Five Cool Things and The Bride!

Severance: Season One

I know I’m way behind on watching this AppleTV+ series. It seems like everybody who is anybody has already watched both seasons and is eagerly anticipating the third. But holy crap! This is an insanely good series thus far.

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For those of you who aren’t cool (like me), Severance follows a group of people who work for Lumen Industries and have been severed. That is to say, they’ve had a procedure to their brain that disconnects their work life from their home life. When they walk into the office building, all memories of who they are outside the office simply disappear, and vice versa. Outside of work, they have no idea what goes on inside the office building.

For the outtie (as the person outside of work is called), this sounds like a dream. They get the benefits of having a full-time job but none of the annoyance or stress. For people like Mark (Adam Scott) who just lost his wife in an automobile accident, being severed sounds like the perfect way to leave that pain behind (at least for part of the day). But for the innie, life is a living hell. All they do is work. They don’t sleep; they never see the sunshine. They can’t go to the movies or fall in love.

Season One follows both of Mark’s innie and outtie lives. I won’t go any further as this is a show best watched knowing as little as possible, but if you haven’t watched it, watch it now.

28 Years Later: The Bone Temple

Spoilers for the ending of The Bone Temple ahead.

Having been rescued from a horde of infected by a terrifying gang of satanists who fashion themselves after Jimmy Saville (the infamous British pedophile), Spike (Alfie Williams) must now prove himself in a battle to the death. Spike wins the battle but must now become one of them. Half the film follows this horrible gang as they pillage and murder across the landscape.

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The other half follows Dr. Ian Kelson (Ralph Fiennes), who has found a sort of peace living in this land of the dead. He has created the titular bone temple – an ossuary made of the bones of those who died before him. He’s also discovered that by injecting one of the alpha zombies, er, infected, with a dart full of morphine, he can not only make him docile but maybe rediscover the humanity buried deep inside.

These two stories will intersect in some fascinating ways, giving us an utterly spectacular scene set to Iron Maiden’s “The Number of the Beast.” That scene alone is worth the price of admission, but the entire movie is really good. I can’t wait to see how they conclude the trilogy.

The Cocktail Waitress by James M. Cain

Before he died, James M. Cain was working on this novel. He had actually submitted a draft to his publisher, but they sent it back, wanting him to make some changes. He never finished it. Decades later, Hard Case Crime pieced it together and published it. Unlike other unfinished books that get published after the author has died, Hard Case didn’t need to hire a new writer to finish it. Cain had actually written the story from start to finish; in fact, he had written parts of it multiple times, making various changes. The challenge with this book was not figuring out how to complete the missing parts, but choosing which parts to include in the final draft.

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So, you can’t really say this is the book Cain wanted to publish, but what we’ve got is still pretty good. Told in the first person, the story follows Joan Medford, who begins her tale with the death of her husband. He was a drunk and abusive, so she’s not too sad that he died in a car accident. But it does make it hard on her because all he left her was a small house and a lot of unpaid bills.

She takes a job as a cocktail waitress and meets two men who will change her life. The first is Earl, a rich, elderly man with heart problems. He takes a shine to her, and his big tips allow her to pay off all those bills, moving her a step closer to getting her son back. Her son has been staying with her sister while Joan gets back on her feet. Eventually, Earl will ask her to marry him. That would set her and her son up for life, but she doesn’t love him, and she doesn’t really find him attractive either.

Which brings us to Tom, the other man who will change her life. He’s broke but handsome, and he really turns her on. She’d rather be with him, but he’d never be able to help with her son situation.

Since this is a James M. Cain story, you know things will get messy. And dirty. There is a surprising amount of sex in this book. In the end, it doesn’t quite live up to Cain’s classic novels like Double Indemnity or The Postman Always Rings Twice, but it is fascinating to see what he was capable of writing in his 80s, and the story is well worth your time.

What’s Up, Doc?

Peter Bogdanovich’s 1972 update of the classic screwball comedy Bringing Up Baby is an utter delight. Ryan O’Neal stars as Howard Bannister, a nerdy, intellectual musicologist who takes his stuffy fiancée (Madeline Kahn in her feature film debut) to San Francisco to compete for a much desired grant. Along the way, he meets Judy Maxwell (Barbara Streisand), an early example of the “manic pixie dream girl” trope.

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She gets him into fix after fix and on one of the longest car chases in the history of cinema. Naturally, they fall in love by the end of the picture. It isn’t as good as Bringing Up Baby, and it runs a little too long, but Streisand is utterly adorable. I’ve never been a big fan of hers, but this movie changed my mind.

Death on the Nile and Evil Under the Sun

Sidney Lumet directed an adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express in 1974. It was a big success, and so the production company ordered a sequel. Neither Lumet nor star Albert Finney was interested, so they hired Peter Ustinov to play Christie’s most famous detective, Hercule Poirot. He’d go on to play the famed detective a total of six times. The first two films, Death on the Nile and Evil Under the Sun, have been given the UHD treatment by Kino Lorber.

Both films feature Poirot solving a murder (or rather murders) in exotic locations. In the first, he’s taking a cruise down the Nile River in Egypt, and in the second, he’s on a private island in the Adriatic Sea. Both films are loaded with stars. They aren’t necessarily great films, but they are thoroughly enjoyable to watch. I reviewed both films, which you can read here and here.

The Bride!

Maggie Gyllenhaal directs this new take on the Bride of Frankenstein story. It stars Christian Bale as Frankenstein’s monster and Jessie Buckley as his bride, whom he makes out of the corpse of a recently murdered woman. The trailer looks like a lot of fun.