Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2022.13

These are my notes to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. I’ve recently transferred my reviews to IMDb and made the list of around 1600 ratings publicly available. I’ve included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other—I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood and. let’s be honest, level of intoxication. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers.

Ambulance (2022) — 8/10

This movie hit “peak Michael Bay” when the ambulance was driving up the LA river basin, framed by rooster tails of water and a sunset, with Danny (Jake Gyllenhaal) hanging out the passenger window, firing on two LA helicopters in pursuit.

They kept talking about what an amazing driver Will (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II) is, but all I saw was him driving on the road while cop cars flew off the road to both sides of him for most of the movie. It was utterly unclear how they could just keep driving into obvious impediments unless it was a surfeit of confidence and lack of brains. Speaking of lack of brains, neither of the Sharp brothers wore a seatbelt the whole time.

Jake Gyllenhaal seemed like he was having the time of his life, though! He just seemed to be ad-libbing and airing his grievances. He seems to be on board with Bay’s vision of making a movie that’s basically a love letter to LA—with all of its warts. There were a bunch of gratuitous shots of very LA-specific stuff, as well as some shots of trash by the side of the highway, lovingly filmed.

They finally get to the dipsy-doodle where they spray-paint their ambulance and then send out several others—“That’s a military maneuver”, says Monroe (Garret Dillahunt) sagely—it gets really interesting. Danny has promised half of his haul to Papi (A Martinez) and his gang. They deliver, in spades. They load up an ambulance with explosives and drive right into the cordon set up by the cops. Incredible practical effects. The whole intersection lies in ruins.

As usual, their are some frankly impossible things that happen, like Will giving a ton of blood to the hostage cop Zach (Jackson White), Cam (Eiza González) doing surgery on Zach in the back of a moving ambulance—and then Zach being totally good to go and ready for a firefight later. Will also didn’t seem to be suffering from a lack of blood when his adrenalin crash came.

At 132 minutes, it was a bit long, but Gyllenhaal is riveting, absolutely unhinged. Cam shoots Will, but she didn’t mean it. Danny drives them to the hospital, finally. There is a final standoff. Danny leaves the back of the ambulance with Cam, but Will shoots Danny to save Cam. It’s all quite justifiably confused, but it’s an appropriate end to an adrenalin-fueled ride.

It’s so weird, then, that, instead of just ending on the pavement outside the hospital, they had to focus on Cam’s hero’s journey to finding a heart. Who the fuck are they making these ending for? Just the most terrible people, I bet. I’m glad I don’t have to watch movies with them.

Dick Tracy (1990) — 6/10

The plot follows a relatively standard line: Dick Tracy is making things uncomfortable for the local mob bosses, in particular Big Boy Caprice (Al Pacino), who runs everything with an iron fist.

Big Boy Caprice is superficially comical, but deep-down quite evil. The movie looks like a happy, garish comic book, but the criminals are horrific and people are gunned down in droves. Mumbles (Dustin Hoffman) is completely incomprehensible, his lip twists off to the left, and it looks for all the world like Hoffman just kept running with his role from Rainman in 1988.

Breathless Mahoney (Madonna) is a good deal racier than expected. At one point, Tracy asks Tess Trueheart (Glenne Headly) what flavor ice cream she got and Mahoney answers, “fresh peach. And you better hurry, it’s starting to run a little bit.” Jesus. That is not even a little PG-13.

Warren Beatty as Dick Tracy plays it about as straight as its possible to play. He and Tess Trueheart kinda/sorta adopt a “Kid”, which makes them a family of sorts, although they’re so woefully dysfunctional relationship-wise that the straight-arrow Tracy ends up smooching Mahoney before coming to his senses.

They try to kill Tracy a couple of times, they try to frame him, someone named Mr. Blank is trying to have everyone killed (Blank turns out to be Mahoney). Mahoney dies, as do pretty much a lot of people. Tess and the Kid and Tracy live happily ever after. It was decent and quite a vision actually, for the time, but the plot was nothing to write home about and I’ll never watch it again.

Last and First Men (2020) — 4/10

This was less a movie than a 70-minute audiobook of a five-page science-fiction story. The story was of a civilization of the “last men” 2000-million years in the future. They are sending a message back to the “first men”, telling them of their future and of how a giant violet cloud is bringing the solar system to a premature end, of how they’re moving Earth out, away from the sun, of how they’ve moved to Uranus, at least partially, and other kind of insignificant details. They tell vaguely of how they manipulate certain flaws in space-time in order to communicate with the past.

The entire film is in black-and-white and features very slow pans over Icelandic sculptures while slow orchestral music plays and Tilda Swinton slowly reads the story.

I was wondering why the story felt vaguely familiar. The book Last and First Men is by Olaf Stapledon, whose book Star Maker I read a few years back. The movie’s “plot” is only very loosely based on the book (Wikipedia), though.

Le Roi et L’oiseau (1980) — 7/10

The kingdom of Takicardia is a vertical one (think Gormenghast). It is ruled by a heartless, cross-eyed king named Charles XVI. He is mercurial and kills with trap doors. The king is fond of hunting and we see him trying to shoot a baby bird. His strabismus prevents him from hitting it, though, and the baby’s father gathers it back to its nest, high up in the towers of Takicardia. This little bird would be trapped again and again in the same trap, a box perched on a nearly unreachable eave.

