Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2023.05
Published by marco on
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.
- Paddington 2 (2017) — 7/10
A well-constructed if utterly predictable movie with some standout performances. It’s a bit too saccharine for me, but it wasn’t over-the-top. It’s refreshing to see a movie for children that doesn’t look like a cookie-cutter Pixar CGI or Disney cartoon. It’s a slower, nicer kind of movie with longer sections of peaceful life and only a few frenetic sections, at the end.
Paddington (Ben Wishaw) is living with his family in London. He wants to give his aunt a present for her 100th birthday. He finds a popup book of London at the shop of Mr Gruber (Jim Broadbent), but he can’t afford it. So, Paddington finds several successive jobs, which her performs with only modest success, although everyone’s always happy with the jolly little bear.
Phoenix (Hugh Grant) is a local actor with a lot of bills and a lot of money problems, at the tail end of his career. He plots to steal the popup book because he knows that the author had hidden clues in it that will lead him to a treasure hidden in London somewhere. As he’s stealing the book, Paddington tries to apprehend him, but ends up being arrested, tried, and imprisoned for the crime himself. In prison, he meets Knuckles (Brendan Gleeson) as well as many other inmates, all of whom he befriends with his innocent, sweet manner.
The Browns continue to try to vindicate Paddington, getting closer and closer to Phoenix, whom they now strongly suspect is behind the subsequent crimes and heists in which he breaks into buildings to get the clues hidden there. He seems to have gone a bit squirrelly and spends considerable time in his attic, talking to costumes stored on mannequins as if they were real people. Grant is quite good here.
Paddington breaks out of prison with Knuckles and two others. Though they originally broke out together to prove Paddington’s innocence, they others quickly reveal that they’d just like to flee the country instead and that Paddington should come with them. He refuses, electing to clear his name instead.
Paddington and the Browns end up at Paddington Station (of course), where Phoenix boards the circus train that holds the calliope that he has determined contains the treasure. He has the secret code—a sequence of musical notes—that he has enter in order to reveal the treasure. Paddington interrupts him before he can abscond with it. There is a lot of hijinks involving two parallel-running trains with Phoenix eventually unhitching Paddington’s car and derailing it off a bridge and into a river.
Knuckles and co. had meanwhile turned their plane around and come to Paddington’s rescue. Paddington falls into a coma, from which he awakes only days later—on Aunt Lucy’s birthday. He never managed to get her the book, so he has no present. The Browns—as well as the rest of the neighborhood—had flown Aunt Lucy in, so she did get to see London—and her nephew—after all.
To round out the happy endings, Knuckles and co. are exonerated, while Phoenix ends up in prison, but has a captive audience for his incredibly campy one-man show.
- Puss in Boots: The Last Wish (2022) — 8/10
Puss (Antonio Banderas) has used up eight of his nine lives. Because he can’t afford his high-risk lifestyle anymore, he retires to a home for cats run by a Mama Luna (Da’Vine Joy Randolph). She will not be important to this movie in the least. Goldilocks (Florence Pugh) and the three bears, Mama (Olivia Colman), Papa (Ray Winstone), and Baby (Samson Kayo) track him to this home, but think that he is dead because they find the grave where he’d buried his costume.
In the home, Perrito (Harvey Guillén) befriends Puss. Perrito is an irrepressible chihuahua with a heart of gold posing as a cat. Puss, having heard that Goldilocks is on a mission to get the last wish from a wishing star, heads off on one last mission to get his allotment of nine lives back. He heads off to Big Jack Horner’s (John Mulaney) house, where the map to the star can be found. Perrito accompanies him. Along the way, they meet Kitty Softpaws (Salma Hayek).
All the while, Puss is threatened by Wolf (Wagner Moura), who is actually Death incarnate, but it’s hard to tell how much he’s real and how much he’s in Puss’s mind.
The three adventurers are now squared off against Goldilocks and the three bears, as well as Jack Horner and his baker’s dozen. The starmap shows a different path to the wishing star depending on who is holding it. Most of the characters are presented with a miserable path, but Perrito sees only sunshine and lollipops because he’s a truly good soul.
Goldi is conflicted about how to share the wish, should she and the bears get it, as is Puss, who wants to get his nine lives back, especially because Wolf is constantly terrorizing and terrifying him. The bears end up saving Goldi, who ends up saving her brother. Kitty traps Horner in his back of tricks. Puss learns humility and avoids Death’s kiss that way—Death realizes that this is not the same arrogant being who’d disdained his many previous lives.
Horner eats a cake to grow to even more prodigious dimensions, allowing him to escape his bag and almost get to the last wish. But Perrito distracts him long enough for the others to destroy the map, and thus, the star, taking Horner with it. Everyone else lived happily ever after.
