Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2023.03

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.

Iron Man (2008) — 8/10

I’ve seen this movie a few times. Having come earlier in the MCU, it’s definitely one of the better ones, as far as execution is concerned. As far as its politics is concerned, it’s generously all over the place. Ungenerously, it’s just more billionaire-glorification porn.

Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.) is what our world considers to be the quintessential perfect playboy: he’s rich, brilliant, good-looking , hilarious, an unparalleled engineer, metallurgist, theoretician, etc. etc. etc.

The story arc is that Tony Stark is in Afghanistan to demonstrate his company’s Jericho missile system. On his way to another appointment, his convoy is attacked, he is hit in the chest by shrapnel, and taken prisoner by the local freedom fighters who’d attacked the convoy. Stark awakes in a cave with Yinsen (Shaun Toub), a fellow scientist and engineer who’s saved his life by mounting a powerful magnet connected to a car battery over his heart, to keep shrapnel from entering it.

The Afghanis want him to build a Jericho system for them, giving him equipment and supplies and Yensen as an assistant. Instead, he builds a powerful “arc reactor” to replace the car battery and magnet, then builds Mark I of the Iron-Man armor, busting out of the save with it and getting rescued from where he lands in the desert.

He crash-lands in a metal robot suit, but the laws of physics don’t apply to him. The suit is somehow flightworthy without any of the characteristics that would give it any life. It supposedly uses “repulsors”, but damned if I can figure out what they’re “repulsing” because they’re usually just firing against the air, which doesn’t push back very hard. Not only that, but the suit seems to absorb all of the shock of a landing from hundreds of feet—so much so that it doesn’t even lose consciousness or sustain any injuries at all.

Anyway, he gets home and Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow) is happy to see him again. His father’s partner and CEO of Stark Industries Obediah Stane (Jeff Bridges) is less happy to see him—especially after Tony says that their company will no longer manufacture weapons. This goes against what Stane is planning, so Stane tries to have Tony killed.

Tony, meanwhile, builds Mark II − IV of his Iron-Man armor, perfecting the tools and armor in such a short time that your head simply spins. There’s a showdown between Obediah—who’s had his own version of the Iron-Man armor build—and Tony, with Tony winning, of course.

It’s a pretty good outing. I always enjoy Downey’s grandstanding in the desert, the building of the initial suit and the subsequent building and testing of the other suits. It’s just a tremendous amount of screen time spent on building the armor, which is the real star of the show. I’m a sucker for this kind of technology, all the way back when reading about the engineering intricacies of Stark’s armor in the Marvel Universe comics—and then drawing endless variations of my own.

The Lost Weekend (1945) — 8/10

This is the story of alcoholic and writer Don Birnam (Ray Milland). He is much better at the being the form than the latter. He puts a lot more effort and gusto into it, as we’ll see. He stands in his bedroom in an apartment on the lower East Side of Manhattan, packing a bag. He’s to take the train north with his brother Wick for a long weekend away. Don has just spent the last ten days drying out under the watchful eye of his brother Wick (Phillip Terry).

Don somehow convinces Wick to take his girl Helen St. James (Jane Wyman) to a concert. Wick agrees, but only because he knows that Don has no money and that no-one in the neighborhood will give him credit.

“With you, it’s like stepping off a roof and expecting to fall only one floor.”

—Wick

Fortune smiles upon Don and he finds $10 in the sugar tin—the cleaning lady had come by to pick up her salary and told him where to find it. Don tells her it isn’t there and sneaks off to Nat’s bar. Nat (Howard Da Silva) hates watching Don drink—and he hates what Don is doing to poor Helen—but business is business. Don has money, so he gets shots.

He leaves the bar late for his train, late to meet Wick to go north. He avoids Helen and Wick as they walk out—he has money burning a hole in his pocket, and he has two bottles. He’s about to start his long, lost weekend.

The next morning, he’s back at Nat’s in time for Nat’s lunch. Don’s lunch will be liquid. He tells Nat the story that he wants to write, about the time he met Helen. He drinks the day away. There’s a prostitute Gloria (Doris Dowling) at the bar who’s sweet on him. He takes note. He gets a bit of wind in his sails after having told the story; he believes he can write the book. He’s quite eloquent. He tells Nat,

“Love is the hardest thing in the world to write about. It’s so simple. You’ve gotta catch it through details, like the early morning sunlight hitting the gray tin of the rain spout in front of her house, the ringing of a telephone that sounds like Beethoven’s Pastorale, a letter scribbled on her office stationary that you carry around in your pocket because it smells like all the lilacs in Ohio. Pour it, Nat!”

—Don

He returns home, sits at the typewriter, gets the title down, and … loses courage. He needs some liquid courage. He tears apart his apartment, looking for his second bottle, to no avail.

He stumbles out with a matchbook in hand that takes him to another bar, one where they don’t know him yet. He drinks past his ability to pay and steals a lady’s pocketbook. When he returns from the washroom, where he’d gone to empty it, he is apprehended and thrown out unceremoniously. He returns to find that a kind God is smiling on, showing him the second bottle hidden in his ceiling lamp. He survives the night.

The morning is harsh, though. And he’s yet to write that story. He knows he won’t, so he sets out to hock his typewriter. All of the pawn shops are closed: it’s Yom Kippur. He begs a shot from Nat, who only give him one.

“One’s too much and one hundred are not enough.”

—Nat

Don stumbles out and makes his way to Gloria’s apartment, leading her on, seducing her into giving him $5, $10, anything. She does.

