Change Your Image
v9043yve
Reviews
Chef's Table: Pizza (2022)
Is this satire?
Never thought I'd start hating a dish because of a Netflix documentary, but here I am. This is basically one gigantic ad for one guy's pizza place... And I made the mistake of watching this.
The show starts off by proclaiming that "the best pizza IN THE WORLD is made in Phoenix, Arizona".
HAHAHHAHA.
Now, if you live anywhere outside the US, you're probably getting how dumb this is gonna get. Hysterical laughter from me at this point, because I'm not American and I don't feel the need to proclaim everything my country produces as "THE BEST IN THE WORLD".
So Chris went to Italy once and learned how to make pizza. He was surrounded by women you know, and they taught him the Mystical Art of Cooking, which for most people is a basic life skill. Chris is very proud because even though he is a man, he can also cook, which apparently makes him magic!
Also, he had the following revelations: food can be made from fresh ingredients, meals are generally better if you don't use canned products, not everything has to be based on corn, and fruit makes for perfectly good desert.
Chris, I saw your pizza and it's okay. It doesn't look terrible, but THE BEST PIZZA IN THE WORLD is definitely not burnt.
*I'm not Italian. Like that would matter, but I feel like Americans need this kind of information to be less confused.
Neal Brennan: Blocks (2022)
Mediocre man says mediocre things
This show is a guy telling you about stuff. Raise you hand if you've ever met a guy who felt like his mediocre life and opinions deserve everyone's attention. Yup, it's THAT uncle at a wedding.
This show is not unfunny. Neal or Brian or Tom or whatever starts off pretty well, but dives into just drab mediocrity pretty fast. He does have some interesting insights that bring you out of your comfort zone, but ultimately, his whole shtick is Guy Saying Things.
A lot of it is mildly funny, but my ultimate issue with him is that he doesn't seem to even remotely care about any of that stuff that he so desperately wants you to care about, so why should the audience care?
The Watchers (2022)
Average, even by Netflix standards...
Much like most of Ryan Murphy's productions, this show starts off with colorful characters and an intriguing plot line... only to completely disappoint by the second episode.
By the third one, "The Watchers" is kinda... brain dead. It's not interesting, it's not scary, the characters have basically turned into two-dimensional caricatures of themselves. It's like someone told a bunch of preschoolers to write a scary story about a family in a big house and the kids ran out of ideas after 10 minutes.
Murphy's shows all have one thing in common: they SEEM interesting, they FEEL interesting, but in the end, they're all just incredibly boring fluff pieces aspiring to be something way, way smarter than they are (2019's "The Politician" was a notable exception to that).
Such a disappointment, but not really, given Netflix's recent run of, ekhm, sub-par productions.
I wish someone had told me to skip it.
Krakowskie potwory (2022)
I am sick and tired of defending quality Polish shows. This is awesome
This is a good tv show. More than good.
It's weird AF, it's messy, and it might be confusing to Anglo-Saxon viewers. And THAT IS THE POINT. Embrace the weird the go with the flow.
"We" are not like "you". And yeah, you could watch yet another Netflix true crime show with a totally predictable ending, or some s**t about an alcoholic cop who don't give a f about the rules. OR you could watch something different for a change. Your choice.
Quite frankly, I was blown away by this. I've waited decades for a show about Slavic mythology. Soviet rule in Poland tried to erase each and every aspect of "paganism" in Poland. The legends of Wanda and Krak, or the many Celtic mounds in Kraków... There's so much history here that's just waiting to be discovered!
Some of these stories I grew up with, and some are news to me. As my grandma used to say, "Christianity never caught on in Poland" :D Poland is a country filled with magic, mysticism, and definitely not what we want the tourists think it is....
Catching Killers (2021)
Utter incompetence disguised as a tale heroism
Horrendous crimes! Officers who care SO MUCH! How come they're so bad at their jobs then?
The crimes presented here are truly sickening. How little the law cared about the victims is even more sickening (the people who died are almost exclusively referred to as "bodies").
The show's creators trying to present the people tasked with solving these crimes as heroes is... a whooole new level of sickening.
Framing the police as "the good guys trying to fight the system to get results" is downright insulting to the victims and survivors. The amount of evidence they neglected or didn't follow up on is mind boggling. Some of these cops have trouble stringing a sentence together (Netflix makes strategic cuts, bc if they go on for more than 2 sentences they sound like the cretins that they are, not all of them tho, to be fair). If it takes the police DECADES to find perps - same area, same mo, same type of victim, and you've literally had the suspect in custody... My pet parrot would do a better job at finding the guy.
Case after case the cops did a really, really bad job. If I was this bad at my job I'd get fired within a week. Naturally, Netflix, as always, carefully curates details about each case: enough to let them frame the story as one of true heroism, and not enough to make the viewer feel like their distrust in law enforcement is justified. The goal here is for you to have one simple takeway from this show: "cops good, crime bad". No critical thinking required.
Please stop glamorizing cops. Yes, they are human beings with emotions and families. But if they fail at their ONE JOB - decade after decade of trying to catch the perp, getting promoted in spite of zero results - they DO NOT deserve our praise, let alone a friggin' tv show.