Capsule Movie Reviews Vol.2024.17

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

1. Terminator Zero S01 (2024) — 6/10
2. Kung Fu Hustle (2004) — 9/10
3. Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) — 7/10
4. Il pianeta delle scimmie (Planet of the Apes) (2001) — 5/10
5. JFK (1991) — 8/10
6. The Century of the Self (2002) — 9/10
7. Last Breath (2019) — 7/10
8. Farha (2021) — 8/10
9. Roma (2018) — 8/10
10. Another Life E01 (2019) — 3/10

Terminator Zero S01 (2024) — 6/10

As with any other Japanese animated feature, this one is about the danger of atomic weapons. It emanates from the still-gaping wound torn into Japan’s soul by the bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This essential narrative is woven into the story of the Terminator, and it doesn’t work too badly, actually. The basic beats of the Terminator story—time travel, paradoxical family relationships, super-powerful AIs—are all here as well.

There’s a guy named Malcolm who’s an incredible genius, who’s developed an AI named Kokoro as a countermeasure to Skynet, which he somehow knows about. The answer to the question implied by the emphasized “somehow” in the previous sentence is that he has traveled back from the future to stop Skynet. There is also a more classic Terminator, which has been sent back to stop Malcolm.

Eiko has also come from the future to combat the Terminator and save Malcolm’s children? She is at first adversarial, then seems to team up with, Misaki, who is ostensibly Malcolm’s housekeeper, who’s an android but is also technologically advanced in ways simply not available to 1997 Japan. Ditto for Kokoro, which is the first clue that Malcolm is from the future. This isn’t 100% obvious, though, since 1997 Japan in this show has a lot of semi-autonomous robots wandering around—and causing the rifts in society you would expect by such a sea-change.

Stuff happens. The Terminator is relentless. Eiko defends and deflects. Skynet goes nuts, bombing half the planet. Malcolm enables Kokoro’s full power to try to stem further damage, although, you know, with half the planet already gone, what’s the point? You fucked up, bro.

Anyway, Kokoro takes over all of those aforementioned servant robots and starts herding all of the humans into slave camps or concentration camps or death camps, or whatever. It’s not great for humanity, is what I’m saying.

It’s not hard to figure out what happens next if you’re tangentially familiar with the Terminator series. Eiko turns out to be Malcolm’s mother. Malcolm created Misaki, whose initial personality has been converted to Kokoro. One of Malcolm’s kids—Eiko’s grandkids—has the chance to activate an EMP to deactivate Kokoro and also Skynet. He elects not to, even though Skynet is going to attack again—I guess he’s hoping that Kokoro will take a few minutes off from enslaving humanity to fight Skynet, which seems intent on wiping out humanity more quickly?

It was reasonably interesting and visually nice but it dragged on a bit, stretching the plot over eight episodes when it could have been four, or maybe six at most.

I watched it in Japanese with English subtitles.

Kung Fu Hustle (2004) — 9/10

I saw and reviewed this movie in 2017.

I liked it even more this time around, so I gave it an extra star.

I watched it in German but it doesn’t really matter. The storytelling is so visual that you could watch it on mute and miss very little.

Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) — 7/10

Some men are investigating the mysterious appearance of several WWII planes in the desert. An American group meets a French group and they mix English and French and Spanish to talk to each other, the local authorities, and an extremely elderly local man who says that the “sun came out last night and sang to him.”

In Indianapolis, two flights narrowly avoid hitting a UFO—but neither wants to report a UFO incident.

A little boy (Cary Guffey) awakens to all of his electric toys banging and full of life. His mother Jillian (Melinda Dillon) awakens to his fire trucks driving under her bed. She gets up—and here’s the weirdest part—she is wearing a going-out top and jean shorts. Did she pass out in her bed after a hot date? Was she going to sneak out later? No-one knows. No-one sees the need to explain. At any rate, she knows to go to the window to catch a glimpse of her son disappearing out of their backyard, giggling as he goes. How did she know to go to the window? No-one knows. No-one explains.

Roy Neary (Richard Dreyfuss) is building a train set with his son. His wife Ronnie (Teri Garr) has a house full of kids, one of whom is psychotically bashing a doll to pieces on the edge of a crib for which he’s way too big. Roy is not really a father of the year; he’s pretty distracted.

Roy is out investigating a power outage when he sees the UFO, which shorts out his truck and puts him to sleep. He wakes and drives off, encountering a group of people having a UFO watching party—kind of looking like they’re waiting for the peloton to pass by in the Tour de France—with a wizened rancher (Roberts Blossom) whistling, She’ll be coming ‘round the mountain. Roy and the others see a bunch of mini UFOs go flying by, following the road and hugging close to the ground. They are closely pursued by a police car.

Roy gets his wife and kids out to look at the UFOs but they’re disappointed. Teri Garr (RIP this year) is awesome, as always.

Next, in the Gobi Desert, UN investigators take a look at an entire ship that has reappeared, after its disappearance in the Bermuda Triangle, just like the airplanes from before. People are gathering on hillsides for viewing parties. David Laughlin (Bob Balaban) is working with the team to decode the musical message from the aliens. It apparently contains a longitude and latitude.

The UFOs are back at the little boy’s house. His mother is trying to block them from entering. They have somehow imprinted a picture of a mountain on the little boy’s mind, just like on Roy’s. They are back to get him to help them do … something. It’s pretty wild. The whole house shakes as if it had a poltergeist, with screws coming off of heating vents, electronics coming on, and so on. These were all novel and high-tech effects in 1977—they’re still pretty convincing today.