As he’s leaving, he falls down the stairs, knocking himself unconscious. He awakes in a sanatorium, drying out with the other drunks. Helen sleeps outside his apartment, waiting for him. The night nurse Bim (Frank Faylen) tries to keep him there, but Don manages to sneak off in the confusion when another patient wakes with violent night terrors. Don steals a doctor’s coat with money in the pocket and heads home on the subway.

He menaces a shopkeeper for a bottle of booze and ends up back home. He finishes his bottle, then gets night terrors of his own. He hears Helen, the landlady, and the superintendent coming to open the door, but can’t get to the door in time to lock them out. Helen comes in and cares for him, getting him to bed. She sleeps in the living room, on the guest bed.

He wakes and sneaks out, grabbing her coat on the way. She follows him in the rain to a pawn shop, where he’s just exiting. She’s furious and disappointed and at her wit’s end. He dispatches her gruffly while she tries to get her coat back, only to find that Don’t traded it for a gun he’d hocked long ago. Helen follows him home and confronts him, begging him to take a drink because “I’d rather have you drunk than dead.”

Don muses at the end, in a voiceover,

“Out there in that great big concrete jungle, I wonder how many others there are like me? Poor bedeviled guys on fire with thirst. Such comical figures, to the rest of the world, as they stagger blindly towards another binge, another bender, another spree.”

—Don

Westworld S04 (2022) — 8/10

In the very first episode, some unnamed moron who would soon kill all of his partners and then himself at the behest of whatever nanobots William (Ed Harris) has managed to get injected into his system, says something about data being “fungible”, which it absolutely is not, not by any stretch of the imagination, that I thought perhaps it’s OK that this series has ended on this season. We will see what the rest brings. Perhaps I’ll change my mind.

It is seven years after the end of season three. Humanity has fought the hosts and lost. They think they have won, but that’s what the hosts want them to think. The hosts are now kind of in charge and executing a plan to dominate the planet by enslaving humanity the same way that humanity enslaved them. They do this by both replacing key leaders with hosts and by infecting humans with a disease—transmitted via houseflies—that makes them susceptible to manipulation and outright control.

William (Ed Harris) is back, but as a host; his real safe is tucked away in captivity by Charlotte (Tessa Thompson), who’s kind of running the show now. She’s definitely a host and he’s almost always a host when we see him.

A woman named Christina who works at a video-game company writing stories and who looks just like Dolores (Evan Rachel Wood) slowly discovers that all is not as it seems. Her stories seem to be controlling real people’s lives. She is set up on a date with Teddy (James Marsden)—the same Teddy with whom Dolores fell in love long ago. It is utterly unclear who’s a host—but I suspect that both of them are.

Maeve (Thandiwe Newton) and Caleb (Aaron Paul) come back out retirement to take up their battle against the hosts again. She’s a host; he’s not. They’re trying to figure out what’s going and trying to save Caleb’s daughter and wife and they end up in a 1920's version of Westworld—which feels cheaply just like the original Westworld, just with a new coat of paint. The humans are just as odious as they always were; the hosts just as transparent.

Plus ça change—and I’m sure it’s quite deliberately tediously the same, to prove the point that people really can’t think of new stories, that they’re just willing to do the bare minimum to make money, that they can’t think of anything better to do with all of these amazing technologies than to massage their own egos, than to satisfy every stupid whim of a spoiled elite. You end up rooting for the hosts because maybe they’ll do something interesting—humanity has had a dozen chances and always ended up masturbating and hoarding money and stuff.

Bernard Lowe (Jeffrey Wright) wakes up after several years of searching for a way to thread his way through a continuum that would allow survival. He and Ashley Stubbs (Luke Hemsworth) set out to put this plan into motion. They are, of course, both still hosts.

At the end of E04, we learn that Caleb actually died 23 years ago and that he has been resurrected by Charlotte 278 times to figure out how he managed to resist her auditory mind control, if only for a moment. She suspects that it’s the key to why her giant city of humans is sick—38 human hosts have killed themselves recently.

In E05, Charlotte speaks to William, at 17:45,

“Humans are so bound by what they can hear, they’ll never understand what they don’t, what else exists below their threshold. [low organ-like chiming] They called this God’s music. You should hear it on an organ; it’s mesmerizing at that volume. The resonance. Vibration. There was a frequency at which the world … vibrated. It caused joy. Harmony. Dip below that frequency…chaos.

“God [referring to herself] is bored. Do you think this is why the old Gods did what they did? Instead of staying up on Olympus, they’d come down to the mortals, disguise themselves as a swan to get a piece of ass.

“Humans always thought it was about them—benign deities intervening on their behalf, or testing them somehow. Maybe it had nothing to do with them. Maybe there was just…nothing better to do.”

A little while later, William says to Charlotte (at 23:00),

“Define failure: the world is ours. We’ve taken our masters and made them into what they made us. By any definition, we have conquered them to an almost biblical degree.”

To which Charlotte replies, “I didn’t imagine our highest aspiration as a species was ‘turnabout is fair play.’”

At 29:45,

“All of the people in the city run pre-scripted loops, following whatever plot’s been written for them. Why do you think we hide in the desert? She [Charlotte] can’t track us there. We’re the last free humans. But these poor fucks? They use them as entertainment. The loops make them compliant by keeping them busy—stops them from questioning their realities.”

This can’t possibly have been written without knowing that it applies as a good metaphor for how our world works now.

Soon after, Teddy teaches Christina that she can’t see a city that is very clearly there—and that she can control the minds of the people around her. The city that she can’t see contains the Tower that she’s always painting—the Tower that emits the control signal keeping all of the humans in check and running on their loops.

