Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2024.04

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. Mr. Popper’s Penguins (2011) — 6/10
2. David Brent: Life on the Road (2016) — 8/10
3. In the Shadow of the Moon (2019) — 8/10
4. Taylor Tomlinson: Have it All (2024) — 8/10
5. Le jour où la Terre s’arrêta (The Day the Earth Stood Still) (2008) — 6/10
6. Here Comes the Boom (2012) — 8/10
7. Bionda Atomica (2017) — 9/10
8. Rick and Morty S07 (2024) — 8/10
9. Castlevania S03 (2020) — 8/10
10. Turn Up Charlie S01 (2019) — 6/10

Mr. Popper’s Penguins (2011) — 6/10

Mr. Popper (Jim Carrey) is a dealmaker for a large, financial company. His ex-wife is Amanda (Carla Gugino), but they seem to be amicably divorced. His father is an explorer who was never home. At the beginning of the film, we see him communicating by radio with his father, who was never at home. He dies early in the film, leaving his now-grown son Tommy his worldly possessions.

One of these is, apparently, a penguin. He leaves it in the bathtub, as he’s on his way out to negotiate for the purchase of Tavern on the Green. He meets the current owner Mrs. Van Gundy (Angela Lansbury), who is not impressed with him and his oily salesman persona and tells him that the restaurant is not for sale.

He gets home to discover that his penguin has flooded the bathroom. He tries to get rid of it, but no-one wants to take it off his hands. He tries to free it down the hall, but the building doorman makes him take it back. His family arrives for his son’s birthday—and his son assumes that the penguins are his birthday present. Nat Jones (Clark Gregg) shows up from the zoo, to take the one penguin away. He’s delighted to see that there are six or them now—Gentoos. He says that the penguins should be in ice and snow, with a lot of fish.

His assistant Pippi (Ophelia Lovibond) has a P-based alliterative issue and is on the case to help him take care of the penguins, as he doesn’t want to give them back yet, as he’s getting closer to his kids through the penguins. He’s also getting closer to his ex-wife again. None of this is surprising. Jim Carrey lends the film more credibility than it would otherwise have.

He goes to the Guggenheim to meet Mrs. Van Gundy at a showing. The penguins escape the apartment and track him down to the museum, where they wreak havoc, finally finding “Dad.”

Next up is penguin eggs. Ex-wife Amanda comes over with her man Rick, who immediately flees the penguins. Popper and Amanda are hitting it off and he asks her out to dinner. They go to Tavern on the Green, where he’s also to meet Van Gundy. They go skating afterward—in the Trump skating rink.

Popper slowly gives over his entire life to the penguins. He leaves the doors open on his apartment, he shovels snow in, sets up nests for the eggs, and has basically converted the whole place into a penguin exhibit. One of the eggs hasn’t hatched yet. He sets up a hatching area outside, where he continues to watch over it. His bosses come by to discover his madness and summarily fire him.

He gets Nat Jones to come over to look at the egg. Nat pronounces the hatchling dead. Popper shows up at the office the next morning, pretending that he still works there. They’ll take him back because he’s managed to squeeze Van Gundy into complying with a sale. He has to break it to his kids that the penguins are gone. They take it super-well. The plot is as thin and transparent here as, well, as a sheet of ice. He goes back to the bad way he was, his ungrateful kids hate him again—when he stops delivering, they stop loving—and his ex-wife draws away again, exhibiting the same level of care for him that his kids do.

They go to the zoo, where they are told that they can’t get the penguins back because they’re being traded away, three to Washington, three somewhere else, and the chicks to Dubai. They break out the penguins, then head for Tavern on the Green. Everything works out for everybody. They take the penguins to Antartica. The End.

Look, it’s a kid’s movie. It’s not for me, as I found some of the messaging too coarse, but maybe that’s what kids understand? I don’t know. It felt manipulative. It’s a chicken-and-egg question: is this movie what kids respond to naturally? Or is this movie what kids have been trained to respond to by other movies like this? Hard to say.

David Brent: Life on the Road (2016) — 8/10

This mockumentary is just as cringe-y as you imagine it would be, given Gervais’s proclivities when in the role of David Brent. We catch up with him at his new job in sales at Lavichem, a company that sells feminine hygiene products. It is supposed to be almost 15 years later and he’s not changed one bit. None of the men at this new office like him—they find him sophomoric—except for maybe Nigel (Tom Bennett). Pauline (Jo Hartley) inexplicably has a crush on him (she lives right across the road from him), while office secretary Karen (Mandeep Dhillon) admits to finding him kind of funny and spontaneous.

He’s not in the office for long, as he’s heading out on the road with his band, Foregone Conclusion 2. It’s not really a band: it’s a bunch of studio musicians who he’s paying to play with him. He’s also paying the sound engineer Dan Harvey (Tom Basden) twice his usual wages. Not only that, but Brent takes two weeks of unpaid leave, cashes in his pension, and has only eight dates lined up for the three-week “tour”. Tour is in quotation marks because all of the gigs are within easy driving distance of Brent’s home. He has spared no expense, though: he’s rented a giant tour bus and puts up the band in hotels every night. In return, they refuse to socialize with him at all. They won’t even let him on his own bus; instead, he follows along in his car.

Before he leaves, he gets a pick-me-up from his therapist Dr. Keating (Nina Sosanya), whose advice he completely disregards.

David’s sort-of actual friend Dom—who’s a young and aspiring and actually quite-talented rapper—is also on tour with them. Brent’s voice is actually surprisingly good and his music doesn’t actually suck, even if it’s not 100% my cup of tea.

It gets more and more mortifying, as Brent continues with his shows. There’s a signature song about “disableds.”

“♪ Oh, please don’t make fun of the disableds
♪ There’s nothing funny about those
♪ Whether mental in the head
♪ Or mental in the legs
♪ Please be kind To the ones with feeble minds
♪ Help the awkward through a door
♪ Hold their hand
♪ If they’ve got one, understand
♪ You might have to feed
♪ The worst ones
♪ Through a straw
♪ It’s basically a head on a pillow
♪ Head on a pillow Head on a pillow”

He doesn’t stop trying to “support” minority groups. He tries out a song about Native Americans.

