Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2024.02

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.

1. Dave Chappelle: The Dreamer (2023) — 6/10
2. Archer (2023) — 7/10
3. Smokey and the Bandit II (1980) — 5/10
4. Midnight Mass (2021) — 8/10
5. They Cloned Tyrone (2023) — 7/10
6. Bon Tschuur Ticino (2023) — 8/10
7. Nope (2022) — 7/10
8. Pete Davidson: Turbo Fonzarelli (2024) — 8/10
9. My Octopus Teacher (2020) — 9/10
10. A Futile and Stupid Gesture (2018) — 8/10

Dave Chappelle: The Dreamer (2023) — 6/10

There were some highlights in this show, but the first half was a bit too self-indulgent, with a bit too much playing to the crowd. Don’t get me wrong, the crowd absolutely loved it, but it didn’t come across as well for me in a streaming format. He interleaves a certain preachiness with a tacked-on joke. In the best cases, the preachiness is completely faked, forming a long intro to a pretty good punchline. Usually, you can’t see it coming.

The quotes below are taken from the beautifully formatted Dave Chappelle: The Dreamer transcript (Scraps from the loft).

He starts off with what he probably thinks is an extremely clever transgender joke, where he says that dealing with Jim Carrey pretending to be Andy Kaufman on the set of Man on the Moon is just like dealing with transpeople. If that’s the best you’ve got, then just stop, man. Just stop mining that seam. It’s petered out completely at this point. He moves on handicapped people, to show that he’s equal-opportunity. Here, he circles back to the original topic, saying that he wrote a play,

“It’s about a Black transgender woman whose pronoun is, sadly, n*gga…

“It’s a tear-jerker. At the end of the play, she dies of loneliness ’cause white liberals don’t know how to speak to her.”

Which is actually not bad. But then he moves to Huckleberry Finn, and right back to how, if he had to go to jail, he’d claim to identify as a woman and get into a women’s prison. The crowd-pleasing punchline is,

“Give me your fruit cocktail, bitch, before I knock your motherf*cking teeth out. I’m a girl, just like you, bitch. Come here and suck this girl’s dick I got. Don’t make me explain myself. I’m a girl.”

Honestly, it wasn’t any better in context. It’s not like it loses anything because you don’t hear him deliver it. You just didn’t get to see him bang his microphone on his knee, laughing 😂 at his own joke even harder than the crowd could.

Strip clubs, Deborah, then on to the whole Chris Rock/Will Smith incident. Then he’s into this whole long segment about a homeless rasta transperson who attacked him at a show. Dave: are you afraid of becoming a one-trick pony? Or are you playing an extremely long con like Andy Kaufman did? Or are you hoping that we think you’re clever enough to play a boorish comedian who’s secretly enlightened? I hope you know what you’re doing. You’re the man who thought of the skit starring a blind black man who doesn’t know he’s black and is the most racist KKK member in town, so we’ll always have that.

On to marriage and jealousy, then a really long coda about his first years in comedy, messing with the Russian mob, where he, again, comes out looking like the only person brave enough to open his mouth and stand up to anybody.

“I didn’t buckle. You guys would’ve been very proud of me. I was scared, but I didn’t buckle.”

The story goes on to talk about “powerful dreamers”, who can make reality bend to their will. This starts off kind of weak, talking about L’il Nas X, but then a couple of the final parables were decent.

Archer (2023) — 7/10

In what turns out to be the final season of Archer, Sterling Archer (H. Jon Benjamin), Lana Kane (Aisha Tyler), Pam Poovey (Amber Nash), Cheryl Tunt (Judy Greer), Cyril Figgis (Chris Parnell, Dr. Algernop Krieger (Lucky Yates), and Ray Gillette (Adam Reed) are joined by a new hire Zara Kahn (Natalie Drew). She’s a British agent who immediately vies for the top spot at the agency. She gets Lana’s support because it annoys Archer, because she’s quite good, and also because she used to work for Interpol.

The season arc is the gang is trying get the agency into Interpol’s good graces. They hope to ride a gravy train of steady and legitimate contracts if they can just prove their mettle. This proves difficult, as their style, while more than occasionally eventually effective, is quite chaotic and hard to reconcile with the staid bureaucracy of Interpol.

Much of Zara’s mocking of Sterling centers on his age, as she is much, much younger. The other characters stay pretty much the same, though Pam’s best seasons are behind her, when she got on cocaine—there’s a small reprise in this season—or when she revealed her whole yakuza backstory. Cheryl, too, is still crazy, but more muted and her lines are just going through the motions. Krieger has some good stuff at the end of the season, but it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that this show has said all that it’s going to say.

This isn’t the best season by far, but it’s still better and more entertaining than a lot of other stuff out there. The voice acting is, as always, superb.

