Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2023.06

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.

Ted Lasso S03 (2023) — 6/10

At the very least, I’ve learned that Viktor Maslov is the Soviet Pioneer of the 4-4-2 Formation & the Inventor of Pressing. The season starts off with a round of introducing everyone and establishing how horrible Rupert is, but also how everyone has to spend every waking minute responding to his every provocation.

Most of the people in this show are reactive: they don’t actually have a plan for themselves, so their day is consumed with reacting to how other people think of them. Coach Beard is perhaps the exception here.

Ted Lasso has crippling anxiety, for which he’s still in therapy, and which is exacerbated by his wife having started dated their erstwhile marriage counselor. This is considered an affront to everyone in the show but, honestly, if they’ve moved on, what does it matter who she dates now? The heart wants what the heart wants. Does Ted get a veto on anyone who gets to associate with his son when Ted’s the one who’s moved to a different continent? Grow up. Honestly.

The best part of this season is that ZlatanZava has joined Richmond for the season. Jamie Tartt is jealous and Roy offers to train him so that he can play as well as Zava. Zava carries the team to several victories, leading up to a match against West Ham, with Nate at the helm. They lose it. They lose all of their games without Zava, who has retired from football for his own mysterious reasons.

The team travels to Amsterdam for a friendly match, which they lose horribly, 5–0. Coach gives them the night off because they’re already in a rut. Roy makes Jamie go out for training with him, but Jamie knows the city like the back of his hand and gets the upper hand. Roy doesn’t know how to ride a bike, so Jamie teaches him, so they can get to the windmills that Roy also doesn’t believe in. Beard drops acid, with Ted not doing it, until he’s finally bored into it—long after Beard has left. Will the ballboy and Higgins go to a jazz club. Rebecca doesn’t know what a bike lane is, so she gets run off a bridge into the water and into a handsome Dutch man’s boat. Colin sneaks off to a gay bar, with Trent following him. Trent reveals to him that he’s gay too, and that’s OK. The rest of the crew fights between going to a sex show and traveling two hours to a private party. They’ve agreed to go to the party, but then get mired down in food. Coach Ted ends up at Museumnacht, tripping balls.

The show focuses more on the private lives of the players—and continues, of course, to focus on the inner life of the titular character, despite him being unbelievably boring and utterly unconvincing in his supposed misery due to self-confidence-deficit-induced panic attacks. Obisanye is apparently also a figure to be pitied because he doesn’t get to play for the Nigerian national team (don’t worry; he will by the end of the season) while his extremely successful Nigerian restaurant is trashed, but his wonderful team-ful of colleagues jump in to repair everything with skills that they somehow also acquired while being superstar footballers. You see: the menial class doesn’t do anything that requires any skill that their betters couldn’t pick up in a few minutes.

The next couple of shows present dilemmas like what to do with a billion-dollar buyout deal for the team (Rebecca) or Keeley having to manage to build her business without dozens of millions in VC financing (spoiler: she does, because she’s an f’ing brilliant businesswoman, obviously, despite her clear mental deficits).

Jamie’s story is perhaps more interesting than the others—his development was kind of interesting and fun to watch, but he’d kind of finished it a season ago. Now, we’re not legitimately concerned that he’s going to fall off the wagon and “go back to his old ways” again. No tension, no risk; just fan service.

Holy shit, there was absolutely no need for episode to 12 to even exist, to say nothing of being 82 minutes long. It’s just one long chunk of extremely self-indulgent fan-service in which absolutely everything works out for everyone, and no-one suffers in any way whatsoever, and everyone has lots of money. The end.

If moronic fans manage to force Apple to resurrect this show, then I will not be the first to watch a fourth season. The third was already enough of a going-through-the-motions, member-berries orgy of 80-minute shows. It was similar to the finale of Stranger Things, where it got so self-indulgent, I could no longer figure out why they were even doing it. There is less art to this, and more cold calculation of profit and loss. Obviously, that’s the only way that our world is going to work, apparently, but I’m not going to applaud it, or pretend that it’s art.

