Anna Nicole Smith: Tú no me conoces

I never got caught up in Anna Nicole Smith's saga during the 90's. My appreciation for her (like others) never went beyond the physical. Saw her Playboy pictorials and then much much later her two action flicks, PB videos and movie exploits made about her life. I honestly didn't expect 'You Don't Know Me' to add anything new to the tale because frankly I don't think there's any deep secrets to be told. This two hour documentary didn't change my view.

From growing up in small town Texas to her son Danny and then Howard J. Marshall onward to fame, stardom. Playboy, Guess jeans, appearances in legit movies, talk shows. Natural charm, love for the cameras, paparazzi. The reunion with her estranged father than went sideways. Prescription drugs, alcohol, a fondness for partying and the wheels slowly coming off. Howard K. Stern enters the picture, reality show, her weight gain, a new baby with it's father in doubt. Danny dies and she passes soon afterwards at only 39 years old.

Everything here is well put together and flows nicely. A lot of the details are old hat, but the narrative is decent with interviews from people who never spoke in depth about Anna or their roles in her life until now. It's a talking heads style of doc that uses footage from tv, home movies, Playboy or shot specifically for use in montages. Every topic is touched on in compact format rarely dragging on or overstaying it's welcome.

Put this Netflix doc 'You Don't Know Me' in the curiosity category that will get views from lifelong ANS fans or those who think there's deeper meaning to be found when really there isn't. Her undoing was her own. You get sprinkles of new facts, but the end result remains the same. We love our celebrities. We love underdog stories, beautiful women praising them where they're up, tuning in or kicking them when they're down.

No pun intended of course - fame, many want it, few can handle it. But it's not just about that, it's personal too. I have to admit, I was unaware of quite a few things. Not just her personality (her body - well everyone knew about that), but her motivation and her private life. That includes all of her family, parents but also her son.

She was larger than life and while she made great news/ratings, her personal demons were too big. Add issues women have to deal with normally, but get bigger when in the public eye ... that includes shaming of all kinds, especially her looks (weight), but also her behavior. People should mind their own business or try to help, not further drag people down.

She seemed sweet, determined, but also gullible and naive. Add pills to an already unstable individual ... and you know it won't end well ...

I remember Anna Nicole Smith from my childhood and she was really beautiful, almost in every magazine i was seeing her. She was really really famous. In this documentary i felt so sad about her. Story is so classic actually. Poor beautiful girl with some teenage problem and becoming a star immediately and after that unavoidable fact happens... Anna Nicole Smith lived fast and died young. Maybe she did choose this ending.so sad really sad.. I hope she is in better place anymore. I am happy to watch this documentary, in last years i really love Netflix documentaries. This is one of the best again. Watchable, recommended. Do not listen negative comments.

Vickie Lynn, who later became Anna Nicole Smith, had great ambitions. Her good looks and confidence helped her get out of her uneventful hometown in Texas, slowly making her way into Playboy and gradually, Hollywood. But her personal life remains an extremely sad one throughout. A conflicting childhood story, various boyfriends who were there for her body, an old-timer billionaire husband who funded her expensive lifestyle, a steady influx of drugs, a paternity case.. nothing's good in the conventional sense of it. Fame, wealth, and attention can only get us so far. In the end, your life purely remains YOUR RESPONSIBILITY. How you ride out that journey, with all its flaws and vulnerabilities, is on you. Knowing the eventual fate of her child Daniel and a shocking twist at the very end, only furthers the distance between Anna and the audiences. This piece is hard to like, even though it touches upon some important bits of her life, and questions at least some of the people in Anna's immediate circle.

Gertrude Stein made that statement, rather offhandedly, about the place of her birth, which had vanished. The same can be said about Netflix's documentary "Anna Nicole Smith: You Don't Know Me." Although Smith is gone, she's not completely vanished, as a needless 116 minutes regretfully demonstrates.

Like Venus rising from the sea, or just grow'd like Topsy, she came forth from the dire straits of Texas to dazzle and dumbfound the masses. But don't look too closely for any deep truths or poignant lessons about life and death in her 7,884,000 minutes of fame because there's nothing there. Hers is a story no different from those of many vacuous beauties celebrated by the acquisitive for the inquisitive. Good looks, as the saying goes (and it goes for a good reason) are a dime a dozen. While a beautiful face can take one someplace far from the dusty plaines and crispy fried chicken shacks of Texas, it can take one only so far, and in Smith's case, not far enough.

The tragedy here is self-inflicted, although tragedy is maybe too big a word for so small a matter as the life of Anna Nicole Smith. Any parallels with the extraordinary career of Marilyn Monroe are entirely expedient and included here only to frame a narrative that has no other plausible basis for existing. Cashing her winning ticket in the genetics lottery may have gotten her face in print and provided the means for breast augmentation, but being photogenic without having any real talent is like getting all dressed up with nowhere to go. Except, apparently for Anna, only to wheedle her way into Southfork and land smack dab on the lap of wheelchair bound (eventually bedridden) billionaire J. Howard Marshall, who had by then when they met (at a strip club, naturally) reentered the id stage of his life for the instant gratification he had once gotten from breast feeding. In one inadvertently comical phone conversation (recorded for posterity and a future lawsuit), Smith coyly asks Citizen Marshall if he wants to see his "rosebud," which shows--although one doubts purposely--how anything relevant went over her head, like the use of that word.

Always seeming too much at home with sycophants, she was perhaps naive not to see (or maybe just playacting for cameras) that her shady biological father wanted more than the usual father/daughter relationship, or that her "attorney," Howard (dateless-at-the-prom) K. Stern, didn't have her best interests at heart (but knew he made for good television anyway)--and somewhere in the insanity lost sight of her troubled son. He's the tragedy in this meaningless story.

A statement in the epilogue, the purpose of which may not have been the filmmaker's intention, clarifies for viewers, once and for all, Smith's existence, in that her daughter Dannielynn "inherited nothing," nothing monetarily, but from her mother, getting nothing was always inevitable.