Category Archives: Reviews

The Weirdos Are Wolfing

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http://servuclean.com/category/janitorial-service/office-cleaners/ Hollywood spent years trying to build movies nobody could resist, and audiences started falling for the ones nobody could explain.

Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey has earned more than $1 billion overseas and nearly $600 million in North America. It is cinema built at the scale of Homer. Stars, monsters, armies, oceans and IMAX screens tall enough to give Zeus vertigo.

The blockbuster lives.

Yet the year’s stranger story belongs to the little creatures running between its feet.

Obsession cost $750,000 and has earned more than $400 million worldwide. Curry Barker, its 26-year-old writer and director, built his audience making comedy sketches and horror shorts for YouTube. He shot the movie in 20 days.

Kane Parsons was 20 when he directed Backrooms, adapted from the internet horror series he began as a teenager. The feature cost about $10 million and has earned more than $394 million. Parsons became the youngest director to open a movie at No. 1. (apnews.com⁠, peacocktv.com⁠, vanityfair.com⁠)

Now comes You Can See Everything, Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim’s three-hour documentary about Elizabeth Holmes.

That sentence barely describes it.

Holmes invited the filmmakers into her home 34 days before she entered federal prison. What began as an intimate documentary grew into a three-year collision among truth, performance and delusion. Early audiences at Telluride called it shocking, hilarious and among the best films of the year. The film reportedly includes elaborate reenactments and an unnamed Hollywood actress portraying Holmes, then slipping between the role and herself. (elle.com⁠, businessinsider.com⁠, thedailybeast.com⁠)

These films share little on paper. One concerns a wish that turns romantic longing into terror. Another traps people inside an endless maze of yellow rooms. The third places a convicted fraudster across from the one comedian uniquely equipped to stare into her machinery.

They share something more important.

They feel discovered.

For decades, Hollywood sold films through familiarity. A known character. A familiar franchise. A trailer that explained the premise, conflict, explosions and best joke before the lights dimmed.

These movies offer a door.

People enter because somebody online says, “You have to see this,” followed by, “I cannot tell you why.”

That mystery has become rare. Every celebrity shares breakfast. Every trailer receives a trailer. Every franchise arrives with a release calendar extending through the next presidential administration. The culture explains everything until nothing feels worth discovering.

Obsession and Backrooms grew from the internet, yet they resist its demand for instant clarity. They use its language of fragments, hidden passages and shared mythology. Their young audiences arrive already trained to investigate. Watching becomes part of a larger game. The movie continues through theories, reaction videos and arguments afterward.

You Can See Everything exploits a darker version of the same instinct. Holmes has spent her adult life manufacturing Elizabeth Holmes. Fielder has spent his career manufacturing Nathan Fielder. Each understands the camera as both witness and accomplice.

The audience must decide who is performing, who believes the performance and whether a difference remains. It’s telling that if you read the Holmes title top to bottom, it reads You Can See Everything. Left to right, however, it’s Everything You Can See.

That question belongs to this moment.

We live among curated selves, synthetic images and algorithms capable of imitating human voices. Our politicians perform sincerity. Our billionaires perform victimhood. Ordinary people perform their lives for strangers.

The culture has become smooth, branded and false.

These films arrive rough around the edges. They feel personal. They carry the exhilarating possibility that somebody might lose control of them. Even their flaws resemble fingerprints.

The Odyssey proves audiences still want to see the biggest ship Hollywood can build.

The weird little movies prove we also want to slip through a crack in the hull and find something alive inside.

Judgement of ‘The Pastor’s Wife’

The most frightening thing about Netflix’s terrific Death of the Pastor’s Wife is that it isn’t history yet.

We are accustomed to true-crime documentaries arriving after the blood has dried, the trial has ended and somebody has written a book. There is a comforting distance to them. Even the grisliest become archaeology.

This one is still happening.

Mica Miller died in April 2024, two days after serving divorce papers on her husband, John-Paul “JP” Miller, pastor of Solid Rock Church in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Her death was ruled a suicide. Miller has not been charged in connection with her death. He has, however, pleaded not guilty to subsequent federal charges of cyberstalking Mica and making false statements to investigators. His trial is scheduled for October. 

Netflix got there first.

Directors Julia Willoughby Nason and Michael Gasparro have made a three-part series so current that some of its participants cannot fully discuss what is happening. The effect is unnerving. We aren’t watching people remember a nightmare.

