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?
You decide. BQB here with Rob Zombie’s modern take on the monster family classic.
This movie is unlike anything I have ever seen. It’s an almost 2-hour long sitcom episode. Hacky, 1960s-esque jokes, puns and quips abound. Suddenly, I appreciate the concept of the laugh track, that old trick of piping in canned laughter (or in studio audience laughter) to let us know which lines are intended to be funny and which are meant to be serious. Humor, after all, is in the eye of the beholder, or perhaps the ear of the listener.
It reminds me of Elvira, or any of a plethora of old timey monster movie shows where the flick would be interspersed between commercials as well as a wacky, poorly produced host dumping on the movie while dealing with creatures of his or her own.
Ultimately, I have no idea what to make of it. Part of me loves it, because if it’s one thing I always complain about, it’s when reboots completely ignore the source material. This one practically worships the original, to the point where I wonder if the writers and producers of the original fell into a time warp and served as Rob Zombie’s consultants. Sure, the Munsters could have just been shoved into modern times, forced to deal with any number of pop cultural happenings and political trends with a few celebrities stopping by for a silly cameo. Then again, the Addams Family has done that again and again.
Part of me hates it because the joke a minute pace in which all pithy remarks seem like they fell straight out of a book entitled “The Undead Dad’s Joke Book.” We’re talking humor that isn’t just on the nose, but way up, such that you can see the boogers and all. Why would I hate this? Because darn it, that’s the kind of humor I use in my poorly sold books, leaving me to wonder if I’m no better than the lesser (or more-er, depending on your POV) of America’s top two sitcom based freaky families.
The plot? (Yes, there is one.) Mad scientist Dr. Henry Augustus Wolfgang (Richard Blake) and his flunky Floop (Jorge Garcia) seek to bring dead flesh to life in the form of their very own Frankenstein-esque monster. The doc seeks the brain of recently deceased super genius, Shelley von Rathbone, but alas, the incompetent Floop swipes the brain of Shelley’s dimwitted, poorly reviewed, hacky stand-up comic brother Schecky, who quite coincidentally, died the same day, leaving both bodies at rest in the same funeral parlor.
The result is, well, you know him, you love him – Herman Munster (Jeff Daniel Phillips), who uses the late Schecky’s brain to become a more popular entertainer than Schecky ever was. He sings. He dances. He jokes. He becomes the toast of Transylvania, where this tale takes place. He even captures the undead heart of vampiress, Lilly (Sheri Moon Zombie), who lives a hum-drum life in the castle of her schticky father, The Count (Daniel Roebuck.)
The good news? Herman and Lilly fall madly in love and get married. The bad news? Dimwitted Herman is tricked by his new wolfman brother-in-law Lester (Tomas Boykin) into signing the castle over to evil fortune teller Zoya (Catherine Schell), all part of a revenge plot as Zoya is one of the Count’s many ex-wives who claims the fanged one done her wrong.
It all culminates in the spooky family moving to America and I assume Netflix and Zombie will be collaborating to bring us more Munster flicks in the future, perhaps with a furry bundle of joy on the way. We know The Count better as Grandpa, after all.
I gotta be honest. I’ve never been a big horror fan and have never been a Rob Zombie film fan, as he really does lean into the genre. The occasional scary movie? Fine. But scary movies with blood and gore and frights so twisted you want to poop your pants? Hey, it’s a free country, and anyone else can feel free to have at it, but I’ll pass.
But RZ got me on this one and I wonder if maybe Rob grew up on a steady diet of such sitcom schlock as he handles it with love, or whatever qualifies as love in a world where a Frankenstein can marry a vampire and produce a werewolf baby.
Kudos to the cast. They walk a fine line between doing an impression of the original cast. Jeff Phillips provides a voice of his own while still delivering homages to the late, great Fred Gwynne. Meanwhile, Sherri Moon Zombie (isn’t that kinda cool when you create a fictional last name and your wife takes your fictional last name?) deviates from Yvone De Carlo’s femme fatale style Lilly and gives us a sickeningly sweet Lilly, undead and evil yet somewhat naive, kind and lovable, like the vampire girl next door you’d want to introduce to your mother if you weren’t sure she’d bite her.
