Three Films Make A Post: They're all alone in this together.

The Holdovers (2023): It’s not generally a great sign to someone of my tastes when basically every single review about a film describes it as “heart-warming”, but then not too many movies manage to be heart-warming without becoming kitsch, so this isn’t completely my failing. Alexander Payne’s The Holdovers the kitsch by an insistence on all that’s crappy in life existing for its characters as well; its uplifting quality lies in saying “all this is true, but still…” and finding the positive in the small yet life-changing things. All the while, the humour runs a perfect line of sarcasm of the kind that’s quotable and will still be funny after you’ve quoted it a hundred times. The performances of the core trio of actors – Paul Giamatti, Da’Vine Joy Randolph and Dominic Sessa – are point perfect, and Payne directs like someone putting himself completely in the service of the story he is trying to tell (which is a difficult thing if you’re also going to tell it well).

Lot No. 249 (2023): For 2023’s Ghost Story for Christmas, Mark Gatiss went to the Arthur Conan Doyle well. This is probably one of the Gatiss era’s lesser offerings, but I say that rather regularly about these things and then find myself returning to them with great joy later on, so ask me again about its greatness or lesserness in a couple of years.

What’s definitely fine here is a surprising performance by Kit Harington, a cameo by not-Sherlock Holmes quite a few people not me apparently found annoying, and subtext about gayness, (self-)repression and the arrogance of Empire that has lost all of the sub.

The Childe aka Sad Tropics aka 귀공자 (2022): This South Korean action film by Park Hoon-jung concerns the misadventures of a young man looking for his father who learns that some fathers are better not found. A violent three-way-tugging match about with him as the rope ensues. The film features some fun, sometimes – the climax! - brilliant, action set pieces and a handful of performances so cartoonish, one will either find them very fun or very annoying, and very little else worth talking about. Enjoyable, the film certainly is, and I’m not against cartoons in any way, shape or form.

Three Films Make A Post: Still Partying Like It’s 2022

The Wonder (2022): I’ve read rather a lot of excited praise for Sebastián Lelio’s film, but I can’t say I can agree with much of it. Sure, on a technical level, this is a highly accomplished movie, but to my eyes, it is also one that doesn’t have as much substance as its form suggests. What is has to say about grief and female empowerment is rather on the trite and obvious side, its deliberate surface artfulness trying to distract from a lack of deeper thought at its core, its moments of hapless yet self-important fourth wall breaking notwithstanding.

Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio (2022): In contrast, this little wonder of puppet animation by del Toro and Mark Gustafson is just as surface artful in its own way, but it also has – despite much more obvious emotionality and plotting – much more depth on any level: emotionally, politically, aesthetically and intellectually. It is also much less po-faced in its approach to the surprising number of things it talks about – from the problems of fathers and sons, over fascism, death, to the troubles of homeownership when you’re a grasshopper. This doesn’t mean it lacks seriousness in its thinking. Rather, the film treats humour and warmth as important parts of the human experience even under circumstances full of suffering and grief, not allowing itself or its viewers to lose sight of the totality of life.

Count Magnus (2022): Mark Gatiss’s newest Ghost Story for Christmas – again based on a tale by M.R. James, obviously – seems to have been the least well-regarded of the irregular series until now. Admittedly, the tale takes a bit too long to get going, with a talky beginning that’s less than ideal in a thirty minute piece. Particularly in its early stages, it looks terribly stagey and nearly aggressively digital, the BBC’s unwillingness to give Gatiss a decent budget showing to ill effect.

I found myself reconciled with the tale once it got going, though. Even though it never reaches the height of the original story – which is one my favourites of Monty’s – there are eventually some nicely creepy moments, despite the script keeping things a bit more removed from the viewer than even the James tale does, perhaps in reaction to the criticism of last year’s episode showing its monster somewhat longer.

In short: The Mezzotint (2021)

Warning: there will be mild spoilers about the changes the adaptation makes to the tale!

Between the Wars. Academic Williams (Rory Kinnear and his magical facial hair) is sent a mezzotint engraving on approval. On first look, it seems to be not particularly exciting, but whenever Williams or others take a new look at it, it changes in increasingly disturbing and grotesque ways. At the same time, Williams learns some somewhat surprising facts about his family history.

As usual with Mark Gatiss, this half hour adaptation of a Monty James tale as a Ghost Story for Christmas for the BBC has found as much hate as praise (both pretty much from the circles you’d expect them to come from). I’m completely on the praising side this time around, and see this as Gatiss’s best James adaptation yet. It’s an effort that changes exactly the parts of the story that need changing for better dramatic effect, the original tale being one of James’s less exciting stories in need of a bit more punch on the haunting side as well as emotionally for its climax, which Gatiss provides in an efficient and logical manner. Then there are a few bits and bobs added to pull the story a smidgen away from the purely male academic area where James’s stories – as well as their author – dwelt. For this, Gatiss adds some dialogue about women coming to academia, something that actually must have been talked about rather a lot in 1923 in these circles, and puts a bit of organic diversity in by casting Nikesh Patel as Nisbet and adding an important female character (via a wonderful performance by Frances Barber). It’s all very efficiently, effectively and intelligently done, in a way that roots the tale in its contemporary reality, a technique James himself found very important in ghost stories.

