Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2024.09

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

1. American Gods S03 (2021) — 8/10
2. 47 Rōnin (2013) — 7/10
3. The Highwaymen (2019) — 8/10
4. World War Z (2013) — 7/10
5. Seven Pounds (2008) — 7/10
6. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) — 9/10
7. Star Wars: Le Réveil de la Force (2015) — 10/10
8. PBS American Experience S36E04 − Poisoned Ground: The Tragedy at Love Canal (2024) – 8/10
9. Living with Yourself (2019) — 7/10
10. 6 Balloons (2018) — 9/10

American Gods S03 (2021) — 8/10

Note 📝: I watched this sometime in 2022 but somehow failed to write anything for it. I only realized it when I tried to link it from The Sandman review. See reviews of S01, S02.

Shadow (Ricky Whittle) is moving to Lakeside, a town in Minnesota that has some odd traditions—and seems to be an old place, associated with old gods. Laura Moon (Emily Browning) disintegrates herself while trying to resurrect Mad Sweeney (Pablo Schreiber). Wednesday (Ian McShane) continues to machinate, trying to collect support for his side in the war against the new gods. In particular, he is actively recruiting Demeter (Blythe Danner).

Laura, meanwhile, continues to be her insufferable self as she enters Purgatory, trying to redeem herself so that she can return to the world of the living, again. Bilquis (Yetide Badaki) goes through tribulations, fighting with Technical Boy (Bruce Langley), who’s feuding with Mr. World (Crispin Glover/Danny Trejo) / Ms. World (Dominique Jackson). While Shadow is trying to figure out what’s going on in Lakeside, Laura is sneaking her way back to the real world, getting the spear of Gungnir with the help of Mr. World. The whole part where she learns to throw it is wildly unbelievable. I mean, more so than her having come back from the dead two times already.

Shadow, Tyr (Denis O’Hare), and Wednesday are in some sort of intrigue where Tyr is trying to setting old debts with Wednesday. It doesn’t work, with Wednesday emerging triumphant and Shadow being freed of his remaining debt to Wednesday for his help. Meanwhile, the new Gods are launching some sort of hyper-propaganda, social-media campaign to consolidate their power over the old Gods, who will wither from lack of fealty and attention.

Laura kills Wednesday with the spear. The new Gods are ascendant. Mr. World, however, is not a new God. He seems to be an old God, masquerading for the new Gods, and manipulating them into killing Wednesday. Wednesday is dead, but he has, in turn, manipulated Shadow into holding a nine-day vigil while tied to the magical tree Yggdrasil, during which Shadow’s demi-God power is transferred back to Wednesday for his triumphant return.

There is a lot of rich detail and history woven throughout the show that absolutely drives the plot but that is nearly overwhelming to document. See the Wikipedia page for more details. As with the first two seasons, the directing and visuals are lush and convincing—CGI-driven but not obviously so. I really enjoyed this series overall. The story, acting, and direction were consistently top-notch and interesting.

47 Rōnin (2013) — 7/10

This movie was surprisingly supernatural. I thought it was going to be a much more straightforward samurai film but it featured fantastical beasts, witches, and good/evil spirits in non-metaphorical ways. The story is based on a popular and well-known event in very early 18th-century Japanese history called Shijūshichishi. There are several fictionalizations of this story; this is one of them. There have been two Japanese films based on the story, one from 1941 and one from 1994.

Kai (Keanu Reeves) is an at-least semi-supernatural being who’d been raised in a bamboo forest by monk-spirits before being found by a samurai who adopted him. He is raised alongside Oishi (Hiroyuki Sanada) by adoptive father Lord Asano (Min Tanaka). We see them hunting a fantastical beast that almost gets the better of the hunting party until Kai uses Oishi’s sword to defeat it, saving both Oishi and Asano. Because of societal structure, Kai is forced to apologize and is further ostracized for having made them look weak.

Kai falls in love with Asano’s daughter Mika (Kô Shibasaki) and she falls in love with him. Their budding relationship has no chance, of course.

