Reviews

It's like they combined Kimmy Schmidt with a Wes Anderson movie. You might not always be in the mood for it, but when you are, it's perfect. Also, if you (like me) are a podcast geek, you will love some of the references (like how the successful podcaster says her line and then goes into a Squarespace ad - I kept waiting for someone to say they 'put the pub in public radio').

Anyway, highly recommended.

By the middle of episode 3, I kept picturing this conversation in my head:

The writer, director and producers are in the room.

"Guys, they've approved us but they want 4 episodes and we only have enough material for 3," says the writer.

"Well, just write some more stuff in there!" responds the producer.

"Are you kidding?" the writer replies. "I've already explored every tangential diversity-related subplot I can think of and we've already got 12 minutes of reaction shots in every episode. I've got nothing left, man."

"Don't worry," says the director. "If we add 15 minutes of drone shots set to slow, brooding music to each episode, we can definitely get 4 episodes out of this. Everyone will think it's an insightful commentary on the amorality of psychologically-based crime and they will DEFINITELY pick up a second season."

And that's exactly what they did. My recommendation is to watch this while doing housework, because there's so much filler you don't really have to give it your full attention.

I tend to watch formulaic British/Australian murder mysteries (Midsomer Murders, My Life is Murder, Death in Paradise, etc) at night when I'm cleaning the house, so when this turned up on AcornTV I tried it, with relatively low expectations.

But by the middle of the second episode I was totally hooked. Whatever combination of writing/acting/chemistry is happening between the two main characters is fantastic and somehow totally different from the usual stuff in this vein. Instead of the usual unrequited love/stupid flirting + goofy sidekicks that plagues series like Agatha Raisin, these two seem like a real couple who genuinely like each other in a totally non-dramatic way.

Not sure why anyone's criticizing the premise (that crime-scene cleaners would do detective work) since it's no more unrealistic than 3 novelist aunts (like Queens of Mystery) or gardeners (Rosemary & Thyme). Heck, after 22 years, pretty much everyone in Midsomer has been murdered and no one seems to notice that.

Anyway, my only regret is that this only has 13 episodes and now it's too old to be revived.

Definitely recommended.

As the mother of an 8-year-old, I've watched a lot of bad animated movies in the past 18 months of the pandemic. This is easily the worst I have ever had to sit through.

The animation is worse than you get on cheaply-produced half-hour tv shows; the plotline is alternately incomprehensible and stupid; half of it seemed like just borrowed tropes from other, more successful films that were shoehorned together; and the editing is just bizarre.

In almost all the scenes, the animals are walking abnormally slowly - you end up feeling like the production guys said "Guys. This thing is only 72 minutes but we promised the distribution company we'd get them at least 115 minutes of content. You gotta add 40 minutes, stat!" There are weird, lengthy reaction shots (seriously, there is nothing weirder than watching 10 whole seconds of reaction shots between badly-animated animals, especially when there's literally no reason).

Anyway, the next time your kid asks you to watch a movie with them, I promise that watching Frozen II for the 11th time will be better than even 10 minutes of this disaster.

If you can get past the fact that an 'international spy thriller' somehow mostly takes place in glamorous, cosmopolitan...San Diego, your next hurdle will be the writing.

Every. Single. Line. was a cliche, from the "you have my attention" to the "before your time, darling" and the "I'm sorry, did I spoil your big crime?" and "we all have our secrets, darling" could have been written by any teenager who's watched the Ocean's 11 series.

If you managed to get past those two things, you'd have to reckon with the fact that the FBI is somehow investigating international crimes all over the world....? Isn't the FBI restricted to the US, while the CIA deals with the international stuff?

It's a mess. Don't watch it.

I've just watched the first 5 episodes of this series in a row (over a couple of days). At first I really liked the show - I've never been a huge fan of Kenneth Branagh, but the plots were quite interesting and I really enjoyed the 'Swedishness' of it all. I didn't even mind the old, old trope of the tortured-but-driven detective who seems to have sacrificed his personal life for his work.

However.

