BQB here with what may be Netflix’s first Oscar contender of the year.
Based on a true story, this movie tells the story of Nurse Amy Loughren (Jessica Chastain) a nurse with a heart who always calls her patients by first name and goes out of her way to help them.
Alas, she’s in need of help herself. Speaking of hearts, she has a condition with hers that requires a heart transplant. She shouldn’t even be working. She should be at home resting and seeking treatment but she needs to be on the job four more months until her health insurance kicks in.
Thus, when Nurse Charles Cullen (Eddie Redmayne) starts working at her hospital, he’s like a godsend. Charlie helps Amy carry her workload, and even pitches in helping her raise her two daughters as a single mom. He asks for nothing in return, even the relationship itself seems platonic as he doesn’t seek any nookie or anything.
When detectives start poking around the suspicious death of one of Charlie’s patients, they unravel threads that lead to a more sinister tale. Charlie has a habit of being passed around like a bad penny from hospital to hospital. The hospital administrators always suspect foul play, but can never prove it, so they fire him on some pretense (paperwork violation, for example) send him on his way and then Charlie becomes the next hospital’s problem.
In short, Charlie is subtly killing his patients. Putting drugs in their IVs that induce death, but because many of these patients are in a bad state already, their deaths end up looking natural. One of these hospitals could have taken the lawsuit and put Charlie in jail early but instead they just choose to cover up. The problem is the hospitals don’t communicate and Charlie just takes his show down the road.
When the detectives seek Amy’s help in getting the goods on Charlie, she can hardly believe her BFF has a dark side, but she does the right thing at great personal cost, putting her health and job on the line.
STATUS: Shelf-worthy. Charlie is the first villain, though it is confounding as we are never given a reason as to why he murders other than maybe he is mad about his ex wife so takes it out on his patients. Eddie Redmayne excels in this part as a seemingly, at least on the surface, average Joe. He isn’t playing a historic figure or alien or wizard as he often does. Chastain is typical Chastain. She may be the healthiest looking heart transplant patient around, and sometimes they have her huff and puff and keel over to remind you amidst all the running around she is doing that she is sick.
The second villain is the hospital system. Cover, deflect and deny at all costs rather than take a financial hit but in so doing, take a killer nurse out of the system. Cullen was convicted of 28 counts of murder but there are suspicions he may have killed up to 400. He could have been stopped earlier.
Beware the Watcher, 3.5 readers. He or she (or they) might be watching you!
BQB here with a review of this ultra creepy Netflix series.
If you’re looking for the perfect scary TV show this Halloween season, look no further than The Watcher. Your occult side will cringe at a plot ripe with blood drinking cults, ritual murders, and psychopaths galore. However, if you do not fear such silly stories, then surely your adult side will cringe as every homeowner’s worst nightmare comes true – i.e. when what they thought was a sound real estate investment loses its resale value and can only be sold at a substantial loss. In today’s real estate market? We’ll never be able to afford another nice home in a neighborhood with such picturesque views and good schools, access to quaint shopping centers and don’t even get me started about these beautiful countertops! EEEEK!
Such is the fate of the Brannock family, a clan of trendy Manhattanites who yearn to leave the dangers of the crime ridden big city and stretch out in the stately, beautiful home at 657 Boulevard in Westfield, New Jersey. At first, Dean and Nora (Bobby Cannavale and Naomi Watts) believe all their dreams have come true, only to have them dashed when they start receiving a series of anonymous, threatening letters signed only by “The Watcher.”
The highlights of The Watcher’s claims? That he comes from a long line of watchers. His grandfather and father have been watching 657 Boulevard since the early 1900s and now it’s his turn. The creepy threatening letters go on to claim that the Watcher is watching the kids, that he’ll call to him when he learns their names, and that the house needs blood. Yikes. Not exactly the welcome to the neighborhood any family is looking for.
