The Rip (4/5 Stars)

I see about fifty movies a year, which is a lot more than most people, but not nearly enough to have a firm grasp on what is happening in the art form. Take the writer/director Joe Carnahan. He has been writing and directing movies for nearly thirty years. “The Rip” a straight-to-Netflix crime thriller starring Matt Damon and Ben Affleck is only the second movie of his that I have seen. The first was a Liam Neeson 2011 vehicle called “The Grey”, in which he battles wolves in the tundra. I thought that movie’s plot was sharp and the action well-delivered, but didn’t bother to look up who had written or directed it. Turns out that Joe Carnahan did both. Then Joe Carnahan did ten movies between 2011 and 2026, the names of which I don’t recognize at all (Stretch, Boss Level, Copshop, Battle Ready etc.) Now, he did “The Rip”, which I mainly saw because it was the only movie released this January that, on paper at least, vaguely appealed to me.

How I heard about it is counterintuitive too. I didn’t see a trailer or billboard of the movie. Instead Matt Damon and Ben Affleck went onto Joe Rogan’s podcast and said some interesting things about using AI in the writing context. That podcast has episodes that are like 2h-3hrs long, but they will cut out standalone 10-15 minute portions if someone decides to say something particularly interesting. Here, Matt and Ben made the prescient observation that large language models, given their source materials and what they are being trained on, tend to have mediocre outputs. This makes sense because the vast amount of human writing is mediocre and that is what the LLM’s are trying to replicate. So, it is a useful tool, yes, but you can’t rely on it to churn out superior work. In many ways, it is not designed to do that.

“The Rip” is not a typical January movie. The plot is sharply written and the action well-delivered. Matt Damon, Ben Affleck are well cast. Indeed, this is the type of movie that Roger Ebert may have championed as underrated and worth seeing in the early-nineties like One False Move or Red Rock West. But it isn’t a big movie and there are already a lot of movies about cops and drugs. The Rip does not need to be seen in a movie theater and likely would not make money there. Instead, Netflix produced and put it out in January when everyone was staying home. I’m told that like 40 million people have watched it so far. That is a good thing. When One False Move and Red Rock West came out, they struggled to get a theatrical release and people mainly saw those movies interspersed by commercials on television. And really, they needed the help of movie critics championing them to get that far. So The Rip is a well earned success. Keep that in mind when people bemoan the streaming services. For a particular type of movie, it is the correct vehicle.

If it weren’t for the pedigree of its cast, it would feel much more like an independent film. A female cop, a member of a Rip team, has just been murdered. The Rip team is being questioned by the federal bureau of investigation because the feds suspect that the team is corrupt and one of them killed her. The team is headed by Matt Damon (Lieutenant), then Ben Affleck (Detective Sergeant), then Steven Yeun (Detective), Teyana Taylor (Detective) and Catalina Moreno Sandino (Detective). These are all Oscar nominees.

The Lieutenant gets a tip from the murdered cop that there is drug money in a safe house in the neighborhood. Why she is telling him this is not explained. The Lieutenant goes about organizing his crew in an outwardly suspicious manner. He tells all of them that the tip was from a crime hotline (it isn’t) and then tells each of them a different number as to the amount that he thinks will be found (he doesn’t actually know, maybe). Then they show up and the woman living in the house decides to let them in even though they don’t have a search warrant with them. It is hinted that she might be a snitch herself (but for the good guys). Then they find $20,000,000, which is much much more than any of them thought that they could possibly find. Then it is revealed that the safe house is located at the end of a cul-de-sac on a street of empty houses. The cartel owns the whole block. Nobody is getting in and out without somehow being involved in the plot.

This is a locked room mystery thriller. There are plenty of spoilers to give and I won’t be revealing any of them. The movie does an exceptional job of staying one step ahead of the audience while also not cheating. It is the test of the quality of the movie like this (we can call it the Knives Out test), if the audience can pause the action at a particular point near the end (a good time is right after they have all gotten into the DEA truck and are being transported to the drop point), think about what they have seen, and try to figure out what is going on before everything is revealed. If that is possible, but you also have not figured it out yet and need to think about it, it is a good movie you are watching.

