Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2024.03

These are my notes to remember what I watched and kinda what I thought about it. I’ve recently transferred my reviews to IMDb and made the list of around 1600 ratings publicly available. I’ve included the individual ratings with my notes for each movie. These ratings are not absolutely comparable to each other—I rate the film on how well it suited me for the genre and my mood and. let’s be honest, level of intoxication. YMMV. Also, I make no attempt to avoid spoilers.

1. Star Wars: Episode VIII − Die letzten Jedi (2017) — 9/10
2. Six Days Seven Nights (1998) — 8/10
3. Unknown Cosmic Time Machine (2023) — 8/10
4. Manhunt (Zhui bu) (2017) — 6/10
5. Now You See Me 2 (2016) — 6/10
6. In the Tall Grass (2019) — 8/10
7. The Two Popes (2019) — 10/10
8. Snitch (2013) — 6/10
9. The Night Comes for Us (2018) — 7/10
10. Rodney King (2017) — 10/10

Star Wars: Episode VIII − Die letzten Jedi (2017) — 9/10

I have nothing to add or take away from my review in 2017. I might have even liked Mark Hamill in his final outing as Luke Skywalker more than the first time around. Even knowing what was going to happen, I still really, really liked the final showdown between him and Kylo Ren. “See you around, kid.”

I watched it in German.

Six Days Seven Nights (1998) — 8/10

Robin Monroe (Anne Heche) works at a magazine in New York City. She’s very busy. Her boss Marjorie (Allison Janney) has boundary issues and wouldn’t understand the phrase work/life balance if you tattooed it on her forehead. Her boyfriend Frank Martin (David Schwimmer) surprises her with a one-week trip to Makatea. They fly to the island with Quinn Harris (Harrison Ford) and his current girlfriend Angelica (Jacqueline Obradors). Five hours later, Quinn has completely forgotten about how he’d flown Robin out that morning and is hitting on her at a tiki bar. Frank proposes to her that night.

The next morning, Marjorie calls her for an emergency photo-shoot. She’s got to engage Quinn’s services for the flight. It’s getting windy. They’re in the air, though, and on their way to the other island. As the storm comes up for real, Quinn decides to turn back, but the weather turns much worse and they crash-land on an island. The next morning, they discuss their fate—which is that they’re stuck on the island.

While they’re gone, Frank spent the evening ogling Angelica’s island dancing. The next morning, they learn that Quinn and Robin have gone down and they engage a search-and-rescue team together.

Back on the island, Quinn and Robin have climbed to the highest point on the island to find a beacon…that isn’t there. They’re not on the island that they thought they were on. They spot a boat, though. They hurry back down the mountain, taking the rest of the day to get back to camp. They pump up their raft and spend the night rowing around the island to where they’d seen the boat. As they get closer, they see that there are two boats—one of them is a pirate boat.

They flee back out of the water and up into the hills. They fight with the pirates, then convince them that they have jewels, get away again, and are forced to jump off of a cliff into the ocean. They get back out of the water, then kiss for the first time. They flee up the island, still worried the pirates will find them. They can’t go back to camp because the plane is too obvious a sign.

Frank and Anjelica have spent the day drinking together. Frank sees Anjelica home. She strips and convinces him to stay.

Quinn and Robin make camp under a WWII plane, eating breadfruit. He gets an idea: take the pontoons off of the WWII plane to change his plane to a seaplane. They get the pontoons back to camp and spend some time chopping trees and branches and fronds to attach them. They’ve just about gotten everything set when the pirates show up on the horizon again. The pirates have a cannon—of course they do!—and start homing in on them. The last shot gets close and Quinn takes shrapnel. They get in the plane and manage to take off, with the pirates shooting straight up at them, and then blowing themselves up when the shot returns to Earth on a very tight parabola.

They’re in the air, but Quinn is fading. He teaches her how to fly enough for her to be able to land the plane. They make it back, with her landing the plane.

Robin and Frank confess their transgressions and agree not to get married. Quinn hurries to the airport. He thinks he’s missed Robin, but he’d watched the wrong plane take off. She’s just getting off the plane. He meets her. “My life is too simple. I want to complicate the hell out of it.”

Unknown Cosmic Time Machine (2023) — 8/10

Look, it’s a bit of a weird and clickbait-y title and IMDb lists Joe Biden as the main star, even though he appeared in it for about 20 seconds, drooling his way through a couple of throwaway sentences at a press conference that he most likely didn’t understand in anything other than the most superficial manner. Joe Biden had nothing to do with the JWST whatsoever. They happened to finally launch it while he was president. That he’s listed first just shows how much of a cult the goddamned liberal world is. You can bet your boots that there is no way that Amazon-owned IMDb would have listed Donald Trump as the star of this movie had he been president when the JWST launched.

The second person listed is one of the actual stars: Amber Straughn (@Astraughnomer on Twitter; I gotta hand it to her…that’s kind clever) and the main star is actually Thomas Zurbuchen, a Swiss guy who was Head of Science Programs at NASA and was the one who finally got this program done.

The movie lets you know how many single-points-of-failure they had and that they managed to avoid all of them in what ended up being an absolutely flawless launch. I watched it live on Christmas Day 2021. It launched from French Guiana and inserted that satellite so perfectly into its flight path to L2 that its mission is expected to be twice as long as planned.

They got the first images back and everything is lined up and perfect. It’s already making incredible discoveries and collecting absolutely vital data. As the people in the movie say: it’s a bright spot in an otherwise oft-depressing world situation. We came together from all sorts of countries to work together and achieved something wonderful.

I gave this documentary an extra star for being about something totally awesome and for keeping the runtime reasonable (64 minutes).

Manhunt (Zhui bu) (2017) — 6/10

John Woo directed this, and his signature is occasionally apparent. While it has a reasonably interesting story, this is not a great movie. The character-building is kind of non-existent.

Du Qiu (Zhang Hanyu) is an attorney who’s worked for a pharmaceutical company Tenjin for a long time. He’s about to relocate to America. He’s in a restaurant, in the kitchen with two women Rain (Ha Ji-won) and Dawn (Angeles Woo), who he semi-protects from some rough customers who come in demanding food and service and, probably, sex. The customers retreat to the dining room, while Qiu small-talks with them about classic movies. They send him out to get a DVD that he’s been talking about. While he’s gone, they gun down everyone in the dining room. They’re assassins and didn’t really need his chivalry—but they appreciated it enough to be important later.

He’s now at a big company party where he meets two women: Chinese/Japanese Mayumi Mounami / Zhen Tianmei (Qi Wei) and an ethereally thin vamp who dances with him, then sneaks off to his house, where she … breaks in? Or did she get a key from his boss? Anyway, she’s dressed as sexy as she’s capable of doing, given her eating disorder. She waits in bed for him.

