Reviews

Once the cop bragged that he planted evidence and she hit the sack with him what, 15 minutes later?--there was no suspense. Their relationship was not credible from the start.

Spoilers--yes! And they'll save you wasted time. The British are I believe are addicted to/enthralled by overly complicated stories (I think the writerly correct term is "densely plotted.") This is one of them--way too much stuff going on, which means deliberate attempts to confuse and mislead viewers.Focus is on Hotshot TV person (and crap mother) Heathcote, who's re-reporting a decades-old Crime of the Century in a backward little village called Scardale. It's the Disappearance of Young Alison. Walked out the door w/her dog & never seen again. No body found, just the dog. BUT bloodhound young Tec and Tough Old-Timer get killer circumstantial evidence vs Stepdad, despite mulish non-cooperation of villagers, even though they all hate Stepdad as much as he hates them. Evidence such as: 1, Stepdad's a serious pro photog (& classist snob w/pals in high places) whose darkroom is wallpapered w/graphically sexy pix of himself w/ Alison--a 13-year-old made up to look a smoldering 25 or so. 2. More Alison pix found in Stepdad's safe conclusively prove he's a child rapist. 3. Bullets found in a pool of Alison's blood in abandoned mine come from a gun stolen from Stepdad's pal. 4. Gun is found in Stepdad's den. 5 Wrapped in Stepdad's shirt--custom-made & identifiable as his. 6. It's soaked w/ Alison's blood. 7. Also, old map found in Stepdad's possession proves he knew all about mine's locale. Stepdad relentlessly protests innocence but is tried and hanged right pronto. (Well, not quite pronto. Much time is spent by defense team suggesting the photos are fakes--and faked by the Tec. More time waster showing the Tec actually had the skill to do it--and never toold any he hed photo skills.( OK, now things, as Robbie Burns would say, "gang agley." Heathcote, who is herself bloodhounding this story for her TV show, doesn't know why she's obsessed ("it's like an itch I can't scratch') but plows on anyway. Then the Tec from the case, who won fame and career success for nailing Stepdad, suddenly pulls out of her TV show and won't say why. (We learn much later that he begins to doubt Stepdad killed Alison & was wrongly convicted of murder though rightly of rape.) Naturally, because this is "densely plotted," H'cote must also deal w/guilt over her single-crapmotherhood; a sullen, acting-out teenage daughter (ALWAYS a bad sign, the sullen offspring); her OWN crap mother (who warns against digging into the past and then goes back to her eternal typewriter, though we never lean why); a time-pressuring boss (another bad sign); a backstabbing colleague (yet another); and the hatred of the villagers, who say she's trying to do dirt to the beloved hero Tec (but in fact have Their Own Hidden Agenda!). All this is ludicrously wrapped up in a neat but fragrant bundle of happenstance and coincidence, which is what writers use when concocting fake stories, i.e.,stories w/no reason for being. As follows: Heathcote, who in a throwaway line tells sullen daughter that she summered at Alison's family's estate a few times as a child, has been trying to get OK to film inside the manor house for months w/o success. So despite having been fired from her program for not getting the job done and despite she and her daughter and the hero Tec's Old-Timer partner having been threatened at the manor house by ax-wielding villagers mere days before,she goes back to the place again, alone!, and sits outside on a log waiting for someone to come out. And whaddaya know, someone does! What are the odds? Heathcote forces her way in and soon discovers what the hero Tec (now every elderly & fragile) discovered only a week or so earlier (it's the reason he's exiting H'cote's program): ALISON IS NOT DEAD!

