Update + (Half) a Watching Post
Nov. 18th, 2025 06:23 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
thisbluespiritI've not been around so much again, because I had to go out and have a filling amongst other things, and ME/CFS and anaesthetic do not play well together. The rest of the time, when I had energy, in fannish things, I have been mainly focused on making sure I get my ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
yuletide fic typed up. Anyway, as of yesterday, I have a first draft and am not too far off a bus pass version even (\o/), so I shall try and be a bit less faily at keeping up around here again.
I had half a watching post done, and it was already quite long actually, so I will just post that here:
Some more summer watching! This isn't the order I watched them in, but I made my way through two more cosy crime series, and some of Jeremy Northam's remaining CV.
The two BBC cosies were Ludwig starring David Mitchell and Anna Maxwell Martin, which was very good although an odd mix of tone that is exactly encapsulated by the two leads. Some parts of Ludwig felt like the kind of tense, proper crime drama with bent coppers and the like in which you might expect to find AMM and others were more of an outright comedy than most, as seems only right with David Mitchell. It was a strong entry, though! David Mitchell is a reclusive puzzle-setter ("Ludwig"), John, whose identical twin brother James is a police detective who has vanished. His sister-in-law Lucy manages to prise John out of his house to come and help - by pretending to John. Cue John getting a) extremely stressed by all of this and b) distracted by the need to solve the murders that he's sent to deal with, all the while trying to find out why James has disappeared and help out Lucy and his nephew.
Anyway, there should be a s2, with hopefully less stress for John helping the police as a consultant now, rather than trying to pretend to be his twin brother and panicking a lot. I look forward to seeing how that goes.
Magpie Murders and Moonflower Murders have been on my radar for a while because people kept mentioning them, so nearing the end of the summer of the cosies, I thought, why not go for broke, and watched it too. These were really great! They were one serialised mystery per series, rather than case of the week, but Lesley Manville is crime editor Susan Ryeland, whose star crime writer gets murdered. In the course of trying to find the missing chapter of his otherwise complete last manuscript, she inadvertantly winds up on the trail of his killer. The really fun/clever thing about this series is that as she reads the last novel, we follow the fictional detective Atticus Pünd in his investigations, which parallel hers and which are a pastiche of a golden age detective series. Occasionally, she imagines discussing the murder with him, so they meet in dreamlike sequences. Tim McMullan as Pünd is really great - I hadn't come across him before, and it's a lovely performance. Conleth Hill is also fun as the late Alan Conway. Moonflower Murders follows the same pattern, as someone else has noted Alan Conway's spiteful tendency to put real things he oughtn't into his books and pays Susan to investigate the parallels between an earlier book in the series and a death at their hotel.
There's supposed to be a third series to come, so I'll look forward to it, although I understand that it's supposed to have a different writer (as in not Alan Conway in-narrative, not irl - they're all adapted by Anthony Horowitz who wrote the original books), and we'll see how that goes. But it was really unusual and fun.
Creation (2009) Biopic about Charles Darwin, starring Paul Bettany. The bones of this one is essentially the cookie-cutter biopic where the person doing the thing has to recover from grief or a broken heart in order to do the thing. (I don't know enough about Darwin's life in specifics to know how fair or not that assumption is. The one thing I did look up was Jeremy Northam's character, as he was playing a vicar and I guessed he might therefore be a negative character, but the wiki entry at least said he in fact was a lifelong friend of Darwin's and defended him to others, so I though, ah, well, that's nuance, that's promising. And then in the film they broke up due to him being exactly the kind of repressive Victorian vicar you would expect in a biopic about Darwin).
But the flesh of this film is being almost inside Darwin's mind as he works through this process - his endless conversations with his late daughter, his love of the natural world, and this is beautifully portrayed, both by Paul Bettany (who is so much centre it's hardly worth mentioning any of the other, excellent cast, because they are all so peripheral in contrast) and in the gorgeous cinematography. I wanted to gif it, but my copy was very battered and while my DVD player can take anything, the PC is a sensitive soul and winces at scratched discs. But the shots of the natural world, Darwin's imagination, his daughter having the water treatment, shot with light that makes her look like an angel were really beautifully done, to the point that it took me quite a while afterwards to realise it was such a cookie-cutter biopic plot underneath.
