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Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2023.08

Published by marco on

Updated 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.

Men in Black (1997) — 8/10

I’d already watched and written a short review of this movie in 2017. The following summary is a lot more comprehensive.

A truck drives through the American southwest, with a load of migrants in the back. They run into an INS roadblock, but agent Kay (Tommy Lee Jones) and Dee (Richard Hamilton) break up the party and take one of the migrants into the desert—the one who doesn’t seem to understand a lick of Spanish. He turns out to be an alien who’d arrived illegally on Earth. Kay eliminates him before he can take out one of the INS officers (who are absolutely not tricked out in SWAT gear because it’s the 90s). We see the neuralizer and learn that Dee has lost a step.

Seque to a chase-on-foot by Jay (Will Smith), who’s getting his first introduction to an alien. He chases it down, getting Kay’s attention. Kay shows up at the police station to pick him up and follow up a lead that takes them to Jay’s next alien Jeebs (Tony Shalhoub), who’s an off-planet-arms dealer. Jay learns that this is all real.

“Kay: A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it. Fifteen hundred years ago everybody knew the Earth was the center of the universe. Five hundred years ago, everybody knew the Earth was flat, and fifteen minutes ago, you knew that humans were alone on this planet. Imagine what you’ll know tomorrow.”

Jay shows up the next morning at the MIB offices (thought he doesn’t know it yet). We get a whole introduction to the organization, including Zed (Rip Torn), several aliens, and several artifacts.

In a parallel storyline, Edgar (Vincent D’Onofrio) is taken over by a bug, which wears Edgar’s skin like a suit, and which is looking for “the galaxy”. He drives to New York, to Manhattan, and kills two other aliens who he thinks has it. He leaves with a jewel case that he thinks is the galaxy.

Jay and Kay track down a squid family and wonder why they were risking their immigration visa to escape the planet. They check the news—The National Enquirer and so on—and find Edgar’s wife Beatrice (Siobhan Fallon Hogan), who provides them with their next lead.

Meanwhile the alien bodies (Edgar’s first victims) are taken to Laurel’s (Linda Fiorentino) morgue, where she discovers that one of the victims isn’t human. The other alien’s cat is riding on it. Jay and Kay show up, pretending to be morticians. Laurel starts hitting on Jay, while the cat snakes around Jay’s feet. She tells him that her theory is that the bodies aren’t human, but carapaces for transporting other aliens. On one of the bodies, they find a switch near the ear and open up the face to reveal its dying pilot.

“The galaxy is on Orion’s b…”

They zap Laurel with the neuralizer and get on their way, following the next lead. Edgar discovers that he’s stolen useless diamonds instead of “the galaxy”. Jay and Kay finally catch up to Edgar at a jewelry store, where they blow a bunch of stuff up. Edgar gets away, but they get his truck—and his ship, which is stuffed in the back of it.

Meanwhile, all of the other aliens are fleeing Earth because they’re terrified that the bugs will destroy the planet to get the galaxy. Jay figures out that the galaxy is hanging around the cat’s neck. The cat is named Orion. Laurel figures it out at the same time—just in time to receive Edgar as a guest at the morgue. He is received by the morgue attendant (David Cross), who can’t stop him from breaking in and taking Laurel hostage.

Laurel keeps hitting on Jay, but this time mostly because Edgar is hiding under the cart they’re both standing by. Kay discovers the morgue attendant’s body and breaks up the party. Edgar escapes with the galaxy and Laurel, demanding to be driven to Queens, where he’s going to hijack one of the expo saucers. Jay and Kay jet off through the Midtown Tunnel in a considerably transformed Ford LTD—driving on the top of the tunnel.

They get to Flushing Meadows Park in time to shoot down the escaping spacecraft. It grinds to a halt directly in front of them, spilling Edgar out of its broken exit ramp. He reveals himself as a bug, takes Jay and Kay’s guns, then swallows Kay. Laurel is stuck in a tree. Jay gets the crap kicked out of him. He gets back up, then finds a bunch of cockroaches, and starts crushing them to draw out Edgar—“you know, you all look alike to me.”—and to stall for time until Jay can work his magic. “Don’t start nothin’; won’t be nothin’.”

Jay gets his gun back and blows his way out of the bug from the inside. Jay tells him he was hit hard “and it hurt.” As they’re chatting and wiping off bug guts, the bug rises up one last time—but Laurel blows it away. “That’s an interesting job you’ve got there, gentlemen.”

Jay wants to stop Kay from neuralizing her, but he actually says that the neuralizer is for him. “I haven’t been training a partner; I’ve been training a replacement.”

ZAP.

Jay leafs through the gossip rags to see that Jay has “woken from a 35-year coma” and is safely back with his wife. He turns to his partner Laurel to go on their next mission.

Black Widow (2021) — 6/10

The story begins with a midnight escape from Ohio by Melina (Rachel Weisz) and super-soldier Alexei (David Harbour), with their kids Natasha and Yelena. After some pretty nice credits, showing world events, girls training, and assassination plans, we’re taken to a live mission full of black widows, two of whom are Natasha Romanov (Scarlett Johansson) and Yelena Belova (Florence Pugh). Yelena is sprayed with some sort of nano-serum that wakes her up from her hypnotization.

Natasha, meanwhile, is assaulted by a seemingly mechanized assassin, an unstoppable, cobra-commander-looking super-soldier called Taskmaster (Olga Kurylenko). She’s thrown off a bridge into a cold river, but manages to take with her the vials that Taskmaster was looking for. Now, Natasha’s at her sister’s apartment, where they get into a knock-down, drag-out fight.

After the dust-up, they’ve teamed up to take down their old boss, who’s using brainwashing and drugs to keep his army of widows on message. They fight and fall and crash and fall and collect what should be a tremendous number of bruises and broken bones, but they come out with nary a scratch. Taskmaster is hot on their tails, but they get away. Seriously, they don’t have even a single bit of muscle soreness or stiffness.