There’s a press conference with all of the UFO people and the military, where the military tries to convince them all that UFOs don’t exist. This doesn’t help at all. Roy is going crazier and crazier, trying to replicate the mountain he sees in his mind’s eye. “It’s not right!” Ronnie doesn’t know how to handle the weirdness. Roy begs her to help him deal with what’s going on in his head. She cannot. The kids are also not taking this well.

Roy wakes near his train model with verve. He knows what the mountain looks like now. He starts throwing plants and dirt and chicken wire through his living-room window, pillaging the neighbor hood for supplies. Ronnie follows him for a bit but then gives up and leaves with the kids in a giant station wagon. She’s outtathere.

Cut to Roy having built a giant replica of the mountain in his living room. He’s filthy. He’s obsessed. He doesn’t know what to do with himself. He can’t stop.

He sees the mountain on TV. He jumps in his car and heads for it, driving against two lanes of traffic that are going the other way. People are going nuts, trying to get out of there. Roy is trying to get closer. Jillian is there too. They head toward the mesa but notice that there are dead animals everywhere. There is a toxic gas in the air. They throw on gas masks.

Claude Lacombe (François Truffaut), interpreted by Laughlin, talks to Roy about his visions. He is very sympathetic and wildly curious. There is no toxic gas. The army is lying about it to convince people to leave. The helicopter is full of the compelled, including Jillian and Roy. Roy takes off his mask. he’s fine. Jillian does the same. Another guy named Larry (Josef Sommer) joins them as they hightail it toward the mesa. He’s forced to stop by an injury, though. Jillian and Roy soldier on. Jillian makes it up the ridge, but Roy keeps sliding back down the final slope. She pulls him up (remarkably, for a 1970s movie). They come out at the top to find a military base nestled in the top of the mesa.

As night settles, the spaceships arrive, seemingly called by the people at the base. Roy and Jillian watch from the crags of the mountain. The ships leave, then return in a spectacular, meteorological display. More and more ships appear, circling and hovering. It’s unclear what they’re doing. They were securing the area for the arrival of the mothership. It settles in and starts playing music—a “tonal vocabulary”—chatting with the billboard. The song ends. A platform drops. Several figures emerge; they are U.S. airmen and other abductees, lost decades ago. Soon after, another figure emerges, spindly, like a spider but eventually bipedal and bilateral. More figures emerge, more clearly humanoid, looking like children, milling about.

Cut to a group of astronauts, which now includes Roy at the end of the line. They’re lined up to board. The aliens choose Roy—and only Roy. He enters the ship.

I realize now that I’ve never actually seen this movie. I though the UFOs only appeared at the end. It was pretty good, if going on for a bit longer than it probably needed to. Also of note is that a not insignificant part of this film was in French, specifically most of the parts with Truffaut, who spoke very little, heavily accented English.

Il pianeta delle scimmie (Planet of the Apes) (2001) — 5/10

The unbridled optimism of these nearly quarter-century-old movies is enviable. The movie supposed that we would have floating bases orbiting Jupiter by 2029. And yet, though we have those bases, we still somehow need to train apes to fly spaceships. Incredible. Perhaps the most amazing thing is that they thought that the base would be called Oberon when it would obviously have been named Rumsfeld or something.

Captain Leo Davidson (Mark Wahlberg) is on the Oberon, training apes to fly spaceships. When strange anamolies appear near the base, they send his chimp to investigate. The chimp is in trouble, so he commandeers a vessel and follows it into the anomaly. His ship is zapped off somewhere, where it crashes on a planet where tribes of prehistoric-looking humans are hunted and caged by quasi-civilized apes. I say quasi-civilized because the best that this movie can come up with is that the apes achieve a civilization that looks only slightly better than that from Hard to Be a God, with pretty much everyone living in muck, despite some apes being quite advanced. It’s pretty medieval. Spoiler alert: Leo had been zapped by the space anomoly to a future, alternative-reality Earth where the apes had taken over after humans had messed things up for themselves.

On paper, this movie has a lot going for it: solid concept, well-known property, stacked cast, pretty good practical effects. Mark Wahlberg is the purported star but Tim Roth, Helena Bonham Carter, Michael Clarke Duncan, Paul Giamatti, and Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa play apes in heavy makeup but are still easily recognizable. Kris Kristofferson is an elder member of the human tribe who is somehow mysteriously captured for the first time, along with Daena (Estella Warren, who is gorgeous and has perfect hair, despite being a savage living in the wild).

I realized as I was watching that I’d already watched it in 2012. I was watching it again to practice Italian, which worked pretty well but was a bit sketchy in places without accompanying Italian subtitles.[2] This is not a good enough movie to finish watching again without a didactic side-effect.

JFK (1991) — 8/10

Jim Garrison (Kevin Costner) is investigating JFK’s murder. He drives his wife (Sissy Spacek) crazy with his investigations, which have intensified three years later, as he’s read through all of the Warren Commission’s data and their conclusions and realizes that they’ve ignored glaring details. His wife wants his “attention” on a Saturday night, which is mind-bending because they already have five kids—for the love God, stop breeding, you absolute freaks.

Jim re-opens the investigation with Bill Broussard (Michael Rooker) and Lou Ivon (Jay O. Sanders). There are a lot of moving parts and a lot of loose ends. There are also a tremendous number of well-known actors, like Guy Bannister (Edward Asner), a poisonously racist man with a lot of connections, his friend Jack Martin (Jack Lemmon), Lee Harvey Oswald (Gary Oldman), Clay Shaw (Tommy Lee Jones), Willie O’Keefe (Kevin Bacon), Dean Andrews (John Candy), David Ferrie (Joe Pesci)—whose eyebrows and hair are wild and completely fake-looking—Susie Cox (Laurie Metcalf), Numa Bertel (Wayne Knight), Jack Ruby (Brian Doyle-Murray), Senator Long (Walter Matthau), and, finally, X (Donald Sutherland).

