Streaming on Apple TV, Prime Video - Rod Bishop recommends DTF ST. LOUIS (Steven Conrad, USA, 2026)

It sounds a lot like a US police series, but ignore the awful title. DTF St. Louis does have a police procedural sub-plot, but it’s definitely not generic television. 

Tennessee Williams once said: “America has only three cities: New York, San Francisco and New Orleans. Everywhere else is Cleveland.” Suburban Missouri looks as normal as most America suburbs can get. However, in this common-or-garden part of St. Louis, a weird, middle-class wife-swapping threesome holds court.

Local TV weather man Clark (Jason Bateman) has become best buddies with his on-air American Sign Language translator Floyd (David Harbour). Floyd is constantly shamed by his weight, and has lost any sexual interest in his wife Carol (Linda Cardellini) after she begins wearing baseball umpire attire. Clark coaxes Floyd into joining an app for married people wanting sexual hookups without commitment, and nothing is ever the same again.

Jason Bateman (left) Linda Cardellini (middle) David Harbour (right)

A minor character, played by Peter Saarsgard, who calls himself “Modern Love” while using a social media avatar of David Bowie in a dress, delivers the defining one-liner: “No-one’s normal. It just looks that way from across the street”.

Showrunner Steven Conrad, writes all seven episodes, his black humour and pathos never falling into cheap satire. Instead, his characters are all fully formed and congruent, and his empathetic dialogue underpins their aching, compassionate loneliness. 

Bateman, and especially Harbour, excel in developing a strange and weird, but ultimately loving relationship between the two men. Cardellini, deadpans her way as Carol and the police (Richard Jenkins and Joy Sunday) can only fumble, wide-eyed through their interviews, destabilized by the people they investigate over an apparent murder.

Richard Jenkins (left) Joy Sunday (right)

It’s brave television, if at times seemingly repetitive and occasionally meandering. 

*Soundtrack: Needle-drops include Marvin Gaye, Carole King, Bob Dylan, The Kinks, Aretha Franklin, Cream, Frankie Valli, The Zombies and The Temptations. The opening title music is The 5th Dimension’s version of Let The Sunshine In, and as the final episode concludes there’s an exhilarating The Flesh Failures (Let The Sunshine In). A little difficult to track down, it comes from the original 1968 Broadway cast recording of Hair, sung by cast member Melba Moore, and can be found on YouTube. Among the many comments: 

“I finally found it! I got here from DTF St. Louis”

“Crazy how hard it was to find this song from DTF St. Louis…awesome”

 “DTF brought me here…I had chills when this song came on at the end of the last episode”

“This is more beautiful than anything I’ve ever heard”

 “Great song, great artist, great series”.

 

On Apple TV - Rod Bishop recommends STAR CITY (Ronald D Moore, Matt Wolpert, Ben Nedivi, USA, 2026)

After five seasons of For All Mankind on Apple TV, the showrunners Moore, Wolper and Nedivi have produced an official spin-off.

It’s another space-race alternative history and Star City starts with the same premise: the Russians beat the Americans to a crewed landing on the Moon. But the similarities end there. This new series plots its own course as a paranoid spy thriller embedded in a counterfactual account of the 1970s Soviet space program.

The Russian “Chief Designer”, played by the underrated Rhys Ifens (channeling Max Von Sydow), pushes for a new, clandestine operation to send a crew of cosmonauts on a nine-month mission to Venus and rack up another space victory for the glory of Mother Russia.

The Americans have other ideas of course, and Star City spends almost as much time on spy craft as is does on space exploration. Le Carre’s “Moscow Rules” apply here and the malevolent Head of KGB surveillance Colonel Lyudmilla Rascova (the equally underrated Anna Maxwell Martin), holds command over the space scientists. She has to combat traitors and the dastardly Americans, with their CIA sponsored espionage, subterfuge and shadowy agents.

The grainy, gloomy cinematography and the totalitarian brutalist buildings of Star City give the series an unmistakable 1970s feel, reminiscent of the television adaptation of le Carre’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. George Smiley would feel at home here.

It’s one of those series that gets better with each passing episode, and as the surveillance increases, so does the tension. Every character comes to feel they are being watched, and only one mistake will end their careers and maybe their lives. Things might turn worse at any moment; like the old 1970s saying “paranoia is true perception”.

