By PETER THOMAS BUSCH

The Lyle and Erik Menendez story gets spun into a tale about sibling monsters.

Director Carl Franklin goes into the details about the dysfunctional ultrarich Los Angeles right from the start of episode one.

Javier Bardem plays the stern patriarch, Jose Menedez, who rules his family with an iron fist, and if you believe his sons, verbal and physical and sexual abuse.

Lyle and Erik Menendez admit to killing their father and mother with recently purchased shotguns, but they claim the murders were in self defence.

Chloe Sevigny plays Kitty Menendez as someone who bought into her husband’s ‘love your family with a stick in your hand’ mantra.

Cooper Koch as Erik, and Nicholas Chavez as Lyle, spend a lot of screen time together partly to show they were so close that they were able to agree to commit the deed, and in part to show how the brothers were also different.

The series opens with the brothers still free spending their deceased parents’ multi-million dollar fortune in Los Angeles and around the world. 

But the brothers had been taught well, and remained nasty rich, still living on the estate where their parents were murdered.

A score wends in behind the dialogue from the beginning to the end, leaving a kind of eery taunt, as if to say, ‘here these kids had everything to look forward to but did everything wrong to spoil their futures’.

Lyle and Erik even do a series of home break-ins for money, instead of concentrating on going to Ivy League colleges and getting started on their careers.

Jose, the consummate Alpha male patriarch, is not so upset about that they tried to raise money stealing from their rich neighbours, as that they eventually got caught, and he had to bail them out be repaying his victims and explaining to the police that he would give them his heavy hand as punishment.

The Menendez’s are a dysfunctional family with the snobby rich dynamic that seems to accelerate everything horrible, such as when one of the brothers is told he cannot marry the girl at the door because she is a gold digger.

And one brother has a toupee that the other brother does not know about eventhough the siblings appear to be so close as to do everything together.

Franklin and the other episodic directors put this whole surreal layer over everything – with continual flash backs filling in the story to how they got to where they were, which is life in prison just a bit shy of death row.

The script shows how the brothers are twisted into choosing the other brother over their parents.

And one episode discusses how easy it is for people to buy firearms in California.

There is left this almost comic book layer that shows that the brothers just cannot get anything right, eventhough they know how to. Erik and Lyle are far from the perfectionist that their father is. 

So, the murder of their parents is far from a perfect crime. For example, Erik and Lyle know to create a false alibi, but they cannot really get that element planned correctly – making sure people see them, 4 hours in a bar and grill, when they should have gone home after two.

Javier Bardem goes the other way, showing how the patriarch had a disturbing dark side, to the point of perfection. Bardem initially can be missed and set aside in the early scenes because the camera focus is predominantly on Cooper Koch as Erik, and Nicholas Chavez as Lyle, but Jose is revealed more and more as the episodes are released.

Bardem develops a three dimensional character for Jose that is disturbing on one level but more and more complicated the more screen time he gets.

The narrative is driven with flash backs triggered by various question and answers sessions with psychiatrists and defence lawyers, and even among themselves.

One episode focusses on how the brothers learned to survive in prison.

The brothers even dream forward about escaping from prison with new, cosmetically altered faces and changed public images.

Eventually everyone has geared up for trial with defence attorneys developing the abused victim defence with highly coached testimony. But the farcical nature of the story continues without redemption, and the trial does not go all that well.

Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story is streaming on Netflix.

By PETER THOMAS BUSCH

The drug cartels have certain rules within their organization, such as an oath of loyalty, while ignoring rules outside their organization, such as no drugs and no killing.

When the rules inside stopped working, Griselda kills her drug lord husband in Columbia and flees with her children and a kilo of coke to Miami.

Director Andres Baiz creates a gritty portrait of the true to life story of Griselda Blanco as she, out of necessity, sets up her own drug market with the ultrarich as clients in the six episode streaming series, Griselda (Series 2024).

The scenes grind out fairly quickly as Griselda, played by Sofia Vergara, initially just wants to find a buyer for her kilo of coke so she has cash to start life over. But when the existing drug players try to rip her off at every turn, she comes up with the idea of setting up a new market at the tennis clubs and party places, such as lavish yachts and chaotic dance clubs.

By Episode 2, Griselda brings coke into Miami by getting prostitutes in Medellin, Columbia to pad their large size bras with a bit of the white magic. The traffic pays for all the travel expenses as well as their long term stay hotel rooms.

The business is so successful that the market expansion requires more product than can be brought in one girl at a time.

The scenes go by quickly with the pace of the business. When the killings start and the cartel war erupts, nothing can save Griselda from the violence.

Alberta Guerra plays Griselda’s closest confident, Dario, who has a taste of the ruthlessness needed to stay on top. Dario and Griselda soon enough become romantically involved, but the director shows more killings than bedroom scenes.

Baiz creates a reversal scene sequence when Griselda has a psychotropic experience while she takes her car through the car wash. The scenes get wrapped in a layer of aesthetics and transcendental flashbacks.

The narrative is otherwise linear, but so much is going on, that putting everything together in a straight line requires great skill.

The aesthetics of the reversal stands out because most of the series is shot in a kind of flat light, home movie format, like one of Griselda’s children was following her around with the family home movie camera. Biaz then also fills the scenes with interesting details, never wasting any part of the frame. 

Everything is kept real as could be with intermittent use of archival news reels on the television set.

A score drives the scenes in between characters taking hits of coke and becoming involved in deadly gun battles.

