Reviews

While there are moments where Anna Nicole can be captivating, simply because she's so pretty, she lacks the depth and complexity of her role model, Marilyn Monroe. Where Marilyn moves back and forth from Norma Jean to Marilyn more or less at will, Anna Nicole is kind of one-note.

There are a few interesting aspects of her story, notably the former lover and best friend (a much more interesting and harrowing story, and ultimately a better person), but it's mostly just small-town girl makes it big and becomes famous, but she's not very talented and not very smart, so she seems unable.to manage fame and fortune when she gets it. This doc provides no great insights, but I'm not sure there's all that much to provide insight about. A not terribly deep or smart person finds that fame is not all it's cracked up to be, and all the fame in the world can't make her happy. It's sad, absolutely, but pedestrian.

The coyness about her childhood, revealing the distasteful truth in the end instead of including it in the chronological telling of her story, does the film no favors, and I don't see what narrative purpose it serves, except maybe to make us like her and stick with it to the end. Perhaps they realized she just wasn't that interesting or likeable, just another gold-digging pretty girl who yearns for fame but then doesn't know what to do with it when she gets it, and it ultimately destroys her. Or does it? Maybe her lack of substance or smarts might have lead her to perish similarly in obscurity. Who knows. I suppose she felt that to be like Marilyn, she had to have a horrible childhood, but stealing it from her former lover is pretty sleazy, not to mention to damage to her family.

I watched Tiger King the way most of us did, as a guilty pleasure, an amusing look into a sleazy but fascinating world, full of slimy but entertaining characters, plus the beautiful animals. The humans are all either cons, sleazes, victims, or some combination. The Tiger King himself is a loudmouth ignoramus, a thief, and a sneak, but he has a certain flamboyant charm. Jeff Lowe has the most appropriate name ever. He makes you want to shower after his scenes, he's such a scuzzball. All the world's a strip club for Jeff and his doxies. Carol is an attention addict who may also be a murderer, altho there is room for a reasonable doubt there, and at least her animals appear to be cared for. The amount of vitriol she comes in for on social media to my mind has more to do with misogyny than degree of blame, but they're a dubious lot, no doubt about it.

Doc Antle appears at first to be just another lowlife egotist using the poor animals as status symbols and seduction tools with very little thought as to their well-being. But apparently the makers of the first round of shows saw something darker and more unsettling in him, and so he got a whole little series all to himself. It is my opinion that this one was not done for entertainment like the previous episodes, although it is entertaining in its way. This one wanted to expose Doc as a true criminal. Joe Exotic might deserve to be in jail, although it is not blindingly clear that he contracted someone to kill Carol, although his obsession with her was definitely used by Lowe to manipulate and cheat him, and he certainly made very public credible threats. In Doc's case, there is no doubt. He belongs in jail, period. They all abuse and use the animals for base purposes, but he's the one with a freezer full of dead tiger cubs.

They all lie about their past and qualifications, but he's the only one claiming to be both a doctor and a holy man, calling himself Bhagavan, a word used in Indian religions used to denote figures of religious worship. No evidence of any medical training exists, and his claims to holy man status have their roots in his membership in one of these cultoid 70s communes headed by self-styled maharishis preying on gullible westerners. Somehow these maharishis always seem to end up charged with some sort of financial and sexual misconduct. Which is all Doc appears to have learned from his "spiritual education." And he learned it well.

But the real core of his criminality is in his long history of recruiting, seducing, abusing, and virtually enslaving underage girls, in one case actually abducting one across the country. People toss around the terms groomer and pedophile a little too freely these days, but in this case, they both apply. It is amazing to me he is not facing any charges on this account, much less being in actual prison. It becomes clear that the real story here is not his financial skullduggery, animal abuse, exploitation of workers, and even a possible murder, although all these are very real, but his sexual abuse of a long string of underage girls. I believe that this is what the filmmakers wanted to expose.

