Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2024.10

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

1. The Lost City (2022) — 6/10
2. Mission to Mars (2000) — 6/10
3. Mission Impossible − Dead Reckoning Part One (2023) — 8/10
4. Who Killed Malcolm X? (2019–2020) — 4/10
5. Top Gun: Maverick (2022) — 9/10
6. Independence Day (1996) — 9/10
7. Gorillas in the Mist (1988) — 8/10
8. Iron Maiden: Flight 666 (2009) — 7/10
9. (T)Raumschiff Surprise − Periode 1 (2004) — 5/10
10. American Assassin (2017) — 5/10

The Lost City (2022) — 6/10

Loretta Sage (Sandra Bullock) is a writer of bodice-rippers, who’s achieved no small amount of success. She used to be an archeologist before her archeologist husband died. Abigail Fairfax (Daniel Radcliffe) is a rich bastard who kidnaps her to force her to help him translate some runes/glyphs in the Lost City that he’s discovered. Her Fabio-like cover model Alan (Channing Tatum) engages the services of Jack Trainer (Brad Pitt), a hippie, ex-Navy Seal with a tiny car on the island of the lost city to find and rescue her.

Jack is really skilled but Alan is….not. Jack knocks out a dozen guards, rescues Loretta, and he and Alan get her in a wheelbarrow back to their tiny car (because she’s still handcuffed to a chair). Jack has finished being nearly perfect when a sniper bullet caps him. Completely. His shoes come off. Alan and Loretta manage to get into the car and escape. Alan makes an emergency maneuver, throwing Loretta on her chair out of the vehicle. She finally gets free of the chair. The mini-car is lost.

They escape through the forest, pursued by Abigail’s guards. She removes leeches from his backside; mysteriously, they do not check her for leeches. They camp, using his supplies. She judges him unfairly. They come up with a plan to foil their pursurers, who manage to kill themselves without the two having to do a thing.

This movie taught me the phrase bring owls to Athens, which means to “undertake a pointless venture,” which, I suppose, might just have described this movie’s plot? Inadvertently? Or not inadvertently? Advertently?

The movie’s got a few good laughs. It’s green-screened all to hell. They are literally in none of the locations that they appear to be. This is the most cheaply made movie you can imagine. Sandra Bullock, Channing Tatum, and Daniel Radcliffe are all gifted comedic actors, though. Bullock and Tatum have some decent chemistry, although I think either of them have good chemistry with anyone. For anyone wondering, this is a pale remake of Romancing the Stone, which was a much better movie.

I gave it an extra star because I watched it in German—and sometimes German makes this kind of movie better.

Mission to Mars (2000) — 6/10

I had never heard of this movie before, but it’s directed by Brian De Palma and has quite a few well-known stars. Woody Blake (Tim Robbins) and Terri Fisher (Connie Nielsen) are very happily married. Kind of irritatingly happily married. They’re both astronauts. Spoiler alert: so is pretty much every other character. Luke (Don Cheadle) is also an astronaut, as is Jim (Gary Sinise), who’s no longer really active since his astronaut wife Maggie (Kim Delaney) died. It’s never really made clear why she died, but everybody’s pretty torn up about it.

So, there’s a mission to Mars and Woody, Terri, and Luke are going, but Jim is not. Instead, there are a few other red-shirts on the mission with them. They approach a strange rock formation on Mars, they make it angry, it goes totally haywire, showing a wild, weird, snake-like wind tunnel that blows a rock into one lady’s helmet visor, shattering it, and inhales everybody else but Luke, who barely escapes. He reports back, but the transmission is pretty garbled. No-one really knows whether he’s still alive.

Woody and Terri are on a much-expanded ISS and receive the message. They convince their mission director to let them go rescue Luke. They are joined by Jim and also Phil (Jerry O’Connell) to round out the quartet. They fly a pretty comfy ship to Mars with absolutely no wear and tear on their friendships. As they’re approaching the planet, they’re slammed by micrometeorites, one of which tears right through Phil’s hand. Woody goes out to find the leak, while Jim looks for it inside the ship. They fix it. Yay!

