Reviews

Acting was great all around. I've been a huge fan of Sharon Horgan ever since "Catastrophe," and now I'm a huge fan of Eve Hewson, and everyone else was excellent too. Particular kudos to Claes Bang for playing probably the creepiest and most credible villain I've ever seen. There's a lot to love here, and I did love it.

But there are some serious problems with the plot. Let's start with some small ones: do Matt and Becca ever get together? I mean, of course they do, they're the kind of characters that always end up together, there was never any real question about that, but we never actually see it happen. How about Eva's job? Does she still have one? Are we to understand that now that JP is dead, his boss will suddenly stop believing all the bad stuff JP told him about Eva? I HOPE she still has a job, because apparently she's now supporting her sister and niece, but that's left hanging. Ursula's extramarital hanky-panky is very definitively resolved, but come on, "I loved you like crazy yesterday but I now find you too repulsive to be in the same room with because you very subtly suggested that maybe I should kill the guy whom I literally threatened to kill five minutes ago"? Suspending that much disbelief is a pretty big ask.

But those are all mere quibbles compared to the enormous Charlie Foxtrot that is the "Becca tries to freeze JP to death" plot arc. There are just SO MANY things wrong there. Let's start with why is Minna even in the basement at all? Is she checking on George's body, same as JP did every week (for some reason . . . Oh, never mind). So she KNOWS about George, and all the "George is still alive and will be coming home any minute" stuff was pretense, or something? And it never occurred to Becca to wonder about that? It sure occurred to me.

But even leaving that aside, the whole setup simply makes no sense. The plan is that JP will be found dead in the freezer, and everyone will assume that he fell asleep in there. Seriously, someone actually says that on-screen. Why would he fall asleep in a freezer? And of course, when he's found, George is going to be found too; are our heroines not the least bit concerned that that's likely to lead to a bit of investigation?

But ok, so that's the plan, such as it is. The details are that Becca slams the freezer door shut and locks it with her duplicate key -- she HAS to lock it, because we know that if it's not locked you can open the door from the inside and walk out of there; we saw Becca do it -- and then lower the temperature, wait long enough for him to die, raise the temperature to where it was before. And then, for some reason, she's supposed open the door with her key and retrieve the original key from the frozen body. Umm, come again? Why shouldn't he have the key on him, if he went into a locked freezer and then fell asleep? He would have needed a key to get in there in order to fall asleep and freeze to death. It would have been very suspicious for him to NOT have a key. And perhaps Becca figured that out, because in fact she never goes back for the key, because if she had we couldn't have had 20 minutes of suspense over who got killed. But if she wasn't going to go back for the key, why was there all that dialogue about how she was? And then JP shows up the next day and opens the freezer -- wait, how does he do that? The key is still inside with Minna. Does JP have yet another duplicate key? In that case, why is there a shot of him looking for the key in the taxidermied animal mouth and failing to find it? SMH.

Ok, another thing. JP, we eventually learn, died of strangulation. The cops exhume his body and examine it, but the results are inconclusive; that's what they tell Tom. Has anyone on the writing staff ever watched a single episode of CSI? Strangulation leaves a vast panoply of forensic clues: blunt force injury to the neck, mini-hemmorhages in the neck and eyes, cyanosis, bleeding from the mouth, and often a broken hyoid bone. The idea that the Dublin Gardai forensic lab somehow missed all this is really hard to swallow.

Also, the whole "OMG Matt knows that Grace killed him we're all going to prison whatever shall become of us" business was just silly. It was 100% obvious, from the moment we found out that Grace killed him, how the whole insurance investigation was going to end up. Matt and Tom weren't cops, and the cops had already decided (because of their incompetent crime lab) that there was no crime here, and all Matt and Tom wanted was to not pay a claim. So fine, Grace says "ok, don't pay the claim" and everybody's happy. And in fact that's what happens, but anybody who's been paying any attention figured that out 20 minutes ago.

There's probably more of this, but that's enough for now. Again, I actually liked the show. But people who write complex mystery plots should make them make sense, and this one was pretty deficient in that area. This could be the fault of the writers of the original Belgian show, but whoever's fault it was, it was pretty annoying.

