Tag Archives: Streaming on Netflix

The Dirt

You may not even believe that the dudes of Motley Crue are literate, but in fact, they released their Confessions of the World’s Most Notorious Rock Band in 2001. The chapters (because yes, of course I’ve read it, I’VE READ EVERYTHING) alternate between the guys, and everyone’s got a version of the story they’re selling. Lots of the details conflict. In fact, lots of the big stuff conflicts too, but that’s part of the book’s charm. The guys sort of interact within its pages, rebutting each other’s alternate versions and extolling their own. The Dirt is even dirtier than you’d imagine.

So it’s kind of surprising that it took someone this long to make a movie out of it, but Netflix has, and it’s ripe for the streaming.

The film alternates its point of view between the band members but the story is a little more cleanly told than it is in the book. And while almost by definition the antics are somewhat toned down, you’ll still get plenty of the sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll that Motley Crue was known for. In fact, you won’t have to wait more than 3 minutes to see a woman squirting. Stay tuned for the heroin overdoses, vehicular manslaughter, and anonymous head.

Nikki Sixx (Douglas Booth), Tommy Lee (Machine Gun Kelly), Vince Neil (Daniel Webber), and Mick Mars (Iwan Rheon) have some stories to tell. Tommy’s wholesome upbringing contrasts sadly with Nikki’s, while the other two get lost in the dust. The truth is, the 107 minute run time is brisk, and gives more screen time to trashing hotel rooms than it does to insightful backstory, because this is what draws the audience to any Motley Crue show: not the lessons learned or the underdog story, but the fights fought loud and proud and bloody. You come for the famous girlfriends and the venereal disease and the mountains of dope and the increasingly inventive use of leather. And fear not: director Jeff Tremaine delivers. He does best with those scenes of complete debauchery than he does with stitching them together into some cohesive story. And weirdly, the music is very nearly an afterthought. But if you’ve come for The Dirt, I promise you, you’ve found it.

Operator

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Is this a poor man’s Her?

Sort of. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

MV5BMjExMTMyOTk3OF5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTgwMTU4NzEzMDI@._V1_SX1777_CR0,0,1777,740_AL_ Joe (Martin Starr) is a programmer who’s probably on the spectrum and self-soothes with obsessively quantifying his every thought and feeling. His wife, Emily (Mae Whitman), is a hotel concierge with theatrical ambitions. They are a loving couple; she supports him, literally lays atop him light a human weighted blanket, and he applauds her every written word.

And then it all goes to hell.

Basically, he’s working on one of those phone operating systems where a customer calls in wanting to talk to a human but instead gets lost in a sea of options. His operating system is very sophisticated and intelligent, and like Alexa and Siri, she’ll need a voice, a calming but confident presence, and Joe figures: who better than his own wife and empathic helpmate, Emily?

Meanwhile, Emily has just joined a troupe of actors who put on teeny tiny plays that are achingly revelatory and personal. She has promised Joe not to use him as material, but he proves too tantalizing a subject.

So when their marriage hits the rocks, Joe starts dialing in to hear the operating system that sounds like his wife but never says no, and Emily starts flinging Joe’s most innermost personal shit across the stage just to see what sticks. It’s ugly, but it’s also fascinating.

Operator is funny, actually funny, and it’s anchored by two very bright performances by Starr and Whitman. But it’s also analytical and thoughtful and satirical. In short, it’s well-balanced and interesting, and if it doesn’t 100% work out in the end, it gets close enough. It will inevitably be compared to Her, but even if it’s a less attractive cousin, it’s still pretty good company to keep.

Behind The Curve

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I have a friend, Luc, who listens to talk radio. There are only two kinds of people who listen to talk radio: conservatives and masochists. And Luc isn’t conservative. Somehow giphy (2) he can listen to crackpots blowing steam out of their ears without losing his mind. Oh, he gets riled up – that’s kind of the point – but it doesn’t make him lose his faith in humanity. I cannot say the same for myself, which is why I avoid indulging in or even acknowledging this stuff in the least. People who are willfully ignorant really get my goat. Sean knows this, and it was not without a gleeful glint in his eye that he proposed watching Behind The Curve, a documentary on Netflix about the flat earth conspiracy.