Ryan Britt: “Sometimes, and this is a compliment, you forget this is a show about space travel…When Star City is at its best it’s a slow-burning spy show with the subject of optimism under extreme pressure.””

 

ABOUT CARLA SIMON - Rod Bishop discovers the work of the Spanish director

Carla Simon

Catalan writer-director Carla Simón was six-years-old when she was orphaned. Both her parents died from needle-transmitted AIDS. 

Simón was forced to leave Barcelona for a small town in northern Catalonia, where she was raised by her uncle and his family. She later studied film in Barcelona and the London Film School. 

Now 39, she has helmed three feature films and eight shorts. 

 

SUMMER 1993 (2017), streaming on Apple TV

Simón’s first feature was an instant success and chosen to represent Spain at the 2018 Academy Awards. 

An autobiographical backstory to her latest feature Romería (2025), Summer 1993 opens with the orphaned six-year-old Frida (played by an astonishing Laia Artigas), being forced to leave Barcelona to live with her uncle Esteve, his wife Marga and their daughter Anna on a self-sufficient Catalonian farm.  

Frida is completely disorientated by the experience. Disorientated by farm life after Barcelona; disorientated by her new family; and particularly disorientated by a developing relationship with the four-year-old Anna. At various times, she puts the younger girl in danger and her new guardians fear they have been lumbered with a dysfunctional child. They wonder if they should get rid of her. 

In her village, rumours surround Frida and she becomes further disoriented when ostracized after bleeding in a playground accident. AIDS is never mentioned, but the blood phobia, the mention of ‘a virus’ and the constant trips to the doctor for blood tests make it clear both her parents have died of AIDS.

Frida’s hard-fought journey to accept her pariah status and come to terms with her new world drives a simple narrative distinguished by its heightened emotional power. Laia Artigas plays Frida brilliantly, with a poker face and wide-eyed observance of all around her, as she constantly figures out her new life. 

For a first feature, Summer 1993 heralds a fully formed filmmaker in confident control over nuance and ellipsis, and blessed with a quite remarkable child actor.

It won the Best First Feature Award at the Berlin Film Festival and three Spanish Goya Awards, including Best New Director and Best Screenplay. It won Best Director in the International Competition at Buenos Aires; and at the Gaudi Awards it garnered Best Film, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Supporting Actress, Best Editing. The Feroz Awards gave it Best Drama, Best Supporting Actor and Best Screenplay. In all, 30 awards from around the world.

 

 

ALCARRÀS (2022), streaming on Apple TV and Prime

Pedro Almodóvar has called Simón’s second feature a masterpiece: “Behind Alcarràs’s apparent simplicity lies a meticulous director, with hundreds of hours’ worth of work to make this masterpiece look like a documentary.”

It won the Golden Bear at the 2022 Berlin Film Festival and was Spain’s entry to the Academy Awards. Followed by Best Film, Best Director and Best Screenplay at Catalonia’s Gaudi Awards. Alcarrás screened in 60 international film festivals and sold to 35 territories.

The extended Solé family in Catalonia have farmed the same land for generations; land given to them in a verbal promise by a neighbouring family they hid during the Spanish Civil War. The new owner of the land disregards the old verbal agreement and wants them to destroy their fruit trees and install solar panels instead. Faced with rabbit plagues, flooding and price gouging from supermarkets, the family are marooned in a legal quagmire; their way of life doomed. 

The cast are entirely non-professional and Simón carefully fuses the rhythms of everyday farming life with the rhythms of the natural world. Hovering above her beautifully rendered portrait of this humanist family, is the encroachment of a ruthless commercial world wanting to repurpose the land and force protesting farmers into capitulation.

Once again, familial disorientation is Simón’s principal focus and this time a whole extended family are disoriented. Beautifully directed, Alcarrás once again also shows Simón’s extraordinary talent with actors of all ages.  

 

ROMERĺA (2025), current Spanish and Latin American Film Festival

In Competition at Cannes in 2025, Simón’s latest feature upgrades the orphaned six-year-old Frida of Summer 1993 to the now 18-year-old orphan Marina (Llúcia Garcia), who is wanting to apply for a scholarship to study film at a Barcelona university. 

But her name doesn’t appear on her father’s death certificate and she must obtain validation of her birth from a grandparent. Clutching her mother’s diary, she journeys to Vigo in Galicia to meet with her parental family for the first time. She wants her grandfather to sign the appropriate change to his son’s death certificate.