The fact that Wallander is chronically on the brink of some kind of breakdown - he rarely shaves, changes his clothes, or takes a shower, and god forbid he should crack a smile at any time for any reason - eventually becomes not only depressing, but kind of unbelievable. I'm surprised his co-workers don't think he's a lunatic who should be on permanent suspension with a mandatory psych eval.

Other reviewers have said that Branagh's acting is fantastic; I think it starts out well and then veers into melodrama. I'm hoping the third series allows the character to get a little lighter/more normal.

It's fitting that cheese figures prominently in this mystery, because that's pretty much the word that came to my mind the whole way through: Cheese.

I've no doubt that this started as a perfectly good story, with a nice dollop of suspense as Belle (the main character) tries to piece together what happened to her missing friend.

But the whole thing is so chock-full of interminable reaction shots, unrealistically stilted conversations, and inexplicable relationships that it starts to become unwatchable halfway through. I kept feeling like the writer wrote enough for a 90-minute show, but the producer had to somehow extend it to 120 minutes, so they left in all the stuff that should have ended up on the cutting room floor.

It didn't help that the actress playing Belle was dressed in a way that made her look about 5 months pregnant the whole time - I kept waiting for a revelation that never came.

If you're a die-hard Ruth Rendell Mysteries fan, maybe you'll be okay with this; otherwise, I strongly suggest you give it a miss.

I felt like I was watching an episode of Murder She Wrote - bad music (including 'suspense' music randomly sprinkled throughout); terrible casting; the kind of consistently bad acting that reminds you that they had no budget to hire anyone good or do more than a couple of takes of each scene.

I think what was most jarring was that while the main adult characters had super-strong British accents, the kids were so obviously from Texas - and there was no money for a vocal coach. Every so often one of them says 'cheeky buggah', the subtext of which is: "Yes, we know these kids are about as English as Burger King, but we're hoping that if we throw in a couple of stereotypical words, you'll just go along suspending disbelief.

Continuity is also unbelievably bad - in the outdoor scenes, the weather will be totally overcast one minute, and then the next (which is supposed to be 2 minutes later) the sun is shining and the sky is cerulean blue.

I loved the book - if you did too, don't watch this. Go read the book again instead.

How can you tell when an actress can't act, without even needing to see her perform? When she has to put her own name in the title of her sitcom! Let's face it: Fran Drescher has only ever been able to play Fran Drescher. She's always the nasal, long-nailed, 'white trash with a heart of gold' character that she was on The Nanny, and we are led to believe that her off-screen persona, while possibly slightly less annoying, is in fact pretty close to her on-screen one.

I know some people loved this 'character' on The Nanny, so I suppose it's not all that surprising that Living with Fran is pretty much the same show (only this time she's got 3 of her OWN kids, not babysitting that British guy's - oh wait! The British guy IS the father of these kids!). Fans of The Nanny must be happy.

But as I watched this show for the first time, all I could think was: Isn't Fran Drescher getting bored with herself? I mean, she's been playing the same part, with the same affectations, the same type of clothes, the same exasperating-white-trash-with-a-heart-of-gold character for, like, 20 years now! Isn't she embarrassed to be showing everyone how very little acting talent she has? Couldn't she have gone to acting class during the years after The Nanny when she had nothing to do? It's no surprise this show was canceled. What's disconcerting is that it ever made it past a pilot in the first place.

This movie was panned by critics and movie-goers alike, and though many people put a lot of time and effort into explaining why, the truth is that 90% of the blame can be attributed to one simple thing: The unbelievably bad 'accents' of most - if not all - of the main characters. Just as the audience is having some success in suspending their disbelief, trying not to notice that the settings look like bad CGI even when they aren't, getting over the fact that Alexander's mother (Angelina Jolie) doesn't appear to age over the course of 25 or 30 years, and accepting that the story is totally historically inaccurate, one of the main characters opens their mouth and speaks in some totally bizarre accent that reminds them that this is a movie, and a badly-done one at that.