“♪ Oh, oh, your red heart rages
♪ Cut down, burned out And put in cages
♪ You came in peace Held up your hand
♪ How ✋
♪ We cut it off And we stole your land
♪ Oh, oh, Native American
♪ Soar like an eagle Sit like a pelican
♪ Oh, oh, don’t call us Indians
♪ We’re more like West Eurasians crossed with Siberians ♪”

No-one’s coming to the shows. They’re hemorrhaging money, but Brent’s only solution is to double down, to spend more. He’s only barely aware that it’s self-destructive, that it’s pathetic, that he’s not getting out of it what he wanted, despite how often he tells himself that he is. He engages the services of publicist Briony Jones (Diane Morgan), who gets him into a photo shoot, which honestly goes a lot better than expected.

She wonders why he hasn’t got any tattoos, which is a mean thing to say to David because, of course, he goes right out to get one. He faints before it’s half-done and leaves with the word “Berk” on his upper arm. In England, being a berk is synonymous with being a cunt. This is in keeping with his green rooms being constantly labeled as “David Bent” (where “bent” means homosexual in England).

Now he’s got one more person in his crew that he has to pay to be there. No-one wants to even have a drink with him. They’re only there for the money. He has to pay them to have a beer with him after the show. £25.- per person—and he has to pay for drinks. They’re all also hooking up, which is a bonus, but makes him jealous.

This is starting to get him down,

“David: What are you doing?
Briony: Getting off with a bloke.
David: What did you think of the gig?
Briony: I didn’t see it. I was getting off…
David: You were getting off with a bloke. Yeah, sure.
David: Good, innit?
David: Paying them… to get off with people.
David: It’s a new job description, innit?
David: [SIGHS]
All aboard.”

He does karate by himself to warm up. He thinks it’s cool. He’s terrible with people, but with women, he’s extra-terrible. Desperate, he picks up two ladies from the ATM behind the club. They’re only interested in him because he can offer a roof over the heads. They’re not groupie material, but he makes do. They plunder the mini-fridge, racking up exorbitant fees for booze and chocolate—2 mini-bottles of “Champagne” at £25 apiece. Only one overnights, although nothing happens. She was just happy for a lie-in and a bath.

He finally gets a record company to send someone to a show. This is exciting for him—his big break is imminent. They hate him, of course, but they seem intrigued by Dom’s rapping. It’s a shame because Brent isn’t that bad! His lyrics are bizarre, but his voice is good and the arrangement isn’t bad. After the show, the band is forced to show up for a beer with him. This is as painful as you can imagine. They leave quickly, downing their free beers and taking their 25 quid for five minutes’ work. Dom isn’t allowed to leave. We see him guiding a plastered Brent home at the end of the evening. “You’re my n*gga” “David, you can’t say that.”

The next show is a battle of the bands. The bands go in reverse order of number of people they got to come see them. Foregone Conclusion got two people. They’re on first. They play Native American. Afterward, Dom jumps in for a band that hasn’t shown up, playing one of his own songs. He’s an immediate hit. The record agents show up and give him their card. David tries really hard to hide his jealousy, but he’s utterly unsuccessful. They’re still sharing a room.

The next morning, Brent enjoys a day off. Dan comes up to tell him that the snow for his Christmas song on his last show is going to cost £1,500. He begs him not to pay for it. But David had his heart set on the snow. It’s all lost money anyway. He’s down £20k when he’d expected to be down only about £8k—and had hoped to get a recording contract out of it. They bond a bit; Dan tells him that he likes David as he is, when he’s not pretending to be someone else.

They play the Christmas song at the last show.

“♪ Don’t cry, it’s Christmas Santa’s feeling fine
♪ Though you know you’ll never see him
♪ He’s not just in your mind
♪ And it’s not that he’s invisible It’s because you’re going blind
♪ But don’t cry, it’s Christmas Santa’s feeling fine
♪ Though he’s got a billion children He’s only got one day
♪ You’ve got slightly less than that If I were you I’d pray
♪ But don’t cry, it’s Christmas
♪ Everything’s okay”

It snows. Dan paid for it.

David Brent sums up the tour as a life experience for himself.

“I don’t need to be a rock star, you know? That’s just something I enjoy doing. I can live without being “a success.” [chuckles] But, um… I couldn’t have lived without trying. And I did that.

“So… And everything works out, doesn’t it? You think you want one thing along the way, and then you realise you needed something else. Life’s a struggle… with little beautiful surprises that make you wanna carry on through all the shit to the next little beautiful surprise.

“[chuckles]

“So, yeah, all good.”

He’s back in the office. He’s telling Nigel what a great time he had, how he could do it all again. He tells him that Dom has gotten a record deal because of him (David). The goons at the office start in on him again, but Pauline’s not having it—she throws water all over their ringleader, shutting it all down. David’s got a free-coffee coupon. Two, in fact. They head out for coffee. Her hand grabs his just as the curtain falls.

“♪ I was looking up to heaven
♪ It was right under my nose
♪ I had travelled many light years
♪ It was right across the road
♪ A billion trillion grains of stardust
♪ Floating round in space
♪ Two of them collided
♪ In an ordinary place
♪ We are electricity
♪ We will never die
♪ We’ll just burn and burst
♪ And return to the sky”

Look, You’re going to have to brace yourself for Gervais’s cringe comedy—his ingratiating half-laugh is particularly off-putting and grating—but it’s worth it. It’s a heartwarming tale, in the end. I changed my rating from a 6 to an 8 in the last 15 minutes.

In the Shadow of the Moon (2019) — 8/10

Locke (Boyd Holbrook) is a Philadelphia police officer. In 1988, a wave of mysterious killings sweep the city in one night. He’s not a detective yet, but he and his partner Maddox (Bokeem Woodbine) are given grudging leeway by his brother-in-law Detective Holt (Michael C. Hall), so they snoop around various crime scenes. They help figure out that all of the victims have a common three-dot mark on the back of their necks. They seem to have been injected with an unknown compound. They catch a break when one of the victims is still temporarily alive and describes her assailant as a black woman in a blue hoodie (Cleopatra Coleman).

After some misdirection and a foot chase, Maddox and Locke have trapped her in a subway station. She’s quite a fighter, though, and drops Maddox like a bad habit, breaking his leg. After finding what looks like a weapon with three needles on the end of it, Locke catches up to her on a lower subway platform, where she confronts him, addressing him by name and telling him things about himself that she couldn’t possibly know, like that his wife Jean (Rachel Keller) is pregnant and will give birth that day. She also predicts her own death. They tussle but, as with Maddox, she easily gets the best of him, cuffing him to a bench with his own handcuffs. He shoots her with her own weapon, blowing her back into the path of an oncoming train.

