Mini reviews #30

My Sister, the Serial Killer (2018) by Oyinkan Braithwaite. This is truly a stand-out debut. A short and witty novel written as part of an undergraduate creative writing degree, it tells the story of Korede, who constantly finds herself cleaning up (literally and figuratively) after her beautiful, pampered serial killer sister, Ayoola.

Secret Obsession (2019), directed by Peter Sullivan. I hope SJ Watson is suing Netflix over this production. It’s like someone has seen Before I Go to Sleep, missed the point entirely, and decided to rewrite it.

The Adventures of Maud West, Lady Detective (2019) by Susannah Stapleton. An entertaining and illuminating look at the life and career of Maud West, who is probably well-known to geeks like me (and, let’s face it, you) but now unknown to most of the world. We get a glimpse here, not just of how  the detection business worked, and how a woman succeeded in a man’s world, but also at the fuzzy lines between criminality and respectability, between ethics and expediency. It’s an eye-opener and an etertaining read, interspersed with West’s florid accounts of her own cases. It’s also a beautiful book to behold.

Escape Room (2019), directed by Adam Robitel. There are a lot of films (and books) called Escape Room, and this is the only one I’ve experienced. It’s dumb as hell but oddly compelling and enjoyable. You can guess the premise. Apparent strangers are invited to experience the toughest escape room of them all, and they soon find out that the challenge has deadly implications… Will the real And Then There Were None please stand up?

The Turn of the Key (2019) by Ruth Ware. Ruth Ware is the writer I find myself recommending to other people more than anyone else. She really is the closest thing we have in print to a love child of Agatha Christie and Daphne du Maurier. And I don’t think she’s ever written a bad book. Her latest, as you can guess from the title, is a bit of a ghost story, but at its heart it’s a mystery thriller. And, in grand tradition, it’s epistolary. A nanny with a secret gets a suspiciously cushy job in Scotland, where she immediately gets charged with looking after three problem children for a week. And, possibly, a ghost. And, in the meantime, she tries to solve the mystery of why all the previous nannies have scarpered so soon after taking up their posts. It all takes her back to old myths and tragedies surrounding the property, a gothic building converted into a smart house, and the tension is palpable with every flying page.

Stage Fright, directed by Alfred Hitchcock

In his podcast on Alfred Hitchcock, Adam Roche laments that Stage Fright (1950) is 'less of a Hitchcock, and more like an Agatha Christie.' Naturally, upon hearing this, I decided I absolutely had to see it! As if to whet my appetite further, I found out that the film also contained Marlene Dietrich, a theatrical setting, and an original song by Cole Porter. Irresistible, right?

The movie, based on a 1948 novel, stars Jane Wyman as 'a very good actress indeed' in training and, reportedly, production was plagued by Wyman's insecurities at being cast alongside the effortlessly glamorous Dietrich. Matters weren't helped by the fact that their scenes together see Wyman's character in disguise as a frumpy maid, and Hitchcock -- as ever -- played on his leading lady's insecurities by showing blatant favouritism to Dietrich on-set.

Eve (Wyman) is accosted mid-rehearsal by an ex-flame, who tells her that he's a suspect in a murder, and she sets out to clear his name. The not-very-complicated investigation involves doubling as a dresser to the diva Charlotte Inwood (Dietrich). Essentially, she puts on glasses and no one recognises her. As she probes deeper and deeper, getting closer to Charlotte, Eve finds herself falling into a very theatrical trap.

At two hours, the film is pacy and suspenseful. It is generally regarded as one of Hitchcock's lesser works, and often dismissed now as a crowd-pleaser (hence Roche's disparaging Christie comparison). Personally, I'd say it was nothing like a Christie, although the presence of Dietrich and a blood-stained overcoat invites comparisons to Billy Wilder's adaptation, seven years later, of Witness for the Prosecution. In fact, as Mark Aldridge reveals in his excellent Agatha Christie on Screen, Hitchcock was originally considered to direct that film.

