firecat

• Agatha Christie, Cards on the Table (audiobook)
  
• Georgette Heyer, The Great Roxhythe (audiobook)
  
• A Haunting in Venice (movie)
  
• Rustin (movie)
  
• Players (movie)

Listening

• Agatha Christie, Cards on the Table. Poirot #15. Published 1936. Narrated by Hugh Fraser. Recurring characters: Poirot, Colonel Race, Superintendant Battle (I really like him), and Ariadne Oliver (her second appearance, the first is in a short story in 1932). I liked this one a fair bit. I love how Ariadne Oliver is in part the voice of the author (“the character of Ariadne Oliver does have a strong dash of myself,” Christie said at least once). She goes on at length about how she writes detective stories; she has a popular series about a Finnish detective that she’s sick of writing (Christie got heartily sick of writing Poirot), and those scenes alone are worth the price of admission. Also Oliver has written a book called “The Body in the Library”: Christie’s novel with the same title, the first novel featuring Jane Marple, was published six years later. The character Shaitana is really fun. He goes around cosplaying Mephistopheles (his name means Satan in Hindi) and he cries out to be crossed over with Lucifer (TV) and Oscar Wilde.
  
  Premise: Four people who might have committed murder and four crime experts are invited to a bridge party, at which the host is murdered. Knowing more about bridge would have helped me like the story better, although it’s not necessary for following the plot.
  
  
• Georgette Heyer, The Great Roxhythe. Published 1923 (Heyer was 21). Narrated by Stefan Rudnicki (he’s an American, which is a bit jarring given the setting, but he does a good job and has a lovely deep voice). Set during the reign of Charles II, 1660–1685. This is my second Heyer; the first one I read was The Black Moth. This is newly re-released because Heyer came to dislike it and suppressed its publication. So perhaps “by publication order” isn’t the best way to read her works, but that’s how I roll.
  
  A lot of people don’t like this novel, and I can see some of their reasons — pacing issues, major plot shift partway through, the ending. (I dont agree with criticisms that the history is boring or the writing terribly awkward.) But FUUUUCK did this book dig deep into my id. I love proud, powerful, enigmatic anti-heroes and the impossible standards and attitudes they ride straight over a cliff on.
  
  Also the story is SO shippy and homoerotic. As a Goodreads reviewer said, “In [Heyer’s] other books, whatever hidden homoerotic elements they may contain, there is a central heterosexual romance, but in TGR no women come between the men.” The man-love-triangle doesn’t work out the way I was YEARNING for the whole 13 hours I listened. But hey, that’s what fix-it fanfic is for. And there’s a backstory about the main character that’s clamoring to be written.
  

Reading

Watching

• A Haunting in Venice. 2023. Based on Agatha Christie’s novel Halloween Party but moved to Venice & set 20 years earlier. (Suchet played Poirot in a previous adaptation of the same novel.) Directed by Kenneth Branagh, who also played Poirot. Michelle Yeoh has a role where she gets to chew the scenery a lot.
  
  It got good reviews, and the cinematography is amazing; they filmed it on location in this wonderful old building that’s a character in its own right. I gather it includes stylistic homages to lots of old movies. I don’t know much about such things, and I wish Ebert were still around to do a commentary because he’s great at explaining that stuff.
  
  *sigh* I didn’t like it all that much. I found it difficult to care about the characters, and the plot seemed jumbled. Branagh’s Poirot is kind of flat if you ask me. And he did this one thing that is SO out of character for Poirot I wanted to pause it to yell at the screen.
  
  I think I didn’t like it because I wanted to watch a different movie, so let me quote the reviewer from RogerEbert.com, who gave it 3.5 stars. He says it’s the best of the series: “empathetic portrayal of the death-haunted mentality of people from Branagh's parents' generation who came through World War II with psychic scars, wondering what had been won….[Poirot has] a monologue about his disillusionment that evokes comments made about Christie near the end of her life, and in the novel, about what she perceived as increasingly cruel tendencies in humanity.”
  
  Yeah, that’s part of why I didn’t like it. I want escapism from my entertainment these days. There’s enough cruel humanity in real life, it’s too much to get it in my movies too.
  
  
• Rustin. 2024. In 1963, Martin Luther King made his “I have a dream” speech at the first March on Washington, attended by 200K+ people. This film is about the guy who led the team of organizers. He worked mostly from behind the scenes because he was gay and the Civil Rights movement was uncomfortable with that back then. Colman Domingo, who plays Rustin, got a Best Actor nomination and definitely deserves it. I loved his performance; the guy jumps right off the screen at you. Ami Ameen plays MLK very well. There are lots of quotable lines and a great (nostalgic for those of us who were alive then…I was only one year old in the summer of 63 but I remember a lot of them anyway) set of songs was used in the soundtrack.
  
  This is a purposely optimistic film where most of the problems get solved. So of course it’s leaving out a lot of tragedy and struggle. I’m hungry to be reminded of progressive victories and progressive message that we deserve to believe in ourselves or else, to borrow a quote from the film, “we do the work of our oppressors by oppressing ourselves.”
  
  A couple of interesting historical notes that appeared in the IMdB Trivia:
  
  —Fellow Civil Rights leader Julian Bond often quoted Bayard Rustin as joking that "Martin Luther King couldn't organize vampires to go to a bloodbath"
  
  —Some celebrities who attended the 1963 March on Washington were Josephine Baker, James Baldwin, Harry Belafonte, Marlon Brando, Tony Curtis, Bobby Darin, Ossie Davis, Sammy Davis Jr., Ruby Dee, James Garner, Charlton Heston, Lena Horne, Eartha Kitt, Burt Lancaster, Rita Moreno, Paul Newman, Gregory Peck, Jackie Robinson, Joanne Woodward.
  
  Personal note: I attended the 20th Anniversary March on Washington in 1983.
  
  
• Players. 2024 Netflix film.
  I watched it because Tom Ellis has a major role. He brings on some top-notch eye-candy. It’s a rom-com with a mildly interesting trope reversal. It’s cute and predictable — but you want this type of movie to be predictable, right? — and the chemistry among the friend group is good, and with one exception the characters are interesting and not stereotyped. The exception is seriously offensive though.
  
  Stef-Bob says to check it out if one or both of these is true:
  You like looking at Tom Ellis. His character isn’t that interesting, so if you mostly like him for his acting chops, it’s not worth it.
  You like rom-coms
  
  And if this is true:
  You can tolerate several gratuitous “fat geek who’s always eating” scenes.