MINDHUNTER: TO BINGE OR NOT TO BINGE?

In early 2018, Netflix offered up one of their more intriguing original programs since the first season of Stranger Things. Produced and partially directed by David Fincher, Mindhunter brought viewers sexy, decompressed story-telling at its episodic best. A sexy, chilling, well acted, beautifully mounted, and relatively truthful exploration of the role played by fine, upstanding young white men from the suburbs (men who just happen to be a little cracked in the head regarding certain things) in the development of the FBI's profiling techniques. It also features the best Ed Kemper impersonation ever committed to celluloid!

I realize some of these "reviews" are ridiculously short, but the truth is, I'm using this blog as a way to remind myself of the movies I've seen, the books I've read, the comics I've perused, and the music I've listened to... or at least those that have left an impression on me. Mindhunter, while good, only just made the "remarks-worthy" cut by thismuch.

DOCUMENTARIES CURRENTLY ON NETFLIX ~ BULLET REVIEWS

NOBODY SPEAK ~ Brian Knappenberger's documentary will prove a chilling corrective to anyone who thinks the lawsuit that destroyed Gawker had anything to do with them providing a showcase for Hulk Hogan's sex tape (something they barely even did, as they only ran brief excerpts). The real story here is that quasi-fascist Silicon Valley billionaire vampire Peter Thiel (easily one of the worst people in the world today) used the trial as a stalking horse via which he was able to deal a lethal blow to a journalistic outlet that he despised for having previously published stories that pissed him off, that pesky first amendment be damned.

***

11/8/16 ~ A mesmerizing, meditative, wide angle exploration of election day, USA, 2016. Eighteen directors from coast to coast follow a vast array of citizens, families, organizers and volunteers of every political stripe as the contest evolves from a relatively boring foregone conclusion to a cause for shocked panic and genuine distress in some quarters, while others are overcome with joy at having apparently beaten impossible odds. There is no voice-over narration to guide your thoughts as you follow the film's subjects from home to work to the voting booth to back home again, which makes it a Rorschach test of sorts. How you react to this film will definitely depend on your politics. To me, and I suspect a great many of you, 11/8/16 comes close to being a horror film.

***

GLOW: THE STORY OF THE GORGEOUS LADIES OF WRESTLING ~ You've seen the entertaining, highly fictionalized version of the story of the first all female professional wrestling league, now find out the inspiring true story behind it all! Seriously though, if you enjoyed GLOW as much as I did, I think you'll get a lot out of this doc. It's fun and moving and more than a little bit inspiring.

***

BEST OF ENEMIES ~ Speaking of cat-fights, it's unfortunate that the makers of Best of Enemies--a documentary about the long-running feud between arch-liberal Gore Vidal and ultra-conservative William F. Buckley--chose to focus on the tawdry and salacious particulars of the enmity between these two men, rather than using them as examples to help illuminate one of the 20th century's most important and still-raging philosophical struggles. For those interested, Michael Lind's review is essential reading. 

***

AMERICAN ANARCHIST ~ As a history lesson in how The Anarchist's Cookbook, a poorly written collection of dubious and dangerous recipes for poisons and explosives, became a perennial international publishing phenomenon that's been found at or near pretty much every single significant act of terrorism in the last five decades, Charlie Siskel's American Anarchist is a worthy documentary. As a character study of the book's author, William Powell, it is frustrating and unsatisfying. But perhaps that couldn't be helped, because despite his occasional declarations about how the book haunts him, Powell seems to have given precious little thought to the consequences of producing his book, and is singularly uninformed about its ubiquity among those who have engaged in atrocities. This flaw is magnified by the fact that all of Powell's comments come from a single interview. Perhaps a follow-up meeting would have helped clear a few things up?

PUBERTY GOES 2D ON THE NETFLIX ORIGINAL CARTOON "BIG MOUTH"

I first heard about Big Mouth, Netflix’ latest animated comedy series, while patrolling an ideologically diseased sector of the Internet where I was gathering material for a project that I’ve been working on for a while now. It was at one of the Chan boards, where some concerned patriots were trying to figure out how best to deal with the immanent release of a sinister new cartoon show that they described as being an obvious example of how Far Left Jews and their Illuminati Satanist partners were using their strangle-hold on the entertainment industry to “normalize” pedophilia, because Cultural Marxism.

It turns out that series was Big Mouth, and after watching all ten episodes in a single binge, I am pleased to report that it is nothing less than a triumph, and that only the most religiously indoctrinated, sexually dysfunctional, and/or psychologically damaged among us will be able to find anything objectionable about it. There’s nothing more explicit here than what can be found in old classroom sex-education videos. The target audience is clearly older teens and young adults, and the vast majority of viewers will be too distracted roaring in laughter as they re-live their own junior high experiences to fret over the fact that they’re being shown a (cartoon) 13-year-old (cartoon) girl’s (cartoon) talking vagina.

