Reviews

Without a doubt THE most effective ad for Apple this-es-and-thats EVER!!!

Especially the many, many carefully-wrought iphone sequences -- great looking phones and SO ESSENTIAL to the modern cut-throat lifestyle: My heart was constantly in my throat as actual text-messages on these GREAT-LOOKING PHONES advanced the plot at a speed so warp it's FRIGHTENING!!

(Can anybody tell me, since I am not an expert on at-a-glance cell phone design: Did they remember to have the loser characters use a non-Apple product, or did they just shot-gun Apple all the way?)

The desktop sequences were OK, too (even though desktops are so DYING) -- just can't get enough of that COOL APPLE LOGO ... ten or twenty shots an episode just isn't enough, and I really think at least three of these products deserve to be spun off into a show of their own!!!

Always nice to see Mr. Spacey do anything at all, but one episode was enough for me. "Macbeth" (the play) at about two-and-a-half hours is just about right for the subject; but Season One alone has twelve episodes, and the thing's still running, and since the pay-off of any take on "Macbeth" is the part where he finally gets splattered, well ... damned if I'm gonna spend years watching a bunch of really unpleasant characters fail to put enough pieces together so that Birnam Wood FINALLY gets to Dunsinane and Congressman Underwood finally gets his.

Not even to see a bunch of Apple products.

Not that I didn't enjoy watching this (sort of ... ), but I think this production is wrong-headed -- there are very few places where the sparkling wit characteristic of GBS is given a chance to breathe.

In form "The Devil's Disciple" is a melodrama; but one of the things Shaw attempted to do with the established forms of his era was to turn them upside-down and inside-out to reveal their limitations as representations of life; and this play is no exception. The director and cast of this BBC production apparently decided to play every scene with the kind of High Seriousness that would raise the melodramatic form to exquisite heights, instead of revealing those dramatic conventions (and the false societal codes behind them) as absurd.

Laugh after laugh is strangled in its cradle as the actors display their chops -- starting with the early scenes featuring Richard Dungeon's mother. Shaw meant you to laugh those kind of people right out of your mind and circle of acquaintance, not take them with such deadly gravity; the play should dance right along, not trudge, the dramatic and philosophical points making themselves with effortless good celestial humor.

The old Lancaster/Douglas film was much closer to the mark, as was a college production I saw many years ago that knew how to spoof melodrama, not insist on it -- and both were better representations of the kind of thing Shaw had in mind.

By the time Gentlemanly Johnny Burgoyne is allowed to sparkle, it's too late; and for my money, Laurence Olivier's breezy turn in the film beats Ian Richardson's somewhat labored performance into a cocked hat.

But the very worst performance of a Shaw play I ever saw was well worth watching; and that goes for this conceptually-flawed, all-but-plodding version of "The Devil's Disciple.

Saw this movie when it was released, and was delighted: It was good to see Marlowe back in period L.A., dressed properly and surrounded by the right cars after the noble (but failed) experiment two years before of the Altman/Gould "The Long Goodbye".

For me, though, it hasn't worn well; and I am particularly mystified by all the claims here that this version is somehow more "authentic" than the vastly more entertaining (it was Chandler's favorite Marlowe film) "Murder, My Sweet". When you have eliminated the Anne Riordan love- interest character in favor of a newsboy; combined quietly deadly psychic Jules Amthor with Dr. Sonderborg into a loud, crude, butch-gay whorehouse madam and set Marlowe's captivity in her joint instead of a private hospital, added an entire subplot surrounding a trumpet player and his family, and deleted Detective Randall, well ... I fail to see how that is any more "true-to-Chandler" than the changes in the Dick Powell version.

The film looks great, the music and period details are right, but there really isn't any "there" there: Mitchum's too old (although he always has and always will look better in a trench-coat than anyone in history), Charlotte Rampling's too willowy and silver-spoonish to have EVER been the Velma Valento of the novel; in general all the parts were better cast and acted in "Murder, My Sweet", and there is a leaden feel to a great deal of the film that Chandler certainlt didn't put there.

Only John Ireland's portrayal of cop-on-the-fence Nulty really grabbed me when I revisited my VHS copy last week -- it's not the Nulty of the book (more authenticity?), but Ireland is fully engaged from start to finish while Mitchum often dozes and Rampling simpers and pouts.

Do yourself a favor: First read "Farewell, My Lovely" (still a hard-boiled treat), then watch the Dick Powell and Robert Mitchum versions in any order you choose. (Extra Credit: get hold of James Garner's "Marlowe", a re- telling of Chandler's "The Little Sister" and add that to the mix ... )

I think you just might find that Powell & Company are truer to the actual rhythm and tone of a novel which dances (yes, that's the right word) edgily from light-footed hilarity to angst and back again with side trips into quick, tart social commentary; good as Mitchum occasionally is in this one, he (along with Bogart in "The Big Sleep") just ain't the often-puzzled-but-always-game dancer that was and is Philip Marlowe.

This version of "Farewell My Lovely" is selling nostalgia, not Chandler.