Author: Diana Paul

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...

Colors of Evil: Red—Blood and Rage

Written by Diana Paul on August 18, 2024. Posted in movie reviews.

The Netflix film Colors of Evil: Red (2024) is adapted from a novel by Polish author Małgorzata Oliwia Sobczak. This Polish police procedural opens with the body of a young woman, brutally murdered and mutilated, washing onto the beach, surrounded by police and the forensic doctor. The circumstances of her death indicate Monica was the victim of a psychopath, a sadistic serial killer with horrific, heinous sexual proclivities. Rookie prosecutor Leopold Bilski (Jakub Gierszal), perhaps the last honest cop in town, is determined to do the right thing, emulating his father...

Mary & George–Lust for Power

Written by Diana Paul on August 12, 2024. Posted in Television reviews.

In the Starz historical drama, Mary & George, we see the fiercely ambitious Countess of Buckingham, Lady Mary Villiers (Julianne Moore), groom her extraordinarily handsome son, George (Nicholas Galitzine) to be the boy-toy of King James 1 (1566-1625)(Tony Curran). This is not your usual mother-son relationship! Lady Mary, a formerly poor lower-class woman, has plotted and schemed to become a woman of noble rank through successive marriages to two wealthy aristocrats. However, her fear that her original social status will be discovered by her enemies at court compels...

Holdovers–No Home for the Holidays

Written by Diana Paul on August 4, 2024. Posted in movie reviews, Unhealed Wound.

Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers is a film in the style of “Dead Poets Society”. Set in a New England prep school, Barton Preparatory, sometime in the 1970s, the predominantly white students dominate what the school administration can do. A curmudgeonly, lonely instructor, Paul Hunham (Paul Giamatti), draws the short end of the straw and is forced to remain on campus during Christmas break to babysit the handful of students with nowhere to go: “the holdovers”. Although his self-constructed reputation has been to prepare the coddled, spoiled miscreants for a world...

Two Sides of the Abyss–Cat and Mouse

Written by Diana Paul on July 29, 2024. Posted in Television reviews, Unhealed Wound.

A disturbing German psychological crime thriller, Two Sides of the Abyss (2023) opens with an obsessive, grieving police officer, Luise Berg (Anne Ratte-Polle), determined to re-incarcerate the murderer of her teenage daughter. Berg is outraged that Dennis Opitz (Anton Dreger) has been released early from prison. His psychiatric evaluation suggests he is completely rehabilitated. Berg believes otherwise and is obsessively driven to achieve justice. Other murders occur shortly after Dennis Opitz’s release, including a brutal murder in a trailer...