He wakes the next morning next to her. She’s dead. He calls the police. They arrive, but so does a housekeeper he’s never seen before. She accuses him of definitely being the murderer. Commanding officer Yuji Asano (Kuniharu Tokunaga) seems hell-bent on setting him up, letting him go so he can gun him down as he runs away. Du Qiu escapes over a railing with some gymnastic skills. Old hand Satoshi Yamura (Masaharu Fukuyama) is put on the case, paired with eager neophyte Rika (Nanami Sakuraba), who’s as much in the way as she is helpful. She’ll get better, though.

Yamamura tracks down Qiu and almost has him a few times, but Qui slips his grasp and ends up in a migrant camp, befriending Sakaguchi (Yasuaki Kurata), who speaks Chinese. The other migrants help him blend in and avoid being swept up in the occasional police raid.

Qui arranges a meeting with his former boss Yoshihiro Sakai (Jun Kunimura), president of Tenjen, to find out what the hell is going on. The boss and his company hire Rain and Dawn to take him out. Despite Dawn’s exhortations, Rain can’t do it. Instead, she shoots the emissary from the company and starts spraying bullets everywhere so that Qui can escape. He does—on a jet-ski. Yamamura is hot on his trail, on his own jet-ski. Lots of splashy-splashy and John Woo-style super-jumps and slo-mo camera angles.

Mayumi shows up to help him escape on a Shinkansen (bullet train). Thanks to his investigation, Yamamura actually wants to help Qiu because he now believes that he’s innocent. He’s convinced the killer was left-handed, which Qiu is not. Mayumi and Qiu escape to her country home, where she tells him how he’s the reason that her husband committed suicide—Qiu was so relentless in pursuing a case against him three years ago that the husband couldn’t take it anymore. Qiu apologizes, saying that the information he worked with came directly from the authorities.

Rain and Dawn crash the party quite literally. Yamamura isn’t far behind, plowing into Dawn a few times, with her popping back up each time. She keeps shooting herself up with some drug that gives her quasi-superhuman endurance and strength, as well as making her nearly invulnerable. Qiu and Mayumi flee in a car, but Yamamura drives them off the road, pairs up with them. then pulls a Defiant Ones and cuffs himself to Qiu.

Rain and Dawn continue the pursuit. Yamamura takes a bullet, but puts down Dawn for good. She overdoses trying to resurrect herself and dies in Rain’s arms. The camera zooms in on her face, showing us that Rain thinks she’s now justified in thinking she deserves revenge. Dude, you’re a contract killer whose job is to frame some people for crimes that you’re covering up for other people. You don’t exactly have the moral high ground.

They take Yamamura to the hospital and let Qiu go. He ends up with Sakaguchi, infiltrating the top-secret experiments of Tenjin, posing as homeless “volunteers”. Once inside, they find out that everyone’s being horribly abused in violent experiments with subsequent generations of the drugs that Rain and Dawn use to pump themselves up. Sakaguchi goes first and comes back, pumped up like a living weapon, helpless to stop himself from killing several of his fellow prisoners before he manages to kill himself in a moment of clarity. Qiu goes next and is deep into painful experiments when Yamamura shows up, demanding to see him.

Sakai cuts him off at the entrance, where Yamamura bribes him with a few letters of the code her needs to unlock the extra-super-good version of the super-soldier formula. Just try to keep up here. As Qiu is released and sicced on Yamamura, Rain makes peace with Mayumi, realizing that Sakai is actually responsible for Dawn’s death. This is done in a much cheesier manner than I’ve described here. Let’s just leave it at that. Qiu breaks the conditioning after a nice fight with Yamamura. He, Rain, Yamamura, and Mayumi blast their way through the lab, covered in blood and all carrying at least one or two bullet wounds, but not seeming to feel them.

Head of the lab and Sakai’s son Hiroshi (Hiroyuki Ikeuchi injects himself with the super-duper soldier-serum and rampages for a bit, kicking everyone’s ass. No-one really gets hurt or damaged enough not to be able to continue fighting. They finally put down Hiroshi—but not before he’s able to confess to the murder for which Yamamura was pursuing Qiu.

They now turn to his dad, who’s somehow still alive. He regrets nothing and kills himself anyway—I guess to avoid jail time?—but not before mortally wounding Rain, who dies in Qiu’s arms, mumbling something about classic movies (callback to the first scene in the film). All that’s left is a goodbye between the now-best-of-buddies Yamamura and Qiu, who share a respectful handshake.

There’s a lot of slo-mo footage of flying cherry blossoms, more than one dove, and Murayami on her wedding day, watching her husband die. It’s John Woo, baby.

That doesn’t sound too terrible, does it? The plot is pretty bog-standard, but it could have worked better if the actors were allowed to just act. I don’t know which genius inspired them to try speaking English half of the time, but it was a bad idea. It felt like they were dubbed half of the time, and the other half they just tried to muddle through. I’ll have to take their word for it that they handled the Chinese or Japanese any better. It was pretty distracting. It was kind of interesting, though, that people spoke to the Chinese guy in English, except for Mayumi, who spoke both. It’s kind of like German and French in the German part of Switzerland. Swiss-Germans feel more comfortable speaking English than French; Swiss-French feel the same about German.

On the other hand, it is kind of endearing how wedded to the style John Woo is. This movie could easily have been made in the 80s. The soundtrack during well-choreographed fight scenes was all horns—trumpets, sax, etc.—so it was quite a throwback. There was even what I thought was going to be the classic freeze-frame-to-credits, but the camera froze on Yamamura for only two seconds before it moved to a short scene of him and Rika walking into the camera and her coyly dropping that “a lot of people are getting married on trains these days.” Fade to credits.

I was torn between six and seven stars because it kind of won me over by the end. The voice-acting was kind of painful and the acting was sometimes laughable, but I’d probably watch it again if it drifted by on TV.

I watched it in the original Chinese, Japanese, and occasional English.

Now You See Me 2 (2016) — 6/10

It’s odd to see so much fan service for a movie that’s only the second in the series, but that’s kind of how it feels. This movie also totally expects you to have remembered what happened in the first movie (which I watched in 2014), as well as who is who in the cast.

So, there’s the Four Horseman, except it’s only three of the original horseman because, apparently, Isla Fisher, either wasn’t invited back or was unable to come back, or whatever. Anyway, in what passes for being open-minded, Fisher’s character Henley is gone and has been replaced by Lula (Lizzy Caplan). She joins Merritt McKinney (Woody Harrelson), Daniel Atlas (Jesse Eisenberg), Jack Wilder (Dave Franco), and super-secret hidden member Dylan Rhodes (Mark Ruffalo), who is also in the FBI. The FBI suspects, but does not know.