If there's a BAFTA category for "Most Egregious Failure to Resolve Plot Threads," this opus would be a shoo-in. Acting was decent, for the most part; nice to see both of the leads from "Hidden" (although you'll miss the guy who played. DS Vaughn if you blink), Mr. Bates from "Downton Abbey," and the always impressive Claire Rushbrook from "Sherwood." I can't say I ever warmed up to the lead character Matilda (Lydia Wilson), but perhaps I wasn't supposed to. The direction was kind of frenetic, with FAR too much reliance on the "character gets a letter/phone call/text message and reacts violently but we're not going to tell you what was in the message ha ha" technique.

But wow, the ending was ridiculous. It really reeked of "ok, we've been greenlighted for six episodes and we've burned through five of them without actually resolving anything; let's just write something and then we can all go out for a drink." Is Matilda evil now? Ok, the Mr. Bates guy is dead; how did that happen, and what happened to his evil companions? And speaking of him, what exactly WERE the evil companions doing for his kid, and what's going to happen to said kid now? Creepy Antiques Lady was going to "sort" one of the other baddies; did she? If not, what was the point of that bit of dialogue? Is Hal going to be ok? Are he and the "Hidden" lady going to get together and defeat the now-evil Matilda (if in fact she is) in the next season (which isn't going to happen, thank God)? Are we to understand that Sean will be getting better now because the "thin ones" are gone, and if so, how did that happen exactly? Just because your plot has some supernatural elements, you don't get to just wave a magic wand and go "abracadabra, it's resolved."

The word from here is don't bother. If you want to watch a creepy Welsh mystery with a tacked-on serving of family drama, go with "Hidden," which is generally pretty good, and whose writers understand how to stick the landing.

It's of course impossible not to compare this to the 1940 Hitchcock classic, and let's just say it: it's not as good. But it's better in some ways. I actually liked Hammer's approach to Maxim better than Olivier's; Olivier was so overbearing that I had to wonder what the heck the nameless Joan Fontaine character saw in him, other than his money. Hammer walked the line between loving and domineering pretty well. And Fontaine's totally meek and submissive approach was probably about right for 1940 viewers but it's always hit me as creepy; Lily James did much better for a modern audience. Kristin Scott Thomas is a terrific actor, but sorry, nobody but Dame Judith is ever going to be Danvers. She owns that role.

Couple of things, though. First off, the tacked-on ending was really bad, reminding me uncomfortably of the idiotic framing device in the original "Invasion of the Body Snatchers." What the heck were they thinking? WHY did it need a happy ending? That was a bad, bad choice. A smaller but weird thing is the use, in two different places in the movie, of Pentangle's recording of "Let No Man Steal Your Thyme." Pentangle was a unique English folk/jazz fusion group whose sound absolutely reeks of the late 70's, and the song is about men who abandon women, which has nothing to do with the plot of "Rebecca." It's generally just bizarre and inappropriate, and I say that despite being a diehard Pentangle fan. Also, it's been a while since I read the book and I don't remember exactly how Danvers meets her end there, but the iconic scene of her staring out the window as the house collapses on her in the Hitchcock version is so powerful that any other ending seems anti-climactic.

All in all, not bad, I'm glad I saw it, but it's not a patch on the Hitchcock version. (And any fans of the Hitchcock version really need to see the Mitchell and Webb sketch about it: just look up "mitchell and webb rebecca" on YouTube. It's one of the most brilliant pieces of sketch comedy ever.)

This movie is an excellent demonstration of why this series of books -- there are 13 -- needed to be adapted into a TV series rather than a two-hour movie. It was going along pretty well; Jim Carrey is a decent enough Count Olaf, and Meryl Streep can do no wrong, and there were some fun cameos that were also pretty decent, and the kids were great, and all in all it was pretty ok. But then, after getting through about three of the books, they just basically ran out of time and decided they were done, leaving a massive tangle of unresolved plot threads waving in the breeze. What, exactly, was the deal with the parents and Aunt Josephine and Uncle Monty and their secret society or whatever? What's up with the spyglasses? What's with all the fires? I know the answers to all of these questions because I've both read the books and seen the TV adaptation, but this version completely ignores them. My impression is that they thought that they were going to make a sequel, and that might have been fine, but as a standalone this is just frustrating and annoying. Word from here is, give it a miss and check out the TV adaptation instead. It's delightful in every respect, and though it pains me to say it, Neil Patrick Harris leaves Jim Carrey in the dust, scenery-chewing-wise.