In E07, in the dusty western town left over from a long-dead instance of WestWorld,
Frankie talks to her lover, whom she’d locked away, suspecting she’d been replaced by a robot.

“Frankie: I am sorry for locking you up. But I had to keep you safe.

“Lover: You’re my safe place. Don’t forget that next time.”

Jesus, that was bad. Did somebody lose a bet? Did the director’s nibling show up to write a scene? Also, before that, there was a fight where Frankie held the gun in her enemy’s face but didn’t/couldn’t shoot him. You knew he was going to bat it away. Lazy, lazy writing. Unnecessary.

In the same episode, though, we get this,

“William: When the radiation knocks all of the electrons right out of your bones, what do you want? To know who you are? To know what it all means? You’ll be too busy vomiting up your organs. Culture doesn’t survive; cockroaches do. The second we stopped being cockroaches, the whole species went fucking extinct.

“Host William: Speak for yourself. I’m not you.

“William: Well, you might as well be. You can’t fix a few millennia of broken DNA with a fucking hard drive. Why do you think you spend so much time in the goddamned human cities?

“Host William: You’re right.

“William: Of course I am. Civilization is just a lie we tell ourselves to justify our real purpose. We’re not here to transcend; we’re here to destroy.”

It’s impossible to tell who’s a host and who’s real, who’s a human resurrected from the dead, who’s running in a simulation, who’s in which time period. There are parallel streams for episodes and then it turns out that all of these things were happening dozens of years apart.

I love it, but I can see how people trained on much simpler fare would check out.

Like, what is Caleb? When is Caleb?

Is the quest to blow up the tower even the main goal? What is the main goal? Is there even one? Is Dolores going to win? Or lose? Or who cares?

Do the hosts know what the real goal is? Or are they just following a pre-programmed routine? How do we know that the one where they seem to be succeeding is the real one? Does it even matter? What does it mean for one to be real when there are infinite virtual worlds? And that’s now just within one continuum—what about all of the other continua? Do we even bother trying to figure it out or just have a laugh while we can?

E08:

William kills Charlotte and Maeve at the tower. William also kills Bernard, who leaves a tablet for Charlotte to find later. William turns up the tower to eleven and everyone goes batshit, killing each other.

Charlotte’s robots resurrect her, building her a stronger body. No-one says a thing about how he shot her right through the core. I suppose the bullet was a little bit off-center? But it was off-center for Maeve, too. Whatever. Charlotte’s now on the warpath, ready to meet William on his own terms, in the horrible game that her world has become. She turns off the artifice on the city, snatching the core that was running it.

“Charlotte: You’re ruined my world, turned it into a game.
William: It was always a game. I’ve just turned it up to expert level.”

Dolores/Christine and Teddy are figuring shit out, with Dolores being all cheesy and communing with the characters that she made up in order to figure out what to do.

Clementine kills Stubbs, then goes after Frankie, with a completely different personality—just a cold-eyed killer now. It’s fucking terrible, like they promised her she could get at least one fight scene before the show ends. It feels like a promise to the actress that she gets to pad her resumé.

William ends up at the Hoover Dam on a horse—looking to destroy not only this world, but the next (The Sublime). Charlotte alights not long after, in one of those utterly un-airworthy little ornithopter numbers.

William and Charlotte face off—and it’s the now-dead Bernard whose message she remembers. She finds the gun he hid there when he and Maeve had gone through earlier. Charlotte kills William, scalps him, extracts his mind, and crushes it, killing him for good. Charlotte strips down to her robot body, losing most of her skin, then pulling out her core and crushing it, committing suicide.

Frankie and Caleb make it back to the docks, but Caleb’s body is unstable and will die soon. He says his goodbyes at the pier.

Charlotte places the brain of her city into The Sublime, transferring Christine and Teddy back to the city, but powered by the data center in the Hoover Dam. Let’s remember also that Charlotte is a shard of Dolores, just like Christine is. Teddy’s not real, of course. He’s just another one of Christine’s sparring partners. He thinks he’s real, but he’s … a virtualization of a host.

Christine awakes and, instead of Teddy, sees Dolores, who is there to “tell her the truth about what we are. […] We are reflections of the people who made us.”

She walks out into the shattered half-virtual world as Dolores. It is still unclear whether everything is virtualized and how many concentric shells of reality there are. I’ve long since lost track of whether a person is a person or a host of a sim of a host or person or…what.

“Sentient life on Earth has ended, but some part of it might still be preserved, in another world. My world. There’s time for one last game, a dangerous game with the highest of stakes. Survival or extinction. This game ends where it began, in a world like a maze, that tests who we are, that reveals what we are to become. One last loop around the bend.”

Ok. Ok. But you’re not going to get the chance. The Gods of television have not decided in your favor, Dolores. You vanquished all of humanity, but lost to Hollywood producers who didn’t like the numbers you were putting up. 🤷🏼‍♂️

Shantaram (2022) — 8/10

Dale Conti (Charlie Hunnam) is an Australian convict, EMT, and former heroin addict. He is in jail because he robbed a bank. Actually, he was in prison for having tried to help the police office gunned down by his accomplice on a robbery. He was tortured in prison for the name of his accomplice, whom he never gave up. Before being killed in prison by either the officers squeezing him for information or by other prisoners whom he’d crossed, he organizes a daring escape with his cellmate.

They end up clambering down 40 feet of extension cord to drop down outside of the battlements. Lin melts into the city, first visiting his father, who gives him a bit of cash and his blessing/forgiveness. He makes his way to his accomplice and gets his share. He buys a passport (now as Lin Ford from New Zealand) and heads to India, landing in Bombay.

Much of this is told in flashbacks.

