Marple

Joan Hickson was Marple anyway, and that other woman that's doing it now looks, well, not like Joan Hickson. She seemed a bit Nana-Moon-off-EastEnders-ish.

geraldine mcewan is the best marple, fight me

Can't stand Geraldine McEwan in anything tbh.

Margaret Rutherford's early life :-O

Margaret Rutherford's early life was overshadowed by tragedies involving both of her parents. Her father was William Rutherford Benn, a journalist and poet who married Florence Nicholson on 16 December 1882 in Wandsworth, England. One month after his marriage, however, he suffered a nervous breakdown and was admitted to Bethnal House Lunatic Asylum. Released to travel under his family's supervision, he murdered his father, the Reverend Julius Benn, a Congregational Church minister, by bludgeoning him to death with a chamber pot, before he slashed his own throat with a pocket knife, at an inn in Matlock, Derbyshire, on 4 March 1883.[1][2] Following the inquest, William Benn was certified insane and removed to Broadmoor Criminal Lunatic Asylum. Seven years later, on 26 July 1890, he was discharged from Broadmoor and reunited with his wife. He legally dropped his surname.

Margaret Taylor Rutherford, the only child of William and Florence, was born in 1892 in Balham, South London. Margaret's uncle Sir John Benn, 1st Baronet, was a politician, and her first cousin once removed was the Labour politician Tony Benn. Hoping to start a new life far from the scene of their recent troubles, the Rutherfords emigrated to Madras, India, but Margaret was returned to Britain when she was three years old to live with her aunt Bessie Nicholson in Wimbledon, London, after her pregnant mother hanged herself from a tree. Young Margaret had been told that her father died of a broken heart soon afterwards, so when she was 12 years old she was shocked to learn that her father had actually been readmitted to Broadmoor Hospital in 1903, where he remained under care until his death on August 4, 1921. Her parents' mental afflictions gave rise to a fear that she might succumb to similar maladies, a fear which haunted her for the rest of her life, and she suffered intermittent bouts of depression and anxiety.[3]

I like McEwan more than McKenzie as Marple, but I liked them both... their Marples are endlessly rewatchable. Can't really be bothered with the Joan Hickson ones.

i’ve been re-reading these at bedtime, strangely. i subscribe to the highly conservative view that joan hickson is the best marple. but i have to be careful as i want to use words like “definitive” where reinterpretations are often more interesting than the notion of the platonic ideal.

this has reminded me, i meant to mention this before, from the body in the library:


“‘Well, naturally. I mean, I’d put it there—what?’”

This from a young upper class man and as a mannerism rather than interrogation. like this at 22:06 here:

https://youtu.be/bO61a-8K2Kc

it only struck me seeing it written down what an odd fashion in mannerism it is. it usually seems to be used to identify upper class nitwits, but presumably was actually used and seen to be in one sense “fashionable”. did it actually go hand in hand with affected imbecility?

oh and this is quite cute from a young lad talking to a policeman and miss marple in the same novel:

‘You bet it does. Do you like detective stories? I do. I read them all, and I’ve got autographs from Dorothy Sayers and Agatha Christie and Dickson Carr and H. C. Bailey. Will the murder be in the papers?’

i've been bingeing on miss marple books recently, and as part of this i was awe-struck at how bad 'a pocketful of rye' is. good example of Christie's desire for a puzzle that's linked to a nursery rhyme, and here the need to deliver that overwhelms any notion of plot. i'm not sure how much really that's a worrying thing; i feel that golden age tec fiction has a lot more to do with edwardian parlour games than literary novels. (i never *solve* the puzzles – are they *really* meant to be solved? apparently they were and my beloved John Dickson Carr is explicit about his rules – but i do enjoy them as things to read).

so along with the stifling nursery rhyme theme, there's a lot of doubling – the brothers Lance and Percival (their mother liked reading Idylls of the King, two women with anonymous backgrounds (Mary Dove the housekeeper, and Percival's wife whose name escape's me for the moment), two chancers: a womanising fraudster called Dubois, and a nasty *socialist* with *glasses* called... Gerald Wright I think? I'm not sure of the chronology but this is the second of the books I've read with rather nastily portrayed fabian socialists, who want to set up *schools* or *reform criminals* with other people's *money*. (Conversely the communist in A Murder is Announced is rather attractively portrayed iirr). Both of those former books rely to a degree on an idiot – A Pocketful of Rye to a ludicrous extent.

