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wadegustafson
Reviews
Ripley (2024)
Almost Perfect But One Epic Fail
This is beautifully shot courtesy of long time Paul Thomas Anderson DP/collaborator, Robert Elswit. The sound is also brilliant - skull's properly thunk when they smack off heavy wooden furniture and lighters puncture the room when setting a non-tipped cigarette ablaze. The pacing is fabulously slow and deliberate, taking in every single miniscule detail of Tom Ripley's malevolant Latin oddysey.
One of the great pleasures of the books is that Patricia Highsmith gambles with high stakes props that divert us into believing they will surely be the undoing of Tom. The ashtray, the suitcase, the ring, the watch, the boat, the money, and, of course, his split identities.
All of these aspects only serve to make the many scenes of great jeopardy all the more compelling and gripping, and keep the eight one hour episodes moving, just like the bus navigating the dizzyingly twisty Meditarranean corniches that Steven Zaillian wrote into this script adaptation.
Best of all, it stays true to the essence of the books. Tom is complicated. Very complicated. Dickie is not all spoilt and vapid and Margie is smart as a tack but vulnerable enough to keep Tom at a distance despite her grave suspicions - just never entirely sure of him as he slips and twists her punches.
A couple of nit-picks. One small, the other huge.
Andrew Scott is a brilliant actor and carries this magnificently enough to forget he's twenty-two/three years older than his character as written. But as terrific as he is (I loved his proposterously awful walk, beloved bomber jacket, and appallingly greased hair that mark his lack of breeding), the accent he picked for Ripley is grating - a sort of over-indulgant, invented effeteness that tries too hard, or at least reminds the viewer that he's really trying hard to project an accent for Ripley rather than it coming naturally. A young Kevin Spacey would have absolutely nailed it.
But the big mess up was with Freddie Miles' casting. Eliot Sumner has an absolute shocker. They (Eliot Sumner identifies as non-binary/gender non-conforming in case this is news to readers) appear like they misread the script for a River Phoenix biopic...when River Phoenix was an agitated, lank haired teenager. Even if that were not their intention, dressing and acting as a kind of foppish, louche, shoed-in Millennial/Gen Z Freddie Miles is just anachronistic in this production. It just doesn't work and they are not very good at acting.
Otherwise, this would have been a clear and stellar 10/10 production.
Post Script:
If the producers are considering a second run at one of Patricia Highsmith's other Ripley novels, maybe consider Éanna Hardwicke, Barry Keoghan or Josh O'Connor for Ripley.
The Gone (2023)
About As Gripping As A Handshake With An Arthritic Frog.
This is an awful attempt at a serious crime thriller that never elevates itself above ponderous, and badly acted ponderous at that. With every episode the creator's/writer's gears grind clunkily, desperate to shift out of the opening episode's snail-sluggish first gear.
To be fair, the premise is decent enough, and certainly not terrible and plausible enough. Sadly, the creators threw endless, plodding plot devices and misdirects at the thing, and the acting rarely convinces beyond amateur level and is often excrutiating, particularly the insufferable Irish cop and an investigative journalist who grates like fingernails down a blackboard.
And boy is it slooooooow. Plot devices normally move the story forward. In The Gone they act like speed bumps and traffic lights.
As the whole thing chugs and splutters to its final, final finale, we're left with the tropiest of tropiest conclusions (set in, wait for it, a cabin in the woods) and the depressing inevitability that the only point of this six part exercise in a new genre of no thrills thrillers was to squeeze out another six parts.
The Midnight Sky (2020)
Sky Falls In On This One
The Midnight Sky opens with the words
"Three weeks after the event."
From there it's just a gaping 2 hour long plot hole.
It Follows (2014)
It Follows...Slowly, Wonkily, Nonsensically.
First the good. There's a decent premise/concept: A disturbing human form phantasm/chimera passes from human host A to murderously (if incredibly slowly) stalk human host B after sex between A and B. The only way to arrest the menace is for B to pass it on to C - also through the act of intercourse. If C is killed by 'it', the pesky illusory menace returns to make life a headache for person B - so B has to find a D or die horribly. Or something like that. Also good - It's actually well shot, and lovingly captures suburban Detroit with some fine detail. Also good is its obvious homage to John Carpenter's Halloween, along with a fine, off-kilter score. Also pretty good - a decent and willing cast that handle the angst of teenage hood shifting to the dread of adulthood.
So that's the good out of the way.
Then there's the not so good. It's not really a horror in the traditional way - which is nothing to be ashamed of - but it's neither particularly scary or in anyway satisfying if it's trying to be a psychological horror, promising and intriguing prologue aside.
Given the premise of the film (and the early buzz raving about it), I was expecting something at least on a par with the original Ring - a film that is properly freaky. But It Follows settles for neither intensely freaky/disturbing or all out nightmarish scares.
You just sit there waiting for the scares to arrive and the 'It' needle barely registers close to mildly creepy. As the camera moves, you find your eyes wandering into the background to see if you can spot anything that will give you sleepless nights for a week only to find there is n-o-t-h-i-n-g there. There's no Mulholland Drive freak you out Bonnie Aarons behind the dumpster, no Don't Look Now Adelina Poerio in a red raincoat. If you're going trope hunting - this ain't that film. No psycho in a William Shatner mask either. Sorry.
Probably the most disturbing thing about It Follows is it's resolute refusal to make any real sense as it assiduously and deliberately avoids to cow-tow to the requirements to make a film genuinely memorable or scary. Explanations are treated with disdain, logic is given short shrift, there's absolutely no attempt at a real time revelation, and an utterly and woefully ambiguous ending that comes across as nothing more than one of those dreadful decisions by a director to 'make it more fun' and missing by planetary distance.
The only reason why I think a lot of critics liked this film so much is on account of exactly what the director didn't do and given him a of huge amount of latitude in producing a film that could be interpreted as something that it patently is not. In film critic's universe - this is called original or imaginative or fresh. But in avoiding entirely the A-Z of 'How To Scare The Living Hell Out Of Me' - the film pretty much throws out the entire language required do precisely that.