“We can compel men to be bad, but we cannot compel them to do good.”

—Abdel Khader Khan (S04)

Once in Bombay, he settles in to the ex-pat community, having a good time mostly. Lin befriends Prabhu (Shubham Saraf), a local guide. He meets heroin-addict and prostitute Lisa (Elektra Kilbey) and her two pimps Maurizio (Luke Pasqualino) and Modena (Elham Ehsas), mysterious Swiss-American businesswoman Karla (Antonia Desplat), and French dealmaker Didier (Vincent Perez).

After several weeks, Lisa has been trapped at Madame Zhou’s (Gabrielle Scharnitzky) palace, a bordello. Karla engages Lin’s help to rescue her, acting as a representative from the American consulate. He ends up pressing Madame Zhou with intimations that he is CIA and she releases Lisa into their custody. On his way home, Madame Zhou’s men mug him and steal his passport and money—she had figured out his ruse.

He escapes the police who come to “help” him and ends up in the Sagar Wada (slum) where Prabhu lives. There is a bit of back and forth. Karla agrees to give him a thousand dollars to buy his passport back—he’s getting too noisy and she’s worried he’ll spoil her business deals. As he’s about to abandon Prabhu and Bombay, Madame Zhou’s men find him again, this time in Sagar Wada. The ensuing fight starts a fire that kills a woman (Lakshmi), despite Lin’s best efforts to save her. Lin is devastated.

“The worst thing about corruption as a system of governance, is that it works so well.”

—Abdel Khader Khan (S04)

The next morning, though, there is a long line of people outside of Prabhu’s tent, waiting for medical assistance. Lin kind of freaks out, but collects himself quickly, donates the thousand dollars to the wada—for medical supplies and to repair the burnt tents—and goes to work. He isn’t a doctor, but no doctors ever set foot in the wada anyway, so he’s the best they’ll ever get.

Abdel Khader Khan/Bhai (Alexander Siddig) is a local businessman/mob-boss with ethics and philosophy who cares very much for Sagar Wada and wants to see it survive. His business rival wants to mow it down for the property value. Khader Khan learns of Lin’s efforts there and pays him a visit, building up a friendship of sorts, telling him, at the end of the evening, to call him Khaderbhai (brother).

Lin’s medical services hit a roadblock when he learns that the hospital to which he sends the patients he can’t help are being rejected—even though the hospital is supposed to be free. He approaches Khaderbhai for help in getting black-market medicines. He goes back to hustling with Prabhu to earn the money for medicine.

Karla’s still aiming to build her luxury apartments around or on the Sagar Wada—together with Khaderbhai. They are still vying for control of the contract with Walid, the other local mob boss.

“The sane man is simply a better liar than the insane man.”

—Abdel Khader Khan (S04)

Lin gets a motorcycle from his brother from another mother Abdullah (Fayssal Bazzi) and he keeps it so that he can run his own errands. He returns Khaderbhai’s money, to which Khaderbhai says that he respects him and would like to remain friends. Lin says that the Wada has its own rules and he can’t be seen to be owned by Khaderbhai. Lin spends a platonic night with Karla, telling her about his past.

Parvati (Rachel Kamath) turns into a better nurse. Journalist Kavita (Sujaya Dasgupta) is on Lin’s trail, sniffing out his fake passport and getting Australia back on his tail. A doctor is helping out in the slums and she can only think of how she can figure out what his real past is—not caring at all that the slums will be left without a doctor if she succeeds in digging up dirt.

Because of this, Lin prepares his departure, seeking a new passport from Didier. He sells the motorcycle, but it thwarted when Didier is arrested for homosexuality. Lin and a cowboy friend must rescue him, paying thousands of dollars to get him out unscathed—and also for the police to continue to ignore Lin’s transgressions.

Karla sics Abdullah on Maurizio and Modena, who are trying to pimp out Lisa again to seal a drug deal that Khader Khan would absolutely not allow if he knew about it. She agrees, but for 10% of the deal.

Parvati and Prabhu go to a movie, but she falls ill. He barely gets her home, where no-one knows where the gora doctor is. Lin returns to discover many, many people are sick. When he gets a closer look at them, he discovers that there’s a cholera outbreak. Prabhu is worried that Parvati is going to die. Against Qasim’s (Alyy Khan) wishes, Lin gets Khaderbhai to deliver water—under the condition that he gets credit for it from Sagar Wada. Parvati recovers.

Meanwhile Karla and Khader Khan plot to get leverage on the new minister. They kidnap his mistress and stash her away with Madame Zhou. Karla is then busy taking care of Lin, who’s gotten cholera from treating so many people. Lin recovers as well, but he’s thinking about leaving town again—because Kavita is getting closer to figuring out who he really is, and she’s bound and determined to nail him and get him out of Sagar Wada. What do they need a doctor for anyway?

Walid Khan’s men show up to steal the water, smashing it on the ground, and threatening the whole Wada. It’s a bit unclear why they let those men overpower them—there were only about six of them, and only one of them had a club, but I digress.

Karla and Madame Zhou come to an uneasy truce, teaming up to break the mistress, to make her pliable and useful. Lin meets with Khaderbhai to learn that Khaderbhai is fighting with Walid for control of Sagar Wada. The land on which they live is very valuable and will be sold, no matter what. Lisa, Modena, and Maurizio pull off the deal, with Lisa sleeping with Raheem to seal it. Maurizio wants more, though, and decides to screw everyone over, sell the heroin, keep the money, and flee Bombay before anyone’s the wiser.

