MovieMonday: Little Women

This is at least the seventh film presentation of a novel that was released 150 years ago and has been in continuous publication ever since.

Little Women is the story of four sisters coming of age in Concord, Mass., during and shortly after the Civil War.  The author was Louisa May Alcott, who was raised in a very similar family.

The film is beautifully made and is the third from Greta Gerwig, whose previous works (Frances Ha and Lady Bird) were much admired.  The acting is also very good, particularly by Soairse Ronan, who plays Jo March, the second sister and a writer whom the film and the book treat as a stand-in for Alcott herself.

The other sisters are Meg (Emma Watson,) an aspiring actress, musician Beth (Eliza Scanlen,) and budding artist Amy (Florence Pugh.)  Their father is off fighting for the Union forces, and the mother, Marmee (Laura Dern,) is generous and kind.

The next-door neighbor is Theodore/Laurie (Timothée Chalamet) a wealthy young man who from the look of him couldn't beat any of the Marches in an arm wrestling match. He is very fond of Jo.


Two Problems

Alcott was a writer whose work helped support her family when she was urged by her publisher to write a story about her youth.  She turned out Little Women in a matter of months.  It was published initially in two volumes -- one about the girls' teen years and the other about their early adult lives.

For some reason this film tells the story in back-and-forth scenes instead of sequentially.  Since most growing-up narratives show how young characters grow into their adult selves, it’s a little hard to understand why this production jumps around so much.

Second, and more worrisome, is that the film seems at odds with its subject – Jo March/Louisa May Alcott.

Everything we know about Alcott suggests she would be very comfortable in the current milieu of third (or fourth) wave feminism, and this seems clear in the movie as well.  Part of that, for her, meant that she preferred not to marry.  She also did not want Jo March to marry, but she was warned by her editor that stories about women needed to end in marriage or death.  In the  movie, the girls' Aunt March (Meryl Streep) strongly urges them to take a transactional approach to marriage, seeking husbands who will provide financial security. 

If there is a problem with this movie, it is that it tries to have it both ways.

(Spoiler alert: If you do not know the story and plan to see the movie, please stop reading now.)

Jo's older sister falls in love with and marries a low-earning tutor, and financial tensions arise.  Younger sister Amy, who resented Jo when they were children, accepts a proposal from Laurie after Jo spurns him.  (Jo's refusal of Laurie has puzzled Alcott fans for, well, forever.)

Jo herself, per the book, enters into a companionate marriage with a middle-aged schlubby fellow named Friedrich Bhaer, apparently in a grudging concession to her publisher's exhortation.

In the movie, however, Bhaer is played by Louis Garrel, a handsome 35-year-old French filmmaker.  Jo plays coy when he visits the family, but her sisters understand immediately that she is in love with the man.  A joyous ending ensues.

Alcott herself never married and said often that she preferred to support herself by her writing.  Given that, it seems odd that a movie that depicts its star almost as Alcott herself would settle for such an ending.

But women like romance, and this is a movie made for women.  At least 90 percent of the audience in the very full theater where I saw it were female – teenagers to senior citizens.

Louisa May Alcott would not have been pleased.

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker

It's just possible we're seeing a bit of Star Wars fatigue here.

This final movie in the third Star Wars trilogy had a great opening weekend, selling $176 million of tickets in the U.S. and Canada.    But that total was 20 percent lower than sales for its predecessor, The Last Jedi, which itself generated less enthusiasm than the 2015 film, The Force Awakens.

Let's remember the history:  The first trilogy, which opened in 1977, was the product of George Lucas' absorption in classic mythical ideas:  the hero's journey, the forces of good and evil battling for the soul/identity of a warrior and battles between oppressors and resistance fighters.  There are themes of family lost and found, and of the responsibility of a given soldier to colleagues in battle.  There is also the occasional consideration of redemption.

All these are found in this new movie -- and in this latest trilogy -- but without the focus that Lucas brought to the original story.  It feels like a machine assembled of old, once-useful parts, but to less effect.

So, while The Rise of Skywalker looks good and was made by people who know how to make movies, it's striving for something that it cannot achieve.  It's a bit of a clunker.

Counting the Ways

The plot is labored, convoluted, incongruent with the plot of 2017's The Last Jedi and, effectively, incoherent.  I am not going to discuss it here.  Those who want to know more can find internet discussion boards where devotees have been dissecting its elements in great detail for days now.