The king sleeps and dreams, during which his own non-cross-eyed portrait comes to life, as do those of a shepherdess with whom he is in love and a chimney sweep whom he hates because the shepherdess loves him. The portrait deposes the real king (using a trap door, naturally) and takes over, even more devious than the real one. The shepherdess and chimney sweep—with the help of the bird—flee throughout the castle with the king in hot pursuit. The castle is kind of high-tech, with canals and motorized, single-person conveyances.

The king eventually calls forth a giant robot from the bowels of his city, half-destroying the city in his attempts to dig the shepherdess out of the depths a village in the bowels of the castle, where the sun never shines. There, she and the chimney sweep had holed up with a blind organ-grinder and a slew of giant felines. The king, using the robot, eventually gets the shepherdess to submit to and marry him, to save her chimney sweep’s life.

L’oiseau and the chimney sweep are forced into manual labor in a factory producing statues of the king. They are arrested again when they turn out mockeries instead. L’oiseau and the big cats and the chimney sweep stage a revolt to rescue the shepherdess. The bird and his sons use the robot to destroy the castle. They banish the king with extreme prejudice. The robot uses its pincers to open the cage one final time to free the same stupid little bird who keeps getting trapped in there.

The drawing style is fine, but nothing to watch for. There are almost no people in the city. It’s unclear what the source of power is, or how they manufactured all of the King’s toys—especially the robot. The plot is languorous and somewhat meandering and a bit simple, in the end. There is no score to speak of. The voices are quite muddy, making the characters quite difficult to understand.

I watched it in the original French without subtitles.

Rick and Morty S06 (2022) — 8/10

This season is not nearly as crazy as the previous one, but it’s still layer upon layers of realities. The first show picks up where the last season left off, with a confrontation with Rick Prime and a different Jerry, and a creature that accidentally replicates itself to planet size. The family is together and relocates to a different dimension where they had no longer existed. They are Summer, Morty, Rick, Jerry, and Beth. Rick still doesn’t have a functioning portal gun.

The second show is based on Die Hard and has Rick and Morty trapped in a video game based on same. Summer has to rescue them, all wrapped in several levels of indirection.

In the third show, Space-Beth is back for Thanksgiving and starts a torrid affair with Beth. After briefly wanting to kill himself, Jerry gets in on the action. Space-Beth leaves again.

The fourth show has the whole family doing their odious chores and tasks through their “night selves”. These selves eventually rise up and try to take over the day. Summer is, of course, the ringleader. With Rick refusing to comply with their demands—that he do his
own dishes—the night family rules for several months before giving up.

The fifth show involves a fortune-cookie factory and empire and a creature that poops out all of the fortune cookies in the world.

The sixth show is about dinosaurs returning to Earth to bring peace and harmony and technological advancements. Rick is not impressed. He discovers that this race is hounded by a species of homicidal and intelligent asteroids that seek out the dinosaurs. Because they are peaceful, they never destroyed any, letting their planets instead be destroyed while they moved on. Rick, after having gotten a new and improved portal gun—it lets you see where you’re headed—from the dinosaurs—which he broke out of spite—rebuilds his portal gun.

Episode seven pushes the meta-meta-meta so far that there is a whole crew of superheroes named after various meta concepts and tropes. Rick even mentions that they’re fourth-walling harder than “the third season of Moonlighting”, which I thought was a lovely reference (because I totally got it). Jan and Story Lord (Paul Giamatti) are behind the whole plot, engaging the help of Jesus Christ (Christopher Meloni), whom they betray. Morty engages the help of Joseph Campbell (Wikipedia) to get them back to the real world. This was a pretty awesome episode; would watch again.

Episode eight has Rick exhausted of having to constantly battle supervillains, so he foists the latest, Pissmaster, on Jerry. Jerry takes him out, thanks only to Rick’s awesome armor. Jerry goes viral and is asked to join an intergalactic council of heroes, who turn out to be pretty lame, of course. Rick discovers that Pissmaster has committed suicide—and takes his place, performing heroic deeds to redeem the poor, sad, suicided man’s name. He is poised to pretend to kill himself while disarming a bomb so that he can end his career as Pissmaster (á la Batman) when Jerry shows up to reluctantly ask the hero to join the intergalactic council of heroes. He sees that Pissmaster is Rick and refuses, getting himself kicked out of the group, as well. The family finds out about Pissmaster’s suicide and tear Jerry down some more for it.

Episode nine has Morty joining the Knights of the Sun, where he quickly climbs the ranks to become king of the sun, which is boring and stupid, as Rick points out. Morty points out that their worldview is completely at-odds with reality and disbands them, spiraling the solar system into war, as the Knights were the only thing keeping the balance. Morty and Rick end up having to fake their deaths in order to avoid getting their penises chopped off by the Knights, who require this somehow in order to regroup and save the solar system.

Episode ten has Rick giving Morty a lightsaber for Christmas, which he promptly drops vertically into the Earth, threatening humanity should it reach the core. Meanwhile, Rick has been replace with a robot to keep Morty busy for the last few episodes while he searches for Rick Prime. The President gets Morty to get Rick to help save the Earth, promptly swiping the lightsaber once they’ve retrieved in from the Earth’s core with the amazing core-digging device that Rick built. Rickbot dies, while Morty apologizes and pledges to help Rick find Rick Prime, leading Rick to monologue nearly endlessly about what will almost surely form the plot arc of season seven.