They get a gigantic, old Soviet helicopter and fly to Alexei’s prison in the Siberian mountains to rescue him. Natasha drops out of the helicopter while Yelena messes about, shooting rockets and starting avalanches. Alexei’s actually got some superpowers, but he gets cattle-prodded into submission. He gets up on a catwalk while Natasha grabs him on the end of a cable just before the avalanche engulfs the prison.

They want Alexei to take them the “Red Room”. There’s a bunch of family baggage to get through, where Alexei tries to make up with the girls. They head overland on foot to meet up with Melina, who meets them with a long-range rifle. She decides not to shoot them and, instead, lets them into her home. Alexei puts on his old Red Guardian costume, which barely fits over his prison-fattened body. There’s a bunch of family jokes and stuff.

Melina demonstrates how her pigs are completely under her control—because she’s installed ganglial neural controls into them so that they follow orders. Natasha calls her father an idiot and her mother a coward. Natasha has a heart-to-heart with Melina, while Yelena and Alexei do the same. This is a really long scene. She calls him Crimson Dynamo; he corrects her that it’s Red Guardian. They sing American Pie together. It’s endless.

They are interrupted by the blue lights of a giant helicopter. Melina had called Taskmaster to take them all to the “Red Room”, which is pretty literally Bespin, the Cloud City. Melina is apparently deep in with the baddies, seemingly in charge of much of Dreykov’s (Ray Winstone) army. She’s all dolled up like a top-level widow now. She turns out to be Natasha in disguise, but Dreykov sees through it.

Melina reveals herself to Alexei (taking off her Natasha mask), then contacts Yelena to tell her about a hidden weapon so that Yelena can free herself from the operating theater where she’s about to get her face rearranged. While Dreykov and Natasha fence about Natasha’s real mother, the others make their escape. He reveals that Taskmaster is Antonia, an old colleague of Natasha’s, who she thought she’d killed. The woman is kept alive only by her armor and Dreykov’s neural contraptions.

After Taskmaster leaves, Natasha realizes that she can’t shoot Dreykov because he’s programmed her with an olfactory neural control to be unable to attack him.

Meanwhile Red Guardian squares off against Taskmaster, while Yelena infiltrates further into the flying cloud city. Milena tries to hack the system. Natasha spars verbally with Dreykov. She taunts Dreykov into attacking her physically. She taunts him into revealing his worldwide widow army.

She’d tried before to get him to hit her nose hard enough to cut her olfactory nerve, but he “war nicht stark genug”—so, she breaks her own nose to break the control and takes him out. Melina takes out one of the large fans holding up the city, then helps Alexei trap Taskmaster in a prison cell. Dreykov’s army of widows shows up to save him from Natasha—“und lasst ihr leiden.” They are beating the hell out of her until Yelena shows up with the cure for the mind-control, freeing the widows.

As the city crashes to Earth, Natasha saves the information about the other widows all over the planet. She doesn’t seem to be too hurt for having had the shit kicked out of her by an army of widows. I guess they don’t hit that hard? Also, none the worse for wear for having crashed with an entire city out of the stratosphere.

Melina and Alexei are ready to fly away, but they are forced to take off without Natasha and Yelena. Their plane takes some damage to its control surfaces, while Natasha tries to find Yelena. But she finds Taskmaster instead, letting her free, thinking that there is something of Antonia left in there. Dreykov is making his escape, but Yelena jumps onto his plane and blows herself up, also blowing up his plane. She’s ragdolling toward the planet when Natasha catches her and opens a chute for both of them that somehow doesn’t get hit by any of the myriad pieces of falling debris.

Natasha sees Taskmaster coming for them and lets Yelena go. They grapple, jump off a bunch of stuff, pop Taskmaster’s chute just in time to land safely (of course), then start fighting. Natasha pops Taskmaster’s helmet, then pops a vial of the cure to free Antonia from her prison—and her life.

Natasha finds Yelena in the wreckage. Nobody is hurt. Barely even cut. Bitch blew herself up and she’s totally fine. Melina and Alexei show up next, having survived their plane crash with only minor injuries. The rest of the family is forced to flee before the U.S. army arrives. A planeload of widows lands to take them away. Natasha remains because she’s an Avenger. Apparently, Antonia is still alive, too. Happy endings all around.

An epilogue sees Yelena mourning over Natasha’s grave. Valentina Allegra de Fontaine (Julia Louis Dreyfus) appears out of nowhere to tell her that her next contract is her sister’s killer—Clint Barton. Sure, sure.

I subtracted a point for having no tension—like pretty much every other Marvel movie made in the last 15 years. Also for the utterly ridiculously artificial cliffhanger. They’re just not even trying. I don’t care.

I watched it in German.

It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia S01-S16 (2005–2023) — 10/10

There are so many great things about this show: They don’t have a laugh track, for starters. They also do not believe in continuity. They believe in laughs instead. If something is funny, it doesn’t matter if it makes sense or it will carry over into the next show. They just forget about it the next show, like it never happened.

  • Dennis (Glenn Howerton) is a perfect egotist who never shows any interest in the needs of others. His love for himself often leads to him utterly embarrassing himself—except that he’s never embarrassed. Never.
  • Mac (Rob McElhenney) is a moron, dumber than Charlie, although he has no idea that he’s dumb. He thinks he’s the brains of the outfit. He also thinks that he’s a bouncer because he likes to work out and has a karate fetish. Dennis accuses him, though, of not having a core, and of only working his “glamour muscles.” He and Dennis live together, in an incredibly tight and codependent relationship.
  • Sweet Dee (Kaitlin Olson) is even worse than Dennis, if that’s even possible. She is scheming and conniving and convinced of her own beauty, even though the others constantly tell her how ugly she is. “She’s a bird!” She dates and dumps for the most superficial reasons. She is a wonderfully feminist statement that a woman can be just as horrifically asocial as any man. She lives alone, possibly with a cat.
  • Frank (Danny Devito) raised Dennis and Dee as his children (although we would discover that he is not their biological father). He is a dirty, filthy, old man who is interested in having fun, having, sex, smoking whatever, drinking to exhaustion, and reveling in filth. He is the only one of them who has any money. It is enough for him to finance their various schemes and to bail them out of trouble, but it’s utterly unknown how he still has so much.
  • Charlie (Charlie Day) is an idiot, though possibly an artistic genius, but he’s possibly the nicest of them. He cannot read or write very well, though that doesn’t stop him from trying. He is, like Mac, utterly convinced of his ability to hold his own in the planning department, despite his only very fleeting grasp of the laws of physics and social interaction. He lives with Frank and they sleep in the same bed, in a sea of garbage.

