pebsdad

Going in, I thought this was a documentary about Miss Cleo. No...this is a BAD dramatization of her life, some woman pretending to be a psychic called Miss Cleo. First sign this wasn't going to be good...half the actors had names during the credit introductions that looked like drag names, like maybe they didn't want to be associated with this mess. It was filmed on video, not actual film, and each scene looked like it was the lead up to a porn scene. The acting throughout, especially the scenes with the producers/owners of the Psychic Hotline, was dreadful.

Avoid this mess! The story of Miss Cleo deserves a full documentary with actual footage from her history of performing this character and the actual fallout of the network.

Crowd work is improv. Improv is scary and hard. Matt is brilliant at it...seriously, and looks so comfortable in front of a crowd, who is always judging you, and he is able to completely hold court. You have to be whip smart and have a varied diet of history, current events, politics, general gossip, etc, and Matt has all that at a young age.

I just don't get that some people hate him...he's so personable and funny. I know he's be accused of punching down at women in his routines but there is none of that here. It's super fun to watch him play off the crowd and seems to even be overly respectable to everyone involved.

I'm not sure what the purpose of the "documentary" is. It's just a group of young actors (who are all quite good) work shopping the play scene by scene, but this was done after the Broadway production. I supposed this might be of interest to acting students but it really tells us nothing about the controversies of the original staging. I saw a couple positive reviews that read like we probably saw 2 completely different films.

What is DOES seem to be is a huge ego-stroker for the writer/director. What a huge disappointment as I was going to see the show in a few weeks in London but now...meh.