STATUS: Shelf-worthy. I’m still shaking my head, not sure what to make of it, but I’ll give it this. By giving us more of what it was, it stands out in a crowd of everything that currently is.
Murder! Cannibalism! BQB here with a review of Netflix’s latest true crime series.
If you were alive in the early 1990s, then you may recall a time when the news was all Dahmer all the time. You couldn’t turn on the TV without learning something new about the prolific, psychotic serial killer who was caught when one of his victims escaped and led police back to his Milwaukee, Wisconsin apartment which contained bones, skulls, heads, photos of dead bodies and body parts, some preserved and some left to dissolve in a barrel of acid. Yup, Old Jeffy was doing that long before Jesse botched it in his bathtub on Breaking Bad.
Speaking of botching things, Netflix tends to do that with a lot of its movies and shows, but they handle a very gruesome story here and they do it well, such that if you have a sensitive stomach or just ate lunch, you might not want to watch. Otherwise, they bring the viewer in and provide a lot of history, parts of the story that either weren’t well publicized or maybe I just missed it at the time because I was just a kid.
It’s weird how certain things happen that affect a person’s life. But for a certain incident or even several strung together, someone might have been an entirely different person and lived an entirely different life. At any rate, the chain of events in Jeffrey Dahmer’s young life were such that it’s almost as if he were given a master class on how to become a serial killer at a young age and could not have become anything else.
SPOILERS ABOUND!
The story moves around a lot, starting when Dahmer gets caught. He openly confesses to police and from there the story shifts back and forth in time, from Dahmer’s childhood, teen years, early twenties back to the height of his murder spree in his late twenties and early thirties up until his arrest.
As a child, Little Jeff saw a lot of things that kids just shouldn’t see. His mother Shari (an almost unrecognizable Penelope Ann Miller) has mental problems, such that she attempts suicide often and Lil’ Jeff sees her in a drugged up state of near death. She constantly screams and hollers at husband Lionel (Richard Jenkins), pulling a knife on him at one point for Lil Jeff to see. Also, she’s obsessed with UFOs. She really believes little green men are after her, to the point that she’s ready to cut you if you disagree.
In turn, Lionel’s response to the situation isn’t great. Though it’s understandable he doesn’t want to stick around his crazy, alien obsessed wife while she’s yelling at him and pulling sharp cutlery on him, the solution wasn’t to just run away, leaving the kids with her alone for days at a time. The solution was to get her some help and get the kids out of the house.
Overall, I’m confused on what happened with his parents. On one hand, the series treats Shari as a woman who late in life, it is revealed by more modern medicine that she suffered from postpartum depression, and perhaps if 1960s doctors had been more up to snuff, they would have been able to help her and not just treat her as a wacko lady suffering from lady delusions. On the other hand, she does pull knives on her hubby and I doubt if the situation were reversed, we’d have much sympathy for a man who pulls a knife on his wife, bats in his belfry be damned.
At any rate, the couple divorces but a lack of communication leads to each assuming the other is taking care of Jeff during his senior year. Mom leaves the house with younger son David, telling 17 year old Jeff to go live with his father. Dad runs off with a new love interest and assumes Jeff was staying with his ex-wife. In a total not-parents of the year move, neither bothers to check on the lad until Dad finally does and realizes the kid has been living by himself for three months (who the eff was paying all the house bills?)
During this unsupervised time, the Jeffster makes his first kill and its a road to horror from there. Then again, the boy was always obsessed with death. Watching his father remove a dead possum from under the house catches his interest. Lionel, a scientist, mistakenly assumes this means his young son has an interest in anatomy, so the duo develop a hobby of collecting roadkill and dissecting dead animals in the garage together.