Flat Earthers are…ugh. There’s no excuse and there’s no understanding them, not from a rational perspective. Although I did get the feeling that they, and conspiracy theorists in wp-contentuploads201306Brave1.giffit-in__1200x9600 general, share a common mistrust for authority. They’re a group of outsiders who find a brotherhood in “believing” this stuff. And I’m still not 100% certain they’re not just having us on. I mean, can they truly believe that the Earth is not a sphere? That Big Globe has been the sinister force behind science and reality for hundreds of years?

Thankfully, this documentary doesn’t try to give credence to their impossible theories. But we do get a brief look into their psyches, into what might attract an otherwise 978672a0-cf17-0131-693e-423d576c0d42 reasonable human being to the murky world of hating science and believing in baloney. And what we uncover are basically just some sad and lonely people looking for connection, and maybe a moment or two in the spotlight. On the fringes of society, there aren’t a lot of options for these people. How fantastic that all it takes is inventing an inflammatory piece of fake news, and building a community around it. That’s all it is – that, and making a few coins from the merch, which seems to double as evidence as far as these people are concerned.

The interesting thing about this documentary is that it doesn’t just give a soapbox to giphy (1) crackerjacks who put a little too much value into Youtube and not enough into critical thought. It tells us how we contribute to the problem – and I think the message transcends beyond just the conspiracy nutters. I think it’s also a reminder on how to speak to anyone whose views are polarizing to your own. It gives us all something to aim for as we hurtle through space on our beautiful, round planet.

Whitney

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The tape deck in my mom’s forest green Ford Aerostar minivan ate a tape and never spit it out, so I spent my childhood listening to one album and one album only in the car: The Bodyguard soundtrack. Whitney Houston was no stranger to us at home either. I think my Mom had all her CDs, and our home was almost never without music, and therefore, rarely without an impromptu dance and singalong. It was very exciting when the Waiting to Exhale soundtrack came out but much less exciting when the movie did; my mother and I rented it from the local Blockbuster, not understanding what we were getting ourselves into. Sex scenes go on forever when you’re a kid watching them with your mom. FOREVER. Some part of me is still on that sectional sofa in our basement, stiffly watching, rapt, but trying to seem uninterested, and maybe a touch confused, for my mother’s benefit. And some part of her is still there too, trying to breathe normally and appear blase while secretly inching her hand toward the fast forward button on the remote.

Anyway. Whitney Houston. A luminescent talent that captured the whole world’s attention. She was a model, a singer, an actress, and an undeniably massive talent. But despite her fresh and innocent image, her success was often eclipsed by damaging headlines. Her marriage to Bobby Brown being a big one. And her drug use an unfortunate other.

mv5bodbiztq2nzctmte4ns00yje3ltk5mwmtywe0nde0zde0ytjjxkeyxkfqcgdeqxvyodazodu1ndq40._v1_sy999_sx648_al_ This documentary explores the highest highs and lowest lows of her life and career. Featuring archival footage of Houston herself and lots of interviews with friends and family and those who knew her best, the message is often complicated and conflicting. Did she have a hard childhood? Yes and no. Her mother was also a professional singer who groomed her for a career in the industry. She proudly sang in the choir of her church – where her mother had an affair with the pastor, ultimately causing the collapse of her marriage and Whitney’s parents divorced, leaving her devastated. Whitney director Kevin Macdonald manages to find new ground, and to probe beyond the headlines.

There’s rare concert footage and resurrected recordings and plenty of joy, but the whole thing still feels a bit macabre. In life, her increasingly erratic behaviour tainted her image and her downfall felt, if not inevitable, then at least unsurprising. It’s a painful reminder of how little it takes to extinguish even the brightest of lights.

