Current Events > What did you think about the Elisa Lam Netflix documentary?

(+) Yeah! (+)

A bit too much focus on the armchair YouTube detectives and some of their Q tier theories imo.

Didnt know it existed

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Why is it 4 episodes?

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I finished the first episode last night and I couldn't help but laugh at the people they were interviewing. The British couple, YouTuber, and that social media investigator or whatever at the end. That shit made sense in Don't Fuck With Cats but these people seem completely inept.

That being said, they could play more of a big role in the later episodes. It was just a weird introduction of a bunch of nobodies.
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Way too stretched out, one episode was plenty to fit all pertinent information.

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very cringe

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I don't have netflix but i know a lot about her case. And yes i believe she was murdered. And someone out there has gotten away with it

its out? niiice
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i liked it more than night stalker tbh

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Stewman_Magoo posted...

Why is it 4 episodes?

KiwiTerraRizing posted...

Way too stretched out, one episode was plenty to fit all pertinent information.

This tbh. They couldve just made one long movie/episode but they out hella fluff in, like the mentioned social media/youtube peeps.

Hell, half of the documentary just felt more like it was advertising how fucked up the Hotel Cecil is. Interesting, but really adds a lot of fluff and kinda detracts from the whole case

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Not yet but it's on my list. In general I think the Netflix true crime docs haven't been very good tbh

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Not yet. Did they cover the timestamp discrepancies?

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Half way through the second ep. The blonde hotel manager is a character for sure. I'm not sure how this can go on for two more eps but I guess I'll see.
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Actually I just got to the third ep and these "web sleuths" are fucked up. Feels like glorified murder tourism.
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i mean, the conspiracy or "OMG IT WAS A GHOST" things are kinda fun for a bit...but its pretty clear she was having an episode and didn't take her meds. as far as her being able to access the water tank? that's just negligence from the Hotel and i'm sure they love that this paranormal stuff keeps getting talked about so no one talks about how they fucked up.

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That's depressing. I was hoping it would be a more legit doc.

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The web people piss me off, they pretend to care about Lam but only care about solving a mystery. If she had been hit by a car nobody would care.

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Ill watch this weekend

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KiwiTerraRizing posted...

The web people piss me off, they pretend to care about Lam but only care about solving a mystery. If she had been hit by a car nobody would care.

I think you're giving them too much credit. They seemed to just be having fun or using it for views when they were filming inside the hotel. At least the sleuths, the "Youtuber" actually seemed like he cares to solve the case. The one sleuth shedding fake tears to a quick cutaway was gross when you see him running around smiling in the hotel in the next few scenes.
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I was but reading through this topic makes me not wanna watch it

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i really hope this case gets solved some day in our lifetime, im super curious

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SSJ2GrimReaper posted...

I was but reading through this topic makes me not wanna watch it

Imo it's not worth. They did a decent job with Night Stalker. This one just feels like a cheap cash grab and the way they drag it out and add so much speculation and fluff feels disgusting tbh.

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cousinvini posted...

A bit too much focus on the armchair YouTube detectives and some of their Q tier theories imo.

i liked it but yeah internet sleuths suck

skermac posted...

i really hope this case gets solved some day in our lifetime, im super curious

Still haven't watched the documentary but I think it's a pretty obvious case of a mental health episode leading to a horrible mishap

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skermac posted...

i really hope this case gets solved some day in our lifetime, im super curious

doesnt seem to be much to solve. She was having a mental episode, wasnt on her meds (thus why toxicology reports came back clean). The hotel was negligent and left access to the water tank open and in her mental state she found herself on the roof.

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I felt like the show didn't really know what it wanted to be.

The story of Elisa's death itself is obviously not something that warrants four full episodes of exploration - and the fact that it was just a tragic accident brought about by her illness makes the attempt to turn it into a documentary somewhat ghoulish - but the things they used to pad it out just fell flat and didn't really run on any internal logic.