Nobody (2021) — 8/10

An absolutely over-the-top and somehow pitch-perfect movie about a guy with a particular set of skills who gets unleashed on the world once more. There are definitely John Wick vibes here—especially with the enemy being stupid Russian who mess with the wrong man. Hutch Mansell (Bob Odenkirk) lives with his wife Becca (Connie Nielsen) and his two kids. His is a normal life. But he’s not normal: he’s a former auditor for all of the other secret agencies, which means that he was the one called in to clean house when things needed cleaning. That means he’s a god of destruction and mayhem.

Two petty thieves rob his home and he lets them go, even though he had the drop on one of them. He realized that the woman’s gun was old, and not even loaded. His son is disappointed in him, but we know the son will soon think otherwise. Hutch is willing to drop the whole thing, especially after he’s spoken with his mysterious brother from this mysterious den, but then he discovers that his daughter’s kitty-cat bracelet had been stolen along with the fistful of small bills. He searches for and finds the couple who’d robbed him, demanding the kitty-cat bracelet back. He sees that they have a baby and realizes that he’d gone slightly off the rails.

He leaves them be, but he has an encounter on the way home: five drunk guys crash their car next to his bus. They are all uninjured from the crash, get on the bus instead, and start to terrorize everyone. Hutch sits in the middle of the back, the calm in the storm, anticipating the coming ass-kicking with absolute delight. He takes the group of five guys apart, sustaining a bit of damage himself, and having taken out one guy badly enough that he has to give him an emergency tracheotomy to save his life. Hutch gets home and his wife helps patch him up. She’s seen this before. He tells her he wants a change, that “they haven’t had sex in months, and haven’t made love in years.”

That guy ends up dying. That guy was the little brother of a psychotic Russian mobster, Yulian (Aleksey Serebryakov). Yulian is in charge of the Obshchak (общак), which is a giant pile of cash held in common by criminals and oligarchs. Yulian sends a bunch of people to Hutch’s house, which doesn’t have the hoped-for result. They manage to kidnap Hutch, but he escapes from the moving car, killing everyone else in the process.

His rampage is gaining momentum. and he lays waste to everyone in his house, then sends his family away, and gets started on Yulian. He is a force of nature, taking out anyone and everyone, eventually lighting the общак on fire. He ends up in one of Yulian’s clubs, eating calmly as Yulian finishes a karaoke session. Hutch gets away, escaping to the family factory that he’d just purchased from his father-in-law with gold bullion and that he had just turned into an armed death trap. He barely gets to the parking lot, with the Russians hot on his heels. He finds his father David (Christopher Lloyd), also a former auditor, and his brother Harry (RZA), there to provide covering fire. Together, they take out the remaining Russian army.

The police apprehend him, but they are told by mysterious sources to let him go. We see him and his family purchasing a house three months later. He gets a call.

This is every person’s self-defense fantasy, being able to defend the home and hearth and family from evil forces. In this case, no-one in the family had to die in order to spur the revenge fantasy. In this case—as is happening more often—the hero is possessed of an unbelievable power of planning, combat readiness, and ability to take punishment. He is also wildly independently wealthy, so money is never an object. Hence, the fantasy. The hero has a secret life where he has fuck-you money, physical skills to defend against anyone and anything, and will never be grievously injured

Enemy (2013) — 7/10

Adam Bell (Jake Gyllenhaal) is a professor of history who leads kind of a lonely, repetitive existence. He teaches during the day and goes home to sleep with Mary (Melanie Laurent). A co-worker of his suggests a movie in which he spies an actor who looks just like him. He gets intrigued and rent two other films with the actor Anthony St. Clair in them. It’s the same actor. It’s his own face. They’re not speaking roles, though.

Adam gets Anthony’s home number and calls there. Anthony’s wife Helen (Sarah Gadon) picks up and thinks it’s Anthony. She hangs up on him after he freaks her out a bit. He calls back and gets Anthony. Adam freaks him out, too. But Anthony is now intrigued and starts investigating Adam. Helen, suspecting that Anthony is cheating on her again, snoops around and finds Anthony’s notes on Adam. She also looks him up.

Anthony calls Adam for a meeting, while Helen goes right to the university where he teaches—and finds him outside, contemplative after having spoken with Anthony. he makes small talk, while she can only gawp at him. He has no idea who she is. He’s nice to her, but she’s very, very confused. I honestly have no idea why she’s so devastated.

Anthony and Adam meet up at a motel outside of town. They look alike, they sound alike, they have the same scars. What is going on? Losing his nerve entirely after having found out they have the same scar, Adam rabbits out of there. Anthony catches up to him on his motorcycle and goes blazing past him.

Anthony tracks Adam down to his home and discovers Mary. The wheels are turning now for Anthony. He figures maybe he can bag her because she’ll think he’s Adam.

To boost the weird cred, Isabella Rosellini shows up as Adam’s mother. This is where we find out that Adam is also apparently unfaithful. Anthony puts his plan into action, telling Adam that he will take Mary on a getaway weekend and then will disappear out of his life forever. Why in God’s name would Mary not notice that it’s a different person? Anthony doesn’t know anything about Mary and Adam’s shared life together, what they talk about, their verbal cues. He would be very strange to her immediately. Unless she and Adam don’t know each other well at all.