Oh sure, at first it's okay - Anthony Hopkins' accent is a standard 'British theatre' kind of accent, and Christopher Plummer's Aristotle is in the same vein. But then the young Alexander starts migrating to some kind of inconsistent Scottish accent. At first you wonder why, but the answer soon becomes clear: Colin Farrell, who plays the grown-up Alexander - apparently can't manage a British theatre-type accent, and so delivers his lines in a slightly toned-down version of his normal Scottish-accented voice. Because Farrell can't get rid of his Scottish accent, the kid playing young Alexander has to use a Scottish accent for consistency's sake. On top of which, Alexander's father (Val Kilmer) then has to speak in some kind of bizarre hybrid of 'British theatre' and 'Scottish' accents in order to demonstrate how Alexander ended up with a Scottish accent! Angelina Jolie's accent is similarly atrocious: She seems to be using some kind of vaguely Eastern European or Russian-type accent, for reasons known only to herself. I think it's supposed to reinforce the fact that she comes from a different background than Alexander's father, but it's not only a bizarre choice (Russia and 'eastern Europe' didn't even exist at the time) but Jolie's delivery is so bad it's like watching a teenager in their first high school play. I thought her British accent in Tomb Raider was reasonably well done - why didn't they just let her use that, instead of these amateur-hour rolled-Rs? As we've seen with other Oliver Stone films, even the most far-fetched, historically-inaccurate plot and the most schlocky dialogue can be redeemed by decent 'delivery' by first-rate actors (and, whatever else you might say, Hopkins, Jolie, Farrell and Kilmer are all recognized as 'serious' actors). Hopkins, Jolie et all have been in the business for a long time - so why didn't one of them speak up and say, "Hey Oliver, you need to get us a vocal coach, dude. We are totally sucking here." More importantly, why didn't Oliver Stone recognize that their accents were ruining any chance he had at making Alexander successful at the box office and with critics?

Perhaps when it came out, this movie could be watched as a light-hearted romantic comedy, but 30 years later, it's hard to buy a story about an international arms dealer selling automatic weapons to Saudis - and the 'spunky' feminist investigative reporter who loves to hate him - as a 'comedy', let alone a 'lighthearted' one.

The movie is marketed as an 'international adventure with Roger Moore', so you think you're getting a James Bond-type film with lots of action; instead, what you get is a slow-moving, heavy-footed piece of cheese - Swiss cheese, in fact, given the number of plot holes.

Moore plays arms dealer Scott, who finds himself living next door to an investigative journalist (played by Susanna York) in Brussels. He's in town to sell some hard-core weapons to the US military; she's in town to cover war games. I think he is supposed to be a charming-but-insincere international playboy, while she is supposed to be a highly principled feminist (!) just trying to get ahead in a man's world.

Unfortunately, the whole thing never really gets past the level of farce: it's just one stereotype after another. Her portrayal of 'feminism', for example, seems to consist entirely of shrieking about how terrible men are and storming off in a huff. And we never actually see her doing any 'reporting' at all, unless putting a piece of paper in a typewriter just before getting distracted by something (a phone call, a daydream) counts as 'reporting'.

Now this kind of stereotyped farce works fine when you've got lots of action, a fast-moving plot, evil villains, stylish art directing, great music, etc. But this movie hasn't got any of that. On top of which, the supporting actors don't seem to know whether they are in a comedy, a drama, or an action film.

Bottom line: Only for die-hard fans of Roger Moore or British films set in European countries during the 1965-75 period.

Considering that Matt Damon makes a cameo appearance (actually the funniest bit in the whole movie, which isn't saying much), and Michelle Trachtenberg (who should know better, having spent 3 seasons with the good writers on Buffy), it's an understatement to say this movie was 'disappointing'. It's like someone started out with a good idea about 14 script drafts ago, but since then they slashed the writing budget and eventually the thing was written by the 18- year-old mail room guy in the producer's office, and the Xanax he was taking led him to forget a bunch of important plot points.

Judging from the outtakes at the end, the best parts of this movie (like a cameo by one of the women from Absolutely Fabulous) were left on the cutting room floor.

And just in case anyone's not clear: shooting in Slovakia and including a scene in which a brother and sister french-kiss does NOT make a movie a 'dark comedy'. It just makes it kind of creepy - and not in a good way.