As they’re completing their orbital insertion, though, micrometeorite damage to the rocket causes it to fail catastrophically, blowing the entire rocket assembly off the back. They’re floating free and in a degrading orbit. There is, however, another module that’s still in orbit from the first mission. They abandon ship and head, Conga-style, to the module. Woody boosts toward it and manages to hook a line to the module, but spins past it. He can’t stop his progress because he’s all out of propellant. The movie doesn’t explain why inertia doesn’t continue applying to him, though. It just needs to have for the next bit.

At any rate, Terri’s in bits and tries to rescue him but her rescue hook is too short to reach him. She has used up 50% of her propellant and can’t approach Woody without being lost as well. To prevent her from trying it, Woody pops off his helmet and makes his rescue a moot point. Terri’s gutted.

We next see the module on the surface of Mars. The remaining three—Phil, Terri, and Jim—have landed on the surface and are trudging toward Luke’s base. At the base, they discover that Luke is alive! He’s done a bunch of hydroponics and farming and kept himself alive. He’s gone a bit off his head but it’s sorted pretty quickly. This whole survival song-and-dance pretty significantly predates both the book and movie The Martian.

They figure out that the artifact that had killed Luke’s crew was actually trying to send them a message. Jim figures out how to complete the message and they send the little rover to deliver it. The artifact opens. Luke, Jim, and Terri enter and are quickly trapped inside. They are treated to a 3d light-show of how Earth was settled by the original Martians, who’d blasted off to settle the rest of the galaxy after learning that Mars was going to be hit by an asteroid.

Jim stays and is launched in an alien ship to those other civilizations, while Terri and Luke return to Phil and manage to escape the oncoming Martian storm. Jim’s ship buzzes by them on its way outtathere.

That’s it. The end. What an odd little sci-fi film. It was OK, but it wasn’t great. I didn’t feel like I was watching a movie by one of America’s greatest directors, though.

I watched it in Italian with Italian subtitles.

Mission Impossible − Dead Reckoning Part One (2023) — 8/10

It was going pretty well until they made Gabriel (Esai Morales) some sort of unstoppable force. They literally just made him up for this movie. We have no idea who he is. He only started meaning something to Ethan in this movie, because of a flashback we saw at the beginning. Also Paris (Pom Klementieff). She weighs about six kilos. There is no way she can deal or take that much damage. Her head got banged against brick walls more times than I can count and there was never any noticeable effect. It’s so stupid because it takes you out of an otherwise enjoyable action film.

There was a moment of denouement, an anticlimax in the middle of the movie where Ilsa Faust (Rebecca Ferguson) finally buys it an utterly unconvincing sword fight on a bridge in Venice, where she somehow manages to evince complete competence and confidence in her sword-fighting skills but then also to lose a fight to Gabriel, who looked flat-footed and was armed with only a switchblade.

But that’s only the part that made me start writing the paragraphs above. Up until that part, it was a bit bumpy, but a lot of fun. From that point on, though, they spent fifteen minutes trying to recruit Grace (Hayley Atwell) to join them and help them make a swap on a train heading to Austria. Benji (Simon Pegg) and Luther (Ving Rhames) trot out some real chestnuts about how being part of the team is better than going it alone. Then Ethan lays it on even thicker.

What are they swapping? A key. Or, rather, they’re trying to get both parts of the key.

On the train, Gabriel tries to take out Paris, saying that she’ll betray Gabriel and the Entity because Ethan had spared her life. In this scene as well, it’s like a fucking magic trick how a knife magically appears in her belly after she’d just kicked his ass. I rewound the scene to look for the second knife—because the first one went flying out of his hand across the train cabin—but it was not to be seen. It just deus ex machina-ed it’s way into her. Gabriel magic. They’re trying to make me hate him, but it just makes me more disappointed in how low-effort these parts are.

I mean, this is just ridiculous. We all enjoy watching Tom Cruise making one deus ex machina after another but Gabriel is just blessed. The key practically bounced into his pocket. So unsatisfying. He doesn’t even have to try. Henry Cavill was a way better and more believable villain, by far. I am not watching this movie to watch Esai Morales do awesome things. I’m watching for Tom Cruise. So far, it’s been 2.5 hours of watching Ethan flail and Gabriel constantly outwit him. Ethan gets the final key-switch, though, which is pretty satisfying. They could have made Gabriel’s constant wins more believable, but it was decent.

