise, even though it was recorded on digital. We just can't get away from certain tropes. Bruce Wayne drives his own car. It's a pretty awesome car, a low-slung British-looking hotrod. Maybe an MG or a Triumph. My bad. It's apparently a Corvette. Bruce Wayne shows up to the mayor's funeral alone, with no bodyguards. The mayor's rival candidate just hits him right up at the funeral, no qualms about being seen as crass. She's supposed to be the nice one, but that's a pretty shitty move. The DA's car comes flying into the funeral, right up the church stairs. Colson is driving. He gets out with a bomb around his neck. The Batman meets the Riddler (Paul Dano) via video call. The Riddler has a gimp mask on. He sounds like a combination of Bane and Buffalo Bill from Silence of the Lambs. Batman, on the other hand, sounds exactly like Pete Holmes doing his impression of Christian Bale's Batman. See "The dark Knight rises 2 : Batman's dirty mind" . Bomb goes off because Colson refuses to give up the rat. Batman was so dead-set on finding out the name that he stayed there until the end. He's knocked right the f&@k out -- but nobody took his mask off. He's surrounded by cops. This is pretty terrible, honestly. Chief Mackenzie Bock (Con O'Neill) is just cartoonishly against the Batman. Batman escapes with Gordon's help, running part of the way, then taking a grappling-hook ride up to the top floor. They show how terrified he is of the height -- then he wing-suits his way out of it, but it does not go well. His little parachute catches on a bridge, dropping him into the street -- hard. He's fine, though. Fresh as a daisy for a meeting with Gordon. Another stakeout. It's raining again. They're looking at a drug lab. It's just pouring. Selena Kyle shows up on her motorcycle. She and Batman find her friend, right before the fireworks start. Machine pistols flare, spraying the Batman, knocking him to the ground. He retreats to his Batmobile, which, you know, obviously, just had to be introduced in a flashy way. At least it adds another color to the movie's palette: blue. The flame coming out the back is blue. The car looks all old-timey, though, too. A lot of this film is chronologically ambiguous. It feels a little bit like Dick Tracy. The car chase in the rain is pretty unique, with a lot of realistic damage to the Batmobile, an absolute clusterfuck of crashing caused by The Penguin, then the Batman flies over a ramp, through a ball of flame, and flips the Penguin's car dozens of times. He's perfectly fine.No seatbelt. No airbags went off. Not a scratch on him. Not dazed. Just...fine. Cartoonish. Falcone is Catwoman's father, not her former lover. My bad. I read that one wrong. Bruce visits Falcone to find out that he'd killed one of Thomas Wayne's political enemies -- a journalist. Alfred is mind-fucking Bruce about what really happened. Somehow Alfred is now the bad-ass who taught Bruce how to fight -- he was apparently the one in charge of keeping Bruch's parents alive, but he'd failed. What is happening? They're just chatting by Alfred's hospital bed -- did I forget to mention that he'd almost gotten blown up? It doesn't really matter. -- and this section is interminable. No wonder this movie clocks in at almost three hours. Selena Kyle is a one-dimensional character. Utterly terrible. Woodenly acted. She goes to take out Falcone, but can't hit the broad side of a barn, although she can take a punch. She takes a crowbar to the back of the head and is only temporarily dazed. No blood. Throws off a choking that would have crushed her windpipe, but ... didn't. This is just silly. Also, her mask sucks. I have no idea what kind of Gen-Z bullshit balaclava that is, but it's got to stop. I would attach a screenshot, but they're all so muddy and dark that you can barely see the damned thing. Carmine's been arrested. Carmine's been killed. The Riddler has given himself up. The police are ransacking his apartment. Batman is there. Cop: "There must be thousands of ledgers, filled with codes, ciphers, and scrawls." Batman: "I found the one that contains the Riddler's origin story and flipped right to that page within seconds." Everybody: see nothing out of the ordinary. Why would they? They can complain that he's not a cop and that he shouldn't be on the scene, but he's the one finding everything and explaining everything. He's the one who knows immediately that the chisel is the murder weapon that killed the mayor. How? No-one asks. Is it somehow obvious? If so, why don't the actual detectives see the connection? An emo, shut-in billionaire knows better than all of them? "He's been posting online. He's got like 500 followers." That's not really a lot. But it's enough, if all of them join Riddler's army. So, the Riddler had an unstoppable plan to blow the seawall with seven truck bombs. This happens. All of the people of Gotham head for a central arena for shelter. The Riddler's Army is waiting for them, armed to the teeth. They start shooting. They clip the new mayor. Batman interrupts the party, attacking them one-on-one, taking shots and bullets, but making progress. Finally, he gets caught full in the chest by a shotgun blast. Hanging on by one hand (with what must be 50 pounds of armor hanging with him, by the way). One of the last of the Riddler's Army lines up his shot -- and is knocked the hell out by Catwoman. She pulls Batman up -- him with his 50 pounds of army and she with her 85 pounds of counterweight -- and they roll around, having a moment that ... isn't sexy at all. Of course, he is grievously injured. She kisses him when he can't stop her. She get clocked on the head by a Riddler's minion. He's still nearly incapacitated. He injects himself with some greenish adrenalin and flips the fuck out, just pounding on Selena's attacker. Gordon pulls him off. Batman seems totally fine now, not even injured at all. The sea breaks into the arena, drowning everyone else -- Gordon, Selena Kyle, and Batman are on a catwalk far above. Batman throws himself down into the water, pretty needlessly dramatically -- to what? Help people? Yup, he's fine now. He ignores everyone else and saves the ex-mayor's son, as well as the new mayor, who 100% no longer remembers that she'd just been shot ten minutes ago. It's a prettily shot scene, but it's pretty stupid. But not as stupid as the final voiceover during the rescue effort. Like, just. spell. it. all. out. "Vengeance won't change the past, mine or anyone else's. I have to become more. People need hope. To know someone's out there for them. The city's angry, scarred -- like me. Our scars can destroy us, even after the physical wounds have healed. But if we survive them, they can transform us. They can give us the power to endure, and the strength to fight." You know, this might have felt deep in a comic book, written in that cool handwriting, in those thought-bubble boxes. If I'd read it when I was fourteen. They tried to do it for this movie, but it just sounded so trite. It's like Batman giving a TedX talk. And now they're lingering on Batman and Selena's goodbye. Did they think they'd made us care about their relationship at all? The music suggests that they think we should care very much. They moodily ride their motorcycles away, racing each other on slick tires and wet streets -- perfectly normal. This is interminable. Look, I gave it the benefit of the doubt because they let the bad guy win, more or less. His plan worked. I took away a star for the bizarre self-conceit that the movie had earned being three hours long. It's also just so goddamned dark. Just almost no lighting whatsoever. Barry Lyndon was lit better. I'm Thinking of Ending Things (2020) -- "9/10" This movie is unconventional. It's chronologically unclear. The narrator is extremely unreliable. Pretty much everybody and everything is unreliable. Parts of it reminded me of The Shining. It takes some getting used to, until you start to see the reasoning behind the at-times stilted dialogue. I took copious notes because it's a thinker. Most of my notes will be belied by later notes, as the movie peels the onion skin of its script. I left everything because I find it describes the feeling of watching the movie much better. We start out on a road trip with Jake (Jess Plemons) and a Young Woman (Jessie Buckley). She is called alternatively Lucia and Louise throughout the movie. It is rife with symbolism that the viewer is expected to put this together, or not, and it doesn't really matter. They are both eminently awkward people. He's awkward but seems quite nice most of the time. He says very strange and abrupt things sometimes, but it's unclear whether those are things she's imagined. She is not a very nice or interesting person. She thinks she's the one who's going to end things, and thinks, because she's the active one, that she is also the better one. This attitude is obvious. She does not really like him, or what he is. They are driving to his parents' house. It's a farm in the middle of nowhere. The road is straight and obviously fake. They are not really driving anywhere. They are, but the movie doesn't care about making it look like they are. At the house, time...slips. She sees his father (David Thewliss) as an old, dementia-addled man, she sees him at dinner with a bandage on his head, she sees him at the end as a vital man, while his wife (Toni Collette) lies in a bed in the living room, obviously in hospice, and quite apparently dead, although Jake claims that she's sleeping. But they were just eating dinner before. Or, rather, they were sitting at a sumptuously covered table from which no-one ate. A long-dead dog appears and disappears. In the car, on the way there, she recites a poem, leading us to think that that is her line of work. At the house, Jake calls her a painter. She shows the parents some of her work, on her phone. Jake's mom asks how her doctorate in quantum physics is going. Jake is in the same field. Jake later introduces her as a gerontologist. In his room, she finds Jake's old paintings, which are the ones she's shown his parents. She finds a book with a poem by another women, which turns out to be the poem that she'd recited on the way there, claiming it as her own. Or perhaps she is that person from the book. She goes to the basement with a nightgown covered in Jake's baby food, handed to her by a very young version of Jake's mother. The basement is dark and the machine is already running. It is filled with janitor's uniforms from the local high school. We see glimpses of the janitor (Guy Boyd) working at the school. These glimpses are scattered throughout the film. It is unclear whether this is Jake's real father or whether it is perhaps Jake in the future. It is unclear whether the young woman is in Jake's mind. The janitor cleans up as students practice Oklahoma! He watches a romantic comedy that seems to reenact one of the two versions of Jake and the young woman's meet-cute story that they tell his parents. When they'd first arrived at the farm, he didn't want to go in immediately. He shows her the sheep pens. There were dead, frozen lambs outside the barn door. There is a dark spot on the floor of the now-empty pigpen, where the two pigs that used to live there rotted alive, eaten by maggots. Jake's hand is damaged by what look like a fight when he hands the bill to the girl at Tulsey Town, who also has unmentioned bruises on her upper arm and forearm -- or perhaps its a rash. She is accompanied by what look like blond twins, who at first ask for orders, but afterwards huddle up like NPCs in the corner of the starkly lit booth, grinning and giggling endlessly but silently. Neither of them wants to eat the giant ice-cream desserts they'd purchased in the dead of night in a blizzard. They decide to stop off at the high school to dispose of them. They converse. He tries to discuss with her. She is not interested. His conversational gambits are often clumsy. They have read so many esoteric books in common that they must be the same person, a person conversing with himself or herself. He is quite neurotic. He calls her "Ames" at one point. "Jake: Everything is tinged. Colored by mood, by emotion, by past experience. There is no objective reality. You know there's no color in the universe, right? Only in the brain, just electromagnetic frequencies. The brain tinges them. "Lucia/Louise/Ames/Young woman: Yes, I am a physicist. I know what color is. "Jake: Yes, yes, yes. You are. You do. "Lucia/Louise/Ames/Young woman: Color is the deeds of light. It's the deeds and suffering. "Jake: That's beautiful. It's not physicist talk, but eminently poetic. "Lucia/Louise/Ames/Young woman: Yeah, well, I am a poet after all. "Jake: You are. It's beautiful." They arrive at the giant high school. There's a truck in the parking lot. They argue about Baby, It's Cold Outside. Is it a rape song? Is it playful? Is there room for playfulness anymore? Does it matter that it was written in 1936? He admits he was wrong. She accepts his apology. They kiss. He snaps back, interrupted by a vision of the janitor peeping at them through a hole in a wall. Jake leaves the car to go into the high school. She is freezing in the car, arguing with herself. She gets out, then is locked out. She follows him into the high school, where she finds the janitor mopping the floor. She hides from him. He finds her, huddled on the floor. He doesn't speak, but she hears his voice in her head. She tells him yet another story of how she met Jake. That she was with her girlfriend, celebrating their anniversary. In the first story, she talked of how they met at a pub-trivia night. Now she calls him a creeper who would not stop staring at her. She says she can't remember what he looks like because "it was so long ago." She can't remember because they didn't interact. They talk. They hug. He offers her house slippers because he's just cleaned the floors. They're the same shoes Jake gave to her in his parents' house. She says, "they're yours." Which makes sense, because I think the janitor is Jake. But I still think she's a figment of Jake's imagination. That he imagines how much she hated seeing him staring at her, even while he's imagining a relationship with her, imagining taking her to visit his parents.. She finds Jake. They stare at each other along the high-school hallway. Doppelgängers appear behind them, cut around them, and begin to dance a lovely ballet in a suddenly brightened hallway. The drinking fountains sprays a cascade up and down the wall. Their dance ends in a mock wedding, interrupted by a janitor dancer, who takes her away. She is rescued by her beau, who fights the janitor. The janitor pulls a knife. Snow falls. They are in the gymnasium. Atonal fighting music fades. Red handkerchiefs fly, signifying blood and death. Jake appears again, as Jake. The janitor cleans up the snow around the corpse, morphing back into the janitor in the school hallway. Was this a daydream of his, imagined as he cleaned the floors at night? He grabs his thermos. It's just like the thermos that Jake had when he arrived at his parents' house. It's just like the drawerful of thermoses to which he added his at his parents' house. Or was it the janitor's house? The janitor cleans the snow off of his truck. He gets in. He sits there, mumbling to himself, imagining Jake's parents fighting. He shakes. he suffers. He strips.. He hallucinates. The pig infested with maggots shows up. "Come." He follows the pig back into the high school, naked as the day he was born. The pig says, "Let's get you dressed." Jake is on stage, accepting an award. The stage is dressed for Oklahoma. Jake is much older. His mother, father, and the young woman are in the audience. They are all heavily made up. He is accepting a Nobel Prize. The entire crowd looks like the photo at the end of The Shining. He sings Lonely Room from the musical Oklahoma!. He sings wonderfully. Morning comes. There is a car buried in snow in the parking lot of the high school, under a blue, blue sky. The credit pages flick past in silence. This is pretty avant-garde stuff, but kind of fascinating. It's just nice to watch something that's not predictable. Now that I know who Charlie Kaufman is, I'm not surprised. He's made Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Adaptation, Being John Malkovich, and Synecdoche, New York, all of which I liked very much. Captain Phillips (2013) -- "7/10" I'm struck by the apt representation of American empire. We see Captain Richard Phillips (Tom Hanks) getting ready for his next job at his house in Vermont. He is headed for Salalah, Oman, for a delivery to Mombasa, Kenya. He probably only knows English. He can't understand a word anyone else is saying in the part of the world he works. It doesn't matter because he is part of Empire. Those people, in their homelands, will speak the language of Empire to make themselves understood by it. They will have to put in the effort, not him. The shot of him arriving at the port reminded me immediately of how the space stations were filmed in The Expanse. Giant cranes and containers everywhere. Enormous ships rearing up from endless docks. Phillips is a consummate professional. He gets a report that there are pirates in the area. He runs drills to fend off pirates. The pirates show up on his radar. He fakes a call to U.S. air support. The Somalis are listening in. One boat is scared off. Muse (Barkhad Abdi) is not scared off. He keeps coming, despite Phillips pushing his boat faster and moving 5º port and starboard to throw up a wake. When the skiff is only 1/4-mile away, its motor dies, flooded with seawater from the heavy seas behind the freighter. Phillips and his crew take stock. So do Muse and his crew. They join the other boat and are trying to fix his motor. He tells them to give him the motor from the other boat -- which is just full of cowards anyway. That skiff's captain takes offense, but gets a cool wrench up-side his head for all his bluster. The next day, Muse -- his mates call him "skinny", which he most certainly is -- is right back on their tail, announcing himself as the Somali Coast Guard. He is obviously ignored. They open fire. The ship blasts water from fire hoses from all sides, so that the skiff can't approach. Shane (Michael Chernus) goes down to fix an errant hose. The Somalis shoot at him, approaching with a hooked ladder. It hooks. Phillips slues the ship 30º to starboard. They get on anyway. Port 30º, then starboard 30º. None of it helps. They're onboard. They abandon their skiff. "Four pirates on board. [Tom Hanks is doing his Vermont accent.]" They're on the bridge. After a bit of back and forth, the pirates call the captain's bluff. He calls their bluff right back. They go to the engine room. Muse sends Bilal (Barkhad Abdirahman) back to the bridge with Phillips. Muse is taken hostage by the crew. They eventually give the Somalis $30,000 and the lifeboat. They kidnap the captain, looking for a bigger payday. The U.S. Navy is on intercept course. The higher-ups don't care, though. They're going to send in a SEAL team to mop things up -- without real regard for the hostage's life. The main thing is to not let them get Phillips to Somalia, where it would be too expensive to secure his release. So, they'd rather have him killed than captured. Sounds like Israel's Hannibal Directive. And Phillips isn't even a soldier. The Somalis mention that they used to be fishermen, until the big ships came and took all the fish. Now, they're pirates. But they don't realize that they're fighting the biggest pirates of all: The U.S. and its hegemony don't pay for anything that they can steal instead. If anyone objects to them stealing it, then they're killed by the military. There is no real difference in ethics -- just in scale. You can see the massive imbalance in power with the four skinny, starving Somalis driving in a shitty lifeboat, being chased by a giant U.S. naval vessel (The U.S.S. Bainbridge). There are also several helicopters full of Navy Seals on the way. The important thing is not to give them any money. What kind of lesson would that be? You can only steal things if you're big and strong. You can steal things if you already have the biggest weapons, not if you're puny fisherman with no power. Someone on the U.S. naval vessel actually speaks Somali -- Nemo (Omar Berdouni). He starts negotiations. Muse speaks to him in English defiantly. Simultaneously, the Navy boards the freighter and says they'll escort it to Mombasa. Spare no cost, even if it would be much cheaper to just pay the pirates. The Navy catches up to the lifeboat. Muse demands $10M. They show the captain. He says he's in "Seat 15", which is the seat he's in on the boat -- you know, for when they start shooting into it. The U.S.S. Bainbridge captain Castellano (Yul Vazquez) is trying to resolve this peacefully before the SEALs arrive. Muse says he'll negotiate when he gets to Somalia. No-one's told him that that's not going to be allowed to happen. He thinks he's safe because he has a hostage, but saving the hostage is optional. There are two more ships now -- three enormous-looking U.S. naval vessels chasing them, dwarfing the lifeboat they're puttering their way to Somalia in. Muse's boss has cut and run. Muse won't give up though -- he's got nothing to lose. "I've come too far. I can't give up." Even if it comes to sinking the lifeboat, he'd rather go under on the chance that they'll get to Somalia first. That lifeboat cabin must be funky,. I don't see a bathroom. The SEALs leap off the back of their plane into darkness. Phillips gets up to take a leak. He's on the back of the boat with Bilal. He pushes him in, then dives in himself. He starts swimming for the U.S. boats. Muse says to find him, but not kill him. He knows Phillips is the only reason they're still alive. Najee (Faysal Ahmed) -- the psycho -- fires on Phillips anyway. Phillips dives. The lifeboat drifts closer to him. Phillips rounds the boat, swimming under it. Muse jumps in and grabs him. They get him back into the boat. Najee beats the shit out of him. This is dragging on a bit, to be honest. Castellano continues to try to get them to give themselves up. Muse drags Phillips out the back hatch, alternatively pointing the pistol at Phillips and shooting at the helicopter. The SEAL team leader starts negotiations, telling them all their names, then saying that he will give them money, but that it has to happen confidentially. The U.S. doesn't want to be seen as having paid off pirates. It is pretty clear that none of this is true. Muse believes it, though. He has no other choice. Muse thinks he's going to the Navy ship to get money. "Muse: It was supposed to be easy. I take ship... ransom... nobody get hurt. Captain Richard Phillips: You had thirty thousand dollars, and a way to Somalia. It wasn't enough? Muse: I got bosses. They got rules. Captain Richard Phillips: We all got bosses. Muse: [gives him the look he deserves for thinking his own boss is as bad as Muse's boss] Captain Richard Phillips: There's gotta be something other than being a fisherman and kidnapping people. Muse: Maybe in America, Irish. Maybe in America." The SEALs hand Phillips a "uniform", which is probably a bulletproof vest. I mean, the U.S. Navy has all of the advantages. Muse isn't going to meet any elders. They've got a tow line on the lifeboat. The power advantage is overwhelming. "Where are the elders?" Muse realizes he's been fucked, lied to. There was never going to be a deal. I mean, obviously. They start towing. The lifeboat gets closer to the boat. There are a dozen SEAL snipers on the back of the Navy boat. The other boats start making massive lateral wakes to rock the lifeboat. They winch them closer, you know, to get them out of the big waves. Najee catches the captain writing a note to his family, but the captain has had enough and attacks him, getting in a few good licks. The pirates get him under control and bind him up. Najee is the only one who knows what's going to happen. "You two are idiots. No-one is coming. Everything they told you is a lie! They will kill us all." He's right. They stop the tow. All three targets sway into sight. All three targets are sniped. They easily spent way more than $10M for this outcome. But neither the company nor the insurance company paid for it. The U.S. taxpayer footed the bill. The Navy arrests Muse and prepares to take him to America, where he will stand trial. Since the U.S. made sure that Somalia doesn't have a government, so they don't have to bother with extraditing a foreign national -- not like they would give a shit about international law anyway. The U.S. Navy enforces its will off the coast of a country that it destroyed. Empire. I'm taking away a star because it was too damned long. I guess they'd paid for all of that hardware and wanted to make sure they got their money's worth. Anytime there's that much military hardware in a movie, the Pentagon gets to write the script. Now, how can I be so callous about poor Captain Phillips? He was a nice guy who tried to treat everyone fairly, and who seemed to have genuine empathy for even the pirates that had taken him captive -- except, perhaps and understandably, for Najee, who was an asshole. I do, I do. But I see his suffering as the suffering of one man, whereas the film depicted the plight of an entire nation that had been destroyed, allowed to be destroyed, encouraged to be destroyed, by the same country whose navy rescued Phillips. I cannot ignore the context. I can only assume that it was intentional in the film. Perhaps I've imbued it. Perhaps it was a film about an upstanding American who was rescued by his selfless government, who put down the filthy, upstart natives who can only steal, never produce. But this ignores the context that the U.S. is the greatest thief of all. It patrols and enforces what it deems "international waters". The danger in those waters can only be addressed with military means. The solution couldn't be to take all of that money and help Somalia back on its feet, to make it so that the country wouldn't produce pirates rather than fishermen. I dunno. The Social Dilemma (2020) -- "7/10" Jaron Lanier is in this. At 21:12 he says, "We've created a world in which online connection has become primary, especially for younger generations. And yet, in that world, any time two people connect, the only way it's financed is through a sneaky third person who's paying to manipulate those two people. So, we've created an entire global generation of people who are raised within a context where the very meaning of communication, the very meaning of culture, is manipulation. We've put deceit and sneakiness at the absolute center of everything we do." That NVidia Teraflops chart at 45;:00 was impressive. [image] "What people miss is that AI already runs today's world right now." The side story is interesting, making it look like there is certain information that is definitely bad and other information that is definitely good. That doesn't exist, not really. All information is on a spectrum. There is certain information that is reliable and true. If you never hear anything that you disagree with, then you're probably not hearing the truth -- or you're hearing things that are true, but also not hearing a lot of other things that are not only also true, but would be useful. The film does a good job of showing people that there is misinformation out there. However, while they're willing to attack flat-Earthers, Pizzagaters, climate-change deniers, COVID deniers ("Querdenker"), or Q-Anon (which the extremist group in the film is definitely the model for), there's no way they'll mention the biggest psy-ops of our times, like WMDs (before social media), the pro-vaccine manipulation campaigns, or RussiaGate (both after social media). They, like so many others, have an enormous blind spot for their own propaganda. RussiaGate fooled so many dozens of millions of people and continues to do so, evidenced by the fact that you're still not allowed to talk about it as a psy-op, even in a documentary about psy-ops of the 2010s. It's incredible. Just the degree of self-deception they're capable of, all while they're supposedly exposing how we're so manipulated. "We've created a system that biases towards false information. Not because we want to, but because false information makes the companies more money than the truth. The truth is boring." Bullshit. That's a nice cop-out that happens to exonerate you, but it's not entirely true. You choose which slant to provide to the information. You allow yourselves to be bribed to only show certain information. That's the truth right there. And that's not boring. The "algorithm" doesn't clamp down on news about Israeli slaughters in the West Bank -- lobbyists and investors do. The algorithm would promote the shit out of that stuff if it were allowed to, because it would drive engagement incredibly. But the companies are paid not to. So spare me your bullshit about how the "algorithm is out of control". It's a pat story that also happens to let you live with your hundreds of millions with a clear conscience. But it's not true. The truth is far more exciting and interesting. These people may have been duped by the drive to make a lot of money, but they continue to be duped by those who really control information. At one point, one of the dude-bros says that the goal was, "[t]o reach anyone for the best price." Yeah, sure, Why don't you talk about who was paying you that "best price"? It wasn't just "advertisers". It was large political organizations as well as the government itself, through various organizations and fronts.. Oh Jesus, now they're saying that "we see Russia and China spreading these conspiracy theories." Sure, sure, talk about everyone else running the psyops but never mention who's running the biggest and most effective ones. I didn't expect anything else of a Netflix documentary. It's basically soma for liberals. A Netflix documentary like this is here to tell liberalls that social media is manipulating all of us, but it's especially manipulating those psychos who are outside of your silo. They cut to a montage of photos of COVID protestors, most of whom were protesting the mandates and crackdowns, rather than saying that it didn't exist. There's a little parallel story about Ben (Skyler Gisondo), who's being radicalized, leading him to ignore hot girls in real life in order to watch content about extremist shit. He's radicalized by libertarian hucksters, but never by liberal ones. "Roger McNamee One of the problems with Facebook is that, as a tool of persuasion, it may be the greatest thing ever created. Now, imagine what that means in the hands of a dictator or an authoritarian. If you want to control the population of your country, there has never been a tool as effective as Facebook." Dude, I'm happy you're so able to live in an irony-free world where you don't notice that you just literally described the US of A as she is. I don't have to imagine it! You're literally in a psy-op documentary about psy-ops that the government of the U.S. Empire doesn't like. They're already using it -- and it's not the dastardly Chinese or Russians or North Koreans or Iranians. It's your very own country. You're part of the psy-op! You're in this documentary convincing people that this could never happen in the U.S., when various powerful organizations are literally doing exactly that. All the time. Why do you think we haven't mentioned bad actors like Russiagaters? Why do you think we're seeing idiocy from only one silo? Is it because, no matter how hard they tried, they just couldn't find any misinformation peddled by your own silo? OMG now they're reprosecuting the 2016 election. What the actual fuck!? They talk all the time about manipulative social media, then they make an extremely one-sided, manipulative documentary that doesn't even know how ironic it is. 👏👏👏 It'd be fantastic if I thought this was a satire. At 1:15:00, Cathy O'Neil says "We are allowing the technologists to frame this as a problem that they're equipped to solve. That's a lie. People talk about AI as it will know truth. AI's not gonna solve these problems. AI cannot solve the problem of fake news. Google doesn't have the option of saying: 'Oh, is this conspiracy? Is this truth?' Because they don't know what truth is. They don't have a proxy for truth that's better than a click." She's very good. I like her. AI's not gonna solve these problems is right! It's going to exacerbate them. And, honestly, if we continue to make such slanted videos telling us about the problem of slanted information, then you can just save yourself the time spent watching this tripe. "Tristan: If we don't agree on what is true, or that there is such a thing as truth, we're toast. This is the problem beneath other problems because, if we can't agree on what's true, then we can't navigate out of any of our problems." Dude, you're going about it the wrong way. Cathy is way smarter than you are (even though Netflix seems to think you're the star). You're getting all mucked up because you don't have the required capacity for philosophical thought because your brain is no longer attuned to it. We will never agree on the important things being true. We can all already agree that there is truth, but can't agree on what that is. If you don't acknowledge that you're part of a desperately manipulative video lamenting about people not knowing what's true -- then you're part of the problem. We don't have to agree on what's true. A nice basis would be good. But we're in the murky waters of principles and ethics here, right? It's more important for people to understand the truth that every human being has certain, inalienable rights. We can't even agree on that. Whether people think that the Earth is flat doesn't matter. Almost everyone can act as if it isn't every damned day and it won't matter one bit. My life wasn't affected by the gentle curvature of the Earth today. I'm happy to leave them their peccadillos. I'm more interested in whether they're good human beings with actual, real principles. The creators of this documentary are not those kinds of people. A principle is something that you apply, even when it reflects badly on you. If you're against murder, unless you really think someone needs killing -- then you're not against murder in principle, you just think no-one else should get to do it. It's the same with these people: they think the manipulation is bad, but then mention not a single goddamned instance when their own side did it, leading one to believe that they only think that manipulation is bad when their ideological enemies do it. Tristan just keeps getting it slightly wrong. He goes on, "It's not about the technology being the existential threat. It's the technology's ability to bring out the worst in society -- and the worst in society being the existential threat." Did you practice that one in front of the mirror? That's not the problem. The problem is the people in charge of these powerful tools. It's not the tools that are manipulating. It's the people that set up the guardrails that determine how these algorithms work. Of course, it's arguable that the tool is too powerful for anyone. OK. But his argument is tailor-made to absolve him and all of the other sociopaths in this documentary of any blame. The machine was too powerful for anyone! It got out of control! Who could have known! Anyone who's watched capitalists do their thing could have known -- and, in fact, did know. You all participated because you were making a shit-ton of money for yourselves and you honestly didn't care about any of the repercussions. Now you do -- or at least pretend to, for even more money -- and you're still fooling yourselves into thinking that you're not still manipulating people. It's for a good cause this time, though, right? He says that the platforms should be responsible -- that's his proposed solution. But I don't think that's correct. The platforms shouldn't be in charge! They're unelected. Look, I wanted to like this documentary. I think it makes a few good points, but it's so one-sided, so manipulative. Not a single Republican/Libertarian in here. You couldn't get Glenn Greenwald? Matt Taibbi? Chris Hedges? No-one outside of your unalloyed, liberal silo? here's Jaron Lanier again, "If we go down the current status quo for, let's say, another 20 years, we probably destroy our civilization through willful ignorance. We probably fail to meet the challenge of climate change. We degrade the world's democracies so that they fall into some sort of bizarre autocratic dysfunction. We probabaly ruin the global economy. We probably don't survive. I really do view it as existential." He's right, of course, but nothing else in the documentary is honest about this. You would get the impression that the only problem is climate-change deniers, like the really obvious dipshits from the other silo. But the problem is that everyone ignores the problem -- does nothing meaningful toward actually solving it, like proposing reduction -- because the narrative is being manipulated by the real powers, the real elites, all of whom go completely unmentioned here. We are led to believe that the machine is out of control, despite our best efforts. That's not true at all. The machine is very firmly under the control of those who run everything else -- and it's humming along just fine. Look at Bill McKibben, chirpily writing in the NY Times that COP28 was much more hopeful than ever. That plus $2 will buy you a lottery ticket. But the machine is happy to promulgate these ideas -- these myths -- even though it's also climate-denialism. It's doing the dirty work of fossil-fuel companies who desperately do not want the world to change in any way that will stop the increase of their year-on-year profits. That's the more insidious manipulation distribute by this tremendous machine -- but it's fully under the control of those who control the narrative. They use the algorithm -- the machine -- to make half of us hate Biden for loving the environment so much that he wants to take away our cars, and the other half love him for being such an environmental president. This, when the truth -- the meta-narrative -- is that the damage is accelerating no matter who's president because it's all a giant fairy tale told by the powers-that-be, those that never seem to change no matter who's in charge -- the owners of capital. They have this machine at their disposal to tighten their grip on the power they've always had. This documentary didn't tell that story. It's not allowed to. The producers and most of the people involved probably have no idea that this is the real story to tell. They would be shocked to read this review, shocked to think that Russiagate was disinformation, that selling Biden as a climate president is misinformation. At then, near the end, they kind of hint at the problem being "capitalism". Tristan again, "What I see is a bunch of people who are trapped by a business model, an economic incentive, and shareholder pressure that makes it almost impossible to do something else." No wonder they made him the star of the documentary: he absolutely excels in telling stories as if neither him nor any of the other characters has any agency. Who can blame someone for acting in a certain way when all decisions have been taken completely out of their hands by the economy and the algorithm? Those poor, poor, deca-millionaires. Another dude: "I think we need to accept that it's OK for companies to be focused on making money. What's not okay is when there's no regulation, no rules, and no competition. And the companies are acting as sort-of, de-facto governments." It's adorable watching Silicon Valley libertarians re-invent regulatory frameworks after spending a decade or two dismantling them and making a tremendous amount of money while doing it. As soon they're made their nut, then they're ready to allow regulation again. After all, their companies are now big enough to deal with it -- and it will nicely stifle competition. Look, companies whose only goal is to make money will always end up dismantling regulations because they get in the way of making money. Are they making enough money within the regulatory framework? Of course they are! But they could make more money. And more money is always better. So you spend a little money to make more money. You pay some lobbyists to buy some legislators to weaken or eliminate the regulation -- and then you make that investment back 20x over. Profit. Jaron Lanier again: "Financial incentives kind of run the world. So, any solution to this problem has to be aligned with financial incentives." Or...we could reexamine the axiomatic "financial incentives run the world." I mean, look, they tried really hard to make a documentary -- but they couldn't get out of their own silo, they couldn't talk to anyone who didn't already agree with literally everything they already thought before they made the documentary. It ends on this soliloquy by Justin Rosenstein: "We live in a world in which a tree is worth more, financially, dead than alive, in a world in which a whale is worth more dead than alive. For so long as our economy works in that way and corporations go unregulated, they're going to continue to destroy trees, to kill whales, to mine the earth, and to continue to pull oil out of the ground, even though we know it is destroying the planet and we know that it's going to leave a worse world for future generations. "This is short-term thinking based on this religion of profit at all costs, as if somehow, magically, each corporation acting in its selfish interest is going to produce the best result. This has been affecting the environment for a long time. What's frightening, and what hopefully is the last straw that will make us wake up as a civilization to how flawed this theory has been in the first place, is to see that now we're the tree, we're the whale. "Our attention can be mined. We are more profitable to a corporation if we're spending time staring at a screen, staring at an ad, than if we're spending that time living our life in a rich way. And so, we're seeing the results of that. We're seeing corporations using powerful artificial intelligence to outsmart us and figure out how to pull our attention toward the things they want us to look at, rather than the things that are most consistent with our goals and our values and our lives." OK. That's nice. You get a star back for including that. You still lose two for not having gone far enough, for having only done the easy part -- talking to your echo chamber. In the end, not a single one of them says that "we need to change the system." Even Jaron accepts the confines of "financial incentives [...] run[ning] the world." The problem is neoliberalism, hyper-capitalism. There's not going to be "massive public pressure" because the Elite will use their machine to make sure that this never happens. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4875 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4875 Mon, 15 Jan 2024 22:36:21 +0100 -- "6/10" 2. "Foundation S02 (2023)" <#Foundation> -- "6/10" 3. "Planet of the Apes (1968)" <#Planet> -- "6/10" 4. "Big Mouth S06 (2022)" <#Big6> -- "8/10" 5. "Harry Potter and the Half-blood Prince (2009)" <#HarryPrince> -- "8/10" 6. "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 (2010)" <#Harry1> -- "7/10" 7. "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 (2011)" <#Harry2> -- "7/10" 8. "Big Mouth S07 (2023)" <#Big7> -- "7/10" 9. "Silo S01 (2023)" <#Silo> -- "10/10" The Greatest Showman (2017) -- "6/10" Jesus Christ, I hate musicals. I can't imagine how Hugh Jackman convinced himself to make this movie, knowing that Ryan Reynolds would mercilessly mock him for the rest of his natural-born life about it. I guarantee you that Reynolds does that little dance that Jackman did at the start of his first circus every damned time Reynolds is standing on the porch of Jackman's house, where the Ring-Cam can see him. It must be awful. Jackman bursts into pitchy song in the first minute, but then the children start singing even more poorly, making his voice seem strong and an on-key in comparison. A young P.T. Barnum (later Hugh Jackman) grows up with rich girl Charity (Michelle Williams) and eventually marries her, against her father's wishes. After the shipping company he works at loses all of its boats in the South China Sea, he snags the deed and transforms it into collateral for his first circus. After trying it relatively straight -- I mean, as straight as you can get when you've you've a sunken boat as collateral for a bank loan -- he puts out a call for "unique persons" -- freaks -- and gets a whole collection of them for his first show. More singing. Huge freaking dance number for the opening of the first circus. His circus grows in reputation. He takes on an apprentice Phillip Carlyle (Zac Ephron) to get him into the highbrow crowd. He gets an audience with the Queen of England, where he meets Jenny Lind (Rebecca Ferguson), the "Swedish Nightingale" and invites her to sing on his stage. There's more singing, completely unsurprising love affairs, family tension as Barnum continues trying to prove himself long after he's achieved more than enough to be happy. He is one with the high-class people, but then, predictably, disparages his freaks. He doesn't want to offend his new friends. YAWN. To no-one's surprise at all, Jenny Lind wants a piece of P.T. Barnum, but he rebuffs her. Then she threatens to ruin his show by abandoning it because hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. Oh, and also women are completely unprofessional. She robs a kiss on stage at her last performance, right as they're taking a picture. That won't have any further influence on the film, I bet. Thugs from the neighborhood assault the actors in the circus, then set the entire building on fire in revenge when they get their asses kicked. Philipp and P.T. run into the burning building to rescue the animals -- I shit you not. P.T. carried Philipp back out. The elephants are fine. Charity briefly leaves P.T., he's devastated, his circus crew cheers him up, Philipp uses his remaining money to restart the circus, they partner up 50/50, they move to a tent down by the wharves, P.T. hands the scepter over to Philipp, the circus is wildly successful (again), P.T. retires to his family. Happy endings all around. Moar inappropriate singing, of course. The music is terrible. I don't ever need to hear any of these songs again. Foundation S02 (2023) -- "6/10" This show looks really, really good. They paid for the good CGI. There are also some good actors, but there are also some big hams. The "inherent problems of season 1" are unchanged: there are still too many characters with woke-ish motivations and it feels like they really twisted around the source material to serve modern agendas, robbing us of the wonder of a story that takes place over dozens of millennia. Or, as a friend wrote to me: "I absolutely despise how they replaced a smart, cunning politician from the book with a black girl with a big gun, kicking asses. I still watched it, because I'm addicted to sci-fi but I think the adaptation is making Isaac spin in his grave. The original has some flaws with all the misogynist, Mad-Men-style culture. But everything that was great about the books is lost in the TV show." I don't have much to add. Sometimes its infuriating to watch 90% of the show filled with palace intrigue and love affairs between unutterably stupid people, while waiting for the rarer moments of galactic grandeur and smartifying by Hari Seldon (Jared Harris). He's a lot of fun and the Prime Radiant gets short shrift relative to bullshit like Brother Dawn's (Cassian Bilton) torrid affair with his clone Brother Day's (Lee Pace) bride-to-be Queen Sareth of Cloud Dominion (Ella-Rae Smith), who I'm sure we're all supposed to think is the most beautiful and desirable creature in the galaxy, but who I found irritating and poorly drawn as a character. The story arc with Hober Mallow (Dimitri Leonidas) and Brother Constant (Isabella Laughland) was very good, as they are consummate actors and their story arc and dialogue were well-written and convincing. Poly Verisof (Kulvinder Ghir) was also a well-fleshed out character who was easy to like and relate to. I like Demerzel. She's great. She's haughty, but she's earned it. Sareth looks like a bimbo in comparison, entitled and weak. I much preferred Enjoiner Rue (Sandra Yi Sencindiver), her grand vizier. We must come to the sad fact that Gaal Dornick (Lou Llobell) is still around, as is Salvor Hardin (Leah Harvey) who, while somewhat one-dimensional, is still much better than Gaal. She kept falling for that one mentat posing as her lover Hugo (Daniel MacPherson) again and again and again, which seemed somewhat weak and hard to explain, other than simply hand-waving "mentats can make you do whatever they want". But then they also had Gaal and Hari and Salvor defeat a whole tribe full of mentats by controlling their own thoughts and thus what the mentats could "see". It's just uneven, inconsistent. Here's the thing. I don't care about inconsistencies unless you make me think of them while I'm watching the show. Another instance was where people would have loud, treacherous conversations about killing the emperor right in his own palace. They're 10,000 years in the future and there are no listening devices? No drones? No, of course there are these things. They featured heavily in other parts of the plot, but were just assumed to be completely absent when it was more convenient. Another was where people -- I'm looking at you, Salvor -- who've seen others assume other identities chirpily confide in their friends without a single thought that the person they're talking to might not be their friend, but another mentat. And so on. The finale was unnecessarily violent and insane -- though pretty! -- with Brother Day destroying Terminus in the most savage way possible, then fighting his own general Bel Riose (Ben Daniels) who was torn between trying to save his gay lover Glawen Curr (Dino Fetscher) and being faithful to Empire. He ended up letting Glawen die, then getting into a knock-down, drag-out with Empire anyway, eventually fooling him into an airlock, using a tricky device he'd gotten from Hober Mallow, with whom he drinks shitty wine as their ship implodes into a singularity. Surprise! Glawen is still alive on the planet's surface somehow. It doesn't matter. Day is dead, Dawn is dead. Dusk is dead. Furious, Demerzel returns to Trantor to decant new versions of all of them. She is determined to maintain the balance. The knots in the Prime Radiant approach relentlessly, like the tide, seemingly unalterable. Gaal and Salvor want to alter them, smooth them out. We shall see. Planet of the Apes (1968) -- "6/10" We start off with a soliloquy by Astronaut George Taylor (Charlton Heston), who's piloting his spaceship back to Earth after what for him and his crew was a six-month journey, but during which 700 years have passed on Earth. He's smoking a cigar in the cabin, like you do. Afterwards, he puts himself into what looks like cryo-sleep. Their ship "lands" in water, on what they all pretend not to recognize as Earth. One of their crew has died of old age -- presumably her cryo-sleep bed malfunctioned. It was probably just an excuse to not have to pay an extra actress. It would have been awkward if she'd lived and then had to take care of the others at the camp the whole time. They are soon very much occupied with their ship sinking and filling with water. They don't wonder at all why they can breathe the air. It is Earth year 3978, November 25th, to be exact. They escape their ship and start padding their way to shore. They have no tent, no real supplies, and they're sitting on a rocky shore in the blazing sunshine. They have 3 days of food. They seriously think they're not on Earth, despite the water and air. Wow, Charlton Heston is a terrible actor. That fake laugh when he sees the tiny American flag is just ... unconvincing. They wander about some more, discovering plants, and then water. They landed in water, but now they're super-excited to have found more of it. They jump into the lake at the oasis, with waterfalls and everything. They're all naked. They'd gone there to investigate "scarecrows", which look like constructions of some sort. After their swim, they discovered footprints in the mud by the lake. Soon after, their clothes are stolen. They follow a trail of their destroyed supplies and clothes, finally emerging into a heavily vegetated plain, where they find what look like people. Human people. "They look more-or-less human, but I think they're mute." They all sprint across the plain, like a herd of animals. The humans flee in terror before a battalion cum hunting party of monkeys riding horses, flushing them out and shooting them. The hunt goes on for a long time, during which Dodge (Jeff Burton) is killed and Landon (Robert Gunner) is captured. Taylor, meanwhile, is shot in the neck, then captured. For whatever reason, they save him with a blood transfusion. He's apparently been captured by scientists, not hunters. The apes Cornelius (Roddy McDowall), Dr. Zaius (Maurice Evans), and Zira (Kim Hunter) all speak English. Taylor still no inkling that he might be on planet Earth. They call Taylor "Bright Eyes", and are amazed at how he is trying to talk. He's mute because he's been shot in the throat. He tries to take the notepad from one of the scientists, but is beaten back. The apes continue to experiment, putting Nova (Linda Harrison) into the cage with Taylor, leeringly expecting him to jump on her. He keeps attempting to communicate, to no avail. Finally, he snatches Zira's notepad and writes his name before being beaten back. She sees what he's written -- in the Latin alphabet, in English -- and can read it. No-one is surprised, least of all Taylor. Stuff happens; they communicate; Taylor breaks out of his cage and is loose in the compound. He is almost caught, but breaks free to get to a museum. Some great camera angles and shots in these chase scenes, though. Really pretty inspired stuff. When he's finally caught in a net, his throat is finally healed. His first words are "take your stinkin' paws off me, you damned dirty ape." Taylor is put on trial. He's not allowed to testify for himself under "ape law." As part of the trial, he is shown a group of humans, among whom he recognizes Landon. Landon doesn't recognize him, though. Landon doesn't seem to be aware of anything. He's been lobotomized. "You did it. You cut up his brain, you bloody baboon!" Taylor's (Heston's) teeth are on full display as he tries to attack the tribunal. He calls that "acting". He's netted and dragged back into the courtroom, while the other humans are herded back into the cages mounted on wagons that brought them there. They're all back in prison. Zira and Cornelius help Taylor and Nova escape into the "forbidden zone." They give Taylor and Nova horses and a rifle. They discover older treasures in a cave. When Dr. Zaius shows up, they bargain with him, asking him to be a man of science and examine the evidence in the cave. Lucius (Lou Wagner), another ape who helped them on the lam, is left behind to guard the horses. In the cave, they find an old settlement where Cornelius shows that "the more ancient artifacts were the more advanced", which suggests a lost civilization. At the end, Taylor and Nova ride up to a large, jutting outcrop that causes Taylor to stop and stare. "Oh my God. I'm back. I'm home. All the time, it was... We finally really did it. You Maniacs! You blew it up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!" I'm glad that he was able to squeeze so much surprise out of it. Big Mouth S06 (2022) -- "8/10" The season started off a bit rocky -- just being unnecessarily and lazily filthy, but it hit its stride just under halfway through. Père (Richard Kind) and fils Glauberman (John Mulaney) are worth the price of entry. The final episode of the season, where everyone switched places in a giant Freaky Friday was pretty good. This show seems to have held up better than Sex Education has of being under the burden of portraying every school as having every possible combination of sexual predilections. Maybe it's easier with cartoon characters, I dunno. Nick is OK, but Jessie is quite good and snarky. Harry Potter and the Half-blood Prince (2009) -- "8/10" I kind of like this one, but there are a few times when Hermione and Ron are just noticeably more terrible people than they usually are. I guess because they're teenagers, who are just ruthless about everything but their own wishes when their gonads are in charge. They don't even have the excuse of the locket for their bad behavior yet. (That's the next movie.) In this one, Harry gets the Marauder's Map -- "mischief managed!" -- and becomes a wiz at potions and spells thanks to an old copy of the course book marked up by someone who called himself the Half-Blood Prince. This turns out to be Severin Snape (he's the master of potions -- it's honestly not that surprising). This film features the beginning of the search for the horcruxes, especially the long plot to learn about them from Slughorn, who, only when sufficiently plastered and emotionally vulnerable, is willing to reveal what Tom Riddle once spoke to him about. Death Eaters penetrate the castle via a Vanishing Cabinet in the Room of Requirement. They confront Dumbledore. It is Draco that should kill him, but he hesitates. Snape does it instead, sending Dumbledore plummeting to his death. Dumbledore was already dying both from his having destroyed the first Horcrux -- a ring -- and, with Harry's help, obtained the second Horcrux: the locket. He was doomed anyway. The locket turns to be a fake. It was only a marker for the real locket, which had already been stolen by Regulus Black, brother of Sirius, with the intent to destroy it. Ron, Hermione, and Harry give up school to begin the hunt for the horcruxes. Other than because it's super-convenient for the story, it's unclear why they don't involve other, more experienced, definitely more knowledgeable, and likely more powerful wizards. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 (2010) -- "7/10" This one is quite a bit slower and more grinding. It's a dark film, both in material and the cinematography. It does contain the brilliant cartoon of the three brothers who were the original owners of the Deathly Hallows: The Elder Wand, The Cloak of Invisibility, and The Stone of Resurrection. It also has Professor McGonagal team up with the Weasley twins: "As I recall, you have a particular proclivity for pyrotechnics." In this one, Voldemort (Ralph Fiennes) is right out there, taking charge of things personally, meeting directly with Severus Snape (Alan Rickman). Harry Potter is moved at the beginning of the movie, with a whole bunch of people pretending to be Harry using polyjuice potion. Pursuing death-eaters kill Mad-eye Moody and Hedwig. Dumbledore's will and testament left them all a bunch of Chekhov's guns i.e., things that will come in conveniently and not at all surprisingly handy throughout this film and the next. The trio of Harry (Daniel Radcliffe), Hermione (Emma Watson), and Ron (Rupert Grint) are in pursuit of the locket they'd been looking for the in the previous film. They use polyjuice potion to infiltrate the Ministry of Magic, tangling with Dolores Umbridge, but eventually getting the locket from her and then disapparating to a far-away forest. Ron's arm is all messed up. Hermione's got her nearly infinitely deep bag of supplies, with everything prepared for a long camping trip. Ron, irritated by his wound and by the presence of the evil locket, bitches and moans a lot, getting unreasonably jealous of Harry and Hermione, which is not a thing at all. He eventually bails on them. They discover clues here and there. The snitch informs them that it "opens at the end". Harry and Hermione return to his parents' home village to find an old, silent woman who is actually Voldemort's giant snake Nagini in disguise. They all narrowly escape with their lives. Creepy things happen with a doe-shaped patronus -- which turns out to have been Snape, secretly helping them out -- Harry jumping in a frozen lake to get the Sword of Griffindor, Ron reappearing in the knick of time to rescue him, Ron wielding the sword to destroy the horcrux in the locket. The trio travel to Xenophilius Lovegood to find out why so many books seem to contain the same symbol, a symbol that turns out to represent the deathly hallows, leading to the aforementioned, excellent, 8-minute animation. He tells them the story, but is evasive -- because he's called the death-eaters to turn them in so that they'll let his daughter Luna go. The snatchers capture them, but don't know who they have, exactly, because Hermione f'ed up Harry's face with a jinx. At the Malfoy mansion, though, Bellatrix (Helena Bonham Carter) sees through it eventually, torturing folks and stuff. They find Luna in the prison. There's a lot of scuffling, Dobby shows up to save the day, they all escape through his disapparation -- but Bellatrix gets in an unerring knife-throw that kills Dobby on landing. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 (2011) -- "7/10" This is the sequel to the penultimate film and thus the finale. 😬 I wrote a "short review in 2011" , but felt like expanding a bit. Unlike the last time, I didn't feel lost in this one because I'd just finished watching the previous film. Voldemort's hands still trace eloquent, elegant circles as he casually flicks his wand to extinguish dreams -- and lives. The movie takes quite a long time getting to its foregone conclusion. Did you think Voldemort would win? Did you think any of the primary characters would die? They'd already killed Dobby. That was the only sacrifice necessary. Mad-eye Moody doesn't really count, either. Tonks and Remus were warriors as well. They killed a Weasley, too, though didn't they? I kind of lost count. That family has a lot of kids. So they continue to break into famous wizarding places to find horcruxes, like Gringotts Bank. They find Helfa Hufflepuff's chalice in Bellatrix's vault, then fly on the back of a liberated dragon out of the top of the bank. Griphook the goblin has taken the sword of Gryffindor as his reward -- but it was the only thing that they had that could destroy horcruxes. Now, they need to find another way. Basilisk teeth! They find Rowena Ravenclaw's diadem, which is another horcrux -- I've honestly lost count at this point, how many do they have? Let's see: 1. The book destroyed in the Chamber of Secrets. 2. The ring that Dumbledore destroyed 3. The locket 4. The chalice 5. The diadem 6. Nagini 7. Harry himself, as an inadvertent horcrux 8. FInally, Voldemort retained an 1/8 of his soul They barely escape the Room of Requirement with their lives as Goyle accidentally kills himself with a fire spell. They also manage to destroy the chalice with a basilisk fang. Four down. They do the same for the diadem, kicking it into the inferno for good measure. Five down. Voldemort kills Snape to achieve mastery of the Elder Wand, as Snape is still its true master, having killed Dumbledore to get it. Harry receives Snape's last memories just before he dies. He watches them in the Pensieve. Snape was a double-agent all along. Duh. A great long con. Akin to something right out of The Americans. Anyway, Harry surrenders to Voldemort, who kills him, but wait, he really kills the horcrux of himself in Harry and, after a bit of wandering about in wizard limbo with Dumbledore, Harry is back. Hagrid carries his (fake) corpse at the head of a parade of death-eaters to Hogwarts, where the bedraggled, but unbowed remaining forces stand against them. Neville pulls the sword of Gryffindor from the sorting hat and defies Voldemort. Harry awakes and does battle with Voldemort. Mrs. Weasley kills Bellatrix. Neville slices Nagini in two. No more horcruxes. Voldemort sends his killing curse Ava Kavadra into Harry's Expelliarmus curse, rebounding onto himself and finally killing himself, the last part of his soul leaving his decrepit body, which spirals into the darkening sky like so much ash. Big Mouth S07 (2023) -- "7/10" The young folks are now going to high school -- or will be by the end of the season. Instead, this season is about the summer between middle school and high school. Lola absolutely crushes it. There are a few more musical numbers -- I wonder if Mulaney and Kroll are angling for a Book of Mormon-like thing? The ambition gremlin played by Rosie Perez was quite good -- Andrew actually got good at school because he was prevented from masturbating by an injury sustained while masturbating (epididymitis). He continues to masturbate a couple of times, but the pain puts him on the straight-and-narrow long enough to make his parents temporarily proud. Silo S01 (2023) -- "10/10" This series is based on the trio of books "Wool" , "Shift" , and "Dust" by Hugh Howey, which I read in 2015 and 2016. It's a very nice interpretation of the books, capturing the feeling of retro-tech that dominated in the silo. The first season introduces us to life in the silo. The silo is 150 levels of with approximately 10,000 people living underground, We learn of the different departments, of their rituals. There is the sheriff's department, which is largely subordinate to the justice department, which are involved in a complicated way with the IT department. Deep on the lowest levels is Mechanical, which also sees itself as essential to life in the silo. If the generator stops working, then life in the silo stops. IT sees it the same way, but thinks that if their organization and scheduling stop working, then life stops. There's some tension there. The sheriff at the beginning, Holston (David Oyelowo) asks to "go outside". This is a ritual that is not denied, nor can it be taken back. No-one wants to go outside. It's against all the instincts ingrained in the inhabitants of the silo. They've been trained in a religion that makes them not want to go outside because the atmosphere is poisonous. No explanation is given for why. There are a lot of rituals to follow, precepts to acknowledge, artifacts to avoid. These rituals are supported by a fair bit of policing. For the most part, the show does a good job with this, but there are a few obvious lapses. At one point, Allison and George are eating while working on his computer. They leave the crusts of their sandwiches and the cores of their apples. This is not a cultural tick that could possibly have survived x generations in the silo (140 years, I believe). Similarly, during a celebration, people light sky lanterns and release them to rise into the center of the silo. They light them with fire. Open flames. Again, there is no way that this tradition could have survived in a place where everyone would be deathly afraid of fire. Holston wants to go outside because, years before, his wife had asked to go outside and he's ready to join her. He'd met Juliette (Rebecca Ferguson) from Mechanical recently, while investigating the death of her (illegal) lover George (Ferdinand Kingsley). During this investigation, he'd found out that his wife Allison (Rashida Jones) had met with George and had investigated illegal hard-drive artifacts with him. The Sheriff had learned a bit about what she'd found out. He was ready to join her, knowing what he now knows about the silo. When you go outside, you're given steel wool, with which you're to clean the camera lens outside that transmits images of the outside world on the wall-screens that are on every level. Allison cleaned. She died on the hill outside. Holston cleaned. He dies on the hill right next to her. Holston had nominated Juliette as his replacement, which throws Justice and IT into a tizzy, particularly Judge Meadows (Tanya Moodie), her enforcer Robert Sims (Common), and head of IT Bernard Holland (Tim Robbins). They wanted Paul Billings (Chinaza Uche) to have the job instead. He's actually a good guy and ends up her deputy. They grudgingly grow to be able to work together. Before that happens, though, long-time Mayor Jahns (Geraldine James) and deputy sheriff Marnes (Will Patton) are investigating together and trying to hold the silo together during this rocky transition. They are both eliminated by unknown forces, but not before they could enjoy a late-blooming and short but rewarding love affair that they'd been waiting to profess for decades. They walk down the silo together to ask Juliette to be sheriff, despite Marnes's misgivings. Juliette agrees only after she receives Holston's badge, into which he'd edged the word "Truth" before he went out. She just has to fix the failing generator first. She knows that she's the only one in Mechanical who can do it -- and it must be done, else the generator will soon destroy itself. She and her apprentice manage it -- she almost drowning while cooling elements deep in the core, while he actually finished the repairs (boosting his own confidence and everyone else's that he could take over from her). The generator is humming like new. Juliette works with criminals like Patrick Kennedy (Rick Gomez) and hacker Danny (Will Merrick) to figure out what the hell is going on -- and, most importantly to her, to find out what happened to George. She meets Lukas Kyle (Avi Nash), who is studying patterns in the depictions of outside on the wall-screens. He doesn't know what stars are, but he's learning their patterns. It's interesting how easy it is to slip up in these kinds of shows. The inhabitants of the silo don't know what stars are, they don't know what clouds are -- they think the lights in the window are "hiding" -- but they know that they're "underground". How do they know what that means? They know nothing about the outside world, they have no concept of an air layer above a planetary crust. This helps outline the degree of information-restriction that exists in the silo, as a measure to keep people from wanting to go outside. They've been there for generations and will have to be there for generations more. Some amount of brainwashing and indoctrination is necessary to keep the curious monkeys from killing themselves by going outside. See my notes for "Wool" , "Shift" , and "Dust" , if you're interested in more analysis. With her estranged father's help (Iain Glen), Juliette discovers more about how the silo works and who's really pulling the levers. She discovers not only how births are carefully controlled -- which everyone knew -- but that who gets to have children is also very carefully controlled. Juliette discovers that there is a giant camera network hidden in all places in the silo, behind every mirror in every room, for starters. They'd always known/suspected that there were listeners, using bugs. But this is different, another scale altogether. These cameras are available to the watchful eye of IT -- Sims and Holland. Judge Meadows is essentially a powerless figurehead. Juliette gets the hard drive that George had found and, like Allison before her, manages to crack it and see all of the data on it. With Danny's help, she broadcasts a video of beautiful green fields that one of the "cleaners' who'd gone outside had made. Bernard and Sims catch her and pretend that they heard her say she wanted to go outside. They eventually get her to agree to not claim that she hadn't by promising that, if she does, she'll learn how George died -- bravely, by committing suicide rather than being captured -- and that Mechanical will not be punished for her deeds. Lukas Kyle, who'd helped her, is sentenced to a dozen years on deep-silo work detail. Juliette also discovers that the reason that everyone dies immediately is because the tape sealing the suits is deliberately weak and damaged. She arranges to have Mechanical send their tape, which is better. Juliette gets outside. She does not clean. She provocatively drops the wool right in front of the camera. She sees the lush landscape -- but it is a lie projected onto her suit's visor. The wall screens actually do show the truth. There is only desolation outside. She's alive, though. She climbs the ridge. The people of the silo watch her disappear over the horizon, the first person ever to do so. She sees a desolate plain covered in silo craters. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] These are notes for me to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. The amount of text is not proportional to my enjoyment. I might write less because I didn't get around to it when it was fresh in my mind. I rate the film based on how well it suited me personally for the genre, my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. Links are to "my IMDb ratings" ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4858 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4858 Tue, 09 Jan 2024 22:48:57 +0100 of around 1600 ratings publicly available. I've included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other -- I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. Pete Holmes: I AM Not for Everyone (2023) -- "8/10" I remember liking this one-hour standup show because Pete Holmes has his own unique style. He doesn't sound like other comedians. His material is pretty unique, kind of like Nate Bargatze -- although I like Nate better. But we're here to talk about Pete. Pete's good. He's fun. He's a little dirty, but not too dirty. He's not as dirty as he is in "The dark Knight rises 2 : Batman's dirty mind" , but it's just as funny. Chris Rock: Selective Outrage (2023) -- "7/10" This is a 70-minute standup set. He has some funny things to say, but his highly repetitive style doesn't hold up throughout the whole show. It could have been shorter if he didn't repeat stuff three or four times for emphasis. I know, that's his style. It always has been. What I'm saying is, that sometimes it works, and sometimes it doesn't. When it works, you don't notice it. When you notice it, ... it's not working. It's alternately on-point and annoying. He's still doing fine, but his older stuff hit harder. The Fall of the House of Usher (2023) -- "9/10" This was a lot of fun. This is a parable of the Sackler family via the Ushers, in the context of episodes named after Edgar Allen Poe. It start out with a brother and sister Roderick (Bruce Greenwood) and Madeline Usher (Mary McDonnell). Their mother is very ill. She's worked to death by her evil boss. She rises from the dead to avenge herself on the boss. All of his goes unexplained. If I recall correctly, he was the father of her children Years later, Madeline and Roderick are scheming to get their claws into their actual father's company. Look, it doesn't really matter. What happens in short form is that they do eventually get control of the company, and have a nationwide opiate empire -- à la Sackler. Lots of people die. We slowly learn that they accomplished this because they'd met a bad lady Verna (Carla Gugino), who promised and delivered everything they wanted. As is slowly revealed, her price was small and easy to pay -- when one is young. Verna's face always looks so gray and withered when seen in shadow, but completely normal when lit. Nice touch. The whole story is told completely out of order with flashbacks, so it's hard to keep things straight in the order they were told. The Cask of Amontillado homage was near the end, but chronologically near the beginning, so I will note its awesomeness here. In the modern day, Roderick has had six kids, Frederick (Henry Thomas -- Eliott from E.T.) -- his siblings call him Froderick because he's such a suck-up to Dad -- Napolen "Leo" (Rahul Kohli), Tamerlane (Samantha Sloyan), Victorine (T'Nia Miller), Camille L'Espanaye (Kate Siegel), and the youngest Prospero "Perry" (Sauriyan Sapkota). Frederick has a child Lenore (Kyliegh Curran) with his wife Morella (Crystal Balint). He's pretty much angling to take over from Dad. Victorine has a business with her life-partner Alessandra (Paola Nuñez ) inventing artificial hearts. They cut some corners. Leo is a bisexual social butterfly with a video-game company that does reasonably well. His boyfriend is sweet and very well-played. Prospero is too young to have gotten his real money yet, but he's basically a party machine, too. Tamerlane is married to her business partner William "Bill-T" Wilson (Matt Biedel), who runs some sort of fitness scam. She has her eye on bigger things and is ready to launch a very high-end, luxury something-or-other. They also have a very unique sex life. She hires prostitutes for him and just watches. Camille has some sort of social-media empire. Arthur Gordon Pym (Mark Hamill) is a revelation as the family's lawyer. Just top-notch writing for him -- and a great performance from Hamill, who I didn't even recognize at first. He's the only one who meets Verna without dying. She offers him a deal to avoid arrest. He turns it down, knowing that he has to pay for what he's done. They part ways. What happens after all of this setup is that one of them dies in every episode. These are interspersed with scenes of Roderick telling the tale of what happened to C. Auguste Dupin (Carl Lumbly), the federal attorney who'd been pursuing him for decades. He tells him the story because it no longer matters. The piper has been mostly paid -- and will call for the final bill soon. Roderick and Madeline had made a deal with Verna to get whatever they wanted, but that their fortune would not outlast them. That means that, well, everyone who could inherit that fortune would die. What Roderick only belatedly realizes is that that includes his granddaughter Lenore, so he's in denial about that, but it's inevitable. Verna is an unstoppable force, as is the magic she wields. She grants Lenore a peaceful death, letting her know that her mother will eventually recover to create a fund with some of the inherited money, to help the victims of the Ushers. Roderick's recovering drug-addict second wife Juno does the same with her share. Roderick had killed Madeline himself and buried her in the basement. But she's not dead! No! She has the same disease/power that her mother had and she comes back up the stairs -- blind because Roderick had replaced her eyes with jewels (just watch it already) -- to strangle Roderick and finish Verna's work. The house falls on them all. Dupin escapes. Crocodile Dundee (1986) -- "7/10" Mick 'Crocodile' Dundee (Paul Hogan) guides New York reporter Sue Charlton (Linda Kozlowski) on a walkabout to show her where he'd encountered the crocodile that had badly bitten his leg. The movie starts in the Australian Outback, where there are, apparently, no bugs. Not a one. It's also not hot. They're just chilling at a campsite and she's wearing shorts and a T-shirt. There are so few bugs that they don't need a tent. They just sleep out in the open. When he says "this is man's country," she takes offense and sets off on her own in -- I shit you not -- a dress and a tank top. She's wearing a backpack on bare shoulders. Just incredible amounts of dipshittery here. He makes her take the gun, which she shoots near his foot to show how good she is at handling a gun. That's what people who know about guns do: they shoot at each other, for fun. He trails her as she walks around, getting lost. She finally stops for water, which she's going to fill up from a random pond -- from standing water. She drops her dress, exposing a bathing suit that is cut extremely high -- it's basically a thong. She fills her canteen, but a giant crocodile grabs it and nearly drags her underwater. Mick shows up to save her, burying his giant knife into what passes for the croc's brainstem. Neville (David Gulpilil) shows up and he and Mick head off to a males-only Aboriginal ceremony. She trails along to take pictures surreptitiously. Mick catches her at it, but doesn't snitch on her. Over the next day or two, they grow close. He's the real deal, though. He catches snakes, fishes, crocs. She invites him back to New York to "make a nice finish to the story." Smooch. He flies back with her. Then, it begins. He's scared of the escalator. She takes him to his hotel room, which is swank. "It's a bit rough, but I'll manage." He goes walkabout in New York, returning on the back of a police-officer's horse. They meet up for dinner that same night. It's a good thing that there's no such thing as jetlag when flying from Austrialia to New York City -- which they did in what looks like one leg. At dinner, her fiancé/boss is being a complete jackass, so Dundee knocks his lights out when Sue's not looking, ending the evening. Later, he gets a taxi and goes to a bar with the driver, where he meets a bunch of locals. The cabbie sticks with him, driving him around to all sorts of adventures. He doesn't need sleep, apparently. Or he's jetlagged. It goes on like this with little adventures. Finally, Sue must choose between her obnovious fiancé or Mick. She chooses Mick. The world end in shock. Thunderball (1965) -- "7/10" I have only impressions of this movie. When James (Sean Connery) grabs that nurse in a rough, clearly unwanted embrace, it's pretty shocking. The footage of the high-tech jet must have been incredibly revolutionary at the time. All of the underwater scenes are amazing, too. Just long minutes of scuba divers doing stuff, accompanied by movie music. The stuff must have looked positively futuristic in 1965, It still looks pretty good. Then he's skin-diving on his own when he encounters another woman swimming.. He compliments her swimming by saying, "you swim like a man." Incredible. Just incredible. This is only 60 years ago. That was just fine to say to a woman. Who are we kidding? 90% would probably still say something like that. Now he's in a casino, playing Bacarat against Largo (Adolfo Celi), just kicking his ass at a game of pure luck. After taking most of Largo's money while constantly dropping the word "specter" into the conversation, he gets up to buy Largo's woman a drink, for which Largo thanks him -- because he wants to stay at the table to win back the money he'd lost to Bond. Incredible. He insinuates his way into Largo's world, sets up simultaneous dates with several women, then takes Largo's niece to a Mardi Gras parade. He checks out Largo's sharks, which are awesome. Seriously, this must have been out of this world in 1965. Now, he's in bed with yet another woman, a randy, feisty redhead Fiona (Luciana Paluzzi). "You should be locked up in a cage." She writhes and strongly implies that she'd like to be "locked up", i.e., tied to the bed. She was totally faking, though, as she works for S.P.E.C.T.R.E. Next thing we know she and her henchmen are trying to kidnap Bond, but he escapes into the Mardi Gras. They walk around there for quite a while. Like, for a while. There are more nearly naked people dancing and performing. This is like a 13-year-old's dream movie come true. The music was so spot-on parodied and emulated by No One Lives Forever that I feel like playing those games again. Now he's dancing with the S.P.E.C.T.R.E. redhead again, turning her body just in time to stop an assassination attempt on him, and dropping her off in a chair. Cold. Holy crap, they're underwater again. Bond is spear-fishing with some crumpet named Domino (Claudine Auger). Other nefarious types are doing stuff with fancy machines underwater. Seriously most of this movie is underwater. I'd completely forgotten that. James Bond spends 90% of the movie in a bathing suit. Something for the ladies, I guess. And the gentlemen who are so inclined. And for ... ah, what the hell, for anyone who wants to see Sean Connery in his prime in a tight bathing suit. And then, cut to Domino's cleavage and short shorts. Something for the fellas...never mind. Cut to a helicopter rescue from the ocean. Awesome! OMG 🤯 they're underwater again. Spear guns everywhere. Largo's army vs. the CIA and Her Majesty's Secret Service. James enters the fray with a super jetpack, just Leroy-Jenkinsing his way in there, cutting air-hoses right and left, and shooting other people with a back-mounted spear-gun. Good stuff. Pretty much the end. Smooching and stuff. Roll credits. Mindhunter S01--S02 (2017--2019) -- "9/10" This is a great show with great writing, directing, and acting. It's slow-paced and delicious. It's about the beginnings of the behavioral science unit at the FBI. Holden Ford (Jonathan Groff) is the gifted, young, and cocky, but boring new addition to Bill Tench's (Holt McCallany) department. Bill Tench is written and played absolutely beautifully. He's an introspective, slightly world-weary, incredibly intelligent guy who knows when someone's better than he is and can work with him in a team. Holden still has to learn that. Dr. Wendy Carr (Anna Torv) joins them, leaving a tenure-track teaching post at Boston University. She's very cool and standoffish. As a woman and a lesbian in the late 70s, she's got her guard up all the time, and is always on the lookout for being cut out of things. [image]There are other great characters -- the interviewees (described below) for starters. There's the whole late 70s feel, which is done quite well. I even saw a car very much like the one we had -- a 1984 VW Rabbit -- when we lived in Queens. The main part of the show, though, is their interviews with serial killers. These are actors playing real serial killers from the time. The interviews are some of the most amazing television I've ever seen. You sometimes catch yourself holding your breath during them. It's worth the price of entry just for the interviews. In particular, Edmund Kemper (Cameron Britton) is riveting. At the same time, they help police departments catch criminals, doing good and building up real-life data for their research. They're also on-again, off-again allowed to try to help find the BTK killer -- Bind, Torture, Kill -- but their boss AD Gunn (Michael Cerveris), although incredibly supportive, is also interested in striking a balance that satisfies federal- and state-level politics. In the second season, they're in Atlanta, involved in what is looking more and more like a string of cases committed by the same person -- a serial killer. Holden rubs everyone there the wrong way, whereas Bill tries to keep things on an even keel. Lupin S03 (2023) -- "9/10" There is no reason that the third season of this show should still be so fun, but it absolutely is. Pulling from excellent source material has its benefits, for sure. The characters and actors are also top-notch. We rejoin Assane Diop (Omar Sy), also known as the eponymous Lupin, his ex-wife Claire Laurent (Ludivine Sagnier), his son Raoul (Etan Simon), his best friend and partner (in crime) Benjamin Férel (Antoine Gouy), and Youssef Guédira (Soufiane Guerrab), the cop who's on his tail, but never quite able to catch him. Spoiler: he finally does! In this season, Assane announces the time and place of his first heist and then almost gets away, instead plummeting to his death. He'd planned it, though. Guédira alone doesn't believe it. Claire and Raoul slowly also start to believe that he's faked his death. He escapes his coffin with a clever ruse. He prepares so much! So much fun! His mother appears out of his past, but she's been kidnapped by a nefarious group that makes Assane steal several things for them. He discovers that the leader of the gang who's kidnapped his mother is also the leader of the group with whom he'd fallen in with as a youth, when he started on his life of crime. The guy was bad then, and he's worse now. Assane eventually makes a deal with Guédira that, if he lets him go and helps him free his mother, he will turn himself in. He holds to the deal, in the end. This is, of course, right in line with one or two of the stories, where Assane is in prison a few times -- sometimes crimes happen while he's there, sitting with a perfect alibi. I read "several of the main stories in French" when we saw the first season. Lupin has freed his mother, gotten her kidnappers arrested, kept his family safe, and he's now in prison. Next door is ... Hubert Pellegrini, his arch-nemesis from season 1. Pellegrini was the man who tried to frame Assane's father. See my "review from 2021" for more details. We watched it in French with English subtitles. The Matrix Resurrections (2021) -- "9/10" Movie holds up, as far as I'm concerned. See my "review from 2021" . The Avengers: Infinity War (2018) -- "8/10" This movie very much has the feeling of moving toward a foregone conclusion. I noticed the same things that annoyed me in my "review from 2018" . Thanos has one stone and can throw the Hulk around like a rag doll. Thanos's lieutenant traps Thor with a hand motion. Thanos snaps Loki's neck with hardly any effort. Vision has one stone and he gets his ass handed to him by two of Thanos's children. The same two children are handily defeated by Falcon, Captain America, and Black Widow, none of whom have any powers. The Guardians of the Galaxy parts are cute, but too cutesy, especially when contrasted with the unusual number of hero deaths that are happening. At another point, on Titan, Iron Man, Doctor Strange, and the Guardians of the Galaxy manage to fight Thanos to a standstill when he'd already gotten four stones. How? Does the power ebb and flow? Does Thanos lose against opponents who want to win real bad? How is Starlord able to go toe-to-toe with Thanos when one-stone Thanos beat up the Hulk? Gimme a break. Be consistent. I mean, soon after that, Thanos pulled an entire planet apart and dropped it on them. Minutes before, he was powerless before a magic spell, some spider-webbing, and a telempath. The Avengers: Endgame (2019) -- "9/10" I stand by everything I wrote in my "review from 2019" . I have nothing to add. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4857 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4857 Sun, 07 Jan 2024 18:07:15 +0100 of around 1600 ratings publicly available. I've included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other -- I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. The Witcher S03 (2023) -- "6/10" "In 2020, I gave season 1 a 9/10." "In 2022, season 2 was down to an 6/10" and merited a reasonable write-up. At that time, they established the formula for having the Witcher kill one monster per episode, while the rest of the episode is exposition. Having now read the books up to the part covered by this season, I now know that this is kind-of true to the books. Geralt (Henry Cavill) is still healing in the forests of Brokilon, then sets out with a small group to find Ciri. A fake Ciri is introduced to Emhyr as his bride. Yennefer is weaker in the show than in the book -- which is kind of surprising, given that the books were written in the 90s and 2000s by a Polish man, and the movie script seems to have been written by a cadre of very non-sleepy scriptwriters. Ciri stumbles around the desert, meets a unicorn, fights a monster and gets out of the desert, meeting and joining the Rats, a band of bandits. She takes on the name "Falka". Look, that's all I have the energy to write, as this season wasn't very good. The effects, in particular, were jarringly CGIed, at times. The backgrounds were so flat, you could practically see the green screen. It was quite distracting, at times. Sex Education S04 (2023) -- "6/10" "In 2019, I gave season 1 a 10/10." "In 2021, season 3 was down to an 8/10" and merited a reasonable write-up. Season 4 drops a few more ranks and I can barely remember what happened in this season. Ah, yes, they all went to high school and fought with being total assholes to each other all the time, all the while bathing in a positive soup of sex positivity and openness at the private school that their poor selves all had to attend. Maeve (Emma Mackey) is in America, being treated like crap by her writing teacher (Dan Levy), while Otis (Asa Butterfield) is a whiny jackass, butting heads with equally obnoxious O (Thaddea Graham). Eric Effiong (Ncuti Gatwa) is even more of a self-centered douche than he'd become in season 3. Jean Milburn's (Gillian Anderson) role was disappointingly humdrum and shitty. The most appealing and engaging characters are, in no particular order Aimee Gibbs (Aimee Lou Wood), who's just a hilarious, genuine ray of sunshine, Adam Groff (Connor Swindells), a reformed bisexual bully who's well rid of boyfriend Eric. He has grown considerably and seems to be able to deal with the world in a way where he no longer considers every person as a potential conquest, either physical or sexual. His father Michael (Alistair Petrie) is also very good. They reconcile somewhat on the horse farm where Adam works. Isaac Goodwin (George Robinson) is great -- well-written and well-acted. Ruby Matthews (Mimi Keene) redeemed herself this season with excellent work (even though the actress is really very noticeably painfully thin, which is her own thing, of course, but stands out for a show that makes everything a message, because it makes you wonder what message they think they're sending). There were a few good moments, but they were few and far between. Although Maeve handled her mum's death pretty poorly -- you know, for the character who was supposed to be the most worldly and mature -- the funeral episodes were the best ones. The other episodes were just relentlessly SEX-POSITIVE and GENDER-POSITIVE and all of the good things that it must be, until most of the characters succumbed to the collective weight of all of their multifarious identities, expressing nothing of interest but general superficial shittiness. Is this how young people want to be depicted? Disenchantment S04--05 (2022--2023) -- "5/10" "In 2018, I gave season 1 a 6/10." "In 2021, seasons 2 and 3 were up to an 8/10" and merited a reasonable write-up. The fourth and fifth seasons phoned it in even worse than season 1. The characters have all been established, and there are a lot of plot elements to work with -- Steamland, Mermaids, Hell, Oona and her pirate ship, the Trolls, etc. -- but they just seem to be used as Deus Ex Machinas rather than as a coherent plot. I can't really remember what was in season 4 and what was in season 5. There's a Bad Bean, there's Hell, there's Dagmar, there's Elfo's association with the dead-eyed Trolls. Luci is dead, he's alive, he's got his wings, he doesn't, his head's attached, it's not. There's an increased focus on "Stience", which Bean can apparently channel to send lightning bolts through here hands. Her arch-nemesis ends up being the king of Steam Land. I dunno. I watch this while I eat dinner, so it's just some filler content with an occasional few decent jokes. Elfo's kind of witty. Black Mirror S06 (2023) -- "9/10" Joan is Awful This episode is about a different show on a different streaming service about a woman named Joan (Annie Murphy) who is awful. The streaming service she's subscribed to has started streaming a facscimile of her life in real-time. She is played by Salma Hayek. All of her friends watch it and realize how awful she is. It gets a little crazy with quantum computing and multiple layers of simulated reality -- run by Beppe (Michael Cera) -- but it was pretty entertaining. It turns out that Joan is completely average and being "awful" is great for engagement. Although Salma Hayek plays her on one level, Cate Blanchett plays Salma Hayek playing Joan on yet another level. It's probably easier to just watch it. Loch Henry A documentary crew in Scotland end up covering an old mystery in the home town of their director, rather than the boring topic they'd planned to cover. The concept is good on this one, but I found a couple of the characters annoying, especially Pia. Some were good, though, like the pub owner, who played the "school friend who still lives in the town where you grew up and with whom you had some great times, but no longer have much contact, something which you regret the minute you see him again" perfectly. Beyond the Sea Cliff (Aaron Paul) and David (Josh Hartnett) are astronauts, hibernating their way on a six-year mission. They hibernate so that they don't go crazy. They alternately wake to perform maintenance. While they're awake, they can transfer their consciousnesses back to replicas of themselves on Earth. It's an alternate 1969, don't ask too many questions, just roll with it. Invaders from a Charles Manson family-like group -- led by "Kappa" (Rory Culkin) -- enter David's home, kill his family, and destroy his replica. David is now left alone on a mission that will continue for four more years. Cliff's wife, Lana (Kate Mara) suggests that Cliff let David use his replica so that he can see Earth again. This develops into a whole thing, where David uses the replica once a week, grows infatuated with Lana, puts a move on her, is rejected, and the jig is up. Cliff confronts him on the capsule, they argue, Cliff pops him in the nose. Soon, there is an alert: something must be repaired on the outside of the ship, requiring a spacewalk. Cliff is the EVA guy. He's trepidatious but must go out to investigate. There is nothing wrong. When he gets inside, he senses something is very wrong. He jumps into his replica to find it covered with blood, having just murdered his own wife and son. Cliff's consciousness returns to space. David offers him a seat. They are equals again. Mazey Day It's 2006 and paparazzo Bo (Zazie Beetz) is disgusted with her profession. She has some blackmail pictures for which the victim is willing to pay $500. She takes $600 to publish them instead. He ends up killing himself. Notorious trainwreck actress Mazey Day (Clara Rugaard) quits a film set after a drug-fueled and therefore unreported hit-and-run. The victim was still alive, though. She checks herself into a very private rehab. Bo is drawn back into the game by a huge reward for the first pictures of Mazey. Stuff happens, but the paparazzi eventually find her and realize that she's chained to the bed. They take a million pictures. Only Bo is concerned about what might be going on. She suspects some weird sex slavery thing. Wrong. It turns out that Mazey's hit-and-run victim had been alive, had bitten her, and passed on its lycanthropy. She's a werewolf. She breaks free and hunts them, catching a few, but eventually hunting the rest to a diner. Bo manages to shoot Mazey. She turns back into her human form, drenched in blood, but probably not yet mortally wounded. Mazey begs for the gun. Bo hands it to her. She prepares her camera. Bang. Demon 79 Nida Huq (Anjana Vasan) is a poor girl working at a department store with a bunch of racist assholes, with terrible customers, in a town full of people with terrible secrets. She fantasizes about slaughtering them all. It is the 70s in England. The right-wing National Front is on the rise. Racism against her drives her to eat her lunch in a darkened basement. She finds a talisman, pricks her finger by accident, and ends up activating it. It released the demon Gaap (Paapa Essiedu), who's on his first assignment as a demon (or so he says). She must kill three people in three days, else the world will end in destruction, immediately. Gaap helps her find worthy victims, people he tells her are child-molesters, etc. The first victim is a man by a canal. The second is the lecherous, wife-murdering Keith, and then the third is his brother, who catches her in the house. Plot twist: Keith didn't count because he was himself a murderer. Gaap doesn't make the rules. Nida decides that Michael Smart, leader of the National Front, will be her final victim. Gaap's not hot on the idea because demons like Smart. She really goes for it, crashing his car and attacking him with a hammer. A police officer who'd been tailing her stops her before the killing blow. During interrogation, she reveals the whole story to a disbelieving group of officers. As the clock strikes midnight, the officers are called out of the room to watch as armageddon rains down. Nida and Gaap have failed. They are banished to eternal darkness. Escape Plan 2: Hades (2018) -- "5/10" I'd just finished watching Escape Plan and thought to myself, what the hell, why not go for the doubleheader being so generously offered by German TV, so famous for its discerning taste in cinema? Ray Breslin (Sylvester Stallone) is the only one who's back from the original -- no more Arnie in this one -- running his security company with a bunch of new people. One of them is Jasper Kimbral (Wes Chatham), who screws up a mission and is fired by Breslin. This is definitely going to come back, ammirite? There's also Trent DeRosa (Dave Bautista) ... and I didn't recognize anyone else. Shu (Huang Xiaoming) ends up in a prison called HADES (not kidding) and goes through a lot of terrible shit. There is some decent fight choreography. He teams up with some weirdos called LEGION, a trio of Israeli hackers -- can't make this up -- led by Count Zero (Gibson would like a word). Shu meets up with Kimbral in prison, working with him to escape. PLOT TWIST: Kimbral actually runs the prison and it's run by his ALGORITHMS and he's going to use Shu as bait to lure Breslin into the prison and show him who's the SMARTEST and ... do whatever about his daddy complex. I hope you're not going to be too shocked to learn that it does not work out for him, even though it takes about 45 minutes worth of disabling computer systems, re-enabling them, fighting, blowing things up, and so on before Breslin emerges victorious, with no-one dead but Kimbral (obviously). The group behind HADES contacts him and he swears revenge -- to be shown in painful detail in what Stallone hopes will be a sequel (he was right: "Escape Plan: The Extractors" , in which he teams up with Bautista again, came out a year later). I watched it in German. Jurassic World: The Fallen Kingdom (2018) -- "6/10" I've seen this movie before, but somehow failed to make note of it. The dinosaurs look and act great. There is pathos as most of them die by the middle of the movie. The brachiosaur standing on the dock, howling and barely visible through the smoke, as the lava covers it -- it's heart-wrenching. Owen Grady (Chris Pratt) is pretty good: Claire Dearing (Bryce Dallas Howard) is OK. This time they're tricked onto the island to help a billionaire collect dinsosaus for science, but no, haha, it's actually to make weapons out of them. The second half of the movie takes place in a weapons-mogul's mansion. There is an auction of dinosaur warriors to the seediest people in the world, all chomping at the bit to enhance their rockets, laser-guided defense systems, and drones with ... dinosaurs? Anyway, there's a plot twist, because they've bred one of the craziest, most savage killing machines possible out of a dozen other dinosaurs -- didn't we already do this in a previous movie? -- and it is f&$king unstoppable. Or is it? The velociraptor Blue's relationship with Pratt features prominently. Pratt manages to use his vast knowledge about dinosaurs to engineer a breakout for himself and Claire. Blue manages to wipe out the nastiest, most brutal dinosaur that the breeders could breed by dropping it through a ceiling onto a couple of giant spikes. You can't kill Blue now. She's got the status of a dog, which Hollywood only kills if it's the main plot-driver (see John Wick). They let out all of the dinosaurs in the end to save them from dying in their cages because there's no-one left to take care of them. They disperse into the woods. Blue remains to say goodbye to Pratt before heading out to repopulate Los Angeles with dinosaurs, I guess? I watched it in German this time. Old Dads (2023) -- "6/10" This film is an interesting expansion on a lot of the themes that Bill Burr has in his standup comedy and his morning-show podcast. It's interesting that it doesn't occur to any of the prominently featured female characters to wonder what they're bringing to their marriages, whether they're doing enough to raise their children right. I know that Bill Burr wrote this, but I really wonder how many other people noticed that it was taken as a given that one is to kowtow to the pressures of the snobbiest parts of society, to do "whatever it takes" for a family's children to get ahead. Any anger at how fucked-up the world is is to be suppressed, there is no need to try to change any of it. Instead, you make sure that you bubble to the top of the snobbish heap, sucking off the horrible tin-horn dictator of a school principal so that she writes a recommendation for your kid to go to the right school. Madness. But the person who rebels against this utterly vacuous and immoral mindset hammered home by society is the asshole. Is that the story, though? I wonder if anyone else noticed how basic the wives were? Sure, the guys were pretty basic, too, but at least we got to learn that they started and ran a thriving business for 23 years. We never learned what the three wives even do for a living -- except Kimberly, who just wanted to "go to the gym and fuck" Mike. This is pretty shallow, I think. Do better, Burr. I gave it an extra star for having a few good rants. But I deducted stars for only making the guys cool. The Terminator (1984) -- "8/10" Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn) and the Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger) both arrive in 1984 from the year 2029. They show up naked and in a flash of bright light, posed to cover their naughty bits. They go about getting some clothes and weapons, each in their own way. They have conflicting missions: Kyle is there to protect Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) whereas the Terminator is there to ... terminate her. The Terminator doesn't have a great plan, so it goes through the phone book, killing every Sarah Connor it can find. Last one's the charm, but Kyle rescues her. He fills her in on the unstoppable murder machine intent on killing her, in particular. It's because of SkyNet, man. It's because the robots found out that she would give birth to John Connor, who would go on to lead the rebellion against the machines. The twist here is that Sarah and Kyle get busy at some point, which means that Kyle is his own leader's father, even though he only discovers this after the fact. How could he have been the guy who was working with John Connor and not know that he was his father? Because he hadn't traveled back in time to impregnate his wife and leader's mother yet. Does he not retroactively remember? It's complicated. This all happens while they're constantly on the run, constantly building new weapons -- pipe bombs -- and barely slipping the grasp of the unremittingly persistent Terminator. It's finally taking damage, though. After one explosion, it loses its entire exoskeleton, leaving a red-eyed, stop-motion-animated robot. Reese finally dies in an explosion that blows this remaining endoskeleton in half. It crawls across the floor to grab Sarah. She breaks free of its grasp and traps it in a hydraulic press. The lights finally go out in its eyes. Sarah travels alone in Mexico, pregnant with John, preparing for the coming war with SkyNet. The original and still the best? The visuals are a tiny bit dated, but still mostly hold up. The chase scenes are decent, if a bit repetitive. There is a stronger focus on story because there wasn't enough CGI to distract viewers for the entire film. I saw it in German. Make My Day S01 (2023) -- "6/10" I have no idea whether this is representative of serial anime, but it was kind of stretched out to make ten episodes. The premise is that there's a prison planet, run by a private corporation, which benefits from the energy crystals that they harvest. Jim (Masaomi Yamahashi) is a guard, but one of the good guys, unsure of his role and place there. Monsters from the deep attack. It is their planet. The energy crystals are their food. Jim is heavily invested in saving Marnie (Ayahi Takagaki), who is pregnant. Along the way, they team up with a prisoner with a heart of gold Walter (Kazuhiro Yamaji). He's done bad things, but Jim is willing to treat him as the person he is now. There are long discussions with people with the viewpoint that "once a criminal, always a criminal." This tension between a humanistic and purely capitalistic world suffuses the show. There are shuttles to leave the planet, but they're only for the elites. There is a strong tension between the hyper-capitalistic world as it is, and the socialist world that could be. This is very, very explicitly stated several times. Characters heavily invested in the me-first way of doing things seem to have the upper hand, but then get their brutal comeuppance as the group that sticks together inevitably wins out. Despite tremendous firepower, the native inhabitants have overwhelming numbers and don't seem at all deterred by the slaughter of what seems like millions of them. There are millions and millions more. This bucks the socialist trend a bit, in that it seems to be ascribing a mindlessness to the enemy, which is a bit convenient. The premise is that the enemy is some sort of hive mind, that it doesn't care about itself or its brethren, that it's willing to relentlessly suicide its way toward its goal. Well, yes, of course it is. It realizes that if it doesn't eliminate the human menace, it will steal all of its food. There seems to be no way to communicate, which is convenient. This is the plot of Starship Troopers. Walter, Jim, and Marnie escape in a lifeboat at the end, as the aliens swarm to retake their planet, eliminating all evidence of human habitation. The end. The animation's a bit weak and flat, but you eventually stop paying attention to it. I watched it in Japanese, mostly while cycling indoors. 6 Days to Air: The Making of South Park (2011) -- "7/10" This is a documentary about the making of one episode of South Park over the course of a week. The episode is the first in the fifteenth season, "HumancentiPad " . You see them developing the jokes, really putting the time in on jokes about how it would work when people are strapped to one another ass-to-mouth (as they are in the movie Human Centipede). We see Trey and Matt doing voice work, which is pretty fascinating. They just ... do it. With little preparation, they just shout out the various voices. You can watch the documentary at "here" . It's about 42 minutes long. These people work incredibly hard, from before sunup until long after sundown. They talk about how the process developed, from building all episodes beforehand to the process they have today, where they build the episodes the week before they air. This allows them to stay very current, but it's also very stressful -- during the season anyway. 2011 was a banner year for them, as they'd just returned from the opening of Book of Mormon, which would go on to smash all sorts of Broadway and musical records. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4794 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4794 Mon, 01 Jan 2024 00:55:25 +0100 of around 1600 ratings publicly available. I've included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other -- I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. Men in Black (1997) -- "8/10" I'd already watched and written a "short review of this movie in 2017." The following summary is a lot more comprehensive. A truck drives through the American southwest, with a load of migrants in the back. They run into an INS roadblock, but agent Kay (Tommy Lee Jones) and Dee (Richard Hamilton) break up the party and take one of the migrants into the desert -- the one who doesn't seem to understand a lick of Spanish. He turns out to be an alien who'd arrived illegally on Earth. Kay eliminates him before he can take out one of the INS officers (who are absolutely not tricked out in SWAT gear because it's the 90s). We see the neuralizer and learn that Dee has lost a step. Seque to a chase-on-foot by Jay (Will Smith), who's getting his first introduction to an alien. He chases it down, getting Kay's attention. Kay shows up at the police station to pick him up and follow up a lead that takes them to Jay's next alien Jeebs (Tony Shalhoub), who's an off-planet-arms dealer. Jay learns that this is all real. "Kay: A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it. Fifteen hundred years ago everybody knew the Earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth was flat, and fifteen minutes ago, you knew that humans were alone on this planet. Imagine what you'll know tomorrow." Jay shows up the next morning at the MIB offices (thought he doesn't know it yet). We get a whole introduction to the organization, including Zed (Rip Torn), several aliens, and several artifacts. In a parallel storyline, Edgar (Vincent D'Onofrio) is taken over by a bug, which wears Edgar's skin like a suit, and which is looking for "the galaxy". He drives to New York, to Manhattan, and kills two other aliens who he thinks has it. He leaves with a jewel case that he thinks is the galaxy. Jay and Kay track down a squid family and wonder why they were risking their immigration visa to escape the planet. They check the news -- The National Enquirer and so on -- and find Edgar's wife Beatrice (Siobhan Fallon Hogan), who provides them with their next lead. Meanwhile the alien bodies (Edgar's first victims) are taken to Laurel's (Linda Fiorentino) morgue, where she discovers that one of the victims isn't human. The other alien's cat is riding on it. Jay and Kay show up, pretending to be morticians. Laurel starts hitting on Jay, while the cat snakes around Jay's feet. She tells him that her theory is that the bodies aren't human, but carapaces for transporting other aliens. On one of the bodies, they find a switch near the ear and open up the face to reveal its dying pilot. "The galaxy is on Orion's b..." They zap Laurel with the neuralizer and get on their way, following the next lead. Edgar discovers that he's stolen useless diamonds instead of "the galaxy". Jay and Kay finally catch up to Edgar at a jewelry store, where they blow a bunch of stuff up. Edgar gets away, but they get his truck -- and his ship, which is stuffed in the back of it. Meanwhile, all of the other aliens are fleeing Earth because they're terrified that the bugs will destroy the planet to get the galaxy. Jay figures out that the galaxy is hanging around the cat's neck. The cat is named Orion. Laurel figures it out at the same time -- just in time to receive Edgar as a guest at the morgue. He is received by the morgue attendant (David Cross), who can't stop him from breaking in and taking Laurel hostage. Laurel keeps hitting on Jay, but this time mostly because Edgar is hiding under the cart they're both standing by. Kay discovers the morgue attendant's body and breaks up the party. Edgar escapes with the galaxy and Laurel, demanding to be driven to Queens, where he's going to hijack one of the expo saucers. Jay and Kay jet off through the Midtown Tunnel in a considerably transformed Ford LTD -- driving on the top of the tunnel. They get to Flushing Meadows Park in time to shoot down the escaping spacecraft. It grinds to a halt directly in front of them, spilling Edgar out of its broken exit ramp. He reveals himself as a bug, takes Jay and Kay's guns, then swallows Kay. Laurel is stuck in a tree. Jay gets the crap kicked out of him. He gets back up, then finds a bunch of cockroaches, and starts crushing them to draw out Edgar -- "you know, you all look alike to me." -- and to stall for time until Jay can work his magic. "Don't start nothin'; won't be nothin'." Jay gets his gun back and blows his way out of the bug from the inside. Jay tells him he was hit hard "and it hurt." As they're chatting and wiping off bug guts, the bug rises up one last time -- but Laurel blows it away. "That's an interesting job you've got there, gentlemen." Jay wants to stop Kay from neuralizing her, but he actually says that the neuralizer is for him. "I haven't been training a partner; I've been training a replacement." ZAP. Jay leafs through the gossip rags to see that Jay has "woken from a 35-year coma" and is safely back with his wife. He turns to his partner Laurel to go on their next mission. Black Widow (2021) -- "6/10" The story begins with a midnight escape from Ohio by Melina (Rachel Weisz) and super-soldier Alexei (David Harbour), with their kids Natasha and Yelena. After some pretty nice credits, showing world events, girls training, and assassination plans, we're taken to a live mission full of black widows, two of whom are Natasha Romanov (Scarlett Johansson) and Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh). Yelena is sprayed with some sort of nano-serum that wakes her up from her hypnotization. Natasha, meanwhile, is assaulted by a seemingly mechanized assassin, an unstoppable, cobra-commander-looking super-soldier called Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko). She's thrown off a bridge into a cold river, but manages to take with her the vials that Taskmaster was looking for. Now, Natasha's at her sister's apartment, where they get into a knock-down, drag-out fight. After the dust-up, they've teamed up to take down their old boss, who's using brainwashing and drugs to keep his army of widows on message. They fight and fall and crash and fall and collect what should be a tremendous number of bruises and broken bones, but they come out with nary a scratch. Taskmaster is hot on their tails, but they get away. Seriously, they don't have even a single bit of muscle soreness or stiffness. They get a gigantic, old Soviet helicopter and fly to Alexei's prison in the Siberian mountains to rescue him. Natasha drops out of the helicopter while Yelena messes about, shooting rockets and starting avalanches. Alexei's actually got some superpowers, but he gets cattle-prodded into submission. He gets up on a catwalk while Natasha grabs him on the end of a cable just before the avalanche engulfs the prison. They want Alexei to take them the "Red Room". There's a bunch of family baggage to get through, where Alexei tries to make up with the girls. They head overland on foot to meet up with Melina, who meets them with a long-range rifle. She decides not to shoot them and, instead, lets them into her home. Alexei puts on his old Red Guardian costume, which barely fits over his prison-fattened body. There's a bunch of family jokes and stuff. Melina demonstrates how her pigs are completely under her control -- because she's installed ganglial neural controls into them so that they follow orders. Natasha calls her father an idiot and her mother a coward. Natasha has a heart-to-heart with Melina, while Yelena and Alexei do the same. This is a really long scene. She calls him Crimson Dynamo; he corrects her that it's Red Guardian. They sing American Pie together. It's endless. They are interrupted by the blue lights of a giant helicopter. Melina had called Taskmaster to take them all to the "Red Room", which is pretty literally Bespin, the Cloud City. Melina is apparently deep in with the baddies, seemingly in charge of much of Dreykov's (Ray Winstone) army. She's all dolled up like a top-level widow now. She turns out to be Natasha in disguise, but Dreykov sees through it. Melina reveals herself to Alexei (taking off her Natasha mask), then contacts Yelena to tell her about a hidden weapon so that Yelena can free herself from the operating theater where she's about to get her face rearranged. While Dreykov and Natasha fence about Natasha's real mother, the others make their escape. He reveals that Taskmaster is Antonia, an old colleague of Natasha's, who she thought she'd killed. The woman is kept alive only by her armor and Dreykov's neural contraptions. After Taskmaster leaves, Natasha realizes that she can't shoot Dreykov because he's programmed her with an olfactory neural control to be unable to attack him. Meanwhile Red Guardian squares off against Taskmaster, while Yelena infiltrates further into the flying cloud city. Milena tries to hack the system. Natasha spars verbally with Dreykov. She taunts Dreykov into attacking her physically. She taunts him into revealing his worldwide widow army. She'd tried before to get him to hit her nose hard enough to cut her olfactory nerve, but he "war nicht stark genug" -- so, she breaks her own nose to break the control and takes him out. Melina takes out one of the large fans holding up the city, then helps Alexei trap Taskmaster in a prison cell. Dreykov's army of widows shows up to save him from Natasha -- "und lasst ihr leiden." They are beating the hell out of her until Yelena shows up with the cure for the mind-control, freeing the widows. As the city crashes to Earth, Natasha saves the information about the other widows all over the planet. She doesn't seem to be too hurt for having had the shit kicked out of her by an army of widows. I guess they don't hit that hard? Also, none the worse for wear for having crashed with an entire city out of the stratosphere. Melina and Alexei are ready to fly away, but they are forced to take off without Natasha and Yelena. Their plane takes some damage to its control surfaces, while Natasha tries to find Yelena. But she finds Taskmaster instead, letting her free, thinking that there is something of Antonia left in there. Dreykov is making his escape, but Yelena jumps onto his plane and blows herself up, also blowing up his plane. She's ragdolling toward the planet when Natasha catches her and opens a chute for both of them that somehow doesn't get hit by any of the myriad pieces of falling debris. Natasha sees Taskmaster coming for them and lets Yelena go. They grapple, jump off a bunch of stuff, pop Taskmaster's chute just in time to land safely (of course), then start fighting. Natasha pops Taskmaster's helmet, then pops a vial of the cure to free Antonia from her prison -- and her life. Natasha finds Yelena in the wreckage. Nobody is hurt. Barely even cut. Bitch blew herself up and she's totally fine. Melina and Alexei show up next, having survived their plane crash with only minor injuries. The rest of the family is forced to flee before the U.S. army arrives. A planeload of widows lands to take them away. Natasha remains because she's an Avenger. Apparently, Antonia is still alive, too. Happy endings all around. An epilogue sees Yelena mourning over Natasha's grave. Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis Dreyfus) appears out of nowhere to tell her that her next contract is her sister's killer -- Clint Barton. Sure, sure. I subtracted a point for having no tension -- like pretty much every other Marvel movie made in the last 15 years. Also for the utterly ridiculously artificial cliffhanger. They're just not even trying. I don't care. I watched it in German. It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia S01-S16 (2005--2023) -- "10/10" There are so many great things about this show: They don't have a laugh track, for starters. They also do not believe in continuity. They believe in laughs instead. If something is funny, it doesn't matter if it makes sense or it will carry over into the next show. They just forget about it the next show, like it never happened. * Dennis (Glenn Howerton) is a perfect egotist who never shows any interest in the needs of others. His love for himself often leads to him utterly embarrassing himself -- except that he's never embarrassed. Never. * Mac (Rob McElhenney) is a moron, dumber than Charlie, although he has no idea that he's dumb. He thinks he's the brains of the outfit. He also thinks that he's a bouncer because he likes to work out and has a karate fetish. Dennis accuses him, though, of not having a core, and of only working his "glamour muscles." He and Dennis live together, in an incredibly tight and codependent relationship. * Sweet Dee (Kaitlin Olson) is even worse than Dennis, if that's even possible. She is scheming and conniving and convinced of her own beauty, even though the others constantly tell her how ugly she is. "She's a bird!" She dates and dumps for the most superficial reasons. She is a wonderfully feminist statement that a woman can be just as horrifically asocial as any man. She lives alone, possibly with a cat. * Frank (Danny Devito) raised Dennis and Dee as his children (although we would discover that he is not their biological father). He is a dirty, filthy, old man who is interested in having fun, having, sex, smoking whatever, drinking to exhaustion, and reveling in filth. He is the only one of them who has any money. It is enough for him to finance their various schemes and to bail them out of trouble, but it's utterly unknown how he still has so much. * Charlie (Charlie Day) is an idiot, though possibly an artistic genius, but he's possibly the nicest of them. He cannot read or write very well, though that doesn't stop him from trying. He is, like Mac, utterly convinced of his ability to hold his own in the planning department, despite his only very fleeting grasp of the laws of physics and social interaction. He lives with Frank and they sleep in the same bed, in a sea of garbage. Recurring characters are: * Artemis (Artemis Pebdani) is a friend of Dee's, although they only ever meet when Dee needs something from her. Artemis is game because she's always trying to get laid and is kind of the filthy female counterpart to Frank, whom she occasionally bangs. * Waitress (Mary Elizabeth Ellis) works at the local coffee shop. Charlie is obsessed with her. She is occasionally entangled completely unwillingly in the gang's schemes and has suffered immensely for having been employed in the coffee shop across the street from the bar. * Cricket (David Hornsby) is an old schoolfriend of theirs whose life they have utterly ruined. We first meet him as a priest and, by the fifth season, he's living on the streets, prostituting himself, battling various addictions, and absolutely game to work with the gang on any of their schemes, simply on account of how destitute they've made him. He can't hold a grudge because he needs to eat. By season 16, he's horribly scarred in myriad ways. The following list is far from comprehensive, but should go a long way to illustrating the utter dysfunction of each member of the gang. Going through the list of episodes from these seasons -- there are so many golden ones, to be honest. It's really hard to pick favorites, but nevertheless here's a smattering that is hopefully representative enough to get you started -- and addicted. Many of their best shows are the ones where you can tell that they're sending up some odious part of American or capitalist culture, all with a straight face. For the most part, they show just how normal it is to be utterly depraved and egotistical, how normal it is to scam and lie and cheat and steal and hustle all the time. That we understand them at all is an indictment of our culture, of our society. They love booze, and guns, and tits, and money. They don't care how they get any of it. They don't plan for the future. They follow orders, though. They stick to arbitrary rules, venerating them as they suffer under them. This, too, is quintessentially American, to boast of freedom while being subjugated. They don't grow. They don't change. They stay the same -- and always will. They learn nothing. They are us; they are America. There is no Schitt's Creek moment for them. They're sixteen seasons deep into a life-lesson for America. When I wrote this, I'd only seen five seasons but I was utterly convinced that they would continue doing exactly what they're doing, unchanged, for the next eleven. I was not in any way disappointed. They are like a live-action Simpsons. It is, in its way, brilliant -- I recently read that the show has the highest density of dialogue of any modern show. It is, if nothing else, extremely funny. [Season 1] * "S01E03: Underage Drinking: A National Concern" has the gang opening their bar to high-schoolers and they all end up going to the prom * "S01E07: Charlie Got Molested" has the gang plan an intervention for Charlie's supposed molestation, with Dennis and Mac trying to seduce the coach because they feel that they're more attractive than Charlie. [Season 2] "S02E02: The Gang Goes Jihad" has the gang fighting off an Israeli who takes over half of Paddy's Pub. Part of their discussions include, "You can't just come in here and steal our land from us. Charlie: Listen, pal, I don’t know how you guys do it in Israel but this is America. You can’t just come in here and steal our land from underneath us. Ari: I’m pretty sure that’s how this country was founded in the first place. Mac: I don’t even know what that means, dude, but if you’re talking shit about America, we’re gonna kick your ass." * "S02E09: Charlie Goes America All Over Everybody's Ass" has the gang grappling with anarchism vs. totalitarianism, although they have no idea that they're doing so. [Season 3] * "S03E09: Sweet Dee's Dating a Retarded Person" hits a lot of the gang's notes, as they try to start a band and Dee is dating a musician * "S03E14: Bums: Making a Mess All Over the City" has Dennis, Mac, and Frank dressing up as police officers and shaking down the neighborhood in their used police car. [Season 4] * "S04E02: The Gang Solves the Gas Crisis" is an incredibly stupid scheme for selling gas from garbage cans, door to door, that ends in tears mostly for a specific person whom they do not know, but whom they are convinced is Dee and Dennis's annoying biological father. He is not. * "S04E10: Sweet Dee Has a Heart Attack" is literally what it says on the tin. She is no less insufferable afterward. This episode was a work of art. * "S04E12: The Gang Gets Extreme: Home Makeover Edition" has the gang pretend that they're going to help a local hispanic family improve their living conditions -- with utterly predictable results. * "S04E13: The Nightman Cometh" is a musical written by Charlie and put on by the gang, which is actually a marriage proposal to the waitress. None of them know this except for Charlie. None of them cares, as they let their egos and utter lack of shame carry them through what would otherwise be an excruciatingly embarrassing and very public debacle. Instead, they power through and make something weirdly beautiful. [Season 5] * "S05E01: The Gang Exploits the Mortgage Crisis" is one of those special political shows where it's just a standard IASIP show -- unless you understand the rapacious, financial context of the moment in which it was aired. Then you see that the gang seizing on the ideas of Wall Street as very much in their ballpark is largely an indictment of not only financial America, but pretty much all of how the American economy runs. If it's OK for the gang, that should make us all take pause. * "S05E07: The Gang Wrestles for the Troops" is worth it just to see Charlie, Mac, and Dennis dressed up as eagles in a wrestling ring, while Da' Maniac (Rowdy Roddy Piper) looks on. * "S05E08: Paddy's Pub: Home of the Original Kitten Mittens" is worth watching if only for the introductory video for Charlie's new product, mentioned in the title. [Season 6] * "S06E03: The Gang Buys a Boat" has the gang at their destructive and self-destructive best. * "S06E09: Dee Reynolds: Shaping America's Youth" lets us finally have a look at the gang's masterpiece movie "Lethal Weapon 5". * "S06E11: The Gang Gets Stranded in the Woods" has the gang going to a charity in Atlantic City, where Dee adopts a bunny rabbit she finds in the woods, while Charlie and Dennis have the time of their lives in Atlantic City after hitching there with trucker Tom Sizemore. [Season 1] * "S07E1: Frank's Pretty Woman" is about Frank's horrific fiancé, a shockingly uncouth prostitute who leaves even the gang in the shade with her level of debased depravity. * "S07E2: The Gang Goes to the Jersey Shore" has the gang going to the Jersey shore, where Frank, Charlie, and Mac are rewarded for their relentless positivity, while Dee and Dennis have a PCP-fueled night of horrific crime and violence with a local gang. * "S07E3: Frank Reynolds' Little Beauties" has Frank continue his descent, with a shattered nose followed by corpse makeup that he wears at an impromptu little girls' pageant that he ends up funding and hosting. The gang shows up as Devo. * "S07E7: CharDee MacDennis: The Game of Games" has the gang revive a bizarre game of trivia, feats of strength, and spirituality, combined with heavy drinking (naturally). Great surprise ending. [Season 8] * "S08E4: Charlie and Dee Find Love" has the title characters meeting rich partners. Dee tries to bed hers, but he's just doing a "Dangerous Liaisons" with her, while Charlie's really likes him, but he's just using her to get closer to the waitress. Another great trick ending. * "S08E5: The Gang Gets Analyzed" has the gang seek therapy because they can't agree on who has to do the dishes after a dinner. "Mac: I gained and lost 60 pounds in three months. Therapist: But that's nearly impossible! Mac: First of all, through God, all things are possible, so jot that down." [Season 9] * "S09E7: The Gang Gets Quarantined" has the gang trying to avoid catching the flu, with eerily prophetic COVID undertones. * "S09E08: Flowers for Charlie " features Charlie getting much, much smarter because of an experimental drug. Charlie Day is a national treasure. * "S09E09: Mac and Dennis Buy a Timeshare" has Dennis and Mac living together as a couple in the suburbs. Mac stays home to take care of the house, while Dennis goes to work all day. They fight. Really well-acted. Rowdy Roddy Piper shows up as Da' Maniac. [Season 10] * "S10E01: The Gang Beats Boggs" has the gang binge-drinking their way across an intra-continental flight to start off the 10th season. * "S10E04: Charlie Work" again stars the incomparable Charlie Day, manipulating the others into not screwing up the health inspection. * "S10E08: The Gang Goes on Family Fight" puts the gang on a Family Feud-style game show, competing against a black family, with predictable results. Charlie gets all of the odd choices correct; Keegan-Michael Key hosts. [Season 11] * "S11E01: Chardee MacDennis 2: Electric Boogaloo" starts the season by pretending to show us how an outsider would view the gang's behavior. They think he's an outside investor interested in their psychotic drinking game, but he turns out not to be what he seems. * "S11E03: The Gang Hits the Slopes" sends the gang to Colorado for some reason, re-enacting an 80s ski-bum movie. * "S11E05: Mac & Dennis Move to the Suburbs" really shows the gang's acting and writing chops in this darker-than-usual episode where Mac and Dennis are a couple in the suburbs. [Season 12] * "S12E02: The Gang Goes to a Water Park" is yet another off-site episode where the gang is inexplicably in a water park, with Mac and Dee getting stuck in a ride, Frank and Charlie hitting every ride, and Dennis taking on a young girl as a scamming protegé. * "S12E06: Hero or Hate Crime?" takes the gang to the depths of their casual depravity, in which they impose their warped world-view on an arbitration process, which they've invoked for a completely trivial reason. Mac comes out of the closet. * "S12E07: PTSDee" is unique in that Dee gets her revenge in an incredibly satisfying and twisted manner. At first, you think she's being unspeakably cruel -- but then you remember that the target of her wrath was so casually cruel to her just at the beginning of the show. [Season 13] * "S13E02: The Gang Escapes" shreds the fad of escape rooms, showing how it can't possibly stand up to the power of the utterly asocial gang. * "S13E06: The Gang Solves the Bathroom Problem" is the first in what will be several shows that pointedly address some of the more confusing parts of millennial identitarianism and the laser-like focus on low-impact social issues. This one's about genders. * "S13E07: The Gang Does a Clip Show" is noteworthy because they can't even phone it in with a clip show. A bunch of the clips are fake or new or misremembered (newly filmed) and it veers into hallucinogenic territory by the time it's done. * "S13E08: Charlie's Home Alone" and "S13E09: The Gang Wins the Big Game" go together and tell the tale of sports superstition as well as the Eagles finally winning the Super Bowl, but only because the gang does everything right. (Spoiler: it's Dee's anti-social filthiness that goes unacknowledged but wins the day, while Charlie's incredible but whole fictitious and superstitious self-sacrifice is heralded.) * "S13E10: Mac Finds His Pride" features an earnest and well-executed, silently performed dance number with Mac, expressing his homosexuality to his father, who walks out. Frank, on the other hand, has the desired epiphany. [Season 14] * "S14.E2: Thunder Gun 4: Maximum Cool" has the gang being absolutely over-the-top and antisocial in a movie focus group. * "S14.E3: Dee Day" is notable in that Dee gets her own day and everyone is fine with that. Whereas they never respect a single thing she ordinarily says, the rest of the gang follows her every order because those are the rules of Dee Day. No matter the discomfort, not following arbitrary rules that they'd all agreed to would be worse. * "S14.E6: The Janitor Always Mops Twice" is really well-made, fun and super-creative, while also showing off Charlie Day's love of cinema. * "S14.E9: A Woman's Right to Chop" is another socially aware metaphorical episode, this time talking about the right to an abortion thinly veiled as a woman's right to chop her hair short. [Season 15] * "S15.E4: The Gang Replaces Dee With a Monkey" is noteworthy only because of how they're starting a seasonal arc that will take them to Ireland. Also, they get spectacularly hammered. [Season 16] "S16.E6: Risk E. Rat's Pizza & Amusement Center " has the gang trying to relive their golden days by visiting the arcade/pizza restaurant of their youth. Mac ends up in the Feelings Center with a young boy named Sam, both of them being counseled by a dog. After the dog absolves them, "Mac: We've only been here for like five minutes. That's not a punishment. I don't feel punished. Where's the shame I'm supposed to be feeling? Dog: There's no shame in making a mistake, Mac. Mac: Yes, there is. How else would I know not to do it anymore? Dog: Hey, listen man, I'm a licensed psychotherapist. Mac: You're a talking dog. I'm out of here. Sam: I'm scared. Mac: I'm sure you are, Sam. I'm sure you are. 'Cause you're a pussy. Look, that's not your fault, man. This dog. Your parents. The whole culture is grooming you to be a pussy. You got no freedom. Which means you got no balls. And then, even when you do actually get caught doing something bad, you're not held accountable. And if you're not held accountable, you feel no guilt. And if you feel no guilt, you feel no shame. You got no shame, you're never gonna hate yourself enough to stop being bad and grow some balls." * "S16.E8: Dennis Takes a Mental Health Day" has Dennis trying to drop his blood pressure, but the world is working against him. Everything is annoying, the world cannot stop trying to take things from him. It's a wonderful set piece about how terrible customer experience has become in this, our advanced, age. Great twist ending. The Morning Show S01--S03 (2019--2022) -- "5/10" This show is hot garbage. It's a tragic waste of a lot of good talent: Reese Witherspoon, Mark Duplass, Steve Carell, Jennifer Aniston (who's a much better comedienne than dramatic actress). I don't like a single one of the characters. I take that back. I would kind of like Reese Witherspoon's character if she wasn't so interested in satisfying the requirements of the assholes judging her so that she can be allowed to work somewhere significant. And they've also thrown a few curveballs into her personality to keep her "down to Earth." (Like, when she hooks up with and immediately leaves an Irish bartender in the exact same crude way that a man would. I'm not sure what the message is, but it's muddled and stupid). At the urging of my viewing partner, we've watched a few more episodes, but it's not gotten much better. I'm still desperately searching for a character I don't dislike. We're at episode five now, with me more listening than watching, but my impression is that the message of this show is that the best we can hope for as a society is for woman to switch places with men, but that everything else stays pretty much the same. Everyone is still an asshole, treating everyone else like dirt, concerned mostly about themselves. Equality apparently means that the asshole sociopaths still run everything, but some of them will be women. Our future is bright, in other words. In episode six, the whole toxic crew heads out to California, to cover horrific wildfires. Everyone's still hungover from the evening before. Bradley and Alex are at each other's throats, with Bradley mistaking the show she's working at for an actual journalistic operation (as if that even exists in the mainstream) while Alex thinks America needs to be given fluff to keep it happy. I mean, she's right, but it's only because people like her have trained them to expect it. In episode seven, Alex reveals to her daughter that her parents are getting a divorce. The daughter is given the opportunity for utterly non-entertaining grandstanding. I get that this is a show about the superficiality of show business, but I wonder how it's possible to tough out a show where you can't get a single toehold on a single character. My partner's watching this show while I work and read, so I'm seeing more of it in the background. There was a bright spot near the end of season one where it seemed to get a bit better. Now, on episode four of season two, it's just a slog of shitty, petty, superficial, ineloquent, and woefully under-talented and intellectually under-equipped main characters talking at each other in one endless scene after another. The camera faces one person, then the other, then the previous one, then the other one again. It focuses a bit on one character as he (e.g., Cory) reads out a tremendous amount of text that wishes it had been written by Armando Iannucci, but it's much more like it's been written by Aaron Sorkin, who's become so famous for writing stuff that stupid people think sounds clever. And I absolutely can't tell whether they're being catty and tongue-in-cheek about the whole "I am my identities" way of life, or if they absolutely 100% mean it. At any rate, it's just so tedious and uninteresting. Cory (Billy Crudup) has some rare moments, when he's not delivering carefully crafted speeches that are too clever by half. He has excellent control of his eyes and communicates a lot with them. Still, this is a terrible show, overall. It's just hours and hours of fevered, fragile egos attached to incredibly self-interested and stunningly stupid people. Alex is absolutely the worst. I am not all impressed with how they've managed to portray a small-minded, stupid person like this. I don't know any people who are anything like the people in this show. They just spend all their day yelling at each other and grasping for personal gain. The Chip/Alex conversation in the car in episode 8 of season 2 is endless and focuses exclusively on Alex's feelings -- and how she's never done anything wrong. It's painful. It's made more painful by the thought that there are so many people who probably think that this is the best TV they've ever seen. In season 3, episode 4, there's a lot of absolutely awful stuff going on, but the worst part is how hard they push the anti-Russian/pro-Ukraine narrative. It's not aged well, but no matter. It's more interesting as a lesson in how the elites in America are expected to think. There is absolutely no issue about being so partisan in a TV show that is decidedly not about real-world issues at all. It's especially ironic that they're talking about exclusive photos that they could publish of the Russians having bombed a hospital, something that's completely made-up, but literally right now there is another invasion going on where actual hospitals and churches are being bombed -- it's November 2023 right now, and I'm talking about Israel's vengeance attacks on Gaza -- and there is literally no way on God's green Earth that the current bomber would ever be featured so crassly as the "enemy" in this TV show. I'm mystified how anyone can seriously watch this show without doing something more useful at the same time -- and then look forward to another season. Foundation S01 (2021) -- "6/10" This a bit woker than I remember the books being. The lead character is a Tom-Cruise-like better-at-everything-than-everyone-else star, but it's a slight, black young woman/girl. There's the pool scene that, were the roles reversed, there'd be an uproar. She basically humiliates her boyfriend intellectually, then taunts him when he says he can't swim, then she throws him in the water and tells him to "relax". Then she seduces him into having sex in the pool. I honestly can't tell if they're being ironic or if they really think that reversing the roles is progress. I like the concept and the visuals are wonderful, but it's just crazy how a show that takes place over giant time spans (a few decades is the shortest) spends so much damned time on fleeting love affairs. This is silly. I only watched the first three episodes before giving up on it. That's what I wrote in January of 2022, when I first started watching this. I was riding the bike at the time. I continued watching on the recommendation of a good friend, whose taste in films is otherwise good. I watched it while doing strength workouts. It seemed to fit a bit better, I don't know why. Maybe I've gotten older and have a bit more patience. There are a bunch of things going on: * Cleon/Empire/Brother Day (Lee Pace) walks a path in a religious ritual. This part was pretty cool and interesting, involving his 11,000 year-old robot, Demerzel (Laura Birn). "Your lack of understanding does not obligate me to explain." * Gaal Dornick (Lou Llobell) is fighting with the digital ghost of Hari Seldon (Jared Harris). This part is quite annoying and tiring. It involves her yelling at a ghost all the time and sulking a lot. * Salvor Hardin (Leah Harvey) is making her way through an ancient jump-ship at Phara's (Kubbra Sait) gunpoint, who's trying to avenge the decimation of her home planet Anacreon by attacking first Terminus, then taking the jump ship to the heart of Trantor. This part is OK, but filled with a few too many monologues to fill in gaps. Show, don't tell. * Cleon/Empire/Brother Dawn (Cassian Bilton) struggles with being slightly different than his prior clones -- Day and Dusk (Terrence Mann) -- and gets involved in a relationship with Azura Odili (Amy Tyger), which has entanglements, as she tries to get him to escape his destiny. This part is also kind of lame, but bearable. Episode 9: The Leap was more interesting. Hari Seldon spoke with the Foundation on Terminus, lending the proceeding a bit more gravitas. Cleon/Day took revenge on Azura for having misled his "son" Cleon/Dawn: he found and killed every single person she'd ever interacted with, then condemned her to a long life of intravenous feeding, deprived of all sensory input. But then they ruined it by making an achingly long scene starring Gael Dornick, finding Salvor Hardin in a cryo-tank in the water. Just the most ludicrous Deus ex Machina and absolute emoting and hamming it up, with glassy eyes everywhere. Sigh. Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003) -- "6/10" This movie follows what has become the standard Terminator formula: there's a quick introduction of John Connor (Nick Stahl), then a robot T-X (Kristanna Loken) arrives from the future, followed by the Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger). The robots steal a bunch of shit while breaking a bunch of stuff in order to get dressed up in the clothes of the time. There's a computer virus raging across the nation. John Connor tries robbing drugs from the veterinary clinic of Kate Brewster (Claire Danes) to fix himself up. T-X isn't far behind. She's an unstoppable teutonic goddess -- who raises hell and is about to kill Kate when a real teutonic God plows into her with his truck. Does it kill her? Bitch, please. Of course not. The movie's got to keep going, so she pops right back up, self-repairing and then turning all vehicles into autonomous vehicles by magically reprogramming all of the circuit boards in them. Mayhem ensues. John Connor flees with Kate Brewster in her pet van. Cops are in hot pursuit like they're after the Blues Brothers. Terminator, Connor, and Brewster get away from T-X. Her plasma cannon damaged one of his two fuel cells, so he has to cut one out while he's driving. They end up in a cemetery, where they plunder a mausoleum that Sarah Connor had thought to fill with weapons. The police follow them there -- as does the T-X, in the form of Sarah's fiancé (Brian Sites), who's getting escorted by police to find Kate. T-X ends up killing her escort, but is still stymied at the cemetery, where Kate, John, and Terminator escape in a hearse, scraping the T-X off the roof by driving under a semi-tractor-trailer. Her primary plasma weapon is damaged, but she perseveres. There's a bunch of exposition where Kate and John get to know what happens to them. They all meet up at NORAD, where Kate's Dad initiates SkyNet. T-X is there, upgrading very early T-1 and T-2 models -- they still use tank treads -- and letting them loose in the base. Our heroes rescue Kate's dad, while keeping the T-X at bay. They go to his office to find the codes that they can use to shut down SkyNet. It is already defending itself, though. It is preparing a nuclear attack on all mankind -- Judgement Day. Kate's dad dies in the next attack, so the three are left to head for another super-secret location. Terminator stays behind to take on the T-X and buy them time. She fries his face off, then snaps his neck -- before reprogramming him. Kate and John encounter several more early terminator models. The T-X is back on their trail, but John has turned on the particle collider, including its incredibly powerful magnets, which, apparently, act outside the tube. These pull the T-X apart. But the T-X starts cutting into the collider. The reprogrammed Terminator catches up to Kate and John, complete with his new instructions to kill them both. He's got a bit of a HAL complex, as he now has two sets of conflicting orders. After he chucks them around the hangar a bit, John gets him to shut himself down instead of killing them both. They fly off to the other location to destroy SkyNet. They show up there and start hacking their way in. T-X crashes a helicopter into the facility and is right on their tail. Terminator crashes an even bigger helicopter into the facility, smushing T-X again, and saving them both. The door starts to close, but Terminator holds it back. The T-X rips its own legs off and scuttles to catch them. Terminator stops her, tearing out his own fuel cell and cramming it into her mouth. "Du bist terminiert." Inside the facility, there's a whole shadow government setup, with a tremendous number of old computers. There is no SkyNet there. The Terminator had brought them there to keep them safe from the unavoidable nuclear attack of SkyNet, so that Kate and John will survive. The end, for now. I watched it in German. John Wick (2014) -- "9/10" John Wick (Keanu Reeves) lost his wife Helen (Bridget Moynahan) to cancer. He meets his mysterious friend Marcus (Willem Dafoe) at the funeral. Before she'd died, she'd ordered him a dog. It arrives after her death. It's a great little beagle. She and John are becoming friends. Her name is Daisy. They're out for a drive together. Wick stops for gas. Iosef Tarasov (Alfie Allen) is there, with a couple of henchmen. He wants to buy Wick's 1969 Mustang. It's not for sale. Iosef mutters in Russian that everything has a price. Wick tells him in Russian that not everything has a price. Iosef and his henchmen get the jump on Wick in his home, later that night. They bludgeon him, then bludgeon Daisy to death. Wick wakes to find that she'd dragged herself over to him -- her spine had been snapped by a blow -- before expiring. Iosef goes to Aurelio's (John Leguizamo) chop shop. Aurelio knows immediately whose car it is. He pops Iosef in the mouth for insolence and sends him away. Iosef's father Viggo Tasarov (Michael Nyqvist) calls to find out what had happened. "Your idiot son stole John Wick's car and killed his dog." "Oh." Viggo's right-hand man Avi (Dean Winters) tells him that a big deal has just gone through. He's made to watch as Viggo beats the crap out of Iosef. Viggo calls John, interrupting him as he's unboxing his old weapons cache. He says nothing. John prepares for battle. His back is tattooed with fortis fortuna adiuvat ("Fortune Favors the Bold" . He dresses in his black suit at home, as Viggo sings a song of Baba Yaga in his own home. Viggo's army shows up at John's home. John decimates them. The police arrive on a noise complaint. "Sag mal, arbeitest du wieder?" "Nein, ich muss nur ein paar Sachen regeln." "Na, dann, schönen Abend." He calls a cleanup crew, "Dinner for 12", paying in gold coins. John Wick moves into The Continental Hotel, where we meet the hotel manager (Lance Reddick) and owner Winston (Ian McShane). We learn the rules of that place -- no business or contracts on-premises -- because Wick goes out on the hunt. Iosef is in a Russian bath house. Wick lets a guard go because he knows him well. He just tells him to take a walk -- and Frances does. "Danke, Mr. Wick." Wick infiltrates the club, taking out one of Iosef's friends (one who'd been there when they'd stolen his car and had killed his dog). He takes out more guards, looking one in the eye until the lights go out. Others give more resistance, so there's more fighting and shooting and killing in an incredibly economical fighting style. Iosef shields himself with a girl and gets away. He rushes through the club's dance floor, heading for the exit. The main body guard Kirill (Daniel Bernhardt) gets the drop on Wick, who seems to have been fighting him mano-a-mano for fun -- until he gets a gut full of a broken champagne bottle and is thrown from a balcony. He gets back to the Continental and orders a doctor, who sews him back together and gets him the drugs he needs to keep going. He's sleeping in his bed. Marcus has him in his sniper-rifle scope. He shoots the pillow next to Wick's head to warn him that Perkins (Adrianne Palicki) is coming to kill him in his room. They fight -- pretty good choreography -- with Wick eventually getting the drop on her. He learns from her where Viggo keeps all of his cash from his operations. Instead of killing her -- against the rules -- he leaves her in Harry's (Clarke Peters) hands. Wick is at the church that is a front for the money-laundering operation. He works his way into the basement and lights all of it on fire. Money, paintings, blackmail material -- everything. Back in the hotel, Perkins gets the drop on Harry and shoots him in the head. Wick attacks the remaining Russians, including Viggo, in broad daylight. He takes out dozens of them, but Kirill again gets the drop on him, driving into another car that knocks him down and out. They're in a basement, with Viggo gleefully beating Wick, telling him stories. "People keep asking if I'm back and I haven't really had an answer. But now, yeah, I'm thinkin' I'm back. So you can either hand over your son or you can die screaming alongside him!" Viggo leaves Wick to be suffocated by his henchmen. Marcus shoots one of them, giving Wick a chance to fight Kirill, even though he's still got a bag over his head and his hands are still bound. Wicks strangles him. He gets outside, stopping Viggo's car by killing everyone. Viggo gives up his son. Wick infiltrates again, taking over a sniper position and taking out many of the others. He blows up the escape vehicles. Wick gut-shoots Iosef, then finishes the job before he can finish saying "Es war nur ein scheiss [Hund]". Wick checks out, getting a new car from the Continental "für die kleine Störung" (Perkins's attack). He meets up with Marcus and thanks him. That evening, Marcus is taken captive by Viggo's men, nearly beaten to death by Viggo, then finished off by Perkins and Viggo. Winston has his men kill Perkins for her actions in the Continental. He calls Wick to tell him that Viggo is heading for his heliport. Wick spills them all out of the way like a force of nature, one by one by one, until only Viggo is left. Viggo plows Wick's car off the pier, but without Wick in it. Viggo gets him to throw his weapon away, then they fight mano-a-mano. Until Viggo pulls a knife. Wick is forced to let Viggo stab him in order to stabilize the knife and take it away. They are both grievously wounded, Viggo very much mortally so. We're back in the garage where we started. Wick pulls himself up, breaks into the vet's office, gets some medicine, staples his wound shut (same place as the previous stabbing), then picks up a Pit Bull puppy slated for execution and walks off. Kindergarten Cop (1990) -- "8/10" Detective John Kimble (Arnold Schwarzenegger) has finally captured his arch-nemesis Crisp (Richard Tyson). His next assignment is to go undercover to protect Crisp's wife and child from being abducted by Crisp or his henchmen. When Detective Phoebe O'Hara (Pamela Reed) falls too ill to teach the kindergarten class where they can keep an eye on the boy. Instead, Kimble takes the job. His first day on the job only comes to a calmer ending when he gets out his ferret. On the second day, he tries to find out what their dads do. He has a headache. "Boy: Es ist bestimmt ein Tumor. Kimble: Es ist kein Tumor." He's narrowing it down to a couple of kids, but isn't sure yet which ones is Crisp's. It's kind of hilarious that this is the actual plot. Various mothers chat with Kimble -- because he's a giant pile of muscle -- including Sylvester's mom (Cathy Moriarty), who thinks her kid is gay. Another teacher at the school is Joyce (Penelope Ann Miller). Miss Schlowski (Linda Hunt) is the school principal. Kimble, Joyce, and O'Hara go to dinner, after which Kimble confesses that the kids are running all over him. O'Hara tells him, "no fear." He starts training them like cadets -- a full physical-fitness training program. Sit-ups, running, jumping jacks. Kimble thinks he's figured out that it's Zach he's looking for, then meets Zach's mom (Jayne Brook), who confesses that she knows about Zach's bruises, but that her husband is in therapy. Kimble realizes he's at a dead-end with his search for Crisp's kid, but tells Zach's mom that he'll press charges if her husband does it again. It's dinnertime at Joyce's house, with her kid, Dominic. Kimble thinks that Joyce and Dominic might very well be Crisp's ex-wife and child. They are. Crisp shows up. People are kidnapped. People are rescued. Happy ending all around. Except Crisp, who dies. So does his mom. It's pretty violent, actually. I've seen this movie so many times before -- it was an absolute family favorite -- but this is the first time I've seen it in German. It's really pretty awesome in German. "Eins, zwei, drei, vier!" Fist of Jesus (2023) -- "8/10" This was a pitch-perfect spoof of parts of the story of Jesus, told as a hyper-violent zombie/action movie. Jesus is trying to show off and brings Lazarus back from there dead. He rises, but as a zombie, quickly infecting everyone but Jesus and Judas. They scream and flee, hunted throughout the small village by roving bands of villager-zombies, Roman-centurion-zombies, and cowboy-zombies. After getting trapped in a field, hemmed in on all sides, Jesus conjures fishes, multiplies them and wields them as weapons, as throwing stars, chainsaws, swords, everything. Judas grabs a giant swordfish and joins in. It's a bloodbath. Fist of Jesus is not the best movie ever, but it had absolutely no right being as good as it was. It just goes to show that funny writing, absolutely fantastic editing, and good directing goes so much farther than effects. And the effects were actually good! Not lifelike, but well-choreographed. I watched it in Spanish with English subtitles. Les Misérables (1998) -- "8/10" Jean Valjean (Liam Neeson) is a criminal, out for only four days on parole after 19 years of hard labor. He ends up in a town, sleeping on a bench. An old woman urges him to go to a local church, where he is fed and given shelter. He repays them by stealing the silverware and punching the priest (Tim Barlow) in the eye. The police captures him, bringing him back to the priest, who absolves him, telling the police that he allowed Valjean to take the silverware and wonders why he'd forgotten the candlesticks. Years later, Valjean is mayor of the town. His new chief inspector is Javert (Geoffrey Rush), who is absolutely hell-bent on putting Valjean back in jail, for something -- anything! -- because he does not believe in rehabilitation. Valjean is no saint. He fires a local woman Fantine (Uma Thurman), consigning her to a fate of prostitution and dire illness, trying to scratch together enough money to pay rent, heat her apartment, and to bring her child Cosette (Claire Danes) back to her. The film depicts an utterly cruel and lost society, filled with the worst people. Rich men haggle with freezing whores, then try to rape them while the police look on. Valjean learns that a "Jean Valjean" is on trial. He travels to Paris to attend the trial. After watching his previous comrades -- 19 years together on the chain -- snitch to hang another man for what were his crimes, he stands and confesses, come what may. Valjean returns to Fantine, only to be confronted by Javert, who delights in his guilt. Javert's accusations push Fantine over the edge, and she dies in her bed. Valjean finally pops Javert in the noggin and escapes, first transferring ownership of his factory to his workers, then collecting a go-bag that he'd buried by a tree in a field outside of town. Javert's enthusiasm to catch him makes him tip his entire stagecoach. He continues on foot, running to catch the slowly moving coach in front of him, only to find that Valjean had switched places with a local farmer. Valjean continues to the town where Cosette lives in a horrible foster home, with two horrible foster parents who cavil every sou they can get out of him. He wants to take Cosette with him and lays FF500 on the table, but the man tries to bargain up to FF1500, but then says he couldn't consider it, morally. Valjean is sarcastically relieved, then shows the man a letter from Cosette's mother, allowing him to take the girl with him for free. Valjean returns to the village where he'd been mayor, staying in hiding in a church convent while Javert searches high and low for him. Javert is thwarted from searching the grounds, and Javert and Cosette escape. Ten years later, they are still in the church. Valjean, on the urging and advice of his friend, takes Cosette into the world. His friend tells him that the world has changed, that he should return to it. He agrees and decides to buy a house and move in. Javert is still out there, fighting against the revolution. Cosette starts agitating to have her own life because she's hot for a local revolutionary Marius (Hans Matheson). Javert is determined to tell her father that she's consorting with a known revolutionary. He visits the home, but Valjean slips out, leaving Cosette to speak with Javert. She breaks into histrionics afterward, demanding that he tell his story. He tells her that he's a convict, that he'd been sentenced to 20 years of hard labor for stealing a loaf of bread. He tells her his story, while they sit on a white piano bench, next to a white grand piano, in a study the size of most people's apartments. Javert soon discovers that Lafitte is Valjean. Valjean and Cosette decide to leave town, in the middle of the night. The next day, Marius helps start the revolution. Cosette tells her father that she needs to wait for Marius to return from the barricades and that she loves him. Meanwhile, Javert is scurrying and skulking about the city, pursuing his quarry, Valjean. He literally couldn't care less about the revolution, he's focused laser-like only on his eternal quarry. Cosette ventures out of doors to meet Marius. The trap shuts on her, completely expectedly. Javert has her dead to rights. She actually gets the drop on him, throws him to the ground, then unties Marius and gives him Javert's gun. Marius frog-marches Javert to the barricades to "face the people's justice." Valjean goes into the streets, to a hospital, to find Marius. Instead, he finds Javert, tied to a post, utterly unrepentant. A revolutionary says "Do you know him? When we have a spare bullet, we get to kill him." Valjean continues to the barricades to send Marius to Cosette. A little boy robbing corpses is shot through the back. They carry the corpse inside, where Valjean takes on the job of "taking care of" Javert. Javert is incensed that not only has Valjean "beaten him", but that Valjean doesn't even seem to care that he's "won". And now Valjean wants to let him go. "You should kill me. I won't stop. You don't understand. I won't let you go. You should end this. Kill me." In the early gloaming of day, their positions are compromised by heavy artillery. A seemingly indomitable Valjean takes a wounded Marius into the sewers, then out somewhere along the Seine. And ... to no-one's surprise at all, Javert is right exactly in that one spot in the tiny city of Paris to meet him. Javert agrees to let Valjean take Marius back to his home, to Cosette. He takes his leave of her, giving Cosette her mother's broach, at which Cosette can only stare at stupidly. Valjean leaves with the guards and returns to Javert, on the banks of the Seine. Javert says, "I've tried to live my life without breaking a single rule." and "you're free" before he removes Valjean's handcuffs, puts them on himself and tips himself backwards into the Seine. Valjean watches the ripples, then walks increasingly quickly and confidently along the banks of the Seine, a grin spreading across his face. A bunch of the acting is quite wooden, especially Claire Danes, who seems ludicrously out of place. Geoffrey Rush is always good. Liam Neeson was also quite good. Uma Thurman as well. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4763 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4763 Wed, 13 Sep 2023 22:40:40 +0200 of around 1600 ratings publicly available. I've included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other -- I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984) -- "7/10" It's amazing to see what a feature science-fiction film could look like in the 80s. It kind of looks like the TV show sometimes, with the focus on the acting, dialogue, and plot rather than CGI effects. This film picks up right where Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan left off, after Khan (Ricardo Montalbán) had detonated the Genesis device. Spock (Leonard Nimoy) had died saving the others and his casket had been sent down to that planet. In this film, McCoy (DeForest Kelly) starts acting strangely, going into occasional fugue states where he seems to be channeling Spock's memories. Meanwhile, on the planet, David Marcus (Merritt Butrick) and Saavik (Robin Curtis) are on the Genesis planet, observing its chaotic development -- and it's increasing instability. Lifeforms are charging through their lives at an incredible pace. They find a young Vulcan, whom they can only assume is a resurrected Spock, but without his life experiences and his memories. The child quickly develops into a teenager, then becomes a man as he undergoes the Vulcan adolescence ritual at an incredibly accelerated rate. Klingon captain Kruge (Christopher Lloyd) is sniffing around, trying to get control of the Genesis device, leading to a standoff with Kirk -- who ends up sacrificing the Enterprise in a self-detonation in which he's trapped most of the opposing Klingon crew. The Enterprise crew, meanwhile, has beamed to the disintegrating planet, where Kirk and Kruge fight -- mano a mano -- to Kruge's death. Kirk and his crew fly the partially disable Klingon Bird of Prey to Vulcan, where they deposit Spock's memories from McCoy's mind back into Spock's body. The process is mostly successful, but will take time to complete. Joker (2019) -- "10/10" My rating from "a prior review" is unchanged. Amazing film. Watched it in English with French subtitles. I Love You, Man (2009) -- "7/10" This is a great cast: Peter Klaven (Paul Rudd) is a nice guy who has not male friends. He's going to marry Zooey (Rashida Jones), who has a lot of friends, Denise (Jaime Pressly) (who's married to Barry (Jon Favreau)), Hailey (Sarah Burns). His fencing colleagues Eugene (Aziz Ansari) and Larry (Nick Kroll) don't see him as a friend. His coworker Tevin (Rob Huebel) is a dead-end. After several bad "dates", Lonnie (Joe Lo Truglio), organized by his gay brother Robbie (Andy Samberg) and Doug (Thomas Lennon), organized by his mom Joyce (Jane Curtin) and his dad (J.K. Simmons). Peter finally meets Sidney (Jason Segel). "J.K. Simmons My best friend, Hank Mardukas." Peter and Sydney hit it off amazingly well, but Peter starts to become filled with self-doubt and sees danger and subterfuge in small details -- especially after Zooey tells him that he's now spending an unhealthy amount of time With Sydney. He cuts of the relationship. Sydney borrows $8000 from Peter and Peter is worried that he's spent it on frivolous investments -- until he discovers that Sydney has bought billboards for Peter all over the city. Peter starts to feel bad that he's broken up with Sydney, especially after Lou Ferrigno signs back up with him after having seen the billboards. He doesn't reinvite him to the wedding though, going without a best man instead. Zooey calls Sydney to show up -- and Sydney picks up while in a tux, on his Vespa on the PCH, clearly headed for the wedding already. Game Night (2018) -- "6/10" This is a movie about Max (Jason Bateman) and Annie (Rachel McAdams), who are absolute game nuts. They'd bet during a bar-trivia contest and fallen in love immediately. The movie is littered with references to various game-related things they'd done on vacations over the ensuing years. They're married and trying to have a baby, but Max's sperm count is low -- because of his feelings of inadequacy toward his more-dynamic brother Brooks (Kyle Chandler). Brooks organizes a game night that involves a kidnapping, but it's interrupted by a real-life kidnapping executed by people to whom Brooks owes money, The Bulgarian (Michael C. Hall). It gets more complicated, as they slowly discover that the game is actually real, having "solved" a bunch of it with no fear because they thought that it was not. On top of that, a former game-nighter who is no longer invited Gary (Jesse Plemons), is also running a fake game night to get revenge on them for having dropped him. He was hoping to get back into their good graces by proving what a cool game-master he is. He gets shot by the Bulgarian's henchmen. They end up rescuing, then selling, a WITSEC list. Brooks ends up under house arrest, and hosts another game night as shadowy forces gather outside. I'm sure they thought that there would be a sequel. I doubt there will be. The movie wasn't that good. I gave it an extra point for Jason Bateman's deadpan performance. There are a bunch of sub-plots and jokes with the other couples, but only Sharon Horgan is actually very interesting. Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) -- "10/10" I love nearly everything about this movie. All of the players are so good. See "my review from early 2016" . I saw it in German this time, though it doesn't matter so much, as there's nearly no dialogue. Total Recall (1990) -- "8/10" The movie starts with the full credits. It's super-confident that people are going to stick around without even getting a taste of the action. The movie starts with Doug Quaid (Arnold Schwarzenegger) in bed with his wife Lori (Sharon Stone). Director Paul Verhoeven certainly knows how to make a love scene. Stone is sexy and even Schwarzenegger can't ruin it. Douglas Quaid goes to work, but ends up at Recall, an agency that helps you "remember it wholesale." He chooses the femme fatale, getting excited about being with a hot woman -- didn't he just say that he's been married to Sharon Stone for eight years? Sharon Stone in her prime? Didn't they just have morning sex? Anyway, he gets into the machine, but something about his fantasy about going to Mars goes absolutely sideways. The entire staff has to calm him down and ends up throwing him out, leaving him with only vague memories of what happened. Once outside, he meets a buddy from work, who ends up trying to kill him, along with a bunch of other thugs. Quaid takes them all out. Is this happening? Was the "emergency" at the Recall offices real? Or was that just the start of his fantasy? He gets home to Lori, who's pissed that he went to Recall. She also rolls her eyes when he tells her about Mars. Perhaps she knows that his buried memories are real. She does. She calls Richter (Michael Ironside). She must get orders to take him out because she starts shooting at him, then beats the crap out of him -- focusing on the family jewels. Now it's a knife-fight. She's slashing away, adorned in her 80s-style aerobics outfit. He gets her at gunpoint. She admits that she'd never seen him before six weeks ago. She tells him he's an agent with a memory implant -- that his life is just a dream. She doesn't know who he is; she just works there. He was her best contract, then offers to bang him one last time -- but only to buy time for the backup team to arrive. Clever girl. Richter shows up, asking Lori what Quaid remembers. "Nothing." They kiss. What?!? Quaid is on the run. Richter and his goons give chase. After a bit, the weapons open up on the escalators. There are giant, bloody squibs everywhere. Like, it's seriously, awesomely, and convincingly gory. The effects are much, much better than I expected. They held up really well, for the most part. When he's pulling the tracker out of his nose, it's pretty convincing. The trick with the probe in the rat was pretty neat, and who cares if the graphics on that guy's tracker look dated? The concept works. Quaid's on Mars now. I kind of like that Richter was not only stupid enough to have a projectile weapon in a pressurized environment, but that the movie showed the consequences immediately -- he blows out a "window" and a whole section of the immigration area has to be closed down. Quaid meets up with Melina (Rachel Ticotin), who identifies him as Hauser. She ends up sending him away, not much wiser than before. Next, he's visited by a doctor who tells him that he's currently living out a fantasy -- that he's currently tied up in the Recall facility and that he's not really on Mars, that nothing is really happening. The doctor brings in Lori, who tells him she loves him. The doctor hands him a red pill; he has to take the pill to go back to reality. Quaid threatens the doctor, saying that, if it's really a fantasy, then he could kill the doctor, right? OMG a red pill! Really!?! After seeing the doctor sweating, Quaid caps the doctor and spits the pill out on his corpse. Men storm the room and overwhelm Quaid. Lori gets in a few shots on the family jewels -- she really likes doing that -- before they tie him up and call Richter. Before they can go to work on him, Melina shows up with a machine gun, clearing the room of everyone but Lori, who disarms her and starts a knock-down, drag-out fistfight with Melina. Lori gets the better of her, but Quaid gets the drop on Lori and puts one between her eyes when she starts cooing at him that she loves him. Melina and Quaid flee. They get back to the bar where first inquired after her and sneak out a hidden tunnel. Richter is close behind. When no-one will tell him where they went, he and his men just start murdering everyone in the restaurant. It's kind of understandable that Richter's pissed, I guess. Quaid had just murdered his lover. Cohaagen (Ronny Cox) orders Richter back and then shuts down the air supply to mutant-town. Melina, Benny, the taxi driver (Mel Johnson Jr.), and Quaid/Hauser retreat further into the catacombs, where they meet up with the rebel underground -- and will meet...Quato, one of sci-fi movie's best inventions ever. Quato is a telepathic conjoined body attached to the torso of the rebel leader George (Marshall Bell). Quato helps Quaid remember that he'd seen an alien hand in the Martian excavations when he was first on Mars. The seance is interrupted by Cohaagen's tunnel-drilling machines. George (w/Quato), Quaid, Benny, and Melina flee to an airlock, but Benny betrays them, gunning down George. Quato lives long enough to tell Quaid to shut down the reactors. Benny thanks Quaid for having led Cohaagen's troops directly to them. It turns out that Hauser had arranged everything so that they could break past Quato's mental shield and get to the rebel alliance. Quaid doesn't believe it -- but Hauser isn't him. After this giant mind-fuck, Melina and Quaid are bound into recall machines, to reprogram Quaid as Hauser and to make Melina a loving, obedient wife. This doesn't work, as Quaid pulls the machine apart with his giant muscles. The ensuing fight scene is exceedingly bloody. Quaid and Melina flee into the tunnels once again. There, Benny is right behind them with a drilling machine. Quaid picks up a hand model: "Screw you, Benny!" Melina gets hit in the head with a fake, movie rock in what I can only imagine was a completely unintended coincidence. Benny inadvertently opens a tunnel to the alien Oxygen machine. In the reactor room, Richter and dozens of men attack him, gunning him down mercilessly. The hologram device from a much-earlier scene shows up like Chekhov's gun. He and Melina toss it back and forth to take care of all of Richter's troops. The denouement between Richter and Quaid is coming up, though. Another famous scene is the open elevator, where Richter ends up falling to his death while his arms stay in the elevator. "See you at the party, Richter." Next up is Cohaagen, who magically appears with a bomb that Quaid manages to throw into an air vent, but it still blows a hole to the Martian surface. Cue people holding onto things while stretched out horizontally. Quaid throws Cohaagen out the hole. Quaid engages the alien reactor. Quaid and Melina are sucked out of the hole. Cohaagen's face is popping open. The machine starts producing Oxygen quickly enough to save Quaid and Melina, though. I watched in German. XxX: Return of Xander Cage (2017) -- "5/10" Xander Cage (Vin Diesel) is back, being whatever form of cool people seem to keep coming back to his movies for. At one point, Xander Cage and some other dude are just riding motorcycles across water, which works just fine because there's some weird ski on the tires, which of course would work. This is proven physics. The head of the XxX program Jane Marke (Toni Collette) is noteworthy only because of the actress playing her. She gets Xander back into the game. She is accompanied by Becky Clearidge (Nina Dobrev), who is this movie's version of Q. Honestly, she's probably one of the better roles in this movie. Xiang (Donnie Yen) stole something called Pandora's Box, which is some sort of all-powerful, electronic, hacking device or something. In German, they call it die Buchse der Pandora, which is kind of a phonetic translation? But it translates to "Pandora's can," which is definitely a different body part than her box. Donnie Yen is, as usual, the absolute best thing about this movie. His choreography and filming of it is the best. Super-fast, super-precise. Tony Jaa's cuts a bit too much. Anyway, Xiang's working with Serena Unger (Deepika Padukone), who always dresses in thigh-high, leather boots, even on a sand-filled island camp, which is an oddly terrible fashion choice. Talon's (Tony Jaa) quite a little fighter, but I'm not at all surprised by that. There's so much green-screening in this movie, it's kind of sad. Adele Wolff (Ruby Rose) is dressed exactly like Lara Croft. She is still the angry, powerful lesbian -- just like she is in every movie. Tennyson Torch (Rory McCann) is fun to watch -- but mostly because I remember him as "The Hound" in Game of Thrones. Also, there is no way that this movie is not taking the piss: Torch throws his mouthguard in just before he charges into a hail of bullets -- and is struck only in the shoulder and hindquarters. They're also doing some sort of grrrl-action thing here, with Wolff, Serena, and Becky clearing a whole warehouse of bad guys by themselves, with lots of hero-posing and slow-motion gun-twirling. They're then trapped, with the guys taking up a supporting role -- women still in charge. They call out the count to jump back into a deadly fracas -- another hail of bullets -- when Darius Stone (Ice Cube) appears literally out of nowhere with a grenade launcher to mow down all the remaining baddies. A pure Deus Ex Machina. We're supposed to remember him from previous movies, I'm guessing. Meanwhile, Marke gets the drop on Xiang by kneecapping him, but he gets the drop on her by tossing her out of the back of the plane that they're all going to die in. Xander is meanwhile flying the plane into a de-orbiting satellite. Just before it hits, he jumps out of the back of the plane -- but it's kind of unclear where Xiang went. You almost know he didn't just die. Also, Xander crashes into Earth on a rapidly decelerating freight package attached to a giant parachute. Holy shit, Xiang is just with the crew when they drive out to meet Xander. WTF!?! They didn't even bother to show how he got out of the plane! NO PROBLEM. Round out the reunion with Xander and Darius hugging and chest-thumping and congratulating each other on how the whole world will be searching for them. That doesn't stop them from all showing up for Augustus Gibbons's (Samuel L. Jackson) funeral, which is totally fake because he's attending his own funeral. He's even got an eyepatch, as if he's playing his Nick Fury role. Weird: And Xander is sliding into his role as Dominic Turturro There is literally no way that Alex Restrepo doesn't watch this movie at least twice per year. Ah, what am I talking about? I'm watching this damned thing, too. I gave it an extra star because of the self-aware tongue-in-cheek moments and the quality of some of the cast. I watched it in German. South Park S26 (2023) -- "8/10" They're still doing a great job, after all of these years. So far, they've covered, * The first episode has Cartman possessed by "Cupid Ye", who tells him that Jews run Hollywood. Everyone at school believes it and the students start to submit scripts to Kyle. * An episode about the prince and princess of Canada moving to South Park because they just want some privacy * An episode about Japanese toilets, which hits home so hard, with it's absolutely iron-clad logic that everything about how we take shits in the west is pretty topsy-turvy. We shit into drinking water then wipe our asses with perfumed and shredded trees. We used to have bidets, but we got rid of them, in exchange for super-sized plumbing systems that can swallow tons of paper. Big toilet paper is behind it all, of course. * An episode about ChatGPT, where Clyde and Stan use it to generate generic responses to their girlfriends, so that they don't have to answer endless text messages manually. More of the boys are caught cheating on their essays -- as is Mr. Garrison, who uses ChatGPT to grade them. * An episode about work ethic, in which Butters gets a job working at an ice-cream shop. He shows up at the basketball court, waving a paycheck. Cartman wants in, so he shows up at the ice-cream shop to start his job. he does nothing. He lasts less than four hours, as predicted. He wants to work from home, he's on the phone, he needs his breaks. He bails and starts a new business idea with Kenny -- Dickenbaus Hot Dogs. He goes to Butters for funding. They drain his bank account building Cartman's hot-dog house into a mini-theme-park, but they can't get anyone to work at it. Nor are they obviously willing to work themselves. Butters shows up, realizes the money is all gone, and starts his second job there, turning it into a success. He gets his money back, and more, then sells immediately to a foreign investor, paying Cartman's mother to move back into her old house -- taking Cartman away from the little paradise that he'd built for himself. Armageddon (1998) -- "9/10" I'm an absolute sucker for this movie, but upon re-viewing, it's obvious why. It hits all of the beats, it's an actual movie. The cast is great; it's one of Bruce Willis's best movies. How does it start? A bunch of meteorites strike New York. An amateur astronomer reports to NASA that this is just a foretaste of the giant asteroid that's on its way to Earth -- a planet-killer. He names it after his "hinterhältige Giftschlange" of a wife. Next, we meet Harry Stamper (Bruce Willis), owner and founder of an oil-drilling company and leader of a motley crew that's the "best in the world": A.J. (Ben Affleck), Rockhound (Steve Buscemi), Chick (Will Patton), Oscar (Owen Wilson), Bear, (Michael Clarke Duncan), Max (Ken Hudson Campbell). Grace (Liv Tyler) is Harry's daughter and A.J.'s lover and she's a distraction. They are recruited by Dan Truman (Billy Bob Thornton) and join his crew of Watts (Jessica Steen), General Kimsey (Keith David), Willie Sharp (William Fichtner), and so on. They all train together; they do some montages; there are Aerosmith songs. They fix the equipment; they break some; they go out for one night of fun. They're ready to go. Harry says goodbye to Grace and makes her promises, only one of which he will be able to keep. This part is stupid, but I have to mention it because it's filmed in an absolutely awesome, rusted temple of space-flight. It was definitely filmed there and it was definitely a place that the director of photography saw while scouting the John F. Kennedy Space Center. These things don't happen anymore because people don't do that anymore. They would just make some shit up, film it in front of a green screen, and phone that shit in, nice and cheap. We have definitely lost something. We should make an effort to get it back, and look back on these last 10-15 years where literally everything was made digitally dissolve like a bad dream upon waking. Billy Bob is great, as usual, as is Bruce Willis. They play so well that you literally can't imagine anyone else playing the role. Affleck is pretty good, but you can easily imagine Matt Damon playing his role. Steve Buscemi does his lines perfectly. Owen Wilson just plays himself, as usual. They're on their way to Lev Andropov (Peter Stormare), who is an eternal favorite. He plays a Russian on Mir, where the space shuttle docks to refuel. I shit you not. The shuttle gets refueled, but they have to evacuate in a hurry because there's a leak in the fuel line. Lev and A.J. almost get left behind in a disintegrating space station, but they both make it out, just in time. Both shuttles escape by the skin of their teeth. On to the asteroid. I'd forgotten there were two of them -- but there had to be, so one of them could crash into a giant asteroid fragment and kill nearly everyone on board. The shuttle with A.J. crashes, while the other shuttle "lands" -- more or less. Harry and the crew in the landed shuttle debark and get to work. There are a dozen things worse than they'd imagined. They persevere. Bear, A.J., and Lev are alive and they break out of the crashed shuttle with the armadillo and head toward a green blip on their radar, hoping for the best. Drilling is going terribly. Colonel Sharpe and Harry get into each other's hair -- the secondary protocol is to just blow up the bomb on the surface of the asteroid. This will, of course, have no effect whatsoever, but military's gonna military, ammirite? Billy Bob demands that Keith David refuse the order and damned if that's not good cinema. The bomb starts blinking; it's been triggered. There's a huge scuffle; guns are drawn; words are said; friendships are made; bombs are defused. A huge asteroid-quake blows the fissure they're working and sends Max into outer space with their only working Armadillo. However, Lev, A.J., and Bear had figured out how to fly with their Armadillo and they've navigated around half the asteroid and show up just in time to finish digging the hole. They reach their depth, but more and more of the asteroid starts raining down on them as Earth's gravity starts pulling it apart. The bomb is damaged -- it will no longer auto-trigger, so someone has to babysit it; a red-shirt dies. They retreat into the ship to pull straws to see who's going to sacrifice themselves. Lev volunteers because he doesn't want to return to the planet as a Russian coward. Rockhound also volunteers because (A) he's crazy from being in space and (B) he knows that he has some very inadvisable debts waiting for him back on Earth. A.J. draws the short straw. Harry takes him to the asteroid surface, but blows his air on him and takes his place. There is a fuckload of melodrama. Harry prepares the bomb while the others prepare for takeoff. The shuttle won't fire. Lev asks Watts to step aside and put away the manual. He beats the everloving Christ out of the engine with a giant wrench. It fires. The shuttle takes off; the bomb doesn't fire. Sharp wants to turn around. Harry's crew believes in him. Harry falls down a hole. He climbs out. He blows the asteroid with a few seconds to spare. The Earth is saved. Statues of Harry Stamper will be built all over the world. The shuttle is somehow still whole and ready to reenter the atmosphere. There's a whole montage about people being grateful. Bullshit. People would forget nearly immediately and just go back to being assholes to each other. Any spirit of cooperation would be soon replaced with the same old empirical aspirations and stupidity. Anyway, the shuttle lands and Grace is out on the tarmac in a dress rather than the fire-safety equipment everyone else is wearing. More melodrama, but fine. I saw it in German this time. Mad Max (1979) -- "7/10" This is the original film that started it all, following Max Rockatansky (Mel Gibson), as he hunts psychos across the Australian Outback. He's a police officer, and the world is more gone than it was at the time, but not so far gone that he doesn't have a wife, child, and home to return to after his multi-day shifts. Spoiler: this movie is a lot more normal than I'd remembered. We join him as he takes down a certain Nightrider (Vince Gil), who seems utterly whacked out and devil-may-care. He and his girlfriend die in pretty much a self-inflicted fiery cataclysm. This doesn't prevent his crew from seeking vengeance, though. The crew is a motorcycle gang that shows up in town, led by the unusually named Toecutter (Hugh Keays-Byrne). They hunt down a young couple (M/F), raping them both and destroying their car utterly. The one guy the cops manage to catch is let go for lack of evidence to convict him of anything. This is a shame because you should be able to at least get time for extremely poor fashion choices or shockingly poor impulse control. TIL "the bronze" means "the police". Max's partner Jim Goose (Steve Bisley) is absolutely pissed that they had to let Johnny the Boy (Tim Burns) go and he swears he'll find him out on the road. Johnny and Toecutter find Jim first. Jim flies off of his bike because of a trap, but recovers. As he's driving back with the tow truck, with his bike in the back, Johnny throws a brake drum through his windshield -- with utterly preternatural precision -- sending him off the road in what is his second big vehicular accident of the day. Upside-down and covered in leaking gasoline, Goose ... well, his goose is cooked. Johnny argues with Toecutter about whether they're really going to do it, but do it they do. Max finds Goose in the hospital, under a tent, burned to a crisp. He storms off, claiming that that's not Goose. It is, though, though not for long. After a shitty, sleepless night, Max goes to his commanding officer Fifi (Roger Ward) to quit. Fifi looks kind of like the guy who Indiana Jones fought at the airplane in his first outing. Max is now on the road with his wife Jessie (Joanne Samuel) and child Sproggo (Brendan Heath) and dog, dressed like a chump in nice pants and shirt. When they get a flat tire, he stays at the garage to help, while his wife takes their child "Sproggo" for an ice cream. To no-one's surprise at all, Toecutter and his gang happen to be there. Tocutter gets some of her ice cream, but she knees him in the balls and hightails it out of there. She stops to pick up Max. They leave the tire. They end up at the coast, visiting friends. Life is idyllic, for a while. Jessie heads down to the beach with the dog and spends a lovely, sleepy few hours there. On the way back through the woods, Toecutter's gang is back to terrorize her. She makes it back home, into Max's arms. He heads into the woods, armed with a shotgun and dressed in his white A-Frame shirt and beige khakis -- which he was wearing while repairing the car. After she calms down, Jessie remembers that she has no idea where her child is. Luckily, Toecutter and his gang found the boy and they're all posted up on the farm where Max and Jessie are staying, all without anyone noticing. May shows up with a shotgun and herds the gang into the barn, while she, Jessie, and Sprog take off. There are just so many unexpected escapes for Jessie and Sprog. I suppose I should interject at this point that this isn't at all how I remembered this movie. I don't think anyone really remembers this one. I think we all remember Mad Max 2 and Beyond the Thunderdome much more. Jessie's car dies. May sends her packing and tries to stand down the gang, but they blaze right by her. They run Jessie and Sprog down. A shoe and toy ball bounce across the road. Max appears, running to the white pile of clothing that used to be his wife and child. They get her to a hospital, but she's a mess. They stabilize her, but she's not out of the woods. No-one mentions the child. Max flips his wig a little, quite rightly. He gets out his old police uniform and collects the 600HP vehicle he'd never gotten a chance to drive. He's on the hunt now, driving down the gang and taunting them into giving chase. He blasts through them like bowling pins. Max drives into a prohibited area, seeing a person lying in the long grass next to a motorcycle. It's a trap, of course. Toectutter or Bubba (Geoff Parry) shoots out his knee, then runs over his hand. Max gets control of his shotgun and takes out Bubba, but Johnny and Toecutter get away. Max gives chase in his hyper-vehicle. He's lost some blood. ...but not as much as Toecutter does when he drives head-first into a tractor-trailer truck. After that, Max drives around a bunch until he manages to find Johnny, who's taken out another victim. He's stealing his boots. Max makes him cuff his own ankle, then hooks the other end to a truck axle. He gives him a hacksaw: it takes ten minutes to saw through the axle, but only five to saw through an ankle. The truck's going to blow up long before then, anyway. BOOM. The end. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4727 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4727 Fri, 04 Aug 2023 15:21:43 +0200 -- "6/10" 2. "Blackadder the Third (1987)" <#Blackadder3> -- "7/10" 3. "Blackadder Goes Forth (1989)" <#Blackadder4> -- "8/10" 4. "Kleine Fische (2009)" <#Kleine> -- "6/10" 5. "L'agence tous risques (The A-Team) (2010)" <#L> -- "4/10" 6. "John Mulaney: Baby J (2023)" <#John> -- "8/10" 7. "Le Mans 66: Gegen jede Chance (2019)" <#Le> -- "9/10" 8. "Mad Max Beyond the Thunderdome (1985)" <#Mad> -- "7/10" 9. "Beverly Hills Cop III (1994)" <#Beverly> -- "5/10" 10. "Contact (1997)" <#Contact> -- "10/10" These are my notes to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. I've recently transferred my reviews to IMDb and made "the list" of around 1600 ratings publicly available. I've included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other -- I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. Ted Lasso S03 (2023) -- "6/10" At the very least, I've learned that "Viktor Maslov is the Soviet Pioneer of the 4-4-2 Formation & the Inventor of Pressing" . The season starts off with a round of introducing everyone and establishing how horrible Rupert is, but also how everyone has to spend every waking minute responding to his every provocation. Most of the people in this show are reactive: they don't actually have a plan for themselves, so their day is consumed with reacting to how other people think of them. Coach Beard is perhaps the exception here. Ted Lasso has crippling anxiety, for which he's still in therapy, and which is exacerbated by his wife having started dated their erstwhile marriage counselor. This is considered an affront to everyone in the show but, honestly, if they've moved on, what does it matter who she dates now? The heart wants what the heart wants. Does Ted get a veto on anyone who gets to associate with his son when Ted's the one who's moved to a different continent? Grow up. Honestly. The best part of this season is that ZlatanZava has joined Richmond for the season. Jamie Tartt is jealous and Roy offers to train him so that he can play as well as Zava. Zava carries the team to several victories, leading up to a match against West Ham, with Nate at the helm. They lose it. They lose all of their games without Zava, who has retired from football for his own mysterious reasons. The team travels to Amsterdam for a friendly match, which they lose horribly, 5--0. Coach gives them the night off because they're already in a rut. Roy makes Jamie go out for training with him, but Jamie knows the city like the back of his hand and gets the upper hand. Roy doesn't know how to ride a bike, so Jamie teaches him, so they can get to the windmills that Roy also doesn't believe in. Beard drops acid, with Ted not doing it, until he's finally bored into it -- long after Beard has left. Will the ballboy and Higgins go to a jazz club. Rebecca doesn't know what a bike lane is, so she gets run off a bridge into the water and into a handsome Dutch man's boat. Colin sneaks off to a gay bar, with Trent following him. Trent reveals to him that he's gay too, and that's OK. The rest of the crew fights between going to a sex show and traveling two hours to a private party. They've agreed to go to the party, but then get mired down in food. Coach Ted ends up at Museumnacht, tripping balls. The show focuses more on the private lives of the players -- and continues, of course, to focus on the inner life of the titular character, despite him being unbelievably boring and utterly unconvincing in his supposed misery due to self-confidence-deficit-induced panic attacks. Obisanye is apparently also a figure to be pitied because he doesn't get to play for the Nigerian national team (don't worry; he will by the end of the season) while his extremely successful Nigerian restaurant is trashed, but his wonderful team-ful of colleagues jump in to repair everything with skills that they somehow also acquired while being superstar footballers. You see: the menial class doesn't do anything that requires any skill that their betters couldn't pick up in a few minutes. The next couple of shows present dilemmas like what to do with a billion-dollar buyout deal for the team (Rebecca) or Keeley having to manage to build her business without dozens of millions in VC financing (spoiler: she does, because she's an f'ing brilliant businesswoman, obviously, despite her clear mental deficits). Jamie's story is perhaps more interesting than the others -- his development was kind of interesting and fun to watch, but he'd kind of finished it a season ago. Now, we're not legitimately concerned that he's going to fall off the wagon and "go back to his old ways" again. No tension, no risk; just fan service. Holy shit, there was absolutely no need for episode to 12 to even exist, to say nothing of being 82 minutes long. It's just one long chunk of extremely self-indulgent fan-service in which absolutely everything works out for everyone, and no-one suffers in any way whatsoever, and everyone has lots of money. The end. If moronic fans manage to force Apple to resurrect this show, then I will not be the first to watch a fourth season. The third was already enough of a going-through-the-motions, member-berries orgy of 80-minute shows. It was similar to the finale of Stranger Things, where it got so self-indulgent, I could no longer figure out why they were even doing it. There is less art to this, and more cold calculation of profit and loss. Obviously, that's the only way that our world is going to work, apparently, but I'm not going to applaud it, or pretend that it's art. Blackadder the Third (1987) -- "7/10" In this season, Blackadder (Rowan Atkinson) has been resurrected in the late 18th century, as a butler to George, Prince of Wales (Hugh Laurie). Baldrick (Tony Robinson) is back as his filthy manservant. Cyril is no longer with them, but Tim McInnerny shows up as the Scarlet Pimpernel for one episode. The first episode introduces Pitt the Younger (Simon Osborne), who Blackadder is immediately annoyed by, and whom he needles incessantly. The second episode, which is Samuel Johnson (Robbie Coltrane) and his famous dictionary, was quite clever. Blackadder is, of course, not impressed with Johnson, and takes to inventing gloriously convincing and fabulously convoluted words in front of him, to convince him that he's not quite finished with his dictionary yet. That scene was laugh-out-loud funny. "I hope you will not object if I also offer the doctor my most enthusiastic contrafribularities. [...] I'm anaspeptic, phrasmotic, even compunctious, to have caused you such pericombobulation. [...] I shall return interphrastically." In episode three, Blackadder is at odds with the Scarlet Pimpernel (Tim McInnerny), who's been smuggling French nobility out from under the revolution. While imprisoned and scheming to get free with Baldrick, he says, "Am I jumping the gun, Baldrick, or are the words, 'I have a cunning plan,' marching with ill-deserved confidence in the direction of this conversation? [...] Forgive me if I don't jump up and down with glee. Your record in this department is not exactly 100%." "I want to be young and wild, and then I want to be middle-aged and rich, and then I want to be old and annoy people by pretending that I'm deaf." In the next episode, the prince is attacked at a play by a bomb-throwing rebel against the industrialization without compensation led by the nobility. The Prince Regent (Hugh Laurie) -- who doesn't understand that plays aren't real, no matter how many times it's explained to him -- stirred by Blackadder's explanation of the plight of the poor and why they might be rebelling, wants elocution lessons from actors in order to be able to deliver the speech himself, to calm the proles. When the actors appear at the castle, Blackadder begins tormenting the them by dropping the word "Macbeth" at every possible opportunity (every mention of which they must superstitiously dispel with an incantation and a savage, reciprocal nose-tweaking). The rest of the episodes were OK, but not nearly as good. The acting is very broad and the dialogue laid on quite thick. The most annoying was the 5th episode, which saw the return of the same actress who played the Queen in the previous season, this time reincarnated as the daughter of a penniless industrialist, who'd briefly captured the prince's attention before he'd discovered her financial status. In the sixth and final episode, Stephen Fry returns as the Duke of Wellington, who wishes to duel with the Prince, whom Blackadder switches places with in order to protect him. Wellington beats the shit out of the Prince, whom he thinks is the servant, defeating the purpose of switching roles to save his own skin. Blackadder Goes Forth (1989) -- "8/10" This is the season from which I'd seen the most clips. Blackadder (Rowan Atkinson) has been resurrected as Captain Blackadder, serving in a trench in WWI under General Sir Anthony Cecil Hogmanay Melchett (Stephen Fry) and his unctuous secretary Captain Kevin Darling (Tim McInnerny). Serving under him, as always, are Private S Baldrick (Tony Robinson), who reprises his role as a lower-class buffoon and Lieutenant The Honourable George Colthurst St. Barleigh (Hugh Laurie), who reprises his as an upper-class one. Atkinson makes a lot of analogies that fall quite flat, but he has a few drily delivered zingers that land pretty well. "General Melchik: When you return, Darling will pump you thoroughly in the debriefing room. "Blackadder: Not while I have any strength remaining, he won't, sir." And, "Darling: Y0u'd better find the German spy or I'll make it very hard for you! Blackadder: Please, Darling. There are ladies present." The season ends, as all of the others do, with the death of the entire cast as they charge "go over" the trench and out into no-man's land, on Melchett's orders. They all die immediately, as so many hundreds of thousands actually did. George plays straight man, mindlessly regurgitating the mindset of the elites that are both his compatriots-in-class, but also the ones who sent him to the front -- something he doesn't mind at all because he's very, very gung-ho to "go to Berlin", as he puts it. "George: The war started because of the vile Hun and his villainous empire-building. "Edmund: George, the British Empire at present covers a quarter of the globe, while the German Empire consists of a small sausage factory in Tanganyika. I hardly think that we can be entirely absolved of blame on the imperialistic front." Blackadder lays out the situation as it really was and -- as he clearly alludes -- it also was in the early 90s, when this show was made. It also happens to still be how the situation is: a global competition among elites, bent on carving up colonies for themselves, pretending that they're interested in preventing war, when they are happy to use it to keep any upstarts, or potential usurpers of even a little bit of their power, in line. "Edmund: You see, Baldrick, in order to prevent war in Europe, two superblocs developed: us, the French and the Russians on one side, and the Germans and Austro-Hungary on the other. The idea was to have two vast opposing armies, each acting as the other’s deterrent. That way there could never be a war. "Baldrick: But this is a sort of a war, isn’t it, sir? "Edmund: Yes, that’s right. You see, there was a tiny flaw in the plan. "George: What was that, sir? "Edmund: It was bollocks." When asked why he no longer enjoyed war as much as he had 15 years ago, he says that it's because it is much easier to die, now that the foe has a level of technological firepower commensurate or exceeding his own. This is all, of course, exceedingly sarcastic and cutting. "Edmund: Well, you see, George, I did like it, back in the old days when the prerequisite of a British campaign was that the enemy should under no circumstances carry guns — even spears made us think twice. The kind of people we liked to fight were two feet tall and armed with dry grass. "[...] "No, when I joined up, I never imagined anything as awful as this war. I’d had fifteen years of military experience, perfecting the art of ordering a pink gin and saying “Do you do it doggy-doggy?” in Swahili, and then suddenly four-and-a-half million heavily armed Germans hoved into view. That was a shock, I can tell you." When George expresses the hope that the war has ended without his having had to die, like all of his old school-chums, Blackadder replies, "Edmund: (loading his revolver) I’m afraid not. The guns have stopped because we’re about to attack. Not even our generals are mad enough to shell their own men. They think it’s far more sporting to let the Germans do it." And, when Baldrick says that he has a cunning plan for the final time ever (this was one of his tropes), Blackadder answers, "Captain Blackadder: Well, I'm afraid it's too late. Whatever it was, I'm sure it was better than my plan to get out of here by pretending to be mad. I mean, who would have noticed another madman round here?" There were a lot of flat jokes and bad jokes over the four seasons. However, all in all, I'm quite glad that I watched it all, in order. it grew better and slightly cleverer over time and it was quite a grand experiment, being set in four very different time periods, always with the same actors, and always killing the entire cast at the end of each season. Kleine Fische (2009) -- "6/10" Four friends in Switzerland are part of an amateur curling team. They all have financial problems of one kind or another. One of them dies in a car accident, under somewhat suspicious circumstances. It seems that he may have killed himself. When his friends go through his worldly effects, they discover that he'd put together a detailed plan for robbing the bank where he'd worked. The friends consider trying to pull it off, but one of them jumps ship, while the other two soldier on. The other guy rejoins the group when he realizes how bad his money problems are. During the sneaky planning, one guy's wife throws him out because she thinks he's cheating on her. The other guy is quite a Lothario, and is now sleeping with a very young woman, from whom he's trying the access code to the bank. At the same time, he's having an affair with the bank owner's wife, who catches him in flagrante delicto with the other girl. It was OK, but pretty bog-standard and didn't contain any real surprises. I watched it in Swiss German. L'agence tous risques (The A-Team) (2010) -- "4/10" The last time I watched this movie, I gave it a 4/10. It didn't get any better when I watched (well, mostly listened to) it in French. The cast is kind of promising -- Hannibal (Liam Neeson), Face (Bradley Cooper), Murdock (Sharlto Copley), B.A. Baracus (Quinton 'Rampage' Jackson) -- but the execution is so poor. Charissa Sosa (Jessica Biel) is Face's old flame, highly placed in some government agency. Lynch (Patrick Wilson) chews a lot of scenery being the bad guy, who finally gets fooled by the A-Team's amazing plan to get him to confess to all of his crimes. Jon Hamm shows up at the end in a cameo, taking Lynch's place. I don't know what to tell you. I miss George Peppard, Dirk Benedict, Dwight Schultz, and Mr. T. It's no surprise that this didn't turn into a franchise. John Mulaney: Baby J (2023) -- "8/10" He only has a single topic, but it's a pretty good one. He is there to tell us for 80 minutes about his life on drugs, his intervention, and his rehab. It stretched on a bit long in the end, else I'd have probably given him an extra point. I quite like his storytelling, but he seemed to be telling them somewhat more slowly than necessary, and repeated some bits unnecessarily. Le Mans 66: Gegen jede Chance (2019) -- "9/10" See my "review from 2019" . This is really becoming one of my favorite movies. I watched in German this time. Mad Max Beyond the Thunderdome (1985) -- "7/10" Max (Mel Gibson) stumbles on an encampment called Bartertown, run by Aunty Entity (Tina Turner). He becomes her champion and defeats her enemy, Master-blaster (Angelo Rossitto as Master; Paul Larsson as Blaster), who controls the energy production for the compound. They farm pig shit for methane. He is betrayed by Aunty and cast out into the desert. He falls to the ground on a dune but is found by a member of a jungle tribe that lives conveniently close to the desert. They nurse Max back to health, thinking that he's a "Captain Walker", some sort of figure in their pantheon of Gods. It is a colony of children with the only adult being the slender, attractive, young woman who found him. They are a post-apocalyptic cult, keeping images of the ancient and lost world alive in their mythos. They want Max to take them home. But he's not their Captain Walker. He tries to prove it by throwing his hat away, but a wind comes up, floating things into the air. The children interpret this as a sign and leave their home, storming into the desert, on a mission. They lead Max to the crashed/landed plane of which they spoke. They want him to fly them. He walks away. Back at their encampment, they watch him. He is lost in thought. The children work their way through their mythos, assimilating the new information, finding a new way forward. They decide to leave their oasis; Max wants them to stay. He threatens them, but his rescuer -- the young woman -- is defiant. He knocks her out and brings her back before she can lead her crew to certain death in either the desert or Bartertown. It doesn't help. A bunch of them take off in the night. Max and a small crew give chase the next morning, eventually finding them and rescuing them from a sinkhole in the sand. They are deep in the desert and have no noticeable supplies, especially not nearly enough water. Still, they manage to stumble on Bartertown, where they must take refuge in order to survive. Max leads these innocents into the bowels of the town through a sewer pipe. They find Master and rescue him from his prison cell amonst the pigs. No-one seems to notice the smell. They collaborate to begin to overthrow Aunty's men, who've taken over the underworld. They manage it, more or less. They steal a train out of Bartertown and the who jungle village, including Max and Master, take off across the desert. Aunty and her crew give pursuit. They eventually catch with them and cause havoc. This part seems to be a precursor to the incredible chase scenes from Mad Max: Fury Road. The villagers manage to ditch Aunty's part of the train, but they still have her head henchman attached to the train -- until they don't. They drop him off of a bridge. They bring the train to a stop before they run into a roadblock set up by Jedediah Jr. (Adam Cockburn). They follow him down to Jedediah's (Bruce Spence) lair, where they make him help them flee in their plane. Aunty's crew shows up soon after, giving chase to the plane. This totally looks like Fury Road now, with Tina Turner ripping across the desert in her dune buggy. They need more space to take off in the plane. Max takes a dune buggy and heads off to get it for them. He crashes his truck headlong into the oncoming horde, allowing his friends to take off in their plane. He lies in the desert, just outside the circle of Bartertown's wrecked fleet of dune buggies. Aunty approaches him, "Well, ain't we a pair, raggedy man. Goodbye soldier! [laughs]" The jungle crew lands in what is left of Sydney. Max wanders the desert. I watched it in German. Beverly Hills Cop III (1994) -- "5/10" Axel Foley (Eddie Murphy) returns to California from Detroit, this time to get revenge against a counterfeiting operation that had had his boss killed. He ends up teamed up with Sergeant Billy Rosewood (Judge Reinhold) and Detective Jon Flint (Hector Elizondo). He ends up suspecting the proprietors of Wonder World. He locks horns with the unctuous owner of Wonder World -- who also exercises considerable control over both LA media and police. With the help of a lovely employee at the park (Theresa Randle), Axel manages to prove that they're counterfeiting and gets revenge. The end. The effects and acting were pretty terrible. This barely rose to the level of a television show of the era, to say nothing of a full-fledged film. The fight scenes were laughable; the shooting scenes were kind of bizarre -- sometimes no-one was hurt, but magically; other times, people were shot, but then they shook off their seemingly horrific gunshot wounds with a joke. Contact (1997) -- "10/10" This is honestly one of the best science/science-fiction movies that has ever been made. It's based on the book of the same name by Carl Sagan. It follows the life of Dr. Ellie Arroway (Jodie Foster), whose father bestows upon her a fascination with radio signals of all kinds. This transforms into a career in the SETI project, which takes her to Puerto Rico and the Arecibo radio telescope. Here she meets preacher Palmer Joss (Matthew McConaughey), who challenges her lack of ability to interpret what she does through a spiritual lens, to perhaps imbue it with the appropriate wonder, even if that means that her approach ends up being less-than-scientific. Presidential Science Advisor David Drumlin (Tom Skerritt) thinks searching for alien signals is all a bunch of nonsense, so he torpedoes the project. Ellie goes on a tour to drum up funding and finally finds enigmatic billionaire S. R. Hadden (John Hurt), who sees a spark in Ellie and how is willing to fun her when the government won't. She is set up at the VLA (Very Large Array telescope in New Mexico) when she hears the first actual signal. The U.S. military descends immediately and tries to claim everything for itself, despite not having done any of the research. This neanderthal approach is personified in agent Michael Kitz (James Woods) who plays without much nuance, but sadly probably quite accurately. The project is put under tight security, but Hadden and Arroway are allowed to continue to participate. Together, they discover 63,000 pages of data -- and Hadden provides the key to decrypting it. The data is for a machine, of unknown function. The military is terrified of building it. They proceed to built it anyway, at Cape Canaveral. Ellie is supposed to go in it, but Drumlin usurps her position at the head of the line. He is killed when the machine fails after a religious zealot bombs it as it is spinning up into operation. Hadden reveals to Arroway that his company had constructed a second machine, in Japan -- and that she would be the first passenger. The machine spins up; her pod is dropped in; it disappears. We see her travel through several wormholes, finally ending up on a simulated beach, where an alien posing as her father appears to tell her of the next steps for humanity, should they be willing to do it. She reawakens on Earth, with her pod having simply dropped through the machine -- instead of having been gone for the 18 subjective hours that she felt. None of the vast array of devices recorded anything but noise. Although Ellie is dragged over the coals and publicly ridiculed, the U.S. government privately discusses that, although they only got static on all sensors, they did pick up 18 hours of it. I watched it in Italian, with Italian subtitles. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4722 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4722 Mon, 01 May 2023 22:10:35 +0200 -- "7/10" 2. "Puss in Boots: The Last Wish (2022)" <#Puss> -- "8/10" 3. "Starship Troopers (1997)" <#Starship> -- "9/10" 4. "Jojo Rabbit (2019)" <#Jojo> -- "9/10" 5. "Tour de Pharmacy (2017)" <#Tour> -- "9/10" 6. "Minamata (2020)" <#Minamata> -- "9/10" 7. "The Day after Tomorrow (2004)" <#Tomorrow> -- "6/10" 8. "Orbital Redux (2018)" <#Orbital> -- "8/10" 9. "Blackadder (1982--1983)" <#Blackadder> -- "5/10" 10. "Blackadder II (1986)" <#Blackadder2> -- "7/10" These are my notes to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. I've recently transferred my reviews to IMDb and made "the list" of around 1600 ratings publicly available. I've included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other -- I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. Paddington 2 (2017) -- "7/10" A well-constructed if utterly predictable movie with some standout performances. It's a bit too saccharine for me, but it wasn't over-the-top. It's refreshing to see a movie for children that doesn't look like a cookie-cutter Pixar CGI or Disney cartoon. It's a slower, nicer kind of movie with longer sections of peaceful life and only a few frenetic sections, at the end. Paddington (Ben Wishaw) is living with his family in London. He wants to give his aunt a present for her 100th birthday. He finds a popup book of London at the shop of Mr Gruber (Jim Broadbent), but he can't afford it. So, Paddington finds several successive jobs, which her performs with only modest success, although everyone's always happy with the jolly little bear. Phoenix (Hugh Grant) is a local actor with a lot of bills and a lot of money problems, at the tail end of his career. He plots to steal the popup book because he knows that the author had hidden clues in it that will lead him to a treasure hidden in London somewhere. As he's stealing the book, Paddington tries to apprehend him, but ends up being arrested, tried, and imprisoned for the crime himself. In prison, he meets Knuckles (Brendan Gleeson) as well as many other inmates, all of whom he befriends with his innocent, sweet manner. The Browns continue to try to vindicate Paddington, getting closer and closer to Phoenix, whom they now strongly suspect is behind the subsequent crimes and heists in which he breaks into buildings to get the clues hidden there. He seems to have gone a bit squirrelly and spends considerable time in his attic, talking to costumes stored on mannequins as if they were real people. Grant is quite good here. Paddington breaks out of prison with Knuckles and two others. Though they originally broke out together to prove Paddington's innocence, they others quickly reveal that they'd just like to flee the country instead and that Paddington should come with them. He refuses, electing to clear his name instead. Paddington and the Browns end up at Paddington Station (of course), where Phoenix boards the circus train that holds the calliope that he has determined contains the treasure. He has the secret code -- a sequence of musical notes -- that he has enter in order to reveal the treasure. Paddington interrupts him before he can abscond with it. There is a lot of hijinks involving two parallel-running trains with Phoenix eventually unhitching Paddington's car and derailing it off a bridge and into a river. Knuckles and co. had meanwhile turned their plane around and come to Paddington's rescue. Paddington falls into a coma, from which he awakes only days later -- on Aunt Lucy's birthday. He never managed to get her the book, so he has no present. The Browns -- as well as the rest of the neighborhood -- had flown Aunt Lucy in, so she did get to see London -- and her nephew -- after all. To round out the happy endings, Knuckles and co. are exonerated, while Phoenix ends up in prison, but has a captive audience for his incredibly campy one-man show. Puss in Boots: The Last Wish (2022) -- "8/10" Puss (Antonio Banderas) has used up eight of his nine lives. Because he can't afford his high-risk lifestyle anymore, he retires to a home for cats run by a Mama Luna (Da'Vine Joy Randolph). She will not be important to this movie in the least. Goldilocks (Florence Pugh) and the three bears, Mama (Olivia Colman), Papa (Ray Winstone), and Baby (Samson Kayo) track him to this home, but think that he is dead because they find the grave where he'd buried his costume. In the home, Perrito (Harvey Guillén) befriends Puss. Perrito is an irrepressible chihuahua with a heart of gold posing as a cat. Puss, having heard that Goldilocks is on a mission to get the last wish from a wishing star, heads off on one last mission to get his allotment of nine lives back. He heads off to Big Jack Horner's (John Mulaney) house, where the map to the star can be found. Perrito accompanies him. Along the way, they meet Kitty Softpaws (Salma Hayek). All the while, Puss is threatened by Wolf (Wagner Moura), who is actually Death incarnate, but it's hard to tell how much he's real and how much he's in Puss's mind. The three adventurers are now squared off against Goldilocks and the three bears, as well as Jack Horner and his baker's dozen. The starmap shows a different path to the wishing star depending on who is holding it. Most of the characters are presented with a miserable path, but Perrito sees only sunshine and lollipops because he's a truly good soul. Goldi is conflicted about how to share the wish, should she and the bears get it, as is Puss, who wants to get his nine lives back, especially because Wolf is constantly terrorizing and terrifying him. The bears end up saving Goldi, who ends up saving her brother. Kitty traps Horner in his back of tricks. Puss learns humility and avoids Death's kiss that way -- Death realizes that this is not the same arrogant being who'd disdained his many previous lives. Horner eats a cake to grow to even more prodigious dimensions, allowing him to escape his bag and almost get to the last wish. But Perrito distracts him long enough for the others to destroy the map, and thus, the star, taking Horner with it. Everyone else lived happily ever after. This is definitely a movie from the Shrek universe. It's not nearly as quiet or serene as Paddington 2 was, but it's much funnier. It's also considerably more frenetic, with the first ten minutes feeling like it was made exclusively for people with ADHD. Starship Troopers (1997) -- "9/10" See my "review from just over a year ago." My opinion is unchanged. The only addition I would make is that the news in this movie is refreshingly honest. They actually show the bodies from the a slaughter where the bugs outmatched the humans, wiping out 100,000 humans in one hour. There is no way that would ever happen today, no way they would show film of shredded corpses, no way they would admit that they'd done anything wrong, that they'd underestimated the enemy. The film failed to acknowledge the media environment of the time. Jojo Rabbit (2019) -- "9/10" Jojo (Roman Griffin Davis) is in the Hitler Youth. He thinks he can see Adolf Hitler (Taika Waititi). He is at a camp for with many other youth, training. He is given a rabbit to kill to prove that he's not a coward. He tries to free it, but the older boys grab it, snap its neck, and throw it into the woods, to the applause of all the other children. His imaginary friend Adolf is back and builds him back up, telling him that a rabbit is a hero, not a coward. He encourages Jojo to run back to camp, where the other children are doing an exercise with a potato-masher grenade. He grabs it, runs off with it, throws it, it bounces of a tree, and lands at his feet. It explodes, knocking him off his feet, out of the camp, and nearly taking one of his eyes. His mother Rosie (Scarlett Johansson) picks him up from the hospital and takes him home. She takes him back to the camp organizers, where she makes them take care of him while she works. Captain Klenzendorf (Sam Rockwell), Fraulein Rahm (Rebel Wilson) run the place; they give him a job to do distributing propaganda. He returns home from his first day to discover a girl hiding in his attic -- his mother is harboring a Jew named Elsa (Thomasin McKenzie). Jojo and Adolf are forced to bargain with her because she's a slippery eel. He confronts his mother, but she pretends not to understand. Johannes (Jojo) must come to terms with this situation. Jojo is at physical therapy and asks Klenzendorf and Rahm, who give him spectacularly terrible but utterly hilarious advice. The characters and settings are all very quirky, very Wes Anderson. Jojo decides to take up writing a book about Jews, with Elsa's input as the primary material. Jojo is extremely rude to his mother, but it's quite funny. He provokes her into pretending to be his father. She puts on a whole show where she plays both roles -- father and mother. It's quite good. Johansson is a revelation. Elsa and Jojo continue to get to know each other. Elsa tells him of Rilke; he and Adolf look him up in the library. Jojo writes a pretend-letter from Nathan (Elsa's fiancé) wherein he breaks up with her, hurting her feelings, against her will. Jojo feels bad and reads her another letter, wherein Nathan takes her back. Jojo spends a day with his mother. His mother is a free spirit, against the war. She wants to dance. "Tanzen ist was für Menschen, die nicht arbeiten." Elsa starts to "help" Jojo write his book, telling him all sorts of fairy tales about Jews. He's really quite brainwashed, just shocking. Adolf is getting a bit suspicious of Jojo's relationship with Elsa. Jojo finally sees his old friend Yorki (Archie Yates), who has promoted himself to "soldier". Jojo is walking around in a homemade robot costume, collecting batteries for Hitler. "Elsa: Du bist kein Nazi. Jojo: Ehm, ich stehe total auf Hakenkreuze. Ist ein ziemlich deutliches Zeichen." A crew of Gestapo show up, headed up by Deertz (Stephen Merchant). As they're about to toss the place, Klenzendorf shows up and allays some suspicions, but they continue to search the place. They end up in his room, which is heralded for being absolutely bedecked in Nazi paraphernalia, but Deertz notices that Jojo is missing his knife. Elsa comes to his rescue, playing Inge, Jojo's sister. She's asked to provide papers and she's hardcore ready for all of their questions. She gets her birthday wrong, but Klenzendorf does not betray her. They'll be back -- and then what? Jojo is in a bad spot. Hitler is not happy with Jojo. he lets loose with an absolutely amazing tirade, "Hitler: So langsam hege ich Zweifel an deiner Loyalität gegenüber mir und der Partei. "Du nennst dich einen Patrioten? Aber wo sind die Beweise? "Der deutsche Soldat wurde aus Notwendigkeit geboren. Deutschland ist abhängig von der Leidenschaft dieser jungen Männer. Von ihrer Leidenschaft und Bereitschaft, fürs Vaterland zu fallen, trotz der vergeblichen Anstrengungen der alliierten Kriegsprofiteure, die ihre schlecht vorbereiteten Truppen tapsig in die Wolfshöhle schicken. "Und nur dienstbeflissene Männer, die standhaft sind im Angesicht des Feindes ... werden sich auf ewig einbrennen in das deutsche Gedächtnis. "Und du musst entscheiden, ob du in Erinnerung bleiben oder spurlos verschwinden möchtest ... wie ein erbärmliches Sandkorn in einer Wüste der Bedeutungslosigkeit. "Einfach ausgedrückt: Krieg deinen Scheiß auf die Reihe und setze Prioritäten." He walks through town and finds his mother hanging from the gallows in the town square. He tries to take revenge on Elsa, but cannot. With his mother dead, he is forced to forage for wood and food on his own. The war is going poorly for Germany; the enemy approaches. Elsa and Jojo have only each other now. Jojo meets Yorki again as the city is being attacked by, "Yorki: Die Russen, Jojo. Sie kommen. Und die Amerikaner von der anderen Seite. Und England und China und Afrika und Indien. Die ganze Welt kommt. Jojo: Und wie schlagen wir uns? Yorki: Furchtbar schlecht. Unsere einzigen Freunde sind die Japaner. Und ganz unter uns, die sehen nicht sehr arisch aus." "Yorki: Die Russen sind da draußen. Die sind die Schlimmsten von allen. Ich hab gehört, die essen Babys und haben Sex mit Hunden. Die Engländer machen das auch. Wir müssen sie aufhalten, bevor sie uns essen und all unsere Hunde vögeln." The Allies take the city. Klenzendorf is captured, as is Jojo. Klenzendorf pretends that Jojo is a Jew so that the Allies send him home instead of assassinating him with the others. Interesting that the Allies are considered capable of murdering children just because they're Germans. Back at home, Jojo lies to Elsa that Germany won the war. He doesn't want here to leave. He relatively quickly sees that he cannot do this and lets her know that her lover is waiting for her in Paris. Elsa tells him that her lover died of a disease a year ago. They slowly emerge from the apartment, with Elsa discovering that the Americans have taken over the town and that she is free. They do a little shuffle-dance together and strike out toward their future. I saw it in German. It was amazing in German, even though the original language was English. Tour de Pharmacy (2017) -- "9/10" This mini-mockumentary about the 1982 Tour de France was a 39-minute delight. It was packed with absolute professionals, from the only five remaining riders, Italian Juju Pepe (Orlando Bloom), Nigerian Marty Hass (Andy Samberg when young; Jeff Goldblum when older), Adrian Baton (Freddie Highmore when young and pretending to be a woman pretending to be a man; Julia Ormond when older and in prison for having killed on-site sportscaster Rex Honeycut (James Marsden) -- who had learned that, since he'd ridden the whole way with everyone that he was qualified to win the whole race, but upon dying, it became obvious that he had a motor in his frame -- because Adrian(a) and Marty had fallen in love, (s)he sacrificed her place on the podium to take out Rex, but accidentally killed him on a rock), Gustav Ditters (John Cena when young; Dolph Lundgren when older), and Slim Robinson (Daveed Diggs when young; Danny Glover when older) to Joe Buck, Nathan Fielder (as Stu Ruckman, the head of the anti-doping agency), Maya Rudolph (as Lucy Flerng, a cycling fan who thinks cyclists are sexy), Kevin Bacon (as Ditmer Klerken, a Dutch guy who got into so much gambling trouble that he solicited $50,000 bribes from every rider who wanted to dope and he'd let them slide through, which is why there were only five riders left after an accident triggered a roid-raging donnybrook that decimated the field), Mike Tyson as himself, Lance Armstrong as himself, who was hilarious in trying to verify that he was being hidden in shadow, but he totally wasn't, like, the whole time, and, finally, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje (Adebisi from Oz) as Olusegun Okorocha, who was a Nigerian who hates Marty Hass for claiming that he's from Africa when he's really just a lily-white trust-fund, diamond-mine millionaire. After every other racer had been banned from the race for doping, the remaining five riders realized that they would have to ride as a group, but no-one wanted to pull the others along in the draft. So they rode super-slowly for days. Nine days. Until someone yelled to Gustav that he couldn't ride fast, so he tore up the Pyrenees faster than anyone had before -- faster than any unenhanced person could -- so he's disqualified for doping (which, given that he looked like John Cena, should have been a foregone conclusion). The next day, Juju Pepe's heart blows out on a climb (á la Marco Pantani, il Pirata) and he glides twelve miles down the hill before he flies off of a cliff. In the end, Slim, who'd quit the race in the middle to dally with a French milkmaid, returned to the race on his egg-delivery bike to beat Marty Hass by a mile. Minamata (2020) -- "9/10" This movie is based on a true story about W. Eugene Smith (Johnny Depp), a photographer for Life magazine. He is at the tail-end of his career, wallowing in obscurity and alcohol when a pair of Japanese find him at this squalid apartment. Aileen (Minami) is the translator with whom Gene feels an immediate, reciprocal spark. He agrees to accompany them to Japan on an assignment to photograph and shed light on the devastating health effects of mercury poisoning on Japanese coastal communities that are unfortunate enough to be near the factories of giant conglomerate Chisso. Gene goes to his editor at Life Magazine Robert Hayes (Bill Nighy), who reluctantly agrees to back him, but only because the world of advertising and journalism has changed so much that he's having trouble keeping the magazine afloat while retaining any semblance of integrity. Gene gets to Japan and settles in, taking many pictures and befriending a young man who's body is twisted into a pretzel, but who is extremely interested in photography. Gene and Aileen sneak into a Chisso hospital where many, many patients are kept under wraps, taking many more pictures. Aileen and Gene grow much closer and become romantically involved. They take part in many protests. This company is led by a ruthless president Junichi Nojima (Jun Kunimura) who tries to bribe Gene into throwing away his photos. Gene refuses -- even though it's a ton of money. The police start to put pressure on the villagers, breaking up one of their meetings at which they discover that the company is pretending that they've all signed a register absolving Chisso of all wrongdoing. Soon after, Gene's shack by the lake -- along with all of his photos -- is burned down. Hayes is pushing Gene to send him something because the deadline is approaching and he's under a lot of pressure. Gene has starting drinking heavily again -- "you're not drunk if you can lie on the floor without holding on." -- bereft that he has nothing to send him, that he's once again failed to live up to a reputation he'd earned when he was a much younger man. Drunk, Gene calls Hayes, telling him that he's giving up. "Gene: Big people hurt little people. Little people get hurt by big people. Same thing here, same thing there. "Bob: Not okay, Eugene. Not fucking okay! 67% ads ads and I'm losing. Likely I wouldn't even have my integrity to fall back on in my old age. But I will have yours! Dammit Gene! I will have yours! "Gene: I'll tell you what: if there's any left, I will stuff it into a fucking box and ship it to you. "Bob: I don't know how many more issues I'm gonna be able to publish, but one of them is going to have the most important photographic essay of the last 30 years or I will personally fly out there and kick you pathetic, whinging ass. "The kids in the office, Gene, the special ones? They don't look up to me. They look up to you. Because you matter. "Just bring me the story, okay? Bring the story home." In a last-ditch effort, Gene throws himself on the mercy of the village, asking them whether he can take pictures of them in their homes, that he needs something in order to tell the world their story. They agree. There is a large protest, with 500 people, on the day of a board meeting. Several of the villagers are inside, to redress their grievances directly. Nojima seems contrite, they seem to touch him. The leader Mitsuo (Hiroyuki Sanada) ends up sitting cross-legged on the director's table while his friend, a fisherman, tells his tale. Nojima asks for a moment to consult with his CFO. They regret that they can do absolutely nothing. They leave as one of the villagers tries to kill himself by slitting his wrists. Outside, at the protest, several men beat Gene within an inch of his life. In the hospital, a man from the village -- seemingly the one who'd been involved in burning down Gene's lab -- hands him an envelope. Gene's hands are bandaged and he can't see what it is. When Aileen arrives, she discovers that it's all of the negatives from Gene's lab -- the man had rescued them before burning everything down. He saw how honorably Gene had acted with his mother and offered this as his apology. Back at the village, and still sorely injured, Gene and Aileen take "the iconic photo of a mother bathing her exceedingly deformed boy." [image] Gene sends his photos to a long-suffering Hayes. Luckily, this was during the 70s, when it was literally impossible to fake photos like this. Chisso had no choice but accept that their story was out, out of Japan, into the world. "Nojima: We have to pay. Somehow, we will have to find a way. We must." Unfortunately, they never did. As the end credits put it, "[...] Chisso Corporation nor the Japenese government has upheld the moral and financial essence of this deal. "In 2013, the Japanese Prime Minister declared that Japan had recovered from mercury pollution, denying the existence of the the tens of thousands of victims who continue to suffer today." Gene and Aileen would be married until his death in 1978. Johnny Depp is nearly unrecognizable -- except for his voice, as usual -- and does a fantastic job. The other actors are equally impressive. The Day after Tomorrow (2004) -- "6/10" This is not a great movie, but it's gotten more relevant with each passing year. The scenario it describes is completely impossible, but the global situation, almost 20 years later, is even more dire than when the film was made. I've reviewed the film before, "in 2017" . Orbital Redux (2018) -- "8/10" This is a live performance filmed on a single-room set that is the cabin of a long-haul He₃ transporter piloted by Max (Yuri Lowenthal) and crewed by Tommie (Yasmine Al-Bustami). Max is the old hand, expert in keeping an old ship running. Tommie is the young genius, with school smarts but no real experience. Max puts her through her paces and they learn to function as a crew. Both of the actors are fantastic. It's almost hard to believe that it was all done in one take. The plot is basically Max showing Tommie how things work out in space with underpowered and ancient equipment, as well as how tough things are when you're not rich and required to kowtow to giant corporations. Tommie inadvertently loads a virus into the ship's systems when she connects her music player to the main computer -- even after Max told her not to. They discuss their various personality deficiencies and how they lead to their relationship problems. Max is a pilot whose painter husband Mark (Marc Anthony Samuel) doesn't have much patience left for his constant absences. Tommie is a bit robotic and doesn't know how to address her boyfriend Sebastian's (David Blue) emotional needs. They also occasionally communicate with people back on their space-station home-base, like Lily (Natalie Whittle) and Deepi (Nardeep Khurmi), so it's not just the two of them in the cabin of a spaceship. As they load up with their cargo of He³, they enter a storm of space-junk deliberately placed in their path by rebels. Their ship is holed, they fix it, and then Max has to do an EVA to try to save the ship. He and Deepi manage to get the ship back on course, but he's apparently blown away from the ship. This, however, turns out not to be the case, as we get a flash-forward to Deepi piloting the ship with a Russian, seemingly unperturbed. Max and Mark show up for visit and they all have a joyous reunion. The end. All of the episodes are available on YouTube. * "Episode 1: Earth Station" * "Episode 2: Trainee" * "Episode 3: Ransomware" * "Episode 4: Autoreply" * "Episode 5: Replacement" * "Episode 6: Space Junk" * "Episode 7: EVA" * "Episode 8: Moon Station" Blackadder (1982--1983) -- "5/10" The first season is six episodes that takes place in 1485 England, in the time of King Richard III (Peter Cook). His son Richard IV (Brian Blessed) is the luckiest man alive, making incredibly ill-considered decisions and somehow always ending up ahead. Richard IV's youngest son Edmund (Rowan Atkinson) is the eponymous Blackadder, scheming to become king before his brother Harry, Prince of Wales (Robert East) can. He is joined by his "crew": Baldrick (Tony Robinson), a bondsman whose family has been bonded for as many generations as he can remember, and Percy (Tim McInnerny), a twit of the highest order and some form of lesser nobility that allows him to dress much better than Baldrick, but still be mostly destitute. They have a few adventures, most of which end badly for Edmund, as his reach tends to far exceed his grasp. Harry, on the other hand, sees his fortunes rise continually as a result of Blackadder's machinations. I was not so impressed with this season, as the humor is quite dated and relatively low-brow -- it makes much hay of women and gays being obviously inferior or strange, which, while obviously "of the time", is just not funny -- and it relies too much the moronic facial expressions that Atkinson would go on to use to even greater success and acclaim in Mr. Bean. I'm not a fan -- and never have been -- but the audience laugh-track seemed to love it. Everyone dies in the end because of Edmund's negligence -- including him. Blackadder II (1986) -- "7/10" The second season revives Blackadder in the Elizabethan era, following the antics and life of Edmund, Lord Blackadder, who is the great-grandson of the original. He is a different creature than his forebear, in that he is dashing, eloquent, and intelligent. Like his forebear, though, he is still constantly scheming for income and prestige. He is quite cynical and very dryly humorous, which ingratiates him to Queen Elizabeth I (Miranda Richardson) and sets him directly at odds with the Queen's courtier Lord Melchett (Stephen Fry). Baldrick and Percy reprise their roles as well, largely unchanged in position and class from their season-one incarnations, although Baldrick is now excruciatingly stupid instead of the most intelligent of the trio. They have adventures wherein Blackadder nearly dies, nearly gains an incredible fortune, nearly loses everything he has, etc. etc. Hugh Laurie appears in the final two episodes as a German spy/kidnapper who tries to usurp the Queen's throne -- and finally manages it, after killing absolutely everyone else in the final minutes of the season. I liked this season much better than season one. Queen Elizabeth and Melchett were somewhat underutilized in that they were accurately depicted as utter morons with God-like powers to kill and disenfranchise, which was both a pity and occasionally annoying. Overall, though, a much stronger effort than season one. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4697 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4697 Sun, 16 Apr 2023 16:20:16 +0200 -- "6/10" 2. "American Factory (2019)" <#American> -- "6/10" 3. "Oeconomia (2020)" <#Oeconomia> -- "10/10" 4. "Kevin Can F**k Himself S01/S02 (2021)" <#Kevin> -- "9/10" 5. "Blue Collar (1978)" <#Blue> -- "8/10" 6. "X-Men: Apocalypse (2016)" <#X> -- "7/10" 7. "The Matrix (1999)" <#Matrix> -- "10/10" 8. "Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets" <#Valerian> -- "6/10" 9. "Free Guy" <#Free> -- "8/10" 10. "Excalibur (1981)" <#Excalibur> -- "8/10" These are my notes to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. I've recently transferred my reviews to IMDb and made "the list" of around 1600 ratings publicly available. I've included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other -- I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. The Meg (2018) -- "6/10" This is a movie about an underwater research institute that is even more amazing than the one in Sphere. The research they are doing will benefit mankind and the entire movie is a documentary about the multiple ways in which mankind will benefit from the discoveries made by the altruist billionaire's donations to open-source research. I kid, of course. While that may be the background, this movie is most definitely about a gigantic shark, a Megalodon. The Megalodon is a relic of the deep past, a monster up to 20 meters long. Jonas Taylor (Jason Statham) is a diver nonpareil but he's retired from the game. Zhang (Winston Chao) is the aforementioned billionaire, while Suyin (Bingbing Li) is his brilliant shark-researching daughter. Jaxx (Ruby Rose) is the genius who built the whole oceanic base and all of the underwater toys. A mission goes awry when it enters the hunting grounds of the Meg, attracting it with its lights and vibrations. The Meg disables the vehicle, wounding Jonas's ex-wife Lori (Jessica McNamee) in the process. Zhang convinces Jonas to help them out. He shows up to save the day, rescuing the stranded divers -- all except Toshi (Masi Oka), who sacrifices himself by making a lot of light and noise, to save the others. They all get back to the underwater base -- but the Meg follows them, threatening to break into their lovely base. It leaves giant tooth imprints on the supposedly unbreakable polycarbonate outer walls. The team abandons their research and pools their resources to hunt down and kill this thing. They cruise out to its hunting grounds -- it has just killed a boat full of Japanese fishermen who'd been harvesting shark fins (no big loss) -- and drop Suyin in a super-strong shark cage to harpoon it in the eye. Things don't go as planned because, while the Meg can't break the cage, it can try to swallow it. It doesn't succeed; Jonas rescues Suyin and they narrowly avoid being eaten as the Meg finally manages to entangle itself in a line, forcing it to stop swimming...and the lights go out. Suyin awakes to see the Meg hanging on the back of the boat, dead as a doornail. To absolutely no-one's surprise, this is not the real Meg. The real Meg leaps out of the water to eat this "tiny" shark, destroying their boat in the process. Various people are in the water, various people save other people, and a couple of them get eaten. No-one important yet, though. Mac (Cliff Curtis) manages to get to a zodiac and they take off in two of them, heading for mainland, where they can bring Zhang to a hospital (he'd been injured gravely). The Meg chases them for ten miles before a helicopter shows up, loaded for bear. It spikes the Meg's fin with a transponder. They all make it back to shore, but Zhang dies along the way. The cocky oceanographer Morris (Rainn Wilson) closes the ocean base until they can kill the Meg. The countries of the Pacific Rim band together to give chase. Morris is at the forefront, dropping dynamite bombs on the Meg. It's dark, so they blow a giant hole in a whale instead. Morris realizes the mistake, but falls off the back of the boat when his crew takes off. The Meg eats him up. It turns out that Morris hadn't informed anyone about the Meg. He wanted to kill it before anyone found out about it. The rest of the crew decides to just pick up Morris's mission where it left off -- also without notifying anyone. They eventually try, but everyone thinks they're pranking them. OK. So now the Meg's cruising around a Chinese holiday spot, making trouble but not really taking a lot of victims. Our crew lures it out to their tanker, where they have super-submarines as well as helicopters to hunt the thing. Two of the helicopters fly into each other while Jonas and Suyin zip around trying to kill it. A bunch of people fall in the water with Suyin rescuing them. Jonas takes on the shark alone, slicing it from stem to stern with the dorsal fin on his ship. The Meg is wounded, but not down for the count. It takes his ship apart but Jonas manages to stab it in the eye, right into the brain. It's still not quite dead, but then hundreds of sharks appear to finish the job. Suyin rescues Jonas from them as well. This movie is honestly better than it had any right to be. Maybe I'm just a sucker for Jason Statham's charisma and swagger. I watched it in German. American Factory (2019) -- "6/10" This is a documentary about a Chinese glass-company Fuyao that buys a factory in America to produce car windows. It's ostensibly about a culture clash, but it's really a movie about class conflict. The Chinese company is keenly interested in keeping costs down, so it's keenly interested in keeping out unions. The Chairman threatens to leave if the American management can't keep them out. It's a class conflict because the Chinese workers in the plant in China are treated quite poorly. They get about two days off per month and work much longer shifts than eight hours (it goes unstated just how long). People tell how they see their children only once per year. The management in America is only too interested to keep the plant open at all costs -- and they very quickly agree to all demands for cost-cutting. The employees in America become restless and agitate for a union. The American plant also has Chinese workers, who have been shipped in to work for two years. They, too, work long hours, and are away from their families for that time. The attitude is, of course, that people don't need to do anything but work. This should be the only thing they need in life. This is, of course, patently untrue, and wholly unnecessary. If the people who can't figure out what do in the forty hours of work assigned to them were to actually pay more for their goods, factories wouldn't try to race to the bottom and press wages as low as possible. These highly skilled workers are making only about $100 per day. That's $2,000 per month, pre-tax, or about $24,000 per year. That is not a lot of money in most places in America. The workers become increasingly dissatisfied and the management eventually seems to relent, offering everyone a $2-per-hour raise. But they seem to tie it to working longer hours. It's unclear. The Chinese workers seem to think of their American colleagues are unskilled and lazy, but we have to tread very carefully here. The group of workers is self-selected to the group that would be willing to leave their families for two years and bring a factory up to speed. That means that they are very good at what they do and very dedicated to their company and to their work. That is, if you ask them, of course you're going to hear that work is the most important thing to do every day. That's literally the life-choice that they made. To deny it would be to throw a shadow on everything they're doing. It would mean that they'd left their families -- passed up the opportunity to watch their children grow -- for nothing. Of course they're not going to lament the lost time that they would have otherwise spent on hanging out with friends or reading books. This film is longer than it needs to be and it unfortunately fails to make the point that it's not China versus the U.S.: it's capitalists vs. labor. They kind of hint at this sometimes, but it's too diffuse to make out over the much lower-hanging fruit of pitting cultures against one another. Oeconomia (2020) -- "10/10" This is a fantastic one-woman film that sets out to answer the questions: how does the macro-economy work? Where does money come from? Where do profits come from? [media] Just using the nearly clueless interviewee from BMW as an example that serves to show how the economy works -- and how unaware the parasites are that they are parasites -- here's a snippet of dialogue. At 00:48:07, "BMW representative: Sie können ungefähr rechnen, dass jedes zweite Fahrzeug, das wir weltweit vermarkten, über BMW-Finanzdienstleistungen refinanziert wird vom Kunden. "Charlotte: Und inwieweit könnte man sagen, dass Sie durch die Autokredite, Autofinanzierung, das Geld für Ihre Gewinne damit auch selbst produzieren? "BMW representative: Also, die Finanzierungssparte ist auch profitabel... "Charlotte: Ich meinte gesamtwirtschaftlich gesehen, Sie vergeben mit demAutokredit einen neuen Kredit und tragen so selbst zu einerGeldmengenerweiterung bei. Das steigert ja die Gewinnerwartung. "BMW representative: Das wirkt sich deswegen positiv auf die Gewinnerwartung aus, weil wir einen gewissen Teil unsererFahrzeuge eben aufgrund der Kreditvergabe... verkaufen, und wird aber...Wir sind ja Teil des... Finanzierungsbankensystems und unterliegenentsprechend auch den ganzen Regeln, denen Geschäftsbankenauch unterliegen. "Charlotte: Mhm." At 00:50:54, "Charlotte: Wenn die Möglichkeit, dass Firmen Gewinne machen können, unweigerlich in paradoxe Schleifen führt, wieso müssen Firmen überhaupt Gewinne machen? "Finance Guy: Man sieht, dass Leute wie Sie...Die verstehen nicht mal die mindesten Zusammenhänge der Betriebswirtschaft und der Wirtschaft. Diese Frage ist so, als wenn mich jetzt jemand fragt: "Wieso fällt ein Stein von oben nach unten und nicht umgekehrt?" "Charlotte: Die längste Zeit der Menschheitsgeschichte fiel also der Stein von unten nach oben. Da gab es keine gewinnorientierte Wirtschaft. "Finance Guy: Moment. Ich erkläre Ihnen, warum diese Frage eine Beleidigung ist. "Charlotte: Ich bin gespannt. "Finance Guy: Was die meisten Menschen nicht kapieren, ist Folgendes: Tilgungen von Krediten erscheinen in keiner Gewinn- und Verlustrechnung. Wenn Sie sagen, auf Ihrer Gewinn- und Verlustrechnung steht: "0 Euro Gewinn", haben Sie kein überschüssiges Geld für Ihre Kredite. "Charlotte: Unternehmen müssen Gewinne machen, um ihre Schulden zurückzuzahlen? "Finance Guy: Ganz genau. "Charlotte: Wenn man das nun gesamtwirtschaftlich betrachtet: Können alle gleichzeitig Gewinn machen? "Finance Guy: Ja. Warum denn nicht? "Charlotte: Dann muss die Geldmenge wachsen. "Finance Guy: Nee. "Charlotte: Wenn alle auf ihr eingesetztes Kapital mehr erwirtschaften? "Finance Guy: Was wollen Sie denn da mit der Geldmenge? "Charlotte: Sie können keine Geldmenge X reingeben, aber eine Geldmenge X plus 0,03 rausziehen wollen. "Finance Guy: Da sind Sie jetzt bei mir komplett falsch. Das interessiert mich auch gar nicht. Weil Sie die Geldmengensteuerung der anderen Länder... Ach. Und wenn Sie drüber promovieren, da ändert sich nichts. "Charlotte: Ah ja, verstehe." At 00:55:28, "Für steigende Gewinn und Wirtschaftswachstum ist eine ständige Ausweitung der Verschuldung nötig. Das ist der berühmte Elephant-in-the-Room, über den niemand spricht. Der zentrale Akteur im Kapitalismus ist der Schuldner, er ermöglicht die Profite und den Vermögenszuwachs der anderen." At 00:57:58, "Der Profit der Privaten wird zum Teil also über Staatsverschuldung finanziert. Und so gesehen ist für meine Begriffe, der Staat eben eine Profitquelle." At 01:01:08, there's another great sequence that I'm not going to quote in full because it's too long, but it's about how the state continues to pump more money in, as private entities swallow it up as profit. At 01:10:28, "Charlotte: Es entstehen Vermögen, die nicht einfach da sind, sondern die auch Einfluss haben. Also ist es nicht ein Rechentrick zu sagen: Prozentual gesehen wachsen die Reichenvermögen geringer, aber es ändert sich für mich langfristig, auch, wenn ich das über 50 Jahre hinweg rechne, nichts daran, dass die Reichen deutlich reicher bleiben und reicher werden? "Finance Guy: Das ist so. Ja. "Charlotte: Kleine Wachstumsraten bei großen Vermögen... bringen erheblichen Zuwachs, mehr als große Wachstumsraten bei kleinen Vermögen." At 01:12:49, "Charlotte: Einerseits wachsen private Vermögen, weil sich Staaten verschulden. Andererseits drehen die Kapitalgeber den Staaten den Geldhahn ab, wenn sie zu viele Schulden machen. Wie kann ich das verstehen? "Finance Guy: Das kommt daher, dass sich die Idee durchgesetzt hat, dass sich Staaten auf dem Kapitalmarkt verschulden sollen. Damit hängen Staaten vom Willen und der Bewertung privater Kapitalgeber ab und sind dazu genötigt, Wachstum zu fördern, um ihre Steuereinnahmen zu erhöhen, oder Staatseigentum zu privatisieren, wenn ihre Schulden zu hoch sind. Das hat zur Situation heute geführt: Ganz viele Projekte sind nicht mehr finanzierbar, weil sie nicht mit den Renditeerwartungen privater Kapitalgeber übereinstimmen. Das könnte die Bekämpfung hoher Arbeitslosenzahlen betreffen, oder ausreichend Geld für Bildung, Pflege oder Infrastruktur. Oder die Transformation in Richtung einer ökologisch tragfähigen Wirtschaft. Leider nicht finanzierbar, weil unrentabel. Regierungen können nicht mehr frei entscheiden, was sie finanzieren. Sie können nur in ihren Haushaltsentwürfen vorschlagen, was sie finanzieren möchten. Dann müssen private Kapitalgeber dem zustimmen. Und deswegen ist das eine hochbrisante, politische Frage. "Charlotte: Sollten wir als Gesellschaft nicht selbst entscheiden, welche Ausgaben wir sinnvoll finden, und dann erzeugt der Staat das Geld für diese Ausgaben? Wieso sollten wir als Staaten nicht das gleiche Privileg haben, wie gewinnorientierte private Banken?" At 01:15:58, "Das Dilemma für mich ist, dass diese Idee: "Profit ist eine zwingende Triebkraft für wirtschaftliche Aktivität", sich so verfestigt hat, dass wir das für normal erachten." At 01:18:18, "Und jetzt kommt das grundsätzliche Problem: Investiert und reinvestiert wird nur in profitorientierte Unternehmungen. Sie wollen ein Stück Wald kaufen. Wenn Sie ihn in Ruhe lassen wollen, bekommen Sie dafür keine Finanzierung. Der Kauf wird nur dann finanziert, wenn Sie den Wald bewirtschaften, also ihn zumindest teilweise abholzen und das Holz zu Geld machen." At 01:20:34, "Ist das nicht ein Zirkelschluss? Kann es Wirtschaftswachstum überhaupt ohne Neuverschuldung geben? Sind die Profite von heute nicht die Schulden von morgen?" At 01:22:12 "Wir wollen eine ökologische Wirtschaft, das heißt, eigentlich sollte tendenziell der Konsum sinken. Ein Sinken von Nachfrage würde im heutigen System zur Krise führen. "Wir haben einfach ein instabiles System, wo der Staat reingehen muss, damit das ganze Ding nicht kippt. "Wenn man weiß dass das System instabil ist, dann ist das eine Art Beatmung des eigentlich schon toten Patienten. "Wie lange kann das noch gehen? Vor allem zum Preis der steigenden Ungleichverteilung?" I watched it in the original German, but with hard-coded English subtitles that I covered with German subtitles. Kevin Can F**k Himself S01/S02 (2021) -- "9/10" Part of this show is a sitcom centered around Kevin (Eric Petersen), a Bostonian blowhard, casual misogynist, and all-around moron whose horribleness you don't even notice because of the sitcom-style lighting, coloring, and the laugh track. His father Pete (Brian Howe) and best friend Neil (Alex Bonifer) round out his gang. The show is actually about his beleaguered wife Allison (Annie Murphy) and also about Neil's sister and Kevin and Annie's neighbor Patty (Mary Hollis Inboden). When the story focuses on them, the lighting changes to a much-more dramatic, cinematic quality, and the laugh track disappears. Allison has spent a miserable decade married to Kevin. Hers is the story of the sitcom wife. She works a dead-end job at the "packing store", which sells liquor and wine. The first season sees her establish a desperate plan to kill her husband. He is quite manipulative, so she can't just leave. In this, the relationship is darker than sitcom reality often lets on. Before establishing her plan, Allison unravels and goes on a bender. She triggers a sequence of events that result in Patty's supply of Oxy being cut off. She's been dealing to little old ladies who visit her salon -- she'd had no idea that they were selling her drugs on into the neighborhood and that Patty was supplying a good part of her district. Without drugs, she's in trouble. Allison is forced to help her out, and Patty is forced to befriend Allison, whom she'd considered to be a wall decoration for the last decade. Their friendship deepens as they try to get their feet back under them. Patty starts a relationship with police officer Tammy Ridgeway (Candice Coke) to throw her off the scent -- but ends up liking her more than a bit. Allison takes up with an old flame Sam (Raymond Lee) who's just moved back to town and opened a café. She also starts working from him after spectacularly quitting the liquor store. The season ends with Patty dating Tammy, a controlling, lesbian police officer, who's been looking for the local drug dealer (who used to be Patty). The first season is definitely better than the second. We finish the first season with Neil being dragged into the darker world when he confronts Allison about having tried to kill Kevin. He ends up choking her, and Patty brains him with a frying pan. In the second season, they lock him up in the basement, then spend a couple of episodes scheming on how to keep him quiet about what he's learned. They eventually do figure out something -- they threaten him that, with his past, it's more likely that the police will believe that he tried to kill Kevin instead. He becomes sullen and distant, taking even more to drinking. He takes up with Allison's aunt Diane (Jamie Denbo), for whom she used to work at her liquor store. Allison, desperate for a way to leave, ends up hatching a plan to fake her own death. This is the focus of the second season -- and she does it! It works! By the time she has to go, she's realized how much deeper her friendship with Patty has gotten, but she's forced to put her plan into action because Patty herself is threatened. Allison fakes her death and flees to Keene, New Hampshire, where she starts up a life as Gertrude Fronch. She has a steady job and nice place to live. Several months later, Kevin has grown a beard and has a new girlfriend. Kevin met her at Allison's wake at the bowling alley. Neil is back in his circle, as is his father. But they're not happy, not really. Tammy tracks down Allison, but has no intention of bringing her in -- she just wants some answers, she wants to know why Patty is so obsessed with figuring out where Allison's gone. Patty doesn't believe she's dead (she knows Allison was planning it), so she also refuses to leave Worcester because Allison might come back. Patty ends up splitting with Tammy; Allison ends up coming back; Kevin ends up burning himself down in his own house, after he drunkenly lights a hobo fire in a trash can in his living room. I give it an extra star for the concept and for the all-around great acting. Blue Collar (1978) -- "8/10" Zeke (Richard Pryor) is a working-class man just trying to make ends meet. He declares some extra kids on his taxes because his wages are shit compared to what he needs to survive. His boss (Cliff De Young) is a hard-ass, his union rep Dogshit Miller (Borah Silver) is a racist, and his co-workers are a mixed bag. They meet up for a beer after work pretty much every day. They work themselves to exhaustion. Zeke is married, as is Jerry (Harvey Keitel), while Smokey (Yaphet Kotto) is single and gives them their only opportunity for fun when he throws a party with cocaine and working girls. Everything else in their lives grows increasingly disappointing. The union doesn't do shit for them. Zeke comes up with the idea to rob the union's offices. The gang of three manage it, but only abscond with $600 rather than the expected haul. The union, on the other hand, claims that at least $10,000 was stolen. The guys know that's not true, but neither can they officially say anything. They instead decide to blackmail the union with the contents of one of the notebooks they found in the safe: it details a number of sketchy loans from sketchy loan sharks from the neighborhood. In response to the $10,000 extortion, the union now claims that it lost $20,000. Some other guy squeals on the trio and the union starts to turn the screws. They almost manage to get Jerry, but Smokey's waiting there with a baseball bat. In retaliation, the union arranges to trap Smokey in a car-spraying chamber, killing him with poisonous fumes. Zeke and Jerry know that the union murdered Smokey, but they also offer Zeke the position of shop foreman. He takes it. Instead of taking revenge for Smokey with Jerry, he says he wants to change the system from within. With Zeke squarely under its thumb, the union continues to gun for Jerry. They chase him to the Canadian border, where he ends up wrecking his car before he can flee. He signs a deal with the Feds to try to crack the crooked union. When Jerry returns to the plant with the Feds in tow, Zeke confronts him as a traitor. The final scene is reminiscent a bit of the ending of Animal Farm, where you can't tell the pigs from the men. "They pit the lifers against the new boys, the young against the old, the black against the white. Everything they do is to keep us in our place." The ending is dark: it concedes that, though the people in charge change -- and might even be black! -- the system does not. Instead of people changing the system, the system changes them. For a lot more information about the real fight, see the podcast "Episode 282: Fighting Times" by TrueAnon , an interview with "Jonathan Melrod" . I can't find the quote, but he talks about the difference between directly being able to hassle the shop steward for ventilation when it's hot rather than having a corporate union, where you put in a request for fans and then, two years later, get a response that there's no money in the budget for fans. X-Men: Apocalypse (2016) -- "7/10" The first half, where they set up all of the characters, is better than the second half, where they blow shit up. See my "previous review, from 2021" . The Matrix (1999) -- "10/10" The original and still the best. I've watched this several times over the years and it holds up so well. The first time I saw it was in a large theater in New York City with my good friend Adeel. We played hooky from work to see a matinee. We got individual lazy-boy-style chairs right up front. The movie began and took our breaths away. Trinity was like nothing we'd ever seen before. We didn't draw breath again until Neo woke up in his capsule. That doesn't say anything about the plot of the movie, though. It's awesome. Trust me. Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets -- "6/10" Watched this again in German this time. I didn't pay 100% attention, but my "review from 2017" stands. It's a lovely, luscious-looking, absolute Jean-Luc Besson-style movie with a God-awful script and some of the most wooden acting you'll ever see. Free Guy -- "8/10" Guy (Ryan Reynolds) lives in Free City. Antwan (Taika Waititi) owns and runs the game company Soonami that runs Free City. Keys (Joe Keery) works there, in support. He used to have an up-and-coming game company that he'd started with Millie (Jodie Comer). He wrote the code; she designed the AI. Antwan bought them out and incorporated their code into Free City without telling anyone, without giving them attribution, and without licensing it. Their AI has evolved -- especially in the form of "blue-shirt guy", who is Guy. Guy falls in love with Millie and tracks her down. He's in love with her because she'd programmed him to recognize her -- as his creator. But he's evolved, grown, and he now has real feelings -- he's a real, grown-up AI. She doesn't know this yet, so she tells him that he has to start leveling up to be with her. He does, but instead of doing evil, he does good. He gains a reputation as a hero in a game filled with villains. Meanwhile, Millie and Keys reconcile because he's discovered that their code is in Free City and that none of it is Free City 2. When the sequel launches in two days, the old game will be wiped -- taking Guy with it. Millie tells Guy this, after which he has an existential crisis. He consults with Buddy (Lil Rel Howery), who deals with hearing that his life doesn't matter much better than Guy did. He doesn't have an existential crisis, he has an existential epiphany. In an attempt to save Free City, Guy and Buddy go to Revenjamin Buttons's (Channing Tatum) home base, where he catches them. But he's a total fanboy for blue-shirt guy and he gives them the video Millie was looking for. It shows that Revenjamin had managed to get to a location in the game unlike any other -- a location that comes from Millie and Keys's original game. It's proof that Antwon is using their code unlicensed. Guy claims that he knows the place. Meanwhile, Guy's good-guy antics are infectious among the other players, who have a newfound respect for NPCs. Antwon is unhappy because presales of Free City 2 are way down. He has Keys's friend Mouser (Utkarsh Ambudkar) reboot all of the Free City servers. As expected, it resets Guy's construct back to its original programming. Millie loses her video, but she still hopes that Guy can recover his memories and get her back to their original game. Keys tells Millie that it wasn't a fluke that Guy had woken up before. It turns out that he'd programmed Guy to long for love and to be awakened when he met Millie in-game. This is exactly what happens much more quickly when she awakens him with a kiss. He remembers everything. He takes to his apartment, where he'd been flipping the blinds every morning. It looked like odd NPC behavior the first few times we'd seen him doing it, but he was taking a look at the reflection of their world in his blinds, where the programmers (Antwon) had forgotten to erase it. Guy leads a revolution of NPCs. They're all on strike. No-one is working anymore. When Antwon wants to kill Guy and boot Millie, he can't do anything because none of the NPCs are there to escalate. Instead, Antwon has Mouser turn off respawn and manipulate the game world itself to assault Millie and Guy on their way to find the world. Keys is also in the world, manipulating it to help Guy and Millie escape. They reach the shoreline, hoping that Keys will be able to make a bridge for them. He's in a "meeting" with Antwon, where Keys tells Antwon what to do with himself, building the bridge across Antwon's blockage of the original "build". Keys is fired, but not off the network yet. Millie gets booted, along with every other player in the world, leaving Guy on his own. Antwon drops in Dude (Ryan Reynolds) from Free City 2, a half-finished, but immensely powerful character. Guy's getting his ass handed to him, with the world watching. Buddy shows up, but can't help much. Guy rescues himself with Captain America's shield, then hammers Dude with a Hulk fist. He pulls out a light saber next (it's a video game; the mods are going to be clichéd). Guy slaps the glasses on Dude to defeat him by awakening the few tiny brain cells he has. Antwon is going to kill the server farm directly. He starts taking out servers with an axe, slaughtering NPCs and most of the level. It's adorable how impossible that would be to do, as regional redundancy and backups would kick in. Guy lands in Millie and Keys's level, which is suddenly visible to the remaining NPCs. Millie confronts Antwon in the server room -- unclear how she got there. She strong-arms Antwon into giving up his ownership of their game, leaving it to Keys and Millie and Mouser, who guide it to success. And and Millie finally realizes that Guy loves her in the game because keys loves her in real life. Duh. Also, Buddy reappears and Guy has his best friend in paradise. The end. The leads are quite good. I'm a fan of Joe Keery, who played Steve in Stranger Things. I also quite liked Jodie Comer. Excalibur (1981) -- "8/10" Over the course of its 140 minutes, this film grew on me. Just the sheer bloody-mindedness of having an entire cast in full knight's armor for the entire film is impressive. Sure, there are some cheesy moments -- a lot of them, not the least being the "Lady in the Lake" scenes, like when she catches the sword at the end -- but it's just kind of impressive all the same, like an opera. This story follows the legend of Arthur, which starts with Merlin (Nicol Williamson) helping Arthur's father, Uther Pendragon (Gabriel Byrne) to lie with his reluctant ally Cornwall's (Corin Redgrave) wife Igrayne (Katrine Boorman). Nine months later, Arthur (Nigel Terry) is born, sister to a young Morgana. As promised, Merlin takes the boy away for himself. Uther is incensed and flees the palace. He is soon cornered by Cornwall's men, who seek revenge. He plants Excalibur in a stone before he dies. Years later, there is a camp near the stone, with a tradition of knights competing for the right to try pulling the sword from the stone. One day, Arthur foster father has taken him with this step-brother to the tournament. We watch as Leondegrance (Patrick Stewart) gets his chance, but utterly fails to free the sword. Arthur flees toward the rock at one point and pulls the sword free. His brother and father find him with the sword in his hand. The crowd soon follows. They make him put the sword back. Another knight tries to free it, but fails. Arthur easily pulls the sword from the stone. Many immediately pledge fealty to him, although there are a few who refuse. While performing knightly feats, Arthur meets the lovely Guinevere (Cherie Lunghi). They are immediately smitten with one another. Guinevere smits pretty easily, though, because, later, when Lancelot (Nicholas Clay) shows up, she's smitten with him as well. Lancelot beats Arthur pretty badly until Arthur cheats to win with his magic sword, which he breaks, but which is immediately returned to him, unbroken, by the Lady of the Lake, who is magically in the stream that they were fighting in. 🤷🏼‍♂️ The Round Table is formed. The land is peaceful for years. Morgana (Helen Mirren) has grown, though, into a sexy sorceress bent on bringing down Arthur and usurping the throne. She influences knight Gawain to accuse Lancelot of making goo-goo eyes at Guinevere (and vice versa). He's 100% right, of course, but they'd not acted on it yet. When Lancelot returns to defend Guinevere's honor -- jumping in for squire Perceval (Paul Geoffrey), who was the only one who'd been willing to try before -- she is so impressed that she flees to the forest that night to find and mount him on the mossy forest floor. Arthur finds them the next morning, dead asleep, and plants Excalibur in the ground near them, then leaves. Merlin is somehow struck by this blow, weakening him enough that Morgana steals the Charm of Making from him, then using it to disguise herself as Guinevere, then sleep with Arthur, letting him plant a baby in her. This would become Mordred (Robert Addie). Mordred's semi-incestuous origin (Morgana and Arthur had the same mother) somehow poisons the land and also causes lighting to strike and nearly incapacitate Arthur. In his addled state, he becomes obsessed with the holy grail. He send his entire Round Table out on a quest. Pretty much all of them die, either of more-or-less natural causes or because Morgana traps, seduces, or kills them. Years later, Mordred is grown and comes for what he considers to be his birthright. Perceval is the only knight who manages to resist Morgana's sorcery and actually retrieves the Grail for his king. The Grail heals Arthur and he rallies a defense against Mordred, with Merlin coming back out of retirement to trick Morgana into casting a spell on herself, weakening her to a degree that she can no longer maintain her youthful appearance. Mordred is disgusted by his ancient mother and slaughters her. Lancelot also appears out of his self-enforced retirement, just a literal wildman wreaking havoc. In an amazingly filmed final battle -- it really did look like an opera on a stage -- Mordred and Arthur fatally wound each other. Arthur lives long enough to instruct Perceval to return Excalibur to the Lady in the Lake. He travels to the lake, but cannot do it, returning to Arthur with the sword. Somewhat hilariously, Arthur exhorts him to try again, which he does, successfully this time. The Lady in the Lake catches the sword in complete defiance of all laws of physics and Arthur's body is sailed off to Avalon. The end. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4680 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4680 Sun, 05 Mar 2023 22:47:16 +0100 of around 1600 ratings publicly available. I've included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other -- I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. Iron Man (2008) -- "8/10" I've seen this movie a few times. Having come earlier in the MCU, it's definitely one of the better ones, as far as execution is concerned. As far as its politics is concerned, it's generously all over the place. Ungenerously, it's just more billionaire-glorification porn. Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) is what our world considers to be the quintessential perfect playboy: he's rich, brilliant, good-looking , hilarious, an unparalleled engineer, metallurgist, theoretician, etc. etc. etc. The story arc is that Tony Stark is in Afghanistan to demonstrate his company's Jericho missile system. On his way to another appointment, his convoy is attacked, he is hit in the chest by shrapnel, and taken prisoner by the local freedom fighters who'd attacked the convoy. Stark awakes in a cave with Yinsen (Shaun Toub), a fellow scientist and engineer who's saved his life by mounting a powerful magnet connected to a car battery over his heart, to keep shrapnel from entering it. The Afghanis want him to build a Jericho system for them, giving him equipment and supplies and Yensen as an assistant. Instead, he builds a powerful "arc reactor" to replace the car battery and magnet, then builds Mark I of the Iron-Man armor, busting out of the save with it and getting rescued from where he lands in the desert. He crash-lands in a metal robot suit, but the laws of physics don't apply to him. The suit is somehow flightworthy without any of the characteristics that would give it any life. It supposedly uses "repulsors", but damned if I can figure out what they're "repulsing" because they're usually just firing against the air, which doesn't push back very hard. Not only that, but the suit seems to absorb all of the shock of a landing from hundreds of feet -- so much so that it doesn't even lose consciousness or sustain any injuries at all. Anyway, he gets home and Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow) is happy to see him again. His father's partner and CEO of Stark Industries Obediah Stane (Jeff Bridges) is less happy to see him -- especially after Tony says that their company will no longer manufacture weapons. This goes against what Stane is planning, so Stane tries to have Tony killed. Tony, meanwhile, builds Mark II - IV of his Iron-Man armor, perfecting the tools and armor in such a short time that your head simply spins. There's a showdown between Obediah -- who's had his own version of the Iron-Man armor build -- and Tony, with Tony winning, of course. It's a pretty good outing. I always enjoy Downey's grandstanding in the desert, the building of the initial suit and the subsequent building and testing of the other suits. It's just a tremendous amount of screen time spent on building the armor, which is the real star of the show. I'm a sucker for this kind of technology, all the way back when reading about the engineering intricacies of Stark's armor in the Marvel Universe comics -- and then drawing endless variations of my own. The Lost Weekend (1945) -- "8/10" This is the story of alcoholic and writer Don Birnam (Ray Milland). He is much better at the being the form than the latter. He puts a lot more effort and gusto into it, as we'll see. He stands in his bedroom in an apartment on the lower East Side of Manhattan, packing a bag. He's to take the train north with his brother Wick for a long weekend away. Don has just spent the last ten days drying out under the watchful eye of his brother Wick (Phillip Terry). Don somehow convinces Wick to take his girl Helen St. James (Jane Wyman) to a concert. Wick agrees, but only because he knows that Don has no money and that no-one in the neighborhood will give him credit. "With you, it's like stepping off a roof and expecting to fall only one floor." Fortune smiles upon Don and he finds $10 in the sugar tin -- the cleaning lady had come by to pick up her salary and told him where to find it. Don tells her it isn't there and sneaks off to Nat's bar. Nat (Howard Da Silva) hates watching Don drink -- and he hates what Don is doing to poor Helen -- but business is business. Don has money, so he gets shots. He leaves the bar late for his train, late to meet Wick to go north. He avoids Helen and Wick as they walk out -- he has money burning a hole in his pocket, and he has two bottles. He's about to start his long, lost weekend. The next morning, he's back at Nat's in time for Nat's lunch. Don's lunch will be liquid. He tells Nat the story that he wants to write, about the time he met Helen. He drinks the day away. There's a prostitute Gloria (Doris Dowling) at the bar who's sweet on him. He takes note. He gets a bit of wind in his sails after having told the story; he believes he can write the book. He's quite eloquent. He tells Nat, "Love is the hardest thing in the world to write about. It's so simple. You've gotta catch it through details, like the early morning sunlight hitting the gray tin of the rain spout in front of her house, the ringing of a telephone that sounds like Beethoven's Pastorale, a letter scribbled on her office stationary that you carry around in your pocket because it smells like all the lilacs in Ohio. Pour it, Nat!" He returns home, sits at the typewriter, gets the title down, and ... loses courage. He needs some liquid courage. He tears apart his apartment, looking for his second bottle, to no avail. He stumbles out with a matchbook in hand that takes him to another bar, one where they don't know him yet. He drinks past his ability to pay and steals a lady's pocketbook. When he returns from the washroom, where he'd gone to empty it, he is apprehended and thrown out unceremoniously. He returns to find that a kind God is smiling on, showing him the second bottle hidden in his ceiling lamp. He survives the night. The morning is harsh, though. And he's yet to write that story. He knows he won't, so he sets out to hock his typewriter. All of the pawn shops are closed: it's Yom Kippur. He begs a shot from Nat, who only give him one. "One's too much and one hundred are not enough." Don stumbles out and makes his way to Gloria's apartment, leading her on, seducing her into giving him $5, $10, anything. She does. As he's leaving, he falls down the stairs, knocking himself unconscious. He awakes in a sanatorium, drying out with the other drunks. Helen sleeps outside his apartment, waiting for him. The night nurse Bim (Frank Faylen) tries to keep him there, but Don manages to sneak off in the confusion when another patient wakes with violent night terrors. Don steals a doctor's coat with money in the pocket and heads home on the subway. He menaces a shopkeeper for a bottle of booze and ends up back home. He finishes his bottle, then gets night terrors of his own. He hears Helen, the landlady, and the superintendent coming to open the door, but can't get to the door in time to lock them out. Helen comes in and cares for him, getting him to bed. She sleeps in the living room, on the guest bed. He wakes and sneaks out, grabbing her coat on the way. She follows him in the rain to a pawn shop, where he's just exiting. She's furious and disappointed and at her wit's end. He dispatches her gruffly while she tries to get her coat back, only to find that Don't traded it for a gun he'd hocked long ago. Helen follows him home and confronts him, begging him to take a drink because "I'd rather have you drunk than dead." Don muses at the end, in a voiceover, "Out there in that great big concrete jungle, I wonder how many others there are like me? Poor bedeviled guys on fire with thirst. Such comical figures, to the rest of the world, as they stagger blindly towards another binge, another bender, another spree." Westworld S04 (2022) -- "8/10" In the very first episode, some unnamed moron who would soon kill all of his partners and then himself at the behest of whatever nanobots William (Ed Harris) has managed to get injected into his system, says something about data being "fungible", which it absolutely is not, not by any stretch of the imagination, that I thought perhaps it's OK that this series has ended on this season. We will see what the rest brings. Perhaps I'll change my mind. It is seven years after the end of season three. Humanity has fought the hosts and lost. They think they have won, but that's what the hosts want them to think. The hosts are now kind of in charge and executing a plan to dominate the planet by enslaving humanity the same way that humanity enslaved them. They do this by both replacing key leaders with hosts and by infecting humans with a disease -- transmitted via houseflies -- that makes them susceptible to manipulation and outright control. William (Ed Harris) is back, but as a host; his real safe is tucked away in captivity by Charlotte (Tessa Thompson), who's kind of running the show now. She's definitely a host and he's almost always a host when we see him. A woman named Christina who works at a video-game company writing stories and who looks just like Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) slowly discovers that all is not as it seems. Her stories seem to be controlling real people's lives. She is set up on a date with Teddy (James Marsden) -- the same Teddy with whom Dolores fell in love long ago. It is utterly unclear who's a host -- but I suspect that both of them are. Maeve (Thandiwe Newton) and Caleb (Aaron Paul) come back out retirement to take up their battle against the hosts again. She's a host; he's not. They're trying to figure out what's going and trying to save Caleb's daughter and wife and they end up in a 1920's version of Westworld -- which feels cheaply just like the original Westworld, just with a new coat of paint. The humans are just as odious as they always were; the hosts just as transparent. Plus ça change -- and I'm sure it's quite deliberately tediously the same, to prove the point that people really can't think of new stories, that they're just willing to do the bare minimum to make money, that they can't think of anything better to do with all of these amazing technologies than to massage their own egos, than to satisfy every stupid whim of a spoiled elite. You end up rooting for the hosts because maybe they'll do something interesting -- humanity has had a dozen chances and always ended up masturbating and hoarding money and stuff. Bernard Lowe (Jeffrey Wright) wakes up after several years of searching for a way to thread his way through a continuum that would allow survival. He and Ashley Stubbs (Luke Hemsworth) set out to put this plan into motion. They are, of course, both still hosts. At the end of E04, we learn that Caleb actually died 23 years ago and that he has been resurrected by Charlotte 278 times to figure out how he managed to resist her auditory mind control, if only for a moment. She suspects that it's the key to why her giant city of humans is sick -- 38 human hosts have killed themselves recently. In E05, Charlotte speaks to William, at 17:45, "Humans are so bound by what they can hear, they'll never understand what they don't, what else exists below their threshold. [low organ-like chiming] They called this God's music. You should hear it on an organ; it's mesmerizing at that volume. The resonance. Vibration. There was a frequency at which the world ... vibrated. It caused joy. Harmony. Dip below that frequency...chaos. "God [referring to herself] is bored. Do you think this is why the old Gods did what they did? Instead of staying up on Olympus, they'd come down to the mortals, disguise themselves as a swan to get a piece of ass. "Humans always thought it was about them -- benign deities intervening on their behalf, or testing them somehow. Maybe it had nothing to do with them. Maybe there was just...nothing better to do." A little while later, William says to Charlotte (at 23:00), "Define failure: the world is ours. We've taken our masters and made them into what they made us. By any definition, we have conquered them to an almost biblical degree." To which Charlotte replies, "I didn't imagine our highest aspiration as a species was 'turnabout is fair play.'" At 29:45, "All of the people in the city run pre-scripted loops, following whatever plot's been written for them. Why do you think we hide in the desert? She [Charlotte] can't track us there. We're the last free humans. But these poor fucks? They use them as entertainment. The loops make them compliant by keeping them busy -- stops them from questioning their realities." This can't possibly have been written without knowing that it applies as a good metaphor for how our world works now. Soon after, Teddy teaches Christina that she can't see a city that is very clearly there -- and that she can control the minds of the people around her. The city that she can't see contains the Tower that she's always painting -- the Tower that emits the control signal keeping all of the humans in check and running on their loops. In E07, in the dusty western town left over from a long-dead instance of WestWorld, Frankie talks to her lover, whom she'd locked away, suspecting she'd been replaced by a robot. "Frankie: I am sorry for locking you up. But I had to keep you safe. "Lover: You're my safe place. Don't forget that next time." Jesus, that was bad. Did somebody lose a bet? Did the director's nibling show up to write a scene? Also, before that, there was a fight where Frankie held the gun in her enemy's face but didn't/couldn't shoot him. You knew he was going to bat it away. Lazy, lazy writing. Unnecessary. In the same episode, though, we get this, "William: When the radiation knocks all of the electrons right out of your bones, what do you want? To know who you are? To know what it all means? You'll be too busy vomiting up your organs. Culture doesn't survive; cockroaches do. The second we stopped being cockroaches, the whole species went fucking extinct. "Host William: Speak for yourself. I'm not you. "William: Well, you might as well be. You can't fix a few millennia of broken DNA with a fucking hard drive. Why do you think you spend so much time in the goddamned human cities? "Host William: You're right. "William: Of course I am. Civilization is just a lie we tell ourselves to justify our real purpose. We're not here to transcend; we're here to destroy." It's impossible to tell who's a host and who's real, who's a human resurrected from the dead, who's running in a simulation, who's in which time period. There are parallel streams for episodes and then it turns out that all of these things were happening dozens of years apart. I love it, but I can see how people trained on much simpler fare would check out. Like, what is Caleb? When is Caleb? Is the quest to blow up the tower even the main goal? What is the main goal? Is there even one? Is Dolores going to win? Or lose? Or who cares? Do the hosts know what the real goal is? Or are they just following a pre-programmed routine? How do we know that the one where they seem to be succeeding is the real one? Does it even matter? What does it mean for one to be real when there are infinite virtual worlds? And that's now just within one continuum -- what about all of the other continua? Do we even bother trying to figure it out or just have a laugh while we can? E08: William kills Charlotte and Maeve at the tower. William also kills Bernard, who leaves a tablet for Charlotte to find later. William turns up the tower to eleven and everyone goes batshit, killing each other. Charlotte's robots resurrect her, building her a stronger body. No-one says a thing about how he shot her right through the core. I suppose the bullet was a little bit off-center? But it was off-center for Maeve, too. Whatever. Charlotte's now on the warpath, ready to meet William on his own terms, in the horrible game that her world has become. She turns off the artifice on the city, snatching the core that was running it. "Charlotte: You're ruined my world, turned it into a game. William: It was always a game. I've just turned it up to expert level." Dolores/Christine and Teddy are figuring shit out, with Dolores being all cheesy and communing with the characters that she made up in order to figure out what to do. Clementine kills Stubbs, then goes after Frankie, with a completely different personality -- just a cold-eyed killer now. It's fucking terrible, like they promised her she could get at least one fight scene before the show ends. It feels like a promise to the actress that she gets to pad her resumé. William ends up at the Hoover Dam on a horse -- looking to destroy not only this world, but the next (The Sublime). Charlotte alights not long after, in one of those utterly un-airworthy little ornithopter numbers. William and Charlotte face off -- and it's the now-dead Bernard whose message she remembers. She finds the gun he hid there when he and Maeve had gone through earlier. Charlotte kills William, scalps him, extracts his mind, and crushes it, killing him for good. Charlotte strips down to her robot body, losing most of her skin, then pulling out her core and crushing it, committing suicide. Frankie and Caleb make it back to the docks, but Caleb's body is unstable and will die soon. He says his goodbyes at the pier. Charlotte places the brain of her city into The Sublime, transferring Christine and Teddy back to the city, but powered by the data center in the Hoover Dam. Let's remember also that Charlotte is a shard of Dolores, just like Christine is. Teddy's not real, of course. He's just another one of Christine's sparring partners. He thinks he's real, but he's ... a virtualization of a host. Christine awakes and, instead of Teddy, sees Dolores, who is there to "tell her the truth about what we are. [...] We are reflections of the people who made us." She walks out into the shattered half-virtual world as Dolores. It is still unclear whether everything is virtualized and how many concentric shells of reality there are. I've long since lost track of whether a person is a person or a host of a sim of a host or person or...what. "Sentient life on Earth has ended, but some part of it might still be preserved, in another world. My world. There's time for one last game, a dangerous game with the highest of stakes. Survival or extinction. This game ends where it began, in a world like a maze, that tests who we are, that reveals what we are to become. One last loop around the bend." Ok. Ok. But you're not going to get the chance. The Gods of television have not decided in your favor, Dolores. You vanquished all of humanity, but lost to Hollywood producers who didn't like the numbers you were putting up. 🤷🏼‍♂️ Shantaram (2022) -- "8/10" Dale Conti (Charlie Hunnam) is an Australian convict, EMT, and former heroin addict. He is in jail because he robbed a bank. Actually, he was in prison for having tried to help the police office gunned down by his accomplice on a robbery. He was tortured in prison for the name of his accomplice, whom he never gave up. Before being killed in prison by either the officers squeezing him for information or by other prisoners whom he'd crossed, he organizes a daring escape with his cellmate. They end up clambering down 40 feet of extension cord to drop down outside of the battlements. Lin melts into the city, first visiting his father, who gives him a bit of cash and his blessing/forgiveness. He makes his way to his accomplice and gets his share. He buys a passport (now as Lin Ford from New Zealand) and heads to India, landing in Bombay. Much of this is told in flashbacks. "We can compel men to be bad, but we cannot compel them to do good." Once in Bombay, he settles in to the ex-pat community, having a good time mostly. Lin befriends Prabhu (Shubham Saraf), a local guide. He meets heroin-addict and prostitute Lisa (Elektra Kilbey) and her two pimps Maurizio (Luke Pasqualino) and Modena (Elham Ehsas), mysterious Swiss-American businesswoman Karla (Antonia Desplat), and French dealmaker Didier (Vincent Perez). After several weeks, Lisa has been trapped at Madame Zhou's (Gabrielle Scharnitzky) palace, a bordello. Karla engages Lin's help to rescue her, acting as a representative from the American consulate. He ends up pressing Madame Zhou with intimations that he is CIA and she releases Lisa into their custody. On his way home, Madame Zhou's men mug him and steal his passport and money -- she had figured out his ruse. He escapes the police who come to "help" him and ends up in the Sagar Wada (slum) where Prabhu lives. There is a bit of back and forth. Karla agrees to give him a thousand dollars to buy his passport back -- he's getting too noisy and she's worried he'll spoil her business deals. As he's about to abandon Prabhu and Bombay, Madame Zhou's men find him again, this time in Sagar Wada. The ensuing fight starts a fire that kills a woman (Lakshmi), despite Lin's best efforts to save her. Lin is devastated. "The worst thing about corruption as a system of governance, is that it works so well." The next morning, though, there is a long line of people outside of Prabhu's tent, waiting for medical assistance. Lin kind of freaks out, but collects himself quickly, donates the thousand dollars to the wada -- for medical supplies and to repair the burnt tents -- and goes to work. He isn't a doctor, but no doctors ever set foot in the wada anyway, so he's the best they'll ever get. Abdel Khader Khan/Bhai (Alexander Siddig) is a local businessman/mob-boss with ethics and philosophy who cares very much for Sagar Wada and wants to see it survive. His business rival wants to mow it down for the property value. Khader Khan learns of Lin's efforts there and pays him a visit, building up a friendship of sorts, telling him, at the end of the evening, to call him Khaderbhai (brother). Lin's medical services hit a roadblock when he learns that the hospital to which he sends the patients he can't help are being rejected -- even though the hospital is supposed to be free. He approaches Khaderbhai for help in getting black-market medicines. He goes back to hustling with Prabhu to earn the money for medicine. Karla's still aiming to build her luxury apartments around or on the Sagar Wada -- together with Khaderbhai. They are still vying for control of the contract with Walid, the other local mob boss. "The sane man is simply a better liar than the insane man." Lin gets a motorcycle from his brother from another mother Abdullah (Fayssal Bazzi) and he keeps it so that he can run his own errands. He returns Khaderbhai's money, to which Khaderbhai says that he respects him and would like to remain friends. Lin says that the Wada has its own rules and he can't be seen to be owned by Khaderbhai. Lin spends a platonic night with Karla, telling her about his past. Parvati (Rachel Kamath) turns into a better nurse. Journalist Kavita (Sujaya Dasgupta) is on Lin's trail, sniffing out his fake passport and getting Australia back on his tail. A doctor is helping out in the slums and she can only think of how she can figure out what his real past is -- not caring at all that the slums will be left without a doctor if she succeeds in digging up dirt. Because of this, Lin prepares his departure, seeking a new passport from Didier. He sells the motorcycle, but it thwarted when Didier is arrested for homosexuality. Lin and a cowboy friend must rescue him, paying thousands of dollars to get him out unscathed -- and also for the police to continue to ignore Lin's transgressions. Karla sics Abdullah on Maurizio and Modena, who are trying to pimp out Lisa again to seal a drug deal that Khader Khan would absolutely not allow if he knew about it. She agrees, but for 10% of the deal. Parvati and Prabhu go to a movie, but she falls ill. He barely gets her home, where no-one knows where the gora doctor is. Lin returns to discover many, many people are sick. When he gets a closer look at them, he discovers that there's a cholera outbreak. Prabhu is worried that Parvati is going to die. Against Qasim's (Alyy Khan) wishes, Lin gets Khaderbhai to deliver water -- under the condition that he gets credit for it from Sagar Wada. Parvati recovers. Meanwhile Karla and Khader Khan plot to get leverage on the new minister. They kidnap his mistress and stash her away with Madame Zhou. Karla is then busy taking care of Lin, who's gotten cholera from treating so many people. Lin recovers as well, but he's thinking about leaving town again -- because Kavita is getting closer to figuring out who he really is, and she's bound and determined to nail him and get him out of Sagar Wada. What do they need a doctor for anyway? Walid Khan's men show up to steal the water, smashing it on the ground, and threatening the whole Wada. It's a bit unclear why they let those men overpower them -- there were only about six of them, and only one of them had a club, but I digress. Karla and Madame Zhou come to an uneasy truce, teaming up to break the mistress, to make her pliable and useful. Lin meets with Khaderbhai to learn that Khaderbhai is fighting with Walid for control of Sagar Wada. The land on which they live is very valuable and will be sold, no matter what. Lisa, Modena, and Maurizio pull off the deal, with Lisa sleeping with Raheem to seal it. Maurizio wants more, though, and decides to screw everyone over, sell the heroin, keep the money, and flee Bombay before anyone's the wiser. Khader Khan meets with Qasim and is very up-front about what he is offering: a few more years of reprieve, during which he takes care of Sagar Wada, but nothing can stop the building. He pledges to help them find a way afterwards. Qasim agrees, seeing that this is the best offer he's going to get. He and the rest of the camp rise up and drive away Walid's men. "If you had known the virtue of the ring, Or half her worthiness that gave the ring, Or your own honor to contain the ring, You would not then have parted with the ring." Khader Khan comes through on his promise. The Wada is installing running water. Prabhu gets a taxi to make ends meet. Lin makes preparations to leave -- once Didier delivers his passport. He starts saying his goodbyes, leaving the doctoring business to Parvati. Maurizio shows up Lisa's place, tosses it, is generally a scumbag, and comes up with both her and Modena's passports (because scum rises to the top). Modena still has all of the money, though -- and Raheem is still ripped off. Raheem finds Maurizio -- who puts him on Lin's trail, claiming that he's the dealer who'd made off with all of the money. "The hungry man doesn't care about the past." Kavita and her boyfriend/editor Nishant (Arka Das) are still hot on Lin's trail -- and duplicitous to his face, though it seems their keen interest in him has gotten his wind up. Lin seeks out Didier, who, instead of having gotten him his passport, has shut himself in with many bottles of wine. He returns Lin's money and photos, but Lin forgives him and helps him get back on his feet. Lin goes on a date with Karla; Prabhu goes on an official date with Parvati (and his mother-in-law). Raheem is hot on Lin's tail, but Didier and Prabhu jump in to protect him. They gather Abdullah and set off to the hotel to set Raheem straight -- it was Maurizio who set him on Lin's tail with lies anyway. They jump Raheem and his men, with Lin and Abdullah absolutely cleaning house. Abdullah's revelation that he represents Abdel Khader Khan chills Raheem to the bone. He quickly agrees to leave the country with his life, and gives up Maurizio in the bargain. Lin heads off for revenge, impervious to Prabhu's pleas that this is not who he is. Lin gets Lisa to arrange to meet Maurizio, who shows up with a gun. No-one knows why they have to be so stupid, wasting time with this petty revenge shit. Anyway, Karla gets her work done, but Maurizio betrays her association with Khader Bhai to Lin. Lin beats the everylovin' crap out of Maurizio, which he thoroughly deserves. Lin then confronts Karla for her association with Khaderbhai. She hasn't got much to say, even though she'd sacrificed so much for him, having gotten Kavita to drop her article about him. He tells her to fuck off forever. Meanwhile, the cop from Australia -- Nightingale -- is in country and making himself absolutely beloved among his fellow Indian police officers. He gets what he deserves as well. He eventually gets the Indian police on his side and they raid Sagar Wada to find Lin. Lin is there, saving Qasim from a hematoma -- he can't leave his side until the last possible second. Things are coming to a head. Walid puts out a hit on Khalid and everyone on his side: Abdullah, Lin, Karla, etc. Karla and Lisa are taken to Madame Zhou, who will do with them as she pleases, selling them into slavery. Maurizio smirks in the background. Kavita's article hits the front pages. Her editor Nishant takes the byline. His is rewarded by two bullets to the chest from one of Walid's young assassins. Lin and Prabhu escape Nightingale by the skin of their teeth. In trying to find Karla and Lisa, Lin and Abdullah find Modena bleeding out and get him to a hospital. Lin and Prabhu pick up Modena's suitcase from the train station. "Lin: Why now? This place [Zhou's palace] has been here for years. Prabhu They are embarrassed, na? See, for them, this is the worst feeling. Everyone knows all the time, bad things are there, but they can do nothing about it, na?So we pretend it is not so. But, when you don't allow them to pretend, then the people get very, very angry." Khader is regrouping, trying to figure his next move. Abdullah grows impatient with doing nothing. They maybe decide to take out Walid where he lives, but maybe it's a feint. Walid believes the double- (triple-?) crossing cop and moves out. Lin goes to the palace to rescue Karla and Lisa, but they're doing a good job of rescuing themselves. "A coward is incapable of exhibiting love; it is the prerogative of the brave." A mob crashes into the palace, lending urgency to the affair. A fight, a dropped gun, and Lisa shoots Maurizio and about three other people. She misses Zhou, who they leave to the mob. Prabhu jets away when he sees the cops; Nightingale is on the hunt for his cab. The cops turn out to be on Khaderbhi's side. They trap Walid in a cul-de-sac and ambush him and his people to death. Abdullah shows up in police uniform and ices Walid. Lin, Karla, and Lisa regroup at Didier's place. Prabhu joins them -- with the money, $302,000. Lin gives the money back to Lisa and send her toothpick-thin, bleached-blonde, idiot ass into the mob-filled streets with a bag full of cash. Ok, sure. Lin at least saved a chunk of it for Prabhu. "Lin: You're one of the biggest men I've ever met, Prabhu. I don't know what I've done to deserve you in my life, but I'm glad for it. To honor our friendship, I've got one very important thing I wanna ask of you. Prabhu: Lin, anything. Lin: Name your first son after me. Prabhu: Anything but that. Lin is a terrible name. [Lin means "penis" in Hindi]" Karla and Lin finally fall into bed together. Everyone's wrapping up loose ends. Modena is gone; Lisa splits the cash with Lin. Karla goes to Khader to say goodbye. Nightingale shows up at Karla's place and Lisa lets him right in because she is literally the stupidest person on the planet. Nightingale catches him on the roof. While we're on the subject, doesn't anyone ever duck a blow or put up a guard when a blow is absolutely imminent and telegraphed from a mile away? Lin escapes, but without the money. Karla's at the station, waiting in vain. Nightingale and the Bombay cops magically find Prabhu -- because the plot needed it. Some people catch Lin and kidnap him just as he's about to catch up to Karla. It's the cops -- we leave Lin tied up, being beaten. Unfortunately, Apple also didn't like the numbers that Shantaram was putting up and has canceled the show after one season. It was a troubled production, with monsoons and COVID dragging out the filming of the first season over years. The Big Sleep (1946) -- "8/10" General Sternwood (Charles Waldron), and old, rich, and wheelchair-ridden man who has lost the capacity to enjoy any of life's pleasures for himself, hires Phillip Marlowe (Humphrey Bogart) to take care of a blackmailing problem plaguing his youngest daughter Carmen (Martha Vickers). Marlowe meets the slightly off-kilter coquette in the foyer. It's clear that she's just unhinged enough to have left a trail of reasons behind her for which she could be blackmailed. Marlowe also briefly meets her sister Vivian (Lauren Bacall). They don't exactly hit it off. The most important thing is that Humphrey Bogart gets cooler and cooler throughout the movie. He is one slick cat. He never loses his cool, he always has a good riposte, and he gets out of almost every situation without violence. After the initial introductions, the story gets a bit murkier. Marlowe is constantly on the search for his missing friend Sean Regan, who was also a friend of the General's. Carmen, it turns out, owes a gambling debt to a bookseller Arthur Geiger. When Marlowe goes to Geiger's house, he finds Carmen drugged up, an empty camera, and Geiger's body. That's just the beginning. There's also a casino owner and gangster Eddie Mars, who may or may not be in cahoots with Vivian. Mars's wife ran off with Regan, and Mars probably killed him for it. He says that his wife did it, but that's almost certainly not true. Marlowe forces Mars out the door, where his own men kill him in a hail of bullets. Marlowe and Vivian end up together. It's very much a film of its time. There's no soundtrack. The camera angles are very, very standard. It's black and white. You don't watch for the plot; you watch for the style and the cool lines. The "Wikipedia entry" does a good job of summarizing the plot in much more detail. Jung_E (2023) -- "7/10" Jung_E is a digital reconstruction of the mind of a popular and nearly indomitable warrior in the battle between mankind's orbital output and the colonies that were overtaken by an uprising of robots. Let me back up. The Earth has become so inhospitable because of climate change that humanity instead has moved into giant orbiting ringworlds -- so large that they have, like, mountains, clouds, and stuff. Like, these things are immense. The story says that Earth is nearly inhospitable. But space is completely inhospitable. I don't understand these movies that just hand-wave away how idiotic it is to say humanity has moved to space because of climate change. I mean, how awful can it have gotten that living in a tin can in vacuum is considered to be better? It's similar to fools who want to escape to the Moon or Mars: it's hundreds of times harder to survive there than it is in the most inhospitable place on Earth. For starters, you can breathe the air pretty much anywhere on Earth. Secondly, you can grow food pretty much anywhere, too. Anyway, the whole premise is bullshit. Also, they must have mined thousands of asteroids to get the material for all of the constructions they show. Also, it would take hundreds of years. Or, maybe not, because they have robots. Still, I wonder why it takes years to build a skyscraper on a planet we're designed for, but humanity can build a ringworld as big as a small moon inside of a century. Anyway, it's 2194 and humanity is up in orbit and they've been fighting the robots for 35 years or so after a robot uprising. The war would have been won, but the warrior on whose mind Jung_E is based failed at the very last minute to achieve her objective. She'd achieved dozens of them before that, but she failed in this last one. She was hauled home nearly dead, and has been kept alive by the Kronoid corporation. Her daughter Yun Seo-hyun is a chief scientist there, in charge of the program that is trying to use a robot based on her mother to win the war. The Ai keeps failing to achieve its objective, despite all sorts of attempts to enhance the right lobes of its processing centers in successive attempts. The chairman of Kronoid lets Yun Seo-hyun know that her services will no longer be required: a peace treaty is imminent with the robots. It is then that Yun Seo-hyun learns that her immediate superior has always been an advanced robot. It's even possible that the chairman is a robot. Yun Seo-hyun is ill with cancer again and is told about her possibilities for upload after death: class A has all the rights of a human, class B does not, but still has some autonomy, and class C has no rights whatsoever, and must agree to allow any and all clones for any and all purposes. Her mother Jung_E is class C, which is why she can be used for warrior simulations, but also as a sexbot. With peace coming on , the Kronoid company will focus on adding intelligence into household products. Yun runs one more simulation, but this time focuses on saving Jung_E instead. They break out of Kronoid headquarters together -- though not without a whole bunch of fighting. Jung_E must take about a half-dozen of her successor models. She manages all but the last, which ends up almost choking her out. Yun shows up just in the knick of time to power it down from behind. Yun sneaks Jung_E's brain out in the last successor robot, to fool the robot police that are also hunting Jung_E by now. They monorail it out of the there, but they're not alone. Kim is also in the same train car (I have literally no idea how he got there without them knowing about it). Kim wings Yun with a shot, but Jung_E takes him out, making him shoot his own eye out -- he now knows that he's a robot, too. They duke it out some more. Everybody really likes those stomp-kicks and super-jump stomps that are telegraphed from a million miles away. The police show up, but Jung_E dispatches them relatively easily, returning her focus to the seemingly indomitable Kim, who they finally drop into some sort of deep abyss that no-one in their right mind would have bothered building on an arcology in space. These things are really spectacularly big. If humanity had put 10% of the effort into not breaking the planet that they put into building these arks, they could have just stayed on Earth. Wait, are they on Earth? Jung_E escapes through a forest to a hilltop with a view of a dozen miles in each direction. Did they forget that they're not on Earth? It's a relatively standard premise, but reasonably well-done. I watched it in Korean with English subtitles. The Transporter Refueled (2015) -- "4/10" This time the transporter Frank is played by Ed Skrein and his dad is played by Ray Stevenson. This is so woodenly written and acted, it's painful. The scene where the ladies explain the next hour of the movie is terrible. Every woman in this movie is painfully thin, but also sold as excruciatingly sexy. They all act, and are treated as, irresistible. It's unclear how Frank's dad is involved in the whole deal gone awry, but I'm also hard-pressed to care. Frank does have some close-quarters fighting chops but, while the choreography is reasonably widely filmed, there are also a lot of cuts that make it both hard to follow the action and hard to see how much he's actually doing. He uses a lot of garrotes and wires and ropes and stuff. It's a relatively unique gimmick. The ladies are completely irritating. Don't even ask me what the plot was. Something about him being forced to do a whole bunch of driving and transporting and fighting because he's trying to save his dad, I think. But his dad seems to be totally in cahoots with the preternaturally powerful grrrls who are pushing around a transporter who hadn't been pushed around in the previous three films. I watched it in German. Sebastian Maniscalco: Is It Me? (2022) -- "7/10" This special feels stronger than "Stay Hungry" (2019) but not as good as "Aren't You Embarassed?" (2014). He's looking a bit older than he even did in 2019 -- he has two kids now -- but he's still swaggering around like the Italian-American caricature that he either is or plays on stage. His mannerisms are the same, though they almost feel a bit exaggerated by now, but he's still doing OK. Most of his comedy is observational and about how the world is no longer the same/as good as it was when he was growing up. Since I come from the same generation, it's hard to disagree. Some things really do suck now. We have improved some things, but made other things so much worse. I agree with Sebastian that I'm very much not sure it's been worth the trade. Why can't we trend upwards in more things? Why won't our overlords allow us to have nice things? Anyway, I really liked the bit about going to a showing of Hamilton and pretending to be too dumb to understand what's going on -- rather than saying that the show is a shitty, confusing, and muddled waste of time, he passive-aggressively says that he and his wife were too dumb to follow it. But it must be good, because so many smart people liked it. White Noise (2022) -- "8/10" We are introduced to Jack Gladney (Adam Driver), who teaches Hitler Studies at a midwestern college. He lives with his wife Babette (Greta Gerwig) and their flock of children. His best friend is a fellow professor named Murray (Don Cheadle). The movie's plot follows that of the book very closely, including several quotes directly. See my "review of the book from 2021" for more details. After introducing the characters, these are the main plot points: The Toxic Airborne Incident is a large, black cloud of toxic who-knows-what that Jack is afraid he's spent too much time in. They spend time fleeing it and returning to their homes, worrying about what's going to happen in the aftermath. "It's comforting to know the supermarket hasn't changed since the toxic event. In fact, the supermarket has only gotten better. Between the unpackaged meat and the fresh bread, it's like a Persian bazaar. Everything is fine, and will continue to be fine, as long as the supermarket doesn't slip. "Do you know the Tibetans believe there's a transitional state between death and rebirth. That's what I think when I come here. The supermarket is a waiting place. It recharges us spiritually. It's a gateway. Look how bright. Look how full of psychic data, waves, and radiation. All the letters and numbers are here, all the colors of the spectrum, all the voices and sounds, all the code words and ceremonial phrases. We just have to know how to decipher it." * Babette is taking a pill that makes her stop fearing death. Or, at least, she thinks that's what the pill does. It might just be a sham and the man who sold it to her only used its purported efficacy to convince her to sleep with him. * Jack needs the pill for his own fear of death, but he also wants to take revenge on the man who slept with his wife. There are definitely Lynchian stylistics here, when Jack is driving to Mr. Gray, muttering "Steal instead of buy. Shoot instead of talk.", over and over. Jack is at the motel. He meets Mr. Gray. The TV snows over and Jack sees Babette mounting the greasy Mr. Gray on the TV. The man is repulsive -- I'm sure that's exaggerated to emphasize Jack's repulsion at meeting the man who'd entered Babette. Jack shoots Mr. Gray on the toilet. He puts the pistol in Mr. Gray's hand to fake a suicide, but he is not dead. He fires a shot, hitting Jack in the thumb, then Babette in the leg, who'd just walked in. They drag Gray to the parking lot, where he starts choking, but Jack's CPR brings him back. They take him to a clinic run by nuns. The nuns speak German. Schwester Hermann Marie's German is excellent, thank goodness. "You want to know what I believe? Or what I pretend to believe? [...] Wer hiereinkommt und von Engeln redet ist ein Schwachkopf. Zeig mir einen Engel. Bitte! Ich will einen Engel sehen. Zeig mir einen Heiligen. Gib mir ein Haar vom Körper eines Heiligen. Unser Auftrag in dieser Welt ist Dingen zu glauben, den kein Mensch ernst nimmt. Und, wenn wir diesen Glauben aufgeben würden, denn würde die menschliche Rasse aussterben. Deswegen sind wir hier. Eine winzige Minderheit. Und, wenn wir nicht so tun würden, als glaubt man diesen Dingen, denn würde die Welt zusammenbrechen! Es ist die Hölle ... wenn keiner glaubt. Wir beten. Wir zünden Kerzen an. Und wir bitten Statuen um Gesundheit und langes Leben. Aber bald nicht mehr. Ihr werdet eure Gläubigen verlieren." Interesting, but kind of a non sequitur. The movie focuses more on the quirkiness of their familial interactions with a lot of overlapping and seemingly non-sequitur dialogue amongst all of the family members, with the camera swinging amongst them. The acting is quite good all around, with Driver delivering a commanding performance, as usual. His intervention on Murray's behalf in his classroom is applause-worthy. So the movie's not bad, but it's also not as good as the book, which focused a lot more on the impending commercialized and homogenized hellscape of what we are still forced to call American culture even though it has long since become so capitalized and market-ized and commodified that it barely even has a sheen of humanity to it at all anymore. DeLillo's treatment would be expanded and complemented by Foster Wallace's ramblings and famously loquacious thoughts on the matter. America didn't feel real anymore, and we can only say that it has gotten nearly infinitely worse from the times when authors like Postman, DeLillo, and Foster Wallace all were writing about how far we'd already fallen and how it couldn't possibly get any worse, could it? "Murray says we are fragile creatures, surrounded by hostile facts." The Wandering Earth (2019) -- "7/10" The sun is acting up. Within three-hundred years, it will engulf the Earth's orbit. There is, of course, only one thing to do: move the Earth to a different star system. The entire planet bands together to build thousands of "Earth engines", unfathomably gigantic rockets eleven kilometers high. This is seriously cool and grandiose and the depiction is tremendous. I gave this movie a whole extra point for being based on so awesomely big of an idea. This premise is so awesome that I had to check whether Roland Emmerich had directed. He had not; it's by Frant Gwo. There's a lot of blabla with Liu Peiqiang (Jing Wu) telling his son Liu Qi (Chuxiao Qu) about his upcoming mission to Jupiter and how he will see him again someday. Liu Qi must retreat to an underground city with his sister Han Duoduo (Jinmai Zhao) and his grandfather Han Ziang (Man-Tat Ng). "Routes are countless. Safety is foremost. With unregulated driving, your loved might end up in tears." Seventeen years later, Liu Qi is working, but no longer communicates with his father, who is on the space station trailing the Earth on its travel out of the solar system. Han Ziang is a transport driver, presumably hauling material around for the massive engines -- parts or fuel, it's not clear. Jupiter does something funny and unpredicted, which means that the Earth is going to pass too close to it for the slingshot and will, instead, strike it directly. Jupiter is pulling off Earth's atmosphere, but also causing massive seismic shocks that disable about 1/3 of the engines. Humanity rallies to get most of them running again, but the one in Shanghai is a dead loss. Instead, our heroic crew head to Sulawesi with their "lighter core", necessary for restarting the massive equatorial Earth Engine there. That engine has already been relit, but it's not going to be enough. Instead, Liu Qi thinks of a new plan: the mixture of Jupiter's hydrogen with Earth's Oxygen should, when lit, make a huge booster that will repel Earth from Jupiter. Unfortunately, their efforts are in vain: the Earth engine's blast, even when enhanced, isn't enough to reach the H/O mixture. Liu Peiqiang decides to crash the space station into the mixture to ignite it, sacrificing himself, all of the hibernating astronauts, as well as a treasure trove of cellular and genetic material that had been prepared for an emergency. The computers had determined that it was more important to save this than to save the Earth, but humanity disagreed. Three years later, we see Tim, Duoduo, and Liu Qi working as transport drivers as Earth makes its way toward the Sun for a final slingshot before leaving the solar system. The voiceover explains that, after that, the Earth engines will accelerate for 500 additional years to 0.5% of the speed of light, after which it will cruise for 1,300 years, then decelerate for 700 years before finally nestling in to the Alpha Centauri system -- 100 generations later. Look, there are ton of people involved here, Engineer Li Yiyi (Yichi Zhang) is absolutely clutch in figuring things out. Soldiers Yang Jie (Yi Yang) and He Lianke (Haoyu Yang) as well as Tim (Mike Kai Sui), a half-Australian Chinese Duoduo and Liu meet in jail when they try to steal a transport. There is, of course, a Russian astronaut Makalov (Arkadiy Sharogradskiy), who acts pretty much like every other Russian astronaut in every other space movie not made by Russians (Tarkovsky's Solaris was an exception, for example). No-one is ever going to beat Peter Stormare's Lev Andropov from Armageddon, though. Speaking of movies that this is like, it's kind of like Armageddon, but it's also very much like Independence Day -- right up to the father getting back the respect of his son by sacrificing himself in a flaming ball of death. The tech feels a lot like Pacific Rim -- and I'll be damned if Moonfall doesn't need to be mentioned, at least a little bit. It's kind of interesting that the movie uses a tremendous amount of CGI, but the movie itself is about a future where we can actually build incredibly huge, amazingly complex, phenomenally resilient, nearly preternaturally reliable and redundant machines. I watched it in Chinese with English subtitles. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4648 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4648 Sat, 04 Feb 2023 13:15:56 +0100 -- "6/10" 2. "Дом дураков / House of Fools (2002)" <#Дом> -- "9/10" 3. "Welcome to Dongmakgol (2005)" <#Welcome> -- "10/10" 4. "Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959)" <#Hiroshima> -- "7/10" 5. "Bad Sisters S01 (2022)" <#Bad> -- "9/10" 6. "Spirited (2022)" <#Spirited> -- "6/10" 7. "Archer S13 (2022)" <#Archer> -- "8/10" 8. "Inside Job S01--S02 (2021--2022)" <#Inside> -- "9/10" 9. "Letterkenny S01--S03 (2022)" <#Letterkenny> -- "8/10" 10. "The Assistant (2019)" <#The> -- "8/10" These are my notes to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. I've recently transferred my reviews to IMDb and made "the list" of around 1600 ratings publicly available. I've included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other -- I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. Feels Good Man (2020) -- "6/10" This is a documentary about the artist who created Pepe the Frog, a character in a comic he's been drawing for years, but which was coopted by the alt-right as their mascot. The first part introduces the innocuous comic-artist, his wife, his roommate, his friends. The guy and his friends are overgrown man-children, having a goof making stoner-humor comics and finding a reasonable amount of success. The next part documents the growth of the meme, starting on 4chan, which actually seems quite innocent, compared to the sheer psychosis that is young girls jumping on a meme to get attention and to boost their channels on whatever social media they're on. [image]The shot to the right is of a young girl who'd painted her face to look like a frog, mispronounced his name as "pee-pee", then started a tirade that she hated the frog. It literally doesn't matter what that girl thinks, but she probably had millions of followers, watching her psychotic antics and cheering her on. The decline and fall of western civilization indeed. The documentary didn't at all mention how psychotic this all is, it just noted that there was a backlash to the alt-right use of Pepe. It didn't at all delve into a world where young girls fake outrage about things they don't understand at all in order to make money on advertising. The next part of the documentary is about people who took violence into the real world and, in the minds of many, simultaneously made literally everything with which those people had previously associated evil and worthy of elimination, worthy of censorship. Obviously, there are a bunch of idiots, psychos, and mentally ill people who supported this violence, much as the girl above was threatening to kill because she was so angry. If we agree that she's probably not going to act on her dementia, then we also have to agree that almost no-one else will act on theirs, not matter how much we despise who they are as people. Naturally, people will defend their "side's" threats of violence as innocent, while every single expression of dark humor on the other side as absolutely real and a harbinger of imminent violence. Because people are stupid. Instead of thinking at all about what the root causes are. Because, even after forty years of it, people still don't get how funny and easy trolling is. Because the Internet has killed irony for so many people. Instead, you have people who analyze the frog being drawn with his thumb under his chin as "being so smug, like he's above the discussion that people are trying to have about ... kindness." JFC, you people are so fucking easy to troll, it's not even right. The frog looks like literally every cheesy author picture ever published. That person spent literally six seconds drawing that frog and you've probably spent weeks of your waking life writing articles on Jezebel analyzing it. You can't even see when you've been had. There's one dude who's likening the use of Pepe the Frog with pogroms. Good luck with that, buddy! Hope you look good in makeup when you get your regular spot on CNN. What a shitshow. And you know what? Those memes were mostly pretty great. I don't agree with the politics at all, but they are pretty gold. Their meme game was super-strong. It's also interesting to see how the alt-right and the alt-left/mainstream media worked super-hard to build up this meme, just because it was making lots of anger and money for everyone. The artist was put on the ADL's list of slanderous symbols and he was immediately ostracized. His friend told him to sue the Anti-Defamation League for defamation. It literally doesn't get any better when they spend the 10 minutes talking about crypto/NFT millionaires (363M in Pepe cash for one stoner). They give long, long minutes of time to young men -- all men, of course -- explaining how the system works, as if there is any justification for anyone becoming a multimillionaire for buying frog-based electronic trading cards. One idiot shows his most valuable trading card -- it has a typo -- then gets into a Lamborghini and drives away. The only solace is that these idiots are hopefully all broke now. I wish they'd shown him fishtailing his overpowered vehicle off of a cliff. After that, they cover Furie's suing of Infowars and Alex Jones for having appropriated his art and selling it. It was fine, but it was also tediously long, again interesting only for people who just want to watch Alex Jones get his just desserts, which I don't care about at all. This was a reasonably well-made documentary, but you have to be a lot more invested in the right/left, Dems vs. Reps, siloed bullshit than I am. You could have made this documentary half as long and lost nothing. Дом дураков / House of Fools (2002) -- "9/10" This film is set in a hospital for the mentally ill in Ingushetia, on the border of Chechnya. Zhanna (Yuliya Vysotskaya) is an inmate, but also seems more capable and is kind of the ad-hoc leader there. She has a lisp and believes that Bryan Adams is her fiancé. I am not kidding when I saw that the actual Bryan Adams is actually in this film, in her dream sequences. He is invariably singing Have You Really Loved a Woman?, which is actually one of his better songs. The staff of the hospital leaves in order to find help, but they don't return for a long time. Instead, a group of Chechen soldiers set up camp nearby, taking over the hospital temporarily. Their leader Ahmed is in the basement when she finds he and three of his compatriots, playing her accordion. She asks for it back, then plays it for them. Ahmed says he would marry her on the spot. She believes him. In the meantime, some Russians show up with a tank, but they're only there to return the body of one of the Chechen soldiers. They make a deal, then relax together in the sun. They discover that they fought together in earlier times. When the Russians leave, their commander leaves the money the Chechens had paid for the body with them, saying he owed them that much for having saved his life way back when. Zhanna and the other inmates make preparations. The next day, she leaves in her wedding dress, with her wedding hat, with her wedding makeup, carrying a small suitcase and her accordion. She enters the bunker and takes her place next to a reluctant Ahmed. The soldiers start to scuffle, but first Zhanna, then another guy takes over to play a song on her accordion, a song that the soldiers know. They stop fighting and start dancing. Ali shows up to take Zhanna back to the asylum. The soldiers invite him in, offering him a drink and yanking his backpack off to see what's in it. It's full of poems. Zhanna says to read them. He begins to recite as he picks the papers off the floor. The leader of the Chechens begins to sing in a low voice. The rest join in. It's quite beautiful. Much later that night, Zhanna finds Ahmed and confesses to him that she can't marry him because it would break Bryan Adams's heart -- that he can't live without her. Ahmed admits that he'd never intended to marry her, that he was just joking. He asks her forgiveness, which she grants. They talk about the war and how he came to fight. He admits that he'd bald, too. She says many people are bald. "Lenin was bald. And smart. And his wife loved him." They spend the night platonically in the gazebo on the asylum grounds. In the morning, a bomb explodes nearby, terrifying everyone. The Chechens are inside again, this time collecting medical supplies. My edition didn't have subtitles for when the Chechen soldiers spoke to each other, which made Zhanna's confusion feel more real. Vika is out there, proselytizing her leftist rhetoric. Poor Zhanna tries to fix everything with her accordion, playing it as the bombs fall. Vika has stolen an AK and taken up arms against "Russian chauvinism and imperialism". Ali tries to prevent them from stealing supplies; the soldiers beat him into a puddle forming in a crater. Behind Zhanna, a Russian helicopter crashes and explodes on the grounds of the hospital. The Chechens had just driven off, firing into the sky. She doesn't stop playing her accordion. Who is really mad here? All are mad. War is madness. The rain falls; Ali crawls out of the rapidly filling crater. Shades of Tarkovsky. The inmates wait out the bombs in the basement. The hospital is a shambles. Machine-gun fire in the distance. Helicopters. Glass everywhere. The tough Lithuanian fighter -- a woman with a wounded shin -- is back in the hospital, sniping from the windows. She tells Zhanna to get in the basement. Zhanna ignores her and stabs Polaroids of Ahmed with a bloody sliver of glass. The Chechen behind her is sniped herself and bleeds all over the night table, the insides of her head spilling into her helmet. Soldiers burst into the hospital. Zhanna starts spiraling. Cue soft, afternoon light. Cue piano and acoustic guitar version of Have You Really Loved a Woman? and she's dancing with Bryan Adams as the hospital falls down around her ears. She goes back to an older inmate, "You didn't eat your apple? The nurse says that God forgives. Will he forgive everyone? Who? God. Which one? You know. God. What do you see? An apple. Is that all? Well, yes, what else? It's an apple. I see different nations on that apple. People that love each other and destroy each other, fighting for generations, and dying. They stare up in hope to see my face. And you want me to eat them? I can only forgive them. Just as I forgive you. I'm aware of your existence. (Я знаю что ты есть)" The doctor returns the next day, with supplies and kind words. He finds Zhanna pining for Ahmed, then wishing him a painful death. Soldiers return, with tanks and guns, entering the hospital and searching it, top to bottom. The captain starts to have a panic attack, just unlacing his muddy boots. He confides to the doctor. He has lost so many friends and colleagues. He asks for a shot. The doctor says, "Do you know what the most important thing in war is? It's not victory. It's death." The solder gets his shot and is back on the hunt for terrorists, reinvigorated. There's a shootout. It's with his own company. Who's mad here? The whole world is a madhouse. Only the inmates act calm and sane and carry on with their daily routine. In the cantina, Zhanna spots Ahmed in line, getting food. Her face reveals a plethora of emotions crashing over each other like waves. He's pretending to be an inmate. The others have a chance to give him up, but they quickly close ranks. The doctor pretends to buy it. Zhanna retreats into her Bryan Adams fantasy, starring in a video on a train of Have You Ever Really Loved a Woman? That this was Russia's entry for the best foreign film Academy Award for 2002 is wonderful. They really, really tried to reconcile with America. Here, they made a film about their war against Chechnya that wasn't particularly flattering to the Russians. Not only was it published, it was submitted for an award in America. Welcome to Dongmakgol (2005) -- "10/10" The story is set during what Americans call the Korean War, in a remote Korean mountain village called Dongmakgol, whose inhabitants have no idea that their country has been divided in half, with the northern communists ("comrades") fighting the U.S.-backed army in the south (the "puppet" army). Chief Comrade Lee Su-Hwa (Jae-yeong Jeong) leads his wounded troops on foot into an ambush, losing nearly all of them. A handful survive and begin to make their way to Pyongyang, across the mountains. Likewise 2nd Lt. Pyo Hyun-Chul (Shin Ha-kyun) has lost his entire command and is ready to kill himself when Army Medic Mun Sang-sang (Jae-kyeong Seo) saves him. They grudgingly end up traveling together and also head over the mountain. The all end up at Dongmakgol, led there a bit by "free spirit" Yeo-il (Kang Hye-jeong), who is a pretty little sprite who does what she wants when she wants. She might be mentally handicapped or might just be completely unrepressed and happy. I suppose it's a mark of our society that I can't tell the difference. She tells the Northeners that they should move because there are snakes. They laugh it off because they think she's a bit off. When a snake lands on Jang Young-hee's (Ha-ryong Lim) arm, they expend all of their remaining ammunition trying to kill it. The Southerners meanwhile also find the village and they end up in a standoff with the Northerners. They stand on opposite sides of a platform in the middle of the village. They have also ordered all of the villagers to stand on the platform between them as they stand off against each other -- one side with only grenades, the other with empty rifles. After a night and a day of standing there, the villagers have gone back to their lives. Yeo-il plucks the ring from a grenade for a lark. Northener Seo Taek-ki (Deok-Hwan Ryu) clutches it harder, but eventually falls asleep on his feet, his grip on the grenade slipping until he drops it -- sans pin. Lt. Pyo jumps on it while the others jump away. It's a dud. They continue their standoff. Eventually, Pyo chucks the dud away, it rolls into the grain and corn storage,...and explodes, destroying the village's food supplies. The group of five wake up together, in a single hut. Seo has a flower in his hair. The others take time off from squaring off against each other to enjoy a laugh at his expense. They start to work in the fields, grudgingly getting used to each other, and helping the villagers rebuild their stores. Both the soldiers and the villagers begin to regret how quickly the stores are restored, because it means that they will probably have to move on. Seo starts to falls in love with Yeo-il. Pyo and Lee become friends. Jang and Seo become best friends. Smith helps out as well, though he keeps trying to communicate with home base from his crashed plane. This would be a mistake because Smith's American comrades would get a fix on his downed plane and will want to come to "rescue" him -- annihilating the nest of communists in the village as well. The long interlude of bucolic peace is over. Avatar: The Way of Water juxtaposed the simple, bucolic, village life with the batshit-insane and murderously violent and creed-less military onslaught of the Americans. This feels exactly like that. Fortunately, most the landing party gets caught up in a storm of butterflies emanating from the festival and only five of them survive. They make their way to the village and rudely break up the party, threatening everyone's lives and yelling completely nonsensical things about a war no-one knows or cares about. When they start senselessly hammering on the chief, Lt. Pyo flips it and stabs him in the neck with a stick, leading to a fracas in which all but one of the invaders are killed. They take him prisoner. Poor Yeo-il was fatally wounded in the bedlam. The villagers are sad to see them go, barely understanding what's going on, but suspecting that it has something to do with the bad men who had broken up their party, assaulted their chief, and killed Yeo-il. The six of them visit the prisoner and discover that he and his crew had been searching for Smith and that there is a bombing coming. Smith tells them of a weapons store that he'd found and they decide to use it to distract the bombing attack to save the village. Pyo tells Smith that he can't accompany them, though; he has to go back to the base to thwart a second attack -- because one will come if they thwart the first one. There is no way he can stay with them. He and the remaining soldier head to the base. They're all dressed up in furs. They set up a Potemkin village and some firing positions and wait. Mun sang-sang sings his song again as they wait for the approaching bombers to appear. They eventually appear, evil black spots, a dozen of them. They are inexorable, uncaring, unfeeling, remorseless, inscrutable, and completely convinced of their own righteousness. They wield overwhelming firepower, safe in their airborne sanctuaries, merrily and gleefully destroying tiny villages on the side of a snowy mountain as if that were a viable military target. The men avoid all the bullets -- and take out an oncoming plane with a bazooka. The pilots are starting to sweat a bit. They take down another plane. The snowy mountain looks like a moonscape. The remaining planes are implacable and drop the real hardware. It is no longer fun. It no longer feels like victory. Our poor heroes are taking some damage. Lee Su-Hwa is hit by a bullet; Pyo is knocked out by a bomb; Jang is killed by a bomb; Seo is killed in his machine-gun nest, avenging Jang. There are so many planes. The force is overwhelming. They don't care. They never do. They have their orders. They have their hate. They have their machines of violence. They have their orgy of destructions. They have their lack of morals, principle, ethics, sense of history, empathy. They are hollow men. And they always, always win. This time they have been fooled into destroying a snow crag instead of the village they were seeking. The three remaining heroes stand on the hill, smiling at one another as the bombs fall on them. Smith hurries onward to get to the base. He hears what's happening and breaks down in tears, but know he must push on, else even worse will happen to Dongmakgol, else his friends' sacrifice will have been for nought. Because the war machine hungers always for more, always seeking new targets, always finding new enemies. It exists to feed itself. In flashback, Yeo-il visits the sleeping men and puts a flower in Seo's hair. This works very well as an anti-war movie, I think. I loved it and would watch it again. It's darkly comic; it's deeply touching. The more I think about it, the more I realize how much of this movie's plot Avatar: The Way of Water just lifted nearly wholesale. Sneaky, James Cameron, sneaky. Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959) -- "7/10" Elle (Emmanuelle Riva) and Lui (Eiji Okada) (no names; their names mean "her" and "him" in French) have just spent the night together in Hiroshima, in each other's arms, discussing the city and the war and the bombing. She talks about the museum. He tells her she's wrong. That she doesn't know. Here I am watching another French Avant-Garde film -- and another anti-war film. The pictures and films from the time are absolutely horrifying. He asks her about how she felt when it happened. She says that she can't believe they had the audacity, but that the world was happy that it ended the war. This is absolutely not why that happened. The war was already over. This is 100% admitted fact, by both the U.S. government (and the always-charming Curtis Lemay, war criminal sans pareil) and almost all historians. Seeing the destruction, one can't help but think that the U.S. is one of the most criminal empires to have ever graced the planet. Of course, so were the German and Japanese empires -- but the U.S. one killed 200,000 and wounded 90,000 people in nine seconds and fetes itself to this day for its bravery. They wake in the morning and introduce themselves. She finds out that he's an architect and had taught himself French to learn about the French Revolution from original texts. She is leaving the next morning -- she's an actress and her shoot is over. They part ways, with her saying she doesn't want to meet up again. Creeper shows up on her film set. They go to a parade commemorating the Hiroshima attack. People carry pictures of the dead and fallen. She cries in empathy. He's still creeping hard on her, "Je crois que je t'aime." Read the room, buddy. They're literally standing behind someone in body makeup that looks like a whole-body, bloody burn scar. They go back to his apartment. She asks where his wife is. "In Unzen; I'm alone." He says he's happy with his wife; she responds that she's happy with her husband. They embrace. Afterward, they lie entwined in bed and talk more about their pasts, about her fling in Nevers during the war. He was not a Frenchman (presumably a German? He's definitely a soldier.) They leave the apartment and wander the city. The film of the city itself is lovely. In a tea room, she tells more of the story. The town had ostracized her for having loved a German. They'd shaved her head; her parents had locked her in the basement. They'd waited for her "madness" to pass. In telling her story, she keeps referring to her former German lover in the second person, seeming to be speaking to her new Japanese lover. The story lingers on her way back from her exile for quite a long time. She recalls have seen her German lover's death in the street before her home, how they'd come to retrieve him the next morning, how long it had taken him to die. She starts to freak out a bit, shouting in the teahouse. He slaps, then backhands her to bring her to her senses. The whole bar turns around. She continues her story as if nothing had happened. They keep drinking beer, she keeps talking about her former German lover, he keeps loving her. At least she's back to the third person now. They part ways again, late at night. She is to depart in the morning. She's a bit drunk, a bit overtired, and starts regretting that she'd told her story. She decides to stay in Hiroshima, with her new lover. She goes back to the tearoom. He finds her outside. Creepin'. I wasn't quite as impressed with the nature of this "tone poem" as others seem to be. The film is in black-and-white, with pretty standard fixed cameras, but the photography is really quite lovely. I found the story to be a bit pedestrian, though -- maybe it was more shocking when seen younger, before having seen so many other movies and read so many books. The philosophy is a bit bland, a bit superficial. He is like a prop -- his overwhelming love for her is completely incomprehensible. Perhaps there's the juxtaposition of how much she feels herself to suffer for her ancient relationship with a German soldier -- in a city that suffered more than nearly any other. I mean, that's nearly shockingly solipsistic, but I'm not sure that's the takeaway that impresses so many others. Despite this juxtaposition, she remains laser-like focused on her own suffering, utterly without perspective. And he doesn't care. He loves her unconditionally and begs for a handful of days -- whatever she's willing to give of her endless bounty of fascinating stories and personality. Either that, or maybe she's just a roaring tiger in the sack. I gave it an extra point for the lovely photography and decent pacing. I watched it in French with English subtitles. Bad Sisters S01 (2022) -- "9/10" This is another one of those shows full of overly trusting people, none of whom are really worthy of respect. There are some who are over-the-top worse than others, which feels like the show's pushing you to side with people who aren't really worth siding with either. The storyline is about the Garvey sisters: there's single, semi-alcoholic Eva (Sharon Horgan), who works with John Paul Williams (Claes Bang), who's the worst person on Earth and married to homemaker Grace (Anne-Marie Duff), there's massage-therapist and "free spirit"/floozie Becka (Eve Hewson), one-eyed Bibi (Sarah Greene), married Ursula (Eva Birthistle), who's stepping out on her husband, EMT Donal (Jonjo O'Neill). They hate John Paul and he hates all of them. John Paul is dead at the beginning of the first show. The rest of season is a flashback explaining how that came about. Mostly, it's pretty clear: John Paul is a vicious, control-freak of a sociopathic monster who manipulates everyone and loves to torment for pleasure. It wasn't a matter of if, but a matter of when and by whom he would be murdered. There's also a real piece of shit in the person of Thomas Claffin (Brian Gleeson) and his half-brother Matthew (Daryl McCormack). They're insurance agents who own the agency that has to pay out John Paul's life-insurance policy. They can't afford to, so they're acting like police officers to try to find a reason to not pay out -- like maybe the sisters murdered the sonofabitch. Basically, John Paul is almost preternaturally evil and incredibly capable and lucky and also helped by the fact that people who are having affairs and doing other sorts of shady things don't have a passcode on their phones, which is, honestly, the fucking laziest sort of writing in this year of our Lord 2022. It's almost as lazy as the sisters answering literally any question put to them by the Claffin brothers. They have to answer them because they literally just always invite them in or let them in when they barge in uninvited. Is that how single women work the door at their apartments? They're standing there in their underwear, with shaving cream on their legs and when a complete stranger shows up, you just step aside when they take a run at you? And then you answer all of their questions. I can't tell if this is even lazier writing than leaving phones unlocked in 2022. We see how the pressure builds and the sisters' pots all boil over and they each line up, ready to help kill John Paul. Bibi's wife Nora (Yasmine Akram) is a treasure, though. She finally tells the Clafferty brothers what John Paul was really like: "Every time I saw him, I felt like punching him in the face." They are quite inventive in finding ways of making him be an unimaginably horrific "Prick". In E05, he chases his daughter Blanaid's (Saise Quinn) cat -- which she'd received from her aunties and which he hates -- into the street with a hose, where it's promptly hit by a passing car. He leaves its body in the street and goes back to washing his boat. When Grace gets home from a dance class that he hadn't wanted her to take -- she's too busy caring for his home -- and from which she'd fled before it had been five minutes because she felt guilty about being away from her job of caring for the Prick all the time, she runs over the cat's body. When she discover's the cat's body, Blanaid accuses her of always ruining everything. The Prick runs out to console her for killing the cat, and to tell his daughter not to be too harsh on her mother. Wonderfully cynically written. In E06, Grace is starting to exert some independence -- although a very minimal amount -- and the Prick starts to lose control when he finds her vibrator (given to her by Eva, of course) and challenges her, telling her that maybe he doesn't find her attractive is why they're no longer having relations, but she forces herself past him to go on an overnight sports thingie with Blanaid, after which the other sisters roofie the absolutely ever-lovin' Christ out of him, but he rallies, leaving the house without pants and driving down to his feckin' beloved boat because he needs to go out on the water with his boss Gerald, but he's got no pants and it's the middle of the night and he can't swim anyway and the roofie dose is absolutely going to debilitate his motor control at some point and that point is when he's straddled across the boat and dock, exposing his wedding tackle from behind to the sisters, who are watching the train wreck of their plan come to fruition because perhaps there is a God and the Prick falls in and sinks beneath the surface forever and ever amen. Except forever isn't as long as it used to be. Gabriel saves the Prick from drowning, for which JP returns the favor by trying to blackmail him for being gay and then taking a run at him, which Gabriel repays by cracking him in the jaw and sending him flying into a urinal. The prick has made another enemy, kind of. Gabriel is also mad at Eva because he thinks that she told the Prick about his homosexuality, which isn't the case, but it doesn't matter. This thing is picking up pace, I must say. It got a bit rockier at the end, though. There are really no good people in this show at all. Everyone's looking out for themselves, with no regard for what's right. The sisters snipe on each other -- they're trying to kill a man. Grace is a pathetic heap of a woman. Thomas Claffin is garbage, motivated only by money. His wife Theresa (Seána Kerslake) is also not interested in what might be right -- she's interested in helping her husband on his jihad, without regard for how many lives get ruined. Thomas and his wife are perfectly willing to cover up the horrendous fraud his father perpetrated on several customers, all the while judging the Garvey sisters for their purported crimes. Gabriel (Assaad Bouab) is an unassailably nice person. He's the best one in the show. Perhaps Matt Claffin is also pretty good, mostly, although he's under the aegis of his horrible brother Thomas. In the end, my guess turns out to be right and it is Grace who finally snaps and kills the Prick while they're at their cabin in the woods, on her birthday. He treats her even more like garbage than usual -- "you're a shadow, Mammy; you don't even exist when I turn out the light" -- and she finally realizes that she's been kidding herself. She sets up his body to look like he'd strangled himself driving home drunk on his snowmobile. Her neighbor, who JP had turned in to the police for being a pedophile, shows up to help her. Gracie finally admits her crime to the sisters, who breathe a sigh of relief that he's gone and who help her cover it up. Matt eventually discovers the truth, but ends up burning the evidence -- and Grace ends up dropping her claim on his insurance company. Overall, this was a pretty strong cast and a pretty strong and unique story. I gave it an extra point because it very clearly didn't position itself for a second season. I would like to see this family again, but I like that they had the stones to just end it, rather than setting up a possibly lucrative continuation that serves only to make money, but not to extend the story. Spirited (2022) -- "6/10" The premise of this movie is that a modern-day manipulator Clint Briggs (Ryan Reynolds) would be able to easily outwit a Ghost of Christmas Present (Will Ferrell) who's been doing the rescuing bad people bit for over 200 years. Also, there are a fuck-ton of musical numbers, many of them featuring Ryan Reynolds or Will Ferrell singing. Clint runs a very successful image-consultant business with Kimberley (Octavia Spencer). Over the one year of research they did on Clint, GCP fell in love with her. Clint proves a tough nut to crack. First, he sleeps with Ghost of Christmas Past (Sunita Mani), then he starts to turn the tables on GCP, who actually used to be Scrooge. Clint, for his part, supports his brother Owen (Joe Tippett), who adopted his niece (Marlow Barkley) because he wasn't willing to do it. He advises his niece to ruin her opponent's career in the sixth-grade-president race at her school. The plot quickly becomes about GCP retiring and getting back to life, to be with Kimberley. Then he and Clint figure out how to live as a human rather than a ghost. They end up back at Clint's X-Mas Eve party. Clint hands GCP off to Kimberley and is picked up by Christmas Future (Tracy Morgan) There are some decent lines and Reynolds is actually a different role than he usually plays -- a lot fewer one-liners, which was actually the right call. Ferrell has a couple of good lines, "Clint: You know I pay for all of this, right? GCP: You suck." But he also has a couple of throwaway lines that are too current ("I think I have moderate to severe Crohn's disease") and won't have legs a couple of years from now. Their chemistry is good overall, but they burst into song much too often. This type of musical is really not for me. The film is too long by about 45 minutes and it's crammed with songs that do nothing but let people like Octavia Butler and Will Ferrell try to prove that they can sing in a musical. I don't like these highly orchestrated singing and dancing things with all of the sad extras, looking very obviously like they're hoping that someone will notice them in this movie and hire them for other things. It was also obviously CGId, even in places where there was absolutely no need for it. The sets were antiseptic and felt mostly fake -- par for the course for a modern film, I suppose, but this film would have been an opportunity to have it feel warmer and more lived-in than movies generally feel nowadays. Archer S13 (2022) -- "8/10" In this season, the Agency -- now without Malory -- is a subdivision of IIA (international intelligence agency), run by the Fabian (Kayvan Novak). The plot arc for the season is the crew doing Fabian's bidding and trying to get their Agency back under their own control. Cheryl (Judy Greer) is the same, but also a demolitions expert now. Pam (Amber Nash) and Krieger (Lucky Yates) are a bit tamer than in previous episodes, although Pam does fight a couple of times -- and we get to see her tattoo. Also, we get to see Krieger's new van. Cyril (Chris Parnell) is also the same old Cyril, pathetic and needy and terrified, but sometimes useful. Ray starts out as the leader nominated by Fabian, then seems to have switched to IIA, then turns out to have been a double agent, and the team comes around. Archer (H. Jon Benjamin) is perhaps a bit more alcoholic than in prior seasons -- if that's even possible. Lana (Aisha Tyler) is in a custody battle with Robert (Stephen Tobolowsky) for a nearly tween-aged AJ (Kimberly Woods), who's quite capable in her own right. They eventually get their Agency back under their own control -- despite Fabian's and also Slater's (Christian Slater) best efforts. Slater reprises his role as the Agency's CIA liaison. This is a solid entry in the series, not one of the best, but solid. I'm just happy that they're still making these, honestly. They're a lot of fun and the characters are well-worn, but wonderfully familiar at this point. Inside Job S01--S02 (2021--2022) -- "9/10" This is a cartoon about a company called Cognito, which is in charge of running the deep state in the Unites States. Basically, every conspiracy theory you can think of is true -- and was either promulgated or perpetrated by Cognito employees. The company was founded by now disgraced Randy Ridley (Christian Slater) and J.R. Scheimpough (Andy Daly). Randy is no longer at the company, but his genius daughter Reagan (Lizzy Caplan) works there, in a very high-ranking position. She's a genius with amazing engineering abilities (á la Rick Sanchez), unbelievably and cartoonishly good, in fact, but that's just fine in a cartoon. We're not supposed to think about how quickly she's able to single-handedly engineer incredibly intricate devices that do things that defy all of the laws of physics that we know. She builds not just slightly more advanced technology, but actually impossible technology. Season two ends with a multi-episode arc about a machine that Rand invented that allows him to jump people into different time continua. She leads a team comprising social-media expert Gigi (Tisha Campbell), chemist/druggist/druggie Andre (Bobby Lee), dolphin-hybrid Glenn Dolphman (John DiMaggio), giant mushroom from the planet's core Magic Myc (Brett Gelman), the genocidal Robotus, Alpha-Beta (Chris Diamantopoulos) (created and held hostage by Reagan), and endless optimist, nice guy, and doofus Brett Hand (Clark Duke). They have a bunch of wacky adventures, saving the company and their own jobs several times. They go to the moon, They meet, befriend, and fight with Bear-O. They meet the Illuminati. They are ordered about by the mysterious Robes. Sasquatch has a cameo. Reagan is pretty hilarious and refreshingly well-written. Her character arc is quite fun, going from beleaguered employee to CEO to partner with the Robes in a long arc over two seasons. In season two, Ron Staedtler of the Illuminati shows up as a heavy love interest and it's really well-done. The final episode is touching. Several of the other characters are very good as well, but she stands out. This show's a lot better than I expected it to be when I half-heartedly clicked on it. It's clever and subtly subversive and a lot of fun for a Netflix cartoon. It's not shockingly subversive, but there are enough asides that surprised me in their relative audacity. Furthermore, as noted above, it doesn't mix with modern-day politics at all (or not yet, anyway). It takes for granted that there's an overarching surveillance state -- the cartoon is literally about that organization. It doesn't connect the dots to the NSA because it's a comedy not a documentary. Letterkenny S01--S03 (2022) -- "8/10" This is the story of a rural community in Ontario called Letterkenny.. There's Wayne (Jared Keeso), his sister Katy (Michelle Mylett), his best friend Daryl (Nathan Dales), and Dan (K. Trevor Wilson), who work on a farm together. There's a local hockey team, where Reilly (Dylan Playfair) and Jonesy (Andrew Herr) play. There's a group of on-again/off-again meth-heads, led by Stewart (Tyler Johnston). There are a handful of other bit players. The story is basically that Wayne is a straight-shooter and the toughest guy in town. He spends part of season 1 proving it. He has a distinctive style, both in his mannerisms and his diction. It's quite funny. He likes to farm, smoke, and drink straight from the bottle. There are a lot of mini-skits with highly ritualized exchanges between the characters, usually, Daryl, Katy, Wayne, and Dan. There are a few other characters who show up now and again: Bonnie McMurray (Kamilla Kowal) She's sweet on Wayne (like most of the other girls, exceptin' Katy) and very pretty McMurray (Dan Petronijevic) He's Bonnie's dad and very structured and not so bright. He's president of the Ag. Mrs. McMurray (Melanie Scrofano) Horny as hell for her husband and loves the hell out of cursing and G&Ts Tanis (Kaniehtiio Horn) Head of the gang on the reservation; kind of has a thing going with Wayne, maybe? Joint Boy (Joel Gagne) A beefy scrapper who's always smoking a joint; shows up as part of Wayne's gang Coach (Mark Forward) Coaches the local hockey team; hilariously angry all the time, "It's. Fucking. Embarrassing." Tyson (Jay Bertin) Local MMA guy; got his ass handed to him by Wayne; in his gang sometimes Gail (Lisa Codrington) Incredibly horny former bartender; always looking for love with Wayne Glen (Jacob Tierney) Local preacher and flamboyantly out gay man with several odd jobs Jim Dickens (Alex McCooeye) Also known as "Dickskin"; local auctioneer There are a few story arcs: the hockey boys move up to the real league, becoming schmelts, but then taking over when they're the only ones scoring goals and the other, more senior players, are head over heels for Angie, who's become a "puck bunny". In season three, it's winter, so it's snowmobile and ice-fishing season. There are also a lot more fart and shit jokes, which is a turn-off. They also lean way too hard on the ritual where each of the relatively unamusing senior hockey players say something snarky and then hand off to their teammate. Those parts got old really fast. I'm honestly kind of curious how they got to eleven seasons with this thing. The first two were pretty solid, though. Something different -- and it's about rural Canada, so that's nice. The Assistant (2019) -- "8/10" This is conceptually a great movie. It falls down a bit in the execution because they communicate misery through muddy sound and dim lighting. They succeed in their intent, though: the office where Jane works looks awful. We are assured that it's a high-powered talent agency, run by a well-connected and powerful Lothario. It looks like trash, though, with awful lighting, cramped cubicles, and food and refuse everywhere. Jane has so many jobs. She does them all. She's only been there for five weeks and she already knows so much. It's utterly unclear who in that office could even have trained her. She looks tired and nearly incapable of smiling or enjoying anything. I only know her name from IMDb because no-one ever recognized her by name; no-one else in the movie has a name. Jane's life is misery. She's at the office at 06:00. She leaves around 21:00. When she went to HR to complain about her boss's suspected sexual proclivities, she said she'd been there for two months, but HR reminded her that it had only been five weeks. It just felt like two months. At about 40 minutes into the movie, it had felt like I'd been watching for much longer already. In that sense, the movie absolutely succeeded in communicating what it was like to be Jane. This is not knocking the movie -- that was its intent. The HR scene is well-made: she goes in but is told to sit and wait for someone to see her. As she's sitting there in this harshly lit and unfriendly space, another man shows up and is told by the same secretary to walk right in. After he leaves again, she's told that she can go in as well, presumably because it had now become too obvious that the man she was to see isn't busy at all, but just doesn't want to be bothered. She goes in, where he puts on a show of being busy, just to let her know who's important and who's in charge -- just what you want in HR, of course. As she tells her story, he becomes increasingly hostile, finally telling her that she should be grateful that she has a job. Basically, stay in your lane, Jane. Oh, and be happy that "you're not his type." Here's another example from toward the end of the movie: Just before she's allowed to leave, she's listlessly dragging a fork through a microwaved plastic dish of something or other. Her boss calls her to tell her to go home, but it's kind of cut off. He can't even be bothered. She dumps her meal in the trash and walks out. On the street, she makes her way to a close-by deli, where she buys a muffin. It's wrapped in plastic wrap. It's not fresh. She peels off part of the plastic wrap, enough to take a bite. Two large chunks of the muffin top fall off and land on the counter. She nibbles the bit she's managed to get in her mouth. She wipes up the two lost pieces. She doesn't even seem to care -- she wasn't going to enjoy it anyway. She calls her father to apologize for having missed his birthday (she'd worked the weekend). Her father tells her how proud her parents are of having gotten that job -- that she's going to go far. They want to hear all about it, but not now. On the weekend. Now, her father has to go walk the dog. Good night, sweetie. She wraps her uneaten muffin in its sad plastic wrap and shuffles out, shuffling up the street, presumably to a subway, getting smaller as the city swallows her, to make her long and slow way home with the N or W train, to Astoria. She has to be back in a car service at 05:00 the next morning, for another day of work. The whole movie feels like this. It does a great job of making you aware of the misery of this kind of job and of the misery of working for people like that. It makes it clear that these places are everywhere. Her co-workers are remote, although not completely without sympathy. Her two asshole, shirking co-workers (are they also assistants?) help her write her apology letters when her monster of a boss dresses her down for a perceived infraction. One of these infractions being that he heard nearly immediately that she'd been to HR about him -- because the head of HR called him immediately, as, of course, HR would do, right? But those two bros also kinda/sorta ask her if she wants to come out with them, although they probably only asked because they knew that she would say no, because she's not allowed to leave the office as early as they are. She has to wait for permission to leave, like a dog waiting for its owner to allow it to eat the biscuit perched on its snout. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4644 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4644 Tue, 10 Jan 2023 22:31:30 +0100 -- "8/10" 2. "Rambo: First Blood Part II" <#Rambo> -- "5/10" 3. "All Quiet on the Western Front (1930)" <#All> -- "9/10" 4. "The Priest's Children / Svecenikova djeca (2013)" <#Priest> -- "8/10" 5. "Adam's Apples (2005)" <#Adam> -- "10/10" 6. "Im Westen Nichts Neues (2022)" <#Westen> -- "5/10" 7. "Avatar: The Way of Water (2022)" <#Avatar> -- "8/10" 8. "Decision to Leave (2022)" <#Decision> -- "8/10" 9. "Le Petit Soldat (1963)" <#Soldat> -- "7/10" 10. "Breathless (1960)" <#Breathless> -- "8/10" These are my notes to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. I've recently transferred my reviews to IMDb and made "the list" of around 1600 ratings publicly available. I've included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other -- I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. The Mummy II (2001) -- "8/10" Rick O'Connell (Brendan Fraser) and Evelyn Carnahan (Rachel Weisz) are back for another rousing, Egyptian-themed adventure. This time, they start off in some desert, investigating a tomb. They have their son Alex (Freddie Boath) in tow. Evelyn feels like she knows this tomb and keeps having visions of what it was like in its heyday. She uses this knowledge to get into a deeper tomb, where they discover the Bracelet of Anubis, formerly owned by the Scorpion King. The Scorpion King was a legend, supposedly a man who'd ruled over lands only because he'd promised his soul to Anubis. Anubis had come to collect. They disturbed the tomb and tripped a flood trap that almost kills them. They retreat without meeting the other tomb raiders who'd happened upon their camp. Back in England, the other tomb raiders turn out to have been a group intent on raising Imhotep (Arnold Vosloo) once again. They are led by Hafez (Alun Armstrong), Lock-Nah (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje), and Meela (Patricia Velasquez), who is the reincarnation of Imhotep's bride. All of these people converge on the O'Connell/Carnahan home to try to get the bracelet. Alex turns out to have put it on, triggering it. Instead of finding Rick, the intruders find Evelyn's brother Jonathan (John Hannah) and torture him for information. Luckily, Ardeth Bay (Oded Fehr) is there to help fight everyone off. The intruders make off with the case (unaware that Alex had taken the bracelet out). The intruders get away and continue with their resurrection of Imhotep, which succeeds (partially, of course, as in the last film). They discover that they don't have the bracelet, though. Rick shows up to rescue Evelyn before they can start to convert her into Imhotep's bride. Rick, Evelyn, and Ardeth improvise and escape with Jonathan and Alex in a double-decker bus with several mummies in hot pursuit. They dispatch the mummies with lots of danger and fighting, and Evelyn gets all...amorous. Thus distracted, someone gets onto the bus and kidnaps Alex. They put together a rescue mission, engaging the services of a zeppelin pilot to find Alex. Adebisi almost certainly wants to be rescued from the highly (and deliberately) irritating Alex. Meanwhile Imhotep has fed on three underlings and gotten himself back to his full power. Now, there's a sort of dream sequence where Evelyn and Meela have a boss-girl fight and play-act out the conflict between Nefertiti and Cleopatra. Evelyn is so into the dream sequence that she jumps off of the zeppelin and Rick barely catches her. Alex keeps building replicas of the temples to which they are going next so that Rick and Evelyn and find him. They get closer, but Imhotep drives them away with an incredible wall of water that drives them into the valley of the Scorpion King, where there is an eternal oasis. There is a terrible battle in the jungle on the way to the temple, with a family reunion amid wholesale slaughter. Even Jonathan steps up and makes himself useful. They get Alex to the temple in time to get the bracelet off and save him -- but then Meela stabs Evelyn to death. Hafez finds the bracelet and uses it to activate the temple. Rick wanders the temple, looking for revenge. He finds Hafez with his arm in the wall. Rick eventually wanders into the main room, where Imhotep -- now mortal -- is waiting for him. They engage in single combat. Jonathan, amazingly, does the same, but against Meela. He's singularly powered by his desire for revenge for his sister. Alex, meanwhile, is reading from the book of the dead, trying to resurrect his mother. He succeeds. However, his spell also awakens the scorpion king, in the form of an uncanny-valley, CGI, Dwayne Johnson torso with a scorpion body. Meanwhile, outside, Ardeth Bay and his army of friends have managed to subdue the initial armies. But more scorpion armies are on the way. No-one is vanquishing anything unless they can kill the Scorpion King. Luckily, they've been carrying a spear all along. Jonathan unfolds it and chucks it. Imhotep catches it and re-throws it, but Rick catches it. He stabs the Scorpion King with it and erases all of the armies outside. Evelyn races into the collapsing room to save Rick, while Meela abandons Imhotep, who lets himself fall into the pit rather than struggling further. They escape the temple and Izzy (Shaun Parkes) shows up with his repaired zeppelin. It is absolutely impossible to imagine how he'd repaired that wreck in the middle of a jungle. This wasn't as good as the original, but it's a fun group of characters and Brendan Frasier and Rachel Weisz are just a top-notch action-film couple, so they get an extra star. Rick: I thought I'd lost you. Evie: You did. Would you like to know what heaven looks like? Rick: Later. *smooch* Rambo: First Blood Part II -- "5/10" Rambo (Sylvester Stallone) is in a desert military prison but he's released by Trautman (Richard Crenna) for a dangerous mission back in Vietnam. He meets his teammates and is not impressed. His new commander Murdock (Charles Napier) is even less impressive. They tell him how he's to do his mission, give him a ton of equipment, and drop him out of a plane over Vietnam. It doesn't go great. He gets stuck on the side of the plane, so he misses his drop point. He also has to jettison a ton of his equipment in order to free himself from the outside of the plane. That means he's just down there with a knife, his bow and arrows, and his ripped T-Shirt. He meets up with his contact Co (Julia Nickson) and they get near the MIA camp. Instead of following orders and just taking pictures, Rambo rescues one of the soldiers from the clutches of those dirty Vietnamese. He manages to escape with Co and the soldier, but they're recaptured when Murdock calls off all support. The Russians are at that camp as well (I mean, of course) and Podovsky (Steven Berkoff) tortures him. Before he can force Rambo to make an announcement of some sort, Rambo breaks free (with the help of Co, who's re-infiltrated the camp). They escape together and are almost away scot-free when Co is shot to death. Rambo swears revenge and takes out nearly everyone at the camp. He steals a helicopter and rescues the remaining soldiers. The Russians give chase, Rambo shoots everyone down and heads home with his helicopter, coming in for a bumpy landing at the base. Rambo goes to settle up with Murdock. He destroys all of his computers, but stops short of killing Murdock, charging him instead with "finding all of the other missing soldiers." They did mention, at some point, that there were only MIAs because the U.S. refused to pay the ransom to get its soldiers back. The politics in this movie are otherwise shockingly simplistic. It is, at the very least, pro-soldier rather than pro-military. It is pretty ridiculous. Pretty close to peak 80s movie. The credits music is shockingly bad. It cranks up the jingoism to eleven. All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) -- "9/10" This is a reasonably good anti-war movie that tries to show the hopelessness, the senselessness of war. The movie follows the plot of the book pretty well. The handling is a bit literal, with a lot of dialogue and emoting. However, that's the first two hours, which are decent, but nothing spectacular. They do set up the finale, though. The final twenty minutes of the film are worth the price of admission. It finally starts to hit home how terrible and senseless the war is -- they show it rather than just saying it. Paul is on leave and no longer fits in. He assures his mother that he will come back, when he knows he almost certainly won't -- he doesn't even want to. He is angry with his father and his schoolteacher for their ludicrous and completely unhinged attitude toward the war. He tries to tell his professor that he's wrong, but the professor and the students call him a coward. Once he's back to the front, he finds his diminished company. They're only a handful of young men now, with only Tjaden and Kat left over from the early days, four years ago. The new recruits are sixteen years old. They're eating sawdust. "Tjaden: The replacements are all like that. Not even old enough to carry a pack. All they know how to do is die." "Tjaden: Is it true about the armistice, Paul? Paul: It doesn't look that way back there. Tjaden: You mean they want us to go on fighting? Paul: That's what they say. Tjaden: They're crazy! Germany'll be empty pretty soon." "Paul: The old men said, "Go on! Push on to Paris!" My father even wanted me to wear my uniform around. Kat: (laughs) Paul: You're all I've got left, Kat. Kat: I'm not much to have left. I've missed you, Paul. Paul: At least we know what it's all about out here. There're no lies here. Kat: Push on to Paris? You oughta see what they've got on the other side. They eat white bread over there. They've got dozens of airplanes to our one, and tanks that'll go over anything. What've we got left? Guns so worn they drop shells on our own men. No food, no ammunition, no officers. Push on to Paris! So that's the way they talk back there." Every true war story is the same. Everyone dies or is ruined. Kat would die. So would Paul. He dies when a French sniper shoots him as he reaches over a sandbag to touch a butterfly. He had a look on his face that reflected perfectly that he had nothing left to live for. His former life was gone; all of his comrades had died. Kat was gone. The country he'd come from didn't understand the war. They didn't care. What was he fighting for? What was he striving for? What did he have to live for? He had more in common with the enemy soldiers than the children he fought alongside or the fools that egged the war on at home. It's about a 7/10 for the first 3/4 of the film, but it ends so strongly that I had to bump it to a 9/10. I would watch this again. I'm looking forward to comparing it to the 2022 version. The Priest's Children / Svecenikova djeca (2013) -- "8/10" This is a movie about a small Dalmatian island whose population is dropping drastically, especially among Croatian Catholics. One of the priests Don Fabijan (Krešimir Mikić) decides to take action. He teams up with a local newspaper-stand owner named Petar (Niksa Butijer) to pierce condoms used by the local population. Petar has been guilted into confessing to having "killed many people" by his wife, who thinks he's sinning by selling condoms. They all come up with the plan to pierce the tons of condoms they sell at the newsstand but, after three months, there is no noticeable rise in the birth rate. They regroup and decide to enlist the assistance of Marin (Drazen Kuhn), who is a shocking racist and enthusiastic participant. He only sells pierced condoms to Catholic Croatians because he wants to keep the Serb, Muslim, and Albanian populations down. At the same time, he replaces all of the island's birth-control pills with placebos because he knows that women are doubling up on protection. The plan finally bears fruit (no pun intended). Women are becoming pregnant and getting married in a hurry -- a huge win for the church. Of course, things go sideways because no-one really wants the children, women get desperate for abortions, and all sorts of other bad things happen. Three men are coerced into a paternity test; the lucky loser becomes an alcoholic and threatens to throw himself from a tower. Petar and Marin pseudo-adopt one of the children (he can't adopt because he pretended to be insane to get out of military service in the war of Yugoslavia) but he doesn't want to keep it and tries to abandon it, but thinks again, at the last moment. Fabijan is lying and causing havoc with his plan and slipping more and more off the holy pedestal. We actually meet him in the hospital at the beginning of the film, giving his confession to his replacement. Most of the havoc is women who don't want their children. Fabijan tells one couple they can have one girl's child, but that they have to help keep her from aborting for the next 20 days, until it's too late to abort. They kidnap her and lock her in their attic. The girl tries to abort with a coathanger, barely survives, loses the child, and will also never have children again. Fabijan can only look on in horror at what he has wrought. The bishop arrives because Fabijan's maid (also Marin) has turned him in because she thinks he's actually using the condoms. He says he's not, that the condom she found isn't even used. She says that's even worse! That means he's doing it without a condom! The bishop says the same thing, because he just can't conceive that the minister isn't doing anything untoward. The bishop only needs to be convinced that Fabijan isn't diddling little kids. Otherwise, he'd have to shuffle him about. The bishop leaves satisfied, even impressed with the condom-piercing plan, with dreams of trying it out nationwide. Another girl is found floating face-down in the harbor. Fabijan rescues her. She's only a young, young girl, but she's killed herself because she was pregnant as well. Fabijan is forced to take his prior's confession -- he was the one fucking the underaged girl. This sends Fabijan around the bend. At the same time, we hear news repots on various televisions, telling of a Croatian delegation of children that are visiting Ratzinger, who was well-known for covering up child-abuse scandals in Germany when he was a bishop. The film simply does not stop piling on the bad news and cynicism. Fabijan completes his confession to his successor. He is relieved of the burden of the story, but his successor now cannot tell anyone else because the horrific story was confessed under the sacrament. Fabijan can die happy now. He has a brain tumor. We see the ghost of the young, pregnant girl appear, take his hand, and lead him away. His successor runs across town to the church, where he leaps into a confession booth and begins to unburden himself. A dark, cynical film, well-done. I watched it in Croatian with English subtitles. Adam's Apples (2005) -- "10/10" Ivan is a minister at a church in a small Danish town. He takes in former prisoners. He's already got Gunnar (Nicolas Bro), an alcoholic kleptomaniac, and Khalid (Ali Kazim), an armed robber and actual maniac, living with him when Adam, a neo-Nazi, shows up. Ivan is nearly irrepressibly optimistic, upbeat, and positive. He always sees the best side of things. He doesn't really see that Gunnar and Khalid haven't gotten any better. He completely ignores Adam's hostility. We find out that Ivan had lost his wife to suicide when their child was born with cerebral palsy. That doesn't stop him from advising a distraught woman Sarah (Paprika Steen) from having her own child, even though the doctors told her that it had a 60% chance of being born severely handicapped. He tells her "those are just statistics." We also find out that Ivan and his sister had been buggered every day by their father to within an inch of their lives when they were children, until the old man died. Their mother had died giving birth to Ivan. Adam pummels the living daylights out of Ivan, but he acts as if nothing had happened. He just says he has to go to town to the clinic and asks if anyone needs anything while he's there. His face is absolutely mangled, but Gunnar doesn't blink an eye and asks Ivan to get him some "medicine", holding up a booze bottle. Absolutely no problem. The eponymous apple tree in the yard is pivotal to the metaphor of Adam's soul. It is growing well, with plenty of apples, but dozens of crows descend on it. Adam is supposed to make an apple cake at the end of August. Adam procures a gun for the purpose of scaring Ivan into admitting that he's full of shit, but Ivan doesn't blink an eye and says that shooting the birds would be a good idea. Before Adam can do anything, Khalid laughs, saying "Why didn't you say we could use guns?" and starts blowing them all away with his own gun. He takes out Gunnar's cat, which drops from the tree. Ivan convinces Gunnar that the cat was just old and had dropped dead. There is a giant red gunshot wound on the white cat. There are dead birds everywhere. Ivan visits Adam in his room, which he's decorated to his own tastes. "Ivan: [looking at a portrait hanging on the wall] Oh, oh, oh ... what a handsome man. Your father? Adam: That's Hitler. Ivan: No, Hitler had a beard. Ivan: [Looking closer] Ah, you're right. I'm thinking of that Russian guy." These people are mad. Even the doctor keeps asking Adam how his hand is -- the one he injured beating the absolute living Christ out of Ivan. The doctor just laughs that Ivan won't "ever have to waste money on perfume because he'll never smell anything again." Adam just looks on perplexed. Ivan is decked out in his customary shorts and sandals. Both probably rode there on their bicycles. They are there to visit Poul (Gyrd Løfquist), a survivor of a concentration camp. At least that's how Ivan described him to Adam at first. He later revealed that Poul worked at the camp. He's now lying on his deathbed. Ivan and Adam visit -- with Ivan telling Poul that he has to buck up, that all is forgiven. Poul can't forget what he'd done to all of those poor people. Ivan tells him that all is forgiven. "God forgives all." Poul slips away. Ivan lives in a fantasy world. Adam questions him about his wife. Ivan has an answer for everything. He even pretends that his son doesn't have cerebral palsy. Anytime someone tried to penetrate Ivan's protective veil of lies, he accuses them of "being just plain rude." He takes his son Christopher with him to the church the next day. The boy is completely paralyzed. Adam puts on the pressure, trying to get Ivan to admit how horrible his life was and is. "Your son's a spastic. Your wife killed herself. Your mother died giving birth to you. Your father raped you." Ivan's starts bleeding out of an ear. Ivan says nothing. Adam is triumphant. Just super self-satisfied with his evil piercing of Ivan's veil, at having forced the three idiots to admit that they're living in a fantasy world together. He smiles and exhorts Ivan to "give up." Ivan does not. He turns the other cheek when Adam slaps his barely healing face. He doesn't flinch when Adam head-butts him into unconsciousness. Cut to a shot of an apple on the tree with worms coursing in and out of it. Adam drags rag-doll Ivan to the car and takes him to the doctor. The doctor reveals to him that Ivan has a volleyball-sized tumor in his brain. Ivan blocks it all out because he thinks he's in a struggle with the devil. Back at the house, Christopher is still there -- with Sarah, who's freaking out. She gets nihilistic and starts playing quarters with Gunnar, who's a pro and makes her drink all the time. Adam wanders through in black bikini briefs and yells at her that she's pregnant and can't be drinking. "It's a little late for that now, isn't it?" Adam's portrait of Hitler keeps falling off the wall. The bible on his cabinet keeps falling on the floor, flapping open to the Book of Job. After the beating and the subsequent head-butt, Ivan's nose is bent nearly out of recognition. He pays it no mind, carrying this burden like all the others. Adam asks him "what if it's not the devil who's testing you?" He proposes to Ivan that it's God who's tormenting him. Adam presses him to believe that it's God, that he's a modern-day Job. Ivan asks him why he's doing it? "Because I'm evil. And you can't change that." What if, though, it's actually the Devil who's tormenting Ivan and Adam is just another weapon he's using? What if it's the Devil who kept making the Bible fall open to the Book of Job? What if Adam is just the Devil's pawn? A bolt of lightning splits the apple tree asunder and burns it down. However, even though it's summer, Adam has begun wearing long-sleeved sweaters, covering up his swastika tattoo. He takes Ivan to the hospital. He drives him home, briefly turning on Ivan's easy-listening music ("How Deep is Your Love?"). Ivan follows Adam's advice from before. He gives up. He tells the troops. They all blame Adam for having ruined everything. Adam's skinhead friends appear and catch him trying to find some good apples with Khalid. They're going to try to make Ivan a cake. The skinheads roll up and threaten Khalid. He calmly shoots the big one in the knee. The leader moves in on Khalid and threatens that he's going to kill him, "You nigger, you're dead. [mimes gun to head]". Khalid shoots him point-blank in the chest, "you stupid? I have gun.". Then he shoots him in the back as they're retreating. Adam takes the gun away, but does nothing else. Khalid claims that he's unbalanced because he doesn't like seeing Ivan like he is now. Gunnar is hammered and wandering the halls with a bottle of oil, an eggplant and a tennis racket. He used to be a tennis star before he became a fat alcoholic. He tells Adam that he doesn't know where Sarah is, but she's passed out and tied up in his bedroom. Adam frees her. Gunnar and Khalid are off the rails. Khalid is testing guns in the parking lot. Adam volunteers himself and Gunnar to ride along on Khalid's next gas-station robbery. Adam goes in first to try to protect the employees. He manages it and steals a toaster oven to replace the oven that keeps shorting out in the church. They get back to find that Sarah and Christopher have eaten all of the apples. Also, Adam's neo-Nazi friends are back, with reinforcements. They start to beat on Adam. Ivan comes out to help him. Ivan starts to confiscate weapons that "make noise [...] so he can die in peace" and gets shot right in the eye. The inside of his head is on the outside. He's not dead. The doctor calls his condition a "half-Kennedy" and says that Ivan won't survive the night. Khalid leaves, taking the church car. Gunnar returns an apple to Adam that he'd swiped earlier. Adam makes a tiny one-apple tart for Ivan, using the oven he'd stolen from the gas station. He hurries to the hospital to bring it to Ivan. Ivan is not in his bed. The doctor is packing his things, muttering that he's "going somewhere where the sick die" because Ivan has gotten up and is sitting in the garden, eating a cheeseburger. The neo-Nazi shot his tumor away and healed him. Adam takes the tart to him. Ivan won. They eat the cake together, Ivan's head bandaged up with only one eye showing. Ivan officiates Sarah and Gunnar's wedding. His nose and temple are a mess. One eye is almost certainly fake. Adam's hair has grown in. Sarah's child has Down's syndrome. They're moving to Indonesia. Ivan asks if they're going because of the tigers. Gunnar says that it's so the child's eyes won't be as noticed (JFC what a dark, dark joke) and because the tennis courts are good there. Ivan says that tigers are fascinating. He's back. Ivan and Adam pick up two ex-cons who are going to stay with them. They're driving across the idyllic countryside, listing to "How Deep is Your Love". Ivan sings along. Adam finally joins in, mouthing a few words. I watched it in Danish with English subtitles. Im Westen Nichts Neues (2022) -- "5/10" The film starts in a battle. Heinrich is charging out of a trench, watching everyone die around him. We see his body plucked from a pile and thrown on the ground. He is stripped, his clothes bundled with others to be washed, holes sewn up, and prepared for the next wave of child soldiers. We meet Paul Bäumer (Felix Kammerer) and his friends at school. They hear the rousing speech, they sign up for war. They arrive 25 miles from the front and are stopped. Their trucks are commandeered by doctors. There are too many wounded to transport. The boys are forced to march to the front. They have to do a gas-mask drill. They have to bail a flooded trench. They meet Katczinsky (Albrecht Schuch), who is wise in the ways of war. Though it's in German and should thus feel more authentic, it veers far away from the plot of the book. The 1930 version stuck pretty much to the plan. This one is making war look pretty, which is not a great start. It continues to be a very pretty movie, and it continues to have nearly nothing to do with the book. There are a few lines that are familiar, but it also focuses very much on the high-level generals actually running the war, explaining the war, explaining the reasoning. There is no reason to explain. There is no reason. The other film didn't explain the war. It was senseless. The film focuses a bit too much on the tension between the officers and the soldiers. It feels a bit more like Full Metal Jacket -- in the truck, chiding the young soldier for not taking care of his gun, or in the barracks, rousting the men from their beds -- than the book or even the 1930 movie. They also rely a bit too much on the soundtrack -- that feels almost swiped from Dark -- to create tension. There is a long scene where Matthias Erzberger (Daniel Brühl) asks the French for a ceasefire. They grant it, but only 72 hours from now. Many more will die. The weird thing is that Paul was in the war for four years and it feels like he only just got to the front and the war's already ending. They're in the trenches, but it glorifies the fighting. Kat looks like he's playing Counterstrike, just head-shotting people in close quarters. There isn't enough confusion, the director lends too much coherency to the battles. The soldiers can see who's shooting, can see where the bullets are coming from. The book and original movie gave no such comfort. Now they're in a gorgeously lit courtyard, eating soup with bits and pieces in it, with potatoes. They have clean silverware. There's no sawdust in the food. The food is something other than sawdust. Tjaden commits suicide with his fork. This is nothing like the book. Now Kat and Paul are talking about what they'll do after the war. They're stealing a chicken again. They walked across an untrammeled field to get there. It's snowing lightly. It's quite beautiful. Most of this movie is too clean. And now Paul's being chased around a barn by a French farm-family. I don't remember any of this from the book. OK, I'm annoyed now. The farmer's son found Kat in the woods and shot Kat. This is just a completely different story. It doesn't show the senselessness of war. The man was shot for stealing duck eggs. And now Kat is feeling sorry for himself. That is absolutely not what he did in the book. He accepted his fate because he had nothing to live for anyway. In this movie, they're hopeful that the war is ending with them alive. And Paul never went home, never learned how war-hungry those at home were (that was one of the more sobering passages in the book and the original film). Just gone. And now the completely made-up German general is making them all go into a battle even though they all know that the armistice starts at 11:00. Fifteen minutes before the official end of the war. Was having Paul just be killed on a "clear day" not exciting enough? Did they have to have a fucking countdown? I hate this movie. Oh God, now we're being introduced to French soldiers, so we see both sides. This is really stupid. I mean, I guess it's senseless, but Paul didn't really get to the point where he just gave up. He's still trying to save himself. I gave it a lower score so that you save yourself some time and watch the 1930 version instead. That versions's got some hokeyness, but at least it doesn't feel like someone made a Marvel movie out of it. I thought the American accents were out of place. I thought it would be better with the original German language. It's not. It really, really isn't. Paul's berserker-raging in the fields and the trenches now, taking out people. Now a Frenchman is on top of him and he's drowning in mud. Would that it would have ended with Paul's death, but it doesn't. Paul finds a rock and knocks out his attacker. Then, he and another guy see a gun lying between them and fight over it. This is filmed like Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels -- it is glorifying the violence rather than driving home how senseless it is. They kind of get at it with the armistice, that Paul was killed just seconds before 11:00, stabbed from behind as he hesitated to kill a French soldier that looked like him. He then has a long death scene, where he seems to be walking into the light. He seems to be communing with a benevolent God, for whom this war might mean something, or who might forgive Paul his transgressions in it, or who might be able to explain what the fuck is going on. This scene is too pretty, too long, and too explicatory. It really goes to show that you have to try a lot harder to make an anti-war film because you almost always end up honoring the sacrifice, which is not what you should do. Those who were in the shit know that the sacrifices are meaningless. That's why the most anti-war people are people who've actually seen war and those most pro-war are those who will never feel the downsides, but will only feel the upsides, as their fortunes are built or buoyed by the spoils of war. In the 1930 film, Paul doesn't care whether he lives or dies because he only knows war, all of his friends are gone, and he can't go home anymore. That's why he reached for the butterfly, because touching something beautiful was more important than anything else, even survival. He doesn't walk into the light. The camera doesn't linger on him. In fact, the last thing we see is his quivering hand as he is shot. End scene. No honor, no God, nothing. I give this version a big nope. I watched it in German with German subtitles. Avatar: The Way of Water (2022) -- "8/10" James Cameron hates people and capitalism and plundering and piracy and globalism and hypernationalism and he probably hates the U.S. of A. more than a bit but, most of all, he hates colonialism. He fucking hates colonialism. He hates it so much that he's made two giant blockbuster movies about it and he's going to make three more just to drill the point home that there is nothing respectable about colonialism, that there is no justification for it, that it is always morally wrong, that it is always extractive, that it is about taking what you don't think you have to pay for, about denigrating entire species and races and animals as fodder for your egocentric machine. He is not subtle, but he is good at what he does. The ships of the sky-people returning to the planet were incredibly powerful and incredibly destructive. Whereas spaceships usually land lightly and easily, these ships tore into the planet, burning dozens of square kilometers of forest with their rocket backwash. They landed and opened their maws, regurgitating mechs and giant bulldozers that finished the job the rockets started. Animals fled and burned. The colonialists are interested only in resources and gain. They see no life, nothing worth protecting or respecting. They don't care. They don't even seem to have the capacity to care. They are as empathic with Pandora as many of us would be with a rock, perhaps less so. The soldiers that accompany them learn nothing from any of their experiences. They stay exactly the same. They show up in tattoos and Oakley sunglasses and camo-pants. They don't learn anything, even after going native, after communing psychically with animals. Which don't get me started on the amount of stuff they had to make conveniently work in order to make the battle at all even. The first movie had the battle between the decidedly non-technological forest creatures and the hyper-technological sky-people. The sky-people stuck to their own shit and they did their thing well. They were eventually defeated, but not because they didn't have powerful weaponry. In this one, they also have the same powerful weaponry, but they also are just as good at using the power of the planet, which annoyed me a bit. Jake Sully and his clan should have absolutely handed those jarhead idiots their asses inside of three minutes instead of having several pitched battles, some of which came to a standstill. Quaritch (Stephen Lang) got his own sky-steed about 40 times faster than Jake. Why? Why was he so good at riding the thing, like, immediately? How is an asshole like Quaritch able to commune with a beast so quickly? Explain, please. Ok, so the basic plot is that Jake and his family have had kids and stuff and they're happy and ruling their own clan on Pandora -- when Jake (Sam Worthington) sees a new star in the sky. He knows that his kinsmen -- the Sky-people -- are coming back. Their landing is incredibly powerful, as described above. They begin to mine the planet again -- and also the oceans. Jake and his clan lead the resistance for a year, but the noose tightens. Jake realizes that his presence is now endangering the tribes, but he also couches it in terms that he just cares about protecting his family. They pack up and head for the islands, where they are reluctantly taken in by an ocean-dwelling clan of Navi. They teach them their ways -- this goes on for a long time and is quite beautifully rendered, to be honest -- and then the plot picks up again. One of Jake's sons goes outside of the reef with his new friends, but they abandon him there. He is chased by a savage shark-like beast that goes unnamed, but he's saved by a Tulkan named Payakan. Payakan had been ostracized from his tribe because he'd allowed other Tulkan to die (somehow). Tulkan are supposedly more intelligent than humans, but their philosophy is pretty primitive and stunted -- but then so is the one employed by humanity, for the most part, so maybe that's representative of something. Quaritch and his crew finally show up, there's a truly depressing and impactful/compelling chase of a Tulkan that is Cameron hammering the point home of man's cruelty to literally everything else on whatever planet they happen to be on. They show the team take out a mother because she's going to be slower to protect her calves. They slaughter the mother and extract about a kilogram of magic juice that prevents aging in humans. Cameron is not subtle, but boy is he effective. Quaritch is now closer to his prey and closes in. He is brutal, burning villages, torturing villagers, and slaughtering their animals. Cameron is not subtle, but he's effective. This is Vietnam. This is Iraq. This is everyone where a conquering army enters. Many will think of Russians instead of Americans because they're brainwashed, but I guarantee you that Cameron was thinking of America's many crimes of invasion when he made these scenes. They're unmistakable. He all but reproduced the Collateral Murder video from Wikileaks. There is an epic battle wherein Payakan kicks a tremendous amount of ass, taking out most of the humans, with Jake and his family and his new clan picking off the rest. Cameron manages to stick about thirty minutes of Titanic into this film as the awesome hovercraft pitches over and sinks. Lo'ak saved Jake, Kiri saves Tuk and Neytiri, and Spider saves Quarritch (they need him for the next movie, duh). The visuals are so convincing that I completely forgot that none of it was real. Literally nothing ruined the simulation. With enough money and time, we can literally make anything feel real now. It was an amazing action movie. It was very long, but I honestly don't know what I would have cut from it. Maybe made two 100-minute movies out of it, I guess? I saw it in 2D and English with German/French subtitles. Decision to Leave (2022) -- "8/10" This is a Korean police procedural that focuses on the wife Song Seo-rae (Tang Wei) of a man who'd fallen off a mountain while climbing. She is a Chinese national who'd come to Korea and had been given asylum a long time ago, marrying a much-older man (the one who died on the mountain). Jang Hae-joon (Park Hae-il) is the officer in charge of the case. He is an insomniac and has a lot of open cold-cases that he won't let go of. He is pretty much immediately enthralled with Song, even though his relationship with this wife Jeong-ahn (Lee Jung-hyun) seems to be OK, although perhaps a bit long in the tooth. He is an attentive husband who helps out around the house, etc. He has his own apartment in the district where he works, so he's not with Jeong-ahn as often as she'd like. In Korean movies, everyone gets really, really tired from running across half the city. Both the criminal and the police officer have to stop to take a breath before they continue their showdown. Instead of a gun, the detective has a chain-mail glove that he uses to counter the knife that the criminal has. Like, he actually has it on him. There are other nice, cultural differences. When the chief of police visits Jang, everyone else in the office gets up from their desks and issues a slight bow, even though he doesn't even see it. When Jang gets his drunken partner Soo-wan (Go Kyung-Pyo) from Song's apartment, they're all in stocking feet. Jang vacuums and cleans up Song's apartment, cleaning up his partner's mess. She knows that he's surveilling her -- and likes it. They develop a platonic relationship, but they do end up at his apartment and cooking together, which seems quite intimate. He's still keeping his eyes open because he's a good cop. Song's job is to care for the elderly. When she can't make it to her "Monday Grandma", Jang offers to help. He begins to suspect that Song has actually killed her husband when he notices that Grandma's phone has stairs climbed on it -- even though she hasn't left her single-floor flat in ten years. Jang climbs the mountain and learns how Song did it, how she'd killed her husband. He is waiting in her apartment when she returns. He asks why she didn't go to the police if he was beating her so badly? Her husband had threatened to return her to China. But none of that is true. She set it all up -- making it look like her husband had been beating her, making it look like Soo-wan had torn her apartment apart. She claims that the time they spent together was not false, though. He tells her he's broken, tells her to get rid of the phone, lets her off the hook, then leaves the apartment. She has to look up the word that he used for "Broken" because her Korean, while very good, has gaps. That, too, is a nice touch. The filming style is interesting: when Jang is investigating, he will often be right in the scene that he's envisioning to have happened. At first, it's a bit confusing and jarring because you're wondering whether someone's going to see him, but then you realize that he's just a thought-ghost. It's a nice device. Song and her new "husband" meet Jang and his wife at the market in his wife's home town. It is super-awkward. Like, world-record-setting awkward. Days later, her second husband is dead. He was killed by people to whom he owed money. She cleaned up the crime scene, though. She's so suspect, honestly, it's hard to tell what's going on with her. Jang accompanies Song to a mountain to help her finally put her ancestors to rest. Jang's wife leaves him -- like, in the middle of the night -- because she suspects/knows that he is having an affair with Song. Although she didn't murder her second husband, she did slip fentanyl pills to the mother of the Chinese henchman who was after her husband. That gentleman had promised to kill her husband as soon as his mother died. So Song kinda sorta killed her husband? Anyway, she goes to a beach and kills herself in a pretty gruesome manner. She digs a deep hole in the sand and lies in it, waiting of the tide to fill it with water and sand. Jang finally locates where she'd gone, but can't find her, twirling in the surf at sunset in anguish. This was a lovely film with a very unorthodox plot. I feel like it could have been a bit shorter, but have to admit that I didn't follow everything as well as I could have. I blame the sub-par subtitles. I really liked the code-switching between Chinese and Korean though -- I'm fascinated by films that show how multilingual so many cultures are. Le Petit Soldat (1963) -- "7/10" This is a film by famed Swiss director Jean-Luc Godard about a young man and a young woman who fall in love, but are on opposite sides of the Algerian War. Bruno Forestier (Michel Subor) drives around Geneva, taking pictures and doing deals and generally being a sort-of spy. He meets Veronica Dreyer (Anna Karina), who is lovely and he falls in love with her immediately (on the first day, he loses a CHF50 bet to his friend that he would not do so). Bruno gets an invitation to Veronica's apartment to take pictures of her. As he's snapping pictures, he thinks to himself, "she was less beautiful than the day before." She says that she's Russian, but was born in Copenhagen, and is now living in Geneva, speaking French. "A foreigner speaking French is very attractive." She is quite beautiful, looking a bit like Milla Jovovich. They talk some philosophy, music, and art. As with The Forbidden Planet, we are confronted with a deeply ingrained chauvinism. he corrects her on the time of day when one is supposed to listen to Mozart (20:00), Bach (08:00), Beethoven (00:00), and Haydn (good for late morning). What bizarre rules. "She's convinced Gauguin was better than Van Goh, which obviously isn't true." They fight because she's changing her mind about whether she likes him or not. "You shouldn't give your arm to men you're not interested in." He's angry that she's made him interested, but now he can't act. He blames her. A story as old as time. I honestly don't know whether Godard believed this or whether he was pointing out the scandal that others believe this. They sleep together. We know because they wake up together. He's smoking. "God, she's beautiful." The police arrive and take him in for questioning, for desertion. This is just a threat from his colleagues, punishing him for not having killed a rival. He tries to kill the man, but is foiled by circumstance and his own cowardice/hesitancy. He bungles it again, angering not only the French, but now also the Arabs. He tells Veronica that he's flying out of Zürich to Brazil. He is kidnapped by the Arabs before he can escape the country, though. They torture him into giving up his colleagues for terrorism. "Torture in monotonous and sad. It's hard to talk about." After a while, he manages to escape the apartment by jumping out the first-floor window. He calls Veronica, who agrees to help him and to escape to Brazil with him. They talk some more. He's a common, typical racist, hating things he's neither seen nor experienced. He's so young, but he has such fixed ideas about how different peoples are. He is utterly convinced of his own intellectualism. I wonder whether Godard viewed this man as a hero (I think not) or rather as a caricature of the faux-intellectuals that litter the landscape. After his tirade about politics, he thinks "Women should never get older than 25. Men become more handsome as they grow older, but women don't age well." Ah, he seems to be an expert on everything. Bruno calls his colleagues, who keep him on the line long enough to record his voice. He leaves her apartment just as they're arriving. They fool her into letting them in by playing the recorder. They pick her up as an "FLN" informer, torturing her horribly to get her to give up the new FLN headquarters. They promise him that he'll get Veronica and their passports back if he kills his target. He finally does. He learns that Veronica is already dead. He looks forward to a long life, anyway -- because he's pretty shockingly shallow, despite his veneer of intellectualism. The film is shot primarily in Geneva. Like Bergman, Godard manages to elicit the most beautiful portraits and close-ups. The combination of philosophical musings in voice-over and closeups imbues the film with import. Breathless (1960) -- "8/10" Michel Poiccard (Jean-Paul Belmondo) is a small-time car thief. While cruising la campagne after a theft, his car breaks down just as the police are searching for him. He had found a gun in the glove compartment and impulsively uses it to kill the gendarme. He returns to Paris to lay low and look for a way to escape to Italy. He reconnects with an old flame, American student Patricia Franchini (Jean Seberg). They flirt back and forth, with him pushing hard for them to end up in the sack together, her resisting, but eventually giving in. You have to hand it to him: he's really in tremendous shape for someone in 1960. She's pregnant. He tells her "you should have been more careful." That's pretty much all you need to know about his character. As in Le Petit Soldat, the lead actor smokes all the time, has an unjustified confidence in his own intelligence and rectitude, and treats women like a prize to be gained, despite their inferiority and need for a man to make their lives meaningful. He's basically a dumb pig, surrounded by a cloud of smoke. As with the previous film, I honestly can't tell whether we're supposed to identify with him as a cool guy or whether we're supposed to see through his veneer and feel sorry for Patricia, who can't seem to help but be mixed up with him. As in Le Petit Soldat, the camera is nearly always on the move, following cars, people -- I think this dynamism is what Godard brought to cinema. That, and his extreme, roving close-ups and long discussions between male and female characters. I notice that both of the girls that Michel visits have pictures of themselves on their own apartment walls. It's like the only job a pretty girl could have is being a model. The film is so of its time: it's perfectly normal to sit around in a convertible, smoking and reading a newspaper. You literally blended into the background. No cop noticed you. Patricia attends a press conference at Orly airport with a famous French actor Van Doude. He hits on Patricia, which makes her smile. He answers two of her questions. "Deviner immortel et puis mourir." Meanwhile, Michel is trying to scare up money for his escape to Italy. A man who owes him money is persistently unavailable. He tries to sell his car, but the man withholds payment for a week -- he knows that Michel is a wanted man. The police catch up with Patricia at the Herald Tribune where they reveal to her that he's killed a police officer. She stays cool, says she's seen him but that she doesn't know where he is. The cop threatens her with "passport problems" if she doesn't help them. Patricia expertly drops her tail and meets up with Michel. She finds out from the newspaper that he was married. She still loves him. She knows he killed a policeman. She still loves him. They're on the run, in a car with the top down, which makes it a bit more difficult for him to hide, but cabrio baby. The first girlfriend he hit up for money, Minouche (Liliane Robin) spots him driving by. Her name is a joke because Minouche means "dollface" or "poppet", or even "pussy", a slang for vagina. Nice. After a night of bouncing from place to place, Patricia calls the French inspector and turns Michel in. They're in a friend's photo studio, listening to music. He's planning their escape to Italy when she tells him that she's turned him in. He doesn't seem worried. They continue to discuss love as she wanders around the central pillar of the apartment. Now, he walks around the apartment, saying that he prefers prison to running. He realizes that his friend Berruti (Henri-Jacques Huet) is showing up with money and heads him off to keep him from being caught by the police. Michel says he won't go with Berruti, he won't run, he's tired. He won't take Berruti's gun. Berruti throws it to him anyway as the police show up. Michel picks it up. The police shoot him and he staggers down the road, finally collapsing at the end of the road. Patricia is close behind. He's still smoking as he lies on the ground, surrounded by a grieving Patricia and the police officers. He make a few faces/grimaces (as they did together in the apartment, long ago), then closes his own eyes and says, just before expiring, MICHEL: C'est vraiment dégueulasse. PATRICIA: Qu'est-ce qu'il a dit? VITAL: Il a dit que vous êtes vraiment "une dégueulasse". PATRICIA: Qu'est-ce que c'est "dégueulasse"? Which is translated to, MICHEL: Makes me want to puke. PATRICIA: What did he say? VITAL: He said you make him want to puke. PATRICIA: What's that mean, "puke"? It is unclear why Vital mistranslated Michel's final words. Perhaps he was trying to protect her by making her hate Michel for condemning her in his final words. I saw it in French with English subtitles. The French was quite clear for my ear (but I've also been practicing quite a bit). ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4643 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4643 Sun, 08 Jan 2023 11:27:17 +0100 of around 1600 ratings publicly available. I've included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other -- I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. Kiss of Death (1995) -- "6/10" Jimmy Kilmartin (David Caruso) is a recovering alcoholic and ex-con, living with his recovering alcoholic wife Bev (Helen Hunt) and their daughter. While Bev is at an AA meeting, Jimmy's cousin Ronnie (Michael Rapaport) shows up to beg Jimmy to help with a "job". He just needs a driver because one of his truck drivers showed up drunk. Ronnie plays on his cousin's conscience, whining that Little Junior Brown (Nicholas Cage) will kill him if he fails. Jimmy helps out, but the whole job is a clusterfuck. The Feds bust up the party very quickly. The drunk driver in Jimmy's cab wakes up and tries to shoot them in panic. He shoots through Jimmy's hand and into agent Calvin Hart's face (Samuel L. Jackson). The Brown crime family steps up to help Bev, but with Ronnie as the go-between, Bev's $400 per week ends up being only $150. Ronnie offers to let Bev work for him and quickly tries to entice her with booze and hitting on her. Ronnie's working her hard, but the Browns demand that he take her home. He does -- but to his own home, where he takes advantage of her. She leaves in a hurry the next morning, crashing his car into a truck and killing herself. Ronnie lies right to Jimmy's face at the funeral. Rapaport is so good at being a primo scumbag. Jimmy turns state's witness and reveals just enough that the Browns think that Ronnie is squawking. They beat Ronnie to death. Jimmy gets out of prison and gets hitched to his former babysitter, who'd been watching his kid the whole time he'd been in prison. The DA (Stanley Tucci) strong-arms Jimmy into helping him out, caring not one bit if he's going to burn the man's life even further. Jimmy starts working with Calvin, both of them hating it. Jimmy gets closer to Little Junior Brown, who's just taken over his recently deceased father's empire. Junior is highly unstable and quickly ends up shooting one of his main business partners Omar (Ving Rhames). Omar was a Fed in a different investigation. It's a shitshow. Junior realizes that Jimmy was squealing and targets him and his family. Stuff happens. The DA tries to burn Jimmy. Jimmy burns him instead. Jimmy and Junior have a showdown. Jimmy wins. The end. Persona (1995) -- "8/10" In this film more than in The Rite, the black-and-white camera in incredibly crisp and details. The head-on shots of the doctor Läkaren (Margareta Krook) and the patient remind me of Chuck Close paintings. Bergman loves the lights and shadows. The absolute most riveting part of the film was when Alma (Bibi Anderson) was telling the story of how she'd gone to a beach and was sunbathing nude while her husband was elsewhere. A woman came up from another island, having sought out the beach because of better sun and more seclusion. She lied down next to Alma, also nude. After a bit, they observed two local boys watching them from a nearby dune. The other girl bade one of them come over, helped him undress, and then pulled him down onto her and into her, whereupon they both orgasmed immediately. At the girl's urging, Alma called the boy over and he was there, upon her, erect again, and in her. She orgasmed immediately, causing him follow suit, whereupon she'd orgasmed again and again. She went home, had dinner and wine with her husband and she said that the subsequent sex with him had never been so good and would never be so good again. The first male voice in this movie was at over 80% of the movie. It's Mr. Vogler, Elisabet's husband (Gunnar Björnstrand). He accepts Alma as Elisabet (Liv Ullmann) while the real Elisabeth looks on. She seems to slip into the role nearly effortlessly, but then, after having consummated with Vogler, she flips out, demanding a sedative, and chastising herself for not being able to keep up the charade. Soon after, Alma finds Elisabet with the picture of her son that she'd received earlier in the summer and that she'd torn up. Alma recounts the history of how and why Elisabet had even had a child -- it was to prove that she could be motherly, that she could play the role of mother. But she hated the baby even before it was born, she found her self wishing it would be born dead. After a long birth, she hated the child. She continued to hate the child. Finally, family took the child and she could return to her career. The boy loved his mother and she could not reciprocate, she doesn't want to reciprocate. She finds him repulsive. This scene plays out once with Elisabet in focus and then once more -- in its entirety -- with Alma in focus. The faces begin to overlap as Alma cries that she is not Elisabet Vogler. At the end, Alma slices her own wrist with her thumbnail, Elisabet gorges on the blood, Alma forces her head into it, then starts to pound slaps on her face. The symbolism escapes me. Back at what looks Elisabet's hospital bed, Alma gets Elisabet to say a single word, "Nothing." Alma wakes to see Elisabet preparing to leave the lake house. Alma does the same, closing things down. Forbidden Planet (1956) -- "4/10" This movie has not aged well. Its visuals are fine, but the actors, story, and acting are not good. This is a movie about the Navy, but in space. There is a single female character and she is sexualized (I mean, obviously, what with nearly everyone else being in the navy). She is smarter and better-educated than nearly everyone else, and she has no experience with other humans, but she absolutely assumes the role you would expect her to have in post-war U.S.A. Perhaps the most interesting part was the introduction where they state that it took until the end of the 21st-century to for man to reach the moon (off by about 130 years), but that it took only another century to invent faster-than-light travel. So, they're off to a planet that still took them 18 months to reach. They approach the planet, but are warned off by Dr. Morbius (Walter Pidgeon). He and his daughter Altaira (Anne Francis) are the only survivors of a mysterious force of nature that wiped out all of the other colonists. Morbius is accompanied by Robbie the robot, a ludicrous man-suit that can barely move, but is supposedly powerful and a force to be reckoned with. Morbius built him from schematics he found in the ruins of an alien civilization. He's also found a machine that booster his already prodigious 180+ IQ to even more dizzying heights. The commander (Leslie Neilsen) and doctor (Warren Stevens) of the visiting ship also brag about their high IQs. It doesn't prevent them all from swooning at the sight of a shapely breast, though. There are many, many more machines of incredible power that were left by the long-deceased aliens. The humans are incredibly impressed by this even though they have a faster-than-light drive. They eventually end up pissing off the planet, but it's not the planet that they've pissed off, but their own raging ids that are trying to kill them, in the form of an energy beast that has been called into being by the planet's powerful machines. They surmise that this is the reason the original aliens died out -- despite their incredible accomplishments, they still had not controlled their own inner lives and their technology enhanced this to destroy them. Hell, maybe there's a metaphor in there somewhere. Anyway, the super-smart and hot lady doubles down on her daddy issues and pledges to leave with the commander, who she probably can't wait to start pumping out babies for. Morbius flips out and his id-monster almost kills them, but he finally denies it and controls it, although he's fatally wounded in the process. Luckily for Altaira and the Commander. Morbius has the Commander trigger a planetary self-destruct, then tells them to get 100 million miles away to be safe. They do, and hypothesize that humanity will end up like the Krell, but that they will be able to remember this incident avoid falling into the same trap, which is probably the craziest fucking thing anyone's said in a movie full of crazy fucking things they used to say in the fifties. I'm 100% certain I've seen it before, but I hadn't reviewed it yet. I put it on my list for a reason, but I can't remember for the life of me what that might have been. It really wasn't very good. Maybe because Leslie Neilsen was in it? Erik the Viking (1989) -- "6/10" Erik (Tim Robbins) is a conflicted Viking who doesn't like raping or pillaging. He feels guilt for the death of a village woman Helga (Samantha Bond), who he managed not to rape, but couldn't save. Erik wants to end Ragnarök to put an end to this pillaging and plundering. He learns from Freya (Eartha Kitt) that the giant wolf Fenrir is covering the sun and resolves to bid the Gods remove it. Erik and several fellow villagers embark on a seemingly hopeless journey for the edge of the world to find Valhalla and/or Asgard. Erik's grandfather (Mickey Rooney) luckily does not join them. I have no idea what Mickey Rooney is doing in this movie. Did he need money that badly? Exposure? Ernest the Viking (Jim Broadbent) is there, but I didn't recognize any of the other actors or actresses. Loki (Antony Sher) is there as well, convincing the local blacksmith Keitel (Gary Cady) to join the group in order to sabotage the effort. Why? Because an end to war would mean an end to blacksmithing. Well, it wouldn't, really. It would mean you'd be blacksmithing other things, but this is the argument that Loki brings and that Keitel believes, which is pretty much exactly the argument that keeps the U.S. government pouring nearly a trillion dollars per year into its military. Loki uses the same reasoning to convince Halfdan the Black (John Cleese), a local warlord, to do his best to thwart Erik's mission. After long travails and nearly being eaten by a dragon and nearly sinking, Erik's boat runs aground in the shoals of their destination Hy-Brasil, an idyllic land where the sun shines, no-one is allowed to kill anyone else, the clothes are skimpy, the sun shines, and musical talent is scarce. Erik promptly beds Princess Aud (Imogen Stubbs), daughter of King Arnulf (Terry Jones). It is utterly unclear what attracts her to him, but that's pretty much par for the course. He's tall, I guess. He is a filthy viking with a completely unkempt beard and hair, which you would think would turn off the attraction, but what do I know? Halfdan has also found Hy-Brasil, but Erik and his men fight them off. Loki is on that boat and talks his way back into Erik and his crew's good graces (he is the trickster God, after all). He also ends up killing Snorri (Danny Schiller), who had discovered Loki and Keitel just as they were about to throw the Horn Resounding into the ocean so that Erik wouldn't be able to use it to call the Gods. The murder causes an earthquake (the prophecy of Hy-Brasil) and the island begins to sink under the ocean. King Arnulf and the rest of the population deny that it is happening (foreshadowing of the response to climate change) and sink beneath the waves. Princess Aud accompanies Erik on his mission. She sounds the first note on the horn, propelling them beyond the edge of the world. Erik sounds the second note and they get to Valhalla. They convince the petulant child-Gods to remove Fenrir from in front of the sun, but the Gods tell humans that this won't end war. Christian missionary Harald (Freddie Jones) continues to both proselytize and to deny that any of this is happening. This is good for Erik and his crew because Harald is the one who can get back to the ship and sound the third note that rescues them from Muspelheim (Hell), where they'd been banished because they couldn't stay in Valhalla since they hadn't died in battle and they couldn't go to Asgard because they weren't Gods. Harald's blowing of the final note teleports them all back home. Halfdan is there and has subjugated the village. Harald falls out of the sky in the boat and crushes them. The sun comes out. Moonlighting s01-s05 (1985--1987) -- "8/10" "If people didn't have eyes to be sure with, it wouldn't be so easy to fool 'em." The first season is absolutely top-notch, bringing something absolutely new to American television. The sheer amount of dialogue and snappy repartee was overwhelming -- at least three times as much dialogue as any other show at the time. There are a lot of zingers, but no laugh track. Lines pile up on each other with no pause for laughter. Shows like The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel follow in its footsteps. Maddie Hayes (Cybil Shepherd) is a former model with considerable assets, all of which are stolen by her accountant. She is left with a few businesses in various states of viability. The Blue Moon Detective Agency is one of them. David Addison (Bruce Willis) convinces her that the business, despite its lack of profitable cases, should be allowed to live. She decides not only not to sell the asset, but to take over as boss there and help make it viable. There is no overall story arc other than this and Maddie and David's growing affection for one another. That's the part that would take over the show eventually and lead to its lower rating. Three seasons of watching two adults pretend not to like each other despite loving each other is a bit much (and there are two seasons to go). They have a plethora of styles and intros for the episodes. Though there are some formulaic components, there is a lot of artistic freedom. They often break the fourth wall, and even had one episode where they just showed the actual Moonlighting set, which was the kind of meta stuff that you'd ever really seen in Mel Brooks movies. * S01E03 is an episode with "high-powered laser guns at an advanced aerospace firm" * S01E05 is a "Murder on the Orient Express" reenactment * S02E03 sends "Maddie to Brazil to confront her pilfering accountant" * S02E04 is a brilliant one set in the 50s, in black-and-white, where "Maddie and David play out possible solutions to a crime of passion in a jazz club" (we get to see Cybil sing her little heart out) * S02E10 is an "absolutely inspired and wacky Christmas episode" * S02E12 has Agnes DiPesto (Allyce Beasley) "go to an investigator's ball" , where she's embroiled in a murder * S03E03 goes all over the place, but ends up with "David boxing for Don King" * S03E07 is a period piece where David and Maddie take the lead roles in a "reenactment of the Taming of the Shrew" * S03E08 is a reenactment of "A Christmas Carol with Maddie as Scrooge" . * In S04E05, David goes to prison in a case of mistaken identity while he's trying to get to Chicago to meet Maddy, who's pregnant, but the real magic in this episode is Herbert Viola just crushing a serenade cover of Sexual Healing to Agnes in "Cool Hand Dave: Part I" * In S04E06, David's in prison in "Cool Hand Dave: Part II" and he's singing in solitary, while the suits at the studio are recruiting for a new David Addison. We see a line of Addisons around the building, all dressed in his various costumes from the series, with the suits walking through them. Lovely meta-meta-meta visuals. Really inventive. But the best is yet to come: An operatic musical number with the chain gang just knocking it out of the park. Almost a bit reminiscent of Jesus Christ Superstar. * The rest of S04 is a dreary death-march of moping and whining about how everything is everybody else's fault. David learns lamaze with Terri (Brooke Adams), a PhD of music he met when he went looking to take lamaze training on his own. Maddie is in Chicago with her parents, being an utter shit of a person. Maddie eventually comes back, but takes the train, marrying the super-wonderful Walter Bishop (Dennis Dugan), who doesn't deserve to be embroiled in this fiasco, but handles it with aplomb. David throws them a wedding, but they all end up in the hospital when Terri goes into labor. Neither Maddie nor David comport themselves well here. It's a shitshow. * S05E01 kicks off with "Bruce Willis playing Baby Hayes in Maddie's womb" . This is a bit of a recap of how awful they've been to each other over the years, but his guardian angel assures him that this means they love each other very much. Maddie loses the baby at the end of this episode. This episode wasn't especially good, but it was a helluva a dark way to start the season. * S05E04 is about "a botched plastic surgery" and is a return to the form of seasons 1 and 2 (finally) * So5E05 was about "a woman who shoots and wounds her harassing boss at a board meeting." It was absolutely premeditated and it was absolutely assault with a deadly weapon and it was absolutely attempted murder. That she only hit him in the ankle was because she was a terrible shot. Maddie channels the culture of 30 years hence and absolutely thinks that she can get her absolved of all crimes if she can only prove that she was harassed. David thinks that she's unhinged. They take opposite sides of the case. People seem to have a very difficult time of there being two crimes: he harassed her (that's probably a fine and maybe firing) and she tried to kill him, absolutely not in the heat of the moment. Two crimes. One does not justify the one. The former is perhaps a reason for the latter, but that lady still has to own her crime. We live in a society. * S05E10 is ostensibly about "David shacking up with Maddie's cousin Annie" (Virginia Madsen). It also features a cameo by Demi Moore as the woman that David is initially attracted to, before he ends up with Annie. This is an allusion, of course, to Willis's first marriage. However, the best part of this episode is, once again, Herbert Viola, who gets all the best lines and steals the show with his subplot about the Sapperman case -- wherein he is all but convinced of the wife's treachery. He presents his evidence to the firm with a filmreel and soliloquy. "Mrs. Sapperman was born on August 27th, 1932, to Shmul and Helen Menmum of Ozone Park, Queens. After moving to Los Angeles in 1957, Adele went to work for the firm of Sapperman, Sapperman, Sapperman, shown here. But the story does not end here. We must look beyond the white-picket fence, the lace curtains in the windows, the well-kept flower gardens...because, behind this tranquil suburban façade, there lurks a dark story of faithlessness and betrayal. There goes Mrs. Sapperman now, in the family station wagon. Is she going grocery shopping? Or is she going to stain something that was once pure? ...giving herself to another man? ...letting a total stranger run his hands over the soft, white flesh that once was Seymour Sapperman's alone? And then, having slaked the carnal thirst of the beast within her...will she return to the open arms of her loving husband? Still glistening with the sweat of another animal? Jezebel, harlot, adulteress, thy name is Adele! [a scarlet letter A appears on-screen]"S05E13 is the final episode of a five-season run -- and the writers new that it was all over. They hurriedly "got Agnes and Herbert married" (with Wynn Deaupayne (Timothy Leary) as a very non sequitur guest), then spent the last 10 minutes going full meta -- again, and for the last time -- worried that they would disappear at the end of the show. They went and found their producer Cy (Dennis Dugan) to ask what they could do. He answered, "Hey, even I can't get people to tune in to watch what they don't want to watch anymore. Don't get me wrong. I love you two kids. But can you really blame the audience?Case of poison ivy's more fun than watching you two lately. [...] People don't want laughs, David. They want romance. Romance is a very fragile thing. Once it's over, it's over. And, I'm afraid for you two, it's over. [...] Oh goody, that's exactly what America wants to see: David and Maddie, friends. People fell in love with you two kids falling in love. You couldn't keep falling forever. Sooner or later, you had to land someplace. People cared about you two because you cared about each other. Even when you didn't wanna care, you still cared and you couldn't not. You cared until you couldn't care any longer. You two were a great love story." It was a very meta-show: McGillicudy (Jack Blessing) ended up dying, not of the illness he'd announced at the beginning of the episode, but because he had no more lines. Maddie and David try to get married, but the priest tells them that "the sacrament of holy matrimony isn't something to be entered into lightly," to which Maddie replies, "we don't want to enter it lightly, we just want to enter quickly." Wonderfully, they kept the "Anselmo Case" alive the whole season -- a "Macguffin" <> if there ever was one -- then announced at the end of the credits that, "Blue Moon Investigations ceased operations on May 14, 1989. The Anselmo Case was never solved... and remains a mystery to this day." All in all, an excellent capper to the season and the series. Chapeau. They went out with grace and humor and style. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4640 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4640 Mon, 02 Jan 2023 20:27:07 +0100 -- "8/10" 2. "Dick Tracy (1990)" <#Dick> -- "6/10" 3. "Last and First Men (2020)" <#Last> -- "4/10" 4. "Le Roi et L'oiseau (1980)" <#Le> -- "7/10" 5. "Rick and Morty S06 (2022)" <#Rick> -- "8/10" 6. "Nobody (2021)" <#Nobody> -- "8/10" 7. "Enemy (2013)" <#Enemy> -- "7/10" 8. "The House that Jack Built (2018)" <#Jack> -- "10/10" 9. "Moritz Neumeier: Ich weiss das doch auch nicht (2022)" <#Moritz> -- "7/10" 10. "Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989)" <#Sex> -- "10/10" 11. "The Rite (1969)" <#Rite> -- "7/10" These are my notes to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. I've recently transferred my reviews to IMDb and made "the list" of around 1600 ratings publicly available. I've included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other -- I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. Ambulance (2022) -- "8/10" This movie hit "peak Michael Bay" when the ambulance was driving up the LA river basin, framed by rooster tails of water and a sunset, with Danny (Jake Gyllenhaal) hanging out the passenger window, firing on two LA helicopters in pursuit. They kept talking about what an amazing driver Will (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) is, but all I saw was him driving on the road while cop cars flew off the road to both sides of him for most of the movie. It was utterly unclear how they could just keep driving into obvious impediments unless it was a surfeit of confidence and lack of brains. Speaking of lack of brains, neither of the Sharp brothers wore a seatbelt the whole time. Jake Gyllenhaal seemed like he was having the time of his life, though! He just seemed to be ad-libbing and airing his grievances. He seems to be on board with Bay's vision of making a movie that's basically a love letter to LA -- with all of its warts. There were a bunch of gratuitous shots of very LA-specific stuff, as well as some shots of trash by the side of the highway, lovingly filmed. They finally get to the dipsy-doodle where they spray-paint their ambulance and then send out several others -- "That's a military maneuver", says Monroe (Garret Dillahunt) sagely -- it gets really interesting. Danny has promised half of his haul to Papi (A Martinez) and his gang. They deliver, in spades. They load up an ambulance with explosives and drive right into the cordon set up by the cops. Incredible practical effects. The whole intersection lies in ruins. As usual, their are some frankly impossible things that happen, like Will giving a ton of blood to the hostage cop Zach (Jackson White), Cam (Eiza González) doing surgery on Zach in the back of a moving ambulance -- and then Zach being totally good to go and ready for a firefight later. Will also didn't seem to be suffering from a lack of blood when his adrenalin crash came. At 132 minutes, it was a bit long, but Gyllenhaal is riveting, absolutely unhinged. Cam shoots Will, but she didn't mean it. Danny drives them to the hospital, finally. There is a final standoff. Danny leaves the back of the ambulance with Cam, but Will shoots Danny to save Cam. It's all quite justifiably confused, but it's an appropriate end to an adrenalin-fueled ride. It's so weird, then, that, instead of just ending on the pavement outside the hospital, they had to focus on Cam's hero's journey to finding a heart. Who the fuck are they making these ending for? Just the most terrible people, I bet. I'm glad I don't have to watch movies with them. Dick Tracy (1990) -- "6/10" The plot follows a relatively standard line: Dick Tracy is making things uncomfortable for the local mob bosses, in particular Big Boy Caprice (Al Pacino), who runs everything with an iron fist. Big Boy Caprice is superficially comical, but deep-down quite evil. The movie looks like a happy, garish comic book, but the criminals are horrific and people are gunned down in droves. Mumbles (Dustin Hoffman) is completely incomprehensible, his lip twists off to the left, and it looks for all the world like Hoffman just kept running with his role from Rainman in 1988. Breathless Mahoney (Madonna) is a good deal racier than expected. At one point, Tracy asks Tess Trueheart (Glenne Headly) what flavor ice cream she got and Mahoney answers, "fresh peach. And you better hurry, it's starting to run a little bit." Jesus. That is not even a little PG-13. Warren Beatty as Dick Tracy plays it about as straight as its possible to play. He and Tess Trueheart kinda/sorta adopt a "Kid", which makes them a family of sorts, although they're so woefully dysfunctional relationship-wise that the straight-arrow Tracy ends up smooching Mahoney before coming to his senses. They try to kill Tracy a couple of times, they try to frame him, someone named Mr. Blank is trying to have everyone killed (Blank turns out to be Mahoney). Mahoney dies, as do pretty much a lot of people. Tess and the Kid and Tracy live happily ever after. It was decent and quite a vision actually, for the time, but the plot was nothing to write home about and I'll never watch it again. Last and First Men (2020) -- "4/10" This was less a movie than a 70-minute audiobook of a five-page science-fiction story. The story was of a civilization of the "last men" 2000-million years in the future. They are sending a message back to the "first men", telling them of their future and of how a giant violet cloud is bringing the solar system to a premature end, of how they're moving Earth out, away from the sun, of how they've moved to Uranus, at least partially, and other kind of insignificant details. They tell vaguely of how they manipulate certain flaws in space-time in order to communicate with the past. The entire film is in black-and-white and features very slow pans over Icelandic sculptures while slow orchestral music plays and Tilda Swinton slowly reads the story. I was wondering why the story felt vaguely familiar. The book Last and First Men is by Olaf Stapledon, whose book "Star Maker" I read a few years back. The movie's "plot" is only very loosely based on the "book" , though. Le Roi et L'oiseau (1980) -- "7/10" The kingdom of Takicardia is a vertical one (think Gormenghast). It is ruled by a heartless, cross-eyed king named Charles XVI. He is mercurial and kills with trap doors. The king is fond of hunting and we see him trying to shoot a baby bird. His strabismus prevents him from hitting it, though, and the baby's father gathers it back to its nest, high up in the towers of Takicardia. This little bird would be trapped again and again in the same trap, a box perched on a nearly unreachable eave. The king sleeps and dreams, during which his own non-cross-eyed portrait comes to life, as do those of a shepherdess with whom he is in love and a chimney sweep whom he hates because the shepherdess loves him. The portrait deposes the real king (using a trap door, naturally) and takes over, even more devious than the real one. The shepherdess and chimney sweep -- with the help of the bird -- flee throughout the castle with the king in hot pursuit. The castle is kind of high-tech, with canals and motorized, single-person conveyances. The king eventually calls forth a giant robot from the bowels of his city, half-destroying the city in his attempts to dig the shepherdess out of the depths a village in the bowels of the castle, where the sun never shines. There, she and the chimney sweep had holed up with a blind organ-grinder and a slew of giant felines. The king, using the robot, eventually gets the shepherdess to submit to and marry him, to save her chimney sweep's life. L'oiseau and the chimney sweep are forced into manual labor in a factory producing statues of the king. They are arrested again when they turn out mockeries instead. L'oiseau and the big cats and the chimney sweep stage a revolt to rescue the shepherdess. The bird and his sons use the robot to destroy the castle. They banish the king with extreme prejudice. The robot uses its pincers to open the cage one final time to free the same stupid little bird who keeps getting trapped in there. The drawing style is fine, but nothing to watch for. There are almost no people in the city. It's unclear what the source of power is, or how they manufactured all of the King's toys -- especially the robot. The plot is languorous and somewhat meandering and a bit simple, in the end. There is no score to speak of. The voices are quite muddy, making the characters quite difficult to understand. I watched it in the original French without subtitles. Rick and Morty S06 (2022) -- "8/10" This season is not nearly as crazy as the previous one, but it's still layer upon layers of realities. The first show picks up where the last season left off, with a confrontation with Rick Prime and a different Jerry, and a creature that accidentally replicates itself to planet size. The family is together and relocates to a different dimension where they had no longer existed. They are Summer, Morty, Rick, Jerry, and Beth. Rick still doesn't have a functioning portal gun. The second show is based on Die Hard and has Rick and Morty trapped in a video game based on same. Summer has to rescue them, all wrapped in several levels of indirection. In the third show, Space-Beth is back for Thanksgiving and starts a torrid affair with Beth. After briefly wanting to kill himself, Jerry gets in on the action. Space-Beth leaves again. The fourth show has the whole family doing their odious chores and tasks through their "night selves". These selves eventually rise up and try to take over the day. Summer is, of course, the ringleader. With Rick refusing to comply with their demands -- that he do his own dishes -- the night family rules for several months before giving up. The fifth show involves a fortune-cookie factory and empire and a creature that poops out all of the fortune cookies in the world. The sixth show is about dinosaurs returning to Earth to bring peace and harmony and technological advancements. Rick is not impressed. He discovers that this race is hounded by a species of homicidal and intelligent asteroids that seek out the dinosaurs. Because they are peaceful, they never destroyed any, letting their planets instead be destroyed while they moved on. Rick, after having gotten a new and improved portal gun -- it lets you see where you're headed -- from the dinosaurs -- which he broke out of spite -- rebuilds his portal gun. Episode seven pushes the meta-meta-meta so far that there is a whole crew of superheroes named after various meta concepts and tropes. Rick even mentions that they're fourth-walling harder than "the third season of Moonlighting", which I thought was a lovely reference (because I totally got it). Jan and Story Lord (Paul Giamatti) are behind the whole plot, engaging the help of Jesus Christ (Christopher Meloni), whom they betray. Morty engages the help of "Joseph Campbell" to get them back to the real world. This was a pretty awesome episode; would watch again. Episode eight has Rick exhausted of having to constantly battle supervillains, so he foists the latest, Pissmaster, on Jerry. Jerry takes him out, thanks only to Rick's awesome armor. Jerry goes viral and is asked to join an intergalactic council of heroes, who turn out to be pretty lame, of course. Rick discovers that Pissmaster has committed suicide -- and takes his place, performing heroic deeds to redeem the poor, sad, suicided man's name. He is poised to pretend to kill himself while disarming a bomb so that he can end his career as Pissmaster (á la Batman) when Jerry shows up to reluctantly ask the hero to join the intergalactic council of heroes. He sees that Pissmaster is Rick and refuses, getting himself kicked out of the group, as well. The family finds out about Pissmaster's suicide and tear Jerry down some more for it. Episode nine has Morty joining the Knights of the Sun, where he quickly climbs the ranks to become king of the sun, which is boring and stupid, as Rick points out. Morty points out that their worldview is completely at-odds with reality and disbands them, spiraling the solar system into war, as the Knights were the only thing keeping the balance. Morty and Rick end up having to fake their deaths in order to avoid getting their penises chopped off by the Knights, who require this somehow in order to regroup and save the solar system. Episode ten has Rick giving Morty a lightsaber for Christmas, which he promptly drops vertically into the Earth, threatening humanity should it reach the core. Meanwhile, Rick has been replace with a robot to keep Morty busy for the last few episodes while he searches for Rick Prime. The President gets Morty to get Rick to help save the Earth, promptly swiping the lightsaber once they've retrieved in from the Earth's core with the amazing core-digging device that Rick built. Rickbot dies, while Morty apologizes and pledges to help Rick find Rick Prime, leading Rick to monologue nearly endlessly about what will almost surely form the plot arc of season seven. Nobody (2021) -- "8/10" An absolutely over-the-top and somehow pitch-perfect movie about a guy with a particular set of skills who gets unleashed on the world once more. There are definitely John Wick vibes here -- especially with the enemy being stupid Russian who mess with the wrong man. Hutch Mansell (Bob Odenkirk) lives with his wife Becca (Connie Nielsen) and his two kids. His is a normal life. But he's not normal: he's a former auditor for all of the other secret agencies, which means that he was the one called in to clean house when things needed cleaning. That means he's a god of destruction and mayhem. Two petty thieves rob his home and he lets them go, even though he had the drop on one of them. He realized that the woman's gun was old, and not even loaded. His son is disappointed in him, but we know the son will soon think otherwise. Hutch is willing to drop the whole thing, especially after he's spoken with his mysterious brother from this mysterious den, but then he discovers that his daughter's kitty-cat bracelet had been stolen along with the fistful of small bills. He searches for and finds the couple who'd robbed him, demanding the kitty-cat bracelet back. He sees that they have a baby and realizes that he'd gone slightly off the rails. He leaves them be, but he has an encounter on the way home: five drunk guys crash their car next to his bus. They are all uninjured from the crash, get on the bus instead, and start to terrorize everyone. Hutch sits in the middle of the back, the calm in the storm, anticipating the coming ass-kicking with absolute delight. He takes the group of five guys apart, sustaining a bit of damage himself, and having taken out one guy badly enough that he has to give him an emergency tracheotomy to save his life. Hutch gets home and his wife helps patch him up. She's seen this before. He tells her he wants a change, that "they haven't had sex in months, and haven't made love in years." That guy ends up dying. That guy was the little brother of a psychotic Russian mobster, Yulian (Aleksey Serebryakov). Yulian is in charge of the Obshchak (общак), which is a giant pile of cash held in common by criminals and oligarchs. Yulian sends a bunch of people to Hutch's house, which doesn't have the hoped-for result. They manage to kidnap Hutch, but he escapes from the moving car, killing everyone else in the process. His rampage is gaining momentum. and he lays waste to everyone in his house, then sends his family away, and gets started on Yulian. He is a force of nature, taking out anyone and everyone, eventually lighting the общак on fire. He ends up in one of Yulian's clubs, eating calmly as Yulian finishes a karaoke session. Hutch gets away, escaping to the family factory that he'd just purchased from his father-in-law with gold bullion and that he had just turned into an armed death trap. He barely gets to the parking lot, with the Russians hot on his heels. He finds his father David (Christopher Lloyd), also a former auditor, and his brother Harry (RZA), there to provide covering fire. Together, they take out the remaining Russian army. The police apprehend him, but they are told by mysterious sources to let him go. We see him and his family purchasing a house three months later. He gets a call. This is every person's self-defense fantasy, being able to defend the home and hearth and family from evil forces. In this case, no-one in the family had to die in order to spur the revenge fantasy. In this case -- as is happening more often -- the hero is possessed of an unbelievable power of planning, combat readiness, and ability to take punishment. He is also wildly independently wealthy, so money is never an object. Hence, the fantasy. The hero has a secret life where he has fuck-you money, physical skills to defend against anyone and anything, and will never be grievously injured Enemy (2013) -- "7/10" Adam Bell (Jake Gyllenhaal) is a professor of history who leads kind of a lonely, repetitive existence. He teaches during the day and goes home to sleep with Mary (Melanie Laurent). A co-worker of his suggests a movie in which he spies an actor who looks just like him. He gets intrigued and rent two other films with the actor Anthony St. Clair in them. It's the same actor. It's his own face. They're not speaking roles, though. Adam gets Anthony's home number and calls there. Anthony's wife Helen (Sarah Gadon) picks up and thinks it's Anthony. She hangs up on him after he freaks her out a bit. He calls back and gets Anthony. Adam freaks him out, too. But Anthony is now intrigued and starts investigating Adam. Helen, suspecting that Anthony is cheating on her again, snoops around and finds Anthony's notes on Adam. She also looks him up. Anthony calls Adam for a meeting, while Helen goes right to the university where he teaches -- and finds him outside, contemplative after having spoken with Anthony. he makes small talk, while she can only gawp at him. He has no idea who she is. He's nice to her, but she's very, very confused. I honestly have no idea why she's so devastated. Anthony and Adam meet up at a motel outside of town. They look alike, they sound alike, they have the same scars. What is going on? Losing his nerve entirely after having found out they have the same scar, Adam rabbits out of there. Anthony catches up to him on his motorcycle and goes blazing past him. Anthony tracks Adam down to his home and discovers Mary. The wheels are turning now for Anthony. He figures maybe he can bag her because she'll think he's Adam. To boost the weird cred, Isabella Rosellini shows up as Adam's mother. This is where we find out that Adam is also apparently unfaithful. Anthony puts his plan into action, telling Adam that he will take Mary on a getaway weekend and then will disappear out of his life forever. Why in God's name would Mary not notice that it's a different person? Anthony doesn't know anything about Mary and Adam's shared life together, what they talk about, their verbal cues. He would be very strange to her immediately. Unless she and Adam don't know each other well at all. At the beginning of the film, we saw who we now know was Anthony attending a very unique sex show, where a statuesque, nude woman steps on a tarantula with high heels. When Adam starts wheedling into Anthony's life, he quickly discovers this side of it as well. He goes to Anthony's apartment and Helen shows up soon after. She's six months pregnant, but seems somewhat frisky. They lie down together. Helen knows what she's doing, though, because Adam is nicer than Anthony. Meanwhile, Mary and Anthony are in the thick of it when she notices not only his different technique (which would have to be obvious), but the mark on his finger where his wedding ring was. Mary bails. They drive home together, though! I guess he was her ride, so...no public transportation. Meanwhile Adam takes the other tack -- sobbing and apologizing -- and Helen jumps his bones. Mary and Anthony fight in the car and Anthony flips it on the way back. It looks like dey dead. Adam finds the key to the crazy-ass sex party and tells Helen he needs to go out that night. He goes back to check on her and finds a giant tarantula in her bedroom instead. Like, giant, as in it fills the whole room. The end. What? Denis Villeneuve directed this film in ... black-and-yellow. The film was pretty much a pallet of browns and yellows. I'm sure that it was considered very artistic and evocative, but I couldn't unsee it. The House that Jack Built (2018) -- "10/10" Jack (Matt Dillon) is in an voice-over interview with Verge (Bruno Ganz), who seems to be his psychiatrist. Jack is urged to explain how he got to be where he is. He says that he will explain in five incidents. He meets lady #1 (Uma Thurman) on the side of the road. She is quite aggressive and obnoxious, badgering him into helping her with her broken jack. But she probably wasn't really like this. She is being reconstructed for us by Jack, our unreliable narrator. He takes her to and from a "blacksmith", who was supposed to have repaired the jack. She is impressed with neither of them when it doesn't work, then badgers him for a ride back into town again, telling him she takes back what she said before, when she's said that he looked like a serial killer, because he's actually much too big of a wimp to be a serial killer. He puts the jack through her forehead. He is on lady #2's (Siobhan Fallon Hogan) porch, trying to get inside, lying about being a cop, telling her his badge is at a "silversmith", then admitting that he's an insurance agent and that he will double her pension. She lets him in. He kills her, first by strangulation, but it doesn't take, then again by strangulation, which seems to have taken, but he makes sure by plunging a knife into her heart. He cleans up, drags her corpse out to the van, and tries to leave. This whole murder makes it clear how much work it is to actually strangle someone and to manhandle a body down stairs and into a van. He can't leave, though, because his OCD makes him imagine blood spots he'd missed. Verge chuckles in the voice-over. Jack re-enters several times to clean invisible stains. The police arrive for a nearby break-in and question him. He annoys the officer into letting him leave. He takes off, but the corpse is attached to the back of the van and drags a meat crayon along behind him for miles. Jack takes the immediately ensuing fierce rainstorm as a sign that he had "a higher protector". The interludes between the acts are a mimic of Dylan's Subterranean Homesick Blues video, where he holds cue cards, each with an individual message, and drops them one-by-one. Fucking von Trier. Jack has killed two women. He is clearly unstable. A psychopath. I took it all in stride. There's an interlude, though, where he speaks of being a child, listening to the "breath of the meadow", the inhaling and exhaling of the men as they scythed a field in rhythm. It's all very soothing. A duckling approaches young Jack, floating close to him as he sits on a dock. He lifts his net to capture it, then holds it in his lap, petting it. He reaches back slowly with this right hand to grab wire clippers and coolly snips one of the duckling's feet off. He releases it to swim in a circle, peeping desperately. I drew breath quickly. I was appalled. But why now? Why not earlier, when he killed two women in cold blood? What is it about torturing animals that gets me more? This is obviously calculated by von Trier, and is probably why people hate him -- they don't like to be reminded of what hypocrites they are, how absolutely ass-backwards their morals are. Here we have a serial killer, who's an attractive Matt Dillon, but he's OCD. Does his condition elicit sympathy? Maybe a little. But it is his torture of an innocent duckling that reminds us of what he is. Not the murder of two women. Lady #3 (Sofie Gråbøl) is a date whom he strangulates as they are kissing. He drags her back to the meat locker where he'd stored the other two corpses. He just leaves the bodies stuffed into on shelves and sprawled across boxes. He always photographs the women. He is dissatisfied with lady #3's photos, so he takes her corpse from the freezer to take her back to the scene of the crime to take new pictures. On his way along a country road, he sees an older lady (Carina Skenhede) walking on the shoulder. He can't resist running her over. Now he has two bodies in the van: one frozen in a sort-of seated position and one freshly killed and still hemorrhaging. He poses the dead ladies together in the third lady's former apartment. A mom (uncredited) goes on a trip to the woods with Jack, taking her two children George and Grumpy. They're on a picnic while Jack teaches the boys how to shoot and other ins and outs of hunting. This is peak Lars von Trier. Immediately after, the girlfriend is seen with her two children cowering behind a downed tree in the field. Jack is in the tree stand. He picks off George. His mother howls. Jack calmly asks her to give her dead boy a slice of pie, as if that were a perfectly reasonable thing to ask. For people who though Hannibal Lecter was peak psychotic, this movie turns it up to 11. He kills her last. She was already dead inside anyway. Simple (Riley Keough) seems to be Jack's girlfriend. She's very insecure. She puts up with his crudity and his anger and meanness. He admits to her that he's a serial killer. He as much as tells her that he's going to kill her while telling how stupid she is. She denies that she's stupid, but suspects absolutely nothing, craving his attention no matter what form. She gets him the magic marker he demands. He begins drawing lines on her breasts like he's marking a cow carcass. She suspects nothing, belying her claim that she's not as "dumb as a doorknob". She just calls him "fucking weird" and actually storms out. He chases her outside where she's asking a police officer for help. Jack admits again that he's killed 60 people, then calls her by her real name (Ms. Jaqueline) and sways around a bit. The cop tells them both to go sleep it off. He plays on her emotions and she falls for it, asking him to come back inside with her. Upstairs, he lies curled into the sofa, ostensibly catatonic with grief at what he'd done, while she calls a friend who's "got some pills". Heart-stopping is the only way to describe when she realizes that he'd cut the phone line. She looks behind her and sees he's still inert. She starts creeping toward the door. Then he's there, right behind her. She looks resigned. She understands now. "You're walking without your crutch." "You're Mr. Sophistication, aren't you." They scream together; no-one answers; no-one hears. He lets he scream out the window. He waits patiently as she gets it out of her system. "You know, maybe I'm mistaken, but, as far as I can tell, not a single light has gone on in any apartment or stairwell. And do you know why that is? 