Oh, come on. Seriously? That's where you want to go? Novelists and screenwriters should pick a genre and stick with it; no fair suddenly changing part way through. If, let's say, the final season of "Game of Thrones" had featured space aliens beaming all the White Walkers up to their flying saucer, people would have been understandably annoyed (though, to be fair, that wouldn't have been all that much worse than the actual last season). This turkey is no better. It was going along just fine, nice little psychological thriller, and then at episode 4 or so it took a whiplash-inducing swerve into supernatural horror. And even if you're willing to accept the absurd premise, the plot still has holes a mile wide. For instance, is one's accent a feature of one's personality/soul/astral body/whatever, or is it a physical attribute of one's body? Apparently it's the latter, because a character with a heavy Glaswegian accent suddenly speaks perfect BBC-announcer English after switching to a different body.

However, kudos on one point. There's a scene where Our Heroine is talking on a cell phone, and the person she's talking to hangs up on her. To the director's immense credit, all we hear is a little click, which in fact is what you hear when you're talking on a cell phone and someone hangs up on you. What we do NOT hear is a dial tone. You never ever hear a dial tone on a cell phone under any circumstances, but you don't get a dial tone when someone hangs up on you even on a land-line phone. Nevertheless, every movie and TV show ever made uses the dial tone to indicate that the other person on the call has just hung up, and it makes me nuts because THAT'S JUST FREAKIN' WRONG, so one star to this show for not doing that. And two more for the acting, which was really quite decent. Eve Hewson, in particular, is terrific. I'll definitely look for other things she's in.

Overall, however, do yourself a favor and watch something else.

It's really a shame what they did to this terrific show. Let's start with the glaringly obvious: the singers who dubbed O'Toole's and Loren's songs were just dreadful singers. I mean, why not get someone good? There are plenty of good singers. I know that they picked the guy who dubbed O'Toole because his voice sounded like O'Toole's speaking voice, but that's not a good reason for picking someone who can't sing in tune. I'd guess that they wanted to find someone for Loren's songs who could do a convincing Italian accent, but I'd really have been a lot more ok with a mismatch with the actors' speaking voices than with the dreadful singing.

And then there's the dancing. I'm told that some musicals can point to their dancing with, umm, musical-ish pride. (And we'll get to that disastrous editing choice in a minute.) There was precisely one dance number in this entire movie; the horses during the framing scene in the dungeon. One dance number. In a Broadway musical. (Or rather in the sad remnants of one.) Someone was actually credited for choreography; I'm darned if I can understand why.

And speaking of the dungeon, in the stage show, it's a true framing device: we've got Cervantes and the scary bad guys in the dungeon at the beginning; that transforms to the story of Quixote through the magic of theater; and then we're back to it at the end and they're not scary any more. In the movie, they continually cut back to it. Why? And the "We're Only Thinking of Him" number was actually set in the dungeon -- again, why? This is part of the story that's supposed to be set within the framing device; why wouldn't it be set in Quijana's house, the same way the tavern scenes are set in an actual tavern? Dumb and pointless decision.

But not nearly as pointless as the biggest disaster of this thing: cutting the entire first half of Aldonza's big song. It's a GREAT SONG. It's one of the most memorable highlights of this show. This is like doing cutting the first half of "Climb Every Mountain" or having Nellie and Emile just do the final 24 bars of "Some Enchanted Evening." Granted, if she'd sung the whole thing it would have been painful for twice as long because, see above, Aldonza's songs were dubbed by someone with a terrible voice, but still. This song is utterly central to Aldonza's character and to her whole relationship with Quixote. What in God's name were they thinking? And also, they cut "Why Do You Do the Things You Do" completely, which isn't quite as big a tragedy because it's only a so-so song, but leaving out "I was spawned in a ditch" is just freakin' criminal. Maybe it was a censorship thing; was the idea that Aldonza's father wasn't married to her mother too risque for a movie in 1972? I wouldn't have thought so.

And ok, small thing I guess, but they weren't even trying with O'Toole's makeup. The beard was obviously fake and obviously intended to be obviously fake. Because, right, he put on the fake beard during the dungeon scene when he transformed into Quixote. But then in the non-dungeon bits it should be a real beard, same as the guys in horse suits magically transformed into real horses. Weird.

Three stars because Loren was pretty darn good other than the singing which wasn't her fault, and O'Toole was kind of a weird casting choice but pulled it off pretty well, and James Coco was James Coco and there's nothing wrong with that (except you'd think they might have sprung for a dialect coach to help him suppress the. New York accent), and it was fun seeing the very young Ian Richardson and Brian Blessed (who was quite the stud-muffin back then). But a complete Charlie Foxtrot other than that.

