Poker Face

Long In
The Truth

Poker Face
Created by Rian Johnson
Season 1 10 episodes
January - March 2023
Blu Ray Zone A

I bought new mystery TV show Poker Face for my mum for Christmas because it was being heavily compared to Columbo on the internet, a show that she had loved watching in the 1970s. I wish I’d have held out a few weeks longer because, when I grabbed it, it wasn’t available in the UK so I just assumed it wouldn’t be getting a release in this country. So it cost me more to import a copy than I needed to have paid, if the company putting it out over here had only got its act together and given it a simultaneous release.

Okay, so it’s created by Rian Johnson, who made a couple of films I really liked called Brick and Looper (plus one of the worst Star Wars movies ever... plus the Knives Out movies which, yeah, were okayish I suppose). He’s written and directed a few of the episodes and the lead actress who plays Charlie Cale (aka Poker Face), Natasha Lyonne,  also directed one of the better episodes of the show.

So, I’m not sure my mum could quite get into the swing of them, to be honest, but my dad and I really enjoyed it and, yeah, there are a couple of superficial resemblances to Columbo. The first being that Lyonne does resemble Peter Falk’s detective in her accent and some of her mannerisms (which a lot of people have pointed out to me). Secondly, the structure of the show is not, mostly, a whodunnit every week. Like Columbo, it starts off with the audience usually in full knowledge of the murder and perpetrator(s) in a five or ten minute sequence without Charlie Cale in it at all (my mum could never get the hang of this and kept asking if the woman from the last show was going to be in it). We then flashback to before the murder and find how Charlie has been inserted into that story from before the events we saw... and then we catch up to those events about half way through, as Charlie solves the case.

So here’s the thing... Charlie has a... let’s call it what it is, a super power. She can tell when anyone is telling her a lie. This gets her into trouble because a casino boss (Ron Perlman) bans her from gambling and has her working at a waitress in his casino instead (which she loves). However, when the boss’ son (Adrien Brody) takes over the casino, he involves Charlie in a scheme to get rich quick in a huge gambling game for him. But, he and his right hand heavy (series regular Benjamin Brat) murder Charlie’s best friend... something she figures out right before their end game and which, eventually, leads to chaos and death for the new casino management. From that point at the end of the first episode, Charlie is off the grid and on the run from Perlman’s character for the rest of season one.

So the format is, she’ll stop in a new town each week, get a temporary job and, pretty much every time, get involved with a murder which she’ll try and solve without the police, often bringing justice in her own, unique way. And most of the episodes have celebrity guest spots too... with actors such as Clea DuVall, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Chloë Sevigny, Ellen Barkin, Luis Guzmán and Nick Nolte all getting involved in the ‘murder of the week’. So there’s a star studded aspect to the show as well.

And it’s pretty well done, the format even allowing for a few twists and turns along the way, as not all the information is always revealed at the episode’s opening and some things become apparent later on which, sometimes, change the identity of the known villain of the episode half way through.

Added to this we have a conclusion to Charlie’s story arc in the final episode of season one, only for it to kind of get soft-rebooted for season two. So, when the casino boss finally catches up with her through his right arm, Benjamin Bratt, the capper of that initial meeting early on in the episode is a) not what you think it would be and b) not telegraphed either. In fact, there’s even a little successful misdirection involved on the part of the writer before the show comes back full circle, with Charlie now being similarly hunted by an even greater threat. I actually thought it was kind of a shame that they decided to soft boot it in that way but I can certainly see why that temptation was there on the part of the show’s producers. They want to keep Charlie hopping from place to place and this is their way of doing that.

One minor thing I didn’t like was the fact that, from episode eight onwards, they gave the main character a facial twitch every time she hears a lie. I guess it’s a nice visual shorthand but, it feels a little clunky and we were doing fine without that for the preceding seven episodes, I thought.

Even so, I really enjoyed the show and, I think I’ll grab the second series of Poker Face too, once it’s aired and played on TV and gets properly released on Blu Ray (otherwise they’ve lost me as an audience, frankly). Definitely worth a watch if you like a large slice of humour with your murder investigations, for sure.

Knives Out

Old Knives Tale

Knives Out
2019 USA Directed by Rian Johnson
UK cinema release print.