Okay, so let’s get a few nit-picks out of the way. Big Mouth starts out slow, with the first episode being one of the series’ weakest entries. Fortunately, everything lines up nicely by the second episode, after which there’s a good stretch without a single stinker in the bunch.

Visually, Big Mouth fits snugly in the Family Guy, American Family tradition. In other words, it’s on the decent side of adequate, but it’s no masterpiece. I do find it somewhat ironic, however, that many of the same folks who accuse the show of trying to make kids seem sexy also accuse the character design as being “really fucking ugly”.

There are two areas where Big Mouth truly shines.

First, the writing. The jokes come at you thick and fast, and they have an enviable hit/miss ratio. With few exceptions, the fourth wall breaks and fantasy sequences feel earned and organic, especially when compared to those found in the aforementioned Family Guy.

Second, the performances. Having already explored the comedic potential of late middle-age with their phenomenally popular Broadway smash (and subsequent Netflix special) Oh, Hello!, the dynamic duo of series co-creator/co-writer Nick Kroll and John Mulaney portray best buddies Nick and Andrew, two junior high kids in the clutches of pubertal chaos, each in their own special way. For Andrew, the struggle is all too primal, as evinced by his near constant state of sexual arousal. Nick, on the other hand, is navigating the tricky waters of being a late bloomer surrounded by peers who are for all intents and purposes exploding into adulthood, with occasionally bloody consequences.

While Nick and Andrew provide the series with a focal point, Big Mouth is very much an ensemble showcase. The voice actors portraying the circle of friends are uniformly excellent, with Jenny Slate’s precocious nerd Missy being a particularly endearing stand-out. Series co-creator/co-writer Jessi Klein’s Jessi is meant to be the character that female viewers identify with, so she’s a bit of a cypher, but it works in context, and she makes the most of her many chances to shine. Jason Mantzoukas’ wannabe magician Jay rounds out the main gang, and is a fine example of the self-aware fifth wheel.

The rest of the Big Mouth universe is populated by three specific types of character.

First, there are the other kids, like the catty gay stereotype Matthew, the young interracial couple who go by the joint name “the Devins”, and Jay’s terrifying older brothers.

Next, we have the adults, who range from the incompetent (and incontinent) Coach Steve, to Andrew’s fraught father and anxiety-ridden mother, to Nick’s exaggeratedly enlightened, loving and supportive parents.

Finally, we come to the supernatural characters. For instance, Andrew is being stalked by the Hormone Monster, here rendered as a shaggy, degenerate Pan figure on a quest to get Andrew to spend every waking moment masturbating. Jessi, meanwhile, is visited by the Hormone Monstress, beautifully voiced by Maya Rudolph. In fact, Rudolph and the writers make the Monstress so distinct from her male counterpart, you’d think they could have come up with a better name. And finally, seeing as he has yet to reach puberty, Nick’s otherworldly connection comes in the form of the ghost of Duke Ellington, who haunts the attic of his house. It’s a silly contrivance, but it’s an excuse to have Jordan Peele on the cast, so I’m not complaining.

Ultimately, Big Mouth pulls off a pretty impressive high-wire act, embodying multiple paradoxes at once. It is simultaneously edgy yet empathetic, graphic yet gentle, surreal yet truthful, hilarious yet educational, vulgar yet sweet... all in all, it is perfectly imperfect, and thus so very human... despite being a cartoon. If you have teenagers, you might want to consider torturing them by forcing them to watch it with you. Be sure to pepper them with questions for the duration!

Oh, I almost forgot... if you're considering watching the show but you're on the brink, and still need just one more reason to push you into checking it out... the theme song is the recently deceased Charles Bradley’s heavy soul version of Black Sabbath’s mournful ballad “Changes”, and it is a revelation.

