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Day of the Dead (2021)
netflix-americans and awful writing
The netflix-americans in this are some of the worst outside of the shoehorned netflix casting I've ever seen. Appearance wise they are Zendaya tier - hideous. Acting skills - zero.
WandaVision: We Interrupt This Program (2021)
The most sophisticated, adult and complex series since LOST
Where LOST betrayed its fans and never worked out its plot in any real detail, Wandavision builds week to week, layering everything from the different "waves" of Feminism to old style episodic mystery and horror, together with the most depth of any Marvel offering.
And most amazing of all, Wandavision's leads provide the type of performances rare in ANY film let alone "superhero" productions.
And now with this episode the full Ray Bradbury Theater third act comes into view along with heaped doses of familiar faces... And fridge horror.
Jade's Asylum (2019)
Texas Chainsaw Massacre meets LOST third season
It's similar to Haute Tension, with some graphic gore. The psychological aspect is established early on.
Harsh critics of this sort of film who nevertheless think David Lynch is a genius are being very hypocritical.
As the type of genre piece that it is, it establishes its ground rules early, including the use of cinematographic shorthand, dialogue of course and also mise en scene. The title alone indicates exactly what this story is about. As I said- Haute Tension is the sub genre into which this film fits comfortably.
The effects for the forest monsters are excellent and it's a shame that there weren't more lingering closeups of the makeup which is great.
The small amount of nudity is an interesting choice since despite its psychological approach it is still a genre film and an exploitative one at that. However, all in all it does what it says on the can.
Windsor Drive (2015)
Extremely good!
This film is like a well made and coherent version of a later David Lynch production. Spare, lean and intense, it has the triple layers of Mulholland Drive with the brutality and raw emotion of the highlights of films such as Lost Highway and Blue Velvet.
However, this is not a mere pastiche or "Lynchian" film. This production has a distinct unique voice.
Anna Gurji is as always heart stoppingly beautiful and a perfect blend of tough and vulnerable on screen. A credit to Georgia!
With a small cast, it paints with a rich palette.
Agatha and the Midnight Murders (2020)
Something of a triumph
From the African MI5 agent to the blood libel against Max Mallowan as an adulterer, the witlessly foul mouth dialogue and the actress portraying Christie, this effort manages to get every salient point not just inaccurate but willfully wrong.
Mallowan and Christie were MI5 contact agents. Christie herself was the godmother of Ian Fleming, and she provided the name "James Bond" in a story he enjoyed reading, years before he came up with his own explanation for where he came up with the name.
Reading those factoids you have now achieved a level of accuracy and research the makers of this peculiarity have never broached.
The murderer in this story is so transparently easy to guess it verges on the theatre of the absurd. The characters are as cod and stock as any 1930s stereotypes except they are the modern equivalent- right-on portrayals of the usual modern Netflixian sort.
Agatha Christie, never a petite lady and never a fool, is portrayed if that is the word as a sort of desperate middle class conniver, stumbling along before suddenly turning brilliant at the last moment. Ham fisted story telling but then this is less about telling a story and more about the same sort of subtle persistent character assassination of Agatha Christie that afflicted the latter years of what was still called Poirot and (Miss) Marple despite being nothing of the sort. Christie was a conservative, and a Conservative, a defender of the monocultural ethnic England that was under assault already by the 1930s and she was a shrewd observer of the sinister forces staging the "managed decline" of a country she passionately loved despite its many faults.
As usual with modern Christie of all types, what we get is a crude attempt at deconstruction and a high school level "mystery" that is on a par with the disastrous later years of Doctor Who. And has the same odious not-so-subtle politics behind it.
Read a Christie novel instead, and marvel again at the sharp eye she possessed. She invented "signature" as a concept in criminology (unacknowledged), the idea of profiling, and she was also an acute observer of human relationships. All of that goes out the window in favour of cartoon pastiche. And the same can be said of Poirot and Marple of recent decades.