Ken and Robin Consume Media: A Besieged Fortress, a Sinister Snorkel, and Some Ghosts In Need of Busting

November 30th, 2021 | Robin

Ken and Robin Consume Media is brought to you by the discriminating and good-looking backers of the Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff Patreon. Each week we provide capsule reviews of the books, movies, TV seasons and more we cram into our hyper-analytical sensoriums. Join the Patreon to help pick the items we’ll talk about in greater depth on a little podcast segment we like to call Tell Me More.

Recommended

The Fortress (Film, South Korea, Hwang Dong-hyuk, 2017) When Qing forces pin down the Joseon court in a remote, wintry fortress, rival courtiers (Lee Byung-hun, Kim Yoon-seok) pull the frightened king between honorable doom and pragmatic acquiescence. Period war epic interweaves military tactics on the receiving end of a siege with the lethal intrigue of Korean royal politics.—RDL

The Shadow of the Wind (Fiction, Carlos Ruiz Zafón, 2001) In 50s Spain, the naive son of a bookseller investigates the origins of a rare novel, stepping into the paths of a psychopathic secret policeman and the mysterious burned man determined to destroy every copy. Thrilling literary page-turner fuses mystery structure with neo-gothic elements.—RDL

The Snorkel (Film, UK, Guy Green, 1958) When her creepy sponger stepfather (Peter Van Eyck) uses the titular breathing apparatus to commit the seemingly perfect murder of her mother, a teen no one will believe (Mandy Miller) vows to expose him. Hammer Studios domestic thriller, set in an Italian resort town, takes a while to rev back up again after a supremely unnerving wordless cold open.—RDL

Good

American Sherlock: Murder, Forensics, and the Birth of American CSI (Nonfiction, Kate Winkler Dawson, 2020) Tormented obsessive rises from poverty to become a famed freelance criminalist, pioneering key techniques and taking part in notorious cases, including his determined participation in the railroading of Fatty Arbuckle. Biography of a prickly figure provides a detailed source on the state of forensics, and the difficulty of convincing jurors to pay attention to it, in the Call of Cthulhu era.—RDL

Ghostbusters: Afterlife (Film, US, Jason Reitman, 2021) Egon Spengler’s unknowing grandkids (Finn Wolfhard, Mckenna Grace) move into the house in rural Oklahoma where he died, and uncover a mystery. “Ghostbusters, but make it The Goonies” is perhaps the only way to properly make a sequel to the 1984 Pinnacle, and as long as the movie does that it remains a happy success. Sadly, grownup stories intervene with less uniform effect (although Carrie Coon is remarkably good in a thankless role as the mom), and even Dan Aykroyd looks a little tired of what he helped spawn. –KH

Tatja Grimm’s World (Fiction, Vernor Vinge, 1987) On a metal-poor ocean planet, a young mutant genius rises to power while searching for aliens like her. A fixup of Vinge’s first (1969) novel, itself a fixup of a 1968 novelette about Tatja manipulating the crew of a SF magazine barge (!!) to seize the throne. As a novel, it’s clunky, but as three shorts it’s pretty grand worldbuilding from probably the 1990s’ best SF author. –KH

Okay

Army of Thieves (Film, US/Germany, Matthias Schweighöfer, 2021) As an offscreen zombie plague roils financial markets, heister Gwen (Nathalie Emmanuel) recruits safecracking wannabe Sebastian (Schwieghöfer) to open three legendary safes. While one of the better sidekicks in the Army of the Dead ensemble, Schweighöfer’s Dieter (nee Sebastian) can’t particularly hold a whole movie, especially one that takes about an hour to start, you know, thieving anything. Plus, watching safes not open cannot be made interesting with more CGI of the interior of the safe: audiences need a way to judge the action, not simply wait for it to finish. –KH

Ken and Robin Consume Media: The Harder They Fall, Wrath of Man, and Tolkien Landscapes

November 23rd, 2021 | Robin

Ken and Robin Consume Media is brought to you by the discriminating and good-looking backers of the Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff Patreon. Each week we provide capsule reviews of the books, movies, TV seasons and more we cram into our hyper-analytical sensoriums. Join the Patreon to help pick the items we’ll talk about in greater depth on a little podcast segment we like to call Tell Me More.

Recommended

The Harder They Fall (Film, US, Jeymes Samuel, 2021) Outlaw Nat Love’s (Jonathan Majors) quest for revenge on his father’s killer puts him athwart the scheme of said killer, Rufus Buck (Idris Elba). The attempt to squish a sprawling cast of historical (if often wildly out-of-period) Black heroes and villains into the straightforward story of a Leone-style Western alternately chokes the narrative and spins entertaining diversion, but never quite settles into a hangout rhythm. The same, sadly, could be said for the ambitious final gunfight act. But there are classic Western moments aplenty, a few terrific jokes, many beautiful shots both gun- and cinematic, a reggae-infused score by Samuel (and an even better soundtrack of banger needle drops), and a mega-cool Delroy Lindo as legendary Oklahoma territorial marshal Bass Reeves, more than enough to get Recommended. –KH