Kevin Bacon goes all-out as a gay convict with very strong opinions about how things are going in America.

“Jim Garrison: What I need to know is why? Why are you telling us this?
Willie O’Keefe: ‘Cause that motherfucker Kennedy stole that motherfuckin’ election, that’s why. Nixon was going to be one of the great presidents ‘til Kennedy wrecked this country. Got niggers all over the place, askin’ for their damned rights. Why do you think we got all this crime now? He promised those motherfuckers too much, you ask me. The revolution’s comin’! Bullshit, man! Fascism is comin’ back! I’m gonna tell you this: the day that communist sonofabitch died was a great day, a great day for this country. And I’d just hate to think that they’d blame it on some silly fuckin’ Oswald, who didn’t know shit anyway. People got to know. People got to know why he was killed. Because he was a communist.”

Phew, that’s a lot to chew on. It just goes to show that the incoherence of online discourse isn’t new. This is a movie made over 30 years ago about a period nearly 30 years before that. Incoherence seems to be in our DNA.

So much stuff in the official narrative doesn’t add up. Oswald was almost certainly a patsy. He was almost certainly not what they said he was.

• Who knows Russian that well and stays in the Marines?
• Who can renounce his citizenship at the height of the cold war, move to Russia, move back, and get this passport back within 48 hours?
• How could his Russian wife Marina get into the country so easily?
• Was it because he’d gone on a mission to give the Soviets enough information to down a U2 plane and thereby scuttle a potential peace conference?
• Why would he order a traceable rifle to his home when he could have just bought one at any of dozens of stores within a mile of his house in Texas?
• Why was there no attorney present during his 12-hour initial interrogation?
• Why are all of the records of that interrogation redacted and missing?
• Why are all of the records related to Oswald’s service missing?
• What was Jack Ruby doing in a supposedly broken-down truck on the day of the assassination with someone carrying a long gun from the back of the truck?
• What about the shadowy figure on the grassy knoll?
• Why were they browbeating eyewitnesses already twenty minutes after the assassination?
• Why was witness testimony changed in the record?
• How was Oswald able to get off three shots with such a slow rifle?
• With a defective scope?
• With mediocre skills?
• With trees in the way?
• That were in full bloom?
• On a moving target?
• At 88 yards?
• Why wasn’t he allowed to fire when Kennedy was coming up Houston, when he had a much clearer shot, when he had him dead-to-rights? Because they needed the real positions to be able to hit Kennedy, so he had to wait.

If you ever get a trivia question that asks for the name of the film in which Joe Pesci, Kevin Bacon, and Tommy Lee Jones engage in a gay sex party where they all take poppers, with Jones on hands and knees, painted gold like a statue, Pesci in powdered wig and whiteface, and Bacon in a dress and makeup, it’s JFK.

Joe Pescie as David Ferrie played tough but he started to unravel.

“Jim Garrison: It’s gonna be OK, Dave. You just talk to us on the record, we’ll protect you. I guarantee it.
David Ferrie: They’ll get to you too. They’ll destroy you. They’re untouchable, man. I’m so fuckin’ exhausted I can’t see straight.”

About halfway through, X (Donald Sutherland) shows up to give us a post-WWII U.S. history lesson, discussing all of the black ops in which he’s partaken. X is basically a mid-20th-century Smedley Butler (Wikipedia).

“WWII, I was in Romania, Greece, Yugoslavia. I helped evacuate part of the Nazi intelligence apparatus, just before the end of the war. We used those guys in the fight against the communists. In Italy, ‘48, stole the elections. France ‘49, broke the strikes. Overthrew Quirino in the Philippines, Arbenz in Guatemala, Mossadegh in Iran. We were in Vietnam in ‘54, Indonesia ‘58, Tibet in ‘59. Got the Dalai Lama out. We were good. Very good. Then we got into the Cuban thing. Not so good. Set up all the bases for the invasion. Supposed to take place in October ‘62. Khrushchev sent the missiles to resist the invasion. Kennedy didn’t invade. We were standing there with our dicks in the wind. A lot of pissed-off people, Mr. Garrison.”

X explains how he was in New Zealand, on the way back from the South Pole, where he’d been mysteriously and oddly stationed for a while, when he read about Kennedy’s assassination in the newspaper. It described Oswald in detail, even though he wouldn’t even be charged for four more hours. So how did the newspaper in New Zealand already have all of the information? It was fed to them by a black op. Instead of being done against a foreign country, the black-ops forces were being used domestically, to carry out and then cover up the assassination of a president. He goes on to explain how they’d gotten him out of the way so that he couldn’t ensure the president’s safety, which would have been his job. He goes on in detail about all of the safety measures that weren’t taken that fateful day.

“We would have arrived days ahead, studied the route, checked all the buildings. Never would have allowed all those wide-open windows overlooking Dealy Plaza, never! We would have had our own snipers covering the area the minute a window went up! They would have been on the radio. We would have been watching the building, checking for baggage, coat under the arms… Never would have allowed a man to open an umbrella along the way! Never would have allowed the car to slow down to 11 miles an hour, much less take that unusual curve at Houston and Elm! You would have felt an army presence on the streets that day. But none of this happened. It was a violation of the most basic protection code we have, and it’s an indication of a massive plot based in Dallas.”