There are some pretty funny parts, though! Like driving the yellow Topolino in Rome. That was great! “The car’s on fire!” Also, when Ethan is base-jumping onto the train, his cheeks are flapping and he’s spinning around and he’s telling Benji “I don’t think I’m going to make the train.” It was kinda funny. The other funny part was with the two U.S. agents Degas (Greg Tarzan Davis) and Briggs (Shea Whigham). Briggs is a sledgehammer whereas Degas speaks at least Italian and French, but he’s the subordinate.

This is a decent entry in the franchise, but it’s a bit of a disappointment after Fallout and it’s too long. There’s a part 2 coming as well.

Who Killed Malcolm X? (2019–2020) — 4/10

This is a typical Netflix documentary. It’s repetitive. It doesn’t at all deliver the information it purports to deliver. It’s slow. I like the clips of Malcom X’s oratory but the rest of it is quite slow. It’s not that I didn’t learn anything but that it could have been so. Much. Shorter.

The premise indicated in the title is wrong: we know who killed Malcolm X. They caught him dead to rights and he admitted it. He had accomplices who got away and whose names he never gave up. Instead, the police zeroed in on two other guys who had nothing to do with the killing and arrested them instead. They served 20 years in prison for a murder they didn’t commit. They would eventually receive large payments as a partial compensation for their having been railroaded and for their suffering.

The series covered the alleged involvement of a New Jersey mosque run by Elijah Mohammed, the head of the Nation of Islam at the time. He was butt-hurt because Malcolm X had left that church to pursue his own path. This did not sit well, so they were constantly at odds. Elijah Mohammed and his fanatical organization are not painted in a good light. The local police, state police, and federal police are not painted in a good light, as they were all bent on making the mouthy and eloquent Malcom X as uncomfortable as they legally—and illegally—could. Someone firebombed his home.

In the end, the series managed to make a Wikipedia page’s worth of information available to those who hadn’t known it but most of the information was speculative. It was so mixed up with actual facts that it’s kind of hard to remember afterward what can actually be used and what can’t. I suppose that’s how people like their documentaries these days. They probably don’t even notice that most of the information is either made-up or speculative or, at best, extrapolated from fact. You can’t really use any of it, but most people will “remember” what the documentary intended for them to remember. Even then, though, the message was so muddy that you’ll believe what you want to believe anyway.

Top Gun: Maverick (2022) — 9/10

My review from 2022 stands. I added a star because it held up so well on re-viewing. Those actions scenes—oh my.

Independence Day (1996) — 9/10

This is still one of the tightest alien-invasion movies ever. Sure it’s got a bunch of hoo-rah America in it but it’s a work of art. For some reason, all of the pieces fall into place. It’s a bit goofy in places, but it more than makes up for it in many others. I find it impossible not to keep watching it when I zap into it on television.

Aliens come to Earth in giant, giant ships. It is, at first, unclear what they want. One of the ships unleashes an energy beam that completely annihilates a building in Los Angeles, pushing a wave of destruction in an expanding circle for miles. Their intent is now crystal-clear. Exotic dancer Jasmine Dubrow (Vivica A. Fox) barely escapes with her life (and her dog’s life). She ends up rescuing the president’s wife Marylin Whitmore (Mary McDonnell).

Meanwhile her boyfriend Capt. Steven Hiller (Will Smith) is a U.S. air-force pilot who goes up against the alien fighter ships—and manages to take one down. He captures the alien pilot and drags it across the salt flats to Area 51. He is received by President Whitmore (Bill Pullman), General Grey (Robert Loggia), David Levinson (Jeff Goldblum), his dad Julius (Judd Hirsch), David’s ex-wife Constance (Margaret Colin), Secretary of Defense (James Rebhorn), and Dr. Brakish Okun (Brent Spiner).

Alcoholic crop-duster Russell Casse (Randy Quaid) and his family drive their RV—along with hundreds of others—across the salt flats to Area 51 as well. David figures out how to get the spaceship captured in the 50s going again. They also figure out how to write a computer virus to infect the mothership. David and Steven fly to the mothership, infest the whole armada, and turn off all of the shields. The militaries of the world can finally take out the aliens. The President is in the air. Russell is in the air. He ends up sacrificing himself to destroy the giant force beam.

The world is saved; all of the aliens are defeated. David and Constance are back together. Steven and Jasmine are married. They all live happily ever after.