At the beginning of the film, we saw who we now know was Anthony attending a very unique sex show, where a statuesque, nude woman steps on a tarantula with high heels. When Adam starts wheedling into Anthony’s life, he quickly discovers this side of it as well. He goes to Anthony’s apartment and Helen shows up soon after. She’s six months pregnant, but seems somewhat frisky. They lie down together. Helen knows what she’s doing, though, because Adam is nicer than Anthony.

Meanwhile, Mary and Anthony are in the thick of it when she notices not only his different technique (which would have to be obvious), but the mark on his finger where his wedding ring was. Mary bails. They drive home together, though! I guess he was her ride, so…no public transportation. Meanwhile Adam takes the other tack—sobbing and apologizing—and Helen jumps his bones. Mary and Anthony fight in the car and Anthony flips it on the way back. It looks like dey dead.

Adam finds the key to the crazy-ass sex party and tells Helen he needs to go out that night. He goes back to check on her and finds a giant tarantula in her bedroom instead. Like, giant, as in it fills the whole room. The end.

What?

Denis Villeneuve directed this film in … black-and-yellow. The film was pretty much a pallet of browns and yellows. I’m sure that it was considered very artistic and evocative, but I couldn’t unsee it.

The House that Jack Built (2018) — 10/10

Jack (Matt Dillon) is in an voice-over interview with Verge (Bruno Ganz), who seems to be his psychiatrist. Jack is urged to explain how he got to be where he is. He says that he will explain in five incidents.

He meets lady #1 (Uma Thurman) on the side of the road. She is quite aggressive and obnoxious, badgering him into helping her with her broken jack. But she probably wasn’t really like this. She is being reconstructed for us by Jack, our unreliable narrator. He takes her to and from a “blacksmith”, who was supposed to have repaired the jack. She is impressed with neither of them when it doesn’t work, then badgers him for a ride back into town again, telling him she takes back what she said before, when she’s said that he looked like a serial killer, because he’s actually much too big of a wimp to be a serial killer. He puts the jack through her forehead.

He is on lady #2's (Siobhan Fallon Hogan) porch, trying to get inside, lying about being a cop, telling her his badge is at a “silversmith”, then admitting that he’s an insurance agent and that he will double her pension. She lets him in. He kills her, first by strangulation, but it doesn’t take, then again by strangulation, which seems to have taken, but he makes sure by plunging a knife into her heart. He cleans up, drags her corpse out to the van, and tries to leave. This whole murder makes it clear how much work it is to actually strangle someone and to manhandle a body down stairs and into a van. He can’t leave, though, because his OCD makes him imagine blood spots he’d missed. Verge chuckles in the voice-over. Jack re-enters several times to clean invisible stains. The police arrive for a nearby break-in and question him. He annoys the officer into letting him leave. He takes off, but the corpse is attached to the back of the van and drags a meat crayon along behind him for miles. Jack takes the immediately ensuing fierce rainstorm as a sign that he had “a higher protector”.

The interludes between the acts are a mimic of Dylan’s Subterranean Homesick Blues video, where he holds cue cards, each with an individual message, and drops them one-by-one.

Fucking von Trier. Jack has killed two women. He is clearly unstable. A psychopath. I took it all in stride. There’s an interlude, though, where he speaks of being a child, listening to the “breath of the meadow”, the inhaling and exhaling of the men as they scythed a field in rhythm. It’s all very soothing. A duckling approaches young Jack, floating close to him as he sits on a dock. He lifts his net to capture it, then holds it in his lap, petting it. He reaches back slowly with this right hand to grab wire clippers and coolly snips one of the duckling’s feet off. He releases it to swim in a circle, peeping desperately. I drew breath quickly. I was appalled. But why now? Why not earlier, when he killed two women in cold blood? What is it about torturing animals that gets me more? This is obviously calculated by von Trier, and is probably why people hate him—they don’t like to be reminded of what hypocrites they are, how absolutely ass-backwards their morals are. Here we have a serial killer, who’s an attractive Matt Dillon, but he’s OCD. Does his condition elicit sympathy? Maybe a little. But it is his torture of an innocent duckling that reminds us of what he is. Not the murder of two women.

Lady #3 (Sofie Gråbøl) is a date whom he strangulates as they are kissing. He drags her back to the meat locker where he’d stored the other two corpses. He just leaves the bodies stuffed into on shelves and sprawled across boxes.

He always photographs the women. He is dissatisfied with lady #3's photos, so he takes her corpse from the freezer to take her back to the scene of the crime to take new pictures. On his way along a country road, he sees an older lady (Carina Skenhede) walking on the shoulder. He can’t resist running her over. Now he has two bodies in the van: one frozen in a sort-of seated position and one freshly killed and still hemorrhaging.

He poses the dead ladies together in the third lady’s former apartment.

A mom (uncredited) goes on a trip to the woods with Jack, taking her two children George and Grumpy. They’re on a picnic while Jack teaches the boys how to shoot and other ins and outs of hunting. This is peak Lars von Trier. Immediately after, the girlfriend is seen with her two children cowering behind a downed tree in the field. Jack is in the tree stand. He picks off George. His mother howls. Jack calmly asks her to give her dead boy a slice of pie, as if that were a perfectly reasonable thing to ask. For people who though Hannibal Lecter was peak psychotic, this movie turns it up to 11. He kills her last. She was already dead inside anyway.