Blackadder the Third (1987) — 7/10

In this season, Blackadder (Rowan Atkinson) has been resurrected in the late 18th century, as a butler to George, Prince of Wales (Hugh Laurie). Baldrick (Tony Robinson) is back as his filthy manservant. Cyril is no longer with them, but Tim McInnerny shows up as the Scarlet Pimpernel for one episode.

The first episode introduces Pitt the Younger (Simon Osborne), who Blackadder is immediately annoyed by, and whom he needles incessantly.

The second episode, which is Samuel Johnson (Robbie Coltrane) and his famous dictionary, was quite clever. Blackadder is, of course, not impressed with Johnson, and takes to inventing gloriously convincing and fabulously convoluted words in front of him, to convince him that he’s not quite finished with his dictionary yet. That scene was laugh-out-loud funny.

“I hope you will not object if I also offer the doctor my most enthusiastic contrafribularities. […] I’m anaspeptic, phrasmotic, even compunctious, to have caused you such pericombobulation. […] I shall return interphrastically.”

In episode three, Blackadder is at odds with the Scarlet Pimpernel (Tim McInnerny), who’s been smuggling French nobility out from under the revolution.

While imprisoned and scheming to get free with Baldrick, he says,

“Am I jumping the gun, Baldrick, or are the words, ‘I have a cunning plan,’ marching with ill-deserved confidence in the direction of this conversation? […] Forgive me if I don’t jump up and down with glee. Your record in this department is not exactly 100%.”

“I want to be young and wild, and then I want to be middle-aged and rich, and then I want to be old and annoy people by pretending that I’m deaf.”

In the next episode, the prince is attacked at a play by a bomb-throwing rebel against the industrialization without compensation led by the nobility. The Prince Regent (Hugh Laurie)—who doesn’t understand that plays aren’t real, no matter how many times it’s explained to him—stirred by Blackadder’s explanation of the plight of the poor and why they might be rebelling, wants elocution lessons from actors in order to be able to deliver the speech himself, to calm the proles.

When the actors appear at the castle, Blackadder begins tormenting the them by dropping the word “Macbeth” at every possible opportunity (every mention of which they must superstitiously dispel with an incantation and a savage, reciprocal nose-tweaking).

The rest of the episodes were OK, but not nearly as good. The acting is very broad and the dialogue laid on quite thick. The most annoying was the 5th episode, which saw the return of the same actress who played the Queen in the previous season, this time reincarnated as the daughter of a penniless industrialist, who’d briefly captured the prince’s attention before he’d discovered her financial status.

In the sixth and final episode, Stephen Fry returns as the Duke of Wellington, who wishes to duel with the Prince, whom Blackadder switches places with in order to protect him. Wellington beats the shit out of the Prince, whom he thinks is the servant, defeating the purpose of switching roles to save his own skin.

Blackadder Goes Forth (1989) — 8/10

This is the season from which I’d seen the most clips. Blackadder (Rowan Atkinson) has been resurrected as Captain Blackadder, serving in a trench in WWI under General Sir Anthony Cecil Hogmanay Melchett (Stephen Fry) and his unctuous secretary Captain Kevin Darling (Tim McInnerny). Serving under him, as always, are Private S Baldrick (Tony Robinson), who reprises his role as a lower-class buffoon and Lieutenant The Honourable George Colthurst St. Barleigh (Hugh Laurie), who reprises his as an upper-class one.

Atkinson makes a lot of analogies that fall quite flat, but he has a few drily delivered zingers that land pretty well.

“General Melchik: When you return, Darling will pump you thoroughly in the debriefing room.

“Blackadder: Not while I have any strength remaining, he won’t, sir.”

And,

“Darling: Y0u’d better find the German spy or I’ll make it very hard for you!
Blackadder: Please, Darling. There are ladies present.”