(One missing point is an examination of what death means to the human-looking looking residents of that galaxy far, far away; one character flat-out admits he's already died at least once, and two or three others seemed to have expired in earlier movies, only to reappear, conveniently, here to juice up the narrative.)

The characters are well-played, but in roles don't demand much of them.  The exceptions are valiant, wonderful, noble Rey (Daisy Ridley) and, more, Kylo Ren (Adam Driver).  Each is challenged, sort of, to answer the most basic existential question:  Who am I?

The movie clocks in at two hours and 22 minutes.  At least twice in the second half, there comes a climactic scene that leads the viewer to think, okay, so that's the resolution and we're near the end.  But it isn't near the end. In fact, this long movie feels longer than it is.

Familiar 

The filmmakers have gone to some lengths to gratify the nostalgia of Star Wars aficionados.  Some points:

-- Light sabers.  These are passed around with the reverence traditionally accorded to crown jewels.
       In addition, there are many, many light saber duels, which tend to make a cynic (okay, moi) think, why don't these characters use their revolver-like blasters to blow holes in their enemies and just kill them instead?

-- The Millennium Falcon.   This main vehicle of the Resistance is well into its second generation and, yes, there is an emotional association because Han Solo won the MF in a card game with Lando Calrissian.  Meanwhile, the bad guys (thoughtfully outfitted in black to help viewers keep things straight) have assembled several massive Death Stars and many, many fleets of newer space vehicles over the course of three trilogies.   Couldn't technical mismatches like those prove troubling over the course of time?
          Luke Skywalker's X-wing fighter also makes an appearance, and so do enemy TIE fighters.
          On the plus side, Billy Dee Williams returns as Gen. Calrissian, which is rather nice.

-- Tatooine.  Star Wars heroes land several times on the dry planet where Luke Skywalker was raised, including on one occasion when Tatooinians(?) just happen to be celebrating a once-every-44-years celebration of their ancestors.

-- Chewbacca, the big furry friend who doesn't talk but is a crack mechanic and wingman who can revive long-abandoned space vehicles, without fuel and on a moment's notice.  Plus R2D2, C3PO, BB-8 and Babu Frik, a new small furry mascot with attitude that has been described in some reviews as "adorable."  Adorable?


And Another Thing

There are also derivative elements at work.  As was the case in this year's Avengers: Endgame, the Resistance fighters must hunt down a needed item to help them find the bad guys' hidden redoubt.  This search takes them to a low, dark reality that owes a lot to the dark street scenes in Blade Runner.

In addition, there are references to gunfights in old Westerns: Resistance fighters make their way into enemy strongholds and dart around, unnoticed by cameras or sensors, as they peek from behind corners to see storm troopers and either avoid them or confront them with their blasters.  This might have worked in 1977, but even century-old houses are outfitted with security cameras, Alexas and/or Ring doorbells now.  It seems fair to wonder how long audiences will go along with the idea that high-tech death stars manned by paranoid enemies will not be similarly equipped.

-----

As much as I admire the Star Wars movies overall, if Lucasfilm (now a Disney subsidiary) launches a fourth trilogy, I'm pretty sure I'm not going to watch it. 

All I Want For Christmas Is You

Above is the first video recording of Mariah Carey's 1994 Christmas classic.  Now, a quarter-century later, it is the No. 1 song on the Billboard Top 100.  That's some staying power.  What follows is a 2016 post.

-----

This may be the catchiest pop/rock Christmas song of all time.  

It was released before and included in Mariah Carey's first Christmas album, "Merry Christmas," the best-selling Christmas album, worldwide, in history.  Even now, people download the song hundreds of thousands of times each year.  It's popular from Australia to Japan to Scandinavia.  

AIWFC begins with a slow, almost sad recitation of the singer's disinterest in the holiday and bursts open only at the end of the line, "All I want to for Christmas is you."  Then the musical notes tick up a few tones, the syncopation comes to life and the rest of the song is glorious energy, a particularly effective matching of lyric and score.  

If you wander through stores or tune your car radio to a pop station, you will hear the song many times a day all through December.  It gets more play than Bing Crosby's White Christmas or Elvis Presley's Blue Christmas, and certainly more than Wham's Last Christmas.

Carey still makes holiday appearances where she sings the song, and of course it has been covered by other singers and musical groups.  But the version above is the one with the staying power. 

In addition to singing, Carey co-wrote All I Want with Walter Afanasieff during an especially productive time in her early career.  They collaborated on two other songs for Merry Christmas, her fourth album.  

