Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2024.05

Read the explanation of method, madness, and spoilers.[1]

1. How it Ends (2018) — 5/10
2. Castlevania S04 (2021) — 8/10
3. Paddleton (2019) — 8/10
4. Star Trek: Nemesis (2002) — 7/10
5. The Curse S01 (2023) — 5/10
6. Death Note (2017) — 5/10
7. Licorice Pizza (2021) — 5/10
8. A Series of Unfortunate Events S01–S03 (2017–2019) — 7/10
9. Long Shot (2019) — 9/10
10. Dune (2021) — 8/10

How it Ends (2018) — 5/10

Will Younger (Theo James) and Samantha Sutherland (Kat Graham) are expecting. Her parents know that they’re together, but they don’t know that they’re pregnant. Will travels to Chicago to have dinner with her parents Paula (Nicole Ari Parker) and Tom (Forest Whitaker). Tom is a dismissive hard-ass, a control-freak Marine with 27 years of service. They’re apparently also wealthy, so they’re of course entitled to be shitty to everyone, including their future son-in-law.

Before Will flies back, he’s on the phone with Sam and she cuts out. She can only say that something is happening, but she doesn’t have time to say what. She’s scared. She cuts out. It’s not just her. There is no communication at all with the west coast. Will can’t fly back to Seattle because nothing is flying. The electricity is out in Chicago as well. F22s soar by. He returns to Tom and Paula’s apartment to find Tom packing for a cross-country ride to find his daughter. Is will coming?

It’s an uncomfortable ride because Tom doesn’t respect Will at all. They stop for gas. Tom has to defend Will from getting mugged by a bunch of drifters. Tom’s respect hasn’t risen. Soon, though, their way is blocked They get on the wrong side of a cop who turns out to be an escaped inmate. He tries to pull them over and take them down, but they get the jump on him. Tom breaks a rib They get away with both cars, pulling in to a small group of houses with a garage on a reservation. There they meet mechanic Ricki (Grace Dove) who fixes their radiator but has questions about all of the bullet holes. They convince her that they’re not dangerous and she accompanies them to the west coast for $2,000, promising to help fix their car if they need it.

They make their way west, restocking as needed, but get jumped by another group, which steals all of their gas. They give chase. Will hunts them down, with Ricky riding shotgun and firing the pistol out the window. Tom is not doing well. The earlier car crash punctured his lung; his breathing is labored and he’s weak. He couldn’t raise his arm to shoot the interlopers. Ricky’s shooting causes the other car to flip. She and Will race over to rescue…the fuel canisters and, maybe, also the people. Nope, it’s gonna just be the fuel canisters. Boom.

Ricky is torn up about the people she’s killed. Toward dawn, she demands that they pull over. She wretches by the side of the road, curses at them, curses at herself, then moves down the road a piece to be away from them. They all fall asleep. Later that morning, they wake to find Ricky gone. Tom is drifting in and out. He and Will finally connect, revealing their secrets. Tom’s breathing grows worse and he pulls out a medical stent that Will has to plunge into his lung to release the pressure.

They drive on. In the middle of the next night, they cross a bridge and are ambushed by a local, self-elected constabulary. Will exhibits no small amount of savoir faire, executing not one, but two J-turns on a narrow bridge. Tom is pleased that this man will be able to take care of his daughter for him. He helps Will one last time by shooting several of the interlopers out the rear, passenger-side window, then succumbs to his condition and dies in the back of the car. When the car runs out of gas, Will uses the dregs from one canister to douse it and give Tom a funeral pyre.

He walks westward. A truck stops. A man with wife and child. He agrees to take Will northward, but not necessarily further west. Will shows them where his father lives. Well, lived—there’s no-one home. They rest and there’s food for a few weeks. Will makes them a deal: they get the house, the food, and the car in the garage if you can take their truck immediately and continue west. Deal.