And thus, the Brannocks go down the most unsavory of rabbit holes as they attempt to unravel the mystery of who the heck this mysterious watcher is. They liquidated their 401Ks just to afford the down payment on this stinking mansion, after all, so they aren’t going to lose their equity without a fight! (You younger non-homeowners might balk at this notion but seriously, once you’ve cobbled together enough money to put a down payment on your first home, you’ll stop wondering why so many homeowners in movies and TV refuse to leave a house even after they find out it is infested with ghosts, goblins, werewolves, zombies, barracudas, sharks with laser beams on their heads, chainsaw maniacs or impolite time share salesmen. I’m sorry but we’re not going back to renting or, yeesh, living with our parents, just so murderous monsters can unleash mayhem on our dime, thank you very much.)
The plot thickens as the neighborhood harbors a seemingly endless cornucopia of yahoos, weirdos and malcontents, each with their own grudge against the Brannocks, largely over the fact that they were able to afford such a luxurious home that everyone in the hard to buy into yet highly desired neighborhood can’t afford. Possible watcher suspects include a laundry list of jealous neighbors, jilted bidders who also wanted to buy the property, greedy real estate agents, unhelpful cops, an eccentric private detective, a young alarm system installer crushing on the family’s teenage daughter, an architecture loving teacher, a historic society that believes it can dictate whatever you do in your home right down to your every sneeze, a suspected blood sucking cult believed to be operating in the area, the perpetrator of a gruesome murder long thought to be on the run but who has now returned, a mentally challenged neighbor who really like’s the house’s dumb waiter and…honestly, I forget. There are at least ten or twenty more suspects I’m missing.
Perhaps that’s the scariest element of this story. The Brannocks are the victims of a crime, yet with no smoking gun, no clue that blows the case wide open, they are left hopelessly chasing their tail between their legs, running round and around, yanking one thread after another but never quite getting anywhere. Everyone is a potential suspect, preventing them to ever feel safe making friends in their new community.
Sure, there is some unlikely silliness. The couple embarrasses themselves often when they pull an “aha!” out of their butts and public hurl accusations at random townsfolk who quickly make them feel like crap when they share a glossed over fact that proves their innocence. The Brannocks quickly agree to stop jumping to conclusions and to never again publicly confront a suspect until they have the hardcore, unvetted and undeniable proof so as to not embarrass themselves or others only to do the old, “Aha! It was you!” routine of public embarrassment again and again.
Meanwhile, forget the part above where I said a good homeowner will never leave their equity investment, psychos and monsters be damned. Eh, the silliness abounds when pets are murdered, mysterious videos emerge showing an unidentified party in the house while the family sleeps, a secret tunnel is found and a blurry figure is seen running into it yet strangely never boarded the eff up, all these and more signs of foul play afoot in the house yet the family never abandons the property. They do rent a motel to escape the creepiness, but the dad usually remains because, damn it, we must preserve equity!!!
In truth, once you get beyond all the frights and chills, the real villain might be the American real estate market. A family feels the need to keep up with the Joneses by purchasing a dream home, the down payment on takes up all their reserve funds, meaning if something goes wrong, they’ll never be able to keep up with the payments and expenses and will be ruined if forced to re-sell at a loss. Sure, they could have bought a smaller home, but they really like this one and fear they’ll never find another like it again. Meanwhile, the highly competitive real estate bidding process leaves buyers angry when they are left out in the cold. Even further meanwhile, covetous neighbors who are used to your property looking a certain way get angry when you change it.
If you think this show is creepy, feel free to read about the real-life story the series is inspired by.
I read the article and while the real-life Broadus family didn’t encounter a list of potential suspects who were anywhere near as wacky as the embellished Netflix series, they did undergo the horror of finding their dream home, only to have their dreams dashed when they received scary watcher letters. They attempted to figure out who said watcher was only for an investigation into myriad suspects to go nowhere. Alas, they never moved into their dream home and had to sell it at a substantial $400,000 loss five years later, without even ever living there.
The scariest thing of all? Lost equity. EEEEK!
Bonus points to Bobby Cannavale, he who typically plays tough guy cops and crooks but plays against type as a typical nerdy upper class suburban dad here. Naomi Watts does fine as the upper class suburban mom though one wonders just how many upper class suburban moms/struggling artists there are.
