It’s on Netflix.

If you’re playing the home game, and you’re paying attention, you know that today the Maggie Gyllenhaal film “The Lost Daughter” goes live on Netflix. A New Year’s gift, it’s a marketing mistake. In today’s fast-flowing world you want the product available simultaneous with the hype. The “Lost Daughter” hype took place weeks ago, when the movie opened in theatres. Now, the stories in America are completely different. You shoot someone in the morning and it doesn’t even make the nightly news, which no one watches anyway, how come movie marketers can’t adjust?

Have you read any of the music Top Ten lists? THEY’RE ALL DIFFERENT RECORDS! Used to be there was some consensus, now there’s none. And I won’t bother to debate what albums are good or bad, but I will tell you if you wanted to be informed, dive deep, discover new material, good luck. Check ’em out, there seems to be some consistency in listing Jazmine Sullivan, but other than that… And this isn’t about the critics, who like to amplify their pet favorites, but the landscape. It’s incomprehensible. If we can’t even agree on a Top Ten, then what are the odds there really is a Top Ten? This is how scattered and abstruse the music world has become, and there’s not a single purveyor who will mention it, for fear their project won’t be featured. The “Billboard” Top Ten is manipulated, in media everywhere, not an accurate reflection of what is being played (Purchases? Do you know anybody who’s bought an album recently? And don’t talk to me about vinyl, it’s a feel-good story, and creating analog records from digital sources makes no sense anyway.), and if you’re looking for John Lennon’s truth in music, good luck.

I found “7 Prisoners” via the “Washington Post,” in an article entitled “The movies that wowed Post critics in 2021 – and where to watch them”: https://wapo.st/3qEgTmf

Remember when everybody was freaking out twenty years ago that music and movies and news would be free online, that no one would pay anything for anything? Isn’t that a laugh. More and more outlets are creeping behind a paywall. We live in a two-tiered society, those who know and those who don’t. Furthermore, those who don’t think they do. My recommendation is you at least sign up for Apple News+, at ten bucks a month. But after subscribing for a while, if you’re a periodicals junkie, you’ll realize how awful the writing is in most of these publications. Even worse are the clickbait headlines employed. But you’ve got to start somewhere, get on the information train or be left behind.

So “7 Prisoners”…

You don’t know where it’s going.

And it starts out slowly, and doesn’t really speed up, but then, like the prisoners, you realize what is happening.

And then the story unfolds.

This is a Brazilian movie. That means subtitles. But the message is universal. Life is hard, people will take advantage of you and if you’re not looking out for yourself, you’re falling behind.

This always depresses me. In our educational system they teach you to obey, get in line, pay fealty to the teacher, all qualities that will leave you left behind in real life. Especially college. It’s like an alternative universe. You get good grades…exactly why? Have you noticed that all the people who didn’t fit in, who weren’t the teacher’s pet, are the ones who blew up the world and made beaucoup bucks? Turns out you win if you color outside the lines. If you behave you’re a sucker. You’re being taken advantage of right this very second, unaware of it. And to win you’ve got to bend the rules, employ obfuscation and abandon relationships and in many cases morality.

“7 Prisoners” is not a huge commitment, it’s only 94 minutes long, but I highly recommend it. This is how the world works.