He keeps driving, without further incident, until he gets to Seattle. There, the air is thick with ash, too thick to breathe. He finds a mask in an abandoned fire truck and continues onward, toward the city, where he finds his old apartment. There’s a location and a message for him scrawled on the door. Sam is alive.

He drives to where she indicated—no idea how he did that, as GPS has been dead for nearly a week—and finds her holed up with their former neighbor Jeremiah (Mark O’Brien). The guy acts a bit weird, though. He’s obviously highly paranoid, is strongly convinced of the veracity of far-fetched and completely evidence-free, unprovable, and, frankly, irrelevant theories about what’s happened, and he’s in love with Sam. He asks to see Will’s weapon—a Sig Sauer. Will hands it. The clip is empty.

The next morning Jeremiah leads Will into the woods, pretending that he’d seen two kids run into them after having seen them sneaking around Will’s truck. They see two deer running, giving Jeremiah an excuse to pull his own weapon. Will says “You don’t have to do this.” Jeremiah turns on him; Will calmly shoots him in the head. He’d fooled Jeremiah into thinking he had no bullets. His father-in-law must have been smiling from beyond the grave.

More ash is starting to fall. Will races back to the house to gather up Sam and get the hell out of there. “Where’s Jeremiah?” “He tried to kill me.” The pyroclastic cloud rumbles closer as they race up a dirt road, just escaping its clutches as it seems to be subsiding. The end.

No closure on what caused the volcanic eruptions, no closure on why the power went out everywhere. No closure really at all. It’s not the ending that ruins it, though. It’s the half-assed story that meanders and seems to be designed to be made cheaply as a film. Most of the film takes place in a Buick. The most expensive part of the movie was probably Forest Whitaker, which is why I bumped the rating a star. Theo James wasn’t bad, either.

Castlevania S04 (2021) — 8/10

This season picks up with a long segment of Sypha and Belmont battling increasingly recalcitrant and resistant Dracula-worshippers, all of whom seem to be trying whatever means they can to try to bring Dracula back from the dead. None of the methods have a chance of being effective yet, but it’s possibly only a matter of time. They finally end up in Târgoviște, where they defeat yet another band of vampire-worshipers. They are exhausted and need to regroup for a day or two. Belmont surreptitiously slides a magical dagger into his sleeve.

Meanwhile, Alucard is drinking himself into a stupor every night, and has added to his collection of piked corpses outside his front door. One morning, a horse with a dead rider arrives at his steps. The card on the rider says that the village from which the rider came needs his help. Strangely, he feel the urge to help, “like a Belmont.”

The season cleans up all of the loose ends, with some well-choreographed and spectacular battles. What happens? Hector traps Lenore, thwarting the slave ring. Isaac attacks Carmela’s castle, conquering it with his night creatures. Carmela falls in battle. Lenore remains trapped with Hector in what is now Isaac’s castle.

“Lenore: As a quartet, my sisters and I had strength. The strength to enforce a stable environment. Strength can fight a war, yes, but it can also build a shelter. Are you following me?
Hector: Just bumping into things along the way. Small shapes are stronger than big ones, Lenore. Carmilla wanted more than a weatherproof shelter.
Lenore: In the end. But it all came from that virtue, do you see?
Hector: Strength and power are different. You wanted strength. Carmilla wanted power.
Lenore: In the end, yes. That’s what it turned into. Which is what ruined my life. Power. Big, international, non-diplomatic, projected power is something else. It lends you more might, but it doesn’t have the utilities of strength. It lays eggs in you. It becomes a parasite you have to feed. Power does nothing but eat.
Hector: Like a vampire.
Lenore: Like a vampire.”

She eventually walks out to greet the sunrise, obtaining freedom.

In another thread, Alucard has teamed up with villagers, hosting them in his home. The demons chasing them seek them out there and he fights a losing battle to defend the castle. At the same time, Saint Germain has revealed himself to a right bastard, hell-bent not only on reuniting with his lady love, but also with transforming Dracula and his wife into some sort of hermaphroditic hybrid that will be so enraged at its condition that it will kill all of humanity.