Khader Khan meets with Qasim and is very up-front about what he is offering: a few more years of reprieve, during which he takes care of Sagar Wada, but nothing can stop the building. He pledges to help them find a way afterwards. Qasim agrees, seeing that this is the best offer he’s going to get. He and the rest of the camp rise up and drive away Walid’s men.

“If you had known the virtue of the ring,
Or half her worthiness that gave the ring,
Or your own honor to contain the ring,
You would not then have parted with the ring.”

Portia from Shakespeare's 'Merchant of Venice' by Abdel Khader Khan (S08)

Khader Khan comes through on his promise. The Wada is installing running water. Prabhu gets a taxi to make ends meet. Lin makes preparations to leave—once Didier delivers his passport. He starts saying his goodbyes, leaving the doctoring business to Parvati. Maurizio shows up Lisa’s place, tosses it, is generally a scumbag, and comes up with both her and Modena’s passports (because scum rises to the top). Modena still has all of the money, though—and Raheem is still ripped off. Raheem finds Maurizio—who puts him on Lin’s trail, claiming that he’s the dealer who’d made off with all of the money.

“The hungry man doesn’t care about the past.”

—Qasim (S09)

Kavita and her boyfriend/editor Nishant (Arka Das) are still hot on Lin’s trail—and duplicitous to his face, though it seems their keen interest in him has gotten his wind up. Lin seeks out Didier, who, instead of having gotten him his passport, has shut himself in with many bottles of wine. He returns Lin’s money and photos, but Lin forgives him and helps him get back on his feet. Lin goes on a date with Karla; Prabhu goes on an official date with Parvati (and his mother-in-law).

Raheem is hot on Lin’s tail, but Didier and Prabhu jump in to protect him. They gather Abdullah and set off to the hotel to set Raheem straight—it was Maurizio who set him on Lin’s tail with lies anyway. They jump Raheem and his men, with Lin and Abdullah absolutely cleaning house. Abdullah’s revelation that he represents Abdel Khader Khan chills Raheem to the bone. He quickly agrees to leave the country with his life, and gives up Maurizio in the bargain. Lin heads off for revenge, impervious to Prabhu’s pleas that this is not who he is.

Lin gets Lisa to arrange to meet Maurizio, who shows up with a gun. No-one knows why they have to be so stupid, wasting time with this petty revenge shit. Anyway, Karla gets her work done, but Maurizio betrays her association with Khader Bhai to Lin. Lin beats the everylovin’ crap out of Maurizio, which he thoroughly deserves. Lin then confronts Karla for her association with Khaderbhai. She hasn’t got much to say, even though she’d sacrificed so much for him, having gotten Kavita to drop her article about him. He tells her to fuck off forever.

Meanwhile, the cop from Australia—Nightingale—is in country and making himself absolutely beloved among his fellow Indian police officers. He gets what he deserves as well. He eventually gets the Indian police on his side and they raid Sagar Wada to find Lin. Lin is there, saving Qasim from a hematoma—he can’t leave his side until the last possible second.

Things are coming to a head. Walid puts out a hit on Khalid and everyone on his side: Abdullah, Lin, Karla, etc. Karla and Lisa are taken to Madame Zhou, who will do with them as she pleases, selling them into slavery. Maurizio smirks in the background.

Kavita’s article hits the front pages. Her editor Nishant takes the byline. His is rewarded by two bullets to the chest from one of Walid’s young assassins. Lin and Prabhu escape Nightingale by the skin of their teeth. In trying to find Karla and Lisa, Lin and Abdullah find Modena bleeding out and get him to a hospital. Lin and Prabhu pick up Modena’s suitcase from the train station.

“Lin: Why now? This place [Zhou’s palace] has been here for years.
Prabhu They are embarrassed, na? See, for them, this is the worst feeling. Everyone knows all the time, bad things are there, but they can do nothing about it, na?So we pretend it is not so. But, when you don’t allow them to pretend, then the people get very, very angry.”

S01E12, 00:16:00

Khader is regrouping, trying to figure his next move. Abdullah grows impatient with doing nothing. They maybe decide to take out Walid where he lives, but maybe it’s a feint. Walid believes the double- (triple-?) crossing cop and moves out. Lin goes to the palace to rescue Karla and Lisa, but they’re doing a good job of rescuing themselves.

“A coward is incapable of exhibiting love; it is the prerogative of the brave.”

—Khaderbhai, citing Mahatma Ghandi

A mob crashes into the palace, lending urgency to the affair. A fight, a dropped gun, and Lisa shoots Maurizio and about three other people. She misses Zhou, who they leave to the mob. Prabhu jets away when he sees the cops; Nightingale is on the hunt for his cab.

The cops turn out to be on Khaderbhi’s side. They trap Walid in a cul-de-sac and ambush him and his people to death. Abdullah shows up in police uniform and ices Walid.

Lin, Karla, and Lisa regroup at Didier’s place. Prabhu joins them—with the money, $302,000. Lin gives the money back to Lisa and send her toothpick-thin, bleached-blonde, idiot ass into the mob-filled streets with a bag full of cash. Ok, sure. Lin at least saved a chunk of it for Prabhu.

“Lin: You’re one of the biggest men I’ve ever met, Prabhu. I don’t know what I’ve done to deserve you in my life, but I’m glad for it. To honor our friendship, I’ve got one very important thing I wanna ask of you.
Prabhu: Lin, anything.
Lin: Name your first son after me.
Prabhu: Anything but that. Lin is a terrible name. [Lin means “penis” in Hindi]”

S01E12 00:32:00

Karla and Lin finally fall into bed together. Everyone’s wrapping up loose ends. Modena is gone; Lisa splits the cash with Lin. Karla goes to Khader to say goodbye. Nightingale shows up at Karla’s place and Lisa lets him right in because she is literally the stupidest person on the planet. Nightingale catches him on the roof. While we’re on the subject, doesn’t anyone ever duck a blow or put up a guard when a blow is absolutely imminent and telegraphed from a mile away?