I like the following moments from S14.E6 ∙ Face Off, where the team goes undercover at an upscale and exclusive plastic-surgery spa, where they’re on the tail of an arms dealer who keeps changing his appearance.

“Archer: Thanks for walking with me, Pam. One bad fall, and my hips could shatter.
Pam: According to one doctor!
Archer: And according to the X-rays of my buckling tibias.
Pam: Screw the X-rays! This whole place is toxic. These doctors only make money if they convince you there’s something broken that they can fix.
Archer: Dr. Spencer actually refused to work on me because I’m too broken.
Pam: [laughs] That was reverse psychology, dude.
Archer: Oh. You think?
Pam: I know! Look, Archer, you’re not the fresh young agent anymore, but you’re something better: the salty old pro who’s seen it all and lived to tell about it.”

After a typical Archer-style clusterfuck in which he ends up achieving his objective but only after nearly failing to do so in every way possible, we have:

“Archer: What happened?
Lana: You fell 50 feet onto jagged rocks. Also, you held that asshоlе sloth to break its fall with your body. And, uh, it bit you when you landed. And just soaked you in piss.
Archer: That’s… amazing!
Lana: Uh, but is it?
Archer: I was worried I was getting old. But I just survived an accident that should have killed me. I might be invincible. [crackling] [groaning]
Krieger: Yeah, that’d be the 30 stitches. Or the nanobots, if they decided to rebel.
Archer: [sighs] Fine, I’m probably not invincible. Just lucky to the point of being immortal.”

At the end of the episode, Archer sums up his style of success.

“Archer: More like all in a day’s work for the world’s greatest… [coughing, hacking] …greatest spy. That probably would have been more convincing if I hadn’t coughed up blood.
Pam: You know, bud, maybe this is the mission where you learn not to rely so much on luck.
Archer: Are you kidding? This was my luckiest mission yet.
Pam: You got shot, like, a dozen times.
Archer: Yeah, in a hospital.”

Don’t ever change, Archer. You are my spirit animal.

Quotes are pulled from the wonderfully thorough Archer Season 14, Episode 6 Face Off Transcript (TV Show transcripts).

Smokey and the Bandit II (1980) — 5/10

This movie is absolutely not good, but nostalgia carried me a long way. It starts off with Cledus (Jerry Reed) driving his semi in what looks like a Nascar race, but for trucks. I have no idea whether this is a real thing—or whether it was ever a real thing. After handily winning a race, he’s approached by Big Enos (Pat McCormick) and Little Enos (Paul Williams), who want him to transport a package across the country—for $200k. He needs to get the bandit (Burt Reynolds) on board, but the bandit is falling-down drunk because Carrie (Sally Field) has left him. Meanwhile, she was about to get married to Buford T. Justice Junior (Mike Henry), but she skips out on that wedding—just like in the first movie.

Buford T. Justice (Jackie Gleason) is hot on their tail, waiting for them to mess up. They get to the package, which turns out to be Charlotte the elephant. She’s sick, though, so they pick up a “doctor” (Dom DeLuise). After a little while, they discover that the elephant is not sick, but pregnant.

The film is filled with hijinks and just plain messing around. Sally Field is adorable. Dom DeLuise is hilarious, just naturally goofy. He fakes an Italian accent most of the time. There are many, many more bit characters and somewhat-famous actors. Jackie Gleason actually plays two more roles—a Canadian mountie as well as a swishy Savannah-gentlemen-looking sheriff. The three police armies fight with the Bandit and a truck army for what feels like the last hour. Burt Reynolds is really phoning it in, but I guess it was a payday.

They end up not making the delivery, dropping the contract to let Charlotte have her baby instead. It is never made clear why they’d been asked to transport a pregnant elephant across the country in the first place. At the end, the Bandit is towing the elephant and baby with his Trans Am. I wish I were kidding.

It must have cost nearly nothing to make this movie. Probably renting the elephant cost the most. Maybe they had to pay for destroying a bunch of the vehicles. There are really a lot of vehicles, all destroyed with practical effects. It’s all out in the desert, which makes it a lot easier and cheaper than if they’d been in a city (as in the Blues Brothers). It’s amazing to think that adults went to the movie theater to watch this. It’s a movie that aims at 10-year-olds (probably about how old I was when I watched it the first time). I guess it’s the same thing as superhero movies these days. At least there were highbrow movies in the theaters right next to them.

Midnight Mass (2021) — 8/10

Riley Flynn (Zach Gilford) is out of prison after four years. He’d been convicted of drunk-driving and vehicular manslaughter. He returns to his parents’ home on Crockett Island, a village with 127 souls in it. We get to know some island residents as well as some events to set things up.

The island has a new pastor: Father Paul (Hamish Linklater). He’s there to replace Monsignor Pruitt, who was still recovering from having fallen ill on his pilgrimage to Jerusalemn. Father Paul moves into Pruitt’s quarters, shoving a large steamer trunk. Something rustles inside it.