Everything is awkward about her visit, firstly with an uncle and his family; and then with a dressmaker aunt; with young cousins who have been warned not to touch Marina because of her blood; and with contradictory stories and dates about her parents. Finally at an extended family gathering in the sumptuous home of her grandparents, she finds she is anything but welcomed, or wanted.

Marina spends her whole pilgrimage (romeria) in wide-eyed, dazed disorientation, waiting for snippets of information about her parents. She does learn of their heroin addiction, their drug dealing, and her AIDS-positive mother taking Marina to Barcelona as a baby. She is devastated to learn the grandparents kept her AIDS-afflicted father a virtual hostage in their house until his death.

Simón then shifts gears from the naturalism of all her features, and creates a magical realist third act where Marina spectates on the lives of her parents.

Among its other qualities, Romería is a chance to wonder at who our parents really were before we were born. All Simón’s great strengths are in evidence here, her naturalistic acting performances; her ability to make us feel like wide-eyed spectators experiencing the chaotic humanity of extended family life; and the almost subliminal way she makes us feel the ache and pain of a lost family.

Carla Simón’s next project is a flamenco musical.

 

STREAMING ON APPLE TV+ & AMAZON PRIME VIDEO - Mike Retter recommends THE LAST GRIND (Pete Williams, Australia, 2023)

 

Jude Turner starring in Emotion Is Dead/The Last Grind (2023) 

Over the last couple of years, several people have brought up Emotion Is Dead (2023) and suggested I watch it. It's a loose thriller plot wrapped around a conceptually more interesting look at de-industrialised Elizabeth and closure of the Holden automobile plant. The film opens with old television sets playing nostalgic Holden commercials and rosy educational films about Elizabeth before the city was gutted of industry. It then centers on a young man in the present played by Jude Turner working as a gardener who starts thieving from wealthy clients. 

On the one hand, we have a valiant attempt to make an independent film that explores serious existential issues for many thousands of people. Social catastrophe comes in the wake of deindustrialisation and the film is quite aggressive in its position and sincere in its tribute to an ocean of people affected.  

But on the other hand, the film is filled with a great degree of caricature where it could have used more naturalism. The protagonist's mother is uncannily written like that of Vincent Gallo's mother in the black comedy Buffalo '66 (1998). She is dressed in Holden-branded clothing and living past glories of Peter Brock car races like Vincent Gallo's Buffalo Bill's obsessed VHS watching mother played by Anjelica Huston. The problem is, Emotion Is Dead plays it straight and it comes off as immature cliche. 

Left: Gabby Llewelyn as "Shazza" in Emotion Is Dead/The Last Grind (2023). Right: Anjelica Huston in Buffalo '66 (1998).

Sometimes artists use being born in a town as license of authenticity in regards to what they depict. But very little of Elizabeth's character, a city that has lots of it, is actually captured or depicted. Instead we get a cartoonish class consciousness, where an upper-crust university friend puts the protagonist through some demeaning hazing rituals. It's just ridiculous. Even the train journey is a lost opportunity to make an impression of the landscape or express the often atmospheric train cabin interiors. Elizabeth has many interesting vistas that catch the light and distinctive red soil that tip-toes to the desert. Much more attention to detail is spent capturing the leafy green Eastern suburbs where the lead actor does gardening work and arguably the film's sensibility lies.    

 

Buffalo New York, the hometown that director Vincent Gallo sometimes claims to hate, is shown in more focus, familiarity and reverence than anything about the Northern Suburbs in Emotion. Look at all the scuffed surfaces of Recckio's Bowling Center in South Buffalo. Gallo buys Christina Ricci a heart shaped cookie, a regional Buffalo specialty from Dickie's Donuts. The local Denny's haunt evokes transience and Americana. People online mourn the loss of Caffé Lococo, which became iconic because of how Buffalo '66 presented its graphical signage. You can make big claims about being a local and use it as a selling point for your film's authenticity, but what is the purpose if you don't capture the area's character?    

 

Another northern-born filmmaker who felt they had a golden ticket to depict these suburbs however they liked was Justin Kurzel. Snowtown (2011) on first release felt like a revelation. It had a high level of competence and a lot of skillful restraint in terms of naturalistic direction. But it's a film whose initial praise is now worth critical revision. In reality, its a film that depicts the lower-classes as entirely sub-human and takes the form of torture porn while dressed up as an art film. Ice cream vans with distorted chimes traveling across dilapidated expanses are hackneyed symbolism, naff comedic wide and suburban cliche.  

