By: Henry J. Fromage –
This was a short week with fairly considerable amount of work, but I still made time for a few series and two of the biggest releases of the year.
183. The Curse of Von Dutch
This Hulu-hosted true crime tale tells the sordid tale of the origins of the Von Dutch clothing line that was so popular in the cultural void of the early 2000s, when Paris Hilton was a trendsetter and trucker hats were all the rage. Everyone involved sucks pretty hard and is seedy as hell, which doesn’t make for the most gripping material, which is otherwise dealt with pretty straightforwardly. Four Beers.
184. Bad Vegan
This Netflix true crime docuseries also features people you generally wouldn’t want to hang out with- in this case a vegan celebrity chef and her controlling boyfriend with shades of another recent Netflix boyfriend from hell – the Tinder Swindler. Maybe shows like this don’t have a chance of truly getting to the bottom of how mediocre men like these guys can captivate beautiful, successful women and drain them emotionally and financially dry, but this one may come the closest to getting into the realities of their plight. Three Beers.
185. Dr. Brain
This Apple series from Korean action director extraordinaire Kim Ji-woon has not a little DNA from The Matrix and Inception in its story of a benignly sociopathic scientist obsessed with creating a way to connect two human brains together at a quantum level who, of course, draws the attention of a shadowy organization who may have been meddling in his life well before his first successful experiment with connecting to the brain of a deceased person. It’s got plenty of ideas of its own, though, both storytelling and visually, keeping up the extremely strong run of American streaming service-produced Korean television in the last few years. Two Beers.
186. The Batman
I couldn’t shake the feeling throughout this film that this was all such an unnecessary exercise after Christopher Nolan’s very successful gritty Batman run and Zack Snyder’s decidedly less successful attempt, but Robert Pattinson does make a pretty great younger version of the superhero than we’ve yet seen, Matt Reeves intriguingly focuses on the detective work no previous live action iteration has been all that interested in, and there are some absolute bangers of action scenes (plus Zoe Kravitz is dynamite as Catwoman). I’m down for the next one even if, sigh, it looks like it’ll give us yet another Joker (but a pretty damn interesting young actor playing him). Three Beers.
187. The Lost City
I really can’t buck the critical consensus that there’s nothing particularly special about the setup and delivery of this Romancing the Stone-indebted lark about a archaeologist turned agoraphobic romance novelist (Sandra Bullock) who’s drawn into an adventure like one in her books after being kidnapped by a billionaire (Daniel Radcliffe) who recognizes some of her latent translation skills in her latest novel, with her affably inept cover model (Channing Tatum) and an impossibly competent and attractive soldier of fortune (Brad Pitt) on the trail to rescue her. Well, nothing special but that collection of charisma and crack comic timing in that cast, which is special indeed. Just a rollicksome good time. Three Beers.
