Unhealed Wound – Unhealed Wound

Penguin–A Waddle of Weirdness

Written by Diana Paul on December 1, 2024. Posted in Television reviews, Unhealed Wound. No Comments on Penguin–A Waddle of Weirdness

Based upon the DC Comic Batman and one of his nemeses, Penguin, this HBOmax mini-series is a spinoff of the 2022 Batman movie. Premiering on September 19 as a weekly installment, each episode tightly leads the viewer to the next surprising and noirish plot point. Oz Cobb (Colin Farrell), rather derisively called Penguin because of a limp and a disfigured face, no longer wants to be the nebbish that the mob boss, Carmine Falcone (Mark Strong of “Law and Order” fame), orders around contemptuously as his driver and go-fer in Gotham City. Not unlike...

Civil War–Battleground States

Written by Diana Paul on October 21, 2024. Posted in movie reviews, Unhealed Wound. 2 Comments on Civil War–Battleground States

In the 2024 film Civil War a van of war correspondents travels undercover from New York City to Washington DC to bear witness to the civil war between a dictator/president (Nick Offerman of “Parks and Recreations” fame) and violent secessionists. There is no explanation of why there is a civil war, who is fighting whom, or what the expected outcome or mission is. The protagonist is Lee Smith (Kirsten Dunst), a renowned war photojournalist, who seems immune to the horrors of wars she was assigned to photograph in the past. Her mentor and veteran...

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...

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...