Six-episode follow-up to Andrew Jarecki's Emmy-winning series The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst lays out what has happened in the intervening eight years. Video / Max
Looking for some good entertainment recommendations for the wintry long weekend ahead? Reviewers Greg Bruce and Zanna Gillespie pick their favourite bizarre true stories that are currently available for streaming.
HE SAW
Can You Ever Forgive Me? (Disney+)
What elevates the true crime story of writer Lee Israel to thetop echelon of weirdness is not just that she had a successful career as a writer of biographies before she began forging letters to sell to unsuspecting New York City booksellers, but that the writing she illegally produced was legitimately excellent. She is so skilful in assuming the voices of famous literary types like Dorothy Parker and Noël Coward and in using those voices in service of her own funny, cutting prose, that it’s hard to believe she couldn’t find a way to make a legal living. Why, you will ask yourself, is this clearly talented person putting in so much work for so little money and such high risk of imprisonment? There are no easy answers in the bizarro world of Lee Israel. In her spare time, she makes weird prank calls, engages in general antisocial behaviour and lives in such filth that a pest exterminator refuses to enter her house. Take that raw material and give it to one of the modern movie world’s greatest writers Nicole Holofcener (You Hurt My Feelings), then cast Melissa McCarthy as Israel and Richard E. Grant as her criminal friend / enabler and you’ve got one of the weirdest, funniest, saddest true stories of the last decade.
Melissa McCarthy as Lee Israel and Richard E. Grant as Jack Hock in Can You Ever Forgive Me?
The only thing weirder than a documentary about a weird artist is a documentary about two weird artists, who are married to each other and living in one of the most chaotic and bizarrely functional dysfunctional relationships you’ve ever seen. Ushio and Noriko Shinohara are an elderly Japanese couple living boho lives in New York City. He: 80 and best known for the paintings he produces by punching canvases while wearing paint-soaked boxing gloves. She: 59 and until recently known mostly for enabling both his art and his selfish behaviour (sample comment: “The average one has to support the genius”). But she also makes art of her own – cartoons about a jerk called Bullie and a woman called Cutie who enables his selfish behaviour – and it’s fantastically good. It’s time Bullie learnt some hard truths.
The Beatles: Get Back (Disney+)
Watching the biggest band in history sitting around what looks like an aircraft hangar for three weeks - smoking, drinking and ignoring all input from George Harrison - might not seem that weird on the surface, but add the tension of Yoko Ono sitting far too close to John Lennon while he’s playing guitar, the eternal repetition of the songwriting process and large quantities of uncomfortable chat with fawning hangers-on in suits, and you’ll start wondering if maybe you shouldn’t have had so many of those mushrooms with dinner. Imagine the most awkward family gathering you’ve ever been to, but with Ringo Starr sitting sadly in the corner, on a drum riser, doing whatever Paul McCartney tells him to.
Watch The Beatles: Get Back on Disney Plus. Photo / Supplied
SHE SAW
Three Identical Strangers (Netflix)
Humans have done some truly awful things in the name of research - Harlow’s monkeys and the Stanford Experiment come to mind - but the story at the centre of Three Identical Strangers is among the cruellest. This 2018 documentary feature tells the story of three college-aged students who randomly discover they’re identical triplets, separated at birth for a nature versus nurture study conducted by New York-based psychiatrists Peter B. Neubauer and Viola W. Bernard in the 1960s. Using interviews, archival footage and reenactments, the film is a riveting and heartbreaking account of a futile and unreplicable science experiment conducted on unconsenting babies, the long-term effects of which will never really be understood.
Ashley Madison: Sex, Lies & Scandal (Netflix)
Like most of Netflix’s true-crime documentaries, Ashley Madison: Sex, Lies & Scandal is salacious and seedy and far too long. It seems the platform writes into its contracts that nothing is to be left on the cutting room floor and, if in doubt, rinse and repeat. Nevertheless, this three-part limited series about the rise and fall of the adultery website Ashley Madison - “Life is short: Have an affair” - is a weird and wild ride about human weakness, morality and stupidity. Anyone crying about homosexuality and trans rights ruining the sanctity of marriage are clearly barking up the wrong tree, AM’s 37 million adulterers are doing that. The documentary walks viewers, at a glacial pace, through the growth of the company and the fateful data leak that named and shamed its users. But it was more than just millions of marriages that unravelled after the leak, the company’s CEO had quite a lot of explaining to do as well.
Nine years since the release of season one, director Andrew Jarecki has finally delivered the second season of The Jinx: The Life and Deaths of Robert Durst and while it can in no way live up to the mind-blowing revelations of the first season, Durst is still a hugely compelling weirdo. Anyone who has seen the first season will know that it investigates mega-millionaire Durst’s involvement in the murders of his wife, his best friend and his neighbour. The series finished with a gasp-inducing audio recording, tantamount to a confession, which the production later turned over to the police who used it as the basis for his arrest. The newly released second series follows his arrest and trial and while it’s a little bit self-congratulatory - Jarecki includes footage of himself showing the season-one finale to one of the victim’s family, among other slightly cringey moments - there’s enough mad Durst content to warrant a full rewatch.
