Call Me Miss Cleo

I had no intention of being actually engaged with this but was sobbing by the end. Miss Cleo was just some hack from 90s infomercials right? Who knows, but she was also a human with a life and a soul and trauma with people who loved and cared about her. I can just hope that people in my life look back on my mistake sworn as much grace and forgiveness as the people that love her looked back on her.

It also just gives me some mad nostalgia for waking up in the middle of the night on the couch seeing her and being so curious and having idea what is happening and it feels like some weird closure to at least a part of my childhood.

Whatevs, watch it if you have a soul.

Engaging documentary regarding an iconic Black woman that was skewered in the public arena. Heartbreaking to hear of her humble, tumultuous beginning that inconclusively led to her poor handling of affairs later in Seattle and beyond. The Miss Cleo commercials couldn't be avoided in the 1990s and early aughts, as she was an engaging being. Fallout from the scheming duo that devised the Miss Cleo brand seem to have buried the person, while leaving the business moguls unscathed. Miss Cleo, her patrons and the company employees were all used and mistreated. Glad to see that this documentary illuminates this cautionary tale for anyone with a tremendous, personal talent that can be abused.

While not completely awful, this documentary isn't particularly engaging and drags for most of its 90 minutes. Most of the interview subjects add nothing, and even the people who knew Miss Cleo don't offer anything particularly insightful. But perhaps the main problem is that she wasn't a very interesting person. And it seems a bit odd that this doc lets her off so easy for scamming both a theater company before she took on the phony Jamaican identity (she was born in Los Angeles) and of course, all of the people who called into the psychic hotline. At best, she's a footnote -- and worse, she doesn't seem to have any bit of self-reflection or remorse for all of the desperate people who lost money calling into that silly hotline.

Before the widespread use of the internet, there was something called 1-900 or 1-800 connections on the telephone for "services". In the 1990's, in the multitude of late-night infomercials was the Psychic Readers Network, a group of people hired to read Tarot cards in a system that charged in the neighborhood of $5/minute. The biggest name of this group of people was Miss Cleo. I really don't know if you are not aware of who this person was that you would be interested in this documentary, but it is interesting anyway for a handful of reasons. People from Seattle were perplexed to see this woman who claimed to be a Jamaican voodoo priestess since she seemed so familiar to them. Her life in Seattle is a good basis as to how to take this person as you see this story unfold. The irony of this is that she was used by the PRN to make millions for them while some poor souls poured their hearts out to her and others in a desperate need to find answers to their problems. The Florida people who owned PRN used her identity (?) to make their money while paying her and others very little. The ending of this movie really confused me as she bravely fought her own confusions and angst to find a happy resolution to the rest of her life. The problem was for me. . .what self image was being addressed? I found the whole thing to be ironically confusing, yet I could not stop watching this.

This is not a very well made documentary. A good number of the people being interviewed have no personal connection with miss cleo. Nobody in the documentary knows anything about her background/childhood, everyone is just speculating. This film then takes a turn towards the end when it just beings to pander to certain audiences and prolongs useless scenes. This movie is filled with a bunch of useless filler scenes and celebrity commentary that brought absolutely nothing to the documentary. Terrible documentary, no one interviewed knows anything about Cleo. Just random white people saying their her family, but yet they have no idea where she's from.