They’re all in hiding at the start of the movie. They are kept there by an organization called “The Eye”, practicing for a big “show”. Everyone has a boss, even anarchist-magicians. The Eye is the boss of the Horsemen. They basically crash the reveal of some sort of new phone, called Octa 8—a bit redundant—and start to reveal how the company’s CEO is hell-bent on collecting everyone’s data. In the middle of their interruption, they themselves are interrupted by a mysterious figure who reveals all of their secrets. Turnaround is fair play! Switcheroo! This kind of thing is going to keep happening. It’s kind of this movie’s “thing”.

They barely escape, sliding down an escape tube into a van. Wait, no, they end up in Macau. Magic! Switcheroo! There are a lot of reveals in this movie. These were just the first of many, so buckle up.

Dylan is at the pick-up point, but the Horsemen are not there. Instead, he gets a call from his arch-nemesis Thaddeus Bradley (Morgan Freeman), who says that the wheels of his own plan are in motion. [Reveal!] Dylan goes to the prison to confront him, but does a bad job of confronting him in that he ends up springing him. They travel to Macau together because Thaddeus’s people heard from little birdies that the Horsemen are there.

Back in Macau, where it turns out that Merritt has a twin brother Chase [Reveal!]—obviously also played by Woody Harrelson—who reveals a bit more about their shared life growing up in a pretty over-the-top campy way. He leaves them at The Sands casino in Macau where they are to meet his boss in a sumptuous suite. Another big [Reveal!] introduces us to Walter Mabry (Daniel Radcliffe).

He tells a long story about his partnership with the CEO of the company that makes the Octa 8. That guy betrayed him, so Walter faked his own death, then bought out the company through a bunch of anonymous investors…look, it doesn’t matter, right? Most of this is bullshit because everybody’s lying and there are layers of subterfuge, so there’s no point in even trying to figure out which of these head-fakes are head-fakes and which moves are real attempts to get closer to yet-unrevealed goals.

The Horsemen (well, horsepeople) make a plan to steal a computer chip-like thing that everybody calls “the stick”. They pretend to be buyers of it and finagle their way into the vault, where Jack swipes the chip/card and they do a little ballet of throwing the thing around and doing sleight-of-hand to prevent guards frisking them from finding it.

Meanwhile, Dylan and Thaddeus go to the world’s oldest magic store—where the Horsemen had just outfitted themselves—to follow the trail. Thaddeus [Reveals!] that he speaks Mandarin when he responds to the shop owner. Afterwards, he goes fishing for a compliment from Dylan, who responds in Mandarin, “If your Mandarin were any good, I would have let you know.” [Reveal!] They track the Horsemen to a local market, where Danny, Dylan, and Walter tussle. Well, Walter’s henchmen tussle with Dylan, who’d pretended to get rid of Danny for Walter, but had really deftly slipped him the real “stick” before locking him outside. Dylan eventually gets caught by Chase and Walter and their henchmen. The Horsemen are mystified as to how they still have the “stick”.

Walter has his goons beat up Dylan, vamping and preening and generally chewing the scenery in a truly awful way. I can’t tell if Radcliffe is serious about this performance or if he’s taking the piss, but it’s god-awful. But that’s not all! Walter introduces his father Arthur Tressler (Michael Caine), who is also god-awful. In the scene on the boat, otherwise great actors are all trapped together by an awful script with laughable dialogue in a sort of Mexican standoff. Father and son pack Dylan into the safe his father died in and throw him into the water, toasting champagne and chortling. I am not kidding about any of this. If you’re wondering, Ruffalo is no better, just phoning it in.

Dylan escapes, thinking of what his father told him and just by believing in himself. The rest of the Horsemen show up in the nick of time to save him from drowning and they have a real gladfest about how awesome it is that they’re all together again. They have the stick, but it’s fake—or is it?—and have no time to plan, but then they plan something super-elaborate anyway because they are impossibly amazing and flawless. Oh, and the lady and son from the oldest magic store in the world show introduce themselves as “The Eye” and that they’re fully on board and no longer hiding in the shadows, so that’s resolved too! [Reveal!]

Each of the horsemen puts on their own magic show somewhere in London, with the locations pointing somewhere in the Thames, by the bridge. They pretend to barely get away, then jump on motorcycles, then fail to escape, then get captured by Walter and Arthur and Chase, who’s a maniac. They all herd onto a business jet, which feels odd, then Walter gets the stick, reveals that it’s actually the real one, then orders them all thrown out of the plane. Chase obliges.

TADA! The Horsemen float back into view by the windows, inviting Tressler and son outside. They are on a floating barge in the middle of the Thames, just before midnight on New Year’s Eve. [Reveal!] The horsemen grandstand around, explaining their trick, then turn the whole lot of them over to the authorities. The FBI closes in with boats, but the Horsemen are gone, except for Dylan, who his counterpart at the FBI catches, but he bribes her with a USB stick of data on Walter, then disappears.

They rendezvous at some mansion that the Eye owns, all driving there in a car together like a bunch of poors. Thaddeus shows up, [revealing!] himself and Dylan’s dad as having been the best of friends, with their rivalry having just been a diversion. Dylan swallows it hook, line, and sinker. Thaddeus leaves, telling them to check out what’s behind the curtain. OMG it’s just the entire nerve center of the Eye that was used to track the Horsemen and to build them up until they’re worthy of running the Eye themselves. [Reveal!]

The end. Jesus, this was a pretty thinly written bit of fan-fiction, honestly. There was little to no tension. All of the tricks are so bombastic and huge that you can’t even be impressed by them because there’s another one coming two seconds later. I did like how Jack Wilder covered himself in a hail of playing cards, then disappeared.

As with Manhunt, I was torn between six and seven, finally granting it the same score as that other film that was sometimes lower in quality, but seemed to believe in itself more.

In the Tall Grass (2019) — 8/10

Becky (Laysla De Oliveira) and her brother Cal (Avery Whitted) are driving across the country. They’re about 1500 miles into their journey—so, about halfway to San Diego. She’s pregnant and feeling nauseated. They pull over so she can throw up.

They hear a little boy calling from the field of tall grass. It’s, like, really tall grass, well over the height of a person. Torn, they decide to see if they can rescue him. Cal parks by a church and they plunge into the grass, quickly losing sight of one another. The boy Tobin (Will Buie Jr.) seems to fade further away. Cal and Becky also drift away from each other. For a minute, they can still see each other, but then lose each other again. The tall grass is bedeviling.