Lord Yoshinaka Kira (Tadanobu Asano) rides in to take Asano’s kingdom, aided by his witch consort and advisor Mizuki (Rinko Kikuchi), who weaves powerful magic. Her tricks are enough to convince Asano to not only give up his kingdom but to ritually kill himself for a perceived offense that was manufactured by the witch. There is a duel where Kai is outed as a non-samurai who’d taken over the duties of warrior from Oishi who’d been bewitched into incapacity.

Oishi is sent to prison, Kai is sold into slavery, and Mika is given a one-year mourning period before she will be forced to marry Lord Kira. After one year, Oishi is released and he seeks out Kai, as well as Asano’s other former samurai, becoming the 47 rōnin. Kai eventually leads them back into the magical forest where he’d been raised. He wants to obtain special swords from his old masters. He and Oishi master the tasks set to them and the whole crew leaves with new swords.

They aren’t so good at planning, though, so they end being lured into an ambush while trying to attack Lord Kira. Half of the rōnin are eliminated in a fiery slaughter. Kira and Mizuki think that Oishi and Kai have been eliminated, convincing Mika of the same. With only half of the rōnin, they now have a better chance? They sneak into the wedding celebration of Mika and Kira, with Oishi triumphing over Kira and Kai defeating a now dragon-shaped Mizuki by using his Tengu magic.

As a reward, the remaining rōnin are allowed to ritually kill themselves with seppuku, pardoning only Oishi’s son Chikara. Everyone else is dead. The end.

The Highwaymen (2019) — 8/10

This is the true story of the trapping and killing of Bonnie and Clyde, in which a two-year rampage of death and robbery was brought to a bloody end. We do not see Bonnie and Clyde until the very final scene, and then, only for a few seconds before they are riddled with bullets.

Frank Hamer (Kevin Costner) and Maney Gault (Woody Harrelson) are two old-school Texas Rangers. They built a tremendous reputation in the days when they still rode horses and have long since retired, Hamer to a fancy estate owned by his wife Gladys (Kim Dickens), while Gault is a recovering alcoholic in his small, country-plains home. Hamer convinces Gault to come back.

As they get to work, on a contract from the venal and self-serving governor of Texas Ma Ferguson (Kathy Bates), the budding FBI and other law-enforcement agencies disparage the old Rangers’ methods, preferring to throw their prodigious resources to cordons and surveillance that are easily avoided and yield no results.

Bonnie and Clyde wouldn’t have survived on the lam as long as they did without the help of so many star-struck citizens. These people can’t be blamed too much for ignoring the bloodthirsty nature of their heroes because they were all simultaneously in the throes of a crushing depression. Their nation’s solutions—then as now—tended to protect existing wealth and let everyone else blow in the wind. Small wonder that they would make heroes out of people that were poking this system in the eye, no matter how horrible they were as people. These dynamics never change.

The rangers track them down relentlessly, feeling their age, but getting the job done nonetheless. They leverage their reputation to enlist the services of local law enforcement to finally trap Bonnie and Clyde, fooling them into stopping to help a friend of theirs who’d been placed at the side of the road with an apparent flat tire.

We finally see the two famous renegades through the front window. They lift their weapons and are torn to shreds by hundreds of bullets. As their shattered car is towed through the nearby town, hundreds of fans and onlookers swarm the vehicle, trying to touch the corpses through the windows. The people are distraught that their heroes have died. They have no judgment for their deeds, placing them high on a pedestal for their purported good deeds for the people (robbing banks, killing police officers, etc.)

This was a well-paced, old-style film with a satisfying two-hour length that didn’t feel too long or overly filled with sermonizing. It let the story speak for itself, more or less. It is odd who is considered to be a hero, which foibles and outright crimes can be forgiven when people are willing.

It is a shame when actually good people like Hamer and Gault are disparaged for having taken down the cop-killing heroes. This is the problem when the police don’t act like heroes. We even heard a story told by Gault where Hamer didn’t act very honorably on one of their missions as former rangers.

These transgressions matter. They lead to ACAB; they lead to a breakdown in society and morals. People see the police taking advantage everywhere, getting relatively huge salaries and pensions, retiring much earlier, reaping tremendous overtime—all with no accountability and no rules for themselves. They get to drive drunk, commit traffic violations, they beat their spouses. People notice. They think to themselves: if the criminals are in charge, then why wouldn’t we just celebrate criminals that we actually like?

