Michael Duran

The Russian propagandists are out in force in reviewing this series here. This kind of social media manipulation is exactly what the documentary examines in episode nine. This is a comprehensive, demanding historical documentary that examines how the Cold War never ended (you have to see the horrific invasion of Ukraine through this lens) and how it is inextricably intertwined with nuclear weapons. It begins with the rise of authoritarianism in Germany and the Bolsheviks in Russia which led to the Soviet Union and Stalin's murderous regime. After a rigorous discussion of WWII, it surveys the United States' carpet bombing of Japan before the decision to destroy Hiroshima and Nagasaki with nuclear weapons. (those who saw "Oppenheimer will be interested in the discussion of the brilliant physicist and the development of the A and H bombs) The series looks at the post-WW II tensions between the US and the Soviet Union, including the sick US government's communist paranoia in '50s America ( interestingly, Roy Cohn and Joseph McCarthy are echoed by today's MAGA obsession with migrants)0 and the end of the Warsaw pact--the fall of the Berlin Wall, The Cuban Missile Crisis, Glasnost, Perestroika, America's foolish underestimation of Russian leaders and the rise of the corrupt reign of Putin. It unfortunately glosses over the Vietnam War and the Russian boondoggle in Afghanistan, which drained the country's coffers and cost lives. Still, this is a valuable history lesson and analysis of the post-WWII years with academics, political figures, Russian dissidents, the former Ukrainian president as well as President Zelensky, and many more major figures of the last 50 years. With 9 episodes taking 10 hours, this is a big time investment but more than worthy of our time. If you have children, make sure they watch.

How bad is this? Let's count the ways. It wants to be a Southern noir but has an aimless pace with too many scenes that are nothing more than filler instead of moving relentlessly to its conclusion. It needed to be better written if they were reaching for a kind of True Detective swampy, philosophical pace. There are no characters here. They have no backstory and come off as types. The central bad guy Frog is as much a cipher as the two dim-witted lead characters, Kyle and Swin. The two women characters, Her and Johnna, who incomprehensibly falls for dim bulb, man-bunwearing, Swin, are, just random women with no character arcs. They are inconsequential and obligatory women. Vince Vaughn and John Malkovich pick up paychecks but at least they bring some spice to the proceedings. Lead actor, charisma-free Liam Hemsworth, is a complete blank--he just doesn't register. Most egregious, Clark Duke, who plays Swin, makes too many rookie director mistakes. This is unquestionably the worst lit film in recent memory. Do not shoot a scene in which headlights shine into viewers' eyes. He also has problems finding proper camera angles. Don't shoot actors from the floor--it's not arty. It's a film noir. Tell the story without fat. Streamline. This is a film in which 2 hours feels like an eternity and the conclusion just goes splat from indifference. Avoid.

Watch the first two funny episodes of this trite, brutally sentimental series, and STOP. It turns into an insufferable dramedy about a 49 year-old-woman who somehow has never resolved the death of her mother when she was 19 and lives perpetually aggrieved while making life miserable for everyone who comes into her orbit. Katherine Hahn does her best with the schmaltzy and unconvincing teleplays that exist only to tug at heartstrings and make the audience cry. Milan Kundera called this manipulative kind of pop culture "kitsch," where every "serious" moment feels overly diagrammed to bring the tissues out and the sentiment is unearned. It's easy to make people cry with weepy drama or bogus, superficial koans about love and beauty. Claire is a hard-drinking, hard-loving, hard-living failed writer who takes out her life disappointment on the world but is somehow lovable because she has a tragic backstory. Unfortunately, she's not. She's just a liberal Karen who wears Beastie Boy sweatshirts. Claire gets a job doling out self-help advice to the lonely souls of America on the internet. Somehow this kind of column still exists in 2023 and, get this, she doesn't get paid for it even though it's viral. She somehow doesn't know how to monetize her web views. This is what happens when you try to make dated material contemporary. This stuff probably would have been apt for 1999. The show is framed around letters sent to Claire and her treacly advice about life, love, and women's agency. My progressively feminist wife and daughter both threw up in their mouths while watching this series pass off painfully empty epiphanies as profundities. This is one of the sourest and least convincing portraits of contemporary alienated women. Somehow, Claire never went to therapy to deal with her mother's death or her drunk, abusive father and thinks she's entitled to be an irresponsible and miserable human being who takes out her angst and recrimination on the world. This is Chelsea Handler stuff circa 2004, only she tried to make it funny. For a better take on contemporary anxiety and women's pain watch "Beef," which is philosophically sound and insightful while being funny.