(In JN terms, as I said, Paul Bettany and the natural world and the cinematography is this film, so there's not much to be commented on, although I did like his little effort not to cry when Darwin broke up with him, and it is a curiosity being a rare instance of him singing - here, leading the congregation in a very mean-spirited All Things Bright and Beautiful. JN and singing is like Spiders Georg - Gosford Park is a hugely misleading outlier and should not have been counted. My biggest disappointment, honestly. The only other time he sings on screen, as far as I know, is a brief snatch of Moon River in The Net).
yuletide fic typed up. Anyway, as of yesterday, I have a first draft and am not too far off a bus pass version even (\o/), so I shall try and be a bit less faily at keeping up around here again.I had half a watching post done, and it was already quite long actually, so I will just post that here:
Some more summer watching! This isn't the order I watched them in, but I made my way through two more cosy crime series, and some of Jeremy Northam's remaining CV.
The two BBC cosies were Ludwig starring David Mitchell and Anna Maxwell Martin, which was very good although an odd mix of tone that is exactly encapsulated by the two leads. Some parts of Ludwig felt like the kind of tense, proper crime drama with bent coppers and the like in which you might expect to find AMM and others were more of an outright comedy than most, as seems only right with David Mitchell. It was a strong entry, though! David Mitchell is a reclusive puzzle-setter ("Ludwig"), John, whose identical twin brother James is a police detective who has vanished. His sister-in-law Lucy manages to prise John out of his house to come and help - by pretending to John. Cue John getting a) extremely stressed by all of this and b) distracted by the need to solve the murders that he's sent to deal with, all the while trying to find out why James has disappeared and help out Lucy and his nephew.
Anyway, there should be a s2, with hopefully less stress for John helping the police as a consultant now, rather than trying to pretend to be his twin brother and panicking a lot. I look forward to seeing how that goes.
Magpie Murders and Moonflower Murders have been on my radar for a while because people kept mentioning them, so nearing the end of the summer of the cosies, I thought, why not go for broke, and watched it too. These were really great! They were one serialised mystery per series, rather than case of the week, but Lesley Manville is crime editor Susan Ryeland, whose star crime writer gets murdered. In the course of trying to find the missing chapter of his otherwise complete last manuscript, she inadvertantly winds up on the trail of his killer. The really fun/clever thing about this series is that as she reads the last novel, we follow the fictional detective Atticus Pünd in his investigations, which parallel hers and which are a pastiche of a golden age detective series. Occasionally, she imagines discussing the murder with him, so they meet in dreamlike sequences. Tim McMullan as Pünd is really great - I hadn't come across him before, and it's a lovely performance. Conleth Hill is also fun as the late Alan Conway. Moonflower Murders follows the same pattern, as someone else has noted Alan Conway's spiteful tendency to put real things he oughtn't into his books and pays Susan to investigate the parallels between an earlier book in the series and a death at their hotel.
There's supposed to be a third series to come, so I'll look forward to it, although I understand that it's supposed to have a different writer (as in not Alan Conway in-narrative, not irl - they're all adapted by Anthony Horowitz who wrote the original books), and we'll see how that goes. But it was really unusual and fun.
Creation (2009) Biopic about Charles Darwin, starring Paul Bettany. The bones of this one is essentially the cookie-cutter biopic where the person doing the thing has to recover from grief or a broken heart in order to do the thing. (I don't know enough about Darwin's life in specifics to know how fair or not that assumption is. The one thing I did look up was Jeremy Northam's character, as he was playing a vicar and I guessed he might therefore be a negative character, but the wiki entry at least said he in fact was a lifelong friend of Darwin's and defended him to others, so I though, ah, well, that's nuance, that's promising. And then in the film they broke up due to him being exactly the kind of repressive Victorian vicar you would expect in a biopic about Darwin).
But the flesh of this film is being almost inside Darwin's mind as he works through this process - his endless conversations with his late daughter, his love of the natural world, and this is beautifully portrayed, both by Paul Bettany (who is so much centre it's hardly worth mentioning any of the other, excellent cast, because they are all so peripheral in contrast) and in the gorgeous cinematography. I wanted to gif it, but my copy was very battered and while my DVD player can take anything, the PC is a sensitive soul and winces at scratched discs. But the shots of the natural world, Darwin's imagination, his daughter having the water treatment, shot with light that makes her look like an angel were really beautifully done, to the point that it took me quite a while afterwards to realise it was such a cookie-cutter biopic plot underneath.