We are watching them live in one.

And it is difficult to watch Death of the Pastor’s Wife without getting furious.

At men. At white men. At God. At the church.

At a system that seems capable of discovering a reason why somebody else’s hands are tied every time a woman says somebody is tightening his around her life.

Most infuriating is how comfortably Jesus survives all of it.

Mica praises Jesus. The people around her praise Jesus. Her husband preaches Jesus. Religion doesn’t disappear when the behavior becomes ugly. It becomes part of the vocabulary through which the ugliness is explained, defended and sometimes sanctified.

The series gives Christians enough room to say these people perverted Christianity.

It also gives everyone else enough evidence to wonder how often Christianity provides the authority required to do the perverting.

Then something unexpected happens.

The congregation gets bigger.

It becomes the internet.

Mica’s death became a social-media phenomenon, with strangers digging through videos, sermons and records and refusing to stop talking about her. Ordinarily, “internet sleuths” are among the least reassuring words in the English language.

Here, they become something else. Witnesses.

The institutions that were supposed to protect Mica repeatedly proved inadequate to what she said was happening to her. South Carolina law did not adequately recognize the pattern of nonphysical coercive control her family says she endured. Her family now backs legislation known as Mica’s Law, which would criminalize coercive control and broaden the state’s understanding of domestic violence. 

State Senator Stephen Goldfinch said in June he intends to reintroduce the bill in January.

After watching this series, the bill deserves the kind of cultural recognition the Amber Alert achieved: a dead person’s name transformed into a warning system for the living.

But Death of the Pastor’s Wife suggests another kind of warning system already exists.

Us.

Social media cannot convict anyone. It shouldn’t. It can be reckless, cruel and spectacularly wrong.

But it can also make forgetting impossible.

That may explain why this series feels different from the endless conveyor belt of Netflix true crime. Nason and Gasparro aren’t excavating some safely concluded scandal. They’re dropping us into one whose legal, political and cultural consequences remain unresolved.

The documentary itself becomes part of the phenomenon it documents.

Mica Miller wanted people to hear her. Now millions can. Maybe that isn’t justice.

But it is one hell of a congregation.

Why Supergirl Flopped


Supergirl’s failure at the box office is less about one bad movie than about a structural change in audience behavior.

For roughly 15 years, Hollywood operated under the assumption that franchise recognition could compensate for everything else. If a film carried a superhero logo, belonged to a cinematic universe, and cost $200 million, there was a reasonable chance it would become an event. That assumption has weakened considerably.

The first change is economic. Ticket prices have climbed, streaming has improved, and audiences have become much more selective.

Moviegoers no longer ask, “What’s playing?” They ask, “What’s worth leaving home for?” A character they know vaguely is no longer enough.

The second change is that intellectual property has diminishing returns. Studios treated comic-book characters as interchangeable assets. They aren’t.

Batman is not Blue Beetle. Spider-Man is not Morbius. Superman is not Supergirl. Recognition exists on a spectrum, and studios often budget films as though every recognizable character has roughly the same commercial ceiling. They do not.

The third change is that shared universes have lost much of their novelty. In 2008, the promise that a story connected to something larger was exciting. In 2026, it is expected.

Connected universes have become infrastructure rather than spectacle. Simply telling audiences that this film matters to the larger mythology doesn’t create urgency anymore.

There’s also a creative issue. Much of modern blockbuster filmmaking has become risk-averse. Studios spend enormous sums minimizing risk, which often produces movies that feel professionally assembled rather than essential. When audiences sense that a film exists because a release calendar required it, rather than because someone had a compelling story to tell, they wait for streaming.

Hollywood also continues to misunderstand what “franchise fatigue” means. It isn’t fatigue with superheroes. It’s fatigue with mediocrity. Audiences still show up for films they believe are exceptional. They ignored weaker entries while embracing films that generated genuine enthusiasm. The genre isn’t dying. The middle of the genre is.

Finally, there is a budgeting problem. Spending $170–250 million on every franchise installment leaves almost no margin for error. A movie doesn’t have to be terrible to become a financial disaster. It merely has to be “pretty good.” When break-even requires $600–700 million worldwide, “pretty good” isn’t enough.

If those trends continue, expect studios to make fewer mega-budget films centered on secondary characters and more films with either iconic leads or significantly smaller budgets.

The era when almost any superhero could justify a $200 million investment may have met its kryptonite..