The central gimmick of this flaccid heist series is you can choose your own adventure by picking any episode to watch in any order, but the series isn't clever enough to make that premise work. Sure, you can scramble the timelines instead of seeing a linear story but it doesn't add to the viewing experience an iota. The creator seemed to have taken the best ideas from "Money Heist," "Reservoir Dogs, "Inside Man," and, "Mission Impossible" and dumbed them all down into a bland story of revenge and grand heist. You end up with the story for a two-hour film stretched over eight hours with plot holes big enough to build a freeway through. The two things all heist stories must have are 1) a smart heist and 2) great characters. This has neither. The heist is preposterous and all the characters are bland with no backstory, except the ringleader, Leo, played by the great Giancarlo Esposito in bad wigs and dreaming of "Breaking Bad" and "Better Call Saul" scripts. The characters are just stuck figures with specialties--the chemist, the driver, the safe cracker etc. but we know nothing about them and the actors don't bother to dig deeper than the surface. One example of how sloppy the execution is. RJ, the driver and mechanic, is introduced as having an OCD tick of banging on things and playing rhythmically with any tool on metal. He never does this again after the introduction--he acts like everyone else.. All the members of the crew are too stupid to pull off a 7 billion dollar heist. One member, Bob, is an idiot bully safe cracker. He is brought along because he's married for some reason to the chemist, Judy (Judy is torn between Bob, the jerk, and Stan the good guy who was Leo's cellmate years before). Why she would be interested in Bob makes zero sense because she's a cipher. Maybe sex?). No crew would carry liability like Bob on any high-stakes heist. It's beyond reason. The brains, Ava, is a shady high-powered lawyer who somehow is not smart enough to make sure her longtime friend and mother figure is a naturalized citizen and protected from the law. Sigh. The show lumbers along to the heist, double crosses (which you see a mile away), and a rushed ending that leaves you shrugging. Most problematic are the two FBI agents trying to solve the heist. Here they steal from "Mare of Easttown" with the troubled, in-recovery woman cop and her young straight-laced, good guy partner. Unfortunately, both characters (and actors) are so vanilla and nondescript, you forget they are part of the show. Consider this: Tarantino told a great time fractured heist film in 90 minutes with "Reservoir Dogs." This puppy will suck up 8 hours of your life. You can watch Godfather I and II and take nap in the same amount of time.

A total botch adaptation of one of Don DeLillo's great novels. Writer/director Noah Baumbach seems to think it's a farce instead of a dark satire, and though he may be loyal to the plot (except for the different ending, which turns things to schmaltz), he completely misses the tone. The book is a sharp satire of American paranoia, consumerism, and academia while lamenting the pervasive white noise (incessant overload of information, distractions, and other assorted nonsense we are preoccupied with) but the film, with its garish costumes, haircuts, and sets misses most of this. The academic sections are preposterous and played as a parody and the slapstick "comic" first hour that culminates in the airborne toxic event that sets the action in motion feels like something out of a bad "I Love Lucy" episode. The pace is too frenetic so there's no gravitas to the story. The second half goes completely awry and turns into a family story (sigh). It misses the whole idea of the numbing cultural white noise that paralyzes us and creates a sense of dread. Adam Driver is much too young to play Jack, the professor of Hitler Studies, and Greta Gerwig is miscast as harried Baba (with a terrible wig). Read the magnificent book and skip this mess. Note to Baumbach: we already saw the choreographed dance-off over the end credits in "After Yang." It's time for filmmakers to leave DeLillo's books alone.

A shockingly banal and obvious stinker about how patriarchal culture gaslights and controls women and forces them to conform to roles that are against their inherent nature. The stars are for Florence Pugh, who is the only person acting in this flimsy quasi-sci-fi film that's like a bad "Black Mirror episode for people who need things spoonfed to them. Olivia Wilde directs an inept script and tries to turn it into an art film, but the direction is so overcooked and pretentious--like a film student who has seen too many Kubrick and Cohen brothers' films--it takes away from the storytelling. It's from the school of "hey look what I can do" directing. Poor Harry Styles has no role to play and barely registers while Chris Pine and the other actors sleepwalk through their underwritten roles. Styles fanboys and fangirls might enjoy seeing their hero on the screen, but anyone looking for a well-told story that doesn't hit you over the head with its MESSAGE like a sledgehammer, look elsewhere.

