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Reviews
All the Light We Cannot See (2023)
Like a 16 year old's story of Nazi Germany
This entire show reads like a teenager went to Berlin for the first time and learned that children and teenagers were groomed and was like :O
Bad accent from Mark Ruffalo (everyone but Jonas's accent was... silly) - but also, why does he need to be English? Full of PG-13 style "I understand you have a sister... if you fail to find radio station XYZ, your sister will die tomorrow. And she will die very badly". Altogether, it's like a Disney channel movie with occasional curse words and more swastikas. Like, we get it, nazis bad.
Whatever magic and hope accompanies all YA novels and love stories was most certainly aggressively abandoned in the creation of this high-budget-no-soul Netflix ode to masturbatory WWII stories.
The Curious Case of Natalia Grace (2023)
Engaging, but everyone was terrible
I watched the whole thing in a few days. This is a documentary where you root for absolutely no one, except a few (not even all) of the neighbors. The family is despicable (note: the mom capitalized on her son's autism by writing a book when he was a child that made her a TON of money and TED talks, etc).
The adopted girl/person is clearly a liar and frankly, I don't trust anything she said, the family is ridiculously unlikable, and the main interviewee, the father Michael, is awful to the point of wanting to turn it off. He's obnoxious, dishonest, hyperactive, and histrionic.
Altogether, I hope they all lose - and while that may sound unbelievably cruel if you believe one of the two narratives provided in the doc, I really believe something in the middle, and root for none of them.
The Mentalist (2008)
This is fun TV
You know how sometimes watching the self-improvement montage in a movie is the best part? Just watching a bank robbery go perfectly, or an amateur pitch a no-hitter? This is that show in a nutshell. Sure, it's about murders, and sometimes gnarly ones, but overall it's fun, goofy, light-hearted, and witty. You're watching someone be really, really good at stuff. It's not particularly deep or nuanced, and the relationships are buddy-cop in a Brooklyn 99 sort of way. It's kind of (a lot) like Psych, complete with upbeat Seinfeld-esque music, quippy transitions, and "gotcha"'s. Twists and surprises and just... fun TV!
Edit: After watching almost the whole series, the gruesome murder dichotomy with the network inability-to-curse is a little jarring after a while. "I don't give a heck!" by a mass murderer kind of takes you out of the scene a little bit. But still fun TV.