Cinemavenger

   The funniest, nastiest movie reviews anywhere.

The OA (or Why most TV show recommendations are shit)

Hold on to your tits, because we're taking a detour from movies into "TV" this week. Why? I don't know. Stupid Covid?

Back in the day there were only three major networks on TV. So, everyone watched - or at least knew about - all the same shows. Nowadays, with the twenty-hundred streaming options out there, there are a fuckload too many "TV shows" to keep track of. I guess that's why every other motherfucker who crosses your path feels compelled to tell you about some show that you JUST HAVE TO WATCH.

Once in a blue moon these happy assholes hit the mark. The rest of the time, it's a literal shit show. The latest example for me was a Netflix series, The OA. A bunch of people told me to watch this thing. Now that I have, all I can say is, "Fuck those people."

Prairie (Brit "Wit" Marling), a woman in her late 20s who's been missing for seven years, suddenly reappears, but now she wants to be called "the OA," which stands for MINOR SPOILER ALERT, the original angel. Like religion in general, the fact that this show put "angel" right in its title makes no fucking sense when you realize that, while the show plays with interdimensional and time travel, it never makes it into the same fucking zip code as angels of any kind.

The mythology that The OA painstakingly sets up is tossed out the window as quickly as the characters explain it. You have to leave the door to your house open in order to jump dimensions. Except you don't. Goofy interpretive dance (wait, is that redundant?) is apparently the key to everything, but it must be done with "true feeling," whatever the fuck that means. Until it can be done by robots.

Sometimes five people need to shake their thangs to send one person to another dimension. Other times everyone ends up making the jump. A handful of characters are held captive by a psycho for years so that he can do near-death experiments on them. He gives them a bunch of chances to escape, chances none of them ever even really try to take advantage of.

Oh, and the co-creator and show runner wants us to believe his real name is Zal Batmanglij. Ok, Bru Swayenovich.

June 25, 2021