Crime Scene: The Vanishing at the Cecil Hotel

I will keep my review short. The story about the vanishing speaks to everybody's imagination. But the story is pretty straightforward, this is coming from somebody who has been working in psychiatry whole his life. She was bipolar and suffered clearly from a psychosis. I work with these people on a daily base. Yes, it can be so bad, people would bring themselves in strange situations. In that way 4 episodes is just too much for a story that could have been told in 2 episodes (at most).

I found this documentary much more interesting in another aspect. The way 8 years ago fake news was invented by stupid people on the internet just blowing their mind on things they have absolutely no knowledge about. I was heavily triggered by the youtubers/influencers claiming one stupid theory after the other. On the way almost destroying a young musician life. This is still the dark side of the internet and it saddens me to see where we are at almost a decade later.

Am very much interested in the subject matter, and the history surrounding the Cecil hotel. I really enjoyed the interviews with the hotel employees, but I was hoping to learn more about the actual forensic investigation. Yes, LAPD is a part of this documentary, but the YouTuber angle, ughh. Whiny, unhelpful, and super bloated. They literally added nothing of true value to the investigation. Zilch. Also, if you're any kind of traveler, investigate the property, the surroundings in the environment of where you're going! How do people travel, especially internationally, not do this?!?

Will Netflix ever learn that their true crime documentaries don't need to be 4 hours long? Even the Night Stalker felt long & drawn out when that spanned years. Apart from the elevator footage & uncovering the body, what else really happened?? And who are these nut jobs who don't even know Elisa but are behaving like they lost a love one & going to the crime scene 10-20 times. Finding internet fame over the death of someone else doesn't sit right with me. I feel like Buzzfeed Unsolved did a better episode on the Cecil Hotel. Save some time & watch that instead.

Sherlock Holmes eat your heart out. An hour documentary stretched to four. First episode excellent. Very insightful into the Skid Row area, something I wasn't aware of. Good footage of inside the hotel. Falls off a cliff when Morbid comes onto the screen, who has nothing to do with it except he once went there. Stretched out in typical Netflix fashion. What's the library code/ cemetery location about? Some good questions remain. Overall a very interesting case.

The Elisa Lam story is both interesting and tragic. Aspects of this Documentary are interesting and well told but the grouping of YouTube numb skulls, spouting their conspiracies, drag it down. They are essentially just a bunch of self styled "internet sleuths", whose actual grasp on the events is as insignificant as they are. Everyone, up to and including Santa, comes under suspicion from these nitwits. They desperately want to include themselves in the drama of it all, and even go so far as to group at the Hotel to point and whisper.