Simple (Riley Keough) seems to be Jack’s girlfriend. She’s very insecure. She puts up with his crudity and his anger and meanness. He admits to her that he’s a serial killer. He as much as tells her that he’s going to kill her while telling how stupid she is. She denies that she’s stupid, but suspects absolutely nothing, craving his attention no matter what form. She gets him the magic marker he demands. He begins drawing lines on her breasts like he’s marking a cow carcass. She suspects nothing, belying her claim that she’s not as “dumb as a doorknob”. She just calls him “fucking weird” and actually storms out.

He chases her outside where she’s asking a police officer for help. Jack admits again that he’s killed 60 people, then calls her by her real name (Ms. Jaqueline) and sways around a bit. The cop tells them both to go sleep it off. He plays on her emotions and she falls for it, asking him to come back inside with her. Upstairs, he lies curled into the sofa, ostensibly catatonic with grief at what he’d done, while she calls a friend who’s “got some pills”.

Heart-stopping is the only way to describe when she realizes that he’d cut the phone line. She looks behind her and sees he’s still inert. She starts creeping toward the door. Then he’s there, right behind her. She looks resigned. She understands now. “You’re walking without your crutch.” “You’re Mr. Sophistication, aren’t you.” They scream together; no-one answers; no-one hears. He lets he scream out the window. He waits patiently as she gets it out of her system.

“You know, maybe I’m mistaken, but, as far as I can tell, not a single light has gone on in any apartment or stairwell. And do you know why that is? ‘Cause in this hell of a town, in this hell of a country, in this hell of a world, nobody wants to help. You can scream from now until Christmas Eve and the only answer you’ll get is the deafening silence that you’re hearing right now.”

He gets to work, tying her up with a plastic cord and then making her choose which knife she wants him to use on her. He slices along the lines. He goes back to the cop car and places one of Simple’s breasts on the windshield.

A segue on how to make dessert wines, or ice wines. This is such classic von Trier. Verge and Jack discuss putrefaction. Jack’s house isn’t coming along very well. Jack isn’t able to build the house that he wants to build, so he keeps having them bulldozed. It is at this point that we learn that “Verge” seems to be short for “Virgil” because Jack asks him about his greatest work and Verge answers with the Aeneid. They continue to discuss art and the value of art and the subject of art. Cue a Glenn Gould interlude. Verge speaks Italian sometimes.[1] They discuss the Stuka plane and its unique sound when it dive-bombed, filling its intended targets’ veins with ice. “Jericho’s Trumpet”. As Jack waxes about “icon-creators”,

“Jack: What I’m getting at is this: As disinclined as the world is to acknowledge the beauty of decay, it’s just as disinclined to those—no, credit to us—who create the real icons of this planet. We are deemed the ultimate evil. All the icons that have had and always will have an impact on the world are, for me, extravagant art.”

He says this as wartime footage of concentration camps and horrifically emaciated prisoners play.[2]

“Verge: Stop it. You Antichrist! I don’t recall ever having escorted a so thoroughly depraved person as you, Jack.

“Verge: Since you have now apparently set your heart on mass extermination, let me make a brief comment on the Buchenwald camp that emphasizes my attitude towards art and love. In the middle of this concentration camp stood a tree. And not just any old tree, but an oak. And not just any oak, but the one Goethe, when he was young, sat beneath and wrote some of humanity’s most important works. Goethe. Here you can talk about masterpieces and the value of icons. The personification of humanism, dignity, culture, and goodness was, by the irony of fate, suddenly present in the middle of the all-time greatest crimes against humanity.

“Jack: Some people claim that the atrocities we commit in our fiction are those inner desires which we cannot commit in our controlled civilization. So, they are expressed instead through our art. I don’t agree. I believe heaven and hell are one and the same. The soul belongs to heaven and the body to hell. The soul is reason and the body is all the dangerous things. For example, art and icons.”

Jack’s whole speech is accompanied by clips from von Trier’s other films (I spied Dogville, Antichrist, Melancholia, Nymphomaniac).

Jack continues with another incident, though it’s not labeled as such. He has six men on sawhorses in his freezer. They’re alive. Their heads are lined up so that he can shoot them all with a single bullet. He explains this all calmly to them, in a calm manner. One of the men points out that the round that Jack has showed them is not a full-metal jacket round, as he’d claimed. He realizes that the guy is right. Annoyed, he goes back to the gun shop, where he’d obtained the incorrect goods. He goes nuts on the poor store-owner, Al (Jeremy Davies). The store-owner wonders whether he even bought the bullets there. The transaction goes downhill from there. Al is allowed to live, though.

Jack gets stuck in a rut on the way to his next destination, to get full-metal jacket rounds from S.P. (David Bailie). The camera chases him down the logging road, gloriously unencumbered by a steadicam. S.P. catches him and calls the police. He thinks he’s a robber, though. Jack sweet-talks him into putting his gun down, making him think he’s remorseful. S.P. pours him a drink. Jack drives a knife up under his chin and into his brain. Jack waits for the police to arrive, poses as S.P. to get the officer close, then shoots the officer. He steals the cop car and returns to the freezer where he’d told the men to “try not to die on me.”