Becky runs into Ross (Patrick Wilson), who is Tobin’s father. He says he’ll lead her to Cal and get them out of there. Meanwhile, Cal runs into a careworn Tobin, who tells him that “Becky will die soon”. Unnerved, but desperate, Cal follows Tobin deeper into the field, to “the rock”. The rock looks like an alien egg, onyx and striated. Tobin touches the rock, thrilled by it. He invites Cal to do the same.

Becky is attacked by something vaguely humanoid. Tobin and Cal can only listen to her screams. Tobin predicted this.

The moon is out. The rock gleams, ancient symbols carved into it thrown into stark relief. It throbs. It hums. It tempts.

Travis (Harrison Gilbertson)—Becky’s baby-daddy—drives along the road. He spots what he thinks might be their dirty car in the parking lot. He wipes off the license plate to confirm his suspicion. He can’t fathom it, though. They’ve been missing for months.

Travis approaches the grass, draw by the sound of Becky and Cal. He plunges into the grass, quickly losing himself as well. He runs into Tobin, who claims to somehow know him. Tobin leads him to Becky’s corpse.

We see Tobin’s mother Natalie (Rachel Wilson) and Tobin by the side of the road, with Ross on the phone. Tobin and his dog Freddy hear Travis calling Tobin’s name from the tall grass. Natalie and Ross follow behind, quickly separating from each other and never finding Tobin.

♾️ A time loop ♾️

1. Cal and Becky heard Tobin and went in to find him.
2. Two months later, Travis heard Cal and Becky and went in to find them.
3. Sometime before Cal and Becky went in, but somehow after Travis, but also before him because Travis already knew him—Tobin heard Travis calling him … and went in to find him.
4. Go to 1.

Travis meets up with Cal and Becky, revealing how long they’ve been missing. They manage to locate Tobin as well. Ross is watching them from the tall grass. Travis pops Tobin on his shoulders to look out over the grass. Tobin sees the church. They head in that direction, walking, walking, and walking, but not there yet.

When Becky drops with a pain in her uterus, Ross appears from out of nowhere to give her CPR and “save” her. Tobin pops back up on Travis’s shoulders—but the church is gone. Ross leads them all deeper into the grass, claiming to know the way out. Ross is singing The Midnight Special, answering Travis that “yeah, it’s CCR, but it’s older than that.” It originated with prisoners from the American South.

Ross takes them to the rock. He touches it. Shivers. With eyes aglow, he exhorts them to do the same. Cal is about to do it when Natalie appears, yelling that they shouldn’t do a thing that Ross says. Travis attacks Ross, who pops his arm out of his shoulder socket for him, then pops his wife Natalie’s head like a zit as the others run away.

The others run and spot a dilapidated bowling alley, where they escape Ross for a moment. Cal relocates Travis’s shoulder and then they fight over whether Cal wants to bang his sister Becky. Ross eventually shows up and they flee to the roof. Travis and Cal watch Freddy disappear behind a copse of grass, but not reappear on the other side. Creepy. Weird, Supernatural. Then they see the dog again, just jogging through a long gap in the grass—and onto the road. Instead of remembering that the dog literally just disappeared a few seconds ago—and forgetting how treacherous the seemingly living grass is—they decide to follow what looks like an obvious and easy path out of the grass and back onto the road. Problem solved.

Travis slips from the roof, but Cal catches him. A very Stephen King look crosses his face as sibilant voices whisper incomprehensible suggestions in his head. He lets Travis drop to the pavement.

As Ross pops through the roof exit that they’d barred, Cal and Becky flee the building, following Tobin. Becky: “Where’s Travis?” Cal: “He’s coming.” Becky doesn’t believe him and runs back. Cal continues, but Ross appears out of nowhere, tackling him and choking the life out of him. The camera pulls back to reveal several Cal corpses in increasing stages of decomposition. Ross has been killing him for quite a while now.

♾️ Loop-de-loop. ♾️

Becky awakens in mud, in a torrential downpour. She hears Travis, who is somehow either still alive or alive again or in another timeline … or something. At any rate, she hears him. He is close. Close enough to touch. It’s so dark and rainy. They reach out toward each other, fingers nearly touching Then Becky screams. The hand she’d touched was not Travis’s.

She wakes. She is still in mud. Different mud. Mud at the foot of the rock. Lightning sheets across the sky, starkly illuminating the sigils roughly engraved in its surface. The stick figures show a woman giving birth. The baby lifted high. Impaled.

Cal is suddenly there. He holds her baby, tells her it’s beautiful, perfect. She squints through the rain, smiles, drops her head back down, letting herself relax for a second. He feeds her something. She eats it eagerly. He tells her it’s grass. Then he tells her it’s her—it’s unclear whether it’s her baby or placenta he’s purportedly fed her. It’s not Cal, though. He’d dead. It’s Ross, feeding Becky her baby.

Tobin is there. He calls to Travis, who stumbles into the clearing. Travis attacks Ross, who attacks him back, easily besting him. He stabs him with the spiky end of a snapped femur. Travis drops into the mud. Ross turns to Tobin and tries to make him touch the rock. Before he can, though, Becky rises out of the mud one last time to stab out Ross’s other eye with her heart locket. She drops back to the mud, finally dead for good.

Blinded, Ross flails about. Travis struggles back to his feet. Rain lashes down continuously. The rock looms above them, silent, watching, exhorting, humming, whispering. Travis rips grass from the ground and garrotes Ross with it. It takes forever.

Against Tobin’s pleas, Travis stumbles to the rock, to place his palm on it, to finally understand what it wants, what it does to people. He is strong enough to resist its wiles. This is like in Midnight Mass, where the message, though covered in gore, was one of hope. People can resist, if they really want to. Even seemingly irresistible forces can be resisted. You don’t have to take their filthy deals. You can take less for yourself, sacrifice for the group. If a sacrifice is demanded, then maybe it’s got to be you. This is very hopeful.

Travis leads a terrified Tobin to an exit that he knows about now, having communed with the rock, but having been strong enough to betray it. He sends Tobin out to prevent Cal and Becky from ever having entered the grass in the first place. Perhaps, if it works, he will also have retroactively saved himself, since, if Cal and Becky never enter the grass, he will never have followed them to also become trapped in the grass. Perhaps he is breaking the time loop. Perhaps he knows that only his current self will suffer, but that his other, original incarnation will survive, untouched by the eldritch horror of the rock. But perhaps he doesn’t suspect any of this. Perhaps he simply selflessly sacrifices himself to save a little boy, his unborn daughter, and her mother and uncle.