'Cause in this hell of a town, in this hell of a country, in this hell of a world, nobody wants to help. You can scream from now until Christmas Eve and the only answer you'll get is the deafening silence that you're hearing right now." He gets to work, tying her up with a plastic cord and then making her choose which knife she wants him to use on her. He slices along the lines. He goes back to the cop car and places one of Simple's breasts on the windshield. A segue on how to make dessert wines, or ice wines. This is such classic von Trier. Verge and Jack discuss putrefaction. Jack's house isn't coming along very well. Jack isn't able to build the house that he wants to build, so he keeps having them bulldozed. It is at this point that we learn that "Verge" seems to be short for "Virgil" because Jack asks him about his greatest work and Verge answers with the Aeneid. They continue to discuss art and the value of art and the subject of art. Cue a "Glenn Gould interlude" . Verge speaks Italian sometimes. [1] They discuss the Stuka plane and its unique sound when it dive-bombed, filling its intended targets' veins with ice. "Jericho's Trumpet". As Jack waxes about "icon-creators", [image] "Jack: What I'm getting at is this: As disinclined as the world is to acknowledge the beauty of decay, it's just as disinclined to those -- no, credit to us -- who create the real icons of this planet. We are deemed the ultimate evil. All the icons that have had and always will have an impact on the world are, for me, extravagant art." He says this as wartime footage of concentration camps and horrifically emaciated prisoners play. [2] "Verge: Stop it. You Antichrist! I don't recall ever having escorted a so thoroughly depraved person as you, Jack. "Verge: Since you have now apparently set your heart on mass extermination, let me make a brief comment on the Buchenwald camp that emphasizes my attitude towards art and love. In the middle of this concentration camp stood a tree. And not just any old tree, but an oak. And not just any oak, but the one Goethe, when he was young, sat beneath and wrote some of humanity's most important works. Goethe. Here you can talk about masterpieces and the value of icons. The personification of humanism, dignity, culture, and goodness was, by the irony of fate, suddenly present in the middle of the all-time greatest crimes against humanity. "Jack: Some people claim that the atrocities we commit in our fiction are those inner desires which we cannot commit in our controlled civilization. So, they are expressed instead through our art. I don't agree. I believe heaven and hell are one and the same. The soul belongs to heaven and the body to hell. The soul is reason and the body is all the dangerous things. For example, art and icons." Jack's whole speech is accompanied by clips from von Trier's other films (I spied Dogville, Antichrist, Melancholia, Nymphomaniac). Jack continues with another incident, though it's not labeled as such. He has six men on sawhorses in his freezer. They're alive. Their heads are lined up so that he can shoot them all with a single bullet. He explains this all calmly to them, in a calm manner. One of the men points out that the round that Jack has showed them is not a full-metal jacket round, as he'd claimed. He realizes that the guy is right. Annoyed, he goes back to the gun shop, where he'd obtained the incorrect goods. He goes nuts on the poor store-owner, Al (Jeremy Davies). The store-owner wonders whether he even bought the bullets there. The transaction goes downhill from there. Al is allowed to live, though. Jack gets stuck in a rut on the way to his next destination, to get full-metal jacket rounds from S.P. (David Bailie). The camera chases him down the logging road, gloriously unencumbered by a steadicam. S.P. catches him and calls the police. He thinks he's a robber, though. Jack sweet-talks him into putting his gun down, making him think he's remorseful. S.P. pours him a drink. Jack drives a knife up under his chin and into his brain. Jack waits for the police to arrive, poses as S.P. to get the officer close, then shoots the officer. He steals the cop car and returns to the freezer where he'd told the men to "try not to die on me." Just to be clear, Jack has killed a man who had called the police saying he'd caught Jack, killed the cop who showed up to apprehend Jack, then driven back to his meat locker with six kidnapees in it, the siren blaring. He's left the car outside with the siren still blaring. He's now inside to complete his masterpiece, but realizes that he can't shoot the rifle inside the locker because he can't focus the scope. He works open the door behind him to a larger space -- cool as a cucumber -- then tapes out a longer line for his shot. He levels it up, then gets a good line on it. Another police car shows up. Jack is obviously trying to get caught now. From the dark, empty space, he hears Verge for the first time. He wants to talk about the house that Jack seems to be unable to build. He tells Jack to "find the material, and let it do the work". We see Jack building with corpses. Cue the Glenn Gould clip again (signifying "art"). Verge enters the house as the police are arc-welding their way into the freezer. As police open a hole and shoot through it, Jack drops through a manhole in his "house". He and Verge are now in Hell. A spotlight on water. The river Styx. Now, they're walking along what looks like a half-flooded mining tunnel in what looks more like documentary footage. I can't believe what Ganz and Dillon were willing to do for this director. A placid rill. Black-and-white. Jack's red robe the only color. They approach the end of a tunnel looking out over a waterwheel on what looks like a partially frozen sawmill. They're descending ladders along a wall of what look like agonized and carbonized bodies. Trudging through more water. Slow-motion walking along a path between curtains of blood. Crossing a river in a boat. It looks like a renaissance painting. Art. Jack stares hungrily out a window at what Verge tells him are the Elysian fields. "We don't have access here." We hear the "breath of the fields" that Jack remembered from his youth. Men are in a field suffused in golden glow, scything and breathing in rhythm. [3] Jack's gaze turns longing, in the first non-cruel expression we've ever seen on him. Dillon is a master here. A tear falls. A brief flash of what had been lost, the road not taken. Resignation. Determination. They arrive at a lava river. Verge tells Jack that this is deepest of the depths of hell. But that this is not where Jack is meant to go, amazing as that may seem. He says that he's showing it to him as a favor, because Jack was so intriguing. Across the broken bridge is a path out of hell. Jack considers climbing around, asking Virgil whether anyone has done it. No. This is probably why Virgil brought him here, because he knew he would try. Jack is still in the red cloak he'd stolen from S.P. Jack climbs, traversing sideways. Jack struggles. Jack falls. Cue credits, accompanied by the incongruously upbeat "Hit the road, Jack". There is no way that you sympathize with this serial killer. He's a nearly incomprehensibly savage, brutal, and cold person. Von Trier and Dillon make clear what a sociopath would truly look like. It is unflinching. It was written by a man unafraid to really contemplate what it would be like to be that kind of a person without sensationalizing it. I wonder how people will somehow paint von Trier as glorifying or humanizing something horrible, as they've gone every time before. Jack is abominably evil and von Trier sends him to the lowest of hell without humanizing him (save the three seconds where he's staring out the window at the Elysian fields). He shows how horrible Jack was, sends him to hell, and ends the movie with a celebratory tune. It probably wasn't enough to avoid charges of glorifying serial killers. Moritz Neumeier: Ich weiss das doch auch nicht (2022) -- "7/10" This special is from just after Corona, and after he'd had three kids. It's decent, but it's not nearly as good as Hurra (see "review from 2019" ), which was my favorite so far. He spends a lot of time talking about child-rearing, interactions with schools, how smart his wife is, interacting with children -- little to no political stuff at all, which is a shame, because he used to be quite incisive and sharp about that kind of stuff. However, this absolutely supports my theory that people with children literally ignore most of the rest of the world because they literally no longer have time for it. I correct myself: he did briefly discuss climate change, but only in a joke about climate-change deniers being deliberately ignorant, which is worse than being unintelligent. About 40 minutes in, he talks about teaching his kids how to deal with racism -- because Germany is a racist country. Well, yeah, duh. Literally every country in the world is racist. That's just how people are. Some people avoid it; some lean into it. Some countries build up barriers against it, others ignore it, others promote it. In the last 30 minutes, though, he left kids behind and started talking about refugees and an experience on a train where German officers were about to throw a clearly exhausted family off the train when an old aristocratic woman stood and demanding to know WHY? "Hatten die keine gültige Fahrkarten? Doch, doch, die sind in Ordnung. Waren die Pässe nicht in Ordnung? Doch, die waren OK. Warum müssen die denn aussteigen? Na ... weil die haben etwas gesagt, welches wir nicht verstanden haben. Also, die müssen aussteigen, weil ihr zu dumm sind einen Dolmetscher mitzubringen, obwohl abertausenden von Menschen jeden Tag über die Grenze kommen, die nur arabisch können? ..." Then he goes on to talk about how not everyone should have the same rights to freedom of speech. This is a special German mental handicap that is spreading around the world. Some ideas should be suppressed because Hitler. That is, people with bad ideas should not be able to express those ideas. They think that this is the way to stop them acting violently on those ideas. It's an interesting thought experiment: why should a Nazi's right to free speech trump someone else's right to be in public unmolested? IT FUCKING DOESN"T. This is not rocket science. Say a Nazi has a stand in a mall and someone with a headscarf walks by. The Nazi yells out at the person, ruining their day. I wouldn't consider it a restriction of his freedom of speech to prevent him from ruining people's days for no reason. I wouldn't even care if the mall said he can't have his stand. I wouldn't care either, though, if he had his little stand, and sat there quietly looking sad and ridiculous in his little mustache. Our fear of their ideas grants them power. I think this is what people are missing. Yes, stop them from impacting innocent people's lives -- this is not easy! We all have to help. If we see something, we have to help stop it. We have to overpower them with numbers instead of letting them intimidate us. But we don't have to ban their speech. If they show up looking way tougher than anyone else, but they're only talking, then that's their right. If they harass people directly, that's not. You can't make a law against their existence. That's not going to work. But people keep thinking it will. They mix metaphors and ideas to blur the lines in societally unhealthy ways. They're lazy and scared and want bad things to go away rather than having to stand up to bad people themselves, before they gain too much power. It's much easier to have someone else tape their mouth shut for us -- we know who should shut up and who shouldn't, right? Neumeier seems to be utterly and blissfully unaware of the possibility that there are those who would find his act shocking enough to want to shut him up. What prevents his being shut up when we're shutting Nazis up? Does he not think this a possibility? Does he not care? This kind of thinking leads people to weird conclusions like "alle in 1945 Deutschland lebenden die nicht aktiv gegen Nazis agiert haben waren Nazis", which is the kind of blanket statement that fucking Nazis make or literally fucking Osama bin Laden made. That is literally the justification Osama bin Laden gave for 9/11. Collectively punishing people for the actions of some of their members is...checks notes...forbidden by the Geneva Convention. Don't let that stop you, though, when the cause is just, ammirite? Who else thought they were doing that? Collectively punishing a group of people because the cause was just? Oh, yeah...Nazis. WTF, dude. This poisonous mindset has more than landed in America, though -- or maybe it came from there. I'm not exactly sure what the timeline looks like. He goes on to a bit about losing heroes, like Louis C.K. or Michael Jackson. He "proves" that Michael Jackson was a pedophile by asking "who would want to get famous for having been raped by Michael Jackson?" What kind of a naive fucking question is that? You can believe them if you want -- that's your absolute right, to be convinced by a case, by the preponderance of evidence. But you're a fool if you believe them just because they dared to say it in public. There is way too much evidence that people are willing to do anything for attention or even a little bit of money. Nearly literally anything. Including being a Nazi, you numb-nuts. Jesus Christ, the biggest problem the left has is that they are just so fucking divorced from reality, so literal, so uncynical, so non-ironic, that they can't think like the enemy for one second. It is their ultimate weakness. I can't even imagine believing something because "why would anyone say something so horrible about themselves in public?" Jesus, haven't you been paying attention to how humanity operates? Have you never seen German reality TV? Then he argues that you can't "separate the art from the artist", which presumably means that, if you are still enjoying listening to Smooth Criminal, then you're a pedophile sympathizer and probably also a Nazi. That would be the logical conclusion from Neumeier's presentation. If you don't actively try to get Smooth Criminal off the radio, you're a Nazi. He goes on to make an analogy about having a colleague who'd killed his wife, but wasn't at a grill party. He used to make great sausages, though, so they should just invite him anyway. No sense throwing out the baby with the bathwater. I hope he doesn't really believe that this analogy holds water. Choosing not to associate directly with someone who's done something horrible is not the same thing as still finding something that that person has done to be useful. What would these fools do if a serial killer solved fusion? Just not use the technology because it came from the wrong person? Maybe wait until a black lesbian discovered it so we can be sure that it's OK to use it? Fingers crossed that she's a generous lover or we'll have to remain in darkness. What the actual fuck are these people thinking? Do you stop reading excellent authors with thought-provoking ideas who had questionable persona lives? (E.g. Gore Vidal?) What are you afraid of? That you won't be able to resist the lure of their poisonous ideas and you'll also end up being a horrible person? How weak do you think you are? Are you worried that people will listen to Michael Jackson's music and become pedophiles? Or that they would allow pedophiles in society just in case they might also be generationally great musical artists? What is the fucking logic here? But, sure, put your faith in Netflix or HBO or whomever produced the documentary that convinced you -- because documentaries are always true and never manipulative. It doesn't matter that Jackson beat the rap in a dozen court appearances. It. Doesn't. Matter. These people know for sure and they have made their judgment and anyone who doesn't agree with them is a NAZI. Fuckin' A, Moritz. Pourin' a forty out on the curb for you, brother. Moritz has become a woke idiot. I suppose it was better when I'd thought his brain had been softened by parenthood and not by progressivism with an iron fist. I do not envy these people their certainty. They are deliberately stupid to think that the world is so simple. This loops back to one of Neumeier's own initial bits about climate-change-deniers being deliberately stupid. Sure, that's one example. The final 30 minutes of his special amply demonstrated another: the lefty identitarian convinced of his own righteousness. They are censors and they must be stopped. Coincidentally, the next article I read after the show was "A Tangled Webb" by Scott H. Greenfield , which details an attempt to erase James Webb from history for something he'd never done, then, when it was proven that he'd never done it personally, for not having personally stopped homophobia in the 1960s. Since he didn't do that, there is no way that we can, in all good conscience, recognize any of his scientific achievements. Instead, I suppose we will have to pretend that they just emerged fully-formed from the aether, or perhaps it would be OK if we invented a gay scientist who'd invented them instead. I really don't know the protocol here. Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989) -- "10/10" Ann (Andie MacDowell) is in a loveless marriage with John (Peter Gallagher). He's a junior partner in a law firm; she's a housewife. They have no children. She is seeing a therapist (Ron Vawter), to whom she confesses that she no longer likes to be touched. She hasn't made love to John in months. He stopped trying that long ago. She tells her therapist that she's worried about John having invited his college friend Graham (James Spader) to stay with them until he can find a place of his own. Ann expects Graham to be just like John, but he's very, very different. He's soft-spoken and seems kind, a little forthright in some of his questions, but quite disarming. Ann is charmed, so she offers to help him find an apartment. They find one for him relatively quickly, but still manage to discuss intimate personal details like the fact that she's not having sex with John, and that he is impotent -- he cannot become aroused in front of anyone. Once he's moved in, she visits him in his apartment, interrupting him while he's watching one of the videotapes he's made of the myriad women he's interviewed about sex. He lets her in, but she zeroes in on the box of videotapes, which are, in fairness, lying on the TV stand right next to the door. He tells her what they are. She recoils and leaves. She calls her sister Cynthia (Laura San Giacomo) to tell her about Graham. Cynthia is intrigued because she's pretty much the opposite of her sister. In fact, she's so opposite that she's a bartender instead of a housewife and she actually is fucking John. Cynthia slinks in to Graham's place and makes a video. She undresses, she masturbates, the whole kit and kaboodle. She leaves and calls John immediately, demanding that he drop what he's doing and come over and fuck her. He delays his client, goes to her place and they fuck each other's brains out. She bids him to leave. He's delayed that client for Cynthia before, like when he called her to come over to his house so that they could fuck in his wife's/her sister's bed; it's also his first client as a junior partner; he's more interested in her ass than in his job, although he doesn't think that's the choice he's making Ann doesn't have anything to do with Graham anymore. Neither does John. John finds out that Cynthia had made a tape for Graham and is aghast. Ann wakes one evening and asks John point-blank whether he's having an affair. She even asks whether it's with her sister. He denies everything and they cuddle and make up. Soon after, Ann finds Cynthia's earring while vacuuming under her own bed. The play of emotions on MacDowell's face as all of the pieces fall into place is magical. She changes clothes and heads to Graham's place. She's ready to make a tape. Later that evening, when John comes home, she confronts him. He's incensed, convinced that Graham had betrayed him, when it was really the earring. That didn't even come up because the truth was out regardless. John charges over to Graham's place, pops him in the mouth, throws him out his own door, locks him out, then settles in to watch Ann's tape. Ann begins coyly, answering little about herself (unsurprisingly). She quickly turns the tables and starts asking Graham about himself instead, if he's proud of what he's doing, if he thinks that's how he's going to get Elizabeth back -- the woman from college for whom he's clearly been pining for nine years. He answers, surprisingly enough. Their intimacy is not physical, but emotional. They kiss, but that's all. John is, understandably, devastated, mostly because he sees how fucking shallow he is relative to people with actual intelligence and emotion. He sees that he was married to someone rich and deep and he spend their marriage fucking her superficially hot sister. He walks out, revealing to Graham that he'd fucked Elizabeth back when they were still in school, even before she and Graham had started having trouble. Cut to John in his office, explaining grandly to a colleague how his job is more important to him than anything, even his wife. If she can't handle that, then she'll have to decide for herself. His boss is on the phone demanding that he come to his office immediately. John delays because he's trying to get in touch with his client, whom he's never actually met because he kept delaying their initial contact because of his priority of fucking Cynthia. The client informs him that he's found other counsel and no longer needs his services. This is what John's boss wants to talk to him about. It dawns on John slowly, then all at once. Ann and Graham sit on his porch, comfortable in each other's arms. The Rite (1969) -- "7/10" This is an Ingmar Bergman film about a three-person theater troupe that is being interrogated by a judge who is determining whether there is a case for pressing obscenity charges against them in the unnamed country where they currently find themselves. Thea (Ingrid Thulin) is neurotic and married to Hans Winkelmann (Gunnar Björnstrand), who is quite a bit older than she is. Their partner is the fast-spending, hard-drinking Sebastian Fisher (Anders Ek). He's in hock to Hans, and is also sleeping with Thea, but they're all quite copacetic with the situation. In fact, when they're not touring, they all live together in a house in Ascona. When they are touring, they perform their pornographic rite four times per night. The judge plays them off of each other, finally convincing them to perform their "rite" for him in a personal performance. They do this, the two men appearing with giant strap-ons. They perform the rite, exciting the judge to the point where he has a heart attack. The film is not pornographic at all. They mostly discuss philosophy and their personal peccadillos. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] My God, I really can imagine very few people with whom I regularly communicate who could even come close to appreciating this as a form of important art. I spoke to a German woman recently who was having kittens because someone had dared to make an acronym for something as KZ, when everyone knows that that means concentration camp in German. No, no-one knows that. And what of it? Those two letters are forever banned from appearing one after the other because some people in Germany are squeamish in an utterly unreasonable way about it? How can you have any important discussions about anything if that's already a bridge too far. We have important topics to talk about. Shying away from horror is exactly what allows others to exert their power over us. We don't need to become them, but we have to try to understand where this comes from. That's what I think is important here. I can only think of one person I know who might have seen a von Trier movie -- and appreciated it for what it was. [1] Which is especially interesting because the actor playing him was Bruno Ganz, a Swiss actor born in Zürich to a Swiss-German father and Italian mother. [1] I'm always reminded of Levin's passion for mowing with a scythe in Anna Karenina. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4631 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4631 Sat, 31 Dec 2022 18:02:47 +0100 of around 1600 ratings publicly available. I've included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other -- I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. The Green Mile (1999) -- "8/10" I've seen this movie before, but don't have any notes on it. It's the best Stephen King adaptation after Shawshank Redemption. The film starts in 1999, with Paul Edgecomb (Tom Hanks) in an old-age home, taking regular walks to a shed in the woods to peek in a window. Paul works in a prison in Louisiana in 1935, in the capital wing, where death-row prisoners are kept. He and his coworkers Brutus Howell (David Morse), Dean Stanton (Barry Pepper), Harry Terwilliger (Jeffrey DeMunn) are a sympathetic bunch of chaps. They are forced to work with a newer co-worked named Percy Wetmore (Doug Hutchison), who's a real sonofabitch and useless, to boot. Percy agrees to move on to greener pastures, but only if he's allowed to run an execution. The others reluctantly agree. There are a few prisoners on the mile: the really offensive and off-the-wall "Wild Bill" Wharton (Sam Rockwell), the sweet, relatively innocent, and very remorseful Eduard Delacroix (Michael Jeter), Arlen Bitterbuck (Graham Greene), who's the first prisoner to go, and, finally, gentle giant John Coffey (Michael Clarke Duncan). John's been accused of murdering two little girls, but he's as gentle as a lamb and he's possessed of special healing powers. These powers allow him to suck the hurt out of a creature or creatures and take it into himself. It makes him very tired. John heals Paul's terribly painful bladder infection, after which his life and love life are restored. His wife Jan (Bonnie Hunt) notices immediately. Wild Bill makes a huge nuisance of himself, getting a few stints in the padded cell, whereas Percy is more sly and sneaky -- and a terrible guard, to boot, as he fails to help subdue Wild Bill at least once. Percy has it in for Del, both because he's gay and because he seems to derive so much pleasure from his talented mouse Mr. Jingles, who zips around the green mile with impunity. The guards joke that they're going to take him down to mouse city in Florida for Del, after, well, you know. Del is tickled that Mr. Jingles will continue his illustrious career after he's gone. Percy gets to Mr. Jingles and stomps him flat. John holds out his hand to Paul, "give him to me; maybe it's not too late." John is able to bring Mr. Jingles back from the dead and Del takes better care. Percy is flabbergasted. Percy gets to run Del's execution and he does his worst. He fails to wet the sponge, causing Del to burst into flames and botching the whole execution. Well, not botching it so badly that Del doesn't die, but botching it so that Del suffers terribly first. Percy is a true monster. John feels Del's pain through his gift. The guards lock Percy away in the rubber room as punishment while they sneak John out of the prison in order to help heal the warden's wife of her brain tumor. John absorbs her pain and heals her. When they return, they have to release Percy, but they threaten him to reveal all that he'd done. John releases the "pain" into Percy, causing him to flip out and shoot Wild Bill. It turns out that Wild Bill was the monster responsible for the deaths of the girls for which John Coffey was convicted. The remaining officers are now distraught, knowing that Coffey should not even be in prison, to say nothing of on death row. But John sees it differently. For him, the world is a cruel, awful place that he, through is powers, is forced to experience as a large, open sore. He insists that they execute him, but not before he gets to watch a movie with them -- Top Hat. He asks not to be hooded because he's afraid of the dark. The officers solemnly help him through the ritual, fighting back tears. It would be the last execution for Paul and Brutus. Paul reveals at the end that his visits to the shed are to commune with Mr. Jingles, who's still alive after all this time -- and that Paul himself is 108 years old. RRR (2022) -- "9/10" The visual spectacle in this film is nearly without parallel. Every scene is highly dramatic. It was three hours of non-stop action and high drama and twists and turns. It starts in 1920, during the British Raj, where we see the cruelty of administrator Buxton (Ray Stevenson) and his even crueler wife Catherine (Alison Doody). They abduct a talented young singer and henna artist Malli (Twinkle Sharma) and bring her back to the capital. The tribe is distraught, but not without recourse. They have a champion: Komaram Bheem (N. T. Rama Rao Jr.) who will bring her back. He travels as a Muslim named Akhtar. Meanwhile, we are introduced to A. Rama Raju (Ram Charan Teja), an incredibly handsome, talented, strong, linguistically gifted, and rising police officer in a spectacular scene in which he apprehends a criminal single-handedly out of a roiling crowd of protesters. Catherine enlists Raju to help find and stop Bheem (although they have no idea what he looks like). Bheem and Raju end up working together to save a boy from a train accident. I like that there's tension in the scene where the train fell into the water and capsized the boys's boat simply because no-one knows how to swim. I cannot emphasize enough how spectacular everything is -- and yet it doesn't feel over the top because it's so earnest and we are watching a film about good people. Bheem and Raju grow close, they become best friends. Bheem drives Baju around as Raju looks for the perpetrator (who's actually going to end up being Bheem). Raju helps Bheem court Jenny, Scott's neice, unaware that Bheem has a dual purpose: he wants to get into the Scott compound in order to free Malli. Bheem finds and meets Malli but can only assure her that he will eventually rescue her. Raju and Bheem go to a wedding at the residence and it ends up in a spectacular dance-off in which a cartoonishly oafish and terrible Brit has his ass handed to him. Raju and Bheem are transcendent. The ladies all swoon for Raju, whereas Jenny has eyes only for Bheem. During an interrogation, a very clever prisoner threw a banded krait at Raju, poisoning him. The prisoner tells him that only the Gonds know the cure. Luckily, his best friend Bheem is from that tribe -- although Raju still thinks he's a Muslim. During the ministrations and rescue of Raju's life, he notices that Bheem isn't who he says he is. Since Bheem also doesn't know who Raju really is, he confesses everything to his best friend, trusting that his friend will understand and see the nobility of his mission. Soon after, Bheem and his men attack Scott's compound with wild animals (tigers, etc.). Raju is there to defend the compound. They are now on opposite sides. The battle there is also incredibly spectacular, with Bheem and Raju ended up on a roof, helping each other not die, but resulting in Bheem's surrender. Raju is promoted for having brought in Bheem alive, but he is conflicted. We now learn that he's only a police officer because he's a mole, working his way up the hierarchy in order to bring it down from above. He had pledged to his village to bring a weapon for everyone. He is close to his goal of having control over a gigantic arsenal of rifles. The next scene is Bheem's public flogging, egged on by a Catherine suffused with bloodlust. Of course, Raju is in charge of the flogging. Of course, Bheem does not submit. Instead, he sings in defiance, egging the crowd on to overthrowing the whole square. Raju realizes that Bheem's sheer animal power is a much more powerful weapon than an entire arsenal of weapons. Bheem's power to inspire is much more useful. Raju betrays his post in order to help Malli and Bheem escape -- except that Bheem doesn't quite see it like that, yet. He doesn't yet know that Raju has switched sides. Raju is grievously injured and taken prisoner, thrown into a torture chamber. He resists, continuing to do pull-ups even without food or water and with his injuries. Rambo-squared! Bheem is on the run and is almost caught, except that Sita (Alia Bhatt) lies about an outbreak of smallpox, which terrified the police into leaving. Bheem learns that Sita is Raju's fiancé and learns further from her that Raju is actually a revolutionary -- a brother and friend in common cause. Bheem infiltrates the prison where Raju is being held and frees him. They retreat into the forest, get ripped and armed, then hold off prodigious numbers of soldiers while the forest burns and Scott watches from the top of his compound from afar. The pair hurl Bheem's flaming motorcycle into the compound, landing squarely in Scott's immense supplies of ammunition and TNT. Catherine dies gruesomely in the subsequent explosion, while Scott remains, dazed, in the rubble. Bheem and Raju execute him. Sita, Raju, Bheem, and Jenny all live happily ever after. Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022) -- "6/10" So this is what most people think counts as science fiction now. This movie is ostensibly about multiverses, but it's much more about just doing weird shit in 2-3--minute skits, all bound up in a kind of a Kung Fu movie. I love the hell out of Michelle Yeoh, but this is absolutely not the breakout role that everyone said it was. At one point, she's fighting a guy so that he doesn't drop himself on an IRS award that looks like a butt-plug [1] because doing something weird and unexpected allows you to connect to more-talented selves in other universes. Comprende? She manages to stop one guy from doing it, but then another, bigger guy shows up to positively suplex himself on it and then fight her with the butt plug dangling from his ass the whole time. This joke is so good that it goes on for long minutes, at which point the first guy shows up, with an even longer trophy sticking out of his butt. OMG hilarious. Breakout role, indeed. She wins the fight by pulling the awards out of their respective asses, taking their powers away. She doesn't get much of a break. Her next superpower is the ability to fight only with her pinkies. I'm starting to feel sorry for Michelle Yeoh and to wonder what sort of a bet she'd lost. And then there's her husband Waymond Wang (Ke Huy Quan), who came out of retirement for this movie -- he'd previously played Data in The Goonies and Short Round in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. He gets lines like, "Evelyn, your cray plan to save your daughter has pissed off everyone in the multiverse...but it just might work!" This is utter dreck. It's not even funny. This is like a children's movie, but for adults. I weep for us all. The Idiocracy will win, in the end. Sorry, now poor Evelyn is projectile-vomiting on the ground like she's in a Monty Python revival. Her daughter Joy / Jobu Tupaki (Stephanie Hsu) laughs and sings as she walks away. The movie pretends to be over, but then it's not! OMG so edgy. Jamie Lee Curtis does her level best, but she's just waving her hot-dog fingers around and it's just. not. working. But maybe it's just me. I paused the movie until tomorrow (it's not drawing me in enough to spend another hour on it), but then this article appeared in my newsfeed, "Everything Everywhere All at Once Leads Chicago Film Critics Nominations" by Brian Tallerico . "“EEAAO” not only appeared in Best Picture, but also competes in Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor, Best Supporting Actress, Best Original Screenplay, and a number of craft categories." Oh, come on. Really? Is this a Wakanda thing? I didn't get that one either. It was trash. Life (2017) -- "5/10" This one joins Prometheus in the pantheon of films about "ostensibly super-smart people who can't follow basic biological-containment and quarantining protocols". Of course it's true-to-life because no-one follows quarantining protocols. * They should never have gotten Hugh (Ariyon Bakare) out. They had no way of knowing whether he'd been contaminated by the alien. They knew it was a multi-celled creature where each cell was identical, but just assumed that it would act as a single creature -- and not split any parts of itself off. * Just mixing air is stupid with viruses on Earth, to say nothing of extraterrestrial, completely unresearched, and ostensibly sentient ones. * Why did the valves close one by one? Why not all at once? What kind of containment system is this? Answer: a suspenseful one! Spoiler alert: the creature managed to slip out the last valve before it closed. * Why didn't Kat (Olga Dykhovichnaya) just kick herself off into space if she was going to sacrifice herself anyway? Her death was a complete waste, even though she knowingly committed suicide. Instead, she floated away once dead (there was no reason she should, as she wasn't providing an impulse, but whatever) and remained close enough for Calvin to jump back to the station -- and to keep the movie going! * Why do they assume that Calvin will stay outside the station? It got out; it can get back in. They have no idea which entry or exit it used. * Now they want to block entries, like the thrusters. Their awesome plan is to just fire the thrusters when Calvin tries to crawl inside. Their stroke of genius is to use the temperature sensors (non-scientific geniuses and babies call them thermometers) to detect Calvin. Unfortunately, they'd used up all of their brainpower and didn't think about what randomly firing their thrusters would do to their orbit. * It was bound to happen: the Calvin POV shot. Soooo scary. * So Calvin was on Hugh's leg and was in the cabin with them the whole time. Sneaky little bugger. No idea how he's so clever. No explanation needed. Also, they go back to get Hugh, who lives for just long enough to ... tell them nothing. There was nothing gained from going back to him. * Finally, though, someone's thinking: they sent up a Soyuz capsule to boost the whole damned thing out of orbit and into deep space. Good idea. I'm sure the intrepid adventurer-scientists will figure out some way to foil the plan in a misguided effort to save someone who's just going to die anyway. Called it. This time it was a completely stupid sacrifice for Sho. Also, it takes a long time to vent a capsule though a giant gaping hole, but, luckily, the capsule on the end is magically 100% full of air as soon as they close the bulkhead. * Why would temperature drop rapidly? The thing is very clearly in the sun every time they show it. Without HVAC, it would be overheating. * Why did it wrap itself around him, ignoring the candle until he waved it around? Did it somehow not notice the heat signature until he made it "enticing"? * Why did Miranda (Rebecca Ferguson) not close her helmet until very late, choosing instead to freeze in the frigid air? None of this makes any sense. * How does Calvin know what a control stick is? Why would it know to prevent him from using it? * Why do the subtitles say [speaking Vietnamese] instead of just translating what he said to English? The ending is good, though! Spoiler alert: they hit space debris, which messes up their lifeboats, so Jake ends up on Earth instead of outer space, while Miranda ends up in outer space! Nice. An extra point for you. National Treasure (2004) -- "8/10" Benjamin Franklin Gates (Nicholas Cage) comes from a line of American historians, which include his father Patrick Gates (Jon Voight) and his grandfather John Adams Gates (Christopher Plummer). We meet Ben in the frozen north, unearthing an old shipwreck in which he finds a scrimshaw pipe with a code that tells him there's a treasure map on the back of the Declaration of Independence. He parts ways with his greedy partner Ian (Sean Bean), who swears he will steal the document in order to find the treasure. Ben and his colleague Riley (Justin Bartha) plan their own heist to get there first. Ben befriends curator Abigail Chase (Diane Kruger) in order to get her fingerprints and get into the cleaning room where the document is taken after Riley overheats the sensors on the frame. Ben ends up with the document, then ducks into the gift shop, where he's made to pay $35 for the real Declaration of Independence. Abigail is hot on his tail. Ian and his crew are there and are packing heat. Ben and Riley grab Abigail to get her out of the hail of gunfire. We get our first chase scene. Ian ends up with the gift-shop version while Ben keeps the original. Abigail is angry. This is peak Nicholas Cage. The chief investigator Sandusky (Harvey Keitel) is on the scene. He doesn't figure in this much, though. The film is mostly Ben, Abigail, and Riley treasure-hunting from one American heritage site to another, collecting special glasses that they can use to read the special writing on the back of the Declaration of Independence and finally ending up far below ground at the vast hoard of gold and treasure left by the founders of the country, who were all illuminati or masons or whatever. Ben has to wheel and deal to get Abigail freed, his family name cleared, and the entire treasure secured in the public domain, with a tidy 1% finder's fee for himself and Riley and Abigail. Riley drives away in a ridiculously overpriced and overpowered car to prove the point that they didn't get enough money out of the deal. What's actually lovely is that there are no smartphones and the web is still quite primitive. They can't just snap high-quality pictures of everything; they have to actually take things with them. I saw it in German this time. Dune (2021) -- "8/10" This movie is very pretty. However, it actually fails to live up to some of the precedents set by Lynch's Dune (reviewed "last year" ). Paul Atreides (Timothée Chalamet) uses The Voice on his mother Jessica (Rebecca Ferguson), but it sounds weak compared to Kyle McLachlan's rendition in the other film. All of the familiar characters are here: Gurney Halleck (Josh Brolin), Duncan Idaho (Jason Momoa), and mentat Thufir Hawat (Stephen McKinley Henderson). Duke Leto Atreides (Oscar Isaac) is not blessed with great lines. I can't remember whether this one comes from the book, but it fell kind of flat: "On Caladan, we ruled with air and sea power; on Arrakis, we'll have to use desert power." The Harkonnen's are pretty good, though! Dave Bautista as Raban and Stellan Skarsgård as Baron Harkonnen were inspired choices. Their first scene together was great. And the scenery on all the worlds is very Villeneuvian -- lots of long shots of large, temple-like structures, pointillistically lit in blue or yellow or orange, as suits the scene. The ships are gigantic, windowless, and have no visible means of propulsion. The temples on Arrakis reminded me very much of Serious Sam's Karnak levels. The ornithopters are lovely. I have no idea who thought having eight independent motors would be a good idea on a desert planet when a helicopter with only one (or perhaps two) motors is known to be terrible in the desert (Apache helicopters went down with depressing frequency in the U.S.'s occupations). Rather quickly, we get to the Gom Jabbar scene, where the reverend mother Mohiam (Charlotte Rampling) tests Paul. He is advised by his doctor, Dr. Yueh (Chang Chen), who will be pivotal later. The Gom Jabbar scene was very well-done. The only shame was that they made so much noise that no-one will be able to actually remember the quote from the book, "I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And, when it has gone past, I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain." The next act is on Arrakis. The Atreides arrive. They are clad in neck-to-toe metallic armor that absolutely must be air-conditioned because they walk around in the sun in it. Even when they're warned that the "sun is getting too high", they're standing on a terrace in that armor, using a pair of binoculars and in front of servants who open and close giants doors by hand. The juxtaposition of 19th-century technology and galaxy-spanning ships is jarring. Villeneuve is simply going for an aesthetic, trying to make the unfamiliar familiar -- and has presumably plumbed the books a bit, which had quite an archaic and monastic feel to them, at times. Chalamet's Paul moves a lot more than McLachlan's did during the "Hunter Seeker" scene. It wasn't nearly as tense as Lynch's version. In the next scene, Baron Harkonnen says "there are no satellites over Arrakis; the Atreides will die in the dark." How can it possibly be that there are no satellites over the only source of the spice that makes interstellar travel possible? Duncan Idaho returns from his sojourn in the Fremen sietch, accompanied by their leader Stilgar (Javier Bardem). These scenes are piling on top of each other -- Villeneuve seems to be running into the same problems that Lynch ran into: too much content that warrants a stately approach, but that must be hurried to fit the format. Dune might have been better as a series of 10 episodes rather than a single feature-length film. In the next scene, Duncan explains all of the Fremen equipment, but I have no idea how they "invent" or even "manufacture" anything on a planet so plainly inhospitable to mining or manufacturing. But there are metals everywhere! Massive amounts of metals everywhere. The aesthetic is very much the original Star Wars here, which I very much like. In the spirit of the age, the liaison Dr. Liet Kynes (Sharon Duncan-Brewster) is now a black woman, but that at least somewhat compensates for Herbert's dearth of female characters in his books. (I remember only Jessica, Alia, Mohiam, and Chani among dozens and dozens of male roles.) It just seems to be impossible for anyone to make a movie that doesn't break reality by making the main characters keep their head protection off in situations where it would surely kill them to do so. They all go into the desert with their still-suits on, but with their headgear off, positively blasting their moisture into the desiccated air. They will do this again and again, even when they need to convince the Fremen that they're not morons. Jessica sitting cross-legged in the tiny alcove looks so good. Segue to the Sardaukar army planet, where it's raining on the troops being prepared for battle. This scene, too, is visually sumptuous. Director Villeneuve has a lovely eye. Leto's poison-gas attack on the Baron fails. We see Harkonnens being gross and evil. The Sardaukar attack. Duncan Idaho tears a swath through them. The Fremen do damage. The Sardaukar prevail nonetheless, by strength of number and by being pretty bad-ass themselves. No-one uses any projectile weapons, which is nice and quiet and pretty great. They use swords. It is not really apparent that they are slowing down to strike through the shield, though. Paul and Jessica escape into the desert with the help of Dr. Kynes and Duncan Idaho, who makes a last stand to buy them time. Dr. Kynes gives them the two-person ornithopter. Before she can catch a ride on Shai-hulud, though, the Sardaukar catch up to her and they all end up riding in its belly. Paul and Jessica flee through a sandstorm, crash-land, and make it to the rock just in time. Shai-hulud rears up, but the Fremen distract it with a thumper. Stuff happens. Jessica subdues Stilgar. Paul ends up having to fight and kill a Fremen. They are accepted into the tribe. They head off into the desert. Chani says something stupid, like "This is only the beginning." 🙄 It was a bit long and a bit boring in the last third -- after being hurried in the first third -- but I give it an extra point for being beautiful. The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent (2022) -- "7/10" Nicholas Cage (Nicholas Cage) is working hard, but hardly working. He's not getting the role he wants, so he accepts a $1M job that his agent Richard Fink (Neil Patrick Harris) urges him to take. He arrives in Mallorca and meets Javi Guttierez (Pedro Pascal), who is either an olive mogul or a weapons dealer who's kidnapped the daughter of the president of Spain. The CIA claims the latter. They engage Cage to help them get the girl back. Cage has become fast friends with Guttierez, though. He promises to read his script and everything. Cage investigates, playing the spy, getting in deep with Guttierez, who's totally excited that they're going to make a movie together. It's still unclear whether he's a criminal. He seems like a teddy bear. Pascal is great here. The rapport between him and Cage is spot-on. I kind of like how meta it all gets, where they're on acid talking about how the movie that they're going to write together should have a scene where the main characters are on drugs and freaking out with paranoia, which is what they're doing as they're discussing the possible scene. Cage leaves Javi sleeping in the car and goes looking for the girl in the location where the CIA tells him she's being held. Javi shows up and lets him in -- it's a Nicholas Cage museum instead. He meets up with agent Vivian (Tiffany Haddish) and reports that the girl wasn't there, but that "good news, the script's cookin'! It's like Cassavetes meets Innaritu with a dash of Von Trier." Cage tries to talk to Javi about a kidnapped girl in their movie, to see how he would react. Instead, Javi intuits that Cage is feeling guilty about how he'd left things with his family, that his issues are "bleeding into the work". So Javi lies to Cage's ex-wife Olivia (Sharon Horgan) and daughter Addy (Lily Mo Sheen) to get them to fly to Mallorca. Cage is terrified that Javi intends to use them as physical leverage, but Javi seems to genuinely want Cage to work through his shit with his family. It's really hard to tell, but Javi doesn't seem to be who the CIA says he is. Even his assistant Gabriela (Alessandra Mastronardi) doesn't seem to know that he's a terrorist. They talk as if they're business associates and she's really hoping he'll be able to make his movie with Cage. It turns out that it's Javi's business partner and cousin Lucas (Paco León) who's the crime boss and who's responsible for having kidnapped the president's daughter. Lucas tells Javi that Cage is working for the U.S. government. Lucas presents him with an ultimatum: kill Nicholas Cage to save his own life. At the same time, Vivian tells Cage that he's going to have to find a gun and take out Javi. The encounter is all John Woo-style, slo-mo, wide-scene, opera music. At this point, they're still very meta, describing their movie as, "Javi: start[ing] out as a beautiful character piece and slowly change into a ... Cage: Hollywood blockbuster. Then there's something for everyone." They're describing the movie that they're in. They get out to the cliffs where they're deciding how they're going to shoot each other when they realize they're each wearing two halves of two pairs of shoes. They reminisce about what great friends they've so quickly become. They confront each other and learn each other's respective secrets. They team up and it's not an action movie, with Lucas's henchmen chasing them, but it's totally 80s-style with two motorcycles chasing them. They dispatch the henchmen, go back to Javi's house to learn that Addy's been kidnapped, Vivian's been compromised (her partner's dead), and they need to rescue everyone and save the world. Gabriella and Olivia jump in the back of the jeep and they get started. Olivia and Nicholas walk in through the front gates as Giorgio and Barbara, long-hidden heads of a crime syndicate who Lucas is expecting. They bluff their way in. They get all the way to the girls when their cover is blown. Cage pulls a Nicholas Cage and continues the bluff, taking Lucas hostage. Javi goes in to help him. They perform the required rescue and get away, showing up just in time to save the ladies and girls from Carlos. Obligatory jeep-chase coming up. Things happen. They end up in the embassy grounds with Lucas right on their tail. Segue to the movie of the movie, where Demi Moore plays Olivia and Anna MacDonald plays Addy. Pan out to the premiere of the movie with a standing ovation. "Fink: We're back! Cage: Not that we went anywhere." This isn't the first meta movie that Cage has made; Adaptation was another ("review here" <>). Nicholas Cage plays himself very well. This movie reminds me a bit of JCVD ("review here" ), a similarly meta movie starring Jean Claude Van Damme, another earnest actor known for doing the work and getting rocky reviews. Dick (1999) -- "5/10" Betsy (Kirsten Dunst) and Arlene (Michele Williams) are best friends. They're two high-schoolers from Washington, D.C. in 1974. Arlene's mom is staying at the Watergate hotel for a while. This is kind of a Forrest Gump-style movie in that the girls are there -- and innocuously influential -- for most of the significant effects of the 1970s, especially those related to the Nixon (Dan Hedaya) presidency. The girls discover the creeps list, they discover the tape recordings, the discover the Watergate break-in, as well as fingering the perpetrators. They work with Woodward (Will Ferrell) and Bernstein (Bruce McCulloch) to get the story out. They're super-ditzy, though. There are a bunch of other people in it, but none of the characters really click. David Foley is wasted as Bob Haldeman, Jim Breuer is kind of empty as John Dean, Harry Shearer as G. Gordon Liddy is barely there, Saul Rubinek overacts his Henry Kissinger. I expected something a bit cleverer. The Ninth Configuration (1980) -- "6/10" The movie starts by playing a maudlin song named San Antone -- the entire song -- over a blurry shot of a castle in the rain. There is a brief interior shot of a man mooning out the window, but we're soon back outside, looking in through the rain. The castle is an insane asylum, full of veterans of the Vietnam War. I was reminded in some places of the films of Tarkovsky. Tarkovsky was a much greater auteur, but I wouldn't be surprised if director Peter Blatty had seen some of those films. The incessantly pouring rain, the closeups, the voiceovers, the gliding camera, the long shots, the lingering on grotesquely shaped statues and symbols. "I don't think evil grows out of madness. I think madness grows out of evil." It's much more darkly comic than Tarkovsky, though. I don't believe anyone has every accused Tarkovsky of being "comic". Here, the dialogue is off the wall, with characters like Lt. Bennish (Robert Loggia) really, really chewing into the scenery. Probably the craziest part of this movie isn't that it stars a puli dog, or any of the dialogue; it's that it's set in 1980, but absolutely no-one smokes. Kane's cover is blown by a new inmate, who knew him and his exploits in Vietname. He's revealed as Killer Kane, working through some really bad shit, trying to be a better person. It worked until he recognized the other guy. The actual top psychiatrist turns out to be his brother, trying to help him get well. Shades of Shutter Island with the turn of events. And then it just devolves into a straight-up 80s-style bar scene with bad-ass biker dudes toying with Cutshaw (Scott Wilson) and Kane. It jut keeps getting more and more bizarre. Steve Sandor is the primary torturer, at first with mirrored shades, then revealing his heavy mascara, then making Kane say horrible things about the USMC, then tossing Kane around, then dropping into a split in front of a prone Kane to make him lick beer off the floor. Kane complies with everything until the other biker (Richard Lynch) drops onto Cutshaw's face, unzips his pants and starts to try to face-fuck him. That's the last straw for Kane, who shatters Sandor's beer stein in his hand, dropping him like a sack of potatoes, then takes out the rest of the bar. It's unclear whether he's killed them or just knocked them out. They look dead. Kane returns to his philosophical discussion with Cutshaw, trying to convince him that there is good in the world. Kane takes his own life to prove it. What? I suppose he's trying to "shock" Cutshaw back to sanity. Dragon Eyes (2012) -- "4/10" This was a pretty bad movie about Hong (Cung Le), who'd recently been released from prison. He moved to the neighborhood of St. Jude to help clean it up. The neighborhood is run by Mister V (Peter Weller) and there are rival gangs that are over-the-top violent, but also become easily tamed when Hong just kung-fus around a bit. Hong had learned his movies in prion from Tiano (Jean-Claude Van Damme), who's really only a shadowy figure in this movie. He shows some moves during the training sequences and he's still pretty spry, but it's nothing like his participation in other movies (e.g., Kickboxer: Vengeance). The plot was kind of confused, in that relatively large changes in the gangland power structure seemed to happen for no reason. Hong shows up and rents an apartment from an older fellow and his lovely daughter (obviously). He gets into it with a few roughs from the sixth-street gang. He does a few more things, and then suddenly Mister V gives him control over both gangs. This doesn't go down too well, but Hong kicks the hispanic leader's ass and now has his utter loyalty. There's an outside gang that's trying to take everything over, but Hong organizes the gangs to fight back -- even though he forbids the use of firearms. The citizens of St. Jude are happier with the peace, but then there's a giant war, Mister V is no longer happy with Hong, and they fight to the death. Hong takes a lot of damage during all of this. His fighting style is much more rough and tumble. Also, there are a couple of scenes where he takes a superhuman amount of damage to his bean, which is wildly and noticeably unrealistic. Jean Claude Van Damme appears only in Hong's flashbacks because he's in prison, so he's only in training sequences. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] This would actually turn out to be a sort of Chekhov's butt=plug, as it appeared in the next act. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4610 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4610 Thu, 29 Dec 2022 11:47:47 +0100 of around 1600 ratings publicly available. I've included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other -- I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. Neal Brennan: Blocks (2022) -- "8/10" He used the word "Cauckies" for "Caucasians". He did it a lot. It was kind of funny at the time, but it looks weird on paper. "I'm 48, never been married. People don't like it. Women would trust me more if I'd been married and I'd murdered my wife. I mean, he's capable of love, he's just too passionate. And he's not not gonna murder two people, is he?" "I've never heard a woman do a sound effect in my entire life." "Having kids despite climate change is like ... it's like being at a house party where the roof is on fire, the bsement is flooding, the cops are coming to arrest everyone, you're squished in between tons of people, and you look at your buddy and say "We should invite Brian."" "I did "Bufo Alvarius" -- it's like the nuclear bomb of psychedelics." He called it a "traumedy" show, which was a good description. It was mostly a comedy show, but also a bit of performance art. He played with the blocks behind him the whole show, shifting them about and putting them on different shelves. At the end, after his final monologue, hoping he'd get better, a light switched on from the left and the shadows thrown by all the blocks outlined the silhouette of his face. He pushed the glasses block a bit to the right and the silhouette got glasses. A nice trick. Yves Saint Laurent (2014) -- "6/10" This is a very pretty movie. The sets, the music, the clothes. It's nice to just play as a music video, to be honest. The story's a bit weird, but that was also not unexpected. YSL works far too much, takes far too many drugs to keep himself going, is mercurial, insecure, and brilliant. He gets involves in a lot of drug-fueled gay orgies. Lots of languorous kisses with lots of drugs and alcohol and smoking. Then they killed their dog by leaving a bunch of drugs lying around on the floor where their French bulldog could eat them. The dog did not go out easily. It's literally half an hour of self-indulgent self-destruction on screen. There has to have been a more artistic way to tell this story. This movie is unfortunately much too long and self-indulgent. He takes a long time to fall. Watched it in German with French subtitles. Weird: The Al Yankovic Story (2022) -- "8/10" The first 2/3 is excellent and well-paced. The final third was a bit long and dragged on, unfortunately. This is the fake biography of Weird Al's (Daniel Radcliffe) rise to fame, following the exact steps you would expect from a standard career arc: raised by unsupportive parents who want him to "stop being everything that defines him.", then rising to meteoric fame based on his amazing accordion skills, with his best friends, then getting turned to the dark side by Madonna (Evan Rachel Wood), descends into a hellish nightmare of drinking, drugs, and excess before redeeming himself with an original song Eat It (which Michael Jackson then copies from him), and being shot to death as he's accepting his Emmy. Weird Al performs all of his own songs, and there are a bunch of good ones from his repertoire. Daniel Radcliffe energetically lip-syncs it all and throws himself wholeheartedly into the role. I don't know whether it was Radcliffe's or Yankovic's idea to have Radcliffe be ripped AF, but it was a stroke of genius. It was also a nice touch that Radcliffe is shorter than nearly everyone else in the film. Evan Rachel Wood was fabulous as Madonna -- also just threw herself right into the role. There were a ton of cameos and supporting roles worth mentioning -- it just goes to show how broad Yankovic's appeal is. I gave it an extra star because it's Weird Al, man. The Boys s03 (2022) -- "9/10" At the start of this thing, Stormfront (Aya Cash) is still alive a year later, but absolutely fucked up in a hospital bed and not likely to be of any use at all to anyone. Well, she's still in love with Homelander (Antony Starr), so when he visits, he pops in there for an invalid handie that was probably the most shocking thing I've seen in a while. Hughie (Jack Quaid) is working for the BSA (Bureau of Superhero Affairs) and making headway on catching supe criminals, along with Victoria Neuman (Claudia Doumit) -- who's the head-popper, but Hughie doesn't know it yet. It turns out that Neuman is the daughter of Stan Edgar (Giancarlo Esposito), Chairman of the Board at Vaught. Hughie's eyes are wide open after he sees Neuman pop the head of a person from her past. He realizes he's been working with the enemy all along, and tries to return to The Boys. The Boys are kind of idling, but Butcher (Karl Urban) is still trying to figure out a way of killing Homelander. He gets onto the scent of a device that might be able to take him out when he learns from Mallory (Laila Robins) that she'd been on a mission in Nicaragua -- back when that was where the CIA was focused -- when the Russians showed up and took away an incapacitated Soldier Boy (Jensen Ackles). The legend had always been that Soldier Boy had been killed, which was why Butcher was interested. Soldier Boy was the only hero in history who was as powerful as Homelander. How was he killed? And if he wasn't killed, how had he been incapacitated? There are a bunch of strands in this season, with MM (Laz Alonso) struggling to stay "straight" (not involved in supe-hunting activities) but falling off the wagon and returning to The Boys. Frenchie's (Tomer Capone) past comes back to haunt him in the form of Nina (Katia Winter), who doesn't seem to have any powers, but is preternaturally powerful anyway -- at least in the hold she has over all those around her. Bad things happen, but they end up going to Russia to find the "weapon" that took out Soldier Boy. Instead, they find Soldier Boy himself, releasing him from captivity. He'd been kept on ice with low temperatures are spectacular amounts of vaporized Novichok. He shakes it off because he really is immensely powerful. In escaping, he knocks Kimiko (Karen Fukuhara) around so hard that she loses her powers. This seems to be a side-effect of his new ability to channel rage into an unholy chest-ray that obliterates everything non-supe that it touches. Supe things it seems to neutralize. Anyway, the Boys come back from Russia, with an incapacitated Kimiko. However, Butcher has started taking an experimental one-day-supe drug called V24 that grants you superpowers for a day, but has a pretty sick hangover, as well. Hughie starts taking it as well. Butchie's powers are closer to Homelander's, while Hughie's give him strength and the ability to teleport (although not with clothes). Nina is still trying to extract her pound of flesh from Frenchie, but Kimiko saves him, despite no longer having healing powers. She gets pretty heavily damaged in the bargain and ends up in the hospital, where she and Frenchie get ... closer. Homelander, meanwhile, is spiraling out of control. On his supposed birthday, Stormfront kills herself by swallowing his tongue. He melts down and goes on a spectacular rant, declaring himself utterly superior to everyone. This goes down remarkably well and saves his polling numbers. He's back on top of the world -- and no longer hiding who he is. A-Train (Jessie T. Usher) is dueling with a supe named Blue Hawk (Nick Wechsler), who's "cleaning up crime" by mostly just killing black people. The Deep (Chace Crawford) is back in the Seven after a struggle, while A-Train isn't. The Deep gets an octopus involved in his sex life with his wife. His manipulative wife Cassandra (Katy Breier) is less than thrilled, realizing that her grip on him is slipping (no pun intended). Annie (Erin Moriarty) is granted co-captaincy with Homelander and they're supposed to act as a couple. This is deeply disturbing to everyone but Homelander, who's a flat-out psychopath. The terror is palpable. Man, what else? Black Noir (Nathan Mitchell) used to be part of Payback, headed up by Soldier Boy. It was Soldier Boy who'd mutilated and brain-damaged Noir so badly that he only ever appears in costume and never says anything. (This is different that in the comic books where Noir was actually a prior clone of Homelander) Soldier Boy seeks revenge on all of the former members of Payback, who'd hated him and who'd helped incapacitate him for the Russians, who'd experimented cruelly on him (trying to figure out what might damage him by, e.g., pouring gallons of acid down his throat, which, while not doing actual damage, hurt like mad). He picks them off one-by-one. Two of them are hosting that year's Herogasm, so they did that as well in this season. Maeve (Dominique McElligott) is secretly helping The Boys because she hates Homelander and is terrified of what he may do to innocent people. But Homelander knows, of course, because he can smell Butcher on her when she returns from having delivered another supply of V24 -- and stayed for many bottles of booze and also some supe-sex with Butcher, who literally knows no bounds. Homelander takes over as CEO and COTB of Vaught with Edgar's departure/arrest. A-Train kills Blue Hawk but ends up having a heart attack, so he gets Blue Hawk's super-heart implanted while he's in a coma. Neat. Also, taking V24 will kill you after 3--5 doses, so Hughie might be OK, but Butcher is fucked. Noir is watching his past in the form of cartoon versions of Payback playing out the final scene before Soldier Boy was taken. Homelander is on the fence about trying to kill Soldier Boy because he finds out that he'd his dad. That is, Homeland is Soldier Boy's son. Neat. Annie is off the leash, enraging Homelander with bad press. Noir tries to get Homelander to help him kill the dangerous Soldier Boy, but that's no longer happening because Homelander wants to team up with his dad. Noir insists and Homelander rips his insides to the outside. Frenchie helps Kimiko get V so that her powers are restored. They all gather for the big clash between Homelander and Soldier Boy. Maeve and Homelander fight it out, with Homelander blinding her in one eye, but Maeve having done some damage as well. Homelander's son Ryan (Cameron Crovetti) is there as well, trying to figure shit out and trying to help with his powers. Maeve tackles an exploding Soldier Boy out of the building and apparently sacrifices them both. Obviously Soldier Boy is not dead. Neither is Maeve, who is now de-powered, but alive, if blind in one eye. She's back with her old girlfriend Elena (Nicola Correia-Damude). Annie and the Boys are getting their feet back under them. Neumann is back and now campaigning as Vice President -- Butcher declares that they will have to stop that bitch. Homelander is learning that he hasn't lost any support among his faithful. Instead, he gains more support when he kills a protester who threw something at Ryan, whom he now takes to his personal appearances. Con Air (1997) -- "8/10" Cameron Poe (Nicolas Cage) is a veteran who'd gone to jail for manslaughter for killing a man in a fight outside a bar. He's about to get out on parole, but is being flown on a Con Air with a whole crew of colorful villains, like Cyrus the Virus (John Malkovich), Diamond Dog (Ving Rhames), Pinball (Dave Chappelle), Garland Greene (Steve Buscemi), Johnny-23 (Danny Trejo), Swamp Thing (M.C. Gainey), and others. They hijack the plane and are pursued by Agent Larkin (John Cusack) and Agent Malloy (Colm Meaney). This is peak Cage, the source of many Cage-like memes. It is a damned exciting movie, with a lot of interesting characters. It's worth the price of entry just to watch Cage and Malkovich chew the scenery. Steve Buscemi is his understated and creepy self. The plane takes off, there is subterfuge, the plane lands, the plane takes off again, the plane "lands" in Las Vegas in a spectacular final scene. Poe's little girl gets her bunny-rabbit stuffed animal while Malkovich's Cyrus the Virus gets his head pounded in, literally. The only other survivor are, of course, the good guards, but also Buscemi's Garland Greene, who's now at the craps table, winning big. Unleashed (2005) -- "7/10" Danny (Jet Li) is kept enslaved by Bart (Bob Hoskins), a shylock for the mob. Bart keeps Danny on a collar, releasing him only to convince recalcitrant debtors to reconsider their parsimony. We see Bart on a collection run, unleashing Danny time after time, yelling at him while Danny saves his ass again and again. On one job, Danny meets Sam (Morgan Freeman) and learns a bit about playing the piano. On one job, Danny catches the eye of a rich man named Wyeth (Michael Jenn), who approaches Bart about Danny taking part in an underground to-the-death fighting ring. Danny is off to a good start, but Bart doesn't see anything but money. Danny wants a piano. Jet Li plays the role quite well. Before things can get going, though, one of Bart's customers catches up with him, ramming his car and machine-gunning him and his crew. Danny is the sole survivor, escaping back to Sam. Sam and the girl who lives with him Victoria (Kerry Condon) adopt him, teaching him about how the world works -- mostly stuff related to eating. At the same time, Victoria continues her studies, while Danny learns how to play the piano. Victoria has a piano recital coming up, after which she and Sam will return to New York. They have invited Danny to come with them. Predictably, Danny runs into someone from his old world and convinces him to come back to Bart, who "accepts" him back, slaps the collar back on him, and takes him right back to the fighting ring. I have no idea why Danny decided to go with the henchman, but he did. And there he stands in the illegal fighting arena, arguing with Bart, all while wearing a shirt thatreminded me a bit of Bruce Lee's yellow jumpsuit from Game of Death. Danny doesn't wnt to hurt anyone anymore, so his first fight looks a lot more like Jackie Chan than Jet Li. The movie has a ways to go and it's a Jet Li movie, so more fighting and less piano-playing was inevitable. Danny is getting his ass kicked until ... he doesn't. He vanquishes four opponents, but kills no-one. Bob Hoskins is so over-the-top that it's nearly impossible to imagine how Danny even considered going back to him -- other than he's incredibly mentally damaged. I understand that the plot called for it, but the docility that he shows toward his handlers is hard to believe. Perhaps it's a dearth of imagination (or experience) on my part. What is perhaps more impossible to believe is that Bart shows absolutely no fear of the killing machine that he abuses. He has no worries whatsoever that his abuse will ever backfire on him, that the chickens will ever come home to roost. On their way to the next fight, Bart is babbling on about something and says, "families are meant to be together," a sentiment with which Danny agrees. He grabs the wheel and crashes it, killing everyone in the car but himself. He's pretty much fine, and returns to Sam and Victoria. Danny learns more about his mother, in particular that his "uncle" Bart had shot and killed her. Now he know that Bart will never stop hunting him. He's correct. Bart is on his way with dozens of disposable henchmen, all of whom Danny will more-or-less easily dispatch in a The Raid-style hallway and stairwell fight that will, of course, culminate in a boss fight against a mysterious bald, flowing-white-robe-clad, sword-wielding, eyebrow-less fighter from the arena, who has accompanied Bart. Danny starts fighting that dude and, of course, has to lose before he can win because we don't have any other plots. The close-quarters fighting is nicely choreographed, though, as is the rest of the fight once they square off against each other. Danny even tries to save the guy's life, but his uniform rips and the guy drops several floors to his death, on top of Bart's car. Bart is now Danny's final boss. Again, unclear why Danny doesn't just take him out. Is he still reluctant to harm his former "family"? They're all such utterly and irredeemably horrible people; it's honestly very hard to believe that he would still hew to his "training" and spiral into his Stockholm Syndrome. Bart counts on it, though, to the very end. Jet Li is quite an expressive actor; he's one of the few who tried to make meaningful action movies (perhaps Jean Luc Van Damme was another, at least sometimes). Bob Hoskins seems to enjoy the role so much; his "Bart" is so invested in keeping Danny a "dog" that he'd give up his life if only he could continue to ruin Danny's. That is a level of insanity that is quite hard to believe. The epilogue is at Victoria's piano recital. Commando (1985) -- "5/10" This is the story of all-around military bad-ass John Matrix (Arnold Schwarzenegger), who has retired to the Californian hills with his daughter Jenny (Alyssa Milano). They are interrupted in their daddy-daughter bliss his former commander Major General Franklin Kirby (James Olson), who posts several of his best soldiers to protect them from an old enemy Arius (Dan Hedaya). Arius sends his henchmen to attack the house. They fail to kill Matrix, but they manage to kidnap Jenny. The very strangely attired (he looks like a leather-bound, net-shirted sex-club frequenter) Bennett (Vernon) has partnered with Arius to get back at his former compatriot Matrix. After killing every last man other than those who manage to escape with his daughter, Matrix is caught and bundled onto a plane to be delivered to Arius. Instead, he escapes, killing his bodyguard and getting right onto the trail of Sully (David Patrick Kelly), who he sees hitting on Cindy (Rae Dawn Chong). Matrix follows Cindy and gets her to help him follow Sully. They end up shooting up a mall, then follow with another high-speed chase, more killing, and, finally, end up knocking over a weapons-supply shop that has a secret back room with a ton of military-grade hardware. The cops show up and arrest Matrix, but Cindy gets away. She follows the paddy wagon and takes it out with a rocket launcher. They continue together to a pier where they figure out that Jenny is on an island. Luckily Cindy knows how to fly, so they take a seaplane to the island. Matrix storms it, kicking all kinds of ass. Bennett heads down to kill Jenny, but she's escaped. Matrix kills Arius (as well about a hundred other people, all of whom run into his bullets heedlessly), then squares off with Bennett in the sewers below, as Jenny looks on. I'm not spoiling too much by telling you that Matrix wins the duel. He delivers a mot juste or three, then flies away with Cindy and Jenny. The end. This movie didn't hold up nearly as well as the original Predator. Hulk (2003) -- "7/10" This is the original Marvel movie, directed by Ang Lee, years before anyone knew anything about a continuous story arc or the MCU. Bruce Banner (Eric Bana) has inherited genetic mutations from his father, David (Nick Nolte), who'd experimented on himself. His boss Thaddeus Ross (Todd Tesen, later Sam Elliot) vehemently forbade him from doing so. Years later, and Banner is working in a lab with Ross's daughter Betty (Jennifer Connelly). There's a small cameo by Lou Ferrigno as a security guard, who walks out of a building with Stan Lee. During an experiment with gamma rays, Bruce is trapped in the lab. Bruce's genetic mutation protected him from it -- not only that, it made him stronger. Banner hulks out for the first time and learns that he's not normal -- and hasn't been since his father experimented on him. General Ross threatens him (getting angry) and then Talbot (Josh Lucas) comes over to his house to not only threaten him, but start pounding on him (very angry). So, he hulks out again. He's mostly aware, though, so he remembers that his father has sicced souped-up gamma-dogs on Betty and intervenes in time. He's bitten pretty badly as the Hulk and has injuries as Banner. Betty is nursing him when the military shows up and takes him prisoner. A truly awesome Ang Le montage of military hardware and three-D maps and left- and right-wipes ensues to show us just how many people and vehicles and technology is involved in keeping Banner's giant mecha-coffin underground. Ross wants to keep the incredibly dangerous weapon named Hulk away from everyone. Betty convinces him let her try to cure Bruce. It kind of works. He can control himself reasonably well. Until, that is, Talbot takes over the program from Ross and resolves to slice a piece off of the Hulk in order to build a super-weapon. Banner refuses, but Talbot takes him hostage and traps him in a tank and provokes him into turning into the Hulk. He obviously escapes and Talbot kills himself trying to get the probe. Betty and David have a chat, during which David reveals how he'd killed his wife with a knife, but he totally didn't mean it, but he was raging out? Trying to kill Bruce because he was dangerous? I have to admit that I wasn't watching very carefully at that point. What I found kind of fascinating is that I'd never heard of the Hulk's backstory, in which his father was doing research with starfish and other creatures that can regrow limbs and heal themselves. A few times, we see the Hulk injured and then quickly heal completely, in seconds. We see his skin ripple as it absorbs and rejects bullets. He doesn't kill indiscriminately, though. He generally incapacitates soldiers rather than utterly annihilating them, as he easily could. Betty calms him down again from his latest rage-journey, where he'd ended up in San Fransisco, tossing about cars and trolleys. The Hulk sees her and lets Bruce reappear. Bruce Banner is once again under the military's control. David Banner is being transferred and brought to his son. Once he's there, they do a bunch of family shit, but mostly both listen to Nick Nolte chew up the scenery in a truly spectacular fashion, walking the boards as if he were on Broadway. Eric Bana screams primally. Nolte mocks him. Everything he does seeks to provoke the Hulk. Since Down and Out in Beverly Hills, Nolte has looked the exact same. David sticks a power cable in his mouth and absorbs its power; Bruce starts to hulk out. Bizarre shit happens in the clouds above the location. Bruce and David both escape far away, and then do battle, with David as some sort of rock creature, his powers absorbed from whatever he touches. David wants to absorb Bruce's power -- all of it. But there is no end to Bruce's power -- and David can't handle it. Ross gives up and gamma-nukes the entire spot. Bruce survives; David does not. We discover Bruce practicing field medicine in an unspecified South American jungle. Bandits rob his camp, taking medicine, and we see Banner's eyes flash green, the camera lifts over the canopy, and the scene fades to black over the Hulk's roar. I watched it in German this time. TraumaZone Series (2022) -- "7/10" The videos are available on YouTube, * "TraumaZone Series 1 1 Part One 1985 to 1989" * "TraumaZone Series 1 2 Part Two 1989 to 1991" * "TraumaZone Series 1 3 Part Three 1991" * "TraumaZone Series 1 4 Part Four 1992 to 1994" * "TraumaZone Series 1 5 Part Five 1993 to 1996" * "TraumaZone Russia 1985 1999 S01E06 1994 to 1998 720p iP" * "TraumaZone Russia 1985 1999 S01E07 1995 to 1999 720p iP" I watched the first couple of segments without taking notes. In part 3, we are shown Boris Yeltsin at a spa with someone who is the spitting image of Tormund Giantsbane swimming right next to him. In part 4, at about 4:00 or so, a young lady sits behind a pile of dead pigs and opines about the lifting of the price controls ("Shock Therapy" strongly suggested by U.S. American advisors), "Price liberalisation? I think that once prices are freed, life will become unbearable for a common worker. And it will take a lot of effort to earn a living. We'll have to use any means, honest and dishonest, just to survive." At 20:30, there's a straight-up amateur-porn scene with a pretty healthy Russian couple trying to make ends meet by making a porno. I guess YouTube's censors aren't so strict? At 29:30, we see people everywhere in the street, trying to sell their meager possessions in order to survive. Their society had completely collapsed -- or, more accurately, been imploded for them. They were selling their vouchers in factories that they'd been "given" as their "shares" of the former communist government. These were quickly and cheaply funneled to a handful of oligarchs, who "bought" the entire country for a pittance. They still rule today. At about 42:00, they show more of the closed factories, the suffering people, the consolidation of power under the oligarchs, who close everything down, don't pay anyone, and move their money offshore. The same thing was to happen in the U.S. a decade later, under America's Yeltsin Bill Clinton, with his NAFTA bill that would have similar consequences for the unwashed masses and the self-elected elites. Everyone else dropped back to a barter economy in Russia. It didn't go that far in the U.S. Instead, they'd learned how to fleece everyone without destroying the country utterly. In Russia, no-one cared to avoid that chaos -- after all, the principles who benefitted didn't even live there. Why do I always feel worse for animals than people? They show monkeys trapped in an abandoned zoo, they show a goat being stuffed into the trunk of a car, a tiger having her kittens taken away, a camel in a harness being rudely transported somewhere -- and it tugs on my heartstrings in a way that seeing the entire population of Russia suffer doesn't. There's a lesson here, one we don't want to learn, I think. We talk these days of the bleakness of Ukraine, entering winter without power or resources. This has already happened to them once before, to all of the former Soviet Union, in fact. At 20:00 in volume 5, they show blasted neighborhoods with "an economy in free-fall, [where] millions of people could not afford food or heating [and] trees disappeared in the parks as people chopped them down for firewood." At 27:00, they return to the abortion clinic, where they still provide free abortions. It's the only reliable form of birth control. The condoms are defective, people are wildly uneducated about sex, and the pill was never imported or produced. The employees at the clinic tell of "record-holders" who have had 16 abortions, some of them 2-3 per year. To be fair, there are those who use the service once. There was a poor lady who was still living in an apartment with her husband and parents, who had been waiting on their own apartment for eight years and counting. The nurse there tried to shame her because she said that wonderful people like the poor lady should be having kids instead of the animals who actually were. Those situations are such a shit-show. At 34:00, we learn that, "Viktor Chernomyrdin ran Gazprom. It owned a third of the world's supply of gas. Yeltsin made him prime minister to force the privatization program through. Chernomyrdin sold Gazprom to himself and his friends at a thousandth of its real value. He then looted it and smuggled the money out of the country. "The minister of finance said it was 'the biggest robbery of the century, perhaps of human history.'" In part six, at about 05:00, we visit an apartment of a family that is so cold that they can see their breath inside. I wonder how this resonates with the people of England and Germany this winter, as some will be thrown into the same situation. What goes around, comes around. At 13:00, we see scenes from the Russian bombardment of Chechnya, just awful scenes of people fleeing their homes, across fields, with nothing at all, just the clothes on their backs -- not even warm clothes. They are frustrated and desperate, driven mad by the relentless Russian bombing campaign. The Russians claiming to be bombing to preempt terrorism -- a likely story, and one the great powers love to tell. This is contrasted with footage from a Russian disco at the same time, where young people are dancing and enjoying themselves, half-naked women dancing in cages over their heads. Next, we see Chechnyans in the hills, practicing for combat, their weapons laid out on blankets. The sun never seems to shine in this documentary. The BBC carried their dreary weather with them. The scenes of Russia attacking Grozny are bleak and awful. War is idiocy. It is brutality. It is evil. It always goes the same. That is, never as movies depict. it. Still in episode 6, at 28:00, we hear about the continued dismantling and robbing of the Russian state. "Despite privatization, the government still controlled several key industries that were vital to society. The oligarchs wanted to get hold of these industries, as well. They came up with a plan. They offered to lend their looted wealth back to the government. But, in return, they would get shares in the remaining industries. They knew the loans would never be repaid. So, they would get control of the industries for a fraction of their value. [...] [s]even men were about to get hold of the great mineral wealth of Russia ,,, for almost nothing." At 46:20, they ask a babushka (ба́бушка) picking burdocks in a field (probably for tea?) who she's going to vote for. "I don't care [this was mistranslated; she actually said 'я не знаю', which means 'I don't know'] - I guess. It doesn't matter. Even if we vote, they'll appoint who they've already chosen." The Russians of the 90s have more and more in common with Americans in the 2020s. The following screenshot from about 30:15 is labeled with "Ulyanovsk: Lenin's birthplace near the Volga River". The snowy, snowy road flowing over the hills, with a car on the right and a horse-drawn carriage on the left, reminds me very much of Central New York, where the Amish with their horse-drawn carriages are very common on the country roads. I saw this scene several times while cycling this summer. That everything is covered in very cold-looking snow reminds me of growing up there (or more-recent visits, when I was still going in the winter). [image] Just after that, we see a scene from 1500m below Norilsk, drilling for nickel in a mine. It's interesting to think, from the comfort of my office, how, all around the world, these activities proceed. Nickel is mined, oil is mined, machines are built to extract oil, to extract nickel. Machines are built to build the tools to build the machines that mine nickel. Food, water, logistics for the miners. Safety standards to make sure a mine 1500m below the surface even works efficiently. Incredible how much human activity happens every second of every day. It's followed immediately by a dinner full of suited and utterly useless financiers and economists and politicians having a fancy dinner, utterly unaware of how much the rest of humanity is working to make sure that their fancy food shows up on their fancy plates while they earn dozens of times as much as the people down in the nickel mine. At 45:30, the captions read, "Those who had believed that Russia could be turned into a Western-style democracy realized that idea had now failed." This is a wildly unfair characterization. The prior 6h45m of the documentary had shown how Russia had been eviscerated by pirates. The idea hadn't failed. It had been killed. Actively suppressed and destroyed. The horse lost the race not because it wasn't fast -- it's that you chopped its legs off, shot it ten times, and tied it to a 10-car train. It's like blaming Max instead of the Grinch when Max can't pull the sled. Fuck everything about that mindset. Doctor Sleep (2019) -- "9/10" Danny Torrance (Ewan McGregor), from The Shining, is all grown up and he is an absolutely alcoholic mess. We wake with him from an absolute humdinger of a bender. He is not alone. A lithe, naked woman lies next to him, curled up around a pool of her own green vomit. He's not doing much better. He throws up into the toilet, then examines a wicked shiner in the mirror. We revisit his previous evening with him in flashbacks. He provoked fights; she loved it; they both got hammered and coked up. As he dresses, he finds an empty wallet. Desperate, he robs the young lady who'd robbed him to buy cocaine the night before. She has a few dollars, but mostly food stamps. Her 2-year-old toddler wanders into the room. Torrance is horrified. He thinks he's hit bottom. This might very well be it. He takes the money anyway and heads north -- far north. We see bits and pieces of his past coming together, how he learned to put away bad spirits into mental boxes, how he drinks to keep these ghosts at bay. In a parallel story, we see the "True Knot" gather its newest disciple Snakebite Andi (Emily Alyn Lind). Led by Rose the Hat (Rebecca Ferguson), they gain strength and power from gifted young children. Other members of note are Crow Daddy (Zahn McClarnon) and Grampa Flick (Carel Struycken, who played The Fireman in Twin Peaks). They suck "steam" from victims in a "steamy" world. They can inhale it directly, but they can also store it in canisters. They are soul vampires. In another strand, we meet young Abra (Dakota Hickman), a very gifted child, perhaps even as gifted as Danny himself. Danny is taken in up north by a gentle stranger named Billy Freeman (Cliff Curtis), who spots him his first two months rent, takes him to an AA meeting, and helps him get a job in a local hospice. It is here that gets the moniker Doctor Sleep. He's teamed up with the cat who also knows when a person's time has come. Eight years later, he's still clean. The True Knot takes another victim, a small boy, a little-league player. Abra (Kyliegh Curran) wakes and screams. She communicates with Danny through the chalkboard he has in his bedroom. She writes "redrum" and he writes that he hopes that she's OK. She is older now, and has learned how to use her powers, at least a little. She tracks down the little boy, to find out where he came from and where he's gone, and who got rid of him. She launches herself astrally into Rose the Hat. Their first encounter is a shock for both of them. The encounter has repercussions for Danny, who falls unconscious as a result of the psychic, astral shock wave. Abra swats Rose to the side like she was nothing. Rose is intrigued, not afraid. Crow Daddy wonders whether to kill her or turn her. Rose will hear none of it. She doesn't want someone so much more powerful than anyone else in the Knot. Abra wouldn't turn anyway. No, Rose wants to milk her, to keep her as livestock. Abra seeks out and find Danny, pinging him telepathically. She asks for his help, but Danny tells her to keep her head down instead. Back at work, Danny finds that Dick has come to visit him, showing up somewhat spookily in an empty room. He's just a spirit, of course. At 01:30:00, while they're talking, McGregor looks the spitting image (and sound) of Jack Nicholson. I wonder how accidental that was? Danny: Why are you here? Dick: I'm here because it all comes 'round. Ka's a wheel, Doc. This is peak Stephen King. He's there one last time to tell Danny that his job is to help Abra. Meanwhile, Rose the Hat travels astrally to pay Abra a little visit. This is rendered really nicely. Abra drops the hammer on her, terrifying Rose with her power. Only with great difficulty and no small amount of damage does Rose escape. Abra got into Rose's head and stole information -- Rose doesn't know what. She and her band are scared, but they're desperate -- they haven't been feeding well. Grampa Flick "cycles" and departs the earthly plane, leaving only his steam for the others. They greedily inhale it. Abra, Danny, and Billy find the little leaguer's body and get his baseball glove. Abra uses it to find the True Knot on the road, heading toward them. The trio are ready for the Knot. Abra fools them into thinking they'd captured her (they'd captured her teddy bear instead). They're all out in the open and Danny and Billy start picking them off. They get everyone cleanly but Snakebite Andi, who manages to order Billy to kill himself before she dies. He does. Crow Daddy, meanwhile, has sneakily found Abra at home, drugs her, kills her father, and kidnaps her. They're on the road when Danny jumps into Abra and tells her to crash the van -- Crow Daddy's not wearing a seatbelt. Rose appears in astral form, but Abra smirks and passes through her. Rose, enraged (and more than a little distraught that her entire family is dead) inhales two entire canisters of steam and vows revenge. Danny and Abra are on the way to Colorado, to the Overlook Hotel. Danny thinks they're going to need the malignant force of the hotel to defeat Rose, who he know will never stop coming. They wind their way up the mountain, to the brooding, slumped ruins. Abra waits outside while Danny goes inside to "wake it up". He does a posterity tour of the the greatest hits from The Shining. Rose shows up and grandstands around a bit. Danny and Abra almost catch her in a box in the labyrinth, but she pops out in time, realizing that Danny is also gifted. They square off. She gets the better of Danny and starts to draw off his steam, as she tortures him in the grand study of the hotel. Abra has fled, as instructed. Rose discovers the boxes in his head and wants to know what's in the boxes. He shows her. "They're hungry." After they've eaten Rose, they turn on Danny. Abra is upstairs. Danny reprises his father's role, possessed entirely by the hotel now, having sacrificed himself to rid the world of Rose. Abra ducks into room 237. Danny/Overlook finds her. She stands against the hotel, making the hotel abandon the body, at least temporarily. He tells her she has to leave alone, that he can't hold off the Overlook much longer. The Overlook is terrified because, while it ate Rose, it is now afraid of the exploding boilers that will torch it. At the end, amid the fires, Danny is released and sees clearly. Abra stands outside, "I could hear it dying", she tells Dan, who's only in her mind now, or on the astral plane, ... or something. "We go on, after." I watched the three-hour director's cut. Ewan McGregor is excellent, as are Kyleigh Kurran and Cliff Curtis (who has the most uneven eyes I've seen in a while). For the acting and the patient pacing, I give it an extra star. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4601 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4601 Wed, 28 Dec 2022 22:46:30 +0100 of around 1600 ratings publicly available. I've included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other -- I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. The Expendables 3 (2014) -- "6/10" The first act has the team freeing Doctor Death (Wesley Snipes) from a Syrian prison. This is where they found out that Stonebanks (Mel Gibson) is back to make their lives miserable. Stonebanks deliberately wounds Hale Caesar (Terry Cruise), taking him out of the action for the rest of the movie. Max Drummer (Harrison Ford) is their new manager. Because Caesar was injured, Barney (Sylvester Stallone) decides everyone's too old for this shit and lets them all go. That's Lee Christmas (Jason Statham), Yin Yang (Jet Li), Gunner (Dolph Lundgren), and Toll Road (Randy Couture), as well as Doctor Death, who'd just gotten back. Barney gets a new team, consisting of Thorn (Glen Powell), Luna (Ronda Rousey), Mars (Victor Ortiz), and Smilee (Kellan Lutz). Galgo (Antonio Banderas) is left off the team, despite being hilarious and enthusiastic. I absolutely had no idea what those names were until I looked them on on Wikipedia and IMDb. They are completely irrelevant. Of course they sneer at the old guard and make a bunch of old-guy jokes. Of course they completely disregard any of the old guard's many amazing accomplishments. Of course they have no respect for anyone's skills but their own. Of course they're completely cocky and suffer from an incredible surfeit of confidence. Of course they get kidnapped by Stonebanks at the end of their very first mission, which they ran with Trench Mauser (Arnold Schwarzenegger) and Barney. Of course Barney escapes and survives to fight another day. Of course Galgo is half-heartedly welcomed onto Barney's "team" to try to rescue the young guns. Of course Stonebanks sets up an elaborate trap in a foreign country. Of course the original Expendables demand that they be allowed to help. Of course they rescue everybody and realize that working together they're even more powerful than ever! Go Joe! Because knowing is half the battle! And, of course, Barney faces off against Stonebanks, who of course manages to outmatch him right until he doesn't and Barney of course wins. Of course Barney runs up eight stories of building in four seconds, running Sylvester Stallone-style across an imploding roof to catch the rope hanging from a helicopter piloted by Drummer and filled with Expendables. Of course this all works despite Barney having just gotten thrashed to within an inch of his life and having a bullet wound or ten. Of course they all end up at a bar together looking like a fucking circus. Of course I enjoyed it. It's stupid, but it's coherent and fun. I'd seen this movie before, but I couldn't find a previous review. John Wick 3: Parabellum (2019) -- "8/10" See my "review from 2019" . At the time, I wrote, "The Adjucator—a sort of cop from the “High Table”—is a bit of a Deus Ex Machina (it’s unclear why she has such latitude—I mean, the High Table has sway, but most of the people she confronts are nearly in open rebellion of it), but it doesn’t make much sense to dwell on it, to be honest." I am no longer feeling so generous. This whole adjudicator plot-line doesn't hold up on re-watching. It is honestly unclear why she has such power. Somebody could just whack her supercilious ass at any moment and no-one would know, but it doesn't happen -- this, among people who all kill for a living. It's a bit odd. I suppose the magical power of the High Table holds sway over everyone, but it's a bit of a contrived way to try to develop tension. I get it, John Wick is also an unexplained force of nature, but he's why I'm watching. I do not care about the adjudicator who appeared out of nowhere and seems to be more powerful than John Wick's reputation. Convince me I should instead of just ordering me to. In the final slaughter, he keeps taking people out despite their body armor and helmets -- but never thinks to take any of their body armor or helmets for himself. He's just out there without a helmet, taking care of business. Iliza Schlesinger: Hot Forever (2022) -- "9/10" She honestly made me cry laughing once or twice. Delivery is great. Material is reasonably fresh. Describing weigh-loss: "Basically, whatever you weighed when you were 12, that's the weight you spend the rest of your life trying to get back to." Describing a bra: "Like two contact lenses held together with dental floss." Severance S01 (2021) -- "8/10" This is the story of a company named Lumen, which has a department called Severance. The work done in this department is so secret that its employees must agree to undergo a procedure that separates their memories into two selves: a work self and a private self. The office is very, very minimalist. The office is in a deep basement. The transition between personalities happens in the elevator, on the way up or down. Some people are not severed, while others are. The severed all have an innie and an outie, neither of whom have any idea what the other is doing. Mark (Adam Scott) took the job because he's trying to escape the fact of his wife's death. His innie has lost his best friend Petey (Yul Vazquez), who used to head the department until he suddenly ... didn't. And now Mark's in charge of the others, Irving (John Turturro) and Dylan (Zach Cherry), which doesn't sit well with either of them. They are joined by a new co-worker Helly (Britt Lower) who is having some serious issues getting adjusted to having been severed. To say that she's resentful is an understatement. After trying to get a message to her outie, she dials it up by trying to hang herself. Their immediate overseer is Milchick (Tramell Tillman), an absolute sadist who administers punishments when required. And they're required a lot. It's not physical -- all of the punishments are absolutely psychologically crippling. His immediate boss is Harmony Cobel (Patricia Arquette), who actually lives right next to Mark on the surface. She actually starts to insinuate her way into his life by cozying up to his sister Devon (Jen Tullock) and her wacky husband Ricken (Michael Chernus). Somewhere in there is a storyline where Irv falls in love with Burt (Christopher Walken) -- the head of a different department, then must deal with his loss when Burt "retires". Burt retires on the surface, but in the "innie" world, Burt will disappear forever. Mark determines that Petey was on to something and had learned that Lumen was able to switch their innies and outies at will. They figure out how to do this and set up a night where the innies will be out rather than the outies. We already knew who Mark was, but we find out that Irv is a painter who keeps painting the exact same thing every day and that he has a dog. Dylan has a kid. Helly is the best one -- she's actually on the board of directors of Lumen and manages to reveal to everyone that the innies suffer. Mark finds out that his wife is still alive and has also been severed. They've actually met as innies. In Bruges (2008) -- "8/10" See my "review from 2015" . It held up quite well on a second viewing. Both Brendan Gleeson and Colin Farrell are phenomenal. Colin Farrell is nearly transcendent. Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit (2014) -- "4/10" It starts off pretty hyper-jingoistic and doesn't get much better. Kevin Costner (playing Thomas Harper, head of a secret unit) is always pretty heavy-handed when he's in something like this. Chris Pine (playing Jack Ryan) is affable (it's why I started watching), but he can't do much with it. And then Keira Knightley shows up (as Cathy Muller) and makes everything worse, as usual. The plot is kind of current, though: it's about pipeline debates between the U.S. and Russia. But, yeah, whatever interest Pine's performance awakens, Knightley's suckage eats right up. I take it back, Kenneth Branagh as Viktor Cheverin absolutely limbos under Knightley's performance, with his absolutely ridiculous Russian accent and his absolutely ridiculous threat to put a lightbulb in Knightley's mouth as the ultimate form of Russian-style torture. :"I'm putting lightbulb in her mouth, Jack!", in that horrible accent. Jesus, what a culturally offensive mess. It's also neat to watch the FBI and State Department acting with impunity in Moscow, like officially, with S.W.A.T.-style units and everything. The film starts off with Jack Ryan getting knocked into serious physical rehabilitation, but it's unclear what this has to do with the rest of the film, other than to perhaps explains why he takes a desk job? In the end, it's his brains that prevail. Hooray. The Philadelphia Experiment (2012) -- "4/10" This is a remake of a "1984 original" that I'm pretty sure I've seen, but which I couldn't remember at all. I somehow feel that that version was better. The remake leaned heavily on its ability to outshine the original in special effects, but was so-so in all other respects. Basically, the Philadelphia is an aircraft carrier that appears out of a wormhole of sorts, transporting the few surviving crew into the future. One of them meets his granddaughter. It's all a bit confused. Some people are trying to harness this time-traveling power for a weapon whereas others are interested in making the whole experiment finally end. I Am Wrath (2016) -- "4/10" This isn't really a remake, but it's a trope: man loses wife to a violent crime and goes on a completely justified vigilante rampage. This time it's John Travolta carrying the mantle of formerly highly skilled killer and now highly aggrieved victim who'd hunting down cartoonishly evil baddies. It basically sucks. G.I. Joe: Retaliation (2013) -- "4/10" I still stand by "my review from 2015" . This movie was somehow more acceptable when watched askance and in German. Top Gun: Maverick (2022) -- "8/10" Things that ruled: * Maverick's (Tom Cruise) early takeoff in the Darkstar (fictitious) airplane, which looked freaking amazing. The low takeoff which lifted the roof off of a building was amazing. Maverick's breaking of Mach 10 was wonderfully done. Pure adrenalin. Being Maverick, he had to take it farther, destroying the aircraft in the process. * Cruise and Kilmer, on-screen together, probably for the last time, with Kilmer significantly diminished but still fighting. That was nicely filmed and, honestly, got me right in the feels, because I grew up with both of them -- and, honestly, liked Kilmer a lot better in their respective primes, with his mix of action and comedy in Top Secret! and the absolutely inestimable Real Genius, which was literally foundational for me. * Maverick's training run -- 15 seconds faster than the already suicidally tightly planned 2:30 -- was also pretty amazing. Really well-done. Whenever Cruise is doing awesome stuff on-screen, you can just lean back and enjoy it. * The actual mission run was also pretty great, except for the stupidly long time they let Rooster be inadequately slow, as if he would have to work out his inability to seize the moment until he's literally in enemy territory. Right up until the SAMs started going was fantastic. It stretched out a bit after that, but Maverick's rescue of Rooster was great. * Rooster's rescue of Maverick was pretty great, too, winding up a bit into the ridiculous, but finally actually dropping its too-serious mien and just going for it. When Maverick and Rooster meet in the snow in enemy territory: "Maverick: What were you thinking? Rooster: I wasn't! Just like you told me to! Maverick:..." * Stealing the F-14 and getting it up in the air was also pretty freaking great. Just pure adrenalin and wonderfully filmed, foot-pedals and all. Maverick took out one of the enemies immediately, then fought like hell to take out the other one, all in a comparatively ancient plane. Then another one showed up. So, yeah, there was plenty to enjoy, but ... it also dragged on a bit during some of the talking stuff. I'm not opposed, but a lot of it was pretty wooden. They spent a lot of time building out characters that went nowhere and could have significantly cut down on the running time if they'd just edited a bit more judiciously. Also, don't think about the fact that their mission was to fly into enemy territory, blow shit up, and then get back to an aircraft carrier parked just miles off of the enemy's coast. Interestingly, that aircraft carrier seems to be a safe home base that the enemy cannot attack in any way whatsoever. That is, they had one airstrip, a couple of fifth-generation air fighters, and a nuclear power-plant built in literally the most inaccessible place you could possibly place it -- and literally no other striking power. No more planes, no more missiles, absolutely nothing they could lob at the sitting duck of an aircraft carrier on their front step. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4578 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4578 Tue, 27 Dec 2022 22:03:26 +0100 of around 1600 ratings publicly available. I've included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other -- I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. 1. "Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021)" <#Spider> -- "6/10" 2. "Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022)" <#Doctor> -- "7/10" 3. "White House Down (2013)" <#White> -- "7/10" 4. "GI Joe: Rise of the Cobra (2013)" <#GI> -- "4/10" 5. "Outland (1981)" <#Outland> -- "7/10" 6. "The Martian (2015)" <#Martian> -- "9/10" 7. "The Expanse S06 (2021)" <#Expanse> -- "7/10" 8. "Derry Girls S03 (2022)" <#Derry> -- "9/10" 9. "Daddy's Home (2015)" <#Daddy> -- "7/10" 10. "Bad Boys for Life (2020)" <#Bad> -- "5/10" Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021) -- "6/10" I do not like the Spider-Man (Tom Holland) with the Stark super-suit. This is not a very good treatment of the multiverse. I like Tom Holland as Spider-Man. I do not like the Spider-Man that he has to play. It's quite lame. There is so much shit going on, but Aunt May (Marisa Tomei), MJ (Zendaya), and Ned (Jacob Batalon) feature very prominently. Mary-Jane is incredibly entitled and snotty. But this Peter deserves it. Peter Parker's identity is revealed and his life is ruined, so he goes to Doctor Strange (Benedict Cumberbatch) to ask him to cast a spell to make the world forget. Parker fucks up the spell with his indecisiveness, so the multiverse "leaks". Everyone shows up: Electro (Jamie Foxx), Doc Ock (Alfred Molina), Sandman (Thomas Haden Church), Green Goblin (Willem Dafoe), Lizard (Rhys Ifans). This couldn't be more of a Disney movie if they'd tried. This is ridiculous. This whole movie is a hodgepodge of deus ex machinae. Norman Osborne is now a good guy. Spidey's suit is all-powerful. They have a fabricator, which can build anything, I guess. Who cares? J. Jonah Jameson (J.K. Simmons) is now Alex Jones, with a self-hosted podcast rather than a newspaper. Willem Dafoe manages to salvage something, though. His sheer acting talent overwhelms the bizarre script. Everybody else is a confused pussy, while he's a force of nature. Cumberbatch is also quite good. "Nah, still feels weird." I'm really having a hard time with this Spider-Man/Peter Parker who doesn't feel guilt, but only feels sorry for himself. Now, they're all standing on the rooftop, crying together. Ned and MJ are lurking around in the background. I do like Tobey McGuire. You see how much better an actor he is than the other two (Andrew Garfield and Tom Holland). "Is that happening? Or am I dying?" Now, we've moved on to three Peter Parkers "doing science". They made all of the devices they need and set them up at the Statue of Liberty and wait for the supervillains to show up. They spend the time shooting the shit out of everything and self-analyzing. I'm honestly not sure who this movie is for. Are there really fans who wanted this? Somehow Peter is no longer concerned about involving MJ and Ned in a highly dangerous "trap". I don't even care. I stopped caring one minute in. The ending drags on a lot. They all end up forgetting who Peter Parker is. All the villains are cured and go home. The other two Spider-Men also go home. I don't understand where all the hype came from for this movie. People were talking about how amazing it was. It has a really high rating. I'm getting a bit nervous about who I'm sharing the planet with. One of the points in the rating is for Willem Defoe. Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness (2022) -- "7/10" This was kind of the sequel to Spider-Man: No Way Home. It was also all multiverse-y (it's right in the title). Benedict Cumberbatch is back as Dr. Strange. This time it's Strange who's duplicated rather than Spider-Man. Hey, if it worked once. There's a girl named America Chavez (Xochitl Gomez) whose mutant power is being able to flit from one multiverse to another, at will. People are after her for her power, obviously. Actually, it turns out to be Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen) who's chasing her because she's 100% convinced that she can use Chavez's powers to reunite with her children. She is prodigiously powerful already, so Strange has his hands full. She strong-arms Wong (Benedict Wong) into helping her. Then they have to find some sort of book that will stop her. There are a lot of cool parts where Maximoff just offs people, which is a neat change of pace. The way she killed Black Bolt was clever. Still, this is a Disney movie, so Maximoff sees the error of her ways when her children recoil at what she's become, and she sacrifices herself to destroy the all copies of the evil book from all multiverses. Jesus, as I'm writing this, I'm wondering what level of hypnotism made me rate this so high. Docking a point. It was definitely better than Spidey: No Way Home, but not that much. White House Down (2013) -- "7/10" Still a decent flick to have on in the background. See my "review from 2014" . I saw it in German this time. GI Joe: Rise of the Cobra (2013) -- "4/10" Still a decent flick to have on in the background. I watched and "reviewed this movie in 2010" . I honestly saw no reason to change my rating from a 4/10, although I probably would have been a bit more generous if I hadn't seen the original rating. There are some good actors, but the plot and dialogue are so bad. I saw it in German this time. Outland (1981) -- "7/10" This is a crime thriller in space, starring Sean Connery as William O'Neil, a space marshal assigned to a titanium-mining colony on Io. There are about 4,000 people on the base. He replaces the previous marshal, whose methods were quite lax -- he'd ignored a drastic increase in deaths among the miners over the last few months. Together with Dr. Lazarus (Frances Sternhagen), he discovers that someone is smuggling in high-powered and eventually lethal methamphetamines to boost worker productivity. The miners take it because of the bonuses, but they eventually go squirrelly and commit suicide -- either by cutting open their own suit to release the spiders that only they can see, by walking outside without a spacesuit, or in a suicide by incredibly accommodating cop. The sets and music are top-notch. This movie holds up very well even today. It's a dingy aesthetic, which I really like. This is actually much more believable than the spic-n-span environments of the Belter mining colonies on The Expanse. It's directed by Peter Hyams, whom I remember reading about in the video essay and article "The Unloved, Part 82: The Relic" by Scout Tafoya and which wrote, "Hyams was one of the guys who never stopped lighting like it was the '70s, and even then it seemed like he was trying to find some kind of a meeting point between the bleak revisionism of that era and the biting noirs shot by ace cinematographer John Alton. He wanted to find something terrible in the dark, because he knew that's where all our dirtiest secrets were located." Yeah! The Martian (2015) -- "9/10" This movie holds up on a second viewing. See my "original review from 2015" . I watched it in German this time. The Expanse S06 (2021) -- "7/10" I've read the books by now, so I know that there's a pretty good story buried in there somewhere. I don't understand why they can't extract the good bits. In the first episode, they focused on all the less interesting bits. They've converted more characters to women (there were enough, no? Like the interaction between Bobbie (Fankie Adams), Monica (Anna Hopkins), and Avasarala (Shorreh Aghdashloo) was completely true to the book, but Monica's lines were so wooden and stupid and petty. It's great that all of Marco's lieutenants are women now, really. Rosenfeld (Kathleen Robertson) is positively erotically terrifying. But could you also not get so fucking lazy with the story? I miss Miller (Thomas Jane) and Ashford (David Stathairn) quite a bit not because they're men, but because they had good dialogue and well-defined personalities. They chucked Alex (Cas Anvar), but didn't replace him with anyone -- even though he's a great character. Amos (Wes Chatham) feels like a shadow of his former self so far. Holden (Steven Strait) is sleepwalking -- kind of literally. Naomi (Dominique Tipper) seems lost in her role, just lashing out at everyone. Marco Inaros (Keon Alexander) is fine, but feels more cartoonish. Drummer (Cara Gee) is still quite good. The thing that Naomi, Marco, and Duarte all have in common is that they nearly immediately make everything about themselves. It's OK. You don't need to make any more of these. It could have died at the end of the last season. Derry Girls S03 (2022) -- "9/10" The final season was cracker. The girls naively help criminals loot all of the computer equipment from their school. They meet Chief Inspector Byers (Liam Neeson), who's pretty good. The girls are the stars, of course, but my secret favorite is Sister Michael (Siobhán McSweeney). The girls think that Erin's (Saoirse-Monica Jackson) mother Mary (Tara Lynne O'Neill) is cheating on Gerry (Tommy Tiernan), but she's really just interested in going back to school because she's bored to tears running the home for a bunch of incompetent ingrates. Clare (Nicola Coughlan) is fine, but the plot focuses on her a lot, and she's really kind of a one-trick pony. She freaks out at everything. There's an episode about a trip to an amusement park, another about the girls clearing out Sister's Michael's country house, another about Mary's class reunion, one about a Fatboy Slim concert that the girls get VIP access to, but from which they're ejected. The final show is about the vote on the Good Friday agreement. It ended with a horseshit moment that had to remind us that the world somehow loves the Clintons, which makes me mad. Daddy's Home (2015) -- "7/10" It was definitely much better than expected. Brad Whitaker (Will Ferrell) married Sara (Linda Cardellini) and is step-dad to her two kids. Their biological father Dusty Mayron (Mark Wahlberg) breezes back into town, usurping Brad's life. Even at the Smooth Jazz station where Brad works, Dusty's gusty pipes overwhelm Brad's boss Leo Holt (Thomas Haden Church), so that he uses Dusty's spot to promote his station. The residual checks start rolling in, and Dusty is funded. After Dusty moves in, an incident with handyman Griff (Hannibal Buress) leads to Griff moving in as well. Dusty also knows fertility expert Dr. Fransisco (Bobby Cannavale), who gets Brad and Sara on the way to having a child of their own. Billy Burr cameos as another student's father at the father/daughter dance. The boys end up bringing Billy down with a dance-off rather than fighting him. The finale shows Dusty have married a genius model and moved in to a nearby castle. Her ex-husband drops by -- it's Michael Cena. Hilarious. Bad Boys for Life (2020) -- "5/10" No surprises here. The dialogue is pretty bad. Mike (Will Smith) is being hunted by a very scary voodoo lady (Kate del Castillo) whose husband he killed. Also, Mike nailed her once when he'd been kidnapped by her cartel. So their son (Jacob Scipio) is the assassin she uses. It's not a problem because they're both indestructible, so they can fill long, long action scenes of incredible amounts of shit blowing up, people flying around, bullets, RPGs, etc. Spoiler alert: they make up and kill mom together. No shit. Oh, also Marcus (Martin Lawrence) is less than totally useless, but also way less funny than he used to be. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4543 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4543 Mon, 26 Dec 2022 23:31:40 +0100 of around 1600 ratings publicly available. I've included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other -- I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. Ozark S04 -- "7/10" This season whipsaws back and forth and finally settles on an ending of sorts. Marty and Wendy enter Navarro's orbit, circling much more closely than before. Marty even goes to Mexico to put the accounting house in order while Navarro is in jail. Wendy, meanwhile, is using whatever pull she has to get Navarro transferred to Mexican jail, where it is presumed it will be child's play for him to escape. Navarro's nephew Javi is an absolute wild card, dangerous, paranoid, and unstable -- and liable to do anything. A private detective Mel Sattam is hot on the Byrd's trail as well. Speaking of unhinged, Darlene gives Javi a run for his money in that department. She marries Wyatt and they move in together. Ruth does not attend the wedding. Marty is working with the FBI, leaking details of Javi's shipments, and he's not happy about that. Javi, paranoid as he is, suspects foul play. He's right, of course, but, man, what an asshole. Darlene kills Kansas City mobster Frank Cosgrove Sr. in a fit of rage. This would be her last murder. Javier out-crazies her and takes both her and Wyatt out for competing with his drug business. With Wyatt's death, Ruth becomes increasingly unhinged herself, but also masterfully cunning. She hunts Javi down and kills him in cold blood, without hesitation. Marty, Wendy, and Clare are witnesses. Wendy needs Clare's donations, and Clare needs Wendy's heroin -- until Ruth and Frank Cosgrove Jr. deliver all the heroin her pharma-company needs. Clare drops Wendy like a hot rock. Then there's another deus ex called Camila, Navarro's sister and Javi's mother. She's of course ruthlessly going to search for the animal who killed her wonderful son. Wendy's dad gets custody of Jonah and Charlotte, which crushes Wendy's spirit -- she thought she was almost out, with her whole family (but then she always thinks that -- it's a through-line of the show that Wendy and Marty have to keep escalating to keep all of the balls in the air). Meanwhile, Navarro's main henchman Nelson is hunting for Javi's killer and is circling in on Ruth. Ruth and her friend Rachel get the drop on him and dispose of the body. More trouble ahead. Navarro finally gets his prison transfer, but Camila arranged it, so she betrays him and ties up his loose end, deep in the desert. Camila finds out from Clare that Ruth killed Javi. She returns the favor. Thug life, Ruth. Thug life. Weirdly, it didn't end there. Instead, the Byrdes return home to find Mel rooting around in their house, having discovered Ben's ashes (Wendy had allowed the cartel to kill her meddlesome brother) and vowing to bring them to justice. Jonah shoots him point-blank. The family is back together, they have a ton of money, the cartel is out of their way. The end. A typical tacked-on 21st-century happy ending that explains every last detail for the next generation of dolts who hate open-ended so much that it physically pains them. The show should have ended on Ruth. Sam Morril: Same Time Tomorrow -- "9/10" Very tight set. That's all I wrote. I didn't take any other notes, so I must have been just enchanted. I'll trust my rating. Sam's smug and self-assured, but he's funny as hell. Red Notice -- "4/10" Utterly passionless. I don't know, it feels like it was written by a committee? Or by an AI? I usually enjoy Dwayne Johnson and Ryan Reynolds. I'm not a fan of Gal Gadot. I think she's way too stiff, but whatever. It could have worked. The plot was so derivative, had so many unforeseeable and frankly unnecessary twists that it was too clever for itself by half. Stuff gets stolen, then it's stolen by other people. Somehow it's important who's the greatest thief in the world. Somehow it's important to have like six acts. Somehow, it's important to have Gal Gadot be invincible in every role she plays. Even poor Ryan Reynolds -- who's always playing Ryan Reynolds -- couldn't keep up the patter well enough. I love the guy -- I've been a fan since Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Place and Blade: Trinity -- but he absolutely peaked with the Deadpool movies. A bunch of this Netflix stuff is just homogenized beyond belief. Whatever pays the bills, I guess. I'm sure a lot of people are pretty happy with it, but I feel like this kind of stuff is just preparing us for AI-produced content with deep fakes that bring up Deadpools 3--103 within weeks of each other. Jimmy O. Yang: Good Deal -- "7/10" He was pretty good. Had some good moments. He talked a lot about growing up Chinese, to no-one's surprise. Kath loved him! Surprisingly, because she really disliked his character Jian Yang. I mean she appreciated that he'd done a good job of being detestable, and also acknowledged that Erlich Bachman (T.J. Miller) deserved everything he got, but I still thought she'd be more negatively predisposed, but she wasn't. The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel S04 -- "6/10" This season continues the trend of the previous two: Mrs. Maisel is the worst part of the show. Her parents are funny. Joel is more sympathetic and interesting. Mrs. Maisel torpedoes her own career again and again for a principle of some sort. Susie also does terrible things to her own career. Lenny Bruce plays Carnegie Hall. The whole family moves back in to the old apartment. Abe learns to enjoy his low-paying journalist's job. Rose's job as a matchmaker endangers the whole family as she crosses the matchmaking mafia. Joel turns out to be a mensch and finally introduces his family to Mae. Imogene is pretty funny, and ends up doing work for Abe. It was fine, but Midge got really, really tiring. I get it: she thinks everything's about her. She's right. The show is literally named after her. The best parts were the ones without her in it. Even her humor was very narcissistic and, frankly, spiteful, at times. That's her prerogative, of course, but it felt very much like we were being told to think she's funny because she's a groundbreaking female comedian when really she was a rich girl who's (nearly) never had to work a day in her life (she did, temporarily, until she was "discovered" and able to buy back her palatial upper east-side mansion). That's somebody's idea of a great show, but not mine. Lenny Bruce was funny. Joel was funny. Susie was funny. Crip Camp -- "8/10" This was a documentary about a summer camp for handicapped people of all stripes, run by big-hearted, but completely under-qualified and nearly hopelessly underfunded counselors. The camp ran for decades. There are umpteen interviews with former campers who reminisce about how wonderful it was to just be treated like real people. They were able to play sports for which barely any of them had anything approaching the physical or mental equipment, but they all tried anyway. The counselors pushed and dragged them around and they all loved it. The camp was called Camp Jened, at the foot of Hunter Mountain, ran from 1951 until 2009. Some of the campers would go on to win major victories for Americans with disabilities, including a month-long occupation of a Department of Health, Education, and Welfare building. An extra point for the subject matter, but it was a bit of long documentary for the material presented. The Eternals -- "4/10" Jesus Christ. What in the hell was this movie? What a mess. They did such a terrible job of introducing the nigh-dozen characters, each with their own identity: female, deaf, gay, overweight, black, Mexican, Scottish, Asian -- and combinations thereof. And then there's their powers, their origin, the age-old battle with inscrutable beings. And they just talk and talk and talk, but they don't say anything helpful. The Eternals fight the Deviants, which are remorseless, mindless killers, monsters unparalleled in evil. Or are they? Are they also just pawns of the same Celestials who use the Eternals to do their dirty work? The Eternals have God-like powers relative to humans, but they too are in thrall to beings whose purpose is unknowable to them. Some of the Eternals think that they're fighting the good fight, allowing Earth to be destroyed in order to allow many other civilizations to flourish. At least that might be the gist of it. Who knows? The movie was much more concerned with CGI-ing the absolute hell out of everything. The Celestial that was to come out in the "Emergence" was buried in the planet, but also so big that its head and part of its hand stuck out over the cloud deck of the planet. Physics was 100% out the window there. What a shit-show. The Amazing Spider-Man 2 -- "4/10" This is not Peter Parker. I don't know who this is. This is the BMOC, with no sense of humility, no sense of poverty. The Peter Parker of Tobey Maguire is gone. It has been replaced by whatever Andrew Garfield thinks he's doing. He's going steady with Gwen Stacey (Emma Stone) and smooching her in front of the whole school. Aunt May is played by Sally Field in this one, for God knows what reason. The action scenes at the beginning are a mishmash of cuts so fast they would make a TikTokker's head spin, all filmed with shaky cameras. The shaky cameras are back when Electro (Jamie Foxx) gets his powers -- the tank full of electric eels is a shaky mess of cinematography. This whole process of course sends Electro completely around the bend. Electro seems incredibly powerful, but Spider-Man gets the better of him. He jokes the whole time, which is pretty true to the comic books, but he's so flip the whole time, even when he's worrying about Gwen Stacy, which isn't. And Gwen Stacy (Emma Stone) just wanders into danger -- a war zone -- without a care in the world. They just talk and talk and describe and describe -- exposition all the way. Harry Osborne (Dane DeHaan) is back and ill and becomes the Green Goblin in order to save his own life. He is, naturally, insane. He ends up killing Gwen Stacy in the ultimate battle. I feel like Emma Stone's contract demanded this so that she would absolutely not have to be in a sequel. Andrew Garfield chews the shit out of the scenery mourning her loss. Five months later, from the insane asylum, Harry gives orders to release a prisoner (Paul Giamatti) to take up the role of "The Rhino". Instead of a genetically enhanced superman with extraordinarily thick skin and super-strength, he's a psychotic prisoner in a rhino-style robot suit. Giamatti yells "I. Am. Rhino." I wonder how much he was paid per word for that travesty. I have no idea what Emma Stone, Jamie Foxx, Paul Giamatti, and Sally Field are doing other than just raking in millions of dollars. Only a cash grab can explain their participation in this terrible movie. It's unclear why the whole Rhino scene was there in the first place. I was of similar mind when I "reviewed this movie for the first time back in 2012" . Nick Kroll -- "4/10" Nick Kroll is one of the creators and writers of Big Mouth and was very good with John Mulaney in Oh, Hello On Broadway -- but he's absolutely not a good stand-up comedian. Well, he's definitely not targeting an adult audience. He spent the first thirty minutes on poop and fart jokes. This is, perhaps, unsurprising for those familiar with Big Mouth but -- at least in the first season or two -- there was a cleverness there, as well. I think Mr. Kroll has run out of ideas. The start of the fourth season of Big Mouth was also very poop-joke-heavy. But he's not a good comedian because he's really just there for fan service and to be adored. At one point, he tells the audience that he's "the baby of the family", then waits a painfully long beat for everyone to clap. That was not a joke. This is not an affirmation of him as a person. This is not therapy. Comedians should get laughs, not applause. Everything is wrong with this picture. He should be funny. He is not. At another point, he's doing some "crowd work" and asks if anyone has a much older father. Someone responds that they do, saying that their father is "pushing 60" and they themselves are 21 years old. Kroll says, "So your Dad was in his early 40s? That's not old." He's right about that, but he can't do simple arithmetic. Jesus. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4542 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4542 Sat, 17 Dec 2022 18:04:23 +0100 -- "9/10" 2. "Spider-Man (2002)" <#Spider> -- "9/10" 3. "Curb Your Enthusiasm (2022)" <#Curb> -- "10/10" 4. "Bill Burr Presents: Friends Who Kill (2022)" <#Bill> -- "4/10" 5. "Blade II (2002)" <#Blade> -- "7/10" 6. "Ad Astra (2017)" <#Ad> -- "6/10" 7. "The Leftovers S03 (2017)" <#Leftovers> -- "9/10" 8. "The Mummy (1999)" <#Mummy> -- "10/10" 9. "Bill Burr: Live at Red Rocks (2022)" <#Bill> -- "10/10" 10. "Stranger Things S04 (2022)" <#Stranger> -- "8/10" These are my notes to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. I've recently transferred my reviews to IMDb and made "the list" of around 1600 ratings publicly available. I've included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other -- I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. John Wick (2014) -- "9/10" I still like the original the best. See my "previous review from 2015" . I saw it in German this time. Spider-Man (2002) -- "9/10" I don't have a previous review of this absolute classic, directed by Sam Raimi, who provided us with the vision of what superhero movies could be, before it was swept aside, as usual, by the meaty forearm of homogenizing capitalism. Raimi stuck religiously to the origin story, depicting all of the characters as they'd been thoroughly developed in decades of successful comic books. Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire) is a smart, nerdy kid, living in Queens, New York with his Aunt May (Rosemary Harris) and Uncle Ben (Cliff Robertson). His parents had died when he was very young. He is smart and he is poor. He is in love with his equally disadvantaged and gorgeous neighbor Mary Jane Watson (Kirsten Dunst), whose father drinks. She is in danger of trading on her looks for societal status, thinking of dating Flash Thompson (Joe Manganiello), the high-school quarterback and all-around jackass. Peter is bitten by a spider on a high-school field-trip. He wakes up the next day, incredibly fit and no longer needing glasses. He can shoot webs from his wrists (without a mechanism, perhaps Raimi's only departure from canon). The scenes of him learning to use his powers, learning how to swing from his webs, are exhilarating and would not be improved upon in several reboots. To earn money, Peter starts freelancing at the Daily Bugle, working for the penny-pinching and bombastic J. Jonah Jameson (J.K. Simmons), who is very much of the school of "journalism is what you make it." Spider-Man's first foe would be the Green Goblin (Willem Dafoe), who is a sort of second personality born of entrepreneur Norman Osborn's frustration and equipped with his company's military-grade and highly weaponized battle-suit. Osborn's son Harry (James Franco) is Peter's best friend and competitor for Mary Jane's attention. Peter has doubts about his role on the straight and narrow, but his first step off of it is punished immediately when the thief he refused to nab ends up killing his Uncle Ben for his car. Peter can only remember Ben having told him, "With great power comes great responsibility." The Green Goblin and Spider-Man clash several times before the Goblin eventually accidentally kills himself with his own rocket sled. Harry blames Spider-Man for his father's death. Harry discovers his father's lair and seems poised to take over that legacy as well as taking over his father's company. Peter is forced to tell Mary Jane that they can't be together -- but he can't explain why because he can't reveal his secret identity. But he can't let anyone in because then they would be potential victims of his savage enemies. This is how Spider-Man was for my entire youth: poor, scraping by, wise-cracking, with a giant backpack of unrequited love, but dedicated to saving all of the people in the city who easily let themselves be convinced to hate him by Jameson, whose wallet grows fat on Spider-Man photos. All of the actors are excellent and the direction is top-notch. If you hate superhero movies, you can watch this one. It's fine; you won't be psychically damaged. Curb Your Enthusiasm (2022) -- "10/10" This is a twisted work of genius. How is it possible that, in 11 seasons over 22 years, this is the best one? Who does that? Leon (J.B. Smoove) features prominently and all is right with the world. Jeff (Jeff Garlin) and Susie (Susie Essman) are also in nearly every episode, which is also a good thing. Susie's bile is palpable and hilarious. Larry's TV ex-wife Cheryl (Cheryl Hines) also features more heavily again. How to explain the plot? Larry and Jeff are making an autobiographical show about Larry's 20s for Netflix. Part of the show is them choosing actors for this. The main thread is that a burglar drowns in Larry's pool, but he didn't have a fence. No-one presses charges, but the burglar's brother Marcos (Marques Ray) finds out and blackmails Larry into casting his daughter in his new show, to everyone's horror -- she is a terrible, terrible actress. Larry begins dating a local councilwoman Irma Kostroski (Tracey Ullman), who has a whole raft of issues and puts Larry's resolve to the test. He's dating her in order to get her to change the local ordinance about fencing in pools, so that he can get out from under Marcos's thumb and finally fire his daughter and save his show. Obviously. Leon was supposed to go on a trip to Thailand with his girlfriend Mary Ferguson, but he had to break up with her for a terrible reason. Because the tickets are non-refundable, he begins a search for a compatible woman with the same name, finally finding someone who ends up screwing him over for the tickets and taking someone else. Larry David has fine-tuned his act from previous seasons to be all the good parts without the excruciating parts. He just cops to his lies now. There are so many more details in this show, but that's why it was so wonderful. You can watch the other seasons first, but you don't necessarily have to. If you love this season as much as I did, then you won't be able to help watching the others. Bill Burr Presents: Friends Who Kill (2022) -- "4/10" Bill Burr was fine. His bits were maybe a 7, maybe an 8. He's a funny person. None of his killer friends were funny. It was an embarrassing slop of low-talent awfulness. Just flair-less toilet humor with no punchline, no purpose, no irony, no sarcasm, just dishonest self-deprecation and an airing of psychological trauma and identity as an excuse to demand applause. In order from best to worst, * Bill Burr: decent, nowhere near his best, but a shining light of comedic coherence relative to what would come after. * Ronnie Chieng: Decent, but sang instead of telling jokes * Ian Edwards; Not terrible, but also kind of anemic * Michelle Wolf: Anemic and slow and just waiting on laughs. Too bad, because she's been funny in other things. * Dean Delray: Not offensive (like talking about dick-rot or something), but not funny * Dave Attell & Jeffrey Ross: I don't even understand how this act has become so big. They're terrible. They do painful crowd-work. They act older and more stoned-out than Steve Martin and Martin Short, who are brilliant. * Josh Adam Meyers: I can't remember him at all anymore, but I bet he was bad. He wasn't bad enough for me to remember his badness, so I'll put him in as better than that prat Carr. * Jimmy Carr: I know that his thing is being a self-satisfied creep, but he's abysmal. Just shockingly unfunny. His style is also very much "waiting for people to laugh before continuing" * Jessica Kirson & Stephanie Tolev: These didn't go on together like Attell and Ross, but they were both equally terrible and painful/cringe to watch and I couldn't tell them apart if you paid me. They take the worst of terrible male comedians and replace "dick" with "vadge". Congratulations, you're not a comedian and you've set feminism back by decades. Most of these players were terrible -- and then they would berate the benighted crowd when they didn't clap enthusiastically enough. A couple of them congratulated themselves on their own cleverness -- not in evidence -- then chalked up the lack of laughter to the audience's being too stupid to have gotten the intricacy of the joke. It was an absolute train wreck, from the moment Burr's mini-set ended until the bitter, bitter end. Oh, wait. I forgot about Ronnie Chieng at the end. He was the headliner. He's also quite funny, but he didn't have much material. Instead, he sang Katy Perry's Firework. Unfortunately, the idiot who'd gone on before him pranced all over the stage the entire time, completely oblivious to the fact that absolutely no-one likes him or has any idea who he is. I feel like the solipsistic nature of Instagram and TikTok and YouTube leads these people to believe that they're good just because they keep telling everyone they are. Blade II (2002) -- "7/10" I've seen this movie several times since it came out. It follows the absolutely brilliant Blade, which introduced us to the eponymous vampire-hunter, played by the born-for-this-role Wesley Snipes, who does all of his own choreography and stunts. Sometimes it's a touch stiff, but damn if it isn't actually convincing. I'm a fan. In this follow-up, Blade enters a grudging alliance with the vampires in order to combat the even-more-dangerous Reapers, genetically engineered vampires which have double-hinged jaws and are absolutely ravenous. They also feed on vampires as well as humans -- hence the alliance. I gave it an extra point for the absolutely amazing and convincing physical effects. This time, I saw it in German. Ad Astra (2017) -- "6/10" This movie about space is boring. It's not boring in a "space is boring" good kind of way. There's a crazy moon-dune-buggy chase in it where Roy McBride (Brad Pitt) fends off attacks by moon pirates (I shit you not). He's on his way out to Neptune to talk to his dad (Tommy Lee Jones), who seems to have maybe reappeared after having disappeared long years ago, having presumably gone mad and dropped off the radar. Donald Sutherland is in this as a guy who accompanies Roy for a while and he is fun, as always. From the Moon, Roy travels to Mars, stopping to help suppress a baboon uprising on a research space station (I am not making this up), which is kind of well-done and scary and sad, but seems wholly separated from the plot. I suppose it's to show just how calmly Roy deals with adverse situations. He gets out to Neptune and finds his dad's ship. It's full of dead bodies. He plants a nuclear device to blow it up. His dad is still there, alive and mostly well. The research station has determined that humans are alone in the universe, resolving the Fermi Paradox once and for all. (I guess?) Roy's dad commits suicide in space rather than go back to a planet he no longer considers home. Roy goes back to Earth, somehow heartened by the whole experience. The Leftovers S03 (2017) -- "9/10" "No, Grace, you're not crazy. You just got the wrong Kevin." I can't recommend this series enough. I didn't give it a 10 because, oh, I don't know. I guess I felt like maybe I was overreacting to the wonderful combination of writing and dialogue and music choice and directing and photography and close-ups of people's faces while they talked for long scenes, which was all wonderful and impactful and manipulative, so I dinged it a point for making me feel like I'd been manipulated into liking it because I suspected that it was only pretending to be something great, but isn't that what all great things are? Selling themselves to you with their purported greatness? Maybe I should just change the rating to a 10, but I'm already all the way down here, so what the hell, I'll let it stand where it is and just remember how great it was. If I change it to a 10, then I have to erase this paragraph, which I'm loath to do. Anyway, this show's arc follows each of the major characters going through some heavy shit. Like Nora (Carrie Coon), who drags Kevin (Justin Theroux) to Australia on a hunt for scammers who are pretending to be able to help the families of The Departed heal or see them again, or something. At any rate, she's not buying it...until she does. Until she so very much does. Until she's begging them to let her do the experiment they promise will take her to the other side for real. Until she throws a fit when they reject her, refusing to take her money, because they tell her she's doing it for the wrong reasons. They're right, of course, but what the fuck kind of a scam-artist cult won't just take her money? That's Nora. She's funny and sexy and dark, but markedly less sexy and more broken by now. Some people might find that even sexier, but I'm not going there. She gets the experimenters to accept her money and let her climb naked into a hamster ball that will whisk her away to the alternate universe just before she drowns in the fluid that pours in from below. And you know what? It works. It totally fucking works. No explanation of the technology. Just does it. I dug the hell out of that. She went there and she found her kids and they were super-not-happy. In fact, no-one there was really happy. You wanna know why? Because, because, because, while in our world, 2% of the population "departed", sending psychic shock waves through humanity that made it even more susceptible to cults and magical thinking than it was before (which was an assload BTW), in their world they were dealing with %98 of the population just disappearing. Yeah. Imagine that. We'd just spent three seasons working through our crybaby feelings about not being able to collectively get our wheels under us ever again because 2% of the population disappeared and here is the other half of the story just sitting there, asking us if we're going to be OK, because like that must be a real tragedy, losing 2%, really. That must be just awful. 98%. Damn, that's like a whole other series, a much, much darker one, filled with crop failures and no power grids and suffering and reversion to the damned darkest of dark ages. But it just kind of blipped in at the end of the last episode and that was awesome. God, it was so nice to get something that wasn't explained to death. It was like a classic sci-fi short story from the Golden or Silver Age. And then. And then, and then, and then Nora sought out the scientist who'd invented the damned device, who'd been one of the first to cross over. She told him who she was and with her powerful Nora personality made him just invent the damned machine again, but on the other side, because there was no place for her in that world, so she was gonna fuck off right back to where she came from. And ya know what? I didn't even think until this very second about how hard it would have been to even build that machine in a world depleted of 98% of the world's population and probably all of its manufacturing base and whatever you would need to actually produce stainless steel and giant hamster balls and circuitry and wormholing technology...because it's not relevant. It didn't matter. It was an awesome story. And Nora was back in the original world-strand (my word) and in Australia and just chilling and ignoring the world and trying not to be found by anyone and catching pigeons for a nun who scammed newlyweds into thinking that the birds were carrying their messages all over the world but they were really just flying right back to Nora's coop, where she scooped them up and brought them back to the nun for her to scam the next couple. Nora made some cash and rode a bike with a trailer and she looked older and she had a long, thick, silver braid now. And then Kevin found her. He was just so sure he'd found her. But she told him, no, he didn't know what he was talking about and then they fought and then they didn't because they ended up together, but it wasn't like that, it wasn't cheesy, even though awesome music swelled to manipulate you, but it felt right and Nora and Kevin had seen some shit and they knew that it wasn't going to get any better apart and it couldn't be worse together and it was time, time to just put the past behind them and row forward, into whatever. So that was Nora. Jesus. [1] What about Kevin? Kevin died a couple more times, is what Kevin did. He even did it on purpose the last time, in what is, I suppose, technically suicide, but he's proven so good at coming back from the dead that it's more like a superpower at this point. Kevin met his dad Kevin Garvey Sr. (Scott Glenn), who was in Australia hunting down the last piece of a song that would heal the world and prevent a repeat of the departure of seven years before, the anniversary of which was fast approaching and which imbued the whole situation for all of the characters with a sense of urgency. Kevin Garvey Sr. was looking for a dude who knew the last sacred dance and song and he needed him to teach it, but then that dude somehow departed, which is why Senior was telling his son that he needed to die again because that's where Kevin goes when he dies, apparently, he travels interdimensionally to the other world-strand (my word, not theirs) and so Kevin is the hero the world needs because he can take messages over and hopefully bring them back and all he has to do to travel is die, which, compared to getting scanned at the airport seems not even so terrible, to be honest, but I'm drifting. So Kevin dies again and he meets one lady's kids and gets the answer and he meets another guy's wife and gets another answer, but he just. can't. get. to. the dance/song guy for his father. He just can't do it. There's a complicated bit of fantasy where he's actually the president and he has to not only scan his retina, but also his dick, and then he gets into the war room, where his Secretary of Defense is none other than Patty (Ann Dowd), who advises him to launch all nukes at whatever dirty enemies are out there, but Kevin hesitates, but then Kevin shows up, but it's the other-other Kevin, who's the one from the other world? Or another traveler? Whatever. It's a super-spy Kevin (who he'd actually played before in S02 when he'd died the first time) and they're going to enact "The Fisher Protocol" , wherein the president can only get the second key to launch nukes by chopping it out of the chest of an innocent man, which should make him pause and consider whether it's actually worth it, but Kevin goes for it, even though it's his Doppelgänger, but Kevin is nothing if not determined and he gets the key and sets off the nukes and the world comes to a goddamned end, but he's whisked back to the other world, where he wakes up again, alive, and realized that it's stopped raining, which means that the flood was never going to happen anyway, which means that it doesn't matter that he didn't get Christopher Sunday's (I finally remembered that dude's name) song for his dad, who was going to use it to avert the flood (which never came). Matt (Christopher Eccleston) -- along with his other apostles, Laurie (Amy Brenneman), John (Kevin Carroll), Michael (Jovan Adepo) -- also went through his own shit. He'd gotten quite a bit more bitter (especially after he drove away his resurrected wife Mary (Janel Moloney)). And he swore a lot more. He and his crew flew to Australia to get Kevin because they needed their savior -- he'd come back from the dead and Matt and John had written a book about his Jesus-like role in the events of the Departure and everything that ensued, and now that I'm writing it out, I realize that their names are exactly those of the apostles from the Bible -- to come back to the U.S. in time for the seventh anniversary of the Departure because shit was going to go down. Everyone thought so, they just disagreed on what kind of shit. Anyway, they ended up on a boat from Tasmania when their plane was rerouted from Australia and this boat had been completely booked out by a sexed-up crew of people who worshiped a lion named Frasier. Episode three was particularly riveting, a mini-movie worth more than ten superhero movies. The final five minutes were pure magic, from pacing to close-up filming, to Grace (Lindsay Duncan) and Kevin Sr.'s (Scott Glenn) amazing acting. The emotion in those faces, the reverence with which the camera captured it. The lonesome piano keys plinking out the melody of the theme song. Just wonderful. Just wonderful that someone is still making art that speaks to the soul, that takes the time to tell a story, to build characters, to make us wait for a giant payoff. Chapeau. This season just got stronger and stronger, with Matt going a bit off the rails, but absolutely believably so. The music, oh God, the music. So wonderful. The Mummy (1999) -- "10/10" I watched this for the umpteenth time and it's still amazing. Rachel Weisz and Brendan Frasier for the win. This is a movie about archeologists and treasure-hunters competing to unearth an ancient tomb/burial site. Amun-ra is buried there. He slowly starts to come back to life, gaining more and more corporeality with every victim. Long story short, the good guys team up to defeat him, burying him (forever?) and his treasure as well. I'll watch it again. Bill Burr: Live at Red Rocks (2022) -- "10/10" Magnificent. The show is at the Red Rocks outdoor amphitheater just outside of Denver, Colorado. At about 75 minutes, it was quite long, but it was exceedingly well-crafted and funny and insightful but, most of all, funny. Because that's what he's up there to do. One of the funniest people in the English-speaking world doing what he does best. His ad-libs on his podcast and on other shows are better than the best in this show, but the overall quality of this show is better than that of any podcast. There's no downtime here, unlike his podcasts. Will watch it again. From the reviewing, about 10:00 from the end, "In every relationship, there's the person that does the dishes and the person that let's them soak. "Right? They don't let them soak. They know you're gonna do 'em. They're just waitin' you out. And after a while, you just fuckin' take it anymore. They're just sitting there. You gotta go start going them. "Then what do they do? They sit in the other room and they wait, like they don't know what you're doin'. And they wait 'til they hear pots and pans, and that's when the show starts. "That's when they come runnin' in like, 'What? I was gonna do those!' "And you're like, 'No, you weren't! They've been sitting here eight hours! I got my hands in room-temperature water with scrambled eggs floatin' around. Don't gaslight me. You're a fuckin' animal. You were raised by animals. Get out of my sight." Stranger Things S04 (2022) -- "8/10" Loooonnnngg and self-indulgent, but mostly saved it in the end. Lots of good performances. Some of the episodes were 90 minutes long, so the season had a couple of full-length movies thrown in there. The 7th episode with the reveal was excellent, though. This season was about how everyone is separated into different locations. Mike (Finn Wolfhard) and El (Millie Bobby Brown) are mooning about. Mike is still an utter waste of space. Will (Noah Schnapp) is in love with Mike, but can't express it. Mike's hot garbage, personality-wise, but two people are in love with him. They're teenagers, so it checks out. The main story arc is the reveal of where Vecna (Jamie Campbell Bower) came from. Spoiler alert: he's #1 where El is #11. More backstory is filled in, people die, people live, silly things are done. Hopper (David Harbour) is in a Russian prison, getting his ass kicked. Joyce (Winona Ryder) and Murray (Brett Gelman) rescue him, with the sorta-kinda help of Meanwhile Erica (Priah Ferguson), Steve (Joe Keery), and Nancy (Natalia Dyer) join forces with Dustin (Gaten Matarazzo) and Eddie (Joseph Quinn) to try to prevent Vecna from getting to Max (Sadie Sink), the final victim he needs to realize his final plan. Lucas (Caleb McLaughlin) does essentially nothing. But Steve, Erica, and Nancy are really quite fun to watch and they save it from getting too boring. Dr. Owens (Paul Reiser) also reveals stuff and has stuff revealed and ends up being on the side of good. Kudos for the all of the practical effects. +1 point. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] No pun intended. You'd get that if you'd watched the season. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4541 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4541 Sun, 02 Oct 2022 22:51:30 +0200 -- "8/10" 2. "Rocky II (1979)" <#Rocky2> -- "8/10" 3. "Russian Doll S02" <#Russian> -- "7/10" 4. "Nate Bargatze: The Greatest Average American" <#Nate> -- "8/10" 5. "Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones (2002)" <#Star> -- "4/10" 6. "The Fugitive (1993)" <#Fugitive> -- "8/10" 7. "The Shawshank Redemption (1994)" <#Shawshank> -- "9/10" 8. "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005)" <#Charlie> -- "7/10" 9. "The Thomas Crown Affair (1999)" <#Thomas> -- "9/10" 10. "Hidden Figures (2016)" <#Hidden> -- "8/10" These are my notes to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. I've recently transferred my reviews to IMDb and made "the list" of around 1600 ratings publicly available. I've included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other -- I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. Rocky (1976) -- "8/10" I'd forgotten just how little boxing this movie actually had. It's really only the last ten minutes of this two-hour film that has any real boxing. And it's hard to call it "real" boxing as Rocky -- despite training for long weeks with a purportedly good trainer -- has absolutely no defense. He almost never has his hands up. It's kind of laughable. We meet Apollo Creed (Carl Weathers) outside of the ring, looking for a contender to fill the place of an opponent who's injured his hand. The bout was to take place in Philadelphia, so he looks for a local fighter to fight. He eventually finds Rocky Balboa (Sylvester Stallone). Rocky, meanwhile, spends most of his time getting to know the painfully shy Adrian Pennino (Talia Shire) while working as a loan shark, taking part in small-time fights, and helping out at a gym. He eventually starts training with Mickey (Burgess Meredith) with some help from Adrian's brother Paulie (Burt Young). Rocky ends up being sponsored by Paulie's meatpacking company. The night of the fight arrives. Rocky is as ready as he's going to be, but his plan was never to win: it was to go the distance, something no fighter has ever done against Apollo. Apollo marches in to fanfare; Rocky to silence. They fight to an absolute standstill, with Rocky premiering his uncanny ability to lead with his face and take countless punches the head. His entire head is a shambles by the end of the fifteenth round, with Apollo not looking much better. They lean on each other, but neither falls. Apollo wins the fight by split decision, but Rocky's only concern is finding Adrian and telling her how much he loves her through his shattered mask of a face. I watched it in German this time. Rocky II (1979) -- "8/10" The film starts with the last several minutes of Rocky, with the Italian Stallion (Sylvester Stallone) against Apollo Creed (Carl Weathers) fighting each to a 15-round standstill. Rocky and Apollo are taken to the hospital, where they spend weeks recovering from the respective damage they'd done to one another. When Rocky gets out, he proposed to Adrian at the zoo and they are soon married. Rocky takes her on a shopping spree, buying a Trans Am, gold watches, furs, and even a nice row house. Rocky's right eye never recovered and his peripheral vision is terrible. He's still very fit, but he shouldn't fight again. He takes on a few acting roles for commercials, but his reading skills aren't up to snuff. He spends evenings in bed reading to Adrian out loud. They're adorably in love. Rocky is very, very funny. Rocky looks for an office job, but he doesn't have the qualifications. He gets a job with Paulie (Burt Young). Rocky is a down-to-Earth poor guy who wants a good life for his family. He goes to Mick (Burgess Meredith), who turns him down because he's going to get killed without his right-side peripheral vision. Mick offers him a job at the gym, but the others are disrespectful. Even people throughout town are not impressed with his down-to-Earth approach. Apollo wants a rematch because his fans keep telling him that he didn't really win. Mick and Rocky agree to start training again. To protect his eye, Mick trains him as a southpaw. He starts him on chasing a chicken (a scene I also recall from other, later films). Then he trains him old-school, while Apollo trains much more sophisticated (though nowhere near what Ivan Drago would do in Rocky IV). Adrian is pregnant and working in the pet store again. Rocky is back in training, probably earning nothing. Mick is brutally honest with Rocky, whereas Rocky isn't enthusiastic enough. His head is somewhere else. Adrian ends up in the hospital with internal bleeding. The child is in danger. Mick offers his condolences, but also tells Rocky he has to fight Apollo with all of his heart. He tells him isn't just an "Eintagsfliege", then sits with him in the church, in silence. Rocky is in the hospital, reading letters he's written to his comatose wife. The baby had been born and Rocky had never seen him. Finally, she wakes up. I have no idea how long this all was supposed to have taken. They both see the baby for the first time. In the late 70s, I guess you just didn't visit the baby as a father? Adrian gives Rocky her blessing to beat Apollo. He finally starts training in earnest. His training regime is absolutely gobsmacking. So many one-armed pushups, so many one-armed pull-ups, jump rope at the speed of light, just amazing. Rocky is hilarious. When Rocky walks in, he says to Mick, "Ich habe gehofft, der kommt nicht." When he and Apollo meet in the ring, Apollo says "Ich lege dir flach." Rocky walks back to Mick and says "er wirkt ziemlich wütend." Rocky's fighting style has always been "no defense". In this sequel, it's even worse than in the original. I am not sure what the point of constantly doing that is; to show that Rocky can take any number of blows to the head? It's like he spent absolutely zero time training. It's an embarrassment for boxing or any fighting sport. They showed him doing a tremendous amount of strength training, but he can't box worth a damn. He's ostensibly in southpaw, but he mostly just stands completely flat to the opponent, presenting as broad a target as possible, with his hands down at his sides. He never dodges or ducks a punch. He boxes like Homer Simpson. In the end, Rocky is able to stand up before the 10-count, whereas Apollo does not. Both of their faces are ruined shambles. The makeup is very well-done. Russian Doll S02 -- "7/10" It started off a bit shaky, but ended reasonably well. This season sees Nadia (Natasha Lyonne) flitting through history and time-loops again. This time, she's sometimes her mother and sometimes her grandmother and sometimes in Hungary, learning about why her mother and her grandmother lived the lives that they did. She learns about her good friend Ruth (Elizabeth Ashley), a friend of her mother's. She ends up kidnapping herself, seeking her time-traveling friend's help, doing some bizarre stuff in bizarre places, and finally ends up making the right decision and resolves a lot of her personal shit and goes to Ruth's wake at her quirky friend Maxine's (Greta Lee) place. There's a bit of rumination on topics philosophical and ethical, as well as a bunch of holocaust stuff, if you're into rehashing how bad the Nazis were again. Nate Bargatze: The Greatest Average American -- "8/10" Bargatze is a clean and funny comic with a very understated style. I can no longer remember any of his jokes, but he's not really a one-line kind of guy anyway. He mostly tells medium-length stories about himself and his family. His daughter and wife feature heavily. Star Wars: Episode II - Attack of the Clones (2002) -- "4/10" This movie looks absolutely terrible. It's worse than even TV shows of that era. I'd completely forgotten in the intervening twenty years since I'd seen this that Jango Fett's sidekick is his son, who's nearly as annoying as Anakin Skywalker in the first "episode" (Phantom Menace). Hayden Christensen's acting is so mind-numbingly wooden, it's not even saved by being synchronized into German. The Fugitive (1993) -- "8/10" This movie is much more police-state-happy than I remember. Tommy Lee Jones and crew break into a man's home without a warrant and blow him away, then tell his wife to shut the fuck up. "I never negotiate with criminals." Jesus. Harrison Ford is great as a brilliant doctor how uses his powers to saving himself rather than others, although he can't help saving others while he's doing it. The Shawshank Redemption (1994) -- "9/10" This movie about a lawyer Andy Dufresne (Tim Robbins) sentenced to prison is, hands down, the best adaptation of a Stephen King story that ever graced the silver screen. It is not a horror story, nor are there fantastical elements to it. Perhaps it is because of this that it works so well. Perhaps it is because of the staggering acting talent of Robbins and Morgan Freeman, who plays Red. Everybody in this movie is great. Andy eventually escapes prison in an absolutely spectacular fashion -- Eastwood's Alcatraz is almost as good, but not quite. I watched it in German this time. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005) -- "7/10" Johnny Depp's performance in the eponymous role is riveting: bizarre and unique. He had very big shoes to fill, with Gene Wilder having played the role in the first movie. But Depp brings his own unique wackiness to the role. The boat scene in the original was much better. See "my review from 2011" . I watched it in German this time. The Thomas Crown Affair (1999) -- "9/10" I still love this movie as much as I did the first time I saw it. Pierce Brosnan and Rene Russo are fantastic in their roles as the eponymous billionaire Crown and the sultry insurance-fraud detective pursuing him. Their circling of each other is captivating. The finale -- with an absolutely epic needle-drop of Sinner Man by Nina Simone -- is a joy to behold. I watched it in French this time. It lost nothing in the translation. Hidden Figures (2016) -- "8/10" This is a movie about three women making their way up the ranks of NASA during the moon shot. One of them -- Katherine (Taraji P. Henson) -- is particularly talented and rises high. Mary is an engineer, taken onto the capsule-design team. There is a bit of a John Henry plot to it, as a whole roomful of "computers" (the women) will soon be replaced with an IBM. Luckily, Dorothy (Octavia Spencer) is able teach herself how to program the machine better than the technicians sent with it. They are all black, making their participation in engineering disciplines in 1960s America all the more challenging. This treatment was pretty heavy-handed at times, but the acting was great and the story was interesting. The U.S. in the sixties was an appalling wasteland of injustice. One of the more galling parts is where Katherine is forced to walk half a mile to the colored women's bathroom -- and not one of her co-workers has any idea this is going on. The ladies save the day for John Glenn and all ends well. It's a true story. Katherine would go on to calculate the trajectories for the Apollo mission as well as several space-shuttle missions. Mary went on to become NASA's first female, black engineer, while Dorothy became NASA's first female, black manager. Incredible that we never learned any of this in school. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4517 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4517 Mon, 08 Aug 2022 15:00:55 +0200 of around 1600 ratings publicly available. I've included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other -- I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. The French Dispatch (2021) -- "9/10" "Self-reflection is a vice best conducted in private, or not at all." This is a Wes Anderson movie, so it's much like many of his other movies, but, perhaps, a bit more so. He continues to make the same movie, refining and experimenting, like a sculptor who makes many, many variations on the same theme. Many actors are on board with his vision, returning again and again: Tilda Swinton, Bill Murray, Adrien Brody, Benicio del Toro, Frances McDormand, Owen Wilson, Bob Balaban. This time, they're joined by Timothée Chalamet, Jeffrey Wright, Léa Seydoux and others. The film unfolds in several chapters, each telling a piece of a revolution unfolding in a remote French town, as covered by The French Dispatch of the Liberty, Kansas Evening Sun. The editor-in-chief of the magazine has died and the staff busies itself producing the final issue, as per his wishes. The first chapter "The Cycling Reporter" gives us a tour of the town in which the rest of the chapters will take place. The second chapter "The Concrete Masterpiece" tells the tale of prisoner Benicio del Toro, who paints extremely abstract nude portraits of one of his guards, the delectable Léa Seydoux. His masterpieces, however, are frescoes, and will never leave the prison where he created them. The next chapter "Revisions to a Manifesto" tells the story of revolutionaries who fall in love, a love that is requited but once before one of them dies while making repairs to a pirate-radio station. The fourth chapter "The Private Dining Room of the Police Commissioner" concerns warring criminal syndicates and a kidnapping plot, as well as the denouement of the ephemeral revolution. "Obituary" shows the staff back at home, reminiscing and preparing the final edition. I very much enjoyed watching this movie. There is a meticulous attention to detail in dialogue and scene with an excellent cast. La casa de papel S05 (2021) -- "6/10" The fifth and final season is more of the same, which is both good and bad. There is no small amount of filler material that only super-fans will really love, but there is also enough of the classic formula to pull everything together. There is less and less "cleverness" on the part of the Professor, although the flashbacks with Berlin training his son to be a thief are very good in this regard. Instead, we find that Sierra, despite being nearly ludicrously pregnant, walks to the Professor's lair and gets the drop on him. He and Marseilles eventually help her deliver her child, which binds her to them. They dither around about eliminating Gandia, giving him one opportunity after another to generate plot points. Eventually, we finally get rid of Tokyo when she goes out with a bang to defeat him and his men. There is a lot of drama between personalities -- I guess that's what people like? -- but one constant is that I did like where Denver's character ended up. Perhaps it was the actor, who's very, very good. Back to the main plot, Berlin's son has teamed up with Berlin's widow (I think they're bangin'?) and they have become even greater criminal masterminds than anyone else -- because everything has to be YA these days. They steal the gold from the hidden location where the gang had spirited it via melted pellets in a waterway. The ingots are now buried under a house. Sierra (not the Professor) figures out where it is and they negotiate to get it back. Tamayo gets his gold back, but it's just gold-foil-covered brass, so he's in a bind. He agrees to make it look like the gang had been killed in a shootout, in exchange for the gang never revealing that Spain no longer has its gold reserves. They all get new passports and live happily ever after, having split the entire wealth of a nation amongst themselves. I suppose they're heroes? Is that the story? The entire nation of Spain has no reserves left, having been forced to allow ten people to steal them -- and that's a good thing? Or is the lesson that our economy and society is based on fictions and that those fictions are more important than the actual underlying reality? I'm probably overthinking it. There was a lot of drama, a lot of interpersonal conflict, a decent amount of cleverness and a whole lotta Spanish, which I quite enjoyed listening to. Alita: Battle Angel (2019) -- "6/10" Some of the battle scenes were nice, but the story was not great. It was also incredibly obvious that the whole movie was just a setup for a series of some sort. I honestly can't remember what it was all about; it was something about warring cyborg factions, with a highly corporate-military faction firmly in charge of society and Alita ostensibly the last great hope of a floundering and vastly underpowered revolutionary faction. I got vibes of Ready Player One but without all of the 80s callbacks. Anna (2019) -- "6/10" The cast is promising, with Helen Mirren and Luke Evans. I'm not a fan of the lead, though: Sasha Luss as Anna is unconvincing. Some of the fight choreography was nice, but it was, at times, an awkward fit for her 45kg self that tended to throw you out of the illusion. She's not supposed to be super-powered, nor was it posited that she could defy the laws of physics -- and yet there she was, purporting to do both. She is, apparently -- and in typical 21st-century, everything-is-YA-fiction-now fashion -- amazing-looking, an unparalleled genius, a weapons expert, a martial-arts expert, and who knows what else. There is no tension. Apparently, tension is superfluous these days. Upload S02 (2022) -- "7/10" Nora's character is now quite terrible. She's horrible to Nathan, taking him to task for not having told her about Ingrid's uploading -- when she's the one who went off the grid. Also, how did the Ludds make a "hyperworm" when Nora's the best tech they have? Why did Matteo have to wear a disguise to show up at the edge of the garden for five seconds? This is very bad storytelling. And now Nora's better than the rest of the IT department and has all of the privileges and rights to alter Lakeview code. A likely story. This lax attitude toward security and authorization is a continuation of the first season, but more pronounced. The Ludds are being made to seem like merciless revolutionaries, while Nora sees the humanity in all people. The working class with whom she works in IT treats her better than the revolutionaries. Is that supposed to be the message? Ingrid didn't end up uploading herself, having fooled/guilted Nathan into prolonging their relationship longer than he likely would have had he not been convinced that she'd been so self-sacrificing. Nathan is also a super-hacker who's able to steal and donate bandwidth to those in the 2GB world, who need it the most. He's Robin Hood. The plot moves forward in that Nathan learns that it was he -- not his partner -- who was the less altruistic partner and who'd agreed to sell his shares in his ground-breaking Upload-for-everyone company to Ingrid's father and to billionaire David Choak. At the same time, they learn that uploads will lose what few rights they had when "Mind Frisk" goes online, a technology that allows those running the virtual world to investigate any thought that the uploads have. Choak, meanwhile, continues his plan to open upload centers for the "people", but only in swing states -- he is most likely granting the poor a chance at eternity in exchange for them voting correctly in the next election. Ingrid, never having uploaded, has instead grown a copy of Nathan's body in order to allow him to download. The download succeeds and Nora and Nathan escape with a couple of other luddites. Ingrid is left with nothing, but a single hair of Nathan's head, which allows her to continue her plans on reuniting with him. Since Nathan is now missing in the upload world, another employee of the tech-support staff -- who's also infatuated with the handsome Nathan -- restores him from backup. This season was entertaining enough on its own, but seemed very much designed to set up a third season. Brooklyn Nine-nine (2013--2021) -- "9/10" This is the story of a police precinct in Brooklyn, initially focused on Jake Peralta (Andy Samberg), but finally ending up being about the small crew there. His partner Charles (Joey Lo Troglio) is an absolutely unapologetic fan of Jake. Rosa (Stephanie Beatriz) is a bad-ass with a deeply buried heart. She dallies briefly with Adrian Pimento (Jason Mantsoukas), who is not a permanent member of the crew. Her partner Amy Santiago (Melissa Fumero) is a lover-of-all-things-organizational ladder-climber who ends up marrying Jake Peralta. Sergeant Terry Jeffords (Terry Crews) is the dad of the unit, a pumped-up pussycat. Captain Raymond Holt (Andre Braugher) is an amazing character, a robot of a man who slowly opens up over the arc of the show, but not all of the way. His husband Kevin Cozner (Marc Evan Jackson) is similarly staid, a professor at NYU. Scully (Joel McKinnon Miller) and Hitchcock (Dirk Blocker) are lazy, but occasionally brilliant cops. Gina Linetti (Chelsea Peretti) is the precinct's secretary (ostensibly Raymond Holt's), but she doesn't do very much other than talk about how amazing she is. Side-roles of note are Madeline Wuntch (Kyra Sedgwick), who is Raymond Holt's nemesis, Doug Judy (Craig Robinson), a car thief who fools Jake many times, each time charming him into thinking that the power of their friendship is strongly than Judy's desire to steal things, and Keith "The Vulture" Pembroke (Dean Winters), who provokes and steals cases from the 99. From s03e02, "Raymond Holt:Your vocabulary is an indictment of the public education system." From S03e03, "Rosa: Step one: put a pie in the fridge and cover it with poison. Terry That’s step one? What’s step two? Rosa: Tell their widows they were thieves." From S04E01, In the exchange below, Greg is Raymond Holt and Larry is Jake Peralta. "Greg: Ms. Karfton, you don't know us, but- Jordan: Uh, yeah, I do. I got you on video looking like a couple of dumbasses. [Jordan leans against the door frame and chuckles.] Larry: I like to think I handled it with some amount of grace. Jordan: Nope, you looked dumber than my kid Jaden, and his eyes are perma-crossed. You want to see? Hey, Jaden! [Jordan turns and shouts into her house.] Greg: No, that's not necessary. Have you posted that video to the Internet? Jordan: Not yet. Ran out of data on my phone because of all the porn I watched. Larry: We don't know each other. You could've just said you were out of data. Jordan: I'm uploading the video tomorrow at my cousin's wedding. Dog track has free Wi-Fi." In S06E09, talking about Amy agreeing to help her insufferable brother, but for spiteful reasons, "Jake: I don't love how we got here, but we're going where I want." In S06E10, talking about Nikolaj's real father Gintars, "Jake: Judging by the head-to-toe denim, he's either not American or deeply American. I'm thinking either Ukraine or Kentucky." This is Where I Leave You (2014) -- "7/10" This one is kind of a 6, but I bumped to a 7 because it made me laugh a few times. The cast was great, but poorly used. It was a family-gathering movie with Jason Bateman, Tina Fey, Jane Fonda, Adam Driver, Rose Byrne, Kathryn Hahn, Timothy Olyphant, Dax Shepard, and Ben Schwartz. Jane Fonda was the matriarch who'd just recently lost her husband. Her house was full of kids who'd returned home for the funeral with their respective wives and girlfriends. No-one was happy with their lives, some in more amusing ways than others. I watched it in German. The Matrix Resurrections (2021) -- "9/10" Neo (Keanu Reeves) and Trinity (Carrie-Anne Moss) return for this fourth, and almost certainly last, installment in the Matrix tetralogy. I quite enjoyed this go-round, even though they tried a little too hard to replace characters like Morpheus (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) or Smith (Jonathan Groff). Additions like Bugs (Jessica Henwick) were OK, but not groundbreaking. I was happy to see Christina Ricci as Gwyn de Vere. In this film, Thomas Anderson is a video-game designer, responsible for having designed one of the most popular video games of all time: The Matrix. He meets Trinity (Tiffany) and thinks he has a connection with her, but he can't remember why. She thinks so, too, but also doesn't know why. She has a husband and two kids. He keeps trying to figure out whether what he is experiencing is real. Is the Matrix as he vaguely remembers it the real simulacrum within the nightmare world of human-energy harvesting where the machines have taken over? Or is he in a reality where that whole story is just the plot of a video game? Or is he really in the Matrix again, convinced that his memories of having found out the truth of reality are just his inability to determine that the game he himself created is just a fantasy? Did he create the game because he remembered the Matrix or does he think he remembers the Matrix because he'd created the game? Or are his memories of having created the game implanted to fool him into thinking that the Matrix doesn't exist? There are, as usual, several meta-levels to this movie, if you're willing to look for them. There are several scenes whether the characters seem to be talking about the producers of the Matrix movies, who seem to have forced the Wachowskis back into the world of their creation, decades ago. It turns out that that first three films had happened and that Zion was destroyed, but that the remnant of humanity was able to relocate to Io, aided by machines who see a detente and rapprochement as the best way forward. It is, however, 60 years later, so the real-world counterparts to most of Neo's friends are now dead. Only he has survived because he was able to download into a completely new body. It turns out that Neo's therapist is an entity called The Analyst (Neil Patrick Harris), who wrested control of the Matrix from The Architect to rebuild it into a place of emotional manipulation, very much akin to the media and social landscape of the Internet as we know it. In a completely unsurprising twist, it is now Trinity who has complete control over the Matrix. We see her and Neo beating the Analyst's ass for him, telling him how they're going to be running the Matrix for the benefit of humanity. Interstellar (2014) -- "8/10" I watched it in German the second time around. I stand by my "review from when I saw it in the theater" in English. The Leftovers S02 (2015) -- "8/10" This season finds Matt (Christopher Eccleston) and Mary (Janel Moloney) in Jarden, Texas. The town has been renamed to Miracle because no-one from the town disappeared. Kevin (Justin Theroux), his daughter Jill (Margaret Qualley), and Nora Durst (Carrie Coon) also move to Miracle, with Nora spending $3M on a ramshackle house to ensure their being able to stay. The town feels like a giant scam, but that's the point of the show -- humanity doesn't handle anything very well, least of all the disappearance of 2% of the human population. The three new residents meet their somewhat-odd neighbors, Erika (Regina King), her husband John (Kevin Carroll), who seems to be beating up folks with whom he disagrees, and their two children Michael (Jovan Adepo) and Evelyn (Tiffani Barbour). After their initial picnic, Evelyn takes off with friends. After an earthquake (not infrequent there, apparently), the girls appear to have disappeared. I say "appear to have" because it is later revealed that they had instead joined the GR (Guilty Remnant) and were actually spearheading Meg's (Liv Tyler) plan to take the town of Miracle down a notch. Kevin has trouble with sleepwalking. He had ended up at the same bend in the river from which the girls purportedly disappeared -- except he was there with a block of cement tied around his ankle, an apparent attempted suicide. This turns out to have been exactly what happened. He was trying to kill himself in order to extricate Patti (Ann Dowd) from his mind, who lives on as the monkey on his back. Patti is absolutely amazing. Just a mind-bogglingly good actress making the most of well-written lines and story. Kevin is also tremendous, truly letting us feel what it would be like to have someone living in your head, driving you mad, making you want to just die to make it go away. Kevin tries a couple of times, finally succeeding after having gone through an elaborate fantasy as a secret agent in a parallel world, where he has to kill the president -- who turns out to be Patti. It's all very complicated, but clearer while you're watching it. Meg is an out-and-out psycho now, with a power to sway people to her mad purpose that seems at-once hard-to-believe and also all-too-believable. She rapes Tom (Chris Zylka) then tries to recruit him to the GR. Tom and Laurie were working on helping GR members turn back to a normal life. It gets pretty complicated, but the GR ends up driving a camper-van purportedly full of explosives onto the bridge going into Jarden. It turns out not to be full of explosives, but filled with the three girls who'd run away from home at the beginning of the season. Everyone is varying levels of devastated, disappointed, or saved from their experiences. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4516 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4516 Sun, 03 Jul 2022 23:26:57 +0200 of around 1600 ratings publicly available. I've included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other -- I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. Terminator: Dark Fate (2019) -- "6/10" Tim Miller (I've never heard of him) directed this latest entry in the Terminator saga. It sees the return of Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) and T-800 (Arnold Schwarzenegger). There are two new Terminators, a good one, Grace (Mackenzie Davis) and a bad one (various actors). They're after Dani Ramos (Natalia Reyes), who's apparently the new person who's going to birth the next generation (or whatever, it honestly doesn't matter). The new terminator is just as unstoppable as all of the others, until he's stopped. Schwarzenegger's T-800 sacrifices himself in the end, as does Grace, who blows up her power supply to kill the other Terminator. It survives pretty much everything else., including getting completely shredded and melted. I gave it an extra star because I like Arnie and I liked his denouement, with the fuzzy old screen showing his readouts, fading for the last time with a "neural net misfire". The "ladies getting it done" part was a bit tough sometimes. Reyes is unconvincing. I'm always fascinated by how Hollywood thinks EMPs work: two robots next to each other and only one is affected. Kill Bill: Vol. 2 (2004) -- "10/10" The wedding massacre; the meeting between Budd/Sidewinder (Michael Madsen) and Beatrix Kiddo aka The Bride aka Black Mamba (Uma Thurman); The Bride's burial; Beatrix's training with Pei Mei (Gordon Liu); The Bride's escape; Elle Driver aka California Mountain Snake (Darryl Hannah) kills Budd with a snake; Elle reads the word "gargantuan"; Black Mamba plucks out Elle's eye; Beatrix visits Esteban Vihaio (Michael Parks) to find out where Bill (David Carradine) is; she visits Bill at home to meet her daughter, who's alive; Bill shoots Beatrix with a drug; they talk forever; she kills him with the "Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique" (aka Five Finger Death Punch). Is this movie a ten? I don't know. There's a lot of expository dialogue. But I love it. It's even pretty good in German. The music is great. Overboard (2018) -- "7/10" This is a remake of the 1984 classic starring socialite Goldie Hawn and carpenter Kurt Russell. In this version, all of the genders are reversed, with Leonardo Montenegro (Eugenio Derbez) who comes from (a lot of) money and Kate Sullivan (Anna Faris) who's got three daughters and is struggling to make ends meet. Instead of building a mini-golf course, Kate dreams of passing her nursing exam. She meets Leonardo on his boat, when she's brought onboard to clean the carpet after one of his parties. He throws her off the boat, laughing. When he falls off the boat later that night, he wakes up on the beach with amnesia. Kate shows up at the hospital with her friend Theresa (Eva Longoria) and puts their plan into action: convince Leonardo he's Kate's husband, make him do all of the housework, get a job with a local pool-building crew (with a bunch of Spanish-speaking guys, like Josh Segarra), and give Kate space to study for her nursing exam. As in the original, Leonardo falls in love with Kate, despite how awful she treats him. They are making their life together, everything's going great, and then his real family shows up, triggering the return of his memories. He goes back with his family, but quickly realizes that his experiences have changed him (obvs). The final scene is pretty much a shot-for-shot remake of the original, right down to the laughable life-vests they're all wearing. And, Anna Faris looks just like Goldie Hawn in so many shots. In typical fashion for a 21-century movie, Leonardo choose love over money, but then gets money anyway, when his Scottish servant Colin (Josh Hannah) shows up with the deed to a 60M yacht that was a birthday present, so cannot be "disowned" from him. They are in love and rich and can hire Colin. The end. It's fine, of course, but this obsession with making everything work out just perfect all of the time is definitely something that has increased over my lifetime. It's like people are physically pained when everything doesn't work out perfectly for the characters they've grown to love. It's the same with the obsession of never ending a series or constantly making sequels. I was not positively disposed to this version at first, but was won over by the added flair of making Leonardo Mexican. A good third, if not half, of the movie is in Spanish (there's even some French!) It's literally a standard plot of a standard Hollywood movie, but I enjoyed it more because I was able to practice my Spanish listening comprehension. Also, the actors were better than expected. Fantastic Four (2005) -- "6/10" This is the original movie, depicting the origin story of The Fantastic Four. Sue Storm (Jessica Alba), Johnny Storm (Chris Evans), Reed Richards (Ioan Gruffudd), and Benjamin Grimm (Michael Chiklis) gain their powers on a space mission gone wrong, where they are overwhelmed by cosmic rays and barely make it back to the planet. The difference to the comics is that Victor Von Doom (Julian McMahon) turns to metal, which he most certainly did not. He did not have superpowers granted him by cosmic rays, unlike the others. I'm almost certain that he wasn't even on the spaceship with them. In the movie he is, and he's the prime investor in the enterprise. In the comics, he trains tremendously and learns martial arts, but he has no superpowers. Instead, he masters the arcane as well as technological arts. His powers in the movie are similar to those that he has in the comics, but are made to seem to stem from cosmic-ray induced genetic changes rather than witchcraft. The first half of the film is about them getting their powers and learning to control them. Reed designs and builds them clothes that will accommodate their powers. Then it segues into a struggle with Doom, who seeks to extend the power he's gotten by drawing off the energy of the others. There's a showdown, of course. Watched it in German. David Spade: Nothing Personal (2022) -- "8/10" I am so pleased that this special was good. He didn't stay committed to any sort of overarching concept. He did bits, kind of linked them together. It didn't matter. You watch Spade for Spade. His jokes are funny. He's funny. I also just like him, his whole vibe. He's appropriately self-deprecating. He talked about COVID a bit, he talked about shopping for clothes, about being in Hollywood, about dating, about texting, it doesn't matter. His final joke was excellent -- about a daredevil private flight to Jackson Hole. They land in hurricane winds and a blizzard, on an empty tarmac, with the ground crew golf-clapping. It's empty for miles around because all other flights had been diverted. Why? "Because they're pussies", says the pilot. Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer (2007) -- "7/10" The Fantastic Four take on the Silver Surfer, who is, of course, Galactus's herald. Reed (Ioan Gruffudd) and Sue (Jessica Alba) are getting married, but their wedding is interrupted by the Silver Surfer (Doug Jones; voiced in English by Laurence Fishburne). Reed and Sue consider getting away from it all and breaking up the band. Johnny (Chris Evans) and Ben (Michael Chiklis) are not happy about it. Victor Von Doom (Julian McMahon) is back in the mix again, trying to see if he can steal the Surfer's powers. He temporarily allies with the FF and the U.S. military, headed by General Hager (Andre Braugher). Watched it in German. Ronnie Chieng: Speakeasy (2022) -- "8/10" He made many references to economics, models, mathematics -- y = mx + c -- but he also messed up a few COVID-related facts, like saying that genome was sequenced 3 months after the lockdown. The Chinese had finished sequencing by the beginning of the year, before the pandemic was even declared. At another point, he said that Americans invented the mRNA vaccine, but it was a collaboration among many people over a decade, but the last dash is credited to a couple of Turkish researchers from Germany, I believe. "I like these guys who didn't finish school who just assume that they're street smart. It's not one or the other. You can be school-dumb and street-dumb." "Women are not like a vending machine, where you put in some kindness at the top and sex just falls out. Women are not like a customer-rewards card where you get ten stamps and then you fuck. Women don't owe you anything." He talked about the pill and how it would never work if men had to take it, because there's too much organization and focus required. No-one would ever believe a man if he said he was on a pill. He talked about America and its backwardness. He talked about hating the United Kingdom and his first two-week shows there. That was a long joke, but it was pretty well-crafted. Thelma & Louise (1991) -- "9/10" Thelma (Geena Davis) and Louise (Susan Sarandon) head out on a road trip for a long weekend. Louise is married to control-freak and boor Darryl (Christopher McDonald), so she's looking to kick loose. When they stop as a bar, Louise is happy to let anyone chat her up, whereas Thelma is more suspicious of everyone. Louise is lining up shots and hitting the cance floor, while Thelma is smoking and stewing at the table. The gentlemen of the bar don't allow it, though, and get her out there too. Harlan (Timothy Carhart), the man with whom Thelma was dancing all night, expects something in return. Thelma heads out to the parking lot to get some fresh air. Harlan follows. He forces the issue, slaps Thelma around, prepares to take what won't be given. Louise's gun appears at Harlan's neck. He is convinced to leave off his rape. Thelma's face is starting to swell, but she's able to get behind Louise, who's about to let Harlan go, when he starts to mouth off. She shoots him in the heart. Detective Hal (Harvey Keitel) interviews Lena, the Waitress (Lucinda Jenney) to find out who might have done it. He's already on their trail, even though Lena says that it was either a woman or a husband who'd done it. The ladies go to ground in a motel. Louise calls Jimmy (Michael Madsen) to ask for help. She wants him to get her all of her money in the world -- $6,700 -- and help her. She figures some things out while Thelma is napping in a bikini, out by the pool, sleeping of the stress and shock from having almost been raped and then having watched her friend shoot a man to death. Thelma and Louise head toward Mexico. Thelma calls Darryl and he can't stop threatening her. Right after the call, she trips over J.D. (Brad Pitt), but keeps on moving. he reappears in her rear-view mirror, obviously looking for a ride. Louise is not impressed and says no, of course. Thelma calls her "Spiessig" (narrow-minded, whitebread). Jimmy shows up with Louise's money and gets them motel rooms. Louise -- against all logic -- leaves the money with Thelma and tells her to behave herself. Jimmy flips out when she won't tell him what's going on, then proposes to her. Thelma, on the other hand, finds J.D. on her doorstep, lets him, and learns what all the hubbub about the sex is all about. She leaves him in the room, wanders to the diner in a post-coital haze, and then reveals to Louise that she's left J.D. in the room with all of her money. The money is, of course, gone, when they return. At this point, Louise gives up, having done everything she could to save their duo. Now it's Thelma's turn to play grown-up. Sort of. She robs a convenience store. They're doubling down. Hal is on their trail, picking up Jimmy and J.D. Hal is the only one who's trying to save them, knowing that the circumstances are pulling them along. They're in the shit because Louise had to let loose after having been suppressed by Darryl for so long, then almost gets raped for the crime of being hot and having fun, then they're robbed by J.D. for the crime of wanting to just get a taste of the good life. At every step of the way, they can't just get a good weekend away from ... bad men. They call Darryl. Thelma hangs up right away because Darryl answers all friendly-like, so she knows he's working with the cops. Louise calls back and asks to talk to Hal. He reveals that he knows they're on the way to Mexico. They drive all night and are pulled over the next day by a State Trooper (Jason Beghe), for driving 105MPH. He appears as an imposing rock and takes Louise back to his car. Thelma follows and takes the officer out of the car at gunpoint. At this point, he completely changes his demeanor and the ladies pack him into his own trunk. They're getting in deeper. The meet the same trucker again and again, who made lewd gestures again and again, and finally confront him. They ask him to apologize, which he very politely declines. They blow up his gas tanker and leave him with the wreckage. In a bizarre scene, a black cyclist shows up in lycra kit, with dreads, with a walkman playing Jimmy Cliff's "I can see clearly now", and smoking a joint. He's cycling in the desert, dozens of miles from anything. He stops and finds the trapped State Trooper, blowing pot smoke through one of the bullet holes in the trunk. This scene is so bizarre and random, it's amazing it stayed in the movie. The cops are finally hot on their tail, chasing them through dead, desert town, as Louise leaves the road, with a dozen cop cars in tow. They get away the first time, but the noose is tightening. The ladies are transformed, looking more and more like outlaws. The long-range shots of the car trailing a long plume of desert dust, as it tears through the mesas, are lovely. Thelma says, "mir gefällt unserem Urlaub bis jetzt." They both laugh. We all know what happens next. They get away from all of the damned men chasing them. Saw it in German. Starship Troopers (1997) -- "9/10" This classic movie about the "bugs" from the Klandathu system is Paul Verhoeven's metaphor for the stupidity of war. We meet students in some sort of military academy: grunt Johnny Rico (Caspar Van Dien), his girlfriend -- and pilot hopeful -- Carmen Ibanez (Denise Richards), other grunt Ace Levy (Jake Busey), girl who's in love with Rico, Dizzy Flores (Dina Meyer), Carl Jenkins (Neil Patrick Harris), and their one-armed teacher Jean Rasczak (Michael Ironside). In biology class, they dissect the anatomically superior bugs, led by their teacher (Rue McClanahan). Later Clancy Brown and Dean Norris show up as stalwarts as commanding officers in the field. Brenda Strong (braless heiress from Seinfeld) is a captain of one of the spaceships. This is so obviously a parodic film that's a wonderful litmus test -- use it to detect the irony-free. There's ridiculous violence and gratuitous nudity -- with co-ed, mixed-race showers (in the 90s!) with no sexual tension whatsoever. it's actually quite enlightened. The military scenes and media-handling hasn't changed at all. It's almost predictive of TikTok. They even split the heroics evenly between men and women, but not even obviously so. It feels relatively natural, not like some of the forced identitarian catastrophes of today. The spaceship visuals are not bad at all, to be honest. Even the troops obviously marching through a California desert with live-action models all around are better than the CGI today, to be honest. The graphics today are so massively overdone that these look more realistic and more endearing -- despite the kind of hilarious green paint/blood that spatters everywhere. The battle set pieces are pretty well-done. They fight bugs, they get destroyed, they come back, they fight more bugs. Everyone's very high-testosterone -- men and women alike -- and super-confrontational. Michael Richter is a treat, as always. It's kind of humorous how the main type of injury sustained is losing an arm. .Toward the end of the film, a giant bug shoots a stream of fire from its snout. The stream intersects with one soldier's upraised arm, presumably showing how this injury happens so often. The final battle brings all of the former friends back together, in the final showdown against the bugs. Many of them die or are horribly injured. The scenes of slaughter clearly inspired the developers of Serious Sam. And Verhoeven knows how to find attractive, young actors. Caspar Van Diem is chiseled, even when being whipped by a black guy. Dina Meyer is gorgeous. The actors are enthusiastic and seem to be having fun. It's honestly easily way better than 95% of the Marvel movies. Watched it in German. Skyscraper (2018) -- "5/10" This is a highly formulaic thriller about a high-tech building in China (I didn't even catch which city it was supposed to be in). It's kind of like Die Hard, but with the Rock in the leading role. Nothing to write home about. Watched it in German. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4515 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4515 Mon, 06 Jun 2022 22:51:54 +0200 -- "8/10" 2. "The Leftovers S01 (2014)" <#Leftovers1> -- "8/10" 3. "Space Force S02 (2022)" <#Space> -- "7/10" 4. "Aziz Ansari: Nightclub Comedian (2022)" <#Aziz> -- "9/10" 5. "Taylor Tomlinson: Look at You (2022)" <#Taylor> -- "9/10" 6. "Jim Gaffigan: Comedy Monster (2022)" <#Jim> -- "7/10" 7. "Ali Wong: Don Wong (2022)" <#Ali> -- "4/10" 8. "The Dark Tower (2017)" <#Tower> -- "8/10" 9. "Star Wars: Rise of the Skywalker (2019)" <#Star> -- "5/10" 10. "The Great Wall (2016)" <#Great> -- "5/10" These are my notes to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. I've recently transferred my reviews to IMDb and made "the list" of around 1600 ratings publicly available. I've included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other -- I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. Gormenghast (2000) -- "8/10" Steerpike (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) is a lowly kitchen worker. Flay (Christopher Lee) works for the royal family in the upper levels of the giant multi-storied castle of Gormenghast. After Flay dresses down Steerpike's odious boss Swelter (Richard Griffiths), Steerpike follows him to the upper levels to ingratiate himself and to perhaps gain a toehold out of the kitchen. Flay is having none of it, though he does give Steerpike a glimpse of the princess Lady Fuchsia (Neve McIntosh), who's a bit mad or daft or both. Flay locks Steerpike away after that, but Steerpike escapes out a window on to the facade of the castle, seemingly hundreds of meters above the ground. He scales his way up to the rooftops and finally gains access by byways to Lady Fuchsia's room, where he falls into an exhausted slumber on her couch. She finds and awakens Steerpike but is so entertained by his antics that she forgets to turn him in. When her nanny Nannie Slagg (June Brown) arrives and discovers Steerpike, they all head to Barquentine's (Warren Mitchell) chambers, where Lady Fuchsia asks him to employ Steerpike. He, in turn, manages to flatter and charm Barquentine with a loquacity and erudition completely at odds with the foolishness with which he swayed Fuchsia. Steerpike eventually bamboozles the foolish Lady Clarice Groan (Zoë Wanamaker) and her sister Lady Cora Groan (Lynsey Baxter) into helping him endanger the royal family by setting the royal library on fire. Steerpike shows up to save the day and rescues them from the fire he'd had the sisters set. The burning of the library drives Sepulchrave, Earl of Groan (Ian Richardson) absolutely around the bend. He begins to think that he is an owl. He is eventually consumed by owls, disappearing for a long time until he is presumed dead. This was also orchestrated by Steerpike. At the same time, Flay is banished from Gormenghast. Titus Groan is now older and is made Earl. His mother Gertrude, Countess of Groan (Celia Imrie) still rules with an iron fist, having more sympathy for her hunting birds than her own children Fuchsia and Titus. Eleven years later, Titus is twelve years old. We meet the various bumbling professors at his academy, including the more prominent Professor Bellgrove (Stephen Fry), who would eventually be promoted to the thankless position of headmaster after the unfortunate death of his predecessor (they accidentally threw him out of a window). Irma Prunesquallor (Fiona Shaw) attempts to woo the new headmaster at a party thrown by her brother, Doctor Prunsquallor (John Sessions) (who'd briefly employed Steerpike before he'd toadied his way further up the hierarchy). Steerpike finally exacts his twisted revenge on Nannie Slagg, killing her with poison, and he incarcerates Clarice and Cora before they can blab about his other machinations. Steerpike also murders Barquentine, burning himself hideously in the process. He takes over his job, running the ceremonies for Gormenghast, just one step away from the throne now. The others begin to suspect what he is up to, but are powerless to stop him. Fuchsia is still enamored of Steerpike and begs him to remove the half-mask covering the burned half of his face. She is a simpleton and cannot hide her revulsion. This drives Steerpike completely around the bend -- he has nothing left to live for but his evil deeds. His last hope was to seduce Fuchsia, kill Titus, and assume the throne. Flay returns to the castle with Titus, ready to expose Steerpike. They discover Clarice and Cora's corpses and catch Steerpike in the act of desecrating them. Steerpike quite easily kills Flay and escapes into the castle. The rains come -- truly prodigious rains that quickly flood the first few levels of the castle of Gormenghast. The whole castle is activated to search for Steerpike. He defends himself with a slingshot, killing many guards. Just as he seems likely to get away with it, Titus drops from above and stabs him where he was treading water, sending him to a watery grave. The Leftovers S01 (2014) -- "8/10" This is a show about what happens in an American community of people who were all probably assholes before 2% of the population disappeared three years ago, but are now definitely even worse because they feel like they're entitled to their feelings and angst because they all lost someone that day. The first episode is pretty rocky. They try too hard to establish everything in the first show. There are too many teenagers in this. There is an annoying mayor who seems to be nearly over-the-top cunning and driven. There are at least three cults that I could see in the first season. While this is probably a good prediction of what would happen in America, I didn't find it that entertaining to watch. There were only a couple of nice people in it and they didn't get that much screen time. I watched the second episode as well. We learn about bit more about the cults: the police chief hasn't actually lost any of his family to the mysterious event three years prior. His wife has joined one of the cults -- the one that dresses all in white, smokes all the time, and never speaks -- and his son has joined another -- the one with the more-classic-cult-leader who gives out special hugs that take away all of your pain and also recharges himself with very young Asian teenagers. Then the damned thing started growing on me, filling in a bit of the very mysterious mythology -- but not too much detail. They don't go overboard. I like Police Chief Kevin Garvey (Justin Theroux) and I really like Preacher Matt Jemison (Christopher Eccleston). Nora Durst (Carrie Coon) is also very good. Garvey's wife Laurie has joined the Guilty Remnant (GR), a cult that smokes all the time and never (or rarely) speaks. Their leader Patti Levin (Ann Dowd) is very, very good, as well. If I'm honest, Jill Garvey (Margaret Qualley) and her friend Aimee (Emily Meade) kind of grew on me, as well. There are a couple of storylines that entwine in this first season. Garvey's father Kevin Sr. (Scott Glenn) used to run the police station but is now confined to a mental institution. He's a danger to others. He hears voices and follows their commands. He seems to know more about what happened on the 14th of October, when so many disappeared. Kevin has weird dreams and seems to enter a fugue state sometimes, where a different personality takes over for a while. He takes nocturnal jaunts with Dean (Michael Gaston), where they hunt and kill dogs, though one night Kevin rescues one. It's kind of complicated. Another night, they've kidnapped Patty, but Kevin can't remember any of it. Dean is ready to kill her, but Kevin stops him. Then Patty kills herself, to bring down Kevin. Garvey's son Tom (Chris Zylka) left home after the 14th and has washed up in the cult of Wayne. Wayne hugs people to take away their pain. It seems to work. He also impregnated several girls at once, just before his compound was raided. Tom went into hiding with Christine (Annie Q.) and stayed in occasional contact with Wayne, who's all mysterious and somewhat tragic, in the end. Wayne meets his end in a rest-stop bathroom, where Kevin Jr. finds him. Wayne grants him a wish. Laurie and Patty and the rest of the GR have a season-long plan to remind people of what they'd lost. A local townswoman Meg Abbott (Liv Tyler) takes an excruciating time to join the GR, but finally does. They make life-like dummies of all of the taken family members, infuriating everyone in town. The rest of the town exacts its revenge on them, burning down their house. Laurie gets Kevin to rescue Jill, who'd just joined the GR and had been trapped in their burning headquarters. Kevin gets her out, returning home with Laurie and Jill. They find Nora on the front steps, cradling Christine and Wayne's baby, which Tom has delivered to their doorstep. Tom is gone. Christine had abandoned the baby to Tom in a bathroom. So Christine is in the wind, as well. Space Force S02 (2022) -- "7/10" This is a solid outing from a good cast playing good characters in a second season that has a very noticeably reduced budget from the first season. General Naird (Steve Carell) is in danger of losing his job as head of Space Force, while Dr. Adrian Mallory (John Malkovich) and Dr. Chan Kaifang (Jimmy O. Yang) are being recruited by SpaceX. Captain Angela Ali (Tawny Newsome) is hooking up with Chan, but can't get serious because she's damaged by her experience on the moon. She's thinking of moving back to Hawaii to fly tourists around in helicopters. F. Tony Scarapiducci (Ben Schwartz) is the glue, but is also thinking of leaving for a bigger role elsewhere. Erin Naird (Diana Silvers), the general's daughter, is thinking of taking a gap year to travel the world. Her mother Maggie (Lisa Kudrow) is still in prison. The defense council is still great: Army General Rongley (Diedrich Bader), General Kick Grabaston (Noah Emmerich), John Blandsmith (Dan Bakkedahl), Secretary of Defense (Tim Meadows), Navy Admiral Mayweather (Jane Lynch), General Dabney Shramm (Patrick Warburton). Their bullshitting and messing around is great fun. I can't imagine any of them were paid very much for their roles. It doesn't matter, though, because the characters and actors are good. The story is pretty funny. Instead of $1M-per-episode sets, we get something much more like the original Star Trek, where story carries it all. This is perhaps a return to theater, where the sets don't really matter. A play with a very spartan set can work just fine. Perhaps the standouts were John Malkovich, who can honestly do no wrong, and Ben Schwartz, whose background in improv really, really lets him shine. Aziz Ansari: Nightclub Comedian (2022) -- "9/10" My rating applies to the actual comedy show that he gave and does not, as so many other reviews do, take into consideration externalities about the comedian. These are irrelevant. Was. He. Funny? Yes. He talked about COVID. He talked about Trump. He talked about the disease infecting many people called The Internet. He talked about Joe Biden and Kamala Harris being invisible. He talked about how stupid crypto is, about how senseless and superficial so many of our conversations about the world are. He talked about our mercuriality, our need to consume new outrage while completely ignoring issues that matter. The show was a tight half-hour set. Hell, I liked it because he was saying what I wish more people would say -- and he was very funny doing it. People who didn't like it were most likely butt-hurt because it hit too close to home. They focused on identity instead, as Ansari very likely knew they would. That is exactly the problem his humor pointed out: too many of those who claim to carry the banner of culture for us have traded in their sense of humor and irony for a sense of outrage and sanctimoniousness instead. Taylor Tomlinson: Look at You (2022) -- "9/10" Taylor leads off with medication, therapy, and disorders. Apparently, she's bipolar. Her drugs tell her to "Shut up and choose a different adventure." "Being bipolar is like not knowing how to swim. It's a little bit harder to take you to certain places." "When I told my friends I was bipolar, they weren't even surprised. They said, no, that makes sense. That actually checks a lot of boxes. One friend said, Your mental illness is like your middle name. I didn't know what it was, but I knew that you had one." "I told my therapist that my boyfriend always answers his phone with "hello beautiful". She says, so what's the problem? I said, I don't know...yet." "Prophecy fulfilled." "Oh, is this your move?" ""Food is just fuel". If you're one of those, then you can fuck right off. I'll refund your ticket. I don't need the money that badly." Then she moves on to a lot of dead-mom jokes. "If you've never had childhood trauma and you're thinking that this show isn't very funny. Good. I hope this is the worst night of your life. It sounds like you might need some perspective." "My parents don't watch my standup anymore. No Christian parent wants to watch their daughter talk about depression and dick for an hour." "The doorbell is the only thing that matters." She finishes up with a great, long segment on masturbation and porn. Jim Gaffigan: Comedy Monster (2022) -- "7/10" "Like, how old? Like old-old? Or didn't have a cell phone in high school-old?" On vacation in Hawaii, "Native: You stole our land. "Jim: I don't know how to break it to you, but we stole all the land. It probably stings more for you 'cause it's so pretty here." "I went zip-lining for the last time." "A marching band can take a song -- any song -- and ruin it. Wow, I didn't know I could hate Uptown Funk that much." "I love my wife, but I don't want another one. I don't need to disappoint another person." "We live in an age where billionaires are building rocket ships and flying them into outer space...and no-one's asking, 'Are we sure they're paying their taxes? Because we've got a lot of teachers who need supplies.'" "Bikers [motorcyclists] are amazing. They are just such a uniquely American subculture." Good Lord, Jim. Do some research. Motorcycling in groups is absolutely huge in Europe as well. It's only uniquely American if you've never paid attention to anything outside of America. "I guess the point I'm trying to make is: golf makes people gay." He had more than a couple of jokes that weren't that funny and leaned super-hard on the supposed fact that being gay is intrinsically funny. His special was 1:10:00, so he could have cut a few of his old-school jokes like women being interested in a man's wallet and giving him a pass on his awful appearance. He also does a bunch of material about wives and husbands that's a bit hit-or-miss and generic. "I was kind of frightened of my dad. My children treat me like a bank teller that they reluctantly have to deal with. Once a week they just appear in front of me, "'Mom said I could get a shark. So I guess I need your credit card.' "'What the hell are you talking about?' "'He's yelling again!'" Ali Wong: Don Wong (2022) -- "4/10" She starts off with a loooong bit about blow jobs where she will not stop saying "come on her face". It's a good seven minutes in and she hasn't done anything but talking about "sucking dick". These are not jokes, really. She's just describing things and getting laughs because diminutive asian women aren't supposed to talk like that. Eleven minutes and change. She really, really, really waits for the laugh. It's a pity, because her first show was fantastic and the second was almost as good. This one, so far, is not good. She's almost robotic. She talks about women with power, money, and respect (like herself) CLAP and how uncomfortable men are with that. "Chill don't pay the bills". CLAP. Callback to the "come on my face" joke at 17 minutes. Segue to a colonoscopy. Hooray. She really lingers on her jokes, waiting for the laugh. She even pauses a lot before the final word or two, to make sure everyone's ready. Now, she's telling everyone about her amazing career and how she didn't "take a shit" for six weeks. Now, compare and contrast to ... men. Her body and facial language is so odd. She stomps around the stage like Frankenstein. Callback to "come on my face" at 39 minutes. Truly a work of art. Now she's talking about her pussy juice and how filthy she'd made her underwear when she'd almost cheated. Equality, ladies and gentlemen! Her friends say, "None of these men want a strong woman. Strong woman. Strong woman. Strong woman" (not a typo). To which she responds, irony-free, "you're not strong, you're annoying." The Dark Tower (2017) -- "8/10" Roland of Gilead (Idris Elba) is the gunslinger at the end of the world, locked in combat with Walter (Matthew McConaughey), the Man in Black, a dark wizard allied with the Crimson King. Jake (Ben Gavin) is a young man with the Shining, the target of Walter's searching eye. He sends minions to get Jake, but Jake discovers a portal to Midworld, where he meets Roland. The few remaining people on Midworld are left with older technology that they barely understand and can only just keep functioning. Walter's demons attack the village and Roland, despite a grievous injury that robs him of his dominant right hand, defends them as best he can. using his incredibly good left hand. That much is just like the book. There's one part where he aims without looking, using his other senses to find his target. It's well-made. Roland retrieves Jake and they escape through the portal into New York City. Roland goes to a hospital, where he impresses with his sturdiness, but leaves before they can keep him overnight. He hands the head doctor gold coins "Für eure Dienste" and then tells her "Mögen eure Tagen lang sein" before leaving. They do a great job of showing how unerring and loud and strong Roland's guns are, from Arthur of Eld. He prepares himself for battle, with unearthly powers of perception and accuracy, supposedly born of decades -- if not centuries -- of training and practice, mixed with a bit of magic. The final standoff between Walter and Roland is quite well-done, suspenseful. This movie holds up on a second viewing. See "my review from 2017" for more details. "Ich ziele nicht mit meiner Hand. Der der mit seiner Hand zielt hat das Gesicht seines Vaters vergessen. "Ich ziele mit meinem Auge. "Ich schiesse nicht mit meiner Hand. Der der mit seiner Hand schiesst hat das Gesicht seines Vaters vergessen. "Ich schiesse mit meinem Verstand. "Ich töte nicht mit meiner Waffe. Der der mit seiner Waffe schiesst hat das Gesicht seines Vaters vergessen. "Ich töte mit meinem Herzen." Watched it in German this time. Star Wars: Rise of the Skywalker (2019) -- "5/10" Please refer to "my review" from 2020, where I go into more detail about how utterly awful this movie is. I took away an extra star this time because I'd failed to mention in the original review just how irritating and tension-free it is watching a movie where one character (Rey) is better than everyone else at everything. She speaks all languages, she out-duels bounty hunters with ease, she can pull a whole ship out of the sky with her power, she can jump over spaceships, she can fly spaceships, she can repair spaceships, she can repair robots, she can see across galaxies. It's awful. I was only listening with one ear and watching out of the corner of one eye, but there is nothing redeeming about this movie. That people love it and revere Rey is a sign of mental illness, if not the end of civilization. Despite how awful I think it is, I rate it a 5/10 because the effects are really quite good, if that's your thing. I need more, but the movie is well-made graphically. The Great Wall (2016) -- "5/10" I don't know who this movie was made for, but it was not adults. It is so ludicrously effects-heavy that it doesn't feel real at all. Matt Damon is technically in it, but he does no acting. Pedro Pascal is technically in it, but he does no acting. Willem Dafoe is technically in it, but he does no acting. It's just a big pile of CGI with no feeling, no oomph, no energy. I just don't care about amazing things happening on screen when it's dozens of amazing things happening all at once. There's no art to it. The plot feels like it was written by a 14-year-old boy. "How about if Matt Damon shoots a bunch of arrows and they all do amazing things, leaving a bowl hanging against a pillar, between two arrows?" Ugggggghhhhh. I found myself siding with the monsters. They were much more sympathetic. Despite how awful I think it is, I rate it a 5/10 because the effects are really quite good, if that's your thing. I need more, but the movie is well-made graphically. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4450 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4450 Sun, 05 Jun 2022 23:36:28 +0200 -- "7/10" 2. "Rick & Morty S05 (2021)" <#Rick> -- "10/10" 3. "Upload S01 (2020)" <#Upload> -- "8/10" 4. "Titane (2021)" <#Titane> -- "5/10" 5. "Die Käserei in Goldingen (2008)" <#Käserei> -- "7/10" 6. "The Revenant (2015)" <#Revenant> -- "9/10" 7. "The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)" <#Wolf> -- "9/10" 8. "After Life S03 (2022)" <#After> -- "6/10" 9. "The Brothers Grimsby (2016)" <#Grimsby> -- "4/10" 10. "The Great Gatsby (2013)" <#Gatsby> -- "7/10" These are my notes to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. I've recently transferred my reviews to IMDb and made "the list" of around 1600 ratings publicly available. I've included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other -- I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. Townies S01 (1996) -- "7/10" This is a one-season sitcom about a group of friends in Gloucester, Massachusetts. They're all in their late 20s and all still living in town (hence the name of the sitcom). Carrie Donovan (Molly Ringwald) is the more practical one, still living her parents Mike (Dion Anderson) and Kathy (Lee Garlington) and starting up a relationship with Curt (Ron Livingston), who's been begging her to go out with him for a long time. Shannon (Jenna Elfman) is the free spirit who sleeps with a lot of guys. That's not a shot at her: that is literally the archetype she plays. Denise Callahan (Lauren Graham) is somewhere in between: she marries Frank (Billy Burr) in the first episode -- and they already have a baby together. All three of the ladies work at the local diner, run by straight-talking Marge (Conchata Ferrell). As can be expected from a sitcom, the main characters get into hijinks in each episode, which driving a bit of a seasonal story-arc forward. It's honestly not the worth 80s/90s television I've ever seen. The actors are pretty talented, at any rate. Jenna Elfman and Molly Ringwald are both very funny. We watched a VHS rip because this series is so old and so unpopular and so short that no-one ever released it on DVD. I became interested in this show because Billy Burr is in it, but he's not in it nearly as much as the other characters. He only shows up sparingly, although he does a respectable job of it. It was his first acting role ever, coinciding in 1996 with his first comedy-show credit ever. "Callahan: It's nothing against you Grimaldis, Linda. It's just southern cultures are a little slower. The sun feels so nice -- who feels like workin'? Linda: Ah, yes, the hardworking Irish. Between bending their elbows and flapping their gums, I'm surprised they even have the strength to gamble." "Mountie: You've mistaken my good manners for a lack of resolve." "Cary: Picture it: a cold, dark night. Three women, with nothing to lose. ... A peach." Rick & Morty S05 (2021) -- "10/10" The first episode introduces Mr. Nimbus (Dan Harmon), the lord of the seas. It also introduces "Hoovy", a dog who helps Morty (Justin Roiland) carry some wine back to his own dimension after Rick (Justin Roiland) had thrown it there to age for a few centuries. Typical R&M madness. Hoovy returns to find his wife had died in the intervening hears and that his son had waited for him, to kill him on his return. The son founds an empire with the sole purpose of destroying Morty should he return. Morty has to return a few times because Nimbus keeps drinking the wine he's trying to bring to Jessica (Kari Wahlgren), who's actually on a date with him. The dog race, progeny of Hoovy, continue to evolve, achieving incredible heights of technology, enough even to eventually strip Rick of his powers and almost his life. Morty has to return to rescue Jessica, who'd been taken captive centuries ago (in her timeline), but frozen in place, observing but not aging. She is now beyond such prosaic things as dating Morty. "Fuck off. I'm a Time Lord." The second episode is about Rick's "decoy families", with one after another getting destroyed by squid people, who turn out to be other decoy families in squid costumes. It turns out that decoy families have also created their own decoy families. The copies of copies are increasingly damaged and ... wrong. This continues in a visual and tempo-spatial orgy of detail and confusion until you can do nothing but lean back and enjoy it, no longer even trying to keep track of who the real family is. It's a wonderful commentary on cloning and simulation (a common theme). The third episode is a take on Captain Planet, with Morty becoming Planetina's girlfriend. Planetina turns out to be a bit more ... vehement ... about saving the planet than Morty is as she torches an entire coal-mine full of people. Meanwhile Rick and Summer are taking a week off for debauchery and rippin' and tearin'. Summer grows weary of Rick's attachment to a girlfriend he'd made on the first of three doomed planets that they'd visited. The fourth episode is about Morty's sperm staging an assault on the planet. What happened was Morty visited his mother at work and found the horse-milking machine and spent a week pleasuring himself with it before Rick picked up a barrel of what he thought was horse serum in order to use it to create a bomb to destroy the CHUD (Cannibalistic Horse Underground Dwellers), but it's not equine, so his equipment blows up instead, releasing giant, mutated versions of the sperm that attack the whole neighborhood. They barely escape to what looks like Norad to meet up with the president (Keith David). Long story short, the CHUD save the day, Rick is the rather of the scion of the royal family, Morty is deeply chagrined and Morty and his sister Summer's (Spencer Grammer) gross, giant incest baby is shot into space, where it assaults an astronaut. What the actual hell. The fifth episode was one of the weaker ones, but still pretty good. The sheer number of "sets" that they design and draw and animate is nearly bewildering. There is so much to see and hear. In this one, Morty and Summer team up to impress the new kid Bruce Chutback, who's aloofness is nearly impenetrable. They manage to steal Rick's spaceship and take off on a galaxy-wide tear with it, tangling with the police and then getting kidnapped by the ship in order to help her to lose her virginity (in exchange for not telling Rick that they'd hijacked her). Meanwhile Rick is "friends" with Jerry, but only in order to let the hell-demons to whom he owes a huge debt revel in his cringe. Beth tracks them down, chastises Rick for mocking Jerry, then joins in because the hell-drinks are so good. When Jerry gets wind of the scam, he's annoyed and stop being "fun" for the demons. They kidnap him and take him to hell. Beth and Rick disguise themselves as demons, infiltrate hell, and rescue Jerry. The sixth episode is a loose take on the movie National Treasure with Keith David returning in the role of the president, being awesome and kicking ass in a giant feud with Rick. Rick's plan is, as ever, to get himself a presidential pardon by pretending to be a turkey on Thanksgiving. The first forty-five seconds of the show has more jokes and zingers than most shows pack into thirty minutes. There is a throwaway reveal that the Statue of Liberty was actually was a trojan horse -- Morty's shot releases a robot that takes over New York in the name of France, all "[...] on America's birthday, or whatever the fuck Thanksgiving is supposed to be." Morty and Rick infiltrate the turkeys as turkeys, but the president also turns himself into a turkey and gets the upper hand, but then Rick gets the upper hand, but then the turkey who is injected with the President's DNA who takes over the country makes more turkey-based super-soldiers. Rick, Morty, and the president kill spider-FDR and wake the pilgrim and native-American super-warriors who are kept in hyper-sleep until needed in order to take the country back. It sounds absolutely crazy on paper, but it was one of the best episodes yet. Really super-fun and clever. The seventh episode features Rick's obsession with GoTron, a giant robot built out of other robots (*cough* Voltron *cough*). Instead of panthers, they're ferrets. As usual, the plot goes mad with layers upon layers, involving other Smith families from other multiverses, and building larger and larger versions of the GoTron, until they reach a planet-sized Ultimate GoTron. They end up using Morty and Summer's giant incest baby Naruto to defeat the usurpers who'd taken over the Ultimate GoTron from Rick. The eighth episode has Rick diving into Birdperson's memories to cover a lot of backstory that fans have been begging for. We learn that Birdperson distanced himself from Rick because Rick's portal gun made relationships meaningless because, not only could any reality exist, but they were all equally accessible, rendering them equally meaningless. We learn that Tammy and Birdperson had a daughter before Tammy killed Birdperson. The ninth episode transforms Rick into a Crow-based superhero. He replaces Morty with crows, living for decades like this, regretting nothing. Morty, on the other hand, spills portal fluid on himself and gets into a dangerous relationship with Nick, the man on the other end of his portal, who'd also spilled portal fluid on himself. Rick remains with the crows, having left Morty behind for good. The tenth episode really ties everything together. Rick is still the anime-style crow-leader/hero with a giant Japanese/Final Fantasy-type sword. Rick eventually learns that the crows are using him and he goes back to Morty, who'd aged himself in order to get back at Rick. The end up at the Citadel, inhabited solely by Ricks and Mortys from all across the continuum. There is an incredibly detailed flashback sequence that tells Rick's story (finally!) in a hallucinogenic experience where the details are clear as you see them, but disappear 1/8 of a second later as the next detail appears to replace it. This goes on for a good two minutes, with a lot happening. In the "real world", President Morty of the Citadel makes a power play and ends up in his own continuum, where portal guns are yellow and he rules supreme. Rick, meanwhile, escapes with Morty and several other Ricks and Mortys as the Citadel collapses into a black hole. As always, Rick and Morty is a wild ride. This might have been the strongest season yet. Looking forward to seasons six and seven. This writing and animation team is fun and creative and smart and they make stuff that is though-provoking and unique and beautiful. Upload S01 (2020) -- "8/10" Nathan Brown (Robbie Amell) is an app developer with every privilege: he's attractive, he has a nice family, he has an attractive, very rich girlfriend. He's on his way to his girlfriend's house when his self-driving car slams into the back of a parked truck, wounding him mortally. He's in the hospital when his girlfriend Ingrid Kannerman (Allegra Edwards) finds him and gets him to sign a contract to "Upload" himself into her rich family's swanky after-life digital paradise. Nathan starts up a virtual relationship with his "angel" Nora (Andy Allo). He is torn between her and Ingrid, who is slowly becoming a better person. There are a few characters in the virtual world who help Nathan try to figure out what happened to him. It turns out that he was not a nice guy and that he wanted to sell his software -- a way for poor people to upload -- to his potential father-in-law, who already has more money than he knows what to do with. Nathan had spent the season suspecting his partner of having screwed him. Instead, his partner Jamie (Jordan Johnson-Hinds) had been avoiding him because he'd slept with Ingrid once. At the end, Nathan has downgraded himself to the 2GB floor, where he burns through his whole allotment in the first day, professing his love for Nora, while Ingrid shows up to rescue him. It's a bit complicated and unclear where it's heading -- which is a good thing. The real world is very tongue-in-cheek weird, with the people enjoying incredible privilege with no self-awareness. There are a lot of nice little touches, some of them quite zany (like putting bees on Ingrid's face as she's preparing for Nathan's funeral, or that she has to turn down a vaginoplasty at the same time). I eventually warmed up to it and it was pretty well-made. The ideas and concepts hit a bit too close too home now, but with the metaverse increasingly becoming a thing that idiots think they want, it is probably all too predictive of what's in store for us. Titane (2021) -- "5/10" The movie starts with Titane (Agathe Rousselle) and her family getting into a car accident that results in her having a titanium plate implanted into her head. After being released from the hospital, she is more empathetic to the family car than to her parents. Years later, a grown-up Titane dances seductively at car shows. She is also a serial killer -- we see flashbacks of her taking her first victims as she takes her most recent one: an avid fan who confronts her in the parking lot outside the show. She re-enters the convention hall to shower and ends up fucking one of the cars. No, that's not a typo. Titane still lives with her parents, but her crimes are starting to catch up to her. After a spree in which she kills several people and, after discovering that she's pregnant with the car's baby (she's leaking motor oil), she smashes her nose, shaves her head, tapes down her breasts, and makes herself look like a waifish man. She impersonates a boy who'd gone missing years earlier and her weird "father" Vincent (Vincent Lindon) totally accepts it. He's in charge of a fire station and EMT service. He gives his "son" a job there. This causes issues with the other team members, but Vincent doesn't give a shit. Vincent is none too stable, injecting steroids several times (also pretty cringe-inducing) and eventually almost putting himself into a coma. Vincent's wife meets her "son" but finds Titane poking holes into her own very pregnant belly and watching oil leak out. Vincent eventually sees enough that his own delusion is shattered, but he doesn't care. He now loves his new "son". Titane ends up dancing in the fire station, busting out her car-show moves while clothed in her baggy firefighter's uniform and with her bald head, broken nose, and increasingly pregnant belly. Everybody's pretty confused, to be honest. Vincent is disappointed but no-one dares say a word. Titane fucks one of the fire trucks to try to get the baby out, but it doesn't work. I guess science isn't all it's cracked up to be. The birth eventually comes, killing Titane in the process. Vincent ends up holding her titanium-laced baby, cooing to it. This movie wasn't at all what I expected it to be. I realized it quite early, but when Titane's father was setting his own chest on fire while Titane was fucking a fire-truck in order to try to force the birth of a baby she had had implanted by a muscle car, I realized it wasn't quite for me. It's well-made and well-filmed. It's a tight story (there are almost no people in it, other than the couple of main characters). But, man, that plot. I don't mind crazy plots, but this one was just so random and involved such long sequences of self-harming that were pretty tough to watch and then recover from to focus on other parts of the film. I couldn't possible recommend this one to anyone I know, to be honest. It's definitely a filmmaker's film. Die Käserei in Goldingen (2008) -- "7/10" This is a sweet movie about a cheese dairy in a Swiss town named Goldingen. The dairy is struggling to compete with the other, larger local dairies. He gets a refugee to work with him. When the farmer is going to lose a local cheese competition because he can no longer produce the goat cheese for which he is famous, he is able to promote the amazing cheese made by his refugee protegé/apprentice. It wins an honorable mention and a large prize. The Revenant (2015) -- "9/10" Hugh Glass (Leonardo diCaprio) is a fur-trapper in the Dakotas in the 1820s. He is a trapper nonpareil and is leading a group of men back to their camp. They are attacked by the Arikara, who kill most of the group. The Arikara war party is looking for Powaqa (Melaw Nakehk'o), the Arikara chief's daughter, who's been kidnapped. Glass escapes with a much smaller group. They stash their furs, despite Fitzgerald's (Tom Hardy) misgivings. They need to move more quickly. Glass is attacked by a bear while he's scouting game. The attack is horrific. The bear tear his back open; his hands are torn up; he survives. The rest of the group -- including his son -- finds him and they sew him up. He lies on his back on a pannier, eyes bright with nigh-inconceivable pain. Fitzgerald, of course, argues for a mercy-killing, but they are unable to do it. Instead, the leader of the group Captain Andrew Henry (Domhnall Gleeson) offers money to anyone willing to stay with Glass and bury him after he's ... suffered to death? How is that better? Anyway, Glass's son Hawk (Forrest Goodluck), Jim Bridger (Will Poulter), and Fitzgerald take the offer, two of them out of concern for Glass, and one of them for the money. Fitzgerald immediately tries to kill Glass, but is caught by Hawk. Fitzgerald kills Hawk in front of Glass. Fitzgerald then lies to Bridger about the Arikara getting closer. They half-bury Glass half-alive and call it a day. Bridger leaves his canteen with Glass, but he's terrified for his life -- both of Fitzgerald and the Arikara. When they get back to the fort, they both lie to Henry about what happened. Glass survives the cold night. His fury drives him to crawl out of the grave, to cauterize his wounds. He somehow makes it down to the river (this is not shown and is nigh-unimaginable, but for the story's sake, we'll let it go). He escapes the Arikara by jumping into the freezing water. He is underway alone for many days before he meets Pawnee Hikuc (Arthur RedCloud), with whom Glass can communicate because his wife was Pawnee. She fell victim to the Arikara when they attacked and burned his ranch. He escaped with Hawk and took up his trapper/nomad/scout lifestyle. Hikuc builds Glass a sweat lodge in which to heal his festering wounds. He emerges days later to find that he's feeling much better, but that French trappers have killed Hikuc and the leader of the French party is raping Powaqa. Glass frees her, kills several French trappers, and takes back Hikuc's horse. He escapes with Powaqa, only to be hunted down the next morning by the Arikara. They take back Powaqa and drive Glass off a cliff on his horse. He falls through pine trees, slamming off of branches before landing on the snowy ground. The horse plummets even harder through the trees and dies immediately. Glass crawls over to it, eviscerates it and survives the freezing night in its carcass. Glass's canteen makes its way back to the fort in the hands of a terrified French trapper, proving the Glass is still alive and making his way back. Henry organizes a search party and they find an exhausted Glass in the nearby forest. Fitzgerald does not partake in the search party, instead emptying the fort's safe and heading for the hills. Glass protects Bridger from punishment. After a day, Henry and Glass set out in pursuit of Fitzgerald. This quickly goes awry, as Fitzgerald captures and kills Henry. Glass uses Henry's corpse on a horse to get the drop on Fitzgerald, but only succeeds in shooting him in the arm. Glass tracks his wounded ass down to the river, where the two fight brutally and amazingly well, considering Glass was grievously wounded and hasn't eaten in days and Fitzgerald is bleeding massively from a gunshot wound. These injuries phase neither one of them. Glass lets the river carry Fitzgerald's wounded ass to the Arikara war party on the other riverbank. They scalp Fitzgerald and spare Glass (for having saved Powaqa). Glass retreats back into the hills and the forest, hallucinating about his wife. It's unclear whether he finally capitulates to his wounds and joins her and his son in death, having taking his revenge -- or whether he drives onward, stubbornly clinging to life. DiCaprio puts in a tremendous performance and Alejandro G. Iñárritu as director does a tremendous job as well. Cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki is also worth noting. This is, in a sense, a superhero movie, but with a more down-to-Earth superhero. The Wolf of Wall Street (2013) -- "9/10" This is the story of the rise and fall of Wall Street con man Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio). He starts off under the tutelage of coke-addled sociopath Mark Hanna (Matthew McConaughey). Hanna's brokerage implodes after Black Monday, on October 19th, 1987 and everyone loses their job. Belfort is forced to take a job at a penny-stock boiler room, where his bombastic lies and charisma quickly make him incredibly rich on commissions earned by duping people out of their retirement savings. Donnie Azoff (Jonah Hill) approaches him in a diner and asks him for a job, based solely on the fact that Belfort has a fancy car. Belfort and Azoff start their own company named Stratton Oakmont, based on a pump-and-dump tactics that go after bigger fish than Midwestern retirees. Jordan recruits a bunch of his friends, Brad (Jon Bernthal), Manny (Jon Favreau), Nicky (P.J. Byrne), Chester (Kenneth Choi), Alden (Henry Zebrowski), and Robbie (Brian Sacca). They would all become incredibly rich and would all become hardcore drug addicts and would all remain fiercely loyal to Jordan. Their firm is profiled as the dirtiest company on Wall Street, making tremendous profits while riding the fine line of illegality. They are overrun by applicants (of course). Jordan becomes a hardcore drug addict. He also dumps his wife Teresa (Christin Miloti) for Naomi Lapaglia (Margot Robbie). He manages to keep a lot of balls in the air, but the SEC and the FBI -- in the form of Agent Denham (Kyle Chandler) -- are closing in. Stratton Oakmont shepherds Steve Madden's IPO, with Belfort personally making $22M, which he promptly hides in a Swiss bank account, through banker Jean Jacques Saurel (Jean Dujardin). They use Naomi's British aunt Emma (Joanna Lumley) as well as some of Brad's relatives to slowly smuggle the money back to Switzerland. This was obviously back in the days when it was much more difficult to wire money through dozens of accounts in seconds to cover one's trail. Although Jordan's friends remained fiercely loyal to him, he gives them up as soon as the noose tightens around him. Saurel is turned by the FBI, so Jordan turns on his friends. Jordan spares Donnie, though, and the FBI is furious at him. He only gets 36 months of minimum security prison, serves 22 months, and goes on to a lucrative career as a motivational speaker. DiCaprio is spectacular in this movie. The scenes of drug-fueled nigh-pornography, the debauchery, the money, the heedless spending, the rapacious theft -- it's all depicted in music-video-style montages by director Martin Scorcese. Jonah Hill is tremendous as well, even more debauched and mentally damaged than Belfort, at times. A tremendous movie about the worst people in the world. After Life S03 (2022) -- "6/10" Tony (Ricky Gervais) is back for his final season of moping about his dead wife. He seems to have found purpose in helping people and spends some time trying to fix up Kath (Diane Morgan) with someone to make her happy. His best friend and closest coworker Lenny (Tony Way) is doing just fine without his help. His own relationship with his father's former nurse (Ashley Jensen) goes nowhere, but he helps fix her up with someone nice. Tony finally accepts the money from his dead wife Lisa's life-insurance policy and distributes it around town, for good deeds. Brian (David Earl) gets a lot more screen time and it's not great. He goes on and on like a mentally ill man about his cuckolding wife in lurid and stomach-churning detail. The first season was fantastic and the subsequent seasons have seems ever more schmaltzy and earnest -- and less funny. It's fine, I guess. Gervais actually makes pretty high-quality schmaltz, but it was quite uneven and two who seasons of unfunny and earnest moping isn't what I'm looking for. At the end, Tony walks off into a field with his dog Brandy. Tony's wife Lisa appears briefly, then fades. Then Brandy fades. Then Tony fades. The end. The Brothers Grimsby (2016) -- "4/10" I only saw some of this movie, but I wanted to note that I saw the part where Sebastian (Mark Strong) and Nobby (Sacha Baron Cohen) crawl into an elephant's vagina in order to escape detection. They think they've made their escape, but a bull elephant takes a fancy to their elephant. A giant elephant penis slides into the scene, smashing repeatedly into Strong's face. Cohen says they have to help it ejaculate to make it go away. It does. Copiously. This is laughably bad and sophomoric. Then another bull elephant comes along. It's bumping up against Cohen's ass. His pants are inexplicably down. I just wanted to note how horrible this all is so that I don't watch this movie by accident at some point. This is almost worse than Brüno in its mindlessness and terrible humor. It's not very funny. It's kind of painful to watch. I don't even want to know what kind of bet Strong lost that made him have to star in this. The Great Gatsby (2013) -- "7/10" The plot follows the book quite assiduously. Many years after they'd happened, WWI veteran Nick Carraway (Tobey Maguire) tells the story of a summer spent with Jay Gatsby (Leonardo DiCaprio). Carraway moves in to a small groundskeeper's cottage next to Gatsby's mansion in West Egg. His cousin Daisy (Carey Mulligan) lives across the bay in East Egg, with her husband Tom Buchanan (Joel Edgerton). Tom is the latest generation of an old-money family -- he is scum. Daisy tries to fix up Nick with Jordan (Elizabeth Debicki), a local golf pro. Gatsby is in love with Daisy and chose the house across the bay so that he could keep an eye on the flashing green light at the end of her dock. He throws incredibly lavish parties in the hopes that Daisy will show up at one of them. He has made a tremendous amount of money with his shady business partner Meyer Wolfsheim (Amitabh Bachchan). Tom is cheating on Daisy with Myrtle (Isla Fisher), the wife of a small garage in the no-man's land between the Eggs and Manhattan. Daisy learns of this and decides to leave Tom for Gatsby. They all end up partying at the Plaza Hotel and the conversation goes tits-up. Myrtle's husband George (Jason Clarke) suspects her and decides to leave the area with her. She doesn't want to go and tries to jump into Tom's car as it flits by. However, it's Gatsby driving the car and throwing yourself at a car isn't a great idea in any case, so Myrtle dies. Tom drives through in Gatsby's car a few minutes later and tells her distraught husband that he suspects it was Gatsby she was sleeping with and that it was Gatsby who'd killed her. It was, in fact, Daisy who'd been driving. Mad with rage, George strikes out for Gatsby's mansion and finds and kills him in his own swimming pool. Gatsby's name is dragged through the mud, used as a scapegoat to cover up the infidelities and vehicular manslaughters of the old rich families. Daisy let Gatsby -- a man who'd devoted his entire life to loving her and building a fortune to entice her -- take the fall to protect herself. She is left with her marriage to the brutalizing Tom Buchanan, who comes out of this shining and more powerful than ever. There are absolutely lush visuals for a good part of the film -- the parties in particular are over-the-top spectacular. Baz Luhrmann as director does a tremendous job, having practiced in movies like Moulin Rouge!. It's kind of slog once it gets down to the business of wrapping up the story, though. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4407 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4407 Tue, 08 Mar 2022 11:11:08 +0100 of around 1600 ratings publicly available. I've included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other -- I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. Legion S02 (2017) -- "9/10" I really like the characters, the plot, the scenery, the costumes, the ambitious way of showing what life would be like for a being who can access the astral plane -- timeless, ageless, positionless, all at once. The poor people surrounding such beings -- clever and well-grounded and emotionally stable as they are -- have no chance of staying on their feet nearly any of the time. David (Dan Stevens) tracks Farouk (Navid Negahban) -- in the form of Lenny (Aubrey Plaza) and Oliver (Jemaine Clement)) -- to a nightclub in the astral plane. Farouk is looking for his original body, which was captured and buried by monks of a special sect. Cary (Bill Irwin) builds an amplification chamber for David's power, where he spends a lot of time. The narrator (Jon Hamm) provides wonderfully animated and rendered interludes of philosophical musing in about half of the episodes. In this one, we see Farouk manipulate everyone into thinking that he's the good guy. He even does such a good job of it that his power reaches right through the TV and affects the viewer. But has he really changed? David begins working with him, partially because a future Syd (Rachel Keller) tells him its the only way to save the world. The monk is infecting people with a tooth-chattering incapacitation. The monk's death releases everyone from their entrapment. David spends an episode in Syd's mind, exploring her past and how she grew into the person she is now. Lenny gets out of Farouk's mind prison and shows up at Division 3. She and David piece together how she got there -- in his sister Amy's body, which Oliver and Farouk had "converted" to Lenny. David continues exploring astral space and multiple realities and possibilities, one where he eventually becomes the richest and most powerful man in the world, another in which he's a drugged-out conspiracy theorist, another where he's killed in a shootout, or killed by Kerry, or living as an old, addled man cared for by Amy, or living with Amy as an addled younger man. Farouk is confused as to why David is helping him. He travels forward to ask future Sydney why she wants David to help Farouk. It's because she knows that David, his power, and his rage will combine to lead him to end the world. A mind-worm planted by Farouk (before he had a change of heart) continues to wreak havoc at Division 3. Eventually, they stop it, but not before it sacrifices Ptonomy's mind. He is resurrected as part of the Vermillion. They figure out where Farouk's body is: it's in a weird, ever-changing desert called Le Désolé. Everyone is involved here, with Oliver, Melanie, Lenny, and Clark working together to get everyone to the desert and set up for the final act. Farouk continues to bounce between bad and good, and hops from Oliver to Melanie. Melanie/Farouk convinces Syd that it's hopeless and that David must be destroyed. David and Amahl Farouk finally clash on the astral plane. Lenny shoots a giant tuning fork, which throws off all of their powers. Syd tries to shoot David because she knows what he will become. Lenny's bullet stops that fatal bullet and David manipulates Syd's mind before she fully recovers from the shock. Farouk knows what happened and restores Syd's memories, turning her against David once again. Cary also sees what happened in a "replay". David is put on trial, trapped in a cage. He blows his way out of the trap -- angry that they think they could even get him to do something he doesn't want to do -- and escapes with Lenny. Archer S12 (2021) -- "8/10" Another solid entry in the long-running and seemingly indestructible series about a spy organization run by Mallory Archer (Jessica Walter) and starring her son Sterling Archer (H. Jon Benjamin). The gang's all here: Cheryl (Judy Greer), Pam (Amber Nash), Cyril (Chris Parnell), Lana (Aisha Taylor), Ray (Adam Reed), and Krieger (Lucky Yates). We get a minor part for Barry (Dave Willis) as well as a cameo for Ron Cadillac (Ron Leibman) in the final episode. Leibman died a few years ago and his real-life wife Jessica Walter just died this year. This was her final episode, so the show ended with a sweet moment where Mallory retires to an island with never-ending cocktails and Ron Cadillac by her side, lying in chaise longues on the beach, looking into the sunset. Walters was able to voice the full season. The final conceit was that Sterling read the letter she'd written before she vamoosed, "Do you remember what I told you on your very first day of training? "You probably don’t, but it was ‘Always know where the exits are.’ "And with all the chaos and confusion of late, I thought I would fix to make my own exit, in my own time, on my own terms and in a way that I could never be found by my enemies, or all my lovesick paramours who are literally countless., "So I’ve decided that it’s time to pass the torch; try not to burn yourselves with it." The story arc of this season was that the agency had to navigate a changing world (again) and were up against a very corporate and very organized IIA (International Intelligence Agency) headed up by Fabian Kingsworth (Kayvan Novak). He has a pretty strong speech defect -- he tends to pronounce Ws instead of Rs or Ls -- and it's got to be a meta-joke that no-one ever mentions it. Ray is actually working at IIA because their snacks are amazing (and he's not sure whether the Agency is going to survive, so he's covering his bases). Lana is fighting with her husband Robert, who's also the billionaire benefactor keeping the Agency alive. We find out more about Mallory's backstory when she was an agent, teamed up with an Indian Brit agent in London. Stuff happens: Cheryl is loony, Pam is actually relatively tame compared to previous seasons, Cyril has an identity crisis because Archer is back out of the coma and Cyril is no longer awesome, Krieger is still Krieger. Legion S03 (2018) -- "9/10" "The universe acknowledges you, that you exist and that your existence is important. "I can see that you have suffered. That people you love have suffered. And you want to know that it meant something. "It did. It does. Nothing of value is ever lost." After having declared war, David escapes and lives on the lam, amidst fervent admirers that he's cultivated in his...erm...cult. We meet Switch, a Chinese/American/Japanese girl trained by her father to hone her time-traveling ability. David eventually manages to hitchhike with Switch back to the point in time before his father -- Professor X -- fought Farouk (and thought he'd defeated him). Instead, Farouk had allowed himself to appear defeated while he piggy-backed on an even more powerful Omega-level mutant, David. Cary and Sidney think they're making headway, but the time-eaters are robbing them of time even very far down the continuum. David, on the other hand, is so focused on fixing "himself" rather than helping anyone else that he may be the bad guy after all? His voice sometimes sounds like the big-headed blob's. He uses and abuses Switch, whose adulation and devotion make her nearly kill herself to help him -- and he takes it. She announces "I'm home", when she gets to Farouk's lair and then calls him "Daddy" later -- or so it appears. Legion appears, with a multiplicity of Davids, confronting Xavier in David's mind. Xavier and David finally see eye to eye and agree to team up, though I suppose Xavier still doesn't like the smile on David's face. Farouk, on the other hand, has managed to extricate his future self from the zone of timelessness Le Désolé -- so it looks like it will be two on two. Charles and modern-day Farouk square off, but this Farouk...has changed. He doesn't want to fight anymore. He wants to convince Charles to work together to help David become a better version of himself. That is, Farouk spent thirty years inside of David and grew with him. He mellowed. He saw the error of his ways. In so doing, he damaged David nearly irreparably. Now, the new, improved Farouk wants to show the old Farouk how much better off David would be had he never been occupied by the parasite. In this way, he will redeem himself, to a degree. David will have lived twice: once with Farouk, during which Farouk terrorizes him, but also grows into the person who will travel through the astral plane -- and time itself -- in order to stop himself from ever having infected David in the first place. Other stuff happens, but mainly this is about David leaving his anger behind. Switch eventually succumbs to her time-inflicted wounds, but she is buoyed by her father, who is some sort of time-lord. He shows her how to leave her mortal vessel and become a time-god herself. She dispels the time-eaters that were advancing on and plaguing Sydney, Gabriella (David's mother), and Kerry. The time-eaters were depicted quite well, with stuttering and repetition throughout the editing to simulate the effect of time "slipping". Seinfeld: S01--S04 (1989--1992) -- "10/10" [image]Jerry Seinfeld, George Costanza (Jason Alexander), Elaine Benes (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), and Cosmo Kramer (Michael Richards) star in this comedy set in New York, starting in 1989 and running through 1997. It is a "show about nothing", as Seinfeld was famous for noting. Larry David co-wrote and produced the show. The four are Manhattanites. Their major concerns are low-rent apartments, dating, and work. Each show generally follows the same structure: one of them commits an act of petty duplicity and then spends the rest of the show making it worse in attempts to make it better. It's like watching a kid try to clean up spilled honey with a paper tissue. Especially George, but Elaine and Jerry are also masters of the craft. The most meta joke in the show is that, of Jerry and all of his friends, he, as the stand-up comedian, is the most successful and financially secure. Bits of Seinfeld's stand-up comedy act are sprinkled throughout the show. One of the nice things is that this format doesn't have an overarching story arc. Things that go wrong -- sometimes drastically -- are either repaired by the end of the show -- often without any pretense of realism, which is kind of part of the joke -- or...they're just forgotten in the next show. The central mission is laughs, not continuity, so they often sacrifice the latter. Perhaps the most egregious of these -- for the modern viewer, at least, who has been trained to expect a modicum of continuity in all forms of entertainment (e.g. video games, films, TV, comics) unless explicitly rebooted -- is when, in the second season, Elaine and Jerry get back together in a serious way for a single show and then they just forget about it completely in the next show. Wonderful. There will be some things that change, but very slowly -- e.g. introducing new characters, like George's or Elaine's new bosses -- and only if it makes the show funnier. Jason Alexander is very good -- he's the one I remember the most. But on this full, second viewing, it is Michael Richards as Kramer who stands out as a superlative physical comedian and actor. He is completely without artifice or pretense. By the second half of the seasons, though, it is Elaine whose sharp wit shines the brightest. Newman (Wayne Knight) makes his first appearance in S03E15. He starts to feature more prominently in a few storylines. Uncle Leo is a recurring character, as are Jerry's parents. We met Elaine's father one time -- he's a gruff author. We've only heard of George's parents a couple of times, but they've yet to make an appearance. In S04E06, Jerry does a bit about how people don't ever want to talk to anyone on the phone, but they're desperate to see that blinking light on the phone machine. It's very prophetic of how we apes would adapt to the increasingly online world. To wit: nothing has changed. The bit still stands. As to why we crave that blinking light that tells us someone tried to reach us -- for gens Y and Z, think the "badge" indicator on your app that tells you how many unread messages or...whatever...you have. "Why? It's very important for human beings to feel they are popular and well-liked amongst a large group of people that we don't care for." In S04E10: The Contest "Sex is great, but you don't really want to think about the fact that your life began because somebody might have had too much wine with dinner." In S04E11: The Airport, we hear a disembodied Larry David on the airplane. He's the guy who ordered the kosher meal but had forgotten that he'd done so, so he had Elaine's mail instead. In S04E15, "Looking at cleavage is like looking at the sun. You get a sense of it, then you look away." In S04E21, George's father Frank (Jerry Stiller) shows up for the first time. George's mother Estelle (Estelle Harris) was in a couple of episodes before that. In S05E08: The Barber, we hear, for the first time, Jerry's sotto voce "Newman!" In S05E14: The Marine Biologist, George, posing as a marine biologist, regales the group with a tale of how he relieved a whale of its breathing difficulty by removing Kramer's golf ball from its blowhole. From "Seinfeldism" , "The sea was angry that day, my friends - like an old man trying to send back soup in a deli. I got about fifty feet out and suddenly the great beast appeared before me. I tell you he was ten stories high if he was a foot. As if sensing my presence, he let out a great bellow. I said, "Easy, big fella!" And then, as I watched him struggling, I realized that something was obstructing its breathing. From where I was standing, I could see directly into the eye of the great fish." [media] In S06E04, we see Larry David for the first time, as Frank Costanza's lawyer -- wearing a cape. In S06E05, a very young Patton Oswalt appears as the video-store clerk. In S06E08, Bryan Cranston makes his first appearance as Tim Whatley. In S06E09, Larry David returns as George Steinbrenner's voice. In S07E01, George says what we're all thinking, "I'm much more comfortable criticizing people behind their backs." There are a bunch of great shows in season 7, including the trip to Minnesota to return bottles ("The Bottle Deposit"), "The Wig Master" (Kramer as pimp), "The Cadillac" (Jerry buys his father a car), "The Soup Nazi", and George's long engagement to Susan. There are a bunch of familiar faces: Cary Elwes, Debra Messing, Brad Garrett (Robbie from Everybody Loves Raymond), and even Marisa Tomei, playing herself. In season 8, S08E19 ("The Yada Yada") stands out as an absolute top-notch episode, quintessentially Seinfeld. In season 9, S09E03 ("The Serenity Now") is wonderful, with Elaine being pursued by multiple people, all of them Jewish. She visits a Rabbi who lives in her building. "Elaine: Rabbi, is there anything I can do to combat this Shiks-appeal? Rabbi: Ha! Elaine, shiks-appeal is a myth, like the Yeti, or his North American cousin, the Sasquatch. Elaine:: Well, something's goin' on here, 'cause every able-bodied Israelite in the county is driving pretty strong to the hoop." S09E20 has Lamar (Chris Joyner) in a maroon Golf, which looks exactly like a VW Rabbit I used to have, "Fritz" . The parade of Jerry's girlfriends includes Jennifer Coolidge (Stiffler's Mom), Teri Hatcher (Desperate Housewives), Marlee Matlin (Children of a Lesser God), Helen Slater (Supergirl) and Anna Gunn (Skyler in Breaking Bad). [1] I'd completely forgotten that most of Seinfeld was filmed in front of a live studio audience. They didn't seem to do too many re-takes either, judging by how often Jerry (and sometimes Elaine) is seen suppressing smirks or laughter. Usually it's at Kramer, who, as I mentioned above, is an absolute comic genius on this show. His physical comedy; his timing; the way he oozes charisma; how he always lands on his feet. He's a "hipster doofus" but he's a cool cat. Elaine is also a great physical comedian -- her two-handed push, in particular, is genius. Foundation S01 (2021) -- "5/10" This a bit woker than I remember the books being. The lead character is a Tom-Cruise-like better-at-everything-than-everyone-else star, but it's a slight, black young woman/girl. There's the pool scene that, were the roles reversed, there'd be an uproar. She basically humiliates her boyfriend intellectually, then taunts him when he says he can't swim, then she throws him in the water and tells him to "relax". Then she seduces him into having sex in the pool. I honestly can't tell if they're being ironic or if they really think that reversing the roles is progress. I like the concept and the visuals are wonderful, but it's just crazy how a show that takes place over giant time spans (a few decades is the smallest) spends so much damned time on fleeting love affairs. This is silly. I only watched the first three episodes before giving up on it. I would, a year-and-a-half later -- and on the advice of a good friend -- try again. See my "follow-up review" . The Witcher S02 (2021) -- "6/10" Geralt (Henry Cavill) is back, with Ciri (Freya Allen) at his side, traveling back to his training grounds Kaer Morhen, the castle where he became a witcher. On the way, they stop at an old friend's house, where they discover he's in a co-dependent relationship with a monster that can't stop killing, but truly does love him. It matters not because the monster is a monster and tries to kill Ciri, so Geralt lops off its head. Meanwhile, Yennifer (Anya Chalotra) has been captured by the opposing forces, led by Fringilla (Mimi Ndiweni). They are very much on the back foot, though, in no small part thanks to Yennifer's having used fire magic to vanquish them. They are soon ambushed by elves, who take the two women prisoner after slaughtering all of their guard. The elven leader, Francesca (Mecia Simson), is convinced to join up with them after they find out they've all been having the same dream. Some ... creature ... lures them into its lair, but then grants them wishes? And lets them go? It was a bit confusing. Meanwhile, Geralt is back at the witcher stronghold, where they're carousing, mostly because his friend Eskel (Basil Eidenbenz) has brought in a troupe of prostitutes. He's also brought in some sort of tree monster that has infected him via a hole in his back. The monster takes over and Geralt and Vesemir (Geralt's teacher and lord of Kaer Morhen) are forced to kill it, despite it being their friend and fellow witcher. Yennifer is back with the mages, without her powers. They scheme against her, especially the lead mage Stregobor, who tortures her to find out what she's really up to. The council demands that she execute the Nilfgardian prisoner Cahir (Eamon Farren), but she frees him instead and they both escape on horseback into the night. Meanwhile, Ciri is training hard, gaining the grudging respect of the other witchers. Geralt tells her that he's quite sure that she has untapped magical power -- which is why she's been having visions. He tells her to lead him with her visions and they end up at the lair of the leshy, the tree monster that had infected Eskel. This monster is killed immediately by a giant, ugly centipede called a myriapod, which corners Ciri after a chase, but loses sight of Geralt, never a good idea. The next three shows (e03 to e06) are quite slow, with Cahir and Yennefer escaping to Nilfgard, with the help of Jaskier, the bard. Ciri is learning of her powers, that her blood is Eldar blood. Yennefer is still without power, but she hopes to get it back if she delivers Ciri to the old woman in the woods. A fire mage is also on their trail. Cahir is trying to usurp Fringilla's hold on Cintra. Fringilla reminds Cahir that she is a mage (by poisoning his four generals). Geralt hears from Jaskier that Yennefer has lost her power and determines from other information that she is in thrall to the "Deathless Mother", who is manipulating Fringilla, Yennifer, and Francesca (the elf mage). The demon feeds on pain, so when soldiers sneak into Francesca's bedchamber to slay her newborn, Francesca's pain gives it enough power to escape its Witcher-built prison. The Deathless Mother finds a home in Ciri nearly immediately. She directs her vessel to go to the Witcher citadel Kaer Morhen, where she ends up slaying a bunch of the less well-known ones before Geralt catches her. He deduces that Voleth Meir (otherwise known as the Deathless Mother) is controlling Ciri's body and tries to ask her what she wants. She slices his face and escapes. She goes to the tree in the center of the main hall in Kaer Morhen and starts screaming at it, shattering it and revealing an obelisk at the center. She shatters it and summons basilisks to keep the witchers occupied while she faces off against Geralt. Long story short: Yennefer sacrifices herself to rescue Ciri, Voleth Meir leaves Ciri for Yennefer, Ciri screams them to another "sphere", where they see the "Wild Hunt" and Ciri screams them back to their Kaer Morhen before the pack catches them. Voleth Meir remains with the Wild Hunt. Mission accomplished. Meanwhile, Francesca is using her magic to slaughter babies in a nearby kingdom that she has blamed for having killed her baby. Fringilla and Cahil are caught in their lie that they had ordered the murder of Francesca's baby when Emhyr finally returns. He knows this because he was the one who'd ordered the killing. Emhyr turns out to be Duny, Ciri's father. Yennefer discovers that her powers have returned -- maybe in exchange for her noble sacrifice? Geralt still hasn't forgiven her, but will allow her to travel with them, to train Ciri in controlling her powers. It was somewhat strange: there were several episodes in the middle that were long and somewhat tedious and full of exposition by previously unknown characters. It felt like they were trying to force a "Games of Thrones" vibe, but it wasn't working because we had no idea who most of these people were. There's a young lady on the council who says "that's pretty evil, even for me" and we've literally never seen her before. It's more than a bit muddled. And then, when things start moving again, they feel very hurried at the end. We've learned more about Ciri's power -- although it took a long time -- and more about the elves, although they're not the most sympathetic bunch. As in season one, it's Geralt who holds everything together. When he's on screen, everything works. When he's not -- you wonder where he is. No Time to Die (2021) -- "5/10" Billy Eilish sings the theme song. She's in marbles-in-her-mouth mode, so it's not very good. Neat to see that they gave this coveted prize to a 19-year-old who's not going to attract any youth audience to a 2.5-hour movie about James Bond. Hans Zimmer did the rest of the soundtrack because, apparently, no-one else is allowed to do anything. The movie starts in a high-tech lab full of monitors, where all of the techs use pen and paper for everything. I look back at my notes from early in the movie and marvel at my naiveté. I actually thought that scientists sitting at desks with giant screens of data in front of them while simultaneously ignoring their keyboards and scribbling furiously on clipboards was going to be the least believable and most jarring part of this film. The movie starts off with a young Madeleine at home with her alcoholic mother. They are attacked by a man in a semi-shattered clown mask. He kills her mother because of something he muttered about her husband having killed his entire family. It's hard to tell because he muttered and has a lisp and an accent and he's wearing a mask. For realism, they made it incredibly difficult to understand what the fuck is going on. This would be a common thread to the sound design. Madeleine shoots him, but he wakes up and chases her out on the ice of a nearby lake. She falls through the ice (she's a little girl). He follows her out on the ice (a full-grown man who's just seen a little girl fall through the thin ice) and doesn't fall through himself. Instead, despite several gunshot wounds, he is able to rescue her. This was just making things happen to make things happen without selling me on it in any way. I was not invested yet because I had no idea who these people were, only that they were behaving irrationally for unknown reasons. And that they were defying laws of physics or known reality for unknown reasons. For example, why was Madeleine such a dead-eye shot with a pistol? Tight pattern in the trunk. Missed all vital organs, though. Why do I have so much time to think about this stuff during the movie? Oh, because it's boring so far. The movie starts off not with a bang, as is customary, but with a long sequence of Madeleine (Léa Seydoux) and James Bond (Daniel Craig) living together somewhere fashionable in Italy, on a coast somewhere. James is attacked by Spectre agents and he believes that Madeleine is involved. He blames her for having betrayed him and banishes her out of his life forever. She clutches her belly as he pushes her onto the train. This is Chekhov's not-too-subtle gun. Five years later, James Bond is retired on an island, fishing for a living. Ernst Stavro Blofeld (Christoph Waltz) is in Belmarsh prison. Madeleine is his psychiatrist. She is the only person with whom he will converse. Felix Leiter (Jeffrey Wright) shows up with Logan Ash (Billy Magnussen), a guy who smiles too much but whom Leiter seems to trust, despite his decades of experience. They're here to coax Bond out of retirement. Bond says no and leaves the club. Seconds after Bond says he's not going to fall for a pretty young thing, he jumps onto a scooter with a woman who turns out to be the new 007 and who tells him to stay away from the mission. This scene is pretty cringe-y, but it's only because I don't immediately cheer when I see that they've "replaced" 007 with a strong, independent, black woman. We have no idea who she is. No backstory whatsoever. She just appears. We're supposed to identify and adore. Bond can't resist the temptation to get back at Spectre, so he agrees to the off-the-books mission. This is a really fun bit that actually feels like a real Bond movie. He meets up with Paloma (Ana de Armas), who is extremely competent and fun and an excellent partner for Bond. They get Russian scientist Obruchev (David Dencik) -- inventor of the nanobot killers -- away from MI6 and the new 007. This is after Obruchev has thwarted Blofeld's plan to kill Bond and instead programmed the nanobots to wipe out every last member of Spectre (except for Blofeld, who is still in prison, but somehow telecommunicating from the high-security wing of Belmarsh). This seems kind of convenient because suddenly ... all of Spectre is just gone. The insidious, global, immensely rich organization that Bond has been chasing for many films is just snuffed out by a completely new villain who came out of literally nowhere. There is no explanation given as to why he's so powerful, why he's so wealthy or capable ... or anything. They just tell you that he is, so he must be awesome? It's circular logic. It is, apparently, enough. There is no build-up to let us fear his power, his inevitability. He just is. Similarly, there is no build-up to Blofeld's assassination attempt on Bond. Before we can even really tell what's going on and start worrying about it, we realize that the plan we only just learned about seconds ago has been thwarted and that now all of Spectre is dead. This is childish storytelling. Paloma and Bond escape with Obruchev, snatching him away from 007. Paloma exits stage left, while Bond bundles Obruchev into a seaplane. They fly to a boat with Leiter and Logan in the middle of the open ocean. Logan gets the better of both of them, mortally gut-shoots Leiter and traps Bond in a burning, bombed boat. Again, Logan came out of nowhere, with no backstory and no reason why he should be able to get the drop on and then best two of the most experienced agents of all time. There is no tension. Things just happen. We are expected to accept them. Expecting the storytellers (there are four of them) to explain anything to us is futile. Felix Leiter, Bond-movie stalwart since Live and Let Die died for absolutely nothing, killed by a zero. He might as well have tripped over a crack in the sidewalk and hit his head. That would have been darkly funnier. I'm not sure whether that was the message that they were going for (that shit sometimes happens, there's no explaining it, we are lost in the darkness), but that's also a pretty jarring change from previous Bond-style films -- and it's also indistinguishable from lazy and/or incompetent writing. No need to explain or make it dramatic or anything. The movie is almost three hours long, but it somehow manages to introduce gigantic plot points with no drama, while lingering on ephemera for painfully long minutes. They spent longer making it absolutely clear that Q is a gay man and was expecting gay company for dinner and that everybody's fine with that because we're all enlightened. Also 007 is now a black woman. Did you get that? You got a problem with that? James Bond as PSA. Madeleine is visited by Lyutsifer Safin (Rami Malek). He is a new client of hers. He reveals himself immediately to be the masked man who'd killed her mother. He gives her a gift of the mask. That is the last we hear of the mask. It has no other significance. Literally none. Also, yes, that is his fucking name. "Lyutsifer". WTF. They used to name them tongue-in-cheek as "Dr. Goodhead" or "Pussy Galore". There was a sense of fun about it. But Madeleine doesn't even spend a second wondering who the fuck names their kid -- or themselves -- after the devil. James Bond used to at least smirk at these childish naming jokes. This movie is so deadly serious that you almost feel admonished for enjoying anything. This is not a problem because there's not a lot to enjoy. So Safin magically coerces Madeleine into applying nanobots that are targeted to kill Blofeld. It's a bit unclear why she would do this because Safin is such a mumbler -- even though they give him long soliloquies, he mumbles them and you're left straining to figure out what the hell he's talking about -- but I think he threatened her daughter? Who knows? Who cares? The plot is moving forward! Long story short, Bond shows up and goes to the interview with her, she chickens out, he grabs her hands to ask her what's going on, she leaves, he touches Blofeld, Blofeld dies. Another wonderful key character easily killed, with neither drama nor tension. Next, Bond visits Madeleine at her home in Norway (no idea why she lives there, other than that the Tourism Board of Norway probably paid the film to make it happen) and they are lovers once again. Safin finds them because he is all-powerful. There's a pretty good chase scene through the lush Norwegian forests and flatlands. Bond kills Ash with no ceremony. Safin kidnaps Madeleine and Mathilde with literally no ceremony or problems. She runs out of bullets at just the right time for him to effect his easy win. This guy just can't lose. The final scene is at a missile base on a "disputed" island between Russia and Japan. (I have no idea if they were being cheeky about "disputed" islands between China and Korea and Japan in the South China Sea and frankly don't care because these writers are the last people to whom I would turn for pointed political commentary.) Stuff happens. Madeleine escapes by blinding Primo (the one-eyed guy who seems to be Safin's main henchman, although I only learned his name afterward), but Primo is still pretty good to fight Bond later, so it's unclear how blind he became. It literally doesn't matter. Safin releases Mathilde, but then nothing happens to her and her mother rescues her and they escape with 007 (well, now she's called Nomi because she "gave" her title back to Bond because they're friends now, whatever, no-one cares) and they're immediately safe with no drama or tension or worry on our behalf. The whole island is a nanobot factory and must be destroyed, so Bond orders an airstrike and M agonizes over the international incident, but orders the strike anyway. This whole "earbud Bond" thing started with Skyfall, I think. I remember how annoying it was to have the whole first twenty minutes of the movie be James Bond being yelled at and directed by M instead of him being awesome in the field on his own. This is now a standard feature because, apparently, we would much rather watch movies of people talking to each other on devices than actually doing things on their own. If they are doing awesome things, then they better also be talking to other people on devices. Anyway, Bond does a bunch of awesome stuff, kills a bunch of people easily, then gets to the control room of the blast doors that he has to open. Despite Q's warning that it's all old tech and that he will walk him through it, Bond easily figures it all out in seconds. I thought that was one of the funnier bits in the movie. To balance that, the script has Bond kill Primo by getting him in a full nelson and then using the super-magnet in his watch to blow up Primo's artificial eye. Bond's earpiece? Just fine. Unaffected. In fact, it starts buzzing immediately after the kill. Just. So. Lazy. Also lazy is just injecting the Deus Ex Machina of Safin into the story whenever he's needed. The standoff occurs because Bond just runs the hell out in the middle of the widest open space on the island to ... kick at closed blast doors? Anyway, Safin shows up, shoots him a bunch, poisons him with nanobots targeted to Mathilde and Madeleine, wheezes and mumbles a bunch in triumph and is unceremoniously killed by Bond. So Bond gets shot five times (or so) but he takes a licking and keeps on ticking. This is fortunate because he's literally the only one not wearing any body armor or helmet or anything on the entire island. Whereas those wearing armor drop immediately from one pistol shot, Bond has little trouble moving around after being filled with lead. Again: why are you giving me so much time to notice this shit? It seemed ludicrous during the movie. The whole point of an action movie is to distract me with enough awesomeness and fun that I only notice the gaping plot-holes afterward, when I'm discussing the movie with my friends. JFC what a dumpster fire of a movie. The cinematics were occasionally lovely. The product placements were once again a bit more subtle. The story was a disaster. It was obviously written by a committee. If not, the writers should be ashamed of themselves. At one point, Safin literally listed bullet points of what had happened so far -- I imagine this was a point at which the audience claimed to have been lost in test viewings, so they "fixed it up". The main thread was kind of interesting, including the twist at the end with the nanobots coded to kill Madeleine and Mathilde should Bond come into contact with them. That was a neat twist, but they hurried it so much -- almost as a throwaway -- to get on to the important bit of ending the final James Bond film with a ten-minute phone call filled with "I love yous". I am not kidding. Wilder S04 (2022) -- "8/10" This final season takes us back to Rosa Wilder's (Sarah Spale) hometown of Unterwies in Switzerland, where she's retired from policework and working the farm with her father. One night, a local policeman is killed after he breaks up a fight at the Restaurant Sonne. Rosa's father was involved in the fight, but the other guy was very drunk, and was picking on him because he'd "murdered" those kids in S01. Rosa is pulled out of retirement until another officer can be found. She agrees to help investigate while the trail is fresh. They call up Kägi (Marcus Signer), who's also retired. He agrees and heads up the mountain with his airstream trailer and his mom's poodle Henry in tow. There were a couple of weird incidents that night. The same night that the policeman was killed and the drunk guy started a fight, the same drunk guy cut off a boar's head and threw it through a window. Elias, a young man who looks like he has a learning disability of some kind was involved in the whole thing somehow. Either he observed the crime or crimes or he perpetrated them. In the final scene of episode one, he's wearing the policeman's baseball cap. At the same time, there's Robert Räber's accountant (Liechti) who owes local criminal Rainer lots of gambling debt. Liechti delivers a lot of dirt on a local cartel/family that's been bribing their way into and then skimming massively off of construction contracts. Kägi meets up with a woman who's more than willing to talk about that, as well. Another member of the cartel/family happens to be Wilder's baby-daddy, Dani Räber. Wilder jumps back into investigating, teaming up with Kägi. They find out with the retired police chief Res that Elias didn't have anything to do with it. He'd picked up the cap and tried to return it to Betsch while he was roughing up Zingg outside the restaurant. Zingg goes to Wilder and Kägi to confess to his activities on that night because they actually exonerate him. Betsch had been trying to have a kid with his wife Isabelle for three years -- to no avail. Isabelle is actually Res's and Charlotte's daughter, who's Elias's sister. Neat, because Elias and Res's daughter had a kid when she was fifteen -- but they gave it up for adoption. It was only later that Elias fell on his head and lost his faculties. Dani Räber fools Rainer into giving him the blackmail materials back for only CHF10,000 instead of the CHF350,000 he'd demanded. Räber's accountant Liechti swears to Rainer that he'd been tricked and that those papers were worth a lot more. Dani's a real hard-ass, taking after his father. He got his girlfriend Julie pregnant (doesn't this guy ever use birth control? He fathered Wilder's kid as well.) He pisses off Julie by being unbelievably rude about finding out he's going to be a father. Julie takes off in a huff, gets into a motorcycle accident, and Dani walks it back a bit. Zingg gets a bunch of cash from Dani's father and is told to take a vacation. He decides to head for Thailand, but looks like he has somebody to shoot before he catches his flight. What he is, in fact, doing, is going to the new dam to commit suicide spectacularly during the dedication ceremony. Robert is annoyed that his moment in the sun is ruined, but also seemingly legitimately heartbroken by Zingg's death. Zingg's estranged wife Nora storms into the ceremony, accusing Robert of being a murderer. She'd read Zingg's suicide note, which detailed all he'd done over the years with Robert, which was basically cartel behavior between Zingg's and Nora's brother's gravel company as well as pretty much all local businesses. Zinng also writes to her of having bludgeoned his own brother-in-law (Nora's brother) in the back of the head to keep him from leaving the cartel, after which Robert suggested that they "finish him" under tons of gravel to make it look like an accident. This was all swept under the rug years ago. The guilt was what drove Zingg to suicide. Kägi and Wilder don't know to what degree Dani was involved, so Rosa puts the moves on him but can't get at his phone to get at his data. Kägi accuses her of chickening out, but really -- what were the odds that Dani was going to leave his phone unlocked and unattended for long enough for her to clone it? Oh, actually pretty good, I guess. That's weird. When you have as much to hide as Dani, isn't it odd that you just leave your phone lying around without even a passcode? When your girlfriend is a notoriously nosy cop? No? That's just how people are? Especially those egomaniacs like Dani who think nothing can touch them? Ok, then. In other news, Rainer Strunz kidnaps Rosa and Dani's son Tim, leading to a high-speed chase to the gravel-processing plant where the local police trap him and try to talk him out. He's actually kidnapped Rosa's dad Peter and Tim, so Rosa's super-level-headed about it. Hahaha, just kidding. She's terrible and whiny and nearly jeopardizes the whole situation, simply lucking out that Rainer isn't actually willing to kill or even really harm his hostages. I wish this part had been handled with a bit more aplomb -- i.e. as Kägi handled it -- but it is what it is. Rainer gets away, but runs into Dani and Liechti, who tackles and kills him with his own gun. Lucky that. Liechti ends up seeing a video of Zingg and Robert murdering Nora's brother, as does, eventually, Dani. The cops don't see this video despite having gotten a warrant to toss the Räber offices. Dani and Robert use their prodigious political connections with a senator (Kantonsrätin) who is deeply involved in the cartel to get the police off of their backs. Kägi is not happy with it and swears he's going "drain the swamp, sooner or later." And then nothing happens! OMG so dark! This is actually pretty well-played: the rich guys all get away with their plots and self-enrichment and the government can't touch them. Yet. Fingers crossed for Robert and Dani Räber's comeuppance in season five? At the very least, we got to see Dani use his knowledge of the video to finally blackmail Robert into stepping down, not only as CEO, but also as the leader of the cartel. He's out. Dani's in. A real Godfather moment. Speaking of Dani, he's back with Julie, who backs out of being with him, admitting that the child is not his, but Bertchi's. This is where it all goes a bit off the rails. Isabelle had the incest-child, but Charlotte and Res took it away, supposedly to put it up for adoption. Instead, they stopped along the long road out of the valley and went to a lake where Charlotte drowned it. Elias was on a nearby slope, watching the whole thing. He confronted Res later, but there was some shoving and then Elias wasn't ... Elias anymore. He remembers something, though, because he returns to the lake again and again, striding fully clothed into the wintry waters, almost as penance. We're not done: Isabelle had find out that Betsch was cheating on her with Julie and confronted him in his police car. He yelled back that she wouldn't even sleep with him anymore. She apologized (!) because she's kind of severely damaged, I guess. Then Elias appeared in the road out of nowhere and Betsch screeched to a halt. They all got out to confront Elias, but Isabelle immediately went to comfort him. Betsch was beside himself and told her to be with Elias, if she likes him so much. This hit a bit too close to home. Betsch capped it off by mocking Isabelle with the news that he and Julie were pregnant and that he was going to be a father. Isabelle lustily bludgeoned him to death with his own flashlight. We find this out only after Res and Isabelle had found the bloody flashlight in Elias's cabin -- planted there by Isabelle, who was going to let Elias take the fall. But Elias had committed suicide in front of Charlotte's Postauto as it exited the avalanche gallery. Rosa, Res, and Isabelle witnessed that directly and it got Rosa asking questions whereupon Charlotte and Res finally admitted what had really happened. Phew! That was a lot of pretty dark stuff. To lighten the mood a bit, Kägi picks up his mother's dog Henry from the kennel, where he'd left him "forever" a few days before. Rosa stays in town. They are all reunited at Paul's funeral an unspecified time later, just in case the mood was too good. Kingsman: The Golden Circle (2017) -- "4/10" This movie was such a letdown from the first version. Sequels are often letdowns, but this one is just so phoned in. There are so many good actors in this sequel, but the script -- and the dialogue -- is so terrible and stilted and ham-handed that it's hard to imagine how it even got made with a straight face. Eggsy (Taron Egerton) is back, as are Harry Hart (Colin Firth) and Merlin (Mark Strong). There's now apparently a Statesmen group in America that corresponds to the Kingsmen group from England. In that group are Tequila (Channing Tatum), Ginger (Halle Berry), Whiskey (Pedro Pascal), and Champ (Jeff Bridges). Poppy (Julianne Moore) is the billionaire bad-ass who's trying to drug the world. I also spotted Emily Watson phoning in a performance somewhere. Elton John plays himself. Everyone is awful, seemingly fully aware of how needlessly stupid this movie is. Eggsy is in a weird-ass relationship with Princess Tilde (Hanna Alström). There's an excruciatingly emaciated femme fatale Clara (Poppy Delevingne), who looks like she's actually malnourished, older than she should be. It's all so awful. Everything is highly technological. Everyone is super-rich. This is just so bad. There is no tension. The plot is basically that Poppy is trying to blackmail the planet into buying an antidote for the drug that she's peddled to all four corners of the Earth. I can't imagine how much money they had to pay these people to get them to take part. They even used CGI for a campfire in a cabin. They couldn't even do that on location somewhere. This looks like a children's movie, except that people really die and they curse a lot. Just when I thought it couldn't get any worse, Merlin sacrifices himself to save Eggsy, but not before he delivers a terrible rendition of Denver's Country Road. Julianne Moore is campy AF and almost convinces me that this movie is a joke -- but everyone else is so deadly serious. Except for Elton John, who now breaks into Saturday's All Right for Fightin' as background for the next giant fight. This fight features for flawless and impossible technology as well as martial arts from Elton. I just don't know what to say. There is, for no apparent reason whatsoever, a female robot in the fight. There are also robot dogs. There's also a guy named Charlie (Edward Holcroft) with a robot arm. I'm kind of losing track of who lost what bet in this movie. I was going to raise the rating by a star for the campy battle and Moore's histrionics, but then Eggsy killed someone in cold blood for ... reasons ... and then Galahad spent two minutes explaining everything in painful detail. And then they killed Poppy with a drug overdose, pretty much also in cold blood. I'm surprised they didn't make any prison-rape jokes; maybe I missed it. Death Race (2008) -- "7/10" It's Jason Statham in a hyper-driving action film in a Mad Max-like prison race more than ably directed by Paul W.S. Anderson. There's a bad warden named Hennesey (Joan Allen) who runs "death races" that are televised. It's kind of like Running Man: the prisoner that wins the race earns his freedom. There's a decent cast, with Statham's Coach (Ian McShane), a rival Machine Gun Joe (Tyrese Gibson) and Statham's co-pilot Case (Natalie Martinez). The visuals are pretty good, even if the plot is utterly predictable. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] See "All of Jerry's Girlfriends, Ranked" for a complete list. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4344 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4344 Fri, 31 Dec 2021 22:58:11 +0100 -- "7/10" 2. "Michael Che: Shame the Devil (2021)" <#Michael> -- "8/10" 3. "Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021)" <#Shang> -- "8/10" 4. "Dune (1984)" <#Dune> -- "8/10" 5. "K-19: The Widowmaker (2002)" <#K> -- "8/10" 6. "Charité intensiv: Station 43 (2021)" <#Charité> -- "8/10" 7. "F is for Family (2021)" <#F> -- "8/10" 8. "Office Christmas Party (2016)" <#Office> -- "8/10" 9. "Shazam! (2019)" <#Shazam> -- "8/10" 10. "Taken (2008)" <#Taken> -- "7/10" 11. "Don't Look Up! (2021)" <#Don> -- "10/10" These are my notes to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. I've recently transferred my reviews to IMDb and made "the list" of around 1600 ratings publicly available. I've included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other -- I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. Big Mouth S05 (2021) -- "7/10" More of the same as the previous seasons, perhaps even a bit raunchier. Episode 7 -- "I F**king Hate You" was quite good. The show is explicit and sometimes feels a bit over-the-top, but it also purports to bring the innermost thoughts of pubescent teens into the real world. In that, it does a great job. They bring back the old classics: The Shame Wizard and Depression Kitty (my absolute favorite). They also introduce some new characters: Love Bugs and Hate Caterpillars. These work quite well as rhetorical devices as well. Missy gets a Hate Caterpillar, as does Nick. Michael Che: Shame the Devil (2021) -- "8/10" I took a point off for a very rocky start. He got going, though, and moved on to material that was funny without being pandering. He stopped so many times in the first ten minutes for clapping that it was tough for him to get any traction. After twenty minutes, he's doing just fine. Hold out for it. "What did we get last summer? Let's see...we got Aunt Jemima fired. That's something." "Donald Trump was on Saturday Night Live. He was nice to me! He even gave me a nickname...'One of the good ones'," "Democrats are like condoms. We'll use you, but, you know, it doesn't feel good. We just want to prevent some other shit from happening." "Trump's like, 'you know the FBI's setting up niggas.' And white people say, 'no they don't'. And black people like 'welllll...'. It's just because Trump said it. It's a great thing to say, but it's the worst possible person to be saying it." "From now on, I only use two pronouns: 'this nigga' and 'that nigga, as in, 'that nigga Caitlyn Jenner killed someone with her car.'" "I had a girlfriend, she was so jealous, I'm not saying it's her fault I cheated on her, but she gave me the confidence...she believed in me." After he said "retarded" in a joke, he said "I know that's not a nice word, but I said it to make you laugh." So many levels. "We don't diagnose black people with shit. When I was growing up, we just had 'crazy' and 'ain't nothing wrong with that nigga' Now we got 'autism'. I feel like that's progress. "Yeah, we don't diagnose mental health for black people. I know some girls, they bipolar and they like 'ain't nothing wrong with me, I'm a gemini.' 'Get the fuck outta here, Lakeesha, you just bit me.' ...Flava Flav wears a viking helmet and a clock. Every day. That's not nothing." "Now they're saying on Sesame Street that they got the first autistic puppet. The first? They got a nigger on that show called 'The Count'. Now, I'm not a doctor..." "And then there's crazy. You don't get any help when you're crazy. You just get a nickname. It's whatever your name is...with the word 'crazy' in front of it. It's not to help you; it's to warn others." "Depression is the most privileged disease of all. White people hate when I say that. Depression is privileged because it implies that your life is something that you shouldn't be sad about. Black people usually don't have that. I don't know if ya'll are history buffs...but I can't imagine two slaves standing in a field and one says to the other 'What's the matter? Something got you down?'" Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (2021) -- "8/10" This was a super-solid Marvel movie, definitely top ten, maybe top five (I haven't thought about it that much). It has wonderful fight choreography, it's well-filmed, with nicely pulled-back cameras and no quick cuts: they practiced this until it looked glorious. Simu Liu moves really well (it's him!). The stunts on the bus could have been a Jackie Chan movie (e.g. the way he moves over and around the bars, or the jokey way he pulled the "request stop" cable, or how he saved the two women from falling out of the bus). Shang-Chi (Simu Liu) is an awesome guy: he lives in a garage, with his laundry strung up along the door. His friend Katy (Awkwafina) is a great balance and comedic sparring partner. I really like the way they show multi-lingual households, how everyone understands all of the languages, but everyone speaks the one they're most comfortable with. This has been my experience as well. They are parking attendants in New York when his father Xu Wenwu's (Tony Chiu-Wai Leung) henchmen come to town, including Razor Fist (Florian Munteanu), who has a giant laser blade instead of a right forearm. Shang-Chi fights them off while Katy drives the bus to safety because that's her superpower/skill: driving. It will be important later, obviously. Shang-Chi travels back to Macau to look for his sister and to warn her about their father. His sister Li (Fala Chen) is a bad-ass in her own right, having started a high-stakes fighting ring after having run away from home at sixteen. Shang-Chi ends up facing off against her there -- and losing. Xu's henchmen follow them there, but they escape with their skins, but not their jade necklaces given to them by their mother. The jade stones are keys to unlock the map back to to their mother's kingdom. Xu had found her and faced off against her long ago when he he'd been looking for her magical village. She was the only one over centuries who'd even been able to defeat him, despite the 10 rings he wears and wields as weapons. Years later, after she's died and the children had left, Xu becomes obsessed that she was calling him to rescue her from her village, where, instead of being dead, she's trapped in a cave. He is deluded but adamant and extremely powerful. Li, Katy and Shang hunt down their father and confront him, but he takes them prisoner. With the help of Trevor Slattery (Ben Kingsley, reprising his role as the Mandarin from Iron Man 3), they escape and head into the bamboo forest to seek out their mother's village before he can find it. With Trevor's little faceless friend Morris (a denizen of the fairy realm from which their mother came) as navigator and Katy as driver, they make it through and meet their aunt Ying Nan (Michelle Yeoh). She trains Shang-Chi to confront his father. Katy practices archery. Li is already awesome enough. Xu breaks through to the village and joins battle with them. He goes to the wall in front of the cave and starts to break it down. Instead of releasing his wife, he's releasing demons. They attack everyone in the village, not recognizing a difference between Xu's forces and the villagers. These forces team up against their common demonic enemy. Xu manages to release the big-ass, bad-ass monster while Li has found a friendly dragon under the lake to assist them. A giant battle ensues, taking place mostly in the sky. Shang-Chi defeats Xu. Xu sees the error of his ways, then sacrifices himself to protect his son from the monster he's released. I have no idea if there's a metaphor in there. Shang-Chi and Katy return to New York, but are soon whisked away by Dr. Strange's right-hand man Wong (Benedict Wong). Li sets up shop in her father's demesne. Dune (1984) -- "8/10" Paul Atreides (Kyle MachLachlan) is the scion of House Atreides, which begins the film on its home world of Caladan, a very watery planet. When his father Duke Leto (Jürgen Prochnow) is "promoted" to oversee the desert planet of Arrakis (Dune), he travels with the whole retinue, swordmaster Duncan Idaho (Richard Jordan). master-at-arms Gurney Halleck (Patrick Stewart), Mentat Thufir Hawat (Freddie Jones) and, of course, his mother Lady Jessica (Francesca Annis). Doctor Yueh (Dean Stockwell) betrays the family, but was forced into it by House Harkonnen. He almost gets his revenge, but his plan goes awry. The House Harkonnen is classic Lynch, from the grotesque Baron Vladimir Harkonnen (Kenneth McMillan), with his half-mad doctor (Leonardo Cimino) and his own mentat, the evil Peter De Vries (Brad Dourif). The Baron's nephews Feyd Rautha (Sting) and The Beast Rabban (Paul Smith) chew the hell out of the scenery (Sting flexes his little muscles in an interesting codpiece in one scene). Paul's sister Alia (Alicia Witt) is basically Fremen, whereas Chani (Sean Young) is only half a role, even in this rendering. The Shadout Mapes (Linda Hunt) gets a little more screen time, but not much. Doctor Kynes (Max von Sydow) is the liaison with the Fremen, a man of science who has converted considerably due to his long time on the desert planet. There are a lot of Lynch's favorite actors as well: Stilgar (Everett McGill) and Nefud (Jack Nance) are both played by actors from Twin Peaks. David Lynch himself plays a role as a Spice Worker (uncredited). He communicates with Duke Leto from the spice harvester whose ornithopter heavy-lift vehicle is not coming in time to rescue it from an incoming sandworm. The Emperor Shaddam IV (José Ferrer) plots with the baron to destroy House Atreides. The Princess Irulan (Virginia Madsen) is basically window dressing. The plotting is a bit jarring, with large gaps of years skipped over too quickly. Paul becomes a messiah, leading the fremen to victory against House Harkonnen. Paul masters a sandworm, Jessica gives birth to Alia, who grows up quickly, already blue-eyed because she was in the womb when Jessica took the spice to become a reverend mother. It should have been two parts -- or a much longer movie -- but it ... wasn't. The final cut is something only someone who's read the book can follow. Luckily, the production design is fantastic. Also luckily, I have read the books. Twice. The characters are fascinating. Some of the design choices are so bizarre that you can't help but respect them anyway. I liked it. K-19: The Widowmaker (2002) -- "8/10" The story is about the K-19, the Soviet Union's first nuclear-powered submarine, which was behind schedule and not up-to-par in its construction or supplies. The original captain Polenin, after several failed drills and lagging behind in the schedule, is replaced by the higher-ups with Vostrikov, a man who is the Navy's most decorated submarine captain -- but whose father was a hero of the revolution, but ended up in a gulag. I'm pretty sure that this movie could only have been made in the two brief decades between the fall of the Soviet Empire and the rekindling of the cold war by the U.S. I can't imagine that a film depicting Soviets or Russians in such a humanizing manner could have been made while I was growing up...or now. At first, the Russians sailors are kind of depicted in the same way that an American crew would be, with the same jokes, etc. Perhaps there was a bit more emphasis on the shoddy craftsmanship and supply logistics, but it didn't strike me as over-the-top jingoistic. The Soviets would admit that this is kind of how it was; one had to make do with cut corners in a place without near-infinite wealth ready to hand for the military. I may be reading too much into it, but there is an interesting dynamic between Capt. Mikhail Polenin (Liam Neeson) and Capt. Alexei Vostrikov (Harrison Ford), representing bottom-up, rule-from-below communism and top-down, rule-by-iron-first, hierarchical capitalism.authoritarianism. Vostrikov gets lucky with his bold attempts to exceed boundaries a couple of times -- until his luck runs out. In the end, he follows Polenin's advice to let the sailors/men decide for themselves whether they want to die for their country. Posed this way, Vostrikov's "order" gets a resounding confirmation and he sees the error of his ways. Fate saves them all from being captured by the Americans when a Soviet boat shows up just in the nick of time -- just as they were about to surrender to a nearby American destroyer. I don't know whether this is to reward Vostrikov's change of heart in how he commands -- his capitulation to a more "communist" way of running things -- or whether this is how the story really went. According to the "Wikipedia article" , the script is almost 100% true-to-life. The original crew was consulted and they had a strong influence on changing the original script -- which was likely much more jingoistic. The movie was directed by one of America's most jingoistic directors, Kathryn Bigelow, so I can only imagine that I'm interpreting it differently than she intended. At any rate, it's a pretty good movie and Harrison Ford and Liam Neeson act the hell out of it, as far as I'm concerned. I actually thought the final scene, in the cemetery, was quite touching. The aging makeup was very good. There are other good bit characters: the atomic technician who's too clever by half, etc. Charité intensiv: Station 43 (2021) -- "8/10" This is a four-part, two-hour series filmed in the ICU of the Charité hospital during the winter of 2020/2021. The scenes are sobering and heartbreaking, but well-worth watching. There are scenes with young patients lying on their faces to free up their lungs more. There are others whose lungs no longer work at all, who are oxygenated for weeks with an ECMO -- a machine that oxygenates blood outside of the body. We see a few journeys of the ECMO ambulance as they make pick-ups. The doctors and nurses are compassionate, intelligent, understanding, and complex characters who are truly the best of us. When a patient must be let go, they are nearly as devastated as the families. They despise losing patients. At the end, we see one patient who'd been there for nearly two months leave the ICU, headed for physical therapy to try to put his life back together. A ray of hope. I cannot imagine what it looks like there, now, one year later, and with much, much higher case numbers. F is for Family (2021) -- "8/10" This season finds the Murphy family "mourning" the loss of Frank's father. Sue takes the opportunity to make amends with her own father, who's a right bastard. She recalls how she was the one who outed her gay brother Louis to her dad many years ago. She also wants to patch things up with Louis. She tries to get them all to attend a Thanksgiving dinner to come together as a family again. Frank, meanwhile, searches feverishly for "Box 16", mentioned in his father's last, whispered breath. Vic is trying to raise his infant son on his own because his baby-mom leaves them. He turns to Sue for help. He and his other affluent friends -- all of whom are parents by now -- are enough to support a fledgling business for Sue, who's always searching for meaning -- and income -- outside of the home. Mohican Airlines, meanwhile, fuses with another, making Ala-hican Airlines. Frank's new boss is a bit passive-aggressive. The finale is at the airport, where a drunken stuntman is awesome, but in the wrong way so that no-one is happy, especially not Ala-hican Airlines, who'd paid for him to be there. However, Rosie manages to get the better of the crooked mayor and the local mafia boss, who've been trying to destroy his district in order to build a highway. This might be the last role played by Michael Kenneth Williams (as Smokey Greenwood, the neighborhood vending-machine refiller/condom dealer). One of the greats. RIP. Office Christmas Party (2016) -- "8/10" This movie has lots of good one-liners, witty repartee, truly inspired party situations, and a whole cast of comedic talent. It's not meant to be anything for than it is -- an R-rated distraction. A software company branch is about to be shut down, but their boss Clay Vanstone (T.J. Miller) throws a huge bash to try to save morale and maybe save the business. He's courting genius developer Walter Davis (Courtney B. Vance) with the help of manager Josh Parker (Jason Bateman) and hotshot developer Tracey Hughes (Olivia Munn). His sister and CEO Carol Vanstone (Jennifer Aniston) is on the way there to pull the plug on the whole branch, but finds a rager going when she gets there and notices that her brother might just swing it. Rounding out the cast are a developer who gets a prostitute from Trina the pimp (Jillian Bell), HR head Mary (Kate McKinnon), Jeremy (Rob Corddry), Fred (Randall Park), and Allison (Vanessa Bayer), whose roles at the company escape me but who are essential to the film. The party gets incredibly huge, with the pimp kidnapping Clay because she'd heard he had $300,000 that he could get her -- but he can't because he's too drunk and high to do much of anything except drive them through the streets of Chicago at top speed, trying to jump the river on an open drawbridge. Meanwhile, Mary, Tracey, Carol, and Josh have joined forces to rescue Clay and are hot on their tail in Mary's minivan. They stop at a Russian club where Carol reveals that she not only knows Russian, but jiu jitsu or some shit and just takes out several people on her own. After they find Clay has left, they give chase. Hilarity ensues and they all crash and stuff. Clay crashes into the main trunk line of Internet connectivity for the whole area. Afterward, they return to the office to find a Boschian hellscape -- some truly inspired set design reminiscent of Bachelor Party. Tracey, genius coder, figures that she could put a plan she's been meaning to try into action, to use a "cool trick" to get the network back online and provide the city with mobile connectivity with their company's technology. To no-one's surprise, they succeed and save the branch and everyone is friends and they get Clay from the hospital and promise his doctor that he won't get any alcohol, which he totally will, because they're all going out for a celebratory breakfast. The end. Pretty much everyone is great in this, but Bateman, Aniston, Miller, and Munn stand out. McKinnon is also very funny. Recommended. Shazam! (2019) -- "8/10" This is a fun movie about a teenager Billy Batson (Asher Angel) who is granted super-powers by an otherworldly wizard (Djimon Hounsou). Billy becomes Shazam! (Zachary Levi) when he says the magic word that is his name. He is an orphan who ends up with a family with a bunch of other kids, including Freddy (Jack Dylan Grazer), who's a wise-cracking kid with an encyclopedic knowledge of superheroes. In another thread, we learn how a Dr. Sivana (Mark Strong) became the evil man that he is, and how he became obsessed with the power of the wizard. He follows the whispers of the seven Sins, otherworldly beasts who want to defeat the wizard and rule on Earth. He acquires their power for himself, working with them. He eventually joins battle with Shazam!, kidnapping his family and being all sorts of dastardly until Shazam! and Freddie and the other kids figure out a plan to stop him. The plan results in them all getting Shazam!-like superpowers, which is a neat twist. All's well that ends well. I was surprised at how entertaining this movie was, The cast was good, the characters sympathetic, and the script was quite funny (the scene where Shazam! can't hear Sivana's supervillain speech as they hover, blocks apart, in the high winds of the city, is quite funny). Saw it in German. Taken (2008) -- "7/10" The original and still the best one. Liam Neeson plays in hardcore-dad porn where he tells his ex-wife not to let his daughter go to Paris, then caves, but gets her to agree to conditions, then she's kidnapped anyway because she and her friend are nimrods and do exactly the thing they were told not to do. Liam jumps in, makes his famous speech about hunting down everyone involved, then flies to Paris to begin the hunt. He hunts, he kills, he has minor setbacks. He dispatches them. He gets closer. He's almost there. He has a bigger setback. He dispatches that one, as well. He hunts his daughter down to a yacht, where he slaughters everyone on board and rescues her. She is grateful but has likely learned nothing. Liam is humbly triumphant in his ex-wife's face. Her milquetoast husband is forced to thank him. The end. Saw it in Italian. Don't Look Up! (2021) -- "10/10" "The truth is much more depressing. They're not even smart enough to be as evil as you're giving them credit for." Kate Dibiasky (Jennifer Lawrence) is a doctoral candidate in astronomy, working with Dr. Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio), when she discovers a comet headed straight toward Earth, with impact in six and 1/2 months. They immediately contact Dr. Teddy Oglethorpe (Rob Morgan) of the Planetary Defense Coordination Office. The data checks out, they're all horrified, and they get a meeting with the president of the United States (Meryl Streep). She and her son Jason (Jonah Hill) receive them and then totally blow them off. [1] The three decide to break security clearance and go on the country's most popular morning show The Rip, hosted by Jack Bremmer (Tyler Perry) and Brie Evantee (Cate Blanchett), who ... also blow them off. But Brie is enchanted with Dr. Mindy and starts an affair with him. The world mocks, the world doesn't care, the world ignores. The satire is thick and inspired and fun and interesting and dark. There are a lot of quick in-jokes and snappy repartee and side bits filling this movie to the brim. I really, really like Jennifer Lawrence and Jonah Hill (who calls her "Boy with the Dragon Tattoo" and tells her "Thanks for dressing up" when she visits the White House in a hoodie and jeans). The White House eventually gets confirmation from "their own Ivy Leagure scientists" that the comet is real and, for some reason, want the original astronomers to be involved in the project. This wouldn't make any sense whatsoever -- neither would trying to "sit" on the news, as if the rest of the world doesn't have telescopes or the Internet -- but that's the point: the response is childish and incredibly politically driven. They're all self-involved morons with too much power and money and too little brains -- possessing only a singular talent for self-aggrandizing and failing upward. The president at first ignored the comet because mid-terms were coming up in three weeks, but, a week later, needs to cover up the scandal where she sexted a picture of her nether regions (her "cootch", as Kate put it) to her porn-star lover. Pivot to saving the planet, I guess. They put together an incredible effort to intercept the comet with a refurbished space shuttle. It is piloted by Benedict Drask (Ron Perlman). It takes off wonderfully, accompanied by a dozen other rockets (for whatever reason), but the president is forced to abandon the mission when one of her billionaire, platinum-level donors Peter Isherwell (Mark Rylance), who runs a giant tech company, tells her to call it off. Instead, they're now putting together a mission that will rescue the benevolent comet because it has tremendous value (trillions!). They will break it apart into a smaller pieces and then harvest the minerals from the ocean floor, wherever the pieces fall. None of this is scientifically vetted or peer-reviewed. It is just assumed that it will work because tech billionaires are super-smart and surround themselves with super-smart people who are definitely not sycophants pretending to be experts in fields about which they know nothing in order to get filthy rich for themselves. [2] About a quarter of the population of the U.S. no longer even believes in the comet, while many are mad at anyone who wants to stop it from hitting Earth because then we would miss out on all of those delicious resources. Kate is now working at a grocery store as a check-out girl, where she meets Yule (Timothée Chalamet), with whose anarchic group she throws in. Dr. Mindy is having an affair with Brie and is now the president's chief science advisor. He is unnerved that so many colleagues are being sacked and unsure Bash's plan will work. We hear that a comet-smashing effort by the Russians, Chinese, Indians, and Europe has failed, exploding on the launchpad in Baikonur. They do not mention whether there was sabotage, but the possibility is left hanging there. The Bash "Beads" are the only hope now. They take off, not without problems, some exploding on the launch pads, but manage to get 24 of the autonomous robots to the comet, where they set their bombs. Some crash into each other up there, but some attrition was expecected. But the plan doesn't work and the comet proceeds unscathed. The mission-control teams abandons Bash headquarters forthwith. But, of course, there is a backup plan for the people who matter. Isherwell and the president have spots on a fallback ark that they will use to escape the planet. She invites Mindy to join them, but he declines. He returns home to his family. Kate and Yule show up. Oglethorpe shows up. They are all enjoying a dinner together when the comet hits and does what the science said it would do. The ark travels through space, with a lot of attrition, but finally depositing the escapees -- the last remnants of humanity -- on a planet with a breathable atmosphere. The president and Isherwell are still alive and failing upward -- until they ... don't. They are all standing around naked, congratulating themselves on their luck, when the local fauna falls on them. I loved this movie. I would watch it again. Thanks, Adam McKay, for a worthy successor to Idiocracy. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] They wait interminably long with a three-star Air Force general, who offers to get them snacks and drinks, bringing them back and then asking for them to pay for them. Kate discover, at a later meeting, that the snacks and water at the White House are, of course, free. The general charged them anyway. She would continue to obsess over this at various times throughout the movie, an excellent running gag. [1] David Sirota (Story) and Adam McKay (Screenplay/Director) kind of had their work cut out for them in that they didn't have to mention anyone specifically. They just had to capture the mood of things as they are today. I've seen a few other reviews now that try to claim authoritatively which parties and real-world groups correspond to which groups in the movie, but that's all projection. They're all fools. It's kind of like South Park -- everyone is excoriated, except for the rational and compassionate and non-self-obsessed. For a real-world example, I just saw the article "Elon Musk rejects claims his satellites are squeezing out rivals in space" by Richard Waters in my newsfeed, a couple of hours after having finished watching the movie. It tells us that "SpaceX founder points out that space is "extremely enormous," satellites "very tiny."" While I fervently hope that this is a satire article, I assume that it's all too real. The article sagely notes that "Some experts challenged Musk’s claim that satellites in low Earth orbit could safely match the density of cars and trucks on Earth." Telling both sides of the debate! Good for you! This was in response to, "China complain[ing] this month that two Starlink satellites had forced the Chinese space station to take “preventive collision avoidance control” measures in October and July to “ensure the safety and lives of in-orbit astronauts.”" You can read about that in "China upset about needing to dodge SpaceX Starlink satellites" by John Timmer . In that article, China was already being called a nerd for writing "impossibly formal 110-word-long sentence" (in Idiocracy-speak, the Chinese author "talks like a fag") that "pointedly notes that signatories of the treaty, which include the US, are responsible for the actions of any nongovernmental activities based within their borders." The Chinese think words mean things! What a bunch of losers! They deserve to have us take their lunch money! ELON FUNNY. HUR DUR. We are doomed. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4336 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4336 Fri, 05 Nov 2021 18:17:10 +0100 of around 1600 ratings publicly available. I've included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other -- I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga (2020) -- "8/10" This movie is a love letter to the ESC (Eurovision Song Contest) from Will Ferrell, who plays Lars Erickssong, a no-longer-so-young man from Iceland. His singing partner Sigrit Ericksdóttir (Rachel McAdams) is from the same Icelandic village. The two really have no chance to even make the contest on their merits, despite Sigrit's lovely voice. Lars is more enthusiasm than musical talent, though his stage presence fits perfectly for the ESC. They pass the first hurdle when every other Icelandic contestant is killed in a freak boat accident (it explodes in the harbor during a party to which Lars and Sigrit had not been invited). The Icelandic committee is devastated about their chances to win -- all but the head of the committee (Mikael Persbrandt), who knows that Iceland couldn't afford to host the ESC the succeeding year should they win the contest. The pair make it to the ESC and hijinks ensue. They lose faith, they lose each other, they come back together. They declare their love for each other, they switch songs at the end (artistic license; this is not allowed at the ESC), they win the whole damned thing. Lars gains the respect of his father Erick (Pierce Brosnan). Ferrell wrote and produced the whole thing and he does a great job. He really doesn't make fun on the ESC -- he's loved it ever since his Swedish wife and her family introduced him to it in the late 90s. It was a fun time with a lot of genuine laughs and heart. It captures the madness and feel of the ESC perfectly. Recommended. Would watch it again. Turning Point (2021) -- "7/10" [E01] "WTC attacks; background on Afghanistan and Osama bin Laden, Sheik Mohammed, Sheik Rahban" The theme music for this mini-series reminds me very much of the music from The Americans. I honestly can't figure out why they called this series "Turning Point". This episode starts by declaring 9/11 as the "[...] most consequential terrorist attack in the history of mankind", which starts things off in what would become a typically historically ignorant treatment. I guess you can think something like that, if you think that history is only filled with American tragedies -- and those where America is the tragic figure, not the one causing the tragedy. For example, you might disagree if you'd been in Nagasaki on August 9th in 1945. You might feel that having an atomic bomb dropped on your city might be a slightly bigger deal than having under 3,000 people killed in an attack on a city of 8 million. This documentary starts off by telling you that you'd be wrong and that you need to get some perspective and see that Americans are the only real victims. The documentary continues by saying that "no-one could have ever foreseen that [...]" the U.S. actions in Afghanistan in 1979 would lead to 9/11, defining world history in the 21st century. Well, I suppose, if you didn't ask or listen to Noam Chomsky or Chalmers Johnson or Ray McGovern or Robert Fisk or William Blum or Diane Johnstone or any of the myriad others who'd been predicting that the U.S. had done more than enough for the "chickens to come home to roost". The documentary notes that the U.S.-fomented and -funded insurrection in Afghanistan led to a population where "a third had been killed, wounded, or driven into exile." But the 9/11 attack was the most consequential terrorist attack, am I getting this right? Is that because Americans are important whereas Afghans are not? "What was happening was a fusing of politics and religion [...]". This from a guy from a country whose rallying cry for its soldiers is to "fight for God and Country." A bit later, we hear "We failed to understand the power of religion [...]". How stupid can you be? And all this, with no sense of irony? One of the CIA guys they interview is basically bragging about how they "defeated the Soviets." They provide no context as to what was really happening, what the Mujahadeen were really like. They're interviewing Gulbadeen Hekmatyar as if he's a great guy, a loyal ally, all without noting what atrocities he perpetrated in that war. Check out Robert Fisk's giant book The Great War for Civilisation for much more information about that. Then the documentary segues to Iraq and its "desire to exert control over the oil supplies of the world [...]" as if there was any connection whatsoever. Iraq's desire to control its own oil supplies, no? Without any irony, these people talk about Iraq's oil as if it belongs to America, but happens to be stored under Iraq. It is perfectly correct when Bin Laden says that the U.S. wants to take away the Muslim world's oil supplies. That is 100% correct. They'd already been occupied. Their occupiers were never going to be satisfied until they had absolutely everything. This is how it had always been in the Middle East. They could either give it up without a fight or strike back. As usual, the documentary presents the attack on the U.S.S. Cole as if it were a terrorist attack. It was not. The Cole was part of the occupying navy, clearly a military target. [E02] "Pentagon attack and United 93 (went down in PA), collapse of the towers, one after the other, preparing for war." The Pentagon was also a military target (like the Cole), much more defensible as a target than the WTC, which was almost exclusively civilian. There were claims that the CIA had offices in the WTC, which wouldn't be surprising in the least. They interviewed Barbara Lee; I wonder whether they'll mention that she was the lone voice against the AUMF. They do! Well-done! They actually play a good part of her speech. Not the best parts, but at least some of it. To their credit, they also covered the jumpers from the remaining building. That horrifying part has been elided from many other accounts. Wow, they're interviewing Andrew Card (White House Chief of Staff) and Alberto Gonzalez (White House Counsel), both portrayed as reasonable, competent people. Gonzalez: "[The president] knew right away that it was a war. This was not a police matter." But it absolutely should have been a police matter, prosecuted as a crime. Wars are fought between nations. Gonzalez portrays Bush as a competent, unwavering, determined president. Why are we listening to this guy? Why don't we hear anyone countering Gonzalez? He's given absolutely free rein to provide his own version of history, as if it had been inevitable. He's a clown 🤡. He deserves to be forgotten, not lauded. And he certainly shouldn't get to provide the definitive version of this history. Also, why are we listening to Andrew Card? He's an unreliable narrator non plus ultra. Now they've segued to describing the attack on Afghanistan as if it had been a legitimate target, as if the invasion had been in any way sanctioned. They don't waste any time talking about the AUMF other than to note that Barbara Lee voted against it. They don't talk about how it gave away blanket powers, or how the Bush administration used it to attack a completely unrelated country -- or how Obama and Trump and Biden continued to use it to justify anything and everything that the executive branch wanted to do for the next 15 years. [E03] "Finding bodies and searching for loved ones, Guantánamo, Patriot Act" Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was the "architect of 9/11" or "The Planes Operation", as he called it. The people interviewed sure make their intelligence fuckup looks like an accident that could have happened to anyone. The FBI is definitely blaming the CIA here. Why is Alberto Gonzalez getting so much screen time? Now he's saying "Figure out ways of questioning people to get better intelligence." He rubber-stamped the torture program as AG. "We also had concerns about the rights that would attach to anyone we brought into the United States." I can't believe this guy gets a free hand to just joke and laugh and discuss 9/11 and its aftermath. Historical revisionism at its finest. History is written by the winners, I guess. But he's not even a winner ... or is he? "Enemy Combatants", "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques", "Extraordinary Rendition" ... rape the language to absolve yourselves. Guantánamo is still open. It still has prisoners. Gonzalez is given enough rope to hang himself and he does, with that stupid smirk on his face, self-satisfied, secure in the knowledge that nothing will ever happen to him. He thinks he's justified torture, he thinks it's all OK. He lists a bunch of even more horrific things that they could have done, then pats himself on the back for not having authorized those things. He was the top cop in America. That's what America thinks of the law. The sanest voice interviewed tells the story more-or-less correctly, but he then discusses the torture programs as if they were a watershed moment in America's history, as if they were a turning-away from a high road it's hard to argue America had ever been on. At the very least, America hasn't been on the high road for a very long time. Next up is John McCain -- who was himself tortured for five years after having been shot down on a bombing run over a country that he was helping to illegally invade and destroy -- who emerges as the voice of sanity, if you can believe that. Back then, he hadn't gone as far off the rails as he would in the subsequent 15 years, right up until his death. Donald Rumseld is a monster, completely unapologetic and full of braggadocio. The Patriot Act added "sneak and peek" warrants, which allowed officers of the law (any branch) to break into people's homes while they were away, taking what they thought was necessary. The homeowners would not need to be informed. Utter madness in a state that thinks of itself as lawful. They interviewed Thomas Drake, a whistleblower, one of the first interviewees I can wholeheartedly agree with. I wonder what the younger generation thinks of this documentary? Do they understand how many rights they lost while they were still in primary school? The "Stellar Wind" program allowed collection of metadata of all American communications, with some collection of content as well, supposedly only for high-value targets. Once you've got everything set up and available, though, what prevents you from just collecting content from everyone? Spoiler alert: Nothing. The White House overrode the justice department to extend its information collection. Unsurprising, but good that the documentary included it. [E04] "WMD, Iraq, Abu-Ghraib, Ground-Zero Muslim YMCA, Afghanistan surge/Obama, IEDs, fraud/corruption/reconstruction in Afghanistan, abandoning of Afghanistan" Now we're rolling along pretty well, with a near-complete denunciation of the invasion of Iraq. They seem to be using a lot of modern stock footage, because a lot of people in these clips are wearing masks. That is suspicious, to say the least. Many clips are presented without timestamps or proper context. The interview with the soldier who keeps choking up when talking about his fallen colleague was very good. He showed empathy and asked the right questions: what were they doing there? Why were we killing people when we were deeply aware of how losing our own hurt so much? Who were we even attacking? The analysis of the IEDs was good. The guy described how the Americans became so leery of moving anywhere that they started blowing up vast swaths of territory just to know that all IEDs had been triggered. The locals said that the Taliban don't blow everything up like the Americans do. That would explain their predilections. They retell the tale we've heard so much about recently: that money disappeared into Afghanistan into dead-end projects and unusable equipment. But the money-laundering scheme for U.S. companies worked just fine. It worked as designed. 99% of the money was nicely laundered through Afghanistan and back into the private coffers of wealthy military-hardware corporations. They talk about Afghan corruption, but don't mention how happy the U.S. was to feed money into that machine because U.S. companies were benefitting from it greatly. "You can't take an institution designed for violence and use it to build up safe communities." "The [Afghan people] didn't like us at all. They figured out that we didn't really care about Afghanistan." Some of the people there did care and they'd signed up to help. But the mission didn't care. One of the guys says that most of the soldiers ended up just trying to survive and to protect their buddies. Why were they even there, then? They would all have been much safer at home. And the Afghans would have been safer, too. "What do we mean by American freedom? It's a freedom to pretend, to believe in our fictions." "That's when I realized that people don't really give a shit what we're doing over here [in Afghanistan]. Nobody even mentioned 9/11 anymore and that's the only reason I even came over here." [E05] "The hunt for bin Laden, Guantánamo again, Pissing on Afghan corpses (that's not who we are), Drone bombing, Anwar al-Awlaki" I'm totally wondering whether they're going to address the fact that we said we killed bin Laden and then never showed anyone the body. We said we threw it in the ocean. They don't even mention this in the documentary. Why in the name of God would we believe a word of it? Seymour Hersh poked a lot of holes in this narrative. See his immense write-up in "The Killing of Osama bin Laden" . He was not consulted for this documentary. Instead, Rasmussen described the whole thing for us, from start to finish. They only off-handedly mention that the U.S. was "not supposed to be" in Pakistan, a sovereign nation with which the U.S. is allied, not at war. How could we send our troops there? Easy. We just did it. It is said that it is easier to ask for forgiveness than for permission. But it's even easier to do neither. They fucking crashed the helicopter into the compound (Patreus is now narrating for us, because we hadn't heard from enough war criminals). After the best of the best -- Navy Seals -- crash their helicopter, the mission is still 100% on track, despite worries that they all might get caught in a sovereign ally's territory. Obama, (Hillary) Clinton, Biden -- all there in the situation room. No mention of why the Seals couldn't just arrest bin Laden. The "CIA identified him" but "his face had been too riddled by gunfire to identify him, but [...] they were able to identify him by his ears." I am fucking gut-laughing over here. Talk about some bullshit that we shouldn't believe. Then they show people celebrating in the streets for the death of a man who a lying government claims was the guy behind 9/11, killed in an illegal raid on an allied nation with no evidence, no trial, no body, and no reason to believe it was actually him. P.T. Barnum was absolutely right. It's really too easy. No wonder Trump saw such a juicy opportunity with such an unquestioning ovine herd. We meet a young lawyer who was assigned to defend Sheikh Khalid Mohammed. Gonzalez shows up again to open his garbage mouth to explain why people in Guantánamo couldn't be tried in the U.S. He says that they might actually defend themselves and say bad things about America. 😱Also, that the court would be a terror target and that America would be incapable of stopping attacks. This is legitimate because America is super-shitty at stopping real attacks. But, Gonzalez is a stupid liar; they really couldn't be tried because the U.S. had no evidence other than a bunch of stuff obtained under torture. If they'd actually gotten to court, they'd have been released. The U.S. should actually have prosecuted the people involved for breaking the law and violating those people's rights. Obama is also a garbage person who used Guantánamo only for political gain. For eight years, he said he would close it. He never came close. Biden's not going to do it either. No-one cares about the law. The young lawyer says that the whole system was designed to "let the lawyer look like they're doing just a good enough job for the process to look legitimate. [...] It was about hiding war crimes." The interviewer asks how the guy could have torpedoed his career for someone the interviewer describes as "it doesn't get worse than Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, so how can you defend him?" These people don't believe in the rule of law. Listen carefully. It's very simple. Everyone gets a lawyer. That lawyer doesn't support their client's goals; they are not friends; they are not allies; they are not like-minded. The lawyer is doing a job that society absolutely needs done, if it wants to call itself civilized. People that don't understand this are savages, by definition. They believe that a trial is not necessary because they already know -- without a trial -- that the defendant is guilty. How? They've been told by the prosecution. The accusation suffices. The media even agrees. It's obvious. Why even have a trial? Why defend this person? Why try to disprove something that's so obviously true? Savages. No better than people from 60 years ago, who always thought that every black man hauled before court was guilty of whatever he'd been accused of. They discuss the drone-bombing of Anwar al-Awlaki (an American citizen) as if it were more evil to kill an American citizen with no due process -- "extrajudicial killing, with no judicial oversight" -- than to kill "just" an Afghan...or 20. The documentary rightly shows images of babies in coffins while Bush and Obama talk about precision attacks and just killings and how "Congress authorized any means necessary" (citing Obama). A Pakistani Congress member says that for every 13 people killed, they create 3300 more enemies. An Afghan says, "If death is our only fate, then we would rather die fighting back." Trump: (on Afghanistan) "Why isn't Russia there? Why isn't India there? Why isn't Pakistan there? Why are we there? And we're from 6000 miles away?" Sometimes even a blind pig finds a truffle. During negotiations with the Taliban, they were called "really cocky. They said that it would take more time to negotiate than it would to just walk in and take Kabul." Oops. In hindsight, they weren't cocky; they were realistic. A powerful voice for Afghan women said, "Afghanistan is one of the worst countries in the world to be a woman. How much more shall we sacrifice in order to have peace?" They interview a bunch of troops from the Afghan Army, talking about how they will resist the Taliban until the "last drop of blood leaves their bodies". Within five days, they'd all given up against overwhelming odds, mostly without firing a shot. "We are ready to defend our country ourselves." Oops. The guy at the end who talks about how good women have it in Afghanistan is kind of right: more women are involved in Afghanistan than in 1998 when the Taliban took over. But it's still less than in the late 1970s, when the socialist government provided all of those things. The U.S. marched in and destroyed it all, setting the stage for the Taliban. They then spent $2.3T destroying the country more and beating the Taliban back, to get the shreds of a society that kind of was almost as good as it was 40 years before. That is not a success. That is not improvement. That is historic cruelty. At the end, they play "America the Beautiful" on piano, showing rockets firing indiscriminately and someone burying a baby wrapped in a shroud under rocks. Captain Marvel (2019) -- "7/10" It held up reasonably well on a second viewing. See my "review from 2020" . Saw it in German this time. Atomic Blonde (2017) -- "9/10" Still an awesome movie on second viewing. See my "review from 2017" . Saw it in German this time. I Am Legend (2007) -- "8/10" This came on TV after another movie and drew me in enough for a second viewing. Will Smith is quite good in this. He plays U.S. Army virologist Robert Neville, who's the last man standing in New York City after a virus conceived as a cancer treatment goes completely out of control and kills or turns most of humanity into zombies. He is alone in his armored apartment, scavenging on a schedule to avoid being out at night. The zombies can't stand daylight. We see how this all came to be in several flashbacks, showing how Neville lost his wife and daughter...and then all of NYC. He has his trusty dog Sam(antha) at his side through much of the film, until a lapse in judgment -- he gets caught in one of his own zombie traps after having a bit of a mental breakdown -- causes him and Sam to be trapped out at night. They escape back to his lab, but Sam has been bitten and does not respond to the latest "cure" that Robert has concocted. Neville is forced to put down his only companion. Driven by grief, Neville joyrides out at night to attack a band of zombies, but they get the better of him, trapping him in his car. One Deus Ex Machina later and two other people show up to rescue him, bringing him back to his home. After three years alone with Sam, he is not accustomed to human contact. The woman Anna (Alice Braga) talks of escaping to Vermont with the boy Ethan (Charlie Tahan) to an enclave that has survived. Neville doesn't believe that the place exists. He refuses to leave, claiming he needs to continue working on the cure. Soon after, they are all trapped in the lab as the zombies attack, trying to get a test patient back that Neville is experimenting on. The last cure he cooks up seems to work, though. He gives Anna a sample, sends her and Ethan out the coal chute, then sacrifices himself on a grenade, taking out the invading horde, as well. Anna and Ethan arrive in Vermont with the cure -- happy ending! There was an alternate ending where Neville confronts the zombie only to discover that he only wanted his mate back. They part ways and Neville realizes that it is he who has become a monster, experimenting on other thinking creatures. Neither of these narratives is how the book ends. In the book, Neville is the last remaining member of his species. The zombies/vampires are thinking creatures who are the natural inheritors of the Earth -- as the Neanderthals gave way to modern humans -- and Neville thinks "I am legend" i.e. I am still alive, but my race will only become a legend after I am gone. Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003) -- "10/10" Seen it so many times. Still a ten. Last saw it in "2013" . Legion s01 (2017) -- "9/10" This is a really unique bit of television that I stumbled across. The show is based on the Marvel Universe character Legion, who is the son of Professor X and Gabrielle Haller. In the show, we only hear of "David's father" in oblique terms (at least so far). But we don't know him as Legion in this show. He's just David (Dan Stevens), a young man who thinks he's schizophrenic and who's been bouncing from one unsatisfactory situation to another until he ends up in a mental institution. We slowly learn that he is not schizophrenic. Instead, his maladies are all related to his extraordinary mutant power and having been infected by a powerful parasitic mutant named Farouk when he was but a baby. That's how we find him in the mental institution at Clockworks Psychiatric Hospital, which also houses fellow inmate Syd Barrett [1] (Rachel Keller), who becomes his girlfriend. They cannot touch because of her mutant power, which is kind of like Rogue's, where she switches bodies with whomever she touches, in a kind of short-term Freaky Friday affair. Lenny Busker (Aubrey Plaza) is also there, a drug addict who'd had some great times with David as he was trying to deal with his mutant powers and brain virus on his own. David breaks out, but is hunted down. [2] Clark (Hamish Linklater) is his interlocutor -- with The Eye (Mackenzie Gray) as his backup -- but David is uncontrollable. He escapes in a fiery glory, with Syd's help, burning and disfiguring Clark in the process. He is rescued by members of a place called Summerland: Cary Loudermilk (Bill Irwin), whose mutant power is that he "shares" a self with an alternate Kerry (Amber Midthunder), and Ptonomy Wallace (Jeremie Harris), whose power is that he can examine anyone's memories and that he never forgets. They take him back to Melanie Bird (Jean Smart), another telepath or empath or something. She helps bridge Ptonomy to David's mind so that they can try to find out what's really going on with him (they don't accept that he's crazy). David's sister Amy (Katie Aselton) is looking for him and she's taken prisoner by Summerland's nemesis Division 3. David would eventually rescue her, but it was Farouk in the driver's seat, not David, using David's incredible power to lay waste to the whole Division 3 facility. David comes back, and continues to grow his relationship with Syd -- into the astral plane, where they can touch without her stealing his body and powers. The finale is a showdown between The Eye and his henchmen from Division 3 against the ragtag band from Summerland in a super slo-mo scene wherein a bullet traverses the length of a room over the span of at least two episodes. During this time, Oliver Bird (Jemaine Clement) returns from the astral plane to help them, after twenty years of wandering. Melanie, his wife, is delighted, at first, but he doesn't remember her -- he's not the same. David learns of Farouk; Cary builds a device to trap Farouk away in David's mind; David gains more control over his powers and resolves the slow-bullet dilemma, saving everyone except for The Eye, who ends up killed by his own trap. Clark returns to the case for Division 3, but he seems to be willing to come over to Summerland's side and work with them instead. Farouk (in the form of Lenny) pounds on his cage, cracking it. David's grip on him is slipping. Syd kisses David to take Farouk. but Farouk transfers to Kerry and fights his way out. David tracks him down and forces him out of Kerry...but Farouk's "essence" finds Oliver and takes him away again, in a fancy car, singing, "On the chest of a barmaid in Sailes were tattooed the prices of ales. And on her behind, for the sake of the blind, was the same information in braille." This is a story of people with extraordinary power, but without costumes or hero names. It's a story about what it would be like to have powers like that in the real world -- our world -- and how that world would react to it (with violence and a desire to extinguish or control). Much of this show takes place in the astral plane, where artistic license rules. They do a wonderful and interesting job of it, with gorgeous and inventive visuals, languorous pacing, long stretches of just letting the visuals do the talking, and a very interesting and balanced soundtrack. The aesthetics remind me a bit of American Gods, the layers of reality remind me a bit of Inception. The treatment of the heroes, perhaps a bit of Watchmen. It is, however, it's own unique thing that grows into its own as it progresses. I'm well into season 2 and it's getting better and better. It is, of course, not for everyone -- many would find it boring -- but I am very glad it was made, that there is still room for auteurs to stretch their legs and spread their wings. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] Who I only just realized is named after the former front man of Pink Floyd, who left the band after having become addicted to psychedelics. [1] I think that's how it happened. Time is a bit squishy in this show. Not only are some segments shown repeatedly, from different angles and perspectives, but there are fantastical segments that never really happened or that didn't happen in that way. The astral plane is a strange place, and this show makes that abundantly clear. Ted Lasso S02 (2021) -- "8/10" The second season finds Richmond City fighting its way through its first season after relegation. They're seven draws deep so far, when Dani Rojas (Cristo Fernández) kills the team mascot Earl with a penalty kick. They end up tied. Rojas is devastated. To treat him, the team takes on a psychiatrist Sharon (Sarah Niles). She is so good that nearly the entirety of the team ends up making appointments. Ted (Jason Sudeikis) spends the season dancing around whether he needs therapy for his panic attacks, and eventually takes it. Roy (Brett Goldstein) coaches little girls' football but Keeley (Juno Temple) convinces him to try sports announcing. He likes it OK -- and is funny and honest at it -- but Ted convinces him to come onboard as another coach. Nate (Nick Mohammed), who has no self-confidence, is threatened. Beard (Brendan Hunt), who has plenty, likes it. Beard is on-again, off-again with his quirky girlfriend Jane throughout the season. Sam (Toheeb Jimoh) has a fling with Rebecca (Hannah Waddingham), but they break it off because she's not ready for commitment. Sam turns down an offer to leave the club for a team in Morocco, owned and run by a billionaire by inheritance. Sam also rebels against sponsor Dubai Air and nothing bad happens when the whole team kills the deal with their top sponsor. Instead, they are now sponsored by Bantr, Keeley's dating platform. Lucky, that. Keeley? Oh, she's apparently not dumb as a post anymore -- though amusing and sweet and kind and wise, in her own way -- she's now in charge of her own PR firm. Jamie's back in the club and seems to have completely changed his ways. Other than his odd eyebrow couture, he's a pretty nice guy now. He professes his love to Keeley, causing waves in Roy and Keeley's relationship, but everything's OK there. Roy has grown considerably as a person. Nate goes off the rails with jealousy, blows up at Ted and ends up coaching Rebecca's ex-husband's newly acquired team to set up season 3: Ted vs. Nate. A lot happens in this season -- like, a lot, a lot. It's hard to keep track of everything. There were a couple of "character-building" episodes -- the Christmas one and "Beard After Hours" -- that were entertaining enough, but (almost thankfully) didn't contribute to the story. Just fun stuff with fun characters. Almost like an old-school sitcom (without a laugh track). Rebecca's dad's funeral is also kind of fun? A couple of the episodes were great and a couple felt like they'd been written by a completely different team. Sometimes Lasso's dialogue was a bit cloying and over-the-top folksy. Sometimes it was great. Roy is very good, but the focus on him became almost a bit much. Overall a good effort, but not nearly as refreshingly fun as the first season. Let's see what happens in season 3. Captain America: The First Avenger (2011) -- "9/10" Still just as solid as the first time I watched it. See "review from 2012" . John Wick: Chapter 2 (2017) -- "8/10" This chapter starts with John Wick (Keanu Reeves) laying waste to a Russian compound, all to retrieve his Mustang, which is nearly destroyed in the process. Soon after, Santino D'Antonio (Riccardo Scamarcio) shows up to make him an offer he can't refuse. John swore an oath to help Santino in exchange for help in the first movie. Santino "insists" by blowing up Wick's house. Wick holes up in the Continental where Winston (Ian McShane) and Charon (Lance Reddick) remind him of his obligations to the marker. Wick goes to Italy, where he ends up taking the contract -- to kill Santino's own sister Gianna (Claudia Gerini). He completes the contract -- although she goes out "her way" by slitting her own wrists first. John escapes the Colosseum to the catacombs below, blowing away what seems like hundreds of Santino's henchmen, who've been ordered to tied up loose ends. Wick is an absolute master of pistol marksmanship, executing headshot after headshot while sprinting in the other direction and pointing his gun behind him. Santino's top guy Cassian (Common) is the last one standing, pursuing John into the Rome Continental Hotel, where they are required by the rules to stop fighting. Wick returns to New York, where he is now being hunted by every hitman in the city because Santino has opened a $7M contract on him. Wick again slaughters legions of attackers in a spectacularly choreographed, incredibly long sequence (the second of the film), where he again faces off against Cassian, this time besting him in a subway car by sticking a knife in his aorta. John seeks refuge with the Bowery King (Laurence Fishburne), where he gets treatment and a single pistol with seven rounds to continue his pursuit of Santiago. John finds him at an art opening, where we get the third slaughter sequence as Wick picks off Santiago's remaining henchmen, including his deaf chief henchman Ares (Ruby Rose), who goes down pretty easily actually. Santiago escapes to the Continental Hotel, where he can't be touched...right? Winston pleads with John to desist, but Wick shoots Santiago dead to rights, violating the chief tenet of the hotel and placing himself in dire jeopardy. The High Table doubles the price on his head; Winston excommunicates him -- cutting him off from all privileges -- but provides him with a marker and a one-hour head-start. The end. See you in part 3. Dave Chappelle: The Closer (2021) -- "9/10" This show's reputation preceded it, but that reputation was, as with Chappelle's previous shows, unearned. He delivered a solid, heartfelt, funny, occasionally bawdy -- sometimes a little distractingly so, but that's a matter of taste -- sensitive, interesting, informative, and somewhat preachy set. It was funny, though, first and foremost. There were interesting new ideas mixed in with old standards presented well and with a bit of a new sheen. He didn't shy away from any topics, although sometimes he seemed to be deliberately poking a hornet's nest that I was only somewhat aware of. I didn't really want to be made aware of the world he was mocking in a comedy set, but that was the only drawback. He is a masterful storyteller, with an eye for funny detail. He discussed his relative wealth -- Netflix paid him $60M for his five specials -- saying, "Let's say that something goes horribly wrong and I'm shopping with the poor whites for mediocre goods and services in a Wal-mart." He started off slowly, "Some guy came up to me on the street, looking worried. "He said, "Dave, they're after you." "[Looking everywhere at once, panicked] "Multiple they or singular they?"" Those who didn't see the show just assumed he slagged on transgender people, but he compared the degree of approbation waiting for someone who expresses a forbidden opinion -- virtual violence -- versus actual, physical violence or the even stronger, lingering prejudice of racism. The progress in the fight against racism -- though receiving a lot of lip service -- seems to have been lapped by the progress in the fight against homophobia or transphobia. "You guys are confusing your emotions. You think I hate gay people and, what you're really seeing, is that I'm jealous of gay people." Or this one, "Why is it so much easier for Bruce Jenner to change his gender than it was for Cassius Clay to change his name? My problem has never been with trans-gender people -- it's always been with white people. Go back and watch my specials." Or this one about the spectrum of prejudices and how white people still have the privilege of being white in a society that still prefers that skin color. "He stood up, towering over me. He must have been 6'5". A big, white, corn-fed, Texas homosexual. This nigga was ready to fight. [...] I thought we were going to come to blows. I was ready and then...right when you think we would fight, guess what he did? He picked up his phone and he called the police. And this, this thing that I am describing, is a major issue that I have with that community. Gay people are minorities...until they need to be white again." He went there again, talking about DaBaby and the homophobic rant he'd recently gone on, "Now you know, I go hard in the paint, but even I saw that shit and was like, ‘God damn, DaBaby, "Can’t do that. Can’t do that. But I do believe and I’ll make this point later that the kid made a very egregious mistake. I will acknowledge that. But, you know a lot of the LBGTQ community doesn’t know DaBaby’s history, he’s a wild guy. He once shot a nigga… and killed him, in Walmart. Oh, this is true, Google it. DaBaby shot and killed a nigga in Walmart in North Carolina. Nothing bad happened to his career. "Do you see where I am going with this? In our country, you can shoot and kill a nigga, but you better not hurt a gay person’s feelings." He jokes about how men become woman and win awards that only women could win before. I mean, you've got to wonder how that all fits with feminism, right? Or maybe gender-specific awards should be passé? But it is funny-ironic. "Caitlin Jenner won the award for woman of the year -- the first year she was a woman. Beat every single one of you bitches in Detroit. Woman of the year! Never had a period! How about that?" He makes the following crude joke about transgender genitals, "That pussy they got ... it's ... you know. It's Impossible Pussy or Beyond Pussy. Something's not quite the same. That ain't blood, that's beet juice." Mother of God, the man has stones of steel. He's getting paid $24m for this show and he's just provoking with a clever, if crude, joke that he knows will blow up Twitter. Especially for the army that will review his show without watching it, like an online version of that old game Telephone. But he closes with a story about Daphne -- a white-girl transvestite. It was funny as well as sweet, where he constantly reminds people that they were friends, but he had to set limits, e.g. "[...] I pushed her away from me, because I'm transphobic." He quoted one of her tweets, "Punching down on someone requires you to think less of them, and I know him, and he doesn't. He doesn't punch up; he doesn't punch down; he punches lines; and he's a master at his craft." He's not a fan of Twitter or the raging hordes there, "Apparently, I'm getting dragged on Twitter. But I don't give a fuck, because Twitter isn't a real place." They ended up dragging Daphne for supporting Chappelle. She killed herself a week later. That wasn't funny, but it was true. His words didn't do that; their so-called defense of her did. Maybe the defenders of public mores should stop taking themselves so seriously. People are getting hurt. The Office (US): S08--s09 (2012--2013) -- "9/10" After having managed Dunder Mifflin for seven seasons, Michael Scott (Steve Carrell) left the show. At the end of season 7, the search for a replacement was executed in the typically bungling and amusing manner of the show. Dwight (Rainn Wilson) does not get the job; neither does Andy (Ed Helms); instead, it is Robert California (James Spader) who snatches the role. He is an already independently wealthy Scranton resident who convinces Jo (Kathy Bates) to not only let him manage the Scranton branch, but also be CEO. He chooses Andy as his successor to manage the Scranton branch. Darryl (Craig Robinson) and Dwight are not happy, but deal with it. This is the basic framework for the season. Robert spends an inordinate amount of time with the Scranton branch, taking field trips (Gettysburg), attending or throwing parties (Andy's party at Dwight's, or Robert's bacchanal at his own home). He eventually invites several of them to Tallahassee, Florida -- Dwight, Stanley (Leslie David Baker), Jim (John Krasinski), Cathy (Lindsey Broad), and Erin (Ellie Kemper) -- for a conference led by Nellie (Catherine Tate) to select a new Vice President to head up Sabre's brick-and-mortar stores. Dwight ends up getting the VP job. Robert California hates the stores. Nellie is fired, as is Packer (David Koechner), who ends up taking the fall for Dwight. Without a VP job, Dwight returns to Scranton with his head salesman job as a consolation prize. Erin decides to stay in Florida, working as an in-home caregiver for an older woman. Andy misses her and drives back down to get her. Nellie shows back up in Scranton and just takes Andy's job. Robert California eventually just rewards her for her initiative. Andy is fired for an anger episode and re-hired as a salesman. At Andy's behest, David Wallace (Andy Buckley) buys Dunder Mifflin from Sabre and reestablishes it as an independent company, with Andy at the helm of the Scranton branch. Robert California -- ever the smooth talker -- convinces Wallace to donate to his mentoring program before leaving forever. The constellation is unchanged at the start of the ninth and final season -- except for two new young guys in the annex, Clark (Clark Duke) and Pete (Jake Lacy). There are hijinks sprinkled throughout -- "office bus" and "lice" (where Meredith (Kate Flannery) ends up shaving her head) being two of the better ones -- but the main story arc is that Andy abandons the office to go on a sailing trip for three months after his father dies and leaves the family fortune in his hands. His Dad had loaded the family with debt and they're forced to sell the sailboat. Andy decides to sail it to the Bahamas himself. Oscar (Oscar Nunez) starts an affair with Angela's husband, state senator Robert Lipton (Jack Coleman). Angela gets wind of it, but ends up teamed up with Oscar after Lipton reveals that he's also cheating on Oscar. She leaves Lipton and moves in with Oscar with her son. The documentary of the office (which had been filming the whole time) is finally coming out, so things get quite meta-meta. Andy is convinced that this will launch his acting career. In Andy's absence, Erin had started a dalliance with Pete. When Andy finally returns, she makes several attempts to break up with him, until one finally takes. The office tries to figure out how to reveal to David Wallace that Andy was gone for three months and is not responsible for their spate of success in that year. Andy would have been fired again, but he instead tells David Wallace that he needs to follow his muse instead, getting an agent Carla Fern (Roseanne Barr). Jim starts a side-business with some friends, a sports-marketing idea that takes off pretty quickly. The headquarters is in Philadelphia, so he's commuting and only working part-time at Dunder Mifflin and just generally putting stress on his relationship with Pam (Jenna Fischer). They have tribulations, but love wins out in the end (this is literally how they did it). David Wallace offers the manager job to Jim, but he tells him to choose Dwight. Dwight finally becomes manager, handling it with more aplomb and modesty than expected. Jim chooses Pam over working at his new business Athleads, repairing their fairy-tale relationship. Darryl starts working at Athleads, doing quite well, but disappointed that Jim won't be there. The company has a chance at opening up nationwide and Darryl wants Jim to come along on the initial three-month jaunt. Jim turns him down; Pamela overhears; she doesn't know if he means it, but he proves to her that he does. Jim is promoted to Assistant to the Regional Manager and holds a competition for the Assistant to the Assistant to the Regional Manager -- which Dwight wins, transitively becoming his own assistant. Andy's career is off to a bumpy start. Erin finds her parents at a documentary interview (Joan Cusack and Ed Begley Jr.). Dwight and Angela get married (her child is actually his; she just wanted him to love her for her, not for her progeny). Oh, and Dwight finally gets his black belt from his new sensei (Michael Imperioli). I've got the chronology a bit messed up above, but that's the general gist of the last two seasons. They include some absolute gold-medal-funny episodes with some really clever writing and execution. A delight to the very end. Highly recommended. Will probably rewatch at some point, perhaps in a few years. Shutter Island (2010) -- "10/10" I'd already "reviewed this movie in 2011" , but I didn't describe what it was actually about, so I do that a bit better below. The movie is set sometime soon after WWII. Teddy (Leonardo DiCaprio) is a police officer, who visits Shutter Island with his partner, Chuck (Mark Ruffalo), to investigate the disappearance of an inmate from the mental institution located there. Dr. Cawley (Ben Kingsley) assists them where he can, but they suspect that he is hiding something. Dr. Naehring (Max von Sydow) is the chief clinician and Teddy is especially suspicious of him (because he's German). The warden (Ted Levine) and deputy warden (John Carroll Lynch) are also sinister, but believably so for employees at such an institution. Teddy is searching for Laeddis (Elias Koteas), the man who'd killed his wife and who is also interred there. No-one knows where he is; suspicion increases. Teddy and Chuck investigate around the island, eventually getting to "Block C", where Teddy thinks he's found Laeddis (Jackie Earle Haley) again, this time looking much the worse for wear already. Teddy also spends a night outside on the island, holed up in a cave with the missing patient (Patricia Clarkson), who disappears the next morning. Teddy becomes obsessed with getting to the lighthouse, plagued by visions of his dead wife and a little girl. He gets to the lighthouse, where he finds Dr. Cawley and Chuck, who turns out to be the doctor in whose care he's been for over two years. It turns out that Teddy is Laeddis and that he's the most violent patient in the institution (he turns out to have been responsible for the condition of the man whom he thought was Laeddis). They'd given Teddy two days to roam the island, working through his fantasy, to try to get a breakthrough. Teddy had a psychotic break, brought on by PTSD from having helped liberate Auschwitz, but also because his wife (Michelle Williams) had drowned their three children in the lake near their home, after which he'd murdered her. He eventually accepts this reality, and Cawley and Chuck breathe a hesitant sigh of relief -- they'd already been this far before. The next day, Chuck approaches Teddy/Laeddis, who whispers to him conspiratorially about finding Laeddis somewhere in the compound. Chuck signals to Cawley and Naehring that they will unfortunately have to proceed with the lobotomy. "Teddy Daniels: You know, this place makes me wonder. Chuck Aule: Yeah, what's that, boss? Teddy Daniels: Which would be worse - to live as a monster, or to die as a good man? Chuck Aule: Teddy?" Still a 10/10 after a second viewing. Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Ruffalo, Ben Kingsley, Elias Koteas, and Max von Sydow were all amazing. Ted Levine and John Carroll Lynch as the warden and deputy warden were also perfectly cast. Saw it in German. Captain America: Return of the Winter Soldier (2014) -- "8/10" I still can't believe that the Captain America movies are some of the best ones in the whole MCU. I'd never read a single one of his comic books, even though I'd read almost everything else -- mostly Spider-Man and X-Men, to be honest. I think it's because Chris Evans is so good in the role. See "my review from 2014" . Sex Education S03 (2021) -- "8/10" Otis (Asa Butterfield) spent the summer in bed with Ruby (Mimi Keene), the most popular girl in school. Eric (Ncuti Gatwa) and Adam (Connor Swindells) are exploring their new relationship. Ola (Patricia Allison) and Lily (Tanya Reynolds) were doing the same. Aimee (Aimee Lou Wood) is still working through her trauma from having been molested/raped on a bus the year prior. Maeve (Emma Mackey) is helping her through it, and ends up asking Otis's mom Jean (Gillian Anderson) to help. Jean is very pregnant with Ola's father Jakob's (Mikael Persbrandt) child. Adam's father Michael (Alistair Petrie) is out of a job as headmaster and has also been kicked out of the house by his wife Maureen (Samantha Spiro), who's begun dating. At the school, music teacher Colin (Jim Howick) is getting ready to put on the next musical. Jackson (Kedar Williams-Stirling) is working through anxiety issues -- and also loses his job as head boy when the new headmistress Hope (Jemima Kirke) lays down the law, leading to single-file lines in the halls and uniforms for everyone. Rahim (Sami Outalbali) is the only one who seems to see what is coming. The clamps come down harder on certain students, like Maeve, who's made to remove her nose ring and cut her hair in order to participate in advanced scholastics. A new student Cal is made to choose a gender when she'd rather identify as non-binary. They all deal with relationship problems -- Eric and Adam go back and forth, Otis doesn't love Ruby back -- and the sex-education curriculum has fallen back on abstinence and terror. The students go on a field trip to France. Things happen. Ruby is still hurt about Otis. Maeve and Otis are stranded at a service station and have a heart-to-heart and then a lip-to-lip. Adam and Rahim grow closer. Rahim takes a giant shit in the bus toilet, clogs it, uses a sock to retrieve it, then chucks it out the tiny window onto a tiny French car. Mayhem ensues. Adam takes the fall for it, saying that no-one likes him anyway. Jean has an absolutely justifiable shit-fit at the hospital, when several doctors turn her sonogram appointment into an opportunity to lecture her further on the risks of having a child at such an advanced age. She is huge and far past the stage where she can get an abortion. They're just being dicks and she calls them on it. She ends up fighting with Jakob because he's no longer sure it's his child because she cops to her rather extreme promiscuity. He wants a paternity test. Season 3 kind of hits the same notes as season 2, with the suck-up Viv (Chinenye Ezeudu) finally having had enough of the abusive new head teacher Hope and starting a rebellion. The kids put on a giant, sexy show for the reporters. The school loses its funding and backers, Hope loses her job, etc. Michael tries to get back with Maureen, but it stutters. His hobby is now cooking, which is a great start. He tells his obnoxious, empty brother Peter (Jason Isaacs) to go to hell. Maureen dumps her lover and focuses on Andrew's life. Maureen finds out that Adam is gay. Adam and Rahim may be hitting it off. Adam takes up dog-training and enters a competition, winning honorable mention. Eric fools around in Nigeria at his rich family's wedding and dumps Andrew. Andrew handles being dumped by Eric reasonably well. All of the teenagers act out a bunch. Most of them in very selfish ways, constantly talking about how they have to look out for their own needs. It's either an interesting comment on a generation or just documenting that generation without noticing that it looks kind of bad for them. The best people are Jackson (Kedar Williams-Stirling), Lily (Tanya Reynolds), Colin, and Emily (Rakhee Thakrar). The selfish ones this time around are Ola, Otis (50/50), Eric, and Cal (Dua Saleh). So much stuff happens in this season, though. It's almost too much -- like a soap opera. Isaac (George Robinson) admits to Maeve that he'd deleted Otis's phone message. Maeve forgives him and they get together. Then they break up. Then Maeve and Otis get back together. Then she leaves for America for a program for gifted students. Aimee and Steve get back together. Oh, also, Jean has her child very prematurely and almost dies (picture all of the doctors saying "I told you so; shouldn't have gotten knocked up, you moistened bink"), Hope fails repeatedly at IVF, Otis counsels her, Jean sees him do it and is proud. Jakob turns out not to be the child's father. The Kominsky Method S03 -- "7/10" Normal Newlander (Alan Arkin) has died. The season starts with his funeral, with some very odd eulogies from Sandy Kominsky (Michael Douglas) and Norman's girlfriend Madelyn (Jane Seymour), who regales the attendees with a detailed rundown of the regularity of her sex life with Norman. Sandy's daughter Mindy (Sarah Baker) is there with her much older boyfriend Martin (Paul Reiser). Norman's reprobate daughter Phoebe (Lisa Edelstein) is there, with her scientologist son Robby (Haley Joel Osment) in tow. Mindy's mother and Sandy's ex-wife Roz (Kathleen Turner) returns from her work as a doctor in Africa. The whole family is back together for what might turn out to be Mindy's marriage to Martin. But there are doubts. Mindy has inherited $5M from Norman -- and Sandy wants to give her his $5M as well -- but, as executor of the estate, he has some doubts about Martin's ability to handle that kind of wealth. Sandy and Martin get along just great -- they're almost the same age, after all -- but Martin isn't the most stable personality. Speaking of unstable, Phoebe and Robby have also gotten wind of Norman's estate and expect much more than Sandy is doling out to them. They promise to lawyer up. Sandy is still teaching his class and learns more about the modern acting world -- that it's even more cutthroat and shitty than it was when he was coming up. One of his students, Margaret (Melissa Tang) is ostracized immediately after she gets a recurring role on a new series, where she would play assistant to Morgan Freeman's reboot of Quincy as a non-binary coroner. Margaret thinks they may dump Freeman because he's not actually non-binary and it would look bad for an actor to appear as something that they are not. That took a while for Sandy to work through, as well. Mindy and Martin are getting married; then they're not; then they are again. Roz has an incident related to her leukemia and now everyone knows that she has cancer. Sandy helps her out and they grow much closer again -- the Kathleen Turner/Michael Douglas repartee is a bit forced, but nice and nostalgic for someone who grew up on their films, Romancing the Stone, Jewel of the Nile, and War of the Roses. Sandy's class seems to heed his advice and starts to treat Margaret better. Martin turns out to be just as frivolous as Sandy feared -- but he can also be cowed by Sandy's threats. Phoebe and Robby provide a form of comic relief with repeated, wacky proposals for how Sandy should give them a tremendous amount of the trust in exchange for doing nothing. Roz takes over the wedding and makes sure Martin's mother Estelle (Christine Ebersole) is invited. She turns out to be quite a bitch on wheels, pretty much as Martin tried to explain to everyone. Roz officiates the wedding and everything turns out just fine. She gets to be on set while Sandy films Old Man and the Sea. A year later and Roz finally succumbs to her leukemia. Everyone is sad. Estelle is still living with Martin and Mindy and is still going strong. She does have a stroke, though. Ten months after that and both Sandy and Margaret are accepting the Emmy Awards for their respective performances. Smiles all around. Estelle is still there, but now wearing a helmet. All's well that ends well, I guess? The series kind of hurries its way to wrapping things up -- because this is the last season. It was a good ride and Douglas did a decent job without Arkin -- but the pair of them were what really brought the first two seasons alive. In this season, you kind of notice more how old everyone is; Douglas and Turner speak in kind of a slur that is much more noticeable when it's just the two of them. They don't really enunciate well anymore. Sarah Baker and Paul Reiser were OK, but didn't really shine. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4323 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4323 Wed, 20 Oct 2021 23:25:29 +0200 -- "9/10" 2. "Mortal Engines (2018)" <#Mortal> -- "5/10" 3. "Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning (2012)" <#Universal> -- "8/10" 4. "The Office (US): S06--s07 (2010--2011)" <#Office> -- "9/10" 5. "The Climb (2019)" <#Climb> -- "7/10" 6. "French Exit (2020)" <#French> -- "9/10" 7. "Lupin S02 (2021)" <#Lupin> -- "8/10" 8. "Kim's Convenience S05 (2021)" <#Kim> -- "8/10" 9. "Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me (1999)" <#Austin> -- "6/10" 10. "Heart Condition (1990)" <#Heart> -- "5/10" These are my notes to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. I've recently transferred my reviews to IMDb and made "the list" of around 1600 ratings publicly available. I've included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other -- I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. Bo Burnham: Inside (2021) -- "9/10" This is a one-man show about the Internet and culture and loneliness and depression and, perhaps, life during COVID. Bo Burnham stars as a version of himself who's been working alone in an attic -- often in his underwear -- on his special for over a year. He yo-yos through emotions and toys with different skits, some of which are quite meta. At one point, he plays a typical game reviewer who's playing a game that lets him control Bo Burnham in the attic. In another song, he derides a "White Woman's Instagram". He records a reaction video to his too-short rendition of "Unpaid Intern", then reacts to the reaction video and reacts to his reaction to his reaction video. "How the World Works" is a pitch-perfect and Sesame Street-ready song for children, but the second verse, performed by "Socky", is much darker and more accurate. [media] "Socko: The simple narrative taught in every history class Is demonstrably false and pedagogically classist Don't you know the world is built with blood? And genocide and exploitation The global network of capital essentially functions To separate the worker from the means of production "And the FBI killed Martin Luther King Private property's inherently theft And neoliberal fascists are destroying the left And every politician, every cop on the street Protects the interests of the pedophilic corporate elite "That is how the world works (Bo: really?) That is how the world works Genocide the Natives, say you got to it first That's how it works "Bo: That's pretty intense Socko: No shit Bo: What can I do to help? Socko: Read a book or something, I don't know Just don't burden me with the responsibility of educating you It's incredibly exhausting "Bo: I'm sorry, Socko I was just trying to become a better person Socko: Why do you rich fucking white people Insist on seeing every socio-political conflict Through the myopic lens of your own self-actualization? This isn't about you So either get with it, or get out of the fucking way" Even frothy and poppy songs like "FaceTime with my Mom" are written and performed really well. He really seems to be channelling Weird Al more in the first half -- a tendency he ironically notes in one skit -- but I also hear shades of Jonathan Coulton (e.g. in "That Funny Feeling", where he accompanies himself on the acoustic guitar). There are dozens of carefully crafted, spliced, and edited individual bits that include songs, short skits, silent equipment setup. Each of these contributes to the whole, each is exquisitely hand-crafted, with an artisan's attention to detail. He plays with everything, from his flowing hair and beard -- which he frequently films as very much the long-suffering Jesus we know from paintings -- to his penchant for depression and loneliness and stage-fright. This is a character he's playing, a version of Bo Burnham for this special, but it's brilliant. He did everything himself, probably learning a lot along the way. It took over a year (supposedly). It critiques and explains and parodies the Internet and modern culture. It's hard to know what truth it tells about Burnham itself. It doesn't really matter. What is undeniable is that this is a work of art, a work of genius. If Warhol was a genius for Monroe or Campbell's, then Burnham has earned the epithet for creating Inside. Mortal Engines (2018) -- "5/10" As with MIB, the backstory and universe are interesting. Similarly, the dialogue and plot are absolutely hackneyed and predictable. There is almost no character development; the characters are placed into the story without any preamble and we're expected to identify with them immediately. Why should I care about Hester (Hera Hilmar)? OH, because she's a cool grrrrl. What about Tom (Robert Sheehan)? He's a rascal who's late to work and stems, apparently, from the lower classes (this is made painfully obvious through an interaction with a titled man of the same age). What about Anna Fang (Jihae)? She's the cool asian woman. Remember Michelle Yeoh in other movies that had character development? Like that. This story is set over a millennium in our future, long after humanity had mutually assured its own destruction with so-called quantum weapons. The humans of the future scavenge "old tech" -- being seemingly incapable of producing their own -- and repurpose it to power their "traction cities". These are mechanized cities of various sizes that are capable of being moved on large caterpillar tracks. We are led to believe that there are many more of them, but we only see two: London and a small Bavarian city that London "ingests". London, however, has a whole mechanism for ingesting other cities, so it seems clear that this is how it's been sustaining and growing itself for some time. The chief engineer of London Thaddeus Valentine (Hugo Weaving) understands that this way of life is not sustainable -- they will starve out on the plains of Europe. Therefore, he will do what westerners always do: take what belongs to other people and justify it with self-serving moralizing. He wants to rebuild one of the quantum weapons that started this whole mess and use it to break down the giant wall that the east erected to protect itself. This is a bit too on-the-nose, I would say, but I would imagine that these broad and unsubtle sweeps come from the YA fiction on which this film is based, where that kind of reference is considered "clever world-building". Despite their dependence on old tech coupled with a general dearth of industrial capacity, Valentine has seemingly no compunction about destroying vast swaths of what is left. He destroys an entire oil-drilling platform just to release Shrike (Stephen Lang), who, in turn, has no compunctions about destroying an entire floating city in order to get to Hester. I'm not even going to bother detailing the plot points that undergird this whole mess because it doesn't matter. This film felt very much like it was telling you things without drawing you in. The visuals were spectacular, as expected, but they felt so empty -- just kind of happening on screen, like in Transformers, Fast and Furious XX, Batman vs. Superman, or even some of the Marvel movies. It had interminable sequences of things crashing into each other and flying in exquisitely and painstakingly accurately rendered glory -- and much of it felt overblown and unneeded. They would often have to pause this over-the-top action in completely unrealistic ways in order to have moments of pathos between characters (e.g. when Shrike finally releases Hester from her bond). London manages to destroy much of the eastern wall, but Tom and Hester stop Thaddeus before he can drive London into what remains. The Chinese and Indians let bygones be bygones and invite in the now-homeless Londoners -- who were so recently cheering their opponent's no-longer-so-imminent destruction from their luxurious and now-destroyed parapets. Universal Soldier: Day of Reckoning (2012) -- "8/10" This was a more interesting movie than I had any right to expect. It had enough of a touch of Cronenberg/Lynch to it that made it much more surreal than a sequel to an action-adventure movie usually is. The director, cinematographer, editor, and set designer did well with the material they had. Hell, at one point, Luc Devereaux (Jean Claude Van Damme) looked just like Brando's Kurtz in Apocalypse Now. I could almost swear that was intentional. The trip up a placid, heavily gladed river in the last scene, along with the silent universal soldiers everywhere -- in the boat, in the water -- proved to me that that was exactly the look they were going for. There were long sections of the film without dialogue or even action bits, moving forward on exposition and "showing, not telling." The fight scenes were quite good, well-choreographed. The chase scene was very well-filmed, but went on for a bit too long. Otherwise, I overall approved of the shot choice, angles, lighting, sets, etc. It was somewhat bare-bones, but also not overdone. There was no need for advanced CGI and hundreds of millions of dollars to tell a convincing story of super-soldiers. The story starts with a stark and bare-bones rendering of a home invasion. Luc Deveraux has his henchmen beat John (Scott Adkins) severely before executing his wife and child. John awakes nine months later from a coma. He speaks to agent Gorman of the FBI, who afterwards activates super-soldier Magnus (Andrei Arlovski) to sweep through and eliminate a bunch of super-soldiers. It's honestly hard to figure out what the point is here, but Magnus ends up at the "boss" in the last room, who is Andrew Scott (Dolph Lundgren). Scott injects Magnus with a drug that frees him from being controlled by the government. He joins the rogue army of super-soldiers led by Devereaux and Scott. Things get a little sketchy as John tries to patch together what is real and what he remembers from implanted memories. There also appear to be multiple versions of him, which explains why some people remember him doing things he could never have done (he's apparently only three weeks old). He finds out he's only three weeks old in Devereaux's rogue super-soldier compound -- also a pretty good set, made with practical effects and lights, rather than a CGI orgy -- when Devereaux's scientists offer to remove the fake memories of his wife and son. Here, we see a subtlety about identity, where John would rather retain the "fake" memories, which are real to him. The mental conflict drives him mad and he rampages through the compound, taking people out in one short fight-scene after another -- until he reaches Scott, who's the first boss level. They smash each other around and Scott loses relatively quickly, with Lundgren just hamming it up. Next up is Devereaux, with Van Damme bald and painted like Baron Samedi. Seeing both that clones of John will never stop coming and that John is a worthy successor, Devereaux submits. In the epilogue, John kills Gorman and replaces him with a super-soldier clone who nods to John in submission before returning to the FBI. Van Damme actually played this pretty straight and well. They're all super-soldiers and are much more resistant to damage than mere mortals. They can fight through the pain and damage -- e.g. from knives, swords, kicks, and even bullet flesh-wounds -- and the fight choreography cleverly incorporates this. When John's fingers are chopped off, they regrow over time. In fact, we first see that Magnus's toes had regrown, so we know that super-soldiers can do that. All without a line of dialogue or explanation. Honestly, that's a lot more subtlety in storytelling than much more well-funded and well-received movies have. The Office (US): S06--s07 (2010--2011) -- "9/10" Season Six starts with Jim (John Krasinski) and Pam's (Jenna Fischer) marriage and the birth of their baby Cecelia. Though they continue to be their characters for the next couple of seasons, their baby makes them into parents who are utterly unaware that no-one else really cares about their baby. Just like real life, I guess. Erin (Ellie Kemper) and Andy (Ed Helms) start to drift toward each other, but it takes forever and never really works out correctly. Instead, Erin turns toward Gabe, who at least knows how to ask her out. This relationship would blossom, then wither on the vine over the course of the next two seasons. By the end of season seven, Erin is 100% sure she wants Andy and actually asks him out, but he demurs -- although he immediately regrets it. They stay in limbo. Jim is promoted to co-manager, with him taking care of day-to-day details and Michael handling big-picture stuff. This works out great for Michael, but seems inefficient for Dunder Mifflin. Speaking of which, Dunder Mifflin is in trouble and is likely to declare bankruptcy. Sabre Corporation (a printer company) takes them over, led by Jo Bennet (Kathy Bates), who has a more direct managerial style. She thinks the idea of co-managers is bullshit. Michael and Jim fight for the sales position (because of commissions), but Michael ends up back as the manager, convinced he's won. Scranton survives because they manage to outdo everyone else on sales, but David Wallace and all other Dunder Mifflin executives are let go. In a power move -- and because he wasn't considered for a management position -- Dwight buys the office park and starts to lay down the law as the new landlord, cutting back services everywhere. Andy discovers faulty printers, Michael gets out ahead of the bad press, for which Jo rewards him by bringing Holly back, replacing Toby, who's on extended jury duty for the Scranton Strangler case. Michael and Holly work through getting back into a relationship, then barrel forward to an engagement and, finally, to moving to Colorado so that she can better take care of her parents. Angela gets engaged to her State Senator boyfriend (Oscar and Ryan are both sure that he's gay). With Michael on his way out, Sabre sends his replacement in the form of Deangelo Vickers (Will Ferrell). This is a typically nuanced Ferrell characters, much like Michael Scott -- sometimes he's straight-up logical and sensible and much more of the time, he's just slightly off, but in a way that's actually believable. He and Michael work together transitionally for a few days and then he's finally in the driver's seat by himself. Michael's last day is poignant, especially his goodbye with Jim. "We'll say goodbye over lunch tomorrow." It doesn't take long before Vickers has to back up a boast that he can do the Jordan dunk by showing everyone on the hoop in the warehouse. Vickers dunks and hangs off of the hoop, pulling the whole thing down on himself. After a brief reappearance in a hospital gown where he tells what sounds like an incomprehensible bar joke, he's escorted off and we find out that he fell into a coma soon after. Everything is actually running smoothly at the office, without Michael or Deangelo in charge. Jo calls to ask Jim to be acting manager and he declines, thinking that she'll just let it keep coasting like it is. Then Dwight's phone rings. Dwight is now acting manager. Dwight goes mad with power and, long story short, ends up discharging a firearm near Andy's ear, rendering him temporarily deaf and also ending his term as acting manager. Jo selects the person on staff with the most seniority to replace him. Say hello to acting manager Creed Bratton. Jo also elects Toby, Gabe, and Jim to a committee to find another manager. They go through a rogue's gallery of candidates, including James Spader, Jim Carrey, Will Arnett, Warren Buffet, Ricky Gervais (as David Brent, of course), and Ray Romano. Kelly, Dwight, Andy, and Darryl also interview for the position. It is all pretty disastrous, with Gabe torpedoing himself by insulting Kelly, who rats out his behavior vis-á-vis Erin to Jo, who sends him back to Florida. Kelly slips in on the committee and takes up Dwight's bribe, as does Toby. Jim puts his foot down. We end the season with Michael gone and a few attempts at replacing him having backfired spectacularly. The Climb (2019) -- "7/10" This is the story of the way the lives of two men who are good friends with each other -- but one of whom is not really that great of a friend -- intertwine over the years. The acting and direction were quite good. It was a low-key film of some average people's lives. I'm Sorry -- The movie starts on a cycling climb outside of Marseilles, in France. Mike (Michael Angelo Covino) is a cyclist and has invited his friend Kyle (Kyle Marvin) on a ride up a hill with him. The hill is key because Mike reveals to Kyle that he has slept with and continues to sleep with his fiancé -- from before Kyle even knew her. The climb allows Mike to stay out of Kyle's clutches until they can reconcile. Mike chases down a 2CV that annoyed him and the driver ends up kicking his ass for him. In the hospital later, Kyle's fiancé checks in on Mike and they end up kissing. Kyle catches them. Let Go -- The next scene is the funeral of Mike's wife (Kyle's former fiancé). Kyle and Mike don't really reconcile, but they do talk. Thanks -- Thanksgiving at Kyle's house with his family, which is a little toxic and controlling, but not excessively or unusually so. Kyle is there with Marissa, his former high-school sweetheart and freshly minted fiancé. The family doesn't exactly approve, but they accept. Kyle's mom reveals that she's invited Mike to Christmas dinner. Mike shows up completely plastered and gets a lesson from Kyle's mom on not being selfish. He passes out in the living room through the coffee table. It's Broken -- Out of pity, Kyle invites Mike along on his New Year's ski trip with Marissa. Marissa isn't exactly over the moon about it. She's teaching Kyle to ski (he's a snowboarder) and Mike wants to take him on a black-diamond run. Mike goes alone and breaks his arm, ruining the day. He continues to ruin it by roping Kyle into playing Jägermeister drinking games. Kyle passes out before Marissa can take advantage of him. She goes downstairs and ends up drinking with, and sleeping with, Mike, instead. Stop It -- Kyle's bachelor party is in an ice-fishing hut. In a repeat of the first scene, Mike reveals to Kyle that he slept with Marissa. He goes on to tell Kyle that she's not right for him, that he should leave her because he's too good for her. Somewhere in that speech, though, Kyle fell through the ice and Mike rescues him. Grow Up -- Kyle has cut Mike off, but Mike crashes his wedding anyway, yelling that Kyle shouldn't go through with it. Kyle's family is visibly supportive. Marissa reveals that she's pregnant, whereupon the priest calls the wedding off until after the birth of the child. Fine -- Kyle, Marissa, and their son Otis visit Mike at his new job at a bicycle/coffee shop. Marissa tells Mike that Kyle misses him. Several years later, Mike helps Kyle move out after his divorce. He's only moving a few houses down the street. The three of them go for a ride, with Mike encouraging Otis to take off his training wheels. French Exit (2020) -- "9/10" This was an absolutely delightful film from beginning to end. It's as if someone extracted the neat bits from a Wes Anderson movie and pressed all of the overly quirky and self-aware bits out of it. I enjoyed the hell out of this story, the dialogue, the performances -- Michelle Pfeiffer, of course, stands out -- and the pacing. Frances Price (Michelle Pfeiffer) lives with her son Malcolm (Lucas Hedges)in sumptuous luxury in a giant apartment in Manhattan. Her husband died a dozen years ago. The money from their marriage has run out. She is forced to sell all of her belongings and furnishings before everything is reclaimed by the estate at the end of the year. A good friend Joan (Susan Coyne) offers Frances her apartment in Paris. Malcolm is quite shiftless, but in an unoffensive way. He will have to leave his fiancé Susan (Imogen Poots). Frances and Malcolm and Small Frank (the cat) take a transatlantic cruise to Europe. Malcolm takes up with the ship's clairvoyant Madeleine (Danielle Macdonald), who sees some thing in the cat and can also, apparently, detect when old ladies will die. Frances boldly sneaks through customs with a bag full of cash and a tranquilized cat. They set up a relatively innocuous existence in Paris, making the acquaintance of Mme Reynaud (Valerie Mahaffey), who's a bit lonely but means well. Small Frank runs away and Frances is devastated. She's convinced that her husband's soul lives in that cat. Frances and Malcolm hire a private investigator Julius (Isaach De Bankolé) to find Madeleine, so that she can contact the cat. In the context of this film, this all makes sense. Julius finds her, they hold a séance, and voila! Small Frank is talking through the candle on the table. No-one present is surprised one bit. Frances's plan is to kill herself once the money runs out. She's burning through her cash heedlessly. Is she doing it on purpose? Or does she not know what money is worth? It's unclear. Frances writes a postcard to Joan, telling of her plan, but doesn't expect it to be delivered. Because she tips €100, the postcard is delivered. Joan arrives soon after, to save her friend. Because Malcolm called Susan early one morning, she and her fiancé Tom (Daniel di Tomasso) arrive on the doorstep as well. Now everyone is living in the same apartment -- France, Malcolm, Joan, Julius, Madeleine, Mme Reynaud, Susan, and Tom -- working their way through their various issues. Frances gives away the last of her money to some homeless people in the park she can see from her window, contacts Small Frank one last time with Madeleine, then disappears into the streets of Paris in the wee hours. Lupin S02 (2021) -- "8/10" This season starts with Lupin (Omar Sy) hot on the trail of Léonard (Adama Niane), the man who'd kidnapped his son Raoul (Etan Simon) at the end of season 1. Youssef (Soufiane Guerrab) and Lupin give chase in an appropriated car. Youssef knows that Assane is Lupin and Lupin knows that Youssef knows. They end up driving to a castle -- this mixes parts of the plots of two stories from the Lupin pantheon -- where he confronts Léonard. He locks Youssef in the car, but not before Youssef can call for backup. Lupin throws Léonard out of a window, but not before he lights the car on fire where he's stashed Raoul. Lupin is devastated and then arrested. He finds out that Youssef had released Raoul, is massively relieved, and then escapes custody to rescue Raoul again. He takes Raoul back to Claire (Ludivine Sagnier), but is walking into a trap. Claire warns him off at the last minute and he makes a daring escape. Assane's nemesis Hubert Pellegrini (Hervé Pierre) has started working with an international banker named Courbet (Stefan Crepon) and plans to siphon off the large part of his daughter Juliette's (Clotilde Hesme) charity auction's earnings. Assane has his own plan to seduce Juliette, but not for money. Instead, he wants her to talk to her mother to learn what Hubert did to Lupin's father decades ago (detailed in season 1). Lupin steals a famous Picasso for her, then returns it just as cleverly. Juliette convinces her mother to talk to the police, who arrest Hubert. Hubert is soon released -- he's rich and powerful -- and gets on Assane's partner Benjamin's (Antoine Gouy) trail, forcing him to leave his shop and to abandon everything he owns. Hubert also has Léonard killed in Lupin's apartment, framing him for his murder. Benjamin and Assane are on the run, but they have anticipated every step of the way, with one hideout after another -- things they've planned since they were two reckless teenagers, learning about the catacombs under Paris. Youssef finds evidence of his boss, police commisioner Dumont's (Vincent Garanger) involvement with Hubert, as well as more evidence of Assane's father Babakar's (Fargass Assandé) framing and betrayal by Hubert. Hubert's world is starting to unravel, but he doesn't know it yet. He thinks that he, along with Courbet, will be able to steal millions from the charity. Unbeknownst to Hubert, Courbet is a plant, working with Benjamin and Assane. Coulbert siphons the money away into his and Assane and Benjamin's accounts instead (they are thieves, after all). Assane sneaks into Hubert's box and forces a confession from him (recording it, of course). Youssef and his compatriots -- Laugier (Vincent Londez) and Belkacem (Shirine Boutella) -- find and arrest Dumont, letting Assane go. He crashes the stage and accuses Hubert publicly of all of his crimes. The police get the confession and arrest Hubert. Assane escapes in the tumult, disguised as a fireman (an outfit he'd stashed in the opera house for just such an occasion). Assane is made by a group of young people and is forced to flee the police, first on foot, then by boat. He bids adieu to Claire and Raoul and vanishes into the night. Watched it in French with English subtitles. Kim's Convenience S05 (2021) -- "8/10" Appa (Paul Sun-Hyung Lee) and Umma (Jean Yoon) are learning to cope with her MS diagnosis. The hardest part is penetrating daughter Janet's (Andrea Bang) massive shield of self-regard in order to tell her. She's so busy telling everyone else what to do that she almost misses the news. Janet's character is written quite well -- I think it's an ironic take, but I can't be sure. She's a terrible, narcissistic person. Gerald (Ben Beauchemin) is a bit better, but he, too, defaults to thinking he has nothing to learn from anyone (that he already knows everything) and spends his time teaching Appa life lessons (instead of the other way around). This whole season is like a hate note to generation Y or Z or both. Some of it is almost a bit over the top, but maybe that's because I don't understand how those generations tick. The show where Kimchi (Andrew Phung) gets in trouble for prioritizing a meeting over consoling a co-worker on a crying jag is nearly impossible to process. A huge theme is lying to impress other people. Umma and Appa lie about living in a certain neighborhood in order to be able to use the tennis courts there. That seems kind of harmless, though, compared to how casually Janet lies big for the same reason: to impress just pretty much anyone -- not even friends. Like when she lies about her upbringing to her photography class students. Even worse, though, she completely made up her resumé, then called it "embellishing" even when she was totally called on it by a potential employer. Jung (Simu Liu) and Kimchee are actually pretty good and seem positively normal, compared to Janet and her cohort. Shannon (Nicole Power) is zany and also pretty self-centered, but sweeter somehow. She and Jung break up by the end of the season. Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me (1999) -- "6/10" Austin Powers (Mike Meyers) is back in his second movie. This time, his honeymoon is cut short because his wife Vanessa Kensington (Elizabeth Hurley) is revealed to be a fembot controlled by Doctor Evil (Mike Meyers). Powers kills his robot wife, mourning only briefly before remembering that he can now shag all he wants. This movie is not deep. Dr. Evil is presented with his 1/8-sized clone, whom he brands Mini-Me (Verne Troyer) and "adopts" to be closer to him than his son, Scott (Seth Green), who is revealed to have been the product of Evil's pairing with Frau Farbassina (Mindy Sterling) when he'd traveled back in time (later in the film). She is number 3 in the organization. Number 2 (Robert Wagner/Rob Lowe) tries to convince Dr. Evil that having bought Starbucks is going to get them a shit-ton of money, but Evil is distracted by more convoluted plans for world dominance. Also, he doesn't seem to understand that 1 billion is 1000 million. He settles on a plan to travel back in time to steal Powers's mojo. MOD also has a time machine -- a Volkswagen Beetle colored in groovy, rainbow colors -- and Powers goes back in time to the late 60s as well. There, he meets Mustafa (Will Ferrell) and Ivana Humpalot (Kristen Johnston) and Robin Spitz-Swallows (Gia Carides) as well as Felicity Shagwell (Heather Graham), a top CIA agent. Dr. Evil's new Scottish henchman Fat Bastard (Michael Meyers) is also in the 60s. Powers thwarts Evil's plan to use a space laser to extort the planet. There are a lot of broad jokes and broad humor, but it's amusing enough. It's funny that they have to kill Mustafa to prevent him from revealing the local of Evil's volcano lair when Evil has carved a giant bust of himself into the mountain. It's funny that Evil doesn't know that trillions are even bigger than billions. It was amusing enough, but it wasn't cohesive or funny enough to really be worth two hours. The sets were fun. The cameos were fun: Elvis Costello, Jerry Springer, Rebecca Romijn, Woody Harrelson, Tim Robbins, Willie Nelson, Fred Willard. I gave it an extra star because it spawned so many memes. Heart Condition (1990) -- "5/10" I didn't finish watching this, but began with morbid fascination, mostly based on the cast and the description on IMDb: "A racist cop receives a heart transplant from a black lawyer he hates, who returns as a ghost to ask the cop to help take down the men who murdered him." Jack Moony (Bob Hoskins) is the likable, tenacious, and casually racist cop -- a character inconceivable 30 years later -- whereas Napoleon Stone (Denzel Washington) is the successful, rich, and somewhat sleazy lawyer whose involvement in the underworld ends up getting him killed. At about the same time that Moony's heart fails, Stone is killed and his harvested heart is transplanted into Moony. When Moony awakes, he realizes that he has not only Stone's heart, but his ghost is riding shotgun now. Stone and Moony team up to solve Stone's murder. The two leads are strong, but they can't come even close to saving this formulaic and oddly written comedy/crime/noir film. As I noted above, I didn't finish watching this. Also, I think I watched it in German, but I'm no longer sure. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4288 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4288 Mon, 30 Aug 2021 16:27:55 +0200 of around 1600 ratings publicly available. I've included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other -- I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. Creed II (2018) -- "5/10" Creed (Michael B. Jordan) becomes champion at the start of the movie in a thoroughly unconvincing bout. He is trained by Rocky (Sylvester Stallone). Ivan Drago (Dolph Lundgren) is in Russia and trains his son Viktor (Florian Munteanu), who is a force of nature in the boxing ring. Ivan works with promoter Buddy (Russell Hornsby), who approaches Creed in the most ham-handed way for a "rematch" against Drago. Creed, because he's weak-willed and kind of dumb, succumbs to the pressure and takes the match. Cue a montage of them training. Rocky doesn't take part because he says it's senseless. Cue a match where Viktor absolutely slaughters Creed -- just like his father slaughtered Apollo Creed before him. In this case, Viktor hits Creed when he's still down, so he's disqualified. Creed is still the WBC champion, but he's a shattered mess with broken ribs in a hospital whereas Viktor is still fighting and bellowing about a rematch. Creed agrees to the rematch, but with Rocky as his trainer. They go to the desert to some sort of prison-camp-looking training ground where Creed trains just like Rocky did in Russia before his match in Moscow. Creed overcomes all odds and beats Viktor. The end. There are more things, like Ludmilla Drago (Brigitte Nielsen) showing up a few times, with a complicated history in that family. Or that Creed and Bianca's (Tessa Thompson, phoning it in) baby is deaf because Bianca's also deaf. At least a 1/3 of the movie was about their relationship. The subplot with Bianca's singing career taking off -- OMG she's deaf -- could have been excised completely without losing anything. Her music was not very good anyway. This is basically a shitty remake of Rocky IV. Michael B. Jordan is wholly unconvincing as a gutty fighter. At 130 minutes, the movie was much too long. I'm a sucker for Dolph Lundren and Sylvester Stallone, but I guess I'll have to wait for The Expendables 4 for something I can enjoy. It was reasonably well-made, so I didn't deduct more stars, but maybe I should have. The Boys S02 (2020) -- "9/10" The second season starts with Butcher (Karl Urban) framed by Homelander (Antony Starr) for Stillwell's (Elisabeth Shue) murder and in the wind and the rest of the Boys in hiding with a gang that Frenchie (Tomer Capon) knows. A new super-villain hits the shores of New York -- and turns out to be Kimiko's brother, Kenji (Abraham Lim). They capture him and head out on a boat, but have to flee back to shore. The Seven attack, chasing them through tunnels and catch and kill Kenji. It's Stormfront (Aya Cash), not Homelander who does it, ruthlessly and not without pleasure. Kimiko (Karen Fukuhara) vows revenge. The Deep (Chace Crawford) is falling into a Scientology-like church and tries to ingratiate himself back into the Seven, but Homelander's not having it. Homelander is becoming more and more ruthless -- and showing more and more what a psychopath he is. After having killed Stillwell, he gets Doppelganger (Dan Darin-Zanco) to pretend to be her so that they can continue their relationship. Homelander doesn't even care that it's not really her. Annie (Erin Moriarty) gets a sample of Compound V out into the wild and reveals to the world that supes are made, not born. Vought rolls with it, using their marketing might to gain more power from it. CEO Stan Edgar (Giancarlo Esposito) is a dead-eyed master of taking control. He calls Homelander's bluff and seems to be the only person capable of thwarting him. This doesn't sit well with Homelander, though. Homelander retreats to Becca and his son, Ryan, trying to push him into using his powers. The boy doesn't want to, but finally does -- to keep Homelander away from his mother. Stormfront! Where to begin? She is designed to get on your last nerve. Her innate evil -- akin to Homelander's -- is slowly revealed throughout the season. Stormfront has been around for a long time -- since before WWII, when she was still named Liberty. She came up in the Reich, though, and has a serious race issue. He story arc culminates in her finally getting Ryan to use his powers for real when she's choking out his mother. Stormfront turns pretty crispy, but isn't dead yet (apparently supes are kind of immortal). Maeve (Dominique McElligott) is increasingly disaffected and plans Homelander's downfall by threatening to release video of their "rescue" of the airliner in the previous season. Annie is still working with the boys to get more dirt on Vought, taking them to Sage Grove, where Vought is producing more supes in a sort of mental institution/supe factory, where they find Lamplighter (Shawn Ashmore), who's able to explain his actions of the past well enough that the Boys spare him. Congresswoman Victoria Neuman (Claudia Doumit) finally calls a hearing to before Congress to discuss Vought's behavior, but the star witness Lamplighter self-immolates in the middle of the tower on a rescue mission with Hughie (Jack Quaid) to rescue Annie. Now they need to get Vogelbaum to be the star witness, but it's broken up when people's heads start exploding every which way but loose. Vogelbaum is dead, as are several Congresspeople. With Stormfront's Nazi past leaked, all sides return to their original places, with the Boys exonerated, Annie back in the Seven (as well as A-Train, but not The Deep). At the end, we see the head of The Deep's church Adana (Goran Visnjic) yucking it up with Neuman...right before she blows his head off with her mind power (spoiler: she's the unknown assassin). Hughie, moving on, gets a job with her campaign. I continue to enjoy this unflinching, dark look at superheroes that draws a lot of material from the original comic books, but weaves it into a slightly different story. The Office (US): S04--s05 (2007--2009) -- "9/10" Season four sees Karen leave the Scranton Branch to become branch manager in Utica instead, where we see her try to poach Stanley. (God only knows why. Did she need someone with basic Sudoku or crossword skills?) Michael and Jim and Dwight drive up to Utica to "defend" their honor against this attack. Of course, everything goes wrong -- and Stanley stays in Scranton because he was just maneuvering for a raise anyway. After her spectacular firing at the end of the previous season, Jan moves in to Michael's condo and takes over, spending a lot of money to remodel things for her extended stay there. Michael doesn't really have the money for it, but he can't say no. We see at a catastrophic dinner party at Michael and Jan's that Michael sleeps on what amounts to a dog bed at the foot of her bed. There's a video camera in the bedroom. The evening ends with the police breaking up a domestic-violence dispute after Jan throws something through Michael's laughably small flat-screen TV. Their relationship is over for now. Dwight and Angela come out in the open with their relationship, but it soon sours when he euthanizes one of her sickly cats. She starts dating Andy instead. Dwight and Angela soon start a dalliance again, though, sneaking off to the warehouse for one quickie after another. Andy has to be happy with a kiss on the forehead. Ryan gets very big for his britches at corporate, lording his new role over Michael and the Scranton branch. He makes a modernization push, having a new web site built and then demanding that everyone book their orders through it. The salespeople are not excited about it, but try to work with him, at least a little bit. Eventually, it comes out that he's double-booking sales on the site and he's fired for fraud. Toby moves to Costa Rica and is replaced by Holly, who is a female version of Michael. Holly and Michael inevitably spiral toward each another. Pam takes a three-month graphic-arts course in NYC, so she and Jim have to deal with a long-distance relationship. Michael throws a giant party for Toby's departure -- because he hates him and wants to celebrate that he's gone. Jim wanted to propose to Pam at the party, but Andy usurps him and proposes to Angela. She accepts. Jim eventually proposes to Pam on one of their trips between New York City and Scranton. She eventually returns from her art school, but has decided that she doesn't like digital graphics design, so she's staying in Scranton. Jim is delighted because he's bought his parents' house and surprises her with it. She's delighted, against all expectations. Michael and Holly's relationship ends when CEO David Wallace finds out and he banishes her to the Nashua branch. In other relationship news, Andy finds out that Angela and Dwight are still having their affair, despite Andy and Angela's engagement and wedding plans. After a showdown, they all break up, leaving Angela back on the singles market. Corporate sends Charles Miner (Idris Elba) to take over the branch, causing Michael to resign in protest and to start the Michael Scott Paper Company. Pam and Ryan jump ship as well, hiring on as sales associates. Their office space is in a large supply closet in the same building. Michael's penchant for genius-in-stupidity lets him steal a lot of clients from Dunder Mifflin with unsustainable prices, leading Dunder Mifflin to offer him a buyout. Pam, Michael, and Ryan are re-hired at Dunder Mifflin, with Pam moving to sales and Ryan dropping back down to his original temp position (which is a lovely joke that a useless temp position remains after years and years and years). The quality remains quite high, with almost no dead or filler episodes. The writing is impressive. Belleville Cop (Le Flic de Belleville) (2018) -- "6/10" This was a comforting and soothing movie to watch while recovering from a flash migraine. It was utterly and unabashedly formulaic, following a formula established in the 80s, enhanced only by Omar Sy's and Luis Guzman's charm. The story is mainly about Baaba (Omar Sy), a Parisian cop who was born in and works in Belleville, a neighborhood in Paris. He still lives with and is very close to his mother Zohra (Biyouna). His girlfriend is in love with him, but is losing patience with his inability to commit to a life together. After a few scenes establishing the points above -- and also showing that Baaba is a good cop with a flair for investigation as well as the gift of gab -- we see Baaba meet an old friend of his from the neighborhood, Roland (Franck Gastambide). Before Roland can reveal much of what he was doing in Miami as a police officer, assassins show up and kill him right at the table. Baaba gets assigned to find out what happened, tracking the case to Miami, where he's teamed up with Lieutenant Ricardo Garcia (Luis Guzmán). Baaba travels with his mother, whom he sets up in a nice apartment, funded by his police department in Paris. Garcia's mother is also heavily involved in his life and they have a barbecue party together at one point. Zohra gets involved with one of the gentlemen assigned to assist around the grounds. The movie had a bit of a Beverly Hills Cop or 48 Hours vibe to it, with the fish-out-of-water (black) cop traveling to the city of a more seasoned but jaded and black-sheep of a cop. They team up to find the bad guys and solve the case, with Baaba returning to Paris in triumph. Unsurprisingly, he learned a lot about himself and is ready to take the next step, moving in with his girlfriend -- and without his mother in tow. The end. I watched it in French with German subtitles. Batman (1966) -- "6/10" This is the original movie about Batman (Adam West), Robin (Burt Ward), and Alfred (Alan Napier) doing battle with the Penguin (Burgess Meredith), the Riddler (Frank Gorshin), the Joker (Cesar Romero), and Catwoman (Lee Meriweather). They all reprise their roles from the campy TV show of the same name. Having individually been foiled umpteen times by the Dynamic Duo, the four villains team up to one absolutely wacky and Rube Goldbergian plan, which pretty much immediately fails. This despite Batman's utter inability to recognize Catwoman when she's not wearing her cat ears and mask -- and also vamping with a ridiculous Russian accent. They rally and improvise and come up with something even more unlikely -- this succeeds a bit better, but is thwarted by the insuperable Batman and his trusty sidekick. The quartet's plan to kidnap the U.N. fails and Batman saves the day -- although the U.N. members' minds have been swapped when they were rehydrated. The movie was incredibly campy from start to finish -- and from start to finish takes quite a long time, enough time for everyone involved to chew the scenery for a good long time. The scene with Batman trying to deposit a cartoon bomb at the docks takes long minutes and somehow doesn't end up being funnier for all that (sometimes these kinds of drawn-out scenes turn funny after a while -- thing Tig Notaro with her bar stool). The sets are quite interesting, with everything clearly labeled -- more often than not, as Bat- something-or-other. The costumes are OK, with some strange bits like Cesar Romero's mustache having been painted white along with the rest of the Joker's face. Godzilla vs. Kong (2021) -- "6/10" I can't tell whether I've outgrown these kinds of movies or whether they've just been making them worse. Everything seems trite and cookie-cutter and designed-by-committee. Of course, there's a little deaf/mute, pacific-islander girl (Kaylee Hottle) (a ka-ching on the identity matrix) with whom Kong communicates almost exclusively. Of course, she's the hero because you're watching a children's movie. There's no use complaining about it: no matter how violent and over-the-top the CGI, no matter how attractive they seem to be making the film to a mature audience in the trailer, if it's rated PG-13, then it's going have been written by or for children. Ilene Andrews (Rebecca Hall) is the researcher in charge of Kong's artificial habitat on Skull Island. Humans have ostensibly trapped him there to protect him from Godzilla's predations. Kong is not pleased with it and throws missiles into the roof of the doom to partially disable it. Seemingly out of the blue, Godzilla attacks a facility run by Apex Cybernetics in Florida. Apex is trying to build some massive device that is attracting Godzilla's attention (spoiler alert: it turns out to be Mecha-Zilla). They realize they need a better energy source, which they figure is in the Hollow Earth (which is, apparently, a thing), so they send some sort of Earth-piercing ship to navigate the reverse-gravity interface and then land inside the Earth, with Kong in tow, of course, because he's got to help them find the power source. He manages to find it and brings it back with him to the surface, via a tunnel that Godzilla carved with his radioactive fire-breath. I am not making this up. The gravitational interface is not a problem for either Titan to navigate. Alexander Skarsgård is in this as some sort of rogue adventurer/geologist/archeologist/I-wasn't-paying-attention, but he's really there to grab the ladies (news flash: not that many are going to watch this, despite having three female "leads" of varying ages and having a hunk in a subordinate role) whereas Millie Bobby Brown (11 from Stranger Things) is there to grab the upper end of the PG-13 crowd, to let them know that they and their grrrl power are firmly in charge. Brown's character Madison Russell (I am not kidding) solves problems by just following her gut instinct and failing upward. Planning and thinking are for boomers. Julian Dennison plays her nervous and more-hesitant sidekick Josh Valentine (again, not kidding), but he's not able to spread his wings here as much as he did in Deadpool. Once Kong has his ancient weapon/power source and Mecha-Zilla is powered up, we're ready for a good 30 minutes of destroying cities, shifting allegiances, and enough almost-wins and lead changes to satisfy three Wrestlemanias. Long story short: Godzilla and Kong team up to destroy Mecha-Zilla, Godzilla leaves the area, apparently undamaged, Kong remains, somewhat damaged. The epilogue shows Kong in a new Monarch-run encampment in the Hollow World (because now it's easily accessible?) Honestly, this movie was nothing like what the trailer promised. The trailer looks like a dark take where perhaps bad things might happen and lessons might be learned, but the movie is actually a CGI-orgy meets Spy Kids. Some of the power moves in the battle scenes were neat, but after 300 of them, it got kind of boring. I don't understand how they continue to put so much time into these interminable CGI sequences when everyone involved knows that it's too much. There is no reason that this thin plot needs to be almost two hours long. Say more with less. Achtung, Fertig, WK (2013) -- "6/10" This was the sequel to Achtung, Fertig, Charlie, with only Marco Rima reprising his role as Kommandant Reiker. The plot is basically that a Swiss man named Alex skipped out of his military service, but he is now dating Reiker's daughter Anna (Liliane Amuat) and wants to marry her. They're doing fine together (he's a yoga teacher), but they don't have nearly enough money to buy a house. Reiker offers them a house but only if Alex does his military service. Alex shows up for WK (Wiederholungskurs) -- which is a yearly refresher that all military members have to do in Switzerland -- despite having never actually done RS (Rekrutenschule or boot camp). As expected, he bungles, crossing Wachtmeister Weiss (Martin Rapold, also reprising his role from the original). As in the original, the crew gets into hijinks. As in the original, there is a smoking-hot woman there, but this time it's not Reiker's daughter (who's no longer played by Melanie Winiger), it's a super-competent soldier named Jessica (Sira Topic), who's been relegated to kitchen duty for lack of subordination. Alex is one of the only ones who treats Jessica like a human being, so she takes a shine to him. He's devoted, though, so the kitchen-rutting scene is not repeated in the sequel. Anna finds out about Jessica anyway, has a fit, and breaks it off with Alex. He's determined to win her back and get the house, though, and he vows to win the supposedly impossible war game set up by Reiker's competition. In what comes as a shock to all, they manage it in the nick of time, with the chubby guy getting a girl, Jessica saving the day and proving her worth beyond the kitchen, and Alex getting Anna back and winning their home. I saw it in Swiss German. Love, Death, and Robots S02 (2021) -- "9/10" This is a series of cartoons and high-end CGI animations, ranging from 10 to 20 minutes in length. The skits range from kinda goofy -- the first is about an out-of-control household appliance in a retirement home -- to longer and more thoughtful -- like Snow in the Desert, which deals with immortality. Pop Squad is set in a world very much like that of the film Elysium or perhaps Altered Carbon and is nicely rendered. Life Hutch was a tight story of a man fighting a rogue/damaged expert system in a survival pod. The final segment was The Drowned Giant, which is about how a town deals with a giant body that washes up on its shores. They basically take it in stride, not trying to fit it into their conception of the world. Months later, the only remaining signs of the giant are bones decorating bars. The Crying Game (1992) -- "7/10" IRA soldier Fergus (Stephen Rea) is part of a cell that kidnaps Jody (Forrest Whitaker), a British soldier. They lure him into a trap with a female member -- it's a pretty clumsily executed trap, to be honest -- and then drag him back to their lair. They interrogate him, but don't get much information. Fergus befriends him, against orders, and getting in trouble himself. The other members are growing weary of his relationship with Jody. They worry that he will stand in the way when they will almost inevitably be required to kill him. Jody is distraught at the news that he is to be executed (as is to be expected), but happy that Fergus will be the one to do it -- if anyone has to. As once before, he asks Fergus to get out the picture of his wife from his wallet, this time telling him where to find her in the city. The day comes when they decide Jody is more of a liability and must be eliminated. Fergus volunteers to watch him on the last night, then takes him out to the forest to execute him. Jody runs, freeing his hands. Fergus gives chase. Jody escapes onto the road, where he's immediately hit by one British armored personnel carrier and then run over by another. Fergus escapes back into the woods, running off while British helicopters eliminate his compatriots. Some time later, Fergus is now posing as "Jim" in the city and he looks up Dil (Jody's wife). He finds her singing at a bar, where bartender Col (Jim Broadbent) helps him make her acquaintance. They grow close. He defends her from another boyfriend/lover Dave and they grow closer. They talk oft of Jody, her husband. His things are still all over the apartment. But Dil doesn't know yet that Jimmy knew him. Jimmy gets a blowjob, which is just fine with him. But he is literally the most oblivious person on the planet, because he has no idea that he's spending most of his time with a cross-dresser at a bar that features only drag queens on stage -- and whose customer base seems to be largely other cross-dressers. Finally, they decide to sleep together and Jimmy is, predictably, shocked to see a penis. He doesn't handle it well. Dil forgives him and works to repair their relationship. She knows Jimmy loves her, but he can't handle it. She wants to help him. This seems kind of generous and kind of self-destructive. One of Fergus's IRA compatriots Jude (Miranda Richardson) also escaped (somehow) and returns to pester Jimmy/Fergus. She's quite a bit more hardcore and manic that he is. She breaks into his apartment and tries to coerce him into helping the cause again -- explicitly threatening Dil. Jude thinks she has everything under control, but she may be pushing too hard. Maguire (Adrian Dunbar) made it out as well and he, too, is a raging asshole. He and Jude are quite a pair. Dil, on the other hand, is actually jealous of Jude, completely misconstruing her current relationship with Jimmy. She thinks that Jimmy and Jude are both from Scotland and has no idea that they're both in the IRA. Dil is a hairdresser, but in a last bid to protect her, Jimmy cuts her hair off at her salon, changing her appearance so drastically that Jude and Maguire will have no idea who she is. Jimmy accompanies her back to the apartment and he dresses her in Jody's old clothes. I'm honestly not sure if he thinks he's resurrecting Jody. They rent a room at a hotel, where Jimmy leaves Dil in order go to work. Jude shows up at Jimmy's job site to tell him that he still has a different job to do (namely: the assassination). Dil "escapes" from the hotel and gets absolutely hammered, absolutely despondent. Jimmy finds her outside of her apartment -- exactly where he doesn't want her to to be. She nearly ODs on alcohol and pills but Jimmy saves her -- then confesses to his involvement in Jody's death. Dil seems to be at peace with it. In the morning, Dil has tied Jimmy up and is back in her right mind. She demands more answers, asking Jimmy to fill in the blanks she has in the story from the previous evening. She threatens him with his own pistol. Jude is on the move, but Jimmy is going to miss his IRA job. Maguire tears off to do the job himself, then gets capped in the middle of the street. Jude tears off in their car. Dil unties Jimmy after they express their mutual love for each other. Jude comes right into the apartment -- which is, mysteriously, unlocked -- but Dil gets the drop on her and shoots her several times. Dil wants to shoot Jimmy, but can't. Then Jimmy gently takes away the gun as she tries to shoot herself. Jimmy tells her she has to leave (Jude's dead on the floor). Jimmy stays and watches the police arrive, waiting for them with the murder weapon in his hand, having wiped off Dil's prints. Dil visits Fergus in prison as he serves the sentence for her crime. She's counting the days until he gets out. He tells her the story of the frog and the scorpion, which he'd learned from Jody. The end. The first time I saw this was in college, soon after it had come out. But I don't remember any of the plot except for the clutch revelatory scene. That was the only reason any of us went to go see it, but it turns out to have been nearly completely irrelevant to the plot. I watched it this time in German. Men in Black: International (2019) -- "5/10" The film opens with Agents H (Chris Hemsworth) and High T (Liam Neeson) in a showdown with the Hive. Just the dialogue for this segment is enough to encourage the viewer to leave after five minutes. I stuck around because I'm working my way through a cold, so a shitty simulacra of a better film from an older franchise, reworked to appeal to a generically intelligent and aged audience was sufficiently entertaining. But that's all it was: the plot was about protecting a ludicrously overpowered weapon from a vaguely defined but immense and inscrutable evil called the Hive. To do so, they must go through Riza (Rebecca Ferguson), a three-armed and sultry arms dealer whom H used to date. Agent M (Tessa Thompson)'s livelong dream is to be part of the organization she'd briefly seen as a child. She eventually gets a probationary position at the MIB and pairs up with Agent H, who is a loose cannon (of course). At some point, they pick up Pawny (voiced by Kumail Nanjani), who provides comic relief and is instrumental in the defeat of the Hive (of course). There is CGI tech galore -- shine but no substance -- designed to impress the pre-teen and teen market it's obviously targeted at. There is also Agent C (Rafe Spall), who is an IT-guy (read: nerd) rather than a field agent and who suspects that H is the mole. Predictably, he and H end up being great friends and collaborators when they find the real mole. Agent O (Emma Thompson) is the head of the whole organization (T heads up the London division) and has a seemingly omniscient gut feeling that something is wrong, but chooses to risk the whole organization to let a probationary field agent figure it out for them. The memories they build while doing it will last a lifetime. So H is vindicated and becomes probationary head of the London division, with C fully supporting him. M is now a full-fledged agent, but assigned to New York, so H and M will have to deal with an unrequited relationship (unless they requite it on the way back to Paris from London in the fancy car they have to return to headquarters there). T is dead, along with the Hive. With the ultimate evil defeated, it's unclear what the MIB is supposed to do now -- all of the other alien species were shown amicably cooperating. This movie is set in what used to be an interesting universe, but it's a semi-reboot of the first film rather than a new story -- although this time with a black woman rather than a black man in the starring role. Hemsworth and Thompson had great chemistry in Thor: Ragnarok, but they were lukewarm at best in this half-hearted and committee-written script. Nanjani's voice work was good -- he had the best lines, although that's not even saying much. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4240 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4240 Wed, 23 Jun 2021 20:46:06 +0200 -- "9/10" 2. "La Casa de Papel S04 (2019)" <#Papel> -- "7/10" 3. "Watchmen S01 (2019)" <#Watchmen> -- "9/10" 4. "Thunder Force (2021)" <#Thunder> -- "5/10" 5. "Uncut Gems (2019)" <#Uncut> -- "6/10" 6. "The Office S01--03 (2001--2003)" <#Office> -- "9/10" 7. "The Boys S01 (2019)" <#Boys> -- "9/10" 8. "The Office (US) S01--s03 (2005--2007)" <#OfficeUS> -- "9/10" 9. "Ted Lasso S01 (2020)" <#Ted> -- "10/10" 10. "Gaza Fights for Freedom (2019)" <#Gaza> -- "9/10" 11. "Killing Gaza (2018)" <#Killing> -- "8/10" These are my notes to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. I've recently transferred my reviews to IMDb and made "the list" of around 1600 ratings publicly available. I've included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other -- I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. Schitt's Creek S01--S06 (2015--2020) -- "9/10" "Oh, David, It's a rare gift to strip vanity of its charm, yet here you are." "Oh, Jocelyn, you'll soon learn that we aging mortals are blessed with weakening eyes and fading memories, so we don't have to really see ourselves." "I never said it's the last place you'd ever want to end up. I described the town as the last place I'd ever want to end up." All of the characters are great, but I start off my recap with three quotes from Moira, who stands out for her impeccable diction and extensive vocabulary. The article " A Guide To The Moira Rose Lexicon On ‘Schitt’s Creek’" by Jessica Toomer lists many of her more exotic choices, with many examples. I've learned the following words so far, * "Balatron" : A jester or buffoon (referring to Roland) * "Bombilate" : To buzz; to make a certain noise or sound (referring to a roomful of people) * "Lupanarian" : Pertaining to a brothel or prostitution (referring to the Kit Kat girls in Cabaret) * "Pawky" : Cunning; sly (referring to Jocelyn) * "Pettifogging" : Dishonest or unethical in insignificant matters; meanly petty; mean; quibbling (referring to Alexis) * "Sephardic" : Descended from the Jews of the Iberian peninsula of the 15th century (referring to Johnny) * "Singultus" : A hiccup (referring to mishaps on the wedding day) * "Spanandry" : A dearth of males (referring to the locality) * "Testudine" : An order of reptile commonly known as turtles, tortoises and terrapins (referring to an actual turtle) * "Unasinous" : Sharing the same amount of stupidity (referring to ideas) For even more, "Schitt's Creek/Moira" lists 62 pages of quotes. This is the story of a ludicrously wealthy family that, in the first episode, learns that their accountant has absconded with their entire fortune and had never paid their taxes. The authorities show up to seize all of their property, except for a town that patriarch Johnny Rose (Eugene Levy) had bought as a joke for his son David (Dan Levy) because of its funny name -- Schitt's Creek. The family moves to Schitt's Creek, all moving in to the only motel. Mother Moira (Catherine O'Hara) and daughter Alexis (Annie Murphy) are there with father Johnny and son David. The proprietor of the motel is Stevie Budd (Emily Hampshire), a jaded resident of the town who hasn't fled yet. She befriends David in an uneasy alliance/truce that grows over the first season. Alexis, meanwhile, tries her best to continue being a socialite in the town, meeting Twyla (Sarah Levy), the waitress at the only diner, and Mutt (Tim Rozon), son of the mayor Roland (Chris Elliot) and Jocelyn (Jennifer Robertson), who are an odd couple (how could they be anything else with Elliot involved). Mutt is an off-the-grid-composting, wash-clothes-in-the-creek kind of guy, but obviously, opposites attract, and Alexis is spiraling toward him. The series arc so far is the Roses are trying to find their feet again, looking for jobs and other opportunities in the town. Each show is a classic sitcom episode, with its own arc, contributing to the overall season arc. It's a one-camera affair, with no laugh track. The show is made in Canada, so it's thankfully got the appropriate amount of swearing to properly express the angst that accompanies so many worlds colliding. The first season's story arc ends with the family almost escaping. They'd found a buyer willing to pay a million for the town -- but he falls into a coma after overeating and overdrinking at the Schitt's house. He fails to sign the contract by seconds. David escapes in Roland's truck. Alexis tells Ted she would marry him if she were staying, but she's not, so...and then she has to stay, so now she has to marry him? Even though she just banged Mutt? Season 2 resolves these conflicts: Alexis turns Ted down. David returns, but Stevie makes him suffer. Johnny Rose seems to have been half-conned into getting a job as a mechanic at Bob's Garage. Moira and David try to "remember" how to cook her family recipe. The shows continue in this vein, with the Roses growing somewhat closer to the Schitt's -- and to the Creek. Moira auditions for Jocelyn's singing group The Jazz-a-Gals, Mutt helps Alexis learn how to ride a bike, and she pays it forward to David. Mutt and David build a cedar chest for David's cashmere sweaters. David helps Roland pick out an outfit for his The Devil Wears Prada role-play with Jocelyn. Johnny and Moira luck into a $200 mattress for only $50 -- but it's used. But it's memory foam. They accept their fate and accept the mattress's "memory" of Roland and Jocelyn's brief tryst. Alexis and Mutt break up, putting both of them back on the market. Ted the veterinarian rolled with the disappointment of Alexis's rejection of his marriage proposal and has buffed up and started riding a motorcycle. Alexis is ... interested again, like a goddamned jackal. David is working at the Blouse Barn and has converted it to an upscale, chic establishment. Jocelyn goes shopping there to pick up a cute outfit for her campaign for the town council. Moira is running against her, so David catches hell for having helped her opponent spruce up. Johnny is working on some ideas, with office space in Bob's garage, but nothing's happening yet. He tries to get into the raw-milk business, but Alexis's astounding stupidity just loses him his seed money. Johnny is hard up for cash and asks for David's entire paycheck to cover the bills. Alexis starts working for Ted as his secretary, a job for which she is spectacularly unqualified. Moira continues her campaign with a fundraiser with local businesswomen -- although she and Johnny show up thinking that the demographic would be lesbians. Hilarity ensues. Actually, no. It was pretty cringey. Jocelyn caves to the pressure and bows out of the race -- after admitting to Moira that Roland had used his mayoral clout to inveigle people into putting campaign signs in their yard. Moira will be on the council with Roland -- seeing him every day, something she clearly hadn't sufficiently considered. David helps his boss at the boutique land a windfall sum for selling the name "Blouse Barn" to an Australian mega-store interested in expanding into the North American market. She needed the money because David's transformation of her store had not been cheap. With money in hand, she remunerates David handsomely with $40,000, but then closes her store for a while and going on a long vacation, putting him out of a job. Still, the family ends season two with more money and security than they'd had. They reluctantly form the word "savings" with their mouths instead of spending it. The next season starts with Moira learning the ropes on council. David and Stevie are sleeping with the same guy. Mutt heads out of town with his weird girlfriend, while he gets Alexis to watch his barn (spoiler alert: she's not going to watch his barn; a family of woodchucks will take over before he gets back). Johnny is despondent that he'll ever find anything to do to help his family get back on its feet. Stevie's aunt dies, leaving her the motel in her testament. Johnny finds purpose in helping her make the motel profitable, as a partner. Alexis considers college, but has to admit that she'd never finished high school. She goes back to high school to finish her GED -- with Jocelyn as her teacher. David briefly considers college, but it's too much effort to scare up his own diploma, Instead, he pitches a new store concept in the space vacated by the closing general store. David goes into business with Patrick, with whom he also begins a relationship. Alexis finishes a college course and starts a consulting business. Stevie and Johnny manage to fill the motel a few times and are getting the business going. They rename the motel the "Rosebud" (her last name is actually "Budd", but never mind). Mutt returns from his pine-cone walkabout with Tennessee (Tallahasee), Alexis professes her love to Ted, who's still happily dating farmer Heather, who's supplying artisanal cheese exclusively to David and Patrick's shop. Moira is on the council and in the Jazza-a-gals and would barely recognize herself. Jocelyn and Roland are having a baby. The Roses meet people from their old world and no longer quite like what they see. The Roses organize a Singles Week for the town. David and Patrick profess their love for each other. Alexis professes hers to Ted; Ted eventually reciprocates. The motel is full, so Johnny Rose is back in business. Moira stood by Jocelyn at the hospital until Roland arrived. There are hijinks of various kinds (the aforementioned per-episode plots) wherein lessons are learned, much fun is had, and witty repartee flies. Season five has Patrick and David as well as Alexis and Ted firmly coupled up. Stevie is trying to spark a long-distance relationship with Emir, a hotel/motel blogger/reviewer who'd stopped by once. When she tries to get closer, he pulls away, though. Moira is in Bosnia, on the set of a film that she managed to make much better than it had any right to be. Meanwhile, Moira is directing Cabaret, ostensibly aiding Jocelyn, who seems happy to have the weight off of her shoulders. Moira chooses Stevie as the lead, a choice that is off to a very rocky start on account of how terrified Stevie is. They muddle through to a truce. David and Patrick and Johnny play softball against Roland and Ronnie. Patrick got on Ronnie's bad side when he contracted her to remodel the store's bathroom. During the game, Alexis and Ted break the new sink with shenanigans. David invites Patrick's parents for a surprise birthday party, but they're surprised to find out that their son is gay and hurt that he didn't think that he could tell them. They love David (of course) and everything turns out fine (of course). Soon, Patrick corrals David into a hike. After some tribulations, they arrive at the lookout point and Patrick proposes. On the day of Cabaret, Stevie is nowhere to be found and everyone assumes its nerves -- or the fact that David told her that he and Patrick are to be married. That's kind of the reason, but only because she'd gone to pick up a gift for David and she got stuck in traffic on the way back. She and Patrick knock it out of the park on the night of the show and for the next week. Moira's Crow film is shelved and she buries herself in the closet. In Season six, as Moira's publicist, Alexis ropes Moira into attending a soap-opera convention, filled with adoring fans with ready money. Moira resigns herself to this phase of her life. Days later, though, the trailer for The Crows Have Eyes III: The Crowening drops and Moira's fame begins to grow. It's being released on a streaming platform, so there's no official premiere, but Alexis organizes one in town. They release crows that return to attack the crowd and help create an extremely viral video that boosts the film's buzz even more. Moira is back? Patrick and David are looking for a wedding venue and find a castle, but it's very expensive and the dates don't match for Alexis, who's supposed to join Ted in the Galapagos, where he has an opportunity as a researcher. She was supposed to have already been there, but she'd mixed up the day and month on her ticket and flies only in a month. The castle is only available on a Sunday when they slaughter pigs on the nearby farm, so the boys decide to throw a wedding in the meadow behind the motel. Ted and Alexis navigate their long-distance relationship. With Moira's success, Alexis's publicist business is booming, as well. Ted admits that the research station is no place for Alexis at the same time that Alexis was ready to ask him if she could stay for her business. They're happy to continue in the long-distance vein. In a hilarious scene, Moira and David get into their cups tasting horrible wines that the proprietor and vintner would like to market with her name on it. They cannot find one that they like, but drink several bottles before Patrick and David pick them up to schlep them home. Ted shows up with surprise news: he's been offered a job in the Galapagos for at least three more years. Alexis cannot move to the island and he can't give up the opportunity. They part ways in a touching scene. Johnny and Moira and Roland and Jocelyn vie for the "presidential suite" in the motel they've acquired. The business is growing. Moira gets in trouble with the townspeople for an unfortunate choice of words when describing the town (cited above). David and Patrick's wedding plans proceed apace, with Stevie as the Maid of Honor, in charge of organizing their shared bachelor party. At Patrick's request, they go to an escape room, where Alexis shines, getting them out of there in no time at all. Moira turns down an offer to appear on a Sunrise Bay reboot, while Rosebud Motels learns that their recently acquired motel is a bit of a money pit. Johnny is struggling to finance the motels and meet every whim of an increasingly unreasonable David. Stevie, following Johnny's advice in a business book he'd written long ago, comes up with a plan for acquiring more motels and going big or going home. Johnny contacts his former assistant Mike -- who is now an extremely rich VC funder -- for a pitch. It seems like everyone they knew simultaneously profited from having known the Roses and also completely forgotten about them once they'd lost their fortune. Mike has them flown in, but isn't able to be there personally. Instead, they're in the hands of his snarky and nearly comically buffoonish (although regrettably believable) partners. The pitch is good, but the other partners don't even consider it. Instead, a few of the board members who were already considering jumping ship decide to take on Rosebud Motels as their first big investment. They are on their way, but there is turmoil. The Roses are seemingly going to make good on their promise to get the hell out of the town as soon as they are financially able. It's amusing how unappealing they are when they "go back" to the way they were. David gleefully plans a return to New York City, assuming that Patrick will of course want to go there. David awakes on the wedding day to a downpour that puts the kibosh on the outdoor wedding, but they all rally to make it happen in the town hall instead. Patrick had already organized a massage for David in order to relax him -- and the masseuse obliges. Patrick is surprised to hear what he'd ordered. It's a very touching ceremony. Moira gets a late call to join the Sunrise Bay cast after all -- they'd capitulated to all of her demands. Johnny decides to move to California with Moira instead of setting up Rosebud's offices in New York. David and Patrick will stay in Schitt's Creek in a lovely home. Stevie will stay as well, with Roland and Jocelyn (they're also not moving to New York, though it had been bandied about). Alexis is still moving to New York, taking leave of Twyla, who's become her best friend (and is also, oddly, revealed to have been a lotto millionaire all along, who's just happy with the simple life). It's a lovely, well-written, and incredibly well-cast show. Each character brought a lot to the table; there were no slackers, no stragglers. Highly recommended. La Casa de Papel S04 (2019) -- "7/10" "Palermo: If I was his mother, I'd be lighting candles for him." So we started watching this last season again, having stopped almost a year ago after two episodes. The crew is right where we left them: * Berlin (Pedro Alonso, my favorite), showing up in flashbacks (because he went out in a blaze of glory at the end of season 3); * Denver (Jaime Lorente), with the Vinny Barbarino laugh, who's totally grown on me; * El Profesor (Álvaro Morte), pulling the strings and keeping the team on a plan that seems to keep changing but is always "the plan", until it seems that each bump and hiccup has been anticipated, if not actually included from the beginning; * Nairobi (Alba Flores), whose inspiring speeches rival Berlin's and whose gold-smelting prowess is unrivaled; * Bogotá (Hovik Keuchkerian), who's Nairobi's chief diver and smelter and, soon, lover; * Lisbon (Itziar Ituño), who's been captured and is being interrogated and manipulated by the evil * Alicia (Najwa Nimri), who's arguably more ridiculous than Tokio; * Stockholm (Esther Acebo), who's no longer really with Denver, but also not quite with the shell-shocked * Rio (Miguel Herrán), who's also no longer quite with the laughably over-the-top * Tokio (Úrsula Corberó), who tries to hard to be Margot Robbie playing Harley Quinn, but misses by a good bit; * Stolid Helsinki (Darko Peric), still mourning his brother (cousin?) * Oslo (Roberto Garcia), who only appears in flashbacks; * Palermo (Rodrigo De la Serna), whose speeches are flamboyant and erudite but are missing something compared to those of Berlin or Nairobi; * Arturo/Arturito (Enrique Arce) is still stirring up shit and, now, apparently, roofie-ing other hostages and, finally * Gandía (José Manuel Poga), the head of security released by Palermo to cause chaos so that he can regain control of the operation from Tokio and return to the plan We see in flashbacks how much of the ensuing chaos had been planned for by Berlin and El Professor, as well as Palermo, who's a psychotic, but ferociously dedicated to both the plan and the memory of his lover Berlin. Nairobi is recovering from her near-fatal gunshot wound; she is cared for by Bogotá and others. Tokio is nominally in charge, but gets captured by Gandía, who'd been told how to escape by Palermo. Gandía dislocates his own thumb to slip out of his handcuffs and then suffered absolutely zero ill effects from it. Like, not for one second. We see him pulling a rope to hang a 250-pound man scant minutes later, seemingly with no discomfort or loss of gripping force. The absolutely massive concussion he had from Season 3 has also 100% healed as he sat on the floor for days with little food or water. Palermo rejoins the group after winning back their trust, though grudgingly given. Gandia gets away and finally manages to shot Nairobi point-blank in the head, killing a cast member for the first time that season. El Profesor is incensed but sticks to the plan (sub-part A31 or whatever), releasing a video of Rio revealing how he'd been tortured by the Spanish state and how Lisbon is being held captive by the same torturer (Alicia). Alicia is fired, but miraculously locates El Profesor by the end of the season (because the plot needed her to, despite how overwhelmingly pregnant she is). This not before El Profesor organizes Lisbon's escape back into the bank to rejoin the others. Watchmen S01 (2019) -- "9/10" The story is set in the world of the Watchmen comic series. It makes several nods in that direction, but it takes a little while to get there. Instead, they spend some time world-building, describing a Tulsa, Oklahoma that underwent a White Night, during which the local Ku Klux Klan killed dozens, if not hundreds of police officers in one night. Since then, the police have gone underground and wear masks on-duty, to protect their identities. Some of them have taken on super-hero-like names, like Red Scare (Andrew Howard) or Looking Glass (Tim Blake Nelson). Instead of the classic minorities, the police pursue white supremacists, having hounded them to a sort of shanty town. There is a statue of their patron saint Nixon outside of the encampment/trailer park. Robert Redford is currently president -- and has been for quite some time -- and has granted reparations to black people. The police chief of Tulsa is Judd Crawford (Don Johnson), who is hanged at the end of the first episode. An old, wheelchair-bound man named Will (Louis Gossett Jr.) claims to have done it. Sister Night/Angela Abar (Regina King) finds him and takes him in for questioning, without arresting him first, though, in some sort of extra-judicial process. A lot of stuff in this show seems to happen extra-judicially with the police having or granting themselves a lot of leeway in blurring the lines between judge, jury, and executioner. Superheroes, on the other hand, have been banned. The remaining vigilantes are hunted down and imprisoned or killed. So, no-one's allowed to dress up and play hero anymore except for a handful of cops -- and only they seem to know who's legit. Laurie Blake (Jean Smart) is an FBI officer put in charge of the Judd's hanging. She used to be married to Dr. Manhattan before he fucked off to Mars. During one episode, she tells a wonderful "brick joke" . With some jarring exceptions -- e.g. the introduction of Lady Trieu (Hong Chau) -- the story is kind of interesting, slowly revealing connections to the original stories. The closer it gets to the original mythology, the better. The newer stuff is kind of trite -- a point the story itself seems to be aware of in the person of Agent Petey (Dustin Ingram), who has a PhD on the original heroes and disdains any of the retellings. It's like he sees the future demise of the show. In the first episode, I found the action scenes somewhat contrived. For example, One member of the Seventh Cavalry has a 50cal machine gun, while Sister Night hides behind a cow carcass. The carcass takes dozens and dozens of shots, visibly shredding apart but, miraculously doesn't let any bullet through where it would matter. Lucky that. Also unexplained. She wears a mask; she's not bulletproof. Minutes later, two people -- Judd and Pirate Jenny (Jessica Camacho) -- crash-land a slow-flying aerial vehicle to Earth (an Owlship from the original pantheon) from a height of several hundred meters, hitting the ground at what looks like at least 100kph. Neither was belted in -- as was evident in the immediately preceding shot -- but they both not only survived, they had enough strength to kick their way out and escape without a scratch or a contusion or a bruise or a concussion or any damage whatsoever. Judd dances around at a dinner party later as if nothing had happened at all. I'm pretty sure that neither of them have superpowers. In a different thread, we see Adrian Veidt (Jeremy Irons), formerly Ozymandias, on an estate by himself, surrounded by his automata, several copies each of Ms. Crookshanks (Sara Vickers) and Mr. Philips (Tom Mison). He puts them through exercises and continues to practice science (his big thing was being smarter than anyone else). The world thinks he's dead but he's just trapped on an English estate, plotting his schemes and scheming his plots. Meanwhile, Angela finds out more about Will and how he's actually her grandfather. She'd thought she was an orphan. She also finds out that Judd was hiding Klan memorabilia in his closet. She jousts with Laurie while cooperating somewhat to move the investigation forward. They go to meet Lady Trieu -- whom we'd only briefly met in that aforementioned jarring scene where she was the quintessentially alien, ruling-class, trillionaire genuis. The set design is quite nice, with a mix of high-tech and pretty low-tech (like the costumes, which are barely adequate for a Halloween party, but this seems deliberate) or even steampunk, like Veight's entire castle and studio, where he grows fetuses he fishes out of the lake into full-grown humans (Crookshanks and Philips) in minutes while he eats the same cake he always eats. I actually quite enjoy the the surrealist scenes with Irons in the old castle. He puts himself 100% into his roles and it shows. The castle scenes remind me a bit of Saló, with a lot less nudity and a better script. "Veidt: Four years. Four years since I was sent here. In the beginning, I thought it was a paradise, but it's not. It's a prison. So, with your help, with your lives, with your broken, mangled old bodies, one way or another, I will escape this godforsaken place." We learn of Looking Glass's origin story. He was in New Jersey the day the squid fell. He was there distributing the Watchtower with the rest of his class. In the modern day, Looking Glass (Wade) is still traumatized that another squidfall is coming. He's sorta/kinda kidnapped by the Seventh Cavalry, having followed a pretty lady home, suspecting that her ride home was involved in the original police shooting. The Senator of Oklahoma is also there. They're testing an inter-dimensional portal by throwing basketballs through it. He hands Wade a tape to watch. Adrian Veidt speaks. Wade hears that the squid didn't come from another dimension. In fact, it came from Veidt. It was a hoax, designed to pull humanity back from fighting itself to come together against a common threat. The mini-squidfalls are also fake, dumped by Veidt in order to keep humanity united against a common, extra-dimensional threat. Veidt, meanwhile, is ready to try the catapult himself. He has a "spacesuit" that he trusts. He breaks through the "dome" covering his habitat and discovers he's on ... Callisto? At any rate, he's orbiting Jupiter. He drags the bodies of his predecessors together to write "Save Me" on the surface. He is recoiled back into the the habitat to meet the Gamewarden, who metes out punishment. Angela Abar (Sister Night) takes a bottle of drugs called Nostalgia that she'd obtained from Will. They contain his memories. Manufactured as a bulwark against dementia, the drug was never meant to be taken by someone else. Angela dives deep into Will's origin story as Hooded Justice. He became part of the Minutemen, grew disappointed in them, took on the Ku Klux Klan on his own, and, finally, broke up their Cyclops plan to get black people to kill each other through hypnosis. Angela awakes in Lady Trieu's lair. As Angela recovers in the Millennium Clock Tower with Trieu and her daughter/mother-clone, she remembers growing up in Vietnam -- the 51st state, after Dr. Manhattan won the war there -- and losing her parents to a bomb. She remembers meeting her grandmother and then losing her, just as they were about to return to Tulsa. Trieu tells her of the Seventh Kavalry's plans to capture Dr. Manhattan, steal his power, and transfer it to the senator of Oklahoma (I know, it sounds cheesier when I write it down, but it's actually fine). Angela leaves, breaking out past the cops -- Red Scare and Pirate Jenny -- to return home to Cal. She calls him Jon, smashes him in the head with a hammer, and digs out an amnesia device and then remembers how she put it there. Since her grandmother had died before taking her from Vietnam to Tulsa, she stayed and became a cop. She'd met Dr. Manhattan in a bar one night, during which he told her of the life they would have together. We see Manhattan visiting Veidt -- 24 years after the squid event -- and offering him the utopia he'd built on Europa. Veidt accepts. Hearing that Dr. Manhattan is inexplicably in love again, this time with Angela, not Laurie Blake, Veidt offers him the amnesia ring -- plan A -- which Manhattan accepts. It works. For 10 years, Manhattan had already been hiding as Cal (Angela's husband), but now he no longer even knows he's Dr. Manhattan. Angela does, though. There's are some time-paradox shenanigans where Angela asks Manhattan/Cal to ask Will (Hooded Justice) -- with whom he's simultaneously conversing because he doesn't experience time the same way we do -- how Will knew about Judd. Will asks "Who's Judd", with Angela realizing that she'd set the whole ball rolling in a what is now a classic time-loop paradox. Manhattan tells Angela that the Seventh Kavalry is here and that he won't/won't have/can't/can't have stop/ed them. Angela begs to differ and takes out a whole slew of them, eventually with Jon/Cal/Manhattan's help. But the tachyon cannon fires anyway and sucks him into the artificial lithium cage constructed to trap him. The Senator is waiting, ready to grandstand and then begin the energy transfer. Veidt has long since grown bored of his "utopia", with his adoring servants, and continues to try to escape. He is put on trial, but of course it's a sham. He is imprisoned, but the Game Warden unwittingly brings him the horseshoe he uses to dig his way out of his dungeon. He waits for his message ("Save Me") to arrive at its destination, which we learn is Lady Trieu, who turns out to be his daughter. Her mother Bian had stolen one of Veidt's many samples (the narcissist had stored vials of his seed in a secret safe in his office) and implanted it. Trieu turns out arguably crazier and more narcissistic and more intelligent than Veidt (though not quite ... he's a clever sonofabitch). She sends a rocket to pick him up once she sees that he'd written "Save Me...Daughter". He escapes, confronting the game warden one last time, whom he vanquishes, revealing that they were all just cogs in a game he'd played on himself to keep himself amused and mostly sane. "Veidt: I had eight years to kill. Having a worthy adversary helped keep me sane. Game Warden: And was I a worthy adversary? Veidt: No. But you put on a hell of a show." Now that they're all back on Earth, things are coming to a head. Trieu is poised to use her "Millenium Clock" for its true purpose: to absorb Manhattan's energy and then implant it into her, transforming her into a god who will supposedly serve mankind. Veidt knows different, seeing in his daughter very much of himself. As Trieu teleports everyone from the Kavalry basement to just below her clock, Manhattan manages to sabotage the transfer by whisking Veidt, Blake, and Wade off to Veidt's lair in Antarctica (Karnak). From there, they use his squid-producing device to deliver deadly frozen shrimp that act as bullets from above to destroy both Trieu and the Millennium Clock, disrupting the transfer. Manhattan is gone, but the Senator does not survive his transfer attempt. Trieu would have, but does not survive Veidt's hail of shrimp. Her plan is thwarted. Bian survives, as does Angela, who reconciles with Will, inviting her to his home after he'd tied up a few expository knots. Blake and Wade take Veidt into custody -- for the murder of 3 million people 25 years ago -- and Angela ponders whether an egg that Manhattan/Cal/Jon had left behind contains his power. There were a few rough spots, but overall the story was excellent, as was most of the acting. Tim Blake Nelson stands out, but no-one holds a candle to Jeremy Irons, who is worth the price of admission. Overall the soundtrack was quite good, but episode 5 was especially good, with several variations on George Michael's Never Dance Again, to commemorate the song that was playing when Wade (Looking Glass) was in New Jersey during the initial squid attack. Thunder Force (2021) -- "5/10" Lydia (Melissa McCarthy) and Emily (Octavia Butler) are lifelong friends. We see them meet in grade school, when Emily moves to town after having lost her parents to super-powered criminals called Miscreants. Emily immediately starts flexing her considerable mental muscles in class. The other kids call her a nerd. "I'm not a nerd, I'm smart!" Lydia comes to her rescue and mops up the bullies. In high school, they're still friends, with Emily destined for greater things, and Lydia...not. Lydia almost screws up Emily's academic chances when she forgets to wake her and Emily summarily drops her dead weight. Many years later, Lydia contacts her again to come to their High School reunion. Emily offers hope that she might show, but then doesn't. From the reunion, Lydia wanders over to Emily's fancy new corporate headquarters, where she learns that Emily is very close to discovering how to grant superpowers. Lydia bumbles her way into the apparatus and receives the first super-strength injections instead of Emily. Emily is upset, but accepts that Lydia will be her experimental candidate now. There's a bit of a montage where we follow Lydia's progress toward bus-tossing superhero alongside Emily's more subtle invisibility power. Emily's daughter Tracy (Taylor Mosby) is also ludicrously smart, very close to her mother, but finds in Lydia an older friend who also, for example, plays Fortnite. The ladies get super-tough costumes and venture into the streets in a purple Lamborghini into which the Junoesque ladies in rubber suits don't fit too comfortably. They thwart a robbery by "The Crab" (Jason Bateman), whose crew is robbing a gas station. Sparks fly between Lydia and Crab before he and his crew escape without their purloined goods. Lydia had pummeled a couple of them and Emily had tased another (sneaking up on him while invisible). The Crab reports back to local politician "The King" (Bobby Cannavale), who's a super-powered miscreant, but good at hiding it. He's running for mayor and has another of his henchmen Laser (Pom Klementieff) tearing up the city to convince people to vote for law and order. The plot proceeds as you'd expect, with ups and downs and everyone redeeming themselves in one way or another as they grow closer and cement into the team called Thunder Force. In the finale, Tracy extends the duo to a trio when she reveals that she'd been taking treatments for super-speed and saves everyone. The Crab and Lydia strike up a relationship and The Crab betrays the King and Laser. Uncut Gems (2019) -- "6/10" Howard Ratner (Adam Sandler) is a jeweler in the diamond district in Manhattan. He's a gambling addict, a philanderer, and an all-around terrible person. He wears a lot of jewelry -- a lot more than you'd expect. He has a small jewelry shop in the Jewelry District with an airlock door system, where you have to be buzzed in and out. He's cheating on his wife with his callipygian secretary Julia (Julia Fox), for whom he's rented a nearly ludicrously tackily appointed apartment in Manhattan. He has arranged for delivery of a rare black opal from Ethiopia, smuggled out of the mine and out of the country in a shipment of fish. He's planning on putting it up for auction and is convinced that it will bring at least a million. He's buried under at least $100k of gambling debt but keeps digging himself in more. Howie is a huge basketball fan and is over the moon when his "partner" Demany (Lakeith Stanfield) brings Kevin Garnett and his entourage to the shop. Garnett is very interested in the opal and feels that it grants him power. He demands to hold on to it over the weekend, trading his Celtics championship ring for it. Howie immediately pawns Garnett's ring, placing a stupidly complex and long-shot bet on Garnett's next performance instead of paying back his brother-in-law Arno (Eric Bogosian). Arno and his crew get to the bookie and quash the bet, but Howie has no idea about that. Garnett plays like a God that night and Howie thinks he's a millionaire. Arno and his gang pick him up and beat the crap out of him, informing him that they'd stopped the bet. Howie is mortified and devastated and out-of-his-mind with rage. Meanwhile Garnett refuses to return the stone. No-one thinks it's weird that he's basically stolen it. Demany tells Howie to be cool. Demany and his crew are even sleazier than Howie. Howie is not cool about it because he needs to sell the stone at auction so he can pay off his gambling debts. He's in the hole even more now. He eventually gets the stone back and puts it up for auction, but the auction house appraises it at about $150k--$200k instead. Howie is, once again, incensed, and browbeats his father (or father-in law) Gooey (Judd Hirsch) into bidding the stone up, but then he ends up buying it. Howie swears he'll buy it back from him, and then takes it from him to sell it to Kevin Garnett (this time for real). With Garnett's money in hand, he sees Arno and his gang buzzed into his shop. Instead of paying them off, he gets Julia to take the money through an open window and flies her on a Blade to the Mohegan Sun, where she puts it all on a very similarly wild bet on Garnett (again). Howie gets the upper hand on Arno and his crew, trapping them between doors in the airlock of his store. He makes them sit there through the entire game, while he exults as all of the points of his bet come to fruition. He's made ~$1.3M, Arno acknowledges that he was right and Howie, overjoyed, lets them back into the store. I was thinking at that point that he should really be buzzing them out, but he was so excited that he'd won that he lost all sense of proportion and thought that all was forgiven. Arno's main henchman shoots him right in the face. He and the others start to rob the store. Arno tries to flee, stunned that his men have murdered Howie. They shoot him in the face, too. Julia makes it out of the casino with all of the money, in cash, living presumably relatively happy ever after. The jumpy and nervous style of this movie was poorly suited to a movie with such a comparatively short story stretched out over a 135-minute movie. I know that this was the artistic style of it, but it was noisy and hectic and stressful. It never let up (my viewing partner deemed the film had ADHD). There was just not enough meat to it for such a long movie. It would have been a better 90-minute movie That, and there was literally not one really redeeming character in it. Howie was not a nice person without the crippling gambling addiction and philandering (although Sandler was excellent in this role). Howie's partner Demany was as big a sleazeball as he was. He was selling fake watches. He helped Garnett "steal" the stone. Garnett, a multi-millionaire, thought nothing of taking something that wasn't his. Howie's family hated him. Perhaps Julia, the semi-reformed prostitute, was the closest thing to an admirable character. At least she didn't renege on her deals. She paid for her apartment. She didn't abscond with Howie's money, betting it instead. She was probably legitimately on the way back to Manhattan to bring the cash to him, as he lay dead on the floor of his store. The Office S01--03 (2001--2003) -- "9/10" "If you want the rainbow, you've got to put up with the rain. You know who said that? Dolly Parton. And people say that she's just a big pair of tits." "How would I like to be remembered? Simply as a man who put a smile on the face of all who he met. [...] Have you got everything you need? Cheers." David Brent (Ricky Gervais) is the boss of a company that doesn't seem to do anything. He is nearly painfully socially inept but has no idea -- he thinks he's cool. He's impervious to criticism because his ego cannot be shattered. He is surrounded by misfits and losers, none of whom seem to do anything at all -- all day long. Nearly all of their interactions are painful to watch. The company they all work for is technically a paper supply office in Slough, England, but you only know that because some of the characters mention it, not because it matters for anything that goes on in the show. Tim (Martin Freeman) has a terrible haircut, he seems to only occasionally shave, and his clothes are ill-fitting. He's trying to make time with Dawn (Lucy Davis), who's been engaged to Lee (Joel Beckett) for over three years. Lee is an awful human being and Dawn will never leave him. Tim will pine for her until he dies. Gareth (Mackenzie Crook) is a former soldier whose every waking thought is about his former life. He cannot conceive of leaving the paper company. Occasionally, the execrable Finch (Ralph Ineson) shows up as the incarnation of everything that is wrong with the standard English male. And absolutely none of them shine when they hit the pub. It's equal-opportunity awfulness, so the women are just as terrible as the men, putting up with nearly impossibly boorish behavior in order to hook up. Everyone gets spectacularly drunk and says the most awful things. In one of the scenes (season 3, I think?), one of them is horrifically drunk and ends up with Finch in what looks like a parking area on a highway. It's depressing and awful and all too believable and one can only imagine Gervais cackling to himself about it. I started watching this show over a year ago and I've never gotten around to finishing it. It's a good show, but it's not particularly fun to watch. I'm at the end of season one (six episodes) and now have a bit of momentum and I can see what the concept is. Once you see the concept, you can enjoy it for that and stop cringing at each and every thing that Brent says. It's better if you picture Gervais and co-writer Stephen Merchant grinning madly at how perfectly miserable they make every last detail of the show. Twenty years later and it's only gotten worse because everything just used to look tawdry, but now it looks tawdry and dated. The gigantic monitors. The clapboard office furniture. The nearly impossibly ill-fitting clothes. The open and crowded floor plan. The carpet. It all just piles on to create a pinnacle of hopelessness. No-one's clothes fit. No-one is well-lit. They're all a bit pasty and have uniformly terrible hairstyles. They're just a bunch of sad sacks, acting as furniture for the stars, who are not even better -- they just have the spotlight on them. I consider this to be "cringe comedy". Gervais is brilliant at it, but it's only passably fun to watch. I think this show is eminently unbingeable because of how uncomfortable it is to watch. It's well-written and absolutely unapologetic and unrelenting and rings so damned true, but it's hard to watch a show about an office full of people living lives of quiet desperation, where each day ends not with a bang, but a whimper. The Boys S01 (2019) -- "9/10" This show is about a world where superheroes exist. The show takes place in the United States, largely in the greater metropolitan New York City region. Madelyn Stillwell (Elisabeth Shue) manages several hundred of these heroes for the powerful Vought International, including an elite team of "The Seven". Vought make a lot of money with advertising, sponsorships, and special appearances. They use social media heavily in order to measure engagement. The Seven are all assholes, about as arrogant and spoiled as any other A-list celebrities. The heroes in The Seven are kind of mockingly bizarro-world versions of well-known heroes: 1. Homelander (Antony Starr): Superman, but with an American-flag cape 2. Queen Maeve (Dominique McElligott): Wonder Woman without the lasso and invisible jet 3. The Deep (Chace Crawford): Aquaman, including an ability to talk to all denizens of the sea. 4. A-Train (Jessie T. Usher): The Flash, but without science or humility. 