Discover Top Posts Tagged with #doug miro

#griselda netflix #tv shows #netflix #carlo bernard #ingrid escajeda #doug miro #sofia vergara #alberto guerra #juliana aidin martinez #illustration #vintage art #alternative movie posters

Some more dubious TV:

GRISELDA: Griselda Blanco, la madrina de cocaína in early '80s Miami, gets the #girlboss treatment in this six-part miniseries starring Sofía Vergara. Writers Doug Miro and Ingrid Escajeda seem to have made a close study of the 2007 film AMERICAN GANGSTER, about Frank Lucas, which is similarly structured and has a similar abundance of period detail that never feels organic or authentic. If you know anything at all about the real Griselda Blanco, it also feels pretty sanitized, and of course prettified. For contrast, there's also a 2017 Lifetime movie called COCAINE GODMOTHER, starring, improbably, Catherine-Zeta Jones, which is much more tabloid-lurid, although calling Jones' performance and accent "a broad caricature" would be giving it more credit than it deserves. Curiously, the Lifetime version is much more upfront about presenting Griselda as bisexual: Both it and the new mini indicate that Blanco's bestie, who eventually died of a drug overdose (called Carolina in the 2017 version, Carmen in the new one), was in love with her, but the new version is weirdly noncommittal about Griselda herself. Pondering the behind-the-scenes politics of that is honestly more interesting than much of what's onscreen.

MASTERS OF THE AIR: Lugubrious Apple TV+ miniseries about the USAAF 100th Bomb Group of WW2, based on the nonfiction book by Donald L. Miller and produced by Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks, and Gary Goetzman, obviously keen to recapture the success of BAND OF BROTHERS. A heavy-handed and often tedious propaganda piece, MASTERS is basically a long-form modern version of WW2 movies like AIR FORCE or THIRTY SECONDS OVER TOKYO, full of contrived patriotic uplift (inevitably underlined by obnoxiously syrupy orchestral scoring), lots of CGI (most of which looks like a video game), and a few more naughty words than the 1940s Production Code would have allowed. The promos suggested the show would deal with the experience of Black fighter escort pilots, which could have had some interest (especially since the 2012 movie RED TAILS did such a disastrous job of it), but the handful of Black characters don't appear until the eighth episode, and they're much more thinly drawn than the white officers who comprise the core cast. Most of the main characters are theoretically based on real people (who are shown in a brief coda in the final episode), but the show's dramatization is much less effective than a decent documentary treatment would have been, particularly since it's already reliant on sleepy voiceover narration to hold together its disparate story threads. The main consolation is that there’s a refreshing lack of distracting stunt casting; I didn’t recognize anyone in the cast, which is for the best with this kind of thing. A show for your dad or grandpa who only watches WW2 documentaries.

STAR TREK: PRODIGY: I only barely struggled through the first four five episodes of this animated STAR TREK spinoff, and the kindest thing I can say about it is that I'm not even remotely adjacent to the target audience. The animation and character designs caused me physical pain, and overall it feels like what we would get all the time if STAR TREK became another of the many properties absorbed by the evil power of the Mouse. One shudders to think.

The Great Wall (2016)

Impression: The colours!!! The choreography!!! The stunts!!!

Collection: yes

Overall: ⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2

Concept: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Story: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Storytelling: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Characters: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Casting: ⭐️⭐️⭐️

Visually: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Score/Soundtrack: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

Entertainment: ⭐️⭐️⭐️1/2

Best: Jing Tian as Commander Lin Mae. The colours! The choreography! The Nameless Order!

Worst: Matt Damon as William Garin.

Chadwick Boseman Joins “Yasuke”

Chadwick Boseman is set to star as Yasuke. Yasuke is a native of Portuguese Mozambique who was taken to Japan as a slave in the 16th century and became a samurai for Oda Nobunaga. He is the only known person not of Asian descent to become a samurai.