Tag: Netflix

“Squid Game”–Hunger Games Meets Snowpiercer: Gangnam Style

Written by Diana Paul on October 13, 2021. Posted in Unhealed Wound. 1 Comment on “Squid Game”–Hunger Games Meets Snowpiercer: Gangnam Style

This #1 Netflix mega-hit, streaming in nine episodes, is a Korean dystopian story of survival. A mastermind known as the Front Man, in a mask like Darth Vader, stages a series of deadly childhood games (tug of war, red-light-green-light, and the Korean-specific squid game). The debt-ridden players, trapped on a remote island, are forced to compete in deadly versions of the gladiator-style games: gunned down if they lose. Guards with triangles, circles, or squares marked on their masks are anonymous. Squid Game’s sometimes shocking–always bloody–drama...

“Navillera”—Soar Like a Butterfly

Written by Diana Paul on July 25, 2021. Posted in movie reviews, Television reviews. 2 Comments on “Navillera”—Soar Like a Butterfly

This quirky and endearing sleeper mini-series from Korea (premiered on Netflix, March 2021) is a definite winner. (Navillera in Korean means “like a butterfly.”) In the opening scene Sim Deok-chul (the renowned Park In-hwan) is celebrating his 70th birthday with his wife, three sons and their wives. Only the youngest son, considered a failure for quitting his hospital position as a doctor, is unmarried. Sim is a retired mailman who always dreamed of performing “Swan Lake” on stage and now, at his advanced age, is determined to...

“Red Dot”(2021)– Laser Focused

Written by Diana Paul on May 17, 2021. Posted in movie reviews. 1 Comment on “Red Dot”(2021)– Laser Focused

Trying to put more excitement into their marriage, Nadja and David, a young doctor and engineer, decide to go on a camping trip in a remote forest in Sweden, fantasizing that it will be romantic, gazing at the Northern Lights with their adorable dog. The impending “excitement” is not exactly what they bargained for, however. Stalked by an unseen enemy, they become the targets of a hellish nightmare. Red Dot is an intense psychological thriller. In a reversal of gender roles, frequently seen in Nordic Noir, Nadja is not in need of saving. A very competent...

“The Life Ahead” –And Then the End

Written by Diana Paul on March 7, 2021. Posted in movie reviews. 2 Comments on “The Life Ahead” –And Then the End

This 2020 Italian drama stars Sophia Loren in an adaptation of the Romain Gary novel, The Life Before Us. Directed by Sophia Loren’s son, Edoardo Ponti, The Life Ahead is the third film based on Gary’s novel. The Life Ahead has two main characters: Madame Rosa, an octogenarian ex-prostitute and former Holocaust survivor, and a 12-year old Somalian child. To support herself Madame Rosa cares for the children of local sex workers in her apartment. Consequently, Rosa is the glue in her neighborhood and the lifeline for women desperate...

“Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am”–Dissembling the American Dream

Written by Diana Paul on February 22, 2021. Posted in Film Festivals, movie reviews. 1 Comment on “Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am”–Dissembling the American Dream

Toni Morrison (1931-2019), the 1993 Nobel Prize winner in Literature, was a complex artist who did not hold back from confronting the worst of human history. The documentary, Toni Morrison: Pieces I Am, is a historical panorama of a slice of history dating from the 1930’s until the conclusion of the film in 2019. Morrison emerges as a powerful, iconic, and formidable moral and intellectual force. The film gives us a retrospective of her groundbreaking novels which challenged the literary status quo, rewarding the reader with imagining black lives...

“Retribution”–Karma is a Beast

Written by Diana Paul on December 7, 2020. Posted in movie reviews, Television reviews, Unhealed Wound. No Comments on “Retribution”–Karma is a Beast

Retribution ( a 2016 BBC production originally titled “One of Us”) opens with a horrific double murder, which will tear apart the lives of two families, the Douglases and the Elliots. They are friends who live side-by-side in the isolated Scotland Highlands hamlet of Braeston. The atmospherically remote Scottish scenery is reminiscent of Nordic noir landscapes. Events soon take an even more brutal turn when a badly injured man arrives at the Douglas family’s doorstep after his car careens off the road – a man who they...