An Homage to More or Less Everything

Somewhat against my better judgment, I  trekked off behind Mrs. Buce to the Plookaville Multiplex this afternoon for a screening of Wes Anderson's Grand Budapest Hotel.  I was probably being too fussy. Ir's a good-natured entertainment with lots of comic side effects.  But I'll sign on with others and say I just don't get this hat tip to Stephan Zweig.  It's not that the movie is not derivative.  No: it's a virtual tropical rain forest of homages: Laurel and Hardy, Dudley Moore and Peter Cook, Holmes and Moriarty, Alfred Hitchcock, I'd say even a little of the early Disney: Pinocchio for sure, maybe a little Fantasia and I think I even sniff a little Lady and the Tramp.   If there is a hotel in the background, I suppose it would be the Hotel Savoy of Joseph Roth.  If on a mountain top, then Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain.  Or if he is just trying to make a buck on the hotel theme, then I suppose it would be The Best Exotic Marigold.  But Zweig, oy.  My guess is that he's never so much as read him.  And it doesn't have much of nothing to do with Budapest, either.

As I Lay Dying: How to Deal with a Classic

Chez Buce took in a screening last night of James Franco's As I Lay Dying last.  It's a good movie, maybe a a very good movie, but it screws up one of my hobbyhorse theories of moviemaking.  Let me see if I can explain.

First; it's a movie-from-a-book.  More precisely a movie from a famous book: William Faulkner's first or second or third best novel, depending upon taste.  We did it as a readaloud a few years ago, and sign on to the conventional opinion.

But here's the hobbyhorse. It's not original with me, but I share the view that to make a good movie from a book, you need a second-rate book. Think Gone with the Wind, or Wizard of Oz, or Bridges of Madison County.  A really good book, either the director just uses the franchise for his own private flight of fancy: think The Great Gatsby. Or he tries to be faithful to the original and winds up with an expensive high-end visual aid: think Merchant-Ivory (admit it now--has anybody ever watched a Merchant-Ivory movie twice?).

Franco's Faulkner is not at all a directorial private fancy (with one glaring exception-see infra).   It's  faithful--you might almost say obsessive--attempt to remain loyal to its source.  So far, sounds like trouble, but the odd thing is, it works.  This is, in short, the most successful obsessive recreation I can remember.

I'm not certain I understand why it works.  I can offer a tentative guess: it's the style of the telling in the source.  Faulkner's novel (not all Faulkner novels, but this one) is a monument to artistic restraint.    It's short: Amazon says 267 pages but that overstates because so much of it is in the form of short chapters that leave  lot of white space on the page.  It needs to be savored.   And so much of what you come to appreciate is unstated, so as to make you seek it out for yourself.  In this sense it is almost the opposite of the (even shorter) Great Gatsby, where so much of its appeal is in the magic of the prose.

So my guess is that you don't need to worry about the stuff that is left out: it was left out in the first place, and we are the better for it.  

But there is a perplexing flip side here. That is: I 'm not in a position to know but this is one movie where I suspect you really do want to have read the book beforehand.  There is a lot going on beneath and around the surface, and you're always saying "wait a minute--what?"  With the novel, you can stop and think.  Or you can flip back a few pages and double check.  Without the book as a crutch, you don't have that luxury.  So it might be that this really not so satisfying a movie for one who does not know the original.  Still, we thought it was great.

Well--I said one exception.  That is: Franco never should have cast himself.  Too much of a pretty boy. Way too self-indulgent.  Not an easy task, I suppose to fit out a cast of semi-human scrub farmers.  Tim Blake  Nelson as Anse  and Logan Marshall-Green as Jewel filled the bill admirably: one step short of Planet of the Apes.  Ahna O'Reilly as Dewey Dell was conscientious and honorable but somebody should have fitted her out with a set of rotten teeth.  Franco himself makes you think (at least for a moment) to Leonard DeCaprio, and that is never a good thing

Last Post on Last Post, etc.

A few final words on the Ford/Stoppard Parade's End, of which we have at last finished all five episodes--some about Stoppard, more about Ford.

Stoppard first: my appreciation grows for his capacity to do something that always seems to have eluded Merchant/Ivory: to take a "classic" and turn it into something other than  mere visual aid, while still keeping faith with the original.  Mrs. B reminds me he has done it (or tried it) at least once before--in Anna Karenina, where it didn't work so well.  I suppose you might write it off to the fact that Tolstoy is just a much bigger whale for any literary Ahab.  But there were good bits to Stoppard's Anna: the real problem, I think, was that he had no more than an absurd two and a half hours.

