WHAT ARE YOU WATCHING ON TV IN DECEMBER,2022?

What are you watching in December?

On Public Television
Rebuilding Notre Dame
Rick Steves European Christmas
CALL THE MIDWIFE CHRISTMAS SPECIALS

On my DVDs
The Bishop's Wife
Love Actually
The Holiday
A Christmas Memory

Mostly I watch movies when I'm too fried to do anything else...

Did some movie watching Sunday, bummed the UConn women's team got whacked by Notre Dame (rebuilding going along nicely, it appears) & Sunday Night Football game looked boring. So the following cheered me up a bit:

House aka Hausu (1977) 1 hr. 28 min. Director Nobuhiku Obayashi. Screenplay Chiho Katsuri, from a story by Chigumi Obayashi (IMdB: “The script was partly inspired by Obayashi’s then 12 year old daughter Chigumi. She told him of a fear she had, that a mirror she used would eat her.”) Via: Criterion Channel. Starts as sort of a Japanese teen movie (like an ensemble Gidget) as the plot goes Hansel & Gretel on acid. Musical teen Melody (Eriko Tanaka) eaten by a malevolent piano (energized by a cursed cat with blinking green eyes), her body parts flying hither & thither, her amputated fingers playing the concluding theme, one flying limb giving a knockout punch to another schoolgirl who gets covered with goldfish. How did we get here? Gorgeous (Kimiko Ikegami) will miss school vacation with her pals (to some beach resort equivalent to USA teen flick) to go on an island vacation w/her composer father just back from Italy (Leone: he’s better than Morricone claims daddy) but horrors with his new wife; but daddy’s girl will have none of it because she idolizes her mother. Instead, she writes to her aunt, who invites the niece to aunt’s house in the country where G.’s mom got married. Aunt’s been waiting for her fiancé to come back from the war but since it’s 1977 & he’s still a no-show … Meanwhile, the girls learn the owner of the inn they were planning to stay on vacation is having a child so that’s canceled but Gorgeous shows up at the last minute & hey why not stay at my aunt’s place? Auntie’s OK w/it since she’s been dead for some time but eats unmarried girls to keep going (I believe the aunt is also played by Ikegami, who also plays her own mother). One girl meets her demise in a kind of horror pillow fight. Another gets her ass bit by a decapitated head. Horribly funny.

Also caught Pierrot le fou 1965. 1 hr. 50 min. Director & screenplay: Jean-Luc Godard. Cinematography: Raoul Coutard. Couldn’t get over the beauty of the cinematic compositions in this restored film last seen in a 42nd Street re-run theater (those were the days!) in my college years. Criterion Channel; this film is leaving after Dec 31. I believe Godard’s films took a different direction after this one, which reads kind of like a farewell to the New Wave signature style he was known for in the 60s; Belmondo kind of re-doing his role in Breathless & Godard’s cinematic tribute to Karina, the fun loving cabaret singer the cerebral book loving Belmondo/Godard can’t fully comprehend but can’t stop obsessing over so he kills her off. Singing & dancing, lots of irresponsible behavior, oddball Truffaut/Shoot the Piano Player type gangsters. Interesting that there is a mirror theme also running through this film, as in House, maybe starting with the Picasso reproduction in Karina's flat, where everybody ignores the corpse.

PS: Criterion Channel is also rotating off Louis Feuillade’s Les Vampires (1915) 10 episode serial Dec. 31. Watched the first episode, restored with very nice music score; not sure whether I’ll have time to watch the whole thing this month but I’ll try. Musidora, the vampy star, has not yet appeared. Also just started Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Happy Hour (2015), which, pace the title, is … 5 hr. 17 min. (Maybe some of it isn’t so happy?) He did a film I liked a lot, still on HBOMax I believe (haven’t checked), Drive My Car (2021).

