Movie Crime Log: Dying, Enemy, Woman

So, look, I’m about to deliver you a mixed-bag of news. Grip the arms of your chair and hang on for dear life. The bad news is, it’s 2015 already. 2014 is gone, never to return. The good news is, the year is kicking off with a Nicolas Cage movie!

In Dying Of The Light he stars as Evan Lake, a desk-bound Langley CIA agent forced into retirement by signs of early onset dementia. When his former tormentor pops up on the grid Lake decides to deliver him some good old-fashioned retribution while he still can.

Dying Of The Light has an interestingly tortured development. It was intended to be directed by Nicholas Winding Refn and star Harrison Ford, but Refn bailed to direct Drive instead. Screenwriter Paul Schrader – you know, Taxi Driver and suchlike – then directed from his own script.

But the movie was taken away from him by the studio and re-edited and mixed. The expressionist colour-scheme Schrader used was removed. The whole thing has received, as a result, a suitably tepid critical response. My earlier enthusiasm in the first paragraph was clearly misplaced. However, do make your own mind up by eyeballing this trailer.

Behold Cage’s grim countenance:

Dying Of The Light is out today in cinemas and available on your new laptop tomorrow.

Moving on.

It’s well-know that somewhere in the world, we all have a doppleganger, someone who looks just like us. Mine is Alijaz from Strictly. In Enemy Jake Gyllenhaal plays beardy Adam, who’s watching a film when he sees someone just like him in the background. Oh, the irony. He becomes obsessed with finding his double. ‘The result,’ it says here, ‘is a haunting and provocative psychosexual thriller about duality and identity, where in the end only one man will survive.’

Enemy is based on the Nobel Prize-winning novel by Jose Saramago and directed by Denis Villeneuve, the bloke who made the awesome Prisoners, so it’s probably worth the watch. Double movies are always kind of creepy. And Gyllenhaal’s mostly good in everything, these days. Except Prince Of Persia. That was totes rank.

So a few years back Susan Hill wrote a ghost story called The Woman In Black, and I think it’s fair to say it’s done quite well. It became a long-running – and trouser-browning scary – theatre production, and then a movie starring the boy wizard.

Now there’s a sequel called Woman In Black: Angel In Death which delivers up more period scares, courtesy of Hammer Films. The action moves forward to the Blitz, when a group of schoolchildren are taken to the old, sinister estate — always a good place to house some shell-shocked kids – and here must confront the dark force who still resides in the house.

I mean, really? Orphans, a decaying mansion full of scary dolls? Aren’t there any suitable B&Bs in town, or what?

TV & Movie Crime Log: Murder, S.H.I.E.L.D, Prisoners, Runner

You’re reading a crime fiction blog so I’m going to take a wild guess that BBC4’s new three-part series, A Very British Murder, which starts tonight, may be your cup of tea.

It  looks at the curious relationship between killing and mass entertainment, charting the rise of the whodunit and the development of the classic British murder-mystery.

Colonel Mustard, in the Library, with the cut-and-paste:

In the first programme, Lucy Worsley begins with real-life crime from the first half of the 19th century: the Ratcliffe Highway Murders; Mariah Marten and the Red Barn; and the Bermondsey Horror. She investigates how our modern pre-occupation with murder began here, during the period when writer Thomas De Quincey wrote his celebrated essays on the subject that teasingly identified the guilty pleasure we get from it. A nation of ‘Murder Fanciers’ De Quincey called us.

As each gripping story of murder is told, Lucy explains how each of these crimes was transformed and mythologised into a variety of popular entertainments. And to recreate these moments, Lucy sings the ballads, acts out the melodramas and holds the strings during the puppet shows.

A Very British Murder is on tonight at 9pm, on the aforementioned BBC4.

Come with me now, if you will, to the other end of the televisual spectrum, where we keep locked away all the programmes labelled Guilty Pleasures. I’d bet my house that Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D will fit that tag nicely. It’s a spin-off from all the Marvel movies – I mean, like, duh! –  with Clark Gregg reprising his Agent Coulson role from the movies. That’s him, in the middle, trying to look as hip as those young people by wearing his sunnies indoors.

Wait, you cry, how can that be so? Coulson expired after getting torn a new one by Loki in The Avengers. Considering Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. is about superpersons and hi-tech gizmos and such, I’d humbly suggest that you’re probably over-thinking this stuff. Expect many scenes where everyone stands around looking at holographic schematics that rotate far too quickly.

S.H.I.E.L.D. by the way stands for Strategic Homeland, Enforcement and Logistics Division. I remember reading a Nick Fury comic when I was a kid and this guy escaped by using jet thrusters in his shoes. Even then I remember thinking you’d have to have legs as strong as girders to fly on those suckers.

Funnily enough, the detective in the movie Prisoners is called Loki. It’s not even mildly amusing, actually, but is a good way to segue to this week’s movie release, Prisoners.

The reviews in the States have been pretty good and the box-office healthy for this drama about a father who takes the law into his own hands when his daughter goes missing. It stars Hugh Jackman, rocking a beard, and Jake Gyllenhaal, and is apparently haunting and suspenseful.

If the title is a good indication of quality, then it certainly seems to have the edge over Runner Runner.

Runner Runner stars Justin Timberlake and Ben Affleck – we like Ben –  and is about a guy who goes to confront an online poker mogul on his flash island and ends up as his protégé – until the FBI come calling.

Incidentially, here’s no truth in the rumour the sequel will be called Runner Runnier.