The murder rap was illegitimate after all!. Poor Tec? Not really. First, Heathcote gets from Alison definitive photo proof that Stepdad had raped almost every child in the village. (She's kept it all these years, like relics of the saints) Immediately afterward, Alison convenes a meeting of the villagers, at which Heathcote learns the following: When the dozen-or-so parents learned Stepdad's continuing multiple rapes they decided to Act. Here you'd expect something glorious amd gory like a torchlight parade with pitchforks and savagery, ending w/Stepdad's mutilated corpse buried in a bog or pushed through the wood-chipper. But No. Alison's Mom and all the parents decided instead to frame Stepdad for murder! For that, Alison must 'disappear'--but first she is bled--bled like a stuck pig. Drained of enough blood (3 pints!) to convince investigators she must be dead--murdered--despite lack of a body. The gun is duly pinched by a housekeeper who conveniently works for both Alison's mom and the gun 's owner. After a couple of shot are fired to provide bullets at the supposed murder site, the gun is planted in Stepdad's den. And Alison? Alison is shipped off to distant relatives and, using their family name, moves w/them to Canada! At least for a time; anyway; then for no known reason she returns to live as, a recluse, in the manor house. That's where Tec accidentally spots and recognizes her--and pulls out of Heathcote's program, but can't say why lest the whole world learn that hesent an innocent man to the gallows.) All this is proudly admitted to at the meeting of villagers, When Heathcote tells them that framing a guy for murder could put them in prison, Alison calmly notes "that's what they signed up for." (Easy for her to say: she was 13 at the time and is legally not liable!) Still, no one objects. No one tries to talk Heathcote into keeping this to herself. No one says 'boy, are we ever screwed." People who went after her with axes only a day or so before now just SIT THERE and let her go off with the evidence that could put them all in jail. Or gaol (it's England, remember.) Surely this is enough, eh? But, again, No. Remember Heathcote's unscratchable itch? Remember her own crap mom? Well, later she goes riffling through the photos again and Bang-O right between the eyes! She finds a pic that proves to her horror that one of Stepdad's victims was HERSELF. Yes, she was raped by Stepdad too.! And she also realizes that her own crap mom knew too and did nothing. This would be the point at which Heathcote,gives her a belt in the eye,but she doesn't do that. She takes all her evidence for what would make her show the Story of the Year and blithely hands it over to the boss who canned her, thus rewarding him as well as the disloyal colleague who has taken her show over. Why? Because she and Sullen Brat are going to take a month off together and become the Best Pals they always should have been, thus making up for 15 years of parental neglect.

OK, so it's "densely plotted." Everything fits in tyhe end. All the little pieces are wrapped up and the strings tied. Just like one of those 1000-piece picture puzzles or Lego toys. Perfect if you like that sort of thing.

Spoilers ahead-actually, defensive warnings. A small Dutch town is terrorized by mysterious and always unwitnessed disappearances. A cop from Amsterdam is brought in. Also rung in is Peggy, local daughter who herself mysteriously disappeared several years before. Every episode throws suspicion on a new resident, but Frits, dad of the first vic is given a chance to go psycho several times, probably to keep the scriptwriters awake. Only one of the 12 vics (the first one) returns-alive but mute. Promising clues appear by the long ton; none pans out. It's a national scandal! Finally the top cop is kicked out but of course he continues investigating on the sly. And of course he and Peggy, whom he threatened with arrest for interference at the outset, become allies. At length we learn the motive for all this; it is ridiculous and non-credible. After all the red herrings that have been thrown about there is as lot of housekeeping to be done at the end to tie everything up; maybe that's what this goes to 13 rather than the customary 12 eps. And the ultimate clue is discovered in the finale in a building clearly visible to the but for some reason never searched. A neat row of fresh graves is clearly visible, as are the tools that ID the killer. The acting is on a par with the writing. Our two leads are so wooden you could count their growth rings; you could carve then in to camp stools or use them to finish the basement. In short, you can do just about anything but believe them.