The Worlds of JRR Tolkien: The Places That Inspired Middle-Earth (Nonfiction, John Garth, 2021) Tolkien scholar Garth breaks down the types of locations in Middle-Earth (and the larger Tolkien legendarium) and provides plausible (if a wee bit over-certain at times) inspirations from Tolkien’s life and travels: the Swiss Alps birth the Misty Mountains, rural Sarehole the Shire, the Somme’s no-mans-land the Dead Marshes, etc. Beautifully produced and illustrated, and copiously footnoted, it’s not the last word in Tolkien landscapes but it’s an excellent first word on them. –KH

Wrath of Man (Film, US, Guy Ritchie, 2021) Self-possessed crime crew boss (Jason Statham) goes undercover at an armored truck company in search of the inside man who got his son killed. Ritchie pares back his style to a Soderberghian level of formalism in this slow-burn combination of revenge thriller and upended heist flick.—RDL

Good

The Beetle: A Mystery (Fiction, Richard Marsh, 1897) A shape- and species- and gender-shifting Egyptian sorcerer seeks revenge on rising Liberal parliamentarian Paul Lessingham. Told Wilkie Collins-style from four perspectives (terrified, ironic, earnest, and cop), this “mystery” wonderfully manages to explain almost nothing you want to know while providing eventual “solutions” for what you need to know. The result: an unsettling and uncanny novel of the unnatural foreign Other that (for 20 years) outsold Dracula. –KH

Last Night in Soho (Film, UK, Edgar Wright, 2021) Psychically sensitive fashion student (Thomasin McKenzie) rents a Soho bedsit, spiraling her into an initially beguiling, soon horrifying dream journey into the life of a sixties singer (Anya Taylor-Joy) exploited by a ruthless pimp (Matt Smith.) Two acts of vertiginous cinematic mastery at the intersection of style and feeling, followed by a conclusion that violates the cardinal rule of plot twists. (Pinnacle + Pinnacle + Not Recommended/ 3)  = Good.—RDL

Okay

Red Notice (Film, US, Rawson Marshall Thurber, 2021) When Interpol questions his FBI profiler cred, Hartley (Dwayne Johnson) is forced to work with chatterbox narcissist thief Booth (Ryan Reynolds) who’s trying to spoil art theft mastermind The Bishop’s (Gal Gadot) plan to steal the three eggs of Cleopatra. Netflix has somehow spent $200 million re-inventing the TV movie: bland “I recognize those people” mush moving peristaltically through set-up cliche sequences, farting supposedly-arch dialogue. In 1978, it would have starred Lou Ferrigno, Robert Conrad, and Jaclyn Smith, everyone wouldn’t have daddy issues, and the location shooting wouldn’t have all been garbage CGI.  –KH

Ken and Robin Consume Media: Music, a Mogul, Mumbai

November 16th, 2021 | Robin

Ken and Robin Consume Media is brought to you by the discriminating and good-looking backers of the Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff Patreon. Each week we provide capsule reviews of the books, movies, TV seasons and more we cram into our hyper-analytical sensoriums. Join the Patreon to help pick the items we’ll talk about in greater depth on a little podcast segment we like to call Tell Me More.

Recommended

Carl Laemmle (Film, US, James L. Freedman, 2019) Documentary profiles the go-getting immigrant who set up a film distribution empire, busted Thomas Edison’s goon-assisted monopoly on film production, founded Universal Studios, and devoted his later years to fighting the American government to get Jews out of Nazi Germany. Archival images and talking head interviews paint a warm portrait of the lone mensch among the hardboiled crop of first wave studio moguls.—RDL

The Devil’s Stairway (Film, South Korea, Lee Man-hui, 1964) A calculating surgeon’s thoughts turn to murder when he gets a chance to marry the boss’ daughter but the nurse he’s been secretly bedding refuses to go quietly. Corrosive domestic noir escalates into contemporary gothic horror. Also known under the less salubrious title of The Evil Stairs.—RDL

May It Last: A Portrait of The Avett Brothers  (Film, US, Judd Apatow & Michael Bonfiglio, 2017) The Americana band looks back on their lives and career so far as they record their 2016 album “True Sadness.” A rare documentary that finds profundity by pointing the camera at a deeply functional creative team and family.—RDL

Sound of Metal (Film, US, Darius Marder, 2019) After suffering severe hearing loss, an obsessive rock drummer (Riz Ahmed) joins a deaf community which has an AA program for recovering addicts like himself. Naturalistic drama driven by Ahmed’s performance and an appropriately disorienting sound design.—RDL

Good

Sooryavanshi (Film, India, Rohit Shetty, 2021) Mumbai anti-terrorist supercop Sooryavanshi (Akshay Kumar) pursues a sleeper cell of Pakistani terrorists plotting a new bombing campaign. Shetty leans into his brash, patriotic high-energy style like a less-jittery Michael Bay to produce an operatic banger of an action film. The two other stars of Shetty’s “Cop Universe” franchise join Sooryavanshi for a final too-artificial act that undoes some of the sincere conviction the film depends on for effect. The screamin’ score and the eternal love of man for helicopter keeps the final rating a solid Good, though. –KH

