Oxford Murders

haha! i was wondering what the deal was with this. it was supposed to come out yesterday, but hasn't been reviewed anywhere and isn't on in cambridge despite there being posters up. yet i saw it was on in oxford. i've got to review it, but again, they don't seem to have preview-screened it; either way i'll be reviewing it off a public screening. stoked for the suckage! assuming it actually gets released outside oxford.

I asked the guy in the cinema on the way out if this was a preview or a general release and he said general. Who knows.

The screenplay seems to be this spectacularly misjudged attempt at camp. You can't play a thriller/mystery like that. Breaks the contract with the viewer to the extent that they no longer give a shit about whodunnit.

weird. it does seem to be out in london, so i guess it is a 'general' release, but the papers seem not to have reviewed it.

It's a weird production arrangement. Mostly Spanish money, it seems. Perhaps they've stuffed up the UK distribution/marketing.

Either that or they know that have a stinker are hoping for a decent opening weekend before the reviews come out.

I think its based on a Spanish novel, hence the strange Spanish director, spanish money, misunderstading of anything that actually happens in Oxford (ie if there is a murder, Morse, or latterly Lewis sorts it out).

I may have to see it to check on the maths.

Seen plenty of adverts for this on TV.

the no press-screening thing is almost always code for 'godawful', and yet this director has form and it's not like 'the avengers' or whatever where star-power and the strength of the brand can be relied on for that first weekend push. could be a cock-up.

I really need to see Acción mutante again.

I'd love to see this if/when it gets to the US, though I haven't seen any of his movies before or since Day of the Beast.

I read the book, and that was rubbish too. It seemed to have been written by someone who knew little of the geography of Oxford, i.e. someone comes out of the Pitt Rivers museum, turns right and is immediately in St Aldates. That sloppy approach to detail really annoyed me.

The book was written by Guillermo Martinez. He's Argentinian, he has a PhD in maths and did his first post doc at Oxford. Getting details about Oxford wrong isn't a problem for me, and he don't remember him doing it very often. I don't understand why anyone would care that much, and I did get very annoyed with the nerdy guffawing students in the audience in the cinema laughing loudly at mistakes of geography.

The maths and physics in the book at least are watertight. Marcus du Sautoy who reviewed it for the Guardian and the Notices of the American Mathematical Society agree with me. Go me!

The problem I suspect is that you can get away with exposition of e.g. quantum mechanics masquerading as a tutorial in a pub for ten pages much more easily than you can in a film.

Interest declared: I interviewed the author a couple of year ago. I'm not going to link to the article because it's awful, but I found him to be a good guy and an intelligent author.

the natives are restless: http://www.dailyinfo.co.uk/reviews/feature/2949/The%2BOxford%2BMurders%2B/