Erin (Kate Siegel) is a former schoolmate of Riley’s. She’s also back on the island after having spent some time off-island. She’s returned with a baby in her belly. She picks up her friendship with Riley, but he’s distant, at least at first.

Bev Keane (Samantha Sloyan) is a nightmare of a repressed little control freak. She’s zealously religious and predictably judgmental of everyone on the island—all while gathering money and glory for herself. The islanders are basically terrified of her. This lady just rolls on and on and on, quoting the Bible and just talking so much because she’s terrified that someone might say something that she doesn’t approve of. She cites the Bible for everything, it’s quite brilliantly written.

Some kids sneak off to a nearby part of the island where they can hang out and smoke pot. That part of the island is mostly abandoned and inhabited only by feral cats. Cats and … something else. Later that night, it storms something fierce. The entire island had prepared for it and hunkered down. Riley looks out at the beach, lashed with rain. He thinks he sees Monsignor Pruitt in a lightning flash. He braves the storm to descend to the beach. A thin figure in the Monsignor’s duster and fedora hurries up the beach, away from him.

The next morning, there are a bunch of dead cats all over the beach. They’d washed up from the abandoned part of the island. Their necks are broken. They have bites taken out of them. It’s hard to say what happened, so people just ignore it. They clean up the bodies, making up stories about how it might have happened.

Sheriff Hassan (Rahul Kohli) is relatively new to the island. He’s investigating the poisoning of Pike, the dog that belonged to Joe Collie (Robert Longstreet). Bev totally poisoned the dog because she’s an evil person. Years ago, Joe had shot Leeza (Annarah Cymone) and paralyzed her from the waist down. Leeza is very religious and kind of one-dimensional. I’m skipping over details here, but it doesn’t really matter. Bev’s a dick and a dog-killer is what I’m trying to say here.

Riley starts AA on the island with Father Paul. It’s a one-on-one session for now. Riley unloads on religion, but he’s working through some stuff. Father Paul is patient. Local drug dealer Bill/Bowl (John C. McDonald) is lured into an abandoned building, then attacked by something savage and vaguely humanoid.

At church that Sunday, Father Paul exhorts Leeza to take the sacrament on her own two feet. The flock is shocked. But she rises and does so. Miracolo. The island experiences a complete religious revival. People are suspiciously feeling better, looking better…looking younger.

Father Paul up and dies, coughing blood but is resurrected minutes later. Later, in a confession booth, he recalls how he’d gotten there. He is Monsignor Pruitt. His dementia had led him into the desert near Jerusalem. A sandstorm had overwhelmed him. He’d sought shelter in a cave that presented itself. As he’d stumbled deeper, two feral eyes greeted him. A winged, humanoid thing confronted him and fell on his neck. He awakened young again. The creature was watching him. Father Paul concluded that his restored youth was a gift from God, visited upon him through this angel. He’d convinced himself with various verses from the Bible that say that angels are scary, which tracks with the angular-looking obvious f&@king vampire before him.

The transformations continue. Erin’s baby completely disappears, as if she’d never been pregnant. Dr. Sarah Gunning (Annabeth Gish) is absolutely mystified. She’s further perplexed by Erin’s blood sample exploding spontaneously when sunlight hits it. Father Paul can also no longer abide sunlight. Bev knows all and literally doesn’t care for one second. She’s fully on board with this miracle express and is super-OK with breaking a few eggs to make an omelette. Time for judgment day. Bring. It. On.

Sarah’s mother Mildred (Alex Essoe) has very bad dementia, but she, too, is getting younger and … better. How is this possible? Easy! Father Paul has been “enriching” the eucharist with the vampire’s blood. So, people are benefitting from its immortal powers, but they also start suffering from the associated maladies. Paul is overwhelmed by a thirst for blood. Joe is in the wrong place at the wrong time. Paul feeds. Bev discovers him and doesn’t blink an eye. She and Sturge (Matt Biedel)—along with mayor Wade Scarborough (Michael Trucco) and his wife Dolly (Crystal Balint)—cover everything up, convincing themselves that they are part of the second coming of Christ. YOLO.

Riley suspects something is up and returns late to the church to see father Paul and the Angel in the rec hall. The Angel leaps on Riley and takes him as a victim. Riley is gone for a day or so, and Erin reports him missing. That night, he returns and finds her. He asks her to go out on a boat with him. They row far from shore. He tells her his story, how he awoke after the attack, what Father Paul told him. The Angel. He tells here that he can see her pulse in her neck. The sun is coming up. He tells her to row, row for the shore. “Run away.” He explodes into flames. She screams in terror. She returns to the island, determined to save whomever she can.

