nighthouse66-1

This one will haunt you.

I went into this completely cold, having watched all the other DS episodes out of curiosity. But this one I have watched several times and I am glad that I downloaded it as I do not see it anywhere available on Youtube.

Rick, the protagonist, is a slave-master, and the show does not flinch in its portrayal of all that entails. There are things that happen that you really will not be expecting. This is not for the faint of heart, I can assure you.

But this is not the reason I come back to it time and again. Rick is simply a really interesting guy. He has had a very tough life, which led to his line of work- and I believe he is sincere in wanting to leave the life. However, I do not know how that is going circa 2023. I hope that he was able to leave the life that he so sorely seemed to want to leave- I hope that he has found a way to make peace within himself.

Make no mistake- this is a story that should be told, and retold, and told again. But Alan Parker dropped a major ball on this one.

How could the combo of Parker, Gene Hackman, Frances McDormand etc fail so badly? I had to keep reminding myself- "this is the man who made 'Midnight Express'". It was easy to forget in the bad writing, the ham-handed smashing-together of facts, the cartoonish depictions.

Something like this should never be fictionalized, because it could easily be written off as sensationalism. But o, how real it was. ANd how poorly it was rendered in a master's hands. Everyone's performances were not up to par, though Gene Hackman pretty much owns it as usual. Willem Dafoe was strangely incompetent. Frances McDormand's bad accent (as a southerner I really take umbrage at poor southern accents) left much to be desired.

Everyone was drawn in (forgive the pun) black and white, and it just all felt so sophomoric. I feel like the heavy subject matter blinds people to its poor craftsmanship. I would like to see these events depicted again, but properly, and with all the facts. Because the truth was far uglier than this fictionalized brew could impart.

I seriously do not understand why this film received such great reviews. I knew absolutely nothing about it other than the fact that it had received some accolades and so went in cold. I was expecting the film to go in one direction, then it veered off....another direction, then it veered off again.....and then by the end I felt like i was watching some kind of rom-com-horror mashup. The humor was misplaced, the calmness of the main character when confronted with something that would make any normal person at least hyperventilate was completely unrealistic, and not once during the entire film did i feel even the slightest thrumming of my pulse. It was pointless eye candy and could hardly be called "original". If this is considered original then this tells me all I need to know about the power of mass opinion. It is much ado about nothing.