I really enjoyed the earlier films of Rian Johnson and absolutely adored his 'high school mystery told in the vernacular of hard boiled detective fiction' movie Brick. I also thought Looper was quite good. When I’d heard he was on board with a Star Wars movie I was kinda nervous because, from the evidence of these two works, I really didn’t think he was a good match for he project. Turns out I was right too. Although not completely unwatchable (no Star Wars film has been so far), it made the mistake of having a few nicely done and appropriate set pieces kinda grafted on to a story that was possibly one of the least ‘Star Warsy’ we’ve seen to date. So, as far as I’m concerned at least, The Last Jedi kinda ranks right at the bottom of the pile with Attack Of The Clones and Revenge Of The Sith.

However, I was really looking forward to seeing what he was going to do next and was delighted when another mystery story... this time in the vein of those old Agatha Christie ‘Whodunnits’... called Knives Out, was announced. I was also pleased to see it getting a very positive response on the internet too. Alas, the first warning I had that the film might not be ‘all that’ was when two of my real life friends, both who had seen the film at different times in different towns, both told me it was... well... kinda disappointing. That being said, I was still looking forward to the film enough so that, when I saw it, I was indeed disappointed with the end result.

So... good things first.

Johnson has assembled a pretty impressive cast with the likes of Daniel Craig (good actor, bad Bond), Toni Collette, Jamie Lee Curtis, Michael Shannon, Chris Evans, Don Johnson, Frank Oz and Christopher Plumber. There’s also a brilliant young actress who I’ve not seen before called Ana de Armas playing the lead character, as becomes clear as the movie progresses. I was always going to be a sucker for whoever was going to be playing this character, to be honest, because she’s written as one of those people who truly are ‘pure in heart’.

The style of the film takes exactly the form that one of those old, ‘gather up all the guests’ whodunnits would have taken and the story, it has to be said, emits a strange and, perhaps, ‘welcome to some’ air of snooziness as it plays out in front of the eyeballs. There’s nothing really offensive or in your face about the movie at any point in the proceedings and, if this floats your boat, then it’s definitely like a Christmas movie that you can fall asleep to after dinner.

And that’s pretty much the only good stuff I can think to say about it.

The real problem for me was that... the film feels kinda uneventful and a little bit like the cast and crew were having a far better time with the material than the audience were ever going to. There are no real surprises in this movie either and though it’s certainly a little twisty-turny as the film continues on its merry way, there aren’t really any revelations in store for anyone either. So even though the story line seems quite fluid for a lot of the time, it still, I’m sad to say, manages to telegraph itself a lot as we follow Ana De Armas trying to dodge an explosive situation which she has, it seems, partially created.

The other thing which I was disappointed by, in all honesty, was the brilliant cast. I mean, you have all these truly wonderful actors and actresses and most of them seem to be just wasted in their roles. It was nice to see people like Chris Evans and Michael Shannon playing against type but, mostly, some really famous people seem like they’re a little relegated to the sidelines and I couldn’t help but think that a lot of these 'A List' performers could have been replaced with relatively unknown people and the studio could have saved themselves some money.

Nathan Johnson provides a score for the movie which is a throwback to those 1960s and 1970s genre films that the director is trying to emulate and is completely appropriate to the on screen visuals. That being said, it didn’t really do a lot for me and I did find it a step down from his absolutely amazing work on Brick. The score for Knives Out doesn’t really stay with you after the movie and, even though I am writing this less than 24 hours after seeing it, I can’t remember much about it, to be honest. It fits the film and probably elevates it but I can’t imagine trying to listen to this one as a stand alone musical experience.

And... yeah... sorry for the short review here but I really don’t have much to say about this one. Knives Out is a competent and unobtrusive little movie which kinda strolls along at its own sleepy pace but never really, as far as I’m concerned (and I know I’m in a minority here), strays into the great or even ‘wildly entertaining’ category. If you like old style whodunnits and want a movie you can relax to without needing to worry you’ll be caught off guard, then Knives Out is probably just for you. As for me... I’m just grateful I don’t have to ever sit through it again.

Star Wars Episode VIII - The Last Jedi

Kylo And Stitched

Star Wars Episode VIII - The Last Jedi
2017 USA Directed by Rian Johnson
UK cinema release print.

Warning: I’m not even going to attempt to write a spoiler free review of this movie because I believe to do so would remove any elements worth talking about in a series of films which have gone on this long. So... yeah... spoilers right from the outset. If you don’t want to know then don’t read. You have been warned.

Okay... so The Last Jedi, the latest film in the Star Wars franchise, is not what I was expecting. Which is not necessarily a bad thing at all except... I was kinda expecting something a little more lively and satisfying, truth be told. I actually really like Rian Johnson’s work as a director (especially Brick) and this is not a terrible film, by any means. There are some truly nice moments in here but there are also a fair few things that got the blood boiling and, neither of those sets of issues has anything to do with my main takeaway from this movie which... I’ll get to a little later.