World War Z (2013) — 7/10

I watched and reviewed this the first time in 2013. My review stands. Brad Pitt’s great, and David Morse drops a wicked cameo as a crazy CIA agent. They arrive in Jerusalem, which has walled itself off. The man in charge there, though, he is letting everyone in anyway—“every one I let in is one less zombie to fight.” That’s the least believable part of this whole movie—that Israel would let people in like that. This movie came out seven years after Israel left occupied Gaza and turned it into a prison instead. The parallels are interesting. It’s kind of an advertisement of sorts for Israel, though, if we’re honest.

The scene in Jerusalem is really well-filmed—fast, but decipherable action.

Seven Pounds (2008) — 7/10

This movie has an interesting plot twist, but it’s really the story of a wealthy guy spreading his benevolence to the less fortunate because of a crushing guilt for his crimes. He has his wealth and he gets to pick and choose who will be saved. If he’s feeling so guilty for what terrible things he’s done, then why does he simultaneously think that he should be the one to decide how to redistribute that wealth to maximize good?

The story follows a nearly permanently lugubrious Ben (Will Smith) as he meets various people in various dire straits, usually due to some medical condition. He meets blind and gentle musician Ezra (Woody Harrelson), coronary-disease-ridden Emily (Rosario Dawson), and five other people who he determines to help. His best friend Dan (Barry Pepper) is a lawyer who’s wittingly helping him; his brother (Michael Ealy) is unwittingly helping him, as Ben has stolen his identity in order to get closer to the people he wants to help.

Ben and Emily end up falling in love, but it is doomed. You see, Ben is not only giving away his worldly possessions—a victim of domestic abuse gets his beach house—but also pounds of flesh. Specifically, he’s donated a lung to someone, a kidney to someone else—and finally, after his suicide by poisonous jellyfish, his heart to Emily and his eyes to Ezra.

In order for Emily to live, Ben had to die. Why was Ben doing this? He’d killed his wife and six others in a car accident that he’d caused by arrogantly and recklessly texting while driving. He decided to extract seven pounds of flesh from himself to make things right. It was an interesting story, well-told, revealing a bit at a time. The movie is more interesting than the synopsis because it maintains more tension when you don’t know what’s coming. If you know what’s coming, there’s less to enjoy, I think.

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade (1989) — 9/10

As luck would have it, I don’t have to write down any of the plot to remind myself of what happened—because I’ve memorized pretty much every line and scene by now. I probably first watched the movie in 1989 when it came out in theaters. Since then, I’ve seen it at least half-a-dozen times more.

The movie starts with a flashback to Indy’s youth (River Phoenix), where we see him meet archeological marauders for the first time, we see him get his whip and his hat, and we meet his soon-to-be nemesis Vogel, who gets the cross of Coronado. Indy didn’t like being thwarted but his father (Sean Connery) admonishes him for insolence.

Fast-forward to the modern day of the mid-1940s, where the Nazis are hot on the trail of the Holy Grail, while Indy is using his father’s notebook to find it first. His father’s lifelong mission has been to find the Holy Grail. Together, they get closer and closer. Indy and Elsa (Alison Doody) travel to Venice to uncover a knight’s tomb and get the next clue. Elsa is so obviously unhinged that it comes as absolutely no surprise that she’s actually a Nazi who had seduced not only Indy, but also his father.

TheJones’s wind up tied together in a German castle to which they inadvertently set fire during their escape. Elsa is now firmly against them, no longer pretending to be anything but a nearly cartoonish Nazi. Henry Sr. and Indy, along with the help of Marcus Brody (Denholm Elliot) and Sallah (John Rhys-Davies) get closer and closer to their goal. The Jones’s make a side-trip to Berlin to retrieve Henry’s notebook. Indy dresses up as a German officer and bumps into Hitler during a book-burning, who signs the notebook for him before marching imperiously away.

Henry and Indy escape Germany on a zeppelin, then use the small “lifeboat” plane attached to it to escape that, taking down two pursuing planes before crashing/landing themselves and escaping on foot. They meet up with the Nazis again, trying not only to thwart them but also to rescue Marcus, who’s fallen into their hands. Thus follows a long tank sequence that culminates in the head of the Nazis plummeting to his death and Indy barely surviving.

