BEFORE: I took some time this weekend and caught up on some TV, I think I've watched nearly all of my shows that got recorded during the week I was away, except for "Survivor" and one episode of "Shark Tank". Now we just need to catch up on "Halloween Wars" and this week's "Masked Singer", then I can start making a list of things to do while I'm not watching movies through most of November and December. We took in a new cat from outside, the one that's been hanging around on our front porch for the past year, so she'll need to be trained on how to behave as an indoor cat, and then integrated into our brood, so that's probably first priority. Then I'd like to catch up on reading, cataloguing and organizing some comic books, and taking another four longboxes to my storage unit. After that, I've got to plan for Thanksgiving and start thinking about my Christmas mix CD and maybe make a dent in the holiday shopping. And then maybe I can think about watching some TV shows that I need to catch up on, now that I finished Season 2 of "The Orville", which was better than expected. Maybe I can watch one or two of the Marvel Netflix shows, like "Daredevil" or "Punisher", or keep moving forward with Season 1 of "Arrested Development" - but that's assuming that I get to all the other stuff first.
John Malkovich carries over from "Bird Box". He'll be here tomorrow too, so Malkovich will make it to the year-end countdown, at almost the last minute.
THE PLOT: A chronicle of the crimes of Ted Bundy from the perspective of Liz, his longtime girlfriend, who refused to believe the truth about him for years.
AFTER: The questions you always hear about Ted Bundy are the same, again and again - like "How did he get away with killing so many people, over such a long period of time?" and "How did so many women manage to fall in love with him, even women who he'd never met in person?". And then there's "Was he related in any way to wrestler King Kong Bundy?" OK, maybe that last one is just me - but the other two questions seem very relevant. We often joke about serial killers, how they can walk among us and look just like very normal people. For many years people who don't want to participate in Halloween shenanigans or dress up in silly or overly sexy costumes could just say, "I'm dressed like a serial killer, because they look just like everyone else." These days I tend to prefer the costume of "Someone who never lived up to their potential" so when someone says to me, "Hey, what are YOU supposed to be?" I can act dejected, look down at the floor and say, "Well, I was SUPPOSED to be a lot of things..."
This is where casting pretty boy Zac Efron as Ted Bundy offers something close to an explanation - Ted Bundy was an attractive man, and if you Google pictures of the two men, you'll see that Efron wasn't that far off. Plus Bundy had to be somewhat charismatic, and of top of that, he was studying law - not that all law students or lawyers are guilty of something, but as is shown in the second half of the film, who would know more about the technicalities of beating the rap as a serial killer than a lawyer? I hate to fall back on current politics, but in the news right now I think we're seeing what happens when we elect (mostly) lawyers to public office. If you want to create a society where the politicians are JUST barely skirting the edge of legal with all the campaign contributions and collusion deals, and making sure that phone calls and payoffs to porn stars are all TECHNICALLY legal, perhaps, but still, very very shady and mostly indefensible, sure, by all means, keep voting for lawyers for public office. BUT, if you want to maybe change the system, consider voting for someone without a law degree in 2020. Just putting that out there.
(ASIDE: Of course, I realize that Donald Trump is not a lawyer, never was one, never claimed to be. But many of the people he has appointed ARE lawyers, or former lawyers, or future criminals, and that's just never a good thing. Plus, he surrounded himself with lawyers like Michael Cohen and Rudy Giuliani, and we've seen what a house of cards that turned out to be. So I maintain that politics should be its own career track, and not just a dumping ground for ex-lawyers or failed lawyers, people who can really parse out the super-fine line between what's legal and illegal, as opposed to electing a regular person as President, who might tend to just stay away from anything that smells even remotely illegal, just to be on the safe side. Electing a lawyer as a politician is a bit like hiring Jared Fogle to run a day-care center, or putting coal and oil lobbyists in charge of the EPA - which Trump DID.)
My next thought is that Zac Efron is really fit, some good muscle definition, as seen not only here, but also in "Baywatch". I'm not usually one for admiring men's bodies, but this guy is really in fine shape, a solid human specimen. This also feels sort of appropriate for the movie, because if you think about it (and I just know when I make this point it's not going to sound like a good thing to say...) a serial killer probably does have to be in great shape. All that running through the woods, chasing down victims while carrying heavy power tools - it's not a good pastime for people who don't work out regularly. But I suppose even if you're not in shape when you start killing, then with all that dragging heavy bodies around, and cutting them up with hacksaws or even chainsaws, you may find yourself in better shape in no time flat. Yeah, I was right, that doesn't sound like a good thing to say at all. But I bet most people don't even stop to think about the exercise involved in the logistics of killing - digging shallow graves alone is probably great for the arm muscles.