Police procedurals. On Amazon Prime, watched the first episode of Three Pines (2022), a series featuring Alfred Molina as Armand Gamache. I’ve read one of the books in the Louise Penny series but found it a little too village-cozy in a retro way, though I have had another sitting in the Kindle cloud for some time I picked up for 1.99. Thought I’d give Gamache another go, though I’m not sure if layering on his likability is helpful. If you’re familiar with the series, the setting tends to be in backwoods Canada, & this one opens with a very up to date reference to unsolved missing persons cases of indigenous people. When Gamache rescues a demonstrator from a police arrest & drives her & her family home, he promises to follow up on the trail of a single mother who disappeared with her boyfriend over a year ago. However, he is later called on to look into a death by electrocution of a celebrity (at a curling match no less) loathed by everyone in the village where she was an outsider (the retro Penny returns), but conveniently close to the First Nations' community of the missing person. Before the murder, the unpleasant celebrity curses her husband & daughter for breaking the last handmade Christmas decoration created by her own mother before she was committed (we’ll see where that storyline goes, I suppose) which seemed rather ham-handed from a narrative point of view. The celebrity death brings out the village eccentrics I tend to associate with Penny’s world, including a potty mouthed poet who lives with a duck, & the inspector’s crew includes an inept trainee for comedy, but the crew also includes an indigenous female sergeant somewhat alienated from her roots (she was adopted) & the crime team’s temporary base of operations is the back of a gallery devoted to indigenous art, so the opening theme is bound to continue.

Logged into Criterion Channel again to watch another episode of Les Vampires but got distracted by another “crime” film, L’Humanite aka Humanity (1999). 2 hr 21 min. Director & screenplay, Bruno Dumont. Cinematography, Yves Cape. To start off, didn’t like it; trying to work out why. Positives: uses non-professional actors, but the acting doesn’t come across as amateurish, not at all. The problem is that I believe Dumont decides to use his moony police detective Pharaon De Winter (played by amateur Emmanuel Schotte) as a secular suffering Christ figure, overcome/burdened with the sins of humanity. De Winter is the great grandson of a famous painter (a self-portrait of the artist, whose work is on Christian themes, graces the detective’s bedroom), and the artist’s works are being featured in an exhibition at the local museum. De Winter lives a few doors down from a working class neighbor Domino (Severine Caneele) & her bus-driver boyfriend Joseph (Phillipe Tullier). De Winter lives with his mother (Ginette Allegre); De Winter’s boss (Ghislain Ghesquere) is grumpy, sweaty, & rather uninspiring as the leader of a criminal investigation. The crime is the murder of an 11 year old girl, seen only as a bloody vagina, which Dumont’s interviewer (Criterion includes a number of interviews as extras) rightly references to the well-known Courbet painting Origin of the World (a once favored possession of Jacques Lacan) though Dumont claims ignorance, though the auteur goes on about using the police procedural to evoke the spirituality of Dostoyevsky. Part of the “spirituality” involves an over the top empathy combined with a certain vacuity & sexlessness of Emmanuel Schotte’s performance, which admittedly is brilliantly weird. Although Domino (Caneele) has quite a bit of explicit sex with Joseph (Tullier), De Winter, who is always tagging along with the pair, comes across as a naïve onlooker. According to Dumont, Schotte insisted on no sex for his character at his real wife’s insistence, despite Dumont’s script, & the auteur went along, though the effect, where De Winter refuses sex with Domino (ending with a close up of Caneele’s grown up vagina) but nuzzles the face of an Algerian drug dealer and plants a long kiss on the face of suffering Joseph suggests that sexual expression will come out one way or the other, spiritual overtones and all. The other unintended consequence is that, again based on the interview w/Dumont, his cultural narrative, of Humanity’s good (De Winter) struggling against evil (non-spiritual), is more like educated spirituality based on Christianity vs secular vulgarity, when the murder is finally solved (out of the blue from the procedural level). Unsettling for the wrong reasons.

DUAL (2022; streaming on Hulu; available for rental/purchase at Amazon/Apple) stars Karen Gillan in the double role of Sarah and her clone, forced to prepare for a duel to the death when Sarah's illness turns out to be not so terminal after all. Comedy doesn't get any more dry and deadpan than this; dialogue is delivered flatly and with an absurdist tinge that reminded me of Lanthimos. Gillan's achievement in creating two different Sarahs is even more impressive given the limited tonal and emotional range to which the style of writer/director Riley Stearns confines her; there are equally fine supporting performances from Aaron Paul as Sarah's personal combat trainer and Sanna-June Hyde as her doctor. Not at all the violent gorefest that the storyline might lead you to expect. A delightful surprise.