This is definitely a movie from the Shrek universe. It’s not nearly as quiet or serene as Paddington 2 was, but it’s much funnier. It’s also considerably more frenetic, with the first ten minutes feeling like it was made exclusively for people with ADHD.
- Starship Troopers (1997) — 9/10
See my review from just over a year ago. My opinion is unchanged.
The only addition I would make is that the news in this movie is refreshingly honest. They actually show the bodies from the a slaughter where the bugs outmatched the humans, wiping out 100,000 humans in one hour. There is no way that would ever happen today, no way they would show film of shredded corpses, no way they would admit that they’d done anything wrong, that they’d underestimated the enemy. The film failed to acknowledge the media environment of the time.
- Jojo Rabbit (2019) — 9/10
Jojo (Roman Griffin Davis) is in the Hitler Youth. He thinks he can see Adolf Hitler (Taika Waititi). He is at a camp for with many other youth, training. He is given a rabbit to kill to prove that he’s not a coward. He tries to free it, but the older boys grab it, snap its neck, and throw it into the woods, to the applause of all the other children.
His imaginary friend Adolf is back and builds him back up, telling him that a rabbit is a hero, not a coward. He encourages Jojo to run back to camp, where the other children are doing an exercise with a potato-masher grenade. He grabs it, runs off with it, throws it, it bounces of a tree, and lands at his feet. It explodes, knocking him off his feet, out of the camp, and nearly taking one of his eyes.
His mother Rosie (Scarlett Johansson) picks him up from the hospital and takes him home. She takes him back to the camp organizers, where she makes them take care of him while she works. Captain Klenzendorf (Sam Rockwell), Fraulein Rahm (Rebel Wilson) run the place; they give him a job to do distributing propaganda.
He returns home from his first day to discover a girl hiding in his attic—his mother is harboring a Jew named Elsa (Thomasin McKenzie). Jojo and Adolf are forced to bargain with her because she’s a slippery eel. He confronts his mother, but she pretends not to understand. Johannes (Jojo) must come to terms with this situation.
Jojo is at physical therapy and asks Klenzendorf and Rahm, who give him spectacularly terrible but utterly hilarious advice. The characters and settings are all very quirky, very Wes Anderson. Jojo decides to take up writing a book about Jews, with Elsa’s input as the primary material. Jojo is extremely rude to his mother, but it’s quite funny. He provokes her into pretending to be his father. She puts on a whole show where she plays both roles—father and mother. It’s quite good. Johansson is a revelation.
Elsa and Jojo continue to get to know each other. Elsa tells him of Rilke; he and Adolf look him up in the library. Jojo writes a pretend-letter from Nathan (Elsa’s fiancé) wherein he breaks up with her, hurting her feelings, against her will. Jojo feels bad and reads her another letter, wherein Nathan takes her back.
Jojo spends a day with his mother. His mother is a free spirit, against the war. She wants to dance. “Tanzen ist was für Menschen, die nicht arbeiten.” Elsa starts to “help” Jojo write his book, telling him all sorts of fairy tales about Jews. He’s really quite brainwashed, just shocking. Adolf is getting a bit suspicious of Jojo’s relationship with Elsa. Jojo finally sees his old friend Yorki (Archie Yates), who has promoted himself to “soldier”. Jojo is walking around in a homemade robot costume, collecting batteries for Hitler.
“Elsa: Du bist kein Nazi.
Jojo: Ehm, ich stehe total auf Hakenkreuze. Ist ein ziemlich deutliches Zeichen.”A crew of Gestapo show up, headed up by Deertz (Stephen Merchant). As they’re about to toss the place, Klenzendorf shows up and allays some suspicions, but they continue to search the place. They end up in his room, which is heralded for being absolutely bedecked in Nazi paraphernalia, but Deertz notices that Jojo is missing his knife. Elsa comes to his rescue, playing Inge, Jojo’s sister. She’s asked to provide papers and she’s hardcore ready for all of their questions. She gets her birthday wrong, but Klenzendorf does not betray her. They’ll be back—and then what? Jojo is in a bad spot.
Hitler is not happy with Jojo. he lets loose with an absolutely amazing tirade,
“Hitler: So langsam hege ich Zweifel an deiner Loyalität gegenüber mir und der Partei.
“Du nennst dich einen Patrioten? Aber wo sind die Beweise?
