Two Reviews: I Am The Night and Roma

I Am the Night
What I expected: True crime
What I got: Family drama

While I was looking for good podcasts, my niece attended a live broadcast of My Favorite Murder, so I started listening to that. My first MFM broadcast did not get to the murder quickly enough. Instead, there was a lot of pre-murder giggling that turned me off, but now that I know to ignore the non-murder silliness I quite enjoy the murder silliness.

A few weeks ago MFM focused on the Black Dahlia murder so they could promote the new I Am the Night TV series, which - and this may surprise viewers of I Am The Night, and also SPOILERS - is only tangentially about the Black Dahlia murder. Instead, it's all about the peculiar family dynamics of one of the primary suspects. Granted, he's the most interesting suspect, but I signed up for murder and I'm getting incest and baby-selling and other lesser crimes, yawn. I think I would have preferred an anthology series in which each episode deals with a different Black Dahlia suspect, because I am four episodes in and I am tired of this weirdo and his family.

Roma
What I expected: a plot
What I got: As Kathleen Madigan tweeted, "#WhatTheFWasThat #WhenDoesItStart #WhyStuffedDogHeads"

Had I known there was no plot to Roma I would have watched it with a completely different attitude. Instead, I kept checking my watch, thinking the plot was going to kick into gear any minute now. There's an earthquake an hour or so in, and I felt relieved, because now we were going to see how the family deals with the earthquake, but no, fooled you, this is the director remembering an earthquake and making it look lovely and striking and black and white.

And it wasn't even episodic like Huckleberry Finn, where Huck and Jim wander toward the resolution of a conflict. They're on the river to get Jim to freedom, and Jim [SPOILERS! And HOW DO YOU NOT KNOW THIS EVEN MY NEWLY INTEGRATED HIGH SCHOOL HAD TO READ IT] is re-enslaved and then freed at the end.  Of course, maybe it's more like War and Peace, my favorite Giant Slice of Life. Still, in both of those books, the characters end up someplace different from where they started.

I don't know. Maybe I should watch it again without expecting a plot or a revolution or an earthquake.

Comments

[Big Dot]

I had to have three goes at Roma. I quickly gave up on it, then read so many raves I tried again, wasn’t hooked and found the subtitles hard to read, gave up again. Then it did so well at the Oscars I thought I must have stopped too soon and ploughed on till the end. And? Pft. It’s like that Monty Python sketch Nothing Happened. Can’t understand the fuss at all. And I have an MA in Eng Lit! (Sorry - but, you know...)

[TheQueen]

Big Dot - as I was reading this I heard a man on the TV give it a 63% chance of winning the Oscar. Maybe you and I, as English Lit majors, are too ... literal for this movie.