The Outsider

I watched about 30 minutes of Matrix: Resurrections. One reviewer at IMDB titled his review "blah blah blah blah." I couldn't have said it better. Perhaps an even better title, offered by another IMDB review, is "The Matrix Regurgitated."

This is basically sort of a back-to-square-one remake of the original Matrix. Neo is stuck at some dead-end job, now unaware that he is in a false reality created by machines. Blah blah blah blah.

This is truly a cynical and talent-less example of creating a movie only with dollar signs in your eyes. One reviewer said it was an "embarrassing attempt to flog an old horse to death."

Both Terminator II and Aliens were noted for the fact that they were worthy sequels, often considered better than the originals. These franchises also eventually went down that same hill "flogging an old horse to death." But Matrix Regurgitated is quite a hackneyed example of milking sequels for money. The dug up a dead horse just to flog it again.

Another reviewer has an interesting observation:



I found that breaking of the 4th wall to be amateurish. This movie was clearly written by talentless hacks.

Another dead-end series is The Staircase.

A woman is apparently murdered in her home. The prime suspect is the husband (played by Colin Firth). Synopsis:



Now here's the problem. The series proceeds as a plodding place plus it repeatedly makes jump forward and backward in time:



This technique ruins whatever kind of story they have. And you can be pretty sure that don't actually have much of a story when they have to keep jumping around, which is clearly an implicit indication of lack of content.

In Casablanca, they do one time jump to show Rick and Ilsa in Paris before the war to set the stage on their relationship. But had that movie adopted the modern technique of disguising a lack of content with time-jumps, it would have been the mess that The Staircase clearly is. One reviewer sums it up nicely:



There's a lot of that going around. There is now a Deep State in movie-making. It's populated by low-talent Snowflake hacks who must constantly show everyone how "creative" (or "woke") they are. And it comes always at the expense of good storytelling.

Reviewers note that there is a good documentary of this real-life story and that it is far superior to this mess.

Here's a revelation about the likely murdering father. Let me just quote one of the daughters when events of 20 years ago in Germany come up:



I'm lucky I wasn't drinking something at the time or I would have spit it out all over. That was LOL funny when I heard that. And these two daughters are in a serious conversation...one of them basically in a "don't go there" mode. Yeah. What a coincidence.

I finished binge-watching The Staircase. It may not be everyone's cup of tea but I enjoyed it. But after watching all that, it can leave you a bit depressed.

I'd love to have the rest of you watch it just to see if you think it was: A) An accident; B) Death by Husband; or C) Death by Owl.

I don't think the husband got into an argument and killed her. What I think happened is that she was attacked by an owl, possibly slipped on the steps and then her husband took advantage of the situation...either by delaying the call to 911 or possibly smashing her head into the wall a couple times.

Being a sleazy, serial adulterer (with men) doesn't automatically make one a murderer. But it doesn't help. And he may have beat his young daughter at one point. And his wife seemed to be the main money provider. And when she lost most of her savings, she wasn't of as much use to him.

And clearly if Firth played this guy anywhere near real, he was a self-centered user of other people...more than is typical.

I did finish The Investigation with the help of fast-forwarding. This series could have as easily been called The Grief Counselor. We spend an inordinate amount of time with the grief-stricken parents. It's a wonder that head detective, Jens Møller Jensen, had any time at all to carry out an investigation on…

On who? Honestly, I had not heard of this "world-wide story." And they don't mention the perp's name once. But he is considered the Danish equivalent of Elon Musk. Was this unfortunate woman killed by an SUV? By sharks? Global warming?

No, the guy was Danish entrepreneur Peter Madsen. So a docu-drama on the murder investigation never once mentions his name nor do we see any interview with a character portraying him. Nothing. A ghost.

Like I said, this is less a documentary and more of a sad-a-thon. But with deft use of fast-forwarding, you can skip all the right bits and get right to the police work, although I do really like the actor who played the grieving father. It was just way, way too much of this.

Pardon my political incorrectness, but I had assumed that Danish women were a cut above the rest. The decidedly PC writer/director, Tobias Lindholm, seems to have gone out of his way to scrub beautiful Danes from this series.

And none of this shows the police in a particularly good light. As one reviewer noted, "We see two types of investigators in this tale; those who willingly sacrifice their private lives to get the job done, and those who moan endlessly about having to do so at the behest of the others."

He's mostly talking about the complaining leader of the diving team who were looking for the various parts of the murdered journalist's body. (She had been dismembered.) But there was one cop (a chick, not a beauty, but beauty is only skin deep) who really got the bit between her teeth and found time to be a cop instead of a grief counselor (unlike her boss). That was Maibritt Porse, played ably by Laura Christensen.

We won't mention the clearly token Muslim, Dulfi Al-Jabouri, who looked like an affirmative-action hire, even within the police agency and quite apart from his role as an actor. I guess he was there to show how over-staffed the Copenhagen murder squad was. They certainly had time enough so that the head of the investigation could play a grief counselor. Over and over and over again.

Anyway, there's also a two-part documentary on HBO about this murder. It provides some further details although it is painful to watch. The women interviewed waste no time telling you that this is part of a continued assault on women who just can't catch a break. Never mind that they now predominate in college. Never mind that when men are murdered (much, much more regularly than women), there is no talk about this as an attack on the male of the species.

Seeing this other two-part documentary (and, no, you shouldn't watch it), I don't think Western Civilization can survive women. With all the wars and such, it barely survived men. But you catch a glimpse into what is considered normal in Denmark. Trust me. They will be bowing to a majority Muslim population withing 30 years.

But the good news is, they have only about 50 murders a year in Denmark on average. That would be a good month in Chicago (which averages to about 58 per month currently).