NEW ON NETFLIX ~ BULLET REVIEWS

THE HISTORY OF THE EAGLES / NOW MORE THAN EVER: THE HISTORY OF CHICAGO ~ Over the last couple of weeks, I've spent a combined total of nearly six hours watching these documentaries about two of the most successful bands in the history of popular music: The Eagles and Chicago. Odd thing is, I didn't much care for either band prior to watching these in-depth, decades-spanning, warts-and-all explorations of their career highlights and lowlights... and now, after spending so much time with both bands, I still don't care for their music. At some point in both docs, the bathos gets to be a little difficult to swallow: "Waaah! We had too many hits! Waaah! The cocaine was too pure! Waaah! The groupies were too beautiful!" Both movies do an admirable job of chronicling the clash of monumental egos, the back-stabbing management shenanigans and record company rip-offs, and the obligatory late career comebacks, always suffused with a tinge of regret and, at the very least, one or two left-behinds who are unable to rise above the hard feelings generated by all the drug-fueled drama and chaos. But you can really see how much of what would turn out to be the worst parts of the 1980's were presaged by some of the seedier undercurrents in the popular culture of the 1970's. Before watching these, I'd seen the "Blue Jean Committee" episode of the Bill Haider/Fred Armisen parody series Documentary Now (IFC), and it turns out they were way more gentle and soft than they could have been. So, yeah... both these docs were a hard slog. But it could have been worse. It could have been a 4 hour documentary about Uriah Heep.

***

It's So Easy and Other Lies ~ Whoever convinced Duff McKagan that getting (kinda) sober, having two kids, and developing a mid-life obsession with martial arts is the stuff gripping biographies are made of... that person did the Guns and Roses/Velvet Revolver bassist a great disservice. I mean, the Duffster seems like kind of a nice guy and all, but this... this flick is an embarrassing enterprise on all fronts. From the idea of having Duff up on a stage, reading (slowly, haltingly) from his own recently published biography, to having him be surrounded by musicians providing a bed of cues and vamps that build towards what should be moments of great catharsis, only to have those moments be something utterly banal, like "we had another hit record!" Everything is so disconnected in tone that it leads us, the viewer, to feel completely alienated from Duff's life as he lived it. Actually, come to think of it, maybe that perfectly realized alienation makes It's So Easy the most true-to-life rock documentary ever made!

***

THE KEEPERS ~ Ryan White's ridiculously complex, infuriating, and disturbing documentary series dares to stare deep into the heart of darkness for hour after life-sucking hour. He might as well have called this one Trigger Warning: The Series. I won't bother giving you the details. This is, after all, a bullet review. If you're partial to the wave of Scandinavian Noir books, movies, and TV shows that popped up in the wake of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, then you'll probably dig The Keepers. If you liked Making of a Murderer, you'll find White opening up a whole new bag of tricks for this outing. Either way, if you do decide to watch this, try to remember what Nietzsche said about staring into the abyss. Small bites... and maybe take a Jim Carey break between each episodes. I recommend Dumb and Dumber.

***

KARDASHIAN: THE MAN WHO SAVED O.J. SIMPSON ~ I suppose the success of ESPN's incredible documentary series O.J. Made in America made this documentary look into the life of the man who may have been instrumental in Simpson getting off inevitable. Surprisingly, it didn't make me vomit into my own mouth. Your mileage may vary.

***

IS GENESIS HISTORY? ~ There's an old publisher's cliche about how any news story or book title in the form of a question can usually be answered with an emphatic: "NO!" This most definitely turns out to be the case with Is Genesis History?, a competently produced but also profoundly dishonest attempt to frame the creation/evolution question as one of Deep Time orthodoxy versus the possibility of rapid Earth changes. The former is portrayed as Charles Darwin piling errors atop the foundation of 19th century geologist Charles Lyell's folly (Deep Time), while the latter is shown as being HIP! and FRESH! and backed by much beautifully photographed and convincingly argued (for the layperson) evidence. A brief perusal of online critiques of this film indicate that people who actually know what they're talking about find it even more offensive than just plain old activist atheists do... and we all know what a grumpy bunch THOSE guys are. Anyway, if you have no interest in checking out rebuttals afterward, I'd probably just skip this one. It's basically really well made Christian Fundamentalist propaganda... and who needs that in their lives?

DOCUMENTARIES ON NETFLIX ~ BULLET REVIEWS

GET ME ROGER STONE ~ Daniel DiMauro, Dylan Bank, and Morgan Pehme are the three people responsible for bringing us this landmark political documentary, perhaps the best of the genre since 2003's The Fog of War by Errol Morris.

To mark their film's debut, they penned an op-ed about it for The Daily Beast: "Over the course of the five-and-a-half years that we followed him for our new Netflix documentary Get Me Roger Stone, Roger Stone went from being a down-and-out, has-been political dirty trickster to the individual most responsible for making Donald Trump the president of the United States."

If you're even minimally invested in the ongoing soap opera of the Trump Era in American politics, Roger Stone's personal arc as presented in this film is something you will feel in your bones, like pulling heavy G's. Early on, Jeffrey Toobin calls Stone "the sinister Forest Gump of American politics", a spiffy bon mot that hovers over a stark, dark truth that grows all the more terrifying and inescapable the longer you continue to ignore Nietzsche's warning and gaze upon it.

