IN REVIEW

ULTRA RICH LA FAMILY DECONSTRUCTS INTO VIOLENCE

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

In the backdrop of the Nixon Presidency a young real estate entrepreneur starts to create a bit of space away from his father’s autocratic reach in The Apprentice (2024).

Sebastian Stan plays Donald Trump with all the facial nuances and personal vanity projects involved in an ambitious plan to rejuvenate New York City, which has been hit with a recession and a crimewave as well as disco.

Stan is interesting to watch as he creates the character incrementally.

Director Ali Abbasi keeps the camera on the rising real estate mogul as he reaches out to Roy Cohn, played by Jeremy Strong, at an exclusive high end New York City club.

Cohn is a ruthless lawyer who knows or has access to all the big deal makers in the city, such as the mayor. 

Trump’s big start up idea is to refit the historic Commodore Hotel, near Grand Central Station, into a swanky 1500 room hotel with a glass façade that will reflect the iconic buildings in the area. The whole city block needs a bump, and Trump is okay with taking on that project next.

In the club, the inexperienced Trump moves slowly, but he learns quickly from the connections he is making as Cohn introduces him around to his inner circle.  Trump’s first big ask of the political fixer is to make a Federal lawsuit, for discriminatory rental practices at their New York City housing project, go away.

Stan deadpans Trump’s lack of other worldly knowledge when he has a little chat with artist Andy Warhol, but Trump does not know who Warhol is.

Stan shows how Trump gets mentored by Cohn as Trump leaves his father’s charge and seeks to make his own name with the real estate project.

Cohn teaches Trump three rules of business: attack, deny and claim victory.

The close cropped camera follows Trump around from room to room inside New York City, as he learns the nuances of these three basic rules.

Abassi shows how Trump gradually develops confidence as he builds up business successes with the assistance of Cohn. The narrative goes from Trump’s involvement in a business controlled by Trump’s father, Fred, to Trump as a real estate mogul with the construction of Trump Tower.

The starting point is a young entrepreneur personally collecting rents and a budding deal maker with personalized license plates ‘DJT’. Collecting rents from low income people is not all that straight forward, though. And million dollar deals require a lot of insider knowledge that Trump does not have yet.

Trump and Cohn eventually come to a meeting of the minds which is basically that Cohn is ‘brutal” but ‘whatever he does he does for America.’

Strong creates a dark stealthy character in Cohn, who is shown to have the laconic approach of legal professionals who see the world through the singular lens of winning at all costs.

Cohn was involved in the McCarthy hearings that sought out communists in America. Cohn was also the prosecutor who had Ethel and Julius Rosenberg convicted for espionage in 1951.

The Rosenbergs were executed for leaking American nuclear secrets from the Manhattan Project to the Soviet Union. 

The camera also creates a certain take on the Trump family, with the hardliner patriarch, Fred, basically destroying his son, Freddie, who is made to feel shame for choosing to work as an airplane pilot.

The Trumps are able to just barely sit together for dinner, while Fred simultaneously dishes out personal criticism and business advice.

The camera also captures the moment Trump meets his first wife, Ivanka. Maria Bakalova plays the independent woman who becomes a dedicated wife until reason proves otherwise.

Abassi is not necessarily critical in his portrait of the young Trump, but he is not entirely flattering, either. 

The camera attempts to create an objective distillation of Trump’s early real estate career, while showing the various ways that deals get made in the high stakes real estate game.

By PETER THOMAS BUSCH

The terrorist attack shocked the world and change the idea of the Olympics forever.

Director Timothy Fehlbaum creates the inside view of how the story, that shattered the image of the international Olympic movement at the 1972 Munich Summer Olympics, unfolded on the international stage in September 5 (2024).

Fehlbaum creates the main narrative inside the Olympic broadcast center of ABC Sports, but then he also creates consecutive sidebar narratives as people outside the broadcast center get involved, or people inside leave and then come back.

The narrative remains extremely linear with the subplots moving forward with the story.

The 1972 Munich Olympics is a bigger event than previously known to the world because of international broadcasting’s use of satellite technology that relays live coverage to broadcast markets simultaneously. In all, 900 million viewers tuned into the ABC Sports coverage of the terrorist attack at the 1972 Munich Olympic Games.

The sports broadcast gets interrupted by a terrorist attack on the Israeli Olympic team when members of Black September, a Palestinian terrorist cell, sneak into the athletes’ village and take 9 Israeli athletes hostage inside their dorm rooms, with two additional athletes being killed in the process.

Peter Sarsgaard plays the President of ABC Sports, Roone Arlege, who makes the final decisions in the broadcast center, on a minute by minute basis until finding someone he can trust to do the same.

John Magaro plays producer Geoffrey Mason, with Ben Chaplin playing operations manager of the broadcast center, Marvin Bader.

Leonie Benesch is the German interpreter, Marianne Gebhardt, also known for her role as Greta, in the streaming series Babylon Berlin (Series 2017-2025) about a police detective in Berlin during the interwar years as radicle change begins to grip the nation.

Marianne’s role becomes more and more important as the sports story about American athletes at the Olympic Games becomes overtaken by the news story about the Israeli athlete hostages. 

ABC Sports has the broadcast rights to the games, and are just a hundred yards away from the hostage scene inside the athletes village. Sarsgaard shows how the journalist inside Arlege struggles with the broadcast executive to maintain control of the story unfolding in front of him.

The scenes are kept tight to emphasis the close quarters, such as close cropped head shots, which intensifies the importance of the decisions. A score is used to compel scenes in conjunction with the clicks of radio sets and analogue telephones.

The aesthetic of the 1970s technology and design of such machines as the analogue phones, the broadcast van and the police escort car plays a role in supplementing the reality from inside the broadcast center. 

The old school news machine is intentionally part of the set that becomes hard to ignore as the hostage takers begin negotiating with German authorities for the release of 200 Palestinian prisoners in exchange for the 9 Israeli hostages.

The production crews use the technology to get the story, as well as paper maps and city street plans.

Fehlbaum sticks to the script and shows how the news broadcast is produced by sports journalists instead of swinging the camera around to somehow being inside with the hostages, which no one was.

The script has interesting dialogue between the players that raises the ethical dilemma broadcast journalists often confront when telling stories on live television that are rapidly unfolding in realtime.

But the script does avoid the bigger discussions, although partly in the haste of collecting the facts to put the news story together.

The news story begins with the sound of machine gun fire in the distance of the Olympic athletes village, and the narrative slowly grinds out from that point until machine gun fire is heard again, this time at the airport as the hostages prepare to leave for Cario, Egypt. 

The little details of the events unfolding painstakingly materialize as the American Broadcast Company struggles to maintain ownership of the story. But this part of the news process adds to the intensity of the moment inside a small broadcast room jammed with various production staff.

Fehlbaum maintains the camera’s attention on the players on the inside of the story that replicates the intensity of professional journalists on the trail of a hot news story.