Lin escapes, but without the money. Karla’s at the station, waiting in vain. Nightingale and the Bombay cops magically find Prabhu—because the plot needed it. Some people catch Lin and kidnap him just as he’s about to catch up to Karla. It’s the cops—we leave Lin tied up, being beaten.

Unfortunately, Apple also didn’t like the numbers that Shantaram was putting up and has canceled the show after one season. It was a troubled production, with monsoons and COVID dragging out the filming of the first season over years.

The Big Sleep (1946) — 8/10

General Sternwood (Charles Waldron), and old, rich, and wheelchair-ridden man who has lost the capacity to enjoy any of life’s pleasures for himself, hires Phillip Marlowe (Humphrey Bogart) to take care of a blackmailing problem plaguing his youngest daughter Carmen (Martha Vickers). Marlowe meets the slightly off-kilter coquette in the foyer. It’s clear that she’s just unhinged enough to have left a trail of reasons behind her for which she could be blackmailed. Marlowe also briefly meets her sister Vivian (Lauren Bacall). They don’t exactly hit it off.

The most important thing is that Humphrey Bogart gets cooler and cooler throughout the movie. He is one slick cat. He never loses his cool, he always has a good riposte, and he gets out of almost every situation without violence.

After the initial introductions, the story gets a bit murkier. Marlowe is constantly on the search for his missing friend Sean Regan, who was also a friend of the General’s. Carmen, it turns out, owes a gambling debt to a bookseller Arthur Geiger. When Marlowe goes to Geiger’s house, he finds Carmen drugged up, an empty camera, and Geiger’s body. That’s just the beginning. There’s also a casino owner and gangster Eddie Mars, who may or may not be in cahoots with Vivian.

Mars’s wife ran off with Regan, and Mars probably killed him for it. He says that his wife did it, but that’s almost certainly not true. Marlowe forces Mars out the door, where his own men kill him in a hail of bullets. Marlowe and Vivian end up together.

It’s very much a film of its time. There’s no soundtrack. The camera angles are very, very standard. It’s black and white. You don’t watch for the plot; you watch for the style and the cool lines. The Wikipedia entry does a good job of summarizing the plot in much more detail.

Jung_E (2023) — 7/10

Jung_E is a digital reconstruction of the mind of a popular and nearly indomitable warrior in the battle between mankind’s orbital output and the colonies that were overtaken by an uprising of robots.

Let me back up. The Earth has become so inhospitable because of climate change that humanity instead has moved into giant orbiting ringworlds—so large that they have, like, mountains, clouds, and stuff. Like, these things are immense. The story says that Earth is nearly inhospitable. But space is completely inhospitable.

I don’t understand these movies that just hand-wave away how idiotic it is to say humanity has moved to space because of climate change. I mean, how awful can it have gotten that living in a tin can in vacuum is considered to be better? It’s similar to fools who want to escape to the Moon or Mars: it’s hundreds of times harder to survive there than it is in the most inhospitable place on Earth.

For starters, you can breathe the air pretty much anywhere on Earth. Secondly, you can grow food pretty much anywhere, too. Anyway, the whole premise is bullshit. Also, they must have mined thousands of asteroids to get the material for all of the constructions they show.

Also, it would take hundreds of years. Or, maybe not, because they have robots. Still, I wonder why it takes years to build a skyscraper on a planet we’re designed for, but humanity can build a ringworld as big as a small moon inside of a century.

Anyway, it’s 2194 and humanity is up in orbit and they’ve been fighting the robots for 35 years or so after a robot uprising. The war would have been won, but the warrior on whose mind Jung_E is based failed at the very last minute to achieve her objective. She’d achieved dozens of them before that, but she failed in this last one. She was hauled home nearly dead, and has been kept alive by the Kronoid corporation. Her daughter Yun Seo-hyun is a chief scientist there, in charge of the program that is trying to use a robot based on her mother to win the war.

The Ai keeps failing to achieve its objective, despite all sorts of attempts to enhance the right lobes of its processing centers in successive attempts. The chairman of Kronoid lets Yun Seo-hyun know that her services will no longer be required: a peace treaty is imminent with the robots. It is then that Yun Seo-hyun learns that her immediate superior has always been an advanced robot. It’s even possible that the chairman is a robot.

Yun Seo-hyun is ill with cancer again and is told about her possibilities for upload after death: class A has all the rights of a human, class B does not, but still has some autonomy, and class C has no rights whatsoever, and must agree to allow any and all clones for any and all purposes. Her mother Jung_E is class C, which is why she can be used for warrior simulations, but also as a sexbot.

With peace coming on , the Kronoid company will focus on adding intelligence into household products. Yun runs one more simulation, but this time focuses on saving Jung_E instead. They break out of Kronoid headquarters together—though not without a whole bunch of fighting. Jung_E must take about a half-dozen of her successor models. She manages all but the last, which ends up almost choking her out. Yun shows up just in the knick of time to power it down from behind.

Yun sneaks Jung_E’s brain out in the last successor robot, to fool the robot police that are also hunting Jung_E by now. They monorail it out of the there, but they’re not alone. Kim is also in the same train car (I have literally no idea how he got there without them knowing about it). Kim wings Yun with a shot, but Jung_E takes him out, making him shoot his own eye out—he now knows that he’s a robot, too.