They end up at the doors of Petra in Jordan where the Nazis gut-shoot Henry in order to provide Indy with incentive and focus to solve the final three riddles and find the grail. Indy does so, taking the final leap of faith and getting into the chamber where an immortal knight (Robert Eddison) greets him. Elsa advises her boss Donovan “poorly” and he explodes into dust, having drunk from a false grail. Indy grabs the correct one and rushes back to heal his father’s gunshot wound.

The grail cannot leave the grounds, though. Elsa doesn’t accept this and triggers an earthquake by taking the grail too far from the cave. Indy and his friends all escape, while all of the Nazis die—due to God’s wrath, presumably. They literally ride into the sunset.

“It tells me that goose-stepping morons like yourself should try reading books instead of burning them.”

Sean Connery’s admonition to a real-life Nazi is more apropos than ever.

Star Wars: Le Réveil de la Force (2015) — 10/10

Known in English as Star Wars: Episode VII − The Force Awakens. I stand by my review from 2015.

This time, I watched it in 2D and in French with French subtitles.

PBS American Experience S36E04 − Poisoned Ground: The Tragedy at Love Canal (2024) – 8/10

This is a recounting of how the Love Canal became a superfund site. Love Canal is a neighborhood of Niagara Falls that sits on top of a hazardous-waste-dumping site that belonged to Hooker Chemicals. The company sold the land to the local community and they chirpily agreed to ignore reality, buy Hooker’s lies about safety, and build schools, playgrounds, and houses on the site.

Soon, though, people became very sick. Adults, children, all succumbed to various debilitating illnesses. Black sludge was bubbling up out of backyards. Horrific smells suffused the neighborhood. Kids’ shoes were melting off of their feet. Piles of rusty barrels were dumping dozens of lethal chemicals into the groundwater. No-one cared because (A) there was no money in it and (B) they didn’t know any of the affected poor people living there. Morality never entered into it.

People started demonstrating. No-one believed them, despite the clear evidence. They were all in denial because no-one wanted to assume responsibility. The mothers of the neighborhood were relentless in their activism and they finally won compensation for moving out of areas that the state had not originally considered to be “affected”.

The whole thing was ridiculous, from a humanitarian point of view. People were suffering; the amount of money needed to remediate them amounted to peanuts. It didn’t matter. The point was to teach the people a lesson about what they can expect from their society—and to teach their corporate masters that their interests will be defended, nearly no matter what. Due to nearly impossibly high perseverance by the mothers of the region, who basically dedicated years, if not decades, of their lives to this cause, they were eventually compensated in the most minimal manner that could be considered halfway satisfying for all of the work.

The lesson remained though: If you want to be treated fairly in this society, we will punish you and punish you and punish you and only give in at the very end, when the political tide has turned and it benefits the powers-that-be financially more to capitulate than to continue fighting. There was nothing in this calculation that had anything to do with morality or empathy. The only way to get justice is to make the elites benefitting from injustice lose money from it instead.

The story was reasonably well-told, if a bit long on its laudation for the women and a bit tepid on its remonstrations of the corporations responsible. Despite covering the topic, there is still a feeling that they’re handling the issue with kid gloves to avoid offending sponsors and elites that continue to benefit from similar practices today. It very much focuses on the specific case without expanding the argument to consider what kind of society is so morally bankrupt as to let something like this happen in the first place.

Living with Yourself (2019) — 7/10

Miles Elliot (Paul Rudd) is kind of an asshole. That is, he doesn’t love life anymore. He barely loves his wife Kate (Aisling Bea); he doesn’t like himself. He’s kind of given up. He’s not a better person for it. He’s falling behind at work, riding his earlier success but not producing much at all.

A work colleague (Desmin Borges) tells Miles about a clinic that might help him become a better person. Intrigued, he heads out into the countryside to the relatively remote clinic, located in a strip mall. They require $50,000, which he takes from a shared account. He asks very few questions, perhaps showing his desperation, perhaps his cupidity.

