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Post by Nalkarj on Sept 9, 2020 16:40:19 GMT
A more recent example but I really enjoyed Branagh's Dead Again. I keep meaning to check it out.
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Post by politicidal on Sept 9, 2020 17:18:14 GMT
A more recent example but I really enjoyed Branagh's Dead Again. I keep meaning to check it out. Pretty great. I don't hear it mentioned much though.
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Post by Nalkarj on Sept 13, 2020 3:36:02 GMT
This may be blasphemous, but is Geraldine McEwan anyone else’s favorite screen Miss Marple? To be candid, I find the McEwan adaptations much better-paced than the much-vaunted Joan Hicksons, and McEwan displayed a wonderful mischief-streak that made her Marple more of a character than a stereotypical old gossip. Watching the Murder at the Vicarage adaptation now… It’s splendid, and McEwan’s Marple is wonderfully mischievous—“the worst cat in the village,” Christie originally called her.
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Post by Nalkarj on Nov 12, 2020 18:59:42 GMT
I'd like to praise the Murder, She Wrote episode “The Corpse Flew First Class,” which I rewatched yesterday for the first time in years. It’s got everything I like best in mysteries: confined setting, eccentric suspects, witty dialogue, multiple clues, surprise solution (object lesson in misdirecting attention away from the most-likely person)—all of which are more than most MSW eps can boast. Direction (by TV vet Walter Grauman) better than usual too.
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Post by Sarge on Nov 15, 2020 6:59:47 GMT
I am a huge fan of The Thin Man and the Pink Panther movies but Knives Out is an exceptional whodunit, one of the few that gives enough clues to solve it yourself if you are observant. (I wasn't observant enough.) I also enjoy Clue although it's unsolvable. Guess I like my whodunits with some grins.
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Post by dirtypillows on Nov 24, 2020 16:46:08 GMT
And Then There Were None - the 1945 version is the best. Though I like the 1974 version more than most.
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Post by Nalkarj on Dec 7, 2020 4:31:10 GMT
I’ve been watching some ’30s Philo Vance flicks recently. I’d already seen The Kennel Murder Case (1933, with William Powell as Vance; a classic of the genre, brilliantly directed by Michael Curtiz), The Dragon Murder Case (1934; entertaining but a weak solution, and Warren William is no Powell), and The Garden Murder Case (1936; pretty weak). William Powell played Vance in four Murder Cases: Canary (1929), Greene (1929), Benson (1930), and the aforementioned Kennel. Other than Kennel—by far the best of the series— Benson is good, with a solid mystery plot and a quick pace. The 1929 films are not especially great, but they are fascinating as early talkies. I’ve got to give Canary another shot, but I liked quite a few things about Greene despite its slow pace and few camera movements. Not-yet-Sherlock-Holmes Basil Rathbone played Vance once, in The Bishop Murder Case (also 1929). It’s also more interesting than good, but it has some effective Gothic-horror touches and a genuinely creepy sequence in which a man is killed as a schoolteacher reads fairy tales to her pupils. Rathbone, though, is stiffer than Powell is in the same year. I haven’t seen the rest in the series. Has anyone else seen these?
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Post by novastar6 on Dec 7, 2020 7:18:56 GMT
Knives Out. I couldn't figure out how they were going to fill up 2 hours when less than halfway in it's revealed there was no murder, so how can you have a murder mystery without a murder? but they found a way to tie up that loose end anyway.
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Post by Nalkarj on Dec 2, 2021 16:33:10 GMT
Did I not put The Verdict (1945) on my list? It deserves to be on the list.
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Post by Nalkarj on Apr 18, 2022 2:09:05 GMT
Oh, this is where I was talking about overplotting in Monk! I’ll be conciser this time, I promise.
I’m watching “Mr. Monk Goes to the Hospital” (S5:E16) on MeTV. It’s one of the show’s best episodes—lots of good jokes and situation, fun guest stars in Dan Butler and Charles Durning, and a really clever alibi. (My only major criticism is a weak ending—not the solution, but the lack of conclusion after the solution is revealed.)
