BEFORE: OK, last film for July tonight, so here's the format breakdown for the month:
7 Movies watched on cable (saved to DVD): The Devil's Double, The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, The Green Knight, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, Easy Virtue, Creed III, Frankie & Alice
7 Movies watched on cable (not saved): Bulletproof Monk, Barely Lethal, Reasonable Doubt, Arsenal, Blue Bayou, Son of a Gun, Conspiracy
6 watched on Netflix: Worth, The Bubble, Unicorn Store, Beckett, Earthquake Bird, Rebecca
1 watched on iTunes: American Assassin
2 watched on Amazon Prime: The Protégé, Vengeance
2 watched on Amazon Prime: The Protégé, Vengeance
1 watched on Disney+: Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania
2 watched in theaters: The Flash, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse
26 TOTAL
Cable still dominates my life, over half of my movies are still coming to me by way of my DVR, whether I can dub them to DVDs or not. If not, these movies may turn up later on a lesser channel with ads, like TNT on Demand or TBS on Demand, and I can always dub them later. Also took another big chunk out of my Netflix list this month, and also went out to the movies, not once but TWICE for superhero movies. Three superhero movies this month, that's what progress looks like to me, finally catching up on outstanding Marvel AND DC movies.
Phylicia Rashad carries over from "Creed III" and I'll list my August actor links tomorrow.
THE PLOT: A go-go dancer with multiple personality disorder struggles to remain her true self and begins working with a psychotherapist to uncover the mystery of the inner ghosts that haunt her.
AFTER: You know, I recorded this one back last year, I want to say - and put it on DVD, and now for the life of me, I can't really remember why. I guess I wanted to put something on the DVD with "Things We Lost in the Fire", I love making little double-bills like that on one disc, but was I really that interested in this story? The synopsis seems so ho-hum now, it's just a simple story about a woman with multiple personality disorder. Like, first off, who cares, and secondly, hasn't this been debunked over the last few years as a misdiagnosis, not a real psycological condition? I've got to check that out before I go any further, excuse me.
OK, so Wikipedia now calls it "dissociative identity disorder" and that sounds a little more specific than "multiple personality disorder" or "split personality". If I read between the lines, the name now suggests that two different personalities don't necessarily exist, it's that the patient has become disassociated from knowing who they are, right? The other term they toss around these days is "neuro-divergent", meaning the person thinks differently than most people, so I'm honestly surpised they didn't rename MPD as "identity-divergent", but then I suppose that sounds a bit perjorative, like the person really doesn't understand who they are AT ALL. Well, you say tomato, I say to-mah-to, I guess.
This is still a controversial diagnosis, so that means they either haven't studied it enough or found enough prime examples of it taking place, or maybe the psychiatrists in the world just can't come to some kind of consensus on what exactly this condition IS. The people with this condition also seem to have memory gaps, and are also more likely to have PTSD, borderline personality disorder, depression, substance use, OCD, eating disorders, sleep disorders, and then don't forget amnesia, seizures, anxiety disorders, and an urge to self-harm. Great, that's the whole ball of wax, isn't it? How is anyone supposed to get treated for DID if they've got all that other stuff going on, too? I suppose you have to start with the self-harm and the eating disorders and work backwards from there.
Still, this film claims to be "based on true events", which has become something of a meaningless phrase by now - a film needs to be either non-fiction or fiction, to either showcase true things that happened, or not. "Based on true events" could mean anything, because that's just admitting that you're telling a story that was kind of inspired by something that happened, and who's going to say otherwise, the movie police? To date nobody has ever gotten in trouble for changing around a couple of facts when making a non-documentary movie, and they probably never will. But somebody should be held accountable if they're taking on psychological conditions that don't really exist, or if they do, they end up portraying them incorrectly.
The story is set in 1973, when a dancer named Frankie Murdoch starts behaving in an odd way, she takes home the club DJ, who she seems to have a thing goin' on with, and then all of a sudden, she starts acting puritanical and starts calling him a sinner, and beats him over the head with a lamp. She also finds out her rent check has bounced because SOMEONE else wrote a check from her account for a fancy new dress and a wig, which are in her walk-in closet. The other dancers in the club also notice that Frankie's been doing the newspaper crossword, but with her other hand, and Frankie claims to have no memory of doing that.
Frankie loses her job at the club because she beat up the DJ, but this frees her up to be examined by Dr. Oz - no, not that one....this is Dr. Joseph Oswald. During psychotherapy and hypnosis, he learns she was two alter egos - a seven-year-old child named Genius and a southern white racist woman named Alice. So the rest of the film is putting together the traumatic events in Frankie's life that might have triggered her personality to split, or for her to become dissociated from her identity, or neuro-divergent or whatever you want to call it.
Really, who cares, I sure didn't, I mean I guess it's a good thing if a woman i able to get in touch with her past trauma and this prevents her from interrupting another woman's wedding or lying down in the middle of an intersection. More likely it seems like a big excuse to both cast Halle Berry as a go-go dancer AND give her a shot at another Oscar at the same time. Yeah, the first part worked but the second never really had a chance. Her character here just wasn't the slightest bit interesting until she started talking like a young girl. I mean, THAT was almost good enough to convince me that dissociative identity disorder exists, but yet deep in my heart I know it's just a movie, and I shouldn't completely believe this condition exists just because a movie says it does, right?
Also, does it make sense for a black woman to have an alter who is a white racist woman? How does that work? When Alice takes over and looks in the mirror, what does she see? Apparently when this happens, Alice tries to put on white make-up, and now I'm not sure if I should be offended by that. If it's offensive for a white person to put on blackface, then a black woman putting on white make-up should also be offensive, or else there's a double standard. And so what does Alice think, does she hate herself for being in the body of a black woman, or is the whole Alice personality just a symptom of Frankie's insecurity or self-hatred? Just asking, I have no idea how this is all supposed to work.
Then what exactly happened to Frankie? Did she HAVE a baby, or just imagine that she had a baby? And then what happened to the baby - because if it's wrong for a white family to disown a young woman who had a baby with a black man, then it's JUST as wrong for a black family to do the same to someone who had a baby with a white man. But it was so hard for me to tell what really happened in this movie, and what was just in Frankie's imagination.
Also starring Halle Berry (last seen in "Things We Lost in the Fire"), Stellan Skarsgard (last seen in "Thor: Love and Thunder"), Chandra Wilson (last seen in "Head of State"), Alex Diakun (last seen in "The X Files: I Want to Believe"), Joanne Baron (last seen in "This Is 40"), Brian Markinson (last seen in "Godzilla" (2014)), Matt Frewer (last seen in "The BFG"), Rosalyn Coleman (last seen in "Music of the Heart"), Melanie Papalia (last seen in "Hell or High Water"), Kira Clavell, Joey Bothwell, Adrian Holmes (last seen in "The Cabin in the Woods"), James Kirk (last seen in "Needle in a Timestack"), Andrew Francis (last seen in "The Unforgivable"), Vanessa Morgan, Michayla McKenzie, Megan Charpentier (last seen in "It: Chapter Two"), Katharine Isabelle (last seen in "Bad Times at the El Royale"), Kenneth W. Yanko, Emily Tennant (last seen in "Scooby-Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed"), Scott Lyster, Anne Marie DeLuise, Benjamin Cole, Rod Conway, Alexis Ioannidis, Xantha Radley (last seen in "Tully"), Colin Foo, Christina Schild (last seen in "Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian"), William J. Phillips, Daniella Evangelista.
RATING: 4 out of 10 crossword clues
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