He asks the question we should always ask when something terrible and/or sketchy goes down, cui bono (Wikipedia)?

“Why was Kennedy killed? Who benefitted? And who was the power to cover it up?”

X sums up why Kennedy had to go.

“The organizing principle of any society, Mr. Garrison, is for war. The authority of the state over its people resides in its war powers. Kennedy wanted to end the Cold War in his second term. He wanted to call off the moon race and cooperate with the Soviets. He signed a treaty to ban nuclear testing. He refused to invade Cuba in 1962. He set out to withdraw from Vietnam. But all that ended on the 22nd of November, 1963.”

They turn the screws on Garrison. His wife turns against him; she doesn’t want to lose their good life for the truth. The IRS audits him. The National Guard terminates his participation after 18 years.

He and his team argue about the size and shape of the conspiracy. Bill Broussard argues that it was probably just the Mob—but he nearly literally can’t conceive of “our nation’s hallowed institutions” having been involved. Garrison isn’t having it; he responds,

“I don’t doubt their involvement, Bill, but at a low level. Could the Mob change the parade route, Bill, or eliminate the protection for the President? Could the Mob send Oswald to Russia and get him back? Could the Mob get the FBI, the CIA, and the Dallas Police to make a mess of the investigation? Could the Mob appoint the Warren Commission to cover it up? Could the Mob wreck the autopsy? Could the Mob influence the national media to go to sleep? And since when has the Mob used anything but .38's for hits, up close? The Mob wouldn’t have the guts or the power for something of this magnitude. Assassins need payrolls, orders, times, schedules. This was a military-style ambush from start to finish… a coup d’etat with Lyndon Johnson waiting in the wings.

“[…]

“If I’m so far from the truth, why is the FBI bugging our offices? Why are our witnesses being bought off and murdered? Why are Federal agencies blocking our extraditions and subpoenas when we were never blocked before?”

The finale in the courtroom is absolutely brilliant and utterly convincing. The most convincing proof? Literally everything else the U.S. government has done in the last 100 years. There’s your proof.

Here are some chunks from the closing arguments, taken from the script by Oliver Stone & Zachary Sklar (IMSDb).

“The Official Legend is created and the media takes it from there. The glitter of official lies and the epic splendor of the thought-numbing funeral of J.F.K. confuse the eye and confound the understanding. Hitler always said “the bigger the lie, the more people will believe it.” Lee Oswald − a crazed, lonely man who wanted attention and got it by killing a President, was only the first in a long line of patsies. In later years Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King, men whose commitment to change and to peace would make them dangerous to men who are committed to war, would follow, also killed by such “lonely, crazed men,” who remove our guilt by making murder a meaningless act of a loner. We have all become Hamlets in our country − children of a slain father − leader whose killers still possess the throne. The ghost of John F. Kennedy confronts us with the secret murder at the heart of the American dream. He forces on us the appalling questions: Of what is our Constitution made? What is our citizenship, and more, our lives worth? What is the future of a democracy where a President can be assassinated under conspicuously suspicious circumstances while the machinery of legal action scarcely trembles? How many political murders, disguised as heart attacks, cancer, suicides, airplane and car crashes, drug overdoses will occur before they are exposed for what they are?

“[…]

“I believe we have reached a time in our country, similar to what life must’ve been like under Hitler in the 30's, except we don’t realize it because Fascism in our country takes the benign disguise of liberal democracy. There won’t be such familiar signs as swastikas. We won’t build Dachaus and Auschwitzes. We’re not going to wake up one morning and suddenly find ourselves in gray uniforms goose − stepping off to work … “Fascism will come,” Huey Long once said. “in the name of anti-fascism” − it will come in the name of your security − they call it “National Security,” it will come with the mass media manipulating a clever concentration camp of the mind. The super state will provide you tranquility above the truth, the super state will make you believe you are living in the best of all possible worlds, and in order to do so will rewrite history as it sees fit. George Orwell’s Ministry of Truth warned us, “Who controls the past, controls the future.

“[…]

“What kind of “national security” do we have when we have been robbed of our leaders? Who determines our “national security”? What “national security” permits the removal of fundamental power from the hands of the American people and validates the ascendancy of invisible government in the United States? That kind of “national security,” gentlemen of the jury, is when it smells like it, feels like it, and looks like it, you call it what it is − it’s Fascism! I submit to you that what took place on November 22, 1963 was a coup d’etat. Its most direct and tragic result was a reversal of President Kennedy’s commitment to withdraw from Vietnam. War is the biggest business in America worth $80 billion a year. The President was murdered by a conspiracy planned in advance at the highest levels of the United States government and carried out by fanatical and disciplined Cold Warriors in the Pentagon and CIA’s covert operations apparatus

“[…]

“Let’s ask the two men who have profited the most from the assassination − your former President Lyndon Baines Johnson and your new President, Richard Nixon − to release 51 CIA documents pertaining to Lee Oswald and Jack Ruby, or the secret CIA memo on Oswald’s activities in Russia that was “destroyed” while being photocopied. All these documents are yours − the people’s property − you pay for it, but because the government considers you children who might be too disturbed to face this reality, because you might lynch those involved, you cannot see these documents for another 75 years.

“[…]

“Individual human beings have to create justice and this is not easy because truth often presents a threat to power and we have to fight power often at great risk to ourselves.