Critics rave about this film for two reasons: 1, they're raving mad; 2, in the #MeToo era, attitudes are hardening into groupthink, and critics typically go along with political correctness-which, apart from terrific acting, is all this boring, noisy, claustrophobic and out-of-date (again with the embittered wife?) stinker has going for it. Boring because it's endless talk. Noisy? It recalls Queen Victoria's comment on Gladstone: "he speaks to me as if I was a public meeting." People are constantly shouting here, and in sets that seem to have terrible acoustics. Then there's the deafening score. Claustrophobic? Everything happens indoors (and if it moves outdoors it's only to move into a car). Dated? It's another resentful-wife tale of lost identity. So here's the story: Young writing hopefuls fall in love: student Joan and professor Joe. After breaking up his marriage the two pair up, she on the wife/mommy track, he on the great American novelist track, only to be derailed because his novel stinks. Really stinks. Birds won't fly over it. After much agony, he agrees to let her "fix" it, and she does. Taking only the facts of his weary trope (again with "my Jewish family"? Oi!), she replaces his wooden characters and stilted dialogue with heart and soul and life, and (mirabile dictu!) the revision is a boffo hit. Realizing that "team writing' is their future, they divvy it up like so: he'll be the house husband, kid minder, cook and provider of plot material; she'll be Rumpelstiltskin, spinning dross into gold, but only Joe is credited. He does the book-signings, the tours, the great-author interviews, the relentless philandering. For 40 years they go one, she getting an easy, prosperous life in return for anonymity. But then Joe wins the Nobel Prize, kindling in Joan long-buried angst of the (do I have to spell it out for you?) "What about my career?" and "I coulda been a contenda" variety. Fanning her flames is Nathaniel Bone, a slimy would-be biographer of Joe and a truly cringe-making character on his best day. Give him credit though: he has doggedly unearthed the truth of the Joan-Joe partnership, and all he needs is her confirmation. In Stockholm, in an over-drinks tête-à-tête with Joan he tries oleaginously to get it. He fails at that but succeeds in threatening the stability of my stomach. OK, off we go to the Nobel Prize grand dinner, and since the director of this movie, Björn Runge, is a Swede, we are entitled to believe that the dinner is accurately represented. Thus my question: who knew a Nobel Prize dinner was exactly like Gala Night on a Carnival cruiseliner? More high-volume tantrums follow until Joe has a heart attack and keels over, dead as a smelt. One the flight home, the slimy Nathaniel is warned by Joan: write a single bad thing about Joe and I'll take you to court, and he slinks off, crushed. Who's kidding whom here? The bio of a famous author, even a freshly dead Nobel winner, might sell a piddling few thousand copies. Somehow the writer of this epic, who can't tell the difference between 'implied' and 'inferred,' seems unaware that a juicy scandal + lawsuit would shoot sales through the roof. Similarly unreal: the scene in which Linnea, the toothsome young lens-hen assigned to covering Joe, is this-close to heading sackward with him until he has to take his heart pill. OK, she might well want a Nobelist as a notch on her garter belt-but when 15 minutes before he almost collapsed in front of her? All in all, the acting's great, the story stinks and Glenn Close ought to ask her dentist about whitening.

What's interesting here, and supported by the judge's on-camera statements, is that the prosecution offered perjured evidence by Mr. Deaver and manipulated or hid inconvenient evidence, and relied excessively on the inflammatory bisexuality angle. Apparently the medical examiner changed her opinion under pressure from her superior; how was that discovered? What if anything was done about Deaver's perjury? Were other cases he'd handled examined? And here's what we get from IMDB reviewers: the director's purported sexual affair with Peterson, a $1.4 insurance policy on Kathleen (was it paid and to whom?), the German conclusion that went from accident to homicide and back again, and more. Some IMDB-ers stated that the documentary couldn't cover everything, but as an experienced editor (of narrative text, though not film), I think that view is wrong-headed. There is an appalling amount of flab in this documentary that ought to have been cut, much of it footage of Peterson blabbing on and on, saying mostly the same things repeatedly. I couldn't believe that so much of that hadn't been cut-it struck me as amateurish editing. Many of questions noted above could have been covered if room had been made for them. I felt the director was struggling desperately to fill more episodes. In the end, despite some good content, I don't see this thing winning any awards, and many of IMDB's rave reviews struck me as merely enthusiastic rather than analytical. FYI, I tried to get the BBC podcast and the sister's article mentioned by Shoyt_2001 and andy-love, but all my clicking got me was "can't find".