Was it an expos on the dangers of internet mob mentality and how easy it is to be suckered in to conspiracy theories online? If so then it dropped the ball, because the show lost any moral high ground in criticising the way that that poor black metal guy's life got ruined by the accusations when the show itself ended the previous episode with close-ups of him played over sinister music as some form of cliffhanger that screamed "LOOK AT THIS SCARY BASTARD!"; and it's similarly hard to buy that the show was trying to make a point about the dangers of people being suckered into wild theories when the show itself deliberately left out so many major facts about the story until the back half of the last episode, effectively perpetrating the sort of crazy paranoia that it was supposed to be decrying. It's one thing to try and make a point about how easily people can get suckered into false narratives online (and honestly that would be a very pertinent subject for exploration as of late), but it's another thing to present those same false narratives without counterpoint for several hours. It's like... I'm sure we were supposed to find it disturbing that the weird part of the internet was descending on the roof of the hotel with videocameras to have a look around, but the point is very much lost when presented as part of a documentary that was...well... doing exactly that.

But then, as well as that, was it aspiring to be an exploration of skid row, or the history of the hotel itself? Because a few random scenes - completely orphaned for the rest of the scenes around them - of "Skid Row historians" talking over poverty-porn shots of people on the streets, or people gleefully saying that Richard Ramirez went to the hotel once wasn't really the way to do it - if anything it was like they had some unused footage from their Night Stalker documentary that they didn't know what else to do with.

But take out those aspects of the show that fell flat and all you're left with is a disturbingly detailed account of a young lady drowning. And it was just uncomfortable to watch, really. Sure, serial killer documentaries are morbid as fuck, too, but with them the fascination and focus is firmly on the perpetrators, the motives, the psychology etc. They don't focus too much on the victims because anything that reminds you too much that real people have died in these events just reminds you that actually this is something really horrible. But there's no serial killer in Elisa's story, no villain or enemy - it's just us watching in salacious detail the story of a poor girl who forgot to take her medicine, had an episode because of it and in her terror accidentally drowned. That's not entertainment, that's not even news, really. It's just desperately sad.

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Tom Clark posted...

I felt like the show didn't really know what it wanted to be.

The story of Elisa's death itself is obviously not something that warrants four full episodes of exploration - and the fact that it was just a tragic accident brought about by her illness makes the attempt to turn it into a documentary somewhat ghoulish - but the things they used to pad it out just fell flat and didn't really run on any internal logic.

Was it an expos on the dangers of internet mob mentality and how easy it is to be suckered in to conspiracy theories online? If so then it dropped the ball, because the show lost any moral high ground in criticising the way that that poor black metal guy's life got ruined by the accusations when the show itself ended the previous episode with close-ups of him played over sinister music as some form of cliffhanger that screamed "LOOK AT THIS SCARY BASTARD!"; and it's similarly hard to buy that the show was trying to make a point about the dangers of people being suckered into wild theories when the show itself deliberately left out so many major facts about the story until the back half of the last episode, effectively perpetrating the sort of crazy paranoia that it was supposed to be decrying. It's one thing to try and make a point about how easily people can get suckered into false narratives online (and honestly that would be a very pertinent subject for exploration as of late), but it's another thing to present those same false narratives without counterpoint for several hours. It's like... I'm sure we were supposed to find it disturbing that the weird part of the internet was descending on the roof of the hotel with videocameras to have a look around, but the point is very much lost when presented as part of a documentary that was...well... doing exactly that.

But then, as well as that, was it aspiring to be an exploration of skid row, or the history of the hotel itself? Because a few random scenes - completely orphaned for the rest of the scenes around them - of "Skid Row historians" talking over poverty-porn shots of people on the streets, or people gleefully saying that Richard Ramirez went to the hotel once wasn't really the way to do it - if anything it was like they had some unused footage from their Night Stalker documentary that they didn't know what else to do with.

But take out those aspects of the show that fell flat and all you're left with is a disturbingly detailed account of a young lady drowning. And it was just uncomfortable to watch, really. Sure, serial killer documentaries are morbid as fuck, too, but with them the fascination and focus is firmly on the perpetrators, the motives, the psychology etc. They don't focus too much on the victims because anything that reminds you too much that real people have died in these events just reminds you that actually this is something really horrible. But there's no serial killer in Elisa's story, no villain or enemy - it's just us watching in salacious detail the story of a poor girl who forgot to take her medicine, had an episode because of it and in her terror accidentally drowned. That's not entertainment, that's not even news, really. It's just desperately sad.

Good write up. I agree. The documentary really didnt know what it wanted to be, or it tried to be too many things and ends up just being gross in a lot of different ways when it really didn't have to be.

Also it really didn't have to take until the end of the 4th episode to elaborate that this was a mental health issue.
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bumpp


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Pretty bland, tbh

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Good fun at first; way too much emphasis on the internet idiots and conspiracy theories.

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