In this post, I will review (some) added shows and movies on Netflix for the month of June. What you should watch and what you can avoid.

MOVIES:

CAKE:

I was really excited to see this movie because of the many appraisal it received concerning Jennifer Aniston’s performance. Of course I loved her in Friends, and then she sort of disappointed me with a lot of not so good, dumb movies, with a few exceptions. She became mostly known for roles in what I call heavy comedies, that are hard to digest, where most of the humor revolves around poop, falling, farts, burps and so on..

Cake is not a great movie. The premise is pretty interesting though: A woman, Claire, played by Jennifer Aniston, becomes obsessed with a young woman ( Anna Kendrick) from her chronic pain support group that has recently committed suicide as she has to overcome her own difficulties.

***Spoiler alert

Claire, we learn, has had a horrible car accident that has left her in constant pain and handicapped, but most horribly, that killed her young son. Her refusal to deal with the pain eventually also led to her separation from her husband. And that’s where we are. She is mean, angry, in pain, addicted to painkillers and incapable of dealing with her emotions. She is trying to shut everyone out of her life, and has successfully done so, apart from Silvana, her maid, that is trying to help and protect her, even taking a lot of risks doing so.

Claire becomes obsessed with this young woman, Nina, from her support group that committed suicide and has many visions involving her (although stopping the mix wine/ pain killers might be a good idea for it to stop). Claire decides to know more about her life and a strange relationship blossoms between her and Nina’s late husband. They are both desperately hanging on to life but he is doing so in a much more grounded way, he has not given up on life, mainly due to his young son. He tries to help Claire as much as he can and both give each other hope of a better tomorrow. Of course the parallel is obvious between the two women. One killed herself and left her son and husband grieving for her. The other had her son killed in a car accident and was left by her husband. What are Claire’s reasons to wake up every morning? What has she left to live for?

The story deals with grief, hope and love but in such a way that we are not sure what the film is trying to convey. There is no clear direction in the movie and we are left wondering where this is headed.

There are a lot (too many) shots of Claire in her bed, hallucinating and in pain. The shots involving Nina are a bit cliché, she is dressed perfectly, talks with a smooth voice. Some of the narratives are not subtle, like the whole metaphor of the cake with the introduction of a runaway teenager that does not add anything to the story.

Sure the acting is pretty solid from Jennifer Anniston, but I would not say it is mind blowing. Why is it that every time a story involves some kind of tragic past and/or physical alterations from glamour criteria ( loss of weight, gain of weight, shaving head, scars etc..) people judge it as great acting and expect an Oscar nomination? The movie has to be great, the character has to be deep and complex. In that case the characters are a bit too cliché and are not very well established. Their complexity is not understood. The movie does not work very well.

Rating : 2/4

Beyond the lights

This movie as everything a good romantic Drama should have : beautiful people, true love, obstacles, and drama.

The movie is about a pop star, Noni, with a controlling manager/mother, who is on the verge of becoming a huge star. She meets Kaz, a boy with a good heart and strong principles that is about to enter politics. Their world could not be further apart and their relationship would hurt both of their careers.

This movie is about the star system, about what sells and what does not. It is about a lot of today’s singers in a way, how they are manipulated, marketed, sexualized to sell, sell, sell. It does not matter if they feel comfortable in that persona labels create for them, or if they are happy. People have to believe they are, they have to sell the American dream, the illusion.

Noni meets Kaz, someone that truly cares about her for the first time and her principles evolve, which, no surprise here, does not please the many investors in her career.

Kaz also represents the hypocrisy of the political system. It is not good for his campaign to be seen with a pop star, it would show him as someone looking for fame, someone that enjoys drama when in fact he is a grounded, good hearted person, in love and trying to help the person he loves. People are labeled and both words despise each other.

Sure there are moments that are a bit soapy but I thought this would be a bad romantic drama and it proved out to be a really entertaining movie, touching on a lot of subjects and allowing a (brief) look in the backstage of fame and politics, with the final message being to accept yourself for who you are ( which is always a nice message to convey).

Rating : 3/4

THE BEST OF ME

I was not expecting much when I started this movie but I still was shocked by how bad this was. It is horribly bad. It is basically about two persons that haven’t moved on since they were 17 after what seems like 3 months of romance.

They are so stuck in the past, which would be fine if the movie showed the pathetic aspect of it but no, it is somehow seen like a really good thing. Everything about it is really dull.

They admit they still love each other after having talked for 10 minutes total, about 20 years after their teenage fling.

Using very subtle flashbacks to their teenage years (where the guy actor looks nothing like the older one, apparently people shrink with age) It tries to involve drama. The main guy (I don’t even remember his name, let’s call him lover boy) has a horrible family he tries to escape from but they really want him bad and are ready to kill for that (for whatever reasons..). There is a semi- violent scene and his best friend is killed after a fight. Lover boy goes to prison (along with his father) and of course, teenage girl is in love and says she will wait for him. But he breaks it off (duh) because, obviously, she is not going to wait like 8 years for him to get out.

But apparently, even though she has “moved on” in the meantime, and has had 3 kids (not out of love is an understatement), she is still pissed at him for breaking it off 20 years later because « she would have waited for him ». This is just ridiculous.

