August 23, 2022

Chippendales · Breaking · Tik Tok

Plus: What's the deal with Adventures With a Purpose?

the true crime that's worth your time

This Welcome to Chippendales “teaser” is bullshit. Am I interested in seeing if known funny person Nanjani can play an arguable villain like Chippendales founder Somen Banerjee? Absolutely. Do I also want to see if his notoriously buff body will play a role in the Hulu series? Yes, ma’am. Would I happily settle for any other snippet of footage? Sure, why not. Does this teaser look like it was made with the “spotlight” function on an iPhone’s texting app? Yup yup.

As we know, Vanity Fair served up stills from the series a couple weeks ago and they are indeed intriguing, especially Juliette Lewis in top big hair form. So why the step back with that nothingburger of a teaser? Give the people something, Hulu, or hush up until you have something to share. Otherwise, I’m inclined to agree with the Nanjani respondent below. — EB

If you want to go see Breaking “unspoiled,” you should jump to the next item now. The John Boyega-starring film is being marketed as a heist movie (see the trailer above), but it’s not quite that simple: it’s about a real guy, Lance Corporal Brian Brown-Easley, who attempted to rob an Atlanta bank in 2017.

The movie is an adaptation of Aaron Gell’s 2018 longread, “‘They didn’t have to kill him’: The death of Lance Corporal Brian Easley.” The piece, which was published in U.S. military trade pub Task & Purpose, is a heartbreaking indictment of how the VA is failing folks like Brown-Easley, who returned from the Persian Gulf War with debilitating PTSD that left him reliant on disability payments to survive.

When the VA failed to pay him, the threat of homelessness prompted Brown-Easley to talk into a Wells Fargo with what he said was a bomb, and to take everyone inside hostage. As you can guess from Gell’s headline, things did not end in his favor.

The film was first screened at Sundance in January under another name: 892, the amount of his missing disability payment. A friend who saw it then said that the audience felt “deflated” at the film’s conclusion. “‘Deflated’ in a good way, like ‘we have been alerted to an injustice’?” I asked. “Deflated like ‘why did we have to go through all that’?” they responded.

I’ll admit that I sort of blew off that reaction at the time — I’m a big believer that we need to confront ugliness in the face if we truly want to enact change. But after watching the movie this week, I understand that Sundance audience’s reaction. It’s not that the movie is bad, or poorly acted, or boring. But as a viewer, you just wonder why you’re putting yourself through this — a question that feels even more relevant when there’s an excellent written piece that communicates the same information, but better.

Boyega is one of contemporary cinema’s greatest rising talents, but that’s due in large part to his broad and engaging charisma. As Brown-Easley, we see him actively tamping down his star quality, and he’s mostly successful — but it also makes you wonder why a naturally more subdued actor wasn’t just cast in the role, instead. (Jonathan Majors was reportedly the filmmakers’ first choice, until Marvel scheduling blocked his casting. I could see him having an easier time of retreating into the role.)

Unlike other bank robbery films with a social justice subtext (Dog Day Afternoon — also based on a true story — comes to mind), Brown-Easley never gets that showboat, star-turn moment, which sort of adds to the overall sense of airlessness. This is a very responsible approach, don’t get me wrong! The world does not need another “erratic bank robber who just might snap” film, nor do we need a movie that depicts a person with PTSD as unpredictable — especially when that person is real, with living relatives and other folks who loved him.

But dramatically, this is a problem for Breaking, even if we didn’t know how it all ends. Brown-Easley seems like a nice, albeit opaque, person who made a tragically bad decision, but from the jump we don’t feel any sense of peril for the hostages. We also don’t see any way out for the main character. It’s a big ask to expect an audience to engage, given that.

The rest of the cast is also good: Nicole Beharie, who I really feel should be cast in more things, brings her steady and calm presence to the bank manager/hostage role, and Selenis Leyva is just fine as the bank’s teller.

Ironically, the moment I felt most in my gut wasn’t related to any onscreen action, but to a real-life loss. When Michael K. Williams appeared onscreen as a hostage negotiator and fellow former Marine, the wind was knocked out of me. [“An ad for the film came on during the Mets game last night and I YELLED, ‘Michael K.!’ We really couldn’t spare him.” — SDB] Williams died unexpectedly nearly a year ago (September 6, 2021, to be exact); can you believe it’s been that long? I don’t think I realized how much I missed him until I saw him onscreen in Breaking, one of his final roles.

But even Williams’s presence isn’t enough to make me feel like this faithful adaptation of Gell’s reporting is worth your leisure-time viewing, especially given all the projects out there that are competing for our attention at this moment. In the end, there’s just not enough to work with to make this a compellingly dramatic feature film — and even if you haven’t read Gill’s report (or this item), you sort of know how this story is going to end from the first few scenes…and you know it’s not going to be pleasant. That means we end up with a movie that feels like a cross between homework and a chore. Life’s too short. Just read Gill’s story. — EB

Speaking of living relatives…Mariah Day was 17 when her mom, Betsy Faria, was killed, she told a local news station last year. That July 2021 interview with Fox 2 was the first time Day went on camera to talk about her mom, but she’s since developed a solid following on Tik Tok, where she calls out what she says were deceptive practices from the folks behind The Thing About Pam.

