Melody Zeda

Awful, excruciatingly boring and one-note. Bleak, drab with characters who barely speak and are being paid not to emote. It’s worthless in every cinematic sense and I now truly wish I could get my money back even though I saw it for free.

This was a very self-serving narrative that really didn’t ask or answer any hard-hitting questions about the very problematic nature of how she ended up with 14 kids. As depicted, she is a delusional and narcissistic woman whose underlying mental health issues have never been fully addressed or treated. I will say that it’s obvious she is downplaying her own culpability while simultaneously playing the victim. You can tell she’s very uncomfortable when she is confronted with FACTS about her past as well as when other people report a contrasting appraisal of her own words and actions. Even when she is confronted with video and audio of herself, she dismisses it saying she doesn’t remember that or that she was “forced” to act that way by producers of reality tv in order to get paid. Zero accountability. I think she is blatantly lying by saying he only has anted “one more” Child and the doctor was the one who decided to enseminate her with 8 more on how own accord without her consent or knowledge. That’s a lie. What’s more, she could have chosen to terminate any number of the embryos as soon as she found out supposedly that there were 8 more not 1 more, but she chose to keep all of the embryos. So whose fault is that? Why after already having 6 children from IVF was she wanting ANY more, even if it was just one? She couldn’t even support the 6 she has let alone be responsible for 14! It’s ridiculous and disgusting. She is OBSESSED with having kids and it’s clear she has some very serious personality disorders centered around trauma & abandonment, insecure attachment, coercive control, anxiety, lack of executive functioning, narcissism, inability to assess reality, emotional immaturity and colored anxiety/ADHD/OCD. She is quite socially awkward and so are her children whom she calls “well-adjusted and grounded” which is clearly not how they come across to anyone but her. She keeps them isolated and under her strict control, constantly bossing them around, fearing for their safety to the point of paranoia, and desperately seeking their love and attention via coercive methods of keeping them with her at all times. She has forced them to echo her every delusional thought and revels in them reflecting her back like a mirror times 14. It’s unhealthy, unhinged and very bizarre. These poor kids are not prepared or adapted to the outside world and will no doubt suffer from the consequences of being raised in isolation by an unwell parent. The documentary also doesn’t explain how she pays for 14 kids plus herself over two decades, her oldest being 23. At one point she said “my overhead was 35k per month”, but never explains how she sustained that over the now 16 years since the 8 were born. Something stinks there! Yeah she admits she did porn and exploited herself at the height of her infamy to pay the bills, but that was many years ago. What happened when she disappeared from public eye and the money from exploitation ran dry? Is she on public assistance? Does she have family money? She says she takes care of her profoundly disabled son 24-7 so who pays for the other 13 kids??? Maybe that’s why the pathologically reclusive woman has come back into the light, to capitalize on what little “fame” she has left to fund her brood.

This was so pointlessly long, over 3 hours is indulgent and merciless. It told the whole story in an hour and then rinsed and repeated for another hour and a half and summed up in 15 minutes. It was repetitive and so boring in parts that it was almost unwatchable. The characters have no depth, very two dimensional and you’re beaten over the head with everything yet the characters seem inexplicably mentally deficient when it comes to the obvious ploys and tropes. Hello! White people are trying to steal your money, natives. So how bout you stop acting like this hasn’t happened for years and maybe stop marrying them and giving up your freedom and land. I hate when movies portray indigenous people as both cunning and extremely stupid. It’s infuriatingly obvious and frustrating.

Not gonna lie, this was TERRIBLE. So fake, so unbelievably flat acting-wise, such regurgitation story-wise. No likable characters, zero authenticity or imagination. 2-D nonsense. No creativity whatsoever, just recycled tropes done poorly. I expected more of Justin Theroux, who I love. At least he was watchable, but the lead actress LLANA GLAZER (Lucy) was absolutely awful! Terrible acting, so fake, so amateurish and so unlikable. Hope she has a day job and a hidden talent, because I really don’t know how she got this role opposite Theroux. My guess is it had to be as a favor to someone given it’s not because she’s pretty, she’s not at all something to look at and it’s not because she can act obviously. Even if she had been amazing, the story and plot were unsalvageable. It’s like a cross between a high school play and an amateur straight to DVD flop. 47% on rotten tomatoes is generous. It’s comically bad. The ending is just adding insult to injury, it actually made it so much worse, which I didn’t think possible having sat through an hour and a half of trash. Guess the garbage needed to be set ablaze as they went all in on it being totally ridiculous and utterly stupid. Dumpster fire 🔥 of a film. Unsubscribe.

This was a very engaging psychological thriller with a lot originality brought to the adaptation of the original 1987 film starring Glenn Close and Michael Douglas. I love the creative interpretation the writers used with the expression of Alex and I loved the director’s choice to replay scenes from different characters’ perspectives as it really went to show the the blurred lines between objective reality and subjective experience highlighting the various dichotomies at play here, like the perspective of the man in the affair vs. the female, the married man vs. single siren, the psychologically maladapted person vs. the sane yet morally questionable person and all the different ways other characters interacted with what they witnessed vs. what they were told. Lizzy Caplan was a captivatingly tortured, charming, yet sympathetic villain and the chemistry between her and Joshua Jackson was palpable. The depiction of someone with BPD was also quite accurate, so they really did their research to bring that to life. I hope there’s another season!