Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2024.11

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

1. Shrinking (2023) — 8/10
2. John Wick 3: Parabellum (2019) — 8/10
3. South Park: The End of Obesity (2024) — 8/10
4. South Park (Not Suitable for Children) (2023) — 8/10
5. South Park: Joining the Panderverse (2023) — 8/10
6. The Terminator (1984) — 8/10
7. Glass (2022) — 8/10
8. Ghosts of Mars (2001) — 4/10
9. Five Days at Memorial (2022) — 4/10
10. The Sandman (2022) — 7/10

Shrinking (2023) — 8/10

Jimmy (Jason Segal) is a psychiatrist at a small practice run by Paul (Harrison Ford) and working with Gaby (Jessica Williams). He lives in a swank neighborhood with his daughter Alice (Lukita Maxwell), next to their close neighbors Liz (Christa Miller) and Derek (Ted McGinley).

I’m just going to break it to you: everyone in this show is pretty rich and they all spend so much time feeling kinda sorry for themselves, even though their lives are nearly infinitely better than everyone else’s. This is a common trend in the American zeitgeist: you are expected to be disappointed in your lot in life if anyone else is doing better than you or if anyone else gets anything that you don’t have. It’s a pretty nauseating moral stance but it’s becoming more and more evident to me that this is how the populace is being trained: so many TV shows are set up like this and people I’ve anecdotally talked to in the U.S. act like this too.

Anyway, Jimmy’s wife died about a year ago and he’s still dragging ass around, kind of leaving his daughter in the lurch. She, however, also has expectations that she’s the main character in her Dad’s life, even though she’s a relatively good kid. Main character syndrome is also strong: even good characters are imbued with it. Paul starts dating his Parkinson’s doctor Julie (Wendy Malick) while Jimmy starts to drag himself out of his funk by opening up to his patients. He tells Grace (Heidi Gardner) to leave her gaslighting boyfriend; he asks Sean (Luke Tennie) to move in with him.

Alice and Gaby are good friends. Gaby gets to be good friends with Liz, who’s dealing with Derek’s impending retirement. Paul tries to reconcile with his daughter Meg (Lily Rabe) and her family, even though she’s also a total main character, who thinks that her father is an asshole if he doesn’t fly across the country two times a week to see his grandson—even after she finds out Paul has Parkinson’s. It’s incredible how selfish these characters are, and how normalized this selfishness is when you live and breathe this culture. From outside of this normalized sphere, it looks completely bizarre. Meg is not really a nice person; she’s utterly basic.

Brian (Michael Urie) is fantastic as Jimmy’s estranged best friend. They reconcile with Jimmy telling him that hearing someone constantly say “Everything always works out,” right after his wife had died was hard to take, so he stopped hanging out with him. Brian thought about this for a bit and said “when I said that, I meant that everything always works out for me, not for you.” It was the pitch-perfect thing to say to repair the friendship. I gave this show an extra star for how well-written Brian and Jimmy’s relationship ended up being.

Jimmy and Paul lock horns, while Alice continues to see Paul for counseling, but on the DL and she counsels him just as much. This is a good role for Harrison Ford. Alice tries to kiss Sean, but he’s the most stable member of the show and he rightly turns her jail-baiting ass down. She’s upset and tells Gaby about it, but Sean is dead-ass right that he’d be on a list if he’d even thought of kssing her. It’s amazing how cavalierly the show deals with this issue—as if exactly this kind of shit hadn’t ruined so many people’s lives. It’s just a cute little girl expressing her feelings—but in a way that might ruin her love interest’s life if he were to respond.

A lot of other shit happens: it gets kind of overwhelming. In some cases, streaming channels will absolutely pad the shit out of their content, stretching what could have been a short movie to a six- or eight-episode season. In other cases, they cram in so much material that you’re overwhelmed, trying to keep all of the details straight. Here we go.