Even before the series aired, Day said she wasn’t interested in watching, telling the local NBC affiliate that though she spoke at length with producers and actors from the show, “It felt like they're kind of making a mockery of it.” Months later, she started posting Tik Toks that detail her side of interactions with the producers of the series.

“I mean, my mom's [alleged killer] is the main character. There's parts of it where she's consoling me and that's never happened in real life. It's just really cringey to watch,” Day told BuzzFeed last week, saying that she started posting to the social media app because “I just want people to see that I'm a real person and it affects me.”

Speaking with the Daily Dot, Day said that TTAP’s producers “just told me whatever they needed to say to get me to agree to” the series, and that “It was supposed to bring awareness to wrongful convictions and just the injustice of it all but it was just a mockery of the situation …It was just a funny little story they could bring to Hollywood.” — EB

The disappearance of Kiely Rodni appears to have been solved…by a group of YouTubers. Am I seriously writing that lead sentence without a “jk”? Yes, I am.

So, here’s the deal: Rodni, a 16-year-old from Northern California, disappeared after a party near Lake Tahoe about three weeks ago. Though law enforcement has been out searching the area since she was reported missing, it wasn’t the cops that found her remains: it was Adventures With a Purpose, a donation-and-ad-funded dive team that with a tagline of “Solving Crimes, Cleaning Up Our Ecosystem, and Bringing Closure to Families Along the Way!”

According to its website, it has 1.5 million subscribers on the platform, but that leaped to 2.49 million in recent days. That’s because, per the SF Chronicle’s story headlined “The Kiely Rodni case stumped police for weeks. YouTubers found her body in less than 48 hours,”

In an unusual move, the company announced that Rodni’s body and vehicle had been found on its Facebook page rather than coordinating the announcement with the family and officials organizing the search effort. Law enforcement officials did not immediately confirm that Rodni was located, but a news conference was planned for Monday morning.

“WE FOUND KIELY RODNI,” the dive team wrote on its Facebook page. “THIS IS A BREAKING NEWS LIVE STREAM ANNOUNCEMENT.” The group wrote that a “full edit of our search and recovery efforts will be available in the next few weeks.”

This isn’t the first time this volunteer dive team has made headlines for their role in a high-profile case. As noted by The Daily Beast:

Among their most notable cases was the December 2020 discovery of Ethan Kazerzak, a 22-year-old who was missing for seven years in Iowa. Last year, the group found an Arkansas mom and her daughter after nearly 23 years. In March, Adventures with Purpose found the remains of James Amabile, who had been missing for nearly 20 years.

The Sacramento Bee has an overall explainer on the group, noting that AWaP threatened to sue a group that offered a $100,000 reward for information to solve the 2013 disappearance of Ethan Kazmerzak. AWaP found his body in 2020, saying in one of its videos of the search that "This is a real-life treasure hunt…There's $100,000 on the line if you can find Ethan,” the Des Moines Register reported at the time:

Staley told the Register on Monday that he received an email from Leisek's group indicating it may file a lawsuit to try to collect. Leisek confirmed to the Register that his group is discussing possible legal action. 

He wants to reinvest the money in his business and use it to help other grieving families, Leisek said.  

“We never (pursued) Ethan’s case because there was a reward tied to it,” Leisek said. “(But) if you take away this reward, you have ruined the integrity of what rewards are there for.

"So we just ask a God-loving county of donors do what’s right in their hearts.”

(It’s unclear from my rudimentary Googling how that case resolved — if you know more, drop it in the comments!)

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Even after reading this lengthy profile on the group from May, I’m still not clear what the organization’s overall goals are, above and beyond financial security (not that there’s anything wrong with that!).

Unlike the amateur detectives we’re spoken about in these pages, they don’t seem all that interested in the true crime/mystery angle of it all, nor do they charge up-front for their services: they’re very clear that they show up to investigate on a volunteer basis, with revenue coming from endorsements, endowments, and YouTube ads. According to AWaP’s Doug Bishop, “There’s a lot of people that are missing, underwater in America, I would estimate probably several thousand people.”

“It happens all the time, whether it’s an accident, whether it’s a suicide, murder.”

And now, it appears, his group is set to find, if not them all, a lot more of them. And yet…I am waiting for another shoe to drop. This might be more of a comment on me and my baggage than on AWaP, I’ll own that, but there’s something about their approach (the all caps? The streaming on Facebook?) that has me cocking a brow.

Of course, I’m also sure that as I type this, multiple cable channels are battling to take AWaP from YouTube to their network for a show along the lines of Duck Dynasty or (my secret fave) Dirty Rotten Cleaners. And with an alleged “several thousand” people to find, it seems like there’s an endless amount of content to present, if A&E (or whomever) can meet or beat what the group is making via other revenue streams. — EB

Wednesday on Best Evidence: Practical true-crime tips.

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