>5 KeithChaffee: I don't have a Hulu subscription, but can't help but wondering if there is some hidden dialog going on with Gillan's earlier roles as the fighting sisters in the Marvel movies.

Quote from IMDB:

Gamora : this is 2014 Gamora talking to 2019 Nebula Tell me something. In the future, what happens to you and me?

Nebula : I tried to kill you... several times... but eventually, we become friends. We become sisters.

Netflix. Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio (2022) 1 hr. 57 min. Directors, Guillermo del Toro & Mark Gustafson. Screenplay Giullermo del Toro & Patrick McHale, based on Carlo Collodi’s story. Stop-motion animation via Henson productions, including “regular” (?) animation. I loved this, & recommend it if you have access to Netflix. Puppet becomes a substitute for a “real” mortal boy, but the “real” world is a puppet world. An exploration of mortality using inanimate objects; artifacts as memento morii. Catholic/fascist Italy setting, religious/secular vs pagan animism? Songs, but not particularly memorable tunes, though the vocals are OK w/me. Good vocal acting (& in some cases singing) by: Gregory Mann (Pinocchio), Ewan McGregor (the cricket narrator), David Bradley (Geppetto), Cate Blanchett (hilarious as Spazzatura the carnival monkey & puppeteer with a change of heart), Tilda Swinton (as the spirit of the woods AND Death), Christoph Waltz (as the appropriately fox-faced Count Volpe), Ron Perlman (Podesta, the village fascist), Finn Wolfhard (as Candlewick, his son).

Amazon Prime. Continued Three Pines series. If I understand correctly, two episodes are added weekly, where Inspector Armand Gamache (Alfred Molina) solves a murder by the conclusion of episode 2. I will note that poor Molina/Gamache gets quite a few sententiously cringey lines scattered through the whole series as it has unfolded so far. The series practice of solving a murder in 2 episodes I don’t care for; accepting that the Three Pines villagers are generally hiding secrets, the 2 episode length doesn’t really provide sufficient time to develop character motivation. My reaction to the closing of the CC de Poitiers murder in the first 2 episodes was a feeling of disappointment, a feeling that so much backstory was being left out, with, at the same time, too much time spent on the mechanics of the murder. However, the general, ongoing background (so far it’s background) regarding the ongoing exploitation of the First Nations population as embodied in the neglect of a missing indigenous woman, is much more interesting, and is finally helping to develop Molina’s crew: Jean-Guy (Rossif Sutherland), Yvette Nichol (Sarah Booth as a comic relief French-Canadian doofus), and, especially, his indigenous sergeant Isabelle Lacoste (Elle-Maija Tailfeathers). The second 2 episodes (3-4) focus on a murder taking place in the empty mansion of the late CC de Poitiers, formerly a notorious home for indigenous children taken from their parents. There is a funny conclusion to a police chase involving an overweight bear. The duck lady hatches a duckling that soon dies, I assume in some attempt at symbolism.

I’m still following & liking another, older TV series using DVD Netflix rentals, the Danish/Swedish The Bridge aka Bron/Broen; I’ve written about the 1st 3 epis earlier & just rec’d & watched 4-6. Thought they would be done in 6 episodes, but Season 1 is not done so I’ve added those to my DVD queue. I’m seeing the series now as a way to call attention to problems in Swedish/Danish society using the lurid crimes as a kind of clickbait just as the master criminal is doing (puppet master creating a puppet to call attention indirectly to the puppet world): so far the homeless, the mentally ill, police brutality of Middle Eastern immigrants. Somewhat deflected by the theme of unempathetic Swedish police detective vs the equally unfeeling criminal anarchist & their self-conscious mutual recognition.

Notes. I was complaining HBOMax’s Studio Ghibli hub only had the English dubbing, but I was incorrect, so it’s possible to select the original language. Watched Spirited Away in the original language which I haven’t seen for some time. Outstanding, can’t recommend it enough. Caught another Japanese anime with an environmental theme on the Criterion Channel called Wonderland; I didn’t think it was comparable in imaginative creativity to the Miyazaki film, but it did make good use of color. CC has the option to watch it in Japanese which I might try, but still prefer Spirited. If interested, I notice that Everything Everywhere All at Once is now on Showtime.