After a party and having gotten pretty drunk, Gaby and Jimmy fall into bed together. Liz also drinks quite a lot, with day-drinking a pretty common occurrence. Again, this goes completely without note by the script because this kind of behavior is just normal. Alice runs away to a party, for which Jimmy grounds her, to her utter shock. Jimmy is officiating Brian and his husband Charlie’s wedding. Paul gets a big award but chooses to fly to his grandson’s play instead of accepting the award in person. Sean starts a catering business, funded by Derek and Liz. One of Jimmy’s patients Grace pushes her boyfriend off a cliff, kinda/sorta on Jimmy’s recommendation.

John Wick 3: Parabellum (2019) — 8/10

My review from 2022, which extended my review from 2019, is unchanged. The Adjudicator is still super-annoyingly written.

I watched it in Italian with Italian subtitles. It somehow seemed even more bad-ass that way.

South Park: The End of Obesity (2024) — 8/10

Cartman is trying to get Ozempic but he’s not able to get a prescription. Meanwhile, every mom in town is taking it—and getting ripped, to boot. Randy, of course, gets in cahoots with the moms, thinking that they’re doing drugs. When he finds out that it’s Ozempic, he rolls with it and just starts taking that instead.

Meanwhile, the gang is trying to help Cartman navigate the American healthcare system. When they utterly fail to do that—as so many others have failed before them—they start up a homemade pharmacy using ingredients that they purchased from India. The ladies catch wind of this and break bad, hijacking the semaglutide delivery truck and stealing its contents. The sugar and cereal lobby and industry gather to figure out how to take down the boys’ business. The mascots of these companies eventually mount an attack on the Indian factory supplying the semaglutide, killing most of the workers there.

The boys order more material from a place in North Carolina but the mothers hijack this truck as well. Randy betrays them, hieing across the desert in what ends up looking very much like a Mad Max: Fury Road-style chase. Kenny dies. In the end, no-one has or needs semaglutide and people stop fat-shaming. Cartman takes this opportunity to insult everyone he possibly can, because no-one can make fun of his weight in return.

This episode was decent but had more potential than I think it realized. It felt a bit long.

South Park: Not Suitable for Children (2023) — 8/10

This double-length episode is about a sports drink called Cred that all the cool kids are drinking. “Do you have cred? I’ve got cred.” Clyde pretends to have Cred, but his parents won’t let him have it. He purchases an empty bottle from local dealer Nathan, fills it with apple juice, and then gets caught out. He’s ostracized from the group, which travels to a Cred convention to reestablish their … cred as a group of cool guys.

Randy starts a bottomless OnlyFans channel, with Sharon starting her own, far more successful channel, our of revenge. Whereas Randy just shows her junk, we near from his review of her channel that she’s actually having sex with a couple of guys. Randy is unfazed, instead criticizing her channel’s lazy camera work. Randy starts using Cred in his videos, which picks up a ton of subscribers—what Sharon suspects are mostly minors. She is, of course, right.

Randy gets embroiled in an “influence market”, with the boys also discovering that one of their favorite influencers is deep into the network and is terrified that someone is going to kill him. He is eventually taken out by a sniper. They all return home, having learned the lesson that social media is evil, influencing is evil, and children should not be associating with any of it.

The next day, at school, the children forget all of these lessons as Cartman reveals a special bottle of Cred, which he gives to Clyde, to let him try it. The children rejoice as yet another child joins the cult. No lessons were learned.

This was probably my favorite of the three longer episodes. It didn’t feel padded.

South Park: Joining the Panderverse (2023) — 8/10

In this one, Cartman is introduced to the multiverse—which is just lazy writing—in which he and all of his friends have black, empowered female counterparts. Meanwhile, Randy Marsh is too lazy to repair his own oven door, so he tries to get a repairman. It’s impossible because no-one knows how to do anything anymore. The boys start investigating what’s happening as characters bleed back and forth between the multiverses.

The ironically lazy story conjures a Panderstone, whose power is to help write movies that appeal to everyone and no-one. There is a lot of fighting with incredibly wealthy repairmen, who end up challenging each other to spaceship races and battles. The multiverses clash and are set right.