I could go on and on, but overall, it’s a story of how a kid can grow up to be messed up if a) he’s exposed to messed up things and b) there isn’t an adult who gives the kid the proper guidance as well as c) the police, government, teachers and other members of the system miss the warning signs.
One wonders how many lives might have been saved if Lionel had told his son, “No son. Dissecting roadkill is creepy and everyone will think you’re a creepy little shit if you do it. Stop doing creepy shit.”
What if Shari’s doctors had caught her problem early so she wasn’t always being mental in front of Lil Jeff? What if the police had arrested him at 18 when he had human remains in the back seat? What if the police had listened to good samaritans who found a drugged up boy with a head injury and pleaded with police to look into this rather than just assume it was a lover’s spat gone wrong?
To be certain, there is much non-wokeness in Jeff’s life and Netflix doesn’t ignore it or try to spin it for modern times. It takes places from the 1960s to the 1990s, not exactly a good time for wokeness. Rather than sugarcoat it, Netflix lets things that were considered fine in that day happen on screen for us to cringe at with modern eyes. Lionel and Shari’s doctor talking about Shari as if she wasn’t there, scolding her for interrupting. Cops who couldn’t get out of Dahmer’s apartment fast enough, concerned they might catch gay germs. Grandma who urges the young man to come to church and pray the gay away. (Although I don’t want to knock Granny too much as she seems like the only relative the kid had who had any patience for him.) A socially isolated Jeff who makes fun of kids with cerebal palsy for laughs, just because he’s starved for any kind of attention.
Context is largely dead in modern TV, but Netflix trusts us to look at these olden times, warts and all, that we won’t think the bad things that were acceptable in that era were cool but rather, that we can see how they led someone like Dahmer to do bad things.
STATUS: Shelf-worthy. Great acting from Miller and Jenkins (Molly Ringwald also as Lionel’s second wife Shari) as well as Evan Peters, he of X-Men Quicksilver fame who plays Dahmer. Don’t forget Niecy Nash who plays Dahmer’s long suffering next door neighbor Glenda. Speaking of what ifs, one wonders how many lives might have been saved if police had taken her calls about her neighbor’s smelly apartment, scary sounds coming from her neighbor’s apartment, holy shit will you guys come check out my neighbor’s freak show apartment already?
I’d been avoiding this one for a while too, largely because I assume most Netflix flicks are trash, but everyone’s favorite streaming service has been surprising lately. This one is a special effects laden, hardcore action, ridiculous amounts of destruction action scene and had it been released in a theater I would have been satisfied on the return on investment on my ticket price.
Many stars and Netflix doesn’t do the thing they often do where they just pack a movie full of stars and they have them do a passable job on a lackluster script.
Ryan Gosling plays Sierra 6, one of a numbered agent assassin program devised by Fitzroy (Billy Bob Thornton.) The sierras are ex-cons, released from prison in exchange for a lifetime of service taking out bad guys at the CIA’s command.
Alas, when Six is ordered to take out a fellow Sierra, said target provides our protagonist with evidence that his bosses are up to no good and now the hunter becomes the hunted. Yes, I know this literally the plot of most spy movies, but it is done in great globetrotting style here.
Chris Evans plays against type, here as uber douche Lloyd Hansen who is an ends justify the means type of guy, completely uncaring as to how many innocents have to die in the name of acquiring his target. He even brags about his villainy, so that’s different for the guy we’re used to seeing as squeaky clean Captain America.
Meanwhile, the ever lovely Ana de Armas, who I intend to propose to when my self-publishing millions come through, rounds out the cast as Miranda, a spy who sometimes is out to help Six, or catch Six, or help him again, depending on where we are in the movie.
It’s up to Six and Miranda to save the day, and Fitzroy’s niece Claire (Julia Butters), kidnapped by the vile Lloyd in the hopes of drawing Six out.
