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TadDavis
Reviews
Manhunt (2024)
Filled with visual inaccuracies
Tobias Menzies is a fine actor and would have made a fine Edwin Stanton - if they'd given him a beard. Stanton had one of the most dramatic beards of any of the members of Lincoln's cabinet. It came to a sharp point almost to the base of his breastbone. Menzies is completely clean-shaven. What, NO effort to make him look the part AT ALL? As well-known an historical figure as Stanton was?
(He also had a dramatically receding hairline, but OK.)
They could at least have given him as fake-looking a beard as they gave the mediocre actor playing Lincoln. (By the way: to those who reacted negatively to his reedy, high-pitched voice: that's one aspect of the character he actually got right. That's how Lincoln talked. It's well-documented.)
The travesty of the recreated Ford's Theater has been commented on elsewhere here. Lincoln's box was essentially closed and he was largely invisible to the rest of the audience unless he leaned out of one of the "windows," which I believe he did once or twice to wave to the crowd. And where were Major Rathbone and his fiancée, who were sitting in the same box just to the right of the Lincolns? I guess the guy in uniform who comes charging down after Lincoln is shot was supposed to be Rathbone. He does appear to get stabbed, as Rathbone was. But he didn't have to come charging down from anywhere. Rathbone was sitting right there in the same box, inches away from Lincoln.
Lincoln reads the telegram about Lee's surrender and says "Lee accepted all of OUR terms." It would have been more accurate for him to say "Lee accepted all of GRANT's terms," because Grant made them up on the spot without consulting Lincoln or anybody else. But I don't in fact remember what may have been in that telegram and what Lincoln may have said, so I won't press that point too hard.
But here's one point about which there is no dispute. Abraham Lincoln was shot behind the left ear, NOT behind the right ear as depicted in the program. ARE YOU KIDDING ME? You can't even be bothered to shoot Lincoln on the correct side of the head? To get that one detail right would have required changing the blocking only a few inches - which calls into question the attention to detail throughout the entire program.
Interestingly, when an attendant exchanges a bloody towel for a clean one under the dying Lincoln's head, he does so on the left side. So which is it, showrunner? Make up your mind.
I'll give them credit for one thing. At least they had Stanton saying "Now he belongs to the angels" rather than "Now he belongs to the ages."
The Vanishing Triangle (2023)
Spoilers alert
I'm sorry this particular series got the brunt of my anger. It probably deserved more than one star. But I'm sick to death of crime dramas that are as brilliantly written and acted as this one was - the kind that grip you for six episodes of increasingly agonizing suspense, with real characters caught in terrible moral dilemmas, and then -
**** SPOILERS ****
- throw it all away in the last five minutes for the sake of a cheap fling at fashionable cynicism.
In a nutshell: the bad guy gets away with it. And we never find out what happened to Amy, who started the whole thing rolling. (Did I miss that somewhere along the way? I assume she's dead, but she gets lost in the shuffle.) I loved seeing all the scenes in and around Dublin, and I felt like things were drawing toward a satisfying conclusion; and then, once again, literally in the last five minutes, the rug was yanked out from under me, because God knows we can't have an ending where the people involved pay a terrible price, but some measure of justice, you know, manages to win in the end. Cheap shoddy conclusion that throws everything that came before it in the trash: deus ex machina in reverse.
Bron/Broen (2011)
Brilliant and wrenching
I've only seen the first series/season, so take that under advisement. This was so much better than the series Forbrydelsen, which left me puzzling over a dozen plot holes and character inconsistencies. This one - not at all. I hope I can say without venturing into spoiler territory that you should be prepared for a no-punches-pulled roller-coaster ride. The acting is brilliant, the writing is too-notch, and for once most of the usual tropes have been left behind. The two detectives at the heart of the case have an unusual chemistry and an unexpected kind of loyalty to each other. And I don't think 10 episodes were too many to work out the complex interactions of the story - no padding detected from my perspective. Looking forward to the rest of it.
Forbrydelsen (2007)
What a disappointment
*** FORBRYDELSEN SPOILERS ***
Don't read this if you haven't seen the Danish version of The Killing and you still plan to. And maybe don't read it if you haven't seen the American version of The Killing and still plan to.
That said...
