Ghillie_Forrest Reviews

Nineteen Nineteen (1985)

A Great, Great Film

[10/10 · 1 March 2022]

Quiet, nuanced, and compelling. I remember it from 1985 at an art cinema, and searched long and hard to find it again. It is irresistible -- makes me think how far movies have sunk, from its developmental years through its monumental ones -- where great writing, truly towering performances and substantial stories -- whether true or fictional -- were available across a range of genres -- to the action, comic-book and fantasy or horror that seem all people can take in today.

If you can get near this, and another underrated Scofield wonder, Utz, don't miss the chance. Whither now A Man for All Seasons? Scofield won a Best Actor Oscar for that. This year it will probably be Will Smith for playing a tennis player's father.

The Chelsea Detective (2022– )

Love it

[10/10 · 28 February 2022]

I like these characters. I like that he lives on a houseboat (and is planning to stay on it -- the one thing that might have spoiled it for me would have been a reconciliation between Max and Astrid). I found Frances Barber irrelevant.

And I liked the stories. No, they may not be all that deep, but I also love Death in Paradise. I don't want a steady diet of Line of Duty, much as I enjoyed it.

I devoutly hope Acorn makes more of these. Like the one in Brighton with Jason Watkins, these slightly quirky combinations of characters give a show a little appeal of its own. But I must say I was relieved in Episode 4 when the wife of the murder victim also turned out to be black. I have nothing against mixed-race coupling, but it has so much become a given in recent series that it has lost a lot of credibility. I get very sick of box-ticking in casting.

Bring on more!

Law & Order: The Right Thing (2022) Season 21, Episode 1

Bland and simple-minded

[2/10 · 25 February 2022]

That script would never have got out of the writers' room in the original series.

Not happy about the new cast, but it took me a while to warm up to some replacements in the later series. Nobody could have made that script sing.

Mostly, I was recoiling in horror at Carey Lowell: that is not ageing. She has done something horrible to her face, and it is painful to look at it -- once one of the most beautiful faces on television. Her mouth could hardly move.

I'll give it a couple more tries, but it had better raise its game.

Louis Theroux: Forbidden America: Rap's New Frontline (2022) Season 1, Episode 2

Depressing

[10/10 · 23 February 2022]

I thought if I heard one more iteration of "You know what I'm saying" from some semi-literate rapper I would put my fist through the screen.

Their empty lives, driven by the desire for fame and money and what they seem to think of as power, would be laughable if they were not so violent. But their thinking does not seem to embrace any concept of what death actually means.

Even more than the appalling legacy of Trump captured in Episode 1, this episode paints a very depressing picture of a growing segment of America.

Hotel Portofino (2022– )

Slow-starting

[3/10 · 31 January 2022]

I am finding this tiresome, despite the beauty of the scenery and the appealing cast. Two episodes in, and I had to force myself to finish the first, and to check out the second. I will probably get through it at the rate of one a day or so.

The actress to watch, as far as I am concerned, is Louisa Binder, apparently in her first screen role. She is quite luminous. The Olivia person mentioned by someone else is quite unmemorable.

I am only sticking with it on the promise of a mystery, but so far the mystery is where this is going and what is Anna Chancellor doing in it? Sod all so far.

My rating is based on the scenery -- like another contributor I love this sort of thing in winter (love Death in Paradise, The Mallorca Files, Montalbano, for the same reason).

Law & Order: Special Victims Unit: Tommy Baker's Hardest Fight (2022) Season 23, Episode 12

Captai Benson

[3/10 · 21 January 2022]

It's well-seeing Mariska Hargitay is an exec producer on this show. Olivia is constantly portrayed as the all-wise, all-knowing . What she has become is a sanctimonious preacher of woke gospel. It makes quite good storylines nauseating.

The Company (2007)

Riveting -- but inaccurate

[8/10 · 25 November 2021]

This is a compelling watch, one of the best I have ever seen on this subject, and I have seen many. The performances are wonderful, especially the three Yale friends who take divergent paths. Alfred Molina is great, as ever. I especially liked Ted Atherton as Frank Wizner.

But did anyone ever call Kim Philby "Adrian"? Maybe James Jesus Angleton: he was just weird enough. (Weird, also, to see him portrayed by Tom Hollander, who played Burgess in Cambridge Spies). And while Angleton suspected Philby, he did not send him tearing off to Moscow -- Philby returned to London, where he was interrogated by effectively cleared (by Harold MacMillan, among others) and on later to Beirut, as a journalist, which allowed him to return to working for MI6 and, presumably, the KGB. It was his MI6 friend Nicholas Elliott who finally broke him, prompting Philby to flee to Moscow in 1962. From Beirut.

But the fictional elements work well enough to make this a very watchable mini-series. And they have an artistic truth that factual manipulations do not spoil.

I dispute the comments that find the series to be anti-American. Some Americans apparently still believe that their country is without fault. There is no reasoning with such people. Having Chris O'Donnell's Jack query how "good" the "good guys" were is just realism, honesty and moral principle: it only takes two words to show that the USA is not always interested in right: Salvador Allende.

