Three Identical Strangers. Tim Wardle, dir. This documentary is disturbingly sinister and strange. Triplets separated at six months are given up for adoption to three different sets of parents by a creepy adoption agency. They are reunited at nineteen. During all that time, they had no idea they were a threesome. They live it up after they reunite, enjoying a long-delayed camaraderie. Then, as one aunt says, things started turning funky. Separation anxiety at six months and possibly an inherited propensity for mental illness causes the good times to unravel.

The movie leaves viewers with more questions than answers. I won’t spoil the experience by mentioning the ones still haunting me. The movie is a conspiracy theorist’s delight. Starting with that adoption agency that misleads the three sets of parents, we learn that the triplets and their parents were unwitting participants in a larger, secret, and unpublished study, its results now squirreled away in an archive at Yale that can’t be opened until 2065. Mind-blowing! You will be thinking about this one for a long while, wondering how this could have happened…and why.

Mission Impossible: Fallout. Christopher McQuarrie, dir. Ho-hum. Boring. More car chases, motorcycle riding, and daring-do with a helicopter. More contrived plot with stupid technology. More Tom Cruise, which is even worse. (I can’t help seeing him as the antithesis of the fictional Jack Reacher.)

I guess this film proves that the summer movie offerings were really bad: I went to see this lengthy, confusing #whatever in the franchise. There’s so little originality coming out of the Hollywood mega-studios anymore…sort of like Big Five publishers and their formulaic and expensive offerings v. small presses and indie authors, who offer fresh voices and original stories. Putting the review of this disastrous movie on the same page as the one above fills me with guilt. Three Identical Strangers took the bad taste out of my mouth that Mission Impossible put there, thank goodness.

***

Soldiers of God. In the future, an FBI agent and a priest must battle religious fanatics…and a criminal mastermind. This stand-alone novel is a bridge between the “Clones and Mutants Trilogy” and the “Chaos Chronicles Trilogy.” Great late summer and fall reading.  On sale now at 50% off on Smashwords.

In libris libertas….   

This entry was posted on Friday, September 7th, 2018 at 3:30 am and is filed under Movie Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.