They duke it out some more. Everybody really likes those stomp-kicks and super-jump stomps that are telegraphed from a million miles away. The police show up, but Jung_E dispatches them relatively easily, returning her focus to the seemingly indomitable Kim, who they finally drop into some sort of deep abyss that no-one in their right mind would have bothered building on an arcology in space.

These things are really spectacularly big. If humanity had put 10% of the effort into not breaking the planet that they put into building these arks, they could have just stayed on Earth. Wait, are they on Earth? Jung_E escapes through a forest to a hilltop with a view of a dozen miles in each direction. Did they forget that they’re not on Earth?

It’s a relatively standard premise, but reasonably well-done. I watched it in Korean with English subtitles.

The Transporter Refueled (2015) — 4/10

This time the transporter Frank is played by Ed Skrein and his dad is played by Ray Stevenson. This is so woodenly written and acted, it’s painful. The scene where the ladies explain the next hour of the movie is terrible. Every woman in this movie is painfully thin, but also sold as excruciatingly sexy. They all act, and are treated as, irresistible. It’s unclear how Frank’s dad is involved in the whole deal gone awry, but I’m also hard-pressed to care.

Frank does have some close-quarters fighting chops but, while the choreography is reasonably widely filmed, there are also a lot of cuts that make it both hard to follow the action and hard to see how much he’s actually doing. He uses a lot of garrotes and wires and ropes and stuff. It’s a relatively unique gimmick.

The ladies are completely irritating. Don’t even ask me what the plot was. Something about him being forced to do a whole bunch of driving and transporting and fighting because he’s trying to save his dad, I think. But his dad seems to be totally in cahoots with the preternaturally powerful grrrls who are pushing around a transporter who hadn’t been pushed around in the previous three films.

I watched it in German.

Sebastian Maniscalco: Is It Me? (2022) — 7/10

This special feels stronger than Stay Hungry (2019) but not as good as Aren’t You Embarassed? (2014). He’s looking a bit older than he even did in 2019—he has two kids now—but he’s still swaggering around like the Italian-American caricature that he either is or plays on stage. His mannerisms are the same, though they almost feel a bit exaggerated by now, but he’s still doing OK.

Most of his comedy is observational and about how the world is no longer the same/as good as it was when he was growing up. Since I come from the same generation, it’s hard to disagree. Some things really do suck now. We have improved some things, but made other things so much worse. I agree with Sebastian that I’m very much not sure it’s been worth the trade. Why can’t we trend upwards in more things? Why won’t our overlords allow us to have nice things?

Anyway, I really liked the bit about going to a showing of Hamilton and pretending to be too dumb to understand what’s going on—rather than saying that the show is a shitty, confusing, and muddled waste of time, he passive-aggressively says that he and his wife were too dumb to follow it. But it must be good, because so many smart people liked it.

White Noise (2022) — 8/10

We are introduced to Jack Gladney (Adam Driver), who teaches Hitler Studies at a midwestern college. He lives with his wife Babette (Greta Gerwig) and their flock of children. His best friend is a fellow professor named Murray (Don Cheadle). The movie’s plot follows that of the book very closely, including several quotes directly. See my review of the book from 2021 for more details.

After introducing the characters, these are the main plot points:

• The Toxic Airborne Incident is a large, black cloud of toxic who-knows-what that Jack is afraid he’s spent too much time in. They spend time fleeing it and returning to their homes, worrying about what’s going to happen in the aftermath.

  “It’s comforting to know the supermarket hasn’t changed since the toxic event. In fact, the supermarket has only gotten better. Between the unpackaged meat and the fresh bread, it’s like a Persian bazaar. Everything is fine, and will continue to be fine, as long as the supermarket doesn’t slip.

  “Do you know the Tibetans believe there’s a transitional state between death and rebirth. That’s what I think when I come here. The supermarket is a waiting place. It recharges us spiritually. It’s a gateway. Look how bright. Look how full of psychic data, waves, and radiation. All the letters and numbers are here, all the colors of the spectrum, all the voices and sounds, all the code words and ceremonial phrases. We just have to know how to decipher it.”

  At ~01:13:00 by Murray
• Babette is taking a pill that makes her stop fearing death. Or, at least, she thinks that’s what the pill does. It might just be a sham and the man who sold it to her only used its purported efficacy to convince her to sleep with him.

• Jack needs the pill for his own fear of death, but he also wants to take revenge on the man who slept with his wife. There are definitely Lynchian stylistics here, when Jack is driving to Mr. Gray, muttering “Steal instead of buy. Shoot instead of talk.”, over and over. Jack is at the motel. He meets Mr. Gray.

  The TV snows over and Jack sees Babette mounting the greasy Mr. Gray on the TV. The man is repulsive—I’m sure that’s exaggerated to emphasize Jack’s repulsion at meeting the man who’d entered Babette.

  Jack shoots Mr. Gray on the toilet. He puts the pistol in Mr. Gray’s hand to fake a suicide, but he is not dead. He fires a shot, hitting Jack in the thumb, then Babette in the leg, who’d just walked in. They drag Gray to the parking lot, where he starts choking, but Jack’s CPR brings him back. They take him to a clinic run by nuns. The nuns speak German. Schwester Hermann Marie’s German is excellent, thank goodness.