This one was pretty decent as well: not as good as “Cred” but better than “Ozempic”

The Terminator (1984) — 8/10

My review from 2023 stands. I watched it in German this time.

Glass (2022) — 8/10

My review from 2019 stands. I watched it in German this time.

Ghosts of Mars (2001) — 4/10

John Carpenter directs this near-future movie about a colony on Mars. Lieutenant Melanie Ballard (Natasha Henstridge), Commander Helena Braddock (Pam Grier), and Sgt Jericho Butler (Jason Statham) are on a mission to pick up a prisoner. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Statham with this much hair.

Melanie and Jericho go to pick up Desolation Williams (Ice Cube) but the prison has seen better days. Carpenter just loves making movies like this: soldiers in a near-future, quasi-futuristic situation. Lots of pipes, concrete bunkers, and creepy noises. Mysterious destruction, blood stains on the walls, body horror, weird sculptures, and so on.

An organism at a Martian colony survives the long dry period by encysting. When it’s released, it infects people, causing them to go kind of insane, piercing themselves, self-harming, filing their teeth. They kill anyone who hasn’t been transformed, taking and wearing their faces, making trophies of their heads.

There are two groups of people who aren’t infected. They make peace with each other, grab a bunch of weapons and head back outside. One of them is getting absolutely crazy high off of a high-tech crack-pipe-looking device. He’s definitely going to be a red shirt. Ice Cube is absolutely awful—just a terrible, terrible actor. He’s been better in other things. John Carpenter is not innocent in all of this. I have no idea what he was thinking. He, too, has been involved in far better projects. Natasha Henstridge proves why she never really went anywhere as an actress.

The metal music during one of the big battle scenes is relentless. It’s really not too bad.

The whole movie takes place in the form of a deposition of Lieutenant Melanie Ballard (Henstridge), who tells the story of what happened, how a band of Martian zombies who no longer need water or sustenance took over the mining camp. Whitlock (Joanna Cassidy), a scientist at the camp, reveals how she and her crew had discovered an ancient alien ruin. She admits that she released the alien horror.

Bashira Kincaid (Clea DuVall) shoots the prisoner that they have who’s been infected. The creature gets out and infects Ballard. They let her ride out the infection instead of killing her. She looks like she’s going through withdrawal—or like Jericho (Jason Statham) has finally gotten a shot at her. Whatever medicine they gave her allows her to expel the disease/creature. Ballard does stuff. I don’t know if she’s trying to break out or break in or what. This movie is really bad! What the hell was John Carpenter thinking?!?

This is possibly the worst movie that Jason Statham has ever been in. Ice Cube was in NWA, then in Singleton’s Boyz ‘n the Hood, then this. Seriously, watch the final battle scene: there are better-filmed things on YouTube, made on iPhones. The only cool thing about it is the makeup and some of the practical effects. Whenever things need to get eerie, we get a Dutch angle or a blurry view that’s supposed to be the Martian virus seeking a new host.

Henstridge is a terrible fighter, but her stunt double is pretty good, even if the camera work is cut so badly that you can barely see what’s going on. Ice Cube is also a terrible fighter and I fear he did his own stunts because…why not? The last scene was absolutely ridiculous. Ice Cube breaks into Ballard’s room, tosses her a chrome-plated Uzi and gets her to come along to some sort of revolution.

“Desolation Williams: If you ever want to come to the other side, you’d make a hell of a crook.
Melanie Ballard: You’d make a hell of a cop.
[they both look at each other]
Desolation Williams, Melanie Ballard: [together] Naaah.
Desolation Williams:: Let’s just kick some ass.
Melanie Ballard: It’s what we do best.”

From Wikipedia,

“Ghosts of Mars has received a cult following since its release, with critics praising the action sequences, soundtrack and blending of genres. Given the film’s debt to Western cinema, particularly the works of Howard Hawks, it has been considered by a number of critics as an example of the Weird Western subgenre.”