Affanasieff is a Brazilian immigrant with Russian parents and a sixth sense for shaping music that appeals to people.  His many film credits include producing "My Heart Will Go On," the Titanic song that was 1998's best-selling single.   He has composed and orchestrated music for dozens of contemporary musical artists and groups, including The Hanukkah Song, another holiday number, for KennyG. 

Affanasieff is not as famous as Carey, but his fireplace mantel is crowded with Grammy statuettes, and he has left his marks all over the last 40 years of the American songbook. 

On the 20th anniversary of the AIWFC release, he was interviewed about the Merry Christmas album.  He said neither he nor Carey anticipated the success of their breakout song.  Some of his comments:

         "There are always three different areas that Christmas music goes into: Traditional Christmas songs, fun kiddie songs like "Rudolph" or "Frosty," and then you have your love songs, which are like “Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire,” “I’ll be Home for Christmas,” all those kinds of songs.  (For the album) we decided to write one of each.
         "It was always the same sort of system with us. We would write the nucleus of the song, the melody primary music, and then some of the words were there as we finished writing it. That went very quickly .... 
         "(All I Want for Christmas) was very formulaic; not a lot of chord changes. I tried to ... put in some special chords that you really don’t hear a lot of, to make it unique and special .... That part of it took maybe an hour, and then I went home. 
         "Then for the next week or two Mariah would call me and say, 'What do you think about this bit?' We would talk a little bit until she got the lyrics all nicely coordinated and done. And then we just waited until the sessions began ... in the summer of ’94 ... and started recording.  
         "And that’s when we first heard her at the microphone singing, and the rest is history."

2019 Notes

People just keep trying to do things with this song. Michael Buble and Barbra Streisand have a cover, and Lady Antebellum has a ballad version.  If you want your school band to perform it, there's a chart for that.  You can find saxophone, French horn and trombone renditions online.  For all I know, it's being performed around now in cities with annual those Tuba Christmas recitals.  And there are remixes all over TikTok.

There's an All I want for Christmas children's book.  A documentary, just about the song, is said to be in the works. Carey's third video of the number dropped this week.  

This song is so infectious it makes me want to sing along and dance whenever I hear it.  I don't see why we can't have Labor Day or Halloween versions too.

MovieMonday: Richard Jewell

This is not going to be a review of a movie, but here's a recap of the plot:

Richard Jewell (played very well by Paul Walter Hauser) is a security guard in Atlanta's Centennial Park, a concert venue,  during the city's hosting of the 1996 Olympics.  He observes a backpack abandoned under a park bench, investigates and sees what look like bombs and sounds the alarm.  When the bombs explode, one woman is killed, a man running to the scene has a fatal heart attack and about a hundred people are injured.  Without Jewell's action, many others would have died and been hurt.

Jewell initially is heralded as a hero but then becomes the lead suspect in an FBI investigation because he "fits the profile" of a lone wolf bomber.  True, he is eager to be a police officer, and is a "wannabe" who spends hours poring over criminal procedure manuals.  He is pudgy and naive and has been excessively officious in security guard jobs.

But being a person who "fits a profile" is not evidence.  In this story, the lead FBI man at Centennial Park, Tom Shaw (Jon Hamm) is upset that the bombing happened on his watch and is very motivated to find the bomber.  Per the movie, he leaks to a local newspaper reporter that Richard Jewell is the lead suspect.  She files the story, which is picked up, immediately and internationally, by the many news organizations who have teams in Atlanta to cover the Olympic Games.

From then on, Jewell and his mother are staked out at their home by teams of journalists and cops.  Their belongings -- Tupperware, vacuum cleaner, underwear and so on -- are collected and taken to an FBI lab.  A member of the Olympic security team visits the apartment for a home-made dinner and wears a hidden wire to record the conversation.  Finally a lawyer/friend named Watson Bryant (Sam Rockwell) convinces Jewell to stop identifying with the lawmen who are determined to charge him with capital murder.

After 88 days, the ordeal ends because there is no evidence against Jewell and one matter of timing that suggests strongly that he is innocent.

This story deserves telling if only because the subsequent apologies from the press -- none came from the FBI, apparently -- were so much quieter than the reports of possible charges that made him a public enemy and a figure of ridicule.

The movie is well made, nicely paced (if long, as usual now) and interesting to watch.


The Problem

Richard Jewell seems to be becoming yet another Rorschach Test for political tribes in this country.  Since it is a Clint Eastwood production and Eastwood is some kind of traditional conservative -- possibly even a Trump supporter -- it seems to be attracting a certain kind of audience.  When I saw it, I moved seats two times in the theater because people in my rows kept talking back at Jewell's accusers on the screen.

