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Monday, February 22, 2021

I Care a Lot

I Care a Lot 2019  R - 106 min

If you could condense Breaking Bad into less than 2 hours, you'd get this, only the female version, and a very different kind of "drug"...money.  $$   

Our main character, Marla, is the most savvy and ruthless kind of schemer to be found.  She is in a Lesbian relationship with a partner in "legal" crime...trafficking in the elderly right in front of the legal system, preying on outliers that do not have good family protection.  The problem with one of her clients?  The lady has quite a bit of family protection.  The cast includes Dianne Wiest, Peter Dinklage, Chris Messina, and Eliza Gonzales, along with other supporting roles, all incredibly well-defined characters, a result again of...good casting.

The acting is brilliant, and so is the edit on this one, very fast paced and exciting with some adrenaline inducing scenes.  There is an air of the comic about this, the dark side, but the dark side overwhelms the comic fairly quickly, so it's just drama for the most part.  And the reason I cite Breaking Bad here is because oddly enough, as evil and menacing a person as our protagonist is, there is a point where you find yourself rooting for her and wanting to protect her, because dang it, there is someone/thing more evil than she is!  And you "feel" for her girlfriend as well.

No spoilers here of course, but you do have to take care to watch out who you're taking care to watch out for....as a way of putting it.

Yet we have another one to put in the Girl/Girl category bin, which is growing all the time.  Fascination has never been higher with lesbians, love between same-sex partners, and coupled with authoritative female dictatorshi....uh, I mean leadership, while simultaneously placing men in roles of high vulnerability, cliche' weaknesses and "good old boy" politics and law (such as we see from the judge in particular in this film).  It's like a gender turkey shoot out here.

So "I Care a Lot", while it may have some kind of surface motivation of another expose on the corrupt capitalist system we live in, is a Venus Flytrap of a film, injecting us with more liberal line-towing.  As per usual...great film, horrible inner core.

The "R" rating means restricted, of which I've been thinking lately, that much like they have "R"ed light districts in Europe, maybe we should have "R" film districts that you have to go to in order to view films like these, instead of on Netflix where we all know our teenagers and vulnerable minds go at night when unsupervised and snicker under their blankets at cheddar like this.  I'm not really a "star" person, but if pressed, I'd have to give this 4.5 for quality of filmmaking, and 0 for moral cleanliness.

- Agitatus

Sunday, February 07, 2021

Orphan Black

AmzPrime 2013  TV-MA


The label "TV-MA" fits this demi-drama ONLY with regards to the displays of visual material and vocabulary, but it definitely does NOT mean "MATURITY".  This is yet another DNA-Drama that is attempting to manufacture a fiction based on the "what if" scenario of the production of multiple clones and distributing them throughout a populace, as some sort of experiment, most likely to do with the comparison/contrast of their lives.  Therefore in reality this is an exposition on the nature/nurture debate, and it is obviously falling heavily on the side of nurture, while DNA-based research proponents would love nothing more than to prove that science wins and the nature of the molecule would reign supreme over that which is "learned". 

The problem with this series...well, there are many actually...is that there is a continual barrage of insistent LGBtQ+++ Alphabet Soup incursion that is not only distracting and annoying, but completely unnecessary, and an obvious plant by the writers of said show.   As in the main character with this foil...aka one homosexual friend that consistently and blazingly pre-dominates every single episode with his intrusion and near comical cliche' homosexuality.

The latest, and I have to say the last, episode that I will be watching of this juvenile creation, Ep. 3 of Season 1, had the homosexual friend "babysit", in which case the end resulted in both children being found by the responsible adult female in a state of cross-dressed clothing, the boy dressed in a nightclub dress complete with beads and makeup, and the little girl in a dad-shirt, tie, and a man-hat.

It does not take one long to understand exactly where this series is intending us to go, manipulated into believing that human biology and our future lies in the cellular selection of "the fittest" and the random selection of genetic material that will supposedly dictate our identification, and will of course include our tolerance of the same as acceptable and "normalized". 

The show has a definite agenda that is easy enough to see.  It took me 2.5 episodes to see it coming.

This reviewer is also without any need to dive further as well into the dramatic drawbacks of the show which depend on the tension between the protagonist and said homosexual friend, who consistently bicker over every step she is taking in her journey, and which he is privy to, as is necessary when being a "conscience" that must bring the dilemma to the surface because honestly, there would be no other way to hook us... the audience... into said drama without it.  In other words, the "foil" is also the audience's foil.  Ok, it's a clever writer's trick, and one that steadfastly escapes those who are regularly addicted to soap operas.

Negative 5 stars, if that's possible.  Please do not waste your time.

- Agitatus