There's at least three people involved in bringing about the nursery rhyme manifestation. It's also one of those books where Jane Marple takes a bit of a back seat, in this case to an odd detective, who appears stupid, but has a way of drawing people out.

Basically it's a novel where the detective can go no further with his method and then Miss Marple basically TELLS him who did it THE END. It's totally abortive and stupid. Also its explanation is absurd.

Anyway - this preamble has a point. I noted in the Joan Hickson Miss Marple, they understandably swapped out the end for a rather unexciting slow car chase. Joan Hickson herself is of course superb - that 'cockatoo' head that Christie describes, and she manages all the mannerisms perfectly. They sensibly do away with both the daughter in the family and the unpleasant *socialist* she's woo-ing. And I think they sub in Inspector Slack for teh lolz, again probably rightly so.

What with mark s always going on about Geraldine McEwan, I thought I'd see what sort of a fist they'd made of such a bad novel in that adaptation. Anyway, I noticed just now that actually they didn't do it in the Geraldine McEwan period, rightly preferring to go into the short stories before having to deal with the turd that is A Pocketful of Rye.

Long and short of it is i've had a couple of beers and slightly more than half a bottle of wine and now i'm going to liveblog this adaptation of a pocketful of rye with Julia McKenzie, sux to be you.

ok, they're establishing the idiot adenoidal maid (quite well done in the Hickson Marple - HM from now on). Gladys far too attractive. Lol they do a silly reveal of non Geraldine McEwan reveal of McKenzie Marple.

sort of supposed to make you go 'oh noes not geraldine mcewan still i suppose i'd best get used to it'.

unpleasant relationship between marple and the maid, not right, reference to the blue shepherdess in the a murder is announced.

lol rupert graves is lance, played by pete davison in the HM version. (in the book he's dark so RG prob better).

i don't believe the office. rather a cynical 'this is silly isn't it everyone' approach to the actors and mannerisms.

muuuuch faster paced and edited. so comic book basically. not a terrible approach. interested to see how it plays out.

Timothy West is enormously enjoyable as Rex in the HM version. The actor here - i don't know him - gets very little time to die.

the doctor who pronounces rex dead in the HM version (1985) is black, which feels like a deliberate statement of sorts, but despite its frivolity this newer version (2009) feels less willing to show that sort of latitude in the casting (there's no indication in the original book - and with a much later one - The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side, making a bit of a play about someone described as 'black looking but not a n___' i think we would know.)

yewtree lodge is wrong. it is supposed to feel like a gaudy sham. all of the money is 'wrong' somehow.

my lord they're keen on the strenuous 'comedy' sex in this version.

keeenya. tick.

anyway, yewtree lodge here is just boilerplate 'wealthy house'.

mary dove whoever is playing here is not a housekeeper, even a dodgy one as in the book.

Helen Baxendale.

Matthew Macfadyen a very unconvincing detective inspector neele.

the acting in this is awful.

this habit of large 'surreal' close ups on people's faces, as through a convex glass, is odd. it's presumably intended to convey unreality of 'period' and generally criminal oddness? it's oppressive, but maybe not entirely wrong for the mood.

Not recognizing the name Geraldine McEwan, I did a image search on her. I swear, in every single photo she had the same precise facial expression, with the identical slight smile, across decades worth of pics.

they've kept the daughter and the nasty socialist gerald (yet to appear). i guess the breakneck pace means you can fit in the full range of characters (one of the problems with whodunnit adaptations is that they often have to get rid of additional people designed to confuse the 'whodunnit' aspect, making it much easier to see who did do it. in this case the original HM version got rid of the necessary doublings designed to confuse the reader).

that's her, though she'd died by this version.

hence the very unappealing McKenzie Marple in this.

oh very close shot for shot version of Lance being apprehended off the plane in both the HM version and this. That's quite nice.