STATUS: Shelf-worthy.
SPOILER ALERT: (Look away if you want no spoilers.)
The in-show Brannocks never definitively find out who the Watcher is, just as the real-life Broadus family never did either. The mystery was never solved and you might experience angina as the show hurls an endless supply of schmucks and weirdos, each with their own motive, only for the undeniable “gotcha, you totally did it and here’s the undeniable proof!” moment to never happen. Sadly, we’ll never know who the Watcher was, what was their grudge with the family and what was the point of all those creepy letters?
We’ve got a coup. We’ve got an impending civil war. We’ve got dragons!
SPOILERS ABOUND!
GRRM and the show writers a) have a way of making things happen but not in the way you’d expect and b) good become bad and bad become good.
The king has died. Alicent shares her mistaken belief that on his deathbed, Viserys wished for Aegon to be named heir. Turns out, this never mattered, because Otto and his flunkies had long planned in secret to install Aegon as king anyway, so this news just strengthens what they were going to do no matter what. Perhaps though if Alicent had not misunderstood Viserys’ last words, she might not have gone through with the coup.
We see a mini civil war between Alicent and Otto and their respective flunkies in a race to find an undercover Aegon in King’s Landing and bring him back from a night of debauchery. Both hope to find him first and be the first one to talk him into agreeing or not agreeing to have Rhae killed. Unfortunately, Alicent doesn’t quite understand the depths of what she’s getting herself into. Otto might be wrong morally but correct in plan execution, in that if you’re going to pull a coup, you can’t try to warn Rhae or negotiate for peace or just put her in jail. You have to, sad as it is, kill her and all challengers before they and their supporters even have a chance to fight back, before they even know there is a reason to.
Aegon is an unscrupulous pervert who even admits himself is unfit for the crown, though once he gets a taste of a cheering crowd, it’s clear he wants it. Aemond is jealous for he has trained to rule his entire life but will not get to do so.
Cole goes to the darkest of dark sides when he kills Lord Beesbury, the elderly coin master and only member of the small council to stand up for Rhae and declare and his colleagues traitors.
The White Worm uses her power to stand up for the poor, abused and exploited children of Flea Bottom.
Oh, and we learn Larys and Alicent have a deal where she lets him spank the monkey while staring at her naked feet in exchange for him giving her information about her enemies…which frankly, tons of internet memes about the creepy relationship between this duo already called that Larys was a degenerate foot sniffer.
The coup de grace final scene is when Rhaenys crashes through the coronation on dragon back, having just broken her pet and bff dragon Melys out of dragon jail. She could have stopped a civil war before it started by burning up the entire Hightower side of the royal family, but declines to do so, the theories being that a) she had a heart b) didn’t think it was her place to do so and wasn’t going to fight Rhae’s for her and frankly neither side of the fam has done her right so she’s best not taking either side c) has a soft spot for mothers and women in power and Alicent standing in front of Aegon moved her but any rate she sends them the message that she could have cooked those fools if she wanted to. Alas, all the peasants crumpled under her dragon’s feet were not so lucky. Neither side really gives a crap about the peasants.
STATUS: Shelf-worthy. Another episode that got me to watch it at the moment it aired.
I did something Sunday night that I haven’t done in a long time. I sat down at the time when a show aired and watched on the first airing, rather than just wait until I was ready to stream it. Such has been my growing interest in this show and I haven’t done any appointment TV viewing since its predecessor, Game of Thrones, was on the air.
SPOILERS abound, so look away if you don’t want any.
My thoughts:
#1 – Paddy Considine really nailed this sendoff episode where his character, King Viserys dies. The king suffers from leprosy and old age, though more the former. I found out later he is only supposed to be in his 50s but being in your 50s and having leprosy were both dangerous things in ancient times. Yes, I know leprosy is bad think to have now but we’ve pretty much gotten rid of it with modern medicine and hygiene haven’t we?
