Flu reviews

So there I was Wednesday night, sitting contentedly in seat 8-A on my flight home to Florida when – OH. MY. GOD. – I realized I was about to be sick. (Warning to the squeamish: You might want to skip to paragraph 5.)

Not just sick, I was gonna vomit and it wasn’t going to be something subtle I could hide from my fellow passengers. I was about to release a stream of projectile vomit so forceful the doors of the cockpit would blow open and the pilots would be sucked out the windshield like the bad guy in Goldfinger.

Somehow, mercifully, I managed to hold it off until the plane landed.

The minute I walked out of the terminal I started hurling, pausing only to come up for gulps of air before the heaving began again. This went on for what seemed like five minutes as travelers who had just landed in Florida, thrilled to be among the palms and eager to start their vacations, ran away screaming. I owe the maintenance staff at Southwest Florida International Airport my sincere apologies along with a large tip. (See? I told you to skip to the fifth paragraph. You have nobody to blame but yourself.)

The stomach flu. I’ve been sick ever since but am happy to report I’m feeling somewhat human today.

I broke my reading glasses on my trip so couldn’t read during my convalescence, but I did the next best thing: I binge-watched TV shows and movies on Netflix and HBO.

Here, in case you ever find yourself lying in front of a TV for 72 hours straight, are my reviews to help you decide what to watch.

Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown: I watched eight episodes of this CNN series, a combo travelogue/food show featuring chef, author, bon vivant and traveler Anthony Bourdain. A better name for the series would have been “Hearts Unknown.” Bourdain travels the world, bonding with locals over plates of revolting food including goat hearts in Colombia, chicken hearts in Myanmar, sheep hearts in Libya, pig hearts in Peru, eland and beef hearts in South Africa and goose hearts in Quebec. Luckily I had nothing left in my stomach by the time I discovered this series or I would have been sick all over again.

Hope he packs a bottle of Scope in his luggage along with an ample supply of Imodium A-D.  

Rich Hill: This powerful documentary follows a year in the lives of three poverty-stricken adolescent boys in tiny Rich Hill, Mo. Harley, who refuses to go to school, is being raised by his grandmother. His mother is in prison – we find out why toward the end of the movie. Appachey, who is taking meds for ADD and bi-polar disorder, lives in filth with his Mama June-lookalike mother whose vocabulary consists of various ways to order him to shut up. Andrew is an intelligent, sensitive soul. Unlike his father, a drifter who dreams of becoming a country singer, he is realistic about the lousy cards life has dealt him. He says he believes in God, knows He must be busy with lots of things and is confident that someday He will have time to give him some attention.

I grew up in a Missouri town the size of Rich Hill during the 1960s and knew kids from impoverished backgrounds who triumphed over their disadvantages but I fear these kids won’t be able to. Back then, before big box retailers drove the local businesses and manufacturing facilities out of small towns and out of the country, there were jobs to be had. Nobody had heard of crack, meth or whatever it is the people who surround these kids take to escape their miserable lives. (Harley’s mother, 33, has no teeth.) Townsfolk saw each other every day at the businesses where they shopped and worked, so they knew what was going on in their neighbors’ lives and could intervene if help was needed but today the downtowns that housed those businesses are by-and-large abandoned. Residents have to commute to larger towns for jobs and to shop so they don't have as much time to interact. While tiny towns in the heartland still come together for celebrations like the Fourth of July, as Rich Hill residents do in this documentary, there are no longer the safety nets woven by a sense of community there once were to keep kids from falling so deeply through the cracks that they can’t claw their way back out. Nobody in Rich Hill, other than a guidance counselor who does his best to convince Harley to stay in school, apparently gives a shit about these kids.

Rich Hill offers no answers, only a sobering insight into the hopeless poverty that has transformed life for kids in many small towns into a living hell Norman Rockwell couldn’t envision in his worst nightmare.