Guilty pleasures. CBS 12/11: Must Love Christmas. Only because I’m a Liza Lapira fan, otherwise your Standard Hallmark/CBS Christmas wholesome romcom. Christmas romance writer lives with her cat looking for the right closing scene for her annual Christmas romance book, stranded in upstate NY village at a Dickens Stopped Here festival, meets high school flame. Funny moment in the (movie) end scene, where writer Natalie (Lapira is under 5’ in high heels) strains to embrace her new found love who looks 6’ but even taller with his upswept hair. Backstrain in their future is my guess.

Watched a fascinating one and half documentary about Peter O'Toole, it was very interesting, especially the old footage of his movies and plays.

Watching some old movies- Buck Privates starring Abbott & Costello and then watched Laurel and Hardy in The Flying Deuces. I think they still hold up pretty well.

Strawberry Mansion (2021, dir. Albert Birney & Kentucker Audley; currently streaming on Mubi) -- In the not-too-distant future, the government now taxes our dreams, and James Preble (played by Audley) is an auditor, investigating those who've been evading the dream tax. That takes him to the isolated home of Arabella (Penny Fuller), an eccentric old woman. While auditing her dreams, which are populated with versions of her younger self (Grace Glowicki), Preble begins to fall in love with Bella. Their relationship develops as Preble moves in and out of a variety of dream/unconscious states, which is where most of the movie takes place.

Very low budget, so don't look for flashy CGI dreamscapes. Instead, we get creative uses of costumes, in-camera effects, cardboard, and papier-mache as we move through cotton-candy colored vistas that evoke thoughts of (among others) Lynch, Gondry, and Melies. There is (eventually) something of a plot involving Bella's son (Reed Birney), but the less attention paid to it, the better. I was happy just to follow the free assocation driftiness of the movie as it wafts gently from one clever visual to another.

From Amazon Prime, appeared originally on Netflix. The Man from Reno (2014) Director, Dave Boyle. Screenplay, Boyle, Joel Clark, Michael Lerman. Cinematography, Richard Wong. Film editing: Boyle, Sean Gillane, Yasu Inoue. Character driven mystery, featuring a successful Tokyo mystery writer Aki Akahori (Ayako Fujitani) who drops out of the book tour for her latest, to lose herself in San Francisco, where she picks up an expatriate Japanese man in a hotel bar (Kazuki Kitamura) who subsequently disappears after one night. And he leaves a suitcase behind. In a parallel plot, a body turns up in Sheriff Paul Del Moral’s (Pepe Serna) town who appears to be the same person writer Aki hooked up with in SF. Sheriff & writer get together when Aki’s description doesn’t match the identity of the body. Aki herself doesn’t feel comfortable in her skin; she confesses to her pick-up (whoever he is) that she feels like an imposter. The film cleverly plays this out thematically. Both Fujitani & Serna create likable and interesting characters. Her decision to hook up seems questionable, perhaps because someone from her own country seems more trustworthy. Unexpectedly pleasant surprise. Half the dialog is in Japanese with subtitles.

Also on Amazon, watched the 3rd part (episodes 5-6) of Three Pines. The missing indigenous woman may be a victim of the Montreal police, but this is background & won’t be concluded until the last part (7-8 I assume). The foreground mystery involves the murder of an heiress, apparently crushed beneath a monumental statue of her father. Dysfunctional family quarreling over surprises in the father’s will, felt like a lesser Knives Out knockoff. Relaxing, anyway. The prime suspect is, coincidentally, reminiscent of Cameron in the second season of the HBO series White Lotus, which I’m still trying to finish.