The Bleeding Edge

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Medical devices. We can’t help but be grateful for them. You may have a grandparent kept alive by a pacemaker or a friend kept mobile with a metal plate holding pieces of bone together. I’ve been bodily attached for months to a device that kept my wound from going septic and though it was a pain in the ass, it’s sort of a miracle to even have access to it – a piece of motorized equipment that hadn’t even been around during a similar surgery 5 years prior and sped my healing by quite a wide margin. The reason my mother walks around at all today is that both her knees have been replaced by metal ones. They make a ruckus at the airport but I know she’s happy to have them. Think about how many people you know who would be dead today if they’d been born just a few decades earlier. Science advances, technology advances, and the medical field innovates to keep our bodies running more smoothly.

But The Bleeding Edge is here to warn us that the for-profit world of medical devices isn’t just here to do good. In fact, it often feels that any good they do is secondary, an afterthought to simply churning out products that make money. You’re probably used to thinking about big pharma in this way, but medical devices may be even more guilty, especially because they’re less regulated. You wouldn’t be crazy for assuming that the FDA regulates them the same way they do drugs and vitamins, but this is not the case. These things may be made to go inside your body, but few tests are done to see how they actually fare inside there. And this documentary unfortunately finds a lot of people who’ve had their lives ruined by untested devices – things as simple as contraceptive devices. But in a rush to sell as many of these devices as possible to doctors, sales reps don’t actually care whether or not a doctor can safely use this new device. And the scarier thing is, when something goes wrong, there’s not a single doctor who knows how to take them out.

This is one of those documentaries that makes us all uncomfortable because we’ve likely all be complacent about asking the right questions before we consent to medical intervention. We do assume that someone has done their due diligence, and I think that should be a fair assumption, but it isn’t. So what a film like this is an important reminder that we are all our own best advocates. We have the right to be concerned about what goes on in our bodies, and perhaps we should slow down a bit when making these life-altering decisions. We can do our own research. We can ask the right questions. And we can demand stricter guidelines and regulatory bodies. Because medical ‘innovation’ isn’t good to any of us if it’s making things worse.

Lady-Like

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Allie is a codependent college student with not much going for her. She’s lazy, sloppy, and mean. She’s crass enough that we struggle to understand how she has any friends at all – and in fact, she does not appear to have many other than her bff Kort. Allie (Stephanie Simbari) and Kort (Allie Gallerani) live together in a share house full of girls who have an assortment of small to medium to large resentments against each other, but manage to drink cheap wine together on a regular basis anyway. You know, friendship in your 20s. It’s a mix of backstabbing and jealousy and holding each other’s hair while you puke. Good times.

Also: frat parties. Ugh. Is there anything worse? But it sorta kinda works out for Kort, whose adorkability is noticed by some cute guy and he asks her out. He asks her out! That may seem like pretty standard stuff to you (and certainly to I) but these millennials make it pretty clear to us old fogies watching that this is cultural insanity. Nobody asks anyone out anymore. Not on actual dates. Not out for dinner. Who does he think he is, a Kennedy?

So then typically, Kort gets busy with her new relationship and she neglects her friendship. And Allie acts out in frighteningly immature ways. While normally I mv5bzwi1ytdhn2mtymq3zi00ztmylwi4yzktngm1zte4zwzmm2ezxkeyxkfqcgdeqxvymjq4odcxmdq@._v1_sx1777_cr0,0,1777,999_al_ would agree that it’s problematic that we tend to let friendships slide when we have a new relationship, in this case I was glad to see Kort get out of Allie’s evil clutches. I don’t understand how anyone would consent to sit on the same park bench as Allie, let alone be her actual friend. Allie has no idea what a friend actually is and has a LOT of growing before it’s even within her skill set. So in that way, I think the story is a little lost on us. I feel zero sympathy for passive aggressive Allie and her selfish ways. Allie is a tough character meant to straddle a line, but for me she pretty much pulverizes it, defeating the point.