Just to be clear, Jack has killed a man who had called the police saying he’d caught Jack, killed the cop who showed up to apprehend Jack, then driven back to his meat locker with six kidnapees in it, the siren blaring. He’s left the car outside with the siren still blaring. He’s now inside to complete his masterpiece, but realizes that he can’t shoot the rifle inside the locker because he can’t focus the scope. He works open the door behind him to a larger space—cool as a cucumber—then tapes out a longer line for his shot. He levels it up, then gets a good line on it. Another police car shows up. Jack is obviously trying to get caught now.

From the dark, empty space, he hears Verge for the first time. He wants to talk about the house that Jack seems to be unable to build. He tells Jack to “find the material, and let it do the work”. We see Jack building with corpses. Cue the Glenn Gould clip again (signifying “art”). Verge enters the house as the police are arc-welding their way into the freezer. As police open a hole and shoot through it, Jack drops through a manhole in his “house”.

He and Verge are now in Hell. A spotlight on water. The river Styx.

Now, they’re walking along what looks like a half-flooded mining tunnel in what looks more like documentary footage. I can’t believe what Ganz and Dillon were willing to do for this director.

A placid rill. Black-and-white. Jack’s red robe the only color. They approach the end of a tunnel looking out over a waterwheel on what looks like a partially frozen sawmill.

They’re descending ladders along a wall of what look like agonized and carbonized bodies.

Trudging through more water.

Slow-motion walking along a path between curtains of blood.

Crossing a river in a boat. It looks like a renaissance painting. Art.

Jack stares hungrily out a window at what Verge tells him are the Elysian fields. “We don’t have access here.” We hear the “breath of the fields” that Jack remembered from his youth. Men are in a field suffused in golden glow, scything and breathing in rhythm.[3] Jack’s gaze turns longing, in the first non-cruel expression we’ve ever seen on him. Dillon is a master here. A tear falls. A brief flash of what had been lost, the road not taken. Resignation. Determination.

They arrive at a lava river. Verge tells Jack that this is deepest of the depths of hell. But that this is not where Jack is meant to go, amazing as that may seem. He says that he’s showing it to him as a favor, because Jack was so intriguing. Across the broken bridge is a path out of hell. Jack considers climbing around, asking Virgil whether anyone has done it. No. This is probably why Virgil brought him here, because he knew he would try.

Jack is still in the red cloak he’d stolen from S.P.

Jack climbs, traversing sideways.

Jack struggles.

Jack falls.

Cue credits, accompanied by the incongruously upbeat “Hit the road, Jack”.

There is no way that you sympathize with this serial killer. He’s a nearly incomprehensibly savage, brutal, and cold person. Von Trier and Dillon make clear what a sociopath would truly look like. It is unflinching. It was written by a man unafraid to really contemplate what it would be like to be that kind of a person without sensationalizing it.

I wonder how people will somehow paint von Trier as glorifying or humanizing something horrible, as they’ve gone every time before. Jack is abominably evil and von Trier sends him to the lowest of hell without humanizing him (save the three seconds where he’s staring out the window at the Elysian fields). He shows how horrible Jack was, sends him to hell, and ends the movie with a celebratory tune. It probably wasn’t enough to avoid charges of glorifying serial killers.

Moritz Neumeier: Ich weiss das doch auch nicht (2022) — 7/10

This special is from just after Corona, and after he’d had three kids. It’s decent, but it’s not nearly as good as Hurra (see review from 2019), which was my favorite so far.

He spends a lot of time talking about child-rearing, interactions with schools, how smart his wife is, interacting with children—little to no political stuff at all, which is a shame, because he used to be quite incisive and sharp about that kind of stuff. However, this absolutely supports my theory that people with children literally ignore most of the rest of the world because they literally no longer have time for it. I correct myself: he did briefly discuss climate change, but only in a joke about climate-change deniers being deliberately ignorant, which is worse than being unintelligent.

About 40 minutes in, he talks about teaching his kids how to deal with racism—because Germany is a racist country. Well, yeah, duh. Literally every country in the world is racist. That’s just how people are. Some people avoid it; some lean into it. Some countries build up barriers against it, others ignore it, others promote it.

In the last 30 minutes, though, he left kids behind and started talking about refugees and an experience on a train where German officers were about to throw a clearly exhausted family off the train when an old aristocratic woman stood and demanding to know WHY?

“Hatten die keine gültige Fahrkarten? Doch, doch, die sind in Ordnung.
Waren die Pässe nicht in Ordnung? Doch, die waren OK.
Warum müssen die denn aussteigen? Na … weil die haben etwas gesagt, welches wir nicht verstanden haben.
Also, die müssen aussteigen, weil ihr zu dumm sind einen Dolmetscher mitzubringen, obwohl abertausenden von Menschen jeden Tag über die Grenze kommen, die nur arabisch können? …”

Then he goes on to talk about how not everyone should have the same rights to freedom of speech. This is a special German mental handicap that is spreading around the world. Some ideas should be suppressed because Hitler. That is, people with bad ideas should not be able to express those ideas. They think that this is the way to stop them acting violently on those ideas.

