valiantprince

Okay, aside from agreeing with the many reviewers who have lauded this miniseries, I'm really not here to discuss the writing, directing, and acting. Granted, I loved all three, and I find the negative reviews that seem dead set on convincing the rest of us that we didn't really enjoy the series, sadly unimaginative.

No, what I want to discuss-and the reason I'm giving this brilliant series a 9 rather than a 10-is the choice of title. As much as I enjoyed every bit of this Flanagan/Siegel masterpiece, it simply is NOT The Haunting of Hill House. Shirley Jackson's novel, even according to Shirley Jackson, was never really about ghosts or other supernatural phenomena. It was about the people who research supernatural phenomena and their personal motivations. The novel is full of questionable occurrences and isolated events with never quite sufficient evidence or at least no more than one witness. What Flanagan and Siegel have done here is take versions of the Hill House researchers and recast their types (many with the same first names) as members of a new fictional Crain family, and the ghosts are pretty hard to dismiss. Honestly, I don't see why they didn't just call it the Craine Hauntings or some such. It's a great series, but it owes next to nothing to Shirley Jackson's novel.

The story is cobbled together from 60s and 70s rock clichés, and the original songs are hideous. The selected 70s music in the soundtrack serves only to punctuate how awful the original tunes are. None of the songs in the first three episodes has a decent hook, and the lyrics are so bad they make Suicide Is Painless sound like pure genius-and that song was written by a fifteen-year-old trying to write "the stupidest song ever written." The original tunes in Daisy Jones and the Six are bland and in no way memorable. Also, although Riley Keough is not a bad actress, she can barely carry a tune and has zero vocal power. I've watched the first three episodes, but I won't be watching the rest.

Yes, the drug sales subplot drags a tiny bit-not much really if you add up the total time of the Smush scenes. Still, the main story is moving and rewarding. I was blown away to learn that Paris and Esha, among others, were amateurs drawn from the actual Fletcher street stables.

Idris Elba, Caleb McLaughlin, and Method Man all give reliable believable, heartfelt performances. And the amateurs are endearing and surprisingly hard to pick out.

Ignore the low ratings. It's a classic urban coming of age story, so yeah, some of its been done before. Who cares? If you're not crying along with Cole at the cowboy funeral, something in you is broken.

1. Those of us who lived through the 70s can attest: YES. The clothes, the cars, the hair and sideburns, YES they were really that over the top. In hindsight, it all looks ridiculous, but even the executives in my Dad's branch of General Electric were sporting the polyester leisure suits, the gold chains dancing in their chest hair, and those godawful white patent leather shoes and belts. I'd go into home devote and the peak of avocado appliances, but the memories are just too horrifying.

2. For those who keep asking, "What's with all the comic book references?" Do you not know where when and how the superhero comic genre was born? Just take a look at the names of the originators: Jerry Siegel, Joe Shuster, Will Eisner, Jack Kirby (born Jacob Kurtzberg), and Stan Lee (born Stanley Martin Lieber). All Jews who began publishing their stories with the rise of the Third Reich. A people who needed very much to believe in good people with extraordinary ability to right the world's wrongs. The parallel is brilliant.

Here's what I would have said after the first six episodes: Despite claims to the contrary by some fans of the novels, the series is mostly brilliant. Beautifully filmed in (disagreeing with some) a charming locale, the stories are riveting. I could go on, but I likely would have rated this series at a 9.

Then I watched the last two episodes. Generally, these two continued in the same vein. Inspector Gamache solves the fourth series murder and the over-arching Blue Two Rivers mystery (although how he didn't catch on that his buddy was manipulating the evidence, I can't understand; it was blatant).

Then they screwed everything up in two stupid steps. First, Isabelle Lacoste comes face to face with Jean-Guy but doesn't notice that he's been drinking? And she lets him drive in a high-speed pursuit? Kind of wrecks her cred as a detective. Finally, the brilliant Inspector Gamache turns his back on the crooked cop who just committed ANOTHER murder, this time of a fellow (crooked) police officer and gets shot. It's not clearly stated that Gamache dies, but the imagery with the blue jay strongly implies as much. Dumb. Simply dumb. Killing Gamache does nothing for this series but to irritate the viewers.

First, I simply disagree with the reviewers who complain that the season finale didn't answer all their jiggling questions. The goal, after all, was several seasons, so I expected some of the questions to remain open for development.

Second, sorry, but this show lost a 9 from me when it violated one of my personal expectations from good fiction. Understand, I want to be fair. I expect some aspects of The Midnight Club to be tailored to a teen/YA audience, so naturally I expect a degree of naïveté from the teen characters. Naïveté, however, doesn't mean stupidity or blind obedience from a character who has been repeatedly touted as intelligent. When Dr. Stanton begins haranguing Ilonka for not being honest with her, I expected to see some spark of that intelligence respond. Sure, I get that Ilonka has had a shock, sees that she's been used, feels guilty for endangering her comrades. That's still no excuse for the sudden huge gaps in Ilonka's memory of Stanton's earlier statements.

In this episode, Stanton essentially claims that she's been honest with Ilonka and believes she's earned honesty in return. Really? Has Ilonka forgotten that Stanton feigned ignorance of Julia and withheld knowledge of the woman's past crimes? If Stanton had been more forthcoming in the first place-when Ilonka made it pretty clear she came to Brightcliffe solely because of Julia's miracle story-perhaps Ilonka would have been on her guard. Now, however, after Ilonka has nearly been assassinated, Stanton admits that Julia's been a source of trouble for the hospice for years.

As far as I can see, the only thing Stanton has earned from Ilonka is litigation.

Yes, the cinematography is glorious. Yes, Daniel Day-Lewis is a genius, and I'd say he nailed the character.

Unfortunately, the character just isn't worth getting to know. Plainview is just another hateful megalomaniac, and this two-and-a-half-hour explication of that nastiness brings nothing new to light. Eli is equally uninteresting, and we never really get to know the son. Some of the dialogue is clever, but it's never clever enough to save this movie from the overwhelming miasma of depression cast by the hideous protagonist and the appallingly slow movement of the story. I understand the use of empty spaces and immobility in a film. Malick, Sayles, Kubrick, and Haynes have all managed to produce brilliant moments of exposition in which nothing actually happens and little is visible, but this movie just doesn't reach those heights.

Finally, worst of all, the sound track is just ghastly. It's like Philip Glass on Quaaludes. Deafening atonality.

In a year that gave us Michael Clayton, Juno, No Country for Old Men, and Before the Devil Knows You're Dead, I can't see how this movie garnered a single award.