No. None of that is accurate. The action sequences are terrible and look like they were filmed by a child. The soundtrack is an uncredited heavy-metal band.

Further down, the critical response is summed up as,

“John Carpenter’s Ghosts of Mars is not one of Carpenter’s better movies, filled as it is with bad dialogue, bad acting, confusing flashbacks, and scenes that are more campy than scary.”

Yeah, that’s more like it. Carpenter says that he was,

“[…] intentionally trying to make Ghosts of Mars as over-the-top and tongue-in-cheek as possible. He claimed he was trying to make a mindless and silly, yet highly entertaining and thrilling, action flick where “the universe allows its characters and plot points to be silly without becoming full-fledged comedies”, […]”

He tried to make Starship Troopers and came up very short.

Five Days at Memorial (2022) — 4/10

This was another one of those Netflix series that could have been a tight 90-minute movie. It tells the story of a hospital in New Orleans that had been cut off from all assistance for five days.

There are so many allegations in this series that it’s hard to keep track of them all. The most interesting ones aren’t pursued at all. There’s a question of why a city like New Orleans had no plan for rescuing people in a flood, why it abandoned people to their own devices for nearly a week. Or why did a large hospital not have any plan for flooding in a city famous for it? Or why were there two separate hospital organizations in the same building with no coordination between them? Why were the people who finally showed up to “rescue” people from the hospital so belligerent? Did the hospital have food and water or didn’t it have food and water? Did anyone actually mercy-kill patients against their wishes or not? Was there a moral basis for doing so when there was no expectation of rescue or help for the patients who couldn’t be moved? Could the patients have been moved or were the workers negligent?

This felt very much like a Netflix documentary: no questions answered, lots of allegations, invitation to trial by media, everyone can decide for themselves what they think happened and hash it out online. What fun.

The Sandman (2022) — 7/10

This feels a little bit like American Gods (also a Neil Gaiman property) (S01, S02) and a little bit like Legion (S01, S02). It’s not nearly as consistently solid as either of those, though.

The first few episodes tell of how, in the late 1800s, Roderick Burgess (Charles Dance) trapped Morpheus/Dream (Tom Sturridge) in a container from which he was unable to escape for over a century. He stole Dream’s three tools: his helmet, his sand, and his red ruby.

The final chapter of three episodes pretty much just jump-starts another segment, introducing a whole series-full of new characters, none of whom are particularly interesting, or particularly careful about dealings with strangers. There is Rose Walker (Kyo Ra), a strong, assertive young woman who has never listened to anything in her life that she didn’t demand as an answer to a question. She meets her great-grandmother, Unity (Sandra James-Young), who is also very free with information to complete strangers. She’s also wealthy beyond knowing, so she immediately solves all of Rose’s financial problems.

It seems that’s what passes for storytelling, I guess. I miss the days of Peter Parker, who lived in a world in which it was at least considered possible to make your own way in the world without the beneficence of an already-wealthy sugar daddy or momma. I suppose this is storytelling in an America where the dream has died. If you’re not born with security and wealth, you’ll never get it. Not on your own.

The world-building is OK, but uneven. There’s a lot of focus on The Corinthian (Boyd Holbrook), a nightmare who escaped the realm of the Dreaming in Morpheus’s long absence to wreak havoc on Earth as a serial killer. He’s trying to get control over Rose for reasons that are unknown to me. Much of this happens at a convention for serial killers.

Matthew the Raven (Patton Oswalt, who continues his career of being heard, but not seen in comic-book properties) keeps an eye on everything for Dream, who’s busy regaining control of his realm. We see some flashbacks of how he’s been combatting Constantines for centuries, the most recent incarnation of which is Johanna Constantine (Jenna Coleman), whose power balance vis á vis Dream see-saws, depending on what the writers need in the show. We are also introduced to Morpheus’s ethereal and scheming deity-siblings Desire and Despair.

The source material—the original comic books—look like they might be more interesting. I watched these episodes over time while I was working out. It was a perfect fit for that but I wouldn’t sit down and watch this show without doing something else.