Sarah goes to the sheriff with her evidence, asking the Sheriff to intervene, but he can’t, not with so little evidence. He is powerless before the racism and deep hatred of the town. He’s not been there long enough. He provides some interesting insight through his backstory. Erin, Mildred, and Sarah try to flee the island, but realize that the ferries aren’t running. Sturge cuts off the power and then disables the cell tower. Father Paul reveals himself as Monsignor Pruitt. He tells his flock that they’ve already drunk angel’s blood. Kudos for showing the “angel” early on and still managing to imbue it with menace, despite it being in full view, in daylight. That stride into the church in priest’s regalia was chilling.

Several people drink the blood and die, only to be immediately resurrected. They attack the others who didn’t drink. It’s a bloodbath. The angel rips into Mildred, who’d shot father Paul in the forehead. Don’t worry; he’s immortal. Bev and Sturge unleash the resurrected flock on the townsfolk who’d not gone to church. The shitshow continues, with only a few people resisting. Riley’s parents, for example, have been turned, but they resist their bloodlust. It’s a nice comment on the urge: it can be resisted. Riley did it, too. Those who can’t resist it are morally deficient, is what the show seems to be saying.

Later that evening, Mildred, now also resurrected, returns to the church and finds father Paul. They were lovers long ago and Sarah is their daughter. He’d actually brought the destructive power of the angel to the island to save her from dementia. He’s having a few regrets, I think. Erin, Sarah, Leeza, and Riley’s younger brother Warren (Igby Rigney) set about setting fire to the remaining boats—to prevent anyone from leaving the island. They return to the church and rec center to burn those too—the resurrected won’t have any shelter when the sun comes.

The angel attacks Erin, pinning her to the ground as it feeds. After a while, she regains her senses, pulling a knife, and dragging it through its wings. It continues to feed. When it notices what she’s doing—in a seemingly drugged state—she pulls its head back to her neck and continues destroying its wings languorously. It finishes feeding, but it’s too late. Its wings are in tatters and itsability to fly is severely impaired.

Everyone dies. They’re either shot or immolated in the sun. Leeza and Warren are the only ones to have escaped off of the island. They watch the angel lurch its way through the sky, off the island. There is no way it reaches shore. Leeza’s legs are, once again, numb.

It was pretty good. I respect the actress who played Bev. She’s got major chops, but she got a little too much screen time. Her hateful speeches became a bit repetitive. Also, the show dragged on a bit too long, and it lingered on Leeza’s survival way too much. I didn’t really care about Leeza. I’d hoped that maybe Sarah or Erin would survive, but alas.

They Cloned Tyrone (2023) — 7/10

This movie is a little bit of Westworld, a little bit of Foxy Brown. Fontaine (John Boyega) is a small-time hood in the Glen. He has an oddly strict schedule, an oddness that would soon be explained. He collects money from those who owe him. One of those people is Slick Charles (Jamie Foxx), who pimps Yo-Yo (Teyonah Parris). He goes to collect at the motel where they live, but Charles asks him to come back tomorrow. Fontaine is trapped in his car and gunned down by Isaac (J. Alphonse Nicholson). Slick Charles and Yo-Yo see it happen.

The next day, Fontaine is back to collect his money again. This confuses the hell out of all of them. They set about getting answers. They go into a house that seems to be guarded by a black van that Fontaine vaguely remembers having seen the previous evening. They go in and find an elevator going down, down, down to a secret lab. They find a scientist, who’s just starting to tell them what’s going on when Slick Charles shoots him by accident. Fontaine pulls back a sheet on an operating table to reveal an exact replica of himself.

The next morning, the same house is empty. The three go to a chicken restaurant—they’re hungry!—where they discover that the chicken has been laced with some compound that keeps everyone docile and giddy. Yo-Yo seduces the restaurant manager, who looks just like the scientist they’d killed the evening before. He blabs that the whole Glen is under surveillance and that they’re distributing substances in everything: fried chicken, hair-straightening products, grape drink, etc. Like, only a black director and cast could have made this movie, right?

Next stop is a Black church where they find another elevator in the altar. This time, they’re in a much larger complex, where they see Black people being experimented on in all sorts of innovative, but uniquely “black” ways. They find clones of lots of Glen residents, are starting to put pieces together, but are forced to flee through a strip club, where the DJ is alerted to use special music to control the crowd into chasing them. They flee in their car, but Fontaine’s car is a real beater and it breaks down before they get anywhere. The crowd surrounds the car, but then parts when Nixon (Kiefer Sutherland) and his clone bodyguard Chester (also John Boyega) show up to explain that the whole Glen is an experiment in pacification to avoid a race war. Okaaaaay???

More stuff happens and Yo-Yo is kidnapped and thrown into a cell for experiments. Fontaine and Slick Charles hatch a plan to get her back—and take down the operation while they’re at it. They manage to get most of the gangs in the Glen down there, wreaking havoc and tearing things up. Nixon is not pleased, but he’s not even the one really in charge. The original Fontaine (also John Boyega) has been doing these experiments for forever, trying to figure out how to turn black people into white people. OMG what? I’m hanging on by a fingernail here.