The bad guys are still there, and still pissed at lover boy, who is truly too nice to be trusted. And guess what? The bad guys are bad like really really bad, they’re the scar of the Lion King, even though their end game is never really clear (guess they are really dumb too).

So in the end, SPOILER ALERT, Guess what? They kill lover boy at the same time lover girl’s son has an accident and I kid you not, lover boy’s heart saves lover girl’s son. So basically, her lover’s heart now is inside her son, creepy right?

I mean this movie is so bad, the characters are such cliché; it feels like it was made by a 10 year old because life is simple and true love is eternal. I understand why they kill him off in the end because should they have started really being together, I wonder how long it could have lasted given the fact that they barely know each other and that all they talk about, and have in common is their 3 month romance when they were kids. But seriously, dialogues are bad, characters are bad, just stay away.

Rating : 1 /4

NIGHTCRAWLER :

This movie is very hard to review for me. I admit it is an exceptionally well-filmed movie, every shot is just pure and jaw droopingly beautiful. The character Lou Bloom, played by Jake Gyllenhaal is mesmerizing and the dialogues are poignant. The music is just right.

However, this is not my kind of movie. It reminded me of Drive in its amazing direction but I just do not really fall in love with those kind of movies. I think, after a little soul searching, that I am just too much a fan of dialogues, of knowing he complexity and self awareness of characters.

This movie is about a « reporter », or more precisely a man, with a camera that films local news but is not afraid to go further than anyone else. He will trespass scene crimes, break the law and even create drama himself, in order to get the best ( aka the goriest, most violent) shots.

This film is definitely a critic of today’s voyeurism, especially in the news, with more and more crude and disturbing images being broadcasted. It is a critic of our society that likes it, that always ask for more of it. People are so curious about death, about violence; think about how many people tried to see the corpses or the injured when an accident took place near you, and even you wanted to see as well. I do not know if it is part of our nature, because we wonder about death, or something that has been reinforced due to us being accustomed of seeing those images on the news. Anyways, today, these are the « money shots ».

But the movie is not only about that, it is most and foremost about Lou Bloom, someone that appears to everyone like a great worker, even sympathetic, reaching for the stars, making his own luck ( an American dream embodiment) that is ultimately a manipulative, vicious person, devoid of any empathy.

The camera follows him without making us empathize with his character, and we are able to condemn his actions and judge him very easily, distancing ourselves from such a horrible person. But the truth is, how horrible is he? and how horrible are we if we condemn the means but not the finality, if we watch his images and ask for more?

This emphasizes the paradox we are in concerning most things in the world today, we condemn child labor and exploitation but still buy 5 dollars shirt. We condemn global warming but still do not take our own bags to the grocery store and so on.

The movie is truly a piece of art so I would recommend it, even though, as I stated before, this is not a movie that really touched my sensitivity. Characters that are too distant, storylines that are too distant, and therefore when I have a hard time identifying in the story tends to just affect me less. But that’s just me.

Rating: 4/4

***

TV SHOWS:

Orange Is The New Black

Yes! Orange Is The New Black is back and it is so so good!!

The second season had disappointed me a little but this season was really great. It incorporated much more background on the characters and they became way more complex.

The first episode really sets the tone; the show had previously been criticized for not showing enough the reality of female imprisonment and the strain on family that prison results in, especially for the mothers imprisoned, not being able to have their children visit due to different constraints. This season treated much more about motherhood, being afraid for one’s child’s development, being afraid to be a bad mother or a bad example. It deals with a lot of different aspects of motherhood: Dayanara and her concerns for her unborn child, Gloria and Sophia that are facing their rebellious teenagers, Jessica that has a forced separation with her child or even Pennsatucky dealing with her abortions. All of this added so much humanity to their characters and we really understood how powerless those women are in situations that directly affect them. The gang war is more or less over, leaving them with more time to actually think about the outside world and what awaits them.

The flashbacks were amazing, giving us so much more insights as to who the characters are- especially the one about Pennsatucky that was heart breaking.

There is also more solidarity within the prison, old hatches have been buried and all seem very eager to look forward, to be better and do better. All, except for Piper who becomes more and more attached to the prison. She feels like she has finally found herself, and she is not a nice girl anymore. Shocker, Alex is actually the one trying to stay out of trouble and that ultimately leads to a feud between them.

Prisoners are looking for hope and a cult starts, under the presidency of Morna.

There is also a lot of backstory into the guards, the prison system, with Caputo doing everything he can to keep the prison afloat, without ever being thanked for it.

This season depicted much more all the weaknesses, faults and contradictions of the whole prison system. It showed us the limits of the system, a system that is a capitalistic system after all, lead by money, lead by people with their own ego ( like when the one counselor that actually manages to create trust with the prisoners is fired over Healy’s ego), lead by unqualified people. A lot of the episodes directly demonstrated the numerous pitfalls in the prison system, inability to deal with addiction, inability to counsel adequately and to listen, inability to treat the prisoners like human being even.

This season was really a lot more about empathizing with the characters; it was about showing them as human, complex people and created much more occasions to relate to them. This season was about change, redemption and hope. Not to say that there was not drama and humor, it is still hilarious and a dangerous trigger to binge watching behaviors.

If all of that isn’t enough, watch it at least to get the whole buzz about the latest addition to the cast, Ruby Rose.

Rating 4 /4

Note: These ratings and review are personal opinion of the author.