Amidst all of this mess, lots of people get shot like cannon fodder and there are lots of explosions and car chases and plane explosions and train explosions and at one point I was like, “Oh come on, I don’t think the CIA would kill that many people just to get one guy” but hey, it’s a movie, it’s fun, so stream it today.
STATUS: Shelf-worthy. Between this and Day Shift, Netflix is really winning me over lately.
Aw sweet! Cliff Beasts 6 is out already, 3.5 readers!
Come with me for a review of…The Bubble, not Cliff Beasts.
My first reaction is this is typical Netflix fanfare combined with typical Judd Apatow fanfare. Large ensemble cast. Basic structure but largely improvised dialogue. Too long. Could have benefitted from some editing. Not very coherent but it ended eventually. I assume Netflix likes such movies because they can spend heavy on the cast and not so much on anything else.
But that’s where I was wrong. This is a very special effects intensive film, largely because they are making fun of Hollywood, the film production process, pretentious actors and of course, action flicks. The ensemble, featuring the likes of Karen Gillian, Keegan Michael-Key, Fred Armisen, Leslie Mann, David Duchovny, that girl who played Borat’s daughter, Pedro Pascal and plenty of others who I’m probably too old to know their names star as the cast of the Cliff Beast franchise, a series of lousy action films in which a team of heroes assemble again and again to defeat evil dinosaur like creatures who dwell on cliffs.
This fact alone leads to the biggest laughs of the film as we get a comparison between how CGI scenes look very cool once rendered vs. what buffoons everyone involved looks like when they are shooting such scenes.
The overall premise is that at the height of the pandemic in 2020, back in the early days of the rona when everyone was so worried that they were wiping down their potato chip bags, a major studio dares to be one of two companies still willing to produce a major film. Accordingly, the cast is cloistered in a posh hotel in the British countryside and are forced to live together, not go anywhere or do anything fun for fear of coming down with the dreaded rona. Hotel staff have to pamper these rich entitled bums who are used to getting their way and are willing to throw outrageous temper tantrums over trivial things whereas the rest of us working stiffs have grown used to not getting our way.
Hijinx ensue that’s pretty much where the coherence ends. Each character has their own subplot and it all culminates in the ensemble yearning for a way off the set, for the film itself becomes a nightmare. Mistakes and errors cause the production to drag on for months and months and there’s no exit from the hotel in sight. The actors try almost every option to get out of the film except, you know, being good actors.
STATUS: Shelf-worthy. Not really a great film and not something I’d want to watch twice. It does have a lot of laughs and parodies Hollywood extensively. The behind the scenes looks at actors working on a green screen set are a laugh riot. I suppose we’ve come a long way in two years, from the time when people wearing scuba type helmets on dry land seemed like a great idea to now, when a film can laugh at such silliness.
SIDENOTE: I’m not entirely sure a dry land scuba helmet is a terrible idea. I’d wear one if it were socially acceptable.
Ryan Reynolds stars as himself, traveling to the past to join forces with…his younger self.
BQB here with a review.
This movie is fun but somewhat basic. It’s typical Ryan Reynolds fast talking funny guy schtick, mixed with some great special effects. Not the most captivating backstory, one of those films you’ll munch popcorn to while it happens but the next day you’ll forget all about it. In other words, it’s standard Netflix fare.
RR stars as middle aged Adam from the future, who travels to the past to evade evildoers of the future who want to abuse the time travel tech his father Louis (Mark Ruffalo) invented. Along the way, he joins forces with his 12 year old self (Walker Scobell doing a pretty funny kid version impression of Reynolds). Jennifer Garner rounds out the cast as mother to the Adams.
STATUS: Shelf-worthy, but not a lot more to say about it.
BQB here with a review of this Netflix documentary. SPOILERS ABOUND!!!
Stories abound of men doing dumb, stupid, even horrible things for a beautiful woman. Smitten men have lost their lives, their fortunes, their reputations, careers, livelihoods, even committed crimes and gone to jail, all in the name of a pretty face.
