![]() Both were doctors, and the two shared options in the company with their older brother, Arthur, a psychiatrist. ![]() It is a difficult watch and it would border on impossible if the filmmakers didn't deftly frame the events in such a compelling and linear way.Sacker's father, Raymond, bought Purdue Pharma in 1952, along with his brother, Mortimer. Sebastian and Michelle's perpetual state of existential dread is palpably demoralizing and paints a picture of just how far human beings can bottom out when they get stuck in the heroin hustle lifestyle. If they don't score and produce, they will get severely dope sick and feel like they're near death. They don't have a lifeline like Stacy and Matt do with her father. Even Michelle's estranged son Anthony has resigned to her doomed fate. These two have an even more difficult go of it because there is no one on the planet who cares if they live or die. Sebastian is a useless partner who latches on to Michelle because she will go to any measure to score their next hit. Her hardscrabble spoken stream-of-consciousness narrative is a visceral gut punch. Whether it's selling herself to men, impersonating a cop in a fake prostitution sting, or returning bogus store merchandise for cash, she has absolutely no limits and even less of a filter. Michelle is the ultimate type-A hustler who will do anything (and I mean anything) to get her next hit. The dysfunction in Sebastian and Michelle's relationship is off-the-wall insane. And if they fall down, you help them." The beauty and the tragedy in the documentarian's decision to remain silent and let their subjects speak off the cuff allow for an unprompted, organic interaction with the viewer. At one point, he is captured saying, "You bring a child into this world, and they do their best to survive this world. Stacy's father puts on a brave face, but you know that inside he's falling apart. It's one of life's most difficult quandaries and there are no easy answers. The slippery slope that most family members of addicts all have to navigate at one point is asking themselves if they are doing the right thing by feeding their loved one's habit and ushering them into an early grave or drawing a hard line and completely cutting them out of their lives. ![]() It's incredibly sobering and sad to watch a father who doesn't know what to do to help his daughter. Her father sends her money and comes into the city to provide her and Matt with things like clothing and other necessities. They don't go into their backstories too much, but it's abundantly clear that Stacy's story has several more layers to it than the others. Stacy, on the other hand, is from a well-to-do family and went to a private school but is new to the drug-addled New York streets. Matt is a longtime hustler, sex worker, and addict who has been playing the flow for a long time and his fed-up single mom has washed her hands of him. The relationship between Matt and Stacy is a curious one, to say the least. It is currently free to watch on HBO Max ( or Max? Who knows!) with a subscription which is unusual for a nearly 20-year-old documentary. But the most compelling, raw, and visceral movie about real people doing the most unfortunate is undoubtedly Dope Sick Love in 2005, and it hasn't been matched since. Filmmaker Jon Alpert's sweeping epic was an impressive and sobering watch as well. In 2002, HBO documentary executive director Sheila Nevins and company delivered the first installment of Life of Crime, a documentary that would follow the lives of three down-and-out New Jersey people over the course of 20 years. Taxicab Confessions really got the ball rolling some 30 years ago when they had several hidden cameras in a cab that captured some of the most real and shocking moments we had ever seen on TV. It has delivered more than its fair share of hard-hitting and salacious real-life stories. Have you ever had a documentary outright slap you in the face with such a reality check that you can't stop thinking about it for days afterward? HBO has long been the premier network for original programming and documentaries dating all the way back to the 1990s. ![]()
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