His daughter Amy is born, but wife Jean dies in childbirth. Nine years later, it is Amy’s (Quincy Kirkwood) birthday. Locke has promised to take her to the zoo to see the bears. They’re diurnal. They have to go in the morning. You know what they say about the best-laid plans. A supposed copycat killer has appeared. The police suspect it’s a demonstrator from the crowd of people who’ve never believed the official story of what had happened that night nine years ago.

Maddox and Locke, now detectives, open the case again, this time sifting more carefully through the evidence. One piece is a set of keys they’d gotten off of the killer’s corpse, keys which turn out to be made for a model of plane that wouldn’t come on the market until one year ago—that is, eight years after they’d been collected. Physicist Naveen Rao (Rudi Dharmalingam) tries to convince them that the case has something to do with time travel, caused by the odd perigee of the super moon. They of course summarily ignore this wacko.

Locke tracks the killer down to a small airport where she gets the drop on him and ties him up. She’s actually alive and is still the same age. Locke manages to call Maddox. When he arrives, he thinks he’s gotten the drop on the killer, but she spins and shoots him right in the face with her shotgun. Maddox dies immediately. She knocks out Locke and drags him onto a small plane. When he wakes, she tells him more about himself and his family, as well as how she can return once every nine years because of the moon. She throws him out over the water. He swims to shore to find the crashed plane the next morning.

It’s now 2006. Locke is no longer on the squad. He drinks. He’s obsessed with cracking the case. He thinks it involves time travel. Amy lives with her uncle (Lt. Hart). Locke discovers another victim, who was involved in the nascent beginnings of a hardcore “patriot” movement. Locke starts to suspect that the killer is moving backwards through time. He manages to track her, she leads him on a chase—she on a motorcycle, he in a truck—to a pipe opening off of a beach. He crawls in after her to discover her in what is almost certainly a time machine, slowly filling with water—it looks very much like the inter-timeline-travel device from The Leftovers—just before it disappears. Locke is arrested by a distraught Hart as he exits the tunnel again. Rao watches from above.

It’s 2015, nine years later. Locke doesn’t look much different: he’s more worn around the edges, his hair a bit longer, his beard a little more ragged. Rao kidnaps him and reveals that he knows about the killer’s plan, but that he approves wholeheartedly. It sounds like a cult. They’re killing people, but for a good purpose, to prevent the deaths of millions of others. Locke crashes Rao’s truck. Rao begs him not to interfere. Locke escapes back to the beach. Rao sounds crazy, but he would, wouldn’t he?

Locke confronts the killer as she emerges from her pipe, nine years later, right on schedule. The killer reveals herself to be Rya, his granddaughter. She says that Locke is the one who chose her for this mission in the first place. It’s that important. We watch as Rao triggers the devices throughout the past to kill the key people who would be involved in executing the civil war that would sweep the U.S. into a century of darkness. They’ve changed the past. Back in 2015, Locke is finally able to relax and reunite with his family—and his brand-new granddaughter Rya—because he knows that not only could he not have stopped what happened in 1988 and 1995—he no longer wants to.

It actually works better on screen than it did on paper, mostly because of Boyd Holbrook. I gave it an extra star for being well-made, for Boyd, and for suspending my disbelief until after the movie was over. It was a nice story, even if some of the details were papered over
E,g., how does the time machine work? Why does it only work every nine years? What does this have to do with the moon? Lots of loose ends, but they don’t matter. The story is about Locke.

Taylor Tomlinson: Have it All (2024) — 8/10

She’s still going strong with her third one-hour special. It was a bit of an uneven start, but the second and final thirds were great. I pulled a bunch of quotes from Taylor Tomlinson: Have it All (2024) | Transcript (Scraps from the Loft). Taylor’s on-stage—and perhaps off-stage; it doesn’t matter—persona is that she has anxiety, an inferiority complex, and is terrible at being single because she’s terrible at dating. She’s spent a year alone and it’s been one of the best years of her life. She talks about anxiety, therapy, sleep disorders, married friends, men, women, her childhood, her parents, her neuroses.

“That got me to sixth grade, when I met my friend Krista, and she was pretty, funny, smart, and nice. And that’s when I stopped believing in God.”

“[…] I was like, “Nobody has every single thing going for them as a person. You have been so blessed. Be grateful for what you have. Focus on that. Nobody gets to have it all.”

“And then I saw Hugh Jackman in person.

“I was like, “I guess you can have it all. But there’s none left because ‘God’ gave it all to Hugh.””

“The next time you see your parents, they’re all smug, like, “Jason seemed to like us.”

“You’re like, “I know what you’re doing.”

““Maybe your therapist wants to meet us. Get our side of the story.”

““I cannot wait till you’re in the ground.”

““All right, well, we’d like to be cremated.”

““I will scatter your ashes where God can’t find them!””

“I know how to get men to like me. Easy. You trick ’em.

“Just wait until they kind of like you, and then you’re like, “You don’t like me.” They’re like, “Yeah, I do.”

““You don’t.”

““Yeah, I do.”

“You’re like, “No, you don’t.”

““I do!”

“You do that until they get you pregnant, I think.

“You just turn it into a fun challenge for ’em.

““Bet you can’t spend your life with me.”

“They’re like, “Fucking watch me, you bitch!”

“Like when you ask a kid to take out the trash, and they’re like, “No!”

“And you’re like, “I’ll time you.”

“And he’s like… [gasps]

““See? You didn’t even think you wanted to do that.”

“He’s like, “Who cares? I’m the fastest boy alive.”

“Hitting on women is so much harder. It feels so much more delicate.

“Hitting on a woman feels like trying to skip a stone on a lake.

“Hitting on a man feels like throwing a brick through a window.

“Like, “I don’t really care. I just want to see what happens.”

““I’m not gonna live here.”

“I might be sexist.

“I’m hearing it now as I’m talking.”

“I said, “Any advice for people in relationships who are fighting a lot?”

“They said, “We do.”

““You know how a lot of people have a safe word to stop sex?”

““Everyone needs to have a safe word during fights.”

“I asked a married friend, “Do you have a safe word for fights?”

“He was like, “What?” I’m like, “A word that stops the fight.”

“He goes, “We have one.”

“I said, “What is it?”

“He goes, “Cunt.”

“[audience laughing, wincing]

““But I have to say it. It doesn’t really work if she says it.””

“You know what’s funny about TikTok?

“These kids are like lip-syncing, dancing, pretending they’re in a music video.

“We all did that growing up, didn’t we?

“Yeah! Alone in your room in the mirror, hairbrush. Of course.

“But if anyone had walked in on you doing it, you would’ve killed yourself, right?

“[laughter, applause]

“And these kids are online like, “I hope millions of people see this.”