A bit of Ford/Stoppard: reading Parade's End, I kept picturing Christopher Tietjens as looking like ol' Fordie, the great tweedy walrus himself.  This didn't work at all, and it did prove an obstacle in trying to get my mind round the novel.  Here in the drama, Benedict Cumberbatch may not be the perfect Christopher--but then, who would be?--and in any event, he certainly is an improvement.

And about Ford, two things.  One, it only now dawns on me how PE is yet one more rework of the Don Quixote plot--high minded romantic, tragically and comically out of touch with his own time. This isn't a complete: it just adds to the texture. The only puzzle is why I didn't notice this before.  Is it somehow not so obvious in the novel?

And second Tietjens as a brilliant and decent man so sadly misunderstood.  Based on my somewhat superficial acquaintance, I gather that Ford was a pretty awful specimen: a shameless exploiter of other men's (and women's) lives and money.  Christopher is of course all decency and propriety and if other men hate him it is just because he is so wretchedly misunderstood.  Could be that we are seeing just a smidgen of self-justification here?

Stoppard's End

Still living on Netflix time, Chez Buce took in a screening the other night of the first two episodes of Ford Madox Ford's Parade's End as rendered by BBC. 

No, wait, that's not right: this is Tom Stoppard's rendition, drawing on the novels by Ford Madox Ford. The distinction is not just some Hollywood agent earning his percentage. No: unlike so many film renditions of classic novels, the one thing this is not is a mere visual accompaniment to a novel you've probably been meaning to read since you left the English Department—an accompaniment which, truth to tell, just won't be a lot of fun if you never kept that promise. Stoppard's presentation is in short, nothing if not free-standing.

But at the same time it is not just a flight of fancy, highjacking the author's name and fame for the purpose of better marketing (right—and just how much marketing pull does Ford Madox Ford enjoy?--ed.). No, Stoppard clearly draws on the novels: in many ways, he's quite faithful. As a playwright he works hard to do justice to one of the lonely monuments of 20^th Century fiction. And while you can perfectly well enjoy the video without the novel, the two do make fruitful companions. It happens that we—Mr. And Mrs. Buce--did do Parade's End—together, as a readaloud-- and just a couple of years back so it is still fairly fresh in our minds. And it's fun to watch Stoppard as he draws it out and gives it his own spin. And in a lot of cases, I think you'd agree that Stoppard actually improves the original by putting an extra spin on something that Ford was too shy or reticent to set out n its original form.

Groucho & Co

Mr. and Mrs. Buce have this bud: he's our age, but the poor dear lived a deprived childhood in that he grew up on a ranch and thus did not share our culture of movies.  With the aid of Netflix, we've taken it upon ourselves to rectify this deficiency.  Our latest offering was the Marx Brothers' Night at the Opera, which either is or is not the best of the Marx  brothers 30s spectaculars.  Guest and hosts  at Chez Byce pronounced themselves well satisfied on what was, for me at least, a repeat viewing.  "Repeat," in the respect that I first saw it at the age of about 15 at the Palace Theater in Manchester NH, when I sat gobsmacked and breathless before its irreverent charms.  I should have thought I had seen it a number of times since, though on reflection, perhaps not since my own kid was close to the same age a generation ago.

All of which is by way of saying that I saw things this time that I'd never seen before.  Specifically: how much Marx brothers humor depends on vaudeville schtick, the kind of stuff the brothers would have worked up over an eternity of stomping, hoofing, arm-flapping and suchlike in charmless public venues in nameless and forgettable locales.  I take it from reading some background that this would be the least schticky of the great Marx brothers films--the one Irving Thalberg tried to turn into a musical.  Actually for my money, the musical stuff ain't all that bad: you almost need it as a kind of anti-comic relief.  But it is the vaudeville that comes roaring through.

And another: I suppose no kid would grasp this, but as an old guy I am stunned at how polished these guys are as performers.  Of course this has to be true: stuff this funny can't just happen, no matter how much natural ability lies beneath.