Justin Kurzel's hackneyed surrealism of ice-cream van and its distorted music traveling through the Northern Suburbs has dated poorly and his film Snowtown (2011) should be critically revised as anti-working class torture porn. In the case of Emotion, I just think director Pete Williams has been out of town too long. He's quite proudly a rootless cosmopolitan who left for London to study filmmaking, worked overseas in advertising and corporate media such as Amazon Prime, Disney Plus and doesn't speak like he's ever lived in Elizabeth at all. Although I think the central concept is great, which is to meditate on Holden car production vanishing from Australia despite being so embedded in our psyche, I just think its development was rushed and the thriller narrative desperately forced around it. Rather than being life finding a way through cracks of concrete, it felt a bit astro-turfed.     The film does have transcendent moments, some of the skateboarding and camera movement around this action is effective.. Empty tree-lined streets become a canvas to sketch movement through. Skate wheels transform dormant factory floors into playgrounds. Sequences like this often give us respite from the emo soundtrack with a recurring traditional score by Max Tulyewski, which does marry well with Johanis Lyons-Reid's images. These sequences make us feel the breeze and the score creates a delicateness for such moments.

Some of the skateboarding sequences in Emotion Is Dead/The Last Grind (2023) are quite transcendent and one of the visual strengths of the film.

The pop-punk emo tracks used probably meant a lot to the director.. But I'm not sure how well they resonate for the audience. For me, It's like taking the worst of the tail-end of a genre, where it had become as emasculated as the hippies that punk originally came to depose and stripped it of much of its noise and texture.. All the while expecting me to feel pathos. I just don't think this music sub-genre stands the test of time. But the use of such material isn't as egregious as say The Hounds Of Love (2016) using Joy Division for its groan-inducing ending.. Director Pete Williams does at the very least use the music logically to evoke his youth. In that sense it is personal filmmaking.  

 

The inter-cutting with archival footage and empty factories is memorable. If the film didn't push such a slapped together narrative around it, we could have had more of a poetic art film. But much of this intertwined historic material does serve the central concept well and validates the overall experience. The central character being a young man with no economic future is an important lightning rod and substantial core of the picture. An every-boy and cipher for the radicalised zoomer denied their birthright.  

Intertwined in Emotion Is Dead/The Last Grind (2023) are on-location TV installations that show archival material of a prouder and more successful Australia.

Intertwined in Emotion Is Dead/The Last Grind (2023) are on-location TV installations

that show archival material of a prouder and more successful Australia.