Anyway, my point: Have you noticed how similarly Monk and Columbo construct their mystery plots? “Mr. Monk Goes to the Hospital” has quite a bit in common with Columbo’s “Troubled Waters,” though it uses the basic alibi gimmick even better. Of course Columbo usually reveals who, how, and why from the beginning, while Monk usually saves how and why for the climax, but in how the alibis work and how the detective figures it out, they are close.
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frogarama
Freshman
I actually thought Prometheus both sucked and blowed.
@frogarama
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Post by frogarama on Apr 18, 2022 5:35:23 GMT
Oh, this is where I was talking about overplotting in Monk! I’ll be conciser this time, I promise. I’m watching “Mr. Monk Goes to the Hospital” (S5:E16) on MeTV. It’s one of the show’s best episodes—lots of good jokes and situation, fun guest stars in Dan Butler and Charles Durning, and a really clever alibi. (My only major criticism is a weak ending—not the solution, but the lack of conclusion after the solution is revealed.) Anyway, my point: Have you noticed how similarly Monk and Columbo construct their mystery plots? “Mr. Monk Goes to the Hospital” has quite a bit in common with Columbo’s “Troubled Waters,” though it uses the basic alibi gimmick even better. Of course Columbo usually reveals who, how, and why from the beginning, while Monk usually saves how and why for the climax, but in actual construction they’re very close. Speaking of Columbo, Patrick McGoohan played the villain four times, and was exceptional in each. He also directed several episodes, and even wrote one.
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Post by Nalkarj on Apr 18, 2022 14:29:12 GMT
Oh, this is where I was talking about overplotting in Monk! I’ll be conciser this time, I promise. I’m watching “Mr. Monk Goes to the Hospital” (S5:E16) on MeTV. It’s one of the show’s best episodes—lots of good jokes and situation, fun guest stars in Dan Butler and Charles Durning, and a really clever alibi. (My only major criticism is a weak ending—not the solution, but the lack of conclusion after the solution is revealed.) Anyway, my point: Have you noticed how similarly Monk and Columbo construct their mystery plots? “Mr. Monk Goes to the Hospital” has quite a bit in common with Columbo’s “Troubled Waters,” though it uses the basic alibi gimmick even better. Of course Columbo usually reveals who, how, and why from the beginning, while Monk usually saves how and why for the climax, but in actual construction they’re very close. Speaking of Columbo, Patrick McGoohan played the villain four times, and was exceptional in each. He also directed several episodes, and even wrote one. Yes indeedy. “By Dawn’s Early Light” is my favorite of McGoohan’s Columbos, though “Identity Crisis” has the most Prisoner references. McGoohan got the jobs because of a close friendship with Peter Falk, and he responded with one good performance after another. He also appeared in Murder, She Wrote’s “Witness for the Defense,” walking away with the episode—and making it one of the show’s best—as a conniving Canadian barrister who calls out Mrs. Fletcher for being a murder magnet.
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mgmarshall
Junior Member
@mgmarshall
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Post by mgmarshall on Apr 20, 2022 13:34:13 GMT
The original Sleuth is a masterpiece, even if it apes and cheats the whodunit as a genre.
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Post by Nalkarj on Apr 20, 2022 15:29:53 GMT
The original Sleuth is a masterpiece, even if it apes and cheats the whodunit as a genre. This aspect of Sleuth always interests me because playwright Anthony Shaffer, who adapted his own play for the movie, was a whodunit super-fan. As you probably know, he script-doctored the Finney Murder on the Orient Express and wrote all three of Ustinov’s Poirot movies. And he and his brother Peter ( Amadeus, Equus) wrote three mystery novels in the ’50s. I read one of them, and it’s one of those hyper-complex whodunits where almost every line could be a clue or could be a red herring. I’ve always loved this bit of dialogue, said by the intentionally unlikable, Sheridan-Whiteside-y detective: “It simply amazes me how little-developed people’s sense of tragedy is. A sense of balance, amazing eyesight, splendid palates—all this they have, but nary a sense of doom.” But, like a lot of whodunit fans—W.H. Auden, T.S. Eliot, and Shaffer friend Stephen Sondheim all come to mind—he seems to have been wary about the central premise of the genre, judging certainly from Sleuth but also from his remarks alongside Sondheim in this intriguing New York Times discussion. That’s the element that draws me back to Sleuth—the play more than the movie, despite Olivier’s performance and my elusive search for the Cole Porter singer—even though I know all the twists: its uncertainty about its genre. It could only have been written by a person in love with mystery fiction, but it also could only have been written by a person uneasy about mystery fiction. In a way that sort of reminds me of the movie Pleasantville, which steals whole scenes from classic film and television while heaping scorn on classic film and television. The difference is, I think, that Pleasantville truly is scornful—the filmmakers seem to hate what they’re stealing from—while Sleuth is just more uncertain. But it sure is an interesting aspect.