Miss Marple is listening to JAZZ on the radio. not possibly.

bored of keeenya now. they can just say kenya if they're going to be so indifferent to everything else.

it's like a children's programme.

this does a better job of both the book and the HM version of explaining Lance's motivations *during* the narrative.

they do a good job of slamming the two subsequent murders right next to each other. that's fairly critical in the novel, and is confusingly done in the HM original.

oh they've left out the elderly daughter of the plymouth brethren who despises the church of england, Effie Ramsbottom. she's about the most enjoyable thing in both book and HM version (played very well by Fabia Drake). i wonder if as something of a comedy but moral turn, she just confused the tone of this version too much.

julia mckenzie is no sort of marple at all.

a good deal of the plot in all versions is dependent on only one person liking marmalade in the whole family.

oh interestingly they've had to use the drunk butler Crump considerably overplayed by Ken Campbell to convey the information that old Effie Ramsbottom does. It adds a considerable amount of grotesquerie to it, and again, maybe that's right, but overall this is a hot mess.

people are too attractive in this, for a lot of the comments about plainness and unattractiveness. unfortunately still no sight of the nasty socialist.

this version actually manages the critical aspects of *who* turned up at the moment when the murders happen well, much better than the HM version, and possibly better than the book tbh.

this is fantastically boring. i probably shouldn't have started it.

this version doesn't shy away from the book's subplot that Rex Fortescue is suffering from what was termed, very unpleasantly, as 'general paralysis of the insane' (GPI - here updated to Pick's Disease). i think the HM version doesn't bother with this.

there's an odd directorial mannerism, presumably not confined to this, where the camera slides off to the right and forward of someone's face when they go into recollection. not sure why that motion should suggest remembering.

feels quite artificial now, presumably because you don't see it any more.

SOCIALIST TEACHER.

well played by Chris Larkin.

the conversation between the two arthurian brothers - lance and percival - is quite serious and touching, with layers of meaning to it. best thing so far.

miss marple's bag is wrong. she knows how to go out and dress, just in an old fashioned way. that leather holdall is wrong.

the interview with mrs mckenzie, who is losing her mind, in the book is truly awful. Christie has no sense has to convey mental illness. They do much better here - a rather bleak vengefulness that's quite effective. they leave it out entirely in the HM version - again probably a compression required by the slower pace.

in fact this *has* slowed down in pace and is the better for it.

the sex in this is grim.

it's interesting that this has become extremely faithful even in the matter of dialogue to the novel. suggests they wanted to get through the stages of the murder very quickly in order to more fully dramatise the end stages. that makes sense really - it's the bit that is generally most interesting in tv adaptations. (i think the murders and lead up tends to be equally interesting in golden age books).

fascinated to see how they tie up the extremely dud novel ending given the ever-increasing fidelity.

unfortunately any scene with miss marple in is terrible.

looool the whole truth drug stuff is so ridiculous.

again the central mechanism of the plot is an idiot. it would be almost avant garde if it weren't so necessarily manipulative.

OMG they do just follow the book - miss marple just tells the inspector after a long boring monologue. what a crock of shit.

what a strange adaptation. it starts in comic book style with almost a contempt for the genre, and then becomes slower and slower and more and more faithful until it ends on a very long explanatory monologue. does show the problem of adapting a crap novel.

somewhat like the HM versions the main deductive capacity of Miss Marple in the books - her detection by analogy, that so and so is like someone she once knew in the village - is totally absent (it's more present in the HM version). she is just a bog standard detective who's good at talking to people. it's a bit silly in the books, but it is distinctive, and weakens the point of her somewhat in the adaptations.

in this miss marple cries at the end when she finds the proof she's right. in the novel the emotions are more mixed, memorably - "The tears rose in Miss Marple’s eyes. Succeeding pity, there came anger—anger against a heartless killer. And then, displacing both these emotions, there came a surge of triumph—the triumph some specialist might feel who has successfully reconstructed an extinct animal from a fragment of jawbone and a couple of teeth."

I’ve read this one but don’t recall finding it specifically turdy. Of course I can’t remember a jot about the plot, but I do absolutely remember and adore that ending - Marple’s unexpected biblical anger is v satisfying: “I AM THE LAW (of St Mary Mead)”

Otm re McKenzie

the insight mcewan brings is that marple is bored and extremely bright, but not an especially nice woman: everyone else hunts hard for the niceness, she instead goes for relentless buzzing goblin, trolling the thinking into then out of her not-quite useless cop "buddies" (who hate her but need her). she's like a way less loveable columbo with a burr in the throat (i love her voice it's like a one-note drillbit)

the story which has the reveal on a boat when it cuts to her identifying and explaining it's like a torture scene with the camera hard-focused on the torturer's face as she smiles slightly and the burr starts to bite (i think the murderer throws themselves into the river it's so terrible for them)

the other marples want life to go back to the ordinary country house routine before the crime happened, bcz they enjoy it: the mcewan marple HATES the non-crime country house routine, it's insipid and smarmy and snobbish w/o relief

the brothers Lance and Percival

https://thewonderfulworldofcinema.files.wordpress.com/2019/10/lance-percival-carry-on-cruising-1962.jpg?w=190

lol my dad viscerally loathed lance percival for some reason, enough that he commented on it more than once and it's now the only thing i think of when i see him

His career seems fairly inexplicable.