(In JN terms, as I said, Paul Bettany and the natural world and the cinematography is this film, so there's not much to be commented on, although I did like his little effort not to cry when Darwin broke up with him, and it is a curiosity being a rare instance of him singing - here, leading the congregation in a very mean-spirited All Things Bright and Beautiful. JN and singing is like Spiders Georg - Gosford Park is a hugely misleading outlier and should not have been counted. My biggest disappointment, honestly. The only other time he sings on screen, as far as I know, is a brief snatch of Moon River in The Net).
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Date: 2025-11-18 06:42 pm (UTC)Seems like a bit of a waste to make Charles Darwin's vicar friend into his vicar friend-turned-enemy! But I'm glad he got to sing at least.
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Date: 2025-11-18 08:54 pm (UTC)Seems like a bit of a waste to make Charles Darwin's vicar friend into his vicar friend-turned-enemy! But I'm glad he got to sing at least.
Well, I am only going by wikipedia, so there may be more nuance on both ends, but certainly he was not a particularly great friend at all in the film! The singing was very brief, but I take what you can get.
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Date: 2025-11-18 11:01 pm (UTC)Sounds like a pretty normal one from their letters. (Examples drawn from late in Darwin's life.) Apparently complimented On the Origin of Species and calls himself charmed by The Variation of Animals and Plants Under Domestication. His reactions to The Descent of Man come with a deserved content warning for nineteenth-century racism and then he requests to be thought of as a descendant of a ring-tailed monkey such as he had for a pet as a child. So, looks like a lifelong correspondent, humanly complicated, any dramatic falling-out over religion does not show in the record of surviving letters, demerits to the movie.
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Date: 2025-11-19 05:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-11-19 01:01 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-11-19 05:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-11-18 08:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-11-18 09:13 pm (UTC)a 'biopic' so low in truth that it makes Darwin's poor vicar friend seem like an honest portrayal. Ah, the movies! (He does sing in that one though.)
Yes, I've gathered that everybody hates that one! He doesn't even sing in it, though - I've seen some of the interviews with him from the time, and he says they used the real Dean Martin's songs and he had to mime to them. He did learn to sing like him for it anyway to get at the voice, but they were never going to let him do it, apparently.
He sings a lot in Gosford Park as Ivor Novello, and he apparently sang in a restaurant to pay his way through drama school when he was young, as well as doing various bits of piano playing & singing on stage. I just assumed that, having demonstrated how well he could sing to the world in GP, I would find loads more instances across his CV, but NO. Sometimes he is perversely even in things where everybody else sings and he doesn't. Spiders Georg, I tell you! XD
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Date: 2025-11-19 02:42 pm (UTC)Haven't seen Gosford Park. Shall perhaps remedy this.
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Date: 2025-11-19 06:12 pm (UTC)I'd have to relisten to the interview to be check, because I watched it ages ago when I first fell down the Northam rabbit hole, but I'm pretty sure he said that the network were set on using the real music as a selling point, so it sounds pretty cynical even given the sheer number of biopics out there that range from mildly incorrect to outright libel, so yeah. Be mad forever!
He was pretty definite about not doing the singing, but then they credit for the smallest thing, so it might be something we don't really think about as viewers - a brief sung snatch of something, or talking as a segue into a piece or whatever.
Haven't seen Gosford Park. Shall perhaps remedy this.
Ha, well, it is very good! No idea if it's your cup of tea, but, yeah, definitely an excellent film on all counts. More of a subversion of a murder mystery than a straight-up one, though; that's worth saying, because all the publicity tends to sell it as a classic golden age thing, and it's not so much, it's all about class & just centres around a murder.
If you did want another Northam, you might like Happy, Texas (1999), which is funny, unsentimental & very good-natured - not sure how available it is, though. I just picked up a cheap 2nd hand DVD, so I didn't have to poke any streaming anythings for it.
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Date: 2025-11-20 11:12 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-11-22 02:48 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-11-22 08:06 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-11-18 10:40 pm (UTC)That seems hugely unfair to both the historical vicar and Jeremy Northam!
I am glad it was so visually beautiful.