“Der deutsche Soldat wurde aus Notwendigkeit geboren. Deutschland ist abhängig von der
Leidenschaft dieser jungen Männer. Von ihrer Leidenschaft und Bereitschaft, fürs Vaterland zu fallen, trotz der vergeblichen Anstrengungen der alliierten Kriegsprofiteure, die ihre schlecht vorbereiteten Truppen tapsig in die Wolfshöhle schicken.“Und nur dienstbeflissene Männer, die standhaft sind im Angesicht des Feindes … werden sich auf ewig einbrennen in das deutsche Gedächtnis.
“Und du musst entscheiden, ob du in Erinnerung bleiben oder spurlos verschwinden möchtest … wie ein erbärmliches Sandkorn in einer Wüste der Bedeutungslosigkeit.
“Einfach ausgedrückt: Krieg deinen Scheiß auf die Reihe und setze Prioritäten.”
He walks through town and finds his mother hanging from the gallows in the town square. He tries to take revenge on Elsa, but cannot. With his mother dead, he is forced to forage for wood and food on his own. The war is going poorly for Germany; the enemy approaches. Elsa and Jojo have only each other now.
Jojo meets Yorki again as the city is being attacked by,
“Yorki: Die Russen, Jojo. Sie kommen. Und die Amerikaner von der anderen Seite. Und England und China und Afrika und Indien. Die ganze Welt kommt.
Jojo: Und wie schlagen wir uns?
Yorki: Furchtbar schlecht. Unsere einzigen Freunde sind die Japaner. Und ganz unter uns, die sehen nicht sehr arisch aus.”“Yorki: Die Russen sind da draußen. Die sind die Schlimmsten von allen. Ich hab gehört, die essen Babys und haben Sex mit Hunden. Die Engländer machen das auch. Wir müssen sie aufhalten, bevor sie uns essen und all unsere Hunde vögeln.”The Allies take the city. Klenzendorf is captured, as is Jojo. Klenzendorf pretends that Jojo is a Jew so that the Allies send him home instead of assassinating him with the others. Interesting that the Allies are considered capable of murdering children just because they’re Germans.
Back at home, Jojo lies to Elsa that Germany won the war. He doesn’t want here to leave. He relatively quickly sees that he cannot do this and lets her know that her lover is waiting for her in Paris. Elsa tells him that her lover died of a disease a year ago. They slowly emerge from the apartment, with Elsa discovering that the Americans have taken over the town and that she is free. They do a little shuffle-dance together and strike out toward their future.
I saw it in German. It was amazing in German, even though the original language was English.
- Tour de Pharmacy (2017) — 9/10
This mini-mockumentary about the 1982 Tour de France was a 39-minute delight.
It was packed with absolute professionals, from the only five remaining riders, Italian Juju Pepe (Orlando Bloom), Nigerian Marty Hass (Andy Samberg when young; Jeff Goldblum when older), Adrian Baton (Freddie Highmore when young and pretending to be a woman pretending to be a man; Julia Ormond when older and in prison for having killed on-site sportscaster Rex Honeycut (James Marsden)—who had learned that, since he’d ridden the whole way with everyone that he was qualified to win the whole race, but upon dying, it became obvious that he had a motor in his frame—because Adrian(a) and Marty had fallen in love, (s)he sacrificed her place on the podium to take out Rex, but accidentally killed him on a rock), Gustav Ditters (John Cena when young; Dolph Lundgren when older), and Slim Robinson (Daveed Diggs when young; Danny Glover when older) to Joe Buck, Nathan Fielder (as Stu Ruckman, the head of the anti-doping agency), Maya Rudolph (as Lucy Flerng, a cycling fan who thinks cyclists are sexy), Kevin Bacon (as Ditmer Klerken, a Dutch guy who got into so much gambling trouble that he solicited $50,000 bribes from every rider who wanted to dope and he’d let them slide through, which is why there were only five riders left after an accident triggered a roid-raging donnybrook that decimated the field), Mike Tyson as himself, Lance Armstrong as himself, who was hilarious in trying to verify that he was being hidden in shadow, but he totally wasn’t, like, the whole time, and, finally, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje (Adebisi from Oz) as Olusegun Okorocha, who was a Nigerian who hates Marty Hass for claiming that he’s from Africa when he’s really just a lily-white trust-fund, diamond-mine millionaire.
After every other racer had been banned from the race for doping, the remaining five riders realized that they would have to ride as a group, but no-one wanted to pull the others along in the draft. So they rode super-slowly for days. Nine days. Until someone yelled to Gustav that he couldn’t ride fast, so he tore up the Pyrenees faster than anyone had before—faster than any unenhanced person could—so he’s disqualified for doping (which, given that he looked like John Cena, should have been a foregone conclusion). The next day, Juju Pepe’s heart blows out on a climb (á la Marco Pantani, il Pirata) and he glides twelve miles down the hill before he flies off of a cliff.