The season ends, as all of the others do, with the death of the entire cast as they charge “go over” the trench and out into no-man’s land, on Melchett’s orders. They all die immediately, as so many hundreds of thousands actually did.

George plays straight man, mindlessly regurgitating the mindset of the elites that are both his compatriots-in-class, but also the ones who sent him to the front—something he doesn’t mind at all because he’s very, very gung-ho to “go to Berlin”, as he puts it.

“George: The war started because of the vile Hun and his villainous empire-building.

“Edmund: George, the British Empire at present covers a quarter of the globe, while the German Empire consists of a small sausage factory in Tanganyika. I hardly think that we can be entirely absolved of blame on the imperialistic front.”

Blackadder lays out the situation as it really was and—as he clearly alludes—it also was in the early 90s, when this show was made. It also happens to still be how the situation is: a global competition among elites, bent on carving up colonies for themselves, pretending that they’re interested in preventing war, when they are happy to use it to keep any upstarts, or potential usurpers of even a little bit of their power, in line.

“Edmund: You see, Baldrick, in order to prevent war in Europe, two superblocs developed: us, the French and the Russians on one side, and the Germans and Austro-Hungary on the other. The idea was to have two vast opposing armies, each acting as the other’s deterrent. That way there could never be a war.

“Baldrick: But this is a sort of a war, isn’t it, sir?

“Edmund: Yes, that’s right. You see, there was a tiny flaw in the plan.

“George: What was that, sir?

“Edmund: It was bollocks.”

When asked why he no longer enjoyed war as much as he had 15 years ago, he says that it’s because it is much easier to die, now that the foe has a level of technological firepower commensurate or exceeding his own. This is all, of course, exceedingly sarcastic and cutting.

“Edmund: Well, you see, George, I did like it, back in the old days when the prerequisite of a British campaign was that the enemy should under no circumstances carry guns — even spears made us think twice. The kind of people we liked to fight were two feet tall and armed with dry grass.

“[…]

“No, when I joined up, I never imagined anything as awful as this war. I’d had fifteen years of military experience, perfecting the art of ordering a pink gin and saying “Do you do it doggy-doggy?” in Swahili, and then suddenly four-and-a-half million heavily armed Germans hoved into view. That was a shock, I can tell you.”

When George expresses the hope that the war has ended without his having had to die, like all of his old school-chums, Blackadder replies,

“Edmund: (loading his revolver) I’m afraid not. The guns have stopped because we’re about to attack. Not even our generals are mad enough to shell their own men. They think it’s far more sporting to let the Germans do it.”

And, when Baldrick says that he has a cunning plan for the final time ever (this was one of his tropes), Blackadder answers,

“Captain Blackadder: Well, I’m afraid it’s too late. Whatever it was, I’m sure it was better than my plan to get out of here by pretending to be mad. I mean, who would have noticed another madman round here?”

There were a lot of flat jokes and bad jokes over the four seasons. However, all in all, I’m quite glad that I watched it all, in order. it grew better and slightly cleverer over time and it was quite a grand experiment, being set in four very different time periods, always with the same actors, and always killing the entire cast at the end of each season.

Kleine Fische (2009) — 6/10

Four friends in Switzerland are part of an amateur curling team. They all have financial problems of one kind or another. One of them dies in a car accident, under somewhat suspicious circumstances. It seems that he may have killed himself. When his friends go through his worldly effects, they discover that he’d put together a detailed plan for robbing the bank where he’d worked. The friends consider trying to pull it off, but one of them jumps ship, while the other two soldier on. The other guy rejoins the group when he realizes how bad his money problems are.

During the sneaky planning, one guy’s wife throws him out because she thinks he’s cheating on her. The other guy is quite a Lothario, and is now sleeping with a very young woman, from whom he’s trying the access code to the bank. At the same time, he’s having an affair with the bank owner’s wife, who catches him in flagrante delicto with the other girl.

It was OK, but pretty bog-standard and didn’t contain any real surprises.