I didn’t pause the movie at that time. I could have (thank you Netflix), but didn’t feel like it. The reveals were satisfying and besides a few action sequences that were kind of overkill, it ended well. I just have to say this: driving a car with your left hand on the steering wheel while shooting a machine gun one handed with your right hand outside the driver’s side window is just so enormously impractical and stupid. I don’t think it should have been an otherwise smartly written movie. But then again, I guess Ben Affleck looked cool doing it.

Mickey17 (3/5 Stars)

A “Straw Man Argument” is a logical fallacy where an opposite position is distorted into an extreme version and then argued against. Instead of addressing the actual argument, a straw man argument presents a simplified or false version of the opponent’s stance.

Science fiction polemics, by their very nature, are straw man arguments. Because they take place in the future, the proponent gets to lay the groundwork for several hundred (maybe thousands) of years of distortion by making the audience assume that across the vastness of time and space the opposite argument when enacted into policy will naturally result in an inevitable and disastrous slope towards dystopia.

Here, in writer/director Bong Joon-Ho’s newest movie, Mickey 17, we are introduced to a world where the world is beset by environmental destruction and rampant organized crime. The remainder of the human race desperately seeks to leave a doomed Earth for a distant planet. A buffoonish politician (Mark Ruffalo) and his Machiavellian wife (Toni Collette) lay on thick plans of cultish demagoguery for the new settlement, which an utterly naive populace consumes without a hint of critical thought. One especially pitiful creature, Mickey Barnes (played by Robert Pattison) signs up to be an expendable, which apparently is a category of human being that agrees to be cloned for the purpose of suicidal tasks that range from being exposed to radiation, to being a test subject for biological weapons, to being a guinea pig for the development of vaccines. We are introduced to Mickey 17, who provides an elongated voiceover explanation as to the gruesome fate of versions 1-16.

For various reasons that need even more elongated voiceover explanation, this particular spaceship can only have one expendable on it, so Mickey is tasked with every single suicidal task the mission requires. He’s a great help. Indeed by his multiple sacrifices he saves many lives and is hard to imagine the mission succeeding at all without him. You would think these people would be grateful. But they aren’t, because apparently the future is full of shitheads. (Except for the one black woman. Black women, as we all ought to know, are magic negroes imbued with a sense of heightened morality brought upon by the extreme intersectionality of their historic victimhood).  They treat him as if everyone was still in grade school and he came to class with the wrong kind of shoes. I don’t think Mickey Barnes is even being paid.

Would society in the future actually not care about the experience of cloned people? Would we treat them as second class citizens? I ask you, given the world as it is today, why that would be a probable outcome? There have been many science fiction books and movies about cloned people. Can you think of one example where the author isn’t sympathetic to their plight? Do you hear anyone today arguing that clones might be a decent source of cheap slave labor? Wouldn't it be odd if our culture in the 20th-21st Century started out uniformly sympathetic towards clones and then turned with uniformed antipathy against them sometime in the future? And yet, in every single one of these science fiction books and movies, the creator assumes that this will be the case. If there is basically no one with antipathy against clones today, who exactly is Bong Joon-Ho arguing with here?

The answer I don’t think is any one segment of society that actually has antipathy towards clones. I believe Bong Joon-Ho’s argument is against capitalism and he is setting his scene way far into the future to suggest an inevitable outcome of the march of capitalism towards some dystopia where the lives of human beings become valueless in the face of corporations or contracts. It is telling that he wouldn’t be able to make that argument today, since all that has occurred since the introduction of capitalism as a ruling orthodoxy in society (starting say in England circa the Industrial Revolution) is the steady democratization of political power, an exponential rise in the standard of living, and the universal acceptance of human rights, at least in societies that use capitalism. There are still plenty of places that do not have capitalism, and the people there remain slaves to power monopolies. I’m not sure why Bong Joon-Ho, if he is so concerned about the plight of humans, can’t direct a satiric gaze at North Korea, the totalitarian state across the border, where people are treated like animals as we speak, not far off in the distant future.

One of the more influential pieces of culture in the past few years to originate from South Korea was Squid Game, a contemporary story about a group of capitalistic elites (mainly composed of gay texans and at least one Chinese man) pit debt-laden and put-upon South Koreans against each other in fights-to-the-death. Have any of these people ever heard of North Korea? Squid Game could take place there, except of course, for the prize money element.