In the end, Slim, who’d quit the race in the middle to dally with a French milkmaid, returned to the race on his egg-delivery bike to beat Marty Hass by a mile.
- Minamata (2020) — 9/10
This movie is based on a true story about W. Eugene Smith (Johnny Depp), a photographer for Life magazine. He is at the tail-end of his career, wallowing in obscurity and alcohol when a pair of Japanese find him at this squalid apartment. Aileen (Minami) is the translator with whom Gene feels an immediate, reciprocal spark. He agrees to accompany them to Japan on an assignment to photograph and shed light on the devastating health effects of mercury poisoning on Japanese coastal communities that are unfortunate enough to be near the factories of giant conglomerate Chisso.
Gene goes to his editor at Life Magazine Robert Hayes (Bill Nighy), who reluctantly agrees to back him, but only because the world of advertising and journalism has changed so much that he’s having trouble keeping the magazine afloat while retaining any semblance of integrity.
Gene gets to Japan and settles in, taking many pictures and befriending a young man who’s body is twisted into a pretzel, but who is extremely interested in photography. Gene and Aileen sneak into a Chisso hospital where many, many patients are kept under wraps, taking many more pictures. Aileen and Gene grow much closer and become romantically involved. They take part in many protests.
This company is led by a ruthless president Junichi Nojima (Jun Kunimura) who tries to bribe Gene into throwing away his photos. Gene refuses—even though it’s a ton of money. The police start to put pressure on the villagers, breaking up one of their meetings at which they discover that the company is pretending that they’ve all signed a register absolving Chisso of all wrongdoing. Soon after, Gene’s shack by the lake—along with all of his photos—is burned down.
Hayes is pushing Gene to send him something because the deadline is approaching and he’s under a lot of pressure. Gene has starting drinking heavily again—“you’re not drunk if you can lie on the floor without holding on.”— bereft that he has nothing to send him, that he’s once again failed to live up to a reputation he’d earned when he was a much younger man.
Drunk, Gene calls Hayes, telling him that he’s giving up.
“Gene: Big people hurt little people. Little people get hurt by big people. Same thing here, same thing there.
“Bob: Not okay, Eugene. Not fucking okay! 67% ads ads and I’m losing. Likely I wouldn’t even have my integrity to fall back on in my old age. But I will have yours! Dammit Gene! I will have yours!
“Gene: I’ll tell you what: if there’s any left, I will stuff it into a fucking box and ship it to you.
“Bob: I don’t know how many more issues I’m gonna be able to publish, but one of them is going to have the most important photographic essay of the last 30 years or I will personally fly out there and kick you pathetic, whinging ass.
“The kids in the office, Gene, the special ones? They don’t look up to me. They look up to you. Because you matter.
“Just bring me the story, okay? Bring the story home.”
In a last-ditch effort, Gene throws himself on the mercy of the village, asking them whether he can take pictures of them in their homes, that he needs something in order to tell the world their story. They agree.
There is a large protest, with 500 people, on the day of a board meeting. Several of the villagers are inside, to redress their grievances directly. Nojima seems contrite, they seem to touch him. The leader Mitsuo (Hiroyuki Sanada) ends up sitting cross-legged on the director’s table while his friend, a fisherman, tells his tale. Nojima asks for a moment to consult with his CFO. They regret that they can do absolutely nothing. They leave as one of the villagers tries to kill himself by slitting his wrists.
Outside, at the protest, several men beat Gene within an inch of his life. In the hospital, a man from the village—seemingly the one who’d been involved in burning down Gene’s lab—hands him an envelope. Gene’s hands are bandaged and he can’t see what it is. When Aileen arrives, she discovers that it’s all of the negatives from Gene’s lab—the man had rescued them before burning everything down. He saw how honorably Gene had acted with his mother and offered this as his apology.
Back at the village, and still sorely injured, Gene and Aileen take the iconic photo of a mother bathing her exceedingly deformed boy. (Wikipedia)
Gene sends his photos to a long-suffering Hayes. Luckily, this was during the 70s, when it was literally impossible to fake photos like this. Chisso had no choice but accept that their story was out, out of Japan, into the world.
“Nojima: We have to pay. Somehow, we will have to find a way. We must.”Unfortunately, they never did. As the end credits put it,
“[…] Chisso Corporation nor the Japenese government has upheld the moral and financial essence of this deal.
“In 2013, the Japanese Prime Minister declared that Japan had recovered from mercury pollution, denying the existence of the the tens of thousands of victims who continue to suffer today.”
Gene and Aileen would be married until his death in 1978.