My guess is that when Bombshell, a retelling of the story of Fox News harasser Roger Ailes and his blonde victims, goes wide, Team Blue types will attend to watch their own views gratified. 

It's interesting that entertainment and, worse, news media, have adopted political brands so as to gather like-minded consumers unto themselves.  If there was a day when people could tolerate information not refracted through their preferred filters, that seems to be over now.

That said, let's examine some of the complaints about this film that are threatening to overshadow its story.

Kathy Scruggs

Olivia Wilde plays Kathy Scruggs, the actual police reporter for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution who broke the Jewell story.  In the movie, she meets FBI agent Shaw in a bar and, after she runs her hand up his thigh and suggests they have sex, he tells her that Jewell is the person of interest.  Then she tells him she will confirm what he said with a second source -- a common requirement with controversial stories but not seen here -- and then she convinces her skeptical editor to run with the story because "everybody in town" already knows that that Jewell is the suspect.  Hmm.

People are furious about the sex-for-scoops angle because Scruggs is now dead and there is no proof that such happened.   (This is a pretty hackneyed plot point in mostly male-casted movies to advance information that moves plots forward and allows the introduction of sexy female characters.)  The Atlanta paper, which learned the script included this unproven point, seems to have forced an acknowledgement in the film's credits that not every single action in the largely true movie may have happened as seen on the screen.

I would add two points here:

--  The AJC's recent article about Scruggs, full of outrage at her treatment in the film, describes a hard-drinking, tough-as-nails reporter who was very competitive about getting the story.  It quotes her brother saying this:

“The world needs to know she was as good a journalist as the world has ever seen.  Whenever something would happen, the police would call Kathy. They always trusted her to get the scoop because they knew it would be handled right. She was proud the FBI called her about Jewell. She was proud of the way she reported it to begin with.”  The brother also said Scruggs took various medications for physical and mental reasons, sometimes with bad interactions.

Also from the article:  “'Law enforcement loved her, just loved her,'” said co-author Kent Alexander, a former federal prosecutor. The book (The Suspect) does note the time police responded at 3 a.m. when Scruggs refused to get out of a taxi outside a Buckhead hotel. She was drunk, naked and sitting in the driver’s seat."

Reporters on the police beat who are loved by the police aren't necessarily the best reporters because they can get too close to their sources and favor the police.  It's easy to see how such situations can develop because those reporters typically have their desks in cop shops and spend a lot of time with the boys in blue, but it's a real hazard.  And, if those reporters aren't nice, the police avoid dealing with them.

It is unfair to use any of the above to justify the idea that Scruggs had a sexual relationship with a source, but it seems possible that some of the mythology about her may have become exaggerated over the years.

I worked with a couple of those brassy, brave, hard-drinking female reporters, and they were not quite as they wanted to be seen.  The tough exterior was about as thick as an eggshell; underneath there was a vulnerable, often troubled person.

-- It may be that Eastwood and his screenwriter included this characterization as a poke at the New York Times, which hired a female reporter in 2017 after she admitted to having a three-year affair with a Senate staff member whose work was relevant to her beat.

There were denials that the reporter had received leaks from her lover, but even that would have been irrelevant until very recent times.  Until 2017 I never heard of a journalist who had a sexual relationship with a source.  Such a person would have been fired and -- since journalists can't keep secrets -- never worked in a newsroom again.


That FBI Guy

If this movie plays fast and loose with a real character's story, it goes way too easy on her FBI source.

According to the book mentioned earlier, an actual FBI official named Don Johnson almost certainly told Kathy Scruggs that Jewell was the prime suspect in the bombing, and the leak was relayed over drinks in a bar.

So why is Don Hamm playing an FBI agent named named "Tom Shaw," and not "Don Johnson?"

And, when you think about it, which is worse -- a government agent exposing a suspect who has not been charged or even investigated, or a reporter who learns the suspect's name and runs with it?


Notes

Like Jewell, who died at 45, and Scruggs, who died at 44, Don Johnson also died early.  It seems fair to guess that the stress of being accused was hard on Jewell's health, and it is known that Scruggs was tormented by her role in promoting the false accusation, even if she believed it at the time of publication.

The one who is left alive is Boby Jewell, Richard's mother.  It's a hard thing to outlive a child.