Recurring characters are:

  • Artemis (Artemis Pebdani) is a friend of Dee’s, although they only ever meet when Dee needs something from her. Artemis is game because she’s always trying to get laid and is kind of the filthy female counterpart to Frank, whom she occasionally bangs.
  • Waitress (Mary Elizabeth Ellis) works at the local coffee shop. Charlie is obsessed with her. She is occasionally entangled completely unwillingly in the gang’s schemes and has suffered immensely for having been employed in the coffee shop across the street from the bar.
  • Cricket (David Hornsby) is an old schoolfriend of theirs whose life they have utterly ruined. We first meet him as a priest and, by the fifth season, he’s living on the streets, prostituting himself, battling various addictions, and absolutely game to work with the gang on any of their schemes, simply on account of how destitute they’ve made him. He can’t hold a grudge because he needs to eat. By season 16, he’s horribly scarred in myriad ways.

The following list is far from comprehensive, but should go a long way to illustrating the utter dysfunction of each member of the gang. Going through the list of episodes from these seasons—there are so many golden ones, to be honest. It’s really hard to pick favorites, but nevertheless here’s a smattering that is hopefully representative enough to get you started—and addicted. Many of their best shows are the ones where you can tell that they’re sending up some odious part of American or capitalist culture, all with a straight face.

For the most part, they show just how normal it is to be utterly depraved and egotistical, how normal it is to scam and lie and cheat and steal and hustle all the time. That we understand them at all is an indictment of our culture, of our society.

They love booze, and guns, and tits, and money. They don’t care how they get any of it. They don’t plan for the future.

They follow orders, though. They stick to arbitrary rules, venerating them as they suffer under them. This, too, is quintessentially American, to boast of freedom while being subjugated.

They don’t grow. They don’t change. They stay the same—and always will. They learn nothing. They are us; they are America.

There is no Schitt’s Creek moment for them. They’re sixteen seasons deep into a life-lesson for America. When I wrote this, I’d only seen five seasons but I was utterly convinced that they would continue doing exactly what they’re doing, unchanged, for the next eleven. I was not in any way disappointed. They are like a live-action Simpsons. It is, in its way, brilliant—I recently read that the show has the highest density of dialogue of any modern show. It is, if nothing else, extremely funny.

Season 1

Season 2

Season 3

Season 4

  • S04E02: The Gang Solves the Gas Crisis is an incredibly stupid scheme for selling gas from garbage cans, door to door, that ends in tears mostly for a specific person whom they do not know, but whom they are convinced is Dee and Dennis’s annoying biological father. He is not.
  • S04E10: Sweet Dee Has a Heart Attack is literally what it says on the tin. She is no less insufferable afterward. This episode was a work of art.
  • S04E12: The Gang Gets Extreme: Home Makeover Edition has the gang pretend that they’re going to help a local hispanic family improve their living conditions—with utterly predictable results.
  • S04E13: The Nightman Cometh is a musical written by Charlie and put on by the gang, which is actually a marriage proposal to the waitress. None of them know this except for Charlie. None of them cares, as they let their egos and utter lack of shame carry them through what would otherwise be an excruciatingly embarrassing and very public debacle. Instead, they power through and make something weirdly beautiful.

Season 5

  • S05E01: The Gang Exploits the Mortgage Crisis is one of those special political shows where it’s just a standard IASIP show—unless you understand the rapacious, financial context of the moment in which it was aired. Then you see that the gang seizing on the ideas of Wall Street as very much in their ballpark is largely an indictment of not only financial America, but pretty much all of how the American economy runs. If it’s OK for the gang, that should make us all take pause.
  • S05E07: The Gang Wrestles for the Troops is worth it just to see Charlie, Mac, and Dennis dressed up as eagles in a wrestling ring, while Da’ Maniac (Rowdy Roddy Piper) looks on.
  • S05E08: Paddy’s Pub: Home of the Original Kitten Mittens is worth watching if only for the introductory video for Charlie’s new product, mentioned in the title.

Season 6

Season 1

  • S07E1: Frank’s Pretty Woman is about Frank’s horrific fiancé, a shockingly uncouth prostitute who leaves even the gang in the shade with her level of debased depravity.
  • S07E2: The Gang Goes to the Jersey Shore has the gang going to the Jersey shore, where Frank, Charlie, and Mac are rewarded for their relentless positivity, while Dee and Dennis have a PCP-fueled night of horrific crime and violence with a local gang.
  • S07E3: Frank Reynolds’ Little Beauties has Frank continue his descent, with a shattered nose followed by corpse makeup that he wears at an impromptu little girls’ pageant that he ends up funding and hosting. The gang shows up as Devo.
  • S07E7: CharDee MacDennis: The Game of Games has the gang revive a bizarre game of trivia, feats of strength, and spirituality, combined with heavy drinking (naturally). Great surprise ending.

Season 8

  • S08E4: Charlie and Dee Find Love has the title characters meeting rich partners. Dee tries to bed hers, but he’s just doing a “Dangerous Liaisons” with her, while Charlie’s really likes him, but he’s just using her to get closer to the waitress. Another great trick ending.

  • S08E5: The Gang Gets Analyzed has the gang seek therapy because they can’t agree on who has to do the dishes after a dinner.

