The HARRY & MEGHAN Documentary on Netflix

I was up at the crack of dawn today in order to start watching HARRY & MEGHAN on Netflix, and I have to say, it was well worth it.

The first three parts of the documentary were multifaceted and informative, and it does a stellar job of showing the humanity of the royal prince and his bride.

However…

If you’re hoping I’m going to start railing against them, this is the part where you’re going to be disappointed. I am going to start ranting, folks, but not at Meghan or Harry.

What I found appalling, atroicous, and downright sick within this excellent documentary was watching the diabolical footage of the paparazzi.

We all know that Prince Harry’s mother, the stunningly beautiful Diana, died when the car she was riding in was chased by paparazzi through the Alma Tunnel in Paris. I remember so well the night when that awful news was announced. The next morning I applauded Diana’s brother, Harry’s uncle, the Earl of Spencer, for saying that the press who chased his sister for so long, and the newspapers who paid for her pictures, all had blood on their hands. Indeeed!

But this documentary shows a whole lot more.

It shows the press camped out in the hundreds, yes, hundreds, when the royals went on vacations, or left the house, or when the children went to school. What kind of a childhood can any boy have when there’s two hundred desperate cameramen waiting outside on his first day of school to photograph him simply entering the building? There is a predatory creepiness to the footage of the paparazzi encampments shown in the documentary. It made me want to let out a scream.

To make matters even stranger, the prevailing wisdom among the royal family seems to be that “there’s nothing to be done about it.”

Oh, really? Is that all anybody can say? I’m not one of these people, but I’m just warming up on this subject, and if I can rail on their behalf, by God, everybody else can, too!

I think this insanity needs to be re-examined, folks, without delay and from a legal standpoint. A photo opportunity is one thing, but what is depicted of the paparazzi in this documentary is nothing less than stalking and harassment. I’m going to repeat that. What was going on with those paparazzi lunatics regarding that royal family constitutes nothing less than stalking and harassment. I should think there definitely is something to be done about it, especially where children are concerned. If there’s no English laws on the books to stop little children from being hunted and chased by the media on their way to school or while on a vacation, then by God, there should be! We might never have lost Diana if there had been some protection against the vultures of the press in the first place. Yet on they go.

It’s an atrocity.

You can view the trailer here, but check out the full series, too.

SEPARATED @ BIRTH by Anaïs Bordier and Samantha Futerman

SEPARATED @ BIRTH: The twins who found each other via social media!

I have always loved reading about separated twins.  Once they’re brought back together they usually are found to have a lot more similarities than differences.

I first got interested in the subject back in the 1970s, when so many people were into psychobabble in general and believed in what is now considered to be a laughably inane idea known as the “Blank Slate Theory” in particular.  If you’ve never heard of it, be glad.  It espoused the ridiculous, and scientifically unproven, idea that everybody in the world is born as a “blank slate,” with the same potential for talent and ability as, say, Mozart, and that it’s your “environment” alone that can make you into either a genius or a killer.  I knew a few too many people who couldn’t turn off their psychobabble when I was little.   Finding books on twin studies therefore peaked my interest because, at that time, they were the finest, and most sensible, information available on the subject of who we’re born to be.  Genetics began to get its due thanks to a project known as the Minnesota Twin Study, which took a closer look at identical twins raised apart and concluded that genes are more important than those who chose to ignore them were inclined to think.

That leads me to this new book, a product of a more enlightened age, SEPARATED @ BIRTH.

If Samantha Futerman hadn’t become an actress, maybe Anaïs Bordier might never have found out she had an identical twin sister.

Fortunately, Samantha, whose work I was familiar with in the beautiful movie Memoirs of a Geisha, appeared in a little video that was found on YouTube by a friend of a girl from France named Anaïs Bordier.  He sent it to Anaïs as the one looked so much like the other.

Their resemblance was too strong to ignore.  Both girls had been adopted from Korea, though raised by separate adoptive families on different continents, Parent Trap-style.  When Anaïs found out, thanks to the movie site IMDB, that Samantha and she shared the same birth date, it seemed almost certain that the two were twins.

Samantha is an actress, and Anaïs, who once considered becoming an actress, is a clothing designer, so creativity runs through their veins in abundance.  The book follows their almost miraculous reconnection and reunion – as well as the documentary they decided to create about finding one another.  They funded that through the social media site Kickstarter.

Social media, and all the good it brings to us, is one of the “heroes” of the well-written story, told in alternating chapters by the twins.  The adoptive parents of both girls are as well – all four are so great, so wonderfully supportive of their daughters, that they’re an inspiration.

This book is a fantastically good read.  Never underestimate the power of social media as a force for good.  The name of the documentary, which will be released in 2015, is Twinsters.  I’m already looking forward to it.  Here’s the trailer:

I wish all the best to the two reunited sisters!

The twins, reunited.