Which brings me to a slightly different point.  Mrs. Buce remarked on how, of the three, Grouch seemed the least memorable, even the least original.  If you knew here, you might not be surprised: she is no fan of smartmouth humor anywhere, and Groucho's style is one just designed to grate on some people. Fine, tastes differ.  But a different point is that Groucho is bound to sound less startling today than he did 60-plus years ago precisely because he has become so march part of the culture.   "and Mrs. Claypool's checks will probably come back in the morning"--now, that was funny the first time you heard it.  "Of course you know this means war!"--that was hilarious.  But they aren't at all clever any more: we all say them all the time.  And the reason they aren't all that clever is that Groucho taught us how to make them into common parlance. By contrast Chico and Harpo depend on a mix of character and physicality that was perhaps a bit less memorable at the time and so less forgettable today.

Next up, Alec Guiness, an Ealing Comedy.  We haven't made the final selection yet.  Mrs. B votes for Lavender Hill Mob, which I suppose is the most famous.  But I still favor the gnarlier, nastier Ladykillers, though definitely without Tom Hanks.

Spielberg's Lincoln

Well, we steeled our nerves and popped out to take in Spielberg's Lincoln today--the oldies' matinee, populated by folks (like us) who could have actually met a Civil War veteran.   "Steeled ourselves" in the sense that there are so many ways it could have gone wrong, and I suppose the bluntest thing to say is that it avoided many of them: in a phrase, not nearly as bad a movie as I feared.

But I can do better than that.  I was on guard against cheap sentimentalism and schoolmarm preaching, and there was a bit of both.  But not nearly as much as there might have been, and you'd have to set it off against quite a few good things.  Daniel Day-Lewis inevitably and yes indeed, he did seem to look the part and get the character right,  mostly.  Not perfect: I don't think he mastered a plausible Illinois twang, and after a half an hour I did get tired of  him, as he slid into the kind of history-movie poortentiousness that nothing in the genre can do with out.    But for catching the character, I'd say Sally Field as Mary Todd Lincoln did even better: she brought across everything you might have hoped or feared about this poor, driven, bewildered and deeply unhappy woman.  As Thad Stevens, Tommy Lee Jones was himself which is just as it could be, and my guess is that his surprised last scene is as true to life as anything in the movie.   It was a bit unnerving to see Hal Holbrook (is he really 87?) looking less like Mark Twain than like Teddy Kennedy.

But the real charm of the picture is the secondary stuff. Like: the array of hustlers and time-servers in Congress and around the White House like swarms of live bees.  Like: the tobacco smoke, the overdone furniture, the underdone lighting, the general air of squalor and sleaze.

Spielberg's presentation, taken as a whole, you'd have to call "Shakespearean,"  in a narrow and particular sense.   That is: he has mastered the Shakespearean device (from the Henry plays, if not elsewhere) of telling a private story  woven into a larger public tapestry.  The comparison does identify a puzzle, though. Namely, granting that Spielberg veers into tendentious kitsch, you'd have to acknowledge does so way more.  Yet somehow I can bear Shakespearean kitsch with so much more equanimity than any contemporary exemplar.   Not sure I know why the distinction: my best guess is that with Shakespeare, I know I  can keep my distance; I am not so fearful of getting sucked in.  Another Shakespearean parallel: here as there, I suppose one is tempted to search for contemporary echoes.  Can we think of any other rail-thin, loner, Illinois politician (for example) who just might be under appreciated by the lesser lights of his own time.  No, I think the answer is "no," as in "don't go there," but it's hard to resist.

Mrs. B does add a provocative afterthought: she says it's a shame there wasn't some way of telling the story of how Lincoln's world-view evolved over his lifetime and in particular, of course, his attitude to slavery.  There's something inevitably bogus about presenting our heroes as carved in stone--as if, just hypothetically for example, you wanted to stick them into a temple on the Washington Mall.  I suspect she is thinking of the kind of Lincoln you find in Eric Foner's Fiery Trial, or in what is still my own favorite Lincoln book, Honor's Voice.  I take her point although I suppose the best you can say is that that would be a whole nuther movie and one even harder, I suspect, to get right.

Oh, You Mean That "Apartment"

Mrs. Buce's Netflix queue last night churned up Billy Wilder's The Apartment. I had never seen it before; I remember my friends talking about it but I had just started the repair of my life via night school and I wasn't doing many movies. 

But maybe I need(ed) a better class of friends.  I was always under the impression that it was a comedy. Seeing it last night, I guess I can see what Dave Thompson means (in Have You Seen...) when he says that Wilder "seems to have felt the need to reestablish himself as the surveyor of a cold and heartless world."