An overly earnest, sentimental, weepy American independent film that would probably have felt dated in the late '90s, "Cha Cha" seems like it was written by someone who knows nothing about life and relies on heartwarming cliches about romance and existential anguish. It's understandable why it's being embraced by critics despite its lack of originality, wit, or insight--it's an antidote to our jaded, angry times--but it ends up being as flavorful as a day-old glass of ginger ale. Writer/director/star Cooper Raiff overestimates his own charm as the main character, Andrew, a stunted momma's boy who meets a damaged, gorgeous (of course) divorcee Domino (the always charming Dakota Johnson) and falls in love with her despite the fact she's engaged. They meet cute and Andrew becomes big brother/babysitter for Domino's autistic daughter, Lola. Andrew is figuring out life as Domino tries to navigate her feelings for him and her fiance. Small epiphanies (very small) about life and relationships ensue as Andrew learns things about himself and relationships. The dialogue is often twee and trite--lots of talk about soulmates and lots of tears are shed. Domino comes off like the quintessential fantasy woman--a broken person who Andrew wants to save--but there are tone-deaf moments. Early on she has a miscarriage in a bathroom and an hour later she's making moony eyes at Andrew and mounting him on the couch. In what world would a woman shrug off a miscarriage and immediately come on to a man? Would a mother entrust her autistic teen daughter with a 22-year-old man she just met as her babysitter? There's an uncomfortable scene when Lola asks Andrew to rub her back in bed and he complies. Wha?! These are the missteps of a young male writer who has grown up watching more movies than living life in the real world. Despite some nice performances by Johnson, Leslie Mann, and Vanessa Burghardt as Lola, the film is too wispy and Raiff is far too in love with himself--Andrew comes off more like a sad puppy than a charming, ingratiating dude everyone can't resist loving. If you eat oatmeal every morning and cry yourself to sleep each night with Elliott Smith records, you'll love this--otherwise you might find it insufferable.

This is an interesting show that explores the obvious homoerotic subtext of all pirate/sea stories and it can be extremely funny but it needs to figure out the tone. At times it wants to be F Troop on the high seas and at times it turns into a romantic tale of yearning and melancholy as it questions what masculinity means. Sometimes a comedy just needs to be a comedy and if it wants to examine sexual identity and how men relate to one another, have fun and do it. There are times, like all Waititi produced projects, when the narrative devolves into kitschy sentimentality that's antithetical to the broad humor and slapstick moments. They could learn a bit from Armando Iannucci and go a lot more transgressive--this kind of comedy needs to be daring. A solid show that needs tweaking. There are too many dead spots in the half hours. Is it a comedy or not? Enough with the romantic yearning--make us laugh.

A funny, at times meandering, and extremely transgressive satire of sexism, sexual hypocrisy, a decaying Romania, and intellectually bankrupt societies, this has particular resonance for contemporary America's new Puritanism. The censored version on Hulu may lose some of the film's bite (though the way it's censored is bizarro hilarious), but it's still a wonderful shoe-string budget film with off-beat humor and insight. People who don't enjoy art films and like things spelled out for them probably should steer clear, but those who like to be challenged and laugh at the ridiculous hypocrisy of the sexual propriety police will love it and laugh. Amazing it was made during the middle of the pandemic. Bravo.

The problem with streaming services is they need so much content, they greenlight a four-hour miniseries to tell a story that could have been well told in 2 or 2 1/2 hours. This glacially paced series can't quite figure out if wants to be a meditation on grief and a rape survivor's tale or a mystery thriller. It ends up only doing justice to the rape survivor story. The mystery aspect is preposterous and obvious, and the series falls apart in the last hour. Basically, the narrative serves as a vehicle to demonstrate how women are violated, abused, gaslit, and manipulated by controlling, abusive, violent men--there's not much nuance in this. The men are all so evil, they could be twirling handlebar mustaches. The series tells parallel stories about two women--played by the always excellent Gugu Mbatha Raw and Jessica Plummer (fantastic) who move into an antiseptic, futuristic house built by a wealthy control-freak architect, Edward, who built the house and they fall in love with. The house, which is like a fortress becomes a safe haven from the world and trauma for the women. Or so they think. Edward spouts the pretentious, pompous twaddle about relationships and architecture that seems utterly irresistible to these women (anyone else would probably laugh in his face and run away). It's difficult to tell how many red flags the women need to make better choices. One woman meets her demise and the other feels an obligation to solve her mysterious death and tell her story. With editing, tighter narrative storytelling, and a better ending, this could have been a good psychological drama. Unfortunately, it ends up more of an overly somber jumble about the plight of women in the face of the ugly, oppressive patriarchy. Too bad someone didn't do this with Mbatha-Raw and Plummer in a tight, well-told film.