-----

The actual bomber at the Olympics in Atlanta was Eric Rudolph.  In the two years between that event and when he was identified, he built and detonated bombs at two abortion clinics and a lesbian bar.  He then hid  in the Appalachian forest for five years before he was caught scavenging in a dumpster.

He acknowledged his actions in exchange for two life sentences with no hope of parole.

One question worth asking is whether a broader FBI search shortly after the Atlanta bombing -- instead of an apparently exclusive focus on Richard Jewell -- might have spared the lives lost in Rudolph's subsequent bombings.

Grandma's Celebrity Gossip

Our popular California columnist, busy as ever, vows this will be her final 2019 post. 


That Miley Cyrus is at it again. She’s the one with the singing hillbilly father (Billy Ray Cyrus) who never taught his daughter how to act like a proper lady. She’s the one on TV “twerking” her tuchis in front of the world with that no-goodnick one hit wonder and yekl, Robin Thicke, whose father was that nice Canadian boy (Alan Thicke) a real mensch who was on the show Growing Pains, and he did the commercials for Fruit of the Loom underwear.  Robin died playing ice hockey with his other son -- the good one.

Anyway, so this Miley Cyrus has been cavorting for years with the actor Liam Hemsworth. He’s Australian or Irish or whatever and has been in movies like The Hunger Games and other schtus for kids with short attention spans. Finally, in 2018 they got a marriage license and less than a year later -- Splitsville. She’s decided he’s a shikker and she now prefers the company of women only. Already she’s been caught cavorting with a new bummerkeh. Oy veh, and so many tattoos they both have they look like they just stumbled out of Uncle Billy’s Circus Sideshow.

Bill Cosby? In the news again. He’s the one who was tossed in the hoosegow for slipping all those women mickeys and doing the nasty to them. His wife Camille filed for a get and was ready to take her half of everything, but she changed her mind and decided to remarry him in the prison chapel. She said, “I still love him, and he makes me laugh.” If you asked me, she got a good look at him, realized he could drop dead any minute, and decided to hold out for the entire estate – all the mazuma.

And speaking of farchadat celebrities, Kim Kardashian, the one with the hooties so zaftig she could use them as a flotation device, now wants her husband, Kanye West, to get breast reduction on himself. She said they’re too big and he needs a “Diddie Downsizing.” That whole pack of narrs is addicted to plastic surgery, worse even than the late great Joan Rivers.

I’ve said enough already.


Vocabulary

Bummerkeh is Yinglish (which apparently is something like Spanglish) and means a female bum. i.e., a bad person, not a derrierre.   Possibly derived from the Yiddish word for "potato," but possibly not.

 Get, or gett is the Hebrew word for divorce.  There's a longer version, gettelsheen, but the single-syllable word is more common in the Anglosphere.

Schtus, roughly translated, means "nonsense," as Grandma's context makes clear.

Yekl is an over-assimilating immigrant.  The word traces to a short 1896 novel called Yekl: A Tale of the New York Ghetto. In it, a young man named Yekl takes a different name, Jake, after getting off the boat at Ellis Island.  Grandma suggests that Canadian-born Robin Thicke has become, like Yekl, a shallow and ungrounded fellow.



Note

Billy Ray Cyrus made his fame with the 90s single, "Achy Breaky Heart," but more recently he has worked with rapper Lil Nas X, on Old Town Road, a 2018 monster hit in the new Country Rap genre.  

MovieMonday: Marriage Story

This is a movie whose title is technically inaccurate.  It is not a story about a marriage but rather the disintegration of one.  It is beautifully written and very well acted

The husband, Charlie Barber (Adam Driver,) is a director of theatrical plays, and the wife, Nicole Ryder Barber (Scarlett Johansson,) is a film actress who has been invited back to her native Los Angeles to appear in the pilot for a television show.

His professional life is in New York, and hers is in Hollywood.  They go to a mediator to talk about things but refuse to talk about things.  They agree to divorce amicably -- without lawyers and without hostility.  She packs up their son, eight-year-old Henry (Aszhy Robertson,) and heads west to her mom's home in Laurel Canyon.

Most of the rest of the story is played on Nicole's turf.  She is happy to have left behind a life in which she felt her existence subsumed into Charlie's greater local prominence.  Charlie asserts, several times, that they have "always been a New York family," and Nicole reminds him, also several times, that he turned down an opportunity to run LA's Geffen Playhouse for a year.

She consults a lawyer (Laura Dern) who offers tea and sisterly commiseration and then crafts an aggressive plan for Nicole get full custody of their child.