Bringing it back to the crime theme, Lance Percival co-wrote the 1970s ITV murder mystery drama / panel show Whodunnit? with Jeremy Lloyd. A few of the crime playlets were quite ingenious, and you wonder why somebody hasn't revived the format.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zxuBfdnN6JE

Possibly this time round without Rodney Bewes' memorable shirt, which he once wore as a Whodunnit? panellist, and which was mentioned in the last series of Inside No. 9.

The Rodney Bewes reference in #InsideNo9 was based on a bizarre t-shirt he wore on the TV show "Whodunnit", the episode in particular "Too Many Cooks". @ReeceShearsmith @SP1nightonly pic.twitter.com/tc41tKIuNq

— Mathew (@mattandrewbevan) February 25, 2020

Kingsley Amis appeared as a guest on at least one episode of Whodunnit.

iirc Martin Skidmore had a soft spot for Lance Percival's calypso records.

On a Christie-related note, I've just been reading The Mysterious Affair at Styles for the first time. It's an incredibly confident debut, by which I mean all the elements of the Christie style/formula are already present and correct and will serve her well, pretty much unchanged, for the next fifty years or so.

the insight mcewan brings is that marple is bored and extremely bright, but not an especially nice woman: everyone else hunts hard for the niceness, she instead goes for relentless buzzing goblin, trolling the thinking into then out of her not-quite useless cop "buddies" (who hate her but need her). she's like a way less loveable columbo with a burr in the throat (i love her voice it's like a one-note drillbit)

the story which has the reveal on a boat when it cuts to her identifying and explaining it's like a torture scene with the camera hard-focused on the torturer's face as she smiles slightly and the burr starts to bite (i think the murderer throws themselves into the river it's so terrible for them)

― mark s, Sunday, 19 April 2020 10:25 bookmarkflaglink

This is interesting, and makes me want to watch the McEwan ones, cos I think it's exactly right for the books - Miss Marple gets physically ill or is severely depleted in the absence of murder, and she finds genuine and largely admitted pleasure in bloodthirsty crime and the scent of wickedness or evil. the vampiric or sadistic extent of this isn't admitted of course - in fact everyone looks rather fondly on it, because of her relentlessly emphasised pink fluffiness.

for some reason i'd had it in my head that marple was a trial prelude to poirot, and I was going to respond to Ward Fowler's post saying something along the lines that maybe that's why 'Styles' was so assured, but I see from looking from Wikipedia that this isn't at all the case, and in fact Styles is 1920 I think? and Miss Marple doesn't debut until '27.

donald pleasance’s performance in the hickson caribbean adventure is enormously enjoyable. his enunciation - heavy H on the hour eg - is great.

touching fantasies of older women as "sleuths" --how did they ever evolve & become so popular? in actual life, women like Miss Marple are fretting over arthritis; when to have hips & knees replaced; obsessed with illnesses & losses of old friends, relatives; fearful of c****r. https://t.co/EDtSXLAseP

— Joyce Carol Oates (@JoyceCarolOates) September 21, 2021

Joyce clearly has never read any Miss Marple stories, which are 25% about exactly that

watching the mcewan marples one by one on netflix

1: the body in the library (2004) -- sloppily shocking who-care acting from nearly everyone, why do ppl hire simon callow for telly, he was fluting his "bad posh play" voice the entire time
2: the murder at the vicarage (2004) -- much better all round despite minor gatiss klaxon, plus 🎯 for my thesis that MM is bored until there's a killing (she hears a gunshot & her face lights up)
3: 4:50 from paddington (2004) -- hard work (combination train posh-house whodunit) tho amanda holden is better than i expected (she actually does roughly 75% of the sleuthing)

2: is threaded if not warped by a bit of fake marple lore (= her beloved died in WW1 & she still pines)
3: the family in the big house are almost all horrible, more deserve to be murdered than are

sad drake face: mcewan marple. happy drake face: hickson marple.

drake famously an idiot tbf 😃😇

(based on the three ive watched so far it's entirely possible the hickson marples are better directed lol)

mcewan's resting face is a quietly gleeful "how can i fuck these twats up" (complimentary)

The whole "gleeful avenger fuelled by murder" thing is strongly implicit in the books iirc. Book Marple gets pretty metal at times (albeit in very occasional light asides).