    “Mac: I gained and lost 60 pounds in three months.
    Therapist: But that’s nearly impossible!
    Mac: First of all, through God, all things are possible, so jot that down.”

Season 9

  • S09E7: The Gang Gets Quarantined has the gang trying to avoid catching the flu, with eerily prophetic COVID undertones.
  • S09E08: Flowers for Charlie features Charlie getting much, much smarter because of an experimental drug. Charlie Day is a national treasure.
  • S09E09: Mac and Dennis Buy a Timeshare has Dennis and Mac living together as a couple in the suburbs. Mac stays home to take care of the house, while Dennis goes to work all day. They fight. Really well-acted. Rowdy Roddy Piper shows up as Da’ Maniac.

Season 10

  • S10E01: The Gang Beats Boggs has the gang binge-drinking their way across an intra-continental flight to start off the 10th season.
  • S10E04: Charlie Work again stars the incomparable Charlie Day, manipulating the others into not screwing up the health inspection.
  • S10E08: The Gang Goes on Family Fight puts the gang on a Family Feud-style game show, competing against a black family, with predictable results. Charlie gets all of the odd choices correct; Keegan-Michael Key hosts.

Season 11

Season 12

  • S12E02: The Gang Goes to a Water Park is yet another off-site episode where the gang is inexplicably in a water park, with Mac and Dee getting stuck in a ride, Frank and Charlie hitting every ride, and Dennis taking on a young girl as a scamming protegé.
  • S12E06: Hero or Hate Crime? takes the gang to the depths of their casual depravity, in which they impose their warped world-view on an arbitration process, which they’ve invoked for a completely trivial reason. Mac comes out of the closet.
  • S12E07: PTSDee is unique in that Dee gets her revenge in an incredibly satisfying and twisted manner. At first, you think she’s being unspeakably cruel—but then you remember that the target of her wrath was so casually cruel to her just at the beginning of the show.

Season 13

  • S13E02: The Gang Escapes shreds the fad of escape rooms, showing how it can’t possibly stand up to the power of the utterly asocial gang.
  • S13E06: The Gang Solves the Bathroom Problem is the first in what will be several shows that pointedly address some of the more confusing parts of millennial identitarianism and the laser-like focus on low-impact social issues. This one’s about genders.
  • S13E07: The Gang Does a Clip Show is noteworthy because they can’t even phone it in with a clip show. A bunch of the clips are fake or new or misremembered (newly filmed) and it veers into hallucinogenic territory by the time it’s done.
  • S13E08: Charlie’s Home Alone and S13E09: The Gang Wins the Big Game go together and tell the tale of sports superstition as well as the Eagles finally winning the Super Bowl, but only because the gang does everything right. (Spoiler: it’s Dee’s anti-social filthiness that goes unacknowledged but wins the day, while Charlie’s incredible but whole fictitious and superstitious self-sacrifice is heralded.)
  • S13E10: Mac Finds His Pride features an earnest and well-executed, silently performed dance number with Mac, expressing his homosexuality to his father, who walks out. Frank, on the other hand, has the desired epiphany.

Season 14

  • S14.E2: Thunder Gun 4: Maximum Cool has the gang being absolutely over-the-top and antisocial in a movie focus group.
  • S14.E3: Dee Day is notable in that Dee gets her own day and everyone is fine with that. Whereas they never respect a single thing she ordinarily says, the rest of the gang follows her every order because those are the rules of Dee Day. No matter the discomfort, not following arbitrary rules that they’d all agreed to would be worse.
  • S14.E6: The Janitor Always Mops Twice is really well-made, fun and super-creative, while also showing off Charlie Day’s love of cinema.
  • S14.E9: A Woman’s Right to Chop is another socially aware metaphorical episode, this time talking about the right to an abortion thinly veiled as a woman’s right to chop her hair short.

Season 15

Season 16

  • S16.E6: Risk E. Rat’s Pizza & Amusement Center has the gang trying to relive their golden days by visiting the arcade/pizza restaurant of their youth. Mac ends up in the Feelings Center with a young boy named Sam, both of them being counseled by a dog. After the dog absolves them,

    “Mac: We’ve only been here for like five minutes. That’s not a punishment. I don’t feel punished. Where’s the shame I’m supposed to be feeling?
    Dog: There’s no shame in making a mistake, Mac.
    Mac: Yes, there is. How else would I know not to do it anymore?
    Dog: Hey, listen man, I’m a licensed psychotherapist.
    Mac: You’re a talking dog. I’m out of here.
    Sam: I’m scared.
    Mac: I’m sure you are, Sam. I’m sure you are. ‘Cause you’re a pussy. Look, that’s not your fault, man. This dog. Your parents. The whole culture is grooming you to be a pussy. You got no freedom. Which means you got no balls. And then, even when you do actually get caught doing something bad, you’re not held accountable. And if you’re not held accountable, you feel no guilt. And if you feel no guilt, you feel no shame. You got no shame, you’re never gonna hate yourself enough to stop being bad and grow some balls.”

  • S16.E8: Dennis Takes a Mental Health Day has Dennis trying to drop his blood pressure, but the world is working against him. Everything is annoying, the world cannot stop trying to take things from him. It’s a wonderful set piece about how terrible customer experience has become in this, our advanced, age. Great twist ending.
    The Morning Show S01–S03 (2019–2022) — 5/10

    This show is hot garbage. It’s a tragic waste of a lot of good talent: Reese Witherspoon, Mark Duplass, Steve Carell, Jennifer Aniston (who’s a much better comedienne than dramatic actress). I don’t like a single one of the characters. I take that back.

    I would kind of like Reese Witherspoon’s character if she wasn’t so interested in satisfying the requirements of the assholes judging her so that she can be allowed to work somewhere significant. And they’ve also thrown a few curveballs into her personality to keep her “down to Earth.” (Like, when she hooks up with and immediately leaves an Irish bartender in the exact same crude way that a man would. I’m not sure what the message is, but it’s muddled and stupid).