Gorillas in the Mist (1988) — 8/10

This is the story of how Dian Fossey (Sigourney Weaver) came to live in the Congo, studying gorillas. Fossey was an occupational therapist who decided to devote her life to the study of primates. She pesters Louis Leakey (Iain Cuthbertson) until he agrees to let her go to Congo for six months to study gorillas. She catches her first glimpses of gorillas but her camp is soon broken up by soldiers, who are there to throw her out of the country. There’s been a revolution and they’re getting rid of all white people.

She and her employee/friend Sembagare (John Omirah Miluwi) wash onto the friendly shores of Kim (Maggie O’Neill) in Rwanda, who has an enormous house with an enormous garden. Dian becomes convinced that she can continue her research from somewhere else in the forest, not in the Congo. She requisitions funds from National Geographic to build a new research station. She makes progress, befriending a group of gorillas.

They have more trouble with the locals than the gorillas, all of whom must be convinced that she is friendly and means no harm. Back in a larger village, they are shopping. An older woman approaches her and tries to sell her a gorilla paw. Dian is furious and tries to catch her as she retreats but fails. Later, they discover so many traps and pitfalls in the jungle. They spring the traps but a young antelope falls into one of the pits. Its back is broken; Fossey is forced to shoot it. She paints “witchy pictures” around to scare off the poachers.

Bob Campbell (Bryan Brown) shows up one rainy night. He’s a photographer for National Geographic. Dian begins to indoctrinate him in the ways of observing gorillas: don’t look them in the eyes, don’t let them see you, duck if they do see you, never run away. They start to grow close. They become lovers.

John leaves to return to his wife; his tour of duty is done. Dian is somewhat despondent, but not surprised.

Dian returns to her camp to find the local villagers slaughtering the gorillas, chopping off their hands, and taking babies captive. It’s a horrific scene. Dian manages to catch a young boy, who’s too slow to escape. She terrifies the boy with a witch costume, scaring him into telling her where the group have taken the baby gorilla. The buyer is the national zoo. She breaks into the van and finds the baby gorilla, suffering in a tiny, wooden box.

She storms into the hotel to find the buyer, who shows her his permit to do what he’s done. She tears him a new asshole. She meets the minister who allowed it to happen. It’s all for money. It’s horrific. They need to feed the people and they burn up their natural riches to do it. Why? Because the white man steals everything. Their national resources are not bought, but stolen. The animals suffer for it. And always the biggest scumbags profit the most. When will we build a society where the scum doesn’t rise to the top?

John is back; he moves in. He’s going to divorce his wife and live with Dian instead. She’s resuscitated the gorilla baby and now it’s time to turn it over to the zoo. It’s a heartrending scene. She will get three rangers from the government in exchange but it’s a terrible price to pay.

John gets a job offer in Borneo; she has one too. She refuses to go. She cannot imagine life without going out to her apes every day. She tells John that if he goes, she won’t write to him, and that he should never show up again. He leaves.

Dian visits the minister. She sees the poacher Van Vecten (Aleksandrov Konstantin) there. He was trying to get permission to get another gorilla. Parker the baby gorilla that she’d nursed back to health had died en route. The minister rebuffs Van Vecten this time.

Dian leads four students to the mountain. She has a nasty cough but she was still able to stop a new gorilla from attacking them all. Van Vecten is back.. He’s speaking to the villagers. They attack the gorillas again. There are so many of these little, tiny men, attacking and killing one gorilla. It’s tragic. The gorillas are more human than the people. Dian is out of breath, chasing up the hill. She’s too late. The hunters see only riches. They kill a creature, taking its head and hands for sale to rich people. Two are captured and brought before her. She mock-hangs one of them, taking away his manhood. Together with her guards, she mounts an attack on their camp, burning it to the ground.

Her students are not on board for this—Brendan says that his feelings are hurt. Dian shows him the corpse of the gorilla. Brendan is still upset, perhaps even more so. He’s hugging Kim, who’s crying buckets. I thought to myself that he’s just trying to get laid. Five minutes later, I’m proven right.

Dian goes a bit off the deep end, insulting all of the staff for not having tried hard enough. Sembagare tells her to pull herself together, telling her that her staff has been there for her, working like hell, and that he’s always there for her—has always been there for her—but now he’s ashamed for her. She breaks down, crying that they’d killed Digit and then desecrated his corpse.