There is a class of filmmaking in this country where independents put some serious personal  money into equipment and craft to deliver a product with a level of sheen that if you squint looks  like Netflix. Lighting, high-end cameras, gimbels, rigs etc. These are usually made within popular  genres such as horror, zombie, fantasy .. But what they often lack is a sensibility of their own ..  It's like the filmmakers have missed a step, which is cinephilia and haven't drunk enough from the  well, haven't paid their cinephilic dues.. They have the energy and passion but no reference points  beyond Amazon Prime. Sometimes these productions feel like competent applications of youtube tutorials  but appear otherwise empty. I often think these films would be better-off made on simpler  equipment and shot in a rougher, more immediate way. The process itself forcing a unique  sensibility upon the film-form as it closer resembles the narrative.   Emotion is a step-above this content, it often does have a sensibility of its own, especially with its interwoven bigger picture, but I still think it could have been better served if shot in a more raw  style akin to the work of Larry Clark. Less would have been more when it came to dialogue and characterization. At times dramatically it felt like a TAFE short film and then at other moments  it truly did soar cinematically, usually when the protagonist was soaring down the road through  the breeze. But its mainstream commercial aesthetic shackles it, keeping intuition and discovery  from rising to the surface. A strength of indie cinema is the opportunity to capture the real,  accidental and what the universe offers through the process. Dry Winter (2021), a feature film  made within Flinders University honours program, achieves an intuitive sensibility while also tackling the subject of deindustrialisation by depicting idle hands doing the devil's work. Dry Winter was also  made on a fraction of Emotion's $300,000 budget.      It's probably important to point out the obvious and something that parallels the grand narrative of  Emotion. We don't really have a film industry. To say we have a film industry is like saying a  government department is an industry. We are living off past glories of Mad Max, Bad Boy Bubby, Crocodile Dundee, Picnic At Hanging Rock and probably the most recent being Chopper or Wolf Creek. The Philippou brothers and James Wan have carved-out sizeable niches within the horror  genre globally, but that doesn't constitute a national cinematic revival. There are only a few conventionally budgeted mainstream movies made here per year. And then a handful of art films competing for  limited funding. Outside of that, we have renegades and those willing to work on minuscule  budgets. That entire patchwork does not constitute a real industry.  We are not the Hollywood of Asia.. We don't compete with Asia at all. Hence those working  independently are often operating in isolation and with few peers doing the same thing. And this  affects the work.. It's not a rigorous environment or culture.. Whether it's the layman lacking  sophistication, the sophisticated making films for insular audiences or in Emotion's case the  cashed-up coming from a corporate TV background ultimately landing a middling work. It's not an  industry or culture with all pistons firing. How might this be remedied? BUT if you are interested in understanding local cinema, Emotion should be seen and its ambition respected. It's a first feature and despite all my criticism it has some originality in it. And although we should look at all films on their merits and objectively compare them to the wider world of cinema, the fact that we don't have a real industry does require us to appreciate how a work is made in isolation. And we will have our own understanding of certain local particulars that an international audience would not. Even when aspects of a work misfire, it can still be a film of historical importance and Emotion does take history  head-on.    Being self-funded, Pete William's film is able to critique (in the abstract) government,  unions and international finance's role in destroying the city of Elizabeth. Australian films  tend to ignore all this and go straight to critiquing the mostly men who were put out of  work by such deindustrialisation, depicting them as savage animals like in Snowtown (2011). So  as cartoonish as Emotion is at times, at least Williams gives the victims of oligarchy their dignity  rather than sticking the boot in.    If you would like a taste you can Check out the trailer

*********************************************** Mike Retter is a film director, of the indie feature Youth On The March, creator of the zine "Cinema Now", and the Podcast "Meat Bone Express", and part of the Port Film Co-op. This post was first published on Jan 27, 2026 on Bill Mousoulis's fabulous website PURE SHIT AUSTRALIA CINEMA © Mike Retter 2026

Streaming on Apple TV - Excellent crime adaptations - PRESUMED INNOCENT, BAD MONKEY, LADY IN THE LAKE

Adaptations are flowing thick and fast from Apple TV. For producers and editors commissioning stuff for TV's voracious appetite, there’s always some safety in knowing that the source material comes with a stamp of quality. Famous authors too. Scott Turow, Carl Hiaasen and Laura Lippmann. I haven’t read any of the latter but the adaptation of her 2022 book Lady in the Lake is the best thing I’ve seen of its kind all year. The series showrunner and director is Alma Ha’rel 

It’s Baltimore 1966 with a dip back to the late forties. Two minorities are the primary focus – the Jewish community of suburban Pikesville and the black community. The former is disturbed by the abduction of ten year old Tessie Durst and the subsequent hunt for her killer. Particularly disturbed is Maddie (Natalie Portman), a middle-aged woman who, we learn was once the girlfriend of the father of the murdered child. The relationship was frowned upon and went nowhere and Maddie  Morgenstern married Milton Schwartz, a much less interesting and far more orthodox man. Tessie’s disappearance triggers enormous changes in Maddie – she departs abruptly from home, her son is permanently antagonistic and she embarks on an attempt first to do a little insurance fraud and then to get into newspaper reporting. Along the way she starts fucking a black cop.

 

Across town Cleo Sherwood (Moses Ingram) is trying to eke out a living as window mannequin at Hecht’s department store and as barmaid hostess at a black nightclub run by Shell Gordon, the black rackets king of Baltimore and a man to be feared. Cleo has an ambition to get into politics via a job on the staff of prominent local Congresswoman  Myrtle Summer and is also trying to keep her son out of harm’s way as he embarks on a life of petty crime as a numbers collector. The collision of the two societies, separated mostly by a cynical police force and an even more cynical newspaper reporter makes for great drama. The ending must be as bleak as any in recent times.

