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Reviews
The Upshaws (2021)
Pretty funny
This came autoplayed on Netflix after I fell asleep. When I woke up I ended up watching a few episodes, at like 3:40 in the morning. It's actually pretty funny. I think a lot of the negative reviews are folks who just hate sitcoms. I think we'd all have a better idea of these things of people who hate coffee didn't feel the need to review coffee shops, if ya know what I mean.
The Bridge (2013)
Kruger's portrayal was accurate
I usually only feel compelled to write a review when someone had given bad information in another review. Not that I don't love film and TV; but there's not much in that regard that is helpful - oh, I loved it; oh, I hated it. I don't have much to add to that chorus. But there are some folks - even folks claiming first-hand experience who should know better - who are calling out Diane Kruger's performance as an inaccurate portrayal of Aspergers. As someone who works in mental health, there's one thing I and anyone else in the field know well: mental, emotional and development conditions are simply not monolithic. They are never the same. Ever. Because people are never the same. And anyone who looks at a person with an issue and sees a box to tic off, yes or no, is seeing a condition and not a person. And that should, honestly, disqualify you from claiming any sort of expertise on the subject matter (though sadly there are plenty of clinicians who fall in this category). Because conditions are unique in their presentation to individuals, they are at best clusters of symptoms, - symptoms that are not only variable in their combinations but in their individual presentations. Especially with something like Aspergers, which is A SPECTRUM DISORDER, saying "that's not how someone with that condition acts" or "that's not what they do" is just plain unhelpful. People with spectrum disorders have difficulty with connection; but they are not robots and they don't lack feeling. They tend to feel very deeply. And Kruger's character, as we see, fits this. She feels things almost too much (another common trait of people on the spectrum, who have trouble with overload - sensory and/or emotional). Kruger's character has trouble with social cues and with understanding the point of, and accepting the reality of, deception. But she is curious. You can see it in her eyes. She wants to understand. That is SPOT ON in my experience. She also WANTS to connect with people. And when she does connect, she connects deeply. With her lieutenant and later with Marco. Earlier in life with her sister. This is also SPOT ON. And it's not an easy bit of acting to pull off - to act like you are detached but to seem like you're really not. That ain't easy. And it's more - and more complex - than what many award winning actors have done in even widely heralded performances. I'd also like to correct a specific piece of information that as given - that someone with a spectrum disorder would not be able to work in law enforcement. That is simply false. There are very few mental health conditions that (without prior hospitalization or run ins with the law) flat out disqualify from a job, even in criminal justice. I mean, for God's sake, police officers (and this is not a dig at police, just a fact) have one of the highest incidence of personality disorders of any career, especially cluster B disorders like 'sociopathy'. Granted, they tend to go undiagnosed, and they can weed you out of police work through standard psych testing, but plenty of sociopaths slip through, and there's no reason that someone like Sonya would be weeded out. She is intelligent, responsible, and her condition tends to make her scrupulously honest, dedicated to procedure, and generally risk-averse. Anyway, I could go on forever. But I'll give it a rest and just say, people with mental health conditions are not spectacles, folks! They are not their diagnosis, they are not foregone conclusions, they are PEOPLE. Just people who often behave differently than what we're accustomed to. I think Kruger's performance was a wonderful (and accurate) means of reminding people of this, if they'd give her character the benefit of the doubt and be thoughtful about human individuality. Humanity is wide, "a many-splendored thing", and it's good to be reminded, so skillfully, of some of its less-known corners.
Clarice (2021)
The Accent
I'm still making my mind up about the series, but I feel the need to defend Ms Breeds against all this nonsense about her 'southern accent' being horrible. First of all, there's no such thing as a southern accent. And the accent that comes to mind for most Americans is a condescending and truly awful impression of a way of speaking that was never even very common in the south, even with the particular upper class it was meant to mimic. I'm not going to get into the complexities of the many southern ways of speaking, which are extremely varied and are deeply entwined with the cultural and socio-economic history of England, Wales and Northern Ireland (Scots Irish), not to mention the profound influence of West Africa. I'll just say this: Ms Breeds nails the accent she's going for. Absolutely nails it, as Ms Foster had in the film. You can even hear, as with Ms Foster, a slight uneasiness with her own speech at times - as something that sets her apart from and 'below' her peers. I don't doubt that most people who live in the south and even younger people who live in most of WV today may not recognize that accent as genuine. The people who speak that way don't go on television, they don't have YouTube videos. They are, as many of them proudly admit, twenty or so years behind the rest of the country and extremely insular. Ms Foster is an extremely intelligent and assiduous woman who did her homework, and her academy award was well deserved. I think Ms Breeds probably learned more from Ms Foster accent than from anyone in WV (though I don't know that for a fact), but that's hardly to the point since Foster was so accurate to begin with. As I said upfront, I'm ambivalent about the series itself - it holds my interest but is really quite bad in many ways. But Ms Breeds's accent is not one of them.