Anyone hoping to understand what the hell is going on these days needs to make this documentary part of their personal political education program. Watch ASAP and help spread the word.

*** **** ***

COMMAND AND CONTROL ~ Part of the PBS "American Experience" series, Robert Kenner's Command and Control tells the long-suppressed story about how a minor screw-up, followed by a number of bad decisions, eventually escalated into a deadly explosive outcome at a Titan II missile complex in Damascus, Arkansas, 36 years ago.

Combining harrowing historical footage, interviews with those involved, and exacting re-creations shot at a decommissioned Titan II silo, Command and Control is as gripping, suspenseful, and compelling as the best that Hollywood has to offer.  To call it entertaining would be crass, but denying the effect this film has on viewers would be foolish. It's a documentary, yes, but it's also a thriller.

Fortunately, Command and Control informs as it thrills. Alongside its detailed journalistic exposé of the Damascus disaster, the filmmakers also treat us to a compact history of America’s nuclear weapons programs, buttressed with information from a number of recently declassified documents.

Some of you will be pleased (and others, nonplussed) to learn that Command and Control steers clear of too much philosophical chin-stroking on the awesome subject of nuclear armaments and/or nulcear warfare in general. Suffice it to say that the facts in this case speak volumes on their own, for those inclined to hear.

This is another one to see ASAP and to help spread the word about. Tell your friends and family to watch!

*** **** ***

BOWIE: THE MAN WHO CHANGED THE WORLD ~ This film is lazy documentary wheel-spinning at its absolute worst. There is nothing new here, and it doesn't even do a good job of regurgitating what we already know. It's the same old anecdotes (his eyes!) told by the same old talking heads (whispering Bob!). Pounding the last nail in this doc's coffin is the fact that the filmmakers' were unable to secure the rights to even the briefest bits of Bowie's music, which means we're often treated to the bizarre spectacle of Bowie silently mouthing the words to his songs, while generic instrumental "soundalike" tracks play along. One of these days, we'll get a truly great David Bowie documentary. This one, however, is to be avoided at all costs.

*** **** ***

DMT: THE SPIRIT MOLECULE ~ This 2010 film is the documentary version of Dr. Rick Strassman's earlier book of the same name. Both explore the findings from Strassman's five-year study into the amazing, and occasionally spooky, effects of the naturally occurring psychedelic hormone N,N-Dimethyltryptamine, more popularly know as DMT.

Like the book, Strassman's film isn't for all tastes. For instance, while you don't need an undergraduate degree in organic chemistry to "get it", at some points a solid grounding in basic chemistry will make the difference between being able to follow along, or having the voices blur into the "WONKAWONKA" of Charlie Brown's teachers from those old TV specials.

Though there is a great effort put forth by the filmmakers to present the nitty-gritty granularity of the science behind the DMT experience, the heart of the film is most definitely the "experience reports" provided by those volunteers who took the heroic doses, traveled to the Other Side, and came back to tell us about it.

Depending on your previous levels of exposure to psychedelics, and to the lingo of the psychedelic experience, your mileage may vary. Personally, I found this doc to be incredibly fascinating and deeply satisfying. The first-hand reports are compelling, to say the least, and they have the ring of truth to them... even, and maybe especially, when they dip into those spookier realms. Because when scientists are forced to ask themselves whether or not they're accessing something akin to another "place" beyond four dimensional time/space... and furthermore, to wonder whether that "place" may be populated by conscious entities with a kind of existence that is so unlike our own as to make them invisible to us during our normal waking lives... Well, that's my sweet-spot, right there.

If the sentence previous to this one appeals to you, watch this movie. If not, don't.

*** **** ***

FOR THE LOVE OF SPOCK ~ This documentary by Adam Nimoy--son of Leonard Nimoy, the actor who embodied the character of Mr. Spock for over half a century--is both a son's loving tribute
to a father, and an in-depth exploration of a bona fide pop culture phenomenon.

To put it bluntly, For the Love of Spock is everything that David Bowie: The Man Who Changed the World is not.

To start with, it's chock-a-block with novelty and revelation. If you weren't a full-blown Trekker/Trekkie prior to watching this film--the kind who reads all the actor biographies and autobiographies as they come out--you are pretty much guaranteed to learn a LOT of things you never knew about Leonard Nimoy before. Some of it good, some of it bad, most of it interesting... MOST of it.

Ultimately, Adam has provided us with a fine, complex portrait of his father, a man whom people the world over recognize at a glance, but without ever giving a thought to the hidden depths contained within the man beneath those infamous pointy ears. Now, they'll know. He should be proud.

Oh, and Zachary Quinto seems like a really nice guy. Recommended for a lazy Sunday afternoon watch with the whole family!