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Reviews
The Cruise (2022)
Nice, relaxing documentary
I'm not a cruise person and I won't ever take one, but I love documentaries about the massive effort that goes into managing thousands of guests on a ship.
The Cruise is an adult-only "foodie" cruise that spends 5 days between Miami and the Bahamas. 2,000 guests and 1,200 crew. It's a lovely ship. The food is hilarious. It was nice to see fresh, whole fish being loaded, but I would have liked to see raw beef. They have a "high end" steakhouse and we see the usual black-striped steaks on a grill in the kitchen, but we never see a raw steak hit the heat.
Other cruise documentaries (maybe The Secret Life of the Cruise?) show beef and shellfish being partially cooked on land then being reheated on board. They stripe the steaks, heat them in ovens, then pack them up and load them onto the ship. This ship seems to cook most of their food fresh but the all-important steaks are never shown raw. I don't know about you, but if I'm paying thousands of dollars for a trip I want a properly rare steak, not some cafeteria grey slab. I was also surprised about how many thoings these people have to pay for. I thought food was free on cruises? One couple even paid $7 for a carrot smoothie. LOL, I wouldn't even pay that on land.
Anyway, this is a nice, no-stress series. Just people drinking, eating and swimming. The crew also has one person whose job is just to maintain crew morale, which is a nice touch.
Zone blanche (2017)
Great set pieces and characters, awful plots
I really liked this even though the various plots are just badly written. Black spot seems to have been written by 2 different people. One wrote the (awful) plot lines and the other wrote the setting, quirky characters, zingers and one-liners, oddball moments, creepy touches and atmosphere. The plot gets 3 stars. The atmosphere, characters etc get a solid 10.
Whoever wrote the plot segments needs to find another job. "Maybe they're having an affair". "Can't be!" Plot twist: they ARE!! Over and over and over. This is not a spoiler, there's no way to spoil this awful plotting. Some bits aren't resolved, some things are resolved but the solution is what everyone suspected in the first place, some things pop up once and never recur.
BUT the townspeople are amazing. So is the town. I love the DA to bits, and it doesn't hurt that he's the spitting image of Mr. Bean. The DA's scenes are a hoot, well worth the wait. If you like odd settings and interesting characters you'll love it. If you're looking for a good mystery (ie 'story') save yourself the grief and skip it. I'm all in and looking forward to season 2.