I find both McEwan and McKenzie unwatchable. The Hickson Marples have that lovely 1980s BBC direction style, deceptively casual then suddenly full of squalid closeups - the murder at the start of 450 from Paddington is one of those great terrifying-for-life things that children see on TV. Some New Hollywood influence maybe? It's closer to Tinker Tailor than Sunday night light entertainment. The overacting is better, too.

4: a murder is announced (2005) -- crime is jonathan creek mode, GM given little to work with in this mulch of over-talky exposition and under-realised characters (only catherine tate's angry red herring of a polish housekeeper is not a cipher; alexander armstrong's detective is more bland cardboard than foil)

I cannot forgive the 2000s Marple for doing my favourite Agatha Christie book The Sittaford Mystery (not a Marple story!) changing almost everything and not even making it any good.

I quite like the McEwan/McKenzie Marples... I've read the original material so much I like it when they mess with the adaptations instead of just trying to film the books. It's sort of adult panto actingwise but that's what I want from a cozy serial. The top tier of the 2000s Marples are Murder at the Vicarage, The Moving Finger, By the Pricking of My Thumbs, Murder is Easy, Towards Zero and Why Didn't They Ask Evans. And a Pale Horse is dumb but I can't deny I delight in watching it.

I cannot forgive the 2000s Marple for doing my favourite Agatha Christie book The Sittaford Mystery (not a Marple story!) changing almost everything and not even making it any good.

The Sittaford Mystery *is* really good and is unusual in golden age mysteries in having an elegant, deductible solution. (i did not deduce it)

i’m just about willing to allow mckewen is a good marple but i find the whole “jape” in those irritatingly overplayed likewise acting. hickson is so deadpan.

just listened to st bertram’s hotel to solve my terrible sleep and its central conceit is quite chesterton-ish and wonderful, but see also christie’s imv Bad tendency towards grand conspiracies (especially international conspiracies tho not here). it also ends with a hilarious dril tweet.

mcewan

5: sleeping murder (2006) -- set in my lovely sunny devon (sidmouth playing "dilllmouth"), suspects largely a troupe of pier-end players, played by a gang of well-loved TV-comedian thesps (dawn french! russ abbot!) all disciplined & professional enough not to callow it up. story is intricate & not unpleasingly silly: most interesting element (to me) was how it seemed to be a psychological ghost story until marp firmly squelched that dimension. you can spot the villain a coastal mile off. don't really understand the title.

6: the moving finger (2006): village life is rubbish (poison pen letters to all, then murder), inc. pointless cameo from ken russell speaking mainly latin, problematic age-gap-discourse romance goes unnoticed by most (poison-pen writer in particular sleeping on it). v enoyable depsite marp ebing mainly in the background until the end (when she springs a wildly irresponsible trap lol). several lumpish attempts at hitchcock-style devices (coloured filter for disturbed mental state, lit bulb in a glass of milk indicates poison, fvck-awful back projection as a deliberate “hommage”?)

depsite marp ebing

:)

7: by the pricking of my thumbs (2006): ok this was VERY bad lol, badly conceived and worse written. first thing is the actual book is a v belated (late 60s) tommy & tuppence, written bcz readers kept asking agatha what happened to them. well the TV answer is “he became a pompously obnoxious MI6 spook, she became a teeteringly unhappy alcoholic” — which shoc-reveal it then attempts to rescue to shoehorning in first jane m and then an angela carter-esque reading of the macbeth witches, hansel & gretel, little red riding hood and don’t look now (!) — and guess what? they don’t pull this off! also nearly none of the characters make sense, as if the thesps were all constantly being battered by terrible performance notes from the director (charles dance required to shout a climactic line with just crackpot emphases).

anyway v bad, they done my lovely geraldine wrong (she’s fine, such as she’s present at all)