Point taken; but perhaps we have become more cold and heartless in general, because at the end of the day, you come away still thinking it is a comedy.  I tend to link it generally with so many other films in what you might call the "Apartment 3G" genre: enterprising youngsters having wacky adventures in the big city.  Cf., My Sister Eileen, or Wonderful Town.  You want edgy, you have to move forward to The Landlord.  You want really edgy, you go on to Looking for Mr. Goodbar.

Still, I guess what struck me most about The Apartment was the whole milieu thing.  Here's a place where our hero works in a Chairman-Mao-style bullpen of clerks, where he makes $94 week--and pays $85 a month for an apartment at 51 West 67th.  I mean--actually, I suppose that address is underneath Lincoln Center today, but these days it would be available on an investment banker budget.  And the cab up from 61st Street costs 70 cents.

Bottom line: the film is a great argument for legislation against wrongful dismissal.  And do you suppose by chance the Shirley McLain who plays the winsome elevator operator here is any kin to the Shirley McLain who played the sharp-tongued old harridan in Terms of Endearment?   

Fritz Lang, Vocabulary Builder

Il Teatro Buce featured a screening the other night of Fritz Lang's Metropolis, spruced up and reassembled from its original 1927 version.  It was a first for me--or so I thought, until I kicked back and actually watched, and found that here is Patient Zero for the modern cultural vocabulary.  You want Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton?  Here they are in spirit, if not in the flesh.  You want Batman?--I mean Batman the way I saw him when I waited my turn in the barber shop around 1945?  Yeh, we got Batman?  You want Smithers and Mister Burns, hoo boy have we got Smithers and Mr. Burns.

Indeed the cultural resonances come so thick and fast that you can barely see your way through them to the movie. Which is perhaps just as well because best I can tell, it is actually a pretty terrible movie.  Fun to watch, though.

French Stereotypes and Ours

I don't think I had ever heard of the movie Quai des Orfèvres, nor its director, Henri-Georges Clouzot, except insofar as I had him mixed up with his homonymous counterpart. Never, that is, until last night when it popped up out of Mrs. Buce's well-manicured Netflix queue--an easy match for, in some ways better than, Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity which we took in just a few days ago. Like DI, it's a piece of unadorned story-telling: no tricks, no gimmicks, just a linear power drive from start to finish. Film buffs apparently give it high marks for the camera work; I'm not hip enough to take that in on first viewing, but it sure was a pleasure to watch.

For an American viewer, at least, it's a triumph of  ambience: you get the sense that you're tucked into a fully slice of Parisian life, so vivid that you make it part of your (necessarily stereotypical?) picture of what France must have been like, at least in its time.  On a quick look, you are tempted to bracket it with the Maigret mysteries of George Simenon.  There are some huge gaps in the comparison but it is not entirely wrong.  They both give you a world that is sordid and mean at first look, yet peopled with an array of memorable characters who seem driven by an unspoken compact to maintain a certain kind of an order, and mostly endowed with an impressive knack for muddling through.  These people have been here, as Proust might say, since Geneviève de Brabant; minor nuisances in the way of murder and betrayal are not going to derail them now.

So for an American viewer, a consoling confirmation of all preconceptions. Yet here is the odd part: forget about its international cachet, evidently the film is a favorite in France, as well.   This strikes me as odd: whatever the French view of themselves, you'd hardly expect it to comport with the view of the untutored foreigners: especially those who are so misguided as to suppose that they actually know something about France.   Or, I guess, the possibility is that the French have foisted it all on a credulous international multitude while they stay home giggling into their fromage?

Il Divo

Il Teatro Buce enjoyed a screening of Paulo Sorrentino's Il Divolast night.  That would be the one about Giulio Andreotti, seven times prime minister of Italy and so long the black hole at the center of alliances that make up what passes under the name of "Italian politics."

Well: "half-enjoyed" might be better.  I stuck with it in a stance of reserved  enthusiasm.  Mrs. Buce bagged it early, generously revealing a preference in favor of finishing the dinner dishes.  I can see why: Divio is inside calcio if ever there was such a thing.  I just barely know enough and care enough to catch something like 30 percent of what is going on in this fusillade of names and events and alliances and betrayals; Mrs. B, wisely. has never wasted scarce brain cells on the topic.

