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).