The direction in Stage Fright is distinctly Hitchcockian, blending light and dark and hamming-up the close-ups, which neatly covers over a disparity in acting styles and prevents the stars' egos from overshadowing their performances. It is understandable that not many people seek out Stage Fright, but the film is worth seeing if you get the chance.

Mini Reviews #21

‘Too Clever by Half’ (1939) by G.D.H. and M. Cole. A short story featuring a locked-room puzzle, although we are told the murderer at the outset. In what would become a Columbo-style set-up, we follow the detective as he unravels the clues. The idea is that if the killer hadn’t been so attentive in trying to cover up the crime, he’d probably have gotten away with it; the extra touches were his undoing. If any real murderer made any one of this killer’s five mistakes (e.g. leaving a ‘suicide note’ but neglecting the pen), then ‘clever’ is not the word one would use.

Busman’s Honeymoon (1940) directed by Arthur B. Woods. Competent film adaptation of the novel by Dorothy L. Sayers and the play she co-wrote with Muriel St Clare Byrne, featuring Robert Montgomery as Lord Peter Wimsey and Constance Cummings as Harriet Vane. Yes, Americans! Take it as a period murder mystery, rather than as anything to do with Sayers’ ambitious (and, arguably, unsuccessful) novel, and it’s thoroughly enjoyable.

A Simple Favour (2018) directed by Paul Feig. This movie, based on Darcey Bell’s debut and starring Anna Kendrick and Blake Lively, is absolutely marvellous. I haven’t read the novel, and, candidly, I’m not keen to because it looks like a serious thriller, and the plot is an utterly ridiculous elevation ofGone Girl. However, the film is so splendidly camp – every scene contains one of those cringy stress-release gags that appear once an hour in normal thrillers – that it works brilliantly. Kendrick gives her best ever performance as a single mother-turned-YouTuber and Lively plays her mysterious rich new friend in a way that will make everyone recognise someone they know. The whole thing is very slick and very entertaining.

Bodyguard (BBC, 2018). Honestly, I don’t know why you’re all raving about this, or why you’re all complaining about the last episode. It starts as it means to go on: as a pretty standard BBC political thriller. That is, very gripping, quite preposterous, and mildly jingoistic, like London Spy. The final episode which disappointed so many viewers (seriously, I don’t know why?) is exactly what the first five episodes promised.

Nine Perfect Strangers (2018) by Liane Moriarty. Moriarty’s new novel is a satire that is sometimes witty and sometimes poignant. Set in an unorthodox health resort, it features an engaging and very believable villain, and a nice range of annoying rich protagonists. There is a delightful meta moment in chapter 58, in which a middle-aged romantic novelist trips out on LSD and realizes that she is a character in a poorly written detective story in which no one has yet died. The move towards satire in what used to be called ‘grip-lit’ is very reassuring, although I’ve not yet seen it perfected; Moriarty veers from dark humour to ‘I’m being serious’ moments – and she isn’t alone in that.

Game Night (Warner Bros)

The trailer for Game Night popped up while I was rabbit-holing through YouTube and it was one of those ads that I couldn’t skip. So, like an obedient puppy, I watched it and thought, ‘That sounds interesting, I wonder when it’s out’. Google told me it would be out on Friday 2 March – the date I’m writing this post.

The last two weeks have been tough for me, both mentally and physically, and the sub-tolerable weather hasn’t helped. Nothing’s happened, I’m just susceptible to depression and had the flu – but, yeah, I felt like something to cheer me up and Alan was getting a bit blue from a weird and unstructured half-day of teaching in the snow. So, we lumbered onto a bus and made our way to the nearest cinema.

I wasn’t expecting much from Game Night, although Googling had revealed that it’s got unusually good reviews for a light escapist comedy. Even the filmmakers seem surprised by how well it’s doing. There were only six people in the cinema, including us, but that was probably because we arrived bang in the middle of a snow blizzard. Over in the States, Game Night grossed $17,000,000 in its opening weekend. That’s more than I make in a month! (Actually, it’s more than I’d make in far too many thousands of months… weep.)