The two odd doctors Jung-Ho (James Seol) and Left (Rob Yang) put him under. He wakes in a shallow grave, wrapped in a plastic bag. All around him are similar shallow graves, with tufts of plastic bags sticking out of the ground. Miles stumbles all the way home to find himself already there, entertaining his wife, who seems charmed by him for the first time in a long time. It turns out the treatment is a cloning operation wherein the impurities are left away during personality transfer. On the way in to the clinic, Miles had seen Tom Brady leaving, saying that it was his sixth visit.

In Miles’s case, though, they failed to kill the old version so now there are two. They both have all of Miles’s memories but the clone is a slightly better version. Old Miles leans into this with gusto, sending new Miles to work for him while he writes his novel. New Miles excels at his job, getting themselves a promotion and landing a big contract. New Miles is also awakening Kate’s interest, although she finally finds out that there are two of them. She is less bothered by that than you would think, focusing instead on the $50,000 that Miles spent on himself out of their shared savings. After initially refusing to entertain the notion, Kate starts seeing New Miles on the sly.

Things go a bit back and forth, but old Miles is still old Miles and he is not equipped for rising to the challenge and responsibility of working with or against new Miles. The show ends, though, with new Miles contemplating suicide because there isn’t really a place for him, especially after a tryst with Kate was deeply unsatisfying for both of them.

I gave it an extra star because Paul Rudd is almost always fun. He played a non-fun version of himself quite well. It was easy to tell which clone was on-screen at any given time.

6 Balloons (2018) — 9/10

We meet Katie (Abbi Jacobson) preparing a surprise birthday party for her boyfriend Jack (Dawan Owens). She’s pretty detail-oriented but we forgive her her foibles when we meet her parents, especially her mother (Jane Kaczmarek), who’s quite a she-devil. She just always knows the wrong thing to say to push her daughter’s buttons. Her father (Tim Matheson) is somewhat better but also quite odd and utterly shallow in his interpretation of what is going on around him.

If Katie seems to have been strongly affected by having been raised by this odd couple, her brother Seth (Dave Franco) is even worse off: he’s a heroin addict. Katie leaves the party to pick up the cake and stops to pick him up first. At his apartment, she finds Seth and his daughter, the utterly adorable and captivating Ella (Charlotte Carel/Madeline Carel). There is unopened mail everywhere and Seth is in rough shape. Katie is almost certain that he has relapsed. Their new mission is to find a detox center.

Regular scenes in the film are interleaved with voiceover narration, reading from a story about a woman failing to sail a boat and drowning. The visuals are of Katie and Seth in her car as it slowly fills with water. The whole feeling is one of desperation, of spinning out of control, of succumbing to an uncontrollable fate.

At the first detox center, they’re turned away because the center no longer takes her or Seth’s health insurance. They continue their search in vain. Seth says that Katie has to buy him heroin and a needle. She reluctantly does, seemingly stunned to find where she’s ended up: she’s in a shady alley buying heroin rather than greeting her boyfriend at his surprise birthday party. Her obsessive personality is starting to unravel under the pressure.

Ella is fine, as fine as she can be. She needs a diaper change but the lady at the pharmacy is already looking at Katie with disdain because she bought a needle. Katie is humiliated but also getting angry at how cruel the world can be to a man clearly suffering and a little girl who clearly needs help. Because he’s a drug addict, they all turn their backs on their suffering and need.

Seth uses the bathroom to shoot up and comes out of the stall on top of the world. He’s annoying in his ebullience, although Ella is delighted to have her daddy back in working order. They finally arrive at the party, where Seth is cruising around, making a spectacle of himself and thus implicitly revealing to everyone who knows him that he’s using again.

After the kind of night that Katie’s had, her family thinks nothing of shoving all of the blame for her brother’s behavior on her—because that’s the kind of family that they are and have obviously always been. Seth is shooting up again, in her car. He has left Ella at the party. She is looking for daddy everywhere. Katie finds him in the car and finally tells him that enough is enough. He has to check himself into rehab. She will not accompany him this time.

This simple act is enough to dispel the demons, the narrator, the flooding waters, the sinking sailboat. Katie is free, taking in the fireworks and enjoying a few moments of freedom.

This was a really well-made, tightly shot, well-paced, and well-told story. It was also just under 75 minutes, with no fat left to trim.