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Date: 2025-11-19 06:15 pm (UTC)As a film, it just really went hard on being in Darwin's mind, and the combination of Paul Bettany's performance, the visuals and just the sense of him and the whole film being so fascinated and in love with the natural world really did mean that it took a while to realise that the bones of it were fairly typical.
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Date: 2025-11-19 04:29 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-11-19 06:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-11-19 02:53 pm (UTC)Haven't seen Ludwig yet, although it sounds interesting.
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Date: 2025-11-19 06:19 pm (UTC)Ludwig was pretty good too, although I got nearly as stressed as John at his having to do his impersonation! XD
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Date: 2025-11-20 08:47 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-11-21 07:59 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2025-11-21 02:30 pm (UTC)I liked 'Ludwig' too as I said and I'd forgotten about 'Magpie Murders'. So many cozies so little brain, lol. I liked the first series of 'Magpie Murders' I didn't think the second was as good but I can't remember why!
I'm glad 'Darwin' had top notch cinematography even if like most bio-pics not historically correct. Shame there wasn't much singing, why do film makers deprive us of actors doing other stuff they can do? At least it was DVD quality and not knackered old YT VHS quality.
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Date: 2025-11-21 08:06 pm (UTC)I liked 'Ludwig' too as I said and I'd forgotten about 'Magpie Murders'. So many cozies so little brain, lol. I liked the first series of 'Magpie Murders' I didn't think the second was as good but I can't remember why!
I think I mainly liked the second better because in the first one I was so stressed by her not really investigating but sort of investigating and doing the very silly bit of going to the office alone to talk to the murderer, coupled with being enraged most of the at how unreasonable Andreas was, whereas Moonflower had none of those things. They were both good, though! The first one revolved more closely around Alan Conway, of course, which worked well. I just got stressed at the other bits, lol.
Shame there wasn't much singing, why do film makers deprive us of actors doing other stuff they can do?
tbh, I rather suspect it's Jeremy Northam himself who doesn't want to, but idk if that is true. He seems to like it better if it's pretending to be someone else singing. He apparently sang in a restaurant to pay his way through drama school and it may have put him off? (He was the less good singer for the restaurant and went on in the second half of the evening, so everyone walked out on him constantly, heh). But idk. He is v musical, though, and apparently cannot be stopped from playing the piano on set a lot of the time. I would like to hear him sing properly, just once, as him, but I must make do with the bit in The Net, which is more than I got from Mr "nearly went into musicals" Maxwell, who has only provided me with some humming. :-)
Yeah, scratched DVD is nothing to dodgy VHS, but my PC does not agree!
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Date: 2025-11-22 02:19 pm (UTC)Oh dear, I hope JN isn't suffering from singing trauma! But ideal for Ivor Novello then, lol. I feel like I should start a campaign to get him to record a album of him singing and playing the piano for you:) Bad JM: all the dodgy stick on facial hair was karma;p
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Date: 2025-11-22 02:32 pm (UTC)He started sticking on the fake hair before he even stopped singing, so I think that was just unavoidable doom or something! XD
I don't think any Jeremy Northam campaign would work at the moment - he needs to come back and act in things, never mind sing! He stopped working normally c. early 2016 and it's anyone's guess as to why. I kind of assume it's most likely some brand of ill-health, but *waves wildly* even with all the stalking, that's still just speculation from virtually nothing. :-(
But anyway, I haven't watched ALL his stuff yet, maybe he will get caught out singing something else somewhere, lol. And, tbf, I do have Gosford, which is more singing than you get out of most actors, all at once.
Oh, one nice thing, tho, is that I learned earlier this year that one of his million niblings is now an actor too! I had no idea, because she's French, which was a cunning disguise, but she appears to be his brother Tim's daughter, although I can't find absolute proof. She started out wanting to be a musician first, and she looks so like her uncle, I now understand why one of Google's top Jeremy Northam options is "does JN have a daughter?" XD
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Date: 2025-11-22 02:59 pm (UTC)Lol, very cunning hiding out in France. The firefighters Netflix show sounds a bit soapy. It is very mysterious not having who her parents are on Wikipedia.
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Date: 2025-11-22 08:48 pm (UTC)So sneaky! XD And, ha, I hadn't looked at details, but maybe that balances out the fact that her one English language film sounds deeply depressing!!