    At the urging of my viewing partner, we’ve watched a few more episodes, but it’s not gotten much better. I’m still desperately searching for a character I don’t dislike. We’re at episode five now, with me more listening than watching, but my impression is that the message of this show is that the best we can hope for as a society is for woman to switch places with men, but that everything else stays pretty much the same. Everyone is still an asshole, treating everyone else like dirt, concerned mostly about themselves.

    Equality apparently means that the asshole sociopaths still run everything, but some of them will be women. Our future is bright, in other words.

    In episode six, the whole toxic crew heads out to California, to cover horrific wildfires. Everyone’s still hungover from the evening before. Bradley and Alex are at each other’s throats, with Bradley mistaking the show she’s working at for an actual journalistic operation (as if that even exists in the mainstream) while Alex thinks America needs to be given fluff to keep it happy. I mean, she’s right, but it’s only because people like her have trained them to expect it.

    In episode seven, Alex reveals to her daughter that her parents are getting a divorce. The daughter is given the opportunity for utterly non-entertaining grandstanding. I get that this is a show about the superficiality of show business, but I wonder how it’s possible to tough out a show where you can’t get a single toehold on a single character.

    My partner’s watching this show while I work and read, so I’m seeing more of it in the background. There was a bright spot near the end of season one where it seemed to get a bit better. Now, on episode four of season two, it’s just a slog of shitty, petty, superficial, ineloquent, and woefully under-talented and intellectually under-equipped main characters talking at each other in one endless scene after another.

    The camera faces one person, then the other, then the previous one, then the other one again. It focuses a bit on one character as he (e.g., Cory) reads out a tremendous amount of text that wishes it had been written by Armando Iannucci, but it’s much more like it’s been written by Aaron Sorkin, who’s become so famous for writing stuff that stupid people think sounds clever.

    And I absolutely can’t tell whether they’re being catty and tongue-in-cheek about the whole “I am my identities” way of life, or if they absolutely 100% mean it. At any rate, it’s just so tedious and uninteresting.

    Cory (Billy Crudup) has some rare moments, when he’s not delivering carefully crafted speeches that are too clever by half. He has excellent control of his eyes and communicates a lot with them.

    Still, this is a terrible show, overall. It’s just hours and hours of fevered, fragile egos attached to incredibly self-interested and stunningly stupid people. Alex is absolutely the worst. I am not all impressed with how they’ve managed to portray a small-minded, stupid person like this. I don’t know any people who are anything like the people in this show. They just spend all their day yelling at each other and grasping for personal gain.

    The Chip/Alex conversation in the car in episode 8 of season 2 is endless and focuses exclusively on Alex’s feelings—and how she’s never done anything wrong. It’s painful. It’s made more painful by the thought that there are so many people who probably think that this is the best TV they’ve ever seen.

    In season 3, episode 4, there’s a lot of absolutely awful stuff going on, but the worst part is how hard they push the anti-Russian/pro-Ukraine narrative. It’s not aged well, but no matter. It’s more interesting as a lesson in how the elites in America are expected to think. There is absolutely no issue about being so partisan in a TV show that is decidedly not about real-world issues at all.

    It’s especially ironic that they’re talking about exclusive photos that they could publish of the Russians having bombed a hospital, something that’s completely made-up, but literally right now there is another invasion going on where actual hospitals and churches are being bombed—it’s November 2023 right now, and I’m talking about Israel’s vengeance attacks on Gaza—and there is literally no way on God’s green Earth that the current bomber would ever be featured so crassly as the “enemy” in this TV show.

    I’m mystified how anyone can seriously watch this show without doing something more useful at the same time—and then look forward to another season.

    Foundation S01 (2021) — 6/10

    This a bit woker than I remember the books being. The lead character is a Tom-Cruise-like better-at-everything-than-everyone-else star, but it’s a slight, black young woman/girl.

    There’s the pool scene that, were the roles reversed, there’d be an uproar. She basically humiliates her boyfriend intellectually, then taunts him when he says he can’t swim, then she throws him in the water and tells him to “relax”. Then she seduces him into having sex in the pool. I honestly can’t tell if they’re being ironic or if they really think that reversing the roles is progress.

    I like the concept and the visuals are wonderful, but it’s just crazy how a show that takes place over giant time spans (a few decades is the shortest) spends so much damned time on fleeting love affairs. This is silly. I only watched the first three episodes before giving up on it.

    That’s what I wrote in January of 2022, when I first started watching this. I was riding the bike at the time. I continued watching on the recommendation of a good friend, whose taste in films is otherwise good. I watched it while doing strength workouts. It seemed to fit a bit better, I don’t know why. Maybe I’ve gotten older and have a bit more patience. There are a bunch of things going on:

    • Cleon/Empire/Brother Day (Lee Pace) walks a path in a religious ritual. This part was pretty cool and interesting, involving his 11,000 year-old robot, Demerzel (Laura Birn). “Your lack of understanding does not obligate me to explain.”
    • Gaal Dornick (Lou Llobell) is fighting with the digital ghost of Hari Seldon (Jared Harris). This part is quite annoying and tiring. It involves her yelling at a ghost all the time and sulking a lot.
    • Salvor Hardin (Leah Harvey) is making her way through an ancient jump-ship at Phara’s (Kubbra Sait) gunpoint, who’s trying to avenge the decimation of her home planet Anacreon by attacking first Terminus, then taking the jump ship to the heart of Trantor. This part is OK, but filled with a few too many monologues to fill in gaps. Show, don’t tell.
    • Cleon/Empire/Brother Dawn (Cassian Bilton) struggles with being slightly different than his prior clones—Day and Dusk (Terrence Mann)—and gets involved in a relationship with Azura Odili (Amy Tyger), which has entanglements, as she tries to get him to escape his destiny. This part is also kind of lame, but bearable.

    Episode 9: The Leap was more interesting. Hari Seldon spoke with the Foundation on Terminus, lending the proceeding a bit more gravitas. Cleon/Day took revenge on Azura for having misled his “son” Cleon/Dawn: he found and killed every single person she’d ever interacted with, then condemned her to a long life of intravenous feeding, deprived of all sensory input.