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Post by Nalkarj on Jun 30, 2022 18:08:55 GMT
Rewatched Murder by Death (1976) last night. When I was a kid I loved this movie—it’s one of the reasons, along with the Finney and Ustinov Poirot movies, that I love mysteries. It strikes me now, though, as a very funny movie that doesn’t understand what it’s spoofing. Neil Simon wrote the script, and as with most Simon about half the jokes work, half don’t, but those that work really work. Peter Sellers, as Charlie Chan, and Peter Falk, as Humphrey Bogart’s Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe rolled into one (Falk got the spinoff movie playing the same character), give the best performances, and Simon gives them all the best lines. Truman Capote in a rare acting performance is funny too, but not in the movie much. But it feels like Simon wrote the thing without an ending. There is no revelation, no solution, no conclusion. The movie just ends on an unfunny gag, on “Wait, that’s it?” Basically it’s a mystery spoof that lacks even comical clues and a comical solution. The obvious comparison is with Clue (1985), the only other big-budget, all-star mystery spoof I know. Both movies have cardboard characters who only exist to say jokes. Both movies have the clichéd trappings of the mystery genre. Both have Eileen Brennan, funnily enough. But—while I don’t find Clue half as funny as Murder by Death—at least it is building to something. Simon also didn’t seem to know much about the characters he’s spoofing, other than Chan and Spade. The Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple parodies don’t bear any resemblance to the sleuths they’re based on, either in Agatha Christie’s books or the film adaptations. David Niven plays Nick Charles as a suave Englishman, Lord Peter Wimsey with a martini glass, which has nothing to do with the hard-edged, mob-connected Nick played by William Powell, let alone the book’s child of Greek immigrants. That said, Maggie Smith seems to be trying hard to imitate Myrna Loy as Nora, and she’s very good in her thankless part. And Simon doesn’t seem to know much about mysteries. He has Capote launch into a long diatribe against Golden Age mystery writers for withholding clues, introducing killers in the last chapter who were never in the book, etc. But that’s exactly what Golden Age mystery writers didn’t do. It’s probably what Simon is mocking with his non-ending, except that what he’s mocking doesn’t exist, at least not in the books of the authors he’s spoofing. Simon’s point is all so confusing, and every time I see Murder by Death I end up scratching my head. But still, Falk, Sellers, Capote, and Smith are hilarious in it.
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Post by Nalkarj on Jul 6, 2022 2:37:23 GMT
Inspired by rewarding Murder by Death, I’m rewatching Clue (1985), dir. Jonathan Lynn. It’s one of those movies that I want to love but just don’t (other examples: Live and Let Die, The Fog): It’s got a great cast, a great premise, and tons of elements I like. But I just don’t find it funny. About half the jokes are just dumb and unfunny—say, a person smelling dog poop on Tim Curry’s shoes, which is repeated six times. Or Lesley Ann Warren saying, “Search me,” prompting Martin Mull to pat her down. That last one is not an inherently unfunny joke, but it isn’t funny in this case because it’s too cartoony—which is another problem with the movie, the tone keeps changing between relatively realistic comedy and pure Airplane!. Some of the jokes are good, even very good: Madeleine Kahn has a funny speech early on that ends on a great punchline (“He wasn’t a very good illusionist”). But even the best jokes seem off, somehow—director Lynn has the actors say the lines too fast and (odd criticism here) too naturalistically, reducing their impact. I have other criticisms—I find all the running around hectic and obnoxious, Lynn should have led us through the house early on so that the viewer could get a good sense of where each room is, and I never understand the mystery plot—but the unfunniness is what really ruins it, I think. All that said, the lovely Lesley Ann Warren is great in it, as she always is. Such an underrated comedienne.
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