Netflix pick for 11/30/15 – ‘The Wolfpack’

As heard in episode 151 of Cinema Crespodiso.

“The Wolfpack” is an amazing documentary about the all too true tale of the Angulo Family of New York City, and how the patriarch of the home kept everyone else locked away inside their tiny apartment for most of their lives. And this documentary goes into a little of what happens when this happens to people, and specifically takes a look at the six brothers in this family and how this experience shaped their lives. And despite the dad trying to shield his kids from the big, bad outside world, he still showed them thousands of movies, making these stories the only way these kids learn about the world, and you bet this movie gets into what THAT does to a person as well.

From my original review of “The Wolfpack:”

So when they do start interacting more and more with the outside world slowly over time, it becomes apparent that maybe their outlooks were shaped by movies a little too much. Can it be a surprise that these brothers, whose favorite movies are Quentin Tarantino movies, liberally pepper their speech with the word “fuck?” And the oldest (?) brother occasionally speaks with a proper British accent at times, which is just strange because we know this comes from watching movies. Hell, the oldest brother talks about the first time he sneaked out of the apartment and walked around the neighborhood with a homemade Michael Myers “Halloween” mask and how the cops were eventually called because it IS a weird sight to see on a random day, and he admitted that by wearing the mask he felt like the unstoppable force that is Michael Myers and how he wondered if he might be impervious to bullets at that moment and that is a dangerous way to go about life, expecting the attributes of these fake worlds to carry over to this one very real world.

This actually says a lot about how people escape their reality by getting deep into something else, in this instance movies but also with books, comics, music, drinking, drugs, video games, anything that distracts from the real world and all its problems, and how we can’t just hide all the time from the Big Bad World, but instead we need to go out into it and face it. The mother of the children at one point talks about how she regrets how home-schooling the kids deprived them of the positive social interactions that come with going to school, but she also mentions how she remembers that there is a lot of negative social interaction at school as well, but we can’t do that as people living in a society, we can’t pick and choose which aspects of the world we deal with. It is all or nothing, we take the good with the bad and we find a way to maybe use the bad for something good, otherwise we just press on.

“The Wolfpack” is simply a great movie, so worth watching, and it is available now on the Netflix Instant, so get on it.