future-days

An enormous disappointment, CHAOS (based on the excellent Tom O'Neill book of the same name) barely scratches the surface of the incredible discoveries O'Neill made and the implications they have for the Manson case. This oddly short, 90-some minute doc, instead plays more like your standard true crime piece, with much time devoted to summarizing the murders themselves for anyone who hadn't yet heard about them. What about the story about how the victims of the Tate murders had the power lines cut when they were watching TV at Jay Sebring's home, the night before the murders - proving that they were not killed as a result of some mixup about Terry Melcher still living at Cielo? What about incredibly suspect names and connections like Reeve Whitson and Charles Tacot, or mobster (and associate of Jay Sebring) Charlie Baron? What about even Bugliosi's astonishing corruption, and incredibly vile acts of evil in his personal life, which hint at him being controlled via blackmail by higher ups? And on and on. This documentary is simply a joke and does not do justice to the true scope and horror of this case. It makes Wormwood look like an absolute masterpiece, and indeed at least that effort from Morris was pretty fair to the subject and didn't seem quite so neutered. This should have been easily a 3-5 ep miniseries; 90 minutes is just far too little for a story like this.

This season has some of the worst writing, direction, acting, and use of music I've seen in such a prestigious HBO series. As it trudges along all we get are more tropes, cheap jump scares, and a million spirals to leach off the success of Season 1. Truth is, this is far closer to a weak Netflix original or even a CW show than it is any of the first 3 True Detective Seasons. Every character is unlikeable AND uninteresting somehow, and the way they talk to each other is so corny and unrealistic it reminds one of Tommy Wiseau more than Nic Pizzolatto at times. The initial mystery of the "corpsicle" was interesting, but none of the characters even seemed to care - just business as usual, I guess. Nobody reacts like a human in this show. It truly feels like it was written by AI. This episode continued Ep 3's trend of focusing on dull interpersonal dramas between flat caricature-characters, throwing in a few D-grade horror flourishes, and adding a laughable cliffhanger that's more confusing than mysterious. Who greenlit this disaster? For all his sometime-faults, Pizzolatto wrote genuinely thoughtful quality dialogue in those first 3 seasons. The quality of direction and cinematography was also far above what Night Country has given us so far. There's no momentum, no feeling, just tired tropes overlaid with breathy female-sung ballads like watching a TikTok reel some intern threw together with their Spotify playlist. Don't believe the critics: this is bad, and far below the high standard that HBO usually implies.