She did agree, based on limited viewing, that the film has a certain style about it--perhaps the only aspect that can really appeal to the uninitiated.  Though we had a bit of difficulty putting a name on just what that style might be.  Surrealism?  No, not really.  Modernism?  Way too broad.  I entertained the notion of "video game" but then I had what struck me as an even closer analog: it's Batman, with its murky urban exteriors, its imputations of exotic villainy and its €2,000 bespoke suits.  

Yes, Batman in tone and flavor, and this fact may help to explain the corollary point that strikes one about this murky movie.  That is: at the end of the evening, after all the inquiries, all the charges and counter-charges, we can make only two points about Andreotti: one, he seems to have been in or around the scene of the action for just about everything that happened in Italy in the generation before the Berlusconi era. And two, we have really no idea how (if at all) the hell he did it.  Move along folks, no plot to unfold here. Might as well just enjoy the pretty pictures.

The Geriatric Market at the Multiplex

On heartfelt recommendation of Mrs. Buce, I spent a couple of hours in the dark yesterday watching The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, which seems to be getting a not-entirely-comprehensible bit of buzz among our circle.  It's a harmless piece of fluff with a few good one-liners; a riff on the Enchanted April plot, where wide-eyed Brits dip their toe into an alien pond, find charming and eccentric natives, flashes of self-insight, and the odd bit of nookie.  Not the worst way to spend a summer Monday afternoon; hey, it was air conditioned.  

But what  intrigued me was not the picture per se but the context.  It's billed as a movie about "outsourcing eldercare," so you have some hint they aren't shooting for the preteen market.  It's also  billed as having a strong cast and yes, that's right, with the qualification that you have to be of a certain age to remember who the hell Judi Dench and Maggie Smith are.

And beyond the movie itself: there were three previews, all romances, which seems like good cross-marketing.  One of them seemed to involve actors who probably weren't  even born the last time I went to an afternoon movie.   But the  other two--they seemed to involve actors at least as superannuated as anything in the Marigold Hotel.  Oh look, here's Woody Allen, who was making $1,500 a week writing scripts for Sid Caesar (who?) back around 1954.  And here's Tommy Lee Jones, a veritable stripling who didn't make his Broadway debut until 1969.  "Children!" I wanted to shout, "do you have any idea who these people are?  And by the way, did you know that you can make popcorn without a microwave?"

What we have here, then, is something I didn't know existed: a wrinklies-and-crumblies demographic, an audience so old they can't quite remember which members of the "main" movie audience are really their grandchildren and which are not.  An audience, in short, perhaps no more than 15 years younger than myself.  What a curiosity to find that the entertainment machine has generated at least three movies with us in the crosshairs.

The Evolution of the Errol Morris Audience (Chez Buce Division)

Il Teatro Buce indulged in a screening of Errol Morris' Tabloid the other night.  That's the one about hormone-poisoned former beauty queen who did or did not kidnap a Mormon missionary to make him her sex toy and I am shameless enough to say I enjoyed every moment of it.  Not a shred of redeeming social value of course, unless you count it as instruction in how far the  camera can press the outer limits of vulgar and tacky.

As it happens I watched it in the same room as I occupied to watch my first Errol Morris film 20-odd years ago--Thin Blue Line, about a wrongful death sentence.  Let's stipulate that TBL  had a ton of redeeming social value--saving, as it did, the life of an innocent man, but also exposing the moral bankruptcy of one slice of the criminal justice system.

But there is an inconsistency in my own response on which I want to linger for a moment here.  That is: I remember being uncomfortable with and irritated by so many of the manipulative production tricks in the earlier film, whereas I seem to be far less offended by the cruder and even more manipulative tricks of the later.  What, exactly, is going on here?  Am I just getting crass(er) in my old age?  Does the sheer blatancy of the manipulation in the new item turn it all into comedy?  Or is it that Morris and his ilk have dulled all our sensibilities: persuaded us that it really doesn't matter what you put into a "documentary," still its primary purpose is to entertain?

Still working on them.  Meanwhile, it appears that one person who fails to see the humor is the star of the show (and a side issue: how the hell has she been paying the bills all these years?).  

Carlos, and a New Movie Sensibility

Mr. and Mrs. Buce (enjoyed) (patiently endured) (choose one) Carlos, Olivier Assayas' three-night miniseries about the free-lance troublemaker who became a sort of public face of international terrorism in the 1980s.  It's a mixed bag.  I wouldn't give it anywhere near the 94% score that Carlos enjoys right now over at Rotten Tomatoes (but apparently that is the shorter, theatre, version, so maybe they are beyond compare).  But it certainly has its virtues.  It's ambitious in scope--the budget for location shots must have come across as humongous enough to snap your suspenders.  There is lots of patient attention to detail.  Perhaps surprisingly for a film featuring so much killing and mayhem, it succeeds in presenting itself as restrained without seeming prim--there is a lot more violence porn in almost any episode of The Sopranos.  


