In short: Crooked House (2017)

On paper, Gilles Paquet-Brenner’s Agatha Christie adaptation of one of her more interesting books even for a Christie-sceptic like myself should be right up my alley. It does, after all consist of pretty yet excellent actors like Max Irons, Stefanie Martini, Glenn Close and Christina Hendricks broadly strutting their stuff in front of sets so stylized to be of the 50s your eyeballs might melt and you might just feel they have nothing at all to do with the actual feel of the era the director looks at here. It also features show-off camera tricks that’d make young Brian De Palma blush or (gasp) request moderation. But in practice, I had little joy with the thing, for this isn’t a case of style as substance but a film akin to watching a director you’re really not terribly into masturbate to his own image for two hours straight. There’s little emotional or thematic point to anything going on here, apart from the usual suggestion that the rich are vile, pretty, and spend all their time getting their outfits in photogenic shapes. Instead of having much at all to say, the film is just a parade of loud but empty gestures that never add up to much, and while it is pretty to look at, it’s the prettiness of a particularly empty head. While there’s a surfeit at excellent actors on screen, there’s only so much anyone can do when asked to inhabit an empty shell.

The mystery is probably well-constructed (though the “shocking twist” is neither well realized by the film nor terribly shocking for anyone who has seen a horror movie or three), but at about half of the film’s running time, I found myself encountering a very typical feeling when it comes to me and traditional manor house mysteries: the realization that I not only didn’t care which of these high-strung arseholes killed their arsehole pater familias, but was hoping for the rest of them to be killed off too right quick (spoilers: not much joy there). Which probably isn’t the kind of emotional involvement the thing is going for, but a boy must distract himself somehow when a film’s aesthetics are quite this pointlessly tacky, and there’s no intellectual stimulation to be had by it either.


So this turns out to be pretty much the film I unfairly expected Brannagh’s Murder on the Orient Express to be.

Three Films Make A Post: GET READY FOR THE NEXT ACTON HERO

Frankenstein '80 (1972): Cinematographer Mario Mancini's only film as a director should be easy to love for an old hand in Italian genre movies like me. Its combination of awkward direction, awkward early 70s fashion, an awkwardly stupid plot full of awkward sleaze, and a surprisingly awesome soundtrack is the sort of thing love affairs are made of. Unfortunately, for some inexplicable reason the film's script decides to put its emphasis on the investigative aspect of the story, with a police investigation of the film's murders and that of a journalist with a personal interest in what's going on running parallel to one another and giving the film many possibilities to repeat exposition of the same boring facts twice with a different set of actors. The film doesn't improve on the problem by telling the audience most of what it needs to know early on, which results in a film full of dull scenes in which the characters have to catch up to the audience. Needless to say, this does not make for a very exciting experience.

Captain Sindbad (1963): Byron Haskin's US/German co-production is an excellent reminder of the excellence of the Schneer/Harryhausen mythological by virtue of not having any of those films' virtues. It's not just the markedly worse special effects - though they certainly don't help - but really that the film gets everything about the power of imagination wrong, being childish where it should be childlike, stupid where it should be simple, and lacking all the conviction and joy that should run through them. Turns out making a film of childlike wonder is harder than it looks.

The Fall (TV-Show, 2013): The other thing apart from costume drama and Doctor Who British TV is really good at are various more or less realist modes of crime shows that leave productions from most other countries in the world (except for Scandinavia, sometimes) in the dust with the care and intelligence put into them. This Gillian Anderson starring show is a case in point. It moves on the very dark and cold spectrum, the sort of thing that leaves house favourite Luther looking like a light comedy. I find the show's clinical, non-judgemental way to look at victim, perpetrator and cop alike particularly remarkable, with nary a scene that doesn't seem utterly concentrated on showing us characters’ mental states without ever feeling the need to explain them to us. The thinking - about ethic, morals, and everything else is the job of the audience here.

Technorati-Markierungen: italian movies,american movies,british tv,in short,mario mancini,byron haskin,gillian anderson,horror,adventure,fantasy,crime