    But then they ruined it by making an achingly long scene starring Gael Dornick, finding Salvor Hardin in a cryo-tank in the water. Just the most ludicrous Deus ex Machina and absolute emoting and hamming it up, with glassy eyes everywhere. Sigh.

    Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003) — 6/10

    This movie follows what has become the standard Terminator formula: there’s a quick introduction of John Connor (Nick Stahl), then a robot T-X (Kristanna Loken) arrives from the future, followed by the Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger). The robots steal a bunch of shit while breaking a bunch of stuff in order to get dressed up in the clothes of the time.

    There’s a computer virus raging across the nation. John Connor tries robbing drugs from the veterinary clinic of Kate Brewster (Claire Danes) to fix himself up. T-X isn’t far behind. She’s an unstoppable teutonic goddess—who raises hell and is about to kill Kate when a real teutonic God plows into her with his truck.

    Does it kill her? Bitch, please. Of course not. The movie’s got to keep going, so she pops right back up, self-repairing and then turning all vehicles into autonomous vehicles by magically reprogramming all of the circuit boards in them. Mayhem ensues. John Connor flees with Kate Brewster in her pet van. Cops are in hot pursuit like they’re after the Blues Brothers.

    Terminator, Connor, and Brewster get away from T-X. Her plasma cannon damaged one of his two fuel cells, so he has to cut one out while he’s driving. They end up in a cemetery, where they plunder a mausoleum that Sarah Connor had thought to fill with weapons. The police follow them there—as does the T-X, in the form of Sarah’s fiancé (Brian Sites), who’s getting escorted by police to find Kate. T-X ends up killing her escort, but is still stymied at the cemetery, where Kate, John, and Terminator escape in a hearse, scraping the T-X off the roof by driving under a semi-tractor-trailer.

    Her primary plasma weapon is damaged, but she perseveres. There’s a bunch of exposition where Kate and John get to know what happens to them. They all meet up at NORAD, where Kate’s Dad initiates SkyNet. T-X is there, upgrading very early T-1 and T-2 models—they still use tank treads—and letting them loose in the base. Our heroes rescue Kate’s dad, while keeping the T-X at bay. They go to his office to find the codes that they can use to shut down SkyNet. It is already defending itself, though. It is preparing a nuclear attack on all mankind—Judgement Day.

    Kate’s dad dies in the next attack, so the three are left to head for another super-secret location. Terminator stays behind to take on the T-X and buy them time. She fries his face off, then snaps his neck—before reprogramming him. Kate and John encounter several more early terminator models. The T-X is back on their trail, but John has turned on the particle collider, including its incredibly powerful magnets, which, apparently, act outside the tube. These pull the T-X apart. But the T-X starts cutting into the collider.

    The reprogrammed Terminator catches up to Kate and John, complete with his new instructions to kill them both. He’s got a bit of a HAL complex, as he now has two sets of conflicting orders. After he chucks them around the hangar a bit, John gets him to shut himself down instead of killing them both. They fly off to the other location to destroy SkyNet.

    They show up there and start hacking their way in. T-X crashes a helicopter into the facility and is right on their tail. Terminator crashes an even bigger helicopter into the facility, smushing T-X again, and saving them both. The door starts to close, but Terminator holds it back. The T-X rips its own legs off and scuttles to catch them. Terminator stops her, tearing out his own fuel cell and cramming it into her mouth. “Du bist terminiert.”

    Inside the facility, there’s a whole shadow government setup, with a tremendous number of old computers. There is no SkyNet there. The Terminator had brought them there to keep them safe from the unavoidable nuclear attack of SkyNet, so that Kate and John will survive. The end, for now.

    I watched it in German.

    John Wick (2014) — 9/10

    John Wick (Keanu Reeves) lost his wife Helen (Bridget Moynahan) to cancer. He meets his mysterious friend Marcus (Willem Dafoe) at the funeral. Before she’d died, she’d ordered him a dog. It arrives after her death. It’s a great little beagle. She and John are becoming friends. Her name is Daisy.

    They’re out for a drive together. Wick stops for gas. Iosef Tarasov (Alfie Allen) is there, with a couple of henchmen. He wants to buy Wick’s 1969 Mustang. It’s not for sale. Iosef mutters in Russian that everything has a price. Wick tells him in Russian that not everything has a price.

    Iosef and his henchmen get the jump on Wick in his home, later that night. They bludgeon him, then bludgeon Daisy to death. Wick wakes to find that she’d dragged herself over to him—her spine had been snapped by a blow—before expiring.

    Iosef goes to Aurelio’s (John Leguizamo) chop shop. Aurelio knows immediately whose car it is. He pops Iosef in the mouth for insolence and sends him away. Iosef’s father Viggo Tasarov (Michael Nyqvist) calls to find out what had happened.

    “Your idiot son stole John Wick’s car and killed his dog.”

    “Oh.”

    Viggo’s right-hand man Avi (Dean Winters) tells him that a big deal has just gone through. He’s made to watch as Viggo beats the crap out of Iosef.

    Viggo calls John, interrupting him as he’s unboxing his old weapons cache. He says nothing.

    John prepares for battle. His back is tattooed with fortis fortuna adiuvat (Fortune Favors the Bold (Wikipedia'). He dresses in his black suit at home, as Viggo sings a song of Baba Yaga in his own home. Viggo’s army shows up at John’s home. John decimates them. The police arrive on a noise complaint.

    “Sag mal, arbeitest du wieder?”

    “Nein, ich muss nur ein paar Sachen regeln.”

    “Na, dann, schönen Abend.”

    He calls a cleanup crew, “Dinner for 12”, paying in gold coins.