I watched it in Swiss German.

L’agence tous risques (The A-Team) (2010) — 4/10

The last time I watched this movie, I gave it a 4/10. It didn’t get any better when I watched (well, mostly listened to) it in French. The cast is kind of promising—Hannibal (Liam Neeson), Face (Bradley Cooper), Murdock (Sharlto Copley), B.A. Baracus (Quinton ‘Rampage’ Jackson)—but the execution is so poor. Charissa Sosa (Jessica Biel) is Face’s old flame, highly placed in some government agency. Lynch (Patrick Wilson) chews a lot of scenery being the bad guy, who finally gets fooled by the A-Team’s amazing plan to get him to confess to all of his crimes. Jon Hamm shows up at the end in a cameo, taking Lynch’s place.

I don’t know what to tell you. I miss George Peppard, Dirk Benedict, Dwight Schultz, and Mr. T. It’s no surprise that this didn’t turn into a franchise.

John Mulaney: Baby J (2023) — 8/10

He only has a single topic, but it’s a pretty good one. He is there to tell us for 80 minutes about his life on drugs, his intervention, and his rehab. It stretched on a bit long in the end, else I’d have probably given him an extra point. I quite like his storytelling, but he seemed to be telling them somewhat more slowly than necessary, and repeated some bits unnecessarily.

Le Mans 66: Gegen jede Chance (2019) — 9/10

See my review from 2019. This is really becoming one of my favorite movies.

I watched in German this time.

Mad Max Beyond the Thunderdome (1985) — 7/10

Max (Mel Gibson) stumbles on an encampment called Bartertown, run by Aunty Entity (Tina Turner). He becomes her champion and defeats her enemy, Master-blaster (Angelo Rossitto as Master; Paul Larsson as Blaster), who controls the energy production for the compound. They farm pig shit for methane.

He is betrayed by Aunty and cast out into the desert. He falls to the ground on a dune but is found by a member of a jungle tribe that lives conveniently close to the desert. They nurse Max back to health, thinking that he’s a “Captain Walker”, some sort of figure in their pantheon of Gods. It is a colony of children with the only adult being the slender, attractive, young woman who found him. They are a post-apocalyptic cult, keeping images of the ancient and lost world alive in their mythos.

They want Max to take them home. But he’s not their Captain Walker. He tries to prove it by throwing his hat away, but a wind comes up, floating things into the air. The children interpret this as a sign and leave their home, storming into the desert, on a mission. They lead Max to the crashed/landed plane of which they spoke. They want him to fly them. He walks away.

Back at their encampment, they watch him. He is lost in thought. The children work their way through their mythos, assimilating the new information, finding a new way forward. They decide to leave their oasis; Max wants them to stay. He threatens them, but his rescuer—the young woman—is defiant. He knocks her out and brings her back before she can lead her crew to certain death in either the desert or Bartertown.

It doesn’t help. A bunch of them take off in the night. Max and a small crew give chase the next morning, eventually finding them and rescuing them from a sinkhole in the sand. They are deep in the desert and have no noticeable supplies, especially not nearly enough water.

Still, they manage to stumble on Bartertown, where they must take refuge in order to survive. Max leads these innocents into the bowels of the town through a sewer pipe. They find Master and rescue him from his prison cell amonst the pigs. No-one seems to notice the smell. They collaborate to begin to overthrow Aunty’s men, who’ve taken over the underworld.

They manage it, more or less. They steal a train out of Bartertown and the who jungle village, including Max and Master, take off across the desert. Aunty and her crew give pursuit. They eventually catch with them and cause havoc. This part seems to be a precursor to the incredible chase scenes from Mad Max: Fury Road. The villagers manage to ditch Aunty’s part of the train, but they still have her head henchman attached to the train—until they don’t. They drop him off of a bridge.