“It’s like, “You could benefit from some bullying, I think.”

““Might’ve… overcorrected a bit.””

“Like, I know that all of my friends both pity and envy me.

“Just like I know that I both pity and envy them, right?

“I know my friends look at me and go, “I’d probably focus on work if I was all alone.”

“And I go, “I’d probably have a bunch of kids if I had no talent.””

Le jour où la Terre s’arrêta (The Day the Earth Stood Still) (2008) — 6/10

In 1928, an explorer (Keanu Reeves) encounters a glowing sphere. In the present day, a fast-moving object approaches Earth and lands in New York City. Scientists are mobilized from all over America. Among them is Helen Benson (Jennifer Connelly), an expert in exobiology, who is recruited by an old colleague Michael Granier (Jon Hamm). The ship ejects Klatu (Keanu Reeves) and a giant robot that defends him when the first thing that people do is to to shoot Klatu. He recovers.

They begin to interrogate him. The U.S. Secretary of Defense (Kathy Bates) wants to put him in his place when he looks askance at her, telling her she doesn’t speak for the world. He wants to talk to the world.. He has a message for them. He has a message for Earth, for humanity. The planet does not belong to them.

Klatu escapes with Helen. The military attacks the giant robot, which is still standing in Central Park next to the spaceship. As they travel, Helen’s boy says that we should kill all of the aliens, just to be sure. Klatu listens very carefully. He is there to save the Earth from its judgment, rendered by another alliance of aliens. He speaks to an alien (James Hong) who’s lived on the planet for 70 years, who thinks humanity is more destructive than peaceful, that the empathetic strains are too few and too powerless against the mindless violence inherent in the species.

Klatu communes with one of the many alien spheres that appear all over the world. His robot is captured by the U.S. military, but it feels very much like the robot has them right where it wants them. They can’t dig into its carapace. Meanwhile, Helen and Klatu visit with Professor Barnhardt (John Cleese), who tries to bargain with Klatu, saying that it is on the precipice that civilizations learn how to behave themselves.

Her little shit of a kid calls the military on them all, so that the military can kill Klatu—because “that’s what his dad would have done.” The child is insufferable—but I feel like he’s a stand-in for the adolescence of humanity. He gets his mom kidnapped. Klatu crashes the remaining helicopters. The U.S. military, in the person of Kathy Bates, claims that “we have the situation under control.” The shit kid is left with Klatu, and we’re treated to a few painful scene of child-acting. People seem to love that shit.

The robot releases nanobots from its skin that eat into the restraints and will soon free it. The U.S. military—already outmatched by every group of ragtag fighters on the planet—is also outmatched by an incredibly advanced alien technology. The entire robot breaks down into a giant cloud of nanobots. They blow the door down and escape the underground facility. The military shoots its guns and rockets at it. This is a 💯 accurate representation of how the U.S. military would react.

The nanobots-eating-everything effects are pretty good. The Secretary of Defense is forced to let Helen go so that she can try to convince Klatu not to destroy the planet. The child tells Klatu that he didn’t mean it when he said he thought Klatu should be killed. This is a bald-faced lie. The child is the conniving personification of all of humanity. He wants to kill Klatu until he needs Klatu to help him survive the woods. Then, he realizes that he could try to get Klatu to resurrect his father. He is 100% focused on himself. This is fine for a child, but not ok for humanity. This is the reason that humanity deserves to be destroyed. Because it cannot behave in any way other than the self-serving conniving of a child.

There’s a bunch of hugging and crying when Helen and the child reunite, but it convinces Klatu. That whole shitty scene showed the alien that humans can change. Seriously? Hadn’t they actual seen human interactions before? Didn’t he just have a conversation with the old Chinese man about how he’d fallen in love with humanity? Anyway, the nanobots continue streaming over the planet. The U.S. president is probably gonna start nuking stuff. This is also 💯 accurate.

They let Klatu, Helen, and Granier’s car through, but only so they could bomb it. This was definitely counterproductive. The nanobots start attacking the car. They’re in Central Park. The nanobots envelop the sphere. Granier is dead. The fucking child gets infected with nanobots. The number-one priority is now to save the fucking child instead of the planet. Why? Because his mommy asked you to. You know what? That tracks. Klatu absorbs the nanobots into his own human body.

He says, “your professor was right. At the precipice, we change.” Keanu Reeves strides into the nanobot storm with his frail human carapace. He touches the sphere. A shock wave expands outward. An EMP. The nanobots fall like hail. The grid shuts down as the EMP rolls around the planet. Everything is still. This is the price for stopping the attack. This is the change of which Klatu spoke.

I watched it in English with French subtitles.

Here Comes the Boom (2012) — 8/10

Scott Voss (Kevin James) is a shitty biology teacher, who’s skating through his high-school teaching career. He’s kind of friends with music teacher Marty Streb (Henry Winkler). He keeps hitting on nurse Bella Flores (Salma Hayek). He’s at odds with Principal Betcher (Greg Germann), who’s a pencil-necked dick of an administrator. Betcher decides to cut Marty’s job, but Voss jumps up to defend him, promising that he’ll get the $48,000 for Marty’s salary.

He goes to his brother Eric (Gary Valentine), but he’s got no work for him. So he starts teaching a citizenship class. One of his students is Niko (Bas Rutten), whom he starts tutoring. Niko’s a former UFC fighter who runs an MMA school. Voss gets the idea to start fighting UFC to make big money. He tries to quit the teaching the citizenship class.

He gets knocked out in his first fight. His second fight goes better and he gets out with a tie. His wins his third fight in the third round with an out-of-the-blue haymaker. He continues training with Niko, with his corner-man Marty. Niko keeps training him, but can’t teach him offense. He takes him to Mark DellaGrotte for more training. Scott dislocates his shoulder. He goes to Bella’s house for treatment because he can’t afford the hospital. She’s in cute pajama pants, clambers all over him to get leverage, and yanks his arm back into place.

Principal Betcher tries to dress him down, but Voss gets the advantage and gets Malia’s (Jake Zyrus) father (Reggie Lee) on his side. Voss starts teaching for real again. Malia starts tutoring Niko while Voss carries Marty up and down the bleachers. He keeps fighting, winning some, getting better. Joe Rogan’s in the crowd for a cameo. Bella finally agrees to let him cook for her. He gets his brother Eric to cook for him. He’s quite a chef, but he can’t pursue his career because his painting and his big family take all of his time. Bella doesn’t believe that he cooked it, but it doesn’t matter. She doesn’t understand why he gives up in some fights, so he tries to show her an arm-bar, but she punches him in the head, then jumps him and tackles him to the ground. It’s a cute scene, but it ends there. This movie has no right being this genuine.