Ok, Hugh Grant is perfect as a charming sociopath, and Matilda di Angelis is super decorative, and Nicole Kidman is a terrific actor and whoever did her hair in the first episode deserves three Emmys. But there are some holes in the plot you could drive a late-model gray Range Rover through.

For starters, what kind of lawyer is Sylvia? Definitely not employment; she says that. Is she a criminal defense lawyer? If so, why is she all "you need to find yourself a lawyer" with Grace? Wouldn't she be volunteering to represent her herself? IF she ISN'T a criminal defense lawyer, how does she come to know the original public defender's nickname and how he acquired it? There are a lot of lawyers in New York City; are we supposed to assume that they all know each other?

Oh, and speaking of Sylvia: really? Jonathan, who ends up concealing from Grace that he'd been fired from the hospital, hires one of Grace's best friends to represent him at the disciplinary hearing? Perhaps because he can't find an actual employment lawyer who doesn't know his wife in New York City? Did I mention that there are a lot of lawyers there?

Grace went for a walk after the school party/auction, and happened to walk right by Elena's house. For starters, that really is one full-blown gonzo of a coincidence, a point which the cops totally noticed but I guess we're not supposed to. But even leaving that point aside, Elena's house was far enough away from the party that Grace found it credible when Elena turned down her offer of a ride home in Grace's chauffeured car, and yet Grace managed to walk there?

But here's the big one: at the end of the trial, Haley snaps at Jonathan that he had screwed up badly by not getting rid of the hammer. And yes indeed he did. Really, really badly. WHY did he screw up like that? He's a sociopath, not an idiot. Wouldn't any even semi-rational person's first instinct have been to get rid of the hammer? We've seen about a million shots of Jonathan and Grace walking along the edge of a river; how about throwing the hammer in there, like every baddie in every "Law and Order" episode? Why in the world would he carefully carry it up to the beach house and carefully (but not TOO carefully) conceal it there? You'd only do that if you wanted to make sure you had access to it in the future, but why would he have wanted that?

And speaking of the hammer: a violin case? Seriously? So, then, where does the violin go? We've established that Henry takes violin lessons at school, and he's back at school after the trip to the lake house where he acquired the hammer, so presumably he needs to take the violin to school. How does he do that? Does he hide the hammer somewhere else when he's using the violin case to put the violin in, and then move it into the case when he practices? Does that make any sense at all?

And ok, this one's pretty technical, but Grace's testimony at the trial was definitely hearsay. Just trust me. Haley objects, and the prosecutor says "declaration against interest." That's just wrong. That is an exception to the hearsay rule, but first off, it only applies if the declarant -- that is, the person who made the statement the witness is testifying about -- is unavailable to testify. Maybe living in England would qualify as unavailable and maybe it wouldn't, but the judge didn't know that Mom lives in England, and he couldn't have gone for the "declaration against interest" exception without establishing that. But the other thing is that for a hearsay statement to come in as a declaration against interest, it has to be against the DECLARANT's interest, not the defendant's. For example, if Mom had told Grace "Jonathan is a sociopath because when he was little he saw me kill his father," THAT would be a declaration against her own interest, because she could go to prison for that, so she wouldn't have said it if it weren't true, or so the theory goes. But what she said was not against her own interest, it was merely against Jonathan's, and that's not enough to trigger the exception. I mean, any evidence a prosecutor puts on is going to be against the defendant's interest; that's the whole point. Now, the prosecutor was probably right when she switched to "it's for impeachment," but no lawyer would ever have come up with "against interest" in this situation because it just wasn't. Ok, that one's probably too nit-picky to matter to anyone except lawyers.

Nevertheless, gripping and fun to watch.

Just to get this out of the way, I firmly believe that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare's plays. And you know what? There wasn't actually a bar in Casablanca called Rick's, and there was never an actress named Margo Channing. It's a movie, folks. It doesn't have to be accurate to be good.

I thought it was good. Great ensemble performances, particularly by Redgrave as a mildly senile elderly Elizabeth. Nice tie-ins with the Shakespeare plays; I particularly liked Anne DeVere's speech about "ok, you've slept with your mother, put that in one of your plays," which I gather is a reference to "Titus Andronicus." The story held together well. I really liked the portrayal of Jonson. Not a classic for the ages, and frankly I liked the humorous approach of "Shakespeare in Love" a little better, but it was enjoyable and I'll probably watch it again at some point.