“[…]

“[Starts choking up a bit] I have here some $8000 in these letters sent to my office from all over the country − quarters, dimes, dollar bills from housewives, plumbers, car salesmen, teachers, invalids … These are the people who cannot afford to send money but do, these are the ones who drive the cabs, who nurse in the hospitals, who see their kids go to Vietnam. Why? Because they care, because they want to know the truth − because they want their country back, because it belongs to us the people as long as the people got the guts to fight for what they believe in! The truth is the most important value we have because if the truth does not endure, if the Government murders truth, if you cannot respect the hearts of these people… (shaking the letters)…then this is no longer the country in which we were born in and this is not the country I want to die in…”

It’s a really well-written film with great dialogue and speeches. It goes on a bit long but it’s a tangled web.

The Century of the Self (2002) — 9/10

This is an absolutely excellent 4-hour documentary about how the world we now know took shape. I’ve included some interesting citations that underline the thesis, which is largely a history of Sigmund Freud and his nephew Edward Bernays and the mind-control industry that grew from them. They were far from alone, and they had a lot of help along the way, and afterward, but they kicked things off. Freud was largely uninvolved, except as an inspiration and household name used by others, but Bernays was involved throughout, over a span of decades.

The Century of the Self by Adam Curtis / David Lessig (uploader) (YouTube)

At 16:34,

“Man’s desires must overshadow his needs. Prior to that time, there was no American consumer. There was the American worker and there was the American owner, and they manufactured and they saved and they ate what they had to. When the people shopped, they shopped for what they needed. And, while the very rich may have bought things they didn’t need, most people did not. And Maiser envisioned a break with that, where you would have things that you didn’t actually need, but you wanted as opposed to needed. And the man who would be at the center of changing that mentality for the corporations was Edward Bernays. ”

At 30:05,

“Mass democracy, at its heart, was the consuming self, which not only made the economy work, but was happy and docile, and so created a stable society.”

“Both Bernays’s and Lippmann’s concept of managing the masses takes the idea of democracy and it turns it into a palliative. It turns it into giving people some kind of feel-good medication that will respond to an immediate pain or an immediate yearning, but will not alter the objective circumstances one iota. I mean, democracy, really—the idea of democracy at its heart—was about changing the relations of power that had governed the world for so long. And Bernays’s concept of democracy was one of maintaining the relations of power, even if it meant that one needed to sort of stimulate the psychological life, the lives, of the public. And, in fact, in his mind, that was what was necessary. That, if you can keep stimulating the irrational self, then leadership can basically go on doing what it wants to do.”

At 01:25:00,

“They actually believed that this elite was necessary, because individual citizens were not capable, if left alone, of being Democratic citizens. The elite was necessary in order to create the conditions that would produce individuals capable of behaving as a good consumer, and also behaving as a democratic citizen. They didn’t see their activities as anti-democratic, as undermining the capacity of individual citizens for democracy, quite the opposite. They understood [themselves to be] creating the conditions for democracy’s survival and future.”

I don’t believe that all of them believed this bunkum. I believe that some of them believed it. But I also think that they all enjoyed the wealth, power, prestige, privilege, omniscience, and omnipotence they felt they had gained. They sold the idea that they should be in charge in that way, but I bet most of them couldn’t have cared one way or the other exactly which story was told, as long as it resulted in their own personal dominance and comfort.

Their arrogance was necessary in order to sell the idea that they knew better. Whenever you hear someone saying that people “made the wrong choices”, you’re hearing the voice of elitism creeping in and you should be extremely careful.

At 01:30:00, there is an absolutely excellent and absolutely devastating section on Bernays’s efforts on behalf of United Fruit to topple Arbenz’s presidency in Guatemala in 1954. The inclusion of psycho-warfare would form the template for dozens of other coups and the anti-Communist century that followed—and that still continues in this, the next century. Why stop when it’s still working?

Last Breath (2019) — 7/10

This is the story of a 100M working dive in the North Sea. The divers go into what is called sat-isolation (“sat” for “saturation”) for a month at a time, breathing only a Helium/Oxygen mix. Three divers crowd into a closed system that is analogous to a space station, but ensconced within the ship. They prepare for and execute their excursions from there, with their own access to the water. This is not science-fiction. This happens all the time. This kind of thing is essential for keeping the fossil fuels flowing.

The dives are six hours long, with the diver attached to an umbilical that provides hot water—the water temperature at the seabed is 4ºC—as well as air, communication, and light. They drop down the 100 meters until they hit the seabed. Once they’re down there, they perform maintenance and construction tasks on the pipeline infrastructure. It’s not hard enough to dive at that depth, it’s not hard enough to be breathing a mix of Helium, it’s not hard enough to be trapped in a small habitat for a month, it’s not hard enough to be in such cold water and at such high pressure that you would freeze to death in a minute and would be crushed in seconds. You also have to do construction work that would be difficult to do at the surface, in the open air.

This is the story of Chris Lemons, who had done several sat-dives but was still the junior member of the team, which also comprised Duncan Allcock and Dave Yuasa. Chris and Dave drop down, while Duncan runs things from the bell.

The weather up top was getting rough: 35kt winds and 18ft swells. Not undivable, though. There’s a guy whose entire job is to keep the boat in position. The problems begin when he is no longer able to do so because of a mechanical failure. They immediately call back the divers—but the boat is already adrift. The umbilicals are still attached, but they’re now lying across the structure. The two divers have to climb out, hand over hand, which is normal, but they usually don’t have to clear a structure.

While Dave made it up over the structure, Chris’s umbilical ended up tightly wrapped around it. It’s dark and the water is churning. They can see each other, they’re two meters apart, but Dave is at the end of his umbilical and cannot reach him. Chris’s umbilical snaps, piece by piece. Dave is pulled away by the continued motion of the boat. He continues climbing, back to the bell.