HBO, HBOMax. White Lotus Season 2, 2022. 7 episodes, ca. 1 hr each. Much buzz on this one while the episodes were doled out weekly. Director writer Mike White. I need to take a look at Season 1, where the locale is Hawaii. Season 2 is in Sicily, with plenty of scenic shots for places to visit if you’re very rich, which may be the attraction – luxe hotels, Eurotrash parties, yachts, lots of bare skin for both sexes but also lots and lots of clothes changes to admire or critique. As an added treat, eavesdrop on miserable lives of the ultra rich. Kind of an HBO throwback sex comedy from the late 20th century. The abbreviated series length allows the writer/director to tease a lot of did they or didn’t they, so that generates a lot of online talk (didn’t get on my Twitter feed for some reason). Opens with a woman discovering a body floating off the resort beach; there is talk of other bodies. The series is the backstory – whose body/bodies? Jennifer Coolidge is billionaire heiress Tanya McQuoid (a character holdover from S1) whose husband Greg (Jon Gries) leaves the resort early on, after trying to give her a special day; he encourages her to keep her distance from her personal assistant, Portia (Hailey Lu Richardson – who also crotchets for Etsy & often wears some of her creations), which in retrospect … and leaving her in the hands of gay Quentin (Tom Hollander) & his circle (yacht, Eurotrash). We have 2 couples, the Spillers, Harper (Aubrey Plaza) & Ethan (Will Sharpe) and the Sullivans, Daphne (Meghann Fahy) & Cameron (Theo James); Ethan just sold his company & Cameron is trying to get him to invest in his own; Harper is an HR lawyer dubious about the Sullivans and the zillionaire ethos, Daphne on the other hand, is happy to be along for the ride. The DiGrassos are grandpa Bert (F. Murray Abraham), son Dominic (Michael Imperioli), and grandson Albie (Adam DiMarco); of Sicilian heritage, the plan is to reconnect with their roots, though sex-addict Dominic, a Hollywood exec estranged from his wife, has other plans. The agents of chaos are two young women the DiGrassos refer to as “escorts,” Lucia (Simona Tabasco – surely a stage name! she does a lot of nude scenes) & Mia (Beatrice Granno), her best friend & aspiring singer; the two are frequently harassed by the resort manager, Valentina (Sabrina Impacciatore). Much of the goings on seem to be designed to generate social media conversation & character cliques like Sex and the City. For me it came across as a kind of aspirational Italian sex comedy that if anything clarified how profoundly conservative sex comedies are regarding the status quo. Watched part of it on HBOMax & part on HBO; recommend HBO since Max promises but does not seem to include the post-episode interviews with the actors, who, like many viewers, are unclear what they were doing.

Criterion Channel. Museum Hours 2012. 1 hr. 47 min. English & German. Director & screenplay, Jem Cohen. Cinematography, J. Cohen & Peter Roehsler. Editing, J. Cohen & Marc Vives. Narrator is Johann (Bobby Sommar), a guard at the Kunsthistorische Museen Vienna. He meets a Canadian woman, Anne (Mary Margaret O’Hara), visiting the city for the first time to see her cousin, an only relative, hospitalized & in a coma. Johann & Anne become friends, and because she has limited means, he helps her explore the museum & the more affordable parts of Vienna. The KM functions as a third character, commenting on the transition from life to death, on value, and the mysteries of art. Johann accompanies Anne to the hospital and helps translate, and together they talk to the cousin hoping she can somehow hear them; Johann talks about art the cousin might have seen. Anne visits the museum’s Egyptian holdings & learns about The Book of the Dead, an incomplete guidebook for navigating the afterlife, and together Johan & Anne take a boat ride tour of the underground caverns beneath a lake while her cousin finally dies. Johann’s favorite collection is the museum’s terrific collection of Brueghels, and there is even a learned lecture (in English) on the meaning of Brueghel’s paintings that suggests a key to Cohen’s technique, where a theme may be offset by where the artist chooses to focus the point of view; the technique is actually used to analyze the last scene of the film. Johann does some informal lecturing himself as they eavesdrop on a school tour, & he explains that other than the location of the toilet facilities, the most frequent question is about the monetary value of the art. He notes that some of the art cost large sums while the low value of other works was such that the creators died in poverty, even though the works are considered priceless today, though the definition of priceless is left up in the air. In other scenes Anne visits the local flea market, where art of the present is sold along with rags & other detritus. Backstreet Vienna is seen archaeologically, where one of two attached buildings has been destroyed but its outline can still be seen on the surviving building; there is a group of menacing cylindrical buildings that were once antiaircraft stations from the world war that were too expensive to take down, perhaps alluding to Johann’s offhand observation that the younger generation seems to be enamored with the right wing. If nothing else, it’s a wonderful introduction to an amazing collection of art & the people encountering it, a bit reminiscent of Frederick Wiseman’s documentaries. The film is scheduled to be cycled off the Criterion Channel at the end of the month, so I’m glad I caught it. According to IMDB, it’s available via Mubi.

