Damsel (2018)

In the middle of the Utah desert, two men sat at a peculiarly situated stagecoach stop.  The younger man (David Zellner) said he was heading West to make a new start.  The older man, a preacher (Robert Forester), scoffed at that idea.  The West would be just as bad as where he had come from, though perhaps bad in a new way.  He had enough of the West and was returning to the East.  The old man grew impatient for the stagecoach.    Eventually, he stripped off most of his clothes, handed his tattered bible to the other man, and marched into the desert in his long johns.

At a barn dance, Samuel Alabaster (Robert Pattinson) and Penelope (Mia Wasikowska) were partners with wide grins.  The music was energetic and the dancers stamped the ground like an Irish river dance.

On a lonely northwestern shore, a man rowed a boat a shore.  He unloaded a crate that contained a miniature horse!  The man was Samuel and the horse was Butterscotch.  He made his way to a town and sought Parson Henry.  He found the drunken Parson Henry on the beach.  Notably, Parson Henry proved to be the younger man from the stagecoach stop and he wore the preacher's clothes and carried his tattered bible.  Samuel hired him via telegram for unspecified purposes.  After making Parson Henry presentable, the pair rode into the wilderness.  Samuel eventually explained that Penelope was kidnapped and he was on a rescue mission.  As soon as she was safe, he wanted Parson Henry to marry them.

Billed as a dark comedy, there is precious little comedy to be had.  Here is a collection of motley characters who, once you get to know them, are mostly dislikeable or bad.  Parson Henry, who links the tale together, is a coward who has no direction.  He wants to latch onto something or someone.  So, he's a parasite?  Samuel is an unreliable source, painting a picture that isn't accurate.  Props to Pattinson for taking such a role and doing a great job in it, but Samuel gets less and less likeable as time goes on.  Penelope is a sympathetic character but fails to be likeable; she's a very masculine character, destroying all the men she encounters.

What was the point of this story?  Parson Henry is unchanged from when met at the stagecoach stop.  The other characters have been dislodged from the lives they had, but the future is unknown.  It's like a story about a house that burned down that ends with the family staring at the ashes before walking away.  Uh, okay.  Throughout the movie, there are bits that ruin the setting.  That stagecoach stop in the middle of the desert was one such instance.  There is litterally nothing else in sight and it isn't a crossroad.  How would the potential rider get to the stop?  When leaving the town, Samuel had a chicken in a birdcage on top of Butterscotch.  What's that about?  On their first night out, they eat the chicken and the birdcage is not seen again.  Oh, okay.

Hard pass on this one.  Zellner made a much better movie: Kumiko the Treasure Hunter.  Watch that instead.

Mickey 17 (2025)

Mickey Barnes (Robert Pattinson) was surprised to wake up.  He found himself at the bottom of a snow-covered crevasse on the planet Niflheim.  How could he get out?  Luckily, his friend Timo (Steven Yeun) arrived.  Timo was surprised that Mickey wasn't dead yet; he had only come looking for Mickey's weapon, which was on a ledge above.  Leaving Mickey to his fate, Timo left.  How did he come to this?

Mickey and Timo had borrowed money from a shady character to launch a business.  It had failed spectacularly, and the lender intended to recoup his losses by carving the pair of them into pieces with a chainsaw.  In order to escape this fate, Mickey and Timo signed onto a colony ship bound for a distant planet.  Where Timo had a skill that earned him a spot - the waiting list was long, Mickey did not.  He volunteered to be an expendable.  He was given all the dangerous work.  If he died, a newly printed clone would take his place.  So far, he had died 16 times, making his current incarnation Mickey 17.

Mickey has a girlfriend, Nasha (Naomi Ackie).  The colony ship is led by Ken Marshall (Mark Ruffalo), a buffoonish congressman who lost his election so he paraphrased Davy Crockett: "You can go to hell -- I'm going to Niflheim."  His wife, Ylfa (Toni Collette), is no smarter that her dull-witted husband, but she encourages him in his stupidity.  Yes, this is supposed to be a dark comedy, but the idiocy of these villains is pathetic, not funny.

It was hard to like Mickey.  He comes across as a hapless victim.  The laughs are few and far between.  Mickey falling naked out of the printer because no one put the print tray in place proved to be a repeated joke.  Oh, so funny.  Ugh.  Some of the world building was cool, notably the explanation of how cloning was outlawed on Earth and how the only exception for cloning was if the previous incarnation was dead, thus Mickey's loophole for regular resurrection.  Of course, Mickey 17 surviving the fall into the crevasse and returning to the colony ship resulted in a multiples violation.  Nasha and the Mickeys demonstrated inexcusable stupidity in trying to resolve this issue before they could get caught.  Ugh.

Disappointing.  Skip.

The Boy and the Heron (2023)

World War II is underway and Mahito lives in Tokyo with his parents.  One night, the hospital, where his mother works, is left in flames after bombing.  His mother dies in the fire.  Soon after, his father Soichi (Christian Bale) relocates the family out of Tokyo to his wife's family's estate.  He has since remarried Natsuko (Gemma Chan), who happens to be his dead wife's younger sister.  No sooner have they arrived on the estate than a gray heron starts paying inordinate attention to Mahito.  He soon finds that it is a magical talking heron (Robert Pattison), which wavers between friend and foe.  The property has an old tower where his granduncle (Mark Hamill) went missing years ago.  There is also of story of his mother having vanished for a year in the tower only to return with no memory of the incident.  Of course, Mahito must investigate.

