bbrebozo

It's dramatic, it's funny, it's occasionally surreal. I started watching the first episode and wound up binge watching the entire first season. Now I'm slowly watching the second because I don't want it to end. The last episode I saw from Season 2 was basically a 21st-century take on the "It's a Good Life" episode of the Twilight Zone, only with more laughs and a (slightly) happier ending. Natasha Lyonne is a powerhouse: lead actor, producer, occasional writer and director. And her ability to attract guest stars and motivate them to their best efforts is astounding. Even though I'm not finished with the second season, I'm really hoping for a third.

If I ever again have to hear that many whiny guitar songs, mumbling actors, and vapid high school-level observations about life, I myself will escape into the Alaska woods, find that bus, and beg it to run me over.

The movie is based on a mishmash of true facts, made up events, and vague recollections. Our hero is the world's most charismatic and popular human being - he gets a huge round of applause at his college graduation, and constantly runs into people who immediately fall in love with him, take their clothes off in front of him, give him jobs, let him stay at their place, and otherwise offer to help him. But to the Alaska woods he must go, to camp out on his own, because he must become as one with nature to gain his full humanity, or some such 1960's pabulum. If you watch this movie to try to understand what happened on Christopher McCandless's trip, you will end your two-and-a-half hour journey no wiser than you started it. Just read the book.

On my one and only trip to Paris, I took a bus tour to the Palace at Versailles. The magnificently ostentatious palace was almost certainly visible to many of the poor peasants below. It's a monument to the obliviousness of the French monarchy before the revolution. So is this film.

Don't get me wrong, I'm sure that liberties were taken with the facts, and it left some events largely unexplained. But the overall theme is the arrogance of the upper classes right until the end. ("At least it's better than being hanged," says one character being led away to the penitentiary near the end, apparently unaware of their ultimate fate.)

Delores Del Rio is charming as the free-spirited Madame du Barry, and Reginald Owen is fine as the blustery, pompous Louis XV. I was particularly impressed with Maynard Holmes as the fat, inept, but good natured heir to the throne.

Definitely worth watching if your looking to kill some time with a glass of wine.