Using the power of these corpses, St. Germain will be able to open the Infinite Corridor and finally find his lady love, who he’d lost there so long ago. Whoops, it turns out that his partner-in-crime is actually Death-with-a-capital-D, who’s also very interested in lots of dead things and takes over the whole show.

After Syphy, Alucard, and Belmont do battle with Death for a while, Belmont pulls out some special weapons he’d cobbled together from magical pieces he’d cobbled together from some crypts somewhere and then engages Death in a Kratos-from-God-of-War-style, battle-with-a-Colossus in which he eventually not only triumphs against Death, but is also whisked away via the Infinite Corridor by St. Germain in his final gesture before Death takes him too. Dracula and his wife are also defeated i.e., not even allowed to fully form.

They’re all happy and safe and sound at Alucard’s castle, where they start to found a new village. The end.

Castlevania Finale

Paddleton (2019) — 8/10

Michael (Mark Duplass) and Andy (Ray Romano) are neighbors. Andy lives above Michael. They play a game called Paddleton together, seemingly every day. It involves tennis balls, a filthy barrel, and the back of a drive-in-movie-theater screen. It doesn’t really matter. They play Trivial Pursuit, too. They watch the same kung-fu movie again and again.

Michael has cancer. It’s terminal. Andy’s OCD isn’t really built for these situations. Michael says that, since he has to little time to live, he can get a prescription for life-ending medication. They have to drive six hours to get it. I wondered how real this was and learned from the article This New Netflix Dramedy Was Almost Entirely Improvised by Angelica Florio (Bustle)

“This type of medical care, in which a medical professional prescribes a lethal dose of a medication to a terminally ill patient, is legal in Washington D.C., Hawaii, Oregon, Colorado, Vermont and Washington state, and as of June 2018, it’s legal in California — though litigation challenging the law is currently underway, CNN reports. Since Paddleton is set in California, it’s not a far-reaching plot.”

They end up in a sleepy little town with a lot of windmills. They pick up the medication and check in to a motel, where they are mistaken for a gay couple. They’re definitely a couple. They’re just not gay.

Andy buys a mini-safe, purportedly to protect the expensive medication from being stolen, but really because he wants to somehow prevent Michael from using it to kill himself. Andy and Michael go to an open-mic night, they sneak into the motel’s jacuzzi, meet the motel owner, who hits on them more than a little bit, then make their way back home.

Michael deteriorates. Andy helps him prepare his “medication”. Michael takes the does. Andy watches over him. Michael panics, but Andy reassures him. They truly are best friends, platonic lovers even. It’s pretty heartwarming. Andy is cast adrift without his friend, but he rallies in the end, befriending his new neighbor and her teenage son. It’s a needlessly mawkish ending, but the movie was never going to know how to end itself. Which is kind of ironic, considering the subject.

I gave it an extra star because both leads were very good.

Star Trek: Nemesis (2002) — 7/10

Captain Picard (Patrick Stewart) is the best man at First Officer Riker’s (Jonathan Frakes) and Counselor Deanna Troi (Marina Sirtis) wedding. They embark on a trip to the Beta home world, where Deanna is from. On the way, they stop at a planet where they’d picked up positronic signals—indicating an android like Data (Brent Spiner). Worf (Michael Dorn) collects the parts of an older model B-4.

They move on to the planet Remus, where they meet a clone of Picard, Shinzon (Tom Hardy), who is trying to break the Romulan/Human peace. He schemes with Donatra (Dina Meyer) and his Viceroy (Ron Perlman). Shinzon meets with Picard and tells his tale. It sounds remarkably like that of Bane, whom Hardy also played in The Dark Knight. Shinzon now sees himself as the savior of the Remun race, releasing them from the subjugation of both the Romulans and the Humans.