Griselda is not really portrayed as a hero as the first woman drug cartel lord. Instead, Vergara portrays her character as a kind of cold blooded business woman who become as ruthless as necessary. 

Connections from her former husband’s drug trafficking network help her move quickly before anyone else can take the market away from her like they tried to do to her one kilo of coke, so long ago now. Griselda never forgets the difficulty she has, partly because she is reminded at every turn, and hires her own security detail that doubles as hitmen.

Griselda is streaming on Netflix.

By PETER THOMAS BUSCH

When the Irish weren’t running to other continents from the potato famine, the Irish were in a full throttle rebellion against the religious occupation of Protestant England.

The two sisters, Dolours and Marian Price, occupy a lot of space on the narrative as soldiers in the Irish Republican Army whose resistance to religious persecution devolved into a violent struggle for redemption.

Director Michael Lennox uses the Belfast Project as a narrative device in which Dolours is interviewed about her involvement in what has become known as The Troubles. The Troubles was a violent clash of Irish resistant fighters and the British occupying Ireland in the 1970s, and about three ore decades thereafter.

The series show sin part that the Irish fought amongst themselves in a religious clash between Protestants and Catholics just as hard as they fought against the occupiers.

Lennox shows how the IRA carried out an urban gorilla campaign that frequently transferred over the relative short distance to London, England.

The streaming series plot reversal occurs when the sisters and 9 others travel from Belfast to London and plant four car bombs near buildings that represented the institution structure, colonialism perhaps, that supported the occupation, such as New Scotland Yard and the Old Bailey Courthouse on March 8, 1973.

The sisters, played by Lola Petticrew and Hazel Doupe, get caught partly as a result of mistakes made by the team leader, Dolours, but also because of an informant leaking information about the bombings to the British before the bombs go off. The British military had solicited IRA members to inform from the inside.

The narrative gets intersected by a wraparound that begins with a much older Dolours, played by Maxine Peake, being interviewed, but then quickly falls away to show the sisters as they are recruited into the IRA and eventually sent to prison for 8 years for their involvement in the bombings. 

The camera swings back around and records the last days of Dolours, eventually found overdosed in her own bed just as the information she had been leak to the Belfast Project is used to confront Jerry Adams, the suspected leader of the Irish Republican Army.

Lennox stays away from the faux docudrama look, and instead paints the scenes with that featurette film dramatization quality that seamlessly bleeds through 9 episodes.

A light score is used appropriate to the atmosphere, as a quite hymn frequently provides a backdrop to the plotters plotting and the guns and bombs going off, as well as the blank moments now and then when people never return to Belfast.

Lennox shows how the outward use of violence gradually begins to fold back into the inner circle of the urban gorilla movement with informants being discovered and disappearing – and also, once in a while a member is arrested.

The script is well sown together with the first episodes showing how the gorilla army was formed and carried out various missions, but then as the episodes begin to stack up at the same time the British make inroads, the violence bleeds them out until both sides sue for peace.

A little bit of aesthetics is used with a lot of violence, put into context with dialogue between a large cast of interesting characters, interconnected from episode to episode.

Say Nothing is streaming in Canada on Disney+.

POST WAR PARISIAN COUTURE REIMAGINED FOR GENERATIONS

By PETER THOMAS BUSCH

Fashion has been influenced by the circumstances whether the Parisian couturiers are surviving the austerity of the Great Depression or the persecution of NAZI occupation.

Series creator Todd A. Kessler designs the story boards around the beautiful dresses made for women in The New Look (Series 2024).

Ben Mendelsohn has the title role as Christian Dior while Juliette Binoche portrays Coco Chanel in a parallel narrative. Dior is establishing himself as the leading fashion designer in Paris while Chanel is struggling to remain relevant in Switzerland.

Mendelsohn plays Dior as slightly feminine, thoughtful and ever moving forward to create beautiful fashion.

The script says just as much about the war time society split between collaborators and resistance fighters as about the designers and competing couture houses of the Parisian fashion industry.

Christine’s younger sister, Catherine Dior, is portrayed by Maisie Williams, as she fights in the resistance during the war until her imprisonment at Ravensbrück concentration camp.

Dior initially is employed as a designer for Lucien Lelong, played by John Malkovich. Malkovich augments carefully chosen words with facial gestures and body language to express heart felt sentiment.

The fashion houses, run by people with warm hearts and an eye for detail, is contrasted by Coco Chanel oscillating between submissiveness and desperation. Chanel wants to maintain her position in fashion as newly defined couture emerges from the war years.

This 10 part streaming series on Apple TV+ wends through several twists and turns as the characters become immersed in several personal and systemic issues.

Mendelsohn shows how Dior was torn between his duty to Lelong and his fear of persecution by the occupiers while gradually accepting his own personal development as a leading fashion designer.

Essentially, Parisians did what they had to do to survive the war, and certain people managed to survive a bit better than other people.

Glenn Close appears as the influential Harper’s Bazaar editor, Carmel Snow. Carmel arrives just as Dior begins to explore the possibility of establishing his own house of couture.

Binoche develops Chanel as an interesting world renowned character with eccentric traits and the stubborn determination that made her the leading fashion designer. Chanel at times becomes consumed in self interest as she struggles to remain relevant.

The New Look explains the importance of the fashion industry to culture while also underscoring the negative impact of the war on the people behind couture.

As Dior’s influence spreads, the thorough discussions of the issues throughout the series fold back in on themselves to explain that life and all circumstances are inseparable from culture and fashion.