As my 3.5 readers know, I am absurdly ugly, such that I could describe myself as a bad DNA mix of Ron Pearlman, Steve Buscemi, Willem Defoe and a bulldog and still not begin to describe the depths of my hideousness. While this has led to many crappy aspects of life, I can tell you the one and only good thing is it has prevented me from being hoodwinked by women. A beautiful woman tells me she’ll love me forever if I do X stupid thing? “Ha!” I cry. “That’ll be the day!” I already know no woman could ever love my gargoylish Quasimodo self and thus it would be pointless to jump through her hoops.
Long story short, this documentary posits the hypothesis that rich men are to women what beautiful women are to men. While we should never get bogged down in absolutes as I’m sure there are many women who wouldn’t be foolish enough to lose their wits at the sight of a dude with a big bankroll, there are some members of the fairer sex who throw common sense out the window in the name of a man with a fat bank account.
Think back to all those Disney movies. Does the Princess ever go for a commoner, or does she long to be rescued by…yes, a Prince with a lot of dough? Take away The Beast’s big bottomline and that movie is just a horrid tale about an ugly dog monster man who kidnaps French beauty Belle and holds her hostage. Take away Christian Gray’s fat stacks and 50 Shades of Gray is just a horror show about a weirdo who likes to spank female fannies.
Ultimately, for…not all women but some women…a man with money is their kryptonite. Perhaps this brings us back to our primal caveman days when prehistoric cavewomen would flock to the strongest caveman who could protect them from saber tooth tigers and wooly mammoths. Today, strength and protection take the form of cold, hard cash.
And thus, here is a tale about women who met a man claiming to be the son of a fabulously wealthy Israeli diamond merchant. Simon, as he calls himself, pops up on the Tinder apps of many a lonely lady and when they see his wealth, his fancy clothes, his expensive cars, his personal private jet, his cadre of servants, bodyguards and flunkies, and his globetrotting lifestyle that lets him go from one swanky hotel to the next, they truly believe they have become modern day Cinderellas who have met their Prince Charmings.
Alas, if only these women had consulted a human gargoyle like me, for like the person who sits in the back of a theater showing a horror movie shouting out warnings to the victim about what the baddie is about to do, I found myself shouting at the TV, “No girl! Don’t do that! He’s going to….ugh!”
First, so many of these women get on this dude’s private jet and fly away with him on the first date. My initial reaction is why are these women so dumb to not realize that getting on a stranger’s plane after a first meeting a bad idea? Don’t they know he could very easily fly them to a shitty country where laws don’t apply and they could end up being drugged up, internationally trafficked sex slaves for the rest of their lives? Have these women never seen Taken? Egads.
Luckily, none of them are turned into sex slaves. But they are taken for big bucks. Once Simon woos them, he bombards his lady marks with tales of peril, various reasons why he has lost access to his cash and great dangers that will befall him if the women don’t fork over their dough. These ladies end up not only handing over their life savings, they also take out massive loans, racking up insane credit card debt that they have no hope of repaying, all in the name of…well they think they are saving Simon from peril but in reality, are funding his lavish lifestyle.
The key lie in Simon’s repertoire is to claim that he has “enemies” i.e. he is a rich diamond merchant and various evildoers want to do him in because…I don’t know, he has a lot of money and they want it I guess? At any rate, the S man simply tells his befuddled babes that very bad, naughty men are tracking him through his credit cards, so he has to use theirs but don’t worry…he’ll pay them back.
So, don’t get me wrong. I get that at the end of the day, the con man is responsible for the con. No matter how dumb you think the conned might be, the conner is the one in the wrong who has done a terrible thing.
Even so…yeah, as an ugly gargoyle whose only credit as an ugly gargoyle is an immunity to being conned by a pretty face, I found myself shouting at the TV. “Really, girl? A man that rich claims bad guys are tracking him through his credit cards and so…he needs YOUR credit card? That doesn’t set off a red flag for you? There’s no other alternative for a man that rich? There isn’t like a secure banking service or a security expert or some sort of banking method a man with that much money can use in this type of situation? Borrowing his girlfriend’s credit card and racking up hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt is the only thing he can do? Give me a break.”
