Jodi Arias: Dirty Little Secret

Oh my goodness this was so cringe and poorly written. The piece feels like a student film and there's no sensitivity or skill to the writing and direction of scenes and how they play. Characters are not individuals, you can hear the same voice from the writers each time. The dialogue sounds so on the nose and cliche. The music plays awfully and feels like it was pulled from a royalty free library and placed carelessly - it sounds like The Bold & The Beautiful. The actors had potential but really needed a competent script and competent director which sadly they had neither. The cinematography isn't terrible, visually it looks passable, but the shot selection is so boring and vanilla. The subject of sexuality isn't treated in a sensitive, appropriate or clever way, feeling more like the writers idealised fantasy. The dialogue is so poor it taints the film with comedy, the bad kind. Sadly, there is no depth or substance here. It feels and plays like a rough 1st Draft of a script that needs some serious polishing, though I'm not sure the filmmakers (Writers and Director) carried the skill or taste to see it through or give it improvement.

I felt the made-for-TV movie about Jody Arias was actually very good and was a balanced presentation of a sensational story. Jody Arias is obviously unbalanced, paranoid, has super-low self-esteem, and many other psychological defects. But as the story is shown, it also balances this with Travis Alexander's duplicity. He wanted to maintain the appearance of being a good, pious Mormon but kept Jody Arias as his secret life and kept her out of the mainstream of his life. When he tried to break up several times, he always ended up back in bed with Jody. He certainly did not deserve the terrible thing that happened to him, but he contributed his share. I thought the film was balanced and worth watching.

By dirty I mean the director and producer expect us to sit around watching this slut type prance around making off she's a winner. WRONG. She's not that terrific looking, too much hair, no body to lure anyone with and has this pouty mouth (like her lower jaw extends her upper.) Let's not talk of the plot as there are so many similar ones of the past and so much better. Like the leading vamp could act in those. This one just poses like she thinks all men are attracted to her looks. AGAIN WRONG.

You can also predict she will kill all those in her way. The same as before. I just get tired of looking at her with her dipity-do hair style. So, in summing this trash up, and I won't mention names to protect the rest of the unfortunate cast, this is a horrendous film with a bad leading lady, a stupid plot and not for any seeing eyes to sit through. Amen.

Jodi Arias: Dirty Little Secret (2013)

* (out of 4)

A new crime tale overtook mainstream America so naturally Lifetime would turn it into a movie. Jodi Arias (Tania Raymonde) begins a torrid sexual affair with Travis Alexander (Jesse Lee Soffer) and soon she becomes obsessive and kills him. Am I the only person in the world who finds Travis to be a bad guy? I certainly don't agree or condone what happened to him but at the same time I must admit that I found him to be a jerk by the way he just wanted to use this woman for sex, keep her in the background and hidden from his friends and pretty much just use her whenever he needed her. Sure, thousands if not millions of guys do this to women but most of them don't do it to someone crazy, which is obviously what Jodi was. This Lifetime movie is pretty awful all around and largely because you really don't learn anything about either people and we're left with a story of unsympathetic characters and certainly no one to life. Director Jace Alexander takes a fairly interesting "case" and turns it into a pure case of boredom because there's no energy, no life or anything else going on here. The entire film seems to run on longer than the real-life trial because we just keep getting scenes that add up to nothing. This here is more like a low-rent version of FATAL ATTRACTION but without the performances, tension or style. The movie has all sorts of problems including how it goes all out to paint Travis as this clean-cut Mormon who did nothing wrong and just wanted to help people. We get at least two scenes where Jodi sexually comes onto him while he turns away. Yet, minutes later, we see them two in a steamy sex affair where he's the one using her. You can't have it both ways. Even worse is the fact that these scenes trying to make Travis look clean are done in such a way that you really can't help but laugh at them. Both Raymonde and Soffer are good in their roles but sadly they're just not given much to do. When one watches Lifetime you really don't expect quality but I must say this here is without question one of the worst products they've'e turned out.

This was BRILLIANT. Both actors nailed these parts and they were both very difficult to pull off. But they were utterly convincing and I think this TV movie was smashing. Not at all clichéd and stuck to the facts that I know of the case, having followed it, from London, for the last two years.

Jesse Lee Soffer not only got Travi's charm and obvious boy next door magnetism, but he also successfully reminded us that Travis was a flawed character, certainly sexist, perhaps ambitious at the expense of others, but most of all bound and brainwashed by his particular religious brand of zombieism, Mormonism. Also, it was clear from the show that the two of them had a very very powerful connection that went beyond the physical. Travis liked Jodi for quite a while, and intermittently throughout the saga. We like her too, in this reconstruction. We consider her point of view. At times we are totally on her side even.....until, of course, that fateful, epic, bloody road trip.

Production values are serious and classy and very effective. This is no regular daytime TV true story. This is a highly accomplished piece of work and everyone involved can be very proud of what they achieved. Im looking forward to seeing these two lead actors in other material.

I'm very fussy about I watch and what I enjoy and I give this an unreserved 10/10