But he has yet to face a single charge on this matter, as far as I can tell. He was arrested by the FBI for charges related to money laundering. He also faces charges relating to illegally trafficking animals. But nothing on what I consider to be his worst wrongdoings, the ongoing, habitual sexual abuse of minors. Not that the other charges are not real and criminal. But everyone seems more worried about the animals than the kids.

This spin off, as it were, of the Tiger King series is not intended, in my opinion, as entertainment, but as activism. It's darker and more sinister, as we watch him move from girl to girl to girl. He was in his thirties when the stories begin, and he has amassed a long trail of victims. It does not appear as if any of them will receive any justice, but the makers of this show have done their damndest to expose him for the slimy pedophile he is.

It's as well made as the original, with good footage, clear storylines, and all the technical skill, but I think it was made with slightly different intentions.

I'm oddly fascinated by the Netflix series of documentaries about cons and their victims. Although I have not watched Becoming Anna, I did watch the Tinder Swindler, Fyre, and Tiger King and its corollary about Doc Antle (which is some ways is the most alarming of all, but that's another review).

We all like to think we could never be similarly duped, but after watching these documentaries, I think most of us could. These stories have a kind of logic to them-- twisted, but understandable. They play to our weaknesses, and we all have them. I could more or less understand how people could be drawn into these scams. But Bad Vegan is a much more opaque tale.

The psychological and emotional predation in the Tinder and Tiger stories is, for me, a bit more understandable. Money, status, love, glamour, these are all broad and easy targets and lures. But the Vegan predator, Shane, is weirder and less coherent. His strange narrative about some sort of superhuman, illuminati-type cabal deciding their fates from some vague Valhalla is so fantastical that you wonder how anyone could fall for it, much less an intelligent, successful woman like Sarma. It was during this episode that I got impatient with the show, but I stuck with it and got interested again.

He's not much, really--a delusional, sociopathic gambling addict with no boundaries or long term strategy. So for me the truly enigmatic figure here is Sarma. He had nothing she needed, seemingly. She had friends, family, good looks, degrees, skills, success. Why did she fall for it, when it was so incredible, in the literal meaning of the word? It was completely disconnected from reality. The other scams had their basis in some sort of minimally credible but plausible world, and basic human desires-- money, love, etc. Shane offered none of those, really, just some extremely undefined happily ever after. But her present and future when she met him were looking pretty happy, so why would she be drawn to his hazy promises of... what? I still can't figure it out. I mean, the first wife figured it out at some point and never looked back. This guy must have some sort of mad charisma that utterly fails to come across in the film. He's certainly no Apollo, and he seems completely charmless from what we hear and see of him. From the get go, he seems like a shady, insubstantial creep, hardly a dashing Svengali capable of extracting such enormous amounts of money. The Tinder guy at least has a somewhat credible story and some looks and charm. The Fyre guy was able to keep up a pretense for a while, he had a seemingly cool product and some great marketing, and the plan seemed rooted in possibility. Shane had nothing but insubstantial pie in the sky.

Sarma's deadpan delivery in the interviews is odd. She rarely expresses any kind of emotion, and when she's asked for explanations of some very bizarre ideas and events, she appears incapable not just of giving the explanation, but even of understanding why explanations are needed. The con played on her was so bizarre and lengthy, yet at no point did she ever seem to have a moment of real doubt or effective questioning. Why? The whole world he was weaving was so implausible. By then end of their association, she is clearly in a state of almost complete breakdown. This energetic, accomplished woman who once had a full life and successful business has been rendered incapable of leaving a hotel room or making a phone call. It's distressing and baffling.

There are a lot of questions about the degree of her culpability, given that she seems to have genuinely been not just gaslit but gas-blitzed, but the degree of her willingness to keep going with it is puzzling. How did she fall so completely under his power? Was she really so completely under his thumb? One wonders. The general consensus is that while there is some sympathy for her, she should be be held accountable, and I tend to agree, but the real kicker is how lightly he gets off. This chagrined me as well in the a Tinder and Fyre stories. If these guys had swindled that much money from a bank, they'd be in jail for a long, long time, but since it's just ordinary people they fleeced, they get a slap in the wrist and are released back into the world to do more damage.