Tobin opens his eyes to find himself standing in a room with a wooden floor. He approaches a door, unlatches it, and lets himself into the apse of the church across the road. He trepidatiously exits to see Cal and Becky just about to exit their vehicle, having heard his other incarnation’s cries for help from deep in the grass. He pleads with them not to go in, finally convincing Becky by giving “back” her locket, the one that Travis had given him. She now has two lockets, one quite careworn and still covered in Ross’s blood. She screams at Cal not to enter—he was about to go in.

They drive off with Tobin. Travis hears their car drive off. He lies back into the mud beneath the grass and dies as its fronds arch over him, hiding him from our eyes, waving to and fro in a vaguely sinister pattern as the view fades to credits—CCR’s Midnight Special plays.

I have not read the original story, but this was a great Stephen King adaptation. I could tell at each step that it was Stephen King—and old-school King, at that. I was reminded of several other King stories, like The Regulators, Desperation—CAN-TAH—as well as The Tommyknockers, which also had a talismanic alien artifact capable of bending time, minds, and transcending death.

The Two Popes (2019) — 10/10

Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio (Jonathan Pryce) is from Buenos Aires. He was in the running for pope after Pope John Paul II died. The primary contender was Cardinal Joseph Aloisius Ratzinger (Anthony Hopkins), who was considerably more political. As you probably know, he would end up winning and becoming pope in 2005. He is very conservative and believes in the power of the church rather than the power of the people. The church tells the people what to do; it does not ask what the people would like it to do. His is a wrathful, Old-Testament church, not a merciful, forgiving New-Testament one.

Bergoglio returns to Buenos Aires. He is a simple man, with simple needs, who simply wants to help as many people as he can. He decides to retire from his cardinalcy in 2012 and asks the pope for permission to do so. Instead, the pope calls him to Italy, to his summer home, to discuss the matter. Bergoglio arrives, speaking Italian and English as required, though his main language is Spanish. He arrives at the Palace of Castel Gandolfo, and walks around the gardens with one of the gardeners, deep in conversation, while he waits for the tardy pope Ratzinger to arrive.

Their first conversation starts off contentiously, with Ratzinger spouting a litany of Bergoglio’s transgressions against the church’s doctrine, accusing him of doing what he wants rather than what the church wants. Ratzinger apologizes for his tardiness, saying that his former assistant was “perfect”. Bergoglio responds that “he’s in jail”.

They sit together, then walk together, only tangentially discussing points of theology, focusing instead of the more prosaic presence and role of the church in a modern world. They disagree strongly over the church’s role: Ratzinger thinks the church should lead and not adapt. Bergoglio believes in change, which Ratzinger disparages as “compromise.” He spits out the word.

“Pope Benedict: When you were leader of the Jesuits in Argentina, you had all the books on Marxism removed from the library.
Bergoglio: And I made seminarians wear cassocks all day, even when they were working in the vegetable garden. And I called civil marriage for homosexuals the Devil’s plan.
Pope Benedict: You were not unlike me.
Bergoglio: I changed.
Pope Benedict: No, you compromised!
Bergoglio: No, I changed! It’s a different thing.”

Ratzinger is not without his charm. They walk in the garden some more because his fitness tracker exhorts him to “move”.

“Pope Benedict: My doctor gave it to me. He said, ‘You are in good shape for 86 but very bad shape for a human being.’ I believe this was a joke.”

Ratzinger is very much of the opinion that he knows exactly what the world needs, down to the last detail, and that he has nothing to learn from anyone. The church’s doctrine should not bend in any way, should not adapt at all to the mercurial vagaries of a world that thinks it is so modern that it only wants a church that will bend to its will, rather than the other way around,

“Bergoglio: We have spent these last years disciplining anyone who disagrees with our line on divorce, on birth control, on being gay. While our planet was being destroyed, while inequality grew like a cancer. We worried whether it was alright to speak the Mass in Latin, whether girls should be allowed to be altar servers. We built walls around us, and all the time, all the time, the real danger was inside. Inside with us.
Pope Benedict: You talk about walls as if they are bad things. A house is built of walls. Strong walls.
Bergoglio: Ah… Did Jesus build walls? His face is a face of mercy. The bigger the sinner, the warmer the welcome. Mercy is the dynamite that blows down walls.”

Bergoglio dares to reproach the church—and Ratzinger specifically—for how it handles child abuse. Ratzinger stalks away, looking very much the intolerant and unbending bureaucrat next to Bergoglio’s much more credible man-of-God. Ratzinger had said as much earlier, when he’d accused Bergoglio of “thinking he was better than everyone else, better than the church.” Ratzinger is seemingly offended by Bergoglio’s humbleness, modesty, and seeming lack of a need for worldly goods. He sneers at his ugly shoes, which aren’t nearly as fancy as Ratzinger’s own Ferragamos.

Ratzinger retires for the afternoon. A gentle and kind functionary shows Bergoglio to his room, which surprises him because he’d thought the audience was finished. He’d been prepared to leave—although he’d not gotten what he’d come for: an official acknowledgment and acceptance of his abdication of his cardinalcy. Ratzinger doesn’t want to grant it to him for political reasons. Bergoglio is well-respected for his exceedingly good qualities—he’d almost been pope himself. If he were to leave prematurely—if he were to be allowed to leave—it would reflect badly on the church. People would take it as a sign that the church had become so bad that Bergoglio could no longer stand to be a part of it. The judgment would be clear.

Bergoglio is made to eat alone—Knödel mit Söse—while Ratzinger eats the same, but watching F1 racing in German. Later, Bergoglio enters a lavish sitting room with a television; he asks permission to turn on the TV and watches soccer for a few minutes. Ratzinger walks in, saying to leave it on, even though he himself had never understood the appeal. This, from a man who’d just spent his entire meal watching a different sport. The throwaway comment neatly highlight’s the pontiff’s hypocrisy—which had otherwise become quite clear from their conversation in the garden.

Bergoglio turns off the TV and sits with Ratzinger. They talk quietly. Bergoglio recounts the story of how he’d become a priest in the first place. The flashback shows a much younger man, about to be married. But “the call” came to him, in the form of a spontaneous confession with an older priest. He finished the story, saying that, despite having lost the love of his life, he knows that God would have found him anyway. If not that night, then soon after.

Ratzinger plays the piano, a sad lullaby. They talk about music, about the Beatles. Ratzinger seems a bit confused, with Hopkins playing the part of an old man, late in the evening, forgetting some details, getting lost in the mazes of recollection, then getting a bit angry and defensive about it. He’s not mad, just frustrated with himself. He says that he likes jokes, and that he “likes company”. Bergoglio cites a passage that God is always with you, to which Ratzinger replies that “God doesn’t laugh”.

