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Reviews
The Program: Cons, Cults, and Kidnapping (2024)
Interesting subject, poor documentary.
I fully believe that there was abuse and trauma at the school, but the girl narrating it should have been more in the background. Documentaries are supposed to be about providing unbiased truth of an interesting story. This was not that. It was heavily biased and quite frankly, just weird in its presentation. The emotions felt forced/cringy instead of persuasive. It tended toward making me doubt the severity of the accusations being leveled by the former students. Again, I think the students were certainly abused and people should be held accountable, but the poor way it was done makes this documentary unwatchable. I would be interested in having an outside party do the documentary and learning about this school and what happened there.
Man on the Run (2023)
Misleading trailer, tons of overproduced fluff
The trailer seemed interesting. That this would be an exciting documentary about a "Man on the Run" (aka Jho Low), who stole a billion dollars and used it to fund an extravagant lifestyle full of parties with rich people and celebrities. Only problem is, it isn't that at all. The trailer is basically just scenes taken from the first 5 minutes and then for the rest of the documentary, Jho Low is only talked about sporadically as a connection point for a number of other shady characters.
You know when a teacher would give you a minimum word count but you were 200 words short at the end of an essay so you would add fluff in there to make it longer even though it added no value? Well that's what this felt like. The documentary could have been about 60 minutes instead of 98 minutes and it would have been substantially better. The creators would drag out their creepy artwork(?) shots for 30 seconds instead of moving on to the next scene.
In the end it's not a documentary I would recommend to anyone, which is sad because it's an interesting topic.
Jared from Subway: Catching a Monster (2023)
So awful, such a waste of time
This should be titled "one woman's fruitless attempt to catch a monster". 2 1/2 of the episodes were an interview of a woman who was/is clearly starved for attention. At the very end you find out that all she did didn't even matter. He was charged and plead guilty to crossing state lines to solicit from a minor. All the evidence was gathered from communications he had with another monster. So you sit there for 2 hours listening to this woman's sob story about how horrible Jared is (which he is, no denying that), then you get to the end and find out that her "work" didn't even lead to his conviction. As everyone else has said, it is over-produced. I should have come on IMDB first to read the reviews before wasting 3 hours of my life.