I finally finished watching the first season of the Danish series Forbrydelsen, the one that inspired the US series The Killing.
My verdict: what a crushing disappointment.
After hearing so much about how good it was, how vastly superior it was to the American version... no.
Initially, yes. The acting is phenomenal. The writing is superb in the first few episodes. The atmosphere is dark and brooding, and the pace is perfect.
And then about halfway through the 20-episode sequence, the whole thing starts coming apart at the seams.
Spoilers follow in a moment. All I'll say at the moment is this. The series promised a huge payoff and then completely fizzled. There were several major strands of the plot that were simply abandoned by the last episode; there were so many open questions at the end that my wife and I spent an hour and a half talking about it when it was over, trying to figure out if we missed something. Instead, we kept coming up with more and more things that the writers simply ignored, abandoned, left up in the air, never came back to, or even just plain cheated on.
Bad, bad, bad writing takes over.
** SEMI-SPOILER **
There turned out to be an Agatha Christie quality to the proceedings that greatly disappointed me: that pattern of events where the crime depends on absolutely split-second timing and an almost superhuman ability to predict how other people are going to respond: a kind of three-dimensional chess. It works in a mystery like the kind Agatha Christie wrote, but not in a gritty, corruption-drenched drama like this.
It promised so much and delivered so little.
One thing it's inspired me to do: go back and watch the American version and see if I have the same negative reaction I had the first time, now that I know where it was starting from.
** REAL SPOILERS **
Seriously: what happened to the whole serial killer idea? You're going to spend all that time focusing on the clue about the black heart-shaped necklace, and fishing up a second body, and then do NOTHING to tie Vagn back to those earlier crimes?
And what about the other two women? They discovered one more body. But Sarah had folders for THREE cases of missing women she was digging into. Are we supposed to believe Vagn was behind all four of them? If there were any connecting links between the others, they were never mentioned (except for the possibility - I'm a little unclear about this - that they may all have recently moved).
What role did Leon really play in any of this? Why did he run when he was confronted by the police? Why was he so terrified? Why did he say (not exact quote) "you have no idea what's really going on" - words that we are obviously intended to interpret as meaning massive high-level corruption? Did he really commit suicide - and if he did, why on earth did he do that? All he did was give Nanna a cab ride - right? What the hell was he "sorry" about? And if he was murdered, who on earth did it? Not Vagn.
Who kept leaning on the police to close down the investigation? Who REALLY manipulated the list of phone numbers and the inventory of the evidence? Burchard insisted it wasn't him. Was he lying? We never found out.
What the hell was Jens Holck planning to do with Sarah when he was dragging her to the trunk of his car? He couldn't very well drive it anywhere with the windshield as messed up as it was - especially considering that every police officer in the city was looking for exactly that kind of car with exactly that kind of damage. Was he really about to shoot her? And if so, given what his limited role in the case turned out to be in the end, why the hell would he want to do that? And why would he NOT drop the gun as soon as he was ordered to? Up to that point he had never actually committed a violent act against anybody.
And who was really pulling the strings in Bremer's office? Was it Bremer or Dessau? Or even (as it was hinted at one point) Rie's father? Who was really paying Mr Civil Servant, and what was that all about, and if Holck WAS driving the car that killed him, WHY??? He couldn't possibly have known about the conversation Mr Pathetic CS had just had with Bremer or that he was just at that moment leaving the parking garage or that he posed any kind of threat to anybody. Was it all supposed to be just an unfortunate coincidence?
I couldn't get straight in my mind who did what to the flat to clean it up after the murder. Was it Morten or Rie who scrubbed the stairs and called the plumber? I assume it was Morten, and that pretty much everything he told Troels about Rie was a lie. But if he was so worried about the situation in the flat, then seriously - all he did was wipe down the stairs and the door, and he never once in TWO WEEKS came back to clean up any of the rest of the mess?? The place was soaked in Nanna's blood. Did he not worry that maybe the flies would attract attention?