Shinzon takes Picard captive, using B-4 as a decoy. But Picard uses Data as a decoy for B-4 and escapes into Shinzon’s ship. The jig is up pretty quickly, with a whole platoon of Remuns converging on Picard, who’s shootin’ ‘em up like he was in a Star Wars movie, while Data tries to decode the security system so that they can break into a hangar. They get into a ship, then realize that they have to fly through its corridors like they were in Descent to get to a what looks for all the world like a stained-glass window and escape back to the Enterprise.

Shinzon gives chase to the Enterprise, which tries to escape the Neutral Zone. Data and Picard discuss what it means to be a conscious being, to be a consciousness that strives to be better than it was. Data compares B-4 to Shinzon, as clones that have no aspiration to be better, that they are different, despite being copies, as experience contributes to uniqueness and personality.

Shinzon catches up to them, disabling the Enterprise’s shields and engines to disable it without destroying it. Shinzon’s ship the Scimitar is too strong for them. Picard confronts Shinzon’s hologram—they part ways inamicably. Romulan ships show up with Donatra in charge—she claims to be there to support the Enterprise in its battle against the Scimitar. She’s in pursuit of the Scimitar, when Shinzon pulls a “Maverick”, stopping dead and then strafing the Romulan ship when it shoots past them.

Shinzon is suffering badly from his genetic disease—the one for which he needs Picard’s blood to survive. Data Troi mind-melds with Shinzon’s Viceroy to locate the cloaked ship. Picard fires all banks on the ship. Now both the Enterprise and the Scimitar are listing heavily. Shinzon’s Viceroy beams aboard the Enterprise with a platoon. Riker and Worf take care of them. Riker drops down a laundry chute to chase the Viceroy.

Meanwhile, Shinzon blasts a hole in the bridge, causing some of the crew to be sucked into space before an emergency patch drops in place. The bridge is blown to bits, with debris everywhere—great practical effects—before Shinzon drops in front of the new “screen”. They chit-chat, but Picard cuts him off, moving to ramming speed. There are more great practical effects, showing the Enterprise slicing nearly effortlessly into the Scimitar, taking nearly no damage itself.

Shinzon reverses to disentangle the ships. The Viceroy and Riker continue to fight belowdecks, with Riker getting the advantage and dropping the Viceroy into a pit. The ships grind apart, with Enterprise showing a good deal of damage as well. Picard orders an auto-destruct, but that system is offline. Shinzon is looking much the worse for wear, veins sticking out everywhere, his eyes reddened. He orders a highly destructive weapon deployed to eradicate the Enterprise before they continue to Earth.

Picard beams over to the Scimitar. Data follows by jumping there (because the transporter breaks down immediately after). Picard blows away all opposition, sidelining even Shinzon. He’s near the weapon. The weapon is deploying and it’s pretty awesome. Shinzon has a lot of knives stowed in his suit of armor. Picard finally bests Shinzon, who was really not looking good—although the practical effects on his makeup were great. Data shows up in time to stop the firing sequence. He sends the captain back before annihilating himself in the self-destruction of the weapon.

The Romulans are now a staunch ally. The Enterprise is in a repair bay. Riker has been given his own command. Picard has reawakened B-4 in the hopes of resurrecting his lost friend. “♪ Never saw the sun shining so bright… ♪”

The Curse S01 (2023) — 5/10

Whitney (Emma Stone) and Asher Siegel (Nathan Fielder) have been married for a year. They’re making a reality show about their amazing, selfless efforts to bring affordable, eco-friendly housing to Española. Their director Dougie Schecter (Benny Safdie) is even scummier than they are, although none of them think they’re scummy.

Asher is worse than Whitney is. Whitney was raised rich. Her parents Elizabeth (Constance Shulman) and Paul (Corbin Bernsen) are slumlords, whom Whitney is trying to disassociate herself from, at least publicly. Asher gives a little girl $100, then takes it back from her. She curses him. Her father Abshir (Barkhad Abdi) collects his kids and leaves.