Mickey 17 draws parallels (and maybe inspiration) from a better movie about science fiction clones. That would be 2009's Moon by Duncan Jones starring Sam Rockwell. That is a much better critique of capitalism. The main difference is that the original Sam Rockwell astronaut sold his genetic material to a corporation and gave them the permission to use and dispose of his clones on a remote lunar base. In that movie, the original guy is sitting at home getting paid for the work his clones are performing. His clones, although expendable and not privy to the truth, are treated with a nominal amount of respect. No one goes out of their way to insult them and the robot on the base is programmed to be helpful. It is a much more interesting take on the subject since it is much closer to an actual moral quandary that someday could occur.

Moon came out in 2009. At the time, it was impressive to see Sam Rockwell interact with himself on screen. In 2025, although I enjoyed the performance of Robert Pattinson in Mickey 17, I am no longer impressed all that much by seeing two of the same actor interact with himself. It’s not all that much of a novelty any longer. It is always nice to see Steven Yeun show up in a movie. It would have been better if he was around longer and was more important to the plot. Mark Ruffalo and Toni Collette ham it up as real idiots and that go about doing real stupid things. One wonders how they could ever be put in charge of anything, and then one remembers that this takes place in the dystopic future where everything is possible.

Has it really been six years since Bong Joon-Ho made his previous film, the great Parasite. Do you notice the integral difference between that movie and this one? Parasite takes place in the present day. So, to make it believable, there couldn't be the underhanded straw man cheating that is possible in science fiction movies. Joon-Ho was forced to present characters that would be believable in our time. That constraint made for a much better movie. He should do more of that and, please, more often.

Minari (4/5 Stars)

It is a good business idea. Tens of thousands of Koreans immigrate to America every year. Would they not miss Korean food? Korea is too far away to ship vegetables that would be fresh on arrival. Why not grow the Korean vegetables here and sell same at Korean markets? It is this shrewd entrepreneurialism that brings a Korean family to 1980s rural Arkansas to start a farm. Their efforts and travails form the basis for writer/director Lee Isaac Chung’s movie Minari, the name being a native Korean plant that, it turns out, grows well in the heartland of America.

The visionary in this business quest is Jacob, played by Steven Yuen of Walking Dead fame. The antagonist to his vision is Monica, his wife (played by Yeri Han). You would think that Monica would be a little more supportive given that their previous situation in California involved working in a dead end job sexing chickens for an agricultural corporation. For those unfamiliar, sexing chickens means looking at the hindquarters of chicks to determine whether it is male or female and sorting them likewise. The female chicks grow into hens that produce eggs. The male chicks, the movie infers, are killed immediately. Jacob and Monica do this a thousand times a day everyday. I think, compared to that, living in a prefabricated house in flyover country would be preferable if it meant you had your own property and business. Jacob argues about this with Monica all the time.

I am being a little unfair to Monica. Their son, Paul, has a heart condition and Monica is convinced that if they are not near a hospital in case of an emergency then they are being unforgivably reckless with his health. Understandable, but those of us familiar with the childhood of Theodore Roosevelt are optimistic about the kids chances if he grows up in rural area and engages in farm work.

The fighting amongst the parents comes to a head when the lights go out during a storm and they mistakenly believe they might be hit during a tornado (not a Korean thing I hear). The short term solution is to import Monica’s mother to live with the family (played by Yuh-jung Youn). This movie takes place in the 1980s so that would mean this woman would have lived through World War II and the Korean War and be a tough old lady. She does not disappoint. She likes to watch professional wrestling and curses while playing cards with the kids. Paul points out that she is not a real grandma because she doesn’t bake cookies. She is a good sport about it. A very good grandma, exactly the kind Paul with his condition needs.