Yo-Yo and Slick Charles manage to take care of Nixon. Fontaine tricks Chester—his clone—into killing his older self. They free the clones together, leaving them to wander naked into the streets, showing up on local news—and then national news. The trio decide to stick together and head to Memphis, where they know there’s another big facility they could expose. In LA, a young man named Tyrone (also John Boyega) watches what looks like a clone of himself wander around naked on the evening news.

This movie wasn’t nearly good enough for them to be leaving the door open to a sequel. I liked the actors, but the plot was a bit of a wild mix of everything, with about as much justification for motivation as Smokey and the Bandit II provided.

Bon Tschuur Ticino (2023) — 8/10

Walter Egli (Beat Schlatter) is a Swiss policeman, comfortable in his small-time role in the Swiss government. There is an initiative to make Switzerland have a single official language, with the additional choice of deciding which language should be chosen. To Walter’s delight, the initiative passes; to his horror, French is selected as the official language. Hilarity ensues as the formally German-speaking part of Switzerland prepares to switch over to French, replacing street signs with French versions and enrolling all functionaries—including cops like Walter—in French-language lessons.

An unnamed guy at the post office (Andreas Matti, the guy who’d played Peter, Wilder’s father) was paid to divert a bunch of votes from the German-speaking part of Switzerland to ensure that French won. He was paid by a French-speaking politician Jeannot Bachmann (Beat Schlatter, playing both roles)—although he actually speaks German and Italian perfectly—for what, in the end, are completely unknown reasons. I’m still not sure why they wanted French to win.

Walter is really terrible at French—his teacher tells him he’s in the 20% of people who are too old to learn a new language—and his boss Keller (Pascal Ulli) is having a tough time of keeping him from getting fired. In the end, he sends him and his new French-speaking partner Jonas Bornard (Vincent Kucholl) to uncover a resistance movement in Ticino, specifically in Locarno, led by Enzo Castani (Leonardo Nigro) and Francesca Gamboni (Catherine Pagani).

At the same time, Walter’s mother Rosemarie (Silvia Jost) is starting a resistance movement of her own, blowing up the Jet d’Eau and United Nations entryway in Geneva. Jonas is, at first, much better at infiltration—he bethinks himself a master of disguise—but it’s Walter who stumbles his way into an invitation to resistance headquarters after meeting Francesca. They hit it off quite well and he learns more of their plans. He does so well that Jonas is forced to start speaking German with him so that he can learn more. Up until that point, Jonas had spoken only French.

Castani’s grand plan is to cut off all access to the north and west and declare Ticinia an independent country. Francesca and Walter are chosen to blow up the (old) train tunnel through the Gotthard. Jonas catches up to them, just as Walter is torn between being a cop and a double-agent. He wants to help them fight the single-language Switzerland because he can’t live and work in a country with a language he doesn’t understand.

They blow up the tunnel and flee, with Jonas half-chasing them on an injured leg. The rest of the Ticinese resistance meet them and snap them up, confining Jonas and Walter in a cell. On Jonas’s shoe-phone, they discover the plot to suppress the Swiss-German vote and beg the Ticinese to let them go to Bern to catch the ringleader and force him to reveal his plot. This would derail the impending civil war.

Castani—with a parrot on his shoulder, à la Castro—doesn’t want to let them go, but Francesca takes matters into her own hands, driving the three of them up the Tremola in a three-wheeled, 40kph Piaggio “truck”. At the top, they fool the Swiss soldiers and slip past them, stealing a jeep to head for Bern. From the top of the Gotthard, it’s quite a way, to be honest.

They pretend to be sheep, with sheepskins. When they try to take the jeep, there is a soldier sleeping in the back. He’s about to demand what they’re doing, but she cut him off, demanding in French to know where his sheepskin is? She offers him hers, then they take the jeep. The confused soldier remains in the road, pulling the sheepskin over his shoulders. This is 100% what would happen with the Swiss Army.

In Bern, they sneak in as catering staff, then kidnap Jeannot Bachmann, trying to force him to give himself up. He laughs at them, but then they notice how similar he looks to Walter (it’s the same actor, which is doubly funny). They send Walter out to give a confessional speech in French—with Jonas whispering in his ear via a spy device—because Walter is super-bad at speaking French. The device’s battery dies—that’s probably the only spoken English in the film—but he perseveres and manages to get the point across that the initiative and coming civil war are built on treachery and lies.

They are arrested, but let go for having saved Switzerland from a civil war. Castani is shattered, while his entire council happily goes home. Walter moves to Locarno to work in Francesca’s restaurant.