Okay... so let me highlight the good stuff here first.

The performances were all pretty good although, after she was so good in The Force Awakens, I was kinda left with the feeling that the wonderful Daisy Ridley didn’t really get too much of an opportunity to shine here as she could have been given. That’s okay, though... I suspect the next movie will really need her to carry things so it’ll be an interesting role progression for her, I think.

Mark Hamill was truly excellent. I know he was critical of the direction in which they’ve taken Luke but, given the ‘history’ of events as we know them to have depressingly panned out from the previous chapter, it actually makes a lot of sense. And, as it happens, the Luke Skywalker who has a ‘visitation’ to help out the rebels at the end is now very much the old Luke who is played just as he was in Return Of The Jedi and also... and I think some people may have missed this or just not had time to process the information as yet... now very much believing in the spirit of the Jedi again after the events at the temple burning scene, where Yoda basically finishes what Luke went there to start.

And then we have Kylo Ren... I didn’t know who Adam Driver was before the previous film and I initially hated both his performance in The Force Awakens and, as it happens, the character. However, after having seen him in a few other things and understanding just how great an actor he truly is, I’ve looked back on that last Star Wars role and found there was more going on there than I had previously realised. The pay off to the character comes in this film, where Driver gives a superb performance and the character he plays almost but, not quite, redeems himself in a truly appallingly telegraphed moment where you know he is going to kill the ultimate bad guy, Snoke. However, the punchline to that is, where he appears to shift allegiances, he just creates a new villain by inheriting the mantle, kind of, of Snoke. And he’s finally got rid of that silly helmet in this one so... that’s a good move too, I think.

Okay, John Boyega, Oscar Isaac and Kelly Marie Tran were all good in their roles but their story line felt a bit like it was made up to take out time... just something to do while we kept cutting back to the real character work going on elsewhere in the film. I think Isaac, especially, was very much short changed in his part of the movie where he just felt like a second-hand Starbuck from the 1970s incarnation of Battlestar Galactica, to be honest. I’m wondering just where the heck they are going to go with this character in the concluding chapter of this final trilogy.

Carrie Fisher, though, was very good here and she also gets to ‘use the Force’ in a way we’ve not seen before. It was a nice performance and it was a shame it was relegated to one of the story strands, such as they were, that I was least interested in because... it just all felt like it was filler, to be honest. Although, I have to admit, I think the comedy in this one works very well and I especially, for instance, loved the moment when Chewbacca is trying to eat a Porg. That was nicely done, like many scenes here.

My last good thing was the music by the great John Williams. I need to hear some of it in isolation but it was a beautiful and appropriate score. That being said, I don’t think it was anywhere near as great as his work on The Force Awakens (and I’m only saying this after one viewing so I might change my mind here). It did feel kinda like a ‘greatest hits’ album in some ways and, though I certainly admired the way he was able to catch some of the orchestrational style of the very first film in some of the new music here (especially in the quieter and reflective moments of the story), there were some things I found questionable. For example, unless it was the speakers in the cinema I saw this one in (ODEON Leicester Square in London), the main title crawl seemed somehow a bit clunkier than some of the versions we’ve had over the years. Also, I couldn’t work out why the piece of music directly following that over the first shots of the film was pretty much the dead spit of the equivalent musical moment in the very first movie. I think this is the first time the post-crawl intro has been, effectively, repeated in a Star Wars movie. Also, the cue from the very first film originally known as Ben’s Death And TIE Fighter Attack is used here and it seems to have become a leitmotif building block for the Millennium Falcon in these new films... which is interesting but puzzling since it was used in a scene in Return Of The Jedi in an entirely different context during the sail barge rescue (although, admittedly, it’s use in that sequence was an alternate rescore from what Williams had originally written for it). Also, the thematic hits seemed less subtle and more ‘in your face’ on this one. The moment where it suddenly goes into the Luke And Leia theme from Return Of The Jedi and then quickly transforms itself into the Han And Leia motif made me frown at one point.

Okay... so that’s the, mostly, good stuff. Onto the not so good stuff...

If you’re going to have a Force manifestation give Princess Leia some ‘dice’ from the Millenium Falcon as a remembrance of Han then... well, they’re going to disappear pretty quickly and are not much of a remembrance at all, are they? They’ll just wink out of existence pretty soon. Not cool.