In the first series we learn that Marcella is a brilliant detective with a problem: some horrible event in her past, which she can't remember, plus the death of her newborn daughter from 'cot death (called crib death or SIDS in this country), provoke panic attacks/fugue states in which she does things, often life-threatening, that she can't remember. Meanwhile, her husband is dumping her, she knows not why. She does some great detective work and eventually (very eventually) solves the overly complicated case, and that should have been enough. Unfortunately, the series got great reviews from people devoted more to histrionics than actual drama, paving the way for the lavishly violent, incredibly over plotted and utterly unbelievable second series. Here, almost every character--and there are WAY too many of them--is utterly despicable or a sicko of some sort. It starts with ritual murders of random children (17, it's eventually learned) for no known reason. The subtext is abandonment: Marcella has abandoned her family for her job; her husband has abandoned her for yet another woman (the first was murdered in Series 1, with Marcella made to look guilty for fake-drama purposes); her bosses (one of whom is sleeping with her) abandon the department to this nutcase who is a danger to herself and others; her children (a psychologically damaged 12-year-old son and a fairly level-headed 15(?)-year-old daughter) abandon her off and on; the boss who sleeps with her semi-abandons her for an ice-queen blonde who is a saintly do-gooder running a foundation for poor kids which is in turn threatened by the pig-capitalist husband to whom she is non-credibly married and whose tone-deaf behavior would send Bernie Sanders into cardiac arrest. Then there is the lesbian couple demoralized by financial troubles because of failed in-vitro treatments, which leads one of them, who works at the Foundation, to get involved in a lucrative blackmail scheme in the ice queen's behalf to pay for another shot at in vitro, even though she doesn't want a kid anyway, while the one who DOES want a kid tries to get pregnant the conventional way by inviting some random saloon lout to violently shag her in a restroom toilet stall. There's also a sick member of Marcella's squad, who uses his tech expertise to spy on her home life. At first furious, Marcella cools off when she realizes that she can a) blackmail the guy into digging up dirt on her husband's lover and b) get proof that her husband was trying to blackmail HER. A marginally sympathetic customer in the first series, he's despicable in Series 2. During one of Marcella's attacks he slashes and bruises himself; when she 'comes to,' so to speak, blackmails her: if she doesn't sign over the kid, he'll tell the court how she knifed and beat him, thus costing her not only the kids but her career. Meanwhile the latest kidnap victim just barely escapes from his country-house dungeon and is given a lift by passing motorists, but any hope of great-god-almighty-and-ending at-last is quickly dashed--bashed, really, when the rescuing motorists' car gets into a competition with an oncoming train and wins the silver medal. This give the scriptwriters the chance to produce another kidnapping, and the victim, wouldn't you know it, is Marcella's son! From here we proceed to the further lunacy required to ID and nail the killer who is--well, you wouldn't guess in a million years because it's totally made up and straight out of left field. Enough? But wait--there's more, as they say on TV. In fact there are TWO more endings coming!. First, it has already been established that Marcella is seeking help for her mental derangement via laughably silly recovered-memory therapy: the therapist simply says she'll count down from 5 and presto! Marcella will go back to the Terrible Thing that occurred. And that first time, she almost makes it. Now, after the serial killer is caught and her son has been saved, Marcella goes back for more therapy. She voyages back to the very day and place of the Terrible Thing--her newborn baby's nursery. The infant has colic and has been screaming her bloody head off without letup for two solid days. (This scene feels as if it were filmed in real time.) Alone, with no one to help her, distraught, frantic and on the edge, Marcella hugs the infant to her breast and, overdoing that as she does everything else, accidentally suffocates the child. This in time leads her to the ledge on the roof of police HQ, thinking to end it all. But then a fellow officer who has been nothing but a cold fish for all of two seasons, suddenly turns all melty compassionate and pulls her back. OK? Well, sort of. She compromises by slashing herself with her scissors and running off into the night. In the SECOND extra ending she's found sleeping rough under a bridge, looking homeless and destitute, which she is. But then she is wakened by a stranger from some mysterious, off-the-record enforcement agency. The squat she had been living in, he says, has burnt to the ground, its occupants so badly incinerated they had to be ID'd by DNA. Since Marcella's DNA was found there, she has been made officially and legally dead. And that, my friends, is exactly the kind of non-person the mysterious agency needs to carry out its mysterious deeds. Thus is the stage set for the threat of yet a third season of Marcella. The wise viewer is well advised to imitate the actions of Brave Sir Robin:Run away! Run away!