The King spends his last day of life trying to protect his family and bring them together to avoid an all-out war, not to mention a family conflict that would tear the house apart. Addled by opium, he foregoes this ancient pain med to keep his mind as clear as possible. In one of the greatest underdog wins the day scenes on television in recent years, the down and out king surprises everyone when he staggers, clearly in pain, into the king’s chamber and up to the throne, thus thwarting an attempt by his hand/chief advisor and his queen to undermine his daughter, who he has named his successor, a dangerous move in olden times, for in those days, the people really preferred their leaders to have ding dongs and were willing to go to war to make that happen.
Paddy Considine deserves an Emmy for his performance. Online debate abounds as to whether Viserys was a bad king, a weak king, maybe too kind for the job, or perhaps the time period just handed him a great big lump of crap and he did the best he could with it. To be honest, I think he did the best with the info he had and made the best choices out of a series of options that weren’t the best.
Appoint your daughter the next queen and risk a civil war or name your unscrupulous, wife murdering brother who has shown signs he might be a tyrant if crowned?
#2 – In true GOT style, no one is completely wrong or right and GRRM shows us how bad people turn good and good turn bad. Ultimately, any quest for power is a dangerous game.
#3 – Vaemond lost his head! You know, Corlys just got a bad fever and suddenly, everyone starts fighting over his stuff. They didn’t even wait to see if he’d pull through. I suspect he will and will a) be pissed his bro tried to subvert his wishes but b) that was still his bro and he’s not going to take to him being beheaded lying down.
That was quite a scene, wasn’t it? Vaemond really, really leaned into shouting that Rhae’s children were “BASTARDS!” and their mother was a “WHORE.” Treasonous language that he had to have known was going to end badly for him, but in that moment, the second son of Driftmark went full on IDGAF and you could tell this was building inside him for years that it was a total catharsis for him to say it just before he lost his dome.
Note the king was only going to cut out his tongue though. Losing your tongue is apparently the remedy for slander in the GOT-verse so Corlys, if he pulls through, may likely think Daemon went way too far.
Bottomline: I think a lot of people assumed this show was going to stink. So many prequels and sequels and cinematic universe/in the same ballpark shows end up being silly fan fiction, explaining things no one cared about in the first place. This one really builds a world and characters (albeit the world was already built) but like its original, has us fans back online, spinning our wacky theories and debating the issues of the realm once more.
I saw this movie last night and was shocked to read the reviews today. The critics hate it, calling it the worst movie of the year thus far, a hot, meandering, chaotic mess. Strange, because I walked out of it thinking it was the first Oscar contender of the year. I found it charming, part-mystery and part-comedy that gave me some of the first legitimate laughs in a movie theater in…I can’t even remember.
How could I, your humble blog host and the professional movie watchers be so divergent in our view? Hold that thought. I’ll speculate on it later.
In 1910’s France, toward the end of World War I, misfits Dr. Burt Berendson (Christian Bale), Harold Woodman (John David Washington) and Valerie Voze (Margot Robbie), meet and become fast friends. Valerie is an art-loving nurse who treats Burt and Harold for their war wounds, while they defend her from local French folk disgusted by her penchant for digging shrapnel (metal scraps) from soldiers and forging it into art.
After peace breaks out in Europe, the trio take a detour on their way home to America, finding peace and acceptance in Amsterdam, a sweet sense of bliss they never found in their homeland of the United States. Each has their own personal war waiting for them at home. Burt is half-Jewish, half-Catholic and (SPOILER ALERT) as he laments in a line that had me slapping my knee, openly guffawing, “I think my in-laws sent me to war to get rid of me.” He is estranged from his wife, who defers to her high society parents and their open hatred of her husband, who they consider to be of a low pedigree.
Valerie is a free spirit who lives for creating masterpieces through the brush and photography. In other words, she’s at risk for being stamped “crazy” with a crazy stamp on her forehead and treated that way, free-spirited women being considered bonkers at the time.
Harold is the most level-headed of the trio, but he’s black, and well, we all know the history of how black people were treated in the early 1900s.
