Yesterday Netflix released the second in the series of whodunits featuring Daniel Craig as the brilliant detective Benoit Blanc, playing him with a caricatured Southern accent, vaguely reminiscent of Peter Sellers’ outrageous French accent as Inspector Clouseau. The writer snd director Rian Johnston is a self-admitted devotee of the Agatha Christie-style murder mystery novel and he clearly brings that sensibility to his films. The first one Knives Out (2019) followed the classic form of the genre, taking place in the large country home of a wealthy person, so that the suspects are limited to being few in number.

The second takes the same form except that location is more exotic, the luxurious home on the private Greek island of a billionaire tech entrepreneur who invites a group of his friends and collaborators for a weekend to take part in a murder mystery game. During the event, old animosities surface because of the arrival of the billionaire’s former collaborator who claims that he cheated her by stealing the idea that made him rich, and that the others colluded with him.
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50 years ago, Sesame Street showed this clip of Kermit the Frog and a little girl named Joey singing the alphabet song, with Joey goofing it up. What is amazing is that though Joey could see Jim Henson crouched down below the camera level and manipulating and voicing Kermit, the power of his performance is so great that you can see that Joey interacts with Kermit as if he is an autonomous agent.

I have seen Jim Henson and Frank Oz being interviewed on talk shows and talking through their characters and even adult interviewers seem to get caught up in the magic and talk with the muppets and not the humans behind them.
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I loved watching Sesame Street with my children and especially enjoyed the segments with Muppets which were often hilarious. This particular one has become iconic and is absolutely adorable.

The four-part mini-series each lasting one hour debuted last week on Netflix. I watched it because the premise seemed interesting and it had good actors. It features Stanley Tucci as a criminologist who brutally murdered his wife and is now on death row in the US. But it turns out that he has powerful analytical skills and a superior knowledge of human psychology and this enables his to solve crimes even while in prison. The prison warden allows people to consult him on unsolved cases. A fellow death row inmate in the adjacent cell happens to have an almost perfect memory and accompanies him during these interviews to serve as a recorder. David Tennant is a vicar in the UK dealing with a troubled verger in his church. (A verger is someone who serves as a caretaker and attendant in the church, assisting the vicar in his duties.) Although the vicar and the convict never meet, their stories become intertwined because a British journalist visits Tucci to try and get him to solve the disappearance of someone the journalist knows who happens to be the mathematics tutor to Tennant’s son.
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My tastes in art are decidedly lowbrow. I am the kind of person who would benefit from reading certain authors (James Joyce, William Faulkner) and poets (T. S. Eliot) and seeing the films of certain directors (Luis Bunuel, Frederico Fellini) within the framework of courses taught by experts in those areas who can explain to me what the hell is going on. If ever I needed to be reminded of this, my recent viewing of this film by director Alain Resnais and screenwriter Alain Robbe-Grillet certainly did so. I had heard of this film ages ago and was intrigued by the fact that some film connoisseurs rave about this film (it has a 95% rating of critics at Rotten Tomatoes) while others have placed on the list of the fifty worst films of all time. So when I finally got a chance to stream it, I did so.

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As long time readers know, I am a fan of TV detective stories, especially the genteel type of story set in quiet settings where the villain is unmasked at the end. The British police procedurals are a significant sub-genre and one of the most venerable is the series Midsomer Murders that began in 1997 and is now in its 24th season. Set in a fictitious rural county in England, it follows a set formula and that very familiarity is part of its appeal.

I have seen all 22 seasons and noticed that over time it has developed a certain campy quality as the writers seem to be trying to introduce ever more bizarre ways of having the murderer kill their victims. You would think that any reasonably competent murderer would try to make it quick and clean in order to avoid getting caught. But these murderers seems to be artists who want to make a statement and thus seem to spend a lot of time creating increasingly exotic ways of staging victims, even in places where they are likely to be found doing so. The campiness has reached a point where the discovery of the victims makes me laugh out loud.
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I recently watched this 1946 film directed by Howard Hawks. It had long been on my list of must-see films because it is considered a classic of the film noir genre and I finally found a DVD of it at my library. Based on a novel by Raymond Chandler, it features Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, the former as a private detective Philip Marlowe hired by an elderly millionaire with two willful and beautiful daughters, the elder of whom is played by Bacall, who has a wild, drug using, promiscuous younger sister who is being blackmailed with photographs taken of her in compromising positions.

As Marlowe’s investigation proceeds, people start getting killed left and right. But unlike most detective stories, where everything is neatly tied up at the end and there is a single killer (or maybe two killers), this one defies any such clean denouement. I counted seven killings, with six each committed by a different person and the seventh unaccounted for. The Bacall character also keeps popping up everywhere, even in places where should not be, without any explanation as to why she is there and what she is doing.
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This British documentary directed and narrated by Mark Cousins looks at the history of film making around the world starting from 1888, looking at them from the point of view of the social context of films, the times in which they were made, what they were trying convey, their innovations, the techniques that were used, and how they influenced each other. The scope of the documentary is of the entire history of film over the entire globe, and includes explorations of the work of lesser-known (to me at least) directors, including those in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

The documentary lasts 15 hours in total that are spread over 15 episodes. It is interspersed liberally with clips from many films in order to make its points. Despite its length, some selectivity is of course essential. Cousins focuses on the creative aspects of films and thus the work of directors and, to a lesser extent, screenwriters and cinematographers. Cousins is clearly partial to the realist school of filmmaking and to those directors who took risks and made experimental films that pushed the boundaries of the craft or showed their societies in a realistic and hence unflattering light and thus risked repercussions from their governments. Such directors are less well-known outside the cognoscenti because their films were usually not box office hits. You will find few mentions of the big Hollywood blockbusters unless they used some innovative techniques or are used to contrast with more realistic depictions.

The documentary is presented largely chronologically, except when jumping from one era to another in order to show connections. I think that the more attuned you are to the aesthetic of cinema, the more this will appeal to you. Even though I am somewhat of a low-brow film viewer, I still found the documentary engrossing.

Here’s the trailer.