It took me a while to warm up to this show. This may be, in part, because my expectations were set very wrongly by some of the publicity I'd heard; I was expecting a comical romp poking fun at new-age spiritual therapy. It's not that. There's a taste of that, but this is really about relationships, and it's really getting interesting. The first couple of episodes, I'm now coming to understand, were exposition, just setting up the situation. But now we're starting to see a lot more development of the Amy/Levi, Amy/Mom, and, probably most importantly, Amy/Tyler relationships, and they're all quite nuanced and credible. Laura Dern is great, but it's really an ensemble cast, and Mike White, Luke Wilson, and Diane Ladd (Laura's real-life mom, I see from IMDb) deserve equal kudos. This is by far the best thing I've ever seen Luke do; it's a "whoa, this guy can actually act" revelation on the level of Charlize Theron in "Monster."

I'll say the same thing others have said: don't give up on this one based on the pilot and the first couple of episodes; it really does seem to be taking off.

As a slyly self-referential autobiographical peek at J.J. Abrams's movie-obsessed teenage years, it's not so bad. Trouble is, it's also trying to be a sci-fi thriller, and it's just not going to thrill when it's so damn predictable. Think the shy kid and the popular blonde girl are going to be sweeties by the end? Well, so they are. Think the military dude who's a dead ringer for Kiefer Sutherland in "A Few Good Men" is going to turn out to be the heavy? Whaddaya know. Bad scary monster who just wants to go home going to go home? Yeah, and not a moment too soon.

There was some good stuff here. The kids were great, the aforementioned youthful-movie-obsession stuff was actually kind of cool, the protracted train-crash sequence was as good as protracted train crashes in movies get. But if you want to see the same basic story done with a bit of actual originality, rent "Iron Giant."

I'm honestly not sure whether this movie would be funny to someone who isn't involved in morris dancing, but to those of us in the morris community, this is just priceless. It's a wonderful, gentle, loving, and intimately knowledgeable parody. Other reviews have compared it to "Spinal Tap" because of the mockumentary style, but I thought it was closer to "A Mighty Wind." The thing that jumps right out at a morris dancer is that the dancing is consummately well done, and the choreography -- even the really over-the-top "morris meets Lord of the Dance" bit at the American folk festival -- is always recognizably Cotswold morris, no matter how silly it is. The story actually manages to be touching, even when it's broadly humorous; the little moment at the "rustication" ceremony (where did they get that word?) where Dev silently mouths "I'm sorry" to Derecq just gets me every time, and I've seen the movie four times now. The acting and writing are consistently spot-on. As an added treat, it's fun to spot the actors from all the Jane Austen adaptations: Willoughby, Fanny Dashwood, and Robert Farrars from "Sense and Sensibility" all put in appearances, for example.

My only mild complaint, and it's really a small thing, is that it seems like they could have found an American actress to play Sonia. Some British actors can do American accents and some can't; Naomie Harris, unfortunately, is one of the latter variety. She was perfect in the role other than that, but this is one of those "other than that, Mrs. Lincoln, how did you like the play" situations. Her overly-broad A's, particularly in the TV promo for Villandance bit, came off like a Brit poking fun at the colonials, which wasn't the idea at all.

Nice visuals, killer score, some great (if kind of show-offy) editing -- but I'm with the "What in God's name was that supposed to be about?" crowd. Sorry, but when I see a bunch of different stories, set on different continents in different languages, I don't think it's unreasonable of me to think that I'm being invited to find the common thread. When it turns out that there isn't one, it's like the filmmakers are pointing at me and laughing and saying "Ha ha, gotcha!" It's like Lucy pulling the football away when Charlie Brown goes to kick it. They raised my expectations, completely frustrated them, and apparently expected to get a medal for it (or perhaps a gold statuette).

These three stories (or four, I guess, if you count the Morocco sequence as two separate ones) were all interesting, but their points of connection were completely irrelevant to the stories themselves. They could just as well have thrown in one about the guy who's in charge of the computer network at the Winchester factory where the rifle was made (and his dysfunctional relationship with his adopted Vietnamese daughter, perhaps), or the clerk in the African gun shop where the Japanese guy bought the rifle while on safari (and his struggle to come to terms with his homosexuality in the age of AIDS). I could make up a million of these. It's sort of cool that they did the multiple-intersecting-stories thing, but there needs to be a payoff, a resolution, a closure -- a reason I wasted 140-odd minutes of my life watching this thing. There wasn't.

I was pretty surprised at "Little Miss Sunshine" getting a best-pic nomination, but it was better than this. At least it was about something.