8: the sittaford mystery (2006): upthread disgusted fans say this is a travesty of the 1930s book — i haven’t read it but that doesn’t seem much in doubt. A bit shamefaced how much I enjoyed it as a result. yes it’s an overstuffed ragbag of over-familiar tropes — how to get everyone into snowbound hotel — but it somehow has a pleasantly goofy vibe (not everyone bcz the sleuth in the book isn’t one of her big-name favourites and marp, dragged in to get it made at all, is off away in another big isolated house. moved to the early 50s it kind of hangs together round, as an anthony eden figure with a dodgy past in egyptian archeology, with the kind of bigger-than-life persona that does persuasively attach to real-life politicians (basically it’s timothy dalton trying out his hot-fuzz character a year before edgar wraith discovers him). there’s also a famous ouija board scene: (1) i have never even seen an IRL ouija board let alone used one, and (2) the indicator (here a wineglass not a planchette) was swerving wildly right across a large table, is the physical movement normally so extravagant? marp may disdain the spirit world but they were evidently gleefully active here…

adding: someone in this show is always quietly reading a crime classic, chandler or whoever. also it’s always structured to open with a major flashback to many years previously, a tic that seems like a built-in admission of inadequate writing? anyway like i say i liked it despite all the obvious problems (such as lozzx fox playing an arsehole — who is slapped in the face by an excellent ending we are in NO WAY prepared for )

milestones in no longer proofing my own work

edgar wraith

Harsh but increasingly fair.

9: At Bertram's Hotel (2007)
10: Ordeal by Innocence (2007)
11: Towards Zero (2008)

A knock on my “McEwen is the best marple” theory is that (while entirely correct) i first formulated it years ago watching Towards Zero, not knowing that it was second last in her sequence and arguably the first where a director properly gets and adequately dramatises what she’s up to = marple operating as unshakeable trolling prankish annoyance

All three of these are way better paced than most of the earlier ones, leaving proper space for marp among the rest of the intricate unfolding christie trickiness. viz she doesn’t feel jammed into someone else’s storyline as a needless afterthought; the formal classicism is taken seriously. I’m not going to say there’s NO bad acting — tom baker is briefly on-board lol, looming loudly red-gaced out at us — but tbf they do collectively keep “a HAND-bag!?” to a minimum. First is a hotel where all kinds gather, several semi-unrelated crimes unfolding simultaneously. Second is a large adoptive family just soused in mutual dislike and deep misery, deaths super-nasty with evident upsetting consequence. Third is a quasi-meta ep: villain is aware of the genre’s tropes and plans accordingly, for a long time way ahead of the solving methods of detectives and attentive readers, with marp at one point (no spoilers!) doing the funniest thing.

One to go.

Selfishly I would love some kind of "If you love very mid British TV whodunnits, here's 10 to watch" masterlist with the standout eps of Lewis, Frost, Marple etc

gotta watch 'em all

i lived in the UK in the 80s and 90s, i've done my time

the touchstone of quality in TV whodunnits is the story in which members of an ageing 60s rock group are being bumped off: agatha even lived long enough to be familiar with wish you were here, an LP that shd have inspired more intra-band lethality than it did, but chose to stay in her lane (derogatory)

12: Nemesis (2008)

final return of the mac, this time reading REX STOUT in another v familiar agatha storyshape = a bunch of squabbling weirdos foregathered via eccentric bequest to right a wrong, filmed in the moment i guess when ppl thought rising sar ronni ancona was good not bad (her badness even eclipses my immense and juistified dislike of richard e. grant) (yes i know you love him but yr wrong bcz he's never not annoying).

anyway apart from ronni being terrible it was fine, with a deserted nunnery AND a picnic at hanging rock, mcewen as ever the pea to everyone else's princess. ruth wilson is in it as someone you assume will be more pivotal bcz she's 👍🏽

Interesting about Towards Zero, which I read last year, ahead of a new BBC version which I then didn't get around to watching. It's a standalone whodunnit, no Marple (or Poirot), quite a slow and complex one (lots of characters, backstory) by Christie standards.

I am also E Grant averse - except I think he's really good in Jane Campion's Portrait of a Lady.

Sorry, I don't believe anyone ever thought Ronnie Ancona was good.

i mean ditto but she won best actress in the 2003 british comedy awards

i think she's in this bcz they're aiming for "low-key star-studded" (mike baldwin is in it!) (he's fine)

my "this is very dumb but i'll say it anyway" moment with Towards Zero is feeling that “zero” somehow isn't a word agatha shd know or be saying