nnenok

When Tadej Golob wrote the crime book Jezero/The Lake, he dove into the untapped market that is crime noir on Slovenian ground. There aren't many, if any at all, detective/crime/police dramas being written about this particular part of Europe, so his first try should be commended, and hopefully there will be many more to follow.

The production is excellent - I haven't seen a Slovenian tv show of this high quality before, it is obvious that everyone involved felt confident in what they were working on. All the details, from the general bleakness and colour scheme, the intro, the scenery ... Especially the scenery. Slovenia is well known for its beautiful nature and landscape, as well as the teeny tiny villages in the middle of mountains (the word "zaplankan", its literal translation being "living behind the hills", generally means "narrow-minded, provincial"). These small villages offer both a tight-knit group of people where everybody knows everybody, narrow-mindedness and scepticism about outsiders and visitors from "the big city", as well as the very literal small physical area, making the whole experience feel very claustrophobic. In this show, tensions arise from the small space and its limitations. This show offers interesting character studies (the main detective is, fittingly with your usual crime noir protagonist, a gloomy, grim person), likeable side characters, sprinkles of true Slovenian personality characteristics that make us unique (spying neigbours, beef soup, envy anyone?), and - most importantly - lot of insanely beautiful scenery that will make every Slovenian proud of our tiny nation.

I was super-excited about this film from the second I'd seen the trailer in February. From then on, I would just come back and rewatch the trailer at least once per week, if only just because even those three minutes cheered me up so much. This last year has already been a blessing with two other fantastic films about musical legends (Bohemian Rhapsody and Rocketman), but as someone who was thoroughly obsessed with the Beatles in my high school years (which only ended 15 years ago), this one I was most excited about. The Beatles' songs are the one of the few ones that can get covered and remade and never lose their charm - that's why I predict that even in 200 years time, there will still be a young person with a guitar pluckin' on Let it be or Yesterday near a bonfire.

Even though this film is not a biopic at all, it's a beautiful homage to the Beatles music, and about how bleak the world without it would be. The sweet love story and the hardship of stardom are presented well, and the cast is top notch - Kate McKinnon is always a win though.

Also, my fear was that they were going for a cliche ending of "waking up from a coma and realising it was all a dream", and I was very very pleased that they opted for a much more intelligent end. Perfect summer flick!

As a standalone psychological drama, this would be perfectly decent movie entertainment. However, it most certainly *isn't* the Black mirror we know and love. Black mirror is all about the faceless evils of modern technology which affect the everyday person. This episode, however, has a clear villain, it isn't relatable, as the only person really affected by it isn't someone like me and it doesn't make me feel like this could ever happen to me. And instead of the gloomy dread that usually comes with a BM episode, we are given action sequences and flashy entrances, and a conclusive ending where the technology that was a problem in the beginning isn't a problem (or a thing at all) anymore.

Secondly, the actual peace of technology in question was such a missed opportunity. Appliances and software such as Siri and Alexa terrify me to my very core, so I was very much looking forward to seeing how they will tackle it. And it was so disappointing, because it was completely glossed over. Surely, a better episode could be written with a product that is constantly listening in every conversation in the room, picking it up, and storing it. I hope the next season will get us a more satisfying take on "cloud based voice services".

As I said, as a standalone film, this was a perfectly decent entertainment. However, it did feel much more like a therapeutical project for Miley Cyrus (and I'm not mocking her here - she had a wild period in her life a few years ago as a consequence of being a celebrity which had an effect on her life, so channeling this was probably helpful to her growth). It didn't make me feel like how it should have though.