Tag Archives: humor

Capturing the Friedmans (2003)

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January 29

With just three days remaining on the Genre-ary for 2025, I watched an Oscar-nominated doc called Catching the Friedmans, another tough watch because it centered around a teacher and his son who had been accused of sodomy and sexual abuse of kids.

Director Andrew Jarecki, who was the director behind the amazing docu-series, The Jinx, was the driving force behind this documentary.

According to IMDB, the “Documentary on the Friedmans, a seemingly typical, upper-middle-class Jewish family whose world is instantly transformed when the father and his youngest son are arrested and charged with shocking and horrible crimes.”

There are plenty of scenes in this movie that came from home video recordings taped by the Friedman family themselves. Most of these scenes were really tough to watch considering the way some of this was portrayed. It painted a horrible picture of most of these people. There was a dramatic scene taped at Jesse Friedman’s trial of a parent chasing after him screaming that he had raped his son. Unbelievable.

Elaine Friedman seemed to be a spiteful woman, but it is hard to imagine the situation she found herself in daily. Her husband was a pedophile. Her sons hated her. A lot of the recordings by her kids had her screaming like a banshee. She did not come off looking well. Then, the final scene of the doc seemed to go against everything that the doc had shown us up until that point.

The doc sheds plenty of question on the case overall, especially when it came to Jesse. Arnold, the father who was an admitted pedophile, said that he had committed sexual abuse on two kids, but not the countless number at school.

I’m not sure how I felt about this doc because the voice seemed to be all over the place. I’m not sure what the doc was telling me about this story and it felt as if details changed throughout. I do not have a better understanding of what the truth was in this case or to what level these people were guilty or innocent. Maybe that is the idea with the doc… that truth may be elusive and that you may never know for sure what is happening in the heart of a family.

The X-Files S6 E9

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Spoilers

“S.R. 819”

After a couple of lesser episodes, “S.R. 819” regained the feel of classic episodes of The X-Files, featuring a conspiracy level event.

The show begins with the apparent death of Walter Skinner, setting up the stakes for the episode.

Flashing back to before the ‘death’, we see the events leading up to the current situation and we learn that someone had poisoned Skinner, injecting him with nanobot tech.

Mulder and Scully raced against time to try and save the life of Skinner.

Of course, Mulder and Scully did not solve anything. They circled the truth, but the events were out of their hands. The final shot, of a now compromised Skinner with Krychek of all people was a kick. Especially after Skinner’s ‘deathbed’ confession to Scully that he regretted not being more of an ally to them.

This was a tough episode, but very enjoyable. It had that early X-Files feel to it and advanced the mythology along nicely.

The Jinx Part Two s2 E5

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Spoilers

“Mostly the Truth”

It’s Bob’s turn to testify.

He had to testify because they had stipulated the fact that Bob had written the cadaver note and Bob had to explain that for the jury. Because he had to explain that fact that he wound up admitted to, Bob was able to be cross-examined by the prosecutor John Lewin.

Lewin planned on showing the jury that Bob was a liar… perhaps even pathological. Lewin picked his testimony apart. Bob had told a story of how he would play Uno and throw the frisbee with his mom, brother and father. Lewin pointed out that Uno was created in 1971 and frisbees were created in 1958 and Bob’s mom died in 1950. This showed clearly that those ‘memories’ were not true.

Nine days of cross-examination. Whoa.

Lewin got Bob to admit that he had lied about some things during his testimony and that if he had killed Susan, he would lie about it.

Those words are shocking.

The trial started really strong for Bob and it took a major downswing.

When they played the “Killed them all, of course” clip from the first Jinx show, it was an amazing moment. Bob said that he had said that he muttered the words “They will all think that I” ahead of those five words. However, they did not let that stand.

Another amazing moment was when Bob, who was saying things that he would lie about, said that he would lie about where Kathie was buried. The prosecutor jumped on that phrasing immediately and it sounded terrible.

The verdict came in: Guilty. Durst was not there at the time because he had been exposed to Covid.

Shockingly, since Bob was not there, someone had to tell him that he had been convicted. But none of his own lawyers did it. They left town imediately.

It was Bob’s current wife, Debbie’s lawyer who told him.

And that feels like the next piece of the story.