 

Presumed Innocent is based on a book by Scott Turow, a Chicago lawyer, written in 1987  and filmed by Alan J Pakula back in 1990. I remember that Scott Murray drew my attention to the book and for quite some time I was a devotee of Turow’s very precise, slow boil legal/political/crime stories that peered into the politics and corruption of the fictional Kindle County, a part of the larger area dubbed I think the Tri-Cities. But we know it was really Turow’s Chicago. In a Balzacian fashion, characters bobbed up across the series of books from Presumed Innocent in 1987 to Reversible Errors in 2002. Cant say I’ve read any since. 

 

The new series (showrunner is the amazingly prolific David E Kelley), a long eight parts, starring Jake Gyllenhaal as Prosecutor Rusty Sabich, brings the story into the present. Back in 1987 there were no mobile phones and little CCTV to move the story along in the way that the new series does. It was complicated back then and the update piles on the clues that suggest at every step that we should have a sneaking feeling that Rusty may well have murdered his mistress. As far as I could see it doesn’t layout any clues as to who we finally learn did do it so the twist is a bit mediocre.

 

Bad Monkey benefits from taking its time. Carl Hiaasen is a great humourist, a great satirist but above all a writer with an implacable ability to open up the rotten can of worms that is Florida’s politics and law enforcement. The one previous attempt at making a movie of his books (at least his so-called ‘Adult Fiction”) was the stupendously mediocre Striptease way back in 1996. The TV series  (showrunner Bill Lawrence) tries to capture Hiaasen’s jocularity first via Vince Vaughan’s one man running standup dialogue as Andrew Yancy, a cop who has been tossed off the force then reinstated as a food inspector. It adds to it by possibly outright pillaging or by attempting to copy Hiaasen’s prose via a commentary track where a minor character far too frequently seeks to add a little humour by pointing out what is otherwise mostly the bleeding obvious. Still it does get Hiaasen’s focus – Florida corruption, pathetic police force, the sheer indolence of so many of the inhabitants and the tendency for many to take whatever criminal possibility is on offer. That gets a bravo. More Hiaasen please. 

 

In fact more adaptations of all three writers.  Done as well as they were done here would be just the ticket in between seasons of Slow Horses.

Streaming on Apple TV - Rod Bishop recommends RODENTS OF UNUSUAL SIZE (Quinn Costello, Chris Metzler, Jeff Springer, USA, 2017)

A nutria is a semi-aquatic swamp rat with web feet, big orange fangs, lots of fur and weighs up to 30 lbs. (13 kilos).

These plant-eating rats are literally eating up the Louisiana coastline, munching through the wetlands, destroying all the vegetation that binds the soil together, leaving the earth to wash away. Nothing can grow back.

Although found worldwide, they are abundant in the American Gulf States and during the 1970s, there was an estimated population of 20 million nutrias in Louisiana, now culled down “to only a couple of million”.

The Cajuns who live in the wetlands are losing their soil and their livelihoods in this life-or-death struggle with the nutrias. Every mile of wetland reduces the storm surges by about a foot. As Louisiana loses its wetlands, damage from hurricanes reaches further inland. 

Originally introduced from Argentina to the USA in the 1930s by the heir to the Tabasco fortunes as a cheaper alternative to farming muskrat fur, the nutrias escaped into the bayou during a hurricane (of course). They drove out all competitors; there is no natural predator (except alligators). Nutrias have a litter every three months; and with breasts on their backs can happily swim around the bayou carrying their children.

When activist animal rights groups brought the demand for fur down in the 1980s, the nutria trappers all left for the oil fields. Louisiana stopped hunting them, they bred out of control and increasingly destroyed the swamp. A Nutria Control Program ($5 a tail, no limit) was created and serious, well-equipped hunters are capable of making $1000 a day.

“If there’s one thing Hurricane Katrina taught us, it was having defective canals was not a good thing for human habitation”.

In New Orleans, the nutrias dig extensive burrows under the canals and when they hear each other digging, link their burrows up, creating a subterranean labyrinth. The canals start caving in.

Apart from eradication, two other strategies are used. 

Revive the fur trade. 

And eat them.

Not everyone in this documentary finds eating nutrias at all palatable. But, as proponents point out, they are extremely clean, lean animals that only eat roots and taste like something between rabbit and chicken. “Clean meat”.