    John Wick moves into The Continental Hotel, where we meet the hotel manager (Lance Reddick) and owner Winston (Ian McShane). We learn the rules of that place—no business or contracts on-premises—because Wick goes out on the hunt. Iosef is in a Russian bath house. Wick lets a guard go because he knows him well. He just tells him to take a walk—and Frances does. “Danke, Mr. Wick.”

    Wick infiltrates the club, taking out one of Iosef’s friends (one who’d been there when they’d stolen his car and had killed his dog). He takes out more guards, looking one in the eye until the lights go out. Others give more resistance, so there’s more fighting and shooting and killing in an incredibly economical fighting style.

    Iosef shields himself with a girl and gets away. He rushes through the club’s dance floor, heading for the exit. The main body guard Kirill (Daniel Bernhardt) gets the drop on Wick, who seems to have been fighting him mano-a-mano for fun—until he gets a gut full of a broken champagne bottle and is thrown from a balcony.

    He gets back to the Continental and orders a doctor, who sews him back together and gets him the drugs he needs to keep going.

    He’s sleeping in his bed. Marcus has him in his sniper-rifle scope. He shoots the pillow next to Wick’s head to warn him that Perkins (Adrianne Palicki) is coming to kill him in his room. They fight—pretty good choreography—with Wick eventually getting the drop on her. He learns from her where Viggo keeps all of his cash from his operations. Instead of killing her—against the rules—he leaves her in Harry’s (Clarke Peters) hands.

    Wick is at the church that is a front for the money-laundering operation. He works his way into the basement and lights all of it on fire. Money, paintings, blackmail material—everything.

    Back in the hotel, Perkins gets the drop on Harry and shoots him in the head.

    Wick attacks the remaining Russians, including Viggo, in broad daylight. He takes out dozens of them, but Kirill again gets the drop on him, driving into another car that knocks him down and out.

    They’re in a basement, with Viggo gleefully beating Wick, telling him stories.

    “People keep asking if I’m back and I haven’t really had an answer. But now, yeah, I’m thinkin’ I’m back. So you can either hand over your son or you can die screaming alongside him!”

    Viggo leaves Wick to be suffocated by his henchmen. Marcus shoots one of them, giving Wick a chance to fight Kirill, even though he’s still got a bag over his head and his hands are still bound. Wicks strangles him. He gets outside, stopping Viggo’s car by killing everyone. Viggo gives up his son.

    Wick infiltrates again, taking over a sniper position and taking out many of the others. He blows up the escape vehicles. Wick gut-shoots Iosef, then finishes the job before he can finish saying “Es war nur ein scheiss [Hund]”.

    Wick checks out, getting a new car from the Continental “für die kleine Störung” (Perkins’s attack). He meets up with Marcus and thanks him. That evening, Marcus is taken captive by Viggo’s men, nearly beaten to death by Viggo, then finished off by Perkins and Viggo.

    Winston has his men kill Perkins for her actions in the Continental. He calls Wick to tell him that Viggo is heading for his heliport. Wick spills them all out of the way like a force of nature, one by one by one, until only Viggo is left. Viggo plows Wick’s car off the pier, but without Wick in it. Viggo gets him to throw his weapon away, then they fight mano-a-mano. Until Viggo pulls a knife. Wick is forced to let Viggo stab him in order to stabilize the knife and take it away. They are both grievously wounded, Viggo very much mortally so.

    We’re back in the garage where we started. Wick pulls himself up, breaks into the vet’s office, gets some medicine, staples his wound shut (same place as the previous stabbing), then picks up a Pit Bull puppy slated for execution and walks off.

    Kindergarten Cop (1990) — 8/10

    Detective John Kimble (Arnold Schwarzenegger) has finally captured his arch-nemesis Crisp (Richard Tyson). His next assignment is to go undercover to protect Crisp’s wife and child from being abducted by Crisp or his henchmen. When Detective Phoebe O’Hara (Pamela Reed) falls too ill to teach the kindergarten class where they can keep an eye on the boy.

    Instead, Kimble takes the job. His first day on the job only comes to a calmer ending when he gets out his ferret. On the second day, he tries to find out what their dads do. He has a headache.

    “Boy: Es ist bestimmt ein Tumor.
    Kimble: Es ist kein Tumor.”

    He’s narrowing it down to a couple of kids, but isn’t sure yet which ones is Crisp’s. It’s kind of hilarious that this is the actual plot. Various mothers chat with Kimble—because he’s a giant pile of muscle—including Sylvester’s mom (Cathy Moriarty), who thinks her kid is gay. Another teacher at the school is Joyce (Penelope Ann Miller). Miss Schlowski (Linda Hunt) is the school principal.

    Kimble, Joyce, and O’Hara go to dinner, after which Kimble confesses that the kids are running all over him. O’Hara tells him, “no fear.” He starts training them like cadets—a full physical-fitness training program. Sit-ups, running, jumping jacks.

    Kimble thinks he’s figured out that it’s Zach he’s looking for, then meets Zach’s mom (Jayne Brook), who confesses that she knows about Zach’s bruises, but that her husband is in therapy. Kimble realizes he’s at a dead-end with his search for Crisp’s kid, but tells Zach’s mom that he’ll press charges if her husband does it again.

    It’s dinnertime at Joyce’s house, with her kid, Dominic. Kimble thinks that Joyce and Dominic might very well be Crisp’s ex-wife and child. They are. Crisp shows up. People are kidnapped. People are rescued. Happy ending all around. Except Crisp, who dies. So does his mom. It’s pretty violent, actually.

    I’ve seen this movie so many times before—it was an absolute family favorite—but this is the first time I’ve seen it in German. It’s really pretty awesome in German. “Eins, zwei, drei, vier!”

    Fist of Jesus (2023) — 8/10

    This was a pitch-perfect spoof of parts of the story of Jesus, told as a hyper-violent zombie/action movie.

    Jesus is trying to show off and brings Lazarus back from there dead. He rises, but as a zombie, quickly infecting everyone but Jesus and Judas. They scream and flee, hunted throughout the small village by roving bands of villager-zombies, Roman-centurion-zombies, and cowboy-zombies.