DellaGrotte tells him that Rogan called to have Voss fight in the UFC. Niko turns it down because he says it’s too dangerous. But when Voss asks him about it, Niko confesses that he’s jealous because he never got his real shot because he messed up his leg. He’s jealous because he’s the same age, but he could kick Voss’s ass. They hug it out, meet with Rogan, and head to Vegas.

Oh, and Voss gets his awesome chef of a brother to help out in Malia’s dad’s restaurant, fixing that problem as well. It’s cliché, but it’s quite well-done. They also do killer montages, with pretty good fight-training choreography. They’re in Vegas. The school band shows up to play his song. Rogan flew them in. Malia’s got pipes.

The fight begins. His opponent Dietrich (Krzysztof Soszynski) is built like a brick shithouse. He doesn’t touch gloves because he doesn’t think Voss deserves to be in the UFC. He was promised a better card. He does some damage in the first round, but Voss survives. The second round doesn’t go better, but Voss survives. Marty gives him a pep talk. Voss comes out swinging, and fights Dietrich to a standstill. They end up clinched; Dietrich gets an arm bar, but Voss reestablishes his grip; Voss picks him up and drops him, knocking him out.

Voss wins. Marty’s job is saved. Bella kisses him. The end.

This movie was so much better than it had any right to be. Hayek, Winkler, James, Rutten, Malia—everyone really shone. It’s surprisingly a solid eight overall, but a nine for its genre. Would watch again.

Bionda Atomica (2017) — 9/10

I stand by my review from 2017. Actually that review is pretty meager, but we’ll let it stand. This movie is visually fantastic, stylish as hell, has fantastic fight choreography, and has a fantastic soundtrack. Charlize Theron is fantastic. So is James McAvoy.

The movie’s set just before the Berlin Wall comes down. It’s directed as about 15 80s music videos.

I watched it in Italian (with some Russian and German) with Italian subtitles this time.

Rick and Morty S07 (2024) — 8/10

1. The first episode is pure fan service. It’s so pure that it must have been done on purpose. It doesn’t make it a good episode, but it’s nice to see them throw away the opening episode being annoyingly meta about fan-service shows. Perhaps I’m being too generous. This one stars Hugh Jackman and brings the whole gang back to party with him: Mr. Poopybutthole, Bird-person, Gearhead, Squanchy, and neighbor Gene (who’s new, I think, but they’re pretending he’s been around forever). It’s supposed to be an intervention for Mr. P, who’s despondent and has been living with the Smiths for months. Not their best episode.
2. The second episode has Rick (Ian Cardoni) try to prove to Jerry (Chris Parnell) that the brain has nothing to do with genius, it’s the mind. He switches their minds into each other’s brains, but then immediately kills himself in Jerry’s body when he realizes how wrong he was—Jerry’s brain is utterly inadequate to hold his mind. He shoots himself in the head. Jerry quickly kills himself in Rick’s body because he can’t control Rick’s Mr. Gadget toys. A robot in Rick’s lab patches them up, but makes them each half-Rick/half-Jerry. They grudgingly, then enthusiastically, become friends. They go on a galaxy-wide crime spree together. This culminates in them turning themselves into a single being called Jerricky. It wants to leave, but Beth (Sarah Chalke) puts her foot down, they separate, and go back to bickering. The fade-out-to-credits scene is on a polaroid of the two, drunk as Lords, with the tag “banned for life from this bar” on it. Sweet.
3. The President (Keith David) is back in this one, typically singularly focused on his own success and fame. Rick indulges him, but draws the line at the President dating his therapist (Susan Sarandon). It turns out that one of Rick’s ex-girlfriends is Unity (Christina Hendricks), a hive-mind who’s taken over Virginia. Rick puts a dome over the state to cut off her control, then has to deal with the President taking over their minds to get a 100% re-election. Rick’s therapist forces Rick to deal with Unity and apologize to her for his shittiness.

4. It’s family-spaghetti night and Rick is serving up what the family is lovin’! Morty ruins it all by finding out that the spaghetti comes from another planet, where people who commit suicide end up filled with tasty bolognese. This makes the family conflicted because, well, it’s still so good. To be honest, they don’t stay conflicted for very long.

   Back on the other planet, Morty reveals to the family of the deceased what they did with their loved one’s body. The president of the planet sees a business opportunity and starts to make their society over to an exporter of bolognese. Of course, they need to promote suicide, so the planet goes right in the shitter so that there is enough supply.

   Rick is engaged to fix all this. He industrializes suicide and ends up breeding clones that have only enough sentience and more than enough misery to be able to kill themselves as soon as they realize what they are. This is sufficient to generate the level of cortisol required to generate the delicious bolognese. The clones have one limb, capable of grasping a pick with which they kill themselves.

   The factory looks very much like a meatpacking plant. The clones look like over-breasted chickens. The message isn’t super-subtle, but it’s devastatingly effective. There is no excuse for eating animals. Eventually, though, the president wants Rick to fix things for good, whereupon he creates an intergalactic broadcast showing the uniqueness, wonder, and humble glory of a life lived well, a life lived by a being. It is so effective that people are put off of eating bolognese-filled aliens.

   The Smiths switch to Salisbury Steaks, but they no longer want to know where it comes from. They’ve learned their lesson. The wrong lesson, as usual, but hey, they’re the mirror that Harmon holds up to the world. It’s a pity that Peter Singer probably doesn’t watch Rick & Morty because he would have been touched, I think.