It was a 7/10 comedy, but it gets an extra star just for being unabashedly cute and feeling like it was made specifically for me. We watched it in Swiss German, Italian, French, and German, with German subtitles for the French and Italian parts.

Nope (2022) — 7/10

Otis Haywood Sr. (Keith David) owns the Haywood Ranch, where he raises and trains horses for show business. He’s about to get a big break when he’s killed by a freak accident: a nickel falls out of the sky, straight into his eye. His horse Ghost is struck by a house key. Otis Haywood Jr. (Daniel Kaluuya) is forced to take over the business. To say he doesn’t have his father’s flair or acumen for business is an understatement.

He’s dedicated to his father’s dream—having made it his own—but he’s really just in it for the horses and doesn’t like show-business people, who he rightly considers to be extremely superficial, self-absorbed, and boorish. This makes them terrible people to keep his horses’ company, but he’s forced to go where the money is. His first outing doesn’t go great. He is not a showman. His sister Emerald “Em” (Keke Palmer) is, but she’s also rather flighty and quite dumb. She’s also really pretty, even though she dresses sloppy. Still and all, the day on the set goes poorly when Lucky the horse kicks out when someone holds up a mirror to his face. The fool on the set was getting a light reading, despite OJ’s warnings.

OJ is eventually forced to sell horses to a nearby theme-park ranch called Jupiter Ranch, run by Ricky “Jupe” Park (Stephen Yeun). Ricky’s backstory is that he’s a former child actor who was on a show with a chimpanzee named Gordy who went absolutely and literally apeshit on set, nearly killing the actress who’d played his sister. It’s not really clear what this all has to do with anything, other than animals can be beasts and they do their own thing and we treat them like furniture in our arrogance and it occasionally backfires—but not often enough to make us stop being assholes, if I’m interpreting director and writer Jordan Peele’s implicit message at-all correctly.

Back at Haywood Ranch, OJ and Emerald notice mysterious power outages and spooked horses. They see something in the sky. It’s a UFO. They head off to a local electronics store, where they buy some surveillance equipment from Angel Torres (Brandon Perea), who accompanies them back to the ranch to help set everything up. When OJ asks him to tilt one camera way up in the sky, Angel is so down with that because he’s an absolute freak for aliens.

They experiment with the UFO, but soon discover that it’s not a ship: it’s a creature, a predator that sucks up people, horses, shiny items. When it eats something that disagrees with it, it regurgitates it. Things like the nickel that killed Otis Sr. It’s capable of sitting still in the sky for days at a time, shrouded in a cloud that it creates for itself, as camouflage. It turns out that Jupe already knew what it was and had been offering up the horses he was buying from OJ as sacrifices, to build a rapport with the creature. This backfires spectacularly, as Jupe’s attempt to offer Lucky as a sacrifice ends up killing everyone at the show except for lucky. Hence the name, I guess.

They recruit Antlers Holst (Michael Wincott), the director of the show from which they’d been fired, who lends his gravelly voice and mysterious demeanor to the whole affair, bringing a hand-turned IMAX film camera that will keep working when the power goes out. He works with Angel to set up surveillance and they get some footage…but Antlers goes off the leash, running up a local hill to get even closer footage of the beast. He lures it in…and it predictably eats him right up. He gets some pretty good footage, though, which no-one will ever see.

Angel is almost caught but ends up getting the creature to swallow a bunch of barbed wire—purely by accident—which makes it explode into a different shape, broader, more like a jellyfish than a jellybean. Em and OJ use Lucky and a motorcycle to lure the creature to a giant balloon that’s been rigged to blow, but not before they snap a picture of it using an old analog camera buried in a well (where tourists would snap themselves looking down into it).

Em has the picture as proof and OJ is back on Lucky, safe and sound. The creature has been blown to pieces. The end.

Pete Davidson: Turbo Fonzarelli (2024) — 8/10

The quotes below are taken from the beautifully formatted Pete Davidson: Turbo Fonzarelli transcript (Scraps from the loft).

I like Pete’s delivery. He seems much more humble than Chappelle, so it makes me more forgiving of a rambling style that doesn’t really go anywhere. His super-long stories are funny, replete with mini-zingers. Davidson starts with a bit about drugs, then segues into a rant about Apple’s phones and how that company is like the mafia. Then it’s on to his mom, who still isn’t dating even though his father died 23 years ago. Somehow he gets away with the following joke,

“I’ll go over to my mom’s. I’ll hang out, eat dinner for an hour, and she’s like, “Where you going?” I’m like, “Home. What do you mean?” Unless we’re about to fuck in the shower, I don’t… My duties as a son are done. [audience laughs] It’s to the point where I might fuck her just to get her off my back.”