He consults a nasty shark of a lawyer (Ray Liotta,) then switches a more amiable fellow (Alan Alda) and then goes back to the shark after Nicole's lawyer begins showing her fangs.

There is a terrible exchange between the lawyers in a courtroom and then an even more blistering one between Nicole and Charlie.

Nobody dies, but there is no way the end of such a process can leave anyone undamaged.  So it goes.

Personally, I would have liked to know a bit about the divorce's effect on Nicole and Charlie's child, but the film is long as it is and honestly has no room left for further emotional distractions.  (Still, children almost always prefer to have both their parents in the same location.)

The writer and director of this piece is the esteemed Noah Baumbach,  who has acknowledged that personal experience informed the story.  The movie is excellent and feels quite true -- but it still is difficult to watch.

Johanssen, Driver and Dern almost certainly will be nominated for Academy Awards next year.


Note

Here again, Netflix has released a "movie" for a very short time in theaters just before making it available on its streaming channel.  Marriage Story was not shown in any theater near my home of the moment, a Metropolitan Statistical Area with a scant 1.75 million residents.

My place has a nice television, sound system and Netflix subscription, but I lost the television habit when I went to college and never really got back to it again.  I'm willing to dial up Netflix occasionally, but I've been happy not to spend much time with it, even with all the wonderful binge-watching opportunities on offer.

Except when theaters are full of patrons checking Instagram messages on their cellphones, I prefer seeing movies with a group of other people and observing how they react.  It's not the same as going to a play, of course, but it's an experience, not a distraction running in the background while I take urgent phone calls or am in the kitchen getting a snack.

Maybe when I'm old and frail, I'll change my mind.  We'll see.

MovieMonday: Knives Out

Here we have a well-made movie whose plot resembles that of a  20th century mystery novel or film -- one corpse, many suspects, an inscrutable detective and a many-pieced puzzle whose resolution is not revealed until the very end.

It opens with a deep autumn view of a grand brick country house in Massachusetts.  A string quartet renders a slow tune in a minor key as police cars pull up to the place.

The matter at issue is the death of a famed, wealthy mystery writer, Harlan Thrombey (Christopher Plumber), who is discovered by the housekeeper who brings up his morning breakfast and finds his stiff body with slit throat.  Police investigators arrive, examine the 85-year-old man's corpse and conclude immediately that he killed himself.  Happens all the time, right?

As the cops question the man's children, private detective Benoit Blanc (Daniel Craig) sits listening in the next room and occasionally plinking a piano key.  Blanc has been hired to investigate the death, he says, but he does not know by whom.  Over time, he establishes that Thrombey spent his last evening on earth settling old scores and disinheriting his progeny and their children -- before and during his own birthday dinner party.

The relatives are his son, Walter (Michael Shannon); daughter, Linda (Jamie Lee Curtis); Linda's two-timing husband, Richard (Don Johnson);  daughter-in-law Joni (Toni Collette) and the progeny's progeny, including obnoxious Ransom (Chris Evans), son of Linda and Richard.

Blanc seeks help from Marta Cabrera (Ana de Armas), the nurse who tended to the dead author and was the only one smart enough to beat him regularly at the Go board game.  Blanc does not wear a Sherlockian deerstalker hat, but he calls Cabrera "Watson."

A major theme in this piece, of course, is knives.  The film shares its name, but not its score, with a famous Radiohead song, and it features an ornamental circle of knives that, among all the other gewgaws in the overstuffed mansion, is shiny and features as the background for many interviews.  Plus there is a comment from the dead author.

Make no mistake.   This is not a matter like Agatha Christie's 1935 Murder on the Orient Express with Hercule Poirot drinking his tisane in a prissy fashion, and it certainly doesn't resemble Sam Spade (Humphrey Bogart) in The Maltese Falcon.  Benoit Blanc is a cool character with a broad Southern accent and a tendency, when thinking,  to flip coins into the air and catch them.

The script has been updated further to include themes of the current day:  Political arguments around the family dinner table, a reference to a line from the Hamilton musical, seeming familial affection for nurse Cabrera but inability to remember the country from which she emigrated, cellphone messages and, of course, claims of pride for hoity-toity influencers.

The screenwriter and director,  Rian Johnson, seems to have been concocting the story over many years, and he has said he'd like to make a sequel with the Blanc character.

In fact,  he and Daniel Craig may get the chance.  The film received good reviews and sold more tickets than might have been expected its first weekend, given a limited promotion budget.

The question is whether film audiences -- here and outside the Anglosphere -- are interested in such stories any longer.