As the Hungarian revolutionary Arpad tells Jack in Budapest in 1956, revolutions are fought for three reasons: honour, fear and self-interest. He claims the first two for himself and his comrades. He shrewdly assesses the third as the principal rationale of the US. And who can honestly say otherwise? This programme, as well as Jack, endorses that view.

Dalgliesh: A Taste for Death - Part One (2021) Season 1, Episode 5

This series goes from bad to worse

[1/10 · 19 November 2021]

Still hard to figure out what the makers of this series think they were doing. The plots are stripped of any context or nuance -- it's Dalgliesh for Dummies.

And how can English programme makers get a simple title so wrong? Sir Paul's wife is reported to have been born poor, so she is plain Barbara Swayne when she marries him. As his wife, she becomes Lady Berowne, not Lady Barbara.

We have the usual token conversions of white characters to black -- irrelevantly in Halliwell's case, but an issue in Miskin's. Only because the prickly character of Massingham is turned into the (drop a syllable from prickly) Masterson.

What an actor of Bertie Carvel's quality is doing in rubbish like this mystifies me. And how this garbage ever got commissioned -- did any of these programme people even read the books? Let alone watch the series that showed how they could be done?

All I find here is contempt for a highly regarded English author and for the audience for this material, which, like me, tuned in to see how a new generation of programme makers treated the material. Answer: insultingly.

Dalgliesh (2021– )

Absolute rubbish

[1/10 · 3 November 2021]

A desecration of the source material, shoddily done. Find the original series with Roy Marsden (and latterly Martin Shaw) online. They are far better written. Bertie Carvel might have been fine as a new Dalgliesh but he has been given ghastly, inadequate and almost meaningless material to work with (and a despicable sidekick). There is no excuse for programming as bad as this.

The ABC Murders (2018)

Unwatchable

[16 October 2021]

Gave it about 20 minutes, but realised it was just another half-cocked attempt to cash in on Christie's justified reputation. Note to Ms. Phelps: she earned it as a story-teller. The stories work. Yours don't.

Stick to David Suchet. Those productions were made with integrity as well as intelligence.

Grantchester: Episode #6.7 (2021) Season 6, Episode 7

Dark

[8/10 · 16 October 2021]

Unusually for Grantchester, this episode is unrelievedly dark. Geordie's memories and the threat to his marriage, Leonard's danger, the appalling conditions of the prison.

And that half sister of Will's has to go. She adds nothing to the series and is just an irritant.

Law & Order: Special Victims Unit: Entitled (2000) Season 1, Episode 15

It does conclude -- sort of

[5/10 · 11 October 2021]

To see the end of this story, which "peters out" in SVU, you have to go to L&O, Season 10, episode 14, also called "Entitled." It wraps up the story, though how satisfactorily depends upon what you expect.

Annika (2021– )

Could be, needs to be, better

[6/10 · 1 September 2021]

Like many others, I am a Nicola Walker fan, and enjoyed the radio series. I am also an expat from the West of Scotland, so looked forward to seeing something set at home.

I am quite enjoying this, but in a low key way. I don't mind the fourth wall element, the ensemble is beginning to gel, though I too am tired of leads with stroppy teens and complicated backstories. But the writing here is a real letdown. In each of the three, the sudden realisation of whodunnit -- especially after episode 3 -- does not warrant the usually promising set-ups.

The credentials of this show may get it renewed, which I would rather like, but unless the writing is smartened up, it will founder.

The Beast Must Die (2020–2021)

Absolute travesty

[3 June 2021]

It's just as well anyone watching this seems to have no knowledge of the source material. It is "based on" a novel by Nicholas Blake, in his Nigel Strangeways series. Blake is the nom-de-plume of the former poet laureate, C. Day-Lewis (yes, indeed, father of DDL). In the 15 or so novels, Nigel is a donnish sort, nephew of a big cheese at Scotland Yard, and occasionally "helps." A gentleman sleuth, in fact.

The Beast Must Die is one of the best novels, and was once filmed (respectfully) by Claude Chabrol. It involves the search by a man for the car and driver that killed his little boy in a hit and run.

This series makes the father a mother, and black, thus ticking two boxes. It makes Nigel a young cop with PTSD (tick). His turns with irrational tantrumising may have their place in some film about PTSD but add nothing except tedium to this story.

I keep watching to see what other horrors the series can inflict. I have long wished that someone would make a series for TV of Nigel Strangeways, but now live in terror that they will, featuring this preposterous and totally unrelated character.

Does nobody read any more? Is nobody capable of watching a period drama series any more? Poirot was a great success, and still holds up brilliantly. Poirot could quote Shelley and refer to a factory as the "fons et origo" of a man's success without being afraid an audience would not get it. That was as recently as the late 80s to about 2000. Morse could refer to opera. But it seems to be de rigeur in today's drama that everything should be up to date and "woke," and by no means referential.

I have rarely been so angry at any adaptation. And I am not Luddite -- I loved Baz Luhrman's Romeo and Juliet, and find Benedict Cumberbatch's Sherlock to be of as high a quality as the definitive Jeremy Brett series. But this Beast Must Die has just shut the door on what could have been a brilliant series of TV dramas with compelling stories and fabulous characters. I commend those who liked this series to the book, and any other Nigel Srangeways novels, all of which are available to read free on Internet Archive.