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Ken and Robin Consume Media: New Donnie Yen, Black Doves, A Ghost Story for Christmas, and Gender-Flipped Conan in the Bardo Thodol

January 14th, 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

Day of Anger (Film, Italy, Tonino Valerii, 1968) To get out of a town that treats him as a wretched outcast, a young man who has been practicing his fast draw (Giuliano Gemma) seeks apprenticeship under a cynical gunslinger (Lee van Cleef) ruthlessly pursuing an old debt. Offers unusually strong characterization and dialogue for a spaghetti western, a subgenre that typically paints with broader strokes.—RDL

A Ghost Story for Christmas Series 1 (Television, UK, BBC, Lawrence Gordon Clark, 1971-1978) Shot on film, not videotape, these horror shorts share a rich, haunted look and (with the exception of the final film, made without Clark’s involvement) feel. Of the eight shorts, five are solidly Recommended: the first four M.R. James adaptations and “The Signalman” (based on the Dickens story). “The Ash Tree” lets its timeslip get away from it, although the spider-things are truly horrendous; “Stigma” is a one-note folk horror shaggy dog, and “The Ice House” (the only Okay one in the batch) suffers from truly bizarre line readings and a distinct lack of ghost. —KH

She is Conann (Film, France, Bertrand Mandico, 2023) Guided by a dog-headed psychopomp (Elina Löwensohn), the legendary avatar of slaughter Conann the Barbarian (Françoise Brion) goes on an afterlife recapitulation of her past personae: traumatized teen (Claire Duburcq), implacable warrior (Christa Théret), 80s Bronx scenester (Sandra Parfait), near-future dictator (Agata Buzek) and death-seeking decadent (Nathalie Richard.) Surreal bardo thodol odyssey invokes the spirits of Méliès and Greenaway as it queers the tropes and characters of Robert E. Howard.—RDL

The Score (Fiction, Richard Stark, 1964) Master thief Parker overlooks initial objections to run an operation to knock off an entire North Dakota mining town. An original heist premise provides the foundation for an extra existential installment of the hardboiled realist crime series.—RDL

The Stool Pigeon (Film, Hong Kong, Dante Lam, 2010) Guilt-ridden cop (Nick Cheung) presses an ex-con street racer (Nicolas Tse) to join and inform on a ruthless robbery crew. Bathed in the last vestiges of Hong Kong neon, this crime drama brings hard action and harder fatalistic melodrama.—RDL

The Prosecutor (Film, China/HK, Donnie Yen, 2024) Veteran cop turned rookie prosecutor (Donnie Yen) detects a wider conspiracy in the case of a poor young man charged with receiving a package of cocaine. Martial arts meets aggressively sincere courtroom drama in a star vehicle that begins to question whether anyone, including Donnie Yen, should be making Donnie Yen still get kicked around like this.—RDL

Vertical (Fiction, Cody Goodfellow, 2023) Traumatized urban explorer rejoins his former crew under duress for one last exploit: climbing Moscow’s Korova Tower before its opening. Goodfellow’s superb horror reflexes energize this relatively straightforward thriller, wringing real suspense from standard beats of paranoia, disaster, and betrayal.—KH

Good

Black Doves Season 1 (Television, UK, Netflix, Joe Barton, 2024) When Helena’s (Keira Knightley) lover is killed, she risks her position as a spy planted on (and wife of) the UK Defence Minister (Andrew Buchan) to hunt down those responsible. Let us be frank with one another: unless it’s a real dog’s breakfast, “Keira Knightley spy thriller” is going to get at least a Good from me, assuming Keira both smiles and shoots people. Sterner critics might praise Ben Whishaw’s steady performance as her hit-man protector, or enjoy the occasional descent into Ritchified low comedy, but they would probably also point out that none of it is remotely plausible, tactically or even emotionally.—KH

The Entity (Film, US, Sidney J. Furie, 1982) Targeted by a rapist poltergeist, beleaguered single mom (Barbara Hershey) seeks help from an intense doctor (Ron Silver) and then a team of earnest parapsychologists. Adapted from his own novel by Frank de Felitta and blithely misrepresenting a real case, this psychotoxic dose of eliptonic horror gains disorienting power from its mix of disreputable subject matter and mainstream, naturalistic presentation. The premise is the content warning.—RDL

Eye of the Devil (Film, UK, J. Lee Thompson, 1966) When her husband the Marquis de Monfaucon (David Niven) returns suddenly to his ancestral chateau to deal with a drought killing the vineyards, his wife Catherine (Deborah Kerr) follows and discovers strange cult goings-on. Although its momentum suffers from the last-minute reshoots (Kerr replacing an injured Kim Novak; Thompson was the fourth director on the project), the resulting dreamlike imagery and discordance keep things well and truly uncanny. Sharon Tate and David Hemmings as weird witch-twins, meanwhile, strangely imply that modernism is the new paganism.—KH

Shopworn (Film, US, Nick Grinde, 1932) When a charming waitress (Barbara Stanwyck) and an ardent med student (Regis Toomey) inform his wealthy mother (Clara Blandick) of their wish to marry, she goes to deranged lengths to separate them. Romantic melodrama burns with good old fashioned class animosity.—RDL

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