Muppets in Moscow: The Unexpected Crazy True Story of Making Sesame Street in Russia
Natasha Lance Rogoff
4/5 stars
Rogoff tells her tale of working for Sesame Street in the 1990’s and trying to get the post- Soviet Russians to embrace a Russian Sesame Street to air in their country. I really enjoyed this book and the author does a nice job relating her time in Russia and the people she worked with.

TCM. Sweeney Todd the Demon Barber of Fleet Street (1982) 2 hr. 20 min. Director for TV, Terry Hughes, but pretty much a recording of the Broadway stage musical directed by Harold Prince. Book by Hugh Wheeler. Music & Lyrics by Stephen Sondheim, uncredited by IMDB for some reason, considering this is one his greatest musical creations. I haven’t seen the 2007 version that featured Johnny Depp. This one is a priceless capture of Angela Lansbury’s performance (as Mrs. Lovett) from the original Broadway cast (many of the performers were from the touring company, though I assume George Hearn (Sweeney Todd/Benjamin Barber)* was from the original cast). Theatrical staging, not a cinematic transformation. Marvelous. I was introduced to the score from an LP of the original Broadway cast; great to see all the mostly original stage business (ingenious use of largely a single movable set). All of the cast is excellent keeping in mind that the acting is theatrical rather than cinematic. My only criticism was the meat pies could have been browned a bit more.

If you get a chance to see this, suggest adding closed caption to catch the clever lyrics.

*I checked Spotify & the original Todd role was performed by Len Cariou.

>16 featherbear: "I haven't seen the 2007 version that featured Johnny Depp."

Consider yourself lucky. There is a trend in film musicals of recent years to cast actors who can't sing or dance, which seems to me to miss the point of a musical entirely, and the Depp/Bonham Carter Sweeney is one of the worst offenders. Complete agreement, of course, on the glory of the Lansbury/Hearn production, which was filmed in Los Angeles at the end of the national tour. The show's being revived on Broadway in 2023 with Josh Groban (an interesting choice) and Annaleigh Ashford (love her to bits, but she's far too young for the role).

Showtime. Dead for a Dollar (2022) Director & screenplay, Walter Hill. Cinematography, Lloyd Ahern II. Film editing, Phil Nordern. Hill dedicated the film to Budd Boetticher, who did a lot of good low-budget Westerns in his time, and I suspect Hill modeled his film after Boettichers'. Lots of negative reviews on IMDB, but I enjoyed it. Sort of a revisionist take on Richard Brooks’s big budget The Professionals: a bounty hunter is hired to retrieve a Texas bigwigs’ abducted wife from Mexico, though the Brooks film could be read as a cynical take on The Searchers. The bounty hunter is Austrian actor Christopher Waltz, to some extent reprising his role from Django Unchained. Unlike the Tarentino film, it’s quite low key, in line with its B-movie esthetic. It turns out the “abduction” involved a black U.S. cavalry deserter (Brandon Scott) helping a runaway wife (Rachel Brosnahan) escape a sociopathic husband (Hamish Linklater). The bounty hunter is accompanied by another black cavalry lifer (Warren Burke) who is a friend of the deserter. The film opens with a brief confrontation between Waltz & a Texas cowboy (Willem Dafoe) who’s spent 5 years in jail as a result of one of Waltz’s jobs. The film teases a bloody showdown, though Dafoe does not seem to be eager for retaliation – one of the interesting things about the climax involves various characters’ decisions about what to do as the conventions of the Western close in. You get the feeling that Dafoe really doesn’t want to get into Waltz’s business (involving a Mexican outlaw gang led by Benjamin Bratt & the sociopath husband) but is almost driven by some internalized Western code (he keeps repeating he’s from Texas) to pull out the shooting irons.