And speaking of that mess... Vagn confessed to kidnapping Nanna to keep her from running off with her boyfriend Amir. Suddenly out of nowhere he'd become a raging lunatic racist. But also out of nowhere he had also suddenly become a raging sadist who deliberately destroyed the Larsen family. Whoever kidnapped Nanna didn't just take her to an undisclosed location to try to reason with her. He beat the living daylights out of her AND RAPED HER. She lost buckets of blood in the flat and, bound and gagged and violated, continued bleeding in the basement of the house. VAGN did that??? "We all loved her, you know that," he said. Really?
And if she had just gone to the flat to get her passport, how did she manage to still be there long enough for him to find out where she was, what she was planning to do, figure out how to stage the whole falling-asleep-in-a-chair business, figure out how to get out of the nursing home without being seen, get to the flat, and beat her practically to death? And then remove her to the basement of the house without being seen at either end of the trip, then sneak back into the nursing home and "fall asleep in the chair" so he could be found there next morning?
And where did he keep the ether that her lungs were full of? Rama seemed to have gallons of it, but I don't think we ever saw Vagn with any.
And where did he so meticulously clean her before dumping her in the river? In the bathroom of the house? Without leaving a trace? Was the water in the unoccupied dry-rotted house even turned on?
And why would this man who supposedly loved Theiss and his family so much deliberately engineer his own death in such a way that Theiss would end up in prison, destroying his business and leaving his wife and two surviving children in poverty? Why not just take Theiss out to the woods, confess everything, and then blow his OWN brains out? Dramatic point made, but with a TINY bit of character consistency.
And how on earth did he get the puppy in the box to stay quiet all through dinner and the party so he could get Theiss to go off with him to "get the puppy" without realizing that the puppy was already there?
And what was the point of the missing photograph of the younger Vagn? How did that incriminate him? Why did it need to be removed from the photo album, leaving bloody fingerprints behind?
And what boy, finding the bloody passport of his murdered sister in the basement, would simply put it back where he found it, rather than run screaming immediately to tell his parents about it? And instead only tell a friend of the family in strictest confidence and not want him to tell his parents because it might upset them?
And what was so desperately corrupt about the "deal" Morten seemed to be forcing Troels into at the end? Are we supposed to believe that Troels has now lost his last shred of integrity in order to get elected? Correct me if I'm wrong, but wasn't the only thing Morten was demanding was that Troels continue to keep his attempted suicide and Morten's insignificant involvement in the coverup secret? Not really a huge demand. Not anything close to what Bremer had been demanding.
And I'm sorry, but it really wasn't necessary to kill Jan Meyer to advance the plot. Put him in the hospital, sure. But to have him suddenly relapse and die for no apparent reason? To hint, as they seemed to be doing, that there was something sinister about his relapse - and then do nothing with it? Deliberate red herring, another blatant misdirection that went nowhere. And in doing so, the producers ended one of the few relationships in the show with real chemistry and real potential for future development.
Sorry. No.
It's the law of Chekhov's gun. If you put a gun on the wall in Act 1, somebody has to take the gun down and fire it in Act 3. This series had Chekhovian guns all over the place, and almost none of them went off. Over and over again the scripts required characters to do things that not only no actual human being would do, but that those specific characters would never do.
WUSA (1970)
Loved the movie, hated the music
When I finally tracked this movie down, 25 years after seeing it for the first time, I found that I still loved the story. But I also found the score out of sync and jangly. I wonder if a different score would have gotten the movie a little more respect.
It's now almost 25 years since that re-viewing. I'd love to see it again and see if I still feel that way.
The movie is based on a haunting novel by Robert Stone. If you read the book, you'll find yourself going around saying "Defend me friends, I am but hurt."
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011)
You don't have to choose
Isn't it nice that you don't actually have to choose which version is "better"? They're both outstanding. They're different. They have different strengths. The Swedish version does a better job showing Salander's background; the American version does a better job showing the relationship between Salander and Blomqvist. The Swedish version does a better job handling the Wennerstrom subplot; the American version does a better job handling several aspects of the central Harriet Vanger mystery.
As far as the ending is concerned, neither version follows the book completely; the book's ending is a kind of composite of the two. Or, more accurately, the two directors chose to emphasize different aspects of the book's ending.
Take my advice. Don't choose between them and don't waste time arguing which is better. Appreciate the strengths of each. And while you're at it, read the novel AND listen to the excellent audiobook version narrated by Simon Vance.
And keep all the versions away from your kids.