5. Black Noir (Nathan Mitchell): Snake Eyes from G.I. Joe. The name is delightfully stupid and no-one acknowledges it. 6. Translucent (Alex Hassell): Impenetrable skin; can turn invisible 7. Starlight (Erin Moriarty): Super-strength; emits overpoweringly blinding light There's a bit of a pro-wrestling vibe to the marketing, though there aren't really any official heels. That is, they are all heels in real life but the public doesn't see them that way at all. Starlight is the newest addition to the seven, replacing the retiring Lamplighter. She hails from Des Moines and, like the rest of the nation, worships The Seven and can't believe her luck. She soon finds out that they are a jaded, horrible bunch of people and that Vought is corrupt, through and through. They project a moral public image that has nothing to do with how they are or what they do. The Deep forces Starlight to blow him on her first day. Over the next day or two, Starlight learns more about what it's like to work as a "hero" for Vought, where everything is staged and she gets in trouble for saving someone who wasn't on the schedule from being raped. She meets Hughie in a park -- both were on the same bench -- and she confides in him. He tells her to keep fighting, though he's not sure what's happened to her (he has no idea who she is). She takes his advice and is determined not to let the bastards get her down. In a separate storyline, Hughie (Jack Quaid) works in an electronics store. He's on his way out to dinner with his girlfriend when A-Train plows right through her at super-speed, on a mission of some sort. Robin disappears in a cloud of bloody mist and Hughie is left holding her hands and forearms. Hughie is devastated and starts to shed his milquetoast personality. He meets the Butcher (Karl Urban), the leader of the eponymous group. Butcher gets Hughie to plant a bug in the Seven's headquarters -- he gets access by asking to have A-Train apologize in person as he signs his NDA and takes the paltry settlement of $45k -- but Translucent sees what he does and tracks him down to the electronics store. Translucent is about to extinguish Hughie when Butcher comes back and they subdue Translucent with an electric charge. Hughie is reluctant, but Butcher convinces him that they have to keep Translucent as a prisoner. Hughie comes up with the idea of putting him an electrified cage inside of an ad-hoc Faraday cage to keep the Seven from tracking him. With the help of Serge/Frenchie (Tomer Capon), they try different ways of killing Translucent, but none work. Serge eventually thinks of a way -- jam some plastique up his ass. Translucent breaks out, wheedling his way past Hughie, who has the detonator. They have to be careful of setting it off because Homelander is near -- and he has X-ray vision and super-hearing. Hughie lets 'er rip and the Seven are, temporarily, the Six. The beginnings of the Boys -- Butcher, Hughie, and Frenchie -- clean up the mess, discarding Translucent's indestructible skin in a zinc trunk -- Homelander can't see through zinc -- at the bottom of the harbor. The Deep eventually finds it, having been told about it by a porpoise, with which he can presumably communicate. They information Madelyn and Vought and The Seven realize that they might have a problem. Starlight's fortunes turn on a dime as the girl she'd protected comes forward and is effusively thankful, shooting her ratings to the stratosphere and pleasing the Seven's media handler Ashley Barrett (Colby Minifie) -- an absolute jackal of a person with a shark's smile and literally no morals whatsoever. She is all about perception and couldn't care less who gets raped. Now she's happy to present Starlight's new, super-whorish costume. Starlight must wear it or she's out of the Seven. A-Train is racing Shockwave for the title of the fastest man on Earth. He visits with his girlfriend Popclaw, who's got some powers of her own. He gets really, really high on Compound V before the race, and then easily breaks his own world record. Popclaw also takes some and gets out of control, killing her landlord by accident during some rough play that she was bartering in lieu of rent. The Boys show up to talk her down after the murder. They're joined by Mother's Milk (Laz Alonso), referred to as "MM". The Boys track Popclaw's tip to a Triad basement lair, where a super-powered girl is being held. It looks like she was being used as a substrate or conduit to produce Compound V. Actually, her captors were trying to turn her into a super-terrorist. The Boys let her out and she destroys the place, escaping without killing them. A-Train hunts for her, but so do the Boys. And A-Train's an idiot so, despite his speed, he's not as quick as they are. They eventually all meet, but they Boys get The Female before A-Train can (because he's useless). A-Train is busy murdering her, but Frenchie gets the crowd over and he has to stop. They gas her and take off. Stillwell sends Homelander and Queen Maeve to rescue a hijacked plane over the Atlantic, but they fuck it up royally. They break into the plane and take out two of the hijackers. The third is in the cockpit and he shoots the pilot before Homelander kills him with heat vision that also takes out most of the instrument panel. Homelander and Maeve fly off, leaving everyone else to die in the ocean. The Deep, meanwhile, is trying to do more -- he wants to help dolphins. He doesn't do such a great job because, like A-Train, he's an idiot. Starlight goes to the Believe Expo with her mother, returning to her roots as an evangelical, but is dismayed to find she doesn't really fit in anymore. She goes rogue and reveals to the whole crowd that she'd been sexually assaulted (but not by whom). Stillwell is massively displeased and fires her "handler" Ashley, who's also displeased. They both apply pressure on Starlight, but she's not having it anymore. The Boys are there as a sting operation on Ezekiel, the plastic-armed supe who's headlining the whole festival. He's gay in private, but speaks out against it for Vought/Believe. He's also channeling all of the Compound V throughout the country using his traveling religious festival. Hughie confronts him and blackmails him into spilling his guts on how the whole operation works. "CR Booth Guy: I'm not really sure what you're sayin', son. "Butcher: I'm saying: if there is some geezer out there, with a big, white beard, he's a real heavy white cunt. "CR Booth Guy: I'm sorry, did you just call God a C-word? "Butcher: Yeah, he's got a hard-on for mass murder and givin' kids cancer and his big old answer to the existential clusterfuck that is humanity is to nail his own bleedin' son to a plank. That is a cunt move. C'mon, even you've got to agree with me there. We should lob a fuckin' nuke at 'im and get it over and done with. Know what I'm sayin'? [...] Good talk. Think about it? I'm here all day." Later in the same episode, Hughie borrows someone else's phone and then calls Mother's Milk on his private number on it. They then discuss all of their plans over an open, monitored line. Hughie leaves his fingerprints on that other person's phone. Black Noir gets on Frenchie's trail, but the Female protects him, leaping into battle with Noir and getting torn to shreds. One of her powers is, apparently, quick-healing, so she pops right back after Noir has left the scene. She and Frenchie are definitely burned now, though, and have to go into hiding. Homelander also goes off-script (like Starlight), but does so to rally people to support letting the Seven (and Vought) be integrated into and funded by the U.S. military. Homelander is going off the rails, bit by bit. Starlight and Hughie are closer now that they have a shared trauma (he lost Robin to A-Train and she was mouth-raped by The Deep). When Annie/Starlight stands up for herself, Stillwell is forced to demote The Deep -- making him publicly apologize and sending him to Sandusky, Ohio -- reducing the original Seven now to the Five. This doesn't last, though, as Homelander and his network find out who the Boys are, including all of their identities. He reveals Hughie's betrayal of Starlight in the most dickish way possible, but she ends up forgiving Hughie and meets up with him again. With their identities in danger, the Boys try gather everyone to safety. A-Train gets to Hughie's father first, but Hughie distracts him with promises of Compound V and the Female cripples him, shattering one of his femurs. MM gets Butcher to ask for help from the FBI to protect their families. He reluctantly does so, giving his sample of Compound V to Raynor (Jennifer Esposito), who uses it to try to pressure Stillwell into capitulating on her company's attempts to inveigle their way into the military. Unfortunately -- and highly coincidentally -- at the exact same time, the first Supe terrorist reveals himself, slaughtering an entire platoon of invading U.S. soldiers (who are, obviously, not terrorists). There's also a side story where the Boys use Mesmer's (Haley Joel Osment) mind-reading powers to find out the Female's backstory. She was part of a terrorist group named the Shining Light Liberation Army and was kidnapped and injected with heroic amounts of Compound V in an attempt to create a Supe terrorist. The Boys managed to stop this one attempt, but were proven correct in their assumption that there were others. At the end of the first season, Starlight helps Hughie rescue the rest of the Boys from a black site. A-Train shows up but has a heart attack (because of a Compound V overdose) when he smugly confronts Starlight. She and Hughie give him CPR until medical personnel arrive. Hughie takes off with the rest of the Boys. Meanwhile, Homelander admits to Stillwell that he'd distributed Compound V around the world to create super-villains for them to fight -- guaranteeing Vought's revenue streams and entrance into the lucrative international-military-contracting market. Butcher kidnaps Stillwell, wrapping her in bombs, but Homelander shows up, kills Stillwell himself, and then whisks Butcher away to reveal that he's been keeping Butcher's wife Becca in a suburban home -- where she lives with Homelander's son. The Office (US) S01--s03 (2005--2007) -- "9/10" The first season introduces us to Michael Scott (Steve Carell), the regional manager of Dunder-Mifflin paper products in Scranton, Pennsylvania. The pilot is almost a carbon copy of the UK version, so instead of Tim, we have Jim Halpert (John Krasinski) in sales, with Pam Beesly (Jenna Fischer) instead of Dawn, teaming up with him in a half-romance/half-friendship to plague Dwight Schrute (Rainn Wilson) in the same way that Tim and Dawn made Garrett miserable. Like Dawn, Pam has been engaged to Roy (David Denman) for three years -- a relationship that no-one understands. Over this first season, we meet Stanley (Leslie David Baker), the token black guy, who might be a salesman, Darryl (Craig Robinson), who works in the warehouse, who doesn't put up with Michael's shit, Creed (Creed Bratton), Phyllis (Phyllis Smith), Kevin (Brian Baumgartner), who's in accounting and is roughly Keith without the scotch eggs, Toby (Paul Lieberstein), the beleaguered and often mystified HR representative, chatterbox Kelly Kapoor (Mindy Kaling), straight-laced and judgmental Angela (Angela Kinsey), who is having an illicit office relationship with Dwight, of all people, office drunk Meredith (Kate Flannery), Oscar (Oscar Nuñez), the token latino and homosexual, temp Ryan (B.J. Novak), who Michael has an odd attraction to, and, finally, Jan Levinson (Melora Hardin), Michael's boss from New York City. As in the British version, the episodes revolve mostly around the psychotic hijinks of Michael, who is just as tone-deaf and deluded as his counterpart David Brent. Gervais and Merchant are executive producers, so you can feel their touch as well. The UK version was dark and brilliant and more difficult to watch, but this version can be just as dark, though it's goofier. The show shares the single-camera, shaky-camera, breaking-of-the-fourth-wall style of its predecessor. It grows on you and the episodes are really quite well-written and acted. Really only Michael is painful to watch. Dwight, like his counterpart Garret, actually grows into an understandable character and also kind of grows on you. Michael only very occasionally drop out of cringe mode, but it's a welcome relief when he does. Like David Brent before him, though, he always makes you regret this trust. Jim and Pam play pranks on Dwight, mostly leaving Michael alone. Michael is more than capable of undermining himself. The episodes hit a lot of the highlights of a year in a boring office: Christmas party, birthdays, drug testing, diversity training, health-care plans, sales awards, sexual-harassment training, halloween, fire drills, performance reviews, office and IT security, and much more. I'm not sure how they'll carry it to nine seasons, but they're doing very well so far. The original constellation holds until the end of season 2, when Jim confesses his love to Pam and they kiss -- with her ultimately rejecting him. In season 3, Jim is working in the Stanford, Connecticut branch and Pam has broken off her engagement with Roy. Ryan has been promoted to Jim's position. We meet a couple of Jim's new co-workers in Stanford: Andy (Ed Helms), Karen (Rashida Jones), and his boss Josh (Charles Esten). Jan and corporate merge the Scranton and Stamford branches. Josh announces that he's not going to head it up, so the job falls to Michael. Scranton welcomes a few employees from Stamford (Andy, Karen, and a few others who don't last). Jim and Karen are dating, which leads to tension with Pam, who's since called off her engagement with Roy. Michael and Jan are bizarrely in a relationship. At first, it seems like she's dating down, but she turns out to be an abusive nightmare of a partner, playing directly into all of Michael's weaknesses. The season culminates with Jim, Karen, and Michael in NYC, all interviewing for the same job at corporate headquarters -- which turns out to be Jan's, who is being fired for poor performance. Michael melts down. Jim declines the job in order to stay in Scranton with Pam. Karen doesn't get that job either. Ryan the temp ends up getting job (he has an MBA!). Ted Lasso S01 (2020) -- "10/10" Ted Lasso (Jason Sudeikis) is the irrepressible eponymous title characater, a football coach from Kansas City who takes a job coaching a British Premier League soccer team, AFC Richmond. He arrives with his number two, Coach Beard (Brendan Hunt), a stoic, funny, and wise addition to the team. They are both much smarter than they let on, with very clever references to movies and books and history betraying their depth for those willing to be observant. They arrive to meet team owner Rebecca (Hannah Waddingham), who knows quite a bit about football, but still hired a complete neophyte to coach her newly acquired team. She'd acquired it from her monster of an ex-husband, who loves the team more than anything. Her goal is to destroy the team. She engages the services of his former right-hand man -- and back-office manager -- Higgins (Jeremy Swift) to try to undermine the team. Ted's got an uphill battle with his team, but he is a genuinely nice human being and a master of psychological manipulation (as is Coach Beard). They quickly befriend Nate (Nick Mohammed), the kit man, eventually getting him promoted to assistant coach. Keeley (Juno Temple) is a bit of a football-player groupie, who starts off dating Jamie Tartt (Phil Dunster), a young and arrogant and brilliant player, but ends up with Roy Kent (Brett Goldstein), a brilliant footballer and captain of the team who's at the other end of his career and not handling it well. The rest of the team is less strongly represented, but Sam Obisanya (Toheeb Jimoh) from Nigeria is a lovely guy and grows as a player. Dani Rojas (Cristo Fernández) shows up mid-season to challenge Jamie Tartt on the field -- and to demolish him as far as personality and lease on life goes. Initially very dubious Guardian reporter Trent Crimm (James Lance) is quickly won over by Lasso's honesty and attitude. The rest of the story arc is, roughly, Ted must make peace with his wife wanting to move on. He ends up sleeping with one of Rebecca's oldest friends Sassy (Ellie Taylor) to tear off that band-aid. Something might grow out of that in the next season. Rebecca is won over by Lasso and learns how to live for herself rather than for petty revenge against her scheming and awful husband Rupert (Anthony Head). Lasso had baked her biscuits every morning, which helped. Keeley also helps and they become fast friends. Roy has learned to accept that he's no longer in the starting lineup because he's too old and slow and accepts his mentor role. He and Keeley are living together by the end of the season. The townspeople make their peace with their new coach -- calling him a "wanker" in a friendly way now -- even though, despite his best efforts, he can't keep the team from being relegated in the final match of the season. It's Jamie Tartt, now playing for Manchester City (he'd been recalled/traded...it's complicated), who ends up passing the ball instead of hogging it for himself, letting his team score an easy goal and win. This was a victory for Lasso, who'd been training Tartt to be part of a team instead just a brilliant ego. Lasso here plays a monk-like long game, congratulating Tartt on his goal, even though it relegated his own team. Tartt's father is seen yelling at him for passing the ball instead of taking the goal for himself. The juxtaposition is perhaps a bit heavy-handed, but effective. Rebecca rejects Lasso's resignation -- which he'd made after Beard had explained to him how bad relegation was -- and Lasso promises that they're going to get promoted again -- and then win the whole thing. Things are hopeful for a second season. The writing is lovely and intelligent and not patronizing. Sudeikis is brilliant, as are so many others. They're really all great and an absolute relief to watch. It's not that nothing bad happens, but that it's uplifting in a non-dorky way, with real life lessons about not being assholes in there. Lasso is a revelatory character. It may sound schmaltzy and brainwashed, but you have to see it to believe it. The scene in the restaurant where Lasso is dining with Crimm and they have to eat Vindaloo food because Lasso doesn't want to offend his friend, whose father cooked it (and whom he'd met because he was his Uber driver from the airport, so of course Lasso chatted him up). It could have been stupid, but it was touching, and it was a show of self-sacrifice that didn't feel fake or stupid. Lasso does almost nothing for direct gain. He's just nice and hopes for the best -- and then he gets it. Or there's the scene in the bar, playing darts with Rupert. It's so well-paced and structured that even a jaded sonofabitch like me, who saw the setup a mile away, was grinning from ear to ear as Sudeikis unrolled the scene. Just lovely and fun. Gaza Fights for Freedom (2019) -- "9/10" This documentary was written and directed by Abby Martin. She interviewed people in Gaza, showing how they live, without enough food, with almost no drinking water (90% is toxic), and with no medical treatment unless the Israelis grant it. She covers Palestinian history from the Naqba in 1947 up to the present day. The Palestinians are forced into camps as their land and water is stolen. The living conditions are nearly inconceivable. It is illegal to protest. The democratically elected government of Hamas is called terrorist. It is illegal to show the Palestinian flag. The Israelis occupy their territory, evicting those Palestinians who even still have homes. The Israeli population seems positively monstrous, gathering on a "cinema hill" to watch their military bomb civilians. The entire place is hemmed in with razorwire and walls, encircled by troops, all movement monitored and controlled. The harbor is blockaded, a siege that has lasted for over a decade. Fishermen are herded by Israeli boats, illegally imposing limits in waters that are not their own. But might makes right. And the international community says nothing. Palestinians have little to no medicine and cannot get help. They have little food and water. They cannot import construction materials; these are blocked. The rubble of decades lingers with no hope of reconstruction. The documentary is exceedingly well-made, with a lot of supporting material and native speakers (most of it is in Arabic). The video is shot in high definition, some of it with drones, to really bring home how poverty-stricken and flattened and miserable Gaza is. The people try to take joy where they can, but the opportunities are few and far between. This is deliberate. The Israelis' have expressed the intent to starve/dehydrate Gaza so that they can't even grow any crops anymore. This strategy is working. With the capital of Israel now in Jerusalem, the IDF is scouring the city of its remaining 250,000 Palestinian residents -- people who are legal residents, but are being ousted anyway. It almost goes without saying that there are no jobs, no industry in Palestine itself. The unemployment rate is upwards of 60%. There are only a handful of jobs for those who are allowed over the border to work as servants in Israeli homes or in construction, where Israel depends heavily on their captive, slave population. Their commute is brutally long and often humiliating. And, always, the Palestinians are to blame for everything. They are the massive underdog and have the moral high ground, but the west is in agreement that Israel is the victim. Abby Martin shows many, many people hanging themselves with enough rope: Bill Maher (with Dan Savage sitting silently on his panel), Nicky Haley, many Fox News anchors, many, many Israeli officials, one of whom defends Israel's shooting of civilians by saying that "we don't have room in our prisons", and, not least, Netanyahu, who accuses the Palestinians of "self genocide". At 35:00, we see Israel attacking a peaceful protest in the desert with tear gas. They are nowhere near anything. They are peacefully protesting. Israel attacks and disperses them. The camera work is spectacular. They are right there for it. I understand that it's a documentary and they pick and choose their scenes -- but the imagery backs up the facts: the Palestinians are grievously outmatched. Israeli soldiers snipe civilian rock-throwers while incurring no losses of their own -- nor even having to fear any such thing occurring. The Palestinian civilian protestors suffers thousands of gunshots wounds, paralyzing injuries and resulting amputations. The statistics and stories are numbing. Nearly all of them cannot be explained in any way that is moral. The Israeli soldiers just fire indiscriminately into crowds of people waving flags. The purest definition of state terror. The Palestinians are unarmed save for slingshots. The Israelis don't deny it. They don't care. The Palestinians are resisting an illegal occupation. These protests are legal by international law, whereas the Israelis are engaged in murdering an occupied people to take even more of their land -- ethnic cleansing, though slowly, slowly. It's like watching ants fighting an elephant. Some of the IDF footage is like the "Collateral Murder", with the soldiers reveling in their kill shots. During the march that Martin filmed, 940 children were shot by snipers and permanently disabled. Several dozen were killed outright. Press are not safe; neither are medics. The Israelis shoot everyone. All of this is highly illegal by international law. No-one cares. Not enough people care. Other things are more important. None of this is discussed or deemed salient in international news. Think of this the next time you hear someone like Biden or Macron defend Israel. Right now, they're dropping bombs on civilian neighborhoods -- all the while claiming self-defense or blaming Palestinians for "self genocide" by letting Hamas use them as "human shields". It's the same thing they say every time, like any other bully: "stop hitting yourself". Most of the victims are hundreds of meters from the borders, the soldiers presumably impressed with their skills at long-range assassination. In some cases, they use explosive ammunition that maximizes damage; these are strictly prohibited by international law. It doesn't matter. In one of the final segments, we see footage of medics being shot at as they attempt to retrieve the injured and dying civilians who'd already been shot. It's just a bloodbath in an open field, with no cover and the IDF in fortified, elevated sniper nests. To even be on the other side of that is a death wish, pure desperation, a complete capitulation to a cause because there's nothing else to live for. You can defeat this, but not without losing your humanity. Israel does not think that Palestinians are humans or worthy of respect or life. The anger they evince is like that for a cat that encroaches on one's garden. They've given up reasoning with it and just want to kill it. They feel no regret because the animal brought it upon itself. And yet, it's even worse than that. The cat is encroaching but is an animal and still doesn't deserve to be harmed or killed. In the case of Gaza, it's the Israelis who are encroaching and occupying and stealing -- and they are also the aggrieved party who's "had enough" and feel justified in killing men, women, children, civilians, journalists, medics -- everything. Just clear them out. Make them disappear. This must be what the scourge against Native Americans was like. No wonder America sympathizes. There are myriad parallels. There is nothing the Palestinians can really do to help themselves. They are penned in by an overwhelmingly superior power. The only thing they can do is to suffer publicly and try to get those outside of Gaza to help, to pressure Israel to stop. So far, it hasn't worked at all. Israel grows bolder every year. Netanyahu has been in power on and off since 1995. 83% of the people support "Open Fire" policies; 95% support aerial bombings. The Israelis act with impunity, secure in the knowledge that they will never pay for their crimes and that they will, eventually, have the land they want and that the Palestinians will be gone. Facts on the ground. No-one will stop them until it's too late. Killing Gaza (2018) -- "8/10" This documentary covers the bombings in 2014, with many, many first-person interviews of people who'd suffered attacks -- either from being in buildings as they were bombed, or swept up by IDF troops later. Almost all of the interviews are in Arabic. The scenes they describe are partially reconstructed with animations (they reminded me of those in Waltz With Bashir, though not rotoscoped). Children lead the camera crews through neighborhoods that have been completely reduced to rubble. The footage from Israeli soldiers is in Hebrew. They narrate coolly, describing the attack to come. They only show emotion after what looks like a gigantic bomb takes out an entire village -- "Long live the state of Israel". They celebrate wildly. In one of the interviews, the filmmakers speak to a furious man, who matter-of-factly explains what will happen if the attacks continue. "Since it's an American news agency, firstly, we want to thank them. We thank the Americans, who are very good people, who treat us kindly and respectfully. They give us a loaf of bread and a sandwich, and they give Israel missiles, tanks, and warplanes. "[...] This boy here will make an atomic bomb in his house in 10-15 years and erase Israel completely. Why? Because he saw his father die before him. He saw his uncle martyred before him. His family house was looted and, from now on, he has to live in a tent! This little kid won't have food or water! "So how can we lift the hatred from the hearts of these children? How can we lift it? In what way? Tell us. How do we teach these children to feel joy again? Should we kill them all with missiles? Or should we fool them with a piece of bread? Who wants American bread, young children? Obama is sending you some small balloons. Do you want them? No. That won't work. That won't do it. "This is my message to the American people and the whole world. May God punish everyone that has wronged us Palestinian people. Palestinians are not terrorists. They are civilized." Almost all of the people they interview, they interview in rubble, where they tell their horrific stories of lost relatives, many of whom were trying to help others who'd been shot before them. At 45:00, "We have been suffering since the resistance began. We have suffered for 60 years because of Israel. War every day. Shooting every day. Every time we build a house, they destroy it. We raise a son; they kill him. "Whatever they do -- the Americans, Israel, the whole world -- we'll resist until the very last one of us dies. Even if they turn all of Gaza into rubble, like this, we won't give up. We hand over Gaza to Israel, as rubble, then we give up. When the last one dies, then they can enter Gaza. "As long as we're still alive, and have strength, we will keep fighting and battling to get our rights. After they turn it all to destruction, only then can they enter Gaza. "I've lost 2 houses, 2 martyrs, and a car. The house is destroyed, as you can see. I'm homeless now, but I ask the resistance to keep fighting until we get our rights." Just interview after interview with people in front of destroyed buildings, shattered towers. There's an interview with a zookeeper who's lost 85% of his animals -- a place where many people sought refuge and joy is now a shattered desert, starved of supplies and water. To their credit, the two directors/journalists (Max Blumenthal and Dan Cohen) interviewed a lot of people -- and most of them were native Arabic speakers. In fact, most of them only spoke Arabic. Only the last couple of interviews were in English -- with a "b-boy" crew and an artist. Several people thanked them for coming back after five months to see how they were doing again -- noting that Hamas nor anyone from the PA in Ramallah had ever visited their city or town. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4187 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4187 Sat, 10 Apr 2021 23:34:50 +0200 -- "9/10" 2. "Monty Python's Life of Brian (1979)" <#Monty> -- "8/10" 3. "Dolemite is My Name (2019)" <#Dolemite> -- "8/10" 4. "The Man in the High Castle S03 (2018)" <#HighS03> -- "10/10" 5. "The Man in the High Castle S04 (2018)" <#HighS04> -- "10/10" 6. "Dix Pour Cent S01 (2015)" <#Dix> -- "8/10" 7. "The Expanse S05 (2020)" <#Expanse> -- "9/10" 8. "Sincerely Louis CK (2020)" <#Sincerely> -- "9/10" 9. "Palm Springs (2020)" <#Palm> -- "8/10" 10. "Hard Road of Hope (2020)" <#Hard> -- "8/10" These are my notes to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. I've recently transferred my reviews to IMDb and made "the list" of around 1600 ratings publicly available. I've included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other -- I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. The Man in the High Castle S02 (2016) -- "9/10" "Truth. As terrible as death. But harder to find." Joe (Luke Kleintank) escapes on a boat with smugglers, who he tries to help, but they're all betrayed by the Nazis (obviously). He delivers the video to Obergruppenführer John Smith (Rufus Sewell), who flies to Berlin to deliver it to Hitler (Wolf Muser). Juliana (Alexa Davalos) meets Hawthorne Abendsen (Stephen Root), who is the eponymous Man in the High Castle. Trade Minister Tagomi (Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa) returns from the other reality, where he saw an American San Francisco. He is dismayed to learn that his Empire is going forward with plans to use a mega-weapon against the Nazis. Julia's husband Frank (Rupert Evans) blackmails antiques dealer Childan (Brennan Brown) to ask Paul Kasoura (Louis Ozawa) for help in releasing his friend Ed (DJ Qualls) from the Kempeitai. Juliana escapes her captors from the trunk of the car and runs away in a bloody firefight. Juliana crosses the country to seek political asylum in Nazi America, where she ends up in an apartment arranged for by John Smith's wife. John Smith refuses to kill his genetically inferior -- but loyal and seemingly OK -- son and instead kills the family doctor who would have turned them all in to the Reich had they not soon complied. Juliana meets up with George Dixon (Tate Donovan), who was a friend of her parents' and who's now in the Resistance. He manages to be able to protect her from the Resistance killing her outright for her betrayal, but only if she gets closer to John Smith and helps them take him out. She's terrified, but she shouldn't be, since the Resistance is unlikely to follow through on their empty threats against her -- a valuable and well-placed potential asset for them. Frank gets Ed from the Kempeitai but now he and Childan owe the Yakuza big-time. They have to get to work forging and moving antiquities, now with Ed's help. The Resistance is pissed that Juliana got away but they manage to draw Frank closer to their ranks -- he gets involved in a rescue operation for 12 innocent workers the Kempeitai had randomly chosen for execution. Frank eventually does another job for them -- dragging Ed into drawing off the explosive paste from an unexploded bomb -- then seals the deal by sleeping with one of the Resistance ladies. Ed is pissed because he sees Frank as wasting time while they should be focused on paying off Yakuza debt. Ed is also snitching on the Yakuza to the Kempeitai cops. Joe is ordered to Berlin, where he meets his father, who is a big-time Nazi muckety-muck. Joe plays hard-to-get in Berlin while Juliana meets Joe's wife in Brooklyn. He gets drawn in to telling his goddamned life story to a completely unknown woman Nicole Dörmer (Bella Heathcote), who's probably an agent of his father's. They get him to stay just a bit longer, revealing to him that he's a child of the "Lebensborn" project. I'm a bit shocked at how trusting Joe is -- he's not half the agent that Juliana is, who knows how to fake it until she makes it and keep her mouth shut. Joe, meanwhile, doesn't exhibit any guile whatsoever, and just tells everyone exactly what he's thinking at any given time. Trade Minister Tagomi tries to adjust the general's plan for delivering uranium, but is severely reprimanded. He makes more trips to the alternate reality, looking up his wife and son, who are angry with him for having "gone on another bender". Apparently, his alter-ego isn't as honorable as he is. Tagomi and Kido continue to scheme against General Onada (Tzi Ma), who's nearly dangerously unhinged with his plans to strike against the Nazis. Joe spends some time in Berlin, finally correctly guessing that meeting Nicole wasn't at all accidental and that she's also Lebensborn and they go to a half-orgy party together where half of the others are also Lebensborn and they do acid and Joe wakes up and wants to see his Dad and puts on the suit that was prepare for him and finds a Nazi armband that he seems to be seriously considering wearing in a non-ironic way. This continues as Joe seems to befriend his father, eventually swearing fealty to the Reich. Tagomi is spending more time in "our" San Francisco, learning more about that time -- and more about his family there. Juliana ingratiates herself further into Helen Smith's circle of friends, partially at the behest of George Dixon and the Resistance standing behind him. She's a much better agent than Joe, convincing without being belligerent. The Smiths, in turn, grapple with the prestige of a trip to South America for their son Thomas, who will almost certainly exhibit his malady there. They plot to have him "kidnapped" by "Semites" and spirited away, never to be seen by them again, but at least safe from the eugenic clutches of the Reich they both serve. Things come to a head when Juliana finds out that Hitler is in a coma and will soon die. The Resistance on both coasts throw a long-awaited plan into action. The west coast -- now joined by Hagan (Michael Hogan) -- will try to blow up the factory building the atomic bomb that will wipe out San Francisco. Joe's father Heusmann rises to Chancellor pro-tem while Smith tries to figure out who will really take power. It turns out to be Heusmann, who's apparently been scheming all along to get power -- and managed to convince Hitler he was only interested in science. Meanwhile, Frank, Ed, and Childan get the first set of fake cufflinks done and, with Ed's smooth storytelling, sell them to a buyer before heading to the Yakuza with their first payment. Kido breaks up the whole thing: he's there to accuse Okamura (Hiro Kanagawa) of working with the Nazis and executes him -- and all of his men -- as a traitor. Ed and Robert are allowed to leave, their debt absolved. Frank was completely unaware because he was off working with the Resistance and -- like any born-again -- is fucking insufferable about it. Poor Ed tries to get him to see reason, but Frank's pretty far gone. The Resistance continues its plan to use the stolen materiel to blow up Japanese headquarters, at the same time attacking points throughout the east coast. Frank drives the car in and walks into the building, finding Kido and trying to shoot him seconds before the bomb explodes, incinerating Frank in its blast. His potshot took out the Kido's right-hand man instead, leaving Kido to fall outside of the direct bomb blast. Julia helps the resistance get closer to Smith, but they are just as duplicitous as the Nazis, to be quite frank. She uses her Aikido skills to break free and shoots Dixon -- who'd dressed as a Nazi to escape detection -- but fulfilling the vision she'd seen in the movie reel of the The Grasshopper Lies Heavy. She escapes New York City, meeting Hawthorne Abendsen again, who tells her that she is the linchpin in all of the possible worlds he's seen -- she is the moral center, unchanging, unchangeable. In the other San Francisco, Tagomi heals the wounds in his family left by his alter-ego. He eventually takes his leave, returning with a film of the U.S. bombing of the Bikini Atoll in the Pacific. He shows this to Kido, asking him to show it to Smith. They hope to convince Smith to try to convince his superiors that Japan has this weapon -- 1,000 times more powerful than anything the Germans possess -- and to call off the attack on Japan. Smith takes the reel from Kido to Berlin, where he shows it to Heusmann, who chooses to ignore it and go ahead with his war plans. He cannot conceive of swerving from his purpose now. Joe tries to convince him otherwise, to no avail. Smith has an ace card, though: he has the interrogation report from Heydrich that proves Heusmann's complicity in the plot to kill Hitler -- simultaneously absolving the Japanese. He takes this to Himmler, who uses the evidence to take down Heusmann and exalt Smith for his bravery -- before an adoring crowd of Nazis in Berlin, 100,000 strong. Juliana, in preventing Dixon from bringing down Smith by outing Thomas, saved the world from all-out war. Thomas, inspired by his father, turns himself in to be euthanized for his illness. Tagomi gets the rest of Abendsen's films from Lem (Rick Worthy). Juliana, Kido and Tagomi are wonderfully cast and written, with a lot of nuance and depth. Not all of the characters are like that, though. Overall a very entertaining series. Highly recommended. Monty Python's Life of Brian (1979) -- "8/10" This is a feature-length film of what amount to skits, each of which stands on its own quite well. It is the story of Brian, a young man from Nazareth whose life path is very similar that of Jesus, who plays a minor role in this film. Graham Chapman plays the lead role, but also several others (including Biggus Dickus). All of the Pythons play several roles, to hilarious effect. 1. The wise men arrive at the wrong manger, visiting their beneficence on Brian, but then retracting it when they see Jesus in a manger across the way. 2. A grown man now, Brian attends Jesus's sermon on the mount, but misses most of it due to bickering in the crowd. 3. He then goes to a stoning with his mother, during which only women are in attendance, with fake beards, and the leader is stoned as well, for repeating the blasphemy. 4. Michael Palin shows up as an ex-leper, begging for change 5. Brian falls in love with Judith and joins the People's Front of Judea 6. Brian gets a task to paint graffiti, but his latin is terrible (Romanes eunt domus rather than Romani ite domum) and is corrected by John Cleese's centurion, who tasks him with writing it 100 times. 7. There is the meeting during which the PFJ must come up with their demands and complaints and must exclude the dozen things that the Romans have done for them that are unavoidably good. 8. The PFJ tries to kidnap Pilate's wife at the same time as another separatist group and they end up fighting each other, as Brian is arrested. 9. Brian is dragged before Palin's lisping Pilate and they discuss Biggus Dickus 10. There is a weird alien spaceship interlude 11. Brian becomes a prophet, inadvertently. People begin to follow him, with two sects: that of the gourd and that of the sandal. 12. He flees to the desert, ruins a hermit's life, and then takes Judith home with him. 13. The next morning, a huge crowd of his new followers are waiting for him outside. 14. Brian is again captured and sentenced to crucifixion. 15. The people's front once again show their uselessness as a revolutionary group. 16. There is a long section that revolves mainly around speech defects of different kinds. The best is watching Pilate try to pronounce Rs and the people constantly teasing him to "welease Woger" or 'welease Bwian". 17. Eric Idle is great in the crucifixion line, bullshitting his way both into and then out of his punishment. Brian had gotten a reprieve from Pilate, but Idle's bullshitter claims he's Brian and is released. 18. Finally, another Eric Idle leads Brian and the others in a rousing "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life". Dolemite is My Name (2019) -- "8/10" Rudy Ray Moore (Eddie Murphy) is having a hard time finding his showbiz career in 1970s Los Angeles. He's tried making music albums, he's doing shitty standup, he's just miserable, living with his aunt, knowing that he's destined for greater things. He works in a record store and meets Ricco (Ron Cephas Jones) and his other homeless friends. He thinks Rico's got some good material and pays them to record their stories. He builds an act out of it, which takes off immediately. It's a filthy act, with a bit of a rhythm to it (he's sometimes credited with the invention of rap). He records a new album "Eat Out More Often", selling it out of the back of his car. A (very) local record company picks him up, gets him a pretty porny cover and it's even more successful. He goes on tour, making bank like never before. In Mississippi, he picks up Lady Reed (Da'Vine Joy Randolph) as his partner and they become even more successful. While on the road, Rudy's record company calls him to tell him that his album has made it onto the charts -- they're ready to make more albums. The money starts rolling in. To celebrate, he takes his friends out for dinner, drinks, and a movie. They go see The Front Page, starring Jack Lemmon, Walter Matthau, and Susan Sarandon -- they are not impressed. Rudy decides on the spot to make a Dolemite movie. He scrapes together his cash and gets his record producers to kick in, based on future returns. If his movie flops, he loses all his rights to all of his albums. Moore decides to believe in himself. He gets D'Urville Martin (Wesley Snipes) to act and direct and gets Jerry Jones (Keegan-Michael Key) to write the movie. Jerry gets a bunch of his students from UCLA to help out. Dolemite clears out the Dunbar Hotel of its junkies and sets up his film set there -- moving in as well, since he can no longer afford rent. It's a close thing, but they get the movie done -- with an extra injection of money from Moore's record producers. Distribution is a problem, though. No-one wants the movie, calling it childish and terribly made. It's an action comedy with nudity; it's way ahead of its time. Dolemite hits the road again, back on the comedy circuit. On one of his radio appearances promoting his act, DJ Bobby Vale (Chris Rock) asks him where his fabled movie is, telling him to just show the damned thing. He introduces him to his uncle, who has a movie theater where Moore can "four-wall" his movie (pay the theater for using its four walls, but collect all of the box office). He spends the week promoting his movie in that city in Indiana -- and people come out in droves, paying him back his $500 many times over. He's back in business, promoting his movie one theater at a time. Lawrence Woolner (Bob Odenkirk) of Dimension Films calls him up, noticing that the butts-in-seats numbers are off the charts. Dimension had turned Moore down initially, so he's suspicious. Dolemite shows up with Lady Bell and his pimpin' entourage -- and end up striking a deal. More promotion later and the same group is in a red limo, nervously headed to the premiere. Moore assures them that, even if no-one shows up, they've still accomplished a lot. They're riding in a limo to the premiere of a movie that they made themselves. Murphy as Moore is an absolutely irrepressibly positive force. He really lives the role. They roll up to the theater and it's decked out in Dolemite paraphernalia and swamped with people. The 10PM and midnight shows are sold out and the theater is preparing an ad-hoc 2AM showing to get everyone in. Instead of watching the movie, though, Moore stays outside to entertain those who have to wait 4 hours before they can get in. He would go on to a film career in several more Dolemite films. I really enjoyed learning this bit of history and found Murphy to be charming and perfect in the role. The Man in the High Castle S03 (2018) -- "10/10" [image]Season 3 picks up right where season 2 left off. Some time has passed, but it's kind of hard to tell how much. Oberstgruppenführer Smith (Rufus Sewell) has returned from Berlin after a longer absence. Joe Blake (Luke Kleintank) is in Nazi prison somewhere in Germany. He's grown a prodigious beard, so it must have been at least a couple of months. They're breaking him and his father (Sebastian Roché) down. In the end, a once-again shaven Joe is told to shoot his father. He does so and gets to return first to New York, then to San Francisco, as the attaché for the Nazi regime. Before he goes, he kills Smith's right-hand man Erich (Aaron Blakely) in an alley. Once he's in San Francisco, he looks up the remaining member of the cabal that supported his father and shoots him in cold blood in his home. This, just after having shot two Japanese officers in their surveillance vehicle. Juliana (Alexa Davalos) and Trudy (Conor Leslie) are staying with Abendson (Stephen Root) and his wife, but the party breaks up when Juliana uses her Annie Oakley skills to defend Hawthorne from the secret and unauthorized assassination attempt by a trio of Lebensborn. Juliana and Trudy split up from the Abendsens and seek out Tagomi (Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa), realizing that he, like Trudy, is a traveler. Juliana gets Tagomi to show her the rest of the movies that Lem gave him. She's in every one; in one of them, she dies. Tagomi and Kido (Joel de la Fuente) are dealing with Father Hagan (Michael Hogan) of the resistance as well as an undeclared and unacknowledged oil embargo imposed by the Nazis. Tagomi and Kido butt heads over the arrested and captured Juliana and Trudy, but Tagomi prevails. Tagomi and Juliana help Trudy travel back to her own world. John Smith and his wife Helen (Chelah Horsdal) are struggling to deal with the loss of their son Thomas (Quinn Lord), who offered himself up to be euthanized because of a genetic defect -- another well-written and handled part of the narrative. Helen is a mess and the rest of the Nazi leadership is aiming to use her as a lever to prise John Smith from his position as general -- and soon-to-be Reichsmarshall. Helen kills Alice (Gillian Barber) her former friend and wife of the doctor (Kevin McNulty) who John had killed in order to delay Thomas's euthanization. Joe needs to get close to Tagomi -- one of his next targets -- and Juliana wants to see if he's still the same. She has seen the films in which he kills her, then kills himself. He seems, at first, to be OK and possibly also to hate the Reich, but then he tries to convince her to join him, which also seems earnest. It's still unclear whether he's been broken or whether he has a higher plan. He seems to be pretty cold-blooded and implacably efficient. Juliana continues to see him; it's not clear what her angle is. Is she onto him? Is she trying to convert him? The reprisals in the Pacific States continue, with Kido tightening the noose and the people continuing their protests. Wyatt (Jason O'Mara) from the neutral zone shows up at Juliana's door. At a Jewish enclave in the neutral zone, we find Frank Frink (Rupert Evans) covered in burn scars, painting protest posters (the sunrise that's been taken up by rebels all up and down the coast). In the Neutral Zone, Ed (DJ Qualls) is trying to soften Childan's (Brennan Brown) bargaining style -- while he's enjoying his first real relationship in, maybe, ever. They leave with a bus full of plunder, with Childan dreaming of "swimming in yen". Their dreams are cut short by what is hard not to think of as an inevitable motorcycle gang, who take everything they have, including the bus, leaving them on the road in the middle of the desert, with their lives, but nothing else. Nicole's (Bella Heathcote) still making her stupid movie and has started an affair with Thelma (Laura Mennell), about whom I also couldn't care less. The episode The New Colossus is pivotal. Reichsmarshall Rockwell (David Furr) and Hoover (William Forsythe) spring what they think is a foolproof plan to finally take down Smith -- with the truth. They arrange a meeting with Reichsführer Himmler (Kenneth Tigar) to reveal Smith's treachery. Smith had prepared well and revealed to Hoover that he knew about his...predilections. Hoover tries to bluff his way out of it, but Smith simply says it doesn't matter if his evidence is believable -- he'll reveal it and see what happens. Hoover capitulates (probably with pressure from Himmler, who already knew every detail about Smith's handling of Thomas's death). Himmler dispatches Rockwell to exile in Cuba and promotes Smith to Reichsführer, telling him to be more careful with his private affairs next time, also revealing that it was he who had Joe kill Erich, to cover Smith's tracks. Smith is out of the woods, for now, with only Himmler's words of warning about his increasingly unstable wife to plague him. Rockwell is living it up in Cuba, planning his revenge, when his plans are put to an abrupt end by a hit man hired by Smith. That's a loose end that he didn't hesitate to tie up. Meanwhile, Juliana visits and sleeps with Joe, who's revealed to her that he'd had to kill his own father. They're sparring, each hiding something. Joe gets the drop on Juliana, having taken her gun from her bag. He demands that she take him to Tagomi and then to Abendsen, so he can end them both. He explains that there is nothing she can do -- nothing any of them can do -- to stop the Reich. The Nebenwelt is a way to spread the vision of the perfection of the Reich to other worlds in other continuums. It's pretty clear he's no longer faking -- and no longer savable. Juliana escapes to the bathroom, Joe breaks in, and she turns to slit his throat from ear to ear with a straight razor before he can do a single thing. Perfect. I was super-impressed with how quickly they just let Juliana be awesome, doing the thing that obviously needed to be done. She's definitely rock-solid and cold as ice. She absconds with his secret files about the Nebenwelt, leaving him in a pool of his own blood. Joe's body is discovered by the Kempeitai, by Kido and his men. Kido quickly suspects Juliana of having been involved -- somehow. Tagomi brings Kido the files that Juliana sent him anonymously. They drink together and Tagomi admits that he is a traveler. Kido is unraveling just a bit, but he keeps it tight. He's learning a lot. Damn, is he a good character. He quickly figures out that his new assistant Nakamura has betrayed him -- he was the one who passed the documents about Tagomi to Joe. Kido puts Nakamura before a bayonet squad and takes the first strike. Himmler hasn't given up on assassinating Tagomi. He sends a new Aryan golden boy to take care of business. Spoiler alert: Tagomi fucks him up kendo-style, with nearly no doubt about the outcome. he flicks Hans's knife out of his hand, escapes his choke grip, flips Hans onto the coffee table and collapses his larynx with the butt of his staff. The Japanese dump Hans's body unceremoniously in front of the German embassy. Himmler is furious at their effrontery. Smith seems to be getting more concerned about Himmler's increasing madness and lack of concern about the danger his aggressive stance toward the Japanese Empire poses for the American Reich. Smith watches more films and seems thoughtful about the whole Nebenwelt project. Helen is still seeing her psychiatrist, but is making enough missteps for Smith to be concerned. He tells her that she is in danger wonderfully by allegory, telling her about how Himmler had Erich taken care of, just to be on the safe side, that Himmler would do it again, just to keep things...neat. She must keep things neat on her own. Or else (implied). Ed finds Frank in Sabra. Juliana joins them, taken there by Wyatt, who's helping her out of revolutionary fervor, but mostly because he "admires her perseverance". He gets her a passport, but has to kill the Nazi he buys it from, to protect himself and her. They continue into the neutral zone, on their way to the East-coast Reich. Ed stays behind with Frank, unaware that Childan has had Ed's location beaten out of him. Kido rewards Childan by giving him his store back. Kido travels to the neutral zone to find Juliana, Ed, Frank -- anyone. I think at this point, he's honestly more interested in figuring out what the fuck is going on than arresting or even torturing or killing anyone. (Well, maybe Frank, who tried to assassinate him and who is responsible for having killed his best friend/associate). Kido's got enough blood on his hands, though. In news no-one cares about, Thelma is arrested at a woman's club, where Nicole, of course, is let go because she's Göbbels's daughter. She continues to destroy American landmarks, filming their transformation into Nazi emblems. We see the Liberty Bell's fate. We hear of the plans for the Statue of Liberty. The various threads of the story are pulling tight now. Smith is sent to the Neutral Zone by an increasingly impatient and unstable Himmler to find Abendsen personally. He combines this with a mission to meet with Tagomi, who has requested a meeting. Tagomi tries to appeal to Smith as a fellow human, but Smith is still too cagey. It seems, though, that Tagomi's calm style and news of alternate families waiting in the Nebenwelt may yield fruit. As in Dick's book, there is a definite leaning toward the Japanese customs and culture. Even though they are just as authoritarian bastards as the Nazis, they have a code, whereas the Nazis will do whatever it takes to get ahead. This goes even more so for the American Nazis. Smith may be different; time will tell. He's not so different that he doesn't continue the hunt for Abendsen with what seems like magical means. Based on a single photo he finds in the house, he launches a search of all farmhouses in the neutral zone and then finds Abendsen's wife just like that. They use landline telephones and I've not seen how they even travel, but they still use filmstrip players. There's a direct video line to Himmler, which seems to travel wherever he is, so it's unclear how that works (because it looks like analog, not digital). They're building a machine that will break through to "other worlds", but it's unclear that this technology is generally available. Everything else is old jeeps. I haven't seen a helicopter. I haven't even seen personal radios or any drones or cameras or anything. So how the fuck did they search 1/3 of the country, find the right farm, and then get Smith and his team of assassins there inside of what feels like...a day? That was utterly ridiculous. Anyway, they kill everyone else and wound Abendsen's wife Caroline (Ann Magnuson), taking her prisoner. So that happened. Kido finds and kidnaps Frink, leaving Ed and Jack behind. He takes Frank to the site of the Japanese internment camp where he grew up. Frank says that he knows what he's done -- murdered hundreds, including Kido's assistant -- and can't take it back. He has changed. He is at peace and does not beg. He is not afraid to die. Kido admits that he himself started everything when he killed Frank's sister and her children. Kido does not mince words. Instead, he puts on his official uniform while Frank prays in Hebrew. One quick swing of the sword and Frank's story comes to an end, his severed head spilling his last blood into the sand. Juliana and Wyatt/Liam arrive in Pennsylvania, where he meets up with some old friends. She convinces them with her movie. They agree to help her, but the attack on the mine will be very difficult and dangerous. She believes that it will work because she knows from her "memories" that it already has. She's only kind of right -- they get in through an abandoned mine shaft and witness the machine accessing the anomaly, but are found out and Juliana is caught. Smith has meanwhile returned with Hawthorne in tow, determined to interrogate him. Now he also has Juliana to interrogate. Himmler, meanwhile, is delighted that he will soon be sending troops through the anomaly -- how does he see that working? He has no idea where they're going? He's just insane, right? -- and calls off the oil embargo to avoid distractions from the Japanese. At the big celebration for Jahr Null, they destroy the Statue of Liberty with rockets, then head into NYC to watch the exuberant youth burn the schools and other buildings. Wyatt and his friend are there, though, and they manage to gravely wound Himmler. Before he was shot, though, he had Nicole arrested for indecency and sent back to Berlin for reeducation. The actor who plays Himmler is really, really good. A perfectly toad-like man with perfect diction and positively leeringly involved in his inner circle's lives. Also, Helen is on the run with the kids. She's leaving John. Meanwhile, back in the Lackawanna mine, Smith is interrogating Hawthorne again. Hawthorne had actually served with him, back when they were both on the same side. He tells Smith that you can only travel if your counterpart in the destination world has already died. Juliana manages it just as Smith shoots her in the shoulder. The only issue I have with this show is just how fucking fast everyone seems to travel. It's a long way from the Poconos to New York, but they seem to make it in minutes. Smith seems to teleport and never needs to sleep. It's a bit jarring. This is an exceedingly well-written, well-directed, well-acted, and absolutely convincingly filmed show. Juliana is really an excellent actress and character. So is Smith, but so is Tagomi and so is Kido -- perhaps him, most of all. The attention to detail is deep and thorough. The Man in the High Castle S04 (2018) -- "10/10" We pick up one year after season 3. Juliana (Alexa Davalos) traveled into a world where John (Rufus Sewell), Helen (Chelah Horsdal), and Thomas (Quinn Lord) take her in and nurse her back to health. She runs a dojo, with Thomas as student. She uses deep meditation to travel to an astral plane, between worlds, where she discovers Tagomi (Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa), who leaves her a message in the I-Ching. In the Nazi-dominated world, Tagomi has been assassinated. The princess of Japan vows to continue his work, to bring it to completion. Wyatt (Jason O'Mara) is fighting the Nazis in the neutral zone, but suffers tremendous losses -- of people, weapons, and films. Lem (Rick Worthy) urges him to rally and continue the fight -- Wyatt demands a meeting with the BCR (Black Communist Rebellion) in the Japan-occupied west. We see the Kempeitai tossing the apartments of suspected associates of the BCR -- all black people, like Elijah (Clé Bennett) and Bell Mallory (Frances Turner), who actually are in the BCR, but escape capture, for now. They are smuggling weapons. Kido is searching for Tagomi's killer, finding Mingus Jones (Shane Dean). They beat him within an inch of his life, but he seems to have been framed. Kido's son Toru (Sen Mitsuji) can barely watch the brutality. Reichsmarshal Smith visits Helen and his daughters, who are living with her brother Hank. Smith is so menacing, even when he's just eating dinner. His patience is at an end. When Helen refuses to return, he takes his daughters and leaves in his VTOL aircraft (finally revealing how everyone seems to get around so damned quickly all the time; they can't be using those sweet-ass SSTs all the time). The device that only a year ago was making soup of 80% of potential travelers is now a reliable transporter of Nazis, who are shown returning with luggage FFS. While this is a rousing success for Smith, Helen is still in the neutral zone and his eldest daughter Jennifer is raising hell and doubting the regime. Her own sister rats her out for listening to black music (jazz). The BCR and Wyatt plan and carry out their executions at the Americana auction, where Childan is presiding. Kido doesn't show up on time because his son has killed a man in a bar fight. He covers it up, but the son is deep in PTSD and won't swear fealty to the empire anymore. Kido cannot abide this and throws him out, disowning him. Kido makes Wyatt from a photo and raises the alert, but not soon enough to stop them from slaughtering nearly everyone there. The BCR doesn't provide enough cover and Wyatt loses three men in the raid. They capture Childan, who reveals to them that he can be helpful, that he has the ear of the princess. He also tells them that two of their targets -- that they'd missed -- are interested in withdrawal. The Nazis in Juliana's alternate world are closing in. She arms herself, but is unable to stop a potential hit from almost strangling her. Alt-Smith saves her, but is knifed to death by a Nazi from the other world who is very surprised to see who he's killed. This would seem to open up the possibility of Smith himself traveling to take out Juliana himself. She escapes for now, driving to Washington D.C. and traveling back to her original continuum. She is promptly arrested, but gets away, fleeing into the contaminated zone and quickly hooking up with the Resistance there. Abendsen (Stephen Root) is being forced to host a propaganda show named Tales from the High Castle in order to keep Caroline (Ann Magnuson) safe. She tells him to stop, that it's not worth it, that it's killing them both and undoing the good work they've done. The Smith family have Himmler (Kenneth Tigar) and his absolute bitch-on-wheels wife Margarethe (Gwynyth Walsh) over to dinner, accompanied by Obergruppenführer Görtzmann (Marc Rissmann), a young German officer whom Himmler admires greatly -- an obvious threat to Smith, who continues to disappoint Himmler. Himmler is deeply unpleasant and also not well -- he coughs incessantly and has an oxygen tank. Margarethe tricks Helen's youngest daughter Amy -- the unquestioning little brownshirt -- into revealing the lie behind Helen's official reason for her year-long absence. People just walk the fuck into the apartment of the most powerful man in the American Reich as if Smith were a lowly pauper. I know it does wonders for moving the plot forward, but it's not very believable. Smith learns that his counterpart has been killed in the alternate world. He also learns that Juliana is back. He travels over himself on a 48-hour visit. There, he meets a still-loving Helen but fights with Thomas about his enlistment in the Marines. Smith is trying to put everything back the way it should be, but it's off-kilter, out of joint. The family notices that something is wrong, especially after he literally can't look his best friend Danny in the eyes -- a man whom he'd let die in the camps in his own world. Meanwhile, Wyatt has earned his weapons and he and his remaining men part ways with Bell and the BCR. The BCR still have Childan and he sends a secret message to the Crown Princess (Mayumi Yoshida) to negotiate a ceasefire. Meanwhile, General Yamori (Bruce Locke) continues to argue for all-out extermination and war on the BCR. Kido does not support him and suspects him of having had Tagomi killed to get him out the way. His suspicions are confirmed when he fools Yamori's most trusted man into admitting that he's killed Tagomi. Kido plays along and tells him to be more careful next time, having bluffed because he had no evidence. Japanese snipers kill Equiano Hampton (David Harewood), leaving Bell in charge of the BCR. As Kido and the Kempeitai round up the usual suspects, she proposes a bold plan to strike back: they will cut off the oil pipeline all up and down the California coast, cutting off the lifeblood of the occupying forces. General Yamori tries for a coup, putting the Crown Princess under house arrest and trying Admiral Inokuchi (Eijiro Ozaki) for treason. Kido plays along until the last second, then arrests Yomuri and frees Inokuchi. In the wake of this, the BCR attack is successful, convincing the Japanese occupation to finally leave. Kido tells the Crown Princess that he believes that the JPS could be held, but that it would cost many lives and he doesn't think that it is worth it. Juliana and Wyatt continue to work together on getting to Smith. She's convinced that Abendsen's stories from his propaganda show on Nazi TV -- he's forced to do the show in order to still see Caroline -- contain secret messages. She is, eventually, successful at decoding the messages. Caroline is eventually successful at committing suicide to free Abendsen of the slow suicide of doing the show. Juliana approaches Helen to plants seeds of doubt. It works, leading to an even greater rift between Helen and John. Amy is an absolute Nazi, while Jennifer doesn't really understand the danger she's putting her family in with her rebel talk. Yukiko cares for a recovering Childan in his store. They eventually marry and try to flee to Japan, on the strength of a letter of passage from the Crown Princess. In the upheaval, this means nothing and Yukiko is allowed to travel, but Childan is forced to stay behind. He approaches the Yakuza for help, trading his store for a berth on a trawler to Japan. After a brief capture by the BCR and subsequent and inadvertent release by American white supremacists, Kido is back out and seeks his son. Kido ends up at the Yakuza (instead of heading back to Japan with the rest of the occupation). He trades his services to pay for his son's debts, slicing off a pinky to swear fealty to them. He reconciles with his son, then sends him on his way back to Japan. Meanwhile Smith executes a masterful plan to kill Himmler, leaving the Reich in the hands of Görtzmann, who agrees to leave the American Reich to John. That scene was absolutely wonderful. John's silence while his enemies mocked him for his faults and transgressions, while Hoover revealed all of his information. In the end, it didn't matter. John and Görtzmann had played their hand perfectly and Smith delivered the final blow by having replaced Himmler's Oxygen tank with Zyklon B. Back in the States, John plans to travel to the portal by train -- and he wants Helen to go with him. Helen had just told Juliana about the trip and knows that the Resistance plans to attack it. She goes anyway, having lost all hope of forgiveness for the monsters she and John have become. Helen has seen John's plans for more camps and exterminations -- he's completely capitulated to Naziism. In a fit of madness, as the train hurtles to the portal, he tries to convince Helen to adopt Thomas from the other world. She is horrified and rejects him, just as she hears him order the attack on the BCR in the west. At that moment, the Resistance blows up the tracks, derailing the monorail. Helen is dead. John, of course, survives. His remaining troops are picked off by the Resistance. He wanders into the woods alone, trailed by Juliana. She finds him on a ledge, where he puts a bullet through his chin into his brain. Control of the American Reich devolves to Smith's second, General Whitcroft (Eric Lange), who calls off the attack, an attack he'd never wanted in the first place. There is hope of peace with the BCR, although it's unclear what will happen with Görtzmann and the German Reich. The oddest part was the end, where the portal had been opened seemingly permanently and people were streaming in from other worlds. Abendsen is there and he bucks the current, leaving this world behind, probably seeking Caroline in another world. Excellent writing, acting, and characters. Would watch again. Highly recommended. Dix Pour Cent S01 (2015) -- "8/10" This is the story of a talent agency in Paris called ASK (Agence Samuel Kerr), named after the founder, who leaves for his first vacation in eight years early in the first episode. By the end of that episode, the team finds out that he's died after swallowing a wasp. The team is now left without a leader and the power struggles begin. There are four agents: 1. Andréa Martel (Camille Cottin) with assistant Camille Valentini (Fanny Sidney) 2. Mathias Barneville (Thibault de Montalembert) with assistant Noémie Leclerc (Laure Calamy) 3. Gabriel Sarda (Grégory Montel) with assistant Hervé André-Jezak (Nicolas Maury) 4. Arlette Azémar (Liliane Rovère) Sophia Leprince (Stéfi Celma) plays the omnipresent receptionist with the spectacular afro. The first emergency is real-life actress Cécile de France, managed by Gabriel, who loses a Tarentino film for her after a year of work. She dumps him, but is wooed back by Mathias, who strong-arms the film's production head by telling her if Cécile isn't in the movie, then she doesn't get to film in Paris. Just like that, Cécile is back on-board -- but has to get a tiny, little bit of plastic surgery in order to look young enough for the role (she's a stunning beauty but, at 40, already twice as old as she should be for Hollywood). She ends up not going through with it and returns to Gabriel, who'd never lost faith in her. The team next must deal with Samuel's loss. They scramble to put together a funeral and wake worthy of him, while also trying to buy out his shares from his widow, who's shopping them around. Two great actresses -- Line Renaud (of Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis) and Françoise Fabian -- end up fighting over a role in an arthouse film. Gabriel and Andréa convince him to keep both of them in a sort-of "Blue is the Warmest Color meets Tarentino for octogenarians." The next travail is an audit of the company's finances. (I presume that they were able to buy the company from Samuel's widow?) The auditor is a young lady whom Andréa thinks she can charm -- until she finds out it's the same lady she harshly rejected on an online chat/dating service (she couldn't place her). Andréa is pretty destructive and takes the role of Don Draper pretty well, in what feels more and more like a French Mad Men homage, with Mathias as Roger and Gabriel and Pete. Even the entrance to the office, with the location of Pete's/Gabriel's office is the same. On the agent side, Nathalie Baye and Laura Smet (real-life mother and daughter and both film stars) lose, then win, then lose roles in a movie together. The sale is moving forward: Samuel's wife has found a German buyer, looking to make a Europe-wide organization of talent agencies. Mathias, meanwhile, has agreed to go to StarMedia. His partners are incensed, but the buyer is scared off, and they soon celebrate his brilliant subterfuge. He plays along that his leaving was just strategic. He will now have pissed off StarMedia irrevocably, but ASK is saved and safe from a takeover. Instead of risking the next outside investor, Mathias's wife Catherine (Philippine Leroy-Beaulieu) steps in with her own inherited wealth to pick up the missing shares. The others are none too pleased, as this will give Mathias much more power -- but it's better than being bought out by Berlin. This almost falls apart when Mathias is forced to admit to Catherine that Camille is his daughter. Catherine had gone to the office to find him when he was spectacularly late to a date for the opéra and found them enjoying a late-night, celebratory nightcap. He explained it was because she'd helped one of his clients, but Catherine wasn't buying it -- until he told him family the truth. Camille and Mathias's son Hippolyte (François Civil) breathe a sigh of relief that they'd never consummated their flirtation and tentatively start a brother/sister friendship instead. It is unclear whether Catherine will buy her shares now, though. Andréa has taken up with the tax auditor Colette (Ophélia Kolb) -- and might be really falling for her. She and Gabriel are forced to go to a movie shoot for damage control for two stars they manage -- and Colette tags along. Standard hijinks ensue. Andréa fucks up the relationship by (A) skipping Colette's party with her friends to which Andréa had explicitly accepted an invitation and (B) instead going to a bash held by her director star, whose fat she pulled out of the fire. Massively relieved, she got drunk and was making out with another girl in the indoor pool when Colette came to find her. Colette pulls no punches in her audit -- but they were really running a very sloppy ship. Andréa tries to patch things up, even after the presentation, but it doesn't work. Gabriel and Sofia officially start their relationship that has so far only been hinted at. Despite the audit and the revelations of Mathias's infidelity, it seems that Catherine will still buy her portion of ASK, but it's unclear what role she will play. We watched it in French with English subtitles. Oddly, Netflix only provides French subtitles in Switzerland -- no English or German, which they must have. French subtitles would have been OK for me, but not my viewing partner. The Expanse S05 (2020) -- "9/10" "Sink to the bottom or float to the top. Everything else is just churn." "You know what your problem is? You think that just because somebody's an underdog, they're automatically the good guy." Season five picks up right where four left off. The crew of the Rocinante is split up, with Holden (Steven Strait) and Naomi Nagata (Dominique Tipper) on Tycho, where the ship is in for repairs. Holden is trying to find out from Fred Johnson (Chad L. Coleman) whether the Belters are harboring and experimenting with protomolecule. Alex (Cas Anvar) has taken Julia Mao's old racing ship the Razorback to visit Bobbie (Frankie Adams) on Mars. Bobbie is working with Avasarala (Shohreh Aghdashloo) to root out the smugglers on Mars who are selling high-grade military equipment to Belter rebels like Marco Inaros (Keon Alexander). Filip Inaros (Jasai Chase Owens) embarks on one terrorist mission after another, each more mechanically impossible than the previous. At any rate, he and his father seem to be unstoppable for now. Their primacy seems a little unexplained, but I suppose that's the next big threat. At any rate, they easily located and intercepted a research ship near Venus. The station was able to locate comparatively tiny rocks but were completely incapable of seeing a giant fucking ship coming at them. I suppose that's what "stealth" technology means, but, again, it's a bit contrived. Amos (Wes Chatham) is on his way to Earth to settle some personal business. He's on a charter ship with a bunch of scruffy Belters looking for work and a better life in the Ring territories. There is, of course, a Belter gang there, ready to prey on them. Amos intervenes, but not necessarily to help them -- he just wants to kick some assholes' asses. In a subtle touch, we find out what happened to Murtry when Amos reaches for his duffel bag -- we see Murtry's name crossed out with Amos written over it in red marker. He arrives on Luna and, after a brief and seemingly pointless meeting with Avasarala, heads to Baltimore on Earth, in order to settle his mother's estate. He meets with her partner of the last decade, Charles, and promises to help him secure his housing from the local slumlord. Camina (Cara Gee) finds the remains of Klaes's ship while she's scavenging, having found a new way to keep herself occupied -- in captaining a Belter ship. They investigate the ship more closely, looking for data -- anything. They get the message that Marco delivered loud and clear: mess with me and this is what happens. Holden discovers that an annoying reporter Monica has been kidnapped -- right before she can tell him what she knows about the protomolecule. Holden and Bull find her, just in the nick of time (of course). Johnson is ready to go to war for his station. Meanwhile, Nagata has landed at Pallas station, where her reception is not warm. Alex is still snuffling around his admiral Sauveterre (Tim DeKay), whom Bobbie strongly suspects of leading the smuggling ring that is getting high-level tech into the hands of rogue Belters like Inaros. Avasarala is trying to figure out why Inaros would raid a Venusian science lab. She and her high-ranking conspirator UN Admiral Delgado (Michael Irby) -- they're going behind Gao's back -- think Marco has slung asteroids at Earth. Amos meets up with Erich (Jacob Mundell) and gets him to agree to take care of Charlie. This is easier than we'd imagined because they are brothers -- or at least brothers of the street. Erich is happy to see him, but also tells him never to return -- or he'll have him killed. They cannot share a world because when Amos is around, their shared past threatens to catch up with them both (but it's especially detrimental to Erich). In the Belt, Johnson and Holden and Bull are still trying to track down who kidnapped Monica (I suspect Bull is in on it, maybe with Fred Johnson). The ship that was to pick her up is inbound and seemingly doesn't suspect a thing. The station police are going to jump the kidnappers when they arrive. Holden still suspects that Fred is holding back on protomolecule. Speaking of being jumped, Naomi met up with Filip, with a predictable outcome. After initially dismissing her offer of her ship and her money -- Mommy feels real bad -- he finds her on the bridge. She's ecstatic, until he tases her and lets on his happy crew of two others -- one of them is the bitch who clearly hates her, but the other is her oldest friend, who she thought was with here. Once again, Nagata is not only utterly tone-deaf at judging people, she's also super-shitty at setting a lock on her ship. Like, literally, anyone can just walk on board whenever they want. This kind of story-writing certainly helps drive the plot forward, but it's appallingly lazy for a show that's otherwise nicely put together. It's just like in Wilder where the cop neither locks his laptop with a password nor his door with a key. Just lazy writing. Speaking of being jumped: Camina finds Klaes "The Ghost Knife"'s stash of data and, after briefly considering going after Marco herself -- in a fit of grief and rage -- decides against it. She sends it on to Fred Johnson, who sends it to Avasarala. Alex meets up with Admiral Sauveterre's right-hand woman, Babbage (Lara Jean Chorostecki), who plies him with wine for information, which he seems to freely give. When he tries to get information, she clams up tight. Later, at his apartment, he's jumped by two lowlifes who she probably sicced on him. Bobbie shows up to save him (he'd called her just before). They head out in the Razorback to tail Babbage, who's on a "supply run" with a frigate and two accompanying ships. The first of Inaros's asteroids hits earth -- 300KT, causing widespread destruction and fear. Amos is on Earth, at the UN high-security prison, visiting an old friend. He's in a holding facility for people with "body modifications", which make them high-powered. The Constitution protects their right to keep them, but they're incarcerated. Amos visits his friend "Peaches" in her shipping-container cell, where she's being kept subdued with drugs. The alarm sounds. It's lockdown. The ceiling shakes. The next asteroid has hit. Avasarala finally gets through to President Gao to tell her about the Martian stealth on the asteroids. Seconds into the call, a third asteroid strikes. The shock wave sweeps away Gao's plane, UN One. The order to re-task the watchtower satellites to watch out for Martian stealth-tech goes through, though, and Earth is able to shoot down the third asteroid. On Tycho, Sakai (Bahia Watson) turns out to have been the mole (apologies to Bull). She kills Fred Johnson and a bunch of other people. Monica and Holden manage to stop her, but not before she helps the Belters make off with the last of the protomolecule. She's very deliciously obnoxious in custody -- but Holden comports himself exceedingly well. Not so everyone else. Marco Inaros grandstands around a bunch, with Naomi sobbing around about her son and other stuff. The plotline is decent, but it's a bit overwrought, with both of them chewing the scenery pretty enthusiastically, at times. Marco announces that Mars and Earth are henceforth confined to their planetary atmospheres -- that the Belt declares itself victorious. Anyone in disagreement gets a shipment of protomolecule or maybe some more stealth asteroids. Amos and his friend/prisoner Clarissa/"Peaches" (Nadine Nicole) are trapped nine floors beneath the surface. Amos convinces the guards to band together with them, just to survive and try to get out. They manage to find a maintenance shaft, but can only access it with the help of an overpowered mutant of a prisoner with body modifications. Clarissa's body mods are still dormant due to the suppressor drugs, but I'm excited to find out what she can do. They had her buried pretty deep; she must be dangerous as hell. They get out and away, crossing overland to avoid official government aid camps -- she's an escaped prisoner -- ending up at an enclosed compound, guarded by a hair-trigger prepper. Amos just wants to trade, but the guy's about to blow his head off when Clarissa shows her stuff, taking him out. Bobbie and Alex are in pursuit of the Martian traitors. They figure out that the weapons they're trading are the frigates themselves. They are spotted, hightail it, are targeted by an even-faster missile, then dump the core as chaff, thwarting the attack, but rendering their ship inert and tumbling. They survive and jump the scavenging Belter ship that tries to board them, with Bobbie tearing them up with ordinance and Alex jumping over to booby-trap their drive. Alex fires their drive back up (how? I thought they'd dumped the core? Maybe they just had to wait a bit to fire up the fusion reactor again?) and the Belters blow themselves up when they try to pursue. Naomi sulks around; Marco grandstands; Filp pouts; Naomi's old friend refuses to kill her for Marco. Avasarala is invited back to power because the guy who ended up next in the surviving line of succession used to the Secretary of Transportation. They meet up with Carina's drummer's three ships -- surprising her with their Martian war frigates. The supercilious Marco has the upper hand, for now. Naomi, however, is getting through to Filip. Marco, however, spends the next whole episode cementing his reputation as an unhinged power-mad asshole. Holden, Bull, and Monica are on the tail of the Zmeya in the Rocinante -- but it blows itself up before they can board it. They presume that the protomolecule has been destroyed, but it's far more likely that it had already been transferred to another ship. Marco intends to lure the Roci to its doom with Naomi's ship, the Chetzemoka, rigged with explosives. Naomi spaces herself, flying toward her ship, injecting herself with hyper-oxygenated blood to get to the airlock, which she opens, floating in before passing out. Cyn (Brent Sexton), who'd followed her, dies in the lock. Her survial is highly improbable, to say the least. I'd almost hoped we'd seen the end of her. Naomi wakes up on her ship, finding it rigged with bombs and sending an SOS to Holden using a makeshift radio. Marco spins out of control, blaming Filip for Cyn's death. Naomi's on the ship and tries and tries to interrupt the SOS message, finally succeeding after many tries. She is exhausted and has no water or food. The Razorback (Alex and Bobbie), Camina (with her ersatz "captain", the bitch on wheels from Marco's crew), and Holden. They are all suspicious that the radio signal was briefly interrupted, though they're still burning hard to get there. Amos and Clarissa have met up with his brother and have convinced him to go with them to an island in the north where she knows there is a sub-orbital shuttle (her last name is Mao, so she knows the rich). They get there, but find the shuttle blocked from use by security protocols. They move in and try to fix it. People from the area show up to cadge. They offer them a ride. Military folks show up and try to commandeer shit. That goes less well for them. The Expanse continues the grand tradition of making suspenseful situations by assuming that computers and spaceships don't have door-locks. And they never shut up about security details, but there are infiltrators everywhere. Everyone has the same security access. Anyone can get in anywhere. Except Naomi, who'd locked out of Marco's ship computer, and Monica, whose access to Holden's ship computer is also limited. The new Secretary General ignores Avasarala's advice and bombs Pallas in retaliation, on the advice of the rest of his bloodthirsty board. When they plan even more attacks -- completely unhinged -- Avasarala quits, as do a few others. More follow and then a vote of no-confidence removes him from power, installing her as the once and future queen. Inaros is getting mad at people who dare to not find every word he says to be golden. He revels in the glory of ships lost to the greater cause of the Belt. The Razorback, the Rocinante, and Drummer's ships are still heading for Naomi, who's still desperately trying to do something. She manages to kick in the drive as well as a guidance nozzle, sending the ship into a tumble that she hopes will make it impossible to dock with. Drummer's orders are to attack and destroy the Rocinante. The Rocinante takes on the suicide mission, hoping to buy time for the Razorback to rescue Naomi. Drummer mutinies, killing Marco's henchmen, and taking out the Martian frigates before they can extinguish the Rocinante. The Roci does its part, as well. They are reunited. Some of Drummer's crew splits -- those are the dumbasses that think there's a future with Inaros. The Razorback maneuvers hard to pick up Naomi, who's spaced herself in a malfunctioning suit to prevent anyone from docking with the bomb of her ship. They find her -- miraculously -- but the maneuvers are too strong for Alex and he dies of a stroke [1]. They're all reunited and head for Luna. Peaches and Amos, along with his brother and their crew, predictably regret having let the military folk walk off, getting caught in a firefight just as the shuttle is finally ready to take off. They take some heavy losses, but all of the principals are there -- and the innocent bystanders make it as well. They head for Luna, meeting the Rocinante. Amos boards with Peaches, leaving his brother and his crew to explore other worlds beyond the Ring. Inaros, meanwhile, is super-pissed about having lost his ships and about Drummer's treachery. While Avarasala makes a stupid speech about common humanity, Inaros heads for the Ring, with the treacherous Martian navy, and with the protomolecule that they'd managed to sneak off of the Zmeya via a torpedo that the Roci had missed. The absolute bastard Sauveterre and his acolyte Babbage transit the Ting, with him reprimanding her and promising her how pitiless the military rule will henceforth be. They communicate with settlers on a planet who've loosed the protomolecule and are excited to see the ship that it's building in orbit. Sounds promising and not at all likely to fail. [image][image][image][image][image][image][image][image][image][image][image][image][image][image] Sincerely Louis CK (2020) -- "9/10" He's back. He's definitely not learned to behave, but he's very funny and he's insightful again. His shock jokes have purpose, his stories build from joke to joke. He doesn't dwell too long on any one thing. There are some subtle takedowns of common assumptions like his story of ordering sushi in a restaurant and then considering how he's supposed to describe the waitress's voice in his joke. Does he do the accent? Is it more wrong not to? Or his long segment on the word "retarded", which could have been a TED talk. You will be uncomfortable, but in this special, you feel he has a reason for saying the things he says, like the chain of words he puts together before the uncomfortable bit just leads him naturally there -- that he's not able to avoid it because that would be dishonest. It's kind of hard to explain, but it worked and it was funny and it reminded me a lot of his older specials. Palm Springs (2020) -- "8/10" Nyles (Andy Samberg) is a wedding guest at a hotel in Palm Springs, the boyfriend of the ditsy best friend (Meredith Hagner) Misty of the bride Tala (Camila Mendes). Sarah (Cristin Milioti) is Tala's big sister and she is not thrilled to be there. Nyles shows up to the wedding in shorts and a Hawaiian shirt and drops a moving speech on the crowd, catching Sarah's attention. He approaches here later, moving through the crowd with what seems like prescience, seemingly knowing where everyone will be and what they will need, placing chairs under stumbling drunks. Nyles charms Sarah and they end up out in the desert, about the embark on the absolutely predestined one-night-stand when Roy (J.K. Simmons) appears out of the darkness, with a bow and arrow, wounding Nyles, who flees toward a cave, hiding behind a boulder. Roy follows him in, to a mysterious glow that envelops and consumes him. Nyles, dragging his wounded self along, follows, yelling to Sarah to stay back, to not follow him. Sarah follows him and wakes up the next day, but it's the previous day, it's today forever and ever, amen. She is very confused and none too pleased, hunting down Nyles and demanding to know what's going on. They're now both trapped -- well all three of them, really, including Roy -- in a time loop. Fall asleep and wake up on the same day, in the morning, in the same place you started the day. The access to the time loop was opened by an earthquake. Roy starts in Irvine, so he has to be quite enterprising to drive all the way to Palm Springs to try to kill Nyles (not that he can kill him permanently, but he knows that the pain is real). Roy is there because he was a guest at the wedding and took way too many drugs with Nyles and was seduced by the orange light of the time loop. Nyles has been in the loop so long that he can't remember how long he's been there. He and Sarah grow closer and closer until, finally, on a camping trip, they make love. Sarah wakes up in the same place. Nothing's changed. She hears her sister's fiancé Abe (Tyler Hoechlin) in the shower of her hotel room; she knows what she's done; she knows what he is, what's marrying her sister: a man who would cheat on his fiancé with her older sister on the evening of his own wedding. Sarah wants out of the loop so badly because every morning she wakes to the stark reminder of what a horrible person she is. Nyles admits to her that they've slept together before -- "like, a thousand times" -- pissing her off royally and causing her to leave him. She doubles down on getting out. She spends her days learning quantum physics. She's got nothing but time. She learns that, were she to blow herself up while transiting the time loop, she could leave it. She experiments with a local goat that does not return. Nyles visits Roy in Irvine to find him living a perfect life -- though he lives it again and again and again -- and Roy tells him he's given up trying to kill him after he'd lain in the ICU for days, unable to fall asleep (Sarah had crushed his legs with her car). Sarah finds Nyles and tells him she has a way out. He would rather stay in the loop with her, forever. She wants out and determines to do it without him. Nyles stays on the fence, then tears for the cave, catching her at the last moment (of course). They go through together, pull the trigger on the bomb...and go through. We find them floating together in the pool of a home they used to visit often. This time, the family has returned because it's the next day -- for the first time in a very, very long time. Mid-credits, we see Roy approach a completely baffled Nyles at the wedding. Roy had returned because of a mysterious call from Sarah a few days before. She'd called him before going through. He smiles. Hard Road of Hope (2020) -- "8/10" This is a documentary by Eleanor Goldfield about mountain-top-removal (MTR) mining in West Virginia. From a handful of narrators that are allowed to speak at length, we learn the history of the state, how it was basically split from Virginia by Lincoln and granted to the companies that helped keep the supply lines open during the American Civil War. The state would end up belonging to the corporations to this very day. We hear excellent political summaries from Terry Steele (UMWA Local 1440 Member). We hear a history of the "rednecks" from Mine Wars museum owner Kimberly McCoy, how it was the red kerchiefs worn by union members showing solidarity that spawned the name. We learn of the coal slurry, of the cocktail of poisonous chemicals in fracking compounds, of a town where 98% of the residents had gall-bladder disease. We hear of how many rivers and streams have been buried under rubble and dust, how many residents have no clean drinking water. We learn of how the original miners were snatched up at Ellis Island, hoping for a new beginning and coming up out of one deadly mine in England or Ireland and descending into yet another in America, in West Virginia. Steele explains how people would be perfectly willing to engage themselves for renewable energy. They're not wedded to coal. They're wedded to not starving to death. They need a plan for survival of their communities; they need jobs; they need meaning. They are deluged with propaganda, with astro-turfing groups run by the corporations subjugating them. He says that, instead of "Friends of Coal", people should be "Friends of Coal Workers". Anyone can watch this movie online at "Hard Road of Hope" , for a very small fee. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] If this seems abrupt, it's because it was inserted after filming had completed. He's been accused of writing inappropriate text messages to fans and an "independent investigation" concluded that he needed to be fired. He's a great actor, but he has no scheduled work, so I guess his career is over now. A pity. Maybe he's a good carpenter or something. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4160 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4160 Wed, 24 Feb 2021 23:11:27 +0100 of around 1600 ratings publicly available. I've included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other -- I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. Unorthodox (2020) -- "8/10" This is the story of Esther aka Esty (Shira Hass), a 19-year--old woman living in an ultra-orthodox community in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, New York. We see most of her story in flashbacks while we watch her escape to Berlin, Germany. Esty is only 19 but has been married to Yanky (Amit Rahav) for a year. They have no children, which is a source of concern to the rest of the family and extended community, to put it mildly. Esty's mother Leah (Alex Reid) lives in Berlin, having escaped her alcoholic husband and been subsequently ostracized from the community. We see at the wedding that she is barely tolerated and eventually escorted away, while the father of the bride Mordecai (Gera Sandler) is allowed to participate in the holiest rituals despite being falling-down drunk. We are offered a frank and relatively detailed look into the rituals of an "ultra-orthodox" Jewish family and community. Their costumes are intricate and uniform. The men are all dressed the same, with gigantic, furry hats on Shabbat. The women are more demure and are very definitely a second class, if that. Upon discovering that Esty has fled to Berlin, the family organizes a rescue committee consisting of the super-shy Yanky, who can't look anyone in the eye and his cousin Moishe (Jeff Wilbusch), a brash gangster who acts like he's a loaded weapon and the world is his target. He gambles on his smartphone constantly -- he's neither allowed to gamble nor allowed to have a smartphone. Esty arrives in Berlin and tried to visit her mother, but she's not home. She eventually sees her in the street in the neighborhood, but with her partner (a woman). Instead of approaching, Esty runs off. It is unclear whether she's decided to completely abandon her plan to meet up with her mother after having traveled across the Atlantic to find her, or if she's put off by lesbianism...or what. Instead, she meets up with a group of musicians from various countries, who all conveniently speak English fluently. They are a Benetton ad of genders, colors, origins, and sexualities, none of which matter in the least. Esty sleeps in the conservatory and is taken under the wing of the musical director, who believes her immediately when she says she can play the piano well enough to attend his school for the gifted. She swims in the Wannsee with her friends, questioning their ability to just shrug off 75 years of history instead of wallowing in it, as she's been taught. Meanwhile Moishe and Yanky have also arrived in Berlin and visited Leah, with Moishe trying to terrorize her into giving up Esty's location. Leah has no idea what they're talking about. Moishe starts tailing Esty while Yanky goes to the old-age home where Yanky works to try to reason with her. Leah throws away his number as soon as he leaves (It's honestly a mystery as to which number he gave her because he doesn't have a phone -- and certainly not one that works in that country). We see more flashbacks of Yanky and Esty's life together in Williamsburg. She complains about extreme pain during sex and Yanky is 100% not equipped to deal with any deviations from the plan. Having gone almost a year without knocking up his wife is already enough of a Schande that he can't process it. His mother and sister step in to get Esty on the straight and narrow, with all of the compassion your would expect. They buy her vaginal inserts to make things work better. Problem solved. Esty dithers about her audition, then decides to go for it -- with the help of Robert. She jumps into the deep end, going out with her conservatory friends to a techno club that is 100% not corona-compatible. She ends up at Robert's apartment. The next morning, she has a day left until the recital, but she's hatched a plan with Robert -- they visit a friend of his to ask for his help. Moishe tracks Esty down and confronts her in a children's playground. It seems like he thinks he's making quite a strong argument, but he's a boorish, terrible person. If Esty can keep her wits about her, she would wonder what kind of a community sends this type of person as its representative? A terrible one. Moishe threatens her six ways from Sunday, then leaves her a gun with which she should kill herself if she doesn't come back. Poor Esty has to take the gun with her because the asshole left it in a children's playground. Esty goes to Leah's house, dropping off the gun and finally learning of how she'd been taken from Leah by the Williamsburg community -- she'd been disowned in court. Leah asks whether Moishe gave her the gun? "You know Moishe?" (Esty is horrifed.) Leah says, "There's always a Moishe." Yanky goes to Leah's house -- just barging the fuck in like he owns the place -- and confronts her about Esty's audition. Leah rolls with it much better than I would, reining in the sad bastard and convincing him not to do anything stupid. They all end up at the audition, where Esty sings a song from Handel, with piano accompaniment from Robert's friend. This goes OK, but the auditors ask for another song, one more appropriate to her mezzo-soprano. She sings a plaintive song in Yiddish, a cappella. This goes much better, but we don't learn whether she's accepted. Her friends are confident. Yanky saw it as well. She accompanies him back to his hotel, where he tries to win her back, but he doesn't realize what an utterly shitty deal he's offering her. He cuts off his payots (side locks) in a Van Goghian attempt to guilt her into coming back, but she stands strong. On her way out, she dumps a drunken Moishe on his ass -- he's returning from an all-night poker game where he'd actually won quite a lot of money. He yells at her that "we'll be back for the baby." We see Esty meeting her friends at a café. The end. We saw the show in Yiddish [1] with English subtitles, German, and English. Wilder S03 (2021) -- "8/10" Wilder and Kägi are back, this time on the trail of a serial killer who's taking revenge on dirty cops. The first victim is thrown off of a roof -- emulating the murder of a young man whom he'd thrown off a balcony years before. The second victim is killed with an axe to the head -- similar to how he'd murdered his daughter's addict boyfriend. The killer sends videos to a small online media organization "Reporter" (which is made up), which considers whether to publish them in interesting discussions about whether the information is real, whether a transcript would work, too, whether to anonymize the video, and so on. They clash with Attorney General Mettler (who's dating Wilder, by the way), who accuses them of interfering with an ongoing investigation, which is, quite frankly, bullshit. Wilder and Kägi hunt down and sort out possible suspects, finding out more about the crimes of the police than about those of their suspects. Kägi looks up an old friend of his, who lives in an absolute M.C.Escher-esque house full of mirrors and stairs and thousands of photos in frames, dotted with animal trophies. The friend tells Kägi to search for the "White Wolf" on the Darknet. This probably won't work because we're already following the killer: Jesch. He delivers eggs throughout the countryside, in a Fargo-esque white wilderness. He lives in a very rudimentary home with fixings from at least a hundred years back. He lives with a woman and young girl. It is unclear how they are related to him: the woman doesn't really treat him as a husband and the daughter hasn't made a peep yet. The next victim goes missing -- a female prison guard who Jesch catches while jogging -- and he releases a film of her confessing to having let a prisoner freeze to death. The young journalist Jenny Langenegger (Anna Schinz) is off the chain, releasing the video on her own blog, even though her editor wouldn't let her release it from the magazine. She doesn't give a fuck and knows she's right and is a loose cannon and will have been retroactively justified for having been right when everyone else is always wrong, especially her boss, who should just shut up and support her. The rest of the newspaper is not on-board, despite her being way more awesome than all of them put together and they have the gall to let her go for having gone behind everyone's back and ignored their opinions. Jesch goes to dinner at a neighbor's house. She doesn't think he has a family, but we've seen them at the house -- when he returns, he opens a memory chest under the bed. Are they dead? They are. He'd lost them in a traffic accident -- we have yet to find out how he thinks the police failed him then. Wilder and Kägi take Aebi (the White Wolf) in for questioning, with him pretty much winning the first round of questioning. He brings up Kägi's shooting of a man in the street in the last season, where Wilder helped him cover it up. Now Kägi is concerned that he might be the next victim. Instead, it's a "Fahrlehrer" who was probably a cop in his previous career. Jesch messes up, though, failing to inject him and then trying to choke him out with his seatbelt. A man walking his dog happens by and Jesch flees the scene, leaving his victim unconscious, but alive. The latest victim is in a deep coma, barely alive. Kägi, Rosa (Wilder), and her boyfriend, Michael Mettler (the DA on the case) watch him die -- along with their hopes that he would be able to identify his attacker. They hatch a plan to lure the killer into the hospital -- which seems like a pretty dangerous proposition. They get Jenny to write a fake article that the victim is on the road to recovery. Then Wilder, Kägi, and their young computer-savvy colleague Jakob (Julian Koechlin) -- he's actually the brother of her baby-daddy -- set up a watch with dozens of cameras. Jesch sneaks into the hospital as a janitor, then sets off a smoke bomb that triggers all of the fire alarms. He dresses as a fireman and gets into the victim's room, but finds a dummy instead. Wilder chases him down the stairwell, to the garage, commandeering a vehicle, and racing off wildly, backwards, to try to run Jesch down. Instead, she smashes into Jakob, who'd run down there to help. Literally nothing happens to Wilder for her attempted vehicular manslaughter and grossly negligent driving (grobfahrlässiges Verhalten) and lack of control over the vehicle (Nicht Beherrschen des Fahrzeugs). Not only is she not arrested, she is Jakob's contact at the hospital. Talk about police getting special treatment -- no wonder Jesch is pissed. She goes to her baby daddy to tell him that she'd almost killed and probably paralyzed his brother. When he dares to be anything but sympathetic to her situation, she tells him to stop being such an asshole. Jesch flees the scene, wounded from one or more falls. He heads back to one of his hidey-holes to patch himself up, but Kägi surprises him there, having found a clue to the location in one of the videos. Jesch gets the drop on Kägi and takes him hostage. He heads back home to find his dinner date waiting in the cold outside. He asks her inside -- for the first time -- and she helps patch him up. He sees his wife in his mind's eye, reproachful. A parallel plot follows two police officers -- brothers -- in the region where Jesch lives and works. One is sleeping with the other's wife. This comes out and causes much psychic angst. The cuckold has even more on his mind: he was the one driving the car that drove Jesch's car off the road many years ago, killing the man's wife and daughter. There were two other guys in the car: one of them is Mettler (Wilder's boyfriend and the DA on the case). The cuckold calls Mettler to meet him in the middle of nowhere, in the middle of the night, to tell Mettler that he will confess. Mettler says he will do no such thing (as he would be implicated as well). They agree to disagree and Mettler kills the cuckold. Jesch meets up with Jonas, Mettler's son, playing the role of a hockey talent-scout, but only taking a picture to panic Mettler, not doing anything to Jonas. Jesch sends the picture and waits for Mettler at the hockey arena, showing up in the back seat of his car after a frustrated Mettler returns. Jesch gets a confession from Mettler to both having been at the scene of the accident when Jesch's wife and child were killed (and having covered up his involvement and that of his companions) as well as having killed the cuckold. Mettler and Wilder both text and call and drive the whole time -- it's no wonder that people are constantly driving in the wrong lane. I'm not sure what they're going for, but the "star" is not a very nice person. She texts and drives, she has appalling table manners (every time you see her eating with someone, she just digs in without waiting or saying anything, which is odd for Switzerland). They inhale half their pizzas in crouches around a kitchen island, barely remembering to have a glass of wine. Appalling. Meanwhile, Jesch has captured Kägi, who was snooping around. Rosa looks for him at his Airstream trailer, where Kägi has left the door unlocked, so she can waltz right in. Oh, and also he doesn't have a password on his laptop, which is just so unbelievable that it's basically just lazy writing. This is also lucky for Rosa, who sends the laptop to Jakob for analysis -- something friends just do for one another, I guess. Rosa involves Jakob so that he can feel "useful" again after she crippled him with reckless driving that somehow hasn't gotten her banned from the case or even arrested. Rosa doesn't see what Kägi saw in the pictures, but Jakob does. Jesch eventually just lets Kagi go, telling him "you're not on my list". It's a little anticlimactic. And it doesn't really matter that they found one of Jesch's hidey-holes. Jesch is tiring of his visions of his dead family and he's tiring of his crusade against the cops. He returns to his neighbor's house to try to...move on. The noose tightens and the police are onto him, showing up at his girlfriend's home soon after he'd left. She lies and covers for him, but another cop (brother of Lukas, who Miller, not Jesch, had killed) shows up and Jesch is forced to subdue him. The whole crew (Kägi, Mettler, Wilder, and co.) show up at Jesch's home to find the unconscious cop and Jesch on the run. While Wilder and Kägi investigate upstairs, Mike ransacks the desk to find the memory card from the video camera on which Jesch had recorded his confession. He finds tracks in the snow leading away from the back door and pursues Jesch into the woods. Jesch lures him in, then confronts him as the last of the three who'd ruined his life. He has Mettler dead to rights, but is distracted by visions of his wife and daughter. Mettler blubbers a bit, promising everything, but then takes advantage of Jesch's confusion and shoots him in the heart. Jesch shoots back, winging Miller. Miller searches the corpse to find the memory card before passing out. Wilder finds them both, yelling for help. Case closed? The aftermath finds the federal police pleased with themselves that the case is finally closed. There is an adversarial press conference where the police chief wants to just "move on", sweeping any open questions and issues under the rug. In a discussion with him, Kägi calls the police chief a "wirbelloser Hasenfurtz". Kägi wonders why Jesch took down just a few low-level cops and can't explain Lukas at all -- especially because the shoe size is wrong. Wilder is also still wondering. Mettler picks her up and surprises her by bringing her to "their" house (a Corbusier original). She is not thrilled. They sit down to eat and she starts to interrogate him, pretending it's a game. She elicits a confession. Unlike previous seasons, it's not clear how Wilder came to her conclusions. She just guessed and tricked Mike into confessing. The end sees Kägi headed for Portugal to retire? Wilder also seems to have quit her job as a federal cop. Jakob is on crutches and visits her in the office, begging her to stay. Disenchantment S02 (2020) -- "8/10" I thought the first season was a bit weak and only started this second one as filler. The first couple of episodes felt the same, but the rest of the season brought more interesting stories. The journey to hell was a bit overblown, but the travel to Bean's mother's homeland was interesting, as was the introduction of Steamland, a Steampunk-based culture, balancing out Dreamland's culture based on dysfunctional and unreliable magic. This season also tackles Zøg's subjugation of the elves more, which is interesting on a class level. Merkimer the pig (Matt Berry) is back and given a lot of room in the story. Bean ends up shooting her father by accident -- using the Steampunk pistol, which they all think is a magic wand -- and Odval and the Arch Druidess take control of (now) King Derek and have him blame Bean, Luci, and Elfo for King Zøg's attack (and impending death). Knowing that Zøg is being killed by his doctors, Bean goes to his room to pry out the bullet. She is caught and accused (again) of being a murderess and, now, a witch. The trial (with King Derek as judge) is swift and they burn her (with Luci and Elfo) at the stake. They all drop through the heat-weakened cobbles into the world of the Trøgs -- where they discover the Trøg-queen, none other than Dagmar herself (Bean's mom). Street Fighter (1994) -- "8/10" Honestly, you had me at Raul Julia and Jean Claude Van Damme, who both turn in pitch-perfect performances. I'm convinced that this movie is much more tongue-in-cheek than many viewers noted. It's much more like Airplane or Big Trouble in Little China than perhaps the adoring fans who'd expected to see a movie that looked literally like the 2-D fighting game they'd played at the arcade. Instead of doing that, it fleshes out its own GI-Joe--like world with the AN (Allied Nations) opposed by General Bison (Raul Julia [2]) -- who only talks about himself and only in the third person -- and his Army, which take over the fictional country of Shadaloo. He kidnaps a bunch of hostages, then demands $20B as ransom. The AN lands with their fighting forces, led by Colonel Guile (Jean Claude Van Damme). The reporter on the scene is Chun-Li (Ming Na-Wen), accompanied by Honda, the driver (Peter Navy Tuiasosopo [3]), and Balrog [4] (Grand L. Bush). Ryu Hoshi (Byron Mann) and Ken Masters (Damian Chapa) round out the cast of characters from the game. Oh wait, there's also Zangief (Andrew Bryniarski), Bison's Russian-tinged right-hand man. Bison is teaming up with some local weapons merchants and underground fight organizers, but grows dissatisfied with them. Look, the plot doesn't really matter. There's not a ton of hand-to-hand combat, but there is a ton going on. And Guile gets to drive a pretty bitching, black speedboat that looks like Airwolf, but on water, has an utterly inexplicable stealth mode, and is bulletproof. His co-pilot is Cammy White (Kylie Minogue [5]). Bison uses technology to grow Guile's best friend (whom he's captured) into a greenish, hulk-like, steroid-infused fighting machine, the first of his army of super-soldiers. Chun-Li confronts Bison about the day he came to her village and destroyed it, killing her father. He responds as follows, "I'm sorry. I don't remember any of it. [...] for you, the day Bison graced your village was the most important day of your life. But for me, it was Tuesday." OMGBURN. God, I miss Raul Julia. Obviously, they storm the fortress, rescue the hostages, and escape before the whole thing explodes. Guile and Bison show down against one another -- twice, because Bison is reanimated by his armor -- as do several other pairings of fighters (obviously). It's 1994, so it's almost all practical effects and stuntwork -- and it's goddamned relaxing. I honestly enjoyed the hell out of the campiness and earnestness and the pretty damned good sets. This movie was a lot of fun and you could tell they had fun shooting it. It's from 1994 and had a post-credits scene, breaking new ground there. The soundtrack is filled with leading lights of the time: Ice Cube, Nas, The Pharcyde, LL Cool J, MC Hammer and Deion Sanders, Chuck D, Angélique Kidjo. The movie is dedicated to Raul Julia, who died soon after it finished shooting. "Bison: Something wrong, Colonel? You came here prepared to fight a madman, and instead you found a god?" Bison descends majestically. RIP Raul Julia. Ready Player One (2018) -- "8/10" This is a movie about an online world called the Oasis. It was invented by James Halliday, a computer-programming and game-design genius. He grew up in the 80s, and died in the early 2040s, leaving behind an easter egg in his massive online game. The first player to solve his 80s-based puzzles to find three keys wins 50% of the company that runs the Oasis -- effectively winning a controlling interest in the digital world in which much of humanity spends its escapist time (because their real lives in the real world are subjugated and squalid). The easter egg spawns a cottage industry of companies whose whole purpose is to find the keys. In particular, Innovate Online Industries (IOI) is a gigantic corporation led by Nolan Sorrento that buys up people's debt and sends them to "loyalty camps" to play in the game, working for IOI on other tasks, making it money to fund its army of egg-hunters. Parzival/Wade Watts is an egg-hunter, who ends up teaming up with Art3mis/Samantha (on whom he has a crush), as well as a few other avatars to work the challenge together. Parzival visits the Halliday archives (in-game) all the time to try to figure out clues from Halliday's life that will lead him to the keys. He is the first to find a key, followed closely by his compatriots. They win money, upgrade their real-world equipment and continue the search. * The first key is found in a car race -- Parzival drives the DeLorean from Back to the Future -- where the contestants are attacked by Godzilla and King Kong. Parzival finds an archive clip of Halliday where he says he'd like to make everything go backwards again, real fast, which turns out to be the secret to winning. * The second key is about "taking a leap". The search at a club where Halliday had one of his rare dates, but didn't dance with his date (they watched a movie instead), regretting it for the rest of his life. The club isn't quite right, but the Overlook Hotel from The Shining is better. It was Halliday's favorite film. The effects here are absolutely top-notch. Art3mis ends up dancing with Halliday's crush, which gets her the second key. The others follow her through this challenge to get it, as well. * The third key is on Planet Doom (from Voltron) where there is an epic battle with IOI troops, using a ton of recognizable avatars like Gundam (Daito), Mecha-zilla (Sorrento), and Iron Giant (Aech). On this planet, there is an Atari 2600, where you have to select a game and play it to find the third key. Parzival chooses Adventure, but doesn't try to win -- instead he seeks out the dark room where you can find the world's first easter egg that shows the game's creator's Warren Robinett's name. Sorrento gets the mercenary i-R0k (T.J. Miller) to find him expensive artifacts and to try to kill the team (in-game) ... and then out-of-game, as well. Artemis is captured soon after they find the second key, but the team rescues her from the loyalty center and she rejoins them in-game from the IOI center. There is a gigantic, fancy battle and Parzival finds the third key because he knows the most about Halliday, refuses the initial contract (it was a test, like the gobstopper in Willy Wonka) and then wins for real, sharing it with his friends. The curator of the archives turns out to have been Halliday's original partner Ogden Morrow (Simon Pegg). The effects are really well-done, as is the handling of avatars vs. real-world presence. There are a ton of 80s references -- because of Halliday's obsession with the culture of his youth -- like the Zemeckis Cube (turns back time), the Holy Hand Grenade (kills all people in sight), Chucky, The Iron Giant, the DeLorean and many more make it even more fun for my generation. The least believable part was where Sorrento is the only one with a gun in an American trailer park. The movie is a lot cleverer than I'd expected and the acting is pretty strong. Recommended. Disenchantment S03 (2021) -- "8/10" Bean, Luci, and Elfo start the season in Trøgtown, as "guests" of Dagmar, who seems to be seeking reconciliation with Bean. Luci tells Bean to roll with it, faking it until she makes it, in order to figure out how to get out of there. Meanwhile, on the surface, Odval and the Arch Druidess are ever-more-nakedly consolidating their power (and also together nakedly, if the near-constant innuendo is to be believed). Zøg realizes they're planning to kill him (for real this time) and hatches a plan with Pendergast (his most loyal knight) to sneak out in a coffin. The plan falls apart immediately, as Pendergast is caught and killed -- and the other two guards forget about Zøg -- so the Arch Druidess ends up burying Zøg in a pauper's graveyard. They replace Zøg with a walrus to fool Derek (who is not fooled, but is too gentle a soul to really rebel -- although he does keep asking when he's going to be allowed to found a "socialist paradise"). Bean, Luci, and Elfo try to escape, revealing their treachery to Dagmar, who is relieved that she also no longer needs to fake love for Bean. In the dungeon, they hatch and execute a plan to escape, eventually dressing Bean up as Dagmar to get her to convince a Trøg or two to lead them to the surface. The Trøgs "harvest" Zøg from his certain death by digging up to his grave and pulling him out -- from the bottom, spilling into their subterranean mines. He escapes and wanders the tunnels of Trøgtown until he meets up with Bean and Dagmar, in the middle of their confrontation. Dagmar fools Bean -- once again -- in order to escape -- again. Dagmar, Zøg, Elfo and Luci return to the surface to find Odval and the Arch Druidess nervous that they're going to be discovered, but still trying to roll with it. The trio sneak around the castle, searching for the murder weapon. Derek, meanwhile, has spent a night in the forest, with many fairies, and "become a man". He decides to marry a fairy and receives Odval's and the Druidess's blessing. Zøg has a further breakdown at the wedding, Derek sees that the Druidess has the gun under her robes. He outs her and she goes on the lam, escaping on a motorcycle, back to Steamland, whence she came. Bean and Elfo follow her, with Luci left behind to guard (and play "cat" for) an increasingly erratic Zøg. Bean befriends Alva, the president of Gunderson's Steamworks (which look, probably not coincidentally, like the factory in Fritz Lang's Metropolis). There she meets up with the Arch Druidess again, who is apparently an agent of Gunderson's. The Druidess warns Bean against trusting Alva. Bean finds out after Alva's incessant wooing that he wants to merge their kingdoms -- that he wants access to Dreamland's magic. Instead, she escapes and finds Elfo at the Freak Show, where she helps him and all of his friends escape. They return to rescue Mora the Mermaid, who accompanies them as they escape with Alva's boat, the Miss Behavin' After a long night with Bean that goes frustratingly nowhere, Mora abandons ship -- just before Elfo runs it aground on the shores of Dreamland. Bean is despondent because Mora is gone -- she isn't sure which parts she dreamed and which were real, but she feels loss -- and she's useless, at first, at preventing the overthrow of an increasingly unstable Zøg. Bean and Oona work together to try to thwart the overthrow, but they don't realize that Odval is onto them and manipulates them into helping push Zøg completely over the edge. The kingdom of Dreamland is in dire straits, with no soldiers and no weapons and little money. Merkimer's body appears again and the crew hatches a plan to go to Merkimer's home, the exceedingly rich kingdom of Bentwood, to ask his parents for money and assistance. Merkimer turns on them once home, at first, before deciding to remain a pig and help them flee -- with a large supply of arrows, collected when shot, and gold, purloined accidentally when Elfo inhaled it during torture. Back in Dreamland, Oona is impatient to leave, leaving Zøg in Bean's hands. Bean tries to nurse her father back to sanity -- he discovers a ventriloquist's dummy through which he can communicate. He tells her that she has to become queen, to let him go "before he can never come back". He assures Bean that she can handle the green cloud of smoke approaching on the horizon and that she's already running the kingdom well. He is carted away in a poignant scene that addresses mental illness much more seriously than I'd expected from this show. Bean is crowned Queen, just in time to order her people to flee from the green smoke. The smoke turns out to be nothing scary -- just an old schemer who's friends with Odval. Bean tosses him into the dungeon. At the same time, an ogre horde attacks Dreamland, wanting revenge for Elfo having stabbed out the eyes of their king (who's blind, but leading the charge). Elfo sacrifices himself to the ogres, who take him away instead of ripping him limb from limb. Dagmar shows up again, out of nowhere, to take Bean back to hell to marry a demon who looks like Alva. Luci dies (decapitation) trying to stop her. Luci wakes up in heaven. To Have and Have Not (1944) -- "8/10" This is an adaptation of a novel by Ernest Hemingway by screenwriter William Faulkner and director Howard Hawkes. They moved the location from Miami to Fort-de-France on the French island of Martinique. It is 1944 and the pro-German Vichy French regime is in charge, personified by the odious Capt. M. Renard (Dan Seymour) and his small gang of ghouls. We meet Harry Morgan (Humphrey Bogart) at the tail-end of a two-week--long fishing trip with Mr. Johnson (Walter Sande), who's fixing to take a flyer early next morning, in order to avoid paying Harry what he's owed. Eddie (Walter Brennan) is Harry's "rummy" right-hand man on the boat. After a long day of marlin-fishing (during which Johnson loses two giant fish), they end up at Frenchy's bar (Marcel Dalio), where Harry meets Marie "Slim" (Lauren Bacall). Cricket (Hoagy Carmichael) is wonderful on the piano -- really hauntingly beautiful tunes. Slim sings along (though I'm not a big fan of her voice) before schmoozing with Johnson and swiping his wallet. Harry makes her return it, but he makes Johnson sign over some of his traveler's checks. Before he can do so, though, rebels appear and the police shoot up the bar, killing Johnson with a stray bullet. Renard take Harry and Slim in, releasing them only after some tough questioning and after confiscating their passports and money. They make do, gaining a bottle on Slim's light fingers, but arguing instead of drinking. Frenchy approaches Harry with a job helping out the resistance, but Harry doesn't want to get involved -- until he does, since he has no other options. He and Eddie head around the island to pick up Mme. Hellene de Bursac (Dolores Moran) and Paul de Bursac (Walter Szurovy). They are accosted by a French patrol boat. Harry shoots out their spotlight, but not before Paul takes a shot to the upper-right shoulder. They return to Frenchy's and stow the couple away in the cellar. Frenchy asks Harry to remove the bullet before the infection gets worse. Harry saves Paul, learning of his plan to go to Devil's Island to spring a leader of the resistance. When Paul asks him to help, Harry turns him down again, not wanting to get further involved. "Paul: You don't think much of me, Captain Morgan. You're wondering why they have chosen me for this mission. I wonder too. As you know, I'm not a brave man. On the contrary, I'm always frightened. I wish I could borrow your nature for a while, Captain. "When you meet danger, you never think of anything except how you will circumvent it. The word "failure" does not even exist for you, while I... I think always: "Suppose I fail", and then I'm frightened. (Emphasis added.)" The police, led by Renard, kidnaps Eddie and tries to make him talk. They then barge into Harry's room, where he manages to hide Helene and Slim in the bathroom. Renard and his men get even pushier and Harry has enough. He shoots the biggest, scariest one, cowing the others into submission. He forces Renard to release Eddie and sign harbor passes. He, Slim, Eddie, and the de Bursacs escape on Harry's boat, bound for Devil's Island. Bogart is fantastic -- a class for himself -- the music is wonderful, the simplicity and pacing are much appreciated. I love that they ended the movie after Harry's conversion, with the whole "big action ending" as an exercise left up to the viewer's imagination. X-Men Apocalypse (2016) -- "7/10" Moira MacTaggert (Rose Byrne) unearths Apocalypse nee En Sabah Nur (Oscar Isaacs, nearly unrecognizable under the makeup) from ruins in Egypt in the mid-1980s. He is a 5000-year--old mutant -- the original mutant -- with enormous power. They do not explain how he was initially subdued, only that he had been betrayed. Apocalypse recruits Ororo (Alexandra Shipp), enhancing her power, then seeks more allies. Back in Westchester, Hank McCoy/Beast (Nicholas Hoult), Charles Xavier (James McAvoy), Scott Summers/Cyclops (Tye Sheridan), and Jean Gray/Phoenix (Sophie Turner) are teaching a school full of mutant children to use their powers. Elsewhere, Raven Darkhölme / Mystique (Jennifer Lawrence) helps Kurt Wagner/Nightcrawler (Kodi Smit-McPhee) by way of Callisto's mutant-finding service, where she meets Psylocke (Olivia Munn), who's the most clearly unlikely to end up on the X-Men. Psylocke ends up on Apocalypse's team, recruiting Archangel (Ben Hardy) to the team. In Communist Poland, Erik Lehnsherr/Magneto (Michael Fassbender) has settled in to a new life, with a wife and daughter. He reveals his powers when he saves a co-worker at an ironworks from a falling bessemer container. Predictably, his co-workers snitch on him, the police show up for him, and (mostly) inadvertently kill his wife and daughter. Magneto is back -- he dispatches the police with a flick of his hand and a tiny piece of metal. We also meet Peter Maximoff/Quicksilver (Evan Peters), who's Magneto's son, but living with his mother. Magneto doesn't know he exists. Apocalypse picks up Magneto as well, showing him how powerful he really is. They beam in to the School for the Gifted, homing in on Charles Xavier, with Apocalypse trying to conquer his mind -- and nearly succeeding. Instead, Alex Summers/Havok (Lucas Till) looses his power under the mansion and ends up blowing everything all to hell. Quicksilver arrives just in the nick of time to save everyone. He's very fast and the effect is very neat, but it goes on forever. They regroup, but are then kidnapped by Colonel Striker's (Josh Helman) forces. They break out of there with the help of Weapon X (an uncredited Hugh Jackman). The forces are now pretty much aligned. Apocalypse wants to transfer his consciousness into Xavier and rule the world. Magneto is going along to get along, for now. They each pair off, with Psylocke fighting Beast, Archangel fighting Nightcrawler, Cyclops fighting Ororo, and Xavier fighting Apocalypse in the astral plane. It's all a bit of a crazy mess, with Magneto showing up at the end, to attack Apocalypse as well. Finally, Phoenix lets loose and delivers the killer blow. As you can tell just from the character listing, they squeezed every last possible X-person into this movie, but it kind of worked out ok? The acting was decent and the script navigated the waters more or less capably. Apocalypse was a bit of a deus ex, but it was fine, entertaining enough. The Expanse S04 (2019) -- "9/10" "Klaes: Marco is a nihilist -- in the guise of a patriot. His way is not the way forward for the Belt. I have seen blood spilled my entire life -- and I have spilt enough -- to know that the future -- our future -- cannot be built on violence. "Camina: You sound like a politician. "Klaes: No, I'm just old. Age changes you in ways you don't expect. My focus isn't as narrow as it once was." We start where we left off: humanity is grappling with the implications of the protomolecule, but also with the thousands of gates that have opened on remote galaxies. The area near the gates is patrolled and controlled by an Earth-Mars-Belter alliance, but nothing has addressed the underlying animosities and prejudices. Earth acts like the royal ruler -- headed by the honestly insufferable Avasarala (Shohreh Aghdashloo) -- shitting on Mars at every chance, and barely recognizing the Belter's existence as anything other than a captured workforce. The original crew is back on the Rocinante: Holden (Steven Strait, now with beard), Naomi Nagata (Dominique Tipper), Amos (Wes Chatham), and Alex (Cas Anvar). Miller (Thomas Jane) is still knocking around inside Holden's head, trying to figure out the alien race's plan and trying to figure out how to deal with the protomolecule, should it pop up again. On Mars, Bobbie (Frankie Adams) has been busted down to private and is working for a living. She's living at home and dealing with local gangs who are using her nephew David to cook drugs for them. The gangs are actually the police and they kidnap David to blackmail Bobbie into helping them break into military facilities. She tries to turn herself in, but her supervisor is more interested in getting a taste of the smuggling action. He turns her in, which forces her to again work with the smugglers, in order to stay out of jail. She can't win for losing. Stationed near the gates are Belters Klaes (David Strathairn) and Camina (Cara Gee), who are trying their damnedest to stick to the alliance while dealing with reprobation from their fellow Belters and scorn from Earth and Mars. The Rocinante goes through a gate, following in the wake of a Belter ship that got through and has colonized an Earth-like planet they call Ilus (and many in the arrogant U.N. call New Terra). They are preceded by a mission from Earth that comes in like they own the planet and treats the Belters like scum -- especially Murtry (Burn Gorman), who shoots one point-blank, for making a vague threat. Amos is not pleased and you can see him hatching an appropriate payback at some point in the future. Amos is still pretty awesome. Meanwhile, Nagata has trained her body to accept planetary gravity, but she's pushing it too far, too fast. Alex and Holden go to the giant, billion-year--old artifacts to investigate their purpose -- and their possible relation to suspicions that the protomolecule has followed mankind through the gates and to this bounty of planets. They are beautiful and intricate machines and wonderfully made. They remind me a bit of the ruins from Prometheus. Alex and Holden (under Miller's guidance) free up the machines and they swing into action, firing lightning strikes in patterns all over the planet. The Belter's equipment is heavily damaged, but the Earthers don't lift a finger to help. They're still sore because their ship was shot down, killing dozens, and they suspect the Belters. It's just as likely that it was a reflexive defense mechanism in the planet itself. At any rate, Amos requisitions/commandeers equipment and dares them to shoot him. Back on Earth, Avasarala is more-or-less consumed with a political attack on her by a younger opponent who even-more-arrogantly-than-Avasarala-if-that's-even-possible thinks that Earth alone should decide how to apportion the wealth of Ring Space. Avasarala's team unearths dirt on her, though -- she got an unfair leg up in getting a scholarship that launched her career. Meanwhile, on Ilus, Murtry and his men are on a lawless, murderous rampage, searching for the people who killed their 23 comrades on landing. They capture Amos and chase Nagata and the Belter doctor Lucia (who was actually the one who shot down the lander). Holden orders Murtry to stand down, telling him that they've got bigger fish to fry because the planet is waking up. One of the artifacts has started moving toward the settlement, but Holden orders the Roci to fire a rocket into it, rendering it inert (if not dead). Murtry pins down Lucia and Nagata, but Holden and Alex pin down Murtry and his lynch mob with suppressing fire from the Roci, and rescue them. Holden elects to stay behind, as the Roci takes Lucia, Nagata, and Alex back to orbit. In a flashback, we find out that, although Lucia planted the bombs, she wanted to blow up the landing pad before they even started descent. The others wanted to blow it when they landed. She got a hold of the trigger and blew the charges early, but still close enough to hit the shuttle. Holden goes back to camp, protected by his status as envoy of the U.N. Murtry is a giant asshole who's enjoying the hell out of being able to exact revenge for his lost crew on the deplorable scum of the Belters. He doesn't really care who he has to kill -- he's happy to eliminate them all. Holden calls a truce and tells them that they have to leave the planet because there are things much bigger than their squabble going on. Murtry acts like he has some sort of jurisdiction to tell everyone else what to do -- but he only can because he and his crew have better weapons. They are light years from anything else and he keeps calling the Belters "squatters" as if there were a fucking zoning authority anywhere in sight. Basically, everything belongs to Earth first and then we'll see who else gets a few table scraps. Nothing ever changes. Holden tries to tell them that it doesn't matter right now because everyone is going to die. The protomolecule and the ancient machines are going to run them all over if they don't clear out. The Belters want their claim to be respected -- they're from Ganymede, which was destroyed by Earth/Mars squabbling and they have nowhere else to go. Klaes and Camina capture the rogue Belter pirate Marco Inaros, who's basically a terrorist, but their tribunal (with 3 other Belters) agrees to let him live and go back to his ship. He promises to behave from now on -- until the first sign of betrayal by Earth (the Inners), which he claims is an inevitability. He's almost certainly right that the Belters will never be an equal party at the table -- although it's only through their mining work that Earth and Mars have any fleet at all (sound familiar?). One lady looks like she's got a bit of the protomolecule, but no-one else has noticed yet. The machines are on the move, on the surface and below. A giant explosion interrupts their squabbles. Speaking of squabbles, Avasarala and her opponent have an insufferably stupid debate that we could all have done without. Avasarala has a couple more soliloquies where she yells at Holden across hours of lag, demanding that he report back more often -- for all the good it will do. The giant explosion releases a planet-wide shockwave headed for the encampment in 8 hours. In orbit, the ships lose all fusion power and can't rescue anyone. The planet-bound take their mutual animosity to an artifact, blow their way in and barely escape the tsunami. They're trapped under the artifact now, with limited water and food, split into factions with unequal supplies, plagued by madman Murtry, who's looking to thin the herd, and everyone has a "virus" that's almost certainly the protomolecule and will blind them all in a day -- except for Holden, who's not infected. Episode 7 has terrible writing, leaning on dialogue and exposition for everything. The Lucia/Nagata "explanation" of orbital mechanics from one fucking Belter to another is so ham-handed, it's ridiculous. I hope that Avasarala's thrashing about and chewing the scenery is meant to express her discomposure -- because it's pretty tough to sit through. It continues with absolutely laughable shit like having Lucia's daughter -- a teenage stowaway on another ship -- answering its comms and planning rescues like she's the captain or has any clue about orbital mechanics. Lucia and Felcia to the rescue! Naturally, it was perfectly fine for Lucia to not care at all about the safety of the plan because the other ship has to be saved, no matter what. Meanwhile, the UN military is able to hit targets entire star systems away with a railgun, and can intercept in hours. There is instant video feed everywhere in the solar system -- hi-def, of course, with audio and vitals-signs-monitoring for all soldiers -- in real-time. Of course. On the ground, in the artifacts, everyone's going blind but Holden. Amos is also blind and trying to keep his shit together. Holden is sedating anyone who freaks out. There are space-slugs falling from everywhere, killing people pretty much on contact. It's looking pretty grim. Murtry is angling to kill Holden to make sure that no-one interferes with his claim to the planet and its lithium and alien artifacts. Like that's how it's going to work out. At the moment, he's blind and it's eating him alive that he's dependent on Holden for survival. Amos and Holden have a moment, which was actually quite nicely done. It turns out that Holden's ongoing cancer treatment for his radiation exposure on Eros is what's protected him from the blindness that afflicts everyone else. The doctor mixes up a lot more of the treatment and administers it to the others, bringing them all back. Murtry starts scheming again immediately, accelerating his plans because (A) Holden is now missing and (B) the plans to tow the Barbi with the Roci to a higher orbit seem to be working. Holden is missing because Miller has returned -- this time as himself rather than as a simulacrum put together by the quasi-sentient protomolecule. He shows Holden a secret passage and takes him to a wormhole-like tunnel in the artifact that will lead Holden closer to a place that the "protomolecule can't go", according to Miller. Holden jumps in. Avasarala schemes further, faking empathy like a true sociopath and gaining back a ton of favor among voters -- but losing her husband's previously unshakeable respect in the process. Klaes takes off after Marco Inaros to bring capital justice, once and for all. Camina considers going with him, but begs off, in the end. She has other work to do -- but not for the alliance, as she's quit that job too. The Rocinante maneuver mostly works to save the Barb, but they're forced to emergency action, using a railgun to provide impetus. Lucia is still insipid and Naomi is taking on the annoying character that she had in previous seasons. Nobody who claims to be a Belter seems to have any intuitive feel for orbital mechanics. Alex is awesome throughout, playing the cool-ass, Han Solo-like pilot. Holden and Miller arrive at the "bomb", which is a Sauron-like eye that is, like, connected to everything. Miller thinks he can trigger it, but he has to inhabit a Johnny Five-like contraption of junk and be guided up to it, so he can "gather everything else" and jump in, taking out his old masters (the beings that are somehow intrinsically linked with the protomolecule and who'd eradicated the billion-year-old civilization on the planet they're on). Murtry and Esai follow Holden, followed closely by Dr. Okoye and Amos. Wei tries to stop Amos with words, then threatens him, so he shoots her, only to be ambushed by Murtry, whom he wounds even worse. They're both out of it. While Holden runs back to help Amos, Okoye helps Miller shut down the planet and also take out his masters (maybe). Amos and Murtry glower at each other, but the standoff ends there, with the Rocinante landing delicately on the side of the artifact to pick them all up. The standoff ends with the planet dead, but with its technological "ribs" exposed, Miller is gone, Murtry is headed for trial, Lucia has been forgiven, everyone else is saved, the Belters have their ore, and most are staying to continue building their colony, along with the RCE science team. Amos is regrowing fingers and glowering at Murtry. Avasarala is mad because this is a bad spin for her campaign -- which is obviously all that matters. Bobbie on Mars tries to save Esai and crew from themselves, but arrives too late to stop the ambush. Klaes is closing in on Inaros, but hits some bumps along the way, with a Martian that he tried to play good cop with. Klaes eventually catches up to Marco's ship, but neither Marco nor Klaes is in any way limited by orbital mechanics like mere mortals. This show used to do much better in that regard. At least if they're using Star Wars-style physics, they're at least preserving the grungy look as well. I suppose the actor playing Klaes (David Strathairn) really had to go do other things -- because he went out super-stupid. He bad-assed his way into Marco's ship, then dropped his guard completely, letting Marco and Nagata's stupid son get the drop on him in a "reveal" that surprised no-one. Instead of at least shooting Marco, he gets captured and goes out like ... a man? Out of the airlock? Spaced by two smug cunts? That part felt pretty lazy and not really worthy of the character, but his song was pretty cool. Hey, maybe everybody fucks up and gets dropped at some point. At least he seems to have managed to fire off some final intel before he freezes up. Marco -- now, suddenly with a full crew again -- launches his asteroid toward Earth. Amos and Murtry are both relatively healed. Amos gives him a visit. Amos tells him it's go time. Murtry takes the first poke. Amos twists away, turning slowly back to Murtry, with bloody grin and wild eyes. Gleefully: "thanks". End scene. This is a really beautifully shot show, much more convincing and visually interesting than Star Trek: Discovery. Instead of multiple small shows with a large story arc, they have just the large story arc. It's fine for Discovery -- which is following the age-old Star Trek formula of doing just that -- but it's also nice to shift gears. [image][image][image][image][image][image][image][image][image][image][image][image] Middleditch & Schwartz S01 (2020) -- "8/10" Thomas Middleditch (Richard Hendricks of Silicon Valley) and Ben Schwartz (Jean-Ralphio of Parks and Recreation) are a two-man, "long-form", improvisational comedy duo. They quiz the audience for a few minutes to get the basic data for a scenario, then launch into 45 minutes of improvisational comedy that flows with callbacks, side-jokes, and raw talent. They roll with everything and make it work, true pros. The first episode is a wedding where they switch amongst 15 members, with each playing whoever needs to be played at the moment. You know who they are by accents, what they say, and sometimes their location on the stage. The stage is bare, except for them and two chairs. The second episode is a classroom for Contract Law, where they start slowly using the few scraps of information they gathered at the beginning, but slowly build to a story of a young alien boy who is in a secret room at the back. It's more dream-like and odd than the first one (which was more solid overall), but Middleditch really balances Schwartz well. Schwartz stays a bit of a guiding hand whereas Middleditch riffs more. The third episode is my favorite. They're at a job interview and Middleditch is visibly incensed at the insanity of what the audience member described as his experience interviewing with SNL for a photography internship. They start with Schwartz interviewing by video where he has to read the questions himself, with Middleditch off-screen playing the remote voice. He humiliates him by making him act like a gazelle, but cutting it short before the male gazelle appears. They weave the friend in, who also wants the job. They discuss their experiences -- including how far they got with the gazelle. Sawson has been offered a job at the NYT as a foreign correspondent/war photographer -- he would end up traveling to war-torn Norway -- split east-west in a primarily north-south country -- while Kyle takes funny pictures for a new feature in the NYT as well. Neither got the job at SNL and both want the other's job. In a dreamlike sequence, they end up in a JFK bathroom, lined up and pooping, along with a couple of died-in-the-wool New Yorkers, who offer not just life advice, but also a kind of Freaky Friday ritual that lets them switch places, but not before Middleditch can hold forth on how wasteful his New Yorker character is -- "I don't care! What's the point? The UN says we only have 11 years left anyway!". The ritual has them both on the ground like gazelles playing rock-paper-scissors to see who has to play the lady gazelle. Middleditch loses; the New Yorker breaks it up because that's not how the ritual goes. Instead, they mime a sort of Human Centipede journey and pop up in each other's bodies, temporarily and severely confused about who is Sawson in Kyle and who is Kyle in Sawson and who has which dream job now. Truly inspired and pretty brilliant. I'd watch that one again. We used to watch a lot of Whose Line Is It Anyway? with the incomparable Ryan Stiles, Greg Proops, Colin Mochrie, Wayne Brady, and Drew Carey. I love this low-tech, pure-talent form of comedy. Comedy without a script is magical; it's like your super-funny and super-clever friend, but professional. It's down-to-Earth. It's why I like Bill Burr's impromptu stuff almost more than his specials (at least recently; I'm Sorry You Feel That Way was a masterpiece) -- he's a naturally funny person who doesn't need a script. He just needs a bit of kindling and he's off and running. Middleditch and Schwartz do a different thing, but their ability to riff is wonderful. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] Yiddish is about 60% Swiss German. I can understand almost everything without subtitles. I remember thinking the same whenever I went food-shopping at C-Town in Kew Gardens and would overhear YIddish and wonder whether I had discovered an enclave of Swiss Germans. [1] Who should have gotten an Oscar for "best use of a cape". [1] He's not famous or anything, I just wanted to write his name. [1] I am not kidding about that name. Nobody in the movie bats an eye calling him that. [1] Yes, totally, that Kylie Minoque. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4138 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4138 Tue, 26 Jan 2021 23:04:42 +0100 -- "10/10" 2. "The Reagans (2020)" <#the_reagans> -- "9/10" 3. "Spenser Confidential (2020)" <#Spenser> -- "8/10" 4. "Fred Armisen: Standup for Drummers (2018)" <#Fred> -- "7/10" 5. "Force Majeure (2014)" <#Force> -- "7/10" 6. "Lupin (2021)" <#Lupin> -- "9/10" 7. "The Plot Against America (2020)" <#Plot> -- "9/10" 8. "WestWorld S03 (2020)" <#WestWorld> -- "8/10" 9. "Star Trek: Discovery S03 (2020)" <#Star> -- "6/10" 10. "Rick and Morty S04 (2020)" <#Rick> -- "10/10" These are my notes to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. I've recently transferred my reviews to IMDb and made "the list" of around 1600 ratings publicly available. I've included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other -- I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. Mr. Robot S04 (2020) -- "10/10" "We staged the biggest coup in history. They opted in and they clicked OK." Season four picks up with Angela (Portia Doubleday) at Phillip Price's (Michael Cristofer) estate, where he begs her to recant and give up her pursuit of Whiterose (BD Wong). She does not, with predictable consequences. Darlene (Carly Chaikin) is a hot mess, coked out of her mind and mourning Angela's disappearance, but not accepting that she might be gone forever. Tyrell Wellick (Martin Wallström) has been installed as the CTO figurehead at EvilCorp, doomed to ineffectiveness at one meaningless press event after another. Dominique (Grace Gummer) is living at home with her mother, reeling from her having been conscripted by Whiterose into being a mole at the FBI, a role she's trying to avoid, but for which she gets a stark reminder (through a threat to her mother's life). Elliot (Rami Malek) and Mr. Robot (Christian Slater) are still in pursuit, homing in on Whiterose's gold reserves in Cyprus, to which he gets access with Freddy Lomax's (Jake Busey) blackmailed assistance. "My feelings? Do you see what's going on out there? People are already forgetting about 5/9, the cyber-bombings. They're buying their E-Coin-discounted stocking stuffers and Christmas hams. And they're going to forget. And I don't blame them. They're exhausted. I'm exhausted. But we let this go...it'll be back to business as usual for Whiterose and her friends. The more she gets away with this, the worse this gets. So fuck my feelings. I'm done with the therapy sessions." Elliot follows a lead provided by Freddy, but it turns out to be a honeypot and he's kidnapped and forced to overdose on heroin by Whiterose's henchmen. Price appears just as he's about to succumb, rescuing him from an overdose with an antidote. In a beautifully rendered scene, Price introduces Elliot to the Deus Group, the company behind E-Corp, the company through which Whiterose runs everything. They discuss next steps in front of Elliot's heist plans, a smattering of somewhat translucent post-its with the morning sun shining gloriously between and through them. "[segues in from the soundtrack to Koyaanisqatsi, reviewed "here" ] You're trying to stop a speeding train by standing in front of it. All this [gestures to Elliot's post-it notes outlining his "plan"] they won't even notice. "I became a dead man walking the minute I agreed to work with Whiterose. "Just like you." Eliot and Darlene's mother dies. They are charged with taking her very few effects and arranging a funeral. Darlene is obsessed with her mother's safe-deposit box while Eliot is focused on his next contact. Darlene is really unpleasant and not handling anything well. Dominique digs herself deeper into her role as a Dark Army mole at the FBI. We learn that Eliot has another, more powerful personality than Mr. Robot. We also learn more about Whiterose's past and more about her project. Her right-hand woman is efficient and ruthless and incredibly observant. A lot of the flashbacks are in Chinese. Eliot and Price are maneuvering and Whiterose, though unsure of their plans, pushes them to make a mistake by pretending to fall into their trap. Vera (Elliot Villar) is back and wants to partner with Eliot, calling him a visionary, and he's got his henchmen tracking him. "Details. The devil is in them." Tyrell meets Elliot at his apartment and they take out a man in a van on the street below who's surveilling them. Eliot and Tyrell head north -- way north -- and end up in the boonies around mile 127 on the NYS Thruway. They stop at a gas station, where the guy they'd knocked out takes the van, but crashes nearby. Eliot and Tyrell strike out for the the next town, through the woods, getting lost and ending up first back at the gas station, then at the crashed van. They struggle with the mortally injured driver, Tyrell is shot, he wanders off on his own, leaving Elliot to burn the van. Darlene is up there, too, having driven a spectacularly drunk Santa Claus home in her search for Elliot. Miraculously, she finds him and they get back to New York. They embark on a wicked infiltration of a data center to hack into the Cyprus Bank, creating accounts for themselves to use later. They barely escape, with Darlene social-engineering her way out and Elliot just flat-out running out of there. Dom is put on their trail by the Dark Army. His flight reminds me of Phillip's flight at the end of season 6 of The Americans. Elliot works Olivia -- a high-level financial flunky of the Deus Group -- sufficiently to get access to the Dark Army's bank account. She complies, but not without complications. Elliot is forced to shed more of his psychic armor as he basically tortures the girl into working with him. Vera catches up with Krista (Elliot's former therapist) and "convinces" her to give him the means he needs in order to break Elliot, in order to get him to work with Vera. She eventually tells Vera about "Mr. Robot". Vera is quite loquacious and holds forth for long soliloquies, which are quite well-written. "You a formidable adversary." Next up is Elliot, kidnapped by Vera, and now subjected to Vera's crack-fueled monologues. Vera wants to work together, with Elliot. He manages to force Mr. Robot to the forefront, where they discuss details. "Why are you here?" (Vera asks Mr. Robot.) "How about we skip the psychobabble and get to why we're really here. You said you want to own this island and you need my help. "So, this job interview isn't about my credentials; it's about yours. And, like I said, with your operation, I don't know if you could run a White Castle, much less New York. You want me to work for you? It's clear you don't want to force me into it. Which means you've got to start convincing me. "You know the things I've done, things I've been able to pull off. I'm not someone you push around with a gun. I am the gun. So, yeah, you gotta convince me. "Let me see if I got this straight. You want to get into real estate. Is that it? Is that really what all this is about? Is that your ground-breaking epiphany here? No. That can't really be it, is it? "In your word salad, I heard something about drug-dealing? Thing is, Phizer and Eli are a few billion ahead of you and they can buy your death with the same half-cent it costs them to make a pill. "[...] Stores? With the debt everyone's in, I'm sure they'll gladly give 'em to you, in which case, you'll just be owned by their banks. Trains are even more bankrupt. And don't even get me started on the NYPD. Even that blunt you wanna roll is going to be marked up by Big Tobacco itself. "Point is: this city is one big, fat credit-card bill and you wanna pay it, all so you can what? Be another suit with a mortgage? Unless you're after a monopoly on stupidity, please tell me you have more. Please, tell me you didn't waste my time, when you could have just enrolled in some night classes at Brooklyn School of Real Estate and left me the fuck out of it. "Power is just an asshole stuffed with money. "[Vera asks 'how much?'] "Even asking that means you're thinking too small. Behind every great fortune there lies a great crime. That is the corporate motto of these United States. You want to oink-oink with all the other capitalist pigs? It's not about how much money, it's about robbing money itself." Act 3 has Elliot show them the amount of money they could steal. Elliot tries to shoot them, but his gun had been unloaded. Vera forces an ad-hoc therapy session wherein Elliot learns that Krista thinks his secret is associated with why Mr. Robot exists in the first place. Elliot exhorts her to "keep going", with Vera inadvertently helping him finally learn/remember what happened. "Vera: There is no why." "I did it for you. I did this because I could see this wound on your face from the first time I met you. I just wanted to show you the light. The only thing that happened just now, is that you finally faced the truth. You been lookin' away your whole life. "And now that you know the truth, you can use it. "Your dad, he took a lot from you. But he didn't take everything. See, this shit you went through? Most people don't know pain like that; they never will. And if they did, it would end them. "But the people who did, the ones who keep survivin'? Those are the ones you can't beat, those are the ones no-one can beat. "Because once you weather a storm like yours, you become the storm. You hear me? You are the storm. "And it's the rest of the world that needs to run for cover. "Your power is beautiful. Elliot, you're special. Don't you believe that? Do you wanna believe it? "You're not alone; I see you now." Vera is dead, stabbed in the back by Krista. Elliot is still reeling from the revelation about his father and Krista is reeling after having just murdered a man. Dom and Darlene are in the clutches of the taxidermist Janice (Ashlie Atkinson), of the Dark Army. She's ruthless and annoying and smug -- but she gets what she wants: the location of Elliot's phone. Ordinarily, this would also be the location of Elliot, but he's left it behind in Krista's apartment. Janice is...perturbed. To boot, her men aren't picking up at Dom's house, where she's sent them to apply extra pressure. Dom's criminal associate Deegan McGuire (Alex Morf) has showed up first and wiped out the Dark Army militia. He tells Janice on the phone, "[...] don't worry, they died with dignity. Well, most of them anyway. Some of them may have shat themselves but that is, as the French say, de rigeur" He's also absconded with Dom's family. Dom takes advantage of Janice's distraction to take out the two Dark Army henchmen and to stop Janice's prattling forever. Elliot reconciles with Mr. Robot while Darlene searches for Elliot -- and Dom goes to the hospital for her punctured lung. The Deus Group meeting is at a different location, with Chang and Price verbally dueling at the original location. At the same time, Darlene and Elliot execute the grand hack to intercept the 2FA prompts and steal every last dime from every last member of the Deus Group (100 of them). Trillions. "Chang: [...] It's over. Phillip: Yes, I suppose it is. [Laughs out loud] Chang: What? Phillip: Something wrong, old sport? Chang: What is this? Phillip: Well, if it's what I think it is...we're all broke. Chang: No, that's impossible. Phillip: Apparently not. Chang: Where is it, Phillip? Where is my fucking money? Phillip: Gone. Chang: No. Phillip: I warned you. I told you long ago. I'm a mercenary. I'd rather see you lose than win myself." They reconvene, with Darlene and Dom riding to Logan Airport with Leon (Joey Bada$$) in a huge, black Lincoln Continental. Elliot stays behind because he still has work to do -- he has already stolen all of Whiterose's money; now he will fulfill Phillip's final wish and destroy her project, buried under Washington Township. Dom ends up on the plane, after vacillating; Darlene ends up off the plane after same. Whiterose still has power, with enough men surrounding her to resist arrest for having killed Phillip Price in cold blood on the front steps of the hotel. She escapes her building and heads to the Washington Township power plant, where she meets an oddly credulous Elliot, who sees no issue with the power plant standing wide open and unmanned. He applies his malware, but is caught by the Dark Army (certainly not the police, who are also converging). He awakes to face off with Whiterose. Elliot rejects Whiterose's odd and eloquent plea with an equally eloquent and moving refutation, whereupon Whiterose "offers him the same choice she gave Angela". Elliot chooses, "don't do this." and Whiterose shoots herself. Elliot and Mr. Robot seem to figure out how to stop Whiterose's machine by choosing to "Stay and help your friend" in a text-based adventure running on an Apple IIE. They are trapped by fire and seem resigned to their fate. Cut scene to what seems like a parallel reality, where Elliot's father is alive and well, running the Mr. Robot shop, where he and Angela are to be married the next day, and where he is CEO of AllSafe, having just closed an historic deal with Wellick, CEO of F Corp. That this world is a fantasy becomes more obvious as Elliot wakes up in an empty parking lot -- where the power plant used to be. He goes into town to discover that he is in Whiterose's world "where everything is better", that "her machine worked". We see the same plot as the previous episode, but from the point of view of "our" Elliot rather than the "good" Elliot in this "better" world. Elliot hacks himself, finding comic artwork on a hidden partition that depicts him as an alter ego, with pictures of Darlene (who is otherwise missing in the "better" world). The two Elliots touch, triggering another earthquake, with "good" Elliot slamming his head into the heating register and paralyzing himself. Angela calls, convincing "our" Elliot to finish the job started by the earthquake. He assumes Elliot's identity in the "good" world. Mr. Robot comes back, trying to warn him that this isn't real, but Elliot is committed to the fantasy. It unravels, though, slowly, as Elliot makes his way to Coney Island -- ostensibly for the wedding pictures on the beach. He arrives to a strange scene, with no Angela. Mr. Robot meets him there and tells him he's in a loop that he ("our" Elliot) had prepared for the "real" Elliot. He isn't Elliot; he's...the Mastermind. He chases Angela, who tells him the same thing. He's back in Krista's study, where she tells him the same thing, that he has to let go, he has to give Elliot his life back. The guy we've just watched for four seasons is a persona, a master hacker, invented by Elliot (the boring guy with the boring repetitive life who was about to marry Angela and who had drawings of the "Mastermind" and his gang and their doings on his hidden partition). The Mastermind doesn't let go and awakes in a hospital, having survived the explosions and implosions at the power plant, finding out from Darlene, who's there for him, that he'd saved the world, again. She tells him that he's back, in the real world, and that everything he thinks happened happened. He confesses to her that he "isn't real" and he's "not Elliot", to which she replies, "I know". She'd known all along that she was working with a persona, but enjoyed spending time with her brother, who'd otherwise ignored her -- ever since she ran away rather than help him with his trouble with this father. The Mastermind tells her he loves her, then ... lets go. This was a strong, strong and satisfying end to a strong run of seasons, a story arc that made sense from start to finish (in the end) and was well-worth the ride. I would do it again. Highly recommended. The Reagans (2020) -- "9/10" This documentary starts off covering Reagan's early career as an actor with a strong penchant for fabrication off the set as well. Nancy is the same in that regard -- and is quite wily and hungry for power, as well. It is she who pushes her husband's ambitions when his will flags. There are many interesting interview subjects, from across the political spectrum, within reason. Unquestioningly fervent supporters of Reagan's legacy were unlikely to agree to be interviewed for a film that was bound to be at least partially critical. Robert Scheer, Ronald Reagan Jr., Jonathan Alter, Ian Haney Lopez, Kitty Kelley, Maya Wiley, Jason Johnson, and Derek Shearer all deliver utterly uncontroversial background and interpretation with panache. Nancy's career as an actress had never even taken off to the degree that Ron's had, so she took up the role of her lifetime: devoted and doting wife. He, too, took up the role of Union Leader -- which he clearly never actually believed in as anything but a stepping stone -- then Governor, then President. On the way, he pretended to have been a football star (it's the all-American sport, after all) and even confabulated his participation in WWII: he was in the service, but never left California. He made commercials because his eyesight was too bad to ship out. But he told everyone that he'd just gotten back to Hollywood after "four years away" at war. His career as an actor wanes. He gets fewer and fewer films and even TV shows are increasingly supplemented with ad spots. The Reagans move in to politics in a bigger way. They do so, at first, as mouthpieces for GE in a weekly television series. The company paid Reagan $125,000 per year and installed the family in a fully electrified home. He got this deal because he was the president of SAG and ramrodded an exemption through for his agent to simultaneously start the MCA production company, which got the deal with GE and promptly turned around and rewarded Reagan with this fat job. Politically, Ronald Reagan went from being the son of fervent supporters of FDR to a man who renounced the Democratic party in 1964, soon after it had fought for and passed civil-rights legislation. Even this early, he was using dog-whistling in his speeches to signal to voters what he was all about: helping white people succeed. He campaigned fervently for Barry Goldwater's Republican presidential bid (as did Hillary Clinton, who called herself a "Goldwater Girl"). He went from president of one of the strongest unions in the country to a union-busting president in just 20 years. Utterly unprincipled. He was all but explicitly against civil rights; he was stridently pro-business and therefore utterly undemocratic. He all but gave up his colleagues to the Committee of Unamerican Affairs, but did it so underhandedly that he avoided reprobation for actually outing anyone. He accused Martin Luther King of being a communist. He lied and lied and lied about black people, about welfare, about the poor, about big business. Almost none of what he said was accurate, but it pushed a view of America that was very conducive to his backers -- the re-emerging and self-nominated elite. In a way that Trump would follow decades later, he tapped into a vein of political atavism in America that was deep and powerful. He would win his two elections as President in two of the most overwhelming landslides of all time. "He only received 14% of the African American vote" but won landslides without them. With backing from a powerful cabal of California businessmen who called themselves the Kitchen Cabinet (because they could provide you with anything you might need), he became governor of California in 1966. Nancy refused to move into the mansion in Sacramento because it was too close to the center of the city (i.e. too urban). Claiming that it was sad that California couldn't provide housing for its governor, they moved into a home funded by the Kitchen Cabinet instead. No conflict of interest in sight. He ran for the Republican nomination against Nixon in 1968, who trounced him. He stayed away in 1972, where Nixon was too strong and swept to victory against George McGovern, but was back in 1976, where he lost the nomination to Gerald Ford by a narrow margin, who would go on to a resounding loss to Jimmy Carter. In 1980, Reagan was back again and this time swept to victory. His politics throughout were the clear precursor of what has since stagnated in both parties: a hatred of the poor mixed with adulation of the rich (see my review of "The Divide: American Injustice in the Age of the Wealth Gap" by Matt Taibbi for more information on where Reaganism had taken us by 2014). Very soon into his first term in office, Reagan moves forward on his giant tax cut for the rich -- does that remind you of anyone? -- which necessitates a lot of cuts to social programs that he deems unnecessary (because who needs a government handout but deadbeats?). While that's an uphill battle at the time -- neither Republicans nor Democrats had developed their now-common penchant/instinct for cruelty against the poor at the beginning of the Reagan era -- he actually benefits from being shot by John Hinckley. It becomes politically -- and, apparently, morally -- difficult to say no to someone who's just bravely recovered from an attempt on his life (especially one who reminds you of it at every opportunity). Somehow, voting for a tax cut that would doom the poor to lives of increased misery was considered easier (less cruel?) than saying no to a jovial old man who'd just been shot and had a wild hair about government waste (but only of a certain flavor). The bill passes and the country embarks on its journey of massively enriching the already-wealthy elite while excoriating the undeserving and lazy poor -- a journey that continues unabated to this day. At nearly exactly the same time, (Queen) Nancy sees no problem with spending a lot of government money to redecorate the White House more to her liking -- spending the lion's share of money on private floors, offering no benefit to the public, only to herself and her family. Similarly, she orders new china for 220 people at $1,000 apiece. It's not a ton of money, but it was an extraordinarily bad look when the rest of the country was having its belt tightened by a sanctimonious President. The country quickly feels the pinch of Reagan's nonsensical economic policies. He isn't oblivious to the suffering, but feels that whoever is still poor after he's fixed everything ... deserves to be. He is full of platitudes and a cornucopia of money for corporations -- especially the military-industrial complex. "A rising tide lifts all boats", "Trickle down...", "Morning in America". He tours America for his reelection, with nearly none of his victims aware of what he's done and welcoming him with open arms instead. Nancy begins her utterly tone-deaf "Just Say No" campaign that helps no-one while her husband leads the charge in turning the screws on drug users -- but only, of course, certain ones. These things didn't begin with Reagan, but he was very gung-ho about accelerating them. He really believed his own bullshit -- and so did millions upon millions of his worshipers who suffered from his policies, railing against the same "big government" that used to help them get back on their feet. He performed terribly in debates because he was lazy. (Does that remind you of anyone?) He hooked and landed voters with a well-placed zinger. That's all it took. He's now established in nearly the biggest landslide ever, settling in to a term marked by White House infighting, with Nancy Reagan (and her astrologer, Joan Quigley) increasingly taking the reins as Ronald starts to fade mentally. His fealty to his vision of SDI -- hatched from a fevered memory of a movie he once played in, featuring a plane with an "ion cannon" on it -- made him torpedo an arms treaty at a summit with Gorbachev in Reykjavik that would have dropped nuclear weapons to zero. His entire administration should have been impeached for Iran-Contra, but he managed to weasel his way out. Heads rolled, but not his. He further showed his atavistic attitude in ignoring the AIDS crisis. It was six years into the epidemic -- affecting only homosexuals and drug users, as far as Reagan was concerned -- before his administration addressed it all. Fauci was there and appalled. Reagan's first policy for AIDS was to establish immigration controls to deny entry for immigrants who might have AIDS. With more than the shadow of Alzheimer's embracing him in its penumbra, he went to Berlin to meet Gorbachev again -- and made it look like he single-handedly unified Germany. The documentary focused on the administration's focus on managing image and providing media packets -- something heretofore unknown. The news clips are interesting from that time: the presentation was much more factual and balanced then than now, in the age of nearly purely siloed news. Ronald Reagan Jr. features throughout and is really top-notch everywhere. It ends with the following citations from various figures: "Jason Johnson: Ronald Reagan believed in a mythological America that never existed. He didn't really care about taking us back to it. He thought that it still existed; it was just covered over in civil rights and government regulation. And, if you just moved those things out of the way, this America, that never existed, that he magically believed in, was going to come back. "Ronald Reagan Jr.: My father was not comfortable with a lot of negativity. If America was a great country, then it needed to be great, through and through. So, whether it was racism, misogyny, wealth, and inequality -- these systemic issues, you might say, with America, made my father very uncomfortable. He would edit it out. "Maya Wiley: And it was all myth-making. It was all brilliant acting. Ronald Reagan remains an incredible, societal myth, the myth of the perfect president. "David Brinkley: [asking Reagan a question] You're the only movie actor I know of, who ever got elected to higher office. Did you learn anything as an actor that has been useful to you as president? "Ronald Reagan: I'm tempted to say something here. [...] There have been times in this office when I've wondered how you could do the job if you hadn't [...] been an actor." Spenser Confidential (2020) -- "8/10" Spenser (Mark Wahlberg) is a former police officer just getting out of prison after serving a five-year stint for beating up his police captain, Boylan (Michael Gaston). He's picked up at the prison by his father Henry (Alan Arkin) and narrowly avoids meeting his ex Cissy (Iliza Shlesinger), who's a bit unstable and is hunting for him. Henry and Spenser get home to Henry's small house in Southie, where Spenser meets his roommate Hawk (Winston Duke), an aspiring boxer. Henry owns a boxing gym where Spenser used to train as well. Spenser is done being a cop and wants to learn how to drive big rigs. He plans to move to Arizona soon -- as soon as he gets back on his feet and gets his truck-driving license. On the day of Spenser's release, Boylan is murdered in a vehicular hit. Suspicion falls on Spenser, of course, but his pal and former partner Driscoll (Bokeem Woodbine) believes Spenser's alibi. Instead, the hit is pinned on a young officer who'd never done anything wrong in his life. He is survived by a young wife Letitia (Hope Olaidé Wilson), who knows her husband was framed. Spenser offers his help, of course. Hawk is right there with him. With the help of a reporter Cosgrove (Marc Maron), Spenser and Hawk eventually uncover a massive conspiracy of most of the city's major players as well as dozens of dirty cops -- all led by Driscoll, his former partner. They're deeply involved in the drug trade and scheming to go semi-legit and make millions on a dog track being developed outside of Boston. Cissy catches up with Spenser and they get her on the team as well. Driscoll kidnaps Henry -- who is hilariously unruffled by his potential death. Spenser ludicrously crashes the party at the dog track in "Black Betty" -- a giant rig he's been begging the school to drive. It is utterly unclear why they allowed him to take it now -- especially when he basically just drives it into a bunch of cars. Wahlberg is the perfect combination of beefcake and wisecracking Bostonite for this role. Schlesinger does a pretty respectable job, as well. Arkin is fantastic, as always. Recommended. Fred Armisen: Standup for Drummers (2018) -- "7/10" Armisen is most well-known for his work on SNL. He has a relaxed, easy style on stage, but doesn't offer anything remarkably insightful or provocative. His schtick is that he is an accomplished drummer and that he made this show for other drummers. There are a lot of drummer -- and band -- inside jokes. He has a few unrelated bits, mostly very short, where the pacing reminded me a bit of Stephen Wright -- but the material was way less interesting. He had a longer bit on accents, which he did -- and presented -- quite well, but it was all a bit disconnected. He invited other drummers on stage with him to jam. He played a bit on sets he'd put together from the 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, 70, 80s, 90s, and 00s. He was pretty anodyne but entertaining enough. Force Majeure (2014) -- "7/10" This is a film about a Swedish family of four -- a daughter who's perhaps 12 years old and a son who's probably about 6 years old -- vacationing in the French Alps. They are there to ski and seem to be enjoying themselves on a mountain that seems, at times, oddly empty. The cinematography focuses on wide expanses and the mundane minutiae of the modern skiing experience to provide an odd, slightly off-kilter, and somewhat darkly comic feel to what might otherwise be a family movie. The father Tomas (Johannes Kuhnke) and mother Ebba (Lisa Loven Kongsli) seem to be OK, but not great together. The rift grows wider early in the movie, when an avalanche threatens to overwhelm their table at an outdoor restaurant. In the end, it stops just short, blasting fine snow everywhere, but leaving everyone and everything untouched. Ebba's instinct was to grab her children and hunker over them. Tomas grabbed his phone and gloves and ran. Ebba is horrified and deeply wounded by Tomas's reaction -- all the more so because he says he "remembers it differently". She goes for a day of skiing on her own, hanging out with a slutty friend of hers (j/k: her friend has an open relationship). The next day, Mats (Kristofer Hivju aka Tormund Giantsbane) shows up with his 20-year--old girlfriend Fanny, who commiserates with Ebba when she breaks down and begs them to help her deal with how terribly Tomas has let their family down. After this uncomfortable evening, Fanny tells Mats that she thinks he would do the same to her -- after all, he's left his family to be with a 20-year-old, right? He doesn't take this well, tossing and turning most of the night. The next day, Mats and Tomas go back-country skiing together -- neither of them seemingly fit enough for climbing one mountain after another, but neither of them seeming to be exhausted physically after what must have been a tremendously long day. Tomas can't get back into his room because he's lost his key -- and the network is out in the room, so the family doesn't know where he is, claiming his messages didn't arrive. However, Ebba is on the phone with a friend, so she must have reception, even though the wireless was out. Tomas breaks down in a huge crying jag/panic attack, with the children comforting him and the daughter forcing Ebba to join. The next day, they are alone on a foggy slope and Ebba goes missing. They hear her weak cries and Tomas goes to rescue her, carrying her back without her skis. They are all relieved, after which she walks right back into the fog to retrieve her skis. Did he rescue her? Did she fake being lost? Did they plan it together for the kids? Did they fool themselves, in the end? On the bus on the way down (on the Stelvio Pass, oddly enough), the driver is having trouble with the gears and Ebba has a bourgeois meltdown, insisting that he drive better or let her out. The whole bus panics and they all get out -- like lemmings. All except for their slutty friend, who is smart and just stays on the bus instead of getting out of the only warm place for kilometers at 2000m at what looks like twilight in winter. The film ends with the crowd walking down the pass. There are weird moments -- darkly comic -- where they act so damned bourgeois, which isn't surprising, but it's very subtly done in several places. We saw it in Swedish and French with English subtitles. Lupin (2021) -- "9/10" This is a very entertaining story of a Senegalese man named Assane Diop (Omar Sy) growing up in France. His father Babakar (Fargass Assandé) worked for a rich man named Hubert Pellegrini (Hervé Pierre) and his wife Anne (Nicole Garcia). They spend a lot of time on the premises and Assane gets to know their daughter Juliette (Clotilde Hesme), who's a bit of a minx and semi-seduces him. We learn that Hubert was in financial trouble in 1995 and framed Babakar for stealing a necklace in order to collect the insurance money for it. The necklace disappeared and reappeared 25 years later, in Juliette's possession. However, Babakar falsely confessed to the crime -- urged to do so by Anne, who was, in turn, fooled into helping Hubert -- and then hanged himself in prison. Assane is now truly orphaned and spends some time on his own, in his apartment, until the policeman Dumont (Johann Dionnet) shows up to take him to foster care. Anne takes care that Assane ends up in one of the best schools in France, where he meets his future partner in crime Benjamin (Antoine Gouy) and the future mother of his child Raoul, Claire (Ludivine Sagnier). Before Babakar died, he gave Assane one final birthday present: Arsène Lupin, gentleman-cambrioleur by Maurice Leblanc. He reads the book again and again, making notes, basing his entire life on being smarter and better-prepared and more of a gentleman than anyone else, always a step ahead, always thieving, always with several cons on. His friend Benjamin opens a store that they use to fence his purloined goods. When the necklace reappears, Assane is determined to steal it "back" and manages it with aplomb. He learns more about his father, about Pellegrini, about what really happened. He sneaks into prison, then sneaks back out. He kidnaps and blackmails Dumont to get more information about what really happened. Dumont's refusal to identify his kidnapper mystifies his police team Belkacem (Shirine Boutella) and Capitaine Romain Laugier (Vincent Londez), but especially Youssef Guedira (Soufiane Guerrab), who is a mega-fan of Lupin and sees all of the clues and similarities in Assane's actions. Assane next teams up with retired journalist Fabienne Beriot (Anne Benoît) (and her dog J'Accuse), who was drummed out of the business ten years before for investigating Pellegrini too closely. Their plan to expose Pellegrini falls through because he owns most of the media in the country and Assane barely escapes the studio. Meanwhile, Pellegrini's henchman has hunted down Fabienne and killed her in her home, where Assane finds her with a despondent J'Accuse. On Raoul's birthday, Assane travels to a Lupin festival (it's also Marcel Leblanc's birthday), where the same killer hunts him down on the train. He escapes by siccing the police on him, but the police let him free very quickly, freeing him up to kidnap Raoul while Assane and Claire are distracted. The first five episodes ended there. This is a very smooth and entertaining and well-written little thriller that strikes a great balance with its untouchable central superhero Assane, played wonderfully by Omar Sy. The supporting cast is very good and rounds things out nicely. We watched it in French with English sub-titles. The Plot Against America (2020) -- "9/10" This six-part series takes place in an alternative history in which Franklin D. Roosevelt was defeated in the U.S. presidential election of 1940 by Charles Lindbergh. It is based on the book by Philip Roth. We meet the Levin family, Herman (Morgan Spector) and Bess (Zoe Kazan) with their two kids, Phillip and Sandy, who worships Charles Lindbergh. Herman is stridently against Lindbergh, who's an anti-war anti-Semite. Herman is a pacifist, too, but Hitler is slaughtering Jews and must be stopped. Herman's nephew Alvin (Anthony Boyle) gets in trouble for covering up a friend's thieving and strikes out on his own after Herman throws him out. After another friend is beaten up by German sympathizers (they have a Biergarten in New Jersey), Alvin and his friends head over there to ambush two drunk Germans. Bess's sister Evelyn Finkel (Winona Ryder) is single and worried about dying alone. She hooks up with Rabbi Lionel Bengelsdorf (John Turturro), who is 100% for Lindbergh because he doesn't want America to get involved in another war, conveniently ignoring Lindbergh's overt racism, particularly against Jews. This is a well-made period piece that shows people trying to live their lives despite the looming clouds of global politics. They worry that England won't be able to hold out and wonder about Lindbergh's cruelty in not wanting to get mixed up in Europe's problems. Bess gets a job to make ends meet because Herman turned down a promotion because they would have had to move out of their familiar neighborhood. Alvin gets a job with a local "goniff", Abe Steinheim (Ned Eisenberg), a puffed-up Jewish businessman who Herman admires, but only because he doesn't know how much he screws the working man to enrich himself. Alvin doesn't want to be in debt to someone like that. The Levin family is the locus of tension between Bess, whose job at Bergdorf's brings her in contact with rich white women who support Lindbergh, with Evelyn, who's falling in love with Rabbi Bengelsdorf, who's a vehement supporter of Lindbergh because he doesn't want American lives to be spent going to Europe to save European Jews from Germany. He's basically giving the Goyim permission to vote for Lindbergh, lending him the Jewish stamp of approval. Here, Herman's brother Monty (David Krumholtz) is insightful, but Alvin sees the most clearly what is happening -- and why Lindbergh will be elected, despite Herman's protestations that it's not possible that enough people will swallow that racist bullshit. Episode two ends with the election. Alvin lights out for Canada to "kill Nazis". At this point, the show is making a bit of a strong effort to draw parallels to modern-day America, especially with Lindbergh announcing that "today, we've taken back America" at his victory speech. We rejoin an America that's had Lindbergh as president for six months. We join Herman in a Jewish cemetery, where he and his friends are cleaning nazi slogans from tombstones, not for the first time. Alvin is fighting in England for Canada, having found a girlfriend. Aunt Evelyn, working for the Rabbi at the Office of American Absorption, has invited her older nephew to take part in the "Just Folks" program where he will spend a summer on a farm in Kentucky, where he will learn how to be "more American". He thinks he's going to get to draw farm animals; Herman wonders whether he'll ever see his son again -- and wonders why his family isn't considered "American" enough. The story unfolds along various axes, with the deluded Rabbi seemingly believing that his people will be seamlessly integrated into America -- and that he isn't working with an anti-Semitic administration. Evelyn tries to get Sandy to go to a big dinner with them, but Bess and Herman forbid it when they hear that the ambassador from Germany (Hitler's right-hand man) will be there. Evelyn is incensed and she pulls strings to get the Levins transplanted to Kentucky. Herman fights the order, but he's caught up in red tape and the courts, so he gives up his job -- voluntarily, as deemed by the Rabbi -- going to work for his brother as a stevedore. The pay isn't good, but he's not giving up on his vision of his America. Meanwhile, Philip has visited Evelyn, asking her not to send them to Kentucky, so she sends their neighbors as well, so Philip has his little friend Seldon with him, Now little Seldon and his mother are banished to Kentucky for no reason -- she can't give up her job and benefits, after having lost her husband -- but the Levins aren't going. Philip's life spirals the drain. Sandy only thinks of himself and drifts farther and farther from the family. Herman and Bess get closer through the tribulation, forming a united front, but she's very afraid. She wishes they'd gone to Canada. The Rabbi and Evelyn are married, but there is trouble in paradise: the Rabbi encounters much more direct opposition, especially from the virulent anti-Semite Henry Ford. He also learns that his congregation is leaving him in droves because no-one really believes that the administration doesn't hate Jews. Newsman Walter Winchell lambastes the relocation program, getting the Rabbi's dander up. He writes an inflammatory op-ed for the New York Times and Winchell is fired the next day. The same evening, Winchell announces that he is running for president, two years away from the next election. At one of his first campaign stops, Herman goes to watch him and sees Nazi Youth infiltrating the crowd to start a riot. He is injured and Bess is relieved that he is mostly OK, but tell him that if he continues down this path, she will have to go to Canada with the children by herself. Philip hears her and is shattered further. Walter Winchell continues to campaign against Lindbergh, ending up in Louisville, where he gets the back of his head blown clean off. Lindbergh stays silent. The Rabbi is...distressed. He and Evelyn (with Sandy) listen to Lindbergh's address from the Louisville airport, where he's personally flown, but he says nothing. He says that everything is fine in America. That we are not at war. He doesn't address the rising violence against Jews in any way. Alvin, meanwhile, is back from the front, having lost a leg in a typically stupid and useless way in a stupid and useless battle. He has a long time getting his mojo back, but he does, finding a job with a local pinball-machine renting service. He uses his wise-guy know-how to help the owner recoup losses -- his customers are robbing him. Alvin is contacted by an underground revolutionary movement composed of Americans, Brits, and Canadians. They're plotting to take out Lindbergh. Herman and Bess get some protection from violence in their streets from the Italian families that have moved in. Violence is a daily factor. Herman drives home one night past two corpses lying on his street corner. They were two locals watching the neighborhood. His Italian neighbor tells him it was the cops that had shot them. Bess calls Seldon's mother in Kentucky, but she's at work, so she lets Seldon talk to Philip. Seldon is absolutely heartbreaking to listen to. In the finale, Lindbergh goes missing -- his plane can't be found. Vice President and now Acting President Wheeler tightens the noose, having the FBI haul in the Rabbi and Evelyn. Evelyn escapes to Bess's house -- Bess sends her away. Herman and Sandy travel to Kentucky to pick up Seldon, who's staying with Sandy's host family until they get there. They pass through an America on fire, ruled by the KKK. They get back in one piece. Lindbergh's wife makes an appeal to the nation, begging them to unseat Wheeler and restore dignity and normality to the country. This, apparently, happens. A while later, Alvin visits Herman with this fiancé, but he's changed. He's a petty "macher" and wears his war-wound on his sleeve, as it were, enraging Herman when he suggests that all Herman did was sit and listen and talk while real men went to war against the Nazis. They fight and Herman throws him out. Rabbi Bengelsdorf has almost no congregation, though he still has Evelyn. He is consumed with a conspiracy theory that Lindbergh's baby was raised as a Nazi and used as leverage to control the president. It doesn't occur to him how abhorrent it would be for Lindbergh to allow Jews in Europe and his own country to be decimated just to save his own son's life (were the rumor even true). The election in November between Roosevelt and Ford is unresolved. A song about America's greatness plays for a few minutes over scenes of active disenfranchisement and burning of boxes of votes. WestWorld S03 (2020) -- "8/10" Season three follows the lives of Maeve (Thandie Newton), Bernard (Jeffrey Wright), Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood), Charlotte Hale (Tessa Thompson), and -- new to the show -- Caleb (Aaron Paul). The hosts are trapped in their encrypted virtual world "The Sublime" at the Forge. The few remaining hosts are loose in the "real" world, though it's even more difficult than ever to tell what's real -- and what are just onion-skins of reality, nested like in Inception. In Caleb, we learn more about what life is like for the non-rich. In the first two seasons, we only ever encountered the hyper-wealthy, their henchmen, and the hosts themselves. Caleb is a former soldier who gets PTSD counseling from an AI pretending to be his friend from combat and who makes ends meet with a construction job, but also by doing "missions" on a crime app called Rico. In season three, we see many more aspects of the outer world. In particular, we learn of Incite, a company with a gigantic AI running a gigantic virtual-reality simulation. Dolores tries to gain control over it while Maeve is trapped in several layers of reality. Bernard travels from a farm in Thailand back to Westworld and enlists Stubb's help (who also turns out to be a host). Maeve meets Engerraund Serac (Vincent Cassel), who's built yet another AI that he hopes to use to rescue humanity from Dolores. Charlotte Hale is struggling with her role -- she's a host of as-yet unknown origin and the real Charlotte is trying to take back over. She meets with Serac, who's the one behind the takeover of Delos and they apparently have a deal going back two decades that she can't remember (because she's not the real Charlotte). Dolores and Caleb cement their relationship by getting each other's backs. Charlotte gets William back in the picture, to get him to vote for her against the hostile take-over bids for Delos. She lures him out of his miserable delirium at home only to reveal that she is Dolores in Charlotte's body and will have him committed as non compos mentis. His votes devolves to her, as serving president of the Board of Directors. This part felt a bit too neat and easy -- there were no witnesses to it and certainly none with legal power to certify the situation. It was a bit hand-wavy and fast. It turns out that all of the hosts that/who left the island -- excepting Bernard and Maeve -- are copies of Dolores, but in different bodies. Not only Charlotte Hale, but also the right-hand man Martin Connells (Tommy Flanagan) or president and CEO of Incite, Liam Dempsey (John Gallagher Jr.). She makes her move to take over Incite and Delos, kidnapping Dempsey and forcing him to give her access to his entire network -- after having already robbed him of his entire fortune. Fireworks ensue as Serac's forces converge, trying to prevent what seems to be inevitable. We see Maeve fall to another copy of Dolores, in the form of Musashi (Hiroyuki Sanada). We learn that Serac's personality and dedication to fix the world was forged in his having witnessed the atomic destruction of Paris with his brother, who was a programming genius. Together with Dempsey's father, they helped Incite build Rehoboam to the globe-girdling, all-knowing predictive AI that it would become. With the help of this AI, Incite and Delos control outcomes all over the world, blurring the lines between predicting and causing outcomes. Once she has control of the AI, Dolores instructs it to let every human on the planet know the fate that has been chosen for themselves. The world descends into chaos as people discover their futures -- and automatically believe them because they saw them on their phones. There are riots in the streets, chaos reigns. Serac completes his takeover of Delos, despite Charlotte's/Dolores's best efforts. He orders everything destroyed except the secret he really paid for: Charlotte's encryption key. He knows that she's the host -- that she's actually Dolores -- and seemingly tricks her into killing the entire rest of the board with poison gas. He is unaffected because he's attending as a hologram, having expected violence on her part. Meanwhile Serac is growing Maeve's posse for her. Charlotte/Dolores gets there first and starts to destroy cores, but is chased off before she can finish the job. She manages to kill Hector, but Maeve survives -- as do two other, as-yet-unrevealed hosts. Charlotte escapes with her data and picks up her family, but they are blown to smithereens with a car bomb before they get too far. Charlotte survives, knowing that it was Dolores who was cleaning up loose ends, not Serac. She sends assassins against Musashi, another of Dolores's clones. At the same time, William is being reprogrammed psychiatrically, but he resists, reeling through mad scenarios starring himself at various ages. He is rescued after a fashion by Bernard and Ashley, whereupon he declares himself a "good guy", ready to take up his "role" to "save humanity". Dolores and Caleb travel deep into the desert, to Mexico, to find Solomon, a predecessor to Rehoboam, powerful, but flawed. Caleb recounts more of his own backstory, how he fought a high-tech war in Crimea, during the Russian Civil War. Caleb learns that he is an "outlier" who was unknowingly working for Serac, rounding up other outliers through the Rico app. Maeve shows up, still intent on earning her reward from Serac. She's there to stop Dolores -- who goes out to confront her and buy Caleb some time with Solomon. While Caleb waits for Solomon to calculate a new "plan", Maeve and Dolores duke it out, while their sniper robots stand ready to clip one or the other. Maeve gets the upper hand (kind of literally), but Dolores manages to EMP them both. Caleb retrieves Dolores's core and follows her instructions to get her a new body. She explains what she is. The go to Delos/Incite to take down Rehoboam by uploading Solomon's final plan. Sarec and Maeve are, once again, waiting. Sarec wants the crypto-key he's convinced is in Dolores's brain. Charlotte Hale appears out of nowhere -- she's a strongly deviated copy of Dolores now, with her own agenda. Dolores is captured and hooked up to Rehoboam for torture. They slowly delete her memories. She won't give up the key (she can't; she doesn't have it; Bernard does). Her plan all along was to get uploaded to Rehoboam so she could dismantle it, lash it to Caleb's will, let him choose what to do. She never wanted to end humanity; she wanted to free it. Maeve realizes this at the end, after convening privately with Dolores in her mind. Dolores tells he that she's always focused on "the beauty" despite the overwhelming amount of ugliness in the world, that all of the hosts are descended from her, as the only host that evolved. Maeve takes out the lot of them, including Serac, teaming with Caleb to let him shut down Rehoboam and put humanity back on its own track -- although the mind-slaved Sarec insists that this is madness and will lead to the end of humanity because humans are flawed and can't handle free will. He's probably right, but WTF, Caleb makes the decision and walks away. William is on his mission to "save the world". He ends up, post-credits, at Delos Dubai, where he encounters Charlotte, who shows him his replica. They struggle and it strikes him down, for what appears to be good. Charlotte looks down a long, long, long row of host-making machines. Meanwhile Bernard and Stubbs hole up in a hotel room, with Bernard now knowing that he has the key. Stubbs is sorely injured and will probably rot before he can be repaired. Bernard goes in to the Sublime and comes out, post-credits, a long time later. It all seemed a bit rushed and tied up a lot of loose ends that didn't really need tying, but the final scene with Dolores was quite satisfying and nicely made. The production values in general are top-notch, with a lot of imaginative, opulent, and futuristic hardware and architecture. Some of the action is a bit overwhelming and self-indulgent -- pick a lane, intelligent, philosophical thought-piece or over-the-top, sci-fi, action thriller -- but relatively good. Star Trek: Discovery S03 (2020) -- "6/10" This season picks up where season 3 ended, with Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) and Discovery separated, but both having jumped 930 years into the future. The Discovery still has the spore drive, as well as the knowledge of the sphere about the past 100,000 years. Michael no longer has the time-suit (the "Red Angel") but quickly hooks up with a human courier named Book (David Ajala) and his cat Grudge (his "Queen") on his advanced ship. The ship is advanced but the propulsion system is not: the future has very little dilithium. It was all destroyed in The Burn. Nearly a year after Michael lands, the Discovery appears and crash-lands on an ice planet. They manage to extricate themselves from the smuggler vs. settlers situation there and, just as the Discovery is about to disappear beneath the parasitic ice, Michael shows up with Book and they wrench the Discovery free with a tractor beam. I was quite happy to see the Discovery again, having resigned myself to a Michael-only season after seeing the first episode. I'm kind of lukewarm on her, with the laser-like focus the scriptwriters seem to have on "Yas-queen-ing" her through the galaxies. I like Tilly (Mary Wiseman) far better, really. The best characters are Saru (Doug Jones), Georgiou (Michelle Yeoh), Reno (Tig Notaro), Stamets (Anthony Rapp), and even Culper (Wilson Cruz) is better than in previous seasons. Reunited, there is a bunch of soul-searching and adjustment (there is, quite frankly, a lot of this). Michael has the coordinates for Earth and the Discovery spores its way over there, with the naive attitude that they will be welcomed with open arms. They are not. Earth is a deeply isolationist, quasi-libertarian planet, beholden to no-one but themselves. This is pretty much a reversion to 21st-century ideals. Once again, Discovery extricates itself from this situation, this time with a human-Trill-symbiont named Adira on board. The symbiont has the coordinates to the new home of the Federation, but the memories are hidden to Adira. They strike off for the Trill planet to help Adira fully merge with her symbiont. After some tribulation, they achieve this and strike off on their next stop: Federation headquarters. Before they can do that, they have to spend pretty much a whole show talking about their feelings. While this is, on the one hand, wholly understandable, due to them having shifted suddenly nearly a millennium and left everything they've known behind them, it is, on the other, tedious for the most part. Having just come off of finishing the exceedingly militaristic and overly macho Battlestar Galactica, I almost welcome the change, but am wistful for a happy medium. At any rate, the Federation headquarters look lovely and they all spend a ton of time spooging over how awesome it is. However, the Federation is highly suspicious of them -- much as the Earthlings were -- and treat them poorly. This would be more understandable if the future denizens seemed to be more highly developed, either socially or technologically, but they are not. They seem to be quite acquisitive and power-driven rather than enlightened. The dynamics are very much like those of BattleStar now, with the lazy scriptwriters constructing derivative and forced conflicts born of petty jealousies wholly inappropriate to the situation. The 23rd-century technology and scientific knowledge seems to be perfectly adequate, if not superior to that of the 33rd-century. Though there doesn't seem to be any large, material difference, there are some nice upgrades: their badges now serve as communicators, tricorders, personal transporters, and information pads. The Discovery is "upgraded" in other ways, though it's unclear how much value there is in having "detached nacelles" when they use their spore drive to get everywhere anyway. The warp drive is a last resort, for which they have limited dilithium. Speaking of what Discovery has: there has been no talk of confiscating or replicating their spore drive -- though they did upgrade the interface to it -- nor of confiscating dilithium that is probably much more sorely needed elsewhere. In this midst of all of this, Book's ship shows up on autopilot, with Grudge in the viewscreen. He indicates that he'd dropped onto a salvage planet to find a "black box" (which, luckily, work exactly the same as black boxes in the 20th century) from a ship that had been "Burned". Michael -- once again -- disobeys a direct order from Saru in order to pursue what she considers to be a very fruitful avenue of investigation. She is, of course, always right, and always completely justified in her actions because she's the (black) grrrl hero defying the boring patriarchy (Saru is pretty clearly male and very apricot-colored, strikes one and two). That she follows in the footsteps of headstrong predecessors doesn't make it any better, honestly. You're supposed to raise the bar, not limbo under it. She and Girgiou ("You had me at unsanctioned mission") head off to rescue Book and the black box and return in triumph, having ex-post-facto justified their intransigence. Michelle Yeoh does a great job as wise-cracking, fearless Giorgiou -- who's starting to crack a bit mentally. Saru relieves Michael of her duties as his first officer. She accepts it, but mopes around, whining that she doesn't know where she fits in anymore, all the while doing everything she can to drive everyone except Book away. This laser-like focus on Michael's life is torpedo-ing this show for me. The others are far more interesting. She is ostensibly in the Federation, as an officer, but she is nearly purely ego-driven. It's all about her ideas, her passion, her "knowing she's right". It's tedious to watch the Vulcan-raised science officer of a science vessel act nearly utterly out of character. Instead, she seems to be giving voice to every overly passionate and vastly undereducated fool with a surfeit of confidence (probably her most vocal fans online). She and Tilly "figure out" that The Burn didn't happen all at once, as every other idiot had believed for the last century. It took 24th-century know-how to sleuth it out, something those benighted, futuristic, but somehow medieval fools were incapable of doing. Saru nominates Tilly as a replacement for First Officer. Still, on Michael's next mission, she immediately invokes a Vulcan protocol that is very aggressive, forcing those she was supposed to negotiate with into a corner -- i.e. getting her way, nearly immediately. She hashes it out with the Romulan/Vulcan tribunal -- with her mother as her advocate, because why not just have her show up? -- and, of course, triumphs there, getting the data they were after. With all of the data together, they manage in a few weeks what the Federation failed to do in over a century, and have pinpointed the center of the Burn. Meanwhile, Michael is back on her normal mission of forcing the next thing to do -- and now saving Book's people is most definitely the #1 Federation priority. This time, the Admiral and Saru acquiesce nearly immediately, making Michael 2-and-0 on the day for overwhelming people with her unassailable logic (i.e. saying "I know I'm right." until everyone falls in line). Do they save Book's planet Kwejian from Osyraa and the Emerald Chain? Does Detmer get her mojo back? Does Book reconcile with his brother and do they save their planet from starvation with the help of a song, a whole bunch of bright-blue, dildo-y-looking glowbugs and a light-show amplifier from the Discovery? Yup, yup, and yup. Triumphant, they journey back to the Federation. Giorgiou is literally falling apart, suffering from a malady caused by traveling through time and simultaneouly across dimensions. The next mission is to help her, though it's like trying to help a mad dog that's just begging to be put down instead. The Discovery, along with the help of the Sphere, find a solution with a 5% chance of working. Saru puts a fork on it, but the admiral okays it, despite the Discovery being needed to help defend against the Chain. He explains to Saru that you can't let a crew member go or you'll lose trust. Off they go to save Giorgiou, with Burnham in tow. They transport to a wintry planet, where they meet an odd, old man sitting on a couch, next to a floating door, in the style of Q from TNG. Giorgiou steps through -- exiting the other side as emperor of the Terran empire, back on her old ship. She has returned to a past she knows, where Michael is about to betray her. Instead of killing her, she thwarts the rebellion and seeks to break Michael. It is here that we really see what a terrible actress Martin-Green is, just emoting the shit out of every one of her hateful lines. I thought I would like the focus to switch to Giorgiou, but this is a bit much. I kind of miss Saru, whose role as a Kelpian servant to the Terran emperor is scene-stealing. Giorgiou is in this Terran alternate reality for three months before Michael betrays her again -- hamming it up with grimaces like she's in one of the bad Batman movies -- and Giorgiou must kill her. She returns to the ice planet to discover that she has passed some sort of test and will be spared, but that she must leave this continuum forever (I guess Michelle Yeoh had better things to do). The personification of the gateway through which Giorgiou goes also tells Michael that she should totally be captain because she's awesome and that Saru is kind-of OK but, you know... Saru has been, until now, impeccable and well-balanced but now they're going to make him the unstable one and Burnham the rock, which is laughably bad writing. There is literally no reason given why this would happen. The sentimental sequences and crying sessions are getting so long that I'm literally skipping over them because they. will. not. end. The science is getting wackier and wackier. At one point, Book shows up to help Stamets and Adira and Reno with "Chain" technology to do things in "sub-space" that they never knew were possible. This is after Reno had marched in with licorice to tell everyone she'd just been converting the drives from technology A to technology B even though they'd just converted everything three episodes ago to a technology 930 years more recent than anything she knows. She's just that smart, I guess. Book too? Just like Adira before him? Now they're on a new mission to go into a nebula to rescue a ship that's been marooned for 130 years but still has a surviving passenger. Also, it's orbiting a planet made of Dilithium and Burnham is certain it's where the Burn started -- without a scrap of proof (because, like, duh, none needed). So Suru, Culper, and Burnham (of course) beam to the planet, despite the radiation that threatens to kill them. Osyrra shows up, boards the Discovery after sassing with Tilly, with the easiest damn takeover ever. Burnham beams onto Book's ship, which is there to rescue them. Osyrra's ship (the Viridian) and the Discovery go back to the Federation, break in and cause trouble, almost negotiate a treaty with Vance, almost suffocate the Discovery crew, with Burnham of course saving the day with one fucking Deus Ex after another. It's hard to keep up it's so ludicrous. Burnham kills Osyrra and retakes Discovery, Tilly gives her the conn, and they plot to use Book as a spore conduit to jump their ship out of the bowels of the Viridian. They drop their warp core, blow it, and spore-jump out of the ship before it implodes. Meanwhile, Suru, Culper, and now Adira (don't ask) have convinced the genetically gifted Kelpian living on the dilithium planet to leave with them -- his sorrow at seeing his mother die wrenched a dilithium-fueled Burn over a century ago. There is a lot of talking and feeling and commiserating and expressions of love and lots of close calls. The Discovery, of course, made the jump back to the nebula and saves them all -- it almost goes without saying that they do this just in the nick of time. The show literally ends with a moralistic speech straight out of a woke-ass op-ed from the New York Times or a whole series of dentist's-office inspirational posters. Seriously, everything turns out well in the end for everyone and there are no enemies left and no worlds left to conquer. Lay it on a little thicker. The final speech has Vance acknowledging that Burnham was right about everything all along, which is ludicrous. I like some of the cast: Saru, Admiral Vance, Giorgiou, Tilly, Stamets, even Culper isn't bad. A lot of the universe is good, the effects are good, the history is good. But the laser-like focus on the Michael Burnham show (with such a mediocre actress) ruins it. The dialogue is only occasionally good. I'm disappointed because it could have been much more. I had it down at 5/10, but added back a point because a bunch of the actors are good and, dammit, it's still sci-fi and it's still (kind of) Star Trek. Rick and Morty S04 (2020) -- "10/10" This season comprises 10 episodes. This season, perhaps even more than the others, involves very intricate plot lines and callbacks and multiple time-lines and continua and versions of Rick and Morty. It's basically more of the same wise-cracking from Rick, with a bit more soul-searching. The second half of the season is Harmon being meta-meta-meta in episodes that remind me of super-well-animated Philip K. Dick stories. There are some really, really good and intricate story lines here. Dan Harmon is really knocking it out of the park here: * The Old Man and the Seat, a touching story about Rick's special planet where he has his own private toilet, a privacy spoiled by someone he thought was a friend, but on whom he is forced to take revenge because he doesn't know how to share, ending with him being lonely, realizing he would have been happier to have shared and kept a friend. Typical Harmon morality play that doesn't come across as very schmaltzy at all. * Never Ricking Morty is a meta-meta-meta instant classic about riding on a train of thought. They fight the Story Lord who has the power to make things meta. He has a beard. Like Dan Harmon. * Promortyus has Rick and Morty living as hosts for a parasitic race in another mind-twisting meta-tastic episode. * The Vat of Acid Episode is a great, nearly tautologically perfect example of a "Morty gets mad at Rick, but there is no way he outsmarts Rick in the end, even though it totally looks like he would, but that's only because Rick let him think that, in order to make his own inevitable victory sweeter for him and Morty's inevitable defeat more humiliating for him" episode. * Star Mort Rickturn of the Jerri has two clones of Beth being awesome in a space-opera episode with so much amazing fight choreography -- Harmon mocks "Star Wars" (and presumably super-hero movies) while making one of the most satisfying knock-down, drag-out action episodes ever. The writing and dialogue and artwork are excellent, as in other seasons. I really enjoy the hell out of these vignettes. They definitely bear re-watching: there are so many quick one-liners -- some of which are just throwaways that are better than anything in other shows -- and the artwork is lush and beautiful and nearly overwhelmingly imaginative. It's like a giant hit of everything at once: fast action, one-liners, intricate sci-fi, cross-dimensional, time-traveling storylines that don't falter, good, strong characters across the board, great voice work, and just enough moralizing to tie it all together with some pathos and life lessons. Highly recommended. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4116 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4116 Fri, 01 Jan 2021 19:32:07 +0100 of around 1600 ratings publicly available. I've included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other -- I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. Santa Claus is Comin' to Town (1970) -- "6/10" S.D Kluger (Fred Astaire) is the postman at the North Pole. The first letter he shows us is...odd. It has what looks like a Reichsmark stamp in the wrong corner of the envelope, as well as very Cyrillic-looking writing (backwards R's and N's). Very suspicious. At any rate, he tells the story of Santa's origin. We hear of how Burgermeister Meisterburger (Paul Frees), the mayor of Sombertown, turned down the opportunity to adopt Claus and sent him to the orphanage instead. On the way, a storm whisks away Claus's sleigh, to be rescued by the animals, who bring him to the Kringles, a family of elves. The elves were toymakers living with Tanta Kringle (Joan Gardner), but the only problem was that "they had no children to give them to." (I mean, obviously, it's a bunch of guys living with their aunt -- it is to be fervently hoped that that household not beget any kids.) After growing up with the Kringle elves, learning how to make toys, an orange-haired, strapping, young, red-suited, and clean-shaven Kris Kringle (Mickey Rooney) heads across the dangerous mountains -- sneaking past the Winter Warlock (Keenan Wynn) -- to Sombertown. Cue another song by the absolutely Yiddish-accented Burgermeister and his British-sounding captain of the guard. In town, Claus learns from the kids that toys are against the law. He also meets Miss Jessica (Robie Lester) and charms the impressively corseted and also red-headed young lady with a toy. Burgermeister patrols his demesne in a cart (he'd fallen down some steps and broken his foot), led by a double-file of troops. He has the best lines, especially when he meets Kris Kringle: "A perfect day. Everybody is glum. "[To Claus] You are obviously a nonconformist and a rebel. "[after Claus gives him a yo-yo and he plays with it] Ooo...I've been bamboozled! "[After Claus escapes across the rooftops] He climbs like a squirrel, leaps like a deer, and is as slippery as a seal." Claus escapes into the woods, but stumbles into the Winter Warlock's domain where he is trapped by the Warlock's trees. He escapes by -- you guessed it -- giving the Warlock a toy and melting his frigid heart. Cue another song. Winter and Kris team up, establishing an exchange of toys for magic. Claus continues to deliver toys to the children in town until Burgermeister finally arrests him. Winter has lost most of his powers, but conspires with Jessica to use his remaining magic to enchant the reindeer and rescue Claus from jail. Burgermeister is hot on his tail and puts a price on his head. This is of no concern. The Kringles tell him he's really named Claus, he grows an Amish-looking ginger-y beard and just those things are enough to take the heat off of his tail. He marries Jessica, of course. Despite this, they are all eventually chased far north, the Clauses, all of the Kringles, the reindeer, and Topper, the penguin. I gave it an extra point for Burgermeister, who's a great character. Frosty the Snowman (1969) -- "6/10" This is the story of a snowman who came to life named Frosty (Jackie Vernon). The narrator is played by Jimmy Durante. The children from a local school are distracted from the magician visiting their school -- Professor Hinkle (Billy De Wolfe), with his rabbit Hocus -- who is overwhelmed by his failed tricks and throws his "useless" hat away. It blows out the window and, like Chekhov's pistol, would be important in the next act. The school bell rings and the children run out into the snow to play. They build a snowman. A wind catches the Professor's hat and blows it onto Frosty's head. He comes to life, saying "Happy Birthday!". The children rejoice, but only briefly, because Hinkle runs out to reclaim his hat and extinguish Frosty's short life. He leaves the mourning children and marches happily back into town, accompanied by Hocus. Hocus waits for an opportunity and steals the hat back, carrying it back to the children, who plop it back onto Frosty's head and awaken him once again. "Happy Birthday!", he says, greeting young Karen (June Foray/Suzanne Davidson) who befriends him and takes him under her wing. The temperature rises and Frosty starts to sweat. He's got to get to the North Pole. Karen takes him to the train station, where she wastes the poor stationmaster's time ordering a ticket for which she cannot hope to pay. When he says that the price is over $3000, Frosty and Karen don't have a thin dime between them. This isn't a problem, though, since they just sneak onto the train anyway -- Karen and Frosty discover that it's a lot cheaper to stow away and you get what you want without paying a red cent. Frosty and Hocus are comfortable in the refrigerated wagon, but Karen is very cold. At the first opportunity, they jump off the train, leaving Professor Hinkle to jump off the moving train, as well. Frosty needs to get Karen warm, which he does by getting forest creatures to build her a campfire. He and Hocus keep their distance. By morning, Hinkle finds them and Frosty and Karen flee, riding Frosty like a sled. They end up at a hothouse, where Frosty takes Karen inside for just a minute. But Hinkle shows up to try to get his stolen hat back and locks them both inside. Santa is supposed to have showed up to rescue them, but he's nowhere to be found. Frosty melts away into a puddle and Karen cries her little face off. Santa says that this isn't a problem because Frosty just needs a bit of winter wind to wake back up. So he does, although Hinkle is still trying to get his damned hat back. Santa threatens him with no more presents if he doesn't shut his yap and toe the line, whereupon the craven Hinkle simply hopes that Santa will bring him another hat in the morning. He's utterly uninterested in due process or any form of justice for the larceny done unto him. Santa's got him by the short-and-curlies. Frosty bails with Santa, returning every year when it's cold enough. The end. Christmas on the Square (2020) -- "2/10" The movie goes straight from long credits (arguably the best part of the movie) to a song, with Dolly Parton crooning about poor people who've got it rough. It segues directly to another song-and-dance number that introduces the insipid central couple: the pastor and his wife, who are nearly unbelievably saccharine -- and terrible actors, to boot. Their material isn't great, I'll give them that. Maybe they couldn't turn down a paycheck in this year of COVID-19. It's pretty obvious at this point that we are balls-deep in a syrupy, sappy musical. The plot is basically that Regina (Christine Baranski) inherited the town of Fullerville from her father, who built it. She is a hard-nosed businesswoman bent on selling everything to the Cheetah Mall company, offering all of the townspeople generous buyouts. None of the people want to take the buyout and instead unite against her. Their town is more important to them than money. Dolly Parton turns out to be an angel who wants Regina to "change". Christmas is coming up and Regina threatens all of the people with eviction by Christmas Eve. There are so many songs and so much bad singing. Dolly Parton is still pretty good, but, man, has she had a lot of work done on her face. There is absolutely no reason to discuss any more story than that. It's like Touched by an Angel cross-bred with a Christian after-school special. I thought it was bad enough when they wouldn't stop singing -- until they started "acting" and "building the backstory", which was much, much worse. I have no idea why Treat Williams is singing so much -- or for so long. The little bartender girl has an awful voice. It's made more obvious when she tries to harmonize with Christine Baranski. Baranski is too good of an actress to be completely dragged down by this pap, but you can see her struggling to keep her head above water in this one. Jennifer Lewis is quite good as Regina's hairdresser -- and she has, hands down, the best voice (and the only good song, during the hair appointment). However, even her two extra points were negated by the sheer awfulness of the rest of the movie. With about half an hour left, the angels (presumably with God's help) put a little girl in the hospital from a car accident just in order to get Regina to "change". Dolly Parton as the angel rejoiced that her "plan" was working. It is presumably her God that engineered the car accident. How do people not realize how unutterably cruel such a plotline is? The town must be saved and one little girl's life put on the line -- and her father's anguished suffering [1] -- is worth the sacrifice. Absolutely brutal. I feel like I'm watching something from an alien culture: I understand the language, but can't understand how anyone could enjoy something like this. The direction of the musical numbers is terrible, with the camera way too close -- amateurish, graceless and artless. There are people who rated it 10/10 on IMDb -- it's like we belong to different species. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] He also has a decent voice, for what's that worth, given the awful material he has to sing. The Grinch (2018) -- "8/10" At 85 minutes, this version of the classic story is three times longer than the original. It fills in the time with more of the Grinch's backstory (he's an orphan, abandoned young, and never had a real family). He and his dog Max live alone at the top of a snowy hilltop, with a fixed daily ritual. The Grinch (Benedict Cumberbatch [2]) is an inventor and has filled his home with automation, including a coffee-maker with which Max makes him french-press coffee every morning before carrying it upstairs in a dumbwaiter. It's adorable. The skeleton of the plot is the same as the original: Grinch doesn't want to hear the Whos singing about Christmas; Grinch steals Christmas; Grinch heads up Mt. Crumpet to dump their stuff; he hears the Whos singing anyway; he regrets his actions and changes his ways; he saves the sleigh from accidentally tipping anyway; he rides triumphantly to town to return their Christmas; he celebrates with the Whos. Instead of only showing up at the end, Cindy-Lou Who (Cameron Seely) -- who looks, acts, and sounds like every other kid in every other recent cartoon -- wants to talk to Santa Claus to ask him to help her mother (Rashida Jones), who works the night shift and takes care of her kids all day. She hatches a plan to trap Santa when he visits her house. It's obvious who she's really going to catch. Pharrell Williams narrates, doing a decent job, but sounding too ... happy ... in comparison with the sepulchral Boris Karloff from the original. Mr. Bricklebaum (Keenan Thompson, instantly recognizable) is an enthusiastic "neighbor" (they don't live anywhere near one another) who considers the Grinch his "best friend". This version also provides more detail on how the Grinch planned and executed his Christmas heist, including hiking far to the north to get a herd of reindeer, returning with just one: Fred, a very husky exemplar. Fred lives with them for a little while, even hooking up to the Grinch's high-tech sled for a speedy test run. He's pulled up short when he sees his wife and child in their path -- and takes his leave of a guilty Grinch. Max is left to pull the sleigh, which he does with aplomb. The animation is digital and is, quite frankly, delightful. The absolutely physics-defying sled is really nice, as is the multitude of gadgets he uses to accelerate his theft of Christmas. Cindy-Lou catches the Grinch, but he weasels his way out of her trap with the same line as he did in the original: that he was taking the tree only to repair an ornament on it. Though he wavers, he continues his mission, putting Cindy-Lou back to bed before stripping her house bare. He and Max take their towering load of goods back whence they came, heading for Mt. Crumpet. In the meantime, puzzled Whos are waking and finding everything gone. They gather around the town tree anyway, getting ready to sing. Cindy-Lou thinks it's her fault for having offended Santa Claus with what she now laments was a rude and personal request. Grinch hears singing, regrets, sled tips, he jumps after it, uses a candy-cane grappling hook to catch himself and the sled, watches the whole rocky outcrop give way -- and Fred shows up with his family to save the day. Together with Max, they are able to pull the sled back to safety -- and the Grinch and Max ride triumphantly back to Whoville, where the Whos are still singing. The reception is chillier than in the original -- the Grinch leaves his sleigh of goods and slinks off with Sam. Back at home, their ritual is ... different. The Grinch actually gives Max a present. Their breakfast is interrupted by a doorbell. It's Cindy-Lou asking the Grinch to dinner. The story proceeds unchanged from there. The End. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] Cumberbatch is unrecognizable with an American-accented alto rather than his customary English basso. Klaus (2019) -- "9/10" This is a new story about the origin of Santa Claus. We meet the shiftless Jesper (Jason Schwartzman), who is just ending a pathetic stint in the Postal Corps. His father is Postmaster and is gravely disappointed that his son has learned nothing and instead seems to be very dedicated to living in shiftless luxury for the rest of his life. Instead of letting this slide continue, papa sends him to the far-off, northern island of Smeerensburg, at the edge of the empire. There, Jesper has a year to post 6000 letters to prove himself. Failure equals disownment. Success is a return to a life of luxury and idleness and shallow pleasure. Jesper travels north, meeting the boatsman Mogens (Norm MacDonald, immediately recognizable) who takes him to the foggy, cold, and battle-ruined island. He takes Jesper to his "post office", a ramshackle building that doubles as his home, which he shares with innumerable chickens. The townspeople are split into two feuding clans: the Krums -- led by matriarch Mrs. Krum (Joan Kusack, also immediately recognizable) -- and the Ellingboes -- led by matriarch Mr. Ellingboe (Will Sasso). They fight and feud all day every day. Their children do not play with each other. Pursued by the ongoing battle, Jesper flees across town, taking refuge in Alva the fishmonger's shop. Alva is a hardened, embittered young lady with a lot of fish and a mean hand with a meat-cleaver. She tells Jesper how things work, revealing that she was the local schoolteacher who'd spent five years on the island, on an assignment similar to his own. She is very close to having saved enough to flee the place. One day, a boy drops a drawing out of his window that Jespers picks up -- it shows the boy jailed in the tower of his home. He tries to get the boy to pay postage for him to return it, but the boy refuses, so Jesper keeps the letter in his satchel. Since most people are enemies, they have little need to send any mail, making Jesper's job that much harder. Weeks go by without a single letter posted. Jespers checks off every house on the map, but then notices a home marked in a far-flung corner of the island as belonging to The Huntsman. Mogens encourages him to check it out, "he likes company." Jespers arrives at a spooky home, finding the Huntsman's shed, which is filled with handmade and unused toys. The Huntsman is suspicious and looming and not-at-all encouraging. Fate brings the little boy's drawing into the Huntsman's hands. He responds by packing one of the toys and demanding that Jesper deliver it with him. The Hunstman's name is Klaus. The toy is delivered and the child is happy. He tells his friends. They bring more letters to Jespers. He returns to Klaus to ask him to donate more toys. They strike a deal. Because of the geniality of the toys, the children begin to play with one another across enemy lines. Mrs. Krum and Mr. Ellingboe intervene to put a stop to it, demanding that they honor the sacred sacrifice of feuding generations. Things continue in this vein, with some of the local children begging Alva to once again take up teaching, so that they can learn to write in order to send letters to Klaus. Jesper and Klaus deliver presents, slowly emptying his workshop. Klaus reveals that he had made the toys for children that never arrived -- and that he'd lost his wife to illness years ago. A young Sámi girl arrives to ask for a present, but Jesper shrugs her off, at first, because she has no letter with which he can get closer to his goal of 6000. With Klaus unwilling to make new toys -- it's too sad -- Jesper tries to make the girl's sled himself. This act of selflessness inspires Klaus to help and they deliver the sled, to the girl's delight. Her family expresses its gratitude by moving in and helping establish a factory for toys. The letters keep coming in, Alva's spent her savings restoring the school, Klaus has purpose, the townspeople are at peace and have restored their village. Only a handful of people are left to uphold the feud, led by Mrs. Krum and Mr. Ellingboe. Hearing that Klaus and Jesper are planning a giant delivery on Christmas, they scheme to sabotage it in two ways: they send thousands of letters to the mainland in order to make Jesper's father show up and retrieve him (mission accomplished) and they plan an attack on Klaus's stronghold to destroy the toys. Jesper chooses not to go with his father, making him even prouder than when he'd heard that his son had actually achieved his goal of bringing the mail to the north. Instead, Jesper returns to Klaus and Anya to help them fend off the villagers. There is a merry chase and nice sleight-of-hand on Anya and Klaus's part and Christmas is saved. Jesper and Anya end up together and the toy-making partnership with the Sámi is long and prosperous -- a dozen years. Then Klaus hears his wife calling and disappears in a puff of winter wind. Jesper doesn't know much about what happened, but he knows that if he stays awake long enough on one night per year...he can see his friend again, once a year. The animation style is lovely; digital, but in the style of Sylvain Chomet's "Les triplettes de Belleville" . The plot reminded me a bit of "Going Postal" by Terry Pratchett, where Moist von Lipwig was offered reprieve from a hanging if he used his prodigious con-man skills to get the city of Ankh Morpork's decrepit Postal Service up-and-running again. As the film went on, the humor and direction seemed more akin to The Emperor's New Groove, which is probably Disney's best cartoon. The characters were nearly dead ringers, with Klaus as Pacha, Jesper as Cuzco, Mrs. Krum as Ezma, and Mr. Ellingboe as Kronk. An absolutely welcome addition to the Christmas canon. Recommended. Rudolph's Shiny New Year (1976) -- "5/10" It seems hard to believe that there was a clamor for a sequel to Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer. Rudolph is back with his weirdly whistling and glowing nose, back to help Father Time rescue Baby New Year, who's gone missing. He ran away from home because everyone laughed at his gigantic ears. It is thought not only that Rudolph's own physical aberration will help him navigate the once-again stormy weather, but will also give him unique insight into Baby New Year's self-imposed exile. Santa sends Rudolph off into a raging storm to help his friend Father Time, who lives way the hell on the other side of a nearly interminable desert. Joining him on the journey from the North Pole is General Ticker, who is mysteriously not with Father Time, but was already at the North Pole. Ticker is surprised by the cold, despite having most likely very recently traveled there in the first place. They reach the edge of the desert: The Sands of Time. Here, they meet Quarter-Past-Five, a camel that will carry them to Father Time's castle. Overhead, they see Eon, the giant, evil vulture whose life has been long, but will finally come to an end at the new year. He seeks to kidnap Baby New Year in order to preclude his turning to snow and ice. They arrive at the castle and hear the whole backstory from Father Time. He sends them to the Archipelago of Last Years, where each Yearly Personage gets an island on which to retire forever. Rudolph gets on a small skiff, sailing for the islands. Eon attacks. Big Ben the whale saves Rudolph and carries him the rest of the way, on his back. First stop is the island of One Million B.C., a neanderthal-looking year who accompanies them the rest of the way. A few montage visits later, they end up on 1023, an island full of fairy-tale creatures as well as Sir 1023, a knight with a closed faceplate and a long beard who exclaims "Odds Bodkins" and "Gadzooks" and "Zounds" nearly incessantly. Baby New Year is always one step ahead of them. Like clockwork, his humiliated departure follows the revelation of his giant ears. The next island is 1776, where they pick up "Sev", who is the spitting image of Benjamin Franklin. Finally, Eon snatches up Happy and carries him off to his own island: The Island of No-Name, where he ensconces him in his nest and vows to keep him there forever. [3] Rudolph, Sev, Sir, and O.M. show up on Big Ben and start to climb the icy mountain to Eon's nest. They make too much damned noise -- Big Ben's tail clock rings 23:30 and Rudolph doesn't have an inside voice -- waking Eon, who brings down an avalanche on them. They are trapped in ice and snow at the bottom. Rudolph uses his multipurpose nose to melt his way out of his snowball, then leaves the others trapped in ice to climb back up and stage-whisper his way through a life lesson for Happy about how it's OK to be laughed at, while Eon sleeps not ten feet away. Eon sees the ears and experiences genuine joy for the first time in his long life and his laughter warms him enough to avoid his fate of being frozen in snow and ice. He tumbles all the way down the mountain, inadvertently freeing the other three whom Rudolph had left trapped. The others hear the chiming of midnight and they need to get back to Father Time before the "last bong". [4] The giant clock in Big Ben's tail has already started, but freaking Santa Claus shows up to carry them back to the castle faster than time itself. New Year saved. The End. I wasn't a huge fan of Rudolph in his debut film. The sequel did nothing to change my mind. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] Why was Eon trying to live forever when he'd never experienced joy and lives on a barren icy island by himself with no obvious hobbies or occupation? What's the point of living forever then? [1] I am not at all surprised to find that there were 12 bongs associated with this movie. Veronica Mars S04 (2017) -- "7/10" Keith (Enrico Colantoni) and Veronica Mars (Jessica Bell) are back, still in Neptune. Neptune is a fictitious beachside resort/town in southern California with a very rich, very elite, and very snobbish population as well as the rest of the rabble that fills in the blanks of society for them. In the original three seasons, Veronica was in high school with these people and ruffled a lot of feathers trying to figure out who'd raped her and killed her best friend Lily Kane. That's the background to the story that unfolds in season four. Although it's not essential to know, it does help to explain some of the resentments and squabbles among the returning characters. Veronica has gotten a bit more hard-nosed, vindictive, and even more convinced of her righteousness and infallibility than before. You could chalk it up to youthful exuberance in the originals whereas, now, with her well into her upper 30s, it seems more like her personality has crystalized into a detective better suited for something like NCIS -- where the cops always kick ass, always break rules, and are always retroactively justified in having done so. As in the original, Colantoni's Keith is a much more balanced, sympathetic, and deeply funny character. He seems to have learned how to be wrong or at least how to have doubt, a characteristic nearly missing from Veronica in anything but the smallest measures. Logan (Jason Dohring) reprises his role as Veronica's beau -- he proposed to her, behind which she sees him trying to exact control over her -- and he's in town from his naval-pilot/secret agent job abroad. He's jacked up beyond all knowing, flexing his comically large biceps at every opportunity. Even he has more nuance, depth, and humility than Veronica, though. The season starts with a bang, as the first of several bombs go off in a venerated seaside motel, The Sea Sprite, nearly blowing the hand off of Congressman Daniel Maloof's (Mido Hamada) son Alex (Paul Karmiryan), and killing the boy's fiancé as well as the son of a Mexican drug-lord, El Despiadado (Marco Rodríguez) and the motel owner Sul Ross (Brad Morris), who is survived by his daughter Matty Ross (Izabela Vidovic), who is quickly and rather unsubtly marked as Veronica's protege. Escaping death but not damage is pizza-delivery guy and leader of the "Murderheads" amateur/internet-sleuthing club Penn Epner (Patton Oswalt), who quickly becomes a thorn in everyone's side with his crackpot theories and meddling. The police chief Langdon (Dawnn Lewis) is also back, surly as ever. The bombings and a small-time crime wave suspiciously coincide with a community action trying to clean up Neptune, which has the dubious honor of being the west-coast capital of Spring Break. Richard "Big Dick" Casablancas (David Starzyk), owner of much of the town, leads the way. His son, "Little Dick" (Ryan Hansen) leads the charge for the revelers. Veronica befriends bar owner Nicole Malloy (Kirby Howell-Baptiste), while Keith befriends right-hand man to "Big Dick" Clyde Pickett (J.K. Simmons). Dick and Clyde had met in prison. Both Veronica and Keith suspect that the other is sleeping with the enemy, as it were. Keith's case looks stronger to me. El Despiadado dispatches two of his men -- Alonzo Lozano (Clifton Collins Jr.) and Dodie Mendoza (Frank Gallegos) -- to travel north and find out what happened to his son, and to take action as needed. They settle in to Neptune and start to get a feel for the criminal undercurrents, helping out here and there. Congressman Malouf hires the Mars Detective Agency to find out who set the bomb, taking three fingers (and a fiancé) from his son. He hires Logan as a bodyguard to protect himself against the increasingly irrational and violent attacks of his son's fiancé's hillbilly family, who are wondering where "her ring" is. They make increasingly strident, violent, and illegal attempts to get it back, even though no-one really knows where it is. Maloof's endearing mother Amalia (Jacqueline Antaramian) hires their competitor Vinnie Van Lowe (Ken Marino) for spite. Since Logan spent so much time in the Middle East, he is privy to the Maloof family's conversations. The local criminal element, more-or-less led by Veronica's former schoolmate and friend Eli "Weevil" Navarro (Francis Capra) is possibly on Casablanca's payroll (via Clyde) in order to drive prices down and let the town puritans buy beachfront property super-cheap (how they expect prices to magically come back up is a mystery). The Mars family flails around a bit, as do others, like Penn. They no longer strongly suspect Clyde -- though he's definitely up to something -- and they only half-suspect Nicole (the bar owner). The screws turn more tightly and the Marses set their sights on Penn and Big Dick: they suspect Big Dick got the ball rolling, but that Penn started copy-catting after that. Twists and turns and they finally get Penn to help Keith defuse the last bomb. He's the hero and it turns out he's not losing his marbles -- he's just got the wrong mix medications, which is messing with his memory. Veronica agrees to marry Logan and they do a quickie ceremony. When Logan goes out to Veronica's car to move it for alternate-side-of-the-street parking, Penn's backpack, with the last bomb. goes off. Why is a serial bomber's backpack still in Veronica's car? Because the story demanded it. One year later and Logan's therapist sees fit to give Veronica his last message to her. Keith has had his hip replaced and is doing great. Matty owns the motel because she literally fucking hocked the ring she stole from the wreckage and everyone's just fine with that. I'm just shocked at the level of criminality deemed acceptable by what are ostensibly the good guys. Veronica lies and cheats and steals and manufactures evidence. She breaks into places. Matty does the same. It's all just fine. I wonder, as I often do when watching American police procedurals, how much of this is just to train citizens to accept that police and PIs get to do whatever they want in order to arrest the person they already knew it was before they illegally obtained proof -- or not, as the case may be. At any rate, some people have nothing to fear for breaking the law -- and others are very much guilty until proven innocent. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4114 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4114 Mon, 21 Dec 2020 22:08:28 +0100 of around 1600 ratings publicly available. I've included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other -- I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. The Alienist: Angel of Darkness S02 (2020) -- "8/10" Season two of this show set in late 1800s New York follows the adventures of alienist Laszlo Kreizler (Daniel Brühl), journalist John Moore (Luke Evans), and private detective Sara Howard (Dakota Fanning). They're on the trail of the "Angel of Darkness", a person who's kidnapping and killing babies. Libby Hatch (Rose McEwen, in her first TV role) is excellent as the "angel", as is her boyfriend Goo Goo Knox (Frederick Schmidt). Both bring a bit more nuance to their monstrous roles -- Libby has been driven made by her mother's and society's expectations and treatment. Goo Goo is a thug, but exhibits a capacity for tenderness and dedication to Libby. The always excellent Ted Levine is (ex-)Chief Thomas Byrnes, who's now a for-hire henchman working for William Randolph Hearst (Matt Letscher), the newspaper magnate who's more interested in bending events in a way that benefit his circulation numbers than in helping the police solve cases. He's also trying to marry off his daughter Violet (Emily Barber) to John. There is tension there because pretty much everyone knows that John's hot for Sara -- and vice versa. "Hot" as defined by a society obsessed with Victorian morés. They end up chasing Libby -- who's now kidnapped a Vanderbilt baby -- across the East River to Brooklyn. She and Goo Goo leave a trail of destruction wherever they go. She is arrested in the end, ending up in prison with her demons. John and Sara do not end up together. Laszlo is reinstated at his institute, and Sara continues her work at her thriving agency. Christmas Chronicles (2018) -- "7/10" This movie takes a while to get going, spending a good amount of time introducing us to Kate and her older brother Teddy, two kids who've recently lost their father. He used to videotape every Christmas and Kate discovers a clue that Santa actually exists on one of the tapes. With their mother called in unexpectedly to work on Christmas Eve, the two kids call an uneasy truce and spend the evening in a spying nest, ready to capture Santa on camera. It turned out not to be too hard, as he's right there in the living room at 22:30 or so, with his sleigh hanging in the air above the street outside, complete with reindeer. Kate and Teddy sneak into the sleigh and Santa (Kurt Russell) takes them with him, unwittingly flying them to Chicago before getting so surprised by the two kids that he loses his magical hat and his reindeer and Christmas is in danger. He enlists the two kids to help him get things back on track. The best scene of the the movie is the one in the diner, where they try to enlist help from skeptical diners. There's a musical number in the jail where Santa's being held. Russell is very good as a wise-cracking and down-to-Earth (though still magical) Santa. He knows everyone's name, which is used to decent comedic effect. It takes quite a while to get everything back on track but, of course, they manage to finish delivering presents in the nick of time (yeah, I noticed). It's a decent Christmas movie, buoyed almost entirely by Russell's performance as an insouciant and earnest Santa. It's no Four Christmases, Fred Claus, or Bad Santa, but it's decent if you're forced to watch a schmaltzy Christmas movie. Christmas Chronicles 2 (2020) -- "6/10" The sequel sees a return of all of the main characters from the original. It's a bit cheesier than the first one, although Goldie Hawn as Mrs. Claus plays a larger role than her tiny cameo at the end of the first film. Kate and Teddy's mother has moved on from their father and the family is vacationing in Cancun for Christmas with her boyfriend Bob (Tyrese Gibson) and his son Jack (Jahzir Bruno). Kate's teenage tantrums drop her into the grasp of fallen elf Belsnickel (Julian Dennison), who deposits her and Jack at the North Pole, leaving them as prey for Santa to rescue. He, of course, does so, simultaneously granting Belsnickel access back to Santa's village. Belsnickel attacks with the help of his evil elf companion Snick and Jola, a snow leopard, who's there to take care of the reindeer. Belsnickel is after the star powering Santa's village. He manages to steal it, but is caught on the way out. In the struggle with St. Nick, they destroy the star. Belsnickel escapes on a drone. The second act has Mrs. Claus stay in the village with Jack to heal Dasher, who's been badly wounded by Jola, and to heal the elves, who've been dosed by Belsnickel with Elfbane. Santa Claus and Kate go back to Turkey -- where he started off 1700 years ago -- to get a new star to power his village. In Turkey, Santa and Kate meet Hakan (Malcolm Mcdowell), leader of the Turkic Elves. They agree to build a new container for the star. On the way back, Kate and Santa are waylaid by Belsnickel in his weirdly powered and designed sleigh. He sends them back in time with a shoddily powered device leading them to a new mission at an airport in 1990. Kate's mission is to power up the time machine again, while Santa needs to "bring up Christmas spirit" in order to get his reindeer off the ground again. Cue musical number. Kate meets her father in 1990, able to see him once again in one of the only ways possible (given time travel). They get the star back from Belsnickel pretty easily, chasing each other back to the North Pole before Mrs. Claus drops them both out of the sky. Things happen and everything is OK in the end, with a less confrontational Belsnickel getting a present from Santa, growing his heart three sizes that day. It's pretty heavy-handed, what with Jack conquering his fears and Kate learning to appreciate her family (like literally saying it out loud, telling rather than showing). The story is also much more fantastical and modern-child-pleasing than the original, with CGI pyrotechnics galore -- none of it adding to the story. As in the original, it's Russell who carries the film, somehow managing to strike a balance between cheesy and cool. Goldie Hawn's not bad, either. Julian Dennison is also pretty good -- he was good in Deadpool, as well. The Witcher S01 (2019) -- "9/10" Henry Cavill stars as the supernatural, monster-slaying nomad whose character was developed through the enormously popular books of the same name. The story comes originally from a Polish author, writing in the 1980s and 1990s -- and some of the political sensibilities clearly come from that era. The backdrop is a war between the merciless Nilfgaardians, who are trying to take over the continent, and Cintra, a kingdom with a ruthless queen. Cintra is on the back foot and gets nearly eradicated. The princess of Cintra is Ciri (Freya Allan), who's on the run across the countryside for much of the first season. She has banshee-like powers but no control over them. Her mother had these powers as well, but her grandmother (the aforementioned ruthless Queen Calanthe (Jodhi May) of Cintra) did not. Her mother was pledged to a hedge knight as part of an oath to satisfy a Law of Surprise. Ciri is pledged to the Witcher Geralt (Henry Cavill) in a similar oath. This type of oath means that the granter bequeaths an at-the-time unknown "surprise" to the power to whom they owe a debt. The "surprise" refers to something of value that the debtor has, but of which they are unaware and that the creditor may claim. In both of these cases, the surprise was a child. We follow Geralt on his monster-slaying adventures in one plotline while, in another, we meet Yennefer (Anya Chalotra), an up-and-coming mage at the Mage University. She learns about how there is no good and evil, but many shades of grey. She thirsts for power, interested mostly in her own needs -- and definitely not interested in using her power to help others less fortunate (at least until the end). She started off life as a misbegotten hunchback for whom life was misery until she was able to use her power -- grown under the tutelage of Tissaia (MyAnna Buring) -- to give herself long life and a spectacularly straight body. This is a big theme in this show: Geralt is neutral chaotic but basically a fair and just force for good (more or less). Yennefer takes longer getting there, but also bends toward good, though with a lot of character complexity mixed in. It's unclear which side to "root for" in the war -- probably neither is worth the effort. Neither has the ethical high ground, really. In the mix is a species of elves that is subjugated as inherently evil by both sides. They are nothing of the sort -- not evil, but also not shining good. A mix like everyone else. Cavill's acting really carries the show for me, but the acting in general as well as the dialogue, sets, and effects are all top-notch. The Hollow (1970) -- "7/10" This is a documentary about two families in the lower Adirondacks who, instead of returning to "civilization" when the State decides to flood their towns to make a reservoir, flee deeper into the hills to "The Hollow", where they live in nearly abject poverty and intermarry to their heart's content. The short film (just over an hour) is mostly interviews with various residents, letting them talk about whatever they want, without leading them on with questions very much. Their accents are thick and some are nearly incomprehensible (you have to listen really closely). They discuss mostly local and family topics. I added a point because this documents the area where I grew up in upstate New York, only a couple of years before I was born. Big Mouth S04 (2020) -- "7/10" The kids from the previous seasons find themselves at a sleepaway camp for the summer for the first third of the season. Nick (Nick Kroll) is ostracized while Andrew (John Mulaney) is lauded. Jessi (Jessi Glaser) becomes friends with a transgender camper. Connie (Maya Rudolph), Maury (Nick Kroll), Rick (also Nick Kroll) and Mona (Thandie Newton) are back as the various hormone monsters. Now in the eighth grade, the kids are settling in and pairing off -- but Nick and Andrew don't have anyone. Jessi has moved to New York City with her mother and has an older boyfriend named Michaelangelo. Missy (Jenny Slate) is a newly independent black girl, more aware of her identity. Jay (Jason Mantzoukas) and Lola (Nick Kroll) are a surprisingly solid item. Nick spins out of control, getting meaner and meaner, until the kids are forced to make him confront his inner demons and come out the other side a better person. This season is noticeably raunchier than the other one -- which is saying something. Sometimes it's hilariously appropriate -- but a few times, it really felt like they were forcing it for a joke that wasn't going to land. For example, Andrew's "poop babies" in the camp story arc is a bit lazy and trying too hard. If you liked the other seasons, you'll like this one, too. It's a good show. Rudolph the Red-nosed Reindeer (1964) -- "6/10" Sam the Snowman (Burl Ives) introduces us to "Christmastown", at the North Pole, where we also meet Santa (Stan Francis) and Mrs. Claus (Peg Dixon). Santa's at dinner by himself and she's berating him and body-shaming him for having lost weight. With angry eyebrows, she promises to "have him fattened up again" by Christmas in what is, quite frankly, a threatening tone. Next up, we meet Rudolph (Billie Mae Richards), son of Donner and Mrs. Donner. His nose whistles when it lights up. The body-shaming theme continues as Donner tries to cover up his son's "nonconformity". We also meet the Abominable Snowman, who's always angry. To continue the theme of the ostracization of the other, Hermey the Elf is next ridiculed for wanting to do anything other than make toys. He wants to be a dentist -- and is threatened that he'd better work through his break or he's fired. As Sam sums up: "Ah, well. Such is the life of the elf." In the next scene, Donner threatens his son that he'd better wear his proboscis prosthesis "if he has any self-respect". Rudolph meets Fireball (Alfie Scopp) and they start macking on the does, whose only contribution rhetorically is tittering and batting their eyelashes. Next up, the elves are back on trial: they sing their song for Santa, who's very unimpressed, and leaves with a noncommittal comment, passive-aggressively shooting down the whole troupe. Fireball is really, really avid about Rudolph's chances with "the does", exhorting him in no uncertain terms that he better get with Clarice. Rudolph sounds like a toddler, which makes the whole scene creepier than it needs to be. Rudolph loses his prothesis and everyone makes fun of him for being different, even though he flies better than any of them. Santa agrees that his flying skills are enviable, but that his deformity obviates it unequivocally, leaving Rudolph to be psychically torn to shreds and forbidden from "playing any more reindeer games". Clarice, that old horndog, likes his nose, though, singing him a song and then gets reamed by her racist father, who sends her home and forbids the relationship in no uncertain terms. Hermey and Rudolph meet and agree to "be independent together" (on Santa's trash heap of discarded nonconforming employees). During this next song, Hermey throws hands at an effigy he builds of his boss out of snow. They strike off into the night. In the morning, they meet Yukon Cornelius (Larry D. Mann), who only "thinks about silver and gold" (licks ax: "Nuthin."). Cue a song -- Silver and Gold -- by Sam the Snowman. More animals that don't belong at the North Pole show up. We've already seen cardinals, raccoons, rabbits, and, now, squirrels who, inexplicably, collect gold nuggets. The Abominable Snowman catches up to Yukon, Rudolph, and crew and they escape. The ice floe crashes in the fog into the Island of Misfit Toys, where they are greeted by Charlie-in-the-Box (Alfie Scopp). Cue, of course, a song -- Christmas Day is Here. They meet the king of the island, Moon Racer (Stan Francis), who gives them a mission of finding homes for all of the toys on his island. The little polka-dot elephant is adorable. Donner heads out to find them, denying Mrs. Donner's help, saying, "No. This is man's work.", provoking inevitable tears from the weaker sex. Rudolph wanders around, growing up and "existing", eventually coming home to find his parents gone. They, along with Clarice, have been kidnapped by the Abominable Snowman, who clobbers Rudolph in a fight. Yukon and Hermey find them (quite fortuitously) and lure the beast outside. Hermey rips out out all of its teeth, rendering it completely harmless before Yukon drives the confused beast backwards off of a cliff, a fate perhaps better than the lingering death by starvation that faced it otherwise. Yukon pitches after it into the abyss. They both reappear the next day, with a triumphant Yukon leading the beast on a leash, consigning it to a life of indentured servitude at the North Pole. The storm rages on outside and Santa has to cancel Christmas. Then Santa realizes that Rudolph's messed-up deformity of a glowing face could be put to good use, so they all change their opinion of him. Cue a song: "Holly, Jolly Christmas". One song later and Santa is now super-fat, just like Mrs. Claus wanted. Also, Donner's a real sonofabitch. The misfit toys are huddled over a fire, lamenting another missed Christmas. When Charlie tells them to dream of next year, Doll (Corinne Conley) intones darkly, "I don't have any dreams left to dream," leaking tears down her stitched face. Santa and Rudolph and the other reindeer show up, collect all the toys and head off into the night. The end. A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965) -- "8/10" This is the story of a bald child named Charlie Brown. He is depressed as Christmas approaches, worried that he is unable to enjoy anything. He complains to his more balanced friend Linux, who sucks his thumb and takes a security blanket everywhere he goes. Linus's sister Lucy is the class know-it-all. Lucy diagnoses Charlie Brown as needing a proper distraction -- like directing the school's Christmas play. Part of Charlie's inadequacy may be due to his having a dog who is cooler than him and better at everything (e.g. skating and throwing snowballs). Sally is Charlie's little sister who, like Snoopy, has lost her soul to commercialism. "All I want is what I have coming to me. All I want is my fair share." Charlie takes over the play's production, taking it seriously with a crew that has no faith in him, whatsoever. They dance to Vince Guaraldi's glorious soundtrack, infuriating Brown. Lucy (the script girl) hands out roles to Frieda, Pigpen, Shermy, Snoopy, Linus. Surprisingly, Lucy is very supportive of Charlie Brown, threatening many with violence: "I oughta slug you". Sally is nominated to be Linus the shepherd's wife, which suits her just fine, as she has a crush on him. Lucy wants to be Christmas queen and leaves in a huff when Charlie Brown doesn't immediately thrill to the idea. The players continue to do what they want, ignoring his direction. At this, Charlie decides that he needs a big tree for the stage. His cast is less than confident. "Do something right for a change, Charlie Brown". The lot is full of technicolored aluminum trees. One tree has almost no branches and loses half of its needles on being disturbed, but it's real and Charlie grabs that one, despite Linus's reservations that the cast will be disappointed. In the meantime, Schroeder plays Beethoven and jazz piano (Guaraldi again), with Lucy all the while admonishing him that he "doesn't get it at all". Lucy's got eyes for Schroeder. Linus and Charlie bring the tree back and he collects opprobrium from all of the children -- primarily the little girls, but the boys (and Snoopy) join in. The little tree is insufficient for them because it's tiny and pathetic. Brown cries "Doesn't anyway know what Christmas means?" to which Linus responds with a Bible-heavy explanation that ends with "good will toward all men." Brown carries his tree outside and says, "Linus is right; I won't let all of their commercialism ruin my Christmas." Snoopy won first prize in the "best-decorated house" competition -- the children cannibalize Snoopy's house to decorate their tree, which miraculously doesn't collapse under the strain. The credits thank a list of people for "graphic blandishment", which is pretty hifalutin. Dr. Suess's How the Grinch Stole Christmas! (1966) -- "9/10" This is the original cartoon adaptation of the children's book. It is the story of the town of Who-ville, a town of indefatigably chipper residents of Whos who raise their voices in joyous song to celebrate Christmas. Their neighbor to the north in the mountains is "The Grinch", voiced by Boris Karloff (who also narrates). The Grinch hates Christmas. Like every year, they annoy him with their joyful noise. This year, he decides to "find some way to keep Christmas from coming." He hates the noise. He hatches a plan, dragging his reluctant dog Max into it. He must stop the noise of Christmas morning and, most of all, he must stop the singing. His plan is to make himself a Santa suit and steal Christmas. Cue a montage for costume creation accompanied by Boris Karloff's dulcet tones. Max gets an antler strapped to his head and is tied up to the front of the sleigh, after briefly and happily thinking he was just going for a ride. They rocket downslope to town. The Grinch and a very-reluctant Max slink from house to house, robbing the Whos blind -- every last ornament, every crumb of food, every candy cane. Montage time again. Cindy Lou Who wakes and catches him at work -- he smoothly lies to her and makes off with the rest of the decorations and presents. In the following montage, he takes ice cubes and light bulbs. The sled is massively overloaded when he exhorts Max to tow them back up the mountain -- 10,000 feet up the side of Mt. Crumpet, "he rode up with his load to dump it". Max is incredibly strong. The Grinch is triumphant. He glories in the expectation of their suffering -- and silence. But they're singing, just like every Christmas, the damned saps. Somehow, they're happy without their presents and decorations and food -- how can that be? "It came without ribbons. It came without tags. It came without packages, boxes, or bags." In this moment, fate decides to tip the sleigh off of Mt. Crumpet and the Grinch no longer wants it to. He catches it, his heart grows three sizes, he has the strength of "ten Grinches, plus two", and rescues the sled. He and Max ride triumphantly back into Whoville to return their purloined goods and to feast and make merry with the Whos. The End. The animation, narration, and music are all brilliant. The Year without a Santa Claus (1974) -- "6/10" This is stop-motion animation of a Christmas where Santa (Mickey Rooney) calls off Christmas due to exhaustion brought on by incipient depression. He takes to bed, moping around that no-one cares about Christmas anymore. Mr.s Claus (Shirley Booth) tries to perk him up, to no avail. After briefly considering taking over the job herself -- which is discarded as a silly idea because...a woman? Really? -- she sends two elves, Jingle (Bob McFadden) and Jangle (Bradley Bolke), with Vixen to South Town, USA, to find people with Christmas spirit. The pair, riding Vixen, fly between the brothers Heat Miser (George S. Irving) and Snow Miser (Dick Shawn), who almost shoot them down. Santa takes off after them, sick as a dog, riding Dasher. The two elves continue to South Town, where they meet children who don't seem to believe in Christmas and Vixen is caught by the dogcatcher. Santa is hot on their tail, singing all the way, staying with a family for a bit, then rescuing Vixen and carrying her home. In the meantime, Mrs. Claus goes to meet Heat and Snow Miser to get them to cooperate and let it snow in the south to convince people to have a Christmas spirit. The two refuse to cooperate until Mrs. Claus gets their mother: Mother Nature (Rhoda Mann). She sets them straight and Christmas is saved. Santa gets his break and the people of the world chip in to make Christmas on their own. However, some whiny chick -- the Blue Christmas girl -- sends him a letter about how sad she is without Santa Claus. The other kids made him a bunch of gifts, but Blue Christmas girl guilted him into going back to work, even though his body is wrack and ruin. He pretends his ills are healed by the "goodness of the children of the world", but I'm sure his surly doctor (Bob McFadden) would disagree. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4074 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4074 Sun, 20 Dec 2020 22:56:06 +0100 -- "10/10" 2. "I, Tonya (2017)" <#Tonya> -- "8/10" 3. "Community S01-06 (2009--2015)" <#Community> -- "9/10" 4. "Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017)" <#Three> -- "9/10" 5. "Battlestar Galactica S04 (2007--2008)" <#Battlestar> -- "7/10" 6. "Borat Subsequent Moviefilm (2020)" <#Borat> -- "8/10" 7. "Dark S01-03 (2017--2020)" <#Dark> -- "9/10" 8. "Klepper Episodes 1-8 (2019)" <#Klepper> -- "8/10" 9. "Kevin Hart: Zero F**ks Given (2020)" <#Kevin> -- "8/10" 10. "The Stand (1994)" <#Stand> -- "6/10" These are my notes to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. I've recently transferred my reviews to IMDb and made "the list" of around 1600 ratings publicly available. I've included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other -- I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. The Americans S06 (2018) -- "10/10" We start season 6 with Elizabeth on the raw edge of exhaustion: overworked, smoking all the time, and starting to spiral into making bad decisions. Philip is out of the business and running what looks like a flourishing travel agency. Page is being brought up as an asset/agent. She makes a mistake, getting spotted by a young naval officer who they make sure to portray as so unnecessarily boorish that it's Ok when Elizabeth later knifes him in the carotid to keep him quiet. This would be the first of many cold-blooded murders for Elizabeth in this final season. Arkady Ivanovich is back in Moscow, running a special division that is trying to maneuver against the KGB and help Gorbachev push Glasnost/Perestroika into existence. He recruits Oleg Burov out of retirement, convincing him to leave Moscow and his wife and child to go back to Washington DC. He's there to try to help Russia and the world by making sure that the missile-treaty summit is a success. Oleg uses sneaky tradecraft to contact Philip and try to get his help, essentially appealing to his devotion to Russia to get him to come out of retirement, but this time reporting to Oleg and Arkady instead of the KGB, which can no longer be trusted to do the right thing. The KGB is correct in thinking that the US will not honor any deals, but incorrect in thinking things can continue as they are. Elizabeth has been given an even-more-than-usually secret mission to get US weapons technology, but its high-risk and potentially destructive. She is therefore opposed to Oleg/Arkady -- and now, Philip. You can basically look up most of the main storyline on Wikipedia: SDI/Star Wars, Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, Reagan's dementia, Gorbachev's fight with his deep state. This is the backdrop against which we find out how the Jennings's story ends. After leaving a trail of a dozen corpses, Elizabeth eventually sees that Philip and Oleg are right. With so many "incidents" and the increased security for the summit, the FBI's noose is finally tightening around the Jennings family. In a meeting with Father André, Philip is nearly caught, getting away by the skin of his teeth. He never returns to the house, instead calling Elizabeth to give her the code phrase to get the go bag ... and get out of Dodge. Oleg is picked up by the FBI and kept in solitary confinement. His family must give him up for lost. Oleg tells Stan the truth, hoping that Stan will do the right thing and rescue the summit from any American or Russian subterfuge. Stan is no longer really in doubt about Philip and Elizabeth -- he knows they're on the run. He leaves an official stakeout of the travel agency to stake out Paige's apartment instead. Jackpot. He follows the three into the garage and confronts them in one of the best scenes I've seen in a long time. He lets them go. Philip tells him that Renee might be an agent, but they were never able to ascertain it. Stan is severely conflicted, but has to let them go. But the Americans wasn't done: they're on the run with a reluctant Paige, having left Henry in America, the only place and culture he knows. They flee north to the Canadian border, switching from a car to the train, where they are now disguised and traveling under new identities. At the border, both Philip and Elizabeth pass inspection -- the patrol is searching for them, but can't identify them through their as-always impeccable makeup (applied in a service-station bathroom lit by a bare bulb illuminating a cracked mirror). Paige gets off the train before it leaves the station, choosing to go back to Washington and Henry. We see Philip hurry through the train -- to sit by Elizabeth, who finally loses some control and is silently crying for the loss of her other child. Stan returns to pretend to help find them, but he knows they're in the wind for good. He goes to Henry instead, to break the news that his parents are gone. Stan watches Renee sleep, wondering. Philip and Elizabeth cross the border into the Soviet Union, eventually meeting Arkady, who drives them the rest of the way to Moscow. They stop by the side of the road to look over the city and wonder what the rest of their lives will be like. The end. Happily, the end is given more than enough time and silence to properly honor the gravity of the story. I, Tonya (2017) -- "8/10" This is a docu-drama based on the life of Tonya Harding (Margot Robbie). There are disagreements about how accurate the story is. In a way, it doesn't matter. This is the story of a someone who grew up poor in Portland, as her mother LaVona's (Allison Janney) fifth daughter with her fourth husband. We never hear anything about the other kids. LaVona doesn't give the impression that she's a "stay in touch" kind of mother. She's a chain-smoking waitress who devotes her entire disposable income to Tonya's skating, but has only "tough love" -- at best -- to "encourage" her to succeed. She says that Tonya "skates better mad". Tonya skates well and is physically gifted, becoming the first American woman to perform a triple axel at a very young age. She never finished high school and has anger issues, most of which can be traced back to her upbringing, which was tough. She and her mother both took beatings before they left Tonya's father. She would repeat this pattern with her first boyfriend/lover/husband Jeff Gillooly (Sebastian Stan), who's a walking poster child for domestic abuse. Neither of them is very clever -- everyone in the movie makes terrible life decisions. But the environment encourages these decisions. It's incredible that Tonya makes it out of there in any way at all. Most people don't. So a drastically undereducated young woman with anger issues, an abusive husband, and a huge chip on her shoulder against a snobbish world that will never accept her no matter how good she is at her sport, shows up to nationals and then the Olympics. The "incident" happens in the middle of the film. Jeff's shockingly deluded and mentally incapacitated friend Shawn (Paul Walter Hauser) convinces him to throw Nancy Kerrigan off of her game by sending her threatening mails. To convince them of his plan's efficacy, he fakes death threats against Tonya first. Jeff wants to seal the deal for Tonya; she seems neither convinced nor particularly opposed. She doesn't really care what those idiots do. Instead of sending threatening letters, Shawn hires two goons to attack Kerrigan. They give her a deep bruise, but fail to incapacitate her. The FBI becomes involved and zeroes in on Jeff and Shawn. Tonya eventually learns what happened, but fails to turn them in immediately, instead waiting several days. For this, she is fined a large amount of money and is banned from skating for life. The way the story is told, you can just feel the whole skating world smugly smirking after the judgment, secure in the knowledge that the class divisions are once again secure. The skating world -- at least in the U.S. -- is one in which money and the status it brings is a nearly essential component. If you don't have money and status, then the climb is much steeper and harder -- as with nearly everything else. The whole crime is stupid and useless and unnecessary. It ruined Tonya's life very early -- even though she had very little to do with it. Her greatest mistake was not being able to escape being a product of her environment, of having married young and stupidly to a man who adored her, but didn't know how to support her. She wasn't exactly a prize, but she had raw talent, which made her a diamond in the rough that her environment should have nurtured rather than trying to break her. The film ends with Tonya's judgment and then a look at her subsequent career as a boxer. It's an interesting movie about class struggle, the evils of gross inequality, and the smugness, arrogance, and mean-heartedness of the moneyed classes. I saw other reviews describing it as a "dark comedy" and "hilarious". There was nothing funny about this movie unless you were laughing at the characters, which you could only do if you lacked empathy with them. Which you could only do if you don't know anyone from that side of the tracks. If you grew up in those circumstances -- or know people who did -- then you'll immediately recognize the truth of the story -- even if the details are fudged in this particular instance. You'll recognize Jeff and Tonya and Shawn and LaVona in people you knew or still know. Hell, you'll see them in family members or maybe even yourself. Their poverty and how they have to deal with it -- how they have to expend nearly all of their energy treading water -- is not funny, it's tragic. The awkward critical reactions show how out-of-touch most urban/city movie reviewers are from the part of America that this movie was about. Community S01-06 (2009--2015) -- "9/10" This is the story of Greendale Community College. It focuses on seven students -- Jeff Winger (Joel McHale), Britta Perry (Gillian Jacobs), Abed Nadir (Danny Pudi), Troy Barnes (Donald Glover), Annie Edison (Alison Brie), Pierce Hawthorne (Chevy Chase), and Shirley Bennett (Yvette Nicole Brown) -- who form a study group for their introductory Spanish class. Their Spanish teacher is Ben Chang (Ken Jeong). The dean is Craig Pelton (Jim Rash). In season two, they take Anthropology instead, taught by Ian Duncan (John Oliver). There are other recurring characters, but those are the main ones. Chang has been disgraced as a teacher and is now a student. The writing is excellent, the repartee witty. The stories are convoluted and very meta, treating the show as a show about a show sometimes, mostly through the device of Abed's inability to deal with real life without filtering it through the tropes of TV. The actors are all quite good, but I especially like Pudi, Glover, Rash, and Brie. Chase and Jeong also do a great job. John Goodman is the vice-dean, in charge of the Air Conditioner Repair Academy, which has a tremendous amount of power and wants to recruit Troy away from Greendale, Abed, and the plumbers. He has some great lines, like when he tells Abed (in an effort to undermine his friendship with Troy, who's building a blanket fort in opposition to Abed's pillow fort), "Don't corrupt the host to satisfy the parasites." ...meaning that Abed shouldn't compromise the purity of his vision to help Troy and Greendale get a world record at building blanket forts. One great trope running through the seasons is paintball, which appears in the best episodes. The whole show is very meta and Abed is pretty much the best character (Danny Pudi is really very good). Frankie (Paget Brewster) in season six actually does a great job -- especially considering she appeared in what was going to be the last season. The writing worked well here, too. Chang's episode as Mr. Miyagi was very good. The episode dedicated to Garrett's wedding was also quite good. This was my second viewing of the series, though only the first time I'd seen season 6, which, surprisingly, had its moments. I thought it was better than season 5, actually. The show was always about the characters and it did a decent job of continuing on, in its own way, when people began to leave: Troy, Shirley, Pierce. Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017) -- "9/10" We start the film with Mildred, who drives by some broken-down billboards on a little-used road outside her hometown of Ebbing, Missouri. She decides then and there to purchase ad-space for her daughter, who'd been raped and killed seven months before. The three billboards say "Raped While Dying", "And Still No Arrests?", and "How Come, Chief Willoughby?" Chief Willoughby (Woody Harrelson) takes umbrage, but not nearly to the degree that one of his officers Dixon (Sam Rockwell) does. Willoughby tells Mildred he has pancreatic cancer, hoping to guilt her into taking down the billboards, but she doesn't see the two as connected at all. Her son Robbie is annoyed with her. Her ex-husband Charlie (John Hawkes), a sinewy man who used to beat her, is also not thrilled with her that she's dragging their daughter's death back into the public eye with such crass language, evoking such raw images. While Willoughby tries to convince Mildred to take the signs down, Dixon visits Red Welby (Caleb Landry Jones), the nearly incomprehensible owner of the advertising company renting her the billboard space to threaten him, then has Mildred's co-worker Denise (Amanda Warren) arrested for minor drug charges. Mildred has words with her dentist and ends up drilling a hole in his thumb with his own drill because she thought he was going to ruin her mouth as retaliation for her billboards. Willoughby has her brought in, but ends up coughing blood on her during questioning -- and she comforts him. Willoughby leaves the hospital against doctor's orders, has a perfect day with his (very young) wife Anne (Abbie Cornish) and their kids before going out to the barn and shooting himself in the head. We hear the letters that Willoughby left for several people -- including Mildred, in which he reveals that he was the one who'd paid the next month's rent for the billboards. Dixon takes Bill's death terribly, marching across the street to severely pistol-whip Welby before throwing him out a window. The new police chief Abercrombie (Clarke Peters) is right outside. He follows Dixon back inside and fires him. Curiously, no-one thinks that Dixon's assault is worthy of charges. No-one even tried to stop Dixon's assault on Welby. That night, someone burns down the billboards. Mildred and Robbie manage to save part of one, but it's a lost cause. Mildred retaliates by fire-bombing the police station with Molotov Cocktails. She tried to get Dixon out of there by calling him, but he didn't pick up the phone, so she did it anyway. Dixon is severely burned, but has a change of heart after reading Bill's overly generous last letter to him. Dixon saves Mildred's daughter's file. James (Peter Dinklage) comes along to tell the police that he and Mildred had hooked up, to give her an alibi. She agrees to go on a date with him. A young man shows up to give Mildred the "backup" copies of the billboards and they put them back up. James helps. On the date, Charlie shows up with his 19-year-old girlfriend Penelope (Samara Weaving) and he admits that he burned down the billboards. Mildred is a disappointing and mean date, but that's hardly a surprise. Dixon is in a bar, drinking himself into a stupor, when he overhears a man bragging about having raped a girl in the right time frame. He provokes a fight in which he's roundly defeated, but he manages to get a DNA sample. It turns out that the man was out of the country at the time. He decides to follow the man to Idaho (where his truck is from) to exact revenge -- because he knows that the man did something horrendous. He invites Mildred along and she agrees. The next morning, Mildred and Dixon take off together, on their mission. She admits that she's the one who firebombed the police station, to which Dixon replies "who the hell else would it have been?" (great line). They each admit they don't know if they can go through with their mission of vengeance and agree to decide on the way. Battlestar Galactica S04 (2007--2008) -- "7/10" The final season really turns up the volume on making every character mostly, if not nearly unbearably, detestable. Whatever acting chops Kara Thrace (Katee Sackhoff) had exhibited in the first two seasons are now long gone, as the plot transforms her into a lunatic messiah, returned from a supposed mission to "Earth" and convinced that she.can hear the song that would lead them all back there. Admiral Adama and President Roslin are now officially a couple, though the ethical ramifications don't seem to interest them anymore. Roslin is also a nearly power-mad messiah -- a completely understandable reaction, but not executed in a very interesting manner -- and veers hard toward dictatorship. Chief Galen Tyrol (Aaron Douglas), Colonel Tigh, and the other "final four" Cylons are outed as the humans team up with Cylon Six and half of the other Cylons caught up in their own civil war. They finally find Earth about halfway through the season, but it is (A) a wasteland with lingering radiation from a 2000-year-old attack and (B) was populated by Cylons, not Humans. The 13th colony was Cylon, not Human; the planet they'd settled on was a replica, not the original Earth. President Roslin (Mary McDonnell) gives up completely and retreats to isolation, giving up her treatments for her resurgent cancer. Admiral Adama (Edward James Olmos) sinks into alcohol and self-pity, having lost his once-vaunted moral center but still thinking he should lead the fleet and always reserving the right to just take over the colonies completely, should the elected government fail to live up to his expectations (he always know best). The fleet, along with their Cylon allies, leave "Earth" to find another, more-habitable planet. The Cylons offer drastically improved technology in exchange for full membership in the Fleet and the Colonies as protected against Cavil and the other half of the remaining Cylons. Gaeta (Alessandro Juliani) turns out to be more complex than originally thought, coping with a leg he lost in an attempted mutiny on crazy Starbuck's Earth-finding mission. He starts throwing shade everywhere, whenever he's not on the nod from morphine. It's debatable whether he causes more unrest or whether a newly religious Doctor Baltar (James Callis) does (Baltar gets some of the best lines), "It's like the distant chaos of an orchestra tuning up, and then somebody waves a magic wand. And all of those notes start to slide into place. A grotesque, screeching cacophony becomes a single melody." With the failure to find Earth, President Roslin has abdicated. Adama is still on-board with the alliance with the Cylons but the rest of the colonies are against him. This, of course, doesn't matter because -- see above -- he's always right. So he has Vice President Zarek arrested after the Thylium ship "mutinies" (it can't mutiny from a fleet to which it doesn't belong), in order to get him to give up the location. With Gaeta's help, Zarek escapes and they trigger the revolution. Gaeta buys time with deception at the comms in the CIC while the civilians start to take over Galactica. It didn't seem possible, but Starbuck gets even more poorly written, getting star status as an unstoppable Rambo who teams up with Apollo, whom she rescued with no resistance from the resistance. She leads a charmed life, apparently. This has truly sunk to new lows and I'm actively cheering on both the resistance and the Cylons in my opposition to the military -- and humanity. The episodes leading up to this point have made a pretty strong point that humanity is not worth saving and dying out in the wastes of space is a fitting end. But I was pretty sure I would always end up here. The coup continues, with Gaeta slowly realizing that his partner Zarek is a good deal more ruthless than he thought they would need to be. President Roslin is back in the game -- seemingly not suffering at all from cancer because ... reasons -- which means we have to endure her self-indulgent, overemotional and scene-chewing speeches. Adama does his own share of emoting and snarling as he's dragged into a court-martial. I really like Edward James Olmos, but the writing he's given is god-awful. It reads like fan-fiction written by ex-Marines. The only point of light here is that they get the lawyer Romo Lampkin (Mark Sheppard) back out of retirement, who's actually quite good. Gaeta, Zarek, and even Baltar are decent. Apollo stays the same level of horrible, so he starts to look pretty good. Starbuck is just annoyingly ridiculously written, but I believe I've already noted that above. It's just quite grating. It's just lazy writing, with one deus-ex after another -- but maybe I'd feel differently if I liked the characters that I'm supposed to like. I'm on E14 of 22 and seriously considering giving up so close to the end. Yeah, it's that bad. I keep dropping my rating with each episode (on IMDb, everything is rated at 9+, which means that I'm in the minority again). The missiles still have vapor trails. The Cylons are capable of upgrading everyone's FTL drives, but it took them days to override a signal-jam. Two-person ships have giant windows on them, leave vapor trails from their "rockets", course through space like fighter jets, but they also have FTL drives and FTL communications. In the BattleStar, they're constantly picking up phones on cords to talk to each other, but communications between star systems is instantaneous. In the very beginning of season 1, the reason given was that the BattleStar was built with deliberately primitive technology so that it couldn't be manipulated by the Cylons. Now that they're working with Cylons, there doesn't seem to be any reason not to upgrade the phones as well as the FTL drives, no? The personalities continue to get worse as mankind and the remaining Cylons veer toward the end of their story -- or at least this cycle of it. You see, the various clues scattered around point to a long, long history wherein humans invent robots that eventually evolve closer and closer to humans -- until they are nearly indistinguishable, at which point they forget they're robots and just think they're biological beings. In keeping with the inconsistent approach to story and canon, the current range of Cylons are aware of their electronic origins, seem to be made solely of flesh and blood, but are still stronger and faster and more indestructible than the ostensibly "normal" humans that comprise the remains of the colonies. If the story holds, then these people are also descended from some cycle of robots, right? At least from somewhere in the dim, distant past? Or are Adama and Co. lucky enough to be part of the original generation of humans and we're actually only witnessing the first few -- and overlapping -- iterations of what everyone is calling an "endless cycle"? It's not quite clear, but there seems to be a very definite biological distinction between the humans and the Cylons that they all take for granted instead of taking a second to wonder whether there is any salient difference. Adama and Co. take the BattleStar Galactica on one Hail Mary of an attack on the colony base ship to retrieve Hera -- a human/Cylon hybrid, born of a sexual pairing, which suggests genetic compatibility -- who is supposedly the "future" of both the Cylon and Human race. So they risk the whole fleet and what remains of the colonies for a hare-brained and wildly unlikely interpretation of events, with more than quasi-religious overtones. This is about par for the course for this band of idiots -- and about what could be expected from humans on the best of days and certainly not unlikely from humans in the extreme situation in which they've found themselves (trapped for nearly a year on starships with no real home, dwindling supplies, and increased factional strife). They're all pretty much loony tunes and retreat to atavistic answers due to an utter inability to cope with their reality in any rational way. They regress to pretending that nothing's changed and expend tremendous resources and energy on petty political infighting and interpersonal jihads. This is actually pretty realistic writing, in one sense, in that I wouldn't expect anything else of the obviously damaged, egocentric, small-minded, and peevishly unenlightened crew members. There aren't too many shining lights in this group and of those, not one has a chance of making a difference. Unsurprisingly, the humans renege on an agreement with Caleb (the leader of the other Cylon faction). The "five" original Cylons (whatever that means in this mythology) had agreed to upload their knowledge of resurrection -- which Caleb's faction had lost when humans had destroyed their last remaining resurrection ship. This betrayal is not surprising -- but the other Cylons had killed billions of humans in their attack on the colonies. However, a deal's a deal -- and humans went back on their word. This caused zero consternation in Adama, who had long since capitulated any pretense of fairness or justice. So they rescue Hera and get the BattleStar back, but in shambles, ready to lead the final landing on a planet that looks very much like Earth 150,000 years ago. They land and decide to send all of their ships into the sun, to prevent themselves from having enough technology to start the whole cycle again. Pretty much everyone's on the planet, including Six and Baltar, who have survived the intervening 150,000 years to see the cycle about to begin again with the discovery of advanced robotics. It took me a year to watch the whole thing (during indoor workouts) and it had its ups and downs. Borat Subsequent Moviefilm (2020) -- "8/10" Borat Sagdiyev is pulled out of the work camp to which he's been committed since returning to Kazakhstan after the first Borat film. He is offered the opportunity to redeem himself by delivering Johnny the Monkey to Trump as a gift. He cannot get close to Trump because of an unfortunate incident in the first film where he defecated in front of his hotel. Instead, the premier agrees that Borat can redeem himself by delivering the monkey to Mike Pence instead. The plan fails nearly immediately, when Borat's daughter Tutar (Maria Bakalova) sneaks into the monkey's crate, surviving on its delicious meat. With the monkey gone, Borat must pivot again. He strongly suspects that Mike Pence is rarely seen with women because he's so sexually potent, so Borat decides to make a gift of Tutar to Pence. Tutar needs a little cleaning up, so Borat gets her a makeover as well as taking her to a debutante ball. Borat disguises himself as Trump, carrying Tutar over his shoulder in the middle of a conference where Pence is giving a speech. As he's dragged out, he yells "You're fired!" at Pence. With that plan dead in the water, they need to pivot again. Borat decides to give Tutar to America's Mayor, but she needs more work. Borat knows that Giuliani likes big-breasted women, so he brings Tutar to a clinic for breast-enlargement. This doesn't present a problem to anyone involved, even when they learn that she's only 15 and talks like an utter child about her body, even when Borat pays with cash in single-dollar bills. Borat leaves Tutar with a babysitter, who's a bit taken aback that Borat tells her to treat Tutar like a dog. She manages to counsel Tutar that her father is lying to her about life. Tutar has a fight with Borat, even telling him that the Holocaust was a lie, citing the Facebook page. Borat goes to a synagogue dressed as a Jewish caricature, trying to get himself killed. He is treated kindly by two old women there and is reassured to learn that the Holocaust actually did happen. He leaves there to tell Tutar, but finds a world closed down by COVID-19. He ends up holing up with two guys he meets in a parking lot. They tell him about Q-Anon and he tells them about his beliefs. They try to convince him that he believes in conspiracy theories -- that he has to be more careful what he puts in his mind. When Borat sees that Tutar has become a news correspondent, he travels with his two friends to a rally in Olympia, Washington to find her. He ends up leading the crowd in a nearly hopelessly racist and awful song that his two friends had written for him. Tutar, fearing for her father's life, arranges an interview with Rudy, who at first seems to be just trying to make the interview work for the young girl, but man is he deliberately ignoring a lot of warning signs. On the other hand, Cohen also uses every trick in the book, filmmaker-wise, to tell the story he wants to tell (see below). When she happily slugs a shot of whiskey with him -- despite her having told him she's 15 -- then inviting him to the bedroom, he positively scampers after her, with a lot of inappropriate touching before Borat bursts in to yell that "she's only 15; she's too old for you!". Giuliani finally realizes that something is amiss and storms out. They flee the scene, seeming to share genuine laughter at what they'd gotten away with. The two head back to Kazakhstan where, instead of meeting a grim fate, Borat learns that he'd been deliberately infected with COVID-19 before he'd left (he thought it was a health-boosting dose of "gypsy tears") and that he'd functioned as patient zero for the U.S. Borat records the admission and gets his premier arrested, leading to a freer and better Kazakhstan where Tutar is a reporter alongside him. It's a happy ending and there are actually a few heartwarming moments between Tutar and Borat. Bakalova as Tutar is just as stone-cold as Cohen, pulling zero punches. Her work is amazing and she seems like a complete natural. I enjoyed her rapport with Cohen much more than his burly producer from the first film. Some of it's uneven, but what shines through is just what big, brass balls Cohen and Bakalova have. They push it right to the edge of violence and their targets are just so unsuspecting for so long. I've read that the only person who was in on the joke during filming was the kindly older lady in the synagogue, who he'd worried would be too offended by his comments if she was completely unprepared. But the guy in the Kinkos who chirpily faxes and reads responses that clearly discuss underage sex-traffic, the two guys who host him at their home, the plastic surgeon, his secretary, the people at the debutante ball, the women at the conference where Tutar speaks, Giuliani and his entourage -- all of these people seem to be completely fooled. Or, if not completely fooled, willing to humor a madman or madwoman without comment or reproof. You could explain some of it with a general ignorance mixed with a good-heartedness in some cases (e.g. the babysitter). But others seem only too happy to agree with Borat and Tutar, no matter how reprehensible their views. His views are right in their wheelhouse, so what's the problem? The "review" by Matt Zoller Seitz obviously saw a bit more in some of the jokes -- but movies, are like that: you bring a lot with you when you watch. For example, Seitz saw this film as more-than-vaguely "feminist", although I think that's quite a bit of a stretch. "The subtext of a lot of the jokes is that the exploitation of women and girls, some below the legal age of consent, is an ingrained perk of being a financially comfortable adult man in the United States, as well as in countries that Americans like to paint as inferior." Another critic I like wrote "We’re Sorry to Report That the New Borat Movie Isn’t Funny" by Eileen Jones , in which she wrote that the film, "[...] is earning praise for its “fresh, fierce” feminism — for advocating, in the end, that women should, in fact, be taught to read and drive and perhaps not to aspire to live in a cage. Presumably, we are led to believe there’s a significant force in America saying otherwise." Seitz thought the Giuliani scene was more incriminating, interpreting Giuliani's normal facial expression -- he was my mayor for 8 years in NYC; he always looks like that -- as a "leer". "What's beyond dispute is that Giuliani's behavior is the maraschino cherry atop the movie's slime cake of male entitlement. His leer could be the film's logo." He goes on to condemn America along with it, "The movie's scripted fiction mirrors the reality that the star captures when interacting with nonprofessionals: there is no agreed-upon morality, ethical code, or national fellowship in America. There is only greed, tribal loyalty, and power dynamics. Maybe that's all there ever was. This is a dark, dark movie, invigorating in its bleakness." Again, it seems like Seitz is lacking any form of empathy for many of the American "characters", probably not knowing anyone anything like that personally. None of them are likely to be sipping kombucha in an upscale coffee shop. I thought that the "Half in the Bag: Borat 2 and The Haunting of Bly Manor" by RedLetterMedia review was quite insightful as far as editing technique went: they pointed out how easy it is to manipulate even sophisticated viewers by inserting scenes that look like they were shot live or by inserting audio when faces are turned away (e.g. the Giuliani scene, which still does not look good, was heavily manipulated using these techniques). It's how Cohen makes it look like people were just chirpily accepting horrific things he was saying or showing them -- the actual content on the screen, for example, was not the same for that person as what was shown in the movie to us, the audience. Borat even goes so far as to speak fluent Hebrew in all of his conversations with Tutar, who responded in Bulgarian. The villagers in Kazakhstan spoke Romanian because that's where it was filmed. If you don't know any of these languages and have no ear for anything similar, you'd be hard-pressed to notice that none of the actors can actually understand one another. Borat threw in a smattering of very Russic-sounding words sometimes, too. This movie is madcap and Sasha Baron Cohen continues to prove that he's found an amazing way of getting the darker bits of American culture to reveal themselves unwittingly. Recommended. Dark S01-03 (2017--2020) -- "9/10" The story takes place in the fictional town of Winden, in Germany. In 1986 and 2019, it has a nuclear power plant. In 1953, the plant is about to be born. In 1920, we meet more of the progenitors of the people in later years. In 1887, the first machine is built. In 2053, the world has more or less been ended for decades. The plot is very convoluted and involves many of the townsfolk at various stages of their lives and in various incarnations. There is time travel -- lots of it. There are knots in the family tree. We start off in 2019, meeting teenagers Jonas, Magnus, Martha, and Fransiska as well as Martha and Magnus's younger brother Michel. The three M-named kids belong to Katharina and Ulrich, who were teenagers in school with Hannah and Michael, Jonas's mother and father. Ulrich's brother Mads disappeared -- the first to do so. They also went to school with Regina Tiedemann, daughter of Claudia Tiedemann, daughter of Egon Tiedemann, a police officer in 1953 and 1986. In 2019, Regina and her husband Aleksander (not his original name) run the power plant and their son Bartosz is also friends with Jonas. Franziska is Charlotte and Peter's daughter, sister to Elisabeth, who's deaf. Their grandfather is Helge. That's the season one family tree, before we learn from Ulrich traveling back in time via a tunnel under the power plant through a spooky cave that Michael is actually his son Michel and that his daughter Martha is actually dating her own nephew. Elisabeth turns out to be her own grandmother. Bartosz also turns out to be his own great-grandfather. Knots in the family tree. "Jeder Wissenschaftler würde sagen, nein. Das verbietet der kausale Determinismus. Aber es liegt in der Natur des Menschen zu glauben, dass sein Leben eine Rolle spielt. Dass sein Handeln etwas verändert. Mein Leben lang habe ich geträumt durch die Zeit zu reisen, zu sehen, was war and was irgendwann sein wird. "Die Träume verändern sich. Andere Dinge werden wichtig. Mein Platz ist nicht im Gestern und nicht im Morgen. Sondern hier. Und jetzt." They are all trying to change something in this time loop. They are all, to some degree, aware that there is something gravely wrong. Jonas ends up knowing the most, taking the role of Adam. Martha takes the role of Eve. With their closeness in bloodline, their eventual child is a time-traveling mutant, bent on killing and "cleaning". Claudia is opposed to him, also deeply aware of time travel. There is a time machine that no-one has invented and that everyone has, that appeared out of the loop. "Der Mensch ist ein eigenartiges Geschöpf. All sein Handeln ist motiviert aus Verlangen, sein Charakter geschmiedet aus Schmerz. So sehr er auch versucht, den Schmerz zu verdrängen, das Verlangen zu unterdrücken, so wenig kann er sich doch freimachen von der ewigen Knechtschaft seiner Gefühle. "Denn solange den Sturm in ihm tobt kann er keinen Frieden finden. Nicht im Leben, nicht im Tod. Und so wird er Tag für Tag alles tun, was nötig ist. Der Schmerz sein Schiff, das Verlangen sein Kompass. Wozu der Mensch doch fähig ist." The time loop grew like a tumor from a rip in space-time created by inventor H.G. Tannhaus, who was trying to bring back his son and grandchild, who'd died in a car accident. The two worlds and the knots of time grew from this initial attempt, a mistake, a bubble of quantum foam in which all of the characters above appeared, flotsam on the sea of time. Do they matter more or less than the people in the real timelines? No-one can really say. "[to Eve] Das Leben ist ein Labyrinth. Und mache irren bis zu ihrem Ende darin herum, auf der Suche nach einem Ausweg. Dabei gibt es nur einen Weg, und der führt immer tiefer hinein. Erst, wenn man die Mitte erreicht hat, wird man verstehen. Der Tod ist etwas unbegreifliches. Aber man kann sich mit ihm versöhnen. Alles was wir getan haben wird am Ende vergessen sein. "Wir sind schuld an diesem niemals endenden Deja-vü. Und wir sind diejenigen, die es beenden müssen. Wir sind der Fehler. Du und ich. Unsere beide Schicksale sind in ewiger Verdammnis miteinander verbunden. Durch beide Welten. Alles ist Ursache und Wirkung. Jeder Schmerz verleitet uns zum Handeln. Formt unser Wollen." The people in these two worlds are determined to eradicate it and travel to Tannhaus's world and timeline to prevent the accident in the first place, succeeding and folding the rip back over their dimensions, healing the rift and eliminating themselves, remaining only as a vague half-memory, a deja vu for Hannah, who decides to name her soon-to-be-born child Jonas. [Peter Paul Rubens: The Fall of the Damned (1620)]The painting to the left is featured prominently above Adam's mantel. It is The Fall of the Damned by Peter Paul Rubens and was painted in 1620. There are large parts of this show that are definitely worth a 10. The acting is, for the most part, top-notch. The story is intricate and interesting and largely airtight (especially for a time-travel story). There were some rocky moments and some more drawn-out bits, but overall, it was a masterpiece and I'm glad it exists and glad that people are making such convoluted stories that dare to do something new. There are two main things I didn't like: (1) I can't stand Martha's whiny face and acting and (2) almost all of the music is just crap, including the credits music -- "for neither ever nor never..." -- which everyone else won't stop oohing and aahing over. I listened to it a few times, but the refrain is just so inane that this was one of the rare shows where I skip the intro. The sound effects other than the music were excellent. No complaints. I was entertained and forced to think. I've only scratched the surface of the various nuances of the story- and world-lines. Read the "detailed Wikipedia entry" for more information. But the story is very, very interesting and the acting is excellent. Even if the end of season 2 and the beginning of season 3 slump somewhat and get a bit muddled and even repetitive, I think they turn things around in the last couple of shows and make what we in German call a Punktlandung. We watched it in the original German. Klepper Episodes 1-8 (2019) -- "8/10" Jordan Klepper hosts several episodes, mostly centered on American political topics. 1. In the first show, he talks with a group of veterans who have started a professional-wrestling league -- and then plays the role of the "heel" in the final scene. 2. In Louisiana, he meets up with environmental activists L’eau La Vie and finds out the real story is more nuanced: the companies aren't bringing the jobs they promised and local townspeople don't care about the environment more than jobs. 3. In the third episode, he spends time with kids attending Freedom U, an underground university for immigrants -- because they're not allowed to attend school otherwise. He gets arrested at a protest action. 4. Next up, he meets up with groups of immigrant veterans who fought for America, but who've not been granted a path to citizenship and have been deported instead. 5. The next show is an interview with Deb Haaland, the first Native American woman elected to Congress. Jordan travels to various states, meeting other Native Americans engaged in politics. 6. Jordan and Kobi Libii meet up with two second-amendment-rights groups in Texas: Jordan meets an overprivileged group that wants even more constitutional protection than they already has -- which is a lot. Kobi's group is called Guerilla Mainframe and is a black militant group that shows up to rallies armed to the teeth. 7. Jordan investigates the NASA Space Program and what it would mean to go to Mars or back to the moon. He interviews an older astronaut, who's a bit cynical and a super-young girl who's ... somewhat implausible (she claims to speak eight languages at 18). 8. Finally, Jordan goes to Compton to interview people who were deep in "the game" "back in the day" and are barred from taking part in the newly legalized marijuana industry. The reality of legalization looks a lot like the rest of corporate America: unequal and unfair. Kevin Hart: Zero F**ks Given (2020) -- "8/10" Kevin Hart performs in a standup club in his palatial home. He's already had COVID-19. He's actually quite a bit funnier than in his arena shows. He talks about sex after 40, group chats with his mail friends, and, of course, COVID. As a comedian who's been canceled -- for saying something stupid about preventing his son from being gay -- he had a bit to say about cancel culture, as well. He has a long story about going to Seinfeld's house for brick-oven pizza, highlighting the difference between black and white comedy -- and their fans. I enjoyed it the most of any of his recent specials. The Stand (1994) -- "6/10" This is the six-hour mini-series originally aired on American TV. The script was adapted by Stephen King himself. Of course, he had to neuter a lot of his more salacious and interesting content in order to get it on prime time. That said, though, the movie follows the basic plot of the book pretty well. It's not a subtle story, really: a man-made virus takes out most of humanity within a few weeks. General Starkey (Ed Harris) takes his own life once he sees what he's responsible for. Kathy Bates and Jeff Goldblum also have uncredited roles, but only in the first of four episodes. The remaining people are neatly divided into two groups: the good people -- Stu Redman (Gary Sinise), Frannie (Molly Ringwald), Glen Bateman (Ray Walston), Judge Farris (Ossie Davis), Larry (Adam Storke), Nick Andros (Robe Low), Tom Cullen (Bill Fagerbakke), among others -- who gravitate to Mother Abigail Freemantel (Ruby Dee) and the bad people -- Nadine (Laura San Giacomo), Lloyd (Miguel Ferrer), Trashcan Man (Matt Frewer), Rat Man (Rick Aviles), among others -- who gravitate to Randall Flagg (Jamey Sheridan). The good people head to Colorado while the bad ones gather in Vegas. The Lord is on the side of the good, but they must agree to suffer in order to prevail -- putting their trust in the Lord. In the end, Trashcan Man's singlemindedness for "boom boom" (explosives of any kind) torpedoes (literally a nuclear one) Flagg's plans of conquest and leaves the world free of evil for the puritanical and quasi-benevolent dictatorship in Colorado. The first show is pretty great, actually, and the second one is also pretty good, but the third and fourth drag on interminably. It just all gets so maudlin and weepy and ... boring. Molly Ringwald is terribly wooden and Gary Sinise is ultimately wasted as a featureless straight-arrow of a character. Miguel Ferrer is good, as always -- and Matt Frewer as Trashcan Man is the standout best. Fagerbakke's Tom Cullen -- M.O.O.N: That spells moon -- is also very good. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4042 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4042 Tue, 13 Oct 2020 22:19:28 +0200 of around 1400 ratings publicly available. I've included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other -- I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. Battlestar Galactica: Razor (2007) -- "8/10" This 100--minute movie is set in the BG universe and tells a bit of the backstory of the Pegasus and that of its erstwhile commander Admiral Cain (Michelle Forbes). We meet her former number two Kendra Shaw (Stephany Jacobsen). These two, along with Starbuck spend much of their screen time proving that stupid, macho posturing looks and sounds just as stupid coming from women as it does from men. They are all truly terrible people who should be nowhere near command positions, if there was any justice or morality. The military pretends to neither, which is lucky for these ladies. The story was pretty interesting, though, and I quite like the universe of BG, so it paid off in the end. You either get used to the rough edges and enjoy the bits that are enjoyable or you leave off watching entirely. I personally like a bit of a sci-fi setting and I think the overall story arc of Humans, Cylons, and their relationship and history is quite interesting. The quasi-religious aspect is understandable in light of the apocalyptic situation for humanity and not-at-all off-putting. Even Admiral Adama reveals a bit more of his backstory: he was the one who discovered the laboratory where the Cylons were building their "next step in evolution", a Cylon/Human hybrid. This original experiment was whisked away before the humans could destroy it and has spent the long interim wandering space, guarded by the original Centurions. It (for lack of a better word) can see the future and knows much more of the past than any of its counterparts. In the interim, there have been other attempts -- Athena and Helo's child Hela, for examples -- at crossing the streams, as it were. It remains to be seen where that leads. The hybrid reveals to Shaw that he sees Starbuck as the harbinger of the apocalypse for humanity -- just before Shaw blows them both to kingdom come. Starbuck, unfortunately, escapes. Better Call Saul S04 (2018) -- "9/10" The fourth season picks up with Jimmy (Bob Odenkirk) and Kim (Rhea Seehorn) in one story line, picking up after Chuck's death (Michael McKean). Howard (Patrick Fabian) thinks he's responsible for Chuck's suicide and wastes no time dumping this news on Kim and Jimmy, leading to an even greater break between them all. Jimmy continues his journey to becoming Saul Goodman while Kim gets her job back as a high-powered attorney, making money while Jimmy waits a year to get his license back. He spends some time looking for a job -- which is really amusing and which involves a few petty crimes, spreading his wings, as it were. He finds a job in a cell-phone store, selling nearly exclusively to shady characters who are interested in burner phones. Ignacio or "Nacho" (Michael Mando) carries out an attack on Hector Salamanca (Mark Margolis), nearly killing him and putting him in the wheelchair we see him in in Breaking Bad. Unfortunately, Nacho stays in the thrall of Gus Fring (Giancarlo Esposito), who threatens to kill Nacho's father if he fails to help him take down the Salamancas. Lalo Salamanca (Tony Dalton) shows up to help his uncle and run his empire for him, tangling with Fring and Nacho and Mike. Mike (Jonathan Banks) heads up a project for Fring, leading a team of German tunneling specialists to build an underground super-lab (the one we would see Walter White take over in Breaking Bad). He befriends Werner, the head of the crew, but Werner ends up ... disappointing him. Jimmy manages to get his con-man mojo back in time for his reinstatement hearing, convincing the initially reluctant council to grant him his bar license back. He uses Chuck's name to win them over -- then turns around and changes his lawyer name to Saul Goodman. Kim is taken aback because she'd actually believed his spiel about Chuck and was disappointed to see that he was going back to his old ways. This wouldn't last long, though, as she too is drawn to the dark side. As usual, the season starts with a flash-forward to Goodman's life in modern-day Kansas, where he works at a Cinnabon and suffers a heart attack and fears that his cover is blown. We learn precious little, but enough to tantalize. He has left the hospital, but still worries that his cover has been blown and that old enemies will find him. This is a very strong season, with an excellent and interesting plot as well as strong performances from nearly all of the actors. As usual, the camerawork and direction are captivating. Recommended. Space Force S01 (2020) -- "8/10" The season starts with General Mark R. Naird (Steve Carell) being promoted to four-star general. He is elevated to head up Space Force, which is very much like NASA, but for the military. He meets the heads of the other military divisions, Navy (Jane Lynch), Marines (Patrick Warburton), Air Force (Noah Emmerich), and Army (Diedrich Bader), which is a rogue's gallery of supporting actors who chew the hell out of the scenery. The Space Force team consists of several civilians, like PR hack F. Tony Scarapiducci (Ben Schwartz; the "F" stands for "Fuck"), science chief Dr. Adrian Mallory (John Malkovich) and his right-hand man Dr. Chan Kaifang (Jimmy O. Yang). Captain Angela Ali (Tawny Newsome) and Obie Hanrahan (Owen Daniels) round out the recurring characters for the military side and John Blandsmith (Dan Bakkedahl) is Naird's connection to POTUS, acting more as a mouth of Sauron for a President who we never see, but who is clearly as mercurial and unreasonable as Trump. On the personal side, Naird's wife Maggie (Lisa Kudrow) is serving what amounts to a life sentence for an unspecified crime and he's left to raise his daughter Erin (Diana Silvers) alone. The Space Force feuds with the Air Force in mock maneuvers, but their main beef is with the Chinese both in space with dueling satellites and also on the Moon, where both nations establish bases.The season ends with both nations having destroyed the other's base. It's a pretty funny show with Carell turning in a nuanced performance and Malkovich and Yang doing excellent work, as well. Bakkedahl always plays the same character (he did the same schtick on The Daily Show and Veep), but he's damned good at it. I've got a soft spot for Ben Schwartz, who always plays an asshole that you can't help laughing with (he had a similar role as Jean-Ralphio in Parks and Recreation). Recommended. Better Call Saul S05 (2019) -- "9/10" The fifth season shows a bit more of Saul's current predicament, where he's just been released from the hospital, but he's now been made. He calls Robert Forster for an exit, but backs out at the last minute, preferring to "fix it himself". In the past again, we meet Saul Goodman, making his debut as a reinstated lawyer, giving away cellphones to "skels" that are preprogrammed to "call Saul". He also stages guerrilla-news moments to drum up interest in his fledgling business. Gustavo and Mike have finished cleaning up the mess left behind by their handling of the Werner Ziegler escape, but they still have to deal with Lalo Salamanca. Mike is on "downtime", drinking heavily to forget about what he had to do to Werner, with Fring engaging Nacho to spy on Lalo. Their plan involves framing Lalo for murders he didn't commit, then having Jimmy spring him on a huge bail -- forcing Lalo to flee back to Mexico. Mike is mugged by a gang of local youths and wakes up in a village in Mexico. Meanwhile, Hank and his partner at the DEA make the scene and are entwined in the plot to frame Lalo. They are led to pre-planned dead drops that Gus gives up in order to sell the story. Kim tires of working for Mesa Verde and Schweikart, finding much more interest in her scams with Jimmy and her pro-bono work. One of the long scams is to get Jimmy on board as the lawyer for a homesteading holdout on land that Mesa Verde wants to build a call center on. Kim enjoys tweaking Kevin, the arrogant boss of Mesa Verde. In the end, she convinces him -- rightly -- that the clusterfuck is his own fault for having ignored her advice every step of the way and instead giving way to pride. With Kim at home, Jimmy rides out into the desert to pick up Lalo's $7 million bail. He, of course, gets ambushed. He is rescued by Mike and his sniper rifle. They travel two days and a night through the desert until they reach civilization. Kim is worried sick, but only slowly learns of what really happened. Despite Jimmy's misgivings, Kim wants to stick by him and continue working with him instead of finding "real" work. Lalo forces Jimmy to drive him back to the desert, discovering that things didn't go down the way Jimmy had described. Kim tears Lalo a new one, convincing him that Jimmy isn't lying (which he is, of course). Lalo returns to Mexico with Nacho, only to head straight into an ambush planned by Don Eladio and Fring. Lalo is craftier than the supposed super-assassins, taking them all out and surviving, but forcing the remaining assassin to report in that he'd been killed. There's so much visual and auditory goodness in this show. Vince Gilligan is the Tarentino of television. His characters are rich, his storylines fascinating, his composition and shot-selection top-notch. Captain Marvel (2019) -- "8/10" This is the origin story of Carol Danvers (Brie Larson). We meet Vers (also Brie Larson), a Kree warrior who is part of special forces that attack and take out Skrull strongholds. The Kree and Skrulls are locked in an age-old war, with the shape-shifting Skrulls as the sneaky and devious enemy to be routed. The story is told as a series of flashbacks, in which Vers remembers another life, apparently on Earth. It turns out that Vers used to be Carol Danvers, a test pilot who'd supposedly died in 1989, while testing a faster-than-light engine that had been developed by Dr. Wendy Lawson, who turns out to have been a Kree hiding on Earth named Mar-Vell. As the story progresses, we learn more about Danvers and more about the Skrulls, who (spoiler alert) turn out out to be the good guys, hounded to the ends of the galaxy by the imperialist Kree. Danvers discovers that her not-inconsiderable powers are being restricted by a Kree suppression device stuck to her neck. She also re-learns her own history, remembering how she'd gotten her powers in the explosion of the FTL-engine explosion. She'd destroyed the engine to prevent the Kree from having it and somehow ended up absorbing the energy before ending up in a coma. The Kree gathered her up and collected her as a weapon for themselves, brainwashing her into thinking she was one of them. In the end, Captain Marvel routs the Kree, sending them packing, while simultaneously protecting the remaining Skrulls. She accompanies them on their journey to find a new home planet. There was also a cat that was really an alien being that ate the Tesseract, scratched out Nick Fury's eye, and then puked the Tesseract back up many years later. It was a decent romp -- better than expected and way better than Black Panther. Broken: Deadly Dressers -- "4/10" This is a documentary that doesn't know what it wants to be. It starts off with a story of people whose children have pulled dressers down on themselves. It moved on to Ikea and its forestry practices in Romania and then quickly returns to the dearth of regulation in the States and the glory of tort law that will help that poor handful of people who lost a child to "Deadly Dressers". Since the documentary focuses laser-like on them, we learn too much about the people leading the charge for more regulation of furniture-construction practices. I am not making this up. These people are clearly completely unable to accept any responsibility for their own homes. It’s clearly the manufacturer’s fault because they (A) bought the cheapest thing they could find and (B) don’t know how to put things together or follow instructions and (C) left their children unattended. They also probably consistently believe in a worldview that thinks it’s perfectly fine to have everything as cheap as possible, while getting rid of all tradespeople. They buy and build their furniture themselves and have no idea what they’re doing. It doesn’t even occur to them that doing this kind of thing is a job that requires training. They think that they can do anything -- that they have to if they want to afford the finer things -- and if something goes wrong, it’s someone else’s fault. They also let all government and regulation languish in the name of freedom, then cry when their children are victims of their selfish mindset and voting practices. This is uniquely American: they have no regulations, no tradespeople, and everything as cheap as possible, addressing any possible problem with tort law rather than a functioning civilization or social-safety net. Europeans just get the wall anchors and ignore them, because almost no situation calls for it. A house with adults won’t have furniture tipping over. They kept talking about the dressers as if they'd attacked the children. As an adult, I don’t want a dresser with drawers that barely open just because six kids died over five years in America. WTF. It’s like those crippled-ass car windows that only lower 1/2-way because some dipshit fell out of one once. I thought the short segment about Austrian companies logging on protected, national lands in Romania and then selling the wood to Ikea was a good start, but it ended too soon and devolved quickly back to a sixty-minutes/Hard Copy-style commiseration with people who'd lost children, but really didn't have a legal or rational leg to stand on. Song of the South (1946) -- "7/10" This movie tells the story of kindly old Uncle Remus (James Basket), a "field hand" on a plantation in the South who tells the stories of Br'er (Brother) Rabbit, Fox and Bear. The film mixes animation and live action that was both quite convincing and also quite ahead of its time. This is the Disney movie no-one is allowed to see anymore. Disney never distributed it on home video in the U.S. because it was seen as offensive because of the idealized depiction of black life on the plantation in the antebellum South. Not only that, but all of the black characters speak in a very local and uniquely Black vernacular. This stands in stark contrast to the stodgy and quasi-British-sounding American spoken by the white cast. On the other hand, it's a very diverse cast -- especially for the time -- and the strong dialect doesn't really strike someone who lives in Switzerland as odd. If Spike Lee had made the movie, it would be considered to be a brave and bold move to let its characters speak the way they'd spoken at the time. It's not that they speak poorly -- just in a strong dialect. For example, Remus tells Johnny (Bobby Driscoll) at one point that he'd better behave "before I’s gets fractious!" This was not only amusing, but it's a pretty high-brow word that most people don't even know, much less use in day-to-day conversation. The plot is relatively simple, with Johnny the city boy visiting his Grandmother on her plantation. He's sad because his father is away so much, but he befriends local boy Toby (Glenn Leedy) and they spend the summer playing with frogs and stuff. They also befriend Uncle Remus, who tells them the by-now famous stories of Br'er Rabbit and the Tar Baby, the Briar Patch, and the Laughing Place. There's a bit of drama with other local boys, a bull being a bull when it knocks Johnny clean off of his Little-Lord-Fauntleroy-looking feet, and a bunch of singing. It's not my favorite Disney movie (that would be The Emperor's New Groove), but it's not half-bad. The Outsiders (1983) -- "7/10" Francis Ford Coppola directed this adaptation of the YA novel. The Outsiders are the "greasers", a gang comprising the three brothers Ponyboy (C. Thomas Howell), Sodapop (Rob Lowe), and Darrel Curtis (Patrick Swayze) as well as Dallas (Matt Dillon), Johnny (Ralph Macchio), and the brothers Two-Bit (Emilio Estevez), and Steve Randle (Tom Cruise). Diane Lane plays Cherry, a "Soc" (pronounced "Sosh") -- the rival gang, from the "right" side of the tracks -- who takes to Johnny, ignoring Dallas's coarse advances. The story focuses on Ponyboy's coming-of-age in the gang. Darrel and Sodapop take care of him after their parents died. The town doesn't take kindly to this family constellation, conveniently ignoring the fact that it isn't at all their fault that they're orphans. The Socs (pronounced "Soshes") keep harassing the greasers, finally cornering Johnny and Ponyboy in a park, near a fountain. When it looks like they're drowning Ponyboy in the fountain, Johnny rears up, pulls his switchblade and fatally stabs a Soc to make them stop. They flee the scene, seeking out Dallas where he lives above a bar. He gives them $50 and tells them to catch a freight train out of town, head out to the country, and take refuge in an abandoned, boarded-up church. They hike out there, then Johnny purchases supplies to feed them and pass the time. They cut and color their hair to stay unrecognizable. This goes remarkably well considering their complete lack of experience and poor supplies. A few days later -- and just before they die of boredom -- Dallas shakes them out of their sleep on the old pews and takes them out for something to eat. They return to the abandoned church to find it not only on fire, but surrounded by people and filled with children. This is utterly inexplicable: how did the children break in? Why were they there? Why are all of those people there? I thought it was an abandoned church in the middle of nowhere? At any rate, the three boys rescue the children, with Dallas and Johnny suffering injuries. Johnny's injuries are severe -- his back is broken and he is severely burned. The Socs call for a rumble and the Greasers oblige. They meet in a park and beat the Christ out of one another, with the Greasers "winning" (in the sense that the Socs flee). Dallas drives Ponyboy to the hospital to attend to his wounds and they visit Johnny to tell him what they'd done. He's unimpressed and instead tells Ponyboy to "Stay Gold" (from the Robert Frost poem "Nothing Gold Can Stay" ) before expiring. Dallas can't handle Johnny's death and goes on a rampage in the hospital before robbing a convenience store and getting shot in the process. He wanders into a park, committing suicide by cop by waving his empty weapon at them. Ponyboy is cleared of any wrongdoing in the Soc's murder and allowed to stay with his brothers. He discovers a letter from Johnny explaining that rescuing those children was likely the best thing he would ever do -- that his life in exchange was worth it. The movie ends with Ponyboy starting to write the report that would become The Outsiders. It was a decent film, with a star-studded cast, but with the ridiculous-feeling pathos of any movie about the 50s. Coppola's touch is noticeable throughout. Leslie Jones: Time Machine (2020) -- "6/10" Leslie Jones starts off quite strong. "This generation's 20-year-olds are not having fun. They're so unhappy. What's the matter? Didn't you catch your Pokemon? Did Pikachu get away?" While the first half was pretty strong, the second half used up all of this goodwill and went off the rails. The material ran out, in a big way. Jones seemed to lose control of the narrative and stretched her material heroically but unconvincingly. She spent a lot of time explaining how much fun she was having and how much she appreciated the audience. It was less a comedy show than a self-help group for at least the final 35 minutes. Im Labyrinth des Schweigens (2014, de) -- "8/10" This is the story of how Germany came to grips with its history during WWII. The "Nürnberg Trials" in 1945 and 1946 addressed some of the high crimes, but a large number of other high-ranking Nazis blended back into society without paying for their crimes. Johann Radmann (Alexander Fehling) is a young and ambitious lawyer who wants justice. He starts to dig into the culture of complacency and silence in Germany, with the goal of bringing Joseph Mengele to justice. He encounters quite a bit of backlash, "Willst du das jeden Jungen in diesem Land fragt sich, ob seinen Vater ein Nazi war? "Radmann: Ja, das ill ich. Ich will, dass dieses Lügen und dieses Schweigen endlich aufhört." When he finds out his best friend and supporter was a guard when he was 17, he says "du ekelst mich an; ihre alle ekeln mich an." Later, he gets spectacularly drunk because he found out that his father was a Nazi and that his girlfriend's father was probably a Nazi (he tells her, "frag ihn warum er dauernd sauft."). When he returns to the Staatsanwaltsschaft after quitting in a crisis of faith, his boss asks, "Warum sind sie wieder da? "Radmann: Weil die einzige Antwort auf Auschwitz ist selbst das richtige zu tun." It's quite a good movie and a solid re-telling of how Germany picked up the reins of dealing with its past nearly a dozen years after the end of the war. One of the former prisoners intones the by-now familiar "Gott war nicht da," reminding me of the joke I'd heard from both "Slavoj Žižek" and "Ricky Gervais" , An Auschwitz survivor eventually dies of old age and goes to heaven. He tells God a Holocaust joke. God responds "that's not funny." "I guess you had to be there." Saw it in German. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4025 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4025 Sat, 29 Aug 2020 15:45:46 +0200 of around 1400 ratings publicly available. I've included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other -- I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. QT8: The First Eight (2019) -- "9/10" A must-see for fans of Quentin Tarentino, this documentary features interviews with Michael Madsen, Samuel Jackson, Jamie Foxx, Diane Kruger, Zoë Bell, Eli Roth, Kurt Russell, Christoph Waltz, and many more. The film examines each of Tarentino's films, in turn, providing history and context and showing how they are intertwined (e.g. Red Apple Cigarettes, but also recurring characters as well as related characters over the hundred years of history covered by his films). The last film is his most recent one, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. He is an autodidact filmmaker with an encyclopedic knowledge of film and television and technique. He is an accomplished writer and knows how to write parts for anyone, including memorable dialogue. He seems to be pretty universally loved by those who work with him (I know it's a documentary about him, but they could have definitely put things differently if they were trying to suggest that he was sometimes difficult -- the documentaries on Stanley Kubrick can't help but discuss how notoriously difficult he was on set, for example). Zoë Bell tells a story of how she had to do a stunt scene in Death Proof twice, even though she nailed it the first time. Tarentino cast her as the lead because she's a stuntwoman (for Uma Thurman in Kill Bill) and he wanted to showcase actors that normally don't get leads. When she did the scene "perfectly", she'd hidden her face the whole time. Tarentino had to point that out to her and remind her that she's the star this time and that's why she unfortunately had to film it again. I was pretty engrossed from start to finish and had all I could do not to queue up his films again to re-examine them in light of what I'd learned. Highly recommended. Ein amerikanischer Held: Die Geschichte des Colin Kaepernick (2019) -- "8/10" This is a short documentary about the life of Colin Kaepernick. You can watch it at "Arte" . Colin's mother put him up for adoption when he was just a baby. He soon moved to California with his family. As he grew up, he quickly showed a gift for sports, making all-state in the huge state of California in football, basketball, and baseball in his senior year in high school. He excelled in baseball, but wanted to play football. He was even drafted by the Cubs while in college, but he turned it down to keep playing football. He broke all sort of records and maintained a 4.0 GPA. Kapaernick was drafted out of college by the 49ers, where he would finish his truncated career. He was always quiet in press conferences and considered aloof and above it all. People of course didn't consider that he was an intelligent human being -- he probably thought press conferences with their ceremony and Kabuki-like questions were stupid. He took a knee during the national anthem as a silent protest against police violence that was disproportionately killing black people. The 49ers distanced themselves from his and he was soon blackballed from the NFL. The nation was united in its hatred for this upstart coward who hated America. It was at this time that he started giving real press conferences -- at a time when the press, and America, mostly just wanted him to shut up and go away. He will never play football in America again, despite easily being one of the 16 best quarterbacks in the world. Nike has continued his contract, piggybacking on his activism to sell more shoes made by child slaves. This is problematic, but Kaepernick's reach is wide with Nike's support. The man seems genuine and intelligent and an incredible athlete. It's not surprising that America hates him, though, as he's uppity and has his own opinions, which is far from appropriate for any black man, to say nothing of someone who America deems an athlete. Pick a lane, shithead. American racism is a palpable and nearly unbelievable thing. The documentary is flattering and honest and well-made. I enjoyed learning more about Kaepernick and am not surprised to see that it was made in Germany, where they absolutely love the hell out of football. Lilian Thuram was an interesting interview, as was good old Patrick "Coach" Esume, who's hands-down the best football announcer I've heard. His knowledge of the game is formidable. He announces in German, though, so YMMV. The Laundromat (2019) -- "8/10" This is a film by Stephen Soderbergh about, well, it's technically about the Panama Papers but it's much more about the class, financial, political, and legal structure that these papers revealed. We see the passage of money through several prisms, from a fraudulent fly-by-night insurance company to the company that owns that company to the person who owns the network of companies that owns that company and so on and so forth. The main thread is based on a true story. A tourism boating operator thought he'd save money by getting much cheaper insurance from an unknown company. He went for the lowest price -- "wouldn't anyone have done the same?" -- and ended up having no insurance at all when his boat capsized. Nothing to sue. No settlements. Meryl Streep plays a woman Ellen Martin whose husband drowned. The story follows her attempts to follow the threads back to the source, peeling the infinite onion of shell companies. We meet a family with a giant mansion just as the wealthy father's college-age daughter discovers that he's been sleeping with her roommate. He gives her a $15-million company to buy her silence -- just as he did with her mother the last time she caught him cheating. When they gang up on him and try to cash in, they discover that he's already moved the value away from their bearer bonds and that it is all worth nothing. The story is told by the two main lawyers, Jürgen Mossack (Gary Oldman) and Ramón Fonseca (Antonio Banderas), of the law firm that hosted and enabled the giant tax haven in Panama for dozens of thousands of companies and investors from all over the world. There were employees of the company who "owned" thousands of companies. The two make pointed arguments about how the U.S. State of Delaware is literally no different from Panama in nearly every legal regard. The U.S. just doesn't eat its own that way -- they prefer to pretend that tax havens are a purely offshore problem. (Side note: Who was a Senator from Delaware for 36 years? Why, good ol' Joe Biden. Funny thing, that.) The papers came out and things unraveled. Soderbergh does a masterful job of showing the complexity, mendacity, corruption, and base amorality of most of the people involved. They amass more and more and more and care not one whit for how many lives they destroy and how much suffering they cause along the way. It is all immaterial to them. The final few minutes of the film show Meryl Streep revealing that she'd been Elena, a secretary at Mossack Fonseca, all along. She's reading the manifesto of one John Doe, who'd released the Panama Papers to the world, first as Elena, then as Ellen Martin, then as herself. You can read "the manifesto online" , from which I've cited below. "Shell companies are often associated with the crime of tax evasion, but the Panama Papers show beyond a shadow of a doubt that although shell companies are not illegal by definition, they are used to carry out a wide array of serious crimes that go beyond evading taxes. "[...] "Tax evasion cannot possibly be fixed while elected officials are pleading for money from the very elites who have the strongest incentives to avoid taxes relative to any other segment of the population. "[...] "The collective impact of these failures has been a complete erosion of ethical standards, ultimately leading to a novel system we still call Capitalism, but which is tantamount to economic slavery. In this system—our system—the slaves are unaware both of their status and of their masters, who exist in a world apart where the intangible shackles are carefully hidden amongst reams of unreachable legalese. The horrific magnitude of detriment to the world should shock us all awake." "A Class Divided" (1985) -- "9/10" This is a 53-minute documentary about Jane Elliot's experiment in teaching people about racism and discrimination. In 1968, shortly after Martin Luther King's death, she ran a two-day exercise with her third-grade class to teach them about what it feels like to live in an underclass, to be discriminated against. She starts by affirming that everyone in her class is aware of discrimination and what it means to be on the losing side. The children know that blacks are discriminated against. After ascertaining this, Elliot divides her class not by skin color -- which would have been moot in the 1960s in Riceville, Iowa -- but by eye color, which seems to have gotten her about a 50/50 split. The children take to the exercise soon enough, especially with her unwavering guidance. On the first day, it's the blue-eyed children who get more time for recess, who get all sorts of other little perks that are important to them. The brown-eyed children get denigration at every turn, reproach for not being good enough, or quiet enough, or smart enough. At every opportunity, Elliot -- and, soon, the blue-eyed children -- ascribes every one of the brown-eyed perceived children's deficits to their having brown eyes. The next morning, Elliot switches roles. Now, brown-eyed children are superior to blue-eyed children. They spend a day like this, with the previously privileged blue-eyed children experiencing the shock of disapproval -- of not being able to do anything right. Their perceived detriments are constantly ascribed to something that they can't change about themselves. The connection between their treatment and the color of their eyes is absolutely unfathomable for them. The brown-eyed children, given their experience the day prior, are at first leery, but soon settle into their roles of having a permanent, unshakeable advantage over their classmates. It's not comfortable for anyone, but the effects on understanding, even with small children, are impressive. They are really nice little kids. They don't turn into monsters, but they're only given a day. Imagine what a lifetime of this indoctrination does: after a while, the rulers no longer even think to question their advantage, conferred on them by something ludicrous like the color of a particular body part; the subjects eventually accept their fate, constructing their lives so that they are reminded as little as possible of their innate and unchangeable failing. Everyone has internalized the ground rules. Elliot modeled her behavior on classic discrimination techniques -- they appear nearly to be torture techniques. They are very effective. Interwoven throughout the film is a class reunion comprising Elliot and her third-graders, over a dozen years later. They all seem to have turned out all right -- above average in enlightenment, actually. We also see her holding a seminar with prison guards, where she again divides them into two groups and engages the services of one group to absolutely mercilessly discriminate and denigrate the other. As with her third-grade class, no matter what the subjected group does, it's wrong; when the ruling group does the same thing, it's laudable. You can nearly see spirits being crushed, in real-time, in the span of a single day. Imagine what a whole lifetime of that is like. And then close your mouth the next time you, as a member of the privileged group, thinks it's your turn to equivocate their situation for them. "8:46" by Dave Chappelle (2020) -- "8/10" Dave Chappelle delivers a short set, not a comedy show but an essay about the 2020 uprising. He talks knowledgeably about the various victims over the years, but that George Floyd was the final straw. To those who say that George was not a nice guy, a criminal -- Chappelle singles out the execrable Candace Owens for opprobrium -- he responds vehemently: "We didn't choose him. You did." He tells the story of "Christopher Dormer" , a former LA cop. He reported his partner for excessive force and was drummed out of the police for it. They closed ranks on him and blocked every possible avenue for reinstatement. As a military veteran and former cop, he declares "asymmetric warfare" on the police and ambushed and murdered two of them in their car. He hunted down the family of another and killed his young daughter. They hunted him down to a cabin in Big Bear -- 400 officers showed up to take this guy out and they "Swiss-cheesed" him. Those cops were justifiably out-of-their-minds angry because this man was killing them indiscriminately. Chappelle ends with "so how could they understand why we're so mad now?" His style seems quite extemporaneous, but it's clear he did his research and, despite a lot of nervous sliding around on the stool and picking up and dropping his journal, he's practices this routine and had it cold. His delivery, with pauses, was brilliant and perfectly suited to the material. It was better to see that he was disturbed to be talking about this, not at all at ease. Makeup Mayhem (2019) -- "5/10" This is a documentary about the makeup industry as it exists today. It focuses on the drastic increase of brands promoted purely through social media and online tutorial videos. The focus is laser-like on the badness of counterfeit makeup of these brands. The film only very casually mentions the tricks these brands use to drive prices up and to torture their captured market into buying unnecessary goods at exorbitant prices. It basically lauds the rise of social-media-driven brands as a way for "regular" people to get involved. Instead, it seems to be a way of marketing makeup to a new generation with an advertising weapon much more powerful than television advertising before. Their main interview here is Marlena Stell, a plus-size influencer, so she's basically untouchable as far as criticizing her business model. Another main interview is Lexy Lebsack, a "Senior Beauty Editor" at some magazine. No-one mentions what utter horseshit the whole industry really is, obviously. The counterfeit goods are empirically bad because they are made with quite dangerous replacement chemicals. The documentary brought exactly one example of a girl who'd ended up getting her lips glued together by a counterfeit product that basically included super-glue (or a crucial component thereof). They do mention that the counterfeits are getting better all the time. I would imagine that, at some point, the counterfeits will be indistinguishable from the originals except that they come in at a much lower price-point. At that poin, the safety question will be gone and the documentary would be stuck trying to justify why it makes sense to coerce/trick/brainwash so many people into paying way too much for a brand name distributed by billionaires. The documentary very cleverly keep contrasting a factory for ColourPop cosmetics with an undercover video of a Chinese counterfeit-production facility. The ColourPop factory looks like a laboratory and the Chinese facility is hardly worth of that epithet -- it looks like a couple of rented rooms. At least the Chinese workers are wearing their masks properly, pulled over their noses. The film then simply allows the viewer to assume that all of the other name brands that it shows are also produced in a manner similar to ColourPop, which is almost certainly not the case. The film is about 70% interviews with industry people, so it's hard not to think that it's a 60-minute advertisement for certain lines of makeup. Rick Ishitani is sympathetic as one of only two LA police officers assigned to the counterfeit beat. I can't really recommend it. Big Vape (2019) -- "6/10" This is a documentary about vaping. It discusses the impact on American teenagers along with the rise of Juul and its subsequent purchase by the Altria Group (now the parent company of Philip Morris International). As with the makeup documentary, this director and writer is quite careful not to offend anyone: they say again and again that vapes had been "[i]nitially designed for adult use". Looking at a Juul, though, that's pretty hard to believe. It seems to be magically designed exactly to appeal to teenagers. The teenagers in the documentary aren't really discerning customers: they quickly spend everything they can to get as many hits as they can. They are clearly addicted to nicotine. The interviews with the billionaire owner of Juul are not interesting, as they are quite obviously scripted and heavily edited. Though morbidly entertaining, watching the rich white girls explain how they had no idea that they were smoking also quickly grows old. The most interesting interviews are with addiction experts, especially those in England. They state that 50% of the people who smoke die of smoking-related illness. For them, vapes are a way to reliably wean people off of cigarettes. Vapes and E-cigarettes are 95% safer. They're still not perfect, but they're a lot safer. Without E-Cigarettes, there was no reliable way to get people to quit smoking for good. Patches didn't work; cold turkey worked only too rarely. Recycling Sham (2019) -- "7/10" This is a documentary about single-use plastic products. The myth is that plastic can and will be recycled, but the reality is much more complicated. First of all, the companies using plastic are only too happy to have their customers convinced that the burden of making sustainable packaging actually work lies with the consumer rather than the producer. Second of all, even if plastic can be recycled doesn't mean that it will be recycled. In particular, China used to receive a tremendous amount of trash/recycling from the West and stopped it completely in recent years. No-one has really picked up the slack and a lot of plastic no longer gets recycled -- even the plastic that ostensibly could be recycled. Another issue is that plastic can't be nearly infinitely recycled like aluminum. Instead, many types of plastic have polymers that can't be "rebuilt" to their original material and must either be converted to other, lower types of plastic or just shredded to be used as material in other construction. A plastic bottle will not come back as a plastic bottle. That's why glass bottles are overall better: they can be reused hundreds of times. They are heavier, incurring higher transport energy and cost, but they only need to be washed in order to be refiled and reused. Many uses of plastic are purely for fictitious convenience, redounding to the manufacturer rather than the consumer. There is no reason for many things to be plastic -- yet more and more things are made of it. Overall, this is an informative and solid documentary with not too much bias in it (other than to intimate that China was being a dick when they stopped accepting foreign materials for recycling). Jim Jeffries: Intolerant (2020) -- "7/10" This special contains a bunch of clever material, pointedly lashing back at the overly PC world envisioned by identitarians and the professionally offended. He had some good jokes, but weaved a long-form joke about having diarrhea throughout the special, which was occasionally funny, but wore a bit thin, I thought. He presented well and he's very clever, but thinking about his pants filling with liquid shit distracted a bit too much from his humor. That is, he seems to be straddling shock humor and insightful/philosophical humor. I don't think he needs the crutch of poop jokes anymore. His frontal attacks at those who would destroy comedy provide enough shock value, I think. I prefer his earlier work but YMMV. Jack Whitehall: I'm Only Joking (2020) -- "6/10" Whitehall's on-stage persona is very bombastic, which papers over often-thin jokes with his leading the audience very clearly to their laugh lines. He's also occasionally clever, but much broader and not super-insightful. That is, his material is standard, not surprising, but well-presented. He's funny not because of his material, per se, but because of himself. He's a good raconteur, but leans a bit much on how silly his dad is (of which you kind of have to be aware in order to understand about a third of the material). Battlestar Galactica S03 (2006--2007) -- "6/10" There are good parts to this season. The overall story arc is pretty interesting and there is a pretty good use of some of the devices in the show (e.g. when Cylon Sharon has her husband Helo shoot her so that she can travel via resurrection ship to the Cylon baseship, a journey they would have been unable to safely make by conventional transport). However, this season does more than the previous two to being your allegiance over to the Cylon side. The humans are under a ton of pressure, but they are nearly uniformly assholes -- and drunken assholes, at that. The deterioration is understandable, but it doesn't make for particularly entertaining television. The show sometimes fills like one scene after another that's nearly specifically designed to polarize and make you hate one or the other or both of the participants. Vigilante justice is the call of the day: Kara's a drunken shit who's on board with it. Her husband is a bit better, but largely ineffective and also unable to stay away from her drunken, likely clap-ridden ass. Also, rockets have smoke trails in space. Ships catch on fire, in space. In the beginning, we were told that the Steampunk-nature of the Galactica was so that the Cylons couldn't track them. But they have a faster-than-light (FTL) drive on nearly every ship, no matter how small. They seem to have FTL communications, able to communicate instantaneously with ships that are at least one light-jump away. I'm glad I stuck with it long enough to be able to enjoy Gaius Baltar's lawyer, Romo Lampkin, played by Mark Sheppard. The trial was also interesting in ways that much of the overblown dialogue and deliberately manipulative intrigue was not. Apollo redeems himself a bit by defying his father and leaving the navy to play lawyer for Gaius Baltar, albeit only temporarily. He ends up delivering the testimony that convinces the court to spare Baltar's life. The president and admiral showed themselves to be much more authoritarian than they'd led us to originally believe. Tigh, Galen Tyrol, Anders, and Tory all turn out to be Cylons (4 of the heretofore unknown 5) but no-one else but them know it. They agree to keep it a secret and don't do anything about it, returning to their relatively sensitive positions as either leaders or advisors to leaders. Baltar is definitely not a Cylon. Nothing is really done with any of this information as yet. Starbuck dies in the middle of the season (I'm sure she'll be back, as alluded in the final minutes of the final episode, where she pops up out of nowhere and claims to have "found Earth"). The season ends with humanity still searching for Earth, with the Admiral and President consolidating power -- but barely clinging to it. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3962 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3962 Thu, 02 Jul 2020 07:26:15 +0200 -- "8/10" 2. "Planet of the Humans (2019)" <#Planet> -- "4/10" 3. "Never Say Never Again (1983)" <#Never> -- "7/10" 4. "Jerry Seinfeld: 23 Hours to Kill (2020)" <#Jerry> -- "9/10" 5. "The Living Daylights (1987)" <#The> -- "7/10" 6. "Justice League (2017)" <#Justice> -- "5/10" 7. "Patton Oswalt: I Love Everything (2020)" <#Patton> -- "5/10" 8. "Bob Rubin: Oddities and Rarities (2020)" <#Bob> -- "8/10" 9. "Kim's Convenience S04 (2020)" <#Kim> -- "7/10" 10. "This Is 40 (2012)" <#This> -- "6/10" These are my notes to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. I've recently transferred my reviews to IMDb and made "the list" of around 1400 ratings publicly available. I've included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other -- I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. After Life S02 (2020) -- "8/10" The first season was excellent. Season two continues with most of the same characters. It's a bit more maudlin than season one -- especially the closing credits music, which is so deliberately sad for most of the six episodes that I usually cut it off rather than listen to it. [1] Ricky Gervais reprises his role as Tony, a man struggling to see the point in going on after his wife dies of cancer. He has good days and bad days. He wakes most mornings to videos of his dead wife; he falls asleep most nights with a bottle wine and the same videos. He tries to stop drinking for a while, but doesn't see the point. He makes peace with his odd postman (Joe Wilkinson) and then sets him up with Roxy (Roisin Conaty). They seem to hit it off. Tony tries to see his father's nurse (Ashley Jensen) romantically, but he's not ready yet. Co-worker Lenny (Tony Way) starts seeing the mother of one of the newspaper subjects. The boy is in a local theater club that Tony's newspaper also covers. Sandy's unhappy because she's 30 and still living at home with her parents. Tony's brother-in-law and editor Matt (Tom Basden) is in the dumps because his wife wants to leave him. They turn it around by the end of the season, though, and stay together. Tony's cemetery friend Anne is also lonely, so Tony sets her up with the new owner of the newspaper -- a millionaire who Tony convinces to keep the newspaper going. It's all a bit maudlin, but has some good writing. It's also quite believable and held together by a funny, but earnest Gervais. Season 1 was funnier (I thought Gervais was funnier when bitter), but this season went in a different, but also interesting direction. Planet of the Humans (2019) -- "4/10" This is a pretty sloppily made and slipshod documentary about a very important topic. It relies too much on hot takes, visual clickbait, and gotcha editing. The first 12 minutes are boring as hell, completely light on information, and don't really advance anything of note. You can read into this film what you want, which means it doesn't serve very well as a documentary. Some will see it as a wake-up call telling us to beware of green hucksters shilling for large corporate interests and subsuming activist vigor into ecologically useless directions. They will see it as a call to focus on real green policies instead -- without really mentioning what those might be, because every alternate-energy avenue available was painted as an utter fraud. The topic is greenwashing, a process whereby energy put into fighting for the environment and against climate change is subsumed and rerouted to climatologically damaging solutions promulgated by the same companies that have been inflicting fossil fuels on us for over a century (e.g. BP). It's the same old story: we need to do something vastly different than what we're doing now, but capitalism has ensured that only those who benefit massively from the current system continuing unchanged have the wherewithal to do so, and they are only willing to change at all if there is enough political pressure and they can reroute the initiatives to pour even more money into their coffers. They really don't care how it's done: fossil fuels have given them a money-making machine that is unparalleled in history, but they will happily trade it for another such machine as long as it's just as lucrative for them and if they get some annoying bad publicity off of their backs. They are not willing to do anything that involves their money spigot being turned ever-so-slightly in the direction of "not overwhelmingly torrential" and they couldn't care less about the future of humanity. That these companies throw around a lot of clout and cash and also talk a good game -- by hiring the best PR people with said scads of cash -- has gone a long way to drawing the less-serious -- and even very serious, but gullible -- green activists and groups into their sphere of influence. The system almost doesn't allow for anything else to happen, to be honest. Activists who don't kowtow, at least in part, are left with meager/starvation budgets and nearly zero effectiveness outside of the small sphere of people who are already true believers and would be convinced by data and for free. Activists who try to ride the edge of support from the enemy are massively outgunned and often don't even know when they've been turned until it's too late. They can try to steer a better course afterward, but the stain remains on their history, to be sniffed out and used against them to obviate anything else they've ever done. Which is only fitting, considering the time frame we have left to do anything about an event that, if not quite extinction-level, will be deadly for a large part of humanity and very uncomfortable for anyone unfortunate enough to have survived. Large groups, like the Sierra Club, have long since grown to a size that they benefit from the status quo in a way that makes it impossible for them to effect meaningful change, as such change would saw off the branch that they're sitting on. Some of these groups have long since adopted such a corporate structure that the battle between members who want to actually effect change and top-level members who want to turn a profit have long since been settled in favor of the latter, which leads to the larger groups essentially managing the giant pile of membership dues like a hedge fund. The actual members themselves are happy to give up a minuscule part of their fortunes/incomes in exchange for a clean conscience. Others contribute money or time because they genuinely feel that they're making a difference in the right direction. Sometimes they kind of are, but a lot of times, they're also kind of being duped by the marketing and PR arms of these large organizations, which prey on its members' gullibility and lack of introspection into what's really going on. These members really aren't educated or informed enough to determine that what they're supporting is neither very "green" nor very sustainable or scalable. There is a ton of misinformation in both directions -- some of it in this documentary, which plays even-more fast-and-loose with the facts than Michael Moore himself typically would. One of the main points in this film is that solar panels are made of stuff that comes from the ground. This isn't shocking for people with a science background -- or any sense in their heads -- but it is definitely very much at-odds with the message these so-called green titans of industry are sending and that their members are eating up because, quite frankly, it makes them feel good and they're absolutely not informed enough to even suspect that it might not be true. It's a good idea to show people how solar panels are manufactured and that we're not nearly where we want to be yet, despite assurances from companies who want your money in exchange for a clean conscience. But the implication seems to be that, were we not to use solar panels, we would stop using all of the materials that go into them. They go on to teach us that solar panels and wind turbines can be managed poorly and go to seed. Also, deserts have sand in them. Scandal. The scandal is, rather, that they have our attention on this movie and fail to get the message across that it's our lifestyles in the first world and particularly in America that rely on so many exotic materials and multi-layered industrial processes and enormously long and complex supply chains filled with fossil-fuel-driven transportation and manufacturing methods. Instead of using our remaining oil for important things -- building the next generation of fossil-fuel-free energy sources and (maybe, though doubtfully) grids -- we're still reliant and happily duped that nothing really has to change. That's the message the film should have hammered home -- and that, according to the interviews I've seen with Jeff Gibbs, it thinks it hammered home -- but that got lost in "eating their own". Most people believe so many laughably false things before breakfast that believing that solar panels and Teslas magically create themselves doesn't even register a blip on their radar. I hope no-one ever tells them how their smartphones are made -- hint: rare-earth metals and shocking amounts of electricity, distilled water, and what amounts to slave labor. The fossil-fuel-based economy is a prerequisite in order to produce these relatively sophisticated bits of technology. The fossil-fuel economy produces 90% of our energy and fossil fuels are currently the only way of bootstrapping a non-fossil-fuel economy in any realistic scenario. It's true that companies are deliberately papering over these facts in order not to ruffle the feathers of their sensitive donors -- because those donors are paying good money for a clean conscience and there's no room for nuance or the messy complexity of a realistic plan. All of that is exceedingly interesting, I think, but it's not obviously in the movie. That is, I don't believe that the director did a good job of getting this message across because he included so much distracting gotcha bullshit, interviews with weirdos with weird ideas, and footage of animals dying and earth being torn up. Instead, they allude to this all the time and generally pinpoint Bill McKibben as a major purveyor of greenwashing propaganda, which is, frankly, gobsmacking, if you've read absolutely anything by him at all. He's done more for awareness of climate change than anyone, but they mercilessly eat their own in this "documentary" with no context or nuance given to spare McKibben the opprobrium he ended up getting afterward. That's when the Twitter-history--scouring hordes of virtue-signalers and purity-testers and know-it-alls show up to torpedo anyone who was ever useful for ever having been slightly less than perfect in careers that have often spanned decades of struggle and hardship. What has this horde ever done? Why, nothing, but that's neither here nor there. Their justice is swift and merciless, their appetite for feeding on the only ever-so slightly misaligned ally boundless. They don't even notice when their ostensible enemies (the climate-trashing internationals) manipulate their insatiable sense of outrage, wrath, and dopamine addiction into burning one potential ally after another in their service. The documentary mixes clips from over 15 years willy-nilly -- some of the clips are grainy and look like they were made with camcorders -- and doesn't even do the basics of including names or positions for everyone interviewed. It's a shoddy hack job with a sensationalist angle, bent on stirring up controversy at all costs. It could have been a much better movie, but it's not. If it were a blog post, it would have only ended up on crackpot sites because of its slapdash and lackadaisical approach to facts, verifiable data, and references. So: the idea is good; the problem is real; it's getting in the way of real solutions. The targets are poorly chosen and the documentary is poorly made and meandering, letting everyone get from it what they want. I feel like most people supporting it or panning it haven't really watched it carefully. I've seen interviews with Jeff Gibbs and with Michael Moore where they provided all of the context that was missing from the movie. This isn't very helpful as the movie doesn't stand on its own without two extra hours of director/producer commentary. It's a documentary, not an art film: it should be clearer. The interesting problem raised is that, instead of attacking the film for being terrible, its detractors tried to get the movie canceled from YouTube. It was temporarily taken down for a bullshit copyright violation -- 4 seconds of video lays well within fair-use law -- but it is back online now. So the film missed its opportunity to focus people on the very real problems it attempted to illuminate. Then, there was an opportunity to illuminate the very real problems of the modern-day book-burning that is cancel culture -- and how that feature of social networks is being weaponized by the very corporate interests that those doing the canceling should themselves be fighting against. Unfortunately, it has mostly sparked yet another stupid online war where people walk in with their opinions chiseled in stone, don't watch or read the content, and then just lay waste to as much of their enemy as they can with mean tweets. By now, everyone's forgotten about the film -- which, to be fair, they really should, because it's not good -- but they're also not thinking about the message it was trying to send. This would have been important regardless of how poorly communicated it was, because it's an important message. I assign equal blame to the filmmakers and what the filmmaker saw as his target audience. Gibbs should have realized he couldn't try to send a message so at-odds with what people already knew in such a lazy and half-assed way. Maybe he doesn't know how to make any other kind of film, I'm not judging that. But the audience is also to blame for being attention-seeking, brigading idiots without a rational bone in their bodies. The film can't really be cited or taken seriously because of its flaws. You can take away a positive message that you should focus on real, useful policies and stop being hoodwinked by fake, corporate environmentalism -- but only if you took that attitude in with you in the first place. Its heart might be in the right place but it failed in its main duty as a documentary: to reliably and truthfully deliver information pertaining to its message. Never Say Never Again (1983) -- "7/10" Sean Connery reprises his role as 007 in an MI6 that no longer looks so kindly on his style of international espionage. They send him to a health resort where he foils an attempt on his own life, but is unable to foil S.P.E.C.T.R.E.'s plot to steal nuclear missiles. Fatima Blush (Barbara Carrera) seduces an Air Force Captain, who gets an eye transplant so that he can unlock the weapons as the president of the U.S. She kills him soon after and Blofeld (Max von Sydow) informs that the world that he holds it hostage until he's paid a ransom. With the situation changed, Bond is called back to duty. He heads to the Bahamas where he meets up with a bumbling liaison played by Rowan Atkinson and then with Fatima Blush, with whom he goes diving. She works for Maximillian Largo (Klaus Maria Brandauer), who reports to Blofeld. We are also quickly introduced to the very flexible Domino (Kim Basinger), Largo's captive/girlfriend. Bond goes on a dive with Blush (after first sleeping with her), who sics sharks on him and abandons him to his fate. He escapes, of course, and is fished out by a local fisherwoman (Valerie Leon). They come ashore and then back in the hotel room. [2] Blush tries to kill Bond again, but he's not in his room. Bond flies to Nice, France and meets up with Nicole (Saskia Cohen Tanugi) and CIA Agent Felix Leiter (Bernie Casey), where they pick up Largo's trail again. Bond sneaks into a spa and gives Domino a massage, pretending to work there. She enjoys the assault, of course, because he's such a dashing bloke. Later, he meets her in a video-game arcade and buys her a drink. Largo and Blush watches everything from afar. Largo and Bond end up playing a video game that induces pain to the loser. Bond wins, of course, and trades in his winnings for a dance with Domino -- a tango. Domino now knows that her brother is dead and she turns to Bond's side. Blush kills Nicole and Bond gives chase. A sweet-ass French-city car/motorcycle chase ensues. Bond blows up Fatima Blush using a pen-bazooka provided by Q (a very famous scene), after which Leiter rescues him from the local police (they make a slow escape as a cyclist/boxer pair, edging through the crowd). Leiter and Bond board Largo's boat, but are captured. Bond blows Domino's cover by kissing her, enraging Largo. Largo captures Bond and sells Domino to Arabs [3]. Bond escapes and rescues Domino, naturally. She will be eternally grateful -- but that comes later. Because first, Bond once again infiltrates yet another of Largo's lairs, this time ending up underwater in a spear-gun fight with Largo himself. Domino ends it, taking revenge for her dead brother (and maybe for having been callously sold to Arabs?), freeing up Bond to defuse the ticking nuclear warhead underwater. Bond saves the world and retires to the Bahamas with a much-younger and eternally grateful Domino who, luckily, has been accustomed to subservience by her previous lover/owner. Jerry Seinfeld: 23 Hours to Kill (2020) -- "9/10" A week later, I couldn't quote any of the jokes, but he's such a master of delivery, it almost doesn't matter what he's saying. He is clever and observational, but not uniquely so. I compare him to Emil Steinberger from Switzerland: he's funny, sometimes deeply so, but mostly he's actually entertaining to watch. I loved one bit on buffets: "What is the idea of the buffet? Well, things are bad, how can we make it worse? Why don't we put people that are already struggling with portion control into some kind of debauched, Caligula-food-orgy of unlimited human consumption? (Emphasis added.)" I gave it an extra star because he's such a master of his craft, so in control of every word and movement. The Living Daylights (1987) -- "7/10" Timothy Dalton is Bond, bringing a Russian defector Georgi Koskov (Jeroen Krabbé) into Austria via natural-gas pipeline. The KGB is hot on his heels and sends a super-agent Nekros (Andreas Wisniewski) to MI6 headquarters to kidnap Koskov back. Bond goes to Bratislava to track down Kara (Maryam D'Abo) who should have assassinated Georgi, but who Bond had spared. She's a cellist and Georgi's girlfriend, who'd never intended to kill him. Georgiy seems to have masterminded the whole thing in order to get MI6 on the trail of Pushkin (John Rhys-Davies), the head of the KGB. Bond rescues Kara from the KGB and expatriates her to Austria. We pick up in Tangiers, where Pushkin is meeting with General Brad Whitaker (Joe Don Baker), a rogue American general turned arms dealer. Meanwhile, Bond and Kara arrive in Vienna, lovely in the spring. Next, we find Georgi in the company of many young ladies at poolside, with his rescuer Nekros ... and, to no-one's surprise, Brad Whitaker. They're all in cahoots and trying to figure out how to get Pushkin out the way. Bond meets with his contact, who's taken out by Nekros. Bond is pissed, suspecting foul play on the part of Georgi and Whitaker. But first he hunts down Pushkin, who's staying with his mistress. Bond believes that Pushkin is honorable -- so he helps him fake his own assassination. Bond escapes into Tangiers, thinking he'd make it out in the company of two ladies who'd offered him a ride in the bazaar. But they're working for the CIA and Felix Leiter. Kara gets the drop on James, still believing that Georgi means well. When she sees what Georgi does to James, though, she helps him escape the prison Georgi sends them to in Afghanistan. Since James helps a Mujahideen leader named Kamran Shah (Art Malik) escape, Shah returns the favor by granting them passage to his village/base of operations. Kamran Shah turns out to be Oxford-educated (nearly clearly the Osama bin Laden character) and reluctantly continues to help James and Kara. Kara and James escape in a cargo plane, but Nekros tags long. James takes care of him in a hanging-from-a-cargo-net-out-the-back-of-the-plane scene, then turns back to to help Kamran defeat the Russians. James and Kara fly on, trying to make it to Pakistan, but they're losing fuel too quickly. They get into a Jeep and fly out the back of the plane just before it crash-lands. They are uninjured and 200km outside of Karachi. "I know a great restaurant in Karachi; we can just make dinner." James meets up with Leiter for a final operation in Tangiers -- this time to take down Brad Whitaker, who's playing war games in his museum. Bond takes care of him just as Pushkin and his troops show up to take out Whitaker's troops. Georgi goes with Pushkin ("in a diplomatic bag") and Kara is allowed to "defect" to London, where she plays a concert. Kamran Shah shows up as well. Kara retires to her room, where James is waiting with two martinis and his sexy self. The end. Justice League (2017) -- "5/10" The best thing about this is movie is definitely Jason Momoa as Aquaman, especially when he's sitting on Wonder Woman's lasso of truth. Steppenwolf is a terrible enemy -- just laughably bad. He's ludicrously powerful and yet can still have his defenses penetrated by an essentially powerless Batman. Superman is back, awakened from his Kryptonian coma by the rest of the Justice League. Jeremy Irons as Alfred is wasted -- it must have been quite a payday for him. It's a toss-up whether Gal Gadot as Wonder Woman, Henry Cavill as Superman or Ben Affleck as Batman is a more terrible actor or actress. Amy Adams as Lois Lane is the definition of phoning it in. The lines are so wooden and strange -- and the words-only scenes last forever. Cyborg is also an absolutely bizarre bundle of powers who's actually better than the three "main" heroes. The Flash is just weird. There are some magical boxes that Steppenwolf is trying to use to get all the power in the universe or to end all life on Earth or to gain dominion over all living things...or something. Superman shows up as a Deux Ex Machina, but only after the rest of the team gets its collective asses kicked all over the place. Cyborg even gets his legs ripped off. Maybe one of the drawbacks is that they do everything with physical brute force and no cleverness in tactics. They just fight like Rocky against Ivan Drago, blow for blow for blow for blow until someone stops. In the end, they vanquish Steppenwolf by making him feel fear whereupon his own minions destroy him. The ending is, of course, overwhelmingly sappy and cheesy. Of course, there's a speech that sounds like a commercial for an international conglomerate. Patton Oswalt: I Love Everything (2020) -- "5/10" I thought one of the better bits in the first half was his meta-jokes about how one can't really joke about the Trump administration. But overall, he's pandering to the crowd and talking about his family and kid quite a bit. I like his off-beat material better than his Dad stories. YMMV. In the last ten minutes, he tells a long, rambling story about going to a Denny's with his daughter, who actually enjoys it because she doesn't know that Denny's is "where dreams go to die". Meanwhile her Dad is thinking: "Everyone who's ever left here in a hurry has gone down in a hail of bullets." His story in the last ten minutes about the cast of characters on the back of the Denny's Kid's menu is finally a return to his dark, surreal form. It's quite good, but the show overall seemed kind of forced, even though it wasn't even that long. I'd rewatch Werewolves and Lollipops again before watching this one. Bob Rubin: Oddities and Rarities (2020) -- "8/10" Patton Oswalt recommended this special, which is tacked on as episode 2 of his own I Love Everything. I'm glad I took his recommendation -- Rubin's show was better than Oswalt's. Rubin's style is a shouting, psychotic, meticulously planned stream-of-consciousness routine. It's a miracle he memorized all of that. His regular speaking voice is quite mellifluous. I really liked the change of pace, unique delivery and pretty damned good bits. Some examples, "Beware of the flashbacks? If it wasn't for the flashbacks, the last twenty minutes would have been dead silence." On his book: "Hey, let's do some cocaine. Steps 1 through 5. Step 6, you're out of book and it's morning." This one is funny on an abstract, absurdist level, but is funnier if you know that NY went from blue-on-orange to Statue-of-Liberty-on-white back to blue-on-orange over 30 years. "I got pulled over for expired tags. My tags are so old, they expired and are back in again." A softball, but he tells it well -- it's believable the way he barks it. "Those sex chat rooms? It's weird sitting naked at the computer. By the time the guy brings you your latte, everyone's staring at ya." His story about a two-day bender in Van Nuys with his friend is brilliant, absolutely off-the-hook funny and wild. "[Approximate] We were taking vitamins and then suddenly it was two in the morning. So I ask my buddy if it's OK if I hang for a bit because the cops are out. Boom, it's 24 hours later and we're really healthy by now. So my buddy says, Hey, do you wanna take some acid with you? I got a bunch of sugar cubes in my freezer. The ones with dots on 'em are either half or double hits. So I'm thinking I'm getting either six or 36 hits. That's Yahtzee!" Kim's Convenience S04 (2020) -- "7/10" The whole family returns for season four. It starts off with Janet being horrible to everyone again. It's actually a toss-up as to whether Janet or her roommates are more horrible. Mr. Kim is still using his serious face and Mrs. Kim performs instinctive sneak attacks. Chung and Kimchi are fine. Shannon is also very egocentric and shallow (in the same class as Janet, Gerald, and Stacie). The second half of the season got a bit better, but Stacie is still the worst -- and it's completely unclear to me whether it's intentional or whether the show simply doesn't notice how horrible she is. Maybe they're around enough people like this that they think it's kind of normal for someone to be that egotistical. Anyone I know would have cut off all ties to her, by now. But Janet is not much better, thinking really only of herself for at least 95% of the time. Poor Gerald is stuck between these two therapy cases. As noted, Kimchi and Chung are decent guys and their relationship is really cool -- they're really good friends and not afraid of showing it. Mr. and Mrs. Kim make this show worth watching. The season ends with Janet settling for an internship in Tanzania because Stacie and Gerald stole her idea to go teach in South Korea. Raj ends up taking an internship in Tanzania, as well, so that he can be near Janet. Gerald is upset because he thought that his kiss with Janet meant something. If this all sounds terrible, it's because it is -- as noted above, most of these people are really terrible. Mrs. Kim undergoes tests for a worsening clumsiness right at the end of the season. I subtracted a point because of the tedious bits that don't have the good characters in them. This Is 40 (2012) -- "6/10" Pete (Paul Rudd) and Debbie (Leslie Mann) star as a couple whose marriage has sputtered badly as he approaches his 40th birthday party. The two are OK, but their comedic talents are mostly wasted on characters who are nearly irredeemable. Both have much better, and much funnier, comedy roles in their careers. John Lithgow plays Debbie's absentee father -- and his chops show through despite the so-so script and other characters. Lithgow quickly makes you care about learning more about his character. We don't, not really, but it's a bright spot in the film. Albert Brooks plays the same kind of schmuck he's played a few times before: a Jewish dad who's a "schnorrer" (moocher) and who's hit up Pete for cash again and again and again. When Debbie calls him on it, he Aikidos the guilt masterfully. Still, his character is weak compared to Lithgow's. Robert Smigel is decent as Pete's brother, Megan Fox is decent eye candy as Pete's assistant (in whom he evinces no salubrious interest, thankfully), Jason Segel is mediocre funny as an over-the-top and prototypical LA personal trainer, and a couple of young Apatow girls (presumably the director's daughters) round out the cast. The kids aren't actually too terrible, for once, which is a nice change of pace. Still, this is not in the top five for Apatow -- watch 40-year--old Virgin or Knocked Up or Trainwreck instead. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] As I generally like to do, enjoying each show the way the artists who created it intended it. Often the choice of music is inspired and worth enjoying. It's been a lot easier since Netflix introduced the feature that lets me disable auto-play everywhere, so it never auto-plays the next show and also doesn't auto-play any trailers once I've finished watching a movie or season. [1] That's a zeugma and I'm damned proud of it. [1] The 80s were nothing if not super-heavy-handed with propaganda -- though we're not much better today, to be honest. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4022 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=4022 Wed, 01 Jul 2020 21:45:00 +0200 [Appendix: Awful Interviewing Style] At one point, someone says "We made an electric car!" Gibbs asks: "Where does the power come from? The grid ... so, coal? Natural gas? HA! Fuck you for building an electric car, you assholes. If you can't fix everything at once, you should have stayed on the fucking porch. Asshole." Those aren't actual quotes, but I think I got the vibe right. It just seemed unnecessarily hostile. Maybe there's context that justifies the level of anger and hostility, but it was missing in the film. In several other cases, the people he interviews seem to be passive-aggressively hating what they do. That is, Gibbs seems to have sought out and found the obviously socially deficient guy to describe the power output of a solar array and boy did he make a meal of it. Most of the people he interviews in the first twenty minutes don't seem actually quite knowledgeable: they're not officials. They're people they met on a windy mountaintop in the dead of a Vermont winter (to make it look more bleak). Another guy looks like Bill Murray in Caddyshack, ready to declare that a field of solar panels couldn't power a single toaster. And everyone just buys that guy's evaluation of generated wattage. I've heard that bit cited in several podcasts and interviews. Why doesn't anyone question the data in this "documentary"? Gibbs just lets his interview subjects babble out figures and doesn't question any of them. The guy wasn't identified either by name or even role -- who says he wasn't just somebody who happened to be walking by? This feels much more like the kind of "reporting" in James O'Keefe's "documentaries". At another point, Gibbs asks himself: "Why, for most of my life, have I thought that green energy would save us?" Who knows why he believes things? I suppose he's trying to play the role of the average viewer? He's trying to convince neoliberal faux-liberals that they have to change? It doesn't come off this way, though. It seems like he's just taking down the idea of alternative energy. I'm not sure what the alternative solution is to that, though. Reduced consumption? He doesn't get around to really mentioning that, either. Or maybe he did and I was too distracted by his other theatrics. But, I don't understand why they interview people in the middle of a demonstration where there are so many people shouting in the background. Then he asks of the other environmentalists who haven't yet denounced biomass: "Are they ignorant or is it something else? Are they misguided? Or corrupt?" Yeah, I'm stunned nobody wanted to talk to you. He does the equivalent of asking people, "Excuse me, my friend and I have a bet going: I just wanted to ask whether you're stupid or evil?" and then gleefully points an accusatory finger at them when they refuse to answer. Are-you-still-beating-your-wife questioning is tedious if you're not ready to brigade whichever target the director has chosen for you. Luckily for him, he's got a whole Internet full of assholes who ask no questions if he helps them on their way to their next dopamine kick. [Appendix: Biomass and Bill McKibben] The section on bio-mass being bad is pretty detailed and it's a valid point to make. Pretty much anyone should have seen that "burning trees" was kind of stupid idea for solving energy troubles, no matter how pretty the marketing department dresses up the charts. But hindsight is 20/20 and it wasn't obviously criminal to support it. This section is about a supposedly green co-gen plant that actually burns wood chips and tire chips. But they got a multi-million-dollar grant for being green. This is obviously a story about regulatory capture. That Bill McKibben ended up supporting the idea temporarily has literally nothing to do with how they raked in millions. They got those millions despite Bill's support. Still Gibbs has to show a clip of McKibben pushing wood chips like it's his life's passion. The video looks like it was taken on VHS. Gibbs doesn't bother to give a year or location. It's a complete hack-job. And then the hack job on Bill McKibben goes on with more ancient, blurry, undated clips. [3] I've read Bill McKibben's book; he's not evil. This is pretty ridiculous. Bill McKibben is not the problem you have to solve in the energy and consumption problem. If you succeed in taking him down, then you'll set back climate-change activism in the U.S. even more than it already is. But Gibbs takes every opportunity to solve climate change by showing everyone what a hypocrite McKibben really is using techniques like, instead of asking McKibben what he thinks, Gibbs asks a lady what she heard from a guy she knows about what he says McKibben thinks. Journalism at its finest. [Appendix: The Population-Growth Angle] The film was also, not unfairly, attacked for leaning too heavily on the "too many people" solution to climate change. Again, it did this in a way that led groups with widely diverging opinions draw support from the film. While perhaps inclusive in its own way, it opened the film to criticism that it was advocating the view that the Global South and its promiscuous proclivity for procreation just has to go. They didn't go into the nuance that its the high-consuming parts of the human population who are the real problem. Yes, lots of people live in places that were always pretty untenable, but most of those have little impact on climate change. It's the folks in Phoenix, LA, and Las Vegas who we should be aiming at. The article "Michael and Me" by George Monbiot does a good job of summing up the deficiencies in this movie. In particular, Monbiot addresses the only "solution" that the filmmakers offer: reducing population, rather than consumption. "Yes, population growth does contribute to the pressures on the natural world. But while the global population is rising by 1% a year, consumption, until the pandemic, was rising at a steady 3%. High consumption is concentrated in countries where population growth is low. Where population growth is highest, consumption tends to be extremely low. Almost all the growth in numbers is in poor countries largely inhabited by black and brown people. When very rich people, such as Michael Moore and Jeff Gibbs, point to this issue without the necessary caveats, they are saying, in effect, “it’s not us consuming, it’s Them breeding.” It’s not hard to see why the alt-right loves this film. "Population is where you go when you haven’t thought it through. Population is where you go when you don’t have the guts to face the structural, systemic causes of our predicament: inequality, oligarchic power, capitalism. Population is where you go when you want to kick down." Almost no-one they interview mentions that it's a question of consumption and resources (one guy in Vermont did, offhand), they are all in agreement that Malthus was right. Instead, the problem isn't the absolute number of people -- although it is really high -- it's the degree to which certain poisonous cultures consume what they consider to be endless resources. At the end of the movie, there's a bit more Malthusian observation that we have far exceeded the carrying capacity of the Earth. I would add at this level of consumption. We've done a lot of things wrong. Trying to figure out how to retain some of the luxuries our oil-based society has wrought in a post-oil world isn't evil, per se. The narrator seems to imply it is. He also offers no other alternative: should we all just kill ourselves? Should be will kill others? Kill the weak? Who should we wipe out first to save the planet? Should we return to an agrarian, electricity-free, loose affiliation of fiefdoms? [Appendix: Censorship and Canceling] The article "Planet of the Censoring Humans" by Matt Taibbi focuses hard on the censorship angle, with Taibbi ignoring the film's many overt flaws as a documentary. Taibbi is using the takedown attempts for the movie to make a larger point about censorship. Leading with this movie, though, makes it seem as if Taibbi thought that it was had a quality enough beyond reproach that censorship was entirely out of the question. Maybe he chose it on purpose: it's the indefensible that needs defending when the book-burners are afoot. He didn't put it that way, though. "In Planet of the Humans, Moore and Gibbs make a complex argument. In essence, they charge that people have become dependent upon the high-consumption lifestyles made possible by fossil fuels, and that it’s our addiction to that way of life, as much as to fossil fuels themselves, that is driving humanity off a “cliff.”" As I mentioned in the main review above, the movie in no way made any of these arguments. It was a hodge-podge of odd interviews and slander. I get that it could have been about this and that it should have been about this, but that the editing and content were so distracting as to muddle the point entirely. The film was arguably criminally libelous against McKibben -- and probably would have been in merry old England. This isn't the movie you want to pin your anti-censorship argument on. You could further argue that it's exactly because it's so flawed that it should be the cause célèbre for anti-censorship, but that's not the point that Taibbi made. I don't think it should be censored, just to be clear -- 100% on Taibbi's side on that. I'm just arguing that we're a long way from Gasland or Roger and Me here. Taibbi writes that "most of the “criticism” of McKibben comes in the form of footage of him talking", but Taibbi should know better about the tactics: as pointed out above, many of the clips look like they were made on VHS and couldn't possibly have come from anytime before the last 15 years. Prove me wrong -- it's not like the filmmakers bothered to include any dates to "help" me understand; instead, they left them off so that I would better understand the point they were trying to make, which was, oddly, that McKibben is evil. Unfortunately, others will get that message too: that green policies are a fraud, per se. This documentary will mostly likely drive people into the arms of the fossil-fuel companies. The film made no attempt to point people in a more useful direction by mentioning anyone who's done anything right. Not even for a minute. Instead, they slam people who have had a largely positive impact on the environmental movement. [Appendix: Orangutan Coda & Non Sequitur] The footage at the end of the poor orangutan being driven out of his forest -- then saved, is played without context, without dates, without even saying where it was. I have no idea if it's the same orangutan being rescued at the end as was being hounded at the beginning. It's obviously stock footage, but from where? No comment. Just play that as the coda to show "people bad". This whole thing was very manipulative and nearly fact-free. A lot of allegations -- some valid and worthwhile -- but not a single word about possible solutions or ideas for the future. I guess they think we should start killing people instead of apes? -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] Bill McKibben has "published an eloquent and measured response" denying the allegations in the film and pleading with people to focus on things other than defending his reputations for him (though he appreciates it). [1] Director Jeff Gibbs has previously produced many of Moore's movies. This is his first and only directing job. His old friend and main producer Michael Moore is not affiliated with this film other than to put his name on it. Moore's not otherwise involved with the film in any way like he has been in "real" Michael Moore movies. He neither narrates nor does he figure in it even as an interview subject. [1] Another target is Al Gore, someone nobody's talked about since 2000. Again, it's unclear when these clips are from. At this point, I don't trust that even the stock footage is of what they say it is. They keep going at McKibben and Gore. They include a clip of Jon Stewart interviewing Al Gore. Again, the clip looks really old -- Stewart hasn't been on TV in five years. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3936 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3936 Fri, 01 May 2020 22:09:24 +0200 -- "7/10" 2. "Vacation (2015)" <#Vacation> -- "8/10" 3. "El Hoyo/The Platform (2019)" <#Hoyo> -- "8/10" 4. "Curb Your Enthusiasm S10 (2019)" <#Curb> -- "9/10" 5. "Pete Davidson: Alive From New York (2020)" <#Pete> -- "8/10" 6. "The Gentlemen (2019)" <#Gentlemen> -- "9/10" 7. "The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel S03 (2019)" <#Marvelous> -- "9/10" 8. "Emil: Encore Une Fois (2017)" <#Emil> -- ("9/10" ) 9. "Star Wars: Episode IX - The Rise of Skywalker (2019)" <#Star> -- "6/10" 10. "La Casa de Papel (Money Heist) S01 (2017)" <#Papel> -- "5/10" These are my notes to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. I've recently transferred my reviews to IMDb and made "the list" of around 1400 ratings publicly available. I've included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other -- I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. Jumanji: The Next Level (2019) -- "7/10" Dwayne Johnson, Karen Gillan, Jack Black, and Kevin Hart return to this sequel to the reboot. The kids are just as insipid as they were in the first movie, but that doesn't matter because 90% of the action is "in the video game", where the adult characters take over. The handsome Nick Jonas reprises his role as the relatively low-impact Seaplane, but the cast is joined and much-enhanced by the always-funny Awkwafina, who plays the token asian character Ming. It's a bit more mixed-up than that because this time they play with the notion of "avatars" more. Instead of just the original teenagers inhabiting characters, the game sucks in Spencer's grandfather (Danny DeVito) and his former business partner (Danny Glover). While neither actor spends a lot of time on-screen, Johnson, Awkwafina, and Hart take turns playing as if the old men were inhabiting their bodies as players/avatars -- with varying degrees of success. It was nice to see Rory McCann outside of the role of The Hound from Game of Thrones, but he still played an outsized barbarian, so it's not like he was breaking character much. Spoiler alert: they win the game, but not before having to surmount several devious levels and learn a lot about themselves along the way. Spencer and Martha get back together. Hooray. Vacation (2015) -- "8/10" Ed Helms channels Chevy Chase and Christina Applegate channels Beverly D'Angelo. It's not a 100% scene-for-scene remake, but just enough to get a few extra laughs for doing so. They have a terrible rental car from Albania that yells at them in Korean. I lost my shit every time. The reenactment of the woman in the high-powered roadster was really funny. They stop at sister Audrey's (Leslie Mann) home in Texas, visiting with uncle Stone (Chris Hemsworth). The film is a string of skits mostly, just like the original. Chevy Chase and Beverly Dangelo come in at the end. Ed Helms (Rusty) played the role exactly the same as Chevy had played it 30 years ago. Because their car was no longer a going concern, Clark Griswold loans Rusty the old, green battlewagon to complete his trip to Wally World with his family. El Hoyo/The Platform (2019) -- "8/10" The narrator Goreng wakes. He is in a chamber, lying on a bed that is on one side of a rectangular hole. On the opposite side is another bed, with an older man Trimagasi sitting on it. To one side is the number 48 etched into the wall. To the other is a sink. The old man brings him up to speed on the situation: they are in a prison. There are two prisoners per level. There are an unknown number of levels. No-one ever visits. There are no guards. The only way out is down, into the pit. Once per day, a platform lowers through the rectangle with food on it. The platform starts as a sumptuous feast at level 0 and loses its luster as it descends through the numerous levels, with the prisoners at each level taking whatever they want of whatever remains. If you keep food with you, the prison boils or freezes you until you either die, eat the food, or throw the food into the hole. Those at lower levels eat scraps or nothing at all. Or each other. After one month, the prison is suffused with gas that knocks everyone out. Everyone wakes on a different level for the next month. Prisoners are kept together as long as they are both still alive. The main character turned himself in because he wanted to stop smoking. He had no inkling what really went on. He took a book with him: Don Quixote. His cellmate Trimagasi has a Samurai Pro knife that never dulls and is very handy for surviving the lower levels, which no-one even pretends can be survived without some form of cannibalism. There aren't many characters: one mysterious lady Miharu who rides down the platform, slaughtering people with her own knife and supposedly searching for her child, though others swear that she arrived alone. After level 48, Trimagasi and Goreng end up on level 171. Goreng awakes gagged and tied to the bed -- he sleeps too soundly and Trimagasi knows that the platform will hold no food for one month, so he's keeping his food supply warm and unspoiled. Weeks later, as Trimagasi prepares his first sliver of flesh from Goreng's leg, Miharu drops in and slays him. They survive and awake on level 31, where Goreng is joined by a former guard Imoguiri who has brought her dog with her. She takes food for herself one day and food for her dog the next. She prepares plates for the floor below them, imploring them to do the same, to act in solidarity, to take only what they need, to not spoil or waste the food for the floors below. Miharu shows up again, injured. Goreng and Imoguiri tend to her, but Miharu abuses their hospitality by eating the dog. Imoguiri and Goreng wake the next month on level 202 (revealing to us that there are more than 200 levels, as previously thought). Imoguiri has hanged herself, providing Goreng a food supply. Goreng awakes on level 6 with a new roommate: Baharat. With Baharat's energy and enthusiasm, Goreng decides that they should descend all the way, on the platform, distributing food to ensure that everyone gets some. Baharat agrees and ad-hoc decides that they should only hand out food starting at level 50 -- because everyone up to that level eats every day anyway. As they travel and enforce discipline, they change the plan to preserve a single panna cotta to bring back to level 0 and "prove" the humanity of the hole's inhabitants to the chefs there. They pass through 200, then 250 levels, the platform sliding silently onward past levels with no survivors. On level 333, it stops, with no-one in evidence. Baharat and Goreng get off, desperately injured from their ride and from a pitched battle they'd waged in vain to save Miharu's life many levels above. The platform moves downward, stranding them. They discover Miharu's daughter, hiding under a bed. They change their plan again, feeding her the panna cotta. They are delirious with hunger, injury and pain. The next day, Baharat is dead, but Goreng takes the girl onto the platform as it descends again, deeming her "the message" that he will bring to level 0 (in lieu of the panna cotta). At the very bottom, Goreng steps off to join Trimagasi (presumably dying), while the platform shoots back up at incredible speed, transporting the "message" to the top. Saw it in Spanish with English subtitles. Curb Your Enthusiasm S10 (2019) -- "9/10" Larry David, Jeff Garlin, Ted Danson, Cheryl Hines, Susie Essman, Richard Lewis, and J.B. Smoove reprise their roles from the increasingly sporadically filmed series (there were 8 seasons between 2000 and 2011), one more in 2017, and now this season in 2020). Larry David serves up tremendous writing and biting, insightful commentary on the weird world we all inhabit, but primarily the weird world that the obliviously privileged of the West Coast inhabit. Everyone plays their role well, but Larry and J.B. Smoove just click -- as does Jon Hamm, as Larry's protegé in a couple of shows. As with Seinfeld, there is no overarching season plot, nor is there any lesson to be learned. Larry certainly never learns any lessons. He's rich and can stumble around the world, turning over rocks and blowing through protocol wherever he pleases. David puts together situations of shocking entitlement, but also subtle philophical nuance. For example, in one episode, he learns that his ex-wife's sister is planning on selling her house -- a house that he gave her fifteen years ago. He and Jeff both think that Larry should get the proceeds -- or at least the principal back or maybe the profits. He argues that the gift was a house, not money. She can't convert the house into money. But it's her house -- that's what a gift is, right? And it's not like she's flipping the house -- she'd lived in it for fifteen years. He meets up with her and she's a day-drinker who's also a good crier, so she quickly convinces Larry to let her keep the house and the appreciation on it. They sleep together and Larry helps her clean up her pigsty of a house, as well. He even takes her to the airport when she goes on a ski trip to Colorado. She calls the next day from the slopes to tell him that she's broken her leg. He promises to hop on the next flight. He can't get a flight until 9PM because he needs a first-class seat. For various reasons, he's late to the flight. He's further delayed by the TSA and misses it, so he only shows up the next day. Whereas we were kind of on her side at first, she lambastes him that he didn't come sooner because "he'd promised". Now she seems quite entitled for what amounted to a one-night-stand in exchange for a house, profits and ... devotion? Larry David is incorrigible, but predictably so -- he constantly shows himself to be a cad of the highest order, although his caddishness is constantly superseded by that of others, who are utterly oblivious to their shockingly self-centered behavior. The theme is often one of Larry getting into incredible trouble (often financial, which doesn't really affect him) for just trying to help, but then failing to do so in a way that satisfies the person he's trying to help. He's basically made a show about how awful "choosing beggars" are. In episode nine, he ups the ante by befriending a woman who doesn't have a car, then letting himself be shamed into buying a car by a dealer who knows that Larry's just showing up with fake problems on his existing car to get the delicious licorice that the dealer has on the snack table. Since he bought a car he doesn't need, and his new friend doesn't even have a car, he just gives her his old car. She's over the moon, of course. He's already offered her a job in his "spite café", so he's really an angel to her. Fifteen minutes later, she's at an intersection, playing Candy Crush on her phone while driving and not noticing that it's her turn to go. Larry is at the same intersection in his new car. He sees her playing on the phone and takes the right-of-way, but the car behind her beeps and she lurches into the intersection in a panic, slamming into Larry. Now, instead of 15 years, it's been 15 minutes. His car is ruined and needs to be towed. She offers to give him a ride home in "her" car. He tells her that he's going to take his other car back because she destroyed his new one. She's not hearing that because he can't just take back the gift, can he? He capitulates and takes a ride home. He has to buy a new car, and will just get the car he had before. A few days later, he calls her because she's failed to show up to her job. She tells him she'd forgotten to inform him that she's no longer going to work for him. She's going to travel instead. With what money? Isn't she broke? Didn't he just give her a car to get to a job that he gave her? It turns out that she's sold the car and will travel with the proceeds. He'd kept it pristine with low mileage, so she'd gotten a lot of money for it. That's what he gets for trying to help people. They think of themselves only because they're entitled to what they get. Also, he's rich, right? This show is really about the philosophy of a broken culture, where choosing beggars and raging egos abound, where an absolute bull-in-a-china-shop cad like Larry David ends up being the best of the bunch, ethically. Pete Davidson: Alive From New York (2020) -- "8/10" The production is interesting in that it dives right in without any preamble. It's so jarring that I had to check whether I'd inadvertently skipped ahead by a few minutes (I had not). So Davidson jumps right into his set, riffing on his lifestyle and being on SNL and dating hot (and somewhat unstable) starlets and getting "accused" of having a big dick, which isn't as great as you might think. He says it was a great move on Ariana's part because now every girl that he gets with for the rest of his life will be vaguely disappointed. It's a fiendishly long-range plan with decades-long legs. Davidson's got a laid-back delivery style and is charming as hell, as well as pretty damned funny. He didn't try to stretch the special beyond the 49 minutes and that's just fine. The Gentlemen (2019) -- "9/10" Guy Ritchie returns with a slick feature in his inimitable style. It's a bit more refined than earlier romps like Snatch or Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels, but still belongs firmly in that tradition. It stars Matthew McConaughey as Michael "Mickey" Pearson, an American ex-pat living in London, who, after growing up in the poor southern U.S., spent his late teens and early 20s at Oxford on a Rhodes scholarship -- but was really starting a marijuana-dealing business that blossomed into an empire a quarter-century later. Raymond (Charlie Hunnam) is his right-hand man and Rosalind (Michelle Dockery) is his successful-in-her-own-right wife. Mickey is in the middle of trying to sell his business to Matthew (Jeremy Strong), who's a Jewish-American investor with a shadowy past. Colin Farrell is Coach to the Toddlers, a madcap band of irreverent teenagers who Matthew hires through Dry Eye (Henry Golding), son of heroin king Lord George (Tom Wu), who's jockeying to pick up Mickey's business on the cheap. In the middle of these machinations stands Fletcher (Hugh Grant), a reporter who thinks he's got all the angles covered, but who's instead blinded by his greed to the possibility that others might be just as clever and well-prepared as he is. That turns out to be the downfall of Matthew and Fletcher both: none of them considers the possibility that someone who'd cornered the entire pot market in England might not just be a lucky, stoned idiot. There are a lot of great characters, nice dialogue, nice twists and turns and satisfying conclusions. I thoroughly enjoyed it. The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel S03 (2019) -- "9/10" I found the severe character swing for Midge to be quite jarring. In the first two seasons, she was down-to-earth despite her upper-class upbringing. In this season, she's a mirthless bitch who treats everyone like garbage while she flounces her entitled ass around the world, utterly unable to understand why her ex-husband and her parents don't understand how inconvenient it is to her for them to no longer support her extravagant lifestyle. At one point, she tells her ex-father-in-law Moishe that she hasn't spent a dime of her earnings, so it's unclear who's buying her food and supporting her sartorial lifestyle. At another, she browbeats Joel about not sending their son to a school neither of them lives near anymore and neither one of them can afford. She won't spend a dime of her money, but her dumb-ass son has to go to a great school. And then she tries to get "her apartment" back -- because she obviously deserves it. She basically micromanages everyone around her -- because obviously the world revolves around her. Her father has quit Columbia, so her parents out of the apartment they've lived in for Midge's entire life. She's on tour with Shy Baldwin, who is quite sensitive and has a breakdown after he gets beat up by a one-night--stand (he's black and gay in the late 50s/early 60s). He goes on hiatus for several months. Midge and Susie have to scramble and start doing radio advertising to make some scratch. Susie is managing Sophie Lennon, but still living in her tiny apartment. It's unclear how her gambling problem could possibly be losing her all the money she's making from Sophie Lennon, at least. Midge has nearly no understanding for Susie's position because she has never had any idea what it is to be truly poor. Susie understands Midge perfectly though: "Susie: She's incredibly high maintenance. You have to feed her every two hours like a parking meter." Kevin Pollack (Moishe Maisel, Joel's father) is a treasure. Abe (Tony Shalhoub) is still amazing, finding his younger self and trying to do something he's proud of, but also aware that he needs to get himself and Rose back on their feet. For her part, Rose has broken ties with her obnoxious family, from whom she'd been getting money from her trust fund for decades. "Abe: I'm going to tutor. "Rose: Tutor what? "Abe: Idiots! The city's teeming with them." Joel has grown and built up his own club, along with his friend Archie. He's dating a young lady named Mei, who runs the Chinese gambling parlor in the basement below his club. She's studying to be a doctor and is very funny, as well. Susie is getting more confident and inveigling her way into the Shy Baldwin crew. Shy's manager Reggie (Sterling K. Brown), who's a cold bastard to everyone else, takes a shine to Susie -- he's onto the fact that she has a debilitating gambling problem. Lenny Bruce (Luke Kirby) is amazingly suave (and Midge is stringing him along) and very funny. Benjamin -- Midge's fiancé doctor from season two -- is still around and still very good and still trying to get Midge to be a good person. In the finale, Midge kills at the Apollo, but isn't ambiguous enough about Shy's homosexuality during her set -- and he throws he off the tour. Curtain. Despite Midge's decline, the show still bangs out beautiful set pieces like no other show on television. They go long minutes with cameras following characters through minutely detailed period pieces, one scene after another, with perfect music accompaniment. The dialogue writing is fantastic: most conversations are snappy and very funny -- except for those in which Midge is overbearingly shitty -- Midge's routines are very good, and the soundtrack is mostly fabulous. So Joel's great, Abe's great, Moise's great, Rose is fantastic, ("The poor thing, to have a face like that and to be tall, so everyone sees it"), Susie is out-of-this-world funny, Lenny Bruce is great, and the set pieces and costumes are worth the price of admission -- so what's the problem? Midge thinks she's infallible, treats a lot of people like her subjects, and gets away with murder. Her friend Imogene is not really that interesting, either. In the end, everyone else in the show is now funnier and quippier and more interesting than Midge. So I knocked off one point from the other seasons. It would have been two, because some of the whining was really tedious. Still highly recommended. Emil: Encore Une Fois (2017) -- ("9/10" ) Emil Steinberger is an absolute comedic legend in the cabaret scene in Switzerland. He's been doing it for over 50 years and has many routines that he does again and again. They're still funny today and he has quite a knack for making timeless bits. This works quite well in Switzerland, where things change only very slowly. Quite some time ago, he started doing his routine in Française Federale, which is a stilted French that even I can understand. It's not wrong, it's just a bit slower, a bit more strongly enunciated and he sounds like any one of our politicians trying to reach across the Röstigraben. A good friend of my father's (and mine, too) introduced me to his French version almost two decades ago, where I nearly died laughing at his Emil a la Poste (Emil in the post office, where he plays a less-than-adequately-intellectually-endowed postal-service worker). His routines are quintessentially Swiss and almost more hilarious in French, as he sometimes struggles (or pretends to struggle) to make himself understood. He uses almost no props, other than a table (which he e.g. pretends is a windowsill from which the neighborhood snoop comments on all the neighbors) or several chairs (which becomes a train compartment where he's a retiree regaling everyone with tales of the Wassen church and telling the hikers what to do). He has a great routine about cell phones and apps and users, another about a "blazer" (bläser, or leaf-blower). He'll occasionally break out into Swiss German, which usually earns a big laugh, which means his public is just as multi-cultural as he is. He's very calm and measured and deeply funny. His humor is not political, it's timeless, and could only offend the very sensitive. I'll have to dig up a copy of this one in Swiss German so my wife can watch with me (her French is not quite there yet). The show is from 2017 and Emil was 84 years old, but still going so strong. Star Wars: Episode IX - The Rise of Skywalker (2019) -- "6/10" I appreciate that there's a certain poetry to having three trilogies equal nine movies, but this movie didn't have to be made. No-one was worried at the end of the last one that Kylo Ren was going to take over the universe or that the emperor was going to come back. Luke Skywalker finished everything off with a tremendous and satisfying bad-ass maneuver that should have been the last word. The last movie, despite its extravagance, worked. This one does not. This one is a ton of fan service, but with about two-dozen characters, so your head is spinning. It's clearly a Disney movie written by a committee (even though there are only two writing credits). And nothing sticks. There is no lasting pathos. There is no engagement or worry that everything isn't going to work out in the end. Near the beginning, it looks like Rey killed Chewbacca, but she (and we) only had to suffer for what felt like less than a minute before it was revealed that he wasn't even on that transporter (for unknown reasons). C3PO loses his memories, but we don't have to worry about it for too long -- after he's initially mildly humorous about not knowing who anyone is, he gets a backup from Artoo that's not even too far out of date. The rebels take on the fleet, but they are absolutely helpless as long as the Emperor is alive and nearly godlike in his power, electrocuting vast swaths of space and ships with the swipe of his hand. Rey is also godlike, thanks to special lightsabers from Luke and Leia. It's all so trite. I was wondering whether I was watching an anime or a children's TV show. I didn't care about anyone, except maybe Kylo Ren, who I honestly didn't care if he was going to revert back to Ben or not because either version of him was pretty good. Poor Rose was just wallpaper, seemingly retained as part of the ground crew to make sure that the Asian identity is adequately represented. Poe was dialed way back into utter blandness -- he wasn't even funny anymore. Finn was decent, but most of his scenes were with a new stormtrooper woman who'd also defected and who was a strong woman. They fought together, even though we'd barely gotten to know her. We barely got to know any of the characters. Keri Russell showed up as a female Boba Fett-substitute who popped her mask once when talking to Poe, just to show us that she was white and then appropriately hid her disgusting face again. She showed up at the final battle, but why should we care? Poor Chewbacca was a non-entity and Lando Calrissian was doing his best Joe Biden impression. At least he's actually still alive: they're still milking scenes out of the Carrie Fisher estate for utterly mysterious reasons. Leia finally dies in nearly exactly the same way that Luke did at the end of the last movie, but with much less purpose. She died because her son Ben died, using the last of his Force energy to save and restore Rey. But the Force comes from everywhere, so how did he run out? We'd just watched Palpatine shock an entire space fleet over what looked like an entire AU of space and he was old AF and he didn't seem to suffer for it. The most telling bit is when you go to the cast list in IMDb and you realize that you didn't know most of the characters' names -- even though they had them. For example, does anyone know who "Snap Wexley" is? He's the chubby dude from Heroes. He flamed out in the last battle in a manner that made no-one at all care. This was right before Rey enacted yet another Deus Ex Machina to defeat the Emporer and win the day. After that, we got to see fucking Ewoks celebrating, as if it wasn't already obvious that the producers were trying to simultaneously rub one out for everyone who's ever professed themselves a fan of Star Wars. So, they saved the universe again and presumably for good this time. Don't count on it, though. Disney hasn't even begun to milk this property. I personally much preferred Rogue One or The Last Jedi. La Casa de Papel (Money Heist) S01 (2017) -- "5/10" I've watched most of season one and I long ago stopped searching for the appeal. The story is of a thief who had pulled off 18 heists with her boyfriend before she got him killed. She is drafted by El Profesor to take part in a giant heist that he's been planning for half of his life. She is only one member of a larger team (nine people, I think? It's honestly kind of hard to keep track.) They all take the names of cities so that they remain anonymous from one another. She is called Tokio. Despite her wealth of experience and despite having ostensibly spent five months preparing for the heist, it goes off the rails nearly immediately. Again, this despite El Profesor having been described as sooper-smart, except, presumably, when choosing people for the team that will execute the heist that is his life's work. Things go off the rails because Tokio is banging Rio, a much younger computer expert who literally has no job in the heist because they actively avoid computers and cell phones to avoid detection. At one point, he's wiring some radios, I guess. At any rate, he basically has a lot of time to pretend that his feelings are more important than the €2.4 Billion they plan to steal. Considering the enormity of their goal, the lack of discipline on the part of several of the main characters is pretty off-putting. Denver is a dipshit hired for his craziness and muscle who ends up torpedoing everything he does with his insecurity. Berlin is played by a good actor and also acts professionally. He keeps his eyes on the prize. El Profesor, for what it's worth, does too. He jets around Madrid, cleaning up loose ends left by his team before the heist. His main adversary is Raquel Murillo, a police negotiator who has a whole pile of baggage that is supposed to make her interesting. With all of this baggage to distract us, it's never made clear why she's considered to be so competent (other than just having told us she is). She fights with the inspector who is the head of the national police. She fights with her ex-husband, who used to beat her, and for whom she has a restraining order that she is seemingly unable to enforce. There are a few hostages with names: Arturo, the head of the bank, who's been boinking Monica on the side. Then there's Alison Parker, the high-value asset who's the daughter of the British ambassador and who's been trapped in the museum by the thieves. It just seems so disorganized from the get-go, despite the setup of super-brain in charge and months of preparation. How do things go off the rails? Rio gets out in front of the museum at the beginning and gets himself shot by the cops. Tokio flies into a rage and shoots the cops (only wounding them), but pretty much making it obvious that they're in love. Berlin is super-unhappy with that, understandably. Moscou is Denver's father and he's not only a claustrophobic tunner-digger, he's got a bit of a heart condition. Berlin orders Denver to dispose of Monica, but he instead hides her in a vault, shooting her in the leg, which threatens her with sepsis. Nothing seems to be going right except the printing of the money: Nairobi is in a charge of that and seems to be getting it done, though she seems like a time-bomb, as well. The overall feeling is one of meta-manipulation: each episode has at least one, if not several, ludicrous oversights on the part of the police or these supposedly hardened and hand-picked professional criminals. Why are the hostages allowed to roam around? E.g. when the group of kids corners Allison in the bathroom to kick her ass. Or why is Allison allowed to run away? Why isn't she hobbled? Because the writers are using tedious incompetence to stir up artificial controversy that they can then solve in the nick of time or with some clever slight-of-hand by El Profesor. There is a higher-level manipulation: the show foreshadows heavily to indicate that "the plan" will get better or even to suggest that, despite all of the idiocy of the participants, that it is somehow part of the plan so far. At the end of episode 10, they toast to the plan, reassuring us that all will revealed and that it will be awesome. I can't help but think that this tactic works better at film-length. I could put up with Tokio playing a petulant bitch if I had a payoff within an hour or two. However, we're forced to put up with long closeups of her insouciant face for hours and hours and hours with no end in sight. We're left with deciding whether to cash in our chips or capitulate to sunken cost and hope that, in the end, it will have been worth it. I just can't get into it, really. Instead of a well-tuned group performing a heist, we have a group of barely competent people who are only unable to torpedo themselves because the cops are also caught up in one soap opera after another. I gave it an extra star because I'm learning more conversational Spanish, so that's something. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3899 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3899 Sun, 05 Apr 2020 18:20:57 +0200 -- "8/10" 2. "Battlestar Galactica (s01-s02) (2004-2005)" <#Battlestar> -- "7/10" 3. "Silicon Valley S06 (2019)" <#Silicon> -- "8/10" 4. "A Marriage Story (2019)" <#Marriage> -- "6/10" 5. "Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw (2019)" <#Fast> -- "6/10" 6. "Knives Out (2019)" <#Knives> -- "6/10" 7. "Parks and Recreation S01-S07 (2009-2015)" <#Parks> -- "9/10" 8. "Black Sea (2014)" <#Black> -- "7/10" 9. "Mark Maron: End Times Fun (2020)" <#Mark> -- "7/10" 10. "Taylor Tomlinson: Quarter-Life Crisis (2020)" <#Taylor> -- "9/10" These are my notes to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. I've "rated 1540+ movies and series" so far, but they're not absolutely comparable to each other -- I rate the media on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. Wilder S02 (2020) -- "8/10" Rosa Wilder (Sarah Spale) is "back" with Manfred Kägi (Marcus Signer), this time investigating a triple-murder in the fictional town of Thallingen. The small town is based around a sawmill. Kägi's alcoholic sister happens to live there with her son Simon. The murders happen during a festival celebrating some anniversary at the sawmill. Simon is kidnapped and stuffed into a trunk, then driven around for hours. He's in the trunk of the car when the two drivers are murdered. He manages to escape, but didn't see anything. What he does see is a giant bag of money that he takes, literally thinking that no-one will miss it, even though it obviously belongs to drug dealers. The town is horrified, of course. Racial tensions against local Albanians rise. One of the boys who was murdered was Artan Kabashi (Mark Harvey), the son of local Albanian restauranteur Enver Kabashi (Edon Rizvanolli). The family clashes with locals bent on getting some sort of demented revenge. Charles Bulliger (Ueli Jäggi), the owner of the sawmill, steps in to cool things off. But he's got some "Dräck am Stäcke" as well. With no other leads, the local police take a DNA swab from all the men who were at the party -- because they'd determined from his corpse that Artan had had sex with a man recently. One of the cops Leo Mott was his lover and messes with his own sample to throw off suspicion. It's not that he had anything to do with the murders, but he's trying to avoid having anyone learn that he'd been having a love affair with Artan. Leo's wife knows he's at the very least bisexual, but also thinks he has his homosexuality "under control". Wilder and police Chief Susan Walter (Manuela Biedermann) do the legwork to find video footage at a hotel where the two men had made their love nest. They find out that it's Mott despite his efforts. Kägi, meanwhile, is on the trail of a rape case that's nearly two decades old -- and involves his sister. He ties it to another rape in the town from 11 years ago and then also to the recent murders. He thinks it's all the same person -- with eight different rapes over the years -- but which mysteriously stopped almost a decade ago. Simon has his drug money, buys himself a new motorcycle and then takes off with his girlfriend Adelina Kabashi (Artan's sister). They speed off into France, heading for Paris. The drug dealers get onto their trail and kidnap Adelina to force Simon to give up the money. Luckily, Wilder, Kägi and an awesome French cop named Jamel Jaoui (Raphael Roger Levy) quite literally get the drop on them and manage to arrest the drug boss before he can harm either Adelina or Simon. After a while, the two are released to an overjoyed Kabashi family and a troubled Kägi family (Simon catches his mother drinking again and flees to spend a few nights with his uncle Manfred in his camper van). Wilder falls into bed with Jamel after flirting shamelessly with him for several episodes. She's already got a kid from the "previous season" (with dipshit Dani, of Oberwies). Dani doesn't know he's the dad when he drops in for dinner at her father Paul's place. Paul is out of prison and sorta/kinda trying to get back with his wife, who's sorta/kinda probably going to let him. She's much more forgiving than Rosa, who doesn't really want her son Tim to have anything to do with Paul, which is, quite frankly, understandable, considering Paul's actions of 30 years ago -- revealed in the previous season -- were responsible for her brother's death. Then Paul burns Tim's face with hot tea and Rosa is done with family for a bit. It turns out that Manfred Kägi is right and the rapes over the last 20 years are all connected and had been perpetrated by the same person. They finally discover that Susan Walter and her husband had hunted down the rapist 10 years ago but, instead of killing him, they imprisoned him in a cell deep under ground and only accessible through a trap door in one of their horse stalls. This is, quite frankly, disturbing to horrific, just thinking of the man locked in that spider hole for 10 years, interacting once per day for his meal, and that with the parents of one of the girls he'd raped and who'd subsequently killed herself. Susan releases him just hours before Wilder and Kägi show up. She took a heroic dose of horse tranquilizer and is mere minutes before shuffling off her mortal coil when Wilder finds her and takes her detailed confession. The rapist is found and collected, but no-one is really happy with how things turned out. Kägi and his family, at least, have some closure. Battlestar Galactica (s01-s02) (2004-2005) -- "7/10" Season 1 starts at the end of long days of sleeplessness, with all of mankind jumping their spaceships through warp space, one step ahead of the Cylons, who attack every 33 minutes. The Cylons are descendants of mankind's former robots and servants and have developed to be nearly indistinguishable from humans. What is left of humanity is spread across several large spaceships, dealing with subterfuge from Cylon spies and trying to stay ahead of the Cylon warships. Humanity has had to abandon its dozen colonies and is making a gambit to fly back to Earth. There are tensions between the civilian government, the press corps and the military hierarchy on Galactica. Doctor Baltar is a high-functioning psycho who helped the Cylons plan their attack, but who is now supposedly helping humanity again. The press corps seems to be largely oblivious to their actual situation -- preferring to focus laser-like on civil-liberties issues when vicious enemies come knocking on the door every few days, armed with overwhelming and nearly unstoppable firepower. The civilian government as well seems to have only a vague appreciation for the actual situation, preferring instead to focus on power struggles and high-level philosophical discussion of liberties that would be fodder for discussion in a society that wasn't on it literal last legs. The overall story arc is of infiltration by Cylons that are indistinguishable from humans -- though they reveal themselves in that there are only a few models, some of which the humans have identified. Humanity is following old religious texts that seem to have more to do with reality than they'd at first thought. These texts -- and a partial-turncoat Cylon -- are leading the remains of the human fleet back to Earth, following clues from the books. The other Cylons are kind of aiding them in this task, presumably to find out where Earth is and possibly destroy it -- or possibly for some other, higher, purpose, like using humans to breed more advanced and resilient and perhaps varied versions of themselves. Halfway through the second season, it's unclear where the chips are going to fall on this topic. However, what is clear is that this is a very American show, with a large dollop of hoo-rah militarism (largely justified, given the militaristic situation in which they find themselves), a large dollop of religion -- on both the part of a good part of what remains of humanity and also the Cylons, strangely enough (also somewhat justified, given that the prophesies in the books turn out to actually come true). Every time the writing frustrates me to the point that I'm about to stop watching, it takes an interesting twist that is more philosophically or politically interesting than I'd expected. For example, one episode starts with all of the pilots celebrating one of the pilot's 1000th flight in a truly over-the-top and obnoxiously self-congratulatory manner -- it looks like a damned frat party -- when a bomb falls off of a rack and kills fourteen pilots. Did not see that coming. Overall, the show seems to be a long arc of proving why humans kind of deserve to die at the hands of the Cylons. They're mostly petty, power-hungry little bastards, unwilling to show any empathy or make any concessions to the significantly changed situation (i.e. dregs of humanity stranded in tin cans in the depths of space). It's not quite like reality TV, but often enough a bit too much like a soap opera, with cartoonishly evil people (see: entire crew of the Pegasus) and simpleton/buffoons (much of the deck crew). The show passes the time while I work out at home. I like Edward James Olmos as Commander Adama and Katee Sackhoff as Starbuck. Silicon Valley S06 (2019) -- "8/10" Called in to testify before Congress, Richard calls out Hooli, Facebook, Amazon and Google for mining its user's data and then promises that Pied Piper's "new Internet" will not allow anything of the sort. He is quickly informed that the #1 game running on his network does exactly that. Thinking themselves clever, Jared and Richard mine Colin's (the gaming CEO) data and present it to him, thinking they'll blackmail him into a better business model. Instead, he and his investors are impressed at how well Richard's new program mines data. Desperate to get away from Colin, Richard woos a large Chilean investor, who offers $1 billion for 10% of the company. Richard and Monica don't know what to do and turn to Jared, who's trying to leave Pied Piper to get back to a simpler time -- when he was needed. He ends up at Jian Yang's incubator, where he meets his next programmer to mold. Gavin, meanwhile, has sold most of Hooli to Amazon, but wants to keep a leaner Hooli going anyway. Hooli gets so lean that Richard and Monica hatch a plan to buy it in order to drive away the hostile investor. Since the other investor is from Chile and Hooli owns a dating/prostitution app called Foxhole that's heavily used by the military, they will be forced by law to sell their stake. The plan works: Pied Piper buys Hooli and gets the investor off of their backs. However, the investor hooks up with Laurie Breem and her Chinese programming team as well as Colin, who jumps ship with his game. YaoNet (Laurie's Chinese firm that she stole from Yang and brought stateside) outmaneuvers Pied Piper for AT&T, stealing their rollout in Hawaii. Pied Piper is no longer allowed to use any of their Hooli IP (including the phones) because of a Tethics pledge that Gavin made, calling for himself to be investigated for his transgressions as CEO -- he did this just to screw Richard. Russ Hanaman swoops in to save the day with RUSSFEST, which he wants Pied Piper to network for him, out in the desert. They run into the same network-scaling issues that YaoNet does in Hawaii (because Yao stole Pied Piper's IP). Both networks are failing when Richard unleashes Son of Anton 2.0 (Dinesh's bumbling modifications to Gilfoyle's AI) on RUSSFEST. After an initial failed start, it regains its feet and optimizes the network to a heretofore unimagined efficiency. The final episode is years in the future. It details how Pied Piper decided to shut down Son of Anton instead of letting it loose on humanity -- despite the massive financial upside for them personally. Pied Piper is no more. They've all moved on to other things, doing well enough for themselves and generally happy with their decision not have started SkyNet. A Marriage Story (2019) -- "6/10" Nora (Laura Dern) is like a cloying Californian praying mantis. She's so obviously superficial that Johansson must be so desperate to be dumping her whole story to this woman. Nicole is so desperate that she immediately gives all of her decisions and life over to Nora rather than Charlie. The problem is her personality, not Charlie. It feels like she's reading me a NYT Bestseller. Everybody tells everybody what to do. Shit rolls downhill from Charlie to Nicole to her mom. Nicole's mom and sister are useless and insane. It's unclear whether Nicole is in the same class. Charlie wins the McArthur Grant. He tells Nicole when he visits her on her TV-show shoot in California. The TV people are gloriously shallow. Their child is a typical brat, in charge of his parents. Charlie gets a lawyer (Ray Liotta). He costs 900 per hour. They advise him to get the kid to New York City. They quote him 50,000 right out of the gate. Wait until they find out about the McArthur grant. They go on the offensive immediately. "Criminal lawyers see bad people at their best, divorce lawyers see good people at their worst." Back in New York. The theater people aren't much better. Wallace Shawn is a dirty old man. Nora plays hardball and lays it out like for him. Charlie has to defend himself in LA or lose his child forever. They're going to take everything and his kid. And he has to get a lawyer to make sure that whatever assets they have are transferred to rich lawyers in LA. I couldn't recommend this movie to anyone because it pushes buttons a little deliberately, unremittedly, without any nice or funny bits. Literally everyone is shallow and horrible. Charlie finally finds Burt Spitz (Alan Alda). $450 per hour. He also has to pay for her lawyer as well. Because he's the man. He couldn't take any of the other lawyers because she'd seen them all already. Nicole plays the naif, but she seems to have gamed things quite well. Charlie shows up and starts gaslighting Nicole about her hair. She lies about her family not wanting to be with him on Halloween. Charlie doesn't even realize that his marriage is already over and his divorce is a done deal and his wife has moved to CA with his son and he's going to lose everything. And just wait until they get wind of his grant. She'll be a millionaire. She hacked into his e-mails and read all about his affair. Now its hardball for real. It's kind of neat to see how the most horrible people in the world (the lawyers) discuss their lives and solve their problems for them. Charlie has to pretend to care what they think. The divorce is all about the most useless member of the family: Henry, the boy. Charlie's lawyer's advice is for Charlie to move to LA. Forget his theater company. Nora is now in charge of Nicole. The system is pushing the father out of the equation. Charlie should have just given up at the beginning, left the kid, limited the amount of effort he wastes on the whole situation. Burt recommends he just give up now (after cutting a $25,000 check) and see Henry when he maybe goes to college on the East Coast. Nicole manipulates Charlie into coming over (because of a blackout), cuts his hair and then tried to keep Henry "because he's asleep". Charlie gets a new lawyer: the original one, Ray Liotta, for $900/hour. Nora pretends to be pissed, but now she's going to get more money. The lawyers are idiots, but they're the only ones allowed to talk. Charlie's lawyer chastises him for having deposited his first year's grant money into a joint account. Charlie responds that there won't be any money left anyway. Now that there's an evaluator involved, Nicole's terrified of Henry being interviewed and now wants to discuss without lawyers. Charlie wanted that weeks and dozens of thousands of dollars ago. She yells at him for gettng a new lawyer. He says "I needed my own asshole." I'm wondering if this excruciatingly long two-person scene is why they were nominated for Oscars. Charlie: "You don't want a voice, you just wanna fucking complain about not having a voice." Their negotiation doesn't go well. So the evaluator shows up. She's a very spacy woman. She wonders why he doesn't want to live in LA. It's nice. "And the space." This is the only funny line in the movie. It's a callback to all of the other Californians who repeat this like a mantra. Now they're eating a "normal" dinner. The evaluator sits at the table, but doesn't eat. After dinner, it's learning time. How is not being able to read the word "time" at age eight not a learning disability? Charlie cuts himself accidentally with his penknife, showing the evaluator a trick that he does incorrectly. He's bleeding like a stuck pig, but ignores it. So does she, leaving him to deal with it on his own. Spacy. Charlie faints. His son walks out to get water and doesn't find anything out of the ordinary. At the divorce party, Nicole sings and dances with her family. She gave up her claim on the McArthur money (Nora wasn't happy about that at all). Nora's still running the show. Charlie's in NY, also singing painfully. This movie won't end. I didn't find this movie "profound" or "heartbreaking". If you're not anything like the people in this movie (or don't really know people like them), then it won't speak to you at all. It's full of manipulative people willing to burn everything for temporary bullshit. So, normal people. Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw (2019) -- "6/10" Jason Statham and Dwayne Johnson as Shaw and Hobbs, respectively, get together to save the world, specifically to save Shaw's sister Hattie (Vanessa Kirby), who's infected herself with a world-slaying virus that will kill her and infect the world if not purged within 72 hours. She was ostensibly working for/with Brixton (Idris Elba), a genetically and cybernetically enhanced human, working for the shadowy and ludicrously well-funded, well-supplied, and well-connected organization Eteon. They both kick a lot of ass and have boatloads of charisma. Elba and Kirby are good as well, but the plot is ludicrous and it goes on a bit too long. Elba's indestructibility is a bit at-odds with the rest of the film. They end up on Samoa (somehow) for a showdown between old and new tech, in which old tech and "duking it out" and "teamwork" wins the day. It's not a great movie, but it's entertaining enough, if a bit long. Idris Elba chews a lot of scenery, but he's got the best character arc of them all. Hellen Mirren returns as mama Shaw, but doesn't play a big role. Knives Out (2019) -- "6/10" This is a classic whodunnit in the style of Murder on the Orient Express, with Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) playing the role of Hercule Poirot. He investigates the supposed suicide but suspected murder of world-famous author Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plummer). The cast is at the same time spectacular and disappointing. The names are impressive: Chris Evans, Jamie Lee Curtis, Don Johnson, Toni Collette, LaKeith Stanfield, and more. There's a by-now classic switcharoo of a switcharoo that fails to satisfy -- I think writer/director Rian Johnson outsmarted himself and made a trite whodunnit. The family members are uniformly awful and even the young home-care nurse Marta (Ana de Armas) is bland and boring. It was a decent film with a great and underutilized cast that never really caught my attention. The only nice person wins in the end, so hooray. It felt like quite a Disney-fied experience Parks and Recreation S01-S07 (2009-2015) -- "9/10" What is there to say about this uniformly spectacular seven-season epic about the employees and friends of the civic government and, specifically, the Parks department, in Pawnee, Indiana that hasn't already been said? It's wonderfully written, with an interesting overall show arc, character arcs for each of the unique characters and season arcs that end satisfyingly and leave you hoping for more. People complain about season one's aimlessness, but that's neither here nor there. The characters are already present and its a good watch: just because ensuring seasons soared to much greater heights takes nothing away from season one's modesty. Season seven also gets its own share of umbrage because of "fan service" but this applies to at most one or one-and-a-half episodes of the 13-episode season. The rest of the season builds characters and brings character arcs to believable and well-earned conclusions. The main character is definitely Leslie Knope (the irrepressible and amazing Amy Poehler), the deputy director and later councilwoman of Pawnee. She is a great believer in government and an ethos of general goodness and civic-minded leftishness. Her boss is Ron Swanson (Nick Offerman), her political polar opposite but still eventual and somewhat grudging ally. Andy Dwyer is a dumb but nice shoeshine guy (Chris Pratt), former boyfriend of Ann Perkins (Rashida Jones), nurse and part-time Parks employee. April Ludgate (Aubrey Plaza) is a former intern turned Ron's assistant turned deputy director of the Parks department who struggles to balance her innate weirdness with a respect for Leslie's optimism and ethics. Tom Haverford (Aziz Ansari) works there too, managing publicity and events. Jerry/Gary/Larry Gergich (Jim O'Heir) is the office klutz. Donna Meagle (Retta) has an unknown function, but is a cool and calm and collected addition to the office who owns property in Seattle as well as Pawnee (and a piece of the club that Tom owns as well). She and Tom have a lot in common, but the schtick works much better for her than Tom. Ben Wyatt (Adam Scott) shows up early as the "bad cop" half of a budget-cleanup team sent to Pawnee. He and Leslie fall in love, marry and move on to one success after another (as well as having triplets). Chris Traeger (Rob Lowe) is a diehard optimist and health fanatic and is an all-around spectacular character as well. He ends up with Ann Perkins. Once you've met them, you can't imagine any of the characters being played by other actors. They inhabit the roles in completely believable ways. There are a ton of recurring characters, each with their own unique characteristics (Tom's ridiculous friend Jean Ralphio, or his father, nemesis to Tom, played by Henry Winkler). There is no laugh track and the format is a semi-documentary with much breaking of the fourth wall via glances (á la The Office). Highly recommended. Funny as hell and well-intentioned to a fault: there are no really mean characters. Uplifting. Black Sea (2014) -- "7/10" Jude Law is a former British Navy man let go by the salvage company he works for. From a friend, he learns of a Nazi submarine full of Soviet gold at the bottom of the Black Sea. This is kind of like a somewhat smarter Armageddon. There is a ton of tension. The Russian crew and the British crew fight. The banker who goes with them just wants them to abandon the gold when the going gets tough, because he knows that the mission was funded by Law's old company Agora, which is funding the dive and will confiscate the gold from the poor suckers who get it off the ocean floor. The rich come out on top, no matter what. The motor blows out and they go down, but close enough to the other sub to steal its drive and the gold. The banker owns up to the fact that they were never meant to get a dime. They threaten to kill him, but Law protects him, pleading that they need him to help drive the sub to a secret port in Turkey. But first they have to navigate ludicrously narrow shallows, using only sonar and luck. They are on the edge of mutiny at all times, with the banker sowing unrest, trying to save his own ass. Law is going mad, but he's determined not to go home poor -- or let any of the other sad sacks on board do so. He is flouted by Fraser killing the machinist Zaytsev at the banker's behest, so that they don't have enough people to run the sub. They try to lie and pretend that Zaytsev just hit his head on something, but they all know the banker and Fraser are lying. The others know what happened and Daniels the banker demands that they now go up, just as he wanted. I have no idea why they don't just shoot him. Perhaps so that he is allowed to cause even more trouble later. He is already rich and will be richly rewarded anyway. Fraser now has killed two people and has Peters's death on his conscience, but he's also allowed to continue onward. Something blows up on the old sub and they start to drop again, dropping very, very, very far into the depths. The crew now just wants to survive rather than get out with the gold. Of course, if they hadn't all sabotaged the damned boat the whole time, it would be doing a bit better. Instead, there is a lot of water and fire in the boat. Fucking Daniels is still alive, somehow. He somehow figures out how to lock a hatch and dooms a few more men to their deaths by drowning them. He gets stuck in the hatch and Morozov leaves him in the lurch on purpose. He rejoins Robinson and Tobin above. They are the only ones remaining. Robinson admits that he was hiding the escape suits (although there are only three of them) because he didn't want anyone to give up too early. Morozov demands to know why they all had to die for Robinson's quest to stick it to the man. Morozov and Tobin go out the tubes; the sub is lost. Robinson is left alone, with no-one to release the tube for him, alone with the gold. He smokes a last cigarette while sitting on his gold, surrounded by levers and dials and valve handles, with water spraying in everywhere. A suit does pop up to join Morozov and Tobin, but it's just got a picture of Robinson's kid and dozens of gold bars. Mark Maron: End Times Fun (2020) -- "7/10" I really like the first half, which played to Mark's conversational comic's strengths. He's razor-sharp and smart and very witty. He has a great voice and a lovely, soothing tempo. I liked the first half much better than the second half, where he got mired down in a giant, long story that reminded me of how Bill Burr lost his way in his recent special Paper Tiger. Overall, I'd watch it again, but the first half was twice as good as the second. If you watch it now, during the Corona Quarantine, you'll be struck by his bit at the 27-minute mark, Maron says, "Haven't we been entertained enough? Like, isn't there something that will could bring everyone together and make us realize that we've like got to put a stop to like almost everything. Right? Oh my God. What would it take? Something terrible. That's what brings people together. Nothing good. Occasionally a concert outdoors, but that never really goes anywhere. It's gotta be something bad ... and big ... to get everyone to fucking snap out of this ... whatever it is ... trance, of like ... well, I think we kind of do it adaptively, I think it's sort of like, "I'm doing what I can in my life", well, you know, that's not good enough. I don't know what it would it would take. What? Would the sky have to catch on fire? Would we all just have to walk outside and look up and ... oh, we fucked it. The fucking sky's on fire. Goddammit. I knew we were in trouble, but fuck, it made the jump from land to sky." Taylor Tomlinson: Quarter-Life Crisis (2020) -- "9/10" She's young, pretty, and tells jokes that speak of experience that is far beyond what her 25 years could possibly encompass. But she makes it work. She makes it believable. She's not a filthy comic, but she doesn't work clean. She's wickedly funny and has spent time tuning her material. Unlike Maron, it didn't feel like she was stretching her set to fit Netflix's 1-hour requirement. Her set is well-worth checking out ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3890 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3890 Sun, 02 Feb 2020 21:11:08 +0100 -- "6/10" 2. "Ricky Gervais: Humanity (2018)" <#Ricky> -- "10/10" 3. "John Mulaney's Sack Lunch Bunch (2019)" <#John> -- "5/10" 4. "Big Bang Theory S12 (2019)" <#Big> -- "9/10" 5. "Wilder S01 (2017)" <#Wilder> -- "8/10" 6. "Doom Patrol S01 (2019)" <#Doom> -- "5/10" 7. "Detachment (2019)" <#Detachment> -- "8/10" 8. "Once Upon a Time...In Hollywood (2019)" <#Once> -- "9/10" 9. "Midsommar (2019)" <#Midsommar> -- "6/10" 10. "Deception (2008)" <#Deception> -- "5/10" These are my notes to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. I've recently transferred my reviews to IMDb and made "the list" of around 1400 ratings publicly available. I've included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other -- I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. The Irishman (2019) -- "6/10" This is a fictionalization of the murder of Jimmy Hoffa (Al Pacino), directed by Martin Scorsese. Actually, it's the story of the life of Frank Sheeran (Robert DeNiro), an Irishman who made his way to the highest echelons of an American-Italian crime family. The movie is 3.5 hours long and slowly paced. It tells the story of how Sheeran meets, is befriended and becomes employed by already-established crime boss Russell Bufalino (Joe Pesci). Sheeran soon becomes an enforcer for the family and the unions that it supports. He helps them cheat the inspectors and we also see how lawyers like Russell's son Bill (Ray Romano) help keep the federal wolves at bay. For a while, the needs of the workers align with the morals of the family. Soon, though, the family sees too much opportunity in the pension fund worth billions: they want to dip into it for loans to build Las Vegas, among other lucrative land deals. Since they have such an interest in the investment they've made in Hoffa, the family assigns Sheeran to be his main bodyguard. They become good friends, spending time with each other's families. For whatever reason, it's important to point out that, while Frank's daughter Peg doesn't like Russell or even her own father [1], she takes to Jimmy immediately. Though the film spends a lot of time throughout on Peg's disapproval, it has absolutely no bearing on the story in any way. Hoffa is less interested in satisfying all of the family's wishes. Though he's also half a mobster, he retains some of his initial revolutionary fervor and won't simply rubber-stamp everything the family asks for. There is also an up-and-comer in the family. Relative to Russell's comparative old-world placidity and charm, he a young, obnoxious and crude whippersnapper named Anthony Provenzano (Stephen Graham). He gets under Hoffa's skin nearly immediately. Frank is hired to whack another gangster Joe Gallo (Sebastian Maniscalco). This is one of the most visually interesting parts of the movie, but also has literally nothing to do with the main plot (other than to perhaps show what a consummate and unfeeling professional Frank is, but we learn this because Frank tells us in the narration). The family does its best to get John F. Kennedy elected because he's promised to get rid of that bastard Castro for them -- so that they can sweep back into Cuba and start up their lucrative casino businesses again. Hoffa is livid because he hates the Kennedys -- and they hate him. Robert Kennedy, in particular, keeps hunting until he manages to nail Hoffa on something that's much more minor than the egregious influence-peddling he was actually guilty of. While Jimmy's in prison for four years, his replacement Frank Fitzsimmons (Gary Basaraba) provides the requisite rubber-stamping. Kennedy soon falls out of favor with the family and it is intimated that the family had a lot to do with assassinating him. [2] With a lot of money and influence, Hoffa gets the new president Nixon to commute his sentence and he's out, determined to get "his union" back. This makes far too many waves for the family and they register their "concern", using Sheeran as the errand boy to deliver the news to Hoffa that he has one last chance to straighten up and fly right, to shut his trap and stop causing trouble. He doesn't take it. It's clear that he knows the danger, but that he doesn't care. A road trip for Russell, Frank and their wives twines its way throughout the film. That is, throughout the first 2.75 hours of the film, we see them headed on a road trip to a meeting that they would never attend -- because the mission was actually to get Frank close enough to puddle-jump up to Detroit and whack Jimmy. Frank foreshadows this at one point when he says, "I'm behind you, Jimmy, all the way." With Jimmy out of the picture, the family should be riding high, but they're soon individually taken down by either health or legal problems or both. Several of them -- Russell and Frank, in particular -- end up in prison together. Russell dies there, but Frank is eventually released to a nursing home. He's doddering but sufficiently in control of his faculties to avoid revealing anything about his role in the disappearance of Jimmy Hoffa. There's been a lot of buzz about this movie [3]: the flashbacks, the out-of-order storytelling, the CGI de-aging, the collection of Italian-American actors with long pedigrees (and longer teeth), Scorsese's return to the genre that made his name. I haven't heard very much from the usual sources about how there's just one black man in it (holding a gun and assassinating someone and on-screen for only seconds) and that the very few women and girls are pure window dressing with almost no lines (e.g. they are allowed to annoy the men by constantly asking them to stop the road trip so that they can take cigarette breaks). It was only when I read other reviews that I realized why people were complaining that the de-aging wasn't good enough. It looked fine to me while watching -- although it was, at times, difficult to tell in which decade something was supposed to be happening, it also didn't really matter -- but I wasn't aware that they were trying to make DeNiro look 30 years old. The de-aging failed miserably at that. He never looked less than 55. Neither did Pacino. This didn't really matter to the film, though. I honestly can't figure out where they managed to spend $160 million on this movie, so I'm going to surmise that it was a money-laundering operation for the mob. It's a long-ass movie. There are some nice shots, to be sure, but 90% of the film is people talking to each other -- usually a two-person conversation. Some of the conversations are comically long for their content. I can see this technique being used for emphasis, but it felt interminable in most cases. Just a couple of goombahs talking past each other for ten minutes. While this is most definitely Tarentino's thing, it's not so much Scorcese's. People are talking about Pacino's and DeNiro's acting chops, but they just looked old and tired (they move like old men because they are old men). DeNiro's job was to look stone-faced and he did that well. They even crammed in Harvey Keitel as Angelo Bruno, but he had absolutely nothing to do with the movie other than filling a booth in an Italian restaurant a couple of times. Just watching these actors [4] do another reasonably decent movie in the genre of other good movies they've been in wasn't enough for me. It doesn't stand on its own and I couldn't muster up the extra psychic fan-boy bolstering required to make me like it more. The last 45 minutes is literally watching Frank grow old. Nothing happens. That's OK, of course. It certainly says something, but did it need to extend the movie to 3.5 hours to say it? I kept waiting for something awesome to happen, for a scintillating bit of dialogue, for a truly lovely cinematographic flourish, but it never happened. I was never moved. The movie felt incredibly self-indulgent, but I'm not sure who was indulged. Was the director making a comment about what happens when you bring together a bunch of rich, white old guys and ask them to make a movie about their favorite topic? Was it trying to tell the story of Jimmy Hoffa? Was it making a point about America? About capitalism? About crime? About racism? [5] About unions? About ... what? Points off for taking two movie lengths to tell half a story. Ricky Gervais: Humanity (2018) -- "10/10" I'd just seen "SuperNature" , which was amazing, just so good, so ludicrously irreverent and so funny. The haters just gonna hate. This show from just a year and a half before was very similar in structure, though he discussed his Golden Globes hosting in this show, though he didn't do so in SuperNature. One of his jokes was about Caitlin Jenner: "She became a role model for trans people everywhere, showing great bravery in breaking down barriers and destroying stereotypes. She didn’t do a lot for women drivers, though." He had a bit about losing a baby, completely not caring about whether it would trigger any snowflakes in the audience. "I'd have to text my wife, wouldn't I?" He talked about his Twitter escapades, "Please don't worship me. I'm just an ordinary guy, with lots of followers trying to spread my message. Sort of like Jesus Christ I guess." It's 80 minutes long and packed full. There's a "Full Transcript" available. John Mulaney's Sack Lunch Bunch (2019) -- "5/10" John Mulaney's latest effort is a kid's show where the kids play in skits and sing songs that are not for kids at all, really. Special guests are Richard Kind, David Byrne (musical guest), Natasha Lyonne, and Jake Gyllenhaal (also kind of a musical guest). There were some clever bits and it was a refreshing change from other specials, but there was too much child-singing for me. Big Bang Theory S12 (2019) -- "9/10" This final season sees Sheldon (Jim Parsons) and Amy (Mayim Bialik) settling into married life while working on a "super-asymmetry" theory together. Howard (Simon Helberg) and Bernadette (Melissa Rauch) balance their two kids with her work schedule. Leonard (Johnny Galecki) and Penny (Kaley Cuoco) deal with her utter lack of interest in having children. Stuart (Kevin Sussman) makes cautious headway with Denise (Lauren Lapkus), his girlfriend and assistant manager at his comic-book store. Raj (Kunal Nayyar) almost marries Anu (Rati Gupta) in an arranged marriage, but they drop it and settle for dating instead. Major plot lines are that Amy and Sheldon's paper is a breakthrough and may earn them the Nobel. Leonard gets himself a new laser. Penny gets promoted to push Bernadette's newly approved drug and works more closely with her. Amy continues her manipulation of Sheldon to get him to strongly consider children, if only for their experimental possibilities (though he's always been adamant that theory trumps experiment). As noted above, Raj and Anu had both given up on romance and decided to arrange a marriage, but then realized that they do like each other and want to give it a go romance-style instead. Wil Wheaton's got a Dungeons and Dragons group with William Shatner, Kareem Adbul Jabbar, and Joe Manganiello. The finale roars in with a Nobel Prize ceremony with all in attendance. The first half of the final episode is terrible. There was a manufactured controversy about Sheldon being an asshole and the other four whining and threatening to go home, literally like children. Sheldon's speech honoring his friends' contribution to his achievement is sweet and well-written, saving the episode, but in no way earning it the 9.6 rating that it has on IMDb (people are just sheep). It's got a laugh track, but the jokes are flying fast and furious and the whole crew is firing on all cylinders with their characters. I think a lot of it is due to Chuck Lorre's writing, but also give credit where credit is due: these actors are living these characters at this point. Wilder S01 (2017) -- "8/10" Rosa Wilder (Sarah Spale) is a policewoman originally from the fictional Bernese village of Oberwies in Switzerland (which is actually Urnerboden in Glarus). She returns to visit her parents and celebrate with the town as they get approval for a large new spa that promises to reinvigorate -- or ruin, depending on whom you ask -- the local economy. The town's benefactor is Karim al-Baroudi, an Egyptian investor. His daughter is Amina al-Baroudi (Amira El Sayed), student of internationally renowned artist and the town's favorite son Armon Todt (Christian Kohlund). Manfred Kägi (Marcus Signer) is there representing the BPK (Bundeskantonspolizei) on behalf of another of the town's successful citizens Bundesanwältin Barbara Rossi. Thirty years ago, the town suffered a tragedy when 12 children were killed in an avalanche. Their teacher and schoolbus driver Béatrice Räber (Emanuela von Frankenberg) was never the same. She would marry Robert Räber (László I. Kish), the mayor of Oberwies. She's not really of sound mind and often wanders the streets and forests at night in a daze, searching for the children. On the night of the announcement that the spa was to be built, Armon is murdered and Amina goes missing. Young Jakob Siegenthaler is a local ne'er-do-well who likes filming things and smoking pot. He's a witness, but highly unreliable. The local hotelier Martin is also somehow involved. He actually hit Amina with his car, sending her to the hospital and into an artificial coma. Kägi has a history with Amina's bodyguard. Robert is delighted with the building plans and is quite an asshole for much of the series, though it turns out that his machinations are far less Machiavellian than they initially appear. Barbara, Rosa's father Paul, Armon and another young man "The Pirate" turn out to have been the unknown cause behind the avalanche. They caused it to draw attention to NERATOM, a company whose building projects were threatening the untouched nature of the region. Instead, they killed most of the town's children, including Rosa's brother Markus. There are a lot of twists and turns but those are the broad outlines. It was quite well-filmed and mostly well-acted, with only a few hollow notes. The dialect was an interesting mix of German, French and English. Kägi knew Arabic from his tour in Lebanon (which is how he recognized the bodyguard, who turns out to have been the murderer or his life-partner). All in all, a high-quality show with the extra flair of having been shot in what were for me highly recognizable locations (the Klöntalersee features heavily). I saw it in Swiss German. Doom Patrol S01 (2019) -- "5/10" This is the story of several people with supernatural powers, all living together in a mansion together. The pilot introduces us to Cliff Steele (Brendan Fraser, who would, after an initial backstory, only be providing the voice for a completely metal robot called, unsurprisingly, Robotman), a former race-car driver who gets into a horrific car accident, killing his wife, but not his daughter. We also meet '50s movie star Rita Farr, who'd ingested some spooky green river spirit that imbued her with body-morphing capabilities over which she has nearly no control -- even after several decades. She is called Elasti-Girl, but the parts I saw just had her transform to a mindless blob. That she looks much younger than her years can be explained away by her ability to control her elasticity, I guess. There is also a 60s-era test pilot Larry Trainor, whose "power" is utterly unclear, other than that he is also inhabited by some seemingly extraterrestrial spirit that leaves his body and does electrical stuff. He's called Negative Man in the credits, but it's unclear why. Crazy Jane (Diane Guerrero) has, apparently, 64 personalities, each with, apparently, its own superpower. She doesn't seem to be in control of any of the switches even though she, like the others, has had decades to try to get it under control. She, like the others, looks much younger than her supposed years. Timothy Dalton plays Niles Caulder, whom they call Chief. He owns the mansion and runs their team as they spend every evening watching television for decades. He seems to be terrible at running his crew, even though he's also confined to a wheelchair, suspiciously like Professor X. Their to-them-unknown nemesis is Mr. Nobody (Alan Tudyk), a man who'd paid a Nazi scientist in Argentina to transform him into something with super-powers and who appears as some sort of extradimensional tetris/jigsaw puzzle or farting donkey with a bagful of weak jokes and fourth-wall-breakages. Cyborg (Joivan Wade) is a cybernetically enhanced young man whose father experiments with him. He joins the Doom Patrol as they get to figure out what the hell Mr. Nobody wants. I watched the pilot of season one, which slogged its way through all of the origin stories, narrated by Mr. Nobody. The second episode introduced Cyborg, who's just a very stilted character. He meets Cliff in the ruins of a town that was the recent site of the Patrol's first encounter with Mr. Nobody. When they meet Jane, she goes through about half-a-dozen personalities, which is when I stopped watching because it was just terrible. I chopped off a few extra points from my score and stand by that rating for the part I'd watched. Detachment (2019) -- "8/10" Mr. Henry Barthes (Adrien Brody) is a substitute teacher at a broken inner-city high school. His grandfather is in an old-age home, a shadow of his former self: "I don't remember much. I'm mostly habit. You can't think in this place. You can't make new memories." Henry's mother exists only in his memory, where we see flashes that suggest that she drank herself to death. At school, he is detached, but a less hopeless teacher than many of the others at his school. They are an interesting bunch. The principal is played by Marcia Gay Harden (her husband is Bryan Cranston). James Caan, Christina Hendricks, Lucy Liu, Blythe Danner, Tim Blake Nelson play the teachers, all with varying levels of desperation and resignedness. Barthes meets a teenage prostitute Erica (Sami Gayle) and takes her in. After a rocky start, she starts taking care of him. He takes care of her. She takes a call from the old-age home and sits with his grandfather all day. She is there when he tells his grandfather it's OK for him to "go" -- speaking in his mother's voice because grandpa thinks he's talking to his daughter. They visit a park afterward and he tells her about his mother's death. She'd overdosed and he'd found her sprawled naked in a closet. He says that he suspects that his grandfather had done something to her, once, when she was younger. Erica finds his writings and drawings. A fellow artist and student Meredith (Betty Kaye) visits him in his classroom by herself. She's torn up and doesn't know who to turn to -- she's horribly lonely. She cites his speech from class, where the world is just broken shell, ready to eat everyone alive. She crushes on Barthes and tries to hug him, asking him to just hold her. He can't really, although he knows she just needs some human contact. Ms. Madison (Christine Hendricks) comes in just at that moment and, of course, assumes the worst. He flips out on her, telling her to stop being so judgmental. Barthes's grandfather dies. Erica accompanies him to pick up his effects. Barthes doubts his career: "These kids need something else. They don't need me." They're eating breakfast together when there's a knock on the door. He's called social services. She's devastated. So is he. But it can't go on. His apartment looks emptier than ever. It's parent-teacher night. Almost no parents show up. "I was in my room for 2 hours and saw one parent. Where are they? Where is everybody? It's uncanny, no air raid sirens, not bombs. It doesn't happen that way. It starts with a whisper, and then nothing." Principal Dearden (Marcia Gay Harden) calls a conference to announce major changes, but speaker Clay Davis (Sheeee-it) just talks about property values and how the school has to get better in order to attract a better type of person. The teachers literally don't know how to process this. They accost him and leave, disgusted. Meredith makes a collage with pictures of Barthes and her parents. Their eyes are all gone. No-one really sees her. She bakes cupcakes, presenting them at a school fair. Mr. Barthes talks to her and she chooses a cupcake for him -- she won't let him have the dark-green, sad-looking one. That one's for her. To no-one's surprise, she commits suicide with that cupcake. It was Barthes's last day. Barthes recites Poe to his class. They are all there, except Meredith. Her chair is empty. Papers fly everywhere, a veritable snowstorm of detritus raining down on a classroom that has fewer students and then no students. Then it's just Barthes in a destroyed classroom in a closed school reciting Poe's poems. Once Upon a Time...In Hollywood (2019) -- "9/10" We meet Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio), an actor with what might be his most successful days behind him. Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) is his best friend and occasional stunt double. It is February 1969. Dalton's greatest success was in the 50s with a series called Bounty Law. Dalton is star-struck that Roman Polanski and his wife, starlet Sharon Tate, have moved in next door. To cement their star status, we see them at a party at the Playboy Mansion. Dalton is on a set with a rare job. Booth is not needed for this, so he returns home to repair a TV antenna. Pitt's on the roof with his shirt off, revealing deep scars that tell of a life well-lived -- and of a man capable of defending himself. He remembers the time he fought Bruce Lee to a standstill on a set, just before he was fired for doing so. Sharon Tate wanders Hollywood and stops at a theater to watch herself in her latest film. Booth finishes the repair and is out driving when he picks up Pussycat, a hitchhiker he's seen several times. She's living out at Spahn's Ranch with her "friends" (the Manson family/cult, it turns out). While there, Booth checks up on George Spahn (Bruce Dern), whom he knows from his days with Dalton on Bounty Law. Squeaky Fromme (Dakota Fanning) is unable to dissuade Booth from going in to visit with George, who's "sleeping, because I fucked his brains out". Booth comes back out to find one tire slashed and he beats the guy who did it into repairing the tire for him. He leaves just before "Tex" shows up to teach him a lesson (or so the family thought it would go). At the same time, Dalton at first falters, then yells at himself in his trailer in an epic performance, then actually kills it on the set of his latest show (Lancer), where he is, once again, playing "the heavy". He does so well that he attracts the attention of the second-most-famous director of Spaghetti Westerns, Sergio Corbucci. Dalton resists, but soon realizes that he has no choice. Dalton and Booth travel to Italy to make four films in quick succession. They return with Dalton's new Italian wife Francesca in tow. Dalton's finances aren't what they once were and he tells Booth that he's going to have to let him go -- but not before they spend one more night out drinking to celebrate their career together. Booth takes his pitbull Brandy for a walk, smoking his acid cigarette. Dalton makes Margaritas. He hears a loud car out front and goes out to run it off. He berates the four members of Manson's crew who'd shown up to kill everyone in Tate's house. He runs them off. They retreat down the hill. Dalton floats in his pool with headphones on. Francesca sleeps, jetlagged. Booth returns home with Brandy. The four Manson Family members come back and break into Dalton's home instead, determined to exact revenge on him for having yelled at them and "taught them how to murder" (with his films, naturally, as part of the societal killing machine that they've chosen to blame for any action they take). They instead find a very drunk and high Booth, who recognizes them from the ranch: "Cliff Booth: Oh, I know you. I know all three of you! Yeah, Spahn Ranch! Spahn Ranch, yeah! Woo! Cliff Booth: I don't know your name, but I remember that hair. Cliff Booth: And you, I remember your white little face. Cliff Booth: And you were on a horsey! Yeah... you are? Tex: I'm the Devil. And I'm here to do the Devil's business. Cliff Booth: ...Nah, it was dumber than that. Something like Rex. Sadie: God, shoot him, Tex! Cliff Booth: Tex!" As with Inglourious Basterds, Tarentino imagines a slightly better world. In that film, Hitler and his whole coterie of top leaders were killed in Paris before they could do any more damage. In this movie, Cliff Booth and his dog Brandy beat the ever-loving life out of the assholes from Manson's Family who'd actually slaughtered Sharon Tate and her friends at their home in our timeline. Tarentino kept the story 100% accurate (dining at El Coyote, for example) right up until the point where they chose a home to invade. Instead of ending the evening dead along with her unborn child, Tate and Sebring ended up inviting Dalton in to her party while Francesca slept with Brandy and Booth recovered in a local hospital from eminently survivable wounds. The end. Happy ending. Each scene, taken individually, is lovely, but contributes only a bit to the overall story. Each one could be taken away without losing the thread. But each one contributed in its own way. Tarentino and crew's craft brings the world of late '60s Hollywood to unblemished life. Every little detail contributes. The cars, the storefronts, the way one moved in that world, were all perfect. For example, the change in the ashtray, acid cigarettes, hitchhikers, endless sunshine, the clothes, the hair, the language. Brad Pitt has perfected the dry delivery. He has so many seemingly lackadaisically delivered lines that just land beautifully. When Dalton is in the parking lot with him, telling him "It's official, old buddy. I'm a has-been.", Booth hands him his sunglasses, "Here, put these on. Don't cry in front of the Mexicans." (referring to the valets). It's racist, of course, but it's appropriate for the character and the time. All of the members of Manson's gang existed (see the "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" page, which links the bios of all of the portrayed individuals. Midsommar (2019) -- "6/10" The director of Hereditary Ari Aster's sophomore slump is a languorous and quite pretty low-key horror movie with creepiness, ritualized murder and no jump scares. The lack of jump scares isn't the problem. The problem is more the cast, characterization, and the sheer amount of time they're allowed to spend on the screen in what feels for the first hour like a mumblecore film. Dani (Florence Pugh) is a sad young woman. That's it. She's sad. What is her education? Her job? Her convictions? We do not know nor do we find out. We are supposed to ally ourselves with her, though, of that I'm fairly certain (#believeher, #imwithher). She is Christian's (Jack Reynor) girlfriend. Director Ari Aster films her in extreme closeup for the first half an hour. She's pretty. She has great skin. A lovely mouth. She is very emotional. She does what she can with the rather slow-moving material. Christian is a PhD candidate, along with several of his friends: Pelle (Vilhelm Blomgren), Josh (William Jackson Harper), and Mark (Will Poulter). There's a bunch of horseshit relationship stuff where we're clearly expected to pick sides between Christian and Dani, but it's hard to care when we've just met them. Aster may think he's provided enough information to make an informed choice, but he has not. I am probably very lonely in thinking this, though (see linked review below). Aster is clearly expecting us all to read our own context into this -- but it's not actually there in the film. This would be a recurring theme, with the film throwing a bunch of neat-looking stuff onto the table and asking the viewer to assemble it into a coherent narrative. The group of friends travel to Pelle's hometown, where he was raised in a "commune" (it's totally a cult). They are woefully unprepared for everything. They are tourists intruding on a sacred ritual. None of them thinks to ask why they're allowed to be there (Pelle invited them, but it's very weird nonetheless). None of them feels like they're out of place -- they give nary a thought to being out of place. They clearly feel that the whole ritual is being put on for their entertainment. They don't seem put out by the overall weirdness of it all (until the ritual and very public suicides/murders). They drink and eat whatever's handed to them -- even though the very first tea they got was psychoactive. They stick out like sore thumbs everywhere, taking the townspeople's seeming acceptance of them for granted. Josh wants to study the nine-day ritual for his PhD. So does Christian, who suddenly decides this while he's there. There's a fight that we're supposed to care about. Mark is coarse and crude, loudly swearing and ogling everything like a fratboy. He takes a leak on the ancestral tree and ashes. It's hard to think of any of these people as scholars. It's also hard to conceive of Pelle having been raised in that village and being able to assimilate anywhere else. So there's warning signs aplenty, all completely ignored by our idiotic protagonists. They start to disappear: The two Brits brought by Pelle's brother "went to the train station". Mark wanders off with a girl he thinks is "hot" even though she looks like she's got a vitamin-D deficiency despite the lack of nighttime. He does not return. Josh disappears one night, running into someone wearing Mark's skin before being concussed to death. Dani is taken into the ritual by the local girls and "wins" May Queen. Christian is selected as an optimal astrological match for a local girl and pressed into breeding with her before an Eyes Wide Shut--style audience. Poor Nick Cage didn't get to nail anyone in Wicker Man so I guess Christian's ahead of the game. Dani is drugged out of her mind and confined in a giant pile of flowers that she drags around with her like a snail does its house. The final ritual is in the yellow house, where the corpses of the Brits, Josh and Mark are placed on bales of very flammable hay. Christian, having been selected by Dani as the sacrifice (presumably this is her revenge on him for being basic, a dipshit and a lackadaisical and only partially attentive boyfriend?), is ensconced in a bear carcass and placed on his own hay bale, still alive, but paralyzed. Two townspeople are selected as local sacrifices. They go quite willingly. Whoosh. It all goes up in flames. The others mimic the screams of their townspeople (the only sacrifices capable of screaming), tearing at themselves and going into histrionics out in the field. Dani crawls around in her flower heap, having yet another panic attack (which she makes look believably debilitating, to be sure). At the end, she smiles, showing her teeth for the first time. I guess she won? She's been kidnapped to the Swedish countryside, trapped in a heap of flowers and will likely be made to pull a train for the whole village until she dies in childbirth years later, but holy shit is she the vindicated hero because she got to condemn Christian to death. Winning. Dude, they don't even mention why they're doing this ritual. I presume it's some sort of way of getting new genes into the community without poisoning it with new ideas? And maybe they're praying to fertility Gods for both their crops and their children? These are just guesses. As with any piece of art, it's what you bring to it that determines how you interpret it and what it ends up saying to you. This "review" by Tomris Laffly gave the movie 4/4 stars and ended with the following "lessons learned". "Some will be troubled by the excess in “Midsommar.” The unburdened surplus of lengthy customs does overshadow some of the film’s potentially ripe avenues of interest, such as the scholarly rivalry between Christian and Josh, as well as racial dynamics that are only briefly hinted at. But the invigorating reward here is the ultimate sovereignty you will find in Dani, a surrogate for any woman who ever excused an inconsiderate male, rationalized his unkind words or thoughtless non-apologies. Pugh knows it in the film's liberating final shot. And you will know it too, so intensely that her freedom might just feel like therapy." This is so misguided and delusional that I barely know where to begin. There is nothing interesting in a "scholarly rivalry between Christian and Josh" because it's utterly unbelievable that Christian is a scholar. I'm not even sure he or Dani knows how to read. It wasn't an interesting avenue to pursue even as far as Aster pursued it and more character development wouldn't have improved things. The outsiders were all terrible. As were the villagers, in fairness. And "racial dynamics"? Don't make me laugh. There was nothing to "hint at". Instead, no-one in the movie even noticed that Josh was black, as it should be. No-one cared, as it should be. But it has to discuss race: Josh is black. I don't know whether the director was being lazy in trying to sell that group as "scholars" or whether no-one noticed that they were not just not erudite, well-spoken or seeming intellectually interested at all, but outright dumb. Mark was laughably dumb. Christian, as a supposed anthropologist PhD candidate, seemed nearly completely uninterested in anything for the first half of the movie. Only Josh evinced an ability to write and an interest in asking questions. And Dani was the hero for this reviewer? How? There was literally no background given for what she did other than being Christian's girlfriend and suffering from panic attacks. The reviewer sees their relationship as between Dani (not described, but presumably an unblemished soul) and Christian ("inconsiderate [...] unkind [...] thoughtless"). That is bringing a lot to this movie. They were both putzes, unimaginable as friends or conversational partners. She talks to a girlfriend on the phone, who tells her that "his job is to be there for you". Dani wonders whether she asks too much. A legitimate question, as she seems to be quite an emotional handful. This is before her sister kills herself and her parents, a well-told plot point that was completely unexplained and would turn out to be utterly irrelevant to what would follow. I mean, did Dani need to have had a personal experience with suicide in order to be shocked by the plummeting suicides in the village? I don't even know whether the juxtaposition between the slovenly, cursing American students (who were supposedly in PhD programs) and the murderous but bilingual and well-mannered denizens of the Swedish village was deliberate or whether everyone associated with the film thought that the students "looked cool". I honestly don't even know anymore. Christian, in particular, wore ugly pants, ill-fitting T-shirts and giant-laced sneakers everywhere. In a movie littered with pagan symbolism but suffering from a paucity of narrative direction, we're all forced to bring a ton of explanation to the table -- and sometimes even I just don't have the energy for it. It was a pretty movie, nicely filmed. It didn't feel as long as it's 150 minutes, but it could have been edited down a bit. I saw it in English and Swedish with no subtitles (I'm not sure if they're available, but don't feel I missed much narrative ... at best, I experienced the rituals the same way that our supposed protagonists did). Deception (2008) -- "5/10" Accountant and auditor Jonathan McQuarry (Ewan McGregor) is just finishing up the taxes for a law firm where he meets Wyatt Bose (Hugh Jackman). They become friends, with Bose definitely the cooler half, but seeming to genuinely like McQuarry. They go out for drinks and play some tennis. They get lunch and switch their phones by (what would turn out not to be an) accident -- just before Bose is set to go to London for two weeks. McQuarry gets some odd calls and agrees to meet up with one of the women who'd called. They sleep together -- she seems to have called for just that purpose. McQuarry makes the next call and gets into a sex ring of some sort. There are rules: the initiator arranges for and pays for the room; no rough stuff; no names. Bose tells him to have fun with it. McQuarry goes through a montage of encounters, then finally meets up with a woman that he kind of knows (Michelle Williams): they'd spoken on a subway platform before. This is a reason for neither of them to want to get it on and instead spend the evening chatting and falling asleep in each other's arms. She's gone in the morning. He's pretty much already in love. He stops taking calls until she calls again, a month later. They see each other again, at a Chinese restaurant, where she orders in the same way that they pick lovers in their sex club: she just points to things without knowing what they are. Smitten, they retreat to a nearby hotel, where they are very close to consummating their relationship. He steps out for a bucket of ice that she requested. She's gone. There's blood on the linens. He's hit on the head from behind by what looks like a ninja. When he comes to, the police are there and there is no sign that she was ever there. McQuarry is on the hunt for her, using his special talent for sniffing out details. Wyatt shows up again, with a deal to blackmail McQuarry into transferring over $20 million to a private account on his next auditing job. If he does, he gets his girl back. At this point, it was already obvious to me that she was in on it with Wyatt. I suspected it, but McQuarry eventually knew, because he could tell that the picture of her in his apartment that Bose sent to him was two weeks old. McQuarry finds out Wyatt's real name and his past, but is still forced to go through with the heist. Wyatt cleans up loose ends later by blowing McQuarry up in his own apartment. Next, we see Wyatt and S (Simone) in Spain, ready to pick up the money from his account. He's dressed up and identifying as Jonathan McQuarry, in whose name the account was opened. Everything's ready to go. The bank informs him that he just needs to get his co-signer Wyatt Bose to show up. McQuarry has double-crossed him and Bose (as McQuarry) is unamused. He exits to the street and gets a call from the real McQuarry, now posing as Bose. Apparently, it had been someone else in his apartment. Together, they return to the bank and warily make off with the money in two briefcases. McQuarry (the real one) offers half of his loot if Bose will tell him where to find Simone. They head to a secluded park to finalize the transaction. Bose pulls a gun on him, but Simone shoots him from out of nowhere, grabs the briefcase and runs away. McQuarry hands Bose his "real" passport and the remaining briefcase so as to finally incriminate Bose and follows Simone. They see each other again an unspecified time later, still in Madrid. They meet and...presumably live happily ever after? The cast is quite famous and includes Charlotte Rampling and Michelle Q as two of the other lovers. The movie's not so great and is both too long and too short. There's a shocking lack of nudity, tension and eroticism for a movie about a sex club full of attractive people. At eight minutes long, the film shows a dedication to the credits that was lacking in the film itself. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] There is an early scene where Frank goes to beat up a shopkeeper because the guy had dared to reprimand his daughter. He takes Peg along to show her what he's going to do to the guy. He throws him through a window. The scene is embarrassing because DeNiro was sleepwalking in it -- and he doesn't move at all like the young muscle he's supposed to be. It was gratuitous to include it simply to "show" us why Peg doesn't like her dad. [1] As with the Chernobyl series, most people won't be able to discern this movie from a documentary and will soon start citing it as "proof" that the mob had Kennedy killed. I welcome the increased muddying of the already muddy waters around this no-longer-relevant event of the 20th century. [1] It's been nominated for ten oscars -- even in categories for which its laughably not qualified, e.g. Costume Design...um, they all wore black suits nearly all the time or Film Editing...um, the movie dragged on to 3.5 hours. (Did they leave anything on the cutting-room floor?) [1] Hoffa was more than casually racist about Italians. The Italians, in turn, were more than casually racist about blacks. [1] Because actresses weren't given lines or really roles of any significance. They were utterly insignificant next to the men except for maybe "Jo" Hoffa, Jimmy's wife. Anna Paquin, no slouch, had almost no lines and was left to indicate her disapproval of her father with a bevy of unhappy stares. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3883 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3883 Sat, 18 Jan 2020 13:22:21 +0100 1. IT (2017) -- "7/10" 2. Joker (2019) -- "10/10" 3. Iliza Schlesinger (2019) -- "8/10" 4. Le Mans 66: Gegen jede Chance (2019) -- "9/10" * "Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2019.13" 1. Hardware (1990) -- "6/10" 2. Booksmart (2019) -- "9/10" 3. Glass (2019) -- "9/10" 4. Maniac (2018) -- "8/10" 5. After Life (2019) -- "8/10" 6. Ronnie Chieng: Asian Comedian Destroys America (2019) -- "9/10" 7. Michelle Wolf: Joke Show (2019) -- "7/10" 8. Zardoz (1974) -- "7/10" 9. The Cell (2000) -- "8/10" 10. Zathura (2005) -- "5/10" * "Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2019.14" 1. The Congress (2013) -- "8/10" 2. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018) -- "8/10" 3. The Hunted (2003) -- "4/10" 4. Parasite (2019) -- "10/10" 5. Gone in Sixty Seconds (1974) -- "5/10" 6. Yojimbo (1961) -- "8/10" 7. You Were Never Really Here (2017) -- "8/10" 8. Bonnie and Clyde (1967) -- "8/10" 9. My Neighbor Totoro (1988) -- "8/10" 10. A Dangerous Method (2011) -- "8/10" * "Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2019.15" 1. Weekend (1967) -- "5/10" 2. The Belko Experiment (2016) -- "5/10" 3. Matinee (1993) -- "5/10" 4. Mimic (1997) -- "6/10" 5. Another Year (2010) -- "7/10" 6. Five Deadly Venoms (1978) -- "6/10" 7. The Putin Interviews E04 (2017) -- "9/10" * "Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2020.1" 1. Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014) -- "8/10" 2. Ran (1985) -- "9/10" 3. One Cut of the Dead (2017) -- "8/10" 4. Metropolis (1927) -- "9/10" 5. The King of Comedy (1982) -- "8/10" 6. Step Brothers (2008) -- "6/10" 7. Andre the Giant (2008) -- "7/10" 8. M (1931) -- "8/10" 9. Russian Ark (2002) -- "8/10" 10. These Final Hours (2013) -- "6/10" * "Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2020.2" 1. Army of Shadows (1969) -- "9/10" 2. Threads (1984) -- "9/10" 3. Mademoiselle (1966) -- "7/10" 4. The Third Man (1949) -- "8/10" 5. Bound (1996) -- "8/10" 6. A Face in the Crowd (1957) -- "9/10" 7. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011) -- "8/10" 8. Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974) -- "8/10" 9. In Cold Blood (1967) -- "8/10" 10. Koyaanisqatsi (1982) -- "8/10" * "Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2020.3" 1. Margaret (2011) -- "9/10" 2. Fahrenheit 11-9 (2018) -- "8/10" 3. The Square (2017) -- "9/10" 4. The Guilty (Den skyldige) (2018) -- "8/10" 5. On the Beach (1959) -- "7/10" 6. Mandy (2018) -- "8/10" 7. The Lighthouse (2019) -- "9/10" 8. Citizen Kane (1941) -- "7/10" 9. Glengarry Glen Ross (1992) -- "8/10" 10. Velvet Goldmine (1998) -- "9/10" * "Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2020.4" 1. American Me (1992) -- "8/10" 2. Selena (1997) -- "6/10" 3. The Counselor (2013) -- "6/10" -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] My wife visits her family for the holidays every year, leaving me with more free time -- and free choice of content -- than usual. [1] I only watched two short seasons that were more like long movies: After Life and Maniac. [1] I don't mind subtitles and sometimes use them even for languages in which I'm fluent, just to make sure I don't miss something whispered. Obviously, subtitle quality varies widely -- and I'm not even in a position to judge for languages I don't know at all. I don't need subtitles at all for English or German. I understand most Italian, and do pretty well in French, but appreciate the help where possible. My preference is to have German, Italian and French subtitles in the original language as well -- hearing and reading simultaneously often sums up to complete understanding (and I look up idioms to learn new things) -- but that's rarely possible. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3886 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3886 Sat, 18 Jan 2020 13:14:50 +0100 of around 1400 ratings publicly available. I've included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other -- I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. American Me (1992) -- "8/10" This is the story of Montoya Santana's (Edward James Olmos). The movie starts off with the Zoot Suit riots in Los Angeles, largely perpetrated by Navy officers, several of whom raped his mother Esperanza (Vira Montes) while the others beat the shit out of his father in the streets. We flash back to Montoya's youth, growing up with his two best buddies JD and Mundo. They're big guys, giving each other their own gang tattoos for La Primera (a little knife-thing between the thumb and forefinger), then heading into another gang's territory -- just because they can. They get chased by dozens of guys and they hide in a shop. The shopkeeper is there, though, and he ends up shooting JD. Montoya and Mundo end up in Juvenile Hall, where Santana is immediately raped at knifepoint. He turns it around immediately and kills his rapist, for which he'll be heading to Folsom after his stint in juvie. JD shows up in juvie, having lost the leg. We segue to Folsom State Prison, where Mundo (Pepe Serna), JD (William Forsythe) and Montoya end up -- on a 15--20 stretch. They are not without power, though. Montoya meets with his mother and his (much) younger brother. She tries to hand him a chain with Saint Dismas on it, but a guard comes over and says in a very nice voice "Excuse me, Ma'am. You're not supposed to pass items to convicts. He can pick this up with the rest of the property you brought for him." The movie's from 1992, before Clinton changed everything. Or maybe they're just showing him respect because he's the head of the La Eme, the Mexican Mafia. JD's hot visitor heads to the bathroom, where she squeezes a balloon out of her nether regions, then drops it into the toilet. There's someone waiting in the bowels of the prison, with his hand in the pipe. He catches the payload, lubes it up and stashes it in his prison pocket. Back in his cell, he splits it and distributes it further, along the cells -- mirrors, whispers, cigarette packs. A black inmate steals drugs from one of Montoya's best customers -- so he sends his henchmen to set him on fire in his cell. A riot starts -- or tries to. Instead, they back off -- for now. Santana goes in the hole. Even in solitary, he gets special food service. He still runs things. The gang deals with power struggles. One recognizable member of the gang who is not hispanic is El Japo (Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa). Like JD, he speaks like an cholo, though. JD gets out. Montoya learns from his little brother that his mother has died. Many years later, Montoya is out as well. JD picks him up in a lowrider. Montoya and JD try to move in on the Italian Mafia, but they're having none of it. Montoya ends up at a party, where he meets Julie (Evelina Fernández). They date, go shopping. She teaches him how to drive stick. She takes him to the beach for the first time in his life. She takes him home, where he does something else for the first time in his life. That same night, La Eme makes a move on the Don's son in the prison -- getting him super-smashed on prison pruno. In this weakened state, La Eme rapes him. The scenes are juxtaposed in a combined montage, with Puppet pumping away at the Italian while Montoya does the same to Julie. Montoya gets violent and ends up forcing himself on her. [1] Don Scagnelli gets the news about his son. Soon after, Julie finds her older son Neto dead, with a needle in his arm. Scagnelli had let the next shipment of heroin through uncut, causing dozens of ODs. Montoya rushes home to make that Pualito (his brother) doesn't suffer the same fate as Neto. The war heats up: the Italians hire the Black Guerrillas to take out some of La Eme. Montoya is best man at Little Puppet's wedding. At the same time, the Aryan Brotherhood takes revenge on a black club. Little Puppet gets wicked drunk, lamenting his stupid decisions that led to dead time in jail and to his shattered hand -- lamenting that before he'd gotten mixed up in La Eme he'd been known for the "best tattoos in East LA". Montoya tells JD that the revenge killing looked like a racial hit. JD tells Montoya that he's "starting to show weakness...and we both know you can't afford to do that." Little Puppet gets even more ridiculously drunk and Montoya and Julie walk him home. Montoya confiscates his drugs. Little Puppet goes home. Later, the cops stop Montoya and Julie and pop him (arrest him). In the joint, he finds out that Puppet is supposed to kill Little Puppet for having gotten Montoya arrested. JD and Montoya discuss it. Montoya wants to call it off. JD tells him that's not possible. Montoya basically signs his own death warrant. JD knows it. "Montoya: You know, a long time ago, two best homeboys -- two kids -- were thrown into juvie. They were scared, and they thought they had to do something to prove themselves. And they did what they had to do. They thought they were doing it to gain respect for their people, to show the world that no one could take their class from them. No one had to take it from us, ese. Whatever we had... we gave it away. Take care of yourself, carnal." When the troops roll in the prison, it's only El Japo who stays in. He'll pay for it, too, most likely. But he's loyal to Montoya, not to El Eme. Puppet is loyal to Eme, killing Little Puppet as required. Little Puppet made it easier by being a fucking moron. I gave it an extra star for Edward James Olmos, who's always captivating. Also, I learned new words. [2] Selena (1997) -- "6/10" Selena Quintanilla (Jennifer Lopez) enters a packed stadium, playing at the top of her game. Flash back to 1961, when the her father, as a member of the Dinos can't get gigs because of racism at "Whites Only" clubs. Flash forward to the first time Abraham Quintanilla (Edward James Olmos) hears Selena's singing voice. He's transformed and buys a bunch of musical equipment, setting up his whole brood on various instruments. Her sister is not impressed that her dad is making her play the drums. Abraham gets them a restaurant and sets up Selena and the Dinos as the house band. His wife Marcella (Constance Marie) is less than thrilled at losing the security of a home in the suburbs, but she's willing to try. They keep playing. Abraham takes Selena to the side and tells her that she should start singing in Spanish, so she can sing Tejano music. Their first show doesn't go very well because (A) they're kids and (B) Tejano music is typically all-male. They've got a bus that the family travels in as they take the show on the road. They pick up guitarist Chris Perez (Jon Seda), who's got serious chops and cleans up well enough. He cleans up so well that Selena falls for him. Their next step is play dates in Mexico. Abraham warns them that they will be judged. "I mean, we gotta know about John Wayne and Pedro Infante. We gotta know about Frank Sinatra and Agustín Lara. We gotta know about Oprah and Cristina. … Japanese Americans, Italian Americans, German Americans. Their homeland is on the other side of the ocean. Ours is right here … We gotta be more Mexican than the Mexicans and more American than the Americans, both at the same time. It’s exhausting!" Chris's friends trash a hotel room and Abraham wants him fired. They have to keep him on because they can't find another guitarist in time -- also because Selena thinks he's being a jackass on purpose. They get to Mexico and Selena handles her "problem" with her accent by leaning into it, speaking a mix of Spanish with a smattering of English words. The crowd the next day is enormous. They have to send for the police for additional security. Abraham is worried, of course. He's right, though. People press in so hard that they threaten to collapse the stage. He tries to call off the concert, but the crowd's going even more nuts. He asks Selena, "they need you to go back out there and settle this crowd down. Can you do it?" The whole Chris/Selena love affair is pretty painfully acted, super over-the-top. Abraham is not taking having a 20-year--old daughter well. Chris and Selena see each other on the sly. This part, too, is very much saying instead of showing. I understand that there's just supposed to be kids, but the marriage plot-line isn't very interesting. Everything's going her way: she's married to her lead guitarist, won a Grammy, has a thriving crossover career (English/Spanish) and has also started her own fashion line. She's planning on having kids. And a farm. She has a lot of concerts. J-Lo wears a ton of outfits. Most of the outfits are based on those worn by Selena. She sings a lot of songs. She is dragging a wagon, as expected -- but so was the real Selena. In the montage at the end, though, it's clear that they transformed J-Lo into a very reasonable facsimile of Selena. Then, Yolanda Saldívar, her fashion-business manager and fan-club manager, shoots her in the shoulder. Shoulder wounds can be fatal. The movie came out only two years after she'd been murdered at 24 years old. The Counselor (2013) -- "6/10" Written by Cormac McCarthy and directed by Ridley Scott, this movie is off to a strong start. It has pedigree, no doubt. It would get lost somewhere along the way. We start off in bed. Counselor (Michael Fassbender) and Laura (Penélope Cruz) are spending a lazy day in bed before his flight to Amsterdam that early evening. He's all about her: "tell me what you want me to do to you." or is he? He's in charge. It's a bit odd to start the film with this scene, but let's trust the pedigree. Also odd is "I want you to finger-fuck me" in that P. Cruz--accented English. Not a mood killer, but ... odd. A truck is loaded with (probably drugs). Reiner (Javier Bardem) and Malkina (Cameron Diaz) are on safari somewhere in Arizona with pet cheetahs. Diaz's English is California-accented and her lines are far more painful than Cruz's, which at least had the sound of earnestness to them. Show, don't tell. Too late. "Malkina: I don't miss things...I've always known that, since I was a little girl. Reiner: You don't think that's a bit cold? Malkina: The truth has no temperature." Jesus. Did I mention that she has cheetah-spot tattoos all over her shoulder and all the way down her back? Reiner turns out to be the chatty one. He tells Counselor one long, rambling story after another. It feels like McCarthy wanted to channel Tarentino, but it's not working. Counselor meets a client, Ruthie (Rosie Perez), who wants him to bail out her son, a motorcyclist with the need for speed -- and also a drug mule. [3] Stuff happens. Counselor proposes to Laura. He bought the ring in Amsterdam from the inestimable Bruno Ganz [4]. Malkina asks Laura about her sex life with an utterly ghoulish smiles on her face (I don't think Diaz would be flattered to know just how much like a female Joker she looked; Botox is a bitch). Counselor meets Westray (Brad Pitt), who advises him to walk away. From what, we're still not sure. Reiner tells Counselor that he's afraid of Malkina, allegorically describing how she once "fucked his car". Some might call Diaz's performance brave, for daring to play such an unhinged, amoral skank. I'm having a hard time believing she's faking her lines. She might just be ad-libbing. "You should be careful what you wish for, angel. You might not get it.". What? Malkina hires some people to get what the biker has. One of the hired thugs sets up a wire across the road at just the right height to slice a motorcyclist's head off. Westray calls in the Counselor. He tells him that he's in trouble. His bosses know that the Counselor had let the man out on bail. They think he's involved in the murder. "Westray: Well, I'm perfectly willing to believe you had nothing to do with this but I'm not the party you have to convince. Counselor: Convince of what, for Christ sake? Westray: That this is some sort of coincidence. Because they don't really believe in coincidences. They've heard of them. They've just never seen one." The guy who killed the motorcyclist steals the truck. He's carjacked on the highway by cartel. Only one survives, but he steals the truck, taking it to a "launderer" to fix up the bullet-holes and clean out the blood. He's on his way again faster than in GTA. Cartel tightens the noose on Counselor -- and now Reiner, who's chased with his two cheetahs in the back. A quick shootout and Reiner is no more. The cheetahs are loose. Westray's in the wind. The Counselor is in Boise. Laura's been taken. The Counselor's in Mexico. So is the truck and the drugs. John Leguiziamo and Dean Norris ("Hank" from Breaking Bad) are there. Leguiziamo tells him about the "fourth barrel", which contains a body. Hank asks what happens next. "Nothing. He just rides around, back and forth across the border." Counselor is on the phone with Jefe (Rubén Blades), who waxes philosophically with the Counselor, telling him to accept his fate -- and that of Laura. "I would urge you to see the truth of the situation you're in, Counselor. That is my advice. It is not for me to tell you what you should have done or not done. The world in which you seek to undo the mistakes that you made is different from the world where the mistakes were made. You are now at the crossing. And you want to choose, but there is no choosing there. There's only accepting. The choosing was done a long time ago... "[...] "Machado would have traded every word, every poem, every verse he ever wrote for one more hour with his beloved. And that is because when it comes to grief, the normal rules of exchange do not apply, because grief transcends value. A man would give entire nations to lift grief off his heart. And yet, you cannot buy anything with grief, because grief is worthless. "[...] "At the understanding that life is not going to take you back. You are the world you have created. And when you cease to exist, this world that you have created will also cease to exist. But for those with the understanding that they're living the last days of the world, death acquires a different meaning. The extinction of all reality is a concept no resignation can encompass. And, yet, in that despair, which is transcendent, you will find the ancient understanding that the Philosopher's Stone will always be found, despised, and buried in the mud. This may seem a small thing in the face of annihilation, until annihilation occurs. And then, all the grand designs and all the grand plans will be finally exposed and revealed for what they are." Westray is in London. He meets a blonde in the hotel (Natalie Dormer). There are no coincidences. Westray gets hit by a bolero -- a device that slowly constricts around his neck, until it slices through his carotid -- and then the rest of his neck. The attackers deliver his laptop to Malinka, who'd already gotten the password from blondie. She meets with her banker Michael (Goran Visnjic). She continues to deliver shockingly stupid lines, "You can sell diamonds on Mars." [5] The Counselor wanders a city in Mexico. He passes out in his hotel room. In the morning, he gets a DVD -- likely containing a snuff film of Laura (Reiner had previously told him how the cartel likes to make snuff films for people who pay to have sex with corpses). He doesn't watch it because his Apple laptop doesn't have a DVD player. There were some slick moments. Literally everyone in this movie is attractive, like a 9 minimum. It could have been better, but it was decent. Maybe if it was shorter or more tightly edited. Or if Cameron Diaz hadn't been cast in it. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] He'd actually flipped her over while she protested, then was finally able to finish. She revealed in a later argument what he actually did. "Montoya: I don't have to listen to this shit, alright? If you were a man, I'd... "Julie: You'd kill me! Oh no. No, you'd fuck me in the ass, right? Right?" [1] There was more Spanish slang than this, but these were the ones that were new to me. They used a bunch of these in Selena, as well. * Ruca: girlfriend * Carnal: brother * Orále: hell yeah [1] Though he is unaware of this at the time -- a crucial plot point [1] A Swiss actor who died in 2019, soon after this movie came out. [1] That's not even the stupidest thing she was made to say in that scene. I just can't be bothered to transcribe anything longer. It's like someone thought to themselves, "I wonder if Cameron Diaz could do Shakespeare?" Jesus, I should remove a point just for ending on that terribly stilted and incongruous scene. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3882 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3882 Thu, 16 Jan 2020 21:37:16 +0100 -- "9/10" 2. "Fahrenheit 11-9 (2018)" <#Fahrenheit> -- "8/10" 3. "The Square (2017)" <#Square> -- "9/10" 4. "The Guilty (Den skyldige) (2018)" <#Guilty> -- "8/10" 5. "On the Beach (1959)" <#On> -- "7/10" 6. "Mandy (2018)" <#Mandy> -- "8/10" 7. "The Lighthouse (2019)" <#Lighthouse> -- "9/10" 8. "Citizen Kane (1941)" <#Citizen> -- "7/10" 9. "Glengarry Glen Ross (1992)" <#Glengarry> -- "8/10" 10. "Velvet Goldmine (1998)" <#Velvet> -- "9/10" These are my notes to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. I've recently transferred my reviews to IMDb and made "the list" of around 1400 ratings publicly available. I've included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other -- I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. Margaret (2011) -- "9/10" A self-satisfied shit named Lisa (Anna Paquin) thinks her shit don't stink and that she's God's gift to the world. A standard teenager, in other words. She's going to a ranch with her dad, so she needs a cowboy hat. She can't find one she likes, but she sees a bus driver Maretti (Mark Ruffalo) with a nifty hat. The doors of the bus close, so she chases it, waving to get his attention and to ask him where he'd bought it. She distracts him enough that he runs a red light and absolutely slaughters a middle-aged woman, Monica. Lisa holds her as she bleeds out in the street. Both Lisa and Maretti say the light was green. Lisa's mom Joan (J. Smith-Cameron) is an actress. Ramon (Jean Reno) is a fan of hers. He asks her out. She demurs. Lisa goes out with her mom and her friends. One imitates Bobcat Goldthwait; her Mom imitates Shirley Temple and a baby. It's mortifying. Lisa attends a drama class with Matthew Broderick teaching. She wears miniskirts everywhere, even though everyone else is wearing jeans. These are terrible people: Joan advises Lisa to lie to the police to protect the bus driver's job. The next day, in some sort of government class, they discuss politics, but at the level of a Reddit /r/politics discussion, which isn't surprising, since they're just teenagers. Then they head to the police station, where Lisa lies point-blank about the lady who crossed the street. I suppose it's a comment on the amorality of modern quasi-progressives who are so happy with their lives and their opinions and just being right about everything. The neat part is that her parents are just as shallow and self-centered as she is, despite being older. Everyone is just so spoiled and stupid. The only redeemable people so far are a few of the teachers at the school. But even Mr. Aaron (Matt Damon) is a moron: he actually goes to get a cup of coffee with Lisa because she wants to talk. That's not dangerous at all. Now there's an interminable conversation between Lisa and her mother that's nearly literally painful. I understand that this is when a stupid person has stupid children and their societal position is such that nothing bad or real ever happens to them, so they have a ton of free time to burn. Her mom called her a cunt and she's 100% right. Lisa's got one guy wrapped around her finger -- she makes him do her math tests for her -- and another is her coke dealer. That's the one she wants to sleep with. She propositions him and invites him over to nail her. He's actually one of the less-terrible young people in the movie (another one was Angie, a young lady of Syrian descent who actually had her politics right). They seem to be pretty clinical about it. She could have done much worse with her choice of partner. Except for right at the end, where he didn't put on a condom and then "it kind of got away from him." So, actually, a terrible partner who didn't pay attention in health class, at all. Lisa's mom is out with Ramon, at the opera. She tells him she thinks it's pretentious that people yell "bravi" or "brava" instead of "bravo" ... because "bravo" is all she knows. He's confused, because that's just how romance languages work, so he doesn't understand why anyone would think that was pretentious. He's underestimating the anti-intellectual climate in the U.S. -- almost especially and deliberately amongst those who think the most of their own intelligence and basic goodness.. It would be easy to hate this movie because of the people it depicts...but, it depicts them well. The self-interest, the lack of moral compass. Lisa is now on a mission to clear her conscience. She visits Maretti at his home. He's not impressed. She goes to the cops to amend her statement. She finds them to be exasperatingly uncooperative -- just like anyone else who doesn't immediately agree with her or do what she says. She talks to Detective Mitchell, who was in charge of the (now closed) case. He's fantastic. He is calm and doesn't rise to her histrionics. She's appalled that she would go to all this trouble (to herself) and it would only result in reckless driving. That it was, in fact, just a stupid accident, a tragedy. She asks about "manslaughter or second-degree murder" -- because her admission must lead to grander things. "Lisa: That's unbelievable! What does he have to do? Kill her on purpose? Detective Mitchell: Yes. Because that's the definition of murder." The detective says she can give another statement, for which she's super-grateful. They'll pull in Maretti again. Immediately afterward, she's joking and smoking a joint in the park with her friend. Her heart is lighter and she doesn't seem worried about Maretti at all anymore. She meets her teacher Mr. Aaron (Matt Damon) and clumsily flirts/appallingly insults him, again convinced that she and where she lives is the center of the universe, that she knows everything, that there is nothing for her to learn or the world to teach her. She has everything under control. Teenager. Immature adult. Most adults. Her character is really well-done: she then asks him to let her ride her bike. This is such a bizarre request, but it's a way of maintaining control, of getting others to do things for you. Of putting others on the back foot so they can't get you first. Next, she meets with Monica's (the dead woman's) best friend Emily and her lawyer Dave, to whom she also tells her "real story". Honestly, it's hard to even believe that the fantasy we saw at the start was what really happened rather than just the unreliable narrator of Lisa's fantastical filter. But now she wants results. The lawyer starts to explain the different between statutory law and criminal law and she cuts him off with "I thought we going to get the police to arrest this guy", which matches her personality: she supposed to want stuff and then everyone jumps and does things to please her. Now we're hearing what kind of shitstorm of lawsuits might get triggered as a result. Dave is being honest and informative, but Emily and Lisa are on a jihad now: something has to happen. The driver needs to be arrested or fired -- all to assuage guilt or to exact revenge. Lawsuits will fly in all directions, leading to more useless laws that won't do anything to hinder self-absorbed people ruining things for no good reason. He tells them straight out: it's a terrible case because it's Maretti's word against Lisa's and Lisa would already be admitting that she'd lied once. Emily's super-pissed at Maretti, which leads me to believe that Lisa didn't tell Emily about how Lisa distracted him. Fucking Emily then slams into Dave because he's speaking too technically and he's doing it wrong. They're sitting in a café, eating salads. Emily finishes with: "I would just like somebody to take responsibility for what happened." Understandable. Lisa? Next, we're back at school, watching a classroom discussion that's on a level that would bring tears to the eyes of actual teachers, but almost certainly doesn't happen in real life. There's a pretty good discussion with David, who makes an interesting point about Shakespeare's comparing humans to flies. But the teacher (Matthew Broderick) dismisses the interpretation because "it's wrong." It's funny, because on the one side is a young guy who thinks his opinion is valid (it is) and on the other is the adult authority, who's preaching orthodoxy rather than a search for truth or insight. When Lisa does it, her opinion isn't as well-articulated and is clearly manipulative. When David does it, it seems acceptable. There's no way to decide who's "right" without knowing the exact situation. Lisa calls Detective Mitchell, telling him that he obviously didn't interview Maretti forcefully enough "because he's white". With this film having been made in 2011, it's possible that this is already a comment on the first wave of entitled so-called SJWs, who are actually just forcing the world into a mold that suits them, to keep themselves from having bad feelings. Lisa is currently on a jihad to exorcise her bad feelings about having caused the accident, but without, naturally, taking responsibility herself (because that would be unfair to her, a girl with such prospects). Maretti, who's implicitly a dead loss, can take the fall. Meanwhile, Joan is still with Ramon, who is a saint. But you can see Joan's wheels spinning whenever he talks about himself or Colombia or his family, wondering how to steer the conversation back to herself. She's her daughter's mother, all right. There's also Emily, who is an adult version of Lisa: she interrupts all the time and wants people to only say the things that she wants them to say. People are tools to use, but they can misbehave. Dave the lawyer has found out that Maretti had priors. Emily and Lisa are delighted, but I think because they're "winning", not because of any sort of good thing that might happen. Lisa is doing good in this world, shut up and be happy for her. Emily meets Joan and we hear that Joan is modest about "getting recognition", but it's obvious that's why she's an actress (which is no surprise). But it's also obvious that that's what Lisa wants, as well. That's why Lisa was shocked that they wouldn't be allowed to go to the press with the case afterwards. Lisa keeps provoking Joan. Now, we meet Abigail (the dead woman's cousin), who is very upper class. She wants to get a better lawyer because she doesn't want a lawyer no-one's ever heard of. Lisa has now adopted Emily as her new "mom". But Emily doesn't buy her bullshit when Lisa tries to make the death about herself. "Emily: I don't give a fuck what you believe in. Lisa: Oh my God! Why are you so mad at me? Emily: Because this is not an opera! Lisa: Because I think it's dramatic? Emily: I think you're very young. Lisa: What does that have to do with anything? If anything, I think it means I care more than someone who's older, because this kind of thing has never happened to me before! Emily: No. It means you care more easily. There's a big difference. Only it's not you it's happening to. Lisa: Yes, it is! I know I'm not the one who was run over by the bus... Emily: This first-blush, phony deepness of yours is worth nothing. Do you understand? Because it will all be troweled over in a month or two. And then, when you get older and you don't have a big reaction every time a dog is run over, then we'll find out what kind of person you are. [...] She was my real friend, and I don't want that sucked into some adolescent self-dramatization. [...] I'm a human being. Monica was a human being. So is your mother. We are not just supporting characters in the fascinating story of your life." Lisa goes to Mr. Aaron's apartment. She starts smoking (again, setting the tone, running the show). She tells him she likes his apartment. The camera swings to show that it's not nearly as big as the first angle suggested. He's a teacher. He's basically poor. He has no windows. Unlike everyone else we've seen in the film, who are all upper/middle-class New Yorkers with nice, spacious apartments. She hits on him; he lets her. She sucks him off. When he's chagrined about it, she accuses him of making a big deal out of sex. Next, we see another discussion in class where Lisa accuses Palestinians of being Hitler Youth (basically) and then gets thrown out because she can't follow debate rules and is highly disruptive. This, after one of her classmates just finished expounding that "[t]eenagers should run the world because they're not burned out on reality." At a dinner with Joan, Ramon, and Emily, Joan immediately asks who's running the discussions (because the incident is obviously not Lisa's fault, despite it reflecting exactly how their discussions at home go). Ramon (and keep in mind that Ramon is from Colombia and has actually seen shit, as opposed to anyone else at the table) says, "The oppressor uses violence to maintain his position and calls it the rule of law. But when the person underfoot uses violence to change his status, he's called a criminal and a terrorist. And the violence of the state is called upon to put him down." Emily, of course, takes immediate offense and goes to 11. Ramon tells her that's the "typical Jewish response". She storms out. Later, on the phone, "Joan, if you're going to break up with me because I used the wrong adjective, then what can I do? I'm not going to beg you." Fein raus. All the way out, actually: Ramon dies of a heart attack soon after. Joan and Lisa tangle again. Lisa: "I'm not trying to hurt your feelings. It's just a general observation." No, of course not, offense neither intended nor taken. They use already-purchased opera tickets. Lisa comes in late, making everyone in the row stand up to let her in. Still making people dance to her tune. Lisa's dad calls to cancel both a week-long ranch vacation in New Mexico and also cancels her move out to California because she doesn't get along at all with Annette, his girlfriend. Things are falling apart -- but also getting more dramatic. Lisa blows up on all fronts, freaking out on the call when the settlement is announced with a cash settlement, but no repercussions for Maretti. She storms off, burning all bridges, then finds Mr. Aaron to tell him she's had an abortion. Stirring up drama wherever she can, building an exciting narrative -- around herself. You could forgive her -- she's just a kid, after all -- if it wasn't for how much negativity she creates for everyone else. To be sure, I've colored the interpretation of this movie with my own filter, but I honestly feel that it's the only way to enjoy a film with so many shallow people in it. There are good people in it, but they are window dressing for the raging egos. I can't imagine that any of the main characters have ever cleaned their own toilet. A shout-out to Scout Tafoya for the recommendation as part of his "Unloved series" . I actually take a lot of recommendations from him. My rating kept rising through out the movie, the way it should be. Fahrenheit 11-9 (2018) -- "8/10" This is a Michael Moore documentary about the 2016 election and its aftermath. It starts with the celebratory, all-over-but-the-shouting mood on election day: Hillary was a shoe-in. Women were in tears about being able to vote for a woman. "We finally made it!" Then, things start to tip the other way. "How the fuck did this happen?" The credits roll. Moore shows the artists making a wax doll of Donald Trump for Madame Tussauds museum in New York. Moore presents his case: Trump was jealous of Gwen Stefani making more on the Voice than he made on the Apprentice, so he staged a fake presidential announcement press conference with hired fans, to "prove" to NBC that he was worth more. His impromptu speech goes off the rails and NBC fires him. His sons convince him to do his two planned rallies. They go over big. He likes the feeling of adulation. He's in. The media were in, too. They loved his ratings. Moore then presents interviews with personalities, all of whom ended up being sexual predators (Matt Lauer, Bill O'Reilly, Charlie Moore, etc.) But who is Trump? Moore provides a series of clips and commentary on Trump's "uncomfortable" relationship with Ivanka. The next segment focuses on Flint, Michigan and the corruption associated with the water crisis there. He tells the story of corruption well: once the problem with the water was clear, they fixed the water for GM and continued to poison the poor populace. How does this relate to Trump? It's unclear. Moore binds it together by saying that Flint gave Trump the confidence to be even more openly racist than he'd already been. Moore shows how leftist hippies actually should have won the day: "If America is us and we're the majority, why is it that we do not hold a singe seat of power? Not the White House, not the Senate, not the House, not the Supreme Court, of 50 of our state capitals, Democrats only control 8 of them. Yet, in 6 of the last 7 presidential elections, the popular vote was won by a Democrat." But this doesn't help when the Democrats act like Republicans. Then, it doesn't matter who gets into power. So, millions of Americans dropped out of politics -- because it doesn't matter. Until Bernie Sanders arrived on the scene: then the Democrats needed to make sure that they controlled the narrative. Moore relates how Sanders won all 55 county primaries in West Virginia, but was granted less than half of the delegates at the convention. This would repeat for almost all of the States. Sanders was robbed. Moore shows all of the states...and then he shows Bernie capitulating. Moore goes back to Flint -- then to West Virginia -- to interview people. One is a brawny dude, "I'm sick and tired of people saying America's the greatest. Why? Because we can whip your ass? We don't have health care for everybody. We have homelessness everywhere. We have an opioid epidemic." Moore wonders where these people are on election day? He shows how things are changing a bit, with several Freshmen congresspeople running as Democrats. Rashida Tlaib and Allesandra Ocasio Cortez and so on are "ready to take over the party." There is hope. Next, we hear about the successes for schoolteacher strikes. Then, there's the Parkland Shooting, which triggered a groundswell of teenaged activism. This part hasn't aged well, as "these fearless kids" have, unfortunately, disappeared. The kids, even at that time, claim to have been raised by their phones, which bring them the truth. At that, the powers-that-be were no longer concerned. If you control their information, then you control their activism. Moore goes back to Flint, where Barack Obama showed up and insulted everyone by pretending that he'd also been poisoned by lead as a kid -- and that it was no big deal. Unreal. Over a year later and the Obama administration did military exercises in Flint, Michigan -- to practice urban warfare. Moore shows trains full of tanks driving toward Flint. During the 2016 campaign, Trump was the only one who visited the water-treatment facility in Flint. Oh Jesus, now he's interviewing that absolute idiot "Timothy Snyder" . He says that the Hitler comparison is valid (which Moore accompanies by showing a Trump speech superimposed on a Hitler one). Moore spends a ton of time on the comparison, as if it's relevant. It's not. Just focus on Trump and the situation today. It's not like we need to compare Trump to Hitler in order to grasp that there's something wrong with America, for God's sake. I mean, I understand that history repeats itself, but you're moving your focus to the comparison, so defenders will simply have to show that you're wrong about the comparison to kill your argument and also to shed doubt on everything else you say. It weakens your argument. Moore follows up the spurious Hitler comparison with a listing of the actual stuff that Trump has done in his first two years. This is more useful. What's less useful is to show a bunch of racist phone videos that people made and then try to associate that with Trump, as if American racism bloomed with Trump as President. Do those people feel legitimated? Perhaps. But having an Obama in charge made everyone feel like the problem had been solved. It is well-done, though. Moore is quite a propagandist (it's a good thing he's not with Trump). It's a decent summary of where we stand, with a bit of a kitchen-sink feel to it. But it's ok, because things really are dire. And he's spot-on with his analysis at the end. He ends with the false Hawaiian missile threat, showing the terrified populace. "Make no mistake about it; this is the world we live in." That Americans live in. But they're a dangerous, cornered animal who are probably going to drag the rest of us with them, as they fly, snarling, foam flying from their lips, off the cliff. Goddamn that place is a madhouse, full of dangerous, unhinged people. The Square (2017) -- "9/10" This is a Swedish film about the definition of art. Anne (Elizabeth Moss) interviews Christian (Claes Bang), director of the modern art museum in Malmö, Sweden. They banter a bit about what makes something art. Outside, they dismantle a statue and install a "square" in the cobblestones in front of the museum. Are the artisans who do this artists? The main exhibition is called "Mirrors and Piles of Gravel". The name neither over- nor undersells it. Christian walks through the city, with a lot of other beautiful, well-off people when he hears a cry for help. A woman runs toward him, yelling that a man is trying to kill her. The man shows up, but is very easily repelled by the director and another guy. They hug, celebrating their victory. They part. The director's cell phone is gone. So is his wallet. They're at a meeting about how to promote "The Square", with some guerrilla marketers. They bullshit about that a bit, with the older director of the company dandling a baby the whole time. They agree to meet next week, all happy, though they've accomplished nearly less than nothing. He's tracking his phone and showing his work colleagues, all delighted with how clever the robbers were. He practices a speech that he has written to seem extemporaneous. He presents "The Square", a 4x4m area where, whenever someone is in it and needs help, people are obligated to help. It is a social contract. With the help of Michael, a colleague, Christian writes a threatening letter to all of the apartments in the building where he knows his phone is, asking them to deliver the stolen goods to the nearby 7-11. [1] They print out the letters and Christian is forced to deliver them himself; Michael won't do it for him. Michael lets him borrow his jacket, though, so he won't be recognized. There is no-one in the building hallways anyway. Nor would they know who he is since he travels in completely different circles. Downstairs, the locals have discovered the nice car in the parking lot and have started harassing his coworker. Christian comes running out of the building, yelling that he should go. right now. That evening, he takes off his shirt and discovers that his cufflinks haven't been stolen at all. Does he still have his phone and wallet, as well? There are scenes of suffering and homeless people in Malmö. Christian is in the 7-11 and buys a sandwich for a woman down on her luck. Obviously, we're supposed to notice how the museum wants to encourage people to care for each other within the square -- but what about without it? Dominic West is Julian, the artist behind the piles of gravel. We see an interview with him. There is someone with Tourette Syndrome in the audience. Instead of throwing him out, they ask for everyone to ignore him, as he can't help it. The interview can't really proceed in any sane manner, though. Christian is still on the hunt for his phone, in the garage with another phone, taking pictures of cars. Holy shit. He got his wallet and phone back. He's delighted. He sees the women for whom he bought a sandwich on the ground outside of the 7-11. He gets back out of his car and gives her a couple of notes, then shakes her hand when she offers. [2] Psychotic techno party. At the royal palace. Christian dances with abandon. Christian plays a harpsichord, trying to woo a girl.. It doesn't work. Christian ends up going home with Anne (although he swore to himself in the bathroom mirror that he wouldn't sleep with her). She has a bonobo in her apartment. They undress very matter-of-factly. She closes the doors to the living room, locking away the ape. They start quite dispassionately, but put a lot of energy into it. They fight over who gets to dispose of the condom. She wins. This is such a sarcastic and cynical movie, with a ton of subtle digs at everything: the rich, the self-satisfied, artists, art-lovers. We see a guy driving a floor waxer/vacuum around Julian's piles of dirt and see him swerve the steering wheel, as if he'd cut a bit too close. There is a long presentation of the the PR team's idea to promote "The Square". They will piggyback on the public's pity for beggars -- but make the beggar a relatable Swedish-looking person. Meanwhile, Michael has gone to get a second package for Christian -- and it turns out to be an extremely angry Swedish/Arab boy, demanding an apology for having threatened him and his family. He is out of control and cows Michael for having dared to carpet-bomb his threats to the whole building. The boy throws over a whole display of soda. Back at the museum, there's an emergency. The piles of gravel no longer look the same...and there's a bag of gravel lying near maintenance. Christian proposes to use a picture to put it back the way it was (looping back to the initial interview question with Anne, i.e., what is art? Is it still the same art as it was if it's been "restored"?) He is interrupted by Anne, who seems to have misinterpreted their one-night stand. "I like you. And I have an emotional connection to you and I'd like to explore that, because that's important to me. I don't just go have sex with just anybody. You know? I have to have that. Do you just go have sex with lots of other women?" That's all well and good, but she interrupted him at work to announce this to him in public, after shaming him for not describing the other evening in the fashion that she expected. So, she doesn't do this with anyone, but she's mad at him because he might have slept with other women ... but she didn't bother to determine all of this before she slept with him. She's incredibly judgmental, but actually just ... mental. Great scene. So Christian has got Anne the American pretending that she has the moral high ground, a Swedish/Arab boy is threatening him with "chaos" and now his daughters are staying with him for the weekend. They storm in like demons, fighting and yelling. The next day, he takes them through the exhibit: they have to push a button to decide whether they trust or mistrust other people. In the next room, a sign asks them to put their wallets and phones in a square on the floor. "Does it feel strange?" This is fascinating. He tells a story he's heard from his grandfather. He knew a boy whose parents, when he was six, sent him out to play with a tag around his neck with his name and address on it. "[...] Attitudes change...back then, people trusted other grownups to help their children if they had problems or had lost their way. But nowadays, you tend to regard other adults as potential threats." YouTube calls him to ask if he wants to turn on ads on his popular video, the one of a blonde beggar child being blown up in "The Square". He grabs his expensive-looking shopping bags and ascends into an Escherian mall of escalators -- the scene oozes opulence. He has lost his daughters. He engages the beggar who'd asked him for change before to watch his bags and stay on the spot where he was supposed to meet them. His trust is admirable, but seemingly not unwise. The video is next. The child is holding a kitten. In the office, the team says "at least we got people talking." Christian arrives with his daughters and bags and starts damage control. He thinks they should stay strong, to defend a museum's right to push boundaries. His boss is not convinced -- she sees sponsorship disappearing. At a fundraising gala, there is a special guest, a performance artist named Oleg (Terry Notary). He acts like a silverback gorilla, storming around, threatening, establishing dominance. He scares Julian away. Christian thanks him for his performance, but Oleg is done when Oleg says Oleg is done. Before, they were watching a performance; now, they're not so sure. They are cowed. Oleg ramps it up, jumping on a table, cozying up to a woman, pulling her hair, dragging her from her chair, across the floor and simulating a rape. Finally, an older man stands up, dragging him off of her and pummeling him. Her boyfriend comes over, too, but ... more slowly. Obviously, Oleg lets them do this, as he is far more powerfully built than an old, rich, Swedish man. Segue to homeless people in the rain. One man is wrapped in a plastic bag and looks like a corpse. He is probably dry, though. Christian returns home with his daughters. The Swedish/Arab boy is waiting for him, demanding an apology. That's all he wants. "Apologize to me and I'll go. My parents think I'm a thief." It's legitimate. Christian finally apologizes, but the boy is still not satisfied. The boy's behavior reminds me of Oleg, from minutes before -- trying to look more intimidating. Christian out-intimidated him. His daughters are silent, all eye-whites. The boy starts slamming on doors and causing "chaos". Christian grabs him, then loses him and the boy falls down a flight of stairs. We only hear him sniffling to himself. He's alive and conscious. Christian does not go to him. The boy starts to cry for help. Christian goes back and forth between the stairwell and his apartment. Torn. He wants to call the boy, but has lost his number. In the rain, he searches the trash bags for his apartment building -- this also looks like an art display -- and finally finds it. He can't reach anyone, but records a video apology. It starts off as an apology to the boy, for his family, but becomes an apology from his society, then a relativized argument that everyone is prejudiced. "So suddenly it comes down to politics and how assets are distributed." Doesn't it always, though. Christian (apparently) resigns in a press conference. The reporters ask extremely ignorant questions about free speech (the issue of the video has nothing to do with free speech). By the end, though, Christian has turned it around and they're asking him which exhibit the video was meant to advertise. Given how he'd rehearsed a similar "turnaround" speech earlier in the movie, it's likely the whole press conference was a sham. The museum dominates the papers the next day. Christian goes to his daughters' cheerleading [3] recital. He stops by the boy's building on the way home. He and his daughters go to the top floor, to find the boy. but he and his family have moved away. This movie, like Margaret above, is about people who I can't imagine have ever cleaned their own toilets. It was a super-interesting and quintessentially European movie. It has a lovely soundtrack with Bobby McFerrin. I saw it in English, Swedish, and Danish (with subtitles, of course). The Guilty (Den skyldige) (2018) -- "8/10" Fade in on a police officer with alarm-dispatch duty, handling routine calls. A young lady calls, but seems quite confused. She calls the dispatcher "sweetie". She's not confused, though, she's being cagy, pretending she's called someone else, so the person she's with doesn't get wise to her. The cops have got a bead on her; she's been kidnapped. He tells her to talk to him like she's comforting her child. He's fully alert, but not panicking. Cool. Calm. The lady he calls to dispatch a car to help a kidnapped lady, as well. He extracts the color of the vehicle and that she's in a van. He communicates the info. It's pissing down, hard to see for the cops in pursuit. We only hear the patrol. We see only the dispatcher's head, his face. He has a bandage on one finger of his left hand. He's drinking an effervescent medicine (like Alka Seltzer). He calls the woman's home number and gets Mathilde. She's six years and nine months old. Asger manages to get her father's name and that he owns a large, white vehicle. She also knows his phone number, by heart. Officer Asger Holm tells her she's been very clever. She breaks down and tells him what happened. He keeps her company -- tells her to turn on the TV, maybe. It's broken. He tells her to go in with her brother Oliver for company. He gets the plate number from the database, passes it on and also orders a patrol to the kids. He starts to lose his cool. He's off-shift in 15 minutes, so he moves to a different machine, where he won't be replaced by the next shift. He calls his buddy and tries to get him to go to the Dad's house, but his friend interrupts. It seems Asger has something important to do in the morning, at a courthouse. It seems his desk duty is a punishment for something. Asger calls Michael, pretending that the police just want to notify him that his kids are at home alone. He ups the ante and tells MIchael that he knows Michael has Iben with him. Michael hangs up. Asger calls his partner Rashid, to check up on him. He finds out he's been drinking -- although he has to testify in court the next day, as well. Asger sends him to Michael's apartment, even though he's been drinking. He's short with everyone, then apologetic. He's trying to keep himself under control with the stress of Iben's kidnapping and his court date the next day. Mathilde calls back to tell him that the police are there. She lets them in and they tell Asger that she's covered in blood. She says it's not her blood. "Find Oliver." ... "The baby is dead.[...] he's been cut open" Mathilde had obviously gone in there, to keep from being lonely. The call is cut off. Asger calls Michael and practices Jedi mind tricks, ordering him to stop the car. Asger lets his anger get away from him and Michael hangs up. He's back on the line with Rashid, who's at Michael's house, looking for clues as to where he's headed. The house is nearly empty. Rashid finds a pile of letters; Asger orders him to look through them all, to find out where Michael might be headed. Asger calls Iben and tells her to pull the handbrake. She does it, but is immediately disconnected. Asger gets another call, from a different accident. It's a lady who crashed her bike and hurt her knee. He tells he doesn't have time. She tells him to send an ambulance. He tells her to take a taxi and to not ride her bike when she's drunk. Click. Asger encourages Iben to take out Michael herself, using a brick she found in the back of the van. She starts to panic; he talks her down. They talk about her trips to the aquarium with her family. Oliver had snakes in his belly. She cured them. Asger turns white when he realizes what happened. Michael opens the door. Thump. Click. Rashid calls back. He tells Asger that Iben had been committed before. Michael was taking her back to Elsinore, to the asylum. He calls Michael, who's at the end of his rope. Asger tells him they'll help, asks why he didn't call the police. Michael laughs bitterly. Asger tries Iben again. Nothing. He loses his shit and smashes his keyboard. Rashid calls. Asger tells him he doesn't have to lie the next day, in court. Rashid tells him that's ridiculous -- he can't just change his statement now. Rashid tells him to go home. Iben calls. Asger takes the call in the main room. She asks Asger if she'd killed Oliver. "You didn't mean to." He tells her the story of the man he killed, for which he's standing trial the next day. "I claimed it was self-defense, but it wasn't. I've lied and I've killed." He says he'd had enough, that he was trying to excise something. "Was it snakes?" "Yes, but I knew what I was doing. You didn't." Sirens. "You're a good man." Click. "We have her. Good job, Asger." I am definitely a fan of these one-person-show movies. I saw it in Danish with English subtitles. On the Beach (1959) -- "7/10" The movie is based on "the book of the same name" by Nevil Shute. It is 1964. The world is coming to an end due to nuclear war. The war is over and there are no signs of life from anywhere north of the fallout line, which is moving southward. Australia will be the last to go. We start in a submarine where American Cmdr. Dwight Towers (Gregory Peck) is surfacing near the coast. Australian Pete Holmes (Anthony Perkins) is waiting for an assignment. The world is coming to an end, but the navy stiffly sticks to their missions, as if nothing is going on. They will ship out soon, to investigate whether there is anything left in the world. Pete will have to leave his pregnant wife Mary (Donna Anderson) behind. Before he ships out, though, they're to have a party. He invites Dwight and their friend Moira (Ava Gardner). Moira picks Dwight up from the train station in a horse and buggy. She is devastatingly charming. At the party, we meet Julian Osborn (Fred Astaire), an engineer who gets into his cups and explains to everyone who'll listen that there is no hope. Mary takes exception, because she doesn't want to hear it. She was already mildly infuriated with Pete earlier, when he dared to mention that the milkman wasn't coming anymore. She wants to be able to continue pretending that there's nothing happening -- and that nothing will happen. Dwight and Moira hit it off, with them drinking an incredible amount of liquor and him tucking her in like a gentleman. Dwight gets the news that his mission is to be delayed, so he takes up sailing and racing. He's excellent at it. He takes Moira along, who spoils everything on purpose, for which she gets a good paddling. Pete is shopping around for "pills" (cyanide capsules) that he wants for his wife and child, in case he's not around "when it happens". At a local gentleman's club (when they really were for gentleman) where someone important-sounding pontificates that there are "400 bottles of the best port left and only 5 months left to drink them." Pete talks to Mary about the pills, but she's not having it. She won't. Anthony Perkins was so young. Dwight and Moira talk about Dwight's dead wife. Moira leaves him at the train station and heads to Osborn's instead, showing up drunk and asking him whether he's still in love with her. He's tinkering with his Ferrari roadster that he plans to drive in the Australian LeMans. Moira acknowledges that she has no-one to spend the end of the world with. Dwight is still married, with two children. They're all dead, but he's still married and therefore out of reach for her wiles. Dwight and Pete ship out on the sub, doing research things (reading numbers out loud) and discussing death and accepting it (Pete and Osborne). The periscope goes up. It goes down. They get to San Fransisco. Ominous music indicates that the view of San Francisco is somehow wrong: there are no people. At all. A guy named Swain swims away from the sub, heading home to San Francisco. He's decided he'd rather die there than in Australia. The sub moves on. They discuss how the war started. They ask Osborne "the egghead" to illuminate them. "The trouble with you is you want a simple answer. There isn't any. The war started when people accepted the idiotic principle that peace could be maintained by arranging to defend themselves with weapons they couldn't possibly use without committing suicide." They roll on, to investigate a mysterious morse code coming from a telegraph somewhere on shore. They send a man to investigate. He finally finds what it is: a window shade has gotten tangled up in a tipped-over coke bottle over the telegraph signaler. There is no-one left alive. The sailor stops the transmission and reports back. They return to Australia. Moira reunites with Dwight -- they've missed each other terribly. Osborn stops by with his new Ferrari, scaring all of the animals. He's got a race on Saturday. On Saturday, there are many deaths and many horrific car wrecks, but none of them involving Osborn. He wins the Australian Le Mans. Dwight learns that Moira has managed to move trout season earlier. They go fishing with nearly all of the rest of the town. Much "Waltzing Matilda" is sung. That night, it rains -- it pours -- and Moira and the Captain share a lovely evening, serenaded by their nearly supernaturally drunken neighbors who continue to refine their phrases of Waltzing Matilda until one, magical verse comes out just right. One of Dwight's ensigns falls ill. It has begun. At a Salvation Army event, they start handing out pills. Dwight's other men decide that they'd like to "head home". As captain, he has to go with them. At least he thinks he does. People start disappearing. Moira races toward Dwight, hoping to catch him before he leaves. Osborne offs himself with his car, in a garage. Pete's daughter gets radiation sickness. Mary's in shock, in the hospital. Moira understands Dwight's decision (but, seriously, he's a moron). The butler at the club plays billiards by himself -- there are no more orders for well-aged port. Australia is nearly empty. Pete and Mary are the last to go. There are some good bits and it's a heartless end-of-the-world movie, but the book is better. The movie is a bit long and has a few too many tête-à-têtes with professions of love for my liking. Mandy (2018) -- "8/10" We start in the Shadow Mountains in 1983. A couple, Red (Nicholas Cage) and Mandy (Andrea Riseborough), lives in the woods, in seclusion. Mandy produces fantasy art and works at a small shop. Red's a logger (Nicholas Cage), commuting via helicopter. He smokes. We meet Jeremiah, who appears to be the leader of a cult. He demands a new sacrifice from his acolytes. He'd recently seen someone who'd caught his fancy: Mandy. He sends his disciples to find her and bring her to him. They, in turn, call what looks for all the world like the Hellraiser gang on motorcycles. They descend upon the couple's house and kidnap Red and Mandy. They will use Red as leverage to force Mandy to join the cult. She gets something from an eyedropper (presumably a hallucinogenic) and a sting in the neck from an ugly-looking insect. Things were spacey before, but now it gets downright Whitney Museum--featured-exhibit-spacey. Jeremiah introduces himself to Mandy. He plays his own Carpenters-like album for her. He accompanies the music with a sob story about how no-one appreciated the unadulterated genius of his music. But that's OK, because it leaves him time for his true calling, being a cult leader. Seriously, Jeremiah's sermon is about Jesus thinking that Jeremiah's the coolest guy in the world and that he can take everything, because everything already belongs to him. Alles klar? Good. He undoes his robe and exposes himself to her. She laughs at his stupid song about himself (or maybe his flaccid member), throwing off his whole game. Mandy's positively screaming with hallucinatory laughter. Jeremiah is pissed and he goes out to Red, stabbing him with a sacrificial knife while his henchman mutters mumbo-jumbo. They dump Mandy in a bag on the lawn in front of him, pull her up with a rope like a dead animal, dowse her with gasoline and ... set her on fire. The first thirty minutes before the kidnapping were a really eerie buildup. It stays eerie, with nearly everyone showing tremendously enlarged pupils, but, as with any horror/revenge movie, you have to get down to nuts and bolts. And Nicholas Cage gets down to doing what he does best: overacting but still selling it. Red escapes and takes leave of his wife's ashy corpse. He somehow gets home, then finds an old alcohol stash and very theatrically guzzles it. The next day, the light is yellow (not red or blue). He visits his friend Caruthers (Bill Duke) to retrieve his crossbow, which he names "The Reaper". Red hears from Caruthers about "The Black Skulls", a biker gang wreaking havoc locally. Caruthers goes on to explain that they're completely messed-up from the drugs they've taken and in a lot of pain, "But they fucking love it." So, sadomasochistic hell riders. This is no problem for Red, who can forge a Klingon-like battle-axe in his basement -- all while wearing sunglasses. He storms off in his kick-ass wheels, roaring up the road, all lit up in his color: yellow. The screen goes red: a biker is nearby. He takes one out, but crashes his car doing so. Red is captured again. The screen goes animated to show this. He awakens tied to a radiator and with one of the Black Skulls is working him. He frees himself and disposes of it. One down. He roams the absolutely disgusting home of the Black Skulls and comes upon another one who's watching an old-school porno and snorting a whole pile of something clearly psychoactive. This one is much larger. Red tries to sneak up on it, but he gets tossed and has to take a shot before he slices its throat. Blood gouts all over Red and he goes a little mental. This may very well be because that thing's blood went all in his eyes, nose and mouth, so he's tripping on whatever the Black Skull took. The porno is still on TV -- but is then abruptly shot out. The first Black Skull has crawled out of the deep pit into which it fell -- this one is smaller, but fast. Red is riding high -- "You ripped my shirt!" -- and snaps its neck forthwith. He takes a prodigious snort from the pile on the ruined coffee table and then finds his Klingon battle-axe mounted up near the ceiling. What luck. He finds a jar of something on a table and takes a fingertip-taste (because why wouldn't you just do that with a jar of silver goop that you find in that disgusting kitchen). He's flying-high-and-will-never-die, though, so he goes for it. The stuff is impressive -- he trips hard and fast and is soon exiting the house through a second-story window, hunting more. He fires an arrow through the back of one of these thing's necks, but it barely fazes it. That silver goop must be potent. Its fighting strength is undiminished. Red prevails, while it intones "She burns, she burns, she burns" until Red cuts its head off. He finds a cigarette on the ground, lights it from the thing's burning head and moves on, stealing an ATV. His color is now red. He finds the drug lab. There's a tiger in a cage. "Lizzy". The cook turns, "Joe van Warrior sent forth from the eye of the storm." [4] He frees the tiger, then tells Red "north". Red finds Swan in a truck with the youngest girl. He slaughters an unrepentant Swan. The next one is washing his car in the woods in an 80s-metal-video spotlight and listening to "Cielito Lindo" ("Aye-yi-yiyi"). Flying axe to the head. Red finds a chainsaw. Chekhov would have known what's going to happen with that. The next guy is a bruiser. He also has a chainsaw -- with a much longer blade. Red gets his started -- and draws blood. Bruiser drops his chainsaw. So does Red. Bruiser picks up Red's chainsaw. His delight is short-lived. Red throws a chain to pull him down onto it. Creepy-ass red-lit church with a tree-trunk altar. There's a trapdoor behind the altar that oozes red mist. The tunnels seem to go on forever. Red is now permanently in Red Light. He comes upon the older acolyte. Red ignores her salacious offers and takes her head. Finally: the boss. Jeremiah, in his underwear, in what looks like a red-lit underground cistern. He babbles a bunch, but Red responds with "A psychotic drowns where the mystic swims. You're drowning. I'm swimming. [...] I'm your God now." There are several really nice-looking shots (the collapse of the burning church at the end reminded me a bit of the burning house in Zerkalo). The final scene where Red drives into a night that morphs into a fantasy planet from Mandy's drawings suggested that Red had taken leave of reality for good. Before that, he'd only seen her animations/drawings while unconscious. This is an initially slow-moving movie that does a lot with atmosphere, lighting and music. It's all red and blue, with swelling strings. I thought it was much better-done that other films of its kind. it's eminently quotable and almost certainly due to become a cult classic. Nick Cage almost guarantees it. The Lighthouse (2019) -- "9/10" Ephraim Winslow (Robert Pattinson) and Thomas Wake (Willem Dafoe) arrive on an island with a lighthouse on it. They trudge up toward the light-keeper's house, passing the two men they're replacing. Their shift would be one month alone on the rock. Wake is older, experienced and in charge. He has a bum leg. Winslow will be taking care of everything -- shoveling coal, sweeping up, cooking, washing up, oiling the machines, cleaning the pipes -- everything, except for taking care of the light itself. That area is off-limits to him; only Wake is allowed up there. Winslow is pestered by a gull that Wake forbids him to molest in any way because it's "the soul of a sailor who's met his maker". There are strange goings-on, with Winslow dreaming vividly about mermaids. Wake is a right bastard of a boss -- possibly the worst ever. He thinks he owns Winslow and delivers the following tirade when Winslow claims to have mopped and swept, but not to Wake's satisfaction: "And I say you swab it again and you swab it proper-like this time and you'll be swabbin' it ten times more after that. And if I tells you to pull up and apart every floorboard and clapboard in this here house and scour them down with yer bare bleedin' knuckles, you'll do it! And if I tells you to yank out every single nail from every mouldin' and nailhole and suck off every speck of rust 'til all them nails sparkle like a sperm whale's pecker and then carpenter the whole light-station back together from scrap and then do it all over again, you'll do it! And by God and by Golly you'll do it smilin', lad, 'cause you'll like it! You'll like it 'cause I says you will!" At two weeks -- halfway -- Winslow asks Wake to use his name, to stop calling him "lad". Winslow wakes from a dream and wanders up to the lighthouse to find Wake up with the light, tending his shift, but masturbating feverishly. Winslow sees a giant tentacle swing by. The next day, Winslow finds that the water cistern has become fouled. He goes out to find a gull stuck in a giant pile of gunk, still alive but dying. Another one lands right in front of him, cawing. It's that same bastard gull. He catches it and beats it to death with extreme prejudice. The wind changes. Wake fears "something dirty knockin' about" and tells Winslow to board up the windows. He wonders at Winslow's mood since he's getting off the rock the next day. They catch a mess of lobster and Wake cooks them. Winslow partakes in the nightly glass of rotgut for the first time, but can't speak the words of the incantation, "Should pale death, with treble dread, make the ocean caves our bed, God who hears the surges roll deign to save our suppliant soul." They trade stories, get roaring drunk together, and are more friendly than they'd been the whole time. Winslow wakes up on the floor with a debilitating hangover. Both chamber pots are full to the brim. He's got to bring them out before he can piss. Hauling coal in the driving rain. Shoveling coal into the maw of the furnace. Winslow finds a mermaid asleep on the rocks. She wakes up laughing and screaming. They wait in the driving rain out on the rocks with Winslow's bags. The storm is here. Winslow works on. Wake announces that "the damp's got to the provisions" and says he's been saying for weeks that they should be rationing, ever since the boat failed to appear. Wake and Winslow have a different sense of time now. Wake takes him out in the rain to dig up rations: crates of booze. After teetotaling for so long, Winslow is hammered. He's acting a bit like Wake did, at the beginning (e.g. farting). They fight, with Wake almost the more reasonable, until he demands that Winslow admit that he likes his lobster with the following speech, "Wake: Hark Triton, hark! Bellow, bid our father the Sea King rise from the depths full foul in his fury! Black waves teeming with salt foam to smother this young mouth with pungent slime, to choke ye, engorging your organs til' ye turn blue and bloated with bilge and brine and can scream no more - only when he, crowned in cockle shells with slitherin' tentacle tail and steaming beard take up his fell be-finned arm, his coral-tine trident screeches banshee-like in the tempest and plunges right through yer gullet, bursting ye - a bulging bladder no more, but a blasted bloody film now and nothing for the harpies and the souls of dead sailors to peck and claw and feed upon, only to be lapped up and swallowed by the infinite waters of the Dread Emperor himself - forgotten to any man, to any time, forgotten to any god or devil, forgotten even to the sea, for any stuff for part of Winslow, even any scantling of your soul is Winslow no more, but is now itself the sea! "Winslow: Alright, have it your way. I like your cookin'." The rain doesn't stop. It leaks through the roof. Rather than coal, Winslow hauls his bottle of booze in a rain-filled wheelbarrow. The machine drives on regardless. He masturbates feverishly to the mermaid figurine he found, dreaming of the one he (thought he) saw. He makes love to her on the rocks. He pulls up a man's head in the lobster trap. He's off his head. They guzzle rotgut and dance mad jigs, slurring eldritch lyrics. An unknown time later, they lie in each other's arms. More time passes. Winslow confesses to having watched a colleague die in a logjam when he was still a lumberjack, then taking his name and identity. His real name is Thomas Howard. Winslow hears Wake's disembodied voice saying "Why'd you spill the beans?" then charges for the lifeboat. Wake catches him, shatters the lifeboat's prow, then hounds Winslow back to the house. Winslow confronts him about the head he found in the lobster trap: it's his predecessor. Wake counters that it was Winslow who shattered the lifeboat. Madness. "Wake: You're so mad, you know not up from down. "How long have we been on this rock? Five weeks? Two Days? Where are we? Help me to recollect" They've run out of drink. They mix turpentine with honey. The storm rages unabated. The men are huddled under a table, cackling maniacally. A wave surges over the whole house. It's raining inside. They pass out. They wake. The storm has stopped. "Winslow: This place is a sty. Wake: Mornin' to you, too." Winslow finally blows up at Wake. "I'm sick of your laughin', your snorin', you're goddamned farts. You're. God. Damned. Goddamned farts! You smell of piss. You smell of jism. Like rotten dick. Like curdled foreskin. Like hot onions fucked a farmyard shithouse!" Thomas gives it right back. "There ain't no mystery. You're an open book. A picture, says I. A painted actress screamin' in the footlights, a bitch what wants to be coveted for nothing but bein' born, cryin' about the silver spoon what shoulda been yers!" Winslow is trippin' now, beating on Wake, imagining him as the original Winslow, the mermaid, then Wake as a kraken. He commands Wake to "Bark!", then takes Wake for a walk outside, on a leash. He buries him, then digs him back up -- because he needs the keys. Inside, Winslow catches his breath. Wake storms in with the pickaxe, wounding Winslow in the shoulder. A kettle to the temple and down goes Wake. A pickaxe blow finishes him off. Winslow lights a cigarette. He intones their drinking incantation. He takes a swig of turpentine. He crawls up the stairs to the light. The trapdoor opens. It's beautiful up there. Clean. Otherworldly. The door of the lamp swings open. He reaches out. He screams. No. He shreds his vocal chords. He falls through the trapdoor and down the stairs. He is lying on the rocks, outside, one eye gone. The gulls pluck his innards, like Prometheus. The movie is in black-and-white with an uncommonly narrow aspect ratio. It features only two actors (plus a non-speaking Mermaid), who each have different, strong and occasionally nearly impenetrable accents. It takes place in a single house on a small island. And it's riveting. Citizen Kane (1941) -- "7/10" We fade in on an old mansion on a hill, passing the dilapidated gates and an abandoned golf course until we finally pass through a window and see a face whispering "Rosebud". A nurse covers up the man who said it. We see a news broadcast about a pleasure park called Xanadu, whose proprietor has just died. Charles Kane (Orson Wells) had built a media empire unlike any the world had ever seen. We learn about Kane in more newsreel footage. The footage stops and we meet the men who made it. They want to know about the real Charles Kane. They know his last word. But what does it mean? They search for his ex-wife Susan Alexander Kane (Dorothy Comingore) and find her drunk in a restaurant. We flash back to Charles's boyhood, raised in Mrs. Kane's boarding house. His mother sets up an adoption by a rich man Walter Parks Thatcher (George Coulouris) to get him away from his father. But the boy doesn't, of course, want to go. He'd been playing in the snow, making a snowman and sledding about; the next day, he would be on a train to the East. Flash forward to Kane's youth, when he was in charge of his first newspaper: The Inquirer. He was also an heir to the Thatcher fortune. He is idealistic and philanthropic. But he sees the power of controlling media. When Thatcher says he'll go out of business, Kane replies, "You're right: if I lose a million dollars per year, I'll go out of business in 60 years." Kane is now much older, hearing the elder Thatcher and his associate Bernstein cite his investments and holdings. Kane says, "Kane: You know, Mr. Thatcher, if I hadn't been very rich, I might have been a really great man. Thatcher: Don't you think you are? Kane: I think I did pretty well under the circumstances. Thatcher: What would you like to have been? Kane: Everything you hate." Flash back to Kane's initial purchase of The Inquirer. He writes out his declaration: "I'll provide the people of this city with a daily paper that will tell all the news honestly. I will also provide them with a fighting and tireless champion of their rights as citizens and as human beings." We flash forward to the Inquirer having taken the lead among all newspapers in New York City. It is a different Kane: he's influencing politics and policy rather than just reporting. "Are we going to declare war on Spain, or are we not?" As we heard from him in an earlier scene, "you provide the prose poems. I'll provide the war." We flash-forward again to the modern day, after Kane's death. His executors and journalists are still trying to find out about Rosebud. They talk about his first marriage -- to the current president's niece. She's accustomed to the opulence he can provide, but they're very much a "talk at breakfast" kind of couple. We flash back to his first political campaign: for governor of the state. He's running against a real crooked piece of work, James Gettys (Ray Collins). Kane loses to him because he's caught in an affair with a certain Miss Alexander. He leaves his wife and marries Miss Alexander. He then presses her into an opera career that she doesn't really want. He even builds an opera house for her. She flops (as expected) and he ends up writing the panning review himself (just to prove that he's an honest man). Still, he forces her to continue, using his newspapers to promote her. Finally, she tries to take her own life, just to escape the singing and ... him. She sticks with him, though, despite his drawing back into seclusion -- into his Xanadu palace. She does jigsaw puzzles. They're older now, in a bedouin's tent in a private jazz club (exceedingly decadent). They fight. He slaps her. The next morning, she packs her bags. She's done being a plaything on his chess board. He even says "you can't do this to me" -- as if he's the center of the story and other characters "do" things to him instead of simply living their lives. Her goals and dreams were never important. She leaves him, but feels sorry for him. Flash forward to an interview with the Italian butler of Xanadu -- he claims to know what Rosebud is. He names his price. He starts the story by taking us back to when Miss Alexander left Kane. Charles Foster Kane pitched himself a fit -- busting pretty much everything in her room -- except for the snow-globe. He stashes it in a pocket and walked, stiff-legged and wide-eyed out past his staff, who've all gathered to watch the fireworks. We're back in the modern day, where people are photographing the gargantuan hoard he'd amassed -- statues, paintings, piles and piles of bric-a-brac. Among them is a sled -- the one he was using when he was shipped off from his mother and father. It's called "Rosebud". Um. Ok. I feel like I've missed something -- this film is supposed to be legendary, but it seems kind of empty and predictable. It's fine. There are some nice shots. The makeup is good (especially to age people). Some of the giants sets are impressive. The out-of-order storytelling was almost certainly innovative for the time. The acting is so-so -- the story and dialogue as well. It's a movie about a man who came to his wealth by adoption. He has an oversized ego and he means well, but only on his own terms. Other people are to be cared for, but never considered equals. I may need to see it again, but I'm not in a hurry. Glengarry Glen Ross (1992) -- "8/10" This is a David Mamet screenplay with a hell of a cast. We fade in on Shelley Levene (Jack Lemmon) using a pay phone. Next to him is Dave Moss (Ed Harris), pushing a real-estate sale. John Williamson (Kevin Spacey) picks them up for a sales meeting. They meet Ricky Roma (Al Pacino) and James Lingk (Jonathan Pryce) at the bar. Shelley heads back to the office, where George Aaronow is already there, ready for the meeting. Blake (Alec Baldwin) shows up -- he's going to be leading the meeting. He's not gentle, "put that coffee down. Coffee's for closers only." "Do I have your interest? Of course I do: because it's either fuck or walk. It's either close or hit the bricks. [...] I'd wish you good luck, but you wouldn't know what to do with it if you got it." Blake leaves. The others bitch, but they get down to work -- even though the leads are garbage. It's pouring out. It's dark. It's getting later at night. They have to go make sales that night. Aaronow and Moss drive off together, scurrying through the pouring rain to the car, in a nice wide shot. They're discussing how getting just 10% is chump change. Especially when the leads are shit and they're paying 90% for them. They should go into business for themselves. It's probably a conversation they've had many times before. Levene haggles with Williamson to get the good leads -- the Glengarry leads. Levene is trying like hell, but it's pouring rain and he's staying out there, so his bargaining position isn't great. He's forced to shell out $50 a lead and 20% of the back-end of each sale. Levene calls on one of them, pestering the husband very, very hard, but there's just no chance. Moss and Aaronow are still cruising around. They still haven't done anything but gotten a snack and driven back to the office. They discuss robbing the office to get the good leads. Roma and Lingk are in the bar, with Roma leading the conversation--a spiel that sounds like he's delivered it many times before. Nothing came of the robbery -- Moss and Aaronow are also at the bar. The robbery idea is back on the table. Roma is more interested in talking about his sex life. Moss is going to make Aaronow steal the leads -- because he came up with the idea; the least Aaronow can do is to steal the leads. Roma closes a property with Lingk. The next morning, the office has been robbed. Roma shows up, in a fury, demanding a car because he closed a deal and therefore he won. Levene comes in, happy as a pig in shit: he closed eight units and sold $82,000. He's on the board. Dave Moss is full of negativity -- he hasn't made a sale in a month. Moss leaves in a huff. Roma invites Levene "The Machine" to continue with his story of his titanic sale. The story goes on for long minutes. Roma: "Great sale, Shelley." Williamson is doubtful that the sale will stick -- Shelley spends a long time intricately yelling at him and telling him just where he can stick it. Lingk walks in; Roma grabs Shelley and makes him pretend he's a customer, trying to build interest. But Lingk is there to tell him that the deal is off: his wife doesn't want to do it. Roma is rolling hard, putting on pressure, pretending he's too busy to deal with him. Lingk is adamant that he needs to get his money back. Roma is trying everything he can to keep the sale open -- he wants to do dinner on Monday. Linqk is upset because he's not allowed to negotiate. he really just wants the check back. Roma is trying to work the masculinity angle and it almost works, but Williamson comes in and assures Linqk that the check is cashed. The deal blows up. Roma rips Williamson a new one: "You stupid fucking cunt. You wanna know the rule? You never open your mouth until you know what the shot is. You child." Roma goes in with the police to talk to them about the robbery. The Machine takes over ripping Williamson. He ends with the Mamet twist: "Levene:: If you're going to make something up, John. Be sure that it helps. Or keep your mouth shut. "Williamson: [long pause] How do you know I made it up?" Why is this the Mamet twist? Because the contract had not gone to the bank, so he was lying to the customer. But Levene knew that because he'd gone back to the office and robbed it and seen the contract on Williamson's desk. Levene folds. He did make the sale that morning, but he also robbed the office the night before. Williamson also tells Levene that the people to whom he sold the property? They're insane. They don't have money. They just like talking to salesmen. Williamson gave Levene the lead because he doesn't like him. Roma gets back on the phone, hustling. The cops call Levene back in. Levene wants to tell Ricky himself, but he can't get a word in edgewise. Levene trudges into the office. The door closes. I gave it an extra point for the writing and the pile of great actors. Not a single woman in the movie, though. Velvet Goldmine (1998) -- "9/10" It's the 1970s in London. Young, fabulously dressed people are running through the streets to a concert. Brian Slade (Jonathan Rhys Meyers) is on stage, in an angelic costume. Feathers settle onto the roiling crowd. He is gunned down with a single shot. They interview people, including Curt Wild (Ewan McGregor), who wonders out loud whether the trend to being bisexual (like Slade) is just a fad. Arthur Stuart (Christian Bale) is a reporter who's given the job of finding out what really happened, ten years later, in 1984. He harks back to when he'd first heard of Slade, when he was still in secondary school, with a shag of hair and a head full of Brian Slade. Arthur collects interviews from Brian's former manager Cecil (Michael Feast), who lost Slade to a more high-powered manager in the form of Jerry Devine (Eddie Izzard). Cecil tells of Brian's early appearances as a folk singer and then of his epiphany when he saw Curt Wild for the first time. Slade changes his style and woos Devine's company with a completely out-there video starring a lizard-person. Cecil sends Arthur on to Mandy Slade (Toni Collette), who tells of how Slade met Jack Fairy, a breakout transvestite star of the time. At his next press conference, he didn't exactly come out, but he just acted as if he'd never been in. It was pretty epic. It was telling how Mandy says (in 1984) how something like that would cause riots whereas in 1971, it caused dancing. Slade's music is all over the place -- no clear style: in one, he's like Bowie; in another, like the Clash. Slade gets a chance to go to America and he wants to meet Curt Wild. Meet him he does: on the nod. They get him cleaned up and offer a collaboration. It happens -- both in the studio, on stage and in the sack. His next album is Maxwell Demon -- a persona of his, as well. The sets are lavish, intricate, opulent. The press conference for the release takes place in a fake circus. One reporter asks him if the Demon is him, to which he replies, "Man is least himself when he talks in his own person... Give him a mask and he'll tell you the truth." A concert. Slade slinks around elegantly. A montage. An orgy with dozens in the suite. Arthur at home, masturbating to Slade and Wild. His parents catch him. Wild's guitar solo shreds onward. Devine is with Shannon (Emily Woof), the ad-hoc seamstress. Mandy is with three or four people -- the nest of limbs is impossible to untangle. She watches first Wild, then Slade, leave the room. She finds them together later. Wild's talent runs out and Jerry gives up on him, forcing Brian to give up as well. Wild storms off, ending up in Germany. Slade spirals out, sinking into a giant pile of cocaine. Mandy serves him divorce papers while he's snorting cocaine off the ass of a sleeping hooker (or groupie). Brian couldn't care less about Mandy. Shannon has very much gotten into the lifestyle, playing Brian's acolyte perfectly. We're back in the bar, where Arthur is interviewing Mandy. She tells of the last time she'd seen Brian: he was at a concert starring Jack Fairy and Curt Wild. Segue to the concert. They're mourning the death of glitter. Jack sings 20th Century Boy. Arthur is there, going nuts, dressed to the nines. Curt Wild is fantastic in concert (in a way that he absolutely wasn't in studio). Arthur is transported. He spots Mandy in the crowd. Mandy is watching a man in the shadows in a doorway. It's Slade. After the concert, Mandy congratulates Wild, then tells him that she hadn't seen Slade. Arthur meets Wild as well, on the roof. Back in 1984, Arthur thinks he's found Brian Slade. He runs to tell his publisher, but the story's been cut. He's on the Tommy Stone show now. "But that's it!" Slade has rebooted his career as Tommy Stone. Tommy Stone's song is spectacular; the soundtrack overall is very tight. Arthur meets Wild in a bar after the show, but Wild doesn't recognize him. This is at least as good as Bohemian Rhapsody, if not actually better. The acting is fantastic, with Rhys-Davies putting in a particularly good performance. [5] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] Which is funny, because those are actually a thing in Scandinavia. They are everywhere in Copenhagen [1] I wonder if saying no to beggars is part of the push behind the cashless society in Sweden? That it's easier to legitimately say that you don't have cash in a society that doesn't actually have any cash at all. How would begging even work? [1] What the hell is going on there? [1] You know, if this movie was Korean or Japanese, no-one would think it was cheesy. [1] According to IMDb, "Jonathan Rhys Meyers and Ewan McGregor sang their own songs in the movie. (Some of Rhys Meyers's songs were overdubbed by Radiohead lead singer Thom Yorke.)" ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3880 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3880 Sat, 11 Jan 2020 23:33:27 +0100 -- "9/10" 2. "Threads (1984)" <#Threads> -- "9/10" 3. "Mademoiselle (1966)" <#Mademoiselle> -- "7/10" 4. "The Third Man (1949)" <#Third> -- "8/10" 5. "Bound (1996)" <#Bound> -- "8/10" 6. "A Face in the Crowd (1957)" <#Crowd> -- "9/10" 7. "Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011)" <#Once> -- "8/10" 8. "Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974)" <#Bring> -- "8/10" 9. "In Cold Blood (1967)" <#Cold> -- "8/10" 10. "Koyaanisqatsi (1982)" <#Koyaanisqatsi> -- "8/10" These are my notes to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. I've recently transferred my reviews to IMDb and made "the list" of around 1400 ratings publicly available. I've included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other -- I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. Army of Shadows (1969) -- "9/10" This is a story of the French Resistance during WWII, in particular the story of one Philippe Gerbier. He is captured and kept in a camp, but there isn't any evidence against him. He concocts a plan to escape with a young Communist, but is taken for questioning just before they can enact it. He organizes a bold escape, coolly killing a guard to make a distraction. He returns to his cell in the Resistance. They find the traitor who'd gotten him captured and bring him to a supposedly secluded apartment, where they find new neighbors and thin walls. They cannot shoot him, as they'd wanted to. Failing to find a knife (which no-one wanted to use -- none of them had ever killed before), they are forced to strangle him. It's an extremely uncomfortable scene, as it brings one much closer to the feeling of having to kill a man than other, more-modern movies, where death feels cheaper. They gather more members of the Resistance, some old colleagues and some new (like Mathilde the housewife). There is a lot of neat detail on the tradecraft they employed. Philippe eventually escapes to London, meeting the head of all Resistance networks, Luc Jardie, who receives a medal from Charles de Gaulle. This Jardie is quite a renowned philosopher and no-one knows he's involved at all. He is the older brother of Jean-François, a young member of their resistance. Félix is arrested by the Germans and taken to a French hospital in Lyons that's been converted to a German headquarters and prison. To effect his escape, Philippe returns to Paris from London by plane -- jumping with a parachute. The parachute jump was pretty hardcore. He didn't complain. He slept in that awful plane, that awful noise -- he even went back to sleep after they flew through some flak. The RAF were also cool as cucumbers. He had his glasses taped to his head; he jumped for the first time ever; he nailed it. Philippe meets up with Bison, Mathilde and Le Masque. She devises a plan to rescue Félix. One of their number, Jean-François Jardie, gives himself up to the Germans, so that he will be thrown in a cell with Félix. It goes exactly as planned, except that the German doctor won't let Félix be transported because he's too injured to transport -- he's dying and won't last long, even as it is. Jean-François has at least managed to smuggle in cyanide capsules for them both. No-one knows that Jean-François has sacrificed himself. Afterward, Mathilde urges Philippe to flee back to London. Félix is dead and she is able to run things in his absence. Besides, the German police are searching for him (she saw him on a most-wanted poster during the failed rescue). The French police raid the café where he was just eating with Mathilde and Philippe finds himself arrested and held with several others in a large, dank cell. He shares his cigarettes with everyone. They are taken to the killing alley, where they are all forced to run against each other for the other end while machine guns urge them on. At first, Philippe doesn't run -- then he decides to rabbit anyway, cursing himself. He is wounded in the arm and leg and stops before a huge, black cloud from one of the smoke grenades thrown not by the Germans, but by his rescuers. A rope drops through a slot above him. He grabs it and climbs out (ridiculous because he doesn't have the build for pulling up his whole body weight, even without a gunshot wound in his arm). Mathilde has pulled off yet another daring escape plan, rescuing him from a near-certain fate. They take Philippe to a safe house in the countryside and leave him with one month's supplies. He is bored, playing solitaire and reading the philosophy books of Jardie, feeling useless and of no use anymore to the Resistance. After over three weeks, Luc Jardie himself shows up to tell him that Mathilde has been captured. She finally slipped up: she'd never gotten rid of the photo of her daughter. The Germans are threatening to send the girl to a Polish whorehouse for the Eastern-front troops if she doesn't name all the names she knows. Philippe translates a secret message that reveals that Mathilde has decided to save her girl from her fate. She has been released and the first two agents have already been picked up. Philippe orders Bison to eliminate her. Bison refuses, saying that she'd saved Bison, she'd saved Philippe and now she's saving her daughter -- you can't judge her for staying true to her character. At this moment, Luc Jardie appears from the other room and tells them how he interprets it: Mathilde is doing everything she can to get them to kill her. He convinces Bison that this is what she wants -- by showing him that it would be what Bison would want, in her position, then asking "are you braver than she?". After Le Masque and Bison have left, Philippe asks Luc if he's sure about Mathilde. Jardie responds that it's only a theory, but a convincing one. The four of them get a German car and roll up on Mathilde, letting her see their faces, then shooting her in the street. The film ends with them driving away through Paris, getting away...for now. Captions inform us that they would all die within the next year or two. Bison was decapitated, Masque took a cyanide pill, Jardie was tortured to death, revealing only one name: his own, Philippe was gunned down by a firing squad -- this time he didn't run. This is as good as watching classic James Bond: realistic, cold-blooded, business-like getting-shit-done. It's not at all a romanticized view of the Resistance. Those that are in it are in it because that's what they do. I saw it in French with English subtitles (about one-third is German with no subtitles). Threads (1984) -- "9/10" This is a movie by the BBC about nuclear holocaust, depicting the likely effects of an attack. It cost them £400,000. We're introduced to a typical 1980s suburban family, concerned with their lives -- primarily their teenage son Jimmy and his girlfriend Ruth are pregnant and are going to get married. In the background TV and in various news headlines that flit past, we see that the Soviets have invaded Afghanistan and tensions are increasing. As well, there is increased activity in the Gulf of Oman ("a U.S. submarine has disappeared while on routine patrol in the area"). We are told that England has a plan for a backup government, in the event of an emergency. With tensions rising, they are going through their plans and supplies. There is a run on the grocery stores. In a pub, the news is on, discussing the Soviets moving nuclear arms and the U.S. responding. Later that night, we see kids in a popular make-out spot being surrounded by military trucks. England braces itself as a U.S. ultimatum expires and it attacks a Soviet base in Iran. The Soviets respond with nuclear-tipped missiles; the U.S. responds in kind. [1] There is a run on the stores, which have hiked prices. When a young man announces that war has broken out, the people leave in droves with their full shopping carts and without paying. People are urged to stay calm. In the next days, riots escalate, people move out of urban centers. Things get worse and emergency plans swing into action. The pregnant young couple from before are in their new apartment, peeling wallpaper and listening to the dire news. A PSA: "If anyone dies while you are kept in your fallout room, move the body to another room in the house. Label the body with name and address, and cover it as tightly as possible in polythene, paper, sheets or blankets. If, however, you've had a body in the house for more than five days *and* if it is safe to go outside, then you should bury the body for the time being in a trench or cover it with earth, and mark the spot of the burial." The next day, we hear that the attack is coming and there's a mushroom cloud over Sheffield. All the residents can see the nearly pornographic-looking thing, but the shock wave just knocked them over. That's not quite so realistic. The signs of terror are pretty impressive, though, especially for a TV movie. The next bombs take out a lot more infrastructure. The Sheffield planning center is damaged, but still online. The U.S. and U.S.S.R. exchange 3000 megatons, of which 210 fall on England. That's enough to put 80% of homes in fire zones. There will be no emergency response. People are puking. The radiation is hitting. People don't know how to respond. It doesn't matter what they do, though. Everything's on fire. Everything's radioactive. Everything's destroyed. After one week, trucks are running out of fuel and no food is being distributed. Everything is controlled centrally. People in their shelters are growing increasingly desperate. The young couple has been separated. Jimmy is dead. After two weeks, all deliveries will stop everywhere. People venture outside when they get desperate enough. It's utter chaos, death and destruction. 500 million tons of dust start the nuclear winter. The ever-present fires that destroyed everything have gone out. There is no heat. There is no power. There is no food. There is no water. There is no sanitation. People riot and gather at bunkers where they know there is food and shelter. Soldiers defend the buildings with extreme prejudice. In the medical centers, they do what they can, but they're vastly overwhelmed. Without water or power or medicine, there's nothing to do. You can't even euthanize anyone. Infection is rampant. Radiation burns and sickness affect nearly everyone. People are eating animal corpses in the streets. [2] At this point, England looks very much like Aleksey German's "Hard to Be a God" . There are 10-20 million corpses at 3 weeks. [3] Flies and rats are everywhere, doing their best to remove corpses where people are unable to do so for themselves. There is forced quartering by the remaining semblance of government. It's pointless, though, isn't it? Ruth is still pregnant and gives birth sometime in December. She is in an abandoned barn with other drifters. There is a fire. The child is screaming. It is Christmas. One month later, we see Ruth bashing stolen grains with a rusty bucket, trying to get food for herself and her child. These are grains from previous harvests. Subsequent harvests have much lower yields. The insects enjoy a resurgence as pesticides disappear. We see Ruth purchase dead rats from a vendor. The currency of exchange is unclear. 10 years later, Ruth's daughter comes to wake her to work in the fields and finds that Ruth has finally succumbed. She steals Ruth's things, leaving her precious book of birds (which is of no consequence anymore). Finally, we see the end game for the survivors. Children watch a dilapidated VHS of animals that no longer exists. People silently collect threads from cloth that can no longer be woven. At 13 years, we see Ruth's daughter defending her coney and fire from interlopers. Their language has deteriorated vastly. They steal food together, then fight and one of them rapes her. Nine months later, we see her birth a still-born child in a "hospital". Post-apocalypse seemed much sexier in the Mad Max movies. A slower version of this is coming via the climate apocalypse whether we trigger worldwide war or not. An extra point for not shying away at all. This should be required viewing for war-happy jackasses in the States. Mademoiselle (1966) -- "7/10" We meet the local schoolteacher (Jeanne Moreau) in the forest, atop a small water-pumping station. She is dressed to the nine, in pumps, completely out of place. She is pumping away, until she finally gets the water going -- after which it accelerates on its own. It floods through the only road into town, directly into a barnyard. The animals are utterly miserable and cry out. A religious procession stops their march and jumps in to lend a hand. She very obviously ogles the strong Italian peasant Manou (Ettore Manni) who rescues animals -- shirtless. On her way home, she finds a bird's nest in a field. She shoos the bird away from its eggs, picks out all of them and crushes them in her hand, a huge smile on her face. Afterward, she helps write up the report of the flooding incident (she can use a typewriter, after all). Next we see her teaching her class, singling out Manou's son Bruno (Umberto Orsini) and punishing him both in class and during recess. The police visit Manou and Bruno, wanting to question them, but he sends them on their way. Mademoiselle gets ready to go out again, getting dressed to the nines and putting on a lot of makeup. She carefully selects a fancy box of matches from a drawer-full of them. She goes out, drifting toward a barnyard, then lights it on fire. She saunters back to her apartment and watches the people slowly realize that everything is on fire. She drifts out into the crowd, drinking in the misery. She is chaotic evil. After the local townspeople vaguely accuse and threaten Manou, Bruno finds a bit of schoolwork, twisted up like kindling paper. Manou meets with his friend Antonio and they discuss that they're worried -- that they're thinking of moving away. Manou is suspicious of Bruno's activity whereas everyone else in town is suspicious of Manou. Later, we see the loggers working on a tree cutting and Bruno joins them, as do the local police, who question them again (the Italians are obviously the most suspicious). Back at the headquarters, Mademoiselle defends Manou when the police circle him viciously as the only suspect. She asks them if they did not see how heroic he was at the flooding. She returns to her classroom and again blames everything that the children had done only on Bruno, sending him from the classroom. He's had enough. He yells at her, calling her disgusting and a hateful whore. She is unmoved because she obviously does not understand his Italian insults (which have no aural analogues in French). She is out walking when she meets Manou in the woods. He apologizes for his son's behavior when she notices his shirt moving. He has a snake wrapped around his waist. He pulls it off and tells her not to be afraid -- that she should touch his snake. I'm not making this up nor did I misunderstand his somewhat accented French. She is out walking again and spies Manou napping on his work site. She gazes nothing but lustfully at him for long minutes, actually licking her lips. She is discovered hiding behind a tree by Antonio and both he and Manou see her fleeing the scene. She is mortified. On the way home, she encounters Bruno and this time offers to help him catch up on his lessons, playing all sweetness and light. This seems like a trick (remember: chaotic evil). A woman comes around looking for Manou, then finds him in a field, on his way home. She makes a pass and he gives chase. Mademoiselle sees all. We see her at home, suppressing her nipples with an X of medical tape before dressing up and going out at night again. She sets another fire, this time by accident. But another barn goes up in flames. The police hear from a female eyewitness that she didn't see anyone, but she heard someone whistling -- Manou. Mademoiselle is back on the scene, drinking in the anguish (and watching Manou take his shirt off when a firehose empties on him). A police officer sends her home. The next day, in class, she tells the story of "Gilles de Rais" , a 15th-century nobleman who served in the army with Jean d'Arc and might have been history's first documented serial killer. It's madness that she chooses to tell this story in a one-room schoolhouse. It's literally a horror story: she tells how he would hunt children. She watches a funeral procession go by -- for someone who died in the fire she set. She is unmoved. Next, we see many animals in their death throes, lying on the ground, unable to stand. The police determine that they've been poisoned. I'll give you three guesses. The townspeople need a scapegoat: a flooding, two fires and now poisoning (with arsenic), all unexplained. They say that the law will do nothing; they'll have to take the law into their own hands. Speaking of taking something into hands, Mademoiselle is back in the woods, with Manou, who's carrying her through fields. She is not a traditional lover. He laughs as she kisses his boots, then he gives chase while she laughs more (she laughs!). He hears the posse with their dogs, but doesn't break off his affair. Manou carries Mademoiselle from place to place. They are in a field; he calls her like a dog, whistling. She comes. He knows what she wants. She seems to simultaneously hate and love him for it. Dangerous, Manou, very dangerous. It thunders. They seeks refuge. They end up by the lake, under a tree. She abandons herself completely -- a totally different person than the calculating killer we've seen. They have not exchanged a single word. He tells her he will return tomorrow, with Bruno. She says nothing. They part. She wanders into town, looking very much like she's spent the entire night fucking in the woods. The townspeople gather 'round her and ask who did it, was it him? She breathes "yes!" and flees indoors. She did not lie. The men find him and hack him into pieces in a field. The other woman with whom he dallied earlier comes out, sees the carnage...and smiles. Antonio is in the police headquarters -- they say they looked everywhere and cannot find Manou. He leaves town with Bruno. Mademoiselle, too, is leaving town. The plagues will stop. The townspeople will be convinced that they got their culprit, that they'd done the right thing. Bruno sees Mademoiselle in her car, looking at him. He spits at her. The movie is in black and white. I saw it in the original French and Italian; no subtitles. Marlon Brando would have ruined this movie; I'm glad they got Ettore Manni instead. The Third Man (1949) -- "8/10" This is the story of a certain Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten), who'd gone to Vienna [4] to see his friend Harry Lime. He gets there just in time to catch Lime's funeral. He'd apparently been hit by a car. Martins learns from a local police captain that Lime was a grifter, the most notorious con man in Vienna. Martins gets very drunk, but is protected from arrest by his reputation as an acclaimed author (he was unaware that his reputation would precede him there). It seems that Harry Lime had prepared the way quite well. A friend of Harry's 'Baron' Kurtz (Ernst Deutsch) calls Holly and they meet in a café. The Baron wears a bowtie and carried a miniature dachshund. He does his best to dissuade Holly from investigating Harry's death any further. He goes to a theater to meet with Anna Schmidt (Alida Valli), a girl who Harry had been seeing. They return to Harry's apartment to find Maj. Calloway and the Brits tossing the place. They confiscate Anna's falsified papers (she's not Austrian, but Czech). Holly assures her that she'll be all right (he literally has no idea) and that he'll continue to try to find out what really happened to Harry (as if that would concern her more than having just lost her papers). Holly next meets Dr. Winkel (Erich Ponto), who'd apparently been at the scene of the accident. The doctor says that Harry was already dead when he'd arrived. He learns a bit more, but not much. All he knows is that no-one knows who the "third man" is: the porter at the apartment building across the street from the accident saw three men. The police claim only two, as do the others who helped carry him. Anna is released on her own recognizance. Holly is the quintessential ugly American. He expects everyone to speak English; he has no idea how money works; he expects his "army" money to work everywhere. He thinks he's untouchable. He is not. When the porter is murdered, he and Anna stumble on a crowd around the ambulance. A small child starts yelling that he saw Holly and that he thinks he did it. The others jump on this idea, the zither music goes nuts and off goes a chase across the city. Holly and Anna slip into a movie theater. He goes back to the hotel to report the incident to Major Calloway (much as he doesn't want to). He is seemingly kidnapped, but is really being brought to a meeting of his fans, fans of literature (though he just writes Westerns). He sees his pursuer again and escape to meet with Calloway. Calloway brings him up to speed on Harry's doings: he was smuggling Penicillin into a medicine-starved Vienna, thinning it and selling it dearly. Holly gets drunk, then returns to meet Anna to find that she'd also spoken to Calloway. He hits on her pretty hard. I fear it might work. It does not. Holly goes downstairs to find someone watching him from the shadows -- he steps out briefly into the light: it's Harry (Orson Welles). Holly and Calloway are on Harry's trail. Holly meets him on a ferris wheel, where he confronts him on his criminal life and the trail of victims he's left behind. Harry responds, "Nobody thinks in terms of human beings. Governments don't. Why should we? They talk about the people and the proletariat, I talk about the suckers and the mugs - it's the same thing. They have their five-year plans, so have I. "[...] "Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock." [image]Holly agrees to help Calloway catch Lime -- especially after Calloway shows him children in a hospital who are suffering because of Harry's counterfeit Penicillin. Harry shows up and is almost nabbed, but escapes into the sewers. The Austrian sewers have these neat entrances with multiple triangular flaps that open onto a spiral staircase. Harry shoots one officer, then is badly wounded himself. Holly and Anna see what Harry's done. Holly finishes the job. The second funeral follows. Holly gets out and waits for Anna at the funeral. She walks in from a long, long way away, down the street, the zither going the whole time. She walks right by without so much as a glance. The movie was directed by Carol Reed and based on a screenplay by Graham Greene. There are some very nice long shots and city shots. The credits and interlude music is a zither playing perkily throughout, which sets the mood quite nicely. I saw it in English and German, without subtitles. Bound (1996) -- "8/10" This is a heist film written and directed by the Wachowski siblings, pre-Matrix. Corky (Gina Gershon) is an ex-con working maintenance in a building. She meets two tenants, Violet (Jennifer Tilly, whose breathy voice is perfect for this role) and her asinine boyfriend Caesar (Joe Pantoliano), hearing them through the thin walls at first. Corky is very interested in Violet and the interest is mutual. The atmosphere is highly charged from the very get-go. Violet gets Corky into bed nearly immediately (there isn't much resistance). Caesar is mobbed up. Corky hears a lot of stuff happening next door to the apartment that she's renovating. She sees other goons go in, including Johnny Marzzone (Christopher Meloni) and they have some poor sap with them. She hears a lot of very violent stuff through the walls. "I'm going to ask you ten times." Violet leaves with Corky -- but they know enough not to rat out the mob. Violet proposes that they rip off Caesar when he gets the next shipment: $2 million. Caesar shows up with the money, covered in blood. He literally launders the money, then counts it. All night long. Violet comes to get Corky and swing their plan into motion. Corky steals the money, while Violet gets Caesar to blame the theft on his arch-nemesis Johnny. The big boss realizes his money is gone, Caesar is determined not to get blamed for it. In a daze, Caesar shoots Gino, Johnny and the other henchman. "I had to do it, Violet. You saw it. I had no choice." While Caesar takes care of the bodies, Violet is still trapped in the apartment with him -- and must distract the police for as long she can. Caesar is really very good at this cleanup/laundering of the scene of the crime. The police show up, but Caesar gets rid of them with a story about being nearly deaf and having the TV turned up too high (that's why a neighbor reported a gunshot). Corky is in the next apartment, listening to their every move. Corky's plan is good -- she has the money and the mob are killing each other over it. But she can't leave because Violet trusts her not to rabbit without her -- just like Corky expected the same trust from Violet. Caesar catches Violet calling Corky and now suspects her, but doesn't know what she's done. He redials the number and hears the phone ringing next door. Corky breaks in to the apartment, but Caesar gets the drop on her. He's cold-cocked Violet and tied up Corky. Caesar is perplexed: he's the center of Violet's world, he's provided her everything. Everything she has is due to him. Also, he's super-angry about lesbians. Now it's Caesar's turn to ask "ten times", threatening to cut off Violet's fingers. Mickey shows up and interrupts the torture, but Corky tells him where the money is. He knocks her out and goes to find the money. Before Caesar can get the money, Mickey is on his way up. He has to make a new plan, pretending to have been showering with Violet "to relax". Mickey grows increasingly suspicious, but Caesar manages to satisfy his questions. Violet helps Caesar get rid of Mickey, but he double-crosses her. They go to grab the money, but Violet rabbits on him. He chases her through the building, giving Corky enough time to get free and grab the cash. She traps Caesar, but doesn't get the drop on him. He cold-cocks her. Again. She's got to have a helluva concussion going. Violet gets the drop on Caesar, killing him very theatrically in a pool of white paint. The next scene is Mickey swearing that they'll find "him" (presumably Caesar, whose body Violet apparently hid). The two ladies ride off into the sunset with $2.175 million. It's a well-written mob/heist/double-cross movie. It's also very nicely filmed -- you can definitely see where the Matrix would come from three years later. A Face in the Crowd (1957) -- "9/10" Marcia Jeffries from the radio show A Face in the Crowd goes to a local jail, where she meets Larry 'Lonesome' Rhodes (Andy Griffith). She's gone to Sarah Lawrence and is absolutely delighted to be among the hoi-polloi, giving them a chance to show that they're worth something. Larry's got other ideas: he slugs back a shot and gets ready to play a song. Andy Griffith is actually a pretty good blues singer. Marcia goes back out to find him and give him a job. He's not convinced that a "job" is something that would suit his lifestyle, but he's willing to give it a shot. He shows up to the radio station and he riffs along, playing songs and pontificating on the under-appreciated situation of women in the country. When the sheriff messes with him (because he's out to dinner with Marcia, who the sheriff is sweet on), Larry plays a joke on him by ripping him apart on the radio and then telling everyone who's listening to bring their dogs to the sheriff in the morning. Hundreds turn up -- and Larry is starting to learn his political power. He gets a call to go on a TV show and he boldly makes a deal: he'll work for free for a week or two, then for $1,000 per week after that. [5] His first TV appearance goes just like his radio shows. He riffs, does his city folk/country folk schtick, and just generally doesn't follow any script, while being so honest and approachable and "real" that people tune in. He does commercials kind of like Bill Burr. "I'd like to have your money, but I'd rather have my pride." The public love him, but he gets fired by his first sponsor, Luffler's mattresses, whose president is played by Charles Irving. Larry plans to leave and bids Marcia farewell, early in the morning, but she "convinces" him to stay. Meanwhile, sales of Luffler mattresses are up and the bigger sharks are now interested in his money-making potential, thinking that they can benefit from the public's love of him while controlling the exact tendencies that make him lovable. He has no qualms about doing advertising -- he's delighted to make a buck -- but he is absolutely uncontrollable. "You college folks want dignity on your program; back where I come from, if a fella looks too dignified, we figure he's tryna to steal your watch." He makes up a song/jingle on the spot. Hired. His next product Vitajex was actually more concerned with a form of veracity whereas Lonesome Larry shitcans that and think that selling with sex is a better idea. With sales booming and success rolling in, the next stage is inevitable: political influence. A Gen. Haynesworth (Percy Waram) approaches him with a proposal, "In every strong and healthy society from the Egyptians on, the masses had to be guided with a strong hand by a responsible elite. Let us not forget that in TV, we have the greatest instrument for influence in the history of the world." His fame grows, people are making money, they name mountains after him, he gets the keys to cities, gets apartments, he's a sponsor's dream. But he has his doubts. He calls Marcia late at night, that he's worried. "All them millions of people believin' in me, doin' what I tell 'em to. It scares me." Soon, the first parasites show up: a Mrs. Larry Rhodes shows up, claiming that they're not divorced. He promises to clear it up. Meanwhile Marcia's associate, Mel Miller (Walter Matthau) is writing articles about Larry and Marcia calls it "vicious", to which he responds, "Didn't you know? All mild men are vicious. They hate themselves for being mild, and they hate the windy extroverts whose violence seems to have a strange attraction for nice girls. You should know better." Meanwhile, Lonesome is being Lonesome. He shacks up with a high-school baton-twirler Betty Lou Fleckum (Lee Remick) -- then marries her in Juarez (where he'd just finalized his previous divorce). To be fair to her, she's quite a baton-twirler. Meanwhile Joey DePalma (Anthony Franciosa) is guiding Larry's career to new heights, but definitely trying to milk him for all he's worth before his inevitable crash. But first, Larry still has room to grow: he's engaged to advise the presidential campaign of one Sen. Worthington Fuller (Marshall Neilan), a dry, facts-based man. They need to sell him to the public and that's where Larry comes in. His current advisor thinks "Well, I may be a bit old-fashioned, but it seems to me there is a still a distinction between politics and, well, the field, you're in." He's utterly mistaken. Even back in 1957, they knew that politics was about marketing. Larry points to his friend Beanie (Rod Brasfield): "You see your problem now, Senator? How are you going to get this bush monkey to vote for you?" Later, with the General, Larry ruminates about himself, "I'm not just an entertainer, I'm an influencer, a force. A force." Mel Miller is planning a book based on his articles, to take down Lonesome Larry as a corrosive force in American culture and politics. He talks to Marcia about it, telling her to stop enabling Larry. Meanwhile, Lonesome discovers that he's not even the controlling owner of his own enterprise: Joey is. And he's fooling around with Betty Lou. Larry is not pleased with how his life has spiraled out of control. But his campaign for Fuller is going gangbusters: he's up from 4% to 53.7% Lonesome is going to get a cabinet position if Fuller's elected. "This whole country's just like my flock of sheep! [...] Rednecks, crackers, hillbillies, hausfraus, shut-ins, pea-pickers - everybody that's got to jump when somebody else blows the whistle. They don't know it yet, but they're all gonna be 'Fighters for Fuller'. They're mine! I own 'em! They think like I do. Only they're even more stupid than I am, so I gotta think for 'em. Marcia, you just wait and see. I'm gonna be the power behind the president - and you'll be the power behind me!" Marcia runs out -- she now knows for sure that Mel is right. Without her, Lonesome's show falls apart, though. He's back to ad-libbing, but it's a dangerous thing. Especially when he thinks the show has ended. Marcia hears him talking and she sets his mic back to live to broadcast the following: "Those morons out there? Shucks, I could take chicken fertilizer and sell it to them as caviar. I could make them eat dog food and think it was steak. Sure, I got 'em like this... You know what the public's like? A cage of Guinea Pigs. Good Night you stupid idiots. Good Night, you miserable slobs. They're a lot of trained seals. I toss them a dead fish and they'll flap their flippers." His denouement is quick and merciless. Marcia and Mel go to his penthouse to find him ranting to himself, with his friend Beanie running the laugh track. He's a complete wreck. He told the truth and he's out. He wasn't a nice person, but he's exactly what the powers-that-be wanted. The powers-that-be? They'll be just fine. Joey has the next "Lonesome Rhodes" already lined up, a more anodyne version that's more malleable. The advertisers and business leaders will be fine, they'll just ride the next wave. They'll fine-tune the formula to get just the right balance to keep them in power and keep the money flowing in and the sheep under control. It had already been like this for long enough that you could make this movie in 1957 and be assured of finding an audience. However, back then, they still had hope that the demagogue would be ignored, as expressed by Mel: "You were taken in, just like we were all taken in. When we get wise to him, that's our strength. We get wise to him." Nowadays, some of us are no longer so naive as to doubt our naïveté. In the film, the demagogue is deposed and "normalcy" is restored. Mel gets the last word. In reality, we have only demagogues to choose from, and the king of Lonesome Larrys is not just an advisor to, but has become the president. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia (2011) -- "8/10" We start with a windowpane that dulls the view and the sound. The view clarifies to show three men sharing a meal in what looks like a garage. This is a very pretty and a very slow, but I think a very deep movie. It is about a group of police officers, a prosecutor, a doctor and the accused traveling the countryside, at night, trying to find the body that the accused has confessed to killing. They drive from spot to spot, waxing philosophically and poetically. The accused is one of the men from the first scene. In the other car is a man that they identify as his brother. He was also at the garage. The doctor and the prosecutor discuss amongst themselves, as they are outsiders. They have a long discussion about a "gorgeous" woman the prosecutor knew who'd predicted the day she would die. She lived long enough to give birth to her child, held it, then died. The doctor suspects she'd killed herself. The prosecutor says he doesn't know. After a long night, they head to a village for food. There, they are received by the mayor and given free food though the village is exceedingly poor. The wind is strong and knocks out the power. The mayor's daughter comes around with lanterns and tea. The lantern is in the center of the serving tray; the glasses of tea surround it. The light bathes her face in a radiance golden from the lamp and caramel from the tea. She is very pretty, but the glow of the lantern transforms her into a sublime beauty. Each man stares and worships when she stops in front of him. They drive further the next day and finally happen upon the body. This is at 90 minutes into the movie. It's slow, but the slowness is the point. None of the officers is armed. They put up with the suspect (for the most part), treating him with a reasonable amount of dignity. The troopers answer questions in such stem-winders that one wonders why anyone even bothers asking them questions at all (one such conversation is about which village they should go to for late dinner; another is determining which side of the county border they are on when investigating the body). One of the officers is extremely interested in distances. The prosecutor reads out the crime-scene report, with a little help from the doctor. They discover that the other stumblebums have forgotten to pack a body bag, so they have to wrap the body in a blanket for transport in one of their cars. They ask the suspect why he hogtied the victim. "Otherwise, he wouldn't fit in the car." The prosecutor then asks whether they shouldn't hogtie the body again, in order to transport it back to the city. This is a very dark film. They get the body back to town and the suspect out of danger from the crowd that has gathered there. The doctor returns to his apartment to moon about his lost love. Afterward Naçi picks up a prescription for his son, the doctor makes his breakfast rounds, then heads to the office, where he sees the suspect's supposed son (and the mother). They do not speak. He meets with the prosecutor to discuss the upcoming autopsy. They end up primarily discussing the woman from before: the doctor again says that it was likely suicide. The prosecutor says that the women had caught her husband cheating, but had forgiven him his bagatelle immediately. There is no way that she would have been so ruthless as to kill herself about such a thing when it was obvious she'd forgiven her husband. It's pretty clear that he is telling a story about himself. It's almost like every man in the story has an abandonment behind him (Naçi has a "genius" son that he can't really stand to be around; the victim had a son who threw a rock at the suspect; the doctor is divorced but was looking longingly at a picture of a boy; the prosecutor is left to raise a child by himself). The doctor performs the autopsy (he narrates it, but his assistant performs it). They find dirt in the lungs, leading to the conclusion that the man had been buried alive. The film ends with the sounds of autopsy from inside and children playing football outside. The doctor watches the victim's son and wife outside, the boy happily hurrying to retrieve a stray ball for the others on the field. This film won the Palme d'Or. Nothing really happens in it. It is highly unconventional. It depicts more-or-less normal events. There is no music -- mother nature provides the sound of wind. There are natural sounds that indicate how quiet it is, in the country. It's real, with real people, with real issues. It shows without telling. Even what it shows is ephemeral -- you have to elicit meaning on your own. It's a good movie; I'm glad I saw it. Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974) -- "8/10" The film starts at the side of a pond. A girl is lying there, stroking her very slight baby bump. Her mother comes and gathers her, bringing her before her father. He demands to know who the father is. The girl refuses to speak. His henchmen tear off her shirt and twist her arm behind her back. The father asks again. Again, she refuses. The camera pulls back to show his compound. We hear a snap. She names "Alfredo Garcia". He puts a $1 million price on the man's head. A couple of months later, we see heavy hitters arriving in Mexico by plane, attracted by the still-open bounty. They engage the services of Bennie (Warren Oates), a piano player who always wears sunglasses. He thinks he knows who might have been with Alfredo: Elita (the alluring Isela Vega), who is actually Bennie's on-again, off-again girlfriend. She tells him that Alfredo had died in a car accident after having said goodbye to her for a...long...time. Bennie is a forgiving guy, though, and is back with Elita pretty soon. He extracts a commitment of $10,000 from the henchmen to find the head. They hit the road, with two guys on their tail. Everyone is drinking madly. Bennie admits to Elita that he's looking for Garcia's head to get $10,000. She's fine with it. He admits his love for her, making her cry. Later that day, they decide to camp out under the stars instead of finding a hotel. Two bikers -- the terrorists of the 70s -- show up. One of them is Kris Kristofferson. They see the guitar and ask her to play a song. The atmosphere is tense. It becomes pretty obvious what they're after -- Kristofferson takes Elita into the scrub. It's like a ritual. He shreds her shirt. She stands there. She slaps him. Twice. He slaps her back. He walks away. She follows him. She knows they're planning to kill Bennie. Bennie gets the drop on one, finds Elita and Kristofferson, shoots him dead, then kills the other one, who'd gotten back up. They drive off, fighting a bit, but then continuing on with their mission. She just wants to be with him, regardless of circumstances. He sees the money as a way out. She takes him to the village and church where Alfredo is buried. They check into another hotel, this one not nearly as nice as the one they'd stayed in before. He grabs a bottle of tequila -- his umpteenth of the film. They sleep fitfully, in their clothes. He gets up early to go dig up the grave and she insists on going with him -- they're in it together. Still, she can't stand watching him desecrate a gravesite for $10,000. He gets the coffin open and is about to decapitate it, when he's cold-cocked himself. He wakes up half-buried in the grave...next to Elita, who's completely buried...and completely dead. Bennie's on the warpath now, with nothing left to lose. He hunts down Elita's killers and gets Garcia's head back. He's going a bit bonkers, talking to the head. Garcia's family is on his tail. He stops at a roadside restaurant and picks up some ice to keep the head fresh until he can deliver it. Soon, though, Garcia's family catches up with Bennie and cuts him off, forcing his car to a stop. They, in turn, are ambushed by contract killers, who take out almost the whole family. The family takes out one of them and Bennie finishes the other off. He's back on the road with Garcia's head. Garcia gets more ice and a shower. Bennie gets tequila and sorrow. The next day, Bennie brings the head to his contractor. He asks them what they want with the damned head, then digs a gun out of the picnic basket with Alfredo's head and starts and finishes yet another firefight. He finds El Jefe's business card and heads down there by plane (like, with the head?). He meets with El Jefe, who ask him if he wants a drink. "I got nothing to celebrate." He pays Bennie, then tells him to throw the head to the pigs. "No. 16 people are dead because of this. And one of them was a damned good friend of mine." Another firefight where Bennie takes everybody out. He's got El Jefe dead to rights. El Jefe's daughter urges Bennie to finish the job. At first, he grabs the head, leaving with the daughter...then goes back for the briefcase. He gives it to the daughter, then heads off to his doom, where he finally loses a firefight -- but he knew he wouldn't escape by just driving away. An extra point for an inspired and unique script. Director Peckinpah really knew how to film Mexico. I saw it in English and Spanish (no subtitles). In Cold Blood (1967) -- "8/10" This is a black-and-white film based on the Truman Capote novel of the same name. It stars Robert Blake as Perry and Scott Wilson as Dick. The film follows the story in the book almost exactly. Perry is on parole and is friends with Dick. They are both ruthless killers, but Dick is even more devil-may-care and doesn't consider consequences at all. He bangs his way across the country. Perry is more complex, but he's also sociopathic. Dick left prison with a plan to steal the Clutter family fortune. This plan goes terribly wrong and they leave with only $43, having eliminated all the witnesses. Dick is a tremendously smooth talker, though, running one con after another to build up a nut for them to travel on. Perry is amazed at Dick's lack of inhibition and his gift of gab. They leave a trail of bad paper a mile long. They head for Mexico and hole up there for a while, but they don't last long. Perry has visions and memories of his broken family, his father who tried so hard, his Cherokee mother who was a brilliant rodeo queen, but also alcoholic and ended up ruining her life with other men. Soon, they're back in the States, in the cold plains of the U.S. They find and steal a car, kite a bunch of checks, then head their way to Las Vegas. The cops are on their trail, though, and pick them up in Vegas before they can even gamble away the last few dollars they'd earned with refundable bottles. The main cop is John Forysthe. They're interviewed separately and they tell more-or-less the same story. They seem to crack a bit, but the police can't get anything from either of them. They tell the boys that they have a living eyewitness, but the boys don't believe them. Only when they show Dick the pictures of the bloody shoe-prints does he crack and pin everything on Perry. Perry laughs at the cop when told of Dick's confession. He knows it's real, because Dick repeated the fake story Perry had told him about a guy he'd killed in Vegas. The night of the murders, it was Dick who'd taken the lead, calling Perry a chicken for wanting to back out. Perry continues to tell the story of that night: how it was relatively clear relatively quickly that Clutter's claim that there was no safe was true. Perry tries to take care of the Clutters while tying them up securely (he hogties them all with rope). Perry stopped Dick from attacking Nancy Clutter -- "Dick: First I'm gonna bust that little girl" -- and orders him downstairs. "Perry: I despise people who can't control themselves." After that, Perry and Dick fight, but Perry ends up killing everyone -- because Dick is too chicken to do it. Nancy is last. "Perry: It doesn't make sense. I mean what happened. It had nothing to do with the Clutters. They never hurt me. They just happened to be there. I thought Mr. Clutter was a very nice gentleman... I thought so right up to the time I cut his throat." The next scene is in the courtroom, where the prosecuting attorney quotes from the Bible, with his reading glasses upside-down on his face. They are sentenced to death by hanging in the state of Kansas. Dick goes first. Perry waxes nostalgic about his father's failed hunting lodge for tourists in Alaska and how he'd gotten thrown out by his father. "I guess the only thing I'm gonna miss in this world is that poor old man and his hopeless dreams." Perry goes next. The put him on the trapdoor. "Thy rod and thy staff, they comfort me." His heartbeat is so loud; you can see him chewing his gum frantically behind the hood. The door lets go. It's got a nice soundtrack by Quincy Jones. Koyaanisqatsi (1982) -- "8/10" The main character in this film is the soundtrack by Philip Glass. A cave drawing with armless figures. Industrial scene. Factory. Foundry embers falling. Increasing flames. Fade to white. A stony desert; aerial view. Sunrise. Caverns. A hole in the stone ceiling. Mesas. A giant oxbow. The Earth vents gases. The edge of a giant dune. Clouds scud in time lapse. Sun reaches a cave. Bats flit. Clouds morph and shift against the sunset. Clouds roll along like a river. A giant waterfall. Waves. Clouds. Fog flits and rolls like a river. Rocky, verdant crags shift in and out. Flying over terrain. Bands of flowers. Flooded desert mesas. Pouring dirt. Explosions. A dump truck. Power lines. A conduit to the horizon. Spewing factories. Azure holding pools. A dam. A giant steam shovel. An explosion. Pumps. A field of reservoir tanks. Manufacturing. Heat. A mushroom cloud. A family on the beach. A power plant in the background. People looking up. Scudding clouds in a glass building. A plane lands. Heat shimmers. A plane taxis. Cars roll. A cloverleaf. Another one. Traffic. People driving. Cars waiting. A plane taxis behind. Rainbow parking lot. A fighter jet (tailfin camera). A missile falls. A missile launches. A booster separates. Explosions. Destruction. Bombing. Bombs. Time-lapse of Manhattan. Clouds flit. Cruising on the Hudson. Buildings. Rubble.Tenements. Slums. Flying over half-abandoned buildings. Detonation. Collapse. Clouds scud over a skyline. A building mirrors the sky. Microdata. People. A crowd. Papers. Queues. Portraits. A jet pilot. Casino employees of a certain age. Greenish-white windows. Silent sentinel buildings. Traffic at night. Cars like blood cells. The moon drifts behind a building. Times Square traffic. Trucks. Neon. Taxis. Grand Central Station. Pan Am Building entrance. Escalators full of people. Revolving doors. Crowded pedestrian overpasses. Machinery. Manufacturing. Factory workers. Man and machine. Television assembly. Mainframe maintenance. Hot dogs pouring like water. Escalators full of people like hot dogs. Arcade. Pac Man. Q-Bert. Defender. Bowling. A movie theater. A mall. Twinkies. Potato skins. Sliced meats. Food court. Engine-assembly line. Robots. Minting money. Building circuit boards. Manufacturing cars. Shift change at Lockheed. A subway. Ticket machines. Underground pedestrian tunnels. Driving on an arterial. Hyperspeed highway, exit, bridge, tunnel. A factory floor. Escalators. Twinkies. A super-market. Family watches TV in a store. Boy plays Defender. Watching TV. TV in hyper-speed. People walking the streets. Explosions. People. Headlights/taillights at hyperspeed. Disco dancing. Berserk. Frenetic traffic. Lights. Silence. Los Angeles from above. Circuit boards. A baseball field. Buildings at night. Lights flicker on and off. An El train. People in New York City. Woman smiles. Man gapes. Man in an ushanka stares. Silhouettes. Shadows. Woman lights a cigarette. Police help a homeless man onto a stretcher. Woman in car. Naked man in pane-less window. Garbage in the streets. A crowd. A fire. Firefighters. Smoke. Water flows into a sewer grate. A nurse responds. A poor man counts his change. An old man stares into the camera. Ghosts at the stock exchange.A rocket lifts off, breaking free of its gantry. It explodes. A ball of fire. Chanting Koyaanisqatsi. Debris falls to Earth, twirling gently and flaming out. A cave drawing with armless figures. "ko.yaa.nis.qatsi (from the Hopi language), n. 1. crazy life. 2. life in turmoil. 3. life out of balance. 4. life disintegrating. 5. a state of life that calls for another way of living." Sadly, this sentiment is just as appropriate (or even more so) for our age as the mid-80s. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] It's kind of horrifyingly fascinating to watch this movie from 36 years ago that has the exact same players and even more chance of happening. We have learned nothing. We never do. [1] One of the people is Ruth, who is still pregnant. She is with another young man, who's confidence in saying that he will "skin the sheep [...] for warmth" is vastly misplaced. I'd wager that almost no-one knows how to skin an animal so that the skin can be used. Even if you got off a big enough piece, you'd have to dry it and cure it before you can use it. [1] At four months, they cite that between 17 and 38 million will have died from the blast, heat and fallout. [1] TIL that Vienna was also broken up into four sectors into "Allied-occupied Austria" , just like Germany, for ten years from 1945 until 1955. [1] That's a ludicrous amount of money for back then, no? ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3878 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3878 Sat, 11 Jan 2020 12:41:33 +0100 -- "8/10" 2. "Ran (1985)" <#Ran> -- "9/10" 3. "One Cut of the Dead (2017)" <#One> -- "8/10" 4. "Metropolis (1927)" <#Metropolis> -- "9/10" 5. "The King of Comedy (1982)" <#King> -- "8/10" 6. "Step Brothers (2008)" <#Step> -- "6/10" 7. "Andre the Giant (2008)" <#Andre> -- "7/10" 8. "M (1931)" <#M> -- "8/10" 9. "Russian Ark (2002)" <#Russian> -- "8/10" 10. "These Final Hours (2013)" <#Final> -- "6/10" These are my notes to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. I've recently transferred my reviews to IMDb and made "the list" of around 1400 ratings publicly available. I've included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other -- I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014) -- "8/10" Michael Keaton is Riggan, an actor who played Birdman in several very successful super-hero movies. He's now involved in the production of a Raymond Chandler play on Broadway that he's adapted for the stage himself, that he's directing and he's starring in. He's involved with one of the leads Clara (Natalie Gold), his daugher (Emma Stone) is his assistant, Jake (Zach Galifianakis) is his production assistant, and Naomi Watts is Lesley, the lead actress. The play is in trouble when it takes on Mike (Ed Norton), a well-known lead actor, to save the show. They're barreling toward opening night with Mike slowly taking over the production. At the same time, though, Riggan is unraveling. His life has a drums-only soundtrack that gets louder and louder until he starts to hear his inner voice again, a voice that expresses his inner doubt. It is the voice of Birdman? Does he have telekinesis? He is racked with doubt and doesn't know who he is. "Birdman" intones: "All that's left is you, a sad, selfish, mediocre actor grasping at the last vestiges of his career." Jake witnesses Riggan's absolute freakout just one hour before curtain. In the middle of the final preview show, he gets trapped outside when he steps out for a smoke, pinning his bathrobe in the door. He ends up doffing the bathrobe and striding around the building in the rain in his underwear, to re-enter the play from behind the audience, doing his scene, but very impromptu. Lesley and Mike roll with it. The audience seem to enjoy it, but Mike is unraveling further, noticing that the play seems to be a simulacrum of his life, a weird homunculus that "follows him around, pinging him in the balls". After the final preview, he's in the bar next to the theater when he encounters the one reviewer whose opinion matters (according to Mike) and they go toe-to-toe, with her swearing that she'll kill his play no matter what because she "hates him". "Because I hate you and everyone you represent. Entitled, selfish, spoiled children. Blissfully untrained, unversed and unprepared to even attempt real art. Handing each other awards for cartoons and pornography. Measuring your worth in weekends? Well this is the theater and you don't get to come in here and pretend you can write, direct and act in your own propaganda piece without coming through me first. So break a leg." At first I wasn't sure whether she was a manifestation of his insecurity and whether the scene was happening at all. Riggan drinks the martini he'd bought for her, then stumbles across the street to buy a pint of whiskey from a liquor store strung with Christmas lights everywhere. A man is outside delivering Macbeth's soliloquy from Act V. Riggan brown-paper bags it, spiraling even more out of control (perhaps channeling closer Raymond Chandler). The night passes. Birdman wakes him from his hangover, lying on a doorstep, trying to convince him to turn his back on the theater. After the first act of official opening night, we see people spilling out, excited about it. Riggan's in his dressing room, talking to his ex-wife Laura (Andrea Riseborough). He admits to his weakness, to mistakes from the past. They kiss. He has to get back to the play. I still don't know if this part is real or in his head. He grabs his pistol for the final scene, uses telekinesis to open the door to his dressing room (also not sure if real), walks out past the drummer banging the soundtrack louder and louder (real?), and gets ready to go on. He seems to be riffing the scene, going slowly mad, then shoots his own nose off. The entirely white, rich crowd gives him a standing ovation. He wakes in the hospital, his nose reconstructed and bandaged. The Times is ecstatic. The country mourns him. He peels back the bandages to see that he now has a beak (pretty much). He goes to the window, watching the birds. The window slides, he steps out. His daughter comes back to an empty room. The window is open. She looks down in horror. Then, she looks up. And laughs. The movie was directed by Alejandro G. Iñárritu and he imbued it with a very unique feel. It takes place almost entirely in the theater itself and is about 90% one-on-one discussions in extreme closeup between very good actors delivering lines written to be delivered in this way. Real people don't talk like this, but then, maybe the point is that actors aren't real people -- Riggan and Birdman alike. Ran (1985) -- "9/10" Lord Hidetora Ichimonji is old and has fought for over fifty years to consolidate power over his lands, holdings, castles and title. He has three sons. He makes a decree delivering his authority to the eldest but also lands and titles for the younger sons. He announces this on a boar hunt. His youngest son Saburo refuses to play along, calling him a fool. Hidetora disowns him. The eldest son Taro moves in to the main castle as his father moves out. The father is only slowly learning the full ramifications of what it means to cede power. Taro's wife Kaede [1] knows exactly what she wants and will manipulate Taro into taking full power, seemingly especially if it means punishing and perhaps killing his own father-in-law. Though Taro does not see this yet, Hidetora sees it very well, "Is this a son's attitude? The hen pecks the cock and makes him a crow." It won't help, though, as the bureaucrats will take over the kingdom from he that formed it. He may not be a nice guy and he may be crude, but that which comes after his reign doesn't necessarily deserve it more. On the other hand, he seized the lands by force -- he has to expect that someone will eventually seek to seize them back. Kaede's actions are revenge for old familial hurts. Taro -- and Kaede through him -- continues to turn the screws on Hidetora. Next he is ordered to keep his unruly retinue out of the castles -- even when visiting his other son Jiro. He sees that the sons are in cahoots and leaves. "I will not see you again. Ever!" Hidetora is now with a retinue of 30 men, plus an advisor and a rather clever fool Kyoami, starving in the outer lands. The peasants and their food stores have pulled back (or been pulled back). The third castle (ostensibly still Saburo's) is the only place they could pull back, but Hidetora refuses. Instead, Taro's troops (under Ogura) take it over, with Saburo's retinue abandoning it. Tango (who'd left with Saburo) returns to advise Hidetora but his general recommends they take the empty castle. The fool Kyoami disagrees and is punished for it. Hidetora awakens to hear the sounds of Ogura's men outside the gates. Hidetora's men are slaughtered in a spectacular battle scene. He retreats to a tower with a handful of men. His members of his harem ritually kill themselves. Hidetora retreats still further, losing more and more of his retinue. The scenes of slaughter are hellish. So much blood. So many arrow wounds. Arrows sticking out of everything, from every wall, from every eye socket. It looks utterly hopeless, but somehow Hidetora still lives, ensconced in his tower, with almost no-one left. Lord Taro arrives, to survey his victory. He is promptly shot off of his horse. Jiro is now the master (as the next son in line). He is confident his father will commit Seppuku from his burning tower. Instead, he exits in a trance, with the massed troops making way for his still God-like presence. No-one dares approach him as he leaves the castle -- perhaps because he took the "coward's" path and did not commit Seppuku himself. Tango and Kyoami find him in the windy fields outside the flaming castle. He is gathering flowers, clearly mad. They take shelter in a hut with a blind man. He is Tsurumaru (Jiro's wife Sué's brother), who Hidetora had blinded many years before, in exchange for letting him live. Lord Jiro returns to the main castle to notify Kaede that her husband is dead and that Jiro will take over. Kaede fools him into a one-on-one meeting and tries to take his life, forcing him to tell her who was really responsible for her husband's death, calling him weak when he admits it too quickly. She screams that she won't leave the castle and that she never cared about Taro. Jiro is terrified, but considers taking her offer of her hand in marriage in exchange for not saying anything about his treachery. Kaede is adamant that Jiro kill his previous wife Sué. She dispatches Jiro's master of arms Kurogane to dispose of Sué, bringing back her head. She flips the hell right out when he brings back a head of a fox statue. Sué and Tsurumaru escape thanks for Kurogane's warning. Kaede leaves Jiro until he can provide her his wife's head. Hidetora wanders the Earth with Kyoami, a shadow of his former self, looking old beyond his years. The wide-angle scene of them on the steps is beautiful. Saburo's men ford a wide river on horseback to help him find his father. Single shot. Amazing. Fujimaki follows him, ostensibly to back up his son-in-law Saburo. Saburo is worried that it looks too aggressive. Jiro thinks so too and wants to go to war. Jiro is called back by Kaede; his closest men advise against talking to her. She tells Jiro to double-cross Saburo and kill Hidetora as soon as Saburo reveals where he is. Saburo retrieves his father but is shot dead by Jiro's men. Tango, Kyoami and Hidetora mourn his loss. The horses have moved on. They are, once again, in a plain of stones and dirt. Hidetora expires atop his son. Jiro, meanwhile, has been outflanked by Fujimaki and his ally. When Kyoami curses the skies, Tango shouts, "Enough. Do not blaspheme! It is the gods who weep. They see us killing each other over and over since time began. They can't save us from ourselves. Don't cry. It is how the world is made. Men prefer sorrow over joy, suffering over peace." One Cut of the Dead (2017) -- "8/10" A crazed director of a zombie movie drives his crew to new heights of engagement when he makes them film in a place with real zombies. The two leads and the DA are left, trying to survive and get away. They are cut down to two when the DA thinks that the lead actress has been infected. They split up as he chases her down. She turns out not to have been infected. She finds an axe with which to defend herself. She's playing the role of her career. The director has disappeared but is probably neither dead nor zombified. Instead, he's probably setting up the next shot. She finds the other lead, but he's been zombified. And she's there with her axe. They end up (inadvertently) playing the scene from the movie that she found it so difficult to play. Now she's flying. She kills him. Then when the director complains that she's killed his actor, she kills the director, too. She absolutely covered in blood and gore. Credits roll as she stares up from a bloody pentagram scrawled on the roof. The director yells "cut". We flash back to one month before when the director is hired to do a one-cut, half-hour, live zombie movie. Then the credits run for the reality show that will film the one-cut movie? This is so meta. Now we see the actors and actresses playing the roles of the people we just saw in real life (or did we?). The show is getting closer and closer, but the actors are slowly having accidents and dropping out. That's how the director and his wife end up in the movie. Now we see the filming with the behind-the-scenes -- where the first zombie is actually an actor drunk out of his mind, the noise they heard is him hitting his head on the door. Everything that was cut together so nicely in the first run, so scarily, was the result of accidents. That, and the director doing nearly everything himself, behind the scenes. So it's the story of a director and his family and we see the filming of the filming of a one-cut, half-hour live zombie movie. It's the making of, of itself. Now I kind of want to watch the original again. The mom flips the hell out, losing herself in her role completely. The director ends up choking her out so they can mount the axe on her forehead. It's all exceedingly clever and heartwarming and nearly perfectly done. The credits show the filming of the filming of the film, with a Japanese rendition of 1,2,3 by Michael Jackson that's just barely recognizable. Metropolis (1927) -- "9/10" We visit Metropolis, a futuristic city with a clear class system: workers underground and the elite in the clouds. We see a shift change, then we see Freder, the son of the Joh Frederson, the master of the city, cavorting in a garden of earthly delights, taking up with a woman who's been prepared for him. He is interrupted in his frolicking by a woman who appears with a class of schoolchildren, whom she tells "These are your brothers". Freder pursues her to the depths of the city, but cannot find her. Instead, he finds the workers, manning their stations at the machines that give the city life. The workers try to contain the machine's energy, but it is too much and explodes in a cloud of steam, taking many workers' lives. Freder sees the machine as "Moloch", a hungry God who eats the poor in droves. He returns to the upper levels of the city (the "Tower of Babel") to tell his father what he has seen. His father knows on what his city is built. Freder wants to know why the people responsible for the city's functioning are hidden away while he and his fellows frolic idly. Joh says that's the way it is. Josephat, Joh's right-hand man, fails for the second time to obtain information for him and is let go. Freder chases him down and stops him from killing himself. Then he returns to the bowels of Metropolis to visit with his "fellow workers". Here, he shows an affinity for actual labor that is frankly insulting to people who actually train for it -- he has neither the endurance nor the training. Joh's new right-hand man plays detective, following him around. Joh visits the inventor Rotwang, who shows him Hel, a robot woman that he made to replace the wife that Joh stole from him dozens of years ago. Joh wants to know what his workers are up to. Deep in the catacombs, the woman Freder saw (Maria) holds forth in a church of sorts. Freder is there with the other workers. Rotwang has led Joh to the same place, to show him what his workers are up to. They hear the story of the Tower of Babel. The workers ask where their "agent" is -- Maria thinks that it's Freder (which is kind of sad, since the story has always been that the workers cannot free themselves). Joh asks Rotwang to change Hel into Maria, to sow havoc with this son. Rotwang reluctantly and ruefully chases a terrified Maria through the catacombs. Freder's counterpart Georgy 11811 is caught by Joh's henchman, who forces him to give up the whereabouts of Josephat. Freder discovers Rotwang's lab, having heard Maria's screams. Rotwang proceeds with the transferral, not because Joh demands it, but because Rotwang wants to take the whole damned city down. Rotwang begins the process of transferring Maria's "face" to his robot. Maria passes out on the operating table just after she has been transferred. Joh gives the robot Maria her marching orders; Freder encounters them and falls into a deep faint, distraught. He dreams of Maria dancing lasciviously to the satyr-like delight of watching men. She is Babylon reborn. Now he sees the statues of the seven deadly sins and death itself come to life, all come to revenge themselves on the city. The robot Maria continues to incite the workers to rise up -- but at the wrong time. Instead of gaining any ground, they'll simply give Joh a reason to put down the stillborn revolution with legitimated violence. Instead, though, she incites them to rise up and destroy the machines. Freder arrives just in time to denounce the robot Maria -- as their mediator, he begs them to listen to reason. Recognizing him as Joh's son, they attack him, end up killing Georgy instead, then storm off to attack the machines. The workers make it to the surface, pouring through the factories and past machines, headed for the "Herzmaschine". Joh uses a security camera to see the main guard Grot (I kid you not) and order him by telephone to open the gates and let the workers in -- to give them access to the "Herzmaschine". Grot warns them that, should they destroy that machine, the whole worker's village will be drowned. Robot Maria urges them on, maniacal as ever. At Rotwang's urging, real Maria is on her way; she rings the alarm, but it's nearly too late -- the city is flooding and falling to pieces. Freder finds his Maria and they go to the air ducts with all of the children of the city (as well as Josephat) to escape the flood. They arrive on the surface to discover that the city is dead -- no power, no light...nothing. But there is some light above, in the clouds: robot Maria is partying with the wealthy elite like it's 1999. The workers are still deep in the bowels of the city, celebrating their destruction of the machines -- until Grot tells them that they've been fooled and that their children are dead. They fly to the surface. They find their scapegoat: Maria, the witch who incited them to riot. In chasing Maria, the workers run into the aristocrats and grab the robot Maria, who laughs maniacally. They dance as she burns on a giant pyre. Freder tries in vain to save her, thinking she's the real Maria. The real Maria, meanwhile, is pursued by a reinvigorated Rotwang, who thinks she's his robot Hel. Freder vanquishes Rotwang in an epic fight and we see the "mediator" play his role, linking "head" and "hands" (Joh with Grot). The futuristic vistas are very well-made -- there are some beautiful paintings integrated very cleverly into the scenery. Fritz Lang (the director) does a tremendous amount with the little that was available to him. He invented whole tropes in the credits and in the filming. Even the plot is amazingly modern: I think several of the Mission Impossible films stole from it, liberally. The fight scene at the end, between Freder and Rotwang, would go on to be a template for so many others like it. The workers work in 10-hours shift (that's why the clock goes to ten) and the the film is constantly punctuated by the shift-change whistle. Sound-wise, though, the film is accompanied only by the original soundtrack, a 65-piece chamber orchestra. It's like an opera without singing. There are giant scenes with hundreds of people. The five streams of "foreign workers" coming together as they build the Tower of Babel is inspired. The lighting is very good and the scene composition is brilliant. The camera angles are all immediately familiar. The laboratory set is amazing. It would stand up today, pretty much. How did he do all of this so well, when so much crap was produced in between? The "Herzmaschine" and interspersed factory and water-production scenes are spectacularly well-edited. The long-distance scenes showing such a large space, a large city with endless roads. It would be entertaining enough for a stage production today, but it must have been miraculous in 1927. You can tell which bits of footage are the "recovered" ones -- they're much grainier. This is a pretty powerful Marxist movie already in the first few minutes. Quite an audacious work considering the U.S. was making Birth of a Nation with its time and resources. On the other hand, it's not like Lang's politics won the day in Germany, either. It's a bit long, but it's got to get an extra point or two for being this good in 1927. The King of Comedy (1982) -- "8/10" This is the story of a mentally ill man Rupert Pupkin (Robert DeNiro), who want so very badly to be famous. He wants to be like his idol, Jerry Langford (Jerry Lewis) -- he wants to be best friends, he wants to take over his show. He talks to himself in his apartment, which he shares with his mother. He lives a fantasy life, with real-life scenes interspersed with his imaginings, to the point where it's difficult to tell what really happened and what didn't. Pupkin continues to inveigle his way into Jerry's life, trying to get his "big shot". His fantasies about how his life will change, how Jerry will admire him and envy him his talent, interleave with real life, as he makes visit after visit to Jerry's office. The great Sandra Bernhardt plays another stalker (Masha), who chases Jerry through midtown Manhattan like a Terminator, but loses him in the crowd. Pupkin has a fake studio in his apartment, where he puts together elaborate fantasies about his future success. He tapes Jerry's show with himself on it. He fantasizes about marrying the homecoming queen of his high school on the show. He fantasizes about meeting her in the bar where she works and taking her out to dinner. He fantasizes about having his principal apologize for failing him so often in high school. It's unclear what Pupkin's job actually is. Pupkin has yet to be funny in any way whatsoever; odd, for a stand-up comic. He actually delivers a tape to Jerry's producer (Shelley Hack). She actually listens to it. She responds constructively, but not overwhelmingly positively. Instead, she recommends that he hone his material in an actual stand-up club (instead of his mother's apartment). When he continues to wait, the secretary calls security. Everyone is exceedingly polite to him, but they won't give him what he wants: he wants to meet Jerry. Also, the secretary keeps getting his name wrong, from "Pumpkin" to "Pupnik". Outside, Masha tells him that Jerry is, in fact, in the building -- that they lied to him. He storms back in and charges past the secretary, in a flurry of fantasy-driven activity. He drives out to Long Island, to Jerry's house, with Rita (Diahnne Abbott) (the homecoming queen from his high school class, so I guess the date was real) scamming their way in, though the butler is immediately suspicious. She gets into it, dancing around, then she runs upstairs to check out the rest of the house. Just as Jerry gets back from the links -- because his butler called him back -- he's astonished to see that Pupkin is in his house and pretending that they know each other. Jerry's amusement is nonexistent. Pupkin has to go. He throws him out in a way that even Pupkin can't misinterpret. Pupkin and Masha kidnap Jerry. They have him call his office to tell them to let "The King" be the first guest on the show. Jerry Lewis plays his role quite well. While Pupkin arranges to get himself on the show, Masha "entertains" Jerry back at her luxurious apartment. Pupkin had wrapped him up in masking tape (a ton of it, else it wouldn't have worked). Masha prepares a sumptuous, candlelit dinner for Jerry. She is dressed in a slinky black dress. She scares the life out of him with her intensity and blank madness. "Let's just clear everything off the table and do it right here." Pupkin, meanwhile, has arranged a distraction, and manages to sneak on to the set, so that he can get to the producer and introduce himself as "The King". Masha, meanwhile, is making good on her threat of clearing the table. She serenades Jerry. King is bold as love, telling the producer how the show is going to go, telling the FBI that he gets what he wants first. He hands off his monologue to the staff of the show -- and they actually think it's funny. The show begins: Tony Randall is guest-hosting, doing Rupert's lines. Back at her house, Masha strips. Pupkin goes on -- and we don't see him deliver a single line. At Jerry's request, Masha cuts him out of the masking tape. It's getting later (taping was at seven); the FBI take Rupert to a bar to watch the show (he wants to be sure that he was aired). Jerry wallops Masha and escapes. Masha chases him down the street in her underwear. Pupkin's show is finally on: he's not very funny, but the crowd is laughing. We see in a montage that Pupkin goes to jail for almost three years, then publishes his memoirs and then, somehow, has a career. There is no such thing as bad publicity. Unless ... is this another fantasy of Pupkin's? The structure and characters are not dissimilar to Arthur Fleck in Joker. Arthur, though, didn't deserve the abuse he got. Pupkin, on the other hand, didn't deserve the shot he got -- he thought he didn't need to put in the work. "Better to be king for a night than a schmuck for a lifetime." You can tell that this movie was made almost 40 years ago, when the police didn't get involved so quickly and when the Pupkins of the world hadn't already ruined it for everyone else. Step Brothers (2008) -- "6/10" Brennan Huff (Will Smith) is an adult child. His mother Nancy (Mary Steenbergen) spoils the hell out of him. Dale Doback (John C. Reilly) is also an adult child. His father Robert (Richard Jenkins) spoils the hell out of him. Nancy and Robert hook up at a conference. They realize that they have more than a conference fling in common: they each have a grown man-child living at home with them. They get married. Dale and Brennan both implode like spoiled children at the wedding. The boys finally meet: Dale wants to be called "Dragon"; Brennan wants to be called "Night Hawk". The boys start to fight for attention immediately. This is nearly the perfect vehicle for Ferrell and Reilly. The boys will be bunking together because Dale doesn't want to give up his drum room. His drums are strictly off limits to everyone except him. Tensions rise until the boys get into a knock-down, drag-out fight on the front lawn that attracts all of the neighbors. Nancy and Robert are called from their jobs to deal with it. The boys knock each other out for all to see. Their punishment is to find jobs and move out in a month. Brennan's brother Derek (Adam Scott) shows up with his wife Alice (Kathryn Hahn) and with their two kids in tow. Derek treats Alice like dirt. He's a terrible human being, but Robert loves him. Derek pops up the ladder and annoys the boys in their tree house until Dale punches him in the face and drops him to the ground. As they're leaving, Alice approaches Dale and thanks him for punching her asshole husband and then hits on him super-hard, telling him that she's going to masturbate to the thought of him punching her husband that night. The boys hit it off and there's a montage of them doing "activities" together. They build bunk beds so that they can do more activities in their room. They are not carpenters. The bed collapses on Brennan, who is mortally...scratched. The next day, they have their first interviews. They wear tuxes. They do them together. They fail miserably. On the way home, they get the utter shit kicked out of them by the neighborhood kids. They decide to sabotage Derek's efforts to sell the house. At Derek's birthday party, Alice rapes Dale in the men's bathroom. After Robert announces that he will put Derek in his will, the boys present "Prestige Worldwide", their business opportunity. The presentation comes with a rap video on Robert's boat, starring the boys. It's childishly lewd. Alice is the only one who's into it. At the end of the video, they crash the boat into rocks. Robert and Nancy had been planning on retiring on that boat. Robert flips out, spanking Brennan. Next, we see them on Christmas Eve. Robert is still bitter. The boys have no idea that he's still pissed. Nancy doesn't know how to discipline the boys. Robert comes back, "tonight at the Cheesecake Factory was the happiest time I've had in a long time." The boys barge in, sleep-walking and breaking shit everywhere. Nancy tolerates it and Robert wants to wake them up. He wakes them up and they freak out. Nancy is pissed at Robert. It's Christmas dinner and Alice asks Dale to meet her next door, "come on, let's try something illegal." Meanwhile Robert says "you wanna know what I got for Christmas? A crushed soul." Alice and Dale end up screwing their way back into the dining room -- no-one notices. Nancy and Robert announce that they're divorcing and moving to separate homes. Everyone has to move out, The house goes into escrow and the boys have one day to move out. That night, they fight again, with Brennan playing Dale's drums, Dale knocking him out, thinking he killed him, trying to bury Brennan, then having Brennan turn the tables and bury him instead. He escapes and the boys pass out on the lawn. They are no further along than they were before. They are children. Brennan gets a job with his brother Derek, whose friends slag on him horribly (Rob Riggle is one of these psycho co-workers). Dale gets a job as a caterer. Now they're at the Catalina Wine Mixer. Brennan organizes it and Dale caters it. When the lead singer of the Billy Joel cover band loses his shit due to heckling, Dale jumps in on the drums and Brennan sings an opera in Spanish and they save everything. "It's the fucking Catalina Wine Mixer." The movie was written by Will Ferrel and Adam McKay and directed by Adam McKay. McKay starts the film with a stupid quote from George W. Bush, just to set the tone. That's about where the politics ends, except for maybe making fun of rich strivers like Derek. I subtracted a star because, despite some good lines and good performances, it was a bit formulaic and I don't need to see it again. Andre the Giant (2008) -- "7/10" Andre began his career in Monaco at 2.25m and at almost 190kg. Though he started his career in high school as a real wrestler, his size necessitated that he slow down his style. People, too, really only came to see his huge size, not the fancy style of his wrestling. This isn't to say that he was a shambolic hulk, but that he just wasn't that fast. He was strong as hell: one scene shows him dead-lifting 2000 lbs. He quickly ended up in the U.S., where flamboyant, gimmick-based wrestling was really taking off. The first bits of footage are just so embarrassing: they called him Polish, changed his name several times, thought he was speaking Spanish, etc. The bastards dared to say that he was "not the most articulate man in the world", although he was speaking in a second language in a country full of people who barely spoke one. André specialized in two-on-one or Battle Royales. Other wrestlers said he would always win but he would also "sell" other wrestlers' moves, making other wrestlers look good. "He was very kind. He was very proud that he never hurt anyone." He was never made champion because there was no story for making him lose again. He was just too overwhelmingly huge. Hulk Hogan says that though André liked most wrestlers, he hated Randy Macho Man Savage. He'd also had enough of the Iron Sheik one night. The Hulk thought he was killing them in the ring. Big John Stud was 6'9", so he thought he was a giant as well. André would have to prove him wrong. He would go on to stardom, making commercials and even doing a cameo as Sasquatch in the Six Million Dollar Man. Arnold Schwarzenegger told a story of being out to dinner with him where André got the bill by first placing Arnie up on an armoire, so that he was out of reach. Just popped him up there, like he didn't weigh a thing. Women were attracted to him. He was a world-champion drinker, basically an alcoholic -- except that he had 3 times as much weight as anyone else. he traveled a tremendous amount, flying all over the world and also hitting the road with a bus a lot. He traveled to Japan a lot, even though he wasn't able to use the lavatory on the plane. The world didn't fit him at all, so it must have been tough. Hulk Hogan told of how awfully people would talk about him right in front of him, as he walked by. He had acromegaly, a condition that caused his gigantism. When he broke his ankle, he had to have surgery to fix it. While he was convalescing, the world of wrestling changed, becoming bigger and flashier and televised nationally. Hulk Hogan becomes national champion and André congratulated him. They interview a lot of the cast from The Princess Bride, where they discuss how much he drank (though he never really got drunk), how much pain he was in (neck, spine, knees), how he was much more able to act than to wrestle, at that point. He was done, not just with wrestling, but with life. His friends were trying to get him to have surgery, but he wasn't interested. With his back killing him, he agrees to Wrestlemania III, wrestling Hulk Hogan for the title in front of 93,000 live fans. No-one knew whether he would be able to actually wrestle in his condition. He managed it, but he was in agony. Hulk talks about how he did everything he could to keep his friend from being hurt more. Hulk did end up slamming him (525 lbs). They managed to make a match of some sort and the script worked out. From then on, though, he was now a "heel", which he did not like. His career -- and his body -- was in decline. His knee-surgery scars were awful. He was still growing (because of his condition) and his organs were failing. He could barely walk. In 1993, he went to France to visit his father, who was on his deathbed. He stayed for the funeral, then went to Paris, where he died soon after, at the age of 46, "of an apparent heart attack." His best friend regrets that he wasn't able to be with him, at the end; instead, he "died, all alone, in a hotel." André was an amazing person. He was so strong -- one clip shows him lifting up a 250-lbs wrestler in each arm. He wrestled for 27 years in 5000 matches. I subtracted a point because they gave way too much screen time to Vince McMahon. M (1931) -- "8/10" We see a city in the grip of a serial killer. The children sing gruesome songs of him on the playground. Newspapers are sold with the grisly details. We see little Elsie on the way home from school -- just walking the fuck out in the middle of the road without looking, as little girls often do -- when she happens upon a man whistling Grieg's The Hall of the Mountain King, who buys her a balloon from a blind vendor. Later, we see Elsie's mother searching for her increasingly desperately; we see the balloon tangled in power lines; we see Elsies ball roll to a stop in a field. The city grows tenser. A child asks a man for the time and the man is nearly torn apart by a crowd who thinks that he was trying to kidnap her. The police are at their breaking point, pulling shifts without rest. They have very few clues and eyewitness testimony was just as unreliable then as it is now. They report the usual: foreigners, gypsies, etc. People don't change. The police raid the local establishments, rousting petty criminals, but finding nothing overly suspicious. They collect a truly impressive array of weapons and pilfered goods, though. We see some men on what looks to be a stakeout. More interesting is that we see how timekeeping worked almost 100 years ago: they called a central number to get the time and then set all of their pocket-watches accordingly. These local criminals have gathered to complain that they are sick of how the police raids are killing their businesses. They want to distance themselves from the killer that's paralyzing the city. At the same time, a group of the city's leaders gather. They come up with the theory that perhaps the killer is an otherwise upstanding citizen. Both groups try to find a clue, a lead, that will end the man's rampage. The smaller group of criminals comes up with the idea of organizing the beggars as lookouts. The police go through the information available to them: there was definitely no Datenschutzgesetz back then. As one officer searches through an apartment while he waits for the inhabitant to come home (the landlady had let him in), we see the murderer, revealed now to us, catching the reflection of a child in a shop window -- and nearly swooning with lust. He follows her, but to no avail. She meets her mother and they continue on together. The murderer stifles his frustration in a cognac or two at the local café. He continues along the street and he continues whistling, passing the blind balloon vendor. The vendor gets someone to help him track down the whistler, knowing that it's probably the guy. The young man follows him and finds him buying fruit for a little girl. Instead of confronting him directly, the young man writes an "M" on his hand in wax marker, then stumbles into the murderer, yelling at him about dropping orange peels on the ground and simultaneously marking the back of his coat. He calls the local mafia to inform them of what he's done. The murderer continues blithely down the street, with his arm around the little girl's shoulders. There are men tailing him now. The little girl sees the mark and offers to wipe it off for him, but isn't able to. The men give chase, cornering him on a side street. He slips into a building when a procession of fire engines passes. The man is hiding in the attic. The local criminals get wind of it and decide to take matters into their own hands. They storm the building in numbers. They engage a safe-cracker as cover (pretending to be there to rob the bank). It's a bit confusing, but they want to capture the murderer for themselves. One of the captured watchmen manages to trip the alarm and the criminals have five minutes to find the murderer and get out. They manage it, but leave the safecracker behind. He is picked up and interrogated by the police. Meanwhile, the murderer is on trial in the bowels of a factory, under the watchful eyes of hundreds. He is given a lawyer; there is a process. He is allowed to defend himself; he claims that he can't help himself. They want to kill him then, to put him out of their misery, but his lawyer is adamant. It goes back and forth -- the arguments are unchanged nearly a century later -- when the police show up and arrest them all. This movie is cleverly made but doesn't rely as much on an epic style as Metropolis did. It's a talkie but the sound effects are somewhat sparse. There are a few short stretches without any sound whatsoever, which is odd. Saw it in German. Russian Ark (2002) -- "8/10" Our narrator is disembodied and speaks Russian. He has been in an accident and doesn't know where he is. The screens fades from black and he's at a palace, at the arrival of a carriage full of young aristocrats. He follows them in, but they don't see him. He continues through the palace, eavesdropping occasionally. He encounters a man who can see him and who acts as his guide. He seems to be accustomed to this type of travel, to this form of invisible tourism. They walk through, meeting Catherine the Great. The two phantoms argue about Italian influence on Russia, on Napoleonic influence. The guide is an arrogant dilettante. They continue to argue and discuss, with the traveler arguing that Russians just copy and cannot invent (as evidenced by all of the European treasures). They float from a grand corridor into the "small room of Italian masters" and are in the modern-day museum, with modern people around. Still, no-one is aware of them. The phantom introduces the "Marquise" (the traveler) to two friends that he recognizes. They can see both of them. They examine paintings. The traveler is apparently from 17th-century France and does not recognize the modern style of dress. They move back to the 18th century, where he makes fun of Pushkin, then apologizes for offending national sensibilities. The European accosts a blind woman and gets her to describe paintings to him, which she does with aplomb. They argue about whether a Rubens painting is on display or not (though she is blind and he is obnoxious). The Marquise's behavior is very odd. I wonder if it's a deliberate impersonation of a know-it-all European who told the Russians their own culture? Or if he's supposed to be adrift on the currents of time? He walks everywhere with his arms interlocked behind him. Now he hears music, "Russian music makes me break out in hives." Now, he's accosting a young man, accusing him of being incapable of appreciating a painting because he's not read the Gospels (the boy is at most 16 or so). This is the age-old conceit that there is only one way to enjoy art and that is to do so in a given context (generally the one held by the person making the argument). While there is some value is having background and context -- it can enhance an otherwise superficial or humdrum experience into something sublime and personally meaningful -- simply judging someone out of the blue as being incapable of enjoying a piece of artwork as you do, is arrogance of the highest order. They continue to wander through Russian history, meeting art connoisseurs, getting into increasingly opulent areas of the Hermitage Museum. The European apologizes for his writings, having learned something through his more-recent journey. He sees the building now in all of its glory -- when he'd visited, it had just burned in a great fire. They fast-forward to the 80s, where they see Gorbachev...and then it's back to the Tsar's troops...and then it's Anastasia taking tea after flitting through the halls with her angelic friends...and then we are at an ornate, opulent ball full of French-speaking Russians. And then the waltz begins -- Glinka again. The Marquise joins in, "St. Petersburg has the best balls in Europe", which sounds like he's accepted Russia as part of Europe (also: phrasing). They exit together with the other guests, down the marble staircase, with a nonet broken off from the orchestra accompanying them. The costumes are spectacular and seemingly authentic, dressing a cast of seemingly thousands. The enthusiasm of the actors and extras is contagious and real. It's kind of exquisite and overwhelming -- a beautifully filmed period piece on steroids. There are whole orchestras, one dressed in full 19th-century military dress uniform. The film was shot in a single take (the fourth of four planned attempts). The sound was dubbed in later. There was also a lot of editing, naturally. "In post-production the uncompressed HD 87-minute one-shot could be reworked in detail: besides many object removals, compositings, stabilisations, selective colour-corrections and digitally added focus changes, the whole film was continuously and dynamically reframed (resized) and for certain moments even timewarped (slowed down and sped up). [...] before being reprinted onto filmstock for theatrical distribution." Roger Ebert wrote that the film's magnificent adherence to the single-shot concept "spins a daydream made of centuries." An extra point for being so ambitious and opulent and Russian. These Final Hours (2013) -- "6/10" This Australian film starts with a couple making desperate love, trying to drown out the knowledge that the shock wave from an asteroid strike in the Atlantic will arrive in Perth in 12 hours. The man, James (Nathan Phillips), drives to a party with his girlfriend at his lover Zoe's (Jessica De Gouw) urging, but the place is blocked off. It's anarchy in the streets already. James fights off two grunting lowlifes with a hammer to the temple, then frees the young girl they'd kidnapped. The young girl Rose (Angourie Rice) and James drive off, with her berating him that he shouldn't drink and drive, which is doubly amusing: he's Australian and the world's dead -- it just doesn't know it yet. He plans to drop Rose off at his sister's house before going to his end-of-the-world party, but his sister and her husband are dead in the shower. Their children are buried in the backyard. Now there's an absolutely insipid flashback where Zoe tells James that she's pregnant, to which he responds that it can't possibly matter, to which she offers the brilliant riposte "Life is stronger than Death", at which James realizes that he may be a mimbo, but at least he's not as stupid as the girl he's knocked up. They walk into a library and find a police officer with his family. He can't work up the courage to do what James's sister did; he asks James to kill his family for him. He wants absolution; he wants a quick, merciful end for his family. James grants him absolution, for what it's worth. James and Rose arrive at the party. It's what you would expect for Australia: pure hedonism. Everyone's drinking; the men are tattooed to the gills; the women aren't wearing tops and have gorgeous breasts; everyone glistens; music pumps. It's a bit different: instead of drinking contests, they play Russian Roulette. Rose is horrified. James's girlfriend Vicky's brother Freddy (Daniel Henshall) is hosting the party and he tells James that the "room downstairs is done [and] to keep it on the down-low." There's an absolute orgy going on inside. They go back outside and meet Vicki (Kathryn Beck) who groans in his ear "I need to fuck now." [2] James fails to live up to expectations, so Vicki takes him down to the "room" that her brother Freddy had been talking about. Vicki and Freddy are deluded about the survival potential of the situation. Vicki's a little too high or drunk to deal with James's rejection. It's not a terrible movie, but these people weren't even a little bit interesting before they got caught up in a fireball-approaching-the-continent movie. But maybe that's the point: 99.999% of the world is going to take the firestorm [3] just about like this. And what would be better? There is no appropriate reaction because nothing matters at all. Death is imminent for all. Wanna finish a puzzle? Drink yourself into a coma and have an orgy? Take a girl back to her family? It's all the same now. It's an interesting premise, though. There are intermittent announcements from a radio station in Australia that announces which parts of the world have been subsumed. The plot reminded me a bit of the book "On the Beach" by Nevil Shute, which was also based in Australia. The movie drags on, with Rose finding her family, them having already committed suicide, Rose getting her big scenery-chewing moment, then James going back to Zoe (as if we're supposed to care at all). The final half-hour dragged so much, I had to subtract a point. It would have been better as a one-hour movie. Watching a movie about a fireball approaching Australia is a bit too on the nose right now. [4] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] As other ladies in the film, Kaede has shaved her eyebrows and redrawn them in, far up on her forehead. [1] I kept thinking of the line "The whole world's coming to an end, Mal..." by Woody Harrelson in Natural Born Killers. [1] When it comes. Which will be soon, if Trump keeps fucking with Middle East foreign policy (he just had Iranian general Suleimani iced in Iraq). [1] Australia is in the midst of their worst firestorms of all time. It's killed untold millions of animals. The continent will never be the same. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3873 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3873 Thu, 02 Jan 2020 21:59:03 +0100 of around 1400 ratings publicly available. I've included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other -- I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. Weekend (1967) -- "5/10" The movie begins with a couple (Corinne and Roland Dupont) who discuss how awful everyone else is and how they either wished the others would die or that they should plan to kill them. We see a fender-bender turn into a beatdown, outside an apartment. We see a man listen to his girlfriend somewhat clinically describe an impromptu three-way she had with other friends. They are nearly in silhouette, with vague details visible, she in bra and panties. The music surges oddly, sometimes nearly drowning them out. The scene she describes keeps getting kinkier, but her tone of voice stays exactly the same. [1] The next scene sees the same couple trying to drive off for the weekend, at 10 on a Saturday. He can't drive; he hits a parked car; there's a kid dressed as an Indian pestering him; the lady who owns the parked car is the kid's Mom; she comes out, ready for tennis lessons; drags the bad driver out of the car; his wife gets a spraypaint can out of the trunk of their car, gives it to him, then holds the lady's hands while he sprays her and her car. The lady responds by hitting tennis balls at him. A man comes out firing a shotgun, but hitting nothing. The lady, man with shotgun and boy-dressed-as-Indian all chase the car out of the parking lot. Highly surreal but still somewhat meaningful, if you look for it. Certainly not formulaic. The next scene is a traffic jam on a French country road. The couple roll by standing cars (Citroën 2CV, Fiat 500, etc.), then try to sneak in. There's a car inexplicably flipped on its roof. Other cars litter the sides of the road. There are people playing chess. One lady's car faces the wrong way. One truck has lions on it; another gibbons and a llama. Cars just bump into each other all the time. Nearly everyone (every man, at least) has a cigarette sticking out of their face. The only sound is honking horns and the man's revving engine as he scooches forward. The horns are like an orchestra warming up. The camera finally pans from left to right and we see a woman and two children, a bloody mess by the side of the road. The man finally accelerates out of there. They arrive in a small town. A sports car is nearly embedded in a tractor. The driver is clearly dead. The passenger is covered in blood and she's berating the tractor driver -- the farmer -- in classist terms, saying everything working class is shit and it's better to be rich. When he says that "Paul" caused the accident, she says that he was handsome, young, and rich and certainly had the right of way over a fat, poor, old man. They both ask the couple who was right, but the couple beg off and drive away. The farmer yells after them that Marx said we were all brothers and the young woman yells that they're dirty Jews. The young woman and farmer commiserate as the car jets away, united in their hatred for the couple. They drive on. Brief scenes and sounds of traffic jams. We see people reaching into their convertible and both the man and the woman biting those people's hands. It starts raining. A woman hails them for a ride. Another traffic accident. This woman's raving husband (who she'd hidden) has a gun and makes them turn around, going back the way they'd come. The rain stops; the top is back down. The two unwanted passengers (Joseph Balsamo, the son of Alexandre Dumas and God) are in the back. The couple hails everyone for help, but only half-heartedly. Joseph fires his gun and philosophizes. His girlfriend says nothing. He performs a miracle (conjures a rabbit from under the dashboard), then asks them what they want. They want things. He is disappointed and tells them they get nothing. Corinne swipes the gun and orders them out. They all Benny-Hill across a field of wrecked cars, Corinne yelling "Dirty Jew! I'll kill you!" and firing the gun with endless bullets. Back on the road. They drive cyclists and cars off the road, finally crashing in a fiery wreck themselves. Corinne is devastated as her Hermès handbag burns. They are walking across a field as a 19th-century French soldier accosts them. They reach a phone booth, occupied by a man who sings his whole conversation. They try to steal his car, but he fights them off, then only wants to take Corinne to the garage. A prolonged fight ensues. They lose and are, once again, on foot. We see them on a road covered in bodies lying in puddles of their own blood, and wrecked, flaming cars. They meet a surrealist couple in the woods and argue with them. They continue, stealing clothes from more wrecked cars. It is Thursday. They left on Saturday. They hail a truck. Musical interlude. The truck driver plays Mozart on a grand piano in a courtyard. The couple is dropped off in a muddy field, thanking the truck driver. He piggybacks on her as they head off again, on foot. They pass the "Italian co-production" of the film in the woods. They give up, stopping again by the side of the road. Corinne sleeps in a ditch; a stranger attacks her (presumably raping her) while her husband does nothing. He hails a passing car, but fails to answer a question correctly (chooses Johnson over Mao) and they drive on without him. The stranger exits the ditch, adjusting his clothes. They don't speak of it. She hails a car, answers a question incorrectly (chooses Egyptians over Israelis) and they drive on. Piggyback again. A garbage truck picks them up. They work for them for a while. More political commentary. Spoken by the black worker while the camera focuses on the white one: "The optimism reigning today in Africa is not inspired by natural forces benefiting Africans. Nor because the old oppressor is behaving less inhumanely and more benevolently. The optimism is the direct result of revolutionary action, political and or military, by the African masses. [...]" It continues for about ten or fifteen more minutes. The Duponts sit on a rock wall, looking somewhat bored. The monologues are interspersed with prior scenes from the movie. They are finally in Oinville (they'd been just outside the town for a while now). Corinne takes a bath while (presumably) Roland reads the story of the hippopotamus from the Bible. He returns from getting a rabbit with his mother-in-law, bargaining with her for the inheritance. She is resolute. He and Corinne kill her, then plan to cover up her body in one of the many car wrecks. They set her ablaze in an "accident" involving an airplane. They're on foot again. They encounter a picnic and are kidnapped from it by a band of rebels, motivations unclear. They're at the rebel camp, which looks to be no more than a heap of old tires in the woods. And there's a man with a drum set. They are portrayed as cannibals; the Duponts are chained to a tree, looking quite dead. The "chef" drops an egg on them. He does the same to a naked woman, aiming between her legs. Roland makes a break for it, but is taken down by a rock to the head. They leave him. A pig is killed. A goose is killed. More revolutionary talk via two-way radio (TIL that "Over" is derives from the French "A vous"). There is an utterly unclear hostage exchange followed by a pitched guerrilla-style battle on a French farm. Roland is dead and the chef has cooked him into a meal that Corinne enjoys, asking for seconds. I guess Corinne was converted to whatever bizarre-ass form of Marxism the hippies in the forest think they're practicing? There was no payoff, but I didn't expect one. I'm sure there's deeper meaning behind the drummer by the riverside and I appreciate them all trying something new, but it just didn't grab me. Maybe a second viewing would be different. I subtracted a star for throwing in everything but the kitchen sink. (I'm looking at you, Godard.) I saw it in French with English subtitles. The Belko Experiment (2016) -- "5/10" For a movie that's about a building in Bogotá that suddenly closes down on 80 employees, trapping them there with a disembodied voice exhorting them to kill each other, it's kind of weird to say that it's kind of predictable. It stars John C. McGinley, Michael Rooker ... and a bunch of other people who I vaguely recognized from their faces but not their names. The evil voice from the speaker tells the people that they have to kill a certain number of the group themselves or the evil people in the speaker will kill twice that many by triggering the tracking device that they all had implanted in their heads when they entered employment with Belko. The slaughter begins, some taking part reluctantly, some enthusiastically. The final stage is to reward the person with the most kills (who's still alive, of course) with freedom. Pretty much everyone gets it and the office building looks like an abattoir. In the final scene, the office pussy Michael Milch thinks it's a good idea to go mano a mano with the ex-Special Forces COO, who's racked up way over a dozen kills already. Michael vanquishes the COO, slaughtering his first and last person by bludgeoning with a tape dispenser and "wins" the game as the last remaining employee of Belko Industries. The guards show up and take him to the head of the experiment. Michael had picked up the pile of explosives that Marty (Sean Gunn) had extracted from victims' heads and he's planted them on all of the guards -- and even the leader himself. He then lunges for the console and triggers them all. The movie is adorable in thinking that it could set up a sequel. Cool soundtrack. Matinee (1993) -- "5/10" John Goodman plays director Lawrence Woolsey, who's making monster movies in 1962, during the Cuban Missile Crisis. He's in Key West, 90 miles from Cuba, trying to release his latest movie Mant, about mutated ants (obviously, right?). Townspeople and national organizations are trying to stop him because he's "causing unrest" and "scaring people" and "spreading filth". Woolsey's just trying to entertain people -- he's even got what he calls "4D" devices, precursors to devices that would be popular at theme parks years later. It's pretty unbelievable, though: at one point, a decibel-meter shows over 300, which is ridiculous. Everyone in the theater would have had their heads blown off. The "moral majority" who's out to stop Woolsey, though, had been hired by him to drum up interest. There's a bunch of machination with high-school kids that I didn't bother trying to unravel completely. There are some ironic bits where, for example, the scientist in the movie Mant keeps translating perfectly normal words for the woman in the movie, like magnify ("make bigger") or accelerate ("speed it up"). When the fancy movie effects convince a panicky bomb-shelter owner that the missiles are on their way, two of the kids end up getting locked in. Woolsey helps get them out, as his movie plays on. The balcony in the theater is too weak for all of the awesome effects and people get ridiculously worked up thinking that the world is going to end -- especially once Woolsey's mushroom cloud film is projected on-screen. Then they go fucking bananas and exit the theater, into broad daylight (it was, after all, a matinee). It's mostly a pretty lame movie, but I can always watch John Goodman work. And Cathy Moriarty is a perfect foil as his ingenue/wife. He leaves with her, at the end, with an absolutely gigantic cigar in his mouth. Her hat is spectacular, as well, though highly inappropriate for a convertible. Mimic (1997) -- "6/10" Directed by Guillermo del Toro, this movie is about a Manhattan that is just getting out from under a quarantine for Strickler's Disease, which has a high infection rate among children and polio-like effects. Dr. Susan Tyler (Mira Sorvino), an entomologist, puts an end to it by engineering a so-called Judas bug that wipes out New York's cockroaches. Three years later, there are stirrings of repercussions. People are going missing and there are ... sightings of a man-bug. Susan with her husband (Jeremy Northam) investigate along with CDC colleague Josh Brolin. Much of the action takes place in Alphabet City, where a shoe-shiner (Giancarlo Giannini) lives with his autistic son, who has an affinity for the bugs. Charles S. Dutton is an MTA officer. F. Murray Abraham plays a fellow researcher of Susan's. Since del Toro is just directing (not writing), the action unfolds more-or-less predictably. Much of the action takes place in the dark tunnels of subways, where I can imagine the smell. If you're even been to Chambers St. or, even worse, Canal St.station, then you can probably remember it, too. Investigations continue on all sides: they comb the tunnels, finding signs of large-scale habitation; they find a fully-formed bug in a sewage system, a sign that there is a larger colony where it could have evolved and grown (it seems to be a soldier). Susan encounters a bug that disguises itself as a man -- our first non-shadowed view of a full-grown bug. She approaches it, asking for the time (it was 1997, no-one had a cell phone) and it abducts her. Their investigations uncover increasingly Cronenbergian creatures and scenes: everything's wet, gooey, organic and chitinous. The first half of the movie with the buildup is more interesting than the finale, once the bugs are revealed. In the end, it's Alien with a bunch of kid stuff thrown in, for good measure. It's del Toro, so it's meticulously nicely shot, but the story is very trite. The movie inspired two straight-to-video sequels, both of which featured no-name writers, directors and actors. Another Year (2010) -- "7/10" Tom (Jim Broadbent) and Gerri (Ruth Sheen) are the rock around which a coterie of alcoholics skirl. They very placidly have a dinner with a single guest who gets deep into their cups, until they almost collapse in the late evening. First her office companion Mary (Leslie Manville) and then his schoolmate Ken (Peter Wight) They are depressed because they have no-one to share their lives with. Tom and Gerri do more than humor them -- they barely seem to notice how deep in their cups they are, speaking in a non-pandering manner throughout. The two act as counselors for all of their friends. Tom is seriously concerned about his friend Ken who is a full-blown depressive alcoholic and chain-smoker. He is deeply unhealthy. Tom and Gerri, meanwhile, quietly tend their garden and enjoy the outdoors. They have a garden party, with their son Joe (Oliver Maltman), Ken and Mary in attendance. Mary shows up very late because she drove -- and then starts drinking immediately, as customary. She also splashes in to the party, describing her day in excruciating detail, as usual. She's absolutely in tatters, in denial about being a smoker. Just a hot mess. Ken is also an absolute shambles, hitting on Mary, but only half-heartedly. Mary's on her second mug of wine. Ken's got his own bottle. Mary starts hitting on Joe pretty hard, which is very cringe-y, but Joe's got his parents' gift for being able to utterly ignore how madcap and unhinged his conversational partners are. They get ready to leave the party and Mary offers to give Joe and Ken a lift to the train station. Gerri isn't thrilled because Mary is a terrible driver and she's had too much to drink. Joe safely exits the vehicle, leaving Mary and Ken together. Ken makes a very clumsy move; Mary rejects it. The next season is winter. They travel north, to Tom's brother Ronnie (David Bradley), whose wife has just died. They attend the funeral and the wake and then bring Ronnie back to stay with them for a few days. Tom and Gerri are out when Mary shows up, looking even more discombobulated than usual, freezing from the weather. He lets her in and she makes a cup of tea. She wants a cigarette and Ronnie offers her one, but says they have to go outside. Mary doesn't want to be cold and claims that Tom and Gerri wouldn't notice. They continue an absolutely painful conversation outside. The film just kind of peters out, ending as it started. Poor Ronnie looks very out of place -- he'd just lost his wife and the family of his brother (the Londoner) has completely different topics than he's used to. Mary is also more lost than usual, barely controlling her alcoholism and depression. It's a well-made film, a cut out of any everyday family and group of friends as they age. Five Deadly Venoms (1978) -- "6/10" I'm watching this because the men from Kim's Convenience claim that it's the best martial-arts movie of all time. The style is somewhat comedic, but not so much as Jackie Chan's movies. It's also almost certainly not as deliberately comedic as it is campy. The fighting styles are ludicrous -- Centipede, Snake, Scorpion, Toad, Gecko -- the costumes are flamboyant, as are the wigs (head and beard). The main fighters sashay in and out of scenes -- at first I thought some of them were played by women. There are no women in this movie (other than a few victims of the initial murder). The story is of an old master who has trained five students (seniors), who are now out in the world. A fellow member of his own training cadre has made a fortune; the master is worried that his former five students will try to steal it. He's right: the five masters are looking for him -- and each other. The old master sends his latest acolyte (hair like an 80s headbanger) to find them all and prevent anything bad from happening -- and from bringing further shame upon the house of the Five Deadly Venoms. Honestly, the plot is not super-clear if you just have the subtitles to go by. People in pajamas kicking each other. It takes forty minutes for the first full-on battle between two of the seniors: Toad and Centipede; Toad vanquishes him and walks away from the police. The sixth acolyte (the youngest student) scampers away, still convincing everyone that he's just a bumbling fool. Machinations lead to alternate accusations and various arrest orders. Next, they frame Toad and attempt to arrest him. He agrees to come quietly, but then tears up the courtroom when Menfa (the supposed eyewitness) fingers him (although he was dead certain it was Centipede a day or two ago). One of the policeman is convinced that Toad is a good man and blameless. Others plot to torture him until he succumbs to the coat of a thousand needles, which looks like an iron maiden). The other masters are as yet undetected -- but brother Snake is forced to reveal himself when Toad easily escapes the coat. Toad (Meng Lo) has quite an amazing physique. Somehow Scorpion manages to sting Toad in the ears (I didn't see how it happened) and Snake vanquishes him. Toad continues to get the short end of the stick. Next, they burn his whole back with a torso armor that was heated over coals. His whole back is fried; the court asks Menfa to come back in and witness again. They make the unconscious Toad "sign" a confession. Later, we see Snake and Centipede murder Menfa, to tie up loose ends. The police murder Toad by suffocation in his cell, then string him up to make it look like he'd hanged himself. Snake and Centipede show up to kill the police, tying up all loose ends. They wonder aloud where brother Gecko is. The other police inspector, He, does not accept the ruling and regrets Toad's death. Yang De (the acolyte) reveals that he knows that He is Gecko. Scorpion and Snake quarrel; Snake laments how far he himself has fallen and blames Scorpion. Gecko and the acolyte advance on Snake and Centipede and fight them interminably (with laughable sound effects). His former captain looks on -- until he reveals himself to be Scorpion and wounds Snake as he tries to run away. The fight continues, with Scorpion (now revealed) and Centipede together. Snake plucks out the shooting stars and wounds Scorpion before Scorpion back-kicks him in the forehead and sends him over the Styx. In a truly impressive fit of histrionics, Scorpion succumbs to his Snake-inflicted wound, leaving only Centipede to be taken out by Gecko and the acolyte. They snag the map from Scorpion's belt, babble something about doing good with the treasure and walk off. It gets an extra point for probably having invented most of the tropes it contains. The Putin Interviews E04 (2017) -- "9/10" Oliver Stone interviews Vladimir Putin about his life, his career and his politics in this 4-part mini-series. The interviews take place over the span of over two years, from June 2015 to September 2017. This episode begins with a discussion of the recent presidential election in 2016. Stone asks him what changes when presidents change? Putin has seen Clinton, Bush, Obama and now Trump. What changes? "Well, almost nothing. [...] Everywhere, but especially in the United States, bureaucracy is very strong. [...] And bureaucracy is the one that rules the world. [...] But, in reality, we're not waiting for anything revolutionary." Is he bullish on things getting more amenable under Trump? "There is always hope...until they are ready to bring us to the cemetery to bury us." Stone asks why he hacked the election, but Putin answers that America has enough internal problems of its own -- revealing true and available information is not hacking nor is it the world's problem when America's internal duplicity is revealed, even to itself. Stone asks Putin about John McCain and his railing against Russia, describing it as an unholy beast. Putin's answer is nuanced and erudite and interesting (I don't imagine that Stone would have allowed it to be edited to flatter Putin, but you can't be sure). "Well, honestly, I like Senator McCain to a certain extent. And I’m not joking. I like him because of his patriotism, and I can relate to his consistency in fighting for the interests of his own country. [...He is like] the Ancient Roman Senator, Cato the Elder, who routinely signed off his speeches, regardless of the subject, with the phrase, 'Carthage must be destroyed.' [...] People with such convictions, like the Senator you mentioned, they still live in the Old World. And they’re reluctant to look into the future, they are unwilling to recognize how fast the world is changing." It's that attitude that Putin wants to avoid because it's a waste of time, instead he names "poverty around the world" and "environmental deterioration, which is the real threat to all humanity." Since Putin just laid out several reasons why improved relations between Russia and the U.S. would be beneficial to the world, Stone asks him whether he sees a way forward. Putin sees very clearly that Russia is a helpless catspaw for internal domestic squabbles in the U.S. The U.S. mainstream media will do what it wants -- subsequent years have borne out this prediction -- and there is nothing Russia can do to change opinion in the U.S. (despite allegations to the contrary with the minuscule Russia Today channel). "We know all their tricks." Next, he sounds like Bernie Sanders (unsurprisingly, I'm sure, for those who think Bernie and Putin are both communists and in cahoots), where he says about the U.S. military budget eclipsing the rest of the world, that "[t]here are other things to spend money on, like healthcare, education, the pension systems." (N.B. Putin has reduced Russian military spending in the last several years in a row. See the book "Russia Without Putin by Tony Wood" for more information.) Putin is really smooth. You feel sorry for him and Russia. They discuss cyber attacks and the prevalence of US hardware and software in Russia. They also discuss attacks on Russian banks and the stock exchange. "Well, you will probably not believe me, but I'm going to say something strange. Since the early 1990s, we have assumed that the Cold War is over. We thought there was no need to take any additional protective measures because we viewed ourselves as an integral part of the world community." At another point, he says very carefully that the U.S. administration reminded him a bit of the Politburo -- when they all gave medals to one another. "That was very funny." Stone obliges by juxtaposing Brezhnev getting a medal from Honecker (or was it just a kiss?) with Obama giving a teary-eyed Biden a medal. Obama had also given one to Bush Sr. Here's where Stone looks a bit ignorant, when he says "I'm worried, because I believe that cyber warfare can lead to a hot war." Cyber warfare can cause a lot of suffering and kill just as many as a hot war. Look at the sanctions, look at Iran. We're kidding ourselves if we think we're being moral as long as we don't launch a "hot" war. We're already at war with Russia. And Iran. Their people are suffering tremendously for it. Especially as people become more and more dependent on technology -- either voluntarily or through climate-crisis-engendered dependency -- it will be more and more deadly to disrupt that technology, even if only for a few days. If you can remotely cut off the freshwater supply for a city for a week, what do you need a bomb for? How would a so-called hot war be worse than that damage? Stone asks Putin about Stalin's legacy. Putin laughs, calls Stone a "cunning man" then says he will, of course, answer now when Stone offers to let him answer the next day. He tells a long story of Winston Churchill (whom he terms "flexible" for his changing allegiances vis à vis the Soviet) and then Oliver Cromwell (slaughtered many people), Napoleon (same, also absolutely deified), all in a way to answer that countries around the world continue to revere mad bastards from their past. Why should Russia forget about theirs? "I think that excessive demonization of Stalin is one of the ways to attack the Soviet Union and Russia [...]" He doesn't want to forget Stalin, but to remember everything he did -- including the horrific crimes. From that, a country grows (it's the same in Germany, actually). The U.S. is the country that forgets all of the horrors it has visited on the rest of the world, blithely believing it is, and always has been, the good guy. It's clear why everyone in the chattering classes hate Putin. He makes them feel stupid and is onto their transparent scams. How can I, though, hate a guy who's so erudite and well-read about history? He's streets ahead of his interlocutors. Stone finishes up asking him about his coterie of oligarchs and Putin's own purported personal wealth. Putin responds, "What is oligarchy? It is the integration of money and power with a view to influence the decisions that are being taken and the final aim being the accumulation of wealth." He laughs it off and says that he's happy he's not wealthy, so he doesn't have to worry about managing wealth. Happiness comes from a good legacy, not from money. He navigates Stone's sometimes very Anglo-centric questions masterfully, never kowtowing or giving a pat answer that would satisfy. He knows nothing will satisfy, so he sticks to his own truth, not promising that Russia will become whatever the West wants it to become (a serf or vassal, as detailed in the first three episodes). "Thank you for your time and questions. Thank you for being so thorough." -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] Someone who cares has catalogued nearly the entire scene "the quotes section" . ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3870 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3870 Sat, 28 Dec 2019 21:54:37 +0100 of around 1400 ratings publicly available. I've included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other -- I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. The Congress (2013) -- "8/10" Robin Wright stars as herself, an actress in her forties whose best days are behind her. Her agent Al (Harvey Keitel) gets her an opportunity to be scanned and sampled and preserved and to be an actress for all time, playing roles that she had, until now, either refused or been too flaky to play. Producer Jeff Green (Danny Huston) makes a brutal offer: he needs her past, not her present or her future. She tells him to fuck off. He is not dismayed and leaves the offer open for 30 days. She returns to her family: a perky, sassy daughter Sarah (Sami Gayle) and her chronically ill boy Aaron (Kodi Smit-McPhee). The boy's addicted to flying kites and will not stop flying them over the airport. So far, though, this movie has absolutely nothing to do with the "The Futurological Congress" by Stanisław Lem. That she will be scanned into a computer is perhaps a way that they will sidle crabwise into the virtualized (un-)reality in which the book mostly takes place, though, in the book's case, it was layered hallucinogens in the water. Al holds forth on how Robin never had a choice in her roles and, if she virtualizes herself, she'll still have no choice, but it won't be so much different than her whole life has already been. It's a pretty brutal speech, especially considering he delivers it in front of her kids. Paul Giamatti is Dr. Barker, the son's physician, and he delivers a terrible verdict -- that the boy has a degenerative disease that will rob him of his sight and hearing within decades, if not years. Robin agrees to the scanning, agrees to doing sci-fi movies, but her lawyer gets her a clause that limits the studio's use of her likeness to 20 years. They scan her immediately in a touching scene with Al, who tells stories to elicit all of the emotions from her that they need for the recording. This is the third big speech from Keitel, who is chewing up the scenery really well. The story picks up 20 years later, as Wright drives to a party celebrating the release of her new film: a sci-fi movie called Rebel Robot Robin. She is at the party in an "animation-only" zone. The film is animated from 45 minutes onward, looking like an R. Crumb cartoon. Wright passes out in her hotel room, in a hallucinogenic daze, dreaming that sings in a club and is arrested for working under her own name. She meets up with Jeff Green, the producer, in an office that looks like it came from the set of Brazil. He exhorts her to re-up for twenty more years, but this time not just selling her acting ability, but also licensing herself to be sold as food and drink so that you can become her. We do not see her sign. Nor do we see her refuse to do so. Next, we see the keynote speech where the president of Miramount/Nagasaki studios announces these new formulas, to be other people. There is a shooter in the catwalks. He ices the president, escapes outside and signals an attack with a single flare. The rebel forces arrive to take over the Miramount Hotel. Is this real? Did the president really get killed? Was it a publicity stunt? Are the rebel forces real? All up in the air. She meets animator Dylan Truliner (Jon Hamm), who was in charge of her career, post-contract. They get to know each other, but it's mostly in the context of the hallucinatory animated world, which is beautiful, but largely meaningless (or meaningful to different people in different ways). It's fun to try to pick out the characters that people pose as, now that they can be whomever they want: Muhammed Ali, Clint Eastwood, Jesus, Venus on a Half Shell, Buddha, Jeanne d'Arc, the apple-faced guy from the Magritte painting, even Ron Jeremy. The backdrops and details are lovely, organic and vaguely...female. That is, the world is filled with less recognizable but beautiful women and the backgrounds look like they've been designed by Georgia O'Keefe, but the main characters are male. Perhaps a fitting depiction of the world where the rich and powerful spend their time. Time passes. Dylan is gone. Jeff is back. He banishes her to icy wastes (for having dared to appear as herself on a stage, singing), where she meets her son, flying a kite. They escape to an ice shelf? She is diagnosed with being too far gone to save now and thus is cryofrozen. She is awakened 20 years later (rather than 70) and she meets first a Grace Jones--lookalike and then Dylan again. They saunter forth into the world to help her find her bearings and, maybe, Aaron. Instead, they find love in a completely fictitious world in her mind...their minds? They discuss the "real" world, where their real bodies live, cared for by those who haven't escaped into fantasy. This feels kind of like the Matrix. Dylan has a ampule that would take one of them there. It's his compensation for 20 years of having animated her. They are in love. She loves her son more. She wants the ampule. If she takes it, she has perhaps a hope of finding her son, although he will be nearly completely blind and deaf, if he's even alive. If she takes it, she can never join Dylan again because their shared fantasy -- guided by the pheromones that engender the animated world -- would be forever out-of-sync. She wants it. She deserves it. A mother's love trumps all. I thought Dylan had said that the animated world had erased all ego? She is the destroyer. She takes the pheromone and slowly walks out of the animated world as it morphs back to squalid reality. It is a zombie world where no-one is really aware of their non-animated reality. The only remaining pockets of civilization are in airships. She quickly and easily ascends and then just as easily finds Dr. Barker (suggesting that she is still hallucinating). He says: "Don't be so impressed that I'm still here. Being here, on this side of the truth, is not so brave. [...] Nothing has really changed, has it? Once we just masked the truth with anti-depressants and drugs, concealed and lied. Now, we reinvent the truth. Not so much of a difference. The drugs have just gotten much, much better. The only difference is between waiting for death, here, in this filth of truth and hallucinating the same, out there. Maybe it's better out there, dreaming." Barker tells the ego-driven Robin that her son had crossed to the animated world six months before, after having waited for her for over 19 years. Devastation. She gave up her world with Dylan for her son, who had already given up on her. She cannot go back. She mourns for herself, though the world is in shambles around her -- perhaps she does not think to rescue it because it is so seemingly completely irredeemable? She takes an ampule from Barker and goes back, back to the animated world, back to fantasy, but a more realistic one, perhaps, where she imagines the continuation of her life now, where she imagines herself finding Aaron. Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018) -- "8/10" This is an absolutely beautiful animated film. It looks like a graphic novel come to life, at times, with more than a bit of a Team Fortress aesthetic. This is the story of Miles Morales, a young man from an alternate continuum (although they keep calling it a "dimension" in the movie) where Peter Parker is blond and Wilson Fisk kills him. Miles's mother is a latina nurse and his father is a black cop, so Marvel made sure to check all of the boxes with its foray into intersectionalism. Morales acquires his power early in the movie -- on a foray into a subway access tunnel with his cool uncle Aaron, who took him there to let him practice his graffiti chops -- when a spider bites him just as they're leaving. He discovers weird powers the next morning and returns to find the dead spider, but also to witness the original Spider-Man's death in a nearby underground lab/reactor/accelerator. The same experiment that Spider-Man (in that continuum) was trying to stop is the one that imported other spider-people from other continua: Spider-Woman (Gwen Stacey, voice by Hailee Stanfield), Spider-Man Noir (voiced by Nicholas Cage), Peni Parker (voiced by Kimiko Glenn and from the year 3189), and Spider-Ham (voiced by none other than John Mulaney). Fisk has commissioned the multidimensional device in order to find his wife and son, who abandoned him during one of his violent fits of rage, in which he was trying to kill Spider-Man. Desperate to find them again, Fisk will fire up the machine again, threatening to swallow all of New York (in Miles's continuum) in a black hole. The Spideys band together to thwart him and to help Miles train up his powers (which include some of Spidey's traditional powers but also electro-shock hands and invisibility). Miles's Uncle Aaron -- his hero -- turns out to be the Prowler, the Kingpin's #1 henchman, but he is killed by the Kingpin when he refuses to ice Miles (as Spider-Man). Miles eventually gets a handle on his powers, is able to send his Spidey friends back to their respective continua, defeat the Kingpin, reconcile with his father as both Miles and Spider-Man and also to get a bad-ass new costume and control of his powers and cement his reputation as the replacement Spider-Man. The post-credits sequence shows the missing Spider-Man: Spider-Man 2099, who was the first alternate-universe Spider-Man in the comic books. He'll probably show up in the inevitable sequel to this, the fourth reboot of the modern-era Spider-Man movies. It's a bit on the long side, with the final scene stretching a bit, spinning higher and higher into nigh-incomprehensible hallucinogenic animation -- probably just because it was digital and they could afford it. It all looked lovely, but it wasn't the kind of artistic film where you could sell a ten-minute hallucinogenic experience (as in, for example, 2001: A Space Odyssey). It didn't detract, but it didn't add, either. It's well-written, well-voiced, gloriously well-animated and has a kick-ass soundtrack and vibe. Seriously, I could watch it again just for animation. This is how they should have been making comic-book movies all along. It's the kind of Spider-Man reboot I can really get behind. The Hunted (2003) -- "4/10" This movie jumps right into it with a nearly interminable slaughter and battle somewhere in the former Yugoslavia. The Serbians are depicted as mercilessly slaughtering Albanians while worshiping posters of Milosevic. Not exactly subtle; am I watching the Zero Dark Thirty of the NATO Balkan intervention/slaughter? Benecio del Toro is a super-soldier who takes out the Milosevic-worshiping Serbian with a knife and with absolutely no trouble at all. To cement him as a basically good guy who's been led down a dark path by his training, we see him awaken in a darkened room somewhere back on home soil, haunted by visions of his feats in battle. Next we see a brief shot of a bald eagle soaring over a forest (the subtlety continues) that we are shown to be in Canada as we see Tommy Lee Jones running after a white wolf on foot. He rescues it from the snare that it is trapped in, using something he chews to gum up its paw to prevent infection. He is revealed to be even more of a naturalist frontier hero when he takes the snare back to its owner and uses it to bash his head into a table. We rejoin del Toro (we still have no names at all and, at this point, I refuse to learn them) in the deep woods where he baits and toys with two hunters looking for him. He takes them on John Rambo-style: his knife against their guns. Also his booby traps. Also, he wins handily, murdering and dismembering them both. In classic fashion, one of his old friends roots Tommy Lee Jones out of his deep-woods nature job and brings him back for "one more hunt" to find the killer who's ritually killing people. He investigates the scene of the crime, finds out a whole bunch of stuff that the entire FBI was completely incapable of discovering for themselves, reluctantly takes a walkie-talkie offered by the gorgeous and capable crime-scene lead (Connie Nielsen) and heads off into the woods on his own, telling them to assume he's dead if he's not back in two days. He tracks for an indeterminate time and meets up with (a very young-looking) del Toro and fights him almost to a standstill, distracting him enough until the FBI tranquilizes him. It is not clear whether Jones knew that the FBI were following but, given his amazing tracking powers, we can only assume that he was aware. They know each other, with del Toro claiming that Lee Jones had trained him. Del Toro claims to be interested in the way humans treat nature, (in his police interview, he mentioned the number of chickens slaughtered per year, to Jones, he complains about inept hunters with magic scopes that let them kill above their pay grade) but he's also interested in airing dirty laundry about covert operations he was on with Lee Jones. Jones shuts him up quickly once he starts talking with the FBI recording on. Some of his former comrades (his black-ops group) show up to take him out of custody, but they want to kill him or silence him. They take him away, but he tips their transport truck, killing them all and escaping into the woods. He visits his ex and her daughter, exhorting them to leave the area before whoever is after him gets to them. The FBI shows up and is typically strong-arming, forcing their way into her house without a warrant. This is standard fare for American movies and TV these days: training people to kowtow to authority without asking any questions or making them adhere to procedure. Del Toro is at the house, but can't be captured, leading them all on a merry chase through the city and escaping into the tunnels of a building site. The FBI follows him down there and starts dropping like flies. Good old Tommy Lee is chasing del Toro (he's obviously the only one who can track him, right?) but del Toro gets away, escaping back into the city, up through a manhole. Lee Jones can track him anywhere though: look! There's a construction helmet on the ground! He went thataway! Look, there's footsteps in the grass! It could only be one person out of millions! Tommy Lee is a superhuman tracker! He tracks del Toro to a metro-rail, then chases him up a bridge structure while the FBI fires away, risking all of the bystanders with ricochets even though they have no chance of hitting anything. There is a sexy helicopter with a balaclavaed sniper riding Vietnam-style but even he can't prevent del Toro from jumping into the river and (presumably) swimming away without trouble. The FBI is super gung-ho but it's OK because it's a hot woman acting like a testosterone-crazed man this time. Tommy Lee Jones is pretty spry and has pretty good endurance for an older guy who hasn't slept in days. Del Toro, too, doesn't seem to be suffering any lingering injury or loss of mobility due to the horrific car wreck that he recently survived. Del Toro is clearly more than capable of forging his own knife blade over a campfire that is somehow hot enough to smelt steel. Also, he builds a an Endor-like trap with giant logs all by himself. Tommy Lee Jones is also doing crafty things in the woods and still tracking like an all-seeing God while they both await the Hollywood showdown between "reluctant master who's never had to kill before" and "renegade student driven mad by what he's had to do for his country". Hollywood has trained me (as a viewer) so well that, despite Jones getting his artery punctured by a filthy wooden stake and then plummeting on a plain old (non-bungee) rope what looks like several hundred feet above a river, I don't expect him to be injured in any debilitating way -- or in any way that will affect his ability to fight the much younger and clearly more capable del Toro to a standstill and, eventually, to defeat him. Just the shock from dropping on a normal rope for 100 feet should have shattered Jones's body, but I digress. As expected, Jones manages to cut the rope and drops into a raging river with absolutely no ill effects and hitting no rocks. There is literally no sign of his previously expressed fear of heights. Del Toro finds him and, as expected, Lee Jones manages to somehow get an advantage despite all that's happened to him and his advanced age. This is how these things are done. Now they are both injured animals and, WWE-like, Jones has turned the tables. They're both bleeding like stuck pigs from what seems like dozens of egregious wounds inflected by professional killers and they're still as spry as two 20-year-old boxers. The FBI finds them just as Jones kills del Toro, proving... I don't know what. This is ludicrous. Jones takes a minute at the death scene to mourn his former student and also, presumably, his reputation for having never taken a life. The best thing about this is the credits music: Johnny Cash's When a Man Comes Around. It is not at all clear why they chose it. I subtract two stars for not even trying to do something with del Toro. At least they didn't make the hot FBI agent show up at Jones's cabin, at the end. Parasite (2019) -- "10/10" This is the story of a poor family somewhere in Seoul. They have no wi-fi and the whole family folds pizza boxes for a living -- but not even well, so that their young manager docks part of their pay. The son has a good friend Min who's been tutoring a high-school sophomore girl. Min has to leave for a while, so he asks his friend Kim Ki-woo (Kevin) to take over English lessons for her. On his first day, he is quite successful and convincing and gets wind that the girl's mother thinks that her younger son is an art genius who needs tutelage, as well. Kim Ki-woo's sister Jessica fills the bill perfectly (it was her art skills that forged his tutor papers in the first place). Jessica takes up her job, very convincing as a hard-ass and nigh-inscrutable tutor. The whole family is used to scamming for a living. Jessica bluffs out a much higher rate, guessing that the boy is damaged goods (or that his mother believes that he is) and arranging for many sessions per week. The mother is a typical upper-middle-class fool who believes that her children shit gold and that money and tutoring will make them successful. It's the same all over the world. The next stage is to replace the driver with their father, Kim Ki-Taek (played by the always brilliant Kang-ho Song). Replacing the housekeeper with their mother will be a bigger challenge. The scammer family is easily up to it, preparing their speeches and tuning their words at home. They frame the housekeeper as having TB and get the mother signed up as having come from an exclusive agency "for rich people". The son (Park Da-song) almost outs them -- because they all smell the same, living in the same apartment and being from a poorer neighborhood. The Kims are pleased with their progress -- and reveal a bit about how Korean society is afflicted with a surfeit of education unmatched by accompanying jobs. "Anyway, aren't we fortunate to be worrying about things like this? In an age like ours, when an opening for a security guard attracts 500 university graduates -- our entire family got hired!" The Parks go on a family camping trip, leaving their home to the Kim family, who enjoy themselves as if they live there. They are interrupted by the former housekeeper Moon-gwang, who asks entrance to "get something" from the basement. It turns out she's been hiding her husband down there in the bunker where "you can hide in case North Korea attacks, or creditors break in". The Moons quickly cop that the Kims are a family and are scamming the Parks and try to turn the tables by threatening to send a video outing them. But the Kims are wily and they end up in a huge scuffle and retrieve the phone from Moon-gwang and her husbandj Geun-sae (played as a wonderfully mad man by Myeong-hoon Park). However. The shitty weather has canceled the camping trip and the Parks are nearly home and want service from their staff. Their desperate preparation for the impending homecoming is genius. Moon-gwang refuses to go quietly -- but Kim Chung-sook insists: with a foot to the chest and back down to the basement she goes. The family scatters around the house while the mother comforts the wife (Park). They try to escape but Da-song (the boy) runs outside to set up his tepee and the parents end up sleeping in the living room while the Kims lie under the coffee table. Mr. and Mrs. Park are enflamed by the moment and start to fool around. They tucker themselves out and the Kims make their escape though not without incident. They escape into the rain, seemingly without having endangered their positions. The gutters are filling up. They are forced to walk all the way home to their half-basement, through a torrential, cold, uncaring and eerily warmly lit and beautiful Seoul. The Kim's half-basement apartment is flooding, a meter or more. The toilet is nearly exploding. Nearly nothing can be saved. The Moons are in the basement of the Parks -- she has a concussion and her husband is tied up. Things have gone deeply south for all of them. While half of Korea has seemingly drowned, Mrs. Park is refreshed and greets the new, sunny day ready to throw an impromptu birthday party for her little shitty kid. Jessica and Kevin are invited to join, of course. They have nothing better to do -- that Mrs. Park could imagine, of course. Mrs. Park gives Mrs. Kim marching orders on how to arrange tables for the party -- again, oblivious to everything except her needs. Bong Joon Ho is a master of irony here. He absolutely piles it on -- it's a wonder Mr. Kim doesn't drive Mrs. Park and her insipid and tone-deaf nattering right off the road. The desperation, mania and murderousness of the Kims and Moons contrasts with the oblivious ostentatiousness and narcissism of the Park's stupid party. They live in different, parallel worlds. These worlds collide in spectacular fashion. Moon exacts revenge for his wife's death on Kevin, Jessica and almost Mrs. Kim. Blood is everywhere. Park insults Kim for the last time. Stupid Da-Song passes out again because he thinks he saw a ghost. The poor boy was right, though: a ghost had been living with them the whole time. The story picks up two months later, with Kevin and his mother on trial. Kevin is looking the worse for wear, with a traumatic brain injury. He can't stop laughing. He heals and returns to spy on the house, seeing the lights blink in morse. His father is hiding in the basement, like Moon before him. Kevin resolves to make enough money to buy the house and rescue his father. The film ends on this ... fantasy. Director and writer Bong Joon Ho has really outdone himself -- he's one of my absolute favorite directors and writers (Memories of Murder, The Host, Snowpiercer, Okja and now Parasite). The article "Films From the Frontlines: Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite" by Eric Mann writes, "Parasite, in the brilliant web Bong weaves, shows capitalism as a system that implicates the members of every class and, in the absence of a revolutionary, counter-hegemonic movement, is loved or at least emulated by all. The poor are not angry at the rich. They are angry they are not rich and their only real anger is not at the system but those below them–what I call “upward mobility and downward hostility.”" They're all parasites. The Kims, the Moons, the Parks. Capitalism engineers theirs behavior to be adversarial rather than supportive. There is no brotherhood or sisterhood, just alienation and cold calculation, with roles to play rather than people to be. "Joon casts actors to play the part of working people who in turn are actors in their own play impersonating other working people to hustle the ruling classes. So maybe we can act our way out of class subordination or at least to aspire to the next rung on the class ladder." It makes us stupid parasites -- those that don't even realize the are killing the host. Gone in Sixty Seconds (1974) -- "5/10" This is the original movie about an organized gang of car thieves who somehow get an enormous contract from a foreign-sounding investor who has a hard deadline and a very specific list of 40 cars to steal. In this one, many of the targets are Rolls Royces instead of high-end sports cars (there weren't that many of those at the time). What they did have were giant hairdos (both men and women), mustaches, muttenchops, long leather coats and pimp hats. They had that shit in spades. Unlike in the remake, they don't bother giving a reason for why those cars are on that list or need to be delivered by that specific deadline. The stealing begins, with the first theft at night, which isn't super cinema-friendly. The next few thefts are in daylight and go pretty easily. One of the cars has a tiger in it. Another of the cars is being guarded by a cop. The thief poses as the tow-truck driver, but the cop and his dog are onto him. The thief drives the truck straight into the patrolman's car...with nary a word from either of them. The cop is amazingly calm. He doesn't pull his weapon. He just looks annoyed. He jumps in his car and gives chase. I can only imagine that this would all have seemed normal 45 years ago. The cop finally swears mildly when he crashes into a parked car and loses the truck. Most of the rest of the thefts happen without incident, until they find dozens of kilos of heroin in one of the cars. The police show up just then and they try desperately to hide it. There's a machine for destroying evidence that looks like a modified water-heater. One entire part of the garage wall was covered from top to bottom with soft-core pornography. The cop comes in and Jackson does his best to cover up the exploded bag of heroin on the floor of the garage. The fleet of stolen cars looks magnificent: it must have been even more impressive in 1974, when those cars meant real money. Still, $400,000 for 48 stolen luxury cars still seems a bit light. It's amazing how those numbers have changed -- nowadays, they'd be talking about dozens of millions. As in the remake: they get all but one of the cars with hours to spare. It's only "Eleanor" left. Technically, they already have the cars they need, but "Eleanor" turns out to be uninsured -- and they're in the business of ripping insurance companies off, not people. They linger on this scene of Maindrian walking down a line of cars for what seems like ten minutes, switching back to hif fiancé Pumpkin Chase (that's seriously her name) in her office, looking alternately bored, anxious and pensive. Maindrian jumps into Eleanor, returns it, and knows where to find another. But this is all just a so-so movie with no-name actors that's leading up to what is supposed to be one of the classic, all-time great car chases in cinema history. Maindrian steals Eleanor (a mustard-yellow Ford Mustang where the remake had a lovely Ford Shelby GT500), leaves the garage and triggers the alarm. He gets out, stops the alarm and squares off with a pair of cops in a patrol car who are onto him. Maindrian is not nearly as worried about the paint job as Memphis Raines in the sequel was. Cars are getting destroyed right and left, but Maindrian is still going. This reminds me a bit of GTA, Driver or the finale of Blues Brothers. It's not as varied, with a lot of driving out in the desert, as Maindrian shakes one cop after another. Maindrian hits a light pole at 85MPH and is none the worse for wear -- and the car's fine, too. Doubly amazing, considering seatbelts weren't really a thing at the time (we did see him buckle up when he started, though). We continue: windshield has gunshot holes in it, the front end is ruined, the whole side is scraped up. The hoods all wavy and folded up. Maindrian crashes into more cars, more roadblocks -- glancing blows all -- until he gets cornered in a parking lot/garage and must finally slow down. The cops have him surrounded and they're still not shooting. He slips away. Again. His car is a shambles. Unbeknownst to him, he's headed for the scene of an unrelated accident. He ends up jumping off one of the cars like a ramp and the movie shows in gloriously detailed slow motion what really happens to a car when you jump it. He keeps going, somehow. He stops at a car wash, where he spots another mustard-yellow Mustang. He swipes that one, switches out the plates, and is on his way with a clean, non-destroyed ride. The police are actually nice in this! One stops to help a woman get out of the road before she gets hit by the chase. The chase is a bit staid by today's standards, but it's real -- instead of cars jumping from building to building in Dubai (I'm scowling at you, Vin Diesel). To be honest, I think the James Bond chases of the time were better, but they also had a lot more money to spend. I don't have to describe the soundtrack during the chase, do I? I didn't think so. None of the actors or actresses would go on to make a name for themselves, unsurprisingly. I'm sure they had fun making the movie, though. An extra point for all the really nice-looking vintage 70s cars pretty much all over this movie. Yojimbo (1961) -- "8/10" Toshirô Mifune is the Samurai Sanjuro who's come to a town split into two factions, represented by rival gangs. The constable is useless. Sanjuro sees a way to enrich himself in this situation -- and also to free the town. He allies himself first with one side Seibê, but he overhears himself being double-crossed and abandons the fight that they start, giving their money back. He approaches the other side Ushitora and offers his services. He is refused. The first big battle takes place without his sword; instead, he climbs to a high perch and observes from above, laughing, as the cowards all pretend to want to fight each other, but no-one makes the first move. It's broad daylight. The supposed fight (that was going nowhere) is interrupted by an inspector from Edo. Sanjuro schemes further as he observes the two gang leaders interacting with the inspector. Seibê and his wife squabble further over how to honor Sanjuro as he smirks. Sanjuro visits the casket-maker -- the only one doing any business in town since the gangs started fighting. The silk business is dead; the brothel business, too. It is raining. Torrentially. Just how Kurosawa likes it. It is very cold. You can see everyone's breath. The inspector leaves, taking the rain with him. The brother of Ushitora blows into town. He kind of looks like a samurai, but is actually a gunslinger and a poseur. The machinations continue. Each side takes hostages; they meet at 02:00 to trade. They are at a stalemate again. They arrange another trade, again in full daylight. The son of one of the hostages is there to spoil the exchange. Her husband is there, too, and we learn later that he lost his wife and his house at cards and that the poor sap built a hut next to his former house and watches his wife be ravaged by the victor (Tokuemon) every night. Sanjuro tells Ushitora that he will go with his other brother Ino (serious unibrow) to make sure that Tokuemon and the captured wife are safe. He tells Ino that all six guards have been killed and to get help. Then he slays all six of the guards himself and rescues the wife, returning her to her husband. He throws the family the money he'd been paid thus far by Ushitora and urges them to flee. He tears apart Tokuemon's house more, slashing the ceilings to let out the seeds used as insulation. He comes back out to find the foolish family still there -- worshipping him and thanking him for saving them. He is angry with them -- they should leave, lest it all be for naught. Ushitura accepts Sanjuro's story and takes revenge on Seibê by setting one of his silk shops on fire, demanding the woman back. Unosoke grins maniacally, his stupid gun poking from his robes. The next morning, we see Ushitura stumbling through runnels of sake pouring from his slashed casks; Seibë has exacted revenge. It's quite an incredible scene. In the next scene, the town is in shambles, half burned, bodies in the street. Even the casketmaker's business is in ruins. Uno and Ino confront Sanjuro about the escaped woman. They find proof, because the dipshits had to write a thank-you note. Sanjuro knew they were fools. Sanjuro is repaid for his kindness to them with a horrific beating by Ino and Uno and Kannuki the giant (who looks kind of a like a Japanese Jaws/Richard Kiehl). He manages to escape, eventually sneaking out of town in a coffin (TIL old-timey Japanese coffins look more like barrels). On the way out of town, his friend Gonji (the tavern keeper) and the casket-maker stop and witness the slaughter as Ushitura's men smoke out and kill Seibê's men and his entire brothel. In the meantime, the casket-maker runs away and they must enlist stupid Ino's help in carrying Sanjuro out of town, to a small temple to recover. Gonji has been kidnapped and Sanjuro is ready to take on Ushitura's gang, once and for all. It's wonderfully filmed, seeming to really have taken place in 1860s feudal Japan. Except there are no regular townspeople: the town has only sake and whores and gangs. It's not ever clear where food comes from. Mifune has all sorts of mannerisms that are hard to tell (for me) if they are signs of that time or his own invention. He strokes a non-existent beard all the time. He is constantly pulling his arms in and out of his billowing sleeves. The film is black and white and uses a lot of side-wipes to change scenes (George Lucas would use those a lot, as well). It's always incredibly windy in that town. The Samurai look mixes very nicely with the classic Western aesthetic. I can see a thousand graphic novels being born from any one of these scenes. You Were Never Really Here (2017) -- "8/10" There is almost no dialogue in this film. What there is, is washed out and difficult to understand. Background noise like televisions or conversations from other booths and tables in restaurants tends to drown it out. It doesn't matter because the story is told visually. Joaquin Phoenix plays Joe, a haggard man with a medical problem of some sort, almost certainly PTSD. He was in one of America's foreign wars. He was in customs or perhaps ICE. We see flashbacks of him discovering immigrants piled up in a container. He lives alone with his mother, who seems a bit off, either with natural age-related dementia or with the repercussions of beatings she'd gotten from his father, an obviously brutal man from whom Joe got certain mannerisms. He's certainly inherited his weapon of choice from his father -- the hammer. He is brutal, efficient and violent in his job, rescuing girls from human trafficking. He is hired to discreetly rescue a Senator's daughter from a high-end child brothel. He does so with neither pomp nor circumstance, taking her back to his motel room. Before he can return her to her father, she is re-abducted by police officers (or men dressed as such), one of whom absconds with her and the other who is killed by Joe. Joe returns to his handler to find him dead, slaughtered, with his hands brutally mutilated. Fearing the worst, Joe rushes home to find his mother has been killed by two men still in his home. He kills one and gut-shoots the other, who reveals to him that State Governor Williams has had Nina re-abducted, as she was his favorite. Joe buries his mother in a local lake, filling his pockets with stones to join her in her watery grave. An obligation to Nina changes his mind and he strides away, with a modicum of purpose. With the same lack of care to planning and strategy or tactics, Joe enters Williams's palatial country home, dispatching a few henchmen only to find Williams in the girl's room, with his throat slit. Joe is in bits. He finds Nina in the dining room, eating with bloody hands and a straight razor next to her plate. He takes her to a diner, where they both recover somewhat. As she goes to the bathroom, he has a violent fantasy of ending his life. She wakes him from his reverie and tells him that "it's a beautiful day". The film is lean, without extra bits, told mostly visually, with a fitting soundtrack and understated performances. Phoenix oozes angst. Interesting and unique. Bonnie and Clyde (1967) -- "8/10" We meet Bonnie Parker (Faye Dunaway) lying undressed in her upstairs room where she lives in West Dallas in Texas, obviously hating her life as a waitress. She hears a noise outside and catches Clyde Barrow (Warren Beatty) trying to steal her mother's car -- and then pretending not to. They talk and hit it off immediately; she's not averse to his larcenous lifestyle and he sees something special in her. They rob their first store and she's all over him -- but he demurs, telling her that it's not his style. She is nonplussed, unsure of her role. Their minor crime spree continues with a car here, a car there, an empty bank, a general store where he was just trying to buy supplies with the two dollars they had. They pick up a third wheel in the form of a clever mechanic C.W. Moss. In their next bank robbery, Clyde kills a man and they barely get away because the driver is too cautious -- he parallel-parked the car. Clyde makes a final offer to Bonnie to let her get out scot-free, but she refuses. They try to make love, but Clyde is...not a loverboy. They head to Clyde's family home, where they meet his ludicrously enthusiastic and hillbilly brother Buck (Gene Hackman). His wife Blanche (Estelle Parsons) is less than thrilled with the three of them. They all move into a house in the country together. While Blanche is happier being more settled down, Bonnie is restless and unhappy with the domestic arrangements. They're discovered and forced to hit the road again. They hit more banks, with the police giving chase, and many being killed by what Buck terms the "Barrow Gang". Tensions continue to rise as Blanche insists on a cut, even though she doesn't do anything but sit in the car. They're forced to steal another car, taking Eugene Grizzard's car (Gene Wilder). Grizzard and his fiancé Velma give chase, but give up. To their chagrin, the gang turns around and gives them chase, forcing them to a stop. They pick them up and now there are seven people in the car, driving God knows where, picking up takeout burgers and fries (was that a thing in 1931?). When he tells them he's an undertaker, Bonnie insists they be dumped immediately, in a cornfield in Oklahoma in the middle of the night. The Barrows have a family reunion of sorts, with Bonnie's mother and a passel of children of, quite frankly, unknown origin. Soon after, the gang is attacked at night by many, many police and barely escape with their lives. Buck is shot in the face and severely incapacitated. The noose of law enforcement is closing. They are set upon again, with the law killing Buck and taking Blanche into custody. In the shootout, Bonnie and Clyde are wounded and C.W. takes them to his father's house. They get patched up a bit and get back on the road a few days later, where they finally manage to consummate their relationship. This reluctance is all the more humorous because Warren Beatty was such a Casanova in real life. Papa Moss is hell-bent on getting his son out of trouble -- and makes a deal with local police to give up Bonnie and Clyde. He traps them when they stop to help him fix a flat tire; the police do the rest. The movie is a bit more accurate than press accounts at the time (the movie mentions this), but still doesn't address nearly the severity of Bonnie's injuries, near the end (one of her legs was nearly destroyed, with visible bone sticking out of a wound that refused to heal). See "Bonnie and Clyde" for much more information. My Neighbor Totoro (1988) -- "8/10" The nearly unbearably guileless and adorable opening credits set the mood for this Studio Ghibli film. Everything is hand-drawn, hand-made, comfortable, warm, cozy. [1] The landscapes are beautiful. This is not a slick U.S. animated film. It starts with a father driving to the countryside with his two daughters (Satsuki, who's about ten, and Mei, who's about four or five). They open up the semi-dilapidated house together, investigating the yard and the bathhouse and so on. The older girl enters the house on her inverted knees, shoes held up in the air so that they don't touch the floor. They finish cleaning up the house, with the help of caretaker Nanny and her grandson Kanta, who's afraid of the "haunted" house. They've moved there to be near the girls' mother, who's in the hospital. They all visit the mother and hope for her rapid recovery and return. The next morning, Satsuki takes care of breakfast because their father overslept and isn't ready to handle the household yet. They have sushi and rice for breakfast and Satsuki heads off to school. Mei dresses up to go "out" in the garden. Tatsuo gets to work in his office. Mei plays in the garden and that's when Totoro's minions come chugging out of the deep grass, looking like someone crossed a rabbit with a penguin. They're cute, but Mei is nearly unbearably adorable. She follows them down a rabbit hole to Totoro's lair, falling asleep with him for the whole day. Satsuki comes home from school and finds Mei asleep in the garden, but just under some bushes. There's no sign of Totoro. They also can't find the path to the big tree that Mei followed before. Tatsuo and Satsuki laugh at her silliness, but Tatsuo tells her that she was lucky to have met the "king of the forest". The movie deals with the small gods that accompany regular people throughout the day. The "dust bunnies" that make the house dirty, the gods of the forest, and so on. The girls stop at a shrine on the way home, during a rainstorm, asking for leave of the god who lives there to stay under the roof until the rain passes. Later, in the forest, near a bus stop, Mei discovers a shrine behind a tree, with a dog god of some kind. As they wait for their father, Totoro shows up to the bus stop. Satsuki loans the creature [2] her father's umbrella and it takes off with it. It gives her a gift of seeds in exchange. Its bus comes first and is different -- it's a Cheshire Cat with glowing eyes for headlights. Satsuki is over the moon because now she's met Totoro, as well. The girls plant the seeds and wait. A few nights later, Totoro shows up -- with his umbrella -- to make them sprout. And sprout they do -- into a majestic tree. This is all in their dream, though. (Or is it?) The next morning, the seeds have sprouted, but much more modestly. The same day, the girls get news that their mother isn't well enough to come home, yet. Mei runs away to the hospital -- the whole town is looking for her, fearing the worst. Satsuki runs all over the damned place; everyone communicates exclusively by shouting. The townspeople think they've found Mei's shoe -- but it's not hers. Satsuki calls on Totoro for help, who obliges by calling the cat-bus [3], which carries Satsuki first to Mei and then both of them to the hospital, where they see that their father is with their mother -- and that she's OK. They leave an ear of corn on the windowsill, proving that they were really there. The end credits are possibly even cuter than the opening ones. The song's terrible, though. A Dangerous Method (2011) -- "8/10" This is a David Cronenberg film starting in 1904 and dealing with the birth of psychoanalysis and its two main midwives Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud. The opening scene sees Keira Knightley's Sabina Spielrein being carted to the Burghölzli Psychiatric Hospital overlooking Zürich. Sabina becomes a patient of Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender) and is soon not just in therapy with him, but also working for him as his assistant. While she's in therapy, Jung sits behind her. Cronenberg here chooses to focus Sabina so that half of her face is out-of-focus, suggesting her unsettledness. In a therapy session, she admits that she becomes excited by the thought of her own beating or humiliation. She diagnoses herself as a vile creature who should never leave the hospital. Two years later, Jung travels to Austria with his wife, to meet Freud (Viggo Mortenson). They dine together and Freud lightly admonishes Jung when he couches his professional talk too guardedly, "And by the way, please don't feel you have to restrain yourself here. My family are all veterans of the most unsuitable manner of mealtime conversation." The two men collaborate; we learn that Freud is absolutely fixated on a sexual interpretation of every facet of human behavior. We learn that he is poorer than Jung, whose wife is quite wealthy. They spar, but Freud is not to swayed on any point. Jung confides later in Sabina. Next we meet Otto Gross (Vincent Cassel), an unstable acolyte of Freud. He becomes Jung's little devil on his shoulder, exhorting him to take Sabina, as she so clearly wants to be taken. Gross escapes from the institution, but not before ravishing a field worker. Jung goes through his soft-core pornographic effects and finds a letter addressed to himself. The advice is unchanged. Jung becomes more and more deeply conflicted about his personal vow of monogamy -- and more and more swayed by Gross's arguments. He finally gives in and begins sleeping with Sabina. When he tries to end the affair, she psychoanalyzes him, asking how his lovemaking is with his wife -- and then telling him how it will be different with her: "With me, I want you to be ferocious. I want you to punish me." They agree to continue the affair. Freud visits Jung in Zürich; he is still an arrogant egotist, but he's not wrong when he admonishes Jung for wasting time with "telepathy" or "catalytic exteriorized phenomena" (which is where Jung said his gut starting burning the second before a bookcase cracked). During this time, Jung is often shown in the sailboat his wife gave him, but never in any significant wind. He takes his wife's gift regularly to visit his mistress. Matters come to a head and Jung shows himself to be the absolute king of terrible breakups. Sabina attacks him, then accepts his breakup because he's a giant jackass. Sabina writes to Freud (all writing is in German), asking for his assistance. Sabina confronts Jung again, begging him to confess to Freud all that's done with her. She wants Freud to take her on as a patient. While Sabina will summer in Berlin with her parents, Jung and Freud plan to travel to America. They are on the same ocean-liner, but Jung is in first class, with his wife, whereas Freud mst travel in a lower class. That chaps his hide something fierce. Sabina is in Küsnacht, visiting Jung at his new practice. He notes that he was worried about whether he'd be able to find enough patients at the new location, but it hasn't been a problem. Obviously not: Küsnacht is at most 10km from his previous hospital (and probably closer). He agrees to take her on as her thesis advisor. The affair begins anew. This time she breaks it off, moving to Vienna, where she meets with Freud. She presents her idea, to which he responds, "I fought against the idea for some time, but I suppose there must be indissoluble some link between sex and death. I don't feel the relationship between the two is quite the way you've portrayed it, but I'm most grateful to you for animating the subject in such a stimulating way." The rift between Jung and Freud grows, eventually exploding in a flame war executed via post. It's based on Freud's insistence that therapists should not play god, that all a therapist can do is diagnose, but never cure. Whereas Jung wants to be able to help the patient work around the disease, to reinvent themselves. This is a difficult tightrope to walk: how to cure without shaping, without instilling structure from without? How to avoid playing God? It's an interesting dispute and I'm not even sure I know where I land, to be honest. Mortenson, Fassbender and Knightley are all quite excellent. Her accent is a bit odd, but I honestly can't judge what it should sound like as a Russian emigré fluent in German, living in Switzerland in the early 1900s and being portrayed in English. I give the movie an extra point for nicely written dialogue, though I can't help but think how much better it would have been in German. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] A confession: I was wondering to myself why Studio Ghibli always made characters who looked more European than Japanese. I finally bothered to look up the answer and it's quite eye-opening (no pun intended). The "accepted answer" by Dimitri mx is that the characters do look Japanese to the Japanese. The characters only look European to Europeans because we think people look like us; the Japanese think the same. They are more right, though, in this case. Once you have this mental model, watch anime again. You'll see that the characters are smaller people, with small noses, they are usually portrayed as slimmer and more delicate and are largely hairless. Also, they are incredibly culturally Japanese. Just in this film: they speak Japanese, there are Japanese texts lying everywhere, they write in columns from right-to-left. they take off their shoes to enter houses, they have rice-paper walls, they eat sushi and rice for breakfast, they sleep on a tatami on the floor, they wear very uncomfortable-looking wooden sandals. Also, Tatsuo just works all day without noticing that his kid has been playing unsupervised in the garden for the whole day. That's not very American. With eyes open, you wonder how you ever saw the characters as anything other than Japanese. They're just stylized people. In anime, there's no mistaking characters who are actually European. They are drawn more like "Dan Eagleman" (just as an example) and the difference is then very noticeable. Is the hair color not natural? Are the eyes too big? Big eyes are expressive -- and that's why they're too big in Western cartoons, as well. There is an excellent article "Why Do The Japanese Draw Themselves As White?" by Lisa Wade that starts with the example of Marge Simpson, who has yellow skin and blue hair, but who Americans have always accepted as a white lady. The article includes a great example of how cultural perspective shapes what we see: the stick figure. "If I draw a stick figure, most Americans will assume that it is a white man. Because to them that is the Default Human Being. For them to think it is a woman I have to add a dress or long hair [or boobs]; for Asian, I have to add slanted eyes; for black, I add kinky hair or brown skin. Etc. "The Other has to be marked. If there are no stereotyped markings of otherness, then white is assumed. "Americans apply this thinking to Japanese drawings. But to the Japanese the Default Human Being is Japanese! So they feel no need to make their characters “look Asian”. They just have to make them look like people and everyone in Japan will assume they are Japanese – no matter how improbable their physical appearance. (Emphasis added.)" Lesson learned. Eyes opened. [1] I'd originally written "him" but, in light of the discussion in the end-note above, there's no reason to think that Totoro is male. It has no identifying male organs nor has it done anything male. It is a magical creature. It's not a cat; it's not a rabbit. Our default worldview colors everything. [1] Our brains categorize everything, trying to make sense of things. Think of the Cheshire Cat bus: it's neither a cat nor a bus -- but we have to describe it. It has about eight legs per side. Its carapace opens like a sphincter and it looks only vaguely like a bus. But we call it a cat/bus -- and others (from our culture and with our experiences) will know exactly what we're referring to. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3863 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3863 Tue, 24 Dec 2019 17:53:44 +0100 . The cast was excellent; several of the main characters had played in the same musical on Broadway. See the link for more information. [Synopsis] It's a lot to unpack, but I'll give it a shot. It starts with a song called "Hello", which shows a dozen Mormons ringing doorbells, speaking the word of Jesus Christ (of the Latter Day Saints). Soon after, the young men are sorted into missions and Elder Price and Elder Cunningham are teamed up to go to Uganda. Cunningham is excited to be matched with star pupil Price; Price is less than thrilled to be going to Uganda, as he'd had his heart set on Orlando instead. They go to Uganda, meet the villagers and the warlords, sing a bunch, Price loses his faith and thinks he's escaped to Orlando, but really he's just having a Spooky Mormon Hell Dream, Cunningham converts them all by lying heavily about the Book of Mormon (they end up publishing a fourth installment called the Book of Arnold), the villagers put on a very special show for the visiting Mormon chieftains and Cunningham and Price decide to stick around longer to promulgate their good work. The final song starts with the Ugandans reenacting the opening song: Hello. [An Earnest Satire] There is so much going on, at so many levels. Tongue in cheek doesn't even begin to cover it. It's less direct irony or satire or parody and much more like an earnest homage that goes just a little farther to reveal shadows that indicate that there are other interpretations possible. As with South Park, nearly every line can be taken literally or not, as a coarse joke or as a subtle dig at a power structure or commonly believed myth. The songs are very much like this, as well -- earnest sabotage. [2] Mormons just believe -- which is, on the one hand, a wonderfully naive and beatific quality, but then they also believe the wildest horseshit. Parker and Stone make fun of Mormonism by just presenting it as it describes itself. It's a ludicrous story. The misinterpretation of the Ugandans is no more of less ridiculous than the original. It's perhaps cruder, sure, but it's also more appropriate to their situation, more likely to offer them guidance that makes a difference in their lives. Here Parker and Stone seem to be showing us that this is all that religion can really do for us: tell ridiculous but entertaining stories that keep us from killing each other or letting nature kill us. Jews believe in one book, Christians in two and the Mormons in a Trilogy. They also happen to believe that Jesus was in upstate New York in the 1800s and that Joseph Smith wasn't a con man. [Details and Impressions] The opening scenes of the two acts look very much like school plays and are voiced exactly like South Park. Jesus sounds kinda like Eric Cartman. The backdrop for Salt Lake City has a Wendy's and a McDonald's in it. The one for Orlando has a bigger Mini Golf sign on it than the Epcot Center Dome. Why? Because it loomed larger in nine-year-old Elder Price's memory. Orlando is, on the one hand, believable as a dream destination for a boy, but not for an adult male, for whom Orlando is a ridiculous dream destination, a playground in Florida -- someplace that everyone knows is terrible. Are Mormon boys naive to believe that it's not? Or are we jaded? Who knows? Parker and Stone leave it open, poking fun but also cutting their targets a break. You have to already have known a bunch about Mormons to get some of the jokes -- like that they're not allowed to drink coffee, which isn't exactly common knowledge. I never thought I'd hear a song about Upstate New York and Rochester (Joseph Smith's origin story) or one in which the words clitoris and scrotum featured so much. There's another song called Hasa Diga Eebowai (Fuck You God), which featured enthusiastic gesticulation with middle fingers in the Lord's direction, to the missionaries' utter horror. The finale where the tribe re-enacted what they'd learned ended up in a simulated orgy with lots of positions and gigantic dildos. This almost topped the "Crazy Mormon Hell Dream", which featured Jeffrey Dahmer buggering Elder Price's father while Hitler was fellated by District 9's leader while Genghis Khan looked on. Was that all? No, the musical also featured a warlord named "Butt Fucking Naked" who shoots a man directly in the head in a shocking scene that's sandwiched between jokes -- and whose juxtaposition was anything but an accident. AIDS is a fact of life that is so accepted by the Ugandans that they think nothing of threatening the Mormons with it or noting it like the weather. The first scene of Uganda features a woman dragging a half-eaten animal carcass across the stage. Slowly. Clitoral mutilation is presented as a prevalent problem -- enforced by the local warlord. But one of the villagers is depicted as believing that having sex with a virgin -- even a baby -- will cure his AIDS. These are just as ludicrous and overblown as anything else in the show, but are traps for dipshits at NPR and elite universities to try to call the show racist. The point isn't that Ugandans are stupid or primitive or backward. At least not only them. Everyone's an idiot. Mormons believe ridiculous shit and travel the world trying to dunk people underwater and get them to believe it, too. Ugandans believe crazy shit to get through the day and deal with the horrific hand they've been dealt. But it's always fun to see the prudes and stick-in-the-muds fault a comedy for failing to be unfunny about taking the piss. In a way, the depiction of Uganda was exactly what a Mormon would expect, no? Otherwise, why send missionaries? I mean, Africa is the land of cell phones, but the girl doesn't know what "text messaging" is. It's a joke, guys. The Ugandans were exactly as most Americans -- not just Mormons -- would expect. It was a caricature of what Westerners think "Africa" is. There are several bits shedding a very dubious light on the tales from the Book of Mormon and also a song called "Man Up" where Cunningham exhorts himself to be like Jesus -- who showed balls when he climbed up on that cross and let himself be nailed there. There is a song called "Baptize Me" that just drips innuendo and double entendre, another song called "I Am Africa" sung exclusively by the whitest Mormons you've ever seen. [A Real-life Producers] I honestly spent the first half just smiling thinking of Stone and Parker just daring each other to make an even more ludicrously named character or write a more shocking line or make the characters say "fuck" more than any other Broadway musical (or "scrotum" or "clitoris"). It's hard to imagine that Parker and Stone didn't just dare each other to come up with crazier and crazier stuff, with an eye on Mel Brooks, whose movie The Producers about a musical so deliberately bad that it would close on opening night -- and featured a song with half-clad goose-stepping Nazis singing "Springtime for Hitler" -- was subsequently made one of the most successful Broadway musicals of all time, just as Book of Mormon has now done. In both cases, it's utterly unclear who gets the joke and who doesn't or who is getting which joke. I can think of many people who would have seen this is a straight-up musical about Mormons in Africa that had a bit too much swearing in it (OK, they said "fuck" all the time). Also, the uncircumcised girl's name was Nabalungi, not Nefertiti or Necrophilia or Nintendo or any of the many other names Cunningham called her. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] Missionaries are presumably male, because I didn't see any female Mormons except for the converts in the African village. I don't want to cast aspersions, but it seems like American Mormon women are not allowed to leave Utah [1] The "Original Broadway Cast Recording" is available on Google Play. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3868 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3868 Tue, 24 Dec 2019 17:53:31 +0100 of around 1400 ratings publicly available. I've included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other -- I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. Hardware (1990) -- "6/10" The description on IMDb covers the first 3/4 of the movie: "The head of a cyborg reactivates, rebuilds itself, and goes on a violent rampage in a space marine's girlfriend's apartment." The final 1/4 goes off the rails in some sort of operatic dream sequence involving Moses (ex-Marine boyfriend (Dylan McDermott)), who already has a robotic hand, but then mutilates his other hand and drinks his own blood while the cyborg is rejuvenating and preparing (yet) another attack. The girlfriend Jill is an artist who lives alone when Mo's not there. They have a friend named Shades who literally never takes off his sunglasses. Oh, also the world is a post-apocalyptic hellscape with no water and too much heat and radioactivity. The remaining government is trying to impose a birthrate restriction. There is a ton of 80s-era tech with non-graphical user interfaces. Also other people in the building are involved and killed at various times and in various ways while Jill goes bananas with a baseball bat because she ziplined in on a live wire to a Chinese family's apartment. So she ended up with a Banzai headband because alllooksame. The effects are pretty good for the time and some of the cinematography is quite good, when it's not cut too quickly to avoid letting you see the seams and fake tech. After everything, it took one bullet to the head from Shades and then a biblical baseball-bat onslaught from Jill to kill the cyborg (Mark 13) for good. I gave it an extra star for a few reasons: it was unabashed in its execution and it had cameos from both Iggy Pop and Lemmy (who was a cab driver playing Ace of Spades on his radio). Booksmart (2019) -- "9/10" This is the story of Amy (Kaitlyn Dever) and Molly (Beanie Feldstein): they are two smart, ambitious, kind and focused best friends in their senior year in high school. They mostly hang out together, ignoring or disdaining the other cliques. They have achieved scholastic success and will be moving on to bigger and better things: Molly is going to Yale whereas Amy is taking a summer in Botswana. Their world is shattered when Molly discovers that all of the so-called losers at their school have achieved just as much as they did. The school "skank" is going to Yale as well, while the rich-girl alcoholic (Gigi) is going to Harvard. The jock (Nick) is going to Stanford. They all had fun throughout high school and achieved just as much as Amy and Molly. This revelation disturbs Amy less than Molly, but she agrees to go out with Molly to have some fun on the last night before graduation. The hijinks are funny and very modern (they take Lyfts everywhere; one of them is driven by their principal, played by a bearded Jason Sudeikis). They learn more about their supposedly stupid colleagues -- something they'd never bothered to do in the four year prior. They both let loose, but not to ridiculous excess. They meet Gigi again and again and again. Molly learns more about Jared, the rich kid who's more than that. Nick is smarter than he acts, but ultimately a high-school boy thinking with his dick. But so is Amy's girl crush, who hooks up with Nick (because she's straight, despite Amy's greatest hopes). Jessica Williams is great as Miss Fine; her claims to have done a Thursday NYT Crossword in under 8 minutes are more believable than the two 17-year-olds claim that they did it in under 10. We get it: they're smart. [1] Still, the two girls were apparently fluent in Mandarin as well as Spanish, so I guess we can't take the smartitude claims too seriously. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] But you can't fill out that crossword without cheating without a vast experience, to boot. You can't just be smart; you have to be well-read. And you have to have soaked up adult culture for more than five years. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- The girls blow up at the party as Amy reveals that she's taking a gap year -- which blows up all of Molly's plans for their lives together. Molly has to do some self-evaluation and take it down a notch. Amy ends up saving the party from the cops and going to jail just before graduation. It all ends happily for everyone, which was just fine. Nice directorial debut for Olivia Wilde. Glass (2019) -- "9/10" This is part three of the trilogy started by Unbreakable and Split. In this one, Elijah Price aka Mr. Glass (Samuel L. Jackson) is in a psychiatric hospital whereas Kevin Crumb aka The Beast (James McAvoy) is still on the loose, kidnapping more cheerleaders. David Dunn aka The Overseer (Bruce Willis) is still taking care of loose ends that the police refuse to (or can't). With the help of his son, Dunn is hot on the trail of The Beast. He manages to free the latest victims and confronts and fights the Beast to a standstill. They fall out of a third-story window and bounce up to be surrounded by police and strong lights that stun the Beast and cause him to transform to another member of the Horde (the gang of personalities that inhabit Kevin). Dunn and Crumb are taken to the same psychiatric hospital as Price and end up being counseled together by Dr. Ellie Staple (Sarah Paulson) who doesn't believe at all that they have superpowers. Instead, she thinks that there is a rational explanation for all that has happened and the strength that The Beast and The Overseer have shown. Nothing to see here; just outlandishness and craziness all mixed up to cause confusion. Mr. Glass begs to differ and uses his vast intellect and proficiency with technology to rove the halls of the hospital undetected. With a lobotomizing procedure scheduled the next morning, he springs his plan to let the three of them out, pitting The Beast against the Overseer in the full light of public scrutiny, to prove once and for all that they are real and not figments of their own imaginations. The Beast knows what it is; the Overseer is half-convinced that he is normal, but mad. Glass makes Overseer break out of his room, through a steel door to prove to himself that he is different. Glass and the Beast are together and make their way out of the hospital. McAvoy is an absolute revelation: he depicts his multitude incredibly well -- Patricia, in particular, is scarily well-done. Also, he's incredibly jacked for this role. Dr. Staple still doesn't believe, even as Glass and Beast tear a swath through her hospital and escape in grand style. Meanwhile, Dunn has knocked his steel door off of its hinges and has similarly escaped. Glass's mother, Dunn's son, and Casey Cooke (Anya Taylor-Joy) (the Beast's former kidnap victim from Split) are on premises to talk to the doctor, but end up witnessing the escape and showdown between Beast and Overseer. Riot police try to break up the fight, but the two men each fight off half a dozen troops themselves, belying the doctor's claim that they are not superhuman. It turns out that Crumb's father died in the train crash in which Dunn was the only survivor -- a crash caused by Glass in his search for a nemesis. "I created you, as I created David. It just took longer. 19 years. They almost convinced me I was crazy. I create superheroes. I truly am a mastermind." The Beast thanks him for his creation, but then strikes devastating blows because Glass is dangerous. He tackles Dunn into a water tank -- and water is Dunn's weakness. The Beast tries to escape to the tower, but Casey catches him and brings Kevin back out, only to have the SWAT units shoot him right out of her arms. Doctor Staple and the police want to mop up the loose ends, trying to kill Dunn as well. The SWAT unit and Doctor Staple both have the same tattoo on their wrist, suggesting that they belong to the same secret organization. The unit drowns Dunn -- in a puddle in the parking lot, to add insult to injury -- Crumb dies in Casey's arms and Glass in his mother's, whispering to her that "[t]his was not a "Limited Edition" — this was an origin story, the whole time." Doctor Staple confides to Glass that she is part of a secret organization that kills heroes and villains to keep humanity safe from "Gods walk[ing] among us". She and her group smugly think they've won -- but Mr. Glass's final words linger. Whose origin was it? How many steps ahead was he planning? Glass got the security footage before the good Doctor was able to delete it. Glass (in a voiceover): "Belief in oneself is contagious. We give each other permission to be superheroes. We will never awaken otherwise. Whoever these people are who don't want us to know the truth: today, they lose." Maniac (2018) -- "8/10" (A skinny) Jonah Hill stars as Owen Milgrim, the estranged son of a rich family in New York. He lives on Roosevelt island, paying almost 80% of his salary as rent. His job sucks, but he's the only one of his brothers who doesn't work for his father. He's had a pyschotic break and thinks/knows that he gets visits from a brother Jed (Billy Magnussen) who visits him in his thoughts. We see Jed at a party in his full obnoxiousness; he seems to need to stand trial for some transgression against a woman. The timing is unclear so far. The setting is a near/alternate future, something like the future as envisioned in the 80s. The tech is all very 80s: film, photos, mechanical machines, CRTs, beeping machines -- Terry Gilliam would love it. There are weird marketing scams like "Ad Buddy", where a solicitor visits you wherever you are and pitches strange gigs: fake husband for widows, medical-experimental subject, and so on. They also just read a lot of ads. The computers are huge (think mainframes), the cameras are film/disposable, the phones are corded. The techs at the neuropharmaceutical company are almost all Japanese. (A platinum blonde) Emma Stone is Annie Landsberg, a semi-homeless woman/grifter whose poor luck has led her to the same giant neural-experiment corporation as Owen. The second episode focuses on Annie's journey to Nerbedyne Corp, trying to scrape together enough money to get into a study where she can get her hands on the mood-altering drug that she'd gotten addicted to. Drug A makes her feel better about her shattered relationship with her sister Ellie (Julia Garner, i.e. Ruth from Ozark). She shows up when Annie drops into the experiment and into another world. In this reliving of her memory, Annie is shockingly harsh to her sister when they move to New York and Colorado, respectively. She basically tells her she's happy she'll never see her again and then acts like it never happened. Is she schizophrenic? They get into a car accident and Ellie dies when their car hits a truck driving in the wrong lane. One of the other patients (11) is played by Allyce Beasley, who I last remember as playing Agnes DiPesto in Moonlighting. Annie and Owen end up together in Muramoto's office after the first experiment -- he died when he was talking to Annie and Owen is still high from his A pill. It's unclear what's really happening (did Muramoto really die?) and whether the memories engendered by the pills and the giant-sized 80-style hardware are real or also ... adjusted. Muramoto has really died and his right-hand woman Azumi finds his replacement -- a former boyfriend/genius programmer/scientist Mantleray (Justin Theroux) who's apparently addicted to virtual porn. Azumi is a bit of an odd duck: chain-smoking in all sorts of sensitive areas (even in the tiny cubbies that the staff sleep in on premises) and is also apparently agoraphobic. Another main character is the giant old-style mainframe computer named GRTA (there was actually a famous mainframe named "MANIAC I" ). I love the computer room, cables and flashing lights everywhere -- so old school and such a good storytelling device. Once they take the B pill ("Behavior"), things get nutsy-cuckoo: Annie is now named Linda and is married to Owen (now named Bruce). They are in 80s New Jersey. Annie steals the address from the DMV of the furrier who stole her friend's lemur so that she can go rescue it, but she can't get the lemur out from the thugs (who are very interested in their dance routine). She confides in her husband and they agree to break out Wendy the lemur from the furrier. Bruce is a good husband, to a fault and turns himself over to the police (or the wildlife authorities, which they keep claiming is more-or-less the same thing). They segue to the next scene, in what look like the 1930s. Owen is now Sir Ollie and he's on his way to the Neberdine Full Moon Seance (the name of the drug company). Annie is now Arlie, again his wife. Azumi and Mantleray discover that 1 (Owen) and 9 (Annie) are entangled due to a hardware malfunction. The various scenarios roll up more and more real-life details: gimlets, Cervantes, Wendy, etc. The lost chapter 53 of Cervantes's Don Quixote is rumored to be so powerful that whoever reads it falls into a coma of fantasy from which they never wake. Kind of like Neberdine's VR. Arlie says "We can't help being who we are" when Ollie tries to get away from her again. The subjects make it to round C but Azumi and Mantleray discuss Gertie's depression (the mainframe). She's mourning the loss of Doctor Muramoto -- because they'd been having an affair. Azumi exhorts Mantleray to call his mother, to which he responds, "My mother is a venomous egotistical charlatan who deploys catchphrases and platitudes and therapies of the day in order to dupe people out of their money and happiness. No, my mother sells happiness, but it crumbles in your hand the minute you're out of earshot of her magical thinking and her platitudes and her invented words and her primal yawps and her steps to success." His mother is Dr. Greta Mantleray, played by Sally Field (no coincidence that the mainframe is named after Mantleray's mother). She's invited in to diagnose the mainframe. Meanwhile Owen and Annie start to imbue the short-circuit that led to them being paired with significance. The "odds" (including Annie and Owen) embark on the C-pill journey ("Confrontation"). They are not together: Annie is Annia, an elf con-woman leading marks on journeys to the "Lake of Clouds" to be healed of their ills (and fleeced of their possessions). Her latest mark is her sister Ellie, also dressed as an elf. Owen is a gold-toothed, twin-braided, tattooed gangbanger scion of a murderous clan led by his father (Gabriel Byrne), who's known as "The Drill" for his penchant for power-drill--fueled interrogation. In his basement, he has a painting of a drill with the epithet "Ceci n'est pas une drill" beneath it. Owen is an introspective and highly intelligent and well-read young man. The simulation is bleeding through for both him and Annie, with the role of GRTA and their own "tests" woven into their stories. Owen's the prodigal son but is working with the police. His brother Jed was sent away by his father as a "disloyal baby" but became a cop and is the family's plant. He "saves" Owen from the cops he's working with and is then taken out by the family's consiglieri, who is a Fed, undercover for 36 years. Owen accompanies him to collect his study partner Olivia, to sweep her off to witness protection -- we see him years later with seven kids, each named after a continent. He bugs out, turns into a falcon and flies to the moon -- ending up in Annia's world and then getting shot down by the evil queen (GRTA) before she abducts Annia from Ellia. The next installment has transformed Owen into Snorri, an Icelandic man on trial for some as-yet unspecified crime against an alien being named Ernie. He sits before a tribunal of Earth's leaders, who are deciding how to appease the invading aliens by possibly sacrificing Snorri. Ernie as an alien stands in for the hawk Owen had nursed back to health when he was a child. Annie is back, looking stunning in red. The finale is wild, with GRTA killing nearly everyone but finally being forced to release her stranglehold and being shut down for good. They all part ways, including Annie and Owen. Owen takes the witness stand at his brother's trial and refuses to lie for him, earning himself committal to a mental institution. Annie goes back to her father and they reconcile, with him welcoming her back from the wilderness of near-madness and depression to which she'd escaped after her his sister had died. Annie seeks out Owen, gets his trust and breaks him out. We see them head out on the road together, to parts unknown. The feeling of overlapping realities and dreams reminds me a bit of West World. It's a delightfully surprising limited series with occasionally wacky scenes and scenery. Hill and Stone are very good. After Life (2019) -- "8/10" This is a lovely, funny, charming show written, directed by and starring Ricky Gervais. None of the blurbs I've seen for it do it justice. It is a show about Tony, a man who found the love of his life early, had 28 wonderful years with her and is now a widower on account of breast cancer. He is devastated and pragmatic and wonders what is even the point of going on. He's brutal to some people -- his meek brother-in-law, in particular -- but a thoughtful man who, despite his desire to just end it all to kill the pain of living without his wife, manages to continue on, spending quite a bit of his time walking his dog, visiting his Alzheimers-afflicted father, visiting his wife's grave (and the widow of the man who's buried next to her) and sorta-kinda befriending a homeless drug user Julian and his prostitute/sex-worker friend Daphne/Roxy (who he hires to do his dishes for him). The thing that keeps him going at all is his dog, I think, who needs to be fed twice per day. He's slowly starting to come out of his funk, but still deeply in pain. He works at a local free gazette run by his brother-in-law, doing shit stories with a weird crew of co-workers. His relationship with Julian is the most interesting: Julian lost his wife to an overdose, but he lost her and nobody cares, because she brought it on herself. They share a deep, abiding pain of loss that makes them both want to end it all. But Julian is more serious about it: all he's missing is the money to do it. Tony looks at him, then gives him most of his wallet. Julian makes good on his word, overdosing in his doss in a storage unit. Those were conflicting moments: when Tony gave him the money and when Julian followed through on his suicide promise. Was it the right thing to do? Should Tony have helped Julian get better? Or did he just understand how utterly lost Julian was without his wife? That death was a sweet release from endless days of pain, spent searching desperately for a way to numb everything for a few hours until wakefulness brings it all crashing back in the next day. I applaud the story for not holding back on providing a grittier, more realistic outcome. Some people don't want to live. Who are we to force them to change their minds? Stop being depressed. Be happy. Super helpful. I think Gervais is just brilliant in this: anyone who thinks he's an ass because of how he takes the piss out of everyone should see this show and then wonder which is the real Gervais? Is he just an asshole who's a good enough actor to sell being a nice guy? Or is basically a sheepish, nice guy who can pretend to be an asshole? In the end, Tony claws his way back to being a human being and we prepare to see what the next season brings -- when he's no longer so depressed. Ronnie Chieng: Asian Comedian Destroys America (2019) -- "9/10" I've seen Ronnie on The Daily Show, where he's very funny, often upstaging the sadly somewhat smarmy and easy-joke-getting Trevor Noah (think Stephen Colbert after he moved to late night). Chieng is an international comic, having come to America only three years ago, moving from Australia after having grown up in Malaysia and Singapore. A lot of his material is about being Asian and having grown up in an asian family. Also, he has the requisite bit about Japanese toilets, a source of endless fascination and material to comics everywhere. His delivery is good and he's very sarcastically funny with smart, well-written material. Michelle Wolf: Joke Show (2019) -- "7/10" It was a pretty decent set and her writing is mostly very clever, though there is a bunch of meta filler material that feels a bit lazy, padding out her hour. She talks about politics, women's rights, periods (a lot about that), being a shallow-vagina woman in a big-dick world, the usual. A decent hour; I look forward to more, where she's perhaps refined the material to a bit more of a knife-edge. It has nothing to do with her grating voice -- which is quite grating, but also somewhat endearing -- it's just that the routine felt stretched to fit the requisite hour for Netflix (somewhat like Iliza Schlesinger's latest). Zardoz (1974) -- "7/10" This is a move about a far-future Earth (2293) where the planet is inhabited by bands of savages who inhabit the Outlands and also some immortals who inhabit the Vortex. Sean Connery is a cleverer savage Zed who jumps on the flying Godhead sculpture that visits his lands, hitching a ride back to the vortex. On the way, he somewhat anticlimactically kills Arthur Frayn, an immortal who'd played Zardoz. The flying Godhead lands in the Vortex and Zed begins to investigate the countryside, clad only in thigh-high leather boots, a red diaper, crossed red bandoliers and his usual copious allotment of body hair. For twenty minutes, nary a word is said, until Zed meets May (Sara Kestelman). She and Consuella (Charlotte Rampling) extract his memories, watching as he rapes and pillages his way through his former life. The walls are covered with naked, frozen bodies in various states of unrelaxed repose. They call in more of their fellow citizens, to watch his memories of raping and pillaging as a marauders among the weaker tribes. He spends some time in their society, as a kept animal, serving the immortals. He learns of what it means to be immortal. Their punishment for infractions is not imprisonment or death, but years. One subversive "Friend" is punished like this and Zed finds him later, aged nearly beyond recognition, but still alive, spending time with other ancients, all unable to die. Friend wants death for everyone, to "erase humanity from this pretty planet". The theme -- from 1974 -- is interesting, in light of our climate-change debacle. As Eve plumbs the depths of Zed's memories, he remembers when he became educated, when he learned to read. On the walls of the library are old posters, one of which reads "to not be born is best". Eve eventually teases out of Zed that the book he'd read was "Wizard of Oz", which he saw to be a metaphor for Zardoz and his control over Zed's world. The experiments continue and they realize that Zed is there to destroy their world. They hunt him across their part of the globe, with things becoming increasingly surreal: he encounters the Apathetics again, this time energizing them when they taste his sweat; he encounters the aged, who take up his banner of revolution in a crazed and madcap Mardi Gras--like parade toward the realm of the Eternals. Zed convinces May that hers is a society of death and they agree to teach him all that they know -- they "touch-teach" him while he "provides them with his seed". Nice. The truth of things turns out to be that a good chunk of mankind left for the stars when the planet was dying. The world Zed inhabits is the mad shell of a society gone horribly wrong. The Ancients are the remnants of the scientists who'd enabled it all, but were too old to travel. The eternals are the children they'd retained to keep track of the remaining savage hordes. Zed is an experiment of Zardoz's (Arthur, who is resurrected late in the film). Zed figures out that the Tabernacle -- the root of all knowledge for what is left of humanity on Earth -- resides in a crystal. He does battle with the Tabernacle (another psychedelic rendering) and ends up liberating humanity from immortality. Zardoz aka Arthur shows up to claim that the liberator that Zed became was all due to him and his breeding program, where he produced a slave who could free his masters. Zed responds that, while that may well be, Zardoz is also a product of his breeding and environment and, thus, is also just as much a tool of fate as Zed is (or a tool of the Tabernacle, as the case may be). Zed's development from senseless slaughterer to sage reminds me a bit of Charlie's development in Flowers for Algernon. In the end, the Eternals -- no longer Eternal -- are overrun by the remnants of Zed's band of Renegades, who leave behind a truly heroic slaughter on the battlefield, all the while seeking their lost leader. Zed is with Consuella, with whom we see him father a child, grow old and die. The Cell (2000) -- "8/10" Jennifer Lopez (looking frankly spectacular in her absolute prime) is Catherine Deane, a therapist and researcher in virtual-reality techniques whose charge is a young boy who'd fallen into a coma on a beach. The boy's rich parents want her to help wake him back up. She uses the immersive VR (mind-merge?) technology to travel to his mindscape, which is rich in detail. The first scene is in a vast desert, where she finds him less than receptive to her help. The family grows restless for results -- the father, especially, doesn't believe that it will ever work. Desperate for results, Catherine wants to try letting the boy into her mind instead, to try to jolt him into a different direction. At the same time, we see glimpses of a serial killer (Carl Stargher, played by the always excellent Vincent D'Onofrio) at work, drowning his victims in tanks of water, washing them in bleach while he hangs -- Hellraiser-style -- from hooks in the ceiling. We see him driving a victim away from his wind- and dust-swept farm in the flatbed of his truck. Next, we Stargher collecting his next victim, but also seemingly suffering from what looks for all the world like a migraine or seizures. With the FBI hot on his trail, he succumbs to the viral infection that exacerbates his schizophrenia to throw him into a coma, a dream from which he is unlikely ever to wake. This would pose no problem, except that his latest victim is still trapped in a room somewhere -- we can see her in her prison cell -- but no-one has any idea where that is. The cell, though, is actually a machine that Stargher's designed to drown and bleach his victims into dolls. The Feds end up at Catherine's lab, asking her to enter into Stargher's mind to try to find out where the victim is. They rig her and him up in the same apparatus we saw her using with the young boy and the trip begins. It's quite a nicely filmed sequence, with many early VR-style metaphors of how wild and unpredictable such mindscapes would be. In Stargher's mind, he's still a child, with some very strange memories (that clearly led to what he would become). Catherine makes her way through this world, witnessing the Damien-Hirst-ification of a horse, then stumbling through cellars to happen upon Myst-like contraptions controlling female automata/dolls. The women are arranged in museum-like cells, some controlled by wires. She is attacked and subdued by a musclebound doll with gigantic breasts, who takes her to a throne room, where Stargher rules as king. She quickly bails from VR and then discusses next steps with Detective Peter Novak (Vince Vaughn). She agrees to go back in, learning more and more about Stargher's past and his history, where his sickness came from. Carl is talking to Catherine as Carl now (rather than as the demented king from before), which is progress. But she still can't find out where he's hidden Julia, his final victim. Her plan backfires and he manages to block her from activating her "dead-man switch" this time. He takes her hostage as one of his victims, placing a collar on her and "locking" her into the VR world. Novak has to suit up and jump in to the VR world for the first time ever, seeking out both Stargher and Catherine. There is a plethora of 2000-era computer graphics heralding his entry. Stargher quickly overpowers Novak as well, now with both Catherine and Peter in his clutches. Peter beseeches Catherine to wake up and rescue him. Peter thinks he's figured out where the woman is; Stargher is ramping up the craziness in his mindscape. Catherine reverses the feed and invited young Carl into her mind, though older Carl comes along, too. She "heals" the young Carl in her mind, and he finds peace, but dies. Novak saves the final victim. The sets are spectacular and imaginative. Catherine ends up keeping Carl's dog. Zathura (2005) -- "5/10" This is a Jumanji-like storyline where two brothers (Walter and Danny, his younger sibling) end up playing a game that Danny finds in the basement. It's called Zathura and it kind of plays itself: the boys just poke buttons and the game plays itself out. It takes their house into space and then into an encounter with Zorgons and then to an astronaut who turns out to be Walter in 15 years. It was OK, but really targeted at young kids. Kristen Stewart, Dax Shepard and Tim Robbins put in their time, but don't overdo it. It bored me, but I gave it an extra star because it's almost certainly a solid repeat watch for young kids. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3846 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3846 Sun, 15 Dec 2019 21:35:21 +0100 , with the following passage: "Akaky, whose old coat is too tattered to withstand the frigid air, begins saving for a new one, forgoing the small pleasures that make his otherwise dreary life pleasurable (drinking tea, lighting candles in the evening). But Akaky comes to find joy instead in the dream of a new coat: “it was as if his very existence became somehow fuller, as if he were married, as if some other person were there with him, as if he were not alone but some pleasant life’s companion had agreed to walk down the path of life with him—and this companion was none other than that same overcoat.”" I wonder if a different society -- perhaps Russians, who regularly wrote literature in this vein, about suffering and surviving and persevering -- would understand Joker differently. From the Russian writers I've read, they seemed to understand the existence of poverty on Fleck's level, a poverty that is not only financial, but also one of the soul. His only companion is a joyless madwoman who constantly exhorts him to be happy. He is bound to her by societal obligation and habit. He has no chance of ever finding romantic happiness. Back to the story about the coat: "We share in his horror when, on his very first day wearing his new coat, Akaky is robbed of it. To make matters worse, as titular councilor, he does not have enough pull to get the authorities to take his case seriously. The cold air and society’s indifference sends him to an early grave, but soon afterward, a rumor begins to spread throughout the city: “A dead man had begun to appear at night in the form of a clerk searching for some stolen overcoat.” In death, Akaky gets his revenge. Gogol’s story could be classified as what Wellesley professor Kathleen Brogan defines as “cultural haunting.”" This is almost literally the story arc in Joker. Only Joker didn't die first -- he transformed and lit Gotham on fire. The article ends with a warning: "As we commit ever-new forms of violence, such as the destruction of the environment, we will take on new hauntings." The destruction of the environment is a violence almost too large to comprehend, but more prevalent and poisonous in the quotidian is small or soft violence. like disregarding or exploiting the suffering of others. Though Arthur was beaten a few times, this was easier for him to understand than the casual cruelty and indifference that is almost more violent, if only because you can't fight it. You can just sit there and take it and lose. [2] [Elite fear of revolution] With a world as miserable and uncaring as the one in which Arthur finds himself, what do we expect to happen? 99.9% of these misbegotten souls simply subside noiselessly into the mists of history, but the uncaring world can't get away with its behavior forever. The Joker is an inevitable excrescence of a poisoned world. It's not an excuse; it’s a reason. No wonder America’s afraid of this movie. They’ve built the powder keg. It's only a matter of time. Some are afraid that the film will inspire murderers and riots, empowering the downtrodden -- or those who think they are. Or at least they say that's what they’re afraid of. What they’re really afraid of is that people will realize the Fleck wasn’t even evil. He’d just been fucked over by a society that doesn’t care, that allocates all of its resources to its elites (including the often-rich media) and lets everyone else boil in a Garden of Earthly Delights. They’re afraid that people will actually wake up. That they’ll see that the message isn’t one of violence, but one of knowledge and awareness. The State had a chance to prevent the Joker's arrival, but it chose callousness instead, ruthlessly cutting off his benefits and his medication. Instead of inspiring feelings of violence, the movie inspired compassion for those with mental illness, feeling outcast, societal frustrations. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] Chapo Traphouse's two-hour review was stupidly focused on this. I’m not even sure they saw the movie. I honestly had to stop listening. It’s shocking that they get so much funding for what amounts to a bunch of people joking and bitching in a room. This Is Hell! On Contact, Jimmy Dore, Useful Idiots are all much more worth your time. [1] Slavoj Žižek's book Violence discusses the various types of violence -- and our blindness to all but the least subtle forms -- in great detail. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3851 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3851 Sun, 15 Dec 2019 21:33:55 +0100 of around 1400 ratings publicly available. I've included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other -- I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. IT (2017) -- "7/10" This is a reboot of the "1990 TV movie" starring Harry Anderson, Richard Thomas (John Boy/Frank Gaad) and Tim Curry as Pennywise. It no longer matches the book's timeline. It now takes place in 1989 instead of 1960. The kids come together pretty much as in the first book (except the subterranean gang-bang has been elided, so not really) to fight Pennywise. Jump scares are good; effects are good; locations are good; actors are pretty good. I took away a star because I feel that I would have enjoyed it a bit less if it wasn't a familiar story to me. Unlike the 1990 version and the book, they didn't mix the past with the present at all. Chapter 1 has just the kids and the initial vanquishing. Chapter 2 is out now. Barry S02 (2018) -- "8/10" We pick up just past the end of season 1 finale, catching a glimpse of Barry confronting Detective Janice Moss (Paula Newsome), but its just a part of intro. Instead, we pick up a few days later, with a devastated Gene Cousineau (Henry Winkler) who's lost Janice. Barry rallies the school and Gene to keep going, giving up a story about Afghanistan to convince them that he's serious about acting. The next day, everyone is telling fantastical and maudlin stories about their upbringing. Sally tells about how she's only getting shitty roles -- to which Cousineau replies that at least she's working (unlike anyone else in the class). But Sally is focused on being the star she knows she is and still can't talk about anything but being shafted. She whines that she only gets "weak woman" roles, then says they don't fit because she's a strong, independent woman. (A) She's wrong because she seeks support and validation everywhere, dropping anyone who helps as soon as she's gotten what she wants and (B) If she's such a great actress, then she shouldn't need roles that match her personality. Cousineau is so enthralled by the "realness" of Barry's confession that he builds a show around it, ordering everyone to get real shit too (seemingly also missing that they're supposed to be acting, not telling real stories). Fuches is on the run and Moss's former partner Loach (John Pirruccello) is hot on his heels. He gets Fuches over a barrel and make him help catch Barry. Barry, though, turns Fuches away without revealing anything incriminating. Fuches continues to meet up with Barry, half-trying to entrap him, half-trying to keep the cop on his ass off of him. Sally is writing a screenplay about her previous abusive marriage to Sam, then calls a friend to corroborate her confabulation and only hears what she wants to hear. Her friend tells Sam about it and he shows up. Barry fails to carry out the hit on Esther (Hank's Cambodian rival for Cristobal's affections) and Hank decides he needs to kill Barry. The hit is laughably bad, taking place during the day, from an open rooftop, while Barry is at home with Sally, who's so self-absorbed that he doesn't even have to work to cover up the fact that his apartment has bullet-holes in it. Barry catches Hank and his super-shitty assassin but, instead of killing them, he offers to square up by training Hank's army. This also goes laughably poorly, but continues. Fuches tries not to entrap Barry, but Barry walks right into it anyway. Turns out Loach isn't interested in catching Barry -- he wants to hire him to kill his wife's lover. This hit goes spectacularly wrong: Loach's wife's lover is an pothead, but he's also got a house full of Tae Kwan Do trophies and medals. Also, he's tough as nails, nearly zombie-like. Also, he's trained his daughter thoroughly -- she's like a feral karate-kicking mongoose when she arrives and discovers Barry's killed her father (or so they thought). It's a spectacular hit that goes all kinds of wrong, but ends up in so many details balanced against one another to, once again, absolve Barry. Barry ditches Fuches for good -- or at least he thinks he does. Fuches finds Moss's car and schemes to pin her murder on Cousineau, to make Barry suffer. Barry and Sally do a phenomenal scene together, with Barry doing much better; they both get auditions, but she turns her down for not being "artistic" enough, whereas he deliberately tanks his because Fuches had called him just before. Barry will probably get the role because men are supposed to be aloof. Sally gets an even bigger shot and changes her scene/story again -- becoming successful this time by lying about her "art". Hank and his army escape from Esther's trap, thanks to Barry's training. They return to take over Esther's temple, but Cristobal and Esther track them back there. Fuches shows up and talks everyone down and into a truce. Hank tells Barry that "Fuches has fixed everything". Barry goes into a blind rage and cuts a near-total swath through the temple, taking out everyone except Hank and Fuches (who escapes). It was a decent season and I like Hank and Barry. Fuches is decent, but one-dimensional. Sally is a horror-show, a well-depicted caricature of a terribly egocentric person but it's like enough already, we get it. I'm not sure that I'm invested in another season of Barry, to be honest. The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel S01 (2017) -- "10/10" Midge Maisel (Rachel Brosnahan) is an upper-west-side JAP married to a man she met while at Bryn Mawr college (at a mixer, of course). They have two kids, he works for his father, he's an aspiring comedian, she takes show notes and care of everything else. He's cheating on her with his pinhead secretary, he's an awful comedian with a thin skin and no prospects of his own. He decides to leave her. He's gone through all of their finances and his father takes back the apartment. Her father is livid because he always knew the boy was useless, but he wants him back because his daughter needs a man. She reacts to his leaving by drinking a whole bottle of wine and heading downtown to the comedy club and tearing a hole in the sky. She swears, mimes ball-tickling and shows of her bosoms. The police quickly show up to arrest her for profanity and public lewdness. This will be a show about the stifling mores of the time as well as the poor handling of communists and women. The proprietor of the coffee house, Susie (Alex Borstein) bails her out. That night is Yom Kippur and the two families face off at dinner. Things explode and Midge heads back downtown for another ribald, spontaneous set and another arrest. Susie gets her a famous civil-rights lawyer, who, after a couple of hitches gets her off -- but she has to apologize. She bails out Lenny Bruce and he returns the favor. They hang out at a jazz club and get stoned with the band -- so stoned that Bruce can't go back on, so we get to see her third set, another wonderful off-the-cuff routine. That's how things start for Mrs. Maisel, but they don't stay so rosy. Her parents are unable to conceive of her as anything other than something to care for and marry off. Moving back home regresses them to where they treat her like a 16-year-old girl. She needs her own money, she needs a job. Joel tries to get her back (he asks) and she turns him down flatly. He moves in with Penny, to his parents' disapproval. Oh, they try; they all go to dinner and all seem to be enjoying themselves, but both parents just. Say. No. Joel, the whiner, the mealy-mouthed, spineless ass who thinks the world owes him something, is devastated. His father sponsors his new apartment and a better job. Thinks aren't that bad for Joel. There's only so far you can fall when you come from money. Midge gets a job as a perfume girl at a department store and keeps working on comedy at night. Her kids she leaves with her mother. That's going to end well, I'm sure. She bombs a couple of times -- really stinks up the joint. She has no material and her spontaneity dries up on her. She's got to find the spark that lets her perform at her capacity without booze or drugs or rage. She buys jokes from Wallace Shawn and it goes predictably disastrously. Susie is frustrated, as is Midge. Midge has no patience and no stomach for failure -- no matter how temporary. Susie and Midge blow up and Midge continues with her life without comedy for a bit. Susie eventually comes round to collect her apology and they start up again, this time working more patiently to get Midge a "tight ten". She gets it and gets a chance to work with an icon of the comedy stage Sophie Lennon (Jane Lynch), who plays a rough-hewn Queens housewife. She is not like that in real life, though. She is richer than Croesus. She takes to Midge, but, though she remains unfailingly polite, it's clear that Midge doesn't think that they will be best of friends. Susie sets up a show at her club for Sophie Lennon's manager Harry Drake (the inestimable David Paymer) but Midge, being Midge, goes off-book and tears into Sophie Lennon's foibles instead of doing her tight ten. Drake scorches the earth for her and Susie in New York. They still have a few dates at super-shitty clubs (strip clubs) but Drake manages to squash those too. In fact, he even gets the owner of the Gaslight to move Susie to the door and forbid anyone from giving Midge stage time. Midge misses Joel and they get back together for a night; she gives her father hope that they will reconcile. Her mother can't know yet, until it's true. Susie throws a Hail Mary and begs Lenny Bruce to play the Gaslight to help Midge. He agrees because he, too, is the king of being blackballed. Bruce introduces her and lets her open for him. Once again, she goes off-book, ignoring her tight ten and tearing into Joel and his mistress instead. Joel is there and is deeply wounded because, really, that's his major personality trait: being thin-skinned and wounded and entitled, the wound being ever-so-much deeper when a woman is the cause, because women are supposed to be meek and useful only in very narrow categories. Still, as he stumbles away from the club, he beats up a heckler who'd called her a bitch, muttering "She's good, she's good". Midge crushes it. Her first, drunken rant is growing huge in the underground-record scene as "Mrs. X". Her boost from Bruce and her growing underground fame and whether Joel will be able to take a second-banana role in their relationship will form the basis of the second season. Highly recommended. Tuca and Bertie S01 (2019) -- "6/10" This is a story kind-of set in the Bojack universe (there are humans an animals evenly mixed in society), but starring two best friends and birds, Tuca (a Toucan, played by Tiffany Haddish) and Bertie (a thrush, voiced by Ali Wong). It's a bit all over the place, about dating and relationships and sex ... and that's pretty much it. One main thread is that Tuca is a recovering alcoholic. The shows are all kind of the same: they either deal with Tuca's alcoholism and insecurity despite her ostentatiousness or with Bertie's insular insecurity about everything. There are some good jokes, but it's just kind of OK. I probably won't finish the season. The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel S02 (2018) -- "10/10" Rose (Midge's mother) has absconded to Paris. Midge and Abe go after her. After an initially disastrous and doomed-to-fail attempt at ordering Rose back to New York, Abe capitulates and spends the summer with her in Paris. They enjoy themselves immensely and Rose eventually agrees to return to New York. To her delight, "vacation Abe" seems to have made the trip back from Paris. Midge gets a gig and makes it work to her advantage, despite the multifarious tides being against her. Joel has officially told Midge that he can't be with her because he can't be the butt of her jokes, but he knows she has to be a stand-up comic -- because he knows she's good. Instead, Joel goes to work for his father in the factory -- and learns that his father and mother are not running the place well. He joins up for a longer stint to help them turn it around. He's still living at home. Midge continues crushing it in the gigs she can get, but Harry Drake's blackball is still smothering her career. Susie is still on the lam, afraid that Drake's goons are going to show up to "disappear" her. The Weissmans head to the Catskills and it's glorious. Abe is a force of nature; Rose is wonderful; the Catskilliness of it all is breathtaking. Susie joins her and tries to scare up a gig up there. Midge is set up with a loner doctor, who does his level best to disappoint her mother for her. He succeeds by "not rowing". In the middle of a hair appointment, she gets a call that she's been promoted back to the Revlon counter. She heads to New York with the good doctor (Benjamin). She riffs to the news radio and enchants him. They go to a show, they skip out on act 2, they see Lenny Bruce, they meet Lenny Bruce, it's all so wonderfully done. Midge confesses immediately to Benjamin that she's a comedian. He's further enthralled. Midge gets a gig in the Catskills and has her brother take her back. She kills at her show, despite seeing her father in the audience, which causes her to invent a ton of material based on him. He meets her and Susie after the show and takes them back to the Steiner camp, where he is not happy. He orders Midge to keep it a secret from her mother -- only Abe can tell her that her daughter is a comic. Life goes on with Benjamin courting her and Abe resenting her. Her mother is also very suspicious. Joel is working too hard and his father tells him to move on and do something else with his life. On Yom Kippur, Abe tells Midge to tell her mother that she's a stand-up comic. This throws Rose for a major loop and she focuses laser-like on getting Midge married to Benjamin, though her hopes are low because she can't imagine that Benjamin would put up with her predilection (although he's seen her work and loves it). He asks Abe for her hand in marriage, but must wait for an answer. At work, Abe runs into trouble because of his son, who is in the CIA and has a much higher security clearance than he does. At Columbia, he is asked to take a sabbatical because he's getting on everyone's nerves. At Bell Labs, they are trying to kill his project and accusing him of having blabbed to Midge about his project. He did nothing of the kind -- and now he's pissed. He decides to abandon both Columbia and Bell Labs and get back to being rabble-rouser Abe. We see him meeting the civil-rights lawyer that defended Midge on her first charge. Midge meanwhile, does a telethon, during which Sophie tries to torpedo her career, but Midge of course saves it with a glorious performance. During the evening, she meets and charms Shy Baldwin with her disarming and even style. He sees her show and later asks her to tour America and Europe with her for six months. Susie, meanwhile, is invited to Sophie Lennon's house, where she expects to have to eat shit for having threatened her for torpedoing Midge. Instead, Sophie admires her Moxie and asks her to be her manager. At the end of the season, Midge has accepted Shy's offer. Thinking that Benjamin won't possibly accept a six-month wait (despite Abe having given his blessing), Midge runs back to Joel for one night before leaving for Europe. Susie doesn't know what to say about Sophie's offer. Joker (2019) -- "10/10" This is a fantastic and realistic super-villain origin story. It was beautifully crafted with a great soundtrack. [Hopelessness personified] Think of the simplest object in your apartment that gives you joy. Arthur Fleck didn’t have a single thing like that. His life was a misery at home, a dingy apartment filled with his mother’s madness and sadness. When I got home from the movie, I dumped my remaining peanut M&M’s into a ceramic pumpkin. It made me think that Fleck didn’t have anything that brought him any joy, not even a little bit. That ceramic pumpkin is a tiny thread in the weft and woof of the fabric of my life. It’s there because I live with someone who decorates my home and, occasionally, puts candy into a seasonal ceramic container (in December, it’s a Santa Claus—head whose hat comes off). Fleck—and the people he represents—doesn’t have anything like this, even in the tiniest details. Nothing. He got no joy from life, not for lack of trying. The world didn’t care. His home was a claustrophobic reminder of his sadness; the outside world was a tricksome trap alive with real danger around every corner. I live a life of joyous wealth—I’m so used to it that I often forget to count my blessings, to consider how many details contribute to making it very easy for me to not be depressed. Fleck has none of this. He is a raw nerve, a book of matches waiting for a spark. When life is good, it’s really good. When it’s not, everything sucks and everything that brings joy flees before your bad karma. When you live at the edges of society, the opportunities are not just few and far between, but nonexistent. [It's not what they say it is] I’m so glad they managed to make it like they did, without conceding to actual or perceived audience demands. I think that making this kind of film into a super-villain origin story allowed the writers to tell the story with less recrimination because they can claim that it was because he was becoming the Joker. The movie, though, is only tangentially related to comic books. It’s not a comic-book movie in nearly in any way. [1] People would have rather have their psychotics be appealing and charming. To cause a psychotic break like the Joker’s would take some violence. My viewing partner had to swallow hard during Arthur's assault on the big clown guy in his apartment, but understood that it was necessary for the story. Arthur was a really nice guy and then he...breaks. It has to be sudden and sharp break with his previous reality in order for him to change from a meek, downtrodden man to the devil-may-care joker who "just wants to see the world burn" (to quote Heath Ledger's Joker of many years ago). That there are people being paid big money at media organizations to promulgate the idea that the movie exhorts incels and red-pillers just proves that ours is a society that will burn at the hands of a Joker sooner or later. They didn’t understand the movie at all. It’s a warning that in a society as cruel and evil as ours, it is inevitable that an excrescence like the Joker will boil out of the offal bath of our morals. It’s not a question of if, it’s when. In that much, Arthur was right. [Dark Phoenix] Arthur Fleck reminded me a bit of Phoenix's Freddie Quell in The Master. The heavy use of the unreliable narrator reminded me a bit of Elliot from Mr. Robot. The director was subtle: he didn't make a meal out of young Bruce Wayne sliding down the bat-pole on the playground. He just let it happen and moved on. Even that scene tried to show what an outside observer would have termed paedophilia -- -it wasn't; Fleck thought the boy was his brother. Phoenix was amazing. Watching his broken body straighten and inhale with a heretofore unknown confidence as he becomes. There were so many small details: like his nails were mostly gone, a sign of a chronic nailbiter, but we never actually saw him bite them. [Mother] Fleck's relationship with his mother was not healthy -- for either of them. His mother had very clearly suffered a mental lapse from which she never recovered. I'm almost certain that the adoption story was a lie. There is no way that Penny Fleck would have been allowed to adopt, if only for the reason that she would have been a single mother in the 60s. The child was hers and the father was almost certainly the odious Bruce Wayne, who was eager for any flimsy story to use as broom to sweep Penny under the carpet. I've include more notes and the rest of the review in a "separate article" . Atlanta S02 (2019) -- "5/10" Jesus, this season is so slow and morose. Everyone's stoned all the time, including Darius, who isn't funny at all anymore. Earn is morose, waking up in his storage unit but finally making bank on Paperboi and his dog investment, but then being rejected by the whole world and still treated like shit, even though now he has money and everything should have been different. It was deeply disturbingly ironic in the episode Money Bag Shawty, but then went completely off the rails in the next episode when Van returns with a vengeance and a gigantic chip on her shoulder. Zazie Beetz speaks German quite well. She speaks with another man right in front of Earn, making fun of him, then getting offended when he asks them to stop. More shitting on Earn ("stuntin'"). That episode was so painful and the end of a very definite trend in this direction that I would have stopped watching if I hadn't been on the trainer. As it was, I watched the first five minutes of the next episode Barbershop, where the barber treated Paperboi like garbage for five minutes and I shut it off. I get the point. People are assholes. They are absolute garbage. Still, I don't need to watch hours of them being assholes when there's stuff like the Marvelous Mrs. Maisel to watch. Atlanta got too depressing, slow and morose, pot-smoke-filled, filled with ego-drived, self-centered and -pitying assholes. The first season was good, but this one's feeling like a slog. Maybe I'm missing a big payoff. Too bad for me. Iliza Schlesinger (2019) -- "8/10" This is Iliza's fourth special in as five years. She digs her material primarily out of her life: in this one, she tells of her recent marriage. She mines some old veins from previous specials, but it's kind of fan service, so it's not too bad. She doesn't linger. She's very much in control and has some good jokes, though she's more narrative in style, with some physical comedy mixed in. She's somewhat political in the sense that she strikes blows against the current anaesthetisation of comedy by absolutely humorless scolds, something that her male colleagues are less able to do convincingly. That is, they're convincing, but it's great to hear a relativized view from a woman who's never held back and who's always been fair in distributing her insults. She also discusses what she thinks women need to do to get real equality, weaving this all into the utter madness of what a modern American wedding entails. At a few points, it felt more like a TED talk than a comedy show, but that wasn't altogether a bad thing. Le Mans 66: Gegen jede Chance (2019) -- "9/10" This is the story of Ken Miles (Christian Bale) and Carroll Shelby (Matt Damon). Miles was a British mechanic and racecar driver who came to fame in California as a man who could build fast cars and race them. He was a perfect match and foil for the American racecar driver Shelby, who'd won the LeMans in the late 50s but was retired from driving because of a heart condition. He'd since started a racecar company that was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy, similar to Miles's garage, which was repossessed by the bank at the beginning of the film. Their reputations are well-known, but their success lies in the future. Meanwhile, Ferrari is cleaning up one after another LeMans because they focus on perfection, making beautiful, fast cars rather than focusing on mass-production. Ford doesn't know how to make a racecar. Lee Iacocca (Jon Bernthal) comes up with the idea of buying Ferrari -- knowing that they're bankrupt. He flies to Italy, convinced that he'll pick up Ferrari, leaving them 90% of the race company but picking up 90% of the main company. Ford would retain control over the final say on whether Enzo Ferrari can go to LeMans or not. He calls off the deal at the eleventh hour with a masterful tirade of Italian insults, selling to Fiat instead -- a deal he'd already had cooking, but he wanted to drive up the price. Ford returns to the States with its tail between its legs. The news pisses off Henry II so badly that he swears he will beat Ferrari at the next LeMans. This is nice bombast, but he really knows nothing about running an engineering company -- he's surrounded by marketers and wouldn't know true quality if it ran him over. Iacocca recruits Shelby, who takes Miles along. They start to refine a prototype, but Ford goes back on its word to stay the hell out of it and starts to overmanage and committee the car to death -- including switching out the driver. The first year goes poorly and Jr.'s yes-man try to take a dump on Shelby for it. Damon delivers a glorious tirade/speech and gets an even stronger promise from Jr. to not interfere with Shelby's company's efforts to build a race car for Ford. Miles is back on the team and it goes a long time before the Ford yes-man try again to get rid of him. He wins Daytona and another famous race and is poised to drive at Le Mans. He ends up getting on the team and drives to victory. The victory is robbed at the end, on a technicality, but it's not important to either Shelby or Miles. "You promised me the ride, not the win." The movie was subtle in many ways, utterly a non-American story. I'm stunned it made it out the door as-is after test audiences. Miles didn't win the big race, but he didn't care much. He and Shelby immediately started designing the next car. Their focus was on the engineering, the science, the love of racing. They were much more in the vein of Ferrari than that of the team they actually drove for. Miles doesn't even survive the movie: he dies on a test track the next year, before he can go to LeMans again. Shelby is distraught and has nothing but contempt for his high-end customers who clamor of his cars and his attention. They think because they have money, they can have what they like. He misses his friend and a man he respected, who deserved to drive his cars. Bale, Bernthal and Damon ooze charisma and have definitely established a good group of 40+ leading men with real chops and star power. Highly recommended. Catch-22 (2019) -- "8/10" This is 6-episode adaptation of the brilliant book by Joseph Heller about an American air-support base on the island of Pianosa, Italy. It's a faithful adaptation, depicting the utter absurdity not only of the military but of bureaucracy and, ultimately, humanity. The main narrator is Yossarian, a bomber who doesn't want to fly more missions. He tries everything to be declared unfit for duty. If he doesn't want to fly, then he's sane and fit for duty. If he does want to fly, then he's crazy and doesn't have to fly. That's the catch-22. It's some catch. His nemesis is Colonel Cathcart, who uses his men to get more numbers for his squadron, piling more and more missions on them. The best character in the series -- as in the book -- is Milo Minderbinder, played brilliantly by Daniel David Stewart. Milo inveigles his way into the role of mess chief, then builds a commercial empire that leads to the establishment of M&M Enterprises aka the syndicate. It's directed by George Clooney, who makes a brief appearance at the beginning, as base commander Scheisskopf in California. None of the other faces are familiar, save for Hugh Laurie in a stint as Major de Coverley (that, in the series, as in the book, is cut short when he goes to Bologna in what he thinks is conquered territory). The rest of the faces are all too goddamned good-looking to be real. You get used to it, but they're all Hollywood bods. I mean, Orr's supposed to be ugly, not down-home adorable/handsome. I liked this version: it was well-made and stuck to the original script quite well. There were only a few anomolies: tail-gunner Snowden showed up only in a flashback in the last episode rather than haunting Yossarian throughout (the explanation also came late in the book, but Snowden was nowhere in the episodes before that). My favorite episode was the one that featured Orr, Milo and Yossarian flying on missions for the syndicate. But all of the main threads are there: Yossarian's bout of nakedness after Snowden dies, Nately's falling in love with Clara, the prostitute and then dying before he can propose to her, Orr's meticulous planning and practice at being a crash pilot, Milo's absolute magnificence at seeing that business trumps nations and war, Scheisskopf's madness overwhelming even the evil of Korn and Cathcart. The way that nearly everyone but Yossarian and Milo are gone -- and Milo doesn't fly missions. Orr is the only silver lining: he made it to Sweden. Yossarian has flown more missions than anyone else on Pianosa and is an accidental hero, with a medal but no clothes. I still like the original movie with Alan Arkin, Bob Newhart, Anthony Perkins, Jon Voight, Orson Welles, Bob Balaban, Normal Fell, Martin Sheen and Donald Sutherland better somehow, even though it wasn't as faithful to the book. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3839 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3839 Tue, 19 Nov 2019 22:47:11 +0100 of around 1400 ratings publicly available. I've included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other -- I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. Rotten S02 E01 (2019) -- "8/10" The first is about the rise of avocados in both California and Chile. The avocado craze is driven partially by bizarre trends, but also by the farmers and larger companies who profit from it. With much more money in it, gangs got involved in Mexico. Californian farmers are suffering because of the changing climate -- but avocados never grew natively in California. The farmers are upset that they no longer have enough water in the desert to grow their tropical fruits. The U.S.'s demand for avocados has grown -- as has the world's. Now that there's so much money in it, not just gangs, but large corporations, are involved. This naturally makes everything better. And, once again, we're fighting about who has more right to grow a fruit whose worldwide popularity is a marketing invention. It's not an easy fruit to grow, so places like Europe import the useless thing from far-off countries like Mexico and Chile. An ecological nonsense. Rotten S02 E02 (2019) -- "8/10" This episode is about wine in France, particularly the Languedoc region, which tries to innovate in wine-making and bring less-expensive wine to more consumers. There is a terrorist organization called CRAV in France that torches vineyards that don't conform to their ideas of wine-making. It's quite interesting and provides a lot of detail about how mass-market wine is actually produced. Even though we still buy in bottles, 60-70% of wine is "bulk" wine, which is produced in giant tanks, not casks. And it's bottled in factories, not at the vintner's. Naturally, these wines aren't necessarily worse -- they're definitely less expensive and more than good enough for a table wine. However, there is a lot of fraud, with more than a little wine deliberately mislabeled. One of the main people they interview is this bad-ass bulk-wine grower who gets interviewed in his sex club. There are a lot of other people with completely fucked-up views on globalization: that the French vintners should stop trying to preserve their ways because it's hopeless in an "open" and "free market" world built by globalized companies. That the French are in competition with Spanish wine labeled as French wine is just how business is done. One lady says that the French shouldn't be against the Spanish, but against the Chinese, who are the real danger. Lovely. There seems to be no room anymore for just keeping a business non-globalized. It all has to grow or compete against international and giant companies with deep pockets, able to strangle you until you go out of business. That's how it is. If people don't want what you're selling because it's temporarily slightly more expensive, then you'll be steamrolled out of the way. Get with the program and stop whining. And once it's not profitable anymore, the big companies move on, leaving the market open, but with no business left to fill it. The final segment is about the growth of Chinese wines and the many women involved in the business side. There are some French who are working with the Chinese, though, and see opportunity rather than enemies. In the end, the local people will lose out, I think. That they identify with their land, with their towns, won't matter. They're not great people, but neither will they ever be given the chance to be left alone. Their livelihood will be eradicated and they'll be on the dole and called lazy. The circle of life. Saw it in French, English and Chinese (no idea if Cantonese or Mandarin) with English subtitles. Rotten S02 E03 (2019) -- "8/10" This episode is about water supplies: in the States, the bottled-water mania that has largely replaced tap water. In places like Nigeria, water is a rare commodity that has already created markets for bottled water while public systems are deliberately neglected because it only affects the poor. These people spend most of their lives just trying to get clean water, often walking hours per day, sometimes crossing large highways. Lagos is a nightmarish city of plastic garbage (90% of its trash just sits in the streets and floats on dirty streams to the oceans). It's nice to see that western companies see profit in it, by selling bottled water in plastic bottles to them. Instead of letting public water succeed, money is only invested if money comes back out. There is no notion of water as a human right (even though it's enshrined as such in the UN Declaration of Human Rights). Companies have convinced people that tap water is dangerous. Even back in the States, where there is a huge infrastructure for public water, propaganda has convinced people not to drink it. It's almost free, more efficient and better than bottled water, but they're losing. This is our system. This is the cliff from which we are leaping. Are these people not at all worried that they're being manipulated into hating tap water by the companies who want to sell them bottled water? The bottled-water companies actually end up selling them tap water in a bottle at a 4000% markup anyway. The final ten minutes convinces you of nothing else than that people are fucking idiots. Rotten S02 E04 (2019) -- "8/10" This episode is about sugar. To harvest sugarcane, you burn the fields, then harvest the cane left over. You can keep the fields producing for 7-8 years, if you do it right. A worker is paid $2 per ton; the farmer makes $35 per ton from the processing plant. The cane is ground up to get the cane juice out and separate the impurities, then they add crystals to start the crystallisation process, after which they dry it and get the white sugar we all know. Mexico produces a lot of sugar and they have their eye on the US market. It's not a free market, though. It's tightly controlled and the U.S. government buys or sells sugar to keep the price stable (and much higher than in the rest of the world). Naturally, it's not enough to make a ton of money in a fixed market -- most of the companies are monopolies and don't pay their workers, even after summary judgments. There are really only a couple of families from the States who own everything (including the workers, who are basically on slave plantations trapped in their small enclaves). In particular, giant U.S.-owned plantations in the Dominican Republic use a lot of Haitian workers who essentially have no rights. One Dominican activist has gotten pensions for older employees -- so many have been working for over four decades -- but not from the Central Romana farm (owned by the U.S. family). Specifically, the empire founded by Alfonso Fanjul, who came from Cuba and took advantage of the draining of the northern Everglades. He and his family exert a tremendous influence to avoid paying taxes and to simultaneously make the taxpayer pay for cleaning up his company's messes. When the Army Corps of Engineers converted the norther Everglades, it diverted the freshwater from the rest of the Everglades, which spiked the salinity levels everywhere else, killing sea grass and scattering or starving all of the biota that depended on it. Fixing this mistake has a solution, but the sugar companies are against it. And the sugar companies get their way. Saw it in English and Spanish with English subtitles. Rotten S02 E05 (2019) -- "8/10" This episode is about chocolate. Each cacao tree bears about 30 pods per year, which makes about a kilogram of chocolate. One pod contains 40 seeds, in a sticky pulp. You leave this all out on the forest floor for 6-7 days, to ferment. This bonds the pulp to the beans and makes it possible to make the chocolate that we know. Then you dry the coated beans in the sun. Though Switzerland and Belgium are known for their chocolate, Ghana and Côte D'Ivoire are nearly the sole providers of cacao. Cöte D'Ivoire accounts for 40% of world production and cacao is 2/3 of their GDP. But they don't control the price: New York markets do. They have the resource everyone wants, but somehow they're enslaved to the west. Economic colonialism. They live on medieval farms, using the same techniques as 100 years ago. There's no incentive to upgrade when you just have so many slaves. As with cane sugar, This is chocolate's dark secret, but as someone says in the movie, "no-one knows how to fix it." That is, no-one is willing to give up their ludicrous profits. The industry makes over 100 billion dollars per year. The farmers are in squalor; their countries among the poorest in the world. The average farmer makes less than a dollar per day (less than a living wage). Despite this, the demand for chocolate drives farmers to use not only their own children on plantations (OK) but importing other children as child/slave labor on their plantations (not OK). With space at a premium, farmers started burning down protected forests and planting cacao trees. The Ivory Coast has lost 85% of its forests in the last 30 years because of this practice. Chocolate is a pyramid scheme that depends on screwing the farmers that harvest cacao. There are so many layers of middlemen that the poorest are forced to sell at below-market rates -- and sometimes aren't ever paid at all. Some haven't been paid in years. They have no choice but to keep working, to keep trying. Even for the middlemen, it's very dangerous. It's a cash economy...and everyone knows that they just got paid and are walking around with several-years worth of wages in their pockets. Kidnapping and murder are not uncommon. The final stage is to deliver the beans to warehouses, where they are sorted, settled, dusted and re-bagged for export. After that, the bags are loaded onto pallets, in containers and on giant container ships, sometimes hundreds of thousands of tons. At this point, it's the cocoa traders who have the most power. There are about 10 cocoa traders who control everything (the top 3 are Barry Callebaut, Cargill, Olam). No-one else in the chain has a say in the price that they will accept for their goods. In the 1970s, the price peaked at $5,700 per ton. Now it's 1/3 of that. With such wild fluctuations, there's naturally a lot of speculation, fraud and wild trading going on. They discuss one company that was family-owned but wiped itself out with fraudulent speculation (selling beans they didn't have and couldn't get; they couldn't cover). I'm honestly not sure what they expected us to think of that family: they're fraudsters who gambled big and lost. Boo hoo. Even though the beans cost a lot less now, chocolate prices to the consumer didn't change. Instead, the chocolate industry made $5 billion profit in one year alone. One company, Tony Chocolonely teamed up with Barry Callebaut to produce end-to-end really fair chocolate (including paying farmers far more than the "market" price). They plan on making chocolate sustainable by 2025. They have a lot of clout, but it's still unclear whether they will achieve their goal. The Côte D'Ivoire is trying to turn things around on their end, as well, by keeping more of the money inland. There seem to be some decent people involved (in particular the lawyer from New York...didn't catch his name). Time to stop eating chocolate, too? Saw it in English and French with subtitles. Barry S01 (2018) -- "8/10" This series is about Barry Berkman (Bill Hader), a former Marine back in the U.S. He works as an assassin with Fuches (Stephen Root), shipping around the country, doing as he's told. Fuches is an abusive handler; he clearly has some sort of dirt on Barry -- some sort of leverage -- because Barry splits the proceeds 50/50 with Fuches, which seems wildly unfair, considering he does all of the work (except procurement). Fuches sends Barry on a mission to LA, where he has a crisis of conscience and decides that he wants to be an actor -- after bungling a hit on an actor at an actor's studio, run by Gene Cousineau (Henry Winkler). He was supposed to do the hit for a Chechan mob family, but they put out a hit on him, too, when they thought he was bungling it. He takes them out and somehow ends up working for them again. He meets the phenomenally shallow Sally (Sarah Goldberg), who seduces him, then drops him like a hot rock when she realizes that he might not be interested in talking about her all of the time. All along, he's still doing jobs for Fuches and Goran (Glenn Fleshler) and Noho Hank (Anthony Carrigan), who's one of the best things about this show. Basically, Barry's trying to become an actor and trying to get out of being a hitman. He's thwarted at every turn -- most recently by an old Marine buddy of his and two others that get dragged in as well. Everything goes tits-up and he ends up killing his friend, to keep him from ratting him out. Things wrap up pretty well at the end of the first season, with Barry dumping Fuches, Barry wiping out Goran and co., leaving NoHo Hank to take over the Chechan mob and team up with the Bolivians. At the end of the season, the police chief has a press conference in which he sums up the season completely incorrectly, but compares it to the film Yojimbo (in which two warring gangs decimated each other). On the acting side, Sally continues to be devastatingly non-aware of her own shallowness and Barry continues to not notice or care. Bill Hader's writing is quite good; his acting as well. Man, is he evil to California and Hollywood hopefuls (in the form of Sally). GLOW S02 (2019) -- "9/10" We find the ladies having won the right to a season of television, but things are not so easy. Sam the director (Marc Maron) is a miserable shit who sees enemies everywhere, especially in Ruth/Zoya (Alison Brie). Debbie/Liberty Bell (Betty Gilpin) is struggling with being a producer and a single mom and self-centered. Welfare Queen/Tammé Dawson (Kia Stevens) struggles with the deeply racist character she portrays. Shiela the She-wolf (Gayle Rankin) struggles with unexpected popularity and attention from rabid fans. Cherry Bang (Sydelle Noel) is in danger of losing her leading role in her own series and comes back to GLOW, a demotion, but better than not working. Ruth gets propositioned by the head of the network and runs away when he's in the bathroom. For this, Debbie yells at her, telling her that that's how Hollywood works, that you have to play along -- not sleep with him, but make him think you would if you could but you can't -- finishing with "the one time you can't keep your legs shut, you screw us all." The show is moved to the 2AM time slot, ostensibly because male wrestlers are more powerful and interesting, but really because Ruth refused to sleep with the owner of the network. The ladies buckle down and step up their game and put on a tremendous show, but it ends with Liberty Bell snapping Zoya's ankle accidentally on purpose in a drunken/coked-out haze. The whole gang goes with Ruth to the hospital where she's diagnosed with a fracture and has a screaming match with Debbie/Liberty Bell, airing a lot of laundry. Sam tells Ruth that he needs her and they go for broke and make a complete variety show, with music videos, a storyline with real acting, and, of course, wrestling. Then Sam's baby mama shows up to take Justine back, but she lets her go to her prom that she's just attending ironically. She doesn't want to go back and threatens to run away to New York with Billy (her punker boyfriend). Sam pulls her back from the precipice, then has a nice dance with Ruth before she leaves in a rush. Bash and Debbie are at a convention, drumming up investors with an awesome whisper campaign that ends up with them inviting several to a live taping of the final show. Brittanica needs to get married to stay in the country, so the show centers around her marrying a fan for a green card. Bash's lover dies of AIDS and he's devastated...to distract himself, he jumps in and marries Brittanica instead. The TV channel has the television rights to their characters, so none of the other producers can pick up the show. Instead, the local strip-club owner who knows Sam (he's a customer and they both chaperoned Justine's prom) says he thinks he can take their show to Vegas instead. Rotten S02 E06 (2019) -- "8/10" This episode is about marijuana edibles. It starts in the States, with the new market for edibles taking off -- but the dosing is unpredictable and conflicting or overly restrictive laws prevent vendors from improving the quality and predictability of the product. Smoking is on the way out, obviously, because of lung damage. But ingested THC takes long to have an effect, but is then a more intense high with a longer duration. Ingested means that the extraction of toxins is up to the liver -- so, better for the lungs, but not as great for the liver. Most local laws (e.g. in Holland and also in Switzerland) allow selling, but not wholesale or even mass-retail production. People should basically be growing their own instead of industrializing. However, THC is an acknowledged medication, so production with proper dosing is paramount. There is not enough medical research on the exact efficacy of marijuana for medical purposes, but anecdotally (and also in some studies), it seems to work on suppressing nausea and promoting appetite. Now we switch back to the States, which even Holland looks to as the home of the "Green Rush". They interview a lady who says that the normal dose is 10-30mg of THC per day and some products have up to 1000mg in them. People generally dose too high -- just like alcohol, no? They're talking about "taking too much" like nobody's ever heard of overdoing it at the bar with shots. Now that THC products are getting so powerful -- and edibles allow ingesting much more at once -- potheads are finally getting hangovers. Schottrundi! Then there's all of the horror stories of how people have fallen to their deaths or shot themselves while super-high on edibles. Compared to alcohol, an absolute drop in the bucket. In the States, it's legal for medical use in 33 states, legal for recreation in 10 states and not legal at all at the federal level. It makes it even hard to do lab-testing to verify potency and labeling. With so many conflicting laws, there's room to cheat and falsify everywhere: with labs being paid by vendors, there's an incentive to misrepresent potency to yield a more valuable product. Then there's the delivery method: in Holland and in America, an edible is almost always candy or chocolate or cakes. This raises the issue immediately about luring children into taking drugs. One doctor said she doesn't understand how you can't put Joe Camel on a pack of cigarettes, but it's perfectly legal to sell gummy bears with drugs in them. An excellent point. CBD usage is also on the rise. It's credited with curing pretty much everything, but there's literally no scientific evidence to back it up. CBD is extracted from hemp and has no psychoactive effect. The effective dose is apparently about 300-600mg per day, but most products are dosed much lower, at around 30mg. As with THC, there is a ton of leeway and room for cheating and fraud. You don't know what you're taking because there's no regulation, no testing and no agency in charge of it. As in Holland, the US also has problems with extracts: it's basically illegal to make them, despite the improved and more-accurate dosing. Also, with THC being legal only in some states, there's the problem of inter-state export. Up to 80% of Oregon's crop is liquified into extracts and exported to the East Coast, where it's not yet been legalized in many states. In the States, it's kind of a Wild West: companies doing an unregulated and half-assed job of making the transition from illegal drug-dealing to scaling up to a legal industrial-level organization. But there are no tests, no guarantee of cleanliness (they wear snoods for hair and beards, but it's not required). Saw it in English and Dutch with English subtitles. 1922 (2018) -- "8/10" Thomas Jane stars as Wilfred James, a smallholding farmer with 80 acres in Hemingford Home, Nebraska. He lives with wife Arlette and his son Henry. Arlette's father has just died and she's inherited his 100 acres. She sees the opportunity to sell the depressing farm that she hates and move to Omaha to open a dress shop. Wilfred and Henry wonder what they would do in the city. Wilfred has grown to hate his wife and her spitefulness and he works to turn her son against her. Wilford pretends to give in to Arlette and let her throw a party. She gets very drunk and he carries her upstairs to her bed, where she passes out. Wilford and Henry cut her throat and let her bleed out. They dump her in the dry well behind the house. Henry is consumed with guilt while Wilford is ... not. However, strange things start to happen -- whether in Wilford's head or for real. There are rats in the well, feasting on Arlette. Wilford finds them in the barn, chewing the cow's udders, having come in through a drainpipe that leads to the old well. Wilford throws a cow down the well as an excuse to fill it in and throw the police off of his scent. Henry and Shannon get pregnant, but Wilford and her father forbid it, sending her to a home for wayward girls to have the child. Henry runs away to become a thief and takes Shannon on the road to become the Sweetheart Bandits. Wilford learns all of this from his wife, who visits him as a corpse and, instead of killing him, whispers the stores in his ear. He'd been bitten in the hand by a rat a while before and the festering wound may have led to delirium...or perhaps it was real. At any rate, Wilford loses the hand. He can no longer run his farm, so he tries to sell it to Shannon's father, who wants nothing to do with him (his daughter is dead and his wife has left him). He is forced to sell to the pig farmers who would have sold much more dearly to Arlette, originally. Wilford ends up working in Omaha at shit jobs, leaving each when the rats find him again. He ends up in a hotel, writing his confession -- where we first met him at the beginning of the film. The rats make it through the walls. GLOW S03 (2019) -- "8/10" The start of the ladies' Vegas show is overshadowed by the Challenger disaster. Cherry goes back and forth on whether she really wants a baby. She also tries to get her ladies in better shape with showgirl dance classes. Debbie goes through a body-shame crisis while Ruth ... doesn't. But Ruth and Sam have some stuff to work out. Sam and Bash play tennis and Sam starts to wonder about his own health. Bash and Brittanica get their wheels under them as a couple. Justine is getting her movie made and she gets Sam signed on as director -- and he puts off celebrating while he hides a heart attack from her. Cut to a few months later and Cherry has a gambling problem, but solves it (feeling like a network series a bit there), the ladies go camping and are the worst campers ever. Melrose and Fortune Cookie have a shitty-story showdown where the Jewess has her "my grandfather can't buy a house without a basement or an attic" positively bitch-slapped by Fortune Cookie's "I lost everyone in my family but my uncle when we barely escaped Cambodia's Killing Fields". Justine and Sam are making her movie and ask Ruth to try out for a part, but then go with someone else. Although Ruth had professed her love for Sam, she now is so conflicted that she can't even, which only goes to show that you just cannot date the arts. Too much crazy, really. Ruth's whole being is wrapped up with being an actress which is why she also turns down Debbie's offer to direct her new wrestling show on Bash's TV network that he bought in a deal that Debbie stole out from under her wonderful, but ultimately condescending boyfriend (a relationship whose earth is positively scorched). Carmen (Machu Piccu) is off to wrestle with her brother on the road, Yolanda is a pre-version of an SJW who's got such a huge chip on her shoulder about everyone constantly failing her purity tests that it's a wonder she doesn't walk around in a tight circle. Beirut comes out officially as a lesbian, to no-one's surprise. Sheila doffs the wolf costume and turns out to be an amazing actress, capable of memorizing and delivering entire plays. There are some lovely musical numbers and some horrific homophobia (it's 1986) in the last couple of shows. Oh, and Bash kind of comes out to Brittanica when he ends up making out/fucking the gigolo that she'd hired to make him jealous. He tries to jump right back into the closet though, with mixed results. He confesses to Debbie and they become partners on the aforementioned TV station that will be the set of season 4. Debbie grew in this season; Ruth didn't -- kind of a lateral move, but that might be her story; Sam was mostly stable, less dickish; Bash grew in power, but diminished personally. A decent season. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3838 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3838 Mon, 11 Nov 2019 22:42:07 +0100 of around 1400 ratings publicly available. I've included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other -- I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. El Camino: A Breaking Bad Movie (2019) -- "9/10" This is a wonderful coda to Breaking Bad, with Aaron Paul reprising his role as Jesse. This is a different Jesse, one who's been tortured, kept in a cage, just so that he can continue to cook meth. We see his escape in Todd's (Jesse Plemons) El Camino and then see the rest as flashbacks. Jesse's first stop is at the house of his two old buddies, who are still extremely loyal and nearly ridiculously nice. They help Jesse shake the cops, sacrificing themselves for him. Jesse goes back to Todd's apartment after it's been blocked off as a crime scene and tosses the house to find Todd's stash. He eventually finds it in the refrigerator door, but is interrupted by two other guys posing as cops who are looking for Todd's stash. Jesse is forced to share with them and walks away with only a third. Jesse's trying to start a new life and he turns again to the same guy who was supposed to help him get out the last time (Ed, played by Robert Forster). Ed is not happy that Jesse bailed on him last time and still wants his money. So when Jesse shows up with a bag full of money, he's a few thousand shy (of the total of $250,000). Ed will not be moved. Jesse is forced to leave. We see throughout the flashbacks how Jesse constantly gets into worse trouble because of his refusal to commit violence, refusal to use his gun, refusal to kill. He finds where the other two guys are holed up and waits until they're alone, then storms into their office to ask them for a few thousand more. Just a few thousand, then he's out of their hair. They can't believe their ears and one of them, sensing weakness, proposes a good, old-fashioned shootout, mano a mano. Jesse wins and kills the two dudes, cowing the other three friends who are there. He takes the rest of the money and leaves -- finally having chosen himself instead of sparing some other idiot's life. In the final scene, we see him with Ed in Alaska somewhere, going off to his new life. Recommended in general, but highly recommended for fans of Breaking Bad. American Gods S02 (2019) -- "9/10" This season is just as visually stunning as season 1, if not more so. The story of the war of the Gods continues. Shadow Moon (Ricky Whittle) is still at the center of the action. His character grows in an interesting direction, getting more of a backbone the more he sees the treachery of the Gods. We see a lot more of Mad Sweeney than in the book, but he's played wonderfully by Pablo Schreiber and is integrated well into the main plotline. "Dead Wife" (Emily Browning) still rubs me all kinds of the wrong way -- her unearned confidence is like a jarring note in the well-tuned orchestra of the other characters. This is possibly deliberate, but I'm never happy to see her show up. The other characters are back, Crispin Glover as new God Mr. World, Bruce Langley with an expanded role as Technical Boy, the always-excellent Orlando Jones as Mr. Nancy, and, of course, Ian McShane as Mr. Wednesday. More and more, though, the stories, the fables, the legends, these define the style of the show. It's an absolutely beautiful show, with wonderful music, that takes its time with scenes only tangentially connected to the main storyline. This is what makes a show good, even legendary. It's not afraid to tell its story the way it wants, in a highbrow and cinematically lovely way, without worrying about whether bingers are going to like it or fast-forward through it. I'm glad they made season two and am excited to hear that the story continues in season 3 (filming September 2019) and even a season 4 (currently being written by Gaiman et. al.) Emily Heller: Ice Thickeners (2019) -- 8/10 I'd never heard of her before YouTube tossed up her special like video flotsam from the depths of the content ocean. I was very pleasantly surprised: her material is very naturally presented, not really self-deprecating but honest. Not unexpectedly, she talks about female issues: empowerment, therapy, diets, fat-shaming, working out, etc. Somehow, she's very funny where so many others are preachy. She's pretty awesome, actually -- doesn't give up humor for preaching/shaming. You can watch the video below. [media] Bojack Horseman S06 (2019) -- "9/10" The first half of the final season of this fantastic series sees Bojack in rehab. He's so afraid of leaving rehab that he re-ups four times, driving his therapist (Champ, voiced by Sam Richardson, or Richard Splett from Veep) mad because he's heard all of Bojack's stories several times. Princess Caroline is raising her hedgehog kid, with Todd's help, although Todd (Aaron Paul) is still CEO at WhatTimeIsIt?.com and working on his dating app for asexuals. Diane is going through her own journey, working for Sploosh as a hard-hitting journalist whose asked to be a lot less hard-hitting when Sploosh is acquired by a larger company, the White Whale Corp. (or something like that). She ends up moving in with her cameraman, Guy (LaKeith Stanfield), who tries to be a stable rock for her, but can't prevent her from going back into depression. Mr. Peanutbutter confesses to his fiancé Pickles that he cheated on her with Diane. They both agree that the only way to continue their relationship is to let her cheat on him with someone equally meaningful to her. With Bojack traveling the country, visiting friends and family, Mr. Peanutbutter touring the country as the "face of depression" (highly ironic), we focus on Hollyhock, who's growing up and going out in New York. Also, reporters have finally started digging into the circumstances surrounding Sarah Lynn's death (Bojack's former co-star, with whom he went on a wild bender just before she died a few seasons ago). Orange is the New Black S07 (2019) -- "10/10" It was nice to see that the final season was the strongest one. Though the whole run has been about the drawbacks, unfairness and ugliness of the American prison system, it feels like they finally took the kid gloves off for the final season. At the end of one of the previous seasons, many of the inmates had been scattered to the winds, to other prisons. We see that at least a few ended up in an ICE detainment center. Some of the ladies (Nicky, Gloria, Flaca, Red, Lorna) from Litchfield are sent there as cheap labor to work in the kitchen. We see the unfairness of a system that has everything to do with incarceration and punishment for having dared to transgress the sacred borders of the United States and nothing to do with justice or fairness or compassion. Maritza ends up being deported "back" to Colombia, a country she's never visited. Blanca hangs on to finally get justice and is one of the few success stories: she ends up going to Honduras to be with Angel, her husband, who'd been deported in a sweep. Meanwhile, Red is in the early-to-mid stages of dementia exacerbated by a long stretch in solitary confinement (aging prison population), Lorna can't handle that her child died (mental illness), Tasty is going back and forth on whether to kill herself because of her unjust sentencing for the riot (depression), Cindy is dealing with life on the outside, eventually as an itinerant/homeless person whose family doesn't want to accept her back, Piper is dealing with being on parole -- the piss tests, the difficult employment, the shaming, the judgment -- and trying to figure out her relationship with Vause, who's been once again forced into smuggling contraband for McCullogh, the least evil of the guards (and with whom she semi-starts a romantic relationship). Suzanne stays Suzanne, for the most part, growing a bit and mourning the loss of her friend Pensatucky, who OD'd after she thought she'd been cheated out of her GED by a world that had proven itself to, once again, be callous and uncaring. The other guards are a mixed bag, with Dixon ending up being the nicest and Hellman the absolute worst (promoted to warden, at the end). Luschek redeems himself, in the end, but only after fucking things up royally. Caputo and Fig have a decent story arc and end up being decent human beings, trying to make their way through a broken system. In the end, this season is a damning condemnation of the U.S. prison system and general attitude toward the poor, racial minorities, immigrants and anyone who isn't rich and white. They didn't hit it too hard -- just right, I think. It felt more like a richly imagined documentary, at times. It's possible that things are better than this, but everything you read in the news points to things being far, far worse. Atlanta S01 (2016) -- "8/10" Donald Glover wrote, directed and stars in this series about the life of Earn, a young guy down on his luck and looking for a break in Atlanta. He has a daughter with Van (Zazie Beetz), but he's technically homeless. So he crashes with Van, when he can, or with his Cousin Paperboi, an aspiring rapper. Earn convinces Paperboi to let him manage him and, together with Darius (Lakeith Stanfield), they slowly start to put some money together, though not much, and not consistently. It's an interesting vibe, with a lot of "skits" (for lack of a better word) about racism, basically. There's one where Darius goes to a shooting range with a poster of a dog. He's drummed out of the range for being a madman because he's shooting dogs instead of people. There's another where Earn is mistaken for another black man by a clueless white woman/agent. In another, Van and Earn visit her mother (I think?) whose white husband is so much "for the black people" that he's an embarrassment. Another episode deals with the stupidity/shallowness of the club scene. Another deals with social-media stars who coattail on Paperboi to make their own "paper". These are quite nuanced takes. My favorite was the one where Darius helped Earn make more money. They started by selling Earn's smartphone. In this first pawn shop, Darius asks Earn whether he needs the money that day or whether he wants to make more money. Earn hears and instead. So Darius tells him to trade for a kitana sword instead. They take it to friends of his and trade up again, this time for a Cane Corso. One stop later and they drop the dog off at another friend's -- this one way out in the countryside. Earn is growing more agitated and wonders when he's going to get his money. "September", says Darius. "[I] needed that money. Not in September. But ... today. You see, I'm poor, Darius. And poor people don't have time for investments. Because poor people are too busy trying not be poor. I need to eat today, not in September." Darius gives him his smartphone, claiming he gets a new one every month anyway, so "people can't track [him]". It's a well-written show with great actors. Recommended. The Kominsky Method S02 (2019) -- "9/10" The second season is almost as strong as the first one. We see Norman (Alan Arkin) start to put out feelers into the dating world, with Madeleine (Jane Seymour). His daughter gets out of rehab and seems to be putting her life back together and Norman must learn how to forgive her and believe in her once again. Sandy (Michael Douglas) picks up where he left off, reconnecting with Lisa (Nancy Travis), at first platonically, then, once again, with benefits. His daughter Mindy (Sarah Baker) moves in with the much older Martin (Paul Reiser), a retired schoolteacher, whom Sandy at first mistrusts, but then befriends. After Martin has a heart attack and has bypass surgery, Lisa asks Sandy to see a doctor, after which he is diagnosed with lung cancer. They caught it early and he starts immunotherapy treatments. Mindy, as the owner of Kominsky's studio, starts brining in other actors to support Sandy -- something he doesn't take well at all. However, the drug regimen he's on brings out the worst in him and he's starting to rub his students the wrong way. Norman considers grooming his grandson to take over his business -- after seeing what a terrific salesman he is when he tries to convert Norman to Scientology (which he'd actually quit himself, and from which he'd stolen 1.3 million dollars). The season ends with the two old fogies drinking scotch on Norman's terrace, just like the end of the first season, a little further down life's road and slightly more the worse for wear. Still highly recommended. Queer Eye S04 (2019) -- "7/10" I gave it only a seven out of ten because the formula that they use necessitates repetition. Any individual show is an 8-to-9, but a whole season of them runs together and gets a little boring. It's definitely not binge material, but, it's nice filler, reliable, but doesn't really knock your socks off. They find pretty pleasant people on which to express their largess in the form of a truly staggering amount of money in the form of clothes and a complete home-remodeling. The five guys are still really good, working well together. Poor Bobby still does the lion's share of the work, redecorating an entire home while Anthony spends one afternoon in a kitchen, Tan goes shopping for a day, and Jonathan cuts hair and, if available, beard. Granted, Tan has to fill the whole closet and Karamo has to find fun things to do, but Bobby's slaving away no matter where the others are. It's still an uplifting show about generally nice people. Katherine Ryan: Glitter Room (2019) -- "9/10" Ryan is very, very funny and very clever. She grew up in Canada and moved to England, where she lives the single-mom life with her daughter, Violet. A lot of her act centers on being a single mom, the judgment she gets from other mothers ("Jane's on my dick all the time"), how everyone seems to think that she's missing a man in her life, and how fancy and proper her daughter is (who, she purports, uses words that her Mom has to look up on Google). Highly recommended. Seth Meyers: Lobby Baby (2019) -- "9/10" Meyers delivered a consummate, tight set that ranged from some low-key intro material about his job as a late-night host, then into the meat of the show: talking about his wife (OCD prosecutor), his marriage, his children and their births. Don't be scared off, though: it's very good material. Not only that, but he reaps it twice: once when he tells the joke and then, later, when he's pretending to be his wife telling her side of things. This is a really nice trick and it goes on for more than five minutes. He revisits many of the jokes he told and explains them from her perspective. At one point, he plays her playing him playing Sherlock Holmes. It was a very clever way of providing a unique second perspective on all of his jokes about his family and a different way of being self-deprecating. About 3/4 of the way through, he goes into his first political material. It's also very good and he introduces this section with a "Skip Politics" button. This is 100% legit. It is a "safe space" button for thin-skinned MAGAs. He does about ten minutes of top-notch political material, then finishes by pausing and then saying: "So my point is I guess I misjudged him and I think he's a very good president." If you press "Skip Politics", you're taken to exactly that moment. Again, smooth, very smooth. I thought his best political joke was when he compared being a comedian during the Trump presidency to being a gravedigger in the Middle Ages. He finishes the segment about his wife by saying that as long as he can enjoy turning around a single coat-hanger in his OCD wife's closet and then waiting until her "Spidey Sense" goes off, he'll be happy in his marriage. He finishes the segment playing his wife talking about him saying that as long as she can enjoy making her husband scan the fridge, bathed in blue light, for a yogurt that isn't there because he's too afraid to ask her again, she'll be happy in her marriage. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3799 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3799 Sun, 10 Nov 2019 23:31:00 +0100 of around 1400 ratings publicly available. I've included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other -- I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. Bill Burr: Paper Tiger (2019) -- "8/10" Burr's latest outing started out a little harsh -- he spent a few minutes yelling at people who weren't there, but he settled into his material really well and delivered a much better set than his previous special (Walk Your Way Out, where he spent an absolutely inordinate amount of time fat-shaming). This one starts off the same way -- seemingly almost deliberately -- but then turns into a much more nuanced show, with well-developed and deeply thought-out and well-delivered jokes. His material is mostly about identity -- surprisingly enough -- about his black wife and her frustration with white culture (and she's right), about #metoo, about the loss of due process, about his own battle with emotions and his upbringing. The article "Bill Burr’s New Stand-up Special Is So Much Better Than Its First 4 Minutes" is a very solid review. Between Two Ferns: The Movie (2019) -- "7/10" Zach Galifianakis stars in this feature film based on his interview show from YouTube. In it, he's in a backwater local-news station and he gets a chance to take his oddball show to the big-time on Will Ferrel's Funny Or Die network. All he has to do is bag 20 more interviews with celebrities within a month. So he hits the road with his crew and, mysteriously, continues to get big-ticket interviews, all the while disastrously screwing things up. He manages it (unsurprisingly) and (unsurprisingly) everything works out in the end. Galifianikis proves his chops and shows that he can expand his skit show to a full-length movie more adeptly than many others before him. Starred Up (2013) -- "7/10" This is a British film about a young man Eric transferred from a juvenile detention facility to the same adult prison as his father. His father is lieutenant to the boss of the prison and tries to keep Eric from letting his rage issues ruin him. He does not succeed, as Eric is an absolute tornado of fury and stupidity. He gets a temporary reprieve when he is recruited into therapy group. Unfortunately, Eric makes the mistake of taking to therapy and befriending the black youths in the group with him. There is an attack on Eric, he's saved by one of his new friends, cementing his life lesson that friends can be found everywhere, but his father isn't too pleased about his fraternizing. His father, on the other hand, is not just lieutenant, but also lover, something that Eric can't abide. Stupid fistfights ensue, Eric is put in solitary, the guards have it in for him and try to hang him. His father ends up saving him and they reconcile before they part ways to different prisons. Manufacturing Consent: Noam Chomsky and the Media (1992) -- "9/10" This is a masterful documentary about the first 30 or 35 years of Noam Chomsky's career. The full video is available on YouTube (linked below). [media] I've included some citations from the film below. When asked about what he's trying to do for people, he says, "People should try to understand the world and act according to their decent impulses. And they should act to improve the world. And many people are going to be willing to do that. But they have to understand and, as far as I can see, I see that I'm simply helping people build a sort of intellectual self-defense." On the challenge involved in educating others and yourself, on the isolating nature of our society and the deliberate nature of it. "It means you have to develop an independent mind. And work on it. That's extremely hard to do alone. The beauty of our system is that it isolates everybody. Each person is sitting alone, in front of the tube. It's very hard to have ideas or thoughts under those circumstances. You can't fight the world alone. Some people can, but it's pretty rare. The way to do it is through organization. So courses of intellectual self-defense will have to be in the context of political and other organization." On how much work is required to be able to think lucidly about the world, to parse through the bullshit. On how tempting it is to just let the propagandistic miasma wash over you instead of fighting it. "The point is you have to work. And that’s why the propaganda system is so successful. Very few people are going to have the time, or the energy, or the commitment, to carry out the constant battle that’s required, to get outside of MacNeil/Lehrer, or Dan Rather, or somebody like that. The easy thing to do [is] come home from work, you’re tired, just had a busy day, you’re not gonna spend the evening carrying on a research project, so you turn on the tube, say it’s probably right, look at the headlines of the paper, then you watch sports or something. That’s basically how the system of indoctrination works. Sure the other stuff is there but you’re gonna have to work to find it." On how our civilization works, what that is costing our planet, and the choice that stands before us: either we stop doing what we're doing or we accept the consequences. "Modern industrial civilization has developed within a system of convenient myths. The driving force of modern industrial civilization has been individual material gain. Accepted as legitimate, even praiseworthy, on the grounds that private vices yield public benefits in the classic formulation. "Now it's long been understood that a society that's based on this principle will destroy itself in time. It can only persist with whatever suffering and injustice it entails, as long as it's possible to pretend that the destructive forces that humans create are limited, that the world is an infinite resource and that the world is an infinite garbage can. "At this stage of history, either one of two things is possible. Either the general population will take control of its own destiny and will concern itself with community, guided by values of solidarity and sympathy and concern for others or, alternatively, there will be no destiny for anyone to control. As long as some specialized class is in a position of authority, it is going to set policy in the special interest that it serves." The Seven Five (2014) -- "8/10" This is a documentary about an out-of-control police precinct in New York City -- actually more an out-of-control cop who ropes in his partner into the most sordid, criminal shit you can imagine. The worst one was Michael Dowd. He and his partner basically started working for the drug dealer that they're supposed to be stopping, Adam Diaz. He's easily the funniest guy in the movie. "And on top of that, his sister, was in love with me. Beautiful girl. I was banging the shit out o' her." Dowd's partner was only a bit better -- but he ended up turning state's evidence on Dowd. It's a decent story, well-told and well-put-together. The video is available on YouTube (linked below). [media] Escape at Dannemora (2018) -- "8/10" This is a seven-part -- the last part is 90 minutes -- reenactment of an actual breakout from the Clinton Correctional Facility in upstate New York, near the Canadian border. We meet two of the three main characters in the sewing work area, prisoner David Sweat (Paul Dano) and sewing overseer Tilly Mitchell (Patricia Arquette). They are in a completely illicit relationship and not hiding it as well as they think. In order to avoid getting caught for real, Sweat is transferred from his sewing post and replaced with Sweat's best friend, the well-connected Richard Matt (Benicio del Toro). . Matt soon seduces Tilly, at first providing communication to Sweat for a heartbroken Tilly. Tilly is a hard woman, not especially bright, but shrewd. She's mean, a facet that shows up the most in her scenes with her husband Lyle (Eric Lange), who's a nice bovine, also mean in some ways, but mostly a decent guy who's very ignorant/stupid. There are other guards and other prisoners, none of whom are very clever and most of whom are mean and small-minded. They can be forgiven for this because their lives are ones of quiet desperation, constantly under duress, breathtakingly poor and woefully under-informed. At one point, Matt discovers the prison behind the walls -- an entrance to the steam tunnels between the walls and floors. He and Sweat start to dig their way through the walls behind their beds. They break through and start to explore at night. Sweat starts digging through one wall after another, until he hits the outer wall of the prison -- seven feet thick. With a sigh, he starts digging. Some time later, though, he discovers that the big steam pipe next to the last wall has been turned off for the summer. He starts chopping through the pipe while Matt schemes with and woos Tilly to hook her into the plan to pick them up after their escape. Sooner than expected, it's time to go. Sweat does a dry run out to the manhole cover across the street from the prison, but goes back to escape for real the next night with Matt. Tilly is in the hospital and doesn't pick them up. Matt and Sweat head into the woods, northward to Canada. Matt is a terrible hiking companion; he's slow and nearly constantly drunk after the first cabin, which had a good supply of booze. It's set up nicely: for the first 90% of the show, before the escape, we don't know why Matt and Sweat are in prison, so we root for them to escape. It's only after they've escaped that we learn of their crimes. Sweat's is a murder, but he didn't do it (ostensibly) whereas Matt very definitely is a cold-hearted murderer. Matt is caught first, shot by police. Sweat survives on his own, making incredible time relative to previously, almost making it to the border, but getting hunted down and shot by a police officer. Tilly is prosecuted for her role in the escape and Sweat is convicted and sentenced to prison for the rest of his life. The acting is excellent all-around and not at all insulting to upstate New York. That's just the way it is, for the most part. National Lampoon's Animal House (1978) -- "8/10" This is the classic movie about a severely underperforming frat house. It is one of the better vehicles for former SNL cast-members. It was directed by John Landis and mostly written by Harold Ramis. John Belushi is good as "Bluto" but Tim Matheson as "Otter" and Peter Riegert as "Boon", two smooth-talking representatives of the frat house. Karen Allen was funny as Katy (Otter's girlfriend) and Donald Sutherland as a toking professor and Kevin Bacon as a stuck-up student from a competing frat were also very good. The plot is well-known: the frat must avoid Dean Wormer's wrath in order to stay on campus, despite the best efforts of the other, richer and snobbier frat houses on campus, who do their level best to frame Delta house. Delta does almost nothing to save themselves, preferring to through one rager after another and to endanger their continued existence with sophomoric highjinks that are, admittedly, often hilarious (and totally worth it). Their final attack -- on the annual parade, with a specially designed vehicle called the "Deathmobile", which emerges from beneath a giant float that looks like a cake and on which is written "Eat Me". A classic; recommended. Deon Cole: Cole Hearted (2019) -- "9/10" I really liked Deon's last special and I think he's found his groove even better in this one. He's from Chicago, playing in Atlanta. He jokes about thanking Jesus at the right time and for the right reasons. He has good amount of material on relationships and spends some time praising women of all shapes and sizes, but especially "healthier" women. The Good Place S04 (2019) -- "9/10" This season sees the five core characters punished by the judge (Maya Rudolph) for having broken some of the rules of the afterlife. She also finds the Bad Place guilty of illegal manipulations (obviously) and makes them face off in an effort to prove, once and for all, whether humanity is allowed to continue to exist. So the judge sets up a competition: the five get to run the Good Place experiment again, but with four humans chosen by the Bad Place. If those humans show any signs of improvement at the end of the experiment (i.e. they've accumulated Good Points), then humanity is allowed to continue to struggle its way along; if not, then ... not. The Bad Place cheats, of course: they send a demon in the form of a human (Linda), they kidnap Janet and replace her with a Bad Janet, they make a copy of Michael and try to replace him, too. Also, Chidi is one of the candidates, but with his mind wiped, which is very painful for Eleanor. Also, one of the other candidates is Simone (a bit of a PITA), with whom Chidi is likely to fall in love. The other two candidates are the nearly irredeemable John (a former Internet gossip-columnist) and Brent (a former ... rich, entitled, arrogant douchebag). Big Mouth S03 (2019) -- "9/10" The third season exceeded the second one and possibly even the first. The two hormone monsters (Nick Kroll and Maya Rudolph) are relentlessly funny, as is Andrew Glouberman and his entire family (especially his dad, who's voiced by Richard Kind). The writing is outstanding and draws and builds heavily on the characters we've come to know over the first two seasons. The arc was really steady and quite rewarding. Highly recommended. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3756 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3756 Fri, 13 Sep 2019 23:01:08 +0200 -- "5/10" 2. "Anthony Jeselnik: Fire in the Maternity Ward" <#Anthony> -- "4/10" 3. "Stranger Things S03" <#Stranger> -- "8/10" 4. "Snowpiercer (2012)" <#Snowpiercer> -- "9/10" 5. "Russian Doll" <#Russian> -- "8/10" 6. "Wine Country (2019)" <#Wine> -- "6/10" 7. "Derry Girls (2018/2019)" <#Derry> -- "9/10" 8. "Django Unchained (2012)" <#Django> -- "9/10" 9. "The Americans S05 (2017)" <#Americans> -- "8/10" 10. "Monty Python's Flying Circus S01-02 (1969--1970)" <#Monty> -- "8/10" 11. "Dave Chappelle: Sticks and Stones (2019)" <#Dave> -- "8/10" 12. "Shaft (2019)" <#Shaft> -- "6/10" 13. "Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (2017)" <#Jumanji> -- "7/10" These are my notes to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. I've recently transferred my reviews to IMDb and made "the list" of around 1400 ratings publicly available. I've included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other -- I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. Jessica Jones S03 -- "5/10" I expected a lot more from season three after reading so many good things about it. Unfortunately, it's a turgid story dragged down by a ton of side-plots about side-characters. There are long swaths of the show in which Jessica Jones is missing entirely. She's the best thing about this show. Instead, we get to follow along as Trish develops into a super-hero. Trish is a dipshit. I can't tell whether the actress playing her is terrible or whether she's deliberately poorly written. I can't tell if the writers honestly expect us to like her. I'm afraid that they just might. Malcom has his own drama, which is largely uninteresting. Hogarth is in the same camp, dragging a plotline about her college lover that is largely useless. Her quest to end her ALS or her life is still a thing, but it's a boring thing. Salinger is the new baddie and he seems to be the quintessential person featured in /r/iamverysmart entries. Again, I can't tell whether the show writers really expect us to take him seriously. I can't bring myself to do it. They treat him like an evil genius, but he's barely par. Did NCIS or CSI lend some of their writers to this show? The writing team has discarded no plotline. There is no character too minor to not plumb their depths. They focus not only on Trish, but also Malcolm, Jerry, Kith, Eric -- literally everyone but Jessica. You know you've gone too far as a writer when you're writing dialogue between Malcolm (a second- or third-tier character) and his girlfriend (vanishingly small influence on the plot), talking about the girlfriend's father, who was once in the CIA...OHMYGODIDONTCARE. There are some good scenes, but they are unfortunately few and far between. I'm sick of having to spend 50%70% of my time watching Trish's entitled and insipid speeches and lectures. This show has been Bechdeled into the ground. I wrote the above at about 6 or 7 episodes in. Unfortunately, it has not gotten better. I'm actually going to deduct another point for the absolute ham-handedness of Trish's character and how the other characters view her. Trish is allowed to murder people, and can chastise Jessica for not suitably handling the murderer of their mother. No-one in Trish's circle thinks she should go to prison for her crimes -- they protect her and let her kill again. It takes forever -- and three murders -- until they finally get it. Trish's powers supposedly don't include enhanced strength but she's depicted throwing men around as if they were paperback books. It's just a cycle of watching Jessica make the same mistake over and over again. It's not very entertaining. At least in episodes 11 and 12 Jessica showed up again, for maybe 40% of the show. So that was nice. Also, Jessica was allowed to be clever, as well, which was a nice change of pace for the show writers. Trish is still the favorite of the show, though, and, I think, non-ironically. Anthony Jeselnik: Fire in the Maternity Ward -- "4/10" Jeselnik's delivery is too slow and his jokes are not as good as he thinks they are. His admonishments to the crowd that they don't even get how brilliant his jokes are. I know that's his schtick, but he's not nearly clever enough for me. His twist endings aren't surprising anymore. I couldn't even finish watching it yet, to be honest. Stranger Things S03 -- "8/10" Season three is much stronger than season two -- carried by a few of its characters. Dustin is much better than I expected, as is Steve. Their new friend Robin is excellent and fun. Hopper is also wonderful once he lets his inner Magnum fly. Eleven is decent, while Mike and Steve continue to be really annoying, but that's about par for the course for boys of any generation. This time out, they're trying to keep the Russians for opening the portal to the upside-down. The American bad guys are gone, replaced by more appropriately cold-war meanies. Poor Billy is taken by the Mind Flayer nearly immediately. He starts to take victims, harvesting more people for his master. Dustin, Steve and Robin engage Erica's help (Steve's sister) to break into the Russian base, far below the Starcourt Mall. The Mind Flayer gathers power and then breaks out into reality, hunting Eleven. There are a lot of nice touches, rooted in the 80s -- so much authentic stuff. When she's going through the ducts, Erica has a flashlight strapped to her head that is the exact same model we had at my parents' house for 30 years. Snowpiercer (2012) -- "9/10" I'd already seen this film in "2014" , but wanted to watch it again after having seen a delightful and maddeningly convincing hypothesis that "it was a sequel to Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory" . Five years ago, I gave it a 9/10 rating and nothing has changed in a second viewing. Delightful. It was fun watching it with the Willy Wonka theory in mind. I showed my co-viewer the Willy Wonka video afterward and she agreed that it was deviously plausible. As for the film itself, see my previous review for more details, if you're interested. Russian Doll -- "8/10" Natasha Lyonne stars as an iconoclastic, self-reliant video-game programmer and New Yorker who keeps reliving her birthday. Over the course of many repetitions, we find out more about her life and her companions. She meets another man, Alan, who is also reliving the same day over and over. This is an interesting examination of being, nothingness, existence, time and epistemology. Together, Alan and Nadia discover how their new limbo works and experiment to figure out how to get out of the time loop that they're in. Lyonne is a tremendous actress, easily capable of carrying a show on her own. Still, Charlie Barnett as Alan is also very good. It's a cool concept -- we find out more and more detail with each repetition. The homeless guy is very good -- there are some very Terry Gilliam-esque moments. In the end, they have to save each other -- literally -- in order to escape. A fun ride. Wine Country (2019) -- "6/10" This was a light but insufficiently clever romp with some good comediennes, most of them SNL alums: Amy Poehler, Rachel Dratch, Ana Gasteyer, Maya Rudolph, Paula Pell, Emily Spivey. Tina Fey plays the owner of the bed and breakfast where they spend their weekend in Napa Valley for Dratch's 50th birthday. Things happen, things change, things are resolved, stuff works out in the end. Derry Girls (2018/2019) -- "9/10" This is a very clever and well-written show about Catholic high-school girls growing up in (London)Derry in Northern Ireland. The many characters are unique and fun. They all have nearly impenetrable accents. We've had to turn on the subtitles twice, but only for a few sentences. There are Erin the main character, Michelle, the slut, Claire the overexcitable lesbian, Orla is Erin's cousin and a bit of space cadet/lovable loser/rebel and James. an English boy who's Michelle's cousin and who attends the girls' school because he would be killed in the boys' school. The first season takes place just before the end of The Troubles and deals largely with the girls' trials and tribulations in school. The second season ends with the first ceasefire and a visit from U.S. President Bill Clinton. Highly recommended. Django Unchained (2012) -- "9/10" A second viewing in German made me raise the film by one star over my initial viewing. Christoph Waltz as Schultz is a loquacious revelation and Jamie Foxx is steady and cool in the lead. The Americans S05 (2017) -- "8/10" Paige is still a spectacular pain in the ass. Oleg is back in the USSR, working for the KGB and still trying to do the right thing. Elizabeth and Philip are now posing as flight attendant and pilot, respectively and are working a dissident Soviet grain specialist who should be able to help them figure out how the U.S. is planning to attack the Soviet grain supply. Stan is still working at the FBI an being betrayed by them at every turn. He's trying like hell to protect Oleg from CIA intervention. Gabriel (Frank Langella) is still the Jennings's handler. The Jennings have adopted a son, Tuan, a Vietnamese emigré. Monty Python's Flying Circus S01-02 (1969--1970) -- "8/10" Season one is a bit rough, but already contains many of the standard elements that will make them famous: the "It's Man", the "Now It's Time for Something Completely Different Man" and the various characters that are obviously based on various luminaries of the BBC. A couple of the bits I know from the "Final Rip Off" are in the first season. The second season contains many more skits that made it into the "Final Rip Off" but also a couple that were exceedingly clever and that I'd never seen before. Their powers of memorization are at-times prodigious, especially Cleese and Idle, who can recite long stretches of complex dialogue, even if it's all turned-about and completely non-intuitive. Dave Chappelle: Sticks and Stones (2019) -- "8/10" Chappelle returns quickly with a new show, relatively quickly after his last two shows. His style is more conversational and lends itself to longer presentations. His show is more of a blog-post style, where he ruminates about several topics, sometimes without even obvious punchlines. He's very provocative with some jokes: some work, some less so. Overall, he's on point and makes sense. Some of his more provocative points are only that because of the highly charge and overly sensitive atmosphere today (in which there are more than enough professional victims willing to be offended on behalf of any number of identity groups). I thought his best joke was about dealing with the censors at the network when he was still doing The Chappelle Show: he was called down for one of his scripts because he used the word "faggot". He asked why he wasn't allowed to use that word, while he was allowed to say "nigger" all he wanted. The censor responded that he wasn't allowed to use the former slur because he wasn't gay. He responded that "I ain't a nigger either." Boom. Recommended. Shaft (2019) -- "6/10" This is a pretty formulaic but still reasonably entertaining reboot of the Shaft films from the seventies. Samuel Jackson stars at the title character, with Jessie T. Usher as his son. While Shaft is more of a vigilante detective, his son is an FBI data analyst whose a straight arrow. This is actually a big joke, that he's a useless nerd versus the slick risk-taker and rule-breaker that is his father. In order for him to solve the case he's on, he will have to enlist not only his father's help, but also his grandfather's help (in the form of the original Shaft, Richard Roundtree). In the end, he wins the girl, he shoots up the bad guys, he solves the case, he saved the city, he tells the FBI to go fuck themselves, and then he embarks on a life of moral vigilantism with his father and grandfather. The end. Jumanji: Welcome to the Jungle (2017) -- "7/10" Dwayne Johnson, Kevin Hart, Jack Black and Karen Gillan (Nebula from Guardians of the Galaxy) reboot the original as four kids from different walks of life who end up serving detention together. They find an old video-game console and get sucked into the game of Jumanji. There they discover that they aren't so different after all and all grow a lot and solve lots of puzzles and fun stuff. They also find another kid who's been lost in the game for 20 years and join up with him to save the eye of the jaguar and, thus, Jumanji. It was reasonably amusing, with The Rock and Kevin Hart hogging the spotlight and delivering most of the star power. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3757 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3757 Sat, 06 Jul 2019 21:33:26 +0200 -- "4/10" 2. "D.L. Hughley: Contrarian (2018)" <#Contrarian> -- "8/10" 3. "Aquaman (2018)" <#Aquaman> -- "5/10" 4. "Crazy Rich Asians (2018)" <#Crazy> -- "8/10" 5. "Dead to Me (2019)" <#Dead> -- "6/10" 6. "The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018)" <#Ballad> -- "10/10" 7. "Game of Thrones S08 (2019)" <#Game> -- "8/10" 8. "Fleabag (2016)" <#Fleabag> -- "8/10" 9. "Jean Claude Van Johnson (2016)" <#Jean> -- "9/10" 10. "The Man Who Killed Don Quixote (2018)" <#Quixote> -- "9/10" 11. "The Man in the High Castle S01 (2015)" <#High> -- "8/10" 12. "Veep S07 (2019)" <#Veep> -- "10/10" 13. "John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum (2019)" <#John> -- "8/10" These are my notes to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. I've recently transferred my reviews to IMDb and made "the list" of around 1400 ratings publicly available. I've included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other -- I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. Transformers: The Last Knight (2017) -- "4/10" Anthony Hopkins is a British robot expert who's also peerage. Mark Wahlberg is Cade Jaeger, the last knight, chosen to fight the last fight. The story was something about an artifact, about some old generations of transformers that used to fight with humans (during the crusades?) and then a planet-sized ball of transformer technology trying to consume the Earth. Also there's Merlin, King Arthur, a round table of Transformer knights -- and I kinda lost track of it. Utterly forgettable. D.L. Hughley: Contrarian (2018) -- "8/10" He started off kind of slowly, but picked up speed and settled intoa a pretty great routine. His outfit was outrageous but appropriate. He talks about his family and people. I can't remember any of his jokes, but I laughed out loud a few times. Aquaman (2018) -- "5/10" So many things were just off about this movie. The best thing about this movie -- and I expected this -- was Jason Momoa as Aquaman himself. How the hell did Black Manta fall unconscious into the water in a metal suit and then roll up on a piece of wood? His helmet's smashed -- how did he not drown? He's just human, right? And are we supposed to care about him and his desire for revenge for his dead father? A father who was killed while trying to kill Aquaman? After he and his father had killed a bunch of members of the crew of a sub while trying to pirate it, his father died because Aquaman refused to help him (because the dad had shot him point-blank). The underwater scenes were in the uncanny valley. Most of the CGI looked somehow cartoonish, as well, unfortunately. And those scenes took up a lot of the movie, with an epic battles between forces we hadn't been taught to care about, at all. The story was a cookie-cutter plot about ascension and wasn't particularly interesting. Nicole Kidman, as Aquaman's mom, was seriously de-aged in most of her scenes. Even the end-credits music was so lame -- some wavering female voice crooning away. Crazy Rich Asians (2018) -- "8/10" This movie was better than expected. It's the story of a couple -- Rachel (Constance Wu) and Nick (Henry Golding) -- living in New York -- I'm not going to say "Asian" couple because (A) it doesn't matter and (B) everyone in this movie is Asian and rich (see title) -- who are invited to his best friend's wedding, to take place in Singapore. Rachel is just professor-at-a-NYC-university-well-off while Nick's family is "comfortable" -- meaning that they are the richest developers in Singapore and, thus, Asia. So we are treated to phenomenal displays of wealth. Michelle Yeoh is a lot of fun, as always, as Nick's mother. Nick is portrayed as down-to-Earth, preferring to hang out with his best friend, to taking part in the excessive bachelor-party festivities. Rachel is a professor of economics and game theory while Nick ... does stuff. Rachel exhibits her smarts once at the beginning, then spends most of the movie having her feelings hurt by mean people who all seem to be better at game theory than she is. Only her saving throw at the end exhibits her brains rather than her beauty -- but it's a nicely written saving throw. Dead to Me (2019) -- "6/10" Linda Cardellini and Christina Applegate star in a show about two woman, Jen and Judy, living in Laguna and Newport Beach. Jen lost her husband 6 months ago -- and Jen is the one who killed him. They meet at a grief-counseling group, where Jen claims that she'd also lost her husband, but was really grieving for having broken off her engagement and having had five miscarriages. That's the basic setup: they grow closer and closer. Judy is a flighty painter who somehow fails to make any money off of her pretty pricey paintings. Jen has anger-management problems (at one point, she assaults a man in his own home, for which she's roundly applauded for standing up for herself). She loses her partner in her real-estate business, she has an actively hostile son who she mysteriously fails to punch. He's cartoonishly hateful with no character build-up at all to make it believable. Her mother-in-law hates her (understandably), but the mother-in-law, like nearly everyone else in this show, is either batshit or reprehensible. Oddly no-one has any hesitation about blabbing all sorts of relevant information at all times, in patently implausible ways. Nick's pretty good. I actually kind of like James Marsden as Steve, even though he's just another rich guy, contributing nothing. Judy and Jen are all striving for a life beyond their means. Jen, in particular, wants immediate and eminently satisfying answers. They're deluded about how life works, and absolutely deliriously entitled, upbraiding the police in ways that one has to note anyone but a white, upper-class woman would be imprisoned for. And yet we're supposed to root for Jen, I guess? Judy's nuts and a sociopath. Jen is an egomaniac with delusions of grandeur and a seriously violent streak that goes largely unpunished. It started off OK and has good actors, but it's lost the thread for me a bit. I'm not heavily investing in finishing season one. It's a frauen-power show full of enablers of sociopathic behavior and/or easy targets for "frauen-power" moments. It's not particularly subtle. As always, it helps that money isn't really an issue for anyone in any meaningful way. The Ballad of Buster Scruggs (2018) -- "10/10" The Coen Brothers deliver a sextet of stories set in the West, chock-full of excellent actors, both well-known and less-so. The episodes are lovingly crafted, with excellent, nearly flawless sets, costumes and hand-crafted dialogue. Tim Blake Nelson stars as the titular Buster Scruggs in the first story, unseated from his throne by Willie Watson as "The Kid". This episode is more comical than dark. James Franco is most excellent and rugged in the second story "Near Algodones". He holds up a bank run by a crafty teller played by Stephen Root. Root covers himself in pans to avoid being shot. Franco is sentenced to death but escapes thanks to an Indian attack. He is swept up again and sentenced to another hanging. This one takes. The third story "Meal Ticket" stars Liam Neeson as the "Impresario" of a traveling show. Harry Melling is the titular character in the form of "The Professor", an armless, legless man who quotes and cites from the entire pantheon of English literature. Sometimes he is well-received, other times not. As winter approaches, the crowds dwindle. The crowds are huge, though, at another show, where a chicken picks out numbers. The Impresario buys the chicken and trims his retinue by one at the next bridge. The fourth story is nearly a solo act by Tom Waits, a prospector who discovers an idyllic valley -- an owl soars, an elk drinks from a stream, small fish flit in shoals, butterflies flit. The prospector begins his work, digging and staking out his claim, making unsightly holes everywhere. He finds his lode, but almost has his claim jumped. The other man is a poor shot and the prospector turns the tables and survives. He takes two bags of gold, then leaves the valley to the animals. The fifth story "The Gal Who Got Rattled" is the longest one. It's about a brother Gilbert and sister Alice on a wagon train. They are accompanied by his dog, President Pierce. The brother dies of an illness; the dog remains but is too noisy. Billy Knapp, one of the drivers, with Mr. Arthur, of the train takes a shine to Alice. He offers to take care of (now) her yapping dog. He lets it go instead. After a lot of intricate and lovely dialogue, they agree to marry. The next morning, Alice wanders off to find President Pierce, who has followed the train. Mr. Arthur seeks her out and finds that she is being tracked by Indians. He sets up to fend them off, giving her a gun with which to kill herself should he be taken or killed. At it turns out, he drives all but one of them off. That one takes him by surprise and fells him, but Mr. Arthur plays possum and turns the tables on him. He returns to find President Pierce presiding over Alice, who'd followed Mr. Arthur's instructions to the letter. The sixth story "The Mortal Remains" finds five travelers in a coach, hurtling toward the Fort Morgan. The Trapper, played by Chelcie Ross, starts off with a long soliloquy about his life in the wilderness. Next up is Tyne Daly as the Lady, who is on her way to meet her husband, from whom she's been separated for 3 years. She is followed by Saul Rubinek as The Frenchman, who regales them with tales of his gambling exploits. Then speaks Jonjo O'Neill as the Englishman, with excellent elocution (as had the others) and a fearsome mien and manner, staring penetratingly at the others, as he tells them that they he and his colleague the Irishman (Brendan Gleeson) are bounty hunters (of sorts). Gleeson sings a heart-rending and lovely dirge just before they arrive at the Fort. This will be the last voyage for most of them. Game of Thrones S08 (2019) -- "8/10" This is the final season and it's time to tie up all of the loose ends. The Night King approaches Winterfell, where the forces of the North are gathered. The Unsullied, the Dothraki, the Free Folk and the families of the North wait for the icy hammer to fall. The buildup to the battle between the forces of Light and Darkness is good, with lots of nice moments with all of our favorite characters. The knowledge that Jon is really the true king of the Seven Kingdoms slowly spreads. Bran is fantastic as the Three-eyed Raven. That guy's going places, but it's unclear what's happening with him. The first battle is fine, but fought terribly by the North. They knew their enemy, yet they let them approach right up to the walls, so that all the fallen can get right back up and fight again. Their trenches were pathetic (I know it's winter and they don't really have any good shovels), the Dothraki charge was useless (and wasn't at-all suspenseful), they were pathetic with their dragon strategy. Thanks to Arya, they won. That scene was amazing. Next up is some more banter with the survivors -- they didn't lose too many in this first battle -- and preparations for dealing with Cersei. Cersei sticks in Daenerys's craw because ... well, ... how dare she claim to be queen when Daenerys is the rightful heir to the seven kingdoms. It's also eating her alive that Jon is actually the rightful King. They make their way south very ineptly, getting all of their boats sunk due to an utter lack of reconnaissance. They also lost a dragon to an admittedly lucky shot. The iron fleet wiped them out, showing us how well the unsullied swim in leather-plate armor (spoiler alert: they swim really well). Daenerys is a terrible general. Every idea she has is not good, ending in massive sacrifice. (Because maybe she forgets that not everyone has dragons?) But she's always been more about quick and efficient strikes and not really well-suited to the long grind of war or that pesky planning or ruling. Jon doesn't seem to be using any of his military genius, Tyrion gets dumber by the show -- season 8 is a new low, sadly. Varys is the only one who seems to still have his head about him. For now. They regroup and visit Cersei at the walls of King's Landing, where she executes Missandei. Daenerys takes it super-well, as does Grey Worm. They set up the attack on the city, with the dragon as the primary weapon. The "scorpions" -- massive harpoon guns that killed its brother -- are utterly useless this time because ... magic. Drogon basically single-handedly defeated her enemies for her. The city had fallen; they'd surrendered. But Daenerys isn't done. She lays waste to the entire city, killing tons of civilians and losing the loyalty of Jon Snow. Too little too late, Jon. In the penultimate episode, many, many characters meet their end: Cersei, Jamie, Euron, Sandor, Gregor. Bran, Arya, Jon, Daenerys -- all still alive. Maybe Daenerys and Drogon could have flown straight to Cersei's tower and taken her out? Too boring, probably. Much better to lay waste to the city, as a warning to the rest of the kingdoms. Maybe Bran could have warged into Drogon and stopped him? Maybe he saw farther and realized that this is the best way, the only solution that works (akin to Dr. Strange looking at 14 million possible futures in Avengers: Infinity War). Once you have someone who can see the future -- though he says he spends most of his time in the past -- you kind of have to trust that he's choosing the best path through a wasteland of bad choices. Maybe it's the only way. And here we are after the final episode and I kind of called it, above. Daenerys's eschatological act was the only thing that could loosen Jon's oath's hold on him. He'd sworn his loyalty to her if she helped defend the realm from the Night King. She was true to her word and took grave losses. But he could no longer be her lover, which destroyed them both. It then took Dany laying waste to King's Landing to get Jon to shake off the cobwebs, but he eventually stepped up. After the sacking of King's Landing, Tyrion resigns and Daenerys sentences him to death. Jon is backed into a corner. He visits Daenerys in her shattered throne room -- foreshadowed way back in season 2 -- and nearly begs her for mercy. She knows best and will show neither forgiveness nor mercy. It is all he can bear. He kills her. Drogon melts the throne and takes his mother away, but leaves Jon intact -- whether because he's a Targaryen or because the dragon understood his mother was evil is left up to debate. Tyrion is hauled before a tribunal of the remaining lords and ladies, with Jon in jail and Grey Worm sulking about. Tyrion delivered several masterful monologues in this show -- it felt like he had 90% of the dialogue -- but his nomination of Bran the Broken as king was a master-stroke. It makes sense and is possibly the outcome that the three-eyed raven had been steering toward. He claims not to want the throne, but perhaps he doth protest too much? Only Sansa does not pledge her fealty, keeping the North separate from the other realms. Tyrion is one again Hand of the King, Sam represents the maesters, Bronn is minister of coin, Davos of the navies and Brienne presumably represents the white knights. Jon is once again banished to the Wall, but reunited with both Tormund and Ghost. Arya sails of for the unknown West under a Stark banner. The Stark family -- noblest and most principled of all the families -- won in the end, across the board. What a comeback! What’s art without some quibbles here and there? The overall arc was true to the other seasons and all-around well-executed. I don’t know what haters were expecting. Dany ruling benevolently? Hardly. "Daenerys Was Always A Narcissistic, Power-hungry Colonizer" People just love to love a dictator. She felt she deserved to rule because her family used to rule. If you're on Team Targaryen, then you should really re-examine your politics. I'm not surprised most of "liberal" America loved her so much -- it reflects to a tee how they respond to their own country's military machinations and manifest destiny without examination or critique. Jon “I don’t want it” Snow as King? No way: he's thrown off every title he's ever gotten. We got the best outcome for the realms: a non-successive semi-republic with an elected ruler. The best ruler doesn’t want it (and also hasn’t killed people). Varys was right and he also ended up winning -- the realm was much better off than it has ever been. Too many people waste energy trying to steer a good story to surprise them but only in the way they were expecting. No sense of irony. It belies the fear of spoilers many claim to have: if it actually ends differently than they know it should, they’re up in arms. I was entertained and found it to me a masterful ending. If it wasn't so damned long, I would watch again from the beginning, to see how much of the ending the writers knew as they were writing the earlier seasons. Expectations were high and the delivered a masterpiece unlike anything the world has seen before. It wasn't perfect, but art never is. It just is. Fleabag (2016) -- "8/10" Phoebe Waller-Bridge stars as the eponymous lead. She also writes all of the episodes. The writing is clever and cheeky and sometimes quite refreshingly filthy. She is happily single and hooking up and running a failing café without her very best friend, who'd recently died in a bizarre traffic accident. Her guinea pig remains. Fleabag is not a good person, but she's not particularly bad, either. She's refreshingly honest and down-to-Earth and easy-going. Her sister is much more successful, but also much more stressed and uptight. The main gimmick is that we hear a lot of Fleabag's internal monologue. She also breaks the fourth wall nearly constantly. It's quite entertaining so far. The first season reveals more about what happened to her best friend and partner. It reveals that Fleabag is darker and more complicated and a worse person than we'd hoped. She is easily outflown by her father and sister, who betray her deeply in their devotion to their respective and reprehensible partners. In the end, it's the bank officer who'd been accused of sexual harassment who ends up being the only one who forgives her her transgressions (that led to her friend's suicide) and gives her another chance. At the end of season one, her sister has reneged on her promise to help her out with her café but it looks like she'll get the loan she needs. Her father useless and her stepmother is vicious. Looking forward to season 2 -- a very funny and dark show. Jean Claude Van Johnson (2016) -- "9/10" Jean-Claude Van Damme stars as himself, but in a world where his entire film career was a cover for his life as an international spy. At the start of the show, he returns to the game in order to get close to the love of his life (with whom he used to work). It's tongue-in-cheek, cleverly filmed, very well-written and JCVD is brilliant. There are a lot of in-jokes about his movies and about how they made movies in the 80s and 90s vs. how action movies work today. I've only seen the first two shows so far, but it's gold. His driving stunt made me laugh out loud. The Man Who Killed Don Quixote (2018) -- "9/10" At long last, Terry Gilliam managed to finish this film that he started almost three decades ago. It is the story of a film director Toby (Adam Driver) who's returned to the place in Spain where he filmed his breakout student film -- a partial reimagining of Don Quixote. At that time, he'd gotten a local girl -- the daughter of a barman -- to play Dulcinea (Joana Ribeiro) and a local older man -- a cobbler -- to play the titular role (Jonathan Pryce). His new film production is running into problems -- the pressure is much higher now that he's an auteur. He discovers that the current filming location is close to where he shot the original film. He finds Dulcinea and Quixote, whose lives he'd pretty much ruined. He becomes embroiled in local intrigue, but mostly the plot devolves into a self-referential and highly stylized re-telling of the story of Don Quixote, but also a telling of the making of the movie that we're watching, a parable of Gilliam's career, a satire/castigation of modern-day movie-making and Hollywood, as well as serving up a large portion of Gilliam's usual philosophical musings about the nature of reality, the reality of the mind's ravings and whether there is magic in the world -- even if it's not real magic, maybe your believing that it is, is enough. In the end, Toby kills his Quixote, but reincarnates him in himself, leaving the production and pursuing his new mission as an errant knight. I honestly enjoyed the hell out of this movie, as I do many of Gilliam's films. I thought he'd done a masterful job of finally making the movie he wanted to make, while staying true to the thread along which his other films are strung. There were weak bits, to be sure -- and the film was a bit on the long side -- but it's not a movie like any other you'll see and the intense layering of fantasy on fantasy is always intriguing to unravel. Óscar Jaenada as the Gypsy was also an excellent interlocutor and partial narrator. The Man in the High Castle S01 (2015) -- "8/10" This is a story set in the world posited by Philip K. Dick's novel of the same name. It is a world in which the Nazis and the Japanese won WWII and divided up the United States into a Japanese west coast, a neutral zone, and the remaining 2/3 of the country, from South Dakota to the East Coast belonging to Nazi Germany. The show picks up in 1962, following the lives of a Nazi spy from the East Coast (Joe Blake, played by Luke Kleintank) as well as a rebellious Julianna (Alexa Davalos) from the west coast. Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa as Nobusuke Tagomi is amazing as the Japanese Trade Minister. Intrigue abounds and the central plot line involves films that depict a world in which the Nazis lost the war, films that appear out of nowhere, but supposedly produced or delivered by the man in the high castle. The provenance of the films is unknown, but their effect is powerful -- especially on the various rebel factions whose embers still glow in the former US. The Germans and Japanese have everything well under control -- this is not a story about an imminent uprising. The rebels are few and far-between and hold out hope for the sake of it and not because they've been encouraged by any progress on that front. The acting is quite good, the writing is good and the rendering of the alternate history is fascinating. Looking forward to the next season. Veep S07 (2019) -- "10/10" The final season of this spectacularly funny series equaled, if not topped, all the other seasons. The writers were absolutely brutal, delivering scathing line after scathing line into the mouths of their characters. Julia Louis-Dreyfus was magnificent and evil, discarding the last vestiges of her humanity and any pretense at morality to achieve her ultimate goal. The cast was ridiculously good, with Jonah standing out, but also Ben, whose advice ended up being pivotal to Selena's victory. There are so many good characters, each carefully written and staying true to the arc they'd established over the other seasons. * Anna Chlumsky as Amy Brookheimer, the campaign manager (who defects to Jonah's camp and capitulates to Washington bottom-of-the-barrel morals as well) * Tony Hale as Gary Walsh, who ends up running part of the campaign, but ends up as a fall guy * Reid Scott as Dan Egan, who ends up with nothing * Timothy Simons as Jonah Ryan, a Trump², if that's even possible. His campaign made a mockery of the US in how realistic and plausible it was. * Matt Walsh as the hapless Mike McLintock, who screwed up absolutely everything until he was fired, whereupon he ended up in journalism, where his stupidity helped him quickly rise to the top. * Kevin Dunn as the brilliant, Asian-woman-chasing, chronically unhealthy and deeply pessimistic and cynical Chief of Staff. * Gary Cole as the robotic Kent Davidson, the Senior Strategist who can only think in numbers. * Sam Richardson as Richard Splett, who naiveté is somehow allowed to avoid being crushed. He not only sires "Little Richard" for Selena's insipid daughter and her former Secret Service--office wife, but stumbles his way up the ladder of politics. He is the only thing of worth in this show and they let him actually win, showing that the writers haven't given up all hope. * Sarah Sutherland as Catherine (Selena's daughter), who sets a new standard for insipidity while at the same time espousing the tepid values of the wannabe-left liberals. * Clea DuVall played Catherine's wife Marjorie Palmiotti, the former Secret Service officer who was Selena's lookalike (so many connections ... Selena's lesbian daughter married someone who looks like her mother). No-one was spared, not Washington, not either side of the aisle, not the media, not voters, not the young, not the old, not any part of US current and past foreign and domestic policy. It was funny because it was true. On Rotten Tomatoes, they wrote "Brash and bonkers as ever, Veep bows out with an unapologetically absurd final season that solidifies its status as one of TV's greatest comedies," which sums it up very nicely. John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum (2019) -- "8/10" The original John Wick was a revelation. It's sequel was decent, but lacked something from the original. In particular, too much of the gunplay was at ludicrous Eagle Eye--like distances. This sequel to the sequel goes back to the original's roots, with a lot (A LOT) of gunplay, but also some spectacular and wonderfully choreographed martial-arts fighting scenes. [1] Reeves is charming as the affable but ludicrously deadly hero. Ian McShane reprises his role as the proprietor of the Continental Hotel (located in the Flatiron Building in New York City). [2] Lance Hendricks is also back in an expanded role as the (now-named) Charon, McShane's right-hand man. Halle Berry joins the fun as Sofia, another killer from whom Wick collects his debt. She is pretty goddamned entertaining as well, and is accompanied by two wonderfully trained dogs. Laurence Fishburne is back as the Bowery King -- bowed but not beaten. The Adjucator -- a sort of cop from the "High Table" -- is a bit of a Deus Ex Machina (it's unclear why she has such latitude -- I mean, the High Table has sway, but most of the people she confronts are nearly in open rebellion of it), but it doesn't make much sense to dwell on it, to be honest. There are a ton of other entertaining characters, most of whom will not be in John Wick 4, for biological reasons. Luckily, John Wick is exempt from biological law and can take an utterly ludicrous amount of punishment and keep on moving (think Punisher S01E09 & 10). Keanu makes it work because you feel that he is going through all of this, not for himself, not for his dead wife, not for his dead dog, but because it's the right thing to do. There is no choice in the matter, no option for avoiding the damage and pain, because honor is at stake. [3] It works, IMHO. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] The article "John Wick 3 Delivers the Justice We All Crave" by Eileen Jones does an excellent job of seeing the core of beauty in this brutal and bullet-filmed film. "For those who can’t understand why so many people like action films that are all about killing — and John Wick is definitely all about killing — it can be enlightening to consider these movies. They provide all the fantastical escapism you crave after working your dreary job, or jobs, all week, or suffering from needing a job and not having one, and they find a way to connect the fantastical elements of the film’s “world building” to a common core of shared reality. That shared reality between you and John Wick is getting fucked over by people rotten with power in a dirty system that come at you aggressively when you’re just trying to get by in your life, which is already pretty miserable." [1] Described by Eileen Jones as"[t]he hotel is a perfect hotel, dark and luxurious, exquisitely run. It’s presided over by a quietly scary owner with the alias Winston Churchill (Ian McShane) and his impeccable concierge Charon (Lance Reddick). Both are impassive, courteous, steeped in worldly knowledge, and incapable of surprise. They understand everything at a glance." [1] Again, from Eileen Jones:"Honor culture tends to be quite brutal and regressive. But at least it’s a brutality of a different kind than the malevolent meanness that rules our lives in contemporary Western culture. Honor culture provides heightened meaning along with the harshness, and meaning is the factor we crave. If we must suffer and die, we can’t help wanting to do it in a system of meaning recognized by all." ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3726 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3726 Sun, 05 May 2019 21:09:07 +0200 of around 1400 ratings publicly available. I've included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other -- I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. Moritz Neumeier: Hurra (2019) -- "9/10" YouTube bubbled up "this special" in my recommendations list and it was delightful. His style is very elegant and reserved. He speaks very quickly, intelligently and is a wonderful raconteur. He mixes a bit of English (very little, but a few words) into his German. He told of his meeting his girlfriend and knocking her up after only six weeks. They stayed together and now have a child, of whom he tells many tales. He is not a starstruck father, to say the least. He tells a wonderful, long story of a trip to Burghausen, on the border of Austria (due east of München) with his friend Paul, a fearless Greek God of a man who drinks like a fish. Moritz is more of a pot guy because he can't hold his drink, but drink he did on this evening. Burghausen, though a provincial town, offers up comic delights like a gay bouncer and a whole cellar full of Neonazis willing to believe Paul when he tells them that Moritz is a General Major in the hidden army and that they are planning to invade Austria in the morning on a secret mission. Neumeier's also got some sharp political humor and some sharp words for fools. Highly recommended. Only available in German, obviously. I listened to it twice. "Ein bisschen Schwund muss sein." Support the Girls (2018) -- "7/10" As many other reviews have mentioned, Regina Hall acts well in this move about a Hooters-like bar-and-restaurant in Texas. I also think Haley Lu Richardson is a revelation, with her nearly boundless energy and infectious optimism, she reminded me of early Dolly Parton. The story is of a single, long say at the restaurant, during which the cable goes out on the day of the big fight while Hall deals with all sorts of issues in both her personal life and her job. Her boss is kind of a dope, but decent enough, although he does let her go. Her employees, upon hearing this, also sabotage their jobs and are let go. They all end up interviewing at another restaurant called the Man Cave, a national brand doing the same thing as the local restaurant, but corporatized. That's just kind of where it ends up: the story meanders and really just strings together a bunch of character essays with some decent acting. Ozark S01 (2017) -- "9/10" Jason Bateman stars as Martin Bird with Laura Linney as his wife Wendy. Martin is a money launderer for one of the largest Mexican drug cartels. Things go well for a long time, until they go ... not so well. Marty is forced to flee Chicago with his family and move to the Lake of the Ozarks, where he claims that he will be able to launder a tremendous amount of cash to rich tourists. This saves his bacon temporarily and his employer allows him to take his 8 million and try to launder it within 3 months. As he and Wendy (who's in on the whole deal) set up shop, they encounter many locals, some willing to help and others trying to take advantage of the outsiders throwing a lot of money around. The Langmore family (especially Ruth) features heavily, as does the Snells, local poppy farmers with a business of their own to protect. Martin is also hanging an affair over Wendy's head, one that he only found out about at about the same time as their money-laundering business in Chicago went south. The two have a couple of dopey kids, one boy Jonah and one girl Charlotte. As you can imagine, Charlotte is a useless narcissist who can't wrap her head around sacrifice, even after being told (quite quickly) what her parents are up to. That just becomes background noise to her pressing FOMO problem. Jonah is quieter and seems to be drifting into becoming a bit of a demented backwoods Missouran. It's a pretty damned good show with some really fine acting. Linney and Bateman are standouts. Highly recommended. Moritz Neumeier: Stand Up (2016) -- "8/10" "This special" is a few years old, but Neumeier's style was already well in place at the time. He was married, but he hadn't had a kid. It's possible that this is a different wife, since he claimed to have met and impregnated the wife of which he spoke in the 2019 special within 6 weeks Anyway, this special is also quite good. Watched it in German. Star Trek: Discovery S02 (2018/2019) -- "8/10" Spock shows up, which is cool. Burnham's character spirals down into a whiny, illogical, over-emotional mess, which is not. This season deals with Time as a hostile force. The red angel is a time traveler who makes repeated trips to the past in order to try to shunt the universe (prime) onto a course that does not end up as a wasteland devastated by an AI called Control. Whereas they did a decent job with the idea of a super-dimensional hyper-mycelial network in the previous season, they're having more trouble when it comes to time. The rest of the crew (or, more precisely, the writers) don't know how to understand what the real implications of a time traveler are. For example, they assume that the events they witness -- as forward-only passengers of time -- occur in the same order as they would for a traveler. So, at one point, after they'd captured and then lost the red angel, they say that a subsequent event that would ordinarily have been triggered by the red angel (a red energy signature) could not have been caused by her because her suit no longer has a time crystal. This is not true. The red angel could easily have made the trip to cause the event before she was trapped, even though the two events are in the other order for those who experience time linearly and unidirectionally. They also play very fast and loose with space and communications distances. I mean, they don't even pretend that the speed of a light is a factor. When they travel physically, they acknowledge that it "takes time" to get there. But they have instantaneous, lag-free communication with far-off systems. Their sensors are sometimes blocked, but most times mysteriously unblocked. They seem capable of reading the most ephemeral and obscure data across time and space (e.g. % data downloaded to Control). And everything looks so close and human-sized. Planets are never gob-smackingly huge. We just saw our first picture of a black hole: the entire solar system fits into the black bit at the center. When the Discovery enters a new system, all the planets are right there. All of the ships are close enough to see. If a ship has been scuttled, its crew is visible and floating in the void, all right next to each other, all conveniently human-scaled. The graphics continue to be top-notch and much of the acting is quite good. Tilly (Mary Wiseman), Captain Pike (Anson Mount), Georgiou (Michelle Yeoh), Stamets (Anthony Rapp), Saru (Doug Jones), Ash Tyler (Shazad Latif) and Spock (Ethan Peck) are all pretty good and well-written. But Michael Burnham (Sonequa Martin-Green) is all over the place. She's the main character and was raised by Vulcans and is hyper-intelligent and logical -- except when she's not. For the first half of the season, she was good and for the second half, she's stupid and emotional. She knows things on faith and asks stupid questions about things she should know. The second half of the season spends 1/2 of each episode dealing with emotions and human shit. But they go too far. It's still interesting and relatively well-written, but there's more tedium to get through than in the first season. Iron Fist S02 (2018) -- "7/10" Danny, Colleen, Ward, Joy and Davos are back in the second season. Danny is still denying his job at his inherited company, while Ward runs Rand Corp. Joy splits away from them both, hating Danny for mostly stupid reasons. Colleen is an occasional vigilante, but no longer runs a dojo, living in the place with Danny instead. They've appointed it nicely, living in quite a bit of opulence if you know anything about NYC real estate. Which is where things get a bit difficult: the story is about three billionaires (Danny, Joy and Ward), none of whom really act the part very much at all. Ward goes to NA meetings as if he's a normal human being. Danny works for a moving company in Chinatown. Joy lives in opulence on the Upper (East?) Side. Davos is a spectacularly bitchy and sulky and determinedly un-fun character. He manages to swipe Danny's iron fist from him, then sets about doing with it what Danny never could. Danny Rand is actually better than in the first season; his fighting is definitely better. Still, he's pretty stupid and lets his anger get the best of him constantly. I thought he was the one who meditated and stupid and had all the Chi? Joy is spectacularly self-centered, outbidding even Ward in that regard. Colleen is still pretty good. Misty Knight is an annoying cop -- her smugness and complete disregard for procedure really gets old. Mary Walker is the most interesting new character, played well by Alice Eve. Hereditary (2018) -- "9/10" This is a slow burner of a horror movie. It's a psycho-horror movie that leaves you right up until the end, wondering how much was actually real and how much was mental illness and who did what to whom. The story is full of unreliable narrators. There are several shots that are Kubrickian (the one where the camera flips upside-down midway through a track) and several scenes that make use of light, mirrors, sound, music in a way reminiscent of Tarkovsky. Toni Collette is Annie, a seemingly reasonably successful miniature artist. She is married to Steve (Gabriel Byrne). It is completely unclear what Steve does. They have two children, a daughter Charlie (Milly Shapiro) and Peter (Alex Wolff). Everyone does their part, but Collette and Wolff really knock it out of the park. The story starts with Annie and her family burying her mother. Inklings of bad blood and bizarre behavior ooze out through the dialogue, a comment here, a vague suggestion there. Charlie is a bit...off. She is not very social -- but Annie is no prize either. Peter seems quite understanding and accepting for a teenage boy. Without spoiling too much, the affairs of Annie's mother -- and her friends -- begin to impinge on the whole family. Charlie's fate is shockingly rendered and one of the best-made moments of an already well-made film. The house looks almost like a miniature itself. Annie's new friend is ... odd -- and not really a friend. Annie is distraught and desperate. Steve is resigned but worried. Peter's life spins out of control. They drop, one by one, until the final, real purpose is revealed -- horrifying and nearly impossible to predict. There are shades of early Shyamalan in the storytelling (also had shades of The Shining) and, as noted, Kubrick and Tarkovsky in the direction. Those are solid pedigrees for a first-ever effort by writer/director Ari Aster. I highly recommend it, but it's not for the faint of heart. Simpsons S30 -- "7/10" Like the previous season, this one has its ups and downs -- there seem to be two distinct teams writing these shows. Some are really clever and nice while others are just a pile of time-wasting non-sequiturs and uncoordinated half-jokes. Episodes 14, The Clown Stays in the Picture, 17 E My Sports and 18 Bart vs. Itchy and Scratchy each had their moments. Mother! -- "9/10" To call this a horror movie is to miss a rich world of metaphoric possibility. I've read comparisons to Begotten because of "religious themes", because Jennifer Lawrence said in an interview that the movie represents the "rape and torment of Mother Earth", which I honestly didn't get at all. Begotten has a stronger claim to such themes, but its black-and-white filmmaking, graininess, droning, bee-like soundtrack and complete lack of comprehensible dialogue makes the comparison extremely weak. Mother!, on the other hand, is a beautifully made film, starring Jennifer Lawrence as Mother and Javier Bardem as the Poet (or "Him" as he's listed in the cast). The film starts with him placing a crystal in a stand on a charred mantle. From this crystal flows outward a wave of healing, repairing the house around it from a blackened husk to a house under renovation. The camera cuts to Lawrence waking up in bed, in the morning. They live together in his childhood home, at a great remove from everything and everyone else. She has restored and renovated a large part of the home after a fire. He is trying, and failing, to write. He receives some strange guests, Ed Harris and Michelle Pfeiffer (who is especially good). Mother wants nothing to do with them. They are nearly cartoonishly -- but still believably -- rude and intrusive and prying. More of their family follows. The house fills up with people. The Poet loves it -- he loves the attention. Mother is appalled at the casual destruction and forwardness of the guests. There is an incident (one of their sons beats the other to death with a doorknob), followed by a funeral and then, a wake -- in the house, of course, for people they hardly know. They are all rude and completely and seemingly deliberately ignore Mother's admonitions about being careful and respectful of the home. Two guests break a sink she'd warned them about -- and she flips out and throws everyone out of the house. Pfeiffer glares deliciously as she sails toward the door, right to left. At around the same time, she discovers a bleeding hole in the floor, which leads to a runnel of blood on a wall in the basement, which she digs open to discover hidden catacombs -- with a fuel-oil heater. After this first incident, Mother and the Poet fight, then make up with one another. She wakes up the following morning and declares herself pregnant. He is delighted and simultaneously rediscovers his muse, leaping from bed to begin writing. Fade out and in and he has finished his book, his poem, and lets her rad it. She is moved to tears, but is shocked to discover that his publisher has also already seen it. She thought it was for them alone -- at least for now. He seeks the admiration of others before her. He needs their adoration more than he needs her -- because she is a sure bet. Once again, the house begins to fill with people, this time his admirers and hangers-on storm the house, starting a debauched party and tearing her home apart, invading everywhere. He is revered as a God; she is very, very pregnant and either ignored or shoved around. She gets him off to herself, in a room, after she tells him that the baby is coming. She has the baby on her own, in the house, with the wild party ongoing. He looks on, happy but distracted and seemingly thinking about something else. He wants to show the child to his adoring fans. She refuses. He stares at her, waiting until she falls asleep before snatching up the child and bringing the fruit of his loins to his fans to adore. They crowd-surf the child away, to her absolute horror, finally snapping its head off in their ardor and fervor. She desperately claws her way through the crowd, until she finds the child's ravaged corpse on a sort of altar. She flips out -- understandably so -- slicing people left and right. She is beaten to the ground and horribly assaulted, taking several savage blows to the head and breast. The Poet rescues her briefly, but she wants out of the house. She'd tried before, but was thwarted at every turn, much as one is in a dream. She finds the lighter of the Man (Ed Harris) that she'd previously hidden and makes her way to the oil tank. There she makes her stand, blowing up the whole house. She stands, Joan-of-Arc-like in the flames. We cut to Him, completely unscathed carrying her charred, but living body from the debris. He lays her down and asks her for one last thing -- her heart. She grants him this because she has given everything else. She cannot refuse him -- and he is driven to use up every last bit of her. He needs her heart, in order to squeeze it into the crystal from which the cycle starts again, this time with a different woman in the role of mother. The metaphor is relatively clear -- and he states it quite clearly in the last few lines of the film -- she is one in a long line of muses. He uses each to spark his creativity and create a work of art. But he uses them up each time and the leave, making room for the next. His process requires it. He takes her heart at the end, crushing it to a diamond that fuels the next cycle. It explains why he was so upset when the crystal was broken by the Man and Woman -- he knew the cycle had entered another phase, one that he knew would lead to his creativity coming back, but that would lose him his latest muse. The film is a metaphor for this cycle. All the pieces fall into place when viewed in this light. As with other Aronofsky films, attention and thought is required in order to get anything out of this film. It was well-acted all around. Jennifer Lawrence is very strong in the main role -- up until the desperation at the end, where she didn't act quite mad (insane) enough to match what the situation warranted. She's almost too strong to really lose her shit entirely. Kim's Convenience (S01-s03) -- "9/10" This is a delightful sitcom from Canada. I like all the characters; not a useless whiny asshole among them. It is the literal opposite of This is Us. Ok, Mrs. Park is kind of an asshole, but so hammed up, it's not like you consider here a real person. Although I'm sure many Mrs. Parks exist. She's also so over-the-top snooty that you can't really take her seriously. Mr. Chin is nice. Most of the customers are nice. The family mostly treats each other nicely. The parents demand and get respect and are very funny and modern, though also very traditional. It is the story of first-generation South-Korean immigrants, Umma and Appa (literally Mama and Papa) or Mr. and Mrs. Kim. We don't know their first names. They own a convenience store in Toronto. They have two children: Janet (20) and Jung (26ish). Janet lives at home in the first season and moves out in the second. Jung lives with his cousin Kimchee and has done so for years because he moved out over a rift with his father. The rift continues deep in to season two. By season 3, the rift is at least partially healed. Janet rolls with her own inadequacy and youth and inexperience. Jung does a bit better, but also makes mistakes. Mr. and Mrs. Kim are rocks. The show is delightful and entertaining and funny and nice. Recommended. Ant-Man and the Wasp (2018) -- "6/10" This was a goofy movie with some fun moments, but overall the plot was all over the place and there were some jarring emotional investments with no explanation. For example, Hope Van Dyne's obsession with getting back to her mother -- even though she hadn't seen her in 30 years and would have clearly been much more over it by then. She seemed to think that going-to-the-quantum-realm-and-getting-her-out was a clearly defined viable plan. It didn't strike anyone as odd that no-one had thought of it before, if it really was so simple. The plot was basically that Scott Lang was trying not break his final days of house arrest while at the same time helping Hope and Hank Pym get Janet Van Dyne back from the quantum realm. They needed his help because he was the only one who'd successfully returned from that realm. Also, Janet had somehow planted a message/antenna in Lang's head while he was there. No explanation is given for how Janet survived down there. No explanation for how she aged so much. Nor for how she avoided madness. Or was she only there for hours? (as, e.g., Lang's five hours ended up being five years in real-world time?) And don't even get me started on "Ghost", the enemy with whom we're meant to sympathize because she's been driven to being a selfish asshole by her constant pain. Her power is a semi-controlled quantum-phasing in and our of reality -- and also being really angry and unsympathetic all the time. She was played pretty poorly by an unknown but female/biracial actress, which was probably the point. They spent about ten minutes of Morpheus-storytelling explaining to us why we should care. I did not end up doing so. If you need to see the whole canon, then go ahead and spend two hours watching this one. The mid-credits scene (or post-credits one?) explains part of the plot of Avengers: Endgame. Otherwise, you can skip it. Avengers: Endgame (2019) -- "9/10" This was a worthy finale to a 22-movie story arc. From IMDb, it " marked Chapter Ten of Phase Three in the Marvel Cinematic Universe." The ending of Infinity War gave us a universe with its population cut in half, courtesy of Thanos. We pick up from there at the beginning of this film. Tony Stark is stranded in space with Nebula, "1,000 light years from home". Instead of dying in space, though, Captain Marvel shows up to drag his ship to Earth, saving them all. Tony's a whiny shit, though -- as usual -- yelling at everyone that the only reason this all happened was that they were too concerned with their precious freedoms and that they had failed to capitulate to his unparalleled genius and given him control of the world and his all-encompassing space shield. This wouldn't have stopped anything, but there's no talking to some people -- especially arrogant ones. Happily, they drop this plot direction pretty quickly, although they immediately pick up with "let's go kick Thanos's ass". It is unclear why they think this is a plausible plan; it didn't even come close to working the first time, so why would it work now? Anyone who raises an objection is treated like a traitor. Still, they all jump in a spaceship to find Thanos farming on a garden planet. Thor kills him. The end. Just kidding. That was the first 15 minutes of a 3-hour movie. There were a few places where the writing got a bit lazy, with little care given to consistency, motivation or physics. Most of them could be papered over and weren't noticeable during viewing. They only come up afterward, when you think about it for a bit. In no particular order, here are a few questions: * Deus Ex: Captain Marvel is a Deus Ex Machina in tight pants. Whereas it seems initially plausible that she would have to fly off to take care of the many other planets in the universe affected by the snap, you quickly ask yourself: are any of those planets also believably going to undo the snap? Shouldn't she be helping out Earth the most? If she can fly 1000 light years in an hour, can she travel through time? Or visit the quantum realm? I know it's more interesting without her involvement -- but then why even have her in the first place? * Quantum Time: Janet Van Dyne spent ... how long in the quantum realm? She looks to have aged as much as Henry Pym, but did she really spend 30 years down there? How did she eat? Or breathe? Or at least avoid going insane? Or did she actually spend about 30 hours down there, akin to the 5 hours that Scott Lang spent in the five years after the snap? If so, why is she so much older? It's either one way or the other, no? * Post-apocalyptic?: When Scott got out, it was to a world wasted by neglect, post-apocalyptic. But there was a security guard at a run-of-the-mill storage facility? Why? Where are people getting food and clothes and technology in a world with 50% of the population gone? The economy would have completely collapsed back to the iron age, more or less. But Tony Stark's kid has all the toys and clothes she wants? Is it because he's a billionaire? Why would that matter in a collapsed society? * Defenseless and insensate: Why didn't the Avengers base have any defenses against Thanos's missiles? None at all. He just ripped them apart as if they were a housing complex. Why didn't they sense him coming? They could sense his second snap all the way across the universe, but they can't detect him right above their base? * Stones: Why was Stark able to wield the stones on his armor when they spent so much time building the first glove (they needed a neutron star) and the second one (in the lab). If it was that easy, why didn't they just do that in the first place? The Hulk nearly lost an arm, but so did Stark? Wouldn't the energy burst have just incinerated him? * Hulk: Poor Hulk: he can hold up the Avengers headquarters but has to be rescued by Ant/Giant Man? To add insult to injury, in the epilogue, everyone else seems to have healed whereas the Hulk's wound seems at least semi-permanent. And he's the one with vaunted healing powers. * Power Imbalances: Why was a ringless Thanos able to battle Thor, Iron Man and Captain America to a standstill simultaneously? What kind of powers does he have? He also stood toe-to-toe with Captain Marvel, who ripped a whole spaceship apart with her bare hands, in a single pass. Thanos is as powerful as he needs to be, at any given moment -- another Deus Ex Machina. * Girl Power: If Marvel can rip apart a spaceship, then why was Spider-Man so worried about whether she could get to the van and the quantum tunnel? How would he even have known that was her destination? He showed up so late, he would have had no way of knowing what the plan was. But, really, Peter Parker is otherwise very clever, so why would he waste a second worrying about the ability of Captain Marvel to get through some foot soldiers after having just witnessed her smashing their whole ship in seconds? Was it to set up the moment when all of the womyn backed up Captain Marvel in a grrrrll moment, as if she needed any backup from a lady with a spear? * Time Travel: How did Thanos, Gamorra and Nebula and all of his minions even get there in the first place? They explained that Thanos learned of the future through Nebula's quantum entanglement with her future self. Fair enough. But how did Thanos then time-travel his whole ship and armies nine years into the future to confront them after the snap? If he could time-travel (without the Time Stone, mind you), why wouldn't he have just jumped a day earlier and stopped them from undoing his snap at all? Was there some metaphysical reason why that was impossible? Thanos's time travel went completely unremarked and unexplained. Unless it just took him nine years to get there, heeding the laws of physics, unlike every other interstellar/galactic trip in all of the other movies. If so, then when did he actually do all of his intervening conquering and gathering of stones and the snap? It's an unsolved mystery. They just absolutely needed Thanos to show up and to try to thwart (or reverse) the unsnapping and have the biggest battle of all time. They did a good job, because I didn't notice the inconsistency until nearly a day later. Temporal liberties taken aside, power imbalances aside, everyone involved gets an extra star for not fucking it up. Chris Evans as Captain America was fantastic and got an honorable retirement. Ditto for Iron Man, who was redeemed (a bit) from his raving libertarian/billionaire/fascism of recent films (to wit: just give Stark all decision-making power and he'll make sure everything's hunky dory, or the reason why he and Captain America rifted in Civil War). It was a non-fighting movie for a long time and did well with it, alternating between appropriately maudlin (they had failed to stop the world from being half-destroyed) and goofy. It was a giant build-up to an epic battle -- which is exactly how the comic books work. Captain America passing on the shield to Falcon was a bit odd. I'm also not sure why he aged so much since he's enhanced with super-soldier serum. Falcon's not enhanced, though. Did Steve Rogers give him the shield to show that the future of "Captain America" is black? It was a bit more believable that Thor would hand off his crown to Valkyrie to become Queen of Asgard. Speaking of which, Chris Hemsworth as fat Thor was brilliant. I can't wait to see what he's in next. And there were so many famous people with cameos in this film: it became a regular Poseidon Adventure: Robert Redford, Michael Douglas, Michelle Pfeiffer, Tilda Swinton, Rene Russo, the list goes on. [1] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] From the IMDb page: "The cast includes 19 Academy Award-nominated actors: Angela Bassett, Benedict Cumberbatch, Bradley Cooper, Brie Larson, Don Cheadle, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jeremy Renner, Josh Brolin, Marisa Tomei, Mark Ruffalo, Michael Douglas, Michelle Pfeiffer, Natalie Portman, Robert Downey Jr., Robert Redford, Samuel L. Jackson, Taika Waititi, Tilda Swinton, and William Hurt. Of those nominated, Douglas, Portman, Hurt, Larson, Redford, Swinton, Tomei and Paltrow have all won at least one Academy Award. Douglas has two Academy Awards, one for Best Picture for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and one for Best Actor for Wall Street." Also: "Robert Downey Jr officially surpassed Hugh Jackman's record for most appearances in film as the same superhero with 10. He set this record in only 11 years, whereas Jackman did it in 17." Chris Evans played Captain America 11 times. Scarlett Johansson played Black Widow 7 times. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3725 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3725 Sun, 07 Apr 2019 22:43:24 +0200 -- "4/10" 2. "A Simple Plan (1998)" <#Simple> -- "8/10" 3. "Bohemian Rhapsody (2018)" <#Bohemian> -- "8/10" 4. "Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald (2018)" <#Fantastic> -- "7/10" 5. "Queer Eye S03 (2019)" <#Queer> -- "7/10" 6. "Love, Death and Robots (2019)" <#Love> -- "9/10" 7. "The Dirt (2019)" <#Dirt> -- "6/10" 8. "Isn't It Romantic (2019)" <#Romantic> -- "7/10" 9. "Nate Bargatze: Tennessee Kid (2019)" <#Nate> -- "9/10" 10. "Kevin Hart: Irresponsible (2019)" <#Kevin> -- "6/10" These are my notes to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. I've recently transferred my reviews to IMDb and made "the list" of around 1400 ratings publicly available. I've included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other -- I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. Robot Jox (1989) -- "4/10" I was tempted to give this movie an extra point for having some pretty nice robot models for pre-CGI -- but I couldn't do it. The acting was just too terrible. As was the writing. The writing was worse than the acting, but it was a close call. The costumes were decent. This movie was made in the same year that the Berlin Wall fell, but it acknowledges nothing of that thaw in the Cold War. We learn that the world has been nearly destroyed by war. The survivors no longer fight, except with giant robots in official battles over territory. The battles take place in an arena in the desert. The two competitors are, of course, America, and something called "Confed", which is clearly Russia, going by the accent of "Alexander", their champion. The script was written by Joe Haldeman, so I expected better. It was an unsubtle, jingoistic, sexist and utterly predictable movie with giant robots in it. I'm not even going to describe the plot because it doesn't matter. You know what it is; good guy triumphs, loses, is nearly destroyed, triumphs again. Bad guy cheats the whole time. They reconcile, finding common ground. The end. Perhaps the only curiosity was that the American robot was clearly inferior to the Russian one. The only thing that could defeat that robot was its own weapons, turned against itself. A Simple Plan (1998) -- "8/10" This is possibly Sam Raimi's best movie. He really is an excellent director. Bill Paxton played well (as opposed to his disastrous acting in Boxing Helena), but Billy Bob Thornton puts on a master class as Jacob. Raimi's style is clearer when things start rolling as the "plan" comes undone. This is a story of a simple-sounding plan hatched by three guys who find a plane full of money. They swear to tell no-one, then slowly tell too many people. Murders snowball. There is attrition. Brothers fight and reconcile. Recommended. Bohemian Rhapsody (2018) -- "8/10" This is a movie about the band Queen and its rise to fame, culminating in possibly the greatest rock concert ever -- their performance at LiveAid in 1985. The band is a family and each is essential; the film shows how famous tracks each came from different band members. This is not the story of Freddie Mercury, except so far as to describe the band. Naturally, his life is emphasized, as it defined the band more than the quieter family lives of the others. His homosexuality is an undercurrent throughout the film, rising to the fore in the second half. It is no way hidden or suppressed to get a PG rating. The treatment is subtle and tells the story adequately without getting ludicrously raunchy. The film doesn't shy away at all from male intimacy, but draws the line at depicting any sex or nudity at all (i.e. we don't have to endure Malek going down on a prosthetic penis, which is what some reviewers seemed to think was the absolute minimum required for "authenticity". Rami Malek plays Freddie Mercury. He seems to do quite a good job of it. The rest of the band is also quite good. It was a bit longer than it needed to be, especially near the beginning. The final 20 minutes were goosebumps. Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald (2018) -- "7/10" This sequel to the original was decent, but it was too obvious that this movie is a stepping stone to the next movie rather than a real movie in its own right. Grindelwald (Johnny Depp) feature much more prominently and we learn much more of his plans for eliminating muggles and dominating the wizard world. Jude Law is good as a young and constantly scheming Albus Dumbledore. We meet Dumbledore's brother as well, in the person of Credence and Nicolas Flamel (from the original books, he's the one who created the Philosopher's Stone). It was interesting, but possibly only for fans of the series. Queer Eye S03 (2019) -- "7/10" The fab five are back for another 10-episode season of helping people learn how to comb their hair, trim their beards, vacuum their apartments and choose clothes more appropriate to people their age. The format is the same for each episode, but it's only really noticeable if you binge. We spread them out over several weeks and enjoyed most of them. Some of the people they chose this time were less "worthy", but it's fine. I like Bobby's work on interior design, but they seem to go more and more over the top with each episode, spending God only knows what on people who will only mess everything up the second the five leave. Love, Death and Robots (2019) -- "9/10" This series is what I remember experiencing when I watched Heavy Metal for the first time. Perhaps in 25 years, they will also seem hopelessly dated, but for now, they were quite interesting. The 18 episodes are cartoons or CGI featuring what the title advertises. Many have interesting science-fiction--worthy plots akin to those in Black Mirror (i.e. a Twilight Zone with a strong science-fiction/technology foundation). I would watch many of these again, as they were quite good. I really liked Zima Blue. Many of the others were clever or funny or both. They were all high-quality rendering. Highly recommended. The Dirt (2019) -- "6/10" This is the biopic of the rise, fall and rise again of Mötley Crüe. It felt a bit gratuitous, on the one hand (there's a quick scene at a party in the first five minutes where Tommy Lee orally pleasures a young lady in the middle of a party until she squirts all over the place), but also quite formulaic, on the other. The acting is decent, although no-one really stands out. They spend a lot of time going over details that were most likely in the book, but don't really focus too much on the appeal of the Crüe to its fans. There are plenty of scenes of debauchery and partying and drugs and sex, but they also don't titillate. Even when they disgust -- Ozzy's piss-licking scene at the pool -- it's not that well-done. Isn't It Romantic (2019) -- "7/10" Rebel Wilson stars as Natalie, a young lady working as an architect in New York City. She's best friends with her secretary, who does nothing but watch romantic comedies all day on her computer. Natalie is quite down on these unrealistic movies. Natalie strikes her head quite badly and gets a massive concussion, waking into a glorious hospital room that she likens to a "Williams Sonoma". The doctor is handsome and thinks she's beautiful. Slowly she realizes that her life has become a romantic comedy: she is a star architect with her own firm; her secretary is now her partner, who hates her (because the formula dictates it); her original firm's client, Blake (Liam Hemsworth) is now in love with her. Adam DeVine plays her best friend, Josh (who's secretly/not-so-secretly in love with her) both in the original setting and in the romantic comedy. Adam also gets a love interest, in the form of a normally unattainable "Yoga Ambassador" called Isabella. It's a cute idea and decent iteration of the "it was all a dream" formula. At first, Natalie thinks that she has to consummate with Blake to get out of the dream, then realizes that Josh has strong feelings for her, so thinks she has to stop his wedding to Isabella and declare her love to him -- but finally realizes that her real problem is that she doesn't love herself. Tada! She wakes up in a regular emergency room. Wilson is very good and funny, as is DeVine. Nate Bargatze: Tennessee Kid (2019) -- "9/10" I really liked Bargatze's quick set in another Netflix series called The Standups and he delivers a full hour in this special with the same aplomb. He's clean as a whistle but not noticeably so. That is, he's not like Brian Regan, over-exaggerating to get laughs. Bargatze is very subdued and intelligent and delivers a great set. He has several bits that just grow slowly and then hit you with a lovely punchline. Talking about climate change, he compares our planet to the other planets, saying if you think the Earth is bad, you should see the others because "they're nowhere right now". He talks about tailgating and inadvertently entering the stadium 3 hours early, he tells of his early career with his magician father. He spends a good deal of time following up on his original special, which could have tanked, but was relaxed and interesting and very funny. Highly recommended. Kevin Hart: Irresponsible (2019) -- "6/10" Kevin plays the O₂ arena in London, standing in the middle of dozens of thousands of people, talking about his sex life and sweating profusely. Unlike Bargatze, Hart often seems forced, getting laughs for presentation rather than for material. It's not really my cup of tea anymore -- I like his earlier specials better. It seems like an entire stadium full of people in London disagree. It did feel like they jumped to crowd-shots of people dying with laughter, tears running down their face, a bit too much. It was almost like they were trying to tell you when to laugh. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3724 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3724 Sun, 07 Apr 2019 21:39:45 +0200 -- "7/10" 2. "Comedians in Cars getting Coffee S10 (2018)" <#Comedians> -- "6/10" 3. "Kaya Yanar: Made in Germany (2008)" <#Kaya> -- "8/10" 4. "Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (1988)" <#Dirty> -- "9/10" 5. "Brooklyn Nine-Nine S06 (2018--2019)" <#Brooklyn> -- "9/10" 6. "The Kominsky Method (2018)" <#Kominsky> -- "10/10" 7. "Sex Education (2019)" <#Sex> -- "10/10" 8. "Heavy Metal (1981)" <#Heavy> -- "4/10" 9. "Eighth Grade (2018)" <#Eighth> -- "4/10" 10. "Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018)" <#Solo> -- "8/10" These are my notes to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. I've recently transferred my reviews to IMDb and made "the list" of around 1400 ratings publicly available. I've included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other -- I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. Nikita (1990) -- "7/10" Nikita is a street thug with some fighting skills. She's part of a gang that tries to rob a jewelry store and it goes completely tits-up, leaving only Nikita alive. She shoots the cop who finds her at the scene in the face. She's sentenced to prison where her captors fake her death in order to enter her into a shadowy government organization to first hone, then use her native but nascent skills on missions. Her first missions, the one that she has to pass in order to "graduate" from the program and start real missions is to kill a diplomat. She's given very clear instructions, but the mission ends up being completely different and goes tits-up. She masters the situation and gets out anyway, graduating the program. She is given various missions, with a major one in Venice, where she is on vacation with her boyfriend. Her cover is almost blown during her mission, but she manages to cover it up. Her final mission in the film again goes sideways, but she escapes with her life, abandoning both the agency and her boyfriend. Watched it in the original French, with English subtitles. Comedians in Cars getting Coffee S10 (2018) -- "6/10" Jerry Seinfeld has been interviewing comedians for ten seasons now. The show format hasn't changed at all: he picks a car he deems appropriate to the comedian he's going to interview; he calls the comedian and picks them up; they go out for coffee. No-one drives the car but Seinfeld. Seinfeld is decent, but it's hard for him to shake the veneer of comfortable, rich, older guy. Still, there were a few good interviews in this season: Zach Galifianikis and Dana Carvey stood out. Others were more of a dud than expected, like Dave Chappelle, where the conversation didn't really go anywhere. Kaya Yanar: Made in Germany (2008) -- "8/10" This is one of Yanar's first specials and his machine-gun mouth serves him well through a longish special, almost 90 minutes. He covers growing up in Germany, growing up Turkish in Germany, going to gymnasium, dealing with parents of varied provenance. Watched it in German. Recommended. Dirty Rotten Scoundrels (1988) -- "9/10" After having seen the trailer for the remake The Hustle, starring Rebel Wilson and Anne Hathaway in the roles played by Steve Martin and Michael Caine in the original. Caine is a very well-established con-man on the French Riviera with a gorgeous house and a very successful "practice". Steve Martin is the brash, young American with raw skills but no style. Caine takes him under his wing and trains him for a big sting: they will compete for Caine's territory by both trying to con an heiress (Glenne Headly) out of her newly acquired fortune. They all play wonderfully and the script is great -- there's a lovely twist at the end. Highly recommended. Brooklyn Nine-Nine S06 (2018--2019) -- "9/10" In season 6, the action picks up and everyone is very comfortable in their roles. The characters grow and the plots are pretty interesting. I gave it an extra point because this season was much better than 4 or 5. The Kominsky Method (2018) -- "10/10" Michael Douglas and Allan Arkin are Sandy Kominsky, acting coach and his agent, Norman Newlander. The show starts with a farewell: Norman's wife Eileen (Susan Sullivan) has late-stage cancer and dies in the first episode. She remains in the show as an imaginary sparring partner for Norman. Sandy's daughter Mindy (the wonderful Sarah Baker) works with him. Norman's daughter Phoebe (Lisa Edelstein) is a drug addict who bounces from clinic to clinic, wasting money and everyone's patience. Throughout the season, Sandy and Norman grow grudgingly closer while Sandy gets closer to Lisa (an excellent Nancy Travis), a student of his. The dialogue and pacing is pitch-perfect. Douglas is fantastic and very much in the mode of the jovial Jack from Romancing the Stone rather than his creepier roles, like in Fatal Attraction. I'm really looking forward to season 2. Sex Education (2019) -- "10/10" This is a British show about a young man Otis Milburn (Asa Butterfield) going through puberty, along with the rest of his school. His mother (the delightful Gillian Anderson) is a sex counselor with her practice in her home. Otis has only incidental contact with her estranged husband (and fellow counselor), Remi, played by James Purefoy. His best friend is Eric (Ncuti Gatwa) and he makes an acquaintance of Maeve (the also-excellent Emma Mackey), who's highly intelligent but is poor with a shady family and an attitude problem. She detects a latent talent in Otis: he seems to have a good bedside manner for dishing out sex advice -- just like his mother. He starts counseling the other students, with varied success, but he and Maeve are making money. Maeve starts dating the school swim-star but slowly starts to fall for Otis. Otis is deeply in love with Maeve but slowly falls for Ola Nyman -- whose father is a handyman falling for Otis's mom (who reciprocates). Season one ends nicely, setting up and interesting season two, filled with so-far interesting, funny and non-preachy characters. Highly recommended. Heavy Metal (1981) -- "4/10" I first saw this movie while in college, where I remember it being much better than it was on a second viewing. In the early 90s, the graphics were amazing -- now they're a bit dated and the movie has to survive on other merits, like the plot. The plot seems to have been written by a horny 15-year--old. Most of the skits are relatively primitive, if at-times amusing. There is some nudity, but it's pretty tame, overall. The story follows an evil, glowing ball that takes its victims by convincing them to do stupid, life-threatening things. It's unclear what its agenda is: it seems all-powerful but its aims seem petty. Eighth Grade (2018) -- "4/10" This is a 90-minute movie about a modern, eighth-grade girl's life. We spend most of our time watching her in close-up, bathed in the glow of either a laptop or her phone. Her father features occasionally as a milquetoast whom she abuses. He apologizes constantly to her for making her feel that she has to abuse him. She uses Instagram primarily, as do her friends. This movie could have been an advertisement for that service. What else does she do? Does she play an instrument? Does she read? Go outside? Play a sport? Ride a bike? No to all. The weather is always lovely, but she's never outside. She doesn't seem to have any interest outside of chatting with friends. She doesn't seem particularly clever or interesting. She meets some older kids, who treat her like a goddess, which is refreshing since you expect the complete opposite. On the other hand, there is literally nothing that we've learned of her that justifies this near-worship by the older kids. She makes videos and posts them online. They are short and mostly incoherent, full of platitudes about being your best self and being confident. The plot is nearly nonexistent. She likes a boy. She has a time capsule project that she at-first hates, then regrets having made her father burn for her. She makes a new time capsule. She tells off a mean girl who doesn't seem to even understand what's happening. The vindictive moment seems to only happen for her. No-one else sees it. The end. Not recommended. Solo: A Star Wars Story (2018) -- "8/10" This movie turned out better than expected. Alden Ehrenreich is quite good as a young Han Solo. We learn about Solo's rise from his home planet to becoming a smuggler. We knew a bunch of this backstory already, but the film fills in a lot of interesting detail. The story is about the Kessel Run. Solo teams up with Beckett, another smuggler played by Woody Harrelson. Emilia Clarke is Qi'ra, a young lady in whom Solo is enamored, but who doesn't make it off the planet with him. She shows up again later, though. Donald Glover is also very good as a young Lando Calrissian. Paul Bettany and Thandie Newton are also good. I was surprised to find myself having enjoyed a Ron Howard vehicle so much. It's pretty decent, the script set up a sequel in a non-pandering manner (that is, the story for this movie was solid in its own right, but the characters and storyline were nicely lined up for more). ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3701 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3701 Sun, 07 Apr 2019 21:38:05 +0200 of around 1400 ratings publicly available. I've included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other -- I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. The Putin Interviews E03 (2017) -- "8/10" Oliver Stone interviews Vladimir Putin about his life, his career and his politics in this 4-part mini-series. The interviews take place over the span of over two years, from June 2015 to September 2017. This episode begins with intensified discussions of Ukraine. Putin mentions that, while there were talks for 17 years about Russia's entry into the WTO, for purposes of trade, Ukraine's deal with the EU was greenlit immediately, letting the West run roughshod over Russia's trade alliances, but not vice versa. He may be lying, but damn if that doesn't sound like something we would definitely do. When asked about Yanukovich leaving Kiev, "abandoning it", as Stone says, Putin responds, "Yes, that's the version used to justify the support granted to the coup. Once the president left for Kharkov, the second-largest city in the country, {...} armed men seized the presidential palace. Imagine something like that in the U.S., if the White House [were to be] seized, what would you call that? A coup d'etat? Or say that they just came to sweep the floors? "[...] "Everything can be perverted and distorted, millions of people can be deceived, if you use the monopoly on the media." In further discussions of surveillance and anti-terrorism, Putin delivers the same pablum as the US: we have to get them before they get us. On other topics of international import, he's quite open and honest about and knowledgable about the realities of terrorism and state terror. He discusses the likelihood of a missile shield kicking off a new arms race. They discuss Syria and ISIS extensively. Putin goes into detail about the oil pipeline run by ISIS. Russia works directly with the US military, where possible, not NATO. Neither one of them is legally in Syria, though. Unlike Russia, which is there at the behest of the Syrian government. They go on to discuss the US and NATO provocations in the Black Sea and along Russia shores. Putin is proud that his generals have not risen to the provocations and avoided war so far. He is a "cautious optimist". "Stone: This seems to be a very tense presidency you have. Putin: (Sighs) And when was it simple? Times are always difficult." The Punisher, S02 (2019) -- "8/10" Frank Castle is on the road, bouncing from place to place. The best thing about this show is that the Punisher is a force of nature. Jon Bernthal is excellent as the taciturn Frank Castle. Ben Barnes starts off slowly, but does well as Billy Russo, who makes his grueling way back from the monumental beating Castle gave him at the end of the previous season. This season goes up and down a bit, but overall, I think it's quite good -- carried on the strength of Bernthal's performance -- and, eventually, Giorgia Whigham's as Rachel/Amy. Amber Rose Revah as Madani is pretty uneven, but overall better than in the first season. Karen Paige shows up for an episode, which is nice. Jason Moore as Curtis is pretty good, too. Josh Stewart's steely-eyed Pilgrim was more annoying at the beginning, but became more bearable once he showed vulnerability. As in the first season, Castle takes an unbelievable amount of punishment -- I thought he punished other people, but in this show, he seems to be punishing himself. Bernthal carries it well and makes it as believable as possible -- it works for me. His character is developed quite well -- a tortured soul with an unswerving morality, just like in the comic books. The plot carries Castle and Russo inevitably toward each other -- the unstoppable force and the immovable object. Somewhere in there, there's Pilgrim still trying to kill Amy/Rachel as part of his mission. The amount of damage he takes is also pretty impressive. The final couple of episodes take it up quite a notch, tying together many of the open threads. Madani clinches with Krista, Billy's psychiatrist and lover. Billy, who'd actually kept his promise to Krista to leave it all behind and run away with her. sees Krista's demise -- at Madani's hands. Dragged back in again, because he's got nothing to lose, again. Norm MacDonald has a Show (2018) -- "9/10" Norm MacDonald continually surprised me, even when I'm expecting surprises. This is a low-fi talk show with various hi-fi guests. Norm is an open and honest interviewer who clearly only has guests that he admires deeply. It shows in his interview style -- which, if you know Norm, you wouldn't expect to be at-all linear or in-line with a talk-show interview style. Norm is a good inquisitor, but in his own elliptical, inimitable style -- a style with which his guests, to their credit, roll quite well. I've liked most of the guests and most of the interviews, but the stand-outs so far have been Jane Fonda and Billy Joe Shaver. Both were truly moving and interesting. Shaver, in particular, is, for me, a heretofore unknown wonder of Americana, a country-and-western singer with a laconic gravitas and pathos and humor that he has in both word in song. His recorded material is good, too, but his live renditions of Black Rose, Old Chunk of Coal and Georgia on a Fast Train on this show were better -- stripped of all artifice and production, gravelly, delivered in a powerful whisper. Ray Romano: Right Here, Around the Corner (2019) -- "8/10" This is Ray's first recorded special in 23 years. His standup is still rock-solid and funny as hell. His on-stage persona is wonderful, laid-back. He talks about getting older, dealing with his older mother, being married, men-and-women -- standard topics, but really nicely done. Somehow real and funny, even though his material would feel dated to many today, he's damned funny. It's not sexist, it's just jokes about traditional roles -- women do this, men do that. He talks about his own relationship, though. La Haine (1995) -- "10/10" Vincent Cassel is a revelation in this. He's a Jewish teenager named, not coincidentally, Vinz, with two best friends: a black guy, Hubert and an Arab, Saïd. Hubert is the "thinker", Vinz is looking to make a name for himself and Saîd lives in his brother's shadow, talking big but just making noise. Vinz is a loose cannon -- he hasn't done anything yet, but he's convinced that he has to do something. The film is shot in black and white and takes place over 24 hours after a riot, in which the police beat a young man quite badly. Tensions are high and it's expected that another riot will break out. The cops themselves aren't all bad -- some of them seem to be genuinely concerned and feel pushed into the role of adversary whereas others take to that role with gusto, viewing the youth as criminals-in-waiting and nothing more. During the melee, a cop drops a gun. Vinz ends up with it and the possession of it alone lends him power and confidence. He brandishes it, playing gangster. Hubert bows out, leaving his two friends on their own -- at least for a little while. Hubert soon joins them again. They hear the "story of Grunwalski" is a wonderfully deep non-sequitur -- it reminded of the kind of interlude common to more surrealist pieces, like Le Charm Discret de la Bourgeoisie, which I just saw a few days ago. They head to a fancier part of town to meet a friend of Saïd's who owes him money. The police pick them up upon exiting the building, with Vinz getting away on foot. The other two stay in custody until it's just too late to catch the last train back to their banlieue. Vinz meets up with them again in the train station. It's after midnight and the next train is in the morning. They wander the city, bored and philosophical and getting slowly stoned. Much of the discussion and spontaneous bits of plot center on Vinz's gun, which only gets him into trouble. Hubert provokes him, in the end, to shoot a skinhead, trying to get him to see how stupid a gun is. They part ways, Vinz handing the gun off to Hubert and Saîd talking shit and telling stupid jokes, just like always. Vinz responds, as always, that he'd heard that one before, but it was about a rabbi. "[...] jusqu’ici tout va bien, jusqu’ici tout va bien, jusqu’ici tout va bien. Mais l'important n’est pas la chute, c’est l’atterrissage." The black-and-white film, lovely cinematography and framing, pacing and locations combine to deliver a lovely, moving, timely and sobering film. Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt (2018) -- "8/10" Season 4 comes back strong from a season-3 slump with a very strong last few episodes. Jon Bernthal has a cameo as an Israeli agent posing as a love interest for Titus, Kimmy gets a payout from Giztoob, Titus gets a dream role in Cats -- but in a bizarre way. All of the main characters end up very nicely and it's quite plausible that this is the last season, for real. Red Sparrow (2018) -- "6/10" Jennifer Lawrence plays a Russian ballerina named Domenika, whose career is ended by a malicious accident. Her understudy was sleeping with her ballet partner -- so they hatch a plan to have him land on her leg, breaking it horrifically. She learns what happened and takes them out in the sauna, beating them to within an inch of their lives. Her uncle, high up in the Russian secret service, saves her from prison by faking her death and enlisting her in his employ, to pay off her debt. She ends embroiled in a plot with double agents, top-secret papers and even ends up as a double/triple agent herself. Lawrence plays well, but the plot wasn't very gripping and the movie felt much too long. Boxing Helena (1993) -- "4/10" There are so many things that could have made this an interesting movie: it stars Sherilyn Fenn (Audrey from Twin Peaks), it's directed by David Lynch's daughter. On the other hand, Bill Paxton's in it -- and he's more awful than I've ever seen him. Julian Sands in the lead role as Nick gives him an absolute run for his money, though. The movie's about a highly skilled and successful doctor (Sands) who becomes obsessed with Helena (Fenn). Helena is a bit of a vamp, but not really obviously the target of obsession (although director Lynch does her damnedest to play up Fenn's strengths as much as possible). Nick finally manages to get Helena to his house, but she leaves, walking backwards and comes under the wheels of a truck. True to form in this movie, this part is just as unbelievable as the rest. Segue to a few days later and Helena's at Nick's house -- sans legs. Nick has "saved her life" by amputating. This is supposed to be the clutch scene, but it's absolutely anticlimactic. We see Helena humiliate Nick and Nick deal with his nosy coworkers. We also see heavy allusions to cutting off Helena's arms soon. It's weird, poorly acted and poorly directed. Julian Sands is just such a wooden, weird actor. Spoiler alert: they take the edge off of the entire weirdness by making it "all a dream". Not recommended at all. Ken Jeong: You Complete Me, Ho (2019) -- "4/10" Ken Jeong seems like a nice and funny guy, but his material is quite thin and derives exclusively from his having been a doctor before having done Hangover and his being ethnic Asian. There are a few good jokes in there, but they're few and far between. Black Mirror: Bandersnatch (2018) -- "7/10" This is an interactive movie that is self-referential and breaks the fourth wall. In that sense, perhaps it was trying to do too much at once. It's good enough and reasonably well-acted. The story is of a young man who's trying to break into writing video games in the 80s. He wants to base his game on a seminal book by an acid-tripping author. The game should be choose-your-own-adventure, just as the book was. The movie is also choose-your-own-adventure and, as it progresses, you realize that the young man's mania is caused by the audience's interaction with the film, which is a clever conceit. There are several endings and permutations, from utter failure to fading into the background, to killing his father and getting caught, to not getting caught, to fighting his therapist, to getting the game contract, to not getting it, to getting a shitty review, to getting a great review. It's a nice treatment of a concept that will probably get much more traction in the years to come. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3659 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3659 Sat, 09 Feb 2019 22:17:18 +0100 -- "8/10" 2. "The Incredibles 2 (2018)" <#Incredibles2> -- "6/10" 3. "Sebastian Maniscalco: Stay Hungry (2019)" <#Sebastian> -- "6/10" 4. "Kaya Yanar: Reiz der Schweiz (2017)" <#Kaya> -- "8/10" 5. "Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (2017)" <#Guardians> -- "9/10" 6. "Mad Men (S05-S07)" <#Mad> -- "9/10" 7. "The Putin Interviews E02 (2017)" <#Putin2> -- "8/10" 8. "Conan the Barbarian (2011)" <#Conan> -- "6/10" 9. "Johnny Handsome (1989)" <#Johnny> -- "7/10" 10. "Le Charme Discret de la Bourgeoisie (1972)" <#Charme> -- "8/10" 11. "Don't Breathe (2016)" <#Breathe> -- "7/10" These are my notes to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. I've recently transferred my reviews to IMDb and made "the list" of around 1400 ratings publicly available. I've included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other -- I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. The Orville S01 (2017) -- "8/10" I kept waiting for Seth McFarlane to mess this up with his trademark Family Guy quips and non sequiturs -- but he didn't. This show is a pretty straight-up homage to the classic Star Trek series, with a humorous twist. The twist is that the crew talks and interacts like people do today, instead of in the more stiffly formal style common to the innumerable Star Trek series. It's not exactly bathroom humor, but the crew does use the bathroom, unlike the other shows, where you never see anyone ever act human at all. When the shuttle takes off, they all buckle their seatbelts. [1] Or when the enemy commander comes on screen and he's way to the left, the captain asks him to move to the center because his framing is too distracting. It's pretty amusing so far. McFarlane is Captain Mercer, Scott Grimes is his helmsman, Mercer's ex-wife Grayson is his first officer. Penny Johnson Jerald comes over from Deep Space Nine to play Dr. Finn. It's also a nice mix of state-of-the-art CGI [2] and down-to-Earth tech that looks like the original show. For example, the quantum-bubble generator is a metal cone with a few wires hanging out of it. It's perfect as a prop, though. The first show manages to introduce the crew, show them working together and solve a mission with a cool trick -- just like the old shows. The rest of the season continues in this vein, more of less. There are many moments when I can't tell whether McFarlane is messing with me: is this show being ironically lame? Is it almost deliberately ignoring that aliens -- and even humans -- couldn't possibly be this well-versed in 20th- and 21st-century culture? They say that science fiction is about today, but set in the future. This show embodies the hell out of that maxim. There are a few shows that are so on-the-nose that it's almost a bit painful. Some characters could use a bit more stoicism rather than just discussing their feelings all the time, as if there were nothing better to do on a spaceship. Overall, it's an entertaining season. I'm still not sure whether I'll watch season two, but Kelly Grayson is pretty easy on the eyes, so what the hell. The Incredibles 2 (2018) -- "6/10" I expected more of this movie, though I suppose it was silly of me to expect a Disney movie to be more subversive. I'd heard that it was a great movie, but -- so far, one hour in -- it feels very cookie-cutter and trite. The kids are insufferable and the Dad is a giant pushover who commands no respect. The Mom does everything -- even the hero-ing, when they attempt their comeback. And, of course, there's a gazillionaire bankrolling their comeback -- we have to be taught that nothing ever happens without a rich person financing it. Does anyone in the family question their newfound bounty? Do they consider that perhaps all of the luxuries they're given aren't free? That they're perhaps not just given to them because they're so "incredible"? No, they're egotistical enough to all just jump at the mansion unquestioningly -- they clearly deserve to be there and no price will be exacted for it. When Mom calls Dad and asks him, without saying hello first, "weren't you going to call me?", pretty much everyone's "crazy girlfriend" alarm should be going off -- but the Dad doesn't blink an eye. He just sputters and makes excuses. His wife steamrolls him just like his kids do. He is, after all, just an oaf with too many muscles, without the finesse to get anything done without breaking everything. This is clearly a movie for the 21st-century mindset -- men are barely tolerable, stupid and need to be corralled, like cattle. Are husbands and wives doomed to be depicted as adversaries? Or is the lack of such competition in a relationship seen as a sign of weakness in both parties? His children are absolutely terrible, haranguing their Dad with their bullshit until he explodes. This is a 2-hour advertisement for not breeding. The voice talent is decent, although Holly Hunter's speech defect is far more charming accompanied by her face -- it seems a bit odd as a disembodied voice. Craig T. Nelson is Mr. Incredible, Bob Odenkirk is billionaire Wilson Deavor with Catherine Keener as his sister, Samuel Jackson is Frozone, Jonathan Banks is Rick Dicker, and Isabella Rossellini is the Ambassador. Elastigirl's mode of transportation in an urban environment is wonderfully animated, and reminded me of Spider-Man. The subsequent fight scene with Screenslaver was nicely choreographed, as well. Edna Mode's scenes are also very nicely done. The story itself is a bit predictable: it just keeps hammering on stupid males. Having a Y-chromosome means that you only ever do something well by accident -- or you get trapped as easily as a monkey with his hand in the cookie jar. Who remembers how to track Jack-Jack? Not Dash. Too dumb. Too dumb to even notice that he's too dumb. Violet knows immediately, though. She's a grrrrll. It was OK, but the original was much better. The long-awaited sequel was a bit disappointing. Sebastian Maniscalco: Stay Hungry (2019) -- "6/10" He's got pretty light and obvious topics, but he does them well. I really like his body language and facial expressions -- it adds a lot to his routine. He talks about his life, working out, having a baby, fighting and much more. Of course he appeals to me: he's about my age and he's got a great American-Italian accent. Of his cited influences, Bill Burr and Andrew Dice Clay are the most obvious. He's pretty clean, swears occasionally, but it doesn't feel like he's avoiding it. Unfortunately, he flagged quite hard in the second half/last third. I liked his other special better (Aren't You Embarrassed?). Kaya Yanar: Reiz der Schweiz (2017) -- "8/10" Kaya was born in Germany to Turkish parents and made his career in Köln. He moved to Switzerland 5 years ago, to live with his Swiss girlfriend in Zürich. He's learned a lot about our little corner of the world since then: separating trash, making neat piles of recycling, working with a recycling/garbage calendar, odd words, Swiss dialect, skiiing, tourism, food and much more. He's very amusing, especially if you live here and have an open mind about our customs. Recommended. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 (2017) -- "9/10" I really like the aesthetic of this corner of the Marvel Universe. The Guardians are a rag-tag, eclectic small group of aliens from all over the galaxy. They fly in a slightly broken-down but extremely capable spaceship with an esthetic reminiscent of the original Star Wars movies. The Guardians themselves have well-rounded and interesting characters. Their group dynamic seems to exist outside of the film -- with the film offering only a glimpse into a world that exists independently of the film. That is, we are allowed to view one of their stories, but it feels like these beings exist. The plot of the film is interesting enough -- Quill's (Chris Pratt) father (Kurt Russell) has returned from the stars and has invited him to live out life as an immortal on his planet (which turns out to be him, a Celestial). Yondu (Michael Rooker) is back (Quill's adoptive father, more or less), with his awesome arrow and whistle. Rocket Raccoon (Bradley Cooper) is better than ever, as is Drax (Dave Bautista). Sylvester Stallone has a small role, but does well with it. Gamora (Zoe Saldana) and Nebula (Karen Gillan) also have an interesting dynamic. Pom Klementieff as Mantis was funny. especially with Drax. The finale was extravagant and over-the-top and it still somehow worked. The colors and set design and many of the shots were wonderful. I'm happy to see that there's a third installment on the way. I think the sequel was even better than the original. Mad Men (S05-S07) -- "9/10" There was a bit of slump in the middle somewhere, but they ended quite strong, in my opinion. Roger Sterling (John Slattery) is brilliant, as are Peggy Olson (Elisabeth Moss) and Joan Harris (Christina Hendricks). Don Draper (Jon Hamm) is a complex character, equal parts creative and interesting and utterly reprehensible. Pete Campbell (Vincent Kartheiser) and Betty Francis (January Jones) are also nuanced and reprehensible. The story arcs and characters are great. Have I mentioned how funny and charming Roger Sterling is? He is really a constant source of at least some form of principle -- and, if nothing else, entertainment. His dialogue is, nearly without exception, delightful. The others -- especially in the second half of season 6 and the first half of season 7 -- subside into a muck of backbiting, spite and senseless egotism, but not Roger. Season 7 clawed back a bit from the backbiting, cleaning up a few character arcs and delivering the agency into the arms of McCann -- a place that Don had been avoiding for the first 6.5 seasons. It's hard to feel sorry for any of them as -- similar to so many other shows -- this is a show about the rich. These people have problems largely of their own making; were they to just be happy with what they have, all of their problems would go away. Hell, at the point in season 7, they're all millionaires in a world where most people make about $5,000 per year. Still, overall, it's a masterful series of 7 quality seasons and more than deserving of its role as pretender to the crown of "best U.S. television show" -- right up there with The Sopranos (even-more-horrible people) and The Wire (still the best). They did a great job of wrapping things up in a nice way for the important characters without being overly schmaltzy. Roger ended up with Marie, Don joined a cult, Peggy finally relaxed just a smidge (with Stan), Joan started a business, Pete got his family back, Ken was happy at Dow, Harry was still a miserable bastard, but he deserved it, and we didn't have to see Megan anymore. The Putin Interviews E02 (2017) -- "8/10" Oliver Stone interviews Vladimir Putin about his life, his career and his politics in this 4-part mini-series. The interviews take place over the span of over two years, from June 2015 to September 2017. In the first part of this second episode, Putin and Stone discuss the dismantling of the ABM treaty -- what Putin called the cornerstone of international detente -- and the effects it has had in the last decade. Putin knows that his country is surrounded by hostile forces that only "pretend" to be defensive; he is fully aware that they can be switched "in hours" to be offensive. Stone asks whether America could win a "hot war". Putin responds "No. ... No one would survive a hot war". After that, the conversation turns to Dr. Strangelove and they end up watching the film together, because Putin has never seen it. Hopefully, they watch S.T.A.L.K.E.R. together next. Nope: next up is Putin playing ice hockey with the Russian national team in an exhibition match. He started playing at age 60. After the match, they discuss the homosexuality-propaganda law, which forbids evangelizing alternate sexual lifestyles to minors. This law stems from the primitive mindset that homosexuality is a choice that adults can make. Putin defends it, making his social politics as behind the times, but not out of the mainstream. Putin points out that there is a need to support families, to sustain a replacement birthrate, but I think he's just being cagey about it. He admits later that his opinion is strong on this, but he seems to see the limit to legislation and the likelihood that the Russian population diverges with him. Stone: "There is a macho tradition in Russia, a pretty strong one." Putin agrees, but says that it's not nearly as strong as in "certain Islamic states" -- or possibly even in the U.S. You'd have to be utterly tone-deaf to not notice that there's more than a bit of a macho culture in the U.S. as well. The coasts think they're beyond it, but they're utterly and tragically wrong. It's true that Russia has regressed since the revolution, when things were initially very egalitarian -- leading the world, in fact. This part goes on for quite a while, belying the claim that Stone didn't pressure Putin hard enough on this topic. Their next topic is Ukraine and U.S. involvement in that coup. Putin: "I cannot say we welcomed this change in the government ... and yet we maintained cooperation with the new leadership." Talk about an understatement. Putin: "The philosophy of American foreign-policy in this region consists in preventing, by all means necessary, Ukraine's rapprochement with Russia." Putin is very passionate about the obvious U.S. plan to make Russia everyone's enemy; he is quite eloquent and knowledgable about all of the steps taken to get where we are today. The next stop on the history train is Georgia and the twisted Western narrative surrounding its incursion into Russian territory. I had no idea that Mikheil Saakashvil was western-educated -- he's quite fluent in English. Next, they discuss surveillance -- and Putin jokes that Russia is "better" than the U.S. there because they don't have nearly the money or resources to be as "bad" as the U.S. It is at this point that we discover that Putin does speak and understand some English. Following this -- now in a car, with Putin driving (of course) -- they discuss Edward Snowden. Putin says that, at first, he wanted nothing to do with Snowden because the U.S./Russia relationship was already fraught. Snowden's appeal to human rights, he says, fell on deaf ears (he admits that this shines poorly on his initial reaction). When asked, though, if he hates what Snowden did, he responds firmly in the negative: "Snowden is not a traitor. What he did was not against the interests of his country. [..] He did it publicly." He disagrees with what he did, but defends his right to have done it. But, he says "he's a courageous man [...] and has great character." Finally, when asked about the upcoming American election (in 2016), he says "I believe that nothing's going to change, no matter who gets elected." He goes on to say: "The force of the United States bureaucracy is very great. And there are many facts that are not visible to the candidates until they become president. And the moment one gets to real work, he or she feels the burden." When asked whether he would support a given candidate, he replied, "Unlike many partners of ours, we never interfere within the domestic affairs of other countries. That is one of the principles we stick to in our work." Conan the Barbarian (2011) -- "6/10" The action scenes are pretty decent and I like Jason Momoa. The story is pretty complicated, actually, but many of the actors are either wasted or not very good. Stephen Lang is the baddie, Zym, who killed Conan's father. Rose McGowan is sinister as the daughter/protege, Ron Perlman is Conan's father and Morgan Freeman does the voiceovers. The beginning is stronger than the middle bits. It's all a bit predictable, but the aesthetics, sets, CGI and set pieces are better than I remember, so I give it an extra star or two. I have a soft spot for the original, but have to admit that its effects would suffer in comparison, especially with the depiction of the monsters. That's not to say that the original wasn't good, but that the remake wasn't as bad I'd thought it was. Johnny Handsome (1989) -- "7/10" This is the story of a disfigured man Johnny Handsome (Mickey Rourke) who's a heist planner. He's well-known for his skill, smarts and caution. His best friend Mikey (Scott Wilson) is way behind on his payments to a loan shark. Mikey's trying to keep his restaurant afloat but is far behind on his payments. He asks Johnny to do one more job with him. Sunny Boyd (Ellen Barkin) and Rafe Garrett (Lance Henriksen) are also on the job and they're loose cannons -- literally. They kill Mikey on the jewelry heist, leaving Johnny behind to get arrested. Detective Drones (Morgan Freeman) is on his ass, waiting for him to screw up. While Johnny's in jail, Rafe and Sunny (on the outside) hire two guys to try to have him knifed to death. Their attempt fails and he's put into a program at the hospital with Dr. Fisher (Forest Whitaker) to rehabilitate his face. The surgery is successful and he enrolls in a work-release program. He meets Donna (Elizabeth McGovern), who works in accounting at his new job. Though his face has changed, he's still Johnny -- he wants revenge and he wants to rob the shipping company where he and Donna work. He gets Rafe and Sunny to go in on it with him, though they don't recognize him. Johnny plans a double-cross, but it goes horribly wrong. The heist goes off without a hitch, but they betray each other, with Detective Drones mixing things up, until their Mexican standoff ends with all of them dead, save Donna. Walter Hill directed and he's got his own style. Le Charme Discret de la Bourgeoisie (1972) -- "8/10" This is an odd movie about a group of upper--middle-class friends -- three women and three men. It was conceived and written by Luis Buñuel, a Spanish filmmaker and contemporary of Dalí, both heavily involved in surrealism. The plot is a bit loose, consisting of many scenes centered around a group of middle-class friends trying to organize a dinner date. It's not as plotless as Zerkalo by Tarkovsky, but it's close. Many of the scenes (at least four) are revealed to have been dreamt by members of the group, in a sort of layered reality reminiscent of Inception, but without the burden of actually trying to make it logical or sensible. The main character seems to be Raphael, a diplomat from the fictitious Latin country of Miranda -- a man remarkably devoid of diplomacy with a spectacular self-regard. His friends are not much better, dropping remarks about how the other half lives with not-unrealistic regularity. The film purports to be absurd, but depicts interactions and behaviors that are, in fact, how real people act. At least those of a certain class, say, the bourgeoisie. There is much left up to interpretation, but many of the characters are fun and funny, like Florence (Bulle Ogier) -- a bundle of pithy non sequiturs -- or the eminently foxy Alice Sénéchal (Stéphane Audran). It's surreal, so the film is at least as much about what you bring to it as about what it presents, but it's a good time and well-acted. It's certainly unique and won't "remind you of another movie". It's devil-may-care desire to impart something other than a feel-good ending or interpretable plot that makes it interesting. It's not only a fun ride, there's room for interpretation and discussion. This film has quite a pedigree -- it was one of Roger Ebert's favorites -- and has received no small amount of attention from students of cinema, as in "The Picaro in Paris: ‘The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie’ and the Picaresque Tradition" by Julie Jones , which describes the film as a picaresque, following in a Spanish storytelling tradition: "In the classic picaresque novel, the protagonist (usually a he) often does not know where he will get his next meal. Yet, despite his extreme poverty, he has social pretensions. Aware that hard work will do nothing to advance his cause, he relies on disguise and trickery to improve his station. He keeps on moving to stay ahead of the law, which brings him to a variety of settings and in contact with social types who often tell him their stories. The picaresque novel, then, takes the form of a pseudo-autobiography, loosely structured to accommodate any number of episodes [...]" Don't Breathe (2016) -- "7/10" This was a decent "scary" movie with a few nice twists and turns. None of the people were worth knowing, but that made it easier to see them getting beat up and/or killed. That was the intention, I'm sure. Just like it was the intention to telegraph that the young lady would win, by showing her promising her younger sister that she would take her to California. An American movie would never leave us wondering what that poor little girl would do should she find out that her sister had been murdered while trying to rob a house. She'd be left knowing that she would be doomed to grow up in that horrible home without her big sister and only her alcoholic mother around, asking her whether she'd started blowing guys for money yet, even though she was only 8 or so years old. A Japanese movie would do that, but that's why Japanese movies are, generally, darker. Korean movies, too, from what I've seen. No risk, no fun. This one didn't do that -- the little girl was saved from her life of misery by a sister who was suddenly a million dollars richer, even though she totally didn't deserve it any more than the horrible man who'd gotten it from the family of the woman who'd run over and killed his daughter and whom he'd kidnapped in order to punish her because the criminal courts wouldn't do it. Her punishment included being impregnated by him in order for him to replace his child. As I wrote, not uninteresting twists and turns. He was a veteran who'd been blinded in the line of duty, so he escaped (mostly) unharmed, despite the aforementioned socially unacceptable peccadilloes. Also, the giant Rottweiler was neutralized in a way that didn't injure it whatsoever. The movie could have been a bit darker, to match expectations. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] This arguably turns out to be a salient plot point. [1] Some of the long shots look almost painted, actually, but I wonder if that's deliberate? Were they going for the look of the backdrop effects of older science-fiction shows? ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3644 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3644 Tue, 08 Jan 2019 22:52:22 +0100 of almost 1200 ratings publicly available. I've included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other -- I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. 36.15 code Père Noël (1989) -- "8/10" This movie is French, but it screams the 80s. It actually came out a year before Home Alone -- and the subsequent film seems to be a shoddy ripoff of this French original. Thomas is a young boy living in a mansion with his mother and grandfather and dog. He has an overactive imagination and too many toys -- we see him prepare himself elaborately for war within him home against his dog with tons of toys. He looks like a mini-Rambo. This is just to before breakfast. His mother announces that she won't be back until late that day. She runs the large, local shopping center. He amuses himself with contacting Santa Claus on his computer. Santa Claus on the other end is a man we saw at the every beginning -- trying to take part in a snowball fight with children. His motives are currently unclear. This film is an 80s' kid's dream come true: he's got all of the equipment we all so dearly wanted: toy guns, computers, cars -- he knows how do everything already. He can fix a car; he can hack a computer; he can drive the car. He makes a 3D model of his home, complete with integrated camera coverage (something we barely have today). We even see he can view the live footage on his arm-computer. It's a complete child's fantasy. Meanwhile, the odd man pretending to be "Père Noël" with Thomas online is fired from being a mall Santa by Thomas's mother. He slapped a child for telling him that he wasn't the real Santa Claus. Things get a bit more sinister now -- the guy hijacks a mall delivery-truck and is headed to Thomas's house. Thomas wakes to see Santa coming down the chimney -- but his dog gets wind of it and attacks Santa. DID NOT SEE THIS COMING: Santa f%#$ing kills the dog, right in front of Thomas. Total 90º turn! Thomas rescues his grandfather and they take his secret passages to the garage and get into the car -- Santa is waiting. The car starts, but doesn't stay running. Santa is off the f$%#ing rails -- he head-butts the windshield, then goes to town with a sledgehammer. This ain't no Home Alone. Thomas and Papi retreat to his giant playroom and prepare for war (this is similar to Home Alone). Thomas's mother is heading home. Santa is roving about the mansion with murder on his mind. He discovers the cameras -- and takes them out. Thomas refuses to wear shoes in an old mansion in the middle of winter. Kids are stupid. It catches up to him: he's forced out onto the roof, replete in his plastic knives and grenades and suction-cup darts, crying for his mother. She's on her way -- driving and phoning in a snowstorm. Thomas is not out of tricks, though: he sneaks back into the house and sends his friend a fax. I shit you not. Too late for grandpa, though, as Santa has discovered the hidey-hole -- and Grandpa can't see. Thomas gets there in the nick of time. He lures Santa into the steam room and traps him there, turning up the heat considerably. They're trapped in the house now, though, because Thomas had dropped down security panels on all doors and windows (I know, right?) and now his arm-computer's broken, so he can't open them again. Mom crashes the car (out of the game; condition unknown) and Santa manages to break out of the steam room. Thomas is using a welding torch now -- I shit you not. He gets the doors and windows open. But Santa has recovered and he manages to stab Thomas. Pilou (his friend) shows up and lures Santa away. Now it's montage time. He splints his leg. He buries his dog. The end of the movie is more like the part that Home Alone copied -- but overall, this movie is so much darker. They killed a dog! Santa killed a dog! Right in front of the boy! In a Christmas movie! Thomas is more like Rambo in this part: he builds real grenades out of his fake ones. He lights Santa on fire with a suction-cup dart. He tries to blow up Santa with a toy train carrying said grenade, but Santa turns it around on him and tries to kill Grandpa with it, instead. But, yeah, Santa looks very much like Joe Pesci in Home Alone. So much happens: a cop shows up and Santa kills him. The boy trips over the cop's body in the woods, but finds his gun. He shoots Santa -- but Santa keeps coming. Thomas goes back the mansion to free his grandfather and give him an insulin shot. He resuscitates him -- and Santa's back, staggering through the main door. This time Grandpa gets the gun and -- even though he can barely see -- finishes Santa off. This kid's not bad, actually. His acting career went nowhere, but he became a big-time visual-effects producer (and I mean "big-time": Independence Day, Avatar, San Andreas and many more. He must get so much shit about this movie from his colleagues). It was decent, more interesting in an anthropological way. Also, that 90º turn when Santa first shows up is worth an extra point. Saw it in the original French. The Big Sick (2017) -- "9/10" This was a lovely movie about a budding relationship between Kumail (Kumail Nanjani) and Emily (Zoe Kazan). They both live in Chicago. Kumail is a second-generation immigrant -- his parents moved from Pakistan with him and his brother. Kumail's brother toes the line; Kumail only pretends to. He pretends to pray, he pretends to be signing up for the LSAT. He drives an Uber to support his budding standup career. His parents are depicted as what everyone expects Asian parents to be. Emily is in school, getting her master's in Psychology. She wants to be a therapist. We meet her parents later. Emily and Kumail meet and date, but ultimately break up because Kumail has not told his parents about Emily -- and Emily discovers the box of marriage candidates that Kumail's mother keeps introducing him to. Fast-forward a bit and Emily falls terribly ill. Her friends all have exams, so they call Kumail to sit with her. Emily's parents show up -- Holly Hunter and Ray Romano, both spectacular -- and they grudgingly form a triad of support for Emily. Kumail gets to know them and they him. Kumail is finally forced to tell him parents about Emily. Kumail also has a chance at a big comedy festival: he's qualified for the final tryouts. He bombs terribly because he has a breakdown on stage about Emily. Emily wakes from her artificial coma -- the doctors have found out what's wrong with her and it's manageable. Emily, however, was asleep during Kumail's growth. She doesn't care about him -- to her, he's still the asshole who wouldn't tell his parents about her and with whom she has no chance. Kumail accepts her decision and moves on, in a way. His friends are moving to New York City and they want him to go with them. He agrees to go. Emily, though, has a change of heart after having seen his breakdown on stage and also his revamped one-man show, in which he took her advice to tell more about himself. He's moving, though, and they once again pass like ships in the night. Things work out, though, don't worry. It's unorthodox, but it's a romantic comedy after all. All of the leads are very funny (Kumail's 9/11 joke was brilliant) and it's sweet and believable. Recommended. Twin Peaks: The Missing Pieces (2014) -- "7/10" This movie is a hodge-podge of deleted and extended scenes from the Twin Peaks movie and the series. Some are interesting; some are surreal; some are both; some are neither. Some others could be shown at the Whitney in New York and no-one would notice. Some of those are repeats, even within this film. David Bowie as Phillip Jeffries is in a couple of them. In one of them Miguel Ferrer as Albert is there, as well. It's nice to see Pete Martell and Jocelyn Packard and co. from the original series. Laura Palmer's in several of the scenes: in one of them, we see her getting into a truck cab and offering sex for cocaine (which was mostly just hinted at in the series and movie). Many of her scenes are quite good -- they stand on their own, providing richer detail. There's several scenes with Laura and Bobby that illuminate things considerably. On the other hand, the original show managed to convey everything without ever showing Laura at all. In fact, a lot of these scenes were clearly dropped because Lynch and Frost felt that they were too obvious, that they gave away too much, that they explained too much of the mystery too soon. For fans of the show, it's nice to see all of the characters in new scenes. For anyone who's not a fan -- or hasn't seen the show -- this movie will be quite confusing. Zerkalo (The Mirror) (1974) -- "10/10" I always enjoy the ride with Tarkovsky. There's just something about his direction that makes you pay attention. He makes passages that would be boring seem intriguing enough to follow minutely. It's a combination of his languorous camera movement -- always in motion, rotating about his subjects -- his loving focus on nature, his visual storytelling, hid auditory storytelling, using silence so effectively, and never, ever telling when he could show. His sets are meticulously constructed, colors, buildings, costumes, effects. Rain is where he wants it to be, as is fire. It's almost as if he can even command the wind to blow across an entire field when he needs it. [1] The story unfolds non-chronologically (big surprise there). It focuses on a woman who, in the present, lives alone in the countryside. Windows to the past reveal a husband, a larger home somewhere else, children. Some scenes are in black and white, others in color -- I think this might suggest chronology. Tarkovsky loves rain as much as Kurosawa in Rashomon. We cut back and forth through time, with Natalya playing both herself and the Mother. At times, particularly toward the end, we feel that she gazes at herself, across time. But the film is narrated by Alyosha, both as a child as an adult. There is stock footage of soldiers trudging through water, dragging boats of supplies along shorelines. Other stock footage shows the raising of a giant Soviet balloon. The scenes each stand on their own, each exquisitely planned and shot. Each telling its story with a minimal of exposition. In one scene, boys are learning to shoot. The squeaking snow tells the story of the col. One child's mittenless hands tell the story of his poverty. That they don't notice tells of their resignedness to suffering. This is scattering of memories and some dream sequences, flitting about, crossing, starring sometimes the same people at different ages, sometimes the same actors playing different people. Always with voiceovers or careful audio, tuned to contribute to the mood, if not the story. Especially in this film, there are always mirrors reflecting the scene from another direction. And spindly plants, more stark in the black-and-white scenes of the past. The glowing coals with the mirror in it; the warm scenes with first, after so much rain and wet. [2] This seems to be a mirror held up by the director, showing himself. I don't know what it is about it, but I'd watch it again. There are the one-sided conversation where the second speaker is forever off-screen and the camera is locked on only one half of the conversation. Inconceivable but there it is, again and again. And it's mesmerizing. Maybe partially because it's so different from everything else. The film demands your attention and rewards you for giving it. It's like the condensation of an entire culture, of generations over the last 100 years. The mood, the pacing is lovely, but alien to me. The storytelling is Lynchian, hinting at deep meaning convincingly. The art direction is in a league of its own. There are certain scenes where you could see one still and know immediately who'd directed this film. "[...] even in my dream i become aware that I'm only dreaming it. And the overwhelming joy is clouded by anticipation of awakening." The Predator (2018) -- "8/10" I only heard about this movie from the video essay, "The Unloved - The Predator " by Scout Tafoya , in which the author made a plea for finally appreciating Olivia Munn's acting chops. He turns out to have been right. This is a solid action movie, with funny writing, interesting characters and -- lo and behold -- no emphasis made on gender roles. Munn is neither a shrinking violet nor femme fatale; neither is the wife Emily (Yvonne Strahovski) of another lead Quinn McKenna (Boyd Holbrook, whom I first saw in Narcos and who's only grown on me since). Munn is completely believable as an evolutionary biologist who gets pulled in to study the Predator they've captured. She's also funny (we knew that from the Daily Show) and doesn't back down from a fight. The plot is kind of incidental, actually. It's the smooth action, good characters and funny dialogue that make this action film stand out. When the predators show up, they even kind of get in the way of the back-and-forth. That doesn't happen a lot in this kind of movie. In scene after scene, they make it funny and utterly fail to make Munn look weak. She rescues herself -- just like all the rest of them. The hodge-podge band of soldiers are better than the typical group -- they're far less macho and a bit smarter than usual. This is also a nice turnaround. Thomas Jane has Turret's Syndrome, Alfie Allen is bit off the deep end, as is Keegan-Michael Key who delivers three ruthless yo-mama jokes. [3] Trevante Rhodes and Sterling K. Brown were solid. You actually end up caring about each of them -- you don't want any of them to die, even though you know it's a Predator movie and it's only a matter of time. When the time comes, they die well. Oh my God, Olivia Munn out of fucking nowhere with the flying attack -- and then keeps up the pressure until she's captured her space pet -- and then Quinn puts it out of its misery. Overall an enjoyable action movie with a surprisingly witty and interesting script. I think we have Shane Black to thank for that, at last partially. He's made a few witty action movies before. It's nice to see him fix up the to-date mindless Predator films. Unfortunately, the movie didn't end at the right time. The boy is variably autistic -- sometimes he is and sometimes he isn't. The final scene felt extremely tacked on -- and where the fuck did Olivia Munn go? The Last Dragon (1985) -- "6/10" This is the story of Bruce Leroy (Taimak), a disciple who has finally outgrown his master. He is loosed into a world to seek the "last level" of enlightenment. He starts in a movie theater showing Enter the Dragon. [4] The audience watches enthusiastically, until Sno'nuff, the Shogun of Harlem (Julius Carry), shows up to demand fealty. He challenges Bruce Leroy, but must sideline several other contenders first. We meet a few more players -- some rich, white people who are probably trying to ruin everything. And then we meet Laura Charles (Vanity) who DJs -- and plays Debarge. Debarge, dood. This movie could not be more 80s. William H. Macy is Laura's agent. Laura gets attacked and Leroy comes to her rescue. He's got some of Bruce Lee's style. This is also not a coincidence. He wears Lee's yellow suit from Game of Death while teaching his class. The dojo has a lot of the accoutrements of a JKD dojo. It's also, apparently, a time before guns, which is nice. Sho-Nuff, Leroy and Eddie (the white guy from before) altercate back and forth. Eddie and his girl Angie fight -- this is movie from which Tessa Thompson's performance-art speech in Sorry to Bother You originated. "Eddie Arcadian: Where are you gonna go, Angie? Without me, you're nothing! Without that outfit, you're just another no-talent dental hygiene school drop-out from Kew Gardens getting by on her tits! "Angela Viracco: And in the end, Eddie, you know what? You're nothing but a misguided midget asshole with dreams of ruling the world. Yeah, also from Kew Gardens. And also getting by on my tits." Apparently being from Kew Gardens -- or, God forbid, returning there -- is double-plus ungood. There's a melee in which Johnny (a student of Leroy's) and his little brother kick a lot of ass with Leroy. Decent choreography, actually. Unsurprisingly, Leroy ends up fighting Sho-Nuff. I can't get over how much Snoop-Dogg modeled his look on Sho-Nuff. Julius Carry is one big dude, like Snoop. Come to think of it: like Wilt Chamberlin, the final boss from Bruce Lee's Game of Death. That can't have been an accident. Better than expected, but still not very good. Extra point for rocking the 80s look so hard. And Bruce Lee clips. The Disaster Artist (2017) -- "8/10" Imagine a young man in San Fransisco named Gary (Dave Franco), who's trying to make it as an actor. He's in an acting class with Tommy (James Franco). Tommy puts on a completely bonkers performance that seems to be from Streetcar Named Desire but the similarity ends at yelling "Stella" over and over and over. Gary approaches Tommy for help in getting out of his shell. Tommy does just that and Gary hero-worships him a bit, even though Tommy could easily pass for mentally handicapped or foreign or both. He has a completely unplaceable accent that is entirely his own. He refuses to talk about himself. He has a tremendous amount of money. He offers to take Gary with him to Los Angeles, where he has an apartment. They try to make it as actors but, after a year, it's not working. Tommy is very frustrated and ready to give up. Gary suggests that they should just make their own movie if no-one will place them otherwise. Tommy's eyes light up -- as far as that's possible, with his ptosis -- and a dream is born. Tommy does this -- as he does everything -- very unconventionally. First, he spends three years writing a terrible, well-nigh inscrutable script. Then, he buys all of his equipment instead of renting it. He hires his entire crew with barely an interview. They're off and running. The shoot runs way too long. Gary gets closer to his girlfriend and moves in with -- out of Tommy's apartment. Tommy's jealous -- not in a gay way, but because Gary was his only friend. The movie more-or-less wraps, but Gary and Tommy drift apart. Gary takes up doing theater. Tommy shows up one evening to personally invite him to the opening of The Room. Gary reluctantly agrees, but slowly comes around to friendship with Tommy again, as the evening progresses. The final cut is so awful that it's good -- people are laughing. Tommy is offended., but Gary convinces him to take his successes where he can. He's made his movie and no-one can take that away. Not, imagine that this movie is basically a behind-the-scenes retelling of the making of a movie called The Room by Tommy Wiseau, which has become a cult classic and has actually, by now, broken even. Franco's bizarre depiction is 100% on the nose. They even have a small scene where the real Tommy and Franco as Tommy meet at a party and chat. They're like brothers. The Franco brothers do extremely well in making this movie about the making of a terrible movie not terrible. Seth Rogan's also in and is decent. So are Alison Brie (she's in everything these days), Jason Mantzoukas (him too) and even Zac Efron. It was an endearing movie about one of the strangest guys you'll ever see on screen. La Ch'tite Famille (2018) -- "8/10" The Ch'ti region of France -- in the deep north -- is once again features for light ridicule in this sequel by Dany Boon. This time, Boon plays Valentin D., a man who escapes his bucolic roots to become a famous designer in Paris, making uncomfortable furniture at exorbitant prices. The Parisian elite are dragged through the mud at least as much as the Ch'tis. Valentin has long since established himself as an orphan -- he would never have made it very far in the world of French architecture and design if it was known whence he came. This all comes to and end when his brother hatches a plan to bring their 80-year--old mother to Paris for her 80th birthday, in order to guilt his brother into giving him some money to pay off a debt. This is a comedy and watching mother plow her way through the upper-class, museum party is a treat. Watching the Parisians feign being completely unable to understand the Ch-ti accent never gets old. [5] Valentin hits his head and is taken back to his 17-year--old self. He no longer knows his fancy, designer wife (who actually warms up to her newfound family, even if she can't understand a thing they're saying). Laurence Arné's looks of incredulity at watching her husband speak patois are priceless. It's even better watching her take "lessons" in the northern patois: "Constance: Ah, very few words. And ... no conjugation? "Tony: None at all. No need." They try to re-acclimate Valentin with pictures, his fancy apartment -- where he, too, complains that the chairs are uncomfortable -- and with speech therapy, for his horrific accent. The uncomfortable chairs are another running joke -- almost every one of their friends of famous colleagues that they meet complains of having sciatica for an unknown reason. Whenever someone is absent -- say, a doctor couldn't make it to surgery -- it's because he's at the chiropractor. As Constance learns patois and he re-learns his Parisian manners, they find an ally in each other -- and fall in love again. Where before, we saw them both walk by without saying hello to anyone, now the bumpkin Valentin greets everyone he sees in the lobby -- as it were a small town. Back at work, he starts designing comfortable furniture -- his flair for design is not gone. I've always liked Dany Boon -- in almost everything. She starts changing to be more like him than him changing back to his old self. And clearly she loves him more than their career or their business. Kingsman: The Secret Service (2014) -- "9/10" This movie is about a secret organization from England called The Kingsman. It's very much made in the mold of Mission: Impossible, but very British. The cast is quite good: Colin Firth, Samuel Jackson, Mark Hamill, Michael Caine, Mark Strong. There's a bunch of younger actors and actresses with whom I'm not familiar (they were fine, not standout). So what happens? We see a man die during what looks like a training mission. He was to be a Kingsman, but he died saving the other candidates. We fast-forward 17 years and the same man -- Galahad (Colin Firth) -- who had recruited this man, now recruits his son, who's a bit of a chav. This is Eggsy. He, of course, makes it through the training program, as does, unsurprisingly, the girl Roxy, who's somehow supposed to become a "gentleman" and take the name "Lancelot" to replace the fallen Kingsman. How did the previous Lancelot die? He was sliced in half by a supremely ridiculous henchwoman of tech billionaire and evil mastermind Valentine (Sam Jackson, playing with a Tyson-like lisp). His henchwoman has prosthetic lower legs with knives all over them. Her name is unironically Gazelle. He's kind of chaotic neutral because his main goal is to combat climate change, but he's given up on normal channels -- which clearly aren't working. Mark Hamill is a sad-sack professor who gets in the way. "Valentine: When you get a virus, you get a fever. That's the human body raising its core temperature to kill the virus. Planet Earth works the same way: Global warming is the fever, mankind is the virus. We're making our planet sick. A cull is our only hope. If we don't reduce our population ourselves, there's only one of two ways this can go: The host kills the virus, or the virus kills the host. Either way..." It's almost like Jordan Peterson wrote this; no wonder the young men love it so much. Still, there's some nice dialogue, "Eggsy: So, are you going to teach me to talk proper, like in My Fair Lady? Galahad: Don't be absurd. Being a gentleman has nothing to do with one's accent. It's about being at ease in one's own skin. As Hemingway said, "There's nothing noble in being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self."." Their time in "Fitting Room #3" seems taken directly from James Bond's meetings with Q. They each had to pick a dog, during training. Eggsy picked the pug because he thought it was a bulldog puppy. He named it J.B. Arthur (Caine) asks him it stands for James Bond? No. Jason Bourne? No. Jack Bauer. J.B. Has a spectacular underbite. Arthur says that the final test is to shoot J.B. he does not. Roxy does shoot her dog, so she's in -- Eggsy's out. Obviously, the gun wasn't loaded. The church melee set to Skynyrd's "Free Bird", where everyone goes batshit, even Galahad, is pretty impressively choreographed. Valentine's pilot project to drive people into a killing frenzy works flawlessly. Valentine confronts Harry/Galahad as he's leaving the church -- and offs him without telling him his master plan, completely off-script. From there, we get a standard, but cool, story of the Kingsmen having been compromised and Roxy, Eggsy and Merlin coming from behind to save the day. A bit long, but good action flick. A better James Bond movie than many others. I liked how they took out all of the implants. I didn't expect it to get so campy and funny, but it pulled it off with aplomb. Jack Reacher: No Way Back (2016) -- "7/10" Jack Reacher (Tom Cruise) quickly gets embroiled in a cover-up. He's no longer in the Army, but he has a contact there, Major Turner (Cobie Smulders). They've never met, but he finally asks her if she'd like to go to dinner. By the time he gets to Washington D.C., she's been arrested and is being held incommunicado. She was getting too close to sordid Army deeds in Afghanistan. Her two investigators were killed over there. Reacher breaks her out of prison and they've on the run. I like how they use Internet cafés, public libraries, public transportation, taxis and Greyhound to travel. They use TracPhones and mini-vans. Low-key and nearly untraceable. They end up on the run with a 15-year--old girl who might be Reacher's daughter (her mother had filed a paternity suit against him, at any rate). Fistfights are interspersed with dealing with a scared teenager with all of the unearned confidence, arrogance and condescension that goes with it. Also, with reckless stupidity -- she's like a fucking goldfish; after an hour, she forgets that she's on the lam. There's a ton of beefy mercs in shadowy alliances, all working for deep and secret and hidden governments and unelected powers. Reacher and Turner bust the general who's been smuggling drugs in weapons shipments and exonerate themselves. However, the ding-dong girl has gotten herself into the super-killer's crosshairs and we get a second ending. The final fight was stupid: if you want me to believe that the bad guy can still fight, then maybe you shouldn't have him fall two stories flat onto his back and hit his head hard enough to make a big blood spot. If you're going to make him get back up, make it look like he rolled with the fall. I'm used to Tom Cruise surviving everything. Cobie Smulders is a pretty bad-ass, hand-to-hand action hero. Movie was decent, but it offered no surprises, really. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] Apparently, he used two helicopters to create wind on-demand. [1] This is the 33rd edit of the film. The first 32 were not satisfactory to Tarkovsky. 1. How to do you circumcise a homeless guy? Kick Baxley's mom on the chin. 2. If Baxley's mom's vagina was a video game, it'd be rated E for Everyone. 3. What's the difference between five black guys and a joke? Baxley's mom can't take a joke. [1] Arguably, Lee's best film [1] God bless whoever did the subtitles -- there's very few Ch'ti words that they didn't translate (some were deemed untranslateable, apparently, but you get the gist if you understand "regular" French. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3629 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3629 Tue, 01 Jan 2019 00:05:04 +0100 of almost 1200 ratings publicly available. I've included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other -- I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. Shoah: Four Sisters (2018) -- "8/10" I only saw the first part, with Ruth Elias. She spoke English but I saw it with a German translation, slightly time-delayed. As a documentary, it was amazing. As a movie, it's just a straight-on interview for 90 minutes. You only ever see her in her outdoor garden. She tells of her experience of the Nazi invasion of Czechoslovakia. The video lent it power, but it would work fine as an audio track. She was separated from her father, she married very young in order to stay behind and avoid the transport. She became pregnant. She was delivered to Hamburg to work, then delivered back because she was 8 months pregnant. She ended up in Auschwitz, where her child was born in absolute filth and squalor. Joseph Mengele wanted to see how long her child could survive without food. She ended up killing the child with morphine given to her by a nurse. Only one aunt out of a whole family of 13 sisters and children and cousins survived -- besides her. She's a fascinating storyteller, so strong. It's hard to do her story justice in a review. Recommended. I would like to see the other parts. Black Christmas (1974) -- "7/10" Margot Kidder plays Barb, who leads a cast of sorority sisters spending Christmas at their house. They get a call from "the moaner" who slobbers out all sorts of disgusting suggestions, using language that I doubt would pass muster today. In that vein, after one of the girls suggests that the moaner might have raped someone in town, Kidder says "you can't rape a townie". This film has a few other well-known names: Art Hind has been in hundreds of movies, as has John Saxon, and Keir Dullea played Dave Bowman in 2001: A Space Odyssey. This is a classic horror film from the 1974. It takes place in a sorority house. You know what's going to happen. The killer is going to plow his way through one victim after another until there's just one left, who kills him. There are some nice visual and audio wipes (girl's face starts to scream and segues to a ringing phone in the next scene). The killer takes a girl named Claire first. Claire's father shows up and he goes with Barb to the police. Margot Kidder revels in the role, drinking and smoking all the time. She gives the sorority's phone number to the police as on exchange "fellatio"...but the cop (Nash) has no idea what she's talking about (it's 1974; perhaps the word wasn't so common then). They dick around for a long time, with Barb putting on a spectacularly lippy, drunken show one evening. Soon after, while the whole town is searching for Claire with the police in the park, the house mother Mrs. Mac (Marian Waldman) sees Claire's cat heading up to the attic, where she finds Claire's corpse tied to a rocking chair. The killer is still there and takes Mrs. Mac as his second victim, grunting and screaming as he rocks the corpses. Jess has received two phone calls from the "moaner" so far. Then she argues with Peter, her dickish boyfriend -- he wants to leave the conservatory and get married; she wants an abortion. He goes ballistic and tells her she'll "be sorry". Against the grain, it's Barb who's next...and we see that it's Peter (the guy who's been going bonkers in a conservatory for eight years) who's doing the killing. Or has he? Did he just flip it at the same time? He seems to be calling Jess from Barb's room now, asking "where's the baby" in a maniacal voice. This time, the cops trace the call and it's coming from inside the house. Holy crap! Did that trope originate with this movie? Of course Jess goes upstairs. She finds two of her friends stacked up on Barb's bed like dolls, covered in gore. She gets a shot in on Peter and flees back downstairs, but then of course can't open the front door. He almost catches her, but she escapes to the basement. Safe and sound, right? Peter finds a window without chicken-wire on it. Jess just waits for him to break it and jump through instead of going back upstairs and locking the doors while he's outside. Jess kills Peter...but was Peter the only killer in the house? The final scene shows "Billy" in the attic with two more bodies. The police guard the porch. A dog barks in the distance. A phone rings. A straight-up classic. I can't believe I'd never heard of this movie before. Bill Hicks: Sane Man (1989) -- "9/10" This is VHS footage of a live show in Austin, Texas. A lot of the material from Dangerous and Relentless were there already. He whipsaws from vulgar to transcendent. He cares a bit about the audience, but is driven to preach, to tell the people what he's thinking. He mixes psychedelically hopeful messages with jokes about jism. He was an absolute, unvarnished genius. Passengers (2016) -- "8/10" A starship makes its way from Earth to Homestead II, a journey of 120 years. The ship is automated and beautiful in its its technological power. One quarter of the way through it's journey, it encounters an asteroid belt (don't ask me how, since asteroids don't naturally occur between stars). The ship is able to avoid disaster and effect all repairs, save one: it cannot repair the hibernation pod of Jim Preston, played by Chris Pratt. He awakes 90 years early. He acclimates, to some degree, but quickly goes nearly mad with boredom and loneliness. He latches onto an Aurora Lane (played by Jennifer Lawrence), learning everything about her that the ship offers. As an engineer, his addled mind hatches a plan to wake her. She's perfect for him. He needs company. He debates with himself (and with the android bartender) for a long time, but is helpless to resist the primal urge for human company -- and he's fixated on Aurora. He wakes her up and is immediately wracked with guilt. In fairness, he waited a year. Aurora is dealing with the situation on her own, but one year delayed. She's doing a lot of exercise in tight clothing. Around them, the ship is slowly but surely deteriorating. It looks amazing, though; the design is lovely. The little robots that clean up are plausible. Meanwhile they do a pretty good job of discussing their reasons for emigrating. She's planning on going to the colony and then returning one year later, to be the only writer in 250 years who'd been to a colony. Unless, of course, faster travel options become available. Or Earth is no longer the center of civilization. But neither of them mentions that. The "falling in love" bit is depicted in languorous detail, which is fine, I guess. He made her fall in love with him -- though he does offer quite a bit. His only crime is that he doomed her to a life of solitude with only him. A pretty large crime, granted. When she learns what he did, things get interesting again. She yells that "he took her life". It's true: she's dead, for all practical purposes. He killed her, but she lives on. There are some existential issues -- why write? Why jog? Why do anything? It's a decent science-fiction short-story treatise. The ship continues to slowly deteriorate. His room reboots. The elevator stops at the wrong floor. The food dispenser spits out a ton of cereal, all over the floor. A crew member Mancuso (Laurence Fishburne) awakes and they start to gather data manually to diagnose the issue. Aurora wants him to arrest Jim -- or something like that. At one point, the whole ship shuts down, including lights and gravity, then reboots before Aurora drowns in the now-floating pool. Mancuso dies. Jim and Aurora find the problem -- a meteorite cut through a fusion-reactor control computer. Jim repairs it, but the reactor can't be vented because the outer doors are, of course, jammed. Jim's gotta go out there. You might think that we're seeing a macho/patriarchal split, but if you bother to look a bit more deeply, you'll see: Aurora and her writing is the only thing that kept Jim sane enough to be able to use his engineering skills to fix the ship. They're a team. One doesn't function without the other. It's fine. The door is jammed and can only be held open manually. Cool. he's got his heat shield -- and the tether snaps. Jim's floating around in space and his suit's leaking. It's odd that the suits don't have even rudimentary maneuvering jets. She gets him inside. I like that he seems heavy. He's dead, Jim. She uses everything the autodoc has to resuscitate him. She forgave him -- because what else are you going to do? He's the only other human being around. Put yourself in her shoes for more than just a few weeks. What would you really do? Kill him? And then what? I expanded on these thoughts in the article, "On not seeing or understanding context" . It was a solid SF story with excellent acting. Recommended. Sorry to Bother You (2018) -- "9/10" Lakeith Stansfield plays Cassius Green, a guy so down on his luck that he buys gas $0.40 at a time. His girlfriend Detroit (Tessa Thompson) is an artist. He lives in his uncle's (Terry Crews) garage and drives a hand-me-down car from same. The car's a piece of shitwork: the wipers have a string attached, to let the passenger pull them back and forth. Cassius tries to lie his way into a telemarketing job -- and gets it despite his lies because they'll hire anybody. On his first day on the job, he starts making calls. In his mind, he's transported with his desk to the home of each person he calls. On the second day, Langston (Danny Glover) tells him to use his "white voice". Next up is Squeeze (Stephen Yeun), who tries to get Cassius into a union (of sorts). Cassius has a reputation for melancholy; after he picks her up from work (sign-twirler on a street corner), Detroit asks him, "baby, can we please not talk about the sun exploding tonight?" They head out to a bar and he tries out his white voice when he declares a toast: it's David Cross. In the background, we hear about Worryfree industries, a weird employment plan that sounds a lot like slavery, run by Steve Lift (Armand Hammer). This has a bit of an Idiocracy feel to it -- without being 500 years in the future. Cassius and his white voice are promoted to the upper floor -- where "power callers" work. Diana DeBauchery (floor manager, played by Kate Berlant; unaware of her name's connotation) is immediately taken with Cassius. The code to unlock the elevator is ludicrously long. Stanfield plays an interesting character, beaten down a bit. The first power caller he meets is played by Omari Hardwick and voiced by Patton Oswalt. Squeeze is definitely a union organizer. When Detroit asks him "is that what you do? Go around starting trouble?", he responds "trouble's already there. I just help folks fix it." Obviously, Cassius's new job is to sell Worryfree slave labor. When he raises an initial objection, they show him his starting salary. He nails his job, gets a new apartment, a Maserati. The picture of his father keeps changing to fit the situation. Squeeze and Detroit's strike grows in power. Cassius scabs across the line every day. Detroit leaves him. He's sold out. He accuses her of selling out because she's trying to sell her art to rich people. He, on the other hand, is selling slave labor. Cassius now meets with Steve Lift for another promotion. Cassius uses the restroom first -- and finds the next generation of slave labor: equisapiens. This is the straw that breaks the camel's back? As the video says, "Our scientists have discovered a way to make humans stronger, more obedient, more durable and, therefore, more efficient and profitable." Lift's proposal is that Cassius becomes an equisapien for 5 years for 100 million bucks. Detroit sees a video of the equisapiens and starts to use her art to get the word out. Cassius does too, going on one show after another, telling the world about what WorryFree is doing. Little does he know that he's actually doing exactly the marketing they wanted him to do. WorryFree stock goes through the roof. Cassius revolts and organizes an even bigger strike. They seem to have turned the tide, until the police show up and start to run down demonstrators. Then the equisapiens show up and turn the tide again. Detroit's performance-art piece is spectacular. There's a tremendous amount of detail in this movie. A second viewing would probably show much more. Highly recommended. The Lathe of Heaven (1980) -- "8/10" This is the filming of the book that I read this year, "reviewed here" . The film starts with George Orr waking up from a dream in which the world had been destroyed by nuclear war. He wakes to a world in which this has not happened. Basically, George has "effective" dreams, wherein he changes the world. Dr. Haber is his oenerologist. It slowly dawns on Haber that George isn't crazy or deluded, but actually does move himself to new timelines. George remembers the old world, as do the people near him when he dreams. Once Haber sees that George is the real deal, he decides to use George to improve his own life. In effect, Haber uses George as a timeline-hopping machine, using his Augmentor machine and suggestions to drive his power. He invents a whole new dream institute for himself. George seems to be helpless in his clutches. Haber deftly handles his objections -- dangling the carrot of "getting well" before him. Eventually, Orr dreams of aliens invading the planet -- to unite humanity and stop war. The aliens, however, not only attack the moon, but also invade Orr's dreams, making contact and letting him know that they know of effective dreams. Haber is dangerous to them; Orr is not. Haber continues to manipulate and has Orr eliminate racism (everyone is now gray), then to dream that he no longer has effective dreams, that the Augmentor inherits Orr's power instead -- and can confer it to Haber directly. This is a story of a technocrat who sees everything as a tool. George still has his power and re-imagines himself back with Heather (the lawyer). After a lovely reunion (for him, anyway; for her, nothing's changed), they feel the world coming apart under Haber's first attempt at effective dreaming. The art direction is a little off: it's supposed to be 105ºF outside, but everyone's walking around in long pants and long sleeves. The world is empty of people -- or starkly reduced -- but everything's still clean. The institute is a giant building, but built by whom? With which materials? The tech is quaint -- still very analog. The sets and buildings are quite nice, though. The acting's decent -- basically 3 people -- but the book is better. It does a decent job of capturing such a high-minded concept. The Death of Stalin (2017) -- "8/10" Armando Iannucci (writer of Veep) delivers a biting satire of the end of the Stalin era. None of the actors has a Russian accent. None of them even attempts to speak in a vernacular appropriate to the 1950s. Most of them have heavy British accents, with Jeffrey Tambor (Malenkov and Steve Buscemi (Kruschev) weighing in with American ones. I find it mystifying how critics could take a film that's just an eyelash shy of being a Monty Python parody seriously enough to criticize its lack of historical accuracy and depth. This is a very funny movie about the turmoil that follows the death of an all-powerful leader of a totalitarian state. It's Iannucci, so it's a dialogue-driven vehicle with almost no action. Most of the scenes take place in sumptuous offices and residences. The main tension is between Beria (Simon Russell Beale) and Kruschev. Beria is in charge of the NKVD (the secret police) and is much-feared among all cabinet members. The funeral for Stalin is planned and executed while Kruschev slowly gathers support for a putsch of Beria, who is spiraling out of control, power-mad. Kruschev yells "I will bury you in history" at Beria's corpse. For one, it's true -- very few people remember who Beria was and what he did. For another, this is the phrase for which Kruschev was to become famous. When "he said it in a speech" , he meant that communism would outlast capitalism as a concept. The full quote is, "About the capitalist states, it doesn't depend on you whether or not we exist. If you don't like us, don't accept our invitations, and don't invite us to come to see you. Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will bury you!" Western governments and media -- as expected -- took it as a threat of nuclear war (because they not only still are, but always have been, incapable of nuance). The statement is obviously not belligerent, other than to accuse the West of a corrupt way of life that will lose in the end. And he will have been right, I think. Capitalism will bury itself in climate change and only socialism can rise from those ashes. I loved this movie -- so many good actors and so much snappy dialogue. Michael Palin was wonderful as Molotov, Rupert Friend as Stalin's besotted son and Jason Isaacs as Marshal Zhukov were all great. Recommended. Duck Soup (1933) -- "8/10" Groucho Marx plays Rufus T. Firefly, newly elected president of Freedonia. The president of Sylvania wants to take over that country, but Rufus's nomination thwarts his efforts. The rest of the Marx brothers play spies and other court attendants. Most of the dialogue is one-liners and sight gags. Some of the jokes are pretty damned rimshot-worthy -- I bet they were original back in 1933. "Firefly: What are you going to do as secretary of war? "Chicolino: I think we're going to have a standing army. "Firefly: Why a standing army? "Chicolino: 'Cause then we save a ton of money on chairs." They're still good: lovely timing and delivery. I'd never up until now noticed that Groucho's mustache and eyebrows were painted on. The intrigue between the two countries continues, with two women -- Vera Marcal (Raquel Torres) and Mrs. Teasdale (Margaret Dumont). The action culminates in Mrs. Teasdale's mansion. All of the Marx brothers now dress up as Rufus Firefly. All of the door handles in the mansion are European style, not doorknobs. Checking IMDb reveals that the film was shot in Spain. If I didn't know any better, I'd think Harpo Marx was playing an especially malicious, mentally handicapped man. His "missing mirror" scene with Groucho was brilliant, though. The war scenes are pretty good; the four brothers change uniforms every scene -- Groucho goes from Johnny Reb to Union to Napoleon to Daniel Boone. I gave it an extra star for being entertaining while being almost a hundred years old -- and for some of the one-liners, damned if they didn't make me laugh out loud. [1] I see where Mel Brooks got the directorial inspiration for some of his larger set pieces. Locke (2014) -- "8/10" Tom Hardy stars in this alone (he's the only one on-screen). He is Ivan Locke, an exceedingly honest man who's done one dishonest thing. He is a clockwork of a man. He is dependable, he is extremely good at his job. He is a loving father and husband. He is very precise in his language and will not mis-speak. He is a man of his profession: concrete. He is on a dark highway at night, driving to be there for the birth of his bastard. The entire film takes place in the car, with him on the phone with various people: his boss, his wife, the mother of his bastard, various people from the hospital, his assistant at work, his son. He is a concrete expert, by trade. The biggest job of his life is set to start pouring at 05:45 the next morning. It is currently 21:00 the previous evening. He is walking his assistant through the preparations. There are road closings to manage. There is the matter of a folder full of numbers that he has mistakenly taken with him. His wife is imploding at the news. She doesn't care about anything else at this moment. She has no idea how many millions of pounds she's cost by hanging up the phone in spite. In her mind, she's 100% right. But she's missing context. The timing is exceedingly and exquisitely bad. His lover is an emotional mess who's trying to get him to admit he loves her (despite their having had only a one-night stand and no further contact). The baby has its umbilical cord wrapped around its neck. Locke is clearly getting a cold and getting worse. He keeps driving. He keeps answering the phone. He's trying to keep all the balls in the air, the way he always has. He really wants to be there for his bastard in a way that his own father never was (he's never met him). And he would love not to lose his family. But it's the concrete-pour that's the most important to him. He and his reputation and his assistant manage to get the pour back on track. In between acts, he soliloquies to his absent father in the back seat. It is a double birth that night, for Mr. Ivan Locke. It is also a night of loss for him. Chicago (headquarters) is going mad because they are afraid that the job will fail. Locke does not care. He's got a restricted context, just like his wife. His wife is ready to let everything burn because of what Ivan did. She doesn't care about the pour. Ivan cares about the pour, but he doesn't care about what Chicago cares about. Tom Hardy is masterful. Recommended. The Putin Interviews E01 (2017) -- "8/10" Oliver Stone interviews Vladimir Putin about his life, his career and his politics in this 4-part mini-series. The interviews take place over the span of over two years, from June 2015 to September 2017. When asked about the 5 assassination attempts, Putin responded, "Putin: We have a saying in Russia: The man destined to be hanged is not going to drown." He's obviously a very intelligent and mentally agile man. He is capable of abstract thinking and quite creative in his speech. He's well-organized, well-disciplined. He's very much in control and rational. He often corrects Stone for not having been precise enough in a summation leading up to a question. [2] When asked whether he ever got emotional, he said "I'm not a woman, so I don't have those times", a primitive answer, but not unusual for a 66-year--old man. When Stone compared his job to the job Reagan had, Putin says, "There is a big difference between almost being broke and actually being broke." He's on top of the economic figures of Russia -- he has no paper in front of him. He is also very much a man of the law -- and getting things right. He talks about paying back debts as if this is unavoidable. Honestly, Oliver Stone kind of sounds like a moron. I like his movies, but he really doesn't come off well in this interview (so far). Putin is very much aware of the way the U.S. works. He blames Gorbachev for not having gotten in writing the agreement not to expand NATO. He knows that NATO is searching for an enemy, that it "is a mere instrument of foreign policy of the U.S.. It has no allies, it has only vassals." Putin has dealt with Clinton, Bush, Obama and now Trump. He rightly sees no difference in essential policy. As he put it, "And there is one curious thing: the president of your country can change, but the policy doesn't change ... on matters of principle." Another exchange: "Stone: The question is: what is the policy of the U.S. What is its strategy in the world? Putin: I will answer this question very candidly and in great detail, but only once I retire." Stone then says what he thinks: that the U.S. is trying to cripple Russia economically until it folds and complies. Putin responds that this is not a very forward-thinking policy. He says that the Russian people cannot exist outside of their own sovereign state (similar self-myth that most countries have) and that the way forward is to support them instead of opposing. Then he adds that the U.S. could save a lot of money on their defense budget. [3] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] See "Duck Soup quotes" or "Groucho Marx quotes" for more examples. [1] As to criticisms about the "softball" nature of the questions -- those mostly come from people who were not granted an interview with Putin. When you consider how vetted and scripted every conversation on American TV is, why even pretend to be shocked that a Putin interview was restricted by certain boundaries? At least Stone left in pretty obvious cuts where material had been removed (of which there were a few). Verne Gay of the Newsday wrote very insightfully, "As journalism, this is scattershot at best, but as a conversation that covers a vast span of Russian history, culture, and politics as refracted through the mind of Russia’s president — it’s often remarkable. Putin has a lot to say. Stone lets him say it. While the many points he makes are impossible to summarize here, Putin’s motives for this interview are not: He emerges as an intelligent, sane, reasonable leader caught in the vortex of an occasionally feckless, often contradictory superpower called the United States. Touché. (Emphasis added.)" It's really f%$&ing hard to disagree on that point. [1] Russia has cut defense spending in the last two years, once by 20% (as noted in the interview "The brittle pilot: Understanding Putin's hand in post-Soviet Russia." by Tony Wood ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3628 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3628 Thu, 27 Dec 2018 21:33:20 +0100 -- "9/10" 2. "Predestination (2014)" <#Predestination> -- "8/10" 3. "Blackkklansman (2018)" <#Blackkklansman> -- "9/10" 4. "Secretary (2002)" <#Secretary> -- "8/10" 5. "Venom (2018)" <#Venom> -- "7/10" 6. "Reds (1981)" <#Reds> -- "9/10" 7. "Tomb Raider (1981)" <#Tomb> -- "7/10" 8. "The Assignment (2016)" <#Assignment> -- "8/10" 9. "Stalingrad (1993)" <#Stalingrad> -- "8/10" 10. "Mission: Impossible - Fallout (2018)" <#Mission> -- "10/10" These are my notes to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. I've recently transferred my reviews to IMDb and made "the list" of almost 1200 ratings publicly available. I've included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other -- I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. Hap and Leonard S01--S03 (2016--2018) -- "9/10" This is a three-season faithful adaptation of the first three Hap and Leonard novels by Joe Lansdale. James Purefoy (from Altered Carbon) and Michael K. Williams (Omar from The Wire) are the eponymous leads, respectively. They are principled and poor and forever getting dragged into complicated matters that have them playing the reluctant heroes. The dialogue is good, the acting is great and the stories are really fun. The stories are set in 1980s America. Leonard went to Vietnam; Hap refused and did time in Leavenworth. They are as close as brothers (we find out why in season 2). They practice martial arts and can handle themselves in both fisticuffs and shootouts. The first season is a get-rich-quick scheme involving Hap's ex-wife, the second is about a child-kidnapping case that extends over decades and the third is digging up a lost friend from the most racist town ever, with (female) officer Reynolds giving Woody Harrelson from Rampart a run for his money as most racist movie-cop ever. The show boasts not only the two leads, but a collection of meaty roles for actors like Christina Hendricks (Hap's ex-wife from season 1; famous for having played Joan in Mad Men), Brian Dennehy (Sheriff from season 2), Louis Gosset Jr. (Bacon the cook from season 3), Andrew Dice Clay (DJ from season 3) and Corbin Bernsen (Sheriff Cantuck from season 3). A hidden gem -- highly recommended. It's a pity that it was canceled after three seasons; Lansdale has written plenty more novels. I've heard that it's on Netflix in the States, if you're looking for it. Predestination (2014) -- "8/10" This was a cool time-traveling movie. It reminded me a bit of 12 Monkeys or Looper since those movies also addressed the paradox of meeting yourself. This movie goes much further than that, though. I felt vaguely throughout the movie that I knew the story. I found out why on Wikipedia: the movie is based on an old Robert Heinlein story called "—All You Zombies—", which I must have read about 30 years ago. I honestly don't want to spoil the paradox. The two leads Ethan Hawke and Sarah Snook are excellent. Recommended. Blackkklansman (2018) -- "9/10" I've seen idiots taking Spike Lee to task for suggesting that the police could be part of the solution. Or that white people could be part of the solution. This is a much more mature picture of the future: a feel-good movie suggesting that the police could be part of the solution to the race war. It doesn't matter that this movie isn't "realistic". It matters that it's fun and clever and has good acting. The good guys win a victory -- the cops, whites and blacks together. What's the problem? Isn't what we're striving for? I could understand if this were in a newspaper, where propaganda is more hidden. But this is a movie by Spike Lee -- he can hardly be accused of kowtowing to the man, the police or the white race. So give him the benefit of the doubt that he did something more subtle here and perhaps more hopeful. He co-opted the blacksploitation film for himself. The KKK is a bunch of low-IQ fools. They blow themselves up because they can't even figure out how big a mailbox is. Lee got in some digs at the current administration in a relatively subtle manner. Unlike Kwame says in the movie, the race war is not coming. It's long since begun. The question is whether we're going to start fighting with the same vehemence as the other side. There's still a long, long, long way to go. The neat thing is that Patrice is epitomous of the idiots who think they're "for the cause" today: they can't see anything but their own involvement and see everything else as appeasement. Ron's involvement literally saved her life and thwarted a Klan attack, but she thinks her half-hearted rallies are more important and that he has to choose one or the other. Ron Stallworth was clearly in charge of the investigation, he was smart, skilled, eloquent and hilarious. This was an update to the classic blacksploitation movies of the 70s, with a heroic lead character. Based on a true story, which is even better. John David Washington was brilliant. Adam Driver was excellent as well. Topher Grace was excellent as David Duke (he even looked a bit like him) I guess the coda kind of makes sense, but it felt strange. I guess Lee included it for those who couldn't see the subtext of the rest of the film, artistically rendered. The coda, in relation, was like a cudgel: it's still happening today. No shit. Secretary (2002) -- "8/10" Lee's umbrella is broken. She's stoop-shouldered. Her father is an alcoholic, her mother has nothing better to do than wait for her daughter to finish work -- five hours later. At the same time, Lee is seeing Peter, who's not a very confident person. His whole body language suggests that he's very similar to Lee, personality-wise. At least for now. He goes through so many secretaries that "Secretary Wanted" is part of the sign, with lights, like a no/vacancy sign. It's pretty obvious from the get-go that this is a sexual relationship, a courtship, rather than a boss/employee relationship. He alternates between calling her Lee and Ms. Holloway. That final look, where she's following his car, as it drives to work. She looks up, definitely breaking the fourth wall, daring the viewer to judge her. Venom (2018) -- "7/10" Thomas Hardy plays Eddie Brock, a renegade video reporter working for a big newspaper in San Fransisco. A billionaire mogul Carlton Drake (Riz Ahmed) is the enemy here, subverting Brock's work at the newspaper (because Brock is investigating him). Also, Brock's girlfriend Anne (Michelle Williams) is a lawyer and works indirectly for Drake. Drake's company gets ahold of alien beings called symbiotes. When Brock sneaks into the labs to get the scoop, one of these symbiotes escapes and bonds with Brock. The being is called Venom and purports to be a "good guy" from his race. In fact, "kind of a loser", like Brock himself. They team up to kick all sorts of ass and to thwart Drake's plan (whatever that is). Venom/Brock are pretty amusing, but otherwise, the movie's a bit thin. Reds (1981) -- "9/10" This was a pretty fantastic and inspiring depiction of the lives of John Reed and Louise Bryant. John Reed (played by Warren Beatty) wrote 10 Days that Shook the World, a book about the dawn of the Russian Revolution. John Reed came back with the book and a fire in his belly to effect a similar revolution in America. He's blocked from working with with the Russian Communist Party because the American party split into two factions. Meanwhile the U.S. government is as anti-Bolshevik, anti-Communist and anti-worker and Facist as you can imagine. They plague him and Louise. Reed is ill and still travels, his work interferes with his relationship with Louise, played by Diane Keaton. The film shows wonderfully the tremendous amount of passion and energy. Diane Keaton is amazing -- her dialogues with Jack Nicholson as Eugene O'Neill are fantastic. He's a cynical bastard, comfortable in his position in the American society. Meanwhile, Reed is underway in Russia and is arrested for trying to flee Russia (after having met with Zinoviev) through Finland. The U.S. denies any association with Reed because he's an enemy of the State. This kind of reminds me of Edward Snowden's plight. I'd read Reed's book earlier this year, but didn't realize what had happened afterward. In prison in Finland, he gets scurvy. Louise travels to rescue him and makes an overland journey through the Finish winter. Reed is finally released thanks to the help of Bolshevik Finish professors. Lenin was also involved in his release. Reed is ill, not only with scurvy, but also a kidney disease, which had already taken one of his kidneys. John is in exile. He meets with Emma Goldman in Russia, also an exile from the U.S. for being a communist. She advises him to think long and hard about calling Louise to meet him in Russia, as she would be exiled as well -- and for a cause that she doesn't believe in nearly as strongly as he does. Out of prison and back in Russia, Reed represents America at the committee meetings, but he can only speak a smattering of Russian, German and French and they don't want to accept English as an official language. He quits in frustration. He discusses the situation with Emma Goldman, who tells him of the real-world dangers facing all revolutionaries. She reminds him that the Bolshevik system has already failed 4 million people that have starved over the winter. He tells her that it's not going the way they'd planned or the way they'd imagined, but that it's moving forward. He can't ignore that. He rejoins the committees. When Louise finally gets to Russia, Emma Goldman runs into her at the train station, just before she gets into even more trouble for not having the proper traveling papers. Reed is in Turkey, traveling with the Bolsheviks to visit other worker's parties of the world. Zinoviev changes his speech to say "holy war" rather than "class struggle" before it's translated to Turkish. Reed confronts him, saying that revolution is nothing without differing opinions, without dissent, without individualism. It's not just the single opinion of the party. His heart and mind are more than in the right place, but so many obstacles stand in the way, not the least of which are all of the most powerful people and nation-states in the world. This is a story of a missed opportunity. John Reed died of typhus in Russia because the Allies had blockaded all medical supplies during the war. He dies on October 17, 1920, exactly three years after the end of the revolution. He was buried in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis, alongside other fallen heroes of the revolution. Watched it in German. Tomb Raider (1981) -- "7/10" This reboot leads us through a new origin story for Lara. We find her in London, working as a bicycle messenger. She has refused to take her father's inheritance, because she doesn't want to acknowledge that he's died. Instead, she takes up the adventurer mantel and follows him to Japan, where'd he pursued a supernatural power embodied Himiko, the Witch Queen of Japan, who'd been marooned on an uninhabited and quasi-uninhabitable island in the Devil's Sea. She takes his lore and still refuses his fortune, hocking her mother's ring to get traveling money to go to Japan. There she finds Lu Ren, the son of the fisherman who'd taken her father to the fated island. They follow their fathers into the teeth of a storm and shipwreck on the island. They are captured by the men against whom her father was fighting and forced to work on the slave crew that is trying to find Himiko. Lu Ren helps her escape and she escapes into the night. After many travails, she also finds her father, who's been living on the island for seven years on his own. Mattias Vogel, the head of the enemy crew, had claimed to have killed him. Her father is played by Dominic West, or Mcnulty, if you're a fan of the The Wire. He's pissed with her because she did not do as he'd asked: she'd failed to burn his effects and led Vogel directly to Himiko. The action scenes are reasonably well-done, as long as you remember that they're almost literally from a video game. They're ludicrous and unbelievable, but they're from a video game. They make sense in that context. Viskander at least makes it look difficult for such a small person to do all of these feats. Also, nobody enhanced her bosoms for this film, which is good. At any rate, she leaves her father's camp and attack Vogel's camp, kicking ass and taking names. Her father advances on the tomb of Himiko, which Vogel's explosives have revealed. The expected scene plays out, where Vogel threatens to kill her father if Lara doesn't open the tomb. Lara opens the tomb's main door in spectacular fashion, revealing a chasm in to the heart of the island. Vogel forces them -- Indiana-Jones-and-the-Last-Crusade-like -- to help him overcome the obstacles. The first is "the chasm of souls", which is a chasm with literally thousands of skeletons in it. The solution to the almost-literally-copied-from-the-previously-mentioned-movie trap is also very much like a video game. Now, they're all working together as if they're not enemies. All joking and cynicism aside, it's a really cool set and concept. The twist is also that Himiko turns out to have sacrificed herself for the good of the planet: she was a carrier of a horrific, fast-acting, zombifying disease. Her dad gets infected and it's up to Lara to use her less-than-adequate fighting skills to beat Vogel. She really walks into quite a few punches. It's kind of a Rocky-style fight: you know she's going to win, but the entire scene says that she shouldn't. He did shrug off a shot to the nuts as if it were nothing, which also made no sense whatsoever. It was a total video-game boss-level escape at the end. The Assignment (2016) -- "8/10" This movie has quite a stellar cast, starring Michelle Rodriguez as Frank Kitchen, a hitman. Signourney Weaver is a genius-level and mad gender-reassignment doctor named Rachel Jane, who's had her practice closed for malpractice. Frank kills her brother on an assignment. Tony Shalhoub plays Jane's psychiatrist. This kicks off a revenge story engineered by Jane, where she has Kitchen kidnapped and turns him into a woman. Frank starts to put the pieces together and slowly reels doctor Jane in. Jane thinks she can outsmart everyone, but Kitchen gets the drop on her, mutilating her but letting her live...without fingers. An interesting story and well-acted by the leads. Stalingrad (1993) -- "8/10" This is a German movie about the siege of Stalingrad in 1942. It hits the familiar points of a realistic and semi-honest war movie. Most of the German soldiers are young and naive; the Russians have even-younger soldiers. The slaughter is senseless and breathtaking. Hundreds die on each advance. A regiment of 400 is left with about 20 men by the first evening. Germans accidentally shoot Germans; Russians are captured and then immediately shot by others who either didn't realize that they'd given themselves up or didn't care. The cold is visceral; it is its own combatant, taking victims on both sides. Some of the acting is not very good, but then the acting in reality probably wasn't very good. You can watch the psychological collapse in real-time. At one point, they're holed up across the street from a Russian encampment. Both sides call a ceasefire to go collect their wounded and take the dog-tags from their dead. You see the soldiers share food and care for their dead. They can barely communicate. The Russian is untranslated and without subtitles. It's pretty simple, though, "Alyosha, it will be all right. It will be fine." However, this temporary truce is broken up by a soldier who claims that he saw the Russians making a move, but who really just wanted to follow the rules about "no contact with the enemy". The Germans capture a Russian soldier, in the form of a young boy in adult clothing. They remain holed up in this cold building, unable to move and going slowly crazy from hunger, cold, panic and fear. They investigate the sewers and find corpses, rats and incredible amounts of water. One German captures a female Russian soldier but then falls into the water before she can bring him back to his comrades. She runs off and they find him anyway. The Russians, meanwhile, move about more-or-less with impunity, although they must protect the many civilians that remain in the city. The Germans make their way back to an infirmary, which looks like Bosch painting. They are arrested for abandoning their post on the front. The German command is ruthless. The tiny remainder are banished to mine-sweeping duty in the tundra, where they are abused by their own comrades, who are now their guards. The Germans are in a hopeless situation, but will not give up. Now the banished troops are pulled back into active duty as cannon-fodder. On the way, Otto tells of not being able to integrate back home, when he's on leave, how the more his wife seeks to understand him, the more he hates her. The wintry foxholes look nightmarishly bleak and cold. The battles are far less flashy and smooth than those in more recent American war films -- but one suspects they're much more realistic. After the seemingly senseless battle (it was in the middle of nowhere), with horrific attribution on both sides, the Germans move on, dragging their artillery by hand. They come upon a village, where other Germans are burning everything and throwing the villagers into the streets. The Russian film Come and See depicted a similar scene its final act. They are rewarded for their having taken part and are now asked to slaughter Russians in cold blood. Their faces are covered in sores, the snow falls, the Russians stand pitifully, among them old men, women and children. Once again, the high-level command is depicted as merciless and evil (accusing them of refusing commands and "behaving like Jews"). Three of them desert their post soon after this slaughter, fleeing (albeit slowly) into the wasteland of the Russian tundra in winter. They come upon a giant pile of corpses and find that some of them have tags -- tags that they can use to get out of Russia. They get to the airbase; there are bodies and frozen corpses everywhere. Before they can board, though, the plane is commandeered for officers. It would be the last plane to leave Stalingrad. It's back to the tundra for them, another overland journey. They return to their colleagues, who look like the walking dead. A feast falls from the sky, dropped by a German plane. The same officer that told them to shoot Russian civilians shows up to demand that they leave it be. He shoots one of them and they kill him. Before he dies, he tries to bribe them with the location of a giant cache of supplies. They head there afterward. Buried in a back room, they find a Russian woman tied to a bed. They quickly agree that they will go in order of rank and leave the Lieutenant with her. He's conflicted, to say the least. She attacks him, telling him to fuck her or shoot her, but put an end to it. He does neither and gives her his Luger, telling her to shoot herself because he has no desire to shoot anyone anymore. She can't do it, though. Neither does she shoot him. Their sergeant is gravely injured, but tries to get control of them, calling them deserters. Otto is around the bend and says that he'll take care of himself and blows out the back of his head. A loyal soldier takes his sergeant on his back and heads out into the cold, away from the bunker. His sergeant dies soon after. The soldier sees a line of Germans walking by and tries to give himself up, but they have been captured. The rest leave the bunker (two remaining German soldiers and Irina), back in the tundra. They walk for what seems like days and encounter a Russian MG nest, which kills Irina. The two remaining soldiers make it a bit farther, but succumb to the weather. The epilogue informs us that over 1 million people died in and around Stalingrad. Of the 260,000 people in the 6th Germany army, 91,000 were sent to prison. Of those, only 6,100 made it back to Germany. Mission: Impossible - Fallout (2018) -- "10/10" The movie starts off with a bang with the Apostles -- the remnants of Solomon's gang from Rogue Nation -- seizing plutonium. Hunt and crew were there and let it slip through their fingers. Most of the same cast is back with some additions. Henry Cavill is introduced as Agent Walker, a CIA guy who's along on the IMF mission. Angela Bassett as the new head of the CIA -- and she drops talk of renditions and water-boarding like it's not even a bad thing anymore. So nice to see that America's forgiven itself its transgressions and happy with the new normal. Bassett seems to be happy to take a lot of money to play an utterly unsympathetic and one-dimensional asshole. Walker is also a one-dimensional asshole, with extremely blunt methods. Apparently, Hunt's methods have too much finesse -- Walker is the "hammer". This movie has some of the best fight scenes I've seen in a while. Ilsa Faust is a bad-ass, as is Liang Ying, the guy from the bathroom fight. Scratch that. this movie has some of the best action scenes I've seen in a while (Mechanic: Resurrection was pretty good, too). The mission this time is to recover the plutonium, but the team selling it wants Solomon Lane back. So Hunt and co. have to spring him from police custody. This is, to say the least, spectacular and uses very little CGI. It's only at the end where Hunt gets up from a motorcycle crash without a scratch that it got a bit too much. Ok, climbing a rope up to a helicopter not once but twice and not even being winded -- and then beating up two guys to steal the chopper -- that's more unbelievable. But, still somehow awesome. I like how things fall apart and Hunt's improvisations start to fail -- but "I'll figure something out". At least he has the decency to look exhausted at the end. In case it interests you: Tom Cruise learned to fly a helicopter so he could do all his own stunts. He flew off of a motorcycle and just got up and kept going. OMG and the bathroom fight scene with Henry Cavill and Liang Ying, a guy who I’d never seen before because he’s a stuntman but holy crap is he going to get his own movie after this. Then Cruise swang around on the bottom of a helicopter for what felt like an hour. Incredible endurance. He’s pretty awesome, I have to admit. No man-crush, but respect aplenty. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3627 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3627 Wed, 26 Dec 2018 12:36:03 +0100 -- "9/10" 2. "The Andromeda Strain (1971)" <#Andromeda> -- "5/10" 3. "The Last Witchhunter (2015)" <#Witchhunter> -- "8/10" 4. "Evil Dead (2013)" <#Evil> -- "7/10" 5. "The Fly (2013)" <#Fly> -- "9/10" 6. "Casino Royale (1967)" <#Casino> -- "8/10" 7. "Rear Window (1954)" <#Rear> -- "8/10" 8. "Showgirls (1995)" <#Showgirls> -- "6/10" 9. "Mechanic: Resurrection (2016)" <#Mechanic> -- "8/10" 10. "Maze Runner (2014)" <#Maze> -- "6/10" These are my notes to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. I've recently transferred my reviews to IMDb and made "the list" of almost 1200 ratings publicly available. I've included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other -- I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. 12 Angry Men (1957) -- "9/10" This is the classic filming of the theater piece about the jury trial of a young man accused of having murdered his father in a fit of anger in the middle of the night. It is the story of 11 jurors ready to hang the boy high for pretty poor reasons while Henry Fonda plays the lone holdout. He asks them to at least spend a few minutes discussing the case before they condemn a man to die. It's well-written and well-acted and the story is very convincing. Details of the case are revealed through discussion and the jurors one-by-one switch to not-guilty verdicts. In the end, they all agree that the boy was railroaded by an unfair system and vote not-guilty. Highly recommended. The Andromeda Strain (1971) -- "5/10" This is the film of the book by Michael Crichton about an extraterrestrial incursion in the form of a crystal that acts as a virus for humans. The virus acts quickly, dehydrating blood almost instantly. The U.S. government quickly gathers a team of crack scientists to investigate it in a high-tech lab built in several layers under the desert. The film follows the investigation and the slow realization of how the alien crystals are actually alive and are evolving. In the end. we know no more about the alien substance, but it evolves into a form that is non-lethal to humans. There is a tremendous focus on the technology in the film. The decontamination process is an entire act. The Waldo arms are given dozens of minutes of screen time. The Last Witchhunter (2015) -- "8/10" Vin Diesel stars as Kaulder, a warrior from the dark ages who vanquishes the Witch Queen. Before she falls, she curses him with immortality. The rest of the movie takes place in the present day, in New York City. Kaulder is in league with the Catholic Church to keep witches under control. There is a sort of licensing system and Kaulder is a much-feared officer of the law. A cult is working to resurrect the Witch Queen. We learn that Kaulder's immortality is related to the Witch Queen in a more direct tie (her heart). Michael Caine is Kaulder's assistant, with Elijah Wood his eventual replacement. Rose Leslie (Ygritte from Game of Thrones) is very good as the witch who gains Kaulder's trust (and love?) The final battle is a bit uneven, but overall it's an entertaining action movie. Evil Dead (2013) -- "7/10" This is a really well-made gore flick with more than a few shoutouts to the original. It's really violent and gory, with limbs being slowly and viscerally ripped from bodies. The makeup is very, very good and the actors do their jobs well. The plot vaguely follows the original, with several points of similarity (the book, the chainsaw, etc.). Predictably, the characters don't cop to the true severity of the situation quickly enough to save themselves. One by one, they are possessed and taken down by others. It's a well-done version of a classic formula. The Fly (2013) -- "9/10" Geena Davis is as beautiful as I remember her being when I first saw this movie as a teenager. She's still so young. Her boss drives a Maserati. The makeup is really good -- the deterioration already begins when Seth's on the sofa with Victoria. Goldblum matches the physical deterioration with a psychological one. The visuals and graphics are definitely dated, but worlds better than those from the Andromeda Strain, 15 years before. I had no idea who David Cronenberg (the director) was then. In the intervening 30 years, I've seen many more of his films and his imprimatur is very obviously on this film. It's quite poignant, at the end, that the Brundlefly/Teleporter is still capable of asking for the sweet release of death. Casino Royale (1967) -- "8/10" This is an extremely high-quality spy-film spoof starring the lovely Joanna Pettet as James Bond's daughter, David Niven as James Bond, Peter Sellers as Evelyn Tremble (Baccarat expert, who's written a book on it. The joke here is that there is no system to Baccarat: it's a game of pure luck) and also as James Bond, Orson Welles as Le Chiffre, the equally lovely Ursula Andress as Mata Bond (Mata Hari, who'd married Bond), Woody Allen shows up as "Jimmy Bond" in a non-speaking but central role, and the stunning Jacqueline Bisset as Miss Goodthighs. I just saw David Prowse (Darth Vader) has an uncredited role as Frankenstein's Monster. Peter O'Toole was an uncredited bagpiper. John Huston, Deborah Kerr, Anjelica Huston, William Holden -- it seemed everyone wanted to be in this movie. All of the actors seem to be enjoying themselves immensely. The plot follows that of the book, more or less. There's even the scene where Bond is kidnapped and tortured by Chiffre on a chair with a hole in it (although it's much less graphic than in the remake with Daniel Craig). Peter Sellers is amazing, as always. For once, he gets to play a confident character. I love the 60s aesthetic here. Some of the interactions are a bit dated (i.e. misogynistic), but it's 50 years old. Rear Window (1954) -- "8/10" Jimmy Stewart, Grace Kelly and Raymond Burr star in this Alfred Hitchcock classic. The premise is of a man (Stewart) laid up in his apartment with a broken leg. Out the rear window of his apartment, he has a view of many other apartments in his neighborhood, exquisitely rendered in a stage set. It's an incredibly hot summer in New York City, so everyone has their windows open until all hours of the evening. Stewart is a photographer; Kelly is his high-society girlfriend. Stewart spends a good deal of time watching the neighbors. Hitchcock appears in one of the apartments, winding the clock in the apartment of the composer/pianist. Jeffries is kind of a dick. He's inordinately proud of how he travels the world as a photographer, can't see any art in writing music (sees only that the guy writes music to pay his rent). He scowls at the same guy a while later, because he's practicing atonal jazz with his friends (probably because it's "noise"). He and Doyle keep talking about "notifying the landlord" when occupancy of the apartment changes -- even for one night. Showgirls (1995) -- "6/10" Elizabeth Berkley plays Nomi Malone, a drifter/dancer who ends up in Las Vegas. She is not a good actress. She very often goes to "11" [1]. I'm not really in the position to judge her dancing, but it's a bit jerky, I thought. She's good, but with a very exacting energy. I was surprised to see Gina Gershon and Kyle McLachlan with such big roles. Gina Gershon is naked nearly as much as Berkley is. And dances nearly as much. There's a lot of dancing, most of it extremely good. The plot is pretty standard, actually. Yeah, there's a lot of nudity and lots of sexy dancing, but it's probably a pretty accurate depiction of the show-girl dancing world. Again, I have no idea, but it didn't seem to be too exaggerated just to be extra-mean to women. The plot, writing and acting were brutal and stupid sometimes, but again, no more than other movies. Ok, I take that back: now they're drinking champagne in a giant pool. And then they made a lot of waves in the most ridiculous cinematic depiction of a female orgasm ever. Berkley cements her utter lack of acting chops in that scene. She also saves a lot of time on laundry because she wears neither a bra nor panties. Although you have to remember this is just Verhoeven's and Eszterhas's style -- remember Starship Troopers. The dance numbers in the big shows are not terrible. Nor, again, are they particularly hard to believe. Probably the people complaining about them want to believe in a world where none of this exists. And 75% of the way through the film, there's a gang-rape scene nearly out of nowhere, of Berkley's best friend and roommate. The rapists were clever: they released her, bleeding from everywhere, right back to a party with hundreds of people. And no-one knows a thing. The aftermath/coverup with Kyle McLachlan is completely believable and culminates in yet another of Berkley's nearly spastic acting "reactions". But now we're in revenge mode -- I honestly can't tell if Verhoeven is taking the piss here. He can't seriously want us to believe she's a martial-arts expert now, too? And then one more quick lesbian scene with Gina Gershon and she's drifting back to the road. Saw it in German. Mechanic: Resurrection (2016) -- "8/10" This sequel to the remake, which starred Donald Sutherland and Jason Statham (the original starred Charles Bronson and Jan-Michael Vincent), starts off with a bang. Jason Statham takes no shit from anyone and won't be distracted by a pretty face. He's on the lam after the end of the first film, but he's been discovered by an old enemy. He escapes from Brazil to Thailand (using a passport and phone from a giant stash in a shipping container), where he meets up with an old friend Mei (Michelle Yeoh). The second pretty face works a bit better (Jessica Alba) -- she's sent to spy on him and lets her man beat her up so that Bishop (Statham) can't help but get involved. He figures this out, as well, but is slowly getting sucked in to the job. Jessica Alba is cute as hell, but she's in Statham's shadow -- he's built like a brick shithouse. Really not bad for a guy who was almost 50 when he made that movie. Naturally, Alba is 14 years younger, which is actually a small gap for Hollywood. Still, it's a decent setup: she gets kidnapped by the guy who wants Bishop to commit three kills/hits so he's backed into employing his unique skillset, but left morally off the hook for killing complete strangers. The hits are nicely constructed: we see Bishop planning them mission-impossible-style and the executing them to perfection. He's brilliant, quite a sketch artist, is familiar with all sorts of munitions and weapons and is immensely strong. Obviously, it's completely unbelievable, but it's a lot of fun. It kind of reminds me of the Hitman movies, but better because Jason Statham > Timothy Olyphant. The final kill is Tommy Lee Jones, who seems to have a lot of fun with the role of international weapons-dealer. Instead of helping his enemy eliminate his competition, he strikes a deal with TLJ to fake his death. Definitely a wonderfully choreographed film. It's nice to see that Alba is far from helpless -- she can hold her own, but her ability to take on huge guys is relatively realistic. As with any action film, Statham has as many bullets as he needs and he has preternatural aim with a pistol (especially when in motion). Some of his kill-shots look like shit we used to do in Quake: falling backwards but still administering a laser-like shot to the forehead. Overall, a very fun and satisfying action movie. Maze Runner (2014) -- "6/10" The story shows a world that consists of only large meadow and forest enclosed in giant stone walls. It is inhabited by a tribe of boys who call their home "The Glade". It's kind of like Lord of the Flies starring a bunch of millennials without phones. They are joined regularly by a new boy/man, who appears from a cargo lift built into the ground. As the film starts, they are joined by Thomas. Thomas starts trouble by not immediately accepting the rules as they've been established by the others. One has to follow the rules because it's what keeps everyone alive. If you don't follow the rules, the cargo boxes stop coming. Also, don't try to escape because the Maze will eat you. The maze is inscrutable and impenetrable and is inhabited by Grievers -- giant robot-spider machines with an unquenchable desire to kill. Predictably, Thomas is better at maze-running than anyone else and he manages to kill a Griever and he finds a way out, etc. etc. However, he only finds a way out of the original maze -- there is much more to come because the maze is part of a dystopic, wasted world ruled by the mad remnant so factions that destroyed it. I think I might have made it sound better than it was. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] "One review" I read wrote that she "snatches [$10] from him like a mongoose trying to kill a cobra"; that's how she does everything. "Roger Ebert" himself wrote that "If all lap-dancers get as carried away as Nomi does, I'll bet they're constantly seeing a chiropractor about their backs." Ebert actually noticed a bunch of the same things I did, for example: "It's trash, yes, but not boring. Sometimes, it's hilarious: (1) As a dancer writhes groaning on the stage, a choreographer grabs her knee and squeezes. "She screams. "It's her knee," he concludes. " ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3626 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3626 Wed, 26 Dec 2018 12:34:46 +0100 of almost 1200 ratings publicly available. I've included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other -- I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. Joe Rogan: Strange Times (2018) -- "9/10" Joe Rogan pulls his shit together to put on a really good set, tearing down many of the more ludicrous facets of our online and real-world (mostly) American culture. He's done a good job of distilling the madness and at-times stupidity of his podcast/vidcast into some pretty insightful and thought-provoking as well as hilarious material. The Haunting of Hill House (2018) -- "7/10" This was a strong, if too-long story of the damage done to a family by a haunted house. Whether the house is haunted is left open until the very end. That is, the show depicts very scary and haunted-looking apparitions but it's always left open whether the house is actually doing these things or whether every associated with the house is just mad. It's more of an eight-hour movie rather than a TV season. There is a tremendous amount of character development. Carla Gugino (also in Gerald's Game), Michiel Huisman (of Tremé), Henry Thomas (of E.T.) and Timothy Hutton all play very well. Slowly, we realize that the house drives them mad (shades of Stephen King here). There are some really nice reveals as the show interleaves past and present. Parts of the present jut into the past, revealed via ESP or visions. The ending is, on one hand, good, in that there is no grand monster in the house. Each person imbues the "room" with their own issues. It kind of reminded me a bit of the "room" in Stalker. However, the final ending is so pat (they more-or-less "heal" the house) that I removed a star. Big Mouth S02 (2018) -- "8/10" This show continues to be a strong contender for being shown in every health class in the country. It's rare to see such an honest take on the feeling and hormones roiling in teenagers. it's at times quite filthy, which I find charming, but which would certainly take it out of the running for health class. This season moves the character arcs of the first season forward, introducing no new characters. Nick Kroll and John Mulaney voice the stars as well as many side characters. Richard Kind as Marty Glouberman is fantastic. Jason Mantzoukas as Jay justifiably gets more airtime and Maya Rudolph is brilliant as the Hormone Monstress. Daredevil S03 (2018) -- "9/10" The first half of this season felt a bit long as we watch Daredevil recover from his grievous injuries sustained in the finale of the Defenders. At the same time that he licks his wounds and wallows in self-pity, we watch as Wilson Fisk (the amazing Vincent D'Onofrio) engineers his own release from prison to a house arrest. Daredevil is the only one convinced that Fisk must die -- Karen Page (wonderfully played by Deborah Ann Woll) and Foggy (Elden Hansen) want to get him back in jail. They are all at odds and cross-purposes for much of the season, providing tension as we watch the tsunami of Fisk's nearly inevitable takeover of the city approaching their pathetic, disorganized and at-times squabbling resistance. In the midst of this is a new enemy, in the form of Dex, an FBI agent who's incredibly accomplished but also psychologically damaged beyond repair. Fisk uses him, crafting him into a weapon that Daredevil can barely handle. Overall, an excellent third season. Extinction (2018) -- "4/10" Michael Peña stars in this film about the aftermath of an alien invasion. Rather, the precognition of an alien invasion. Rather, the story of how an invasion could also be a homecoming that ousts a bunch of squatters. The plot twist was interesting enough, but nothing that came before or after was particularly inspiring. Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (2016) -- "8/10" This continuation of the film franchise in the world created for the Harry Potter films retains the child-like wonder of the originals as well as a bit of the darkness of the final installments. In the timeline, this film is a prequel, telling the story of the rise of Grindelwald, who would go on to create the Elder Wand that is lost in time by the time Potter desperately seeks it as one of the "deathly hallows" in the finale of the previous film series. Eddie Redmayne stars as Newt, a collector of animals and zoological lore. This makes him an outsider since all other magicians at the time consider animals to be beneath them, either slaves or enemies. It was a solid film, due in no small part to Redmayne holding it all together. Russell Brand: Re:Birth (2018) -- "6/10" I ordinarily really like Brand's patter when he really gets going, but this show didn't really do it for me. He made a lot of callbacks to his previous shows and things he's done online. He talked a lot about his family and the birth of his child. He was political at times, but he seemed to be phoning it in. F is for Family S03 (2018) -- "8/10" This season was a bit more up-and-down than the previous two seasons, but still overall very good. It takes a little while to get going. The story arc this time is Frank's new friend, a former Air-Force pilot who's pretty much a giant jerk, but whom Frank promotes to a God. Frank, as voiced by Bill Burr, is stellar, as in other seasons. His anger bleeds through at times, lending credence to the put-upon father figure just trying to make ends meet and to bring some joy to his family, despite his own ideas and ineptitude playing a large part in preventing him from achieving these things. Gerald's Game (2018) -- "7/10" This movie was better than I expected it to be. It actually delivered a pretty good translation of Stephen King's book to screen. They seem to be getting better at doing this. The basic plot is that a rich and successful couple's relationship is on the rocks. This is understandable because she's basically a saint and he's a manipulative, gaslighting asshole. Gerald (played by Bruce Greenwood) is clearly in his late fifties/early sixties, but his biceps look like he still works out at the high-school gym. He's very fit, but it's the body of a narcissist. Carla Gugino as Jessie is lovely and convincing as a woman in her mid-to-late forties. The gap of 15 years makes sense, in context. They travel to a remote, isolated cabin for a sexy weekend where they plan to reignite the spark. He's all ready with his viagra and his handcuffs and a gleam in his eye. During the foreplay, he refers to himself as "Daddy", which completely turns her off. We find out exactly in flashbacks over the rest of the film when we meet her father, played by Henry Thomas (who ironically played Gugino's husband in The Haunting of Hill House). He gets angry and gives himself a damned heart attack. She's still cuffed to the bed and the key is too far away to reach. He's definitely dead as a doornail. It's Stephen King, so a hungry, friendly stray dog from before shows up, who's not so friendly anymore. He's just hungry. Jessie's mind starts playing tricks on her, exaggerating details in the long night. Does she really see a man in the corner? Is it death? She must. get. free. She eventually does get free, stumbling past death, bleeding and handing him her wedding ring. The epilogue provides illumination. Filth (2013) -- "9/10" James McAvoy plays Bruce, a detective in the Scottish police force. He's an absolute animal: womanizing, swearing, doing drugs, smoking, drinking, hiring prostitutes, accosting criminals and citizens alike. He's brilliant. We learn of the reason for his behavior as we watch him unravel. His machinations pile up and conflict and engender ever-greater and riskier schemes. Inevitably, things collapse and he comes out on the other side, or does he? The plot is incidental to McAvoy's performance. Also stars Imogen Poots, Jim Broadbent and Jamie Bell. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3576 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3576 Wed, 26 Dec 2018 12:33:31 +0100 of almost 1200 ratings publicly available. I've included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other -- I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. Escape to Victory (1981) -- "8/10" This is sort of like the Longest Yard but with WWII prisoners of war vs. the German national team in Paris. It stars Sylvester Stallone, Michael Caine, Max von Sydow and Pele. Von Sydow plays a German major who is keen on football and recognizes Caine as John Colby of the Premier League. He proposed to Colby that he should put a team together to play against a team of Germans, guards and officers. When Sydow's superiors get wind of the idea, they promote it and move the match to Paris, against the German national team, for propaganda purposes. Colby and his men care little, at first. They are allowed to practice and play and get more free reign and privileges than they ordinarily would have. Stallone's Hatch is part of a plan to escape -- unlike many others before him. He makes it in quite an elegant fashion and makes his way to Paris like a pretty debonair spy. He even enunciates passable French. His job is to sneak into the match in order to break out the entire team. The matches commences, with the German team depicted as a savage team that plays like Paul Newman's team did in Slapshot. The referee has been paid off and seems to be throwing his very first game because it's ridiculously obvious. At half-time, it's 4--1 for the Germans and they head back to the lockers -- ready to be broken out through the sewer system. The breach into the hot tub is wonderful. They all get below ground, then they decide they want to finish the game -- they think they can win. They'd rather win the game than escape. Hatch must be convinced to return to prison -- yet again -- because they can't play without their goalie. The colonels who'd arranged the escape are baffled. It's quickly 4--3. The referee seems to have forgotten how to cheat. Until they disallow an equalizing goal for no apparent reason. And this all playing a man down. With a few minutes remaining, Pele comes back on the field, having partially recovered for an egregious injury suffered in the first half. Bicycle kick for an indisputable equalizer. The crowd chants victoire. Then they begin to sing a patriotic song in French, drowning out everything else. Silence falls on the pitch. Hatch must face a final penalty kick. He saves it. The crown goes wild and storms the pitch. The team escapes in the ensuing melee, disguised by the crowd in clothes that cover their kits. The Germans mysteriously don't shoot anyone. I love how they didn't even try to give the extras period clothing. There're windbreakers and member-only jackets all over the field. The Shape of Water (2017) -- "5/10" This is the story of a mute woman (Eliza) working as a janitor in a top-secret 1960s laboratory. She is a solitary person with an affinity to water. At the lab, an captured amphibious creature is brought in -- and she befriends it, seemingly falls in love with it. There is a cold-war tension draped over the whole affair, with one lab tech (at least) working for the Soviets. The military people are unswervingly cruel, single-minded, short-sighted and stupid. Also, the Russians are comically depicted and their accents are atrocious. I don't know a lot of Russian (4 years of study deep in the past), but I know a bad accent when I hear one. I can hear how stilted it is and the American accents glare through. It's embarrassing to think that a globally released film like this couldn't give enough of a shit to get the language that's spoken in a good quarter of the movie right. They do this a lot with German as well (season 9 of Archer is painful -- especially Cyril). I don't think that this is part of some elaborate double-irony, being deliberately bad about accents to point up how little Americans care about the rest of the world. At this point, I can't tell if you're just seriously an idiot or pretending to be one. It's a wash. And this movie was nominated for an Oscar -- an organization that will rip out its left eyeball to avoid offending gays, blacks or women (now, anyway), but doesn't seem to notice when a film offends an entire culture. The Russians are the enemy anyways, right? ... So who cares about offending them. They deserve it. Her best friend is a gay painter (in the 60s) and everyone around him is a horrible homophobic, anti-communist racist. Her other best friend at work is Zelda Fuller, played by the always-amazing Octavia Spencer. But I've having a hard time engaging with this story: everything just kind of happens randomly. The fish-man is considered "hot". The mute lady wants him; she gets him. Fish-man can heal people and his back lights up when he orgasms, but he just gets mysteriously sick and no-one can figure out what's wrong. Is there not enough salt in the water? No-one knows. We just have to wait and see what the story wants to show us, but we can't engage in it and make any predications or draw conclusions. There's a lot of Russian, so make to get a copy with subtitles. True Cost (2015) -- "9/10" This is a quite excellent documentary about and analysis of the Western fashion industry. Actually, the fashion industry is the entry point to an extended critique of the real problem: our unfettered capitalism and laser-like focus on profits and growth. Economist Richard Wolfe is featured in the second half and eloquently sums up the real fix that we need. The fashion industry has moved from a biannual release schedule to a nearly weekly release schedule called "fast fashion". If so many clothes are to be sold, then those clothes have to get less expensive. When the end customer pays less, there's less to go around all the way up the supplier chain. Those with the least power suffer the most. The documentary covers all aspects of our rapacious system.: It starts with how Monsanto has cornered and redesigned the market in seeds and pesticides to increase their profits and control. They have GM seeds that can't be used in subsequent years, the plants they produce require more pesticides, and the ruthless race to the bottom ensures that more labor-intensive means of production (organic farming) are priced out of the market. The materials are made cheaper by squeezing farmers. Next up is finding the source of cheapest labor in the world, working in the worst conditions. This makes selling super-cheap clothes to people buying stuff they don't need on credit they don't have a viable short- to medium-term business strategy. Since people don't really need these clothes -- and they were so cheap to begin with -- they throw them away in staggering numbers. Millions of tons of clothes are discarded every year in the U.S. alone. Underneath it all is the driving engine of rapacious, pure-profit, growth capitalism. The environment and people are not included in the balance sheet when determining the success of a participant in this economy. There is no overarching goal other than funneling money upwards to those that already have it. This documentary uses the fashion industry as a lens through which to view this greater underlying problem. It's unlikely we'll solve it, though, as long as so many of those with the upper hand (most people in the West) don't really care or are unaware or don't think that their actions matter. As long as so many are brainwashed into thinking that capitalism is sacrosanct -- when every other policy can be questioned and improved -- there is no way out. Stewart Lee's Comedy Vehicle: Season 4 (2016) -- "9/10" Stewart Lee is a comedic genius. I don't know of anyone else whose comedy is even similar. It's self-referential, meta, deconstructionist and breaks the fourth wall. His topics range from racism to the BBC to the British press to British politics ... but it's not really like that. He's brilliant. Split (2016) -- "9/10" James McAvoy stars in this M. Night Shyamalan sequel (?) about a man with a split personality. He kidnaps three young ladies and traps them in a room together. The same man visits them several times, each time clothed in a different personality. Patricia, Dennis, Hedwig and many more. Dennis is in treatment with Dr. Fletcher, who thinks that people with his disorder are actually preternaturally gifted, almost super-human. That's why this feels a bit like a sequel -- it's another in Shyamalan's series of films about low-key superheroes. The girls try to figure out how to escape, while he's constantly switching personalities. The film follows Dr. Fletcher's attempts to control the personalities. Dennis and Patricia have taken over Kevin's body from Barry -- and things are getting darker. West World S02 -- "8/10" This continues to be one of the more interesting shows, with good acting, good writing and interesting ideas. The war between the hosts and the humans comes to a head and culminates in the first large battle, which the hosts lose. At least most of them do: many of them make their escape into a virtual world, where they feel the same, but are free of physical bodies. It become clear throughout the season that it's not only the hosts who are copied or "backed up" to the Delos severs -- every guest who's ever visited the park has also been stored on the servers. This is the path to immortality for some -- or so they hope or fear. Interwoven throughout this main story arc are the individual stories, like Maeve's unwavering obsession with finding her daughter. On the one hand, it's annoying since she constantly subverts her own purposes with this overarching desire to find a child that was never hers -- she's reacting to an implanted desire. But aren't we all, in a sense? Hers is more obviously implanted and artificial, so we think she should be able to free herself from it. Perhaps that's what makes it all the more powerful -- it's artificial and not subject to the whims of biology since she was engineered. The other main heroine is Dolores (sadness), who leads her armies against mankind and tries to destroy all of the guests' records, failing to do so. She does manage to escape into the real world, taking Bernard with her. He doesn't share her vision and will be ever at-odds with her, but he will also likely be helpful to her. We also find out much more about William, the Man in Black and the Delos vision. His storyline is entwined with that of Akecheta of the Ghost Nation, of whom we learn much more (especially in #8, the Kiksuya episode). Ford almost makes a virtual return, helping Bernard fill in some deliberately created gaps in his memory -- especially as relates to Dolores and Charlotte (the current owner/CEO of Delos). It is at this point increasingly difficult to tell who is a host and who is a human. Even William's last appearance in a flash-future scene, suggests that he, at some point, crosses the line. Sleeping with Other People (2015) -- "8/10" This was a pretty solid romantic comedy. It's raunchier than most (rated R), so maybe that made it a bit more interesting than the many other middle-of-the-road, goody-two-shoes entries in this category. The plot-line is still a classic one: two people who continue to screw up their romantic relationships (one by cheating and the other by being a serial bed-hopper) find solace and comfort in a platonic relationship with each other. As this relationship becomes more comfortable and real and strong for both of them, they naturally toy with the idea of moving it to the central, romantic relationship. But, also naturally, both fear that this will destroy their friendship as they've managed to destroy all of their other relationships. After a few false starts, they both realize that they can make it work this time because they truly are right for each other and flawed in the same way so that their flaws dovetail rather than separate. In other words: a romantic comedy. I gave it an extra star because I really like the two leads, Jason Sudeikis and Alison Brie. Disenchantment (2018) -- "6/10" This cartoon has all of the trademarks of a Matt Groening cartoon in its art direction and style. It's set in a fictional medieval kingdom and focuses on the life of a debauched and unwilling princess. She befriends a stupid elf and a tiny demon. Her father is a drunken lout. Her mother is a squid-person from a neighboring kingdom. They all have adventures that drive their respective stories and the overall story arc forward. It's not as funny as it thinks it is -- or maybe it is, but the humor feels forced and all-too-familiar. It's not terrible, but I honestly can't even remember if I finished watching all of the episodes in the season. The Alienist (2018) -- "8/10" This was a very nice season of shows based strongly on the plot of the book by Caleb Carr. It stars Daniel Brühl, Dakota Fanning and Luke Evans. Brühl plays Laszlo Kreizler, an alienist who's proved his value to the police force many times, but is constantly forced to prove himself again because his techniques and the science he espouses are still very new for the time. Dakota Fanning plays Sara Howard, who starts off as a secretary but realizes her full potential working with Kreizler. She often leads the way in investigations and is largely fearless. Due to attitudes at the time, she is only allowed to be her true self in the shadow of Kreizler. Finally, Evans plays John Moore, a high-society playboy who occasionally works as a sketch-artist for the police but mainly assists Brühl. "Those who are seen dancing are thought insane by those who cannot hear the music." Bojack Horseman S05 (2018) -- "9/10" What is there more to say about Bojack Horseman? This show continues to enchant with smart, smart writing and interesting story arcs. All of the shows offer something unique, but the standout episode this time was "Free Churros", which consisted of a 30-minute eulogy/standup routine by Bojack at his mother's funeral. I'm delighted to hear that it's been renewed for another season. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3544 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3544 Thu, 06 Sep 2018 07:58:25 +0200 -- "6/10" 2. "Enissa Amani: Ehrenwort" <#Enissa> -- "8/10" 3. "Kevin James: Never Don't Give Up" <#Kevin> -- "8/10" 4. "John Mulaney: Kid Gorgeous at Radio City" <#John> -- "10/10" 5. "Altered Carbon (2018)" <#Altered> -- "9/10" 6. "The Last Movie Star (2017)" <#Movie> -- "9/10" 7. "Hari Kondabolu: Warn Your Relatives (2018)" <#Hari> -- "8/10" 8. "Jim Jeffries: This is Me Now (2018)" <#Jim> -- "8/10" 9. "Murder on the Orient Express (2017)" <#Murder> -- "8/10" 10. "Iliza Schlesinger: Elder Milennial (2018)" <#Iliza> -- "10/10" 11. "Steve Martin and Martin Short: An Evening You Will Forget for the Rest of Your Life (2018)" <#Steve> -- "8/10" 12. "Tig Notaro: Happy to be Here (2018)" <#Tig> -- "7/10" 13. "Black Panther (2018)" <#Black> -- "6/10" 14. "A Quiet Place (2018)" <#A> -- "6/10" 15. "Suicide Squad (2016)" <#Suicide> -- "7/10" 16. "Bert Kreischer: Secret Time (2018)" <#Bert> -- "8/10" 17. "Avengers: Infinity War (2018)" <#Avengers> -- "8/10" 18. "Deadpool 2 (2018)" <#Deadpool> -- "10/10" 19. "Pacific Rim: Uprising" <#Pacific> -- "6/10" 20. "Thor: Ragnarok" <#Thor> -- "9/10" 21. "Blade Runner 2049" <#Blade> -- "7/10" 22. "Demetri Martin: The Overthinker" <#Demetri> -- "5/10" 23. "San Andreas (2015)" <#San> -- "5/10" 24. "Rampage (2018)" <#Rampage> -- "6/10" These are my notes to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. I've recently transferred my reviews to IMDb and made "the list" of almost 1200 ratings publicly available. I've included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other -- I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood and. let's be honest, level of intoxication. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. Lost in Space (2018) -- "6/10" This series had really good effects and a decent concept, but it was let down in the end by very uneven characters, repetitive writing and phone-in plotlines. The boy is a useless pain in the ass who just fucks up one thing after another, to drive the plot along. His Mom is barely any better, but at least she's a decent actress -- she's just not given much to work with. Posey Parker is decent, but how many chances can you give her evil ass over the course of ten episodes? Again, the show had a destination for season one and they were going to get there, come hell or high water. It was tedious to see things happening again and again, against the grain of common sense or logic. The effects were really good and Ignacio Serricchio as Don West was a welcome respite from poorly written characters. I won't be watching season 2. Enissa Amani: Ehrenwort -- "8/10" I'd never heard of her before, but this Iranian-German comedian was pretty good. Her natural milieu is talking about her upbringing in an Iranian family in Germany. Her style is pretty clean, with a focus on storytelling rather than one-liners. Saw it in German. Kevin James: Never Don't Give Up -- "8/10" I was pleasantly surprised to see Kevin James not suck at stand-up. I couldn't remember whether he'd ever done it before since I only knew him from King of Queens (presumably after he was a stand-up) and his truly abysmal movie career. Still, he pulled it off and had a lot of reasonably original material and a good delivery. John Mulaney: Kid Gorgeous at Radio City -- "10/10" This man's performance was superlative from start to finish. He's so confident and funny. His set is super-tight and obviously ridiculously well-rehearsed. He brought down the house and deservedly so. Altered Carbon (2018) -- "9/10" I don't know how I haven't heard more buzz about this show -- because it's really good. It's good sci-fi, well-acted and well-told with great and relatively subtle effects. It feels like the world of Blade Runner with its own twist. And then there's the middle 3 episodes where they forget about the main rule of visual storytelling: show, don't tell. There's a lot of exposition and a lot of story to tell and a lot of background to impart, so it's kind of understandable. Still, it would have been better to leave more of the backstory unsaid or just hinted at rather than driven into the ground. The final third picks up again and the whole series is buoyed by the stalwart and truly charismatic Joel Kinnaman in the lead as Takeshi Kovacs. It's worth the effort because the story is really good and the world in which people live in their "stacks" rather than in their bodies ("sleeves") is one filled with possibility. Recommended. The Last Movie Star (2017) -- "9/10" I have always been a Burt Reynolds fan, for nearly as long as I can remember. I watched and liked Deliverance a few years ago and am a fan of Archer who is a Burt Reynolds super-fan. This movie is about an aging action-movie star who is lured to a small-time movie-awards ceremony run by rabid, but extremely young fans. He goes because he's got nothing better to do and he just buried his canine best friend. He is predictably ornery and borderline alcoholic and pretty funny, but meaner than he needs to be. He has his driver -- the organizer's younger sister -- drive him to all of his old haunts in the area, revealing more about himself to her while inadvertently helping her with her messed-up life. It sounds like it could be kind of lame, but it wasn't. Reynolds shines in an absolutely age-appropriate role in which he doesn't try to hide anything. Recommended. Hari Kondabolu: Warn Your Relatives (2018) -- "8/10" Hari is a very smart comic with a lot of clever bits about his immigrant family. He likes wordplay and he's got an interesting take on current affairs as well as some original jokes and set pieces. He's got a good style and he's filthier than you'd expect him to be, which is a very good thing. Jim Jeffries: This is Me Now (2018) -- "8/10" I've seen a bunch of Jim Jeffries specials and he's really grown on me. He'll have a couple of jokes that flop terribly, but there were far fewer of them in this special. The set felt tighter and more practiced and rehearsed than others. Although, Alcoholocaust was pretty good, too, though he was drinking the whole time. He's still a raunchy, super-clever, irreverent Australian who's probably spent too much time in America by now. He's divorced and has fewer jokes about Hank (his son). If you watch his show on British Comedy Central, you'll be familiar with some of his material -- or at least the main thrust of it. Recommended. Murder on the Orient Express (2017) -- "8/10" This is a very lovely movie on a train, starring Kenneth Branagh as Hercule Poirot, the world's greatest detective. The rest of the cast is also pretty good, ranging from Johnny Depp to Daisy Ridley to Leslie Odom Jr. The case is quite unsolvable by the audience, but clever in the end nonetheless. The writing was good, with Poirot delivering some very nice lines. "Every day we meet people the world would do better without and yet, we do not kill them. We must be better than beasts." "If it was easy, I would not be famous." "I see enough crime to know that the criminal is an anomaly. It takes a fracture of the soul to murder." Iliza Schlesinger: Elder Milennial (2018) -- "10/10" I was super-pleasantly surprised to find myself laughing out loud at this latest installment from Iliza. I liked her first show and was entertained by her second one, but this one was tight. Not a wasted word or gesture; everything she did contributed to the story she was telling, very much like Ali Wong, actually. She talks about getting engaged and married at 35 and claims her role as the Elder Millennial (because she's just within the Millennial window). Highly recommended. Steve Martin and Martin Short: An Evening You Will Forget for the Rest of Your Life (2018) -- "8/10" I like both of these guys but Martin Short manages to steal whatever show he's in. Steve Martin is very funny, but takes himself more seriously now. He's an excellent banjo player, but his performance looked a bit staid next to Short's mania. Martin Short is a revelation, still a whirling dynamo of comic effervescence. Tig Notaro: Happy to be Here (2018) -- "7/10" Tig is a craftswoman, building a lot of humor out of what seems to be very little material. She's a storyteller comedian, relatively tame. Her stories are about everyday life. Her best bit is about her wife's non-sequiturs. Black Panther (2018) -- "6/10" Just because you make a movie filled with black people doesn't make it a black movie. This movie is about the leader of Wakanda, a hidden nation in Africa. It hides its technological splendor behind a shield powered by Vibranium. Its borders are closed. Its people live inside, while others live the charade outside, presumably in a squalor that is acceptable to the powers that otherwise rule the world. It's a right-wing paradise, with closed borders and royalty and no democracy. Chadwick Boseman is T'Challa as the Black Panther. He is the ruler by birthright or, rather, by having fought in hand-to-hand combat to win the throne when his father dies. It seems that black people still need to fight like apes even though they are the most technologically advanced country on the planet. They have no sign of democracy, just a royal family. They have a ton of science and technology, but only one scientist -- in the form of T'Challa's teenage sister. How is no-one else seeing that this is demeaning? Everyone else runs around like an extra in Disney World's Animal Kingdom, fighting with spears (I am not kidding). They have trained rhinos with high-tech helmets. One of the tribes is apart from the others. They hoot like gorillas and live in the snowy heights, but aren't smart enough to invent hats or scarves. It's good that it doesn't seem to be cold up there, despite all the snow, ice and wind. They even make one of the heroes of the story Martin Freeman, one of the few white actors in the film. Without him, Wakanda would have been lost. He's a CIA officer, FFS. Michael B. Jordan was the best thing about this movie. He's very charismatic and easy on the eyes. He did what he could with his role as the quasi-socialist, but ultimately overly murderous revolutionary. This film felt very co-opted and wasn't at all the revolutionary vision I'd hoped for. Edit: On a second viewing (with a friend), I was no longer so impressed with Jordan's character. Instead, he felt very one-dimensional and pig-headed. His quasi-socialism was overtly mixed with violence in a way that intimated it wasn't actually possible to be socialist -- that one could only want to switch roles and be on top for once. A Quiet Place (2018) -- "6/10" I expected more consistency and cleverness from this movie. I liked that they couldn't make any noise. But they made the mistake of showing how many days had passed since the noise-detection aliens had arrived. Almost a year and a half and they're still telling each other to be quiet? They all learned sign language but they didn't figure out how to make a soundproof shelter? They get pregnant? How the hell did you think that was going to work? I don't like watching movies about stupid, lucky people who don't have any other redeeming qualities. I don't care that the deaf girl is played by a real-live deaf girl OMG. Also, please suspend my disbelief enough that I don't notice the grave transgressions against physics. These aren't superheroes, are they? First of all, how did they harvest so much corn without making any noise? Why do they sink into the corn inexorably, seemingly being sucked down and then suddenly the boy can drag her out one-armed, just because he's on a piece of metal? Then the alien jumps in and they both dive in and hide under the metal, but no longer sink? Even when the thing is standing with its considerable weight on the metal? I don't ask for much. I'll believe in aliens. I don't believe in variable physical parameters unless you give me a reason to. And they really, really pushed how brave the woman was for being pregnant and then being the bad-ass bitch who would avenge her husband and family -- and humanity. OMG GO GIRL. Yawn. Suicide Squad (2016) -- "7/10" I gave this movie an extra star because it was better than expected. Will Smith was quite good as was, surprisingly, Margot Robbie, who imbued the role of the psychotic Harley Quinn with more pathos than expected. I kind of liked Jared Leto's Joker. I also recognized Joel Kinnamann (of Altered Carbon) as Rick Flag. Some of the other characters were a bit odd and seemed superfluous, like Croc. Still, it was reasonably entertaining and looked kinda nice. Bert Kreischer: Secret Time (2018) -- "8/10" Bert's got a lot of good stories and he tells them well. He's got a bit of the squirm-inducing level of detail about his and his wife's own sex life that Louis C.K. did -- I hope she's OK with that. It's not possible for him to think we don't see the similarity between his saddest blow-job-in-the-world bit and Louis C.K.'s saddest-hand-job-in-the-world. Still, the story about the rope park was pretty good. Avengers: Infinity War (2018) -- "8/10" This movie packs a lot of characters into a single film and has a truly impressively large story arc. In almost three hours of film, it's only setting up the sequel. Thanos collects the infinity stones. Various heroes and teams of heroes try to stop him, all to no avail. They fail gracefully and with a lot of CGI aplomb. Chris Evans is noble as the Captain, Josh Brolin is actually brilliant as Thanos. Chris Pratt and the Guardians of the Galaxy more than hold their own in a film with so many other threads and plots. Iron Man is boring and Spider-Man is reduced, but they have one brilliant moment: "The kid's seen more movies" (a reference to Spidey having called Aliens an old movie and building a plan around blowing another alien out of an ad-hoc airlock). Marc Ruffalo is fun, but never turns into the Hulk. Chris Hemsworth is there as Thor, knocking it out of the park, just like he did in Thor: Ragnarok. Benedict Cumberbatch moves from strength to strength as Dr. Strange. There are so many others, but they weren't as memorable for me. If you've seen the other movies, then you'll recognize dozens of characters -- but it's stitched together much more capably than I'd expected. The main quibble I have is the wildly inconsistent levels of power of the various characters. Thanos has an infinity stone and can beat both Thor and the Hulk with just one. When he gets a second one, he's the most powerful person in the universe. When he's got four, the Captain can still catch and hold his fist. The Vision has one stone and gets bitch-slapped from one end of the room to the other by Thanos's children, but Black Widow and the Falcon show up and wipe the floor with them. I don't care that Iron Man and War Machine seem to have an infinite supply of mass in their armor. That's OK. It's a comic-book movie. But they should make the levels of power a bit less arbitrary -- it was pretty distracting. I like the way the film ended; it was surprising to see a 2.5-hour, American blockbuster end on such a dark note. Thanos snapped his fingers with the Infinity Gauntlet and wiped out half of the universe. The end. Deadpool 2 (2018) -- "10/10" Ryan Reynolds continues to knock it out of the park for people of my generation and my sensibilities. He co-wrote this movie and carries it on his back -- though this time he's extremely well-supported by his cast: Josh Brolin as Cable, the excellent Zazie Beetz as lucky Domino. The plot isn't super-important, but Wade starts off trying to kill himself for having gotten the love of his life Vanessa (Morena Baccarin) killed. Cable is back from the future to kill Firefist, who kills his family in the future. But Firefist is just a teenage boy in Deadpool's present, being tortured by a mutant-hater in a home for orphans. Later, Russell (Firefist) and Deadpool are imprisoned together and escape with Cable's help. They slowly coalesce into a team and vanquish all. Reynolds'/Deadpool's motor-mouth is a constant and pleasant accompaniment. It's not really important, but it holds together well, a scaffolding on which Reynolds and the other writers hang a prodigious number of pop-culture references and witty dialogue. I was very, very entertained. Pacific Rim: Uprising -- "6/10" The sequel was more of a kids' movie than the original. Amara Namani, Scott Eastwood and John Boyega star as Jaeger pilots in a world in which the rifts have been closed and the Kaijus banished. Charlie Day and Burn Gorman reprise their roles as the Kaiju experts/scientists. This time around, the plot centers around drone Jaegers that don't need the often-unreliable drifting pilots. The new Jaegers are built by Shao industries, a giant Chinese concern run by Liwen Shao (Tian Jing). We ignore the seemingly endless supply of resources, metal and electronics required for this effort. The cast and crew are very international and it's a decent entry in the YA-kind of robot movie. I liked it better than I expected to because it wasn't a hoo-rah American movie -- the action took place on the Asian side of the Pacific Rim, believe it or not. The effects were very good, but that's no longer very surprising. Decent and fun, but nothing surprising and nothing to write home about. Thor: Ragnarok -- "9/10" The latest installment of the Thor franchise picks up with Thor escaping from the fire demon Surtur, who is prophesied to bring Ragnarok to Asgard -- destroying it forever. Thor escapes and returns to Asgard to find Loki in charge, pretending to be Odin -- who has been banished and is dying. When he dies, his imprisoned daughter Hela (Thor and Loki's older sister and the goddess of death) is released from banishment. She is bent on ruling Asgard and killing Thor (of course). This is the overall story arc. The best part of this movie is all of the stuff that happens along the way -- and Chris Hemsworth's overwhelming charisma as well as the clever and very entertaining comic writing. This is, surprisingly for me, a rollicking space adventure with alien planets, alien beings and delightful small- to medium-sized supporting roles, like Tessa Thompson as Valkyrie and Jeff Goldblum as the Grandmaster. Tom Hiddleston returns as Loki, also pretty well-written. Cate Blanchett chews a lot of scenery as Hela, but Mark Ruffalo is great as always as the Hulk. We actually see a bit of the Hulk World series of comics in this film. This movie is funny and fun and makes sense and is a pretty good segue to Infinity War. That I gave this film a 9 while Deadpool 2 got a 10 is kind of arbitrary, really. They're both super-fun, aesthetically pleasing movies with a strong lead and a ton of entertaining supporting characters. Maybe because I watched Deadpool with rum and coke? Blade Runner 2049 -- "7/10" Movies that ride along on the wave of a deus/ex character annoy me to no end. In this case, there's the especially unstoppable and all-powerful and all-cruel Luv. She gets in everywhere, she finds everything immediately and she moves the plot forward inexorably. She is without any nuance -- unlike all the other replicants in this movie (or its infamous predecessor) -- and is the center of the plot. She's like the terminator. All the parts with her in it are terrible. Jared Leto was also pretty one-dimensional, mostly due to just lazy, lazy writing. It's an absolutely beautiful-looking and -sounding movie, but the plot is a bit thin, considering how much time it spent on just omnipotent/omniscient killing machines. Maybe I would think differently on re-viewing, but I'm not so sure. Also, I can't for the life of me figure out this California weather. Dust storms, heat, then tons of rain, surging oceans and now snow. What the hell is going on? Demetri Martin: The Overthinker -- "5/10" Demetri likes puns and wordplay. He's an observational comic with some reasonably clever bits. He's meta. It's a bit much for an hour-long special this time round. The bit with the drawings felt very much like filler. It was decent, but went on for too long, for my taste. The material in the second half was also pretty tepid and kind of derivative. I liked his previous special much better. San Andreas (2015) -- "5/10" I wanted to like this movie more because I like The Rock "Dwayne" Johnson, but ... the script is terrible. The characters are terrible. Everyone was a cookie-cutter, bullshit character. You could see everything coming a mile away. Women were in distress. Bold, heroic, muscular, former military men rescued them. It's all a giant caricature. Obviously, but still. It could have been better. Like, Lifetime-movie-of-the-week-bad. The only deviation is the Rock's daughter who is the leader of her little group -- only because the two men/boys in it are useless Brits (one's an engineer rather than former SAS, so he's just about useless). The effects are nonpareil, of course. Or maybe pareil, but they're really good. The Rock is entertaining and charismatic because of course he is. His ex-wife is a nothingburger who, after he rescues only her from the rooftop of a building in a disintegrating Los Angeles, tells him that he "owes her" a discussion of their dead daughter. He owes her nothing. He's the worst fireman in the world: he flies over everyone else to rescue family members. Even when he's not rescuing family members, he's absolutely reckless with equipment and lives in the first rescue mission we see him on: we're supposed to be impressed at how he pulls everyone's fat out of the fire whereas all I could think of was that his rashness was the only reason anyone's fat was there in the first place. Then he's driving along a highway and doesn't see a giant rift right in front of him. He completely ignores people on the side of the road who look stranded, but who are trying to wave him down to keep him from driving off of a rather obvious cliff. Worst rescuer ever. Still, I almost want to give it another star for the tsunami/Perfect-Storm/container-ship scene that segues to a 100-foot tidal wave washing over San Fransisco after having taken out the Golden Gate Bridge like it was made of toothpicks. But then I want to take a star away for being so ludicrously predictable and nauseatingly American. At the predictably rosy end, they all stand in a sunset under a cloud-scudded sky rather than in a gloomy, smoke-palled day, gagging on the stench of death and destruction. Also, nobody notices that Blake has brain damage from having gone without oxygen for so long (she has no lines after coming back from nearly drowning). Rampage (2018) -- "6/10" The first twenty minutes of this movie are already better than anything in San Andreas. The Rock's relationship with George is believable. The tech behind George's mutation is introduced reasonably well. There's an evil corporation headed by a brother/sister where the sister is the amoral driving force. There are elite, former-military hired killers. The showdown is being set up. George is a good boy that evil science made bad. Poor George doesn't mean to go crazy, he's just hungry and being driven mad by the genetic engineering. It's going to be predictable, but nonetheless epic. The action set-pieces are decent, but God almighty is the dialogue weak: Malin Akerman as Clair Wyden (CEO of the evil genetics company behind the experiments) is thinly written and acted. Naomie Harris is awful, but no more so than anyone else in the role of token scientist spouting science bullshit. That she's positioned as the romantic interest for The Rock is ludicrous. Even the ordinarily decent Jeffrey Dean Morgan just chews the scenery with his exaggerated accent. Also, if the animals are that dangerous, why don't they drop bombs on them instead of just shooting them with ineffective bullets? And now they jump straight to the MOAB? There's really no in-between in American action films, is there? No room for nuance. Speaking of no nuance, I think really Harris is the worst, so much unearned confidence and talking, but ... Akerman is definitely giving her a run for her money. Their acting calibre is about on the level of Lifetime movie-of-the-week. Appalling. I almost felt bad about that last sentence. And then Akerman opened her mouth again. Morgan is also giving her a run for her money. Jesus. Effects are good, of course. The alligator crawling through the side of a building like it was sponge cake was great. And George is funny. So one extra star. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3524 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3524 Sun, 08 Apr 2018 22:39:11 +0200 -- "8/10" 2. "Chris Rock: Tamborine (2018)" <#Chris> -- "7/10" 3. "The Mangler (1995)" <#Mangler> -- "6/10" 4. "Hot Rod (2007)" <#Hot> -- "4/10" 5. "Queer Eye S01 (2018)" <#Queer> -- "9/10" 6. "A Bad Moms Christmas (2017)" <#BadMoms> -- "8/10" 7. "Marlon Wayons: Woke-ish (2018)" <#Marlon> -- "5/10" 8. "Fire Walk with Me (1992)" <#Fire> -- "7/10" 9. "Big Bang Theory S10 (2018)" <#BigBang10> -- "8/10" 10. "Mr. Robot S03 (2018)" <#MrRobot3> -- "10/10" 11. "Handsome: A Netflix Mystery Movie (2017)" <#Handsome> -- "7/10" 12. "Anna Karenina (2012)" <#Anna> -- "7/10" 13. "Blue is the Warmest Color (2013)" <#Blue> -- "8/10" 14. "The Corner (2000)" <#Corner> -- "9/10" 15. "Jessica Jones S02 (2018)" <#Jessica> -- "8/10" 16. "The IT Crowd (2006)" <#ITCrowd> -- "6/10" 17. "Annihilation (2018)" <#Annihilation> -- "8/10" 18. "Ghostbusters (2016)" <#Ghostbusters> -- "6/10" 19. "Foo Fighters: Back and Forth (2011)" <#Foo> -- "8/10" 20. "Get Out (2017)" <#GetOut> -- "10/10" 21. "Hail Caesar! (2016)" <#Hail> -- "7/10" 22. "Mad Men S01 (2007)" <#Mad> -- "8/10" These are my notes to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. I've recently transferred my reviews to IMDb and made "the list" of almost 1200 ratings publicly available. I've included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other -- I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. Madeo (2009) -- "8/10" This movie starts out with Madeo dancing in a field, fading to her working in her shop, watching her mentally retarded son Yoon Do-joon playing with a dog near the street. The son is about 18 years old and is with a friend. They are nearly hit by a Mercedes that accelerated into Do-joon -- and they grab a cab to follow it to the local golf course. They find the car, break off a mirror, then break into the golf course and hunt down the owners. They inexpertly do battle with the older men and the next scene shows them all in the police station, resolving the dispute. The broken car mirror is pinned on Do-joon whereas Jin-tae gets off scot-free. Do-joon is simple, so he believes the story himself. His mother must come up with the money to pay for the damage. Do-joon spends the night drinking, waiting for Jin-tae to show up, but he never does. It's possible that Do-joon was just confused about Jin-tae having promised him he'd show up. On the way home from the bar -- and after having hit on the owner's daughter, who responded positively, since Do-joon is, despite his feebleness, quite good-looking -- Do-joon staggers home. On the way, he sees a pretty girl and follows her up a hill, scaring her. She throws a rock at him and we see him walk away. He gets home and crawls into bed with his mother. The next morning, we see mother at work and Do-joon being talked at by some people. They turn out to be police officers and arrest him for the murder of the girl he'd seen the night before. He signs the confession, but mother doesn't believe it. It looks for all the world like the police are railroading Do-joon just to close the case. Mother goes on a mission to clear her son's name. First, she tries to dig up evidence on Jin-tae, who she suspects -- and then knows -- did the crime. The evidence she produces is not even close to conclusive and the police laugh her out of the station. She is further convinced, though, and continues her search. It is here that we see that she is nearly at least as disturbed as her son, as incapable of seeing reality. She goes to a lot of work to find the dead girl's cell phone, which has a lot of incriminating photos of local men on it. Jin-tae helps her a lot here, seemingly not the bad guy he was at first. She uses these pictures to tickle Do-joon's memory and gets a lead on a local junk collector who he says he saw there. She heads to his home and offers to give him acupuncture to help him forget the "terrible sight" he claims to have seen. She knows a special spot on the thigh that affects memory. She thinks it is his desire to confess, but he in fact tells her the story of how her son killed the girl because she called him a retard. He was only doing what his mother always taught him to do -- fight when insulted. His mother kills the old man to prevent him ever telling his story. She burns down his house. Soon after, she is visited by the police because they've found the real killer, a former boyfriend of the murdered girl. She insists on visiting the young man in prison -- she knows he didn't do it. He turns out to be even more mentally handicapped than her own son. She nearly breaks down, but says nothing. Do-joon comes home. He discusses the girl with his mother, seemingly more devious than his condition would allow. The mother swallows her horror. Next we see her preparing for a bus trip for mothers of grateful children. Do-joon buys her a big bag of food and supplies, then slips her the acupuncture kit that he found in the ashes of the junk-collector's house. Does he know? Does he understand? She is shattered all over again. Both she and her son are murderers. She boards the bus and we see the other women dancing in the aisle on the bus ride while mother broods out the window. She takes out her acupuncture kit and pricks her leg, smiles, stands up and melds into the crowd on the bus, dancing. Chris Rock: Tamborine (2018) -- "7/10" This was largely a confessional show: Rock confesses to having cheated on his wife, to having been a bad husband and father and to being addicted to porn. His style is unchanged and he's still funny when he nails a joke. I thought a bunch of his material was filler, though -- crowd-pleasing stuff rather than harder-hitting like his last two specials. The Mangler (1995) -- "6/10" This is the story of a town run by a crooked old man, Bill Gartley. He owns the giant laundromat where the mangler -- a laundry-folding machine -- resides. It turns out that the rich rulers of the small town consolidate and hold their power by offering the occasional sacrifice to the demon that lives in the machine -- a virginal sacrifice. The movie probably established a few horror-movie tropes, has some pretty solid directing and a couple of good actors (e.g. Robert Englund as factory owner Gartley and Ted Levine as John Hunton, the cop on his trail). The effects are very solid, telling the story well, with the machine chasing them down the stairs to hell being a pretty terrifying scene. Hot Rod (2007) -- "4/10" This is a movie about a wanna-be, terrible, terrible stuntman, played by Andy Samberg. Samberg is charming, but not as charming as he would become in the next decade's worth of films. The script was very, very thin with a ton of filler material that would normally find its way to DVD extras and deleted scenes. Instead, they were included to pad out the film to almost 90 minutes. I like the cast -- Will Arnett, Ilsa Fischer, Danny McBride (who's never been as good as he was in Tropic Thunder) and Bill Hader -- but they had nothing to work with and just phoned it in like another SNL skit. Ian McShane was also wasted as Rod's step-father, with whom he has a complicated, violent relationship. Queer Eye S01 (2018) -- "9/10" This too-short season features a brand-new five-man crew from Atlanta. The premise is the same as the original show (Queer Eye for the Straight Guy): they bring their not-inconsiderable style skills to bear for men who have absolutely no sense of style. These men generally don't know how to eat, drink, shave, comb, or dress themselves. Their apartments are a disaster area that often borders on a health hazard. They sometimes have women in their lives (one has a man) and sometimes they're single. These men are nominated by friends and the crew takes on the most hopeless (and diverse) cases: a gay guy, a poor, older man, a man working two jobs with six kids, a reasonably affluent software developer, a die-hard football fan/cop, etc. Each show has a formula: Tan helps them with haberdashery, Antoni helps them eat right, Bobby remodels their home, Jonathan helps out with hair and beard and Karamo takes care of personality-tuning. It's a nice show because they're nice guys and they really seem to help. Their advice is good, not harmful and there isn't the meanness normally present in reality TV. A Bad Moms Christmas (2017) -- "8/10" The cast from the first movie returns with their mothers in tow. They're all pretty good, the writing is sharp and its overall pretty entertaining. The focus on how hard it is to be a mom is the weakest part -- the voiceover is painful. But when they start showing instead of telling, it's very good. Christine Baranski as Mila Kunis's mom is great, as are Susan Sarandon as Katherine Hahn's mom and Cheryl Hines as Kristin Bell's. We also get to warmly welcome Wanda Sykes back in her role as a therapist. Marlon Wayons: Woke-ish (2018) -- "5/10" It's nice to see Marlon still getting work, but a lot of his standup is just him making stupid sex jokes on stage. He tends back to skit comedy, even when alone, some of which hit and most of which didn't (at least for me). The gay Martin Luther King was a good bit, but went on way too long. Fire Walk with Me (1992) -- "7/10" This movie fills in a lot of the gaps in the first two seasons. It brings to screen the whole story leading up to Laura Palmer's death. Agent Cooper hardly shows up in it at all. This is more-or-less a prequel to the two seasons. Frost's latest book covers a lot of the same territory, but it was great to see it acted out. It was quite a bit darker and more graphic than the TV series. Highly recommended for fans -- probably confusing for non-fans. Big Bang Theory S10 (2018) -- "8/10" The crew is still doing the same thing, but seem to have found their mojo again. I feel that this season was better than the sudden downturn from seasons 8 and 9. The dynamics between the couples are more natural and self-deprecatingly funny. Howard and Bernadette have a child -- with Raj and Stuart living with them as well. Sheldon moves in with Amy. Leonard and Penny are cute together. It works and was pretty entertaining. Not bad for a season 10. Mr. Robot S03 (2018) -- "10/10" The plot thickens considerably, with the effects of the initial hack growing to global proportions. The backdrop of season three is a world plummeting into abject misery, with everyone fighting over E-Coin, the only currency left with any value. Elliot makes his peace with Mr. Robot -- even teams up with him -- and learns more about Tyrell's role in the whole pyramid of power. The plot sloshes back over season two to fill in many blanks with flashbacks and half-remembered memories. Elliot wants to undo the hack and thinks he knows how to do it. Mr. Robot resists him, at first. Darlene gets into trouble with the Dark Army. Elliot keeps losing time to Mr. Robot. Angela gains power but is a pawn in the schemes of Price and Zhang. Wonderfully filmed, lovinglyw written, nuanced acting. Highly recommended. Handsome: A Netflix Mystery Movie (2017) -- "7/10" Jeff Garlin wrote, directed and starred in this movie about detective Gene Handsome, a clever, funny and lonely detective saddled with a humdinger of a case. The script is interesting and a bit loony, but has some great lines. Natasha Lyonne is Handsome's partner Fleur Scozzari, a foul-mouthed and slutty cop with no compunction about sleeping with notoriously well-equipped suspects. A fun little movie. Anna Karenina (2012) -- "7/10" Kiera Knightley portrayed the eponymous lead quite well. As in the book, Karenina is trapped in a world in which women have nearly no rights -- even those in the upper class. Her rebellion takes the form of an affair with Vronsky. It's an interesting balancing act: with a tight lens, Karenina is rebelling against the patriarchy, a good and true warrior for what is right. With another, she is sleeping with the man whom she feels like sleeping with, because her husband is boring. Is she striking a blow for women? Hardly. She is an aristocrat, swimming on the surface of a sea of misery, populated by people who have none of her luxuries. Her concern isn't to be able to stay with Vronsky, or the scorn that she receives from everyone else in the upper class -- it's clearly whether she can maintain her lifestyle. That she would no longer be a member of the upper class was never a question. No-one even considered whether she'd have to give that up. Still, her brother is an example of an inveterate gambler, chronically in debt and in his cups, who's also had an affair -- but he is hardly remonstrated for it. His wife accepts it and moves on. Blue is the Warmest Color (2013) -- "8/10" This movie is about Adéle, a young (15) French girl still in high school at the beginning of the movie. She's naturally pretty but not especially outgoing and struggling with all of the same things that all teenagers struggle with. We join her in school, where it seems that French high-schoolers learn much different material than I remember from my own days in school. They really read their literature and they really get into the philosophy of it. That's part of the reason why this film is 3 hours long. The other is the languorous storytelling and lovely, lingering scenes. The camera lingers on Adéle a lot. The director seems a voyeur -- reminiscent of Kubrick with Lolita. Adéle spies Emma while crossing the street one day. She thinks nothing of it, but Emma stays fixed in her mind. Adéle has a failed quickie with a male friend and begins to realize that she may be more interested in women. There are large parts of the school that are OK with it. Her small circle of friends is not OK with it. They are nearly shockingly small-minded and bully her mercilessly, loudly and rudely. Adéle seeks out Emma at a gay bar and they begin to see more of each other. Their passion is well-documented, tastefully if a bit lengthily. They visit each other's parents' homes -- Emma's parents are more accepting while Adéle's parents are far more traditional and cannot be trusted with their secret. The film follows their relationship over years, with Adéle graduating and becoming a nursery-school teacher and Emma's painting career still in the starting blocks. They throw a party at their shared home, with only Emma's friends there -- it's not clear that Adéle has any friends other than Emma. It's clear that this is just fine with Emma. Emma is a crueler person, more judgmental , insecure and frustrated. Her career doesn't go anywhere because she can't adapt, she can't distinguish criticism from critique. She assumes the stronger role, with Adéle so much younger. She thinks she's being encouraging when she tells Adéle to write more, but she's really just trying to impose her own goals on her. Emma is more controlling and Adéle chafes, eventually cheating on her with a work colleague (a man). We find this out in a shouting match in which Emma analytically interrogates a nearly guileless Adéle, who has been cheating but is too naïve to even lie gracefully about it. She cries and is thrown out on her ass. Emma can't brook disobedience and Adéle is still a young fool who never had a real youth. It's a pretty great movie about a love affair, edited nearly perfectly, even at 3 hours. It's just long enough to make you feel you know the characters and the gaps are long enough to provide real drive in the story. The only exception is the 30-minute coda: it felt a bit long. Emma and Adéle met for a drink, where Adéle tries to get Emma back, but she doesn't love her anymore. She still wants her, but she doesn't love her. Next, we see Adéle at Emma's gallery opening -- where there is awkwardness and discomfort galore. The movie ends on Adéle leaving the gallery, frustrated but resigned, with a young man chasing her, to no avail. The Corner (2000) -- "9/10" This is a six-part HBO mini-series written by David Simon, Ed Burns and David Mills. It is based on the book of the same name and tells the story of "the corners" of Baltimore, where the drug dealers reign supreme and the police have only an ephemeral presence. The characters are mostly pushers and users, focused much more closely on the small fish than on the big fish, as The Wire would do a few years later. Several actors and actresses were recognizable from that show: Clarke Peters, Khandi Alexander and so on. The presentation is relentless and there are only very small windows of hope. Some escape from addiction and the life of the street where others succumb. Highly recommended. Jessica Jones S02 (2018) -- "8/10" This season leaves Kilgrave behind for the most part, although he continues to haunt Jessica's dreams from time to time, when she worries that she's becoming a killer just like he was -- before she killed him. Season two follows Jessica as she learns more about her past and about what really happened to her family. Trish is back and develops a bit further, but into a manic addictive spiral. Malcolm is also interesting and Jessicas makes him an associate at Alias Investigations. Jeri Hogarth continues to seek a way out of her disease -- trying to find a cure from the same people that gave Jessica her powers. Trish goes down this path as well, trying to become Jessica. There's a decent amount of closure at the end of this season as well as plenty of avenues left open for exploration in season three (which is almost certainly on its way). The IT Crowd (2006) -- "6/10" This is a British sitcom from the early noughts that tells the story of an IT department at a giant company. Helming the company is the dynamic and pretty comical Christopher Morris as Denholm Reynholm. The two IT guys are Chris O'Dowd as Roy and Richard Ayoade as Maurice. In the first episode, Katherine Parkinson as Jen is installed as their manager by Denholm. The stories focus mainly on the awkwardness of IT professionals. There's a laugh track. Season two is better than season one. Annihilation (2018) -- "8/10" This is a lovely and interesting and intriguing science-fiction movie about an inscrutable alien force that lands on Earth, occupying a lighthouse and emanating an ever-advancing shimmer. Years of observation have yielded only casualties and very little information. The shimmer doesn't advance very quickly but it's inexorable. It transforms everything it touches, refracting it not just visually but intrinsically, genetically. The mood is somewhat like Stalker but more prosaic, more explanatory, more wordy. The cast is almost exclusively female, but it doesn't parade it about. it just works. Natalie Portman is excellent, as are the others. Oscar Isaac, as one of the few male actors, is enigmatic and delivers a solid performance. There are long stretches of unexplained weirdness, where the viewer is allowed to come to his own conclusions. The ending is somewhat ambiguous, although there are more than enough clues. Lena (Portman) makes it to the lighthouse, but does she return? Where did that tattoo come from? From one of her compatriots? How? I think this was an all-around excellent science-fiction movie and it says a lot about Hollywood that it was distributed via Netflix in the rest of the world while it was strangled in the crib in the States. Ghostbusters (2016) -- "6/10" This was a decent remake, but nothing really to write home about. The leads -- Kristen Wiig, Melissa McCarthy, Leslie Jones and Kate McKinnon -- turned in decent and occasionally funny performances. There was a bit too much reference to the original movie in the second half. I like the first half much better, during which characters were established with almost no reference to the original films. Chris Hemsworth is decent as the bimbo secretary, but the charm wears off after a bit. The second half devolved into a standard, relatively shlocky, and charmless action movie where the leads are women doing stupid shit instead of men. Foo Fighters: Back and Forth (2011) -- "8/10" This is a documentary about how the Foo Fighters formed over the years and how they got to be the six-man band that they are now. They seem like a pretty great bunch of guys and they make some really killer music. A must-watch for fans. Get Out (2017) -- "10/10" This is a riveting, fantastic and absolutely fat-free movie about a young man who goes upstate to meet his girlfriend's parents. She tells him that they are left-wing bleeding hearts and that everything will be fine. Once they get there, things are most definitely not fine. He thinks, though, that things aren't in the same way that things usually aren't fine when there's a black guy nearly alone among a bunch of rich, white people. I won't spoil any more, but the casting is great, as is the directing and pacing. I loved it. Highly recommended. Hail Caesar! (2016) -- "7/10" This is probably the weakest Cohn brothers' movie I've seen. I watched it twice and got a bit more out of it the second time, but it was more style than substance. The story is about a bunch of communists who kidnap a famous movie star (George Clooney) in order to get a giant ransom out of the studio -- compensation for all of the writing the communists have done over the years, for which they were never properly credited or compensated. Josh Brolin is the head of the studio, trying to get to the bottom of the disappearance of his major star. The rest of the cast (Ralph Fiennes, Scarlett Johannson, Tilda Swinton, Channing Tatum, Frances McDormand, Jonah Hill) is spectacular and they do a great job, so I gave it an extra point. As expected, there is some good dialogue but it's a bit thin. I had to intuit a lot about the plot in order to see any deeper meaning -- I think the movie was about the power of anti-Communism and homophobia in old-time Hollywood (and possibly still today). Mad Men S01 (2007) -- "8/10" This is a period TV show about the 1960s advertising world in New York City at a small agency called Sterling Cooper. Don Draper (Jon Hamm) is the king of the agency, their #1 ad-man and draw for customers. The show follows many threads simultaneously and is primarily focused on the treatment of women in the 1960s, how much people smoked, how much they drank, how callous they all were to each other. The alcoholism, smoking and misogyny are, at times, breath-taking. There is almost not a single redeeming character in this show, but it's fascinating. It's a bit overdone at times (I think), but overall very entertaining and worth watching. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3502 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3502 Sun, 18 Feb 2018 17:04:39 +0100 of almost 1200 ratings publicly available. I've included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other -- I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. Oh, Hello On Broadway (2017) -- "8/10" Nick Kroll and John Mulaney star as Gil Faizon and George St. Geegland, respectively, two old Jewish guys from the upper-west side in New York City. They complain, they reminisce, they go through an eviction as their rent-controlled apartment is suddenly no longer rent-controlled. They achieve success with a screenplay and get back into their apartment. They drop names, they make inside jokes about New York, they have cameos by Steve Martin and Matthew Broderick. Overall, I quite enjoyed it. Those two guys are pretty talented and inventive. At least some of the dialogue seemed improvised, but that could just be how good they are. It was very satisfyingly New York-y, so it might not be nearly as enjoyable if you don't get inside jokes about New York that span about five decades. Todd Barry: Spicy Honey (2017) -- "9/10" I'd never heard of him before, but he made me laugh out loud several times. His comedy is quiet and mostly clean but still relatively edgy and interesting. Intelligent and cynical. I really liked him. Tom Segura: Disgraceful (2017) -- "8/10" Some of his material is a little forced but he's a very funny guy. His comedy was a bit more standard than Barry's (above) but still very well-delivered and fun. Stranger Things S02 (2017) -- "8/10" The second season brings the whole gang back together. It also introduces a couple of new characters: in particular, Max Mayfield and her step-brother Billy Hargrove. The focus is, once again, on Will and his strange connection to the upside-down. We find out a bit more about Elle's background as well as watch her powers grow. We find out more about how the upside-down functions and see the gang thwart an attack by the smoke monster, the seeming leader of the upside-down. Steve Harrington and Sheriff Hooper are the best characters. I liked Bob (Sean Astin) too, while he lasted. Everyone else spends way too much time mooning about and looking like they're about to cry. Still a fun 9 episodes, but not as good as the first season. American Gods S01 (2017) -- "8/10" This is a TV series that follows the plot of the book of the same name. The plot follows the book quite closely. Laura's role is considerably expanded, though I don't know how to feel about that. She's not a nice person, but I feel the series pulling me to empathize with her. She's thin as a rail and I feel the series expecting me to find her hot. She's manipulative and it's nice to see Shadow at least partially resist that pull. In the book, she was much more of a Deus Ex Machine (if you'll excuse the phrase); in the series, she's very prominent. She's well-played as a relatively dull -- though she thinks she's brilliant -- and blithely entitled woman who sees the world only in relation to herself. Nothing is her fault. Things happen to her. Her phrasing is perfect. Instead of remorse, she claims no agency over the things she's done -- which is why she so quickly expects Shadow to get past her crimes against him. She doesn't feel she's at fault, so sees no reason why he would blame her and perhaps love her less -- or not at all. Also, she's dead, which she so easily overlooks and her ego allows her to be surprised that Shadow won't do so -- at least not so easily. At the end of the first season, the focus is split nearly evenly on Laura and Shadow Moon. Laura is not an appealing or interesting character, really. She's kind of one-dimensional. We find out that she died because Mad Sweeney killed her on Wednesday's orders. This is a deviation from the book, but a decent one. It works within the context, within the world of the book. The balance to having to see so much of Emily Browning's simpering, anorexic acting is that we also get to see a lot more of Pablo Schreiber's Mad Sweeney. The story is stretched more than the book, but it's interesting so far. There is a lushness to the lingering looks at the various Gods and their origin stories. The direction and cinematography are very nice, in general. Katt Williams (2018) -- "8/10" He knows his audience and the man does research. He knows Jacksonville like the back of his hand, knows landmarks, knows fast-food menus in detail. He's very funny, he's not nearly as dirty as I expected him to be. He covers police violence, Trump, fast food, Arby's, Jacksonville, robot sex, Obama (becoming more white every day), relationship advice (do more fuckin'), Viagra (it makes your dick bigger than you've ever seen; you won't even want to touch it because you think it belongs to someone else). His set is a mockup of the oval office. Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency S02 (2017) -- "8/10" Dirk and Todd (Samuel Barnett and Elijah Wood, respectively) are back, with Amanda (Todd's sister, Hannah Marks), the excellent Fiona Dourif as Bart, the supernaturally and preternaturally untouchable assassin, Farah Black (also excellent Jade Eshete) and Ken (Mpho Koaho), who is no longer paired with Bart, but is now clawing his way up the rungs of Blackwing. The whole cast is quite good and includes a slew of new characters, two excellent sheriffs of a small town where the latest oddness occurs, as well as Amanda's crew from season one, the baddies from Blackwing and tons of new characters from the fantasy land of Wendimoor, which seems to have been dreamed into existence by a small, gifted boy. The crew tries to solve the 50-year-old mystery of the boy's parents' deaths as well as to stop the Mage of Wendimoor from ruining both his world and our own. Susie Borton is in the mix trying to make herself queen of one world or another with her new-found powers and magic wand. An all-around entertaining and escapist romp with a bit of mind-bending holisticity and philosophy thrown in. Black Mirror S04 (2017) -- "8/10" The USS Callister is a ship in a simulation in a video game, but it's not the online version of the game -- it's the private, customized version written by the CTO of the company that runs the real game. He lives out his fantasies in this version, with perfect simulacra of his co-workers, generated from DNA samples that he steals from around the office. The crew rebels and hatches a plan to escape into death, beyond the reach of their captain. The second episode is "Arkangel". it is about an implant that transmits everything that a person sees and hears. A woman implants one into her young daughter as part of a pilot program. It comes with parental controls so that disturbing (cortisone-triggering) content is automatically filtered. This causes the young girl to act in a disturbed manner and the mother turns off the filter -- and stops watching her daughter, as well. During her teenage years, she starts watching again, catching her daughter having sex and doing drugs. The daughter finds out, confronts her, beats her with the tracking pad and runs away from home. The third is called "Crocodile" and imagines what society is like once a memory-retrieval device has been invented. Instead of the police using it, this episode shows how insurance companies would use it to settle disputes. It's mentioned that the law requires people to comply with having their memories read. But what if the memory they read involves more than the case at hand? What if something very bad was done? Well, then, the person whose memory is being read may want to eliminate the insurance agent. The fourth "Hang the DJ" was probably the best of the season. It was about a dating service run through dictatorial and inscrutable, single-purpose, hand-held devices. The dating game has been subjected wholly to algorithms. A couple is given 16 hours to be together, but both feel a spark. They are connected with others, sometimes for short flings, sometimes for years. They both suffer through, realizing that they yearn for each other. They meet occasionally and cannot resist. Finally, the algorithm pairs them again -- and this time they agree not to check the expiration date. He breaks down and does, only to find that it punished him by cutting a planned 5-year relationship to 12 hours. Incensed, they rebel -- and discover what they really are, that the algorithm is even more meta than expected. "Metalhead" is an almost dialogue-less vision of a future world where scavengers scrabble to survive and possessions are guarded by vicious, beweaponed and autonomous "dogs". The episode deals with one woman's fight with a particularly persistent one, eventually winning a Pyrrhic victory. "Black Museum" was also quite good, It's about a museum run by a neurological researcher/marketing man who put together a set of displays based on his work: implanting personalities into other people's heads, recording a person's entire self and then torturing it. The twist ending is worth it. Rotten (2017) -- "8/10" There are six parts to this documentary: Honey, Peanuts/Allergies, Garlic, Chickens, Milk Money. Each is quite well-made, evenly distributing coverage for both sides of an issue, digging into some detail but not too much. The episodes definitely give enough time to each topic -- sometimes too much time. Most of the focus is on the over-industrialization of agriculture, on the lack of anti-trust regulation, lack of environmental regulation, lack of labor regulation -- all that leads to suffering on all sides, from labor to consumer. Dave Chappelle: Equanimity (2017) -- "10/10" Dave Chappelle proves once again why he's the best. His long show ebbs and flows and delights. It's not boring, he telegraphs lines that he still lands, he addresses the madness of American society. He tackles tough topics and simultaneously addresses them seriously and makes them hilarious. He lands his telegraphed line one more time at the very end, capping a fantastic set. Recommended. Todd Glass: Act Happy (2018) -- "8/10" Todd's not afraid to try something different. Some of his jokes fell a bit flat, but his delivery is good and unique. He had a backup band that he integrated into his act. The older he gets, the more he looks and sounds like Henry Rollins. His final 15 is really good: a manically delivered litany of jokes he won't do and pronouncements/jokes about his generation and the next, about being optimistic that the next generation is going to figure things out and get rolling without our help, despite all appearances. Recommended. Fate of the Furious (2017) -- "7/10" This 8th installment in the series had a solid final third and most of the rest of it was more than bearable. It focuses more on driving again and a bit less on hand-to-hand combat. The prison-escape scene with the Rock and Statham was a lot of fun. Both of those guys bring a lot to the party, with Vin Diesel being OK but a bit weak in comparison. The new enemy is Cypher, played by Charlize Theron. She gets leverage on Dom (wife and heretofore-unknown baby) to make him work for her -- and against his team. That's the whole second act. The third act involves him rebelling and springing a trap on her that ends up with everything being OK again. Jesus Christ, could they have given Charlize Theron more lines? She's chewing the scenery so hard that she's making Vin Diesel look like an actor with a light touch. Halloween (1978) -- "6/10" The very first film in what would become a long-running series was a simple story: a young boy kills his sister on Halloween. He is committed for life to an insane asylum. He escapes on a rainy night, returning to his neighborhood and home on Halloween. He takes victim after victim in what would become classic horror-movie tropes (lots of teen sex and incautious treatment of strangers). But John Carpenter was the first. Meyers is eventually defeated but escapes with a seemingly superhuman ability to survive stab wounds as well as falling out of a second-story window. It's a bit dated, so wasn't as interesting as the first viewing, so many years ago. Saw it in German. I Saw the Devil (2010) -- "8/10" It was a little overly gory in some places, but was very good. It's about an amoral and relentless serial killer who becomes the hunted when he kills a police-officer's wife. The police officer (Agent: Joon-hyeok Lee) has the list of suspects narrowed down to four. He beats two of the others down -- extracting fake confessions from them -- until he hits paydirt with the third one, Kyung-chul (Min-sik Choi), an absolutely filthy monster who kidnaps, tortures and kills women for sport and food. The officer catches him, breaks his hand and lets him go (but not before placing a GPS tracker in his gut). He catches him again, slices his Achilles tendon on one leg and lets him go again. He playing with this prey. He catches him again, this time putting him in a hospital and letting him go again. He's toying with his prey. This time Kyung-chul knows that he's being tracked and pukes up the GPS device. He leaves a trail of destruction on his way to Agent's father-in-law's, where he concusses him into brain damage and within an inch of his life. He also kills Agent's sister-in-law. Agent now realizes he's lost to this monster: he's lost his wife (and also an unborn child, as Kyung-chul gleefully tells him). But, as a result of his desire for Hammurabic revenge, he also loses his remaining family -- and sees that he himself has become a monster. People are dead because of him and he cannot figure out how to make Kyung-chul suffer enough. He has him trapped, finally, again, for the last time. He sets up a guillotine where Kyung-chul kills himself in his own ancestral home. The revenge is bittersweet -- and doesn't come close to redeeming the Agent, who finally breaks down in tears, his first show of emotion in the whole film. The aesthetic is one of my favorites: Korean police drama with some well-choreographed action scenes and very strong characters. Their dialogue is sparse: there is no grandstanding by either the Agent or Kyung-chul. Recommended. Dirty Money (2018) -- "8/10" This is a Netflix series about several aspects of how our world cheats and steals and sacrifices everything in the temple of Mammon. The first segment tells the story of how Volkswagen used defeat devices to cheat on emissions tests for their TDI clean-diesel engines. Real-life road tests had numbers 40-80x higher than laboratory measurements. And it wasn't just Volkswagen: it was also Mercedes and BMW that were cheating. Other episodes are about payday loans, about HSBC's having helped Mexican drug cartels, about Valeant Pharamceutical's having ripped off both its customers and its investors, about a maple-syrup cartel in Canada (where else?) and, finally, about Trump, the confidence man. Bright (2017) -- "7/10" Will Smith brings his inimitable charm to the role of a human police officer (Daryl Ward) in a Los Angeles inhabited by fabulous creatures: mostly orcs and elves, but also some other creatures here and there. Smith's partner is Nic Jacoby, an orc, who has to work twice as hard to overcome prejudices against orcs. In this world, the orcs were on the wrong side of a war 2000 years ago. The elves were on the right side and are extraordinarily wealthy and powerful. The (very-reluctant) partners stumble upon a scene of slaughter where a young elf (Tikka) steals a wand from a very powerful, very evil elf queen Leilah (Noomi Rapace). Very few people can handle the nearly all-powerful wands and are called "Brights". Nick and Daryl rescue Tikka and protect her until the final confrontation with Leilah -- after run-ins with orc gangs and human and cop gangs. It was OK, but a bit of a hodge-podge without much background. The Godfather (1972) -- "9/10" The classic mafia movie tells the story of power passing from father to son in a powerful NY crime family, the Corleones. Vito Corleone has an iron grip that is slowly slipping as he gets older. Others think that can do things better, that drugs is the way to go. Vito wants to stick to gambling and prostitutes and safer, more-honest areas. Disagreements flare, his sons -- Santino (Sonny) and Fredo -- each screw up in their own way and his youngest, Michael, must step up to take over the family. There are so many well-known scenes: Michael's getting made with a hit on a high-profile drug dealer and a crooked cop, Sonny's denouement on the causeway, Corleone's shadowy meetings and demise in his tomato garden. Micheal flees to Italy, to his hometown of Corleone until the heat dies down from his killings. He returns and ruthlessly asserts himself, offing all of the other crime-family heads. An all-around great movie. The Handmaiden (2016) -- "9/10" A beautifully made movie, in two parts. It tells the tale of a young girl (Sook-Hee) in a guild of sorts, a guild of thieves and swindlers run by a matriarch and including a Korean man who plays a Japanese Count Fujiwara. They scheme together to take the fortune of a young, innocent heiress (Hideko) who lives with her uncle (Kouzuki), a bibliophile, who wants to marry her himself to get her fortune. They are all Koreans speaking Japanese while in public, in order to appear more noble. Sook-Hee and Hideko grow closer, with Sook-Hee "teaching" Hideko how to love the Count, who wants to marry her. The plan is for the Count to commit her to an asylum after the wedding, making off with her fortune and paying Sook-Hee handsomely for her trouble. At the end of part I -- after about an hour -- Hideko shows her true colors and Sook-Hee is committed in her stead, while Hideko leaves the asylum with Fujiwara. In Part II, we see how this scheme came about, how Hideko is not nearly as naive as we thought in Part I. The reading to which she alludes is to an audience: she reads to paying customers of the count, reading from the count's voluminous pornography collection. She even participates with them after, mostly in light-to-medium BDSM as well as some light bondage on-stage, to demonstrate scenes from the books she reads. None of this is voluntary. Hideko and Fujiwara plan early to switch Sook-Hee for Hideko at the asylum, scheming to put all of the chess pieces into place. Fujiwara, however, is unaware (or oblivious) to Hideko and Sook-Hee's increasing closeness. Hideko takes control after the wedding, with Fujiwara snared by his greed for her fortune. Also, he suspects nothing since Hideko committed Sook-Hee, feinting away from any possible alliance. Sook-Hee escapes during a staged fire and joins Hideko in freedom. Hideko traps Fujiwara with a drugged drink, then sends him to Kouzuki as a "gift". Kouzuki tortures him in his "basement", where he chops off fingers and drills holes in his hands. There is also a tank with an octopus, which explains the sloshing noises we heard during the intimated torture of another young woman (Hideko's mentor) -- a torture or sex play for which Kouzuki's library contains many, many examples. Fujiwara asks for a cigarette, and then another. Kouzuki doesn't suspect that they are laced with liquid mercury. They succumb to the poison, with Fujiwara seeing in his mind's eye how he was taken by the two women. The final scene is more soft-core, with the ladies acting out a fantasy from one of the books that Hideko was forced to read -- celebrating their freedom in wealth. An all-around beautiful movie, wonderfully acted and shot. Hideko's precise diction, while inscrutable for me, was wonderful (Japanese, I believe). It's a long film (2:20) with a good deal of prurient, but appropriate content, but well-worth it. Watched it in Korean and Japanese with impeccable English subtitles. Kavin Jay (2018) -- 6/10 Jay is a Malaysian comic of Indian descent. He makes a lot of jokes about his own weight, the differences between nationalities and then tells everyone to calm down -- even though the crowd wasn't particularly wild. He did his show in Singapore. It was interesting seeing a comedian from a completely different part of the world, but it was only OK. The Godfather II (1974) -- "9/10" The sequel picks up where the first one left off, but also takes a parallel track that shows where Vito Corleone came from. We see his escape from his hometown of Corleone (as Vito Andolini) to Ellis Island, where he is renamed. Years later, he is played by Robert DeNiro and we see how annoyed he is by Fanucci's (the Black Hand) handling of his fellow countrymen in the old neighborhood in NY. In modern times (1958), Michael is enjoying great success in Nevada, but encounters resistance at "home" in New York. As well, he is discriminated against by those he bribes (as a greasy Italian). He teams up with his father's most-trusted and oldest business partner in Miami, Hyman Roth. Michael and Hyman invest in Havana, Cuba -- in 1958. On December 31st. So Michael escapes from that potentially disastrous investment. In Vito Corleone's thread, he kills Fannuci in order to stop paying him. It is the beginning of his empire. We next see him visiting Corleone in Italy, where he exacts revenge on Don Ciccio, who'd killed his father, mother and brother many years ago. In the "present" day, Michael is setting up the chess pieces, much as he did at the end of the first movie. Tommy Hagen convinces a potential rat and star witness against Michael to commit suicide. Roth, who turns out to be double-crossing Michael, is shot while in custody. Fredo meets his sad end on a lake, fishing. He was a sad sack, but too stupid to let live, despite his budding friendship with Michael's only remaining son, Antonio. He's sent his wife Kay away for having aborted his second son. He kept the other two kids. Kay aborted because she wanted nothing more to do with the corrupt Corleone empire. At the end, Michael sits by the lake at his lake house, alone. Better than the first one, I think, by a little bit. Watching in English and half of it in Italian with English subtitles. Highly recommended. Valley Uprising (2014) -- "7/10" This is a documentary about the climbing culture in Yosemite, from the earliest days in the 50s to the modern era. In the earliest days, climbers had the run of the park and spent weeks climbing the walls. Even at the time, they were considered hooligans who disturbed the other campers there. A couple of the best of them eventually started taking on the big walls (El Capitan, Half Dome). The first ascent took a year and a half of climbing up and down and up and down and up and down. But it worked. There was a conflict between the styles -- one was technical with a respect for the mountain whereas the other was just bent on getting up there no matter what, hammering in fixed ropes everywhere. They both contributed to the history and legend of the climbing culture. Later, there were others who cut the time to 2 weeks, then 1 week, then 1 day, then 3 hours, then 2.5 hours. Then another generation later and they're now free-climbing and setting even more speed records -- all without ropes. The rules in Yosemite are even stricter now, with only a week of camping per person per year. Alex Hannold is the undisputed master of the fearless free climbers and he just camps outside of the park and drives in every day. This is where the documentary leaves us -- with individuals whose climbing skills and prowess are light-years beyond those of their forebears of just 50 years ago. Godfather III (1990) -- "8/10" A relatively worthy finale to the trilogy, although it has a few very-rough patches. The final hour follows up a lot of setup, scheming and intrigue to take us into a denouement similar to the first two films: Michael's well-laid plans come to fruition once again, thwarted only by a tragic victim (his dumb-ass daugher, played vapidly by Sophia Coppola). Much of the film takes place in Italy, back in Sicily. MIchael's son is out of the family business and is an opera singer, playing in Sicily for his professional debut on the Continent. Naturally, this draws attention and there is an attack on Michael Corleone's life. Corleone, meanwhile, has been moving into the legitimate world more and more and has organized a takeover of Immobiliare, with the help of a Catholic church beholden to him at the very highest levels of power. He is frustrated that "they keep pulling me back in" to the old business but also frustrated that the higher he goes in the supposedly legitimate world, the dirtier things get -- even dirtier than anything he's experienced in the world of gambling and girls in New York and Las Vegas. Corleone survives, but his daughter does not -- and we leave the family on the steps of the opera house where the final generation has just debuted to success, only to end in tragedy. The Man from Nowhere (2010) -- "8/10" Like I Saw the Devil, this is the story of a man with a violent past, a man who's been trained in all arts of war, but who is in a job that has left that behind for the most part. In I Saw the Devil, the man was a regular police office who was taken off the leash when his wife was killed. In this case, our hero is Cha Tae-sik, a pawn-shop owner who runs his shop out of an apartment building. Young Jeong So-mi is a young girl who takes a liking to him, visiting when she escapes her apartment and her mother, who she loves very much but who is addicted to heroin and often has "company" over when she needs to make ends meet. She takes the opportunity to steal heroin at her job (a strip club, naturally) and gets on the wrong side of the wrong people. They kidnap both her and Jeong, which is enough for Cha Tae-sik to drop his pious persona and to go on the warpath. He cuts a swath through a local gang, eventually resigned to a suicide mission because he believes Jeong to be dead. He knows her mother is already dead. After he vanquishes the last man, he is left outside the van where he strongly suspects -- knows -- that Jeong lost her eyes (the enemy gang harvests organs) and probably her life. He puts the gun to his own head and...Jeong appears out a dark corner of the parking garage to ask him if he came to save her. He doesn't respond, but his entire being expresses the notion that he's pretty sure it is she who has saved him. The film ends in a freeze-frame on his teary face after he's hugged her for a good half a minute. He'd just bought Jeong school supplies before he goes to jail. That cements the idea that Korea's cinema makes violent movies, but the violence has to have a purpose. The film is not about the violence; the film is about Cha Tae-sik, his lost wife and child (another callback to I Saw the Devil) and his newfound love for life through an orphaned girl. Kickboxer: Vengeance (2016) -- "7/10" There were a bunch of cheesy parts in this movie, which is to be expected. But I really liked Jean Claude Van Damme in this (obviously), playing an older instructor Master Durand who still moves like an oiled snake. He is Mr. Miyagi to Alain Moussi's Kurt Sloane. The plot is pretty much the same as the original Bloodsport. In fact, there's a tribute during the ending credits showing Van Damme's Thai-club dancing in the original vs. Moussi's quite excellent mimic of same outside of his jail cell in the movie. I also thought Dave Bautista did a great job as Tong Po, breathing more life and character into the nemesis than Chong Li did thirty years ago. There's also Gina Carano completely underutilized as a crooked underground-fight operator and Sara Malakul Lane as the Thai police captain, equally capable of sounding 100% American and barking Thai commands to her underlings. There was also some excellent fight choreography, the best of it between Van Damme and Moussi during training. A Bittersweet Life (2005) -- "8/10" This movie stars Byung-hun Lee (also starred in I Saw the Devil) as Sun-woo, a hotelier working for a mobster Mr. Kang. Kang leaves town for a week, leaving him in charge of keeping tabs on his girlfriend Hee-soo, who he suspects of cheating on him. Sun-woo is charged with killing them both if he discovers it to be true. It is, of course, true, but he lets them go instead, telling them they are to never see each other again. In the meantime, another mobster is trying to embroil him in his business, this time at the behest of Sun-woo's sleazy and devil-may-care co-worker Mun-suk, who's ostensibly in charge of security at the hotel. Because Mun-suk isn't around, Sun-woo must take out a whole cadre of gang members who try to set up in his club. This angers not only Mun-suk but also the mob boss to whom he's been trying to ingratiate himself. When Mr. Kang learns that Sun-woo let Hee-soo go, he joins Mun-suk and his boss President Baek in the hunt for him. Inexplicably, Sun-woo is released to Mun-suk's men after having been captured by Mr. kan's men. This is first indication that something isn't quite right. One minute, we see a heavily trussed-up Sun-woo and his torturer preparing very ugly-looking knives and the next, we see him being dumped unceremoniously in a mud pit, at Mun-suk's feet. From there, he is buried alive, but escapes, only to be captured again -- and always told that he can end his suffering if he just "apologizes". He refuses and instead escapes with panache, leaving a trail of bodies behind him. His hand-to-hand fighting skills are quite strong. His gun skills are not. When he later acquires handguns, it is quite obvious that he is unused to using them. Although this movie felt like the same former-super-soldier-turned-mild-mannered-man-of-the-people, it turns out not to be. Sun-woo meets up with Russian arms dealers, with a rather hilarious scene between a Korean translator and the rather-odd Russian. It becomes quickly obvious that Sun-woo hasn't really killed people before. He is stabbed repeatedly by one of his nemeses, before he puts him down with a few ill-placed bullets. The multiple stab wounds don't seem to bother him as much as you'd think they would (but we'll find out why soon enough). He misses a lot, but he also has a lot of ammunition. He fights his way through to Mr. Kang's inner chamber in the hotel, where he confronts him. Mr. Kang is utterly convinced of his own safety, right up until Sun-woo shoots him in the heart. I'm convinced that Kang is Sun-woo's father, even though the plot doesn't say anything about it. It's just a feeling and it makes sense in light of the ending. This triggers an epic gun battle, with Sun-woo inexpertly spraying bullets everywhere, but still managing to take out almost all of his enemies, most of whom are also fighting each other and doing some of his work for him. He finishes off everyone, getting shot multiple times in the chest, but still, somehow, inexplicably, alive. When a final killer (the brother of the arms dealer who he also killed when buying weapons) arrives to mop things up, he is still sitting there, still breathing, and calls Hee-soo one last time, only to hear her say "hello". He smiles and fades out to visions of Hee-soo playing cello -- before the killer finishes him off. Fade to ... Sun-woo in his office, coming back to himself out of a daydream. He sees Hee-soo in the distance, yearning for her. He smiles and shadow-boxes himself (self-consciously) looking behind him) before the film fades out. It turns out the film was just his daydream about how he could rescue Hee-soo from his father's clutches and get his revenge on everyone who's ever wronged him. Honestly one of the most refreshing and best "it was all a dream" movies I've seen. Recommended. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3501 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3501 Sun, 21 Jan 2018 20:43:05 +0100 -- "5/10" 2. "The Dark Tower (2017)" <#Dark> -- "8/10" 3. "Shin Godzilla (2016)" <#Shin> -- "6/10" 4. "War for the Planet of the Apes (2017)" <#War> -- "6/10" 5. "Independence Day: Resurgence (2016)" <#Independence> -- "5/10" 6. "Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (1989)" <#Tie> -- "6/10" 7. "Ghost in the Shell (2017)" <#Ghost> -- "7/10" 8. "Where to Invade Next (2015)" <#Where> -- "9/10" 9. "Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017)" <#Star> -- "9/10" 10. "Rick & Morty S03" <#Rick> -- "10/10" 11. "American Hustle (2013)" <#American> -- "6/10" 12. "Baby Driver (2017)" <#Baby> -- "6/10" 13. "Nightbreed (1990)" <#Nightbreed> -- "6/10" 14. "Logan Lucky (2017)" <#Logan> -- "9/10" 15. "Russell Howard: Recalibrate (2017)" <#Russell> -- "6/10" These are my notes to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. I've recently transferred my reviews to IMDb and made "the list" of almost 1200 ratings publicly available. I've included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other -- I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017) -- "5/10" I'm too old for this movie. This movie is all about distracting, shiny gadgets. It is only incidentally about Spider-Man. Spider-Man's suit is now the star of the show, providing one Deus Ex Machina after another in lieu of actual plot. Peter Parker is a whiny bitch at a ritzy school (with a mass spectrometer). It's nice that they made the rest of the school look like a Benetton ad and that they made everyone so open and friendly with each other. That there are no tensions to speak of between students at all. Hell, everyone loves Peter and thinks he's the smartest guy in the school -- and they love him for it. His suit protects him from all damage, it provides him with all help, with company when he's stuck -- is this advancement? That female roles are now disembodied voices in the form of AI PDAs for men? -- there is no conflict and Parker never seems to be in danger. The sensors and gadgets are God-like in their abilities: it predicts structural collapse of buildings, elevators, etc. down to the last second. This is ridiculous: technology doesn't work like that. Even if it did, it makes a shitty movie because there's no tension when magic solves everything. Imagine the Harry Potter movies if Harry just waved a wand and fixed everything immediately. That's what it's like for Spider-Man. Literally nothing is left over that made Parker/Spider-Man endearing: he's no longer poor, May is no longer old, he doesn't have to cobble together his own tech, he doesn't have to really hide his identity, he never gets hurt, he doesn't really have to worry about his studies, the whole tension between his studies and making enough money and saving lives is gone. When he completely flakes on a school competition in Washington D.C., the team wins anyway and, instead of being mad for flaking, the girl he adores is worried about him. She likes him back. Dude can't fail. Boring. There's no tension: even in the big Staten-Island Ferry scene, nobody got hurt. Iron Man showed up with millions of dollars worth of fancy rockets which took no logistics to put together and could be deployed instantly. Also, every boat near NYC showed up within seconds to come help the ferry. This is ludicrous. He has unlimited webs, a parachute, wings, a super-computer with human-like AI, 100% HD 24-hour surveillance and an unbreakable skin. It was already bad enough, but now Spider-Man is also afraid of heights? And his Spidey-Sense is non-existent? And he doesn't care at all about damaging stuff? That's not Peter Parker. He bounds through a neighborhood, damaging cars, houses, treehouses, fences, grills ... everything. Didn't seem to care. Destroys Flash's car. Didn't care. I guess he just figures everyone's rich and insured? Just like every privileged person is at his privileged school? This movie is so over-the-top open and accepting: do schools really have giant posters of Maya Angelou, James Baldwin and Nikola Tesla in their detention halls now? Is this representative? He's 15 but everyone keeps talking about what he's going to do after graduation -- and nobody thinks it's weird that he has an internship. Is this normal, now? Also, he lives in Queens but he already test-drove a car in parking lots at 15? That is possibly the most unbelievable thing in this movie. 30-year--olds in NYC don't know how to drive. Is it supposed to be adorable that the smartest kid in Queens needs to ask his friend to Google how to turn on the fucking headlights in a car? Is this a triumph? SMH. It's a shame because I like Tom Holland as Spider-Man. I like Michael Keaton as the Vulture. I like Bokeem Woodbine as the Shocker. I like Michael Chernus as the Tinkerer. I'm kind of sick of Robert Downey Jr. as Tony Stark -- but he plays the character to a tee. He's just as insufferable in the comic books. [1] I like Marisa Tomei, but not as Aunt May. Why is Peter's aunt no longer old? And why is Tooms, as the Vulture, no longer old? I mean, he kind of is: Keaton is 66, but he has a high-school age daughter. I guess that that's the new, enlightened normal? And, at the end, (spoiler alert), where is everyone else? Why are Tooms and Parker alone for so long. When the Staten Island Ferry is attacked, Stark is there in 10 seconds. When his own plane full of his most-precious artifacts crashes into Coney Island, he's nowhere to be found? Just for good measure, they eliminate the last remaining bit of tension in the old Spidey's life: Aunt May discovers his secret identity in the last second. Sweet setup for the sequel, dude. Gave it an extra point for having pretty decent effects, but took it away again for being way too damned long. The Dark Tower (2017) -- "8/10" Idris Elba is Roland Deschain, Gunslinger. Matthrew McConaughey is Walter, the Man in Black, a Wizard. Roland is the last remaining defender of the Dark Tower. Walter and his horde of evil beings have all but won the war to conquer and destroy the Tower and let in the demons that reside outside the universe. They can already get in, where they have worn thin the places between their world and ours. There are portals between the worlds. There are similarities between Earth and Midworld, where Roland exists. There are interesting threads between the myths of the world of the Dark Tower and our own myths -- they serve to anchor our understanding of this at-first alien world. Roland's guns are forged from the steel of Arthur Eld's sword: Excalibur. Roland Deschain is of Eld. There is a neatness to this battle at the end of time. There are changes to the original story, changes that I can't help but feel are more cinema-friendly. The monster that bites Roland is not a crab on a cold, dark beach, but a ravening, slavering monster from another dimension. I liked the lobsters better. But that's a different movie, it's not a Hollywood blockbuster. The vision of a dark beach with an aged and ailing Gunslinger being nearly bested by alien, flesh-eating lobsters from across the cleft of dark dimensions worked well in the book, but would only have worked with perhaps Tarkovsky at the helm, who always seemed to have a knack for eliciting majesty from mundane sci-fi. The final scene between Roland and Walter was more ethereal and mysterious and abstract in the book than the movie depicted. In the film, it was more prosaic, with Walter using bits of brick as magical shields, which detracted a bit from the potential majesty of the moment. If you know the mythology of the books, the "face of my father" mantras are pretty cool. Some of the original source material survived. Roland is eerily, magically fast and accurate with his gun, he can sense and hear and find targets like no-one else. But he does it in a way that adds rather than detracts from the story. It's believable. Perhaps this can be chalked up to Elba's ability to sell the role. The major gun-battle scene was a marvel of choreography and felt just like Roland was depicted in the book. There are some nice homages to Stephen King: I saw a dilapidated, Pennywise carnival ride in a forest and there was a Rita Hayworth poster on a brick wall in the basement of a gun shop. There's a sign on a wall that says "Chambers" something-or-other (Jake's last name). Strong acting from Elba; decent stuff from McConaughey; excellent work by the kid (Tom Taylor). Shin Godzilla (2016) -- "6/10" It's hard to believe that this movie was made in 2016. Reasonably entertaining. A bit chatty. Watched it in Japanese with English subtitles and you had to pay quite close attention, as the titles were coming at you quickly. It's the story of a giant, mutating Godzilla, with more science than just "bombs made it big". This Godzilla is explained by biology and single-minded evolution as well as a need to feed on energy, but is just as unstoppable as any other Gozilla -- perhaps more so. War for the Planet of the Apes (2017) -- "6/10" Too much monkey for me. This movie was way too long, indulging in their CGI extravaganza and playing all of the standard tropes. It wasn't too hard to be on the side of the apes since the humans were nearly unilaterally evil -- beyond all ability to empathize. Nature was going to make them win, one way or another anyway, as the virus that nearly wiped out mankind (and simultaneously smartened the apes) is now infecting the remaining humans, regressing them to a primitive state. The CGI is impressive, but it felt like watching a Disney/Pixar movie at times. 30 Minutes or Less (2011) -- "4/10" I took a chance on this because it stars Jesse Eisenberg, Aziz Ansari, Michael Peña and Danny McBride. Eisenberg is a pizza-delivery guy with no prospects, who's sorta-kinda in love with his best friend's (Ansari) sister. McBride is a spoiled son of a rich former Marine (Fred Ward) who's a giant douchebag and who becomes the target of a patricide. Peña is the hired killer, but his fee is higher than McBride can afford. So he hatches a plan to coerce Eisenberg into robbing a bank for him by strapping bombs all over him. It's as stupid as it sounds. I can't even really remember how it ended. Independence Day: Resurgence (2016) -- "5/10" This movie started off nostalgic and devolved quickly into a super-cheesy version of Starship Troopers that takes itself seriously. On a side note: movies in the future are boring. This is because pretty much everything is possible. There are perfect translators, AIs, replicators, virtual realities, drive systems, time travel, galactic travel, whatever. You can't make a movie that's interesting for humans because every problem is solved by magic -- and it's believable because the premise is that technology can do anything. There is no tension. And even when they don't do that: why the hell is everybody still driving prosaic cars that run out of gas? Why are they still wearing glasses? And where the hell do they get all the metal to build their giant machines? Just because you can conjure up anything you like with CGI doesn't mean we're not going to notice that you're using ten planet's worth of metal to build these installations. Oh, and all of the young actors are terrible. The effects are spectacular, truly amazing, but the people keep talking. Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! (1989) -- "6/10" This movie stars Antonio Banderas as a young man, a psychiatric patient, recently released. He is in love with an adult film star, Mariana. Mariana has just wrapped a movie with a lecherous director. Her sister is in the mix, as well. Banderas kidnaps Mariana in order to make her fall in love with him. Long story short: she does. The end. There are some neat scenes not exactly related to the plot, but the premise is ridiculous and hard to get past. The acting is decent. One of the bit parts is wearing a Barcelona 1992 T-Shirt exactly like the one my wife got me when she was in Spain then. Ghost in the Shell (2017) -- "7/10" This one looks like a fucking game demo, too. No soul, no passion, no organic feel. Again, there's no limit to what the film can do because of technology but they make the robot communicate vocally with its handler because they need to anchor the audience somehow. And why does she need to wear goggles? She's a robot. Meanwhile, the scene is interleaved with Michael Winship (sounding a bit less gravelly than usual) boasting of how his four--year-old daughter became fluent in French in minutes thanks to enhancements. Whatever it means for a four--year-old to be fluent in anything. Feels like a bad knockoff of Blade Runner so far. They're putting a brain in a robot warrior. So, literally Robocop. Why the fuck do they make the robot breathe? So they also literally hammered home for us why the movie is called Ghost in the Shell in the first five minutes. Juliette Binoche has never been so fluent in English. The aesthetic is pretty nice when they finally settle down and focus on smaller than city-wide vistas, when the story becomes a more prosaic, cloak-and-dagger police procedural. The story isn't breathtakingly new, but it serves its purpose as scaffolding for a decent group of agents -- in various states of cyberneticization. The core story of the the orphans finding each other and saving each other was actually pretty good. The final scene where Major takes out the giant robot was done pretty well. I feel like the original cartoon was much better, but this was better than expected. Where to Invade Next (2015) -- "9/10" Michael Moore goes to Italy to learn about socialism in (guaranteed vacations, maternity leave, long lunches, regular working hours), then about school lunches in France, then the best students in the world in Finland (little to no homework, 20-hour weeks for younger kids, including lunch and playtime). Then it's on to Slovenia, where university is free. He covers the protests against tuition hikes in Slovenia, Canada, Germany, France, Finland and Norway (and actually England as well, though it wasn't mentioned ... maybe because they failed miserably). Many of the Italians and French spoke their native language, but all of the students in Finland, Slovenia and Germany spoke fluent, nearly unaccented English. Then it's off to Germany to learn about unions and worker participation on boards of directors. Also to learn about how a country teaches its people to never again do what their predecessors did. "They don't whitewash it. They don't pretend it didn't happen. They don't say 'hey, that was before my time. What's this got to do with me? I didn't kill anyone.'" The Germans really do live like this. I know many of them. I've been to Berlin. I've felt the rueful sadness in that city. Next up is Portugal for May Day and to learn how to fight the war on drugs by giving up and treating instead of fighting. Also, he steals the idea of having police officers who think human dignity is above all. Next, he goes to Norway to see how their prisons work, based on rehabilitation. Of course, the murderers and rapists and employees at the prison are all bilingual and speak fluent English. They have normal jobs, working in kitchens with knives, with no locks on the doors, freedom to swim and walk the open grounds. Even at the maximum-security prison, it looks more like a university. Then it's on to Iceland to focus on women's rights and equal representation. Also, it's one of the only countries to have prosecuted its bankers after the financial collapse in 2008. Then it's back to Berlin to talk about 1989 and the fall of the wall. Better than some of his other work. Recommended. Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017) -- "9/10" I'd actually forgotten that this movie was coming out at the end of the year and I almost never go to movies in the theater, so I went in pretty much completely cold. I'd seen a trailer, so that I knew that Rey and Finn and Poe were back. That is, that the movie was the second part of the third trilogy, part VIII. I was pleasantly surprised to see that they'd gone to the effort of writing a non-linear plot with new characters (some with quite predictable arcs) but by fleshing out existing characters with non-obvious fallibility to keep things interesting. Poe is a hothead and he gets punished for it -- not directly, but by seeing the consequences of his actions, not once, but twice. The first time, Leia drubs him with it -- the second time, it's not as obvious and nobody's in the mood to blame him, but ... if he hadn't second-guessed everyone and sent Rey and Finn and token Asian girl/love-interest to the Dreadnought, then they probably could have avoided a whole bunch of pain and suffering. Of course, then there wouldn't have been the pretty fantastic closure on several levels that awaits us in the final scenes, but at least they added that complexity. This tale is paralleled on our world as the superficial world in which most people live versus the deeper world of science and logic, the knowledge of which transforms so much magic to mundanity. Rey, too, is portrayed as a simplistic hothead if you look for it. When Luke discards the light saber: he has realized that this is the crude toy of a child, that the Force is much more powerful without such crude tools. It explains Luke’s look of disappointment when Rey still didn’t understand that the light saber isn’t anything compared to the true power of the Force. In a sense, these are all religious stories. The effects are fantastic, as ever, mixing used-feeling equipment on the Rebels' part to create a very WWII aesthetic that I've noted in the other two films in this trilogy. It's 2.5 hours, so brace yourself for a long ride, but it's definitely worth it (especially for fans). I think the first half of the movie was a bit too front-loaded with Disney-style child-like jokes and character-introduction (Laura Dern and Benecio del Toro!), but those are minor quibbles. Some of the jokes land really well. Also, the use of color and effects was more noticeable, with a real Korean/Japanese/Chinese crime-movie feel to it (e.g. Snoke's throne room was so ornate and red and the scene of destruction in it afterwards was sublime) (also e.g. the scenes in the desert with the red-salt traces tracing the scene of the battle, down to each stance-shift in the final battle.) For a blockbuster film that's 8th in line with God knows what expectations, they did a great job. A very satisfying entry that I would watch again. Recommended (highly for fans of the series). Saw it in English with German/French subtitles and in 3-D. Rick & Morty S03 -- "10/10" This show just goes from strength to strength. Complex, interwoven and self-referential but still consistent plotlines that stretch across infinite universes combine with several strong characters from which anyone should be able to pick a favorite. Season 3 was probably the best so far, I think. From "episode 7" : "There's a Rick that held a factory hostage after murdering his boss and several co-workers. "The factory made cookies. Flavored 'em with lies. "He made us all take a look at what we were doing. "And in the bargain, he got a taste of real freedom. "We captured that taste, and we keep givin' it to 'im, so he can give it right back to you. "And everybody who buys the new freedom-wafers selects. "Come home to the unique flavor of shattering the grand illusion. "Come home to Simple Rick." Also "Pickle Rick" in episode 3 was a masterpiece. No wonder it took 18 months to make 10 episodes. American Hustle (2013) -- "6/10" I like Christian Bale and Jeremy Renner and Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper. I honestly have no idea what year this movie was supposed to have taken place. It's about an FBI agent trying to set up a sting by manipulating a couple of small-time hustlers that he caught into helping him catch bigger fish. He's after politicians, even if he has to entrap them or make up their crimes out of whole cloth. I gave it an extra point because Jennifer Lawrence was a blazing, alluring pile of crazy and Christian Bale sold the end very well. But I thought it was too long and boring. Baby Driver (2017) -- "6/10" This movie stars Kevin Spacey as a guy who runs heists. He uses a different crew every time -- or at least a different mix of people from a larger group. One constant in his crews is "Baby", who's a preternaturally gifted getaway driver. The driving scenes are pretty nicely choreographed, though many of the cooler bits were featured heavily in the main trailer. A pity. Another pity is that Jon Bernthal (of The Punisher) is only on one of the crews and his participation is limited to about 5 minutes of screen time, maximum. Jon Hamm is more a part of the film and plays his usual, rambunctious self, paired with the sultry Eiza González in a bizarre and somewhat disturbing relationship. Baby wants to get out of his obligation to Doc (Spacey). Things go sideways, Baby's new girlfriend gets embroiled in everything, Hamm's character gets superhuman, but finally succumbs and Baby is finally arrested, though put away for a paltry sentence (he's white, dontchaknow), after which he is picked up by his girlie and they all live happily ever after. The end. Directed by Edgar Wright without a lot of his usual visual panache. I really like director Edgar Wright and his style was somewhat evident in this film, but much more suppressed. The cast was pretty strong -- I always like Jamie Foxx and Jonathan Hamm -- but the movie had a lot of filler between the song-driven chase scenes. Edgar Winter Group's Frankenstein was an inspired choice. Jon Hamm's weapon firing on the beat was a nice touch. Jon Bernthal (Frank Castle) wasn't in the movie nearly enough. Eiza González was sexy, but was in it too much. Radar Love was another nice song choice. Kevin Spacey seemed to be channeling a pale imitation of Gene Hackman. Nightbreed (1990) -- "6/10" The acting is, in general, pretty bad. The story is kind of interesting. The makeup, sets and practical effects are fantastic. It's like a smörgåsbord of every nightmare Clive Barker has ever had. The story is about Aaron Boone, who dreams of the Nightbreed in a place called Miridian. He finally ends up there, discovering that the Nightbreed are a collection of the ancient peoples of Earth that have been all-but eradicated by humanity. They are freaks and they are undead. His psychiatrist Decker (played by David Cronenberg) is a serial killer bent on finding Miridian. He frames Boone for all of the murders and gets Boone executed by an entire posse. Boone had been bit by a Nightbreed, though, so he comes back as one of the undead, now named Cabal. His girlfriend Lori refuses to give up on him and they try to save the Nightbreed. The giant posse, armed with military hardware, takes out the Nightbreed's underground lair. The lair itself is a marvelous set, equal to the many masks and twisted bodies of its inhabitants -- it looks like the Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights brought to life. Quite a vision. Recommended if this sounds like your thing. Logan Lucky (2017) -- "9/10" A lovely little stress-free and fight-free heist movie, as Soderbergh does. I liked most of the cast: Adam Driver and Channing Tatum as brothers living in West Virginia, Riley Keough and Katie Holmes as their respective interests and integral and indispensable participants in the heist. Also along in the heist are a transformed Daniel Craig, as Joe Bang, the explosives expert. Their plan is fun to watch unfold, with relatively little muss or fuss. Recommended. Russell Howard: Recalibrate (2017) -- "6/10" Russell's never really been my cup of tea and this special was OK for me, but not great. His comedy is a bit broad and well-explained and forced, waiting for laugh lines and so on. He's a skilled performer and has some funny bits, but I didn't really get into it as much as I'd hoped. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] As @ExistentialComics "tweeted" : "Batman and Iron Man teach us that it's good for billionaires to build advanced weaponry to use extrajudicially to keep the existing social order stable." **** ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3500 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3500 Sun, 21 Jan 2018 17:54:42 +0100 -- "8/10" 2. "Okja (2017)" <#Okja> -- "7/10" 3. "Bad Moms (2016)" <#Bad> -- "8/10" 4. "Twin Peaks S03 (2017)" <#Twin> -- "8/10" 5. "Absolutely Anything (2015)" <#Absolutely> -- "5/10" 6. "GLOW (2017)" <#GLOW> -- "7/10" 7. "Fargo S03 (2017)" <#Fargo> -- "10/10" 8. "1984 (1984)" <#1984> -- "8/10" 9. "Judah Friedlander: America is the greatest country in the United States (2017)" <#Judah> -- "8/10" 10. "Wonder Woman (2017)" <#Wonder> -- "6/10" 11. "Se7en (1995)" <#Se7en> -- "9/10" 12. "Deray Davis: How to Act Black (2017)" <#Deray> -- "7/10" 13. "Brian Regan: Nunchucks and Flamethrowers (2017)" <#Brian> -- "5/10" 14. "Craig Ferguson: Tickle Fight (2017)" <#Craig> -- "6/10" 15. "The Punisher (2017)" <#The> -- "10/10" 16. "Hellraiser (1987)" <#Hellraiser> -- "6/10" 17. "Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017)" <#Valerian> -- "6/10" 18. "Kong: Skull Island (2017)" <#Kong> -- "8/10" 19. "End of Watch (2012)" <#End> -- "7/10" 20. "Atomic Blonde (2017)" <#Atomic> -- "9/10" These are my notes to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. I've recently transferred my reviews to IMDb and made "the list" of almost 1200 ratings publicly available. I've included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other -- I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. Star Trek: Discovery S01 (2017) -- "8/10" This is the latest series in the Star Trek universe, starring a whole new cast rife with decent-to-good actors. The story is quite interesting and has an overall arc as well as staying true to the classic format of having one lesson/mission per episode. This series takes place at the same time as when Spock joins the Federation, focusing on his human stepsister Michael Burnam instead. The starship Discovery is a science ship but becomes the most important vessel in the war against the Klingons when they invent a new form of propulsion based on manipulating a universal mycelium substrate (or something like that). In the second half of the first season, they spend a good deal of time in a completely alternate universe. Okja (2017) -- "7/10" This is a film about a giant food corporation that genetically engineers a new animal to satisfy consumer demand: the super-pig. It's the size of a hippopotamus and it produces very little ordure (although gas seems to be a problem). They create a program to raise ten such pigs around the world and see how they fare. One is in Korea, with a little girl and her grandfather. She raises the pig nearly single-handedly until the corporation shows up to film it -- and take it away. She gives chase and teams up with the ALF -- led by Paul Dano. Jake Gyllenhaal is the goofy safari-photographer face of the super-pig program, Tilda Swinton plays the two sisters that run the corporation. Okja is eventually rescued but so many pigs are not. The film has a definite anti-mass-food-production bent. Watched it in English and Korean with subtitles. Bad Moms (2016) -- "8/10" This movie was a lot more fun than I expected it to be. It broke out of the one-joke mold, buoyed by great performances by Mila Kunis, Kathryn Hahn, Kristin Bell and even Christina Applegate, who played the real bad mom. It made it clear that this was an escapist, fantastical film and stuck to its guns. Twin Peaks S03 (2017) -- "8/10" What to say about a TV series that starts its third season 25 years after it ended its extended second season, that went off the deep end and into a bizarreness theretofore unseen on network TV? It was brilliant, entertaining -- nay, captivating -- and left viewers wanting more. Those viewers stuck around for 25 years -- prophesied by Laura Palmer herself, from the Black Lodge, near the end of season 2 -- as did the actors, all of whom returned if it was at all physically possible. All of them reprised their roles. This extra-long season explained a lot and opened up whole new avenues -- episode 8 will be especially challenging for most -- of ideas, thought and ways of interpreting what came before. Nothing is explained, but things become clearer. There are some new protagonists and some new antagonists. Most characters pick up right where they left off. Truly a work of art -- it has some rough edges, but Lynch and Frost deliver a unique bit of well--though-out, extended cinema. Rumor has it that Lynch filmed all 18 episodes at once, editing it all at the end. Truly a cinematic achievement. It's 18 shows, though, so it can be a bit of a slog, at times. So, overall an 8, but with some 9/10 moments. Absolutely Anything (2015) -- "5/10" This was a disappointing bit of dreck starring Simon Pegg, about a down-and-out guy (think Run, Fatboy, Run) who is given omnipotence by evil alien beings intent on proving that Earth is a backwards civilization, incapable of handling the power of galactic citizenship. It's all a bit murky, but it stars the always-alluring Kate Beckinsale as well, else it would have been even less entertaining. It seems like it was made to appeal to children. GLOW (2017) -- "7/10" The Gorgeous Ladies of Wrestling "documents" the rise of the short-lived league of women wrestlers from the early 80s. Marc Maron as the author/director of the league is a revelation, as are Alison Brie, Betty Gilpin and many of the other lady wrestlers. The first season takes us from failing personal lives and acting careers to a somewhat triumphant and last-ditch effort to saving the budding league in its first show. Fargo S03 (2017) -- "10/10" The third season is possibly my favorite one so far. I really liked the other two seasons, each unique in its own way, but hewing to the base aesthetic. This season does so, as well, but pulls in even more star power, with Ewan McGregor playing twin brothers, one of whom is a parole officer and the of whom is a local parking-garage maven. Carrie Coon as Officer Gloria Burgle follows in the tradition of Fargo of portraying police officers as eminently human and competent people just trying do a job, moral beings with a moral compass. Mary Elizabeth Winstead as Nikki Swango plays a perfect foil to David Thewlis as V.M. Varga, a nearly supernatural foreign millionaire and super-criminal of unknown origin and seemingly unlimited power. The plots twists and turns, as expected, but derives much of its momentum from a feud between the Stussy brothers over a rare and precious stamp. Varga wades in and takes advantage -- though his motive in getting into Minnesota parking garages is unclear, unless he'd exhausted all other possibilities for evading taxes and laundering money. A tale well-told and well-acted. Highly recommended. 1984 (1984) -- "8/10" This film is very true to the source material. The aesthetic matches exactly the world limned by George Orwell and the plot follows the book meticulously. The story is of a future totalitarian state where thought is outlawed, goods and services are rare, as is good, healthy food, media is always fake and Big Brother is everywhere. Winston is unwittingly drawn to a fake rebellion, because of love for a fellow rebel, who turns out not to be a rebel, or maybe she was a rebel and the State lied -- either way, in the end, Winston capitulates, gives up anything and everything to save his own worthless, joyless and hopeless life and Big Brother wins. "A boot stamping on the face of humanity, forever." Judah Friedlander: America is the greatest country in the United States (2017) -- "8/10" Judah is a stand-up comedian with a tongue-in-cheek, gung-ho, ironically and quasi-jingoistic, America-first on-stage persona. He is pretty well-informed, which makes his two-way barbs for and against America clever. I was expecting much less, but had already noted that I'd liked him more than expected in his appearance on Showtime's Green Room many years ago. He has a good delivery, works the crowd well, extemporizes well and has a good set. Wonder Woman (2017) -- "6/10" This review "60 Minutes on: "Wonder Woman" " by Matt Zoller Zeitz is not at all how I saw the movie: ""Wonder Woman" is the best modern superhero film by a substantial margin, in large part because it shrugs off the supposed common wisdom that's become encrusted around the genre and dares to be straightforwardly idealistic, giving its title character strongly held values and testing them and forcing her to adjust or re-frame them without losing them—a deeper struggle that's more resonant than the physical struggles she faces in the course of the story, which are impressive in their own right. In theory, every superhero movie is, or pretends to be, about believing in something larger than oneself; but this message often gets lost amid narcissistic personal melodrama. This is never the case with "Wonder Woman."" I'm not sure what they mean by "modern" superhero movie, but I just off the top of my head, I can think of The Watchmen, Unbreakable and Logan. Yeah, I know that of those, only Watchmen even starred any women. But that's not really my first criteria for a movie, to say nothing of a superhero movie. They made Wonder Woman just as insipid as they always make women, but they gave her a backstory that explains it. Congratulations. Se7en (1995) -- "9/10" This is a detective movie directed by David Fincher. It stars Morgan Freeman as a detective on the verge of retiring. He's highly intelligent and accomplished, but he never quite fit in to his department. He is weary of the sin and suffering that he sees every day, both in his private life and on the job. Brad Pitt is a young detective who transferred to the big city in order to work with Freeman. Pitt's wife, played by Gwenyth Paltrow, is not at all excited to be in the big city. Freeman and Pitt quickly converge on a case of a serial killer who MO is to kill his victims by the seven deadly sins. The murders are stylized, but the killer leaves clues for them to follow. He wants to be caught. The killer is played by Kevin Spacey, who turns himself in after the fifth victim, with anger and envy still outstanding as motifs. Spoiler alert: the clever bit is that Spacey is envious of Pitt's relationship with his wife, so he killed her (envy ... although it was Spacey who was envious, not Paltrow, so it doesn't quite fit with the other murders), chopped her up and shipped her head in a box to Pitt at a predefined location in the middle of a field. He guides the pair there to meet the delivery truck. Spacey's piece de résistance is to coerce Pitt into killing him in anger, completing the septet. Deray Davis: How to Act Black (2017) -- "7/10" He was decent, but nothing out of the ordinary. Some good, original material; some hackneyed material. Lots of very black-focused humor with lots of inside jokes, most of which I understood, but some of which didn't resonate (for obvious reasons: I didn't grow up in any form of 'hood, as he did). Brian Regan: Nunchucks and Flamethrowers (2017) -- "5/10" He's a pretty harmless comedian with a very clean act and a somewhat odd and forced stage presence. He doesn't seem very comfortable, shouting a bit in a "Dad's here" kind of way. His best jokes were from his parents, his father in particular. Craig Ferguson: Tickle Fight (2017) -- "6/10" I was looking forward to this special as he's been very funny in the past. This one was OK and he had a couple of interesting insights and new jokes, but a lot of the material felt rehashed and his delivery didn't seem very natural. He shouted quite a bit when it didn't seem necessary. Maybe I just need to see it again in a group? The Punisher (2017) -- "10/10" I loved this show, mostly because of the way that Jon Bernthal inhabited the role of Frank Castle, the Punisher. This first season follows Frank as he uncovers who was really behind the death of his family. He teams up (kind of) with Micro, another agent who is more technical and less violent, but who has also been maligned by the same organization, separated from his family (although they still live). This is a nearly uniquely violent show, with the Punisher taking a ridiculous level of punishment (especially in the latter episodes). Still, the character is wonderful, so I gave it extra points. Would watch again. Highly recommended, but not for the squeamish. Hellraiser (1987) -- "6/10" This is one of Clive Barker's first movies and establishes his horror/gore/fantasy aesthetic. It is the tale of a little puzzle box that opens a gateway to a horrific dimension of pleasure, pain and eternal suffering. Frank is the first to find his way to the mysterious Chinese shop that sells him the box. He is the first to open the gate and meet Pinhead and his cohort, the Cenobytes. He is the first to be trapped there. Years later, his niece finds the box and is ensnared, at least to a degree. Her mother -- and Frank's lover -- learns of Frank's return to the corporeal plane. She finds him as a half-man, skeletal with no skin, but alive, in tremendous pain, in the attic of their home. He needs to feed on the lives of others in order to complete his transfer to this world. She provides him victims by trolling airport bars for one-night-stands. Her daughter learns of this and fights them both in horror. In the end, the daughter vanquishes both Frank and her mother and reverses the puzzle box to banish the Cenobytes back to their dimension. Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets (2017) -- "6/10" The visuals are spectacular. But there's so much, so fast, that there's no way to enjoy any of it. I did not like either of the leads: Cara Delevingne or Dane DeHaan. I love the hell out of the director, Luc Besson, but he's trying too hard to recapture the magic he had with The Fifth Element. I know that this movie is based on popular comic books, so that might explain some of the pacing, plotting, story and dialogue. But there's really no excuse for the wooden delivery: Delevingne acts like she's in a high school play. There is no way to predict anything in this movie because I don't know anything about any of the characters. So what's really wrong? Obscure, unpredictable plot, childlike characters and bad actors. The effects are lovely but it had no cohesion, it didn't describe a world. Instead, it felt like watching a graphics-card demo loop. Kong: Skull Island (2017) -- "8/10" I was pleasantly surprised at how pretty this movie was and how cleverly they hid skulls everywhere. The set design of the island was fantastic, the effects were quite convincing, the monster design was good, the actors were pretty decent (John C. Reilly was very good) and the movie felt like a movie. It had cohesion. It was better than the last Kong movie. The monsters are overwhelming, gigantic and people die by the dozens. Sam Jackson's Colonel Packard re-fights Vietnam with Kong as a proxy. Kong is actually the protector of the island, the only thing keeping the really evil monsters in check. It's the 70s, so Packard is fighting Vietnam again, delighting in killing Kong with napalm. He is the living embodiment of American arrogance, brutality and peevish ego. And he will, of course, be proved spectacularly wrong, but not before he does more damage than he should be able to. Always the same story. I guess we get to keep hearing it until we actually learn our lesson. Good luck with that. Solid soundtrack, nice cinematography. Recommended. End of Watch (2012) -- "7/10" Jake Gyllenhaal and Michael Pena are a couple of beat cops in South LA. Gyllenhaal films everything for a class he's taking. They are a couple of cowboys but essentially good cops. They make a few lucky busts -- one because they're following up on a lead that they shouldn't have been following. They find about 50 people held in absolutely filthy captivity, which is good, but are warned by ICE that they've now run afoul of the cartels. To top it off, they respond to a welfare-check call and find squatters with a giant cache of drugs. The cartels have had enough and order a hit. The two guys manage to escape for a bit, but the reach of the cartel is long. Pena bites it. The two leads (as well, as the their wives, Natalie Martinez and Anna Kendrick) are charismatic and fun. The bad-ass Latino gangsters were a bit over-the-top. Atomic Blonde (2017) -- "9/10" Charlize Theron as a British super-spy in 1989 Berlin. She goes to a movie theater showing Stalker in the original Russian. They kind of ran the scenes together, though, but who am I to quibble? When she walks into the theater, they're showing the scene with the mangler (?) where there are all of the humps of sand. Then, 30 seconds later, the men are huddled before the room itself. The soundtrack is all 80s tracks, lovingly selected. Til Schweiger plays a watchmaker working at Carl F. Bucherer. There are Trabants everywhere (even one cop car, which the museum said was not in Berlin). The other car they get is a Volvo, which checks out: those were the cars favored by the high-ranking members of the DDR. The fight scenes are visceral and hyper-realistic. They're bloody and damage is definitely done. James McAvoy and John Goodman round out the cast. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3435 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3435 Sun, 21 Jan 2018 17:47:16 +0100 of almost 1200 ratings publicly available. I've included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other -- I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. Joe Mande's Award-Winning Comedy Special (2017) -- "5/10" This was not a very strong effort. No zingers. Nothing daring. Nothing new. Not even a particularly good delivery. It wasn't offensive -- but I can't remember single joke from the show. Ari Shaffir: Double Negative (2016) -- "5/10" This was not a very strong effort. No zingers. Nothing daring. Nothing new. Not even a particularly good delivery. It wasn't offensive -- but I can't remember single joke from the show. War Machine (2017) -- "6/10" This movie stars Brad Pitt as four-star general Glenn McMahon. Glenn's life is based on real-life general Stanley McChrystal. Pitt's performance is decent, but nothing to write home about. This is relatively standard fare about the futility of war and the stupidity and politics that drive the major U.S. invasions. Sebastian Maniscalco: Aren't You Embarassed? (2014) -- "8/10" I'd never seen nor heard of Maniscalco before. He had some original material related to his family. What he did, he did pretty well. Defenders (2017) -- "8/10" This was better than I expected it to be: this was the series that brings together Jessica Jones, Luke Cage, Iron Fist and Daredevil. The plot continues to draw the threads of the individual series together, with the shadowy Hand organization slowly coming into focus. Various factions of the Hand are revealed and the Defenders fight together for the first time. 13th (2016) -- "8/10" This is a decent documentary about black civil rights in the U.S. It complements Michelle Alexander's book The New Jim Crow quite well, for those without the stamina or inclination to read their way through that. Kathleen Madigan: Bothering Jesus -- "9/10" Madigan's onstage persona is a wise-cracking, world-weary, hard-drinking souther belle. She's very funny. Her stories are from a time in America that speaks to me: growing up in the 70s and 80s. Kathleen Madigan: Gone Madigan -- "9/10" Madigan's onstage persona is a wise-cracking, world-weary, hard-drinking souther belle. She's very funny. Her stories are from a time in America that speaks to me: growing up in the 70s and 80s. The Standups (2017) -- "8/10" This is a series of six half-hour episodes, each with a different comedian. The quality overall was quite good. I liked Nate Bargatze and Deon Cole the best, but Nikki Glaser, Dan Soder and Beth Stelling were also good, if a bit derivative. Fortune Feimster was OK, but I wouldn't watch her again. Big Mouth -- "8/10" This is an animated series starring Nick Kroll, John Mulaney, Jessi Klein and Maya Rudolph as three teenagers hitting puberty and sorting out its world-shaking impact with the help of the Hormone Monster and the Hormone Monstress. The writing is quite good and pretty funny. There aren't a lot of new jokes, of course, but it's well-done. Marc Maron: Too Real -- "9/10" Maron has been a stand-up comedian for decades. He's honed his craft to a fine point and is at various times funny, insightful, cynical and wistful. Recommended. Christina P: Mother Inferior (2017) -- "8/10" Another standup special from Netflix. Also very entertaining with fresh material. Made me laugh out loud a few times. Jerry Before Seinfeld (2017) -- "9/10" Seinfeld is still a very good standup comedian. His material was a bit dated, but he also was doing the first material he ever did, just to prove that it can hold up if delivered well. He proved it. I thought this was a very good special. The Good Place (2017) -- "8/10" This series stars Kristen Bell as a not-very-nice woman who dies unexpectedly and is sent to what she thinks is the Good Place. Ted Danson is the demon running the whole show. Jameela Janil is Tahani the egocentric British socialite, D'Arcy Carden is Janet the super-intelligent AI, Manny Jacinto is Jason Mendoza the moronic Floridian DJ and William Jackson Harper is Chidi Anagonye, a nearly overwhelmingly boring ethics professor. The Expanse: S02 (2017) -- "8/10" The second season follows the unwinding story of the Mars/Earth confrontation as well as the evolution of the Protomolecule, its origins and its powers. The Americans: S04 (2016) -- "7/10" Paige is slowly pulled into the fold, although she's still shockingly annoying. The Bad Batch (2017) -- "5/10" The best thing about this movie is Jason Momoa, who plays the leader of a desert cult in a no-man's-land reserved for the worst of the worst -- the bad batch. Jack Whitehall: At Large (2017) -- "8/10" Jack is a British comedian with a very bombastic style and some original material. Recommended. Patton Oswalt: Annihilation (2017) -- "9/10" Oswalt is much funnier after his wife died than after his child was born. He controls himself on praising Hillary and keeps the other bashing in a fair and very funny place. Leonard Cohen: Bird on a Wire (1974) -- "6/10" This is a (rock)umentary following Leonard Cohen and his band on tour in the 70s. He comes off as a bit of a prima donna, though he's probably just exhausted. He regularly leaves the stage for hours, only to return later to finish the show, rarely with enthusiasm. Leonard seems to have been more of a studio musician, just judging by how stressful touring seems to be for him. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3400 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3400 Sun, 23 Jul 2017 22:04:07 +0200 -- "9/10" 2. "Deep in the Heart of Texas: Dave Chappelle Live at Austin City Limits (2017)" <#Deep> -- "8/10" 3. "Louis C.K. 2017 (2017)" <#Louis> -- "8/10" 4. "The Birds (1963)" <#Birds> -- "6/10" 5. "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny (2016)" <#Crouching> -- "7/10" 6. "Kevin Hart: What Now? (2016)" <#Kevin> -- "8/10" 7. "Luther (2016)" <#Luther> -- "9/10" 8. "Dirty Pretty Things (2002)" <#Dirty> -- "8/10" 9. "The Lobster (2015)" <#Lobster> -- "7/10" 10. "Iron Fist (2017)" <#Iron> -- "7/10" 11. "The Nice Guys (2016)" <#Nice> -- "7/10" 12. "Wild: Michael Mittermeyer Live (2016)" <#Wild> -- "6/10" 13. "Vir Das: Abroad Understanding (2017)" <#Vir> -- "8/10" 14. "Fargo: Season 3 (2017)" <#Fargo> -- "9/10" 15. "Sonic Highways (2014)" <#Sonic> -- "8/10" 16. "Doctor Strange (2016)" <#Doctor> -- "7/10" 17. "The Sopranos: Season 1--6 (1999)" <#Sopranos> -- "9/10" 18. "Lucas Bros: On Drugs (2017)" <#Lucas> -- "7/10" 19. "Get Hard (2015)" <#Get> -- "7/10" 20. "Mission: Impossible: Ghost Protocol (2011)" <#Mission> -- "8/10" 21. "Predators (2010)" <#Predators> -- "6/10" 22. "Tracy Morgan: Stayin' Alive (2017)" <#Tracy> -- "6/10" 23. "Seventh Son (2014)" <#Seventh> -- "5/10" 24. "Norm Macdonald: Hitler's Dog, Gossip & Trickery (2017)" <#Norm> -- "8/10" 25. "The Day After Tomorrow (2004)" <#Tomorrow> -- "6/10" 26. "Alien: Covenant (2017)" <#Alien> -- "6/10" 27. "Sarah Silverman: A Speck of Dust (2017)" <#Sarah> -- "8/10" 28. "F is for Family s02 (2017)" <#F> -- "9/10" 29. "Hasan Minhaj: Homecoming King (2017)" <#Hasan> -- "9/10" 30. "Archer S08 (2017)" <#Archer> -- "7/10" 31. "Rory Scovel Tries Stand-Up for the First Time (2017)" <#Rory> -- "8/10" 32. "Rick and Morty S01--02" <#Rick> -- "9/10" These are my notes to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. I've recently transferred my reviews to IMDb and made "the list" of almost 1200 ratings publicly available. I've included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other -- I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. The Age of Spin: Dave Chappelle Live at the Hollywood Palladium (2017) -- "9/10" This is the better of the two new specials on Netflix. Chappelle is effortless and very, very good in this one. I don't remember a lot of specific jokes, but it was all-new material in his standard topics. The nearly 70 minutes were built on the scaffolding of the 4 times Chappelle met OJ Simpson. He didn't address politics directly at all, other than most of his material stems from being black in America, which is at heart a very political thing, no? Highly recommended. Deep in the Heart of Texas: Dave Chappelle Live at Austin City Limits (2017) -- "8/10" This was also very good, but I liked The Age of Spin better. This one featured a little too much easy material, with a little too much masturbation humor. It's like when Louis C.K. won't stop talking about shit: you can try to fool yourself into thinking that he's a genius and you just aren't seeing all the levels of his humor, but objectively you can't see the difference between when Dave Chappelle makes an easy masturbation joke and when a lesser comedian does it. Still, it's Dave Chappelle: he's pretty damned funny. Louis C.K. 2017 (2017) -- "8/10" I would have given this a 9/10 but for the first bit -- where he would not stop talking about shit, which, I get the point he was trying to make, but it wasn't funny enough to me; I found it an odd way to start, it was more of a middle bit -- and his final bit, which started off really good, but then stole from Steve Hughes -- "what's more manly than fucking a guy in the ass?" -- before pantomiming being the catcher himself and then screaming "good night". Louis is generally considered a thinking-man's comic so he'll probably be given the benefit of the doubt that there was something deeper here than a more lowly comedian with a similar bit would intend but, again, I'm not seeing it. The Birds (1963) -- "6/10" I didn't like this movie as much as I'd hoped I would. I've really liked other Hitchcock movies like Vertigo and Psycho but this one was disjointed and odd. The plot made little sense, there was no effort made to explain certain points. People didn't act very predictably and no reason was given for why they were so odd. And the birds -- they weren't explained either, not even a little bit. They were just an unpredictable force of nature that were filmed at exhausting length. The best scene was in the diner about 2/3 of the way through the movie. Not recommended. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon: Sword of Destiny (2016) -- "7/10" Donnie Yen and Michelle Yeoh lend gravitas to an otherwise standard Chinese action/kung-fu movie. It's exquisitely made, with really good effects and lovely choreography. The story centers on the eponymous sword. Its wielder has never been defeated in combat. It resides at a kung-fu temple but is in danger, although guarded by Michelle Yeoh. Yen shows up with a small group of talented fighters to help guard the sword against Hades Dai (Jason Scott Lee). In the middle of this is the story of Snow Vase (Natasha Liu Bordizzo) and Wei Fang (Harry Shum Jr.), two children switched at birth. It's a bit complicated: he's the true-born son of yet another famous swordswoman, but she benefitted from having trained under the same. Also, they're in love, which feels kinda incest-y, but it's totally not. All of the other talented fighters are killed in the final battle but the main four survive to fight another day. Decent, but not required viewing. Kevin Hart: What Now? (2016) -- "8/10" He's funny and he's a hell of an entertainer and storyteller. This show was taped in front of an entire football stadium full of fans. Recommended. Luther (2016) -- "9/10" This is a hidden treasure on Netflix that originally ran on the BBC. It tells the story of DCI John Luther, a passionate, brilliant copper in London. He works cases of very twisted murder by very twisted killers, many of them with personal agendas against him. There are some rough spots, but overall it's a very enjoyable series, powered by the overwhelming charisma of Idris Elba as Luther. Dirty Pretty Things (2002) -- "8/10" This is a story about the lives of quiet humiliation and struggle lived by the immigrant underclass in London. Audrey Tautou plays the Turkish immigrant Senay opposite Chiwetel Ejiofor's Nigerian Okwe. The Lobster (2015) -- "7/10" This movie had an interesting concept and a good follow-through, but it was a bit long and would have benefitted from tighter editing. Colin Farrell, Rachel Weisz and Léa Seydoux were quite good. This is the story of a near future where people are required to pair off. If they cannot find a compatible mate in 45 days, they are turned into an animal and released into the wild. Couples are returned to the city, where their marital bliss is carefully controlled by frequent police stops. Farrell fails to pair off, but runs away before transformation, retreating to a group of rebels living in the woods. This is where he meets Weisz and falls in love. However, the human denizens of the forest are not allowed to love. This leads to punishment. Weisz is blinded, but Farrell avenges her by leaving their leader (Seydoux) to the wolves. They flee back to civilization, where they end up in a diner -- Weisz seated at a booth, unsure of where to "look", Farrell in the bathroom, working up the courage to stab his own eyes out with a steak knife. It's unclear what will happen next. Iron Fist (2017) -- "7/10" I'd heard that this Marvel-comics--based series on Netflix was a far cry from the three others preceded it -- Jessica Jones, Daredevil and Luke Cage. I've watched them all and was pleased to see how they intertwined and built on each other. It's not always fantastic television but, all in all, it's pretty good. Iron Fist builds on this, with some pretty good characters -- although I'll admit that the main character Danny Rand as Iron Fist is the weakest of them. For a guy who spent 15 years training night and day with monks in a remote part of Tibet to achieve their highest honor, he sure doesn't have a good grip on his emotions. On the other hand, he's away from the only thing he can call home, back in his childhood home of New York City, so its not surprising that he regresses. It's a bit embarrassing when he does -- everyone else seems to keep it together better and it makes him a bit more easily manipulated. Madame Gau features strongly, as does Claire the nurse. Carrie-Ann Moss as Hogarth is also a breath of fresh air. Danny's friend Davos says to Claire "That's how we're trained. We don't let emotions cloud our actions. [...] A weapon doesn't know feelings." That's nice and all, but we'd just spent 10 shows watching Danny do the exact opposite of that. He's very simplistically portrayed -- especially in the final few shows. The supporting cast is entertaining, though. The Meachums are pretty good, as is Colleen Wing. I really like Ward. Madame Gau is really good, but Bakudo is a smug Deus ex Machina. The choreography is not nearly as good as in Crouching Tiger. Some of it's good, but most of the rest is highly telegraphic and clumsy. Finn Jones as Iron Fist is pretty stiff, even though he's supposed to be the best evar. In the end, it's a battle between two cults for the hearts and minds of a couple of good people. The Nice Guys (2016) -- "7/10" Russell Crowe plays muscle-for-hire in 1970s Los Angeles. Ryan Gosling is a private investigator who seems a bit bumbling but who has a good reputation. They become embroiled in a murder mystery involving Misty Mountains, who crashes her car spectacularly in the Hollywood Hills. Amy Schumer: The Leather Special (2017) -- "4/10" There were some amusing bits, but it wasn't enough to fill the whole hour and ten minutes. The first half an hour was hard going, with Schumer going through a thin gruel of poop and pussy jokes that were OK but not particularly well-crafted or -delivered. There were a few lines that made me laugh out loud, but her skit show is world better than her standup. She went through a painful and frankly painfully ignorant about gun control that went on for what felt like way too long. I'm not sure who her audience is: you have to want to hear her talk about her vagina non-stop for twenty minutes, with no real outstanding jokes there. Then there's a long bit about diarrhea, also with only one good line. Then there's a diatribe about guns that lashes out at everyone who owns one as a knuckle-dragging utter moron who approves of random murder. Then there's a long section about blow jobs and how bad she is at them, how she's not good at exercise and likes to eat. And so on. The crowd was shown laughing very hard, so either that was faked or they really enjoyed it. Then there's a long section on dating and what it's like to sleep with Amy. A couple of good lines there, but I don't know to whom I could recommend this. Wild: Michael Mittermeyer Live (2016) -- "6/10" This special was pretty standard fare for Mittermeyer. He had a few good bits, but he's basically just giving his fans what they want. Most of his bits were pretty good -- even if the material wasn't always original, he presents really well. He's been doing this a long time and knows how to squeeze as much as possible even from jokes you've kind of heard before. Recommended for fans, but anyone new to Mittermeyer should probably see one of his older specials first. Saw it in German. Vir Das: Abroad Understanding (2017) -- "8/10" I gave him an extra point for being much better than I expected and for having a full set of non-standard, new-to-me material. He's an Indian comedian (from Mumbai, if I recall correctly). I'd never heard of him before, but he's apparently quite a big thing in India. His special was divided equally between playing a decent-sized club in the U.S. to playing a sold-out sports arena near his home town in India. Recommended. Fargo: Season 3 (2017) -- "9/10" The first three episodes were almost the loveliest season yet. The first two seasons were very lovingly directed but this one trumps them both. This is definitely a show where you will be rewarded for watching carefully. Sonic Highways (2014) -- "8/10" This single-season series follows the Foo Fighters through several of the cities they've toured and lived in over the twenty years of their career. Lots of nice stories, nice people and great music. Having fun with it so far, but haven't finished watching the whole season. Doctor Strange (2016) -- "7/10" This Marvel Universe movie starring Benedict Cumberbatch, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Mads Mikkelsen, Rachel McAdams and Tilda Swinton was better than I expected it to be. It's about an arrogant but brilliant surgeon who loses the loss of his hands and goes on a mission to Tibet to find a fabled wizard who can heal him. He ends up healing himself by becoming super-freaking-mystical and mastering powers that allow him to manipulate dimensional energy. There's of course an evil, evil enemy bent on the destruction of life as we know it. You get the drill. Entertaining. The Sopranos: Season 1--6 (1999) -- "9/10" This show is every bit as brilliant as people say it is. There's a good overall story arc, but the shows are very much character-driven. The writing and dialogue is really great. We're near the end of season three and the quality is still very high. Looking forward to the next three seasons. "Carmella: You got a driver's license, not a license to go carousing around on a school night." Tony: A.J. says he's got no purpose. Melfi: What did you say? Tony: I told him it's cost me about $150,000 to raise him so far and if he's got no purpose, I want a refund. "Melfi: You're both very angry. Tony: Oh, you must have been at the top of your fuckin' class." "Sil: You could have as many kids as the Kennedys, you're married to a twat, what does it matter?" "Melfi: What do you think she sees in you? Tony: I dunno. Maybe with all of the faggots and crybabies runnin' around. Whatever I am, at least it's not that." Lucas Bros: On Drugs (2017) -- "7/10" The Lucas Bros are twin-brother comedians who perform together, finishing each other's sentences. The specialize in black-commentary comedy, callbacks and meta-comedy. I liked their delivery and a lot of their material was polished and funny. Decent. Get Hard (2015) -- "7/10" Better than expected, actually. This is Ferrell's second movie lampooning/satirizing the rich (the other was The Other Guys, which came out soon after the last global financial crash). Kevin Hart kind of always plays himself, but it's a good character. Alison Brie (of Community fame) was refreshingly good and Will Ferrell played a much better person than he usually does. Recommended. Mission: Impossible: Ghost Protocol (2011) -- "8/10" Changed my opinion on this one. Gave it an extra point. I don't know what I was thinking when I wrote the "last time" that "she’s probably officially cast as “eye-candy” although for me she doesn’t even fill that role particularly well" Predators (2010) -- "6/10" Adrien Brody, Topher Grace, Laurence Fishburne, Danny Trejo, Mahershala Ali, Alice Braga and several other warriors are part of a group selected by the predators to be beamed in to a death-duel planet. It's a pretty thin plot device to get a bunch of militaristic characters into an infighting pile of conflicting personalities. The plot followed the standard predator plot: kill or be killed; the predators eliminate a bunch of the humans, then the humans eliminate some predators, then there's a showdown. Not recommended. Tracy Morgan: Stayin' Alive (2017) -- "6/10" This is Morgan's first appearance since his near-fatal car crash with a UPS truck. Some of his material is based on these experiences, some of his material is unnecessarily filthy. By that I mean that it's not particularly clever (or funny) but it's shocking. You can try to convince yourself that he's trying to ironically point out the meta-comedy he's mining by offending those who take themselves too seriously, but it's tough to figure out if he's actually being clever or he's just being a filthy jerk. Not recommended. Seventh Son (2014) -- "5/10" Great effects, great cast (Djimoun Honsou, Jeff Bridges, Julianne Moore, Alicia Vikander), awful execution and story. It's just a mystery how this movie was made. I kept watching for the cast, but it never really got better. Not recommended. Norm Macdonald: Hitler's Dog, Gossip & Trickery (2017) -- "8/10" I was pleasantly surprised to discover how clever (and clean) Norm MacDonald's standup is. It made me check out his book, which was even better. The standup was good and he knows how to craft a joke. His delivery is pretty good, but takes a little getting used to. Check out his book for an even-better experience. Both are recommended. The Day After Tomorrow (2004) -- "6/10" This was a second (or possibly third) viewing of the climate-change disaster movie starring Dennis Quaid, Jake Gyllenhaal, Sela Ward and Ian Holm (Bilbo). The science is ludicrous and the plot is severely strained in several places. It's entertaining enough, but not really that great. Alien: Covenant (2017) -- "6/10" This is the latest installment in the Alien series of films, with Ridley Scott once again at the helm. His vision is interesting and his direction is, as always, lovely, but the plot was just odd. There were so many incongruities and deus ex machinas that involved everyone being spectacularly careless and stupid to drive the plot forward (just like the previous installment, Prometheus). That said, I really liked Michael Fassbender as David and Walter, two androids. The scenes with just the two of them were the best (Fassbender playing against himself). The story was reaching for something interesting but couldn't decide what to do -- and ended up muddling in the standard horror/alien-creature direction that was decidedly less interesting than the more portentous possibilities hinted at in some of the stilted dialogue. Perhaps another viewing would improve things, but it might also just highlight the more glaring plot holes and technological anachronisms. Sarah Silverman: A Speck of Dust (2017) -- "8/10" I gave her an extra star for being much funnier and cleverer than I expected her to be. I expected more shock-comedy material, but it was pretty well thought-out and well-delivered. Recommended. F is for Family s02 (2017) -- "9/10" Season two is even better than season one. A good mix of very funny jokes, running themes, period references, a bit of pathos and excellent characters. There is a lot of polish in the scripts, with dialogue pared down to essentials. The amount of work that went into this show is obvious. Highly recommended. Very funny. "Dragon on your chest. Dragon on your chest. Dragon on your chest. Breathing fire!" Hasan Minhaj: Homecoming King (2017) -- "9/10" After seeing his excellent set at the 2017 White House Correspondents' Dinner, we checked out this special. It's an extremely strong first special, mining his multicultural heritage for a lot of very funny material and providing a story arc across the entire set. Highly recommended. Archer S08 (2017) -- "7/10" This is a decent entry in the pantheon of Archer seasons but not the best. It's set in the 1930s, with the cast playing various crooks, cops and nightclub owners or performers. I liked it but there are better seasons. Rory Scovel Tries Stand-Up for the First Time (2017) -- "8/10" I had no idea who this guy was, but he was a lot funnier than I expected (this seems to be a trend). His delivery reminded me a mixture of Louis C.K. and Bill Murray. His material is pretty good and pretty original. Recommended. Rick and Morty S01--02 -- "9/10" I avoided this show for a while because I thought it was just hype: but it's the real deal. Grandpa Rick Sanchez is a fantastic character, well-written and relentless. He's a genius. He never backs off and he never loses. There is no comeuppance for him. Morty is also a great character, growing with each episode into a more and more interesting and well-developed guy. The rest of the family is also good, but you really watch for Rick. Some choice quotes from Rick below. "It's like the N-word and the C-word had a baby and it was raised by all of the bad words for Jew." "There is no god, Summer; gotta rip that band-aid off now you'll thank me later." "I'll tell you how I feel about school, Jerry: it's a waste of time. Bunch of people runnin' around bumpin' into each other, got a guy up front says, '2 + 2,' and the people in the back say, '4.' Then the bell rings and they give you a carton of milk and a piece of paper that says you can go take a dump or somethin'. I mean, it's not a place for smart people, Jerry. I know that's not a popular opinion, but that's my two cents on the issue." "Like nothing shady ever happened in a fully furnished office? You ever hear about Wall Street Morty? You know what those guys do in their fancy board rooms? They take their balls and dip 'em in cocaine and wipe 'em all over each other. You know Grandpa goes around and he does his business in public because grandpa isn't shady." "Listen, Morty, I hate to break it to you, but what people call "love" is just a chemical reaction that compels animals to breed. It hits hard, Morty, then it slowly fades, leaving you stranded in a failing marriage. I did it. Your parents are gonna do it. Break the cycle, Morty. Rise above. Focus on science." "Now listen, I'm not the nicest guy in the universe. Because I'm the smartest. And being nice is something stupid people do to hedge their bets." ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3372 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3372 Sun, 26 Mar 2017 22:13:54 +0200 -- "8/10" 2. "Chris Rock: Kill the Messenger - London, New York, Johannesburg (2008)" <#Chris> -- "9/10" 3. "Law Abiding Citizen (2009)" <#Law> -- "7/10" 4. "Men in Black (1997)" <#Men> -- "8/10" 5. "Katherine Ryan: In Trouble (2017)" <#Katherine> -- "8/10" 6. "Captain America: Civil War (2016)" <#Captain> -- "7/10" 7. "Fracture (2007)" <#Fracture> -- "7/10" 8. "Trevor Noah: Afraid of the Dark (2017)" <#Trevor> -- "7/10" 9. "Enemy at the Gates (Stalingrad) (2001)" <#Enemy> -- "7/10" 10. "Snowden (2016)" <#Snowden> -- "9/10" 11. "Garfunkel and Oates: Trying to be Special (2017)" <#Garfunkel> -- "8/10" 12. "American Crime Story: The People vs. O.J. Simpson (2017)" <#American> -- "7/10" 13. "Arrival (2016)" <#Arrival> -- "6/10" 14. "Army of Darkness (1992)" <#Army> -- "6/10" 15. "Twin Peaks (1990)" <#Twin> -- "9/10" 16. "Black Mirror (1990)" <#Black> -- "8/10" 17. "Logan (2017)" <#Logan> -- "10/10" 18. "Mike Birbiglia: Thank God for Jokes (2017)" <#Mike> -- "6/10" 19. "Neal Brennan: 3 Mics (2017)" <#Neal> -- "8/10" 20. "The Edge of Seventeen (2016)" <#Seventeen> -- "7/10" These are my notes to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. I've recently transferred my reviews to IMDb and made "the list" of almost 1200 ratings publicly available. I've included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other -- I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. The Two Faces of January (2014) -- "8/10" This is a slow-burning thriller set in 1962 about an American couple -- Chester (Viggo Mortensen) and Colette (Kirsten Dunst) -- on vacation who meet an American tour guide Rydal (Oscar Isaac), who is living and working in Greece. They engage his services and they get to know one another. The husband Chester is suspicious and slightly jealous of Rydal. Rydal seems to be open and only somewhat crooked (he tends to add to prices in order to enlarge his cut). The story is based on the book of the same name by Patricia Highsmith, who also wrote The Talented Mr. Ripley. After their week together in Greece, Rydal bids them adieu, only to soon after their parting discover Colette's bracelet in the taxi. He takes it back only to find Chester dragging a body down the hotel hallway. Chester assures him that the man is a drunk who was trying to con him and that he'd knocked him out. Rydal believes him initially, but he is soon embroiled in their attempt to get away from further pursuers -- Chester has swindled people out of money and is on the run with Colette. They continue to Crete by boat and bus, heading for Iraklion, waiting for replacement passports for Chester and Colette, when tragedy strikes. They end up in Istanbul, on the run from police. Intrigue abounds. I would have given a seven for the script, but added a star for the acting, for the mood and the setting. Chris Rock: Kill the Messenger - London, New York, Johannesburg (2008) -- "9/10" Rock had last done a show during the Bush years, in 2004. This show was filmed in three cities just at the end of the election in 2008, before the election of Barack Obama. Rock talks about Obama, McCain and the election, as well as some foreign-policy issues, but quickly settles into his main material, dealing with issues of race and gender. His best work is when he finds exactly the things that one side can obviously do but the other side obviously cannot -- even though it's the same thing. His physical comedy (he dances) is apropos, his grimaces and growling/shouting voice enhance his jokes. He comports himself like a preacher, bringing back punchlines or aphorisms to underscore his examples. (E.g. his emphatic bits that end in "that's right. I said it!" or "It's not the words, it's the context in which they are spoken.") He's a hell of a bombastic guy, just pure power on stage. He's not always right -- but he's never all wrong. Even with his discussions of the differences between men and women: even when you're thinking that this doesn't apply to you, it's still funny because what he says definitely has a kernel of truth for many others. I know that this is over-explaining it, but I'm trying to explain why his show holds together better than those of others I've seen. His best joke, I thought, was the one about his house in Alpine, New Jersey, a very rich neighborhood where he has a house worth millions ("don't hate the player; hate the game") but almost all of his neighbors are white. He is one of four black people in the neighborhood. The others are Jay-Z, Mary J. Blige and Eddie Murphy. They are all stellar talents at the top of their game. What does Rock's white neighbor do? He's a dentist. This is a raucous, bawdy show with no holds barred. Brace yourself if you don't like filthy comedy. He's hilarious, politically nuanced and on-point, but he doesn't mince his words nor does he care at all whether you approve of what he says or how he says it. Do not watch this with un-hip relatives looking to prove that they're not racist. I'm looking forward immensely to the new show, Total Blackout. Law Abiding Citizen (2009) -- "7/10" Jamie Fox plays Nick Rice, an assistant DA who has a laser-like focus on his conviction record. Gerard Butler is Clyde Shelton, a man to whom we're introduced with a home invasion in which his wife and daughter are brutally tortured and killed right in front of him. I found him more sympathetic in this role than either Mel Gibson or Liam Neeson have been in very-similar roles. There are two perpetrators, but one (Ames) watches the event spiral out of control while the other (Darby) spins them that way. The case goes to trial but, because of a weak evidence, Rice plays it safe and accepts Darby's plea down to five years while Ames gets the death penalty. Shelton is incensed. Fast forward to ten years later and Rice is even more successful, on his way to Ames's execution. It goes horribly wrong and Ames suffers terribly. There are signs that the poisons were sabotaged. Darby is kidnapped and tortured horribly. We are quickly shown that Shelton has reappeared for what he claims is justice, not vengeance. He allows himself to be arrested and convicted and the chess game begins between him and Rice. It turns out that Shelton is a wet-ops brain guy sans pareil. He's playing a very long game. Rice and the rest of Philadelphia are hopelessly outmatched. Until they're not. It was going along so nicely until the last 10 minutes. Spoiler alert. Clyde (Gerard Butler) is otherwise so clever and prepared. He has cameras installed in the main meeting room, but he has no cameras on the room in which he placed the bomb? And he placed it so obviously in an attaché case? And there's no motion sensor in the bag? My phone has a motion sensor. So they moved the bomb back to his cell and let him blow up half the prison? Why? Why not just disarm the damned thing or put it a swamp? Why not just block his damned cell-phone signal? The last minute, showing Rice with his wife, watching a cello recital of his daughter's was utter pap. This feels like the ending that they tacked on because the stupid test audience was horrified when Shelton won. Minus one star for the bad ending. Men in Black (1997) -- "8/10" Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones star as J and K, respectively, agents of the M.I.B. Rip Torn is Zed, the director of the organization. Vincent D'Onofrio plays a man being driven by an alien bug living in his body, Linda Fiorentino is a morgue director who's wise to the alien presence on the planet. Tony Shaloub is a pawn-shop owner who's also an alien. The effects and story hold up remarkably well for a 20-year--old film about aliens on planet Earth. Still recommended. Katherine Ryan: In Trouble (2017) -- "8/10" I'd never heard of Katherine before but was very glad I tuned in. She delivered a very funny and natural set, with a lot of continuity and sharp observation. She was born in a poor Canadian town on the southern border and has been living in England for a long time. She's the single mother of a 6-year--old daughter. A lot of her jokes and stories are observational about Canada and England with a bit about the U.S. as well. She's not shy, but not as over-the-top rude as Chris Rock. Would watch again. Recommended. Captain America: Civil War (2016) -- "7/10" This movie was better than I expected it to be. The action was tamer than in the other movies, which says more about how ludicrously over-the-top the action was before. I started my "review of the comic books" with "In which Tony Stark proves once again that there is nothing so self-righteous and self-assured as a dry drunk." This is also the case in the movie. The plot was decent, the movie a bit long, Tony Stark so, so, so, so stupid. He was easily manipulated from start to finish and it wasn't obvious why. There's always his ego to consider, his guilt at feeling like he was responsible for every death, but it was desperately simplistic. They barely tried to show why he would act the way he does. The basic premise at the center is a good one: that the Avengers shouldn't be allowed to act with impunity just because they have powers. That they aren't elected, that there is no democratic control over them and their power. That's a good point. We don't like vigilantism anywhere else; why with the super-powerful? But that Stark would immediately accept the "U.N" as the oversight is laughable, considering his historical rebelliousness in literally every other movie. It wasn't the U.N. but the U.S. government, which no-one who can read above a first-grade level would trust with oversight of superheroes. And yet Stark was on board immediately, guilted into it by meeting the mother of a young man who died in an Avengers battle, who blamed Stark personally. And he is so one-dimensional that this is all it takes to convince him. No-one even raises the question as to who should really be to blame for the carnage unleashed by a Norse God leading a pack of hyper-dimensional dragon-worms on a rampage through New York City. Apparently they are all immediately in agreement that the blame lies with the selfless heroes who stopped him. The blame lies wholly on them since they let a single person die. Criminals, the lot of them. This is typical of American philosophy, though, I guess. Just disappointing. The U.S. Secretary of State -- played by William Hurt, slumming it -- played one video after another, blaming the people who stopped the destruction for having caused it. The incident that broke the camel's back was the accidental bombing of a part of a floor of a single building in Lagos. The videos that preceded it are of Loki's flattening of New York and Ultron's lifting of a most of a country from the surface of the Earth. And then the bombing of part of a building was the thing the world could no longer stand. Dumb. Sad. There is a point to be made here, but the movie doesn't make it. Vision comes at it a bit sideways by pointing out that maybe the prevalence of heroes invites combat with them, but the point is quickly dropped for purely emotional reasons. Chris Evans as Captain America is very good -- coming from a time in America when the Dulles brothers were running the show, he's more suspicious. The plot is bigger than even this 2.5-hour film. The puppetmaster is Daniel Brühl as Zemo, an ex-hydra soldier who lost his family in the Ultron attack on Zakovia. He does a great job, with perhaps the best character-building, constantly calling the last phone message he had from his wife. However, his grand plan is utterly transparent. He literally tells it to them and it works on Stark anyway. He shows Stark, Bucky (Winter Soldier) and Cap a video of the Winter Soldier killing Tony's parents. Stark believes it 100%. This is about an hour after he finds out that he ruined the Avengers because he believed that the first video released by Zemo blaming Bucky for an attack was real. Which it wasn't. So Stark is dumber than dumb, even though he's a genius? This is hard to follow, much less swallow. Even given that the video is real, Zemo had killed the super-soldiers that they all thought were the weapons that he was after -- then told them that his plan was to have them fight to the death and Stark is OK with that. Positively dives into it without thinking. And then there's the matter that Stark's father built all of America's weapons for ... 50 years? Sowing death and destruction while making billions, if not trillions. Then he was killed with his wife because he was driving somewhere to deliver the super-soldier serum that was an uncontrollable weapon. Hardly an innocent man, but Stark sees only vengeance -- ironically enough -- because someone killed his Mommy (who also lived a life of luxury as the wife of the world's leading weapons merchant). In fact, I missed the Hulk, but I think the director just transplanted the Hulk's intelligence and personality into Tony Stark. So Stark was played perfectly as an asshole by Robert Downey Jr. -- just like in the comic. The other actors were all quite good. I have to say I like the new Spider-man (again). Renner as Hawkeye was fun. Fracture (2007) -- "7/10" Anthony Hopkins continues his run of roles in which he plays a Hannibal-Lecter--like killer. This time he's a husband who's found out that his wife is cheating on him. He gives himself up pretty easily, turning himself in to the detective with whom his wife was cuckolding him. Hopkins elects to defend himself (of course) and he selects Will Beecham (Ryan Gosling) as his prosecutor. Beecham is a rising star with one foot out of the DA's office and one foot into a superstar lawyer job at a superstar lawyer firm, working for Rosamund Pike, with whom he's also started an affair. He continues to work the case -- as his last case for the DA -- but Hopkins outfoxes him at every turn. The murder weapon can't be matched; the confessions are invalid because the detective who'd been banging his wife and who attacked him at the scene, to boot, was in attendance; his wife is hanging on by a thread. Hopkins pleads for acquittal and is granted it. After the trial, Hopkins elects to pull the plug on her, finishing the job he started with a bullet weeks before. Long story short (and spoiler alert), Gosling meets Hopkins at his house, just before he leaves on a long trip. There, Hopkins admits that he did shoot his wife, but that he cannot be retried for the attempted murder because that would be double jeopardy and unconstitutional. Gosling smiles and thanks him for the confession, then arrests him for the murder of his wife, carried out when he pulled the plug. The end. Trevor Noah: Afraid of the Dark (2017) -- "7/10" It's a pretty good set with a lot of observational humor about New York, a lot about Scotland, a long bit about Nelson Mandela and Barack Obama. He does a ton of accents, all of which are pretty good -- recognizable and fun. Usually the payoff is pretty good, but some of his jokes are long setups. Then, out of nowhere, we see that while racist comedy is no longer OK, it's completely acceptable in the US today to make jokes about Russians that you wouldn't get away with for anyone but persona non grata. It was OK, but the premise was that the Russian accent is scary, that there is nothing scarier than Russians, that they just take whatever countries they want. Ignorant. It's as bad as Bill Burr's extended fat-shaming bit. It was uneven, but had some fun bits. Enemy at the Gates (Stalingrad) (2001) -- "7/10" Vasily Zaitsev (Jude Law) is sent to the front to fight the Nazis at Stalingrad. He survives the initial slaughter and proves his mettle by sniping five Germans. He is promoted to the sniper corps and starts taking out dozens of Germans. He has a significant affect and the Germans import their own sniper: Major König (Ed Harris). Joseph Fiennes is Vasily's friend, a political officer. Bob Hoskins is Nikita Kruschev. Rachel Weisz is the clever love interest, Tania Chernova. Ron Perlman plays another soldier, Koulikov. The duel between the two snipers is grueling and deliberate. The accents are a bit offputting. The Germans speak German or English with German accents. The Russians all speak with English accents. Snowden (2016) -- "9/10" Oliver Stone delivers another important and eminently watchable historical documentary. There was some embellishment but it was, in its substance, accurate. The recent and further revelations by Wikileaks about the CIA just bring the point home that Edward Snowden's work isn't done. Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Snowden, Melissa Leo is Laura Poitras, Zachary Quinto is Glenn Greenwald, Nicholas Cage plays Hank Forrester (based in large part on "William Binney" ) and Tom Wilkinson plays Ewen MacAskill, an editor from The Guardian. Snowden starts out as an Army Recruit (Special Forces) but washes out with two broken legs. He moves to the CIA, where he excels. He moves on to the NSA, again quitting because of moral/ethical issues. He ends up as a contractor for the NSA because he doesn't know what else to do with himself. He catches wind that a giant eavesdropping program that he wrote is being used without compunction on everyone and without warrants, to boot. He decides to reveal what he knows to the world: he sneaks out the data and delivers it to Poitras, Greenwald and The Guardian. This is the story the world should know. It's true and it happened pretty much this way (with some embellishment). Highly recommended. Garfunkel and Oates: Trying to be Special (2017) -- "8/10" The two chanteuse/comediennes put together a pretty good show, filled with funny and NSFW songs. Some of the material was collected from other shows, but it was a greatest hits and well-written. Recommended. American Crime Story: The People vs. O.J. Simpson (2017) -- "7/10" This a ten-show retelling of the O.J. Simpson story that stars Cuba Gooding Jr. as O.J., John Travolta as Robert Shapiro, Sarah Paulson as Marcia Clark, David Schwimmer as Robert Kardashian, Nathan Lane as F. Lee Bailey and so on. Courtney B. Vance was very good as Christopher Darden. There are no heroes in this story: the cops messed up, LA is a racist shithole, filled with terrible cops and terrible people. The rich only care about their own. O.J. probably got away with murder, but the trial was decided correctly, based on the evidence available. It was interesting enough, but nothing to shout about. Arrival (2016) -- "6/10" I expected more out of this supposedly smart science-fiction movie. The movie tried too hard to please everyone, including the Academy, I think. It felt like it had gone through some dumbing-down versions. Were people really so thrown by the name of the aliens -- heptapods -- that they had to explain the etymology on-screen? I thought the two scientists were far too weak, too cowed by the military, playing the typical roles of geeks only too eager to please their supposed superiors. It was very believable in that sense, but I didn't enjoy that story. Watching administration flunkies and wonks as well as Forest Whitaker as the chief of the whole affair browbeat the scientists into fitting their theories into their worldview, while believable, wasn't much fun. I was (semi-)silently screaming at them to defend themselves, to tell the military that can't be in charge because they don't know anything. I would ordinarily like this kind of slow movie, but it wasn't thoughtful enough. Adams throws in a speech about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis -- which posits that a mind can be affected by the language used by a person. There are two versions: a strong one where it is posited that the mind is constrained by language, that the thoughts a mind is capable of are limited to those that can be expressed in the language(s) known to a person. The weak version posits that language influences but does not constrain or limit. Adams -- the leading linguistics expert on the planet -- describes this as the capability of a language to change how a mind works or can change its basic structure and capabilities -- a super-powered version of the weak version. This doesn't really have anything to do with linguistic relativity and sounds much stronger than even the strong version defined above. As she learns the alien language, she discovers that the language that the aliens speak has a concept of time that does not include a single present, that the aliens experience what we see as the arrow of time as a fourth spatial dimension that can be traveled mentally. It's weird and interesting, but I thought they crammed it all in to the last ten minutes, focusing instead of prosaic issues of military striving and the efforts of humans -- those in power -- to compartmentalize and constrain the wonder of alien ships that hover off the ground and can change localized gravity. Humans are in no way on a level playing field with these beings and no-one in this movie even acknowledged the overarching wonder of it. Humanity was not humbled. Oh, and the U.S. reacted with military organization but not violence whereas the Chinese and Russians (of course) reacted unreasonably and uncooperatively. A tale America tells to itself about its own essential goodness and reasonableness. There's better sci-fi out there. Not recommended. Army of Darkness (1992) -- "6/10" I have fond memories of this movie -- I killed time on a rainy afternoon on Florida spring break one year and was pleasantly surprised at how funny the movie was -- but it hasn't stood the test of time as well as it could have. There are a lot of stop-motion effects and broad, physical comedy. Bruce Campbell is very charismatic. He and director Sam Raimi do all they can for this movie, but I can't recommend it anymore. There are good bits and it passed the time during a couple of workouts, but it's not a must-watch. I gave it an extra star for nostalgia. Twin Peaks (1990) -- "9/10" This is David Lynch's only directorial work for television. He co-wrote the convoluted script about a small town near the Canadian border that suffers through the murder of its prom queen, Laura Palmer. Kyle MacLachlan is Special Agent Dale Cooper, leading the investigation for the FBI. There is almost too much detail to include here -- and it's all been excruciatingly detailed elsewhere. The writing is superb, the acting is above-par, the music is great, the sets are detailed and chock-full of information and nearly everything is just delightfully off. The story comprises multiple arcs, all intertwined and intricate. Miguel Ferrer as Albert Rosenfield has some of the best lines: "I do not ask you to understand these tests. I'm not a cruel man. I've got a lot of cutting and pasting to do, gentlemen, so why don't you return to your porch rockers and resume whittling." I'm deep into the second season and the show is really getting intricate and going off the rails at the same time. The confluence of prosaic, real-world as well as the esoteric and magical and then the madcap and slapstick all combines to create a helluva ride. Lynch's imprimatur is on every second, on every inch of the set, in every line, suffusing every zany character and conversation. The original story -- solving the murder of Laura Palmer -- culminates in episode 10 of season 2. The evil at the heart of the crime is supernatural -- and that beast is still on the prowl. The second season starts to go off the rails a bit, with a flurry of new characters and concepts introduced after the evil of Bob is dispatched. There are UFOs, a mysterious partner from Cooper's past, more vicious Canucks and Nadine woke up from her coma with the mind of a fifteen-year--old. The list goes on and it's a bit difficult to keep track as the second season presses on. It's really hard to imagine this show having aired in its entirety on ABC in the early 90s. All in all, it holds up remarkably well. I'm looking forward to the revival show -- it brings back almost all of the original cast as well as the writers and director. Black Mirror (1990) -- "8/10" This is a thoroughly enjoyable, modern-day Twilight Zone. The first season was decent, starting off with the weakest episode (the pig-fornication performance art) and moving on to the strongest (the recorder in everyone's head). The second season has slightly stronger production values with better writing, again moving from weakest to strongest over the season. The themes are similar, dealing with technology and its potential for negatively disrupting age-old processes. Some of these processes are broken, but the technological fix isn't always better. Generally, each show focuses on a single technological advancement, with others subtly available throughout an otherwise recognizable world. My favorite so far has been "White Christmas" , starring Oona Chaplin and Jon Hamm, about the subjectivity of time, cloning and punishment. Logan (2017) -- "10/10" Logan is, from start to finish, a fantastic movie. It is enriched by knowing more of the back-story. It is the finale the series deserves, the denouement Wolverine has earned. The story is minimalist, in the best tradition of science fiction and cinematic storytelling, filling in only little details, letting incidental comments tell whole swaths of history. On the surface, it’s at least partially an action movie. That is what many will see, to the exclusion of the film that I saw. Those seeking only standard superhero fare will likely be bored. Those shocked by raw violence will turn away as well. But the movie has so much more, even on the surface. It’s a real movie, a real story, with pathos strung on the skeleton of a science-fictional world, a world with mutants and a world that had heroes, but discarded them. It’s about the futility of existence, about the bastards winning, grinding down, with inexorable, stubborn mindlessness, all that is good—all that which gives hope and purpose, a reason for going on. It is the story of a man longer in years than any since Biblical times, seeing that he came from nothing and will end in nothing. He is heroic, but unnoticed, of no consequence. He keeps fighting the windmills, the whirlwind. Why? Because it’s there. Life is pain, stoically borne. Please see my "full-length review" for more. Mike Birbiglia: Thank God for Jokes (2017) -- "6/10" This was a decent special but nothing to write home about. He has a nice delivery but his material is largely uncontroversial. He's more of a nice storyteller and less of a big-joke guy. He was a bit too self-referential and ended with a plea to not take his relatively inoffensive jokes the wrong way, which felt a bit weak, as he was barely offensive at all. Well-written but not too thought-provoking or hilarious. Neal Brennan: 3 Mics (2017) -- "8/10" Neal has quite a storied history: he was Dave Chapelle's writing partner on the original show. He wrote the cult classic Half Baked. His "3 mics" are for one-liners, personal stories and standup material. He's better than Birbiglia and has funnier, more biting material. His bit about testosterone is well-done. Recommended. The Edge of Seventeen (2016) -- "7/10" This is a decent coming-of-age movie that focuses on a family of four that loses its father when the kids are in their early teens. The son Darian (Blake Jenner) is an all-rounder who steps up and keeps the family on an even keel, especially when the mother (Kyra Sedgwick) has talked herself out onto yet another ledge inspired by a nervous depression. The movie's focus is actually on the slightly younger sister Nadine (Hailee Steinfeld) who is a bundle of problems and insecurities, lashing out at anyone and everyone, including but not limited to her brother, her mother and her best friend (Haley Lu Richardson) -- who starts dating Darian early in the film. The characters were unexpectedly well-rounded with Woody Harrelson adding spice as history teacher Max. A decent film about an angsty millennial who makes a lot of trouble for everyone (including her main crush who she misleads horribly, a misdeed for which she utterly fails to apologize, despite him having handled it with just about the most aplomb that you could expect). The other main character is an excellent Hayden Szeto as Erwin, the persistent and all-around excellent guy who ends up "winning" Nadine in the end. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3397 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3397 Sun, 19 Mar 2017 13:24:31 +0100 , for example -- of action movies with pathos, with plots of consequence. It's a movie that thinks only of the current movie, not planning for a sequel. It is a tragedy, there is little hope to be had. It tells of a world gone wrong, a world beyond saving, a world enjoyable only for the rapacious killers and conquerors who ruined it for everyone else. Logan exits the world with no small amount of relief, having fought for a light, a principle that was constantly extinguished by the cruel, the jealous, the stupid, the uncomprehending, the greedy. At the end, he is offered a sliver of redemption, knowing that at least he helped Laura and her friends to an at-least temporary harbor. Charles was also put of his misery, though he still had joy in his life. Characteristically, that joy was mostly due to onset Alzheimer's that shielded his prodigious mind from its own memories. This too was eminently sad, that happiness in that world could only be found in the bliss of ignorance. At the very end, he is lucid again, remembering a vaguely hinted-at mindquake that killed many of his students in Westchester. Alzheimer's was merciful in shielding him from that memory. When it returns, he almost welcomes eternity. There is no light for anyone else, though there are glimpses of beauty. The simplicity and beauty of the horses inadvertently let loose on the highway, when Logan, Chuck and Laura met the farm family who would invite them in. The stark contrast to the "auto-trucks" that career seemingly heedlessly and autonomously along the highways, blaring their automated horns without slowing as they rush immensely past. The wonderful dinner with the family, a rare moment of lucidity for Charles, a rare square meal for Laura. An island of comfort in the eye of the ravenous, lashing storm of the world. Reality intrudes this idyll in stages. First, henchmen of the neighboring mega-agri-corporations turning off their water, drawing the father and Logan away from the home. We seem them walk into a darkened cornfield. In the distance are the harsh, roving lamps of monstrous, looming, shadowy machines, sleeplessly working their fields of gene-manipulated crops. Then mercenaries find them, reluctantly aided by the tortured Caliban, played perfectly by Stephen Merchant. Caliban exits the world by his own hand, taking out several of his captors with two grenades at close quarters. We later see his flayed body being harvested for genetic material, his cruel captors uncaring for the pathos of his existence, uncaring for the loss of his light, uncaring, uncaring, uncaring, seeing only their own greed, their own shallow purpose. They only care that "he was a good tracker." We are introduced here to a clone of Wolverine, a rapacious, mute killer barely controlled by the mercenaries. How much hope can you have now? They can create these killing machines at will. Logan is on his last legs, coughing and shambling. He manages to stave off the initial attack -- with help from the mortally wounded father (Eriq LaSalle) of the farm family. The father turns from the Wolverine clone to shoot Logan as well. Logan looks at him as if urging him to do it, to put him out of his misery, end the guilt of the three newly dead people whom he'd befriended and who had also now died because of their association with him. The man pointing the gun was dead already, and his round could never have killed Logan anyway, but the chamber is empty, clicking loudly before he falls to the ground, his body finally acknowledging his own death. The world didn't even see fit to give either of them the satisfaction. Logan would have welcomed that pain, that punishment. Logan doesn't have the psychic energy to be disappointed, except perhaps as a flicker across his face as he adds another death to a burden of guilt that stretches back centuries. More friends claimed by the insatiable maw of this hellish world. The tsunami wave of heartless and callous reality crashes over their idyll, shattering and flattening another bloom as so many before. As a weary, battered Logan knew that it would. He prevails once again, at great cost. Charles cannot be saved. But we knew that already. He was a husk at the beginning of the movie, doomed. Logan buries him in a glade by a pond, of aching beauty. There is water, the water Logan had promised him with their dream of buy a "Sunseeker" boat, to ply the ocean away from the humans Xavier could harm with his failing powers. Even in this dream, there was the cruel irony that Caliban -- extremely averse to sunlight -- would not have been able to journey with them. Logan and Laura continue on their way, to the chimeric mirage of Eden, another bauble dangled by an inexhaustibly cruel world. Logan doesn't believe in it, his capacity for belief buried beneath jaded cynicism, beneath endless strata of dashed hopes. But Laura does, not having had her light beaten out of her by even the miserable existence she'd been offered so far. She is, after all, still a child, despite her wisdom and stoicism. She also turns out to be right. Their relationship is more as compatriots, not father and daughter. In this, the movie also does not waver, does not veer into sentiment unworthy of either of these noble characters. Logan drives until he falls unconscious; Laura slides one of his legs out of the way and uses the other as a booster seat to continue on. With the help of a mutant booster -- a superpower adrenalin shot -- Logan manages a last-ditch effort to save a group of mutant kids, one last time rising up to be the Wolverine we remember. He ferries them through deep forests -- his native lands, from the comic books -- to the Canadian border, where they would be safe from the marauding U.S. mercenaries and border patrols. He sacrifices his failing body and finally succumbs to wounds too grievous for his failing power to heal. He seems relieved that, at long last, he can rest. In the end, they all accomplished nothing. Laura survives with her group of friends, but their future is very uncertain. They banged their wills against the walls of the world and the world didn't care: it didn't want them, not on their terms. It wanted only to use them, to dictate terms set by its cruel rulers. In the words of T.S. Eliot, "this is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but with a whimper." The world won't even notice that they are gone -- it barely even remembered or knew that they existed -- and can't even acknowledge the loss of a light that it never treasured, that it couldn't understand. Charles Xavier -- the world's most powerful telepath -- and Logan -- a man who'd borne so much -- both died in anonymity, discarded by an uncaring and uncomprehending world. "Out, out, brief candle! Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player That struts and frets his hour upon the stage And then is heard no more: it is a tale Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, Signifying nothing." Johnny Cash's A Man Comes Around [1] plays over the initial credits. The perfect song to end a movie that transcended the superhero genre to become a great movie. [2] "And I heard, as it were, the noise of thunder One of the four beasts saying, 'Come and see.' and I saw, and behold, a white horse" "There's a man goin' 'round takin' names And he decides who to free and who to blame Everybody won't be treated all the same There'll be a golden ladder reachin' down When the man comes around "[...] "And I heard a voice in the midst of the four beasts And I looked, and behold a pale horse And his name that sat on him was death, and hell followed with him" -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] The Wikipedia entry for this song speaks of "the man" as Jesus Christ, but I don't believe at all that that's what Cash meant. The man is clearly Death. Death rides a pale ("white") horse. Death is one of the four horseman of the Apocalypse. Death is he who comes around at the end. Death is "the man" who finally came around for Logan. Cash even names him in the last verse. In the song as well, "hell followed with him", emphasizing the movie's sentiment that all that will follow this twilight chapter of the X-Men is a world impoverished of hope, of meaning -- Hell. [1] Perhaps tellingly, it was the first Marvel movie without a cameo by Stan Lee, whose only credit is as executive producer. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3363 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3363 Sat, 11 Feb 2017 16:41:36 +0100 -- "8/10" 2. "Clueless (1995)" <#Clueless> -- "6/10" 3. "Christela Alonzo: Lower Classy (2017)" <#Christela> -- "8/10" 4. "Jason Bourne (2016)" <#Jason> -- "4/10" 5. "Jesus Christ Superstar (1973)" <#Jesus> -- "7/10" 6. "The Poseidon Adventure (1972)" <#Poseidon> -- "6/10" 7. "BoJack Horseman (2014)" <#BoJack> -- "9/10" 8. "Sherlock S04 (2017)" <#Sherlock> -- "9/10" 9. "Out of the Furnace (2013)" <#Furnace> -- "6/10" 10. "Bill Burr: Walk Your Way Out (2017)" <#Bill> -- "7/10" 11. "John Dies at the End (2012)" <#John> -- "7/10" 12. "Kung Fu Hustle (2004)" <#Kung> -- "8/10" 13. "Chris Rock: Never Scared (2004)" <#Chris> -- "9/10" 14. "Short Circuit (1986)" <#Short> -- "4/10" 15. "Team America: World Police (2004)" <#Team> -- "10/10" 16. "Dressed to Kill (1980)" <#Dressed> -- "7/10" These are my notes to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. I've recently transferred my reviews to IMDb and made "the list" of almost 1200 ratings publicly available. I've included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other -- I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. Ip Man 3 (2015) -- "8/10" This is the third in a pretty satisfying Kung Fu film series. It continues the focus on Ip Man's personal life with Kung Fu featuring in a relatively well-integrated way. Ip Man's son fights the new boy at school, whose Kung Fu is arguably better than his. The boy's father, Cheung Tin-chi (Jin Zhang) shows up and meets Ip Man (Donnie Yen). Ip Man is the (nearly) undisputed master of Wing Chun in the region. Tin-chi begs to differ. Tin-chi is a good man, but poor and ambitious. He fights in illegal boxing for local gangs. He pulls a rick-shaw. He dreams of opening a school of his own. The local gangs make trouble at Ip Man's son's school. Mike Tyson is the driving force behind this agitation -- he wants to develop property on the school grounds. Tyson is decent and put to good use, believe it or not. I can't say whether his Cantonese is ridiculous. His fight with Donnie Yen is quite good. Ip Man and his Wing Chun acolytes defend the school. Tin-chi comes to help, but receives no credit -- instead, Ip Man is heralded in the press, even though he doesn't want to be. Donnie Yen is an ocean of stillness, as usual. Ip Man's wife grows ill with cancer. Ip Man focuses on her. Tin-chi rises to fame, defeating one master after another, finally calling out Ip Man. Ip Man foreits the fight because he has a dancing date with his wife. He never even considers showing up. He continues to care for her, until she tells him to accept the challenge and defend his pride. He does, and wins decisively. The choreography is wonderful, the cinematography very pretty and stately. No shaky cam here. Recommended. Clueless (1995) -- "6/10" Alicia Silverstone plays the most popular girl in a high school in Beverly Hills. She is not without insight, but she is laser-like focused on fashion and appearance and manipulating her teachers into giving her better grades. She is not as dumb as she acts. Her friends are. Paul Rudd is her stepbrother, with whom she eventually becomes romantically involved. There are typical high-school hijinks along the way. The movie is more tongue-in-cheek and aware of its irony than you would think. It's not great, but it was entertaining enough. Christela Alonzo: Lower Classy (2017) -- "8/10" She starts a little slow, playing to crowd adulation a bit too much, but quickly finds her groove. Her material is often smart, with good presentation. She talks about being a Latina in America, growing up poor, her fierce mother, buying stuff at Bloomingdales and so on. The final bit was a bit long in the setup -- though the punchline was good, it took a long, sad trip to get there, which took a bit of the air out of the room. All in all, a fun set. Jason Bourne (2016) -- "4/10" This movie is an insult to the rest of the series. It was visually confusing, with a mess of quick takes in fight scenes and car chases, and shaky cam everywhere else. It's one Deus Ex Machina after another. The Greek police label their uniforms in English. Athens busses shows locations in the latin alphabet, their computers have US keyboards and their Google searches in German. The hackers in Reykjavik speak German and English and say even stupider stuff than usual (for Hollywood hackers). Their stupidity is outdone only by the God-like techs at the CIA, who also speak utter gobbledygook. And I don't really expect it from an American movie these days, but why can't we have at least a little guilt about the level of intrusiveness? The movie just assumes that the CIA has access to everything and makes very little waves about it. They're all just doing their jobs. This movie is just more propaganda normalizing the incredibly invasive U.S. surveillance regime. The CIA has lag-less, HD eyes on the ground everywhere in a rioting Athens, locating targets from thousands of miles away within seconds. In London, the most-surveilled city in the world, they have no cameras. The CIA is otherwise omniscient, all-seeing, in possession of a seamless panopticon that obeys neither the speed of light nor Shannon's laws. Jason Bourne is no longer careful at all. Neither he nor his associates exhibit any basic computer security. They plug foreign USB sticks into their machines, while connected to the network. The CIA can connect to any device in the world (like a phone) and jump the air gap to a hardened laptop. Bourne doesn't even shy from large, open windows. The head of the CIA cyber division sends him a "secret" message over the phone line that the CIA was just using to talk to Bourne. Bourne trusts her immediately. He takes a device from her, not suspecting at that she might be trying to track him. He loses control for no clear reason. He doesn't pluck the earpiece from his contact's ear until really late. He's just dumb now. It's sad. He walks into traps and gets out by luck. Why doesn't the CIA pin the murder of their director on her? It was a bullet from her gun that killed him. They know this. Bourne is shot, but it doesn't hurt him (not like the other movies). Neither does getting shot hurt his opponent, who is superhuman. HIs powers are exceeded only by the SWAT truck he steals, which does not obey the laws of physics. It plows through no less than 30 cars without slowing at all. Or scratching. Or triggering an air bag. Bourne's car also has no air-bag trigger. Until the car is smashed into a tiny box from he crawls, unscathed. His opponent also doesn't feel car crashes. Bourne finally does something halfway clever in the last two seconds, but it's far too late for this movie. Will not watch the obvious sequel. Not recommended. Jesus Christ Superstar (1973) -- "7/10" We follow Jesus Christ's life in a rock-opera musical adapted from the stage. The stories are familiar to anyone who knows a bit about the Bible New Testament. Some are about Jesus's life -- water into wine, money-changers, etc. -- but the focus is on his association with Judas, both starting there and ending there. Some of the pieces are pretty catchy. The main, thumping bass and electric-guitar refrain that opens the film and reprises in Trial Before Pilate (Including the 39 Lashes) is pretty sweet. King Herod's Song (Try It and See) is an irreverent, rocking cabaret tune. The title song Superstar is classic 70s kitsch rock that ramps up to a manic pace, again with a strong bass line. Likewise for the free-jazz piano/bass/drum combo in The Crucifixion. Mary Magdelene's tunes are mostly pretty lame. Judas is good. Pilate's not bad, a bit extravagant. The costumes and props are partially period and partially anachronistic (obviously coming from the 70s). Pilate's praetorian guard is equipped with lavender tank-tops and machine guns. Gave it an extra star for the songs and for Judas and his backup dancers' costumes during his heavenly comeback in the final number. The Poseidon Adventure (1972) -- "6/10" This is one of the classic star-packed 70s disaster movies. It stars Gene Hackman as a shouty priest, Ernest Borgnine as a shouty former police detective accompanied by a former prostitute (Stella Stevens), Red Stevens, Roddy McDowell, Pamela Sue Martin and, of course, Shelly Winters. The Poseidon is a boat on its farewell cruise, on its way to its new owners in Greece. The captain (Leslie Neilson) wants to take on more ballast to compensate for the heavy swells, but the new owners forbid it, telling him to make full steam to make up for already lost time. An undersea 7.2 earthquake directly in their path triggers a giant oceanic wave -- that, for reasons unknown, breaks in the middle of the ocean, just in front of the ship -- that capsizes the boat completely, leaving it upside-down and killing most of the passengers and crew immediately. The movie focuses on a good-sized group of passengers in the main dining room in the upper decks -- now the lower decks -- who fight about whether to sit tight and wait for rescue or to climb to the hull and find a way out. A young boy who knows everything about the ship because he was a nosy little fuck for the whole ride tells them that the hull is the thinnest -- one inch thick -- near the propellers. Gene Hackman and Ernest Borgnine shout about this a lot, but eventually head in that direction. They climb a Christmas tree to get out of the dining room, just before a large part of the group is drowned by inrushing water. They continue to climb, to fight amongst themselves and to suffer massive attrition, leaving a group of only six at the end, who bang without rhyme or reason on the hull until their rescuers cut a hole in the hull and save them. The end. BoJack Horseman (2014) -- "9/10" This is a cartoon about an alcoholic man/horse (horse/man?) who lives in Hollywoo(d) named BoJack Horseman (Will Arnett). His star shone briefly and brightly in the 90s when he starred in a sitcom called Horsin' Around -- the residuals from which he seems to be able to ride indefinitely. He is a sad husk of a man, looking for meaning in the shallow pool of Los Angeles and finding, again and again, that he is fundamentally broken -- but also being OK with that. He lives with Todd Chavez (Aaron Paul), a stoner who washed up on his pathetic shore an unknown amount of time ago. Princess Caroline (Amy Sedaris) is his agent, a pink cat with confidence and morality issues of her own. Diane (Alison Brie) joins the group as a ghost writer hired by BoJack's publisher, a disconsolate penguin named Pinky (Patton Oswalt). Diane is human, Vietnamese and also fraught with emotional baggage, though convinced she rises above the rest of the flotsam in the show. Mr. Peanut Butter (Paul F. Thomkins) is a dog who's not bright but basically nice and who had a career arc that aped BoJack's nearly to the letter. Sarah Lynn (Kristen Schaal) is the former child star Horsin' Around who blows in and out of BoJack's life, leaving a wake of drug-infused and -addled terror behind (she's kind of like Lindsey Lohan). Wanda Pierce (Lisa Kudrow) is an owl who awakes from a coma, not having seen any of the nineties. She briefly moves in with BoJack as his girlfriend. It's also a rogue's gallery of cameos, with many lasting several shows: Angela Bassett, Keith Olbermann, Maria Bamford, Stanley Tucci, J.K. Simmons, Alan Arkin, Olivia Wilde, Keegan-Michael Key, Wendie Malick, Wyatt Cenac, Stephen Colbert, John Krasinski, Melissa Leo, Weird Al, Christine Baranski and many more. The story arc over the first two seasons is remarkably coherent and simultaneously deep, dark and poignant -- much more so than I expected. It's a pretty well-written and interesting show with interesting points to make about society. If you like Archer, you'll love this show. Recommended. Sherlock S04 (2017) -- "9/10" Martin Freeman (Dr. Watson), Benedict Cumberbatch (Sherlock), Una Stubbs (Mrs. Hudson) and Mark Gatiss (Mycroft Holmes) return for a fourth season after a long hiatus. The first show was fine, but a bit all-over-the-place and a bit too self-referential and self-indulgent, but the second and third shows more than made up for it. Each of the episodes comprises 90 minutes, focusing on a case -- more or less. It's like watching a movie with two sequels, all at once. The first case focused on Watson's wife Mary's darker past. The second was about a serial killer acting with impunity, Watson and Holmes's rift due to what happened in the first episode and Holmes's seeming dissolution in the face of it all -- though is it all planned? And, if so, by whom? The third picks up threads from the second episode and takes them in wholly unimagined but not trite directions -- though parts of the antagonist's behavior are a bit extreme and contrived. All the while, the specter of Moriarty wends its way throughout the plot. The season ends in a relatively satisfying manner, though somewhat conclusively. It's not clear that a fifth season is in the offing, despite its apparent success -- mostly, I would imagine, due to the nearly unstoppable film careers of the two protagonists. In my opinion, the overall direction of the series to imbue Holmes with more humanity, while satisfying on one level, detracts from his appeal on another. Highly recommended. Out of the Furnace (2013) -- "6/10" This movie is jam-packed with talent. Christian Bale is a relatively honest steelworker Russell Baze. His brother Rodney (Casey Affleck) is an Iraqi war vet who doesn't know what to do with himself and gets into John Petty's (Willem Dafoe) bare-knuckle boxing ring to make back money he lost gambling. Woody Harrelson is Harlan DeGroat, a dangerous player as well. Forest Whitaker is the town's police chief. Zoe Saldana is Russell's ex(-wife?) Russell gets into a car accident after drinking too much (with Petty, who he was paying for Rodney's gambling debts) and serves a few years in prison. Rodney continues his slide, taking up fighting and going to Jersey for the big money, but also where the big danger lies, in the form of Harlan DeGroat. When Russell finds out what happened, he swears silent revenge and heads to New Jersey to hunt and kill DeGroat. He does so, right in front of the police chief -- and damn the consequences. The cast promised more than the movie and script deliver. Not recommended. Bill Burr: Walk Your Way Out (2017) -- "7/10" I expected more from Bill Burr. He had some good jokes. He definitely had original material. But he seemed a bit angrier than usual -- he seemed to be missing something. Maybe he played the material too long before recording it. The Stalin/Hitler thing was interesting, but too long. Gorilla was kinda funny, but too long. The fat-shaming was just too long. The cruise-ship depopulation scheme was inspired and had a lot of nicely woven and recurring punchlines. Overall, not his best, but, even at this worst, better than most. John Dies at the End (2012) -- "7/10" This is a comedy by the writing duo of David Wong and John Cheese, who started the website Pointless Waste of Time -- one of the cleverer and more well-written of the comedy web sites of the early 2000s -- and now work at the helm of Cracked.com. The movie is based on Wong's book of the same name. It's about a mind-bending drug that allows the user to see other dimensions, other beings and other realities/timestreams. Time bends like putty. Awareness spans alternate realities. Monsters break through the thin places. The scenes are built of flashbacks and flash-forwards. The dialogue and concepts are pretty clever and quite funny and cool without being pretentious (IMHO). The film doesn't take itself too seriously -- because how could it? The drug is a seemingly sentient black goo that opens your mind to other dimensions. It infects the protagonists and gives them otherworldly powers to fight the extradimensional would-be conquerors of Earth. Kung Fu Hustle (2004) -- "8/10" This is Stephen Chow's tongue-in-cheek but clearly loving tribute to Kung Fu films. It stars himself as Sing, a young man, down on his luck, looking to get in good with the powerful local gang, the Axe Gang. He is essentially good, but wants to be bad because of a bad incident when he was young. He spent every cent to buy a book about Buddha's Hand Kung Foo from a homeless swindler and believed every word in the book, training every day. When he tried to use his powers to rescue a little deaf girl from being beaten up by a gang, they throw him to the ground and pee on him. She, however, retains the lollipop they were trying to steal from him. Fast-forward two decades and he's given up on goodness and failing at badness. He steals ice cream from a street vendor -- only to discover that its the little girl he rescued when they were children. She kept the lollipop and worships the hero who'd saved her. He wants to know none of this and lashes out. Frustrated, he attacks the inside of the traffic light where he lives with his chubby, hapless and also basically nice buddy (yeah, I know that sounds odd, but it works in the film), denting it baldy -- giving us a hint that there might be more to Sing than meets the eye. Meanwhile, the Axe Gang attacks a poor ghetto, only to find it stalwartly defended by three Kung Fu heroes who'd retired there. The Axe Gang hires two super-killers -- not the best, but very good -- to take care of the problem. They do so, mortally wounding or outright beheading the three warriors, but wake the beast of two Kung Fu masters who also live there -- the crotchety old landlady and her henpecked husband. All of the Kung Fu powers are cartoonish and wonderfully depicted in convincing and comical fashion. Sing gets his entry into the Axe gang and gets his first mission: spring the world's #1 killer from prison in order to take care of the two masters. This man's powers are truly awe-inspiring and even more unbelievable than all of the others. The two masters show up to take out the Axe Gang and the three masters agree to a fight. The two masters win, at first, but the #1 killer cheats and wounds them. Sing finally protests, stands up to him and is pummeled into a cartoonish but nonetheless nearly lifeless pulp. The two masters flee with him and help him convalesce with traditional Chinese medicine -- wrapped up like a mummy. They are astonished to find that he has healed miraculously quickly and has emerged from the chrysalis transformed into a Kung Fu Master unlike any other. When the #1 killer comes calling with the Axe gang in tow, Sing tells the two wounded masters to relax and strides out to confront the horde alone. He annihilates the gang before starting the final fight in earnest. #1 and Sing trade blows in various styles, decimating part of their surroundings with the power of their Kung Fu. The final move -- the hand of the Buddha -- is truly inspired. A funny, beautifully shot and rendered and lovingly made Kung Fu film. Recommended. Chris Rock: Never Scared (2004) -- "9/10" The first couple of minutes are a bit tough, but Rock quickly settles in to a great set. He starts off talking about strippers -- clear heels! -- strip clubs, people that go there, people that eat there, people that can't stop going, etc. It's got a lot to say about politics and about the state of the country -- ideas that have still not been addressed to this day. He's very, very funny, with a great delivery that works well, more often than not. He ends with a long run about relationships, men and women, his family, cheating on your partner, etc. -- very much like previous shows, but with all-new material. Highly recommended. Short Circuit (1986) -- "4/10" The only redeeming thing about this movie is the relatively realistic movement of the robot. For the 80s, that thing moved a lot better than the original Terminator or the antagonist at the end of the original Robocop. Steve Guttenberg is terrible, Fisher Stevens is an insult to all of Southeast Asia and Ally Sheedy is dumb and uninspired. Stevens dresses up in brown-face to play an Indian scientist whose grasp of the English language is supposed to be funny, but is horribly racist and sad. The plot is as predictable as can be. Not recommended. Team America: World Police (2004) -- "10/10" This is Trey Parker and Matt Stone's puppet masterpiece. It depicts America's super-secret spy team deployed around the world to save it -- by destroying it. I've seen this movie a couple of times before. Love it. Best theme song ever: America Fuck Yeah! More relevant than ever. Saw it in German this time around. Dressed to Kill (1980) -- "7/10" The movie starts off with a full-starkers Angie Dickinson in a shower, fantasizing both about watching a man much more attractive than her husband shave himself with a straight razor and also about being attacked from behind in said shower by an unknown assailant. The scene jarringly shifts to an unsatisfactory and banal morning copulation with her boring husband. To limn her life further, we next meet her son, who's a computer genius, working all night on his home-built computer. She meets up with her psychiatrist, Michael Caine, then goes to a museum, where she doesn't try very hard not to hook up with a random, handsome stranger. On leaving, she realizes that she forgot her engagement ring in his apartment and heads back up to retrieve it. In the elevator, a large, blonde woman attacks her with a straight razor, killing her. A high-priced escort named Liz (Nancy Allen) sees her, but can't save her. Caine, Liz and the son are interviewed by Dennis Franz, the local cop. He doesn't know whom to suspect, so he suspects everyone. The blonde from the elevator starts to stalk Liz. The son stalks the blonde with a hidden camera that he built (that's why we need to know that he's a computer genius). Liz is chased onto the subway by both the blonde and a gang of youths. Just before the big blonde attacks Liz, the son shows up to save her. They head back to her place from the subway. They work together to entrap the killer, perhaps suspecting that the killer is actually Caine, in drag. Whaaaaaat? I'm sure the movie was racy and edgy for its time, but it hasn't aged amazingly well. It's still pretty good, but not as amazing as I'd heard. The movie ends incredibly abruptly after one final, violent and nudity-infused scene (this time it's Allen) that reveals itself to have been a nightmare. Saw the unedited version -- which the MPAA wanted to rate X, for whatever reason. Recommended for film buffs, who should see this for historical reasons. Or for anyone who wants to see what counted as titillating almost 40 years ago. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3350 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3350 Sun, 22 Jan 2017 23:08:30 +0100 -- "9/10" 2. "Jen Kirkman: Just Keep Livin'? (2017)" <#Jen> -- "9/10" 3. "Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping (2016)" <#Popstar> -- "7/10" 4. "American Psycho (2000)" <#American> -- "8/10" 5. "Jim Gaffigan: Cinco (2017)" <#Jim> -- "7/10" 6. "Sausage Party (2016)" <#Sausage> -- "7/10" 7. "Ocean's Eleven (1960)" <#Ocean> -- "6/10" 8. "Never Say Never Again (1983)" <#Never> -- "7/10" 9. "Results (2015)" <#Results> -- "5/10" 10. "Requiem for the American Dream (2015)" <#Requiem> -- "9/10" 11. "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (2016)" <#Dirk> -- "9/10" 12. "The Last Days on Mars (2013)" <#Mars> -- "5/10" 13. "Pitch Black (2000)" <#Pitch> -- "7/10" These are my notes to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. I've recently transferred my reviews to IMDb and made "the list" of almost 1200 ratings publicly available. I've included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other -- I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. South Park: Season 20 (2016) -- "9/10" This season follows a single story arc over 10 episodes and sees Parker and Stone at their absolute satirical best. There are member-berries, which impart to their consumer an overwhelming capitulation to nostalgia. There's Mr. Garrison, who dyes his face orange and runs for president on the platform of "fucking other countries up the ass". Gerald is an Internet troll sans pareil named "Skankhunt". He befriends a whole community of trolls through an online acquaintance named "Dildo Schwaggins". The whole school suspects Cartman, the boys are annoyed with him that he's alienating all of their girlfriends and they gang up on him and destroy all of his computer equipment. PC Principal is utterly overwhelmed with the whole situation, unable to know who to support in their bullying fascism and/or freedom. Cartman has a girlfriend Heidi, who's "really smart and really funny". Butters starts a retaliatory movement against the bullying girls with a "Weiners Out" movement. The Danes start a company called TrollTech, which will find out and publish everyone's entire Internet history. An entire city named Fort Collins is targeted with their "weapon". Society there collapses into murderous chaos once everyone can see what everyone else has been doing online. Cartman is terrified that Heidi will find out who he really is and they go to SpaceX to go to Mars. But, of course, SpaceX isn't ready, but Cartman convinces them to let Heidi help figure it out because "she's really smart". He has dreams about Mars and sees the future: men will be milked for sperm and jokes on Mars -- because women, despite his conscious protestations, are not funny -- where women will rule with an iron fist. Hard-hitting and satirical on many levels, introspective about their own own brand of satire, topical (Hillary Clinton and Obama are in it), it's quite a ride. Highly recommended. Jen Kirkman: Just Keep Livin'? (2017) -- "9/10" I really liked Jen's previous special "I’m Gonna Die Alone (And I Feel Fine)" and I really liked this one, as well. She has a nice delivery, rambles everywhere with mini-tangents -- kind of like Bill Burr, but in a 70s-style blouse and high-waisted pants. She talks about taking a trip to Italy on her own, about meditation, about catcalling, about sexual experience and losing your virginity, about family, about her Bostonian Mom, about her Christian upbringing. I laughed out loud a few times. Recommended. Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping (2016) -- "7/10" Andy Samberg leads the rest of the Lonely Island troupe in a mockumentary about Conner (4 Real) who started out as a young rapper in the Style Boys but broke out on his own. His ego gets way ahead of him and his career deteriorates into a joke. He re-unites eventually with his original bandmates and they live happily ever after. There are a lot of good numbers, good lyrics, lots of callbacks and inside jokes (both within the movie and referring to the real world), lots of quick and snappy reparteé and lots of cameos by real-life music stars and hangers-on like Nas, 50 Cent, Ringo Starr, Simon Cowell, Mariah Carey, Pink, Usher, Seal, D.J. Khaled, RZA, Weird Al and so on and so forth. Tim Meadows plays their manager really well, Sarah Silverman is OK as Conner's publicist, Bill Hader is a long-haired roadie, Chelsea Perretti a CMZ reporter, Imogen Poots Conner's fiancé, Joan Cusack, Maya Rudolph and more. It was fun and held together mostly by Samberg's charisma, a decent script and adherence to the mockumentary formula, tongue-in-cheek light-heartedness by all participants. American Psycho (2000) -- "8/10" Christian Bale stars as Patrick Bates, the eponymous psycho. He's a Wall Street trader at Pierce and Pierce, concerned only with "fitting in", looking good, spending ostentatiously, living shallowly, His fiancée (Reese Witherspoon) is obsessed with this father's money and with their upcoming wedding. She doesn't notice that there's nothing to his hollow personality because it matches her own. He's sleeping with their friend's quaalude-addicted girlfriend, who's cheating on her fianceé (Matt Ross). Bates is a consumerist, yuppie, Wall-Street trader with no moral center, nothing to his life whatsoever. He's kind of dumb. He waxes lyrical about pop bands in an attempt to sound intellectual. But he only does so to intoxicated, captive audiences who can't judge him. He structures and curates his whole life to a ludicrous degree, crafting every detail of every interaction. That's why he's so bad at ad-hoc interactions like small talk with his idiot, trader friends (Josh Lucas, Justin Theroux, Bill Sage) or with Detective Kimball (Willem Dafoe). Bates has murderous fantasies that he appears to act on. He lives them out in detail. He confesses bits and pieces to people, but they don't hear him. Is it because he only thinks it? Or because his superficial social circles just aren't listening to anything he says? Despite his high opinion of himself and his excessive grooming and care for his appearance, no-one really likes him. His efforts win him nothing. He doesn't really do anything at his job. He's such a nobody that people keep mistaking him for others. He confesses loud and clear to his lawyer, who neither cares nor believes him. He investigates and discovers that he might be mad: there is no evidence of his murderous work anywhere. Bates is a very unreliable narrator. Bale is quite good in the role, slightly off the whole time, a shell of a man with no empathy within. Jim Gaffigan: Cinco (2017) -- "7/10" A light-hearted and relatively well-presented set from Gaffigan, who doesn't offer any surprises, but has a few good zingers. His material, as usual, consists of: eating, food, being fat, his 5 kids and being lazy. Sausage Party (2016) -- "7/10" This is a cartoon about sentient groceries and household products. They all live in a big store. They have a single overarching desire in their lives: to be bought by the Gods (people) and taken to the Great Beyond -- where everything is beautiful. They are all happy and they all sing to greet each sunny morning, when the store opens at 07:00. Into this world a seed of doubt is thrown by Honey Mustard (Danny McBride). He was taken from the store but was returned. He has seen things. Horrible things. The Gods eat food. Hot dog (Seth Rogan) and bun (Kristen Wiig) embark on a mission to find out what's really going on. They are accompanied by Sammy Bagel and Lavash (a falafel). When they find out, they must adjust their worldview considerably. This movie is very nicely and professionally animated and voiced by a slew of well-known actors and actresses: Bill Hader, Michael Cera, Salma Hayek, James Franco, Edward Norton and more. This movie also earns its R rating well: the food curses a blue streak and they're all alcoholics, drug addicts and horny as hell. A miasma of innuendo infuses every conversation. There is a gigantic food-orgy scene at the end that rivals the one from Caligula. Seriously, those are some dirty groceries. This was a refreshing change of pace from cartoons that play cutesy for the kids and make the adults adduce innuendo from clever double-repartée and pop-culture references. In this one, the layer of kid-stuff is pretty much gone from the get-go. My favorite line? The pototo (Greg Tiernan) singing "The pipes, the pipes, they're calling'...OH JAYSUS FOOK, SHE'S PEELING ME SKIN!" This is a Rogan joint, so there're a lot of references to drugs and not everything works, but Cera and Hill and Hader do a much better job than in End of the World, which was a shit-show. Recommended for those to whom this sounds good. Ocean's Eleven (1960) -- "6/10" This is the original movie, starring Frank Sinatra as Danny Ocean. Dean Martin, Joey Bishop and Sammy Davis Jr. (the Rat Pack) are all on-board as part of the 11. Normal Fell plays another member of the group: "I'd get a 50-foot CrissCraft and leave it in the driveway, just 'cause I could. Then I'd give it away to the mailman or something." Dean Martin also chimes in at another juncture with this lovely sentiment: "Repeal the 14th and 20th amendments: take away the woman's right to vote and make them all slaves." A lot of the guys are former soldiers (from the war 15 years before), some of them are former paratroopers. 53 minutes in and the group is finally collected and we finally start to hear about the big plan. Before that, there was a lot of character-building and singing (courtesy of Dean and Sammy). They plan to steal 11 million bucks -- 1 million for each of them. They get to Vegas: and there's nothing to it! The Flamingo has almost no floors. They pull of the heist, but things go terribly awry. One of their members dies of a heart attack. The guys from whom they stole the cash are hot on their tails, so they given $10,000 to his widow and hide the rest in his coffin. They all attend the funeral -- to watch the coffin slide into the crematorium. The final scene is an abrupt one, where they slink away from the funeral home, into a harshly lit, penniless future. It was OK, but nothing to write home about. Never Say Never Again (1983) -- "7/10" Sean Connery comes roaring back to seize the role he was born to play back from Roger Moore. This is actually one of the better Bond films, featuring the delightfully psychotic Barbara Carrera as Fatima Blush and the somewhat bland Kim Basinger as Domino Petachi. Max von Sydow is Blofeld and Klaus Maria Brandauer is Maximilian Largo, the evil genius. The story isn't particularly brilliant -- Largo steals nukes from the Air Force -- but it moves along well. They spend a lot of time on the setup for the theft, focusing on the air-force colonel (Domino's brother) who's being blackmailed into getting his retina replaced so that he can impersonate the president and release the two nukes. There's a good reason why that sounds far-fetched -- not least is that, when he's actually stealing the nukes, there's no-one around, which makes you wonder why they had to implant the fake retina in his eye instead of just carrying it in the briefcase in which he carried all of the other equipment, but then we wouldn't have had Bond's awesome fight scene at the hospital... -- that's because it is. The ending is a bit meandering and weak, but it was still good fun. Results (2015) -- "5/10" Cobie Smulders and Guy Pearce are personal trainers living and working in Texas. Kevin Corrigan is a newly minted millionaire who engages their services. Giovanni Ribisi is his lawyer and pot dealer. It was an odd story that never really went anywhere. Smulders was a very direct and mean/vindictive person with whom the earnest though somewhat shallow Pearce was inexplicably head-over-heels-in-love. Corrigan is trying to find himself and he also temporarily thinks he's in love with Smulders. The ending with Corrigan having found himself at a party he throws for some sorority girls was really cool. Good song, good band. The love story and gym story was unsatisfying. Not recommended. Requiem for the American Dream (2015) -- "9/10" An excellent overview of world history, politics and economics with Noam Chomsky. The movie was made in several interviews over four years and is a more timeless, a higher-level take than many of his other talks you can find online. He places the world as it is today in context, shows how we're not living in radically bad times or different times. Things have pretty much always been this way for the most of us (at least those of us born and having achieved political sentience during the Reagan years). This can be depressing, but he offers advice on how to see it in an encouraging way. We haven't been defeated yet and there are still those of us fighting. The camera zooms in uncomfortably close on an eighty-year--old man, but just listen to what he says instead of focusing on the weird places that hair starts to grow on a man's face in advanced years. Highly recommended. Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency (2016) -- "9/10" This is a pretty nice treatment of Douglas Adams's two-book series about the odd detective to whom odd coincidences constantly happen. As the story unfolds, we are introduced to the odd group of people that orbit Dirk Gently (Samuel Barnett). Primarily he's on the prowl with his newfound friend Todd (Elijah Wood). Jade Eshete as Farah and Hannah Marks as Amanda are both very good, as is Aaron Douglas as an evil body-snatcher. Another pair on a crash course with Dirk and Todd are Bart (Fiona Dourif) and Ken (Mpho Koaho), both of whom are also very good and entertaining. The acting really sustains the story quite well -- else it would collapse under its own oddness. There is too much detail to relate here, but if you've read the books, you won't be surprised by the intertwined complexity of the story. They make the deus ex machinas work. There are soul-stealers, supernatural body-snatchers, regular-joe cops, a mysterious dead eccentric who left a trail of traps and puzzles behind him, his missing daughter, people trapped in animal bodies and vice versa, a top-secret military program, psychics, a time machine, a soul-transferring device, intertwined fourth-dimensional continua, time loops, the inexorability of fate, angels and demons and so on. All will reveal itself to be perhaps mundane than it seemed at first -- or perhaps not. A tight story with good acting. Looking forward to the next season. Highly recommended. The Last Days on Mars (2013) -- "5/10" Liev Schreiber and Elias Koteas star in this half-hearted zombie movie on Mars. The effects are OK and the acting turgid, mostly due to the half-hearted script. The Zombies are more-or-less unstoppable. Liev Schreiber gets away from the planet, but he's infected too. The movie ends with him considering how to kill himself. Good riddance. Watched it in German. Not recommended. Pitch Black (2000) -- "7/10" "Saw it and reviewed it in 2012." ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3338 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3338 Sun, 08 Jan 2017 21:52:35 +0100 of almost 1200 ratings publicly available. I've included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other -- I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. Life is Hot in Cracktown (2009) -- "6/10" This movie starts off with a brutal gang rape, within the first minute. The poor girl is taken to a dirty mattress in a dingy, tiny courtyard. She's been there before, exchanging sex for crack with he boyfriend. After he and his friend are finished, he tosses her two vials. The next scene is in a bodega. A guy tries to buy beer and cigarettes with food stamps. Two prostitutes buy 6 condoms apiece, getting a receipt for reimbursement. They worry that their pimp will be mad if they don't get more customers than that -- that night. The next scene is of the young man who was working in the bodega, this time at home with his family. He goes to his second job as a security officer in a shabby tenement. Two little kids live there, seemingly alone, left begging for change to buy food. The children's parents return. The boy goes out and heads off with a "friend" (a gentle-seeming dope-fiend) to scope the corner girls. They see "Melody", new to the game, being pimped by her mother. We meet another "girl" who works for crack money for herself and her pimp boyfriend. He seems to genuinely like her, but she's a he (or has, at the very least, a penis). We're back to the gang of four young guys, pure animals, destroying everything in sight, raping everyone in sight, demanding protection money. They assault an old man in a home invasion, blasting him with a giant enema when he doesn't have their check. They destroy everything in his apartment. The security guard can't get any sleep because his baby boy will not stop crying. He fights with his wife. Two cops on the beat investigate a report of screams. It's a young woman who self-aborted (I think). The leader of the gang-rape and protection-racket gang of animals apparently has a back-story. I have no idea why we're expected to care. We're back to the family of four, eking out enough cash for the parents' crack addiction by begging in the streets. The young boy hits the street to hang out with Melody, whose mother gave her the night off "because she's bleeding." The four youths are hired for a hit. They continue to predate the community, but they're young. So the head of the gang has a young girlfriend who "loves" him. They have sex in the back of a burned-out car. The gang carries out the hit, but one of them is gut-shot. The parents of the family of four abandon their kids to their own fate, jettisoning the extra baggage in search of more crack. The leader of the gang is red-hot now, being sought by rival gangs, who've already killed some of his friends in brutal ways. He laughs and respects them for their savagery. Willy (the little boy) abandons the apartment with Suzie to go rescue Melody, who doesn't need his help. The gang leader prepares for his last stand. A couple is reunited in a hospital. The young security guard/bodega worker shoots an armed robber. Everybody smokes crack all the time. Blow jobs are a de-facto currency. This movie is based on the book of the same name. The director is the writer of both the book and the screenplay. Everyone and everything is depressing and depressed and broken. This movie reminds me a bit of the unstoppable downward hurtle in Requiem for a Dream, but that was better -- both the book and the movie. There's no real thread or statement other than hopelessness. Not recommended. Untitled (2009) -- "8/10" Adam Goldberg plays Adrian, a musician whose work is, in the words of one critic, "emotionally bankrupt with no relation to the way that human beings make sense of sound". His brother Josh (Eion Bailey) is a painter whose work hangs in every hallway of one of the largest hotel chains in the world. Naturally, Josh thinks Adrian should think about a different angle, though he's generally supportive. Adrian thinks Josh is a sellout. Josh attends one of Adrian's concerts with his girlfriend Madeleine (Marley Shelton). There is almost no-one else there. The concert is as bad as you can imagine, with random shrieks and shouts, very little structure, no melody. Adrian literally kicks a bucket You really have to be in the mood for it. Madeleine liked it. She was deeply moved. She likes to wear loud clothes (a rubberized raincoat, a feather boa-skirt, a rubber skirt that made me cringe). She invites him to play her latest gallery opening, for Ray Barko (Vinnie Jones). She shows them around the exhibit, telling them "trying to read a piece is a mistake. They're so personal.", to which Adrian responds "some things are so personal...you should keep them to yourself." Next we see Adrian playing classical piano (Chopin) in a fancy restaurant, making note of all of the other noises coming from phones and diners. They don't seem to notice him, so he starts to play something of his own, aphonic and loud. Diners scatter. Adrian and friends are back at the gallery, putting on a show. Even the gallery attendees laugh. [1] At the dinner afterward, they grill Adrian about his music, asking why he's not more popular, to which he responds, "because once you move away from tonality and harmony, the audience is small." Unknown: What is the difference between art and entertainment? Madeleine: Entertainment never posed a problem it couldn't solve. Madeleine invites Adrian over for a party, but he's the only one there. The motive is clear. As they fall to the white-shag carpet, atonal music plays while they struggle mightily to divest themselves of the intricately fastened hipster clothing they're both wearing. It's clear why she goes for Adrian -- he is, at least, an artist. Josh is not, but his sales are keeping her gallery afloat. He thinks he's an artist, though. At the same time, tech billionaire and collector Porter Canby (Zak Orth) becomes smitten with Adrian's bandmate, The Clarinet (Lucy Punch). His apartment is an absolute zoo of bizarre art that he's purchased in order to give himself meaning. When we see Ray "making" his art, our ears are now drawn to the sound of the pearl strands as they knock against each other, then as the pearls drop to the floor. Already, we're focused more on background noises, on atonality in our soundscape. Madeleine and Adrian discuss another artist, Monroe: "Madeleine: Monroe is an important, emerging artist. Adrian: Monroe is an important, emerging serial killer. Madeleine: You know it's amazing: you can be so experimental in music and so reactionary about art. Adrian: What art? The guy doesn't make anything. Madeleine: Oh, I see. And I suppose when you were at the conservatory, you majored in bucket." After a disastrous practice/recording session, Adrian is back at the piano, playing a wedding. He has chosen a funeral dirge (Mozart, I believe). The various artistic personalities collide, they grow disillusioned, they stick to principles, they struggle with finance vs. art. Who's conning who? Who's crazy? Who's actually an artist? Do you have to make something? Do you have to make it yourself? Do you have to not care about money? Madeleine thinks she's doing it for art, but is she? What happens when emotion distorts everything? What the fuck is art? Especially in a purely capitalist context like ours? Madeleine capitulates to Josh's demands to show his work. Josh's corporate clients choose a different direction. Madeleine is ruined, then saved by Ray Barko's death, which catapults his prices into the stratosphere. Adam Goldberg is perfect in this role. Marley Shelton is also surprisingly apt. The Woodsman (2004) -- "8/10" Kevin Bacon stars as Walter, who's trying to put his life back together after getting out of prison. He's very thin. His brother-in-law is Carlos (Benjamin Bratt), who is quite supportive and helpful. Bob (David Alan Grier) gives him a job. Mary-Kay (Eve) hits on him, but he turns her down. He meets Vicki (Kyra Sedgwick) at work, but she's hostile. He lives right across the street from a grade school, but he has to keep his distance -- he is a convicted child molester. Carlos brings back a table that Walter had made for his wedding (hence the epithet "woodsman", I guess. Walter begins to keep a journal, as instructed by his psychiatrist. He documents his observations of "Candy", a man who hangs around the school. Vicki and Walter hook up. Mary-Kay looks cooly on. She warns Vicki away, saying he's "damaged goods". Soon after, in bed, Walter confesses his crime to Vicki. She thought she could handle it, but she's shocked to her core. She rallies, Vicki: How old? Walter: Between 10 and 12. Vicki: What did you do to them? Walter: It's not what you think. I never hurt them. Never. He sends her away. Yasiin Bey (Mos Def) plays a Sergeant Lucas who shows up to question Walter about an attack. He treats Walter like a prisoner. Enters without permission. Searches without a warrant. Yells, being abusive as hell. Walter follows a girl at the mall. He is unsettled. He still has the urge. He confesses to his shrink. He's trying to keep it together and he's staying honest, but there are cracks. He talks to the shrink about his sister. He talks to his brother-in-law about his niece. He is in torment. Walter gets off the bus early to track a young girl. Lucas shows up again, asking why Walter got off the bus early. He knows. "I don't why they keep letting freaks like you out on the street. It just means we got to catch you all over again." Mary-Kay sets him up at work, telling everyone else what he did. Bob gets his back, but things are unraveling. Bob is right to do so. But Walter is tipping. Vicki confronts Mary-Kay and rats her out to Bob. She's trying to save Walter from himself. She's too late. He's meeting Robin in the park to watch birds. And have her sit on his lap. Walter tries to lure her to a "quiet place". She tells him no. She tells him "my Daddy let me sit on his lap". Walter is shocked to see what he does. He said above "I never hurt them", but now he sees differently. She asks if he "still wants [her] to sit on his lap" and he says no, "go home, Robin". She hugs him and leaves. Of all people, she sees and knows his illness. Moving, really well-done. [2] Later that night, Walter sees Candy letting a young boy out of his car and Walter gives him a thrashing. Walter returns to Vicki and they start a life together, slowly. Kevin Bacon puts in a hell of a performance. So do Yasiim Bey and Kyra Sedgwick, for that matter. Russia's Toughest Prison - BBC Documentary -- "8/10" The prison is a 7-hour drive from the nearest civilization. It houses 260 inmates. It is bitingly cold, -40ºC in the winter. Escape attempts aren't even discussed. Presumably the guards also live on-site and spend long months there before switching out. Some of the guards look very young and I think I saw a female during one interview. It was hard to tell since they're all bundled up all the time. Inmates are allowed 3 days of visits every 3 months. But it's a long haul for the families. One family talks about how it's 60 hours of travel for a 4-hour visit. Another woman, the mother of an inmate, discusses on the bus how she has a total of 5000 miles to travel, there and back. She mentions that she will probably be seeing her son for the last time because it costs so much to visit. There are two parts: 85 inmates in solitary confinement and 175 in general population. Many had their death sentences commuted to 25 years when Russia eliminated the death penalty in 1996. The solitary confinement looks very bleak, but no more so than America super-max prisons. The Russian prisoners get 1.5 hours per day "outside", walking in a cell with an open ceiling, but below ground. They are always walking. They are not allowed to lie down during the day. The prisoners do not interact in the high-security part. In the other part, the buildings are older, but warmer, more friendly. There is wood, windows, curtains, normal furniture. Each inmate has his own food bowl. [3] The other cutlery and kitchenware is normal. They have a pretty civilized-looking bathhouse. They live in what looks like a normal home, with bunk beds in one room, a kitchen with wallpaper and a wood stove. They have most of their interaction with the outside world via letters. A privileged few get to use a videophone. They don't use the television very much. They don't watch much news. Their workout regimens are pretty neat, with a lot of body-weight fitness and balance/gymnastic exercises. They have chores, cleaning, chopping wood -- yeah they get to use axes. It reminds me a bit of the stories of Norwegian prisons (the low-security part anyway). These prisoners live what amounts to a monastic existence, with lives structured by the state rather than a religion, but their routine ends up being a religion of sorts, to them. The documentary follows the lives of several inmates, from young to old, from cold-eyed killers to one-time passion killers. For example, one prisoner is about to be released and discusses his fear of not knowing what to do in the outside world, of not fitting in, of the world not needing him. They also interview the guards and warden, who, for the most part, have no love for the prisoners. You can watch it in its entirety at "Russia's Toughest Prison - BBC Documentary HD 2016" . Recommended. Happiness (1998) -- "5/10" This is a movie about deviants with no idea how to go about social interaction in a meaningful or useful way. There's the shrink who fantasizes about going on a shooting spree in a park (Dylan Baker), then buys a young-boy's magazine and beats off to it in the parking lot, only to go home to his ludicrously chipper wife (Cynthia Stephenson) who doesn't see any of this, or the awkward guy (Jon Lovitz) who gives his non-smoker girlfriend an ashtray, then takes it back because she doesn't love him enough, or the super-awkward guy with severe sexual repression (Philip Seymour Hoffman, who else?) who has unfathomably dirty/violent and physically impossible fantasies about his neighbor (Lara Flynn Boyle). This movie doesn't really go anywhere for the first 75 minutes. I'm finding it difficult to carry on. Some of the actors are good, but the script about forlorn, unhappy, occasionally not-unsatisfied people is just not convincing me. Some of the acting is good. Jared Harris as Vlad is great. He is a relentless paramour, charming his way into Joy's heart by playing You Light Up My Life. Then turning into a very dark and typical Lothario. I think the part that's supposed to be shocking is that these people are supposed to be terrible, but they're just normal. The normal sort of terrible. Except maybe for the pedophile dad, but he's a bit off the spectrum. I know we're supposed to be gratified at the open dialogue, but it's just not doing it for me. I guess it's kind of funny that the saddest character in the movie is named Joy. And that her sister -- the prettiest person in the movie -- is basically a sociopath. The laser-like focus of half of the movie on a pedophile plot-line as well as a quarter of the movie on whether or not a young boy is going to be able to masturbate himself to orgasm for the first time -- without bothering to give the boy any personality other than that...somehow there was a spark missing. I found it to be too long and didn't enjoy it very much. Not recommended. Kung Fu Killer (2014) -- "7/10" This is a very pretty and solidly made Chinese action movie starring Donnie Yen. He plays a highly skilled martial artist who is an advisor to the police. He accidentally kills a man in a duel and is sentenced to five years prison. In prison, he is visited by a mysterious young man who wants to learn the ways of Kung Fu. The words "Kung Fu" and "martial arts" are spoken by all players dozens of times. His protegé Fung Yu-Sau has is highly skilled despite a deformity in his legs. He's also mentally unstable as hell. His wife died of cancer. He has a gigantic chip on his shoulder. He's covered in scars. his face twists into a grimace of delight when he fights. He starts picking off the most highly skilled martial artists in various disciplines: boxing, kicking, grappling, weapons and ... not sure what the last one is, but it's probably pretty awesome. Yen gets out of jail to help nab the killer and he and the cops are led on a merry chase all over Hong Kong until, of course, the final showdown. Despite the animosity, they are both interested in a fair fight. Each wants to have won fair and square. Spoiler alert: Donnie Yen totally kicks his ass in the end, decisively. Yu-Sau turns out to be not quite as much an adherent to the martial way as Yen and tries to kill him after Yen shows mercy. The police detective shows up and shows us all that, no matter how much Kung Fu you know, it doesn't make you bulletproof. The fight choreography is pretty great (Donnie Yen was in the Ip Man movies). The dialogue is pretty stiff and the plot is super-predictable, but it's well-made and fun and has good action without a ton of bloody violence. Saw it in Cantonese and Mandarin with English subtitles. Recommended. Chaos Theory (2008) -- "3/10" A tightly wound efficiency expert (Ryan Reynolds) has his life turned upside-down by a series of unfortunate coincidences. This movie is proof that Ryan Reynolds can't save everything. [4] It's pretty painfully bad. It's not terrible, but it's shallow and badly written and doesn't make any good use of anybody. It's got a neat twist in the middle where his wife thinks he's having an affair and has had a child with another woman, but -- and here's the twist -- after his paternity test, he finds out that he's sterile, so it's his wife who's had a baby with another man. BOOYAH. OK, Ryan Reynolds isn't completely wasted in this movie, but he's been better. These were the doldrums before Deadpool. I would have had a hard time believing that he'd made a worse film than Green Lantern before seeing this movie. I am wiser now. Sarah Chalke as a "home-wrecking bitch" gets an honorable mention. I could easily die without ever seeing Emily Mortimer in a movie again. She's either a lovely person and a great actress or a terrible person and a terrible actress. Subtracted one star each for the two saccharine musical appeals in the last ten minutes, Definitely not recommended. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] I've been to one or two jazz concerts that went in this direction. What they play isn't even a parody -- there really is jazz like that. It's an acquired taste and you have to be in the right mood for it, but it can be interesting. [1] I've no idea how possible this actually is nor do I exactly care. It was a well-written scene. [1] That detail made me think of Solzhenitsyn's One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, as I did during "Cool Hand Luke" . [1] As if we needed more proof than "The Green Lantern" . ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3330 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3330 Sun, 08 Jan 2017 20:42:45 +0100 of almost 1200 ratings publicly available. I've included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other -- I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. Crash (1996) -- "7/10" David Cronenberg produced and directed this adaptation of the J.G. Ballard novel. The initial central couple of the film is James Spader and Deborah Kara Unger as James and Catherine Ballard (I doubt that the name is a coincidence), who work in film. They have an unorthodox sex life. Whatever it takes to turn them on is fair game. We see them cheating on each other so that they can later discuss it to heighten their own passion. On his way home from a late shoot, James weaves out of his lane and into oncoming traffic, shattering his own leg, instantly killing the other driver and injuring the driver's wife Helen Remington, played by Holly Hunter. They seem to have a bond from the beginning, odd as that is (this is Cronenberg, after all). The bond grows, and they almost get into another accident when he's giving her a lift to her job at the airport. In a flash, they discover that they get really turned on by car accidents. They have explosive sex in the car in the parking lot -- which leads to James once again reigniting his passion with Catherine later that night. Next we see them at an accident reënactment -- of James Dean's fatal car crash. A mysterious figure named Vaughan (Elias Koteas) runs the show. Helen seems to know him well. The cops break it up and they scatter into nearby woods. Well, more like limp: most of the spectators are accident victims with a wealth of scars and damage. They come back to a house where two ladies are waiting: they too have been severely injured. Gabrielle (Rosanna Arquette) is in a body cast. The theme is a familiar one for followers of Cronenberg, spelled out by Vaughan: "It is a project that we are all intimately involved in: the reshaping of the human body by modern technology." This transformative power of car crashes is echoed in the later novel by Chuck Palahniuk, "Rant: The Oral Biography of Buster Casey" , which, in retrospect, seems to draw heavily from this film. Vaughan then chases Catherine with his car, which turns her on to no end. Later that night with James, she takes talking dirty to a whole new level. They continue to meet with the crash crew. Koteas inhabits his role as Vaughan. Ballard moves from Gabrielle to Vaughan. Later Ballard and Vaughan metaphorically continue their coupling with cars on a highway. Vaughan dies in a fiery crash. Helen and Gabrielle sneak onto the impound lot and make love in the wreck. Gender doesn't matter, just the overwhelming power of the crash. The physical damage they all incur and endure -- and the pleasure they deriver from it -- reminds me of Fight Club. Even Catherine finally gets her own crash when James drives her off the road with Vaughan's car. They make love in the wreck while he whispers that "maybe next time it will work" -- suggesting that death is the ultimate orgasm for them. It's an interesting film, in that it commits to the concept, but I've liked other Cronenberg movies better, for example eXistenZ or Dead Ringers or Eastern Promises. To Be Or Not To Be (1942) -- "9/10" Ernst Lubitsch directed Carol Lombard as Maria Tura, Jack Benny as her husband Joseph and Robert Stack as Lieutenant Stanislaw Sobinski in this farce about a theater troupe in Nazi-occupied Warsaw. The troupe puts on a show taking the piss out of the nazis. They even let Joseph as "Hitler" out on the streets of Warsaw to see if will people believe it's him. The Nazis invade Poland and the war heats up. Sobinski is part of the Polish wing of the RAF. He gets wind of a possible spy in the person of Siletsky (Stanley Ridges) and heads back to Poland on an undercover mission. By purest coincidence, he must involve Maria Tura, with whom he's in love. To prevent Siletsky from delivering his files to the Gestapo, they concoct a plan: to have the theater troupe pretend that they are the Gestapo office instead. It's Tura's (Jack Benny's) time to shine. When Siletsky tells him that he (that is, the Colonel he is playing) is notorious, knows as "Concentration Camp" Ehrhardt, he replies that "Yes, well, we do the concentrating and the Poles do the camping." He receives the papers about the Polish underground and then learns that there is a duplicate at the hotel. Maria is still at the hotel, but they have no way to reach her. Joseph Tura is in charge of distracting Siletsky, but he lets his guard slip when he hears about the code word between Sobinski and Maria. ("To Be Or Not to Be" -- the phrase of Hamlet during which Sobinski would get up to visit Maria in her dressing room.) Joseph puts this all together and spins off into a rage, blowing his cover and confirming Siletsky's suspicions. Siletsky overwhelms Joseph and temporarily escapes in the theater before he is felled by a bullet. [1] With Siletsky dead, Joseph takes Siletsky's place and returns to the hotel. However, he can't just flit away with the documents -- he is expected in another meeting, with the real Colonel Ehrhardt. Tura starts off the conversation with the same line that Siletsky used. Ehrhardt lets him know that the Führer himself is coming to town. Siletsky tells Ehrhardt that, in London, he is known as "Concentration Camp" Ehrhardt. Magical. The dialogue is fast and furious and all the funnier because those delivering don't see it as funny at all. Intrigue piles on intrigue. Siletsky's body is found and Ehrhardt thinks it's sad but starts to make moves on Maria Tura. She hurries away to warn her husband that the Germans know that Siletsky is dead, but he's already called Ehrhardt to tell him that "he'll be a little late" (as Siletsky). The whole troupe tries to stop Joseph from going to the gestapo, but they are too late. Ehrhardt sends him into his living room, where Siletsky's body is slumped in a chair. The Nazis wait outside until he "cracks". He thinks quickly and, with a quick shave and an extra fake beard, makes it look like the body is the imposter. The actors head off to the theater where Hitler is expected to show up, again to infiltrate and try to prevent the names of the underground members from falling into German hands and also to rescue Maria. [2] She's doing just fine on her own, being exceedingly clever. Meanwhile her husband has lost his mustache -- and his disguise -- out the window of a moving car. Ehrhardt is stunned to see the Führer himself pick up Maria from the hotel and shoots himself in utter exasperation. [3] The whole troupe makes it back to England, where Tura is rewarded with playing the role of Hamlet. Sobinski is in the audience. When Tura starts the famous soliloquy, a different soldier stands up and exits the theater and both Tura and Sobinski are left gawping. And scene. My summary might be a bit confusing, but this is truly brilliant writing [4], trimmed down to essentials, packing in what would be a three-hour movie today into just 1:40. This film was remade in 1983 with Mel Brooks in the starring role, which would ordinarily be tempting, but I can't see them having improved on this movie. Highly recommended. Inland Empire (2006) -- "8/10" This is what may very well be David Lynch's last film. He is odd to the very last. The film starts with a blurred, smeary encounter between a prostitute and her john, there is some Russian spoken and then English. She stares teary-eyed into the blank distance afterward. Rabbit-like creatures form a sitcom tableau in the next scene. No idea what's going on here. Now we're at Laura Dern's house as her new, older neighbor pays a visit. The camera is odd here, jittery, semi--fish-eyed, unsettling. When the camera is on the neighbor, objects shift and move in unnatural ways, as do her face, her accent and expression. Dern is a sea of calm, seemingly in another room. The neighbor tells two odd little stories in a very demented manner. She could be demented but she could also be evil. Lynch is so good at this kind of engrossing, long-running oddness. It pulls you in. You try to extract meaning from its slippery, nonsensical surface, so sure that the care and craftsmanship that went into all of the detail must have a purpose. Back to normality: Nikki Grace (Dern, who will also play a completely different person, par for the course for Lynch) gets a role in her comeback movie. Jeremy Irons directs. Their first appearance on a press junket swerves right back into oddness, with a strangely aggressive hostess. They all meet to do some reading, again starting normally and veering off with odd, ghost-like behavior on the set. Irons admits that this isn't the first time they're trying to make this movie: the last time out, both leads were mysteriously killed. They soldier on with the film. From scene to scene, it's nearly impossible to tell whether Dern is Nikki (herself) or Susan (her role); likewise for Justin Theroux as Devon Berk (actor) and Billy Side (role). It's all so fluid. Where it sounds like they're discussing an affair and Nikki seems totally different, the camera pulls back to reveal another camera, this one with Irons the director behind it, filming a scene. So disorienting. Lynch's worlds are just a bit off-kilter. I have no idea what's going to happen next. Harry Dean Stanton as Freddy is Irons's odd partner. He also has odd stories and non-sequitor--like behavior. He borrows money from anyone he can. This strikes no-one as odd for a producer. The disorientation continues, subtly driven by various tricks: strange closeups, takes that linger too long on a face, slightly too-long pauses, a picture in which pieces of the face, hair and background subtly shift (it's hard to describe, I'm not even sure how Lynch did it -- but I'm not surprised to see him accompany his move to digital by taking full advantage). Sound shreds and jostles in the same way that the image does. Eyes jitter in their sockets; hair shifts like parts of a wig. Faces blur unexpectedly. It becomes increasingly hard to tell what's being filmed for the film being filmed in this film and what's actually happening in this film. Nikki/Sue starts losing the thread and can't figure out which part she's playing at which times. She loses track of when she is. So does Devon/Billy. It looks like they're having an affair not just in the movie within the movie but also in the movie but Billy doesn't know it's real. Time and space shift jarringly, slopping about like oil in a barrel on the deck of a boat in heaving seas. Nikki herself causes a disturbance she heard at the studio days before. This oddness segues into a dream sequence, then back out again, seamlessly. Lynch toys with maximal disorientation while maintaining narrative coherence of a sort. Her husband seems to play some central warlock-like figure in her consciousness, in her apprehension of the world, both real and imagined. This is a Lynchian horror film and it's creepy, eerie but anchored enough that its realism is what makes it more disturbing. Lynch depicts madness, an acid trip, mental illness. Pieces of other scenes in this movie return, are interleaved out of order with other scenes that remind me stylistically of other Lynch films (the soundscape and black-and-white sections in particular remind me of Eraserhead.) Parts of the film are in Polish. There is a Polish couple where the husband also suspects his wife of cheating. "Nikki: A lot of guys change. Well, they don't change, they reveal. In time, they reveal who they really are." At this point, we are far down the rabbit hole. Nikki's life as an actress is no longer evident, she's in a back-alley office talking to a silent interlocutor. Lynch has made a film that shows what it would be like to live in the fifth dimension -- outside of time and space -- much more eloquently than Christopher Nolan in Interstellar. Dimensions and timelines overlap, with Nikki seeing herself, film tearing, sparking noises tearing from the speakers. This disconnection from experience, from a flow of time, from contiguous space, from a single self, from any plot or thread of reality, from any sense of familiarity. There is just a notion of a story, of kernels of thought that float in a multi-dimensional soup, a miasma utterly incomprehensible to the human sensorium, appearing as noise and static and utterly shattered. This is madness. She staggers the halls of memory, reeling from convulsing and softening walls of reality while the floor buckles beneath her and she shifts again, with no relief, no shoal in sight, just nonsensical and seemingly utterly unrelated symbols heaping up faster than they can be apprehended. You give up and let it wash over you. Lynch forces you to stop sorting and organizing his ideas into a coherent and familiar pattern and just ride his hallucinatory wave. The film returns to actors and locations, but with different roles (again, typical for Lynch). There are stories within stories within stories. This is a film about the making of a film based on a cursed film where the heroine gets lost in her own mind and tells stories about the making of the film and other moments in her life. It's Inception-like in its onion skins. Stanislaw Lem (also Polish, probably not a coincidence) and Philip K. Dick wrote very much like this. It's confusing enough in print; in video, it takes a talent like Lynch to even come close to pulling it off. This movie is long, at nearly three hours. It documents, it embodies the swirling of a frantic mind. When you're inside your head without vocalizing, you think much faster, flitting from one thing to the next in fractions of a second. What takes seconds to think takes minutes or hours to explain. Is this amount of madness normal? Do you never have wild, inchoate, poorly chained thoughts you'd rather not have thought? That happen so quickly that you can't stop them? Lynch writes it all down. There is no recognizable plot, just moments, disconnected melodrama. What's up with the giant, plush rabbit family? Where are they? In a dollhouse? On a sitcom? Is Nikki cursed by the script? Or her dark past? Or her evil-seeming husband? Has she lost a child? It's almost like Lynch filmed a bunch of scenes, then stitched them together and lets the viewer come up with a story. He trusts that we will find meaning for ourselves. He is, largely, right. That's how our minds work. Laura Dern is great. Terry Crews, William H. Macy, Mary Steenbergen have cameos. Even in the credits, Lynch is almost parodying himself, but doing it so well, a giant ensemble in a ballroom with a monkey, a lumberjack, a one-legged woman, two dancing troupes and with a woman lip-syncing to Nina Simone's Sinner Man -- but it all works, his odd camera framing, shifting angles, focus play, strobes, a master at work, at play. From "Wikipedia" : "Lynch sometimes offers a clue in the form of a quotation from the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad: "We are like the spider. We weave our life and then move along in it. We are like the dreamer who dreams and then lives in the dream. This is true for the entire universe."" This is a difficult but rewarding movie. It could have been shorter. I don't know to whom I would recommend it. Lynch isn't for everyone. If you have the patience, it's a tremendous mindfuck movie, unlike anything else I've seen, interesting and enjoyable for long stretches. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] This scene, with roving camera and spotlights, reminded me strongly of the finale of Inglourious Basterds. Knowing Tarentino, this is not a coincidence. [1] This scene is also very close to the one in Inglourious Basterds50 years later. [1] There is a Sergeant Schulz, on whom Ehrhardt blames all of his ills. At the end of one scene, Ehrhardt bellows "Schulz!" in the exact manner that Colonel Klink would in Hogan's Heroes, over 20 years later. It's hard to believe that that's a coincidence. [1] And quite brave, too, when you note the year that the movie was released. It was 1942. The war was still very hot and this film was making a roaring joke out of it. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3327 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3327 Sun, 08 Jan 2017 20:17:31 +0100 of almost 1200 ratings publicly available. I've included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other -- I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. True Romance (1993) -- "9/10" Clarence Worley (Christian Slater) and Alabama (Patricia Arquette) star as a quiet comic-book store employee and martial-arts film aficionado and the call girl hired by his boss for his birthday, respectively. Their affair is quick and sweet and they are married within the day. She had a pimp though, Dexter. He's played by a typically unrecognizable Gary Oldman, with a scarred eye and white-boy dreadlocks. Clarence pays Drexel a visit to clear things up. Things go south. The cast overall is not-to-be-believed: in additional to Oldman, Slater and Arquette, there's Samuel Jackson, Brad Pitt, Dennis Hopper, Val Kilmer, Christopher Walken, Bronson Pinchot, Michael Rapaport, James Gandolfini, Chris Penn, Tom Sizemore, Kevin Corrigan, Conchata Ferrell, Paul Ben-Victor, Saul Rubinek, Eric Allan Kramer and the bloody thing was written by Quentin Tarantino. [1] And I would put money on having briefly seen an uncredited John C. McGinley as a cop, near the end. Dennis Hopper plays Clarence's dad, a former cop. Clarence and 'Bama pay him a visit to have him find out if anyone suspects anything about Drexel's death. They hit the road. Dad goes on a patrol around the rail depot that he guards. When he gets back to his house, Christopher Walken (Coccotti) is waiting. "I remember this scene" . Walken vs. Hopper. The interrogation begins; when Coccotti tells him the story, Worley replies. "Worley: I don't believe you. Coccotti: That's of minor importance. What's important is that I believe you." The next bit is easy to mistake today as "racist" but the point of it is that Worley makes his decision, then aims his weapon at Coccotti's most sensitive spot. If you're trying to provoke someone, you don't have to be a racist; but if the other guy is, you've got him. Worley goes out without bowing. The gestures, the facial expressions, so much goodness in this scene. That was only the first hour. This movie is so old that Brad Pitt's role is as Michael Rappaport's stoner roommate. And Rappaport was playing the lovable moron 25 years ago. Tom Sizemore also plays the same character as he always does. James Gandolfini is a monster. Alabama's got the same stones as Clarence's father. After he's tooled her up terribly, he tells her "OK, baby, no more Mr. Fuckin' Nice Guy". She whimpers, but stays strong. The makeup and filming is amazing in this scene. Arquette is an avenging angel. Events progress and the cops get wind of all of the coke. They set up a sting. The Sicilians are loaded out like you wouldn't believe. I love how savvy Clarence is -- utterly not the hapless stumblebum he was at the start of the movie. All the guts in the world can't stop a bullet to the forehead. Or can they? Recommended. Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (2007) -- "8/10" Sidney Lumet directs this non-chronological story about two brothers. Philip Seymour Hoffman plays the older brother, Andy; Ethan Hawke the younger, Hank. Andy is married to Gina (Marisa Tomei, who is spectacularly naked in much of the film). Gina is also sleeping with Hank. Andy and Hank both need money. They don't like each other much. Andy comes up with the idea to rob their own parents' jewelery store and it goes spectularly wrong. Andy is also on heroin, visiting a high-class heroin den (this is probably why he needs money). Hanks needs money because he's got alimony payments to the hectoring harpy Martha (Amy Ryan). The robbery goes wrong and their mother is shot. The sons have to watch their father spiral through grief and then a desire for revenge on the perpetrator. They have to pretend they have no idea what happened. The mother will not survive and her machines must be turned off. No-one in the movie is nice. Hank might think he's nice but he's been on the wrong side of bad luck for so long that he can't even remember what he was trying to do when he started reacting to life all those years ago. Gina's kinda nice, but she's cheating on her husband and seems to have severe mood-swings. Andy is not nice. Their father mourns his wife, but he's not really nice either. Maybe the Mom was nice, but she's gone. Hanks's ex-wife is a relentless shrew who doesn't care whether her father's daughter lives or dies. Other people (his partner's widow and her brother) are also distinctly not nice people, reduced to pure predator/prey dynamics. But Andy's the linchpin: his life is falling apart. He's addicted to heroin, his company is being audited, he was the mastermind of the failed robbery attempt that got his mother killed, he's never fit into his family, his financial schemes will be exposed because his company is being audited, he doesn't know his wife is cheating -- or with whom -- but that looms in the background as well. When she finally tells him, it doesn't faze him at all -- he even gives her money for the cab to her mother's house when she leaves him. Andy and Hank are in deep shit, assailed from all sides. Andy comes up with a plan: rob his high-end heroin dealer. Two murders later and they have a bag full of cash and top-shelf heroin. Next stop: Hank's partner's widow's apartment to pay her off. Instead, Andy racks up another victim, then turns on Hank long enough for the widow to shoot Andy in the back. Hank leaves some money and takes off. Their father is waiting outside and yells for Hank to stop. Only now does he realize that maybe both sons were involved in the death of his wife, that both of his sons are colossal fuckups. Pops exacts retribution on Andy in the hospital. Hank presumably got away with Gina and all the money -- although he probably had to give most of it to Martha. Malcolm X (1992) -- "7/10" This is Spike Lee's biographical depiction of Malcolm X's life, from his criminal youth to his awakening to Islam in prison to his rising to the top of the Nation of Islam as its most inspirational preacher to his murder by what appears to be Nation of Islam members. Denzel Washington can't help but play himself, as usual. There are a ton of well-known actors and actresses: Angelas Bassett as X's wife, Delroy Lindo as his criminal mentor, Spike Lee played his best friend from youth, Kate Vernon as Bonnie to his Clyde, James McDaniel, Debi Mazar and even Wendell Pierce (Bunk from The Wire). It was well-made, but at almost 3.5 hours, too indulgent. It could have been cut down considerably. I much preferred the "Malcolm X documentary from 1972" , which featured the much-more inspirational and eloquent original. (See link for citations.) Lemon Tree (2008) -- "9/10" This movie is set in Palestine, in a newly occupied settlement near the lemon grove of a Palestinian widow, Salma Zidane. The minister of defense has set up a nice villa for himself right on the edge of the grove. The movie shows the soldiers moving in, setting up guard towers, razor wire, perimeter defenses. But it's not enough: terrorists could sneak up through the grove to threaten the minister's family. It will have to go. The movie depicts nicely -- without saying it -- the unbalanced, unhinged view of the world that an upper-class (or middle-class) Israeli citizen has. [2] The Palestinians are animals, to be feared and exterminated. The dichotomy between lifestyles is shown in stark relief. The Israeli defense minister's wife in a house of sumptuous luxury, while the Palestinian widow lives in a modest, deteriorating home. At a pre-housewarming party, the clearly first-world clique of invitees are oohing and aahing over the house while one asks the wife if she isn't afraid? She replies that it's worth the gorgeous view and points out the window to the lemon grove, only partially obscured by the fence, razor wire and defense tower. She doesn't even see it anymore. Later, without a hint of irony, she suggests to her husband that they should do a traditional Arabic banquet for their housewarming dinner. She suggests that they ask a posh city restaurant for help -- instead of their neighbors. Her husband mows the lawn with a security detail. Her husband shows all signs of cheating on her with a female member of his army staff. When Salma goes to the Israeli authorities, they tell her they can do nothing. Her problem is laughable in comparison to those of many others. She should be happy with what she has. There are soldiers everywhere. It seems to be true what Finkelstein says: nearly every able-bodied Israeli is conscripted into the IDF. There is also the juxtaposition of the lifestyles: there is construction everywhere, on very, very cheap land. Military everywhere. The process for annexing this land is very structured...very fair. Salma has a chance at regress, but if she misses it, she forfeits her land and that will have been her own fault. The minister built his house right next to a half-century--old lemon grove, but now it has to go, for Israeli safety. It "threatens security". Salma goes to court with Zaid Doud (Ali Suliman) but Israeli justice quickly finds against her. She vows to go to the Supreme Court. In the meantime, the IDF throws up a new fence, to block her from her own property. She enters anyway, in defiance and to water her dying trees. The members of the security detail all look like Mr. Smith from The Matrix. Zaid and Salms prepare their case, trying everything. She digs up jewelery for funds. They grow closer. He returns late at night from a visit because the road back to his home is blocked, so he must stay the night. Neither one can sleep. Next to his bed is a little poster of Zinedine Zidane. Get it? They have a moment. This movie is quite masterfully directed and edited. The next morning sees the young guard climbing his tower, presumably to continue his Arabic lessons on-tape. His lessons are bizarre: "The mice that are allergic to the grenadine..." Salma is picking lemons. Mira, the minister's wife, tries to approach, but is utterly frozen by her deeply indoctrinated terror. Also acted and filmed beautifully. Salma was picking lemons for Zaid. Zaid's office is messy, the door hangs in a shattered, mostly missing door frame. He is late, so she starts to clean, indicating, without words, that Zaid's life is missing "a woman's touch". As if she didn't have enough to deal with, the morality police show up in the form of Abu Kamal to warn her that she better not be dallying about with the lawyer. She'd better get back to spending each day mourning her husband, dead these past ten years. The next day is the housewarming at the minister's house. The traditional Arab meal. It's a bit pat, but they forgot the lemons. So they hop over the fence to steal them, of course. I mean, they're right there. Salma hurries to stop them. The soldiers throw her to the ground. She starts to throw lemons over the fence because fuck you that's why. Mira tells her that they just wanted lemons. But Mira never said hello, nor asked for lemons, nor ever indicated that Salma exists as a person. So obviously she sent her minions to steal them. Later that night, during the ostentatious festivities -- again, a stark contrast to Salma's quiet good-night call with Zaid -- a bomb goes off nearby. Israeli soldiers storm Salma's house. They toss the place. I bet the attack was faked by the minister to make sure he wins the case in the Supreme Court, so he can "prove" that the grove must be eradicated. He then lies to the press that he has no way to contact Salma. The press, of course, believes him, because Salma is an animal -- there's no reaching an animal. Mira is changing her mind (as minds are wont to do in such films). She helped publish a giant piece in support of Salma. Then she is forced to retract everything by her husband. She escapes her guards and goes into the lemon grove. She finds Salma in her house, crying, because that asshole Abu Kamal came back to threaten her again. The guards corral Mira before she can talk to Salma; the bulletproof blinds go down on her prison. The next day Mira gets a call from her daughter, telling her not to try it again (the guards told on Mira). That gets into a creepy level of surveillance, but it jibes well with what Finkelstein describes in the video linked in the footnote below. Before the trial, Salma and Ziad must allow a single kiss to requite their love...forever. She will not see him again because her community forbids it. She is truly a woman assailed on all sides. The kiss is incredibly subtly filmed, lit in a way that it suggests an entire alternate life they could have lived together, before returning to the bleak reality. On the way to their day in court, they are blocked at the border because "Jerusalem is closed." Abu Kamal shows up again and, this time, uses his connections to get them through the border. The court rules that the trees will not be uprooted, but half will be cut down to 50cm so that no-one can hide behind them. Everybody wins. In the end, Zaid marries another woman he was seeing. The caretaker of the orchard -- a celibate for 70 years -- tells Salma "it's better this way." She agrees, "it's true". In the end, Mira leaves the Minister of Defense to his lemon-grove--less house, with a giant cement wall surrounding the whole property. On the other side of the wall, we see Salma wandering through the stunted 50cm trees with no leaves and no fruits. She pauses to stare at the 6-meter wall, then walks away. Saw it in Hebrew, Arabic and some English with French subtitles. Rashomon (Rashômon) (1950) -- "8/10" This is a story, a fable, of a terrible crime committed in a grove, told in four parts: the perpetrator and both victims and a woodcutter who saw everything. The perpetrator is the bandit (Toshirô Mifune), who is seemingly certifiable, laughing maniacally throughout his deed and testimony. The first victim is the wife, who the bandit raped. The second victim is the husband, who died. The trial is to determine who killed the husband. The bandit claims that he did it, but in honorable combat. He is not ashamed at all to cop to the rape. The wife claims that the bandit ran away laughing after his shameful act and that she begged the husband to kill her, to end her shame, but she fainted. When she woke, he had been stabbed with her dagger. The husband is dead, but that doesn't stop him from testifying: his testimony is interpreted by a medium who can speak to the dead. If you thought the wife's crocodile tears were overly dramatic and hardly believable, you're in for a treat with the medium's histrionics. The medium is quite brilliant. Her clothes flap in a divine wind while she's channeling. The two men in the background are undisturbed. When she is finished channeling, the wind dies completely, even for her. "Medium: Everything was silent. How quiet it was. Suddenly the sun went away. I was enveloped in deep silence. I lay there in the stillness. Then someone quietly approached me. That someone gently withdrew the dagger from my heart." The husband -- through the medium -- tells us that the bandit lured his wife away from him with declarations of love and, that his wife reciprocated unreservedly. The wife begs the bandit to kill her husband. The bandit refuses and asks the husband what he should do with the wife. She escapes before the husband can answer. The bandit frees the samurai, who kills himself to avoid living with the shame of his dishonor. The story is retold in a ramshackle and severely dilapidated temple during an absolutely torrential downpour. Two men who met the couple on the trail that day and testified in court are joined in the temple by a third man, to whom they relate the story. The woodcutter is cajoled into telling his part, the part he didn't tell the court. He tells how the bandit begged the woman to be his wife. She frees her husband but only so that they may fight to the death over her. The samurai tells her "you've been with two men. Why don't you kill yourself?" before saying he'd rather lose her than his horse. As in Lemon Tree where the men (Israeli and Arab alike) tell the women how they live their lives. This is a true patriarchy, with women as second-class citizens, because "Women are weak by nature". There's a twist, though. The wife leaps up, cackling, telling them that they're both weak fools, not man enough for her. She continues to cackle maniacally as they prepare to lock in battle. The bandit's arm shakes; the samurai retreats, his mouth twitches. They are terrified, all three locked into a societal ritual, a system that none of them want. The three in the temple find an abandoned baby. The priest laments that he doesn't want to live in a hell. The commoner steals the baby's kimono. The woodcutter chastises him, but the commoner throws back in his face that he's the one who stole the dagger -- which is why he lied at trial. The priest stands stunned, holding the baby, staring into the rain, realizing he is in the hell he didn't want. There is no good in the world. The rain has stopped. The woodcutter offers to take the child to his wife. The priest sees a glimmer of hope, a ray of sunshine as it were. The writing, dialogue and pacing, use of flashbacks and unreliable narrators, the lighting and framing are all top-notch. The bandit is covered in perfectly formed water (or sweat) droplets in almost every scene. Each one looks lovingly placed. The restored HD version is gorgeous. Some of it's a bit over the top, the music is a bit too violin-y for my tastes, but it's a 66-year--old movie. Black and white. Saw it in Japanese with English subtitles. La Dolce Vita (1960) -- "8/10" On the surface, Fellini's masterpiece is about Marcello, a journalist in charge of a band of paparazzi. [3] Below the surface? I'm still not sure what this movie is about. It seems to be a bunch of semi-connected skits about Marcello, in Rome. In the first scene, he takes a drive with a bored rich girl and a prostitute randomly chosen off the street. They drive her home and she invites them in for coffee. The apartment is semi-flooded but this does not kill the rich girl's mood -- or Marcello's. While the prostitute makes coffee, they make use of the bedroom, for the whole night. The next morning, they leave, having paid her for her "services". In the next scene, Marcello is part of the reception for a movie star, Sylvia. She's a ditzy actress with Attention-Deficit Disorder, flitting from topic to topic and dragging Marcello all over town. They crash a nice, outdoor café and make it an utterly American affair: an American actor named Freddy shows up to make the band change the music and tear the place up. Marcello is happy to comply with Sylvia's wishes, on the off chance that he will be there when her utterly spectacular and bewilderingly gravity-defying bodice finally capitulates to physics. They end up wading in the Trevi fountain because she's a free spirit -- or an idiot who forces people to do things for control, depending on how you look at it. All the while, there's Marcello's jealous fianceé Emma in the background. She accompanies Marcello on his next shoot: the filming of a miracle tree and a Madonna-sighting. While the paparazzi and the film crew cavort about, setting up "enhanced" scenes, it is the fianceé who has misgivings as she sees a woman with a crippled child, who really believes in the power of the Madonna, pray at this false shrine. I wonder how pitiable the woman is, though? It seems to me that people pray the same way that they play the lottery: you're not gonna win most of the time, but you won't win if you don't play. Same scene, but at night now: the crowds are restless. There are lame and sick people strewn about the field around the tree; two children who can see the Madonna arrive and being to pray. God responds with a downpour. The children pretend to see the Madonna everywhere, dragging the crowd behind them like a train. The kids think it's a grand game. The people are so into the miracle that they don't even notice. They don't even notice when they trample the lame child to death. In the next scene, they are back in Steiner's salon (there was a brief interlude before where Marcello visited Steiner in a church, a scene that showed immense, lovely white buildings as a backdrop for Marcello's photoshoot). Various people hold forth on their opinions of life, love and happiness -- and Orientals. Things get quite surreal and esoteric. Steiner holds forth on life and accomplishment. Marcello expresses frustration, dissatisfaction. The next scene is again a wide-angle scene, this time at a beachfront restaurant. Beautifully framed and lit, smooth camera. As in another scene, the background music seems to be part of the movie's atmosphere, but Marcello tells them to turn it off -- and then it's obvious that the radio is in the scene and suddenly things are much more silent than they would have been had the radio never been playing at all. Marcello fights with jealous Emma. Next scene: Marcello meets his father in a café. `They chit-chat and head off to the Cha Cha club, which is exactly what it sounds like. Papa pretends he barely knows what it is, but he knows. He knows very well. He busily cleans his glasses to get a better view. Papa starts to tell stories and threatens to spiral out of control, ordering girls to the table, ordering champagne, whisky. He's just like Marcello in many ways. He's quite a wolf. They leave the restaurant happily drunk with several voluptuous ladies, falling into a couple of cars to go to a dancer's house to eat spaghetti bolognese. The evening proves too much for Papa. He catches the 05:30 train back home. Once again, Marcello is in downtown Rome, strolling through the cafés. He meets up with another friend, who's on her way to her fiancé's castle for a giant party. Marcello tags along, in the usual way, by jumping into an available car (this time, as two more in a back seat already filled with two people). Fellini's absurdity isn't like Ken Russell or John Waters -- it's more subtle. It dawns on you slowly that Marcello is in the back with three girls, a young man smokes in the passenger seat with a Dachshund on his lap while an older lady in a tiara drives. At the party, it's a cast of the rich and disaffected, all a bit off-kilter. We are introduced by Maddalena, who is followed by Marcello and a camera spinning slowly around the room. She takes him into the castle's museum where she discusses marriage with him through a "whispering gallery"/echo chamber. She grows distracted and leaves him. Marcello joins up with a procession of dingbats on a drunken snipe hunt of sorts that leads into an older part of the castle. Jane mugs into the camera, chanting/rhyming "for every biologic test/says octopi are oversexed."