He stays on this topic for a while, about how he would shop his mom around on dating sites, if she were willing. Then, somehow, he moves on to Leonardo diCaprio and how he thought he was gay when he was younger because he really, really liked him. From there, he’s on to the Make-A-Wish Foundation and how he’s “had offers”. From there, he’s on a wonderful, long story about his stalker. He really tells this story well, about how he kind of encourages her, about how he’s sad when she’s gone. He talks about how his mom met her—she’d actually invited her in to the house to watch shows with herself and her 79-year-old friend Terry.

He takes the stalker to court for a restraining order, but he’s of two minds (or pretending to be … whatever, it’s hilarious.

“So I was a little excited to see her, a little bit, you know. I didn’t try to look hot or anything, but I picked an outfit. You know, yeah. Hell yeah! You know? An outfit that said, like, “Hey.” “Don’t give up.” You know? [audience laughs] “Some things are worth fighting for.” Restraining order, shmestraining shorder. I go, “What happened, Tasty?” “What happened to my girl?” He goes, “Bro, she was deemed unfit to stand trial.” Deemed unfit to stand up at a trial. That means a bunch of medical professionals and officers of the law saw her and were like, “No.” I immediately felt insulted. It’s a little fucked up and embarrassing for me, don’t you think? “Deemed unfit”? I don’t think you understand how insane that is. Let me put it in perspective for you. Jeffrey Dahmer was deemed fit… [audience laughs] …to stand trial. A guy who murdered and ate gay people. One chick is into me, off to the nuthouse!”

Finally, he talks about house-shopping, as a guy who’d grown up in apartments on Staten Island. He moves on to talking about how his mom made a fake Twitter account to defend him online: “JoeSmith1355”.

“[…] my mom made a Twitter account with her 79-year-old female friend Terry, and Terry was calling the shots.”

My Octopus Teacher (2020) — 9/10

This documentary starts quite slowly and seems inordinately focused on the narrator Craig Foster for what feels like the first 1/3 of the film. But it is absolutely charming and the narrator got me on his side by the middle of the film. This is a movie about a man who begins diving in a South African kelp forest every day for about a year. He was already a documentarian, but he was a bit down on his luck, a bit burned out. He used the routine of his schedule and the serenity of the ocean to heal. Or that’s what he says. Wikipedia says he spent three years making this movie. It’s fine, though. Take liberties with your art, I say!

He would eventually involve his son (somebody had to hold the camera for him). But the style of the documentary depicts him diving alone. He didn’t wear a wetsuit, despite the at-times 10ºC water. He learned how to hold his breath for a long time. He didn’t use a scuba tank because it would have been a hindrance in the kelp forest.

He meets an octopus. She’s not very big. He follows her every day, learning about how she hunts, how she spends her day. They have adventures together. She grows to trust him. He can pick her up. She rides his arm and hand when he rises to breathe. She wraps herself around his chest, almost like a hug.

We learn a tremendous amount about octopuses, eventually. They are solitary. She has taken up residence in a pretty dangerous area, but she is so clever. She learns how to hunt in the shallows. She must evade the ubiquitous and deadly pajama sharks. Once, she doesn’t. It grabs one of her tentacles and tears it off. She manages to escape and return to her lair, but she is gravely injured. Craig visits her every day, deigning to interfere enough to help her get food. He’s mostly hands-off, but he can’t help himself. She doesn’t seem much capable of eating, though. Her color is white as she has no energy to change colors anymore. She recovers, though, with the stump initially sealing off—and then growing a stub that grows to a full-fledged replacement arm over three months. They continue their life together.

When she is attacked again, she is much cleverer: she flees to the shallows—and then right out onto the beach, clambering over shells to return to the water in a different place. When the shark still has her scent, she shoots over to a pile of shells that she uses her 2,000 suckers to pull over herself like a carapace. She looks like a soccer ball. The shark chomps down on her, but is unable to penetrate the ad-hoc shell. She slides to the side and then hops on its back, slithering her tendril-like arms out of the shells to attach to its back. The shark has no idea what’s going on. It’s been “completely outwitted.” She drops off, drops her temporary armor in a cloud of dust and shells, and retreats to the safety of her den. One can’t help but imagine a self-satisfied look on the creature’s face.

Foster watches the octopus play with fish in the shallows. He notices that its play behavior distinct from hunting behavior, that the octopus “seems to be having fun”. Foster has his last close interaction with the octopus, as it cuddles up to him for quite some time. Soon after, he returns to their shared grounds in the kelp forest—and sees another octopus there. A larger, male octopus. These solitary creatures come into close contact for only one reason.

She produces numerous eggs, then slowly expires as she nurtures them until they hatch. She no longer hunts, no longer feeds. Her final purpose will be to produce a brood of octopuses to carry on after her. Lethargic and nearly dead, she floats out of her den. Fish begin to feed on her while she’s still moving a bit. A shark shows up to end things abruptly, carrying her body off into the deep and dark ocean.