One critic has described Game Night as ‘a comic spin on David Fincher’s The Game’ and I can see that. Personally, I found The Game (1997) interesting but not great – a blatant if unconscious rip-off of an Agatha Christie Parker Pyne story where an elaborately choreographed adventure goes turns into a real criminal escapade which then turns out to have been part of the elaborate choreography all along. Game Night plays whimsically with the fact that we never quite know whether we’re watching a murder mystery game or a ‘real’ crime caper playing out.

Rachel McAdams and Jason Bateman star as a hugely competitive couple, Annie and Max, who host regular game nights for an array of comic stock-figure friends. When Max’s annoyingly successful brother, Brook, decides to host a game night of his own, the couple knows that he’s going to outdo them. And, sure enough, Brook announces that he has enlisted top-notch actors to play out an interactive murder mystery. These actors, he tells them, are so great that they never break character. The next thing anyone knows, armed thugs break in, fight Brook, and kidnap him as the hapless guests laugh and applaud.

While Annie, Max, and the others set about trying to find clues, three actors in masks turn up and scratch their heads at what appears to be a real-life crime scene. So, is the kidnapping real or part of a game?

I don’t want to go into the plot in great detail because part of the fun comes from watching it unfold. That said, the real fun lies in the slapstick comedy and throwaway lines. Game Night feels like a cheap comedy done expensively and every second is wonderfully rewarding. It’s so rare to find light entertainment that doesn’t feature anything problematic, but I’m delighted to say there’s no misogyny, racism, transphobia, homophobia, or antisemitism in this film. There are just some very funny scenes. My favourite part involves Max trying the clean blood off a white dog and making it worse. Another memorable routine concerns Annie trying to perform an ad-hock operation, sterilising a knife and the wound with white wine.

Mark Perez has penned a light and consistently funny script, with excellent lines – ‘You’re a double threat,’ says Billy Magnusson’s ditzy playboy to his date, an out-of-his-league Sharon Hogan. ‘You’ve got brains and you’re British’ – and old school physical comedy – at one point, almost the entire cast chases each other around a country house, passing a Fabergé Egg like a baton. Perez is served well by slick direction from John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein and entertaining cameos from recognisable figures like Michael C. Hall. Jesse Plemons, who recently starred in an amazing episode of Black Mirror, plays the tragicomically needy policeman next door who can’t get over his divorce and who exacts an elaborate revenge when he isn’t invited to play.

If this summary makes the whole thing sound piecemeal and incoherent, that’s because it doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. And this is part of the charm. Although Game Night has an easy-to-follow plot, it isn’t something to analyse or overthink. It is something to sit back and enjoy, to laugh through without splitting your sides. On the journey home, I saw a tweet along the lines of, ‘Game Night is a great reflection of a world in which fake news and real news are becoming interchangeable,’ and I just thought, ‘Ugh. No. It’s funny.’ For context, I more or less think it’s impossible to read too much into a text, and am a staunch defender of the analysis of popular culture. But not Game Night. It’s just entertainment, and it’s bloody well-played.

Murder on the Orient Express (20th Century Fox)

I'm lucky enough to be married to the most understanding person in the world. Alan didn't mind when I described the Murder on the Orient Express release day as 'the happiest day of my life'; Alan spent about three hours travelling to and from the cinema despite coming straight from work; and Alan happily allowed me to garner judgey looks from passers-by as I tried to take the perfect selfie next to a cardboard Poirot. So, Alan is pretty cool. Or, as a nurse might say, accepting.