I guess this is not much of a review, more of an analysis. As a documentary I think it's very well done. A lot of first hand statements, and not too many stylistic flourishes, which I tend to dislike. It's clear, well paced, and smart. I have read that Sarma was unhappy with the ending and its inferences, which she denied. I guess we'll see.

I started watching this when it first came out, and I got annoyed at a kind of ridiculous detail: during chemotherapy, Walt goes bald, but keeps his mustache. As someone who has been through chemo myself, this detail offended me disproportionately. Had the chemo really made him go bald, he would also have no 'stache, no eyebrows, no eyelashes. Infuriated by the mustache, I stopped watching.

Years later, I started watching it again on Netflix and I was hooked. It took me several months to get through the whole series, since there were times when I simply could not stomach anymore awfulness. When he goes bad, he goes putrid. By the end, there is barely a human.

It is a truly Shakespearean character arc. Shakespeare's tragedies usually concern an otherwise admirable man with a tragic flaw that leads to his literal and moral downfall--Othello's jealousy, Macbeth's ambition, Hamlet's indecisiveness. Walter fits this pattern perfectly, an otherwise admirable man--intelligent, kind, caring, but with a tragic flaw: pride. And an offshoot of hurt pride, resentment.

The startup he walked out of years earlier became fabulously successful, while he, one of the founding geniuses, ended up teaching high school chemistry, clearly waste of his talents, not to mention vastly underpaid and lacking in status. (One wonders why he did not end up at least teaching at a university, a question the show never answers. The pay isn't great but it carries more prestige than high school teacher.) Underneath his mild and sometimes overly compliant manner, there is a burning resentment and deeply wounded pride, although the people he walked out on, now ridiculously rich, seem like nice people, if a little preening and pretentious in that self-made millionaire way. When his medical expenses become overwhelming, they offer to pay them, and they offer him a position with the company, although it is clear the company has no real place for him. And this is where pride and resentment begin the decline and fall of Walter White.

Angrily rejecting these offers as charity, Walt gets down to business, and it's a long way down. He is unrecognizable by the end. He keeps justifying more and more heinous acts, the primary justification being that it's for his family, which he eventually destroys, as he does pretty much everyone and everything he comes into contact with. By the end, the string of death and horrendous deeds he leaves in his wake is epic. He becomes a somewhat epic figure himself, certainly in his own mind, with his porkpie hat and shades and shaved head and naming himself Heisenberg after the famous pioneering German physicist, an act of boastfulness and pride and to some extent wishful thinking. Walt is no Heisenberg, but he thinks of himself as one. By the end, he is not even a decent human. He loses his soul and everything that was once important to him.

This may make him seem one-dimensional, but he's not. He has some quirky vulnerabilities and remnants of humanity. One of these is his partner in crime and former student Jesse, whom he seems to see as a projection of himself and perhaps a surrogate son, on whom he can practice the kinds of manipulation and projection he cannot do on his real son. Yet his family, for whom he claims to be doing all these horrendous things, all of which could have been avoided had he just take his former colleagues' offer, becomes in the end something of a hindrance in his blazing path to meth kingpin status.

There is also humor among all the devastation. In one episode, Walt becomes obsessed with a fly that has gotten into the lab, and while it is indicative of Walt's deterioration and breakdown, it is also humorous. Some of the humor is really horrible, but still funny, like the tweaker couple with the ATM. Jesse still calls him Mr. White, like some sort of twisted sensei, even when he's murderously angry with him.

In some ways, Jesse is the true hero, who manages to keep some shred of human feeling and morality despite tragedy after tragedy, some of it brought on him by Walt, some by himself. In that sense, the follow-up movie, El Camino, is very satisfying. There is redemption for Jesse. There is none for Walt.

The acting is superb all around. All of the actors take these great scripts and complex characters and run with them. All of them are flawless. I have always had a special regard for Giancarlo Esposito, and he is magnificent. They all are. Really, there's not a bad moment in the entire series. The writing is wonderful, the plot unfolds beautifully and intricately.