Christ has five minutes of oxygen in the tanks on his back but he has no chance of getting back to the diving bell. He can’t just surface because that will kill him nearly immediately as well—he has to depressurize in the bell first. Dave is back on the bell but can’t get back in because the boat is moving so much.

Oh, holy shit! The robot (ROV) found Chris on the structure but it’s been at least 20 minutes. He has no air and no hot water. He’s deep-frozen, so maybe, maybe, maybe there’s a chance. They think he’s moving, though. It looks like he’s moving. Is it just the current?

The ship is still offline and still moving about at the whim of the weather and the currents. It finally comes back online and can finally maneuver back to the structure, in order to pick up Chris. Dave is still on the bell and ready to drop back in to join the ROV in the salvage.

36 minutes after severing the umbilical, Dave’s got Chris back inside, as quick as humanly possible.

Duncan brings him back. He’s alive.

How?

The film spools back to the moment that the umbilical was cut—and lets Chris tell his own story. He talks of not really feeling the cold, about how pitch-black it was, about having calculated how much air he had left and knowing that he was going to die. He said it was like falling asleep. “It was not that bad.”

And then, he’s back in the bell, waking up, getting stronger every minute. He seemed fine. No brain damage, nothing.

He’s still in the space station, though. They get him out and into the regular boat and keep a watchful eye but he really is OK. No lasting damage.

Three weeks later, he’s back on the seabed with Dave, with Duncan in the bell.

The film is a mix of reconstructed scenes and original footage. It was better than I’d expected from the first few minutes. It’s only 90 minutes and, honestly, a bit long for all that. They did a good job of hiding the big reveal that Chris was alive quite well. Unlike me, who spoiled it.

Farha (2021) — 8/10

Farha (Karam Taher) lives in a village in Palestine in 1948 with her father (Ashraf Barhom), who is the mayor. She dreams of moving to the city to study and live with her friend Farida (Tala Gammoh). Her father is reluctant but eventually gives in, getting her admission to the city school.

Before she can go, though, the village is attacked. The Nakba is at their door. Planes fly overhead. Machine-gun fire rattles in the distance—and also much closer. Her father sends her off with his brother-in-law but she refuses to go and returns to him, amid the chaos of the invasion. He secrets her away in a storeroom off of their courtyard, while he leaves to defend the village.

He does not return. Farha spends days and nights in the storeroom, She is trapped. It rains. She catches rainwater to drink. She can see out of a small hole, a window of sorts. She eats potatoes. She is forced to designate a corner of the storeroom as a lavatory. Even after days of no noise, she is unable to force the door. She lies on her potato sacks, sleeping fitfully, singing to herself.

Days later, a family arrives: a man with a pregnant wife. She is deep in labor and gives birth in the courtyard. Farha watches under the door. After a quick birth, they continue on their way. She calls to the father. He returns. He tries to knock the door down. As he is working, a voice calls over a megaphone: “Get out or get killed. Get out or get killed in your houses.”

She catches her first glimpse of Israeli solders. They confront Abu Mohammed (Saleh), who was trying to help her. There is a hooded man with the soldiers. He speaks English. They decide to search the house. The Israeli soldiers act exactly as Nazi soldiers do in every other war movie about this era. They roughly search the man’s wife—who had literally just given birth—and then threaten to kill her. A female Israeli soldier finds a large key on her—then she says she can keep it as a souvenir. This is, I suppose, a nod to the fact that many Palestinians still have keys to the houses that they were forced to abandon nearly 80 years ago now.

The soldiers find the rest of the children, including the new baby. Farha sees this all through a crack in the door that Saleh had opened when he was trying to free her.

The soldiers line the whole family up against the wall and then shoot them, gunning them down with machine guns. Farha pulls back, stifling a scream. She has learned not to make noise. She has taken the measure of the people who have invaded her village. She knows what they are. She knows she will find no mercy there.

The hooded man with the Israelis is her uncle. While gathering water as instructed, he comes to her door and whispers her name, then leaves immediately.

The baby lives. But not for long. “Don’t waste a bullet,” says the commander. The soldier lifts his boot but cannot bring himself to crush its head. He covers its face with a handkerchief and leaves. Farha watches, wide-eyed, horrified, unbelieving. She hears the baby’s cries. Finally, she vomits as well.

She is still trapped. The child has stopped crying. It gurgles occasionally. She can do nothing. She is still trapped.

She redoubles her efforts to free herself, to no avail.

It is dawn again. Farha has sung herself to sleep. The cries have stopped. It was a newborn. Its mother lies dead not meters away. The soldier who couldn’t bring himself to kill the baby has let it die of exposure or thirst or hunger instead.

Farha find a gun in her lentils. She dumps out more lentils and finds bullets. She loads the pistol. She takes aim at the door, putting useless holes in it. It is really unclear what the plan is. Save a bullet for yourself.

The door magically opens.

She is free. She drinks from the well.

The courtyard is littered with corpses.

She goes to the river, to the waterfall. She bathes. The memories do not wash away.

She is on the swing that she’d shared with her friend Farhid. She has the knife her father gave her. She has a slip of paper from her friend. Her school admission paper is gone, left behind with her former life. She walks into the sunset, alone on a dusty, empty road.

She would make it to Syria. This is a true story.

Roma (2018) — 8/10

We start with very nice opening credits, with a soothing scene of soapy water rushing over a tiled floor. A skylight shows a plane flying overhead. At the end of the credits, the camera pans up to show the lady cleaning the floor. We are in black-and-white.