One of the first things I liked about this movie was the convincingly shitty student housing. The shared house looks extremely lived in, bearing the marks of many previous tenants, and the ambivalent at best housekeeping of its current occupants. Turns out, that’s about all I liked about the movie. The girls seem to attend a good college but none of them have jobs yet they do have $90 to spend on yoga pants even though no one does any yoga. There’s a shopping montage worrisomely early on in the film where the two girls try on very few outfits (strung out in a very long montage) in a very posh looking boutique, and then freak out about the price. Um, yeah, no kidding. You two belong in a Forever 21 at best. As if you didn’t go to the mall.

Lady-Like is a bit of an archaeological dig among the millennial way of life, but it’s not particularly enlightening or entertaining. It just sort of is.

Abducted in Plain Sight

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OH MY GOD!

If you love true crime, you need to stop what you’re doing right now and run, don’t walk, run to your nearest Netflix portal.

Abducted In Plain Sight is about a pedophile who cozied up to a nice suburban family in order to have access to their young daughter, Jan. Lots of pedophiles know that you catch more flies with honey, and this guy was the whole damn hive. Apparently charming as hell, the “fun dad” from across the street, “B” would do mv5bnjk3njfjyzatmgizzi00ywnkltgymzatmmu2zdvlmjc5zdazxkeyxkfqcgdeqxvyndm3mtm2nza@._v1_sy1000_sx750_al_ anything to get close to Jan, and Jan’s parents were naive and trusting and just plain dumb. I mean, dumb enough that they BOTH had their own sexual relationships with this man when all the while all he cared about was screwing their kid. Which they basically invited to happen as they allowed him to sleep beside her in her bed because he asked nicely.

He kidnaps her eventually, and I’m not sure why since he had such cushy, unfettered access to her even in her own home, but he clearly had this elaborate hoax ready and was intent on seeing in through. He gets aliens in on the scheme, and a winnebago in Mexico. It’s pretty sordid stuff. But eventually Jan is returned home, months later, and apparently married to this guy even though she’s all of 12, and the parents drop all charges. But they don’t understand how brain-washed Jan is, and how motivated B is to continue their relationship. It just goes on and on and on. I guarantee you you’ll scream at your TV. How could any parent be this stupid, this cavalier with their daughter’s body, her well-being?

This film is bananas. You can’t and don’t want to believe it’s true, and yet here is Jan, all grown up, very neatly and intelligently laying the story out for us. And even more amazing than her survival is her forgiveness of her parents who failed her on pretty much every level a parent can, and then when they ran out of ways to fuck her over, they went ahead and invented some more for good measure. And the film goes out of its way to assure us that THESE ARE GOOD PEOPLE. Sure they are. But…but what the hell? How could this happen? Honestly, this story is so crazy you’ll need to hear it from Jan’s own lips to believe it, and then you’ll need to scrub your brains out with soap just to go on with your life because seriously dudes, WHAT THE HELL? You could make a legit drinking game out of just seeing how many times you mumble WHAT THE FUCK while watching this thing. It’s only 90 minutes long BUT YOU WILL DIE OF ALCOHOL POISONING FOR SURE.

I CAN’T EVEN with this review. It’s been a few days but I’m still reeling, and still really wanting to subject as many people as I can to this, because I shouldn’t have to experience this haunting on my own.

The American Meme

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Has there ever been a film so tailor-made to make me feel smug and superior?

Our culture has devolved into phone-obsessed automatons, but some of us are not content to simply post and share memes – some of us want to star in them.

Bert Marcus’ documentary focuses on 4 such persons, intent on their 15 minutes of internet fame:

Paris Hilton (@parishilton) of course blazed the blue print for internet stardom, for “reality” stardom of any kind, really. But she parlayed her hit TV show persona into an empire that she rules from social media. Her fans are her kingdom and she lives for them. She relates more to her followers than she does to her own friends. Perhaps the line between the two has been permanently blurred for her.