And yesterday meant a great deal to me. Kenneth Branagh's new film adaptation of Murder on the Orient Express is the first English-language Agatha Christie movie in my lifetime. Like Taylor Swift, I was born in late 1989 (there the comparisons end), and the last Christie movie in English was Ten Little Indians, earlier in that year. Believe it or not, I got through school, college, and even the first year of university encountering only a handful of peers who'd even heard of Christie or Poirot. And I genuinely think that's a lot less likely to happen to a young reader now. It means a lot that Christie and Poirot are back on the silver screen.

Sir Ken's turn as director-star has been panned in early reviews: in the Times, the Guardian, the Telegraph, and by nearly all my friends who've seen it. The expression 'The Orient Express has run out of steam!' is almost as common now as 'he truly was the People's Pope' in 2005. Branagh is weird as Poirot, say the reviewers, with a terrible accent, too much macho action, and a travesty of a moustache. His direction, they say, is ludicrous, with big aerial shots that distract from the actual detail of the scenes. And the final criticism that's coming up a lot concerns the legendary cast, including Michelle Pfeiffer, Johnny Depp, Judi Dench, Daisy Ridley, Derek Jacobi, Olivia Colman, Josh Gadd, some attractive male ballet dancer who can't act, and loads of other celebrities I've already forgotten. 'No one gets enough screen time!' cry disgruntled commentators. 'I came for Pfieffer/Depp/Dench/the attractive male ballet dancer who can't act, and s/he was barely on the screen because of all the other celebrities!'

While these are legitimate criticisms, I don't agree with any of them. I actually loved Branagh's fresh interpretation of Hercule Poirot, a much-visited character. He plays Poirot as a troubled, lonely man with an outrageous ego -- and that is very much in the books. Of course, Branagh's Poirot is not exactly like Christie's petite detective with the egg-shaped head and a bourgeois approach to -- well, everything. But it's no more different than David Suchet's interpretation, and a lot more respectful to the source material than Albert Finney's, Peter Ustinov's, Tony Randall's, Alfred Molina's, or Austin Trevor's -- and of those, the first two undeniably gave wonderful performances.

Branagh's Poirot gets most of his dialogue directly from three books: Murder on the Orient Express (1934), The Labours of Hercules (1947), and Curtain (1975) and, more than any other portrayal, it's an authentic one. The accent is less Frenchy than in previous manifestations; there's a bit of Flemish in there, because he's supposed to be Belgian. I have no idea if it's any good but it sounded fine to me. For the first time in cinematic history, Hercule Poirot is not the most ridiculous character in the drama. He's a flawed but brilliant man in the middle of an insane social masquerade.

Branagh acheives this partly by having Poirot's prissiness -- his OCD as he measures the sizes of eggs, and his dainty way of eating a cake -- become essential parts of his character. These are things that make up his unique psychological profile, as they do in Christie's books, rather than being little quirks to garnish the character (Suchet learnt the mannerisms brilliantly but never did anything to justify them; they became a simple signature). That's brilliant.

And let's talk about Branagh's moustache. It's magnificent and ludicrous. It's meant to be. As it is in the books, after all. You know how every now and then in The Simpsons, someone asks Marge why she has hair that is quite that tall and quite that blue? The same thing happens all the time in Poirot's world: why is he making such a statement with his huge, neat, and dramatic moustache? Agatha Christie loved the 1974 version of Murder on the Orient Express but, famously, her main criticism was of the detective's lip-hair.  ‘I wrote that he had the finest moustache in England', she said, ‘and he didn't in the film. I thought that a pity — why shouldn't he?’ It strikes me as criticism taken fully on board this time around.

Why don't people like Branagh's Poiorot, then? I suspect it's simply because he isn't David Suchet. His is a very different interpretation -- but, I think, a lot more interesting. Suchet learnt the mannerisms and then rewrote the character to work out some kind of religious guilt, all the while donning a tiny moustache that I've always thought Agatha Christie would have hated. He gave a brilliant but imperfect performance -- and that's also what Branagh has done. I don't visualise Suchet when I read the books, and I'm not going to start visualising Branagh. But if I wanted to see an actor, rather than to imagine the character in a unique and personal way, I'd watch films or television instead of reading in the first place.