It’s an interesting thought experiment: why should a Nazi’s right to free speech trump someone else’s right to be in public unmolested? IT FUCKING DOESN”T. This is not rocket science. Say a Nazi has a stand in a mall and someone with a headscarf walks by. The Nazi yells out at the person, ruining their day. I wouldn’t consider it a restriction of his freedom of speech to prevent him from ruining people’s days for no reason. I wouldn’t even care if the mall said he can’t have his stand. I wouldn’t care either, though, if he had his little stand, and sat there quietly looking sad and ridiculous in his little mustache.

Our fear of their ideas grants them power. I think this is what people are missing. Yes, stop them from impacting innocent people’s lives—this is not easy! We all have to help. If we see something, we have to help stop it. We have to overpower them with numbers instead of letting them intimidate us. But we don’t have to ban their speech. If they show up looking way tougher than anyone else, but they’re only talking, then that’s their right. If they harass people directly, that’s not.

You can’t make a law against their existence. That’s not going to work. But people keep thinking it will. They mix metaphors and ideas to blur the lines in societally unhealthy ways. They’re lazy and scared and want bad things to go away rather than having to stand up to bad people themselves, before they gain too much power. It’s much easier to have someone else tape their mouth shut for us—we know who should shut up and who shouldn’t, right?

Neumeier seems to be utterly and blissfully unaware of the possibility that there are those who would find his act shocking enough to want to shut him up. What prevents his being shut up when we’re shutting Nazis up? Does he not think this a possibility? Does he not care?

This kind of thinking leads people to weird conclusions like “alle in 1945 Deutschland lebenden die nicht aktiv gegen Nazis agiert haben waren Nazis”, which is the kind of blanket statement that fucking Nazis make or literally fucking Osama bin Laden made. That is literally the justification Osama bin Laden gave for 9/11.

Collectively punishing people for the actions of some of their members is…checks notes…forbidden by the Geneva Convention. Don’t let that stop you, though, when the cause is just, ammirite? Who else thought they were doing that? Collectively punishing a group of people because the cause was just? Oh, yeah…Nazis. WTF, dude. This poisonous mindset has more than landed in America, though—or maybe it came from there. I’m not exactly sure what the timeline looks like.

He goes on to a bit about losing heroes, like Louis C.K. or Michael Jackson. He “proves” that Michael Jackson was a pedophile by asking “who would want to get famous for having been raped by Michael Jackson?” What kind of a naive fucking question is that? You can believe them if you want—that’s your absolute right, to be convinced by a case, by the preponderance of evidence. But you’re a fool if you believe them just because they dared to say it in public.

There is way too much evidence that people are willing to do anything for attention or even a little bit of money. Nearly literally anything. Including being a Nazi, you numb-nuts. Jesus Christ, the biggest problem the left has is that they are just so fucking divorced from reality, so literal, so uncynical, so non-ironic, that they can’t think like the enemy for one second. It is their ultimate weakness. I can’t even imagine believing something because “why would anyone say something so horrible about themselves in public?” Jesus, haven’t you been paying attention to how humanity operates? Have you never seen German reality TV?

Then he argues that you can’t “separate the art from the artist”, which presumably means that, if you are still enjoying listening to Smooth Criminal, then you’re a pedophile sympathizer and probably also a Nazi. That would be the logical conclusion from Neumeier’s presentation. If you don’t actively try to get Smooth Criminal off the radio, you’re a Nazi.

He goes on to make an analogy about having a colleague who’d killed his wife, but wasn’t at a grill party. He used to make great sausages, though, so they should just invite him anyway. No sense throwing out the baby with the bathwater. I hope he doesn’t really believe that this analogy holds water. Choosing not to associate directly with someone who’s done something horrible is not the same thing as still finding something that that person has done to be useful.

What would these fools do if a serial killer solved fusion? Just not use the technology because it came from the wrong person? Maybe wait until a black lesbian discovered it so we can be sure that it’s OK to use it? Fingers crossed that she’s a generous lover or we’ll have to remain in darkness.

What the actual fuck are these people thinking? Do you stop reading excellent authors with thought-provoking ideas who had questionable persona lives? (E.g. Gore Vidal?) What are you afraid of? That you won’t be able to resist the lure of their poisonous ideas and you’ll also end up being a horrible person? How weak do you think you are? Are you worried that people will listen to Michael Jackson’s music and become pedophiles? Or that they would allow pedophiles in society just in case they might also be generationally great musical artists? What is the fucking logic here?

But, sure, put your faith in Netflix or HBO or whomever produced the documentary that convinced you—because documentaries are always true and never manipulative. It doesn’t matter that Jackson beat the rap in a dozen court appearances. It. Doesn’t. Matter. These people know for sure and they have made their judgment and anyone who doesn’t agree with them is a NAZI.

Fuckin’ A, Moritz. Pourin’ a forty out on the curb for you, brother. Moritz has become a woke idiot. I suppose it was better when I’d thought his brain had been softened by parenthood and not by progressivism with an iron fist.

I do not envy these people their certainty. They are deliberately stupid to think that the world is so simple. This loops back to one of Neumeier’s own initial bits about climate-change-deniers being deliberately stupid. Sure, that’s one example. The final 30 minutes of his special amply demonstrated another: the lefty identitarian convinced of his own righteousness. They are censors and they must be stopped.