She works in a giant home, owned by a wealthy family with many children. The lady is on the roof, doing laundry, listening to No Tengo Dinero but with lyrics I’d never heard before—and different than the standard ones. Across the rooftops, the scene repeats, with local women doing laundry on the roof, listening to transistor radios.

It is 1971. Mexico.

It is so wild watching a family with servants. it is a concept completely unknown to me. I don’t think I’ve ever even been in a house with live-in servants. I know only a few people who have occasional maid service.

The lady’s name is Cleo (Yalitza Aparicio) and she lives in the servants’ quarters with Sofi (Daniela Demesa). On their day off, they eat lunch at a diner, and then are picked up by their dates. Cleo’s date Fermín (Jorge Antonio Guerrero) is poor. While she leaves a tip, he sneaks back to empty the soda bottle she’d left. He leaves the money. At the movie theater, he asks whether she really wants to go to the movie—he probably can’t afford it.

Oops. nope. He and Cleo head back to a hotel room, where he takes down a curtain rod and presents her a fully naked Kata. He tells her of how martial arts saved his life. She is enthralled.

Back at work; the morning routine. The dog Borras greets her first. Does he ever go for a walk? I don’t think so. There is so much dog-shit in the driveway, where she was cleaning during the credits.

Cleo is back at the movies with Fermín. They’re necking in the back when she tells him that she’s pregnant. He tells her that’s great…but then skedaddles before the end of the movie. He even leaves behind his jacket.

Cleo tells her boss Mrs. Sofia (Daniela Demesa), who immediately takes her in her husband’s (Fernando Grediaga) fancy car to the doctor. She tries to drive it between two trucks and scrapes it up something fierce. She doesn’t really care because we saw earlier that she knows his frequent business trips are a lie; he’s having an extramarital affair that is tearing her apart.

Cleo goes to a country home with her employer and her friends, where they all yuck it up in jarring ignorance of the colonial savagery around them, being done in their name, to maintain their power, to maintain their ability to perform drunken conga lines in massive living rooms, while hordes of their utterly undisciplined brats tear around, Two of them are racing electric slot-cars. Another pounds down on top of the cars as they go by. I have never hated any child more. I could have watched as a hole opened up in the Earth and swallowed him whole. You do not disrespect the slot-car track. Understood?

Mrs. Sofia’s husband is still gallivanting around the countryside, cheating right and left and pretending to the children that he’s in Ottawa. Cleo visits Fermín’s cousin Ramón (José Manuel Guerrero Mendoza) to find out where Fermín is. He’s at his karate camp. Cleo goes there and watches as they train and then as their fearless leader Profesor Zovek (Latin Lover) shows off his power move: standing on one leg with his eyes closed. His students all scoff but are unable to replicate his seemingly simple feat. Cleo can, though, alone among the students and bystanders. No-one notices or cares.

Fermín tells Cleo to fuck right off in no uncertain terms, threatening her and her unborn child with physical violence before loping off to jump on a truck full of other youths. He is portrayed as an animal, without morals or philosophy, satiating his animal lusts and moving on. In this way, the film does Mrs. Sophie’s husband no better; he is, apparently, the same. If there’s a message in this film, then it’s that men are evil. They are terrible, shallow, irredeemable creatures who prey on women, who are just trying to get along and keep the world turning. Even the young boys are all assholes, for the most part. Little Pepe (Marco Graf) is a typically self-absorbed child but isn’t as terrible as Toño (Diego Cortina Autrey) and Paco (Carlos Peralta).

Cleo goes shopping for a crib with Abuela. As they are driven into the city, they notice everything in an uproar but their only concern is to find a parking space. The revolution does not concern them. It would concern Cleo but, when she is with the family, she is of their world, even though she really isn’t. She doesn’t know, of course. It doesn’t occur to her. After a while, still in the store, there is a commotion and wild youths (more men) storm in with guns drawn, they are looking for a young man who’d fled into the store. They find him and execute him. One of the young men is Fermín, who aims his weapon at Cleo and Abuela.

Cleo’s water breaks.

They rush to the hospital. In an elevator, she briefly sees Sr. Antonio and then he’s gone. After a lot of commotion, Cleo’s child is stillborn. She is allowed to hold the child for a few seconds before the (male) doctor says he has to take it away. It is unclear why things must go so quickly. We are, I’m sure, to assume that the patriarchy is fucking things up again. It’s 1970 in Mexico. It’s possible that this is how it was.

I was born a year later in the far-northern part of Mexico’s northern neighbor. I’m very sure that the doctor in charge Dr. Weeden smoked a cigarette as he accompanied my mother through her epidural and the birth of her twins, the second of which (me) no-one knew she was having. They didn’t have sonograms back then, certainly not in countryside hospitals. I was a surprise. I wouldn’t be surprised if my dad smoked there, too. Except that I bet he wasn’t even allowed in. Was Dr. Weeden an obstetrician? Nope. He was my pediatrician after that for years. He was a GP. There was no such thing as a doctor dedicated to obstetrics back then—at least not in the countryside. So, what I’m saying is, 50 years ago, everything was quite different. So maybe they did just take dead babies away from their mothers after a few seconds.

Cleo is back at her home, but not working. Mrs. Sophie drives home in a new, smaller car, one that fits in the tight driveway. There’s still dog-shit on the tiles, though not as much as before. Everyone just steps around it. God forbid you should take the dog for a walk. Maybe the neighborhood is too dangerous?

