Ken and Robin Consume Media: Morris on Manson, Moravian Witch Hunting, 70s Cops, and the Hottest New Fiction of 1771
April 15th, 2025 | 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
Close Your Eyes (Film, Spain, Victor Erice, 2023) An unsolved mysteries-style TV show inspires a novelist (Manolo Solo) to follow up on the fate of a renowned actor (Jose Coronado), whose disappearance from set a generation ago ended his second career as a movie director. Erice, returning to filmmaking after a 31 year absence, infuses his ambiguous narrative of identity and loss with a complex, absorbing simplicity—not to mention a surprising homage to Rio Bravo.—RDL
The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (Fiction, Tobias Smollett, 1771) An outwardly querulous, secretly kindly gent, his fussy, husband-seeking sister and their lovestruck niece and hotheaded nephew take a tour across England and Scotland. Fictionalized comic epistolary travelogue leaves an accessible, amusing record of everyday life in Georgian Britain.—RDL
The Seven-Ups (Film, US, Philip D’Antoni, 1973) Plainclothes cop Buddy Manucci (Roy Scheider) and his team of maverick “Seven-Ups” find their pursuit of New York organized crime figures complicated by freelance crooks kidnapping those same targets. A fine 70s cop movie is vaulted into greatness by the third (after Bullitt and The French Connection) of stunt co-ordinator Bill Hickman’s legendary car chases.—KH
Sly Lives! (aka the Burden of Black Genius) (Film, US, Ahmir “Questlove” Thompson, 2025) Arts profile documentary uses a diptych structure to examine the musical innovations of funk pioneer Sly Stone, and then to ask what role the extra pressures placed on a black superstar contributed to his breakdown into drug dependency.—RDL
The Thief of Bagdad (Film, US, Raoul Walsh, 1924) Exquisitely muscled rogue (Douglas Fairbanks) poses as a foreign prince to vie with rival suitors for the hand of a princess (Julanne Johnston.) Foundational work of fantasy cinema, its monumental sets dripping with art nouveau and Symbolist style, centered by Fairbanks as the prototypical action star. Obvious caveat: if there’s a non-orientalist way for a Westerner to do this story, it’s not gonna be the one from a hundred years ago.—RDL
Witchhammer (Film, Czechoslovakia, Otakar Vávra, 1970) In Baroque-era Moravia, an erudite deacon (Elo Romancik) challenges a venal inquisitor (Vladimír Smeral) conducting an escalating, lethal anti-witchcraft campaign. Harrowing historical political drama of complicity and inertia in the face of tyrannical abuse hits hard now, as it would certainly have done for Czech audiences two years after the Soviet crackdown.—RDL
Good
Chaos: the Manson Murders (Film, US, Errol Morris, 2025) Morris’ ongoing tumble down the MKULTRA rabbit hole leads him to entertain researcher Tom O’Neill’s admittedly unproven theory that Charles Manson gained his powers of persuasion from a government mind control project. The problem with this challenge to the prevailing narrative of Manson as a Svengali of nihilistic terror is that it still strives to impose sense on what was really a spiral of drug-addled, criminal stupidity, which is where the documentary correctly if somewhat reluctantly lands.—RDL