The big fight scene with Rey and Ren fighting back to back was a truly nice beat or the film but the choreography seemed a lot less interesting than some of the sabre fight choreography in the previous films. It almost seemed like the two actors were either not capable of doing a more challenging choreography and the camera was just cutting from shot to shot to make it feel like there was more going on or... the editing was just plain bad and hurt the scene in general, perhaps? I don’t know which, if either, of those conclusions is correct but I found stuff like the Darth Maul battle in The Phantom Menace to be much more exciting.

Also, a lot of the intriguing set ups like Rey's 'classified' status and the way Luke's original light sabre was recovered were either solidly turned into an anti-climactic red herring or just plainly ignored. I felt betrayed by the direction this film took after investing emotionally in those kinds of elements, to be honest. I also found it kinda weird that, after so many episodes, Luke uses the throw away term 'laser sword' instead of light sabre. Star Wars fans have been correcting casual viewers' use of that term since 1977 so it kinda felt like a sharp jab in the face, to be honest.

The timelines also didn’t make sense but that’s not necessarily the director's fault. He presumably wanted to open on an action set piece and he did (a particularly non-interesting one, as far as I’m concerned) but that scene seemed to be taking place weeks after the end of The Force Awakens... we then cut back to Rey confronting Luke at the end of that film and... it just didn’t make sense. I met a friend who had just come out of the screening before I saw the next performance and he made a comment about the timeline that seemed a lot more critical of it than something I would say (although he liked the movie a lot more than I did, to be fair) but I think the problem was that, as far as I’m concerned, the last chapter should have finished with Rey flying off in the Falcon. Luke really didn’t belong in that last installment, I think. I understand that J. J. Abrams may have got lynched by fans if he hadn’t put Hamill into it but... no, I just don’t think that helped the art of the story line and this movie is kind of left trying to work around that decision. I don’t think it works it out too well.

One last thing...

Finn was wounded at the end of The Force Awakens. So in that relatively long period of, what, a day or so after the final battle, it makes sense that his two best friends Poe and Rey would have visited him in hospital. And they certainly would have come into contact with each other in the room with the map reveal by R2 and BB8... so why are we being asked to believe that Poe and Rey are only just laying eyes on each other at the end of this one. That makes no sense and really stretches the credibility of the film more than a lot of the other bad stuff here, I would say.

Now all of this and the next thing I’m gong to say is going to come with a caveat that I learned when I first saw and reviewed The Force Awakens. I hated that film when I first saw it but, as soon as I saw it a second time, I really loved it. Now that didn’t happen to me with Rogue One (which I still think is a fairly weak film) but it has happened with other films too (Avengers - Age Of Ultron, La La Land, Ant Man) and so there’s a good chance that this one will grow on me very quickly. As it is, though, I’ll get onto my main take away from this one which is... it just felt like a very dull, slow film and I felt the same thing with Attack Of The Clones when that was released. I’m more used to my Star Wars movies moving from one scene to the next at a blistering pace, just like the old 1930s serials they aspire to be... but I found myself getting really bored with this one. Again, that will hopefully change on my second viewing where I hope I will appreciate things a little more but, for now, that’s how I felt about this one. If I was going to recommend a jumping on point for any Star Wars first time watchers it certainly wouldn’t be The Last Jedi and, as it happens, without knowing the back story here you’d probably be lost anyway. Not my favourite of the Star Wars saga, that’s for sure but... not my least favourite either.


Star Wars at NUTS4R2

 Episode 1: The Phantom Menace 

Episode 2: Attack Of The Clones

Episode 3: Revenge Of The Sith 

Solo

Rogue One 

Episode 4: A New Hope

Episode 5: The Empire Strikes Back

Episode 6: Return Of The Jedi 

Episode 7: The Force Awakens 

Episode 8:  The Last Jedi

Episode 9: The Rise Of Skywalker

Looper

Time To Kill

Looper 
2012 China/USA 
Directed by Rian Johnson
Playing at UK cinemas now

Warning: Ever so slight imagery spoilers
looping back through time to confront you.

I’ll admit it up front. I, more often than not, just love stories based around the concept of time travel. Mainly because you can set up so many ironies and mind-blowing revelations just from tinkering with somebody’s past that it makes for some great tales. Stories that can explore ideas and follow through on arcs which remain inaccessible to fictional explorations in other genres. Like most good science fiction does, for that matter.

That being said, I really get angry when the basic temporal mechanics of a piece gets screwed up by mistakes of obvious logic in the story. Sometimes, a writer will fudge a common sense outcome of a change in time and run with it to make the rest of the story he or she has in their head a possibility, rather than find another, perhaps less obvious, route around to the sequences they want to drop in. Back To The Future Part 2, for example, doesn’t just fumble the ball in this regard, it darn well drops the ball and then ostentatiously kicks it out of the field in its complete lack of concern for the rules set up by the man made measure that is “the passage of time”. There’s a moment about a third or a half of the way through that movie when the whole rest of that movie, and the whole of the next installment, couldn’t have actually taken place in the realm of the Back To The Future universe they’ve set up, because a character returns to a point in his future which is no longer there because he’s already erased it. Stuff like that is just plain sloppy... not to mention as irritating as hell.

