Alexandra Dixon

The 1973 film version has been on my top 10 list of favorite films since I saw it many decades ago. It's a cat and mouse game of cunning and detection, brilliantly plotted and acted. And then there's the 2024 remake, which has decided that audiences in 2024 won't sit still for a cerebral thriller, they need side plots, human interest angles, shootouts, moles, and ridiculously intricate and over-the-top assassinations (why just shoot the powerful man in his home when you can stalk an elderly janitor, copy his vocal mannerisms and speech patterns, kill him, spend hours putting on prostheses, wigs and makeup, then go to the powerful man's son's office and WOUND the son in a shootout (lots of collateral damage) then rappel off the top of the high rise building into some smoke bombs you have thrown to ground level, make your escape, then hole up in a 16th floor hotel room two miles away from the hospital where the powerful man's son has been taken (presumably you knew he would be taken to this hospital, and you also knew that the powerful man would (a) visit him and (b) go in through the front door instead of, say, driving into the parking garage where it's safer? So you take a couple of practise shots from over 2 miles away with your rifle, then kill him with a headshot. From two miles away. Which the detective keeps telling us, is the longest confirmed sniper kill - EVER. Because - why? And then, you put a timer on a bomb under your hotel room bed, and apparently you know exactly how long it is going to take the police to figure out that the source of the bullet was a hotel room on the 16th floor over two miles away (actually one detective makes this calculation virtually instantly. Because - how?) ... so then there's a massive explosion miraculously timed to kill lots of people and take out half the 16th floor of the hotel. Because - why? And then you drive your car into a garage where your *other* car is parked, and blow up your first car. Because - why? Save 8 hours, rent the 1973 film and pass up this 10 episode stinker.

When I saw Marnie decades ago, it became my favorite Hitchcock movie. It popped up on Netflix recently and I just watched it again and ... what was I thinking all those years ago? it is a HORRIBLE movie. I hated everything about it. The premise of the main romance is repulsive. Watch it and tell me this isn't just - disgusting and immoral. Even in the 60's would this have been acceptable? And then the hammy acting (which I lay at Hitchcock's feet, he directed Tippi Hedren this way). I read somewhere that he was obsessed with her, wanted to possess her, and I guess Sean Connery was his proxy in this film. The red, the lightning, just over the top and ridiculous. This movie has not aged well at all. I disliked it so much I don't even have the will to go into many details.

This is a very 1980's movie. It's set in a time that will never come again, and that's a good thing. Everything about this movie, viewed in 2024, is awful. The music, the dialogue (or lack thereof), and especially Meryl Streep's extremely mannered and tic-filled performance. It's meant to seem natural and unrehearsed but it's so freaking self-conscious. And the camera lingering on her face, over and over, as if the camera is in love with her. Well, the audience isn't. She's a boring vapid character. Robert DeNiro is also miscast. He has charisma for miles, but they've sapped almost all the masculinity out of him. I really hope these two vapid people got together at the end of the movie (it's a cliffhanger of course) because to inflict them on two *interesting* people would be a crime.

I'm most of the way through Episode 1 and literally almost nothing has happened. Spade is hired in Turkey to bring a little girl to her father in France. The man isn't there, his mother denies the child, Spade gives her to a monastery. Spade marries a rich woman (for love), stays in the town in France, she dies, Spade has witty repartee with the head nun at the monastery, the girl's father is some sort of Hitchcockian McGuffin, often mentioned, never seen, meant to drive the plot, but we are not sure why he is important. Clive Owen speaks with a perfect American accent but his Spade has no personality. He delivers these 40's style Hammet-esque quips but they fall flat. He speaks French with an atrocious American accent which I guess is the way it should be played, but his French is so wooden all personality is stripped from his delivery of his lines. There you go, saved you 75 minutes.