Finally, at the end, Walt visits his estranged wife, who has been almost a hostage to his crimes and is now in greatly reduced circumstances because all their belongings have been seized and Walt has been in hiding. The literal piles of money are gone. She is a tired, defeated woman, who has lost so much because of Walt. He starts to explain why he did it, and she sighs, "If you tell me one more time how you did it for our family..." which has always been his go-to justification, despite the fact that it shattered his family into a million jagged pieces. He finally admits, "I did it for me. I felt alive." But we see how much death and destruction it took for this dying man to feel alive. No one was spared.

Let's start off by saying I like this show. It's pretty original, they've taken care with the setting and the realities of ranching, and the writing is good. I am almost done with season 2, and while I am still enjoying it, there are a couple of things that are starting to bug me.

It's always a pleasure to watch Sam Elliott do his crusty but loveable western guy thing. He's a master of the genre, and between the voice, the mustache, the hair, and the wry tone, he had me at day one. Ashton Kutcher and Danny Masterson are both very good. Ashton brushes off his comic timing to excellent effect, and Masterson is terrific. The girls tend to become a bit of a blur of pretty blonds (more on that later), but on the whole are solid, and the actors good. It is also a great pleasure to see Debra Winger again, who retired from the screen for so many years. No longer the ingenue of "Urban Cowboy" and "An Officer and a Gentleman," she wears her years gracefully.

A little too gracefully, in fact. This is my major peeve with this show: all the women are skinny, pretty, and with the exception of Winger, blond. Winger plays Elliott's wife. Elliott shows every bit of his 70+ years--handsomely, but still, he looks like a 70 year old guy who's led a physically tough life. He looks worn and sometimes tired. Winger looks 20 years younger. If she were really, say, 60-something, she would not have the body of a fit 40-year-old and the face of a very well preserved 50-year-old. OK, maybe she is 20 years younger than Elliott, but she's still got two sons in their 30s, and has lived a hard life, too. Unless she gave birth in her teens (which she didn't, since it is mentioned in the show that she met him while she was at college), that puts her at least in her mid-50s, having spent half a lifetime on a ranch, in all kinds of weather, raising two boys, doing sometimes grueling work.

The same with all the older women in the show. Elliott's character dates a couple of women, both of whom are slender, blond, and look to be in their late 40s, early 50s. But he's in his 70s.

Look, I've lived in places like the town depicted. The women in their 50s and 60s don't look like that. Not even close. This may seem petty, but it's a recurring problem in a lot of shows and movies, and after a while it really interferes with the verisimilitude of the characters: the guys get to look normal, with paunches and wrinkles and all the other signs of their age, but the women are all thin and pretty and unlined (for their alleged age). All of them, except an occasional character actress, like a waitress. But here, even the Cracker Barrel waitress with 2 grown daughters and a couple grandkids looks like a million bucks. Have you seen the waitresses at the Cracker Barrel? Have you seen ranch wives in their 60s? Are they afraid no one will watch the show if the women look like real women?

You could say, most rancher's sons don't look like Ashton Kutcher, either, but he's clearly an exception, and in fact, his preoccupation with his looks is a recurring joke. It is not the norm. But the skinny, pretty women *are* the norm. When will we see women who actually look like they are ranch wives and waitresses in their 60s?

The other thing is that the characters are starting to become a little one-dimensional. It's a hard thing to pull off, making characters that are distinctive and instantly recognizable while still making them complex, realistic humans. I think the staff of this show is up to it, though, and I hope they deal with this.

Diane Lane was magnificent, but her character was basically a blank canvas for Lyne to splatter all his women issues all over. This dude has serious issues. Lane did an amazing job, but there was no character there at all. Not much character for Gere, either, now that I think of it. The eroticism is good, and the lover is super hot, but the morality is weird. Yes, of course, cheating is bad, but isn't murder a lot worse? And yet somehow she's the bad guy.

Interesting that people keep wondering what's her motivation, but no one wondered that about the Michael Douglas character in 'Fatal Attraction.'

Lyne, go get some therapy.