5. We refresh our memories of Evil Morty’s backstory, how he’d manipulated Rick until he’d retired outside the Central Finite Curve, away from shenanigans. Rick & Morty’s search for Rick Prime disturb him, so he seeks them out to help them end it once and for all, even though he doesn’t really care, one way or the other. They get closer to Rick Prime, until he eventually ends up capturing them, along with a handful of other Ricks. Rick wants revenge for Prime having killed his wife. He finds out that Rick Prime has killed Rick’s wife in all dimensions—and threatens to do the same for all members of Rick’s family. Evil Morty helps Rick thwart Rick Prime—again, not because he cares, but because he just wants this madness to stop, and also because he doesn’t think Rick Prime should have a weapon powerful enough to kill anyone in all universes. He leaves Rick alone with Prime to beat him to a bloody pulp. Rick seems to have lost his purpose now because, duh, he has.
6. Rick is in no mood for adventures, so Morty cashes in his free-adventure-of-choice frequent-adventurer cards. Rick calls bullshit and engages the services of an all-seeing Observer to verify the adventures that Morty is claiming. The Observer ends up being a dick, starts blabbing about everyone in the family, Rick & Morty make up, agree on a price for the punchcards (70¢ on the dollar), and then kill the Observer. The other observers put them on trial, which Rick puts up with for a while until he gets bored, after which he just frees himself and convinces the other Observers to fight and kill each other. This is a fake clip show, chock full of tiny skits that probably made it to paper, but never blossomed into anything that was worth making a part of another show, so they all went into this one.
7. Summer does Rick’s chores, then demands an “attribute slider” as payment. It’s a bracelet that lets her control strength, intelligence, charisma, etc. She’s going to a “frolf” party. At the party, Morty gets jealous because Rick’s never given him something like that—it’s because Rick respects Summer more than Morty, as he’s not shy of saying—so he fights her for it. In their struggle, he jams intelligence up all the way, managing to wrest it from a weakened Summer. He pumps himself up, they struggle, fall into the pool, get struck by lightning, and come out as a Summer/Morty/Quato-style hybrid. Instead of doing more chores for Rick, she takes off for a planet where there’s a club for Quatos that she found on what is I guess the galactic Internet? Anyway, she’s kidnapped, Morty is removed, and prepared to be sold as a Quato for a rich guy. Christ, I don’t know, it’s even weirder than usual, all without being particularly clever—the only callback is to Total Recall. Not a great episode.
8. Water-T (Ice-T) is back in what must be another fan-service episode. It’s a follow-up to Get Schwifty. It’s what looks like a long toy commercial in the style of Transformers and Decepticons, but with Numbers and Letters instead. A bunch of stuff happens, there’s some treachery, some of the visuals are good, but the story is kind of lame. There’s not a lot going on that’s very clever. It’s only callbacks and memberberries all the way down.
9. Rick kills Jerry several times in order to determine the location of the afterlife and that it has an infinite amount of energy. He wants it, of course. But, he has to die first. How can he be guaranteed entry to the afterlife? He travels to Norway with Morty to be killed by Bigfoot (whom he carries in a Pokéball), so that he enters Valhalla. Morty messes up yet again and gets himself killed by Bigfoot, so that he, too, enters Valhalla, where Rick has set up a machine to siphon the power of the Infinite and also has fooled the Viking residents of Valhalla into thinking that he is Odin. Bigfoot escapes, chasing down a feral Rick until the Pope catches Bigfoot and turns him into a holy warrior for the church. Bigfoot is deeply unhappy doing this and eventually teams back up with Rick and Morty. The Pope, in possession of the infinite power of the Afterlife, kills them repeatedly, until Rick figures out how to pull the plug on the power plant he’d set up in Valhalla. Rick traps the Pope in a Pokéball, sets up feral Rick as the new Pope, and drops the Pope into an underground fighting ring.

10. Their adventures having made them jaded and nearly impossible to scare, Rick and Morty are given the chance to face a fear that they can’t just shrug off. It’s a hole located in a Denny’s bathroom. It looks like hole that Rey sees in her Jedi visions, with seaweed-like, black, glistening tentacles rising up around its entire circumference.

    Rick says it’s a gimmick, and walks away. So does Morty at first. He returns nearly immediately to jump in and face his fears. Rick reluctantly follows and rescues him from the monsters there. They emerge, pumped that they’ve faced their fears, and return home. At home, they realize that things are awry, and that they’re still in the hole. After “escaping” once or twice, they’re much more leery about believing that they’ve truly escaped the Fear Hole and walk around on tenterhooks, fully expecting to learn, at any moment, that they’re in a simulacrum constructed by the Fear Hole. They could grow old and die and still not be sure.

    Rick’s dead wife Diane appears and Rick is actually happy. He looks sallow and drained, but he’s happy with Diane. He must suspect that the they’re still in the hole and that it’s feeding on him, but he doesn’t care. After a while, Morty hears Rick say that he thinks that Morty is irreplaceable, which is something that Morty knows Rick would never say. He realizes that, not only are they still in the Fear Hole, but that he’s actually in there alone because Rick had never jumped in after him.

    His true fear is that Rick might leave him. The hole begins to drain Morty. That’s still not his true fear, though. Several times, he thinks he’s figured it out and escaped the Fear Hole, only to realize that he’s still in it. Eventually, it clicks, and he’s out. The Hole works as advertised. Rick is tempted to jump in when he hears that Diane might be in there, but he walks away, pinning a polaroid of Morty on the “Fear Hole Conquerors” pinboard in the bathroom stall. This was a great episode.

Castlevania S03 (2020) — 8/10

This series has its moments, but they’re few and far between at first. It grows on you, though. It’s just right to have running as I’m working out, but I can’t imagine sitting down and just watching this show. It’s extremely slow-paced, to the point of induced ennui. The animation is reasonable to pretty good. Some of the religious, pseudo-philosophical discussions are kind of interesting, if not exactly illuminating. The voice-acting is extremely spotty, with accents tinged from seemingly everywhere.

This season picks up the story immediately after Dracula’s (Graham McTavish) death. There are a few main storylines. A quartet of female vampires—Carmilla (Jaime Murray), Striga (Ivana Milicevic), Morana (Yasmine Al Massri), and Lenore (Jessica Brown Findlay)—have taken over Dracula’s empire and have a “big scheme” to build an 800-mile wide corridor straight from the heart of Europe deep into the East. From this corridor, they’ll feed on both sides and rule forever. Or so the dream goes.

Forgemaster Hector (Theo James) has been imprisoned by them. He spends most of the season naked in a prison cell, being interrogated and tortured by Lenore. They chat a lot. Everyone chats a lot. There’s precious little fighting for long stretches, actually. Another forgemaster Isaac (Adetokumboh M’Cormack) is underway with a complement of night creatures. He charters a vessel from “the Captain” (Lance Reddick – I know! right?), who tries to teach Isaac that, while most people are bastards, there is enough good in humanity to warrant preserving it. If Isaac fulfills Dracula’s plan of eliminating every human, then all of that good would be wiped from the world, as well. They speak of Sufism and Islam.

Alucard is still in the Belmont Hold, not doing much of anything until he catches Sumi (Rila Fukushima) and Taka (Toru Uchikado) following him. They are two vampire-hunters from Japan who seek to destroy their own master Cho, an ancient she-devil of a vampire who’d been called away from her manse to fight by Dracula’s side.