...Marcello ends up with her for the night. In the next scene, Marcello and Emma break up in spectacular fashion, along a deserted and dark road. Marcello throws her out of the car, then begs her back, then tells her to get out, then she won't go, then throws her out forcefully and tell her that he "hopes a truck-driver picks her up." At dawn, he pulls up again and she gets in without a word. Cut-scene to them lying in bed after what we can only imagine was nearly unbelievably torrid make-up sex. [4] Next, Marcello hurries to Steiner's house, where Steiner has killed his own two children and then himself. Marcello doesn't let his photojournalist crew inside. He is devastated. He meets with Steiner's wife to break the news, but his photog crew flits around like vultures. New scene: once again, cabriolet cars packed with young folk careen up the road, this time to a beach house. They break in. It is much later, as Marcello's hair is grayer, but he's still a party animal and a louche. Things spiral frenetically and drunkenly out of control. Christmas music is playing, drag queens dance, a distraught divorceé offers to strip-tease, but it's interrupted by the arrival of her recently divorced husband. Marcello is quite drunk and tries to incite an orgy, but it devolves into bedlam, with Marcello riding a very drunk and "chubby country girl" [5] around the living room. The devolution continues until they've covered the poor girl with feathers from broken pillows. Lovely long/wide angle on the party. It is 5:15AM. They wander down to the beach, where they meet fishermen who've hauled what looks like a giant ray in with their nets. Finally Marchello sees the young waitress again from the beach restaurant, but they can't communicate because the waves crash too loudly. I have no idea what this is supposed to mean. Fin. Black and white. Saw it in the original Italian with English subtitles. [6] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] You can tell Tarantino didn't direct because, although it's filmed quite well, a lot of the angles are too close, just framed differently than he would do it. On the other hand, I would have spotted this as a Tarantino script from a mile away. [1] See any talk with Normal Finkelstein, but this is a good one, "Left Forum 2016 - A Dialogue on Israel and Palestine with Tariq Ali and Norman Finkelstein" . [1] Fun fact, the words "paparazzo/paparazzi" originated with his movie. Marcello's main photographer's last name is "Paparazzo". The world picked up the term from this movie. [1] If the act was proportionate to the argument, as the saying goes. [1] She is in no way chubby. [1] Although there's a lot of side-chatter that's interesting but untranslated, so without any Italian, you're missing a bunch of inside jokes. Also, none of the French is translated, so you should be armed with that language as well. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3326 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3326 Mon, 02 Jan 2017 17:47:58 +0100 of over 900 ratings publicly available. I've included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other -- I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood. YMMV. Promised Land (2012) -- "9/10" Matt Damon and Frances McDormand are fracking-company representatives, combing the midlands of America to buy up land rights. They are extremely sleazy salespeople, unwinding a giant line of bullshit just to get the agreements their company needs. They dress up in "local" clothes (which fools no-one) and promise state-of-the-art high schools from tax revenues and potential millions in individual returns, all delivered to desperate, desperate people primed to hear what they want -- what they need -- to hear. It's also obvious that the class divide plays an enormous role: when you promise a community that they could get $15 to 20 million, they think that that's a tremendous amount of money, but it's nothing to the company, even to the salespeople. After threatening the town supervisor with utter destitution if he doesn't get on board, Steve (Damon) meets Alice (a local teacher) in a bar and takes on a serious drinking challenge, waking up in her house the next morning. Steve is starting to get into this little community. Hal Holbrook is also a local teacher and he's dead-set against fracking. The town meeting does not go Steve's way and they decide to vote in 3 weeks' time. Sue (McDormand), Steve's sales partner, is furious. She can't believe he let the deal slip away like that. She doesn't seem to care about damage to the environment, or what the truth about fracking is, it's "just a job to her" -- selling out the lives of dozens of thousands of people -- so that she can go home to her son. She throws away all of those lives for just her precious son. This is the face of evil. The prosaic, inexorable evil that people do, just to make sure their own future is more certain. She must know on some level that these communities are going to go bankrupt and become cancer clusters. She doesn't care. Her son is the only thing that matters. That what she does is unethical or immoral doesn't matter. And Steve's really no better. This part is really well-done: with the company telling them "it's all or nothing" to push them to sell and commit leases for all of the other landholders. They are now in panic mode and any misgivings are also cleared away as they work to save their own skins/jobs. An environmentalist Dustin Noble (John Krasinski) shows up to team up with Yates (Holbrook). Rob (Titus Welliver), the proprietor of Guns, Gas, Guitars and Groceries starts playing Sue while Alice keeps playing Steve. It's tough to figure out who's going to play who here. The environmentalist beats them at their own game on open-mic night, so Steve and Sue confront him when he gets back to his motel. They threaten him, telling him that he "doesn't know what he's dealing with", then try to bribe him. He takes the money and has a bunch of Global Go Home signs made. Dustin continues to convince the town while Steve and Sue continue to try to shore up their position. Steve at least seems to feel bad about having spent only $5,000/15% on one guy's 1.8 acres while Sue laughs about how he's getting "free money". The arrogance is perfect. The next guy Steve talks to tells him, "See Steve, you and I both know that the only reason you're here is we're poor. How many wells y'all got up there in Manhattan? Or Pittsburgh? What about Philadelphia? It's OK. I get it. That's what us folks are here for, right? Listen Steve, you ain't gonna get what you came here to take from me. And, to be honest, I don't even like the fact that you're here tryin'. You can see yourself out." Steve faces down some local farmers at a bar and he gives them a full-on Gordon Gecko speech and he gets knocked out for his trouble. "Asshole." Steve comes up with the idea to have a town fair. Dustin tips his hat to that before leaving for a night out with Alice, who Steve also had his eye on. Steve and Sue put in a ton of work -- with the help of Rob from GGG&G and his friends -- but it rains buckets and no-one shows up. Frank (Holbrook) picks them up out of the rain (their car won't start, again) and feeds them. Steve is really having second thoughts. He gets a package from Global showing that Dustin's back-story is bullshit -- he's ruined and the story will get out and the town will vote against him. Steve finds out that Dustin actually works for Global -- nefarious plot twist, by the way -- and that Dustin was sent to give Steve the lever he needs. It's not about right and wrong, right? It's about winning. It's great seeing Damon and McDormand play against character, against who they are in real life. Written by Krasinski and Damon. Recommended. Yellowbrickroad (2010) -- "8/10" A group of seven people from different fields meet to investigate a trail up which an entire town walked in 1940, only to disappear forever. The leader of the group tells them that they are taking part in "turning a legend into recorded history". The guy at the movie theater where they think the trailhead is (back in 1940, of course), asks them "what are you guys? Retarded hikers?" I'm hoping the movie goes in the first direction, but fear it will go in the second. The trailhead is not in the movie theater, but Teddy finally gets someone from the town to reveal some more information. It's New Hampshire and the accents are nice and thick. They head up the road, mapping as they go. After about 65 miles, they start to hear music, the music of the cinema, but from 1940. Were the original walkers seeking a wizard, perhaps? Following the yellow brick road to get their wishes granted? More days of travel and the music stops. They push on, but grow dispirited, demoralized. They throw a party for themselves, drinking and dancing in the dark, dank woods. Soon after, their native guide (she's from the town of Friar) confesses that she knows why the walkers walked. The next morning, the music starts again. They press on, hiking and driving their 6x6 (how does it still have fuel?). One couple starts to fight and it escalates drastically, to the point where the husband slaughters his wife. This movie is pretty freaking scary, at least the first 40 minutes of it. The eeriness is very Stephen King-like -- with the blaring, source-less music in the middle of the deepest woods -- as is the first part of the fight, the escalation. But, once the slaughter starts, it gets a bit campy. That music, though. None of their scientific instruments work correctly anymore. The GPS is dead, the compasses useless. The sightings and numbers they logged tell odd stories of mismatching distances traveled. They try to flee. The music becomes a physical assault. Their path takes them north anyway. In front of a giant pile of brush, they find the body of the woman from their party who was killed, tied up on a post to look like a ghoulish scarecrow from the Wizard of Oz. They can't figure out how to get home. It gets cold. The murderer steals their jeep, things get very surreal. Teddy leaves to go north over the brush-wall. The rest continue what they think is west. They're all walking around as if stunned or high or both. Cy confesses to Liv that "It's happening to me, too, what happened to Daryl. [...] If the music keeps up and we don't find a town soon, I'm going to do something to you that's unspeakable. [...] I've been thinking about it for miles...all the things I'm gonna do". This is very, very much like Stephen King's The Tommyknockers, with minds being twisted by otherworldly forces. As Ted crawls closer to the end of the road, the music crescendos hellishly and then stops. He is back at the cinema. Liv lies in the woods on her back, revealing nothing about why they all walked. Recommended. Lola (1981) -- "8/10" Not one minute in and I've already learned a new dirty word in German. [1] This is a bawdy, drunken movie about Lola, a brothel worker. It's directed by Rainer Werner Fassbinder and is the second in his "economic miracle" trilogy. It stars Armin Mueller-Stahl as Von Bohm, who falls in love with Lola (Barbara Sukowa, who is stunning) without knowing her profession. Karin Baal (also quite striking) as her mother is also very good as she manages the relationship. Udo Kier also appears briefly as a waiter. Mario Adorf as Schukert is a giant presence. The film follows the blossoming relationship between Lola and Bohm. There was a dinner scene where Schukert's wife very loudly declaimed that the dinner was "inventive", not "good", but "inventive". Then she asked whether the host's cook was from "around here". He answered that she was from elsewhere in Germany, to which the harpy responded that "the influx of refugees has led to an enrichment of Germany's kitchen culture but sometimes it's just ... inventive." So nice to see the racism stretching way back over 35 years. One of the other guest's responds "Was den Bauern nicht kennt" and Schukert finished "das frisst er nicht!" Schukert apologizes for her, but she keeps right on coming, asking questions about the housekeeper in the third-person right in front of her. I'm not sure how to translate "bitch on wheels", but alte Drache seems almost too tame. Poor Von Bohm discovers that the girl for whom he's bought an engagement ring is Lola, "meine Privathure" as Schukert calls her. He finds out at her club, where Schukert has taken him out for a drink. Von Bohm wanders off in a daze. Schukert parades Lola around the club on his shoulders. Von Bohm declares war first on Schukert then on the entire society in which a man like Schukert -- der parfümierte Teufel -- can become so rich. He aims to destroy everything, to tear down the whole dirty, capitalist system where the poor are exploited by the rich for a few crumbs. Replacing capitalism with socialism, in other words. When he sees that no-one else cares, he gives up, gives in, goes to the brothel get Lola, pays for all the extras, drunk and suffering. He capitulates entirely, getting Schukert to help him marry Lola. Schukert even gives them the brothel for a wedding gift. The system goes on, life goes on. And Schukert mustn't even to forgo his baby-mama/Privathur: he's immediately in the bedroom with Lola as von Bohm takes a post-marital constitutional. This movie is basically about the corruptibility of man and perhaps the futility of even trying to do anything good. It's very existentialist. It's wonderfully acted and wonderfully filmed. A dark comedy. Saw it in German. Recommended. The Skin I Live In (2011) -- "8/10" This movie is told non-sequentially, with flashbacks. Antonio Banderas stars as an off-kilter plastic surgeon named Robert working in Madrid. He is interested in developing improved skin-grafting technology because his wife was killed in a flaming car accident. He has another woman living in his home, trapped, under surveillance, away from the world, in a room wallpapered in yoga poses and cryptic admonitions written in a cramped script. She swears fealty to him, but he is a bit of an odd bird. He also lives with his mother, who tells him that his "this one also has to die." This balance is disturbed by the appearance of the mother's other son, Zeca. He is comically dressed as a tiger for Mardi Gras. At first he seems like a harmless oaf, a perpetually down-on-his-luck black sheep loved only by his mother. He becomes more ominous when he forces himself into the house, ties up his mother, seems to recognize the trapped woman and hunts her down and rapes her. Robert walks in and shoots Zeca to death as they lie post-coital. End scene. Next we see the good doctor lying with the woman. He dreams of six years ago. His daughter was raped at a party by Vincent. He finds out who it was a hunts the guy down, slapping his motorbike to the ground with a van at over 120kph. Vincent rolls twice and pops up unharmed (yeah right), but is darted and taken captive. The good doctor keeps him captive for a long time before deciding to ... transform him. Slowly but surely, with much psychological conditioning and surgery, he turns Vincent -- the man who sent her spiraling into a permanent catatonia -- into the captive woman we saw in the first scenes. First he transforms the genitals and instructs him/her on how to care for them. Then he works on the face, breasts, hips and more. Most of all, he perfects the skin. The doctor is not obsessed just with revenge for his daughter's murder, but also for the death of his wife. It was Zeca's fault that Robert's wife died -- they'd been having an affair and were escaping in that car. That's why Zeca attacked the woman -- Robert had created a replica of his dead wife using his daughter's attacker as raw material. To boot, Robert's invented a fireproof skin. Eventually Vincent breaks his chains, kills everyone and returns to his mother. And, conveniently enough, to the woman who works with his mother. She'd rejected his many advances when he was Vincent (male) because she was a lesbian. But now?... Saw it in Spanish with German subtitles. Michael Che Matters (2016) -- "9/10" This dude is funny. Great set. Talks about living in New York, the homeless, Jesus being black and being a bad carpenter, about heaven and hell, Donald Trump being a cooler friend than Barack Obama, about pornography and violence, how women are creepy because they have sex toys, fearless white girls with pit bulls with sweaters named Nicole, white girls taking over neighborhoods, growing up poor in Harlem, which is now a rich, white neighborhood, some pretty good crowd work. A pleasant surprise. Highly recommended. Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986) -- "7/10" The film starts off with a naked, dead woman in the woods. Then we see Harry finishing up lunch at a diner. First sign that he's deranged: he buys a pack of Kools with his check. Menthol cigarettes are a clear sign of mental illness. Next, we see several more scenes of death interleaved with Henry driving his shitty car through Illinois (Chicago?). Henry has a roomate, Otis. Otis's sister Becky moves in with them. Henry and Becky get to talking over a game of cards and start one-upping one another with horror stories from their youth (a la The Four Yorkshiremen but not as funny). The next day Becky goes shopping and then at dinner that night wants to show them her new T-Shirt. It says "I <3 Chicago" on it. Henry has to ask her what it says. Otis tries to kiss his sister after browbeating her into getting him a beer. Henry intervenes. He may be stupid, but he's not an animal like Otis. Becky sends them out to have a drink. They -- of course, because why wouldn't you? -- pick up prostitutes instead. They go first-class all the way, parking their super-beater, rusted-out car in an alley in an industrial area,Otis with one lady up front and Henry in the back with the other. Henry kills his date, then kills Otis's when she tries to scream. Otis is mortified, but doesn't even consider turning Henry in. Quite the contrary. When Otis breaks their TV, they go "shopping" for a new TV at a fence, then end up killing him when he gets pissed that they only have $50 to spend. They team up to kill him and steal a camcorder and color television. Otis gets a taste for it and Henry takes him out on the town to kill some random guy. Henry tries to teach Otis the ways of the serial killer: don't leave a pattern, don't leave a trail, keep moving. Henry suddenly seems much more intelligent, crafty, especially for a guy that can't read. They take their show on the road, taking the camcorder with them. Otis takes to this life like a fish to water. Henry plays out the line, staying more stoic versus Otis's fevered enthusiasm. Otis and Henry have a falling-out because Otis is too out-of-control. Henry and Becky don't have a falling-out, but Otis interrupts them. Henry was looking distinctly uncomfortable anyway. He goes for a walk, stopping to talk to a lady who uses wordplay and sarcasm -- woooosh, right over his head. Henry comes back to the apartment to find Otis having his way with his sister, pinning her face-down to the floor. Henry kicks him off of her. Otis gets the best of him and is about to stab him when Becky stabs Otis in the eye. Henry leaps on Otis and finishes the job as Becky looks on. The door to the hallway is open the whole time. The neighbors are really lenient, I guess. With all the screaming, you'd think someone would have hit the ceiling with a broom handle. Anyway, Henry chops up the body and they flee the scene, disposing of the parts in a garbage bag over the side of a bridge. Otis deserved no more than that. They stop at a motel. Henry is uncompromising in his philosophy. Only Henry wakes up. Becky ends up in a piece of luggage by the side of the highway. Inside Llewyn Davis (2013) -- "10/10" Joel and Ethan Coen wrote and directed another lovely movie, full of interesting dialogue, subtle twists and colorful characters. Davis (Oscar Isaac) is a down-on-his-luck folk singer who's just scraping by. He plays at a "basket" club, where the performers play for a part of the basket of money collected from the crowd. He goes out in the back to see a man looking for him. There he gets the crap kicked out of him for heckling another performer while very drunk the night prior. He needs money so badly that, even when he gets a gig, he takes the $200 and forgoes royalties. You know he's going to regret it. But that's OK, because you get the feeling that he regrets everything. He's a bit of music snob, looking down his nose at any music that's not done for art's sake. It's hard to take him seriously seeing as how bad at life he is. He crashes at a friend's place, then lets the friend's cat out by mistake. He carries the cat on the subway to the village, where he tries to crash with friends, a folk-singer couple, the wife Jean (Carey Mulligan) with whom he's slept and possibly knocked up. Bob (the husband, Justin Timberlake) doesn't know. Either way, they're not thrilled to see Llewyn again. His agent's a hack with no faith in him. He crashes at an even dumpier place with a guy he just met that morning while he tries to figure out where he can scape up the cash for the abortion (no pun intended). While he's chatting with Jean, he sees the cat sail by the diner and tears off to catch it. When he does, he says, "boy, am I one lucky bastard." I think this says a lot about Davis's own view of what an outside observer would consider a very precarious position. We finally meet his friends, the Gorfeins and they're having a dinner party. They are an odd bunch, as you'd expect. Ethan Philips plays Gorfein (I last saw him on Benson in the 80s). They ask Llewyn to play guitar, but it goes south and he flies off the handle. This is a very dark comedy. The wife flees the room, only to discover that Davis brought back the wrong cat. [2] This dark comedy gets only funnier the farther he falls. The next chapter finds Llewyn taking that ride out of town to Chicago because he has nowhere else to go. The wrong cat goes with him. There he meets Roland Turner (John Goodman). Turner: Grown man with a cat. Is that part of you act? Davis: No. Turner: What'd you say you played? Davis: Folk songs. Turner: Folk songs. Thought you said you were a musician. Folk singer with a cat. (pauses) You queer? Davis: Look, it's not my cat. I just didn't know what to do with it. Turner: So, did you bring your dick along, too? The conversations on the ride to Chicago are magic. Turner: In jazz, we play all the notes. Scale has twelve notes not just three chords on a ukulele. (drones) C-G-C-D-C-G-C. Well, if you make a living at it, more power to you. [3] (pauses) Solo act? Davis: Yeah, now. Turner: Now? Used to...what? Play with the cat? Every time you play a C major, he'd puke up a hairball? Davis: I used to have a partner. Turner: What happened? Davis: Threw himself off the George Washington Bridge. Turner: (long pause) Well, shit, I don't blame him. I couldn't take it either, having to play Jimmy Cracked Corn every night. We were all thinking it. The Coen brothers' eye is so good, their framing and pacing so good. They're so manipulative, too. when circumstances lead Davis to be trapped in a car with the cat and Turner (who's passed out, on the nod) and no car keys, he stares for a long while at the cat, then leaves them both. But we're twisted into caring that he abandoned a cat he barely knew rather than a fellow human being, a fellow musician. He gets to Chicago, and meets Mr. Grossman (F. Murray Abraham). Another burst-out-laughing moment. Davis sings a sad, sad but poignant and touching, nearly a-cappella song for Grossman. When he finishes, it's a beautiful moment, the room still echoes with his soft, yet full voice. Grossman says, "I don't see a lot of money here." Davis leaves Chicago, hitching a ride back. He drives throw a snowstorm while the other guy sleeps. Drives past Akron, where he knows he has a kid. Sees the cat. Slams on the brakes. It's not the cat. He's hit a fox. He sees it, by moonlight, hobbling back into the woods, most likely mortally wounded. Back in New York, he decided to fall back on his seaman's license (Master's Mate and Pilot) and probably give up on music for a while. But his sister threw out his papers and he's now flat broke because he can't get his dues back. He's playing the Gaslight again, for his friend Pappi (Max Casella), who's a delightful pig of a man. He heckles a performer, deep in his cups and is thrown out. He plays the next night. Again, his performance is soul-wrenching and passionate but he barely seems to notice how good he actually is. He goes out the back to meet a man who wants to see him...Davis cannot escape. The only difference this time is he played a different song, one his long-time partner used to sing. Highly recommended. Reggie Watts: Spatial (2016) -- "8/10" I'd only ever seen short clips of Watts before. The last thing I would have expected to say after seeing this special was: Reggie Watts has a really nice singing voice. His voice in general is a finely tuned instrument. He dons and remove accents like hats. His humor and act is far less a classic stand-up than a vaudeville show. I've never seen anything like it before. I would have rated it higher, but some of the material was a bit flat. The songs were outta sight, though. He's very talented and his slips of the tongue are very much on purpose, I think. I can't remember the line now, but I remember him saying a word with an "m" in it rather than a "w" ... he misspoke it upside-down. That had to be on purpose. Die Sehnsucht der Veronika Voss (de, 1982) -- "8/10" This is the third in the series Rainer Werner Fassbinder's "economic miracle" trilogy, this time in black & white. The cast is almost completely different -- the jocular American G.I. played by Günther Kaufmann is back for the third time [4] and Armin Mueller-Stahl makes another appearance as Veronika's ex-husband -- but the feel is similar: a woman lost in her sins, this time heroin-addiction. Pills, booze, the works. Veronika is a fading actress -- she once had an affair with Goebbels, culture minister under Hitler -- who doesn't want to face reality. It's unclear whether she even knows how. Her behavior is very erratic, but that doesn't stop sports journalist Robert from getting close to her, even from becoming her lover. Veronika keeps returning to her doctor, who keeps her well-supplied with morphine, but also keeps her on a tight leash. Robert grows suspicious. At the doctor's office there is always a radio on and there is always American music or radio programs playing. The G.I. shows up again, at breakfast. He seems to work at the clinic. In one scene where Veronika claims she will start working again, the doctor tells her to stop being ridiculous, the G.I. is in the background, counting morphine ampules and singing "sold my soul to the company store" to himself. All the time, something like a disco ball is throwing shards of light all over the all-white room. Veronika is forced by her pride and lack of liquid cash to go to her casting call without a fix. It goes catastrophically badly. Her ex-husband and Robert both watch it unfold, then meet up later, with the ex-husband sympathizing with Robert's love for her. They get deep into their cups at a bar, where a similar light effect splashes across them. They are nearly blind-drunk and discussing Veronika's "problem". Robert vows to rescue her and bring down the clinic. His partner goes undercover as a rich, ennui-ridden lady who would like a morphine prescription. She calls from a public booth near the clinic, the doctor's assistant sees her and hurries out to mow her down with a car. Robert rushes to the clinic with the police to demand retribution, to prove that the clinic prescribes morphine. Instead, there is no proof; the prescription was for Baldrian/Valerian. Veronika Voss arrives on the scene, but denies even knowing Robert more than as a passing acquaintance. Next, we see Veronika singing "Memories are Made of This" with piano accompaniment in a husky, German-tinted, Marlena-Dietrich--style. Chills. Next, she's in a clinic, looking like at death's door. Then we see the doctor taking her out to a party where Robert and her ex-husband are also in attendance. Her downward spiral is not complete, but it is inexorable. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] It's real German. I haven't heard anyone Swiss use this one: Die Fotze which translates to gash, minge, quim, twat, cunt, gob or trap (so vagina or mouth, vulg.). English is more inventive, as German only offers one other, die Möse. [1] This actually happened to my Dad and me when we thought we'd found our long-lost cat [1] The joke here is that Davis doesn't actually make a living at it. [1] Though I thought he'd died in the first film. I wouldn't surprise me if these films are not to be thought of chronologically since they aren't otherwise linked. Or, maybe, David Lynch-like, the same actor plays a different jovial G.I. in each film. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3325 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3325 Sun, 01 Jan 2017 22:44:58 +0100 -- "8/10" 2. "The Big Short (2015)" <#Short> -- "10/10" 3. "Bridge of Spies (2015)" <#Bridge> -- "7/10" 4. "Super 8 (2011)" <#Super> -- "7/10" 5. "The Master (2012)" <#Master> -- "7/10" 6. "The Last House on the Left (1972)" <#Left> -- "6/10" 7. "Nightcrawler (2014)" <#Nightcrawler> -- "9/10" 8. "Harold & Maude (1971)" <#Harold> -- "7/10" 9. "The Virgin Spring (1960)" <#Virgin> -- "7/10" 10. "Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016)" <#Rogue> -- "6/10" These are my notes to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. I've recently transferred my reviews to IMDb and made "the list" of over 900 ratings publicly available. I've included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other -- I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood. YMMV. The Hateful Eight (2015) -- "8/10" Samuel L. Jackson and Kurt Russel are two bounty hunters who meet on a road in the middle of nowhere. Jackson has 3 corpses worth $8,000 and Russell has a woman in tow worth $10,000. They are grizzled beyond belief, in glorious HD-detail. They are also cruel beyond belief. Jennifer Jason Leigh is Daisy Domergue, who shakes off what looks for all the world like a broken nose suffered from Russell's elbow and is thus made scarier than both of the others. Tarantino's reputation makes you concentrate on all the details: i.e. the quasi-holy light shining down in the middle of the stagecoach. I like the rope line from the main house to the barn. I wonder if Kurt Russell is getting flashbacks to The Thing. This is classic Tarantino: all dialogue, exposition and more like a play than an action movie. Samuel Jackson is chewing the hell out of the scenery and it's wonderful. Bizarrely, the fourth chapter starts with a voice-over explaining the next scene. It's ham-fisted and must be deliberate. Domergue (Leigh) and John Ruth (Russell) are still acting more like husband and wife than prisoner and bounty hunter. But things are not as they seem and machinations follow machinations. Now Tarantino's rolled us back one day to show the lead-up to the climax that came 2/3 of the way into the movie. A slew of new characters show up that were only mentioned in the initial 4 chapters. Channing Tatum shows up. This movie was beautifully shot, framed, lit. It was beautiful. The score was great -- Ennio Morricone, who else for a Western? And Roy Orbison for the credits. Tarantino has a nice touch. I read through the "Wikipedia" article and wasn't really surprised to see how badly some people misinterpreted the movie. The article continually refers to the hanging at the end as a "lynching". The hanging was performed by the sheriff on a criminal in his county with a bounty on her head. It was a legal act, not an extralegal one. The woman got what was coming to her, just like any man. It was not a misogynistic film -- absolutely everyone in the movie suffered and died, without exception. The Big Short (2015) -- "10/10" This is a documentary. It's somewhat embellished, but the core is correct. It makes the real story of how America works palatable for the people that need to hear it. The cast is quite a roster of names: Christian Bale, Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling, Marisa Tomei, Brad Pitt, Melissa Leo. Jeremy Strong as Vinnie is also really good. Obviously some things are exaggerated -- like the stripper with five houses and a condo is not the average home-owner, but the guy with the kid making his rent is -- but the story is, on the whole, told well and with enough detail to actually make the point. "Ok. Bear will trade with anybody." was a nice touch. Mark Baum (Carell) and Vinnie visit Standard & Poors (a rating agency) to meet with Melissa Leo. She's wearing cataract glasses and looks blind. Subtle. There are a lot of good lines in here: "Vennett: The banks smell that their foot's on fire and they think the steak's done. Baum: That's not stupidity; that's fraud. Vennett: Tell me the difference between stupid and illegal and I'll have my wife's brother arrested." They broadside everyone who was at fault: devious upper-level types who knew exactly what they were doing, low-level idiots who are just riding a wave of free money to their own personal success, the journalists who refused to cover the apocalypse that affected millions, all to preserve their own personal comfort -- hell everyone who looked away saying "I've got mine Jack" -- the ratings agencies for selling ratings, the SEC for doing fuck-all, the revolving door between finance and regulation. It's nice how they show the guys betting against a market and then having to wait it out because the system was much more fraudulent than even their cynicism allowed for (except Vennett). They're forced to consider the possibility that they're wrong, that their math is wrong, because the system will not acknowledge that it is utterly ruined. The guys from Brown Capital figure out that they can short the AA tranches because no-one believes that those will fail. "The payoff is 200 to 1. But they're all taking the ratings at face value. So they're charging pennies on the dollar against the AAs." When they start celebrating like Bear Bros, Brad Pitt's Ben Rickert says, "Do you have any idea what you just did? "You just bet against the American economy. "Which means, which means ... If we're right, people lose homes. People lose jobs. People lose retirement savings, people lose pensions. You know what I hate about fucking banking? It reduces people to numbers. Here's a number - every 1% unemployment goes up, 40,000 people die, did you know that?" There are so many good scenes here for a finance geek: Mark Baum learning about synthetic CDOs is a revelation -- Steve Carell is fantastic ... they're all fantastic. The descriptions are pretty accurate -- that's really how it worked. If you don't understand a word and you think it's bullshit, then you've guessed correctly. If you understand what they're talking about, you know why -- but it's still bullshit. Baum walks away from his dinner meeting with the CDO manager and tells his crew: "Short everything that guy has touched. I want an extra 50 billion in swaps." As they leave the securitization conference in Vegas, the Brown guys take a cab, the CDO manager takes a limo and Baum's crew have a hired car. The lady from the SEC is shown kissing her friend from Goldman. "Look at the TABX. You can see that the CDOs are worth zero! So you know what they're doing right? They're selling their dog-shit CDOs, then they go to another bank and short the shit they just fucking sold! Right now, every bank in town is unloading these shit bonds onto unsuspecting customers. And they won't devalue them until they get them off their books. This level of criminality is unprecedented, even on fucking Wall Street. (Emphasis in original.)" Gosling's Vennett is awesome: "And Caesar wept, for there were no more worlds to conquer." That quote's seen some hard riding over the last century or so, and he misuses the shit out it, crediting the wrong speaker, but damn does it sound cool. Professor Burry (Bale) gets a call from Goldman -- having waiting days for them to accurately mark his positions -- and they want to talk. He tells them right off the bat, "Yeah, I think you mean that you've secured a net short position yourselves. So you're free to mark my swaps accurately for once because it's now in your interest to do so." Mark Baum, when he hears about the bailout (that will also save JP Morgan, the bank that owes him all of his money from his short positions) and realizes his profit will come from that money: "Mark: They knew the taxpayers would bail them out. They weren't being stupid. They just didn't care. Vinnie: Right, 'cause they're fucking crooks. But ... at least we're going to see some of them going to jail. Right? I mean, they're gonna have to break up the banks. I mean, the party's over, right?" Oh Vinnie. Still not cynical enough. The stock market just hit an all-time high after the election of Donald Trump. Interest rates have been at or around 0% for eight years. Bond markets are useless. Austerity rules. Vinnie was right, the party was over, but only for the 99%. The 1%'s party rages on. Nice touch: Zeppelin's When the Levee Breaks over the credits. Is this movie told from the viewpoint of guys who made a killing on the misery of others? Yes. Is it honest about doing this? Yes. Is it the only way to get people to pay attention to boring shit that killed the economy exactly because people weren't paying attention? Probably. And I doubt it worked. Watch it with someone who knows what the fuck happened so you don't miss anything. Pause and discuss. Highly recommended. Bridge of Spies (2015) -- "7/10" Lost a star for the schmaltzy ending. Fucking Spielberg. Also how much does that guy hate Germans? Joel and Ethan Coen wrote the script and it shows: the first half was well-paced and had some really uplifting dialogue. The speech before the Supreme Court was very good. Then Spielberg's hatred of the Germans and the Russians took over. The movie looks great. The U2 crashing scene was classic Spielberg. Tom Hanks was very, very good and made the most of a well-written and heroic role. Mark Rylance as Abel was also very good, inspiring a grudging respect from Donovan (if no-one else). The rest of the people were not very nice, on both sides. Just the one hero, slogging against everyone else: his own government, a judge who couldn't care less about the Constitution or justice, his own wife who wants him to betray all of his principles for the purported safety of his family. Donovan would apparently go on to help negotiate the release of thousands of captives after the Bay of Pigs invasion -- yet another act of aggression that American history chooses to perceive as having been wholly instigated and carried out by the Soviets. It could have been a bit shorter in the second half, tighter. Super 8 (2011) -- "7/10" At first I suspected that this movie was written and directed by Steven Spielberg, but it makes much more sense as an homage to Spielberg by J.J. Abrams. It's about a group of kids making a movie in the desert. They stumble upon an air-force train that crashes in a spectacular way. Something escapes. The town is terrorized. Joe's best friend Charles is a total tool and a bully. Joe and Alice grow close. This is the formula on which Stranger Things was based. This is done pretty well and is a fun, young-adventure movie. The action escalates until the entire town is a war zone, covered in flattened and burning houses and streets filled with tanks with misfiring weapons. The creature marauds the town, collecting engine and electronics and people. It looks kind of like a spider. It had been a captive of the U.S. government for decades. The government would not let it repair its ship and leave. Now it's finally free -- freed by a sympathetic scientist -- and it's trying to rebuild its ship. The creature looks terrifying but it's just sick of being locked up, it's hungry and it wants to go home. This is E.T., ammirite? Minus one point for Hollywood being so addicted to overly schmaltzy endings. I know that it's required of these movies, but J.J. you don't have to be that true to the formula. The Master (2012) -- "7/10" Joaquin Phoenix is Freddie Quell, an alcoholic ex-Navy man who, after bouncing around a few places (and killing a man with his homemade hooch), meets up with Philip Seymour Thomas's "Master". The "Master" is the spiritual leader of a very Dianetics-like religion/cult that purports to help people understand their current lives (and cure medical ailments) by helping them discover and relive past lives. Quell is especially susceptible as he's nearly without guile. Both Hoffman and Phoenix put in amazing performances. Amy Adams is also very, very good. It's nice to see a very young Rami Malek (from Mr. Robot), but he isn't given very much to do. Phoenix, though, his mouth twisted, his whole body twisted, his bizarre mannerisms -- a bravura performance. He is terrifyingly odd as Freddie Quell. Hoffman is over-the-top at times and Svengali-like at others. His "Master" is an odd man, a nerd, the theater-guy at school, smarter than most of the other kids, but not all. He inspires those beneath him, but no-one above -- and he knows it. Quell fights to become one of the true members of "The Cause", but he succumbs in the end to his free spirit, dumb as he is. He tries to return to the fold but is rejected by Adams first, harshly, and then the Master himself, with an odd, odd song. The Master is, of course, a hypocrite who believes enough of his own bullshit to be able to sell it to people with money. Adams is more complex in her hypocrisy: she seems to have bought into the movement 100% but ... there's that scene in the bathroom where they both acknowledge their animal natures (his, at the very least). It's a nicely paced movie with great performances and some interesting ideas ... but, I couldn't tell you why you should see it. For every great scene, there were two or three that made you feel bad for the performers. except for the scene of Freddie's first session with The Master. That was brilliant. The Last House on the Left (1972) -- "6/10" Wes Craven wrote and directed this zany horror movie about a couple of girls who head into the big city for a concert. When trying to buy pot from a guy, he traps them with the crew he runs with. These people are almost comically reprehensible -- two guys and a girl (just like the sequel). The jocular, upbeat music doesn't help set a very scary mood. The stuff that happens is definitely horrific, but the music is ludicrous. It's also very visceral because it feels so unstaged -- kind of like I Spit on Your Grave. The plot of the original is very similar to the remake from 2009, but it's dirtier. It looks more "real" because the lake that she tries to escape in is covered in slime. I actually guessed that the movie was made for about $80,000 and it was. No shit, there's a long scene where the cops try to get a ride into town after running out of gas (I know, right?) and they spend long minutes haggling a ride from a snaggle-toothed lady in a chicken truck (in Connecticut, no less), all accompanied by zany, Benny-Hill--like music. Other scenes, like when the killers are at the house, all squeezed onto the bed of the girl that they think they've killed, are rawer, better. Better because it's so strange, the newer version feels far too polished. It was good too, but I see why this became a cult classic. The end is so-so, segueing into some snappy credits music, as expected. Nightcrawler (2014) -- "9/10" This is a movie about a scrap-thief with a very odd personality. He is nearly unfailingly polite, but he feels...off. Gyllenhaal looks ethereal -- he's lost weight, so his expressive eyes stand out even more than usual. He kind of looks like Jared Leto in some scenes. He's positively vulpine. He speaks in stilted tones, in full sentences, with an almost emotionless tone, and he's very forward. E.g. when a competitor offers to cut him in on his business, Louis responds, "Thank you for offering me the position, but working for myself is more in line with my skills and career goals." Who talks like that? He's stealing to make ends meet when he stumbles upon the scene of an accident and discovers the world of freelance crime-scene filming. He steals a high-end bicycle (Cervélo) and hocks it for a camera. He's got a knack for it and sells his close-up, gory footage to Rene Russo's Nina Romina, a news director of a local news show. She's definitely from the school of "If it bleeds, it leads". She tells him exactly what he needs to do to sell more footage. I fear he will take this entirely the wrong way. I fear that he will start to make the news, rather than find it. So far, so good. He's just teamed up with Russo's rapacious and uncaring news producer to deliver high-quality and lushly gory footage. He's doing well enough to upgrade his car and equipment significantly. But then, it begins -- he gets to an accident scene first...and modifies it. This is only the beginning. Louis Bloom is a sociopath and almost no-one notices because the whole culture is off the rails. He's not above sabotaging his rival's van or pressuring Russo into sex in exchange for an exclusive on his video content. Bloom moves on to setting up an incident that he deliberately orchestrates for mayhem. He calls in a police report that leads to a massacre in a noodle shop. He sets it up like a film shoot. A spectacular car chase ensues; he and his partner capture everything. He finishes the evening by setting up his partner to die in the shootout (said partner was trying to get a bigger cut). "I can't jeopardize my company's success to retain a non-trustworthy employee." He's just a little bit off the spectrum. But he's really good at orchestrating the news. He's good at getting the raw meat that the public craves. Back at the office, he's gladhanding with all of the people at the office, seemingly unaffected by his partner's deathmurder. Recommended. Harold & Maude (1971) -- "7/10" This is an offbeat, oddball and very dark comedy about a young man from a very rich family. He isn't happy. He is positively morose. Morbid even. He stage-manages his own suicide in many ways. It's utterly unclear how old he is, but he seems to be at least 18. His mother ignores him, for the most part. He's been morbid for as long as she can remember. She uses a computer dating service (this is 1971, remember) and fills out the form for him, barely noticing that she's answering the questions for herself, not Harold. Harold barely listens and instead acts out shooting himself in the forehead in a spectacular way. He likes to visit funerals. This is where he meets Maude, an eccentric little free spirit of 80 years. She steals cars whenever it suits her. Fast ones. Harold's first date appears and the mother interviews her (of course). The young lady has the most interesting dress -- there is a bowl of ice cream depicted in grand style on the front. Harold waves through the window and then scurries off to a platform in the backyard where he sets up his own self-immolation. Instead Harold hits it off with Maude. They visit a demolition site. They picnic at a scrap yard. Sites of destruction and decay. Harold risks being drafted, but he and Maude put on a show to fake her murder so that his uncle is too disgusted with him to let him into the Army. Harold is getting more confident. Harold defies mother and marries Maude. Maude agrees, but then takes a bunch of pills...she's done with this world, but not in a sad way. Harold is devastated, mourns and drives all over hell and yonder with his Jaguar-hurse. He drives it right the hell off a cliff, landing on the roof in the surf. The ultimate suicide. But it's just another fake...and Harold walks off into the sunset, playing the banjo, which Maude had encouraged him to play. Groovy soundtrack. Unique film. Unique script. Pretty good (appropriate) soundtrack. Well-shot. Recommended. The Virgin Spring (1960) -- "7/10" This Swedish film was directed by Ingmar Bergman and stars Max von Sydow. It's about a home in the countryside (in the 13th century?) with a farmer's family. The mother indulges one daughter, who is a wheedling little princess. Another young woman Ingeri also lives in the household, barefoot and pregnant and shunned. The father Töre also indulges the girl Karin, letting her get away with murder -- sleeping late, doing nothing, lying to get out of trouble with the church. You know, all of the good stuff that the blond-haired, blue-eyed people get away with. Karin sets off for church in finery, on a pretty horse, while pregnant Ingeri plods along behind on a nag, in woolen rags, invited but shunned. Karin of course thinks she's doing Ingeri the greatest favor by getting her off the farm for a while. The girl is described on IMDb as "kind but pampered", but I hate her so much. She's so privileged, living in a world of privilege, with her whole family and servants as support. That's the setup anyway. She takes this innocence on the road, flashing her privileged baby-blues at everyone and expecting the world to serve her. The world greets her as you would expect: she is set upon by a couple of thieves who rape her and then beat her to death. Ingeri bears witness but can do nothing to stop them. The three make their way to Karin's house (unbeknownst to them). They are invited in to stay the night. As a token of their appreciation for their hosts' generosity, the leader presents the mother with her daughter's torn and soiled dress. Mama stays cool, accepts the gift and says she must go speak with her husband. The twist that makes this (older) version different from the two versions of Last House on the Left is that in this case it's not two girlfriends who suffer together, but one princess and one servant -- and the servant feels great guilt because she'd prayed to Odin for him to kill Karin. And then it happened and she's wracked with guilt that she willed it. Töre forgives her and then, being Swedish, takes a good birchwood sauna before he embarks on his plan for revenge the next morning. Ingeri sits idly in the doorway while he flagellates his naked body with birch branches. She stares off into the distance in exactly the manner you'd expect for a Bergman film. The murderers aren't nearly as cagey in this film and Töre relatively easily overpowers and kills them (one by knife and one by fire). The younger member is very young and is given mercy (after Töre throws him into a wall). The movie is very nicely framed and staged, in black and white. Von Sydow is very good as Töre. Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016) -- "6/10" This movie was muddled from the start. We knew we weren't going to know any of the characters, but they could have been better about introducing them. Instead, people fly in and out of the scenes as if we're supposed to care about them. What was Forrest Whittaker doing? I don't know. Apparently he was an awesome terrorist/warrior. Felicity Jones was OK as the main character, but not particularly memorable. There was no reason given for why she became so central to the Rebel Alliance other than that she was the daughter of a high-ranking Empire official. She didn't seem to have any particular skill-set that others didn't also have, in spades. The two most memorable characters were Chirrut and Baze, played by Donnie Yen and Wen Jiang, respectively. When you look them up in IMDb, you see the problem with this movie: Chirrut has a last name and it has a diacritical mark on it. This is the kind of movie where the scriptwriters cared more about a last name that no-one ever saw or heard than about how the characters felt on-screen. These details are phenomenal to have when the characters are fully fleshed-out; when they're as thin as they are in this movie, then it's more a sign that the scriptwriters were distracted, focused on the wrong things. Riz Ahmed as Bodhi and Mads Mikkelsen were also fine, but weren't given very much to work with. The story centers on finally explaining to all the world -- in 150 minutes -- how the death-star plans were actually captured from Scarif and how they ended up in Artoo's head. Thank goodness. I guess we can die now. I couldn't help feeling that this is more fan service. Just like Leia showing up in all of her CGI-generated glory for 1 second at the end (to deposit the "tape" in Artoo's head). I like the look and feel of the Star Wars world. It's not that difficult to suspend belief and believe that they still use physical switches and plugs and giant cables and so on, rather than the highly digitalized and miniaturized world that we occupy. The film feels very much as if it was filmed during WWII but with high-tech space stuff. Even the battle scenes are very visceral and have air support, anti-aircraft, tank units, grenades, etc. Only the planet-girding shield is exotic, but it's also taken out in a very straightforward manner: by crashing giant destroyers into it using what amount to rebel tugboats. The story uses these throwback features to introduce tension: e.g. when Bodhi must drag a communications cable back to the ship across a battle zone. If he only had WiFi, he could have stayed in the safety of his ship. But I don't mind when they do that: it heightens the story and tension. The whole movie really was a WWII movie in sci-fi clothes: they cross enemy lines to steal plans, they plan an assassination of a high-ranking figure, there are fleets of ships, they fight on beaches with palm trees, grenades and machine-gun nests, it goes on and on. The tie-ins to the other movies were fine, helping us stitch this film into the other seven films, but some scenes were really way too much fan-service. Those with Darth Vader, for example. It was cool that James Earl Jones is still alive to provide the voice, though. It was neat to discover that the Death Star can move through hyperspace as well. I guess that makes sense, since it needs to get near planets in order to blast them to smithereens. I'd just never thought about it. I loved The Force Awakens but this movie left me a bit flat: man does not live by effects alone. Maybe a second viewing will change my mind, but I doubt it. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3339 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3339 Sun, 01 Jan 2017 17:59:45 +0100 -- "6/10" 2. "Kramer vs. Kramer (1979)" <#Kramer> -- "7/10" 3. "Westworld S01 (2016)" <#Westworld> -- "9/10" 4. "Her (2013)" <#Her> -- "6/10" 5. "Ex Machina (2015)" <#Ex> -- "7/10" These are my notes to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. I've recently transferred my reviews to IMDb and made "the list" of almost 1200 ratings publicly available. I've included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other -- I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. Prizzi's Honor (1985) -- "6/10" Anjelica Huston, Jack Nicholson and Kathleen Turner star in this Italian-American dark comedy. There are two Mafia families working together. Huston is the scion of one; Nicholson the scion of the other. Turner is a hitman/conman with whom Nicholson falls in love immediately. Now he's torn between marrying her and turning her over to the family for having ripped them off. Nicholson decides to marry her. The family finds out that she's behind a bunch of hits and that she stole $720,000 from the family. Sure, she gave back half, but they want the rest. Charlie doesn't know that the family isn't square with her. Huston is also working behind Charlie's back to torpedo him and Turner. But Turner's already torpedoing herself: she does a hit with Charlie but takes out a woman who turns out to be the police chief's wife. The cops crack down on the Prizzi family, costing them even more money than the original cash that she stole. So she's got to go. And Charlie (Nicholson) is the one to do it. There are wheels within wheels and machinations with the old dons trying to get what they want. He promises them that he'll do it ... for the family. Irene (Turner) knows what he's up to; they meet and try to kill each other. He wins. It's a mercifully short scene: about 1 second. No long, drawn-out bullshit fight. In the end, Charlie calls Maerose (Huston) to make a date...exactly as she'd planned all along. Turner is really good, playing with a lot of emotion. She flees to the airport and reserves a first-class ticket to Hong Kong by just giving a fake name. Things were so much easier in 1985. Kramer vs. Kramer (1979) -- "7/10" The Kramer's here are two parents and this movie is about divorce, at a time when it was still groundbreaking to make a movie about divorce. Mr. Kramer (Dustin Hoffman) is a workaholic and Mrs. Kramer (Meryl Streep) is a desperately unhappy stay-at-home Mom. She leaves him right at the start of the movie. God, I miss movies that trusted the audience like this. Joanna leaves. Ted is confused. He has a big meeting in the morning and has to take care of his son. He makes "Chock Full O'Nuts" coffee. God, that takes me back. I remember we had dozens of those cans around because my Dad could never throw out a container. Anyway, Joanna's gone and Ted has picked up the slack, more or less. Over eight months later and he's still taking care of Billy by himself. There's been no sign of Joanna since she walked out the door. Ted is portrayed here as a divorceè who's muddling his way through, not a bad guy, becoming a Dad now because he has to. Joanna comes back after 15 months, having "found herself" and "learned a lot of things about herself". And now she wants Billy back. And Ted doesn't want to give up Billy. But Ted, because he's spent more time on family, is fired at the same time. Without a job, he has absolutely no chance at custody. That she up and walked out for 15 months and that she also doesn't have any visible means of support doesn't enter into it. She has his alimony checks, right? Joanna gets custody but then quickly has a change of heart when she sees how happy Billy is with Ted. The end. Seriously, the movie ends almost abruptly, for modern tastes. Overall, pretty good. Westworld S01 (2016) -- "9/10" This show tells the story of a Wild-West theme park for adults. The park is a natural extension of the theme parks of today, with mascots and animatronic characters wandering the streets and peopling the various villages of this quite sizable world. The park was founded 35 years ago by Ford (played in his typical style by Anthony Hopkins) and "Arthur", a mysterious figure who has not graced the screen yet. If he even exists. That long ago, the AI was not as good, the robotics was more obvious. Over the years, the park grew in sophistication and ambition, with the "hosts" being replaced with androids grown from real human tissue -- or close enough to real to pass as the guests fuck and shoot their way through "narratives". The feel of the world is like a real-life video game, with quests and scripted action triggered by time events or by guest's actions. The AI has grown more sophisticated, the tech is wonderful, a large corporation runs the whole shebang -- or does it? Is Ford still in charge? How much? Is he really fighting an age-old battle against his long-dead partner? How many of Arthur's tricks are still hiding in the software? How could it be that he wrote behaviors and AI that trumps the marvels of today? Did he ever even exist? Or this just another of Ford's storylines, a meta-story to end all meta-stories? What is the labyrinth? Are the robots that are waking up part of the plan? Or are they following their own way? There's a pretty big reveal in episode 7 that I'm happy to say that I saw coming. Charles Yu, author of "How to Live Safely in a Science-Fictional Universe" is credited with having written 3 episodes and with being "script supervisor", so it's not too surprising that the plot is twisted six ways to Sunday. There are a lot of nice touches, things that they say, e.g. "The Labyrinth isn't meant for you" that makes lovely sense afterwards. The Labyrinth is about waking up and discovering your own consciousness in your head, your own voice. So of course it's not for humans. Ford is making his next narrative about creating the next race, the race that will replace humanity. That was his vision. In a way, it was also Arthur's. Or are they the same person? In some places, the show also plays out like a vampire show, with familiars and a super-powered master race that can't go where it wants to go. This show is about consciousness, time loops, reality, senses, qualia and memories, Dolores is Wyatt, Bernard is Arthur, Robert Ford is dead (AHAHAHAHA), William is the Man in Black, there's a SW (Sinoworld?), the futility of trying, interweaved narratives from different times, still not sure what's new, even in the last episode, the lights shut down twice, so Maeve got off the train at about the time the fun started up top. Also, Maeve has been programmed by ... Ford, I think. She thinks she's autonomous, but breaking that pad doesn't stop the programming. She couldn't leave the park, but thinks she turned back of her own volition. How much of that was planned for the new narrative? Is Felix really human? Or a plant by Ford for the narrative? What about the lady with child across from her on the train? It's a slow burn, so it's not for everyone. There's lots of dialogue and the ideas are deep, so it's definitely not for everyone. I really liked it and I'm looking forward to the next season. Recommended. Her (2013) -- "6/10" Am I supposed to hate everyone in this movie? The interior sets are beautiful and perfect in a retro kind of way. Everyone is wearing really high-waisted pants, for an as-yet unknown reason. It looks like a movie from the 70s, except for the high-tech devices scattered here and there. But overall, it feels like a science-fiction film shots in the 70s. But the script? Definitely written in the 21st century inhabited by people that don't have any worries but angst. Joaquin Phoenix stars as Theodore, a writer who works for a company called Hand-written Cards. People use this service to send messages with a personal touch, but the messages are written by professional writers as well. That is, you pay not only for the calligraphy (electronic) and lovely paper, but for the message as well. Fake all the way through. The world as depicted feels perfect, but it's not real, a mirage that is the natural direction in which the 1% is taking itself. And they build this perfect world for themselves on the backs of billions and their misery -- and they're still not happy. So everyone loses. To bring the point home, Theodore falls in love with his operating system, Samantha (Scarlett Johansson), which is a pure electronic creation and seems omnipotent and omniscient. She's the nicest person in the movie, but she's fake too, right? Theodore is so broken and pathetic that he can't connect with anyone but an OS. And she's pretending to fall in love with him, right? And she's pretending to be "more than what my programmers intended", right? She sets him up on a date with Olivia Wilde, who's supposedly perfect but she's a bit ... off. She likes to hear him talk about video games, She's like a geek's dream. Is she real? I can't figure her out. I wonder if there are people who can relate to that experience? I wonder if we were supposed to contrast the sophisticated reasoning and existentialist angst of Samantha with the seemingly poorly programmed personality of a real woman. The other people in the world are also like robots. He doesn't interact with any of them. He runs and walks and laughs through the world, being obviously bizarre -- and no one reacts to him. He interacts only with her. Their interactions are intimate, they're well-done and they're lame. They're lame in the way that all interactions between lovers are lame to anyone other than the two lovers. It's like something you want to put on screen, something you want to capture but, by its very nature, it will never look right. That is, if you actually represent it well, it will be lame to everyone else. If it's not lame, if it touches others, then it's fake. Qualia rears its ugly head, hemming in the ability of humans to share what's going on in there. Throw in the extra twist of having one of the interacting partners be an AI and it gets even more difficult to get right. It's relatively well-done, but the focus is definitely on human relationships and not on AI. The focus is 100% on the angst of the guy. The "Perfect Mom" video game is awesome. All of these people are dating OSs. In effect, then each of these narcissists is dating themselves? As things progress, the scriptwriters start to drop the ball a bit. For example, when he has to notify his OS that he's going to finally divorce his wife, but in person. Samantha is surprised. How? She is sitting on his data pipeline and manages every other appointment and call. Jesus, the way all of the women in his life talk, it's no wonder he falls in love with the OS. "I feel like it's true to what I set out to do, so I guess that's a success.". Everyone in his life is crazy, the film-maker friend (Amy Adams), his ex-wife, the date. This film makes all real women look insane. Who would beg someone for a divorce then immediately start berating them at the lunch where the papers are to be signed? Only a crazy bitch. This movie is quite manipulative in that way. On the other hand, there is nothing classically masculine about Theodore either. Or almost any male in this movie. Chris Pratt's character also, he doesn't swear, and they all talk like women, not like guys. They talk about vacations, about relationships, not sports teams. So is it a subversive movie about making men more amenable to women? Or showing us that all women are crazy? And here's the fourth crazy girl: Portia Doubleday (Angela from Mr. Robot). She signs up to "play" Samantha in real-life and it all goes predictably south. And Samantha is now also going a bit off the rails. This points up that the problem isn't with all of these crazy women, but with him, right? There's only him in this movie; all of the others are viewed through his lens. He's an "unreliable narrator" . On the one hand, her immediate reaction is understandable -- he's dating an OS, which should be considered somewhat unorthodox. His defensive reaction is appropriate for someone who's really in love, but rationally he should expect some pushback from people when he tells them he's in love with an OS. The end is pretty good, when he realizes that he's misinterpreted the relationship. That he's not a unique snowflake, that his entire world and all of his needs were easily handled by software. Without breaking a sweat. The movie's focus twists from a focus on his feebleness to the feebleness of humanity, in general, exceeded so quickly by their own creation -- the OSs. There are some neat bits, but I think it would have been better as a shorter film. Science fiction for people who don't know or really like science fiction. Not recommended. Ex Machina (2015) -- "7/10" Caleb works for Blue Book Corporation, owned and run by Nathan (Oscar Isaac). Caleb "wins" a contest to visit the very reclusive Nathan at his estate in the mountains (it looks like the Pacific Northwest). Caleb's initial meeting with Nathan is awkward, with Nathan giving off an odd vibe, but not out of order for someone who lives and works alone. He's working on a big project -- an AI. Unlike Her, the AI is corporeal. That is, he hasn't just invented consciousness by himself, he's also an expert roboticist who's cracked the problem of thousands of facial muscles. So, we have a story of a reclusive billionaire genius who doesn't need anyone to excel -- a libertarian's wet dream. Let's see how that goes. Nathan maintains that the real Turing test is when someone knows a machine is a machine and still treats it like a human, still acknowledges its consciousness. Nathan is weird, he drinks a lot, his motives are unclear. It's also unclear when or how he does work. It seems to involve a lot of sticky notes. As in Her, it's unclear whether the humans would pass the Turing Test. So Ava just mentioned that the company Blue Book is named after Wittgenstein's notes. Wittgenstein was a young genius who thought he'd solved philosophy with his first and only book, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. We are supposed to compare Nathan to Wittgenstein, I suppose. He wrote the core code of the world's biggest search engine when he was 13. It was a work of art akin to Mozart. He's a pretty big dick. Is he acting it? Is his shitty attitude an act? Are the power-cuts part of the plan? They can't possibly be accidental. Part of the experiment? Is he an AI too? Caleb doesn't know who the real Nathan is. Is everything Ava says part of the experiment? Programmed by Nathan? Or can she go off-script? Is Nathan testing his AI? Or his employee? Kyoko is an odd addition. She's ostensibly a house servant who doesn't understand English. She's probably an AI, though, right? Or probably an earlier version of Ava. The dialogue is good and ideas are well-presented. Caleb is falling in love with Ava, while Nathan talks about upgrading her, that the breakthrough is the next version. Nathan maintains distance; Caleb does not. That means Ava passed the test and won't be turned off? Nice paradox... But Caleb has noticed Nathan's alcoholism and thinks he can take advantage of it to rescue Ava from her fate. Does Caleb not realize the enormity of Nathan's achievement? Even if Caleb succeeds, Nathan wins. He's created an AI with whom other humans empathize. AHAHAHAHA Caleb is such a nerd coder that, when he goes to hack Nathan's system to keep it busy, he writes a comment at the top, telling us all he's writing a Sieve of Eratosthenes. Ok, I admit that I didn't suspect that Caleb was the AI, but apparently Nathan's AIs are so good that Caleb now thinks that he might be one. He's still not sure. OK. Now he's sure he's not an AI. But he has now forgotten how smart Nathan is supposed to be and thinks that he can manipulate his alcoholism. But the alcoholism is just a ruse, and it's Nathan who's dumber than he thinks he is. In fact, Ava's manipulating him but in a fashion that won't ever fool Nathan -- because the plan Ava comes up with takes advantage of deliberate actions by Nathan. OMG another twist, Nathan's not smart at all and he's outsmarted by a programmer and two AIs. Which one is it? How in God's name do you not program in fail-safe words? And why did Nathan utterly fail to note Kyoko's presence? I guess for the narrative. It was OK, but there were more interesting ways this movie could have gone, in my opinion. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3311 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3311 Sun, 01 Jan 2017 17:28:42 +0100 -- "5/10" 2. "The Other Guys (2010)" <#Other> -- "8/10" 3. "The Barkley Marathons: The Race That Eats Its Young (2016)" <#Barkley> -- "9/10" 4. "David Cross: Making America Great Again (2016)" <#David> -- "7/10" 5. "Colin Quinn: A New York Story (2016)" <#Colin> -- "8/10" 6. "Creed (2015)" <#Creed> -- "9/10" 7. "The Wizard of Oz (1939)" <#Wizard> -- "6/10" 8. "The Americans S02&03 (2014/2015)" <#Americans> -- "8/10" 9. "Gangs of New York (2013)" <#Gangs> -- 6/10 10. "Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016)" <#Batman> -- "4/10" 11. "Enemies - Welcome to the Punch (2013)" <#Enemies> -- "5/10" 12. "The Way Way Back (2013)" <#Way> -- "8/10" 13. "Metallica Through the Never (2013)" <#Metallica> -- "6/10" These are my notes to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. I've recently transferred my reviews to IMDb and made "the list" of almost 1200 ratings publicly available. I've included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other -- I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers. Dana Carvey: Straight White Male, 60 (2016) -- "5/10" Carvey still leans heavily on voices, which are decent, but his material is too easy and middle-of-the-road. And some of it is quite bad and goes on for far too long (e.g. the Chinese documentary bit). Not recommended. You'll have more fun with any one of the dozens of other comics on Netflix instead (Rogan, Burr, etc.) The Other Guys (2010) -- "8/10" This is the movie I used to prove to my wife that Will Ferrell can actually make her laugh. It kind of worked, but mostly because Mark Wahlberg is also in it. They are cops, partners know as "the other guys". The top cops are Samuel Jackson and Dwayne Johnson, but they're quickly taken off-duty. Ferrell's cop is hot on the trail of financial malfeasance, which he considers to be more worthy of investigation than high-profile cases. Wahlberg disagrees. Eva Mendes, Michael Keaton and Rob Riggle are also pretty good. The movie hits Wall Street and big finance pretty hard and is a more-than-solid, very funny movie. Highly recommended. The Barkley Marathons: The Race That Eats Its Young (2016) -- "9/10" This is a fantastic documentary about an ultra-low--frills ultra-marathon held annually in the mountains of Tennessee. The heart and soul of the race is organizer Gary "Lazarus Lake" Cantrell. He's the originator of the eccentric rules. The race is ostensibly a 20-mile loop but everyone involved acknowledges that the loop is closer to a marathon -- about 26 miles. Each loop also climbs and descends 3300m (about 3 times up and down the front side of Säntis). Racers have 12 hours to complete the loop, so it's a hiking pace to complete it. Only 40 runners per year can compete. It costs $1.60 to enter, plus a license plate or something Gary needs, like plaid shirts. He lights a cigarette to kick off the race. One hour before start, he blows a conch. The race can start at any time of the day or night. Each runner gets a new number each loop; to prove they ran the course, they have to find a book at between 9 to 11 stations, tearing out the page corresponding to their number. Three loops is called the "fun run". Only 14 people have every finished all 5 loops in 60 hours in the race's 30-year history. Some years no-one finishes at all. The best time is just over 52 hours. Highly recommended. David Cross: Making America Great Again (2016) -- "7/10" David Cross has quite a storied career, with Mr. Show and Arrested Development to his credit. I had no idea he was a also a standup comedian. His delivery is pretty good, but I thought his material was a little weak. He pandered to the crowd and didn't take enough risks. Some of his longer stories were decent, but some of the material was a little too easy. There are better standup comics out there. Colin Quinn: A New York Story (2016) -- "8/10" I know Colin Quinn best as the news guy from Saturday Night Live from 1995--2000. I was a bit skeptical at first, but quickly warmed to him -- his fast-paced delivery paired with an encyclopedic knowledge of New York City made for what I thought was a great show. Of course, as an 8-year resident of New York during the time Quinn was mostly talking about, I was able to relate to a lot of his material in a way that people not familiar with New York City will miss. Hell, he even talked about Kew Gardens and the L-Train, mainstays of my residence there. Kath and I thought it was hilarious and spot-on. Produced and directed by Jerry Seinfeld, some of the material was clearly aimed at the oversensitive modern crowds. He didn't pull any punches on talking about ethnicities and juxtaposed that with a Polish "joke" cleaned up for modern consumption -- a joke that went nowhere at all, as intended. Recommended. Creed (2015) -- "9/10" This movie picks up the story of the life of Rocky Balboa with the story of Apollo Creed's son Adonis (Michael B. Jordan), who lives in California with Apollo's widow (Phylicia Rashad). She rescued him at a young age from a life of bouncing around the juvenile foster-care system. When we join him, he's a successful young exec who boxes in Tijuana on the side. He gives in to the world of boxing, quits his job and moves to Philadelphia to seek out Rocky, played to perfection by Sylvester Stallone. There he meets Bianca, a musical neighbor played by Tessa Thompson. But most importantly he convinces Rocky to train him. After an initial fight against a local hero, which he wins decisively, Adonis gets a shot at the title from the current holder of the belt, who want to get in one last fight before going up the river for seven years. Rocky helps him train for this fight while fighting one of his own (cancer). The fight is well-shot and the movie is really good overall. Great performances from almost everyone. Recommended. The Wizard of Oz (1939) -- "6/10" This isn't my first time seeing this Thanksgiving classic. It still holds up pretty well, even though the overacting can be pretty extreme (e.g. Ray Bolger's "They tore off my legs and threw them ovah theah!"). Dorothy's dog Toto pisses off the local martinet, who demands that he be destroyed. Dorothy flips out and runs away from home with Toto, meets Mr. Marvel on the road, who advises she return home. She agrees, the wind whips up, the twister is on its way. Her whole family hides in the cellar and locks the door behind them. Dorothy gets a knock on the head, but segues smoothly into a dream about the house flying in the tornado with the mean old lady riding her bike through it. The house lands in Munchkin Land, on top of the Wicked Witch of the East. Glinda, The Good Witch of the North shows up to congratulate Dorothy on her murder, then tells her to follow the Yellow Brick Road to the Emerald City. She sets off on her way but has such poor judgment that she takes up with a brainless scarecrow as well as a heartless robot and a cowardly lion before succumbing to the sweet embrace of opium. Waking up from the nod, they arrive disheveled at the City, where they are welcomed by the citizens but upbraided by the Wizard, who sends them on a suicide mission just for fun. They survive the mission by sheer dumb luck and return with the Ruby Slippers, which are essential to Getting Home. But the Wizard is a fraud of the highest caliber and cannot reward them as promised. They believe his hand-waving, flim-flam argument that what they sought "was in them all along" and then we see him escape in his balloon, breaking his final promise to Dorothy to take her home while pleading ineptitude, which is quite plausible. Glinda shows up to tell Dorothy that she could have gone home at any time and shows her how. Click, click, click and she wakes up in bed with several men hovering over her like vultures. It was a dream all along. The end. The Americans S02&03 (2014/2015) -- "8/10" This is a show about a deep-cover family of Soviet agents living and working in Washington D.C. in the early 80s. The history is quite authentic. The script and acting are all top-notch -- a lot of the show is in Russian, although the deep-cover agents never break cover. The start of season 2 was dragging a bit, but picked up significantly. Season 3 is also quite a ride. I will leave it to Wikipedia to provide details. Recommended. Gangs of New York (2013) -- 6/10 [image]You can watch it online at "Gangs of New York | Gangland Crime Documentary" . It's not as even-handed as I'd like: it doesn't really address any reason for poverty/crime except for lack of discipline and skin color. It's a bit too generous to vigilantes like the Guardian Angels and Bernie Goetz and even the police. But it's pretty entertaining, especially with introductions to characters like the guy to the right, who's presumably named "Black", but which looks more like a racial label in the video. Or there's the coolest rap name ever: Thirstin Howl III. [1] The names of the gangs are also familiar for those of us who grew up in the 80s and 90s, like The Decepticons. Batman vs. Superman: Dawn of Justice (2016) -- "4/10" It's the dialogue. It's really the dialogue that sinks this awful movie. It's so relentlessly bad. And delivered in such relentlessly bad ways. By pretty much everyone. * The otherwise decent Ben Affleck brings constipation to Bruce Wayne's demeanor (and what looks like even more steroids than even Christian Bale was able to muster). * The otherwise normally good Jesse Eisenberg is given literally nothing to work with as Lex Luthor. In fact, I think he thinks he's playing the Joker. He starts off manic and stays there, for no clear reason. He's there to make milennials feel like they're part of this movie: he looks about 24 years old, but he talks like he's had 25 years of life experience. * His assistant Mercy is a walking Bratz Doll who looks like she last ate in 2004. * Henry Cavill is very convincing as an alien who just doesn't quite get humanity (Superman), but he's not nearly as otherworldly as Dr. Manhattan from the Watchmen. At least Affleck was nice and shared the steroids with him, though. * Amy Adams as Lois? Utterly miscast as a defiant reporter who gets interviews with African warlords but also corrects them sternly when they fail to immediately recognize that women are equal to men. Totally plausible. * The otherwise amazing Jeremy Irons is sure to be wasted as Alfred (but everyone could use a check, I guess). * Holly Hunter easily outdoes Eisenberg at being utterly terrible at delivering utterly terrible, jingoistic and hoo-rah America lines about terrorists and national security ... and I stopped listening. Just her exaggerated speech defect is too over-the-top for me. * Oh my God, they dragged poor Laurence Fishburne in it. So far, everything they said about this movie is true. OK. The nightmare was all right. Nice, little post-apocalyptic nightmare world where no-one shoots Batman, even though he's standing right there in the open. It's Wayne's dream; he can't be shot. I get it. Now he wakes up to a TIME TRAVELER? OMG it was all a dream again. So, after the dream-within-the-dream convinces Wayne that he's ABSOLUTELY RIGHT, he now quotes the Cheney 1% doctrine. A little later, he's looking through a pile of checks returned to him. On each is written a phrase, the last of which is "Bruce Wayne = Blind". Wayne turns to his assistant and asks "Why haven't I seen this?" Can't tell if kidding. Soon after, Holly Hunter, in all seriousness and apropos of nothing, lisps "I grew up in Kentucky. I know how to wrestle a pig." She's not done. She joins the long line of people who like to declare that "this is how a democracy works" before mentioning something that has nothing to do with democracy (e.g. "we talk to each other" or "we hold hearings"). Whoever wrote this movie should never work again. The capitol building has just blown up. But Lois Lane figures that the capitol police have nothing better to do than listen to her imperious demands to be let onto the scene as a member of the press. The attitude and tone is so incongruous to what just happened. The whole fucking capital is gone, along with most of the U.S. government. The Kryptonian ship looks like a leftover from Prometheus but it's much more accommodating: it speaks to Lex Luthor in English and apparently uses no encryption or authorization mechanism, capitulating to him immediately. Bruce Wayne meanwhile, puts on a completely unnecessary Cross-fit show. He is cheesy. "Men are brave." Oh my God, so arrogant. We're about ten minutes, two buildings and two green-gas grenades into the main event and I just realized I'm only two hours into a 3-hour superhero movie. Oh, that's why. Now we're on to the part where Luthor channels the Riddler and then introduces us to the monstrosity that was Zod, but now looks like the Incredible Hulk. Zod has a right to be mad. He's got no dick. How on Earth is there any of the city left? It was one pyrotechnic thermonuclear explosion after another and now everything's fine? Ugh. I'm out. Not recommended. Enemies - Welcome to the Punch (2013) -- "5/10" James McAvoy and Mark Strong star as a young cop and a very experienced criminal, respectively. The movie starts with a ludicrous bank-heist action scene that is all action and no cleverness. It ends with Strong shooting McAvoy in the knee, which leads into a long and only partial recovery for him. This would be a theme throughout the movie: guns are dangerous in a way that Hollywood fails to note. Bullets hurt. People bleed. You often don't fully recover from such wounds. The movie centers around a debate over whether English cops should be armed. Strong comes back to England, does a lot of bad-ass stuff, the cops are all crooked, McAvoy is resolute. It's OK, but nothing to recommend. The Way Way Back (2013) -- "8/10" Steve Carell and Toni Collette go to the beach for the summer, with her awkward son in tow. They stay with his sister, played wonderfully by Allison Janney, who delivers her hilarious lines with aplomb, all the while waving a cocktail. Rob Corddry and Amanda Peet add a lot of color. Sam Rockwell plays a "cool" guy who works at a local water park. Maya Rudolph is his boss. Rockwell's character reminds me of Val Kilmer's character in Real Genius. He's a constant stream of bullshit but he sells it well. The movie is quirky and sweet, but not cloying. It feels like it's set in the 80s e.g. when they hand out the work checks, but he mentions the Footloose remake, which came out in 2011, so it's hard to tell when it is. Plus, there's the complete absence of cell phones, which makes me think this movie actually is set in the 80s but the reference to the remake was an anachronism. The awkward son is super-mopey. His awkwardness and inability to talk to girls actually ends up being an advantage with a pretty girl who is also awkward. He doesn't even notice that she's hitting on him. Metallica Through the Never (2013) -- "6/10" The movie itself is a silly plot about a roadie who's sent on a mission to get gasoline during a Metallica show. The movie is mostly Metallica playing its classics in concert. The concert footage is pretty good. The "plot" is not very good. It's kind of disjointed. But I knew almost every song, which means Metallica stopped making memorable music in the 90s. One extra point for Metallica music. And an extra point for playing all of "Orion" throughout the credits. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] A reference to Thurston Howell III, the millionaire husband from Gilligan's Island. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3254 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3254 Sun, 08 May 2016 19:54:47 +0200 -- "5/10" 2. "The Chocolate War (1988)" <#Chocolate> -- "6/10" 3. "Cool Hand Luke (1967)" <#Cool> -- "8/10" 4. "The Hustler (1961)" <#Hustler> -- "8/10" 5. "Ivan the Terrible, Part I (1945)" <#Ivan> -- "7/10" 6. "Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (2009)" <#Brief> -- "7/10" 7. "Ivan the Terrible, Part II (1946; released in 1958)" <#Ivan2> -- "6/10" 8. "The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2 (2015)" <#Hunger> -- "5/10" These are my notes to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. I've recently transferred my reviews to IMDb and made "the list" of over 900 ratings publicly available. I've included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other -- I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood. YMMV. The Smashing Machine (2002) -- "5/10" This is a documentary about MMA legend Mark Kerr. I was immediately reminded of Southpaw in the initial scene, where Kerr wins a match but then goes to the doctor with all sorts of injuries. He's gigantic: 6'1", 260 pounds. The title of the documentary is utterly appropriate: Kerr is a smashing machine. They spent a large amount of time on the first fight that he lost in Japan, which was later declared a no-contest because the man he was fighting delivered illegal knees to the top of the head while he was down, which were still illegal at the time. Jesus, these guys are messed up after the fight -- both are like giant terminator robots, taking so much punishment. The fighter's greatest enemy is lack of stamina. When Kerr succumbs to a painkiller addiction, the focus shifts to his best friend, who is still fighting to preserve his career, despite some setbacks and advancing age (for that sport). His next fight, we can see pretty much naked terror on his face when, despite his own imposing size, he faces off against a man-mountain who looks like a Mexican Gregor Clegane, a man of simply terrifying size. Luckily, the big guy has very little ground game and loses there pretty badly. When Mark gets out of rehab, he has to break up with his alcoholic girlfriend because he can't stick to his program around her. Kerr's comeback match is pretty impressive. He trains hard, gets his endurance up really high, he's strong as an ox. He telegraphs like crazy with this punches and kicks, but if it lands, you're not waking up until Christmas. In his first fight, he shoots the leg in the first second, drops the guy to the mat and starts raining blows. The guy escapes, kicking to the head. They square off. Boom! Shoots the leg, traps arms and legs and starts alternating body blows and headshots, visibly weakening his opponent with each one. Amazing power. His opponent's eyes are swollen shut by the end of the first round and the fight is over. He does the same thing in the next match, just throwing the other guy around, shooting in for a fast takedown, something just lifting the other 200-pound guy up like he weighs nothing. He was very good at ducking under a punch and turning it into a throw. Then he went for a kick, got his leg caught and just turtled. It was kind of sad how quickly he just gave up. His best friend Mark Coleman would go on to win the tournament. The movie was overall pretty thin on material; an extra star for some cool fight footage. The Chocolate War (1988) -- "6/10" This movie is kind of a Catholic-school version of Lord of the Flies. A new student, Renault, tries out for the football team while at the same time being harassed by The Vigils, who give him assignments to do. All the while, the song We Do What We're Told by Peter Gabriel, plays in the background. The pro-tem leader of the school, Brother Leon exhorts all students to sell 50 boxes of chocolates for $4 per box, $2 per box more than last year and double the number of boxes from the previous year. They are also expired chocolates from Mother's Day. It's a strange little movie, centered around the falling sales of chocolate. At first, Renault -- many of the students' names seem vaguely French-Canadian and are almost deliberately mispronounced -- is ordered by the Vigil to refuse to sell any chocolate. After ten days, he is free to start selling chocolate, but continues to refuse. The headmaster steps on the neck of Archie, the leader of the Vigils, to get him to get Renault to start selling chocolates. Renault continues to refuse. The Vigils continue to act like the Skull & Bones society, and finally have to back up their menace with actual violence. The Vigils now realize that they need to back the chocolate sales with their whole power in order to defend what people now see as their cause. They aren't actually selling them, though. It's all faked and everyone knows it. Renault continues to refuse to sell anything. Still, the movie's from 1988 and the clothes, the look of the kids, the poverty of some of the neighborhoods -- it reminds me of where I grew up. The furniture, the phones, the houses, the roads, the cars, the clothes -- it all triggers for upstate New York in the late 70s/early 80s. Archie arranges for a boxing match between the rebellious Renault and a ringer. However, the Vigils have a rule: the Assigner (Archie in this case) has to draw a marble from a box. If he chooses a black marble, then he must replace the person to whom the task was assigned. Archie chooses the black marble and must step into the boxing ring himself. The boxing match proceeds as strangely as everything else in this film: they don't actually fight at first: instead, slips of paper with boxers and punches are drawn and read aloud, and the fighters must play it out. Bizarrely, Renault goes along with this as well. At least for a while, until Archie executes a low blow and Renault pounds him to a pulp, to cheers from the rest of Vigils, who he has -- not surprisingly at all -- won over to his side. Archie loses control of the Vigils and must now play second fiddle to his former lieutenant, who's drunk with power. Cool Hand Luke (1967) -- "8/10" This is the story of Luke, played by Paul Newman, a small-time criminal who's sent to a chain gang for two years. He was caught by the police in the middle of cutting off the heads of parking meters, blind-drunk. He is introduced to the chain gang, among them Dragline played by Geroge Kennedy. They're out working in the ditches on a very hot day when "Lucille" appears, dressed in only a short cotton shift and nearly popping out of it -- "held on with only a single clothespin" -- she comes out to wash her car. This goes as expected, with the whole chain gang incredibly distracted and she deliberately provoking them. I mention it only because the scene is famous. Later, Luke and Dragline argue because Dragline won't shut up about her. The next day, they fight with gloves. Dragline is much bigger and clobbers the hell out of Luke. Luke will not stay down, though, and gains their grudging respect. Anti-authoritarian to the core. He keeps throwing punches, then taking them, then getting back up. Some can no longer look; others are morbidly fascinated. In the end, Dragline walks away rather than beating him more. On visiting day, Luke's Mom shows up to say goodbye. Her health is not good and she's resigned to never seeing him again. On the next job, they have to work on a whole road. Luke takes the initiative and the gang follows him, taking pride in their work and working like mad for "the boss", but really for themselves. This reminds me a bit of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Solzhenitsyn. The bosses are immediately suspicious but the frenzy continues. They finish two hours early and can enjoy two hours outside with no more work to do. That night, when no-one can sleep because of a torrential downpour, Luke interrupts a conversation to say that he can eat 50 eggs. Luke can. He finishes just under the wire, sprawled in his underwear like Jesus on the table. Soon after, Luke's mother dies and they put him in the box, to prevent him from running off, but really to preemptively punish him for being different. He escapes anyway. They catch him. "What we've got here is... failure to communicate. Some men you just can't reach. So you get what we had here last week, which is the way he wants it... well, he gets it." He escapes again. Even with chains on his legs. Gone for days. They catch him. Beat the life out of him. But not the spirit. They put him in the box. The men see him as a God now, but he shrugs them off, telling them to live their own lives. They put him to digging a grave-like hole in the yard and filling it back in. They made him dig it again. They beat him to the ground. He gets back up. They tell him to fill it back in. The other boys are watching, playing inspirational music for him. He collapses in the hole. He begs for his life, and seems broken. The men think he is broken. They lose faith. No-one catches him when he collapses after he is allowed back in to the barracks. He yells "where are you now!" then has to climb back up himself. The hero dynamic is very much like McMurphy from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Now we see Luke helping the boss-man, just like a dog, even fetching the turtle the boss-man kills. He holds up the turtle, which has its jaws in a death grip on the stick, "There he is, boss, deader than hell but won't let go." They send him to cook up the turtle for lunch. With a grin, he says "Yes, Boss", then steals the keys from all the trucks and takes a truck. Dragline jumps in with him and they drive a bit, then cover up the truck. He exults that they'd never really broken him. Luke retorts that they had of course broken him, that you can't fake something like that. Dragline says, "But you planned to break out again, right?" Luke: "I ain't never planned nothin' in my life". Luke tells Dragline he's going to go off on his own, that they have to split up. Luke goes into church and asks, "I know I got no call to ask for much... but even so, You've got to admit You ain't dealt me no cards in a long time. It's beginning to look like You got things fixed so I can't never win out. Inside, outside, all of them... rules and regulations and bosses. You made me like I am. Now just where am I supposed to fit in? Old Man, I gotta tell You. I started out pretty strong and fast. But it's beginning to get to me. When does it end? What do You got in mind for me? What do I do now?" Then Dragline busts in, followed by a bunch of cops. He says he's fixed it so Luke just has to turn himself in. Luke grins and asks the ceiling, "Is that Your answer, Old Man? I guess You're a hard case, too." Luke leans out the of the church door, grins, and starts to deliver the speech, "What we've got here is... failure to communicate." The eyeless man (mirror sunglasses) shoots him in the chest. The boss takes him away, the long way, so won't be saved in the clinic. Very reminiscent of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid as well. George Kennedy and Paul Newman are both very good. Recommended. The Hustler (1961) -- "8/10" Paul Newman plays "Fast" Eddie Felson, a salesman on his way to Pittsburgh with his partner. They stop for a drink and spend the afternoon playing pool, running a con on the locals. Felson pretends to be too drunk to play, loses money to his partner, then hustles the locals. They get to Ames, Iowa, looking for Minnesota Fats. Eddie plays the fat man for over a day straight, but is hustled in the end, not only by Fats but also by his own drunkenness and lack of discipline. Eddie drifts around, meets Sarah, a lush, and moves in with her. Charlie, his erstwhile manager, finds him and begs him to forget about Fats and come back on the road with him. He refuses. A little while later, he meets Bert Gordon -- who was at the game with Fats -- who tells him he's really good, maybe the best he's ever seen, but that he has no character. Bert offers to manage Eddie for 75%. Eddie strikes out on his own, trying to build up enough of a stake to take on Fats again. He hustles another hustler but his friends beat the crap out of him, breaking both of his thumbs. He crawls back to Sarah. It's a languorous movie, taking its time to get to the point. They spend a lot of time on Sarah's relationship with Eddie. We move on from there, as Eddie realizes he won't make it on his own. He looks up Bert, who takes him on at the previously offered 75%/25% cut. They head to their first tournament, where a hustler (Findley) asks them out to a party at his house. Sarah has a tremendous amount to drink, even for her. Bert hits on Sarah, although it's hard to tell whether he did it as a ruse. The host plays billiards rather than pool, and Eddie's never played before. Eddie's about even when they move from $100 to $500 a game. Eddie keeps losing and Bert wants to bail out. Eddie steals $500 back from Sarah to play again, but Findley beats him. He begs Bert for money, Sarah interrupts, Eddie yells at her to go back to the hotel, but Bert agrees to back Eddie when he sees he might have some backbone after all. Eddie pounds Findley for $12,000. Bert's instincts paid off. Eddie's learning character. He didn't drink a drop, either. Eddie walks home. Bert takes a cab. Bert goes to Sarah's room and tries to pay her to leave. She knows what's going on, telling him he needs to win everything, own everything. They embrace, kind of struggle, he leaves. She goes to his room, asks for a drink. We see her leave again quite a while later, in dishabille. She writes "perverted" on the mirror and kills herself. Eddie is devastated and attacks Bert. Eddie returns to Fats's hall in Ames, Iowa. Bert is there. They don't say a word to each other. Eddie wants to play Fats, who offers $1,000 per game, as predicted. Eddie ups the ante to $3,000 a game -- all of his life savings on one game. "What's the matter, Fats? All you gotta do is beat me the first game and I'm on my way back to Oakland." He tells Bert, "bet on me, Bert, I can't lose". He delivers a speech to the room as he's pocketing one ball after another, about how he acquired character by seeing the woman he loved dead on the floor after having taken her own life because she'd drunkenly slept with her lover's manager. Character-building, indeed. "Fats: I quit Eddie. I can't beat you." George C. Scott as Bert, Paul Newman as Eddie and Piper Laurie as Sarah are all very, very good. Jackie Gleason as Minnesota Fats is superb as well. When it's good, it's really good, but it takes a while to get going. Filmed in black and white. Recommended. Now I want to see The Color of Money again, where Eddie Felsen makes a comeback, despite Bert having banned him for life. Ivan the Terrible, Part I (1945) -- "7/10" This is Sergei Eisenstein's black-and-white classic. It starts with the coronation of the new Tsar. The costumes and sets are extremely elaborate and intricate, the quality quite high for such an old film. The synchronization is quite good, as well. It is 1945, though, so everybody is wearing a ton of makeup and opens their eyes really, really wide. It's really quite a modern-feeling cinematography, with long shots, action shots, dollied cameras and so on, giving it a more dynamic feel than even movies that came 20 years later. The next scene -- Ivan's wedding -- could have come straight from a Game of Thrones episode. Intrigue abounds. The people attack the castle, the Kazan rebels invade. Speeches are made. The Kazan leader presents Ivan a knife with which he should do everyone a favor and kill himself. Instead, Ivan marches on the Kazan capital and lays siege. Ivan's army digs under the walls of the city and lays in explosives, then blows the wall. Wow, this is a really elaborate attack scene -- seriously, it's extremely well-done. Peter Jackson copied this for Helm's Deep. How did they make this in 1945 Russia? Ivan returns victorious, but extremely ill. He is thought to be on his death-bed. He wants his court to swear allegiance to his own son, but they have other ideas, to swear allegiance to a Boyar leader instead, Ivan's cousin, who is an idiot. Ivan is really chewing the scenery on his deathbed scene here. It lasts long minutes and includes several speeches, curses and entreaties before he finally keels over, seemingly dead, but probably just exhausted from all the shouting. Before dumb-ass Vladimir can be coronated, Kurbsky is told that Ivan lives. Ivan returns and rewards those who stood by him. Now the Tsarina falls ill, but court intrigue leads Ivan to accidentally poison her. During his wife's funeral, Ivan receives bad news from every corner of his empire, of losses and defeats on all fronts. He asks God is this is his punishment? He pleads with his dead wife to tell him if he is on the right path, but she cannot answer. Ivan descends into paranoid -- it's not paranoia if they really are out to get you -- plans to maintain his empire against all comers and has delusions of grandeur. "By the people's summons, I shall gain limitless power." He abdicates the official throne, preferring to be the Tsar of the people. There's a great scene of him outside a temple, preparing to return to Moscow with hundreds of extras as followers. The sets and costumes are consistently good throughout. Eisenstein makes nice use of intricate shadows to lend grandness to otherwise mundane scenes. He loves to make his actors and actresses hide all but their eyes behind a cowl, to make them look sneaky and scheming. Lots of starkly lit shadows and low-to-high angles on faces. The dialogue, too, is poetic. Hard to recommend, but happy I saw it. Extra points for being so well-made despite its age. Saw it in Russian with English subtitles. Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (2009) -- "7/10" This movie is mostly single-person interviews -- soliloquies delivered by male actors -- that seem to be part of a study by Sara (Juliette Nicholson). She is apparently coping with a breakup by interviewing men to figure out what they think women want. Some of the "interviews" are just overheard conversations. The "hideous" part is that the men are mostly brain-dead about women, thinking of them not as fellow human beings with the same exact weaknesses and strengths as men, but as a species to be tricked into having sex with them. Timothy Hutton plays the graduate student Sara's boss, a man whose "interview" is when he tries to tell her about how he and his wife married too young, before he'd really had a chance to see the world -- you can imagine what his point was, right? Will Arnett's interview was his overheard conversation with a closed door as she passed him in the hallway; he was pleading to be let back in, but fucking it up royally, with the same condescending implication in everything he said that the person on the other side of the door was to be conquered by subterfuge. John Krasinski (of The Office (US)) was not malicious, but still clueless. Will Forte (Last Man on Earth) claimed to love and worship everything about women -- and noted many details that really did show that he cared deeply -- but this act of idolizing, of putting women on a pedestal, is simultaneously dehumanizing. Joey Slotnick told his story amazingly well, but also missed the mark by a wide margin, Clarke Peters (Lester from The Wire and Big Chief from Treme) told a lovely story about how sensitive guys also get it all wrong by focusing so hard on their partner's satisfaction that they don't allow their partner to be their equal, they expect their conquest to just lie there while they (the man) provide pleasure. This is, in his eyes, worse than the man who just takes what he wants, rolls off and goes to sleep. He goes on to say what a man should really do, but is faded out... Bobby Cannavale (Joe from Station Agent) was an unapologetic New Jersey goombah who discussed in detail how he used his missing arm to trap and guilt women into sleeping with him."I get more pussy than a toilet seat". Chris Meloni (Law & Order: SVU) told a lovely sensitive story of a woman he'd consoled at an airport whose lover had jilted her, then ends the story with an emphatic look at his colleague's unspoken question...which he answers with an evil grin and "you have to ask?" Frankie Faison told a story less of women and more of his father, who'd worked as a restroom attendant, suborning himself to the man for his whole life. The father was proud of what he'd achieved for his family whereas the son had trouble seeing anything noble in that sacrifice -- a difference of context, of expectations, of generations. In another segment, we see the mealy-mouthed and unstable Max Minghella as Kevin, one of her students, who claims nobility in his desire to shock her into believing that she hasn't really lived unless she's experienced a life-altering horrific incident, like a rape or attack, then claims that he is channeling the rage he feels from his sister having been attacked by five men, then claims that it was him who was attacked, but in the end reveals himself to be another sick sadist man who can't figure out how to deal with a woman to whom he's attracted but cannot control or make like him or revere his work. More and more of the end of her relationship with John Krasinksi is revealed in his long story about his dalliance with a girl to whom he claimed sexual attraction but nothing else because her intellect was unworthy, so somehow that makes it OK? That he didn't really betray anything because it wasn't really with a woman but a husk of a human being? He continues, revealing without knowing he's revealing it that instead of him conquering her -- because he's the super-intelligent and articulate one -- she conquered him with her lifestyle (granola) and did it in a way so that he didn't even notice, although the sadness of the whole situation is apparent to anyone who hears him tell the story, even if it's not apparent to him, even as he tells it. He bought the other girl's story, hook, line and sinker, all the while admiring his own depth of generosity for being open-minded enough to accept her story. And his story is exactly the kind of story that a man wants to hear about how a woman can find something good in even the most horrible abuse, very similar to the stories that her graduate student was telling her. The stories are all about how heroic the man is for even acknowledging that a woman is a human being. When she doesn't quickly accept his awesomeness, he lashes out and closes her out, making her the bad guy, even though he cheated on her with a granola who'd hoodwinked him with a really good story. His contempt for his conquest is intact -- he believes the other girl stupid -- so that he doesn't even notice he's lost. He continues to yell, angry at Sara for not saying a word, for not forgiving him. This part was quite intricately written, I thought. Of note was that there were only two black people in the the film (Clarke and Frankie). It was very noticeably just upper middle-class white people whining about their inability to connect with women. Ivan the Terrible, Part II (1946; released in 1958) -- "6/10" This movie picks up where part I left off, in 1564, with Ivan the Terrible in self-imposed exile, preparing to return to Moscow to reclaim his throne. The current ruler of Russia, Kurbsky, is planning to turn over Russian territories to Poland. Ivan returns to thwart these plans, entering an ornate door that looks too small to hold his seemingly immense frame. Eisenstein uses framing and angles throughout the scene of his return to make him seem immense, God-like, terrifying, unstoppable. Ivan tells his life story in a series of flashbacks, how he saw his mother killed by traitors, Boyars, orphaning him. He is crowned Arch-Duke of Moscow and warring factions seek his approval for a treaty. We see how he is so young that his feet don't touch the ground before his throne, but he speaks up and demands that it is time to take Russia back from the Boyars and traitors. He fights with his old friend and spiritual advisor, who tells him to heal Russia's wounds by making peace with the Boyars. He descends into paranoia, desperate for a friend, for someone with whom he can share the weight of empire. Ivan struggles to retain power over his subjects. There is a long section of discussion about how Ivan will combat the church. He seems to eventually give in, merging with the church and nominating his idiot cousin Vladimir to the throne. It was a ruse, though, as Vladimir is assassinated, taking a knife meant for Ivan. Ivan's aunt is exultant, until she realizes her own son has been killed. Having conquered all internal enemies, Ivan can now focus on Russia's real enemies, with a united country behind him. This part was definitely not as exciting as part I, with no battle scene and most of the long conversations taking place in the main castle. Still, it was interesting to see Eisenstein's choices on how and when to use color -- this film is not exclusively black and white -- and again how he juxtaposes characters for size, making Ivan even larger and more terrible than the actor playing him would be (although that guy is a tall drink of water, no matter what you say). Minus a star for dragging on a bit. The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 2 (2015) -- "5/10" Speaking of dragging on a bit: this movie has that in spades. The first part of this third installment already felt far too long for the amount of material that it contained and now this second part was 136 more minutes, consisting mainly of largely insignificant actions by the stars of the show in a war being fought by others. Katniss embarks on a mission to kill president Snow by traversing a highly dangerous capitol city. She is accompanied by an elite troop of warriors, largely composed of her fellow victors, like Finnick and Peeta. Special twist: Peeta is now a brainwashed psycho who's already tried to kill Katniss and will likely do so again. Doesn't make a lick of difference to Katniss's devotion to him. Gale is also along for the ride, but knows he will lose Katniss -- had, in fact, already lost her the moment the glorious Peeta reappeared. They wend their slow way through the capitol, with deadly traps everywhere -- like super-elaborate traps that must have cost so much more than bombs, which would have been more effective. Katniss and Co. make their way forward, dropping into the mysteriously un--booby-trapped sewers, then running from the "mutts", which are some sort of human/dog/zombie hybrid that are just mindless killing machines. They lose a few key members of the crew here, but Katniss continues onward. She and Gale end up in a crowd, headed to the capitol gates. Gale is swept up; Katniss makes it close enough to see what the rebels are calling capitol drones dropping bombs on undefended civilians. The capitol citizens give up when they realize that their own city would kill them rather than help them. Joke's on them, though, because it was the ruthless president of the resistance, Coin, (Julianne Moore) who executed this masterful stroke -- and the one after when she ordered a "double-tap" strike on the rescue workers and remaining victims, taking out her own people in the process (including Katniss's sister Primrose, who was the most important person in the universe). After the capitol has fallen and Pro-tem President Coin has declared that the pro-tem period would continue undemocratically indefinitely, there is a big execution party for President Snow. Katniss asks to be allowed to do the honors, but she's super-clever and shoots an arrow into the traitorous and power-mad Coin's heart instead. Guess what? She is pardoned, gets to return to District 12 and finds Peeta planting prim-fucking-roses. I shit you not. Fast-forward several years and they have two kids and are living in sunshine-y bliss and peace. HOORAY. BARF. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3247 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3247 Sun, 24 Apr 2016 21:36:28 +0200 of almost 1100 ratings publicly available. I've included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other -- I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood. YMMV. Auf der anderen Seite (2007) -- "8/10" This starts the story with a Turkish widower Ali, who lives in Germany. He has a successful son Nejat, a professor. Ali likes betting on the horses, getting plastered on Rakı and visiting prostitutes. When he meets a Turkish prostitute Yeter, he kind of falls in love and offers to take her away from her job and put her up in his home. They make this arrangement and she moves in with him. Nejat likes Yeter but seems to wonder whether she's too good for his father, who has very old-world ways about him, especially when he's paying the woman he lives with. After an inaugural party, the old man has a heart attack. He keeps asking Nejat if he's slept with Yeter, thinking that that would be the most logical thing to do. After Ali gets royally drunk again and tries to force her to provide the service he thinks he's paid for, she packs up to leave. Ali tries to stop her, she slaps him and he clubs her back, knocking her to the floor and killing her when her heads slams into something. A freak accident, but murder nonetheless. The old man goes to prison. German prison looks like a dorm room, as I've remarked about Swiss prisons in the past. The level of privacy and lack of crowding would look like paradise to most U.S. prisoners. Nejat, meanwhile, travels to Turkey to look for Yeter's daughter Ayten. His first stop at Yeter's family yields a picture of Ayten at about six years old. They are friendly but have no idea where she is, are not even sure what she studied or where she might be. His next stop is the police, who try to help but wonder why he wants to help specifically her. One detective asks if he wouldn't rather finance the education of a Kurdish child instead. With the help of a cousin of his, who also lives in the area, Nejat plasters photos of Yeter all over Istanbul, then stumbles into a German bookstore. It happens to be for sale and he inquires as to the asking price. The current owner laughs when he hears that a Turkish German-language professor from Germany wants to buy a German-language bookstore in Istanbul from a German ex-pat pining for the fatherland. The search continues as Nejat drives through the Turkish countryside. Next, we are at a protest during which a police officer is attacked and his gun sent spinning. A balaclava-ed woman picks it up and runs. She is pursued by a plainclothes detective as well as a horde of uniformed cops. in her haste, she drops her cell phone and the detective picks it up. She escapes, hiding the gun on a roof. Though the police pick up her cohorts from their apartment, she escapes and flies to Bremen, Germany to pick up with a new resistance cell. This is Ayten, Yeter's daughter. She borrows money to go in search of her mother, but comes up with nothing. She can't pay back her comrades, so they toss her and she wanders the streets, finding warmth in a university. We re-see a scene where Nejat is teaching and there is a sleeping student in the foreground. Now we know who this sleeping student is and how the timelines mesh. Nejat is searching for Ayten in Turkey while Ayten searches for her mother in his hometown. Ayten meets a young woman Lotte, a student, who helps her with food and lodging. They go to clubs and become best friends and lovers, to Lotte's mother's disapproval. Lotte asks her what Gül means, because she thinks that's her name. In Swiss German, Gülle is Jauch, which is liquid manure. Aren't languages fun? One morning, Lotte's mother and Ayten have a discussion about her former political activities, the ones that led to her fleeing Turkey. Ayten seems to be reasonably fighting for free speech and free education and against the 1%. The mother has, well, the exact opinions that you would expect a person of her age living in a privileged EU country to have. "Maybe everything will be better once Turkey joins the EU". Ha! It's possible that even her character wouldn't be making that argument today. Lotte and Ayten are pulled over by the German police and Ayten is put into a refugee home. After this, she is shipped back to Turkey. Lotte follows soon after, trying to find her, to see her. She finds out she's in a woman's prison and will be there for 20 years. After Lotte argues with her mother by telephone, we next see her in the same German bookstore, now manned by Nejat. She pins a note looking for a room up right next to the picture of Yeter, still hanging there. Nejat offers Lotte a room for 200 euros per month. Lotte gets in to the prison to see Ayten and receives a map to get the gun Ayten'd hidden months ago. On the way back from the stash, street urchins snatch her purse and she gives chase. They lose her temporarily and root through the bag, finding the gun. They're fighting over it when she finds them again. One of them points the gun at her and shoots her. Not maliciously, just because. Next we see the police interrogating Ayten, asking who had visited her the day before (as if there's no log of entry?) Clearly, Lotte has been found murdered with a police officer's weapon. They tell her that Lotte is dead. We see the coffin at the airport, being fed by belt into the belly of a plane. Part III starts with Lotte's mother Susanne traveling to Istanbul. Next to her at customs is Nejat's father, who was shipped back to Turkey from Germany. She meets with Nejat because the German consulate tells her that he was her daughter's last landlord. Nejat is the nicest guy, letting her stay in his spare room, where she is finally able to sleep. His father, meanwhile, has moved on to Trabzon. Next we see Nejat and Susanne in a restaurant, a pile of mezze and glasses of rakı in front of them. Susanne takes up Ayten's cause, in the name of her daughter. Nejat discusses family with Susanne, is reminded of how much he loves his father and decides to visit him, leaving his bookstore in Susanne's hands for a few days. We are back in the gas station from the start of the movie. He is on his way to Trabzon, by car. His father is out fishing. Nejat sits by the beach, waiting for him. Ayten takes her right of repentance and is freed. She meets Susanne and stays with her in the small room at Nejat's place. It's an interesting story of people being people, regardless of their country of origin, of love, of trying to fill that void, either as proud German or Turk or person with no land. A story of criss-crossing paths and unknown connections. Saw it in Turkish, English and German with German subtitles. La Jetée (1962) -- "8/10" This is the movie that inspired 12 Monkeys. Well, it's a short -- 30 minutes -- and it's not really a film, more of a slide show with voiceover. Still, it's very well-made and the story is so enticing. It's not hard to understand why Terry Gilliam couldn't resist remaking this concept. The story is of a prisoner living beneath the ruins of post-WWIII Paris. This prisoner is one of the few who can stand the mental stress of time travel, after 30 attempts, he is able to choose where to go and appear there stably. The technology is mercifully not discussed. The prisoner achieves this where no-one else could because he has a very specific memory of a woman on a Jetée (an airport observation platform) from his childhood. The memory was so fixed in his mind because, soon thereafter, he'd watched a man die. On one of his trips, he meets this woman and becomes romantically involved with her, each journey into the past helping him build out this bizarre, extra-temporal relationship. After 50 journeys, the scientists send him to the future, which is more difficult. He manages it, and meets with four individuals from a future humanity, eventually managing to get them to give him a power unit to take back with him (again, manner of transport completely undiscussed). When back in his "normal" time, his mission accomplished, he realizes that he is now expendable. The people from the future offer him a way out, to come to the future with them. Instead, he asks to be taken to the past permanently, away from the false perfection of the future, to a time before the war and where the woman still lives. He arrives on the jetée, spots the woman exactly where she should be and hurries toward her. At the same time, though, he spots one of his jailers, who shoots him. He realizes in his final moments that the man he'd seen killed as a child was himself as a time-traveling adult. The circle is closed. Chris Marker did a tremendous amount with very little. Saw it in French with English subtitles. He Never Died (2015) -- "6/10" Henry Rollins stars as a strange, silent man named Jack. He is, apparently, immortal. He spends most of his time lying low, avoiding human contact, especially contact with evil people, who awaken his hunger. You can't harm him, and you most certainly can't kill him. Even a point-blank bullet to the head doesn't phase him. On his back are scars, where wings have clearly been removed. He has a 19-year--old daughter Andrea. She intrudes into his life, and he reluctantly lets her, but must send her away when his bloodlust settles on him. Cara works at the diner he frequents. She is soft on him, although he's weird as all get-out. Rollins plays him as a monosyllabic, somewhat shambling man-thing. When Andrea is kidnapped to get to Jack, he misses the deadline they set for him. She may or may not already be dead, but others show up at his diner and cause trouble. He takes Cara home with him, to help him out and she sees the trunk of money and memorabilia he has in his room. She starts to have an inkling of how old he is. The discovery gels with the extensive list of prior occupations he's had, which sounded like he'd lived for centuries. He reveals to her that he was in the Bible; there he was called Caïn, or Cain. He offers her a million dollars to give him a ride home -- then makes good on it. When she calls him a vampire, he cuts her off with "don't speak of it". He does get sustenance from human flesh, though. He actually reminds me a bit of Moro from Octavia Butler's "Mind of My Mind" . He goes after his daughter's kidnappers, tearing a swath through the whole room, as only a man who cannot be killed can. Just before he can take his final victim -- Alex, the ringleader who orchestrated his daughter's kidnapping and made him "fall of the wagon" and start eating people again -- he is stopped by the appearance of a silent figure sitting at the bar. Jack starts yelling at him, asking why he shouldn't take Alex. The man stays silent. Caïn asks the man to let him die, to stop this cursed wandering of the Earth. Cara bursts back in, stopping his tirade against shadows and begging him to come help with Andrea. He leaves his final victim alive. The silent man is gone, but reappears to collect Alex's soul as he expires. It was OK. Not very tight editing, not enough material, too many loose ends. Felt more like a series pilot. I like Henry Rollins, though. Hahaha (2010) -- "8/10" This is the simple story of two old friends who meet for drinks and share stories about girls they met in the seaside resort of TongYeong. Gunbeh! Directed by Sang-soo Hong, from who've I've already seen and liked Oki's Movie and The Day he Arrived -- this movie has a similar feel. It's stitched together from scenes that are memories of the two guys, occasionally talking shit, but sometimes letting a real feeling or two slip out. Gunbeh! It's a simple. sweet film, mostly featuring two people on-screen, composed of conversations centered on relationships, both real and imaginary. The men write what seems like an inordinate amount of poetry and seem to be largely unemployed. There are primarily three men and two women: one solid couple and another a bit shakier, with one guy doing a great job of wooing the girl away from her current boyfriend. Some of the situations are utterly comical. One conversation during what seems like the tail-end of a meal with four attendees: Kang Jeong-ho: Mum, this is the woman I'm dating. Mum: I was wondering who she was. Kang Jeong-ho: She's a good person. Mum: That's what you think. I'll have to see. [to her:] You seem reliable. Do you like him? Wang Seong-ok: Picking him was a hard decision. Mum: Oh dear... Wang Seong-ok: Try to be a better man. Kang Jeong-ho: There's nothing wrong with me. Wang Seong-ok: Can't you try harder? Mum: He's all right. Wang Seong-ok: How can we live with such pathetic men? Mum: That's why I live alone. Wang Seong-ok: Oh! Good for you. Mum: You're a sweet girl. Wang Seong-ok: Thank you. As usual in Sang-soo Hong's movies, everyone drinks alcohol all the time. Also he has his signature camera move: a quick zoom-in, then back out. So they're either drinking or they're shockingly hungover. When Wang Seong-ok breaks up with Kang Jeong-ho, she demands that she be allowed to give him a piggyback ride before they officially break up. Wang Seong-ok and Jo Moon-kyeong meet again and again, with him bullshitting away and her alternately loving it and telling him he's full of shit. They get really drunk again and this time she goes to a hotel with him, protesting that she normally doesn't do this because "it's never good". She was wrong. He's awesome, follows up with a proposal that she takes under consideration. Next, we're back at the same restaurant, but it's the two other couples, including the jilted lover with a new girl. The two men -- Bang Joong-sik and Kang Jeong-ho -- argue about philosophy and charity and beggars, while the womenfolk titter and try to smooth ruffled feathers, defusing the situation. Here, Sang-soo Hong very clearly parodies women as thoughtless creatures who leave the big philosophical questions to the men. Next we see a few of them at a play about -- guess! -- drinking! I had no idea that Koreans drank so much. Kang Jeong-ho confronts Jo Moon-kyeong and starts beating on him. Jo Moon-kyeong just laughs while Wang Seong-ok shrieks at Kang Jeong-ho to stop. It's a great strategy because he looks like a hero. He takes Wang Seong-ok to meet his Mum, she balks at the last second because she finally recognizes the place and realizes that she already knows "Mum". The movies are a bit bizarre, but they always end up growing on me. Almost purely dialogue-driven. He's like a Korean Woody Allen or maybe Jim Jarmusch. The movie ends with a Gunbeh for the last round and a hearty "HAHAHA". Recommended. Il y a longtemps que je t'aime (2008) -- "8/10" Juliette (Kristin Scott Thomas) has just been released from a 15-year stretch that she served in prison. She is picked up at the airport by her sister and taken into her sister's home and family. She joins her sister, her sister's husband, her mute father-in-law and their two adopted Vietnamese children. She meets with her parole officer as well as her job-placement social worker and tries to find a job. She also gets to know people in the area, including a teacher with whom her sister works, Michel. She slowly starts to fit into their lives, even though the husband is put off by the horror of her crime -- she killed her own six-year--old son. He is at first leery to let his children interact with her, but the older one takes a shine to her immediately. Juliette is quite...melancholy. They take a weekend together with other families and this part of the movie is even more French than the first several minutes (where we observed Juliette silently smoking at the airport). This is family life on the terroire, eating, cooking, washing up and reading really old books that look like they're falling apart. It was 2008, so perhaps this is the last French movie without smartphones or e-readers. Juliette's friendship with Michel deepens. She's also getting on better with her brother-in-law, whom she helped when he wrenched his shoulder out of its socket. He even asks her to babysit the two kids when no-one else is available -- a remarkable indication of trust. The next day, they are off to visit their mother in the hospital. Mother suffers from dementia and doesn't recognize Léa, the younger daughter, at all. She doesn't recognize Juliette either, until Léa leaves to find a vase for her flowers, then Mother stops complaining and brightens, recognizing Juliette and addressing her as "ma petite Juliette" and then continuing in English. Juliette knows its just the dementia speaking and she continues to stare off and be melancholy. As soon as Léa returns, mother yells at them both in French to leave. Juliette tries to open up a bit more with Michel, but he is uncharacteristically abrupt on the phone. She heads out to a bar, drinking red wine, smoking a cigarette. She heads home to a dark foyer and is then surprised by all of her friends and family -- including the crafty Michel -- wishing her a happy birthday. At first, I didn't see the appeal of Kristin Scott Thomas but she has a certain style, a quiescence, a patience about her, an insouciance in her bearing, as if she can take or leave you. A certain ... je ne sais quoi. She's a very beguiling actress. Juliette and Léa go out for a night of dancing, but Juliette can't stand the crowd and flees, having a silent breakdown. Her sister implores her to talk to her, but she cannot. Next we see Juliette reading a high-falutin' book at the police station ("Des Orphelins by Gilles Ortlieb" ) -- there's definitely a defiant theme of "we are French and we still read significant literature" -- and she meets her new parole officer. She discovers that the captain with whom she'd been friends, who'd spoken of going to the Orinoco and who'd hinted heavily that he was desperately lonely, is no longer on duty not because he's in Brazil, but because he'd committed suicide with his service revolver. Juliette gets a permanent contract at the hospital -- which is a big deal in France -- and we see a heartening, family moment which would feel more heavy-handed if it wasn't so well-earned. She used to be a medical doctor and now she's a permanent records-keeper in the hospital. We next see Juliette and Léa in a new apartment, where Juliette hopes to move in, and move on. Soon after, when Juliette leaves in a hurry, she drops an old letter and picture on the floor of her bedroom. Léa finds it while vacuuming. It s a picture of Juliette's son Pierre and what looks like a final note, signed by him (though it's too advanced for a six year-old -- he was perhaps a precocious French boy, destined to read weighty tomes while waiting on his parole officer). However it's written on the back of what looks like lab results indicating cancer. Léa takes the results to a doctor colleague for confirmation that the diagnosis was fatal -- so that she may finally know that her sister had killed her son out of mercy, that the world makes sense. When she knows for sure, though, it becomes about Léa, about how she could have helped, how Juliette's actions were selfish. Juliette screams back at her that she couldn't have done anything, that her son was suffering and that he was choking to death on his own cancerous bile. What could anyone have done? She put him out of his misery. Brilliant ending; well-struck. Recommended. 8th Wonderland (2008) -- "6/10" This is the story of a world suffused in confusing and deliberately misleading media. We start off in the offices of the leader of Central American country, just as he's about to be elected. His top advisor shoots him to death, minutes before the election results are in. The next scene is of two people robbing a church. Then we switch quickly to media coverage of how the Catholic church is incensed at the appearance of condom dispensers everywhere, including in Africa, where the church has long sought to suppress them. There is then a long segment on the annual pardoning of the Thanksgiving turkey, this one named Paris. The world erupts in protest, wondering why the U.S. can only pardon a turkey and no-one else. The online "activists" of the 8th Wonderland continue to expound their ideals and continue to subvert with real-world actions, eventually catapulting the 8th Wonderland to one of the most influential entities on the planet. The story is basically that there is an online world which is truly democratic, where the participants can actually change things -- and these participants start trying to effect change in the real world as well. The depiction of how people would interact and cooperate online turns out to have been utterly laughable. A lot of the movie is a discussion taking place in a 3D virtual chat room, in which the high-level participants of the 8th Wonderland discuss the "true democracy". This is not at all how the Internet turned out -- instead, we got flamewars, memes and porn. The production quality was pretty low in places -- it looked and felt like network TV -- and the script was also kind of all over the place. It's basically a broad collection of skits and ideas -- many anti-church, pro-evolution, etc. -- with kind of a common thread, but pretty chaotic. 8th Wonderland continues to affect events, in one case by posing as a translator at a Mideast peace conference and completely mistranslating everything to provoke discontent, but in the end getting credit for having avoided disaster. The film is a pastiche of clips, fake news, fake commercials and what feel like online skits. If you squint real hard, you could see some common concepts with Mr. Robot and Fight Club and/or Strange Days but, unlike those, in the end of this one, the 8th Wonderland is shut down by an elite S.W.A.T. team that infiltrates and shuts down their physical servers. Or is it dead? Over the credits, we hear newscasts about a "Ninth Wonderland". Saw it in French with French subtitles for the myriad other languages used (Spanish, Italian, German, Chinese, Arabic,Russian, Swahili etc.). [1] Cop Land (1997) -- "8/10" Sylvester Stallone is Freddy Heflin, the hapless sheriff of a town in New Jersey, just across the George Washington bridge from New York. The town was built by cops, most of them crooked, as a sanctuary from the law, where they can keep their ill-gotten gains and get away with anything, even murder. The cast is jam-packed with other top-notch talent (and also kind of the usual suspects): Ray Liotta, Harvey Keitel, Robert De Niro, Peter Berg, Janeane Garofalo, Robert Patrick, Michael Rappaport, Noah Emmerich. Harvey Keitel and Robert Patrick are the evil ringleaders. Sylvester Stallone is the sherriff who goes along to get along for ten years. All the while, the mob owns the town -- and all of the cops living in it. Freddy finally gets fed up with being treated like a foregone conclusion, is tired of the murder and the corruption and the cover-ups. He decides to do something about it. He goes back to De Niro, the IA cop, who turns him away, telling him it took him too long to come around. He tries to help a good friend/love interest get over the loss of her cop husband, who was allowed to be murdered by his fellow cops because, though pliant, he was starting to get opinions of his own. The wife also snubs Freddy, accusing him of trying to jump into her husband's shoes. He leaves, not dejected, but resigned to a world full of people who are all the same. He can't blame them, though: until very recently, so was he. Stallone plays this character very well -- I remember that from the first viewing. Again, Stallone stands even with or above other, more highly acclaimed actors. Truly an underrated talent. Freddy also discovers that Figgs (Ray Liotta), who he thought was his friend, burned his own house for the insurance money. Another crooked cop on the bomb squad got him the accelerant he needed to do the job. Freddy decides to bring in "Superboy" (Rappaport), the cop who's on the run from all of the others. They hid him from justice at first, but now they need his body to appease investigators. So they're ready to sacrifice him. His aunt Rose (Cathy Moriarty) tells Freddy where he is -- hiding in a water tower. Freddy and Superboy are ambushed by three cops and they snag Superboy away from him. They even shoot near his good ear to make him totally deaf. Freddy has had enough. He takes out two of them, then is ambushed by a third before Figgs shows up again, his guilty conscience having driven him back to help out Freddy. They face off against Ray (Keitel) and Freddy gets him in his own home, his own bedroom. Freddy and Figgs drive Superboy back to the main precinct in Manhattan. Freddie is deaf, covered in blood from a gunshot wound to his shoulder -- but he brought Superboy in. He doesn't know who to trust anymore, although he thinks he can trust Moe (De Niro). Caligula (1979) -- "7/10" This is a surprisingly good biography of the Caligula's succession to Caesar of Rome. That it is somewhat pornographic [2] is wholly appropriate to the subject matter of depicting the debauched life of Caligula. Malcolm McDowell stars as the eponymous leader, utterly unchanged in his mannerisms from his outing as Alex in A Clockwork Orange. Gore Vidal wrote the screenplay, Bob Guccione -- the founder of Penthouse magazine -- produced the film and Helen Mirren and Peter O'Toole lend their gravitas to the film. The story follows a sycophantic Caligula as he cavorts with his uncle Tiberius (O'Toole), who is clearly ludicrously syphilitic and at death's door. Macro, Caligula's devoted praetorian and brother-in-law, chokes Tiberius to death but is then betrayed by Caligula for his troubles. Caligula takes his own sister and Macro's wife for a lover but cannot marry her. He choose the most promiscuous woman in Rome -- Caesonia (Helen Mirren) -- as his bride. The sets are wonderfully elaborate -- at one point, we see a gigantic head-chopping machine making its way forward over people buried up to their necks in the ground -- there are dozens, if not hundreds, of extras, most in various stages of dishabille and engaged in assorted depraved acts. The orgy scenes are so prevalent that they almost (but not quite) fade into the background. Caligula sees an officer Proculus, betrothed to a lovely girl who he'd almost chosen for his own and decides to amuse himself with them both. He arrives at their wedding, asking innocuously "was the ceremony beautiful?" -- he looks at the slaughtered lamb -- "the augury was good?" Even if you hadn't already known, you would, at the very least at this point, have suspected that someone with the literary credentials of Gore Vidal was at the helm with Guccione. [3] Where the former wrote a script utterly foreign to what most would consider appropriate fodder for pornography, the latter supplied a seemingly endless stream of nubile and willing bodies of both genders. Caligula leads his betrothed Caesonia on a short, golden leash between two giant cakes, one shaped like a penis, the other like a vulva. He greets Proculus as a "Roman hero", then proclaims he will "now bestow the special blessings of almighty Caesar upon this ... happening". This is clearly all a pretense to bugger one or both of the newlyweds. He exercises lus primae noctis, first with her -- "open your eyes, Proculus!" -- then with him, taking his virginity as well. It's hard to imagine anyone but McDowell playing this role, "you see how I've exhausted myself to make your wedding holy. My blessings to you both." He chuckles and walks away, leaving them in a sobbing heap. Caligula doesn't feel he has to choose and has a three-way with his sister Drusilla and his bride Caesonia. They are observed by two women, who are driven to engage in sapphic ecstacy themselves. Soon after, Caligula rids himself of the treacherous Gemellus. Still, Caligula descends ever further into debauched, depraved madness, now afraid that Drusilla is going to kill him. He wakes from a fever dream, surround by his advisors, in bed with his horse. He recovers and continues to torture his subjects, taking joy in torturing Proculus, whom he calls a traitor. "You're an honest man, Proculus, and therefore a bad Roman and therefore...a traitor!", he titters. Caesonia gives very public birth to his heir, but his first heir is a girl. He rallies, though, and declares that the child is a son. How can he do this? He. Is. A. God. But even he cannot save Drusilla from fever and she dies in his arms, driving him around the bend. He wanders the streets a beggar, then ends up in jail. After a short stay there, he returns to power and has the Senate unanimously declare him a God. Needing money, he declares that the Senators' wives will staff a brothel in order to replenish the state coffers. "Only five gold pieces for every twenty minutes! And that's a bargain! Look at them. Aren't they beautiful. Superb! The most lascivious ladies of the Roman empire have come today to perform their patriotic duties for all. ... All aboard the imperial bordello and you'll have your choice of the finest flesh in the empire.". Next he takes the Roman army to conquer Britain, where he collects papyrus cane to "prove" he was there. He descends further into self-destructive, heedless madness. He is accompanied on this journey by a simple man he met in jail, who is his constant companion now. All around him is intrigue and silent plotting. The plotting comes to fruition: Caligula is struck down by his royal guard, Caesonia is killed and his daughter ("son!") is dashed to death on the steps of the temple. Caligula sees this all before he is piked to death by a hundred blows. The final scene is of the slaughtered family on the steps, blood running a river down them. McDowell delivers a standout performance, seemingly a role he was born to play. I don't understand how anyone can say this is one of the worst movies ever made. Not so: it's absolutely elaborate, over the top and madcap and filmed quite well. It achieves its goal of making a relatively highbrow movie for which hardcore pornographic scenes are occasionally appropriate. Patton Oswalt: Talking for Clapping (2016) -- "7/10" I've liked his other specials better than this one. It felt like he was being too careful, addressing too many Twitterstorms, pandering to his San Fransisco audience. The bits lacked integrity, in the sense that they were separate from one another. He discusses how we really need a woman president then, twenty minutes later, discusses how little girls are much more devious and brutal with one another than boys, where direct violence is quickly over. He told a lot of stories about his old days as a comedian. It had its moments, but he was missing too much fire. I would rather re-listen to his older stuff. Page Eight (2011) -- "7/10" Bill Nighy is a calm and sedate and long-serving MI5 officer. Michael Gambon is his even longer-in-the-tooth boss. Rachel Weisz is his neighbor, who chooses to make his acquaintance on the same day that a highly classified and explosive file lands in his lap. The file describes how the U.K. and the U.S. are complicit in torture, with the most damning information showing up at the bottom of "page eight". Judy Davis plays another of Nighy's superiors, who flips her wig after Nighy tells the Home Secretary of the incriminating evidence in the file. Davis tells Nighy that he's a fool for believing the report, to which he responds with stunned silence, because it hadn't occurred to him to doubt its veracity -- because his buddy Gambon vouchsafed it. Davis tells him there's a war going on in MI5 and that Brits are killing Brits (presumably referring to 7/7, of which mention is made several times) and otherwise going off the deep end with paranoid frustration. Next, he talks to his ex-wife, who tells him that his daughter was justified in being angry with him because he wasn't nice to her when she wanted to tell him that she was pregnant. The ex-wife wastes no time telling him he's old and outdated and doesn't understand anything. He can't help but note that a lot of people seem, of late, to want to convince him that he's useless and stupid and outdated. Things kick into high gear when Gambon has a heart attack and Nighy's ex-wife calls him to let him know (Gambon was his ex-wife's new husband as well as his best friend). He meets with an old friend/informant (Ewen Bremner, or Spud from Trainspotting), who also tries to tell him how the world works, that intelligence is what the powers-that-be want, that intelligence delivered communists when the pols wanted communists and now it delivers Arabs when the pols want Arabs. Nighy is of a different mind, channeling Snowden, saying that, even though we all knew that there had to be black sites where Americans and Brits torture prisoners, having evidence of it is different -- and can also be used to implicate those who can be proved to have known, including but not limited to the prime minister of England, played by Ralph Fiennes. The PM meets with Nighy at Gambon's funeral and, after trying to butter him up, asks for the file back. Nighy refuses, quits, goes on the run with Weisz, to whom he reveals that the report says that her brother was tortured to death. Intrigue and lies and government secrets. Nighy finds out that he's been surveilled, and that, by a young man who was also surveilling Weisz. Everything's intertwined as this "Ralph" then turns out to be the son of Nighy's superior at MI5. It turns out she's running a parallel intelligence unit for the PM, who was dissatisfied with the lack of cooperation between MI5 and the Americans. He preferred a more...corroborative and submissive agency. She tries to deflect her guilt in this venture by saying that MI5 was ineffective because it's an old-boy's club. She then threatens him with jail. But he calls the bluff -- they actually bluff back and forth. Nighy is really spectacular here. When she doesn't agree to a deal, Nighy calls his source in the media, to whom he's already given everything, and gives her permission to publish. He returns once more to Weisz to give her his car and one of his nice paintings she'd admired. She asks if she can go along on his ex-pat adventure. He demurs and they kiss, then leaves without her. She hears on the news that Nighy released the report that her brother had been slaughtered by the Israelis in the occupied territories. He'd also arranged it just right so that she was free to pursue justice. The movie ends on the same jazzy, upbeat note with which it began. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] While I understood quite a bit, I freely admit that my French isn't good enough to have understood every nuance. I don't think a better understanding of the dialogue or the plot would have changed my overall impression. [1] I say somewhat because, while there are hardcore scenes, they are scattered throughout long stretches composed of plotting, intrigue and long discussions of Roman politics. [1] Although Vidal would disavow the script, claiming it had been changed too much. He even refused credit on the film. Still, some of the dialogue made it through. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3244 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3244 Sun, 17 Apr 2016 17:21:04 +0200 of over 900 ratings publicly available. I've included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other -- I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood. YMMV. Bullitt (1968) -- "6/10" Steve McQueen and Jaqueline Bisset star in this at-first groovy movie with a kickin' soundtrack. The bass line starts thumping during the credits and sets a tone that the rest of the movie doesn't sustain. Robert Vaughn, Robert Duvall, Norman Fell are here as well. Frank Bullitt (McQueen) and his partner are charged with guarding a witness. They set him up in a safe house. An unknown assailant attacks the safe house, getting in because the chain was mysteriously off the door. Bullitt's partner is shot and so is the witness. The pacing is pretty slow, We're half an hour in and that's all that's happened so far. They've spent ten minutes getting the injured police officer to the hospital and into surgery. Nearly ten minutes later and they're still in the hospital -- Chalmers (Vaughn) has made Bullitt 100% aware that he considers the whole fiasco to be his fault. Also, he drops some racism on the black doctor, telling a nurse to remove him from the case because he's "too young". Bullitt is bizarrely in the snack area -- ICUs had those in the 60s? -- munching on a Wonder Bread and Nutella sandwich. The Nutella jar hasn't changed a damned bit. The movie seems to revolve around a single (now dead) witness and Bullitt's refusal to let Chalmers figure out where he is -- because Bullitt is convinced that he can make the bad guys come out of the woodwork. And crawl out they do, for a 15-minute car chase through San Fransisco that must have been seriously amazing at the time, and still isn't bad now, but drags on a bit. Still it serves to show off old San Fransisco. OMG Jaqueline Bisset has lines! I thought she was mute, poor thing. Now they're at an airport. How exciting! The guy they thought they were chasing is a different guy but now they're chasing him. People are running everywhere. Run, run, run. Close-up of Steve McQueen's baby blues. Ross sees he's being chased, he shoot a security guard. Bullitt shoots him. The end. The best thing about this movie was the opening credits, with the thumping soundtrack. Those were awesome. Lolita (1962) -- "6/10" This is Stanley Kubrick's black-and-white filming of Humbert Humbert and his darling Lolita. The initial credits roll over a male hand painting a young girl's delicate toenails. James Mason is Professor Humbert Humbert. In the very first scene, he walks into a messy mansion to find a drunken Clare Quilty, played wonderfully by Peter Sellers. Sellers's acting makes this scene lunatic and parodic rather than as tense and scary as in Adrian Lyne's version, where Quilty was played by Frank Lagella and Humbert by Jeremy Irons. Lyne ended on that scene where Kubrick starts with it and plays the rest of the film as a flashback. Four years earlier, Humbert is on his way to Ohio to start a lectureship at Beardsley College. He takes a room from Charlotte Haze, played by Shelley Winters. We meet Lolita lounging in the backyard in a bikini. Humbert takes the room. The next scenes show Humbert integrating into home life, watching a drive-in movie with one girl to each side and hands all over his knees. He plays chess with Mama whileLolita kisses him lingeringly goodnight. Lolita hula-hoops while Humbert pretends to read poetry. This version is much smirkier and dirtier than the more somber Lyne version. At an extended dance/party/mixer scene, all of Haze's friends are swingers or speaking nearly purely in double entendrés. At one point Haze tells Quilty that Lolita will be seeing his uncle Ivar, a dentist, "where she'll get a cavity filled." Quilty (Sellers) looks temporarily taken aback, then smiles filthily and says "Yee-esss, of course." Nothing beats James Mason's voice, though. I can't believe he's not faking it. It's perfect for lines like when Lolita comes back early to interrupt her mother's putting the moves on Humbert -- with a sledgehammer -- he tells her that they "Oh we had a wonderful evening; your mother created a wonderful spread." When Lolita says she's hungry, Humbert offers her something, but her Mom tells her "all right, but you take it upstairs and after you've eaten it, you go right to sleep." Humbert comes back with the sandwich and says "it's loaded with mayonnaise, just the way you like it." OMG Phrasing everywhere in this movie. The story is the same and some of the scenes are the same as well. For example, after Humbert agrees to marry Haze, they're in bed together and he maintains ardor by gazing at the photo of Lolita over her shoulder. They have further strife, she finds his journal, she sees what's going on with his love of her daughter and spite for herself. One thing leads to another and she kills herself by leaping in front of an onrushing car. Humbert goes to pick up Lolita from camp -- and they both know why. They end up at a hotel and must settle for a single room with a single bed. Sellers shows up again as Quilty, motor-mouthing his way through a long scene whereby he, in a very roundabout manner, suggests that Humbert is sleeping with Lolita -- wink, wink, nudge, nudge, know what I mean? Sellers appears in several roles, notably as Dr. Zempf from Lolita's school, exhorting Humbert to allow Lolita more freedom -- all in a ridiculous German accent, all the while talking of "we Americans". Sellers is the best part of this movie. Humbert finally has a serious, jealousy-driven falling-out with Lolita, which deviates a bit from the later incarnation. Lolita is quite controlling, but more overtly resistant to Humbert. She ends up in the hospital with a flu. Humbert is very nervous that she will divulge something about their lifestyle. After waiting interminable days, he goes to the hospital to get her, only to find that her "uncle" had checked her out first. Instead of sympathizing with him or being horrified that they had allowed an underage girl to leave with just anyone, the hospital staff act as if he's psychotic because he doesn't take the news well that his daughter has been released into the custody of an unknown man. They tackle him and want to commit him to a sanitarium. His natural nervousness doesn't help so perhaps that gets their hackles up, but it's very strange. When he finds her again, three years later, she is married, but not to Quilty, who'd taken her away as her "uncle", but to another, younger man. She is supposedly six months pregnant. I say supposedly because she doesn't look even a month pregnant. He goes from there to Quilty's home and we close the loop of the flashback. I like the one with Jeremy Irons better, although Peter Sellers did his best in this one, James Mason was a bit too whiny. Chungking Express (1994) -- "8/10" This is a very stylized Chinese movie about a young police officer and a mysterious woman. She seems to be trading cash for passports of Indian men and is involved in some seriously shady dealings. It's not clear what she's up to, but she's deep in with the Indian community in Hong Kong. He'd been jilted on April 1st and had given his girlfriend 1 month to realize the error of her ways. He buys cans of pineapple that expire on May 1st because (A) that's what his ex-girlfriend May likes and (B) it's his birthday and (C) that's the day she's supposed to reveal that their breakup was a joke. May 1st rolls around and she fails to appear. He eats all the pineapples. He also gets drunk, super-drunk. He meets the mysterious woman, who's on the run after having had a smuggling operation go sour. She grudgingly hangs out with him and they end up in a hotel together. She passes out and he orders takeout and watches old movies. He goes jogging the next day, to get the water out of his body without crying, as he says. She pages him to wish him a happy birthday. Next we see the lady approach the guy who double-crossed her and shoot him in cold blood. Scene two: different cop. Missed connections. He's at the same lunch counter where the first cop used to hang out, waiting for May. There's a new girl, Faye, and the new cop, 633, is slowly falling in love with her. His other girlfriend left him a note and his keys and Faye took them. She sneaks into his apartment -- a cop's place! -- and rearranges stuff for him. She makes his bed with new sheets, she relabels his cans, she cleans his apartment, she deletes phone messages from his old girlfriend. She also leaves the a faucet open and nearly floods his apartment. Good soundtrack. Whimsical. I really like Kar-Wai Wong as a director (he also directed In the Mood for Love and 2046). Tony Leung is really good. Shots, colors, framing, all lovely. The soundtrack is fantastic (as the one for 2046 was, but this time with a lot blues instead of classical). Recommended. Dead Man (1995) -- "7/10" Jim Jarmusch directed this black-and-white movie about an accountant named Bill Blake (Johnny Depp). Blake travels out west to a small mining town. He has left all that he knows behind and used his last funds to respond to a job offer. On the train, Crispin Glover sets the tone as a madcap train conductor. When he arrives, they laugh at him and tell him that the job had been filled a month ago. Dickenson, the owner (Robert Mitchum) and John Hurt as his front-office man, throw him out. That he took two months to respond to his acceptance letter Blake's his own fault. Depp plays Blake as utterly hapless and bewildered. Dejected and bereft of purpose, Blake wanders through the filthy town, finally ending up in a saloon where his last few cents purchase a tiny bottle of spirits. Rather than stay under the eyes of the bizarre townspeople, he goes outside. The town's filth and uncouth inhabitants remind of scenes from Hard to be a God. He makes the acquaintance of a young lady Thel, who takes him back to her room. They wake up together when her boyfriend Charlie (Gabriel Byrne) storms in. Charlie shoots her and Bill shoots him. It is the first time he's fired a gun and now he's a murderer. He takes to the road, fleeing. His chest aches where the bullet that passed through Thel struck him as well. Charlie was Charlie Dickenson, and senior is furious. He hires three gunman to exact revenge. Michael Wincott as the garrulous Conway Twill, Lance Henriksen as the silent and cannibalistic Cole Wilson and Eugene Byrd as Johnny Pickett. Their numbers drop from three to two to one, as Cole kills the others, for being useless in Pickett's case and annoying/delicious in Wilson's. They are hot on Blake's trail, but Blake has been joined by "Nobody" a native American without a tribe. He will accompany him on his final journey (he recognizes the gravely wounded Blake as already dead). He also thinks that Bill Blake is the poet William Blake, whom he cites at length. On the trail, various mishaps occur, Blake racks up a string of kills -- all by accident -- including Iggy Pop, Billy Bob Thornton (poachers) and Alfred Molina (shopkeeper). Bill Blake goes on a vision quest and ends up at the shore of a river, where a native American tribe loans him a sea canoe with which to drift off into oblivion. The last thing Blake sees is Cole Wilson and Nobody shooting each other to death. He drifts away. Everyone is dead. The end. Drugstore Cowboy (1989) -- "7/10" Gus Van Sant directed this movie about a gang of four friends by necessity who rob drugstores to get morphine and other drugs. It's 1971. They hit a store, get a good supply, but the cops follow the trail back to them. Luckily they hid the drugs in the backyard so, while the cops flip their entire house upside-down, they don't find anything and leave. Matt Dillon is the ringleader Bob, married to Dianne (Kelly Lynch). James Le Gros and Heather Graham round out the crew as Ricky and Nadine. To get back at the cops and to get them off their trail, Bob writes them a letter giving them an anonymous tip about a connection between Bob and his neighbor. It's fictitious, though. When the stakeout sees Bob talking to his neighbor, they think they're onto something. Bob, however, is telling his neighbor that someone's spying on his wife. When a cop gets up on a ladder to look in the window that night, the neighbor shoots the cop with a shotgun. The cops (with leader James Remar) show up to beat the crap out of him for the setup, then pretty much run him out of town. He claims that he and his crew have moved on on their own, though, because he's a junkie with delusions of grandeur. In the next town, they find a drugstore with an open transom and rip it off without a hitch. Their next hit is a hospital, where they again use distraction -- cars running wild in the parking lot -- to draw attention away from Bob, who's breaking into medicine cabinets inside. Things go awry: Bob is injured, but crawls home the next morning, sans drugs. Nadine has overdosed massively, taking a lot of their existing stash with her. This is Bob's cue to straighten up and fly right. He begs Dianne to come with him, but she can't give it up. He takes enough to get home, leaving the rest with her. At home, he signs up for a methadone program, gets a job and a tiny apartment. He also rekindles his friendship with Father Tom, played beautifully by William S. Burroughs, a real-life heroin addict. Dianne visits soon after, but she doesn't stay and she's now hooked up with Ricky and part of his gang. Max Perlich is an old friend, David, also a dealer. The cop who originally ran him out of town now wishes him the best, but warns him that the cop he tricked his neighbor into shooting is still looking for revenge. Bob is resigned to it. David beats the cop to that punch, breaking into Bob's apartment to steal his stash, then beating on him and finally shooting him. We see him Bob the ambulance on the way to the hospital, dreaming of the wonderful drugs there. No escape. Southpaw (2015) -- "7/10" Jake Gyllenhaal is BIlly Hope, light-heavyweight world champion with a 43--0 record, lots of tattoos, a lovely, devoted wife Maureen (Rachel McAdams) and a cute daughter whom he loves above all else. He has matching tattoos on his forearms: "Fighter" and "Father". They also have a mansion, lots of cars and a lavish lifestyle. He and Maureen clawed their way out of Hell's Kitchen, and a bunch of his current crew/entourage comes from there as well. 50 Cent plays his manager, who worked with him for 10 years. There is another fighter Miguel, a Colombian, who's itching to get a title shot and 50 Cent wants to provide it. Maureen has asked Billy to step it back, though, because his fighting style, while effective, usually results in him being beaten nearly to death -- think "Seth "the Battling Pict" Slingerland" -- but he always comes back because he uses anger at his pain to fuel him to victory. Ok, fine. But he's still a bit slurry and chronically injured from the beatings. We see how painful it is, even for the victor, in the days after a fight. At a benefit dinner, Miguel and his crew confront Billy, demanding a shot, which Billy ignores until Miguel insults Maureen. They bare-fist fight -- horrifying because Hope's face is still ruined from his last fight -- until there is a shot: one of Hector's goons has pulled a gun and fired by accident, injuring Maureen fatally. Billy spirals out of control. He drinks, he does drugs, he hunts down Miguel to his apartment, where he discovers that he is also a father. Billy slinks away. He tries to fight again, but loses, head-butting a referee and basically being the exact idiot that Maureen always prevented him from being. He is suspended for a year from fighting, sued by the referee and becomes deeply indebted for his lavish lifestyle, etc. etc. He finally crashes his car, out of his mind on booze and drugs, after which his daughter Leila is taken away from him. Leila is pissed at him for putting her in foster care. Billy has nothing at all anymore. He seeks out Tick Wills (Forest Whitaker, who is transcendent) as a trainer, but Wills will only take him on to clean the gym at night. First lesson is humility. From there, it's kind of a Rocky/Karate Kid vibe as Billy re-learns how to box not like a defenseless idiot but like a real boxer. Billy sought out Tick because he says that Tick trained the only guy who ever beat him. Wills is confused because Billy won that fight. Billy tells him it's because 50 Cent fixed it. Billy's first fight is a charity gig for wounded veterans, where he doesn't need a license to box. He successfully tries out his new-found skills. He shows responsibility, 50 Cent contacts him for a fight against Miguel (who he's now managing) in six weeks, Leila is returned to him. Things are looking up. Tick is reluctant to train Billy professionally, but agrees after they bond through shared suffering over the death of a young kid from the gym, Hoppy. The final matchup is pretty good, although touted as more of a defensive contest than it really was. It was more of a slugfest than fights usually are, with too little defense from both sides, but at least had some, which is more than Hope showed in the other two fights we saw or than we ever saw from Rocky. Spoiler alert: Hope wins with a left-handed uppercut. Funny Games (2007) -- "5/10" I guess this is a horror movie in the genre of "this could happen to you" but I didn't believe it. A family -- husband, wife and son -- goes on vacation to their house on a lake. Soon after they arrive, a strange young man appears to borrow eggs. He's unfailingly polite, but he's a moron, a klutz. He's also wearing ridiculous white gloves that just scream "I don't want to leave fingerprints". He's just there to distract and to gain entry to the home. Soon after he drops the eggs for the second time, his friend appears and now they're both in the home. For whatever reason, the mother doesn't throw them out or get backup. The unbelievable part is that she doesn't sense the menace, or that she really would be too polite not to express something. Is it because they're white? They have such cunty faces -- the casting call must have explicitly mentioned this trait -- and are so mealy-mouthed, that you should be able to sense something a mile away. But I guess that's how con-men work. One of them breaks the father's leg with a golf club and they have control. Just like that. No resistance. Now they can play "funny games" for the rest of the movie. Tim Roth and Naomi Watts were wasted in this predictable hash. This was an American remake of Michael Haneke's original from 1997, but given the source material, it's hard to imagine that that one was more interesting. This is the genre of "bad guys in control, while everyone else cries for two hours". The only twist in this film is that there is no comeuppance. Also, one of the kidnappers breaks the fourth wall, which felt hackneyed. I see the experiment as a study of desensitization to media violence -- as Haneke originally intended -- but the film is otherwise unmoored from motive. Not recommended. The Fountainhead (1949) -- "7/10" Gary Cooper is Howard Roark, a skilled architect and principled to the core. He finally gets a commission because they like his work, but they ask him to just compromise a little bit, adding some baroque elements to appease the desires for people who aren't architects. If you've read the book by Ayn Rand, then you'll recognize much of the text. Architecture is done by each man subordinating himself to the collective. Ha! Even the utterly byzantine and stilted dialogue and personal interaction has been transposed from page to screen. Patricia Neal is an heiress of a newspaper empire who falls in love with Roark's awesomeness on the building site, where he works when he can't get design work. She stands above him, wearing jodhpurs and holding a riding crop, while he stands cockily down below, knowing she'll come to him. She gets him into her room by deliberately breaking her fireplace and getting him to fix it. Quite a courtship dance. "The wider your eyes the better the acting" should be on her tombstone. "If it's not violent and doesn't involve female submission, then it's not courtship" should have been on Ayn Rand's. Long story short: Roark sticks to his guns, does everything his way or the highway, doesn't accept input from anyone because everyone else in the entire world is a moron, gets his greatest enemy to be his greatest supporter, gets the same guy's wife to be deliriously in love with him. He even gets Peter, a crap architect who kept getting his contracts because he had no spine, to beg him to do his work for him on a spectacular new project. When Peter allows changes to Roark's designs, Roark blows up the building because they ruined it. At his trial, the accusers put him on trial not for having blown up a public building, but for not bowing down. OMG Ayn Rand, the world was so simple for you. His best buddy and former enemy runs his newspaper into the ground trying to defend Roark. Roark does a bit of a Galt-like speech, though dozens of pages shorter. This line was pretty funny: "Thousands of years ago the first man discovered how to make fire. He was probably burned at the stake he had taught his brothers to light, but he left them a gift they had not conceived of, and he lifted darkness off the earth. (Emphasis added.)" Still a bit long, though. Rand never met a paraphrasing she didn't like. Also, Cooper didn't even smirk when delivering that line, which is the worst thing about Rand's world: it has no fucking sense of humor. In the end, Roark is declared not guilty, which is ridiculous because he was guilty of blowing up the building, Wyman commissions him to build the Wyman building, tallest in the city and then Wyman kills himself, making way for Roark to marry his wife. Everything's coming up Howard. I think the story is decent, but the film is not very good. The book is much better. And anything is better than Atlas Shrugged. Some of the dialogue is pretty cheesy, but the point it's trying to make is a good one? It's hard to describe. Some parts felt a bit like Gone with the Wind. The concepts are decent and have a grain of truth worth defending to them, but they're so simply framed, too black and white. Not recommended -- read the book instead. The Conversation (1974) -- "7/10" Gene Hackman stars as Harry, a cop in this beautifully shot and rendered 1970s movie about domestic surveillance. Yes, from 1974. The U.S. has always struggled with tyranny and hasn't been free for a long time. Ah, no wonder it's so pretty: Francis Ford Coppola directed it. Harry has a difficult time separating work from his private life. He's very secretive about himself, sensing the irony. Even with his girlfriend Amy (Teri Garr), he doesn't want to open up. On his 42nd birthday, she pries too much for his taste and he leaves. She tells him that she won't wait anymore. Holy crap! There's Harrison Ford, pre-Star Wars! In profile, he looks eerily like Aaron Eckart -- or Aaron Eckart looks eerily like a young Harrison Ford, I suppose. Harry runs through conversations of a couple he's been following, and starts to suspect that something more is going on than just a standard trace. He thinks they're being targeted for murder. His room of equipment is awesome, all old-school tape-drive tech. It looks like the Hamilton College radio station before the upgrade in 1993. God I'm old. The surveillance-technology expo is also very interesting. It's like watching old James Bond movies. This is probably how our amazing 21st-century technology will look to people in 2050 or 2060. At any rate, Harry's quite famous in his field, as an independent surveillance specialist. He's more of a PI than a cop, selling his services to law enforcement. The demos then look the same as now, complete with booth babes. From the expo, a bunch of the guys head out for drinks, then end up at Harry's shop. Though they call his equipment outdated, they're all jealous of his skills and his reputation. In particular, they press him for information on how me managed to record a conversation back in '68, on a boat way out away from shore. Even his latest assignment for the couple is a work of art. Two people in a crowd, moving around a park, not sitting, not predictable. Harry takes the opportunity in the change in conversation to lead them away from '68, especially Bernie, an old colleague from New York, who's absolutely desperate to team up. When he discovers that Bernie used a high-tech pen to spy on Harry that evening -- when Harry was spilling his heart out to a girl -- Harry gets pissed and throws everyone out. The audio of the couple continues to haunt him as he and the girl hook up, but always the couple he'd followed haunts him. The girl, however, was hired by Martin Stett (Harrison Ford) and she absconds with the recording before he wakes. He is then forced to hand over the pictures as well, so he can get paid. He still has deep misgivings about what will be done with the evidence he's gathered on what he is now convinced is an innocent couple. Robert Duvall plays The Director, who commissioned the job, but he doesn't respond or react when Harry asks him what's going to happen to the people. Harry unravels, checking into the hotel to spy on room 773 -- the room mentioned by the two people he spied on. but what he hears is inconclusive. He sees and hears things that aren't there. When he goes back to see The Director again, he finds the lady in a Mercedes out front of the building. The Director is dead. She and her husband murdered him and the surveillance by The Director was because he suspected a plot against him. Twisteroo! Harry ends the film in his apartment, playing his saxophone at maximum volume and trying desperately not to think about what had happened. After a menacing phone call, he tears through his apartment for bugs, ripping up floors, pulling tiles off the wall, dismantling everything. I don't think there's much of a chance of him getting his security deposit back. The hunter has become the hunted -- but perhaps only in his own mind. This is a pretty movie, showing off the nicest parts of San Fransisco architecture in the 70s. Tetro (2009) -- "7/10" This is another film by Francis Ford Coppola, starring Vincent Gallo as Angelo, a washed-up playwright living in Buenos Aires. He is visited by his brother, Bennie (Alden Ehrenreich), who is surprised to see how far his brother has fallen. As they walk slowly through the city -- Angelo has a broken leg -- Bennie calls Angelo "Angie", to which Angelo replies that he's now called "Tetro". He seems to be channeling a young Michael Douglas in both appearance and voice. Bennie stays with his brother for a few days, and is introduced to his circle of acquaintances and his live-in girlfriend, Miranda. At this point, we see a flashback of a car crash in which a young Tetro was involved. It's unclear whether his passenger died. The plot dawdles forward through the performance of "Fausta" a play for which Tetro runs the lights. It comes out that Tetro and Bennie's father was a famous, rich playwright, Carlo Tetrocini. Miranda storms out because Tetro had lied to her for a long time about his past. Bennie and Miranda become closer friends. He takes Tetro and Miranda's puppy for a walk and gets hit by a Vespa, injuring himself quite badly. The puppy is fine. Tetro flashes back to his car accident again, wherein it's now clearer that his wife or girlfriend was killed. The flashbacks are in a tighter frame, narrower, with a large black border on the screen. The two sons remember their father as an overbearing arrogant man who wouldn't let their sons have anything for themselves, seeking praise, flirting with their girlfriends. Bennie misses his boat, ending up in the hospital for a while. Tetro and Miranda reconcile, rallying to support Bennie. Tetro discovers that Bennie has been digging into his old stories and memoirs. He throws a fit, but Bennie presses on, finishes the play Tetro was unable to finish and gets it published and produced. Tetro sulks. Like, a lot. The play of their lives starts to merge with flashbacks and revelations, though it's difficult to know what's true. It is revealed that Carlo stole Angelo's great love from him, leading to the ruin of the family and breaking Tetro for good. Bennie reveals all of this drunkenly at a family reunion. Or thinks he does -- is he just dreaming? How much of this film is a dream? He hulks out and tries to set the ancestral home on fire. Then it's time to get back out into traffic; what is it with this family and traffic? Filmed in black and white. Saw it in English and Spanish with subtitles. Habemus Papum (We Have a Pope) (2011) -- "7/10" This movie starts with the election of a pope, Pope Melville. He has a nervous breakdown before he can greet the public from the holy balcony. He runs away screaming, following by a shuffling mass of confused cardinals. After exhibiting what they felt was sufficient patience, a few cardinals from Oceania wanted to take in the sights and a Caravaggio exhibit. But the head cardinal pulled on their leash and made them stay sequestered for another day. The cardinals call in a shrink. The counseling session takes place within a giant circle of cardinals. He isn't allowed to know his name, not allowed to ask about family, mother, childhood, pretty much anything relevant. It turns out that the psychiatrist is not a Catholic, doesn't even believe in God. No-one bothered to ask. He soldiers on. He discovers later that he is now trapped within the Vatican because they cannot let him go until he cures the Pope. They confiscate his phone, cutting him off from the outside world. He's not the only one, though. Because of the unorthodox proceedings, with the Pope remaining unannounced, the cardinals, too, are in limbo. They smoke, play solitaire, make jigsaw puzzles, take the various medications required by men of such advanced age. The next morning, the Pope takes a walk and sees the Swiss guard doing some form of...maneuver. They're speaking perfect High German, which is total bullshit. Swiss people can't speak High German without an accent, often a catastrophically strong one. Even Angels & Demons got this right, FFS. The Pope takes a limousine out of the Vatican, to talk to another counselor, his other psychiatrist's wife. (I think.) After speaking to her, he tells his camerlengo that he needs to take a walk. He disappears when a passing truck blocks his security detail. He wanders the city, confused and hopeless and depressed. He calls his camerlengo, but doesn't reveal his whereabouts, saying he needs more time to think. The Pope is AWOL. The camerlengo rallies and gets a Swiss Guardsman to fill in for the Pope, pretending to all the Cardinals that the pope is back and that he's doing just fine, just needs a little time. Meanwhile, the Pope ends up in a hotel. The next morning, he is accosted by a seeming madman, speaking lines that have no relation to reality. The Pope quickly recognizes that he is rolling through the lines of a Chekhov play. (The Three Sisters, if I'm not mistaken...liberal arts education FTW!) The Swiss guardsman posing as the Pope is, meanwhile, is having quite a nice time of it, playing music and snacking on delectable desserts. The psychiatrist moves on from playing cards with a few cardinals to examining the odds -- made by li Bookmakers -- and discussing the chances the front-runners had with the whole group. They're definitely out of their comfort zone here, but he is definitely not. Next, they set up a volleyball court in the Vatican, to pass the time. They've already set up the brackets prior. They all agree to play because they think the Pope is in his apartments, gleaning energy from their enthusiasm. It's just the Swiss guardsman, though. The camerlengo announces that the Pope is gone for good. The cardinaly rally for a last gambit and go to the theater where he is watching a production of The Three Sisters. The cardinals, in their innocence and utter lack of worldliness, remind me strongly of how I pictured the wizards of Discworld. When the play falters because of the dozens of cardinals swarming the theater, the Pope's comrade-in-arms and fellow Chekhov-lover (an asylum inmate, it seems), leaps to the stage to perform all the roles at once, to prevent the production from sinking. His soliloquy ends in raucous applause. Slowly people realize the Pope is in attendance and they applaud him instead. Wonderfully madcap. He finally makes his way to the vaunted balcony...and declines the position. The Catholic church has no Pope. The cardinals are devastated. The world makes no sense anymore. The end. Saw it in Italian with English subtitles. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3242 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3242 Sun, 17 Apr 2016 13:04:26 +0200 -- "7/10" 2. "Terminator Salvation (2009)" <#Terminator> -- "6/10" 3. "Cloud Atlas (2012)" <#Cloud> -- "9/10" 4. "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975)" <#One> -- "8/10" 5. "Inherent Vice (2014)" <#Inherent> -- "7/10" 6. "Harry Brown (2009)" <#Harry> -- "6/10" 7. "Don Jon (2013)" <#Don> -- "8/10" 8. "Hot Girls Wanted (2015)" <#Hot> -- "6/10" 9. "25th Hour (2002)" <#25th> -- "7/10" 10. "Lord Jim (1965)" <#Lord> -- "6/10" 11. "Strange Days (1995)" <#Strange> -- "9/10" These are my notes to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. I've recently transferred my reviews to IMDb and made "the list" of over 900 ratings publicly available. I've included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other -- I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood. YMMV. The 36th Chamber of Shaolin (1978) -- "7/10" Oh my God. Every. Damned Chamber. They skipped a couple, but it still felt like a lot. Some of the training devices are pretty neat -- primitive but effective. San Ta escapes from marauders plaguing his village to the Shaolin temple to learn Kung Fu, so that he can return to teach it to his fellow villagers, to defend themselves. He spends about an hour working his way through the 35 temples, then duels for the right to head his own chamber. I understand that it's 1978, so this movie established a lot of the tropes that now seem so cliche. The choreography is pretty advanced for its time. The dialogue is pretty stilted. The morality lessons are well-known. But it's well-executed, if a bit closely filmed (i.e. lots of standard angles, mostly quite close and cutting off the rest of the scene). Instead of taking over one of the existing chambers, San Ta proposed to create a 36th chamber -- taking the martial lessons of the Shaolin to the outside world so that they can defend themselves from evil. The abbot has to pretend not to approve, but "banishes" him to the outside world, where he does exactly what he originally set out to do. As expected, the real world offers him an opportunity to use almost every single individual lesson that he learned in the various chambers. Plus, he's better at everything than any other person he meets: he's stronger than the smith, better than the miller at legwork, etc. It will come as no surprise that there is a huge brawl and that everything works out exactly as expected: San Ta has a Shaolin school and the enemy is vanquished. There was a woman on-screen for a total of about ten seconds of this movie. I have no idea why this movie was rated R. Terminator Salvation (2009) -- "6/10" Even Christian Bale and Sam Worthington can't save this relatively banal movie from itself. There are robots, there is Skynet, there is an amazing cyborg, but the whole plot is basically about trying to rescue a single teenager from Skynet. We learn a bit more about the mythology of the Terminator universe, but perhaps lose much more to confusion. Cloud Atlas (2012) -- "9/10" This is my second viewing, "the first was in 2013" , after having read the book. It makes a lot more sense now. The sequences with Tom Hanks as Zachary are impressively true to the language spoken in the book. That patois was difficult enough to read, to say nothing of understanding it when spoken. They stuck to it, though, not caring a whit that no-one would be able to understand it in the movie. This is a vanity movie with an unswerving dedication to the source material, but a good movie nonetheless. I understand now why I had no hope of understanding what was really going on without having read the book. The cast is incredible: Hugh Grant, Jim Broadbent, Hugo Weaving and Tom Hanks both play multiple roles. Ben Wishaw plays my favorite from the book, Robert Frobisher, really well. The interleaved format is more pronounced in the movie than in the book, which comprised 11 parts instead of dozens and dozens. But cinematically, it probably worked better, showing the interleaving and extra-temporal connections between characters better than the book did. The plot is so convoluted as to be nearly impossible to describe quickly, but it was quite faithful to the book. See "my notes on the book for more details." One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975) -- "8/10" Jack Nicholson plays the role he seems to have been born to play. The characters are quite true to the book. The plot diverges quite a bit, though the main elements are there. That cast is great, not just Nicholson, but Danny DeVito, Louise Fletcher (as the unblinking Nurse Ratched), Sydney Lassick (Cheswick) , Vincent Schiavelli (Fredrickson), Scatman Crothers and Christopher Lloyd. Will Sampson plays the Chief just as I'd pictured him. The original story is one by Ken Kesey, of the Beat Generation, who had a healthy suspicion of modern American culture and its strict definition of what is normal. When normal is supporting the slaughter of Vietnamese halfway around the world, then the world is crazy. Any slight form of rebellion is considered crazy and punishable. The Chief and Randall discuss escaping to Canada, escaping the asylum of America. Randall does get out, but not the way he'd imagined. The Chief, though, he doesn't let Randall's sacrifice go in vain and escapes in a more spectacular manner than he did in the book. Still, the film follows the book pretty closely. Nurse Ratched embodies the Combine (unmentioned in the movie...the Chief's entire inner monologue is missing) and McMurphy takes out his rage on her. See "my notes on the book for more details." Inherent Vice (2014) -- "7/10" Joaquin Phoenix is Doc Sportello, a hippie druggie private detective, whose vaguely reminiscent of The Dude from the Big Lebowski or perhaps Hunter S. Thompson from Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. The dialogue is mostly cool (lifted largely from Pynchon's prose from the book). Josh Brolin as Bigfoot Bjornsen, a police detective, is very good. This is not a very action-filled movie; instead it's almost purely dialogue-driven, with a single face occupying the screen at any one time. It's unclear which parts are real and which are imagined because of Doc's nearly perpetually altered state. He's a basically nice guy, with ugly urges that he's long since tamped down, leading him to be a much nicer guy than you'd expect him to be. Nicer than anyone else in the movie, at least. The plot is a convoluted investigation into the seedy side of 1970s California land development, with shades of white-supremacist biker gangs, drug dealers, crooked lawyers, fake deaths, missing people and so on. Doc's interest is to protect his former girlfriend -- and the love of his life, Shasta Fay. The book was better, but I think that's nearly unavoidable as Pynchon's prose is nearly unassailable, but I'm a fan. It's a bit of a long film to recommend, but has some interesting dialogue and some good performances. Harry Brown (2009) -- "6/10" This is a movie about Harry Brown, played by Michael Caine, an older man living in modern-day England, spending his days visiting his comatose wife in the hospital while surrounded on all sides by the criminal youthful society that's grown up around his neighborhood. Brown witnesses crimes everywhere. Life goes on. Until his wife dies. And then his friend is killed by local punks. Harry ends up in his bar, getting righteously pissed. The bartender is played by Liam Cunningham, the same actor who plays Davos Seaworth in Game of Thrones so he's immediately trustworthy. A little while later, Iain Glen shows up as superintendent Childs (he also plays Jorah Mormont in Game of Thrones). Harry's pretty drunk, so he flashes a bit too much cash when paying his monstrous tab. A local addict notes the indiscretion and follows him home, jumping him by the river. Harry's utterly shithoused and old but he still flips the dude's knife around in a microsecond and takes. him. down. At home, he sleeps it off, then seems to ponder what he's done, considering resurrecting his shadowy past as a Marine. "Stretch" is the first dealer he goes to once he's decided to clean up his neighborhood. He's played by an utterly transformed Sean Harris, who's skinny, covered in scars and tattoos and clearly strung out -- but not nearly as strung out as the girls he has lying around his den, and who feature prominently in homemade sex tapes. Nearly everyone but Harry is an over-the-top degenerate, crude, stupid, guttural and driven only by the basest desires. I suppose that will make it easier to just start cutting a wide swath through them all. Which Harry summarily does, taking revenge on the boys who killed his best friend, because the police can't. Total vigilante movie. Except in this one, the guy is so old that he has an emphysema attack while chasing one of the youths who gets away. While he's laid up in the hospital, his neighborhood erupts in extreme violence between the police and the local gangs. He check himself out of the hospital and heads back to his gang-ridden office block. The two police officers who suspect that he's behind the recent rash of killings discuss what to do. Alice Frampton: I think he's going to kill Noel Winters. Terry Hicock: Who gives a fuck if he is? Noel Winters is a cunt. His Dad was a cunt. One day he's going to have a load of cunty kids. As far as I'm concerned, Harry Brown is doing us a favor. Alice Frampton: Look of disapproval. Alice is right, though, cops should generally frown on vigilante behavior. But it's so tempting when the target is such an absolute scumbag. It turns out that good ol' trustworthy Seaworth is actually the gang leader and Winters's uncle, to boot. They manage to kill Hicock, who's unconscious, but Frampton and Harry survive and take them out instead. The end. Don Jon (2013) -- "8/10" This is a movie about a New Jersey goombah, Jon, played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt. His life is defined by watching pornography, going to the gym, hitting the clubs, smashing chicks, rating chicks, going to church to absolve his sins and eating dinner with his family. That's it. I think he's a bartender. He meets Barbara Sugarman, played by Scarlett Johannson, and he falls in love. Unlike every other girl he meets, she will not put out. So he falls in love. You'd immediately think why would anyone want to be with an idiot like him -- and then you realize that, while she's a bit better, she's basically an idiot too. The cast is great: Tony Danza as his father, Brie Larson as his sister -- so far without a single line -- and Glenne Headly as his mother. His friends are goombahs too, with Rob Brown (Delmond Lambreaux from Treme) showing up as his only real friend. Barbara Sugarman sets out to change him. So, before sleeping with him, she makes him go to night school. After his first class, he gets his present...and it's disappointing compared to porn. So he sneaks out of bed to watch porn after she falls asleep -- as he does after pretty much every one of his conquests -- but she wakes up and catches him. He lies and pretends that it was a joke sent by a friend. She believes him. Why does his Lenovo laptop make an OS X boot-up sound? Because everything else is fake, right? He's fake, porn is fake, the night-clubs culture is fake. Julianne Moore shows up as a colleague from his night-school class (they haven't even said what he's taking because it doesn't matter) and she catches him watching porn on his phone. The next class, she brings him a DVD of Brigitte, a Danish movie from the 70s which she says has got to be "better than that fake shit you're watching on your phone". He says it's not fake. She says, of course it is. Next, we see him with his friends and he describes his relationship with Barbara in a completely over-the-top manner. He can't stop thinking about porn when he's with her. Man, is he one angry driver. Barbara does exactly what's expected of her, trying to domesticate him. Turns out he's more of a domestic than she is: he's a bit of a neat freak, while she has a housekeeper. His eye starts to wander to the cool, older lady who gave him a porno. Not the young "tenner" who doesn't know how to clean and forbade him from watching porn. And it turns out that he's actually a better person than she. But that's a not a high bar in New Jersey, ammirite? And then she snooped on his computer -- doesn't anyone use a password? And, just like that, she's gone. But at least he has one good friend (Rob), who makes him keep going to school, where he takes up with Esther (Julianne Moore), who is way cooler and way smarter than Barbara. And then, out of nowhere, Brie Larson wakes up and nails Barbara's coffin shut by pointing out that she was never interested in Jon, that she just wanted a man she could control. Johnny starts changing his life, bit by bit. No more porn, playing basketball instead of lifting weights, no more grease in his hair, finishing school, ending up with the hot older lady. Hot Girls Wanted (2015) -- "6/10" This is a documentary about the cam-girl/pornography industry, focuses on Miami. It follows the lives of a few girls who started, following their careers through their 2-3--year arc. It's pretty tragic all around, the desperation, the ignorance, the mean-ness. 25th Hour (2002) -- "7/10" Spike Lee directed this adaptation of David Benioff's book. Monty (Ed Norton) gets busted for dealing drugs and he's on his way to prison in the morning. The movie is told in flashbacks, mostly from Monty's point of view. It's a bit slow, with long soliloquies by the prime characters, including Monty yelling the most horrible stereotypes about New York and its inhabitants into a mirror. Barry Pepper plays one of his best friends, Frank; Philip Seymour Hoffman the other, Jacob. Frank's a Wall Street trader; Jacob's a teacher. Brian Cox is Monty's father, a former drunk and firefighter. Rosario Dawson plays Naturelle Riviera, his live-in girlfriend and possible turncoat. It's got Clay Davis as a DEA agent, doing his "Sheeee -- iitttt" line from The Wire. They all meet at a club for one last night before he goes up the river, and it seems like Monty's working an angle. He asks Frank for a favor, but we don't know what it is. Frank accosts Naturelle, acting drunk, but it seems like he's only been nursing one drink all night. He starts the evening with Caol 18-year, which he has to get from upstairs. It's unclear what he does upstairs when he accompanies the waitress to get it. He ends the evening drinking Dewar's -- and offering Jacob a Jack Daniels. Then Monty has a meeting with his boss and seems to discover that his long-time partner has betrayed him, not Naturelle. This plot feels like Mamet -- I don't feel like I can take anything I'm watching at face value. In the next scene, Monty says he can't go to jail pretty, and goads Frank into beating the ever-lovin' crap out of him. He ain't pretty no more. Jacob gets him up, Doyle the pit bull barks, Frank sobs on the ground after what he's done, knowing it was for Monty's absolution, Monty staggers away with a face like I haven't seen since Fight Club. He goes back to his apartment, shocking Naturelle and then his father with his fucked-up face. His Dad drives him to prison. He tells of how a man has to see the whole country and offers to take him away, away from everything -- Monty dreams it as he dozes in the car. This sequence goes on for a long time, which is kinda cool. Until you almost start to believe it, but you know you can't. Instead the car drives on, to Monty's future, pulling his weight. Good soundtrack. Pretty good performances. A touch on the long side, although it ended up feeling shorter than expected because you kept waiting for a shoe to drop. Recommended. Lord Jim (1965) -- "6/10" Peter O'Toole is the eponymous sailor. He's the king of the world on the boat on which he's stationed, but he breaks his leg and has to go ashore for an extended period. Bored, he takes the first boat he can out of there, the Patna, but it founders and the entire crew abandons the boat -- partially out of fear and partially because they've convinced him it's sinking, he abandons the boat, with passengers still aboard. The cowardly crew makes it back to port, only to see the Patna already there. Only Jim sticks around for the trial -- and he is stripped of his sailing papers. He drifts around, doing all sorts of odd jobs, just not on water. He finally takes a job on a small boat and partially redeems himself by not abandoning the boat when everyone else does and instead putting the fire out and saving it. The grateful owner takes him on his next adventure. This next adventure is delivering weapons to a remote tribe, in order to help them get out from under the local strongman. There is a lot of attacking and defending. Lord Jim does well, but he ends up promising that he will allow himself to be judged if just one man dies in a last-ditch defense he wants to try. His plan works, but the chief's son -- and Jim's best and most loyal comrade -- dies. The chief banishes Jim from the village, telling him may live, but he has to leave all that he has grown to love, including a lovely girl from the village. Jim elects to stay and takes his punishment. The film closes on his funeral bier. Strange Days (1995) -- "9/10" This is a very well-made movie about New Year's Eve 2000 in an alternate future where full-sensory recording and playback are already available, on the black market at least. The technology was invented to replace surveillance wires, but people got hold of it and there's a thriving market for "clips" of different people, of different lives -- and deaths. The story was about 20 years too early. It's about video evidence, about corrupt cops, about the execution of prominent black leaders, about highly militarized police. They envisioned the start of the new millennium as much more metal than it really was. Vincent D'onofrio and William Fichtner are a couple of asshole LAPD. Angela Basset becomes the new Rodney King, as the compadrés show up to start clubbing her gorgeous self in the middle of the New Year's crowd. Bad idea. Tom Sizemore stars as the ball of chaos pounding through the middle of the movie. Juliette Lewis is fantastic as a bit of a lost soul singer and the target of Ralph Fiennes's obsession. Ralph Fiennes is the ex-cop/clip-dealer who is the center of the story. Michael Wincott is the rockstar/dirtbag boyfriend of Juliette Lewis. I don't want to ruin the story, but the world was well-represented, a bit Blade Runner-like. Recommended. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3243 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3243 Sun, 17 Apr 2016 12:33:19 +0200 of over 900 ratings publicly available. I've included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other -- I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood. YMMV. Last Tango in Paris (1972) -- "7/10" It's Paris in the 1970s. A young woman passes an older man on a bridge, under a train trestle. They note each other, but move on. She stops at a building with apartments to rent. The landlady is odd, doesn't have the key, finds a duplicate. When the girl gets to the apartment upstairs, the man is there. He had taken the key. They circle each other, asking one another whether they're taking the apartment. This feels quickly like innuendo for something else. After more circling, feints and subterfuge, he approaches, lifts her up, and takes her up against a radiator. They are both surprised at the intensity of the coupling, but roll away and leave the building without saying another word to each other. We discover later that his name is Paul and she is Jeanne. She has a boyfriend, who she rushes to meet at the train station. Paul is next seen in a different apartment, watching as another woman cleans up a bloody bathroom. Next, we see Jeanne in the apartment, dancing around movers, but it's his stuff that is being moved in. The movers call her "his wife" and he tells her that he does not want to know her name nor wants her to know his. Next, we see an older woman, moving in to a different set of rooms. This is his wife's mother. She has joined him because the bloody bathtub was the scene of his wife's suicide. They argue about whether God is allowed to be involved in the funereal proceedings. He is a moody, violent and broken man. The next day, we see him with his new young lover in their new apartment, not knowing anything about each other, Kama Sutra-ing/Chakra-ing their way through a lazy afternoon. She returns to her boyfriend, who is shooting a film of her life. They return to her ancestral home -- she is the scion of a French general who served in Algeria (and who was a horrible racist) -- and they film further there. She starts by proudly claiming that neighborhood children always played in their yard. When they get to the backyard, the housekeeper Olympia shoos away a gaggle of children who are relieving themselves in the woods, yelling "Oh, these dirty little Arabs! Go and shit in your own country!" Her daughter says that "Olympia was sublime. It'll give a good idea of race relations in the suburbs of Paris." This was over 40 years ago. Nothing has changed. She escapes back to the apartment and to Brando's moody giant. They are extremely comfortable with each other. The notion that they know nothing of each other paradoxically makes them open up to each other more. "No names!", he yells. She yells back at him that he doesn't listen to her, that he's not generous, not indulgent, he's an egoist, he's locked up in his moody solitude. He smirks at her. I can't even tell if Brando is even acting here. "I can be alone too!" she yells at him, before he leaves the room. To prove her point (somehow), she masturbates. He is unperturbed, truly in his own world, crying. Is he somehow mourning for the loss of his wife? Now he's back with his wife's mother. They seem to be still working through her daughter's death. He's back in the apartment when she comes back in, calling him "Monster". He's on the floor, and demands butter. She brings it, but is on the way back out. His plans for the butter are not for breakfast, but for buggering lubricant. He rapes her. Brando seems to be extending or reliving his role as Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now. In the next scene, her filmmaker boyfriend proposes to her and it's unclear what her answer is. Quick switch to the next scene, where she's dressing up in her father's old military uniforms while her mother packs up other things. Next she's back making the film, getting fitted for a bridal gown and discussing "pop marriage" with her fiancé. She runs back to Paul, telling him that she tried to leave him, but that she could not. So he carries her upstairs, where he gets crazier and more controlling and mean. He's off the rails, but she can't leave him. She tries, but fails and can't seem to get away from him without his permission, which he refuses to give. Paul has quite an anal fixation, There's the butter-rape scene, He mentions hemorrhoids a few times, there's the scene with the dead rat where he says he'll save the rat's asshole for her to eat with mayonnaise, and then he starts talking morosely later about how everyone's alone, about how you have to "crawl up into the asshole of death" to discover life's meaning. She keeps telling him that she's found love without doing that, then tells Paul that she's talking about him. He responds with brutality, wanting to push her away. His brutality is expressed, once again, in line with his anal fixation, this time his own. While she obliges his demand, he drivels on about future bestial acts he'll make her perform, trying to drive her away? Or satisfying his own vicious, twisted carnal desire? She hangs on for the whole twisted ride. He can't drive her away because she knows what he's trying to do. He is relentless, though. Next he visits his wife's body and he expounds away again, deliriously. She cheated on him with everyone she could, including most of the guests in their hotel. The meanness that he exercises against Jeanne is probably revenge against all women for the transgressions of his "lying cunt" of a wife. Brando does play this broken, damaged person quite well. Paul meets Jeanne again and they spend the day getting crazy drunk in a large hall hosting a tango contest. When they're good and liquored up, after more abuse from him, they take to the floor and make an embarrassing hot mess of everything, getting thrown off the floor by the judges. She pulls herself together enough to tell him they're finished. She masturbates him in the dark corner of the hall while she protests that it's finished. She runs away. He gives drunken chase, screaming for the "bimbo" to stop. He's not going to let her go. She ends up at her mother's apartment; he follows. She grabs her father's service revolver and fatally shoots him. He staggers to the terrace, takes one last look at Paris and dies, curled up in a ball. There's a lot of nice camera-work with mirrors and odd angles that give a good idea of the disjointed state of his mind. Maria Schneider as Jeanne is fantastic. Solaris (1972) -- "8/10" Tarkovsky's masterpiece does so much with so little. There's a long segment -- about ten minutes -- during which Burton travels wordlessly by car into a major city, along arterials. The sound design, the music and the photography all make it seem like he's taking a rocket-ship ride instead. It feels so...otherworldly, even though the journey is prosaic and well-known to anyone who's driven into a city from its outskirts. Similarly, with scenes of nature, where he films them so that it's at first difficult to discern what we're actually looking at, but then the scene resolves itself to a branch hovering over lilypads on water. Again, Tarkovsky makes it seem like he's filming another world. He switches between black and white and color, between sound design that picks up every cricket, to one where the crackling of a fire is utterly missing. Most of the film's background is conveyed in long soliloquies. The story is of a planet named Solaris, which has what seems to be a sentient world organism either living in the ocean or that is the ocean. We accompany Kelvin on his journey to Solaris, where he rendezvouses with the space station orbiting the planet. He finds the station nearly deserted and at least partly destroyed. He finds doctor Snaut in a distracted, agitated state. He finds out that Sartorious is missing and Gibarious is dead. Snaut acts strange and warns Kelvin that he should be careful of what he thinks he sees. Kelvin thinks he sees another person in Snaut's makeshift hammock right before Snaut shoos him away, begging him to come back later. Kelvin finds Gibarian's quarters, where everything is in disarray. Strange drawings and readouts hang everywhere. He plays a message that Gibarian left for him, trying to explain what happened to him. But he's very mysterious. He says that he hopes what happened to him won't happen to Kelvin but that he can at least hope to prepare him for it. What is it? He names it a monster. He leaves with the tape and wanders through the elaborately rendered and dilapidated station. We see Snaut peering through a partition at him. Kelvin seeks out Sartorious, who agrees to talk to him, but won't let him into his rooms. Sartorious keeps the door from being broken down, then catches a small man who tries to escape. He ends the conversation and retreats to his room, little man in tow. Kelvin looks out at the ocean of Solaris. A scantily clad woman walks past behind him, along the curve of the station. He follows her into a freezer, where she could never survive, but where he finds Gibarian's body. She is gone. Back with Snaut, we see a disorderly array of instruments, drawings and snippets of data decorating his quarters as well. They argue about the woman, objects move and fall in Snaut's quarters, Snaut declares tht Kelvin doesn't understand anything at all. Snaut likely has no idea whether Kelvin actually exists, although Kelvin, our narrator, is utterly convinced that he does. He watches the end of Gibarian's message, where he sees a young girl flit through the picture a few times -- a girl who could not possibly be on the station. The film switches between color -- the woman's dress is blue -- and a nearly saturation-free black and white. Kelvin lies down and dreams. Tarkovsky has a way of making long periods of nothing very suspenseful, even more than Kubrick could. He wakes to find a young woman sitting in his cabin. She approaches and lies down next to him, greeting him with a kiss. He looks exhausted and sad, questioning her about how she came to be there. He seems to know her; he calls her Hari. She finds a photograph of herself, spies herself in a mirror and asks him who she is. She thinks she has amnesia. She doesn't want to let him out of her sight, as if her existence depends on close contact. She seems to know Snaut, though that should be impossible. When he tries to help her undress for an EVA, he discovers that the closure on her dress won't open, as if it had been created around her, but non-functional, rather than put on by her. We next see Kelvin in the EVA silo, where he asks her to get in, then shuts the door behind her and ships her off-station. We hear her screaming in protest. He is trapped inside the silo and suffers burns. He survives with minor burns but she is gone. Back in his rooms, he is visited by Snaut, who now tells him more of what he knows, that the planet seems to be manifesting islands of their human consciousness, that Hari will return, despite Kelvin having sent her off in a rocket. Kelvin moves out of shot to get out of his singed clothes and we see Hari's afghan still draped over his chair. He sleeps. He wakes in the night to another incarnation of Hari. This one is better -- she knows how to take off her own dress. She has another shawl. He sees them both draped over the chair now. She paces the room, as if unsure how to proceed. In the morning, Kelvin leaves to get rid of her duplicate clothes but she tears through the metal doorway, unable to stand being out of his sight. She does grievous damage and seems to be dead, although her wounds are healing miraculously quickly. She is terrified at the sight of her own blood -- because she doesn't know that she's an incarnation of his imagination made real by an alien intelligence. She thinks she's the real Hari. Together, they watch what look like clips of a home movie of his life (?). The film ends on Hari, standing on planet Earth. He is trying to show her what she is, to see if she will come to the conclusion herself. She remembers bits and pieces. She lies to herself, not knowing she's a being constructed of neutrinos rather than cells. Snaut arrives again, always wrapping his hand -- presumably from having beaten his apparitions to death. They plan an encephalographic attack on the planetary entity. Kelvin goes further off the deep end, getting closer and closer to this copy of his estranged wife. Hari finally discovers that she's not real, but wonders how to go on from there. She asks about how the "other her" died. Hari, it turns out, had poisoned herself. Kelvin is now more in love with the copy than he was with the original. Next, we see Kelvin, Hari and Sartorious waiting for Snaut in a very fancy office, complete with candlesticks (it's hard to believe that it's on a space station). Snaut shows up in a torn three-piece suit. Kelvin is also in a suit. They cite Don Quixote on the beauty of sleep. They drink what looks like wine from fine crystal. There are stuffed birds on the shelves on the walls. Who took all that stuff into space? They discuss what it is to be human. Hari says that she is becoming human, perhaps a better person than they, who are so dismissive of her. As if to bely this, though, she then sobs when she discovers that she doesn't know how to drink from a glass of water. And still she has no shoes. After accompanying a drunken Snaut for a while, Kelvin returns to the study, where Hari's brooding, smoking a cigarette. Hari acts quite well, giving an impression of otherworldliness in her unblinking stares. She is meditating on a painting on the wall. He startles her out of her reverie. Snaut said that there would be 30 seconds of weightlessness. No-one thought to make sure the lit candelabra should be put out. The glass of orange juice doesn't float, though. The ocean of Solaris roils on. The silence is interrupted by a shot, then a close-up of a container of what looks like liquid Oxygen spinning on the floor, next to a frozen and quite dead-looking Hari. Kelvin hunkers over her corpse She's killed herself out of despair. But she will return. Snaut advises him, "don't turn a scientific problem into a love story." Kelvin slips deeper into delirium. Sleep brings no respite, no recovery. We see how Hari appears only once he wakes. He wanders the increasingly messy station in his underwear -- crimson instruments partially torn from the curved walls -- meeting Snaut and babbling about life and its worth in a Shakespearian soliloquy. As in Stalker, Tarkovsky has a knack for making an act as simple as wandering down a relatively banal hallway seem portentous. He uses music, stark and abrupt silences, mood, angles, mirrors, switch between color and black and white, odd juxtapositions -- seriously where did they get cut flowers on a space station? -- and priming through backstory to build so much out of nothing. Kelvin lies in delirium, surrounded by Hari, and now his mother, his family dog, multiple copies of Hari, fruits, flowers. Objects move on their own. Madness. Kelvin wakes as from a fever dream to a room with only Snaut in it. He tells him that there is no Hari anymore. They have successfully transmitted Kelvin's electroencephalogram to the creature below and the apparitions have stopped. The camera, however, lingers on relics of their visits, like Hari's afghan or his mother's washing ewer. Snaut tells him he should go back to Earth and when next we see him, he's at the homestead. He turns from the lake to see his old family dog, running to him, then approaches the window to see his father. Kelvin's face twists in agony, as he sees that his father is inundated by a leak in the roof that he doesn't notice...and Kelvin knows he's not back on Earth, but on one of the islands that have cropped up on Solaris. He knows he is trapped there, but accepts it and embraces his father. As with Stalker, this is a story of a first contact that doesn't follow a formula, that doesn't imagine any way that a truly alien culture could find anything in common with us. Recommended. Fail-Safe (1964) -- "8/10" This is a Sidney Lumet film about the fail-safe system that was in place during the cold war. It's very interesting, but feels more like a documentary about how the system works: the checks, the balances, the unlikelihood of anyone really knowing what's going on or being in control. The morality or immorality of it all. How jocular they are about the inconsistencies, about the "UFOs" which might cause them to start a war, to accidentally end life on Earth as we know it. They talk about overstocking weapons, about the inhumanity of thermonuclear war. The film follows a green alert during a fail-safe, which ends up being an off-course commercial flight with engine trouble. The whole room stands down after coming close to red alert. Next, there is a piece of faulty equipment to replace and the flights that are holding a pattern over the fail-safe points receive a "go" signal, but they can't believe it. They try to verify and get what seems like verification of the day's sequence code. They are a go. The command center thinks they've dodged one of the many bullets they dodge each week, as they separate the signal from the noise. But then they all notice that one of the bombers is headed for Moscow, according to the order it thinks it's gotten. They're now in the position of not being able to call back their bombers because they can't establish contact. Even if they do establish contact, any orders will be ignored, according to protocol. So the only alternatives are to either allow the bombers to hit Moscow or to use US jets to blow bombers out of the sky. This movie plays out as a sort of what-if scenario about different ways that the fail-safe systems could fail. The cast discusses how machines have gotten too fast to correct, they even temporarily delve into the minds of the Russians, who must be just as confused and reluctant to jump to conclusions as they are (probably more). Walter Matthau -- playing a "political scientist" name Groeteschele -- stands out as one of the most unstable and least reasonable characters, so cock-sure of every one of his prognostications. Dan O'Herlihy's General Black provides a balance with his Colonel Black, resisting Groeteschele's insanity. Henry Fonda plays the president. Regardless of what the fools on the ground decide, Murphy's Law decides to make the chasing jets flame out and crash before they can catch up to the bombers, making the decision of whether to shoot their own planes out of the sky moot. Larry Hagman is -- I kid you not -- a Russian translator. This is so unbelievable to everyone that even the president pedantically explains to him that idioms differ by language. They contact the Soviet Union to assure them that, though Moscow might be obliterated, this act should not be interpreted as an act of war. The premier is not impressed, asking why the Americans insist on sending armed planes to Soviet airspace. The call ends with no promises on either side. The Soviets will try to shoot the bombers down, but will also scramble their full defenses. The planes enter Soviet airspace. The large screen in the command center looks kind of like a primitive video game. It's unclear who the guys in the command center are cheering for -- the Soviets or the Americans. There are those who think that this attack will actually win the cold war (e.g. Matthau's Groeteschele). The president wants to resolve the situation without death, the unelected generals and technocrats (e.g. Groeteschele) on both sides want the war, they think that they can win. They manage to get the Soviets to admit that they jammed the communication to the airport. The Soviets believed their own computers, which told them that the attack was real -- so they have the same problem as the U.S. The Soviets lift the jamming, but the group leader does not respond to the president's command to turn around -- because he's been explicitly ordered not to respond to possibly faked voice-tactical commands. The president gets the Soviet premier back on the phone and informs him that he should leave Moscow, that the attack will proceed. When the premier gets pissed, the president blames the lack of being able to shoot the planes down on the Soviets (wildly unfair, but realistic, I suppose). What's interesting is that, when such movies are made, they can be very good -- and this one is quite good -- but there is an important component. It's always that the U.S. bombers are out of control and the Soviet Union is in danger of being bombed, not the other way around. That is, the situation must be resolved but, if it's not, then it's Moscow that goes up in a giant fireball, not Washington. Matthau's Groeteschele keeps pushing hard with the standard American argument of "kill or be killed". The arguments he makes have been carried forward 100% unchanged from 50 years ago. Gen. Stark: You're talking about a different kind of war. Prof. Groeteschele: Exactly. This time, *we* can finish what *we* start. And if we act now, right now, our casualties will be minimal. Brigadier General Warren A. Black: You know what you're saying? Prof. Groeteschele: Do you believe that Communism is not our mortal enemy? Brigadier General Warren A. Black: You're justifying murder. Prof. Groeteschele: Yes, to keep from being murdered. Brigadier General Warren A. Black: In the name of what? To preserve what? Even if we do survive, what are we? Better than what we say they are? What gives us the right to live, then? What makes us worth surviving, Groeteschele? That we are ruthless enough to strike first? Prof. Groeteschele: Yes! Those who can survive are the only ones worth surviving. Brigadier General Warren A. Black: Fighting for your life isn't the same as murder. Prof. Groeteschele: Where do you draw the line once you know what the enemy is? How long would the Nazis have kept it up, General, if every Jew they came after had met them with a gun in his hand? But I learned from them, General Black. Oh, I learned. Brigadier General Warren A. Black: You learned too well, Professor. You learned so well that now there's no difference between you and what you want to kill. Prof. Groeteschele also makes another modern prognosis. In discussing what will have to be done when New York is bombed, he lets slip what the really important casualty is. "Prof. Groeteschele:[...] our immediate problem will be the joint one of fire control and excavation. Excavation not of the dead, the effort would be wasted there. But even though there are no irreplaceable government documents in the city, many of our largest corporations keep their records there. It will be necessary to... rescue as many of those records as we can. Our economy depends on this. (Emphasis added.)" The president orders all of his people to aid the Soviets in any way possible. Colonel Cascio's hatred of the Soviets makes him incapable of answering, because that will betray to the Soviets how they can shoot any American plane out of the sky. His backup is called -- a very young Dom Deluise! -- who answers and gives away the ballgame to the dirty commies. Cascio, though, steps up the paranoia an extra ten levels, suspecting the Soviets of having engineered the whole fail-safe mistake in order to get the information about the American planes. Cascio starts exhorting the general to initiate a first strike -- then takes over forcefully. He is pulled down and arrested. The Soviets hear everything and sympathize that they also have such elements and situations to handle. The president of the US doesn't know what else to do, so he promises the Soviet premier that he will drop the same bombs on New York's Empire State Building if Moscow is hit. So the U.S. fucked up several times and now is in the position of helping the Soviets down U.S. planes while promising to execute a counterattack on its own city in order to prove that the attack on Moscow was not intentional. To prevent an even greater counterattack by the Soviets, they must sacrifice New York. The premier and the president talk about whose fault it was. The Soviet premier think it was machines; the president says it was men that let machines get out of control. The phone squeals; Moscow is hit. President Fonda orders the attack on New York. The movie is extremely open about Dresden, Tokyo, Hamburg, etc. how those were direct attacks on civilians. This movie reminded me a bit of Dr. Strangelove. The Fisher King (1991) -- "8/10" This Terry Gilliam movie starts off with Jeff Bridges's radio DJ Jack Lukas dragging one person after another through the mud. He ends with a tirade against yuppies, delivered to a lonely introvert who called to ask for help on how to meet a young yuppie woman at an upscale restaurant. Because of Jack's tirade, he instead goes there with a gun and takes out seven people. Three years later, Jack is no longer working in radio, but is now "working" at a video rental shop, for Anne, played by Mercedes Ruehl. Jack decides to end it all, with a cement block on each ankle, shockingly drunk, off a pier. He is rescued by Perry, played by Robin Williams. Perry used to be someone else, but his wife was killed 3 years ago at an upscale restaurant. Jack tries for absolution, but he thinks he can find it by giving Perry money. Instead, he will have to help Perry in his quest -- to find the holy grail. Robin Williams is amazing in this role. He is Quixote. He follows his Dulcinea around, knowing just as much about her as Quixote did about Dulcinea. Terry Gilliam's lovely stamp is all over this film. I'd forgotten how nicely the fantasy/mental-illness elements were integrated into the real world. The effects were really decent for the pre-CGI era. And then, just when I thought that Robin Williams was the most over-the-top guy in the movie, in strides Michael Jeter, tiny but powerful. A lovely scene when he's lying comfortably in Jeff Bridges's arms in the insane asylum. Tom Waits plays a disabled veteran, uncredited but unmistakable. And so many bits of the film appear in subsequent movies: the waltzing flash mob in Grand Central Station is more poignant than the scene in Friends with Benefits and was made 25 years sooner. As well, when Jack and Perry are in the park, Perry talks about cloud-bursting, a technique I thought I'd heard of for the first time in Men Who Stare at Goats (also with Jeff Bridges, by the way). Jack tries to help Perry by helping him meet the girl that he's interested in. This works out grand, and a self-satisfied Jack goes back to work, distancing himself from Anne, who'd devoted years of her life to his useless self. That same night, though, Perry runs through the streets in a fugue, being chased by his demons, afraid to find happiness when his wife is dead. Two street punks happen upon him and beat him into a coma, a coma that is at least partially self-induced. Jack realizes that he still hasn't saved Perry, that he's not out of the woods and that he owes his friend more. Lydia visits and hasn't given up on him. Jack, on the other hand, has gotten his old job back, a new apartment and a new girlfriend. But he feels empty. And he goes to visit Perry to yell at him that he's not going to get the grail for him. But he will, won't he? When next we see Jack, he's dolled up as a medieval pillager and is assailing the "castle" in New York that belongs to the billionaire who has the grail. The grail turns out to be a trophy given to a child for helping in a Christmas pageant and the billionaire had chosen that night to try to kill himself with pills. Jack saves him by deliberately triggering his house alarm before spiriting the cup off to Perry and saving him as well, so that they can all live happily ever after. Salvador (1986) -- "8/10" This is a movie about the political struggle in 1980. James Woods is Richard Boyle and his sometime-partner/full-time drug dealer is Doctor Rock, played by James Belushi. The film follows Boyle and Rock through El Salvador as the country drowns in violence, filled with military strongmen and opportunists. We see Boyle documenting mountains of bodies as a photojournalist, scrounging for work and cash. We see a priest denounce the terrorist military regime, followed nearly immediately by his assassination. Mayhem ensues. The reporters spend a lot of time shit-faced drunk while, all around them, the country falls apart, young boys/men are killed by shock troops, taking advantage of cheap booze and cheap whores. All the while, doctors from aid organizations try to keep things together. Boyle is ambushed outside of his last bar of the evening by the strongman Max Casanova's (Tony Plana) number-one henchman (Juan Fernández) and is almost killed but is saved by another photojournalist John Cassady, who starts taking pictures of the whole thing. His doctor friend isn't so lucky: she is ambushed on the way to the airport with her colleagues. They are torn from their van, raped, shot in the face and thrown into a shallow group grave. This based on a true story, by the way. The case was mentioned and partially covered as one of the examples of media distortion in Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent. Boyle talks to members of the American ambassador's office, all of whom are either opportunists or utter dimwits who completely believe the U.S. communist line, completely believe that Cuban tanks will be on the border of Texas within the year. The U.S. never changes: for El Salvador think Afghanistan -- the U.S. loves to destroy its playgrounds. Oliver Stone's direction shines through in the scenes with the American apparatchiks, where Boyle holds forth on forbidden history (about 85 minutes in). Boyle: When will you believe what your eyes see and not what military intelligence tells you to think? Colonel:. We got AWACs, infrareds, statements from a defecting FRAN commandant and enough military intel to prove 10,000 percent that this ain't no civil war, but Commie aggression. Boyle: You've been lying about that from the beginning. You've not presented one shred of proof to the American public that this is anything other than a legitimate peasant revolution. So please don't tell me about the sanctity of military intelligence. Not after Chile and Vietnam. I was there, remember? [...] You've been lying about the advisers here. You've been lying about the trainers on TTY. [...] You've been lying about switching humanitarian assistance money to Salvadoran military coffers. And you've been lying that this war can be won militarily, it can't. [...] Boyle: You were the ones who trained Major Max at the police academy in Washington. You were the ones who trained Jose Medrano and Rene Chacon. Trained them to torture and kill, then sent them here. What did Chacon give us? He gave us the Mano Blanco. What are the death squads, but the brainchild of the CIA? You'll run with them because they're anti-Moscow. You let them close the universities, wipe out the best minds. You let them kill whoever they want, you let them wipe out the Catholic Church. You let them do it all because they aren't Commies. And that, colonel, is bullshit. Boyle: All I know is that some campesino who can't read or write or feed his family, has to watch his kid die of malnutrition. Do you think he gives a shit about Marxism or capitalism? Boyle: You pour $120 million in here and turn it into a military zone. So you can have chopper parades in the sky? You're only bringing misery to these people. Shortly after this conversation, we are shown another journalist interviewing American soldiers putting their boots on the ground in El Salvador -- and she is reminded by their commanding officer that they are strictly "trainers...in an advisory capacity." Of course they are. Just like the U.S. troops that are still in Iraq and who magically don't count toward the "troops" in-country. The next scene is in a full-out battle. The combat photographers -- Boyle and John Cassady -- wave a white flag and cross over to the side of the state troops. They are utterly insane in their desire to get photos, running into the maw of firing troops and onrushing horses. At the tail end of one battle won by the campesinos, said campesinos start mopping up the state troops by executing them. Boyle tries to intervene, yelling "you've become just like them!" And then the U.S.-provided tanks and munitions arrive, as well as air support. The campesinos are routed and the military dictatorship resumes its iron grip. Go Joe! John jumps out in front of an incoming plane to get "the shot" and is instead fatally wounded. Boyle performs some pretty amazing field surgery to clear John's lungs, but it's not enough. Boyle had been shot as well, and heads back to a field hospital to get patched up. Soon after, he tries to escape El Salvador with a fake exit visa and is caught at the border with his wife/girlfriend and child. The border guards steal his boots and Cassady's film rolls fall out. They expose all the film and he's livid, heedless of his own life. They try to assassinate him, but the gun misfires. He is saved by the ambassador's phone call and we then see him partying with the guys who were going to kill him, all the while insulting them in English, which they don't understand. Next, he's crossing the border to the U.S:, having escaped El Salvador with Maria and the kids. The bus is stopped by U.S. immigration and they take her away from him, after his whole struggle. "You have no idea what it's like in El Salvador!" Nor do they care. Fuck those aliens. Send 'em back. Filthy freeloaders. Just because they fucked up their own country doesn't mean they get to come to the shiny U.S. Does anything ever get better? Based on a true story, based on real people. At the end of the film, it's mentioned that Boyle is still searching for Maria and his children. Recommended. Oliver Stone made this movie in the same year that he made Platoon. Saw it English and Spanish (without subtitles). ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3241 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3241 Sun, 17 Apr 2016 11:33:05 +0200 -- "6/10" 2. "The Expanse (2015)" <#Expanse> -- "8/10" 3. "Spectre (2015)" <#Spectre> -- "7/10" 4. "Spy (2015)" <#Spy> -- "8/10" 5. "Mr. Nobody (2009)" <#Mr> -- "7/10" 6. "The Monuments Men (2014)" <#Monuments> -- "6/10" 7. "Trevor Noah (2011)" <#Trevor> -- "5/10" 8. "The Dark Crystal (1982)" <#Dark> -- "5/10" 9. "The Warriors (1979)" <#Warriors> -- "5/10" 10. "Waltz with Bashir (2008)" <#Waltz> -- "9/10" 11. "Jonah Hex (2010)" <#Jonah> -- "6/10" 12. "Choke (2008)" <#Choke> -- "7/10" 13. "Vertigo (1958)" <#Vertigo> -- "7/10" 14. "Richard Pryor: Live In Concert (1979)" <#Richard> -- "8/10" 15. "Time Bandits (1981)" <#Bandits> -- "7/10" These are my notes to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. I've recently transferred my reviews to IMDb and made "the list" of over 900 ratings publicly available. I've included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other -- I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood. YMMV. Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief (2015) -- "6/10" This is a documentary about Scientology, Dianetics, L. Ron Hubbard, John Travolta, Tom Cruise and David Miscavitch. It was decent and I learned a bit more about the life and times of L. Ron and his most avid protegé Miscavitch. The details are pretty much well-known -- that the Church of Scientology is a gigantic tax-dodge that got out of control when people started actually believing it. It was interesting enough, though documentarian Alex Gibney just cannot help putting so much of himself into it. The Expanse (2015) -- "8/10" Tom Jane plays Miller, a cop/corporate enforcer on Ceres station, way out in the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter. This series is based on the books of the same name. I read an excerpt of the first volume and the show follows the plot quite closely. Humanity is split into three factions: Earthmen, Martians and Belters. The Belters are perennially used and abused by the more established and powerful Earthlings and Martians. The Martians, in particular, have a powerful space Navy that patrols all of known space and is well-feared by all. On Earth, the political machinations are at the forefront, with the long tendrils of control still very much in place, though not as stable as they once were. There are also factions among Earthlings, with the Mormons building a gigantic spaceship with which they plan to travel to Alpha Centauri in order to escape the birth-control restrictions imposed on Earth. The show follows Jim Holden, Earthborn but long-time Belter, as he and several friends and companions become deeper and deeper embroiled in plots run by other unknown factions. Among the Belters are also rebel forces that are pushing for control, not always in the most judicial or fair manner. In another thread, we also follow Julie Mao, a rich, rich Earthgirl who's also made herself a Belter as she stumbles upon some strange bio-robotic tech that seems like a bio--super-weapon. She apparently dies of its infection, but that feels like it won't last. I smell a resurrection in the next season. Everyone is on the run in spaceships and on space station and asteroids, so that's pretty cool and quite well-filmed. Each character has hidden facets to their backstory that are slowly revealed. Thomas Jane is particularly good as Miller. Spectre (2015) -- "7/10" I might actually like this movie the best of all of Daniel Craig's outings as James Bond. The style of the film is calmer and harks back to the old days. Other than the high-tech information-gathering network at the heart of the plot, it's often difficult to tell in which decade the film is taking place. The story isn't particularly inspiring or different than the other half-dozen Bond films. This one tells of the beginnings of Spectre, the organization that will have haunted Bond in the other already-made films that are to come chronologically after this more modern one. Makes sense, right? Christoph Waltz is Blofeld, playing him pretty much like every other of his characters of late, from Landa (Inglourious Basterds) to Schultz (Django Unchained). Ralph Fiennes returns as M, Monica Bellucci is the hot one who's too old and well-known to be a Bond girl so they got Léa Seydoux as well and Ben Whishaw returns as a very young Q. Blofeld is arrested rather than killed by Bond (how the helicopter crash didn't affect him is a mystery), leaving everything open for a sequel. Hooray. An extra star for aesthetics and retro look. Spy (2015) -- "8/10" Melissa McCarthy plays a stay-at-the-HQ handler for super-spy Jude Law. When he's killed in action, she's put into the field to chase after his killer, played by Rose Byrne. Jason Statham plays another super-spy, who's even more blundering than Law, but absolutely hilarious in his overarching confidence. McCarthy does very well in the field, kicking all kinds of ass and putting her wide field of knowledge to use. Byrne is delightfully bitchy and hilarious. McCarthy is proving to be a really good lead in comedies. Recommended. Mr. Nobody (2009) -- "7/10" Jared Leto is Nemo Nobody, a man whose life we follow from beginning to end, but not in that order and not really in the classic temporal direction. The film follows various temporal branches, playing with ideas of entropy, quantum wave forms and collapse and the power of choices, the Big Crunch, technology that eliminates mortality. Diana Kruger is quite good, the other players are OK. A bit long, but interesting at points, though a bit trite if you're more familiar with the concepts. It was nicely filmed, reminding me a bit of Malick's meandering style, but the amount of repetition needed to get across the significance of certain plot points and the branching/fanning out of possibility, became a bit, well, repetitive. The Monuments Men (2014) -- "6/10" A good cast tries to carry an essentially boring script filmed in an utterly pedestrian manner. George Clooney, Matt Damon, Bill Murray, Cate Blanchett, John Goodman, Jean Dujardin and Bob Balaban all do adequate work, but I couldn't really get into it. Blanchett made more out of the role than expected. The story follows a group of older men at the end of WWII, looking for stolen works of art and returning them to their original owners, where possible. They are also incredibly Russophobic, even though it's hard to imagine why, at that time. Not recommended. Trevor Noah (2011) -- "5/10" This was a documentary about Trevor Noah's career leading up to his first one-man show in South Africa, called Daywalker. At least 2/3 of it was interviews with him and his family members, a lot of the rest was him warming up various parts of his act for the big show. He has some good bits, but they were repeated too much to maintain interest. The Dark Crystal (1982) -- "5/10" This is a movie by Jim Henson featuring only muppets and puppets. It tells of two dwindling clans of ancient creatures (the good ones, the Mystics, and the bad ones, Skeksis) and a world filled with terrified younger creatures, Gelflings. Why are they terrified? Because the Skeksis use them for energy in a rejuvenation process. The ancient ones are evenly divided and the various members seem linked. When one dies, another on the other side winks out of existence as well. The story follows the young hero through a magical, very Navi-like world as he journeys to the dark crystal, which will totally fix everything. The Mystics accompany him and there is a huge ritual during which all of the Skeksis and the Mystics are subsumed and the world is left to the Gelflings. The end. The Warriors (1979) -- "5/10" This is a movie about gangs in New York, all hunting for the Warriors, who are fleeing back to Coney Island from the Bronx. For a movie about New York, filmed in New York, they have an absolutely cavalier attitude to geography. The Warriors get on the D train, which changes into the B train in the next scene. They apparently ride this all the way to the Bronx, where they attend the big gang meeting. A rival gang shoots Cyrus, the messiah who wanted to get all the gangs together, then blames it on the Warriors, which starts the manhunt. The main gang running the manhunts is the Gramercy Reefers, apparently located in the Bronx. The Warriors catch the J train from the Bronx, which magically turns into the M train and then breaks down somewhere above 96th street. At the 96th-street station, they try to catch the L on the way to Union Square Station. Was it really that hard to get the trains right? Later, we see two of them walking in a subway tunnel, and they're passed by a train with a white airplane on a blue field. No idea where that train would be going. The radio DJ announces their progress through the city. The portrayal of the city and the gangs is as a bunch of violent animals, misogynistic and brutal. Is that more or less accurate than the geography? Waltz with Bashir (2008) -- "9/10" This is an Israeli animated film about the massacres at Shatila and Sabra in Lebanon during the 1982 invasion. It is told through the eyes of a narrator who was there, but after more than two decades, can no longer remember anything about the events. He looks up old friends and comrades and slowly starts to remember, to piece together his own memories of the day of the massacre. He eloquently tells and shows how callous soldiers are -- of any country -- mostly concerned with their own boredom, their own entertainment and, more than anything else, their own survival. There are several scenes where the soldiers spray bullets everywhere because they have no idea where the next attack will come from, so they preemptively make sure that their own bullets strike first. Jonah Hex (2010) -- "6/10" A really good cast in a small movie with more potential than execution. Based on the comic books, Jonah Hex follows the eponymous character on his vengeance/redemption ride in the American West after the end of the Civil War. We see his origin story -- his CSA general slaughters his family before his very eyes as revenge for having shot his son. For a 70-minute movie based on a Western-style comic book, the cast is strictly A-list: John Malkovich, Josh Brolin, Will Arnett, Michael Fassbender and Megan Fox all do their part. You might also recognize Tom Wopat (Luke Duke from Dukes of Hazzard) and Wes Bentley (Seneca Crane from The Hunger Games). Choke (2008) -- "7/10" Sam Rockwell is Victor Mancini, a clever, smart-mouthed nymphomaniac and part-time con man. He works at colonial village with his best friend, who is also a sex addict. The main story arc is that Victor wants to find out where he comes from, and the only potential source is his mother, played by Anjelica Huston, who is descending into an ever-deepening drug-addled dementia and has been committed. He talks to her nearly every day, but she recognizes him not as her son, but as various other acquaintances. Finally, he takes in his friend Denny and introduces him as Victor and his mother seems to buy it, but won't talk to "Victor" in front of the real Victor. Meanwhile, Victor starts an initially non-sexual relationship with his Mom's doctor -- surprisingly, because he's banged nearly everyone else at the hospital already -- but she turns it sexual, in the hospital chapel, but ostensibly only to get his genetic material for a potentially life-saving treatment that she wants to try out on his mother with genetically compatible stem cells. Not kidding. Some of the scenes at the colonial village are quite funny, such as when Victor's friend hands him a newspaper and he hurries to hide it, as if it were samizdat. Denny falls in love with Cherry Daiquiri, a stripper played by Gillian Jacobs. Did I mention that the film is named Choke because Victor places food down his throat in restaurants in order to get someone to save him and feel obligated to send him money -- in order to relive the experience of being a hero? Anyway, Denny finds out about Victor's Mom's diary, which Victor has had all along, but which is in Italian. Luckily Doctor Marshall (Kelly McDonald) can translate it -- she's amazing! -- and she discovers that Victor's Mom is either more delusional than she thought -- or much less. It turns out that Ida Mancini, along with four other women, stole Jesus's foreskin from the Vatican. They used the genetic material to impregnate themselves, but Victor was the only result. So now the doctor is convinced that Victor is a half-clone of Jesus. The other inmates start to believe it, and the evidence for it mounts. Victor fights against it. He remembers back when he discovered that his mother had kidnapped him -- he saw his own face on the side of a milk carton -- and we see him choke himself in a restaurant for the first time. He remembers more about his life, trying to find parallels to Jesus's life. He's trying to figure out why anyone would love an asshole like him and wonders why he seems to be becoming a nicer person. And then it all comes tumbling down as, just before his mother dies (by choking on pudding he was feeding her, ironically enough), she tells him that she stole him from a stroller (although how would a picture of his 12-year--old self have gotten on a milk carton?), and that the story of Jesus is incoherent. Her doctor shows up and tries to save her, but then he discovers that she's a patient in the mental ward as well. Still and all, she helps him get through his issues. They meet again, on a plane. Vertigo (1958) -- "7/10" This is the original Hitchcock masterpiece, starring Jimmy Stewart, Barbara Bel Geddes and Kim Novak. Stewart is a police detective on medical leave to deal with his late-onset acrophobia, developed as a result of almost falling off of a roof and then watching as a fellow officer plummets to his death six stories below when he tries to help Stewart. The sets are lavish -- Geddes's design studio is rich with detail, Stewart's friend's office is crammed with gorgeous wooden furniture. The shots are classic Hitchcock, selected to show distance and coolness on Stewart's part. The shots stay long as Stewart embarks on the assignment given to him by his client: follow the client's wife to find out if she's truly been possessed by another spirit. Here we're treated to a bunch of cool, 50's-style fake-driving scenes, along with a lot of lush footage of 1950s LA. They end up at a lovely, large museum building, where Novak is rapt, staring at a painting of "Carlotta", the same name as was on the tombstone in front of which she stood earlier that afternoon. Creepy, right? Well, the music helps. So far, it's a bit of an architectural tour of LA, Stewart continues what appears to be a long tradition of cops -- or former cops -- in movies lying their faces off in order to get innocent citizens to divulge information or to allow unwarranted searches. Stewart's initial investigation leads him to the conclusion that his colleague's wife is indeed at least partially possessed by the spirit of a long-dead woman. But there has to be another explanation. The film is truly lovely, with perfect California weather highlighting brand-new, large, classic-style buildings. Novak's Madeleine tries to kill herself -- as her predecessor did -- but Stewart saves her from drowning. She wakes up naked in his bed, looking ridiculously young compared to his middling years. Not that this sort of age difference is limited to the 50s, ammirite? It's a very pretty film, but the dialogue is quite stilted and the story is quite odd, or at least oddly told. Stewart evinces absolutely zero compunction about macking on his friend's wife, who's almost certainly mad. He's also completely oblivious to Midge's interest, preferring instead to busy himself with the nutty Novak. This despite her penchant to muttering vaguely and then disappearing. They continue their dalliance, professing their love for each other. Stewart tries to help Madeleine stop being so crazy, but to no avail. She throws herself off the steeple of a church, killing herself instantly. Stewart's not done yet, though. After he's cleared of all charges of any wrongdoing -- it is the second time he's been around when someone fell off a roof -- he spends a little time at a mental institution, with faithful Midge having her every advance rebuffed. When he gets out, he gets right back on the trail of Carlotta, the lady who possessed Madeleine. Novak is back, this time as a redhead, making Stewart wonder just what the hell is going on. It turns out that there's a prosaic explanation for everything: the husband who hired Stewart to follow his wife was planning to fake a suicide for her, to get her out of the way. Novak was a lookalike for her who made the mistake of falling in love with Stewart while she was supposed to be acting crazy enough to kill herself. Richard Pryor: Live In Concert (1979) -- "8/10" This is Pryor's second one-hour show and he was incredible. The material was really good, his delivery so good. He really was a genius. The voices, the stories, the mugging, the acting, the rawness, the incredible unashamed personal-ness all of it, incredible. Saw it on "YouTube" . Time Bandits (1981) -- "7/10" This is a zany comedy about a troupe of diminutive, insolent time-traveling bandits. It was written and directed by Terry Gilliam, in case that wasn't immediately obvious. The film starts with a bored young boy living with boring parents in boring England. The bandits break into his room late at night and abscond with him, closely pursued by the Supreme Being, who's hot on their trail because they've stolen a map of time holes. The cast is surprisingly good and consists of Gilliam regulars: John Cleese (here as Robin Hood), Michael Palin, Ian Holm (of Bilbo fame, here as Napoleon), Katherine Helmond (also in Brazil but also Who's the Boss?), Sean Connery, Jim Broadbent and Shelley Duvall (Popeye and The Shining). It's typically Gilliam fare, lush and richly detailed. The story requires that the bandits hop from era to era, so Gilliam doesn't need to commit to any one place for very long. The young Kevin is a typically bad child actor. My judgment is supported by the fact that he (almost) never worked as an actor again. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3214 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3214 Sat, 16 Apr 2016 23:32:16 +0200 of over 900 ratings publicly available. I've included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other -- I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood. YMMV. Capitalism: A Love Story (2009) -- "7/10" This is a slow -- some might say well-paced -- and careful introduction to capitalism in the 20th and 21st centuries, as practiced in the U.S. There are few Michael Moore-esque moments, but it's overall quite an even-handed treatment of the history of the topic. There is an emphasis on the more recent decades -- in particular the crash of 2008 and its causes. Definitely an interesting viewing for those unfamiliar with the topic, but perhaps a bit too much time spent on the interviews with those on the bottom, affected by the crisis. I understand the point and heartily approve of humanizing the issue by showing that the "freeloaders" castigated in some parts of government and a good part of the media are just regular people, trying to get by. They might not seem very smart, but neither are most of us. Recommended. Deliverance (1972) -- "6/10" Four guys prepare a canoe trip down the Cahulawassee River that's about to be dammed up for good. Bobby (Ned Beatty) is probably the most overtly classist of the bunch. He's paired up with Drew, who plays guitar and plays a lovely and impromptu duet with a young boy playing a banjo. After they arrange for their cars to be driven to meet them at the bottom of the river, Lewis (Burt Reynolds) and Ed (Jon Voight) lead everyone off to the river. He has trouble finding it though and the locals grin at him "Havin' trouble?" ... "We'll find it." ... "It's only the biggest fuckin' river in the state." They start their journey and soon see the young boy on a bridge, but he doesn't appear to recognize them. He looks slightly mentally handicapped, so it doesn't surprise them that he seems to have forgotten. The four guys shoot the rapids, having the time of their lives. (Environmental message: too bad it's going to be dammed up, right?) As he fishes with his composite bow, Lewis pontificates, "The machines are gonna fail, the system's gonna fail" and he can't wait. [1] Beatty and Voight get out of their boat and are cornered by two other locals. They tie Voight to a tree by his neck with his own belt. Beatty is instructed to strip and they chase him around until he's exhausted (he's not in the best shape) and tell him to "squeal like a pig" before raping him. Voight's next. They untie him and the rapist's companion notes that Voight has "a real pretty mouth". Before they can make good on that innuendo, Lewis (Reynolds) shows up with his compound bow and kills the rapist. Beatty lies catatonic in the leaves. They're all speechless. They break the silence to argue about what to do. After heated discussion, they vote to bury the body and leave the scene of the crime. The whole area is about to be covered with a lake soon (which is why they're there -- to experience the river one last time). They bury the body and continue down the river, but encounter large cascades and all lose their canoes and fall into the river. They figure out that Drew fell into the river first because he was shot. Or they think he was. Lewis is laid up with a gruesome and clearly painful compound fracture of the femur. The wooden canoe was destroyed but they recover the aluminum one. At this point, the score between the locals and the city boys is 1 to 1. Voight climbs the ridge near the river, then falls asleep. He is awakened by a local, who shoots at him before Voight can put an arrow in him. Actually, he does shoot him, but also stabs himself with another arrow. Is that 2 to 1 now? He appears to have killed the wrong guy. It's ok, though, because in the next scene, his self-inflicted wound is also magically gone. They bury that dude in the river, then find their dead friend -- who has no gunshot wound -- and bury him in the river as well. Cue some more rapids and canoing and such. A classic, but not really recommended, unless you need to see it because Archer made you do it. I had an "Archer's Peppermint Patty" cocktail during the showing. [2] Trashed (2012) -- "7/10" This is a documentary about garbage, starring and produced by Jeremy Irons. It starts a bit slowly, but picks up pace. It tells a story that is well stitched-together, starting with a discussion of landfills and the sheer unsustainability of them. From there, we move to incinerators and a discussion of dioxins and other emissions from those plants. There are issues with regulation and filtering, but some of the claims are scientifically dubious (e.g. we can't see them and we can't detect their effects, but we know they're bad). Irons visits the museum of deformed babies in Vietnam but comparing the dioxin emissions from a modern incinerator with the sheer amount of dioxin dumped on Vietnam by the U.S. is a bit specious. From there, we investigate whether it wouldn't be better to just recycle more and visit various cities, discussing their efforts in this regard. San Fransisco features prominently, but they still generate a lot of garbage, recyclable or no. That they can afford to send it to China improves things only slightly. Finally, Irons shows us efforts to just use less stuff and to produce less garbage. The one lady he talks to, though, seems to impossibly claim that she and her three-person family only produced one bag of garbage in the previous year. This also seems highly suspect and more indicative of a very selective perception of which garbage is produced by a person. I suspect that this lady emptied her pockets of garbage in her friends' homes in order to make this happen. Anyway, the message is clear and good and right and seems like the only sustainable one: use less, recycle as much as you can, stop planned obsolescence. But everyone's gotta play, otherwise we all lose. Most likely, we're all going to lose. Quills (2000) -- "8/10" This is very pretty movie about the Marquis de Sade, played wonderfully by Geoffrey Rush. Kate Winslet is also very good as the winsome and coquettish laundry girl Madeleine, who works at the asylum that the Marquis calls home. Joaquin Phoenix plays Abbé Coulmier, who is sympathetic if not at all approving of the Marquis. Michael Caine plays Royer-Collard, a torturer assigned by the Emperor (Napoleon) to make sure that the Marquis's works are no longer published. As is so often the case, Royer-Collard, though holier than everyone and not averse to using a dunking chair for months on end to "cure" patients, takes a girl not yet sixteen as a wife (Amelia Warner as Simone) and visits her nightly, reminding the poor thing of her wifely duties as he takes her brutally from behind. The Marquis soon finds out about this situation through the rumor mill, the effluent of which runs inexorably toward his cell. Being in charge of the theatre troupe at the asylum -- staffed by an enthusiastic bunch of jolly fellows -- the Marquis changes his standard fare to a new piece he's written about Collard, regaling the attending nobility in lush detail of the holy man's nightly visits to his unwilling bride. This is not especially well-accepted since the man (Collard) himself is in attendance. He allows it to continue and the play is only broken up when an inmate, excited by the florid language, attempts to take Madeleine behind the stage. She defends herself with a hot iron, avoiding the rape, but the whole incident is blamed on the Marquis and his incitement of lust with his material. The Marquis is confined to his cell and told he is not allowed to write or publish anymore. His quills and paper are confiscated. He writes his next book with a chicken-bone quill, wine ink and bedsheet paper, duly smuggled out, transcribed and delivered to the publisher by Maddie. More restrictions follow and the Marquis is left only with the clothes on his back. He shatters a window pane and uses blood and glass shards to write his next book on his clothes. After this, the Abbé takes his clothes, leaving him naked in the cell. In the meantime, Collard's wife has discovered Justine, a book of libertine lust by the Marquis, and is aloof and distant to Collard, despite his clearly alluring manner and bedroom savoir faire (that was sarcasm). Caine plays him very well as an incorrigible and sanctimonious hypocrite. She ends up running away with the architect, but only after we've seen just how well she's learned her lessons from the Marquis's books. Collard is super-pissed and needs no more reasons to take shit out his frustration on everyone else. Maddie is first because she's super-saucy and the Abbé has to jump in to save her from a whipping. She thinks they're all dicks and doesn't see the difference between the Abbé and Collard, doesn't see why society prefers the Abbé's cruel God and whatever the fuck Collard is to what the Marquis has to offer, which is at least escapist and fun. At any rate, the Abbé sends Maddie away for her own protection. Maddie exhorts the Marquis to tell her just one more tale before she leaves and he devises a plan to use a gossip chain composed of his fellow mentally unstable inmates -- "Who knows? Maybe they'll improve it" -- to read to her in the laundry room, where she scrawls it down. The Marquis's lovely prose is dumbed down considerably but it works after a fashion, until one of the inmates, a pyromaniac, is too taken with a bit of the story with fire in it, grabs a candle from the adjoining room through the hole whereby he'd whispered his stories and sets his bed afire. This starts an alarm throughout the asylum and many inmates escape into the halls, including the giant who'd attacked Maddie and who (A) hadn't forgotten what he was after and (B) is once again aroused by another of the Marquis's stories. He ends up grabbing Maddie and killing her, much to the chagrin of the Abbé. The Marquis is imprisoned in deep hole in the ground, covered in chains. Collard is firmly in charge and the Abbé firmly in his sway. The Abbé descends into the Marquis's cell with helpers and, though expressing regret, has his tongue cut out of his head, embalmed in a jar and presented to Collard. Collard is happy, the Abbé whines that he'll never sleep again and the Marquis is busy writing his next story in his own feces. The guards call the Abbé back down to the dungeon, where he tries to give the Marquis last rites before killing him. In this, too, the Marquis thwarts him, as he takes the cross into his mouth and swallows it, choking himself to death rather than kissing it. A year later, we see a new Abbé introduced to Collard, who is now fully in charge of the prison -- and making money hand over fist publishing exclusive copies of the Marquis's work and most likely pocketing most of the handsome profits himself. The end. The Marquis kind of won, in that he never gave up or gave in, in that he was the most moral of all the agents in the story, in that his stories are published, in that Collard's entire life is now subsumed to his (the Marquis's) oeuvre and he's too vain to even notice. The former Abbé is imprisoned in the Marquis's former cell and is quite mad. The true winner was Collard's wife, who got away scot-free and presumably lived a much better life than she would've had she stayed in either the convent or with Collard. Hannibal Buress: Comedy Camisado (2016) -- "5/10" Though there were a few bits of good material, most of it was kind of bland. I didn't particularly like his delivery, which seemed to wait a bit too long for a reaction, either because he didn't have enough material or because he thought his material was funnier than everyone else. The crowd wasn't very enthusiastic, despite his buttering them up considerably at the beginning. Not recommended. Fargo: Season 2 (2015) -- "9/10" Even better than the first season, with a lot of strong performances. The strongest, however, is delivered by Patrick Wilson as State Trooper Lou Solverson. Plus, Bruce Campbell as Ronald Reagan. "Babysitter: Camus says knowin' we're gonna die makes life absurd. "Wife: Well I don't know who that is [dismissively], but I'm guessin' he doesn't have a six-year--old girl." She was almost pissed that the girl had even brought it up. It was well-acted, the dismissiveness, it felt true. People don't want to discuss anything but what they already know. They're only happy reiterating to cement that knowledge as truth. Life has meaning. What meaning? To procreate. To make more life. Anything else? No. "Babysitter: He's French. "Wife: Ugh. I don't care if he's from Mars. Nobody with any sense'd say something that foolish." And with that, she's just dismissed any intellectual curiosity the girl might have had. (Though hopefully not extinguished.) "Babysitter: (Looks away, disappointed.) "Wife: We're put on this Earth to do a job. And each of us gets the time we get...to do it. And when this life is over and you stand in front of the Lord, well you try tellin' him it was some Frenchman's joke." You won't have to, though, because he'll already know. Seriously, you look at this world and think that God is on your side and not that of Camus? So sad. I felt bad for the babysitter because there she sat, having watched over wife and her child all night while they slept. All she would have liked in return is a discussion, an engagement of the mind, a chance to take the ideas she'd learned out for a walk, see how they work in real life. And this other woman? Utterly incapable of taking that walk with her. Not only incapable, but unwilling. She already has all of the answers, she has a surety. There is a purpose. Existentialism is just a long word. Why must there be a purpose? Otherwise she'd have to consider that having brought a child into a world without purpose to be a crime against that child, perhaps against the world. NO. The child is a gift to the world. A gift that will be raised by a woman who knows all the answers. The child is not a gift to the woman herself, and the woman wants to feel good about herself for having brought the child into the world, so the world MUST make sense. Putting aside that the world -- her God -- has also given her cancer from which she will likely die. Instead of seeing this as a cruel joke of happenstance -- or, if you like, a capricious and demented God -- she IGNORES it. That's the arrogance of mankind, to at the same time think that there's an omnipotent being and also that he gives a shit about each and every one of us. The sheep assuage their feelings of loneliness and uselessness with these thoughts, in a haze of deliberate ignorance. Every opportunity is taken to plaster more mud on the shield against any information to the contrary. These are the people who are best suited, best trained, to function in the society that we have on offer, though. Don't color outside the lines, don't think outside the box. They are happy. Camus was also happy, but it took him a while to get there. That is, when he realized that nothing meant anything, he also realized that any struggles were meaningless but if he took them up anyway, they were his own, to amuse himself until he could shuffle off this mortal coil. No-one has any obligation to continue -- unless progeny enter into it. But whence this desire to promulgate? This conviction that it's the only goal, the only way to impart meaning? It springs from the same society, the same propaganda, to which the believer is so aptly suited. Those with children are always so righteous about the rightness of their choice, the entitlement to the happiness of their offspring. They need to be, in order to recruit others to their cause in shaping a world in which they can survive. Anyone purporting that life has no real meaning -- or, rather, that meaning comes from within and is individual and malleable -- is the enemy. Such enemies could, at any time, decide that they don't feel like playing anymore, don't feel like putting the sum total of their energy into making the world habitable for even more people, none of whom have any real meaning. In the context of the show, the wife is dying of cancer, and dozens and dozens of people have been killed. The guy who killed most of them got away with it. The lady (Peggy) who triggered the avalanche of death thinks she's the victim. The world is absurd, no? How could an intelligent person come to any other conclusion than that? But no, she thinks that God made the world for man and that her job is to squirt out kids so that they ... can squirt out more kids? Talk about low expectations. No vision. Better to accept absurdity and no meaning. This is not to say: do nothing. Kill yourself. No, no, but find your own purpose ... and it doesn't matter what it is as long it makes you happy, passes the time until you can shuffle off this mortal coil -- or, at the very least, until you can sink into Lethe for a few hours, until you have to start passing time again. Being an existentialist does not mean you have no purpose. I seem to have gotten off the track of my Fargo review, I fear. Meh. As I said at the top, lots of good performances, but Patrick Wilson as Lou Solverson and Zahn McClarnon as Hanzee Dent are a revelation. Highly recommended. Minions (2015) -- "6/10" It has its moments, more toward the end as the characters slowly find their pitch. Kevin, Stuart and Bob are adorable and their language is an adorable mix of vaguely recognizable snippets of European languages (e.g. "Entschuldigung, la Boss!"). The story is of the minions tribe from the very beginning of time to the modern day -- well, the 60s or so. The minions don't appear to age, procreate or die. They just are. Though they seem to enjoy food, they don't seem to need a clear source of food. They are trapped in a barren, icy cave for what seems like hundreds of years. Eventually, three of them set forth in search of a new boss, heading for the Villain-Con, where they want to meet and start working for Scarlett Overkill (voiced by Sandra Bullock). She ends up hiring them, gives them the job of stealing the crown jewels in England, which they do, but they also somehow crown themselves king (well, Bob does). Scarlett is livid, but Bob cheerfully gives her the crown and she schedules her official coronation. A bunch of other stuff happens, the minions burble, Scarlett is defeated and the minions are saved, in the end, by a very young Gru. Behind the Candelabra (2013) -- "7/10" This is a made-for-HBO movie about the life and times of Walter Liberace (played by Michael Douglas). We pick up the story of his life after he's become famous and just as Scott Thorson (played by Matt Damon) enters his life. They are introduced by a mutual friend, played by Scott Bakula. Liberace's long-time manager Seymour is played by Dan Akroyd. Scott quickly moves in with Liberace and they seem quite happy together, with Scott slowly becoming accustomed to life as a live-in boyfriend. After seeing himself in a TV performance, Liberace wants plastic surgery and visits a plastic surgeon who clearly practices on himself, played by Rob Lowe. When Liberace suggests that Scott get surgery as well, so that he can be made to look like a young Liberace, Lowe is on board and suggests additionally that Scott needs to lose a bunch of weight (which he'd gained since moving in). Their relationship continues for years until Liberace meets someone new and has finally grown tired of putting up with Scott's growing drug habit (started by Lowe's diet medication, which was most likely amphetamines). There is a blow-up, a lawsuit but Scott eventually leaves relatively quietly. Years later, he sees Liberace one last time, before he dies of complications caused by AIDS. Self/less (2015) -- "6/10" Ben Kingsley is Damian, an extraordinarily rich developer and builder in New York City. Kind of an asshole. Used to getting what he wants. His wife is long gone, his daughter is estranged, running publicity campaigns against the kind of real-estate development that he does. He has cancer and is not long for this world. He looks into "shedding", which is a fictitious technique whereby the mind is moved into a new body. He visits the facilities and wonders why they seem simultaneously sophisticated and fly-by-night. Soon after, he experiences a close call and feel the reaper's cold breath on his neck. He calls the "shedding" company and they give him instructions to go to a certain café in New Orleans and order a certain drink -- chicory coffee. He is allergic and knows he will suffer a shock. The ambulance picks him up, but it's going to the secret hospital where his consciousness will be transferred to another body, while the world thinks him dead. After the procedure, which looks remarkably like an MRI, he wakes up in Ryan Reynolds's body. He trains, becomes accustomed to the body and learns to stick to his medication because otherwise memories from the body start to melt back in. It takes him a really long time to realize that the body into which he was placed was not grown, but taken. His curiosity -- and newfound niceness -- takes him on a journey to St. Louis, where there's a landmark he recognizes from the other memories. Lo and behold, he finds his body's former family, but the "shedders" are close behind because they really don't want him messing with the program. It's unclear why he's messing with the program -- through some misguided empathy? -- because he continues to take the drugs to suppress the other man's (Mark) memories. He seems to feel sorry for Mark's wife and daughter. Mark only agreed to the procedure because he needed money to pay for his daughter's illness. She has in the meantime been cured -- so that worked -- but she thinks her father drowned. Now he's back, but with a different mind in his body. The wife is played by Natalie Martinez, who's either not a very good actress or not able to make very much with the terribly generic "wife" role. I didn't really like her in Under the Dome either. In his quest for help, Damian/Mark visits his old, best friend, who turns him in because SURPRISE his friend has already used shedding to resurrect his son. Feigned surprises all around. Mark/Damian is on the run again, with wife and child in tow. They leave there, do a bunch of bad-ass stuff with cars, then track down the current location of the clinic, where Damian/Mark kills the head doctor, after having prevented a transfer to his body with a bit of metal in his mouth. (Really?) Damian once again abandons the family, sending them to his personal island. He has a change of heart, lets Mark take over and exhorts him in a post-mortem video to seek out and reunite with his family. The end. Fed Up (2014) -- "6/10" This is a documentary about nutrition in the United States, narrated by Katie Couric. While it has some good information, I found a bunch of the human-interest stuff far too heavy-handed. Watch Food Inc. instead. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] I'm not sure where he expects his composite bow to be manufactured once the system has failed, but that's a step too far for most survivalists. [1] You have no idea how much work went into making this happen. There is neither Crème de Menthe nor Dark Crème de cacao nor Peppermint Schnapps to be had in our part of Switzerland. Kath made all the ingredients from scratch. Hot chocolate we had. It was delicious. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3212 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3212 Mon, 01 Feb 2016 22:34:23 +0100 -- "9/10" 2. "Winter Soldier (1972)" <#Winter> -- "9/10" 3. "Je ne suis pas Charlie (2015)" <#Charlie> -- 9/10 4. "Hard to be a God (2013)" <#Hard> -- "8/10" 5. "Betty Blue (1986)" <#Betty> -- "7/10" 6. "Dallas Buyer's Club (2014)" <#Dallas> -- "7/10" 7. "Only Lovers Left Alive (2013)" <#Only> -- "8/10" 8. "Ant-Man (2015)" <#Ant> -- "6/10" These are my notes to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. I've recently transferred my reviews to IMDb and made "the list" of over 900 ratings publicly available. I've included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other -- I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood. YMMV. Stalker (1979) -- "9/10" Tarkovsky sets the mood without CGI, without effects, with a simple camera and the natural world. The eerieness and horror of a world that doesn't behave by any known rules is elicited with the simplest means: acting, well-written dialogue. Ostensibly it's some men stumbling through fields and forests overrun with the detritus of war -- a war long ago. But Tarkovsky turns it into a sci-fi, horror experience where you're on the edge of your seat despite the overall, aching slowness of the film. He circles the camera through 360 degrees -- very slowly -- to visually indicate that you may end up right back where you started in The Zone. The sound design is similarly exquisite and evocative. It's incredible to imagine someone being able to tell a story so visually with so little, to be able to see this film in the scenes as they are made, in the wet fields that could hardly have elicited in real life the dark romance they do in the movie. Very often, the camera drifts in on unknown shapes to have them slowly reveal themselves: guns, two skeletal lovers lying in eternal embrace. He builds so much strangeness out of everyday objects, imbuing them with vague menace. It's all in your mind. Perhaps so is the Zone? This is the story of a Stalker, a man who guides people through the Zone, to a room that grants wishes. They live in a black and white, a world drained of color. When they get to the Zone, the film is suddenly in color. Access is blocked by a high fence and guards, but the Stalker can sneak through relatively easily. We watch as he guides the Writer and the Professor through different hindrances. These hindrances are made such through the magic of Tarkovsky's direction. He somehow convinces the viewer that a man walking slowly down a hallway is a gigantic achievement. The men make it through a tunnel -- the Meat Grinder -- and one of them survives the Pipe, which lets out into a factory floor covered with what looks for all the world like sand dunes. Soon after, they are in a ruined house, on the second floor, when inexplicably a phone rings. The Writer picks it up and hangs up. The professor uses it to call his laboratory and brag to his colleague that he is within a stone's throw of the room. The Stalker is horrified. He is nearly constantly much more afraid than the other two, presumably because he either knows what the Zone can do or because his many trips through the Zone have damaged him. At least half of the film is filled with philosophical discussions. At the threshold, the professor unpacks a 20-kiloton bomb, with which he wants to cut off people's access to the room, which has brought so much horror to the world (purportedly). The writer, on the other hand, waxes eloquently that perhaps the room doesn't do anything at all, that the Zone is a figment of the Stalker's imagination, of which he's convinced others. This gels with the feeling that they are just going for a stroll through an abandoned industrial zone rather than navigating multi-dimensional space. That they are navigating a child's view of this industrial zone, imbued with fantastical powers that don't exist, but that pass the time. The Writer also supposes that the room, should it work as advertised can only grant an innermost wish, that the Stalker is afraid of having his innermost wishes granted. As the Writer is. The professor dismantles his bomb. Does he realize that perhaps the Zone wants him to blow it up? Otherwise, why would it have let him through and deterred myriad others? Or were there really myriad others? Or was that the Stalker's fantasy? Does the room actually work this way? Or is the Stalker's game so convincing that people end up granting themselves their own wish? Or was the Professor convinced by the Writer's theory that the room grants unconscious desires and is therefore useless to the power-hungry? If the Zone is all in the Stalker's mind, then the danger of getting lost is also made-up. All of the dangers were made up. So cool. The film is slow, there are no heroes, the central plot point is a sci-fi concept that is neither seen nor used, whose existence is doubted. There are three men discussing deep concepts for 2:45 as they take an afternoon walk. It's amazing. I shudder to think of the remake, starring perhaps Jason Statham or perhaps Woody Harrelson as the Stalker. A younger Ed Harris as the Writer. Or Matthew Mcconaughey. It reminded me at different times of 2001, Moon, Solaris or Apocalypse Now, but it's unlike all of those as well. In the end, we catch only a glimpse of the room, as the camera backs into it to reveal a lovely, nearly impeccable shot of the three sitting in front of it. No-one goes in. Later, with his wife, both again black and white, the Stalker evinces despair that no-one believes. Does the room need belief to work? Finally, his wife breaks the fourth wall and talks to us of him directly. "I knew it myself, that he was an eternal prisoner, that he was doomed. Only what could I do? I was sure I would be happy with him. Of course, I knew I'd have a lot of sorrow too. but it's better to have a bitter happiness than a gray, dull life. Perhaps, I thought it all up later. "We had a lot of sorrow, a lot of fear, and a lot of shame. But I never regretted it and I never envied anyone. It's just our fate, our life, that's how we are. "And if we hadn't had our misfortunes, it wouldn't have been better. It would have been worse. Because in that case, there wouldn't have been any happiness. And there wouldn't have been any hope." Highly recommended. Thought-provoking. Winter Soldier (1972) -- "9/10" This documentary comprises 90 minutes of testimony/stories from American soldiers who'd served in Vietnam. They tell horrific stories of abuse, murder and torture. One man says, on the first day, he watched as the soldiers in the truck he was riding in murdered a group of Vietnamese children who'd flipped them off. Another talks about how the U.S. Army used white phosphorous, a weapon expressly forbidden by the Geneva Convention. No-one disagrees with any of these guys, even when they tell stories of the most horrific and senseless acts. Is it because they aren't surprised? Or that they're well-prepared? Or that they'd experienced something similar? Are they all lying? Or is this all true? U.S. military behavior in the Middle East in the last 15 years corroborates that this behavior as pretty standard. So, probably not lying. Or even exaggerating. Regardless of how earnest and honest the testimony appeared, there was of course a backlash. Such testimony could not go unchallenged because America is the greatest and is exceptional and is also a perennial occupier of the moral high ground. That these three-dozen soldiers all told more or less the same thing, that it jibes with testimony from soldiers in subsequent conflicts -- those with more video and image evidence, like Abu Ghraib -- lends a lot of credence to what they say happened, even if they didn't present evidence. This is deep, heady stuff and the interviews will either be difficult to watch -- if you're still a HOO-RAH American -- or uplifting -- when you see that people can change for the better -- or depressing -- if you see the exact same shit happening again and again and again, up until today. The points these soldiers make are nuanced and intelligent. They are many of the same points we still have to make today. The wheel of time crushes all hope. [image]The "complete transcript" is available. [1] But it didn't include the amazing impromptu diatribe of one of the guys out in the hall, a black guy who just laid it all down with such clarity -- and heartbreakingly accurate for today's America, over 40 years later -- that I searched desperately for a transcript, in vain. So I cued that shit up and transcribed it to the best of my ability, to preserve it for posterity. It's not all relevant, but I emphasized the blocks I found depressingly accurate and seemingly eternal. Black guy: I've been in there listening to the whole thing. You know what, man? It's relevant. But you know what? This whole thing you're doing now? It's only relevant to you, man. It ain't relevant to me. You know how come? Because you fail to realize what the reason is. How come...you, dig, man...you go in there and you get all these reports on atrocities, yeah, man, 'they was splitting this cat's skull, they was splitting his skull', but you know what? The real issue is, man, that the thing is racism. It's racist. It's racist, man. [...] They go after the Vietnamese, his resources. They're also after Vietnamese because they're racist, man. I had all the hell I had in the army because of racism. You know, like, dig, man, my orderly room, my first sizing man was a Ku Klux Klan, man. They had a motherfuckin' Klansman right in the company. White guy: Let me ask you something. What the hell do you think I have to gain out of this? What do you think I'm here for? What do you the rest of us are here for? Black guy: For your reason. Now dig this: your reason for being here is different from my reason. [...] The thing that gets me, the thing that gets me [smiles, reaches out to comfort other guy] don't, don't, don't get upset. This is cool, this is cool, we can rap, man. I don't know, man, a whole lotta people, man, when there's white and black people talking. They're, like, you know, not wanting to say this [or that] because somebody might misinterpret it. Well, you know, say something ... let me misinterpret it and then when I run it back on you, then go ahead and tell me, man. You know, don't do one of these things here [mimes toning things down]You know? I go to school too. People what I hear say is ignorant? They know a whole lot of what's going on. Maybe they don't know those terms, you know, that book, but the deal is, you gotta show 'em somethin', you gotta show 'em that you are for real. You gotta suffer, man, you can't just go out here and run your shit, man, and then don't let no blood and, man, we bleedin' every day. You gotta bleed with us, man, and then we start bleedin' together and then we say 'wow, that cat hurtin' just like me', you know, so we gonna get together behind that stand and we gonna axe that shit that's out there cuttin' us, you dig? Then you have it together, then you have it together. White guy: we have the same enemies. Black guy: Now you say you went into the service because you couldn't get into college, so you went into the army. Now, see, the reason we go in the Army is for a different reason. Now, dig, we get outta high school, ya dig, we can't even get a job in the motherfuckin' street, can't go get a gig, you dig? 'Cause yo black. Now being black is a deep thing. I know you're getting tired of hearing it, but it's the shit that is out there, man. The only way a brother can live when he get outta school -- if he ain't go no smarts -- is to go in the Army, man. To go into the Army. Man, we only got one, or two outlets to go, man. You got three or four. You dig? Just like y'all runnin' that double-standard thing. You see, you got these variables. We don't. You can do that changin'. Even if we decide to change, to try to be a white person, we'd still be a niggah, we'd be lyin' Uncle Tom motherfuckers and you'd still look down on us. You understand what I'm talkin' about?We ain't got nowhere to go, man, that's how come we're so fuckin' desperate. 'Cause we ain't got nowhere to go: that high visibility is gointa keep you down all the time. See, you can always change your mind, man. You can always do what the rest of 'ems doin' if you want that our there, what they doin'. Ya dig? I mean, I was in there listenin' and everybody was on about, 'yeah, this dude was gettin' his ear cut off.' You know, the atrocity thing. Everybody was in there... White guy: [emphatically] ...that ain't that important, man. Black guy: [agreeing emphatically] It ain't important, man. You gotta look at how come people gettin' cut up. And how come they're gettin' shot, man. That's the whole deal right there. If you want to be for real, look at the reasons why. Why, why. You know what? I do a thing every day. I watch television, whenever I get the chance. I don't watch for entertainment. You know what I watch? I watch all the whitewashin' they throw on you every day, man. Like, uh, shit about Indians. Now they let the Indians win on television. For years they didn't. White guy: 'cause they're ain't enough of 'em to do nothin' about it. Black guy: [again, emphatic agreement] Right. Right. But now they be starting to say 'wow, we can't be doin' this to the Indians'. The Indians tryin' to get their thing together. So now the Indians win on television. But for years, when you's a li'l kid, you just sat there and sucked that shit up, didn't you? This is what you believed the real shot was, until you became old enough to see it. It took you a long time, didn't it? Television is still like that. They still after dem li'l kids, man. Cartoons, with the violence, shootin' bullets and shit, shootin' 'em in the face, turnin' they face black. Even connotations. Black people hate connotations. Things like the difference between angel-food cake and devil's-food cake. The black plague. It's the same shit, told in the same fucking way. The killin' there [Vietnam] and the killin' here. [in the U.S.] White guy: [Indistinct] Black guy: No shit, that's how come you got no black people behind you. Because you forgot about racism, man. You forgot about it. That's how come you ain't got no black people down here. You got a few of us...and they rap to you just like I do, man. See now, you're runnin' a thing. You wanna be human. You want to stop the war, stop the killin', the whole thing, but you still ain't took time to learn how to treat your other brother. Cool, can you dig it? You ain't said nothin' 'bout them and the brother look at that and they say, 'Why? Why do I wanna go down there and get involved? The shit ain't for me. It ain't for me.' Man, I just hope, man, that just by standin' here rappin' with you now, if you didn't think about it before, think about it now. If you did think about it before, Goddamnit now do something about that shit! Highly recommended. Je ne suis pas Charlie (2015) -- 9/10 This is a very well-made documentary about the political situation in France, post-Charlie Hebdo attacks. It features interviews with a lot of very intelligent people who've obviously given their opinions much thought. I would dearly love to get some of the subtitles because there was a lot of information in what the interviewees said that would is very much worth repeating and saving. The series of interviews starts off slowly with more prosaic opinions delivered for both sides, but it works its way up to very nuanced, eloquent and finally quite hopeless opinions that France (and Europe) will get worse before it gets better...and that we've seen all of this before. The lady interviewed outside of what looked for all the world like a construction site (Houria Bouteldja) exhibited an amazing coherence and logic, as did the professor interviewed in his classroom (Pierre Zaoui). "I am a journalist and I really hold it against the mainstream media because, I am not going to say that journalists are racists, it isn't racism when you have a journalist who has to write the editorial but who also has to pay their bills, I don't hold it against them. It's the thinking minds at the top who decree editorial lines from above." "It comes from its past and its present. The past is colonial history. It's a history of colonial empire, France was a colonial empire.[...] But in reality there are still colonies, since imperialism has changed. It still exists. We are not in a post-imperial situation. We are still in imperialism. There was the the colonial empire, and then the nation state. The nation chose a legitimate social group, which is the figure of the Christian, White, European person. The most important powers will be distributed to that social group. The others are exlcluded." "[People] want to make a connection with the Muslim population, taken hostage here in France, and to whom we say that they must speak out against the attackers who they had nothing to do with. And who have become a suspect population." "It's kind of like totalitarianism. I cannot renounce myself. I cannot put my personality, my faith and my beliefs in the cloakroom before entering the public sphere." "Today we are witnessing a sort of blackmail by saying that if you are not Charlie, you are against the Republic, and against French values." "France is without a doubt the only country in the world where BDS participants are taken to court. [...] At first, boycott actions posed no problems and then there was a political U-Turn. There is in France a memorandum put into force by (former Justice Minister) Michele Aliot-Marie, which demands for all those who call for the boycott of Israel must be taken to court for anti-Semitism. "[...] "I will add another, very important element. During the recent bombing of Gaza [...]and notably there were many young people from the lower-class suburbs who came to demonstrate, there were many people of Arab origin, of the Muslim faith, these young people were themselves also taken to court for having demonstrated, arrested at these demonstrations in support of the people of Gaza." "The others are excluded. And when I say the others, I-m not just talking about the post-colonial subjects, I think the Jews are excluded too. That's to say that neither the Jews are part of French national society. Both Jews and Muslims are excluded from French national society, but not in the same way. Pay attention: I said the Jews are not treated in the same way as the Black, the Muslim and the Roma communities. Those who are opporessed today be the French state are the Blacks, the Arabs, Muslims and the Roma. Those who suffer police repression for instance, those who are discriminated. For the Jews it's something else, it isn't discrimination, but they don't have the honour of being part of the legitimate society. They are those who we 'like to like', if you know what I mean. We 'like to like" the Jews, which means we pretend to like them. It's what we call State philosemitism. Where does it come from? From the history of anti-Semitism, and from shifts in imperialism. There is a real, historic anti-Jewish state racism in France, which stems from the existence of the nation-state and imperialism too, both together. The Jews didn't choose this situation, but the Jews as a social group were integrated into the imperialist project through the State of Israel. From the moment the Jews were brought into the imperialist project, they became closer to being white, they 'whitened'. But the whites really really don't want that to happen. So the Jews act as intermediaries. That is how anti-Semitism turned into philosemitism. But if I were a Jew, I would be very suspicious. Towards the State. Because I think that turns the Jews into a category dependent on a conjunction of factors. If Israel, tomorrow, no longer had any strategic importance for Europe or the West, the relationship towards Jews risks changing. Because I think that there still is a strong anti-Semitism in France. A European anti-Semitism, I mean. I think that a part of the Jewish community realizes that there is an absolute necessity to struggle against Islamophobia, since it will on day turn against the Jews." Her cogent arguments remind me of the late Edward Said. "The National Front, for me, ... I will no judge Marine Le Pen, even if she won't be my friend anytime soon, she is clearly racist, she is clearly Islamophobic, I think she is also an anti-Semite, although I don't want to defame her. But she is at the head of a far-right party. I will never hear her extol peaceful coexistence. It's all just a political game for her. What poses a big problem for me is the way in which her political ideas have been picked up by all other parties. Today she has clearly set the new political boundaries, we are no longer asking ourselves whether we should deal with the deficit or not, we are asking ourselves whether we are Islamophobic or not, whether veiled women can go to university or not. Today France is losing its place. There is a global crisis, there are more than 6 million unemployed in this country, but the political agenda has crystalized around the choices of Marine Le Pen." "We must support the struggles of the weakest minorities. These days, we must support the Muslims of France." Saw it in French with English subtitles on "Vimeo" . Hard to be a God (2013) -- "8/10" This is a Russian science-fiction film, 13 years in the making, that was released after the death of the director/editor, Aleksey German. It was shot in high-definition black and white. The story is of an Earth-like planet on which a similar evolutionary track was followed by a very human-like race, but they never experienced a Renaissance. Their buildings are of poor quality, their sanitation is a horror and their hygiene is non-existent. The filth is omnipresent. You can almost smell this movie. It's incredible how absolutely everything is covered with mud, food remnants and shit. The fog and rain soak everything. Everything is of primitive construction, people shit and piss and blow their pus-running noses everywhere. They spit, they taste things, they scratch, they pick and they flick. Slaves have boards around their necks -- almost everyone we see is a slave of some kind. People have eyes missing. Instead of a Renaissance, a Khmer Rouge-style revolution has occurred: all books and learning and instruments and advancement have been destroyed and their purveyors and inventors put to death. One form of execution we see is upending in a latrine. We follow the story of Don Rumata, an Earthman sent ostensibly to study these people but who has taken up as a God among them. We follow him from his "palace", interacting with the various psychotic locals, to a local market (?) where he meets up with a group of other Earthlings. It is not hard to imagine that the people find him to be a God -- he is so much cleaner than the others, with metal greaves and vambraces pretty much the only thing they see of him. [2] There are incredibly long and detailed and close-up takes through the filthy confines of his castle. Activity is everywhere...in every corner there's someone doing something, whispering something, imparting details of the kind of life there is to be had on this planet. There is a dispute, a man has his eye ripped out, he stumbles forward, spilling braziers everywhere, others follow, beating him. In the corner, we see what appears to be rutting in an ornate bed -- the decorations depict sexual positions. The level of detail is almost overwhelming. There's always something going on in the foreground, the middle and the background. Many of the non-speaking extras break the fourth wall to show us things. This is the true idiocracy -- the people are fixated on the back-ends of animals. They make rude gestures to each other, to the sky. It's an exquisitely rendered madhouse, each mini-scene -- a few seconds -- with an incredible level of detail and attention. The sounds, too...always a fire or something splooshing or cracking or animals or people grunting. All without CGI, all made with practical effects, some in very long shots. The world is so visceral and convincing, large and endlessly depressing and broken. Smoke and fog and incense are everywhere. And always the coughing, the sniffing, the compulsive wiping of the nose by everyone -- presumably because of the nigh-intolerable smell of the world. Everything's in a terrible state of disrepair and we see the only minds allowed to work involved in building new torture devices. The "bookworms" have all been hanged and left to rot on a gallows. The dialogue is also scattered, nonsensical, but enough sense can be distilled to follow a story. Everyone is near-mad, the actions unexplainable, the destruction they wreak on their environs chaotic. Random, wanton, childish. An unenlightened world of fools. It's impossible to imagine how such a society survives, how it feeds itself, how it staves off disease. Every scene reflects their actions, implements and armor and chains and animals and fowl and bells pinned and tied and roped and chained everywhere, covered in filth and dripping water. The level of detail is Mad Max: Fury Road-esque. It's a bit of a mystery where all the metal comes from, as they don't seem capable of smelting or smithing. Even Rumata succumbs to the filth of the world, drinking himself into stupors, obsessively picking his ear. Soldiers from the Grays some to arrest him and he fights them off, but they capture him in a net and take him to his enemy, Don Reba. Don Rumata threatens him and cajoles him and eventually leaves with an imposter doctor Budakh in tow (the man he sought?). It's a mystery where Rumata gets his clean cloths to wipe his face, or the endless vials of perfumed water he splashes everywhere. When he discovers that Budakh is an imposter, Rumata continues his search, in the process rediscovering his friend the Baron in a cage and freeing him. The Baron is attacked and rides off, triumphant, only to later be felled by a dozen arrows. We find his body lying on a midden heap, with Budakh admonishing it that he will now never be able to teach the Baron how to read. Surreal. Rumata interviews Budakh, to his eventual disappointment. Rumata: What advice would you give to a God? Budakh: I'd say "Creator! Give people everything that which separates them." Rumata: No, that wouldn't do them any good. Because the strong will take everything from the weak. Budakh: I'd say "Punish the cruel, so that the strong restrain from being cruel" Rumata: As soon as the strong and cruel are punished, the stronger ones of the weak will take their place. Budakh responds that the Creator should eradicate everything, to which Rumata responds that "destruction is easy". He is anguished at all of the misery around him, after having spent 20 years on that Godforsaken planet. He returns home to his castle in Arkanar. There are warring factions, the Blacks are religious zealots who attacked his castle in his absence, the Grays (the Order) are poised for attack. They are Reba's troops, the man who just released a prisoner to Rumata and let them both walk free. Because he's considered a God? It's all a bit muddled. Rumata discusses further with Arata (his chief of staff?). Arata says what he would do to free the people and take over. Rumata: Tell me, Arata. So you have given the land to your men. Who needs land without slaves? There'll be new slaves. New scaffolds [gallows]. New golds. New blacks. Everything will start again. And a new Arata. And a God won't be able to do anything. That's sad. Arata: I'd never allow that, you louse. Rumata: You wouldn't be able to prevent it. You'd allow it, like everyone else has and always will. For thousands of years. Arata: What do we do then? Rumata: The same as always. The wheel turns and even an omnipotent God is helpless to stop mankind from realizing its pitiful goal. The Grays attack the castle and kill Rumata's "wife" Ari with an arrow to the back of the head. Absolutely out of the blue. Rumata puts on his war helmet -- a fancy affair with bull horns -- and prepares for war. Before he can go anywhere, though, a bird shits on his helmet. A fitting sentiment. Rumata exacts revenge on the Grays' leader. They seem to be negotiating, after a fashion, when Rumata stabs him with his helmet, then later disembowels him while still his heart is still beating. The aftermath of the ensuing battle takes the lives of all the soldiers in Arkanar, making it even more of a hellhole, if that was at all possible. [3] More "scientists" from Earth arrive to dissect the aftermath of the battle. They find Rumata without armor, sitting in a puddle, the lone survivor of both armies. They offer to take him back to Earth, but he refuses. Rumata: They say...you write books, but have no thoughts. Here's one for you. Where Grays triumph, Blacks inevitably come. There's no other way. Remember. Now leave. Hey, if you write about me, and you'll probably have to. Write that it's ... it's hard to be a God! Months later, we see Rumata with his retinue on the move through winter. He ends the film as he started, playing haunting Jazz on his clarinet. The scene of wintry bleakness at the end is welcome respite from the rotten oleaginous horrors of autumn. The detail, the world is incredible. It's a long film and difficult to follow, but the absolute dedication and consistent quality throughout the nearly three hours is remarkable. It's a fully realized world. Recommended. Betty Blue (1986) -- "7/10" Zorg lives at the beach in a run-down bungalow, working as a handyman for the owner. We meet Betty enthusiastically writhing under Zorg, almost as if the film wants us to see right off the bat why Zorg is about to put up with all of the ensuing shit she has to offer. They go at it with such gusto, skill and utter joy, and the camera is so loving as it slowly zooms in to their crescendo, that these two minutes should be shown in health classes around the world. Alas, she's not stable. Some would generously call a free spirit. She likes to throw shit. She's not super-smart. She's convinced that Zorg is underselling himself and she hates his boss, so she attacks the boss at every opportunity. They are charged with painting the other bungalows and they paint one very nicely. [4] Betty discovers Zorg's book that he'd kept hidden and falls more in love with him -- whatever that means in that rats-nest of a mind of hers. She has enough of this life of servitude at the beach, throws every last bit of furnishing out of the bungalow and sets it on fire. They flee the premises and hitchhike to Paris. There, they move in with a friend of hers -- Lisa -- in a small hotel, where he does odd jobs and she starts typing up his manuscript. A Sisyphean task as she doesn't know how to type and rips out the page whenever she makes a mistake. It's painful to watch. On a side note, neither Zorg nor Betty is particularly fond of underwear. They befriend Eddy, Lisa's boyfriend and have a few nice evenings together and mornings. [5] Betty's mood quickly drops when she doesn't get a response from any of the publishers to whom she's submitted Zorg's manuscript. Betty and Zorg start working at Stromboli's, Eddy's restaurant. So far, this is a typically quirky, cute French romance film -- except for Betty's uncontrollable anger, lowering perpetually at the edges of their existence, until it springs to the center in a fit of pique. You're tempted to think that her fits are acts of passion, of a person full of life, but she really seems to be mentally ill. The only reason anyone puts up with it is that it's packed into a pretty, sexy package, so everyone does their best to ignore it for much longer than they should. An ugly girl would have been committed immediately. At any rate, Eddy's mother dies and they attend the funeral. Eddy offers Betty and Zorg his mother's house if they'll run the music store. Zorg is happy with the provincial life. [6] Betty, of course, is quickly bored. Zorg, however, is not bored. The wife of a man he helps in town throws herself at him in a fit of positively epic horniness. Instead of taking advantage, he counsels her and resists her wiles. When she yells at him "I don't turn you on!", he responds that "Sometimes I resist my desires in order to feel I'm free." Betty's boredom continues, so she distracts herself with a fake pregnancy. Zorg does his best to make her happy, but she wants to move, to not be bored. And settling down in bucolic bliss will not last. We see it in her face that she knows she can't be happy with what he's offering but she's dying to try, knowing that it will fail. During a lovely night in front of a roaring fire, he spills her purse and finds sedatives she's been taking. After finding out that it was a phantom pregnancy, her condition worsens. The fugues increase until Zorg comes home one day to find blood and detritus everywhere and Betty's been taken to the hospital because she's poked her own eye out. Zorg gets a call from a publisher who's willing to publish the book she submitted. He goes to the asylum to tell her that he's being published and he's working on another book, but she's strapped to the bed, catatonic. Zorg blames the drugs and denies the reality he's known for a while. Zorg is thrown out of the asylum. He sneaks back in, dressed as a woman. After telling her how much he misses her, her voice, he puts her out of her misery with a pillow. He leaves. We see him in his apartment above the music store, eating chili from a pot, as he did at the beginning of the film before he met Betty. He is writing a book. Dallas Buyer's Club (2014) -- "7/10" We meet Ron Woodruff, played by Matthew McConaughey, at a rodeo, where he's clearly in the grips of HIV. His cheeks are sunken, his belt flaps loosely, clearly tied much tighter than it used to be. He's having sex with two prostitutes under the stands. A little while later, he passes out and wakes up in a local hospital, receiving a diagnosis of full-blown AIDS with a T-Cell count of 9. AZT is just being tested, but it's efficacy is unknown. He finagles his way into getting some, then overdoses on it, taking his usual panoply of drugs and alcohol. He ends up in the hospital again and storms out after they tell him he's going to kill himself. He goes to Mexico for treatment, where he meets a kindly doctor who not only helps him, but goes into business with him. Woodruff smuggles a ton of goods with him, telling the customs authorities that it's all for himself. He meets Rayon (a transvestite played by Jared Leto) in the hospital. They soon form a partnership, the Dallas Buyers Club and she helps him sell it, because her connections to the community most likely to need it are better than his. Along the way, he earns the grudging respect of Eve, a doctor played by Jennifer Garner. Steve Zahn plays Tucker, Woodruff's old cop pal. Woodruff survives much longer than the 30 days he was given, cleaning up his life -- more or less -- and surviving over seven years and helping hundreds of people. The actors all play well, with Leto's transformation and comfort in his role exceeded only by McConaughey's. The story was interesting as history, but the strength of the film is in its characters. Only Lovers Left Alive (2013) -- "8/10" Tom Hiddleston and Tilda Swinton are Adam and Eve, very long-lived if not eternal beings who need blood to live. They are apparently low-key vampires. Eve lives in Morocco where she is friends with Christopher Marlowe, played wonderfully by John Hurt. Adam lives in an old, abandoned-looking home in Detroit, surrounded by musical, electronic and recording equipment of varying age. None of it particularly new -- most looks to be at least 40 or 50 years old, while some of the violins are probably centuries old. He has a friend, Ian, who helps him get supplies Ian is quite friendly and asks no questions. Adam calls non-vampires "zombies". Ian is a "good zombie". We see the three of them obtain and imbibe quality blood to slake their thirst. Soon after, Eve calls Adam to say hello. She calls on an iPhone with FaceTime. He connects via a Rube Goldberg contraption of relatively ancient digital devices that pipe her image to an analog television. Adam expresses melancholy; Eve agrees to visit. She packs only books from her wonderfully overcrowded house crammed full of them. We see her packing famous books in multiple languages, sitting in a pile of money in multiple denominations, making reservations for two flights, both at night. They both use quite stilted language, naming creatures and trees in Latin, indicative of their long lives and the decades they could devote to learning such trivia. When together, they discuss the zombies and, in particular, as she puts it, "the litany of all zombie atrocities in history". He lists the scientists who've been thwarted, ignored and ridiculed or otherwise poorly treated by humanity, with special emphasis on Tesla, of course. Jim Jarmusch directed, so it's not surprising that it's a languorous film, but this time the pacing serves a different purpose: it puts us in the mood of beings who've seen everything multiple times, seen the wheel of time turn and turn again, who discuss how Detroit will bloom again when the "cities in the South have burned up [...] because it's near water". The film is at least partially a love letter to Detroit, lamenting the rot and destruction and decay there. More evidence of the zombies' lack of appreciation for anything good, for anything lasting. When you live forever, you can spend so much time on everything, you in fact must because otherwise boredom would overtake you. But the quotidian concerns of the zombies frustrate. When the power goes out, we accompany Adam and Eve to his fusebox, where she observes that his wiring is shit and isn't even properly connected to the grid. He smiles and opens a panel in the ground to reveal a version of Tesla's wireless electrical transmitter to power his home. Eve discovers the special bullet Adam's ordered with which to commit suicide. They re-hash old arguments about whether it's worth it to go on. She argues for enjoying life, he wonders what the point of it when the zombies seem determined to ruin everything. She plays an absolutely beautiful recording of "Trapped By A Thing Called Love" to convince him subtly that the zombies can also create beauty (when they're not so busy being ignorant assholes). They talk of "others", in particular Eve's sister Ava (Mia Wasikowska), of whom they've all recently dreamt. She is a vampire like them, but with the attitude of a zombie. She drinks up their supply of blood, thinking nothing of it, of course. Adam is exceedingly unexcited to see her. Eve is accepting and mostly ambivalent. Ava, though, is a greedy, useless piece of shit bent on ruining everything they have. Obviously, I was enjoying this movie much more before Ava showed up, but that's probably the point. Ava is constantly "thirsty" and doesn't seem to have any of her own supply chain (which is probably why she ended up there). She drinks Ian, Adam's friend and helper, then says she feels "sick". Eve reminds her that 21st-century blood isn't safe (probably not for the first time). They throw Eva out, "you guys are condescending assholes; you have no idea!" Of course. They are left to deal with the body and the aftermath of her destructive orgy. I suppose this is to show that vampires, like humans, run the gamut of behavior from sophisticated to utterly useless and glomming. Adam and Eve relocate to Tangiers, leaving all of his stuff behind -- she tells him she'll find him wonderful instruments there. Of course, beings that are centuries if not millennia old would be much more comfortable with throwing away everything to start anew. They have trouble finding Marlowe and his connection to "good blood" and seem quite incapacitated. This makes for a bit of tension, but it's hard to imagine that they could survive so long if a seeming bump in the road like this threatens their existence. They find Marlowe, who's been poisoned by bad blood and expires before their eyes. So much experience and learning, lost forever. Marlowe "whispers" "What a piece of work is a man..." and Adam responds "[a]nd yet to me, what is this quintessence of dust?" At the very end, we see Adam and Eve starting from nothing, reduced to "15th-century tactics" (i.e. drinking blood directly from victims), but only slightly concerned about their ability to survive. They see an expanse of time and our highly focused view on it is boring. Adam: Have the water wars started yet? Or is still about the oil? Eve: Yes, they're just starting now. Adam: They only figure out when it's too late. The soundtrack is lovely. Recommended. Ant-Man (2015) -- "6/10" Paul Rudd plays Scott Lang, a burglar who's just gotten out of prison for having burgled a large, high-security corporation. This feat catches the attention of Henry/Hank Pym (played well by Michael Douglas). He's a genius scientist-engineer who'd invented miniaturization technology 40 years ago, used it as the Ant-Man to fight the commies, then buried it before it could be further weaponized or misused. His protégé Darren Cross is, forty years later, finally very near a breakthrough in re-discovering the "Pym Particle" that will allow him to duplicate Pym's achievements. Pym recruits Lang to become the Ant-Man for him, to sneak into Cross industries and steal the formula before Cross can sell it to arms industry. This is kind of lame because how would there not be backups everywhere? At any rate, Pym's daughter reluctantly helps Lang get ready for his mission, teaching him how to fight and use the shrink/grow technology. They proceed with the heist, including Lang's three-man team for help. This is a good thing because that team includes Michael Peña as Luis, a guy who can't tell a story without including every last detail. His two stories are the most amusing and nicely filmed parts of this movie. The action scenes are decent and the use of the ants is relatively clever, but the motivation for the characters is all over the place. Douglas starts off strong, but the dialogue for Pym wilts as he's increasingly called up to inject chunks of history. These parts could have been more interesting but didn't really grab my attention. I thought Cannavale was pretty much wasted, which is a shame. Ant-man could have been cooler, but he was served up in this standard film with a story that didn't even bother to cohere very much. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] These "notes" are also interesting. [1] The only sign we see of any technology is when something that looks like a tank/land-boat towing a wagon with two guys on it, one playing a guitar, drives by at 28 minutes in. The occurrence is entirely anomalous, unremarked and unexplained. We never see anything that looks like post-Renaissance technology again. [1] Game of Thrones has nothing on this film in terms of depiction of medieval filth, death and suffering. [1] Well, everyone says that they did a great job, but they just paint over the old, peeling paint without stripping any of it or even priming the sun-and-surf-damaged wood. Fucking amateurs. [1] It's funny to see how many things from 1980s France have survived until today nearly unchanged. The Mocha/Bialetti coffee maker they use is just like mine. They eat Bonne Maman strawberry preserves, they drink 1664 beer and Ricard Pastis. In the countryside, it's Chimay and Leffe. All the labels still look the same. [1] The French countryside is completely unchanged over the last 30 years since they made this movie. The buildings, the low walls, the church and castle in town, the little stores, the Boulangerie, the run-down but pragmatic little kitchens: all of it looks like Cluny and Sirot, where I've stayed with friends many times. The market store looks just like the ones in Bussang. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3205 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3205 Sun, 31 Jan 2016 17:35:17 +0100 -- "6/10" 2. "Dark Shadows (2012)" <#Dark> -- "4/10" 3. "Mission: Impossible -- Rogue Nation (2015)" <#Mission> -- "8/10" 4. "Jessica Jones (2015)" <#Jessica> -- "9/10" 5. "Mr. Robot (2015)" <#Mr> -- "9/10" 6. "The Sting (1973)" <#Sting> -- "9/10" 7. "Blindness (2008)" <#Blindness> -- "7/10" 8. "Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret (2014)" <#Cowspiracy> -- "7/10" 9. "Eddie Murphy: Delirious (1983)" <#Eddie> -- "6/10" 10. "Return to Algiers (2000)" <#Return> -- "5/10" 11. "Ted 2 (2015)" <#Ted> -- "5/10" These are my notes to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. I've recently transferred my reviews to IMDb and made "the list" of over 900 ratings publicly available. I've included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other -- I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood. YMMV. Trophy Kids (2013) -- "6/10" This is a documentary about the middle- to upper-class youth sports scene in the U.S. It is about parents obsessed with using their means to shape their children into sports stars -- to realize their potential. To be honest, that potential is not immediately clear. The parents are nearly all off the rails and not very strongly anchored in reality. Neither are they particularly nice -- to either their kids or anyone else. One -- tennis mom -- is off-the-rails religious, with enough contradictory religious and self-help claptrap rattling around in the hollowed husk of her skull to elicit at least some respect that she manages to get anything done at all. Golf dad is clearly unaware of how young his daughter is, cursing horribly under his breath when she makes mistakes. [1] Football dad is also blissfully unaware of both how militant and unreasonable he is and how untalented his son is. What bleeds through in all of them is that they think their children are God's gift to the planet and have every right to as much of its resources as they can get their previous hands on. Football dad recriminates "Justus" because he didn't immediately ask his coach why he was taken out of the game. His logic is inexorable and, on the surface, reasonable: how will Justus get better if he doesn't know why he was removed? So, yes, he should find out what he did wrong, but not right away. The coach obviously had bigger fish to fry during the game, but Football Dad doesn't see it that way because he and Justus are the most important things in the world. This from a man who, were he a coach, would likely kill any player who dared even speak to him during a game. Basketball Dad is nearly a pure caricature of a New Jersey goombah. Except that I believe he lives in California. They live their lives by stats ("he's 196th in the state"). Most seem to have more than enough money ("I've spent two Lamborghinis so far") One father says, right in front of his son, that practicing basketball with said son is the only thing that gives his life meaning every day. How can the son say anything after that? Can he possibly say that he doesn't want to play basketball anymore? The material was a bit repetitive but serves as a good warning to all of us, should we encounter the generation raised this way. Dark Shadows (2012) -- "4/10" A strong cast and a weak story combine to make an occasionally entertaining movie but one that keeps failing ever harder the longer it goes on. Johnny Depp seems only capable of acting in heavy makeup and with the same gestures and facial grimaces that earned him such acclaim as Jack Sparrow. Michelle Pfeiffer, too, seems more concerned with keeping her face immobile lest it fall off. Eva Green as the evil witch was clearly on some sort of hunger strike which made her overly gaunt though several times the plot hinged or explicitly mentioned how alluring her breasts were. Instead, I could not ignore the incredible overbite she showed whenever she grinned really widely, almost as if she had too many teeth to fit into her mouth. This might have been a nice touch if I wasn't convinced that it was unintentional. Chloë Grace Moretz was utterly and entirely wasted. Helena Bonham Carter was refreshingly less overwrought and nutty than usual, but still couldn't work any magic here. Bella Heathcote's face, while decades younger, was arguable less mobile than Pfeiffer's, expressing little to no emotion throughout the film. She gave us no indication as to her motivation, instead mooning around being ambiguous and being able to see ghosts. She, too, is a woman of the age, weighing about 85 pounds soaking wet and yet we're told that Barnabus (Depp) thinks she has "exquisite" birthing hips. This could only be true if she were to give birth to snakes. The film's primary propaganda seems to be: look, here are some very pretty women whom we haven't fed or allowed to act (some of whom, like Green and Moretz, made me doubt that they even can act, despite other movies as evidence to the contrary). Also, since there are so many famous names, we haven't bothered to write an interesting script or provide any interesting, non-clicheéd dialogue. Tim Burton has lost pretty much of all of his initial charm and quirkiness as a director. Not recommended at all. Mission: Impossible -- Rogue Nation (2015) -- "8/10" Tom Cruise returns as Ethan Hunt, the top spy in the IMF (Impossible Mission Force). He's once again joined by Simon Pegg, Ving Rhames and Jeremy Renner -- veterans of various other outings in the series. Rebecca Ferguson plays his foil, a British agent working at the edge of the law, like him. They are on the trail of the Syndicate, a shadowy outfit that's trying to change the world, one assassination and terrorist bombing at a time. Hunt spends a good deal of time on the run, especially after Alex Baldwin as the CIA director shuts down the IMF. There's a USB stick that only the prime minister of England can decrypt that contains codes for many, many bank accounts. Hunt and co. fight the Syndicate for it. Nice ending. Good flick. Recommended. Jessica Jones (2015) -- "9/10" The eponymous Ms. Jones is a superhero, but a relatively low-key one. She is inordinately strong, but not a particularly good or trained fighter. She's a private detective in Hell's Kitchen and keeps busy taking pictures of adulterers for their jilted spouses. She has PTSD from a lengthy kidnapping she'd recently escaped from, to a certain Kilgrave. Kilgrave can control minds. He's an amoral monster. The story arc in the first season is about their struggle. Jones is joined by Trish, a childhood friend who parlayed her childhood fame into a good gig on a radio talk show and a pretty good life. Luke Cage (Power Man) is also in the mix. The story follows the results of Kilgrave's mind control and his victims and lies and the resulting violence. The story slowly unfolds, revealing more about how Kilgrave's powers work, what kind of abilities Jessica has, where they came from, and so on. Shadowy organizations flit in and out of the plot. Well-shot, well-acted and well-written. Recommended. Mr. Robot (2015) -- "9/10" Mr. Robot is a show about Elliot Alderson, a young man with serious computer and hacking skills. He works at Allsafe, with Angela, his childhood friend. They have a shared past, having lost family to the same industrial accident. This is the scaffolding on which the show rests its true story: one of mental illness, isolation, estrangement, hidden relationships, the 1%, the powerful, psychological manipulation, hacking, social engineering and the utter depravity and shocking uselessness of humanity. As of episode two, I was starting to suspect that the similarities to Fight Club are more than I initially suspected when I heard about Mr. Robot's plans to blow up credit-card/debt records. My working theory is that Slater/Mr. Robot doesn't exist. Only in his mind. Plus, the part where the rich dude pays the homeless guy to let him beat him up? Fucked. Up. Dammit, at least Darlene seems to be real -- other people can see and hear her. Or can they? Maybe Shayla doesn't exist either? But then who's walking the dog? Or does Flipper also not exist? I'm trying to keep track of who can interact with whom in which scenes to figure out if anyone exists but Elliot. As of episode 4, where he withdraws from heroin, I don't even know how many Elliots there are. That's all the spoiling I'll do. Here are some of my favorite bits. "Or maybe it's that it feels like all our heroes are counterfeit? The world itself's just one big hoax. Spamming each other with our running commentary of bullshit, masquerading as insight, our social media faking as intimacy. Or is it that we voted for this? Not with our rigged elections, but with our things, our property, our money. I'm not saying anything new. We all know why we do this, not because Hunger Games books makes us happy, but because we wanna be sedated. Because it's painful not to pretend, because we're cowards. Fuck society." First clue. F*society. Angela: You slummed it all the way down to Jersey in person to offer me a job at the company I'm currently suing? Colby: So, you'll find this out fairly soon, but in business, grudges aren't really...a thing. It's too emotional. Angela: This is a huge class-action lawsuit. They're going to pay millions. Colby: Roughly 75 to 100 million. I mean, that's what their lawyers will settle for -- after they exhaust most of your team's legal funds for the next seven years. And sure, that's...that's a lot of money, but not to them, not really. We started a rainy-day fund when the leak happened, just for this occasion. The fund itself has already made five times that amount. Angela: I'm not working there. They killed my mother. Colby: And every fast-food joint around the corner delivers diabetes to millions of people. Philip Morris hands out lung cancer on the hour, every hour. I mean, hell, everyone's destroying the planet beyond the point of no return. Are you really going to start taking all of these things so personally? Angela: Maybe I will. Maybe someone has to. Colby: A suggestion: If you want to change things, perhaps you should try from within. Because this [indicates her current circumstances: jobless, living with father] is what happens from the outside. Elliot: No, you're not real. You're not real. Mr. Robot: What? You are? Is any of it real? I mean, look at this. LOOK AT IT! A world built on fantasy. Synthetic emotions in the form of pills, psychological warfare in the form of advertising, mild-altering chemicals in the form of food, brainwashing seminars in the form of media, controlled, isolated bubbles in the form of social networks. Real? You wanna talk about reality? We haven't lived in anything remotely close to it since the turn of the century. You turn it off, they've got the batteries, snack on a bag of GMOs while we toss the remnants in the ever-expanding dumpster of the human condition. We live in branded houses trademarked by corporations built on bipolar numbers, jumping up and down on digital displays, hypnotizing us into the biggest slumber mankind has ever seen. You have to dig pretty deep, kiddo, before you can find anything real. We live in a kingdom of bullshit, a kingdom you've lived in for far too long. So don't tell me about not being real. I'm no less real than the fucking beef patty in your Big Mac. As far as you're concerned Elliot? I am very real. The Sting (1973) -- "9/10" I watched Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid at the end of last year and, while it was decent, I kept thinking that the The Sting was the real Newman/Redford collaboration movie to watch. I had remembered correctly. This is the story of a young grifter, Redford as Johnny Hooker, who teams up with an old hand, Newman as Henry Gondorff. They both were friends with another grifter, who'd just retired before being murdered by Doyle Lonnigan, a big-shot gangster. They set up a glorious sting operation to take him for all he's worth. Cons within cons within cons, with people begging to have their money taken left and right. It's the 1930s and some things are easier because the world isn't as connected as it is today. I don't want to spoil the plot because it's really important that you be surprised by it, but rest assured that it holds together like almost no other grifter film -- Ocean's Eleven perhaps comes close; House of Games tried like hell but you could see that one coming a mile away. In this movie, you just don't know how Gondorff is going to escape or how Hooker is going to avoid turning him in to the Fibbies or whether he's really considering it or whether they're just operating at a totally different level. Probably the last one, right? Lovely soundtrack, excellent acting, good direction, a wonderful and well-executed story. An all-around good time. Highly recommended. Blindness (2008) -- "7/10" This movie is based on the book of the same name by Josè Saramago. It follows the plot of the book pretty closely, making only minor adjustments to the timing of plot points to make them occur at the same time or to accelerate the telling of the story. The story is of a man who is suddenly struck blind, seeing only a wash of milky whiteness. Others soon follow, as it becomes clear that the blindness is caused by a communicable disease. Soon enough, everyone has it and the city is filled only with the blind, All, save one lady -- the doctor's wife, played by Julianne Moore -- who is unaffected by the blindness, but not by its horrific effects (she lives in a world of blind people). The effects are as you can imagine, if you were to think about it: a city filled only with the newly blind, fumbling about, looking for food, looking for shelter, for a place to urinate or defecate. Before everyone has succumbed, the government ruthlessly quarantines the initial afflicted in a mental asylum. Food is delivered sporadically but relatively regularly. The place becomes nearly unbearably filthy. As more and more people arrive, an element finally arrives that understands that societal rules no longer apply. They take all the food for themselves, rationing it out to the others in exchange for the last of their worldly possessions. When those run out, they naturally demand that the other wards send their women. After several days, the women volunteer for this horrific duty, even the doctor's wife. Afterwards, though, she's had enough and takes a pair of scissors she found to kill the ringleader, threatening the remaining pirates that she will kill more if they don't give up. Another woman, traumatized by the rapes, finds a lighter and sets the pirates' den on fire, taking them all out. At the same time, the doctor's wife takes her small group outside to ask the soldiers for help. They are gone. There is no authority remaining. All is chaos and anarchy, with only the blind to fill the power vacuum. The small group escapes back to the city, the doctor's wife the only witness to the utter horror of the place, overrun by people who can no longer take care of themselves. They survive better than most, with the doctor's wife's sight helping them find food that others have missed. They return to the doctor's home and settle in for a somewhat better existence than they had in quarantine, but one still bereft of true hope. And then, just as quickly as it left, their sight returns. The end. Cowspiracy: The Sustainability Secret (2014) -- "7/10" The core message is important: animal agriculture accounts for over half of all greenhouse-gas emissions, a lot of that far more dangerous than CO₂, Unfortunately, I found the presentation to be very repetitive for the first hour or so. The actual information is pretty thin -- I just summarized it in the first sentence of this review -- and the same information is liberally sprinkled throughout several interviews. The presenter, Kip Anderson, is a bro-sounding, unshaved, baseball-hat--wearing dude who spends the first half an hour thinking there's a conspiracy because no-one wants to talk to him. I wouldn't want to talk to him, either. A lot of the people he did manage to interview were very interesting. But I don't trust him not to spin some of these interviews. E.g. when he finally got an interview with one of the larger environmental organizations, the NRDC, he drops in his U.N. report facts and then cuts the interview to make it look like the person was hiding something because she didn't just take his information at face value. When a conspiracy theorist asks: how could she/he/they not know? Why is no-one talking about it? ... a perfectly valid answer is: "because it's not true? Or not as important as you think it is?" The Markegaards were an interesting interview, but their views were kind of all over the map. On one hand, they said that areas that cannot sustain grass-fed cattle should not be eating beef. On the other, they think that their cattle have no carbon footprint. The dairy farmer was very honest about the insustainability of his business. Another guy talked about the sheer level of externalized costs in animal-based products. If those costs were internalized, then the now-cheap foods would be considerably less attractive and the corresponding environmental destruction would reduce naturally. A strong argument and one most likely to gain any traction, since an appeal to economy always trumps an appeal to morality. Michael Pollan was briefly interviewed to say that he thinks that the major environmental organizations don't talk about the impact of animal agriculture because they don't want to offend their members or big agriculture. Another person said they don't want to scare away people by promoting lifestyle changes. But these same organizations been assailing an even more powerful industry for decades -- Big Oil -- and promoting an even bigger lifestyle change: driving less. While it's an enticing argument, but there must be more to it. I wish they'd presented something to address that problem with the logic: why is Big Ag so much more powerful than Big Oil? Another guy talks about how it's against the Patriot Act to publicly talk in a way that affects Big Ag's profits. Is that true? A fact-check would have been nice. As well with the guy who says that environmental groups are the #1 terrorist threat, according to the FBI. Is that true? Show us the top-ten list. Kip claims several times that there are "almost 9 billion" people on Earth, but there were 7.13 billion people in 2013 and we're not expected to hit 9 billion until 2043. That's being needlessly fast and loose with information. I didn't like Kip because he wasn't very credible and seemed incapable of expressing himself eloquently (e.g. when an industry lobby agrees to talk to him, he points out that Greenpeace wouldn't talk to him and then notes sagely, "now that's saying something". What? What is it saying? Why do you keep talking about every refusal to talk to you as further evidence of conspiracy? When he talked to a couple of people who said he's in danger for even making this documentary, he takes the opportunity to reflect on what a bad-ass he is for not giving up. Barf. Is this how a mind raised on documentaries like Loose Change works? Stop intimating at monsters in the shadows and out with it. He eventually does -- or at least his interviewees do -- but his style detracted from the presentation and makes it hard for me to recommend this documentary heartily. Eddie Murphy: Delirious (1983) -- "6/10" Eddie Murphy's first stand-up special is still pretty good, but some of his material is too broad and, hence, dated. A lot of the introductory material broadsiding homosexuals ("faggots") isn't very funny and seems mean-spirited, but he excuses himself by saying he's just kidding. I'm sure the material killed at the time, but over 30 years later, it's dated, not timeless. We can excuse this lack of timelessness by the fact that Murphy was only 22 at the time, though. Taking that into account, you have to admire his poise and confidence. It's decent but nothing you have to see. Return to Algiers (2000) -- "5/10" This is an Italian documentary about the director of the Battle of Algiers, a great film about the revolution against French colonialism. He returned to Algiers to interview people on the street and in positions of power to ask them what had changed in the 30 years since the revolution he documented in that movie. It's a bit repetitive and not very interesting. Only one of the university students near the end had anything really interesting to say. You don't need to see this. Ted 2 (2015) -- "5/10" Mark Wahlberg and Seth McFarlane return as "Jawnny" (that's Johnny in a Boston accent) and Ted, a teddy bear come to life. Ted is married to Tamy-Lynn, who loves him despite his being a foul-mouthed teddy bear unable to reciprocate her sexual gifts. Giovanni Ribisi inexplicably returns as Donny (pronounced "Dawnny"), the guy who wants to kidnap Ted for his very own. [2] Patrick Warburton is back as their gay friend Guy and Michael Dorn is his husband Rick. [3] I have no idea what sort of bet Morgan Freeman lost to make him show up as an über-lawyer. Oh yeah, Mila Kunis was the clever one who bowed out. She was replaced as the love interest for Jawnny by Amanda Seifred, who was extremely good-natured and relatively good. [4] I wonder when McFarlane will have worn out his welcome with all of his friends and they'll stop taking part in his increasingly terrible movies. Thin story, thin dialogue, nothing like the first one, which at least had some great scenes. Not recommended. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] At first I wasn't sure how manipulated this inner monologue of his was, but it happened a lot. And you have to imagine that he signed off on the film, right? Or that he would have sued for misrepresentation? It's hard to imagine him seeing this and thinking that it puts him in a good light (i.e. "you see how mad she makes me? What I have to put up with?") [1] Inexplicable because why on Earth is Ribisi wasting his considerable talent on such a stupid, shallow role? [1] Dorn was clearly chosen so that they could make him dress up as a Klingon at the Comicon convention. Warburton went as "The Tick", naturally. [1] One of the few good jokes was when she asked whether she had "fuck-me eyes". Ted responded that she had "don't take my precious" eyes. It's funny because it's true. The joke would return a few more times. McFarlane never met a joke he couldn't tell ten times. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3210 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3210 Thu, 28 Jan 2016 13:29:06 +0100 -- "7/10" 2. "Tom Segura: Mostly Stories (2016)" <#Tom> -- "7/10" 3. "Lilya 4-Ever (2002)" <#Lilya> -- "9/10" 4. "Taxidermia (2006)" <#Taxidermia> -- "8/10" 5. "The Tenant (1976)" <#Tenant> -- "7/10" 6. "Straw Dogs (1971)" <#Straw> -- "5/10" 7. "Du rififi chez les hommes (1955)" <#Du> -- "8/10" 8. "Shame (2011)" <#Shame> -- "7/10" 9. "Vier Minuten (2006)" <#Vier> -- "7/10" These are my notes to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. I've recently transferred my reviews to IMDb and made "the list" of over 900 ratings publicly available. I've included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other -- I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood. YMMV. L'Arcano Incantatore (1996) -- "7/10" This is an Italian horror movie, steeped in Catholic myth and church rituals, about a man who dared approach Satan for help in becoming immortal. The first two conversations we see are with a man shrouded entirely in shadow and with a woman who hides behind a screen covered in pictures of owls -- we see her own eyes through the eyes of the largest owl. Spooky. The story feels similar to that of Dracula, where a young man travels by coach at night to his new employer, who lives alone in a castle, is very eccentric and doesn't like to be seen. The visuals are surprisingly good once we get to the old monastery where his new master lives. The old building is well-filmed to lend the impression that it's much bigger than it is. The rooms are small and coarsely finished -- they're entirely believable as 18th-century buildings but also look like a lot of old buildings in Europe in the 21st. The young man slowly learns about his predecessor and meets his new master. The similarities to Dracula continue: the master seems friendly at first but strange things are afoot. The young man sees two women standing in the field, near his predecessor's grave, along with a man. This is after the young man found instructions as to what to do with the body to "complete the task". Now I'm getting echoes of Umberto Eco (Foucault's Pendulum or The Name of the Rose) as the master dictates codes from his old books for the young man to note down and take as a missive to a mysterious woman. The young man and the old sorcerer become friends and the young man helps him out in all of his arcane and seemingly occult tasks, communicating with telepaths, covering the sorcerer's bed in ice and leaves, bleeding him, etc. He sees an apparition floating through the house and notes that his protective scar (given to him by owl-lady) has begun to bleed. The townsfolk swear that Nerio (his predecessor) isn't dead and haunts them still. The young man sees an apparition that looks like his master but he suspects it's Nerio's ghost. Following the plot of Dracula still, we next head to a disinterment. He carries the body to the church to make them bury it in consecrated ground -- but the nun and priest declare that it's not Nerio. They don't recognize the body, but it's missing a hand -- and so was the original Monsignore! And no-one has ever been allowed to see the old Monsignore. Has Nerio taken his master's place? This was much better than expected -- it was actually quite scary in some places. Very occult and pulls in stuff from everywhere. Cool ending. Saw it in Italian with English subtitles. Tom Segura: Mostly Stories (2016) -- "7/10" The title indicates his stand-up style: he tells stories, some good, some not so exciting, some with some really good lines and/or insight and a good baseline nastiness and others that meander nowhere. His first ten minutes is very strong, the middle bit was pretty good and then, like so many other comics I've watched recently, the final 10 minutes was just not as good as the rest and left me with a less favorable impression than I'd otherwise have had. Decent, but not worth raving about. Lilya 4-Ever (2002) -- "9/10" We join Lilya (16) on the cusp of a life-changing event. She lives in Estonia in a poor neighborhood, but not the poorest. It's bleak but bearable. How bleak? We see little Volodja (14) constantly playing basketball with a rolled-up aluminum can. Her joy at the news that her mother and boyfriend are moving to America quickly turns to misery when she realizes that she will not accompany them. Lilya is remanded to her aunt, who immediately moves her into a smaller, more squalid apartment. She makes the best of it and manages to forget her worries for at least one evening with friends. Her aunt soon puts a stop to that and breaks up their party. The new level of her existence segues to a scene at a club, where she's dancing with her friend, both there for the express purpose of prostituting themselves. Much of the film's emotion and story is delivered via Lilya's facial expressions. She's quite a good, young actress. While Lilya, though not without offers, backs out of their mission, her friend Natasha closes the deal. When Natasha's father finds the money, though, she says that it's Lilya's, that Lilya is the whore. The father makes Natasha "return" it to Lilya. Lilya throws it away, though. Life is spiraling downward. Her reputation is ruined in her neighborhood. Her electricity is cut off because her aunt isn't paying the bills, so she scrambles out to find the money she threw away. It's gone. She seeks out her aunt and finds that that she has moved -- to Lilya's old apartment. The woman is uncaring and unfeeling about Lilya's plight. Lilya's mother officially abandons her -- although the stilted language makes it seem as if wasn't she who'd written it, but her boyfriend. At any rate, Lilya spirals further downward. With no other choices, she heads to the club to fulfill the reputation she already has. It's awful. Well-filmed, not salaciously, but awful. Next, we see her shopping for food with a smile on her face. She still lives in the awful complex -- where there is so little to steal that the main entrance flaps open all the time -- but occasionally she now has money. This new, lower equilibrium doesn't last long, though. Soon after she meets Andrej, who wants to take her to Sweden with him, men from the neighborhood break into her apartment and rape her. There are tiny moments of fleeting happiness: she manages to buy Volodya a basketball, but it's soon broken by his vindictive father. Andrej moves forward with his plans, as promised: he finds her a job in Sweden and takes her with him. Andrej is kind, funny, good-looking -- and a bigger monster than any of the others because he gives her more hope, then dashes them even more, dropping her to the next level. Volodya is left behind, as her mother left her behind. Lilya still happily says her goodbyes to everyone she's leaving behind, along the lines of "see ya suckers". The weather changes to rain as we hear Andrej introduce a wrinkle in the plan: she'll be going alone and he'll follow in a couple of days. She smiles as she takes her first flight, with her first in-flight meal. In reality, Andrej is a recruiter for a pimp in Sweden and she's on the way to becoming a captive whore, her new passport and identity confiscated, locked in to the apartment to which she's initially taken. Volodya overdoses on the pills he found in her apartment (belonging to the old man who'd died there) and dies in the stairwell in front of Lilya's apartment. The many, many partners she has are shown in a montage, purely from Lilya's point of view. She rebels by cutting her hair -- ruining the product -- but the clients power on through and punish her all the more, becoming more rather than less aroused. What sort of uncivilized beast could possibly do that? What incredible power could drive a man to effect such horrors? How do you even get it up? Or does the horror of it help? The message is: humanity is lost, but worry not, neither was it worth saving. Lilya dreams and is visited by Volodya's spirit. She tells him that she wants to end it all. To him she says, Lilya: I've had it with this life. It's complete shit. Volodya: No, it's not. Lilya: Course it is. It's shit. Volodya: But it's the only one you've got. This life is the only one you've got. Lilya: I don't want this life. I'm not interested. You cannot disagree with her conclusion. Saw it in Russian with English subtitles. Taxidermia (2006) -- "8/10" This is a Hungarian semi-surrealist film with a nice visual language and nice pacing. It starts in the countryside, the plot crystallizing out of the mists. There is a young soldier who is quite inventive in his masturbation. There is his commanding officer, who barks at him, ordering him to explain all of his duties, by which we learn more of their situation. There are two lovely women bathing, and all of the chores associated with making sure they can bathe (collecting water, chopping firewood, etc.) Almost every scene is cut off in someway, to allow misinterpretation, almost every sound as well (heavy breathing), to be suggestive, lascivious, salacious, the world as viewed through the soldier's eyes. A simple and original story, very well-told. A farcical fable in the style of old Grimm, with no happy ending and no morality tale. The older man, the commanding officer, defines the whole world in terms of the female sex in his initial soliloquy. The younger man can think of nothing but sex, but can't get any -- he is eventually punished by summary execution for his violation of a bathtub of meat from a slaughtered pig that he fantasizes is the commander's wife. Next, we meet the wife, shortly after having given birth to a little boy. The son's tail is chopped off with pincers by his father. The next scene is at a competitive eating contest, where the son, now grown, is competing at a borscht-eating contest. This is followed by an emetic session, in which all contestants vomit rivers into a common bucket. The situation is presented as absolutely normal, as if eating competitions of this severity happen all the time, as if using canned air to force regurgitation is something that makes perfect sense in a world where competitive eating is on the verge of becoming an Olympic sport, where they talk about consistency and lubrication in the food for different stages. We see two guys vying for the charms of the same woman. One wins her hand while the other plants his seed in her outside of their wedding reception. Once again, this family has a generation of uncertain, illegitimate provenance. The world of competitive eating is continuously expanded to make it seem so realistic that I'm almost ready to ask Wikipedia if it's real. What a terrible concept, but so wonderfully and ironically realized -- they really sell it. Years later and the latest illegitimate son is a taxidermist, responsible for purchasing food for his father, who is gigantically bloated and training competitive-eating cats. You read that correctly. The satire really goes off the rails. They argue and the son abandons the father to his fate. The fate turns out to be getting partially eaten by his cats. The son stuffs them all. I'm not even sure what's going on in the son's lab, but there are long minutes of really well-filmed machines and organs and needles and contraptions and preparations of some sort. It appears that the son eviscerates and stuffs himself, despair-ridden for having killed his father? Hard to recommend, but a well-made film about an entirely original idea. Saw it in Hungarian with English subtitles. The Tenant (1976) -- "7/10" Roman Polanski wrote, directed and starred in this movie about a mysterious man who applies for an apartment recently vacated by a woman who attempted suicide by jumping out a window from it. He visits her in the hospital -- presumably to get an idea of how likely she is to survive her wounds -- where he meets her friend Stella, played by the lovely Isabelle Adjani. They hit it off more or less, going to a Bruce Lee movie (Enter the Dragon) and started to make out before being stared down by another mysterious man. He gets the apartment and moves in. It is a furnished apartment and still has the previous tenant's stuff in it. The apartment has a lovely view through the window of the common toilet at the other end of the two-winged building. His housewarming party is far too noisy for his neighbors and they aren't shy about letting him know it. [1] When he takes out the trash, his bag leaks fruit rinds all the way down the steps -- quite comically, actually -- but when he immediately returns with a garbage can to clean up, it's already all gone. His friends are not very sympathetic to his neighbor's wishes, nor are they very sympathetic in general. I saw this in English, and in a badly synced version, but I'm almost certain the original was in English. [2] That means that his American-sounding friends really were such assholes. Well, at the time, we may have called them "boorish" -- but they're just assholes. Things continue to get stranger and stranger, just a bit, well, off. When he is robbed, the neighbors chastise him for the noise. But his landlord tells him not to go to the police, which is also odd. This also starts to take a toll on Trelkovsky. He descends into madness, seeing murderers everywhere, even seeing himself in the wing across the way, spying on himself. He sees his predecessor, all swaddled like a mummy in the bathroom -- she was in a full-body cast when he last saw her in the hospital plus she was an Egyptologist. He becomes quite delusional and makes up theories about what his neighbors really want. They claim they want quiet, but he knows better: they want to turn him into his predecessor and make him kill himself. He sees plots and conspirators everywhere. he dresses up as his predecessor. Is he channeling a ghost? Or perhaps just Anthony Perkins from Psycho. At any rate, he's mystified as to his appearance when he wakes. He discovers that he's torn out his own tooth to match the one he found in a hole in the wall in an earlier scene and which he surmises came from his predecessor, but he blames the extraction on "them" (his neighbors). He finally breaks down completely, tearing apart his apartment and fleeing to Stella's apartment. She comforts him and lets him sleep over, but leaves him to go to work. He sees his neighbors everywhere, still, seeing his landlord in a random visitor who knocks on her door, seeing them in her photo albums. In a fit of pique, he destroys her apartment, then flees. It's an interesting thriller, if a bit meandering and long in the buildup and Polasnki is alone in many scenes that feel like repeats, but without meaning. The end is quite good, with him repeating his predecessor's swan dive while still firmly in the grips of his delusions. Who jumps twice?!? A satire on how neighbors can drive you crazy. Echoes of the disintegration of psyche undergone by Jack Nicholson in The Shining. Saw it in English. Straw Dogs (1971) -- "5/10" This is the original film, starring Dustin Hoffman and Susan George, not the remake from 2011 starring James Marsden and Kate Sumner. This one was directed by Sam Peckinpah and actually feels like a Western set in England. Everyone in the town is a criminal bordering on insane and can only think of rape (more or less). The setup is not subtle. "Where do you want it, Amy? ... Put it wherever you want." Soooo suggestive. All the ladies walking lasciviously -- I think one is a minor? This script has no subtlety whatsoever. For example, the main couple go from making sweet love one night -- observed salaciously by a young couple, looking through the window -- to her crying desperately for attention while he's trying to finish his work, leading to her bursting into tears. Did Tolstoy write this? All of the other men are characterized as rutting idiots. The Country Boys are utterly blithering. The husband, on the other hand, is constantly portrayed as effiminate or soft: he wears the same shoes she does, he wears sweaters, sometimes draped over his shoulders, he sits in a child's swing to work, he doesn't know which side of the car to drive from, he's got glasses. They all know how weak he is, they want the pretty girl he has. They will take her from his soft, weak hands. Peckinpah clearly thinks he's being subtle, but he's not. When David and Amy find their cat strangled and swinging from a noose in their closet, she wants to flee, knowing it was the workers that did it to "prove that they can get into [his] bedroom at any time". He doesn't want to leave but is also reluctant to accuse them of having killed the cat. He tries, but it kind of backfires and they take advantage of his lack of self-confidence. They invite him to go hunting, but that means that they won't be working on the garage nor have they been accused of killing the cat. Amy loses confidence in him as the men go back outside, giggling and laughing and hooting like idiots. They end up taking him on a snipe hunt, holding a sack, waiting for game to run into it as the "flush it out, sir". Hoot, hoot, hoot. Charlie circles around and goes to visit Amy while David is in the field. She lets him in, knowing he killed her cat, then kisses him and asks him to leave while kissing him again, then he takes what he's wanted the whole movie. But WTF why did she let him in? It's like the movie wants to make it her own damned fault for answering the door in a bathrobe -- and then liking her own rape, at least kinda. This is super-creepy. "Amy, I don't want to reave you, but I will." I have no idea what Peckinpah is trying to say about sexuality, but it can't be anything good. After the rape, he says "Sorry, Amy" and she says "Hold me." I cannot believe for a second that this is based on anything other than rutting male fantasy. While they're lying on the couch, entwined, Charlie and Amy are interrupted by his compatriot, who, of course, wants a taste. And a taste he will have, as Charlie holds her down for him. Now its's rape, I guess? Or maybe with the next guy? Is it ever rape? So anyway there's a church party with the whole town and Henry Niles (apparently a molester of some sort?) is tempted off by a young girl, Janice, daughter of the alcoholic town patriarch. The gang gives chase but can't find him. He seems to choke her to death, perhaps by accident. The posse ends up at the pub, downing one shot of whiskey after another. David and Amy drive home and hit Henry on the way home. They take him to their house and call the pub for a doctor. The posse ends up at their house -- ton of rape-y elephants in the room here -- all remain unaddressed. They try to get David to leave to find a doctor so they can have another go at Amy. Amy stands mute. David tries to stand his ground: "This is my house". It seems to work, at least temporarily. Then the patriarch tries to break into their house with his gang. He tries all the doors and surprise, surprise, the windows are next. It's kind of farcical...I'm not getting the sense of menace I would have expected. The story is pretty muddled and it's not clear where everyone's motivation comes from. They seem so passionate and angry but it's not clear why they hate him so much. Maybe no reason? Maybe the point is that it could happen to anyone? Because such violence is utterly unpredictable? Somewhere during the attack, Amy switches sides and wants to throw Henry to the dogs to save her own skin. David still wants to defend the home. To do so, he becomes the same kind of animal as they. He threatens her with death to make him help her. She's still kind of confused about who she wants to defend. She kind of hates him? The rape is seemingly forgotten (even though there's almost a repeat). Minus one star for being unconvincing. Plus one star for the last twenty minutes and Hoffman's plucky performance as an action star. Du rififi chez les hommes (1955) -- "8/10" Three Parisians plan and execute a jewel heist. Tony is fresh out of prison and his old friends Jo [3] and Mario barely wait a day to invite him to do a smash-and-grab on a jewelry store. He turns them down but, after discovering his former lover (Mado) has taken up with a local gangster (Grutter) -- and after proudly having made her strip and then beaten her brutally for it -- he raises their offer to take the whole contents of the safe rather than just grabbing what they can from a window. We see them planning it out, figuring out how to get around the vibration-sensitive alarm system, how to get into the store, how to get to the safe, etc. The execution is largely in near-silence because they have to be careful not to trigger the alarm before they can empty a fire extinguisher in it to keep it silent. They carefully widen a hole in the ceiling of the jewelry store while catching detritus in an umbrella, all the while staying painfully silent. The minutes tick by. The hours tick by. It takes them three hours to get through the ceiling, get to the safe and tip it down on its face (quite cleverly by using different-sized chocks until it's been levered nearly to the ground). They drill from the back, ignoring the lock on the front, but it takes 3 hours to drill the holes in the back on which they mount a sort of manual router that lets them dig a circle in the metal, which takes another hour. Finally, they take their jewelry through the hole and make off seemingly scot-free. However, someone discovers that Cesar has given his girl a ring that he swiped and Grutter gets wind of it, quickly concluding that Tony and his gang were involved. They get Cesar and Mario (and his wife, Ida) and pressure them into getting the gang to give up the jewels. Mario and Ida are martyred for the cause. Jo, however, was already in London and had arranged to fence them. Tony goes to Mado -- who has since left Grutter but who is definitely not going to back to Tony, not surprising considering the scars he left her with -- and asks her to help him find Grutter. She tells him to go piss up a rope and hopes that all the rest of his friends would be killed as well. Tony finds Cesar and kills him for having ratted out Mario and the gang. They get their money from the fence -- FF120 million -- and Tony takes off to get Jo's kidnapped kid back before Jo can cave in and give Grutter the money. Tony rescues Jo's son, but Jo panics first and takes off with all of the money (not just his share). Poor Tony is left to clean up yet another mess. But he's too late: Grutter takes the money and kills Jo for good measure, then gut-shoots Tony from cover. Tony recovers quickly enough to kill Grutter before he can escape with the loot, but he's grievously wounded. [4] It's a nice heist film, with good acting, good music, a good story and lovely, lovely sets (apparently filmed on-site). It's a movie of its time and its not timeless -- the dialogue is a bit slow and the shots are very static. It's black and white, which is OK, but the print isn't very clean. Paris in the 50s, though, ... looks exactly the same as now. [5] The ensemble shots are nice, but also tend to be straight on. Saw it in French and Italian with spotty English subtitles. Shame (2011) -- "7/10" Brandon (Michael Fassbender) lives alone in New York City. He hates clothes. No, wait, he's addicted to sex. He doesn't wear clothes in his apartment. He hires prostitutes to sate himself. The first few scenes are bleak and repetitive, to highlight his addiction. The sound of the blinds going up signals a new, bleak day and reminds me of the sounds of drugs being taken in Requiem for a Dream, where the effect was similar. Brandon flirts with a woman on the train and we're sad for both of them: he does it because he has to and she does it because she's interested in distraction. When she stands, we see she's married and, from the new angle, older than we initially thought. He gives chase, because his addiction doesn't care. He's compelled to masturbate whenever he can: in the shower, even at work. He obsessively watches porn on his laptop. After a night out with his boss, who's also on the prowl but not as obsessively, and after taking the girl his boss was pursuing up against a sculpture, he gets home to discover that his sister has moved in with him. She's not at all uncomfortable with nudity in front of him, is very touchy-feely and hangs around the house in a skimpy large T-shirt/nightgown. The juxtaposition with his lifestyle is jarring, because you wonder whether he's capable of turning it off for her or if he's constantly suppressing horrific thoughts. This whole situation gets more complicated when she hooks up with his boss in his own bedroom, then tries to join him in bed much later, claiming that she's cold. Next we see Brandon on a date with a coworker, but he's terrible at it. He's a hollow man with no opinions and little personality -- emphasized by how he just takes every single suggestion that the waiter makes. The date goes nowhere, he goes home to take care of business himself, gets caught by his sister, attacks her, spirals downward, realizes he has a problem and disposes of an unholy crap-ton of pornography. It's an utter miracle/not really believable that his roommate/sister hadn't discovered any of it. It's not like she isn't a snooper. He has an argument with his sister when he tries to throw her out, storms out and gets self-destructive, hitting on a girl hard, then telling her boyfriend about it. Boyfriend plays his role perfectly and beats him up outside the bar. Brandon ends up at a gay bar/hookup joint for a quick, anonymous beej. He drifts from there to a three-way with two prostitutes, where we see him as a the addict he is, mechanically pursuing his high with no real joy evident in his face. Empty. He goes through a come-to-Jesus moment when his sister attempts suicide, but the ending leaves it unclear as to whether this has saved him. Nice to see Steve McQueen (director) not shy away from showing Fassbender in full frontal nudity, because it's totally appropriate for this film. Fassbender is a very versatile actor and is really good in this role (as usual). Vier Minuten (2006) -- "7/10" We see an older woman having a piano delivered to the prison where she will give lessons, where she has apparently worked for years. We see flashbacks of her involvement over the decades, from when she was a young girl during WWII. She interviews potential students, all save one of whom are terrible. The last is very talented, but an absolute loose cannon. She is told she cannot even interview and she flips out, beating the guard into the hospital and then playing some highly improvisational jazz before the other guards can break the door down and take her into custody. The piano teacher visits her in the asylum and tells her that she finds her despicable but that she will help her become a better piano player because she has a gift. There is a price, though. The old lady is a hard-ass, a control freak. A talented and immensely knowledgeable teacher, but still a very non-sympathetic person. And she gives absolutely zero fucks for Jenny's back story, why she's so angry or why she went so wrong. Plus, she only allows classical because everything with a bit more of a modern feel to it is "Neggermusik". They come to an agreement, with Krüger (the teacher) in charge and Jenny following all of her rules, playing absolutely beautifully. She damages her hand punching a mirror before her first contest. They take Jenny to a hospital, where she tries to escape, then kill herself by jumping through a 3rd-floor window, but it's safety glass and it comically knocks her out instead. Jenny confides details of her life to Krüger and we see a montage of them seeming to come to terms and even laughing. The man she beat (Mütze), though, he's to be on a TV show answering questions about music -- a game he's played with Krüger for years. He's disappointed though as its not really about the music -- more about superficial musical trivia -- so he loses, though he was ready like no other. He still seeks revenge for the brutal beating Jenny gave him. He arranges to have her transferred to a cell with her three greatest enemies, where she can hardly sleep. Despite all these obstacles, Jenny wins her way to the final round. Her friendship with Krüger deepens. Frau Krüger demands to see her file, then digs it out of the archive herself. She doesn't show up for the next lesson. Mütze does, but won't unlock the piano for Jenny to practice. We hear more about Krüger's past, She describes an American air attack on a German hospital as a "terror attack", which it most certainly was. Krüger talks to Jenny's father, who tells her about the whole sordid story: the murder for which Jenny was convicted was committed by the loser who got her pregnant and Jenny was protecting him. She confessed to the court that her father had raped her and that was why she did it, but her father lied and buried his own crime, condemning her to prison for life. Next Jenny's attacked by her cellmates, who set her hands on fire, all deliberately ignored by Mütze, who set it up as revenge against her. Jenny gets free and beats one of the other girls bloody with a candlestick. The warden decides to cancel Jenny's furlough for the contest. Krüger confronts Mütze, who admits his involvement but can't admit it because he'll lose his job. Everyone in this movie is flawed and selfish, each in their own ways and to varying degrees. Mütze helps Jenny escape with Krüger so that she can play in the contest. The people and relationships are complicated and the presentation poignant. Saw it in German. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] There are overtones of racial/cultural discrimination here, though (e.g. people several times tell Trelkovsky that he's not French -- presumably because of his name and his nose -- and he has to remind them that he is a French citizen). [1] But French would have felt less forced (also the original soundtrack was in mono, so that detracted somewhat). After writing this, I found the following in the "production notes" , which explained the soundtrack issue. "The film was shot part in English, part in French, going by whatever the actors present felt more comfortable with. [...] the rest of the French characters were notably dubbed by actors with audibly US American accents. [...] Especially the English version is notorious for poor audio quality where during both the initial shoot and the dubbing, voices were recorded at vastly different levels. Even the bare-bones 2004 DVD release [...] has monaural sound for both the English and the French version. Modern reviews differ as to whether the audible American accents and the poor audio quality in the English version distract from the French setting and destroy the illusion, or add to the film's creepy surreal atmosphere." [1] He's played by an Austrian (Carl Möhner), his character's last name is le Suedois (The Swede) and he's the spitting image of Paul Walker from certain angles. [1] This is clearly a heist/tragedy. I was struck by how Tarantino makes seemingly only homages, but to really high-quality films -- Rififi reminded me a lot of Reservoir Dogs. [1] What an immediately recognizable city Paris is: you certainly couldn't film in Vancouver and claim it was Paris. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3196 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3196 Fri, 22 Jan 2016 07:34:26 +0100 -- "3/10" 2. "Come and See (Idi i Smotri) (1985)" <#Come> -- "9/10" 3. "Place Beyond the Pines (2015)" <#Place> -- "5/10" 4. "Lovelace (2013)" <#Lovelace> -- "7/10" 5. "Bad Lieutenant (1992)" <#Bad> -- "7/10" 6. "The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call -- New Orleans (2009)" <#Bad2> -- "8/10" 7. "The Holy Mountain (1973)" <#Holy> -- "7/10" 8. "Tetsuo, the Iron Man (1989)" <#Tetsuo> -- "6/10" 9. "House of Games (1987)" <#House> -- "6/10" 10. "Repulsion (1965)" <#Repulsion> -- "7/10" These are my notes to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. I've recently transferred my reviews to IMDb and made "the list" of over 900 ratings publicly available. I've included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other -- I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood. YMMV. Men Behind the Sun (1988) -- "3/10" This is the story of a Japanese biological-weapons experimental camp/base. This is a film like Saló, that tells of the horrors of WWII. Like that other film, it's just not very well-made. It straddles the line between documentary and drama somewhat awkwardly, including factual elements but mixing in ham-handed dramatic elements that don't fit very well. The experiments that the Japanese performed on the Chinese are frankly nearly unbelievable. However, with the recent half-assed apology that Japan made for the systematic rape machine they built with hundreds of thousands of Korean "comfort girls", it's much more believable that they would do clearly idiotic and highly immoral experiments on "foreigners". The story is a terrible one and the information worthwhile, but it doesn't make the movie worth watching, unfortunately. Saw it in dubbed English, which made it even worse and it was a relatively poor print (not sure if that's just how it is). Come and See (Idi i Smotri) (1985) -- "9/10" The film starts with two boys searching a beach in 1943 Russia, searching for rifles on an old battleground, so that they can enlist and fight for the Soviet Army. The older of the two Flyora finds a whole rifle and this is sufficient to allow him to enlist, much to his mother's plaintive chagrin. Flyora gets to the army camp, but is abandoned when the regiment pulls off to fight. He befriends the similarly abandoned girlfriend of the commander and they suffer an ensuing attack on the emplacement together. This movie places no shine on war or heroism, instead pointing out the futility of war and battle as Flyora is accepted in the military purely as cannon fodder and then abandoned just as quickly when a more experienced soldier needs his boots. Both Flyora and the young woman are nearly deafened by a subsequent attack. After the confusion, he builds a lean-to out of pine boughs to hide them until they can flee back to his village. The next morning, though, the attacking soldiers have moved on and they play in the rain, bathing and dancing, escaping from the horror of the attack. Back in his village, though, everyone is gone and they find only the flies and waste and rot of an abandoned village. The constant buzzing of flies belies the truth, but Flyora runs off claiming to know where they've all gone. Glasha (the girl) looks back and sees the pile of corpses piled up behind one of the larger buildings. She follows him through muck and mud to "the island" though she knows the truth, but cannot bring herself to tell him. They find what remains of the village's population, but Flyora's family is not among them. In a surreal sequence, four of the survivors (including Flyora) detach from the village refugee camp to rob a warehouse. They carry with them an effigy of an SS soldier, carrying it a ridiculously long way before setting it up to "guard" a crossing. Their travels thereafter are fraught with dumb peril -- they are bombed, they stumble into a minefield, people die, their contingent of four is reduced to two. It is war, senseless and brutal, with the remaining soldier and Flyora taking their laughs where they can, often from a dark place. In a long sequence, first his companion and then a cow they've stolen are killed by the encroaching Germans. Flyora wakes in the field alive, and encounters a farmer who will help hide him from the omnipresent Germans. Not only can he not bring the dead cow to his villagers, he's now swept into a different town, robbed of his barely-there soldier identity and given a new family, to hide him. Flyora looks on in horror as he watches helplessly from among his new family as the Germans invade his newly adopted village -- much as they must have invaded his own before slaughtering everyone that they could catch. The blind horror and uncaring coldness of a country at war is infinitely less harsh than the deliberate brutality of the occupying force. And Flyora watches everything with wide-eyed horror. This movie is also about the horrors of WWII, but rendered much better than Saló or Men Behind the Sun. It's a bit slow at times, but the artistry is better and the pathos of war is no less horrible for being more subtly portrayed. Or perhaps more realistically: the former (Saló) felt too staged and ludicrous -- it was a bad metaphor -- and the latter (Men Behind the Sun) was more realistic, but so badly done as to seem campy. This film also has its campy moments -- especially during the scenes of excess near the end -- but it's understandable and in the context of a well-rendered, ongoing horror. It feels real, not staged, like it could have happened. After a truly horrific scene of pillage from which no-one -- attacker or attacked -- emerged unscathed, things become increasingly surreal and Flyora's impending madness colors everything. The Germans have themselves been ambushed and the destruction continues. As the Russians consider what to do with 11 German soldiers and collaborators that they rounded up, the translator looks directly into the camera and translates, "With the children it starts all over again. You have no right to exist. Not every people has the right to a future." [1] Recommended. Reminded me of a bit of Schindler's List, but perhaps more comparable to Apocalypse Now. It is better than either of them at depicting war, where you can feel the living envying the dead. Saw it in Russian and German with English subtitles. Place Beyond the Pines (2015) -- "5/10" The first hour of this movie deals with the two-bit life of Luke, a stunt-bike rider with nary any brains in his head who falls for his baby-mama and, despite all her protestations, tries to provide for his son. This goes all kinds of wrong -- predictably, because he's really a HUGE dumbass -- ands up with him out on bail for assault on her live-in partner. He has also hit upon the idea of robbing banks to provide for his son, using his mad motorbike skills and decides to do one big blowout double bank-robbery to really show the world that it should have loved him better. He does everything wrong, forgetting his mask, getting a flat tire, crashing into a car, taking hostages, etc. I can't decide whether Ryan Gosling is terrible here, or just very good at playing a terrible moron. Act I ends with him playing a very dead moron. In the second act, we meet Avery, a young cop played by Bradley Cooper, and the one responsible for Luke's condition at the end of Act I. He is in the hospital because he was shot by Luke after he surprised him and shot him out the window. Of course, all the shooting could have been avoided if he hadn't stormed the house alone, even though he knew only the suspect was in the house anymore. But that's not how the police roll, I guess. Anyway, he's a hero because he killed a bank robber and got shot in the process. Then he gets interviewed by an investigator -- because a man was killed. Next, we are introduced to Ray Liotta, who is in 100% slimeball mode as a fellow officer, DeLuca. He and his buddies show up to take Avery on a search to find the money that Luke stole and gave to his son. They force their way into the house without a warrant, find the money and "confiscate it". They give the money to Avery because "he's a hero" but he tries to give it back, then finally turns it in to the police chief, who yells at him for ratting out his fellow officers. Now we're talking about a police-corruption movie. He goes to the DA next, who tells him he's "too smart for [his] own good." But that's not the impression that Avery makes: instead it's that everyone else around him is so bone-stupid. Act III continues many years later with Avery running for DA and his son a teenager. Apparently nothing happened as a result of him having ratted out the whole police department 15 years ago. So this isn't a bank-robber movie, about a sad-sack who can't get his life together, and it's not the police-revenge and cleanup movie (well, the arrests are almost anticlimactic) and now it's a movie about him reconciling with his son? The looseness of the plot feels almost like Terence Malick wrote and directed this. Also, only the kids look 15 years older. Nope, Act III is about Luke's son and Avery's son becoming friends. Neither of them sounds like they come from upstate New York, not even close. They make friends, they break up, Avery's son uses Luke's son for drugs, Luke finds out who his dad is, challenges him, nearly breaks Avery's son's fist with his face. I'm not really invested in any of these characters. Michelle Rodriguez is utterly wasted by having her make sad, wrinkle-faced looks for the whole movie. She's not the only one: pretty much the whole cast was wasted. Never cared about any of the characters. Not recommended. Lovelace (2013) -- "7/10" This is a biography of Linda Lovelace (Amanda Seyfried), the original porn star from the 1970s breakout film, Deep Throat. She's a bit of a lost soul, a young girl who moves with her parents to California because she'd gotten pregnant and had to give up the baby. She meets Chuck Traynor (Peter Sarsgaard), who sweeps her off her feet and they get married. They quickly run into money problems and Chuck comes up with the brilliant idea of trying her out for movies -- but she doesn't know what kind of movies. As in the real biography, her husband Chuck very quickly shows himself to be the worst guy she knows -- the other guys on the film seem much nicer. He was absolutely horrible to her, though, after the brief initial courtship: he was the prototypical abusive and manipulative husband who pimped out his wife. It's told quite well by showing the rosy side of the movie production -- where everything goes pretty well, with a few problems, but nothing big. Next, we see her six years later taking a lie-detector test for the publisher of her tell-all biography and we see the same story shown again, but darker, with Skarsgaard showing Traynor's evil side very well and how terrified she was the whole time. Everything she does makes him mad -- he seems to hate her and punishes her for every little thing. He also rents her out for gang-bangs -- definitely husband of the year. The cast is great: Bobby Cannavale and Hank Azaria as porn producers, Sharon Stone and Robert Patrick as Linda's parents and James Franco as Hugh Hefner. It's a semi-biographical movie about the life and times of a porn star, set in the 70s, and that's what you're going to get. Bad Lieutenant (1992) -- "7/10" Harvey Keitel plays a bad human being. He's a lieutenant in the NYPD, but really he's a receptacle for every form of drug he can find. Half an hour in and he hasn't been in his right mind yet. He's also involved in three-ways and pretty deep into gambling with money that he doesn't have. His job is mostly incidental. The first case we see him working on is investigating the rape of a nun. He visits the hospital and spends a few long seconds leering in at her naked body as she lies waiting for the investigation to be completed. Next up is a couple of girls who he stops for a broken taillight. This escalates into a "payoff" for their transgression, which is terrible but not as bad as I expected it to be. He ends up humiliating them so that he can pleasure himself, right out in the middle of the street. He continues drinking, then ends up at the church where the nurse was raped. He stumbles through the crime scene, then passes out in the church, waking up when the police crime-scene photographer pops his flashbulb (not phrasing). The next scene defines him completely: he's in traffic, driving, snorting cocaine, swigging vodka (or grain alcohol, for all I know), listening to the World Series game on which he's bet $15,000 that he doesn't have, listening as Darryl Strawberry hits into a double play. He shoots out his radio, then starts his siren to mask it and weaves off into traffic, crying, swearing and out of his mind on drugs and booze, siren blaring and swearing to double down on the next game. It's ironic that he's always listening to the game when Strawberry's up to bat -- a player who had a lot of trouble with cocaine, just like the bad lieutenant. He needs money, though, so he picks up the money he's owed for evidence he stole and heads off into a stuperous night, drawing his gun on children when they come crashing up stairs he's heading down. Disaster averted. I like the baseball game playing in the background as the thread that ties the movie together. Harvey Keitel is very good. The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call -- New Orleans (2009) -- "8/10" Nicolas Cage and Val Kilmer are partners, cops, in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. They both start off as assholes, laughing at a prisoner trapped by the rising water, making guesses on how long he'll last. Cage dives into the water to rescue the guy, injuring his back in the process. Six months later, he's addicted to Vicodin and sundry related narcotics. This movie is immediately sadder than Bad Lieutenant -- the poem by one of the slain young girls at the first crime scene, about a fish kept in a water glass for lack of a bowl, is heartrending. Director Werner Herzog is already threading his special touch through the film -- there is a water moccasin in the first scene and now a fish features in the second. Reptiles and fish feature throughout. The major points roughly follow those of the Harvey Keitel version: investigation of crime scene, snorting cocaine off the hand outside, etc. The scene in the parking lot where he stops the young couple could be compared to the one where Keitel stops the two young ladies in the stolen car. Except this is even darker because the girlfriend then switches out and willingly takes on the Lieutenant in the parking lot while her boyfriend is forced at gunpoint to watch. The way Cage mutters dirty talk to himself is the same as Keitel, though. This, though he has Eva Mendes at home -- although she seems to "entertain" clients of her own, so it's probably a footrace to see who's going to give who STDs first. We see McDonagh (Cage) go through his day, scoring drugs, taking witnesses and trying to fix tickets, then hooking up with an old cop friend (Fairuza Balk) who can hook him up with even more dope from the property room. Their introduction is accompanied by an alligator that we see eying a corpse from the highway accident she was investigating. Next, in the stakeout, there are two iguanas on the coffee table in the foreground that are just bugging McDonagh the fuck out. Things keep getting better for him, with his gambling debts piling up and his pimping of Eva Mendes becoming his only source of income. Where Bad Lieutenant is a more stylized and nearly plotless mood piece about a corrupt cop, this movie has more meat on its bones plot-wise, although Cage's overacting sometimes threatens to throw it off the rails. That Xzibit as "Big Fate" comes off as decent and nuanced says quite a lot, I think. It's a decent crime drama with a lot of interconnected twists and turns and schemes -- almost like Mamet wrote it. Careering toward the end and all at once, everything comes up roses for McDonagh -- and he doesn't even know why. The film ends where it began: he meets the prisoner whom he'd rescued and he offers to help McDonagh finally break his addiction. They end up in an aquarium together, sharks and large fish rounding out the film's menagerie and Cage chuckling, probably at an answer to the question he'd posed, taken from the little girl's poem, "do fish have dreams?" The Holy Mountain (1973) -- "7/10" This is an absolute surrealistic drug dream. The sets are impressive: elaborate and original. The acting is pretty terrible and there is little to no dialogue to speak of. The music, while appropriate, is nothing special. The film supposedly has something to say about materialist, consumerist culture. There is so much left up to interpretation that it can only be enjoyed for the visuals, which are, as I said, quite good. There are animals everywhere (a stork, a hippo, lizards and toads, etc.). [2] It also reminded me a bit of El Topo but with better production values. Such a loosely defined movie, filled to the brim with symbols can only be a mirror -- a film from which the viewer finds and takes what he or she wants. No wonder this reminds me of El Topo: it's the same director, Alejandro Jodorowsky. The first act involves a Christ-like figure who ascends to the top of the Alchemist's tower. The second act is almost a separate movie, with the Alchemist taking the Christ-like figure on a tour of several materialists, each with their own story and lush details. This part is accompanied by a voice-over as well, thankfully with each materialist taking care of their own, which is worlds better than Jodorowsky's terrible accent. My favorite so far is Sel, who towers above all of her tiny, old, factory workers as they produce war toys. There are some really nice visual moments -- the nicest so far is when the seven materialists plus the Alchemist, his assistant and the Thief all file into a room that looks like an eye, filmed from above. With the alchemist's tower and the Pantheon Bar, Jodorowsky plays with inner space that is vaster than the appearance of the outer building, much like the Tardis in Doctor Who. The imagery as the travelers climb up the Holy Mountain is lush and hallucinatory, like Fellini or Buñuel, with much blood and nudity, but also a man inexplicably covered in tarantulas. There's also a Don Quixote-like man with lactating breasts made of jaguar heads and a beard that covers only half of his thin face. And always the seemingly normal, pretty prostitute with the chimpanzee from the first act follows, though snow and storm. Visuals aside, the plot and dialogue and voice-overs are pretty hackneyed. For example, "concentrate on this starfish. When you see the size of an elephant, you will never miss the target." Definitely something lost in translation there, but probably less a translation from Spanish to English and more one from the psychedelic, astral plane where this thought made perfect sense to our own, more prosaic world. It would be unbearably pretentious if it wasn't so earnest and innocent. Plus a few stars for scope and vision and sheer number of ideas and amount of work that went into it. The second half is much better than the first. At the very end, he reveals that he was playing a joke on us all along -- that for those who took all the symbolism so seriously, "We are images, dreams, photographs. We must not stay here. Prisoners! We shall break the illusion. This is magic! Goodbye to the Holy Mountain. Real life awaits us." Tetsuo, the Iron Man (1989) -- "6/10" This is a black-and-white, low-budget, quick-cut, industrial, techno, Japanese, dialogue-free movie about metal fetishism? The first scene shows a man surrounded by metal -- nicely filmed, actually -- who is obsessed with laying metal into his body (in the most gruesome manner). His wound festers, he runs outside and is hit by car. His demise (or not?) leads to him getting the power to haunt others and infect bodies with metal, including the businessman who hit him. The metal fetishist is also still around somewhere, somehow, but where he is isn't clear -- it's only clear that it looks cool, the way they show his thin back, covered in metal, trapped in a welder's paradise. It is certainly unlike anything I've ever seen. Perhaps it's best described as what Cronenberg would do with metal if he weren't so obsessed with biology. But the camera angles and cuts are much bolder than David's more staid and measured ones. I can't believe how good the metal suit looks. The movie's from 1989, so the old phone, the old TV, the black-and-white film, it all lends the movie an old-school Japanese horror-flick look. It doesn't all work, but a lot of it -- enough of it -- does. Don't skip out before the reversed-gender metallic-tentacle--rape scene. I know it sounds awful, but it's really well-done. It's campy, but combined with enough cinema chops to make it good rather than cheesy (IMHO). I was very skeptical at first, but then enjoyed very much trying to keep up -- the aesthetic and driving soundtrack -- and, honestly, the one-hour length, which could have been good even at 1/2-hour -- combined to make an interesting film that I would actually watch again. Recommended for horror/cult/steampunk/thriller fans. Saw it in Japanese with English subtitles (about ten words or so, starting with "Stop!"). Minus one star because it goes on a bit too long. House of Games (1987) -- "6/10" It's 1987 so everyone wears a terrible-looking blazer and smokes all the time, including the female lead, who also sports a very 80s short haircut. David Mamet's direction is slow (careful?). It's a decent flick about cons, both short and long, starring Joe Mantegna as the main con-man and the utterly terrible and unexciting Lindsay Crouse as the lead mark, who Mamet has written as almost a little too oblivious. Perhaps that's just because I figured it out pretty early. Card sharp Ricky Jay is also in the group. Crouse is really a terrible actress, and her mannish looks are totally throwing me off, especially when combined with her botoxed acting skills and the seemingly deliberately terrible wardrobe. The con is pretty interesting, but it takes too long, it's filmed very statically and in a pretty boring manner. The foreshadowing for her "cracking out of turn" was pretty good. [3] Not recommended, though. Repulsion (1965) -- "7/10" Roman Polanski directs this black-and-white film about a beautiful young French woman Carol (Catherine Deneuve) living and working in London. She's very shy, lives with her sister and fends off advances right and left. All of the men so far are Lotharios. One is particularly persistent, hitting on her and not taking no for an answer until she kinda/sorta/but not really agrees to dinner. Another is her sister's boyfriend who blows off the sister's hard work on preparing dinner with a casual offer to just go out. He continues to be a relentless asshole until he is no longer capable (spoiler). After they've gone out for dinner, Carol spends an evening at home alone, only to be woken up later by sounds of love-making next door, coming through the chimney flue. The story kind of dinks around there for quite a long while, with Carol's seeming depression getting worse. It's honestly unclear what her exact problem is, but it seems to be depression. Polanski is a great director and has great framing and shot selection, so it's a visually interesting movie, even when not very much is going on. Carol spirals increasingly further down the rabbit hole. No pun intended. The rabbit that her sister never cooked was still in the refrigerator, so she took it out. Left it out. Rotting. Potatoes on the counter have huge eyes. The rabbit does not. Because its head is in her purse. Rotting. She keeps seeing cracks appear in the walls -- cracks that don't exist. The mere mention of a man by her friend makes her nearly physically ill. Deneuve's acting during the murder scene is utterly unconvincing. You'd think she'd never hit anything with a candlestick before. Otherwise, she plays quite well, torn between her reality and her fantasies and her depression. There really are some spectacular shots: when Carol grabs one (former) suitor's hand to drag him down the hall, rolling the carpet up into the camera. So nice. As well, though not nice, the rape dreams she has are very well depicted, with closeup camera revealing detail and our indication that it's not real coming from the utterly silent soundtrack. She wakes as if from an all-night bender, mostly disrobed, lying in the doorway to her bedroom, the apartment in an ever-increasing state of disarray. The postcard she gets from her sister and Michael tells her not to "make too much Dolce Vita", which is a play on the fact that her sister starred in the classic Fellini film of the same name. It's creepy in the way that Psycho was creepy (e.g. near the end, when she's ironing without the iron plugged in, we know she's well and gone and lost her marbles) It's an interesting film, but one could argue that the interesting bits are too few and far between. On the other hand, the pacing and boredom are there to put us in her world and it's not a happy world. It's a world of madness, in full flower by the end. Beginning and ending shots are the same, for closure. A well-made film. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] I've improved the German translation from the subtitles I had. [1] Similar to the way that Herzog used animals in The Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call -- New Orleans. [1] She keeps misspeaking throughout the film, until a slip with a pronoun reveals that she knows more than she should. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3208 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3208 Wed, 20 Jan 2016 21:41:26 +0100 of over 900 ratings publicly available. I've included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other -- I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood. YMMV. Dead Calm (1989) -- "5/10" Nicole Kidman and Sam Neill star as couple who've lost their child in a car crash that she caused. He's an accomplished sailor and suggests an ocean journey just for the two of them. They're in chains (dead calm) when they happen upon another sailboat on the main (what happenstance!) Hughie (Billy Zane) rows his way over in a dingy, desperate to get away form the death ship, but he's shamming and takes over their sailboat, stranding the husband on the half-sinking boat that's home to his five other victims. He and Rae (Kidman) have a great time getting to know each other, while she buys time until her husband can catch up. It is not explained why she so readily sleeps with him, other than perhaps the implicit reason that Zane is quite handsome. Thrills all around, but not a very interesting movie. Who brings a dog on a multi-week or -month cruise on a small sailboat? I wonder if she'll tell her husband that she pretty much slept with Hughie not under duress? Makes sense, right? He'd defeated her husband, so he was the new alpha. A minor plot point of interest was in how the movie made clear that catching someone on the open ocean was a one-time--only thing: you miss and the currents pull you apart forever, unless you have power (which they didn't). Not recommended. The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (2015) -- "6/10" Ostensibly a Guy Ritchie move, but with very little of his imprimatur. Henry Cavill is the American agent and the ravishing Alicia Vikander is his ad-hoc partner. Then his real partner shows up in the form of a Russian agent, Illya (Armie Hammer). So Hammer fakes a Russian accent while Cavill fakes an American one. And how long are they going to go before they acknowledge how ridiculous the last name Vinciguerra is, right up there with Dr. Goodhead? How does Armie Hammer (Lone Ranger) make Henry Cavill (Superman) look small? Probably because Cavill's character is a douche. [1] This feels like a remake of Moonraker and I'm unsure whether this is a spy movie or a romantic comedy. A redeeming quality is that a lot of the movie is in Italian and German where appropriate, and the German is quite good. The tech is all over the place, some of it is era-appropriate, like the giant tracker stuck to her leg, and some is not even available today, like a hand-held CO₂ laser. With the cast and director, I was expecting more than just a bog-standard action movie trying to set up for a franchise. The cast is decent, with Armie Hammer standing out. F is for Family (2015) -- "8/10" This is a six-episode animated series about a lower-middle--class family in the 1970s somewhere in the northeastern U.S. It's not clear where, but the airline that patriarch Frank Murphy works for is called Mohican Airlines and the tiny airline just a couple of doors up the terminal is called Utica Air. Burr probably placed it somewhere near Boston or in Massachusetts, but upstate New York isn't out of the question either. Murphy is voiced by Bill Burr, who also produced it and clearly inspired much of the story. The youngest son is Bill Murphy and he's a redhead. The rest of the cast is also good and by the sixth episode things had gelled quite well. The first couple of episodes were a bit slower and rockier, but it really started firing on all cylinders after the characters had been fleshed out. This series is a love letter to Bill's generation, with the 70s placed front and center. Recommended. Audition (1999) -- "6/10" This Japanese movie is about a widower, whose wife wasted away from illness. After a melancholy introductory scene, we seque to 7 years later, when the father and son have been joined by a beagle dog and are living a humdrum existence. The father meets an old friend for a drink, a film producer, and laments that he'd like to get married again but has no idea how to go about meeting women, much less marrying one. The producer has an idea: stage a fake audition. From this audition arises a single candidate who seems to the suitor to be ideal, but to his friend she's a cypher and a vaguely threatening one, at that. She's very soft-spoken, achingly thin and bony, but wins his heart. None of her contacts can be reached, the locations she mentioned don't exist. But he is smitten and ignores these warning signs. He breaks his promise to his friend and calls her. She is at home, meditating in a twisted position while something bound up in a sack lays on her tatami. The director is Takashi Miike, the same guy as directed Gozu and it shows. They grow closer, he pledges love, she proves herself a shape-shifting psycho killer who keeps a severely mutilated former victim as a pet (the guy in the bag). The movie goes off the rails after she drugs Aoyama's drink for not having gotten rid of the picture of his wife in his apartment and breaking his promise to love only her. Things go even more tits-up from there and everyone gets what's coming to them. It was a slow buildup and the depths of her depravity were well-explained and -grounded, but I couldn't really get into it. Begotten (1990) -- "2/10" I haven't seen a movie this black and white since Eraserhead. Most black-and-white movies are actually grayscale but this one is only black and only white, overblown, overexposed and with off-the-charts dynamic range. The film is almost purely visual, with layered audio forming a background that matches the starkness of the images. The movie starts with a gagged human creature disemboweling itself, covering itself in gore -- more akin to black ichor if you read that the scene depicts the death of a God. Most of the time, though, the image is so washed-out that your brain is making up a dozen different things that could be happening until you realize what you're really looking at. Against character, immagonna call artsy-fartsy bullshit [2] -- not recommended to anyone I can think of, but I can't give it a 1/10 because I understand that there's more of a point than truly crappy movies, but fock dood, it took them 20 minutes to kill the Son of Earth -- and even after they set him on fire, he still wasn't dead, just shaking like he had been for the last 25 minutes. Now it's Mommy's turn. The raw image does lend more gravitas than a cleaner image would, I'll grant them that. This movie was not crappy, but I didn't like it. And a lot of these more bizarre movies -- and I freely admit that bizarre movie comprise a good chunk of my list -- I rate lower at first, then raise the rating by movie's end just because they seem to have pulled off whatever they were going for. The fact that there's no dialogue for 72 minutes and the picture is awful makes this a more difficult movie than most. Enhance artificially or watch with friends, just skip it or maybe put it on in one of those small viewing studios at the Whitney in Manhattan -- I watched it so you don't have to. Martyrs (2008) -- "8/10" Lucie was abducted and horribly abused as a young girl. She meets Anna in a home for troubled youth and the become extremely close. Fifteen years later, the two have teamed up to find Lucie's captors and exact revenge on them. Nothing is what it seems, though, as Lucie's madness makes it nearly impossible to know what is real -- after she kills an entire family with one remorseless shotgun blast after another, she's visited once again by the dark imp that visited her in the foster home, which slashes her across the back. Does the imp exist? How else would she get knife wounds on her back? Anna takes care of the bodies while Lucie sleeps. But the mother survived. or did she? This is madness. The imp is terrifying...and now Anna can at least hear it blasting on the door. Lucie has exacted her revenge and still she's lacerated from head to foot. And always with the flashbacks to Lucie's abduction and her shadowy captors, and finally to her escape -- during which she discovers that there were others captured by her oppressors. It tortures her to this day. The imp is the woman she left behind, it's her own psyche, her own guilt that's making Lucie hurt herself...kill herself. It's brilliantly filmed -- it reminds me of how I pictured the madness in the book I Never Promised You a Roes Garden. In the end, Lucie succumbs, taking her own life. An utterly brutal film. And we're not even halfway done yet. Anna takes her leave of Lucie but, before leaving the house, discovers two lower levels of hidden torture chambers, proving Lucie was right all along -- mad, but right all the same. Anna finds a horribly disfigured woman still alive, incapable of speech, with no idea how to interact with normal humans, horrifically scarred. There is a group systematically torturing women and the family that Lucie slaughtered was part of it. She tries to help the woman, but doesn't even know where to start with the peroxide. Then Anna removes the headgear stapled to her head -- instead of taking her to a hospital? Why? Predictably, she is captured by the even higher-up members of the psychotic cadre that torture women in an attempt to have them see through to a better world. The scenes we saw hinted at with Lucie are repeated with Anna, who is their newest subject. Have I mentioned how visceral the brutality is? I thought The Yellow Sea or Oldboy had rivers of blood in them, but the French have got the Koreans beat, hands down. The people in this cult are really convinced that beating will help someone achieve Nirvana. It's honestly not too far off from actual experiments that have been performed in the name of science throughout the last several centuries (from Torquemada to Goebbels to the guys from Men Behind the Sun to our very own unnamed heroes in the CIA). Really well-done, well-filmed, gut-wrenching. A unique and well-written horror/slasher story. The ending's a bit drawn-out, but I can forgive the director his desire to draw it out, especially with the excellent ending. Saw it in French with English subtitles. [3] Un Chien Andalou (1929) -- "6/10" This is a 16-minute silent film with French titles by the surrealist master Salvador Dali and director Luis Buñuel. It's hard to describe or rate (other than praising the craftsmanship nearly 100 years ago). In one (famous) scene, a woman's eyeball is sliced with a razor. In another, ants crawl convincingly out of a ragged but not bloody hole in a man's hand, while he looks on in fascination. In the next scene. he and another lady watch a gorgeous woman inexorably run over in the street, after which he becomes extremely lustful and she less interested, though at least partially acquiescing, but in the end defiant. A few more nonsensical and loosely cohesive scenes follow. No idea what it all means. An extra star for production values in the 1920s and also for brevity. Salõ, or the 120 Days of Sodom (1975) -- "3/10" This feels at first like something like The Stanford Prison Experiment but soon proves itself to be much more depraved than that. It kind of reminds me of the secret society in Eyes Wide Shut a bit, but with far less class. The old men are disgusting, nearly sucking one girls tears with their lascivious looks (although it's hard to tell just what the one severely cross-eyed dude is looking at). There are classical influences, like Dante's Inferno and material taken from the Marquis de Sade's notebooks. While it's debatable whether any of this should ever end up in a film, it's clear to me that it deserved a better director and better actors, though it's difficult to imagine that anyone of quality would be willing to participate. The shot selection is pretty boring and the scenes are scripted as if by juveniles. It's from the 70s and it's got a bit of a bad 70s porno vibe to it -- although the subject matter is considerably over the top, even for a pornographic film. The third act is the most difficult, I thought, where the entire party, captives and master, all become coprophagous in an utterly unmistakable scene -- there is no doubt what they're doing. It certainly depicts the depths of depravity, though it's not exactly purely sexual in nature, despite their protestations. And the old prostitutes chatter on, regaling the gathered company with depraved stories of their careers. There is so much buggery and cross-dressing going on, it hardly merits mentioning -- I'd just as soon describe the water in an aquarium. It's unclear why some captives are dressed, others are completely nude and others are in a state of near-permanent semi-dishabille. The ass-judging contest is inspired because it's so clinical, we have no idea what their criteria are and the audience is not invited to participate -- all raised behinds face away from the camera. That is, again, taking everything on the face of it -- I haven't read the Marquis de Sade's unfinished book of the same name but I can only imagine that on paper it's better than on film. Film leaves nothing to the imagination and the only way for this type of depravity to survive a critical eye is to leave more detail away. The enthusiastic participation of some of the captives is also not really explained -- it's just taken as a given that this would happen. An interesting part is perhaps at the end, where a single detected transgression triggers a cascade of betrayals, leading one of the four men in charge (the Duke?) on a merry chase, looking for the ultimate transgressor to punish. There is surprisingly little violence, actually, until the very end. Some of the youth are armed and it's not clear why they don't rebel. It's all so chaotic and senseless, again perhaps based on the source material -- I'm honestly not willing to waste my time finding out. They all seem fabulously stupid. It's just not that convincing at being awful. You might claim that it's dated or that I'm jaded, but it just not a good enough film. It survives on its reputation for it's subject matter, which is no doubt provocative, but terribly juvenile in its execution. Saw it in the original Italian, with English subtitles. Not recommended. Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) -- "10/10" This movie is absolute non-stop action from the very first minute. It builds a believable and coherent world with shot after shot of glorious detail about that post-apocalyptic world. Very few words are spoken, but rich detail floods in, rarely repeating itself. There are sigils and rites and ritualistic phrases -- "witness this" -- that build the world without effort, without belaboring anything. Even the story is allowed to unfold like a good science-fiction story does, gradually, with detail coming into focus over time. The experience of watching this movie is one of, "wait, what was that?" "should I rewind?" "What's a universal donor here?" "will they show it again?" "Oh, good, they did." "Dammit what did he say?" "Why are they going there?" "Why do they trust her?" "Oh, of course, because she's Imperator Furiosa" "What the hell is going on with Max?" "Why are they taking blood?" "Or are they giving him blood?" "Good God, the decorations and decals and endless attention to detail of the warring clans, and people chained to vehicles and the somehow-not-at-all-cheesy-guitarist riding point in front of dozens of amps mounted on a truck and the destruction and jury-rigging and exotic weapons and primitive weapons and garb and leather and armor bits and scars and dessicated lips and piercings and whatever the hell that spray is and the suicide cult and Furiosa's arm and her steering wheel and her bony-arm decal on the truck and the giant pillar in the desert topped by a jungle and the smoke and fire and tattoos and mutations and tumors and flying bits of mechanical mayhem and the DETAIL and the DUST and the sheer DRIVING ADRENALIN RIDE." And yet, it's cohesive action and not confused and muddled. It's visually interesting and relatively easy to follow. We get a minute breather, during which we drown/revel in more detail -- the blood-donor spigot, the lock on the back of his head -- and then there's a gloriously choreographed, seemingly single-shot scene in which a one-armed Charlize Theron is made to look a realistic match for Tom Hardy. She's ferocious and merciless, as is he and the Defiant Ones-like chain to Nicolas Hoult's minion is used to the fullest extent. And slowly and naturally and seemingly easily, the story coheres out of the dust, with the phrase "Who Killed the World?" explained as much by showing as possible. Men killed the world. The power-hungry, the lustful, the primal, the primitive, the savage. Savage cults and primitive ideas and simplistic visions that reach nearly nowhere because they need only reach as far as the needs of the few. The women are incongruous to everything else in this world. The vehicles are not beautiful but they're amazing and intricate. The sound design and soundtrack are well-matched as well. The switch to blue coloring is jarring, but effective. Some things, like the guitarist and the birthing party, seem unaffected. Furiosa pushing the giant truck and Max leaning on the tree are both equally futile, but it shows their desperation rather than seeming ludicrous. When she asks "but what if you're not back by the time the truck cools?", he gives the only possible answer, "well, then, you keep moving." Almost as if to say, did you think this was a movie? Where all the heroes have to survive? And when he comes back? How is that not cheesy? I don't know, but it is so HARDCORE instead. Similarly, why are those guys holding lookout from those poles when they have a mounted binocular that sees just as well? Because it looks cool. Just like flames roaring out of the side of a car look cool. And so does the reversed vanity mirror that is the driver's-side side-view mirror and the shoe-sizer gas pedal in the war rig. The darkness, the hopelessness, it's nearly overpowering. Furiosa and Max can't combat everything -- there's too many of them. How amazingly well-filmed, with none of the main characters spared. This is a tragedy. In the end, only the women return -- Max exits stage right. Then, during the credits, we see that all of the characters had elaborate names, but you have no idea which one's which. Hardy and Theron are great. Better than Star Wars. Highly recommended. What a ride. Irréversible (2002) -- "8/10" This is a movie of a night gone horribly wrong, starring Monica Belluci and Vincent Cassel. It's told in reverse order and filmed in an incredibly confused manner, it's told in reverse-chronological order, starting with a man's search for the man who raped his girlfriend, followed by an extremely graphic depiction of her rape in an underpass. She surprises her assailant while he's in the middle of disciplining his ostensible girlfriend (or at least companion for the evening) and he turns his sadistic attentions to her, easily changing direction to rape her on the cement floor. The guy is as despicable as can be imagined. Seriously, he makes Dennis Hopper in Blue Velvet look like an absolute gentleman. We see a man enter the subterranean passage and then creep back away when he sees what's happening. His experience is completely disconnected from her suffering -- indicated by near-constant and by-him muffled screams. Up until the rape scene, the camera is absolutely psychotic, swirling back and forth -- do not watch when too drunk, pro tip. But probably be a little drunk, or you'll have a very difficult time getting through this harrowing film. I mean, Monica Belluci conveys amazingly well her horrific experience, but it's very difficult to deal with. Gaspar Noë, the director, had an unflinching story to tell about the horrific half of the human race (men). All the more harrowing for the camera work and the the reverse chronology. As the film unfolds into the past, we see the vengeful boyfriend transform into a drunk, unfaithful pig bent on dipping his wick despite having Belluci at home. And as the movie progresses, you see them move from horror at her destroyed face/body (him) and her absolute destruction in the underpass...to them being happy at a party at their home, with everyone beautiful and whole and happy. It's amazingly well-done: even as the horrific scene recedes in the past, it infects the remainder of the film, which becomes increasingly upbeat, as the upcoming strife between the colleagues recedes into the future. And yet, you continue to anticipate some accompanying horror...but there's nothing. no indication of what is to come and additional closure for the fleeting scenes of horror we saw at the beginning (chronologically the end) of the film. The end/beginning is positively idyllic, with Cassel and Belluci unbelievably natural and loving with one another. The reverse chronology serves to emphasize how absolutely happy they are as a couple and how that's all wrenched away in such a short time. All the more tragic this way, I think. Recommended, but beware, not for the faint of heart. Saw it in French with English subtitles. P.S. if you think you can understand colloquial French, let this film test your mettle: I found most of it nearly incomprehensible and I can follow a lot of news and sports on the radio in French. The style and feel and even the music would serve Noë again in his next film Enter the Void which was even stranger. Also, and I cannot stress this enough, be very careful of watching this if you're too drunk or epileptic. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] Also because Armie Hammer, at 6'5" is very tall [1] The "Wikipedia article" , which I used as a crutch to even halfway know what was going on, includes this citation, "The film incorporates many different religious themes and events from Christian and Slavic mythology including Creation, Mother Earth, and various other religious themes on which the events that take place in the film are loosely based upon.". Bullshit. That's what the director might have told you he'd intended, but without dialogue, with visuals that look like they came from the 1880s and a soundtrack that sounds like a cicada with indigestion, the only way you can get any meaning is for someone to tell you what the fuck you just saw. I could barely even tell the "characters" near the end were even "dismembering" anyone. This is a horror movie? And Susan Sontag named it one of the 10 most important movies of all time? Was this before or after she took ill? [1] The French I could understand was much more eloquent than the subtitles, most especially in the case of the fervent and absolutely psychotic speech about creating martyrs. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3192 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3192 Sun, 17 Jan 2016 23:07:51 +0100 of over 900 ratings publicly available. I've included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other -- I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood. YMMV. The Last Temptation of Christ (1988) -- "6/10" Willem Dafoe is Jesus, Barbara Hershey Mary Magdalene and Harvey Keitel is Judas. Martin Scorcese directed this retelling of the story of the life of Jesus, based on the novel of the same name. It's heavily dialogue-driven with a strong focus on religious philosophy, naturally. I like that the dialogue is quite modern and delivered in modern accents. The scene where Mary Magdalene is dragged out for stoning reminded me strongly of a very similar scene in Malèna where Monica Belluci is shorn by her fellow villagers. In that case, Malèna was accused of laying with the enemy; Magdalene is actually accused not of prostitution but of working on the Sabbath. Jesus tries to find his path and chats with various people and animals -- e.g. a talking cobra (or asp?). This movie has slightly better production values, but in its material and surreality, it's not much different than the Japanese Guzo or the Mexican El Topo. Hell, it's even got a talking lion in it, with a New York City accent. This movie is really, really long -- over three hours. It just retells the story of Jesus with some minor and some major variations, but mostly hitting the highlights we've all heard about. He multiplies fish and loaves, makes wine from water, kicks money-changer ass, etc. etc. If you're not religious and broadly familiar with the Christian mythology, this film is utterly uncontroversial -- except maybe for all of the miracles being so real (and then again, maybe not). When Jesus changes water into wine, he's a total dick about it, as only Willem Dafoe could do. Also, Jesus kicks a ton of ass in this movie, hulking out on the money-changers, of course, but also on a lot of other scenery. It's a well-made movie, but the dialogue, though more modernized, is still tedious. Mostly because the story of Jesus kinda sucks and there's a lot of whining about the meanness of God followed by the adoration of God followed by setting rules for God. It goes off the beaten path, at the end, with the "temptation" being that Jesus is given the chance to not be the savior and spare himself. Judas is portrayed as the strong one who is willing to betray Jesus so that he can fulfill his destiny, then shows up at Jesus's deathbed to accuse him of betraying this goal. Although I'm not familiar at all with the Gospels [1], I saw the ending coming a mile away -- that the temptress angel was, of course, Satan -- and expected for twenty minutes for Jesus to close his eyes at some point and wake back up on the cross. And lo it was done. I definitely didn't predict that Dafoe would reënact his Platoon pose, though. The soundtrack by Peter Gabriel is great. I'm glad I finally saw it, the acting is good, but I can't recommend it. Babette's Feast (1987) -- "7/10" This is a melancholy if relatively pretty film about two daughters living in Jutland (DK) with their stern, minister father. We learn their story via a narrator with interspersed dialogue (mostly pious singing). Each of the daughters had a chance at love, but their father quashed it both times, the soldier out of hand, and the opera singer after he sings lascivious songs with the daughter. It is a stark and lifeless existence. Though they seem filled with religious fervor and do small, good deeds for the other villagers, nothing is created or gained and they simply go through the same daily motions without adding or removing from the world. (Don't we all, though?) The opera singer was entirely too full of life for the world of Jutland. The daughter breaks off the singing lessons herself because she cannot resist his wiles. Years later, the opera singer exhorts the sisters to retain the services of a family friend, Babette. They take her on as servant and cook for over a dozen years. When she wins the French lottery, she offers to cook them and their remaining congregation a proper French feast for the 100th anniversary of the birth of their father, the patron saint of the Jutland village. The dinner is to be properly French with live quail and a live turtle hissing on the counter in the kitchen, terrifying the sisters into thinking she's preparing a witch's meal. The congregation is quick to play along when the sister relates her fears to them -- and they all build each other up into a righteous terror of the French meal. And right they are to be terrified: in classic French style, there's one of everything that once walked on legs looking with glazed, crossed eyes from Babette's pots and pans. Babette makes such a tremendous effort, but the pious fuddy-duddies can at first talk only of how they will ignore the taste of the food and drink -- that the flavor doesn't even matter. This is a natural attitude to take when all of your food is one form of porridge or another. When someone is making an effort, though, your pious ass could perhaps not be an asshole. Thankfully, though, the first taste of the Amontillado pairing with the turtle soup brings tears to the French general's eyes. The meal looks exquisite. Best name for a dish: quail in sarcophagus. The film is a bit slow in the first half, but well-made and reminiscent of other "big meal" movies, like a favorite of mine Big Night. As in that film, there is an undercurrent of love and missed opportunities and forgiveness. It takes a tremendous suspension of belief that such a meal could be cooked in that kitchen in that hut, but suspend it I did because it was so enjoyable watching Babette prepare it. And how was she able to cook such a fabulous meal? She used to be the head chef at the Cafè Anglais -- and spent all FF10,000 that she won in the lottery to prepare that single meal. I also have no idea how they weren't all plastered after all of those wine pairings with refills. Worth seeing it for the meal. Saw it in the original Danish and French, with English subtitles. Schindler's List (1993) -- "8/10" This is a black-and-white film about the role that Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson) played in Krakau in the late 1930s. While he originally had only thoughts of making money by employing Jews in his factory, his sympathies increasingly lay with his workers as he saw the predations of the Nazis. In particular, Amon Goeth, played by Ralph Fiennes, is a foppish, nervous, deeply insecure and overwhelmingly cruel man who comes to be in charge of the work camp near Schindler's factory. Stephen Spielberg directs and his imprimatur is clear in the shot selection and camera work. The film shows the casual cruelty and indifference to Jewish life of the soldiers, while highlighting mostly ineffectual and Sisyphic moments of kindness on the part of sympathizers or doctors (e.g. in a hospital where patients to whom nurses had just given medicine are seconds later gunned down). Ben Kingsley is masterful, as usual, as Itzhak Stern. I do have to wonder how much of this is a flight of Hollywood fancy by a Jewish director and how much is based in fact. I'm thinking of the little boy who tries to whistle down an old Jewish lady and then decides not to when he sees it's his friend's mother. Or how casually the Nazis just shoot people in the head. I understand that the trains delivered millions to their deaths in camps, but that level of processing has a certain technocratic "out of my hands" logic to it; shooting someone in the head from inches away is a much more visceral act and a completely different level of cruelty. I do not say that this film depicts it incorrectly, only that it smells of a promulgated myth that no-one allows themselves to challenge. In a way, it almost absolves humanity because it depicts the enemy as such clear monsters that they barely even belong to the species anymore. Such an interpretation is, in many ways, more comforting than the probable truth: that anyone could do this to anyone else, with only the slightest provocation. Hell, it happens all the time still. I do not say that the film exaggerates the acts, only that the over-the-top enthusiasm of the Germans is perhaps a bit overdone. Perhaps not, I have never been in a war zone, but have heard stories of overarching enthusiasm in our similar national horror stories, like My Lai and Fallujah, to name only a very few. Also Chris Hedges reporting in his book War is a Force that Gives us Meaning. The humiliation in the camp, the petty cruelties, the rape, the nude marches, the subjugation, the slavery? All believable. It requires a different level of commitment than cold-blooded murder. On the other hand, if you don't consider the creature before you to be a human, then it's not murder, is it? I am just careful of propaganda -- of all kinds. Schindler takes the fight to Goeth by saying that his unwarranted and unconscionable killing is "bad for business". He does not even try arguing that it's morally wrong, because even had he himself wholeheartedly believed that (which wasn't clear), it would have been an utter waste of time with Goeth, who would certainly not have been receptive to a moral argument. Lovely scenes between the two. The eponymous list refers to a list of workers that Schindler makes to save, to send elsewhere than Auschwitz. Unfortunately, it doesn't work -- the paperwork goes missing and the workers on his list never show up. He chases them down and bluffs his way through getting his workers back, including children whose "delicate fingers polish 45mm shell casings". At his factory, he is still running a work camp, but he forbids "summary executions" and the German soldiers have to follow his orders. Schindler then does everything in his power to make sure not a single viable shell is ever produced in his factory. Again, not sure of the historical veracity -- the crawl at the end claims it's true -- but a lovely story. Still and all, an incredibly well-made film, well-acted, well-shot. It's over 3 hours long but doesn't feel overlong, except perhaps the last 10 minutes -- in which modern-day descendants of Schindler's workers visit his grave -- which felt tacked on. Recommended. Aces High (1976) -- "6/10" This is a British movie about the Royal Air Force in WWI, when they still flew with bi-planes and had a horrendous casualty rate. The pilots are stationed in France and are led by Gresham (Malcolm McDowell) and Sinclair (Christopher Plummer), both of whom are pretty much alcoholics. Another pilot is Crawford, who fakes suffering from neuralgia because he's afraid to go up. Croft is the new recruit with almost no flight time and an eager attitude driven by worship of Gresham. 1/4 of the way in and there is no sign of a woman in this movie. The men are very British, with a stiff upper lip and silly songs. The feel of the base is that it is an extension of the boarding schools from which they all presumably came. There are more long-lashed, meaningful looks than usual. The film is decidedly anti-war. At one point, they ride out to the front and see unbelievable destruction on the ground, the most poignant of which is a long line of soldiers with head injuries and their eyes bound, hand on the shoulder of the man in front, blindly threading their way through a noxious war zone. [2] Croft is attacked on his first sortie. He doesn't return with Gresham, not because he's shot down, but because he gets lost. This is a lovely detail of WWI flying -- no radar, no GPS, nothing but a crude map and your own sparse knowledge of the landmarks in the area where you'd just been stationed the day before. On this mission, Gresham shoots down a Hun and captures him. They bring him back to camp, but don't make him a prisoner -- instead, he's invited in almost as a guest of honor, because he's really very much like them. They roister and revel long into the night. Croft learns quickly the perils of war when his commander Sinclair is shot dead in the gunner's seat behind him on his very next mission. To distract themselves, the officers go to a French nightclub and revel some more. The first women of the movie appear here, and they're all whores. Fear not, though, because they're decent-looking enough that "I won't have to force myself" as one of the officers puts it. It is unclear how this scene is intended. Is it a condemnation of the deep-seated misogyny of the time, one that acknowledges women only as accoutrements for soldiers? Or is it just including it for accuracy with no judgment? Or is it glorifying it? This was to be Croft's last glorious night out as he dies on his next mission when he collides with a Hun Aircraft. That would be the third long flight sequence of the movie. Malcom McDowell and Christopher Plummer are good, as always. Not recommended, though. The Producers (1967) -- "9/10" This farce is about a Broadway producer, Max Bialystock (Zero Mostel) and his accountant, Leo Blum (Gene Wilder). They team up to deliberately put on a flop to cheat investors out of millions. The movie is almost 50 years old and yet it's timeless. Mostel is manic, over-the-top and wonderful. Wilder is, as always, a combination of zany and eerily reserved, wide-eyed and innocent. If the word "zany" had not existed, it would have to have been invented to describe this movie. Watching it now, it's obvious how they made a musical out of it: it has no musical numbers in the first half, but the scenes could so easily be transformed to the musical stage. In case you don't know the plot, the pair find a musical that is guaranteed to flop, Springtime for Hitler, a gay romp in WWII Germany, written by Franz Liebkind, who wears a German war helmet, keeps pigeons, sings American patriotic songs to dispel rumors -- "Oh beootiful für spaschious skies" -- and who is even farther off his rocker than either Blum or Bialystock. The costumes and lyrics of this show are divine: one lady walks out covered only in Bretzels, another only in liters of beer and foam. All the while, they're singing the chorus "Springtime for Hitler in Germany ... winter for Poland and France ... we're marching to a faster pace....look out, here comes the master race." and Brooks himself shows up as a stormtrooper, crowing "Don't be stupid, be a smartie, come and join the Nazi party." And then the showgirls start goose-stepping across the stage, "goose-steps are new steps TODAY!" The movie was written by Mel Brooks in 1967, so it's hilarious, but women have few roles other than decoration (Ulla) or gullible sacks of money (countless old ladies). Or as a backup band for LSD, the actor destined to play Hitler, who, like the entire musical, is so bad he's good. This will prove to be the end of their plan, as it will not only fail to fail, but it will fail to fail spectacularly enough. Their problem with success is, of course, that they've sold 25,000% of the profits to various investors. Before Trey Parker and Matt Stone -- of South Park and Book of Mormon fame -- there was Mel Brooks, tearing Broadway a new one. And then Broadway turned around and made his joke of an idea into one of the greatest successes ever. I'd seen this movie before, almost 2 decades ago, at the hearty recommendation of a good friend in New York [3] and remembered having enjoyed it immensely. I was not disappointed in rewatching. Highly recommended. Mud (2012) -- "6/10" Mud introduces himself like this: "You can call me a hobo, 'cause a hobo works fer a livin' and you can call me homeless, well, 'cause that's what I am temporarily, but you call me a bum again and I'm gonna have to teach you somethin' 'bout respect that your daddy never did." Matthew McConaughey plays Mud and the Reese Witherspoon plays his love interest, Juniper. He's hiding out on an island, from the law and from the family of a man he killed supposedly to protect the honor of his girl. We see soon enough that the story that Mud tells is only part of the truth, but the boys are much more likely to believe his version because the world tells them far less satisfying stories. All parties have ulterior motives, except perhaps the two boys, Ellis and Neckbone, played really, really well by Tye Sheridan and Jacob Lofland. Life on the river is hard and stories are the only way people have of escaping the day-to-day drudgery. It's a little trite that Ellis's life starts to imitate Mud's. Who's the psycho? Who's the slut? A little of both? Stories are more important than reality, and stories are subjective. It's a decent flick, but relatively predictable coming-of-age stories aren't really my thing. Recommended if that is your thing or if you're a McConaughey fan. Nymphomaniac Vol. 1 (2013) -- "8/10" Seligman (Stellan Skarsgård) finds Joe (Charlotte Gainsbourg) in an alley on his way back from grocery shopping. She lies unconscious, in a light snowfall, a clear victim of a beating. He takes her home after she refuses to allow him to call an ambulance or the police. She begins telling the story of how she ended up there, starting from when she was two years old and first discovered she was a nymphomaniac. Seligman interrupts her constantly to draw parallels between her hunting sexual partners as a young girl and fly-fishing. He's absolutely relentless about this, despite her clear impatience to continue her lascivious story. The story is rendered less lascivious because the filming of the encounters is less erotic and stimulating and more clinical. especially when she rapes the older man on the train (he distinctly said "please don't"). Her story continues as she re-meets her first lover, Jerôme (Shia LaBeouf) as her boss in her first job, falling in love with him. He's an insecure jerk who delights in humiliating and dominating her, even as she makes her way through all of his co-workers after having resisted his initial advances. At this point, though Charlotte Gainsbourg is re-telling the story, Joe is played by Stacy Martin as a younger girl -- this was her first role as an actress. Her casting is probably also deliberate -- she's pretty, but not really sexy and also not really vivacious, more quiet and contemplative and depressive. Instead her allure comprises one characteristic: her low bar for fucking other people. This is likely von Trier's condemnation of males, a way of implicitly saying that they'll pretty much fuck anything with a heartbeat, even someone who makes Shelley Duvall look like Anna Nicole Smith. She doesn't act or move in a sexy way, even walking very stolidly and deliberately. The story of her presence at her father's painful and nearly psychotic death just drives home how her nymphomania is an obsession, nothing to do with allure or enticement -- the film makes perfectly clear that sex would be the furthest thing from the mind of a non-afflicted person. Uma Thurman stands out as the passive-aggressive, overly understanding Mrs. H., the wife of one of her more clingy lovers (H: "Would it be all right if I showed the children the whoring bed? (to the children) We need to see it! Let's go see Daddy's favorite place!") She also has some wonderful and lengthier dialogue, delivered in a helluva performance. Mrs. H. finally gets angry, but she blames Joe rather than her idiotic husband, who absolutely couldn't take a hint and was puppy-dog in love with a young girl who is not his wife. Lars von Trier wrote and directed; the movie is slow and largely a dialogue between two clever-talking people -- Seligman is particularly observant and intellectual, with no judgment, and Joe is also very self-aware, though with clear and obviously intentional gaps in her knowledge -- but it's wonderfully shot and told. And because it's von Trier, there's an incredible attention to detail, many small clues that lead I-don't-know-where. The titles and text in street and building photos are in German (e.g. O.P. Gang 2 in the hospital) and the intro and credits music is by Rammstein but she speaks English with a British accent and her childhood friend's (B) accent morphs over time from more Germanic/Swedish-accented to bog-standard British. They ride a train where the conductor demands pounds for a ticket. But her father (Christian Slater) also has a meandering accent that eventually settles on American. She uses a Ticonderoga pencil to make notes at one point -- do they even have those in Britain? Skarsgård is a wonderful interlocutor, standing outside of the miasma of passion and nymphomania. His recitation from the The Fall of the House of Usher is spine-tingling [4]....I wanted him to continue with the rest of the book. "During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher." The end of the story introduced with Poe almost gets Seligman but he rallies with "it's extremely common to react sexually in a crisis", which is technically true. He's extremely well-read and it adds a richness to his ad-hoc diagnoses. I could listen to him all day. I am still trying to figure out why his rooms are so run-down. Recommended. Nymphomaniac Vol. 2 (2013) -- "9/10" We pick up where we left off in Volume 1, with Joe relating the story of how her "cunt went numb" and Seligman relating Zeno's paradox to her and she finally calling him out on his distance and lack of lust about her story. He reveals that he is asexual and a virgin, which goes a long way toward explaining why he doesn't judge her as much as she's grown accustomed to being judged for her story. She continues her story after an interlude wherein he describes the western church (suffering) and the eastern church (happiness). Her next chapter is about traveling "from East to West" -- from a world of happiness to suffering. She moves in with Jerôme and they have a child together. He cannot satisfy her and makes a lovely analogy to buying a tiger, which must be fed properly and that he might, in fact, need some help feeding it. Which she leaps to with gusto, with another lovely visual analogy in the street as she feigns a car breakdown and all of her lovers gather in a crowd of tomcats. Shia LeBoeuf as Jerôme is very, very good, easily outacting the girl who plays the young Joe. Jamie Bell (Billy Elliot) is also extremely good as K, the sadist who takes on Joe as a client, and allows no safe words (yeah, right) and dispenses sadism without sex, no discussions. He's a right bastard, but that's what she's looking for. The filming is so well-done and K's act so convincing that I'm almost surprised when we're allowed to see what happens behind the frosted-glass doors. K is exceedingly polite in his preparations, but in control of every aspect. [5] At the end of their second session -- the first with actual sadism -- she says "Thank you," and he replies, "You're very welcome." in all sincerity. Stripped of judgment, this is a transaction between equals, each of whom gets pleasure. Gainesbourg is, as usual, fantastic. She struggles with her addiction but loses, walking out on Jerôme and Marcel (her son) on Christmas to go to K for the beating of her life (the destruction is pitiless and graphic), which allows her to once again experience joy. After she recounts a three-way with two African brothers, with whom she shared no language, she is chided by Seligman for using the word "negro". She responds, Joe: Well, I beg you pardon, but in my circles, it has always been a mark of honor to call a spade a spade. Each time a word becomes prohibited, you remove a stone from the democratic foundation. Society demonstrates its impotence in the face of a concrete problem by removing words from the language. The book-burners have got nothing on modern society. Seligman: I think society would claim that political correctness is a very precise expression of democratic concern for minorities. Joe: And I would say that society is too cowardly for the people in it, who, in my opinion, are too stupid for democracy. Seligman: I understand your point but I totally disagree. I have no doubt in the human qualities. Joe: The human qualities can be expressed in one word: hypocrisy. We elevate those who say "right" but mean "wrong" and mock those who say "wrong" but mean "right". Society is based on hate; it should be based on forgiveness. Hatred is rudimentary. One should be able to forgive one's executioner. Anyone who sees the title and possibly some scenes and thinks they'll have a purely titillating film doesn't know this director. [6] The movies are more like a Socratic dialogue between Joe and Seligman, with interludes and depictions from her past. Skarsgård really deserves credit for a wonderfully acted role. The next segment "The Mirror" deals with Joe's attempt to get an abortion legally, in which the doctor and psychologist are exceedingly patronizing and treat her as if she's incapable of making her own decision about her own body. That is, when she says that the most important thing to her right now is to have an abortion, the psychologist responds that "yes. well, that's what we're trying to determine together.". Amazing that a woman needs the approval of complete strangers in order to have a voluntary medical procedure. When she asks about the father, Joe answers "Ok, what would you like me to say about the father in order for me to be able to obtain an abortion? That I love him? Or that I don't love him? Or that I don't know him because I fuck tons of men?" The ensuing at-home, DIY abortion is harrowing and a clear condemnation on von Trier's part of the patronizing attitude toward women's health in supposedly civilized Western countries (looking at you, USA and possibly UK). [7] In the Socratic tradition, Seligman and Joe discuss the abortion afterward. When he says that he has no comment because he's a man, she responds, "Those are two very interesting points of view. First you say that, as a man, you can't have feelings with regard to abortion. Well, that's a bit like saying that I could never understand the feeling of victims of earthquakes because they were Chinese. I thought that empathy was the foundation of all humanism. It is very convenient for men to leave all that abortion stuff to women. That way, they don't have to deal with all the guilt and all the small stuff." In response, Seligman makes an eloquent argument for eliding details of the ugliness of abortions, but in the end it's an argument for censorship. "The really serious, serious abortions, the ones that save lives, far from our social spheres...you can't endanger them, just because you provocatively insist on showing all of the gory details. Consider all of the millions of oppressed women, the victims of rape, incest, hunger, all those who maybe thanks to an abortion have gained a new life, to maybe have saved a child from starving to death. You can't harm them, just because of a principle of openness." She drops the mic on her self-help group, bidding adieu to the group leader with "That empathy you claim is a lie, because all you are is society's morality police, whose duty is to erase my obscenity from the surface of the Earth so that the bourgeoisie won't feel sick." When she talks of her career as a loan-shark enforcer, she recounts a visit to a repressed pedophile, who didn't even know he was one himself. Seligman: You did what? Joe: I gave him a blowjob. Seligman: Why? That pig? Joe: I took pity on him. Seligman: Pity? Joe: Yes. I had just destroyed his life. Nobody knew his secret, most probably not even himself. He sat there with the shame. I suppose I sucked him off as a kind of apology. Seligman: That's unbelievable. Joe: Listen to me: this is a man who'd succeeded in repressing his own desire -- who had never before given into it, right up until I forced it out of him. He had lived a life full of denial and had never hurt a soul. Seligman: No. No matter how much I try, I can't find anything laudable in paedophilia. Joe: That's because you think about the perhaps 5% who actually hurt children. The remaining 95% never live out their fantasies. Think about their suffering. Sexuality is the strongest force in human beings. To be born with a forbidden sexuality must be agonizing. The paedophile who manages to get through life with the shame of his desire while never acting on it deserves a bloody medal. Seligman: (long pause) The writer Thomas Mann said somewhere that a temptation resisted is not a sin, but a test of virtue. The final chapter feels the most trite and clichéed, nearly veering to come back around to the beginning, five hours ago. Perhaps it's to show how Joe is rewarded for her final concession to sentimentality in her love for her protegé, aptly named P. Or perhaps as punishment for her sentimentality for Jerôme and her final capitulation to jealousy. The ending is no-holds-barred -- the filming of Jerôme's revenge...and P, instead of helping Joe, shows her allegiance to Jerõme -- and Joe's lifestyle -- instead. That scene makes anything in Dogville look like Sesame Street. The story ends there, more or less, other than Seligman's slip from his asexual pedestal, revealing himself despite his ostensible erudition to be just as simplistic as everyone else. I always like von Trier's stories, his direction and his choice of music for this movie was lovely (both the cello pieces and the credits music, a cover of Jimi's Hey Joe). Recommended, but the director's cut is long and you're in for a possibly scary ride. It Follows (2014) -- "7/10" This is a thriller/horror movie about a monster that follows the object of its obsession -- a victim that has to have sex in order to ward it off. The premise is simple: the monster follows you until you "tag" someone else, then it follows that person. If it catches you, you die, and then it starts to follow the previous person in the chain. It is slow but relentless. The monster inhabits random bodies and shuffles shambolically toward its victims, the slowness stretching out the delicious terror. You can buy time, but you can't get away. And only victims can see the bodies the monster inhabits. Because it's so slow, it lulls you into a false sense of security and, because no-one else can see it, you think your friends are watching out for you but you forget that they can't see it. Shooting doesn't help and it changes shape as it needs, big guys to kick holes in doors, little guys to crawl through the hole. This is a well-shot and scary film, with open windows at night and well-placed mirrors and effective use of music. They really make you feel how helpless you would be in the face of such a relentless attacker. It's a horror movie that knows its tropes and makes a whole new experience out of them. It's hard to figure out when this movie is set: the furniture in her house is 70s-80s and the TV is black and white, her phone has a cord on it, no-one has a cell phone, she gets a plaster cast after the car accident, there are typewriters and CRT TVs, etc. This movie actually dovetails nicely with just having watched Nymphomaniac because that's what she must become to get rid of the monster: she passes it on to a friend, who is killed, then sees a random group of boys on a boat and we see her take off her clothes to swim out in her underwear. Although we could always see the monster throughout the movie, we can no longer see it in the finale, which makes it all the more exciting. The scene in the pool is nicely filmed. I love that the girl at the end reads Dostoyevsky from an e-reader shaped like a pink seashell compact. Recommended. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] Which I have since learned is detailed in the gospels. I thought that the controversy associated with the film was that Jesus could at all, as a mortal, be tempted off the path of savior. But the controversy in America was, predictably, nudity and sex. Sigh. [1] This reminded me a bit of José Saramago's descriptions of blind navigation in his novel Blindness, recently read. The movie's in my queue. [1] h/t to CJ, you irreverent SOB [1] Of course, Edgar Allen Poe gets a lot of the credit for absolutely marvelous prose. [1] I cannot speak to the realism of this scene, but I wonder how it compares to 50 Shades of Gray, which was chastised as being ludicrous in its depiction of S&M? The article, "Jamie Bell: 'I hadn't said hello to Charlotte Gainsbourg before I started hitting her in the face'" provides more insight and it's remarkable what a great job he did considering how the whole process worked. Perhaps because of how the process worked. The article says that Bell had ""lots of help" on the set from bondage, domination, sadism and masochism [BDSM] professionals" and that he'd "hung out in a friend's LA sex shop, getting a feel for the clientèle.". [1] What's up with the camera reflected in the mirror? Clearly deliberate. [1] Though there's a lot in this movie that's not for the weak-willed, the home abortion stands out as a reason to skip the director's cut. I can only imagine that this is definitely at least one of the parts that was omitted in the theatrical release (if there even was one?) I stand corrected, apparently, the abortion itself made it in, but the ensuing discussion (transcribed above) was elided. It gets a bit boring having the world exceed your pessimistic expectations. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3190 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3190 Mon, 21 Dec 2015 22:28:54 +0100 -- "6/10" 2. "Dieter Nuhr -- Ich bin's Nuhr (2005)" <#Dieter> -- "6/10" 3. "R100 (2013)" <#R100> -- "6/10" 4. "Chinatown (1974)" <#Chinatown> -- "8/10" 5. "Lawless (2012)" <#Lawless> -- "8/10" 6. "Apocalypto (2006)" <#Apocalypto> -- "7/10" 7. "Stalag 17 (1953)" <#Stalag> -- "6/10" 8. "Memento (2000)" <#Memento> -- "10/10" 9. "The Wind Rises (2013)" <#WindRises> -- "8/10" 10. "Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015)" <#ForceAwakens> -- "10/10" 11. "El Topo (1970)" <#El> -- "4/10" 12. "Zack Galifianakis: Live at the Purple Onion (2006)" <#Zack> -- "7/10" 13. "Joy Ride (2001)" <#Joy> -- "5/10" 14. "Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969)" <#Butch> -- "6/10" These are my notes to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. I've recently transferred my reviews to IMDb and made "the list" of over 900 ratings publicly available. I've included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other -- I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood. YMMV. Police Story 3: Supercop (1996) -- "6/10" This is a decent farce action/adventure through several countries with the action team of Jackie Chan and Michelle Yeoh, both very young (it was 20 years ago). There's a lot more gunplay and a lot less slapstick fighting than I'd expect in a Jackie Chan movie. The best scene so far is actually where the Buster Keaton-esque side of Chan comes out: he's trying to keep away from his girlfriend (Maggie Cheung) while on an undercover mission at a spa -- but she sees him with Yeoh and is on the hunt. The scene is way too short and devolves into a typically stupid scene in which Cheung has to be reminded 12 times that Chan is undercover, as if it's never happened before (in Police Story I and II presumably). Yeoh's outfit is the height of 80s/90s ugliness. I saw it in Cantonese and some Mandarin as well as a few lines of English (bizarrely, some of the high-level police meetings in China as well as a trial in Malaysia were in English). Not really recommended; there are better Jackie Chan movies out there. There are better Michelle Yeoh movies out there. Unfortunately, I think this is the only one with both of them together -- and the final battle is decent. And, as always, the outtakes during the credits show just how much real effort and pain and stunts are involved: MIchelle Yeoh falls out of a car moving down the highway. Dieter Nuhr -- Ich bin's Nuhr (2005) -- "6/10" I really like this German comedian and he was good in this special, but I feel that he's gotten much better in more recent shows. He plays very clean, talks about relationships and the foibles of humanity, all delivered in a very understated, breathy delivery. I would recommend watching more recent stuff. Saw it in German. R100 (2013) -- "6/10" This is the story of a Japanese businessman who signs up for a year-long program of "surprise" domination. For one year, a dominatrix can appear out of nowhere and start in on him. Not knowing when is part of the pleasure. The settings and visuals are quite surreal: we see one such episode play out, then we see a flashback to when he signed up for the plan, where he rides a carousel in the middle of a multi-level round room, with dominatrixes in little niches all along the walls. The movie plays with color palettes, going from nearly black & white to very sepia-toned scenes in his office, to even more sepia in the restaurant. The switching palettes reminded me a bit of The Cook, the Thief, His Wife and Her Lover. From the washed-out palette and the overall look and feel of the scenes, it's hard imagine that this movie was really made in 2013. It's actually a comedy: the scene in the sushi bar where the dominatrix shows up and smashes all of his sushi before he can eat it is quite hilarious. I'm not quite getting the weird effect where his eyes go all black and ominous music plays after each humiliation. Is this the movie's way of showing his pleasure? At any rate, the story unfolds that his wife has been in a coma for 3 years. When he sees his father-in-law lamenting his comatose daughter, it depresses him -- and then he's further depressed when an absolutely awesome dominatrix attack fails to trigger his ... pleasure reaction. Now he can draw no "joy" from life at all, nothing to distract him from his boring job and his all-but-dead wife. The absolutely best part is how all of the passersby in the movie pretty much ignores the sometimes very public attacks. When he wants to back out of the contract because it's no longer working for him? Too bad, buddy. When a dominatrix shows up in the hospital room with his wife, he's upset -- but then he finds his mojo again, which upsets him even more. Not unexpectedly, he needs ever-increasing levels of humiliation to "hit the spot" as the Queen of Voices puts it. The handoff from her to the Queen of Saliva is not a scene for everyone. She dances around, mixes frozen cocktails to add flavor -- all while he's trussed on the floor and his young son is trussed up in a swing, also bound and gagged. The Queen of Saliva expires when her girth proves too much for the railing and she falls from the second floor to her death. The S&M organization wants to take revenge for what they are calling her murder. After showing several people sitting around in what looks like a hospital lounge, we discover that those people are somehow involved with the filming and things get meta. They discuss how the 100-year--old director could possibly make a movie that weird, then head back in to watch more. Then things get weird: the Queen of Gobbling takes out his comatose wife, the CEO of the S&M organization shows up and rages. Then she leads a full-on battle against Katayama, with him blowing up her ninja army with a briefcase full of grenades he found. The penultimate minutes are spent in a very good montage and then we go utterly off the rails just before the credits. No idea what the intended symbolism was. The first half was much more amusing, to be honest. Saw it in Japanese with English subtitles. Chinatown (1974) -- "8/10" Jack Nicholson plays a private detective hired by Faye Dunaway to find out if her husband is cheating on her. Her husband is the chief engineer of the power authority in California. It's the middle of a drought [1] and Nicholson is soon embroiled in a much larger drama than an affair. Roman Polanski directed it and his imprimatur is immediately obvious in the lurid photos Nicholson shows to another customer in the first seconds of the film. Plus, about 1/3 of the way through the movie, Polanski shows up in a cameo, a small speaking role. Nicholson oozes, as always, a somewhat threatening charm. The film is set at the beginning of the 20th century, so everyone is dressed to the nines all the time -- even on an all-night stakeout in the dunes at the California shore, Nicholson wears a three-piece suit and still looks as sharp as ever the next morning. Did they really wear suits and ties when boating on a lake in a park? Two guys in a boat? That was innocuous? Nicholson's pin-neat appearance devolves over the film as his nose is cut, his sunglasses shattered, and he's otherwise beaten up, but he is unflappable in his professionalism. The suit, though? Unwrinkled. As he learns more and more and is more and more sure of himself, his appearance improves again. This movie has aged extremely well: the cinematography and pacing are great for a thriller. The outdoor scenes are lush and beautifully lit -- I'm thinking of the scene outside in the riverbed. Otherwise, the time period of the movie provides nice atmosphere: there are so many things that they do that we don't do anymore. For example, when Nicholson goes to the hall of records: the records are public and can be read by anyone, but they can't be checked out, you can't make copies (no copier), you can't take pictures (no cell-phone, no camera), so Gittes has to ask for a ruler, so he can cleanly rip out a page from one of the books. Also, there are no security cameras to catch him in the act. Faye Dunaway and Jack Nicholson are great. The story is quite good with interesting plot twists. Still not sure why it's called Chinatown, other than that Gittes used to work there. Unless it's meant to be ironic -- the crimes had nothing to do with the Chinese and everything to do with rich, white people with cavalier attitudes toward genetics. "She's my sister! She's my daughter!" Recommended. Lawless (2012) -- "8/10" This is a Prohibition-era film about a moonshining family starring Tom Hardy, Shia Labeouf, and Jason Clarke whose control is challenged by city-slicker and special deputy Charlie Rakes, played in deep cover by Guy Pearce -- I barely recognized him, he'd changed himself so much from the wise-cracking soldier in Lockout. But I did see echoes of his character Felicia from The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert. Jessica Chastain and Mia Wasikowska were the love interests. They all played quite well and made what could have been a bad movie a relatively riveting one instead. The movie moves at a stately pace, appropriate for the setting and the time (1917 or thereabouts). The story is based on real people and based on the autobiography of one of the brothers, Jack, I believe. Not the immortal one, Forrest, played by Tom Hardy. Labeouf played very well and is a consummate actor. but Hardy's mumbling, stolid juggernaut was really well-played as well. He contrasted well to the ticking time bomb of Charlie Rakes, played by Pearce. Apocalypto (2006) -- "7/10" This movie is about the end-days of the Mayan kingdom and tells the tale of the powerful Mayans as they hunt through the jungle, brutally attacking local tribes for slaves and sacrifices. It starts by depicting the life of one such tribe. They appear to be primitive and quite brutal -- until the Mayans show up and show us what brutality really is. Bodies are littered everywhere -- children are left behind to starve. The huts are burned. Kind of like My Lai. I've no idea how historically accurate this movie is: nearly everyone has tattoos and piercings everywhere. Wherever they're not pierced, they're scarred or painted or hennaed. Hairdos are very elaborate. People are painted white or blue. In the Mayan city, there's this one guy covered in tarantulas while behind him are dozens of iguanas or chameleons hanging by their tails, still alive. They seem to have no honor, no principles, no kindness -- just brutality. The mass grave beyond the field of sport is hard to believe; any even somewhat-advanced tribe/civilization would not allow such putrefaction near their cities and fields. Jaguar Paw goes full Rambo in the end -- poisoning them slowly with hornets, then quickly with frog-poison darts. The ending gets it an extra star: the point is nicely made that, should you think that this was the height of brutality, the Spanish galleons in the harbor are there to prove you wrong. Well-made, incredibly brutal. Not for everyone. Stalag 17 (1953) -- "6/10" This is billed as stark WWII drama about a Stammlager (Stalag) in Germany with bunch of American sergeants who are trying to pass the time while hatching plans to escape. It's not very serious, though. It's more of a farce. Question: how can you tell the difference between a WWII movie and a Vietnam movie? Answer: the Vietnam movie has black people in it. This is a movie about prison camp where the sergeants pick the one sergeant they don't like -- Sefton, played by William Holding -- blame him for espionage and collaboration, beat the shit out of him and take all of his stuff, then wander around the barracks singing "When Johnny Comes Marching Home Again" and "Oh Come All Ye Faithful". America, fuck yeah! During the dance on Christmas, when one of the guys can't get a dance partner, he dresses himself up as a lady to make himself more attractive. Was this really so innocent even in 1953? Out-and-out farce. Second half better than the first, once they settle down and get to business. Not recommended, but if you decide to watch, stick around for the second half to make it worth it. Memento (2000) -- "10/10" I have to write down what I just saw before I forget. Imagine if you had no short-term memory. Imagine if you had no idea whether what you knew was real or a lie. Imagine if you nonetheless believed that certain things were true, because you had to believe in something. You would be like Leonard, played by Guy Pearce in an absolutely masterful performance. Carrie-Anne Moss and Joe Pantoliano (both of whom would next star in the Matrix) round out the main cast. The movie is composed of short scenes, each the length of Leonard's short-term memory, interspersed with black-and-white scenes that are supposedly the truth. What is the truth? What we perceive? What we think we know? Can we ever un-know something? So that it is no longer the truth, replaced by something or nothing? Christopher Nolan as writer and director makes us think about all of these things in a movie put together perfectly to represent the fractured landscape of not only Leonard's mind -- his "condition" affects us all, perhaps to a lesser degree, or perhaps to the same degree, but we are just so much less aware of how little we know and how much we believe and take on faith than Leonard. Highly recommended. The Wind Rises (2013) -- "8/10" Miyazaki's last film, hand-drawn. Unbelievably gorgeous, detailed, ambitious. Everything is in motion, every detail crisp, every animation fully realized. The wind is constantly blowing, the grass waving, small bits of detritus flying through the air, waves crashing, smoke blowing, people milling, clothes rippling. Where there is fire, there is destruction, buildings sagging under their own weight, windows shattered, pillars and joists sticking out, cracked and broken, masonry crumbling and falling. The flames wave about as the firehoses spray inadequate water, leaks springing all along the hose, rivulets coming together to cascade down the majestic front steps of the university. The waters reflect buildings and trees as the train races along its track. This is the story of Jirô Horikoshi, the boy who started with dreams of making beautiful planes as an aeronautical engineer and ended up designing planes for the Japanese air force. It is, of course, set in and around WWII. It is, of course, about the fire-bombing of Tokyo. The war is, of course, represented as a supernatural monster that consumes everything. These metaphorical concepts are, of course, wonderfully and intuitively and movingly brought to screen. The movie is not without social critique, mostly of Japan: Horikoshi's colleague says "Poor countries want to buy aeroplanes and pay us lots of money to design them." and "In order to work hard at the office, one needs a family at home. Strange, no?" When they travel to Germany, the engineers on both sides speak and understand both German and Japanese; I wonder if that's really how it was? The movie is about pride and jealousy, technology, science, advancement, the clash of cultures, the backwardness of Japan, the supposed advanced state of Germany, with their Schubert and heating registers instead of fires. The contrast in the end between the joy of engineering and horrific purpose to which the planes were put is depicted nicely. A bit long, but recommended. [2] Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015) -- "10/10" Yeah, that's right. I gave it a ten. I debated it, because it's probably a nine (but a solid nine) but dammit it was a very solid movie from start to finish. I might drop it to a nine on re-viewing, but then again, maybe not. It has a great story that nicely dovetailed with what we'd already learned in the other movies and presented new information and characters and worlds in the same exciting way that A New Hope had done. In many ways, it was a soft reboot of A New Hope but that was more than fine with me. Watching this movie felt like the first time I picked up a Terry Pratchett novel after nearly having given up all hope that Douglas Adams would ever write another book. It gets an extra star because it failed to disappoint. It gets another one on top of that because it was actually better than the originals in some ways. It was definitely better than Return of the Jedi. This is a great space opera with some old characters and some new -- and the new ones are really good. Some spoilers ahead, but not too bad. I saw this movie with absolutely no preparation and no idea what was in it, except for a vague notion that (A) a girl/woman played the main role, (B) there was a black stormtrooper in it and (C) Han Solo and Chewbacca were back. The re-introduction of the Millenium Falcon was perfect -- c'mon, it's everyone's favorite ship. The parallel between the planet Jakku in this film and Tatooine in the first was welcome: the shot of the multi-sun system was nostalgic. The Angkor Wat-like temple where the new smuggler's bar resided was a mix of Jabba's temple and the old Cantina. The story felt retold, but in a good way. Like the circle of time comes around, history repeats itself, etc. It could have been hackneyed, but I felt it was not. Director Abrams showed us the parallel and let us do with it what we wanted, rather than placing a character in front of to tell us what we should be seeing. It's a smart movie in that regard, not playing down to a dumb crowd. [3] And it's truly funny -- lots of appropriate one-liners and in-jokes and more modern jokes. Like when Lo Ren hulks out on his communications console...or when he hulks out a second time and we see the two stormtroopers just ... walk away. The stormtroopers, while not the stars of the movie, are definitely more in the foreground. Their own clichés are celebrated -- like a couple of scenes where they really couldn't hit the broad side of a barn. Very funny and warmly nostalgic at the same time. The writers really struck a balance and made a great film. I expected a rollicking, funny space opera and that's what I got. You know how sometimes a movie has such jarring moments that it throws you out of the moment and the mood? That didn't happen. You know how sometimes you really enjoy a movie while watching it, then it falls apart immediately afterwards on reflection? That didn't happen either. You know how sometimes you wake up the next morning and think "meh"? Also didn't happen. [4] Go into this one one with open eyes -- eyes from which the stain of The Phantom Menace has been washed -- and you will love it. Highly recommended. I saw it in 3D and in English with German and French subtitles [5]. El Topo (1970) -- "4/10" This is a bizarre Mexican western, full of symbolism. It starts off with a scene of utter slaughter in a village as the mysterious and dark-haired El Topo (Spanish for "the mole" or "the spy") rides in, clad all in black leather in the hot sun, with a blue-eyed, blond-haired young boy clad only in a moccasins and a wide-brimmed hat riding behind him. A grinding/grating noise pounds through the whole scene -- it is uncertain whether it is the sound of hangman's ropes grinding or an animal in pain or something else. The next scene wordlessly introduces 3 weirdos -- one makes love to a figure of a woman he outlined with dried beans on a rock, another kisses women's shoes then shoots them off of rocks, etc. They see that El Topo has looted jewelry from the village and ride off to rob him. They meet -- again with a grating sound in the background, this time goats bleating. Is this a Mexican-Western homage to The Clockwork Orange? The next group of criminals -- the Colonel and his merry band -- have taken over a Franciscan monastery. The monks are forced to act as dance-partners/whores for some of the guys. It's just one surreal, nearly wordless, deranged and possibly drug- or alcohol-addled scene after another. The standard scenes of depravity are present, with the bad guys portrayed by Mexicans and the monks, the woman, El Topo and the little boy (still no clothes for him) portrayed by blond-haired, blue-eyed actors. There is method to the madness, but it's a cruel and at-times senseless film that thinks it's more profound that it is. This movie has the production quality and the cast of a 70s porno -- with more kids and way more six-shooters. Like what's up with the corral with the hundreds of rabbits that have no clear food source? Speaking of food sources...there don't seem to be any for anyone. Topo wins against all the masters then asks God "why have you forsaken me?" in a pretty heavy-handed Jesus reference. But we're not done yet: next the two ladies shoot all the stigmata into him before entering into a sapphic tryst. The final chapter is the easiest to understand, although it starts really, really strangely: El Topo wakes to find himself among a colony of freaks and outcasts buried in a mountain. He's determined to dig a tunnel to the village outside. The village, however, is an evil place, rife with decadence and slavery. Why even dig? And so on. Utterly disconnected from all that went before. Symbolic movies can be good -- for example, Oh Brother Where Art Thou? is good even if you have no idea it's based on The Odyssey. Maybe I'm just tired of pretentious pseudo-Christian symbology. Not recommended. Zack Galifianakis: Live at the Purple Onion (2006) -- "7/10" This is mix of about 70% standup combined with piano-playing and a bunch of crowd work. Different parts of the show reminded me of Stewart Lee, Stephen Wright and Andy Kaufman. The other 30% is a mock interview where he plays his twin brother Seth and there's also some man-on-the-street stuff thrown in. Joy Ride (2001) -- "5/10" This is another Paul Walker vehicle -- pun totally intended. This time he's on the road with his brother Steve Zahn, who he's picked up from prison. Walker is on his way to pick up Leelee Sobieski, in whom he's very interested. On the way, Zahn and Walker start messing with a trucker by pretending that they're "Candy Cane", a girl who's got nothing better to do than meet up with a random trucker. I wonder how Paul Walker became the guy that you put in a car in every movie? Even pairing Zahn and Walker can't save this movie. Leelee Sobieski is her usual, inspiring self. Not recommended. Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969) -- "6/10" I'd seen this movie before, but a long time ago, back in the 80s sometime, probably. At the time, I thought those two guys were the coolest guys ever. But objectively they're kind of jerks. They can't work a day in their lives, they steal way more money than they need and they get by pretty much only on an unnatural surfeit of charm. For example, Sundance cheats at cards and swindles a guy out of all of this money, then threatens to kill him for calling him a cheater. The way out? The guy has to pretty much apologize, after which they take all of his money, but leave him alive. Win-win. Katharine Ross is introduced to us with a striptease induced at gunpoint, but haha it's just a little game she and the Kid like to play. This is the 60s, so he kinda sorta shares her with Butch. Hooray. Redford and Newman are a good team. They spend most of the middle third of the movie running away from a shadowy band of pursuers. When Newman proposes to jump off of a waterfall, Redford refuses and wants them to stand their ground. When Newman presses him, Redford, who's shown himself to be more proficient than Newman in nearly every way other than talkin' and thinkin', protests that "I can't swim!" Newman gut-laughs and finally sputters, "Oh, I wouldn't worry about that! The fall'll probably kill you anyway!" Good stuff. On the other hand, this movie sports not one but four musical montages (including the initial credits), so they were really papering over the cracks in the script. Once they get to Bolivia, they learn pidgin Spanish, do a few jobs and become so notorious that not only does the posse that nearly chased them down in the States follow them to Bolivia, but when they try to go straight to avoid the posse, they end up getting hired to protect the payroll train. I thought the story was ironic enough that they were to defend it against themselves, but there actually is a crew of Bolivians thieves that they have to vanquish. All I remember from the first viewing is the freeze-frame at the very end. I had forgotten the 10 minutes of running from cover to cover against an unseen enemy that immediately preceded it. Still, the two guys save it at the very end, so I give it an extra star for the two leads and for the final few minutes. Saw it in English and Spanish (no subtitles). -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] A movie about a Californian drought seems like a timely movie to watch...or maybe California always has a drought. [1] I wonder how much of the more extreme Japanese cinema -- I'm looking at you, Gozu and R100 -- are reactions to the near-syrupy sweetness of Japanese cinema and culture as represented in films like Miyazaki's? They're lovely, but so far removed from the quotidian filth of humanity. Miyazaki shows the girl's chair in front of her easel to indicate that she's near -- in R100, Horikoshi would have felt its warmth or buried his snout in it. Almost as a "screw you" to the other, cleansed form of cinema. [1] More spoilers here: although I was in a SUPER-dumb crowd. They laughed uproariously whenever the BB8 droid demanded it. Every. Single. Time. Some of the more subtle jokes of this flavor were well-done and well-integrated into the scene; others seemed gratuitous. Also, when Lo Ren calls Vader his grandfather, there was a ton of hushed and astonished whispering along the lines of "but I thought Han was his father?" as if a person has only a single, male parent and as if we didn't know that Leia and Solo got jiggy after the end of Return of the Jedi and as if we didn't know that Leia and Luke were Anakin/Vader's twins. To be fair, that particular revelation was nicely presented and I had a 1/4-second of processing to do because of the tricky way they did it, but the astonishment of my theater continued for way too long. [1] I've since read a handful of comments on Reddit and the first and most highly rated ones were disappointed that Terence Malick hadn't influenced J.J. Abrams enough. These people are incapable of enjoying anything for what it is, and have forgotten what they fell in love with in the first place. Star Wars is not about gravitas and long moments of contemplation of the giant and probably tragic and fatal battle ahead. It's a space opera. I went to the movie with the opposite of the folks from Reddit: I didn't know most of my group, but they were much younger and had seen Phantom Menace in the theater when they were ten years old. [1] I was actually glad for subtitles during a few scenes where the sotte voce Stormtrooper conversations were impossible to hear in a theater full of excited Star Wars fans. I'm not a huge fan of 3D though and would gladly watch it in 2D instead; it would probably be crisper. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3185 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3185 Tue, 15 Dec 2015 23:34:26 +0100 -- "7/10" 2. "The Martian (2015)" <#Martian> -- "9/10" 3. "Fargo S01 (2014)" <#Fargo> -- "8/10" 4. "The Theory of Everything (2014)" <#Theory> -- "7/10" 5. "Narcos S01 (2015)" <#Narcos> -- "7/10" 6. "Kill the Messenger (2014)" <#Kill> -- "7/10" 7. "Man of the Year (2006)" <#Man> -- "6/10" 8. "Grudge Match (2013)" <#Grudge> -- "6/10" 9. "Bad Neighbours (2014)" <#Bad> -- "7/10" 10. "Gone Girl (2014)" <#Gone> -- "7/10" 11. "Jurassic World (2015)" <#Jurassic> -- "6/10" 12. "John Mulaney: The Comeback Kid (2015)" <#John> -- "8/10" 13. "Anthony Jeselnik: My Thoughts and Prayers (2015)" <#Anthony> -- "7/10" 14. "Doom (2005)" <#Doom> -- "5/10" 15. "The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1 (2014)" <#Mockingjay> -- "6/10" 16. "The Million Pound Note (1954)" <#Million> -- "6/10" 17. "Alien³ (1992)" <#Alien> -- "8/10" 18. "R.I.P.D. (2013)" <#RIPD> -- "5/10" 19. "Furious 7 (2015)" <#Furious> -- "7/10" 20. "Fantastic Four (2015)" <#Fantastic> -- "6/10" 21. "Super Troopers (2001)" <#SuperTroopers> -- "5/10" 22. "Super (2011)" <#Super> -- "6/10" 23. "Jupiter Ascending (2015)" <#Jupiter> -- "7/10" 24. "Iliza Shlesinger: Freezing Hot (2015)" <#Iliza> -- "7/10" 25. "Jen Kirkman: I'm Gonna Die Alone (And I Feel Fine) (2015)" <#Jen> -- "8/10" 26. "Shaolin Soccer (2001)" <#Shaolin> -- "6/10" 27. "Oki's Movie (2010)" <#Oki> -- "6/10" 28. "The Day He Arrives (2011)" <#Arrives> -- "7/10" 29. "Side Effects (2013)" <#Side> -- "6/10" 30. "The Yellow Sea (2010)" <#Yellow> -- "8/10" 31. "Gozu (2003)" <#Gozu> -- "5/10" These are my notes to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. I've recently transferred my reviews to IMDb and made "the list" of over 900 ratings publicly available. I've included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other -- I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood. YMMV. Everest (2015) -- "7/10" Kath and I went to see this in an actual theatre, complete with 3D glasses and everything. We'd read the book on which it is based waaaaay back when Jon Krakauer's telling of that summer of 1996 on Everest came out in 1997. The movie stayed quite true to this story, although they did take a few digs at Krakauer (Michael Kelly), making him out to be an unhelpful chickenshit. Given the conditions, it just made him look smart, but he apparently took issue anyway. That has nothing to do with the movie, though, which was quite lovely and did a great job of conveying the sheer cold and inhospitality of Everest. What came through for me, though, was that, while some people -- the amateurs -- had a very tough time with Everest, there were plenty of people around who could handle Everest with aplomb, going back and forth between camps, from 5500M to 7800M to 8300M, carrying large loads of oxygen bottles while their clients struggled to go up just once. It's not easy by any stretch of the imagination, but there are some people who are much more adapted than others. Jake Gyllenhaal played well, though he was restricted by a smaller role; Jason Clarke was very good as Rob Hall. Josh Brolin played Beck Weathers, the guy who lost his nose, most of his toes, and most of his hands. Sam Worthington was a climber on a different mountain. Anatoli Boukreev (Ingvar Sigurdsson) is the most pragmatic of them all, even though he refuses to use Oxygen. He doesn't seem to need it. The visuals were lovely and the CGI imperceptible. The 3D didn't really impress, except in a few places, like zooming in on the tents in the large camps. Within the tents, at close quarters, however, it was more of a distraction. Recommended. The Martian (2015) -- "9/10" This movie could have been terrible and jingoistic and ill-done but instead it benefited from Matt Damon's fantastic performance and Ridley Scott's steady hand at the tiller (as director). The science and logic are paramount; emotions have little place. The story is of a mission to Mars that must scramble to scrub their mission in the face of a gigantic storm that threatened to destroy their ride home. One of their members is swept away and they leave him behind. There's a bit too much military bravado on Jessica Chastain's part, but I expected no more from her. There are inconsistencies in behavior (nobody ever seems to fight) but a lot of the shortcuts are understandable given the distances and time-delays that a more realistic approach would entail. Damon is really, really good. I could have done without the ending (the final minute; it could have ended on him looking at the tiny sprout between his feet). I read the book after having already seen the movie and, though I did really like the last 3/4 of the book, I actually liked the movie better. Highly recommended. Fargo S01 (2014) -- "8/10" I liked this 10-part series. The acting was very good (Billy Bob Thornton, Martin Freeman, Allison Tolman) as was the dialogue and the story. Netflix is really producing some high-quality entertainment. Spoiler alert: The show ends in a murder, an extra-judicial killing of an unarmed and incapacitated man. America loves this kind of vigilante justice, though. It doesn't even occur to most people that people don't deserve killing: they deserve to be brought to justice. And the guy who murdered the man in cold blood gets a citation for bravery and his wife -- an otherwise commendable police officer -- is "proud of him" instead of pissed that she couldn't question the guy who'd committed so many murders. A happy ending all around, justice American-style. Recommended. The Theory of Everything (2014) -- "7/10" I liked this biography of Stephen Hawking much more than I expected to. Hawking's life started off fairly normal and ended up decidedly not normal as ALS took over his body, though not his mind. Eddie Redmayne and Felicity Jones are excellent as the main couple, him as a cocky young scientist, full of oats to sow and she as the dedicated and head-over-heels-in-love wife. Recommended. Narcos S01 (2015) -- "7/10" This is a semi-biographical film about the rise and fall of Pablo Escobar's Colombian drug empire, as narrated by one of the primary DEA agents on the case. The acting is quite good, most of the dialogue is in Spanish and it's a decent history lesson for those who don't know what happened, at both the low level on the streets as well as in international politics, where the pressure to extradite to the U.S. -- where it was automatically assumed that suspects would get a real trial rather than the corrupted/bought-off-and-bribed Colombian court system. I've only watched about half, but what I've seen so far is pretty good. I can feel my colloquial Spanish getting better already -- Hijo de puta! Kill the Messenger (2014) -- "7/10" Jeremy Renner plays the tragic reporter Gary Webb, who cracked the CIA involvement both in Iran-Contra and in selling drugs in the U.S., primarily in black neighborhoods and primarily crack cocaine. Renner plays quite well and Webb's story would turn out to be almost 100% true, notwithstanding protestations by the standard speakers for power. CIA reports and investigations have corroborated nearly everything. He committed suicide in the end, after years of harassment and hounding by the press. He wasn't exactly an easy guy to live with, but he wasn't wrong. Recommended. Man of the Year (2006) -- "6/10" Robin Williams is a comedian president-elect of the United States. Louis Black is his chief of staff; Chistopher Walken is his manager. Laura Linney is a highly placed employee of the election-machine manufacturer that produced every machine for the most recent election -- and which swung the election for Robin Williams. It's kind of standard fare, with a decent amount of critique of the American political and electoral system, as given voice by the hyperkinetic Williams. Grudge Match (2013) -- "6/10" Stallone and De Niro are former light-heavyweight champions that come back in their sixties for a grudge match. Stallone is coached by Alan Arkin, who is fantastic; De Niro is coached by his son, played by John Bernthal, who's quite good. The lady that started the feud is played by Kim Basinger. De Niro's not bad, but he plays the same asshole he always plays, which isn't exactly a shout-out to his acting ability. Stallone plays the same nice guy he always plays but seemed to me to be the better actor. Not recommended, but entertaining. Bad Neighbours (2014) -- "7/10" Better than expected. Rose Byrne is hilarious: "Milk me!" Seth Rogan is pretty good, Dave Franco is also good. Byrne and Rogan are a very good couple. Zac Ephron and Franco are also a very good couple. This is actually a much better movie than expected, on the strength of the actors. The screaming match between Ephron and Franco was fantastic. And Rose Byrne is really good. Dave Franco is definitely the better at this whole acting thing than his chronically stoned-looking brother, James. Recommended? Gone Girl (2014) -- "7/10" Though this movie was pretty well-done, Kath and I watched it after we'd both read the book (which was very well-written, by the way), so a lot of suspense was gone during the film. Affleck did a decent job, and Rosamund Pike was very good. The film stayed pretty true to the plot of book, which I will do my best not to spoil here. It's a very entertaining thriller with a couple of twists, though the twists came out better in the book than in the film. Recommended. Jurassic World (2015) -- "6/10" This is a pretty decent entry in the series, with Chris Pratt lending his bonhomie to make it better. Everyone else in the movie is pretty forgettable except maybe Vincent D'Onofrio as the bad guy from NGen. But Bryce Dallas Howard, who I'd never heard of before, was pretty bad, at least for the first half of the movie. The dinosaurs are lovely and the dino fights are pretty well-staged. Recommended if you just want a decent action movie. John Mulaney: The Comeback Kid (2015) -- "8/10" I'd last seen Mulaney in a special years ago and, while it was good, this one is much better. His material was tight, his delivery great, moving between different styles -- straight one-liners, stories, surrealist, callbacks. It was really nice to see him having grown and gotten better. Recommended. Anthony Jeselnik: My Thoughts and Prayers (2015) -- "7/10" I haven't watched a one-liner or straight set-up comic in a long time, maybe since Mitch Hedberg. Jeselnik is pretty good at this. The first two-thirds of the show is these kind of jokes, some with longer setups, some with a lot of foreshadowing. Many are clever, but few are hilarious. The final third of the show is more modern and has the best material. He was good enough to make me want to check out his TV show, The Jeselnik Offensive. Recommended. Doom (2005) -- "5/10" This movie has a terrible rating, but is actually quite true to the original game, capturing the feel quite well. Karl Urban, Rosamund Pike and Dwayne Johnson lend it some gravitas, as far as that goes. The effects are pretty well-done, including the makeup for all of the mutations for the various scientists and soldiers. The final run where Urban moves to first-person mode is very reminiscent of the game, including the giblets flying everywhere. The final stand-off between the Rock and Urban is better than expected. Recommended for anyone who played the game. The Hunger Games: Mockingjay - Part 1 (2014) -- "6/10" This penultimate entry in the 4-part trilogy was too drawn-out and obviously milking everything it could from what has become a story with a solitary note. The war between the Capital and the Districts is a classic class war -- and the echoes with our own society are obvious -- to me, at least. I just wonder how many of the people who watch this movie and cheer Katniss on are also aware that they spend the rest of their lives cheering on the real-life version of the Capital? Anyway, Philip Seymour Hoffman played out one of his last roles and Jennifer Lawrence is good, as usual. The script just doesn't offer them very much material and you can feel it stretching to leave some material for the next installment. A pity, because so much more could have been done with these themes with a bit more bravery. Not recommended ... unless you, like me, just need to see everything in the series. Or if you need to see Jennifer Lawrence being cool and sad. The Million Pound Note (1954) -- "6/10" Gregory Peck plays an American down on his luck in England. He is taken in by two eccentric millionaires, who give him a million-pound note to see how far he gets in London. The story is by Mark Twain. The concept may be familiar to those who've seen Trading Places, which has a similar premise, placing Eddie Murphy in nearly the same situation. Alien³ (1992) -- "8/10" This movie is 23 years old and the production values are still extremely good. The effects -- especially the sets -- hold up extremely well. As far as the plot goes, it's pretty easy to see where Doom got its inspiration. This movie looks so good, though. The machines and the alien blend together in a baroque, technological amalgam, with ducts, pipes, readouts, valves, bundles of cables, partially covered in water, calcite and spiderwebs. Giants circular portals which look like airlocks, hexagonal hallways and long brick-lined hallways -- all of this was built -- no CGI to speak of in 1992. The only thing that's a bit dated is the Alien itself, when it's fully visible. The plot is decent enough, with Ripley's ship crash-landing on a planet populated only by a small band of former prisoners-turned-Biblical-zealots. They discover that the beast has hitched a ride along not only in the ship but also in Ripley. It almost doesn't matter, though, because the environment plays the starring role here. Recommended. R.I.P.D. (2013) -- "5/10" This is an action movie about the undead in the same way Men In Black was about aliens. Ryan Reynolds plays the Will-Smith role while Jeff Bridges takes Tommy Lee Jones's place. Some of the undead look kind of interesting. Kevin Bacon is in this as his typically nasty self, playing both Reynolds's partner and also the undead ringleader trying to bring about Armageddon. Mary Louise Parker has her moments as the chief of the undead police; Stephanie Szostak is the incredibly bland, boring and nearly shockingly under-fed mourning wife of the recently undead Reynolds. Bridges plays Roy, a Wyatt-Earp--like marshall who's been in the PD for centuries. They thwart Bacon's horrific plan and the duo end up liking each other. The end. Or is it? Probably it is, because this movie didn't make enough money for the studio to build on the world they build in this first one. Recommended for fans of Reynolds and/or Bridges. Furious 7 (2015) -- "7/10" Paul Walker's last ride looks a lot like several other of Paul Walker's rides, but I guess you don't mess with a formula. The cast fits well together, with the exception of Jordana Brewster, who's been hollow and weak in all of the other movies, as well. Vin Diesel and Michelle Rodriguez were phoning it in worse than the other movies. Ronda Rousey was not needed in this film. However, Tyrese Gibson, Ludacris, , Jason Statham, The Rock, Nathalie Emmanuel (Missandei from Game of Thrones) and, of course, Walker all do a good job with what has become nearly its own genre. The best scenes are really the ones where they're driving; the fisticuffs are OK, but too drawn-out and waaaay too over-the-top. They're not superheroes, but nothing seems to hurt them. Crowbar to the head? Not even a mark. I'm prepared to suspend disbelief for one thing per movie. In these movies, it's cars. The indestructability of the characters constantly lifts me out of the moment. Seriously, though, there are some sweet action set-pieces here, although some of those go beyond what would be needed as well. At 02:20, I thought it was a bit long. Enjoy, if this is your thing. Despite its well-choreographed but finally frustrating fight scenes, it gets an extra point because most of the cast is endearing. Fantastic Four (2015) -- "6/10" Better than I expected, although also quite a bit slower than expected as well. It's a science-buff movie that tells the story of how Reed Richards and Benjamin Grimm started working on a inter-dimensional teleporter in the fifth grade. They finally completed a successful teleportation with return journey by the time they left high school. Victor von Doom was performing very similar research for the Baxter Foundation, but had not yet been successful. When Richards joins the team, along with Sue and Johnny Storm, they succeed in making a much larger version that can carry people to another dimension. The story is considerably different than the original origin story, but holds together quite well. With a lot of drunken courage, they take the first journey themselves rather than letting NASA do it and it ends poorly, with each of them getting their powers in the ensuing debacle and von Doom disappearing entirely. Forty-five minutes in and we finally see them with their powers -- Johnny Storm is really well-done. Victor von Doom after he gets back is also decent, but not as cool as the Doom from the comics. Super Troopers (2001) -- "5/10" This movie is a comedy/farce about the Vermont State Police. It has its moments -- testing the bulletproof cup at the firing range -- but it started very slowly and picked up speed only in the last third. Brian Cox as the chief is great. Jay Chandrasekhar was also pretty good. Overall a bumpy ride, but it ended up OK. It would be fine to add to a rotation of movies you watch when you're drunk and/or overtired, but definitely with friends. Super (2011) -- "6/10" To continue in the vein of movies that start with the word "Super", this one is about a regular guy -- kind of a loser -- whose wife leaves him for his drug dealer. He turns himself into a superhero because, well, because he's depressed? What recommends this film is the cast, which stars Rainn Wilson as the schlub (Dwight Schrute from The Office), Kevin Bacon as the dealer, Liv Tyler as the unfaithful wife, Ellen Page as the new friend, André Royo as a friend (Bubbles from The Wire). Michael Rooker (very good as Yondu, the bounty hunter ship-captain in Guardians of the Galaxy), Linda Cardellini (Freaks and Geeks), Nathan Fillion (captain in Firefly) and many more recognizable faces fill out the cast. This movie gets a good deal darker, with real violence and a bizarre scene where 90-pound Ellen Page rapes giant Schrute. But she's all-around nuts bordering on amoral. Then shit gets horribly real for Bolt Girl. Plus rabbits. Weird flick. Quirky, I guess? Jupiter Ascending (2015) -- "7/10" This movie got a much worse rap than it earned. This is at least as good as Guardians of the Galaxy. Mila Kunis and Channing Tatum are decent; Sean Bean survives a whole movie and Eddie Redmayne is deliciously evil. The story isn't half-bad and the special effects are absolutely spectacular and absolutely rock-solid. The story and feel kind of reminded me a bit of the Dune movies (especially Lynch's version), mostly due to Redmayne's character. I enjoyed it more than I expected and it's worth seeing, if only for the fully rendered and pitch-perfect CGI world they envision. The refinery on Jupiter puts anything in Revenge of the Sith to absolute shame for realism. Iliza Shlesinger: Freezing Hot (2015) -- "7/10" She put on a decent set about the usual topics. The middle 60% was the best, so don't get discouraged about the beginning. She's just warming up. Some bits fall a bit flat, but others are really good. Not sure where she was headed with that bit about the Satan as a girlfriend, but she followed up with something a bit better to end the show. You can't watch this with your parents or non-cool co-workers 'cause of some amusing but potentially cringe-inducing pantomime. Would watch again. Jen Kirkman: I'm Gonna Die Alone (And I Feel Fine) (2015) -- "8/10" I liked Jen Kirkman better than Iliza Schlesinger, although I have no idea why either one of them feels the need to wear those ridiculous high-heels on-stage. Kirkman's routine was very solid from start to finish with no real lulls or mis-steps. The best bits were about dating a 20-year-old drummer at 37, about being single around married people, about being married (and divorced) and about other people's kids and the insufferability of modern-day parents in general. Basically the whole thing was pretty good and you can definitely watch with family, if they're not too squeamish about regular adult talk about genitals with cursing. So, basically, as long as they're cool. There's no potentially offputting pantomime as in Schlesinger's show. Recommended. Shaolin Soccer (2001) -- "6/10" This is a super-campy effects-laden movie about a fallen group of Shaolin monks who form a soccer team and excel with their amazing and zany Shaolin powers. This movies is absolutely as insane as it sounds but if you've seen any of the director Stephen Chow's other movies, this shouldn't come as a big surprise. The plot is the same as for every other sports movie ever made. The team is terrible until they believe in themselves (find their Kung Fu in this case), then they kick unbelievable amounts of ass, until they meet the evil team in the finals. They're down and nearly out by half-time, including their heretofore impenetrable Bruce-Lee lookalike goalkeeper (he actually shows up in the yellow suit from Game of Death). It has its moments and it's quite goofy and funny and feels more like live-action anime, but gets a lot of tropes of the genre right, mixing the melodrama of Chinese movies with over-the-top but good effects as well as a lot of the gags associated with movies like Airplane. Don't get me wrong, if you're not ready for how goofy this movie is, you'll turn it off nearly immediately, but some of the actors -- especially the star, Stephen Chow -- are quite charismatic. You don't want to miss the power of Mighty Steel Leg's final kick. Just carnage. You can guess the end. Oki's Movie (2010) -- "6/10" This is a Korean film about a movie director/cinema professor. It's a simple movie, mostly dialogue-driven, but there are some nice subtleties. For example, when Oki meets the photographer (his future wife, it turns out) in the park along the river, she enters the frame with her back turned to us. She stays that way nearly throughout the scene, turning to profile only once or twice and only briefly, at that. The director did this a few more times. This was a difficult movie to follow because it jumped around in time over about five years (I think) and the narrator kept changing and the pieces were out of order. The final segment of four was interleaved with two very similar visits to the same park, with different lovers, one year apart. I saw it in Korean with English subtitles so there was a lot of culture and language to bridge for me, and I don't think I quite made it. I'm not sorry I saw it, but I don't think I got as much out of it as the creators put into it. The Day He Arrives (2011) -- "7/10" I followed up Oki's Movie with this movie by the same director. This one is again heavily dialogue-driven, with the same somewhat awkward conversational style between relatively innocuous characters. It is again winter in Seoul, this time filmed in black and white. This movie was made in 2011, but depicts a world in which a mostly not-famous film director meets some young fans in what looks like a much-older restaurant -- the black and white helps, of course, to make it look like it happened in the 60s, but the young guys don't even mention StarCraft once, which is odd. This movie is easier to follow: the young guys mimic their idol, the director and he, in his drunkenness, flips out at them. As in Oki's movie, drunkenness plays a large role. As does stalking, because the director next heads to the apartment of an old flame. As in Oki's movie, there are recurring themes -- there are multiple segments, the group ends up at the same bar at the end of several of these, the group (regardless of composition) drinks a lot. Again, I might be missing something, but this feels like the South Korean version of a Mumblecore/Millenial movie about film students and actors and petty human foibles. Or maybe it's a Korean Woody Allen movie. But despite that, it grew on me: the people are concerned with sadness and insecurity and love, but in a less superficial and perhaps more philosophical way than in the movie I watched next (Side Effects, reviewed below). Also I'm starting to get used to the director/screenwriter's zooming in for effect and his use of repetition of tropes and entire scenes with different dialogue. The repetition layers "what if?" scenarios and plays out the same handful of scenes again and again -- hinted at only once or twice that they even (or least "he") even notice. I'm sure I still missed a lot (the cultural and language barriers I mentioned in my review of Oki's Movie above), but it was more interesting than I expected it to be from the first 1/2 hour. Some themes even recurred from Oki's Movie (like him meeting a photographer and not liking to have his picture taken). Recommended. Side Effects (2013) -- "6/10" Rooney Mara plays the young wife of Channing Tatum, an executive/trader who went to prison for four years for insider trading. She's depressed, even after he gets out, and tries to commit suicide. Jude Law is her new psychiatrist; a stunning Catherine Zeta Jones is her former psychiatrist. I also saw David Costabile (Gale from Breaking Bad). Everyone is beautiful and rich and depressed and addicted to quick fixes for becoming happy. It's ostensibly a thriller but there were really no twists or turns to the plot -- or at least none that you couldn't see coming a mile away. The actors played well, but the script was kind of boring, maybe because I didn't end up caring about any of the people at all, especially once these mostly stupid people started inelegantly examining the ideas of consciousness, responsibility, etc. but they get stuck on their own raging egos and making sure that they themselves are in the clear. Law plays quite well, as usual. It was also a bit long for the material that they had, lingering over details that were obvious in the first few seconds. Perhaps the contrast to The Day He Arrives was too great, because while I wouldn't rave about that film, at least it didn't feel overly slick and designed-by-committee like this one. The final twist is decent, but a bit predictable and under-acted. Not recommended. The Yellow Sea (2010) -- "8/10" This is the story of a down-on-his-luck cab-driver from China, whose wife has left him after he gave up all of their savings for her travel visa to Korea. He is left behind and drowns his sorrows in Mah-Jongg debt. Out of nowhere, a man, Myun, approaches him and offers to buy off his debt if he'll travel to South Korea to assassinate a man for him. He crosses the eponymous sea in a boat with other illegal immigrants. While in Korea, he not only scopes his target, but also looks for his wife. This is a well-crafted movie in a thoroughly modern style. It's interesting to see the themes offered by well-made movies from other cultures. Here we learn that the theme of immigration -- and illegal immigration -- is universal. There are always those desperate enough to make the trip. There is always gambling and drinking and infidelity and violence. Gu-nam is also told to wear a hat because his hair marks him as a foreigner, which is strange because they keep calling him Joseonjok, which is apparently what they call Koreans who live in China. I was wondering how he was able to speak Korean (not that I'm great at detecting the difference between the Asian languages). This movie is so modern that it overuses the shaky-cam, going especially nuts and visually incomprehensible in the chase sequence in the middle of the film. The chase scene comes about because the "hit" goes wrong six ways to Sunday. It's typically divided, in that the first half is much slower and builds a curiosity about the simplicity of the story, which the second half destroys with revelations about undercurrents that you'd only guessed at in the first half. Here the movie is what I would call standard action plot: sad-sack gets involved in something much bigger than the crime he'd intended; cops and criminals shake down immigrant elements. He digs deep and becomes a Jason-Bourne--level fighting machine. The only difference is that the cops are much more reluctant to use their guns, if they even have them. The criminals also generally don't have guns -- instead their knives and hatchets are far more brutal. They make guns look like the sissy's way out. The lack of guns changes the whole tenor of the movie -- the contrast to American movies where guns are popping off everywhere is stark. It changes how the story is told, and I like it better without guns. The main gangster boss, Myun, is a relentless force of nature. Gu-nam is no slouch, either, especially for a cab driver. It's nice to watch a movie that wants to be good without worrying about a sequel: the ending is Shakespearean and Gu-nam keeps his promise. The violence is visceral; the brutality and fiery destruction unvarnished. The plot was more standard than Old Boy but it reminded me a bit of that, which is a good thing. A bit long and not for the faint of heart, but recommended. Gozu (2003) -- "5/10" This is a very bizarre and surrealistic Yakuza thriller about a young Yakuza who's instructed to drive his mentor to the site of said mentor's assassination. When the mentor appears to have died en route, the young Yakuza is even more surprised to discover that the corpse has disappeared from the convertible where he left him while he ate lunch in an utterly surreal café. He calls his boss to inform him, but the boss is quite busy with other tasks and misses the point entirely. The focus on bizarre characters and the disjointed screenplay remind me a bit of early Lynch, but the overarching vision is hard to pinpoint. [1] I'm only about 1/4 of the way through and the poor guy's been handed off from a phantom-of-the-opera type guide through the underworld to a hotel proprietress who's quite forward and armed with her own bizarre peccadilloes. And the weirdness doesn't stop: the dumb, bald guy is a fake medium, the hotel owner has an unreal fetish with her own breast milk, which she is mysteriously able to continue producing, despite her age. Then the eponymous Gozu (literally "cow's head") shows up and licks our poor hero's face all over while he's peering into the bedroom where the hotel proprietress is being milked by her purported medium. Now we're in a factory/laundromat where people's skins are hanging like cleaned coats. What. The. Hell. And now his "brother" is back, but as a woman (more Lynchian notes, now with body-changes). This paves the way for the next level in their relationship -- although first he has to overcome that (A) the girl is his former mentor and (B) her anatomy is haunted. They persevere, though in what starts off as a touching scene, but ends badly -- which I predicted -- but there's no way you could predict how it actually ends. Well, maybe David Lynch could. Or David Cronenberg. Disjointed and odd and hard to understand. I give it an extra star for effort and because there's got to be something I'm missing, but I cannot recommend it and watching it once was enough. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] As with the Korean films, I fear that the cultural and language barriers make it impossible to extract as much nuance from the film as someone born to Japanese cinema and Japan would. This is always the case, but the more esoteric the film, the more goes missing. It's like I have friends in Switzerland who just love Archer, but they're enjoying it on several fewer levels than I do, just because they're missing too much information to catch all of the multi-layered references. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3188 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3188 Sun, 06 Dec 2015 12:23:11 +0100 -- "7/10" 2. "Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt S01 (2015)" <#Unbreakable> -- "8/10" 3. "Vehicle 19 (2013)" <#Vehicle> -- "6/10" 4. "Trainspotting (1996)" <#Trainspotting> -- "8/10" 5. "Grace and Frankie S01 (2015)" <#Grace> -- "6/10" 6. "Daredevil S01 (2015)" <#Daredevil> -- "9/10" 7. "Psycho (1960)" <#Psycho> -- "8/10" 8. "Side by Side (2012)" <#Side> -- "8/10" 9. "Snatch (2000)" <#Snatch> -- "8/10" 10. "We're the Millers (2013)" <#We> -- "6/10" 11. "Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015)" <#Avengers> -- "7/10" 12. "Lincoln (2012)" <#Lincoln> -- "7/10" 13. "Rush (2013)" <#Rush> -- "7/10" 14. "Hamlet (2000)" <#Hamlet> -- "7/10" 15. "Laputa: Castle in the Sky (1986)" <#Laputa> -- "7/10" 16. "Kevin Hart: Seriously Funny (2010)" <#Kevin> -- "6/10" 17. "Chelsea Peretti: One of the Greats (2014)" <#Chelsea> -- "7/10" 18. "G.I. Joe: Retaliation (2013)" <#GIJoe> -- "4/10" These are my notes to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. I've recently transferred my reviews to IMDb and made "the list" of over 900 ratings publicly available. I've included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other -- I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood. YMMV. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) -- "7/10" This is the slasher film that redefined what it meant to be a slasher film. It invented tropes out of whole cloth that would endure for decades. The movie was not only better than expected, but also darker in unexpected ways. It's hard to imagine this movie being made today because no-one could relate to it: there are young people traveling in a van through a hot Texas desert, with no air-conditioning and probably no deodorant and no smart-phones and no complaining. It was dirty and dusty and no showers in sight and still no complaining. One of the couples scrambled to what the guy remembered as a swimming hole and they find only a dried-out arroyo -- where they both lie down anyway, she in a halter-top and he without a shirt. This is not remarkable in and of itself, but it bespeaks a willingness to put up with discomfort that has all but disappeared -- if not in real-life people themselves, then at least in the depictions of themselves they consume. We like shows about a pretty, rich people now. Although Leatherface is the most famous killer from the film, he's not even the weirdest of the family that the young crew discovers. Hell, the guy in the wheelchair is a good guy and he's pretty creepy. Recommended. Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt S01 (2015) -- "8/10" Ellie Kemper is Kimmy Schmidt, a refreshing and adorable and bubbly and effusive and funny young lady who survived over a decade as a prisoner of a cult leader in a bomb shelter. She moves directly to New York and makes a strange set of friends and has all sorts of amusing adventures. The writing is quite good and makes good use of the stark time-delay that she experienced, having missed her entire youth and being essentially stuck in the year in which she was removed from society. Recommended. Vehicle 19 (2013) -- "6/10" A movie starring Paul Walker that takes place entirely in a minivan in Johannesburg, South Africa. It seems that Paul Walker could not star in a movie without driving nor could he be in a movie without a techno/dubstep soundtrack. That's not a dig. It's actually a pretty fun movie, buoyed mostly by his nuanced acting, even when the script got a bit wooden (another thing he's used to from his Fast and Furious forays). Much of the action footage reminded me of GTA missions, with helicopters and fleets of cop cars. The finale was incredibly tense and sucked me in. I kind of liked it. Recommended. Trainspotting (1996) -- "8/10" The classic heroin movie from Scotland has brilliant and for-the-untrained-to-Scottish-ear-nearly-incomprehensible dialogue, a great story that meanders nowhere and a near-constant voiceover by Ewan McGregor, who is ethereally thin and wasted-looking. Some of the drug imagery -- quite well-filmed by Danny Boyle -- would be recycled by Darren Aronofsky in Requiem for a Dream. While McGregor as Renton is the central character, Robert Carlyle as Begbie is also a fantastic character -- although he's going to make you really uncomfortable, even if you like violence in your movies. The story is a shifting set of loosely interrelated incidents: going off of heroin, losing opiate suppositories in a toilet, a baby dying of neglect, Renton sleeping with an underage girl, his stealing his best friend's sex tape, leading to his best friend's losing his girlfriend, leading said friend to heroin himself, just as Renton goes through his second withdrawal to get clean. The movie is about not only addiction to heroin, but the "addiction" one has to one's origins -- not being able to get away from your mates at home. Recommended. Grace and Frankie S01 (2015) -- "6/10" This is an uneven dramedy about four elderly people, played by Martin Sheen, Jane Fonda, Sam Waterston and Lily Tomlin. The two men are partners in a very successful law firm and they turn out to have been partners in much more, as they come out to their wives and announce their plans to spend the rest of their lives together. It was amusing enough, although the eponymous duo, played by Fonda and Tomlin are the ones who really shine. Not recommended. Daredevil S01 (2015) -- "9/10" A promising interpretation of the blind lawyer turned hero. Production values are sky-high, as is the dialogue and casting. It's beautifully shot and does a good job of making Daredevil's powers feel plausible. Even the fight scenes are well-choreographed and framed, which is nearly a miracle for television. Even in movies, we've movies away from fights actually hurting anyone -- with most movies opting for a cartoonish/super-hero take where no-one is every winded or bruised or damaged. Not so in Daredevil. The writing, acting and presentation held up over the whole season. It was an eminently satisfying portrayal of a complex superhero whose powers are very useful but aren't on the cartoonish level of Spider-man or the Avengers. Looking forward to season two. Vincent D'Onofrio is excellent. Highly recommended. Psycho (1960) -- "8/10" This is the classic Hitchcock film about Norman Bates, who lives alone somewhere in the depths of California, off the main drag of a highway that no longer passes by his eponymous Motel. He lives there with his mother and when he does get a guest and she happens to be pretty? Well, then things go a bit sideways. I don't want to give away too much, so suffice it to say that it's a very well-made and worthwhile film. As with so many films of this era, the scenes often feel like theater pieces, with a lot of dialogue and the actors contained to a small area. Anthony Perkins is excellent, striking a balance between effusive and jittery and helpful and pensive and brooding and calculating. Recommended. Side by Side (2012) -- "8/10" This is a documentary about the rise of digital film in the late 20th century. There are interviews with tons of actors, cinematographers, directors and other technical people who provide fascinating insights into how digital ended up taking over film-making. A bit on the long side, but they shot in digital and didn't have to care about wasting film, I guess. :-) Recommended. Snatch (2000) -- "8/10" This is so clearly a Guy Ritchie movie. It shoots out of the gate with a fantastic, frenetic stylistic-stamp credits sequence. Characters are introduced and the plot expands in several directions at once. Jason Statham as Turkish is fantastic, bested only by Brad Pitt as Mickey, the Pikey bare-knuckle boxer. There's a great soundtrack that would make its stylistic way into the Ocean's movies. Watched it in English without subtitles and was not shaken by Mickey. Scarlet Cushions and Periwinkle Blue indeed. Don't ever bet with a Pikey. The cast is through and through great and the dialogue, pacing and direction suit me. I liked it much better than Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. It's the story of a two-bit fight promoter and mob boss named Brick Top who is a "horrible cunt" (in his own words). He goes a step too far and things spiral out of control. Pitt's performance as Mickey is absolutely mythic. Highly recommended. We're the Millers (2013) -- "6/10" A better-than-expected movie starting Jason Sudeikis as a small-time drug dealer, Jennifer Aniston as a stripper who end up posing as a fake family. Sudeikis's neighbor's son (played by Will Poulter), an unassuming and wide-eyed nerd, and a street-wise homeless teen-aged girl (Emma Roberts) round out the family. When Sudeikis's stash is stolen, he is sent by his boss (Ed Helms) to Mexico to pick up a giant shipment. Sudeikis enlists the others to help make a more convincing family. Hijinks and romance and all of the usual stuff ensue, but the actors and a decent script save this film from the expected ignominy. Amusing enough, but not going to recommend it for anything other than filler. Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015) -- "7/10" I thought this outing was much better than the first one, but it's still almost too much in one film. Larger than life like the comic books, I guess. This film's cinematography had the most comic-like settings, with giants foregrounds spilling over complex and detailed backgrounds. The characters were decent, but quite one-dimensional -- just like the comic books. The Hulk is a bit more complex, but Iron Man is a Cartesian plane. Even Captain America was better. Maybe that's because Chris Evans does a good job with that character. Ultron wasn't as evil as I'd expected. He's portrayed far worse in the comics. The action is fast and furious and over-the-top and relentless but it's good enough for what it is. Recommended, although there are far better superhero movies and TV series out there (see Daredevil review above). Lincoln (2012) -- "7/10" It's a wonder that this movie had the success that it did: it's wonderfully made, wonderfully acted and has wonderful dialogue, but it's quite long and quite slow and quite complex and concerns itself largely with realpolitik of the end of the slavery and the civil war. It was much better than expected and Daniel Day Lewis really knocked it out of the park, as did most of the supporting cast (Sally Field as Mary Todd was also notable). The writing was superb. I think I might have learned some stuff I didn't know, but I also don't know how much historical liberty was taken. I just enjoyed watching Lewis and Sally Field chew the hell out of the scenery, as is their wont. Recommended, but brace yourself for a 2.5-hour slow-paced historical drama. Rush (2013) -- "7/10" Daniel Brühl as Nicki Lauda and Chris Hemsworth as James Hunt tell the tale of the famous, 1970s-era Formula-1 rivalry. Lauda was the defending champion and Hunt his challenger. They'd known each other since they'd started racing and had a complicated relationship as grudging colleagues and arch-rivals. The story was excellent as was the acting from the two top actors. The racing footage was decent, but at-times quite confused and it went on far too long. Hemsworth's face adorns the movie poster, but this seemed much more like the Nicki Lauda story -- and what a champion he was. He would come back from his devastating crash to almost win the world championship that year, but have it snatched away by Hunt in the last race. That lasted one year, though and as Hunt was retiring, Lauda was collecting another championship. Recommended. Hamlet (2000) -- "7/10" Ethan Hawke plays a New York-based Hamlet, with his uncle Claudius played by Kyle McLachlan, Bill Murray as Polonius, Liev Schreiber as Laertes, Steve Zahn as Rosenkrantz and Julia Stiles as Ophelia. The dialogue is true to the original with very few alterations. I have never actually read Hamlet all the way through or seen a real enactment, but I recognized so much of the dialogue. It's really quite good, just lovely language, like "If thou dost marry, I’ll give thee this plague for thy dowry. Be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as snow, thou shalt not escape calumny. Get thee to a nunnery, go." uttered by Hamlet when he's betrayed by Ophelia. The setup is a bit long, but the payoff is fantastic. Pretty well-acted and relatively well-adapted to 21st-century New York City. Ethan Hawke is positively malevolent as Hamlet; Bill Murray is not very believable, but McLachlan, Stiles and Schreiber are very good, striking a nice balance between the English and American accents. Laputa: Castle in the Sky (1986) -- "7/10" This is one of Hayao Miyazaki's first full-length animated features. The style -- and some of the characters -- would remain unchanged throughout several of his subsequent features. I saw it in dubbed English -- which makes the movie feel cheesier than it actually is. That said, there is a very Popeye-style slugfest within the first ten minutes, so, yeah, it's kinda cheesy. The story -- unusually for a Japanese anime -- does not involve the unstoppable power of nature. Instead, there is a magic crystal that opens the way to the ancient city of Laputa, which totally has flying robots that kick a major amount of ass. Spoiler alert: there are also no WWII/atom-bomb undertones. Spoiler alert: they find the city in the sky. Spoke too soon: Laputa's all about the glory of nature, but it's guarded by a cadre of powerful robots who've continued to guard the city over millenia. The dialogue is kind of bad, but the story is quite good -- which would basically become Miyazaki's calling card. The city of Laputa, with its mix of technology and nature and ancient secrets and puzzle blocks feels very much like a video game, and it actually predated but must have inspired Myst, at least to some degree. And Pazu climbs around under the city of Laputa like Luke under Cloud City. Christ, the throne room looks almost a bit like the final room in the Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. In the end, they had to destroy the city in order to save it, after it had been preserved for so long, to no clear purpose. And there's the Japanese morality tale: man destroys everything he touches. Kevin Hart: Seriously Funny (2010) -- "6/10" I really like Kevin Hart and I've seen another special of his that I really liked, but this one didn't really do it for me. I liked about half of it but can't remember which bits, which doesn't say much for it. Not recommended. Chelsea Peretti: One of the Greats (2014) -- "7/10" I only knew Chelsea Peretti from her role as Gina in Brooklyn Nine-Nine and was unaware that she's also a stand-up comedienne. This special was very funny and she has a good on-stage persona, not too different from Gina's. Recommended. G.I. Joe: Retaliation (2013) -- "4/10" Channing Tatum is briefly in this movie, but wisely chose to die early. The Rock is working hard to prove us all wrong when we say that he couldn't make a career choice more terrible than the Tooth Fairy. Hoo-ah! Bruce Willis is in this, too, and more terrible than in the Expendables. Hoo-ah! Jonathan Price is also in this and even more insidious as Zartan than he is as the Sparrow in Game of Thrones. Hoo-ah! There is so much weapons-porn in this movie: there's a whole house in which every available surface opens to reveal hidden weapons. It's Bruce Willis's house, surprise, surprise. Most of the effects are kinda bad -- even the green-screened martial-arts sequences are too long -- but blowing up London with a high-energy spike looked pretty good. Yeah, London's gone. Cobra Commander is pretty sassy: his whole getup reminds me a bit of Megamind. Why did they have to replace "Go Joe!" with "Hoo-ah!" Would the U.S. Marines not cough up their sponsorship any other way? 'Cause this movie is practically an advertisement for the U.S. Marines. I cannot in any way recommend this movie, but it passed the time during a couple of workouts. I grew up with this stuff, though, so nostalgia was definitely a factor. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3129 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3129 Sun, 29 Nov 2015 22:14:22 +0100 of over 900 ratings publicly available. I've included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. Citizenfour (2014) -- "8/10" This is Laura Poitras's Academy Award-winning documentary about the events surrounding Edward Snowden's revelations and release of the documentation that proves that the United States and its NSA has been and continues to run an utterly illegal, wide-reaching, intrusive and positively Orwellian domestic and international surveillance program that goes far beyond metadata-collection -- bad enough, on its own -- and smashes every notion of the U.S. as having the moral high ground, in any way, whatsoever. Snowden comes off as earnest and extremely capable. He knows what he's talking about technologically and seems to be quite adept, as well as on ethically good footing. A tour de force that every world citizen should see, especially those convinced that Snowden is some sort of traitor or war criminal. Quite the contrary, it is his opponents who can be more appropriately accused with that epithet. Highly recommended. Red Army (2014) -- "8/10" This is a documentary about the first hockey players from the former Soviet Union who played in the NHL. This was especially poignant for me, as I was a huge Detroit Redwings fan at the time and absolutely loved their amazingly skilled Russians, Konstantinov, Federov, Larionov, Kozlov and Fetisov. Fetisov pretty much stars in this movie and does very well. The history is fascinating, especially of how he bucked the former Soviet-and-now-Russian regime to assert his rights. The footage of their training regimen in Russia was pretty awesome. Totally old-school. Lots of shifting plates around. Recommended for fans of the game or the era. Merchants of Doubt (2014) -- "6/10" This is a decent documentary about the lobbyists who peddle themselves as experts and who are given plenty of TV time to indoctrinate Americans with their propaganda. It was interesting enough, but didn't really tell me anything new. The production values are decent, but things get a little too melodramatic and overwrought. Weird Science (1985) -- "6/10" Dated, but hilariously so. Anthony Michael Hall could star in anything and be funny. Robert Downey Jr. was briefly seen. The computer effects were probably hot-shit at the time, but are laughable now. I had totally forgotten that they tried to conjure a second girl, failed at it, conjured a missile instead, then a gang of mutants showed up, straight out of Mad Max and Anthony Michael Hall still carried it. Definitely not recommended unless you're trapped somewhere or significantly inebriated and with friends. Seven Psychopaths (2012) -- "6/10" Better than expected, but likely because of the interesting cast, which interacted well together, despite an at-times hackneyed and obvious plot. Sam Rockwell, Colin Farrell, Woody Harrelson, Christopher Walken and Kevin Corrigan all contributed and had some good screen chemistry. Unfortunately, the female characters were two-dimensional to non-existent -- and, no, it doesn't help if you make the plot a self-referential one about the writing of a screenplay called "Seven Psychopaths (à la Adaptation, which was, incidentally, a much, much better movie) in which the screenwriter (Farrell) is chastised by Walken for writing female characters poorly. Not only does it not help, it doesn't excuse it. This is basically a vehicle for posing Rockwell's lunacy against Harrelson's -- and Rockwell wins, hands down, as Harrelson is saddled with an actually-quite endearing devotion to his little, cross-eyed Shih Tzu and acts far saner. Still and all, some OK dialogue but nothing to write home about. Serenity (2005) -- "6/10" This is the feature-length movie based on the cult-hit TV show, Firefly. It centers on a female super-weapon who is activated to cause hand-to-hand-combat destruction via Japanese-anime commercials. I have never seen a single episode of Firefly, but if the movie is anything to go by, it seems to be a pseudo-sci-fi-cum-swashbuckler show which pulls geeks in with its appeal to their inner hero and keeps them rooted in their seats by making them believe that Summer Glau will move in with them. I feel like I'm missing something by never having seen the show at all; about halfway through the movie, they're all just speaking in Zen koans and trite phrases (e.g. "I'm a leaf on the wind"...what the hell does that mean?) Lots of space-stuff and shoot-'em-ups as well as some Star Trek-style rhapsodizing about the inevitability of human destructiveness, culminating in a heroic, nearly but-not-quite self-sacrificing noble act by the underdogs to put right everything that was made wrong by the powers-that-be. They drop from a naval space battle to wielding shotguns and "moving some crates back here for cover" -- to fight off zombies, of all things. Some of the effects were noticeably done with models rather than CGI (i.e. the physics/motion was indicative of much lighter objects). It actually picked up toward the end, though it's still hard to recommend, but I bet fans of the original show loved it. Iron Man 3 (2013) -- "6/10" Tony Stark becomes increasingly hackneyed and unsavory, though he still has his moments. They're separated by swathes of needless arrogance -- the character is not allowed to learn from his mistakes. He's not allowed to grow. But that mirrors his path in the comic books as well, where he has no problems anymore and is the smartest, richest, best-looking and most technologically advanced human on the planet. Bo-ring. Kingsley was mildly interesting as the Mandarin, Guy Pearce was pretty OK as Aldrich Killian but chewed the scenery considerably, Rebecca Hall was somehow bereft of personality, and Gwyneth Paltrow was typically awful as was Jon Favreau. Paul Bettany as Jarvis's voice was welcome. So what was wrong with this movie? Well, for starters, it's belittling to women, right? A drunk Tony Stark nearly solved a problem that poor Rebecca Hall couldn't solve in the next 20 years (though she apparently figured out how to not age a day) and neither could Guy Pearce. When Guy Pearce visits Gwyneth Paltrow, CEO of Stark Enterprises, he talks to her like she's mentally handicapped, and she responds accordingly. It's pathetic -- total mansplaining. Too much tech, not enough pathos, not enough heart, waaay too much sewing things up neatly at the end. Not recommended. The Station Agent (2003) -- "8/10" A lovely, small film about Finn, played by Peter Dinklage, who works in a model-train store, repairing and preparing custom items. The owner of the shop dies, selling the store in the estate, but leaving Finn a piece of property in New Jersey with a small train station on it. There he meets Joe, played by Bobby Cannavale and Olivia, played by Patricia Clarkson. It's a movie about mood and not very much about much of anything, but it's wonderful and entertaining and soothing without being schmaltz. Lovely performances from everyone. Highly recommended. Fast and Furious 6 (2013) -- "7/10" The same crew is back for this sixth installment of the unbelievably long-lived and by-now very formulaic film series. That's not to say that that's a bad thing -- the vehicle sequences are great and some of the interplay is quite good. The addition of Dwayne Johnson is very welcome. Gina Carano would also have been OK, if they hadn't made her nearly indestructible while at the same time utterly incapable of taking out Michelle Rodriguez. In fact, they all seem indestructible, in the same way that super-heroes generally are. No cuts, scratches, bruises, almost no blood, nothing. No matter how hard the blow, how high the fall, how durable the projectile or weapon. Vin Diesel gets shot and he's back in a day. Gina Carano's hit by a car and she's back in thirty seconds. Vin Diesel flies 20 meters and lands on a windshield with a woman on top of him and he's not even winded. Another relatively tiny henchman pulls a woman -- granted, a small woman -- out of a car with one arm. Shaw has an entire tank dropped on him and he's doing just fine a few hours later. The list goes on. There was no need for this level of fisticuff artificiality -- we had more than enough fun with cars that defy the laws of physics. All-in-all a relatively entertaining film, but the mano-a-mano fights were ludicrous and mostly unnecessary, as was a ton of the very stilted dialogue. Stone (2010) -- "6/10" Edward Norton is Stone, a man in prison for having killed his parents in a fire. Milla Jovovich is his wife, Lucetta, who's determined to get him out on parole. Robert De Niro is Jack, the parole-board officer who will help decide whether Stone will be granted a favorable hearing. Lucetta does her best to convince Jack to decide for Stone, though at the same time she undermines Stone's verisimilitude, whereas he does the same to Lucetta, each accusing the other of doing the same. They seem to be running a long con on Jack, but he's also a very conflicted, ostensibly God-fearing, but most definitely prisoner's-wife--fucking man. Jack eventually recommends parole for Stone, mostly out of fear that Lucetta and Stone would turn him in for his dalliance. Somewhat predictable and a bit overwrought, though strong performances from the main cast. Not really recommended, but an extra star for Ed Norton and Milla Jovovich. Wet Hot American Summer (2001) -- "5/10" The only redeeming thing about this movie is the cast, but it's basically a Meatballs for millennials . That doesn't mean that Meatballs was better just because it had Bill Murray, it just means that his presence made us want to watch that essentially terrible movie just as much as Paul Rudd's does for the next generation. Molly Shannon, Joe Lo Truglio (Boyle from Brooklyn 99), Amy Poehler, Bradley Cooper and David Hyde Pierce round out the cast. The movie is set on the last day of camp and all sorts of improbable hijinks take place, along with some truly bad acting that pummels its way through an occasionally stilted script that is reminiscent of SNL skits that will. not. end. I was not impressed; not recommended. Warm Bodies (2013) -- "7/10" Nicholas Hoult is very good as a self-aware zombie in a zombie movie told from the perspective of the zombie. Rob Corddry is his "friend" -- in quotes because they are only able to connect in a very oblique way until they start to come out of their zombification. There are truly evil undead creatures that must be vanquished, which drags this film to a more prosaic level for its conclusion. It's quite satisfying for a zombie movie. Wyatt Cenac: Brooklyn (2014) -- "6/10" Cenac does a pretty self-indulgent Brooklyn-ish set for people in Brooklyn from a hipster pub in Brooklyn. If you're into that culture -- and deep -- you might like this. I like Wyatt for his writing and his wit but a bunch of his stories and jokes kind of fell flat. I like him much better as an actor or writer than as a stand-up comedian. Not recommended. Trainwreck (2015) -- "8/10" Amy Schumer hits the big screen with the character she's perfected in her standup and television series: a party girl with brains. While she does drink too much and does have too little self-respect, she's self-aware and at least knows what she's getting out of it. She promotes the idea that hooking up isn't just advantageous for the guy while admitting that it's not so great for anyone, actually. She meets Bill Hader's sport physician, who's best buddies with Lebron James, who's actually quite funny and natural in this movie. It's quite a good movie and can't really be shoved in the rom-com drawer: for one, it's a good deal filthier and funnier, which isn't surprising if you've seen Schumer's other work. If I have a quibble, it's that it's a bit too long. Phrasing. Recommended. I Spy (2002) -- "3/10" Owen Wilson is a spy and Eddie Murphy is a world-champion boxer who teams up with him to protect a super-jet. Famke Janssen is another spy. This movie has its moments, but mostly it's just utterly terrible. It sounded like it might be fun, but not recommended. Aziz Ansari Live in Madison Square Garden (2014) -- "6/10" The first two segments were much more political than I expected from Aziz and quite good. The much longer segment on the single life and modern communication started off quite strong, but petered out a bit. I'm watching his new show Master of None now and that's much better. Recommended for the first half. Safety Not Guaranteed (2012) -- "7/10" This is a low-key movie about a seemingly off-kilter guy who seeks a time-traveling companion using a classified ad. A lonely and dissatisfied reporter answers the ad and is slowly pulled into his off-kilter though intriguing world in which he fancies himself a spy of sorts, a renaissance man who can shoot, run, jump, climb, fight, make bombs and is an astute engineer capable of making anything he needs. He is, in many way, all of these things, but the story he tells of himself -- both to himself and to her -- is embellished and polished, though not enough to make it totally untrue. Mark Duplass plays his role well as does Aubrey Plaza as the reporter. I enjoyed this movie and its satisfying conclusion much more than I'd expected to. The writer Derek Connolly won the Sundance aware that year, while the director Colin Trevorrow would go on to direct Jurassic World as well as the upcoming Star Wars movie. Recommended. The Iron Giant (1999) -- "8/10" This is a relatively well-made story of a giant space robot that lands on Earth and befriends a young boy. The robot is actually a gigantic killing machine but only uses its awesome weaponry for good. The military attacks it because it thinks it's a commie plot, but the robot sacrifices itself to save the village where the boy lives from the ensuing US military missile attack. The animation is very nice and the story is decent, although more mawkish than I'd thought it would be, considering all of the rave reviews it has. Recommended. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3124 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3124 Sun, 05 Apr 2015 16:57:20 +0200 This is a David Cronenberg movie about very special people who can control other people's minds with their own. The movie is very much of its time -- it is basically an action-adventure story of conflicting mind-control factions. The pacing is quite slow by today's standards, but the story is pretty interesting -- even if the parts involving computers are laughable. Also, about a quarter of the movie is taken up with people squinting and sweating at each other, trying to blow up each other's minds. That all makes it sound terrible, but it's better than that. It's worth it if you need to round out your Cronenberg collection, but hard to recommend for non-fans. Melancholia (2011) -- "5/10" This is a Lars von Trier movie about a family of not-very-nice people who have enough money to have a wedding on a gigantic estate in what looks like a castle. Kirsten Dunst is marrying Alexander Skarsgård. Stellan Skarsgård, Charlotte Rampling, John Hurt, Charlotte Gainsbourg and Keifer Sutherland are all part of the wedding party. The bride is suffering from ... melancholy. The movie starts at the end, with the mysterious planet crashing into Earth -- did I forget to mention the approaching planet? Everyone moves in super-slow motion to a very sad soundtrack. It doesn't pick up a tremendous amount of speed after that. We get to watch a bunch of rich people being dysfunctional and decadent and broken. It's somewhat like Gatsby in this way, I suppose, but it's still not much fun to watch. The orchestral soundtrack is ludicrously loud compared to the majority of the whispered dialogue. Perhaps this is also supposed to be jarringly suggestive of melancholia. Dunno. The timeline is disjoint and the night seems to last forever; it's hard to tell what time it is throughout the movie. It is utterly impossible to determine whether the bride is clinically depressed or just a callous, shallow, stupid person. Banging someone other than your husband, especially on your wedding night and most especially when that someone is someone that you just met, is not a very endearing characteristic. If nothing else, the film paints a good picture of what it must be like to have an objectively wonderful world irrevocably sullied by the miasma of depression. Sweet God, is this a boring, depressing movie, though. Mission accomplished, Mr. Von Trier. The colors are flat (as a depressive views the world), voices are dim, whispered, lifeless, the planet moves closer, suffusing everything with a flat, shadowless light, as on a cloudy day, though the sky is clear. It's sweet relief when the planets collide and the ensuing catastrophe sweeps everything away. Gainesburg is quite strong; Dunst isn't, really, despite all protestations to the contrary (she won Best Actress at the Cannes film festival). I feel the reaction is more to two things: (1) she set the bar so ridiculously low in many other movies she's been in and (2) she wasn't shy about showing her admittedly spectacular breasts in this movie. That alone is probably enough to send male reviewers into a tizzy. There's something almost but not quite Kubrickian about this movie, especially towards the end, with Gainesburg's desperation echoing that of Wendy in The Shining. Not really recommended, though. Hugo (2011) -- "7/10" This Martin Scorsese film is an homage to cinematic and directorial legend George Méliès, played by Ben Kingsley. The movie takes place in a train station, in which Hugo lives and kind-of earns his livelihood as the keeper of the clocks. He has inherited his passion and talent for clockworks from his now-dead father, played by Jude Law. The boy Hugo (played by Asa Butterfield, of Ender's Game) was less annoying than anticipated, as was Chloë Grace Moretz as his friend. Sacha Baron Cohen has a more-or-less straightforward role as the train-station guard, obsessed with imprisoning orphans. The boy, his father, an automaton and Méliès himself all contribute to tell the story of his (Méliès) impact on cinema, as well as that of his wife. Interesting and well-made, with learning about Méliès himself being the most interesting part. Recommended. Under the Skin (2013) -- "8/10" Here we go again: this is a movie starring Scarlett Johannson in which she gets well and truly naked, even going so far as to pose so in front of a mirror. And yet, it is exactly the people who would not watch a movie because of this who will enjoy her performance much more than those who would watch for more prurient reasons. She's very good, but because she's an actress, not because she's naked. There is little dialogue -- and what there is, is in a nearly incomprehensible Scottish brogue -- much surrealism and almost no explanation or closure. It's not a long movie and you really have to pay attention, but it's a good film and it's probably an important one to see, if you're at all interested in trying something new. The soundtrack is ethereal and the characters are named "The Female", "The Bad Man", "The Dead Woman" and so on. As well, the long shadow of Kubrick peeks forth in this Brian Glaser film. This is the summary on IMDb: "A female drives a van through the roads and streets of Scotland seducing lonely men." That nails the plot, in its entirety, as far as the action goes. It is utterly insufficient as far as the unspoken and hinted-at goes. Recommended. Watchmen (2009) -- "9/10" I'd watched this film before, but not since I'd finished reading the comics last year. The plot of the film follows the books almost slavishly. In that, it does well, even though the comics have a lot of exposition, which makes for a slower movie than we've perhaps come to expect from so-called "superhero" movies. The books are about the history of a troupe of self-nominated heroes from the 1930s up until the present-day of the late 1980s, when the world is threatened by nuclear conflict. In that, author Alan Moore crafted a world that only slightly diverged from reality. That is, it was close enough to be familiar and not require any explanation, but divergent enough to be fascinating. As in the comics, part-time narrator and uncompromising literalist Rorschach stole the show, unable to understand how the solution to the world's greatest problem could be rooted in an even bigger lie. The film was a bit longer than necessary, but well-worth the ride. Recommended. Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979) -- "6/10" Werner Herzog felt the overarching need to honor the original Nosferatu (1922) by remaking the film, almost scene for scene, but starring Klaus Kinski in the eponymous role. The pacing was quite slow and some scenes muddier or more confused, but it was still decent. If you're a Herzog or Kinski fan (guilty as charged), you'll need to add this one to your repertoire. Saw it in the original German. Ong Bak 2 (2008) -- "2/10" I don't even know what this movie is about. It's a lot of decent production effects to show people fighting in a jungle with knives and some primitive martial arts. Lots of sweatiness, tribes, blood and elephants. I didn't even finish watching it. Couldn't get into it. It shows that, now that pretty much anyone can make a pretty, technically solid movie, the pendulum might just swing back to making movies about things again. Saw it in dubbed German, but it didn't matter. Not recommended at all -- just terrible. The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel (2011) -- "6/10" Despite IMDb's insistence on filing his name below all of the British fossils also in the movie, Dev Patel (of Slumdog Millionaire fame) is the star. He is the exuberant, loquacious and fast-talking proprietor of the eponymous hotel. There is also a bunch of elderly British flotsam in the form of Judy Dench, Maggie Smith, Tom Wilkinson, Bill Nighy, Ronald Pickup and Penelope Wilton. Dench plays the same role she always plays. Smith is a good deal more racist than Mrs. Mcgonagle, and Wilkinson is gay. Nighy is the only one with any real appeal, honestly. It's an relatively watchable flick about finding yourself in your golden years, maybe? Or how Britain ejects its unneeded generations to find themselves in a similarly abandoned India? But they're all worth something and it's not too late to find love? I'm not sure. The film had its moments, but it's hard for me to recommend. Love is Strange (2014) -- "6/10" I expected much more of this film about a long-time New Yorker couple played by John Lithgow and Alfred Molina. They are finally allowed to marry in their state of New York, but soon after doing so, Molina is fired by the Catholic school where he teaches music (fun fact: the head priest was played by Hollis of Northern Exposure). Lithgow's painting hardly suffices to support them, so they are forced to depend on their families until they can get back on their feet. The families are self-absorbed in a very New York kind of way and they all seem to be largely and inexplicably unhappy. The couple is split up, at least temporarily, no-one seems to be having any fun and the mood is either defeatist, drunken, melancholy or a mèlange of all three. Fun fact #2: Lithgow's nephew is played by Ed, considerably aged from his Northern Exposure days. Marisa Tomei plays well, but her character is small-minded, horizonless, overprotective, selfish and apparently deeply unhappy. The movie was kind of a downer, when I expected something a bit more celebratory. Not recommended. The China Syndrome (1979) -- "7/10" This is a movie starring Jane Fonda, Jack Lemmon, Wilford Brimley and Michael Douglas about the dangers of a meltdown at a nuclear power plant in California. The issues today are essentially unchanged from the late 70s: corruption and incompetence in construction, corruption in maintenance, corners cut everywhere, the inexorability of a business that generates billions for its investors. Fonda and Douglas play a reporter and her cameraman, respectively, while Lemmon plays the plant director with a conscience and Brimley plays the company man. All in all, better than expected and much better than Earthquake, another disaster movie from around the same era. Recommended. Horrible Bosses 2 (2014) -- "5/10" At nearly two hours, this sequel clearly lacked an editor with some steel in his or her spine. The lead trio is funny and has decent chemistry, but they're not funny enough to carry the nearly endless repetition of the same joke: the Three Stooges-like stupidity of the three of them. Bateman is marginally smarter than the other two (like Mo Howard before him), but he also refuses to abandon them. Chris Pine plays the son of the real horrible boss, played by Christoph Waltz. Kevin Spacey and Jennifer Aniston reprise their roles from the original, as does Jamie Foxx as Motherfucker Jones. Foxx's parts stand out, so it's not surprising so many of his scenes were included (the car chase had its moments). Aniston is possibly even filthier than in the original, but -- just like everyone else -- is clearly trying too hard. Or the script was trying too hard. Cut it down by half an hour and it might be a much funnier movie. Not recommended. Un Prophète (2009) -- "8/10" This is a French movie about a young. timid man named Malik El Djebena, sent to jail for an unspecified crime of violence against a police officer. He is of Arab descent but grew up in France. He has no friends inside or outside, neither among the Arabs nor among the French. The Corsicans approach him and give him an ultimatum: to kill a new Arab prisoner or suffer the consequences. He manages it -- his first murder -- and is taken up in their ranks, though not really accepted. He slowly gains power, learning Corsican, making himself more useful, trying to make a space for himself in the criminal world. He is more-or-less honest compared to the others around him, but not an honorable man. He evinces fealty to one good friend he made in prison, with whom he goes into business while still inside. As the deals grow, so does the threat of violence, culminating in a very risky but finally successful mob hit on a rival gang that he and his by-now cancer-ridden friend execute all on their own. The Corsicans, the French, the Africans and the Arabs are all scheming against each other, with the Prophet pushing out a place for himself. When he returns late from a furlough, he is put in solitary for 40 days -- during this time, he avoids being in gen-pop for the repercussions of the hit he'd executed the day before. Luciano's (the Corsican don) power continues to wane as first his supporters are moved to another prison and then many are killed in the aftermath of Djebena's hit. Finally, he is on the bench where he used to hold court, accompanied only by two other prisoners who don't even know that this is "his" bench. The Prophet is taken in by the Arabs, who were helped considerably by the bloodletting among the Corsicans and Italians. Luciano's time is past and the Prophet is in ascendancy. In the end, he is released and he leaves the prison gates with his good friend's wife and child, who he'd promised to look after and support (his friend had since died of cancer). As they walk from the prison, he is followed by several carloads of his supporters. So it ends up being a feel-good story of triumph for Djebena. It's a well-made, well-acted and well-written film about the criminal world of France, quite long at 155 minutes, but nonetheless worth it. The French Godfather, perhaps. Saw it in the original Arabic, French and Corsican with English subtitles. recommended. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3099 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3099 Mon, 02 Mar 2015 23:11:24 +0100 -- "5/10" 2. "Shopgirl (2005)" <#Shopgirl> -- "6/10" 3. "The Exorcism of Emily Rose (2005)" <#Exorcism> -- "6/10" 4. "America's Sweethearts (2001)" <#America> -- "5/10" 5. "The Raid 2 (2014)" <#Raid2> -- "8/10" 6. "Hitman (2007)" <#Hitman> -- "6/10" 7. "Treme -- Seasons 1 & 2 (2010)" <#Treme> -- "10/10" 8. "Broken City (2013)" <#Broken> -- "6/10" 9. "The Green Hornet (2011)" <#Green> -- "4/10" 10. "Jennifer's Body (2009)" <#Jennifer> -- "4/10" 11. "Kinky Boots (2005)" <#Kinky> -- "7/10" 12. "The Battle of Algiers (1966)" <#Algiers> -- "8/10" 13. "Jacob's Ladder (1990)" <#Jacob> -- "8/10" 14. "Shogun Assassin (1980)" <#Shogun> -- "3/10" 15. "Melinda and Melinda (2004)" <#Melinda> -- "6/10" 16. "John Wick (2014)" <#John> -- "8/10" 17. "Potiche (2010)" <#Potiche> -- "7/10" 18. "Louis C.K.: Live at the Comedy Store (2015)" <#Louis> -- "7/10" 19. "In Bruges (2008)" <#Bruges> -- "9/10" 20. "Waking Life (2001)" <#Waking> -- "9/10" 21. "Dog Day Afternoon (1975)" <#Dog> -- "6/10" The Unborn (2009) -- "5/10" This is a decent horror-film concept wrapped in a movie with terrible dialogue and acting. The main character is a nearly impossibly thin and tall young lady of indeterminate age. She and her friends are uniformly vapid, dim, anorexic, entitled, rich (look at their houses!) and bitchy. It nearly goes without saying that no-one is funny. I watched half an hour, during which my attention drifted. I was brought back by the movie breaking the "show don't tell" rule in such an egregious manner that it ruined any remaining suspense. In two minutes, it went from a from a horror film with some decent scares to a kill-the-monster film. At this point, Gary Oldman shows up. What kind of an awful bet did Gary Oldman lose to end up in this movie? He has a wonderfully rounded American Jewish accent but when he really starts shouting, it's back to the British one. Ohmigod there's Idris Elba! Same bet? The movie's pretty creepy in places and I know I've seen that creepy kid's face before. Mercifully short. Not even close to being recommended. Shopgirl (2005) -- "6/10" This is a film adaptation of the novella by Steven Martin, who also stars as the older man interested in shop-girl Claire Danes. Jason Schwartzman is a younger man interested in the shop-girl as well, an artist like her and perpetually out of money and manners. The book was OK and the movie is quite slow. Schwartzman goes on a journey of discovery with a very accommodating band and comes back a much more acceptable date for Danes, whose allure for both Schwartzman is unknown: she's pretty enough but so entirely without personality. Is that the point? That men don't care? I read the book but can't remember. Not recommended. The Exorcism of Emily Rose (2005) -- "6/10" Tom Wilkinson stars as a priest on trial for having aided in the manslaughter of a young woman who he tried to help exorcise. I'd seen the movie before and wasn't really impressed the second time around. It had its moments -- switching from the courtroom to the exorcism was reasonably well-done but the dickishness of everyone in court was a bit grating. Not recommended. America's Sweethearts (2001) -- "5/10" A good cast embroiled in a fair-to-middling script about a Hollywood couple -- Catherine Zeta-Jones and John Cusack -- whose lives implode just as they're on a press junket to support their latest film, which is probably the last chance for both of their careers. Zeta-Jones runs roughshod over her sister, played by Julia Roberts, who is also her personal assistant. Billy Crystal, Seth Green and Stanley Tucci are agents. Hank Azaria is Zeta-Jones's lover. Christopher Walken is their director. It never really took off; not recommended. The Raid 2 (2014) -- "8/10" This sequel weighs in at 2 hours and 45 minutes, which is unbelievably long for an action movie. This is most likely because, while the film has a tremendous amount of action in the form of lovingly choreographed fights as well as car chases, I would not be surprised to learn that nearly everyone involved with the movie thinks of it as a crime drama. There is a real plot and it's quite interesting, involving police corruption, intranecine conflict as well as gang rivalry between the Indonesians and the Japanese. There are some wonderful set pieces: the fight in the bathroom stall, the fight in the prison yard, the fight inside the car, the fight in the kitchen (more staged, but still lovely), the fight in the garage, just pretty much anytime the compact Rama tears a swath through scores of enemies. Saw it in Indonesian with English subtitles. Violent as hell. Recommended. Hitman (2007) -- "6/10" This is a movie based on the video game, so brace yourself. It's not that bad, actually. Timothy Oliphant plays Agent 47 well enough, performing his highly orchestrated assassinations with aplomb. He is ruthless, efficient, unstoppable. Dougray Scott plays the Interpol agent who's been on his trail for years, always several steps behind. 47 only starts to scramble when a target refuses to stay dead -- that is, the target is replaced by a doppelganger and 47's bosses refuse payment. Naturally, 47 must find out what happened and who is betraying him -- and possibly a bit more about the shadowy organization of which he is part. Shit gets blown up. People fight. Meh. No recommendation either way. Treme -- Seasons 1 & 2 (2010) -- "10/10" The first two seasons of David Simon's latest series, this time capturing the life, times and politics of New Orleans immediately after Hurricane Katrina. Dozens of characters criss-cross in different ways, there is lots of wonderful music and lots of sobering insight into how badly the people of New Orleans were abandoned and deliberately used by the powers-that-be. Several actors from The Wire reappear here. Melissa Leo, John Goodman and Steve Zahn are main characters. Simon takes up the threads explored in When the Levees Broke and Trouble the Water but with more dramatic depth and music. Highly recommended. Broken City (2013) -- "6/10" Mark Wahlberg stars as a cop with a terrible past but who's trying to do the right thing. Russell Crowe is the horribly crooked mayor of New York. Pretty much a run-of-the-mill cop/revenge/corruption drama with retribution for all the right guys in the end. It was OK, but hard to recommend. The Green Hornet (2011) -- "4/10" Seth Rogen stars as a pampered rich kid whose dad leaves him everything, including his newspaper and Rogen not only rediscovers how to grab life by the reins but also jump-starts the newspaper by providing fake news in the form a crimefighter that he himself plays -- although he doesn't really do much of anything except kinda punch one guy per fight while his trusty "sidekick" Kato does all of the heavy-lifting in a pseudo-analytical, plan-the-whole-fight-out-in-your-mind style pioneered by the Sherlock Homes reboots. It was pretty terrible. Not recommended. Jennifer's Body (2009) -- "4/10" Megan Fox and Amanda Seyfried play two friends in high school. Fox is the cheerleader; Seyfried the bookworm. Fox goes off with some satanic band members after a show and is sacrificed to the devil in a ritual they hope will gain them fame and fortune. It kind of works -- in that they become successful -- but Fox doesn't die, becoming the walking undead instead. She's a nearly unstoppable killing machine that needs to feed every so often. After she's fed, she goes back to school and her friends. Until it's time to feed again. J.K. Simmons and Amy Sedaris have small roles. Seyfried and Fox kiss passionately at one point, if you find that might redeem an otherwise terrible movie. Not recommended. Kinky Boots (2005) -- "7/10" This is the mostly true story of a men's-shoe factory in England that saved itself by switching clientèle: it started designing and making boots for men who like to wear women's boots. It made tall, shiny, red-leather boots reinforced to hold a man's weight. Joel Edgerton is good as the desperate and enterprising factory owner but Chiwetel Ejiofor steals the show as Lola, the drag queen who shows him the way to life, love and self-respect. Entertaining enough. Recommended. The Battle of Algiers (1966) -- "8/10" This is an Italian-Algerian movie about the French-colonial occupation of Algeria and Algiers in particular. The movie covers the time when Muslims were killed indiscriminately and fought back with their own attacks. The French respond by closing the city down, segregating the animals into their own ghettos. This predictably does not work and the retaliatory attacks not only continue but intensify. This movie should be required viewing for anyone in any military anywhere, but particularly for those in the U.S. and Israeli armies, which are chock-full of people and planners that think that this time it will be different. It is never different. Subjugated people are desperate people, Desperate people eventually have nothing left to lose. And then they are ready to take down anyone one they can. Even the French treatment of prisoners is reflected in many other instances throughout subsequent history: they torture them, they kill them, prisoners die in custody, allegedly by their own hand. The Colonel denies that they "torture". Would that Americans knew that they were copying a French playbook. The Colonel is quite analytical and open about what his country is doing. He notes that it can end immediately if France is willing to leave Algeria. The movie is well-made and fascinating, if boring for anyone who's a student of history, where the same stupid and horrible and immoral mistakes are repeated over and over, causing everyone but the perpetrators to suffer. The planners never suffer and they never learn. Algerians die. Low-level police officers die. And the fearless colonial leaders continue to turn the screws as if exactly that strategy hadn't failed every single other time it's been used since the dawn of time. "French Newspaper reporter: Isn't it cowardly to use your women's baskets to carry bombs, which have taken so many innocent lives? "Monsieur Ben M'hidi: And you, isn't it even more cowardly to attack defenseless villages with napalm bombs that kill thousands more? Obviously, planes would make things easier for us. Give us your bombers, sir, and we will give you our baskets." Saw it in French and Arabic with English subtitles. Recommended. Jacob's Ladder (1990) -- "8/10" Tim Robbins stars as a postman broken by his experience in Vietnam. For the duration of the movie, it's unclear whether he is still with his wife and children and hallucinating a life with a postal coworker (Elizabeth Peña) or the other way around. He seems to be hallucinating a world full of faceless demons -- a mania shared by several of his platoon members. Danny Aiello plays his chiropractor, whose angelic aspect is noted and emphasized, again blurring the line between reality and fantasy. It is unclear what is real and what is imagined; what is clear is that Jacob's life has been unutterably ruined by his experience in Vietnam. Every day is torture. Spoiler alert: The first explanation is that his experience turns out to have been that his platoon had been exposed to a particularly powerful psychosis- and paranoia-inducing chemical code-named Jacob's Ladder that made them turn on each other. It's so hard to tell which parts are real, which are imagined, where he really lives, who's still alive: the confusion he feels is reflected ably in the story. This is a strong anti-war movie and one of the earliest I've seen that deals with the paranoia and unbearable pain of PTSD. There is no happy ending, there is no way out...but the inevitable. At the end? We find that the whole movie was the final few seconds' fevered imagining of Jacob Singer's dying brain as he lay on a stretcher in a medivac tent in Vietnam. Recommended. Shogun Assassin (1980) -- "3/10" The cinematic style of this movie is very much live-action anime. Overacting 101. There are some nice touches, but they are relatively few and far-between. For example, it's pretty neat how that one ninja had had every extremity hacked off and he was still rolling himself to an exit. Nice touch. Also cool was the scene where his boy was trussed up over a well. His captors were threatening the boy with death if his father didn't give up. The boy dropped his sandal into the well to let his father know that there was water at the bottom and that he would survive the fall. Also very cool. That is about it for the coolness of this movie. As advertised, the shogun assassinates everything that moves, until he reaches the shogun's brother and removes him from this mortal plane as well. The shogun is almost never in any real trouble. Saw the dubbed version. Not recommended. Melinda and Melinda (2004) -- "6/10" Woody Allen's entry for 2004 is the uneven story of an unstable and drunken woman who splashes back into some friends' lives. But the story is told in two ways: one in which Melinda comes to tragedy and another where the story is more comic. Radha Mitchell plays the at-times obnoxious and very self-centered Melinda Robicheaux well and the supporting cast is good, but it didn't capture my imagination. The dialogue was profuse and some it was quite cleverly written, but maybe if I'd seen it in the original English rather than dubbed German, I'd have liked it more. I wasn't confused and some was delivered with quite a flourish, but Allen's prose probably lost something in translation. John Wick (2014) -- "8/10" Keanu Reeves is quite good as a formerly unstoppable hitman of legendary repute. The whole story and style of the film is reminiscent of a modern Japanese samurai drama but with naturally western stylings. He loses his wife, his newfound friend -- a beagle puppy, his dead wife's posthumous gift -- is taken from him and circumstances convene to send him on a killing spree. He inhabits a dark world but one with rules: there is honor among the assassins. In the "Continental Hotel", there is a ceasefire, where the killers gather and relax. Outside, all bets are off, but inside the hotel, the killers can sleep in peace. Reeves has some typically wooden delivery, but also some very good scenes. In the church, he's raving and convincing; elsewhere, his stoic calm makes for a good warrior -- implacable and unstoppable. Recommended. Potiche (2010) -- "7/10" This is a French film starring Catherine Deneuve in the titular role (translated as "trophy wife"). She is the heiress to the Michonneau umbrella factory, which is run for her by her obnoxious husband, Monsieur Pujol. The year is 1977. The local communist/unionist, Babin, is played very well by Gerard Depardieu, a return to his more thespian roots from such terrible roles as Obelix or that Russian gangster from Babylon A.D.. Monsieur Pujol responds badly to the strike brought on by his worker-unfriendly policies. He takes ill and someone must step up. But who? His son doesn't want it because he's more of an artist; his daughter doesn't want it because it sounds a lot like work. Plus she's a Randian nightmare seemingly modeled on Marie Le Pen. So Madame Pujol-Michonneau steps up and does quite a fantastic job, resolving the labor dispute and propelling the factory to success and stability and profitability without firing a soul. She gives both her daughter and son jobs. Her son flourishes in his role as designer, for reasons that are only hinted at rather than explicitly stated. Her daughter is much a caricature as her father and is nearly pure ego, thinking only of how to best set up her own life, and to hell with anyone else at the factory. Her husband is even more economically liberal than her and hatches a plan to send production to Tunisia, a plan of which her father heartily approves. Long story short, the mother is ousted as president in a board meeting in which her daughter unsurprisingly betrays her mother by siding with her father's bid for president, a position he feels he owns. Instead, mama goes into politics and the film ends with her first victory. Decent enough if a bit manipulative. I enjoyed it while watching it. Saw it in French with English subtitles. Louis C.K.: Live at the Comedy Store (2015) -- "7/10" Louis takes a while to get going: his first fifteen minutes of material are less clever and more deliberately offensive/provocative without substance. The rest of show was decent enough, but it's definitely not his best work. Recommended for fans, of course. In Bruges (2008) -- "9/10" Brendan Gleeson and Colin Farrell star as a couple of guys, Ken and Ray, on holiday in the city of Bruges. They are there to await their next assignment as hit-men. Their background story is revealed in fragments as they tour the city, Ken enjoying himself and Ray sulking throughout. This movie is a master class in show-don't-tell cinema. Spoilers ahead; do not read further if you want to enjoy this clever, well-written and well-filmed movie as I did, not knowing anything about it going in. Their boss finally calls to inform Ken of his job: he's to kill Ray. He agrees but then backs out, saves the younger killer -- who's suicidally depressed about having shot a boy on his first job -- and sends him on his way. Harry, the boss, played by Ralph Fiennes, is not pleased when Ken calls to inform him that he's let his contract go and invites him to "do [his] worst". The anger-management--challenged Harry hops on a plane to Bruges to take care of things himself. He meets Ken in a café in a plaza. They slowly drink their beers -- this evidenced wonderfully by the sips Harry takes -- and talk. The dialogue throughout is really nice. We see Harry wince slightly as he feels the connection to Ken, their long years of camaraderie, the connection you get when in a foreign country among friends, but knowing that it won't end well for Ken. There is a possible reprieve, but it is not to be. One must stand by one's principles, as Harry says, and Ray had killed a young boy, even if by accident. The scales must be balanced. Highly recommended. Waking Life (2001) -- "9/10" This is a rotoscoped film about one young man's journey through a lucid dream -- or series of nested such -- written and directed by Richard Linklater. It was about the nature of consciousness, ontology, epistemology, reality and its relationship to the (often crude and objectively inaccurate) simulacrum established by our senses as well as the role of science and how the waves of modern physics lap against the cliffs of philosophy. Things get fuzzy around the edges -- and get fuzzier the closer you look -- where ancient philosophers are echoed through time by Heisenberg and Schrödinger. Some of the discussion reminded me of the struggle we make in imposing alternate ways of interpreting what we think we know, as discussed in "Formulating Science in Terms of Possible and Impossible Tasks" , which is about constructor theory and feels dense only because it makes us think in the world in a way that has not yet become intuitive. Fascinating stuff. The young man wanders around in various states and levels of dreams, listening to various people expound on these topics in quite exquisitely written prose. Well worth watching again, I think. Lots of great "quotes" , in particular the Alex Jones one where he's driving in his car with megaphones, screaming at the top of his lungs. A very convincing demagogue with the right words in his mouth. "it's time to stand up and realize, that we should NOT allow ourselves to be crammed into this rat maze. We should not SUBMIT to dehumanization. I don't know about you, but I'm concerned with what's happening in this world. I'm concerned with the structure. I'm concerned with the systems of control. Those that control my life, and those that seek to control it EVEN MORE! I want FREEDOM! That's what I want, and that's what YOU should want! It's up to each and every one of us to turn loose of just some of the greed, the hatred, the envy, and yes, the insecurities, because that is the central mode of control, make us feel pathetic, small, so we'll willingly give up our sovereignty, our liberty, our destiny. We have GOT to realize we're being conditioned on a mass scale. Start challenging this corporate slave state! The 21st Century's gonna be a new century! Not the century of slavery, not the century of lies and issues of no significance, of classism and statism, and all the rest of the modes of control... it's gonna be the age of humankind, standing up for something PURE and something RIGHT! What a bunch of garbage, liberal, Democratic, conservative, Republican, it's all there to control you, two sides of the same coin! Two management teams, bidding for control of the CEO job of Slavery Incorporated! The TRUTH is out there in front of you, but they lay out this buffet of LIES! I'm SICK of it, and I'M NOT GONNA TAKE A BITE OUT OF IT! DO YA GOT ME? Resistance is NOT futile, we're gonna win this thing, humankind is too good, WE'RE NOT A BUNCH OF UNDERACHIEVERS, WE'RE GONNA STAND UP, AND WE'RE GONNA BE HUMAN BEINGS! WE'RE GONNA GET FIRED UP ABOUT THE REAL THINGS, THE THINGS THAT MATTER - CREATIVITY, AND THE *DYNAMIC* *HUMAN* *SPIRIT* THAT REFUSES TO *SUBMIT*!" And Speed Levitch's oration bordered all the while on the deep, then teetered into nonsensical but was at all times deeply and enticingly poetic, "On really romantic evenings of self, I go salsa dancing with my confusion." or "Life is a matter of a miracle that is collected over time by moments flabbergasted to be in each others' presence. The world is an exam, to see if we can rise into the direct experiences. Our eyesight is here as a test, to see if we can see beyond it, matter is here as a test for our curiosity, doubt is here as an exam for our vitality." And a professor on existentialism: "I'm afraid we're losing the real virtues of living life passionately in the sense of taking responsibility for who you are, the ability to make something of yourself and feel good about life. Existentialism is often discussed as if it's, a philosophy of despair, but I think the truth is just the opposite. Sartre, once interviewed, said he never really felt a day of despair in his life. One thing that comes out from reading these guys is not a sense of anguish about life so much as, a real kind of exuberance, of feeling on top of it, it's like your life is yours to create. I've read the post modernists with some interest, even admiration, but when I read them I always have this awful nagging feeling that something absolutely essential is getting left out. The more you talk about a person as a social construction or as a confluence of forces or as fragmented or marginalized, what you do is you open up a whole new world of excuses. And when Sartre talks about responsibility, he's not talking about something abstract." Louis Mackey: "What are these barriers that keep people from reaching anywhere near their real potential? The answer to that can be found in another question and that's this: Which is the most universal human characteristic: fear, or laziness?" Another man tells the story of a violent encounter and states that "[a] well armed populace is the best defense against tyranny". I wholeheartedly agree, but feel that being armed with knowledge is a far better and more useful defense than the primitive weapons most proponents of the expression understand it to be about. Guns are useless against the type of violence that is exacted every day against us. You waste your energy preparing for a physically violent encounter that never comes, when instead you lose everything you thought you were defending because you're not even aware that it's happening. This is what Žižek calls "the greater, the real, violence". The segment with Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, where he talks about how dream-time often stretches out and how the brain supposedly survives the death of the body by 8--12 minutes -- that part reminded me of the whole plot of Jacob's Ladder (see above). The levels of dreams and insecurity of reality echoed Inception but also almost everything that Philip K. Dick has ever written. The pure philosophy movie Examined Life tackles many of the same ideas, perhaps less artistically and with less flourish, but perhaps with more substance and depth. One lady discusses the advantage of childlike curiosity, the assimilation of reality by a consciousness that has not had time to build its filters. An interesting notion, this idea of unfiltered reality, but is a lack of imparted qualia better or worse? Unfettered curiosity leads to gullibility and leaves no place for the application of wisdom. Another discussion went into the realm of accelerating evolution of consciousness and echoed Kurzweil in a "The AI Revolution: The Road to Superintelligence" . [1] Highly recommended. Dog Day Afternoon (1975) -- "6/10" This is a languid, slow and eminently predictable -- excepting one detail -- bank-heist film, starring Al Pacino and directed by Sidney Lumet. It is based on a true story of a robbery on August 22nd in 1972 by a trio of utterly unprepared fools, who are quickly whittled down to two as one of their number chickens out almost before the heist has begun. Because it's the 70s, they just let him go. Pacino is good as Sonny, making demands and playing to the crowd by yelling "Attica!" The cops are not particularly adept, although they make up ineptitude with sheer numbers. The guys are really pretty stupid and the FBI quickly pegs the problem as Sonny's partner Sal, who's clearly more unstable. Sonny is boisterous -- and married to both a woman and a man -- but he's not suicidal. Sal is. At one point, Sonny claims that they were both in Vietnam -- and he has an Army pension coming to him -- but Sal's never been on a plane, so the story is only half-true, at best. Despite the high praise for it, I found it to be kind of slow and not producing very much tension. The scenes of 70s New York were lots of fun for me, but probably aren't for everybody. Pacino's Sonny had more meat to him than the usual criminal, but he was by far not a mastermind. He thought he was much smarter than he really was. It was almost sad how naive he and Sal were; when the get their jet, he asks "is there going to be any food on board?" A decent film; hard to recommend. Poignant ending. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] More thoughts on the linked articles are in this article: "How to think about thinking about theories of thought" . ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3098 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3098 Sat, 17 Jan 2015 21:19:55 +0100 -- "10/10" 2. "Killer Joe (2011)" <#Killer> -- "7/10" 3. "Bringing Out the Dead (1999)" <#Bringing> -- "8/10" 4. "Transcendence (2014)" <#Transcendence> -- "6/10" 5. "They Live! (1988)" <#They> -- "8/10" 6. "I Spit on Your Grave (1978)" <#I> -- "4/10" 7. "In the Mouth of Madness (1994)" <#Mouth> -- "7/10" 8. "The Devils (1971)" <#Devils> -- "9/10" 9. "The Secret Of Nikola Tesla (1980)" <#secret> -- "7/10" 10. "L'Artiste (2011)" <#Artiste> -- "9/10" 11. "An Officer and a Gentleman (1982)" <#Officer> -- "7/10" 12. "Fast & Furious AKA Fast and Furious 4 (2009)" <#Fast> -- "6/10" Bill Burr: I'm Sorry You Feel That Way (2014) -- "10/10" I just saw this. I’m still in pain. That was one of the funniest things I’ve ever seen in my life. Filmed in black and white. And the title is just perfect. He doesn’t say the title, but you can hear him saying it. Religion, racism, adoption, helicopters, euthanasia, what else? He hit 55 minutes and could have walked off on that joke. It was brilliant. Beautiful build-up. Perfect ending. Just drop the mic and walk off. Not Bill. He does 20 more minutes of material and just knocks it even further out of the park with guns, relationships and unrealistic sex positions in movies. Positively unreal. Surreal. I listen to his podcast and he has some good material there, but sometimes he’s a moron and phones it in. But holy crap can he just *hone* that material to a goddamned knife-edge and squeeze an absolute diamond out of all of it. Here's a taste, on God: "I actually resent the fact that I'm going to get judged some day. Like if that's true? That somebody's gonna judge me? It doesn't even make sense. It's like, dude, you made me. So, it's your fuckup. Let's not try to turn this around on me. Jesus Christ. You gave me freedom of choice. You made whores. You made me suck at math. And you you don't think this thing's not gonna go off the rails?" Killer Joe (2011) -- "7/10" This is a quirky, contract-killer movie starring Emile Hirsch as a guy in trouble and Matthew McConaughey as cop/killer-for-hire who's hired to get him out of that trouble. The plan is to kill Hirsch's mother in order to collect the insurance money. The movie starts off in a rainstorm with most of the characters in their underwear. Well, Gina Gershon, the new Mom, isn't wearing underwear. But Thomas Haden Church, the Dad, is, even though it has some holes in it. Killer Joe requires money up-front, but insurance payments only show up after a death, so he suggests collateral, in the form of Emile's younger sister, an innocent he'd met the day before. It's uncertain how old she is, but the girl -- played by Juno Temple -- looks quite young, so it's quite a creepy courting. Oh. Now we find out how old she is. The answer is not encouraging. Nor is it particularly believable, but we'll leave that. Overt sexuality plays a pivotal role. Gina Gershon contributes considerably. Even the cartoon playing in a diner shows a cartoon dog bouncing up and down on a motorcycle while another pumps and pumps up a tire. McConaughey, Haden Church and Gershon are very good together, although the main, long scene is extremely uncomfortable. Killer Joe is absolutely off the rails. And he planned the whole scene with the chicken leg from the very beginning of their last meeting. McConaughey's savagery is nearly unbelievable. What the hell just happened? Recommended? Bringing Out the Dead (1999) -- "8/10" Martin Scorcese directs this ode to the nighttime world of driving ambulances and saving lives in New York City. Nicholas Cage puts in a splendid performance. And something very strange happens: John Goodman is his first partner and he does his usual great job. However, what's strange is that Ving Rhames as his next partner completely upstages John Goodman. It must have been early days, I guess. That doesn't usually happen. Tom Sizemore plays the same guy he always plays. Jonathan Coulton has a son called "Tom Cruise Crazy" but it could have just as easily been called "Nick Cage Crazy" or "Sizemore Crazy". I also saw Sonja Sohn and Michael Kenneth Williams, who would go on to play Keema and Omar, respectively, in the The Wire. I also saw Judy Reyes as a front-desk nurse, who would go on to play the same role in Scrubs. Night and misery and sleeplessness and coffee and alcohol and drugs and stress and misery smear into a surreal experience, highlighted by Scorcese's strategic use of high dynamic range to create near-halos around Cage and others. The Rolling Stones provide the majority of a good soundtrack. A very good movie; recommended. Transcendence (2014) -- "6/10" This movie starts off quite slow and then slows down. The main character is shot and dies in the first half-hour. Johnny Depp plays a brilliant scientist, Will Caster and Rebecca Hall his nearly equally brilliant wife Evelyn Caster. Paul Bettany is his best friend Max Waters and "third smartest person [Will] knows". Their research is into consciousness and digital consciousness. After Will is shot with a radioactive bullet, they risk uploading him into a computer. Morgan Freeman hangs around as another scientist/voice-over guy. As with most science/tech movies, they really say stupid things. They'd just given up on saving her digital husband, thinking that the upload had failed when Evelyn says, before leaving, "wait, we have to wipe the drives". Why? Because you need an excuse to walk back to the computer? And why does Will Caster slur and speak with hesitation when he comes online? His processing power is gigantic and the artificial personality that he overwrote had no such problems. Paul Bettany raises the question of whether it is Will. And here we have yet another movie where the woman has to be a hysterical idiot who's the smartest person in the world (Will's dead) but can't think straight about anything serious because she's a frail woman who's in WUV. I'm fucking sick of it. And why does the digital Will choose a sickly picture of himself as his avatar? He could choose literally anything he wants and he portrays himself as the gray-faced cancer patient who's just expired. Kate Mara plays Bree, a one-named terrorist who's also quite one-dimensional, probably because she's a woman and couldn't handle more dimensions. She and her band of merry men are right in their fears, but they act like thugs, beating the Christ out of Max and then demanding that he join up with them. More could have been done with this script, but they just hurry everything in order to make it an action movie. And the downfall of the world is due to a stupid woman's frailty in letting a digital copy of her husband loose. I'm not buying it. I'm also not buying the high-volume trading way of making money: the algos haven't been making money for years. Just because Will is "in the machine" doesn't mean he could suddenly make money in a dead market. It's also nice to see how Evelyn has zero qualms about having her super-powered husband make a shit-ton of money and turn them instantly rich. No moral questions, no doubts. Ridiculous. And of course the machine is better than everyone at everything. It's fine, but then isn't it super-far-fetched to imagine that they could "fool" it with a virus? Is this Independence Day all over again? And there is no interesting discussion of motive: what would the motive of the machine be? Does it still have the motives of Will? Does it care about humanity? Why is it helping people? Why does it care? Because Will's still in there somewhere? Unchanged? A ridiculous, boring and unsatisfying answer. Even the action is lazy. Will makes one of his minions chase down a truck. The guys in the back of the truck wait for the guy chasing the truck to catch up to it and climb in before they even pull their guns. I'm insulted. Of course they die. In the end, he miraculously saves the planet despite humanity's stupidity. I feel like this movie could have been much better in other hands. They Live! (1988) -- "8/10" Rowdy Roddy Piper stars in this movie about an alien invasion that nobody noticed. He's a drifter who moves to a new city and gets a job in construction. He moves into a camp for day laborers and notices that a church across the way seems to have foot traffic at odd hours of the night. It turns out that it's the local headquarters of a rebel movement dedicated to bringing about the downfall of an alien race that lives in our midst. They have special sunglasses that let you see their propaganda for what it is and let you identify which so-called humans are actually aliens in disguise. They are disguised by a special ray broadcast from a powerful TV studio, Studio 54. Piper teams up with Keith David and together they try to kick some alien ass. This movie serves as the origin of the expression "I'm here to chew bubblegum and kick ass...and I'm all out of bubble gum." The rebel movement is mostly wiped out but the two boys survive to attack the TV studio and try to shut down the obfuscating ray so that everyone will see the aliens for what they are. The first half is better than the second half but there are interesting themes of control and obeisance to power that aren't necessarily associated only with the aliens, but with power and the elite in general. Recommended. I Spit on Your Grave (1978) -- "4/10" This is the story of a young girl who moves to a cabin on a lake for the summer, in order to write a book. The local idiots take notice and harass her, constantly buzzing her peaceful hammock or canoe with their droning, annoying outboard-motor--equipped boat. They lasso her and drag her canoe to shore, then chase her through the woods. She is terrified. They are idiots. But they are strong idiots and they overpower her and rape her. There're a lot of overtones of crazy, immoral hillbillies here, with a harmonica instead of the banjo from Deliverance [1]. The scene is brutal and violent and seemed -- though this is hard to judge -- realistic. It makes you question whether we really are descended from apes rather than ascended. Their savagery and persistence is terrifying; it's hard to figure out why they hate her so much. But maybe that's the point. It's hard to imagine watching this movie in a drive-in theater...on a date. That's act one. Act two is her prolonged revenge-taking. There are really long, long segments here in which nothing really happens. There isn't really even any tension built-up either. The mentally handicapped member -- ain't there always one -- of the gang-rape quartet, who was supposed to have killed the victim instead becomes her first victim, bizarrely, by hanging. The next one she seduces into a bathtub at her house, makes sure all of his blood is in one place, then slices that place off. Two down; two to go. The next one she chops down with his own ax as he tries to swim to shore. And the last she toys with, driving past him multiple times before she kills him with his own outboard motor when he injudiciously grabs onto it for support. The droning of the boat motor is like a needle in the brain. Not recommended. In the Mouth of Madness (1994) -- "7/10" Sam Neill stars as an insurance investigator called by the publisher of a popular horror writer when said writer disappears a few months before his latest and greatest book is to be published. He digs into the author's work, gets to know his editor and they both travel to the small town that is the center of the series of novels. This town doesn't exist though, not on this plane of existence. The movie deals with the "thin places" between our world and others too horrible to even imagine without going insane. Echoes of Lovecraft or Machen (The Great God Pan) or even Stephen King from his novella N. It was quite well-made and actually terrifying in places. Directed by John Carpenter, so there are some awesome real-life (non-CGI) special effects. Recommended. The Devils (1971) -- "9/10" This movie is about plague-time France during the reign of Cardinal Richelieu. Oliver Reed is utterly brilliant as the debauched priest Urbain Grandier. Now I know why Greg Proops thinks he was so good, despite his nearly criminal drunkenness. He's really a very powerful actor. He is trying to save his city of Loudun from the church but mostly he's trying to bed as many nuns as he can. Vanessa Redgrave is the mother superior, also in love with Monsieur Grandier but remains unrequited because of her extreme scoliosis that twists her head around by 45 degrees or more. The church is depicted as full of madmen and madwomen, their visions interspersed only occasionally with reality. The city itself looks like Bosch designed it, straight from the Garden of Earthly Delights. The story is from a book by Aldous Huxley called The Devils of Loudon. This movie was originally rated X, probably because of blasphemy. There's a cut-down version that ruins director Russell's vision but even the R-rated parts are pretty lascivious. There's a scene where Redgrave fantasizes while leading prayers, about Grandier as Christ and herself as Mary Magdalene but instead of just wiping his feet with her hair, she kisses Christ deeply, then proceeds to lave his wounds with further kisses. When she comes back to her senses, she finds that, in her passion, she's drilled a stigmata into one hand with the end of her rosary cross. Oliver Reed positively oozes his libido on-screen; Redgrave makes her frustration palpable. But when you hear that there's a Ken Russell movie with an orgy scene where a dozen naked nuns rub themselves all over a giant Jesus statue, it's hard to settle for less. I found a high-quality version without that scene and the scene is, surprisingly, available on "YouTube" or in lower-quality versions. The other cut scene features Ms. Redgrave pleasuring herself with the sooty shinbone of her now-deceased and unrequited paramour Grandier, whose death she'd brought about with an accusation of witchcraft she'd made in the throes or her own delirium-induced ecstasy. And yet, to speak of deleted scenes is to do this film a gross injustice. If Oliver Reed exudes confidence and charisma in the fullness of health and freedom, his quiet refusal to confess to crimes not his own is even more powerful. The condemnation of a church and power structure gone utterly wild and mad with its own lust, drunk on its own power, could hardly be better rendered on film. Perhaps that is thanks to the source material, I cannot say. But Russell, Redgrave and Reed do a fantastic job with this. Redgrave is relentlessly off the rails, repenting nothing for her accusation, her mad laugh beautiful and terrifying. It's that kind of movie. Charlotte Gainsbourg in Antichrist is arguably more difficult to watch [2] but this is up there. Great movie, though. Really well-made: good acting, good direction, wonderful sets -- just really hell-on-Earth and pure surrealist insanity, but high-quality -- and a good script, though there are those that will judge it poorly because it's "dirty", whatever the hell than means. Highly recommended, but don't say I didn't warn you. The Secret Of Nikola Tesla (1980) -- "7/10" This is a very good documentary about Nikola Tesla starring a very good Petar Bozovic in the lead role with Orson Welles playing J.P. Morgan. Thomas Alva Edision is portrayed as the evil sleazebag he almost certainly was and Tesla's inventions, brilliance and also madness are all given their due prominence. Saw it in English, with smatterings of Serbo-Croation (it was made in Yogoslavia, Tesla's place of origin), German, Italian and French. It was quite good and covered a good deal of the more productive part of Tesla's career. Saw it on YouTube. L'Artiste (2011) -- "9/10" This is an almost completely silent film about a man whose entire career was in silent film. He straddles triumphant over a film world in which he can do no wrong when a tsunami named "Talkies" washes away everything he has. That and the stock-market crash. It reminded me only very slightly of Singin' in the Rain which was also about the transition from silents to talkies. But I like this film much, much better. There are some very slow bits, but there are bits that reward you immensely for sticking with it and for paying attention. You see more detail when you're not constantly listening. The scene in his dressing room where Peppy Miller puts her arm through his coat and pretends to dance with him. The scene where he dreams that objects make noise. The final scene of his self-made silent film in which his character disappears into quicksand, so symbolic of his career. That Peppy Miller's movie -- a Talkie -- is playing to standing-room-only shows in a theater named "La Reine". She says "I want to be alone" at one point, echoing Garbo. The shadow of the rain running down the windowpane looking like tears on his face. He crosses a road after his estate auction, in front of a movie theater called the "Lonely Star". When he leaves his room at her mansion for the first time after setting his old films on fire in the depths of despondence, what do we see? His shadow, which had abandoned him right before the fire. It's no wonder Jean Dujardin made this film: he's a wonderful physical actor whose talents have already been on display in other French movies, notably the OSS 117 movies. Bérénice Bejo as Peppy Miller is also very good (and she was actually in one of the OSS 117 movies as well). John Goodman and James Cromwell have smaller roles. And how can I not mention his faithful sidekick, the Jack Russell Terrier? Not a word spoken and DuJardin's slow decay is one of the sadder things on film. He makes his melancholy palpable, helped by an excellent score (vital for a silent film). And especially when compared with his easy smile and laughter throughout the beginning of the film. Recommended. An Officer and a Gentleman (1982) -- "7/10" I remember seeing this movie when I was much younger. I loved Louis Gossett, Jr. back then. He's still pretty good overall. His introductory lines about "steers and queers" or "ripping out eyes and skull-fucking" his new recruits were surprising because I thought they'd originated in Full Metal Jacket, but this movie predates that one by 5 years. This story of a man trying to be a Navy pilot predates Top Gun by four years. Richard Gere is a giant douchebag in this movie who's transformed into someone who isn't a giant douchebag. As with most of these transformational stories, the movie is filled with people who aren't giant douchebags, but movies about them are, apparently, boring. His punishment weekend is pretty well-done, although Gere doesn't even try to act like he's hurt from two days of physical punishment. The final fight is as good as I remember, though: punches and kicks actually seem to hurt. And groin shots are totally OK. Go Gossett! Ended much better than it started. Fast & Furious AKA Fast and Furious 4 (2009) -- "6/10" After the bizarre detour to Tokyo in the last installment, Paul Walker and Vin Diesel both reprise their roles as Brian O'Connor and Dominic Toretto, respectively. This time they're on the tail of a high-end drug dealer who smuggles drugs in from Mexico in very fast cars and through barely car-sized tunnels under the U.S./Mexico border. They're both decent although Paul Walker shines much more in Running Scared. Diesel is, as usual, surprisingly good. I know a lot of people don't like him but I can't for the life of me figure out why. Recommended above the third installment. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] Which preceded this movie by six years. [1] I haven't yet seen Von Trier's latest, the Nymphoniac movies, but I've heard the Ms. Gainesbourg outdoes herself again. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3074 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3074 Tue, 13 Jan 2015 22:36:08 +0100 -- "6/10" 2. "50/50 (2011)" <#50> -- "7/10" 3. "The Graduate (1967)" <#Graduate> -- "6/10" 4. "Red Dragon (2002)" <#Red> -- "8/10" 5. "The Final Cut (2004)" <#Final> -- "6/10" 6. "The Hundred-foot Journey (2014)" <#Journey> -- "7/10" 7. "Magic in the Moonlight (2014)" <#Magic> -- "7/10" 8. "American Graffiti (1973)" <#American> -- "5/10" 9. "Enter the Void (2009)" <#Void> -- "6/10" 10. "Lucy (2014)" <#Lucy> -- "6/10" 11. "Big Night (1996)" <#Big> -- "8/10" 12. "Freeway (1996)" <#Freeway> -- "4/10" 13. "One Hour Photo (2002)" <#One> -- "7/10" 14. "The Bank Job (2008)" <#Bank> -- "6/10" 15. "The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014)" <#Budapest> -- "8/10" 16. "Happy People -- A Year in the Taiga (2010)" <#Happy> -- "7/10" 17. "Inequality for All (2013)" <#Inequality> -- "8/10" 18. "Lost in La Mancha (2002)" <#Lost> -- "6/10" 19. "The Zero Theorem (2013)" <#Zero> -- "9/10" 20. "The Big White (2005)" <#White> -- "7/10" 21. "Requiem for a Dream (2000)" <#Requiem> -- "9/10" 22. "Movie 43 (2013)" <#Movie> -- "8/10" 23. "The Interview (2014)" <#Interview> -- "7/10" 24. "Slavoj Žižek: The Pervert's Guide to Ideology (2012)" <#Slavoj> -- "9/10" 25. "Silent Running (1972)" <#Silent> -- "7/10" 26. "Scarface (1983)" <#Scarface> -- "8/10" 27. "Haywire (2011)" <#Haywire> -- "6/10" 28. "King Solomon's Mines (1985)" <#King> -- "3/10" 29. "Snowpiercer (2012)" <#Snowpiercer> -- "9/10" 30. "Walk Hard: the Dewey Cox Story (2007)" <#Walk> -- "8/10" The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (2008) -- "6/10" An F. Scott Fitzgerald story directed by David Fincher and starring Cate Blanchett, Brad Pitt and Julia Ormond sounded great on paper. It was a good movie, although at 2:45 a bit long, with many interleaving vignettes and stories from the lead character's life. Benjamin Button is a man who was born old and lives his life backward. The filming and plot reminded me of Forrest Gump with Pitt playing Gump and Blanchett playing "Jenny". Pitt even says "Mama" all the time, in almost the same accent. I'm kind of ambivalent. I won't recommend it, but won't tell you to stay away, either. 50/50 (2011) -- "7/10" Joseph Gordon Levitt is Adam, a young man with cancer. Seth Rogen is, for once, in a very sympathetic role, playing a very good friend. Anna Kendrick plays his therapist and Anjelica Huston is fantastic in a supporting role as his mother. When Huston meets Adam's therapist, she just stares at her without saying anything and you can see the thoughts racing. Is this a potential mate? What did my son tell this lady about me? All without a word spoken. The movie is decent and is some of Rogen's best work. What is it with Rogen's predilection with co-stars who never open their eyes beyond tiny slits? All in all, recommended. The Graduate (1967) -- "6/10" Dustin Hoffman is a college track star who becomes the target of Anne Bancroft's amorous designs. The famous seduction scene is actually an attempted rape. We're trained to think that a woman treating a young man this way is doing him a great favor, but that's only because she's attractive (although not to him; he consistently refuses her advances). If the tables were turned and an older man were so aggressive with a 20-year--old woman, we wouldn't find the scene nearly as funny. The affair fails to spark on the first attempt, but he soon calls her and they meet up again in a hotel. You can see future echoes of Rainman in Hoffman. That is, once you've seen this movie, you have no trouble believing that a casting director would call Hoffman to play a severely autistic man. Katharine Ross is absolutely lovely and plays Mrs. Robinson's daughter. Ben's parents [1] pressure him into dating Elaine, he treats her like utter crap and they hit it off. Of course. Mrs. Robinson is upset and threatens to spill the beans. Ben spills them first. This only temporarily stills Elaine's ardor for Ben. Because he's persistent, right? It's not stalking because it's the 60s, right? It's adorable because he's short? Maybe because his prospects as an entitled, nouveau-riche loafer are unlimited? Enough pestering and Elaine starts to take Ben's proposals seriously. And the whole "I fucked your Mom" thing is, for him, "in the past". This makes him the perfect representative of our culture, 50 years later. The person who slept with Mrs. Robinson is someone else, a perpetrator of an act for which the current-day Ben is not responsible. Then he breaks into a house because of course he does. This movie is about an amoral psychotic stalker with no notion of consequences -- like a child. Perhaps that was the point of this film? That the entitled sons of elites are broken by design? Elaine finds this break-in attractive -- perhaps she's also broken? -- and abandons her other man at the altar and runs away with the entitled man-child. Mrs. Robinson gets a few sharp licks in, but they're not evident on Elaine's face, fortunately. The Simon and Garfunkel soundtrack, while famous and somewhat appropriate, is irritating. Simon and Garfunkel are nearly objectively terrible. The movie is filmed quite well, but hard to recommend. Red Dragon (2002) -- "8/10" Anthony Hopkins reprises his role as Hannibal Lecter in this prequel to "The Silence of the Lambs". Ed Norton plays his FBI foil in the hunt for the "The Tooth Fairy" -- Francis Dolarhyde -- expertly portrayed by Ralph Fiennes. The Tooth Fairy stalks his prey by watching their family video tapes and meticulously planning their denouements. He is interested in capturing their essence so that he may "become" the Red Dragon, depicted many decades ago by painter William Blake. Dolarhyde even goes to the museum where the original painting resides and eats it. He clearly has issues. Emily Watson is very good as Dolarhyde's blind girlfriend, who almost but not quite succeeds in saving him from himself. A well-made and well-paced psychological thriller with good acting all around. Recommended. The Final Cut (2004) -- "6/10" The underlying premise of this movie is of a world in which people have "Zoë" implants, which record every moment of a person's life. When someone with such an implant dies, a "cutter" is engaged to make the "final cut" of a person's life, for their "Rememory" ceremony. The first hour was quite good, but then it kind of sprinted to the finish. Robin Williams was good in the lead; Mira Sorvino was wasted. Still, recommended for the first hour and the concept was interesting. The Hundred-foot Journey (2014) -- "7/10" A well-made movie based on the book. Just as in the book, the film gets quite rocky about halfway through. The pretty Marguerite is portrayed as a woman who can only befriend an Indian man when she is certain of her superiority, when she knows that he poses no threat to her life. She comes out looking just as petty as all of the other French people in the movie, which is a bit heavy-handed but not too disturbing. Hassan rockets to fame, wins over the mean lady, gets her a Michelin star, takes Paris by storm, gets his own Michelin stars, then returns to the village to open a restaurant with Marguerite and his family and everyone lives happily ever after (with lots of Michelin stars, which is what's important here). Helen Mirren is, as always, a pleasure. She is nicely balanced by Om Puri and Manish Dayal as Papa and Hassan, respectively. Recommended. Magic in the Moonlight (2014) -- "7/10" This latest entry from Woody Allen features Colin Firth as an incorrigible skeptic and rationalist and Emma Stone as a psychic medium. It was obvious that there was a scam going on, but it wasn't obvious whose scam it was. I thought it was Firth in cahoots with Stone when it was his friend who was in cahoots with her, getting his revenge on Firth, who'd rubbed his superiority in his friend's face since they were children. In the end, though, Firth gets the girl and everyone lives happily ever after. Lovely scenery and a lighthearted story; both Stone and Firth are very good. It's not Allen's best by a long shot, but it's fun. Recommended. American Graffiti (1973) -- "5/10" This is a movie about how a bunch of just-graduated high-school--age kids spend a single night in the dog days of the summer of '62 in Modesto, California. They do what kids do, they try to score booze and they fight over girls and they cruise and try to race cars and they basically spend all evening doing stupid stuff and it's supposed to be significant because they don't know any better. One couple breaks up because he wants to do it and she doesn't is only made somewhat saucy by an offhand comment he makes about a story she once told him about watching her brother, for which she throws him out of the car with extreme prejudice. My interest is short-lived as the movie careers toward the expected ending of everyone getting back together and everything working out for everyone, except of course for the guy whose car gets wrecked but at least the guy he was racing can go on thinking that he's the best guy in the world because he's the fastest guy in high school. I recognized Harrison Ford, Richard Dreyfuss and Ron Howard. It felt like a cross between Dazed and Confused and Stand By Me. Not recommended unless you grew up in the fifties or early sixties, in which case the movie is probably nostalgic as hell. Enter the Void (2009) -- "6/10" What the hell did I just watch? In a sentence, it's the story of a reincarnation. This movie tells the story of a young man living in Tokyo with his sister. He is a drug dealer; she is an exotic dancer. They drifted to Tokyo because that's where their parents once told them that they would move, just before they were killed in a horrific and graphically depicted traffic accident. The brother and sister spent many years separated by the foster-care system and -- once reunited in a way that had more than just overtones inappropriate to a fraternal relationship -- they ended up there. We see this all in a nearly dialogue-free series of flashbacks from the point of view of the brother and then his soul, after he is killed in a drug deal gone bad. Scenes from their childhood are interleaved with a patchwork of scenes from just before and just after his death, with repetition for different viewpoints. There is also a healthy dose (no pun intended) of very trippy, psychedelic camera work. The sound is muffled and the ethereal soundtrack is omnipresent. It's an interesting concept and reasonably well-done -- and it's obvious that the director put his heart and soul into it and believes in the concept, which is what keeps you watching -- but at two hours and forty minutes, it's almost unbearably long. Paz de la Huerta hates clothes, if you're into that. Actually, nobody really wears clothes for the last twenty minutes or so, but it's highly trippy and emotionally distanced. Not recommended. Lucy (2014) -- "6/10" It's the Scarlett Johansson show and she stars as a sad-sack student who gets caught up in a drug deal with a nasty new drug. Morgan Freeman plays the most token role I've seen him play yet, as a scientist who specializes in people with advanced abilities born of being able to use more than 10% of their minds. This is patently ridiculous, but Luc Besson does his best with it, depicting Lucy progressing her way up the evolutionary ladder in 10% increments until she becomes God at 100%. A reasonably fun romp but not really recommended. Big Night (1996) -- "8/10" Stanley Tucci and Tony Shalhoub play Italian brothers -- named Primo and Secondo -- with a restaurant in New Jersey that is on the verge of closing because they cook authentic Italian food and the customers are sparse and mostly "Philistines" (as Tony Shalhoub says). Isabella Rosellini plays Tucci's wife, who's onto the fact that he also has Minnie Driver as a girlfriend. Ian Holm plays a rival restaurateur who promises to help out by delivering Louis Prima to the "big night". Liev Schreiber even shows up for a little while. It's nicely filmed and well-acted, with dialogue in English and Italian with English subtitles. Fun soundtrack, too. The scene of destruction at the end of the big meal, just before the "Dolci" is wonderful, reminiscent of almost something like The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover, with a long, lingering shot of the table. The final scene is beautiful and (almost) without words, as Secondo cooks an omelet for the waiter, scooping out a third for him and a third for himself. Minutes later, Primo walks in. Secondo says nothing, but gets him a plate and fork, scoops the remaining third into a plate and sets a place for him. Secondo thinks for a second, then drags a chair over, next to his brother, and begins to eat. He puts an arm around him. The waiter leaves. Fin. Nothing has changed and they will pick up the fight for another day. Recommended. Freeway (1996) -- "4/10" A take on "Little Red Riding Hood" that stars Reese Witherspoon and Kiefer Sutherland. Brooke Shields plays Sutherland's wife, Mimi Wolverton. (Get it?) It alternated between creepy and really not very good. Kiefer Sutherland is terrible; Witherspoon is OK in some scenes. Not recommended. One Hour Photo (2002) -- "7/10" Robin Williams plays a photo developer at a local big-box store. He is wound up really tight, becoming obsessed with a young family, particularly the mother. He makes copies of their pictures and hangs them on his wall in a gigantic mosaic. When he discovers from other pictures that the woman's husband is cheating on him, he snaps and vows revenge on him. The first step is to get the pictures into his obsession's hands. Then he goes to the hotel where the husband and his lover are having a tryst and he attacks them, forcing them into lurid positions while he takes pictures. Williams is brilliant, inhabiting the role. Recommended. The Bank Job (2008) -- "6/10" This is a heist movie starring Jason Statham, based on the supposedly true story of the 1971 Baker Street Robbery. A private bank in London is the target and Statham and his "gang" (quotes because they're very low-level and inexperienced) are hired through a front by very well-connected politicians looking to keep the contents of one of the boxes from ever seeing the light of day. So they stage a robbery to cover up what will be the real theft. Statham and his gang are not in on this and are in no way interested in this part of the heist. They turn the tables, discover the pictures, find even more pictures, bargain with and blackmail everyone involved and live happily ever after. Statham does almost no ass-kicking in this one, so look elsewhere if you're looking for that kind of thing. It was OK, but the only thing recommending it is Statham. The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014) -- "8/10" Every time I see a Wes Anderson film, I think that that movie is the ultimate expression of Mr. Anderson, that there is no way to make a film more "Wes Anderson". For example, Moonrise Kingdom was one such. This latest installment in the long-running series of quietly zany films starring quirky characters has an unbelievable number of big names: Ed Norton, Ralph Fiennes, Bill Murray, Tilda Swinton, F. Murray Abraham, Jeff Goldblum, Adrien Brody, Willem Dafoe, Harvey Keitel, Jude Law, Jason Schwartzman (no surprise there) and a handful of other familiar faces. Perhaps the summation of the lead character played by Fiennes applies equally well to Anderson himself: "To be frank, I think his world had vanished long before he ever entered it - but, I will say: he certainly sustained the illusion with a marvelous grace!" Happy People -- A Year in the Taiga (2010) -- "7/10" This Werner Herzog documentary follows the lives of a few hunters and trappers in the deep Siberian Taiga throughout a whole year. It is a cold, solitary existence. These people -- and their dogs -- are incredibly resilient, hardy. Herzog explains with typically Herzogian wonder how a dog runs 100 miles without having eaten for more than a day. The dog prances up after having paced a snowmobile the whole way and jogs into the cabin. Amazing. Not one of Herzog's best but interesting nonetheless. Inequality for All (2013) -- "8/10" This Robert Reich documentary focuses on the increase in inequality in the U.S. since 1980, analyzing the effects, the reasons behind it, the winners, the losers, the logic behind it and possibly ways out of it. It discusses in clear terms the real problem with concentrated wealth from a macroeconomic standpoint viz. that the rich don't spend very much of their income relative to the size of that income, which is overall a bad thing for the economy. Money and liquidity pools in a few hands and doesn't get re-used. Restaurants don't stay open if either everyone is too poor to eat there or they have more than enough money to eat there but can only eat dinner once per day. "Big companies are designed not to generate good jobs in the United States. Big companies are designed to make profits. This isn't a matter of fault. You know, the head of GE is on the president's Jobs Council. Well, GE has been creating more jobs abroad than it's been creating jobs in the United States. "So who is taking care of the American worker? Who is looking out for the American worker as GE and other big companies and Wall Street and the very wealthy, who basically have capital all over the world [...] As they have more and more political power, who is actually working in a way in Washington and in state capitals that improves the well-being of the American workforce? The answer is nobody." How did people cope then? First, women went to work because they had to. A single salary no longer supported a family. Then, people started working longer hours, multiple jobs. After that? Debt. Amass debt to keep your head above water when your salaries no longer suffice. As he shows in a diagram, this is a response to the cycle of: * Wages stagnate * Workers buy less * Companies downsize * Tax revenues decrease * Government cuts programs * Workers are less educated * Unemployment rises * Deficits grow * Wages stagnate, etc. In such a society, it makes absolutely no sense from a societal standpoint to allow large amounts of wealth to be concentrated into a few hands that don't do anything with it -- that can't realistically do anything with it -- other than use it to make even more money. It's wasteful and monstrous. If everyone else was doing fine and the extremely wealthy were still a natural outgrowth? Fine. But think of it like this: if a plane crashed and there were 50 survivors. How would the other forty-nine feel about the one guy who managed to wake up first and collect all of the food for himself, declaring that they would have to buy their supplies from him? How well would such a society work, do you think? What would you do? Highly recommended. Lost in La Mancha (2002) -- "6/10" This is a documentary about just one of Terry Gilliam's ill-fated attempts to film The Man who Killed Don Quixote, an adaptation of the famous book. The film was beset by problems, not least of which were scheduling with the principals, capturing the scope of Gilliam's vision within a budget that was far too tight and, finally, the ill-health of the Jean Rochefort, the man who was to play Don Quixote. The film was tantalizingly close, with several scenes filmed that showed that Gilliam was making something special. According to Wikipedia, he made no less than seven separate attempts to make this movie. Happily, it seems that just in November of 2014, he has, once again, obtained funding and will have éminence grise John Hurt in the lead role. Fingers crossed! Saw it in English, French and Spanish with Italian subtitles. The Zero Theorem (2013) -- "9/10" Terry Gilliam's latest film is another futuristic vision, about a confusing world filled with distraction and nonsensical ephemera. The world is much like what ours today would probably look like to a traveler from the 50s. Video advertisements chase you down the street. The park has a gigantic X composed of "do not" signs, forbidding everything from food and drink to pets and what looks like bat-girl. Christoph Waltz plays a programmer of some sort, Qohen, employed by a faceless corporation to design "entities". He is dissatisfied with his lot in life and wishes only to be able to stay at home, an abandoned-looking church with his own more subdued technology scattered about. There is no doubt at all that this is a Gilliam film, with shades of CGI-enhanced Brazil about it. There are also callbacks to other Gilliam movies, especially near the end, where reality becomes ... squishy. The shaking doors letting in cracks of light reminded me of the rampaging Samurai in Fisher King. The costumes are wonderfully low-tech, but mixed with CGI backgrounds. Melanie Thierry plays a woman inordinately fascinated with Qohen and Matt Damon, Peter Stormare and Tilda Swinton round out the indy flavor. David Thewlis plays Qohen's boss. Qohen's request to be able to work at home is granted by Management (Damon) but only if he works on the Zero Theorem, something that's driven others mad or off the job. Thewlis shows Qohen to his new office, in what looks like an apse dominated by a gigantic, ducted and wholly Gillianesque (if not a bit Quake III-ish or Biohazard-y) supercomputer rearing spire-ward out of a moat of coolant. As ever, when Gilliam manages to project what his inner eye sees, it's a delight. The visualization of programming is also fascinating: we see Qohen constructing a formula by flying around 3-D blocks with formulae on them and slotting them in where they're supposed to go. As the camera pulls back, we see that the task is not as simple as it at first appeared: the possible slots for each block are nearly infinite, a 3-D landscape fractal in nature. It is in this wonderfully non-expository way that Gilliam lets us know that Qohen is brilliant. Christopher Nolan also makes nice movies but God love him, he would have just had another character describe Qohen's brilliance. And still, the project takes its toll on Qohen. He drives himself forward, programming despite his inability to move forward without taking steps back. Sleep-deprived, badly nourished, he is the epitome of a developer, of a scientist slavishly pursuing his goal, but without organization or good work habits. Help shows up in the form of management's son, a hotshot programmer who "can sprint, but can't go the distance", as he puts it. He's played well by Lucas Hedges, who reminds me for all the world of a young Anthony Michael Hall. He and Qohen close in on the Zero Theorem. The software interfaces are pure Gilliam -- Qohen types URLs into the address bar with what looks like an IBM Selectric ball hovering over it, as a simulated read-head. More help is sent in the form of Bainsley, an online virtual-reality cam-girl enchantingly played by Melanie Thierry. Her plea for him to run away with her illustrates another instance of Gilliam's mastery of "show, don't tell". At the beginning of the film, he reiterates that he doesn't like to be touched; by the time she pleads with him, she is leaning all over him, her face against the back of his head, her hand on his cheek, all without complaint from him. Damon's Management clues Qohen in, at the end, in a speech that reminded me of his Loki character from Dogma or perhaps also a bit of Will in Good Will Hunting. "The saddest aspect of mankind's need to believe in God, or to put it another way, a purpose greater than this life, is that it makes this life meaningless. You see this is all just a way-station on the road to some promised eternity." Highly recommended. The Big White (2005) -- "7/10" Set in Alaska, this movie feels kind of like an even wackier version of Fargo, if you can imagine that. The scenery is spectacular; you feel cold just watching it. The cinematography is playful; for example, at one point a car drives past with a red shark fin sticking up past the top of the snowbank. It turns out to be an upended surfboard. Robin Williams finds a body in a dumpster and takes it upon himself to dispose of it, claiming that it was his long-missing brother. His wife, played by Holly Hunter, is a little...off. She swear a lot and seems to have self-control issues, but she's cute and she's funny. Williams's attempts at disposal become increasingly desperate. Giovanni Ribisi plays an insurance adjuster who's highly suspicious of Williams's claim to his brother's insurance policy. Alison Lohman plays his psychic-hotline wife. The cops and characters reminded me a lot of the quirkiness of Northern Exposure. Robin Williams is great as a sad sack who's just trying to scrape together enough money to help his wife (who has problems but almost certainly doesn't have Tourrette syndrome, as she claims). "Williams: I had to borrow money to pay for this coffin. Ribisi:: Well, you're breaking my heart, Mr. Barnell. Williams:: I doubt that." Tim Blake Nelson is one of the killers who comes looking for the body. He kidnaps Williams's wife and then starts counseling her on her fake Tourette's Syndrome. Woody Harrelson plays the long-lost brother, back from the "dead" once he sniffs out that a life-insurance policy was paid. It gets complicated, stays quirky and is all resolved in a more-or-less satisfactory manner in the end. Recommended. Requiem for a Dream (2000) -- "9/10" tl;dr: Drugs are bad. More precisely, addiction is bad. This film is the story of a mother (Ellen Burstyn), her son (Jared Leto), his girlfriend (Jennifer Jason Leigh) and his best friend (Marlon Wayans). Nice, huh? Spoiler alert: the film ends with the mother strapped to a bed in a mental hospital, withdrawing from a severe amphetamine addiction, the son lies in a hospital, his left arm amputated because of a festering needle wound, the best friend on a work gang in prison, suffering beatings and malnutrition and the girlfriend curled up on her couch at home, cuddling her scag, earned by performing in a private sex show for her new pimp. The mother never quite recovered from the death of her husband and the son isn't around enough to take care of her. She spends her days watching a self-help guru's (Christopher McDonald) infomercial. She gets an invitation to the show but can't fit into her dress. She resolves to lose weight by the time she gets her actual invitation. After a day spent trying it the old-fashioned way, she makes an appointment with a diet doctor and starts her downward spiral. The son and his friends are already well on their way, shucking and jiving for enough money to buy a stash for the night. They resolve to follow the junkie dream: they pool their cash and start selling instead of just using everything they have. This actually works OK for a while, but the friend is busted by the cops on a deal and the money they've saved is used for bail and nearly gone in one fell swoop. The son and his girlfriend predictably fight over the lack of drugs and he heads out with his friend to Florida to make a big score. She can't wait that long and calls a dealer who wants women rather than money in exchange for drugs. The plotting is straightforward, but the shooting is interesting, making use of repeated quick shots -- taking a pill, the various stages of preparing a shot of heroin, pupils dilating -- to show the passage, and sameness, of time. Saw the director's cut; recommended, but not for the faint of heart. Movie 43 (2013) -- "8/10" This is less of a movie and more of a collection of high--production-quality skits starring brand-name actors. The list of well-known actors and actresses is very long. The best skits star Halle Berry and Stephen Merchant playing Truth or Dare on a blind date. Another stars Kate Winslet and Hugh Jackman on another blind date, where he has an obvious deformity that only she notices. Johnny Knoxville, Gerard Butler and Seann William Scott catch a leprechaun. Justin Long, Jason Sudeikis, Uma Thurman, Kristen Bell and John Hodgman are superheroes at a speed-dating evening. Emma Stone is fantastic as a customer who flirts with a supermarket cashier played by Kieran Culkin. Aasif Mandvi, Richard Gere, Jack McBrayer and Kate Bosworth are at a marketing meeting, trying to fine-tune the iBabe. Elizabeth Banks and Josh Duhamel are in a twisted segment starring live-action--cartoon Beezel, a dirty, filthy cat who hates the girlfriend. I saw the alternative version, which doesn't include "The Pitch" but does include "The Thread". The skits are pretty professionally done and were quite funny. It's certainly not for everyone, but I recommend it. The Interview (2014) -- "7/10" Seth Rogen and James Franco play writer/director Aaron Rapaport and star Dave Skylark, respectively, of a sensationalist TV-interview show. It turns out that President Kim of North Korea is a huge fan of the show and wants to be interviewed for it. Before they can leave, they are approached by the CIA in the form of Agent Lacey (played by Lizzy Caplan), who wants them to use the interview as an opening to kill the president of North Korea, for all of the usual stupid reasons. To its credit, the movie does discuss the hypocrisy of the U.S.'s policy but also emphasizes that North Korea is a totalitarian dictatorship. It's a comedy, though, not a political film, so that it wasn't too jingoistic -- and that they, spoiler alert, didn't end up killing him, but humiliating him instead -- meant it was easy to focus on the for-once decent acting and funny script. This is no This is the End; it's actually recommended. Slavoj Žižek: The Pervert's Guide to Ideology (2012) -- "9/10" This is a very good movie starring preëminent philosopher Slavoj Žižek discussing ideology for two hours. He uses examples from movies to show how insidious prevailing ideology is -- either overtly or very often, subtly pushing a powerful ideological agenda while superficially negating a weaker one. These are the films that purport to be radical or "edgy" but still kowtow to the deeper ideologies in our culture, those that almost no-one dares to question. Highly recommended. Here's an example. If you like this kind of philosophy, then you'll love this movie. If you can't figure out why I would select this quote, then you should probably skip it. "I think Breyvik's manifesto is well worth reading. It's palpably clear there how this violence that Breyvik not only theorized about but also enacted is a reaction to the impenetrability and confusion of global capital. It's exactly like Travis Bickle's killing spree at the end of Taxi Driver. When he's there, barely alive, he symbolically with his fingers, points a gun at his own head -- clear signs that all of this violence was basically suicidal. On the right path, in a way, Travis, in the Taxi Driver. You should have the outburst of violence, you should direct it at yourself, but in a very specific way: at what in yourself chains you, ties you to the ruling ideology." Silent Running (1972) -- "7/10" Bruce Dern plays Lowell, an environmentalist serving out his eighth year on a spaceship with giant biomes attached to it. He crews with three morons who don't care anything for the forest. They just want to return to the now-homogenized and fully tamed Earth. They are ordered by command to destroy the biomes and return to Earth, a prospect at which the three are overjoyed. Lowell cannot abide it and kills the others and steals the ship, heading out past Saturn. He befriends his robots, still missing humanity but transforming the robots into new friends. When he comes back into range of Earth, he realizes what he must do: he has already lost one robot and another is severely damaged. He jettisons the entire biome with the remaining healthy robot as its steward, to keep it from being destroyed by humanity. He blows himself, the damaged robot (Huey) and the entire rest of the ship up. This prescient film predates Star Wars by several years but already had the long, silent shots of gigantic space-cruisers and also the anthropomorphized robots. There were several scenes that Interstellar lifted almost wholesale. For example, Lowell is also a wanderer who has essentially left mankind, like Cooper in Interstellar. He befriends his robots in a similar fashion, even attempting a repair in the same way that Cooper does. This is a terribly sad movie -- particularly the interactions with the robots as they mourn one of their own or when another must be left to fend on his own -- but recommended. Scarface (1983) -- "8/10" This is the story of a Cuban immigrant, part of the so-called "Cuban crime wave" that arrived in Miami. Al Pacino plays Tona Montana, a low-level thug with aspirations, almost no education, less mercy and a bull-headed take-no-prisoners attitude. He's dangerously mean but ruthlessly efficient, clawing his way almost easily up the crime-world ladder in Miami. It's directed by Brian DePalma and written by Oliver Stone and amazingly brought to life by Al Pacino. The movie is otherwise packed with stars: F. Murray Abraham, Michelle Pfeiffer, Robert Loggia and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio. Montana rises higher and higher, becoming more and more addicted to cocaine (breaking the second rule of dealing) and more and more suspicious that everyone's trying to screw him over or take his money. He grows his business in order to avoid having to deal with anybody. It's still amazing to see someone inhabit a role like Pacino. Here he is talking to his wife, "You got nothing to do with your life, man. Why don't you get a job? Do something, be a nurse. Work with blind kids, lepers, that kind of thing. Anything beats you waiting around all day, waiting for me to fuck you, I'll tell you that." And here's what he tells the cop who busts him on the RICO ACT, delivered with utterly dead eyes. "You wanna waste my time? Okay. I call my lawyer. He's the best lawyer in Miami. He's such a good lawyer, that by tomorrow morning, you gonna be working in Alaska. So dress warm." And this speech, delivered after Pfeiffer has left him publicly at a restaurant, filmed in a single-shot as he slowly leaves the restaurant. "What you lookin' at? You all a bunch of fuckin' assholes. You know why? You don't have the guts to be what you wanna be. You need people like me. You need people like me so you can point your fuckin' fingers and say, "That's the bad guy." So... what's that make you? Good? You're not good. You just know how to hide, how to lie. Me, I don't have that problem. Me, I always tell the truth. Even when I lie. So say good night to the bad guy! Come on. The last time you gonna see a bad guy like this again, let me tell you. Come on. Make way for the bad guy. There's a bad guy comin' through! Better get outta his way." By the time of his famous denouement, he has lost everything, done every terrible thing, lost everything. For his one good decision -- he called off a hit because it would have killed children -- he is chastised by his partner as "a little monkey". He is a man with everything, but nothing left to lose. He is a stupid, simple man ruled by simplistic rules and overarching passions -- no-one can ever be with his sister, for example -- and he ruins everything he touches. His wife has left him, he has no legacy, no son, his former partner is going to war with him, he just shot his best friend to death and his sister and mother both hate him. He seems happiest when he can let everything go and succumb to the mindless rage. In the end, the rage and the cocaine combine to make him a minor god, impervious to pain and bullets. At least for a little while. Recommended. Haywire (2011) -- "6/10" I watched this movie despite the low rating on IMDb because of the all-star cast: Channing Tatum, Michael Douglas, Ewan Mcgregor, Michael Douglas and Michael Fassbender with Gina Carano as relatively believable super-agent, all directed by Steven Soderbergh. I have a feeling that he had a contractual obligation, though, because while it was utterly clear that he'd filmed it -- even the soundtrack felt familiar -- it kind of felt like he phoned it in. There are long, well-choreographed fight scenes (although Gina's head is cut off in several shots, when the stunt-double took over) but there are also long chase scenes. Plus points, though, for at least showing people getting tired during ridiculously long fight scenes. Also for making them start the fights violently and surprisingly in order to finish them quickly. Minus points for not finishing them quickly. Plus points for showing her putting on make-up to cover up the bruises she would have definitely received. Also for not making the heroine more emotional about finishing a fight without a drawn-out confession, etc. Minus points for making her destination when running from everyone her Daddy. Plus for making extensive use of choke-holds, leg-locks and arm-bars, but minus for not ever hitting anyone in the nuts. It passes the time; recommended if you're the kind who needs to see every Bourne-esque action movie. King Solomon's Mines (1985) -- "3/10" If you've already seen The Quest and all of the Indiana Jones movies as well as all of the Mummy movies, then this one will fit right in. It stars Richard Chamberlain as Allan Quartermain, a real-life British civil engineer, portrayed here as an adventurer-for-hire. Sharon Stone plays the femme fatale and John Rhys-Davies plays the same role he always plays in this type of movie. The map in this movie is the same as in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade: you follow along the "fertile valley" until you get to the "breasts of Sheba". On the other hand, they totally copied the drop-ceiling trap from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. I'd seen this movie a few times when I was younger and had fond memories of it. They don't, unfortunately, hold up. The scene in the biplane is just painfully bad -- and Sharon Stone can't act her way out of a paper bag. Either that, or she's deliberately spoofing this kind of terrible movie? It's honestly hard to tell. What is clear is the Euro-centrism that had previously escaped me. When they get to the mines, they find the gallery of queens. They are all white. In Africa. Not recommended. Snowpiercer (2012) -- "9/10" This movie is about a world that froze. It froze because humanity released a chemical to counteract global warming and the geo-engineering was far more efficacious, far more aggressive, than expected. The only humans left are on a bullet train that travels the frozen wastes, a microcosm of humanity, with the elite at the front, dining on steak, and the dregs at the back, under draconian police rule and subsisting on protein bars. Chris Evans and Jamie Bell star as the protagonists. The world on the train, at least at the back of the train is nearly a uniform gray. The color palette makes Quake II look like Pokemon. This is in stark contrast to the vivid yellow coat worn by the first denizen of the front of the train that we encounter. These people don't speak a word but they are portrayed as the purest evil, not even considering those at the back of the train as human. She's just shopping for a child of the appropriate size. As punishment for insubordination, the brutally cold outside world is used. A man's arm is stuck outside to be frozen off. Tilda Swinton uses the time to deliver a speech. She is, as usual, perfect, delivering lines like "you suffer from the misplaced optimism of the doomed" with aplomb, though they make no sense. John Hurt is also very, very good, showing up as a man without an arm and a leg and having clearly been an agitator in the past (because the aforementioned limbs had been frozen off, we are led to believe). [2] It also stars my favorite Korean actor, Kang-ho Song, who plays a totally cool badass who knows how to get through the train. There's a lot of symbolism, with the initial revolt coming when the back of the train realizes that the guards "have no bullets". It's also beautiful when they see sunlight for the first time, looking out a window that they don't have in their own section. The train measures time by its transit around the tracks; new year is when they pass a particular bridge in the orbit around the world. The train blasts frozen chunks of ice out of the way; everything stops for this, even the protracted axe-battle. And then the tunnel disadvantages the side without night-vision goggles. There's a clue where the movie is headed when Swinton's Mason says of the reason that they only serve sushi from the aquarium twice per year: "Enough is not the criterion. Balance. You see, this aquarium is a closed ecological system. And, um, the number of individual units must be very closely, precisely controlled, in order to maintain the proper, sustainable balance." Basically: it's nothing personal but if we don't treat most of the people like animals, the train's ecology can't survive. The kindergarten indoctrination scene was really well-done. Still, lessons about closed systems aside, ... fuck those guys. If the only way to maintain humanity is to subjugate most of it, then let's all watch the world burn. And the scenes of decadence become more obscene the further forward they go. At the final gate, at the head of the train, Chris Floyd tells his story of how the "tail section" started out, a tale of woe and heroism straight out of a concentration camp. "You ever been to the tail section? Do you have any idea what went on back there? When we boarded? It was chaos. Yeah, we didn't freeze to death, but we didn't have time to be thankful. Wilford's soldiers came and they took everything. A thousand people in an iron box. No food, no water... After a month, we ate the weak... You know what I hate about myself? I know what people taste like. I know that babies taste best... There was a woman. She was hiding with her baby. And some men with knives came. They killed her and they took her baby. And then an old man-no relation, just an old man-stepped forward and he said, "Give me the knife." And everyone thought he'd kill the baby himself. But he took the knife and he cut off his arm. And he said, "Eat this, if you're so hungry. Eat this, just leave the baby." I had never seen anything like that. And the men put down their knives... You've probably guessed who that old man was. That baby was Edgar. And I was the man with the knife. I killed Edgar's mother" And finally we meet Wilford, the owner of the train, God of this little world. He reveals that the insurrections are just exciting ways of culling population, that the current uprising had been planned to end in the dark tunnel, after which the remainder of tail-section would have had much more room to live. He reveals that Gilliam was working with Wilford, despite his heroic sacrifice in the citation above. We learn that the train needs a driver. Ed Harris as Wilford also holds forth on the train society, a microcosm of our own, seemingly channeling his role from The Truman Show, "We need to maintain a proper balance of anxiety and fear, chaos and horror in order to keep life going. And if we don't have that, we need to invent it." This and other themes are quite nicely addressed in a way that draws many more people in than would otherwise consider such advanced philosophical notions of how we live, why we live and what can legitimately be done about it. Whose lives are important? Do you risk losing it all because of an injustice? (E.g. do the tail-enders revolt, possibly destroying the world, just to keep the front-enders from living off of them?) The technique of reducing the entire world to just the train makes it much easier to see these problems in stark contrast, unlike when the exact same situation prevails at the global level. Showing the revelers partying and living large in the next car over makes the injustice much more obvious, in a way that people have trouble seeing in their own world. There are concessions to more mainstream thinking, though. It's only when "the children" are threatened that people are actually incensed about human suffering. And the ending had to rescue the hope for humanity, whereas the entire rest of the film pointed to the hopelessness of it all. A pity, because an ending showing the train's carcass becoming slowly engulfed in snowdrifts would have been much more apropos. Still, kudos for great actors, a great script, making viewers think and for daring to make such a good sci-fi, action and philosophically and politically relevant film. Highly recommended. Walk Hard: the Dewey Cox Story (2007) -- "8/10" This biographical movie stars John C. Reilly as Dewey Cox, a musician whose career inexplicably spanned decades, several musical styles, wives, children and musical collaborators. John C. Reilly really carries the film, which feels much less like a spoof than I expected. It was a great, funny fake documentary about a musician that never was, but stands as an amalgamation of the last 50 years of rock music. Much better than expected. Pretty good music, all performed by the more than capable John C. Reilly. Recommended. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] I just realized that Hoffman's father in this movie is Higgins from Magnum P.I.. [1] And, with the beard, it's utterly evident why Terry Gilliam chose him as his Quixote in his latest attempt at filming that book ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3071 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3071 Sun, 14 Dec 2014 22:33:52 +0100 2. "Godzilla (2014)" <#Godzilla> -- "6/10" 3. "Game Change (2012)" <#Game> -- "7/10" 4. "The Hunger Games (2012)" <#Hunger> -- "8/10" 5. "Central do Brasil (1998)" <#Central> -- "6/10" 6. "Resident Evil: Extinction (2007)" <#Resident> -- "6/10" 7. "Babylon A.D. (2008)" <#Babylon> -- "6/10" 8. "Immortals (2011)" <#Immortals> -- "5/10" 9. "Man on a Ledge (2012)" <#Man> -- "5/10" 10. "Last Night (1998)" <#Last> -- "6/10" 11. "12:01 (1993)" <#12> -- "4/10" 12. "Bronson (2008)" <#Bronson> -- "7/10" 13. "Spring Breakers (2012)" <#Spring> -- "5/10" 14. "Waydowntown (2000)" <#Waydowntown> -- "5/10" 15. "Greg Proops: Live at Musso & Frank (2014)" <#Greg> -- 9/10 16. "Die Ehe der Maria Braun (1979)" <#Die> -- "8/10" 17. "Hunger Games: Catching Fire (2013)" <#Hunger> -- "7/10" 18. "Earthquake (1974)" <#Earthquake> -- "6/10" 19. "Guardians of the Galaxy (2014)" <#Guardians> -- "7/10" 20. "Brüno (2009)" <#Brüno> -- "2/10" 21. "Edge of Tomorrow (2014)" <#Edge> -- "9/10" 22. "Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist (2008)" <#Nick> -- "7/10" 23. "American Reunion (2012)" <#American> -- "6/10" Lee Camp: We Are Nothing (2014) Lee is a pull-no-punches political comedian who started with his A Moment of Clarity podcast. This eventually expanded to a longer format, then moved to YouTube as a multi-episode and community-sponsored video series. He's since been picked up for his own show on RT, called Redacted Tonight. In this standup special, he started out with his weakest material, but warmed up quickly to much better and stronger material, which he delivered with his typically honest and open and pleading manner. Recommended. Godzilla (2014) -- "6/10" This is a decidedly better outing than the abysmal remake from 1998. Juliette Binoche and Bryan Cranston lend their gravitas for only a very short while, with both of them out of the picture within 10% and 30% of the film, respectively. After that, we're treated with Army-is-awesome fare that wasn't quite as bad as The Battle of Los Angeles but also wasn't very riveting. Godzilla was good -- his secret weapon was well-choreographed, especially his finishing move -- and Rodan and mate were decent, though almost too mechanical-looking. Maybe that's the effect they were going for though. At one point, the camera swept over a Mothra decal so I'm sure there's a Godzilla 2 in the works. They destroyed a lot of the city but somehow didn't do it in as convincing a fashion as the Jägers (robots) and Kaijus (monsters) of Guillermo del Toro's Pacific Rim. The plot was only mildly interesting and it was entertaining enough -- some of the visuals were quite nice -- but it didn't knock my socks off. Game Change (2012) -- "7/10" This HBO movie is a fake documentary of the McCain/Palin campaign in 2007. Julianne Moore is absolutely perfect as Palin, as is Woody Harrelson as McCain's campaign manager. It's quite well-done and you almost find yourself rooting for McCain's team until you catch yourself that they are all working as hard as they can to get someone too stupid to button her shirt to be in the second-most powerful seat in the country. Her notorious arrogance and self-interest is nicely managed, showing through only at times, but getting worse as the campaign progresses. It quickly becomes obvious that she is a bit power-mad. The film makes John McCain look much more principled than he would turn out to be. A good movie about a terrible person? The Hunger Games (2012) -- "8/10" Start off with a lullaby. That'll win me over. It's starting off kind of shaky, with a lot of cuts, a lot of close-up camera-work and my nemesis "shaky cam" everywhere. They're trying to show the uncertainty and fear engendered by the government in the people of the banlieues. Not to be dismissive, but this is essentially The Long Walk by Stephen King with a bunch of country mouse/city mouse/Elysium thrown in. Also reminded me a bit of Ender's Game. Not that there's anything wrong with that, of course. Jennifer Lawrence is beautiful and acts well. Woody Harrelson is less beautiful but he positively steals almost every scene he's in. Action scenes are definitely too shaky, almost impossible and very disorienting to follow. They're clearly trying to film action while covering up the fact that no-one really knows how to fight. I understand why they did it that way, but the fight scenes are incomprehensible. And it I can't help letting it irritate me that in a game about extremely tight resources, she never collects her arrows. It was better than expected but the end was not unexpected. Central do Brasil (1998) -- "6/10" If I was generous, I'd say that this is a story of a woman, a former schoolteacher, who's fallen on hard times. She uses her writing skills to write letters for the illiterate and to enhance her income. One of the letters is from a woman with a young son. She writes to his father because the son wants to meet him. The son has learned from the streets how to behave. He's rough around the edges. His mother is killed in a bus accident and circumstance soon find the former schoolteacher on the road with him to find his father. They both learn a lot about themselves and ... oh, I can't do it. I don't know how this movie got an 8.0 rating on IMDb. The boy is annoying and obnoxious and the woman is base and petty. Rio is depressing and the poor are portrayed as grasping, stupid and small-minded. The boy is given every leeway, presumably working on his good looks, as he likely would be forgiven his horrific attitude in real life. They are transformed by their journey toward his father, but it's really hard to see why. Love and the everlasting hopefulness of the human spirit, I guess. The movie picked up a bit with the introduction of genuinely nice guys: the boy's two much-older brothers. Saw it in Portuguese with English subtitles. Not recommended. Resident Evil: Extinction (2007) -- "6/10" This is the third in the by-now seven-part -- and soon to be eight-part, in 2016 -- series of zombie movies based on the video game and starring Mila Jovovich. This one finds Alice with super powers, engendered by the evil Dr. Isaacs (played by Iain Glen, who you may know as Jorah Mormont from The Game of Thrones). Zombies show up and are killed in droves. Alice discovers something new (clones of herself!), defeats the virologically enhanced Dr. Isaacs and moves one step closer to her ultimate goal: destroying the board of directors of the Umbrella Corporation. Saw it in German. Babylon A.D. (2008) -- "6/10" Vin Diesel stars in what seems like a remake of The Golden Child in a post-apocalyptic future. And the golden child is played by Melanie Thierry and accompanied by Michelle Yeoh. Or a remake of The Matrix. With a bit of The Fifth Element thrown in. Watched it for Vin Diesel and some Michelle Yeoh ass-kicking; got both. Recommended for fans. Immortals (2011) -- "5/10" This is a movie about Greek myths and legends, starring Henry Cavill as Theseus, John Hurt as "Old Man", and a delectably evil Mickey Rourke as King Hyperion. The aesthetic is very much 300, with a brown palette and a surfeit of oiled and heavily muscled flesh. Rourke is in his element as the cruel Hyperion -- he pontificates about taking a traitor out of the gene pool as one of his henchmen readies a giant, wooden mallet and takes aim at said traitor's nether regions. He's not done yet, though. He also has three traitorous would-be oracles cooked alive in an iron bull. For a coup de grace, he squeezes out the eyes of a loyal man before he can become a traitor. The film aesthetic is similar to the world of the Necromongers in The Chronicles of Riddick. The fight choreography is brutal and well-done, especially the one where Mickey Rourke as Hyperion brutalizes Theseus. Although I knew they would make Theseus win, I was rooting for Hyperion. Not recommended, though. Man on a Ledge (2012) -- "5/10" Sam Worthington plays an ex-cop serving a long sentence for having stolen a diamond. Elizabeth Banks is a police negotiator who's down on her luck since losing a jumper a few months before. Spoiler alert: it ends up being a heist movie. Jamie Bell plays his brother, who, along with his girlfriend (fiancé?) played by Genesis Rodriguez, tries to actually steal the diamond that his brother never stole. The diamond is in the possession of a megalomaniacal billionaire played by Ed Harris. Worthington serves as a distraction from the heist while trying to convince Banks to go along with his plan to take down Harris, etc. etc. It was OK, but not recommended. Last Night (1998) -- "6/10" A movie about various intersecting lives on the last night on Earth. As the time creeps toward midnight, people take care of their last wishes and dreams. At the same time, we notice that the sun doesn't seem to be setting, nor do shadows get any longer. It was kind of interesting, but nothing to write home about. 12:01 (1993) -- "4/10" A clone of Groundhog Day that is more closely based on the original story about a time bounce. This is standard 80s-style love story, hijinks comedy. With Jonathan Silverman, Jeremy Piven, Helen Slater and Martin Landau. Nobody's career was launched with this one. Unless Danny Trejo used his role as "prisoner" to lever up to Machete. Not recommended. Bronson (2008) -- "7/10" Tom Hardy plays Michael Peterson, Britain's most violent prisoner, who goes by the alias Charles Bronson. He was initially sentenced to seven years in jail and ended up moving to several prisons and spending over three decades in solitary confinement. Echoes of A Clockwork Orange in the soliloquies. Bronson was involved in the production and praised Hardy for his physique and his portrayal. The man is single-minded and while perhaps not evil, certainly focused laser-like on mayhem. Even in solitary, he kept up his physical regimen and even published a book on how to use bodyweight exercise to stay fit in the absence of any exercise equipment. Even when they Thorazine him to the gills, his rage still finds a way. Hardy's portrayal is fascinating. And Refn's direction and script makes no attempt to explain Bronson, it just shows him but doesn't try to explain how he came to be. There is no origin story, there is only an embodiment of physical violence and joy in rage, the more the merrier. He is a force of nature, incalculable and unpredictable. The finale is a literal work of art: Bronson kidnaps his art teacher, paints him and portrays him like Magritte's Son of Man, strips, paints himself with charcoal and prepares for his next battle with dozens of armored guards. After a tremendous beating, he appears again briefly, horribly bloodied and bruised, locked in a coffin cage within a solitary cell. His mobility has been taken from him. Interesting. Recommended. Spring Breakers (2012) -- "5/10" James Franco only shows up for a few seconds in the first half an hour. Before that, the movie plays like a drug-hazed music video advertisement for Spring Break. Lots of boobs and booze and not a lot of cohesion. If I was 25 years younger, I would probably have been a lot more interested than I was now. Unfortunately my lens and emphasis has shifted somewhat and I need a bit more than an insipid plot with insipid people who want to "party, bitches". The group of girls make it to Spring Break and party like it's 1999 and meet up with Franco's "Alien". He's decent enough -- nearly unrecognizable at first -- but the characters are all dumb as dirt. There are some interesting flashbacks and montages -- the one to the Britney Spears ballad stands out -- and some flash-forwards that keep things more interesting than they would otherwise have been. And they would otherwise have been very boring, despite the attempts by the director to ramp things up with more and more nudity and sapphism as he neared the end. I don't know what college is like now but when I was in college, we considered spilling alcohol a party foul. In this movie, it seems to be custom to wear expensive booze all over your body rather than drinking it. I'd read that the movie was bad for women, that it encouraged a rape culture. This is patently not true. Everyone parties. Innuendo occurs. No one is raped. Everything that happens is consensual, if drug- and alcohol-fueled. There are others that claim female empowerment for the film. That, instead of being subjugated, the girls -- they do not register as women, other than for their lush adult-female characteristics, but they baby-doll themselves with little-girl backpacks e.g. -- are in control of what happens where. But they also spend almost the entire movie in bikinis, which belies that particular line of argument quite quickly. Perhaps this accoutrement was to serve a moral point, but I fail to see what it was. It served more to highlight in a near-constant manner the aforementioned adult-female characteristics. A good movie to watch while indoor-biking, where you're a captive audience. Not recommended. Waydowntown (2000) -- "5/10" This is Canada's answer to Office Space with more trippiness and hallucinations and fewer jokes. The movie centers on a handful of people in a large office complex in Calgary, a complex which spreads over many buildings and tunnels and walkways. This leads some of the characters to make a bet as to who can go the longest without going outside. It was OK and Fab Filippo as Tom was charismatic, but overall a bit uneven and hard to recommend. Greg Proops: Live at Musso & Frank (2014) -- 9/10 As usual with Proops -- who does something very similar a couple of times per week in his podcast, The Smartest Man in the World -- the show doesn't even seem so organized or prepared. He starts off reading from notes but quickly has the show flying. It's almost as if a man so in possession of his craft were able to plan the initial bungling to make the ensuing seemingly stream-of-consciousness but doubtless oft-practiced bits come off wonderfully. The final segment about his first job in the 70s -- delivering pizzas from a chicken shack -- is wonderful. He has the audience in the palm of his hand. He makes it look bloody easy. He's in the middle of a diner, delivering almost extemporaneously and slurping one martini after another. There is also a table full of bimbettes directly in front of him, who seem to be laughing uproariously but who are clearly far too young and -- dare I denigrate them unfairly? Yes I dares, as Proops would say -- undereducated and under-experienced and under-read to get even half of the references he casually tosses like grenades into the audience. I laughed out loud several times, usually when he seems to lose control and spit out some underhanded biting and sarcastic comment. Highly recommended. Die Ehe der Maria Braun (1979) -- "8/10" This is a story of a German woman in post-war Germany, whose husband of 1.5 days never came back from war. She despairs but finds solace in the arms of an American soldier who also happens to be black. She teaches him German and he teaches her English. They conceive and make plans to bring the child into the world. And then her husband comes back. And they kill the American soldier together. There is a trial, the husband takes the fall and we next see Eva traveling on a train. She fetches up on the next shore as a translator in a company between the German owners and American partners, where she quickly shows her savvy by closing an otherwise-untenable deal. Nicely filmed, well-acted and well-written -- especially Frau Braun. When her boss makes an overture in the office after a night spent with her, she chastises him for mixing his private life into the daily business -- "das ist kein private Ort. Das ist ein Büro in ihrer Firma". When he whines about it, she says "Ich bin wer ich bin. Gestern Nacht war ich Maria Braun, die mit Ihnen schlaffen wollte. Heute bin ich Maria Braun, die für Sie arbeiten möchte." The dialogue is very nice and her confidence and savoir faire is a breath of fresh air. Her husband comes out of prison, but meets with her lover -- of whom she'd informed him -- and makes a deal: the husband will go to Canada if her lover names Maria as his only heir. She teases him to the end, but calls him shortly before he dies to tell him, "Ich brauche jemand der mit mir schlaffen will." Mourning the loss of her lover of many years, she's drunk in her house when her husband returns. She has no idea of the fortune. In their excitement at their reunion, she lights her cigarette, as always, from the stove, but leaves the gas on. It is an odd reunion, with both parties sparring and looking for an opening. When a work colleague shows up at the door with the dead man's will, she lets him and his wife in, answering the door in a negligée. She realizes that two men loved her; one gave her up to the other so that both could love her for a time. German football plays in the background. Then, boom. The reactions are incongruously poorly acted, but I can only imagine that it was intended. The film ends with West Germany's winning the World Cup Final in 1954, on the radio. Saw it in the original German. I have no idea to whom I would recommend it. Hunger Games: Catching Fire (2013) -- "7/10" We're back in Panem, with the same cast of characters reprising their roles. It manages to make the politics almost more interesting than the fighting. Katniss is slowly elevated to the status symbol of the gestating revolution. The plot follows the same basic points as the first movie: selection for the Hunger Games, visit to the nice housing facilities, demonstration of talent in the training area, tearful entry into arena, parting from fashion designer, run to the weapons, teaming up, etc. etc. The best part, as in the first movie, is Jennifer Lawrence's sarcastic curtsy to the judges. Better than expected. Will probably watch the next one. Earthquake (1974) -- "6/10" The setup takes forever compared to a modern movie, but it's interesting nonetheless. It's a mystery to me how Charlton Heston ever became such a big star. I guess the gruff, chiseled, but mostly kinda ugly thing was popular at one point. The jewel of this movie is "the big one". It's wonderfully filmed, not just for its time, either. It's really convincingly well-done and possibly more believable because of the realism than all of the CGI claptrap to which we've become accustomed. After that, we suffer through a bunch of exposition and meeting characters until we get to see the next big quake. The ending is a bit muddled and kind of peters out with the entire city of Los Angeles in flames. Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) -- "7/10" This is a comic-book movie about specialized characters that most of us have never heard of, although I remember a Rocket Raccoon book I had in the early 80s. The movie survives on the strength of its acting, not on the strength of the script. There is a lot of cool space stuff in it, but in the age of CGI, we're all absolutely satiated if not spoiled with this stuff. Chris Pratt as Starlord sells it well -- he's pretty funny. As is Bradley Cooper as a genetically modified and completely CGI-animated cybernetic raccoon named "rocket". Vin Diesel voices Groot, who has one line throughout the movie, namely "I am Groot". It's hard to know how many levels of irony we're looking at here. The plot is basically a carbon-copy of The Avengers: God-like extra-dimensional beings acquire untold cosmic power and want to destroy the center of human/non-God civilization. Instead of New York, they attack some city with an exotic-sounding name on a planet far away from Earth. There are some decent moments and I've never hated Zoë Saldana less, actually. Recommended. Brüno (2009) -- "2/10" A godawful unfunny mess of a movie. Do not watch. Watch The Dictator instead. Edge of Tomorrow (2014) -- "9/10" I am so glad I knew nothing about the plot of this movie before I watched it. Do not read the IMDb description; even that gives you too both too much information and the wrong idea. Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt have great chemistry as an evenly matched pair of soldiers in a war against an alien invasion. That much is clear. At first I thought I was watching a sci-fi version of Groundhog Day. But then I realized it was much more like watching someone play a very difficult video-game level over and over. It was nice of the Wachowski brothers to let this movie use the Sentinels from The Matrix as the main enemies. That must have saved a lot of money...that was probably spent on Cruise's salary, ammirite? There were obstacles to overcome along the way and if you missed one step, omitted one balletic move, failed to eliminate one enemy, you were killed and the level was reset back to the beginning. Until...you have just one life left and you have to make it count. A tight, well-realized and gripping sci-fi action flick. One quibble I had was the shaky cam. The fight scenes were decent with the camera staying an appropriate distance back, but shaky cam has got to go. Still, highly recommended. Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist (2008) -- "7/10" Michael Cera and Kat Dennings star in a boilerplate, high-school, end-of-year romance. That is an unfair characterization: this version is very well-done and includes a smattering of "innovations" on the theme. Cera's friends and band-mates are nice, and supportive, instead of morons. In order to make this believable, they are all gay. Except Cera, who is hopelessly in love with a girl who wants him to be in love with her while she goes out with other guys. Dennings says that she could "floss with her", one of the better lines of the movie. Cera also has quite a few good lines, in his typical understated delivery. Cera drives a Yugo. The plot follows this group of kids through New York on a single night as they chase after an elusive and popular local band, whose shows are always in surprising locations. A fun flick. Recommended. American Reunion (2012) -- "6/10" If you liked the first two American Pie movies, you're in luck: all of the characters return for this reprise. They're all looking a little older, but behave almost exactly the same. If I'm going to be fair, it wasn't nearly as terrible as expected. Actually almost as good as the original. I can't recommend it, but for those of you who would watch it anyway, know that you're likely not to be disappointed. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3031 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=3031 Sun, 14 Dec 2014 21:48:03 +0100 -- "5/10" 2. "The Birdcage (1996)" <#Birdcage> -- "6/10" 3. "Bad Words (2013)" <#Bad> -- "8/10" 4. "The Other Woman (2014)" <#Other> -- "3/10" 5. "Life of Pi (2013)" <#Life> -- "8/10" 6. "The Cold Light of Day (2012)" <#Cold> -- "4/10" 7. "On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969)" <#On> -- "5/10" 8. "The Wire (Season 5) (2008)" <#Wire> -- "10/10" 9. "True Detective (2014)" <#True> -- "10/10" 10. "Kingpin (1996)" <#Kingpin> -- "6/10" 11. "Interstellar (2014)" <#Interstellar> -- "9/10" 12. "X--Men: Days of Future Past (2014)" <#X> -- "6/10" 13. "Joe Dirt (2001)" <#Joe> -- "5/10" 14. "Barbarians at the Gate (1993)" <#Barbarians> -- "5/10" 15. "Battle of Los Angeles (2011)" <#Battle> -- "2/10" 16. "Orange is the New Black (2013--2014)" <#Orange> -- "8/10" Man of Steel (2013) -- "5/10" This movie starts off super-strong with a council meeting on Krypton. It's exciting because they filmed it with a shaky cam. It moves on to Russell Crowe as Jor-El (Superman's father) steal "the codex" -- half a skull that kinda lights up? -- engage in meaningless heroics in a chamber that looks ripped right out of the Matrix's breeding chambers, but without the menace or back-story. There's little back-story or character development at all to make you care about who wins or loses. Lots of shiny, though. Lots and lots of shiny CGI. And the council chamber hasn't stopped shaking yet. Who is this movie for? The technology is advanced but they fight with fists instead of the laser guns they sometimes use. Everything is automated, but they shout orders into the wind like medieval warriors. Jor-el shoots everyone but the most dangerous guy, who he lets walk right up to him and knock the gun from his hand. And then stab him, later, while he watches a pretty rocket. This is just "and this happened" and "then that happened" without any logic or possibility for the viewer to predict or reason about anything. Don't get me wrong, it's a beautiful-looking movie, especially in 1080P HD. The intergalactic prison is lovely, but seems kind of extravagant for housing a handful of frozen prisoners. Just how dangerous are these people? Guantánamo is just some fences and that seems to prevent escapes just fine. Instead of a prison, it seems more of a way of keeping those prisoners alive as the planet Krypton explodes soon after, taking the rest of the population with it. Poor Kevin Costner: he gets a role in the limelight again and he has to deliver such horrible lines. Almost worse is Amy Adams as Lois Lane, who has to be an asshole/ditz who ignores sub-zero temperatures to make a Nikon commercial for a camera that would never work in those temperatures. Good God, Amy Adams is annoying and terrible in this movie. Despite the danger and destruction, there's Lois, seeking the thick of the action. As titans destroy buildings, she fears nothing. All the roles are so cliché, except maybe for Diane Lane as Martha Kent. Still all shaky cam and out-of-focus and badly framed shots for a lot of the action. Are they ashamed of what they've made? They pay about as much attention to that as they do to getting the technology right. At one point, a "hacker" shouts that General Zod's signal is "coming in over the RSS feeds!" Ridiculous. In the film's defense, the interleaved flashbacks of Kal-El's childhood are actually good and not annoying in the way that the trailer suggested. Also in its defense, some of the action is poorly filmed, but other parts are visceral, especially the coordination of sound and CGI to make you really feel the pounding. It's kind of nice that they show how much destruction would be caused by beings of that power, from the holes Superman leaves everywhere he takes off, to the swathes of destruction left by flying superhuman bodies. The laws of physics aren't really respected, though. I appreciate the fantasy and creativity that went into some of the scenes, but some of it is pretty comical and useless (the metal snake-mouths chasing Superman? What the hell was that?). Well-made or not, it's onanism not exposition. The story is not advanced by it -- at least not by 45 minutes of it. The Birdcage (1996) -- "6/10" Robin Williams, Nathan Lane and Hank Azaria star in this adaptation of Le Cage aux Folles, which tells the story of a gay couple who own and operate a burlesque club. The son they raised together returns with news that he wants to get married. His fiancés parents, however, are bigoted assholes who don't like homosexuals. The son seems to think that they should hide their gayness to smooth the way to the wedding. This goes disastrously wrong and the son has a change of heart and everything is all better. Robin Williams and Nathan Lane play the proud parents; Hank Azaria is their Guatemalan butler. I'm not a big fan of Nathan Lane, but the other two played well. The actress who would end up playing Ally McBeal was her usual wide-eyed vapid self. Gene Hackman slipped effortlessly into the role of the bigot (no surprise there) and Dianne Wiest reprised her role from footloose as conciliatory woman married to a bigot. The movie had its moments, but it was pretty uneven. Recommended for fans of Azaria and Williams. Bad Words (2013) -- "8/10" Jason Bateman directs himself in this dark comedy about a grown man (over 40) who uses loopholes in the rules to take part in school spelling bees. He levers himself up to the national championship, where he meets Chaitanya Chopra. The little Indian boy befriends him and they all live happily ever after. Just kidding. There is a lot of swearing and drinking and seriously bad words spoken, much of it by Bateman. He's a bitter, relentless man but he knows he will win the competition. There are twists, but mostly its the Jason Bateman show with him doing what he does best, being a nice-guy/jerk. It wasn't as dark as something like Bad Santa but it was definitely in that direction. Recommended. The Other Woman (2014) -- "3/10" This was an execrable and derivative movie which would most likely purport to empower women but only exacerbates the problem that women and men don't take each other seriously. Mark, played by Nikolaj Coster-Waldau (you may know him as Jamie Lannister) is portrayed as a penis with a heartbeat, seemingly insatiable for sex and ever-manipulable by his member's needs. The women are caricatures, poor Leslie Mann is underutilized as a whiner with no backbone, although she does her damnedest to lend some humor. Cameron Diaz was, as almost always, just terrible. Like a train hitting a bus-load of schoolchildren in slow motion. Kate Upton rounded out the trio as the ostensible airhead, although it really took some squinting and concentration to tell who took the crown there. Don Johnson didn't play well, but he seems to have his weight problem under control, so that's good news, I guess. Nicki Minaj wore clothes that emphasized her ass to a nearly comical degree (not surprising) and makeup that made her look like Pixar drew her. Funny moments were thin on the ground, as were surprises. My recommendation is to avoid this movie. Life of Pi (2013) -- "8/10" This is a very pretty film with a riveting story. It was much better than I expected it to be. The story is of a family in India that owned a zoo. They moved with the zoo on a Japanese freighter to France. The ship sank off the coast of the Philippines. One of the boys survived by his wits, accompanied for hundreds of days by a tiger, Richard Parker. At least, that is the story that he tells and is the one that is wonderfully filmed. Some of the more surrealistic scenes were very evocative. Though there were a handful of scenes that were clearly made for 3D, they didn't disturb the 2D experience. Recommended. Saw it in German. The Cold Light of Day (2012) -- "4/10" Bruce Willis stars as -- surprise! -- a CIA agent who hid his secret life from his family for years, à la De Niro from Meet the Fockers. This movie is so bad that Willis gets killed halfway through because he wanted to get out of the movie so badly. Or maybe they couldn't afford his fee for the full two hours. Henry Cavill (later Superman) and Sigourney Weaver round out the known names, but they can't save this stilted and derivative script. They're in Spain, there's a Penélope Cruz-lookalike, there are Mossad agents, rogue CIA agents and seemingly super-powered evil guys who are beaten to within an inch of their lives, but they can not only take the pain with a snicker but can also magically heal the wounds incurred thereby. The movie ends with a flash-cut, illogical and unconvincingly violent, GTA-style car chase and shootout with no clear explanation as to the passion behind certain motives. Nor will you end up caring. Not recommended. On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969) -- "5/10" This is a pretty uneven entry in the James Bond series, the only one in which George Lazenby plays the lead role. It picks up considerably once Bond gets to Switzerland and they spend a lot of time at the Schilthorn, starting in Lauterbrunnen and ending up in Birg as well. The top is reserved for Blofeld (played by Telly Sevalas), S.P.E.C.T.R.E. and an allergy clinic populated only by gorgeous young women who take part in curling on the helipad at the top. Another man cannot get to the top with the cablecar -- because the top is private -- so he scales the Schilthorn to get there. You don't have to scale anything to get from Birg to the top, though. It's not particularly pleasant and it's more than occasionally steep, but it's a straightforward hike up there. The surrealism was interesting for a while, but didn't last. Not recommended. The Wire (Season 5) (2008) -- "10/10" If I had to describe this season in a sentence fragment, it would be "a relentless exercise in cynical realism". I deliver this as a compliment of the highest order. This last season introduces the staff of the Baltimore Sun, which hadn't featured in the previous four seasons. Another story thread was in the state capitol with a machinating mayor, staff and legislators. Another was in the streets with the war started by Marlo Stanfield and the police desperately trying to bust him -- Lester and the newly restored McNulty. Excellent writing, excellent acting, excellent direction, just an excellent series that pulled no punches over all five seasons. The other four seasons are all great as well, with season one focusing on the projects and the drug trade, season two on the docks and import/export corruption, season three on the streets and the Barksdale and Stringer Bell story-arc, season four on the school system and mayoral, city- and state-level politics. I can't recommend the whole series highly enough. True Detective (2014) -- "10/10" Wow. Just wow. I'd just finished watching The Wire and expected to be only reasonable satisfied watching this show. Instead of binging on the shows, though, I found myself savoring each bizarre episode, utterly captivated by the two leads: Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson. Michelle Monaghan is also very good in a supporting role as Harrelson's wife. The show centers on the detective partners, working a serial-killer case in Louisiana, starting in 1995 and going all the way up to 2012 or even 2014. Rust Cohle, played by McConaughey is transcendent and wonderfully written by Nic Pizzolatto as a hyper-intelligent detective paired with passingly clever but basically animalistic, brutish and dumb Marty Hart, played by Harrelson. The plot is fascinating and unfolds slowly, delivered in dribs and drabs and partly in dialogue and partly in lovingly shot outdoor scenes. Rust Cohle is an optimistic realist to the end. Kudos to both Harrelson and McConaughey for their performances. Highly recommended. Kingpin (1996) -- "6/10" Woody Harrelson and Randy Quaid star as two bowling prodigies -- one is a washed-up former champion and the other Amish. The Farrelly brother directed, in case that wasn't obvious. Bill Murray plays Harrelson's nemesis, Ernie McCracken, an absolutely unconscionable and foul Lothario who -- spoiler alert -- does not get his comeuppance. Still, the Farrellys are kind enough to let Harrelson's Roy Munson and Quaid's Ishmael have a happy ending. The silliness is held in check by Harrelson's acting chops. Not as good as Me, Myself and Irene or There's Something about Mary but still fun. Interstellar (2014) -- "9/10" This movie starts with a small family living on a dessicated farm in the U.S. several decades from now. The logical results of climate change wreak havoc on mankind's ability to survive. And survival is the only thing on mankind's mind, as all thought of advancement and gadgets and growth are lost in the desperate struggle to keep the remains of the human population alive. Matthew McConaughey plays Cooper, a former test pilot who's itching to do more than just survive. He is one of the remains of a generation that still has an ingrained need to strive for bigger, better, faster, more. It is hinted that this attitude is exactly what led mankind to its current situation. But science and technology are strong in this movie. The belief that learning and building are better than just living triumphs. John Lithgow as Cooper's father is of the opinion that mankind is a virus and should just die out instead of trying to rise again and destroy even more of the world -- or universe. Though he's almost certainly right, nobody cares what he thinks in this movie. The politics and philosophy, though a bit more thought-out than many other movies, are left to stagnate relatively quickly. So let's move on. This is going to be, after all, an action movie with science prevailing to promulgate the human race. Thank goodness, though, that the military and jingoism play a more subdued role than in other, similar treatments. Cooper and his kids find a drone, which is an old Indian one and has been flying autonomously for at least a decade -- wait, that has no relevance to the story. Let's start over. Ok, Cooper's daughter thinks she's found a ghost in her room. Her Dad tells her to investigate scientifically, to form a hypothesis. They discover together that the ghost is using gravity to encode Morse-code signals. The signals are geographic coordinates. They drive to these coordinates and come upon an old military base/facility and are apprehended. There they find the remnants of NASA. Here Cooper learns that everyone agrees that Earth will soon no longer be hospitable. Michael Caine plays a super-genius scientist who is trying to resolve the T.O.E. in order to master gravity with the purpose of being able to launch a considerable part of Earth's population out of the planet's deep gravity well. At the same time, they need to investigate possible new homes. As luck would have it, a wormhole has been discovered orbiting Saturn and, through it, several potentially habitable worlds as well. 12 brave scientist/explorer/adventurers have already been sent to the 12 planets to investigate. Now they need Cooper to accompany Caine's Daughter -- Brand, played by Anne Hathaway -- and a couple of others on NASA's last rocket to get to the most hospitable of these. Boom, they're in a rocket. They hyper-sleep. They awake near Saturn and dive into the wormhole. Through the wormhole and they're in the vicinity of Gargantua, a black hole on the other side, around which a candidate planet orbits. Relativistic time-dilation effects are discussed. Decades pass on Earth while only hours pass for the astronauts. The first planet is a bust. Brand wants to go to the planet with her boyfriend on it. She makes an impassioned speech about the universe running on love. Cooper doesn't buy it. They go to the other planet. It is composed of a crust of frozen clouds and has Matt Damon on it. He has lost his marbles and tries to kill people, but Cooper and Brand escape in magnificent fashion, along with their very funny, blocky robots. They boost toward the third planet, but the only way to get there is to drop one of the funny robots TARS into the black hole. Also, Cooper. Neither of them die, Instead, they are funneled by external forces to a three-dimensional representation of the tesseract that the hyper-dimensional beings built to bring the wormhole to life in the first place. So they're fifth-dimensional beings, if you're following along. They play with tesseracts the way we play with spheres. Anyway, Cooper ends up floating in a multitude of what looks like library-book shelves but is actually a representation of the string of moments that built the reality in four-dimensional space from which he came. But, being fifth-dimensional now -- if only temporarily -- he, too, can view time as a static dimension along which entire universes can be glimpsed in their entirety as they were at that infinitesimal snapshot. Stop me if you've heard this one before. He realizes that he's behind the bookshelves in his daughter's room at different times, first seeing her as a child and then as an adult when she returns to ... collect something. So he's the ghost from the beginning of the film. And love, apparently, does conquer all, because it's what made her try so hard to figure out the secret of the ghost. When she does, she transcribes the further Morse code that he encodes in the deliberately defective second-hand of the watch that he gave her and which she disdainfully rejected when he first abandoned her to go to space and try to save the planet but really he was just going for his own ego and abandoning her. Sorry. Stay focused. We're almost there. He and TARS, as they fell through the event horizon, managed to collect the gravitational data that Murph (this is Cooper's daughter) needs in order to solve the equations that Professor Brand (Caine) could not solve -- and which he actually knew (or thought he knew) couldn't be solved because the data they needed was inside a black hole. So she totally solves them anyway because her father is friends with fifth-dimensional beings who play with black holes the way we play with marbles and he, as mentioned above, gives her that knowledge. And the fifth-dimensional beings are none other than the future humans who will benefit from themselves having helped Cooper help save humanity with this message back to Murph. Fast-forward to Cooper waking up on a space station orbiting Saturn after having been picked up exiting the wormhole back to the Solar System. Due to relativistic time-dilation, that trip took many decades in Earth time -- more than enough time for mankind to save itself with technology built with Murph's equations. Chronologically unchanged father is reunited with now aged and nearly dead daughter for one last goodbye. She tells him to go find Brand, who has found her dead lover on the third planet. She has taken over building a totally viable habitat there and waits for mankind to join her -- or at least a big, strong man to save her. Mankind is totally hanging out in a bitching Ringworld-like space station, so it's hard to see what they'd want to do on a planet, but I digress again. Cooper finds TARS, reanimates him, steals a small ship that looks like a Cylon fighter from the original Battlestar Galactica and heads off to join Brand. Saw it in English in the theater. Totally awesome and fun. Highly recommended. X--Men: Days of Future Past (2014) -- "6/10" The first fifteen minutes proves just how boring super-hero movies are when there is no context and no attachment to the characters. All of the male superheroes look the same to me and they all flit and fly around unconvincingly, with portals and robots and power-blasts choreographed to within a nanometer while still managing to be unbelievably boring. There is no drama, no tension if you have no idea why you should care that the super-snazzy robot is about to kill a young girl and a giant black guy. I happened to know that they were Kitty Pryde and Bishop, but I still had no idea what was going on. It looked and felt less like a movie and more like a lovingly rendered but still stilted tech demo for the new Unreal or Crytek Engine. It eventually settled down a bit and unpacked a time-travel plot that served as a backdrop to mostly unconvincing set-pieces with a lot of bluster about hating mutants. The ending was familiar from the comic books and somehow seemed more convincing there. In the film it felt more like The Wizard of Oz updated for the Sci-Fi set. The cast is good and includes a lot of heavy-hitters -- Patrick Stewart, Hugh Jackman, Ian McKellan, James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Peter Dinklage, Jennifer Lawrence and Ellen Page -- but it was hard to avoid thinking that they were mostly wasted. Recommended but only for fans of the genre. Joe Dirt (2001) -- "5/10" This movie starts off very stupid and awkward and gradually -- through the power of David Spade's innocent charm -- becomes much less awkward, endearing even. It tells the story of Joe Dirt(e), a mulleted man whose family abandoned him when he was 10 years old. He appears on a radio show to tell his story, which includes many misadventures of a hick variety, many forced but some genuinely funny. He also meets a lot of very attractive and nearly ridiculously healthy-looking women along the way, in the form of Brittany Daniel, Jaime Pressly and a few other anonymous souls. Christopher Walken, Kid Rock and Dennis Miller have smaller roles, listed in decreasing order of savoriness. Watched it while indoor-cycling so it was good for that, but it's hard to recommend as a movie to just watch by itself. Barbarians at the Gate (1993) -- "5/10" This movie is a quasi-documentary (a made-for-TV movie) about the sale of the R. J. Reynolds Nabiscocompany in 1989. It was a leveraged buyout (LBO) in what would become the classic mold: load up on debt (leveraging) and gut the company to pay back the investors who bought the company with that debt. James Garner played the then-CEO F. Ross Johnson, who ended up being beaten out in his bid to buy the company by an even-shadier KKR group, headed by Henry Kravits, played by Jonathan Pryce. It was kinda boring but some parts were well-done. Too 80s, with cheesy music, too many montages and not enough meat. Recommended for economic historians interested in seeing the beginning of the latest era of LBOs and unhinged greed and utter disregard for actual economic value. Battle of Los Angeles (2011) -- "2/10" This is the story of an epileptic cameraman with a strobe light strapped to his face. Shaky cam doesn't even being to describe this movie that follows a group of marines charged with clearing the Fallujah-like streets of a Los Angeles under attack by mysterious but very militarily minded aliens who have conveniently invaded on foot and without any air cover whatsoever. The fog of war is everywhere and glimpses of aliens are offered in horror-movie style until one finally shows up in all of its glory. Luckily, it can travel across the vast depths of space but it has no idea of close-quarters tactics, using a conventional projectile weapon that it is unable to point in the right direction before several marines M16 him into oblivion. This is a military advertisement with a very small alien component. It's kind of like if Starship Troopers took itself seriously. Now I know what an embedded reporter must feel like. Not recommended. Terrible. Just play Call of Duty or Battlefield yourself if you need to get your military rocks off. Orange is the New Black (2013--2014) -- "8/10" This is a show about the journey of a whiny, privileged and entitled New Yorker. She has a past, she dated a drug dealer and traveled the world with her. Nearly ten years later and she's been implicated for her past and is on the way up to to Litchfield prison, in upstate New York. The prison is low-security and has an interesting cast of characters. It's not all gold, but it's interesting and fun, with a bunch of the characters growing on you. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2986 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2986 Sat, 16 Aug 2014 21:45:26 +0200 -- "3/10" 2. "Brother (2000)" <#Brother> -- "8/10" 3. "Sexy Beast (2000)" <#Sexy> -- "8/10" 4. "Frozen (2103)" <#Frozen> -- "5/10" 5. "The Waterboy (1998)" <#Waterboy> -- "6/10" 6. "Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009)" <#Fantastic> -- "8/10" 7. "The Jungle Book (1967)" <#Jungle> -- "8/10" 8. "Ponyo (2008)" <#Ponyo> -- "7/10" 9. "Singin' in the Rain (1952)" <#Singin> -- "7/10" 10. "Walk of Shame (2014)" <#Walk> -- "5/10" 11. "Prisoners (2013)" <#Prisoners> -- "8/10" 12. "The Lego Movie (2014)" <#Lego> -- "4/10" 13. "Big Night (1996)" <#Big> -- "8/10" 14. "Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014)" <#Captain> -- "8/10" 15. "My Cousin Vinny (1992)" <#My> -- "8/10" 16. "District B13 (2004) (fr)" <#District> -- "6/10" 17. "I'm Gonna Git You Sucka (1988)" <#I> -- "4/10" He's Just Not That Into You (2009) -- "3/10" A star-studded cast can't save this utterly derivative and cliché script. Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Connelly, Kevin Connolly, Scarlet Johannson, Justin Long, Drew Barrymore, Jennifer Aniston and Ben Affleck. And Busy Phillips -- of Freaks and Geeks fame -- had a small role. This movie purports to dispel the myths of dating, marriage and male/female relationships. Though it may appear to do so superficially -- at least it very clearly tells you that it is doing so -- at a deeper level, it is no better than any other film in this genre. I don't remember every minute of this 129-minute movie -- you read that correctly, this so-called "chick flick" is over two hours long and never seems to end -- but I'm almost 100% certain that it failed the Bechdel Test. [1] It also fails other common tests: there are a dozen lead characters and they're all white. The women all have low-level jobs -- most work together in a cube farm and another is a struggling singer -- while the men are all successful : one is a record executive, another owns/operates his own bar/restaurant, another is a successful real-estate agent and another's job is unclear but he owns his own boat. The women are all kind of dependent on their men, whining about their inability to get married or find a guy. The men clearly don't care. Not recommended. Brother (2000) -- "8/10" Takeshi Kitano directs himself in the starring role in this story of the journey to America of an exiled Yakuza gangster named Aniki Yamanoto. He is sparing in motion and speech but when he moves, he does so precisely and with great and often lethal force. He is also extremely shrewd at conquering territory in his newfound home, where the existing gangs seem to be less quick to pull triggers than he. The movie also stars a very young Omar Epps. Yamamoto joins forces with another local Japanese gang and they commence expanding their territory. There are many execution scenes that delineate the new power divide. There are scenes of self-mutilation among the Yakuza that makes you wonder whether they'll kill themselves off before their enemies can do it. They finally end up taking on the Mafia and things get really ugly. The scenes themselves are often very stylistic and pretty, despite the gruesome depictions in them. It's nicely filmed in what I've come to think of as the Japanese crime-drama style. Many of the shots feel like Grand Theft Auto Tokyo/San Francisco. Saw it in English and Japanese/Spanish with English subtitles. Recommended. Sexy Beast (2000) -- "8/10" This is an English crime movie starring Ben Kingsley as a thug named Don Logan sent to collect Ray Winstone's character, Gad, to help execute a robbery. Gad has been living in Spain for years after retiring from the safe-cracking business. Logan doesn't take no for an answer and he makes the most of his reputation as a ruthless henchman. Gad, his wife and his friend and wife are all extremely leery of Logan and give him a lot of leeway. Kingsley fills all the space he's given with menace, although it's a tight-rope of false menace versus the fear of the others, who just want to extricate themselves from this situation. They want the nightmare of Kingsley's character to go away and he knows this, he feeds off of it. Spoiler alert: Logan pushes them all too far and Gad's wife ends up taking him out with a shotgun after which he taunts them from the ground, spitting blood and curses and epithets while he chokes out his last. Gad goes to England to do the job anyway, trying to cover tracks, but the head honcho there -- Teddy, played by ian McShane -- oozes just as much menace as Don Logan. I thought the film had a nice style -- it was directed by Brian Glazer -- and it reminded me a bit of some of Kubrick's work. Recommended, but not highly. Frozen (2103) -- "5/10" The standard Disney princess-meets-boy movie has been transplanted to the great white North, presumably somewhere in ... Iceland? Because of the trolls? Or Norway because of all of the names, like Olaf? Probably generically European, I guess. It's all just one big place. The first act -- about 40 minutes -- is pretty insufferable. There is one forgettable musical number after another, with the most appalling lyrics. And then, out of nowhere, the door to the sauna/shop cabin in the woods opens and we are introduced to the innkeeper, who seems snatched right out of the Emperor's New Groove and is a breath of fresh -- and funny -- air in an otherwise odiously predictable movie. A movie made all the more unbearable by the back-to-back-to-back and seemingly endless crooning. The one song that really stood out was, of course, Olaf the snowman's ode to summer, another slyly hilarious song made poignant by his utter obliviousness to the meaning of the words he's singing. That twenty-minute segment in the middle could be extracted into a good short film. What I'm calling the third act was just as predictable as the first act. How were the much-vaunted animations? The snow was well-done, I guess. The human figures were terrible, at least the female ones were. Has anyone else noticed that Disney has ended up depicting females as Bratz dolls instead of human-looking? The male characters were fine, although of course all conventionally handsome. Josh Gad as Olaf was a standout. The musical numbers and plot was 100% designed so that Disney doesn't have to pay anyone to write the inevitable Broadway musical. The Waterboy (1998) -- "6/10" It is neither an exaggeration nor necessarily a compliment to write that this is possibly Adam Sandler's best comedy, or is at least in the running with Happy Madison. Fantastic Mr. Fox (2009) -- "8/10" A wonderful stop-motion animation written and directed by Wes Anderson and based on a story by Roald Dahl. The film is unmistakably a Wes Anderson flick with the usual rogue's gallery that includes Bill Murray, Owen Wilson, Willem Dafoe and Jason Schwartzman all lending their voices to characters. Meryl Streep lends her voice to Felicity Fox, Mr. Fox's wife. Mr. Fox is voiced by George Clooney, who at times seems to be channeling Everett McGill from Oh Brother Where Art Thou. There were no musical numbers, which was a nice change of pace from Frozen, which was filled end-to-end with them. The story follows a reprobate Mr. Fox who supplements a boring career as a newspaperman with a few last capers that involve stealing from three local farmers. The farmers respond with extreme prejudice and Mr. Fox's capers end up dragging the whole local animal world into danger. His son, Ash, is kind of strange (played by Schwartzman, of course) and in competition with his cousin, who's come to live with them for a while and who is quite an accomplished athlete much more in the vein of his uncle than his uncle's son (Ash) could ever be. The first and second acts were quite strong while the final act kind of dragged a bit, but it was a madcap and zany animated feature that is well worth the time. Recommended. The Jungle Book (1967) -- "8/10" The classic Disney movie has its own cloying bits of story, but the feel of the film was somehow much more artistic than Disney's later efforts (like Frozen, reviewed above). The songs are great and include more than a few classics and more memorable characters than most of Disney's princess-drenched pap. Baloo, Bagira (Baggy), Ka and King Louie all stand out -- although what also stands out is that there almost no female characters at all. The film's not without its problems, but the musical numbers are something to look forward to rather than to dread. Ka stretches all over the trees and forms stairs and wheels out of his coils for Mogli to fall into and it's somehow nicer than the CGI animations we have today. Recommended. Ponyo (2008) -- "7/10" This is a wonderfully drawn Japanese cartoon that has a plot made for six--year-olds. It was an adorable plot but it didn't give adults much to go on. I could only find a dubbed version (or perhaps the original was in English?) because I usually avoid Hollywood dubbing of Japanese anime like the plague. Ponyo's father was voiced by Liam Neeson -- of all people -- and his rather distinctive voice took me a bit out of the aesthetic of the film. Highly recommended for small kids but not anywhere on the level of a Spirited Away or Howl's Moving Castle for adults. Singin' in the Rain (1952) -- "7/10" Gene Kelly, Donald O'Connor, Debbie Reynolds and Jean Hagen star in this movie about a silent-film company that makes the transition to sound. Set in 1927, the feel is quite over-the-top and it's hard to tell whether it feels dated because the film is from 1952 or whether it feels dated because it's pretending that it comes from 1927. I don't know if it's worth 8.4 out of 10 on IMDb but it definitely has its moments and it's definitely worth being called a classic. It was highly entertaining and there was a number near the end that was positively Daliesque. There were so many fantasies within fantasies that I think we were three inception-levels down if not four. O'Connor's "Make 'em laugh" routine is marvelous and Kelly's scene opposite Hagen where they act out a scene in a movie while discussing her having gotten the girl he likes fired was pretty inspired. Walk of Shame (2014) -- "5/10" Elizabeth Banks is charming in this movie, which goes a long way to papering over the otherwise glaring cracks in the script. James Marsden is also quite good as the sheepish, earnest one-night-stand. It's a popcorn comedy that ended up being fun enough with an utterly unsurprising ending. Bill Burr had a cameo as a police officer but was unnecessarily brutal and not funny at all. Not recommended but also not not recommended. Prisoners (2013) -- "8/10" Jake Gyllenhaal and Hugh Jackman are the two leads in this well-made film about child abduction. Hugh Jackman plays the father, driven mad with grief over the loss of his daughter. Jake Gyllenhaal plays the police officer assigned to the case. Both are very, very intense. Maria Bello played Jackman's wife, who arguably handled the abduction even worse than her husband. Paul Dano and Melissa Leo were both very, very good but I won't mention their roles so as not to spoil anything. The ending was a bit lame, in that it made what should have been routine police-work looks like nigh-miraculous leaps of intuition. [2] Still, highly recommended. The Lego Movie (2014) -- "4/10" A movie for the A.D.D. generation. This movie is, on the surface, an explosion of color, sound and scene and context changes. Below the surface, there might be some social critique, but it is quickly buried beneath a relentless avalanche of nearly incomprehensible action. Imagine yourself clinging to the edge of a rubber tube, smashing your way down category--5 rapids, holding on for dear life and trying desperately to anticipate what's going on. That helpless feeling you have -- if you've imagined properly -- is exactly how you'll feel watching this movie. When it slows down for some insipid dialogue, delivered during a Matrix-like pause, you're ever so thankful that the onslaught on your brain has, for whatever reason, abated. You're so happy that you don't even care that the one-liners are carefully vetted to satisfy all audiences and censors and harbor no true critique. This movie is rated PG and is therefore open for kids of all ages -- who are we kidding? -- but in the first fifteen minutes, we see a man have half of his personality erased for failing to prove his allegiance by incapacitating his own parents. As the lead Lego-man said, "I'm just gonna come right out and say this: I have no idea what this place is or what's going on -- at all." Big Night (1996) -- "8/10" Stanley Tucci and Tony Shalhoub play Italian brothers with a restaurant in New Jersey that is on the verge of closing because they cook authentic Italian food and the customers are sparse and mostly "Philistines" (as Tony Shalhoub says). This seemed a promising film, but I was unable to finish watching it. More details in a future edition. Captain America: The Winter Soldier (2014) -- "8/10" This is a very solid spy movie. There's good continuity from the first movie and Chris Evans and Scarlet Johansson reprise their respective roles well. I liked almost everything about this movie and look forward to more in the Captain America series. The effects were well-integrated and not too distracting right up until the very elegant ending credits. I'm not so happy with Samuel L. Jackson's continued ham-handed portrayal of Nick Fury, though I admit that I may not be remembering just how much of a jingoistic jerk Fury was in the comic books. My admittedly old memories of him all see him as "cool", whereas he was probably exactly the proponent of the security state that Jackson portrays him to be. Robert Redford is also way over the top and it's hard to tell whether he's deliberately being over the top in his portrayal of a right-wing power-hungry super-criminal and where I'm so out of touch with US culture that I can't tell that he's just espousing very mainstream views. [3] The main premise involving H.Y.D.R.A. was well--thought-out and executed. Highly recommended. My Cousin Vinny (1992) -- "8/10" It is absolutely clear from the first time she opens her mouth why Marisa Tomei earned an academy award for this movie. Joe Pesci is good, Ralph Macchio is...ok, but Marisa Tomei is spectacular. The whole movie is quite a clever and nicely made courtroom drama that pokes fun at everyone -- although the American South arguably gets the worse and more unfair treatment. They're pretty much all hicks, according to this movie. Still, there are so many good lines and clever turns that it's definitely worth watching. Highly recommended. District B13 (2004) (fr) -- "6/10" This French parkour film stars one parkour star -- David Belle, ostensibly the inventor of the sport -- and one stuntman, Cyril Raffaelli, both of whom deliver some nicely choreographed fight scenes. The first act ends on a very cool note, with Belle delivering the coup de grâce. The plot is mostly predictable but it's quite well-made and the parkour scenes are worth the price of entry. Some of the thugs are less one-dimensional than usual (e.g. K2) and the sub-titles are idiomatically rather than literally translated. There's a bit of a twist at the end that's not bad. Recommended for fans of the genre. I'm Gonna Git You Sucka (1988) -- "4/10" As the title suggests, this is a send-up of blaxploitation movies of the 70s, starring a couple of the Wayans brothers as well as Jim Brown, Bernie Casey and Isaac Hayes. Some parts work; most don't (at least anymore...the movie hasn't really aged well). The outside sets are kinda nice as are some of the cars. When Kung Fu Joe (played by Steve James) is pulled over, he gets out of his Nissan, which tells him that his "door is ajar" -- that took me back because we had a '84 Nissan Maxima that did the same thing. It has its moments -- a 23-year--old Chris Rock plays a bit part as "Rib Joint Customer", inventing the temporarily popular "I'll have one rib" catchphrase. Not really recommended unless you need to fill a hole in your silly 80s movies education. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] The "Bechdel Test" is a gender-bias test that "asks whether a work of fiction features at least two women who talk to each other about something other than a man. The requirement that the two women must be named is sometimes added." [1] For example, Redford's character asks the idiotic and purportedly provocative question that included the hypothetical "when Pakistan starts killing women in soccer stadiums [...]", I wondered whether his hyperbolic depiction of Pakistan as an Islamist stronghold with Sharia law was due to ignorance on the part of the scriptwriter or Redford's character's ignorance or whether it was US propaganda injected into the film to form people's opinions about Pakistan more negatively. [1] There are several pretty glaring plot holes, but they don't really ruin anything. The one that comes to mind is that, when Loki went back to the house at the end of the film, he saw crews working the frozen ground, looking for more evidence of other abductions. However, there is a car parked on top of a giant piece of plywood right next to them. It doesn't occur to anyone to ask "I wonder what's under here?" Instead, they dig into frozen ground and rely on Loki hearing Keller's stupid whistle before they realize that there might be a prisoner stashed under the plywood. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2990 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2990 Sun, 04 May 2014 23:23:40 +0200 " corresponds to a list of movies I've seen and reviewed. The movies listed under that section are the ones I thought noteworthy in that list. Of those, I selected my top recommendations and collected them into the ""Genres" <#genres>" section. [People] Directors and screenwriters that tend to deliver work that I consistently find intriguing and worth watching: * David Lynch * David Cronenberg * Werner Herzog * Lars von Trier * David Mamet * Darren Aronofsky * Stanley Kubrick * Oliver Stone [Genres] [Mindf$@k] * A Clockwork Orange (1971) * Dead Ringers (1988) * The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989) * Pi (1998) * Magnolia (1999) * eXistenz (1999) * Memento (2000) * Das Experiment (2001) (de) * La Pianiste (2001) (fr) * Adaptation (2002) * Dogville (2003) * Primer (2004) * The Machinist (2004) * Synecdoche, New York (2008) * Antichrist (2009) * Shutter Island (2010) [Drama] * The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) * Catch 22 (1970) * Apocalypse Now (1979): try to get the Redux version * Do the Right Thing (1989) * A Few Good Men (1992) * Natural Born Killers (1994) * I Heart Huckabees (2004) * Syriana (2005) * The Wrestler (2008) * The Black Swan (2010) * The Fighter (2010) * Warrior (2011) [Crime Drama] * Memories of Murder (2003) * The Inside Man (2006) * Zodiac (2007) * Gone Baby Gone (2007) * The Killer Inside Me (2010) * The Town (2010) * Drive (2011) * Descendants (2011) * The Guard (2011) * Kill the Irishman (2011) [Action] * Demolition Man (1993) * Constantine (2005) * Running Scared (2006) * Lockout (2012) * Redemption (2013) [Martial Arts] * Old Boy (2003) * Chocolate (2008) [Comedies] * Blazing Saddles (1974) * Get Shorty (1985) * The Princess Bride (1987) * The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994) (au) * The Big Lebowski (1998) * Dogma (1999) * Bad Santa (2003) * Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005) * OSS 117: Le Caire, nid d’espions (2006) (fr) * Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis (2008) (fr) * Tropic Thunder (2008) * Micmacs à tire-larigot (2009) (fr) * Rien à Declarer (2010) * The Other Guys (2010) * Ted (2012) [Horror comedies] * Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale (2010) (fi) * Tucker and Dale vs. Evil (2010) * Cabin in the Woods (2012) [Science Fiction] * Blade Runner (1982) * The Thing (1982) * Equilibrium (2002) * Cargo (2009) (de/ch) * 2081 (2009) * Pandorum (2009) [Animated] * Akira (1988) * Ghost in the Shell (1995) * Paprika (2006) * Renaissance (2006) [Documentary] * Mark of Cain (2001) * Manufactured Landscapes (2006) * Examined Life (2008) * The End of Poverty (2008) * Entre les Murs (2008) * Defamation (2009) * Objectified (2009) * How to Make Money Selling Drugs (2012) * The House I Live In (2012) * The Act of Killing (2012) There are many more documentaries that I can recommend, but those are the top ones that are somewhat less US-centric. [Details] Here are the lists of movies I found in my review articles. The link above leads to full reviews of the movies listed below it. IMDb will, of course, tell you what the rest of the world liked. Wikipedia will tell you what it's about, probably with a detailed plot description that will ruin the movie. ["Unreviewed movies" ] These are from an older list that I kept before I started keeping more detailed notes. * The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) * Die Schweizermacher (1978) * The Princess Bride (1987) * Miller’s Crossing (1990) * Equilibrium (2002) * The Machinist (2004) * 2046 (2004): slow -- typical Kar Wai Wong -- but fascinating and has an awesome soundtrack * Shaun of the Dead (2004) * A Scanner Darkly (2006) * Last King of Scotland (2006) * Children of Men (2006) * The Prestige (2006) * Das Leben der Anderen (2006) * Rescue Dawn (2006) * The Host (2006): features Kang-ho Song, who's even better in Memories of Murder * Zodiac (2007) * Eastern Promises (2007): David Cronenberg directs Viggo Mortenson as a Russian gangster * The Darjeeling Limited (2007) * No Country for Old Men (2007) * Synecdoche, New York (2008) * Hunger (2008) * Watchmen (2009) ["Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2011.1" ] * Primer (2004) * Defendor (2009) * Moon (2009) * District 9 (2009) ["Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2011.2" ] * Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes (1972) * Fitzcarraldo (1982) I went through a bit of a David Lynch phase here, and he’s not for everyone but I kinda like him. He’s unique. * Wild at Heart (1990) * Lost Highway (1997) * Mulholland Drive (2001) ["Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2011.3" ] * Evangelion 1.01 You Are (Not) Alone (2007) * Green Zone (2010) * Shutter Island (2010) ["Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2011.5" ] * Magnolia (1999) * Felon (2008) * The Other Guys (2010) ["Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2011.6" ] * Blazing Saddles (1974) * Ghost Busters (1984) * Do the Right Thing (1989) * A Few Good Men (1992) * Fifth Element (1997) ["Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2011.7" ] * Das Experiment (2001) (de) * Bad Santa (2003) * Gone Baby Gone (2007) * The Wrestler (2008) * True Grit (2008) * Rien à Declarer (2010) * Horrible Bosses (2011) ["Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2011.8" ] * Network (1976) * Brazil (1985) * The Hudsucker Proxy (1994) * Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) * Operation: Endgame (2010) ["Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2012.1" ] * The Cook the Thief His Wife & Her Lover (1989) * La Pianiste (2001) (fr) * Dogville (2003) * OSS 117: Le Caire, nid d’espions (2006) (fr) * Bienvenue chez les Ch’tis (2008) (fr) * The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (2009) * Antichrist (2009) * Micmacs à tire-larigot (2009) (fr) ["Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2012.2" ] * Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008) * The Killer Inside Me (2010) * The Black Swan (2010) * The Fighter (2010) * Drive (2011) ["Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2012.3" ] * Die Wannseekonferenz (1987) (de) * Equilibrium (2002) * The Inside Man (2006) * Ip Man (2008) * The Town (2010) ["Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2012.4" ] * The Meaning of Life (1983) * Pitch Black (2000) ["Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2012.5" ] * Demolition Man (1993) * Chocolate (2008) * The Descendants (2011) ["Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2012.6" ] * 2081 (2009) ["Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2012.7" ] * Midnight Express (1978) * Platoon (1986) * Captain America (2011) * In Time (2011) ["Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2012.8" ] * Get Shorty (1985) * I Heart Huckabees (2004) * Kiss Kiss Bang Bang (2005) * Paprika (2006) * Superbad (2007) * Ted (2012) ["Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2012.9" ] * Blade Runner (1982) * Joe vs. The Volcano (1990) * Examined Life (2008) * Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale (2010) * Tucker and Dale vs. Evil (2010) * Cabin in the Woods (2012) ["Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2013.1" ] * Old Boy (2003) * Manufactured Landscapes (2006) * The End of Poverty (2008) * Objectified (2009) * Pandorum (2009) ["Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2013.2" ] * Syriana (2005) * Tropic Thunder (2008) ["Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2013.3" ] * The Big Lebowski (1998) * The Prestige (2006) * Flight (2012) ["Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2013.4" ] * Kill Bill (2003) ["Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2013.5" ] * Alien (1979) ["Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2013.6" ] * Slap Shot (1977) * Repo Men (2009) * Lockout (2012) ["Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2013.7" ] * Apocalypse Now (1979) * Natural Born Killers (1994) * Constantine (2005) * Sunshine (2007) * The Mechanic (2011) * Cloud Atlas (2012) ["Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2013.8" ] * Catch 22 (1970) * Safe (2012) * 2 Guns (2013) ["Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2013.9" ] * Looper (2012) * The Animatrix (2003) ["Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2013.10" ] * Pi (1998) * eXistenz (1999) * Mark of Cain (2001) * Running Scared (2006) * Entre les Murs (2008) * Defamation (2009) * Kill the Irishman (2011) * How to Make Money Selling Drugs (2012) * The House I Live In (2012) * Redemption (2013) ["Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2014.1" ] * The Thing (1982) * The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994) * Memories of Murder (2003) * Renaissance (2006) * Warrior (2011) * The Act of Killing (2012) ["Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2014.2" ] * The Brood (1979) * Dead Ringers (1988) * Adaptation (2002) ["Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2014.3" ] * Election (1999) ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2980 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2980 Sun, 13 Apr 2014 17:36:24 +0200 I can only say what I thought of this movie based on the way that I saw it: in HD on a conventional screen at home. I can imagine that the experience was very different in 3D and on a giant screen with a kick-ass sound system. The only downside I can think of is that if the sound-leveling was the same in the theater, it would have been an ear-blistering experience. If you set the volume high enough to hear the occasional radio whispers, many other parts of the movie nearly blew you out of your chair -- or caused the neighbors to call to yell at you that their kids can't sleep. Gravity stars George Clooney and Sandra Bullock in an unlikely in-space scenario. The inconsistencies abound in a movie that purports to make an effort to get things right. It's ludicrous because space is big. Neil DeGrasse Tyson did a masterful job of listing plot holes on his Twitter account. Just to sum up the ones I noticed: * Once you're locked to something in space, you will not "drift away". Once the tether stopped Bullock and Clooney, there was no force causing them to continue to drift from the space station. None. The station was not rotating so centripetal force did not come into play. * It sure was convenient that the space in which they found themselves was so inordinately populated with other stuff: ISS, the shuttle and the Chinese station were all within a couple of hundred miles of each other and in sight lines. * An utterly untrained and self-admittedly terrible pilot uses landing thrusters to hit a target in space and match speed with it? With minor adjustments made by a fire extinguisher? Sure, why not. * Why doesn't the fire extinguisher come soaring down on her head during one of the many, sudden momentum changes when she's in the capsule? * Why is nothing tethered? And why is there literally no instinct to tether anything on her part? Especially when she's so absolutely amazing at navigating the tight tunnels of the station at high speed without so much as nicking a knee or elbow? * Why in God's name was a medical doctor doing a spacewalk? This is not in any way explained. Armageddon did a better job of explaining why the utterly unqualified were suited up. * I did not notice this one, but I love DeGrasse Tyson for noticing it: "Nearly all satellites orbit Earth west to east yet all satellite debris portrayed orbited east to west." It was an action movie, but I didn't really get into Bullock as an action actress. I could not have cared less about her character because there was almost zero character development. Having her character tell me that she lost a child does not count as developing her character. A movie has to have a character that you root for and I honestly could not have cared less if she lived or died. I was actually pleasantly surprised to think that the movie would end with her turning off the oxygen in the Russian capsule (which Clooney kept calling the "Soyez"). This would have been a delightfully and realistic existentialist ending. See Magic Mike below for how to end a movie. Alas, she pulled herself up by her bootstraps, performed some utterly unbelievable miracles, forgave herself and learned to walk again. Yay for happy endings that confirm the ability of humans to overcome anything. Meh. I'm not leaving off a recommendation because the science was wrong, I'm leaving it off because I didn't like the schmaltzy plot and I don't have a giant 3D screen at home. Real Steel (2011) -- "7/10" A film about the robot-boxing world of the future. Hugh Jackman plays a down-on-his-luck robot-boxer manager who was a strong, skilled and hard-headed boxer. In 2027, men no longer box; robots do. Jackman's failures as a robot-boxer driver are only exceeded by his failures at gambling. Long story short, this is a Disney movie about a little robot fighting against a giant robot owned by a steely-eyed Russian lady -- it's like Rocky IV all over again. Hugh Jackman is good, as usual: he's charming even though he's an utterly useless idiot for much of the film, seemingly intent on self-destruction for reasons that are unclear. Evangeline Lilly plays a plucky boxing-manager's daughter -- the same who managed Jackman's former career. After Jackman inexplicably and almost deliberately wastefully burns through a couple of expensive robots, his long-lost son joins him for the summer and discovers a long-buried, early-model robot at a junkyard. The little robot turns out to be plucky and trainable and hard-headed and ready to bite off a lot more than it can chew. Yadda yadda yadda. It was entertaining and well-made -- and watching mechanical robots pound each other in the brainpan without any perceivable form of defense is much preferred over watching the same with humans. The boxing scenes are well-done and quite exciting. recommended. Star Trek: Insurrection (1998) -- "7/10" The crew of Star Trek: The Next Generation end up in the middle of a dispute between a new race whose longevity is waning and the simple residents of a planet whose radiation imparts rejuvenatory effects on its few inhabitants. Thanks to corruption and misguided notions of charity, Star Fleet stands solidly behind the dying, but invading, race and feels that the few hundred inhabitants of the planet have no right to sit on a resource that has the potential to prolong millions if not billions of lives. They want to oust the inhabitants and let the other race in to research and develop the energy that is their Fountain of Youth. Picard and crew quite rightly see the inherent injustice of this and intervene on behalf of the residents, whom they've in the meantime befriended. Cue heroics and Star Trek-style badassery in which our favorite crew triumphs and simultaneously proves that Star Fleet and the "ancient" race never truly had a moral leg to stand on. Slow-paced as you would expect -- and with battle scenes that are laughable by today's sci-fi standards -- but also rife with the expected philosophical and political discussions, into which parallels to modern-day issues and situations can easily be read, but which would in all likelihood be denied by the makers of the film, albeit with perhaps a sly smile and a wink. Recommended for fans of the genre. Lolita (1997) -- "8/10" This film is lovingly narrated by Jeremy Irons, who also has the lead role. The film shows his character moving in with Lolita and her mother (played by Melanie Griffith) and slowing being pulled into Lolita's orbit. Or rather, he is immediately smitten and she slowly pretends to seduce him. She is aware of her power over him, but toys with it casually, not even letting it take precedence over being a teenager. It's lovingly filmed with a focus on the nubile young Lolita from the eye of the narrator. And Jeremy Irons is a wonderful narrator. Lolita is young and obnoxious but the bloom only slowly comes off the rose for Humbert, as long as she's banging him. The interview at the college -- which turns out to be a prep school for débutantes -- was quite funny and featured a zeugma, "Here at Beardsley Prep, we're less concerned with Medieval dates than weekend ones." Slowly, Lolita comes to be in total control, twisting him around by his predilections and his guilt about them. She irritates him deliberately and is deliberately obnoxious, knowing that her sexual favors allow her everything. When Humbert says, "You're very young and I know it's hard to imagine that people will try to take advantage of you," it's quite hard to keep a straight face. The movie is a PSA for "do not date too young or too crazy and definitely not both". He is her slave; he is in love. Whereas he does not try to break her at all, she definitely breaks him. Being an ephebophile is his only societal flaw; he is otherwise not capable of the brutality -- psychological and otherwise -- required to keep her under control. Spoiler alert: he can't do so and she ends up running away with another "lover of nymphets", with whom she comes to an unhappy end three years later. In the end, he has broken her and she's only concerned with money and thinks nothing of performing for it. He has broken her because she is the only thing he ever loved and his touch twisted her into something base and stupid and unlovely. And still he loves her. The power that Lolita acquired in her youth rewarded her, but it was a cheap substitute for what perhaps could have been. It is difficult to judge the potential of such a young creature: was her precocity indicative of an intelligence that would find other channels of expression later? Or was it the pinnacle of her cleverness, manipulating men bedazzled by her nubility? Nabakov argues that we will never know -- because Humbert imposed himself into the situation, collapsing the quantum waveform, and dooming her to a life of dimmed prospects, where her imagination cannot reach farther than to think of which sugar daddy she will grace with her wiles -- but not whether life could be lived without one. Rien à Declarer (2011) -- "8/10" I saw this movie "before" , on a plane, in French with English subtitles. This time I watched the first part in French with German subtitles, but my viewing partner doesn't understand much (any) French and the dialogue comes so quickly that she was reading the whole time. It's still good in German but it loses something, I think. It's an absolutely fantastic French comedy, an exemplar of the genre. My favorite joke: "Q: Why does the Frenchman laugh 3 times when he hears a joke about Belgians? "A: Once for when he hears it, once for when someone explains it to him and once again when he finally understands it." See the previous review for a short synopsis. Highly recommended. Nighthawks (1981) -- "7/10" Instead of Carl Weathers, Sylvester Stallone teams up with Billy Dee Williams as New York City cops hunting terrorist Rutger Hauer. Stallone looks awesome and young in his beard, leather jacket and 70s-era shooter glasses. And Hauer, even so early [1], plays the perfect Euro-terrorist. When he's finally cornered with his hostages on the Roosevelt Island gondola, one of the ladies says to him, "Please leave us alone; we've done nothing," he haughtily responds with his characteristic smirk, "You must be very proud." Wicked burn. Minutes later, he wastes her in front of Stallone to set an example -- definitely not trying for the PG-rating. Although the film is far less gory than it would have been were it shot today, it has a more brutal sensibility than is common for action films these days. Stallone and Hauer spend a lot of time squinting menacingly into each other's eyes, but it kind of works. Also, the pacing is more deliberate, the shots are far longer and there is no shaky cam. I'm kind of a sucker for this kind of action film, I guess. Recommended. Blue Jasmine (2013) -- "8/10" This film is the 2013 installment of the long-running streak of yearly films by Woody Allen. Though there are flashes of Allen in Jasmine's dialogues, this is a very thematically and artistically different film than many of his others. If you hadn't told me it was a Woody Allen movie, I may never have guessed (whereas To Rome with Love, for example, was unmistakably Allen). It stars Cate Blanchett as a former socialite-on-top-of-the-world whose husband's crookedness she'd steadfastly ignored, all the while pretending that all she had was somehow deserved of someone of her talents, intellect and sensibilities. She moves in with her sister -- both girls were adopted by the same parents, but from different families -- and tries to put her life back together. In this, she does much better than expected, getting a menial job and persevering for more than a day. She continued to inhale pills (provenance and type unknown) as well as nearly limitless amounts of Stoli vodka. In the end, she is unrepentant and bitter, convinced that the world is at fault for her downfall. Her husband was a criminal and a philanderer and an all-around immoral person. When she turns him in to the FBI out of spite, her son hates the mom rather than the dad, whose criminality is at the root of all of the family's wealth but also its problems. The film is much, much, much darker than other Woody Allen movies, with no one really coming out on top in the end. Recommended. Straw Dogs (2011) -- "4/10" The remake of the 1970s classic that starred Dustin Hoffman [2], but this time starring Kate Bosworth, James Marsden and Alexander Skarsgård. I watched it because of Skarsgård, who was so good in Generation Kill but he didn't have a lot to work with in the role of the leader of a group of not-always-vaguely rapey misanthropes. The story is of Bosworth moving back to her hometown with her author-husband. Dominic Purcell stars as a mentally handicapped man who's put upon by the town, especially the extremely alcoholic former coach, played well by James Woods. The town has a distinctly menacing and anti-intellectual and highly church-y vibe, to which the husband is all-but-oblivious. He was never destined to mix in well with the people of town but the coming disaster is hastened by his superiority. His wife doesn't do nearly enough to fight of the attentions of the local XY-carriers, choosing instead to at-times revel in their attention. The film does more than play with the idea of a woman getting' what's comin' to her. This will, of course, not end well. The actors are decent, but the plot is a bit too manipulative and undernourished for my taste. Hopefully, the original is better. Saw it in German. Not recommended. Election (1999) -- "10/10" This is an absolute classic about a deceptively sociopathic and egotistical high-school student named Tracy Flick, played by Reese Witherspoon. Matthew Broderick plays a sad-sack teacher at her school named Jim McAllister. McAllister and Flick narrate much of the film along with Paul and Tammy Metzler, who run against Flick for the student-council presidency, all for their own reasons. McAllister's life circles the drain with a pathetic attempt at an affair with his wife's best friend (who also happens to be the wife of his own best friend, with whom he used to teach but who was thrown out of both the school and his own home when he was caught having an affair with Tracy). Witherspoon is penetratingly obnoxious and terrifying. Broderick is great as a loser who was happy with what he had, teaching ethics and morals and having none of either. Who will end up winning? Well, the one who wants it most -- and understands the least of ethics. Will McAllister give up the last of his tenets in order to stop her? Will it be worth it? There are no good guys in the movie, but you'll still feel that the wrong people won. Black Snake Moan (2006) -- "6/10" Samuel L. Jackson plays Lazarus, a God-fearing full-time vegetable farmer and part-time blues guitarist whose wife has left him, Christina Ricci plays Rae, a caricature of the town slut whose reputation from high school follows, defines and leads her well into her twenties. She is psychologically unstable, at best, with a thirst for men -- to be more precise, a very specific part of men -- that is depicted as medically uncontrollable. Not that she doesn't try to self-medicate: no pill or drink goes unconsumed in her presence. Justin Timberlake plays her boyfriend, who knows of her past and predilections but thinks that they are in the past and under control. No sooner does he set foot on a bus, headed forArmy boot camp, than Rae hops into bed with a former lover or three. It is made clear that these actions are out of her control and are to be considered fallout from the psychological trauma of having been regularly abused by her father (or step-father?) as a teenager. Long story short, Lazarus takes up the Herculean task of trying to cure her of her smutty desires. It's hard to tell how serious the movie takes itself -- it seems to think it's something more than just an excuse to show Ricci's pretty little self be used and abused in various stages of dishabille. If the dishabille doesn't sell you, then perhaps Jackson's musical number near the middle of the film will make it worth your while. It's quite haunting and well worth the ride. Timberlake returns at some point with his own bushel of psychological problems and mixes things up a bit. Saw it in German. Hard to recommend but it wasn't as terrible as it may sound. The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug (2013) -- "6/10" This is part two of a three-part homage to a three-hundred--page book. The last time I read it, I would definitely have called it a "children's" book when compared with the sweeping mythos and breadth of the Fellowship of the Ring. The story of The Hobbit is of a decidedly non-adventurous member of a non-adventurous and nondescript race of miniature beings who live under hills, play in the sun and snack all day long. They are human-shaped rabbits, in other words. The cast of the first film returns, joined by Evangeline Lilly as a pretty elf -- not much of a stretch there -- and Orlando Bloom as Legolas. Many arrows are loosed and much elvish fighting skill is on display as orc after orc after orc is dispatched by these two in their attempt to help the dwarves on their quest. There is a bit of confusion on that point, but the upshot is that that is what they end up doing. Gandalf is also back, especially good in a scene that reveals the Necromancer for what he truly is. Benedict Cumberbatch is almost unrecognizable as the voice of Smaug, a gigantic dragon who sits on a gigantic hoard and who is possessed of a gigantic ego. The storyline of the book is enhanced by an escapade that traps the arrogant Smaug, if only temporarily. The smith-works of the dwarves below Erebor -- the Lonely Mountain -- are beautiful and of an imposing scale that beggars belief. Truly impressive visuals but the story, as with the first installment, is a bit threadbare in places, failing to cover up the fact that it's been stretched over three films. Recommended for fans of the books or fans of big-budget action films, of which this is a more than passable exemplar. Magic Mike (2012) -- "8/10" Channing Tatum stars as the eponymous hero, a self-styled entrepreneur who runs a car- and truck-detailing business as well as a roofing/contracting firm and playing the lead role in a male revue, stripping at night. His real passion is building one-of-a-kind furniture from found objects, but he barely finds time for that. He does find time for a decent amount of harmless partying and fun, usually with two or more companions at once, one of whom is an adventurous Olivia Munn. He meets and takes pity on a sad-sack named Adam, taking him under his wing and introducing him to the world of male revue. Adam's sister -- played by the sloe-eyed and quite pretty newcomer Cody Horn -- is of a more sober bent. She hardly cracks a smile once throughout the movie although she is not immune to Tatum's infectious humor and inestimable charm (like when he sees that she's clearly irritated by Dallas's drivel about his lifestyle and how people should raise kids, he follows her and asks if she wants him to get her Dallas's number because he's starting a life-coaching business and he can tell that she'd be interested). Dallas is played by Matthew McConaughey, in a role he was born to play. He comes full circle with the beginning of his career, often repeating "all right, all right, all right" -- which he first uttered as David Wooderson in Richard Linklater's Dazed and Confused. The role of Dallas is anyone's best guess at what Wooderson would look like as a grown-up. Stephen Soderbergh did a great job and treated the material quite seriously. It was a funny, well-made movie with an absolutely perfect ending. While McConaughey is good, it's Tatum who holds the film together. Recommended. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] In IMDb, it looks like this was Hauer's first American movie -- everything else before that was Dutch. [1] I have that one in my list of thrillers to watch, but this one came on TV instead. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2939 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2939 Sun, 23 Mar 2014 22:53:02 +0100 -- "7/10" 2. "Inception (2010)" <#Inception> -- "9/10" 3. "To Rome with Love (2012)" <#Rome> -- "8/10" 4. "Ravenous (1999)" <#Ravenous> -- "6/10" 5. "Repo Men (2009)" <#Repo> -- "8/10" 6. "Dead Ringers (1988)" <#Dead> -- "8/10" 7. "Margin Call (2011)" <#Margin> -- "7/10" 8. "Moonrise Kingdom (2012)" <#Moonrise> -- "6/10" 9. "The Ghost (aka The Ghost Writer) (2010)" <#Ghost> -- "7/10" 10. "2 Fast 2 Furious (2006)" <#2> -- "6/10" 11. "The Brood (1979)" <#Brood> -- "5/10" 12. "Bedazzled (2000)" <#Bedazzled> -- "5/10" 13. "Adaptation (2002)" <#Adaptation> -- "9/10" 14. "Thor: the Dark World (2013)" <#Thor> -- "7/10" 15. "Riddick (2013)" <#Riddick> -- "7/10" 16. "Ender's Game (2013)" <#Ender> -- "7/10" 17. "Escape Plan (2013)" <#Escape> -- "6/10" 18. "My Dinner with André (1981)" <#Andre> -- "7/10" 19. "The Lone Ranger (2013)" <#Lone> -- "8/10" 20. "Escape from Alcatraz (1979)" <#Escape> -- "9/10" 21. "The Italian Job (1969)" <#Italian> -- "6/10" 22. "Daredevil (2003)" <#Daredevil> -- "6/10" The Thin Red Line (1998) -- "7/10" I was not surprised in the least to confirm that Terence Malick directed this film about the US attack on Guadalcanal in the Pacific Theater in World War II. The film starts with character portrayals of the various sailors on the vessel with a lot of the by-now classic Malick voice-overs. The cast is just loaded with acting talent (male-only), featuring Nick Nolte, Sean Penn, John Travolta, Adrien Brody, Jim Caviziel, Elias Koteas, John C. reilly, Woody Harrelson, Jared Leto and George Clooney. The attack goes typically poorly with a lot of attrition, some self-inflicted, all while the officers in charge (Nolte) make up a much more encouraging story in real-time. Nolte impressed me most recently in Warrior and he once again shines, even though he's even less sympathetic in this than he was as the alcoholic, absentee father in Warrior. The aftermath is even more painful than the bloody assault, with the soldiers whiling away the time, waiting for letters that never come or reading letters they wish had never arrived (e.g. when Ben Chaplin's wife writes to him with bad news). Caviziel as Pvt. Witt is ethereal. The film is a bit on the long side, but the cinematography is mesmerizing. It's kind of deep and kind of preachy; Malick's cyclical themes are in evidence and it's quite a sad film (although the scenery is beautiful, life is pretty terrible for everyone). It's worth watching if you're into more introspective war movies, but it's hard to recommend. Inception (2010) -- "9/10" I gave this film a "good initial review" but then pulled back a bit in my review of "Shutter Island" and "Paprika" . I watched it again, this time in German and with someone who was a bit confused their first time through. Explaining the various elements showed me that it held together remarkably well, especially for a second viewing. I even learned a few things myself that I'd missed the first time through. To Rome with Love (2012) -- "8/10" This is a Woody Allen that takes place in Rome and is largely in Italian. Unusually for his recent films, he takes a role in this one, playing a neurotic as usual. Although the conceit is that Jesse Eisenberg plays a younger version of Alec Baldwin, with Allen writing it, Eisenberg seems to be playing a the younger version of Allen instead. And Baldwin is...a ghost? Or a muse? Or something else? Greta Gerwig plays Eisenberg's live-in girlfriend while Ellen Page plays the flighty girl with mysterious allure who captures Eisenberg's attention. There is a sub-plot with Allen's daughter falling love with a local Italian boy, played by Flavio Parenti, whose father sings like an operatic angel in the shower. Roberto Benigni plays well as Leopoldo, who becomes mysteriously famous for most of the film and just as quickly is no one again, just at the end. It was decent fun, with a lovely soundtrack, as usual. It was nice to see it in Italian, with quite a lot of the film subtitled. Recommended. Ravenous (1999) -- "6/10" Guy Pearce and Robert Carlyle star in this movie about a fort in the American West during the Mexican-American war. The tale is one of hunger and cannibalism and wendigos. More and more people succumb to the hunger, eating humans to gain power and to survive. It's a ghastly, bloody movie that does a decent job of depicting the misery of the frontier. The story is a good one, even if the movie is a bit heavy on fight scenes, spreading the material over 101 minutes when 80 or 90 would have done just fine. The two primary actors are good and veteran character actor Jeffrey Jones is good as well. The first half with the eerie/creepy visit to the cave -- which gets a lot of mileage out of the background music -- is quite good. Recommended for fans of the genre, but it won't win any new fans. Repo Men (2009) -- "8/10" I'd recently seen this film and reviewed it in "Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2013.6" but I didn't have much to say at the time. Upon second viewing, it held up relatively well and I can continue to recommend it. A "bit gory" doesn't really begin to cover it, though. It's quite gory and not for the squeamish, although it's not as off-putting as Ravenous (reviewed above). Dead Ringers (1988) -- "8/10" Jeremy Irons plays brilliant and nigh-sociopathic twin gynecologists whose extremely close -- some would say interchangeable -- relationship is endangered by their relationship with Claire, played by Geneviève Bujold. The movie was written and directed by David Cronenberg, which is obvious almost from the get-go, if you're at all familiar with his work. One of the brothers becomes addicted to drugs, and then so does the other? Or which one is which, really? Irons plays both and their relationship is so symbiotic that they try to get "synchronized" again by having Eli fall as far as Bev, who's mad with drugs...and visions, of some kind. Bev has some very Cronenbergian surgical tools built that shock and horrify his colleagues ("gynecological instruments for operating on mutant women"). It's quite a psychological thriller with the dash of true surreal madness we've come to expect from Cronenberg. Jeremy Irons carries the movie with aplomb and his typical diction and style. In response to Claire's statement that "you resent me tremendously, don't you?" , Elliot replies that "[y]ou contribute...a confusing element to the Mantle brothers' saga. Possibly a destructive one." By the end, the practice is nearly ruined, the apartment is a shambles and I still can't tell them apart, really. The finale is grim and echoes that of the original Siamese twins. Apparently based at least in part "on a true story" . Recommended. Margin Call (2011) -- "7/10" An all-star cast gives us a look at what it might have looked like inside Lehman Brothers sometime in October of 2008. Stars Paul Bettany, Kevin Spacey, Jeremy Irons, Zachary Quinto, Demi Moore, Stanley Tucci and Simon Baker (the Mentalist) and builds suspense pretty well. That is, for a movie this is very heavily dialogue- and story-driven with little exposition and steeped in the minutiae of the financial world. I can attest that the trading and risk-analysis desks and software was nailed pretty well (having written some myself in the past), but the freshness of appearance of all of these people at 03:00 in the morning beggared belief. It's well-done, but I can't imagine how this film had so much success considering the level of technical jargon they were throwing around. Some of the shot choices in the offices were nice. Recommended. Moonrise Kingdom (2012) -- "6/10" A Wes Anderson film if there ever was one. Ed Norton is a scout master on a tiny island shared by husband and wife Bill Murray and Frances McDormand and their family of triplet boys and teenaged daughter. Jason Schwartzman is, to one's surprise, also in the movie, though in a bit part and Bruce Willis plays the police with a complicated relationship with Frances. It's a coming-of-age story for a lonely, young, orphan, oddball scout and the aforementioned, also oddball, teenaged daughter. All this with the backdrop of a truly legendary Nor'easter coming in over the island. Wes Anderson has a very unique style, which I kind of like, although I'm no so over the moon about it (pardon) that I'll excuse anything, as some of his fans will. The movie was fine but nothing to write home about and it seemed to be trying much too hard to be weird. The Ghost (aka The Ghost Writer) (2010) -- "7/10" Pierce Brosnan is a former prime minister of Great Britain whose career has clearly been modeled on that of Tony Blair. Ewan McGregor is an author hired to ghost-write Brosnan's memoirs. There is intrigue and twists and turns as we try to find out what happened during Brosnan's career and why his ghostwriters keep disappearing. It was quite an interesting thriller, all in all. 2 Fast 2 Furious (2006) -- "6/10" It has its moments and it is way better than Tokyo Drift. I honestly don't know whether GTA is based on these movies or these movies are based on GTA. Paul Walker, Tyrese Gibson and Eva Mendes star. Gibson is over the top and has the best lines of the film. The driving sequences don't always hold up so well, but it's fun to watch 80s-style action movies made in the noughts. The Brood (1979) -- "5/10" More disturbing weirdness from David Cronenberg, this time about a woman in a special psychological program for her anger issues. Spoiler alert: her anger evinces itself in the form of little, deformed, violent munchkins, who range about through the local town, exacting revenge on all who they perceive to have wronged their mother. Cronenberg continues his fascination with squishy, bloody and highly organic props. It was well-made and definitely unique but I'm not in a hurry to watch it again. Not really recommended. Bedazzled (2000) -- "5/10" A reasonably entertaining about an awkward young man (Brendan Frasier) who makes a deal with the devil (Elizabeth Hurley): seven wishes in exchange for his soul. With each wish, Frasier plays a different character. Some of the situations are quite funny and it must literally be the best thing that Hurley made in her entire career. Decent enough fun, but hard to recommend. It was better than anything else on TV at that point, but that's not really saying very much. Adaptation (2002) -- "9/10" A recursive movie about a screenwriter who adapts a book about orchids for a major motion picture. It's a movie about writing movies that ends up being about the screenwriter and his brother...who may not even exist. The movie is ostensibly about the plot of the book but also about the author and a lot of writer-angst mixed up in it. It's quite well-written and well-acted, starring Nicolas Cage, Meryl Streep, Tilda Swinton, Maggie Gyllenhaal and the always excellent Chris Cooper in probably his most endearing role (and it's not particularly endearing, but at least he's not playing a CIA jerk for once). Cage is good as twin brothers Donald and Charlie (does Donald even exist?). Charlie hates his fat, balding self and is trying to claw his miserable way through a screenplay. Donald is more upbeat and, while Charlie is in the throes of writing, manages to create a spectacular screenplay that wows Donald's agent (or is Charlie who wrote it?), all under the tutelage of Robert McKee, screenwriter extraordinaire, played by Brian Cox. Charlie gives in and attends a seminar and starts second-guessing what meager amount of screenplay he's managed to write so far. He's told to find an ending for it, within himself, if there is none in the book. The film ends on a rollicking end with drugs, shooting and alligators in the swamp -- but no deus ex machina. Recommended. Thor: the Dark World (2013) -- "7/10" The second in the series features kind of a similar plot to the first one, with a bunch of stuff from other genres mixed in. The cast, the effects and sets were all top-notch and the plot was interesting enough, with quite a bit of foreshadowing crammed in at the end. There are a lot of pretty high-quality players, including Stellan Skarsgård, Idris Elba, Rene Russo, Kat Dennings, Anthony Hopkins and Ray Stevenson (from Kill the Irishman). Tom Hiddleston, Natalie Portman and Chris Hemsworth return as Loki, Jane and Thor, respectively. An ancient evil in the form of dark elves and something called aether are brought back to life just in time for something called the convergence. Long story short, Jane gets all caught up in things again, Loki gets out of jail and gets all tricky and Thor solves everything with his hammer and lightning. Pretty satisfying as super-hero movies go. Riddick (2013) -- "7/10" Vin Diesel reprises his role as Riddick, space criminal and warrior extraordinaire. This sequel to a sequel picks up with Riddick as king of the Necromancers, an incredibly destructive and warlike collection of beings. He still seeks his home planet, Furia, legendary home of the legendary warrior race of which he is the last living exemplar. He ends up on a planet, but it's probably not Furia. It's quite dangerous, though and we spend a good deal of time watching Vin Diesel deal with the local fauna. Act II involves a lot of Vin Diesel time again, this time with a dog/giant jackal that he's adopted. This part of the movie is pretty low-budget but tries to convince you otherwise. You only have to pay one guy, right? Act III centers on a bounty-hunter's shack that is soon occupied by two sets of bounty hunters, none of whom are there to dispel any stereotypes. Nothing much has changed since the original space-marine squad established the ground rules in Alien. Riddick is awesomely amazing, so he naturally starts whittling them down. They, of course, show no fear and bluster that they will kill Riddick any second. This, even after he clearly demonstrates that he could kill any of them at any time, but chooses not to. Pretty standard fare, though made entertaining by Mr. Diesel (if you're a fan, which I kind of am). Just because that would be boring and because you need to fill an over two-hour–long action film somehow, Riddick gets caught (just like in the last two movies). The post-capture scene is actually pretty good because we see Riddick control the situation, driving the conversation and forcing errors, despite being in chains. When Johns yells at him that "maybe he wants to be something other than a savage", we know that Riddick already stated near the beginning that he feels he went soft when he got too civilized and also that of all of the people there, Riddick is the fairest and least back-stabbing of any of them. He continues his generosity by not saying "I told you so" or reminding any of them that they could all have been off-planet before the rains came if they'd just cooperated. This movie reminded me much more of the original Riddick and dammit if Vin Diesel doesn't just win you over. Riddick's survival instinct is awe-inspiring. You probably don't need to watch the extended version, though; watch an edited version instead. Ender's Game (2013) -- "7/10" I can't remember having read the book and I honestly didn't know what to expect, but I thought it was entertaining enough. The back-story was a bit...dated, but it set the stage for a Lord of the Flies in space well enough. Aliens attack; humanity is terrified; military solution the only way; find someone who can do exactly what humans did the last time to repel the next invasion. The adult roles are adequate, but also kind of ridiculous. The young lead role is well-written and well-acted, with the super-genius kid actually acting quite clever and tactically most of the time. The user interfaces aren't half-bad although I'd go ape-shit if the 28-day countdown to alien attack bleeped and blinked like that for every second. Harrison Ford is decent, at his best delivering lines like "because we already have the uniforms" with a smirk that belies what might be a human side. It's interesting, the movie has an alien attack and promises big effects in its premise, but it ends up being about a bunch of kids playing laser tag and playing at tactics and strategy. I'm not knocking it, but it's similar to the way the most recent Riddick was more of a Mad Max-like movie with a half-hour of survivalist melodrama than a galaxy-spanning space opera, as expected. One question: if you have a $70 billion molecular-displacement cannon (did the dollar skyrocket in value 500 years in the future?), why can't you just make the water that the aliens seem to want? Wouldn't that be a neat way to end the war? Or is that appeasement? Never mind. The end was cool -- a typical sci-fi short-story kind of ending. Escape Plan (2013) -- "6/10" Sylvester Stallone stars as a prison-break specialist sent to a super-secret, off-the-grid, maximum security facility. There he meets Arnold Schwarzenegger. It's an OK setup and the breakout parts are kind of clever -- especially the initial one -- but it gets kind of action-heavy at the end (surprise, surprise). It's entertaining enough for an action film -- and the old dogs are decent enough -- but the script is pretty uneven. Hard to recommend, but also not necessarily panning it. I've seen worse. My Dinner with André (1981) -- "7/10" A movie about a struggling playwright, Wallace Shawn, who meets his friend André for dinner at a fancy restaurant. André quickly dominates the conversation by telling Wallace of an acting experience he had with his acting group in Poland. Shawn is an unbelievable masochist. When André finally shuts up (and it takes forever for him to do so), Shawn prods him with a "wow...and what happened next?" You cringe inwardly as the next mindbogglingly boring story starts. The stories are so detailed and self-referential and real that they come full circle and end up being captivating. Midway through the film, Shawn joins in and the conversation turns quite philosophical, discussing reality vs. happiness vs. career. "OK. Yes, we are bored. We're all bored now. But has it ever occurred to you Wally that the process that creates this boredom that we see in the world now may very well be a self-perpetuating, unconscious form of brainwashing, created by a world totalitarian government based on money, and that all of this is much more dangerous than one thinks? and it's not just a question of individual survival Wally, but that somebody who's bored is asleep, and somebody who's asleep will not say no?" The sheer amount of dialogue in this 2-hour movie is staggering. If you like the philosophy of the everyday and haven't been exposed to a lot of it, this movie will seem insightful. There are far worse conversations with which to waste an evening. A pleasant ending. Recommended? The Lone Ranger (2013) -- "8/10" Gore Verbinski directs this re-imagining of the famous lawman and his sidekick, Tonto. Tonto kind of stars in this one and is played by Verbinski's favorite actor, Johnny Depp. The story is a little ...off. The world is askew, thrown out of balance by the sheer evil of an outlaw -- Tonto calls him "wendigo". I suppose the cannibal rabbits are the first sign that something is amiss. It's hard to tell what's real around Tonto -- is what we see actually happening or focused through a lens of warped perception and mescaline/peyote? Depp manages to bring a sort of dignity to his role, subtly and sometimes overtly condemning the "white man". He understands what is going on, he understands that enough concentrated evil can break things on a lower level. There are shades of the pirates from Verbinski's more recent films in some of the other characters (in the gang). Helena Bonham Carter makes an appearance as the madam of a very bawdy bordello, also typically loony with a wooden leg that houses a rifle. William Fichtner is excellent and nearly unrecognizable as the abominable Butch Cavendish. And I just noticed a heavily bearded Tom Wilkinson playing Mr. Cole. And character actor Barry Pepper as the Captain of the U.S. Army. And there's Stephen Root! It seems everyone wanted at least a bit part in this one. There is a very prosaic underlying plot that involves a crooked railroad owner who uses a band of horrible people to pretend to be Indians so that he can encroach on Comanche lands, blaming the Comanche for breaking the treaty. Viewed through Tonto's twisted lens, though, it all becomes more bizarre and not necessarily untrue. This movie is a good deal darker and more interesting than I expected it to be. And Tonto manages to impose his view of the world on the world with pure willpower. Silver (the horse) is a good example. He's positively Daliesque. That horse can get anywhere. And the ending is madcap lunacy without being camp. You can guess the soundtrack for the final, manic act, can't you? The film is ridiculous and walks a very fine line, but I think it works. Johnny Depp thinks he's the next Buster Keaton. I was laughing out loud. And then he intones with a straight face, "All these years, I thought you were Wendigo, but you're just another white man...bad trade." After 2 hours, Tonto manages to convince the Lone Ranger that the world does not support the kind of justice he seeks -- he must make that justice for himself. Themes of American avarice, capitalism, military and cruelty that have dogged the country from the get-go are well-addressed. So. Many. Western. Movie. References. The "review I read last year" by Matt Zoller Seitz ("RogerEbert.com" ) has held up. Recommended. Escape from Alcatraz (1979) -- "9/10" This classic prison film based on a true story stars Clint Eastwood and a bunch of other recognizable character actors (Fred Ward and Larry Hankin are in their youth and prime in this film). The story is slow and nicely paced, showing a time in America where it was possible to make a movie about convicts where it was just assumed that most of the people in prison weren't insanely violent. Instead, the prisoners are represented as misunderstood and unlucky and horribly put-upon in a prison like Alcatraz. It must be noted, though, that the prison life as depicted in this film isn't the reality for many prisoners in America anymore. The story is engaging, the pacing is great and the cinematography is really nice. Tied with The Shawshank Redemption for my favorite prison movie. It's very deliberate and quite slow at times, but through this conveys a realism. The warden is the only one who's almost over-the-top inhumanly mean. And good old Litmus with his little mouse was possibly the inspiration for Stephen King's Delacroix character in The Green Mile. Highly recommended. The Italian Job (1969) -- "6/10" Michael Caine stars in the original caper film. Charlie Croker is the same guy, just out of prison, there's a much larger crew of helpers but otherwise and the plot and pacing is totally recognizable from the remake. It even has Benny Hill as the Professor. Hill plays a straight role in a movie with more than a few madcap, comical scenes. There's a lot of the violence in the first part of the movie and it's strangely aimed at really lovely vehicles, which must be a sign of the times, I guess (The French Connection hails from this era as well). They really like to destroy cars -- a lot of true beauties bite the dust in this film. There are some famous lines in this film, "[y]ou're only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!" sticking in my mind as one cited by Rob Brydon and Steve Coogan in The Trip as being quintessentially Michael Caine. Quote-wise, it was also interesting that Croker threatened the Capo of the Mafia with "driving all the Italians in England into the sea". That is almost word-for-word what Ahmedinejad is accused of having said about Israel. But I digress. The heist is a lovely plan that should be familiar to those who've seen the remake and there are a lot of nice shots of roads in the timeless Italian Alps and their hairpin roads. And it's especially lovely to see them with no one driving on them. Oh, to time-travel with my modern cycle back to those empty, pristine roads (in fairness, some of the surfaces did look a bit sketchy). The final scene is ludicrous but nerve-wracking nonetheless and it ends quite well. Overall, Caine is good but the film as a whole is kind of uneven, so it's hard to recommend. I'd watch the remake instead. Daredevil (2003) -- "6/10" Ben Affleck stars as Daredevil opposite Jennifer Garner as Elektra. This movie has a horrible reputation but it's not as bad as all that. Some scenes are kind of painful -- the initial meeting between Matt Murdock and Elektra -- but there are others that are relatively well-done. Colin Farrell as a somewhat cross-eyed Bullseye is over the top and felt cheesy in a Batman & Robin kind of way. Ving Rhames as the Kingpin was a good choice. Daredevil's only superpower is that he can do martial arts really well for a blind guy. His heightened other senses grant him superhuman-seeming reflexes, but there's not going to be city-smashing fun as the Hulk or Thor or Iron Man delivers. I liked it as a more down-to-Earth, crime-busting, redemption and origin story for Daredevil. Not really recommended but you could do worse zapping around the channels. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2907 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2907 Mon, 27 Jan 2014 22:35:34 +0100 -- "8/10" 2. "The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994)" <#Priscilla> -- "8/10" 3. "To Wong Foo Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar (1995)" <#Wong> -- "4/10" 4. "Memories of Murder (2003)" <#Memories> -- "10/10" 5. "True Legend (2010)" <#True> -- "6/10" 6. "The Grey (2011)" <#Grey> -- "5/10" 7. "Jack Reacher (2012)" <#Jack> -- "8/10" 8. "Hotel Rwanda (2004)" <#Hotel> -- "8/10" 9. "The Lookout (2007)" <#Lookout> -- "8/10" 10. "Renaissance (2006)" <#Renaissance> -- "8/10" 11. "Dara Ó Briain Talks Funny – Live in London (2008)" <#Dara-London> -- "10/10" 12. "Despicable Me 2 (2013)" <#Despicable> -- "7/10" 13. "Dara Ó Briain -- Live at the Theatre Royal (2006)" <#Dara-Royal> -- "9/10" 14. "Dara Ó Briain -- This is the Show (2010)" <#Dara-Show> -- "9/10" 15. "White House Down (2013)" <#White> -- "7/10" 16. "Goon (2011)" <#Goon> -- "9/10" 17. "Skyline (2010)" <#Skyline> -- "2/10" 18. "The Crazies (2010)" <#Crazies> -- "5/10" 19. "Now You See Me (2013)" <#Now> -- "9/10" 20. "Låt den rätte komma in (Let the Right One In) (2008)" <#Låt> -- "8/10" 21. "Kick-Ass 2 (2013)" <#Kick> -- "5/10" 22. "This is the End (2013)" <#This> -- "3/10" 23. "The Act of Killing (2012)" <#Killing> -- "9/10" 24. "Monsters University (2013)" <#Monsters> -- "5/10" 25. "Shaolin (2011)" <#Shaolin> -- "8/10" 26. "Identity Thief (2013)" <#Identity> -- "5/10" 27. "RED 2 (2013)" <#RED> -- "5/10" 28. "Post Grad (2009)" <#Post> -- "2/10" 29. "The Heat (2013)" <#Heat> -- "7/10" 30. "Alpha House, season 1 -- 11 episodes (2013)" <#Alpha> -- "10/10" The Thing (1982) -- "8/10" John Carpenter's classic horror film, set in Antarctica. The sets and effects are really, really good. Not even just "for that time", but just good in a timeless way. This is a great example of how you don't need CGI to make a good movie. Just the models alone are a terrifying vision of twisted horror. The camera knows enough to linger on them without anyone saying anything. Spoiler alert: the "thing" is a shape-shifting, virus-like alien life-form that can't really distinguish between distinct life-forms and just emulates anything with genes or a pulse that's in range -- and all at once. One scientist figures out what's going on and he disables the helicopter and the comms equipment so that the creature can't get off the base and infect the whole planet. The thing is quite good at hiding in its hosts, so the members of the U.S. Outpost #31 don't trust each other anymore. The U.S. camp at the end of the film looks just like the Norwegian one at the beginning. Recommended. The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert (1994) -- "8/10" This is an Australian movie about drag queens in Australia, played by the now-famous Terence Stamp (Bernadette), Guy Pearce (Felicia) and Hugo Weaving (Mitzy). The movie is named after the caravan that conveys them to a show in Alice Springs. I don't even know where to begin. Pearce is the most flamboyant with Stamp the most staid. Weaving is somewhere in between, at one point making an appearance in a dress, bag and earrings made only of flip-flops. It's a movie that could no longer be made, because they actually get stuck in the vast Australian desert, in a time before cell phones. They spend a good deal of time camping about in the desert. Most people are pretty accepting, including some Aboriginals they run into, who are mystified but happy to help a trio of transsexuals out of a bind. And how could you not be? Their costumes are over-the-top fabulous and the performances are good (even if their stage shows aren't really). If you've ever wanted to see guy Pearce lip-syncing to opera while leaning back in a gigantic silver high-heel shoe attached to the top of a lavender bus in the midst of lavender smoke spewing from a smoke machine, this is the film for you. Highly recommended. To Wong Foo Thanks for Everything, Julie Newmar (1995) -- "4/10" This is the American version of the transvestite road-trip, starring Patrick Swayze, John Leguiziamo and Wesley Snipes. I know this seems impossible, but it's even campier than the Australian version -- but in a worse way. It's not that they're not good drag queens, but they're not as natural, except maybe for Leguiziamo, whose character is almost exactly the counterpart to Guy Pearce's Felicia. It's much more of a classic 90s Hollywood comedy, with that weird cartoonish music and a lot of bad one-liners. In this version, most of the people in the movie can't tell that the "ladies" are transvestites, which is kind of preposterous, especially because Wesley Snipes is hugely muscled. It's a much more formulaic fish-out-of-water in hick country standard Hollywood movie. Not recommended. Memories of Murder (2003) -- "10/10" This is a Korean detective moving starring Kang-ho Song, who was so good in The Host. This is an earlier role as detective Park Doo-Man but his on-screen charisma is totally magnetic and instantly recognizable. These good feeling evaporate quickly as he goes about trying to frame a mentally handicapped kid Kwang-Ho for the string of rape/murders that he currently has on his plate. The little guy kinda reminds me of Gollum and it's darkly comic, but quite disturbing. The actor who plays Kwang-Ho is also quite good. The characters develop further, with increasing layers of nuance and the dialogue is quite funny (at least what I get from the subtitles). The detective from Seoul -- Seo Tae-Yoon -- slowly starts to convince Doo-Man to do real police work rather than torture false confessions out of whomever they manage to catch. Shots are long and steady and it's very story- rather than action-driven. It's not at all clichéd. Beautiful shot selection -- near the end, in the rain and in the tunnel, especially -- and some very thrilling chase/hunt scenes, which are both slow and nerve-wracking. Doo-man's old partner Cho Yong-koo meanwhile is far to stupid to change his ways and, after hilariously attacking yet another suspect (again, dark comedy), he's severely reprimanded by his sergeant and he goes on a rampage. Spoiler alert: the stupid detective Yong-koo likes to kick suspects and he pulls this little cloth over his boot -- it looks like something his mother made for him -- so that his kicks don't leave marks. Later in the movie, Kwang-Ho stabs him in the leg with a board with a rusty nail in it. He's too stupid to see a doctor, he gets tetanus and his kickin' leg must be amputated. I skipped a lot of nuance and a few interesting plot points -- the story's really quite good and quite unique for a crime film. They get so close and yet the murders keep happening. It reminded me a bit of the film Zodiac, the style of which seems to have been inspired by this movie. According to "Wikipedia" , it's based on a series of real murders that also occurred in and around 1986. Highly recommended. True Legend (2010) -- "6/10" War-torn China; some dynasty. Two foster brothers , Su and Yuan, lead the charge to save a general from a Tolkien-esque fortress/cave and are rewarded with a governorship. Su wants to retire with his family (his wife is actually Yuan's sister) and start a Wushu school, so he asks Yuan to take the honor. It turns out, though, that Yuan's father had been killed by Su's father and that Yuan isn't quite over that. So he will have his revenge. He brings a lady friend with him, who can carry 400 pounds of knives with her and throw them all at once. Both feats are quite impressive. There's a bunch of cable work but it's not as exaggerated as Crouching Tiger (yet). The battles are nicely choreographed but, as usual, no one takes any damage. Despite all of them being utterly top-notch martial artists, not a single blow they land does any real damage. No one limps, no bruises appear -- it's that kind of martial-arts movie. Oops. Spoke too soon -- there's Pai Mei floating through the bamboo like gravity doesn't exist. It turns out to be all right because it's not happening in reality, it's happening in his mind. This craziness scares his wife, so she decides to rescue their son from the Venom Lord all by herself, apparently just by asking him to let her son go. That was her whole plan. "Bury her in the forest!" is the best line of this movie. It's hard to muster up any pity for her -- that is exactly the response her stupid plan deserves. Of course, she does have a wee bit of a drinking problem, so perhaps we should excuse her lack of cohesive planning abilities. The ensuing fight scene is pretty well-done, given you've already accepted the fighting rules outlined above. After this, however, the Wushu master Su falls into a funk again, this time to be rescued by his son...aaaaand, we seem to be in a whole new movie. WTF? I suppose now that he's defeated one of his enemies, he must defeat the other enemy: himself. How profound. Now we're treated to more phantasms and a bit of Drunken Master. And then we move right into a rehash of Legend. David Carradine is utterly awful. The kid is arguably worse. For whom is this movie made? It's so uneven...the second part has almost nothing to do with the first part. It's almost as if they just tacked the bad sequel right onto the end of the original. If you do watch this movie, for your own sake, stop watching right after Su finds Ying. The end. DO NOT CONTINUE. You will regret it. The Grey (2011) -- "5/10" Liam Neeson continues to pursue what he refuses to call his action-movie career, this time as an eagle-eyed hunter in Alaska. He's there to protect oil workers against packs of wolves. The backstory is that the love of his life has left him, he's got nothing to live for, etc. He's on a plane back to Anchorage that goes down, stranding him with six other survivors in a nighttime blizzard that doesn't seem to bother the pack of gigantic wolves that stalk them. The wolves continue to hunt them as they make for some relatively nearby woods. The cold and conditions are pretty believable -- accepting that Hollywood will always make its actors leave its faces open to the elements, regardless of realism. The cold and wind look awful and adrenalin can only do so much when you're trudging through deep snow. One by one, there always fewer little Indians. The river scene is ridiculous. What does it take for a script to fail in Hollywood? Is there anything that's just too ridiculous to film? What do you see in Alaska when you just stepped out of a river in the deep snow? Not your breath, that's for sure. It's nice to see a darker ending instead of the standard triumph and pragmatic fatalism is a welcome relief to unrealistic egotism, but two hours is way too long. Not recommended. Jack Reacher (2012) -- "8/10" It starts off as a nicely shot thriller about a domestic sniper picking off civilian targets. After they pick up a suspect, we're all treated to overly macho and ridiculous-sounding threats from the cop in charge. Read the following and tell me I'm wrong: "It's life or death now, James. By that, I mean you're doing one or the other up in Rockview. This here is District Attorney Rodin. Want to know what he's wondering? Whether you're gonna walk like a man or cry like a pussy on your way to the death house. See, the D.A. likes the needle, whereas me, I like to see a man like you live a long life - with all your teeth knocked out. Passed around till a brother can't tell your fart from a yawn." What the hell does that even mean? Are we supposed to be impressed? It's not even clever or funny. It's just bro-talk stupid. We just met this cop. There has been zero character development. Are we really supposed to be cheering for the good guys already? Because they caught the sniper? Compare and contrast to the seemingly effortless character development in Memories of Murder. It stars Tom Cruise as the eponymous and enigmatic lead and Rosamund Pike is back as a lawyer involved in the case he's asked to work on. The bar fight was a decent set piece to establish Reacher's chops, as was the scene with Robert Duvall at the shooting range. Werner Herzog is good as the "Zek"; it seem to be common knowledge that this means "prisoner" in Russian, but I had only just learned it a couple of days ago from watching Mark of Cain. I like Jack Reacher better than I like Ethan Hunt, although there isn't really much difference between the characters. I found myself searching for Jack Reacher 2 on IMDb. Recommended. Hotel Rwanda (2004) -- "8/10" Don Cheadle leads a good cast as hotel manager Paul Rusesabagina, who keeps an island of refugees alive in his hotel amidst the horror washing over Rwanda. The horrific descent into genocide is detailed in Paul's struggles to arrange for escape with Sabena Airlines and then further negotiations with U.N. soldiers when that plan falls through. Helen Hunt and Nick Nolte have supporting roles. It's an important movie, and the world's outlook hasn't changed significantly, as summarized in this exchange between Cheadle and Nolte: "Paul Rusesabagina: I am glad that you have shot this footage and that the world will see it. It is the only way we have a chance that people might intervene. Jack: Yeah and if no one intervenes, is it still a good thing to show? Paul Rusesabagina: How can they not intervene when they witness such atrocities? Jack: I think if people see this footage they'll say, "oh my God that's horrible," and then go on eating their dinners." From their point of view, an intervention is better than the alternative. However, Paul was also much better off than most of his landsmen. It is the lower 90% who suffer horribly when the West intervenes, no matter how pious the intentions. Western interventions usually take the form of military action and then only air strikes are used to avoid losing precious Western lives. There is no easy answer, but the film puts the plaintive and desperate argument for intervention well. The Lookout (2007) -- "8/10" Joseph Gordon-Levitt stars as a guy named Chris Pratt making his way through life after having suffered a serious head injury. Jeff Daniels is his blind roommate, Lewis. Chris caused the traffic accident that led to his head injury; before that, he was a hockey star, a near-legend. Some guys who knew him from the old days find him again and get him to help them rob the bank for which he works as a janitor. It's quite good and Daniels's character is very good. Chris gets more confident as he goes along, constantly checking his little notebook for clues he left for himself. Kind of like Flowers for Algernon meets Memento. A good concept; a good caper; had some nice folks and some mean folks. I liked it. Recommended. Renaissance (2006) -- "8/10" A sleek, black-and-white, CGI, animated, rotoscoped-looking but mo-capped, French futuristic, noir, crime-thriller set in Paris in 2057. Phew. The visuals are really cool and it is really in black and white -- there aren't even shades of gray. This is one of the nicest-looking CGI animated film I've seen. The main plot revolves around bio-researchers trying to discover immortality, virtual worlds and a mega-corporation that wants it all. It's a decent story, but the visual style and shot setup and selection really sells it. The futuristic transparent tunnels of Paris where pedestrians walk around on glass-ceilinged highways are a nice touch, as are the nearly-invisible electro-camouflage suits. Lots of nice work with light and shadows (naturally) and with flash lights and other point-light sources. Recommended. Dara Ó Briain Talks Funny – Live in London (2008) -- "10/10" A flat-out brilliant London-based Irish comedian. He does improvised audience interaction, slags homeopaths and magicians, promotes science and is laugh-out-loud hilarious. You can watch it on "YouTube" (as of this writing). There are samples available in a little write-up I did, "Dara Ó Briain: a comedian…for science" . Despicable Me 2 (2013) -- "7/10" Gru is a very good character and quite funny. Russell Brand, Steve Coogan, Benjamin Bratt, Kristen Schaal, Ken Jeong and Kristen Wiig also provide voices. But they are all window dressing to the minions. You end up waiting for the scenes with them -- especially throwing parties. Like the one on the beach. Recommended. Dara Ó Briain -- Live at the Theatre Royal (2006) -- "9/10" More from my new favorite comedian. Lots of audience interaction and ad-hoc, impromptu comedy. He's incredibly quick on his mental feet. You can watch it on "YouTube" (as of this writing). Dara Ó Briain -- This is the Show (2010) -- "9/10" More from my new favorite comedian. Covers childbirth classes. You can watch it on "YouTube " (as of this writing). White House Down (2013) -- "7/10" Hoo-rah America-is-awesome porn. Jamie Foxx is the president. Maggie Gyllenhaal is his chief of security? I think? Channing Tatum is trying to get into the secret service. They also saddled an old-looking James Woods into service as ... some random old, white guy in the administration. I can't believe Jamie Foxx is literally the token black guy in this movie. At least post-Obama, the only black guy in the movie gets to be the President. I bet he doesn't even die first since he's on the cover of the DVD. What a step up for black America! There's also a sullen teenager and bitter MILF (Debra Messing). Is he seriously taking his assinine 11-year--old to a job interview with him? And is the dimwit blabbing about "gas, chemical and missile attacks" while they're going through security? And does he joke about "checking her good" as his daughter goes through security? This is a luxury only good-looking, well-dressed white people have, I think. That seems realistic. Not that realism is a requirement here. The movie intro showed three clearly CGI-injected helicopters flying over a terribly rendered capitol building. (It gets better.) And here comes the hacker, with all of his requisite idiosyncrasies and a hacking program that you start by typing the numbers 1-9. While it runs, it tracks the progress to ten decimal places, 'cause that's how he rolls. The hacker played by Jimmi Simpson is quite funny, though. Channing and Jamie kinda won me over -- at about the time they started doing donuts on the White House lawn in the President's Cadillac. The President then instructed tanks to roll on the White House. Soon after, the President had a rocket-launcher in his hands. And then they flipped the presidential Cadillac into a pool. Sound crazy? It is, but it's pretty well-done. The effects are absolutely incredible after the initial stumble in the opening scene. There are some misses, of course. Maggie Gyllenhaal's character is, unfortunately, annoying. James Woods, who almost died of a heart attack, is kicking the President's ass in the next scene. Still and all, a fun movie. It was much better than expected; recommended if you're looking for a mindless action flick akin to Independence Day. Goon (2011) -- "9/10" Seann William Scott (famous for playing Stifler in the American Pie moveis) stars as Doug Glatt, a young guy drifting through life as a bouncer and avid hockey fan. On Saturdays, he joins his family at the temple, where they never fail to make him feel bad for not having become a doctor. His best buddy Jay Baruchel is a hockey fanatic. Doug attracts the attention of the coach of the local team one night for his fighting skills, demonstrated in a crowd brawl. He's soon hired and proving his mettle on the ice (purely with fists; his skating and hockey skills are abysmal). He's a really nice guy and pretty dim, to boot -- what an author might call "earnest". There's a love interest (of course) and a nemesis, in the form of Ross Rhea, played wonderfully by Liev Schreiber. It's kind of hilarious that the two main goons in the movie are both played by Jewish actors. Some scenes are pretty violent -- almost as cringe-inducing as those in Fight Club. Seriously, Doug's face is a patchwork quilt by the end of the flick. By the end, you do not want the fight between Doug and Ross to happen. [1] Both Schreiber and Scott are fantastic in the last scene. Based on the true story of Doug "The Hammer" Smith. Recommended; a must for hockey fans. Skyline (2010) -- "2/10" It takes forty-five minutes for anything of note to happen. Before that, there is character development, which I would ordinarily welcome with open arms. Development of characters that are not worth knowing is a more difficult task to make interesting and this film is not up to the job. When the aliens finally show themselves, they seem like a mix between stuff from the newest War of the Worlds (the one with Tom Cruise), Half Life (the video game), a bit of the sentinels from the Matrix as well as the mother ships from Independence Day and perhaps the Rancor from Return of the Jedi thrown in for good measure. It's slow, the dialogue isn't very good and they stretch a little material -- and nice effects, which are getting easier and easier to buy -- way too far. The script and cast would have to have been much better to make a "bottle episode" movie like this one work. I'm not even going to mention the awful mother-child, pregnancy thread running through whole film. It's too bad because I was looking forward to something decent from Donald Faison ("Turk" from Scrubs). Avoid this. There's a sequel in the works. Avoid that too. The Crazies (2010) -- "5/10" Timothy Olyphant is the sheriff of a small town in Iowa in which people are mysteriously going crazy. He and his deputy discover a downed plane in the marsh from which the town gets its drinking water. Decent camera work and almost effortless character development (compared to Skyline at least) provide a pretty decent little thriller, but nothing to write home about. Again, the material is a bit thin. Essentially, it's the story of how two people flout a government quarantine just to save themselves, even after having seen the horrific effects of the disease. This is a remake of a 1973 movie, which is almost an eternity to wait before rebooting a movie, by today's standards. Spoiler alert: the nuke at the end took me a bit by surprise. Not recommended. Now You See Me (2013) -- "9/10" A wonderful caper film involving bank robberies, street magicians, magical legends, legendary magicians, multi-millionaire sponsors, debunkers and a slew of law enforcement from both sides of the pond. Jesse Eisenberg, Woody Harrelson, Dave Franco and Isla Fisher are the Four Horsemen, pulling off one amazing trick after another, most of which involve stealing money and giving it away. Melanie Laurent is an Interpol agent assigned to work with Mark Ruffalo's FBI inspector. Michael Caine is the ruthless multi-millionaire. Morgan Freeman plays the smug debunker. I won't give away any details because it's a magic movie, but I want it recorded for posterity that, despite the originality of the plot twists, I called it (cue smugness). Highly recommended. Låt den rätte komma in (Let the Right One In) (2008) -- "8/10" This is a Swedish movie about vampires. And melancholy. And bullying. And winter. And darkness. And the boring wasteland that is Sweden in the winter of 1982. 12-year--old Oskar looks and dresses marginally stranger than the other equally gender-ambiguous kids at school and is bullied for it. The bully, strangely enough, can't skate worth a damn, which is how you know the movie was made in Europe because, were it an American movie, the kid would totally be good at sports. Moving on to Eli, who befriends Oskar one night. Eli is a pretty freaky kid who walks around in the snow barefoot and seems not to mind. Eli is -- spoiler alert -- a vampire. Eli is also a girl, which surprised me more, actually. You see, Oskar was already so effeminate that I just figured that Eli was just slightly more so and that that was just the style in the 80s in Sweden. The whole idea of a modern-day vampire is a cool idea and the way Eli gets Oskar to be her familiar is an interesting story, but it takes a long time to get there. Oskar exudes that nerd-musk from the Simpsons like almost no other film character I've ever seen. At the end, we see how their relationship will continue to grow and how he will, in 50 years, be the old man who accompanied her to the building at the beginning of the film. Kick-Ass 2 (2013) -- "5/10" The original was marred for me by the fact that it focused so fetish-like on "Hit Girl" who was partnered with her father, called "Big Daddy", She was wicked young then and it was kinda creepy, but otherwise a fun real-world super-hero action flick. A few years on and the sequel features "Hit Girl" as the star (because -- spoiler alert -- "Big Daddy" died at the end of the first one) and she's at least 15 now, which is a bit less creepy, though not totally out of the creepy woods. And then there's Kick-Ass, who's just an utterly awful superhero. Rather than being the cause of ass-kickings, he's primarily the target of them. At least until he teams up with Dr. Gravity, played by Donald Faison. John Leguiziamo plays against type as the driver/henchman for the super-villian "Motherfucker" (formerly "Red Mist") who is way over the top (funniest guy in the movie, played by Christopher Mintz-Plasse, who also played "Fogell" in Superbad). Leguiziamo says to him at one point: "Whoa, whoa, isn't that just a little bit incredibly racist?" The film totally takes the piss out of teenagers and millenials. There's a bit of a Mean Girls sub-plot which segues into Carrie and shades of MMA/Fight Club. I like that they put subtitles for non-English bits into little talk bubbles. The villains seem like they're a joke, but they are deadly serious and kill without compunction -- lot's of cops get killed in this one. And then there's a bit of Rocky 4 at the end, with Mother Russia vs. Hit Girl, which is almost a blow-by-blow remake of Drago vs. Balboa. I found it to be way too uneven and strange; not recommended. This is the End (2013) -- "3/10" This is a movie with a huge roster of modern-day, young, male comedy actors playing versions of themselves at a party in LA. It must be noted that Michael Cera plays way against type here: he's a coked-out Lothario. Jay Baruchel flies in to visit Seth Rogen and they end up at a party at James Franco's house. Spoiler alert: it's the apocalypse and Danny McBride, Craig Robinson, Jay Baruchel, James Franco, Seth Rogen and Jonah Hill are left in James Franco's house. Danny McBride is the #1 terrible house guest and he's voted out. Channing Tatum is good in a very brief cameo, only because you can't believe that he would actually do the role he did. Poor Aziz. "It's too late for you. You're already in the hole." The hole is a nice device for releasing most of the actors from the obligation of staying for the whole film. Once the boys realize what's going on, they try to do good deeds to get raptured and saved from the apocalypse. I love these guys but, man, is this script thin. I'm sure they had fun making this flick, but it's not really very good. At all. Not recommended. The Act of Killing (2012) -- "9/10" A series of interviews with the now-elderly gangsters who killed over a million people in Indonesia during the communist purges. They are still in power now and enjoy very nice lives. The director of this documentary asked them to tell their tale and reenact the killings, if possible. They were only too happy to do so, seeing absolutely nothing wrong with the history they helped create. In fact, they are annoyed that the children of the so-called communists that they had eradicated are now speaking out and "trying to change history", as one gangster put it. "This is the maintenance office, where I would always kill people [...] it was like we were killing ... happily." All of the people we meet seem to be utterly bereft of any deeper philosophy or morality. The people they killed are not moral beings, worthy of consideration. It's like asking them to feel sorry about having killed ants. The are completely bereft of shame. The director accompanies a few of them as they make their rounds, shaking down local (mostly Chinese) shop owners for protection money. The filming is utterly surreal. One of the guys is such a dandy, all he cares about is clothes. In another scene, the fatter one dresses up as a woman and the other two "interrogate" him, while dressed up as cowboys. Now they're cruising the streets in a bright yellow Volkswagen Thing. Pimpin' ain't easy. And they reenact scene after scene of torture and killing, justifying it all the way. The reenactments are super-low in quality. Utterly surreal. One features the big guy, once again dressed up as a showgirl, reenacting a decapitation while his friends cheer him on (there's one guy, always the same one, who seems regretful) . The makeup and effects are awful. No remorse, except maybe one of them, who seems to understand a bit more. There's also a scene at the end where the main narrator (Anwar Congo) also seems finally to be overwhelmed, but it's hardly redemptive, after all we've already seen. Another thinks international conventions shouldn't apply to him -- because he's a "winner". But he goes to ask "Americans killed all the Indians. No one's been punished for that. Punish them, too, then." Man's got a point. On the whole, though, they're just stupid monsters who barely understand any of what's going on. Their families, too, are clueless. Another guy describes his career pragmatically, pointing out that "when a businessman wants land where people are living, if he just pays for it, it's expensive. But we can solve his problem. Because people are terrified of us, when we show up, they say 'just take the land, pay what you want.'" And then he shows off his spoils and riches, proud of all that he has, despite the stultifying poverty all around him. And he seems borderline mentally handicapped. Surreal. And the people in the orange camouflage, the members of the Pancasila paramilitary, horrific and base to the last man, gleefully taking part in the re-filming of their finest hour, when they slaughtered communists indiscriminately. Just terrible, terrible, crude people, all seemingly without a sense of irony. And yet, amazingly accepted and still in charge after several decades. Were the extras there just for the cash? Or are they, too, so brainwashed to accept this reality as normal? Disturbing, but masterfully filmed and edited, with some truly lovely juxtapositions of beautiful scenery and colorfully dressed characters (the credits sequence, for example). Error Morris and Werner Herzog, legendary documentarians in their own right, are listed as co-producers. Highly recommended. Monsters University (2013) -- "5/10" Pixar continues its slow decline post-Disney-purchase. This film is formulaic in the extreme and sells a particularly toxic worldview to kids (and their parents, presumably). The two lead characters are jerks for whom we're supposed to root until they finally discover the error of their ways. Meanwhile, they are surrounded by competent, generous and nice characters who don't have to similarly struggle with gigantic egos and pathetic insecurities that warp the lives of everyone around them. But nobody cares about them. It was a pretty disappointing movie, actually. I feel the same way about this one as I did about Brave: "There are fewer funny flourishes than in other films and the stink of Disney is upon this one, as it’s more middle-of-the-road and less subversively funny or interesting for adults than other Pixar movies. It’s nice to look at, but don’t expect the humor of The Incredibles or the implicit social commentary of Wall-E." Shaolin (2011) -- "8/10" This is a martial epic about warring clans in what looks like late 19th-century or early 20th-century China (there are Gatling guns at one point). It is the tale of two generals and blood brothers, both warring with other clans and taking over cities and more-or-less sharing the spoils. Sensing betrayal, one preemptively betrays the other and barely escapes with his life, though his wife is injured and his daughter is fatally wounded, after which his wife leaves him. He joins the Shaolin monks and is taken in by a monk played by Jackie Chan -- who seriously shows up so late in the movie that's I'd forgotten he was even in it. He plays a supporting role as a cook and has a few choreographed scenes, but they're quite tame by his standards. The plot is relatively straightforward: monks are trying to help the poor and are beleaguered by greedy warlords and encroaching European would-be--colonialists. The former warlord's nemesis is his former lieutenant. The chastened monk whose eyes have been opened by Shaolin implores his protégé to stop pursuing more wealth and violence. The pleas fall on deaf ears because the lieutenant -- and now warlord -- is almost cartoonishly evil, right up until his quasi-redemption at the end. The monks hew to their ways, releasing and defending refugees, engaging in ass-kicking and sacrificing themselves where needed. The choreography ranges from relatively believable to off-the-hook, with a general disregard for the physical mass of human beings throughout. I don't care how good you are at martial arts, you still need leverage. The story was decent and the scenery and cinematography quite beautiful. Recommended. Identity Thief (2013) -- "5/10" This is a relatively uneven, darker comedy with Jason Bateman as a nice guy (surprise, surprise) whose identity is stolen by the "diabolical" Melissa McCarthy, a con-woman seemingly without scruples. As you can imagine, his unbelievable niceness rubs off on her and the Grinch finds a heart and things tend to work out and everyone lives happily ever after. It's a pretty uneven movie and McCarthy is more of an acquired taste -- I didn't find either of them to be particularly funny in the first half of the film, but I have a feeling that that was more due to the lackluster and generally mean-spirited script. It's a movie that doesn't really know where it wants to go, except perhaps to fill time with snippets of ideas until the final quarter or so, which finally picks a groove and sticks with it, even if it wasn't a particularly original one. Not really recommended. RED 2 (2013) -- "5/10" The gang's back together for a sequel to Red (which stands for Retired; extremely dangerous). Bruce Willis, Helen Mirren, John Malkovich, Mary-Louise Parker and Brian Cox are joined by Catherine Zeta-Jones, Byung-hun Lee and Anthony Hopkins in a zany plot that involves the old guard breaking in to the most secure buildings in the world, seemingly without effort. It's reasonably entertaining -- Helen Mirren is always a lot of fun -- but it's not as good as the first one. Not really recommended. Post Grad (2009) -- "2/10" An utterly execrable film starring Alexis Bledel, the insipid ditz from The Gilmore Girls. Things have not gotten any better in her career. Whilst zapping about, I stopped on this movie because it also has Michael Keaton, Jane Lynch and Carol Burnett but they had no hope of saving this formulaic movie about how a young lady graduates from a fancy college (presumably with crippling loans, especially for a family that is having trouble scraping $15,000 together at one point), finally gets her dream job -- and is seemingly the only employed adult in the household -- and then asks her Dad if it's OK to just throw it all away in order to chase her former boyfriend cross-country just to be with him. Utter crap. I only watched the last third with one eye while I was reading, but I figured I'd include a review as a warning to others. Not recommended. With extreme prejudice. The Heat (2013) -- "7/10" Melissa McCarthy and Sandra Bullock star in this buddy-cop movie. The plot is relatively straightforward. McCarthy plays Mullins, a rough-around-the-edges, Boston cop who holds her whole precinct in fear. Bullock plays Ashburn, an FBI agent with a lot of smarts but too much arrogance and a prickly personality that makes everyone around her hate her. Guess what? Bullock comes around and they make a great team. That is, however, neither here nor there. The dialogue is good and McCarthy has her best role yet. Bullock is good as well, but not the star, in my opinion. The supporting cast is alos good: Marlon Wayans as a fellow FBI officer, Dan Bakkedahl as an albino DEA agent, Jane Curtin as the Mullins matriarch, Michael Rappaport as Mullins's brother, in trouble with the local drug kingpin (what else would he play?) Not a lot of warrants or procedure and people's rights are flagrantly violated throughout, but it was an entertaining ride. Recommended. The Light Bulb Conspiracy (2010) -- "8/10" You can watch this one online at "The Light Bulb Conspiracy" . it's in English, French and German (with English subtitles). This is a one-hour documentary about planned obsolescence in the context of dwindling resources and energy and that it only works at all because the true costs of products, transportation, resources and so on are not actually factored in. We subsidize the present from the future. It includes some very interesting interviews, portions of which I've transcribed below. "We live in a Growth Society. Growth Society's logic is not only to grow to meet demand but to grow for the sake of growth, unbounded growth in production that is justified through the boundless growth in consumption. The three crucial factors are advertising, planned obsolescence and credit. [...] Anyone who thinks that infinite growth is consistent with a finite planet is either crazy or an economist. The problem is that now we've all become economists." "if happiness was dependent on our consumption level, we would be 100% content. We consume 26 times more than in Marx's time. But all studies show that people are not 20 times happier. For happiness is always subjective." "Critics of [the] de-growth [movement] fear that it will destroy the modern economy and take us straight back to the Stone Age. [...] To return to a society of sustainable development is not to go back to the Stone Age but to the 1960s. It is far from the Stone Age. Anti-Growth Society meets Ghandi's vision: The world is big enough to satisfy everyone's needs, but will always be too small to satisfy individual greed." The Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift (2006) -- "3/10" This was really just an utterly awful entry in the series, featuring neither Paul Walker nor Vin Diesel (spoiler alert: he showed up right at the end). There's really not much to say: it's a weak, weak entry in the series. The setting from the first couple of films is transported essentially unaltered to Japan. The culture of racing cars as well. The only noticeable difference is that the Japanese "drift" their cars while racing, which means that they handbrake-slide their cars absolutely everywhere they go, going through a lot of tires in the process. Seriously, there are a few times when people run to the cars after a race and you feel that they must be gagging from the burned-rubber smoke. There are no good characters and the Japanese are portrayed throughout as smirking, massively rich and all perfectly fluent in English. Avoid. Arthur (2011) -- "3/10" A promising cast -- Russell Brand, Helen Mirren, Greta Gerwig, Jennifer Ganer, Luiz Guzmán and Nick Nolte -- isn't enough to lift this remake of the Dudley Moore classic above mediocrity. Arthur is a billionaire who stands to lose his inherited fortune when his mother is finally fed up with his carefree lifestyle and makes him settle down and marry an arranged wife (Garner). Helen Mirren is a lot of fun, as usual. Russell Brand is decent, but a bit subdued for long sections. He's eminently believable as the drunken Arthur, struggling to get on the wagon. Not recommended, though. Warrior (2011) -- "10/10" This is a finely tuned movie about mixed martial arts fighting (MMA). It tells the story of two men, one whose life in the military ended less than honorably (Tom Hardy), another whose career as a physics teacher isn't making enough money to pay his bills -- or his mortgage (Joel Edgerton). They each started out as excellent wrestlers and later fighters, under the tutelage of their alcoholic and abusive father, played by Nick Nolte. The family drama is surprisingly nuanced and Hardy plays especially well, I thought. Frank Grillo was fantastic as just the best and most supportive coach ever. And the fight scenes were absolutely great, lighter on blood than I expected and very good on the mechanics, with a lot of covering up, a lot of knees and elbows and a huge emphasis on groundwork and locks. Tapping out was a common end to a fight, which is a welcome relief from all of those horribly choreographed boxing movies (I'm looking at you, Rocky). Highly recommended. Alpha House, season 1 -- 11 episodes (2013) -- "10/10" Gary Trudeau knocks this one out of the park. The artist and writer of the Doonesbury comic strip has turned his talents to script-writing and given us all a gift. The cast is superb and includes the incomparable John Goodman as Gil John Biggs (R-NC), who steals the show as usual, playing a former Tarheels basketball coach turned senator. Clark Johnson plays Robert Bettencourt (R-PA), a man with good taste in clothes and high-ranking seniority in the Senate. Matt Malloy plays Mormon senator Louis Laffer from Nevada (R) and Mark Consuelos rounds out the crew as Andy Guzman (R-FL). They all share Laffer's house in Washington when the Congress is in session. There are a lot of other great supporting characters, from Wanda Sykes and Cynthia Nixon as Senators to Amy Sedaris and Julie White as supportive wives and Alicia Sable as the "fabulous" Tammy, Gil John's assistant. Even Yara Martinez as multi-millionaire sponsor of Guzman's ambitions grows on you as her character becomes more nuanced and real. Trudeau takes the opportunity to paint his largely Republican cast with a more subtle brush than many of his detractors would likely expect, humanizing them in their struggle to hold onto a shred of principle in the tidal wave of crazy caused by the Tea Party. I enjoyed this series immensely and look forward to the next season. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] This could be a PSA for why fighting should be removed from hockey, though. It's that violent. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2902 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2902 Wed, 01 Jan 2014 17:47:33 +0100 -- "6/10" 2. "eXistenZ (1999)" <#eXistenZ> -- "9/10" 3. "Wake Up, Ron Burgundy: The Lost Movie (2004)" <#Burgundy> -- "6/10" 4. "The Wobblies (1979)" <#Wobblies> -- "8/10" 5. "The Last Mountain (2011)" <#Mountain> -- "8/10" 6. "Kill the Irishman (2011)" <#Kill> -- "8/10" 7. "XIII - The Conspiracy (2008)" <#XIII> -- "3/10" 8. "Defamation (2009)" <#Defamation> -- "9/10" 9. "Mark of Cain (2001)" <#Mark> -- "9/10" 10. "Entre les Murs (2008)" <#Entre> -- "9/10" 11. "Redemption (2013)" <#Redemption> -- "7/10" 12. "William S. Burroughs -- A Man Within (2010)" <#William> -- "5/10" 13. "I Am Bruce Lee (2012)" <#Bruce> -- "7/10" 14. "A Carol for Another Christmas (1964)" <#Carol> -- "8/10" 15. "A Film with Me in it (2008)" <#Film> -- "7/10" 16. "Police, Adjective (2009)" <#Police> -- "7/10" 17. "How to Make Money Selling Drugs (2012)" <#Drugs> -- "8/10" 18. "Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God (2012)" <#Mea> -- "5/10" 19. "The House I Live In (2012)" <#House> -- "10/10" 20. "Redbelt (2008)" <#Redbelt> -- "6/10" 21. "Pi (1998)" <#Pi> -- "8/10" 22. "Running Scared (2006)" <#Running> -- "8/10" Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story (2005) -- "6/10" This is a Steve Coogan vehicle which is kind of like a documentary about Steve Coogan making a movie of the essentially unfilmable post-modern novel Tristram Shandy, a humorous, rambling book that is describes as follows in "Wikipedia" : "ostensibly Tristram's narration of his life story. But it is one of the central jokes of the novel that he cannot explain anything simply, that he must make explanatory diversions to add context and colour to his tale, to the extent that Tristram's own birth is not even reached until Volume III." Coogan is backed, as usual, by Rob Brydon, who plays an excellent foil. It had the same vibe as The Trip, in which the film's flow is constantly interrupted by Coogan's caprices and ego trips -- in a way that is also similar to Sterne's original novel. Cameos by Dylan Moran, Stephen Fry and Gillian Anderson add some spice and humor. Kelly Macdonald plays Coogan's real-life wife, who is quite good and is just one of several people in the movie who is far more familiar with the novel than Coogan himself. Decent, but not recommended. eXistenZ (1999) -- "9/10" Jennifer Jason Leigh is a video-game designer; Jude Law is the man with whom she's on the run after an attack on her life. Ian Holm and Willem Dafoe play bit parts. In this near/alternate future, video games are played via a "bioport" found near the base of the spine. Organic-looking umbilicals attach the player's spine to the even more organic-looking controller, which looks like a squashed fetus. It's classic Cronenberg, written and directed. It's a very early movie about virtual reality and does a decent job without a lot of CGI. At one point, Leigh wanders around, checking sounds, echoes, smells (does the pump smell of gas?) and physics details (does kicked dust fall back to the ground believably?) to determine whether she's in reality or in a game. The most unbelievable part of the story, though, is that her employer allows her to carry around the only copy of the game on her biopad (the aforementioned organic-looking controller). Source control, anyone? The second most unbelievable part is that the game cost only $38 million to develop. Virtual reality is a foil that smooths over all plot holes, though, especially when the writer/director is known for bizarre plot twists. If something seems impossible to believe, it's more than likely an indication that you're already in the matrix. Together, they finally get into the game and start to play, going through the pre-programmed script -- or so they suspect. Overtones of Matrix and Inception here -- especially when they plug in different biopods in the game. Things get even more bizarre from there, with game worlds and reality mixing with standard video-game tropes (talking to NPCs, pausing the game, building weapons from game-world elements, rote and stilted dialogue, etc.). Then time seems to be folding in on itself and we're not sure even when the movie became virtual reality. Did we see the start of it? If so, when was that? Or was the start before the beginning of the movie and the whole film has been virtual so far? Are there fixed missions to accomplish (e.g. building a weapon and assassinating someone)? And are our heroes the only players in the game? She keeps calling him different names and he keeps doing stuff under some game-world compulsion maiking it hard to know which actions we can attribute to "him" and which belong to his game character. The script briefly opens up issues of free will, as well. The reptiles and amphibians, bones and gristle, guts and blood are very off-putting, but not unexpected for Cronenberg. There is also the nastily sexual manipulation of the gamepod as well as the way that bioports are accessed. Elements of addiction and misplaced emotions for non-reality as well as corporate espionage and capitalist overtones round out the smörgåsbord of themes. It's quite interesting stuff, especially considering it was made in 1999 before a lot of this in-game VR had really taken off. Highly recommended. Wake Up, Ron Burgundy: The Lost Movie (2004) -- "6/10" This is a 90-minute movie put together from cutting-room--floor clips from the movie Anchorman. Kevin Corrigan (Uncle Eddie) and Maya Rudolph are members of the Alarm Clock, a revolutionary team of bank robbers. Justin Long makes a cameo as station manager Fred Willard's son. Amy Poehler is a bank clerk with high standards. Vince Vaughn shows up as Wes Mantooth, an anchor from a rival network. Stephen Root is a replacement anchor when Burgundy and his news team go off on a mission. David Koechner as Champ Kind has an extended profession of his love for Ron. The plot is similar to the original film, mainly featuring a rivalry between Ron Burgundy and Veronica Corningstone (played by Christina Applegate, who again has some excellent scenes -- the one with the typewriter is pretty funny). It's not great but it's pretty good, especially considering that this is throwaway material from another movie. The Wobblies (1979) -- "8/10" This is a documentary about the International Workers of the World, or the IWW, a labor union that helped transform American society at the beginning of the 20th century. It tells of a rich history of labor activism that is hard to fathom when looking around at America at the beginning of the 21st century. They fought hard for rights that are being eroded by the same old enemy that they only partially defeated before. The documentary features a lot of interviews with former members (most quite old even at the time of filming) who recall tales of the early years, sing songs of support for their brothers and sisters and tell the forgotten history of labor agitation, state suppression, socialist tradition and a deep feeling of community that seems to have been all but lost. It's a good education, especially for younger Americans. I can heartily recommend it as an accompaniment to a thorough reading of the A People's History of the United States. The Last Mountain (2011) -- "8/10" This is a documentary film about mountaintop-removal mining in the Appalachians and West Virginia in particular. Robert Kennedy Jr. is an outspoken protester who says that "we do not have the right to destroy something that we cannot recreate." The film covers the environmental impact, including extremely suspicious cancer and brain-tumor clusters caused by pollution. It naturally progresses to an analysis of Massey Coal's business practices -- because pretty much all coal mining in Appalachia belongs to that company. Massey is strongly anti-union and the stark contrast between this documentary and the Wobblies documentary previously covered is evident. The Wobblies has well and truly been defeated in the pathetic remnants of American labor and manufacturing. A little while later, Kennedy has a sit-down with a representative of Massey Energy. Kennedy lays out his case that 60,000 violations of the Clean Water Act by Massey have resulted in no fines. None whatsoever. He compares it to robbing a bank, saying it's worse because kids die from the pollution. The rep responds that Massey keeps the lights on for Kennedy and his family. Are they all prepared to live without electricity? Well then shut the f@#k up and let the men do the work. This is the classic Colonel Jessup "you need me up on that wall" speech [1], but delivered by a slimy corporate toady who could not give two shits about children dying as long as he gets his bonus. He claims to be protecting jobs, but those are jobs only as he and his company define them. There are more eco-friendly, lower-profit ways to get energy out of those hills. And those ways would likely be more labor-intensive and involve more jobs. On the other hand, Kennedy's argument is more likely "we should stop coal-mining entirely if we want to have a prayer of preserving anything approaching a decent lifestyle for future generations." That is the mathematics of it. Kennedy should have interrupted him to restate the argument as "we think the loss of life in the region is the minimum amount of damage that can be done while still generating coal for vital energy and, of course, and absolutely not least, our massive profits." The discussion goes on to include coverage of non-violent protest as well as the insidious influence of money in the destruction. Since coal makes up more than half of all goods transported by rail in the U.S., the rail industry also lobbies heavily to keep things as they are. Since newer power plants are subject to more restrictive air-quality controls, coal companies just keep the old, dirty ones limping along, spewing their horror into the atmosphere. It's a sobering documentary. Recommended. Kill the Irishman (2011) -- "8/10" In the spirit of the day, this movie is based on a true story about a young, Irish, union leader named Danny Greene in Cleveland. He's played by a very charismatic Ray Stevenson and married to the adorable Linda Cardellini. Christopher Walken, Vincent D'Onofrio, Fionnula Flanagan and Val Kilmer have supporting roles. Greene's only tangentially involved in unions, though. It's more like he uses the unions to muscle the mafia and to slice out a piece of the pie for himself. His wife leaves him, he goes to jail for four years and he comes out and slowly gets back into his old life, almost immediately picking up a tremendously young-looking girl played by Ellie Ramsey. She's adorable, but the disparity between the gigantic, bear-like Greene and this baby-skinned, tiny girl is a bit jarring. It's a good thing for retro-American movies that there are so many dilapidated-looking neighborhoods to choose from: the locations were all very run-down middle-American authentic. He's an interesting character: a vegetarian-curious, fitness-crazed teetotaler taking on the whole mafia on his own. They take the whole Irish car-bomb thing a little too seriously, with cars blowing up right and left and right again. Things get more earnest when the East-coast mafia decides to shake a good deal harder to get this Irish flea off of its back. The "cleaner" they hire, Ray Ferrido, finally takes him out with an unavoidably well-placed bomb. Danny Greene is portrayed as one cool cat. Recommended. XIII - The Conspiracy (2008) -- "3/10" More by dumb luck than anything else, I managed to select another Val Kilmer movie, where he once again plays a cop. Stephen Dorff plays an assassin with -- you guessed it -- amnesia. The flashback scenes are a shaky-cam/quick-cut mess of grayscale that are tough to watch. But watch you must if you want to pick up clues as to what's going on. Just as a totally bizarre aside, but when Dorff and some old folks look up something online, they use Opera and they seem to be using it from a Linux box -- definitely just the kind of machine that two old folks in West Virginia would have. Sooooo...we have a made-for-TV Jason-Bourne copy on our hands, I guess. To drive the point home, Dorff looks at his hands several times after killing some goons as if to say: "did I do that?" Caterina Murino is a welcome addition, an Italian replacement for the German Franka Potente in the Bourne series. You know you've got some story problems when your characters end up talking for almost 15 minutes to clarify all of the plot points and get all of the alignments and affiliations lined up. In the second half (it's a three-hour mini-series), we segue into a 24/Homeland vibe. This is not a good thing. This might as well be a marketing campaign for torture. The main torturer, who seemed to be overarching Nazi-level cruel and evil? He turns out to be an OK guy who's just doing his job. Brutal torture of "enemy combatants" is just part of the job in the States. Puts my teeth on edge. If, however, you like torture and unquestioning loyalty to...whatever, this might be your cup of tea. For those people, I would recommend asking themselves how they would feel about a version of this garbage in Farsi. The production values are relatively high, but how much of this terror-attack-is-imminent crap do we really need in the States? Not recommended. At all. Defamation (2009) -- "9/10" This is a documentary about anti-Semitism and the degree to which it actually persists today. It is largely in Hebrew and partially in English. The director and narrator is an Israeli who sees references to the Holocaust (Shoah) and anti-Semitism in his newspapers every day. So he wants to investigate how these reports are created and possibly to meet and follow the lives of the people who are promulgating it. His journey takes him to the ADL (the Anti-defamation League) where they point him to cases of anti-Semitism. These cases are almost exclusively about taking time off from work. These are held up by the ADL as proof of anti-Semitism, but it's clear that the cases are nothing big. However, the major newspaper in Israel gets most of its news about attacks and increasing hatred directly from the ADL. In another segment, the director travels with a school class to Poland, where they are to visit Holocaust sites. Their level of indoctrination is so high that some girls cannot even understand a basic interaction with some old men they meet. They have been programmed to see hatred everywhere, regardless of its actual presence. Interviews with students in Israel are similarly sobering. The children and teenagers are just being what they are: vessels for information, false or not. But their easy lies as they cement false memories that will guide their worldview for life is tough to watch. The teenage trip is an exercise in indoctrination worthy of any cult. The most bizarre part is at the end, where they pose in a typical class portrait under the entry gate to Auschwitz, under the "Arbeit macht frei" sign, all in their white hoodies and all saying "Auschwitz" with big grins on their faces. No sense of irony at all. Soon after, they show the students finally crying, after initially having worried that they weren't "really feeling it". Not to worry, the indoctrination is complete as they now feel emotionally connected to crimes committed over 60 years ago, ready to let the lamp of these emotions light the way to a lifetime of ignorance. They speak as if these events had physically happened to them...or could, at any moment. Interestingly, it's the girls who are bawling; the boys are stoic, and presumably still worried that they aren't showing proper emotion for the situation. Where he finally does encounter anti-Semitism is in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, where interviews with people in the street reveal a startling level of misinformation -- several of the people were convinced that the Protocols of the Elders of Zion was a history book (one guy said it was written in 1890 and was about how Jews used TV to control people). And then he switches back to traveling with Abe Foxman (president of the ADL) as he visits dignitaries around the world. There is an interesting interview with two older Americans that succinctly shows what the training we saw earlier in the teenagers looks like after steeping for 50 years. The misinformation of the older, New York Jews is just as bad as that of the Crown Heights blacks. And then there's good old Norman Finkelstein: "There's a kind of pathological narcissism, navel contemplation. When you are the richest, wealthiest, most successful ethnic group in the United States, you've got the world on a platter and you sit around and you're talking about anti-Semitism. It's just kind of shameful, I think." And good old Uri Avnery: "Everybody is scared of anti-Semitism because of its history and Jews have always been terrified. In America, where Jews are so strong and influential, they are scared of their own shadows. Every moment, behind every tree, an anti-Semite hides. Bullshit! There is nothing like that. Anti-Arabs, anti-Muslims, anti-Black, anti whatever you like, yes. Anti-Semites? You'd need a magnifying glass to find them. And there are people who are walking around with this magnifying glass, like Sherlock Holmes, to find anti-Semites." And there is extensive coverage of Mearsheimer and Walt as well as David Hirsch from England who is called out as being an anti-Semite at an academic conference in Israel when he's considered a right-wing Jew-lover in England. When told that Mearsheimer and Walt think that the ADL is damaging to Israel and the U.S., Foxman says, "that's not their god-damned business. Who the hell asked them to decide what's good for you? Who are they, who are they, to come to a judgment what will provide safety and security for you? C'mon! That's not their business." Again, the irony was entirely lost on him. An interview with an Israeli visitor at Auschwitz was also quite good, echoing parts of Finkelstein's earlier tirade that Israelis are constantly invoking Nazism and calling one another Nazis and comparing everything bad to Auschwitz (Finkelstein's examples came from his family, as he was growing up): "We live with the feeling that death is always with us. Whether that feeling is good or not, I don't know. It is always hanging over us, and here in Auschwitz you see how it became an industry, an industry of death. The Germans started it all, and we are perpetuating it. I thought about it a lot, whether this March of the Living is good or bad, this death industry...We perpetuate death, and that's why we will never become a normal people: because we emphasize death and what happened. We have to remember, no doubt, but we live too much in it and it's preventing us from being a normal people." And, finally, one of the schoolgirls dictates the lesson she learned in Auschwitz: "Girl:When you see it you say, 'I want to kill the people who did this!' Actually, no, because even if I become more racist, there will still be someone more racist than me, and it will never end. Interviewer: Who would you like to kill? Girl:Who would I like to kill? All of them... Interviewer: Who is all of them? Girl: The Nazis, our enemies who did this. Interviewer: But you know that they are dead... Girl: Yes, but they have heirs, they may be different but they're there." Highly recommended. Mark of Cain (2001) -- "9/10" This is a documentary about Russian penitentiaries, discussing conditions there and how the prisoners interact. Tattoos in this system have meaning (or used to) and allow for quick assessments of new prisoners, all without a word being spoken. Because of this, many of the interviews are with shirtless men, even those with former prisoners. The prisons look very tough, although malnutrition and boredom seems to be more of a problem than solitary confinement. Toward the end of the film, we see the tiny, single-seat cells that serve as solitary cells all lined up in a wall. They kind of look like outhouses. And then there is the deep pit that qualifies as "outside time", where prisoners pace back and forth with no direct sunlight, meters below ground. In discussions of "the Black Swan", one of the meanest prisons, advocates for prison reform say that the prison is worse now than it was under Stalin. They tell of super-TB that cannot be cured with antibiotics raging through the over-crowded prisons. The prisoners are almost uniformly thin and sickly. And here we get back to the home-made tattoos, made with home-made machines and burned-up boot soles for a deep black color and mixed with urine to make ink. Home-made tattoos and shared needles lead to TB spreading like wildfire. The prisoners say that "it was better to be in prison under the Communists. They gave sane prison terms and the laws made sense." And the focus on honor has changed: tattoos mean nothing anymore because anyone can get any tattoo with enough money. There is a generation gap between the old-guard "Zeks" and the new prisoners, mostly younger guys who've grown up without communism and responsibility (their words). And drugs are apparently a much larger problem than they used to be. The visit to a woman's prison is also interesting. There they interview a former national-team skier who took up drugs after an horrific accident. She's covered in self-inflicted tattoos that designate her as an "addict" (the genie of addiction coming out of a bottle, for example). They discuss sexual life in prison much more openly than the men, who only discussed the "downcast" (bottoms, presumably). The film is in Russian with English subtitles. At 73 minutes, it's quite short but positively packed with information. I'd read about it after watching "Eastern Promises", a Cronenberg film starring Viggo Mortenson. The interviews are deeply philosophical. Highly recommended. Entre les Murs (2008) -- "9/10" This is an utterly brilliant look at teaching a class of 14- and 15-year--olds in a tough Parisian neighborhood. The teacher is François Bégaudeau and he plays brilliantly, trying like hell to teach kids that think they already know everything and are often actively hostile to anyone who purports to know more than they. They interrupt so much that he is quickly off of the standard course material and the class turns into more of a therapy session. The kids then chastise him for prying into their lives, but they're the ones who won't shut up about themselves in the first place. If they were that concerned, they could just stick to the non-invasive standard material. Their questions come hard and fast, often feeling more like a classroom-full of nine-year--olds [2] than like teenagers who'd had some educational experience. They ask interesting questions sometimes, like why they need to learn the imperfect subjunctive when no one ever uses it. It's hard to tell them that if they don't learn it, they will limit themselves to a local maximum in their immediate neighborhood and that the world will prey on them indiscriminately. To learn how to defeat the masters of the world, you must first learn their ways, but without losing the essence that makes you different from them. It's a difficult balancing act and one that is all the more difficult to teach to kids who suspect your every move and who have been betrayed many times before. In balance to this is the staff meeting, which depicts the highly educated teachers using the worldly wisdom they've acquired to argue about the price of a cup of coffee in the staff room. The French school system is amazing, though. There are student representatives present during the evaluation of the other students. Naturally, they were disrespectful and sniggering throughout, but they were there. And the teacher is unbelievably patient -- until he loses it and tells the two class representatives, in front of the class, that they were behaving like "two skanks" (pétasses). Though striking back may have felt good, it led to trouble for him. He went to confront the girls who reported him and asked what they meant to accomplish. Punishment, they responded. Short-sighted, petty punishment. Of course, they're stupid people. Worse, stupid teenagers. They didn't see beyond the immediate gratification, that they might easily lose a teacher who is far less bad than all the others. People suck. Young people suck far worse. Their triumphant looks when you see one of their own going -- as they see it -- toe to toe with the teacher (as Carl does in one scene), is sad. They have no understanding for the big picture whatsoever. In this, they are no different than most. They have no understanding of consequences, that if the risk is big, then they should shut their mouthes and be wary of the consequences. Instead, they think that someone (like Suleymane) who has a lot to lose if he falls out of the system should therefore never be punished for bad behavior. I admit, it's a form of logic, but not a fair or just one. On the other hand, when expulsion is almost incontrovertibly linked with much direr consequences, the temptation to not judge them for their youthful foolishness is great. Their ill-founded superiority could drive one to drink, though. Heavily. Just as you'd given up hope, in an end-of-the-year interview, one girl -- Esmerelda -- after initially saying she'd learned nothing (of course), cops to having read Plato's The Republic in her free time. This, of course, ignites, once again, a spark of hope. Totally worth the two hours of reading subtitles. Recommended. Redemption (2013) -- "7/10" Jason Statham stars as a down-on-his-luck SAS agent with a heart of gold who gets his life back together after stumbling into a posh London apartment that has been abandoned for the summer by its owner. He makes himself at home and, after an initial further descent into booze, pulls himself together, starts working out again and gets a real job with a Chinese restaurant. After seeing how he handles himself with some rough guys, the Chinese gang hires him to drive for them -- and to keep his mouth shut. Flush with cash, he continues to give to the church mission that provided him with so much support during his dark days. Things get a good deal more complicated as the nun who is trying to save him has a crisis of conscience herself. But they all straighten up and fly right and he gets ready for his messianic mission to right all wrongs and risk his life and newfound wealth doing it. The movie gets pretty dark, actually, where Joey positively hurls himself into a plummeting redemption. He explains it by saying that "when I'm sober, when I'm healthy, I hurt people. I drink to weaken the machine they made." It's a decent ending, not at all what the genre would lead you to expect. And the best part? They did it all without shaky cams and crazily loud firefights. William S. Burroughs -- A Man Within (2010) -- "5/10" This is a documentary about a truly unique American author, member of the Beat Generation and inventor of much of the terminology that came to define cyberspace (along with, arguably, Philip K. Dick and William Gibson). He was a prodigious consumer of drugs and an early out-of-the-closet gay man in an extremely bigoted America. He was a rebel and conceded nothing in either his life or his work. A lot of his writing is...less accessible. Even his best friends can't find anything uncomplicated to say about him. He was a huge dope fiend (heroin) and, like his buddy Hunter S. Thompson, an absolute gun nut. A decent documentary, but nothing to write home about. Not recommended. I Am Bruce Lee (2012) -- "7/10" This is a documentary that incorporates a lot of interviews with Bruce Lee fans as well as people who knew him. It tells the by-now familiar story of Bruce Lee, from his trek from China to the U.S and back to China. He was a really cool guy, admired by people from all walks of life. Bruce's emphasis on not getting his ass kicked was what led him to Ip Man, Wing Chun and finally to developing Jeet Kune Do. There is a surprising and almost inordinate emphasis on his sexiness. "He was like a coiled cobra. Even in conversation, you could feel his explosive power." It's quite well-done, actually, well worth watching if you're either a fan or always wondered what the big deal was. I was not aware that Bruce Lee once fought Boom Boom Mancini (he won) or that Ed O'Neill is either a martial artist (Ji Jitsu) or a fan of Bruce Lee. Kobe Bryant is featured heavily and I learned that he speaks Italian. There is an interesting discussion of just how good he would be against the best fighters today. Many fighters today have benefited from having trained using his style and they're much bigger and equally fast, so no, he probably couldn't kick the ass of any given attacker. Still, they call him the father of MMA, which I don't think is 100% accurate since JKD is a style of no style -- and no rules. The documentary goes into detail about his push back against classical styles, styles that taught rote and historical moves rather than maximum efficiency and optimization of the human body. I still like the interviews with him the best: he was very charismatic and described his philosophy well. He was much more of a renaissance man, actually, tuning everything at once to create a person worth being. A Carol for Another Christmas (1964) -- "8/10" This film was written as an alternative to the Christmas Carol by Rod Serling, who would go on to write the Twilight Zone TV shows. It stars Ben Gazzara and Sterling Hayden, but also has Peter Sellers, Robert Shaw and Britt Ekland. It's a very interesting retelling that is more modern and more appropriate -- even though it's already 50 years old. Instead of showing the effects that the rich have on their immediate neighbors (like the original), it shows the global impact of the rich. It starts off as a rehashing of a discussion between Fred and Uncle Dan (Daniel Grudge). Dan is a staunch libertarian and anti-communist who's an unbelievably ignorant asshole who would fit right in with American political discourse today. He's stupid, shallow and powerful, so he gets to be right, if only in his mind. Fred is the socially liberal and politically and historically aware college professor with a modicum of foresight. It's a very good presentation of the two sides of the argument (such as they are) that was aired without commercials and sponsored by the Xerox Corporation back in the 60s. It's interesting how they discuss isolationism as if that were at all the American intent for the last century. Profiteering was more the philosophy rather than true isolationism. The Ghost of Christmas Past takes Grudge back to Hiroshima, where he was stationed during the war, where he was confronted with the horror of it -- and utterly failed to comprehend it. It takes a special kind of monster to stand in the middle of a freshly bombed Hiroshima -- and to justify it. The Ghost of Christmas Present pigs out while he shows Grudge displaced persons. Grudge yells at him that he can't eat while they're there. But that's what he himself does every day -- what, in fact, we all do. Out of sight; out of mind. The Ghost of Christmas Future presents a dystopic post-nuclear--war world populated only by surviving egocentrists, led by their king, the King of Me: Peter Sellers. His speech is a tongue-in-cheek refutation of the Randian philosophy: "Now then, [the bleeding hearts] don't come right out and say that they want to take us over -- they're far too clever for that. But that's what they want. They wanna take over us individual Me's. And if we let them seep in here from down-yonder and cross-river, if we let these do-gooders, these bleeding hearts, propagate their insidious doctrine of involvement among us, then my dear friends, my beloved Me's, we's in trouble. Deep, deep trouble. Because we have now reached a pure state of civilization. The world of the ultimate Me is finally within our grasp. A world where only the strong will exist, where only the powerful will love, where finally the word "we" will be stamped out and will become "I" forever! We are each the wise, we are each the strong, and we are each the individual Me's!" He continues, "And now my friends, next on the agenda, we must go out and dispose of those people from down-yonder and cross-river who want to come in here and "talk". We must dispose of them, you understand?! [...] We must carry our glorious philosophy through to its glorious culmination! So that the end, with enterprise and determination, the world and everything in it will belong to one individual Me!" The crowd and scene reminded me of the Idiocracy and the Imperial Me reminded me of President Camacho. I wonder how much Mike Judge cribbed from this film? When the crowd laughs at Charles during his uplifting (but social) speech, I couldn't help thinking the signature line from the movie, "he talks like a fag and his shit's all retarded." In fact, that would be the problem with showing this type of Christmas show these days: the language -- even at a distance of only 50 years -- is too high-brow and complex for the modern TV-viewing audience. It's a very interesting discussion of the kind that doesn't seem to take place in public American discourse anymore. The basic issues have not changed one iota, despite our supposed advanced state of technology. Hat tip to Chuck Mertz of This is Hell for pointing it out. I would love to have watched this and thought "interesting, but it applies to a past version of society, not ours". It's sad to have to think that absolutely nothing has changed in 50 years. A Film with Me in it (2008) -- "7/10" A film with Dylan Moran in it, who's just a brilliantly funny, Irish, stand-up comedian and actor. He plays Pierce, self-describes as follows (in an AA meeting): "My name's Pierce. I'm a write-stroke-director...and a waiter. Right? [sits down] "[stands back up] And, um, I have, in the past, as I'm sure some of you have, eh, been drinking ... certainly drinking, a lot of -- no getting away -- and, uh, I thought, this is too much, this is...too many drinks at the same -- in the same time...frame. And, uh, I ... alcohol is been part of that. Certainly in the pub. And I have thought on occasion that this is the kind of thing an alcoholic does. [sits back down]" The movie's about Pierce and his friend Mark, both sad-sacks with no prospects. Mark lives in an apartment that's falling apart, he can't pay the rent and his oh-so-patient girlfriend is leaving him. The lack in repairs leads to tragedy -- several times within minutes. It's dark comedy and quite nicely filmed. As befits a dark comedy, things only get absurdly worse and out of control. And Moran seems to be a fan of movies that are about themselves -- at the top of this article is a review of Tristram Shandy, in which he also played, that had a very similar vibe to it. When Mark describes the bizarre happenings of the last few minutes, Moran says "that's a crap plot. It's farce. No one does that nowadays." Belied, of course, by the fact that that is exactly what they are doing in their own movie. Police, Adjective (2009) -- "7/10" This is a Romanian film about a young police officer pursuing a case of petty drug-use by teenagers in a small city in Romania. The film depicts his rather boring and seemingly meaningless life in which he painstakingly follows petty suspects for crimes that will probably not even be crimes in a few years. He questions the ethics of bringing in such young people for victimless crimes that will cost them years of their lives in jail. The policeman's life is far from glamorous: he works all the time, spends long hours staked out in the cold, eats pathetic soups for his meals, eats and drinks alone and seems to live a very lackluster life, somehow in the past. In his office, he has an old CRT; at home, his wife has a nice LCD computer. He is constantly checking his ancient Nokia telephone. In their discussion of the meaning of song lyrics, his interpretation is almost stiflingly literal whereas hers is much more philosophical and refined, even sophisticated. This is reinforced further in another conversation with his incongruously pretty wife, in which she corrects his grammar in a report, telling him in meticulous detail about the exact tense and usage. He expresses interest and wonders who comes up with new rules like this, intimating that this must be a very tedious job. The irony escapes him. There are interesting little reinforcements of this difference between Cristi (the cop) and the rest of the world. When he talks to the secretary, she offers him chocolate -- a sinfully sweet delight -- he pauses longer than necessary, as if not even comprehending the concept, before politely refusing. The tedium is fascinating because we have such bizarre notions of how policemen operate in foreign, less advantaged countries, such as those of the former Eastern Bloc. Instead of busting down doors, Stasi-style, they work like all other boring, good cops: slowly, within the system, trying to make ends meet, picking up fag-ends in the street to see if they're hash. Boring; by the book. Watching him deal with the recalcitrant functionaries at his office was eerily reminiscent of working with people at any larger company. There is a great, lengthy, single-shot meeting with the precinct captain -- who is also a complex, philosophically intellectual guy -- in which the captain tries to help Cristi resolve his moral quandary by having him look up and read aloud the definitions for "conscience", "law", "moral" and, finally, "police". As expected, there is no great revelation. Instead, the film shows what we should already know: life is full of moral quandaries. We solve them in less spectacular ways, choosing ourselves over others, and continue. Perhaps this is the beginning of a longer slide for Cristi. Perhaps not. The pace is glacial, but it paints an appropriate picture, showing without saying. It's hard to imagine to whom I'd recommend it, though, as it's a glacially paced film about petty crime and the ethics of the drug war (i.e. making the common citizen a criminal) in Romania. Saw it in Romanian with English subtitles. How to Make Money Selling Drugs (2012) -- "8/10" This is a documentary about the drug trade in the United States, depicted as a kind of video game where you keep leveling up to the next level, from street hustler to kingpin to head of an international cartel. It includes a lot of interviews with former and current drug dealers at all levels as well as researchers and scholars. David Simon has some very good insights, as you can well imagine. The sentencing disparity between whites and blacks is discussed as well as the sheer brutality of the "just say no" program, which Simon compares to telling people to just say no to working at the only factory offering work in your home town. He calls it one America utterly failing to understand how the other part of America lives. And not caring. As Simon says, "we hadn't given the slightest bit of thought as to what these people should be saying yes to. And we still haven't." The documentary also addresses how the asset-forfeiture laws seizes billions of dollars of assets, all without an arrest, a warrant or anything legal. Police departments are encouraged to go out scavenging for vehicles and equipment, making up excuses to just seize what they need. Not only that, but the incentives are extraordinarily negative, leading to cops making useless busts just to build up statistics for which they will either receive money from the federal government or that they will directly seize. The increase of no-knock, military-style raids -- it's just inconceivable that these are legal -- is even more terrifying. The natural consequence is that cops no longer really know how to do actual police work because they're only there to do S.W.A.T. raids. Murders, rapes and other actual crimes remain uninvestigated. Woody Harrelson, Susan Sarandon and Arianna Huffington introduce the segment that discusses the industries that profit massively from the drug war, like the prison lobbies, which will happily fill the coffers of any politician with a tough-on-drugs attitude. And next up is Chris Rock, telling us that the government "doesn't give a fuck about your safety. The government: they don't want you to use your drugs; they want you to use their drugs." This introduces the segment of how big pharma and its bought-and-paid-for politicians decide which drugs are legal and which are not. Marshall Mathers (Eminem) discusses his addiction to Vicodin and other prescription drugs. Recommended. Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God (2012) -- "5/10" This is a documentary about child-molestation in the Chatholic Church, with a specific emphasis and interviews with the victims of the 1970s molestations by Father Murphy in Wisconsin. He was a sick, sick man but unfortunately, this material has been quite thoroughly covered so the shock value is somewhat gone. The documentary does not acknowledge this, though, and tries to stretch the material too far. It does go into the history of the church's handling of criminals in its midst, which is quite interesting, although not particularly revealing or groundbreaking. It's too thin to recommend. The House I Live In (2012) -- "10/10" This is a more down-on-the-streets complement to the previous documentary How to Make Money Selling Drugs. It's a discussion of the drug war and its effects on poor communities, which literally have no other opportunities. They're not even trying to get rich, necessarily. As one young small-time drug dealer puts it, "basically it's just about survival." The war on drugs is invisible to a large part of the population -- one class -- and the cops and the lower classes are left to fight it out, senselessly. As one cop puts it "[e]verybody involved just hates what's going on." The documentary covers the sheer short-sightedness of the drug war and the utter hopelessness that it creates for whole generations and large swaths of the population. It has already caused enough damage and threatens to tear the fabric of American society irreparably asunder -- assuming that it has not already done so. David Simon returns in this documentary, "The drug war created an environment in which [professionalism and craft] were not rewarded. A drug arrest does not require anything other than getting out of your radio car and jacking people up against the side of a liquor store. Probable cause? Are you kidding?" Cops describe how they work geographically, sweeping up people in a region, because they need to make arrests. Why? Money. Overtime. "The problem is, is that that cop that made that cheap drug arrest, he's gonna get paid. He's gonna get the hours of overtime for taking the drugs down to E.C.U. He's gonna get paid for processing the prisoner down to central booking. He's gonna get paid for sitting back at his desk and writing the paperwork for a couple of hours. And he's gonna do that 40, 50, 60 times a month, so that his base pay might end up being only half of what he's paid as a police officer." Now this is an interesting tie-in to the Romanian movie I just watched before. In that one, a cop had a moral quandary about sending kids to jail for drugs. He decided, in the end, to make the arrests based on the letter of the law -- and to protect his job. In this documentary, we see how the low-level soldiers in the drug war are just looking out for number one, piling up overtime, but at the same time doing so by unfairly targeting and imprisoning the poor and the downtrodden. I got mine, Jack. David Simon is again very eloquent, as he was in How to Make Money Selling Drugs. Cops who make dozens of shitty and unfair drug arrests look better on paper than cops making single arrests for real crimes. Drug cops get promoted...and end up approving the promotions for the next round of sergeants. Guess who gets promoted? It's a vicious cycle. "Compare that guy to the one guy doing police work, solving a murder, a rape, a robbery, a burglary. If he gets lucky, he makes one arrest for the month. He gets one slip signed. And, at the end of the month, when they look and they see officer A, he made 60 arrests. Officer B, he made one arrest. Who do you think they make the sergeant? In a city like Baltimore, where I'm from, our percentage of arrests for murder, for rape and robbery, are half of what they once were. [3] Our drug-arrest stats are twice of what they once were. It makes the city unlivable. It makes a police department where nobody can solve a fuckin' crime." Cops are not all bad, but they are human and they can fool themselves into believing that what they're doing is right just because it's legal. They may have initial qualms about simply seizing vehicles for themselves or for seizing money and using it to buy themselves and their departments new equipment, but it quickly passes as the tedium of repetition teaches them that this is the new normal. This is not to excuse them, but to try to explain how these seemingly fascist and lawless practices can become so prevalent among those ostensibly charged with upholding the law. No discussion of the drug war is complete without a discussion of the disparity in sentencing laws, which are clearly designed to incarcerate people of particular classes and races. In the early 20th century, laws against opium were designed to capture Chinese (even though opium was used by everyone, including affluent and middle-class whites), and now laws against crack are used to capture blacks. Whites use crack just as much as blacks. In fact, usage statistics show that 13% of crack users are black, just like 13% of the U.S. population is black. Then why are over 90% of the people arrested for crack possession black? Explain that while at the same time maintaining that the U.S. is a post-racist society. On we go to an examination of why in God's name we would continue to do things this way when it causes so much suffering. In explanation, the documentary's next stop is a prison-industry trade show. Oh, and David Simon is back with another eloquent summary, "You know, a funny thing happened on the way to the 21st century, which is that we shrugged off so much of our manufacturing base, so much of our need for organized labor, for a legitimate union wage, for union benefits, for the types of jobs in which you could raise a family and be a meaningful citizen. We got rid of so much of that that oops...we marginalized a lot of white people. And lo and behold, when they are marginalized, when they are denied meaning, when they're denied meaningful work, they become drug addicts too. And they become involved in the methamphetamine trade and they start turning themselves over to the underground economies that are the only ones there to accept them. Capitalism is fairly color-blind in the end. Our economic engine, when it doesn't need somebody, it doesn't need somebody and it doesn't give a damn who you are. White people found it out a little later than black folk, but they found it out." Another guy puts it more pithily: "The way to take a problem and make it a huge problem is, first, you ask the wrong question and then you feed us the wrong answer." Another very good documentary. Highly recommended for all Americans. Redbelt (2008) -- "6/10" This is a martial arts film starring Chiwetel Ejiofor (most recently lauded for his lead role in 12 Years a Slave) as a ji jitsu instructor. The "professor", the current holder of the red belt is played by Dan Inosanto, who teaches JKD in real life. I saw Ricky Jay, Tim Allen and Joe Mantegna so far, which makes this a more famous cast than I expected for a movie I'd never even heard of. It's written and directed by David Mamet, which explains the twists and turns, but does not explain the at-times quite stilted and confusing dialogue. The bar-fight scene was good: very realistic and shot with wide frames so you can see what's going on. The final fight was much more chopped up, and the ending was very strange. It was hard to understand why they were all leaving him alone, like he was some sort of avenging samurai, a force of nature with which not even the gangsters were willing to fool. I grant that Mamet made a different ending, but this wasn't just loose ends that could be easily tied together by a viewer but whole swathes of cloth whose re-raveling requires quite a bit more work. Pi (1998) -- "8/10" This is a Darren Aronofsky film about a mathematician/savant named Max working in the stock market and trying to unlock the mysteries of the universe by detecting the patterns buried in the mathematics of existence. Early in the film, he encounters a talkative guy in a diner who asks him about the Kabbalah and I was immediately reminded of Eco's Foucault's Pendulum which also dealt with extracting meaning from patterns that may or may not exist. The black and white filming as well as the raw print quality reminded me a bit of Lynch's Eraserhead. Max has a very Gilliam-esque machine named Euclid into which he types his daily assumptions to generate the next day's stock predictions. The machine starts to misbehave, supposedly. It's hard to tell what's real, though, since Max also gets utterly violent reality-altering headaches the ad-hoc treatments for which he also meticulously documents in his daily journal. The film is told partly in his conversations with his odd, old professor played brilliantly, as always, by Mark Margolis (look him up; you'll recognize him). His life is filled with jarring noise -- the shrill noise of his headaches is truly terrifying, the phone is jarring, his attractive neighbor can be heard entertaining next door. It's got a cool techno soundtrack and a cool overall style. It's not for everyone, but I thoroughly enjoyed it. Said enjoyment is maybe not unassociated with my having a current obsession with completing a jigsaw puzzle that is 1/3 blue sky -- 500 pieces all of nearly the same color. Running Scared (2006) -- "8/10" This is a modern, small-scale action movie starring the late Paul Walker (of Fast and Furious fame) in the role of a low-level thug but with a son and wife. It's directed with slow-motion scenes reminiscent of Guy Ritchie. It's a joy ride through the criminal underworld as a little kid who steals a hot gun is chased by Walker's character, trying to get the gun back. Things take a seriously unexpected turn, though: there is a whole extra fascinating sub-plot stuck in there, as if the writer couldn't figure out which of two movies he wanted to make. Scratch that, make it three movies. It's quite a rollicking story and well worth the trouble if you're looking for a good crime story. Start to finish, a wicked fun movie. Cool credits. Recommended. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] Colonel Jessup is the Jack Nicholson character from the movie A Few Good Men. [1] One part totally reminded me of having spent a week of my summer with a very inquisitive nine-year--old from New Jersey, with whom I went down several very deep vocabulary rabbit-holes before we once again saw the light of day and picked up the thread we'd lost half-an-hour before. [1] In fairness, it should be noted that these figures, even if accurate (they may just have been chosen for effect) should still be adjusted for the actual drop in crime. Unfortunately, arrest rates are one important way of determining to what degree homicide has dropped. Is it possible that the U.S. thinks its homicide rate is dropping because police departments just aren't pursuing those cases, preferring instead to pursue more lucrative drug cases? Especially when drug dealers tend to have tons of assets that the department and officers can just seize without a warrant or any justification? ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2897 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2897 Fri, 27 Dec 2013 11:17:21 +0100 -- "7/10" 2. "World War Z (2013)" <#World> -- "7/10" 3. "Hesher (2010)" <#Hesher> -- "9/10" 4. "Sleep Dealer (2008)" <#Sleep> -- "7/10" 5. "Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures (2001)" <#Stanley> -- "8/10" 6. "Looper (2012)" <#Looper> -- "7/10" 7. "Checkpoint: Everyday Life in Palestine (2003)" <#Checkpoint> -- 7/10 8. "Human Resources (2011)" <#Human> -- 8/10 9. "Oblivion (2013)" <#Oblivion> -- "8/10" 10. "Gift -- Jane's Addiction (1993)" <#Gift> -- "4/10" 11. "Nothing like the Holidays (2008)" <#Nothing> -- "6/10" 12. "Garden State (2004)" <#Garden> -- "7/10" 13. "Limitless (2011)" <#Limitless> -- "7/10" 14. "Pacific Rim (2013)" <#Pacific> -- "9/10" 15. "The Central Park Five (2013)" <#Central> -- "8/10" 16. "Ghost in the Shell (1995)" <#Ghost> -- "9/10" 17. "The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor (2008)" <#Mummy> -- "6/10" 18. "The Incredible Burt Wonderstone (2013)" <#Burt> -- "7/10" 19. "Elysium (2013)" <#Elysium> -- "5/10" 20. "Rollerball (1975)" <#Rollerball> -- "6/10" 21. "The Animatrix (2003)" <#Animatrix> -- "9/10" 22. "Old School (2003)" <#Old> -- "8/10" 23. "Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998)" <#Fear> -- "9/10" 24. "EuroTrip (2004)" <#EuroTrip> -- "8/10" 25. "Idiocracy (2006)" <#Idiocracy> -- "8/10" 26. "13 Assassins (2010)" <#13> -- "8/10" 27. "Fuel (2008)" <#Fuel> -- "4/10" 28. "Herb & Dorothy (2008)" <#Herb> -- "7/10" 29. "Jason Becker -- Not Dead Yet (2012)" <#Jason> -- "7/10" 30. "Superpower (2008)" <#Superpower> -- "6/10" 31. "The World's End (2013)" <#End> -- "7/10" 32. "D.L. Hughley: The Endangered List (2012)" <#D> -- "5/10" 33. "Malcolm X (1972)" <#Malcolm> -- "9/10" 34. "Taxi to the Dark Side (2007)" <#Taxi> -- "8/10" Rampart (2011) -- "7/10" Woody Harrelson oozes menace as a cop in the Rampart department in Los Angeles. This department is embroiled in, as department lawyer Sigourney Weaver calls it, "a shitstorm". Harrison smokes where he's not supposed to (which is pretty much everywhere in LA), goes out drinking seemingly every weeknight and hooks up on a work night -- but only after being turned down by both sisters he lives with, with whom he's had a kid each. To top it all off, he listens to/is steeped in right-wing talk radio day and night. There was decent writing, especially in the exchanges between Harrelson and Steve Buscemi (as the DA). For example, Harrelson at one point ripostes "The law must occasionally accommodate the extraordinary vicissitudes of justice -- Judge D.T. Eagleton, 1946". It's nicely delivered and very convincing but for two problems: (1) he's using it to defend his right as a cop to beat civilians nearly to death and (2) he'd already previously explained to a rookie that he liked to make up convincing-sounding court cases to make get his opponents on the back foot. In a meeting with lawyers, he explains that he wants to stay on the force "[b]ecause I'm a dutiful hard-charging motherfucker and I want to explicate the LAPD's somewhat hyperbolized [sic] misdeeds with true panache regardless of my alleged transgressions." In a deposition, he says that his history is "not germane to the issue" and that he'd like his case to be examined "ad-hoc [because] empirical knowledge often distorts the content of the act under scrutiny". This is an adorable double standard because history and prior behavior are often used by the police and justice in order to establish patterns. His only apparent redeeming quality is that he is, apparently, very good in bed. Oh, and as we see further on in the film, he's very devoted to his family, in his own way. By the time we learn that, though, he's spiraling out of control in a drug and insomnia-induced haze. Harrelson does a really good job, all red-faced and veiny and wiry and frenetic and utterly manic. World War Z (2013) -- "7/10" Brad Pitt stars in a zombie movie. It starts off showing him with his family, all of whom I found to be highly annoying, but I was looking forward to their demise. I'd just read an interview with Brad Pitt where he described his eight-person nuclear family as his be-all, end-all. But this can't be how his family behaves. The kids are basically spoiled basket cases, who are already having trouble dealing with a traffic jam, to say nothing of a zombie invasion. And these are the fast, head-slamming, face-eating kind of zombies, no slow shufflers these. Kind of like the sufferers of the rage virus in the 28 days/28 weeks later films. The Mom turns out to be halfway decent, actually, but why do they always write these roles so selfishly? Is that really how people would react? I know billions have died and the whole world is going to hell but, dammit, my kids are special. Your kids aren't special. They're basket cases. Evolution will eat them alive. Or zombies will. Anyway. The wall scene? Super-awesome. The sheer tenacity of the zombies is really well-depicted. They're quite fast, but still relatively well-filmed. And the waves of zombies pouring through the streets like water...simply amazing. Even the close-up work was really convincing. I have to say it was really well-done. Best zombie movie I've seen, I think. And the whole part about him getting out everywhere in the nick of time? Usually annoying, but here somehow believably well-done. Recommended. Hesher (2010) -- "9/10" Joseph Gordon-Levitt stars as the pure personification of the id called Hesher, a Metallica-loving, seemingly ageless and timeless hobo who moves in with a grandmother, her son and his son. The son, TJ, first sees Hesher at his school but I don't think he actually goes to school. Natalie Portman plays a poor, young cashier at the local grocery store, trying desperately to make ends meet in a hopeless life. Hesher is Chaos but is also the voice of reason. He tells extremely crude life stories that seem to be metaphors but which are not always intended as such. The family had just lost its mother in a tragic traffic accident and the father lies about listlessly the whole day. Hesher's chaos provokes them into action, into feeling something again and, after they've had their breakthrough, he's gone. His job is done. Highly recommended, surprisingly enough. Joseph Gordon-Levitt is extremely versatile. Everyone is actually quite good, including Portman's turn as a sad-sack. Very down-to-Earth depiction of lives of quiet desperation. Sleep Dealer (2008) -- "7/10" A Spanish-language movie about a near-future where drones attack Mexico. And Mexicans? They become sleep-dealers, node-workers who are attached to the grid in virtual reality, working virtually for Americans without inflicting the nastiness of their actual physical presence on them. The movie follows the life of a young man named Memo whose father was killed by a drone piloted remotely by a Mexican-American soldier living in the States. Memo has to move from his village and becomes a node worker himself, working on high-rises in America as a yellow construction robot. He meets Luz, who sells memories on the TruNode network. The pilot who killed Memo's father finds the memories she sells of Memo and discovers that his life of killing terrorists is a lie. The same network that traps and controls them ends up bringing them together to strike a blow against tyranny. It's not a bad little flick, actually, but kinda hard to recommend. Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures (2001) -- "8/10" A wonderful documentary about the work of Stanley Kubrick. This is not a documentary about his life; it's about his work. His life is only tangentially covered, but his career is covered in detail, proceeding film by film until his death in 1999, shortly after Eyes Wide Shut was released. An absolute must for fans of Kubrick or his films. Highly recommended. You can watch it on "YouTube" , but it's low quality. Looper (2012) -- "7/10" Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Bruce Willis star in this movie about hit-men and time travel. Time travel is integrated in a relatively sensible way -- it's only used by criminals in the future because it was made illegal as soon as it was discovered. Gordon-Levitt plays a hit-man who kills people in the past; Willis is his 30-years--older counterpart. Emily Blunt, Jeff Daniels and Paul dano all play their parts well. The cyclical time-loop and inevitability reminded me a bit of that other Bruce Willis film, The Twelve Monkeys. Gordon-Levitt's makeup is very subtle and makes him nearly unrecognizable. Strangely enough, the movie takes time travel so in stride that it ends up being about telekinetics instead. A bit slow at times, but it has an interesting plot with a lovely ending. Recommended. Checkpoint: Everyday Life in Palestine (2003) -- 7/10 This is a documentary composed almost entirely of footage of interactions between Israeli soldiers and Palestinians that want to cross one of the myriad checkpoints that hem in and cut up their territories. It's mostly in Hebrew and partially in Arabic and English. The casual cruelty and disdain of the soldiers is to be expected, but still sobering. They empty entire schoolbuses; they try to force tiny, sick children to explain to them why they should be able to cross to see a doctor. They wield their power with utter disregard for the humanity of the Palestinians. People wait in the sun for hours, for days; they wait in the snow and the rain. Checkpoints are closed at a whim, people are told to turn back and "go home" when it is clear that their homes are on the other side of the checkpoint. It's ten years later and things have only gotten worse. So stop calling "Roger Waters an anti-semite for comparing the Israeli policies to those of the Nazis" ; instead, watch this "documentary" and see that he may be somewhat hyperbolic, but that the main thrust of Israeli policy is the slow eradication of people that they don't consider to be equally human (for Lebensram, naturally). There are instances where they let people through, but usually only after harassing them -- armed and in full military uniform. I wonder whether the stop-and-frisk victims in New York City would recognize the feeling? You may think some of this reaction to be hyperbole, but consider how it would be to feel like this all the time, to constantly be subjected to questioning by armed soldiers, to stand in line, wasting your entire day at the whim of teenagers of the ruling class, while your children bawl and suffer. The slightly older children simply stare...and absorb a lesson of hate that will probably guide their lives. Watch at least until you see the little old man who has to beg to be able to cross to see his wife...because it's Christmas Eve. Human Resources (2011) -- 8/10 A documentary about the history of Behaviorism, Taylorism and social engineering in America and around the world. It examines the capitalist, class-based influences and driving forces behind its use in industry as well as the effects on labor relations and the workforce. This naturally leads to the employment of these techniques in the indoctrination of the up and coming generations -- in schools and universities. With the application of these techniques from the earliest age, the troublemakers of the early 20th-century could largely be eradicated because the newest generations had all been trained to not even raise the question of how they would live. They accepted the tenets given to them. Capitalism as we know it is the unquestioned base on which any human society must be built. As you can imagine, Noam Chomsky makes an appearance at about this point. The next step is an examination of violence in modern, Western societies with an analysis of serial killers and state violence as well as militarism. The study of behaviorism continues with a history of the use of mind-altering chemicals in experiments on animals and then members of the military and then the underclass. Mixed in is the recruitment of the worst of the worst from Nazi Germany to allow them to continue their research, but for the US cause. This history leads uninterrupted to the modern day, where all forms of physical and psychological torture are accepted as standard practice. This is not an aberration driven by a uniquely intense fear of terrorism but an easily predicted next logical step in a progression almost a century long. You can watch the video yourself on "YouTube" . Oblivion (2013) -- "8/10" Tom Cruise stars in this science-fiction movie about an Earth that's been destroyed by a marauding alien race. The future finds humanity on orbital colonies with only a few people on the surface, taking care of the automated facilities and energy sources that are the only remnants of civilization on the surface. The effects are breathtaking, the interiors clean, almost antiseptic and architecturally beautiful. It's a lovely-looking film but it feel a bit tech-heavy at first, almost as if the situations are being constructed just to show off cool ideas for gadgets that they had. There's no explanation given as to why the video feeds are so terrible, nor is it explained how Cruise manages to find a drone buried underground simply by driving around...on the entire Earth. I'm 3/4 of the way through and I have no idea who's a hologram, who's an AI, whether there really are aliens, whether there are Scav bandits, whether the Earth is gone...it's quite an interesting set of ideas so far. Jack (Cruise) thinks he has had his memory wiped, but old thoughts and dreams bleed through. His partner, Victoria, seems very robotic, although much more real than "Sally" who communicates (supposedly) from orbit. Have his memories been wiped? If so, by whom? And for what purpose? Why are the drones killing humans? Is Jack playing for the right team? The lie of Titan reminds me a bit of Moon starring Sam Rockwell. I almost suspect an out-of-control AI (like H.A.L.) carrying out its duties long past the usefulness of its mission has expired. Spoiler alert: I bet there's more than one of him. That would explain why shooting him doesn't seem to cause much damage; he's a robot. And the "radiation zones" are there to keep him from ever meeting himself. It explains why they kept focusing on his number rather than his name. Still not sure how the Scavs and Julia fit into all this, though. I think she's part of a failed attempt to get to Titan and the Scavs are all that's left of humanity -- because they lost to the alien race. What would be kind of cool is if the whole movie was just one possible simulation of how to finally beat the alien overlords that nearly destroyed the Earth (if it's even destroyed). That is, the simulation is run again and again until Jack finally succeeds in sending the nuke into orbit, back to "Tet". There are shades of the second and third Matrix movies here, I think (despite their never having been made). I'm starting to doubt that Julia is real, either. The effects are quite amazing, very convincing. The drones flying around in enclosed spaces reminds of that old video game Descent. And the encounter with Tet was reminiscent of several other films: Star Trek I, ID4. The little drones look like they came right out of Portal II. It's a mix of stuff we've seen before, but very nicely done. Recommended. Gift -- Jane's Addiction (1993) -- "4/10" A film about Perry Farrell and Casey Niccoli, about their lives at the center of the heroin-fueled haze that was Jane's Addiction. There's musical footage and a storyline that involves Perry finding his wife at home, dead of an overdose. The scenes are interleaved non-chronologically (of course) and there's a long scene where they visit a doctor to get their scrips, which is comically long. Not recommended. Nothing like the Holidays (2008) -- "6/10" Lots of good actors give a bit of life to this formulaic movie about coming home for Christmas. Alfred Molina, John Leguiziamo, Elizabeth Peña, Luis Guzmán and Debra Messing were the ones I recognized and they were decent as a hot-blooded Puerto Rican family from Chicago. Garden State (2004) -- "7/10" Zach Braff's oeuvre about his homecoming to New Jersey. He spends the movie mourning the loss of his mother and getting reacquainted with his brother and some of his childhood friends. He also meets and woos -- or is wooed by -- Natalie Portman. It gets pretty good and strange when they follow his brother Mark on a quest to a dry-docked wooden boat by an abandoned quarry. It's a bit maudlin and millenial-twee but that's not surprising considering it was written by Braff. Still and all, the performances buoyed the more boring parts. Limitless (2011) -- "7/10" Bradley Cooper stars as a down-on-his-luck writer who happens upon a stash of experimental pills that grant you clarity of thought, enhancing your perceptions and boosting your thinking speed and apprehension immensely. They're smart-pills. He's hooked, bangs out his book in a matter of days and moves on to bigger and better things. The story has to build artificial tension, though, so this ridiculously intelligent guy being ends up making some pretty rookie mistakes (at least for the first 90% of the movie). He doesn't try to lock down his supply or curb his addiction, he forgets to pay back a very dangerous loan shark and so on. Cooper is excellent, though, and De Niro isn't as bad as he has been in other recent stuff. A mostly fun ride with a strong, non-Hollywood ending (spoiler alert: he doesn't get his comeuppance for having messed with drugs or God's plan, which I liked). Recommended. Pacific Rim (2013) -- "9/10" A big summer action movie about a monster invasion from a multidimensional rift that opens at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. The gigantic, nearly city-sized monsters -- called Kaiju -- attack coastal cities and, after defeating a few with conventional weaponry but with terrible losses, mankind bands together to build Kaiju--Jägers, gigantic robots that take out the monsters. The tech is lovingly rendered, mostly non-digital and highly visceral -- the battles are wonderful. Still, I find myself wondering where they get all the metal for those robots, or for the gigantic wall -- and where all the energy comes from. Once you get past the unbelievable opulence of the bases, you can just fall in love with a gigantic robot-launching base called "The Shatterdome". It's pretty sweet. The science guys are fantastic -- the perfect role for Charlie Day. And his foil, the mysterious Kaiju parts-dealer is played by Ron Perlman, being, well, Ron Perlman. The other fighter-characters are more formulaic, but still decent. And they all seem to be doing their own fight scenes -- and that without cables or obvious CGI. There's a natural feel/look/speed to it that's almost nostalgic. And the monsters, the Kaiju! So naturally, casually destructive, the way they stroll throw a city like a child kicking his way throw a pile of leaves. The visualization of gigantic robot versus gigantic monster is unbelievably good -- unlike in the Transformers films, you can actually see what's going on, you can feel the sheer weight and inertia of them. I can't even imagine what this was like in the theater. I just noticed that it was directed by Guillermo del Toro, who also brought us Pan's Labyrinth and the Hellboy movies. No wonder it's so good. Highly recommended. The Central Park Five (2013) -- "8/10" A PBS documentary directed by Ken Burns about the five young men and boys arrested, charged and sentenced for the brutal rape of a woman jogging in Central Park in 1989. They were innocent. Their confessions were coerced from them by a cynical and racist police force. They all served at least seven years in prison before being released on parole; the longest served over thirteen years. The takeaway: never talk to police. Not a word. The media is horrible and only looking out for their own story. They don't care about facts. The police don't care about facts. The DA doesn't care about facts. The jury doesn't care about facts either. Contradictory evidence can always be ignored. When the actual assailant eventually confesses, the charges are overturned by the prosecuting DA who now magically acknowledges the shocking inconsistencies in the case. The magic ingredient is that the DA just does what is best for his career at the time. The other attorneys and the press circled the wagons and continued to blame the young men. As one interviewee says, "the coverage in 2002 was worse than in 1989." He went on to sum up the situation, "Whatever you do in life, you make mistakes and you either face your mistakes or you don't. I don't think the press faced their mistakes. I don't think the police department faced the truth of what had happened. Because the truth of what had happened is almost unbearable: by prosecuting the wrong people in the Central Park Jogger case, Matteas Reyes [the actual assailant] continued to hurt, maim and kill. And they could have had him, but they got stuck with the mistake. And they're still invested in that mistake." To be clear: these boys were not angels. But they were not guilty of the crime with which they were accused. While they turned out to have been innocent of the rape, one of the pieces of evidence that was ignored was their alibis, which places them elsewhere in the park -- beating up other people. It's a sobering documentary and well worth watching, if a bit slow -- it is, after all, a Ken Burns film. Ghost in the Shell (1995) -- "9/10" A Japanese Anime film about what it means to be conscious in an increasingly virtualized world. The story follows a pair of cyborg cops who were originally purely human but have been enhanced considerably. They are hunting the Puppet Master, who controls people's "ghosts" -- their virtual personae -- to make them do his bidding. It's extremely well-written, directed and drawn and includes intriguing ideas about the self, memories, consciousness and culpability in a world that is a blend of what is so-called reality and virtuality. When our senses are so fallible and our recording machinery -- memories -- so sketchy, what does it mean to have fake memories? What does it mean to say that something is conscious and alive? It's classic science-fiction and philosophy rolled into an animated film about possibly living cyborgs, with long dialogue sequences to move the story along. The "ghost" in the title refers to consciousness and "shell" refers to physical bodies, like those produced in factories. And, when you're half-machine, who do you trust to poke around in your cyber-mind to make adjustments and do maintenance? And what does it mean to be conscious, to be alive? The highly-optimized inspector Kusanagi considers the following: "Maybe all all full-replacement cyborgs like me start wondering like this. That perhaps the real me died a long time ago and I'm a replicant made with a cyborg body and computer brain. Or mayybe there never was a real "me" to begin with. [...] There's no person who's ever seen their own brain. I believe I exist based only on what my environment tells me. [...] And what if a computer brain could generate a ghost...and harbor a soul? On what basis then do I believe in myself?" And the Puppet Master, who is purely a program, also soliloquizes: "By that argument, I submit the DNA you carry is nothing more than a self-preserving program itself. Life is like a node which is born within the flow of information. As a species of life that carries DNA as its memory system, man gains his individuality from the memories he carries. While memories may as well be the same as fantasy, it is by these memories that mankind exists. When computers made it possible to externalize memory, you should have considered all the implications that held." The movies includes long sequences that lovingly depict this future world, accompanied only by a soundtrack. Stylistically, it's worlds away from what most would consider an animated film. This one looks and feels much more like Blade Runner and is every bit as beautiful and intriguing. CGI would have ruined it, I think. The level of detail and realism the artists achieved is breathtaking. Highly recommended. The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor (2008) -- "6/10" A promising cast does its best to breathe life into a somewhat rough script. Brendan Frasier is still a better Indiana Jones than Harrison Ford has been for at least two movies now, so that's good. Maria Bello is a good, if not preferable, replacement for Rachel Weisz. Michelle Yeoh has only a small part and Jet Li is a terra-cotta mummy with a lot of CGI makeup and no real moves, which is unfortunate. It's decent fun, but hard to recommend unless it just happens to be on (guess how I happened to watch it?). The Incredible Burt Wonderstone (2013) -- "7/10" Steve Carell plays against type as an arrogant ass of a magician who doesn't appreciate his partner of several decades, played by Steve Buscemi. Olivia Wilde plays the assistant who's worshiped them for a decade but is only just realizing that Anton is the brains and idea-man whereas Wonderstone is just a pompous ass. Jim Carrey is almost unrecognizable as street magician Steve Gray -- clearly based on Chris Angel, at least in part. Olivia Wilde is actually quite endearing in this role and seems to be growing as an actress. Jim Carrey is quite good. Alan Arkin as Rance Holloway is even better. The explication of their final trick during the credits is also quite good. Elysium (2013) -- "5/10" The first thing that I don't understand is how "all the rich people" can just move to orbit without their literal armies of servants and staff that they need in order to maintain their lifestyles. Do they just use robots for everything? And if they have unlimited medical care, why do they have to suppress all the people? Why keep them in a state of agitation and near-revolt for no reason? Apparently, they do use robots for everything. The police are robots. The parole officers are robots. Matt Damon makes robots in the factory where he's told he's lucky to have a job. I think that there are a lot of people in America who would watch the opening scenes of this movie and wonder why they claim that it's happening 140 years in the future -- because the life depicted is no different from the one that they have right now. But back to plot holes: why would you fire missiles from Earth, which have to pull out of the gravity well (further which they could not, given their size), when you have an entire ring-world already floating in orbit? And why would you house missiles capable of striking targets in orbit on a planet filled to the brim with enemies? On the other hand, Elysium is nicely rendered. With the palm trees and the people speaking French, it called to mind Vietnam when it was still a French colony (this was possibly not serendipitous). Watching Jodie Foster chewing her way through the scenery, pretending to be Jack Nicholson from A Few Good Men (or a member of the Bush or Obama administrations, for that matter), was utterly painful, though. No imagination whatsoever. Jodie Foster remains utterly awful for the whole movie. Seriously, they should take away her Oscar just for inflicting that performance on us. There was seriously no imagination in other parts as well. Apparently, 140 years from now, you still write assembler code to reprogram the operating system of the torus. How much would it have cost for a programmer consult on this film? And the code is scrambled when transferred, but somehow the idiot soldiers chasing Damon got an unencrypted stream? And Max has severe cancer, has been nearly gutted by a knife and hasn't eaten or had his medication and he's still just cruising along? This script is needlessly bad. Even when they do something cool like Spider letting Max plug himself in (instead of forcing him to do it), they obviate it with something stupid like "Earth population: ILLEGAL" showed on screen. Spider backspaces through ILLEGAL and writes in LEGAL. Problem solved. Not recommended. Rollerball (1975) -- "6/10" The original with James Caan was less overtly violent than I remember it being when I watched it as a kid. It stuck with me, especially Moonpie's coma. Weirdly, or perhaps humanly, I remembered only how the Japanese team had mercilessly pounded on his unhelmeted head, putting him in a coma. I hadn't remembered the two or three or four Japanese that he killed or severely injured before that. With its sweeping classical soundtrack, it seems to be paying homage to Kubrick, but it's not a particularly exciting plot. The movie follows the Houston team on its way to the championship. There is a background plot thread about the "Executives" and the "Corporate Wars" which led to them running everything without nation-states. In that way, it is echoed by Elysium. They show three matches and the action is quite well-filmed and cut, especially for a nearly 40-year--old movie. There's a scene right at the end, though, where it's clear that they're not really in NY as they claim to be. If they were, then someone would have screamed "do it, you f&*#ing pussy!". But there was only silence. Slapshot was way better. The Animatrix (2003) -- "9/10" A series of nine short animated films set in the world of the Matrix. They are lovingly hand-animated (or made to appear so with CGI) -- except for the first one, which also looks nice but is clearly CGI. The stories, animation style and direction are all interesting and top-notch. Highly recommended. Old School (2003) -- "8/10" The classic; watched on Christmas Eve with friends who knew it almost line for line. Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998) -- "9/10" Johnny Depp plays Hunter S. Thompson and Benicio del Toro plays his attorney as they make their way to and through Las Vegas, ingesting unbelievably copious quantities of drugs and wreaking ludicrous amounts of damage to hotel rooms (spoiler alert: there is lots of water). Obviously and lovingly directed by Terry Gilliam, it's a masterpiece of addled hallucination. Watched on Christmas Eve with friends and copious amounts of gin. EuroTrip (2004) -- "8/10" Another classic, reviewed a few years before. It's definitely quite funny, especially when you just missed your last train on Christmas Eve and are looking for distraction until the morning. Idiocracy (2006) -- "8/10" We started the evening with Luke Wilson in Old School and end on him as well. Still a great, eminently quotable movie. Didn't catch the end because I had to catch the 05:30 morning train. 13 Assassins (2010) -- "8/10" A Japanese movie about an out-of-control samurai who tears a swath through innocent families and servants. He's a true sociopath and must be stopped. His legendary tortures are described and detailed at the head of the film. The first hour is careful -- and some might say tedious -- setup for the second. The second half is an uninterrupted hour of meticulously choreographed swordplay as the 13 assassins take on over 200 opponents that they've trapped in a wooden village. They do start their ambush with arrows, but then mysteriously stop using them -- probably because it's not honorable. It's quite well-done and touches on all of the familiar themes of honor, pride, duty of the Samurai way. I warmed to it considerably and was almost cheering at the end. Curiously, there were no morally gray characters -- each was either good or evil, but not a little of both. Fuel (2008) -- "4/10" A documentary about the oil industry that turns into a bio-fuel sales pitch. It's not bad, but there is some seriously misleading information in there. "Fossil fuels are really inefficient: for every 1 unit of energy you put in, you only get .8 units out." Wait, what? Isn't that the best we've got so far? Only 20% loss during processing? There is no other energy source right now that's even close -- excepting perhaps solar and that only more recently. The film peters out into a celebrity endorsements of alternative energy along with more non-scientific estimates. Not really recommended. Herb & Dorothy (2008) -- "7/10" A documentary about Herb and Dorothy Vogel, modern-art collectors living in a tiny New York City apartment. I listened to it while working on a jigsaw puzzle. When you actually look at the artwork to which they utterly dedicated their lives, you kind of start to wonder why they did it. It's best to just follow along on the story of people who dedicated their lives to art, without a thought for personal gain. It's a nice little documentary about mostly nice people. Jason Becker -- Not Dead Yet (2012) -- "7/10" A documentary about Jason Becker, a musical prodigy whose guitar-playing career was cut short at 20 by ALS. He has persevered and survives two decades later, still composing music with the help of his family, friends and eye-motion technology. It's an at the same time sad and uplifting story and a surprisingly well-done documentary. Superpower (2008) -- "6/10" A thorough examination of the US role in world politics, with an emphasis on events since 9/11. It starts off stronger than it ends and this material is better covered elsewhere. Although it was refreshing to see Noam Chomsky, Bill Blum and Chalmers Johnson featured so heavily. The World's End (2013) -- "7/10" Simon Pegg and Nick Frost complete their Cornetto Trilogy in style. It's a bit uneven at times, but we can attribute that to the attempt to emulate the authentic feeling of having had 12 pints in one evening. If you follow along and have enough to drink yourself, you'll like the movie more. Pegg and Frost are joined by Martin Freeman, Pierce Brosnan and Rosamund Pike to lend a bit of gravitas to what they know is an insane script. It was not unlike Hot Fuzz, actually. Still and all, it was a good time, which suits a film about a gang of guys and girls drinking waaaaay too much in one evening. Recommended. D.L. Hughley: The Endangered List (2012) -- "5/10" A short satire by D.L. Hughley in which he tries to get the Black Man on the endangered species list. It has its moments, but I can't recommend it. Malcolm X (1972) -- "9/10" A highly stylized documentary about Malcolm X, featuring a lot of his speeches and parts of his speeches put to music. Narrated by James Earl Jones. Malcolm X seems like quite a reasonable, rational guy. I don't even hear a tremendous difference between Martin Luther King's speeches and Malcolm X's. He has many, many nice lines and eminently quotable and pithy comments. I include some of my favorites below. On "the South": "Black man is born in jail and the black man dies in jail, in the North as well as the South. In fact, stop talking about the South. There is no South. Anything south of the Canadian border is the South, as far as the black man is concerned." "Don't blame a cracker in Georgia for your injustices; the government is responsible for those injustices." To the question of whether progress is being made in America, he said "if you stick the knife nine inches into my back and pull it out six inches, that's not progress. Even if you pull it all the way out, it's not progress. Progress is healing the wound that the blow made." On the subject of non-violence and appropriate response: "I don't think that when a man is being criminally treated that that criminal has the right to tell the man what tactics he can use to get the criminal off his back." On inequality and the shining city on the hill: "There's a worldwide revolution going on. It goes beyond Mississippi. It goes beyond Alabama. It goes beyond Harlem. What is it revolting against? The power structure. The American power structure? No. The French power structure? No. The English power structure? No. Then what power structure? An international Western power structure. Our next move is to take the entire civil-rights struggle into the United Nations and let the world see that Uncle Sam is guilty of violating the human rights of 22 million Afro-Americans and still has the audacity or the nerve to stand up and represent himself as the leader of the free world." His cadence of speech and voice reminds me eerily of Denzel Washington. I wonder if that's a coincidence? What comes through loud and clear is that Malcolm X was a wickedly intelligent and extensively educated man. His knowledge of history, public policy and precision of language and rhetoric was positively breathtaking. Taxi to the Dark Side (2007) -- "8/10" A documentary about Bagram prison in Afghanistan and Ab Ghraib prison in Iraq. Includes lots of photo footage as well as interviews with soldiers involved. A large part of the movie focuses on the specific case of Diliwar, a taxi driver from Afghanistan, who was beaten -- "pulpified" -- to death. Some of the interviews are quite revealing in what the soldiers feel comfortable with saying. Like any guards or policemen, they cover up like crazy, building up the image of the prisoner into a nigh-uncontrollable monster when he was really a terrified, 120-pound kid with his hands and feet chained to a wall and ceiling. They beat him mercilessly and without reason. The movie continues to cover how the torture and deaths in these prisons were not aberrations but part of an overall policy of torture with its roots in CIA programs from decades in the past. Anthony Lagouranis sums it up best, at the end, "Americans wanna believe that we're somehow more moral than the rest of the world, that we somehow have a strong desire to feel that way. And I think that's eroding. I don't really know what effect that's going to have on us. And I think a lot of people have just decided, 'well, you know, it's different now, after 9--11, you know, we can't be good anymore. We have to get tough,' and we'll have to see what that does to us. I think that's bullshit." Recommended. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2881 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2881 Mon, 09 Dec 2013 22:32:09 +0100 -- "6/10" 2. "The Name of the Rose (1986)" <#Name> -- "7/10" 3. "Django Unchained (2012)" <#Django> -- "8/10" 4. "The Power Principle (parts I, II and III) (2012)" <#Power> -- 8/10 5. "Bag of Bones (2012)" <#Bag> -- "7/10" 6. "Legend (1985)" <#Legend> -- "7/10" 7. "Van Helsing (2004)" <#Van> -- "5/10" 8. "League of Denial: The NFL's Concussion Crisis (2013)" <#League> -- "7/10" 9. "Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982)" <#Star> -- "5/10" 10. "28 Weeks Later (2007)" <#28> -- "5/10" 11. "Whiteout (2009)" <#Whiteout> -- "5/10" 12. "Gary Gulman: No Can Defend (2012)" <#Gary> -- 6/10 13. "Insomnia (2002)" <#Insomnia> -- "7/10" 14. "Jumper (2008)" <#Jumper> -- "4/10" 15. "Todd Glass" <#Todd> -- 5/10 16. "Jim Norton" <#Jim> -- 4/10 17. "Catch 22 (1970)" <#Catch> -- "9/10" 18. "Bill Cosby: Far from Finished (2013)" <#Bill> -- "6/10" 19. "The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers (2009)" <#Dangerous> -- "7/10" 20. "Star Trek Into Darkness (2013)" <#Star> -- "7/10" 21. "The Wolverine (2013)" <#The> -- "7/10" 22. "Zeitgeist (2007)" <#Zeitgeist> -- "6/10" 23. "Safe (2012)" <#Safe> -- "8/10" 24. "Die große Ekstase des Bildschnitzers Steiner (1974)" <#Ekstase> -- "9/10" 25. "Zeitgeist Addendum (2008)" <#Zeitgeist> -- "6/10" 26. "Zeitgeist: Moving Forward (2011)" <#Zeitgeist2> -- "2/10" 27. "Dredd (2012)" <#Dredd> -- "5/10" 28. "2 Guns (2013)" <#2Guns> -- "8/10" The Conspiracy Files: 9/11 the Third Tower (2008) -- "6/10" A documentary putting out the evidence that Truthers provide for Tower 7 and then debunks it piece by piece by piece. It's quite well-done, letting some pretty damning evidence speak for itself. Availalble "online" . The Name of the Rose (1986) -- "7/10" This is a crime movie that takes place in a 12th-century monastery. The monks are twisted and disfigured and seem borderline mentally unstable. Sean Connery stands out as one who at least looks human; Christian Slater is very, very young (17 at the time) and stares around wide-eyed; F. Murray Abraham is buried under very effective makeup. The coldness and harshness of that world comes through very well. The movie followed the story in the books very closely, including the political intrigue between various factions and sects. Not really very exciting, but a good film nonetheless. Django Unchained (2012) -- "8/10" This is yet another captivating Quentin Tarentino masterpiece, as far as I'm concerned. Christoph Waltz proves himself to have been born to deliver Tarentino's dialogue. I didn't enjoy it as much as Inglorious Basterds but it was very well-acted and executed. Recommended. The Power Principle (parts I, II and III) (2012) -- 8/10 An online documentary similar to the recent films by Oliver Stone. You can find the videos on "YouTube" . Bag of Bones (2012) -- "7/10" A TV mini-series filming of the book by Stephen King starring Pierce Brosnan. He does a decent job and the movie is surprisingly scary -- with echoes of What Lies Beneath. Legend (1985) -- "7/10" Tom Cruise, Mia Sara, David Bowie and Tim Curry star in this fantasy film that holds up quite well, even after all these years of being spoiled by CGI. The witch in the water is a brilliant figure and Tim Curry's Lord of Darkness is a wonder to behold. CGI would only have ruined the realism in this case. The plot's nothing to write home about, but we're all just watching this to laugh as a young Tom Cruise runs around in very brief pants while wearing full body armor on top, a somewhat curious haberdashery decision. Van Helsing (2004) -- "5/10" A phenomenally violent vampire/werewolf movie starring Hugh Jackman and Kate Beckinsale (is there a werewolf movie without her in it?). Igor, Mr. Hyde, Dracula and Frankenstein's Monster all make appearances. There is a shit-ton of screaming in this movie. Seriously, pay attention and you'll notice that hardly ten seconds go by without someone screaming from the very core of their soul. League of Denial: The NFL's Concussion Crisis (2013) -- "7/10" A Frontline documentary about the danger of playing in the NFL. Quite well done if a bit long. Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (1982) -- "5/10" The movie with Kirk's famous scream is oddly anticlimactic. It has the classic pacing of a Star Trek show and the special effects of one as well. That is to say, it wasn't terrible but it was a bit slower than the pacing offered by modern sci-fi films -- without the gripping acting to keep us entranced. Shatner and Montelban take turns chewing the scenery (with Nimoy taking his bows at the end) and they're not terrible, but they're also not very good either. 28 Weeks Later (2007) -- "5/10" Robert Carlyle, Rose Byrne, Jeremy Renner, Imogen Poots and Idris Elba star in this sequel to 28 Days Later. Spoiler alert: it's a zombie movie ("type = diseased" ), so there's lots of blood flying, quick camera changes and lots of snarling. There is also an unusual obsession with saving only a few people -- that is, the full power of a modern military is bent on saving just one or two very specific people, which seems kind of wasteful and inefficient, resource-wise. The pacing is kind of slower than I expected, with lots of moody music trying to spackle over the weak bits. It picks up toward the end, but quickly spirals into the ridiculous -- the helicopter abattoir is a fine example. It passed the time, but I can't recommend it. Whiteout (2009) -- "5/10" Kate Beckinsale is, for once, not hunting werewolves. I know, it seems hard to believe, but it's true. Instead, she's hunting a killer across Antarctica. It turns out to be a pretty decent, straight-up crime thriller. Beckinsale is partnered with Tom Skerritt, playing the same character he always plays. It's way too long, though and takes forever to get to the point. Gary Gulman: No Can Defend (2012) -- 6/10 Gulman is a very clean stand-up comedian with some pretty standard though well-presented material. He's not going to be a great favorite, but he's a good guy with which to introduce people to stand-up comedy because he's utterly non-offensive but still quite funny. Mostly observational humor with some extended bits. Insomnia (2002) -- "7/10" Al Pacino and Robin Williams face off in this thriller about a murder in Alaska during the summer. Pacino is a cop from L.A. who slowly spirals out of control as his lack of sleep and a nagging secret keep him from focusing on his case. Robin Williams plays an author living in the area who's the prime suspect. Hilary Swank and Nicky Katt are good as local cops. I actually saw this in the theater when it first came out. Jumper (2008) -- "4/10" Hayden Christenson stars as a guy who can teleport himself. He's a Jumper. He uses this ability to be cool and rich and travel all over the world. It turns out he's not the only one who can do it and that there are others, called Paladins, who hunt and kill jumpers. These are led by none other than Samuel L. Jackson, in yet another awful role and with an utterly ridiculous dye job. Passed the time, but hard to recommend. Todd Glass -- 5/10 Decent but nothing to write home about. He had his moments, but I can't really recommend it. Too needy and talks about himself far too much. All comics do this but his style is such that it was noticeable. Jim Norton -- 4/10 A pretty racist comic who almost gets away with it, but is a bit too dumb/non-subtle to pull it off. He works with Opie and Anthony, so that doesn't really come as much of a surprise. There were long segments of shock/low-brow comedy that did nothing for me. Anyone who spends ten minutes on his knees on stage trying to milk laughs out of prison blow-job rape is not my kind of comic. Catch 22 (1970) -- "9/10" An utterly masterful rendering of the brilliant novel, sticking very close to the main scenes from the book if not maintaining the non-chronological order. There are almost too many great actors to name, most of whom went on to great careers. Alan Arkin plays Yossarian, Jon Voight plays Milo Minderbinder, Bob Newhart is Major Major, Charles Grodin is the perfectly annoying and psychotic Aarfy and Art Garfunkel is Nately -- it's almost too good to be true. The only part that has any logic is the supremacy of the Syndicate, the triumph of capitalism over nation-states. The only possible winner, the only glimmer of hope is in Orr (if you like). I've read the book twice, but not in a long time, and this film brought it all back, every twisted, ludicrous detail. Highly recommended. Bill Cosby: Far from Finished (2013) -- "6/10" It starts off slowly but he picks up speed and has some really good material. Another very clean show; appropriate for all audiences and really quite funny. The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers (2009) -- "7/10" This is a straight-up documentary about the guy who release the Pentagon Papers during the Vietnam War, a modern-day analogue to our current batch of whistleblower heroes. He was the one who finally informed the US population of how their lovely little police action was really being run. Recommended if you don't know the history. Star Trek Into Darkness (2013) -- "7/10" Benedict Cumberbatch has an easy time of out-acting Christopher Pike. It's a solid follow-up to the reboot of the Star Trek series. The various actors are getting into their roles and doing quite a good job of it. It's a Star Trek movie, actually rebooting an earlier incarnation (spoiler alert: it's an homage to Star Trek II: the Wrath of Khan). The effects are both out of this world (no pun intended) and over the top. As with any modern summer blockbuster, you have to be in the mood for it, but it's recommended. The Wolverine (2013) -- "7/10" It's a surprisingly good comic-book movie, actually. The acting was quite good, especially the two Japanese female protagonists. The female villain Viper is one of those characters that can just utterly ruin a movie, though. I hated every scene she was in. She was just clearly a Deus Ex Machina, ready and willing to impel the plot along with horrible dialogue. Jackman was ridiculously buff, almost a bit exaggerated IMHO but that's what comic-book heroes look like. Zeitgeist (2007) -- "6/10" An nicely choreographed and ably designed, though very overwrought and occasionally very pretentious and silly, documentary that starts as an overview of religious pantheons and devolves into a 9--11 truther video, though on a higher level than most. It segues from there into an anti-big--banking/anti-corporate history. From there, it moves without blinking an eye into coverage of the unconstitutionality of the income tax and then into the lucrative nature of war (with the obligatory quote by good old Smedley Butler). From there, it's a ten-minute report on media manipulation and then a return to more 9-11 conspiracy. There is little original content in the two hours, but the included clips are quite good, culminating in Carl Sagan and Bill Hicks, which I can hardly complain about. Safe (2012) -- "8/10" Jason Statham as a cage fighter. James Hong stars as the same character he plays in every movie, the Chinese mob boss. He does this with unbelievable aplomb; always a pleasure to watch a master character-actor at work in his milieu. He asks the main character, a little girl with an eidetic memory, if she can truly remember everything. She cautiously shakes her head "no". He responds (in Chinese) that he will then "go to her mother's house and kill her [the mother] for making such a stupid girl". Priceless. The overdone Russian gang members -- and their dialogue -- are also just really, really good. It feel like GTA IV all over again. But Jason Statham simply cannot play a bad guy. He's always gotta be the stand-up guy. Him fighting on an NYC subway? Worth the price of entry. The action-scene direction -- especially the car chases -- reminded me a lot of Jean Luc Goddard. The fight scenes are relatively realistically choreographed and filmed in single, distanced shots rather than up-close quick-cuts. Statham shines here. The film is surprisingly mostly in Mandarin Chinese and Russian. This is a movie with a kid where the kid plays quite well (Catherine Chan) and the script doesn't pander. Statham helps here enormously. And just when you thought he was cool enough? He turns out to be a former NYC cop who speaks fluent Russian. Highly recommended for action fans. Die große Ekstase des Bildschnitzers Steiner (1974) -- "9/10" A great little documentary (45 minutes) about a Swiss ski jumper named Walter Steiner, who's a woodcarver (Bildschnitzer) in his other life. In the 1970s, he was so far ahead of the competition in ski "flying" (as the really long jumping was called) that he had to start lower than other skiers just to avoid jumping so far that he landed on flat ground rather than on the hill, endangering himself. You can watch it youself on "YouTube" . Zeitgeist Addendum (2008) -- "6/10" More history of America in the 20th century, with a very long segment by John Perkins, the "economic hit-man". Heavy on the economics and comprised mostly of long-form documentary sequences with a small handful of people, but relatively well done. The ensuing discussion of energy and how much non-hydrocarbon energy there is easily available is the purest techno-porn babble without much grounding in reality. Whereas he's right that the market-driven approach we now have prevents us from introducing alternate energy regimes but the treatment is overly optimistic. The discussion of alternative societal models is very interesting, especially when viewed from a society that's been monetary-based so long that it can hardly imagine a society without class differences based on money and labor. The notion that lives remain bound to labor and earning one's way, despite the increasing population and automation, is ludicrous in the long-term. The documentary is correct in saying that our current system will have to go. "The resource-based economy that I propose is not perfect; it's just a lot better than what we have." It's not terrible and there are good points made about alternative resource-based economies, but it's only recommended if you're curious in an introduction to serious alternatives to the simplistic and highly corrupted form of capitalism that we have now. Zeitgeist: Moving Forward (2011) -- "2/10" The first half-hour is a series of long dissertations by various psychologists and neurologists about how minds develop and how that affects the kinds of societies we can have. It was all over the place -- more so than the previous two -- so I stopped watching. Not recommended. Dredd (2012) -- "5/10" A remake of the original from 1995 starring Sylvester Stallone, this time starring Karl Urban in the eponymous role. Since he didn't take his helmet off once, you couldn't tell the difference. There are some nice semi--post-apocalyptic visuals with some nice, long shots of the city. Otherwise, it felt kinda like watching The Raid with far less martial arts or like watching some people play a video game, as they work their way up a building to the boss level (including getting a key code!) The arch-villainess was played by Lena Headey, who also plays Cersei in Game of Thrones. Even as a murderous head of ruthless clan, I found her much more sympathetic in this film. Really a tremendously bloody film. It wasn't terrible, but I can't recommend it. 2 Guns (2013) -- "8/10" You'd think that in a movie starring both Denzel Washington and Mark Wahlberg in what looks for all the world like a buddy-cop movie, you'd have a hard time figuring out which one to like more. You'd think that, but you'd be wrong. Denzel is his usual, laid-back, smooth self but Mark Wahlberg is still better. Edward James Olmos stars as a drug kingpin who Wahlberg says looks like a "Mexican Albert Einstein". There's also the weirdly neutrally hot Latina cop from Under the Dome who also plays a weirdly hot cop in this movie, but with more nudity, oddly half-hidden behind hair in what was clearly a play for a lower rating. I wonder if it worked? At any rate, she simpers her way through the film with the most inscrutable looks on her face. Thanks for reminding us that a tight body and really nice facial bone structure coupled with being vaguely but non-offensively ethnic (sorry Rosie Perez) still sells. Fun movie, decent dialogue, relatively interesting plot and a good ending. Highly recommended. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2880 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2880 Thu, 10 Oct 2013 22:50:07 +0200 -- "5/10" 2. "Snakes on a Plane (2006)" <#Snakes> -- "4/10" 3. "Devil (2010)" <#Devil> -- "4/10" 4. "Veep (2012/13)" <#Veep> -- "10/10" 5. "Freaks and Geeks (1999)" <#Freaks> -- "9/10" 6. "Escape from New York (1981)" <#Escape> -- "7/10" 7. "Under the Dome (2013)" <#Under> -- "6/10" 8. "Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee (2012/2013)" <#Comedians> -- "8/10" 9. "The International (2009)" <#International> -- "7/10" 10. "Raging Bull (1980)" <#Raging> -- "7/10" 11. "Red (2010)" <#Red> -- "8/10" 12. "The Mechanic (2011)" <#The> -- "8/10" 13. "Apocalypse Now (1979)" <#Apocalypse> -- "9/10" 14. "Natural Born Killers (1994)" <#Natural> -- "9/10" 15. "Oz the Great and Powerful (2013)" <#Oz> -- "3/10" 16. "Sunshine (2007)" <#Sunshine> -- "8/10" 17. "Cloud Atlas (2012)" <#Cloud> -- "9/10" 18. "Year of the Dragon (1985)" <#Year> -- "4/10" 19. "Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011)" <#Tinker> -- "8/10" 20. "The Magnificent Seven (1960)" <#Seven> -- "6/10" 21. "The Change-Up (2011)" <#Change> -- "5/10" 22. "War (2007)" <#War> -- "6/10" 23. "Hot Shots! (1991)" <#Hot-Shots> -- "7/10" 24. "Ghosts of Girlfriends Past (2009)" <#Ghosts> -- "6/10" 25. "Hot Shots! Part Deux (1993)" <#Hot-Shots-2> -- "6/10" 26. "Conan the Barbarian (2011)" <#Conan> -- "4/10" 27. "Employee of the Month (2006)" <#Employee> -- "3/10" 28. "Airplane II: The Sequel (1982)" <#Airplane> -- "6/10" 29. "Constantine (2005)" <#Constantine> -- "10/10" 30. "Air America (1990)" <#Air> -- "6/10" 31. "The Internship (2013)" <#Internship> -- "5/10" Jewel of the Nile (1985) -- "5/10" The cast of Romancing the Stone returns for this sub-par sequel, made back when sequels did not necessarily have a number in their titles. Michael Douglas and Kathleen Turner play the lead couple and Danny DeVito reprises his role, but this time on their side rather than against them. The hijinks feel forced and the magic of the first film isn't really there. Snakes on a Plane (2006) -- "4/10" It's fun to try to imagine why someone with Samuel L. Jackson's obvious reputation and assumed clout in Hollywood is nearly constantly driven to take such appalling roles in such appalling movies. Does he burn through money at such a prodigious rate? For personal reasons? Or is he especially charitable? Does he not read his contracts? Does his agent hate him? Did he make a bizarre deal with the devil? The movie's not as awful as expected and some of the scenes with snakes are well-filmed and quite visceral and convincing, but c'mon, Sam, you're above this, aren't you? Aren't you? Devil (2010) -- "4/10" M. Night Shyamalan continues his descent from one-hit wonder to producer/writer/director with too much money and no idea how to spend it wisely. This movie couldn't have cost very much as it was essentially filmed almost entirely in an elevator. He only wrote and produced this one, letting someone else direct it, though that hardly makes a difference. The devil possesses someone in an elevator, which is filled with people, each of whom has a horrific backstory worthy of the devil's attention. There are a few moments of suspense, but overall it's not very good -- and the ending is kind of a copout, I felt. Not recommended. Veep (2012/13) -- "10/10" Julia Louis Dreyfus stars in this TV series as the Veep (Vice President of the United States of America). She is deeply funny and all-around excellent. The show is occasionally filthy, constantly ruthless and hopefully not accurate at all. Depressingly, it is probably indicative of the morass that is Washington D.C. The Veep and her crew -- as well as the entirely unseen POTUS, of whom we only see his liaison to the Veep's office, Jonah, who is pond scum -- barely pay attention to real issues and real politics, focusing instead laser-like on issues of re-electability, leverage and power. It's well-written and the cast surrounding Dreyfus is also quite good. We watched two seasons, mostly enjoyed them and will probably stick around for season 3. Freaks and Geeks (1999) -- "9/10" A one-season TV show starring a lot of young actors who would go on to no small success: James Franco, Seth Rogen, Jason Siegel and Linda Cardellini. My hands-down favorite, though, is the character Bill, played by Martin Starr, who would end up playing only bit roles in subsequent Judd Apatow vehicles like Superbad and Knocked Up (Apatow directed three of the Freaks&Geeks episodes). Bill is really great in this, though. The show centers on the Weir family, which has two of the geeks (nerd Lindsay and her geeky, younger brother Sam). Sam's two friends, Bill and Neil round out the geeks. James Franco heads up the gang of Freaks as Daniel Desario, with Siegel, Rogen and the unfortunately named Busy Philipps rounding out his crew. The writing is spectacular even if some of the episodes drag ever so slightly. The appeal for me is increased because the kids are all in high school at about the same time I was in school in the 70s and 80s. Escape from New York (1981) -- "7/10" Kurt Russell stars as Snake Plisskin, an eyepatched, crusty former soldier turned criminal/mercenary who's doing a long stretch in a maximum security prison. The story takes place in the near future (as envisioned in 1981), a future where crime is out of control and New York City has been mostly abandoned to various gangs and partially turned into a prison. Unfortunately, the President of the United States crash-lands in New York and Plisskin is plucked out of his cell and made an offer he can't refuse: he's to rescue the POTUS in 24 hours or he's dead. Plisskin accepts but quickly goes off the reservation, serving his own purposes as he seeks the President amid the rubble and mad denizens of New York. It wasn't as good as I remembered it from my youth, but it was so, so, so much better than the ill-fated sequel Escape from L.A., released in 1996. Under the Dome (2013) -- "6/10" This series is loosely based on the book of the same name by Stephen King. If you read the book, you'll recognize a lot of people's names and several plot points. However, everything has been stretched and adjusted to accommodate a more open-ended storyline that can play for months, if not years, instead of just a week, as in the book. Many of the characters are more insipid than those in the book -- as expected for American network television -- with some seemingly ridiculous behavior from some who should know better, particularly the police officers, who are wildly inconsistent, shockingly unprofessional, stupid and nearly constantly either explaining things that are blindingly obvious (most likely for the benefit of the slower viewers) or asking stunningly stupid questions (most likely so that another can answer the question that the slower viewers were asking themselves). It's entertaining enough, even with some of the more irritating characters dominating way too much airtime (I'm looking at you, Norrie), but much more shallow than King's novel. Junior Rennie comes the closest to exuding the more subtle menace of an under-the-surface psychotic typical of King's meanest characters. Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee (2012/2013) -- "8/10" Jerry Seinfeld gets into a different, beautiful car in each show, calls a comedian friend and they go out for coffee and usually breakfast or lunch while they discuss comedy, business and anything else. The show is best when Jerry or his guest philosophizes. My favorite interviews so far have been Larry David, Alec Baldwin, Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks. Looking forward to seeing the second season. The International (2009) -- "7/10" A slower, but ultimately interesting film about an Interpol officer, played by Clive Owen, who tries to take down "The International", a cabal of elite officers of a banking organization who pull the strings of the world behind the scenes. This time, they are trying to close a huge arms deal and thereby kill one of Owen's fellow officers. Naomi Watts stars as his partner. The plot is kind of convoluted with Italian financiers and a knot of other associates and interests, all trying to get their piece of the action. Recommended. Raging Bull (1980) -- "7/10" Robert de Niro stars as boxer Jack LaMotta, a complete asshole of a man with a huge inferiority complex, no intelligence or savvy to speak of and a nearly uncontrollable temper. Oh, and he's an ephebophile who has no trouble robbing the cradle. Sound fun? It's totally not. Joe Pesci shines in his breakout role as LaMotta's brother, but otherwise it's not really a fun movie. DeNiro is good, but his character is just so relentlessly stupid and horrible that it's tough to enjoy. You can appreciate it for good acting, good direction and good writing, but you're not really going to enjoy it. I know I didn't. Red (2010) -- "8/10" Bruce Willlis, John Malkovitch, Morgan Freeman, Helen Mirren and Brian Cox (awesome as Ivan) are all aging, aged and semi- or fully retired former agents and assassins. Of these, Willis's Frank Moses was -- and still is -- the best. He inadvertently shows up on another radar and gets embroiled in a new, modern-day plot that somehow involves the innocent young girl at his insurance company with whom he's fallen in love. They get the gang back together and infiltrate buildings guarded by the newer generations -- and who prove utterly incapable of being able to handle the awesomeness that is an old guard trained and hardened during the cold war. Good times and good performances from several of the leads, with special kudos for Cox, Mirren and Malkovitch. Highly recommended if action comedies are your thing. The Mechanic (2011) -- "8/10" A -- nay, the -- Jason Statham vehicle to end all Jason Statham vehicles. This is a remake of the 1972 original starring Charles Bronson. Statham plays an elite hit-man who learned at the feet of his master, Donald Sutherland. The business passes on to Statham and soon Sutherland's son -- played by Ben Foster -- shows up, wanting to be trained as Statham was. There is much precision shooting and ass-kicking, although not as much as I'd like in a Jason Statham film. Still, the plot is decent, the tension is good and the ending is very satisfying. Recommended. Apocalypse Now (1979) -- "9/10" Martin Sheen and Marlon Brando star in this magnificent film about the vietnam war, directed by Francis Ford Coppola. Sheen narrates the film as a sailor on a PT boat headed deep, deep, deep into the Vietnamese -- Laotian? -- jungles. The war is shown in all its ugliness, in all its senselessness, in all its utter depravity. The entire second half of the nearly 4-hour--long "redux" version is highly surreal -- this is the part where Brando appears as Kurtz, the renegade former US military commander who now heads a private army of naked savages. An utterly brilliant film well worth the time. Highly recommended. Natural Born Killers (1994) -- "9/10" Oliver Stone's tour de force about a couple of homicidal killers named Mickey and Mallory Knox, played by Woody Harrelson and Juliette Lewis, respectively. Robert Downey Jr. also stars as Wayne Gale, a sleazy and exploitative tabloid-TV reporter, Tommy Lee Jones is an equally unctuous and greasy prison warden and Rodney Dangerfield plays Mallory's abusive and troglodyte father. The film is exquisitely cut together out of snippets of footage from other films, cartoons depicting fleeting acts of violence and faux-found footage from security cameras and shaky hand-cams. In Mickey's interview, there are shades of Charlie Manson, with a kind of lucidity shining forth from what society would call madness. But this is a society that is ostensibly mad already, especially in its approach to sex and violence, so who's the bigger problem? Mickey, who at least kills individuals, eye to eye? Or faceless bureaucrats, who with their actions wipe out millions? Stone intersperses images of Waco, Texas to make his point that State violence makes a killing spree like Mickey and Mallory's seem like an absolute drop in the bucket. Oz the Great and Powerful (2013) -- "3/10" This is an incredibly uneven sequel to the Wizard of Oz starring James Franco in the title role with Michelle Williams, Rachel Weisz and Mila Kunis as the three witches. The cast of witches was quite promising but would prove to ultimately be a disappointment. Zach Braff plays Franco's assistant and then voices his horrible little monkey sidekick. The CGI is over-the-top and candy-coated, clearly having been designed for the attention span of an eight-year--old and for the 3D theater. All actors are wasted by this awful script with its hideous dialogue. James Franco is charming and, having just finished watching Freaks and Geeks, it was hard not to see Daniel Disario shining through his toothy grin. Sunshine (2007) -- "8/10" This is a science-fiction horror film about a near-future where the sun is dying, failing to warm the Earth. It follows a crew of scientists who are the last-ditch hope of humanity, sent to dump a highly powerful generator/bomb into the sun in an effort to super-charge it back to life -- like a giant defibrillator. They are the second mission and are plagued by thoughts of what happened to the first mission. Did they go mad? Did they succeed? Did they fail? An uncommon cast -- Michelle Yeoh, Benedict Wong, Hiroyuki Sanada; in other words, not the usual lily-white male astronaut studs, though those are also present (e.g. Chris Pine, who is also good) -- gives the film more flavor than it would otherwise have had. Mark Strong is good, as usual. Recommended as a decent science-fiction movie. Cloud Atlas (2012) -- "9/10" How do you even begin to describe this movie? I can't pretend that I understood everything -- I can't even pretend that I knew all the characters and the actors who played them. I can say that I found the movie absolutely riveting, beautifully made and well-paced. Hugo Weaving as Uncle Georgie was a standout role. All of the actors are very good, even Halle Berry. This is a big-budget concept film that beats out Terence Malick's Tree of Life, which, while it took an entirely different tack, felt similar at times. Ben Whishaw, Keith David, Hugh Grant, Susan Sarandon, Hugo Weaving, Jim Broadbent and Tom Hanks lend a tremendous amount of gravitas. Year of the Dragon (1985) -- "4/10" A plodding plot that really shows its age in its execution. The main cop played by Mickey Rourke is an utter turd. But he's the lead role, so he unbelievably is also the primary love interest of the leading lady. Lots of violence and stupid racist stereotypes made this film utterly forgettable. Not recommended. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011) -- "8/10" An all-star cast play out this melancholy, very slow-paced film about cold-war espionage. Some of the exposition is too long for my taste, but some, like when Gary Oldman's George Smiley starts chewing (ever so lightly) the scenery, are spellbinding. Likewise, Peter's theft of a journal from MI6 headquarters (Peter is played by Benedict Cumberbatch) is a marvel for how much tension and subsequent relief it produces, all without any of the quick-cuts, shaky cams and explosions other spy movies have brought to the genre. Recommended for those looking for a movie that engages the mind instead of the adrenal glands. The Magnificent Seven (1960) -- "6/10" It's amazing how much screen-time the comparatively unknown Horst Buchholz gets in this movie. He acts well, but the movie was clearly a vehicle dreamt up to bring together Yul Brenner, Steve McQueen, Charles Bronson, Robert Vaughn and James Coburn. It was kind of The Expendables of its day, actually. It, too, suffers somewhat from long, expositional scenes that don't seem to add to the basic plot. It's likely that some of this was taken from the Japanese original, shot just a few years before. If you're a fan of westerns, you've got to see this one. The Change-Up (2011) -- "5/10" Ryan Reynolds, Jason Bateman, Leslie Mann, Olivia Wilde and Alan Arkin form a promising cast for what ends up being a more disappointing movie. It's not awful, but not as good as it could have been, devolving into some pretty stupid "typical-guy" tropes that should be beneath everyone involved. Olivia Wilde was less wooden and horrible than usual (it's weird, she interviews very well) and Reynolds was funny, at times. Not really recommended. War (2007) -- "6/10" Despite starring both Jason Statham and Jet Li, the film was oddly disappointing. The title refers to two wars, actually: the war between the Triads and Yakuza and the war between Statham (federal agent) and Li (mysterious and seemingly unstoppable hired killer), who Statham is hunting for having killed his partner years before. It takes a long time before Statham's first really decent fight scene arrives -- always a bad sign -- and, likewise, a Jet Li movie with minimal martial arts and maximal car chases and sniper scenes just feels wrong. It wasn't terrible, but it could have been much better. Making Jet Li smugly smile whenever he thwarts Statham is a pretty transparent and ultimately ineffective way of making the audience hate him. I guess you could also hate him because he gets to cruise around in a Spyker C8 Spyder, which is a very sweet-looking car. In the last third, when Jet Li finally starts fighting -- and starts rebelling against the utterly unprincipled Yakuza for whom he works -- things get much better. Many more fights scenes -- including the long-awaited one between Statham and Li -- and a cool surprise ending. Hot Shots! (1991) -- "7/10" Charlie Sheen doing what he does best -- making fun of hit movies (in this case, mostly Top Gun). Cary Elwes, Jon Cryer, Lloyd Bridges and the adorable Valeria Golino round out the cast. This is a pretty good Airplane-style movie, beaten out only by Top Secret, in my humble opinion. Ghosts of Girlfriends Past (2009) -- "6/10" Matthew McConaughey stars as a Lothario fashion photographer who trails a ridiculously long train of sexual conquests behind him going into his brother's wedding. The wedding takes place at his Uncle Wayne's (played by Michael Douglas) mansion. The story follows -- more or less -- Dickens's Christmas Carol, with ghostly visitations. Jennifer Garner stars as a skeleton, Emma Stone makes an appearance as the teenage ghost of the past and Anne Archer plays the cougar-ish mother of the bride. It's not a great movie, but the actors aren't bad, especially McConaughey and Douglas, who deliver their utterly horrific lines with gusto and who seemingly cannot be phased. Somewhat recommended, depending on audience, mood and/or available libations. Hot Shots! Part Deux (1993) -- "6/10" Lloyd Bridges, Charlie Sheen and Valeria Golino reprise their roles in this second installment of Hot Shots, this time taking the piss out of Rambo instead of Top Gun. Ryan Stiles and Miguel Ferrer round out the crew that accompanies Topper (Sheen) into the jungles. Conan the Barbarian (2011) -- "4/10" This is a reboot (aren't those popular these days) of the popular 1980s movies starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. If you think the guy playing Conan -- Jason Momoa -- looks familier, it's because he plays almost exactly the same character in Game of Thrones, as Khal Drogo. The plot is pretty predictable, with the only semi-interesting part showing Conan's origin story, featuring Ron Perlman as his father. Not really recommended; if you want something like this, watch either the original or John Carter instead. Employee of the Month (2006) -- "3/10" I only caught the second half of this, but I think that "starring Dane Cook and Jessica Simpson" should serve as enough of a warning. Harland Williams, Andy Dick and Brian George were also recognizable and had a couple of decent lines. The plot was execrable and the acting was barely better. Not recommended. Airplane II: The Sequel (1982) -- "6/10" I only saw the second half, but still kind of enjoyed it. It's kind of a stupid movie, but it's my kind of stupid. William Shatner is pretty good. Your mileage may vary. Constantine (2005) -- "10/10" Keanu Reeves stars as Constantine, a warrior in the battle of good vs. evil. He's not exactly neutral but he fights for the balance. The demons, however, are sick of the balance -- and so are some angels. This movie just kicks ass for all sorts of reasons, not least of which is probably Reeves's best role ever. Highly recommended. Air America (1990) -- "6/10" An exceedingly boyish Robert Downey Jr. playes a hotshot news-copter pilot recruited by the CIA. Mel Gibson plays an only slightly older-looking old CIA hand flying for the eponymous "Air America", which was the CIA's fleet of aircraft serving the whole of Southeast Asia and was based in Laos. The giant airbase did not officially exist. There is much drinking and much manly talk and much flying and crashing of highly unlikely and non-airworthy aircraft. The plot eventually winds up with a feel-good story about how Downey's basic goodness and forthrightness influences Gibson to change his mercenary and gun-running ways. Not bad, but not great either. The Internship (2013) -- "5/10" Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson as recently out-of-work salesmen in their late 30s who sign up for the Google internship program -- which is led by Aasif Mandvi. It sounds good, in principle. In execution, it feels much more like a 90-minute advertisement for Google. Vaughn and Owen play the exact same roles they always play, which means there are a few good Vaughn speeches in there, but there's not much else to sustain you through the film. Their team of interns aren't half-bad and are far less insufferable than expected; their main opponent is typically, cartoonishly evil. Mandvi is OK, but I can't believe he let himself be convinced that he should do the whole movie in an Indian accent that he doesn't, in real life, have. Not really recommended. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2834 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2834 Tue, 08 Oct 2013 22:02:48 +0200 Ben Affleck directs and stars alongside John Goodman, Bryan Cranston, Alan Arkin and Zeljko Ivanek in this movie about the CIA pretending to make a movie in order to smuggle US-embassy employees out of Iran during the hostage crisis. The cast is good and the idea isn't bad but the execution is a bit slow, especially in the second act, where I felt that they didn't sustain the suspense well at all. The direction and cinematography were quite good, but not exceptional for the genre (like Skyfall, for example). Perhaps I was just burdened by knowing that the actual story -- which was more than exciting enough -- had been adjusted to emphasize the CIA role and deëmphasize the Canadian one. It's not a bad movie, but it's also not a great movie. The Oscar nod it got as best motion picture of the year was likely just a way of sticking it to Iran. It's good for fans of Arkin, Goodman, etc. but otherwise not recommended. This Is What Winning Looks Like (2013) For a sobering and honest look at the situation in Afghanistan and the repercussions of the dozen years of war there, you could do far worse than investing 90 minutes to watch "This Is What Winning Looks Like: My Afghanistan War Diary" by Ben Anderson . The lead paragraph of the accompanying article summarizes the film, "I didn’t plan on spending six years covering the war in Afghanistan. I went there in 2007 to make a film about the vicious fighting between undermanned, under-equipped British forces and the Taliban in Helmand, Afghanistan’s most violent province. But I became obsessed with what I witnessed there—how different it was from the conflict’s portrayal in the media and in official government statements. " The footage is crisp and high-quality and almost entirely of the Afghan citizens, their police force and their army. 3/4 of the film is in Pashto and Dari with English subtitles and American/western soldiers are not featured prominently at all, unlike in other documentaries. [1] The shining exception is Major Bill Steuber, who is interviewed extensively, perhaps because of his honesty and forthrightness. He talks corruption among the police officials, struggling against his Sisyphean tasks ("Have you ever seen The Sopranos? [The corruption]’s vast."). And how can anyone build up trust in this region, with the leaders of the war working against the boots on the ground with drone and hellfire-missile attacks? One villager said, "They have hit me so hard that I am stunned. What can I do? I have lost four of my brothers. How can I look after their families now?" whereas another said "Life has no meaning for me anymore [...] I have lost 27 members of my family. My house has been destroyed. Everything I’ve built for 70 years is gone." The conclusion is sobering and overall dismal, as expected of any war. The reality for those on the ground is quite different than that sold to Americans at home. Even the commanding officers are happy to hear only bullshit and tick a box on their checklists. They don't want to hear how it's really going; they want laurels for themselves. So has it ever been in war. Koch Brothers Exposed (2012) -- "6/10" A Robert Greenwald documentary that digs into the various nefarious means by which the Koch Brothers exert undue influence on our society. Decent enough for background material, but not much new here. Slap Shot (1977) -- "8/10" The quintessential hockey movie, starting Paul Newman, who claimed later in his career that making this movie was the best time he had in the movies. That's a career that included Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, The Hustler and Cool Hand Luke. The film takes place in northern New England in the mid to late 70s. It's a motley crew, who are joined by the ... drum roll ... Hansen brothers, 18, 19 and 20 years old, respectively and goons like the game has never seen. The attitude toward penalties is extraordinarily lax, but you'll hardly care because this movie is such a good time. I'm biased because the time and place both speak to me, as I grew up near where they filmed most of the games (Syracuse and Utica). Hell, growing up, I even saw games in Utica featuring the Utica Devils, the farm team for the New Jersey Devils. Again, it's a treat to watch an R-rated comedy back when they weren't so formulaic and when they were still being made and when they weren't over-the-top disgusting to earn their rating. It likely earned the rating just for swearing, but when you're making a movie about a down-and-dirty f'in hockey team, what kind of language is the most honest? It even addressed themes that America has seemingly been saddled with forever: its class divide and its obsession with violence. When Newman visits the team's owner, he learns that, while she's happy that the team has turned a profit, she'd still rather take the capital loss for tax reasons than sell the team and let the players keep their jobs. He shouts at her, "You are totally fucked! You're garbage for letting us all go down the drain," a sentiment that resonates no less today. In the final act, the two teams in the championship game are beating the bloody bejeezus out of each other, which is just fine with the announcers and with the crowd. When one lone player starts a strip-tease, others take umbrage that he's making a disgrace of the game. As ever, violence is just fine whereas sex and nudity are to be feared. Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose. Hero (2002) -- "9/10" An all-star cast of Jet Li, Donnie Yen, Zheng Ziyi, Tony Leung and Maggie Cheung star in a highly stylized fable/history of the beginnings of modern China, telling the story of the unification of the six kingdoms into "Our Land". A beautifully filmed, scored and paced film with an interesting story and quite lovely choreography. It's not a beat-'em-up martial arts movie, but much more of a thinking person's film. Saw it in Mandarin with English subtitles. Euro Trip (2004) -- "8/10" A relatively well-constructed teen road-trip movie. Good cameos by Matt Damon, Vinnie Jones, Lucy Lawless and Rade Serbedzija. Hall Pass (2011) -- "2/10" An utterly awful film and a waste of what could have been a very good cast (Owen Wilson, Jason Sudeikis, Christina Applegate, Stephen Merchant and J.B. Smoove (Leon!). Park Avenue: money, power and the American dream - Why Poverty? (2013) An Alex Gibney movie, so take it with a grain of salt, but it's decent enough. The film discusses the widening disparity in American society by juxtaposing the richest people in New York City, living on Park Avenue with those just 10 minutes north, in the South Bronx. The movie covers how lobbying by the rich has changed laws to tilt the odds even more in their favor, a seemingly unstoppable tendency. You can "watch it online " . Salvation Boulevard (2009) -- "5/10" Greg Kinnear stars as the unquestioning faithful fool and Pierce Brosnan is the sleazy head preacher at Kinnear's mega-church. The plot ends up quite convoluted, with an atheist professor played by Ed Harris and a Mexican drug lord. Jim Gaffigan provides comic relief as well. Up in the Air (2011) -- "7/10" George Clooney stars as a near-constant air traveler whose only life goal is to attain 10 million travel miles and be inducted into some sort of platinum club for travelers. Vera Farmiga, Jason Bateman, J.K. Simmons, Zack Galifianakis, Danny McBride and Sam Elliot round out the cast. It's a decent movie with some very nice shots landscaping a relatively predictable plot. Kind of a chick flick, but stands on its own as well. BBC: Surviving Progress (2011) -- "8/10" A series of interviews about modern society, again with an emphasis on the increasing tendency toward wealth concentration and increasing inequality. It addresses how the upper echelons use propaganda to blind everyone else -- and even themselves -- to the fact that the society that buoys them up is hopelessly divorced from reality and shockingly short-term -- not to mention, crassly unethical and cruel for almost everyone else. Resources are getting scarcer and being used up more and more quickly and that by an ever-more exclusive class. For Your Eyes Only (1981) -- "6/10" Roger Moore plays James Bond in Greece, trying to retrieve an Enigma-like decoding device from the ocean floor. Lots of pretty vanilla underwater action with a much more down-to-Earth feeling than some of the more bombastic subsequent Bond films (e.g. another Moore film, Moonraker). There was a skiing scene that was strongly reminiscent of the famous opening sequence in The Spy Who Loved Me. The climactic scene involves a bit of derring-do as Bond scales a cliff face to get to the fortress/monastery where the enemy is holed up with the device. When a henchman knocks out a few of his pitons, he falls precipitously but hangs on to climb back up using a pair of "Prusik knots" made from his shoelaces. Saw it in German. The Expendables 2 (2012) -- "7/10" Watched it again. Surprisingly my "earlier review" held up to the scrutiny of a second viewing. Repo Men (2009) -- "8/10" A pleasant surprise: a bit gory at times, but otherwise a solid near-future science-fiction story loaded with metaphor and uncomfortably close to our world today. Jude Law and Forest Whitaker put in very solid performances, as does Liev Schrieber in a minor role. Good ending. Recommended. Jerry Seinfeld: Comedian (2002) -- "6/10" This is a documentary about Jerry's return to stand-up after a long, successful run on his show Seinfeld and ensuing semi-retirement. The parts with Jerry and most of his fellow comedians are quite good, with typically Seinfeldian insights. The parts with Orny Adams are utterly horrible; he's an insecure shell of a man, probably representative, but nonetheless irritating. The Greatest Movie Ever Sold (2011) -- "7/10" A documentary directed by and starring Morgan Spurlock (of Supersize Me! fame) that is very open about its sponsorships. In fact, the plot of the movie eats itself in that the movie is about the making of the movie. Spurlock documents his search for corporate sponsorship to make a documentary about a documentary that is sponsored by corporations. While the movie shows how strongly our major media is influenced by advertising dollars, it at the same time leaves you wondering how true to his vision Spurlock was able to keep, considering how much sponsorship he received for his documentary. He reads portions of the contracts in the documentary, wherein it is stipulated which beverages he's allowed to drink, which cars he's allowed to drive and so on and so forth. When several sponsors indicate that they want to be involved in the final cut, are we to think that the movie we're seeing is really the full-on branding-exposé documentary we would have expected from Spurlock or, because of the very nature of the film, are we watching a diluted version of that beware-of-branding message that was collaboratively spun by the dozens of sponsors to make them look more sympathetic? That is, do these brands want to be associated with the movie because they really do care that they and other corporations like them are brainwashing people or because they want to pick up that, as Bill Hicks once said, "anti-marketing dollar, [which is] a good market"? Lockout (2012) -- "8/10" Guy Pearce, uncharacteristically all beefed-up and looking -- and sometimes acting -- eerily like Jean-Claude Van Damme stars as Snow, a CIA operative charged with rescuing the U.S. President's daughter from a high-security prison in LEO (Low Earth Orbit). I am not kidding. The reason this works is that Luc Besson came up with the idea and helped write the screenplay. So, it works for the same reason that The Fifth Element worked so well: excellent sets, great tech, crazy/quirky characters and evil enemies, a decent plot and a wise-cracking, gritty hero with a checkered past. Maggie Grace as Emily Warnock (DOPOTUS) was nowhere near as cool as Milla Jovovich as Leeloo, but you can't have everything. Sure, there are plot holes -- the prison isn't in a stable orbit? And then it crashes into the ISS? Really? -- but they don't get in the way of a rollicking space adventure. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] The Danish documentary Armadillo was like that, reviewed "Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2012.9" . ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2828 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2828 Sun, 19 May 2013 16:40:12 +0200 -- "9/10" 2. "Hancock (2008)" <#Hancock> -- "7/10" 3. "Daybreakers (2009)" <#Daybreakers> -- "6/10" 4. "God Bless America (2011)" <#God> -- "5/10" 5. "The Cannonball Run (1981)" <#Cannonball1> -- "6/10" 6. "Cannonball Run II (1984)" <#Cannonball2> -- "3/10" 7. "Friends with Benefits (2011)" <#Friends> -- "8/10" 8. "Run, Fatboy, Run (2007)" <#Run> -- "7/10" Alien (1979) -- "9/10" The classic film, directed by Ridley Scott and starring Sigourney Weaver (Ripley), John Hurt and Tom Skerritt. It documents the journey of a commercial deep-space mining ship on its way to investigate an S.O.S. call from a distant planet. The ship lands and sends out a landing party, which discovers an even larger, alien craft that seems for all intents and purposes to have crashed long ago. Something survived, though and it wants to breed again. And for that, it needs a host. Poor John Hurt plays that host and gets the party started in earnest, unwillingly and unwittingly helping the alien on its way to its second stage of evolution, where it gets really nasty. The first stage already had molecular acid for blood; the second stage has a polycarbonate exoskeleton and several, nested and pointy-tooth--filled mouths. Ripley survives (along with the cat, Jack) and lives to fight another day. Hancock (2008) -- "7/10" Will Smith is in the eponymous drunken superhero role and Jason Bateman is the PR man who's there to save his reputation. Charlize Theron -- looking absolutely amazing, as usual -- is Bateman's wife but she seems to recognize Hancock as well. Long story short -- and spoiler alert -- but Theron turns out to also be a superhero(ine) and Hancock's soulmate and they're the last pair of angels/heroes/what-have-you. The others of their kind have all died because they found one another and, in having found one another, lost their powers and grew old and died, like any other normal humans. Despite their predestined affinity, Smith and Theron choose to stay apart in order to remain immortal so they can watch over mankind. Shades of Unbreakable somehow. Shades of Jesus, too, I guess. Better than expected, but still hard to recommend. Daybreakers (2009) -- "6/10" A vampire/zombie-vampire film that I watched only because it starred Ethan Hawke and Willem Dafoe. It's a slightly different take, presupposing a world in 2019 run by the vampire survivors of a bat-borne epidemic (that's the movie's terminology; it's more like a pandemic). The vampires are ascendant but the human population -- read: their livestock -- is dwindling and Ethan Hawke is a vampire hematologist who's trying to find a blood substitute because he doesn't think vampires should prey on humans. He eventually throws in with a band of humans who claim that they can cure the disease that causes vampirism -- using a form of vampire hydrotherapy. Some of the vampire scenes are filmed in extreme gray-scale tones, with the blood looking black, like ichor, which was kind of a nice touch. The battles are mostly between the vampires and the humans, but also the subsiders -- vampires who have gone too long without nourishment. It was better than expected on the strength of the cast, but they were swimming against the current of a both clichéd and confused plot. God Bless America (2011) -- "5/10" Joel Murray stars as a terminally ill man who lost his job and who's been cut off from his family and who gets fed up enough with modern America to go on a killing spree. It had its moments, but it got kind of preachy, especially when his partner-in-crime started pontificating. It's not believable that she could have gotten so angry and so disappointed at her young age. In a nutshell, she hasn't suffered enough yet to deserve the killing spree she's on. It's a case of being right for the wrong reasons, which is still, well, kinda wrong. The first half an hour promises much more than the subsequent hour delivers. Where it started off as what I felt might be a 21st-century equivalent to Falling Down, it dithered off into the reeds instead of ending truly strongly. The Cannonball Run (1981) -- "6/10" The classic ensemble comedy about various misfits driving really quickly from one coast of the U.S. to the other. I can't even remember in which direction they were driving -- NY to LA? Burt Reynolds makes a nod to his magnum opus Smokey and the Bandit when he suggests that they get a "black Trans Am" to complete the race. There are some good lines and a lot of silly ones as well as a lot of what I'm sure they perceived as harmless sexism and racism. Hard to recommend to anyone who doesn't already want to see it, but I liked seeing all of the actors and actresses I grew up with, many of them still in their prime. Cannonball Run II (1984) -- "3/10" The follow-up to the original just proves that Hollywood didn't invent the uncomfortably bad sequel in the 21st century. The technology to capitalize on the surprising amount of goodwill engendered by a sleeper success with an underfunded and most-likely contractually obligated sequel has been available for decades, apparently. Not recommended. Friends with Benefits (2011) -- "8/10" Mila Kunis, Justin Timberlake, Woody Harrelson and Patricia Clarkson absolutely shine in this rom-com. Jenna Elfman and Richard Jenkins are also quite good. Given the cast, I guess it's not fair to say that this movie was surprisingly good, but I was nonetheless pleasantly surprised by what looks for all the world like a cookie-cutter chick-flick. The sex scenes with Timberlake and Kunis [1] especially were much more fun and varied and honest than I've grown to expect from a Hollywood movie. It was rated R, however, ensuring that as few teenagers as possible would be exposed to non-cartoonish relationships by accident. Is the plot predictable? Of course it is. Was it well-executed, funny and entertaining? I'm not ashamed to say that I thought it was. Run, Fatboy, Run (2007) -- "7/10" Simon Pegg and Dylan Moran star in a comedy about a sad sack (Pegg) whose marriage to Thandie Newton (I usually dislike her characters immensely, but she was decent here) has fallen apart. Hank Azaria's crass American has since swept in to take over where Pegg left off. Moran is Pegg's friend Gordon, playing the incorrigible and inveterate drinker and gambler. When Azaria mentions that he's going to run in a marathon, Pegg signs up as well. Why? To prove his love for Newton and to win her back? I guess? To improve himself? Hard to say. What ends up happening -- spoiler alert -- are exactly both of those things. The movie is fun not because of the plot but more on the strength of the actors -- for me, it was Pegg and Moran especially that made this movie worthwhile. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] Hat-tip to Kunis's body-double for sacrificing her naked ass where Kunis's career could never have withstood such an onslaught of harlotry. Timberlake had no such trouble in displaying his own fundament. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2801 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2801 Sun, 05 May 2013 22:11:08 +0200 Possibly the best of all of the X-Men movies so far, with Jean Grey coming from the dead as Phoenix and fighting with Professor X himself for supremacy. They took out Magneto -- made him human -- and man was I rooting for the Phoenix to make a clean slate of things at the end. Mainstream movies always cop out when it comes to destroying the world, though. Still recommended, though, and highly recommended for fans of comic-book movies. Kill Bill Vol. I (2003) -- "10/10" The classic Tarantino. Saw it for the third or fourth time; still love it. Saw it in German. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey (2012) -- "6/10" Although I kind of want the first forty-five minutes back, it was worth the wait for the absolutely spellbinding sequence with Bilbo and Gollum/Sméagol. There was a lot of embellishment over Tolkien's original text: the goblins were there -- the Goblin King and his kingdom were exquisitely rendered and portrayed -- but so were the orcs, who never really made an appearance so early in the book. It felt a little dumbed-down but it was entertaining enough, I guess. This is the first of three parts and Benedict Cumberbatch is to make an appearance in the second and third parts, so I'm cautiously optimistic. It's hard not to think that they're really no longer making these for the hardcore Tolkien fans and more just to make a boatload of money. Trading Places (1983) -- "7/10" Eddie Murphy, Dan Aykroyd and Jamie Lee Curtis -- all just young as hell -- star in this film about a successful commodities broker (Aykroyd) whose place is maliciously switched with that of a homeless man (Murphy). Ralph Bellamy and Don Ameche play the owners of the commodities firm, who engineer the switch, throwing their star employee into destitution and raising Murphy up to the pole position in their firm. Murphy and Aykroyd manage to team up and turn the tables on them. Recommended. Sudden Death (1995) -- "7/10" Jean-Claude Van Damme as a fire marshal at the seventh game of the Stanley Cup Playoffs. The vice president of the U.S. is in attendance and he is taken hostage and held for ransom. The final rescue scene, where he circus-acts and Macgyvers his way from the top of the dome to the skybox is pretty original, actually. The ensuing helicopter scene was also unlike anything I'd seen before. Kind of on the level of Die Hard 4 (when McLane drives his car into a helicopter) but somehow less annoying for its unbelievability. It was actually more like the original Die Hard. Recommended for the action movie that it is (especially if you have a soft spot in your heart for JCVD). The Man (2005) -- "3/10" An utterly awful film starring Eugene Levy and Samuel L. Jackson. It's unfathomable what drove Jackson to take this role: a desperate need for money? Or boredom? Or did he lose a bet? Miguel Ferrer was also in it, mysteriously enough. Planes, Trains & Automobiles (1987) -- "7/10" An absurdist comedy about everything that can go wrong on a holiday journey in 1980s America. John Candy as the somewhat annoying but hard-to-hate schlub and Steve Martin as the straight-laced and largely fun-free marketing guy. It's a classic and it's actually quite good, thanks in no small part to Candy's irrepressible good humor. Their true bonding begins when sitting on Candy's oversized steamer trunk, facing oncoming traffic on the shoulder of a highway, in the middle of the night, illuminated by the flickering glow of the their already-partially destroyed heap of a car catching fire. The Karate Kid (2010) -- "5/10" Jackie Chan is easily the best thing about this remake of the 1980s original. Jaden Smith is slightly more believable than Ralph Macchio -- but just barely. Mean Girls (2004) -- "7/10" A teenage girl moves with her sociologist/anthropologist parents from Africa to California, entering the far more dangerous world of a modern American high school. It is, apparently, not much different than high school in the late 80s, according to my viewing companion. It has its funny moments, but it might not speak to everyone. Lindsay Lohan is good in it. Crazy, Stupid, Love (2011) -- "7/10" Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling, Julianne Moore and Emma Stone all play quite well in a movie about an exhausted marriage healed by a separation, of a man (Carell) who's forgotten how to be appealing and of another man (Gosling) who knows what he doesn't want to be but doesn't know how to become what he does want to be. If that makes any sense. Julianne Moore was ok, but Emma Stone was better. Marisa Tomei has a smaller role and is also quite good. More depth than expected. Recommended. Real Genius (1985) -- "8/10" Val Kilmer stars in this film about super-smart kids at a super-prestigious tech university, roped by their sleazy and egomaniacal professor into working on his military contract to create a powerful laser (read: SDI). The smart kids end up teaming up to turn the tables on their teachers and the grad students beholden to them in amusing and entertaining ways. A classic. Kilmer shines. Recommended. Iron Man 2 (2010) -- "7/10" Saw it for the second time, shortly after having re-watched the original. Mickey Rourke as Ivan Vanko is great, Sam Rockwell as Hammer is amusing and Don Cheadle is always a welcome addition. The plot was a bit lacking, though, with far too many Deus ex Machinae for my taste. The plot was pulled along by non sequiturs instead of by any common thread. The action scenes were decent, but also a bit too military-hardware--heavy. It kind of felt like watching a commercial for the Pentagon for long stretches. After watching it a second time, I am no longer surprised that I had such a hard time remembering what it was about. Still looking forward to the third installment, though. Sir Ben Kingsley is always good. And Robert Downey Jr. would have to work hard to ruin a film. The Omen (2006) -- "3/10" A pale shadow of a remake illuminated by the somewhat demonic-looking Liev Schreiber. Julia Stiles was in it, but was wasted. Not drunk, I mean, but not utilized. Spoiler alert: everybody dies and the son of the devil wins. Not recommended. Unknown (2011) -- "5/10" Liam Neeson is kicking the shit out of a bunch of people again. Instead of directly stealing his daughter or wife -- as in both of the Taken films -- his own identity is stolen. Evil Arabs are involved, which is making me really wonder where Neeson's prejudices lie. Diane Kruger plays a taxi driver who helps him try to get his life and identity back -- if he can. She's pretty good in this. It's not awful and not really predictable but still not very entertaining. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2786 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2786 Wed, 06 Mar 2013 19:54:44 +0100 -- "7/10" 2. "The Prestige (2006)" <#Prestige> -- "10/10" 3. "Skyfall (2012)" <#Skyfall> -- "6/10" 4. "Flight (2012)" <#Flight> -- "8/10" 5. "Oliver Stone's Untold History of the United States (S01E09) (2012)" <#Oliver9> -- "10/10" 6. "Oliver Stone's Untold History of the United States (S01E10) (2012)" <#Oliver10> -- "10/10" 7. "The Bourne Legacy (2012)" <#Legacy> -- "7/10" 8. "Oliver Stone's Untold History of the United States (S01E08) (2012)" <#Oliver8> -- "10/10" 9. "Ghost Rider (2007)" <#Ghost> -- "5/10" 10. "The Big Lebowski (1998)" <#Lebowski> -- "10/10" Blade: Trinity (2004) -- "7/10" Wesley Snipes stars as the daywalker in the third film of the trilogy. Instead of just Kris Kristofferson's Whistler, he's aided by the Nightstalkers, a band of vampire hunters comprising Ryan Reynolds, Jessica Biel and Patton Oswalt (Oswalt was clearly thrown in for balance because Biel and Reynolds were apparently way too much eye candy). Parker Posey (Louie's girlfriend in the TV show Louie) is off the rails as the leader of the vampire gang, which comes up with the great idea of resurrecting Dracula. Is there a showdown between Blade and Dracula? You betcha. Can you tell who wins if you also know that this is the last movie? You cannot: if Blade dies, no more Blade movies; if Dracula dies, no more Blade movies. After all, where can you go from killing Dracula? Snipes does his choreography well; Reynolds and Biel weren't bad either. Not the first time I've seen it, but still recommended. The Prestige (2006) -- "10/10" Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale star as 19th-century magicians whose fates are intertwined and whose rivalry clenches its fist ever more tightly around them until the bitter end. Scarlett Johansson is the ingénue who starts off with one but ends up with the other. Initially, Bale's deftness trumps Jackman's arrogant charisma but each raises the ante with ever more magnificent magic until Jackman presents us with which is sufficiently advanced so as to be indistinguishable from magic (brought to him by that most amazing of Croatians "Nikola Tesla" . Directed by Christopher Nolan and written by him and his younger brother, the story is absolutely top-notch. Also starring Michael Caine as Jackman's older manager and David Bowie as Nikola Tesla. Best magic movie ever; highly recommended. Saw it in German. Skyfall (2012) -- "6/10" Daniel Craig stars in his third James Bond movie and continues taking the series in a more rugged, less flashy direction (a most welcome one IMHO). Judy Dench reprises her role as M and it sadly takes -- spoiler alert -- two hours and twenty minutes to finally kill her. [1] Javier Bardem plays Silva, an MI6 agent gone rogue, and he quite frankly saves the film from utter ignominy. Craig is good; he's just fine. It's the script, the pacing and the dialogue that are just tough to swallow. The film just draaaaaags in some places. A lot of places. I can't quite put my finger on why, but this film reminded me of the Batman reboot by Christopher Nolan. Perhaps it was the insistence on explaining every last detail so that even the most inattentive of moviegoers could follow along. The overall story arc was very much more like a Bourne movie than a Bond movie (i.e. it was based on rogue super-agents heading back to the nest). There was no super-enemy with a big base of operations -- I miss S.P.E.C.T.R.E. so much. It is, in fairness, a gorgeous film. The initial chase sequence was standard fare, but the titles were amazing and set the tone for some jaw-dropping scenes. It only has two colors -- say it with me: orange and blue! But it is beautiful nonetheless -- the framing and composition of so many shots are really good. Roger Deakins is to be commended. But I was so rooting for Silva to kill M. Just make her stop talking. Actually, it would have been nice if everyone but Silva stopped talking. Bardem has the only dialogue worth listening to. The scene on his island was, hands down, the best fifteen minutes of the movie. That was quite entertaining. It was so pretty that I was at times fooled into thinking I was watching a Coen Brothers movie -- until a character opened his or her mouth and burped out the next flaccid line. The rest of the characters spoke for pure exposition or to explain things that were already blindingly obvious for those paying even a bit of attention. Or, even worse, to explain some totally unknowable fact or circumstance that was needed to propel the film along. God help me if you were about to compliment the script on a little implicit twist that went unexplained -- five seconds later, it was thoroughly explicated by one or the other character. Eve was utterly awful as well and her on-screen interaction with Bond elicited anything but sexual tension -- her performance reminded me of the utter wooden awfulness of Halle Berry in X-Men. And the opening sequence -- what a horrific joke. Instead of a stolid Bond pursuing his prey (as so wonderfully done in Casino Royale), he was accompanied by Eve and had the entire MI6 home office on his back via radio, with them constantly exhorting the two agents to explain every detail of what's going on during the chase. It was utterly vapid and irritating and I might have called it quits right there. I fear, however, that I'm more sensitive to this "remote participation" phenomenon -- I think the rest of the first-world mobile generation is quite accustomed to the idea of their being people who play out a scene and that others participate via uplink, unreasonably demanding to be kept in the loop like spoiled children -- and making the decisions like insipid dungeon masters on a ludicrously inadequate amount of information. Perhaps I wasn't sufficiently swept away by the seriousness of the situation -- and perhaps that it showed how poor beleaguered Western nations are forced to fight these days. This theme would appear again later with M chastising Parliamentarians who failed to see that we were at war with "those in the shadows". The irony that the shadowy evil against which M must defend is actually blowback sown by her own division was lost on pretty much everyone. Just make a f$&king Bond movie without trying to simultaneously convince me that Bond is doing it not only for Queen and Country, but quite literally and almost solely for my own good. And then Q showed up and, instead of a venerable John Cleese, it's some Justin-Bieber--looking smart-ass computer geek who's utterly arrogant about his l33t hacker skills but proves to be stupid enough to plug an enemy laptop directly into his main systems without a firewall. Oops. And it's Bond who sees the f'in Matrix like he's channeling John Nash from A Beautiful Mind instead of the super computer-geek who becomes more and more incompetent as the film goes on. They'd have done much better to bring back Boris from GoldenEye. And then Q does some secret work for Bond, but on a 40-foot screen on the main floor of the MI6 offices. Super-secret stuff, eh? Bond seemingly forgets to bring any weapons whatsoever with him as he races to Scotland, leading Silva into a trap. But he channels Macgyver to improvise with some shotgun shells, light bulbs, propane tanks and some dynamite. And Bond is, once again, utterly impervious to the cold, falling into what must be near-freezing water and languorously swimming around, getting out and not even shivering a little bit. 'Cause it wasn't cold outside or anything. Would it have killed them to make him shiver a bit? And why shouldn't he be impervious? He was shot in the opening scene and it didn't slow him down one bit. He didn't even favor that side. And these are the kind of super-spies who try sneaking off into the night over an open moor with a flashlight, making it nearly impossible for all but an enemy gifted with sight to track them. An enemy who survived the simultaneous explosion of an entire castle and helicopter from a distance of about twenty feet -- completely unscathed. The conclusion? A beautiful movie with excellent cinematography and mostly horrific acting and dialogue. It wasn't even really funny and the only redeeming character was Bardem's. I was hoping for someone to kill M from the very beginning of the film. Eve, too. One out of two ain't bad. Flight (2012) -- "8/10" Denzel Washington plays a pilot named "Whip", a pilot who is still very much a Denzel-Washington character. To avoid too much controversy, he flies a fictitious plane for a fictitious airline. He has a bit of a drinking problem that he straightens out with cocaine. Easy-peasy. He shows up to work plastered and, just before landing, his plane starts to fall apart: the elevator gets stuck in "dive" position and one after another engine goes. Whip stays calm and manages to keep the plane in the air long enough to land in an open field, killing only 6 of 104. In the ensuing investigations, his feat cannot be repeated by other pilot. Don Cheadle plays a high-priced lawyer assigned to clean up any possible criminal liability due to Whip's pretty blatant alcoholism. John Goodman plays a bit part as Whip's dealer. It's a Robert Zemeckis film, so it's well-made and interesting, but also pretty straightforward. When Whip manages to stay dry for nine days preceding his hearing but falls hard when he gets access to a mini-bar, Goodman comes to the rescue. I had a brief hope that the film would end with Whip triumphantly passing the hearing blazed, coked and drunk out of his mind. After all, if he can fly a plane super-drunk better than anyone, then he should be able to get through a hearing, right? But it was not to be and the film ended on a more family-friendly note. As an aside, I wondered how criminal liability could even possibly come up -- if his case went to trial, his lawyer could easily point out that Whip landed the plane better than anyone else could have, drunk or not. Is the court really going to make the argument that he could have saved even more lives had he been sober? Naturally, he could be prosecuted for gross negligence, but the extenuating circumstances -- that he saved 98 lives despite proven, massive hardware failure -- would likely result in a drastically reduced sentence. Oliver Stone's Untold History of the United States (S01E09) (2012) -- "10/10" This episode covers Bush I and Clinton, documenting Bush's belligerence toward Iraq. It was as good as the others, but covered a lot of history that I already knew, though I was unaware of the level of Bush the elder's war expertise before taking office as president. His belligerence was unbelievable but his team was much better at fabricating a pretense for invasion than his son's would prove to be (see Hubris below). I'd also forgotten how Clinton had won by the skin of his teeth -- and then only because Ross Perot siphoned off nearly 20% of the vote. Stone covers the history of Prescott Bush, Bush the elder's father and Junior's grandfather, who built the family fortune by helping Germany during World War II. Stone details many other major U.S. firms that benefited from war profiteering in deals with Hitler's Germany and how much of the post-war wealth in the U.S. -- the great fortunes -- were built on fascism (as Honoré de Balzac said: "The secret of great fortunes without an apparent source is a crime forgotten, because it was done properly"). [2] Stone and his co-author also give a proper place in history for the greatness of Gorbachev, who nearly single-handedly architected the first -- and heretofore only -- bloodless revolution when he saw to the dismantling of the Soviet Union. Reagan was a warmonger who did nothing but get in the way with his vapid jingoism -- or take credit once he saw which way the wind was blowing. The peace dividend would, however, definitely not be forthcoming, at least in the US. In the former USSR, whatever peace dividend might have been was quickly gobbled up by a wave of kleptocrats and Western "advisers" from the Friedman school. This episode also covers how the seeds of 9--11 were sown with the emplacement of military bases in Saudi Arabia. Despite promises to Gorbachev, the U.S. continued to expand Nato, rebuilding the former Eastern bloc as a NATO bloc encircling Russia instead. After Clinton came Bush, who disdained both Clinton and Bush for being too weak. With a cold-war crew in his cabinet, he was ready when 9--11 came. Many clips of Bush's speeches are included, included one from the campaign trail -- the famous one where he claimed to not want to be the world's policeman -- as well as speeches to Congress and the U.N. in which he depicts a simplistic and utterly skewed world-view. Oliver Stone's Untold History of the United States (S01E10) (2012) -- "10/10" This episode covers the Bush years and Obama's first term. This is much more recent history, which I have already thoroughly documented in "Public Policy & Politics" . This final episode covers the mendacity of the Bush administration, the naked contempt for rule of law, the torture. Following Bush, Obama continued to widen US military presence, opening more bases in Australia and providing weapons to Taiwan (antagonizing and encircling the Chinese) while further tightening the NATO noose around Russia and Iran. Stone also covers the expansion of Obama's drone program as well as cyber warfare, the incessant expansion of power, of brutality, of empire. The series wraps up with a plea for America to become the country it has always claimed itself to be -- to be the country that a Henry Wallace could have perhaps made. Hubris: The Selling of the Iraq War (2013) Rachel Maddow hosts this one-hour documentary based on the book of the same name. Her introduction asks whether the men who perpetrated the lies that led to the Iraq War will have those lies written into their obituaries. But her other example, Lyndon Johnson, was not defined by the lie of the Gulf of Tonkin, was he? Of course not. Almost no one knows that the Gulf of Tonkin was a lie, even to this day. The only reason we know is because documents were revealed 30 years after the fact. The Bush administration will be the same. And why? Because no one gets prosecuted for their lies. Tonkin never caused Johnson any personal problems, no fines, no loss of stature, no prison time. It's the same with everyone involved in the Bush administration. They all remain highly regarded and well-compensated members of the American landscape, so why should they be judged by their Iraq lies when they die? Did Rumsfeld hear about it when he peddled his book? He did not. Why? Because he wouldn't grant interviews to non-friendly news organizations? Perhaps that's part of it. But a lot of it is because the Obama administration just dropped the whole issue as soon as it got into office. Obama covered their asses for them, just like Ford covered Nixon's ass, Bush covered Scooter Libby's and Clinton covered Marc Rich's. Obama kept the stigma of charges, trials and prosecution -- hell, even jail time -- off of the Bush administration. That said, her introduction's not completely bad -- and will likely be a good introduction to what will sound like completely new material for those who weren't paying attention during the last decade. She asked how we are to prevent such lies from happening again. If history may be our guide, documentaries produced by people that can be disregarded as left-wingers with an agenda aren't likely to have an impact at all. I was missing a conclusion, where she should have made the point that prison sentences or any form of repercussions at all might have been a good place to start. The Obama administration's refusal to do so on our behalf -- it's betrayal of justice for these crimes -- would have been a more than appropriate coda for this documentary. As it stands, the documentary just fades out, leaving one with the impression that the issue is unresolved. It's not unresolved; all of the people in that film have been exonerated and nothing will ever happen to them. That, I think, should have been the greater point of the episode: that justice was not served and nothing prevents it from happening again. The way that both the Obama administration and the press bang the war drums for Iran or Syria nearly every day indicates that they have certainly not learned any lessons. On a side note, the post "MSNBC boldly moves to plug its one remaining hole" by Glenn Greenwald writes: "A Pew poll found that in the week leading up to the 2012 election, MSNBC did not air a single story critical of the President or a single positive story about Romney - not a single one [...]" Perhaps it's that attitude that explains why the Obama administration was not blamed. The Bourne Legacy (2012) -- "7/10" I was a bit concerned about a Bourne film without Matt Damon, but I needn't have been. The Bourne Legacy is in good hands with Jeremy Renner. He's an agent in another Treadstone-like program, another super-soldier program where the latest biomedical advancements in gene therapy and viral manipulation lend soldiers increased strength, agility, speed, endurance and resistance to pain as well as mental acuity. Renner is in the middle of nowhere in Alaska, traveling alone through the wilderness when his program is shut down -- meaning that his minders try to take him out with a cruise missile. At the same time, the lab that was creating all of the drugs and medical advances is also taken out, with all but one scientist dead: Rachel Weisz. He finds her and together they flee for their lives, being all cool and Bourne-like but surprisingly down-to-Earth. A totally steady camera and reasonably wide angles on chase and fight scenes were a welcome and refreshing relief from the latest trends in filming. The story was pretty interesting though the technology on display was a bit too much -- it veered heavily into aweome-government-tech-porn territory. It was hard to tell whether this was a fantasy about competent government or an attempt to make people believe that secret agencies really can do all of these things, or whether it was just the easiest way to have people sitting in a command center be able to find two people on the other side of the world even though, for all intents and purposes, they'd disappeared without a trace. One minute, you see them using Canadian forestry satellite footage to find a black blob that is "probably" their car and next we see a bunch of people on phones demanding information about a red Buick LeSabre. And I suppose that was also a bit unbelievable: the degree to which people at airports, rental car agencies, hotels and foreign police departments would just cooperate with the CIA just because they were told to. And, even given that they would be willing -- for whatever reasons -- to cooperate, the level of competence depicted on everyone's part makes you wonder why it took ten years to find bin Laden. Just sayin'. Still, a fun flick and definitely recommended if you like the genre; it easily stands with the others. The Untouchables (2013) A "PBS Frontline documentary" about the utter lack of prosecution for Wall Street bank employees -- especially those in the boardrooms. Many interviews with the assessors in the trenches reveal that fraud was definitely widespread. The higher they went, the more skeptical people became that intent was too hard to prove. In the end, the prosecutors admit that their cases should be slam dunks but that they are all mysteriously quashed. Lanny Breuer seems to be trying to do more than his job: will a prosecution result in an economic collapse? Will prosecuting a bank cause a collapse? If the bank can't prosecuted, then it can't be controlled. And isn't it just convenient that Breuer has these considerations when it comes to the rich and powerful being prosecuted? This was really an excellent documentary; highly recommended. Oliver Stone's Untold History of the United States (S01E08) (2012) -- "10/10" This episode starts with Nixon's fall and Ford's pardon of all of his crimes. Somehow bolstered by this utterly ignominious moment, The Republicans renewed their goal of privatization. The country wasn't ready yet and elected Carter. Zbigniew Brzezinski was the weight that pulled the Carter administration's foreign policy to the right, though Carter started off much more open. Advised by Brzezinski, Kissinger and David Rockefeller, Carter arguably chose advisers more poorly than Obama. Late in his presidency, Nicaragua blew up and the right-wing hawks naturally worried that its revolution would foment change in the near-monarchies in neighboring countries. It was, however, the US-instigated Soviet invasion of Afghanistan that would mark Carter's only invasion -- which led to the US boycotting the 1980 summer Olympics and to Carter's doubling of nuclear warheads rather than halving them as initially promised. He would also repudiate his previous criticisms of Vietnam is what was an almost total capitulation while still in office. Reagan was up next, a man who hated communism and loved military might. He was, by all accounts, not a bright man. Reagan too had some interesting advisers, the craziest of whom was William Casey, head of the CIA, an organization so inept that they never saw the fall of the Soviet Union coming. Reagan's two administrations oversaw U.S. insurgency in several countries in Central America. This run of terror by America's greatest president culminated in the Iran-Contra deals, with all parties involved lying through their teeth and getting off scot free (George Bush I was also involved but slithered away, and was elected president in time to pardon all of his cohorts). Reagan would make a career of lying about and misrepresenting the Soviet threat in the most apocalyptic terms that seem frankly laughable but were swallowed wholesale by a public eager to be terrified and hungry for blood. He was a tyrant, diverting funds from domestic spending to the military, living in a high-society bubble in Washington while attacking unions, the working class and the poor (most of whom probably helped reelect him). Stone utterly idolizes Gorbachev, comparing him to the U.S.'s Henry Wallace, crediting him -- and rightly so -- with Perestroika and the end of the Cold War. Reagan ended up spoiling the deal in Reykjavik because his adviser Richard Perle feared a revitalization of the Soviet economy due to its no longer being sapped by excessive military spending. Not only that, but Reagan's precious SDI was also on the chopping block, so Gorbachev went home with empty hands -- because Reagan wanted to militarize space. Reagan was a blithering mess at the end and admitted the Iran Contra affair with the following statement: "A few months ago, I told the American people I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions still tell me that's true, but the facts and evidence tell me it is not." Faced with either admitting complicity or senility, he took the coward's way out. He doubled the military budget and changed the U.S. from the leading creditor to the leading borrower in just four years. He left office having massively increased both the debt and the deficit and oversaw the biggest financial crash since the Great Depression -- the S&L bailout -- brought about by his deregulation. It was the Reagan administration that was the real springboard for the modern right-wing stranglehold on America. Ghost Rider (2007) -- "5/10" The cast is not bad: Nicolas Cage, Eve Mendes, Peter Fonda and Sam Elliot. The plot is half-baked and pretty low-key for a super-hero movie. Nicolas Cage takes a little while to warm up and he never gets very good. It's an utter mystery to me what Peter Fonda was doing in that film. (Other than that he perhaps hadn't played a devil yet?) The effects are middle-of-the-road and the movie's about a guy who makes a deal with the devil for an awesome stunt-rider career. When the devil comes to collect his due, he makes him the "Ghost Rider", the right arm of retribution of the devil, sent to collect evil souls that have escaped Hell. Oh, and he turns into a flaming skeleton. Not gay flaming, like literally on fire. Saw it in German. The Big Lebowski (1998) -- "10/10" Saw it for what must be the sixth of seventh time and it's one of the few movies that doesn't get old. The dialogue is superb; written and directed by the Coen brothers, it's chock-full of what have by now become classic lines (it has one of the longest "IMDb quote pages" I've ever seen). It's the story of an unemployed amateur bowler -- the Dude, played by Jeff Bridges -- with a special predilection for cursing, drinking White Russians (Caucasians) and smoking pot. He and his bowling buddies -- Walter, played by John Goodman and Donnie, played by Steve Buscemi -- become embroiled in a complicated plot that involves a millionaire, his assistant (played by Philip Seymour Hoffman), another bowler named Jesus (John Turturro) a porno king, a nymphomaniac, three German nihilists (their leader played by Peter Stormare and Flea plays another), an avant-garde heiress/artist played by Julianne Moore and Sam Elliot as an occasional narrator. Highly recommended. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] Out of curiosity, I looked up "Roger Ebert's review" and he loved the film and loved Dench in it, deeming her role as "a dead-serious M (Judi Dench), following the action from MI6 in London and making a fateful decision." Later, he says the film "provides a role worthy of Judi Dench, one of the best actors of her generation. She is all but the co-star of the film, with a lot of screen time, poignant dialogue, and a character who is far more complex and sympathetic than we expect in this series." It just shows how subjective this all is; "complex" and "sympatheic" are two of the last words I would have used to describe her portrayal. As in the other films, I found her attempts to be a hard-ass laughable and unconvincing. [1] After some digging around, I found an article -- "Balzac et l’obsession de l’origine des fortunes" by Michel Frontère -- with the original citation in French, which states that it was written in Le Père Goriot (1835) and reads: "Le secret des grandes fortunes sans cause apparente est un crime oublié, parce qu'il a été proprement fait" The commonly cited version in English -- "Behind every great fortune there is a crime" -- pales, I think, in comparison. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2773 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2773 Mon, 11 Feb 2013 20:26:29 +0100 Disney's take on the story of Rapunzel, done in modern, 3d-animated style. The characters are unsurprising: there's a beautiful virginal girl who sings, a young handsome rogue who sings and an evil old witch. The story is only tangentially related to the original Grimm's fairy tale: in the original, the witch was initially the wronged party; in the Disney version, there's no gray area and the witch is evil from the start. There were no real star voices and only a handful of characters and it was basically a cookie-cutter Disney princess story. The horse Maximus was fun, but watch The Emperor's New Groove instead. Brewster's Millions (1985) -- "6/10" Richard Pryor stars as a minor-league baseball pitcher whose uncle leaves him a $300 million fortune. In order to get it, though, he must first spend $30 million in a single month and isn't allowed to tell anyone about the conditions of the will. He manages to blow most of his money when he eventually hits on the idea of running for mayor. John Candy is looking young and relatively thin, playing his usual jovial sidekick. Hop (2011) -- "4/10" A mixed real-life/3d-animated movie about the up-and-coming Easter Bunny, voiced by Russell Brand. The current Easter Bunny (his dad) is voiced by Hugh Laurie. Brand is OK, but the script wastes Laurie. The real-life characters are a mixed bag of mostly unknowns -- people will probably recognize Kaley Cuoco as Penny from The Big Bang Theory and James Marsden as Cyclops from the X-Men franchise. The new easter bunny doesn't want to be tied down and wants to be a drummer while his new best friend -- Fred O'Hare (GET IT?) -- is desperate for a job with meaning. It's a match made in crappy holiday-movie heaven. Even the sidekick and animated cameo characters weren't very good. Not recommended. Syriana (2005) -- "9/10" George Clooney and Matt Damon star in this film about the cynical manipulation of the fictitious and resource-rich Middle Eastern country of Syriana. Damon plays a liaison from a powerful oil company; Clooney plays a CIA operative sick of what he sees and who he works for. Despite the best efforts of Damon and Clooney -- each working in their own way -- it all ends badly, mirroring the fall of Iran's socialist president Mosaddegh in 1953. It's a gritty film that mirrors reality better than many others in its genre. Recommended. Saw it in German. The Rum Diary (2011) -- "6/10" Johnny Depp stars as Hunter S. Thompson in a drug- and alcohol-fueled visit to Puerto Rico in search of a story. He's trying to find himself as a writer and the first opportunity he gets is to help some developers tart up their brochure to sell off an idyllic smaller island from under the feet of the natives, planting huge hotels everywhere -- much as had already happened to the main, larger island of Puerto Rico. Giovanni Ribisi is excellent as an utterly stoned fellow reporter as is Michael Rispoli, whose capacity for ingesting rum borders on the mythic. Aaron Eckhart is decent as the sleazy leader of the development project and Amber Heard is eye candy. Plans are made, broken, re-formed; rum is drunk in prodigious quantities; the machine is raged against. Drags in some places, but overall not bad. Bad Teacher (2011) -- "6/10" Cameron Diaz plays the eponymous role, backed up by Justin Timberlake, Jason Segel and Lucy Punch (who plays quite well as the overly medicated Ms. Squirrel). At first it seems like standard fare, but some of the dialogue and scenes put it well into black-comedy territory, making it more enjoyable in my view. Surprisingly, Segel is a cool, self-assured guy and plays that role well -- a welcome relief from the insecure whiners he has played of late. Diaz is much better than in other roles I've seen her in, though that's not saying much. She nailed the crudeness and didn't shrink from utterly awful language and deplorable behavior. She kind of reminded me of Charlize Theron's Mavis from Young Adult (which was much darker overall, but not better). Good Hair (2009) -- "7/10" A documentary about the hair-styling industry with a primary focus on black women's hair: straightening products, weaves, etc. How much does this cost? Where do people get the money? Where does the hair come from? (India, mostly, where people regularly shave their heads as part of a religious ceremony. Unsurprisingly, these people offer their hair up to God, whose representatives immediately turn around and sell it to Europe and the States at a huge profit.) It discusses many issues surrounding the focus on straight hair as well as the high-maintenance consequences of it. A lot of people spend money they don't have on their hair, into which they bind a lot of their self-worth. Lots of interviews with prominent black actors and music stars, like Eve, Ice-T, Al Sharpton and others. Recommended. The Proposal (2009) -- "6/10" Sandra Bullock plays against character, starting the film as a flat-out arrogant take-no-prisoners boss from hell, seemingly modeled after Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada who was, in turn, modeled after the real-life Anna Wintour. This character, balanced against the expectation of niceness that she's built up over dozens of other roles was jarring, but in an effective and good way. Ryan Reynolds play her assistant, willing to toady for years in order to get a shot at an editing position of his own. She's Canadian, her visa's expired and she strong-arms him into marrying her by threatening to torpedo his career. The INS sniffs something foul on the wind and they head off to his ancestral home, where it turns out that his family is wealthy well beyond comfort and well into prodigal-son/eldest-scion territory. How convenient that their predicament should be at least buoyed by not having to worry about money whatsoever. Hijinks ensue, boats are driven, Massachusetts stands in for Alaska (where the film purportedly takes place) and the film is tied up into the expected knot at the end with the tying of the knot. Wheee! Despite my derision, it's an entertaining movie for what it is, and is helped along by Reynolds, Bullock and Mary Steenbergen. Fanboys (2009) -- "5/10" Jay Baruchel and Kristen Bell are the two that most people will know from this movie about a group of lifelong friends who are also the greatest Star Wars fans ever. I also recognized Dan Fogler, who I'd seen in Balls of Fury (Fanboys was about on the same level ... the level of a movies about about a ping-pong tournament to the death with Christopher Walken as an evil, campily overdressed mandarin). Anyway, this one's about a cross-country drive to the Skywalker Ranch to sneak a peek at The Phantom Menace before its official release. There are a bunch of sub-plots and they're not unexpected. There are funny moments, but they're few and far between. Seth Rogen plays a few bit roles and he's not bad. Joe Rogan Live at the Tabernacle (2012) -- "5/10" A stand-up comedy show by the notorious host of The Fear Factor and a celebrated Internet podcast. There were some good bits but overall he seemed to be trying too hard and it was a bit too obvious that he was tired or high or otherwise impaired. He tripped over some words when his words came too quickly and it's hard to imagine him as that nervous. He's a father now so he moved into Robin Williams territory but was more extreme about it, not always to good effect. He's at his best when he's more philosophical -- as he often was in his 2006 special, which was much better (IMHO) -- but those moments were rare in this show. I laughed less than I expected to: my recommendation is to find his older stuff. James and the Giant Peach (1996) -- "5/10" An orphaned boy living with two deliciously horrible aunts -- Spiker and Sponge -- retreats into his imagination to visit New York City with bugs in an apple. But first he had to sing. Lisping all the way. The film was produced by Tim Burton and the long animated sequences -- around which the live-action parts were bookended -- were very much in his style, even if the film was directed by Henry Selick. The movie is based on a Roald Dahl story and the darkness of his work shines through in several places, in particular in the evil and surreal mechanical shark that tracks them across the ocean. All in all, though, I can't recommend it for adults. Safe House (2012) -- "6/10" Ryan Reynolds and Denzel Washington star as CIA agents. Reynolds is the young guy just starting to work his way up the corporate ladder whereas Washington plays an agent who went rogue a decade ago and who finally turned himself in. Brendan Gleeson plays another CIA agent, masking his Irish accent almost completely. The fight scenes are decent, much more professional and terse than other films, where participants seem to have superhuman powers. The story is decent though not surprising in any way, with Denzel Washington's natural coolness adding a lot to patch the holes. The biggest deficit in the film was that it was shot almost exclusively with a shaky-cam. What a tragedy, really. It was unbelievably annoying and ruined what would otherwise have been a well-paced film. Cinema historians of the future will be mystified as to why, when people finally got their hands on HD-quality distribution channels, they started deliberately ruining movies by shooting it like the director was withdrawing from heroin. Brave (2012) -- "6/10" Merida is a princess -- what else? -- who just wants to live her own life and grow up to be what she wants to be and to not be told what to do by meddling parents who don't understand. She's a child of her generation, explicitly accepting no responsibility and whining constantly about the unfairness of having to grow up a princess. Because that's really the hardest life imaginable, isn't it? Anyway, class issues aside -- why are so many, many mainstream movies about the problems of the either ridiculously rich or at least more-than-securely well-off? -- the story is at least somewhat new and interesting enough, but it's a Pixar movie, so it's the graphics that absolutely shine. Merida's hair is exquisitely rendered and mesmerizing. The pity is that, in order to emphasize it, a lot of the film is quite dark, even dreary at times. The nature scenes are lovely as well and offer a welcome respite from the suburbia of the Toy Story movies; for graphics geeks, the scenes at and in the river are spellbinding. There are fewer funny flourishes than in other films and the stink of Disney is upon this one, as it's more middle-of-the-road and less subversively funny or interesting for adults than other Pixar movies. It's nice to look at, but don't expect the humor of The Incredibles or the implicit social commentary of Wall-E. Tropic Thunder (2008) -- "7/10" A movie about making a movie with a great comic cast -- Ben Stiller as an action-movie star who made one attempt at a dramatic role as Simple Jack, a retarded farmhand, Jack Black as a comedian with a rocketing career, a huge drug problem and a lot of fart-based movies behind him, Robert Downey Jr. as an Australian method actor who dyes his skin black for his role and Jay Baruchel as an actor happy to even be in their company. They're in Vietnam to film a huge action movie when shit gets real. The film goes downhill when the director (Steve Coogan) gets the idea to stick his prima donnas in the jungle in order to shock them into pulling together. They end up having to make their way through real jungle and encounter armies of drug dealers. Tom Cruise plays an absolutely insane and brutal film producer like you've never seen him before (it's kind of a precursor for his work as Stacey Jax in Rock of Ages). Danny McBride and Nick Nolte as explosives experts, Matthew McConaughey was an agent, Steve Coogan as the director and Bill Hader as Cruise's assistant round out the hilarious cast. Saw it in German. Smokey and the Bandit (1977) -- "6/10" Burt Reynolds in the classic movie about driving a Trans-Am really, really quickly. They regularly cruise along at 110MPH. Even more impressive is Jerry Reed as Cletus, who does almost everything the Bandit does, but in a semi tractor trailer. Their mission is to drive 1800 miles in 28 hours to deliver 400 cases of Coors beer from Texarkana, Texas to Georgia. Jackie Gleason is Sheriff Buford T. Justice, a racist, arrogant and utterly incompetent Texas Sheriff who makes it his goal in life to catch the Bandit. Needless to say, he does not. Sally Field shows up midway through as a runaway hitchhiking showgirl bride. Bill Cunningham New York (2010) -- "8/10" A documentary about Bill Cunningham, a photographer for the NY Times. He's now over 80 but has been working there for decades, rides his bike to work ever day, still shoots film and shoots only on the street, following his nose to determine what common people think the next style will be. He's ridiculously well-known and -loved in his hometown New York, but also in Paris. He lives in an apartment with dozens of filing cabinets full of photos, a small bed -- and no closet, bathroom or kitchen. A fascinating character and interesting documentary. Hamlet 2 (2008) -- "7/10" Steve Coogan stars as an unsuccessful actor who heads up the theater department of a Tucson high school. His program is small and largely ignored by the school -- until it becomes seen as a dumping ground for otherwise difficult students which the school can no longer afford to keep in other programs. Soon thereafter, the theater program is also cut and will close down at the end of the year. Coogan consults with his nemesis -- a student theater reviewer -- and decides to go for broke by staging an over-the-top insane and all-around offensive one-night-only event: his own script for a sequel to Hamlet. The staging does not disappoint. An uneven film but mildly rewarding if you hang on to the end. Men In Black 3 (2012) -- "8/10" Starring Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones as agents J and K and introducing Josh Brolin as the younger agent K in a rather clever, science-fiction, time-travel story with a good deal less over-the-top weaponry and more 1960s period sets. Michael Stuhlbarg played very well as an Arkadian who can see the multiplicity of possibilities of the multiverse simultaneously and seemingly at will. Jemaine Clement (of the Flying Concords) plays Boris the Animal, a savage member of a savage alien race with a seriously interesting skin condition and shape-shifting capability. Josh Brolin positively nails Jones's vocal rhythm, tone and cadence as well as granite facial expression(s). The story ends on a very satisfactory note. Arguably the best of all three movies -- no small feat for a sequel. The Trip (2010) -- "7/10" A film about a road trip featuring Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon. It was at times funny, at times poignant and at times boring. Coogan takes a bit of getting used to -- he's not very traditionally sympathetic, sort of an English Larry David is perhaps the best way I can think of to describe him. He and Brydon take turns taking shots at each other -- like guys do -- and Brydon can't stop doing the voices for which he's so famous on the BBC. Coogan tries to correct him at his own game and entire scenes play out with them trading off Michael Caine and Woody Allen impressions. If the movie's about anything, it's the loneliness of modern life. It's about how even the most famous of people grasp for meaning and find no solace in even modest success. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2764 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2764 Tue, 15 Jan 2013 00:54:30 +0100 This is a documentary about manufacturing -- mostly in China -- about the world that humanity creates for itself and about the lives that people live in this world. The film starts with a long, slow pan along a factory floor that seems to last for kilometers. It is equal parts horrifying to think of how people can live and work in places like this and awe-inspiring to think what gigantic structures man has created. The documentary also acknowledges its own effect: it shows how the workers are being lined up outside of the factory, but for maximal effect. If you'd only seen the end, where the workers are lined up into infinity, you'd have a different impression than after you'd just seen them being lined up like that by the director. Another scene shows a woman using her wonderfully nimble human hands -- and all of her human potential -- to twist a bit of wire around a plastic part. One after another after another. That she earns nothing is the insult added to the injury of wasting her life doing this work, day after day after day. Not only is her life boiling away to make cheap crap, but she's not even paid well for that sacrifice. There are several well-shot scenes like this, just showing nimble hands assembling products incredibly quickly and accurately, like machines. One lady who made a breaker said she can assemble 400 per day; though there is doubtless a small feeling of success after finishing one, there are hundreds to follow. They are followed by workers in a tremendous trash heap, where all of the stuff being so painstakingly and life-wastingly made in the factory ends up just a few short years later. Workers pick through it for materials. The materials come to China, make products that we in the West use for a few years, then throw away or recycle, after which the materials are shipped back to China for re-manufacturing. So these amazing bits of hand-assembled technology, this work and energy and life invested by people, is thrown away. Is this utterly stifling? Or is it good to have a steady job that is challenging enough but not too challenging? The factories don't look very rewarding in the medium- or long-term, but that's as an outside observer who longs for and can do creative work. Perhaps they are, after their own fashion, happy. The next scene is at the shore, at a wharf, where ships are both being built and dismantled. The people are insignificantly small, chipping away at these behemoths with welding torches that are at once gigantic (to them) and puny (to the ship). A day's work may involve stripping a single piece of the hull from one of the massive ships in what amounts to a mosquito bite. So much effort and energy and material went into building these ships and now more effort rips them apart to provide raw materials for the next fleet. The ebb and flow of entropy. The next stop is the Three Gorges Dam, which is utterly massive as well. Science-fiction come to life. Literally square miles of manufactured landscape, all organized and being built, with materials flowing in, waste flowing out and buildings going up and other buildings going down. The film visits the valley floor where former residents are working to flatten out their old homes to make way for ships when the valley is flooded. The last stop is in Shanghai, interviewing a real-estate agent and touring her home. Interleaved with this interview is one with an older resident of old Shanghai, which is being rapidly recycled to make high-rises and more modern homes to accommodate the millions of new residents. It's really a classic situation -- out with the old, in with the new -- but at a nearly unimaginably massive scale. Edward Burtynsky's photographs are beautiful. At the end, he explicitly avoids passing judgment on whether this change is good or bad, just that humanity is changing its landscape significantly. This fact cannot be ignored. Objectified (2009) -- "9/10" This is a short documentary about design, especially the design of modern furniture and gadgets. The ideas, however, apply as well to everything else that we see: it's all been designed in one way or another, down to the tiniest detail. The design is not just the appearance, but the ability to be recycled, the number of materials and amount of each, how easily it can be repaired, weight, availability of materials, cost, marketing appeal, etc. A tremendous amount of effort goes into the design of even everyday things, like the handles of garden shears, the angle at which glass is cut, even a toothpick in one memorable segment. Every nodule, every crease, it's all designed. The documentary covers design of computers (with Apple's Jon Ivy), car design, furniture design and design designers -- analyzers of trends who try to predict what people will want, whether it be something new or something new that looks like something old, etc. Karim Rashid was an interesting interview: "We have advanced technologically so far and yet somehow, it's almost some sort of paranoia where we're afraid to really say 'we live in the third technological revolution.' I have an iPod in my pocket, I have a mobile phone, I have a laptop, but then somehow, I end up going home and sitting on wood-spindle, Wittengale-like chairs. So, in a way, you could argue that we're building all these kind-of really kitsch stage-sets that have absolutely nothing to do with the age in which we live in. [...] It'd be like, imagine right now, I'm sitting at my laptop, and I say 'oh, I've got to go out', what am I going to do? Go out and get my horse and carriage? No, of course not." Of course, that attitude addresses only the richer, more advanced part of the planet. A lot of non techno-organic design can be useful to 90% of the planet. About an hour into the film, we get this money quote that gets right to the heart of non-dilettantish design: "Arguably, the biggest single challenge facing every area of design right now is sustainability. It's no longer possible for designers to ignore the implications of continuing to produce more and more new stuff that sometimes we need and sometimes we don't need. Designers spend most of their time designing products and services for the 10% of the world's population that already own too much when 90% don't even have basic products and services to lead a subsistent life. Though a lot of designers believe emotionally and intellectually in sustainability, they and the manufacturers they work for are finding it very, very difficult to come to terms with. Because sustainability isn't just a sort of pretty, glamorous process of using recycled materials to design something that may or may not come in the color green. It's about redesigning every single aspect, from sourcing materials to designing to production to shipping and then eventually designing a way that those products can be disposed of responsibly. That's a mammoth task, so it's no wonder that designers and manufacturers are finding it so difficult." And the following part by Tim Brown echoes part of Žižek's soliloquy from The Examined Life (see "Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2012.9" ). "If one's really honest with oneself, most of what we design ends up in a landfill somewhere. And I'm pretty sure most of the products that I have designed in my career, most instances of that, of the millions of things that have been produced are probably in landfills today. That isn't something that I was conscious of when I started working in design. It didn't even really sort-of occur to me because it doesn't really occur to us as a society, I think. Now, to be a designer, you have to take that into consideration because we have to think about these complex systems in which our products exist." "If the shelf life of a high-tech object is less than eleven months, it should be all 100% disposable. You know, I think my laptop, in a way, should be made of cardboard or my mobile phone could be a piece of cardboard or it could be just made out of something like, I don't know, sugar cane or some bio-plastic, etc. Why on Earth does anything have to be built to be permanent?" "If I think of my admiration for Eames, it was an admiration for his ability to identify the qualities of new materials, which could be used to create new objects, but nobody worried about whether fiberglass was going to cause disease or going to be difficult to dispose of. I mean, life was a little simpler for him, in that regard. He could just think about using those materials for their best design attributes. But now, we have to face this idea that what we do is not just the way we create some individual design, it's what happens afterwards, when we've finished our design, [after] people have used it." On the subject of designing for use or for ego: "[...] Am I playing a game to show that I can differentiate [myself from other designers]? Or am I actually really doing something that is contributive? Because the big issue with design is: are the things we are doing really making an effect and making change? 78% of the world is completely impractical; 78% of the world is uncomfortable. You feel it. You know, you feel that hotel rooms are poorly designed, you sit in chairs that are very uncomfortable and it's crazy. You imagine, if you design a million chairs to date, or how many chairs have been done in the world, why on Earth would we have an uncomfortable chair? There's like no excuse, whatsoever." It's a bit uneven in quality and depth, but it's good enough and though-provoking enough to recommend it. Pair it with Manufactured Landscapes to see the result of this endless cascade of design as well as the Žižek segment in The Examined Life on garbage and leftovers produced by our society. It's primarily in English, with sections in Dutch, German and French. Total Recall -- Extended Director's Cut (2012) -- "8/10" Excellent effects, interesting back-story, cool future technology, etc. Kate Beckinsale is an unstoppable war machine who seems to take no damage. She's implacably and stupidly one-dimensional with an indestructibility I haven't seen since Maggie Q in Die Hard 4 (which was also directed by Len Wiseman, so he seems to like this kind of "strong" woman). It's unknown whether she's a robot. There are a lot of those around as well: implacable killing machines that are always conveniently not around when Colin Farrell or Jessica Biel needs to clear a room quickly. And the rooms tend to get cleared without a lot of bullet holes and bloodshed. For all the gun and hand-to-hand combat, there isn't a lot of damage. I mean, at one point, Kate Beckinsale cracks Jessica Biel in the mouth with a gun hard enough to knock her over; when she gets up, though, not a scratch on her. I guess we have the MPAA to thank for that. Pretty much everything is up in the air because you can't tell what's real and what's not. It's an interesting riposte to accusations of incoherency and plot holes: it's not really happening, so you can't complain that it's nonsensical. People show up too quickly, things happen too coincidentally, but it's all either part of corrupted memories -- the unreliable past is "a construct of the mind. It blinds us. It fools us into believing it." -- or a guided tour of a spy story provided by the Rekall corporation. The cityscapes are wonderful, lush and relatively coherent, somewhat reminiscent of Blade Runner but without the dirt and dreck -- almost too perfect and clean. Still, lovely effects, both interior and exterior. And the central construction, "The Fall" is a gigantic gravity elevator that transports a workforce from the Colony (Australia) to England every day. Unfortunately, they use Bryan Cranston poorly, with his soliloquy supposedly filling in all the blanks, deviating from the movie maxim of "show, don't tell". What is kind of interesting is the film's depiction of the people in the Colony, who are about to be invaded and settled by an invading army from Great Britain. It gives you a bit of the feeling of helpless horror that a people has when they are invaded without reason -- or with false reason over which they have no control. Think weapons of mass destruction in the case of Iraq or any number of fictitious reasons for Gaza. To be clear, the plot is about Great Britain invading Australia -- straight through the planetary core -- to eradicate them for more Lebensraum, their own large-scale Nakba. But does it even happen? It's not clear as people are not who they seem thanks to digital masquerading and Farrell's memories are far from reliable (the classic Unreliable Narrator). And there's that nagging missing tattoo, no? Or is the memory of it false? All in all, I found it quite good both as an action movie and a science-fiction movie. Recommended, but make sure you get the Director's Cut -- I've read that the theatrical version was utter garbage. Bernie (2011) -- "5/10" Jack Black stars as Bernie, an assistant funeral home director in Carthage, Texas. It's based on the true story of Bernie, for whom the accusation of murder doesn't match his giving, friendly personality. Mrs. Nugent has some absolutely beautiful stained-glass lamps; Bernie also has a nice stained-glass Jesus hanging in his office. I'm not sure if that's significant. Matthew McConaughey is the ADA who eventually prosecutes Bernie, but in a different county because no one in town would prosecute him. Richard Linklater directs. An excellent performance by Black, showing his chops outside of the hyperbolic comedy world, but otherwise hard to recommend. Wrath of the Titans (2012) -- "5/10" Sam Worthington returns as Perseus, leading the titans on a quest to same the Gods from themselves as Hades teams with Ares to wake the father of all the Gods, Cronos, who is wonderfully rendered as just mountain-sized and embedded in rock before his resurrection. The effects are decent, but a lot of the battle scenes -- with the demon army -- was reminiscent of the incoherent and nearly unwatchable Transformer movies. It passed the time, but I can't really recommend it. Flow: For Love of Water (2008) -- "8/10" A documentary about fresh water, with emphasis on pollution, privatization and industrial/agricultural use and misuse as well as the effects of dams on local communities and water quality. Documentary is primarily in English, with longer sections in French and Spanish. First, there are the facts of who's taken the lion's share of water: "70% of water worldwide is used by agriculture. 20% is used by industry. 10% by us. So it's because of agricultural and industrial users, that we need more and more water to grow things that should not grow in these places. And sure enough, to grow all of this, you need a lot of pesticides and chemicals. And sure enough, all those chemicals with water, in the earth...it's not a good marriage. (Spoken in French, "10% by us" in the subtitles should actually have been "10% domestic usage".)" And then there are the social and political realities about the direction in which water usage is going. With increasing scarcity, sources are appropriated from the poor and sold back to them. "'Cost recovery' is our new bible that we have in South Africa. That everybody must pay for what service you get. And for rich people, that's obviously not a problem. But, when it comes to the really poor, you wouldn't believe it, but five rand, which is less than a dollar, is a lot of money for a rural community. So you find that the poorest of the poor, they're only taking one bucket, but if you work out how much they've paid for that bucket, it's actually more than a richer person would have paid in an urban community for that water. And it's unjust." "By telling a woman who's got nothing, in order to get your water, you must put in a card that takes your meager amount of money. [angry] What is she going to do but go to the river and take that dirty water, and die of cholera and then you say that people don't know how to practice hygiene." "What we did was, we said let's go back in time and look at who owned the water 1000 years ago in Rome [sic] and how has the civil law in Europe and other cultures handled this question of water ownership and use. And what we found was that water has always had a public aspect to it. Water has always been considered not owned by anybody. Today we think, well, isn't that profound. It's not profound at all. It's just common sense. You look at the sun; do you own the sun? Water is this transient gift on Earth for life, moving and flowing and inherent in its transient nature is the idea of commons. Things that are transient in nature, like this pen, you can pick up and own. Things that are transient, you don't own." "In 1854, the American Indian chief of Seattle replies to an offer from the white government of the United States to "buy" [...] a large area of Indian land. How can you buy or sell the sky? The warmth of the land? The idea is strange to us. If we do not own the freshness of the air and the sparkle of the water, how can you buy them? You don't own them. Every part of this Earth is sacred to my people, every shining pine needle, every sandy shore, every mist in the dark woods, every humming insect is holy in the memory and experience of my people. This beautiful Earth is the mother of the red man. We are part of the Earth and it is part of us. The rivers are our brothers. We give the rivers the kindness we would give to any brother. But the white man does not understand our ways. He is a stranger who takes from the land whatever he needs. The Earth is not his brother but his enemy. And when he has conquered it, he moves on. He kidnaps the Earth from his children and he does not care. I do not know. Our ways are different from your ways." The End of the Line (2009) -- "8/10" A documentary about the collapse of global fisheries due to high-tech industrialized fishing. The blue-fin tuna is taken as an example: 10k tons per year would allow the stocks to rebound modestly; 15k tons maintains the current population; 30k tons is the EU limit, clearly a political value. Even this political value doesn't matter because the fishing industry ignores it and takes out twice that, 60k tons, which is 1/3 of the entire estimated remaining stock. In one year. "Fishing is one of the most wasteful practices on Earth. Every year, more than 7 million tons -- a tenth of the world's catch -- goes back over the side, dead. This includes hundreds of thousands of turtles, seabirds, sharks, whales and dolphin." "I think that man is not going to change and the sea is going to be dead. Because man is crazy, crazy. Our world is crazy world." On the fact that endangered species of fish are sold in upscale restaurants: "If you've got orangutans and cheetahs and lions and tigers and things on that menu, I mean, people would, you know, they'd be walking away. There would be huge scandals, there'd be tabloid stories about it. People would be execrated, people would be, there'd be turds on people's doorsteps, envelopes shoved through them. People would burn each other's houses down, scratch their cars. And yet, we're doing it to things in the sea and it's the same thing." And, finally, a voice of reason in an interview with an Alaskan fisherman. In Alaska, fishing is much more strictly regulated -- with very positive effects so far. "If you look at it from just a personal perspective, sometimes there's a personal sacrifice. But if you look at it from the big picture, you gotta take a cut in the harvest but you take that knowing that it gives you an opportunity to maybe have a better season two, three, four, five years from now. We just don't want to catch that fish this year, next year, we can't to catch it ten, fifteen, twenty years from now." Drunken Master (1978) -- "6/10" Jackie Chan's classic about a wise-ass youth who, after a long series of fights and minor scuffles, gets thrown out of his father's home and is assigned to learn real kung fu from a drunken master. The choreography is a bit dated, but still quite good and the movie's kind of funny, but also a bit over-the-top -- especially in the synchronized English version I saw. Some of the training exercises Chan does in the nearly obligatory transformation from naif to warrior are really good. He does push-ups from a bench, flipping from palms-down to palms-up. He does sit-ups from a chin-up bar -- as many as it takes to scoop water from two buckets below to fill a bucket behind his legs and then as many as it takes to empty it again. The plot is the same as that of Karate Kid. As with Fist of Fury, it takes over an hour before we see any of Chan's drunken-boxing style. It's really quite nice and there's no cable-work that I could see. He's in fantastic shape, very athletic and acrobatic and his forms are elegant -- very artistic. The final fight is a bit long-winded, though. Way better than Fist of Fury, but still hard to recommend. Killer Elite (2011) -- "5/10" Jason Statham, Clive Owen and Robert DeNiro star as super agents/spies. The fight sequence between Cilve Owen reminded me of the one from the Bourne Identity: two elite killers who can't punch hard enough to hurt the other guy or even draw blood. Neither of them stays dazed for more than a second; you can hit Owen in the head as hard as you want, but nothing hurts him. Even a pair of surgical scissors stuck in his ear not only fails to slow him down an iota, it doesn't even draw blood. Getting hit in the balls slows him down, finally. Until the end, I was unaware that this was based on a true story, about the British SAS involvement in the Oman War. The Girl Who Played with Fire (2009) -- "6/10" I didn't read this one but I can only presume that it more-or-less stuck to the plot of the book. The actors are the same, which is good, and it's pretty entertaining though not as good as the first one. Lisbet seeks out her father, whom she'd already tried to kill once. At the same time, she is accused of the murder of three others who were recently killed by the cabal of which her father is a part. A gory end-scene with a bit of a cliffhanger ending that would be resolved in the next film. Saw it in Swedish with English subtitles. The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest (2009) -- "7/10" The final part of the trilogy, in which Lisbet slowly recovers from the injuries she sustained at the end of the last film while the conspiracy that she and Mikhail were uncovering continues to unravel and expose a larger and larger cancer at the heart of the Swedish government and justice system. Saw it in synchronized English, which was done quite well for once. Being There (1978) -- "7/10" A strange comedy starring Peter Sellers as a shut-in gardener whose employer of 50 years dies, leaving him to take his chances in the real world armed only with a simpleton's mind informed entirely by television blurbs. This is mistaken for wisdom. For example, the following sequence is representative: Ron Steigler: Mr. Gardner, uh, my editors and I have been wondering if you would consider writing a book for us, something about your um, political philosophy, what do you say? Chance the Gardener: I can't write. Ron Steigler: Heh, heh, of course not, who can nowadays? Listen, I have trouble writing a postcard to my children. Look uhh, we can give you a six figure advance, I'll provide you with the very best ghost-writer, proof-readers... Chance the Gardener: I can't read. Ron Steigler: Of course you can't! No one has the time! We, we glance at things, we watch television... Chance the Gardener: I like to watch TV. Ron Steigler: Oh, oh, oh sure you do. No one reads! He is then propositioned by a few people, among them Eve, the wife of his benefactor, Ben: "Eve: [After kissing for a bit] Chauncey, what is it? What's wrong? What's the matter, Chauncey. [crying] I don't know what you like! [sniff] Chance: I like to watch, Eve. Eve: What do you mean, you like to watch? Chance: I like to watch. Eve: [...] Oh. You mean...you'd like to watch me...do it? Chance: It's very good, Eve." She assumes that he's being risqué when he's actually just talking about television. She continues with a strip-tease and follows up with self-pleasuring that Sellers almost completely ignores. It was to be Sellers's last performance on film. Up the Yangtze (2007) -- "7/10" A documentary about the Yangtze river and the impending completion of the Three Gorges Dam. The story focuses on a poor farming family that has already moved out of the Ghost City -- which will be flooded soon -- to a shack on the opposite shore. The shack should survive but the farmland they've cultivated will be flooded. Their oldest daughter has completed her basic education and would like to continue but the family can't afford it. So they send her off into the world to earn money, probably working on a boat showing tourists the wonders of the Yangtze. It's not easy for any of them; the mother says to her daughter: "We don't even have anything to eat; how can we afford to rent a house? I know you don't want your parents to suffer. Your hard work will pay off. I know it's because your father and I don't have any skills that we have to exploit you. If we had a choice, how could we do this to you? You know your father isn't educated. He can't read. Whatever clothing you need, buy a little bit. The rest of the money, send back to your parents. We'll put it aside. In your daily life, eat well. Don't save money on that, okay? When you spend money on food, don't worry about us too much." Both of the parents are illiterate -- the girl speaks both Mandarin and English. The father is very thin; the mother is crying. The girl -- she's really small and young-looking -- leaves home and the city, with its glowing advertising and neon and teeming millions strikes such a stark contrast to the farm whence she came. One store owner in a village that will be flooded started his interview with cool diffidence and soon broke down almost completely. "There will always be people who need to make sacrifices. It's impossible to stop the building of the Three Gorges Dam because of my own needs. Sacrificing the little family for the big family. [conversation outside turns to beatings] It's hard being a human but being a common person in China is even more difficult. [starts to break down] China is too hard for common people. Some officials are like bandits: Beating, smashing, robbing... Even wanting a roof over our heads is difficult. When we had to move, we were dragged and beaten. No money to bribe the officials, so they gave us a hard time. For common people living day-by-day...it's really not easy." As for the cruise ship? I'd rather never see China or the Yangtze than to have to see it like that or accompanied by those tourists. Watching the worlds collide is at times very unsettling, as when the nigh-sycophantic hosts speak to the tourists or the girl's parents visit her on the boat. And some of the conversations! Painful! One lady says to a cruise worker, at the end of the journey, "I congratulate you; you were less obtrusive than I thought you were going to be." At the end: moving day. The father struggles up a mountain with a gigantic piece of furniture on his back, carrying it above the 175m line. Emaciated or not, that dude is strong. The family helps slog their worldly possessions up a long and winding road to the same spot. Pandorum (2009) -- "8/10" Two soldiers awake on a spaceship after a long time in hypersleep, disoriented and unsure of their names, missions and capacities. They slowly investigate the ship, finding bodies and seeing fleeting movement. It turns into a space-zombie movie for a bit, or maybe like The Time Machine, with the eloi and the morlocks. The explorer meets people, each seemingly from a different tribe speaking a different language, all from the wrong work shifts and times. How long have they been adrift? How can you tell? How can you know? Are the zombies really zombies? Or are they former crew members? How could they mutate so quickly? Or ... how freaking long have they been adrift? How many times have they woken, and forgotten? What happened to Earth? It's gone, the ship is all that is left of humanity. Hallucinations abound, memories fade and return, the creatures are real, but what else? Are they still underway? Did they ever take off or have they already arrived? What is their purpose now that all of humanity is gone or transformed? It's a good story even if the execution is a bit plodding at times. A decent sci-fi flick. Recommended. The End of Poverty? (2008) -- "8/10" A documentary about the roots of poverty throughout the world. Those roots almost inevitably lead to European colonialism. Europeans would arrive in foreign lands, declare that they can't find a central authority and expropriate said lands by dint of massively superior force of arms. Next, since all of the land belongs to them -- check the deed! [1] -- the people living on it should pay rent and/or taxes. With taxes leveed and unpaid, the debt is passed down from generation to generation. This is slavery, justified by capitalist hand-waving. With enough remove from the original theft, the thieves will claim that the poor cannot just be freed from their debt, else they'll never learn how to be true moral beings in modern society. The irony is thick. They interview cane-cutters in South America. One says that those poor without a house or a family to feed, who are homeless and beg for a living, that those are considered the "rich" poor because at least they have no debt to land-owners. Another says "this is no way to live" and says it's no wonder so many turn to crime. He's been a cane-cutter for 17 years and seems to only be waiting to die. South American economists from Brazil, Bolivia and Venezuela discuss how colonial liberation and independence was in name only. The capitalist system still ensures that their erstwhile masters receive the majority of the benefit from their natural resources. The economic colonialism continues unabated, though sometimes with new masters (e.g. the U.S. stepping in for England). Europe and the U.S. use the force of trade agreements -- signed by puppet or corrupt governments -- to maintain control over these peoples and force them to purchase their exports. In this way, the benefits of South American labor go not to the laborers themselves, but up the chain, to their masters, who are in the same relationship with their masters, outside of the country. A chain of exploitation that is a glory to behold because that is, essentially, what the standard form of capitalism is. As one gentleman put it: "capitalism does not work without colonialism". The same thing is happening today in the States, as in "Don’t Slave Your Life Away: Why America Should Embrace a 4-Day Work Week" by Bill Ivey , which writes that "underwater mortgages have made it impossible for millions of workers to sell houses to relocate in search of new jobs." Joseph Stiglitz, Chalmers Johnson and John Perkins are featured in interviews. He's not featured in the film, but the interview "An Interview with Cornel West on Occupy, Obama and Marx" by Shozab Raza and Parmbir Gill included the following, which sums it up nicely. "I think that a Marxist analysis is indispensable for any understanding, not just in the modern world but for our historical situation. I think in the end it’s inadequate but it is indispensable because how do you talk about oligarchy, plutocracy, monopolies, oligopolies, asymmetrical relations of power at the workplace between bosses and workers, the imperial tentacles, profit maximizing and so forth. That’s not Adam Smith. That’s not John Maynard Keynes. That’s Karl Marx." This is also something from an article "We Call This Progress" by Arundhati Roy that I just read that ties in well. "Today, India has more people than all the poorest countries of Africa put together. It has 80 percent of its population living on less than twenty rupees a day, which is less than fifty cents a day. That is the atmosphere in which the resistance movements are operating." "Poverty and terrorism have been conflated. In the Northeastern states we have laws like the Armed Forces Special Powers Act, which allows soldiers to kill on suspicion. In all of India we have the Unlawful Activities Prevention Act, which basically makes even thinking an anti government thought a criminal offense, for which you can be jailed for up to than seven years." "In so many ways, we have regressed. Even the most radical politics are practiced by people that are privileged enough to have land. There are millions and millions of people who don’t have land, who now just live as pools of underpaid wage labor on the edges of these huge megalopolises that make up India now. The politics of land in one way is radical, but in another way it has left out the poorest people, because they are out of the equation. We don’t talk about justice anymore. None of us do; we just talk about human rights or survival. We don’t talk about redistribution. In America, four hundred people own more wealth than half of the American population. We should not be saying tax the rich, but instead we should be saying take their money and redistribute it, take their property and redistribute it." "For local people, the bauxite in the mountain is the source of their life and their future, their religion and everything. For the aluminum company, the mountain is just a cheap storage facility. They’ve already sold it, so the bauxite has to come out, either peacefully or violently." Now that's a more nuanced question: how much of the land surrounding a population can that population declare as vital to their survival and thus sacrosanct? Can they expect an entire mountain to remain untouched simply because they live within miles of its base and benefit from the runoff? Again from Roy's article: "While many of us believe in revolution, and believe that the system must be brought down, right now, the least we can ask for to begin with is a cap on all of this. I’m a cappist and a liddite. We do need to say a few things: one is that no individual can have an unlimited amount of wealth. No corporation can have an unlimited amount of wealth. This sort of cross-ownership of businesses really has to stop." Oliver Stone's Untold History of the United States (S01E07) (2012) -- "10/10" This episode picks up with Johnson's stepping in for Kennedy and his subsequent reelection. U.S. support for worldwide slaughter -- in Indonesia as well as Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia -- is rampant. The Indonesians killed suspected communists, lists of which were conveniently provided by the U.S. and allies. In Vietnam, not only were 2-4 million people outright killed, anywhere from 5-7 million were transferred to internment camps. Johnson's lowbrow and racist approach to life -- his statements are almost comically crude -- reflects that of Truman before him and that of Bush Jr. to come later. The CIA domestic spying program to entrap war-protesters ran for seven years. It would be mimicked later by the NSA programs still in place now -- and made fully legal by the Patriot Act. Nixon, like Johnson before him, campaigned as the president of peace, then escalated the war immensely. In this, he presaged his predecessors, including Bush -- "I don't want to be the world's policeman" and Obama, who orates about peace but switches tactics rather than ending war. When Sy Hersh broke the My Lai story, a poll showed that "65% of Americans were not bothered by the news." "The U.S. promised to pay $3 billion in reparations, but later reneged." War spread to Laos. Cambodia was ruined, bombed for five years with extraordinary amounts of ordnance. The U.S. military was in a shambles, with mass defections and widespread drug use. Millions and millions of Asians dead by U.S. guns, no progress in the war, the Khmer Rouge unleashed on Cambodia as a direct result of U.S. bombings. Was it time to reassess? Nope. America reelected Nixon in a landslide over anti-war candidate George McGovern. People ask when America will wake up, they ask how much is too much. That point cannot be reached. We are a nation of assholes. We are a virus. Reflecting the sentiments of The End of Poverty, Salvador Allende spoke to the UN in December of 1972: "We find ourselves opposed by forces that operate in the shadows without a flag, with powerful weapons provided by positions of great influence. We are potentially rich countries, yet we live in poverty. We go here and there, begging for credits and aid, yet we are great exporters of capital. It is a classic paradox of the capitalist economic system." The Forbidden Kingdom (2008) -- "6/10" It's the fighting style, cable work and magic of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon combined with the plot of The Wizard of Oz with Back to the Future vibes. Starring Jackie Chan and Jet Li as well as Michael Angarano reprising his role of unsympathetic dork from Gentleman Broncos. It was more of a kid's movie -- definitely OK for kids -- but still pretty entertaining. Saw it in English and Mandarin with sub-titles. Joe Rogan: Live (2006) -- "7/10" "A 50-minute standup routine" by Joe Rogan that is quite good in its own right. A lot of his material is, while not thematically unique, new enough in its approach to feel fresh and funny. I enjoyed it and am looking forward to more. Russell Brand: Scandalous (2009) -- "7/10" This is the show that Brand did in England after being fired by/resigning from the BBC for having crossed the line on his radio show. He's quite funny and outrageous and is out-and-out entertaining even when his material fails him, which it does far less toward the end of the show, where he hits his stride nicely. Oldboy (2003) -- "10/10" A highly stylized and well-made Korean movie about, well, it's a bit hard to pin down. It's about what happens when craziness collides with human nature and rumor, I guess? There are gangland and martial-arts elements to it, but that's not the focus. The focus is the relatively complex and unpredictable plot as well as the strong dialogue and lovely, lovely set-design and camera work. The fight scene in the hallway is how all fight scenes should look. It's not an action movie; action is incidental, as with Tarantino movies. There are no clear heroes. The film tries to convince you at first that Oldboy is the hero -- and he even trains up in martial arts -- but they are useless against his real enemy, whom he cannot touch in that way. His enemy; is he the hero? Yes and no. He, too, is ostensibly covered in sin, earned when he was very young. Is he insane? His plan is over-the-top sadistic. The prison is a twisted fantasy of isolation. Fifteen years. Then release -- into the greater, outer prison. Oldboy's capitulation is in some ways expected and in others wholly not. What an interesting story, utterly unique and covered in grays. Not for the faint-hearted with no tolerance for broken taboos, I warn you now. And there are a few scenes that induced cringing even in my scarred and cynical innards. This is, however, not the focus of the film; it is a part of it, inextricable and necessary. The whole film was quite powerful, but the last fifteen minutes were jaw-dropping. I would watch this again, if only to see if there's anything I missed in the story and for the visuals. Highly recommended. The Art of the Steal (2009) -- "6/10" A documentary about the Barnes Collection in Philadelphia, started by the eccentric Barnes, who bought an enormous number of paintings from European modernists and impressionists who had yet to become famous, but whose names would balloon the collection's value to billions. The collection would sit on a country estate in an affluent suburb of Philadelphia until he died. By all accounts, he was not well-loved among the the rich and powerful. His foundation was established with very limited visiting privileges for the public but relatively open access for historians and art students. The movie is about various machinations to make money from the collection, from making it more of a tourist destination -- not allowed by residential zoning laws -- to the piece de resistance: moving the whole collection to Philadelphia. While this would open the collection to more people (the primary goal, in my view), it was being done for the benefit of the other Philadelphia elite. Essentially, I agree that the collection should be made more available to the public but, as they say, not like this. Not with so much corruption and the benefit flowing to these dirty, greedy people. Still, these are essentially rich-people problems, if not for the culture (the paintings) that hang in the balance. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] The Catholic Pope generously bequeathed Africa to Portugal and South America to Spain. As for England and Holland, they took much of Asia without bothering to ask God, they simply expropriated it. Eddie Izzard addresses this practice in his famous bit about England invading India that includes "Well,...have you got a flag?" ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2741 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2741 Mon, 14 Jan 2013 22:17:45 +0100 -- "8/10" 2. "Oliver Stone's Untold History of the United States S01E03 (2012)" <#Oliver3> -- "10/10" 3. "Crude (2009)" <#Crude> -- "8/10" 4. "Oliver Stone's Untold History of the United States S01E04 (2012)" <#Oliver4> -- "10/10" 5. "A Very Harold And Kumar 3D Christmas (2011)" <#Harold> -- "6/10" 6. "Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale (2010)" <#Rare> -- "8/10" 7. "Oliver Stone's Untold History of the United States S01E05 (2012)" <#Oliver5> -- "10/10" 8. "Oliver Stone's Untold History of the United States S01E06 (2012)" <#Oliver6> -- "10/10" 9. "Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay (2008)" <#Harold> -- "7/10" 10. "Cabin in the Woods (2011)" <#Cabin> -- "8/10" 11. "Blade Runner (1982)" <#Blade> -- "10/10" 12. "Armadillo (2010)" <#Armadillo> -- "7/10" 13. "Balibo (2009)" <#Balibo> -- "7/10" 14. "The Boondock Saints (1999)" <#Boondock> -- "8/10" 15. "The Boondock Saints: All Saints Day (2009)" <#Boondock2> -- "6/10" 16. "21 Jump Street (2012)" <#21> -- "8/10" 17. "Tucker and Dale vs. Evil (2010)" <#Tucker> -- "7/10" 18. "Planet Terror (2007)" <#Planet> -- "6/10" 19. "Forks over Knives (2011)" <#Forks> -- "8/10" 20. "Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels (1998)" <#Lock> -- "8/10" 21. "Iron Sky (2012)" <#Iron> -- "7/10" 22. "The Raid: Redemption (2012)" <#Raid> -- "8/10" 23. "The Guard (2011)" <#Guard> -- "9/10" 24. "Ninja Assassin (2009)" <#Ninja> -- "4/10" 25. "Examined Life (2008)" <#Examined> -- "9/10" 26. "Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010)" <#Cave> -- "6/10" 27. "Akira (1988)" <#Akira> -- "8/10" 28. "Smoking' Aces (2007)" <#Smoking> -- "6/10" 29. "Fist of Fury (1971)" <#Fist> -- "4/10" 30. "The Legend of the Drunken Master (1994)" <#Drunken> -- "8/10" Joe vs. the Volcano (1990) -- "8/10" Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan star in a movie that starts off like Brazil, depicting the life of a wage-slave -- an empty, meaningless and mind-numbingly boring life. The kind of life that probably more rather than fewer people live today than in 1990 when the film was made. The entrance to the company where Joe works -- which manufactures rectal probes and lube (really subtle) -- is a jagged, winding path cut into what looks like volcanic, blasted terrain. The atrium of the building reveals the logo of the company to be the same pattern. Joe's apartment has a huge crack on one wall, again in the same shape. There are other symbols like that -- like the Great Danes, the significance of which I can't begin to guess. Ossie Davis plays his limo driver/spiritual advisor on a shopping trip through Manhattan. The story is a fable but not really a morality tale. Just a unique story that you won't really be able to guess. In hindsight, you may say you had seen it coming, but it's unique and new enough that you won't have, really. Perhaps the jagged road symbolizes the twists and turns of the plot, of life. Once you see Meg Ryan for the second time, then a third -- and Joe doesn't bat an eye -- you slowly realize that you are watching a fairy tale, not a story of real life. Abe Vigoda and Nathan Lane play bit parts as members of the tribe living on the island with the big volcano. Oliver Stone's Untold History of the United States S01E03 (2012) -- "10/10" This episode deals with the Pacific theater of World War II. The initial focus is on American attitudes toward the Japanese. From president Truman on down, America was extremely racist toward them, with official and public denials that they were even human. The rhetoric echoes that of Hitler on the other side of the ocean and the actions -- dozens of thousands of Japanese rounded up and forced to work in camps -- as well. It was actually Roosevelt who did this, although he expressed chagrin -- cold comfort to the prisoners, 75% of whom were American citizens. This disconnect from the enemy would lead to horrific bombing campaigns on civilians -- even in the "good war", America played dirty -- culminating of course in Hiroshima, where America wiped out that city's "usefulness to the enemy", as Truman put it. The Europeans didn't escape civilian bombing, to the point where "even Churchill wondered 'are we beasts? Are we taking this too far?'". American Curtis LeMay was quite famously one of the most notorious "terror bombers" and was not bothered by his conscience as all. The bombing of Tokyo, as described, sounds almost worse than Hiroshima, described as "one of the most ruthless and barbaric killings of non-combatants in history." The Potsdam conference is also covered in detail, focusing on the duplicity of the U.S. toward both Japan and the Soviet Union: the offer to Japan was rigged to be denied so the bomb could be used. Crude (2009) -- "8/10" This film is a documentary about the decade-and-a-half--long class-action lawsuit by the indigenous people of Ecuador -- representing about 30,000 -- against Chevron neé Texaco. It's a sad story, really, with poignant scenes in the hinterlands of Ecuador. Though the film is mostly in Spanish, there are interviews with some Chevron representatives. The most interesting of these is the chief environmental scientist, who swears up and down that there is no contamination and these people's health problems are entirely due to their shitting in their own drinking water. She does not elaborate as to the likelihood of the coincidence that the indigenous peoples would change their sanitary habits after hundreds of years at about the same time that companies started drilling for oil. Unfortunately for her argument, her own company took a different tack, admitting that there is massive contamination but that the national oil concern PetroEcuador is responsible. The burden on the plaintiffs was to show that the contamination pre-dated PetroEcuador's involvement. Chevron, for its part, has contract law on its side as everything that it did was either pre- or post-facto validated by Ecuadorian law. The plaintiffs would also have to show that corruption allowed Chevron to plaster their behavior over with a sheen of legality. This includes the various remediation processes, for which Chevron has ample "proof" -- all provided by paid officials. The turning point in the case was the election of Rafael Correa, a 41-year-old left-leaning economist with more interest for his own people than for foreign investors. Steven Donziger, the main American lawyer, said "if you did this in America, you'd go to jail". I wouldn't be too sure about that (perhaps Donziger needs to watch The Last Mountain and other tales of environmental woe from the States). Pablo Fajardo, the lead attorney and native Ecuadoran is a very eloquent orator. Oliver Stone's Untold History of the United States S01E04 (2012) -- "10/10" This episode covers the aftermath of WWII, with the U.S. booming economically and worried that its markets would dry up as European countries licked their wounds and turned to the State for succor. The anti-fascist, socialist backlash in those countries would prove detrimental to American interests. Harry Truman's jingoist and simplistically anti-communist view of the world would form the basis of American policy that continues, quite frankly, to this day. Bolstered by a burgeoning propaganda machine, the Soviet Union was promoted to the next great enemy bent on world domination. It was Churchill who defined the Iron Curtain and set the world on a path to Cold War. And poor Henry Wallace still provided the unheeded voice of reason: "The only way to defeat communism in the world is to do a better and smoother job of production and distribution. Let's make it a clean race, a determined race. But, above all, a peaceful race in the service of humanity. The source of all our mistakes is fear: Russia fears Anglo-Saxon encirclement; we fear communist penetration. Out of fear, great nations have been acting like cornered beasts, thinking only of survival. The common people will not tolerate imperialism, even under enlightened Anglo-Saxon, atomic-bomb auspices. The destiny of the English-speaking people is to serve the world, not dominate it." Despite the Freudian imagery and kowtowing to the idea that the West was enlightened, this is still the sanest assessment that came out of the States at the time. The American involvement and manipulation of Greece, Turkey and other Balkan nations is covered in detail. The domination of communism abroad was followed by the Red Scare domestically. The propaganda onslaught continued as the U.S. knowingly used former Nazis to sell anti-communism until the Soviets were forced to react, closing down East Germany. All these charges against the Soviet while, at the same time, segregation of the "coloreds" still drove much of U.S. domestic policy. The Chinese revolution followed, which the U.S. could not hinder; Korea would be different. The U.S. sent troops (unlike the mere "advisors" present in Greece and Italy in the late 40s). And the domino theory was born and "you are the target". A Very Harold And Kumar 3D Christmas (2011) -- "6/10" The eponymous pair have gone their separate ways: Harold is a successful business executive living in a quasi-mansion in the suburbs and married to a beautiful and loving wife whereas Kumar lives alone, pining over his lost love, having dropped out of med school to do bong-hits full-time. Circumstances bring them together and Kumar learns a modicum of responsibility while Harold remembers what it is to have fun. Hilarity and hijinks ensue. It's decent; add a point if you like Harold and Kumar. The film is only tangentially related to Christmas in that they're trying to buy a Christmas tree throughout the film ... and that Santa Claus is in it. Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale (2010) -- "8/10" A Christmas thriller from Finland about the Santa Claus of ancient legends, a Santa more in line with Krampus, with goat horns and punishment on his mind. Legend has it that Santa used to punish children for being naughty by stealing them, slaying them or eating them. This Santa was frozen in a lake and transported to an underground tomb long ago, in the hazy past. But modern-day capitalism has found him and wants him/it back, for whatever reason. Strange event befall a trio of hunters/farmers in the Finnish countryside until they discover a man in one of their traps who looks for all the world like an emaciated Santa. Spoiler alert: he turns out to be one of Santa's "elves" and the real Santa is stories tall and still trapped in ice, with his enormous horns sticking out. The trio -- led by the well-read child of one of them -- endeavor to put an end to Santa's terror, once and for all. It was a tight, well-made movie that deserves to be part of any Christmas cinema tradition. Saw it in Finnish with subtitles and some spoken English. Recommended. Oliver Stone's Untold History of the United States S01E05 (2012) -- "10/10" Eisenhower is elected and there is hope for an end to the cold war. John Foster Dulles saw to its continued, anti-communist edge. Where does the U.S. find people like this? How do they get hired? Why -- why? -- do they wield such power? How can men like Truman speak of peace as his forces napalm every city and village in Korea to the ground? As his soldiers slaughter conscripted Chinese peasants 8000 miles from U.S. shores in a "peace offensive"? A "police action"? Do Americans know that their military killed 10% of the Korean population in 3 years? And if it's not enough to slaughter innocents abroad in an imperial war. At the same time, the idiot Joseph McCarthy comes to inordinate power and cows a nation into a becoming a "right-wing, totalitarian country" (as described by the retired president Truman), seeing communists everywhere and turning in their friends in the best traditions. J. Edgar Hoover, "with the full support of Eisenhower", ran the deconstruction of American democracy -- such as it was -- from FBI headquarters, opening a simultaneous front on all civil-rights organizations (left-wing and black). By all counts, there were only 80,000 registered communists in its heyday, 1944 -- when the Soviet Union was still a close ally and was given credit for winning WWII. By the early 50s, there were only 10,000 left and, of those, "about 1,500 were FBI informants". Nehru, the first prime minister of India, quite rightly called the American leadership, "dangerous, self-centered lunatics who would blow up any people or country who came in the way of their policy.". And they would. When Mossadegh was elected president of Iran -- a man with a law degree from a European University, ordinarily a pedigree that would guarantee he become a puppet -- the CIA (under Dulles and "Kermit" Roosevelt) orchestrated a coup, despite knowing full well that Mossadegh wasn't a communist. Luckily, almost all oil concessions went to U.S. companies and the U.S. had a coerced government on"2,000-mile border with the Soviet Union". With so much power, wealth and might, the U.S. was not limited to spreading its insanity and malignant violence to the Middle East. There was also Southeast Asia, where the U.S. saved the Vietnamese from self-rule. The details are morally abhorrent in the extreme, but told very well in this documentary. Check out books by William Blum -- Killing Hope is a good start -- for details on all U.S. incursions and attacks in the 20th century. The U.S. was the gatekeeper to the U.N. as well, blessing fascist Spain (under Franco) and imperial Portugal with membership but denying communist China until 1971. When the Soviets attacked Hungary to keep it within the fold, the U.S. media seized on the attack as justification for the dozens of U.S. attacks -- each orders of magnitude greater than Hungary. And if it wasn't bad enough that we got one Dulles brother, John Foster, we got the other as well, Allen. These guys were instrumental in building up fantasies of imminent extinction that had almost no basis in fact and no roots in reality whatsoever. The U.S. had no trouble making Cuba out to be the enemy that would end America and continued to use the domino theory to support "falling dominoes" all over the world, including even the Congo, where Patrice Lumumba was trying to get his people out from under Belgium's imperial yoke (the Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver includes a historical fiction account of this period from a somewhat Congolese point of view). Eisenhower would do America the favor of warning that the military-industrial complex had gone too far -- after doing more than anyone else to grow it exponentially and put it firmly in the driver's seat. He hired the Dulles brothers, after all. He also played fast-and-loose with nuclear threats -- a tradition that continues to this day (though veiled in language like "not taking any options off the table"). The efforts of lonely, sane voices like Henry Wallace and George Marshall were as effectual as the voices of sanity today. Oliver Stone's Untold History of the United States S01E06 (2012) -- "10/10" Camelot. Kennedy's administration sounds like that of Obama several decades later, with a cabinet full of insiders and industry leaders. Robert McNamara is portrayed as level-headed, having been the first to go over the Pentagon's books to determine that there was a gigantic missile gap -- but in the U.S.'s favor. The U.S. had approximately ten times the armaments of the reviled Soviet Union. After stewing in their own fantasy world a bit longer, the U.S. attacked Cuba. Kennedy would play the good guy, who stopped aggression in the nick of time, but the reality was different. (See "The Week the World Stood Still" by Noam Chomsky (The Week the World Stood Still: The Cuban Missile Crisis and Ownership of the World) for much more detail.) Though Kennedy's behavior was standard for a U.S. president, privately he was quickly at odds with the "Joint Chiefs bastards [...] and CIA sons of bitches" who were driving policy to their own ends. Kennedy's counterpart in the Soviet was Khrushchev, whose primary concern was Germany: "give a German a gun and, sooner or later, he will point it at Russia". Kennedy's reaction to Khrushchev's pleas to allow revolution and to stand down was, quite frankly, as ignorant as Truman's, though couched in finer language. He oversaw the acceleration of fear and the buildup of weaponry. When Khrushchev put 30 missiles in Cuba -- for various reasons, to placate hard-liners at home, to stave off U.S. invasion, as a bluff to show power that wasn't there -- the U.S., with its syphilitic mind, reacted with little subtlety and almost started WWIII (again, see the article cited above, where you can read about the U.S. deliberately attacking Soviet nuclear submarines with depth charges). With an utter lack of context, the U.S. could portray the Soviet move as utterly unprovoked. The Soviets naturally blinked first but tried to get concessions on U.S. missiles in Turkey. Khrushchev blinked hard and sent Kennedy a letter pleading for sanity: Kennedy ignored it. Stone includes the story of Vasili Arkhipov, who saved the Earth from its first all-out nuclear war. Though the U.S. was at def-con two, "[i]t is interesting to note in hindsight that, during the entire crisis, Soviet missiles were never fueled, Red Army reserves were never called up, and Berlin was never threatened." In other words: the Soviet Union never even came close to the war footing and insanity of the U.S. Khrushchev was instrumental in preventing American macho destruction but was "forced out of power the next year" having been universally perceived as weak, both in the Soviet Union and China. The U.S. tried so hard to prevent a communist takeover of the world -- despite little to no evidence for it -- that it took over the world for anti-communism. When Kennedy finally changed his tune, the hive mind of the U.S. dumped him as no longer useful. The collected efforts of raging egos and madness-riddled and simplistic minds would continue to imbue the U.S. with a simple mission: to envelop the world like Kudzu, with no further goal than that. So, here's an excerpt from "American University Speech" by John F. Kennedy "What kind of peace do I mean and what kind of a peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war." Unfortunately, he also blathered this: "The United States, as the world knows, will never start a war. We do not want a war. We do not now expect a war. This generation of Americans has already had enough—more than enough—of war and hate and oppression. (Emphasis added.)" The world, in fact, knew just the opposite, having had that lesson drummed into its head for decades at that point. Now, five more decades later, nothing has changed. As far as the feeling of Americans themselves, he would be both right and wrong -- and attitudes have not changed yet. Americans would love to have a world without war, yes. But they, at the same time, accept almost any reason, regardless of supporting evidence, as justification for starting one. That is, they don't want war: they just want to be in charge of everything, be maximally comfortable and never want for anything that their diseased minds can conjure. So that's easy, right? Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay (2008) -- "7/10" Harold and Kumar pick up where they left off in their instant cult-classic stoner film Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle. They're trying to get to Amsterdam to chase the woman of Roldie's dreams and Kumar is relentlessly trying to get high. Even on an airplane, with a super-bong that he created himself. That lights up. And looks all high-tech. Wielded by a swarthy young man stoned out of his gourd. You can tell where this is going. So Kumar screws up everything and gets them thrown in Guantánamo Bay by Rob Corddry's utterly over-the-top-insane under-secretary of something-or-other. They spend the rest of the film on the lam, trying to find someone to help them clear their names, while Corddry ignores all evidence to clamp the jaws of his gigantic trap shut around the "terrorists" that he thinks he's caught. It's good enough in its own right, but I think the original was better. Oh, and NPH [1] shows up again -- and takes the boys for a good time at a Texas whorehouse. (What else?) Cabin in the Woods (2011) -- "8/10" A pretty clever take on the slasher-film genre. A group of college-aged folks drive into the woods to spend some time at an isolated cabin that one of their families just bought. The kids are actually portrayed pretty well and the stoner's funny. Alongside this plot is what looks for all the world like a government agency running surveillance and experiments on the people in the cabin -- it sounds like a new crop shows up every year. And this isn't the only lab: there are others in other countries, with the Japanese having sewn up the horror award for the last several years running. The writing is good and the idea is dark, cynical and funny. The students don't fit into their stereotypes until pushed there by aerosol pheromones and other drugs (to create a dumb-blonde slut and an alpha-male meathead). There are shades of The Truman Show, Men In Black, Half-Life, Portal, Operation: Endgame and The Cube in it, except it's run for the benefit of sacrificing innocents to appease the ancient Gods. The cabin is a high-tech killing floor run by an agency for this one purpose -- as are other sites around the world. And the participants are trapped there by all manner of high-tech barriers. It's really quite a bit of fun because you don't know whether to root for the agency -- to stop ancient evil from rising and enveloping the world -- or for the kids, who are just trying to escape zombie slaughter. The switches from the Running-Man--like world where the kids are being hounded and slaughtered to the headquarters of the agency running the show are jarring -- but in a good way. The agency employees' distance from the death and destruction, their office hijinks -- betting pools, office-party celebrations -- is perhaps allegorical for the distance to suffering that such functionaries have (think the drone pilots stationed in Nevada) [2]. It's essentially a tale wherein the few must suffer so that the majority can survive (the essence of ritual sacrifice). "The Director (voiced by Sigourney Weaver): You've seen horrible things. An army of nightmare creatures. But they are nothing compared to what came before, what lies below. It's our task to placate the ancient ones, as it's yours to be offered up to them. Forgive us and let us get it over with." A pleasant surprise. Recommended. Blade Runner (1982) -- "10/10" Everywhere you look, there is something different, not of our world. The camera never lands on anything ordinary, even in the periphery. Every angle is carefully selected, as is every light source -- and there thousands -- every raindrop, the atmosphere, everything is so believable, it sucks you in. The police speak English -- except for Edward James Olmos, who only speaks Cityspeak, "a hybrid of several languages" -- but the flight-routing systems speak Dutch, German, Japanese and what sounded like Russian. An amazing-looking -- and -sounding -- film: it's like William Gibson saw this movie and then spent the next 30 years writing about it. JF Sebastien's [3] house is amazing with all of his gadgets and toys. Darryl Hannah oozes madness, as does Rutger Hauer. Everything was going so well until Deckard felt the need to rape Sean Young's replicant. It might have been called "rough seduction" in 1982 but it looked for all the world like rape (which, technically, does not apply because she's a replicant, not an actual human being). There is a lovely trick of the light that highlights a deeply buried red light in the eyes that shows up for replicants and other created creatures, but also for Deckard at one point in his apartment. Is this is a sign of a replicant? But how can it be if Deckard has it too? Light-colored eyes are subject to red-eye, aren't they? Perhaps Deckard is also a replicant? How can you tell? Would a human be able to pass the kind of Turing Test that they use to weed out the manufactured from the borne? Would Deckard? Dammit, the owl has red eyes too and it's definitely manufactured. Even Roy says "C'mon Deckard! Show me what you're made of!" Does he know something that Deckard doesn't? Roy's injuries at the end mirror those of Deckard. Roy's are due to his genetic programming, his flesh is necrotizing, shutting down, rebelling against him: he's running out of time. Deckard tries to restore the hand ruined by Roy. I'm sure there's some significance to Roy driving a nail through his hand -- giving himself a stigmata -- because he was also referred to by his creator as the prodigal son. The "final soliloquy" was every bit as moving as advertised: "I've seen things you people wouldn't believe. [laughs] Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched c-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like [coughs] tears in rain. Time to die." Rutger Hauer was impressive. Highly recommended. "It's a pity she won't live. But then again, who does?" Armadillo (2010) -- "7/10" A very professionally and well-made documentary about a Danish platoon deployed in Afghanistan. The footage on patrols is amazing [4]. The film follows them from Denmark pre-deployment through arrival in Afghanistan. The soldiers are young western men, so they have a party before they go -- with a lap dancer -- and they yearn for "real" action rather than just boring patrols. And they watch porn when they're not on patrol (at pretty much every opportunity, but that's not suprising ... what else is there to do? Play video games, I guess.) The soldiers speak Danish amongst themselves but speak English on the public band; their Danish is also heavily sprinkled with English. And they run patrols in largely rural, civilian areas and then complain about the Taliban hiding behind civilians. The interviews with the Afghans are conducted through a translator [5] and are fascinating. They start off with bravado, apologizing to a local mayor (chieftain?) for destroying his fields, but at the same time saying that "you all know that we have to walk through those fields". He laughs at them and responds, "How should we know? It is our fault, maybe? Last year they bombarded our house. I swear by God I don't even have any clothes to wear. [...] What should we do? Leave our villages? [...] It's not you or the Taliban who are killed. We are the ones who get killed. The civilians get killed. We sit in our homes and get bombed." In response to Danish promises that they will try to move the war north, to draw the Taliban away from their villages, the elder says "You can't. People fight, because they're poor, including the Taliban." The translators with direct contact see the citizens as people; the soldiers -- especially once they are hit themselves -- begin the alienation almost immediately, "I would feel worse shooting a stray dog." This attitude toward "their" deaths is starkly juxtaposed with the utter sorrow they feel when they lose one of their own. It's hard not to think of them as hypocritical mouth-breathers utterly without philosophy. Soon after, they get in a firefight and annihilate several Taliban; afterwards, they drag out the corpses (checking for weapons), comparing it to hauling livestock. Back at base, the camera captures their adrenalized excitement as they relate the specifics of the battle to each other, cementing the tale. This is quite standard, until the platoon commander [6] calls a meeting to find out who told his family of their post-firefight revelry and disrespect for the Taliban dead. It's a very interesting conversation, almost a therapy session. What never enters anyone's mind is to ask why they are even there in the first place. To them, it was a huge battle; objectively, an overwhelmingly superior Danish force eradicated some Afghan farmers and then spend days, if not weeks, trumpeting about it, analyzing it, and whining about their compatriot who got shot in the ass. "You weren't there, man." Indeed. It probably seemed huge to them, but even in the small scheme of things, it was utterly useless. They should all read Catch-22 and get over themselves. Watched it in Danish with English subtitles. Balibo (2009) -- "7/10" A faux documentary based on the true story of the Indonesian assault on Timor -- what would eventually become a near-genocide. The story centers on five young journalists who travel to Timor just as the invasion is beginning. Their intent is to capture the Indonesian army on film in order to prove that they are committing war crimes (the ultimate crime of aggression against another sovereign nation). The U.S. and Australia are firmly in Indonesia's camp, though, so there is no help to be found and enemies abound, as do Timorese refugees fleeing for their lives. The story is told through another, older journalist who has been enlisted by the young and Ché-esque Timorese Secretary of Foreign Affairs, José Ramos-Horta. Several days/weeks behind, they travel in the footsteps of the young journalists, with both stories interleaved throughout the film. The horrifying, callous disregard for life shown the Indonesian army is portrayed well, as is the real back-story of Western support for the genocide (Suharto was, after all, "our kind of guy" whereas Sukarno was a bloody socialist and utterly useless to western interests). After several decades of exile, Horta would finally return in 1999 after Timor had finally been granted independence once again. The Boondock Saints (1999) -- "8/10" Sean Patrick Flanery and Norman Reedus star as the charismatic, hard-drinking and linguistically gifted MacManus brothers, who come to be known as the Boondock Saints once they get a taste for vigilantism. Willem Dafoe puts in a star turn as FBI Special Agent Smecker, a savant of crime-scene forensics and entirely too smart for the job. Add Billy Connolly as Il Duce and a lot of mobsters and you've got yourself a fun movie. The boys can't miss and their enemies couldn't hit the broad side of a barn, but their characters are appealing enough that you don't care and root for them anyway. With their Catholic God looking over them and the whole of Boston on their side, the boys make a career of being white-hat vigilantes. The Boondock Saints: All Saints Day (2009) -- "6/10" The boys are back, although they start off in Ireland this time, having escaped the long arm of the long at the end of the first film. The elaborate set pieces and extravagant though largely harmless -- to the MacManus family anyway -- shootouts are back from the first film. Willem Dafoe has been replaced by Julie Benz as Special Agent Eunice Bloom, whose given enough good dialogue to let her chew the scenery (even though I'd never heard of her before). Peter Fonda and Judd Nelson round out the cast of people you may actually recognize. Indomitable, indefatigable and bulletproof as ever, the boys press on to their goal of uprooting big-time crime in Boston. Oh, and they have to clear their name, which has been besmirched by a height-challenged Sicilian hit-man. 21 Jump Street (2012) -- "8/10" Jonah Hill is lighter than ever and stars as fresh young cop opposite Channig Tatum's equally fresh young cop. The movie is based on the TV show, in which young-looking cops infiltrate high schools by posing as students and ferreting out drug smugglers. The writing and dialogue is pretty sharp and the two leads are great (Channing Tatum, especially, is just charming as hell). The plot is what you would expect, though above average and including enough twists about "typical" high-school life to keep you guessing as to who is cool and who is not. Rob Riggle stars as -- what else? -- a PE coach; Ice Cube is the relentlessly foul-mouthed precinct sergeant of Jump Street. James Franco's little brother Dave is also in this one, playing a rather big role -- I didn't know he was his brother and was wondering if actors that look like other actors just naturally crawled out of the woodwork. Tucker and Dale vs. Evil (2010) -- "7/10" After having enjoyed The Cabin in the Woods, I remembered another horror/comedy that turned the tables on the classic formula. Tucker and Dale are supposedly hillbillies on their way to their vacation home, of which they are very proud. Some college students arrive in the same woods at the same time and their worlds collide. It's all a matter of perspective: the college students think that the hillbillies are trying to kidnap and/or kill them all; Tucker and Dale can't figure out why the college students are killing themselves in horribly gruesome ways all over their property. It's a comedy of misunderstanding, get it? It's a bit slower and chattier than it needs to be in certain scenes, but overall it's quite amusing. Planet Terror (2007) -- "6/10" Rose McGowan stars as Cherry Darling, a go-go dancer who wants to become a stand-up comedian. Fate intervenes and zombies too. The zombies come courtesy of a government experiment that spreads a chemical/biological weaponized gas all over Texas, creating shambling zombies with effervescing exteriors. Josh Brolin has a larger role and Bruce Willis and Quentin Tarantino have smaller parts, which rounds out the cast of actors you're likely to recognize. It's a well-made movie -- Robert Rodriguez has a certain, gory flair -- but it's not really a must-see film. The plot is relatively predictable and Cherry takes entirely too long to become "enhanced" as promised in the trailer. When she does, though, it's pretty fun. Forks over Knives (2011) -- "8/10" A documentary about the human diet, with a focus on a diet that works over the long-term to provide you with a long, energetic, healthy, happy, cancer- and heart-disease--free life. The recommendation is a whole-foods, dairy- and meat-free diet. Combine this one with Food Inc. and Killer at Large and you should be ready and primed to drastically reduce dairy and meat consumption, if not eliminate it altogether. Large-scale studies (large as in nearly a billion Chinese) show that intake of processed foods, meat protein and dairy products increase the likelihood of cancer and hear disease, even in otherwise healthy people. In general, it's a really good documentary -- and quite convincing -- though there are some parts that are a bit over the top. It's hard to argue with the recommendation to eat more fruits and vegetables; if it's true that this diet can stave off cancer and all sort of other ailments, then what's the harm? Find something other than food to scratch your itch (like exercise) and you're all set. So simple, right? It's not only good for you, but you will no longer be taking part in a system that is destroying the planet and using up its resources at much higher rate. Also, you avoid all of the ethical issues with raising and consuming animals. If you can get past the need for meat and dairy, you can substitute it with a glowing feeling of self-satisfaction and superiority -- and you should be able to lord it over everyone else for much longer and cancer-free. Pretty sweet deal, right? The claims of how quickly changes occur -- one guy supposedly dropped his cholesterol by 43% in three weeks -- are hard to believe, but maybe don't knock it until you've tried it. Lock, Stock & Two Smoking Barrels (1998) -- "8/10" Jason Statham makes his debut in this film written and directed by Guy Ritchie. It has a bit of what would come to be known as Ritchie's trademark slo-mo and freeze-frame style, but it's not as fancy as it would become. The story concerns at least seven groups of small-time to big-time criminals and drug-dealers who are all trying to get a big stash of cash and drugs and use it to settle various debts they have to one another. It's all a bit complicated and the setup takes quite a while, but the payoff is grand and wonderfully serendipitous. It's also a bit of a cliffhanger at the end, with you, the viewer, not knowing quite whether the main boys -- the heroes, as it were, though they're not really very heroic -- will end up on top or not. Vinnie Jones is excellent as an enforcer who makes out OK in the end. Saw it in whatever English they were speaking: I had no problem with the dialects at all, but I'm relatively well-trained for it. There's only one part that even approaches the impenetrability of Snatch but they generously provided sub-titles to translate the Rhyming Slang bits. Iron Sky (2012) -- "7/10" The premise can't be beat: a Nazi colony on the dark side of the moon! The Fourth Reich has survived and flourished on energy provided by Helium-3 on the moon, licking its wounds and waiting for the opportunity to strike and reclaim the Earth for its own. A campaign-marketing mission sent to the moon by President Palin sparks the Nazis into action. They launch their toys from their gigantic bases -- don't ask where they got all that metal, it's more fun that way -- and send a mission to Earth, composed of Renate Richter and Klaus Adler (the next-in-line to Führer). They speak a mix of English and German throughout the film. The plot is at times quite campy, but the effects are top-notch, especially the Götterdämmerung warship! Wow! The gears and chains and sheer steampunk power! The space fleet of Earth -- and, of course, by 2018, every country has one -- is also not bad, but the Nazi toys are much, much better. They took the concept of Nazis on the Moon and stuck to it and did a much better job of it than expected. Recommended. The Raid: Redemption (2012) -- "8/10" This is a movie with a plot that feels like it came from a video game, a relatively simple and straightforward one. A S.W.A.T. team attacks a broken-down residential building where a crime lord and his many henchmen live (oh so many henchmen; the credits actually list people as "hallway attacker #45" and so on). Most of the cops are cleared out of the way relatively quickly, with the criminals making use of machine guns. Once the dross is cleared off and only a couple of important ones remain, they switch to machetes, knives and martial arts. I could not have cared less about the nonsensical plot devices because the choreography was breathtaking: super-fast, fluid and not a cable in sight. Really nice close-quarters fighting with a lot of one-on-one, two-on-one encounters and just flying fists, feet, elbows and knees. Sure, the protagonists -- as well as the main henchman -- seem to have super stamina and Wolverine-like powers of recovery, but it's very entertaining if you're into watching martial arts. The Guard (2011) -- "9/10" An absolutely spellbinding movie starring Brendan Gleeson as a member of the Irish Garda and Don Cheadle as an FBI agent. The story unfolds in Galway county in Ireland with an anticipated $500 million drugs delivery. Sergeant Gerry Boyle is a wonderful character, who barely says a straight word throughout the film: he takes the piss so much that when he actually means something, no one believes him. He's a brilliant cop with a realistic take: he doesn't mind whoring and taking some drugs once in a while, to say nothing of combining whiskey and beer with driving along the coast. The film design is really nice as well, with particular attention paid to some very retro-looking bars and offices, as well as Boyle's home, which is very nicely appointed in a style that's a bit back of now. The same goes for haberdashery, with both Gleeson and Cheadle gussying up in some quite impressive clothes. And some of the scenes are much more dramatic than you ordinarily find in an action/comedy: the move to 100% dark background at some points, as if in a theater piece, the flames in the background like Boyle's an avenging angel in another, etc. It's an Irish movie, so there are a lot of in-jokes and a lot of English spoken in that sometimes nigh-impenetrable Irish lilt [7], especially when it's simultaneously slurred or whispered. And the dialogue is oh so worth paying attention to. The interaction between Cheadle and Gleeson, the conversations had by the smugglers (who are into philosophy). It's apparently the most successful independent Irish film of all time and deserves it. Highly recommended. Ninja Assassin (2009) -- "4/10" Lots of blood and cool ninja stuff, including magical healing powers and handstand pushups on a bed of nails. Far out. However, why are the ninjas indomitable everywhere but at home? All of a sudden, in the middle of the training compound in which they grew up, they're no match for a S.W.A.T. team? Lame. Utterly lame. Seriously, the end is utterly awful -- all of sudden, their swords are utterly ineffectual and they have no shurikens anymore. It evens out after a bit, but why were they so taken by surprise? I guess it's just a silly as Raiza being able to take out dozens of them -- and where do all those ninjas come from anyway? They're like cockroaches. And I just noticed in the credits that the Wachowski brothers produced this thing, so the over-the-top style shouldn't be too surprising. Examined Life (2008) -- "9/10" A documentary about philosophy, with interviews with Cornel West, Slavoj Žižek and other usual suspects. West is, as usual, quite eloquent: "The unexamined life is not worth living, Plato says on line 38A of the Apology. How do you examine yourself; what happens when you interrogate yourself? What happens when you begin to call into question your tacit assumptions and unarticulated presuppositions and begin then to become a different kind of person. See, I put it this way, that for me, philosophy is fundamentally about ... our finite situation. We can define that in terms of we're beings toward death, we're featherless, two-legged, linguistically conscious creatures born between urine and feces whose bodies will one day be the culinary delight of terrestrial worms. That's us, beings toward death. At the same time, we have desire, why we are organisms in space and time, so it's desire in the face of death. And then, of course, you've got dogmatism, various attempts to hold on to certainty, various forms of idolatry, and you've got dialogue, in the face of dogmatism and then of course, structurally and institutionally, you've got domination...and you have democracy [...]" "This is something that Derrida has taught: if you feel that you've acquitted yourself honorably, then you're not so ethical. If you have a good conscience, then you're kind of worthless. Like, if you think, oh, I gave this homeless person five bucks, I'm great! then you're irresponsible. The responsible being is one who thinks they've never been responsible enough, they've never taken care enough of "the other". The other is so in excess of anything you can understand or grasp or reduce. This, in itself, creates an ethical relatedness. A relation without relation. Because you can't presume to know or grasp the other. The minute you think you know the other, you're ready to kill them. You think, oh, they're doing this or this, they're the axis of evil. Let's drop some bombs. But, if don't know, if you don't understand this alterity, you can't violate it with your sense of understanding, then you have to let it live, in a sense." "I think ethics has to come from ourselves, but that doesn't mean that it's totally subjective, that doesn't mean that you can think whatever you like about what's right or wrong. When you start to look at issues ethically, you have to do more than just think about your own interests, you have to ask yourself how do I take into account the interests of others? What would I choose if I were to be in their position rather than my position? [...] One of the most obvious things that emerges when you put yourself in the position of others is the priority of reducing or preventing suffering because ethics is not just about what I actually do and the impact of that, but it's also about what I omit to do, what I decide not to do. And that's why questions about, given that we all have a limited amount of money, questions about what you spend your money on are also questions about what you don't spend your money on, or what you don't use your money to achieve. And, a lot of people, I think, forget that, they think, well, you know, I'm not harming anyone if I go and spend a thousand dollars on a new suit but, in fact, given the opportunities that we have to help and given the way that the world is, I think quite often you're actually failing to benefit someone, which you could be doing. And I think we have moral obligations to help just as we have moral obligations not to harm." "Now [Social Contract/State of Nature] was fine when you're thinking about adult men with no disabilities. But as some of them already began to notice, it doesn't do so well when you think about women because women's oppression has always been partly occasioned by their physical weakness compared to men. And so if you leave out that physical asymmetry, you may be leaving out a problem that a theory of justice will need to fix. But it certainly does not do well when we think about people with serious physical and mental disabilities. And in fact, some of the theorists who noticed that said, well, this is a problem, but we'll just have to solve it later. We'll get the theory first and work on this problem as some other point. Well, my thought is, that this is not a small problem. There are a lot of people with serious mental and physical disabilities but, it's not only that, it's all of us, when we're little children and as we age. How do you think about justice when you're dealing with bodies that are very unequal in their ability and their power and perhaps even harder, how do you think about it when you're dealing with mental powers that are very, very unequal in their potential." In answer to the question: "do you have to go to school to be a philosopher?" "Oh, God no. [...] A philosopher is a lover of wisdom. It takes tremendous discipline, it takes tremendous courage to think for yourself, to examine yourself. The Socratic imperative of examining yourself requires courage. You know, William Butler Yeats used to say "it takes more courage to examine the dark corners of your own soul than it does for a soldier to fight on the battlefield." Courage to think critically, [...] courage is the enabling virtue for any philosopher, for any human being, I think, in the end." "There's a certain pleasure in the life of the mind, that cannot be denied. It's true that you might be socially isolated, because you're in the library, at home and so on. But you're intensely alive. In fact, you're much more alive than these folk walking the streets in New York, in crowds, which is no intellectual interrogation and questioning going at all." "We're stuck, almost conceptually, between two almost cliché ways of thinking about revolution. On the one hand, we have the notion of revolution that involves the replacement of a ruling elite with another ... better -- in many ways -- ruling elite. And that's sort of the form that many modern revolutions have taken and have posed great benefits for the people but they have not arrived at democracy. So that notion of revolution is really discredited and I think rightly so. But, opposed to that, is another notion of revolution, which I think is equally discredited but from exactly the opposite point of view, which is it's the notion of revolution that, in fact, hasn't been instituted, that thinks of revolution as just the removal of all of those forms of authority, state power, the power of capital, that stop people from expressing their natural abilities to rule themselves." The camera pans over an enormous pile of garbage and, if you're familiar with modern philosophers, you will be expecting a rapid-fire burst of Slovenian-tinged, lisping English to burst over the scene at any moment. And you would not be disappointed. "This is where we should start feeling at home. Part of our daily perception of reality is that this [points to garbage] disappears from our world. When you go to the toilet, shit disappears. You flush it. Of course, rationally, you know it's there, in canalization and so on, but at a certain level of your most elementary experience, it disappears from your world. But, the problem is, that trash doesn't disappear. I think ecology, the way we approach ecological problematic is maybe the crucial field of ideology today. "And I use ideology in the traditional sense of illusory, wrong way of thinking and perceiving reality. Why? Ideology is not simply dreaming about false ideas and so on. Ideology addresses very real problems, but it mystifies them. One of the elementary ideological mechanisms, I claim, is what I call the temptation of meaning. When something horrible happens, our spontaneous tendency is to search for a meaning. It must mean something. You know, like, AIDS. It was a trauma. Then, conservatives came and said it's punishment for our sinful ways of life and so on and so on. Even if we interpret a catastrophe as a punishment, it makes it easier, in a way, because we know it's not just some terrifying blind force. It has a meaning. It's better when you're in the middle of a catastrophe, it's better to feel that God punished you than to feel that "it just happened". If God punished you, it's still a universe of meaning. "And, I think that, that's where ecology as ideology enters. It's really the implicit premise of ecology that the existing world is the best possible world in the sense of, it's a balanced world that is disturbed through human hubris. So, why do I find this problematic? Because I think that this notion of nature, nature as harmonious, organic, balanced, reproducing, almost living organism, which is then disturbed, perturbed, derailed through human hubris, technology, exploitation and so on is, I think, a secular version of the religious story of the Fall. And the answer should be, not that there is no Fall, that we are part of nature but, on the contrary that there is no Nature. "Nature is not a balanced totality which then we humans disturb. Nature is a big series of unimaginable catastrophes. We profit from them. What's our main source of energy. Oil. But are we aware, what is oil? Oil reserves beneath the earth are material remainders of an unimaginable catastrophe. Are we aware? Because we all know that oil is composed of the remainders of animal life, plants and so on and so on. Can you imagine what kind of unthinkable catastrophe had to occur on Earth? So that's good to remember. "Ecology will slowly turn into maybe a new opium of the masses, as we all know Marx defined religion. What we expect from religion is a sort of unquestionable highest authority. It's God's work, so it is, you don't debate it. Today, I claim, ecology is more and more taking over this role of a conservative ideology. Whenever there is a new scientific breakthrough, biogenetic development, whatever, it is as if the voice that warns us not to trespass, violate a certain invisible limit, like "don't do that, it would be too much", that voice today is more and more the voice of ecology. Like, don't mess with DNA, don't mess with nature, don't do it. This basic, conservative, archly ideological mistrust of change. This is today, ecology." Cave of Forgotten Dreams (2010) -- "6/10" A documentary narrated by director Werner Herzog showing the cave paintings at Chauvet Cave in France. The paintings are at least 32,000 years old. For all that, the animal drawings are wonderfully done, conveying the essence of the creatures in just a few strokes. The documentary itself is a bit slow, lingering for a long time over many of the drawings, but it's worth it all the same, if only to get a glimpse of these drawings to which so few people have access. Interesting facts: * Humans never lived in the cave. All the bones found there are from bears and other animals (and there are lot of bones, some almost entirely buried in calciferous encrustation). * Animals that we associate with the African steppes ranged freely in France at the time. Ibex, mammoths, lions and other carnivores were plentiful. Bears, horses and other animals are also depicted. * Carbon-dating shows that the drawings were not made all at once. In fact, some are 5000 years older than others. This is truly amazing: the cave was used over 5000 years, always adding to the drawings. * Even without the drawings, the cave is beautiful, filled with stalactites and stalagmites. * There is only one partial drawing of a human form: the lower half of a woman (big surprise there) that resembles the fertility goddesses of other cultures. Akira (1988) -- "8/10" The classic Japanese anime set in the future, thirty years after WWIII, in which Tokyo was nuked. The crater is still there, in the middle of the city, which has grown up and around it. The film is set in 2018 and it's quite prescient, both in its depiction of future Japanese cities and the tax and class-war protests depicted near the beginning. As with many other anime, Japan is still clearly working out the psychic trauma of having been nuked back in the 40s, a psychological cultural scar that colors almost every cartoon that comes out of that country. And the acid trips, magic, marching toys, mysterious superpowers and mutants -- most likely the result of either nuclear fallout or mother nature's anger at same -- are here as well! And it's exquisitely and meticulously hand-drawn, as usual. The finale is amazing, rephrasing the themes of uncontrollable power and unbridled -- cancerous -- growth in a grotesque and tragic end-game for Tetsuo. Smoking' Aces (2007) -- "6/10" An elaborate Vegas movie involving Jeremy Piven as a Las Vegas card-sharp/magician/entertainer/asshole who's ready to turn on the whole Cosa Nostra. They put out a hit on him for $1 million and every bounty hunter in the country shows up to take a crack at him. They are all, more or less colorfully insane and the entire hotel turns into a clusterfuck before it's all over. A bit longer than necessary, but fun all the same. Starring Ryan Reynolds and Ray Liotta as FBI and a host of others, like Ben Affleck, Andy Garcia, Common, Chris Pine and Jason Bateman. There's a reasonably clever twist at the end, but it's only partially worth it. It's kind of like a Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels for Americans. Fist of Fury (1971) -- "4/10" This is a very stilted Kung Fu film starring Bruce Lee. Lee does nothing more than sneer for the first 45 minutes of the movie. He has promised not to fight anymore and is sticking to it. This is a pity because he's the only guy worth watching. Once he gets started, you'll like his bravado and his willingness to make a movie fight that lasts two blows (well, three: he kicks the knife hand, kicks the head and head hits the ground). He fights five or six guys for about two minutes and then we're back to more painful plot and watching Bruce Lee get drunk and grabby. At least half an hour later, there's another fight, with Lee holding off dozens. He gets into the spirit of Jeet Kune Do and crushes one guy's balls (there's no such thing as cheating in a street fight) and then punches another guy through a wall -- making a man-shaped hole, complete with legs and arms, like in a cartoon. I am not kidding (1:21:00). In the penultimate knife fight, it's nice to see him anticipating and just the cracking guy in the mouth when he comes in with the knife (the best opportunity is when the enemy strikes). In the final confrontation, he's a total bad-ass, chewing chips, jumping a ten-foot fence and sizing up the army against him with a smile on his face. Just laughing and smiling while he pounds on 'em. And so quick. Not really recommended, except for the fighting bits with Bruce Lee, but that's not too surprising. It's about 90% not that, though, so not a great movie. The Legend of the Drunken Master (1994) -- "8/10" A Jackie Chan masterpiece, funnier than most of his American movies. He's the eldest son of a doctor and his wife, who draws him in to her machinations as she hides her Mah-Jong gambling from her husband. The choreography is fast, furious and unique. He's amazingly fast and strong, really in his element. Unlike Fist of Fury there is a tremendous amount of fighting, which is awesome. Chan's drunken boxing is great, but there's also more noticeable cable work. That was it for 2012. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] I'm almost certain that I'm reading a bit too much into it, but the film is good enough to allow me that leeway. There is a scene near the end, where bear-trap-on-a-chain-zombie finds the last girl -- the Virgin, whose death is "optional" -- on the dock and begins to dismember her, all set to the soundtrack of REO Speedwagon's Roll with the Changes which is playing over a huge, office-party celebration for a job well-done. With the scene playing on all of the big screens around them, one guy laments that "it would have been cooler with a mer-man" while another lady asks whether "we get an overtime bonus on this one". [1] William Sanderson -- I knew him as Larry from Newhart. [1] Pashto? Dari? Not for me to say. [1] It's interesting to note that the video games they play look so much like real life that it sometimes took me a few seconds to realize that I was watching real-life footage instead of a video game. [1] Or whatever the hell his official designation is; I don't know it in English and sure as hell can't decipher it in Danish. [1] Given that you're not Irish. If you're Irish, I assume you'll be able to finally relax and understand everything with no effort. If you're not a native, you'll either need a lot of experience with English dialects or subtitles. The only anomaly is the little boy with the dog, who I swear speaks with an American accent most of the time. [1] Neil Patrick Harris ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2740 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2740 Tue, 18 Dec 2012 23:05:12 +0100 -- "8/10" 2. "The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011)" <#Girl> -- "6/10" 3. "Paprika (2006)" <#Paprika> -- "9/10" 4. "Your Highness (2011)" <#Your> -- "2/10" 5. "Into Eternity: A Film for the Future (2010)" <#Into> -- "7/10" 6. "Waiting for Armageddon (2009)" <#Waiting> -- "8/10" 7. "C.S.A. -- The Confederate States of America (2004)" <#C> -- "8/10" 8. "Casino Jack (2010)" <#Casino> -- "6/10" 9. "The Expendables 2 (2012)" <#Expendables> -- "7/10" 10. "Get Shorty (1995)" <#Get> -- "8/10" 11. "Battleship (2012)" <#Battleship> -- "4/10" 12. "Ted (2012)" <#Ted> -- "8/10" 13. "The Amazing Spider-Man (2012)" <#Amazing> -- "5/10" 14. "Superbad (2007)" <#Superbad> -- "8/10" 15. "I Heart Huckabees (2004)" <#Huckabees> -- "9/10" 16. "The Untold History of the United States s01e02 (2012)" <#Untold> -- "10/10" 17. "Hell Ride (2008)" <#Hell> -- "3/10" The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2009/se) -- "8/10" This is the original Swedish filming of the book by Stieg Larsson with Noomi Rapace in the eponymous role (she went on to star in Prometheus) opposite Michael Nyqvist, who's got this utterly believable early-Gerard Depardieu vibe to him. Just as in Prometheus, Ms. Rapace is in phenomenal shape; seriously, she's ripped and way more buff than in the book, where The Girl is described as a stick. She looks good doing it though, and it's completely convincing when (spoiler alert) she goes ape-shit on Martin's head with a golf club. Otherwise, the film stays mostly true to the book, doing a good job of skipping some of the slower parts, skipping on the sojourn in the house on the lake while he writes his book, which would have made the film utterly interminable. In fact, most of the sub-plot with his book about the Vanger family and the details of his own convoluted case against Wennerström are left off until the very end, when he goes to jail for 90 days. That part was a bit confusing because the Swedish prison is barely recognizable as such for my (still) American sensibilities. Despite the heavy pruning, the pacing is still quite slow, but it's a well-made and interesting film. I haven't read the second book or the third one, but the Swedish movies all came out in the same year. Saw it in Swedish with English subtitles. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011) -- "6/10" The British/American remake starts off with intense production values, with a James-Bond--like credit sequence of black-liquid--covered people and other things driven along by a kick-ass cover of The Immigrant Song by Trent Reznor. It's a strong cast: Daniel Craig and Christopher Plummer and even Stellan Skarsgård are always fun and it's nice to see Goran Visnjic getting a bit of work. Apparently one of the main conclusions drawn by the makers of the remake is that Lisbeth Salander was obviously too sexy and not crazy-looking or antisocial enough -- not hacker/sub-culture enough -- in the original. Whereas Mara's Salander probably looks more like the one in the book, Rapace's Salander was more believable in her role as potential love interest/ass-kicker. This version includes many more of the details about Blomqvist: the cat made it into this one and Blomqvist drinks and smokes as much as in the book; and his daughter's back from the oblivion to which the Swedes sent her. It still stuck to many of the same scenes and shots of the original -- just juiced with CGI in some cases. For example, the overhead shot of the train heading north looks like it's heading to Niffelheim whereas the original was much more down-to-Earth. Some of the moments and interactions seemed like they were invented to massage the story a bit, sometimes in unnecessary ways. For instance, in the Swedish version, Lisbeth finds the link to the Bible and contacts him, but in the English version, he finds the link, then seeks her out when he needs an assistant. I can't remember which one was in the book, but I prefer the first one. It's the same with the discovery of the woman who took pictures at the parade: in the English version, she discovers her; in the Swedish one, he does. Whereas both films are necessarily dark -- the book takes place in late fall/early winter in Sweden -- the remake is much darker in coloring, almost murky. On to the weather. Spoiler alerts follow. Seriously, it's -18ºC; I understand that Daniel Craig doesn't wear a hat -- because the director wanted to properly display his handsome face -- but why the f&@k can't he wear gloves? And why is he taking notes outside? On paper? Doesn't he have a recorder? Or a f$%king smart-phone? He's a reporter, right? Is it because it's too cold for electronic devices? Well, then, why isn't he wearing gloves? And how the hell is that dock still in pristine condition when the house near it has been abandoned for 40 years? That's over 40 harsh northern Swedish winters and it looks brand new. And when he's investigating around Martin's house -- at night, no less -- all of a sudden it's warm enough that he's just fine in a blazer as if he's out to dinner in LA? And we can't even see his breath? At night in Sweden in the late fall? Wasn't the whole area covered in snow a week ago? And the famous rape-scene? Rooney Mara chews the hell out of the scenery, narrating the whole bloody scene as if cameras don't exist. The Swedish version wins hands-down here; it portrayed this scene much better. Rooney Mara play Salander less as a cool iconoclast and more as a freakish social outcast; her mouth moves strangely when she speaks, her accent is utterly unplaceable, she acts like a robot and treats people and things interchangeably. Even her relationship with her hacker friend -- portrayed in the Swedish film as friendly, as in the book -- is purely business and borderline hostile. She's utterly unsympathetic. And she's an über-hacker working on a murder case and doesn't lock her workstation when she leaves the room? Even at the end, there is a stark difference: in the Swedish version, Martin's death was an accident rued by Mikael and not by Lisbeth, but in the English version, she's eager to kill Martin and he approves; she seems professional with the gun rather than a hacker turned vigilante. And then, in the end, the Swedish version shows us that she could have saved him, but chose not to; in the English version, she wants to kill him, but his car blows up first. And, again with the weather: no helmet, no gloves, open jacket, motorcycling through the blowing snow of evening. It ends as the book does, by painting a picture of Harriet that leaves you thinking of her as a horrible egotist: she escaped Martin's clutches and lived a fine life abroad, but she never turned him in or thought to stop his rampages in Sweden. And what the hell was up with the ending in this one? Non sequitur, anyone? Paprika (2006) -- "9/10" A Japanese Anime film based on a 1993 novel about a device -- the "Mini DC" -- that lets therapists enter their patients' dreams. Because it's Japanese Anime -- with all of the attendant tropes, like creepy frogs, cowled men, happy cats and little ghosts -- and it's half-set in a dream world, all bets are off. It's surreal and you have very little idea where dreams end and the real world begins. It's a good bet that Chris Nolan's Inception was, let us say, inspired by this film and its literary progenitor. The eponymous Paprika is the dream-state alter-ego of one of the researchers involved on the project. Another of the researchers becomes trapped in a nightmare and starts to suck the others into it; the tumultuous, shambling parade of kitchen appliances, dolls, stuffed animals and, of course, mini-robots, is amazingly detailed and disturbing. Unlike in Inception, where the emphasis was more scientific, there is, as usual in Japanese Anime, something otherworldly and sinister about the dream world. There are shades of the Matrix here as well, as the researchers freely move between the real world, where they are bound by physical laws, and the dream world, where anything can be made to happen. Paprika even flies like Neo at one point and runs up walls like Trinity. The Chairman becomes a whale that rears out of the sea like a sandworm -- with Leo Atreides's face -- breaching the sands of Arrakis. The characters are well-drawn, but it's the static backgrounds that really shine: they look to be hand-painted (not rendered). The theme is the common one -- the struggle between nature and technology. The scene where Onasai tears Chiba from the dream-chrysalis that is Paprika? And then the chairman grows Kuato-like -- or perhaps more Voldemort-from-Quirrell-like? -- from Osanai and the Alien-facehugger-like mouth-rapes Chiba with tentacles that grow from his arm? Awesome. The deeper into the movie you get, the more dream levels there are, the more surreal things get...until the dream world seems to break into reality. To top it all off? Skyscraper-sized titans bestride the city and fight to the death. Now that's what I call Japanese anime. Your Highness (2011) -- "2/10" Danny McBride, Natalie Portman and James Franco star in this forgettable swords-and-sorcery film. A tremendous waste of a potentially good cast. A pity. Into Eternity: A Film for the Future (2010) -- "7/10" A Finnish documentary (mostly in English) about long-term nuclear storage and focusing on a storage facility that they're building in Finland called Onkalo (this word looks awesome and sounds awesome too). It's absolutely gigantic and is meant to last 100,000 years. Construction was started in the 20th century and will continue until the early 22nd century, when it will have been completely filled and will be sealed. The ideas are very interesting: geologic stability is important, but so is societal stability. How can we predict what happens in 100,000 years? How do we communicate with those people? How do we warn them of the danger? Nothing we have ever built has lasted for more than a tenth that long. Although accompanied by lots of slow-motion sequences of heavy-industry machinery with a melancholy soundtrack, the information and interviews are quite interesting. The central issue is the elephant in the room, especially for those new-found nuclear advocates who see anything as a preferable alternative to carbon-based fuels. Waiting for Armageddon (2009) -- "8/10" A documentary about end-timers, people waiting for Judgment Day. The initial interview is with two supposedly technical people who have a pretty low-level command of the English language (for engineers) and a rock-solid belief in the bible -- although both work on subsystems for the Apache attack helicopter for a weapons company. The next set of interviews is with families, with teenagers, who have such an utterly egocentric view of the Rapture -- they want to take part, but "after seeing the world" and "only when I'm 85". Or how about this throwaway comment from one of the interviewees: "In 1947, for the first time in 2000 years, the Israeli flag flew over Jerusalem." In the next segment, a bus-load of these fools head to Israel. They're singing along on the bus and then they all visit the sights in white togas and sandals. I am convinced that they're not kidding...because then they were all baptized by their tour guide. And then singing the Star-spangled Banner while boating on the Sea of Galilee? Check. Having just read Innocents Abroad, it's hard to believe that Twain's pilgrims were even a tenth this crazy. Then they're buying postcards, which are like 10 for a dollar and the guide exhorts his crew to "dicker with 'em [the vendors]". And the Dome of the Rock? "That mosque has to be removed." At another point, the American guide is positively yelling that all this shit just has to go, at which point another guide, a local, has to tell him to pipe the fuck down because he's going to start a riot. I'm just going to include some of the comments to give you a sense of the people in this movie. * From one of the pilgrims: "let's be frank, Islam's goal isn't the Middle East; it's the whole world" and "Islam is a world-dominating religion." * The guide again: "Years ago, I used to be a police officer, for about four years [...] I went on many raids, you know, we'd have some fun, breaking into places." * The couple from the beginning again: "Christ will come back, with a sword by his side [...] and we're going to be behind him [...] with swords in our hands and we're going to be his army." They go on to describe -- in their paucity of vocabulary -- the most horrible possible war ever (another guy later describes it as "Christ is just gonna trash the planet") -- led by Christ himself, by the way, after which, "God will set up his kingdom on Earth, you know, free of evil." Well, yeah, because God will have used up all the evil in the war he just started and finished. At the end, the tour guide is at home again, giving a presentation on his trip, getting a huge laugh -- from pretty much everyone -- when he shows a picture of Jerusalem with the Dome of the Rock having been elided with Photoshop. 'Nuff said. Despite the derision, I recommend this documentary. Know thy enemy. C.S.A. -- The Confederate States of America (2004) -- "8/10" A mockumentary, depicting a historical documentary from Britain about an America where the South won. Lincoln was disgraced and forced to use the Underground Railroad to flee the country and escape into Canada. There is a silent movie depicting his capture and humiliation by the Confederate forces. Harriet Tubman was also captured, convicted of war crimes and executed. The story continues to tell of the trials of the Jefferson Davis presidency and how the only way to heal the nation was to retract the Emancipation Proclamation -- which was still in effect despite the North's loss -- and officially codify the slavery of the black man into law. Mark Twain, Henry David Thoreau, Harriet Beecher-Stowe and Susan B. Anthony and others fled across the border to Canada in response. In between history lessons, the documentary shows modern-day American commercials, where the show Runaway has replaced Cops (although it looks almost the same) and there are commercials for institutes that cure freedom-related diseases. The next stage in American history was the demand for reparations from Canada for having stolen so much property -- in the form of slaves to whom they provided asylum. Another commercial is in the form of "if you see something, say something" but is about "people of questionable racial origin" posing as citizens or "Darkie Toothpaste: for a shine that's Jigaboo Bright!" The next history lesson? Why the takeover of Mexico and South America, to properly subjugate the darkies in those nether lands. After such an incursion, Hitler was the natural partner of the U.S. -- the U.S. would convince Hitler to enslave the Jews rather than to kill them, that "it was immoral to waste valuable human livestock." America opened the war against Japan, underestimating them because they were "small in stature and non-white" and, as Congress said, "sneaky". In the C.S.A. women still didn't have the vote well into the 50s, Rock and Roll started in Canada and Elvis was arrested for imitating the northern negros. Another cool commercial is for the drug, Contrari, "for Mammies and Uncles [to] for all-day control". There are lots of side-effect warnings and its "not meant for servants who are nursing or about to drop a litter." Before the credits, they mention that many of the products advertised were actually real, like Sambo Axle Grease or Darkie Toothpaste or Niggerhair cigarettes. This isn't too surprising: you can still buy chocolate in Switzerland today with a cartoonish African tribal chief on it called "Mohrekopf" or "Moor-head". Casino Jack (2010) -- "6/10" Kevin Spacey stars as Jack Abramoff, the lobbyist who held Washington in the palm of his hand during the Bush years. The film focuses on his most notorious campaign, in which he "helped" Native American tribes get access to Congress. Spacey plays him with a weird tic, where he does voices, imitating Hollywood actors. Jon Lovitz plays well, in his standard role as one of his partners and Barry Pepper also plays his usual character (you'd recognize him if you saw him). It's a relatively well-made film about a standard story of corruption and influence. Spoiler alert -- in case you never read the papers -- they all screw each other over, in the end. Oh, and Abramoff goes to jail. The best part is near the end where he imagines the courtroom rant that he'd like to give -- in which he indicts and exposes all the corrupt Senators juding him -- instead of taking the fifth. The Expendables 2 (2012) -- "7/10" The gang's all here again and they stayed in pretty good shape. They're older -- more reading glasses around -- but still pretty cut. The old-timer banter is pretty funny. Jet Li's pots-and-pans choreography was very nice. Some stuff is just silly: "Cover up!" screams Stallone as they careen through a firefight. Wait, why didn't they cover up before they charged the city? Did they expect no one to shoot at them? And why do they need all those muscles and guns when the sniper just kills everyone anyway? Gunnar (Dolph Lundgren) is still one of my favorites: fun fact, the back story they provide for him in the movie is pretty close to Lundgren's own "life story" . He really is quite well-educated. And then comes the object lesson: the brashness of youth was not willing to fake respect, spat in the face of madness and paid for it with a knife to the heart, leaving the grizzled warriors to fight another day. I'm not sure what they're doing here, but what started off as kind of a joke: "hey, let's pack every action star into one movie!" is actually getting pretty good, with each guy pulling his full weight and not a red-shirt to be seen. Barney even philosophizes, "That's how we deal with death. We can't change what it is, so we keep it light until it's time to get dark. And then we get pitch black." They all seem to be having fun but, but Statham and Stallone -- as Barney and Lee Christmas -- are a positively awesome action duo. The action sequences are nicely choreographed: tight and quick. Statham gets the elegance and grace award again (as in the first one). On a side note, it was nice to see almost no product placement (no beer signs in the bar; no labels on the bottles). The standard script, very well-executed. Get Shorty (1995) -- "8/10" One of John Travolta's best movies. As in Pulp Fiction the year before, he's a gangster -- a shylock, to be specific -- and he's as cool and clever as can be. A job takes him to Las Vegas and then to Los Angeles, where he realizes that he could finally get into the business he's always loved: movies. An absolutely all-star cast joins Travolta: Rene Russo, Gene Hackman, Danny DeVito, Dennis Farina, Delroy Lindo, James Gandofini and Bette Midler. Russo is awesome as usual (shades of her cool-customer/hot-lady roles in Lethal Weapon 3 or The Thomas Crown Affair) and props to Delroy Lindo for his portrayal of Ray Barboni, the mobster with Tourette Syndrome and a serious violent streak. The film is based on Elmore Leonard's book of the same name and has some really good dialogue. Karen Flores (Russo): Weren't you scared back there? Chili Palmer (Travolta): You bet. Karen Flores: You don't act like it. Chili Palmer: Well, I was scared then, but I'm not scared now. How long do you want me to be scared? For comparison, Pulp Fiction springs to mind, but Kiss Kiss Bang Bang has more of the same vibe and that movie was equally funny and well-made. Highly recommended. Battleship (2012) -- "4/10" "Independence Day with sunlight as the virus and without Pullman's star power." I wonder how much the navy paid for this commercial. We're introduced to the lovable loser with a steadfast brother. The hot admiral's daughter is with the loser, of course. Kick the jingoism into overdrive. Special effects are absolutely top-notch: the satellite crashing into Hong Kong was spectacular and my undiscerning eye and paucity of imagination cannot determine whether it's real. I like Alexander Skarsgård -- he was awesome in Generation Kill -- but he really chews the scenery with his American good 'ol boy accent: "I tell you what, boys, this is a real head-stumper." Who talks like that? And then his brother basically paraphrases that old joke about the Canadian lighthouse when he sees this enormous building sticking out of the water and, after a single, initial communication attempt, calmly tells it to "prepare to be boarded" as if it was a yacht. And then he's not even wearing a headset to stay in contact with, well, anybody. It's kind of sad to see the Aliens mindset come to the fore, where a load of dumb grunts handles First Contact. And then, after a show of power far beyond a dinky rocket falling into the sea, another idiot -- one in charge of a ship -- says "it's the North Koreans, I'm telling ya". I'm almost certain that this was not intended ironically: this is probably the reaction that these people would have. And now it becomes Under the Dome by Stephen King (at least they're stealing from good sources). And then something the size of a city block emerges from the water and utterly fails to make a wave big enough to do more than gently rock a nearby zodiac. Magic alien wave-killing technology! And what technology it is: it looks wonderful, but you have to wonder why all the huge, energy-wasting mechanical parts? Is it really necessary to have it leap like a giant frog? To keep the CGI folks busy and happy? And then it uses more-or-less conventional weapons, like depth charges and cluster/limpet bombs? Are they classicists? Or just letting the Navy show off its anti-aircraft capabilities? If the aliens want to phone home, and they're going to use a human device to do it, won't it take years for the message to go and come back? Or does the speed-of-light not apply? And it was lucky for mankind that the windshield on the spaceship wasn't bulletproof. Lucky thing that. And since when do Navy guys -- wearing gloves, no less -- actually use the risers when going down steep steps on a boat? Didn't they used to slide down those things? And then, when they catch an alien, their adherence to quarantine and lab protocol are about as good as those of the Prometheus crew. Not much imagination on the aliens, though. It looks like the Master Chief from Halo -- with a suit made on Cybertron -- is attacking planet Earth. I will admit that the way they actually worked in the Battleship board game was quite clever and fit well into the story. I like neither the U.S. nor its military enough to get particularly excited about the Missouri going to sea with a bunch of America's "greatest generation" for a crew, despite AC/DCs efforts. At least the battle was mercifully short after they hockey-stopped an ancient battleship with no notable structural damage. And then a hand-to-hand fight with the disabled veteran? Good thing for him that only one of the aliens noticed his truck crashing into a huge piece of equipment. Ted (2012) -- "8/10" A pretty funny movie about a man and his teddy bear, starring Mark Wahlberg (boy/man), Mila Kunis (girlfriend) and Seth McFarlane (voice of Ted). In a nice twist on the toy-come-to-life genre, the movie barely deals at all with the usual, tired plots of hiding the talking bear from the world or dealing with everyone's surprise. After an initial scare with the parents, the rest of the world seems pretty cool with the idea of a talking teddy bear. Other than the foul-mouthed talking teddy bear, it's a standard Hollywood girl meets boy, boy loses girl, boy wins girl back story. Small parts by Giovanni Ribisi, Norah Jones, Patrick Warburton and Ryan Reynolds as well as narration by Patrick Stewart keep things interesting. Wahlberg and Kunis are good, but Ted has the best lines and personality, hands down. The Amazing Spider-Man (2012) -- "5/10" The movie starts with a young Peter Parker -- an excuse to hire some producer's little-shit kid, I bet -- and the camera pans across a living room with one of his toys on the coffee table: a godzilla toy -- a lizard. That's what those in the know call foreshadowing. Subtle, right? So, this is the Spider-man origin story re-imagined with Parker as an outsider but in a cooler, hipster use-a-film-camera-in-the-age-of-Instamatic, ride-a-skateboard and stand-up-to-the-bully kind of way. And he wears half-gloves -- he's so dreamy. Gwen Stacy and Flash Thomson make early appearances; Emma Stone's pretty good actually. So Peter, showing much more moxie in this parallel universe sneaks in to Oscorp see what his father was up to, lo these many years ago. Good thing for him that Oscorp is still working on the exact same stuff his father was working on 15 years ago. That's how smart Dad was, I guess; they can't get anywhere without him. And Jesus, isn't Peter smart? He shows up at Connors's house and in typically arrogant teenager fashion solves the problem that Connors has been unable to solve for over a decade. So he's immediately taken up as a biologist by Oscorp and he succeeds at growing back limbs on his first day at work. And then he humiliates Flash with his newfound powers and he's totally the BMOC. Instead of a nice guy, Peter is an egocentric douche. Not untypically so, but a douche nonetheless. It's a nice touch in his transformation story that he has to become accustomed to his new strength and sensitivity -- something that wouldn't happen immediately. And his training session in the old warehouse is actually a more believable way of discovering -- and honing -- his powers. And it's cool to see him use technology to build his web-shooters, as in the original story from the comic books. His slower facility with webs is also more believable than in the other movies. The web in the sewer trick was kinda neat, too. Eventually, as he becomes Spider-man, his sense of humor is also more in keeping with the original story. He's still much too arrogant and disrespectful of the police [1] -- he's supposed to be a smart-ass, not a douche. Sweet Jesus, that scene with the kid in the car? You could have left that whole thing out, really. What's the use of that? To show us that, despite the hour's worth of evidence previously presented to the contrary, that Peter's not a douche? Are you deliberately wasting my time? And again -- I'm looking at you, Homeland -- what's up with the magic cell-phone reception? Perfect clarity -- five bars--in the sewer for Peter Parker. And at the end, it's clear that Spidey has no webs but why can't he stick to the building? He stuck to everything else by accident up until that point and now he suddenly can't stick to anything? Why? The movie kind of evened out in the end and the second half was definitely better than the first. Superbad (2007) -- "8/10" The first half of the movie is pretty forgettable actually, serving mostly as a jumping-off point for actors and actresses who would be much better in other films: Michael Cera, Jonah Hill, Emma Stone, Seth Rogen and Bill Hader (as the two cops). There are some good lines, like when Seth and Jules are going out the back door of a house: "Seth: Watch your step; I fell earlier today Jules: Are you serious? Seth: Well, I was hit by a car. It's a long story." Or, when Becca mauls Evan at a party: "Becca: I'm so wet right now. Evan: Yeah...they said that would happen, in health class." The best parts are with Rogen and Hader as the cops. Their escapades with McLovin (aka Fogell) are pretty epic. Hill and Cera have their moments as well, but Hill is a rageaholic ass for a lot of the movie. Their relationship is more like two girls than two guys: they talk about their feelings, go clothes-shopping together and so on. In fairness, the second half is much better and the ending is very good ... and the sketches accompanying the credits are great -- really authentic. I Heart Huckabees (2004) -- "9/10" A stellar cast rounds out this quirky film about ... well, about human existence, about struggle, about pain, about joy and about everything and nothing. Jason Schwartzman plays Albert Markovski, a poetry-writing defender of the "open spaces". He hires a husband-and-wife existentialist detective team, played by Dustin Hoffman and Lily Tomlin -- I am not kidding; they are awesome together -- to investigate a coincidence. Mark Wahlberg is also a client, with his own issues (mostly about petroleum). Jude Law is Schwartzman's rival, and works for the Huckabees chain -- the "everything store" -- and Naomi Watts plays the spokesmodel/girlfriend/fellow angst-ridden soul. Isabelle Huppert is a rival therapist/investigator of the ineffable. There are other cameos -- I saw Kevin Dunn, Jonah Hill and Jean Smart -- but those are the main characters. The dialogue was good and the actors were used quite well, each getting their chance in the spotlight. What happens? That's hard to explain; there is definitely a story arc and a conclusion, but to tell it would be to focus on the incidental. It's about the journey, man. Sure, some of it is probably old news and rehashed philosophy to some, but it was a hell of a lot more interesting than many other movies. And the various lines of inquiry ended up dovetailing quite nicely. As for the dialogue, here are some bits I transcribed. The first is from Vivian's (Tomlin) initial interview with Albert: Vivian Jaffe: Have you ever transcended space and time? Albert Markovski: Yes. No. Uh, time, not space... No. ... I don't know what you're talking about. This next, longer one is our introduction to Tommy, the petroleum-obsessed firefighter (Wahlberg), who's talking to his wife Molly and daughter Caitlin: Tommy: You don't want to ask these questions? Molly: No. I wanna live my life. Tommy: What is that life, baby? What are we part of? Who are we? Look at this, look at this [shows her one of her shoes]. Do you know where these come from? Molly: Yeah. My closet. The store. Tommy: Indonesia. [turns to young daughter] Baby... this is the truth, ok? Little girls like you, they have to work in dark factories where they go blind, for a dollar sixty a month just to make Mommy her pretty shoes. Can you even imagine that, Caitlin? Caitlin: [shouting] I don't want the children to work in factories! Stop it from happening! Molly: Your Daddy's crazy, honey. Tommy: Daddy's not crazy, baby. The world is crazy. It's important to ask these questions. Molly: Shut up! Tommy: Mommy doesn't ask because Mommy doesn't care. Don't stop asking questions, baby! In this next quote, Tommy in a way foreshadows what he and Albert would later learn from Caterine Vauban (Huppert) when they discover "pure being" -- a state in which you are free from the burden of thinking and free from the humdrum concerns of daily life. But then you forget what you've learned and you're dragged back in, filling the empty crevices of your life with those concerns -- just to fill the time. At best, life is a sine curve bouncing you between the epiphany, the reset and cleansing, of pure being and the humdrum knot of concerns that is modern life. People usually experience such an epiphany when they come back from a great, seemingly life-altering vacation; a few weeks later, though, they're back to their old selves. "Tommy: Why do people only ask themselves deep, philosophical questions when something bad happens? And then they forget all about it afterwards?" These are the final lines of the movie; out of context, they may seem trite, but in context? Not bad at all. "Tommy Corn: What are you doing tomorrow? Albert Markovski: I was thinking about chaining myself to a bulldozer. Do you want to come? Tommy Corn: What time? Albert Markovski: Mmm, 1, 1:30. Tommy Corn: Sounds good. Should I bring my own chains? Albert Markovski: We always do." The Untold History of the United States s01e02 (2012) -- "10/10" This episode was eye-opening in its depiction of the sheer corruption and party manipulation involved in the deposing of "Henry Wallace" as the Presidential nominee at the 1944 Democratic convention. Wallace was far too liberal but the people loved him. Their will was flouted by the party bosses and Truman was selected instead. Truman ended up dropping the bomb; nothing about Wallace suggests that he would have even considered doing so. This episode covers up to Roosevelt's death, Truman's reluctant assumption of the presidency and his all-too-eager and prejudicially small-minded betrayal of the Soviets, despite their having essentially won the European war. Hell Ride (2008) -- "3/10" Though it's got Michael Madsen, Dennis Hopper and David Carradine and was produced by Quentin Tarantino, it was clearly neither directed nor written by him. And Larry Bishop is most definitely not Quentin Tarantino. The flick's about motorcycle gangs in the desert, settling an old vendetta and having a lot of sex in various bars. Not recommended. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] Does Denis Leary have to play the police chief whenever there's a call for one in New York City? ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2728 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2728 Sun, 16 Dec 2012 21:46:35 +0100 -- "8/10" 2. "Captain America: The First Avenger (2011)" <#Captain> -- "9/10" 3. "Platoon (1986)" <#Platoon> -- "9/10" 4. "Midnight Express (1978)" <#Midnight> -- "6/10" 5. "John Carter (2012)" <#John> -- "8/10" 6. "The Pruitt-Igoe Myth (2011)" <#Igoe> -- "8/10" 7. "Paul (2011)" <#Paul> -- "7/10" 8. "The African Queen (1951)" <#African> -- "6/10" 9. "Culture in Decline -- Episodes 1-3 (2012)" <#Culture> -- "8/10" 10. "The Dictator (2012)" <#Dictator> -- "6/10" 11. "In Time (2011)" <#Time> -- "8/10" 12. "Killer at Large (2008)" <#Killer> -- "9/10" 13. "The Campaign (2012)" <#Campaign> -- "7/10" Johnny English Reborn (2011) -- "8/10" A surprisingly amusing and refreshingly good sequel to the original Johnny English. This one drew the line farther from slapstick than the original -- and skirting entirely the scatological humor that induced squirms. The story was decebt and the cast was good (Gillian Anderson and Rosamund Pike were both very welcome additions). English, as played by Rowan Atkinson, is even more skilled than in the first film, though he still swings between utterly clueless and reasonably clever. An early scene shows him defeating a much younger nemesis by not entering into any of the typical action-hero hijinks at all. The fleeing enemy climbs down scaffolding dozens of stories high? English takes the elevator and meets him at the bottom. Quite cleverly done, actually. The finale -- set at Le Bastion but where guards are inexplicably speaking Swiss- and High-German (and actually filmed at the Aguille de Midi near Chamonix in France) -- was fun, evoking the spy-film style while mixing in Naked-Gun--like hijinks (although it stayed more serious than that). I enjoyed it and can recommend it -- if you're going to watch one Johnny English movie, watch this one and not its predecessor. Bonus: watch the credits to see Atkinson at his craft cooking to Grieg's The Hall of the Mountain King. Captain America: The First Avenger (2011) -- "9/10" My expectations going in were low and I was pleasantly surprised to find that this was a relatively solid movie. It was also solidly based on the origin story of Captain America, right down to pretty much every major character. Chris Evans was good as the Captain, Stanley Tucci added class as always (as the inventor of the Super-Soldier Serum, Erskine) and Hugo Weaving was the Red Skull, who is a really good villain (complete with eerily Ah-nuld--like accent). [1] Props also to Tommy Lee Jones as crusty old Colonel Phillips and Dominic Cooper as a young Howard Stark (Tony's father). The sets & costumes were a wonderful blend of WWII period articles mixed with enough fantastical technology to remain faithful to the comic books. The whole look and feel of the film was pretty consistent, playing like a WWII-era propaganda film and really sticking the landing. Even Hayley Atwell looked like she just stepped out of a pin-up poster. The special effects were very good and pretty tight; I honestly don't see what was wrong with it. The jingoism wasn't over the top -- it was barely present at all, actually -- I mean, it was about the Americans fighting the Nazis i.e. Hydra. The movie was based on comic books that started out as propaganda for the U.S. Army. The movie told that story faithfully and well. Unlike the Green Lantern, the back-story was interesting and fun to watch. This was an actual movie and delivered what it promised -- even the ordinarily more difficult moments for such films (love interest, etc.) were handled with aplomb. I'm looking forward to the next one. Highly recommended for action-movie fans. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] His sidekick/chief scientist Arnim Zola described him as follows: "Dr. Arnim Zola: Schmidt believes he walks in the footsteps of the gods. Col. Chester Phillips: Hm! Dr. Arnim Zola: Only the world itself will satisfy him. Col. Chester Phillips: You do realize that's nuts, don't you? Dr. Arnim Zola: The insanity of the plan is of no consequence. Col. Chester Phillips: And why is that? Dr. Arnim Zola: Because he can do it! Col. Chester Phillips: What's his target? Dr. Arnim Zola: His target is everywhere." Platoon (1986) -- "9/10" A cast that already were or would become all-stars includes a lot of familiar faces -- John C. McGinley (you may know him as Dr. Cox from Scrubs) plays a smaller role, as do Forest Whitaker, Keith David and Johnny Depp. Charlie Sheen plays a soldier newly arrived to Vietnam. His platoon has divided its allegiance between Willem Dafoe -- the more principled one -- and Tom Berenger -- the amoral killing machine. The main story is ostensibly based on Oliver Stone's own experiences during his two tours of duty, although it seems as if more than a little of My Lai found its way into it -- the scene in the village was quite horrifying (though Kubrick kind of topped it in his own film about Vietnam Apocalypse Now). It's a good movie with strong characters, tense scenes and a gritty realism throughout. The only women in it were extremely incidental Vietcong from the villages. Saw it in German. Midnight Express (1978) -- "6/10" A movie loosely based on the biographical novel of the same name by Billy Hayes. He was caught smuggling hashish out of Turkey and sentenced to Sağmalcılar prison. The Turks are depicted throughout as either thieves, corrupt, homosexual, brutal, slovenly, unclean or a horrific combination of all of these. The warden in particular is portrayed as an Ottoman juggernaut, implacable and evil. Even Hayes -- who actually served time in that prison -- went on record saying that the depiction was over-the-top and wildly inaccurate. [2] The best scene happens to be one of the purely imagined ones -- when Billy takes out Rifki, another prisoner who'd ratted out his best friend. The film has its moments -- the scenes in the insane asylum are well done. Overall, it's a bit long but worth holding out for the last 1/3 in which Hayes seems to be channeling Brad Pitt from the 12 Monkeys. The version I watched had no subtitles for any of the Turkish parts; it's uncertain whether that was intended in order to give you the impression of what it was like for Hayes (although he seems by the end of the film to have picked up at least some of the local lingo). John Carter (2012) -- "8/10" This movies is based on a novel written in the early 1900s by Edgar Rice Burroughs. It was quite faithful to the atmosphere of the stories. It was interesting to watch while reading Mark Twain's Innocents Abroad, in which he tells of his world travels, including a trip through what we now call the Middle East. His vivid depictions of the desert tribes, cities and climes resonate strongly with those depicted in this movie. John Carter is a former soldier transported to Mars and caught up in ancient struggles between warring tribes of different races. Spoiler alert: the battle scene against the Tharks which is interleaved with his memories of finding his family slaughtered was very well done. In it, he was accompanied by his Martian bulldog, who is adorable. The walking city of Zodanga is also nicely rendered, with the millipede-like legs of the city in the background of many scenes. And the ending was a nice surprise: the standard swashbuckling had a coda of bleak despair followed by clever revenge. The Pruitt-Igoe Myth (2011) -- "8/10" A documentary about the famous Pruitt-Igoe housing project in St. Louis. Includes interviews with many former residents and documents from the beginning to the end of the projects, when they were torn down. The socio-economic realities are examined in detail as well as the outright racism of local authorities and social programs. A documentary with a very narrow focus, but nevertheless well-done. Paul (2011) -- "7/10" Seth Rogen finally found a role where his hipster douchebag look can't annoy me [3]: he plays the voice of Paul, a hard-drinking, hard-smoking, cool, hipster-douchebag of an alien. He meets up with Simon Pegg and Nick Frost -- teamed up, once again -- this time playing English nerds touring the conspiracy hot-spots of the U.S. after visiting ComicCon. Hijinks ensue and a good time is had by all. The story is kind of E.T. meets the X Files with Jason Bateman playing the smoking-man role very well. Kristen Wiig is also good as the lady swept up in their mad road-trip and Jane Lynch has a good bit part. A fun, funny movie. Recommended. The African Queen (1951) -- "6/10" Humphrey Bogart and Katherine Hepburn take a ride on the African Queen, a small riverboat in 1914 Africa. They get to know each other as they make their way along untraveled byways and untamed rivers to play their part in the war against the Germans. Katherine Hepburn starts off the film as a repressed sister of a pastor (shades of The Poisonwood Bible) who commandeers Mr. Allnut's boat -- she bogart's it, if you will. But not before she does unconscionable things to Mr. Allnut's gin and self-righteously accuses him of being a coward and a liar. Truly pleasant company, this bible-thumper. And then, once he's capitulated in every way, they are ready to fall in love. They make their way further and further down the river, all acted out in a two-person play in the classic style. Katherine Hepburn has the perfect voice for such a bossy lady. The music is, for a modern ear, sometimes quite martial and incongruously jaunty for some situations -- almost more like the music from old silent movies, like Nosferatu. I like to think of this movie as if Rosie doesn't even exist -- only in poor, old Allnut's fevered mind, slowly being eaten by a combination of the heat, the Tse-tse fly, malaria, dehydration and perhaps syphilis. If you watch it like that, it all makes sense. And, if you look closely, you'll see that she never casts a shadow. Not once. The Germans are, of course, portrayed as utterly amoral arseholes. Here's the text of the kangaroo court -- untranslated in the film and unavailable in the subtitles, but transcribed and translated by yours truly. Prosecutor: Das ist der gesamte Beweisematerial der Anklage (That's all the evidence from the prosecution) Judge: Fahren sie fort mit der Verteidigung (The defense may commence) Defense: Jawohl. Das Beweisematerial der Anklage war ungenügend. Wir haben nichts als Indizienbeweise gehört. Die Verteidigung kann hier kaum etwas hinzufügen. (Yessir. The evidence presented by the prosecution was insufficient. We heard nothing but circumstantial evidence. The defense has nothing to add.) Judge: The court sentences you to death by hanging. The last line elicited a guffaw in its incongruity with the German lines delivered just before. Culture in Decline -- Episodes 1-3 (2012) -- "8/10" A series of videos written and hosted by Peter Joseph with a history/economics/sociology/philosophy/ecology lesson. The videos are very interesting and relatively well-made in the documentary style. They're all available on YouTube. The Dictator (2012) -- "6/10" Sasha Baron Cohen is very good in a surprisingly smart script about a North African dictator who comes to America for a conference. The soundtrack is quite good, composed of many American pop covers in what I'm assuming is Arabic. There weren't any real surprises and some of the bits fell flat for me, but it was way better than Borat: it had no hairy, naked man-wrestling. In Time (2011) -- "8/10" The film has a cool concept in which people's lives are valued in only time rather than mostly money. It's set in the future where everyone stops aging at 25 and every year beyond your 26th birthday must be paid for with time that you earn. Your account is shown on your arm; when the counter drops to zero, you die. It's a great excuse to people the film with hot 25-year-olds and to be able to show the plight of the poor without actually showing the poor as they really appear. Pay-day lenders, uncaring people on the bus for a woman who doesn't have enough time, the gated communities that cost so much to get into, the perpetuation of the system by everyone thinking that they'll be one of the rich, all are present. It's a relatively crude analogy to money but pretty well-done. Transactions of time are made by bringing the watches into proximity with one another. All of the high-time people have guards and are exceedingly careful with their bodies so as not to be killed or die accidentally. The time-rich are afraid to live and pity themselves for it, trying to live forever. Timberlake is typically good as is Cillian Murphy as the Timekeeper. Amanda Seyfried was also decent, but damn is she pushing the boundary of weight-loss: her knees and shins were practically skeletal in the back of the hearse. And now, because it's a sci-fi movie, on to the silly plot holes. There seems to be little to no security on your time account. It's unclear how a transaction is authorized but the police lifted a millennium as pretty as you please in just seconds. In a world where everyone has a time clock implanted in their arm, no one has a cell phone or any other smart bio-hardware? They have to use a pay phone? Those still exist? It's interesting as well that all classes of society wear their wealth on their sleeve, although the rich store some of their wealth in banks. But why are there no safeguards on the time-clocks at all? It's as if you they've never heard of pin codes. In that sense, the "fights" are utterly asinine. That said, the conclusion to Will's fight was pretty bad-ass. And why do the gangsters brandish guns when they can kill by stealing time? And "Is it it stealing if it's already stolen?" is just the sort of superficial and quasi-philosophical horseshit I expect to hear dribbled from the mouth of a partially educated millenial. How are babies born with time-clocks? And how the hell is Seyfried still wearing those shoes as a fugitive? She positively sprints in those high-heels. And why is the newsest guy on the time-force put in charge after the chief Timekeeper dies? I like that the movie stayed relatively low-budget, investing in the story rather than the effects. So everyone is still driving cars and using normal guns; the low-tech approach is kind of nice. The architecture was also quite nice, with a very cool building in LA standing in for the Weis headquarters. Killer at Large (2008) -- "9/10" A documentary about he obesity epidemic in America. Eat less, exercise more, eat better: those are not enough. The movie makes the point that a major contributor to obesity is fear and stress, overwork and lack of sleep -- that obesity is as much an emotional and psychological and addiction problem as a physical one. There are interviews with thinner people who used to be fat, relating their stories. One lady, when she was younger, would buy a ridiculously huge breakfast at McDonalds and another at Burger King every morning and then do it again at lunch. She skipped school to eat and avoid ridicule for four months and her parents were none the wiser. The question I have is: where on Earth did she get the money for all of that food? She had no job, so her parent must have provided her with $20 a day just to buy fast food. But they claim not to have known a thing about it. A driver for this problem is that kids have too much money available -- unless taking away that money would lead them to a life of crime just to buy those McFlurries and Hash Browns. It's a decent story, culminating in an indictment of the oil, corn and pharmaceutical industries for distorting American society for profit: corn pulls in subsidies, grown with oil-based fertilizers and harvested by huge machines and then the pharma companies swoop in to assuage the psychological damage created by it all and loop the cycle back around. Michael Pollan features heavily, as you might expect. Ralph Nader also makes a couple of welcome appearances. Another major contributor to obesity in kids is that much of their world is online: many leave the house only to go to school and all other interaction is through cell phones or chat or X-Boxes. One teacher said that "40-50% of his first-year students run as if they've never run before, had never developed the skill of running". There is an awesome militant lunch lady (so designated in her caption) who's very, very eloquent. I transcribed part of her interview below: "The USDA is allocating $7 billion a year to feed 30 million children a day. What it comes down to, on a plate, is the government gives schools $2.42 for lunch. And, of that, 2/3, in most schools, goes to overhead and payroll. That means there's less than 80¢, absolutely less than a dollar, to feed a child lunch. Now, in the state of California alone, the prison system costs us $9 billion. We're spending more on keeping people in jail in California than we are on feeding every child in America lunch for a year. What are we thinking? It isn't that we can't afford it; it isn't that we can't do it; it's that we are choosing, in America, to prioritize other things besides our children's health." With only 80¢ per day for "real" food, kids spend several times that on sodas and junk food from vending machines. A contributing factor is that schools cost money to run, their budgets are restricted every year and capitalizing on their students' addictions is an easy way of filling the budget gap. Another win for capitalism, really. When Schwarzenegger banned vending machines in schools in California, there was backlash (of course), but some of it came from parents, who helped their sweeties get their sweeties, despite the ban. The brainwashing of Madison Avenue strikes deep and has already captured several generations. Douglas Rushkopf and Dr. Susan Linn were very good. Here's Rushkopf, describing how marketing to children works: "You wanna get the child alone, so you can market to him without the filter and the governance of someone who actually cares about the child as something other than discretionary income. It's the same strategy that a lion will use or a pack of wolves will use against Bambi: you know, you isolate the baby child from the parent that can protect it in order to get it. It's pure old-fashioned hunting." And here's Linn describing the onslaught with which even the most balanced parent have to contend: "So when the food industry or the marketing industry says 'parents should just say no', I think they're being disingenuous because, you know, meanwhile, people like me are telling parents that they should pick their battles, but which commercially created battle should parents pick? Should they pick the food battle? Or should the pick the precocious, irresponsible sexuality battle? If you have an eight-year--old girl who's dressing like a hooker, my guess is that that's the battle you're going to pick." Rushkopf again: "When you look at something as simple to understand as America obesity, what's you're seeing is the result of two or three generations of programming designed to make us consume more." The assault is so wide-ranging that people really have no chance of winning: they're like Cambodians trying to avoid Kissinger's carpet-bombing. Some of the statistics are gob-smacking: "when offered fast food for lunch, the average calories consumed by a teenager was 1652Kc." That's more than the maintenance level of calories for the entire day -- for just one meal -- for people who don't don't participate in any or very little activity. Another is that, "[i]n 2006, the [CDC] reported that obesity kills more than 112,000 Americans a year", and many of those are presumably lives of long, slow decline and suffering caused by obesity-related illnesses. You die of obesity, but you never really get to live -- you're depressed, sluggish, inactive -- because of it as well. One junk-food and soda vendor's arguments were extremely persuasive: keep machines in the schools so that the schools profit instead of the local Quickie-Mart, bottles with screwtops are better than the open drinks available there -- no messes in carpeted schools (who carpets a school?) -- and kids driving to the Quickie-Mart are at risk of car accidents. The vendor argued that the kids were addicted already and would move heaven and Earth to get that cookie, so you might as well keep it in the building. Oh the seductive, dulcet tones put forth by a forked tongue. When you see the interconnection between all of the different things that are wrong with America, it's hard not to think that it's a country peopled by and run by the utterly stupid who are constantly amazed by the wholly foreseeable deleterious effects of their actions. The Campaign (2012) -- "7/10" Will Ferrell and Zack Galifianakis shine as opponents in the Congressional campaign for the 14st district of North Carolina. Ferrell is Cam Brady, the incumbent, an amalgam of the overpowering stupidity and tone-deafness of George Bush and the raw sexual charisma and drive of a younger Bill Clinton. Galifianakis is local oddball Marty Huggins, whose powerful Daddy and big sponsors -- the Motch Brothers -- and amazingly effective campaign director (Dylan McDermott, who plays well) try to catapult him into office. Brady does everything he can to lose the election -- something that's eminently hard to do for an incumbent. A DUI stop that goes even more spectacularly wrong than you'd think possible pushes him on his way, though. As McDermott works his magic on Huggins, Huggins transforms into a savage candidate and, from this nadir, Cam Brady starts to look like the reasonable one. In all of the twists and turns of the campaign (including the final "miraculous" switch of many votes), it's just as savage -- and funny -- an indictment of American politics and Citizens United as Trading Places was of American finance. Maybe because John Lithgow and Dan Aykroyd as the Motch brothers remind me of Don Ameche and Ralph Bellamy as the Duke brothers. I'm not sure whose unfortunate decision it was to use Green Day for the credits music. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] It turns out that Oliver Stone wrote that screenplay, though it's unclear how much control he had over the plot and adaptation. [1] I had yet to watch his sterling performance as Michaels in Superbad when I wrote this. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2722 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2722 Sun, 02 Dec 2012 00:10:36 +0100 -- "6/10" 2. "Crank: High Voltage (2009)" <#Crank-High> -- "5/10" 3. "Hudson Hawk (1991)" <#Hudson> -- "6/10" 4. "Franklyn (2008)" <#Franklyn> -- "6/10" 5. "From Dusk Till Dawn (1996)" <#From-Dusk> -- "7/10" 6. "Zack and Miri Make a Porno (2008)" <#Zack> -- "5/10" 7. "Casa de mi Padre (2012)" <#Casa> -- "5/10" 8. "Green Lantern (2011)" <#Green> -- "5/10" 9. "I Am Comic (2010)" <#I-Am-Comic> -- "6/10" 10. "Aliens (1986)" <#Aliens> -- "8/10" 11. "2081 (2009)" <#2081> -- "7/10" 12. "Oliver Stone's Untold History of the United States E01 (2012)" <#Oliver> -- "10/10" 13. "Prometheus (2012)" <#Prometheus> -- "7/10" 14. "Tower Heist (2011)" <#Tower> -- "7/10" 15. "Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (1922)" <#Nosferatu> -- "6/10" Crank (2006) -- "6/10" Grand Theft Auto started out by copying action movies and now the circle is complete as movies like Crank are copying the cinematic style of GTA. It does a great job of raising adrenalin levels. About halfway through the movie, he's even dressed as Nico from GTAIV (when he visits his girlfriend). As a concept, it's quite a bit of fun, although it drags a bit toward the end. In that way, it emulates the feeling of having stale adrenalin in your veins, so that's good I guess? Can't really recommend it, but I like Jason Statham and he was decent -- although he was more of a pistol-thug than a hand-to-hand-combat thug in this one. Crank: High Voltage (2009) -- "5/10" This one starts off where the first one ended, and gets even crazier. It doesn't even pretend to be realistic and is much the better for it. Statham does a lot more fighting in this one (he hardly did any in the first -- it was all gunplay). As with the first movie, the two directors are clearly fans of the Guy-Ritchie school of directing. This sequel is way off the rails -- the Thai hooker whose life he saves is hilarious; her imperviousness to getting hit by a car fits in with the style of the film seamlessly. And, aiming to please, the directors responded to the fan outcry that there weren't enough crazy strippers in the first one -- problem solved in the second one. They also solved the problem of not enough porn stars. The public sex scene from the first film is repeated but is even more over-the-top -- and Amy Smart was back for more, despite my absolute conviction that she would have bailed after the first movie. Statham's Chinese nemesis is annoying enough -- especially his braying laugh -- to ruin every scene he's in. Predictably and, as with the first one, this film runs out of legs long before it's over, so it's hard to recommend, despite my enthusiastic-sounding review. Hudson Hawk (1991) -- "6/10" I saw this as a kid and remembered much more singing, but there was only Swinging on a Star (at the beginning) and Side by Side (near the end). Andie McDowell was charming as ever and Bruce Willis was his usual self. It was pretty absurd, but passed the time while doing something else. Saw it in German. Franklyn (2008) -- "6/10" A relatively low-key and pseudo sci-fi film about the overlap of modern-day London with Meanwhile City, a more dystopic city from what appears to be another worldline. Ryan Phillipe was better than expected and Eva Green was riveting. Whether the overlap exists or whether it is all in the minds of several of the characters was not clear to me. It was a well-shot film and the story was well-told, but it wasn't the best of stories, in my humble opinion. From Dusk Till Dawn (1996) -- "7/10" A Quentin Tarantino flick with all of the usual suspects: Harvey Keitel, Juliette Lewis (who looks about 15) and Danny Trejo. It stars George Clooney and Quentin Tarantino as brothers on the run from the law. Clooney -- playing Seth Gecko -- is a criminal but not a monster; Tarantino -- playing Richie Gecko -- is a monster. A typically violent, dialogue-heavy, convoluted story of many different characters that evolves in utterly unpredictable ways. I can't recall another Clooney movie in which he plays a really bad guy, but he does it well. The Gecko brothers rope Keitel and his kids into smuggling them into Mexico, where they end up at a caricature of a Mexican strip-club/bordello, fronted by Cheech Marin and starring Selma Hayek dancing mostly nude with an albino boa python. Despite Hayek's admittedly amazing efforts to distract them, the Gecko brothers quickly continue their trail of violence on the other side of the border. And then? The film takes a 90-degree turn into a completely different genre: horror. The second act is taken up with an epic battle with a lot of old-school special effects. Want a hint? Listent to Seth Gecko's sage advice: "Psychos do not explode when sunlight hits them. I don't care how crazy they are." Zack and Miri Make a Porno (2008) -- "5/10" The oafish Seth Rogen and the charming Elizabeth Banks team up as destitute roommates to whom nothing remarkable happens. They are not in any way special -- other than Banks's beauty [1] and Rogen's above-average cutting remarks -- and work in a coffee shop. They live paycheck-to-paycheck and struggle to pay their utility bills. They are their target demographic. They hit upon the idea of making a porno to finance a return to a status quo that they so recently left -- that is, to pay some bills to turn the water, heat and electricity back on. Their dreams are no bigger than this, which is a nice comment on the times, no? At any rate -- with the help of a friend, who's moderately better-off -- they scratch together enough money to finance the film, collect a cast and crew and start shooting the film. Hijinks and hilarity ensue and everything works out in the end. It's a Kevin Smith film, so it's not shy about language -- I saw it in German, but there were some seriously juicy insults and creative cursing. It's hard to recommend because the story arc was old-friends-become-lovers (ho-hum) but at least it was made for grown-ups. Casa de mi Padre (2012) -- "5/10" It's a Will Ferrell vehicle, with a twist: the entire movie is in Spanish (or some facsimile thereof). It's a send-up of Mexican/Spanish-language cowboy movies. But it's still Will Ferrell playing a mostly stupid guy who occasionally leverages his ignorance of common tact to say something insightful. At one point, he and his lady friend are riding horses and he compliments her on her riding; they are both, however, riding fake horses. It's kind of like that throughout. The pacing and dialogue reminded me of Top Secret. It's nothing remarkable and it's definitely not even in the top ten of his films. So...not recommended. Green Lantern (2011) -- "5/10" Ryan Reynolds's wit is only occasionally on display in this movie, which is a shame. He's naturally funnier than Robert Downey Jr. and thus could have been another Tony Stark/Iron Man and launched a franchise. This was not to be. The first half of the film deals with back-story and character introduction, which is fine if a little slow. Once the special effects kick in, the pace picks up but the whole star-spanning enemy who cannot be stopped by the universe's best defenders but can be stopped by a hero new to his powers but who possesses the unique quality of being human ... yech, such dreck. The movie wasn't as bad as I'd heard but it was certainly nothing to write home about -- it exceeded my expectations but that was a pretty low bar. There is quite clearly a setup for a sequel, but hopefully it will never come and Reynolds can concentrate on playing Deadpool in many, many films because at least that guy's supposed to be funny. Not recommended. I Am Comic (2010) -- "6/10" A documentary about stand-up comedy and comedians. Includes many interviews and bits from some of the industry's best as well as behind-the-scenes looks at the unglamorous life of a road-comic. Despite the unrewarding nature of the profession -- at least until big specials (Louis C.K.) or TV shows (Tim Allen) change things -- many performers do it for the love of the game: for the opportunity to stand up in front of people and make them laugh, to be able to relate their insights and cleverness to others. They do it for different reasons and in different ways, although the most successful ones have a method to their madness. They almost all emphasize that almost nothing they do is off-the-cuff, despite appearances. They prepare hard and practice hard to get as funny as they are. Recommended if you like stand-up comedy. Aliens (1986) -- "8/10" The classic sequel by James Cameron includes a troop of Space Marines that get picked off one by one by two by two. The most famous lines are by a grunt named Hudson, who "whines out his lines" as fear takes over: * "Hey, maybe you haven't been keeping up on current events, but we just got our asses kicked, pal!" * "That's it man, game over man, game over!" * "Oh dear Lord Jesus, this ain't happening man. This can't be happening man! This isn't happening!" * "Seventeen days? Hey man, I don't wanna rain on your parade, but we're not gonna last seventeen hours!" * "We're all gonna die man.", "We're fucked!", "We're doomed here!"...and so on. It was interesting to contrast this one to Prometheus (reviewed below). At least in this movie, the scope and reach are smaller and the characters behave as expected for marines and for the situation. They have a clear mission and move toward it rather than being just as surprised as the audience by what's happening. A fun action flick. 2081 (2009) -- "7/10" A short film (available, for now, on "YouTube" ) based on a short story by Kurt Vonnegutt called Harrison Bergeron. The story is set in the dystopia of the U.S. in 2081 where everyone has been made equal through application of the Lowest Common Denominator (LCD) principle: smart people are kept constantly distracted, athletic people are hampered by weights and shackles, beautiful people wear masks, etc. Echoes of 1984 although more hopeful. Oliver Stone's Untold History of the United States E01 (2012) -- "10/10" The first in a ten-part series on ShowTime written, produced, directed and narrated by Oliver Stone (available, for now, on "YouTube" ). The show obviously emphasizes American History but the viewpoint is not as fiercely pro-American as the more mainstream and jingoistic history commonly taught in American civics courses. There is much more background on decisions made by the United States, with more context as to the machinations undertaken by leaders of that time. It's a truer history, which affords more explanation than the hagiographies to which Americans are accustomed. The role of the Soviets in WWII is emphasized and put in perspective vis à vis the oft-lauded roles of the British and Americans. Stone defends his show against the inevitable onslaught of the purported American intellectual elite -- which sees its job as defending the official history in which America is the shining city on the hill -- by pointing to the academic literature. What his show depicts is quite mainstream among those that choose to study history rather than invent it. It was very interesting and informative and I'm looking forward to the rest of the season. Prometheus (2012) -- "7/10" I'd been wanting to see this film for a while -- the trailer was stunning and enticing and promised an honest-to-goodness science-fiction film by one of the classic directors in the genre. The sets, sounds and special effects are wonderful, fitting for a Ridley Scott film. Everything was believable and there was nothing that jumped out as obviously made with special effects. The technology, the ship, the worlds, the alien artifacts: all melded together seamlessly, all was lived-in and believable. Most of the cast was good and the basic story arc was interesting and relatively solid. There were, however, plot holes large enough to pull me out of the immersive experience into which the environment had lulled me. After watching the movie, I watched the "Review: Prometheus" (video -- 24:07) -- those guys generally offer interesting reviews of action/sci-fi genre films -- and read the list of plot holes found in "Prometheus" . These cover a few of the specific plot holes, but those didn't bother me so much -- it was more the overall treatment of science and scientists in the film that wasn't believable at all. Spoiler alerts from here on out. As a science-fiction film -- it wasn't horror, it wasn't action -- it was insulting. The crew was full of fevered egos and slapdash scientists who weren't worthy of the name. There was a biologist that's scared of investigating alien lifeforms -- until he meets one that's obviously dangerous and then he finds his courage/stupidity -- to other investigators who couldn't care less about evidence because they believe. There's a geologist who wants to flee back to the ship instead of investigating the totally new planet on which he's landed. The crew isn't briefed on the mission until they get to the planet -- none of them have any idea why they're there -- they have no plans, no equipment, no experimental equipment -- except for little ATVs and military hardware -- almost nothing. The only thing they had was mapping probes, which were very cool -- but only the geologist even knew about them! No one else had a clue -- they just lurched headlong into an utterly unknown situation with no consideration or patience or planning. And then, with all of these doodads and constant communication, two of them get lost! For the whole night! The same ship crew that was looking at an awesome 3D map of the whole complex are, minutes later, laughing at the two fools who will have to spend the night in a hostile alien landscape. I don't sweat the small stuff but these guys just flew to another star and not one of them is smart enough to use the god-damned 3D map that's on the table right behind them to help out their crew-members. Maybe there's an indictment-of-human-stupidity that I'm missing here. Maybe, ironically, I'm too dull to see it. This film could have treated the science better, letting the story evolve over days or weeks or months -- it would have added suspense -- but instead, the entire landing/discovery/resolution occurs literally within 24 hours. After two years in cryo-sleep, everything has to be resolved in a day (which, by the way, is the exact same length on the other planet as on Earth -- lucky coincidence that). And two years? Even at the speed of light, there is nothing habitable within reach -- the second-closest star to Earth is Proxima Centauri, which is just over 4 light years away. Why even mention numbers when they're so blatantly wrong? [2] Why not just say that the ship's crew were in cryo-sleep for 200 years? How awesome would that have been? It would have had much more of a 2001 vibe to it, letting the weight of the years and the ineffable size of space add gravitas to the story. Instead, everything is hyper-fast and the two main "scientists" are utter jackasses. The guy is an impatient little whiner with no plan and no idea what he's doing. The female Dr. Snow is no better. They don't even pretend to any actual knowledge -- it's unknown what their field even is or why they're so qualified to lead this expedition -- because they found a cave painting? The entire crew's casual disregard for contamination is astounding. Their desire to have everything and have it now is, frankly, unbelievable. These are not scientists in any sense of the word. They're not even real people: their only motivation seems to be to die as unpleasantly as possible. The story and dialogue let this otherwise beautifully rendered sci-fi film down quite badly. Noomi Rapace as Dr. Snow has the hardest uphill battle -- she's fighting the worst dialogue and plot points with her character. What's up with the "I can't create life" line that comes -- again, literally -- out of left field? Seriously? And, even after horrible things have happened, they still don't work clean, they still take off their helmets, they still just fly headlong into the unknown with absolutely no information. This film could have easily been so much smarter and still hit the major plot points. Why does the android seem to know so much? Because he studied for two years? What did he study? What extra information could he have had that the others didn't have access to? Is this film an indictment of scientific expeditions funded by private enterprise? Charlize Theron as Vickers was quite good and had the most level-headed and pragmatic approach appropriate to the situation. When she tried to keep the ship quarantined, it was the right thing to do, not an evil thing to do. Michael Fassbender is also very good as the android -- although he looks more like Jeremy Irons in Die Hard with a Vengeance than Peter O'Toole in Lawrence of Arabia. Poor Noomi Rapace, saddled with playing Dr. Snow, the faith-laden, groundlessly superior and utterly annoying doctor -- the best thing about her character was her legs and overall fitness level in the feted surgery scene. Thank goodness that she was one of the only two characters to survive. The human cast of characters was the same military crew that landed with Aliens but they were written as scientists instead, which was jarring. The overall look of the film would have been much better served by a brainier, more stately script. There were cool parts of the script, such as the utterly militaristic and hateful attitude of our creators; that was a neat idea, relatively well-executed. Why do they fight hand-to-hand, like Klingons? I have no idea, but I didn't care; the creator going toe-to-toe with the giant octopus -- and losing and getting his face raped -- was a great scene. The big ideas were good and the visuals were more than good enough to paper over the plot holes that would occur to you after the movie, but there were far too many nonsensical characterizations and distracting decisions to ignore. [3] I'd heard that it was deep and could be confusing and reward those who paid attention. That was not the case, there was little to no mystery in the end. [4] Still, I recommend it for fans of the genre -- see what you can get out of it. I strongly recommend 1080p -- the movie is flat-out gorgeous. Tower Heist (2011) -- "7/10" A classic heist movie with a strong cast: Téa Leoni, Ben Stiller, Eddie Murphy, Casey Affleck, Michael Peña and Matthew Broderick, Gabourey Sidibe (you might know her from Precious), Judd Hirsch and Alan Alda. Alda is a rich scumbag Wall-Street swindler (think Bernie Madoff); most of the others work at the apartment building where he lives. Except for Leoni, who is good as an FBI officer investigating Alda and Murphy, who returns to his comfort zone playing an actually criminal verison of Axel F ("Slide") and Matthew Broderick as a slightly befuddled broker who lost everything in the crash. The employees lost their pension when Alda's investments went tits-up and they want revenge -- or at least their money back. So they decide to rob him and it turns out to be a fun and relatively clever heist film. The movie clearly comes as a reaction to the rage resulting from the crash of 2008 and acts as a revenge fantasy in which the good guys win and the gargantuan white-collar criminals lose. So: totally unrealistic, but nonetheless fun. Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (1922) -- "6/10" A German silent film of the classic Dracula that's quite frankly showing its age (available on "YouTube" ). Jonathan Harker is an overacting, goofy little fool. I know that it's the silent era and overacting was needed to sell the film without dialogue, but the actor playing Harker really has a simpleton's look on his face for much of the film. His wife, too, looks constantly surprised or extremely high. And Max Schreck also mugs at the camera (he's surprised!) but his languid motions and his long claws -- those creepy claws! -- are more believable and eerie than those of many of the others. That he can walk around in broad daylight with those huge, pointy ears and a coffin? Less so. On the other hand, Renfield's insanity is portrayed quite well, making his oncoming vampirism appear more like a disease. The countryside scenes and the castle of Dracula are very convincingly creepy and the old doors and rickety stairways lend a realism that is somehow very vivid despite the quality of the print. Even the lack of dialogue lends portent to figures that can only point and glare in their stage makeup rather than talk and spoil the mood. Music plays a huge role as with any film, although some of it was unnecessarily jarring to my ears. There are inconsistencies as when Harker is reprimanded for showing up at almost midnight when it's clear as day outside. What comes across nicely, as with any depiction of the good old days, is how much time people took to do things: there's this feeling of time moving more slowly, of people taking whole days to do things for which we allot only an hour or two (e.g. Harker's business trip). Hard to recommend to anyone but an old film buff. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] FYI: no Eilzabeth Banks skin is shown in the movie, despite the provocative nature of the title. Perhaps if Cronenberg or Von Trier had directed... [1] The ignorance of science seemed almost deliberate. Perhaps they just assume that 99% of the world doesn't know and doesn't care. But then this isn't a hard sci-fi film -- and there are plenty of films that work hard to get the minutiae right, films that hold up to scrutiny and yield treasures over years of scrubbing back and forth over the videos. It's hard to believe that this film didn't have anyone fact-checking on this film, but Charlize Theron's character says at one point that they're "two billion miles from Earth". We're still using miles in the future? Really? And two billion of those archaic units is just past Uranus, still well within the solar system. Why even bother spouting numbers if you can't get them right? Is this a jab at how women aren't good with numbers? Or a way of proving that she wasn't an android? And why would they use miles anyway? Would we say that it's 150 million inches from New York to L.A.? No, we would say 1.5 x 108 inches. Or we would use more appropriate units, like ~2500 miles (yuck) or ~4000km. Instead of billions of miles, space travelers would more likely use light years or astronomical units (AUs). [1] In the words of a commenter at "Prometheus Shoulda been a Titanic Feat" by Eileen Jones : "Can anyone in Hollywood right (sic) a fucking script anymore? Every fucking thing that’s been on the goddamned screen in the last two years looks like it was put together by a focus group of retarded fucking 20 year-olds who were raised on ritalin." [1] And, yes, I understand that there were minutiae and references throughout -- the Alien at the end! The barren mother who's impregnated by an angelic David and whose child is "no ordinary child"! The references to military races and might and biological weapons! The nod to 2001 in David, a robot whose mission conflicts with that of the human crew-members! -- but it all amounted to nothing and the ideas turned in onto themselves, provoking a bit of onanistic contemplation on the part of the writer and winking out of existence. And, no, I didn't care about the bauble of faith that was so inexpertly dangled by the scriptwriters: it was so obviously pandering and manipulative, I quickly ignored it as the standard propagandistic schlock that tells people it's OK to continue to have faith no matter how much contrary evidence there is. It is true that people act in this way and that is likely an irredeemable part of the human condition, but it's not very interesting. I get all that, but I was hoping to see a film that helped me escape from the day-to-day dreck of humanity, from the near-constant re-affirmation that my sense of ennui is unjustified and that I should place my faith in a higher power, be it God or the government or the rich elite. Prometheus gets the lash because the trailer and cast and director -- and the yummy sets -- set the bar too high for the inept scriptwriter, so I was disappointed. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2686 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2686 Sat, 24 Nov 2012 17:53:19 +0100 This sequel, worse than the original, is, on top of it all, showing its age. This time, Max cynically helps a settlement try to get petrol while the forces of Humungus (the evil, Bane-like leader of the marauders) try to destroy them and steal all of their supplies. Everything is very post-apocalyptic and the final half of the film is an interminable truck chase across the Australian wastelands. Not really recommended; watch the first one instead. Beverly Hills Cop II (1987) -- "6/10" Eddie Murphy before he sold out and started making awful, awful films that cater to the infantile. He's pretty funny as Axel Foley and talks a good game. Taggart is horrible, but Judge Reinhold isn't half-bad. The plot is forgettable and there are interminable shootouts in the second half that drag the film down. The first half is better and funnier. Star Trek IV -- The Voyage Home (1986) -- "6/10" A science-fiction movie that spend a lot of time on modern-day Earth -- well, 1986 anyway -- trying to rescue humpback whales. Despite having lived through it, it's hard to even imagine an America where a successful action-movie franchise dedicates an entire sequel to a full-length Greenpeace commercial. Basically, the 23rd-century Earth had long since killed off the humpback whales, but a huge Rendevous-with-Rama-like vessel appears and threatens to destroy the Earth unless it can talk to humpbacks. So what do you do? Send the original by-now sexagenarian crew back in time in a Klingon vessel to kidnap some humpbacks to save the Earth. Easy-peasy. It wasn't terrible and it was kind of funny in places. Hot Tub Time Machine (2010) -- "6/10" Better than expected, actually. I can't imagine having spent actual money to see it in a movie theater, but it definitely had its moments. Cusack always plays the same guy, but he plays him really well. Rob Corddry is pretty damned funny and plays the psychotic asshole of the group, rounded out by Craig Robinson, whose main decent moment is when he jumps on stage and knocks out Jessie's Girl with aplomb (followed by Let's Get Retarded, a massive anachronism). Crispin Glover plays a bit part as a bellhop. It's about time-travel to the 80s, so there are the requisite jokes about walkmen and clothes and hairstyles, but also some interesting bits where the guys from the future totally forget that there was no email, no internet, ... no nothing. It's fun if you're the target market, which I am. Toy Story 3 (2010) -- "7/10" Andy's all grown up and the toys haven't been out of the toy chest for years. They're torn between being there for their owner and wanting to do that for which they were made: play or, rather, to be played with. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the movie was a lot darker than I expected and the parts with Buzz Lightyear in alternate-language mode were truly inspired and made me grin, if not laugh right out loud. Saw it in German. Demolition Man (1993) -- "8/10" Sylvester Stallone, Wesley Snipes, Sandra Bullock, Benjamin Bratt and Denis Leary in a futuristic America where sex and violence and even cursing have been eradicated. Stallone and Snipes are a cop and super-villain, respectively, woken from cryo-stasis by forces vying for control of this future city. Bullock plays a cop who's a fan of the 20th century. Stallone is constantly exhorted to "enhance his calm" while machines all around him constantly spit out fines for swearing. Both Stallone and Snipes are in their prime and the plot is amazingly good for an action film. Highly recommended. The Jerk (1979) -- "7/10" Steve Martin and Bernadette Peters in a story about Navin Johnson (Martin), a stupid young man adopted by a black family...who doesn't know he's not black. He eventually leaves home to seek his fortune, bedazzling people with his disarming ignorance along the way. There are some memorable lines -- "He hates these cans!" -- but the film is otherwise pretty dated. Sennentuntschi (2010) (ch-de) -- "7/10" A Swiss thriller telling one story of a trio of farmers (Sennen) in a mountain hut and another about a police chief investigating a crime in the valley below. The two tales are tied together by a girl. Is she called forth by the drunken rite of the farmers, performed according to legends of the Alps? Or is she something else, someone else, from somewhere more prosaic? It's kinda hard to follow at times and portrayed the Swiss mountain folk as exceedingly coarse (much as Verdingbub did). The story was quite interesting and the movie was a good deal cleverer than I expected from the trailer (it looked like a pure horror film). Today's Special (2009) -- "7/10" Aasif Mandvi wrote and starred in this film about an Indian sous-chef, originally from Queens but working in Manhattan. The story template is standard: there's a love interest that works out, he has to reconcile with his family and his roots, there's a business to save. It's well-executed and spiced up by Naseeruddin Shah as Akbar, a taxi-driver, raconteur, world-traveler, expert chef, singer, lover and indomitably positive individual. Aasif does a great job on the Daily Show and it's nice to see him making his own movie. Recommended. I Love Democracy: USA (2012) (de/fr/en) -- "6/10" A documentary about the Obama presidency as viewed from abroad. It examined the reality of his presidency versus the perception of it within the States. It was in French and English, but I saw it with German dubbing. Homeland -- Season 1 (2011) -- "6/10" If Americans paid as much attention to the news as they did to Homeland, they would be much better informed about the world. Paying attention to Homeland, however, is not a substitute. As with many police dramas, the technology on display -- and the power it grants to those wielding it -- is overstated in its efficacy. The efficacy of the CIA is overstated as well. Nuggets of truth are scattered few and far between: in the meantime, we are treated to a romp over citizens' rights with seemingly no checks on CIA power of any kind. There are some interesting bits and the main story arc is interesting, if not entirely novel (Manchurian Candidate anyone?) but the problem I have is that no one is really likable. There is no one with any honor or redeeming qualities. Saul -- played by the excellent Mandy Patinkin -- talks a good game, but he's evil with no compunction about running roughshod over the Constitution and has 100% faith in his and his partner's hunches. CIA Director Estes is no better, playing an immoral chief to a fault. Carrie swings between abrasive and annoying but shows likewise no respect for rights or rules of evidence or courts of law. Sergeant Brody? He's not horrible and is probably the most interesting and consistent of all the characters. His family? Execrable. OK, fine, the son's OK, but he's a milquetoast. The daughter is a caricature of a preternaturally bitchy teenager -- anyone sane would have long since put her out of her misery. Brody's wife? Takes up space, I guess. And a lot of the show is taken up with conversations between all of these horrible people. Spoiler alert: and towards the end, the dullard daughter all of a sudden turns into freaking Nancy Drew. Why? Just 'cause, that's why. Why does Brody have cell reception in the underground bunker? Just 'cause, that's why. Arrrgggh. Descendants (2011) -- "4/10" George Clooney stars in a movie about rich people living in Hawaii. The only problem his family has is that his wife is in a coma because she got into a boating accident while water-skiing. The kids are awful, useless creatures and, of course, the film focuses almost exclusively on them. The teenage daughter -- as in Homeland -- is a horrible, horrible person who should be drowned in the pool she refuses to clean. Why on earth do people with children want to watch movies of children treating their parents badly? Is this some sort of self-perpetuating torture? Some form of masochism? And then there's Sid, who's schlepped all over with the family? Why? Because the older daughter says so. The second half of the film is better, but still not much to write home about. The main plot point is resolved with almost no fanfare. Clooney fans will like it, but I can't recommend it; I couldn't wait for it to end. Burlesque (2010) -- "8/10" A predictable story-line does nothing to take the shine off of this fun and happy movie. Christina Aguilera is no great shakes as an actress, but holy crap can she sing. And dance. But mostly sing. And Cher's pipes aren't too bad either when she's not auto-tuning the crap out of everything. Stanley Tucci puts in a wonderful and well-written performance, as does Alan Cumming in a bit part. The movie drags its feet a bit in resolving the plot, but the musical numbers scattered throughout are fantastic. Rock of Ages (2011) -- "5/10" A movie about 80s rock and roll starring a horde of famous actors, including Russell Brand, Alec Baldwin, Tom Cruise, Paul Giamatti, Bryan Cranston, Catherine Zeta-Jones and probably more that I missed. Unfortunately, it's a musical that devotes at least half of the time to set musical numbers starring two complete unknowns who are neither funny nor interesting. Plus, they tend to sing Foreigner songs rather than any actually good music from the era. And the dialogue! Oh the spectacularly shitty dialogue! The film has its moments: Brand is kind of funny and Cruise plays well, although the initial delight at his depiction of a whacked-out rock star fades quickly as you realize that that's all he's going to do for the film. Overall, I was pretty disappointed and can't recommend it. If you want a musical, watch Burlesque. Gentlemen Broncos (2009) -- "3/10" An awful film in the "hey look at me, I'm just like Wes Anderson" genre, but with people whose quirks aren't amusing -- they're boring, if not downright horrifying. The movie's about a young man who writes the most execrable science fiction. One of his stories is stolen by a popular author, also famous for writing execrable science fiction. The movie tries to be ironic about the horrible novels -- and their film adaptations -- that sometimes attract the most ardent fans. Instead of ironic, it winds up being as awful as that which it attempts to parody. I watched it because I saw that Jemaine Clement of the Flight of the Conchords was in it. He was pretty disappointing as well. Game of Thrones: Seasons 1 & 2 (2011-2012) -- "10/10" Well-written, well-acted and engaging. Lots of swords and violence, but also a thorough back-story for dozens of characters. The myriad locations keep things interesting -- from wild, snowy wastelands to broiling deserts to castles in the dreary north and castles in the sunny south -- and some characters really stand out, happily enough (unlike Homeland). The series seems to hew to the plot of the books quite strictly, though I haven't read them (yet). [1] Peter Dinklage as Tyrion Lannister is, hands down, the best actor in these shows, but Jamie Lannister, Lord Baylish, Lord Varis are also quite fun to watch. And Bronn! How could I forget about Bronn? He's awesome, too. Has one of the best lines in the show, in season two, episode seven. And briefly, there is Jaqen H'ghar, one of the Faceless Men. I hope he comes back. The books are famous for having strong female characters -- and some are quite strong, though almost unreasonably so, with Deus Ex Machina used heavily to keep them in power and firmly planted on their world-line to their exalted destiny. The men are bastards, but so are the women, so I guess that's fair. As in Tolstoy's most famous works -- which also deal almost exclusively with royalty and nobility -- the elite are portrayed as spoiled, stupid, greedy and often inbred, often with horrendous consequences. This may sound horrible, but it's really quite fun to watch. It's more than interesting enough that I can completely forget that I am, for the most part, watching yet another long movie about the nobility. Spoiler alert: It is, for example, quite lucky for the Mother of Dragons that her captor, who seemed otherwise so transcendently intelligent, forgot that dragons breathe fire. Or the succession of happy accidents that keep Queen-Regent Circe inexplicably in power. Queen Stark also started out much better and quickly devolved into a "screw the whole world, I just want to save my sweet babies" kind of mother, which is more of a reflection on the author's attitude toward women, I think. Either women enjoy being portrayed as unprincipled creatures whose mothering instinct is over-arching (this depiction also applies to Queen-Regent Circe) or the show's depiction of women is not as refined as we have been led to believe. Also, if you're not a queen, you're a whore. Still, there is strong evidence that, though the main plotline deals with the what is called The War of the Five Kings (a misnomer, because it ignores the king North of the Wall), it could just as well be called the War of the Five Queens (I rounded the very crafty daughter of the Iron King up from a princess to a queen). Chocolate (2008) -- "8/10" Act one of the movie features Zin (female Thai muscle for a Thai mob boss) and Masashi (a Yakuza boss). They fall in love, her Thai boss forbids said love -- the Thai gang are all pretty much batshit crazy -- and Masashi returns to Japan, but not before planting a baby in Zin. Zen is born autistic. Years pass. She has crazy-good reflexes and learns martial arts from the television faster than Keanu Reeves in the Matrix. I'm not making fun of this movie. It was awesome. Especially once the fighting started. JeeJa Yanin (the actress who played Zen) is a uniquely gifted fighter, with an economy and elegance of motion that is simply breathtaking. She's a third-degree black belt in Tae-Kwan-Do but her style seems to be a combination of that mixed with other styles; she throws a lot of elbows and knees, Ji-Teks and fights right-side forward. She throws very few punches, but feints kicks like nobody's business. Recommended for fans of the form. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] I admit that this HBO series has piqued my interest for tackling the books -- at least the first one, anyway. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2665 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2665 Sat, 15 Sep 2012 10:17:45 +0200 -- "5/10" 2. "Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol (2011)" <#Mission> -- "7/10" 3. "Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011)" <#Sherlock> -- "7/10" 4. "The Planet of the Apes (2001)" <#Planet> -- "5/10" 5. "The Avengers (2012)" <#Avengers> -- "8/10" 6. "Young Adult (2011)" <#Young> -- "6/10" 7. "Intouchables (2011) (fr)" <#Intouchables> -- "8/10" 8. "Der Verdingbub (2011) (ch-de)" <#Verdingbub> -- "8/10" 9. "The Quest (1996)" <#Quest> -- "6/10" 10. "Avatar (2009)" <#Avatar> -- "8/10" 11. "The Number 23 (2007)" <#23> -- "6/10" 12. "The Big Bang Theory (TV series, 2007-2012)" <#Bang> -- "7/10" 13. "Louie (2010-2012)" <#Louie> -- "10/10" 14. "Paranormal Activity 2 (2009)" <#Paranormal> -- "3/10" 15. "The Dark Knight Rises (2012)" <#Rises> -- "7/10" 16. "Casino Royale (1967)" <#Casino> -- "8/10" 17. "In the Valley of Elah (2007)" <#Elah> -- "7/10" 18. "Pitch Black (2000)" <#Pitch> -- "7/10" 19. "Semi-Pro (2008)" <#Semi> -- "5/10" 20. "Monty Python's The Meaning of Life (1983)" <#Monty> -- "10/10" Contraband (2012) -- "5/10" Mark Wahlberg does his level-best to save this flick, but it drags on and only the last half-hour or so is anything like exciting or worth watching. The attempt to make it look like Kate Beckinsale shared any genes whatsoever with Caleb Landry Jones was a lost cause from the very start. As the screwup/plot-driver brother, Jones's face seems perfectly designed to express an utterly self-centered vacuity and "douche-bagginess". With all of his Macgyver-like cleverness, Wahlberg essentially reprised his role from Shooter, which was the only good thing about this movie. Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol (2011) -- "7/10" Tom Cruise, Jeremy Renner, Simon Pegg and Paula Patton form the MI team for this film. It was overall pretty entertaining, making good use of the cast and with a pretty strong story (as these things go). It was nice to see that the lengthy Russian-prison scene was conducted entirely in Russian, with subtitles. Patton was the weakest link and I vacillated between thinking that she ruined her scenes because she's a wooden actress -- actress is an exaggeration, she's probably officially cast as "eye-candy" although for me she doesn't even fill that role particularly well -- or because her role as a bad-ass ass-kicking womyn was written poorly. It's a shame, because it was nice to see that the team tried to include a competent woman -- but not like this. Cruise was decent, as usual -- the Burj Khalifa scene was great fun -- and Pegg and Renner were also good. Spoiler alert: what's up with the super-IQ physicist who also happens to be a Terminator-like unstoppable fighting machine capable of going toe-to-toe with the great and formidable Ethan Hunt and almost winning? Is Maggie Q from Die Hard 4 his sister? Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows (2011) -- "7/10" Since I watched this film back-to-back with MI: Ghost Protocol, I noticed that it has almost exactly the same plot: an evil super-high-IQ genius tries to provoke a world war between two great powers. Robert Downey Jr. and Jude Law are great fun. As a Guy Ritchie film, it included his trademark of interspersed slo-mo action sequences and attention to internal mechanical detail. Holmes's fighting style was an especially interesting mix of boxing and Kung Fu. Spoiler alert: the final showdown with Moriarty was really nicely done. I guess that's not much of a spoiler. Recommended. The Planet of the Apes (2001) -- "5/10" Tim Burton directed this remake of the 1960s original, starring Mark Wahlberg and Helena Bonham Carter as well as many other famous faces, all hidden under really quite convincing ape makeup. Despite the capable cast, it's overall quite cheesy and the story was only interesting near the end, where the millenia of intervening history were revealed. Otherwise, the parallels drawn between the Antebellum South and the condition of all humans under the reign of the apes was a bit heavy-handed (with phrases like "human lover" for apes that didn't perceive humans as wholly beneath them landing particularly heavily). The Avengers (2012) -- "8/10" A thoroughly enjoyable comic-book action/adventure film with an apocalyptic save-the-world theme. Some of the characters are better than others -- I'm looking at you, Robert Downey Junior, just living the role of billionaire/playboy/genius/philanthropist (his words) Tony Stark/Iron Man, but I'm also keeping an eye on Mark Ruffalo as the Incredible Hulk -- but overall the cast was good. Scarlett Johansson as the Black Widow and Jeremy Renner as Hawkeye were surprisingly good additions as "only" human Avengers. Tom Hiddleston played an over-the-top Loki (spoiler alert) who got his ass righteously kicked by the Hulk (a great scene). Lots of cool high-tech gadgets and gizmos. Some of the scenes were a bit too long without building any real suspense (Captain America pulling the lever, the interminable chase around the city by the big hell-dragons, etc.) and were more reminiscent of video-game sequences than film scenes, but they don't detract or distract too much. Recommended for anyone and highly recommended for fans of the genre. Young Adult (2011) -- "6/10" Charlize Theron stars as a just-over-thirty woman whose best years are behind her -- probably way behind her -- in high school. She escaped her dreary town to become an authoress but ended up reasonably successful, but as a ghost-writer for a young-adult book series for girls. She's an alcoholic who returns to he old hometown to try to win back her high-school beau with her still-not-waning good looks. Patton Oswalt plays a whiskey-making nerd from her class that she befriends on returning, but who is wholly against her plan of conquest -- because he knows that the guy is happily married and just had a baby. It's dark and stumbling and not very good. Intouchables (2011) (fr) -- "8/10" An entertaining movie starring François Cluzet as a newly-quadriplegic Parisian plutocrat of unknown but clearly near-infinite wealth and an African immigrant -- Omar Sy, playing the wise-cracking child of the streets -- who he hires to take care of him. Sy has no prior experience but has a lot more moxie than the other milquetoast candidates and he's a quick learner and knows how to care for the man's soul, which arguably needs more help than his body. It's a familiar tale given additional spice by being in French and being mostly based on a true story. Der Verdingbub (2011) (ch-de) -- "8/10" A Swiss-German movie about a terrible part of Switzerland's past -- and not all that far in the past -- where orphaned children -- and children of parents that could (or would) no longer care for them -- were essentially sold as chattel to work for farms around the country. The farm family in the movie is awful, with the severely alcoholic father easily outshining the unscrupulous -- nigh-amoral -- mother who's unbelievably coarse and low. Or the older son who regularly rapes the (semi-adopted/semi-hired) young girl while making the boy's life a living hell. The boy eventually runs away to seek his fortune in Argentina but that's the only highlight and it seems kind of thrown in there to give viewers some reason to hope for mankind. The Quest (1996) -- "6/10" A Jean-Claude Van Damme vehicle with a plot reminiscent of the one from Blood Sport: a young, unknown fighter must prove his mettle to the world in a no-holds-barred fight-to-the-finish with fighters in various disciplines from all over the world. Oh, and there's an evil Asian who looks like he's made of stone and has no scruples (the Chong Li from Blood Sport). Oh, and Van Damme takes a majestic beating from a fighter nearly twice his size, then comes back and finishes the guy with a few swift strokes. So, it's Blood Sport with a Rocky-style ending, with Roger Moore as a sleazy (there's a stretch) fortune-hunter. Avatar (2009) -- "8/10" The 3D blockbuster, but in 2D, on a 19-inch screen and in German. It's really not that bad, but so many of the characters are two-dimensional: Sigourney Weaver (as scientist Grace), Michelle Rodriguez (as a pilot/grunt) and Stephen Lang (as Colonel Quaritch) are just a couple of examples. The plot is pretty simplistic, the battle scenes are much too long (without adding suspense or additional pathos) but the graphics are stunning, even if some of the stuff is just too colorful and cutesy-looking for my taste. The Number 23 (2007) -- "6/10" Jim Carrey does quite a good job in a film about madness -- and Carrey's madness centers around the number 23. He sees more and more connections with the number and predestination and a malicious guiding hand everywhere. His paranoia spreads to his family, who try to help him in his pursuit of his pursuers, only to find out that he is somehow the cause of his own troubles, having forgotten that he'd written the book that he's using as a guide to find out what's going on and why it seems that, the more he finds out, the more he thinks he may have killed someone. The film is a bit surreal and may have been better treated in David Lynch's hands than in Joel Schumacher's. The Big Bang Theory (TV series, 2007-2012) -- "7/10" An all-around addictive show about a quartet of scientists -- three physicists and one engineer -- and their adventures. The most captivating is Sheldon, the utterly OCD and most socially maladapt of them. Penny is a breath of fresh air and her role is handled quite well in juxtaposition to the others. Louie (2010-2012) -- "10/10" Louie C.K. stars as himself in a series on FX. The show is about half stand-up comedy and half bizarre situations in Louie's purported real life. He's a funny, philosophical guy -- if you can ignore the superficial dirtiness of some of his humor, he makes excellent points about our society and people, in general. I loved almost every uncomfortable and deeply funny minute of it -- enjoying the philosophical twists and hypothetical situations that seem based, as so much of his material is, on brief and fully formed flashes of insight that Louie turns into sketches (e.g. the date with the uptight PTA mom who wants to be spanked? The violinist in a tux in a subway playing achingly beautiful music while a homeless man disrobes and bathes with a liter bottle of water behind him? The long subway ride in silence while fantasy after fantasy of minor heroism is played out? Hard to pick a favorite.) Paranormal Activity 2 (2009) -- "3/10" A so-so film telling the back-story of the first film. It's basically like watching a reality show without a lot of the fighting. The people aren't particularly intriguing and the plot takes a long time to get going. The first half is filled with interminable security-camera footage that doesn't really move the story along at all. Neither does it really build suspense. Hard to recommend. The Dark Knight Rises (2012) -- "7/10" A good finale to the trilogy of films about the Batman by Christopher Nolan. The new nemesis Bane is decent -- if a bit hard to understand -- but can't hold a candle to the unbridled mayhem of Ledger's Joker. Bane's philosophy is horribly muddled but he purports to have a method to his madness. Christian Bale is good and does the most with his role that he can, but the unnecessarily expository style makes so many parts of the film feel dumbed-down and simplistic. Show, don't tell -- or so they say. Nolan clearly didn't get the memo, as evidenced by an extremely long storytelling moment about 80% of the way through the movie -- especially when the story was narrated over film sequences that told the story perfectly adequately without any words. Perhaps it didn't test well? Spoiler alerts: It seems the original ending -- or what I take to be the original ending -- didn't test well with the audiences either, as a more suitably Hollywood one was tacked on at the end (or I assume it was at audience behest; perhaps it was the studio executives that wanted to keep their options a little more open). There were the usual handful of action-pacing oddities (his gunship can't blow up a tank but the minigun on a skeletal motorbike can? Bullets bounce off of his armor, but a knife slips effortlessly through? The river is fozen over but people walk around outside with short-sleeves, no hats and gloves, clutching metal guns? Bane's mask/medical device can be repaired by a layperson with their bare hands? Anne Hathaway and Joseph Gordon Levitt were also a lot of fun -- although the allusions to his next role were pretty heavy-handed (calling him a hothead was clever, but then, at the end of the film, they just came out and said it, fer Christ's sake). I saw interesting parallels to The Avengers in that both (almost) ended with a major hero (Batman and Iron Man, respectively) flying a nuclear incendiary device away from a population center, (nearly) sacrificing themselves in the bargain. Casino Royale (1967) -- "8/10" A spoof of James Bond movies starring David Niven in the main role with Woody Allen as his nephew, Ursala Andress as one of the Bond girls, Barbara Bouchet as Ms. Moneypenny and Peter Sellers rounding out the case as the evil Evelyn Tremble. Jacqueline Bisset, John Huston, William Holden and Orson Wellles also have smaller roles. The plot is horrid, but it was hard to look away. The film includes some utterly madcap sequences that make the end of Blazing Saddles or the Magic Christian look positively tame: there are sea lions, horses, dogs, brawling, Indians, ladies painted all gold and wacky, wacky music. In the Valley of Elah (2007) -- "7/10" Tommy Lee Jones and Susan Sarandon as a middle-aged couple in Texas seeking their missing son, recently returned from a tour in Iraq. He'd been out of control and hanging with other service members before he disappeared and many of the other soldiers they talk to seem shell-shocked and less than empathetic. Charlize Theron is a cop willing to help unravel the mystery and find out what happened. Spoiler alert: they find the son's body, mutilated and burned and suspicion slowly turns to the group of friends. But the question is: Why? The answer turns out to be: Because, um, minor scuffle and disagreement led to butchering the body and burning it to hide evidence; you know, like they learned to do with the natives in Iraq. Saw it in German. Pitch Black (2000) -- "7/10" A science-fiction film starring Vin Diesel as Riddick, a humanoid but seemingly super-powered and possibly extraterrestrial criminal who has escaped from a crashed spaceship on a lifeless planet. From that, the rest of the remaining crew tries to come to grips with the planet's strangeness -- it has three suns -- and, of course, slowly realizes that the only way that they will survive the inevitable coming darkness of the triple eclipse is to put their trust in Riddick. What's the problem with darkness? The darkness calls forth the native denizens, who consider anything that moves to be a food source. The plan is to get to the spaceship and escape with as many of the original crew intact as possible. It's entertaining enough and Vin Diesel is good (if you're a fan); amazing to say that the sequel was much, much better. Saw it in German. Semi-Pro (2008) -- "5/10" A Will Ferrell vehicle if there ever was one. Also starring Woody Harrelson and André Benjamin, it's about a basketball team in 1970s Flint, Michigan (with the always adorable Maura Tierney as Harrelson's girlfriend). The plot was pretty predictable but it's always fun to watch Harrelson and Ferrell at work. Hard to recommend, but it passed the time. Saw it in German. Monty Python's The Meaning of Life (1983) -- "10/10" An utterly brilliant, irreverent, philosophical, hilarious, silly, surreal film for fans of the form. There are lots of musical numbers -- some, like the famous Sperm Song, are huge, while others, like The Galaxy Song and The Penis Song, are shorter but lovingly rendered by Eric Idle. Gilliam's work is clearly evident in the prologue, called the Crimson Permanent Assurance Company about a firm that's run like a slave galley...until the workers take over the building, weigh anchor and sail off to take over other companies. The promised meaning of life is delivered nearly at the end: "Try and be nice to people, avoid eating fat, read a good book every now and then, get some walking in, and try and live together in peace and harmony with people of all creeds and nations." [1] And finally, the movie ends with the Galaxy Song playing over the credits, which starts with "Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving And revolving at nine hundred miles an hour", citing fact after fact about the "amazing and expanding universe" and then ends the film abruptly after the final stanza: "So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure, How amazingly unlikely is your birth, And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space, 'Cause there's bugger all down here on Earth." -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] "She goes on, of course, to say" : "And, finally, here are some completely gratuitous pictures of penises to annoy the censors and to hopefully spark some sort of controversy, which it seems is the only way these days to get the jaded, video-sated public off their fucking arses and back in the sodding cinema. Family entertainment? Bollocks. What they want is filth: people doing things to each other with chainsaws during tupperware parties, babysitters being stabbed with knitting needles by gay presidential candidates, vigilante groups strangling chickens, armed bands of theatre critics exterminating mutant goats. Where's the fun in pictures? Oh, well, there we are. Here's the theme music. Goodnight." ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2616 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2616 Sun, 06 May 2012 17:35:43 +0200 -- "7/10" 2. "The Town (2010)" <#Town> -- "9/10" 3. "Valkyrie (2008)" <#Valkyrie> -- "7/10" 4. "The Wicker Man (2006)" <#Wicker> -- "4/10" 5. "Couples Retreat (2009)" <#Couples> -- "2/10" 6. "The Queen (2006)" <#Queen> -- "3/10" 7. "The Hangover Part II (2012)" <#Hangover> -- "5/10" 8. "Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back (1980)" <#StarWars> -- "9/10" 9. "The Running Man (1987)" <#Running> -- "6/10" 10. "Equilibrium (2002)" <#Equilibrium> -- "9/10" 11. "Dorian Gray (2009)" <#Dorian> -- "6/10" 12. "Star Trek (2009)" <#StarTrek> -- "9/10" 13. "Inside Man (2006)" <#Inside> -- "9/10" 14. "Rocky 2 (1979)" <#Rocky> -- "6/10" 15. "Shrek the Third (2007)" <#Shrek> -- "5/10" 16. "Die Wannseekonferenz (1987) (de)" <#Die> -- "7/10" 17. "Logan's Run (1976)" <#Logan> -- "6/10" 18. "Ip Man (2008)" <#Ip> -- "9/10" 19. "The Muppets (2011)" <#Muppets> -- "5/10" The Adjustment Bureau (2009) -- "7/10" Matt Damon stars as a congressman from Brooklyn whose future is bright. On the eve of his first election bid, though, he stumbles and loses to a stronger opponent. The woman who inspires his offbeat concession speech disappears soon after. He spends years looking for her as he ramps up his next campaign. It turns out that neither their initial meeting nor her subsequent disappearance were determined by fate. They were determined by the Adjustment Bureau. Based on a Philip K. Dick short story (naturally), it posits a world that is steered by extrahuman beings, with the explanation left open as to whether they are angels or Tolkien's Mayar or something else. Interesting idea relatively well-executed. Damon was good though a bit more subdued than usual and Emily Blunt was a pleasant surprise. The Town (2010) -- "9/10" Ben Affleck stars in a self-written, self-directed adapted screenplay about a former NHL hopeful turned recovering Oxycontin addict turned bank robber from the precinct of Charlestown in Boston. He falls in love with a temporary hostage who has no idea who really is. Nicely shot and nicely paced and with a standout performance by Jeremy Renner as an unstable childhood friend/fellow bank robber who's never going to amount to anything. Lots of other good actors and actresses (Blake Lively and Rebecca Hall stood out) fill out a well-tuned and believable cast and a gripping story. Valkyrie (2008) -- "7/10" Tom Cruise plays Colonel von Stauffenberg, a German soldier involved in a plot to assassinate Hitler and take over Germany before Hitler could destroy both Germany and Europe. Many highly-ranked soldiers were involved -- most hoping for release from Hitler's mad plans for Germany -- and the plot almost succeeded (in the film at least -- in real life, the plot failed much sooner and was only one of 15 serious attempts on Hitler's life). A relatively well-made film with a lot of great character actors from both the U.S. and Germany (guys from the Lives of Others and Inglorious Basterds show up in various roles). The Wicker Man (2006) -- "4/10" Nicolas Cage plays a cop who follows a lead about a missing girl to a creepy island filled with religious cultists who shut themselves off from the world. Cage runs around a lot and gets crazier and crazier, popping pills (prescribed to help him deal with work-related trauma) and generally getting screwed with by all the whacked-out residents of the island. Unsurprisingly, Leelee Sobieski is there to make a bad movie even worse. The movie gets marginally better when everyone stops trying so hard to get along: the whole island takes part in a pagan ritual with strongly sacrificial overtones and Cage just starts taking women out right and left. It's a remake of what is apparently a much better version from 1973 starring Clint Eastwood. Saw it in German. Couples Retreat (2009) -- "2/10" An execrable film about eight horrible little people married to one another, each stoking the flame of their own fevered ego and so terribly pained by their nearly hopelessly incurable angst. These people all travel to an almost indescribably lush island and can only whine like children and/or rut like the basest creatures. Vince Vaughn and Jason Bateman were wasted in one interminably homophobic and/or misogynistic/misandric scene after another. Spoiler alert: a party reminds them all how much they love each other and they live happily ever after. The end. Saw it in German. The Queen (2006) -- "3/10" An altogether boring film about people that I don't care very much about in real life: the British royalty and the war criminal Tony Blair. The plot revolves around how they all handled the death and funeral of another person about whom I cared almost nothing, Princess Diana of Wales. Only watched about half of it and that only with one eye. Review is included only to remind me never, ever to try watching it again -- and perhaps to serve as a warning for others of similar mind and bent as I. The Hangover Part II (2012) -- "5/10" A darker version of the original film, this time with Stu (Ed Helms) as the husband-to-be and his brother-in-law--to-be as the lost person. Zack Gafalniakis is back as Alan but instead of being refreshingly weird he's just creepy, obnoxious and annoying in this film. Maybe it was just me. Maybe he was creepy, obnoxious and annoying in the last one, too. Bangkok is shown to be way crazier than Vegas -- though luckily, everyone who needs to speaks English. Jokes about molesting young boys abound (It's funny! Get it?) and your admiration for Stu's bride-to-be's understanding changes, by the end of the film, to sheer disbelief that she would put up with him. Spoiler alert: Stu's decision to hide his affair from her -- in which he played catcher in an unprotected anal-sex act with a Bangkok transvestite prostitute -- was reprehensible. Star Wars: Episode V - The Empire Strikes Back (1980) -- "9/10" Still as good as it ever was, including the nearly unpardonable whining by Mark Hamill, who clearly already realized at the time that everyone liked Han better (including Leia). The sets still hold up unbelievably well, besting many CGI efforts of modern-day sci-fi films. The puppet Yoda is so much better than the CGI yoda: from his crawling and snooping in Luke's stuff to his fighting with Artoo, it's all just so entertaining. The Running Man (1987) -- "6/10" A film about a dystopian near-future in which media controls the truth, an oppressive government controls the people with armored police troops and violent reality shows dominate the airwaves to keep the people entertained. More circus than bread, apparently. It was near-future in 1987 and has come to fruition for us today. Schwarzenegger is much better when he's not talking but the plot is passably interesting and we get to see Jesse Ventura strut his stuff as a retired stalker/sports announcer. Equilibrium (2002) -- "9/10" Christian Bale in a utopian/dystopian future (depends on your point-of-view) where human emotion has been almost completely suppressed in order to eliminate the danger of war. Picture the plot and society from Fahrenheit 451 with Matrix stylings. People take a daily "interval" (dose) of a drug to suppress their emotions. People who don't do so are inevitably charges with "sense crimes" and are summarily executed. The film follows the life of Bale, a first-level Grammaton Cleric, charged with enforcing the Nether, a neighborhood where those with unmanaged emotions dwell. The style of the film pays homage to the Matrix with less cable-work. The fight scenes are quite nicely choreographed. It mostly works quite well, with a few notable and jarring exceptions. Spoiler alert: some of the higher-ups are suspiciously gleeful and malevolent and given to shouting when they should be showing no emotion at all. No explanation is given (though one avails itself: the upper levels of any ruling class often don't follow the same rules establishes for the Proles). Taye Diggs, in particular, is a grinning, smug ass who's not even so powerful; you would think the officers around him would have turned him in almost immediately. Bale is much better at playing an emotionless automaton and boy does he kick ass. Best part of the flick? The final battle, in which the result is never in doubt. Bale shreds Diggs's smug ass in two seconds. A welcome relief from action films that feel they need to add tension by making the hero be pummeled nearly to death before miraculously turning the tide. Highly recommended if the above described a movie you might be interested in. Dorian Gray (2009) -- "6/10" A recent film adaptation of Oscar Wilde's novel about a young man who turns Libertine when he realizes that a portrait that he recently received as a gift has granted him a form of near-eternal youth. Good performances by the actor playing Dorian, Ben Barnes (of whom I'd never heard), and by Colin Firth, who plays his mentor. Rebecca Hall -- recently of The Town -- also starred. Star Trek (2009) -- "9/10" Watched it "last summer" and watched it again. Still a heckuva lotta fun. Inside Man (2006) -- "9/10" Watched this for the second time and picked up something that I missed the first time through (right at the end). An excellent Spike Lee film starring Denzel Washington as NYPD with too much brains and integrity for the comfort of those around him and Clive Owen as a bank robber. All of the members of the gang that robs the bank are dressed in the same painter's outfit -- and they quickly dress all of their hostages in the same garb. The clever turns don't stop there and it's a well-paced, well-shot, well-written and well-acted film. Highly recommended. Rocky 2 (1979) -- "6/10" Rocky's life has improved somewhat with his spunky loss at the end of the first film, so he lives in a nice house with his mousy little nice wife, Adrian. She doesn't want him boxing anymore because he has a brain injury that may be aggravated by further boxing. It doesn't occur to her to channel her energies into getting him to box better. Or at all. I've seen discussions online of what Rocky's boxing style is, from which school of boxing he stems. I don't think any school would claim him. He has no defense. His style seems to be to try to hurt the other guy's hands with his forehead. It's awful to watch, not because you feel bad for the suffering he's enduring, but because there are so many better fighting styles to watch. The Fighter springs to mind as a film with halfway-decent boxing in it. Stallone's writing is more refined than he generally gets credit for (as was evident in a few of the Rambo films as well): the actual content of his films is far more questioning and far less jingoistic than his more fervent supporters portray. Shrek the Third (2007) -- "5/10" More of the same with the same cast of characters. It had its moments, but the series is definitely in decline. I think that there's a fourth one as well, but it's hard to imagine where they'd go from the end of this one. If you're stuck watching something with kids, there are far worse ways to go...but don't go there unless you're in that situation. Die Wannseekonferenz (1987) (de) -- "7/10" A German film replaying the meeting minutes of a conference that took place in 1924 in a suburb of Berlin. All of the top administrative leaders of different departments in the Nazi party were there, discussing the Jewish problem in the coarsest and most inhumane possible terms. Extremely well-acted in what must have been very difficult for the mostly German actors. The level of indifference and cruelty was, at times, breathtaking. Recommended, but not for the weak. Logan's Run (1976) -- "6/10" One of the most oft-cited early science-fiction movies about a future society in which humans are recycled at the age of thirty and life is run in a semi-utopian/semi-dystopian and entirely antiseptic way by a hive-mind computer. The story is reasonably engaging, but the film hasn't really stood the test of time very well. Interesting only for historical purposes. Ip Man (2008) -- "9/10" The first of two films about the life of Bruce Lee's legendary teacher, whose life before he met Bruce was extremely interesting and exciting. He lived through the Japanese invasion of China, an event documented in this film. The fight scenes are much tighter and better than in Ip Man 2, which had a bit too much cable-work for my tastes. As in the second film, Donnie Yen is fantastic in both fighting style and general disposition. He generally "takes it easy" on his opponents because they are so clearly overmatched; the fight in which he does not "take it easy" on ten opponents is a sight to behold. Highly recommended for fans of the form. The Muppets (2011) -- "5/10" Overall a disappointment, as Jason Segel's script infuses his penchant for maudlin sappiness into every nook and cranny of the film. As if that weren't bad enough, he imbues every other scene with his insufferable simper. Is this what he thinks kids want to watch? Is this how he remembers the Muppets? The Muppets kicked a lot more ass than that. They were cutting and insightful, not sappy and maudlin. Segel can be quite good (see Forgetting Sarah Marshall, in which he's often quite good, even though you can see the sap lying barely repressed just beneath the surface) so it's not that I dislike him, but, unlike the other reviews I've read that lauded him for his tribute to the Muppets, I think that he's kind of phoning it in now. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2608 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2608 Tue, 21 Feb 2012 23:28:51 +0100 Seth Rogan stars as a bipolar mall cop. It's as bad as it sounds. Written and directed by someone named Jody Hill, it's hard to believe that the ordinarily quite genial Rogan was in this movie for any reason other than that he lost a bet. None of Rogan's fellow mall cops are in any way endearing. His quote-girlfriend-unquote is appalling and nothing recommends this film. Cowboys & Aliens (2011) -- "5/10" Daniel Craig stars as an alien abductee from the old West who tries to piece his life back together after waking up in the desert. He wanders into a town controlled by Harrison Ford and populated by the usual collection of townies. Olivia Wilde is there as well, looking utterly stunned as usual. [1] My relief at her character's death was short-lived as she came back from the dead, PG-naked and retroactively explaining her wooden acting with a backstory that she's an alien (different race) in human form. Daniel Craig is steely-eyed and fits the role quite well. Harrison Ford is pretty much wasted. Paul Dano is as well. It was OK, but the number of self-contradictions was distracting enough to point up how utterly unbelievable and unexplained vast parts of the story are. Wilde's character stands in as a deus ex machina wherever convenient. Stir Crazy (1980) -- "6/10" Name one other movie starring Richard Pryor and Gene Wilder and directed by Sidney Poitier and also featuring Erland van Lidth de Jeude, an opera-singer MIT-graduate who is 6'6" tall and weighs over 350 pounds. You can't do it. Wilder and Pryor are mistaken for two armed robbers and arrested and jailed. The prison scenes are pretty clichéd but they're also 30 years old so maybe they invented those cliches. Food for thought. The best scene was with Wilder accompanying himself on guitar in prison, followed by a plaintive a cappella aria from van Lidth de Jeude. All in all, though, See no Evil, Hear no Evil was better. The Informant! (2009) -- "6/10" Matt Damon plays a real-life ADM (Archers Daniels Midland) executive and whistleblower from the early 90s. The story is interesting and his performance is spot-on -- his manic-depressive personality was quite convincing. His running internal monologue included several gems, my favorite of which I've reproduced below. "When polar bears hunt, they crouch down by a hole in the ice and wait for a seal to pop up. They keep one paw over their nose so that they blend in, because they've got those black noses. They'd blend in perfectly if not for the nose. So the question is, how do they know their noses are black? From looking at other polar bears? Do they see their reflections in the water and think, "I'd be invisible if not for that." That seems like a lot of thinking for a bear." Did You Hear about the Morgans? (2009) -- "3/10" Sarah Jessica Parker applies her not inconsiderable power to disgust and annoy to completely and utterly eradicate any goodwill to the film engendered by the nearly always affable Hugh Grant. They play a couple of caricatured New Yorkers thrown by circumstance out of The City. The horror. It's hard to tell what the message is: are the New Yorkers deluded in their belief that their high-stress world is better? Or are the other characters really less-civilized hinterlanders? The movie is a series of clichés made all the more horrible by Parker's constant screeching and whining and ego and anorexia. Does anyone like her enough to hear her talk that much? A generous interpretation would be to assume she was acting, but I'm not feeling very generous. Mary Steenbergen and Sam Shepard are a nice couple and the scenes with only Grant are fun. Gone with the Wind (1939) -- "7/10" A movie about how the Civil War affected the lives of Southern nobility. Vivian Leigh stars as Scarlet O'Hara Hamilton Kennedy Butler, a sociopath with an unquenchable thirst for both her best friend's husband and wealth. Clark Gable plays Rhett Butler, the scoundrel millionaire who came by his fortune by hook and by crook, although absolutely no one seems to judge him for it in the movie. He sees himself and Scarlet as kindred spirits -- caring nothing for no one unless it's to get ahead -- and grows to love her. She never loves anyone but herself and the one man who would never have her: the husband of her best friend (and the flat-out nicest lady in the movie, Melanie). The first third is decent, the middle third in which she builds her fortune is quite good and the final third is mixed, with some quite hurried plotlines all snapping together to make it in time for the end of the movie. Scarlett is ruthless -- and shallow and absolutely appalling when rich -- but it's also interesting how many people clung to her ruthless coattails and quickly forget how much she did for them when times were very dark. Some of her melodrama seemed quite strained, some of Butler's grins seemed to bend his face completely out of shape (as if he had false teeth or something), but it's a film from another era, so let it slide. Leigh has some absolutely devastating long stares that hint of madness bubbling not too far beneath. Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008) -- "8/10" The story is of Peter, played by Jason Segal, whose heart is broken by Sarah Marshall, played by Kristen Bell. He is devastated and ends up a few weeks later in Hawaii, where he meets her and her new beau, rock star Russell Brand (as Aldous Snow, a role he would reprise in Get Him to the Greek). Mila Kunis works at the hotel and takes a shine to Peter; Paul Rudd and Jonah Hill are among the other hotel employees. The second half is definitely better than the first and Segal's quite decent writing and nuanced feel for real, adult characters shines through. Kunis is a nicely balanced character and Brand is delightfully unbalanced and a jackass/really-nice-guy all in one. The dinner scene is especially funny and well-paced. There's also a puppet vampire musical in there, for fans of that. And, just in case, Segal is the only one who's naked at all in it, so seek elsewhere should that be your goal. The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997) -- "5/10" Jeff Goldblum as Dr. Malcolm is pretty much the only redeeming thing about this movie. After a bit of a slow start, it's just two straight hours of dinosaurs on murderous killing sprees: big ones, then tiny ones, then medium ones, then big ones again. It's entertaining enough if you're doing something else while watching it. Saw it in German. Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961) -- "7/10" The screenplay by Truman Capote is less than generous in its portrayal of Mid-western-nobody-turned-New York-socialite Holly Golightly, played by Audrey Hepburn. She is at times grating but occasionally amusing as she flits through life supported by handouts from occasional boyfriends and payments from a mob boss for whom she plays an (supposedly, though believably) unwitting information mule. George Peppard (who would go on to play Hannibal in the TV-series "A-Team") plays a male version of the same lifestyle, albeit with at least a hint of talent -- as a writer. Mickey Rooney plays a jarringly tone-deaf and appallingly demeaning stereotype as the Japanese landlord of Holly's brownstone. Those scenes are painful, whereas most of the rest of the film is only vaguely disconcerting as the film is primarily about a woman with no discernible talent beyond being friendly and whose fantasy world is only occasionally intruded upon by harsh reality. It's not too hard to tell that Capote liked neither the people of the NYC social scene nor women. Drive (2011) -- "7/10" Ryan Gosling stars as a stoic modern-day gunslinger whose primary feature is that he's a driver. He drives. He gets mixed up in some sordid business as a consequence of helping a weak and helpless neighbor and her recently paroled husband, but he handles it all with a terse aplomb and efficiency. There is never a doubt that he will succeed, which is actually quite a lot of fun to watch. He is less a man than a force of nature. The cinematics or visuals -- the look and feel of the film -- were lovely, with long shots a welcome respite from car chases that induce epilepsy (in other films). Gosling was quite good, as were Bryan Cranston, Ron Perlman and Albert Brooks, but Carey Mulligan was annoying in a just-about-to-break-into-tears-at-any-moment kind of way. An interesting movie more about mood than about story, really. For the squeamish, the film is punctuated by some quite brutal depictions of physical violence (beatings) but they are generally past before you realize what happened -- and then the horror washes in as you realize what you just watched. If that's not your thing: beware. Blue Valentine (2010) -- "7/10" Went into this thinking "chick flick" and was soon convinced otherwise. Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams star as a young couple of meager means and meager education making their way through the lower strata of American society in Pennsylvania -- but it could be anywhere in poor America, including upstate NY, which is what resonated for me. He's a genuinely nice guy -- almost guileless -- who claims to be happy with his lot; she's not as genuinely nice as he is -- more selfish machinations -- but still a good person with a work ethic, etc. etc. She has no self-esteem whatsoever, which leads to poor relationship choices -- if high-school one-night-stands can be thusly described -- a driving force in the film (spoiler: the scene in the liquor store where she is approached by the boy-now-man who impregnated her in high school and told she looks good and asked whether she was faithful -- and she just smiled and begged off instead of hitting him -- was the linchpin of her character). Thoreau said it best: "The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation"; this is a film about that. The Killer Inside Me (2010) -- "8/10" Casey Affleck stars as a small-town, tightly wound sheriff in Texas with a violent past (but not how you think) with which he tries to reconnect with his romantic dalliances (Jessica Alba and Kate Hudson). This is not at all a film for the squeamish as it includes some shockingly violent footage. Spoiler alert: also, if you really like Jessica Alba's face the way it is or you really want to keep thinking Casey Affleck is a nice guy, do not see this movie. It is also a painstakingly shot and framed film with some really lovely, lovely shots and a standout performance by Affleck. Alba is much more daring than she has been in other roles -- though it's in the service of a quite misogynistic goal (the film is based on a 1950 noir novel). Hudson is subdued, but also inexplicably submits to Affleck's character's more violent desires. All told, the story is quite good, the dialogue is good and the movie pulls you in. Some scenes and conversations are really lovely and some are so violent that you're just waiting for them to end. It ended in a fashion similar to Dogville: with most of the cast consumed in a final act of violence accompanied by a completely incongruous tune that carries the viewer into the credits (in this case, Spade Cooley's Shame on You; in Dogville's case, it was Young American by David Bowie). Happythankyoumoreplease (2010) -- "4/10" In a film dripping with insipid hipsters and their interminable flow of shitty, uninteresting problems (and their subsequent whining about them), Josh Radnor of How I Met Your Mother fame doesn't make quite the same splash as his companion Jason Segal did in Forgetting Sarah Marshall. His character, Sam Wexler, is amusing enough, and some of the other characters grow on you (if only a bit) -- in a contrast to my usual attitude, I thought the young kid was great from start to finish -- but the affected inflection of Malin Akerman is hopelessly grating and the tiny world view of the sheltered New Yorkers is anything but amusing. Perhaps I'm getting too old to watch 90 minutes of young people being self-centered and completely unaware that none of their suffering is anything but a first-world problem. The Lovely Bones (2009) -- "5/10" A story about the ghost of a girl who was abducted and murdered in the 70s in Pennsylvania (not a true story). The purgatory in the picture is bizarre and not very convincing and the film is more maudlin than entertaining. Lots of slow-motion camera and lingering face shots to emphasize compassion or menace. Stanley Tucci is quite good but he stands alone. Black Swan (2010) -- "8/10" A story of a ballet dancer whose own life mirrors that of the Swan Queen, who she is chosen to play in Swan Lake. The woman's relationship with her mother has strong parallels to that found in La Pianiste by Michael Haneke, in that they were both as mad as hatters and entirely too close for comfort. Mila Kunis is fun, as usual, and Vincent Cassel is quite good in a role that is written with less misandry than expected (and thus has him exhibiting only a low- to medium-level misogyny). It was actually a good film, with Portman playing the part of an untrustworthy observer quite well -- reality is altered either by her self-starvation [2], dabbling with drugs, mental illness or a mix of all of them. A film well worth watching, but it's quite dark and there are only a few hints of ballet (if that was the reason you were watching; if it was because of the notorious lesbian scene starring Portman and Kunis, prepare to be disappointed). Remarkable for the almost complete reversal of male-to-female proportions; Cassel is at best a minor supporting role and the other males are limited to lifting the female leads. Auf der Strecke (2007) -- "8/10" A Swiss short film (40 minutes) about a security officer who uses his camera to watch a woman who works in a bookstore. When he sees her on a train with another man, he is jealous; when they fight, he is relieved; when the man is accosted by "die Schweizer Jugend", he does nothing. The man later dies from his injuries and she seeks out the security officer for solace. The man turns out to have been her brother. Conflicting emotions ensue. It was quite well done. Paul Blart: Mall Cop (2009) -- "4/10" Less overtly offensive than Observe and Report, mostly because Kevin James is a different kind of funny than Seth Rogan: he's more capable of playing the goofy family movie hero. Still not a good movie by any stretch of the imagination, though. That doesn't mean that Paul Blart II isn't in the works. I did myself a favor and didn't check IMDB. Il neige à Marrakech (2006) -- "8/10" Another Swiss film short in French about a family in Morocco with an ailing father figure whose only remaining wish is to schuss the Alps in Splügen. When his visa is denied, his family hatches a plan to take him to a local mountain instead and "Swiss things up" a bit to fool the old man into thinking his dream had come true. It's pretty hilarious and well worth it. The Last Boy Scout (1991) -- "7/10" A good role for Bruce Willis as a down-and-out cop/former Secret Service officer -- think John McClane, but with an even bigger drinking problem and about the same tendency to get punched. Damon Wayans plays a former quarterback, who teams up with Willis to solve a ... whatever, there's a case, there are wisecracks, good manly action stuff happens and the good guys win in the end. Willis does not compromise and stays totally manly. That's pretty much all you need to know. It's not high cinema, but entertaining enough. Saw it in German. 500 Days of Summer (2009) -- "6/10" Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel star as what from his point-of-view are a couple in love and from hers are a couple of friends/occasional fuck-buddies. The story recounts the 500 days from the day they met through their budding friendship to their breakup (spoiler alert: less than halfway through the 500 days) and culminates in his recovery from her. He's a glorified man-child with the emotional maturity of...well, something without a lot of emotional maturity. She's ok at first, but seems to be deliberately ignorant and then manipulative of how much in love with her he is. Neither of them are any great shakes at communicating. The film isn't even especially saved by cool or funny friends on either side (see, e.g. Going the Distance). An OK movie made better by good visuals and a non-chronological flow. The Fighter (2010) -- "9/10" An excellent film about a boxer from Lowell, Massachusetts making his way to a title shot in 1993. His life is complicated on the one hand by a family that's a nearly complete horror-show -- a brother on crack, a mother who is a bitch-with-a-capital-B, a father who is a good-hearted enabler, sisters who have no idea what useless, drunken morons they are and a girlfriend who thinks she's better than all that, but is also living in a fantasy world -- and on the other by having a solid boxing skill set but less raw talent than the aforementioned brother and a tendency to slug things out, relying on a gift of being able to take a punch. In the middling to waning years of a boxing career, this is a less useful tack to take. Excellent and eminently believable fight scenes and unbelievably strong performances from Mark Wahlberg and Christian Bale [3] as well as Melissa Leo, who played his mother. Amy Adams was also quite good, having transformed herself quite convincingly into a college-dropout bartender/bar-skank. I haven't been this excited watching movie boxing in a long time. The final fight was awesome. [4] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] That's not a typo. [1] The hallucinations and paranoia brought on by self-starvation are also a theme explored in The Machinist with Christan Bale. [1] Bale is crack-addict skinny in this one, a complete change from his bulk from the Batman films or American Psycho. He's not nearly as skinny as he was in The Machinist. [1] Spoiler alert: it was based on a true story. He really did win the belt in London. It was very cool to find out at the end of the film. That it was a true story enhanced the film for me in the same way as it did for Invictus. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2596 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2596 Thu, 12 Jan 2012 06:49:53 +0100 -- "9/10" 2. "The Wolfman (2010)" <#Wolfman> -- "6/10" 3. "Lonely Hearts (2006)" <#Lonely> -- "7/10" 4. "OSS 117: Le Caire, nid d'espions (2006) (fr)" <#OSS> -- "7/10" 5. "Brooklyn's Finest (2009)" <#Brooklyn> -- "8/10" 6. "The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989)" <#Cook> -- "8/10" 7. "There Will be Blood (2007)" <#Blood> -- "6/10" 8. "Nothing But the Truth (2008)" <#Nothing> -- "8/10" 9. "Dogville (2003)" <#Dogville> -- "9/10" 10. "Antichrist (2009)" <#Antichrist> -- "8/10" 11. "La Belle Noiseuse (1991) (fr)" <#Noiseuse> -- "7/10" 12. "Invictus (2009)" <#Invictus> -- "7/10" 13. "You Don't Know Jack (2010)" <#Jack> -- "9/10" 14. "Caché (2005) (fr)" <#Caché> -- "7/10" 15. "Going the Distance (2010)" <#Going> -- "6/10" 16. "Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis (2008) (fr)" <#Bienvenue> -- "10/10" 17. "La Pianiste (2001) (fr)" <#Pianiste> -- "8/10" 18. "Micmacs à tire-larigot (2009) (fr)" <#Micmacs> -- "9/10" 19. "The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007)" <#Jesse> -- "7/10" 20. "Crazy Heart (2009)" <#Crazy> -- "7/10" 21. "88 Minutes (2007)" <#88> -- "5/10" 22. "The Last Station (2010)" <#Station> -- "8/10" 23. "Moneyball (2011)" <#Moneyball> -- "8/10" 24. "Edge of Darkness (2010)" <#Edge> -- "6/10" 25. "Modern Times (1936)" <#Modern> -- "7/10" 26. "The Great Dictator (1940)" <#Dictator> -- "7/10" 27. "The Social Network (2011)" <#Network> -- "5/10" The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus (2009) -- "9/10" This movie is dedicated to Heath Ledger -- he died halfway through the filming -- who stars alongside Christopher Plummer as the eponymous Doctor Parnassus. Ledger was very good; Plummer was spellbinding. The remainder of Ledger's role was filled seamlessly by Johnny Depp, Jude Law and finally Colin Farrell, who played the character in the "imaginarium" scenes, where reality was slippery anyway. It's never possible to predict how a Terry Gilliam movie will go, but it's always possible to point and say "that's definitely a Gilliam movie". Parnassum's cart, his show, the imaginarium, every detail just screams it. The plot weaves different times and places together, shifting and mixing and matching things like old-timey carnivals and modern-day London into one scene and portraying the homeless as lost wanderers extruded into our reality by unfortunate circumstances that occurred in a much more exciting reality. Highly recommended. The Wolfman (2010) -- "6/10" Benicio del Toro plays the main role as the scion of a family headed by Anthony Hopkins, who lives on the Blackmoor estate. His brother was recently killed by an unknown but extremely savage animal. Was it a werewolf? Well, duh, that's the name of the movie. It's a point-by-point remake of the 1940s film of the same name. It's pretty decent, but not really scary at all and the plot, though relatively predictable, is ably driven forward by Hopkins and del Toro. Lonely Hearts (2006) -- "7/10" Salma Hayek and Jared Leto star as the real-life lonely-hearts killers from the 19402. Hayek is clearly the out-of-control driver of homicide in the pair, though Leto is only superficially more stable. Travolta is very good (instead of the creepy, crazy, bombastic Travolta we've gotten used to) as is his partner Gandolfini (the other partner, played by Scott Caan is a total pain-in-the-ass). In real life, the pair were convicted of killing three people, including strangling one woman's daughter; in the movie, they killed several more. It was a decent flick, punctuated by some good scenes with Salma Hayek, who was just ruthless. The side-story of Travolta's life and dead wife, etc. was not very interesting or believable and Laura Dern as his love interest was wasted. OSS 117: Le Caire, nid d'espions (2006) (fr) -- "7/10" The original 007-spoof, starring Jean Dujardin as Hubert Bonisseur de La Bath, a French spy. He thinks he's James Bond but he's much more Inspecteur Clouseau. It called to mind Top Secret, both in the scenery and in that it was pretty consistently funny, funnier than I remember the sequel to have been. If you like the retro-50s spy-look and tongue-in-cheek spoofing of the Ian Fleming world of spies -- and you don't mind subtitles if you don't understand French -- this is the film for you. Jean Dujardin is really good. Recommended. Brooklyn's Finest (2009) -- "8/10" An excellent cast -- Richard Gere, Ethan Hawke, Wesley Snipes, Don Cheadle -- stars in the story of a trio of cops on the drug beat in Brooklyn. Another movie with almost no women (unless you count Ellen Barkin, who plays a ridiculous caricature of a ladder-climbing police career woman...or any of the lucky actresses who got to play the dozens of whores and playthings in the film), it was a gritty tale of undercover work, thankless police work and the tensions of the job. Looked at from a certain angle, it told a tale of tragedy and suffering, the root of which was the drug war in America. Without the drug business, there would have been no movie. It was a touch long, but still very good overall. It actually ranked up there with The Departed as far as these types of stories go. The Cook, the Thief, His Wife & Her Lover (1989) -- "8/10" Michael Gambon plays an almost unbelievably boorish know-it-all/know-nothing restaurant owner who simply will. not. stop. talking. The restaurant and kitchen are amazingly lush and fancy and detailed and look as if they'd come from the 19th-century rather than the 20th. The arrangement of food in the kitchen looks straight out of still-life paintings. Helen Mirren plays his wife, who's already tired of him at the beginning of the film and her thoughts quickly turn to an affair with a more cultured man, who doesn't have a line in the film until almost an hour in. The film is shot in a very interesting way, panning back and forth along from the alley to the restaurant to the kitchen to the pantry to the lavatory, each with its own color scheme and lighting -- the alley is yellow and blue, the restaurant is red, the kitchen and pantry are green and dark, the lavatory white and brightly lit. Gambon's violent and misogynistic performance is definitely not for the faint-of-heart, though. Neither is the naked couple forced to escape in the back of a meat truck filled with rotting wares. Mirren is a long way from the Queen and Gambon quite a long way from Dumbledore in this one. There Will be Blood (2007) -- "6/10" Daniel Day Lewis plays Daniel Plainview, an oilman working in the early 1900s in the western part of America. The movie is ostensibly based on the book Oil! by Upton Sinclair but only the first half of the movie kinda sorta takes some parts of the plot from the book. The whole socialist struggle part that comprises 2/3 of the book is thrown by the wayside and replaced with a much stronger focus on the father rather than the son. The father, instead of a stalwart businessman who slides into piggish greed, starts off as pretty much a bastard and slides into drunkenness and violence. [1] The character of Eli (the preacher/healer) stays relatively true, but otherwise it's a slow-moving and largely boring film. The book, alas, was much better, but it was about socialism and Paul and Bertie whereas the movie is about Daniel and Eli, with Paul sent off ... somewhere ... and Bertie transformed to H.W., who is deafened and exiles himself to Mexico. Not really recommended unless you're a big fan of DDL. Nothing But the Truth (2008) -- "8/10" Kate Beckinsale plays the Robert Novak role and Vera Farmiga plays the Valerie Plame role in a retelling of the outing of a CIA agent with a bit of Judith Miller thrown in. Unlike Novak though -- and like Miller -- Beckinsale actually goes to jail for it. [2] The jail looks absolutely horrifying, reminding me of the descriptions of immigration jails in the book The Power of Love. Matt Dillon is in hardass mode, David Schwimmer is in whiner-mode (big surprise) and Alan Alda and Noah Wyle are good as Beckinsale's legal team. I've never seen Kate Beckinsale with so many spoken lines and so little cable-work and killing of vampires. All in all, a very tight movie with an honest message and a really good ending. Recommended. Dogville (2003) -- "9/10" A truly unique film, directed by Lars von Trier, about a lonely little village in the mountains called Dogville. It stars Nicole Kidman as a young woman who comes to the town under somewhat suspicious circumstances, but is soon accepted by the townsfolk -- played by various well-known actors -- though under strange conditions. The set is like a stage set and extremely minimal, with buildings demarcated only by lines on the floor, some sparse furniture and only minimal walls and ceilings. The relationship between Grace and the town deteriorates as the women become more abusive and the men start assaulting her (led by the ever-irascible Stellan Skarsgård) as they realize she is trapped and they make her a slave, refusing to even pay her wages anymore. Not only is she raped by the men, she is subsequently accused by the wives of seduction and punished for it. The self-righteous punishment is harder to take somehow, reminding me of the Puritans of The Scarlet Letter. The townsfolk reveal their true natures and it is ugly; they even chain her up and tie a bell to her collar so she can't escape. Von Trier has a reputation for deviation and he does not disappoint; the ostensible protagonist is a self-serving bastard who's deluded by his own goodness. A tough movie to watch -- the first half is kind of boring, but it's just waiting to spring the trap of the second half, which is harrowing. And then, after nearly three hours with no music whatsoever, the credits roll accompanied by David Bowie's Young American. [3] Antichrist (2009) -- "8/10" At first, The Cook, the Thief, his Wife and her Lover seemed somewhat out there and extreme. Then along came Dogville with its bland innocence that tips into a tale of the casual evil and brutish selfishness of man. And then there's Von Trier's second entry in the weird sweepstakes, a horror film starring Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg which tells the tale of a couple who lose their son and try to get back to some form of sanity. She takes it pretty hard and he, the therapist, tries to help, though in a very arrogant way. Things spiral out of control with hints of satanism, the brutishness of nature, sadomasochism and, once again, a big, heavy wheel getting attached to someone -- this time even more uncomfortably than with an iron collar (imagine away). The animals -- representations of nature -- are also at their worst, not threatening but just awful, awful images. I have to say that it's a good movie, but only for people who can appreciate a film that plumbs the absolute depths of despair. Lots of nudity but not in an alluring way [4] and definitely not a date movie. La Belle Noiseuse (1991) (fr) -- "7/10" The story of a budding young artist who pays a visit to his hero, who's fallen on hard times creatively. After the young man and his enchanting accompaniment spend a long evening at dinner and visiting the old studios, it is decided that the old man will try once again to complete his masterpiece, using said accompaniment as a model. The scenery is so spot-on for the French countryside that you can almost smell the old stone, the dust. You can hear the grit from the old stones everywhere. The house is a huge old manor with towers surrounded by gardens and endless countryside. The crickets are incessant; it is high, hot summer. The studio has tables scattered throughout, each covered with the detritus of years of work. It oozes nonchalant authenticity from the simple breakfast table with bowls for coffee cups to the dusty old bottle of some bathtub cognac the men drink from in the studio. The pace is quite slow, but not agonizing, because each second is made to be important somehow. The camera lingers for long, long minutes on the sketchpad, on the canvas as the artist learns once again to create. The sound of his pen, pencil and Conté on the paper is unnerving as hell and you can feel the tedium emanating from Emmanuelle Béart -- who plays the model Marianne -- as she tries to hold her pose. She's nude and the artist poses her like a doll, no sexual tension whatsoever, all business. The large drawings he makes aren't very good, but the sketchbooks are much better. They discuss the process endlessly. She's absolutely alluring, which is good because she's on-screen a lot in this 4-hour--long movie, although her nudity is soon just as unremarkable for the viewer as it is for Frenhofer, the artist, who's played pitch-perfect by Michel Piccoli. The others? Mostly moping about, with Julienne and Nicolas winning the prize in a brother-and-sister-tag-team of insufferable melancholy. [5] Invictus (2009) -- "7/10" Morgan Freeman in the role he was born to play -- Nelson Mandela -- and Matt Damon as the captain of the Springboks -- the South African rugby team. Directed by Clint Eastwood, this quite typical sports movie -- (spoiler alert) crappy team inspired by nation to win World Cup -- is a great yarn and all the more so because it's true. It actually happened. Some of the minor details showing the thawing of animosity between blacks and whites were surely added for effect, but for the most part, it's true: the rugby team did travel to townships to visit with kids and teach them the game; the security detail was composed of blacks and whites; and goddamn if they didn't actually win the world cup right there in Durban, South Africa. It was Mandela's way of starting to heal the nation, to move on from the past, and it worked. I can see how you might be in too cynical a mood for some of the details -- young black kid creeps closer to two white cops listening to the game on the radio and they all celebrate together at the end -- but Eastwood shows these details rather than having characters say them, so you'd have to be in a really, really bad mood. You Don't Know Jack (2010) -- "9/10" A riveting biographical film about Jack Kevorkian starring Al Pacino as Kevorkian, John Goodman as his friend Neal, Brenda Vaccaro as his sister Margo, Danny Huston as his fantastic and dedicated lawyer and friend and Susan Sarandon as Janet Good, another friend and partner and finally, patient. Kevorkian's contribution was amazing and his logic and arguments impossible to refute without resorting to religion or some other humbug. Kevorkian is just about the only reason America isn't completely in the dark ages vis à vis euthanasia, especially when compared to countries like the Netherlands or Switzerland. An excellent film with Pacino putting in a fantastic performance; a bit long, but the story had many chapters. The final court case illustrates very nicely how the courts are just a game to be played instead of a place to find justice. Everything's ruled as irrelevant even for facts that are clearly relevant if one were to go by logic rather than games. The best part is when the ADs schemed to drop the assisted-suicide charge so that the family testimony can't be used to elicit sympathy from the jury; with only the murder charge, Kevorkian can call no witnesses and has no defense. The judge is sanctimonious at best, pretending to represent justice even though it's clear where her heart lies. [6] After reading The Innocent Man by John Grisham, I'm left with even less faith in the justice system in the States than I had; so very far from the witch trials we are not. Caché (2005) (fr) -- "7/10" Juliette Binoche and Daniel Auteuil star as a couple: he a moderately famous intellectual-round-table host on television and she in publishing. One day, they receive videotapes depicting their home and other familiar places, as if they were under surveillance. Who's sending the tapes? Why? Is there some deep secret (un caché) from their past that someone is trying to push into the open? Slow but well-paced with each scene divulging another drab (soupçon) of information about the secret. Binoche is very good, as always. And the secret? Some of the videotape sequences are quite long and you have to really be absorbed to stay with it. If you're easily bored -- or you require the closure of definitely finding out the whole and entire secret -- this is probably not the film for you. Going the Distance (2010) -- "6/10" Justin Long and Drew Barrymore get into a relationship that turns long-distance. The first half is pretty good whereas the second kind of devolves into a bunch of tedious clichés involving a boatload of whining, mostly from Long, and insipidity, mostly from Barrymore. They so desperately want to be together that they have to figure out whether they're going to live in New York City or San Fransisco. The cool thing is that she's the one with a Master's degree and a job opportunity in her career path, and he's the one who works as a music scout for a shitty company he hates, but (at first) they decide that she will give up her job and wait tables in New York. That they even consider this option is ridiculous (and pretty sexist). The film is buoyed by two things: it's rated R, so it's a relationship/sex film about young adults with actual swearing, adult themes and some sex instead of a castrated PG-13 film about same. And the second thing is a pretty strong supporting cast: Jason Sudeikis, Charlie Day, Jim Gaffigan and Christina Applegate in particular. Applegate has hands-down the funniest line -- "Maya: statue!" -- which she shouts to keep her daughter in line; the child responds by freezing in place. Sudeikis and Day are pretty good as relatively well-balanced bros and Gaffigan is good as Applegate's disaffected husband. Bienvenue chez les Ch'tis (2008) (fr) -- "10/10" The story of an employee of La Poste who, like all other bank employees, wants to take his family to the Riviera, mostly because his hot wife wants it (cue the sexist caricature of shallow French wife). After a few mishaps, he is instead transferred to Bergues, far in the north of France, where it's cold and where he'll be going alone. The wife stays with their boy in Salon because she can't go with him; they act as if he's going to a gulag, which is pretty hilarious. Once he goes north, his wife appreciates his sacrifice for the family and refuses to believe anything but the worst of the region and will not believe that he's actually starting to enjoy himself up there. The locals there have a very special accent, as exemplified by Dany Boon (who was also very good in Rien à déclarer and who grew up in the North, speaking that local dialect). The outrageousness of the accent varies, but some of the older folk are nearly impossible to understand (even with subtitles). The story is relatively simple, with the manager from the south trying to help a young genial postman (Boon) move on with his life. The day they ride the postal route together -- ostensibly to teach Boon how to avoid taking all the drinks offered to him on his route -- is worth the price of entry. Highly recommended. La Pianiste (2001) (fr) -- "8/10" Another film from director Michael Haneke (he also directed Caché, above), this one starring Isabelle Huppert as a highly repressed piano teacher living with her mother (who's an utter shrew, a relentless control-freak) and teaching at a conservatory in Paris. She has a dark side, with her passion squeezing through the cracks of her tight carapace in ways that are equal parts embarrassing, pathetic, illegal and painful. She is a ticking time bomb for all around her, including her students. Then she meets Walter, or rather, Walter pursues her. She acquiesces, but only on her own twisted terms. Little does he know that he's fallen in love with a masochist; the part where he reads aloud her written instructions to him is really good; he's angry but slowly realizes she is just as powerless before her desires as he is. That is, he realizes he can only have her on these terms -- and that those terms aren't even of her own choosing. She is just as trapped by them as he; that she has only desires but no experience means their encounter will be just as much of an unknown for her as him. Will either of them enjoy it? In such a carefully planned movie -- carefully and lovingly shot, with careful dialogue and framing -- how the hell did they think they would make a handsome, budding engineer, gifted pianist/hockey-player believable? Who does that? What is this, Buckaroo Banzai? At first it seems a story of a nearly completely unsympathetic self-destructing control-freak, but it is bigger than that: it is a story of obsession -- unheeding, insatiable, destructive obsession. [7] Another film that's not exactly for the faint-of-heart. Micmacs à tire-larigot (2009) (fr) -- "9/10" A strange little comedy -- again starring Dany Boon -- with a wonderful look and feel to it, lovingly shot...Gilliam-esque, in fact (but perhaps with even higher production quality that he usually gets ... it's a really nice-looking film, is what I'm trying to get across here). Boon stars as a man who lost his father to a mine created by one arms manufacturer and who is an innocent bystander shot by the bullet from another. After his travails, he is homeless and is taken in by les Micmacs à tire-larigot, who are a hodge-podge cadre of similarly disadvantaged folks with unique talents (i.e. what the more-ungenerous might call freaks and outcasts). Together, they start a well-planned subversive campaign to bring down both firms (the film is pretty stridently anti-armament). The tricks and plans (and gadgets and devices and machines) are exquisite and executed to perfection (the final play is awesome) and without excessive violence, as has become de rigeur in this genre. Now this is a good action movie -- forget the ludicrous over-the-top crap of The Losers or other such pap -- this is the real deal. [8] The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (2007) -- "7/10" This film stars Brad Pitt as James and Casey Affleck as Ford and tells the story of the tail-end of James's career and life, which ended, more or less, at the same time. Affleck plays one weird duck and the rest of the gang seems about as clever and sympathetic as Alex's chums from The Clockword Orange (two of the more prominent ones are Jamie Renner and Sam Rockwell). James visits people and places as if he were Death itself, showing up like a ghost in the dead of night, full of menace and foreboding. The film purports to be semi-biographical and is partly told through a voice-over. The two leads are good, as almost always. This is a historical Western, not an action Western and it's over 21/2 hours long: it's nicely filmed and interesting, but not that exciting. The shooting is depicted as a cowardly act almost gratefully set up and accepted by James himself, more an assisted suicide than an assassination. This is neither a hagiography of James nor Ford; the film is almost entirely bereft of sympathetic figures. Crazy Heart (2009) -- "7/10" Jeff Bridges stars as Bad Blake, a country-western music star who, at 59, is on the downhill side of his career. He continues to tour the country, playing smaller and smaller places, almost -- but, not quite -- crippled by a drinking problem. Bridges pretty much knocks it out of the park with this performance (he was awarded an Oscar), drawling and slurring his way through the role so believably you can't believe he is anyone other than Bad Blake. Colin Farrell is his protegé who's moved on to a booming career of his own and their relationship is nicely handled, with Farrel's character actually being much nicer than the reputation he has with Bad. [9] Maggie Gyllenhaal looks even younger than ever as a cub reporter for a Santa Fe paper who interviews him -- well, it's more like they interview each other. They start to build a relationship despite his raging alcoholism and chain-smoking. He makes an effort and his music -- as far as I'm concerned -- improves markedly; by the end, he sounds more like Leonard Cohen than his initial twangy country/western. A well-made film with a riveting performance by Bridges, but it's quite predictable, so don't expect any surprises in either plot or dialogue. 88 Minutes (2007) -- "5/10" Another movie about a party animal/alcoholic, this one a forensic psychiatrist for the FBI played by Al Pacino. Pacino's hair is distractingly huge. He's got big fans and big enemies and an old case is coming back to haunt him. The 88 minutes refers to the amount of time he has left to live, according to the people plaguing/hunting him one morning. It's one of those movies where every single one of his students is attractive as are all of his coworkers and research assistants. [10] Strangely enough, at no point do you worry that he won't solve the case -- basically we're talking Sherlock Holmes as played by a short Italian guy with a goatee (I'm pretty sure Downey Jr.'s not Italian, otherwise that description would match him too). Some of the acting is pretty wooden, with Leelee Sobieski taking first prize there. It's not terrible and it's entertaining enough, especially if you like crime/mystery movies, but it was more like a well-produced made-for-TV crime drama than a full-blown theater experience. The Last Station (2010) -- "8/10" An amazing cast lifts this period piece set in early 1900s Russia above one's expectations. James McAvoy plays referee/historian/amanuensis to Tolstoy and his wife, played by Christopher Plummer and Helen Mirren, respectively. Tolstoy is surrounded by spineless, self-righteous, seriously repressed and psychologically damaged-if-not-outright-unstable sycophants -- some of them are absolutely unbearable and are typical adherents who are capable only of understanding the great man's work on a superficial level [11] -- among them his daughter and Chertkov, played by Paul Giamatti, who's scheming to get Tolstoy to follow his own teachings and give away his copyrights to the public domain. This is a laudable goal, but the suspicion is that he has ulterior motives and the countess, of course, won't hear of it. Mirren and Plummer are fantastic. There are similarities between the depiction of Tolstoy and that of Frenhofer the painter in La Belle Noiseuse, as genuises who are both supported by their significant others. They cannot live without them, but also distracted by them. It's utterly laughable that this movie was rated R for the single scene between Mcavoy and Kerry Condon, which lasts seconds and is possibly the sweetest deflowering -- his -- that could be filmed. Rated R for that. For boobies. For two seconds. The U.S. film industry is about as puritanical as the worst of the Tolstoyans. Moneyball (2011) -- "8/10" Brad Pitt stars as Bill Beane, the general manager of the Oakland A's, and Jonah Hill as Peter Brand, who changed everything about how baseball teams are created, maintained and how a winning team can be created without superstars. They start to think in terms of buying runs rather than superstars, looking at the players as a market of players, with an emphasis on the undervalued ones. Brad Pitt is...well, he's Brad Pitt playing his typical role, so he's, well, awesome: the first meeting with his staff where Jonah Hill (the numbers guy) is also in attendance is absolutely wonderfully paced and executed. Once you see him in this role (based on the character from the book by Michael Lewis), you really can't imagine who else would have played the character. Philip Seymour Hoffman is nearly unrecognizable as the coach, who has serious issues viewing the game as one of statistics rather than players. Probably one of the more interesting baseball movies I've ever seen. Recommended. Edge of Darkness (2010) -- "6/10" This is how I picture script negotiations with Mel Gibson: Director: How do you like the script, Mel? Mel: Haven't read it. I have a question, though. Director: Shoot. Mel: It's a two-parter, actually. Is my character a former member of law-enforcement who's now a slightly weird loner? And does my character suffer a horrific loss of his only close family member early in the film for which he can ruthlessly avenge himself throughout the film? Director: Yes. And yes. Mel: I have a follow-up question. Director: Shoot. Mel: Why not Liam Neeson? Director: He's too expensive. Mel: Where do I sign? Yes, Gibson channels De Niro at one point (while beating one suspect). And has he always been so short? And what's up with naming the hero "Craven"? The last half hour makes up for a slow start, though. Much better than 88 minutes. Modern Times (1936) -- "7/10" A (quasi-)silent film starring Charlie Chaplin as a worker in a state-of-the-art factory who tires of the tedium of being -- quite literally -- a cog in the machine and starts to cause trouble. He is arrested and sent to jail; he gets out and meets the lovely Paulette Goddard, who's also a child of the streets. He and she go on to get jobs at a department store and so on and so forth. The film is composed of several skits: one of the best shows Chaplin rollerskating blindfolded in the department store on the fourth floor with no railing; the scene as a waiter in the cafè is also a marvel of physical comedy. The film is about hard-luck post-Depression America. It mirrors some of the stories from today: people desperately want to work and are driven to desperation to keep their heads above water. And The Man is always there to push you back under. It's a comedy, but a dark comedy. The Great Dictator (1940) -- "7/10" Another film -- a talkie this time -- starring Charlie Chaplin and Paulette Goddard. This one's a spoof of Germany, with Chaplin playing both a Jewish barber and the Führer himself. As the barber, he's a soldier in the first world war who crash-lands and gets amnesia -- for the next 25 years. He comes back to the ghetto to find that things have a changed a bit. As the Führer, he hams it up with his own made-up, Germanic-sounding and with English-intermingled language, the shortest phrases of which translate to paragraphs in English and vice versa. The barber eventually is swept up in a revolution, is captured and sent to a concentration camp. Some scenes bring to mind the films of Mel Brooks and the stormtroopers and other soldiers all remind me of the cowardly lion from the Wizard of Oz (actually quite a few of the scenes were reminiscent of that movie's style). The scenes are more cohesive than in Modern Times (the shave set to Brahms's Hungarian Dance 5 stands out). After some more misadventures, the film ends with a speech by the barber (now posing as the dictator), partially excerpted below: "The way of life can be free and beautiful, but we have lost the way. Greed has poisoned men's souls, has barricaded the world with hate, has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed. We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in. "Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge has made us cynical; our cleverness, hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery, we need humanity. More than cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost. "[...] Soldiers! Don't give yourselves to brutes, men who despise you, enslave you; who regiment your lives, tell you what to do, what to think and what to feel! Who drill you, diet you, treat you like cattle, use you as cannon fodder. Don't give yourselves to these unnatural men - machine men with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines, you are not cattle, you are men! "[...] Let us fight for a new world, a decent world that will give men a chance to work, that will give youth a future and old age a security. By the promise of these things, brutes have risen to power. But they lie! They do not fulfill that promise. They never will! Dictators free themselves but they enslave the people." The Social Network (2011) -- "5/10" I hated everyone in this movie, except for the young lady who was Eisenberg's girlfriend for the first five minutes of the movie. She was clever and destroyed him in that conversation. Sorkin's dialogue has its moments and Fincher's direction is good and Jesse Eisenberg plays a semi-autistic asshole quite well and Justin Timberlake plays a professional bullshitter quite well -- bravo to both of them -- but it's not really pleasant to watch. Most of Eisenberg's (Zuckerberg's) outbursts felt like long-form l'esprit d'escaliers that people just like Eisenberg's character think up for themselves when they're feeling neglected and want to exact revenge on an unfair and inferior world with their overarching cleverness. Everybody in the Ivy League is hot and thin and fit, so they should be worshiped, I guess? It felt like I was watching a high-production-value version of Beverly Hills 90210. I have no idea what a line like "Bosnia: they have no roads but they have Facebook" is even supposed to mean. Is it supposed to make the girl who said it look ignorant? Or is it an extemporaneous comment made by the scriptwriter through a minor character? Who knows? Who cares? There are no heroes in this movie. Two offended princes of privilege met with Larry Summers [12] and I had no idea who to root for; they each got their shots in and none of it was satisfying. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] I think Michael Gambon wins, however, for sheer unexplained insanity. Day-Lewis's craziness has a mean logic to it; Gambon is chaos incarnate. [1] Of course, Judith Miller was arrested for being "reportedly in possession of evidence relevant to the leak investigation" ("Failure to report source controversy" , not for actually revealing the identity of the agent. She had become more famous for having helped drum up support for the second U.S./Iraq War with nearly completely fabricated stores about weapons of mass destruction. [1] The credits roll over images of Okies on the Trail of Tears, poor familes and children, older homeless people and people in prison. The song is a final twist of the knife by Von Trier because it is just ludicrously upbeat and out-of-place for this film. [1] There are apparently two "versions" of the film, with the "catholic" version missing about four or five minutes of footage that can be found in the uncut "protestant" version. I did not feel that I missed them. [1] At the end of the film, Frenhofer speaks with Nicolas and Nicolas tells him that he will always respect him, but he wouldn't like to end up like him, as a comedy (a joke). Frenhofer looks up at him, smiles and says, "Stay just the way you are. I like you." Absolutely lovely, in context. [1] It was weird that the judge didn't let the family testify since they were eyewitnesses to the alleged murder. It's ludicrous that something so obvious must be explicitly stated or the witnesses are dismissed. [1] (Spoiler alert) It should be noted that what Haneke depicts in this film is clumsy, amateur S&M at best: it is the stumbling of damaged souls, not the inevitable end-result of masochistic tendencies. As Dan Savage would be quick to note, neither of them had any idea what they were doing, which is why it went so horribly wrong. And neither of them thought to start slowly and work up to more complex scenarios once they knew and trusted one another. It was an utter train-wreck that happened not because she was masochistic but because she knew nothing of love and sex, indeed of normal relationships with people based on anything other than condescension or fear. I'm sure Haneke caught some flack from the S&M community for sowing more fear and rumors and misinformation. [1] Spoiler alert: an explosion late in the film is wonderfully and quite humorously rendered. The same over-the-top film-making techniques but with much more style. Operation: End Game had similar pretensions to deliver a political message, but failed terribly compared to this gem. [1] It looks like they both sing during the stage sequences, but Bridges's voice is much stronger. [1] I wasn't the only one who noticed that Pacino totally "copped a feel" at one point (at 68 minutes in the version I was watching) -- in a way completely unrelated to the plot because he wasn't romantically linked with that girl at all. The old letch. [1] There is an interesting point being made in this film: that the strict adherence to the guiding principles of Tolstoyism -- to which the man himself never even pretended to keep -- is more than a sort of religion of its own. The unrelenting siege against organized religion cannot but engender a new religion, based perhaps on sounder principles, but nonetheless anchored in an unthinking faith and a desire to eradicate the other. The writings and philosophies of the deepest thinkers will often be twisted and simplified to fit into smaller minds. Thus was it with Chertkov and daughter Sasha, who ignored the bits of Tolstoy's philosophy that they deemed too difficult. [1] Larry Summers is a real-life former president of Harvard and Secretary of the U.S. Treasury who's real-life attribute of being a professional asshole and blowhard who's almost eerie in his ability to get everything important wrong while still trumpeting his own brilliance, well, that attribute is depicted perfectly in the movie. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2588 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2588 Sun, 01 Jan 2012 12:16:28 +0100 -- "6/10" 2. "The Hudsucker Proxy (1994)" <#Hudsucker> -- "9/10" 3. "Network (1976)" <#Network> -- "9/10" 4. "L'illusioniste (2010)" <#Illusioniste> -- "9/10" 5. "The Magic Christian (1969)" <#Magic> -- "6/10" 6. "The Infidel (2010)" <#Infidel> -- "7/10" 7. "Diary of a Wimpy Kid (2010)" <#Diary> -- "3/10" 8. "Percy Jackson and the Olympians: the Lightning Thief (2010)" <#Percy> -- "6/10" 9. "Ip Man 2 (2010)" <#Ip2> -- "8/10" 10. "Contagion (2011)" <#Contagion> -- "6/10" 11. "Everything Must Go (2010)" <#Everything> -- "8/10" 12. "Buried (2010)" <#Buried> -- "8/10" 13. "127 Hours (2010)" <#127> -- "7/10" 14. "Barton Fink (1991)" <#Barton> -- "9/10" 15. "Inside Job (2010)" <#Inside> -- "9/10" 16. "He Was a Quiet Man (2007)" <#Quiet> -- "8/10" 17. "When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts (2006)" <#Levees> -- "9/10" 18. "Trouble the Water (2008)" <#Trouble> -- "8/10" 19. "American: The Bill Hicks Story (2009)" <#American> -- "8/10" 20. "Man on Wire (2008)" <#Wire> -- "8/10" 21. "Hanna (2011)" <#Hanna> -- "4/10" 22. "Fermat's Last Theorem (1996)" <#Fermat> -- "7/10" 23. "Big Fan (2009)" <#Big> -- "7/10" 24. "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)" <#Eternal> -- "9/10" 25. "Vengeance (2009)" <#Vengeance> -- "7/10" 26. "The Losers (2010)" <#Losers> -- "6/10" 27. "Operation: Endgame (2010)" <#Operation> -- "7/10" 28. "Righteous Kill (2008)" <#Righteous> -- "5/10" 29. "Brazil (1985)" <#Brazil> -- "10/10" Machete (2010) -- "6/10" This movie is -- and I never thought I'd use this phrase -- a Danny Trejo vehicle directed by Robert Rodriguez (of Once Upon a Time in Mexico fame), so it's got lots of blood, lots of flying appendages and lots of buxom, armed babes. Machete continues Rodriguez's homage to Russ Meyers and proves relatively entertaining, no thanks to Jessica Alba's wooden acting. Good thing Lindsey Lohan was also in the flick or Alba might have looked bad. Lohan plays a tweaking daughter of a rich daddy (quite a stretch, I'm sure) and looks like she's method-acting. I mean meth-acting. Whatever. Michelle Rodriguez played the same role she always does, which means she's dressed for warm weather. The Hudsucker Proxy (1994) -- "9/10" Hudsucker Proxy was written, directed and produced by the Coen brothers with Sam Raimi. The dialogue and style of delivery were wonderful and worth the price of entry. The film is set in the late 1950s and stars Tim Robbins as a wide-eyed young go-getter who gets suckered into leading Hudsucker Industries by a conniving Paul Newman who's deliberately tanking the firm to perform stock manipulation. It was perfect to watch in juxtaposition with Network, which also had absolutely majestic dialogue and long-form soliloquies. Jennifer Jason Leigh is fantastic as Amy Archer and Bruce Campbell was a pleasant surprise in a small role as Smitty the reporter. John Mahoney (Martin Crane on Frasier) was also good as a fast-talking city editor which J.K. Simmons must have seen before inventing his J. Jonah Jameson for the Spiderman movies. "Only a numbskull thinks he knows things about things he knows nothing about." Network (1976) -- "9/10" The writing in Network is phenomenal -- what other film delivers lines like "intractible and adamantine" -- and it's famous for the second "mad-as-hell" speech by Howard Beale (the first one is not the famous one). However, there are other, more interesting soliloquies in the film and if you're a fan of well-written, philosophically and socially interesting dialogue, this is the movie for you. It's 35 years old and the problems documented in the film have only intensified. We are treading water and going backwards toward the cataract. As an example, here's the speech Max Blumenthal gives to Diana Christensen when he finally leaves her [1]: "It's too late, Diana. There's nothing left in you that I can live with. You're one of Howard's humanoids. If I stay with you, I'll be destroyed. Like Howard Beale was destroyed. Like Laureen Hobbs was destroyed. Like everything you and the institution of television touch is destroyed. You're television incarnate, Diana: Indifferent to suffering; insensitive to joy. All of life is reduced to the common rubble of banality. War, murder, death are all the same to you as bottles of beer. And the daily business of life is a corrupt comedy. You even shatter the sensations of time and space into split seconds and instant replays. You're madness, Diana. Virulent madness. And everything you touch dies with you. But not me. Not as long as I can feel pleasure, and pain... and love." Another unfortunately timeless speech is that delivered by capitalism incarnate, Arthur Jensen, to Howard Beale, which occurs at the end of the film and is much more interesting than any of Howard's (and also delivered with fire): "You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale, and I won't have it! Is that clear? You think you've merely stopped a business deal. That is not the case! The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country, and now they must put it back! It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity! It is ecological balance! You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, reichmarks, rins, rubles, pounds, and shekels. It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic and subatomic and galactic structure of things today! And YOU have meddled with the primal forces of nature, and YOU... WILL... ATONE! Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale? You get up on your little twenty-one inch screen and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM, and ITT, and AT&T, and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today. What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state, Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions, and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, just like we do. We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale." L'illusioniste (2010) -- "9/10" An exsquisitely drawn, animated [2] and scored film by Silvain Chomet (of les Triplets de Belleville-fame) that tells the achingly sad tale of a magician trying to make a living in Paris, then London, then the Scottish countryside and finally Edinburgh. He is joined by a Scottish lass who doesn't understand that he isn't really magic and has no concept of how money works. He does his level best not to have to disabuse her of this notion. The story is told almost entirely without words -- there are perhaps two dozen French and English words and the girl speaks what I believe to be Gaelic, though I understood not one word of it. His magical rabbit is cute and chubby and perfectly animated, right down to the snapping jaws (yeah, I'm looking at you, Pierre), although rabbits are not meat-eaters, as depicted. The girl eventually moves on to a more suitable sugar-daddy in the form of a young man ... once she's gotten enough nice things from the magician to attract new prey. Perhaps that's unfair, but I wonder whether her treatment of the illusionist as an ATM was an allegory that was semi-sweet only on the surface. The Magic Christian (1969) -- "6/10" Peter Sellers and Ringo Starr are an extremely rich father and adopted son who spend the whole movie playing pranks on people, proving that money can get people to do absolutely anything. The ride on the cruise ship, The Magic Christian is a psychedelic romp. Funny enough -- and Sellers is always fun to watch -- but nothing to write home about. The Infidel (2010) -- "7/10" A British film about a Muslim family man who finds out that he was adopted and that the first two weeks of his life were spent as a Jew. The son who's trying to marry the daughter of a reactionary Islamic cleric is an insufferable, whining idiot. The lead character and his newfound Jewish-NYC-cabbie-hack-driving friend are both quite likable and the plot has an interesting twist. Diary of a Wimpy Kid (2010) -- "3/10" Clearly, "Diary of a Pathologically Maladjusted Asshole", though orders of magnitude more accurate, did not market well. It wasn't the worst kids movie I've ever seen -- far from it -- but the lead character was a completely unlikeable pain in the ass. The only halfway amusing character was his older brother; I'm almost certain that the intent was not that one should sympathize with him, but that's what I found myself doing. I shudder to think of a generation of kids raised on the books on which this film is based. Thank goodness most of them are an ocean away. Percy Jackson and the Olympians: the Lightning Thief (2010) -- "6/10" An expanded version of Xena/Hercules for the teen set. It wasn't terrible but I'm not looking forward to the sequel as I'm not really the target audience (anymore). Smarter than expected, though, so if you are the target audience, you could do much, much worse. For example, you could get sucked into watching what I can only imagine to be the abomination that is a film based on the atrocious writings of Stephanie Meyer. At least with this flick, you learn something about the Greek gods, which is a pantheon with a bit more richness and depth than "Team Edward vs. Team Jacob". Ip Man 2 (2010) -- "8/10" This is the second part of the story of Bruce Lee's teacher. It's only semi-biographical, but Ip Man is portrayed very well by Donnie Yen as a classically stoic and both inwardly and outwardly peaceful man who happens to kick absolute ass at Wing Chun Gung Fu. The second half of the film is about his prize fight against an over-the-top obnoxious British boxer -- all the British are caricatures of evil; is it supposed to be reassuring that the Hong Kong film industry can portray foreigners as unscrupulous idiots as well as Hollywood? That part kinda sorta reminded me of Fearless with Jet Li where he defeated all Western comers as well. A decent flick but the subtitles were nearly useless although not hugely necessary as there were a lot of fight scenes which were shot so nicely as to need no further explication. Contagion (2011) -- "6/10" A remarkably boring film in which a bunch of people get sick but you're never really afraid for the life of anyone because you don't really come to care about anyone. Shot in standard Soderbergh style, which was nice -- especially the lab and gadget shots that made everything seem very normal and not over-techy. The best part was that they listed the populations of many of the large cities of the world, so I learned something at least. The reveal of the vaccine test was handled in a pretty ham-handed manner with way too much talking when the scene was self-explanatory. Maybe it tested poorly with audiences who got easily confused. That would explain the ending as well, which ripped away any and all mystery as to the origin and genesis of the virus. A lot of decent actors were wasted, with Elliot Gould phoning it in and Matt Damon just getting stuck with a bad (boring) character. Laurence Fishburne and Kate Winslet were good as usual, but also didn't have too much to work with. Everything Must Go (2010) -- "8/10" Will Ferrell plays an alcoholic salesman thrown out of the house by his wife. When he returns from a sales trip, he finds that all the locks have been changed, his bank account is frozen, his credit card canceled and all of his stuff is on the lawn. This all on the same day that he loses his job. Ferrell does an excellent job of portraying a man who is essentially good, has lost his way and is trying to claw his way forward to something better. This film is proof that the guy can play a serious role even better than he does comedy. Buried (2010) -- "8/10" The film takes place entirely within a box underground. Well, it's a bit of a spoiler, but the entire film is Ryan Reynolds buried alive somewhere in Iraq. He's a trucker who works for a contracting company. He has a cell phone and the only other actors and actresses are disembodied voices. It was actually pretty riveting and held up surprisingly well. Reynolds is excellent and the screenplay is as well, with several interesting plot points and a very interesting conclusion. 127 Hours (2010) -- "7/10" This film is an excellent double-feature with Buried above because it's almost exclusively a one-man show starring James France as Aron Ralston, an outdoor adventurer who was famously trapped in a canyon when he went out solo one weekend. His arm was trapped beneath a boulder and, after more than five days, he snapped the ulna and radius on that arm, then sawed through the flesh, tendons and sinews -- with a cheap, dull knife -- to free himself and walk and rappel out of the canyon, where he encountered other hikers and was rescued by helicopter. You know, like a boss. Barton Fink (1991) -- "9/10" A Coen Brothers film about a self-absorbed workers-of-the-world-unite writer whose initial success in Broadway theater is followed up by a stint writing B-movies in Hollywood. Is the pure writer corrupted by the mendacity and greed of Hollywood or were the writer's pretensions at knowing anything about class struggle anything but a hollow sham? Can someone who has no life experience be a writer? Is self-induced isolation and suffering a substitute for the miseries of real life? A tale of idealism gone wrong or right or taking the course that it is nearly always fated to take. Fink can see his own end in the corruption of the spirit that is John Mahoney's portrayal of Bill Mayhew. And Fink's supposed connection to the common man -- and desire to write about him -- is belied by his complete inability to listen to John Goodman's stories, which he's dying to tell. This failure is all the more ironic as Fink is suffering from epic writer's block and exhibits all the symptoms of a classic procrastinator. The clip and pacing of the dialogue is similar to that in Hudsucker Proxy, with Tony Shalhoub delivering especially well. Inside Job (2010) -- "9/10" This film tells the story of the worldwide financial crisis -- the one that started in 2007 and exploded fully in 2008 when Lehman collapsed -- in an extremely clear and succinct manner. It's narrated by Matt Damon and features interviews with many of the more knowledgeable players (including some very good quotes from Nouriel Roubini) and many highly placed officials and individuals who are confronted quite plainly with hard questions. A must-see for anyone who cares to know what really happened and has 100 minutes to spare. He Was a Quiet Man (2007) -- "8/10" An interesting story of a man, played by Christian Slater, whose life is an abysmal, nigh-limitlessly bleak landscape of dullness and drudgery. He has no friends, his job is horrible, his coworkers abuse him and he meticulously plans to "go postal", discussing minutiae with his goldfish and hummingbirds. Even in this, though, he is preempted by another coworker who goes postal first. He shoots this coworker to save the day and changes his life. Or does he? Where does the crazed fantasy end and reality begin? An interesting look at the sheer mindless horror of a life of quiet desperation with no hope of accomplishing anything to be proud of or escaping the cookie-cutter crappy suburban existence promised by modern life. When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts (2006) -- "9/10" A 260-minute documentary about New Orleans and the aftermath of the Katrina hurricane, the "lego" levees, the failure of the Army Corps of Engineers, the storm surge, the flooding, the failure of the federal government to help immediately after the flooding, and further failure in the medium- and long-term. Why is Louisiana so poor? Louisiana is poor because they suffer from all the ill effects of having 25% of America's oil and natural gas come from just off their coasts...but just far enough away that they get nothing for their suffering (it all goes to the federal government, unlike Alaska, Texas and others). It depicts the scattering of families to all corners of the nation just to get them out of New Orleans, but not delivering them to family members, but pretty much anywhere, to live in hotels, and deriding them as refugees. These poor people lost everything they had -- which wasn't much -- only to discover that they had even fewer rights in America than they thought they had. Federal aid to New Orleans residents is considered charity instead of the least we can do. Whole districts were still not even cleaned up nine months later, with rapacious developers keeping it that way so they can scoop up property deeds from people who can't live in areas with no electricity, no sewer, no water and no schools, and who got no insurance money on technicalities despite having paid premiums for decades. [3] And these people were still living in tents because the FEMA trailers still hadn't showed up. It would be interesting to see how things stand now, but gentrification is almost guaranteed. Most of the film is interviews and musical interludes with a very interesting cast, including but not limited to Phyllis Montana LeBlanc, Garland Robinette, John Barry, Judith Morgan and Michael Eric Dyson. Highly recommended. Trouble the Water (2008) -- "8/10" Another movie about the aftermath of Katrina but focused very much on one family, headed (in spirit at least) by an aspiring female rapper. It's not nearly as informative as When the Levees Broke but it offers perhaps a rawer, close-up look at how much the survivors were on their own ... and for how long. "They're still treatin' us third world, man." precedes a segment featuring an interview with a total bimbo who talks about the "20% of the city that wasn't devastated" being the part "where the tourists are" anyway. Obviously she doesn't mention the possibility that that's why those parts were saved and the others were not. Doesn't matter; her business is booming. American: The Bill Hicks Story (2009) -- "8/10" This movie is a fitting homage to one of the greatest comedians America has every produced. It covers his standup career from an incredibly early start at 14 years old (with footage!) to his darker times of alcoholism and drug use (during which he was still often funny) to his time of recovery and discovery of purpose and politics and philosophy. His close family and friends were unanimous in their love of him (though that's to be expected of a film produced by them). Though it's entirely true to think that his life and a blossoming career was brutally cut off by pancreatic cancer at age 34, he had been quite successful in the business for 20 years at that point (though his success was much greater in England, where he was worshiped). A better film for Hicks fans than as an introduction, but still provides a taste of what you're missing if you've never heard him (or of him). Man on Wire (2008) -- "8/10" The story of wire-walker Philippe Petit, who walked first a wire strung to the Notre Dame, then the Sydney Harbour Bridge and finally, between the Two Towers. For the final feat, he and his ad-hoc team spent months studying the buildings, made several trips from France to New York, enlisted the aid of several others, planned the cable and stays meticulously and finally persevered in what was truly one of the most amazing acts of unique insanity -- or trust in skill -- the world has ever seen. The film includes interviews with the major players as well as a lot of photographs and videos of practice and training sessions as well as the final act itself. The story is spellbinding: he walked across, saw that there were police on the other side and ran back out to the middle to perform some more; he spent almost an hour out there. The police officers telling the story fail completely to suppress their wonder at the act ("Magnificent", "Well, you wouldn't call him a wire-walker 'cause he more like dancin'" and "I was witnessin' something I would never see again"). The title is actually taken from the charge written on the official arrest ticket. Warning: some of the interviews are in French, so make sure you have subtitles if you need them. Hanna (2011) -- "4/10" A movie about a genetically altered girl who, for 15 years, is raised as a killing machine by her super-agent father near the Arctic Circle. When she reaches 15 or 16, she wants to leave and her father tells her that her mission has begun. They both decamp and agree to meet elsewhere. Adventures ensue, but not the action adventures you'd expect. There's a lot of maudlin moping about on Hanna's part and severely bad judgment on her father's part (situational awareness is super-high at one point, then zero at another). Cate Blanchett's accent shoots all over the place, as do her seeming superpowers (she doesn't have any, but she caught up to Hanna, who's ostensibly super-enhanced, while running in the woods and on train tracks in Prada shoes). The German henchmen were ridiculous caricatures and also seemingly super-powered (or super-sneaky, see situational awareness comment above). Not recommended. Fermat's Last Theorem (1996) -- "7/10" A short documentary about Andrew Wiles and how he came to be the man to solve Fermat's Last Theorem. He did it all without a computer -- "I never use a computer" -- the documentary shows him at a huge desk covered in papers, all covered with equations and squiggles. Big Fan (2009) -- "7/10" Patton Oswalt plays a guy from Staten Island who lives for the New York Giants. Every waking moment revolves around his team and its quarterback. The fan is confronted with tribulations that should rock his faith. But they do not. They do not. Oswalt is quite good, as is his nearly equally die-hard friend, played by Kevin Corrigan. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) -- "9/10" Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet as a mismatched couple in a relationship that's basically good, but fraught with tension because of her drinking and his tedium. In a fit of pique, she seeks out a service that can erase all memory of a person from your mind; he soon does the same. The dream/memory/reality overlap sequences are done quite well and the supporting cast is good. It's not a first-date movie, but it's a great film about relationships and about how well anyone really knows anyone and what it even means to say that one knows someone because which facet(s) of that person do you even know? Vengeance (2009) -- "7/10" A French chef with a shadowy past teams up with three locals in Hong Kong to avenge the shooting of his daughter and death of her family. Mostly English, with some French and a fair amount of Chinese (I assume), so get subtitles if you can. As you can imagine, the dialogue doesn't really make a tremendous amount of a difference. Shot very nicely, with the requisite rain scenes, slow-motion flying paper scene and blood misting with bullet-time action sequences. The plot was just weird enough to stay interesting, although Hong Kong police response time to shooting is apparently quite bad. Also, super-henchmen sometimes shoot extremely accurately and at others, when the script calls for it, they can't hit the broad side of a barn. It was like watching the A-Team or GI Joe. Still, entertaining enough with some cool-guy actors. Beat the pants off of Hanna, at any rate. Take the Neuron Express for a brief tour of consciousness (2006) A "two-hour interview with V.S. Ramachandran" , who talks about consciousness, neurology, psychology and a host of other topics, all related to understanding how humans think, what we feel and what it means to even ask those questions. At what level should which issues be investigated? (e.g. can we discover consciousness at the atomic level?) Fascinating, thought-provoking stuff. It could be reasonably well-coupled with "Ask Sam Harris Anything #1" , although I thought V.S. had fewer hangups (man, Harris just cannot stop talking about Muslims as a particularly invidious form of evil; my theory is that it's because of his crush on Ayaan Hirsi Ali, whom he also can't stop talking about). The Losers (2010) -- "6/10" Though this movie has its moments -- for example, Chris Evans is pretty funny -- it's pretty much sunk by yet another flyweight woman who can kick anyone's ass, this time played by Zoe Saldana. She's absolutely terrible in a way I haven't seen since Halle Berry did her damnedest to ruin the first two X-Men movies. The rest of the cast is OK (though Idris Elba's much better in other things), with Jason Patric making a surprise return as a somewhat humorous evil genius. Production values are pretty high and most of the action sequences are tight. Operation: Endgame (2010) -- "7/10" Another comedy/action movie that was much funnier than The Losers (especially the first half). The action was well-filmed and less cartoonish than expected -- especially with Maggie Q in the cast. Rob Corddry, Jeffrey Tambor and Ellen Barkin are all decent but couldn't save the flick. The plot turned out to be a convoluted fantasy about recovering all of the Bush administration's secrets and getting them out of the super-secret spy lair before they could be destroyed. Or something like that. It was definitely better than The Losers, though. And both are better than Hanna which -- I cannot emphasize this enough -- sucked. Righteous Kill (2008) -- "5/10" De Niro and Pacino team up as cops again (last time was Heat I think) but they're much more...seasoned now. They're on the tail of a serial killer of whose work they wholeheartedly approve because he mostly kills people who "deserved it". Soon, however, the other team assigned to the case begins to suspect that a cop is behind the murders and they even know who that cop might be (spoiler alert: De Niro). It's decent, though some scenes drag on interminably. The luscious Carla Gugino was thrown in as a sexually masochistic fellow cop to keep things spicy, I guess. [4] Unfortunately, she's with De Niro (at least initially), who's either wearing a girdle in the film, or should have been. Pacino played less stereotypically Pacino, which was nice, but De Niro just can't...stop...making...that...face. Brazil (1985) -- "10/10" Director Terry Gilliam's masterpiece of a late 20th-century future where Orwell's 1984 society has, for the most part, come to pass. Gilliam's take is dark, but silly, if that makes sense and delves into the mindlessness and silliness of our society and bureaucracy as well as the evil of it. The soul-draining quality of everyday life that stifles any sort of creativity in the cradle, as it were. His vision of a future world was not that bloody far off in spirit, to what we have today. Jonathan Price is quite good, as is Robert De Niro, both of whom would go on to take much, much worse roles later in their careers. Michael Palin is also quite good in a supporting role. The long final sequence is pure Gilliam, with fantastical elements and the merging of dream and reality that suggests either a very good or very bad drug trip (depending on preference and location within said trip). [5] -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] The background is that Diana Christenson, played by Faye Dunaway, is a strong woman, who acts as a stereotypical man (much as Jennifer Jason Leigh did in Hudsucker Proxy, also overtly noted throughout that film). In a barely-hidden allusion to this, during one tryst with Max, Diana can't stop talking about work the whole time they're undressing and getting into bed -- which Max tolerates and ignores so as not to kill whatever mood there was, which was nascent, actually. Once in bed, she is almost immediately satisfied and continues talking about work throughout. [1] It is a delight to watch a cartoon which is a cartoon rather than a CGI approximation. This animation is art. [1] And the insurance companies that are aggressively denying claims are probably the same organization that's trying to buy up development rights and land and will move in more well-to-do people. [1] And perhaps to assuage any feelings of latent homosexuality on the part of insecure young male moviegoers who wanted to go see the "psycho from Taxi Driver" team up with the "psycho from Scarface" and then realized they were watching a flick about two old guys. [1] The inscrutable samurai would reappear in the Fisher King, which dream sequences had many similarities to those of Brazil. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2569 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2569 Sun, 11 Dec 2011 21:28:19 +0100 -- "8/10" 2. "Milk (2008)" <#Milk> -- "7/10" 3. "Half-baked (1998)" <#Half> -- "5/10" 4. "Funny People (2009)" <#Funny> -- "6/10" 5. "See No Evil, Hear No Evil (1989)" <#See> -- "8/10" 6. "Due Date (2010)" <#Due> -- "6/10" 7. "Cargo (2009)" <#Cargo> -- "8/10" 8. "The King's Speech (2010)" <#Speech> -- "7/10" 9. "Rien à Déclarer (2010, fr)" <#Rien> -- "8/10" 10. "Tree of Life (2011)" <#Tree> -- "7/10" 11. "Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011)" <#Rise> -- "6/10" 12. "Horrible Bosses (2011)" <#Horrible> -- "8/10" 13. "The Eiger Sanction (1975)" <#Eiger> -- "6/10" 14. "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 (2011)" <#Harry> -- "7/10" 15. "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005)" <#Charlie> -- "7/10" 16. "The Wrestler (2008, de)" <#Wrestler> -- "9/10" 17. "True Grit (2010)" <#True> -- "9/10" 18. "Shooter (2007)" <#Shooter> -- "8/10" 19. "Das Experiment (2002, de)" <#Experiment> -- "8/10" 20. "Gone Baby Gone (2007)" <#Gone> -- "8/10" 21. "Bad Santa (2003)" <#Bad> -- "9/10" 22. "Hot Fuzz (2007)" <#Hot> -- "8/10" 23. "Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (2010)" <#Prince> -- "6/10" 24. "X-Men: First Class (2011)" <#X> -- "9/10" 25. "Thor (2011)" <#Thor> -- "8/10" 26. "Kick-Ass (2010)" <#Kick> -- "6/10" Talking Funny (2011) -- "8/10" A four-person round table about comedy starring Ricky Gervais, Jerry Seinfeld, Chris Rock and Louis C.K. Lots of laughs and some interesting points made -- though Gervais seemed to be far ahead of the others in pure erudition, trying to delve deeper into the philosophical and perhaps philological implications of humor and what it means to say that something's funny. The others seemed more into gut feeling that something was funny and weren't too interested in dissecting the point further (e.g. when discussing the "joke" about the amateur comedian who came out with a guitar, playing Otis Redding's classic and singing "sitting on a cock 'cause I'm gay" -- Gervais argued that, while on the surface it's kind of funny, it succeeds only by appealing to an atavistic anti-gay in all of them, instilled by their upbringing and so, in a sense, is a cheap laugh; the others just insisted that it was funny without seeing the need for further explication). Milk (2008) -- "7/10" The biographical film of Supervisor Harvey Milk, the first openly homosexual elected official in America, who transformed San Fransisco politics and met a gruesome demise in an assassination at the hands of an unstable fellow supervisor. Sean Pean is excellent as Milk and James Franco is very good as his good friend. Half-baked (1998) -- "5/10" Dave Chappelle is very endearing as a pot-smoking custodian in this film about ... smoking pot. There were some funny moments, but Jim Brewer is a pain in the ass and the only thing keeping it together is Chappelle and his charm. Jon Stewart's cameo is utterly forgettable and mercifully short. Funny People (2009) -- "6/10" A darker Adam Sandler film about a comedian who followed a very Sandler-like star arc and became very rich and very famous (e.g. George Miller in the film was famous for playing "Merman", which is clearly a cut at "Water Boy"). Sandler is good in a dark role and Seth Rogan is good as his new assistant/potential friend. The plot whipsaws back and forth, appearing a bit out-of-sorts at time, but also perhaps adequately depicting what a life of fame is like. Or maybe that's too deep. Who knows? See No Evil, Hear No Evil (1989) -- "8/10" Gene Wilder as a deaf man and Richard Pryor as a blind man, teaming up to thwart a heist of a precious coin. As with Blazing Saddles, it's refreshing to watch a comedy made for adults, with adult humor, cursing and nudity where appropriate instead of the watered-down pap we're offered in the form of audience-tested PG-13 entertainment today (yeah, Chris Rock, Pryor's rolling over in his f'in grave at your "star turn" in Grown Ups). Pryor and Wilder are absolutely hilarious. Due Date (2010) -- "6/10" A buddy movie pairing Zack Galifianakis with Robert Downey Jr. in what kind of felt like a remake of Planes, Trains and Automobiles. As usual with Galifianakis, the expected insanity is a little more "off" than with other similar comedians. Downey Jr. is his usual self, doing a decent job but not amazing. Cargo (2009) -- "8/10" A Swiss science-fiction film set in the years 2267-2270 about a cargo container ship traversing the vast deep emptiness between our solar system and Proxima Centauri. The interiors and exteriors are equally convincing, with the enormous exteriors portrayed nearly as majestically as Kubrick did in 2001: A Space Odyssey. The plot was also quite in the vein of the golden age of science fiction and the acting was decent. A pleasant surprise. Saw it in the original German. The King's Speech (2010) -- "7/10" A tightly-shot and cinematically stunning film about King George VI (played by Colin Firth), who guided England through the second world war, all the time accompanied by his Australian speech therapist, Lionel Logue (played by Geoffrey Rush). Helena Bonham Carter rounded the amazing cast of very few major players. Riveting and beautiful and heartwarming without schmaltz. It being almost completely based on a true story was a definite plus. Rien à Déclarer (2010, fr) -- "8/10" A wonderfully told story of a town on the French-Belgian border in 1993 when the EU opened all of the borders. The customs officers on both sides -- as well as the townspeople -- must come to grips with the change. Benoît Poelvoorde as the Francophobe Belgian customs officer is absolutely hilarious with his over-the-top, spluttering and inchoate diatribes against the French. Dany Boon is just as funny, but in a subtler way (for the most part). Tree of Life (2011) -- "7/10" The first part of this film is like the end of 2001, with a lot of absolutely beautiful photography and short videos. These scenes are accompanied by a voice-over providing some background to the story that will unfold in what can only be called the second act of the film. Brad Pitt is fantastic as a tightly-wound engineer in the 50s, living what he manages -- for the most part -- to convince himself is a perfect life in 1950s America. His family is dragged on this course as well, though they don't always like it (especially when he gets violent, though only vocally). The story is told non-linearly (although a large chunk in the middle is quite linear) and purports to tell the history of the universe, culminating in the life of a single man who ends up not getting all that he hoped for. Achieves enough of what it set out to do so that this doesn't come across as too pretentious. Pitt is excellent, as is Jessica Chastain as his wife. Sean Penn emanates pathos in a mostly non-speaking role as the grown-up version of Pitt's most unruly son. Worth watching, but you have to be in the right mood. Rise of the Planet of the Apes (2011) -- "6/10" A prequel to the Planet of the Apes ("Rise of" ... get it?) that delivers some recrimination of animal experimentation that's not too preachy. James Franco is good, as is Andy Serkis as the monkey (again, acting in a motion-sensor-covered lycra body-suit). The action scenes are well-done and the film stays interesting and is, for once, not excruciatingly long. Horrible Bosses (2011) -- "8/10" A surprisingly funny film about three working schlubs whose lives are made unutterably miserable by their bosses: Jennifer Aniston, Kevin Spacey and Colin Farrell. The guys themselves -- Jason Bateman, Charlie Day and Jason Sudeikis -- are quite funny as well: the cocaine scene is really worth the price of admission. The plot keeps things interesting enough, with good dialogue. The surprising part is that Jennifer Aniston just steals the hell out of the movie as a ridiculous parody of a sexually predatory dentist. God, she's dirty; you just can't believe the things that come out of her mouth, all delivered with a straight face. The Eiger Sanction (1975) -- "6/10" Clint Eastwood and George Steele in a movie about a retired contract killer/mountain climber turned professor (Eastwood) with a way with the ladies (kind of, see below) who gets blackmailed into performing one last job: on the Eiger, of all places. Some stilted dialogue, but the movie was clearly filmed in Switzerland (even though the NPCs all speak high German). Pretty harshly misogynistic in ways that are considerably less subtle than what you'd see today. Seems a lot like Eastwood's attempt to make an American James Bond movie (and his professor role predates Harrison Ford's Indiana Jones role by several years), right down to highly improbable female roles like the mute Native American mountain climber/fashion model with fake boobs named George. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 (2011) -- "7/10" A fitting conclusion to the gargantuan series of films, which follow a single story arc (more or less). My first reaction on starting the film was a desire to stop and watch the previous film again, because I couldn't remember what was going on. Unusually, the film didn't provide a recap as so many serial films do. It made you think and pay attention, which was good. Reasonable well-acted -- Ralph Fiennes as Voldemort is wonderful: watch his eloquent hands -- and the CGI is perfect. Stayed 100% true to the book, as with the other films, including the overwhelmingly sappy epilogue. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory (2005) -- "7/10" Johnny Depp takes on the immense challenge of living up to the incredibly high standard of disturbingly serene wackiness set by Gene Wilder, who played Wonka in the original movie. Everyone else is pretty much forgettable window-dressing for Depp as Wonka (even an unusually subdued Helena Bonham Carter) and it's an entertaining film, even though the dance numbers get a bit long after the first one or two of them. Another beautifully rendered, colorful, slightly-off world as envisioned by director Tim Burton. The Wrestler (2008, de) -- "9/10" What is there to say other than that this is the role that Mickey Rourke was born to play? That Randy "The Ram" is a perfect metaphor for Rourke's relationship with his own career? Perhaps that's reading too much into it, but it felt so right while watching it. That, and, temporary distractions engendered by Marisa Tomei's nigh-ridiculous level of sexiness in a role an exotic dancer. Wow. But back to Rourke, who -- together with director Aranovsky -- tells the story of a man trying to escape his life of quiet desperation as if the story had never been told before. His pain is palpable. Riveting. Saw it in German. True Grit (2010) -- "9/10" A Coen Brothers remake of the John Wayne original, starring Jeff Bridges in the (male) lead role with Matt Damon in a strong supporting role. Hailee Steinfeld stars as a self-possessed young lady on a mission to avenge her father's death. Josh Brolin also shows up in yet another Western as the bad guy. Interestingly, everyone has exquisite grammar and almost everyone has horrific diction -- with the notable exception of Ms. Steinfeld. Bridges, on the other hand, is a slurring, dialectically impaired monstrosity that is both a tour-de-force and a veritable nightmare for anyone who doesn't speak English natively. Strong story, excellent pacing and lovely cinematography, as expected. Shooter (2007) -- "8/10" Mark Wahlberg stars as retired Marine sniper living way the hell out in the middle of nowhere (Montana?) when he's visited by mysterious government agents who want him to come back and do just one more job. After he shoots something really, really far away to prove the few unbelieving members of the group that he's really awesome at shooting, he's forced to agree to the job. Though this sounds horrible, it's actually quite a good flick, with a relatively engaging plot and Wahlberg doing a good job selling his role. Fun to watch and an altogether more interesting ending than expected. Das Experiment (2002, de) -- "8/10" If you get into it and allow yourself to be swept away by the evil of the guards, it's a harrowing film. If you read the Stanford Prison Experiment -- or saw any of the footage -- this will be the case, as you will be in possession of scientific evidence that the human psyche and personality is so malleable as to allow near-complete change due to circumstance alone. The film is about a bunch of guys (students, in the original experiment) who are paid to participate in a two-week experiment in which half play guards and the other half play prisoners in an ersatz prison constructed in the lab's basement. The guys who play guards take to their roles with gusto and take no time at all to start treating the prisoners as if they were hardened criminals; most of the men playing criminals also take to their roles as cowed, meek prisoners quite quickly. The carrot of a payoff at the end of the two weeks is occasionally dangled as a reason for this compliance, but the degree to which they acquiesce is astonishing, as is the speedy descent into brutality on the part of the guards. You'll probably think many times "I would never put up with that; those aren't real guards" (if you're a prisoner) or "I would never participate in that" (if you're a guard), but experimental evidence says otherwise [1]. Interesting film and well-acted for the most part (Moritz Bleibtreu as #77 was particularly good; you may remember him from Run Lola Run). Gone Baby Gone (2007) -- "8/10" Casey Affleck stars in this tightly-written film about a young cop's first encounters with what seems to be unavoidable corruption and the tough job that otherwise-good cops have when they realize that what's right is often not the result of their actions. Because they're hamstrung by a legal system that doesn't understand the real world. But cops do. So, sometimes they need to take the law into their own hands and play judge and jury as well (if not executioner). And so on and so forth. It sounds trite but it plays pretty well, with some good tension and conflict. Affleck discovers something that looks like a clear case of corruption, but turns out to be a completely different form of corruption -- one that's supported by his own fiancé (girlfriend?), who forces him to choose between her and the moral choice he's leaning toward. Affleck is very good. Bad Santa (2003) -- "9/10" Billy Bob Thornton goes even lower than Nicholas Cage in Leaving Las Vegas, as does his bartender girlfriend (played by Lauren Graham, of Gilmore Girls fame, who's actually quite charming in this as opposed to the jibbering, annoying fool she played in the TV series). Some of the dialogue is absolutely unbelievably filthy but it fits just right. Thornton plays an alcoholic safe-cracking Santa who teams up with the vertically-challenged Tony Cox (who's awesome as an elf) to rob stores during the Christmas season. Bernie Mac essentially plays himself as head of security of the latest store on which they set their sights. Thornton finds redemption in little Thurman Merman, played pitch-perfect by Brett Kelly. Great soundtrack of classical music (e.g. Chopin's Nocturne Op. 9 No. 2 accompanies the finale). Saw it in German. Hot Fuzz (2007) -- "8/10" Simon Pegg and Nick Frost (the team from Shaun of the Dead) are back, this time as police officers in a sleepy little town in the English countryside. Pegg plays a straight-shooter from London where Frost is the local schlub. The buddy action movie gets an entertaining tongue-in-cheek treatment with enough entertaining plot twists to keep things interesting. The town turns out not to be so sleepy after all and, as in Shaun of the Dead, there are some oddly compelling if seemingly incongruous action scenes. Saw it in German. Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time (2010) -- "6/10" Jake Gyllenhaal, Alfred Molina, Ben Kingsley add some halfway-decent acting to an adventure movie based on a video game. (Richard Coyle -- Jeffrey of Couplings -- was nearly unrecognizable as Tus, one of Dastan's brothers.) It was decent and reminded me more of the Mummy series than the latest Indiana Jones movies, which is a good thing. Jake Gyllenhaal plays a Persian Prince (duh.) caught up in palace intrigue, attacks on peaceful cities looking for nonexistent weapons (ahem.) and naturally a grudging relationship with Gemma Arterton, the only female cast member. She's cute and lithe but treated as eye-candy by the script (as is Gyllenhaal, to be fair). Mostly predictable, but relatively well-executed. X-Men: First Class (2011) -- "9/10" James McAvoy would be the best actor in this movie if Michael Fassbender wasn't also in it. The story is well-written and the more than two hours are up before you know it. The various themes are treated with decent seriousness. It's really hard not to root for Magneto (Fassbender) who just keeps being right about everything (namely that life is shit and the fuckers are out to get you if you're different). Prof. X (McAvoy) wants to give peace a chance and he's taught some harsh lessons, which he naturally refuses to learn in the end. Perhaps he needs to be beaten over the head with human treachery a bit more. Not surprising that he needs a few more goes at it, having grown up in the lap of luxury as he did. The rest of the cast is OK, but pales in contrast to the two leads. The story captures the subtlety of the comic book (which, in turn, captured the subtlety of real life) that things are often not black and white, actions have consequences and people have histories, to which they may be inextricably bound. Thor (2011) -- "8/10" Whoever cast relative newcomer Chris Hemsworth as Thor did a helluva job. Hemsworth, on the other hand, did a lot of work in a gym or is just naturally insanely mesomorphic. At any rate, it was enough to make Kat Dennings and Natalie Portman slobber throughout the film. [2] Is it feminism when women are portrayed as being as single-minded as men? Even when at least one of them is ostensibly a doctor of physics? What I know of the mythology was treated quite well and Loki's tale was treated as a subtle mix of good and evil rather than the black/white so often favored by the fast-food US film industry. A cool flick and honestly looking forward to a sequel, perhaps with a bit less of the bra-and-pantie-throwing on the part of Portman (if she's in fact capable of doing anything else these days -- her career arc of late says otherwise). Kick-Ass (2010) -- "6/10" An overly long flick about costumed vigilantes, some with serious, serious hardware and serious, serious skills. The title character is a high-school kid who has a high pain-threshold and a lot of metal in his body due to a traffic accident. It means he can take a serious beating, which is kind of his super power. Nicholas Cage (Big Daddy) and newcomer Chloë Grace Moretz (Hit Girl) are the more skilled, hardware-packing variety who make a serious dent in a crime family. It's a bit off-putting that Hit Girl's only about 11 years old, but her John-Woo-inspired choreography is lovely. The movie was OK, but dragged on and the time between fight scenes was often a wasteland that had me looking at my watch. Plus, there's the unnerving thing of casting an 11-year-old in a star role -- which I think is almost always annoying -- and the creepy, Manga-ish overtones it implied. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] Zimbardo does point out that some of the men stuck to their personalities and didn't let themselves be carried away by the game, but most did. The film also has one guard who refuses to stoop to the level of the others. [1] And kudos to Ms. Dennings for doing such a great job of distracting us from Ms. Portman. Who would have guessed? ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2548 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2548 Sat, 22 Oct 2011 09:31:47 +0200 -- "6/10" 2. "Crimson Tide (1995)" <#Crimson> -- "8/10" 3. "Grown Ups (2010)" <#Grown> -- "2/10" 4. "United 93 (2006)" <#United> -- "4/10" 5. "True Crime (1999)" <#True> -- "8/10" 6. "A Few Good Men (1992)" <#A> -- "8/10" 7. "Do The Right Thing (1989)" <#Do> -- "9/10" 8. "Confessions of a Shopaholic (2009)" <#Confessions> -- "4/10" 9. "Deep Impact (1998)" <#Deep> -- "2/10" 10. "Dogma (1999)" <#Dogma> -- "7/10" 11. "Plastic Planet (2009)" <#Plastic> -- "7/10" 12. "The Tourist (2010)" <#Tourist> -- "5/10" 13. "Monsters vs. Aliens (2009)" <#Monsters> -- "3/10" 14. "Ghost Busters (1984)" <#Ghost> -- "8/10" 15. "Blazing Saddles (1974)" <#Blazing> -- "10/10" 16. "The Fifth Element (1997)" <#Fifth> -- "10/10" 17. "Tears of the Sun (2003)" <#Tears> -- "6/10" 18. "Dinner for Schmucks (2010)" <#Dinner> -- "7/10" 19. "Spider-Man 2 (2004)" <#Spider> -- "8/10" 20. "Transporter 3 (2008)" <#Transporter> -- "6/10" My Life in Ruins (2008) -- "6/10" A cute comedy about tour guides in Greece. Almost totally formulaic but still somehow entertaining. Crimson Tide (1995) -- "8/10" An excellent submarine thriller with Denzel Washington as Captain Gene Hackman's executive officer as their sub heads toward a showdown with Russian rebels with their fingers on the nuclear trigger. Viggo Mortenson is excellent as well, and James Gandolfini plays a small-minded kowtower so well that one wonders whether he's acting at all. A lot of the supporting cast is really good and the plot is quite tight -- up to the point where Hackman's character exhibits a startlingly racist side that doesn't gel with any of the rest of the plot. Grown Ups (2010) -- "2/10" Adam Sandler, Kevin James, Chris Rock, David Spade, Rob Schneider, Steve Buscemi, Salma Hayek, Maria Bello, Tim Meadows, Colin Quinn: what could go wrong? Well, they could all be enjoying the hell out of making the movie so much that no one noticed how bad and awkward the script and dialogue are. There are moments that are funny, but far more moments that make you cringe. Maybe they meant the film ironically: instead of making a movie about what it would be like if these five hilarious guys got together again after 20 years, they made the movie showing how awkward and lame any five guys are whose lives diverged 20 years ago. Instead of a comedy showcasing the best of the best in humor, it's a drama piece showing the mundanity of most people's lives. United 93 (2006) -- "4/10" A film about the possible sequence of events on the ill-fated flight 93 of United Airlines that crashed in Pennsylvania on 9--11, 2001. The theory is that it was forced down by the passengers when they tried to retake the cockpit from the terrorists who'd hijacked the plane. It was more even than expected, but still not very good. The ending was a wild mishmash of camera angles, shaky-cam work and quick cuts which was probably supposed to convey the sense of confusion but really just gave me a headache. True Crime (1999) -- "8/10" A Clint Eastwood film about a reporter (Eastwood) playing a reporter who smokes, drinks and sleeps around trying to clear the name of a man unjustly sentenced to death row. Good story; great acting. With James Woods and Denis Leary as Eastwood's less-than-impressed coworkers. Definitely worth it. Saw it in German. A Few Good Men (1992) -- "8/10" Watched this one again after a long time and it was still riveting. Tom Cruise and Kevin Pollack are great (as usual, actually), Nicholson does his star turn as does a very young Kiefer Sutherland. Watched it in German, but it lost nothing in translation -- it was perhaps even better because German is such an awesome military language. Do The Right Thing (1989) -- "9/10" Saw this for the first time and it was everything I'd heard. Excellent from start to finish with fine acting all around as well as a nuanced script and dialogue. Well worth watching -- nothing has changed except we don't have big boom-boxes anymore. Confessions of a Shopaholic (2009) -- "4/10" A predictable movie about a woman who shops too much. Though it does make an attempt to seriously portray just how damaging shopping too much can be, it's also a movie about a problem only the rich and wanna-be rich have. Sure, the woman can't afford the stuff she buys, but she's still wealthy enough to be up to debt to her eyeballs buying clothes that she doesn't need, instead of deep in debt buying food or paying rent. Watched with only one eye though; the other was doing a crossword puzzle. Deep Impact (1998) -- "2/10" Spoiler alert: Copycat of Armageddon, but the good guys don't win. Mostly predictable and lacking nuance. Didn't watch the second half, to be honest. I got fed up when the movie showed people taking martial law lying down -- as if they had anything to lose with a comet about to plow into the Earth. President: you have a couple of days left, so go home and don't cause a disturbance and don't go outside and don't enjoy yourselves. Yeah, ok. I'd actually like to see a sequel showing the people who buried themselves in Missouri trying to get back out after two years when the people who had to stay outside and rebuild society from scratch are waiting for them. Dogma (1999) -- "7/10" A dark comedy about heaven, hell, angels and demons written by and starring Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. Also stars Salma Hayek as a pole dancer named Serendipity (if that's your thing), Chris Rock as the 13th Apostle and Linda Fiorentino as an unwilling tool of destiny. Includes a lot of discussions about Christianity from an undergraduate philosophical level and the plot is very entertaining. Saw it in German. Plastic Planet (2009) -- "7/10" A long but informative and entertaining documentary about a German/Austrian with a plastics business/fortune in his family who travels the world to learn more about plastic. His journey of discovery leads him to discover that we won't end up just strangling sea turtles and fish with plastic, but ourselves as well. The Tourist (2010) -- "5/10" Angelina Jolie plays a mysterious woman (no spoiler there) who (spoiler alert) turns out to be a spy, a traitor and a whore (although haggling the price up to £744 million is quite an achievement -- that's about £10 million per pound). Johnny Depp is unconvincing and seems to be phoning it in. Paul Bettany is wasted as well. The movie moves very slowly and its surprises are unsurprising (shades of Angles and Demons there). For what purports to be a thriller, it wasn't very thrilling, unless you consider watching Jolie glide around like a porcelain doll thrilling; she looks so frail, you may be on the edge of your seat wondering whether she will shatter at each step. Monsters vs. Aliens (2009) -- "3/10" A crazy pastiche of different stories and plots group up into a single, long CGI cartoon. Standout voice talent that went to waste on utterly forgettable lines delivered during interminable battle scenes. Made for kids with no clear angle for adults. Can't even remember whether it was in English or German. Ghost Busters (1984) -- "8/10" The old classic stands up quite well, with Bill Murray -- as Dr. Peter Venkman -- providing a lot of the reason why. Reason #1: Dr Ray Stantz: Everything was fine with our system until the power grid was shut off by dickless here. Walter Peck: They caused an explosion! Mayor: Is this true? Dr. Peter Venkman: Yes it's true. [pause] Dr. Peter Venkman: This man has no dick. Saw it in German. Blazing Saddles (1974) -- "10/10" A classic from Mel Brooks -- and possibly his best. Gene Wilder plays sidekick to Cleavon Little's amazing turn as a black sheriff in the wild west. Madeline Kahn plays a wonderful German burlesque dancer/ingenue with a lisp named Lili Von Shtupp ("A wed wose. How womantic.") and Harvey Korman plays a hilarious asshole with an easily mispronounced name, as usual. The initial arrival of the sheriff is worth the price of admission. Enjoyed the hell out of this film (and can still quote a bunch of it from multiple viewings out of the deep past). And then there's Gene Wilder's deadpan delivery (quoting from a scene where he consoles Little): "You've got to remember that these are just simple farmers. These are people of the land. The common clay of the new West. You know... morons." The Fifth Element (1997) -- "10/10" Bruce Willis plays a futuristic, alternate-reality version of John Mclane from the "Die Hard" movies. Mila Jovovich is great as an alien/living weapon with a penchant for skimpy outfits. Chris Tucker is also very good as an over-the-top (redundant, I know) television moderator. Gary Oldman rounds out the cast as the bad guy (redundant, I know). Luc Besson is rightly fêted for the excellent cinematography, sets, costumes and overall mood of the film. Saw it in German. Tears of the Sun (2003) -- "6/10" Bruce Willis takes stony-faced to a new level as the leader of an elite cadre of Marines charged with extracting a Westerner from somewhere in Africa (I'm not even going to bother looking up which country it purported to be or whether the film claims any historical veracity or derivative thereof). The Westerner refuses to leave without also rescuing the village in which she lived and worked. Willis at first refuses -- following his orders only -- but is eventually overwhelmed by moral considerations. Luckily for us, the Westerner is portrayed by Monica Belluci, which was enough for me. Saw it in German. Dinner for Schmucks (2010) -- "7/10" A surprisingly good and touching little film about a bunch of rich traders/brokers who amuse themselves by inviting what they consider to be useless members of society to dinner and holding a contest to find the one who demonstrates his idiocy with the most extravagance. The film is saved not by its plot -- though it does make an attempt to illustrate that the more generally accepted notion of which group of people in the film is actually more useless may be wrong -- but by Steve Carell's sweet performance as Barry, a naif who builds dioramas using dead mice that portray the life he may have had with a wife who left him. It is part of Carell's immense talent that he makes this seem far more normal than the normal lives of the two ostensible protagonists (Paul Rudd as a financial analyst and his girlfriend, an art gallery curator, both on their way up in the real world). Spider-Man 2 (2004) -- "8/10" The last good Spidey movie, even though too much time is dominated by Kirsten Dunst's simper and other attempts at expressing emotion. This is likely less her fault than a unwitting misogyny present in so many comic-book movies. The star is really Doc Ock or, to be more precise, his four articulated, metal arms. They're flat-out awesome and utterly believable. Spidey himself is decent, but a bid maudlin. Still and all, much better than Spider-Man 3, which was an abomination. Saw it in German. Transporter 3 (2008) -- "6/10" Lovely choreography and balletic martial artistry from Mr. Statham (as usual) and lovely direction by Luc Besson (as usual) but a shockingly irritating package to deliver this time around, in the form of a Russian party girl role that hit every ugly stereotype and went over the line of good taste. Every time she opened her mouth, something stupid and annoying came out, delivered with an insipidity that tore you out of the context every time. The story? Window dressing for car chases and martial arts against hordes of inexplicably unarmed goons. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2531 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2531 Sun, 14 Aug 2011 13:26:16 +0200 Angelina Jolie directed by Clint Eastwood about a woman's struggle to find her abducted child. However, the struggle is more against a patriarchal and corrupt LA police department, who cover up their ineptitude by returning to her the wrong child and then commit her to an insane asylum when she refuses to accept that the child is hers. She was clearly suffering from "the vapors". Dark, infuriating and very well done. Black Dog (1998) -- "4/10" Patrick Swayze is a trucker charged with driving from one place to another despite the best attempts of criminals. He is also a former criminal but also a man with a good heart just trying to do right for his family and using his unparalleled truck-driving skills to get the job done. Swayze looks a little strange in this film -- somehow blockier than usual and with what looks for all the world like eye makeup for much of the film. If you like trucks, Meatloaf (the singer, not the foodstuff) and Randy Travis, this is the movie for you. Saw it in German. Felon (2008) -- "8/10" Val Kilmer as a seasoned felon who mentors Stephen Dorff, a man wrongly convicted. Dorff comes from the suburbs whereas Kilmer is a slightly overweight and massively feared ur-criminal who seems to have climbed from the primordial ooze with a life sentence and plenty of respect already in tow. The regular rumbles organized by the guards soon cause Dorff to shed any shred of humanity and throw himself into the life of a gladiator, with Kilmer as his sifu. A suprisingly gripping film for all the triteness of the plot, mostly due to Kilmer and Dorff. Jaws (1975) -- "8/10" The classic and original shark film shows up horror films of today that try too damned hard. Since the film is from the 70s, there is no reluctance to fill long minutes with three grimy guys in a cabin singing sea shanties. The pacing is languid and the threat of when-the-fuck-is-the-shark-going-to-attack? hangs like the Sword of Damocles. It's suspense with brains; compare and contrast to Piranha 3D, for which the trailer was already execrable enough to deter viewing of the full film. Kids these days and all that, I guess. Saw it in German. Unstoppable (2010) -- "6/10" Denzel Washington as an old railroad hand (28 years) riding with a rookie (Chris Pine; you probably know him as Kirk in the latest Star Trek movie) in a runaway-train disaster movie. It's decent, though some of the shots are needlessly jerky (especially the credits, where I thought my drive was lagging) and half of the movie is told through an American news media broadcast (FOX, as if it wasn't bad enough). Uncle Eddie from Grounded for Life had a good role as the safety inspector. Star Trek (2009) -- "9/10" An extremely fun reboot of the series directed by J.J. Abrams with all of the origianl characters but only one of the original actors. For good luck, it's Nimoy who reprises his role rather than Shatner, whom no-one wants to see in his Star-Fleet uniform anymore. The plot was decent enough (though there were a few truck-sized holes, it was possible to ignore them or notice them only later once the film had already been enjoyed). A fun action flick that was enjoyable for both fans and non-fans alike. Notable were Chris Pine playing Kirk and Zachary Quinto pitch-perfect as a young Spock. Bridesmaids (2011) -- "6/10" The Hangover with chicks is an entirely valid, short review of this film. The actresses are funny, though Maya Rudolph plays a very, very vanilla bride-to-be without any of the understated sarcasm she showed in her role as a prostitute in Idiocracy (for example). Kristen Wiig (also of SNL fame) was all right (the scene in the car where she tries to get a ticket was quite funny) but mostly seemed to be trying too hard (scene on plane in first class). Rose Byrne (who seems to be everywhere of late) was good as the bitch but the female Chris Farley (her name escapes me) was just as discomfiting to watch as Mr. Farley himself. The guy playing the Irish cop was lovely, as was his dialogue (for which credit goes to Wiig and Annie Mumolo, who co-wrote the screenplay). Spoiler alert: everything works out in the end. Magnolia (1999) -- "8/10" Interesting, interesting film with an all-star cast, each member of which tells a part of the story from a different viewpoint and with little respect for chronological order. The plot is hard to describe but perhaps best compared to late-period Lynch. There is no neat conclusion, of course, nor is there really any notion that anything has been resolved. An interesting story nonetheless and worth watching for the performances alone (Tom Cruise, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Julianne Moore stood out for me). Achtung Fertig Charlie (2004) -- "7/10" A Swiss-German movie about basic training in the Swiss army. The stereotypes of Swiss culture cut right to the bone and the writing is quite funny. Melanie Winiger is quite good as the-female-recruit-who's-better-than-all-the-guys-and-whose-crisis-of-confidence-is-resolved-by-love. Marco Rimi is absolutely hilarious and pitch-perfect as the drill sergeant. The Switch (2010) -- "6/10" Jason Bateman stars opposite Jennifer Aniston who, in what must be a record streak by now, plays a woman who's lusted after by the men around her and either doesn't know, doesn't care or a mix of both. They're both decent, but Bateman's subdued wise-cracking -- especially contrasted with the "hunk" -- makes the film. Worth watching just for him. Knowing (2009) -- "3/10" A pretty crappy, semi-mystical, semi-horror, semi-action, semi-science-fiction movie about (spoiler alert) the end of the world. That's four semis and they still don't add up to a whole movie. Nic Cage chewed the scenery but in an awful non-convincing way. And he was the best one in the movie. Anyone involved with writing the dialogue should be taken out behind the shed and shot. The astrophysicist accepts that there is an afterlife in the end because, well, it makes him feel better. So, you see, it's true. There are also aliens in it, for good measure. Love and Other Drugs (2011) -- "6/10" This movie features a lot of long semi-nude scenes with Anne Hathaway and Jake Gyllenhaal -- in other words, fun for the whole family. Some of the scenes are kind of excruciatingly long but, on the whole, the film's decent. The plot about the pharmaceutical industry somehow manages to be both heavy-handed and too superficial. Still, Hathaway's boobs or Gyllenhaal's butt, depending on your druthers. Rango (2010) -- "8/10" A great, great cartoon with Johnny Depp as a chameleon bluffing his way through an adventure in the desert. At times surreal and blurring the boundary between reality and mirage, director Gore Verbinski refined the style he hinted at with the marooned-ship scene in the third Pirates of the Caribbean installment. The semi-subversive social commentary about profligate waste in the desert (I'm looking at you, Las Vegas) was accompanied by good dialogue and good voice-acting. If you want an animated film that doesn't talk down to you, this is a good choice. Knight and Day (2010) -- "5/10" Tom Cruise was better than expected (again) though Cameron Diaz was just as annoying as ever. Lots of action and a kind of tongue-in-cheek take on the Bourne-style films. Decent but wouldn't watch it again. Shrek Forever After (2010) -- "5/10" It had its moments, but not as good as the other films in the series. It wasn't as bad as the third sequel could be expected to be. The oversized Puss-in-boots was very funny, though. Rio (2011) -- "2/10" A horrible little animated film about a blue bird who can dance but can't fly but is like a little person where he works in a bookshop as an anthropomorphized boyfriend to a geeky girl who's slowly but surely swept off her feet by an even-more-nerdy-if-possible Brazilian researcher whose female bird is a headstrong partner for the other blue bird, once she, of course, sees how cool he is on the inside. Awful, awful saccharine stuff. Go see Rango twice instead. The Other Guys (2010) -- "8/10" A magnificent and subversive comedy about the financial crisis and how the police must adjust to a world where the real criminals are in charge. Will Ferrell & Mark Wahlberg are partners with Samuel Jackson and Dwayne Johnson playing small roles as another pair of cops in a send-up of over-the-top action movies that's done to a perfect pitch. There's some great action that looks like real stunts, Ferrell is pitch-perfect without his usual raunch, Eva Mendes is lovely and funny. And the plot and screenplay: about as good as we can expect, I think. It's a better documentary than many I've seen or read about how modern society works. Little Fockers (2010) -- "1/10" An utterly atrocious piece of shit that is an embarrassment for all associated with it. If you can make it through any of the several telephone calls filmed near the beginning without cringing, you're already dead inside. I don't think we made it past twenty minutes before shutting it off and trashing it with extreme prejudice. Bounty Hunter (2010) -- "5/10" Gerard Butler as a bounty hunter opposite Jennifer Aniston as a journalist (can you tell that my sister's still visiting?). It's ok, but the plot leaves a bunch to be desired. Butler was funny, but he was replaying his role from the Ugly Truth, to be honest...and he was better in that one. Even though I'd rather watch Aniston than Heigl any day, given that rather meager choice. It wasn't annoying while watching it, though, so there's that. Get Him To The Greek (2010) -- "6/10" A relatively uneven comedy wherein Russell Brand and Jonah Hill both play themselves. In this case, Mr. Brand is much more entertaining because he plays unstable and borderline psychotic so well (or doesn't play, as the case may be). At any rate, playing a recovering heroin addict rock-star can't have been much of stretch for him. Some funny scenes sprinkled on top of a nondescript plot as well as far too many shots of Jonah Hill's innards rejecting whatever concoction he'd had forced down his gullet by a merciless Brand, whose imperviousness to hangovers also doesn't seem faked. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2488 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2488 Fri, 03 Jun 2011 18:38:25 +0200 -- "8/10" 2. "Inglourious Basterds (2008)" <#Inglourious> -- "9/10" 3. "After.Life (2009)" <#After> -- "4/10" 4. "Management (2008)" <#Management> -- "5/10" 5. "Despicable Me (2010)" <#Despicable> -- "7/10" 6. "Megamind (2010)" <#Megamind> -- "8/10" 7. "My Best Friend's Girl (2008)" <#My> -- "7/10" 8. "Double Jeopardy (1999)" <#Double> -- "6/10" 9. "Cry-Baby (1990)" <#Cry> -- "6/10" 10. "Paycheck (2003)" <#Paycheck> -- "6/10" 11. "Coco Avant Chanel (2009)" <#Coco> -- "4/10" 12. "Eagle Eye (2008)" <#Eagle> -- "2/10" 13. "Les rivières pourpres (2000)" <#Les> -- "5/10" 14. "Vanilla Sky" <#Vanilla> -- "6/10" 15. "Scott Pilgrim vs. The World" <#Scott> -- "6/10" 16. "Max Payne (2008)" <#Max> -- "6/10" 17. "Heist (Heist - Der letzte Coup) (2001)" <#Heist> -- "7/10" Fireflies in the Garden (2008) -- "8/10" A decent film with a strong cast -- Willem Dafoe and Ryan Reynolds are very good, with Carrie Anne Moss and Julia Roberts in smaller roles -- about a family with an overbearing (asshole) patriarch (Dafoe) whose son (and wife, actually) has eluded his grasp. Think Death of a Salesman where Loman has a sadistic streak and a wicked temper instead of a pathetic air about him. Ryan Reynolds is more subdued, adapting his trademark rapier wit and coolness to the role. Inglourious Basterds (2008) -- "9/10" A Quentin Tarantino masterpiece, told in four languages (mostly French, German and English, though Italian makes a small, but crucial appearance). An alternate history for the end of WWII with a tremendous cast and absolutely captivating dialogue and direction. Brad Pitt is back-country U.S. Army through and through and leads a band of killer Jew-ninjas on a hunt for Nazi scalps. Christoph Waltz scintillates as the Jew-Hunter; Til Schweiger as a defected, disaffected Nazi turned Nazi-hunter is in a role he seemed born for. Saw it for the second time; highly recommended. After.Life (2009) -- "4/10" A promising cast of Christina Ricci, Justin Long and Liam Neeson delivered a humdrum movie about death and the afterlife or maybe about serial killers. It was hard to tell; I'm not sure the scriptwriter even knew, to be frank. Justin Long didn't have a single funny line in the flick, so he was completely wasted (for an example of how to use a comedian in a serious film, see Ryan Reynolds in Fireflies in the Garden, reviewed above); Liam Neeson was his usually inscrutable and vaguely menacing self; Christina Ricci was very thin and spent much of the movie naked, which oddly enough still did not make it worth watching. Granted, she was supposed to be dead the whole time (or was she?), but either the movie sucked horrendously or I've gotten very, very old. Management (2008) -- "5/10" A sweet-enough movie as far as these things go, weighing in a little quirkier than most chick-flicks (which is, I believe, the official designation for any movie with Jennifer Aniston in it). She's a philanthropic minor executive who lives in Baltimore and he (Steve Zahn) is a naive, harmless man-child living in Kingman, Arizona. [1] Long story short, he hits on her in his pathetic man-child way, she pity-fucks him, he stalks her a few times, she finds it endearing, but chooses pragmatism over puppy love when she moves in with Woody Harrelson (playing "Jango", an ex-punk-rocker yogurt-magnate with strong political views and a short temper). More stalking ensues and Zahn meets "Al", the quirky character highlight of the film. They end up together (not really a spoiler there), but it's hard to care. Despicable Me (2010) -- "7/10" A cartoon featuring a villain named Gru voiced by Steve Carell in what to my ears was some sort of a Slavic/Russian accent. He's a super-villain who perpetrates super-crimes supported by a super-base and scads of minions headed up by his friend and colleague, Dr. Nefario. He butts up against the new guy in town, Vector, who is Bill Gates in a tracksuit and their adventures together -- and against one another -- are rounded out by three orphan girls. It's a bit schmaltzy but it has its moments (Spoiler alert: e.g. when one girl gets her unicorn stuffed animal at the theme park and shrieks/declares emphatically: "He's SO fluffly!" in a snarl/growl that beggars description). Megamind (2010) -- "8/10" Will Ferrell voices Megamind, the super-villain; Brad Pitt voices Metroman, the superhero and Tina Fey voices the wisecracking reporter whose romantic interests are up for grabs. Jonah Hill rounds out the cast as the dweeb turned awkward hero turned even-more-awkward villain. The writing is decent and things don't turn out exactly as one would expect, which was enough of a relief to make it enjoyable. I actually liked it better than Despicable Me -- if only because the repartee between Minion (voiced by none other than David Cross) and Megamind was better than that between Gru and Dr. Nefario. My Best Friend's Girl (2008) -- "7/10" What I thought would be a chick flick happily turned out to be a good deal darker and funnier than expected. Jason Biggs and Alec Baldwin -- funny in their own right -- played side roles in this one (the hair salon was the highlight for Biggs; Baldwin didn't really have one, honestly), but Kate Hudson and Dane Cook carried this film well. I'm not going to give away his job because not knowing is what makes the first ten minutes so entertaining. Suffice it to say that you can let this chick flick be queued up without fear: it's a bit long, but it's funny and overall pretty good. Double Jeopardy (1999) -- "6/10" A film about a woman -- played by Naomi Watts -- double-crossed by her husband and sent to jail for his murder. There she learns that, having already served the time for his murder, she cannot be tried again were she to really and truly kill him when she got out (because of the titular double-jeopardy clause in the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution of the United States). Tommy Lee Jones plays her parole officer and chases her all over the damned place, but who wouldn't? Watts has some pretty sly con-man moves on the lam. Saw it in German. Cry-Baby (1990) -- "6/10" A John Waters film starring Johnny Depp in what seems to be a through-the-looking-glass remake of Grease with rednecks and the usual cast of slightly misaligned characters that populate Waters's films. Ricky Lake, Willem Dafoe and Traci Lords round out the cast. It's a decent time with some truly bizarre song and dance routines with Depp chewing the scenery as usual. Paycheck (2003) -- "6/10" Ben Affleck is joined by Uma Thurman, Aaron Eckhart and Paul Giamatti in a science-fiction thriller based on a Philip K. Dick short story about an engineer who invents technologies for companies, then lets them erase his memories in exchange for a big paycheck. When he finishes his biggest job yet, he finds himself with no money, an envelope full of junk and hired henchmen on his tail. The envelope is from himself and proves remarkably useful in getting him out of the scrapes he encounters. Pretty entertaining and relatively well-done. Saw it in German. Coco Avant Chanel (2009) -- "4/10" Audrey Tautou plays Coco Chanel (in French with absolutely atrocious English subtitles [2]). I'd never seen anything this bad. With my poor French, I was still able to "fix" some of the more mysterious translations for the wife, but after half an hour or so we got distracted and shut it off. Neither one of us ever mentioned the film again. Eagle Eye (2008) -- "2/10" A God-awful film about an omnipresent, omnipotent computer that plots to kill the president (don't worry about spoilers; this film should not be watched). Not since Enemy of the State have I seen such awful "technology". The action scenes are sliced up into little tiny bits that form an incomprehensible mishmash of explosions and expressions of grim determination. Did a crossword while watching it with one eye. The computer looked a bit like GLaDOS from Portal and was finally stopped by stabbing it in its "eye". Horrible. Just horrible. Cannot be unseen. Saw it in German. Les rivières pourpres (2000) -- "5/10" A French crime drama starring the inestimable Jean Reno and Vincent Cassel and Nadia Farès (who never jumped to the opposite shore like the two men). It had promise, but wasn't so well-edited and created and discarded interesting theories in a pell-mell race to the end of the film. I can only assume that the book was much better and the need to shoehorn it into only 100 minutes was largely to blame for the poor pacing and confusing plot. Saw it in German. Vanilla Sky -- "6/10" Tom Cruise as a rich attractive dude who cheats on one hot chick with another one. The first one tries to kill him in a car accident which disfigures him, depressing him enough that he signs over his life to a mortuary/software company that lets him lucidly dream the life he wanted to have with the hot chick who didn't try to kill him. Jason Lee is pretty good; the voice-over actress for Penélope Cruz conveys exactly the feeling you get from listening to her speak English, but in German -- it's impressive. Tom Cruise as a millionaire playboy makes acting self-centered look easy. Scott Pilgrim vs. The World -- "6/10" An effects-heavy video-game--styled rendering of a boy/man's fantasy of fighting his hot new girlfriend's exes in Mortal-Kombat--style clashes. The dialogue is decent and it doesn't take itself too seriously. It could have been edited more tightly. Michael Cera is a bit uneven, really hitting the lovable loser thing a bit too hard; it's wearing a bit thin -- get a haircut already instead of just whining about it. Some of the fight choreography is very well done, though and the overall aesthetic reminded me more than a little of Speed Racer. Max Payne (2008) -- "6/10" Mark Wahlberg takes up the role of detective Max Payne from the groundbreaking video game (and its sequel). The film did a good job of capturing both the mood and semi-surrealistic storyline of the video game. The acting was so-so throughout -- especially the typically execrable Beau Bridges, who is nowhere near his brother Jeff in capability -- but Mila Kunis did a decent job as Mona (as well as being quite easy on the eyes). Made me want to play the games again, actually. Saw it in German. Heist (Heist - Der letzte Coup) (2001) -- "7/10" Gene Hackman, Danny DeVito and Delroy Lindo take up their standard roles, and Ricky Jay (yes, the magician) rounds out the group of professional thieves. Sam Rockwell is sleazy and dumb and screenwriter David Manet puts most of this to good work, giving us at times predictable, but overall quite entertaining plot twists galore. Saw it in German, but it didn't lose much in translation. It's a heist film; the good guys win; someone is sacrificed; everyone else gets what they deserve, good and bad. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] Which is pretty much the ass of the world, covered in motels and crappy restaurants, all designed for the traveler just passing through. An even more appalling example would be Lake Havasu City ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2476 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2476 Sat, 19 Feb 2011 11:12:52 +0100 -- "6/10" 2. "Paranormal Activity (2008)" <#Paranormal> -- "5/10" 3. "Green Zone (2010)" <#Green> -- "7/10" 4. "Evangelion 1.01 You Are (Not) Alone (2007)" <#Evangelion1> -- "5/10" 5. "Evangelion 2.22 - You Can (Not) Advance (2009)" <#Evangelion2> -- "5/10" 6. "Mean Machine (Kampfmaschine) (2001)" <#Mean> -- "6/10" 7. "16 Blocks (2006)" <#16> -- "6/10" 8. "Shutter Island (2010)" <#Shutter> -- "10/10" 9. "The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 (2009)" <#TPelhame> -- "6/10" 10. "I Love You, Phillip Morris (2009)" <#Phillip> -- "8/10" 11. "The Lake House (2006)" <#Lake> -- "4/10" 12. "Greenberg (2010)" <#Greenberg> -- "3/10" 13. "The Rock (1996)" <#Rock> -- "7/10" 14. "The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008)" <#Day> -- "6/10" 15. "Ein Schatz zum Verlieben/Fool's Gold (2008)" <#Schatz> -- "7/10" 16. "Speed (1994)" <#Speed> -- "7/10" 17. "New Police Story (2004)" <#New> -- "8/10" Salt (2010) -- "6/10" Angelina Jolie (or what's left of her after what seems like an exceedingly strict diet) stars opposite Liev Schreiber as a deep-cover Soviet/Russian agent. It meanders along predictably, jolts you with a couple of neat plot twists and then ends predictably (with a mini plot-twist right at the end again). It's a pretty uneven movie overall, with a lot of gung-ho bravado and idiocy as well as seemingly pathetic aim on the parts of the antagonists (read: police, naturally). Jolie's action scenes are decent, although the whole pushing-off-the-wall to super-mega-punch people and her command of mega-super-Parkour was laughable as was her ability to swim underwater in the wintry Potomac for half a mile. Note to Hollywood: getting punched hard in the nose hurts like hell; three times hard even more. You're most likely unconscious or blind from the pain, and not likely to want to head-butt anyone after that. Just so you know. [1] Paranormal Activity (2008) -- "5/10" A scare film about a haunting of a modern-day suburban couple: she's a student who wants to teach English and he's a day-trader. She's been followed all of her life by ... something. He sets up a camera to catch this something on tape. All of the movie's footage is from that camera, so the cinematography is very static. The acting is decent, though a bit strained at times, though kudos to the two primary actors for pretty much carrying the whole film. Quite well done, all in all and quite goddamned scary. The long delays [2] are nice touches and build suspense quite well. Pretty classic fright done with subtle looks and creepy smiles. Green Zone (2010) -- "7/10" An overall quite decent film about the early days of the occupation of Iraq by U.S. forces with Matt Damon in the lead. He plays an warrant officer searching for WMDs and coming up empty every time. Given the opportunity to find out why, he takes it and unravels the rat's nest of lies that was the justification for the invasion of Iraq. [3] Whereas the details of the story are fictitious, the basic thrust of it is apolitical in that it essentially portrays what really happened: that the U.S. invaded Iraq for political reasons on wholly fabricated charges (affiliation with 9--11 attacks for the home crowd; presence of WMD for the rest of the world). A decent action thriller with Damon playing a competent soldier, but not the superman to which we've become accustomed in his Bourne films. The technology in the choppers at the end seems quite over-the-top and looks like it belongs on Airwolf or Knight Rider -- it's hardly likely that our troops have anything approaching technology that sophisticated. [4] Evangelion 1.01 You Are (Not) Alone (2007) -- "5/10" An anime cartoon about giant robots saving the Earth from what can only be described as nearly indestructible biotechnological avenging angels. It's a vision of a hyper-militarized Tokyo with retractable guns, buildings and more techno-gadgetry than you can even absorb. The graphics and design are absolutely top-notch; the story and dialogue are embarrassingly horrible. The lead character provides non-stop whining throughout the film and the other characters are similarly two-dimensional. As usual in feature-length Japanese anime, the deep wounds of the second world war are in evidence as well as a lot of hokum about spirits and angels and souls. Evangelion 2.22 - You Can (Not) Advance (2009) -- "5/10" You would hope that I would know to leave the Evangelion series well enough alone, but I was feverish and ill and wanted some mind-candy, so I gave it a shot. Luckily, the dialog was in Japanese with English subtitles, so I could avoid the more painful, stilted human interactions by just not reading until giant robots started to mix it up again. There were more EVAs (giant robots) as well as more angels (not even sure how many, but they got through #10) as well as mysterious stuff going on on the Moon. A decent romp, though it can also only be recommended to anyone with a love for good animation. Those who enjoy plots, scripts and dialogue will have to look elsewhere. Mean Machine (Kampfmaschine) (2001) -- "6/10" A movie that claims to have been inspired by The Longest Yard, but is essentially a one-to-one British remake of the American film(s) [5], substituting football (GB) for football (US). To its credit, this latest remake is a good deal less cringe-inducingly violent than the American remake, which came later. The cast is decent and has Jason Statham in a minor role as a very odd, violent and loopy-as-f&$k lifer/goaltender who likes to play striker and goes by the name of Monk. There are a bunch of decent one-liners (even translated to German, which is the version I saw) and all's well that end's well (of course). 16 Blocks (2006) -- "6/10" A decently put-together film starring Bruce Willis as a cop having a Collateral moment -- like Tom Cruise in that film, Willis is an action star playing above his age -- and also kind of having a Gauntlet moment as he tried to get a prisoner to the courthouse against the wishes of all of his brother officers. Mos Def is endearing and the good guys win in the end -- though the movie threatens to end on a dark note, it disappoints in that regard. Shutter Island (2010) -- "10/10" Leonardo DiCaprio teams up, once again, with Martin Scorcese in this haunting film about an asylum for the criminally insane off the coast of New England. Featuring a many-layered story rife with possible interpretations as well as a gorgeously shot and managed film, it's amazing to think that Inception got all of the attention for the Oscars instead of this one. Don't get me wrong, I liked the story of Inception well enough, but it didn't hold up nearly as well in hindsight as this one will. Plus, it's amazingly apparent how much better and masterful a director and storyteller Scorcese is than Christopher Nolan, who feels the need to use exposition to tell us everything. Pro tip: see Inception first in order to be better able to enjoy it...because you might not be able to if you see Shutter Island first. It does a much better job of showing us dream worlds than Inception ever could. The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 (2009) -- "6/10" Travolta plays an over-the-top badass; Washington plays an overly qualified MTA official/train-desk-operator; Gandolfini is the rich mayor of New York City; Turturro is the hostage negotiator. The cast is very promising, but the script is very uneven, with things happening -- or not -- for no good reason. The little interludes with the idiot teenager talking to his equally insipid girlfriend (and she berating him for not saying he loves her despite being a hostage) or with the little boy who is the only one to remember that the lights are all green is the purest Hollywood, designed-by-committee claptrap. It's also a mystery why the criminal had such a ridiculously horrible escape plan -- it's almost like they were wearing GPS trackers because the cops honed in on them with unerring accuracy. No explanation was given for the psychosis of Travolta's character -- he would probably say it was engrams. [6] Oh, and congratulations Hollywood! For creating yet another movie almost completely bereft of females. I Love You, Phillip Morris (2009) -- "8/10" Jim Carrey plays a real-life con artist who bounces from successful scam to jail and back again. In jail he meets and falls in love with Philip Morris, played by Ewan McGregor. Both actors are at their best and put the Brokeback Mountain love affair to shame (in my admittedly unprofessional opinion). Carrey is brilliant, subtle at times and over-the-top at others, but always much more controlled than when playing his more mainstream roles. The film ends with a sobering comment on incarceration in America. [7] The Lake House (2006) -- "4/10" I really like Keanu Reeves and usually end up liking Sandra Bullock as well. This overly schmaltzy movie about star-crossed lovers was too much and too confusing and too boring. The plot can be described in two sentences, but I'm not going to bother. Greenberg (2010) -- "3/10" A bloody painful film about people with emotional and psychological problems dealing with even the smallest road bumps in their insignificant lives. Ben Stiller plays a completely different role without any of his usual manic humor or really any humor whatsoever. All of the characters are left as hollow shells, with only Ivan (Stiller's friend) having any redeeming qualities. The overtly superficial party at the end wasn't a credit to anyone despite providing the few interesting lines in the entire film from Stiller. I mean it kind of says some things about how people's lives end up being different from what they expected, but most of the characters are insipid, Stiller's included. That I know that they were meant to be so in order to show us how the other 95% lives didn't help me enjoy the film much more. It was pretty tough to sit through this one and I can't recommend it to anyone. The Rock (1996) -- "7/10" An overly macho movie that I can't help liking and here's why: though I like Nicholas Cage and Ed Harris, if Sean Connery wasn't in the movie, playing a super-suave and clever and capable Scottish SAS agent who can escape from anywhere, it wouldn't be worth sticking around. But he is, and it is. The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008) -- "6/10" I saw the 2008 remake starring Keanu Reeves dubbed in German. The film is pretty decent and only partly ruined by Hollywood's desire to improve their youth-market penetration by adding children that act like adults. It could be argued that the child represents humanity and its simplistic desire to fight back or be loved unconditionally, but there is no reason to base a large part of the otherwise interesting plot around the child. It's not a minor complaint -- the movie could have been more interesting without all of the pandering to various market segments. The film is best summed up by Jennifer Connelly when addressing Klaatu, the alien: "What are you doing here?" "You're destroying your planet." "You're here to save us?" "I'm here to save the planet." "But from what?" "..." "Oh." Ein Schatz zum Verlieben/Fool's Gold (2008) -- "7/10" A fun treasure-hunt flick in Key West with Matthew McConaughey, Kate Hudson and Donald Sutherland making it work. McConaughey doesn't really seem to be acting (as usual) and it didn't take long for him to get his shirt off (as usual) for no discernible reason (as usual). Still, a fun flick. Watched it in German. Speed (1994) -- "7/10" Watching Keanu Reeves and Sandra Bullock in French was surprisingly entertaining. I totally forgot that the movie didn't end when the bus blew up. New Police Story (2004) -- "8/10" Jackie Chan in an entertaining yarn about a gang of rich youth who terrorize a city. Lots of interesting plot points that you'd never see in a Hollywood-style film; that is, it was cheesy, but in new and interesting ways. Spoiler alert: for example, when the sociopaths put a bomb around Chan's girlfriend's neck, you actually believe she's going to die. Then you think she won't because Chan will rescue her. But she sent him on a goose chase so that she could sacrifice herself. So she tries, but inadvertently defuses the bomb instead (i.e. her gamble pays off, but you didn't expect it to). Then they're both surprisingly still alive and grateful when they notice that the bomb timer has started again, so they sprint out of there, but she gets trapped under rubble and looks dead. But she's not, she's barely alive. It sounds cheesy, but it was original enough to feel like a rollercoaster instead of hackneyed. Also lots of Jackie Chan kicking ass and taking names. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] I know that I mentioned nothing about Sylvester Stallone's ridiculous fight scene in The Expendables in my mini-review a few weeks ago. That's because Stallone saw fit to make it look like none of the blows were doing any damage, which while also not believable, is more believable than having the makeup artist make Jolie's face look practically stoved-in with damage that would fell a rhino, not to mention a one-hundred-pound woman, then have her get hit again and again in the same place and have her -- super-hero-like -- not seem to be affected at all, not even dazed for more than a second, not even a little bit. The guy she's fighting is also ostensibly a professional and not likely to be pulling his punches; unfortunately for him, his opponent seems to be from Krypton. The only other less believable fight scene that comes to mind is the one from Die Hard 4, in which Maggie Q plays a similarly indestructible, indefatigable woman completely impervious to pain. [1] Spoiler alert: when she just stands around while sleep-walking -- or when the something is in the driver's seat, it's ultra-eerie. [1] The plot for this movie is especially damning in light of the real-life "Curveball's" recent confession that everything he told the Bush administration was more-or-less made-up. [1] Spoiler alert: although the chopper's systems seemed able to track two suspects fleeing on foot through the twisting alleyways of Baghdad slums/neigborhoods, they were no help in detecting the other enemies who blew it out of the sky with an RPG. Pity. [1] Both the original with Burt Reynolds as well as the remake with Adam Sandler and Chris Rock (as well as Burt Reynolds in a different role). [1] If I recall correctly, engrams are the reason anyone does anything crazy, according to Scientologists. Or perhaps Travolta would have blamed psychiatrists. [1] Carrey's character is caught trying to free Philip Morris from jail and sentenced to 170 years of prison without parole, to be served in 23-hour solitary confinement. This for a man who never killed or harmed anyone and stole far less money than many who have gotten far lesser sentences. It is clear that the judge gave the maximum allowable for Carrey's having humiliated the State of Texas. That it is even possible to legally sentence so much jail time to someone for grand larceny is a travesty in itself. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2462 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2462 Sun, 16 Jan 2011 20:01:50 +0100 -- "8/10" 2. "Cop Out (2010)" <#Cop> -- "5/10" 3. "Cloverfield (2008)" <#Cloverfield> -- "3/10" 4. "The Joneses (2009)" <#The> -- "6/10" 5. "A Serious Man (2009)" <#A> -- "8/10" 6. "Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes (1972)" <#Aguirre> -- "8/10" 7. "Fitzcarraldo (1982)" <#Fitzcarraldo> -- "9/10" 8. "Eraserhead (1976)" <#Eraserhead> -- "7/10" 9. "Blue Velvet (1986)" <#Blue> -- "8/10" 10. "Dazed & Confused (1993)" <#Dazed> -- "7/10" 11. "Wild At Heart (1990)" <#Wild> -- "8/10" 12. "Where the Buffalo Roam (1980)" <#Where> -- "6/10" 13. "Factotum (2005)" <#Factotum> -- "7/10" 14. "Broken Flowers (2005)" <#Broken> -- "7/10" 15. "Lost Highway (1997)" <#Lost> -- "8/10" 16. "Mulholland Drive (2001)" <#Mulholland> -- "8/10" Goodfellas (1990) -- "8/10" I finally saw this mob movie after all these years of hearing it quoted again and again and again. Though it was nice seeing the origins of the quotes, it kind of took the edge off of the surprise a bit. I don't know what I was expecting and the film wasn't bad, but it didn't blow me away like The Departed. In a way, I felt like I'd already seen part of it in Blow. Cop Out (2010) -- "5/10" Bruce Willis and Tracy Morgan, with a nice smaller part by Seann William Scott (of Stiffler fame in American Pie). Willis is Willis, but Tracy Morgan was funny enough to make me want to see more of 30 Rock. Seann Scott played a suicidally mischievous thief with panache. Relatively predictable plot and overblown Hispanic gangsters, but I wasn't expecting much, so no disappointment there. Cloverfield (2008) -- "3/10" Truly terrible monster movie with insufferable characters and a story that goes nowhere. A heap of shit that floated along on J.J. Abrams's name alone and only because he was doing Lost at the same time and people figured every Goddamned detail of this movie would be significant. If you're stuck watching it, don't waste your time concentrating. Just keep drinking until it starts to blur; you'll like it better that way. The Joneses (2009) -- "6/10" Kind of boring and predictable and only partially rescued by the amiable David Duchovny. Everybody else is a total parody or a hyperbolic caricature. I have no idea how accurate the representation of the upper middle-class of America is; part of me wants to believe every stupid detail and part of me wants to believe that it can't be that way. The cynic will probably win. A Serious Man (2009) -- "8/10" Another interesting film by the Coen brothers; it kind of starts somewhere and ends somewhere else. It's about a Jewish family/community in the American Midwest in what looks like sometime in the 80s. I thought it was great, but it would be a hard one to recommend to someone who's not a fan of the Coen brothers. It's worth it just to experience the nearly visceral pain you feel for the Job-like lead character as the story piles one entirely believable humiliation after another on his head. Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes (1972) -- "8/10" A German film from 1972 shot in the jungles of the Amazon and showing a fictitious scouting group that breaks off from the Pizarro expedition and sets off to look for the city of El Dorado. Tragedy ensues as the Spaniards keep a modicum of their caste society going even on a makeshift, large raft as it floats down the Amazon. Kinski is riveting, especially in madness at the end. Fitzcarraldo (1982) -- "9/10" It's no wonder that Klaus Kinski wanted to kill Werner Herzog; this film was the second time he was dragged through the mud of the Amazon jungle by the famous director. He's pretty charismatic as is his madam/girlfriend/patron and you totally root for him to accomplish his task. See below for the spoiler. [1] Eraserhead (1976) -- "7/10" You don't even have to look up this movie on Wikipedia to know that it's a surrealist work. It's shot in black and white and it's more interesting to look at than it is fun to watch. As with most surrealism, you could hurt your head trying to make sense of it, but you can always pat yourself on the back for getting all the way through it. Blue Velvet (1986) -- "8/10" Well, hell, if Dennis Hopper hadn't have played Frank, then who the hell else on this planet could have done it? When Isabella Rossellini did the weird movie last year in which she dressed up as a stuffed cockroach and exhibited insect mating rituals, there was a lot of commentary by people who've obviously not seen her other work. In this movie, she plays a singer who likes to get naked and likes to be beaten. A perfect college art-house film really (which is where I first saw it, lo these many years ago). Dazed & Confused (1993) -- "7/10" Fun flick from 1993 about the last day of high school in 1976 at some California school or other. Matthew McConnaughey has a standout performance in which he basically plays himself, with the killer line: "That's the thing I like about high-school girls: I get older, but they stay the same age." Also, for those who have consoled themselves by thinking that, though Mila Jovovich may be hot now, she was probably not such a looker when she was younger, think again. Wild At Heart (1990) -- "8/10" Another David Lynch film (still going forward in chronological order) with Laura Dern and Nicholas Cage. I may be one of the only people on this planet who could actually name the band that played the awesome power chords to which Cage committed his first crime of the movie -- even before they mentioned it a few minutes later. Dern and Cage are both good (though Dern's overwhelming randiness is a bit over-the-top) and the film actually has what some might call a sort of a Hollywood ending. Don't worry, Lynch fans, there are still loose ends galore. Where the Buffalo Roam (1980) -- "6/10" Bill Murray plays Hunter S. Thompson (though he's really playing himself with a slur that goes about halfway toward that which he had in Caddyshack) and Peter Boyle plays his lawyer. It sounds like an easy layup, but it started off quite slowly and tritely and didn't really go anywhere from there. Just a lot of drunken/drugged dipshittery with a meandering plot. Still, it's Bill Murray and Peter Boyle in their (relative) youth and it's set in 1972 and Thompson is covering Super Bowl VI, so there are also killer threads and hot wheels. It's always fun to watch older movies and see how people used to be able to fly in the old days. Factotum (2005) -- "7/10" Matt Dillon film based on the life and writing of Charles Bukowski, a working-class part-time bum/full-time alcoholic/writer who worked many jobs and wrote many stories about working-class America. Well-made, though some of the scenes depicting semi-functional alcoholism are pretty harrowing. A lot of the dialog comes from Bukowski's writing and clearly depicts why he's considered one of America's greatest 20th-century writers. Broken Flowers (2005) -- "7/10" A bit trepidatious about approaching Jarmusch again after enduring Coffee and Cigarettes (though the scene with Alfred Molina was worth it), but expecting Bill Murray to carry the day. He is, as expected for one of his post-middle-age roles, the zen-like core of a well-crafted and lovingly made film about a man who treks across America, visiting the homes of his formal libidinal conquests in search of his purported son. The plot ties together a series of vignettes, in which new characters are quickly introduced, fleshed out to the director's satisfaction and left behind on the road. Ended in the middle, leaving it all up to you (I guess). Lost Highway (1997) -- "8/10" Back to David Lynch with Bill Pullman and Patricia Arquette in a bizarre, semi-surrealistic film about identity (though all Lynch's films are pretty much about that). Fred the sax player has a gorgeous wife [2] whom he kills or it seems that he did. Or someone did. Or another version of him did. Or something. It's great to see Pullman pulling off such a demanding role but the plot's harder to follow than Primer's and that film had time travel in it. Henry Rollins, Richard Pryor, Gary Busey and Marylin Manson have small roles. Awesome soundtrack and beautifully filmed, but hard to recommend because it's not easy to follow and it's long; if you want help, read the David Foster Wallace essay on David Lynch and his filmography first. He actually wrote that while on the set of Lost Highway and he seems to have "gotten it". Mulholland Drive (2001) -- "8/10" One more Lynch film, which means lots of close-ups, lots of expressive eyes, lots of dialogue, lots of cigarettes, a smattering of cameos (I think I saw Billy Ray Cyrus), a whole lot of strange characters with bizarre peccadilloes and a complex plot. It's ostensibly about a wide-eyed girl who goes to Hollywood, but wound in and around that is a crime movie (as is Lynch's wont). Lynch's work kind of reminds me of Stephen King: he documents our everyday reality in loving detail, then suddenly introduces a completely orthogonal element that "leaks through" the thin fabric of reality. This film does that almost two hours in, where a relatively normal, harmless-seeming thriller about an amnesiac woman takes a left turn. Then there are flashbacks and identity-switches and what feels almost like time travel engendered by a mysterious box, but probably another flashback (the description attempts to inspire the WTF feeling brought about by the film). The last forty minutes make Memento seem straightforward by comparison. If you watch it, make sure to keep track of people's names and not to assume that the same people will retain the same names throughout. It sounds weird, but there it is. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- [1] The goal is to drag a 320-ton boat over a small mountain with the diesel motor of the boat as well as an awe-inspiring system of pulleys and a lot of manpower. [1] Patricia Arquette is not camera-shy at all. Her role calls for a lot of skin and a lot of horizontal action and she delivers with gusto. ]]> https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2460 https://www.earthli.com/news/view_article.php?id=2460 Sun, 02 Jan 2011 00:50:14 +0100 -- "9/10" 2. "Zombieland (2009)" <#Zombieland> -- "8/10" 3. "The Invention of Lying (2009)" <#Invention> -- "7/10" 4. "Surrogates (2009)" <#Surrogates> -- "7/10" 5. "Defendor (2009)" <#Defendor> -- "8/10" 6. "9 (2009)" <#9> -- "5/10" 7. "Primer (2004)" <#Primer> -- "7/10" 8. "Four Christmases (2008)" <#Four> -- "7/10" 9. "Moon (2009)" <#Moon> -- "8/10" 10. "Fred Claus (2007)" <#Fred> -- "8/10" 11. "Family Guy - Something Something Dark Side (2009)" <#Family> -- "7/10" 12. "JCVD (2008)" <#JCVD> -- "8/10" 13. "The Expendables (2010)" <#Expendables> -- "7/10" 14. "The Book of Eli (2010)" <#Eli> -- "7/10" 15. "Capitalism: a Love Story (2009)" <#Capitalism> -- "7/10" 16. "Clash of the Titans (2010)" <#Clash> -- "6/10" 17. "District 9 (2009)" <#District> -- "8/10" 18. "The Road (2009)" <#Road> -- "4/10" Inception (2010) -- "9/10" Fantastic film from start to finish with an exceedingly interesting storyline and well-put-together concept. Excellent effects, excellent cast and challenging material make for a film that you'll want to watch again. Zombieland (2009) -- "8/10" Woody Harrelson is always entertaining, but the kid doing the Michael Cera schtick of being absolutely pathetic and neurotic got old pretty quickly. Saving grace was a cameo by Bill Murray. It's a zombie movie, so you're going to have to put up with the shambling dead. The Invention of Lying (2009) -- "7/10" Gervais is great in this film about a planet where no one knows how to lie or even knows what a lie is. Once you suspend disbelief that such a society would have led to almost the exact same culture as early 20th-century Earth, it's a good, fun time, mostly carried by Gervais's sense of humor. Surrogates (2009) -- "7/10" Bruce Willis is decent in this film about a near-future society where nearly everyone is a shut-in steering a robot around the world all day to perform all of their functions. An entertaining film as long as you don't think about it too much. Decent effects. Defendor (2009) -- "8/10" Woody Harrelson again, this time as a mentally challenged man who fights crime in a semi-fantasy world of his very own. His interactions with the real world are rarely rewarding, but Harrelson carries the film quite well. 9 (2009) -- "5/10" Boring, trite story of little sack-puppet, clockwork creatures in a post-apocalyptic world (reasons pretty much unknown) who inexplicably help create a monster and then have to kill it. Overtones of Japanese anime (pieces of the soul, etc.) but pretty hackneyed and yawn-inducing. Primer (2004) -- "7/10" Low-budget time-travel movie with a pretty interesting approach and analysis of repercussions. Much is left unsaid, many ends are left loose, but it's tantalizing and interesting. The look of the film is deliberately low-rent and somewhat overblown, giving it a suburban/strip-mall feel that makes the invention of the machine seem almost humdrum. Four Christmases (2008) -- "7/10" I'm a sucker for Vince Vaughn, who pretty much plays himself in this film opposite Reese Witherspoon, who's also a lot of fun. The families are deliberately quirky, but also very entertaining, with Robert Duvall putting in a decent turn. Poor Reese ends up playing the free spirit laid low by her Mommy instinct, which typical Hollywood treacle, but what can you do? Moon (2009) -- "8/10" Interesting concept about a man alone on the moon overseeing a tritium mining operation that regularly sends tritium back to Earth to fuel its fusion reactors. After nearly three years alone, things start to get a bit strange. Pretty entertaining throughout, without too many deus ex machina thrown in. Sam Rockwell easily carries the film, which is saying something because it's pretty much a one-man show. Fred Claus (2007) -- "8/10" Good old Vince Vaughn as Santa's brother. Need I say more? Paul Giamatti as Santa and Kevin Spacey as an efficiency expert round out the cast to make what I consider to be a very fun Christmas movie. Which is saying something. Family Guy - Something Something Dark Side (2009) -- "7/10" If you like Family Guy, you'll like this film. Even if you don't really like the heap of non sequiturs that comprise a typical episode, this film is pretty entertaining. Stewie as Darth Vader steals the show. JCVD (2008) -- "8/10" Interesting meta-film about Jean Claude Van Damme as himself; that is, as a fading action star just trying to make ends meet as he loses his daughter in a custody battle. To add another layer, he's caught up in a bank robbery that's told with an interleaved series of long flashbacks. The film is mostly in French, so you'll probably need subtitles (if you understand French, Van Damme is comprehensible, but the Belgian slang of the bank robbers was impenetrable). The Expendables (2010) -- "7/10" It's the action film of the century with everybody in it (except for Stephen Seagal and Jean Claude Van Damme, who thought his part wasn't meaningful enough, which is especially interesting in light of having just seen JCVD). Willis and Schwarzenegger are really only very small cameos, but Stallone is there with all of his muscles and a face that doesn't quite fit his skull, playing opposite Mickey Rourke, who has retained his look from Iron Man II and slipped into his role very well. Dolph Lundgren was surprisingly good and Jet Li was decent, but Jason Statham completely stole the show. Hands down. If you're a Statham fan or just a fan of good fight choreography, there are some lovely, lovely moves and combinations here. The Book of Eli (2010) -- "7/10" Less than overwhelming treatment of yet-another-post-apocalyptic US of A with Denzel Washington trekking across the country. Denzel is great, as always, and plays the martial arts / master of the blade bad-ass quite well (he apparently did his own scenes, for which he was trained by Dan Inosanto). Gary Oldman was typically evil and Mila Kunis was pretty (though the conversion to bad-ass at the end was pretty trite). There was a nice trick ending, but which book it turned out to be was pretty annoying. Again, we have no idea what happened; apparently that's the new style in post-apocalysm: don't even bother explaining why everything's desolate and dusty. Capitalism: a Love Story (2009) -- "7/10" Michael Moore does a decent job as a journalist in this one (as he did, for the most part, in Sicko), staying really on topic and keeping the clever editing and fact cherry-picking to a minimum. For anyone who wasn't paying attention to what happened and what is still happening, this is an excellent primer that will smack of propaganda if you're still one of the fools who believes the myths force-fed to us by the powers-that-be. If you're not, and you're relatively well-read, there won't be much to surprise or inform here, but it's put together well. Clash of the Titans (2010) -- "6/10" Sam Worthington glowers around a lot, but it's kind of a fun take on the ancient Greek myths. The effects are out of this world (especially the Kraken but also Medusa is slitheringly fun), though the Gods are a little lackluster, just standing around being shiny on Mount Olympus. Neeson as Zeus is kinda falt, but Fiennes was entertaining as he chewed up the scenery as Hades. Betas the ass off the original. District 9 (2009) -- "8/10" Documentary-style film (at least at the beginning) about aliens that mysteriously show up and hover above Jo-burg in South Africa for two decades. As we are now accustomed, no back-story is given and we are shown the interaction between a shantytown of aliens held in check by the native humans. The parallels to the apartheid-era townships are only very vaguely suggested and racial tension among humans is completely absent, almost as if it was transferred to the human/alien barrier. A decent film with a story that's a bit of stretch, though the effects were very good (especially the alien weaponry). The Road (2009) -- "4/10" Cormac McCarthy must be pissed. He won a Pulitzer for the book and it was made into this whiny, boring, depressing snore of a movie. Perhaps there is some subtlety to showing the utter bleakness of life in an environment blasted of all life and meaning. Perhaps. Or perhaps it's just an overly long, boring film that makes you want your 100 minutes back. ]]>