Johnny Depp is nearly unrecognizable—except for his voice, as usual—and does a fantastic job. The other actors are equally impressive.
- The Day after Tomorrow (2004) — 6/10
This is not a great movie, but it’s gotten more relevant with each passing year. The scenario it describes is completely impossible, but the global situation, almost 20 years later, is even more dire than when the film was made.
I’ve reviewed the film before, in 2017.
- Orbital Redux (2018) — 8/10
This is a live performance filmed on a single-room set that is the cabin of a long-haul He3 transporter piloted by Max (Yuri Lowenthal) and crewed by Tommie (Yasmine Al-Bustami). Max is the old hand, expert in keeping an old ship running. Tommie is the young genius, with school smarts but no real experience. Max puts her through her paces and they learn to function as a crew. Both of the actors are fantastic. It’s almost hard to believe that it was all done in one take.
The plot is basically Max showing Tommie how things work out in space with underpowered and ancient equipment, as well as how tough things are when you’re not rich and required to kowtow to giant corporations. Tommie inadvertently loads a virus into the ship’s systems when she connects her music player to the main computer—even after Max told her not to.
They discuss their various personality deficiencies and how they lead to their relationship problems. Max is a pilot whose painter husband Mark (Marc Anthony Samuel) doesn’t have much patience left for his constant absences. Tommie is a bit robotic and doesn’t know how to address her boyfriend Sebastian’s (David Blue) emotional needs. They also occasionally communicate with people back on their space-station home-base, like Lily (Natalie Whittle) and Deepi (Nardeep Khurmi), so it’s not just the two of them in the cabin of a spaceship.
As they load up with their cargo of He3, they enter a storm of space-junk deliberately placed in their path by rebels. Their ship is holed, they fix it, and then Max has to do an EVA to try to save the ship. He and Deepi manage to get the ship back on course, but he’s apparently blown away from the ship. This, however, turns out not to be the case, as we get a flash-forward to Deepi piloting the ship with a Russian, seemingly unperturbed. Max and Mark show up for visit and they all have a joyous reunion. The end.
All of the episodes are available on YouTube.
- Blackadder (1982–1983) — 5/10
The first season is six episodes that takes place in 1485 England, in the time of King Richard III (Peter Cook). His son Richard IV (Brian Blessed) is the luckiest man alive, making incredibly ill-considered decisions and somehow always ending up ahead.
Richard IV’s youngest son Edmund (Rowan Atkinson) is the eponymous Blackadder, scheming to become king before his brother Harry, Prince of Wales (Robert East) can. He is joined by his “crew”: Baldrick (Tony Robinson), a bondsman whose family has been bonded for as many generations as he can remember, and Percy (Tim McInnerny), a twit of the highest order and some form of lesser nobility that allows him to dress much better than Baldrick, but still be mostly destitute.
They have a few adventures, most of which end badly for Edmund, as his reach tends to far exceed his grasp. Harry, on the other hand, sees his fortunes rise continually as a result of Blackadder’s machinations.
I was not so impressed with this season, as the humor is quite dated and relatively low-brow—it makes much hay of women and gays being obviously inferior or strange, which, while obviously “of the time”, is just not funny—and it relies too much the moronic facial expressions that Atkinson would go on to use to even greater success and acclaim in Mr. Bean. I’m not a fan—and never have been—but the audience laugh-track seemed to love it.
Everyone dies in the end because of Edmund’s negligence—including him.
- Blackadder II (1986) — 7/10
The second season revives Blackadder in the Elizabethan era, following the antics and life of Edmund, Lord Blackadder, who is the great-grandson of the original. He is a different creature than his forebear, in that he is dashing, eloquent, and intelligent. Like his forebear, though, he is still constantly scheming for income and prestige. He is quite cynical and very dryly humorous, which ingratiates him to Queen Elizabeth I (Miranda Richardson) and sets him directly at odds with the Queen’s courtier Lord Melchett (Stephen Fry).
Baldrick and Percy reprise their roles as well, largely unchanged in position and class from their season-one incarnations, although Baldrick is now excruciatingly stupid instead of the most intelligent of the trio. They have adventures wherein Blackadder nearly dies, nearly gains an incredible fortune, nearly loses everything he has, etc. etc. Hugh Laurie appears in the final two episodes as a German spy/kidnapper who tries to usurp the Queen’s throne—and finally manages it, after killing absolutely everyone else in the final minutes of the season.
I liked this season much better than season one. Queen Elizabeth and Melchett were somewhat underutilized in that they were accurately depicted as utter morons with God-like powers to kill and disenfranchise, which was both a pity and occasionally annoying. Overall, though, a much stronger effort than season one.