Okay

Eternals (Film, US, Chloé Zhao, 2021) When the monstrous Deviants return after 500 years, the Eternals (Gemma Chan, et al.) must reunite to save humanity. As others have noted, this ponderous film combines the DC movies’ grandiosity with MCU flatness to no good effect. Gemma Chan is desperately unsuited to deliver Jack Kirby/Zack Snyder style dialogue, or to embody any emotion stronger than “worried about the hash browns,”  but unfortunately she’s supposed to hold the movie together. One or two good performances (Don Lee as Gilgamesh, and Harish Patel as a human POV) don’t save it. Zhao does turn in the first never-ugly Marvel film in a while though, which is something. –KH

The Mysterious Island (Film, UK, Cy Endfield, 1961) Blown far over the Pacific during an attempted escape by balloon from Confederate prison, Captain Cyrus Harding (Michael Craig) and his men land on the titular island. It’s kind of surprising how much of Verne’s original novel survives the addition of Ray Harryhausen stop-motion giant animals and shipwrecked ladies, even managing a sort of “heroic engineering” solution to the final crisis. But high points come a little too far apart, and Herbert Lom’s Nemo is only saved from anticlimax by the fact that nothing except the monster attacks has had much tension to begin with. Bernard Herrmann probably didn’t work too hard on his score, either. –KH

Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (Film, US, Destin Daniel Cretton, 2021) San Francisco-based underachiever (Simi Liu) embraces his martial arts mastery when his immortal father sends goons to retrieve him. Marvel’s latest tussle with the limitations of origin story structure has Tony Leung Chiu Wai but lacks tension and momentum. You’d think that the MCU’s homage to Hong Kong cinema would end with a thrillingly executed martial arts sequence but of course not it’s the algorithms fighting again.—RDL

Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff: Last Night in Soho, The French Dispatch, and Minor Romantic Disasters

November 9th, 2021 | Robin

Ken and Robin Consume Media is brought to you by the discriminating and good-looking backers of the Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff Patreon. Each week we provide capsule reviews of the books, movies, TV seasons and more we cram into our hyper-analytical sensoriums. Join the Patreon to help pick the items we’ll talk about in greater depth on a little podcast segment we like to call Tell Me More.

Recommended

All Hands on Deck (Film, France, Guillaume Brac, 2020) Entranced after a one-night encounter with a charming redhead, a brash but needy home nurse (Eric Nantchouang) makes a 600 km journey to surprise her during her countryside family vacation, roping in his reserved best buddy and their nebbishy ride sharer. Sun-dappled comedy of romantic negotiation and minor disasters in a Rohmeresque vein.—RDL

The French Dispatch (Film, US/Germany, Wes Anderson, 2021) Upon the death of founding editor Arthur Howitzer, Jr. (Bill Murray) the staff of the French Dispatch magazine assemble a final “best-of” issue; anthology film ensues. Dense yet light like the perfect meringue, these comic vignettes examine the inability of art to remain separate from life and (ideally) vice versa. Almost a self-parodic ode to fussy perfection amid chaos, it always charms and in two out of three cases (the comic turn on the Mai ‘68 ironically lacks engagement) absolutely lands perfectly. –KH

Last Night in Soho (Film, UK, Edgar Wright, 2021) Country mouse Eloise (Thomasin Mackenzie) moves to London to study fashion design, and finds herself mystically intertwined with Soho ‘60s girl Sandie (Anya Taylor-Joy). Although the fourth act drops the film from magnificent urban genius-loci folk-horror into a more conventional register, Wright’s commitment to old-fashioned virtues like color, sound, music, editing, and lighting more than complements his interrogation of the dangers and sins of nostalgia; if he’d stuck the landing this would be up there in counterpoint with Tarantino’s Once Upon A Time … in Hollywood as an urban symphony. –KH

Runaway Train (Film, US, Andre Konchalovsky, 1985) Hardened bank robber (Jon Voight) and chatterbox tagalong (Eric Roberts) bust out of an Alaska maximum security facility only to wind up on the titular out-of-control vehicle. Though based on an unproduced Akira Kurosawa screenplay, the guiding ethos of this gritty, frozen actioner is that of co-writer Edward Bunker, America’s great writer of prison life.—RDL

The Sicilian Clan (Film, France, Henri Verneuil, 1968) Hardened bank robber (Alain Delon) brings the criminal family who helped him bust out of prison, as headed by no-nonsense patriarch Jean Gabin, into a mid-air jewel heist. Lino Ventura also stars as the cop on their trail. Caper with noir motifs oozes vintage cool. Verneuil shot English and French versions simultaneously; you want the International cut, on disc in North America but not on streaming.—RDL

Okay

Whipsaw (Film, US, Sam Wood, 1935) Federal agent (Spencer Tracy) goes undercover as the self-appointed bodyguard to a good-hearted jewel thief (Myrna Loy) on the run from her partners’ rivals. The script of this crime romcom spends more time on plot than character, but it’s still fun to see the leads together.—RDL