Trevor Belmont (Richard Armitage) and Sypha Belnades (Alejandra Reynoso) have traveled to a village named Lindenfeld, where things are a bit…odd. There they meet Saint Germain (Bill Nighy – I know! right?), who concurs that things are odd, and that all of the oddness is related to the priory. The Judge (Jason Isaacs) concurs and engages their services to investigate. He tells of how a night creature had landed in the priory one night and, instead of killing everyone, had spoken to them in an unknown language. They now guard the place like a prison and no longer allow anyone in or out. Except for Saint Germain, who weasels his way inside to help them gain knowledge from the books that they’ve discarded and disdained as useless.

St. Germain reveals himself to Sypha as a Count, not a magician. He’s gained access to the priory in order to get to the Infinite Corridor, where he says he’d lost a “friend”. A dream of his soon reveals that this friend was a woman and that he’d last seen her in the multi-dimensional maze of the Corridor. She’d thrown him a stone by which he can find her, should he ever gain access again. The Corridor was quite nicely rendered, a bit like Inception, a bit like Dr. Strange. He’s back in the priory, investigating the books. He finds one on demonology; the drawings in it are great.

Isaac treks onward with his pack of night creatures. He discusses the past life of one called Flyseyes.

“Isaac: What do you remember?

“Flyseyes: I was a scholar.

“Isaac: Really?

“Flyseyes: I was. In a place called Athens. I think it was a long time ago.

“Isaac: What did you study?

“Flyseyes: I was a philosopher.

“Isaac: And this was a thing that sent you to Hell?

“Flyseyes: I lived as a man during a time when the empire that ruled Athens changed its religion and laws. I believed philosophy to be the study of the systems of the world and our purpose in it. And yet discussion of the nature of the divine became a crime.

“Isaac: Who declared this a crime?

“Flyseyes: Christians. To be a philosopher was a sin. And one important Christian was heard to say that the people should hunt down sinners and drive them into salvation, as a hunter drives its prey into traps.

“Isaac: To think about God would surely not be a sin in God’s eyes.

“Flyseyes: Perhaps. And yet… here I am.”

St. Germain, Belmont, and Sypha continue to investigate the priory. They find the night creature crucified in a deep basement, but seemingly willingly. It waits for something.

What it’s waiting for is for the town to be filled with the appropriate runes for it to summon a gateway to Hell. While the trio finish battling the monks guarding what’s left of the priory, two giant demons emerge from Hell, with Sypha and Belmont each taking one on. The gain the basement in time to witness the night creature in its final form, channeling fire into the hell-gate to summon thousands of smaller, flying demons. They continue to battle them.

At the same time, Lenore continues her subtle seduction of Hector, gaining enough of his confidence to get him to lay with her. There’s a bit of sexy-time that is absolutely rated-R. Hector is fully in her thrall as he pledges his allegiance to her. She slips a ring on his finger that expands into loops and coils that rise above him—Carnage-like—then plunge down into his flesh.

At the same time, Sumi and Taka have also been running a number on Alucard. They slip into his bedroom and there is more sexy-time—this time definitely rated-R. Alucard cries a bit because he thought he’d never be able to be close to anyone again (I guess). Once he’s been sexually subdued, the two bind him like a Christ figure on his own bed, enveloping him in what looks like silver bands that cut into his skin.

Isaac moves on to a city where a magician has taken over every single person’s mind. Each person wears an emerald crown made of, presumably, magic. Isaac orders his monsters to kill the people, but not to damage or eat them. He wants to build an army of night creatures. The magician in his tower directs his minions, making them fight cleverly enough to start taking out Isaac’s creatures, one by one.

There is attrition on the human side, as well, but they have overwhelming numbers—and fear nothing, as they are mentally dead inside. The magician’s minions have taken to the skies, as giant, clotted balls of people dropping onto his night creatures. Isaac summons a large creature to do battle with the largest ball.

Isaac gains the tower and climbs the spiral staircase inside. It is a long way up. As he climbs, the minions glom onto the sides of the tower, oozing through the windows, impeding his progress. He gains the upper floor to confront the magician. He is an old, crooked-toothed and quite insane-looking old man who chuckles madly, then throws a magic crown onto Isaac’s head. There is a struggle, but Isaac prevails, then crosses the room in several quick strides and guts the old man. His minions fall from the sky like ash.

In the basement of the priory, the night creature, fed by the souls of the townsfolk and transformed into a conduit keeps the Infinite Corridor open onto hell. The camera soars across plains and mountains until it locates a ruined church within which sit Dracula and his wife Lisa.

Belmont, Sypha, and St. Germain do battle with the demons below in an epic boss battle. The choreography and artwork are pretty nice. As Sypha and Belmont make room for him, St. Germain proves his prodigious magical powers by mastering the gate, then leaping on the main demon’s back to force it to redirect the gate—and to keep Dracula and his bride trapped in hell.

They climb back out of the crumbling priory to find that the judge is dead. They discover only later that he had a dark secret—he’d been killing naughty children for their misdeeds in his town. They leave the town in disgust, getting back on the open road, hunting vampires.

Meanwhile, Alucard, seeing that Sumi and Taka are somewhat obsessed with their being constantly betrayed, and are obsessed with getting what they think he’s not giving them—magic and a moving castle—gives them one last chance. Instead, they lean in to stab him, whereupon he mentally manipulates his giant sword—not that one—and slices their throats. After this betrayal, he retreats further into his misery, piking the two bodies outside his front door as a warning to the others.

Turn Up Charlie S01 (2019) — 6/10

Charlie (Idris Elba) is a struggling DJ living in London. He lives with his aunt and Del (Guz Khan) in a house owned by Charlie’s parents. He doesn’t have a steady income, but he pretends to be a successful businessman for his parents. They still live in Nigeria and own a house in London, but ask their successful son if he can spot them some cash for appliances and a new car—otherwise they’ll have to sell the house in London.

At a mutual friend’s wedding, Charlie learns that his childhood bestie David (JJ Feild) is moving back to London. David is wildly successful as a model and a TV/film star and is moving back to London to “tread the boards”. His wife Sara (Piper Perabo) is a major DJ with her own entourage/staff. Their daughter Gabrielle (Frankie Hervey) is a nightmare of a spoiled brat who can’t enjoy anything without someone suffering and has thus been broken utterly by her parents and their wealthy lifestyle.

When David gets a call for a reading, he leaves Gabrielle with Charlie, who’d only met her that day. They hit it off, of course. There is nothing surprising in the banter or behavior, but it’s Idris Elba, so it’s not as painful as it would otherwise be. It’s still kind of painful, though. Since Gabrielle drove off her most-recent nanny in a horrible incident, Sara and David hire Charlie as a nanny.