We also have to consider that Ted Bundy operated as a serial killer in the 1970's, and that era had a different set of sexual politics. I know this sounds crazy, but there was an Equal Rights Amendment proposed in the 1970's, which stated quite simply that men and women have the same rights under the law - that would be a no-brainer today, but it FAILED as legislation in the 1970's - by the end of the decade, only 35 of the required 38 states had ratified it. So there were enough people alive in the 1970's that still believed that men and women are fundamentally different under the law, for purposes of employment, property, divorce, etc. despite the gains of the women's movement in the U.S. during the 1960's. (Ever since the men came back from World War II, and Rosie the Riveter was forced out of a job, it was a long road back...)
So even though we look at the past through a modern lens, you still have to stop and remember that in many fundamental ways, the 1970's were a very different time. Women were an important part of the workplace, but men were still considered the breadwinners, and for women who were single, divorced, or sole parents of children, in many minds there was something "wrong" there, and a woman wasn't complete unless she was a wife and a mother. And given the opportunity to be a mother, she might be expected to quit her job or put it on hold for years in order to raise her children. Perhaps this goes a long way toward explaining why Liz Kendall, a divorced single mother, thought she'd hit the jackpot when she started dating Bundy, and why she was willing to ignore the long car trips he took into other states when he went looking for his victims.
Eventually, of course, she couldn't help but notice that after moving to Utah from Seattle, whenever he went for a "ski trip" into Colorado or Idaho, he'd tend to get delayed by some silly charge of attempted kidnapping, and have to spend a few weeks incarcerated or return later for a hearing or two. But then again, he knew the legal objections to make, and could easily claim that the police had influenced the primary witness, or told her who to pick in the line-up, and he'd skate once again. And what he told Liz, over and over, was that the police in these different states were all part of some massive conspiracy, that he was on some kind of list ever since an incident back in Seattle. Which, umm, Liz kind of reported him for in the first place, so yeah, this relationship was really built on a solid foundation. But hey, better to be in a relationship with a suspected serial killer than to suffer the shame of being a single mother, right? (Again, it was the 1970's.)
Two other things allowed Bundy's crime spree to continue over the years - first, he was good as escaping from custody. Acting as his own lawyer gave him certain privileges, like access to legal materials and not having to wear handcuffs or leg cuffs in the law library, and this made jumping out of a second-floor window much easier. Also, this was in the early days of crime-scene tech, when they were still using fingerprints for ID but not DNA testing. So a guy who wore gloves and a ski-mask could get away with nearly anything. Hair tests, fiber analysis, even bite marks didn't have much sway in court, and many could be easily shot down. Hair found at a crime scene that's consistent with the suspect still could belong to someone else, but a DNA match is a lot harder to dispel.
I'm reading up on Bundy's crimes now on Wikipedia, and I think this film got things mostly right, only a few minor details were changed for dramatic effect - like the jailhouse conversation between Bundy and Kendall that opens the film (but is set years after his convictions) which in reality didn't take place in person, but over the phone instead. This is apparently my week for "snapbacks", when a movie opens with the most dramatic scene, and then goes back weeks or months or years to explain how we all got to this point. "Alpha" did this, so did "Let Me In", "Bird Box" and I think maybe "Dark Places" as well. I fondly remember the days before this trend dominated the structures of modern cinema.
But when Bundy's crimes finally caught up with him - it turns out that wherever he went in the late 1970's, even after escaping from prison, there were murders in whatever state that he happened to be hiding out in, including a Florida State University sorority house just a few blocks from the Holiday Inn he was living in. Still, he maintained his innocence on all counts, refusing to take a plea deal that would give him 75 years in jail, essentially a life sentence, but avoiding the death penalty. That takes some stones, or at least enough confidence to believe that he could beat the rap on one technical objection or another. Finally he decided to leverage the information that he remembered about his murders to postpone his execution, to stay alive a little longer, but this also gave the families of his victims some small bit of closure. It's very hard to think of that as a decent thing to do, all things considered, but that's how it was pitched at the time. So let's just agree that the 1970's were a strange time. Wait, I guess by the time they executed him, it was 1989 - well, the 1980's were a strange decade, too.
Also starring Zac Efron (last seen in "Baywatch"), Lily Collins (last seen in "Rules Don't Apply"), Kaya Scodelario (last seen in "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales"), Jeffrey Donovan (last seen in "Sicario: Day of the Soldado"), Angela Sarafyan (last seen in "Paranoia"), Dylan Baker (last seen in "2 Days in New York"), Brian Geraghty (last seen in "Bobby"), Terry Kinney (last seen in "Promised Land"), Jim Parsons (last seen in "Wish I Was Here"), Haley Joel Osment (last seen in "Yoga Hosers"), Grace Victoria Cox, James Hetfield (last seen in "Metallica; Some Kind of Monster"), Justin McCombs, Forba Shepherd, Ava Inman, Morgan Pyle, Grace Balbo, Leilani Barrett, Ryan Wesley Gilreath, Alan B. Jones (last seen in "White Boy Rick"), Ken Strunk (also last seen in "Promised Land"), James Harper, Barry Mulholland (last seen in "The Old Man & The Gun"), Kevin McClatchy (ditto), with archive footage of Ted Bundy.
RATING: 6 out of 10 fired public defenders
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