Poor boy gets a scholarship to a rich kids school and he makes the most of it. Rich girl is very pretty but she is not quite right in the head, hard to say whether it's an inherent defect or living with her bitch-ass mother that made her this way. Most of the time she seems normal, but every now then she acts a little weird. Her mother collects a weird kind of bug, and our girl occasionally has hallucinations of these same kind of bugs crawling on her. The time line is a little jumbled, but three episodes in and we've got it pretty well sorted.
Our boy finds that his new connections at school enable him to break into the retail drug trade and start making serious money. One of his first purchases is a six cylinder motorcycle. The first name that came to mind was Benelli, but I checked and it is actually a Honda. The Benelli has six individual exhaust pipes, the Honda routes 3 pipes into one muffler on either side.
Insane Spanish soap opera. We have a full boat of characters: an adopted kid, a kidnapping, the whole panoply of the illegal drug business along with all the aspects of the criminal justice system. The show is set in two cities on opposite sides of the Atlantic Ocean: Valencia, Spain and Bogota, Colombia.
Primary characters:
Mom & Dad
Daughter Soledad
A pair of Spanish cops, male and female
A female Coiombian lawyer, her family and the judges she's screwing
the kidnapper
A pair of rival drug kingpins
Famous soap opera actress who is working in a feature film who is another mother to Soledad. Wait, what? Like I said, insane.
along with a vast array of henchmen and prison inmates.
According to rumor the prison La Brecha in the show is modeled on the real La Modelo prison.
We watched the whole thing and it was great. No false steps, the actors played their roles well. There were some things that wouldn't make sense to any right thinking person, but when people are dealing with strong emotions they don't always do what they ought. I call it a soap opera because in every episode there were a couple of scenes of people being sweet to each other. Fortunately they kept them short, a little syrup goes a long way. Somebody ought to do a body count, I'm guessing there might have been as many as a hundred over the eleven episodes, maybe less than half that, but there were a bunch. Some were even important characters. Episode ten was so over the top that I howled with laughter.
Update a week later replaced missing video. This one doesn't have subtitles, but what we're looking for is atmosphere and attitude, and this teaser does that fine.
Another review stolen from Variety, this one because of the subject, not because of the review itself. Trying to read a review on Variety is just an exercise in frustration. It isn't difficult to copy and paste and the end result makes for smooth reading. We watched Narcos and it was pretty great. There's also a show called Queen of the South that keeps popping up on Netflix. It sounds similar but it's about a Mexican woman, not a Colombian.
“Griselda” is a revenge story. Yes, it’s an account of real-life drug queenpin Griselda Blanco’s (an engrossing Sofía Vergara) rise to The Godmother of the Medellín Cartel. But this tale isn’t an account of some distressed damsel who gets swept up in the underworld. Instead, what creator Eric Newman offers is a window into the mind of a highly meticulous and intelligent woman, intent on taking back everything that was ever stolen from her, even if she destroys herself in the process. Fast-paced and well-acted, the show is brutal, fascinating and full of high drama. It all begins with a bold escape.
Produced by the team behind “Narcos,” the limited series opens in the late 1970s in Medellín, Columbia. An obviously distressed, injured Griselda rushes in the front door of her well-curated home. She makes a frantic phone call to a friend, Carmen (Paulina Dávila), before packing a bag and rousing her sons, Ozzy (Martín Fajardo), Uber (Jose Velazquez) and Dixon (Orlando Pineda). As she ushers the boys out of the house, suitcases in hand, she informs them she is divorcing their stepfather and they are moving to Miami.
Griselda leaves things unsettled in Medellín, which plays out later on, but when she and her sons land in Miami in 1978, she eagerly embraces the city’s frenetic energy. Despite the predictable beats of the show, what’s fascinating about “Griselda” is that the audience meets her exactly in the middle of her life; this is hardly the beginning of her story. It’s immediately clear that reinvention is something Griselda has mastered.
Cramped in Carmen’s tiny house with her three sons, Griselda isn’t content to work the front desk at her friend’s travel agency. Undeterred by the promises she’s made to Carmen regarding getting out of the drug game, she begins working immediately to sell the kilo of coke she’s smuggled into the country. Determined to rebuild for herself and her children, the show depicts the crime boss painstakingly carving out a plan for complete power. She shifts and changes her tactics as she encounters misogyny, machoism, violence and intimidation. For Vergara, who serves as an executive producer on the show and has built her career in the comedy space, watching her transform into an increasingly agitated and vicious woman is something to behold — prosthetics and 1970s fashion included.