Alas, all good things must come to an end. The trio eventually closes their Amsterdam vacation and return to the states, where they go their separate ways, yet they forever see their time in Amsterdam as a state of mind, a yearning to just be themselves without guilt, remorse, or trying to please all the unpleasable people in their lives.
Flash forward to the 1930s. Harold is now a lawyer, fighting for the civil rights of African Americans, poor veterans, and downtrodden folk at large. Burt does this in his own way, starting a practice where he treats the less fortunate who are scoffed at elsewhere and charging little. The dynamic duo come together at the behest of Liz Meekins (Taylor Swift) to investigate the untimely demise of their old Army general, who his daughter theorizes was the victim of foul play.
And so, down the rabbit hole of mystery the friends go, searching for clues and unraveling a far flung, worldwide conspiracy involving fascism, dictators, ornithology scandals, a wacko hitman, and well, if I tick off the other boxes, I’d give the rest of the story away.
Christian Bale, who rivals Daniel Day Lewis in his ability to transform into someone else, does it again here. His character, Burt, is a doctor of the people with a heavy Brooklyn accent. He laments his lot in life, feeling like he can do no right in the eyes of his family, yet soldiers on anyway, caring his injured fellow veterans. He is partly the comic relief and partly the heart of the movie, inventing new drugs, which he argues, the world needs but the medical community is unwilling to develop. He may be right, but he constantly falls flat on his face mid-sentence, the result of being his own test subject. The glass eye he received to replace the one lost in the war is forever popping out only to be found again. I almost want to say the character is reminiscent of Seinfeld’s Kramer, if Kramer had a medical license.
John David Washington excels as the straight man, the brains of the bunch who keeps the trio focused on the case and away from devolving into too much tomfoolery. It’s clear his character would have gone further in life had he not been born in such an openly racist time, yet he refuses to be defined or denigrated by those who dislike him simply because of the color of his skin.
Robbie is a delight, her smile can really warm up a movie theater. She’s not crazy, but suffers the false allegations of craziness with a stiff upper lip.
Who are the stars? Literally everyone. Anya Taylor Joy. Mike Myers. Michael Shannon. Timothy Olyphant. Rami Malek. Chris Rock. Robert DeNiro. That’s all I could think of in one sitting. There are more. It’s as if everyone in Hollywood stopped by the set to get their five minutes in this flick.
Which brings me back to the start of this review. Everyone in Tinsel Town apparently believed in this flick enough to be in it, so why did the critics give it ye olde raspberry?
Admittedly, the plot is convoluted and meandering. As often happens in so many mysteries, the characters pull a thread that leads to another thread, that sometimes leads to four or five separate threads. At some point, you the audience member are left to decide whether you want to whip out a pen and jot notes, maybe even a flow chart on the back of your popcorn bag, or if you just want to shrug your shoulders and assume the writers know what they’re doing and you can look up any questions you were stumped on online later.
It has a lot of heart. The friendship between the three main characters is very sweet. Three people who were not accepted at home find acceptance abroad. I wonder if early 1900s Amsterdam really was that much of an accepting place, or if it was just a matter of the trio going to a new place where no one knew their past and this allowed them to reinvent themselves. There is a romance between Harold and Valerie, but it’s genuine, not tawdry. There’s no titillating sex scene, rather you can tell they legitimately enjoy each other’s company, and by extension, the company of their BFF Burt. Relationships built on sex, money, social standing etc., never last. In life, you’re lucky if you find maybe a handful of friends who accept you as you are, warts and all, and love you all the more for it.
Strangely, unconditional love is the message of the movie. Love the veterans who fought for their country only to be disposed of like garbage when the time came for the country they fought for to pay for their medical bills. Love the African Americans who are just looking for their piece of the pie. Love the women who want to be free-spirited and don’t drug them up under false allegations of being a crazy dame. Love the schmucks who don’t seem to fit in anywhere but who keep showing up anyway, even when their glass eyes fall out.
