Back to the grindstone! One more entry on the year 2015. Let’s take a look at a few more pieces of pop culture fun from the last year.
The Jinx
This definitely became the year of the true crime mystery. The first season of Serial ended in 2015, the next show on the list ended the year, and this fit nicely in the middle. It’s an HBO series all about a wealthy real estate mogul and the three mysterious murders that have happened around him. What makes it especially riveting are the one on one interviews that the director scored with the suspected killer, Robert Durst. He’s got to be one of the most compelling characters in the world, and the series has the most jaw dropping conclusion of anything you’ll see this or any other year. The strange thing is, I knew what the ending was before I started, and even then I found the ending surprising, and Durst himself at least somewhat likeable. He just seems like a harmless weirdo when he’s actually anything but.
Making a Murderer
This series was uploaded to Netflix all at once in December, and made for a hell of a binge over the Christmas break. These true crime things sink their fangs into me like nothing else, and once I get started it’s hard for me to stop. Just for the sake of contrast, I love comics, I love Marvel, I love David Tennant and I’ve loved what I’ve seen of Jessica Jones, but I still haven’t finished that series. (I know. I’m ashamed.) But, this Making a Murderer series is completely gripping and urgent. You feel like you have to keep going just to find out what the next twist will be. And man, there are so many twists. I found myself yelling at the TV more than I do during an entire season of Game of Thrones. Ach! I just stopped for a second to look something up about the show, and I fell into a half-hour hole of articles about it! It’s so engrossing that even though the series is over I’m still obsessed with it.
Fantastic Four
Finally, let’s talk about the biggest disaster to hit theatres this year. The Fantastic Four movie is more than just bad. When people say that a movie is bad, they generally mean that it’s mediocre. It aims for the lowest common denominator, or there are some bad choices. I think there are very few movies that make it to theatres that are genuinely bad. This is one of them, and it seems like it’s a product of one bad decision after another. Chief among them is how much it differs from the source material. As the years have gone on, superhero movies look more and more like their comic book counterparts. I mean, there are pictures circulating of Benedict Cumberbatch as Doctor Strange and it looks like Steve Ditko drew him! Fantastic Four, though, basically just uses the characters names and powers. Everything else is completely new. And, completely bad. It does have one thing going for it, though. I see a lot of movies every year, and nothing generated as much conversation between my wife and I as this one. “Why would Doctor Doom do that?” “Why did the special effects look so bad?” “Why did they make The Thing such a non-entity?” I definitely recommend that you see it if only to learn what a truly bad blockbuster looks like.
Graham Becksted promises that next week will be all about 2016. Probably. He is also the author of Graham’s Grumbles, the second blog by that name that is listed in Google results when you search for Graham’s Grumbles. If you would like to be his 101st follower (thank you, bots), he can be followed on Twitter @GrahamBecksted