I will say part of me gets why the women are duped. Simon appears to have so much freaking money that it seems like it would be easy enough for him to pay the loans back to the ladies. Still, the cynic in me wonders why these women never asked why a man that rich doesn’t have say, the resources necessary to access secure, untrackable credit and ultimately, if that money is a lot to these women, enough to cripple them financially for life, why take the risk? The documentary’s answer is that they do it for love, that they genuinely care for Simon and worry about his safety but…there’s a part of me that wonders if these women saw Simon as their Prince Charming, their lifelong meal ticket who could give them a fabulous lifestyle, so they’d best not question it and do whatever he says, throwing all common sense out of the window.
In other words, if Simon looked like gargoyle old me and had my shitty lifestyle, they probably wouldn’t let me borrow five bucks if I gave them a promissory note signed by the Pope, let alone throw me a life preserver if I were drowning, but they’ll be duped into committing credit card fraud and get stuck with the bill for a handsome man posing as a wealthy adventurer.
STATUS: Shelf-worthy. You know, the strongest among us has their kryptonite, the chink in their armor, their Achilles heel, so I am sympathetic to what happened to these ladies. I just…I don’t know. It was hard not to watch this movie and think if I only had like, a tenth of Simon’s looks, if I had a tenth of his fast talking abilities, if I had just a bit of money…I could have some hotties in my life and wouldn’t be so lonely . I would use those powers for good and treat the hotties right but alas, it wasn’t meant to be. Que sera, sera.
BQB here with a review of the drama based on the wildly popular Netflix documentary, Tiger King.
At the outset, let me ask two questions:
1 – How did Netflix, after Tiger King became so popular, not scoop up whatever rights it needed to produce its own drama based on the documentary?
2 – Did we really need it?
Answer to the second, no, which might explain why Netflix didn’t bother in answer of the first. Then again all these streaming services love money, which is why Peacock did it. Sidenote – this is basically a rare moment where I used my Peacock app.
For the uninitiated, Tiger King is a documentary that takes us deep into the wild and wacky world of big cat ownership. Apparently, unbeknownst to the general public, there has long been a subculture of private, for profit zoo owners who rule their little fiefdoms like kings, raking in bucks from clueless tourists who stop by to cuddle with baby tiger cubs, all the while paying their employees bupkis. These owners tend to be their own personal cults of personality, from Doc Antle who poses as a guru with a harem of hot babes who follow him wherever he goes to Jeff Lowe, an old man who dresses like he just stepped off the set of a 1990s NSync video.
Central to the doc was the feud between Joe Exotic and Carole Baskin, he being a self-described gay redneck blonde mullet sporting gun toting cowboy who loves to blow shit up and can’t stop marrying young husbands half his age. At one point, he becomes a polygamist when he openly marries two.
Meanwhile, Baskin is a flower crown wearing hippy who operates a not for profit cat rescue shelter, working to put for profit cat owners out of business as she exposes their animal abuse practices. A big subplot of the series is, well, while it is never proven conclusively, there are a lot of, shall we say red flags, that might make one ask questions as to whether she might have had something to do with her ex-husband’s death.
When Carole sets out to put Joe out of business, claiming abusive animal practices, Joe responds with a series of online videos that rake Carole’s reputation over the coals. The feud descends into madness, eventually culminating in Joe hiring a hitman to kill Carole only for the hit to be botched, as Joe botches most things in his life.
Ultimately, the Peacock drama is unnecessary yet fun filler, kind of like those M and Ms you ate before dinner but wish you hadn’t. The steak adds protein, the broccoli adds vitamins while the candy is fun at first but later you get sick and wonder why you bothered with it. At times, it feels like a high school drama club took the main beats of the documentary story line and acted them out.