STATUS: Shelf-worthy. The critics are wrong here. This film is a throwback to Oscar winners of the past, large, ambitious, far-flung historic pieces. Comedy ensues, though most of the jokes shine a light on the mistreatment the downtrodden faced during a terrible time in history where if you weren’t a rich white man then society just treated you as being in the way. Admittedly, you could take away the mystery as it basically just serves as a framework for so many actors to meet and riff of one another, but then again, aren’t most films about the search for the elusive MacGuffin? I would like to see Hollywood make more movies like this, though I fear the critics have grown so accustomed to the streaming bologna sandwich schlock served up by streaming services that they have no idea what to do when a steak of a film like this is set before them.
Let’s admit it, GOT fans. We all thought House of the Dragon was going to be a stinkburger.
So many of these sequels and prequels are absurd fan fiction. The Many Saints of Newark gave us the life story of Tony’s uncle, as if we were clamoring for it. Disney is going all out, telling us the tale of an obscure Rebel spy in Andor, a character in a prequel that itself was based entirely off a brief line in the first Star Wars film about a bunch of rebels who stole the Death Star plans. In short, Hollywood couldn’t finish these series properly so they hire new writers to take little details and spin them into, well, something.
But this House of the Dragon has been great thus far. I believe this is largely due to it being based on just one book by George RR Martin. Unfortunately, the original GOT started to suffer when the plot expanded past the last book in GRRM’s unfinished book series.
The time jumps are difficult and often leave plot holes. However, HBO is learning from past mistakes. They don’t have the time, money or patience to tell the story forever, so they need to make time leaps and at least give us some semblance of a complete story from beginning to end rather than focus on the beginning in great detail and then shrug off the end in true, “Meh, I guess Bran can be king” style.
HotD takes us 172 years before GOT, in super woke times for a medieval age. Irony is where the wokeness is often heavy handed in most shows, this one works it into the plot well. King Viserys (Paddy Constantine) lacks a male heir, so to quell bickering amongst the various scheming lords, names his daughter, Rhaenyra, his heir. Alas, things get complicated when he marries Rhae’s BFF, Alicent and has a son, Aegon. Double alas, the show is set in a time when men would rather burn the country down then bend the knee to a queen.
Civil war looms when, after a long time jump, we see that Rhae is popping out kids a plenty, none of which look like her half-black husband (I’d say half African American but Africa and America don’t exist in this fictional world). BTW, while this world is unwoke when it comes to women being in charge, it is hella woke when it comes to interracial marriage and people of color being in charge. It’s nice to think that maybe, when you look up at the sky and see the perhaps infinite number of other worlds that could exist, maybe one of them had people who, at the beginning of their world, shrugged and said, “Eh, what does color matter? Let’s all just be friends.”
Ultimately, former friends Alicent and Rhae become bitter enemies. While Rhae is boldly indiscrete about her out of marriage dalliances (a move that can cause civil war in a country where the monarchy’s secession depends on parentage), one wonders if Alicent’s challenge is motivated by her simply trying to protect her children or if she sees her former friend defying convention and rules and is angry she didn’t. (She was pretty much forced to become the king’s second wife and what young girl wants to be married off to an old geezer?)
Disgust abounds on this show. Lords and ladies openly talk of betrothing (making a marriage engagement) between adults and children, cousins with cousins, uncles with nieces, brothers with sisters and so on. Perhaps the most fictional part of a show (where people ride dragons) is that the children that are the product of these incestuous and gross relationships end up beautiful and healthy. See the paintings of outlandishly deformed European royals who were the products of inbreeding for the non fictional version.
Anyway, never has there been a fictional drawing of battle lines like this since the 2000s Team Jacob vs. Team Edward. Which side are you on, 3.5 readers?
I have noticed the internet seems largely pro-Rhae. I have been Team Alicent because I felt Rhae was very indiscrete, practically begging the world to challenge the legitimacy of her kids, but then again it seems as of late that Alicent is the only one making that challenge publicly. Everyone else seems to be going along with it, at least for now.
Bookshelf Battle 