Netflix had a theatrical release for a short time but has made this available for streaming for the Christmas holiday weekend. Glass Onion (2022) Sequel to the Knives Out movie that I saw on Amazon Prime after its theatrical release. Funny allusion to theater vs. streaming brought on by the Covid pandemic, where the players wear masks until they get “vaccinated” prior to a Clue-type party on a Greek island owned by a tech billionaire with a seemingly well-protected Mona Lisa on “loan” from the Louvre (hilarious sound effects whenever the security system is tripped). Unlike the HBO series White Lotus, it doesn’t take itself seriously (i.e. making “subtle” moral points about the clueless wealthy); plus one can be in awe of Daniel (Benoit) Craig’s gawdawful Southern accent. Excellent makeup job on Kathryn Hahn – virtually unrecognizable.

Amazon Prime. Three Pines I believe with episodes 7-8 the season & possibly the series has come to an end. The end I found better than expected, since the character of Armand Gamache (Alfred Molina) seems so saccharine. That he’s haunted by the death of his parents is explained by a trivial act which makes it come off as a kind of grotesque joke. As with the earlier episode duos, the foreground mystery is solved at the expense of more Three Pines inhabitants, but most of it turns on the work of Gamache’s crew, Jean-Guy (Rossif Sutherland) & Isabel (Elle-Maija Tailfeathers). Jean-Guy is extremely troubled by his wife’s desertion (never explained) which he refuses to talk about except with deputy Nichol (Sara Booth) whom he obviously considers to be an incompetent clown. She gets him drunk during the confession, which has a negative effect on the car chase climax where he shares the vehicle with Isabel. Meanwhile, regarding the ongoing background mystery that has been continuing over the past 7 episodes, in episode 8 Gamache finds the bodies of the missing woman & her friend & connects their deaths to someone in his family’s inner circle. When, acting quite in character, he trusts his gut & tries to do the trusting thing, it all collapses. Not sure whether the series is getting renewed after that. Still, the equivalent of streaming comfort food.

On to something more interesting, watching over the holidays Les Vampires & the remake of Irma Vep back to back. Each series, in its entirety, clocks in at about 8 hr. Vampires (1916) via Criterion Channel, could be considered the 1916 equivalent of a Marvel movie – the director Louis Feuillade’s serials were successful commercial entertainments, and the sequel Judex featured a superhero type who uses the tools of criminals featured in Vampires & another of his films, Fantomas, to combat villainies. Because of its influence on the surrealists & on film technique, time has given it the patina of art. The writer/director Olivier Assayas (Clouds of Sils Maria) made a 90 min. indie film about it in 1996, Irma Vep, starring Maggie Cheung, a Hong Kong action film star he subsequently married, about a writer/director Jean-Pierre Leaud (writer/director & star of many a Truffaut film) doing a remake of Vampires.

Jump to 2022, and Assayas now convinces the A24 people & HBO to fund a remake of Irma Vep as an 8 part series remake of Irma Vep about director Réne Vidal (Vincent Macaigne) in the Leaud role remaking Vampires as a TV series for French TV. Vidal’s ace in the hole is Mira Harberg (Alicia Vikander) a big Hollywood star coming off a smash big budget Marvel-ish hit, who wants to do some more challenging film acting, which she hopes to do in the role of Irma Vep, played by Musidora in 1916, who became a cultural icon of the time. Irma Vep is a member of the murderous Vampires gang, who becomes the mistress of the leader of a rival gang, then switches back.

The hero of the 1916 series, an investigative reporter Phillipe Guérande (Edouard Mathé) on the trail of the gang, realizes that cabaret chanteuse Irma Vep is an anagram of Vampire. Irma Vep comes to represent the gang, since Feuillade changed the actor playing his Grand Vampire from episode to episode, and used Musidora for series continuity (and Vikander’s Mira is an anagram for Irma; a codebook plays an important place in the 1916 series).

I found the 2022 series greatly enriched by first watching the original Les Vampires; I have watched the Maggie Cheung Vep but not for some time, though I did recognize some of the scenes recreated from the earlier film. What makes the HBO series fascinating for me is the way Assayas transforms the original indie movie into a kind of Robert Altman ensemble film, doing for the art of film making what Altman did for country music in Nashville. As with Altman, you get to be backstage while watching the product being created, while the interplay of the characters is for the most part a clown show.