My partner and I watched the first show and a half, but stopped because the characters are really painfully insufferable. Since we’re lucky enough not to have any association with the shows and people that this show is making fun of, it was just painful to watch. Maybe there’s a good punchline—or some good comeuppance—waiting somewhere in the season, but I can’t be bothered. I only got one recommendation for this—from an Emma Stone fangirl—but I’ll wait for another recommendation to give this another try.

Death Note (2017) — 5/10

This is the story of a high-schooler named Light Turner (Nat Wolff) who finds a book with the words “Death Note” on the cover. It’s a supernatural book that has a bunch of rules, but essentially grants the holder the power to have anyone killed in whatever manner they choose, within certain physical and temporal constraints. Also, you have to know the name of the person to kill. He takes out his first few victims, getting the attention of the weird/hot girl at school Mia Sutton (Margaret Qualley). She quickly gloms onto him, sharing in his powers, helping him choose victims.

Nat’s father James (Shea Whigham) is a cop who’s looking for the mysterious killer that’s been taking people out so publicly—and in such strange and improbable ways. The book comes with its own demon Ryuk (Jason Liles; voiced by Willem Dafoe) who encourages more and more mayhem. A mysterious detective named L (LaKeith Stanfield) arrives on the scene to make predictions about the mysterious killer is making things happen. I really almost never like LaKeith Stanfield in anything. He just rubs me the wrong way.

L figures out that Light is the killer, but he can’t even come close to proving it. Light starts to regret what’s happening, while Mia is just getting warmed up. They start to try to find out L’s real name—so that they can kill him. They dig up his weird, orphaned past, with the help of Watari (Paul Nakauchi), who’s enslaved to them through the book. Mia somehow gets control of the book—which allows her to blackmail Light into letting her have control of the book? This part made no sense within the rules laid out in the film. Light turns the tables on Mia by sealing her fate if she tries to seize the book. She falls out of the ferris wheel.

Light also falls out of the ferris wheel, but he had used the Death Note to arrange to have his body recovered. His father eventually deduces that he was the killer—he’d named himself Kira—and asks him why he did what he did. Light mumbles something.

Look, this was kind of fun, but it was ultimately disappointing. I watched it while riding the indoor bike. I was drawn in by Willem Dafoe’s excellent voice-acting as Ryuk. I also quite like Margaret Qualley since seeing her in The Leftovers, but she was much less here than she’d been there, unfortunately.

Licorice Pizza (2021) — 5/10

I ordinarily like Paul Thomas Anderson—Boogie Nights, There Will Be Blood, Inherent Vice, The Master, Magnolia—but I just could not get into this one. It was just kind of dumb and bubbly. This is the story of 15-year-old aspiring actor Gary Valentine (Cooper Hoffman). who’s in love with/in a complicated relationship with 25-year-old Alana Kane (Alana Haim). Gary and his friends are hustlers. They are always working hard to make their money, filming, acting, starting schemes and scams, eventually opening a waterbed store.

Tom Waits, Bennie Safdie, Sean Penn, and Bradley Cooper have cameos or minor-to-medium-sized roles, but it all seems a little forced. I ended up kind of liking Gary—he reminded me a bit of an old friend from high school—but I didn’t like Alana very much. There just wasn’t very much to her character. She fought with her family, who thought her lazy—but she was lazy!

Alana starts working for a local congressman, but he’s not interested in her that way, so she quickly loses interest. Gary opens an arcade. After fucking around some more, Alana eventually returns to the arcade and professes her love for Gary, but I’d long since given up caring even one bit. Please just watch any other Paul Thomas Anderson movie.

A Series of Unfortunate Events S01–S03 (2017–2019) — 7/10

This series is quite educational for older children and younger teens—or for anyone who wants to learn new words and get some exposure to literary references. While the pacing is quite slow—it’s for kids—it’s entertaining enough and has enough top-shelf acting to keep it interesting, even for jaded adults.