To the show’s credit, it does give us some new aspects. For example, we see a young version of Joe we never saw in documentary, one where he meets an out and proud gay man while in rehab after a car accident. Said man encourages Joe to embrace who he is rather than hide it, saving him from going down the path of marrying a woman as a beard and denying who he is, a life Young Joe admits would have eventually ended in his own suicide.
Living out and proud allowed Joe to meet his first husband, the only stable and age appropriate relationship he ever had. Together, the duo open a pet store and eventually that venture morphs into the zoo and said husband is such a grounding, stabilizing force in Joe’s life that one wonders if he hadn’t died young, perhaps Joe would have never picked up so many vices and become a respectable member of the community.
Meanwhile, we see Carole’s younger days, being abused by two husbands and while the abuse leaves her with a broken heart, she also grows stronger as she learns to make money and become independent so she never has to rely on a man who might abuse financial power over her ever again. In middle age, she meets dweebish Howard Baskin and its a romance filled with love and support.
Where the show differs from the series is Carole (Kate McKinnon) is portrayed as the hero of the series, with patriarchical misogyny being the true villain (hey it is in every other show these days so why not this one?) The theme is that all these big cat owners have fragile male egos who prop themselves up by owning and imprisoning wild animals who should roam free. If you see some of the footage of Joe and other cat owners, there’s probably a lot of truth to that.
However, the drama does ignore critical aspects of Baskin. While it does raise the question of her ex husband’s disappearance, it paints her as a victim of gossip who is innocent of the allegations whereas the documentary raises some points that…well…let’s just put it this way. They aren’t so conclusive that I would vote to convict her if I were on a jury, but they do leave you scratching your head.
Overall this is the main difference between the doc and the drama. Carole is the hero of the drama while in the doc, she’s painted as just one more weirdo in the world of big cats.
John Cameron Mitchell provides a decent caricature of Joe though one wonders why David Spade, who looks, sounds and has even sported Joe’s mullet in his Joe Dirt character, didn’t get the part he was literally born to play. At least Dean Winters, who made a career playing obtuse, blissfully unaware characters who truly believe they are more awesome than you when they clearly aren’t, won the role he was born to play in Jeff Lowe.
STATUS: Shelf-worthy but unnecessary. You’ll watch it but wish you hadn’t…not that its bad but just because time on earth is so limited and you could have done so many other things.
BQB here with a review of Netflix’s new improvised comedy series.
Maybe this one just flew over my head. I’m two episodes in and while it is mildly entertaining, it’s one of those shows I might put on while I’m vacuuming the house, just to occupy my brain so I don’t get bored by the housework but don’t get so intrigued by the show that I put the vac down and start watching. Ultimately, if you want background noise while you suck up dirt, this is the show for you.
Critics love it but maybe I’m just a bumpkin with bad taste.
The premise is that Will Arnett stars as broken down, stereotypical tough guy TV detective Terry Seattle. Every episode, he must solve a murder with the assistance of a celebrity trainee. Thus far, I’ve seen two episodes, the first with trainee/late night TV host Conan O’Brien and the second with football star Marshawn Lynch. Marshawn apparently loves guest starring on sitcoms ever since that episode of Brooklyn 99 where he was a terrible witness because when a prison bus flipped over and exploded behind him, he was too focused on the music in his earbuds and the burrito he was eating to notice or care.
Murderville’s hook is that it is semi-improvised. Will and all other cast members have been given scripts. The celebrity guest trainee goes in cold. They play themselves as a police trainee and must come up with their dialogue on the fly. I assume this means that the cast has to improvise on the spot if the trainee says something that doesn’t jive with the rehearsed lines of the script.
While fun to see the celebs act silly, I feel comedy as a general art form has been dead for many years, everyone so afraid to offend. This show is just one in a long line of wannabe comedies that straddle the lines of humor but never quite get there.
Bookshelf Battle 