One of New Orleans’ greatest contemporary trumpeters, Kermit Ruffins, calls himself “a master chef and I play music on the side”. He barbeques nutria at his jazz club in Treme. “We tell them it’s chicken and don’t tell them till the next day ‘[it’s nutria] in case they regurgitate.” Others have made nutria gumbo, nutria hot tamales and nutria sausage but resistance is still strong: “People just couldn’t get over eating something that looks like a large rat”.

And there are pets. Eric Demet keeps a very large one in his home: “She doesn’t know she’s a nutria. She doesn’t know what that is. She thinks she’s a dog…[nutrias] require a lot of maintenance and she doesn’t socialize with people she doesn’t know”. He carries his nutria around town in his arms or in a special cage on the back of his Harley Davidson. Demet is also a nutria hunter, killing thousands of them every year. 

The resilience of the nutrias is hard to separate from the resilience of the Louisianans.

This short, charming documentary is briefly introduced by Louisiana actor Wendell Pierce (The Wire, Treme, above) and boasts a great Cajun score from the Lost Bayou Ramblers.

Barbequed cane toad, anyone? Or maybe as my dentist suggested, a Gucci bag from cane toad hide?

Streaming on Apple TV- Rod Bishop reports on the troubled history of SHANTARAM (Eric Warren Singer, Steve Lightfoot, showrunners, USA, 2022)

Apple TV have canned Shantaram after one series. A huge hunk of Gregory David Roberts’ best-selling 900-page novel may never make it to a screen. 

A big title “To Be Continued” at the end of season one turns out to be just wishful thinking.

Adapting Shantaram has been a fraught experience for almost 20 years. The 27 producer credits are probably an indication of the difficulties encountered.

After the novel’s publication in 2003, Warners purchased the rights for a couple of million. By 2005, Eric Roth had been hired to rewrite Gregory David Robert’s first draft; Peter Weir was to direct and Johnny Depp was cast as the central character, an Australian, now thanks to a fake name and passport, called Lindsay (Lin) Ford. ‘Different interpretations’ occurred and Weir walked.

He was replaced by Mira Nair but Warners cancelled the shoot in 2007.

In 2013, Depp approached Joel Edgerton to play Lin and also join as a producer. Warners sounded out Garth Davies (Lion) as director. But production stalled again and the rights lapsed.

Gregory David Roberts (Charlie Hunnam)
Shantaram

In 2018, Apple announced a 10-part television series with Eric Warren Singer as the scriptwriter and showrunner. The budget was variously reported as $55 million and $100 million. Filming started in Victoria in 2019 with a planned relocation to India. Production was suspended once again in February due to the monsoon season and India’s worsening Covid numbers.

Filming restarted in May 2021, relocating to Thailand, again to avoid Covid outbreaks in India and photography was completed in December 2021. The series started streaming in October 2022 – in twelve episodes (not ten) - and was greeted with luke-warm reviews.

These 12 episodes cover Lin Ford’s escape from Pentridge Prison after two years of a 19-year sentence for armed robbery; his flight to Bombay under a fake name and a fake New Zealand passport; his friendship with tour guide Prabhu; his involvement with the Bombay underworld and its weird collection of multinational characters; and his time as a pretend doctor working in Bombay’s largest slum.

The rest of the book is missing: his small-time Bollywood career; villagers giving him the Marathi name Shantaram (“Man of God’s Peace”); his career in the drug and weapons trade; his prison time in a Mumbai jail; his continuing involvement with the Afghan mafia’s black-market currency and passport forgery; and his smuggling of weapons into Afghanistan for the mujahideen’s war against the Russians.

The luke-warm reviews are mostly critical of the narrative drive, inauthentic characters, the length, the ‘meandering story’ and the ‘false’ picture of life in Bombay. All a matter of opinion and personal taste really, but there are also plenty of viewers on blog sites who violently disagree. Some even consider it the best series of 2022. 

It looks expensive and almost certainly was, and presumably viewer numbers were disappointing, but unless another streamer picks it up, series one is all we’ll get.

The excellent casting has gone to waste. Despite his very dodgy Australian accent and one too many naked torso shots, Charlie Hunnam does a decent enough job as Lin Ford and he’s certainly more empathetic than Roberts managed with his own character in the book.