Charlie’s first official day as a nanny doesn’t go that well, as Gabriella is completely uncontrollable and demands attention from her parents, who are not able to give it. She connives her way to a club where he mother is performing, then sprays the crowd with a fire extinguisher when her mother doesn’t let her on stage, as she usual did. Charlie is helpless to stop her. David is livid, but he’s also pretty powerless. Charlie takes her to his Aunt Lydia’s (Jocelyn Jee Esien) for dinner, where the child is so rude that Auntie Lydia wanted to kill her.

Gabriella’s first day of school also goes terribly, with her completely unequipped to make actual friends rather than gather minions. She’s upset because her mother is working and doesn’t have time to take her to school. Instead, her father does it. The child has no empathy and can be said to be sociopathic and no fun to be around. People shy away from her, if not immediately, then after an initial interaction. There are a lot of other sociopaths at the school who are more than her match. She ends the day in the principal’s office, having a panic attack.

Neither of her parents answer the phone, so Charlie is called to pick her up. He was working in a community garden for Auntie Lydia. He brings her back there and the child expresses some contrition and seems to sincerely apologize for her behavior. Her parents immediately take her bowling and beg Charlie to come back, to take the job again. David and Charlie make up, as Charlie was mad at David for the things he’d told Gabriella, who had hatefully and hurtfully repeated them to Charlie.

Charlie patches things up because (A) he needs a job and (B) he wants to kick-start his career with the help of Sara’s studio, reputation, and chops. Sara is a supreme dipshit. Poor Piper Perabo kind of has the perfect what-people-are-supposed-to-think-is-hot vacuity for being a dumb-ass DJ, with dumb-ass, vapid friends. David is honestly no better—just an empty vessel. I can’t tell whether they mean for us to like them, despite their flaws, or to see their flaws as a condemnation of a society that would allow people like this to bubble to the top of it. Gabriella is just as terrible as ever, just bizarrely obnoxious and mean and petty all of the time. Her dialogue is like one, long esprit d’escalier by a roomful of writer nerds who never had the bon mot they needed when they were younger.

Gabriella sneaks out while Charlie’s working on his new song in the studio. One of Sara’s skank friends slithers by with an open robe and joint and his afternoon’s gone. Gabriella gets home with Hunter, her little, gay, criminal friend, to catch him in the sauna. She doesn’t care, though. They agree to defend each other’s secrets. Sara listens to Charlie’s song and approves.

David confides in Charlie that he’s got a great movie gig lined up, but he’s going to have to be away from home again. Charlie advises against it, as David needs to spend time with his daughter. David pretends that he needs to take the huge, million-dollar role in order to put food on the table, but Charlie rolls his eyes—he knows he’s just doing it for himself because he’s only mediocre at acting in the theater. David and Sara are already obscenely rich—especially for such a young couple—that neither of them needs to work a day in their lives again.

Charlie and Sara get to know each other better and grow closer during collaboration. David has a day with Gabriella, but she has her first period that day, throwing a bit of a spanner in the works. Sara treats David pretty poorly there, but maybe she has her reasons. He’s a bit of an idiot. Plus, they apparently cheated on each other already. I wasn’t really following all of it, if I’m honest. The setup of that backstory was ham-handed and awkward.

At any rate, David takes the movie role and jets off to Hollywood, leaving Sara, Gabriella, and Charlie to enjoy the summer in London. They go to a music festival, where Gabriella and Hunter (Cameron James-King) take off, leading Sara on a merry chase. She starts to panic, though, and then Gabriella really goes missing, losing her phone in a dancing crowd. Charlie knows where to find her, though, and he’s everyone’s hero. Sara plays her secret concert and premieres the song that she and Charlie had been working on. Sara’s manager Astrid’s (Angela Griffin) been banging him, but it’s pretty clear that Sara is seeing him as a “David substitute”, as is Gabriella, who just comes right out and says it. Charlie is smart enough to back off and books himself to Ibiza with a sleazy promoter.

Charlie’s in Ibiza, falling into his old habits: drinking, drugs, up all night, not working on his music, being shitty to the people around him, letting his giant ego get the best of him. He peaks early with his song, but without another song to back it up, fades from the Ibiza scene, then crashes out and has to work his way back up again, when he’s found humility and his creative muse again. Sara and Gabriella surprise him at a show, David having abandoned David them for a mind-cleansing retreat in LA. It’s not clear what there’s left to cleanse there.

Astrid is there, as well, offering to take Charlie on full-time—because she’s fallen for him and she’s bored with Sara’s devotion to family. She wants to party. She gets Charlie a great gig, but Charlie’s leery, aware that he could fall back into his old ways if he sticks with her. Sara is definitely sending all of the signals his way as well, but that also doesn’t seem like the greatest idea in the world. Charlie and Gabriella are getting along well, though.

So, instead of sleeping or working on his music, Charlie spends the entire night partying with Sara. They fall asleep on each other, drunk and high, on some patio furniture, after a racy game of FMK (Fuck, Marry, Kill). David surprises them the next morning, showing up from LA with flowers and …. a wedding proposal. Sara is less-than-thrilled, seeing the wedding proposal for the manipulation that it is when David lets the other shoe drop: he wants to move the family to South Africa, where he’s going to shoot his next movie. Sara is not having it, not ready to uproot Gabriella again.

David notices that Sara is infatuated with Charlie and throws out an ill-timed and unsuccessful ultimatum. David gets made at Charlie, but Charlie shrugs it off. Gabriella and Hunter bail. Astrid puts herself in the center of the show, making it clear for the hundredth time that all she cares about are partying, drugs, and sex—managing DJs is just a way of staying in that lifestyle. Charlie’s still got his gig—and Astrid’s offer still stands. David and Sara break up. Gabriella wants to stay in London. She confesses to Hunter that she wants Charlie to stay with them, not to travel the world. He tells her to go tell Charlie that.

At the show, Charlie’s crushing it, living the lifestyle. He confirms to Astrid that they should work together. Gabriella and Charlie chat a bit, but she can’t bring herself to tell him. She doesn’t want him to give up his dreams for her, I guess? Maybe? Or maybe he decides to stay, knowing why she’s there? We’ll never know. The show ended in ambiguity—and that’s probably the deftest move it made all season. This was a show with some good actors—Idris Elba, Guz Khan, and Jocelyn Jee Esien were quite good—but also depicted a world full of superficial, mostly terrible people. Eight episodes is a lot to be watching people like that. And Gabriella was annoying for the first 6.5 episodes, at least.