The next morning, the pontiff is called back to Rome by a further-unfolding scandal. Bergoglio is forced to accompany him, his retirement-request unsigned and ignored. Later, Ratzinger meets Bergoglio in the Sistine Chapel of St. Peter’s Basilica. Ratzinger confesses that he wants to retire. Bergoglio is horrified.

“Pope Benedict: In 1978, we had three popes.
Bergoglio: Yeah, but they weren’t at the same time.
Pope Benedict: I was making a little joke.
Bergoglio: A joke?
Pope Benedict: A German joke. It doesn’t have to be funny.”

After some back and forth, Bergoglio discerns that Ratzinger won’t sign his retirement because he has come to believe that the only way he can retire with a clean conscience is if he knows that someone like Bergoglio has a chance of replacing him, of saving the church in a way that Ratzinger cannot.

“Ratzinger: For weeks I have been praying. I wanted to resign. But the thought that stopped me − what if at the next conclave, they voted for you.
Bergoglio: Then I offered my resignation.
Ratzinger: Exactly. And I was delighted. One reason I didn’t want to resign was…what if you were next. This is only half in jest.
Bergoglio: [smiles]
Ratzinger: And so you came. And now I’ve changed.
Bergoglio: You compromised.
Ratzinger: No. I’ve changed. It’s a different thing. Your approach, your style is radically different from mine. And I don’t agree with most things you say and do…
Bergoglio: [smiles]
Ratzinger: But now I can see a necessity for Bergoglio. I cannot do this without knowing that there is at least a possibility that you might be chosen.
Bergoglio: No. Father, I could never…not me.
Ratzinger: We both know, in our hearts, that it could be. The Church needs change and you could be that change.”

Bergoglio fills in some gaps in his file for Ratzinger, recounting how he’d behaved when Argentine took a fascist lurch and killed tens of thousands of its own citizens. He’d excommunicated two of his Jesuit friends who’d refused to submit to the evil rules and petty edicts. They continued to tend their flock—and they were punished for it, especially after they were no longer under the protection of the church.

Bergoglio saved many people, and went on to do much good, but he continued to be haunted by what he considered to be an inexcusable betrayal of his friends and comrades, people who’d taken their lumps for the cause. Instead, he’d tried to work with the fascist regime, to guide it into less destructive practices. He was cast out, traveling through the poorest parts of Argentina, bringing the message and the gospel. He hears endless confessions. He slowly regains his reputation. He makes speeches,

“Twenty percent of the world’s population consumes resources at a rate that robs the poor nations and future generations of what they need to survive. Just as the commandment “Thou shalt not kill” sets a clear limit in order to safeguard the value of human life, today we also have to say “thou shalt not” to an economy of exclusion and inequality which idolises money. Such an economy also kills.”

He is made a bishop. But, as Ratzinger says, he “did not live like one. [He] renounced luxury.”

Ratzinger gives Bergoglio absolution for his sins. They order lunch: pizza Margherita and Diavolo with two Fantas from the little stand out front. At Ratzinger’s urging, Bergoglio finishes telling his story, that he’d reconciled with one of his old friends, but never the other.

Ratzinger then confesses about long-running sexual misconduct in parishes for which he was responsible, and regrets having stayed silent. What’s done is done. Bergoglio is incensed, but grants absolution. They emerge from the Room of Tears into the Sistine Chapel, mingling with the common folk.

Bergoglio departs, giving Ratzinger an impromptu and largely unwelcome tango lesson just before he leaves. We see that Ratzinger has grown exceedingly fond of the man—won over by his naturally principled mien, as had so many others before him.

From earlier in the film,

“Ratzinger: Ah yes. It must be very useful, this popularity of yours. Is there a trick to it?
Bergoglio: I try to be myself.
Ratzinger: Hmm, when I try to be myself, people don’t seem to like me very much.”

Bergoglio flies home. One year later, he watches Ratzinger deliver his resignation—in Latin. The cardinals gathered there whisper to each other in Italian—“Aspetti. Mi devo essere sbagliato. […] Mi scusi ma ho sentito bene? Ho tradotto bene?” Bergoglio is watching with Lisabetta and says,

“¡Lo dijo en latín! Siempre que tiene que decir algo embromado lo dice en latín… y así sólo lo entienden unos pocos cardenales…”

And then he translates for her: “El Papa acaba de renunciar.”

We witness another election, this time of Pope Frances (Bergoglio). We see him travel the world. We watch as he and Ratzinger watch the World Cup final in 2014—Germany vs. Argentina. Germany would emerge victorious 1–0. Pope Frances would have to wait until the end of 2022 to celebrate Argentina’s coronation.

They are both so brilliant in their roles. We watched it in Spanish, Italian, Portugese, German, and English with English subtitles. I obtained several of the citations from the the final shooting script.

Snitch (2013) — 6/10

Jason Collins (Rafi Gavron) agrees to take delivery of a pretty huge number of MDMA pills for his friend Craig (James Allen McCune). He gets the delivery up to his room and the DEA is on him like white on rice. He temporarily escapes out of his bedroom window, but where’s he going? There’s over 2,000 pills in a plastic bag on his bed and the DEA is in his bedroom. They have him dead to rights. The DEA agents—including Agent Cooper (Barry Pepper)—chase him down and arrest him. His mom Sylvie (Melina Kanakaredes) is kind of a flake and she’s totally distraught. He would never do anything like this!

His dad John Matthews (Dwayne Johnson) runs a relatively large trucking company. We see him establishing what a great and competent employer he is. As he’s driving out, he sees one employee Daniel James (Jon Bernthal) doing some extra work, even though his shift is over. Matthews initially wants to chide him that he’s not paying overtime—his business is stretched a bit thin—but it turns out that Daniel is just trying to get the bags of cement out of the impending rain. Matthews pitches in instead. We have established rapport.

Matthews shows up to talk to Jason with his ex-wife Silvie. The agent in charge Jay Price (David Harbour) reveals to them that Jason’s facing a minimum sentence of 10 years—and that his friend Craig set him up for the DEA in order to lower his own minimum 10-year sentence. Neat-o. So Jason would never have taken delivery of the drugs if the DEA hadn’t blackmailed Craig into trying to get him to do it. Price says that, if Jason doesn’t find someone else to frame—if he doesn’t cooperate—then the 10 years might become 30 for that amount of drugs. Quite a neat cycle they’ve got going there. Jason refuses, while his dad demands that he find someone to rat on.

