Why it's so much fun to watch Mississippi Mermaid and why you can't stop watching Tiger King

Sure it's not much more than a French take on a noir crime remake featuring an alluring femme fatale, but thanks to Francois Truffaut's Mississippi Mermaid (1969) is incredibly fun to watch - just ignore the improbability of many of the plot twists - thanks to his great, imaginative direction and the presence of two great French film stars in the leads, Catherine Deneuve and Jean-Paul Belmondo. The story, in short (based on a novel by the crime writer Cornell Woolrich) has a well-off factory owner in the French territory of Reunion resorting to the classifieds for a mail-order bride - which first of all is hysterical: Imgine Belmondo in need or a mail-order bride or Deneuve responding to want ad! Of course there are twists, which we see way before Belmondo does, but even he, playing a dolt (funny in itself as well), realizes that this is not the bride he'd expected - though he falls in love w/ her nevertheless (no surprise there) - until she bilks him of all his money. In short, he heads off to France to track her down, but when he finds her he falls in love w/ her all over again and the two embark on a completely improbable crime spree, no details necessary because who really cares about the plot? But Truffaut's touches make the movie lots of fun; to cite a few: the opening credits played out over a page of want ads and read by various men and women; the terrific way he fills us in on the back story while Belmondo drives at reckless speed on the narrow roads of Reunion (or wherever the film was actually shot), Belmondo (his stunt man of course) scaling balconies and ironwork to sneak into Deneave's top-floor apartment; the really funny dialog as they buy a getaway car, the absurdity of burying a body beneath the concrete floor of a house they're renting (Did you ever try to dig a grave beneath a concrete basement floor? It's really hard to do!), and the final moments which make a nice bookend w/ the great freeze-frame Truffaut used at the end of 400 Blows. In short, not a movie to take seriously but one to just plain enjoy.

A few words on the 7-part Netflix Erik Goode-Rebecca Chaiklin documentary series The Tiger King, about the zoo owner "Joe Exotic" and his years-long battle with animal-rights activist Carole Baskin. At least through the first three episodes as we examine the warped psyche of Joe and his increasingly bizarre behavior alongside the weird obsessive behavior of Baskin we just keep wondering: Could these people be real? Could this show can become any more weird? And it does become more and more weird as there are various unexpected twists in the story line through the first 3 episodes. But I have to say that eventually the filmmakers have made their point - everyone involved w/ the illegal market in tiger cats is at best weird and at worst malevolent and criminal, with many victims including not only the wildlife - and by the end we feel or at least I felt I'd had enough already; these are not people I'd want anything to do with ever, I'd never go to one of these "private zoos" nor would I have deal with these people, and I'd had enough - though I have to admit, I couldn't help but see it through to the end. Obviously the filmmakers worked long and hard on this project and it's really hard to "kill your darlings," but some judicious editing would have helped, I think.