A passel of good old boys and girls wrapped in American flags, sheriff's badges and denim are they're doing what comes naturally: hoe-downin' and boot-stompin' and a-signin' the sappiest of hurtin' songs (yo, 'Tennessee Waltz'?). Then it hits you: they're actually wearing 38-liter Stetsons because they're all French. Indeed, there's a subset of Frenchmen that is besotted with America's Old West (as are Germans with American Indians), and we are delighting in this charming foolishness when it's suddenly clear that Alain's daughter is missing. Alain and his wife are subsequently astounded to learn that she has dropped all her old friends, taken on serious boyfriend, that he's Muslim, and that he and she have utterly disappeared. Alain's hunt for her becomes increasingly obsessive, violent and dangerous as he is duped or cheated by various Muslim contacts, more or less ignored by the authorities, and frustrated and humiliated at every turn. Save for an enigmatic visit from a fonctionnaire identified only as a government minister from 'the ministry,' everything hands together; the story is mesmerizing and fraught with tensions. Then circumstance require that Alain's son, Texanly named Kid, take over the hunt. Here begins a series of high- risk scenes and episodes that are equally mesmerizing but devoid of logic or even the remotest likelihood. They are nevertheless convincing in and of themselves, but if you require logic and likelihood, too bad. For example (spoiler!): early on Kid is out of the blue working for an NGO in Pakistan or Afghanistan (I forget which) where he falls for a fellow do-gooder but leaves her like that on meeting a shabby and dubious American freelance 'fixer' (fabulous John C. Reilly) who's going on horseback with $800,000 in gold to ransom two guys from the Taliban and doesn't trust his creepy local guides and so gets Kid to ride along as bodyguard by telling him he can get the sister back. If that won't work for you, beware: things are about to get a lot worse. This didn't bother me; I just rolled with it. But a companion hated every minute and also detected a flash of incest re father and daughter. Proceed at your own risk.

Poland, immediately after WWII: a high-stress French Red Cross unit is working MASH-style, to treat and evacuate numerous wounded French soldiers. A desperate Polish nun asks for help, but by rule the corpsmen can treat only French and only military, yet by luck the nun persuades a your French nurse to break the rule and go to the convent. There she finds that the emergency this: a nun is about to give birth, and with no more help than her sisters' whispered prayers. The subsequent revelations are all convincing and all horrible, especially because they nuns have just barely survived both German and Russian armies,and their cloistered order is extremely backward. This riveting and beautifully filmed story is said to be based on fact. That always makes me want to know more than the 'based on' part. 'Facts are stubborn things,' as John Adams said, to which I add that filmmakers are malleable. They have to make the facts into a story. In this case I felt the wind-up of the story was a high-fructose invention—pat, glib, convenient. Excellent nevertheless.