Jason continues to refuse to do it—he doesn’t know any drug dealers, and he’s not going to do to someone else what was done to him by Craig, despite all of the adults in his world immorally exhorting him to do so. So off to jail he goes, awaiting trial. Matthews starts to pester US attorney Joanne Keeghan (Susan Sarandon) to find out if there’s anything he can do for his son. No. Go away. She seems to have internalized the brazen immorality of entrapping innocent people for more arrests to the point where she either doesn’t care that it’s wrong—or just doesn’t even notice.

Matthews heads out into the night, looking for trouble, and gets his ass absolutely beaten by a group of corner hustlers, who fall on him like a pack of wolves. They’re just about to finish him off and steal his truck when the cops show up.

Matthews is back with Keeghan. She says, fine, OK, if you’re just going to get yourself killed anyway, then I’ll allow you to pretend to sell drugs for the U.S. government so we can pretend that people in desperate circumstances in front of whom we dangle a lucrative drug deal are actually hard-core drug-dealers who need to be put away for a good long time, when what’s really happening is that this is a job-security program for drug-warriors.

Matthews scours his employee records for anyone who already has two strikes for drug-running. Daniel James comes up. John convinces Daniel to introduce him to his former associate Malik (Michael K. Williams). Daniel could be convinced because $20k is a lot of money to him and his family. His wife Analisa (Nadine Velazquez) has to work all hours because they can’t afford to lose her job.

That scene made me think of Marx and wage-slavery. It poignantly showed how most people do not have a choice about the work they do, not really. There is no way to argue around the fact that there is a privileged class of employers, and everyone else. Of course some of us have jobs that treat us well, and that we trust will continue to treat us well. But that doesn’t change the fact that the best you can hope for is a benevolent dictatorship. The structure is not fundamentally a democratic or fair one. The exchange is your time, your creativity, your attention—for money. If you get fulfillment, if you like your co-workers—if you can call them friends—then that’s a bonus, but it’s not part of the structure. There is nothing anchoring those things in anything other than an ephemeral and easily avoided way into people’s lives.

Against his better judgment, Daniel lets John convince him. Malik agrees to try it out, his interest piqued by the sheer carrying capacity of a semi-tractor-trailer truck. “Half a ton? Man, if I was in the thousand-pound business, I wouldn’t be sitting in this dump right now.” (Delivered as only Michael Williams could.) Malik agrees, but only if John makes the first run—and if Daniel rides shotgun.

They drive 1,000 miles to El Paso, where they pick up the drugs, packing it in bags of cement. As they’re about to pull away, a rival gang ambushes them. John plows on out of there, impressing the kingpin Pintera (Benjamin Bratt). When they return to John’s warehouse, Malik orders them to transfer the drugs to John’s truck and deliver it. The DEA is up in arms because they’d not wired up the personal truck as well as the semi. Daniel grows suspicious of John, and confronts him, but is assuaged. He still walks away angry and frustrated because he’s caught up in such a shitty situation again.

They make the drop with Malik, but Cooper decides not to scoop them up. He hears radio chatter that they’re going to meet up with a very high-value target, El Topo (who is Pintera). Matthews is pissed. Keeghan doesn’t care one bit. They urge him to stop shouting at her campaign stop. They basically have him over a barrel and there is f&@k-all he can do about it. She goes back on her deal and extracts another deal out of him. He’s now to take down El Topo for them. His next run will take him into Mexico, from which he’s unlikely to return.

Daniel finds out what Matthews has done, confronting him about it. They send their families into hiding. Daniel is super-pissed about everything, as he should be. Keeghan couldn’t give two shits—Sarandon plays this role quite well—but Cooper has a change of heart and advises Matthews that the play is a suicide run.

Matthews goes rogue. He comes up with a plan. A crucial step is for Daniel to get El Topo’s phone number from Malik. As Matthews switches trucks to drop the DEA listening equipment and tail, Daniel puts one guard to sleep, but then murders two others. When Malik appears, he gut-shoots him while Malik wings him—Omar vs. The Punisher. Malik gives him the phone number—he’s done-for anyway. Matthews fights off several cars full of shooters with his truck and his shotgun, which he wields incredibly well considering he’d just bought it the day before. He takes a shot in the thigh, though.

He ends up flipping the truck, but the DEA arrives before the last cartel member can get to him. It’s a truck full of $100m. At the same time, Cooper spots El Topo leaving his house and arrests him without incident. Matthews leaves the $100k reward check for El Topo’s capture for Daniel, who breezes into the police station as if he hadn’t just murdered three men in cold blood the day before. The DEA officers don’t seem much bothered by it, either, although they must know that he’d done it.

So, the DEA took out one kingpin in the war on drugs and sent three families into hiding. A job well done. And how does the WitSec program work for the two families? Jason lives with his mom—does John get visitation rights in his new role? How does that work?

It was fine, I guess. I think they were indicting the drug war, but you never know. Maybe Cooper’s supposed to be the hero! To sum up the storyline as I saw it:

• DEA helps set up an innocent boy as a dealer so that they can get him to turn on other drug-dealer friends who the DEA is sure he has. If he doesn’t, no problem-o, because they’ve already got two arrests of people who probably wouldn’t have been drug-dealers if the DEA hadn’t encouraged them to do it.
• Then a father goes a bit nuts when he hears his pure and precious son is going to be in jail for ten years. Instead of raging against the lunacy of such a system, he exhorts his son to turn on any or all of his friends, innocent or not. The boy refuses.
• So the father starts dealing drugs for the DEA, getting screwed on deals again and again until he takes matters into his own hands and manages to get his son out of jail, but exiles himself and his family from everything they’ve ever known.
• He implicates an employee of his who had been determined to avoid his third strike, getting him shot at, then shot, and also exiled, in the end.
• All around a heartwarming story of justice.

The Night Comes for Us (2018) — 7/10

This is a pretty well-made Indonesian action movie with some excellent fight choreography mixed into what are often absolutely ludicrous—and flatly unbelievable—levels of endurance, stamina, and ability to take both punishment and grievous damage. You see, Indonesians like to fight with knives. They have to, because they are terrible, terrible shots. Everyone in the first half of the film dies of a knife wound because no-one with a gun can hit the broad side of a barn.

Ito (Joe Taslim) is a Triad enforcer—one of the Six Seas, an elite group entrusted with overseeing all of the Triad’s drug trade. On a mission to wipe out a village, he has a change of heart on a beach and, instead of killing a little girl in cold blood—as he’d already killed her mother—he turns on his platoon and kills them instead. He takes the child back to Jakarta with him, where he holes up with Shinta (Salvita Decorte) and reconnects with his old friends and fellow gang-members Fatih (Abimana Aryasatya) and White Boy Bobby (Zack Lee).