Like all Ghibli movies, the art is outstanding.  However, the story is lacking.  Mahito believes his mother might still be alive, clearly not yet reconciled with her death.  He does not get along with other kids at the local school and inflicts an injury to himself so that he won't have to go back.  Now with more free time, he followed the heron into the mysterious tower where he enters a fantastical world of giant man-eating parakeets led by the Parakeet King (Dave Bautista), villainous pelicans (Willem Dafoe), a strangely familiar fisherwoman (Florence Pugh), and Lady Himi the fire woman.  There are other bizarre denizens of this magical world that Mahito must navigate to save his stepmother and return home.  It is often confusing.

Obviously, it is a must-see for any fan of Studio Ghibli, but it is one of the weaker offerings.

High Life (2018)

While Monte (Robert Pattinson) repairs the hull of a spacecraft, his infant daughter watches videos from her crib.  Her crying becomes distracting, and Monte drops a tool that falls away into space.  As he enters through the airlock, several other spacesuits are on the rack.  Where is the rest of the crew?  It turns out that the crew consisted of death row criminals who 'volunteered' for a deep space mission to extend their lives.  As one would guess, they did not make the best crew.  One mission for the ship was to attempt pregnancy.  Nurse Dibs (Juliette Binoche), who had killed her own children, was charged with managing this.  As the opening shows, she was successful at least once.

The movie unfolds in a non-linear storyline.  Initially, there are brief flashes of how Monte earned his spot on the ship.  There is a random conversation between a scientist and a reporter on a train about sending convicts into deep space.  Then there are scenes that show the crew as it disintegrated and finally self-destructed.  As one would guess regarding death row inmates, none of them are particularly likeable, though Monte easily tops the list.  Heck, he killed a girl because she killed his dog, or that was how I interpreted it.  John Wick in space?

With pregnancy being a central theme, there are a lot of sexual references.  The crew mostly doesn't have sex to get pregnant.  Rather, Dibs gets the men to donate sperm which she injects.  Uh huh.  To make them compliant, Dibs also drugs the crew's water supply.

After all the backstory is explained, a return to the present proves to be more than a decade later.  Willow is now a young woman and Monte's gray patch has expanded.  How far is their destination?

Slow, dreary, and dark.  Avoid.

Waiting for the Barbarians (2019)

Colonel Joll (Johnny Depp), a noted figure from the capitol, arrives at an outpost town on the far edge of the empire.  The town magistrate (Mark Rylance) welcomes him and offers whatever assistance he might require.  Among his friends, the magistrate chuckles at the Colonel's mission, declaring that once every generation there arises a fear that the nomadic tribes will rise to attack the empire.  The following day, Joll interrogates a pair of sheep rustlers.  When he is done, one of them is dead and the other has revealed a planned rising among the desert tribes.  The magistrate finds this ludicrous, but Joll sets out into the desert and returns with more nomads to interrogate.  When Joll leaves to report his findings, the magistrate releases all the captured tribesmen and tries to return the town to its pre-Joll state.  However, there is a blind woman (Gana Bayarsaikhan) who begs in the streets.  The magistrate takes her in and eventually discovers that she was blinded, had her ankles broken, and was severely scarred by Joll's interrogations.  The magistrate offers to return her to her people and sets out into the desert with her and a small escort.  Upon his return, Officer Mandel (Robert Pattinson) has taken over the outpost and arrests the magistrate for consorting with the enemy.

The movie plays as a morality tale.  Joll sees an uprising that does not exist and through his efforts to expose it, he has created an uprising.  The peaceful co-existence that had stood for years was broken thanks to the intervention of an emissary from the distant capitol who did not understand the region.  Worse, he ignored the magistrate who was quite familiar with the people and customs.

Based on the uniforms and the setting, I had guessed this was supposed to be the French Foreign Legion in North Africa, but it is a purely fictional empire.  Most of the characters are nameless; that works fine in films, but it is awkward in writing.

Though well-acted, the story is unengaging.  The magistrate is a learned man whose hobbies include archeology and cryptography, but he is often detached from current events.  Sure, he sees what is going on and does not approve, but he is passive about it.  He's just a victim of this series of events.  Victims rarely make for good protagonists, even if they are the only moral and upright characters.

Mediocre.  Skip.

The Batman (2022)

The mayor is watching the news report of the debate with his challenger.  He is not pleased with the polls and thinks he should be winning easily.  Suddenly, a man in a mask appears behind him and beats him to death.  Lt. James Gordon (Jeffery Wright) arrives with the Batman (Robert Pattinson) to investigate the scene.  The other cops are horrified that Gordon brought Batman.  Batman surveys the scene, noticing several things that the detectives had missed.  Of particular interest, there is a card left for The Batman.  When opened, it offers a riddle.  What does a liar do when he's dead?  "He lies still," Batman states.  There is also a cypher to solve, which Batman takes to the bat cave.  Soon, there are more corpses and more riddles to solve.  The Riddler (Paul Dano) is exposing some dark secret related to city corruption and all the participants are getting eliminated.

Many of the standard characters appear: Catwoman (Zoe Kravitz), Penguin (an unrecognizable Colin Farrell), and Alfred (Andy Serkis).  Carmine Falcone (John Turturro) proves to be something of an enigma, a man who has a history with Thomas Wayne.  In a dramatic shift from the Christian Bale version, this Bruce Wayne is a brooding hermit reminiscent of Howard Hughes.  There is much more emphasis on Batman's skills as a detective; he solves most of the riddles, is frequently trailing suspects, records all his observations in journals, and discovers important facts through deduction.  He is active by day but not generally in costume.  Paul Dano's Riddler is very different from previous incarnations.  He isn't the cackling psychopath (Frank Gorshin) nor an over-the-top redhaired goofball (Jim Carrey).  This is more Unabomber/Zodiac Killer.

Though long, the pacing is good.  There are a few scenes that didn't work, especially the one where the police transport an unconscious Batman back to the police station without removing his mask, especially since the police are hostile toward this version of Batman.  Good popcorn fun!