Addicted to Rehab:  I’m a long-time fan of this reality series featuring Minneapolis realtor Nicole Curtis, a ringer for Cheryl Ladd back in her Charlie's Angels days, who buys and rehabs turn-of-the-century houses. Over the seven or eight episodes I watched she purchased an about-to-be-demolished house for $1 and did to it what she does to all the houses she has ever rehabbed on her show – pulled up linoleum to reveal hardwood floors, applied Minwax stain to the built-in oak buffet in the dining room, built a new mantel, converted an old chest of drawers into a bathroom vanity and retiled the shower with white subway tiles. Her upper Midwest e-uck-cent grates but that’s a small price to pay to watch someone who is otherwise adorable in every way.

Munich: This Spielberg thriller is based on the true story of a team of Israeli agents who tracked down and, one by one, picked off the terrorists who slaughtered 11 of the country’s athletes at the 1972 Munich Olympics. Bully for Israel. And kudos to Spielberg for being brave enough to make this movie. It made me proud to be Israeli.

Wait a minute, I’m not but would be honored if I were.

Barbecue: This French (subtitled) comedy is about a 50-year-old man who has a heart attack, a wake-up call that makes him realize the friends he has hung with since college, with whom he shares endless meals and bottles of wine in each others’ backyards, are annoying, so he purposely alienates them. Predictably, he realizes toward the end that man does not live by baguette alone – you’ve gotta have friends – so he wins them back. He shouldn’t have. These people are exceptionally annoying. So is he. Come to think of it, they deserve each other. (Question: Why do French men – most European men for that matter except the Brits – wear sweaters draped casually around their necks like women’s scarves? Are they terrified a sudden chill might descend and they’ll catch cold? They look ridiculous.)

Property Brothers: I watched six episodes of this HGTV reality show in which twin brothers – one a realtor, the other a contractor – help couples obtain their dream homes.

Every show follows the same formula. The couple rattles off all the features they want in a new house and tells the brothers how much they can spend. The realtor bro shows them a house with all the bells and whistles they want, then informs them it’s way over budget. The couple pretends to be bummed. He then shows them two houses that need rehab. The contractor brother lays out renovation plans, promising he can rehab a house to deliver everything they want within their modest budget. The couple chooses one, the realtor bro negotiates the deal, the contractor bro hands them oversized hammers to demo the kitchen or bath, then oversees the renovations. Five weeks later he admits the couple to their new home which always – always -- includes an open concept kitchen/family/dining/living room with a quartz-topped center island that seats four, new hardwood floors and a gray L-shaped sectional sofa (but nothing else that was on their must-have list, a fact the show conveniently ignores). The wife weeps, “I can’t believe this is my house,” as the husband flashes a jack-o-lantern grin.

My take is that the Property Brothers have only renovated one house and keep passing it off to new clients but what do I know?

The Unbelievers: This documentary follows two scientists as they travel the world holding public forums in venues like the Sydney Opera House, claiming science trumps religion, a premise I happen to agree with which is why I watched, but the movie, consisting primarily of clips from those forums, doesn’t pay it off. Telling a convocation of atheists they shouldn’t be afraid to hold believers in open contempt does nothing to advance rational dialogue one way or the other. As the closing credits roll viewers are treated to perspectives from such noted scientific authorities as Cameron Diaz, Bill Pullman, Ricky Gervais, Woody Allen and Sarah Silverman who reveals she visited Israel and went to the Wailing Wall but didn’t feel anything except anger because there wasn’t much space for women, a contention that has little relevance to the subject matter but made for a good sound bite.

Cast Away: Tom Hanks is a FedEx employee who washes up on a deserted tropical island after his plane goes down, leaving him to spend the next five years with nothing but a volleyball named Wilson for companionship. When he is finally picked up by a freighter, he returns home to find out that Helen Hunt, his fiancé, has married a dentist and has two kids.

After three days flat on my back with the flu watching TV (except for bathroom runs), I now look like Hanks when he was rescued and have lost almost as much weight.