Unlike Altman, Assayas also brings out the economics behind the art – exasperated producer Desormeaux (Alex Descas) trying to keep the show going when the insurers bail – Vidal has been too candid about his anxiety meds -- & keeping the financier Gautier (Pascal Greggory) happy. The series is being financed by Gautier’s perfume company that wants to close a contract with Mira. Unlike Altman, the cinematic history is front and center; Assaya’s technique is to intercut actual scenes from the 1916 series with full production scenes from the fictional remake, with the scenes of the actual film making toggling back and forth.

Vidal clearly has psychological problems – there are a number of scenes with his therapist (Dominique Reymond) that also comment on both the film in Vidal’s mind and Assaya’s as well, which are a bit more complex. At the same time, the production issues with the actors and staff would probably drive someone more suited to more stable jobs off the rails. There is one scene where Vidal has to convince his exquisitely dopey & narcissistic lead actor Edmond (Vincent Lacoste playing the Guérande part) that what appears to be an “unmotivated” act is actually Guérande playing a part to trick the Vampires, a sign that Edmond has either not read ahead on the script or simply cannot comprehend what he is doing.

As the perfume financier (who is uninterested in movies) is aware, Mira is the center of the production. Some viewers found Vikander boring in comparison to someone like her agent (played by Carrie Brownstein, who seemed a caricature to me) or Lars Eidinger, who plays the flamboyant German drug addict professional actor Gottfried von Schack. Gottfried gets an emergency room visit after an autoerotic asphyxiation gone wrong & a big rant about taking risks in movies. This is in fact part of the film’s internal commentary. In addition to the scenes from the 1916 Vampires and the fictional remake, Assayas recreates the making of a scene from the 1916 series where Musidora/Irma Vep returns after escaping arrest. If I interpreted the original scene correctly, Irma Vep gets back to Paris by stealing a ride on a train, drops to the tracks below the train’s undercarriage and waits until the train departs. As Assayas envisions the original filming, Musidora takes time off from her day job to lie on the tracks and Feuillade times it so a train runs over (barely above her) so he can film it. When I saw Vampires I had to remind myself time and time again that the crazy stunts had to be performed, in some cases, by the actors themselves (actors are lassoed from windows twice to land a couple stories down into a blanket held by other actors). In the 1916 film you watch the undercarriage of the train roaring over the actor and there’s no denying it’s Musidora herself! (Assayas cuts out from the 1916 film the backstory where the Grand Vampire uses a cannon to destroy the prison ship where Vep is a captive; Feuillade elides her actual escape).

Here’s where I think Alicia Vikander’s “boring” performance comes in. Part of Vidal’s process (as he works it out in the final episode with his therapist) is to exorcise the darkness represented by Irma Vep. Mira acts out his fantasy, both in the film & in her own life. (She is instrumental in bringing him back to the film after he is temporarily discharged) As was the case with the “original” Irma Vep, Maggie Cheung, Mira “becomes” Irma Vep. While Cheung put on the Irma Vep cat suit & prowled about various hotel rooms, Mira, through movie magic, is able to walk through walls & eavesdrop both on her ex-lover Laurie (Adria Arjona) and her ex-husband Eamonn (Tom Sturridge). For me, this is the film representing her inner life, punishing her ex-lover, and more important, coming to terms with the break with her former husband. When her husband’s new lover Lianna, a celebrity Taylor Swift-type played by Kristen Stewart, has a miscarriage, he can’t be with her, so he seeks comfort in the arms of Mira. In Vep form, Mira eavesdrops on Eamonn when he and Lianna finally unite, and his casual lying I believe is Mira’s way of exorcising him mentally; actors being actors.

Discussing her forthcoming role in a new film with Vidal, the director talks about how Irma Vep prepared her for the role of Meredith, a character of light, in contrast to Irma Vep. Mira’s assistant Regina (Devon Ross) has earlier talked about her obsession with Lucifer as the bringer of light, and Mira’s thoughtful, supportive character has an inner light that I thought Vikander handled very well. One dilemma Assayas doesn’t trouble to resolve: Vidal is remaking Les Vampires (or in some ways recreating it shot for shot), but the references to his earlier film, haunted by his former Asian wife (the Maggie Cheung character – “Jade Lee” is played by Vivian Wu) is a version of Irma Vep, so while for Assayas, this is an actual remake, for his surrogate, which remake is it?