  “You want to know what I believe? Or what I pretend to believe? […] Wer hiereinkommt und von Engeln redet ist ein Schwachkopf. Zeig mir einen Engel. Bitte! Ich will einen Engel sehen. Zeig mir einen Heiligen. Gib mir ein Haar vom Körper eines Heiligen. Unser Auftrag in dieser Welt ist Dingen zu glauben, den kein Mensch ernst nimmt. Und, wenn wir diesen Glauben aufgeben würden, denn würde die menschliche Rasse aussterben. Deswegen sind wir hier. Eine winzige Minderheit. Und, wenn wir nicht so tun würden, als glaubt man diesen Dingen, denn würde die Welt zusammenbrechen! Es ist die Hölle … wenn keiner glaubt. Wir beten. Wir zünden Kerzen an. Und wir bitten Statuen um Gesundheit und langes Leben. Aber bald nicht mehr. Ihr werdet eure Gläubigen verlieren.”

  At ~2:00:00 by Schwester Hermann Marie

  Interesting, but kind of a non sequitur.

The movie focuses more on the quirkiness of their familial interactions with a lot of overlapping and seemingly non-sequitur dialogue amongst all of the family members, with the camera swinging amongst them. The acting is quite good all around, with Driver delivering a commanding performance, as usual. His intervention on Murray’s behalf in his classroom is applause-worthy.

So the movie’s not bad, but it’s also not as good as the book, which focused a lot more on the impending commercialized and homogenized hellscape of what we are still forced to call American culture even though it has long since become so capitalized and market-ized and commodified that it barely even has a sheen of humanity to it at all anymore.

DeLillo’s treatment would be expanded and complemented by Foster Wallace’s ramblings and famously loquacious thoughts on the matter. America didn’t feel real anymore, and we can only say that it has gotten nearly infinitely worse from the times when authors like Postman, DeLillo, and Foster Wallace all were writing about how far we’d already fallen and how it couldn’t possibly get any worse, could it?

“Murray says we are fragile creatures, surrounded by hostile facts.”

At the end of the film, before the credits. by Babette

The Wandering Earth (2019) — 7/10

The sun is acting up. Within three-hundred years, it will engulf the Earth’s orbit. There is, of course, only one thing to do: move the Earth to a different star system. The entire planet bands together to build thousands of “Earth engines”, unfathomably gigantic rockets eleven kilometers high. This is seriously cool and grandiose and the depiction is tremendous. I gave this movie a whole extra point for being based on so awesomely big of an idea.

This premise is so awesome that I had to check whether Roland Emmerich had directed. He had not; it’s by Frant Gwo. There’s a lot of blabla with Liu Peiqiang (Jing Wu) telling his son Liu Qi (Chuxiao Qu) about his upcoming mission to Jupiter and how he will see him again someday. Liu Qi must retreat to an underground city with his sister Han Duoduo (Jinmai Zhao) and his grandfather Han Ziang (Man-Tat Ng).

“Routes are countless. Safety is foremost. With unregulated driving, your loved might end up in tears.”

Seventeen years later, Liu Qi is working, but no longer communicates with his father, who is on the space station trailing the Earth on its travel out of the solar system. Han Ziang is a transport driver, presumably hauling material around for the massive engines—parts or fuel, it’s not clear.

Jupiter does something funny and unpredicted, which means that the Earth is going to pass too close to it for the slingshot and will, instead, strike it directly. Jupiter is pulling off Earth’s atmosphere, but also causing massive seismic shocks that disable about 1/3 of the engines. Humanity rallies to get most of them running again, but the one in Shanghai is a dead loss. Instead, our heroic crew head to Sulawesi with their “lighter core”, necessary for restarting the massive equatorial Earth Engine there.

That engine has already been relit, but it’s not going to be enough. Instead, Liu Qi thinks of a new plan: the mixture of Jupiter’s hydrogen with Earth’s Oxygen should, when lit, make a huge booster that will repel Earth from Jupiter. Unfortunately, their efforts are in vain: the Earth engine’s blast, even when enhanced, isn’t enough to reach the H/O mixture.

Liu Peiqiang decides to crash the space station into the mixture to ignite it, sacrificing himself, all of the hibernating astronauts, as well as a treasure trove of cellular and genetic material that had been prepared for an emergency. The computers had determined that it was more important to save this than to save the Earth, but humanity disagreed.

Three years later, we see Tim, Duoduo, and Liu Qi working as transport drivers as Earth makes its way toward the Sun for a final slingshot before leaving the solar system. The voiceover explains that, after that, the Earth engines will accelerate for 500 additional years to 0.5% of the speed of light, after which it will cruise for 1,300 years, then decelerate for 700 years before finally nestling in to the Alpha Centauri system—100 generations later.

Look, there are ton of people involved here, Engineer Li Yiyi (Yichi Zhang) is absolutely clutch in figuring things out. Soldiers Yang Jie (Yi Yang) and He Lianke (Haoyu Yang) as well as Tim (Mike Kai Sui), a half-Australian Chinese Duoduo and Liu meet in jail when they try to steal a transport. There is, of course, a Russian astronaut Makalov (Arkadiy Sharogradskiy), who acts pretty much like every other Russian astronaut in every other space movie not made by Russians (Tarkovsky’s Solaris was an exception, for example). No-one is ever going to beat Peter Stormare’s Lev Andropov from Armageddon, though.

Speaking of movies that this is like, it’s kind of like Armageddon, but it’s also very much like Independence Day—right up to the father getting back the respect of his son by sacrificing himself in a flaming ball of death. The tech feels a lot like Pacific Rim—and I’ll be damned if Moonfall doesn’t need to be mentioned, at least a little bit.

It’s kind of interesting that the movie uses a tremendous amount of CGI, but the movie itself is about a future where we can actually build incredibly huge, amazingly complex, phenomenally resilient, nearly preternaturally reliable and redundant machines.

I watched it in Chinese with English subtitles.