So I'd go so far as to say that Assayas really has tried to let the story tell itself, bur this kind of restraint becomes a problem in its own right.  That is: even after five-plus hours, you really don't feel you know much about Carlos except that he is a clumsy risk-taker with a more than ordinary appetite for violence.  We're told almost nothing about his pre-movement past.  That's a blessing, in that we are spared the sight of (say) a youthful innocent Carlos suffering injustice at the hands of a sadistic ninth-grade geometry teacher in an encounter that vaults the child straight off to a campaign for world domination.  But we also get none but the sketchiest mention of the fact that his nonfiction father was (is?) a more-than-prosperous lawyer and self-styled Marxist who deliberately named his children after revolutionary icons (By the way, would this movement past explain why the young Carlos can take his date to a five-star restaurant?  Or was that bit just  a concession to the market for entertainment?).  When--abruptly, at the beginning of the series--the young Carlos shows up and confers himself on some Palestinian insurgents,you get the sense that they are just as puzzled as we are.

I suppose you might say that this was Assayas' grand plan: precisely to let us wonder what the Hell Carlos was up to and to come to see--slowly and over time, just as his sponsors did--that he was just a thrill-seeker and not a very effective on at that.  In the end, just lucky.  Or at least until he wasn't lucky any more at which point his handlers sold him to the French (he has languished in a French jail on one conviction since 1994, and is on trial for another outrage right now, today).

My God, as Peggy Lee would say "is that all there is?"  Unless Assayas is a far less accomplished film-maker than I surmise, the answer is "yes." No grand subtext, no manifesto, just a boy and his AK-47, an AK-47 and his boy.  If that leaves the viewer feeling perplexed and bewildered, imagine how it must have felt to some of his co-conspirators, not least his number one girl, the mother of his child--she who thought she was joining the campaign to redress injustice and wound up getting screwed on a countertop.   Carlos, then, was never the Nicolae Carpathia.  He's just a lunkhead  who liked to flash his equipment around.

Shifting gears a bit--we broke out our long evengs of Carlos with a viewing of Zen, the detective series out of the Michael Dibden novels, launched and then throttled by the BBC.  It's an amiable entertainment with the usual cop-mystery gimmicks plus a lot of Rome location shots, and who cannot love Rome location shots?   So, what does it all have to do with Carlos?  In a word, deracination.  Both shows, though in different ways, develop a certain aesthetic of rootlessness that reminds the viewer that he is living in a new and different world.

 Grant that Carlos comes by its rootlessness honestly.  Carlos himself is Venezuelan by birth.  Assayas of course is French, but we hear also plenty of Arabic, German, Hungarian, heaven knows what else.  Which is exactly how Carlos lived his life, at least until they locked him up.  In Zen, it's rootlessness of a different sort. You could call  this an "Italian" mystery but in so many ways it is about as Italian as Marmite pizza.  Almost everything about the structure is exported from a thousand BBC ancestors: Aurelio Zen clearly shares DNA with Inspector Morse and Miss Marple.  But more obviously, it's the cast: they're almost all British and they're isn't the slightest suggestion that they are anything else.  Hey, this is not a docudrama: this is Roman holiday.

I gather this is at least the second time the BBC has done this kind of thing.  Mrs. B watched (I did not) a bit of Kennth Branagh strutting his stuff s Henning Mankell's Inspector Wallander.  Now, that one really does sound like Marmite pizza.   With herring. 

Best Cop Movie Since I Don't Know When

…is Le Petit Lieutenant, about life and hard times in a Paris detective squad. Forget that it’s Paris; forget that it’s Nathalie Baye, and that she looks like a cross between Helen Mirren and Barbra Streisand: this is about as plausible a film about what cop life is about as your are going to find. Some of the reviews complain that it’s too languid, but that is part of the point. A lot of cop work is mind-numbingly squalid and routine; that’s precisely why you are at risk of getting wrong-footed when events kick into a higher gear. It’s great to see a policiere that is not just another knockoff of Law & Order. And it’s great to see the French not trying to be international, but just trying to be themselves.