    After getting trapped in a field, hemmed in on all sides, Jesus conjures fishes, multiplies them and wields them as weapons, as throwing stars, chainsaws, swords, everything. Judas grabs a giant swordfish and joins in. It’s a bloodbath.

    Fist of Jesus is not the best movie ever, but it had absolutely no right being as good as it was. It just goes to show that funny writing, absolutely fantastic editing, and good directing goes so much farther than effects. And the effects were actually good! Not lifelike, but well-choreographed.

    I watched it in Spanish with English subtitles.

    Les Misérables (1998) — 8/10

    Jean Valjean (Liam Neeson) is a criminal, out for only four days on parole after 19 years of hard labor. He ends up in a town, sleeping on a bench. An old woman urges him to go to a local church, where he is fed and given shelter. He repays them by stealing the silverware and punching the priest (Tim Barlow) in the eye.

    The police captures him, bringing him back to the priest, who absolves him, telling the police that he allowed Valjean to take the silverware and wonders why he’d forgotten the candlesticks.

    Years later, Valjean is mayor of the town. His new chief inspector is Javert (Geoffrey Rush), who is absolutely hell-bent on putting Valjean back in jail, for something—anything!—because he does not believe in rehabilitation.

    Valjean is no saint. He fires a local woman Fantine (Uma Thurman), consigning her to a fate of prostitution and dire illness, trying to scratch together enough money to pay rent, heat her apartment, and to bring her child Cosette (Claire Danes) back to her.

    The film depicts an utterly cruel and lost society, filled with the worst people. Rich men haggle with freezing whores, then try to rape them while the police look on.

    Valjean learns that a “Jean Valjean” is on trial. He travels to Paris to attend the trial. After watching his previous comrades—19 years together on the chain—snitch to hang another man for what were his crimes, he stands and confesses, come what may.

    Valjean returns to Fantine, only to be confronted by Javert, who delights in his guilt. Javert’s accusations push Fantine over the edge, and she dies in her bed. Valjean finally pops Javert in the noggin and escapes, first transferring ownership of his factory to his workers, then collecting a go-bag that he’d buried by a tree in a field outside of town.

    Javert’s enthusiasm to catch him makes him tip his entire stagecoach. He continues on foot, running to catch the slowly moving coach in front of him, only to find that Valjean had switched places with a local farmer.

    Valjean continues to the town where Cosette lives in a horrible foster home, with two horrible foster parents who cavil every sou they can get out of him. He wants to take Cosette with him and lays FF500 on the table, but the man tries to bargain up to FF1500, but then says he couldn’t consider it, morally. Valjean is sarcastically relieved, then shows the man a letter from Cosette’s mother, allowing him to take the girl with him for free.

    Valjean returns to the village where he’d been mayor, staying in hiding in a church convent while Javert searches high and low for him. Javert is thwarted from searching the grounds, and Javert and Cosette escape.

    Ten years later, they are still in the church. Valjean, on the urging and advice of his friend, takes Cosette into the world. His friend tells him that the world has changed, that he should return to it. He agrees and decides to buy a house and move in. Javert is still out there, fighting against the revolution.

    Cosette starts agitating to have her own life because she’s hot for a local revolutionary Marius (Hans Matheson). Javert is determined to tell her father that she’s consorting with a known revolutionary. He visits the home, but Valjean slips out, leaving Cosette to speak with Javert. She breaks into histrionics afterward, demanding that he tell his story. He tells her that he’s a convict, that he’d been sentenced to 20 years of hard labor for stealing a loaf of bread. He tells her his story, while they sit on a white piano bench, next to a white grand piano, in a study the size of most people’s apartments.

    Javert soon discovers that Lafitte is Valjean. Valjean and Cosette decide to leave town, in the middle of the night. The next day, Marius helps start the revolution. Cosette tells her father that she needs to wait for Marius to return from the barricades and that she loves him. Meanwhile, Javert is scurrying and skulking about the city, pursuing his quarry, Valjean. He literally couldn’t care less about the revolution, he’s focused laser-like only on his eternal quarry.

    Cosette ventures out of doors to meet Marius. The trap shuts on her, completely expectedly. Javert has her dead to rights. She actually gets the drop on him, throws him to the ground, then unties Marius and gives him Javert’s gun. Marius frog-marches Javert to the barricades to “face the people’s justice.” Valjean goes into the streets, to a hospital, to find Marius. Instead, he finds Javert, tied to a post, utterly unrepentant. A revolutionary says “Do you know him? When we have a spare bullet, we get to kill him.” Valjean continues to the barricades to send Marius to Cosette.

    A little boy robbing corpses is shot through the back. They carry the corpse inside, where Valjean takes on the job of “taking care of” Javert. Javert is incensed that not only has Valjean “beaten him”, but that Valjean doesn’t even seem to care that he’s “won”. And now Valjean wants to let him go. “You should kill me. I won’t stop. You don’t understand. I won’t let you go. You should end this. Kill me.”

    In the early gloaming of day, their positions are compromised by heavy artillery. A seemingly indomitable Valjean takes a wounded Marius into the sewers, then out somewhere along the Seine. And … to no-one’s surprise at all, Javert is right exactly in that one spot in the tiny city of Paris to meet him. Javert agrees to let Valjean take Marius back to his home, to Cosette. He takes his leave of her, giving Cosette her mother’s broach, at which Cosette can only stare at stupidly. Valjean leaves with the guards and returns to Javert, on the banks of the Seine.

    Javert says, “I’ve tried to live my life without breaking a single rule.” and “you’re free” before he removes Valjean’s handcuffs, puts them on himself and tips himself backwards into the Seine.

    Valjean watches the ripples, then walks increasingly quickly and confidently along the banks of the Seine, a grin spreading across his face.

    A bunch of the acting is quite wooden, especially Claire Danes, who seems ludicrously out of place. Geoffrey Rush is always good. Liam Neeson was also quite good. Uma Thurman as well.

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