They all drive to the beach with Cleo, who is having a hard time enjoying anything. I’m sure it’s difficult to be with other people’s children after what she’d so recently endured. At dinner, in a restaurant, Mrs. Sophia tells the children that their father isn’t coming back. He will see them but he doesn’t know when. She will take a different job, to make more money, because their father hasn’t sent them any. Outside, they eat a desultory ice cream. Behind them, a wedding party is in full swing. Their despondency deepens.

Back at the beach, in another gorgeously filmed scene. The children swim close to shore. Even Cleo is helping build a castle. She’s talking again. Pepe is filthy with sand. Cleo towels him off. How did they not make him clean up in the water? He is telling his stories about when “he was older” again, when “he was a sailor”. Cleo sees the children are going out too far; she rushes into the surf but she doesn’t know how to swim. The children are gone. One floats back in. Another. Sofi is gone. She’s back. Cleo has gathered them in. The surf pounds relentlessly, if rather innocuously, as they make their way back, coughing and choking as they fall to the sand. Mrs. Sophia rushes over. Paco and Pepe as well. This is the iconic scene from the movie poster.

“Cleo I didn’t want her. I didn’t want her to be born.”

As noted, this film does not depict a good society. It is clearly nostalgic, a reminiscence. But it is a sober and clear-eyed look at a world that hated women and the poor even, possibly even more then than it still does now.

I have, once again, I think, watched a film at the right time—Mexico has a younger, Jewish, socialist, female president Claudia Sheinbaum who I just heard has told Canada that it doesn’t half a tenth of the cultural heritage that Mexico has, when Trudeau was cozying up to Trump to figure out what to do about perennial problem-child Mexico. But I perhaps digress.

Anyway, women 50 years ago persevered but that is perhaps all they could do at the time. Mrs. Sophia seemed quite resigned to not getting any alimony. Cleo had no chance of exacting any control over her baby-daddy. They both needed more help in breaking free of society’s constraints but they did what they could, within the bounds of their world. Still, we saw in the tumult around them—the marching military bands, the student protestors and rioters—that there was far-worse desperation all around, that their problems, serious as they were to them, were as nothing when compared to those of the rest of the hoi-polloi.

They return to the house. Sr. Antonio has removed all of the bookshelves and many of the books. The many remaining books are piled on the floor. “Es horribile,” say the children. “A mí me gusta,” says Sofia.

The film ends on Cleo climbing the long, outer stairs to the roof, carrying laundry. The same airline flight that passed overhead, reflected in the puddle during the credits at the beginning, crosses overhead again. Life, I guess, goes on. No music over the closing credits. Just the sounds of a city: a dog barking, birds chirping, the sound of the far-off plane.

The film is shot in black-and-white throughout and is beautifully filmed. The story is fine, if a bit banal. It serves as a backdrop to the gorgeous film, a skein on which the moving pictures hang. Its purpose is to provide an even flow upon which the images are carried. The real story is between the lines, I think. But that is perhaps what I brought to it. I’m honestly not sure what director Alfonso Cuarón intended. As you can probably tell, though, the film grew on me as it went on. By the time it was over, I no longer thought it was too long. I guess that’s art.

Another Life E01 (2019) — 3/10

This was a low-effort soap opera with sci-fi trimmings. It “stars” Katee Sackhoff (of Battlestar Galactica fame) as Niko, who is … not a good actor. She’s quite wooden. She is, however, the best in this show! Like, by far! It might be unfair because all of the characters are written so poorly. They are all caricatures, barely sketched out as “identities”, like it was a superhero team. There’s overweight guy of Latin origin. There’s trans-person of indeterminate gender. There’s shitty, bitchy, thinks-she’s-hot girl who can’t stop checking social media. There’s Dunning-Kruger-level overconfident macho asshole. There’s smarmy guy who’s called “old”, even though he’s barely 30, but it turns out that he’s poor, so everyone unironically makes fun of him for it (because that’s one of the last bastions of identity that you are allowed to freely mock: class). There’s 15-year-old-looking female engineer who is almost certainly a lesbian. It goes on and on.

The first episode was one-hour long. It introduced an alien invasion, FTL spaceships, FTL communication, all without explanation or history—not even a second of explanation. The plot has been given about as much attention as that in a pornographic film—it’s just that, in this case, the action that the show can’t wait to get to isn’t a leaky submarine, but in-depth conversations about how people feel about leaving their daughter behind or how soldiers feel about the person in charge.

The spaceship acts like a submarine. They have to weld things on it, for God’s sake. It shifts and bucks as if were in current. There is a mutiny, there is a restoration of power, and then an attempted murder by the mutineer and a self-defense killing by Niko, but which I’m sure episode two would reveal had not been filmed in any way, so that the remaining crew members can sullenly suspect her of having killed her rival, even though she’d pretended to have forgiven him. The other crew members all seemed pretty chill with their fearless leader having nearly gotten all of them killed, while they seemed resentful of her for having saved their asses, even though the FTL jump they made took them into the unknown.

During the mutiny, the “pretty” one took a helluva shot to the schnozz, with blood running everywhere. Not ten minutes later and she’s got no bruises, no blood, nothing. No explanation. It feels more like the show just forgot that she should be nursing an injury, and just lazily hopes that we’re going to assume that she was healed by some futuristic med-bay. It’s trash writing.

Have you noticed how much I’ve talked about female characters? The only male characters are either raging assholes or simps. The general on Earth is a woman. One of the chief scientists is a woman. The only reason the other scientist gets to be male is because he’s married to Niko.

At least 80% of the episode was people talking about their feelings—and that’s with the mutiny and getting lost in space. I decided to stop watching when the top scientist on Earth said, “let’s try it at 1Hz per second.”. Just stop talking. Jesus, what bad writing. Insulting.