They bring the train to a stop before they run into a roadblock set up by Jedediah Jr. (Adam Cockburn). They follow him down to Jedediah’s (Bruce Spence) lair, where they make him help them flee in their plane. Aunty’s crew shows up soon after, giving chase to the plane. This totally looks like Fury Road now, with Tina Turner ripping across the desert in her dune buggy.

They need more space to take off in the plane. Max takes a dune buggy and heads off to get it for them. He crashes his truck headlong into the oncoming horde, allowing his friends to take off in their plane. He lies in the desert, just outside the circle of Bartertown’s wrecked fleet of dune buggies. Aunty approaches him, “Well, ain’t we a pair, raggedy man. Goodbye soldier! [laughs]”

The jungle crew lands in what is left of Sydney. Max wanders the desert.

I watched it in German.

Beverly Hills Cop III (1994) — 5/10

Axel Foley (Eddie Murphy) returns to California from Detroit, this time to get revenge against a counterfeiting operation that had had his boss killed. He ends up teamed up with Sergeant Billy Rosewood (Judge Reinhold) and Detective Jon Flint (Hector Elizondo). He ends up suspecting the proprietors of Wonder World. He locks horns with the unctuous owner of Wonder World—who also exercises considerable control over both LA media and police. With the help of a lovely employee at the park (Theresa Randle), Axel manages to prove that they’re counterfeiting and gets revenge. The end.

The effects and acting were pretty terrible. This barely rose to the level of a television show of the era, to say nothing of a full-fledged film. The fight scenes were laughable; the shooting scenes were kind of bizarre—sometimes no-one was hurt, but magically; other times, people were shot, but then they shook off their seemingly horrific gunshot wounds with a joke.

Contact (1997) — 10/10

This is honestly one of the best science/science-fiction movies that has ever been made. It’s based on the book of the same name by Carl Sagan. It follows the life of Dr. Ellie Arroway (Jodie Foster), whose father bestows upon her a fascination with radio signals of all kinds. This transforms into a career in the SETI project, which takes her to Puerto Rico and the Arecibo radio telescope. Here she meets preacher Palmer Joss (Matthew McConaughey), who challenges her lack of ability to interpret what she does through a spiritual lens, to perhaps imbue it with the appropriate wonder, even if that means that her approach ends up being less-than-scientific.

Presidential Science Advisor David Drumlin (Tom Skerritt) thinks searching for alien signals is all a bunch of nonsense, so he torpedoes the project. Ellie goes on a tour to drum up funding and finally finds enigmatic billionaire S. R. Hadden (John Hurt), who sees a spark in Ellie and how is willing to fun her when the government won’t. She is set up at the VLA (Very Large Array telescope in New Mexico) when she hears the first actual signal.

The U.S. military descends immediately and tries to claim everything for itself, despite not having done any of the research. This neanderthal approach is personified in agent Michael Kitz (James Woods) who plays without much nuance, but sadly probably quite accurately. The project is put under tight security, but Hadden and Arroway are allowed to continue to participate. Together, they discover 63,000 pages of data—and Hadden provides the key to decrypting it.

The data is for a machine, of unknown function. The military is terrified of building it. They proceed to built it anyway, at Cape Canaveral. Ellie is supposed to go in it, but Drumlin usurps her position at the head of the line. He is killed when the machine fails after a religious zealot bombs it as it is spinning up into operation.

Hadden reveals to Arroway that his company had constructed a second machine, in Japan—and that she would be the first passenger. The machine spins up; her pod is dropped in; it disappears. We see her travel through several wormholes, finally ending up on a simulated beach, where an alien posing as her father appears to tell her of the next steps for humanity, should they be willing to do it.

She reawakens on Earth, with her pod having simply dropped through the machine—instead of having been gone for the 18 subjective hours that she felt. None of the vast array of devices recorded anything but noise. Although Ellie is dragged over the coals and publicly ridiculed, the U.S. government privately discusses that, although they only got static on all sensors, they did pick up 18 hours of it.

I watched it in Italian, with Italian subtitles.