Movie Review – Always Be My Maybe

TL;DR – Charming, awkward, delightful, weird, and a hell of a good time.     

Score – 4 out of 5 stars

Post-Credit Scene – Stay for the mid-credit song

Always Be My Maybe . Image Credit: Netflix.

Review

Well, Netflix is currently creating a niche for itself with the romantic comedy genre and today we get to look at another entry into this lineup. However, while some might feel that this is the service limiting itself, I don’t, especially when we get gems like this. Today we look at a film that completely knows what it wants to be, and how best to use their main leads to achieve that as we dive into the world of garage bands and upmarket transcendent Asian restaurants.  

So to set the scene, we open in on Sasha (Miya Cech) who lives with her parents in San Francisco but often spends time alone because her parents work for long hours at their shop. However, Sasha is not really alone because her best friend Marcus (Emerson Min) lives next door and his parents Harry (James Saito) and Judy (Susan Park) teach Sasha about cooking and the joy of using scissors for everything (seriously scissors are an amazing tool in the kitchen). For years they were best friends until one fateful day when Sasha (Ali Wong) and Marcus (Randall Park) became a bit more than friends and then it all fell apart. Fifteen years later, they are both in completely different places in their lives and in different relationships when their old friend and Sasha’s business partner, Veronica (Michelle Buteau) puts them on a collision course with each other.

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TV Review – When They See Us

TL;DR – This is a series that I think is important for everyone to see because what we do has consequences and those consequences can be ruined lives.

Score – 5 out of 5 stars

When They See Us. Image Credit: Netflix.

Review

When I loaded up this limited series, I kind of had an idea of what to expect. I had heard about the Central Park Five before and I thought I had a rough framework as to what happened and of course, having the blowhard-in-chief double down on it helped bring it all back into focus. However, while I understood what happened, it was an intellectual knowledge and not an emotional one. While I walked in here with what I thought was understanding, I now know I had no idea, none what so ever.

So to set the scene, one evening in April in New York City a group of young people of mostly African-American decent came together to have a bit of a raucous in Central Park. Soon the police arrived and brought a bunch of them in disturbing the peace after roughing more than a few of them in the process. However, later that night in the north section of the park woman was found clinging to life after being raped and assaulted. It is at this point that detective Linda Fairstein (Felicity Huffman) draws the connection between the two incidents. Soon Kevin Richardson (Asante Blackk), Antron McCray (Caleel Harris), Yusef Salaam (Ethan Herisse), Raymond Santana (Marquis Rodriguez), and Korey Wise (Jharrel Jerome) are dragged in front of the police, with no adults present. Soon the police would have their confessions, for assault and rape, confessions that looked dubious even under the most cursory inspection.

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