Seeking irredeemable Presbyterian gloom? Then Sunset Song is the haggis you crave. Critically if unconvincingly acclaimed, it's set in rural 1900-ish Scotland, the part where the scenery is well, OK, but hardly of malt-whiskey-ad beauty. Our heroine is Chris, a lovely and intelligent girl now going on to 'college'--meaning secretarial school as understood at the time. That doesn't happen but never mind —as we're told by the incessant bloody narration, Chris is in love with THE LAND! She identifies with it! Spiritually! Hard to believe, but the narration absolutely insists. Home life is hell or a little worse but Chris survives to make a wonderful marriage. Then that goes bad, and she is sort of inconsolable. Fade out. You can stop reading here unless interested in all the loose parts that drag the thing down. We open with a scene of closeness between Chris and her best gal pal--who then simply disappears. Chris says her Pa is a wool-dyed socialist, committed to universal justice, but that disappears too, and instead we get a religious tyrant who beats his grown son bloody, drives his wife to infanticide and suicide and tries to rape Chris but dies in the attempt. There's another unsuccessful rape attempt, this by the hired man, but it means nothing to the story. The Son should have murder on his mind, but he simply leaves; end of HIS story. After Ma's suicide, two surviving younger siblings are brusquely shipped out: end of THEIR story. Chris runs the farm almost alone yet is somehow an extremely good farmer, at least in the romanticized kind of agriculture retailed here: much moony contemplation/joyous reveling re the (semi-lovely) land, little reference to the back-breaking slavery that rural farming actually was. Enter farmhand Ewan, a gentle, loving, considerate, good- natured paragon of Mr. Right. Theirs is a marriage of the made-in- heaven variety, so catastrophe is guaranteed. Ah yes--World War I. Ewan goes off to the army and returns a brute, a savage, a monster. He's barely through the door when he rapes Chris, which he does nightly. Oh!--the horrors of PTSD, right? Well no. Ewan has been totally dehumanized by a mere few weeks of basic training! When he does go to the front, he immediately deserts, is immediately caught and immediately shot for a coward. We close with Chris sobbing into one of Ewan's shirts, crying piteously "I understood." What? Doesn't she identify with THE LAND anymore? Those who consider narration death to movies, and pointless details likewise, will call this a multiple homicide. The filmmakers' failure here is due to inability to manage the novel that is their source. Turning a novel into a movie almost invariably means leaving LOTS of stuff out so as to focus on the essentials. That didn't happen here, and the result is a barely coherent mess, heavily larded with tedium.

An effective alternative to water-boarding, this piece of cinematic rubbish goes like this (I clicked for spoilers but why?--what's rotten is already spoilt. Anyway: young woman still 'finding her way in life' is fired when her boyfriend, who truly raises the bar for other would-be jackasses, makes a scene at the joint where she tends bar. Right away, a good example of the desperation that sours this film: she's fired for the botfriend's stupidity.) No place to live, no money, yada yada, she's DESPERATE! Also desperate is the cold, unfeeling, Leona Helmsley-type mother of a 12-year-old boy: her nanny has quit just as Mom is leaving to visit the boy's maximally absent stepfather, who (of course) cares for/about the boy even less than mom does. Wouldn't you know it? Despite having no nanny, the young woman is hired bang-like-that. Turns out--guess what?--the kid is a child genius: mathematics, music (performing AND composing), chess, who knows what-all else. And with his huge allowance, which is the sole consideration he gets from his parents, he always get his own way. Example: mom insists he be driven to school, but he wants to walk, so he bribes the driver; also, bluffs his way out of the (despised) summer camp Mom has laid on by conning the head counselor. That sort of thing. He's a 12-year-old Ferris Bueller but even more repugnantly smug. Well, at first hapless nanny and the kid don't get along; she's shocked by his behavior. But then they begin to sort of get along. Then they buddy up. THEN--and NO ONE saw this coming--they form A BOND. And finally, what with his folks in China and no one else to say them nay, they proceed to (spoiler alter!) BREAK ALL THE RULES. Another Hollywood surprise-shocvk-stunner is that, it turns out, the kid ends up nannying HER. Adding insult to injury is the score, which is revoltingly clicheed, and may cause stomach upset. By the way: see those rave quotes from US Weekly and TV Guide? Now you know you can never trust them again.

Now in his 50s, the jamesjoyceanly named Paul Dédalus looks back on three episodes of his unhappy and tedious life. Only one is interesting: before a teenage class trip to the USSR, Paul has agreed not only to smuggle money and letters to refuseniks (Jews forbidden to emigrate) but to give away his passport, too: taking the very real risk of being trapped in Russia. But nothing much comes of this—it's an isolated incident unrelated to the rest of his life. The other episode involve Paul's deranged mother and loving aunt, and then, at last and of course, there's the tortured love affair of the intensity and tedium (and talking!) so greatly loved by French directors. If you are up for this level of self-indulgence, you will love this movie. And it's LONG, too, so you will have plenty of time to learn to care for or about the feckless Dédalus. Many critics apparently do, so good luck to you!