There is something that feels very American about this film. It’s actually not to different in tone than those many movies where some city slicker ventures out West to do something different with his life, is awed by the natural wilderness, and interacts with the otherworldly natives. Except, here, instead of a white guy being introduced to Native Americans, it is a Korean family being introduced to evangelical Christians. The most otherworldly, played by Will Patton, seems to have his own church of one. Like all good immigrants, the Koreans politely keep their opinions to themselves and shrug off the natural misunderstandings that would occur between otherwise good people of different cultures. At one point, Jacob takes his family to church, not because he is any sort of convert, but because he wants his family to make friends in the local community. That is a great reason to go to church. Several minor things occur that certain people today might categorize as 'microaggressions' but what the makers of this movie seem to instead be offering up as "jokes", as if the people involved don't have to be natural enemies. I don’t know anything about Lee Isaac Chung and had not seen any of his other movies before watching this one. I'm not surprised to learn that his parents were immigrants who moved to Arkansas while he was a child to start a farm. This movie has a very personal feel to it. 

Sorry to Bother You (5/5 Stars)

Sorry to Bother You has lots to say and uses its time wisely. This is one of those movies that you can spend much time afterwards discussing what it had to say. On an originality scale from 1 to Being John Malkovich, it is around 8 or 9 Charlie Kaufmans. It starts off in a new place and then half-way through goes completely crazy.

Sorry to Bother You was written and directed by Boots Riley. Never heard of him, but the way this movie plays, it feels like he’s had half a decade worth of material backed up in his system wrestling for position at the floodgates of creative fulfillment. Sorry to Bother You is about many things: wealth and poverty, capital and labor, ambition and community, individuality and conformity, weird art, wrong-headed genetic experiments, and slavery.

Our hero Cassius Green (played by Lakeith Stanfield) starts with an existential crisis. He lives in his uncle’s garage and hasn’t a job. He is simply surviving. What will his life amount to future generations? (Even when the movie is small, it is big.) Cassius Green lands a soul-crushing seemingly impossible job at a telemarketing firm. They will hire anyone who walks in the door. He is not doing well. Then, a fellow colleague played by a wonderful Danny Glover (still alive!) gives him great advice. Use your white voice he counsels. “White Voice?” asks Cassius. Glover explains what he means. Its not just sounding nasal. It means sounding like you don’t have student loans, that you pay all your bills on time, that you don’t have a care in the world. You are who the other person on the phone wants to be like. Oh, that white voice. Cassius Green gives it a shot. (He sounds remarkably like the actor David Cross, best known as Tobias Funke the therapist turned actor in “Arrested Development”.) This apparently is what black people think white people sound like. Like the movie in general, it’s too funny to be truly offensive.

Pretty soon, Cassius’s telemarketing career takes off and two subplots run right along side his growing success. The first is that the telemarketing center tries to unionize. This is led by a guy named Squeeze, played by Steven Yuen, who stages a work stoppage during prime calling hours. As one character remarks, it is some very Norma Rae shit. Having seen that movie, I agree. The second is that after Cassius gains a promotion he starts selling a product called “Worry Free” labor. “Worry Free” is a company that contracts with regular people to provide guaranteed food and shelter in exchange for otherwise unpaid labor. Its not necessarily slavery but Sorry to Bother You wants to liken it to such. Obviously, Cassius, being black, has some qualms about selling slavery to anyone, even if the slaves are of all races. But he also doesn’t want to be poor loser anymore and what exactly is his responsibility to everyone else?

Then there are weird art show, at least one riot, and the horse people. But I’m not going to get too far into that. It would be impossible to explain here. Two more points. First, this is the second movie this year that puts Oakland, California on the map. The first was Ryan Coogler’s “Black Panther”. It is beginning to feel like that place is the next hot place to make great movies. If one more great movie from one great new filmmaker springs from there in the near future, it would be fair to say its a trend.

Second, is a philosophical qualm. Unlike Boots Riley, I don’t believe slavery is a particularly profitable or productive way to run a business. Here, “Worry Free” is making cash hand over fist by this type of business practice. History disagrees. As the Adam Smith would say, the problem with slavery (besides all the evil) is that, because there is no hope of bettering their situation, the workers are not incentivised to worker smarter and/or harder. Rationally, a slave will work just as hard as they can to avoid punishment. I’ve heard this weird argument flitting about that the wealth of America was produced through slavery. That is a bit like saying the economy of South Korea was built by North Koreans. If slavery produced wealth, the world would have been a whole lot richer a whole lot longer ago. This the truth of the matter. Having said that, Boots Riley made a great film and Lakeith Stanfield, well, his character reminded me of some great white characters like Peter Gibbons from Office Space and C.C. Baxter from The Apartment.