Unhealed Wound – Passion for Art, Movies, and Culture

Hotel Portofino–A Pleasant Stay?

Written by Diana Paul on October 13, 2024. Posted in Television reviews.

In this three-season British historical drama, Hotel Portofino, Bella Ainsworth (Natasha McElhone), the beautiful middle-aged daughter of a wealthy manufacturer of fabrics, moves to Italy in the 1920s to fulfill her dream of having a luxury boutique hotel in the resort town of Portofino. Problem is that Mussolini is on the verge of seizing power in Italy and destroying what she has built. On a personal level, Bella’s ne’er-do-well womanizing husband, Cecil (Mark Umbers), is sabotaging her efforts to create a life of her own. Alice Mays-Smith (Olivia Morris), Bella and Cecil’s daughter,...

For Love and Life: No Ordinary Campaign

Written by Diana Paul on October 6, 2024. Posted in movie reviews.

In the extraordinary 2024 documentary, For Love and Life, portraits in courage, we witness ALS patient Brian Wallach as well as his wife, Sandra, as they power through a commitment to fight for a cure. Previously an Obama administration lawyer, Brian and Sandra, also a lawyer, become indefatigable activists for ALS, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, a disease whose prominence and awareness are due largely to the baseball player, Lou Gehrig, and the physicist, Stephen Hawking. Both Gehrig and Hawking had endured the inevitable disabilities which weaken and...

Happy Valley: A Micro-Exorcism

Written by Diana Paul on October 1, 2024. Posted in Television reviews.

Happy Valley, a three-season Acorn mini-series, is an unnerving police procedural based in Halifax, West Yorkshire, England. The name “Happy Valley” is the local police’s pejorative term for the low-income Halifax neighborhood. It suffers from a high rate of drug addiction and crime. Catherine Cawood (Sarah Lancashire of “Last Tango in Halifax”), is a no-nonsense policewoman with a tragic family history. She is committed to an incorruptible enforcement of the law. Colleagues look the other way. After the workday ends, Catherine is devoted to raising her young grandson, Ryan,...

Serpent Queen – Venomous Power Grab

Written by diana on September 18, 2024. Posted in Television reviews.

Based on Leonie Frieda’s 2004 biography, Catherine de Medici: Renaissance Queen of France, Serpent Queen, a Starz mini-series, follows Catherine de Medici (Samantha Morton). We first see her as a teenager unexpectedly orphaned by a series of unfortunate events. That her bloodline is from the renowned and extremely wealthy Medici family results in treacherous schemes. Catherine escapes an oppressive Florentine convent to rise as the imperial mastermind of the French Valois court in 1547. Her reign survives for over forty years. Deception...

Man in Full–Empty and Unhinged

Written by Diana Paul on September 2, 2024. Posted in Television reviews, Unhealed Wound.

Based on Tom Wolfe’s book of the same title (1998), Man in Full crosses genre. Charley Croker, a “Succession” type aging patriarch like Logan Roy, still basks in his former football star fame although he is now a mega real-estate developer and womanizing magnate with an oversized, explosive ego. (Sound familiar?) Croker’s emotional dial tone is contempt for everyone who does not shine a light on him. Now on the verge of bankruptcy from overleveraging and excessive borrowing, banks are calling in hundreds of millions of dollars of loans and Croker’s ...

Under the Bridge–Beyond Mean Girls

Written by Diana Paul on August 26, 2024. Posted in Television reviews, Unhealed Wound.

A true-crime thriller mini-series, Under the Bridge is based upon the 2005 titular book by Rebecca Godfrey and the memoir, Reena: A Father’s Story by Manjit Virk. A brutal murder takes place in 1997 in Victoria, British Columbia. The victim is a fourteen-year old girl, Reena Virk (Vritika Gupta) whose middle-class parents are Indian immigrants and Jehovah Witnesses. As a new arrival, Reena wants to fit in with other teens, especially the “popular” girls housed in Seven Oaks, a nearby foster home. Most of the foster girls are from extremely dysfunctional...