Steven Moffat, I feel, sometimes has the same problem with some of his Doctor Who story arcs... which sometimes tend to resort to what I call “the Tinkerbell syndrome” in their ability to reach a successful story conclusion. You know what I’m talking about. We’ve completely destroyed the science of the piece but, guess what, if you believe in Faires... it will magic it back up again out of the ether! That kind of lack of logic is used like a crutch too often sometimes (yes Pandorica, I’m looking at you!).

I’m happy to report that writer director Rian Johnson has no such problems with his new time travel dilemma movie Looper. Or if he does, then the sleight of hand with which he maintains the illusion of complete plausibility of a man who is in a state of flux because of changes to his past happening while he is at present in that past, sent back from 30 years in his future, is absolutely credible and makes absolute sense.

Consequently, Looper isn’t just a believable, fictional universe to find yourself watching... it’s a vital and, frankly, scary cinematic wonderland in which to get lost in for a couple of hours (or 30 years, take your pick).

I’d seen Johnsons debut feature Brick some years back on its initial cinema release, and I was completely blown away by it. So I was really looking forward to Looper until I started to see the poster marketing for it. Note to advertising agencies: comparing a well put together, moody and extremely gritty, time travel noir like Looper to a piece of rubbish like The Matrix, may put off fans of proper science fiction. Seriously, when I saw the advertising calling it “this years The Matrix” it really put my expectations down a notch. You might as well compare it to other, not so great and abysmally over-rated sci-fi movies like Avatar and Inception. However, like I said, I had seen Brick and so I went to take a look at this one regardless.

I’m glad I did.

Like Brick, everything in this movie works so well and comes together so beautifully that you just get swept along in the illusion of the thing. Everything works towards the focussing of a single vision all the way through... set design, knockout performances from everyone (not just the leads who are, obviously, excellent), music by Nathan Johnson which supports this movie in a different way to the way in which his music in Brick worked, marvellous editing... everything works together so well that you’ll feel the intelligence and single-mindedness of the writer/directors intent as every frame passes.

And it’s a harsh world in which you’ll spend your time. A plot involving killers called Loopers who close their own loop by killing themselves from the future as the beginning of their 30 year retirement plan is the main focus of exploration and the identity of a criminal mastermind from the future called The Rainmaker becomes the raison d’etre of the shenanigans in which our two main protagonists... who are actually the same main protagonist from two different points in time (and possibilities in flux in terms of the older of the two facets of the character)... become caught up in. It’s actually a simple plot when you think back on what you’ve seen after the movie is over... but Johnson pulls it off so intelligently that you’ll see where the big pitfalls could have gone and how he managed to avoid screwing with the temporal logic while pushing it right to the edge on occasion. There’s just one little mistake I think might have been made in one sequence towards the final scenes of the movie, but it’s the kind of mistake you seem to see in movies all the time these days (as if that should excuse it) and it may be the result of the film losing some footage in the final cut. Most people aren’t going to question it in the heat of the moment and I’m not going to point it out here... it doesn’t involve time travel.

I think what I’m trying to say here is... not only is Looper a good sci-fi movie... it’s an adult movie in a cinematic landscape which is constantly providing less adult orientated content. There’s also some stuff which is truly horrifying in it... such as the scene where the writer/director is showing you how a Looper can be damaged to change his own future self without actually screwing up the possibility of an infinitely different future, while also killing a second bird with the same stone and using this to show how the two/one main protagonist/s can communicate with each other. It’s all good stuff and will keep you dwelling on the implications long after the imagery lingers in your mind. I don’t want to spoil anything here but... the image of a man running for his life and having his foot disappear because his past self has just had it deliberately amputated to slow him down is not one I’m going to forget in a hurry.

So there you have it. A brilliant script, well acted, designed and scored, from a very young director who is an absolute master of his game. Anyone who thought Brick was a flash in the pan can think again... I think this movie will be pretty successful. Not necessarily at the initial box office take but certainly on home video formats and in terms of something that will still be watched with admiration and hailed as a minor classic in years to come. If you like science fiction, then Looper needs to go on your to watch list quick before it vanishes from cinemas as quickly as most movies made for actual adults do these days.