Most important, obviously, is how well Gatiss has become at directing this sort thing. There are so many clever and atmospheric uses of Dutch angles, extreme close-ups and sharp editing on display, one thinks Lawrence Gordon-Clarke should have been proud of how creepy a tale mostly about men staring at a picture dramatically can get when filmed right. Of course, the men and women doing the staring here are fantastic too, suggesting great degrees of personality and emotion in a very short time.

And hey, Gatiss also adds a nice example of the Jamesian Wallop (term courtesy of the great M.R. James podcast A Podcast to the Curious) to the climax that’s not afraid to do a bit of showing when the telling’s through.

Three Films Make A Post: They faced death......and found life.

The ABC Murders (2018): Or as I like to call it “Poirot: The Grimdark Years”, seeing as this BBC mini-series directed by Alex Gabassi and written by Sarah Phelps goes down the road of all bad grimdark stuff of presenting a worldview and view of people so bleak it becomes more than just faintly ridiculous. In this film’s world, everyone is horrible 24/7, then murdered by a horrid person who in turn is hunted by a past his prime Poirot (John Malkovich doing his best with a crap script) haunted by the shadows of an of course sordid past. Thing is, once your portrayal of humankind becomes as one-note negative as the one presented here, an actual complex and complicated human being watching it does tend to lose the emotional connection to the oh so dark caricatures grimly making their way through one’s field of view. There is, needless to say, quite a bit of scowling involved, as well as the expected scenes of the killer (Eamon Farren) throwing “creepy” poses for the camera.

Need I mention that the main colours in the production are poison green and piss yellow as if this were exactly the low rent copy of a David Fincher production it indeed is?

The Dead Room (2018): As a matter of fact, this half-an-hour ghost story for Christmas written and directed by Mark Gatiss, is just as dark as that Poirot thing. Here, though, it’s a darkness that comes from an actual exploration of character and guilt of the piece’s lead character, radio horror narrator Aubrey Judd (wonderfully performed by Simon Callow). Where The ABC Murders only knows how to strike poses, this one derives its strength and its darkness from an understanding of human complexity rather than from turning humans into caricatures that only know how to be shitty.

Because Gatiss must have been in a hell of a form when he did this, the short film also deftly creates a sense of place and of time having passed, all the while demonstrating – as expected – the writer/director’s love for the classic British ghost story. Quite an achievement for half an hour of television.


Christopher Robin (2018): Despite today’s complaints against a particular style of grimdarkness, I am still a bit too cynical to enjoy the particular style of all ages personal improvement feelgood cinema of most films like Marc Forster’s Christopher Robin. However, in this particular case, I found myself rather spell-bound by the whole affair. In part, it’s certainly an effect of the nostalgia towards Winnie the Pooh et al, but there’s also the fact that the film is quite serious about its portrayal of a very specific post-war malaise that sees Christopher Robin (a fine turn by Ewan McGregor) losing himself in the surrounding greyness of 50s England (despite being married to the most certainly not grey Hayley Atwell). Also bound to win my heart is the portrayal of Christopher’s former friends around Pooh as childlike and gently, yet utterly weird living plush toys. Well, expect for Tigger, who is hilariously deranged and not at all gentle. Really, the only thing that isn’t enjoyable about this one is that it doesn’t solve the problem of alienation in a capitalist society it posits and instead has McGregor inventing paid leave, but I may be asking just a tiny bit much.

In short: Crooked House

Marked Gatiss's semi-episodic TV three-parter of stories in the tradition of the classic supernatural tale is a fine demonstration that even a talented writer with an obvious love, and quite deep knowledge, of the genre he’s working in will not necessarily produce a story in it that's actually all that great.

It's not just that Gatiss's approach here is a bit too conservative for my taste. I have seen, read and heard everything in Crooked House many times before, and enjoyed it, and would probably still have enjoyed it again even if it didn't add anything new at all to the genre. The problem lies with an execution where only the most obvious way to set-up and solve a situation is taken, where the so-called plot twists (an unnecessary thing at the best of times) are made particularly useless through their obviousness and - sorry - lameness. Crooked House's slavish adherence to tradition except for the existence of gay people (but don't you worry, it's not that the series does anything with them) ignores everything that's subversive about the British ghost story and turns it lifeless; if the British supernatural tale were an animal, Crooked House would rather prefer the stuffed and dead version to the living, breathing thing.

Being who I am, I'd still be able to find a lot of enjoyment in this subservient approach to tradition, but the lifelessness of Gatiss's script continues through to direction without any visual imagination, sets that lack any atmosphere, and acting on the theatrical and stiff side, because people in the past clearly talked liked people in the novels of the past. In combination, this number of flaws doesn't add up to something horrible, or unwatchable, but rather to something pointless.

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