Count Olaf (Neil Patrick Harris) is fantastic. He’s the nemesis of the children, focused laser-like on getting the children’s fortune. The child actors grow on you. The baby Sunny (Presley Smith) is quite good, if I’m honest. Klaus (Louis Hynes) and Violet (Malina Pauli Weissman) are OK, but a good deal more wooden. Violet always looks like she’s going to cry. Lemony Snicket (Patrick Warburton) narrates all shows in all three seasons. His brother Jaques (Nathan Fillion) is around for a while, until he’s not. Arthur Poe (K. Todd Freeman) is the useless banker in charge of the children’s well-being.

Count Olaf has an acting troupe, composed of Hook-handed Man (Usman Ally), Esmé Squalor (Lucy Punch), and several other wacky and childishly evil members. They don’t ever really hurt the kids but they do kill other people along the way. There is an organization to which the children’s parents (Will Arnett, Cobie Smulders) belonged—and to which many other people they meet along the way also belong. There are other bit characters along the way, played by Aasif Mandvi, Catherine O’Hara, Joan Cusack

I started collecting literary references, like mysterious cabinet at the Caligari Circus referring to the The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, a German film from 1920, or the chant of the freaks at that circus being similar—and occasionally the same as—that of the freaks in the movie Freaks, from 1932. There are many, many more, often repeated—for educational purposes.

It’s entertaining enough, but drags on a bit for my age and education. For kids, though? Top-notch, I think. It’s the kind of thing that I would have devoured at 10 or 11 and memorized all of it.

Long Shot (2019) — 9/10

Charlotte Field (Charlize Theron) is running for president, after having served ably as Vice President for the current President Chambers (Bob Odenkirk), who’s a former actor who can only think of returning to acting.

Fred Flarsky (Seth Rogen) went to school with her many, many years ago. He’s a journalist. He’s a real journalist. He tells it like it is. He takes the tough stories. He’s being hounded out of the journalism business by new owner and billionaire Parker Wembley (Andy Serkis), who’s also working to bend Field’s program to better suit his needs.

Field hires Flarsky as her speechwriter and he does a pretty good job, although her campaign manager Maggie Millikon (June Diane Raphael) is more interested in getting Field elected in any way possible than with any sort of principles or dignity. Field and Flarsky grow close and, during an attack with actual gunfire, they ride the adrenalin to hop into bed together. There are no regrets; they build a relationship. Fred’s best friend Lance (O’Shea Jackson Jr.) is delighted for him and there for him to support in any way he possibly can.

She is not allowed to date him because he’s not the kind of person that someone as glamorous and beautiful as Field is supposed to be dating. Maggie especially is adamant that they cannot be seen together. Instead she pushes James Steward, the Prime Minister of Canada (Alexander Skarsgård) as an alternative. Parker gives an assist by hacking Fred’s webcam and recording everything he does on his computer—including a masturbation scene that both Field and Flarsky take reasonably well in stride.

Fred refuses to change his image and ends up breaking up with Field. Lance calls him an idiot and tells him that he constantly self-sabotages with his utter unwillingness to listen to any opposing views. He’s right a lot, but he doesn’t acknowledge that other people might be right as well. Lance comes out to his friend as a Republican and a Christian, just to show Fred how terrible he is at judging people. His best friend is two things that Fred claims he can’t stand. Maybe he’s wrong about other things?

Field reneges on her original plan and just comes clean—no pun intended—to the country in a speech, airing not only the content of the video, but also Parker’s involvement in releasing it. She introduces Fred as her lover and partner. They marry during her campaign, she wins the presidency, and we’re treated to a bit of the “first mister” going about his day.

Theron and Rogen have quite a bit of believable on-screen chemistry. They’re both very funny and their characters aren’t caricatures. I thoroughly enjoyed this movie and would watch it again.

I watched it in German.

Dune (2021) — 8/10

My review from 2022 stands.