Lady in the Lake episodes 1 & 2, AppleTV+: 4/10, stopped watching
The limited series stars Natalie Portman as a disaffected Jewish housewife in 1966 Baltimore who is triggered to change her life by the disappearance of a little girl and eventually will come across another horrific death of a black woman played by Moses Ingram (who played the main characters' childhood best friend in Queen's Gambit and was in the Obi Wan tv show which I did not watch).
It's inspired by two real life murders but the story is fiction. The trailer had a lot of stuff that both got me hooked and turned me off:
- I like the cast. Not just the lead but there's quite a few faces I recognized and I like all these actors.
- The trailers had a lot of weird arty stuff like fantasy sequences and musical numbers and CLOSEUPS and I can dig that.
- On the other hand, it seemed like another story of a white lady who becomes spiritually self-actualized by involving herself in the misery of black folks. I already saw the Help... eh...
Well we gave it two episodes and aren't going to finish it. My wife's main problem is that the story of Cleo, the black lady who gets killed, seemed a lot more interesting than Portman's character yet after two episodes the focus seemed primarily with the latter. I sort of agree with that because Portman's character's whole thing is basically the "quite desperation" poor caged housewife trope that we've seen done a thousand times. You know the drill- she always wanted to be an artist but SOCIETY forced her into a boring housewife life. In and of itself there's nothing wrong with that but her husband and teenage son are like cartoonish simpleton caricatures.
I was hoping with the 2nd episode we'd get more life out of Cleo and her story but the show's main problem- where people just bluntly say themes and are ridiculous- harms her story, too. She's interesting because while she's juggling raising kids, and unreliable husband, balancing her principles and survival, she's getting involved with politics and activism and it could be a cool way to hook personal themes into social ones.
Problem is the style- this whole show is extremely up its own asshole. There are all kinds of cuts and edits and angles but it's just show-offy, it's delivering a story. There's a scene early in the first episode that intercuts two events that the leads are separately attending that is supposed to show us their parallel lives, but it's just pointlessly confusing and annoying. There are fantasy sequences but they're static and uninteresting.
On a personal pet peeve- the soundtrack is a mess. 1966 show with black folks- you know there's going to be soul/R&B, but they're using songs that came out a couple years later which is annoying because either go with something contemporary or, if you want to go stylized, interpose something different. There were a couple of scenes where I didn't know if the music was diegetic or not.
It's all, like- let's do art stuff! And none of it comes together in any entertaining or meaningful way.
I also don't know if Portman and her friends' 1966 Baltimore Jewish accent was realistic but either way it was so distracting.
The limited series stars Natalie Portman as a disaffected Jewish housewife in 1966 Baltimore who is triggered to change her life by the disappearance of a little girl and eventually will come across another horrific death of a black woman played by Moses Ingram (who played the main characters' childhood best friend in Queen's Gambit and was in the Obi Wan tv show which I did not watch).
It's inspired by two real life murders but the story is fiction. The trailer had a lot of stuff that both got me hooked and turned me off:
- I like the cast. Not just the lead but there's quite a few faces I recognized and I like all these actors.
- The trailers had a lot of weird arty stuff like fantasy sequences and musical numbers and CLOSEUPS and I can dig that.
- On the other hand, it seemed like another story of a white lady who becomes spiritually self-actualized by involving herself in the misery of black folks. I already saw the Help... eh...
Well we gave it two episodes and aren't going to finish it. My wife's main problem is that the story of Cleo, the black lady who gets killed, seemed a lot more interesting than Portman's character yet after two episodes the focus seemed primarily with the latter. I sort of agree with that because Portman's character's whole thing is basically the "quite desperation" poor caged housewife trope that we've seen done a thousand times. You know the drill- she always wanted to be an artist but SOCIETY forced her into a boring housewife life. In and of itself there's nothing wrong with that but her husband and teenage son are like cartoonish simpleton caricatures.
I was hoping with the 2nd episode we'd get more life out of Cleo and her story but the show's main problem- where people just bluntly say themes and are ridiculous- harms her story, too. She's interesting because while she's juggling raising kids, and unreliable husband, balancing her principles and survival, she's getting involved with politics and activism and it could be a cool way to hook personal themes into social ones.
Problem is the style- this whole show is extremely up its own asshole. There are all kinds of cuts and edits and angles but it's just show-offy, it's delivering a story. There's a scene early in the first episode that intercuts two events that the leads are separately attending that is supposed to show us their parallel lives, but it's just pointlessly confusing and annoying. There are fantasy sequences but they're static and uninteresting.
On a personal pet peeve- the soundtrack is a mess. 1966 show with black folks- you know there's going to be soul/R&B, but they're using songs that came out a couple years later which is annoying because either go with something contemporary or, if you want to go stylized, interpose something different. There were a couple of scenes where I didn't know if the music was diegetic or not.
It's all, like- let's do art stuff! And none of it comes together in any entertaining or meaningful way.
I also don't know if Portman and her friends' 1966 Baltimore Jewish accent was realistic but either way it was so distracting.