Coincidentally, the next article I read after the show was A Tangled Webb by Scott H. Greenfield (Simple Justice), which details an attempt to erase James Webb from history for something he’d never done, then, when it was proven that he’d never done it personally, for not having personally stopped homophobia in the 1960s. Since he didn’t do that, there is no way that we can, in all good conscience, recognize any of his scientific achievements. Instead, I suppose we will have to pretend that they just emerged fully-formed from the aether, or perhaps it would be OK if we invented a gay scientist who’d invented them instead. I really don’t know the protocol here.

Sex, Lies, and Videotape (1989) — 10/10

Ann (Andie MacDowell) is in a loveless marriage with John (Peter Gallagher). He’s a junior partner in a law firm; she’s a housewife. They have no children. She is seeing a therapist (Ron Vawter), to whom she confesses that she no longer likes to be touched. She hasn’t made love to John in months. He stopped trying that long ago. She tells her therapist that she’s worried about John having invited his college friend Graham (James Spader) to stay with them until he can find a place of his own.

Ann expects Graham to be just like John, but he’s very, very different. He’s soft-spoken and seems kind, a little forthright in some of his questions, but quite disarming. Ann is charmed, so she offers to help him find an apartment. They find one for him relatively quickly, but still manage to discuss intimate personal details like the fact that she’s not having sex with John, and that he is impotent—he cannot become aroused in front of anyone.

Once he’s moved in, she visits him in his apartment, interrupting him while he’s watching one of the videotapes he’s made of the myriad women he’s interviewed about sex. He lets her in, but she zeroes in on the box of videotapes, which are, in fairness, lying on the TV stand right next to the door. He tells her what they are. She recoils and leaves.

She calls her sister Cynthia (Laura San Giacomo) to tell her about Graham. Cynthia is intrigued because she’s pretty much the opposite of her sister. In fact, she’s so opposite that she’s a bartender instead of a housewife and she actually is fucking John. Cynthia slinks in to Graham’s place and makes a video. She undresses, she masturbates, the whole kit and kaboodle.

She leaves and calls John immediately, demanding that he drop what he’s doing and come over and fuck her. He delays his client, goes to her place and they fuck each other’s brains out. She bids him to leave.

He’s delayed that client for Cynthia before, like when he called her to come over to his house so that they could fuck in his wife’s/her sister’s bed; it’s also his first client as a junior partner; he’s more interested in her ass than in his job, although he doesn’t think that’s the choice he’s making

Ann doesn’t have anything to do with Graham anymore. Neither does John. John finds out that Cynthia had made a tape for Graham and is aghast. Ann wakes one evening and asks John point-blank whether he’s having an affair. She even asks whether it’s with her sister. He denies everything and they cuddle and make up. Soon after, Ann finds Cynthia’s earring while vacuuming under her own bed. The play of emotions on MacDowell’s face as all of the pieces fall into place is magical.

She changes clothes and heads to Graham’s place. She’s ready to make a tape.

Later that evening, when John comes home, she confronts him. He’s incensed, convinced that Graham had betrayed him, when it was really the earring. That didn’t even come up because the truth was out regardless. John charges over to Graham’s place, pops him in the mouth, throws him out his own door, locks him out, then settles in to watch Ann’s tape.

Ann begins coyly, answering little about herself (unsurprisingly). She quickly turns the tables and starts asking Graham about himself instead, if he’s proud of what he’s doing, if he thinks that’s how he’s going to get Elizabeth back—the woman from college for whom he’s clearly been pining for nine years. He answers, surprisingly enough. Their intimacy is not physical, but emotional. They kiss, but that’s all. John is, understandably, devastated, mostly because he sees how fucking shallow he is relative to people with actual intelligence and emotion. He sees that he was married to someone rich and deep and he spend their marriage fucking her superficially hot sister.

He walks out, revealing to Graham that he’d fucked Elizabeth back when they were still in school, even before she and Graham had started having trouble.

Cut to John in his office, explaining grandly to a colleague how his job is more important to him than anything, even his wife. If she can’t handle that, then she’ll have to decide for herself. His boss is on the phone demanding that he come to his office immediately. John delays because he’s trying to get in touch with his client, whom he’s never actually met because he kept delaying their initial contact because of his priority of fucking Cynthia. The client informs him that he’s found other counsel and no longer needs his services. This is what John’s boss wants to talk to him about. It dawns on John slowly, then all at once.

Ann and Graham sit on his porch, comfortable in each other’s arms.

The Rite (1969) — 7/10

This is an Ingmar Bergman film about a three-person theater troupe that is being interrogated by a judge who is determining whether there is a case for pressing obscenity charges against them in the unnamed country where they currently find themselves. Thea (Ingrid Thulin) is neurotic and married to Hans Winkelmann (Gunnar Björnstrand), who is quite a bit older than she is. Their partner is the fast-spending, hard-drinking Sebastian Fisher (Anders Ek). He’s in hock to Hans, and is also sleeping with Thea, but they’re all quite copacetic with the situation. In fact, when they’re not touring, they all live together in a house in Ascona.

When they are touring, they perform their pornographic rite four times per night. The judge plays them off of each other, finally convincing them to perform their “rite” for him in a personal performance. They do this, the two men appearing with giant strap-ons. They perform the rite, exciting the judge to the point where he has a heart attack. The film is not pornographic at all. They mostly discuss philosophy and their personal peccadillos.