While “Griselda” compresses the three years of La Jefa’s time in South Florida into just six hour-long chapters, not a moment or line of dialogue is wasted. No character or choice is insignificant. The scenes are so sharply cut that the series is perfectly paced. As carefully as the show outlines Griselda’s rise as a savior to the oppressed, by Episode 5, “Paradise Lost,” which jumps ahead to 1981, it’s clear this life of bloodshed, police surveillance and intense paranoia has morphed Griselda into someone else entirely. Touting a shorter haircut, weathered skin and yellowing teeth, she has become a crack-cocaine-fueled Scarface-like monster in a lavish castle. A delirious episode that showcases tropes of telenovelas, it’s almost unsettling to watch, but the chaotic narrative reveals how quickly power and greed can warp the human spirit.
The entire cast, including Vergara, is stellar in this display of ambition and retaliation. However, Martín Rodríguez’s turn as Jorge “Rivi” Ayala-Rivera, a top-hitter in Miami, is one of the most mesmerizing performances of a criminal mastermind on TV recently. Slithery, erratic and sensual, he has a disturbing presence anchoring the audience in the era and super-specific world. The performances and the setting make up for a few elements that don’t quite meld in “Griselda,” including a hand-motion Griselda makes while holding a cigarette throughout the series. It’s supposed to demonstrate how her mind devises her plans, but it feels too on the nose. There is also a strange slow-motion scene from Episode 2, “Rich White People,” which doesn’t quite fit the show’s tone.
Still, even with its minor missteps, “Griselda” soars, showcasing a woman who transforms into a predator after being prey for so long. Though it certainly isn’t aspirational, there is much to be said about taking control of one’s narrative. After all, if we are honest with ourselves, some of the things that we do are to survive. But others are to feed our pride and egos.
Undercover Law Demo | Caracol Internacional
Caracol Play
I'm not too sure about this. It looks likeCharlie's Angels, we've got four good looking, young women like Charlie's Angels, but the show has been transplanted to Colombia. The women are working for the DPI*, which, presumably, is the Colombian equivalent of our very own DEA. So good looking women. That gets it a plus one.
The dedicated DPI agents(as opposed to the those being coerced) greet their boss with 'For God and Country' which is a fine thing, but then again it makes it sound like a religious order, which perhaps it is. There are numerous scenes of satellite imagery and the cop's computerized control center which makes me realize they are probably just as high tech as our cops are. It's kind of a surprise because most of Latin America is supposed to be so poor. Hmm, with our growing homeless population and increasing inflation maybe we aren't so different.
I think it does a fairly good job of representing undercover work. That's another plus. The four women have been sent to infiltrate four different aspects of the illegal drug business. We've got one woman working as a cook in a jungle camp where the drugs are produced. We've got another living in the poor people's district, fooling around with a low level drug dealer in Bogota. The third is working as fitness instructor, trying to get in with upper class people who are helping organize higher level distribution and the fourth is playing house with her ex-boyfriend, trying to infiltrate a money laundering operation run by rich people. All this is being done to get to the kingpin.
The guy running the camp rules with an iron fist which I have come to expect in any show about the illicit drug business. He executes a snitch, never mind that the snitch claimed that the police had threatened to kill his family if he didn't snitch. The police / military don't come off any better. Several times people tell us that a family member was either kidnapped or murdered by the police. And the honchos running this undercover operation don't garner any sympathy either. One woman is only working as a snitch to avoid being sent to jail after being caught trying to smuggle drugs to America. Never mind that her boyfriend set her up to get busted so that several other mules would get through without being molested.
Another woman's mother is dying of cancer and she is very attached to her mother, perhaps even overly attached, but then not everyone is a cold hearted bastard. Anyway, the only way she can get her mother treatment is continue working undercover, which takes her far away from her mother.
On the downside, it's a soap opera, long scenes of people being mopey, or flirty, or flakey, or argueing, so that kind of drags. There seem to be a disproportionate number of women, but maybe I'm just used to watching shows that are full of men. We're eight episodes in right now and it's moving along, but I fully expect several of the characters to start acting insane in the next week or two and that will probably be the end of it.
Netflix 60 episodes, about one hour each, in Spanish with English subtitles.
*Ask Google about DPI and you get the National Police of Colombia, but nowhere did I find an definition of the acronym that refers to the police. I think it must be the Department of Police Intelligence. It does show up in the opening. Kind of weird, man.