Brittany Furlan (@brittanyfurlan) moved to LA to be an actress but as for many others, her auditions went nowhere. But she was intent on becoming famous at any cost, and Vince was a platform where 6-second videos could net millions of views if they were funny enough. So Brittany embarrassed herself for the camera and the people came to laugh and point. And rack up views.

Josh Ostrovsky, better known as @thefatjewish, is the king of displaying himself for the enjoyment of others. Often naked, nearly always disgusting, he became famous for stealing other people’s funny memes and making loads of money off them.

Kirill Bichutsky (@slutwhisperer) took that one step further. He was an almost-legitimate photographer who recognized that he got way more attention by posting pictures of nearly-naked women with his infamous “champagne facials.”

With interviews with other internet-enabled celebrities like DJ Khaled, Emily Ratajkowski, Hailey Baldwin-Bieber, and Dane Cook, Marcus explores the dark corners of internet fame, and how quickly it is changing. When social media was young, you could go viral by stuffing as many of your friends as possible in a phone booth. Now you have to risk your life by eating Tide Pods. Which really makes you wonder why internet fame is so damn alluring that these stupid kids will go to such lengths. And yet, go anywhere. Anywhere. And try your best to spend 10 seconds without getting bumped by someone who insists on being ambulatory while staring solely at their phone. And I don’t mean to single out the young folk, because older folks are just as guilty. I love a documentary that can reflect our culture and make us think about it critically. Marcus doesn’t ask a lot of questions, he mostly just leaves the evidence there on the table, and it’s up to you to take the picture and post it.

Root Cause

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Back pain. Breast cancer. Panic attacks. Arthritis. Chronic fatigue. Bladder infections. Emphysema. Autoimmune disease. Herniated discs. Heart attacks.

Would you believe they’re all related to bad dentistry? In no other branch of medicine would a dead body part or tissue be left to fester. But dentists perform root canals all the time, and there’s just no way to keep a root canal completely sterile. Each tooth has 6-8 miles of tubules, tiny, tiny little tunnels that are basically only big enough to house gif-1-unicorn-1503393855 bacteria and not much else. But a root canal keeps the tooth but cuts it off from the body’s natural immune system so if bacteria gets in, there’s no good way to get it out. And teeth are living things; they are connected in to the larger system of the body. According to the doctors in this documentary, every tooth is connected to particular organs and glands. And it’s weird to really understand the connection, but they’re telling me that, for example, 97% of breast cancer patients between the ages of 30-70 have had either a root canal or a toxic tooth. The worst part is the infected root canals are often asymptomatic. You’re not necessarily feeling tooth pain, so you never even think to have it checked.

A couple of things you should know about me:

I’m a member of the No Cavity Club, which is an actual club at my dentist’s office. He posts my polaroid proudly.
I married the son of a dentist, so my excellent teeth have often been remarked upon.

My dentist growing up, and his hygienist wife, were family friends of ours. I’ve had cleanings but no big drilling procedures so I never developed any of the dentist phobias that so many people seem harbour. That said, this film was occasionally difficult to watch, even for me. There is some actual footage of root canals, and that’s pretty gross.

The thing is, I think I have a healthy amount of skepticism and this all sounds pretty simple and easy for something that continues to cause so many problems. Most dentists are still performing root canals. Most patients are still asking for them: it “saves” the tooth (well, allows the dead tooth to remain). But the evidence presented is convincing: of 30 000 root canals studied, and every single one of them without exception was infected. These are not performed badly, it’s just that root canals are just inherently toxic.

I have no science or medicine credentials. I write movie reviews. As a documentary, this film is fairly well-made, with tonnes of qualified experts weighing in. The science is careful. It adds up. But as viewers, you and I need to exercise our judgement. I can’t tell you how much to panic about your root canals, but the truth is, right now I’m awfully glad I’ve never had one.