She confronts Van Vecten again. Sembagare asks her not to scare off the tourists because she’s making enemies. Sembagare tells her that Mukara (Waigwa Wachira) threatened to not give her another work permit.

Fossey has a nasty cough. Is she getting sick or is she just smoking too much? The movie doesn’t say. She’s listening to jazz, drinking whiskey, and looking at pictures of gorillas. She falls asleep. Someone creeps in to her room…and kills her with a machete.

Sembagare and her camp crew carry her body to the burial ground where Digit is buried. It was only due to her efforts that there were any gorillas left at all. Sembagare links her grave with Digit’s, to link their souls in heaven.

I watched it in German.

Iron Maiden: Flight 666 (2009) — 7/10

Bruce Dickenson knows how to pilot a commercial jet. It’s his band’s jet. It’s called “Ed Force One”, named after their mascot Eddie, who also adorns the plane’s tail. He flew the Iron Maiden jet sometimes. Like, from London to Baku to Mumbai. This is all true but it seems like the fevered imaginings of a 14-year-old boy, dreaming of a future as a rock star.

They go to Japan, to Mexico. They play their hits: Number of the Beast, Can I Play with Madness, Heaven Can Wait, Fear of the Dark, Ancient Mariner, and, of course, my all-time favorites Wasted Years and Run to the Hills. After the Bogotá show, you can hear Always look on the bright side of life from Monty Python’s Meaning of Life as the people are leaving. next stop: Rio de Janeiro. After 46 days, their tour is over. Final stop: Toronto, Canada.

They make a good argument that they’re really in it for the music. They never got radio airplay, no Billboard placement, no media coverage, but they were able to be successful enough to be able to make a living from it. They still go to the local pub when they’re not touring.

I watched it in German and English.

(T)Raumschiff Surprise − Periode 1 (2004) — 5/10

This is a German-made Airplane-like sendup of Star Trek. Brigitte Spuck (Michael Herbig)—”Spucky”, which means “spitty” in German; you see the level of humor—Käpt’n Körk (Christian Tramitz), and Schrotty (Rick Kavanian)—”trashy” in German—are all members of the (T)raumschiff crew and absolutely over-the-top homosexual caricatures. That’s pretty much most of the plot.

The crew is called to save the galaxy, of course. It’s a task that no-one else wants. They’re trying to save the Earth from an invasion by the empire (I think … the guy looked like the emperor from Star Wars). This movie cares about Star Wars/Star Trek canon about as much as Spaceballs did. The crew will have to travel back to 2004 to destroy a UFO that crashed in Area 51 at the time.

Because they can’t figure out how to use the beam-transport, they call a taxi. Rock Fertig Aus (Til Schweiger) shows up and drives them to the planet Earth. That’s a cue for another musical number. It’s ridiculous. Herbig grew famous for filming the Winnetou / Manitou movies based on the Karl May books. He pretended to be a gay Native American in that one, so he’s got a really wide range.

The effects aren’t bad, actually. Til plays his taxi driver pretty straight (no pun intended). Right up until the point where he says “Insalata Mista, baby” in a callback to Schwarzenegger’s “Hasta la vista, baby”. He’s obviously playing the Han Solo role. And then there’s Königin Metapha (Anja Kling) who is sofort verknallt in Rock—and vice versa.

One of the running gags is pretty funny: the janitor who’s always in the throne room, cleaning chairs, waxing the floor, etc. That’s really very much like Airplane.

The three fools get into the time machine—which is a couch—but Schrotty misses the boat, while Rock and Metapha take his place. They overshoot by 700 years and end up in the year 1,304 instead. They couldn’t get away because of Körk and Spuck. William der Letzte (Sky du Mont) hams it up as the king, entertaining Metapha while the others languish in the dungeon. Rock ends up jousting with Regulator Rogul (Hans-Michael Rehberg)—the Darth Vader-like guy—who’s also traveled back in time.

The couch is on a Scheiterhaufen, they all get on, and travel to the next time period, the wild west in Nevada. Right place, wrong time. A train runs through the couch on arrival, blasting it to bits. In this time period, Körk is the sheriff, and he’s chained to Spuck. Rock and Metapha are there as well. So is Santa Maria (Sky du Mont again), who’s the baddie here.