Shubham Saraf as Prabhu

Elektra Kilbey as Lisa

Antonia Desplat as Karla is mesmerizingly mysterious; Alexander Siddig provides quiet charisma as Afghan crime boss Khader Khan; Vincent Perez is suitably hapless as Didier, the German coffee house trader in underworld connections; Elektra Kilbey (Steve Kilby’s daughter) is more than convincing as the American prostitute Lisa and better than portrayed in the novel; and best of all, Shubham Saraf as Lin’s great Indian friend Prabhu has some reviewers suggesting he should have his own series.

A few Indian critics quite rightly point out their country men and women are somewhat peripheral to the story, but that was always the case in the book. 

Gregory David Roberts, addict, bank robber, escapee and on Australia’s most wanted list, learnt fluent Marathi, lived in the slum, but in Bombay immediately gravitated towards the international ex-pats. And what a shady bunch of underworld gangsters, pimps and fellow-travelers they were. 

Charlie Hunnam as Lin, Antonia Desplat as Karla

Although Roberts talks a lot about his own quest for redemption, he never seemed aware that having escaped the criminal world in Melbourne, he just walked straight into a criminal world in Bombay and quickly settled for its treacherous milieu. 

Either that, or he didn’t care.   

Streaming on Apple TV - Rod Bishop warmly welcomes WECRASHED (Drew Crevello, Lee Eisenberg, USA, 2022)

Millennial-scammer stories - a sort-of pop-up new genre – are making good fodder for film and television.

In these based-on-real-life tales, they scam each other, their parents, their friends, venture capitalists, investment lawyers, neighbours, real estate agents, gullible socialites…anyone really…and it makes for some often arresting viewing. 

In 2017, fraudsters extracted $US27 million from investors for their bogus Fyre Festival in the Bahamas and subsequently appeared in two documentaries Fyre Fraudand Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened and the TV series American Greed.  

The Millennial Silicon Valley bio-tech scammer from 2015, Elizabeth Holmes, became the subject of both a documentary The Inventor: Out for Blood in Silicon Valley and a TV series The Dropout. 

Julia Garner, Inventing Anna

Socialite scammer Anna Sorokin/Anna Delvey who pretended to be a wealthy German heiress between 2013-2017 had the TV series Inventing Anna  based on her frauds and she is currently working on her own documentary series (about herself) while still in custody. 

And following the documentary WeWork or the making and breaking of a $47 billion Unicorn, Adam Neumann, the WeWork co-founder from 2010, can now watch Jared Leto playing him in WeCrashed.

Leto, whose shape-shifting capabilities are at a Tilda Swinton level, was unrecognizable in his previous outing, House of Gucci.But in WeCrashed he looks just like Jared Leto, although at 50-years-of-age, he quite remarkably has no problem convincing audiences he is a Millennial. 

Leto gives an exuberant performance as this hustler-of-shared-office-work-spaces who transforms his business into a solutions-for-your-entire-life (“elevate the world’s consciousness”). WeWork was inexplicably valued at $47 billion before crashing to $10 billion when someone got a look at the books.

Leto is more than matched by Anne Hathaway as his wife Rebekah, an equally deluded New Age scammer who even starts WeGrow, a school for uncomprehending toddlers being taught how to be entrepreneurs. She has plenty of screen-time and arguably gives her character more nuance and depth than the often-cartoonish Newmann.

Among the supporting cast there’s none better than Kim Eui-sung playing Masayoshi Son, founder of the hugely successful Japanese investment conglomerate SoftBank. He enters the WeWork orbit after having made billions and just after he has established a $98 billion tech-venture-capital-fund with a $65 billion principal investment from the Saudi sovereign wealth fund (hello, Greg Norman!).

His modus operandi is to say little, be difficult to reach, break appointment after appointment, say little again, then call unexpectedly for a quick tour of the WeWork lobby, followed by 10 minutes in a limousine before coughing up a $4.4 billion investment.

Due diligence apparently is a pre-tech, old-world concept.

SoftBank eventually invested over $10 billion of “easy money” in WeWork and after the company blazingly crashed on the financial markets – described by The New York Times as “an implosion unlike any other in the history of start-ups” – the Japanese company was forced to write-down most of its investment ($9.2 billion).

Like the Elizabeth Holmes and Anna Sorokin series, WeCrashed has little to say about what this all means. What are the implications beyond watching a lot of people with money to burn invest in people who do little else but burn it? 

You are left slightly empty. Is schadenfreude not enough?