That said, the goatee needs to go. Fox is using the moustache to garner lots of attention, and has even partnered with Movember this year.

The direction in this film surprised me. When Branagh was announced as the director attached to the project (back in the days when Depp was being rumoured for the role of HP), I was pleased. He's not a good director, but he can do flash, he can boast over lavish sets and crank up colour filters and basically revel in style over substance. Remember Hamlet and Much Ado About Nothing? Both technically awful but sumptuous and beautiful. And, based on the 1974 version of Orient Express, with its panoramic shots and its equal claim to star power (the tagline was 'The Who's Who of the Whodunit!'), I figured the new film would be much in that vein -- and that Branagh would be perfect to direct it.

So I was surprised and utterly thrilled to see the subject matter sensitively treated. A huge concern in this film is the distinction between good and evil -- something that fascinated Agatha Christie throughout her career. After all, the victim in Murder on the Orient Express is described in the book as 'tangibl[y] evil', the backstory is based on a real case of child-murder, and the solution ... well, even if you're of the ultra-conservative 'it's just a puzzle!' school, you can't deny that the solution and how Poirot deals with it both have something to say about social justice and criminal justice. Unlike Sidney Lumet in 1974, Branagh in 2017 tackles these themes head on. From the opening scene, in which Poirot rounds up a priest, a rabbi, and an imam, then explains that the chief of police is framing them all for a crime, to the revelation of whodunit, with the suspects lined up in a parody of the Last Supper, there is an ambitious and sensitive focus.

And this is why it's so interesting. Because the film could so easily have been flashy and panoramic, with each superstar actor having an Oscar-bidding five minutes, but instead it's ended up a real ensemble effort, in which the story comes first. The film has the star power of the 1974 version but more substance, and the ethical urgency of the ITV version but more fun. And it goes without saying that it's better than the 2001 US TV travesty starring Alfred Molina.

Speaking of the story, the writers have injected some action and a tiny bit of violence, clearly afraid swimming in stagnant waters with a crime-interviews-solution format. This is understandable, but I also see why so many people are cross that, for instance, Poirot chases a suspect down scaffolding, gets shot at twice, and uses his cane like an action man. There is also a second stabbing, which isn't in the book. However, silly as these may sound,  I don't think they take anything away -- and Poirot's action is never out of character. That, I think, is crucial. He's a man who does what he has to do, and he prefers to sit still and think, but sometimes that isn't possible.

However... a note of caution. Because the writers are clearly so palpably afraid of getting boring, some things are sacrificed -- such as major plot points. There is some confusion over a few key clues. This is hard to discuss without giving away the solution, but there are several red herrings. They are laid for very specific reasons -- but Poirot never explains why. Instead they just exist and are then forgotten. Again, I can't go into details, but if you know the story, keep an eye out for explanations surrounding the governess and the embroidered handkerchief. Because neither of these is properly explained.

There's also an incredibly silly scene where Poirot has tea with Mary Debenham outside in the middle of a snowdrift. The idea is to break up the monotony of interior scenes, clearly, but they sit outside in the snow, and occasionally their hair changes colour because of the green screen. There's a teapot between them, but neither drinks from it. Partly because -- I imagine -- the tea would have frozen(?!) but also because there are no teacups! It's all very uncalled for.

None of this stopped me enjoying it, as someone who already knew the story very well. Judging by the annoying people who sat behind us in the cinema, it's also extremely enjoyable if you don't know the plot (or who Michelle Pfeiffer is, or what a rabbi is, or whether the Orient Express was a real train... there was very nearly a Murder at the Picturehouse).  For a while now it's been an open secret that Branagh wants to do Death on the Nile next, and this is directly hinted in the funny final scene of Murder on the Orient Express.  Wallander fell through as Sir Kenneth's retirement project, and he's keeping an eye on how Orient Express fares. I hope it does well at the box office, if not critically, because I'd dearly love the franchise to continue.