They’re not there that long. They steal Regulator’s time-travel bike and finally end up in the right place and the right time. Regulator is there as well. He and Rock have a ludicrous light-saber battle with limp-dick light-sabers. I’m kind of speechless that this movie was made in the 2000s. Germany was pretty far behind the times, as it continues to be. They watch the UFO they were intended to intercept crash in the desert. It’s tiny. The alien is tiny. He’s an alcoholic. That’s why he crashed. They destroy the UFO, saving the galaxy.

They prepare for the trip home, but they’re too heavy. They need to dump exactly the weight that Spucky weighs. He’s getting left behind.

The film picks back up in the interrogation room, where the film started.

The others return to the future, where everything is saved—and where Spucky and Schrotty are there to greet them. Spucky is now 335 years old. He looks exactly the same. He has learned no wisdom in his extra centuries. The end.

American Assassin (2017) — 5/10

Mitch (Dylan O’Brien) and his fiancée (Charlotte Vega) are at a Spanish beach, celebrating their young, attractive, wealthy, and perfect lives. An unnamed terrorist cell lands on the beach and just starts slaughtering people right and left. They cap Katrina and almost kill MItch.

Mitch survives, fueled by rage to train himself into a killing machine, who’s awesome at everything martial—all inside of 18 months. He infiltrates a terrorist cell and gets close enough to the leader to be just about to kill him, when U.S. special forces appear and kill everyone before he can. They take him captive and debrief him, trying to figure out his story. He ends up attached to a special-ops unit led by Stan Hurley (Michael Keaton). Keaton plays Stan as ludicrously over-the-top as possible.

They do a bunch of training stuff that would have been a montage in an 80s film but is taken totally seriously for long, long minutes in this one. Guess what? One of the group’s former members Ghost (Taylor Kitsch) has gone rogue and is planning to sell nuclear materials to terrorists. The bastard. That is also absolutely his name. Mitch, Stan, and Annika (Shiva Negar) are sniffing out the details of Ghost’s complicated plot, mostly in Istanbul, which is pretty neat (because I like Istanbul).

Mitch and Annika are captured, but Stan saves them. Then they save themselves. Then there’s blood spray everywhere. Somehow Annika is also an agent for Iran, but for the good guys who don’t want nuclear materials? Mitch and Annika fight, with him getting the upper hand and almost drowning her. It was a misunderstanding, though, so he goes to rescue her so that they can rescue Stan, who’s also been captured by Ghost again.

They have a beef. Ghost’s mad at Stan for having been betrayed, while Stan tries to explain to him that they all knew the deal—this line of business values money over friendship, bro. Ghost starts prying off Stan’s fingernails. Stan says to rip off the other nine—he loves it! Keaton’s chewing the crap out of the scenery. Ghost gives up on the interrogation and just throws both cables attached to a car battery into the bucket at Stan’s feet. Stan’s tough, though, so it would take more than a mere surfeit of voltage to electrocute him.

The torture continues, with Stan rope-a-doping him and then biting Ghost’s ear off. Stan’s still attached to the ceiling when a bomb goes off. He’s fine. Mitch rescues him. Stan’s capping people like his arm would even work after having been hanging on it for two days. Ghost captures Annika. He uses her as a human shield, but Annika sacrifices herself, shooting herself with Ghost’s gun to take herself out of the equation. WTF? Was there not a better way to do that? Boat fight! Boat’s driving itself while Ghost and Mitch slug it out in a rolling kitchen. This is all Bourne Identity’s fault.

Guess what? There’s a bomb set to go off. Stan is in a helicopter, none the worse for wear. The same can’t be said for Mitch, who’s getting his ass kicked by Ghost, who’s shit-talking his fiancée, for good measure. Lots of U.S. Navy hardware in this movie. Guess what, though?!? The bomb actually goes off! They couldn’t save the day! What a great twist! The U.S. Navy’s boats are tossed about like toys. Stan’s helicopter that rescued Mitch is buffeted on winds, but manages to survive. This is not possible, as the shock wave from a reasonably sized nuke moves at about 750kph (at least). Somehow, there’s no radiation—because the bomb went off underwater.

The movie ends with Mitch on his next mission, ready to assassinate a high-level Iranian general or president or whatever. So, just like real life.

On the one hand, I want to say that it’s a terrible movie. On the other, I was able to easily follow along, despite having watched it in Italian with Italian subtitles, having only paid half-attention, and having watched it in three sections.