The cinematography by Roger Horrocks was absolutely incredible. The colors, the detail, the incredible number of situations that they were able to capture—just impressive. It’s worth it just for the visuals, but the gentle story of precious life and nature is the lesson you’ll hopefully take away. It is in the small, in the supposedly insignificant, that we truly find meaning.

This philosophy flies in the face of nearly everything else our culture tries to teach us. Our culture is geared toward growth and consumption. Bigger, better, faster, more. Don’t slow down to enjoy what you have because you’re missing out on what you don’t.

We should pay attention to these examples, of which there are many, many more. Not just in our culture, but in those we consider backwards, in those places that we disparagingly call The Third World and only grudgingly now call The Developing World. Or we consider other cultures alien and antagonistic (e.g., China).

We consider ourselves to be “developed” but we will watch movies like this for 90 minutes and then go right back to the consumerist, neoliberal grind and hustle, getting as much as we can for ourselves, unaware and unconcerned how much our lifestyles impact billions of other creatures like this amazing little octopus 🐙 .

A Futile and Stupid Gesture (2018) — 8/10

Douglas Kenney (Will Forte) and Henry Beard (Domhnall Gleeson) took the Harvard Lampoon to new heights during their time there. They published Bored of the Rings, a book that consisted nearly entirely of Tolkien puns. In their final year, Henry has gotten into two prestigious graduate schools. Doug hasn’t even applied anywhere yet. He comes up with the awesome idea of taking the Lampoon national. He and Henry should just keep publishing funny shit, but in a national magazine, is what he’s saying. C’mon Henry, don’t be so stuffy. Henry is tempted.

They shop the idea around, with disastrous results, until they end up in Matty Simmons’s (Matt Walsh) office. He publishes Weight Watchers, among others. He takes a chance on them. They fill out the staff with eccentrics and comedians from the bowels of New York, like Anne Beatts (Natasha Lyonne), Michael Gross (Krister Johnson), Tom Snyder (Ed Helms), Gilda Radner (Jackie Tohn), Bill Murray (Jon Daly), and Christopher Guest (Seth Green). Martin Mull plays the narrator—an older version of Doug.

The movie sets up some of the most famous covers and spoofs, like the “If you don’t buy this magazine, we’ll shoot this dog.”[1] They get sued by everybody: Mormons, the Catholic church, Disney, Volkswagen, … the list goes on. They started a radio show. They were flying high. Incredible parties. Lots of booze and drugs. Henry is sober and keeps the ship aright and afloat. Doug is a comic mastermind, but he’s pretty out of control. His wife leaves him when his infidelities become too obvious.

At one point, he goes on a long sabbatical, returning nine months later as if nothing had happened. They miss the boat on a TV show, watching a lot of their writers starting on SNL when Lorne Michaels poaches them all. But the magazine’s success is more than enough for them to look into making movies, introducing John Belushi (John Gemberling), Harold Ramis (Rick Glassman), Chevy Chase (Joel McHale), Ivan Reitman (Lonny Ross), John Landis (Brian Huskey), Rodney Dangerfield (Erv Dahl), and Paul Shaffer (Paul Scheer). Most of these people are well-known actors and comedians of today playing famous people from the late 70s.

Henry and Doug get their promised buyout from Matty: a cool $3.5M a piece. Henry immediately retires. He returns briefly when Doug is deep into booze and drugs, to try to offer him emotional support, telling him that he’s always there for him. They part on shaky terms, but Henry is worried.

Doug writes Animal House. We visit the set and watch producer Brad (Joe Lo Truglio) fight with Doug all the way, then claim that he knew all along it would be a success when Animal House becomes the highest-earning comedy of all time. Doug is terrified of a follow-up. He writes Caddyshack, which wasn’t immediately successful like Animal House, but would eventually become a cult classic. I liked Caddyshack much better. I loved Chevy Chase in it. Bill Murray was great as well, but I thought it was a Chevy Chase vehicle.

In 1980, after a cocaine-fueled week with Chevy Chase—they started off with six days of drying out, but failed to stick the landing—Doug Kenney throws himself off of a cliff at the age of 33. Martin Mull’s narration as the older Kenney was a subterfuge—there would never be an older Kenney. The film ends at Kenney’s funeral, to which everyone has shown up, including Henry. Henry had gotten a call that we were led to believe was Doug finally calling his old friend for help. Instead, it was to tell Henry that Doug was dead. Henry starts a food fight at the funeral, ending the film as it had started at Harvard so long ago.

I gave it an extra star because, man, I lived and breathed this stuff growing up. I watched the movies again and again. I read the Lampoon whenever I could. I read Bored of the Rings. This shit was formative for me. I watched SCTV; I watched SNL; I listened to Monty Python. I had a lot more Mad magazines than Lampoons, but it was all influential to the snarky little asshole I would become.