We all know where this is going, right? The Triad is going to clean up the loose end of Ito. There will be carnage along the way, as well as a twist in the person of Arian (Iko Uwais), another former member of Ito’s gang who is now working in Macau for the Triad. We see him demonstrate his chops by wiping out a whole group of thugs at the casino where he works. Chien Wu (Sunny Pang)—the Six Seas member in charge of cleaning up—recruits Arian to kill Ito, to prove himself in what he hopes will be an initiation into the Six Seas.

First, though, Ito finds out from his former crew members Fatih and Bobby that a local freak named Yohan (Revaldo) had stolen his gang’s money. Ito goes to Yohan’s butcher shop—out of which he sells drugs—to clean house. Lots and lots and lots of blood and body parts and sweet-ass fight choreography. While Ito is fighting there, though, a ton of Yohan’s men infiltrate Shinta’s apartment building. Fatih and Bobby fight them all off in another giant, bloody fight scene. Unfortunately for them, Chinese and Mandarin-speaking Anna (Dian Sastrowardoyo) and French-speaking albino Elena (Hannah Al Rashid)—two more of the Six Seas—show up and finish off Bobby, who gains time for Fatih to escape. Arian returns in the nick of time to help Fatih further, but Fatih only gets as far as the garage before he meets his end.

A woman known only as The Operator (Julie Estelle) appears out of nowhere. She is a Deux Ex Machina and Force of Nature in that she is tireless and can’t take damage. You can ring her bell all day and she isn’t fazed. In fairness, this is the exact same with Fatih, Ito, or Arian, all of whom take prodigious damage at various points in the film—gaping stab wounds, bullets, heads bounced off of concrete or iron girders—and bounce back unfazed seconds later, still just as coordinated, fast, and strong as they were before they got what should have been career-, if not life-ending concussions.

The Operator next hunts down Ito and bests him. This is amazing. One woman, fighting in close quarters, manages what dozens of armed men could not even come close to doing. I imagine that we, as viewers, are supposed to accept that her bona fides have been established, but it felt a bit more like she was a superhero without a backstory.

Anyway, we’re on to the next giant action sequence where Ito wipes out about two to three dozen Triad soldiers. They are all armed with clubs or knives, but he bests them all. Throwing us a bone, the director shows Ito stripping the newspaper “armor” he’d had on under his jacket. Back at the apartment, the Operator fights off more Triad henchmen who are there to get the little girl (for whatever reason). Alma and Elena show up. After The Operator dispatches Alma, we learn that Elena and the Operator were trained in the same unit—or something. The Operator loses a fingertip to Elena’s knife, but Elena loses all of her guts, then one of her arms, and then, finally, her jugular.

Back at the warehouse, Ito seeks out Arian, who had subdued a sniper who was going to kill Ito. They chat a bit, with Ito holding Arian at gunpoint. He throws away the gun and they set to it. Just know that Arian could have just let the sniper kill Ito and the film would have been at least 25 minutes shorter—that’s about how long the ultimate fight scene is—and Ito could have done the same by just shooting Arian. Instead, we get a long fight that, while fraught with indestructibility, doesn’t feel too long because it’s quite inventive.

There is a lot of blood and there are lot of slash and puncture wounds, but we also notice that neither of them breaks the other’s joints, as they have done with underlings and soldiers. I noticed the same thing when The Operator was fighting Elena and Alma: in fights with “red shirt” NPCs, they just brutally slice tendons and snap bones. When the main roles fight each other, they nicely take turns attacking and no-one does any crippling damage until the director has determined that the fight should be nearing its end. Then the knife wounds start up.

Ito bests Arian, but does not kill him. Chien Wu shows up and has his gang of five other people take Arian out with machine guns. He’s taken at least 50 bullets, but he’s still breathing on the ground, so someone has to cap him. Indonesians are truly indestructible—he’d already suffered so much damage from Ito, then all of the bullets, but he was still breathing. They’re like Terminator robots.

The Operator gets the little girl to Ito, then drives away. OK? I guess? No goodbye? Ito’s not long for this world, but he gets the girl on a boat—I suppose a metaphor for “safety”. Ito gets in his car, in front of which appears an army of Triads led by Chien Wu. Horribly damaged, but grinning maniacally, he drives into their hail of bullets. The Wikipedia entry deems this ending as “his fate and the Triads are left unknown.” I would say, “oh naw, son. He ded,” but I’d just had a two-hour object lesson in how indestructible Indonesians are, so maybe Ito lived happily ever after.

It kind of won me over a bit, but it was a lot. The fight between Arian and Ito was at times just laughably inhuman in their ability to take damage.

I watched it in Indonesian, Mandarin, English, and French with English subtitles.

Rodney King (2017) — 10/10

This is a powerful 52 minutes. Roger Guenveur Smith delivers a one-man show. It’s just him. Alone. On a dark stage. He’s in black pants and a black T-shirt. He is barefoot. He sweats profusely. He plays different roles, in myriad LA accents. He is mesmerizing.

He tells a spoken-word, beat-poet, staccato and syncopated and rhythmic story.

• I learned that Rodney King had a jheri curl.
• I learned that he’d lost his mother young, to a shooting.
• I learned that his father had died, drunk, at the bottom of a swimming pool.
• I learned that he could drive a shitbox Hyundai shockingly fast.
• I learned that he was an alcoholic, and addicted to a plethora of things.
• I learned that no-one had ever lost that much blood and lived.
• I learned that they’d taken him to the police station instead of a hospital.
• I learned that Officer Koon had told him, “You’re going to die tonight. Nigger.”
• I leaned that you spell Koon with a K.

  • Just one, though.
  • Not three.
  • And also not with a C.
• I learned that people died in the riots.

  • For no reason.
  • For stupid reasons.
• I learned that he’d surfed.
• I learned that he’d skied.
• I learned that he’d died, drunk, at the bottom of his in-ground pool.
• I learned that he’d gone on TV to ask LA to stop rioting.

Rodney King said,

“Can we all get along?

“[…]

“We’ve got to quit. We’ve got to quit. You know, after all, I mean, I could understand the first two hours after the verdict, but to go on, to keep going on like this and to see that security guard shot on the ground.

“It’s just not right. It’s just not right, because those people will never go home to their families again, and I mean, please, we can get along here.

“We all can get along. We’ve just got to stop. You know, I mean, we’re all stuck here for a while. Let’s, you know, let’s try to work it out. Let’s try to work it out.”

Spike Lee directed this joint.