Twixt (2011)

Hall Baltimore (Val Kilmer), a horror author noted for witch stories, arrived in a small town for a book signing.  The decline of his career was demonstrated by the venue: a hardware store that happened to double as a bookstore.  He only signed one book.  Sherrif Bobby LaGrange (Bruce Dern) is a fan, as well as an aspiring writer.  He had an idea for a book titled The Vampire Executions.  Hall politely declined to be a co-author.  However, when the sheriff offered a chance to visit the morgue and the victim of a murder, Hall consented.  The corpse of a young woman with a stake through her heart laid on a gurney.  Maybe she was a vampire, the sheriff suggested.  Hall also learned that Edgar Allen Poe once stayed in the town.  He eagerly visited the ruins of the old hotel and saw the plaque.

Edgar Allen Poe slept here

Duly impressed, he checked in for the night at the local motel and fell into a restless sleep.  The ruined hotel, the murdered girl, and talk of vampires intermingled in a dark dream.  Here, he met Virginia (Elle Fanning) - the murdered girl? - and visited the hotel - which was open for business - and had dark history of a dozen murdered children.  In the morning, he investigated the dream only to find many truths in it.  As such, he agreed to co-author a book with the sheriff and made multiple trips into dreamland to further investigate the various crimes with the help of Edgar Allen Poe (Ben Chaplin).

For an 80-minute film, it has far too many characters, too many plot threads, and too scattershot a storyline.  Coppola was trying some experimental filmmaking and it clearly doesn't work.  Virginia proves to be a stand-in for Hall's tragically killed daughter, for Poe's dead wife, and for the child who escaped the previously mentioned murder of a dozen children only to be buried alive like in a Cask of Amontillado. The ending is entirely unsatisfying.  Is Flamingo (Alden Ehrenreich) actually a vampire or just some Goth poser?  Does the devil live in the 7-faced clocktower?  Is the sheriff the serial killer that he is supposedly pursuing?  Let the audience decide.  The important thing is that Hall has a mental breakdown about the death of his daughter, thus 'dealing' with the tragedy.

Joanne Whaley - who was Kilmer's ex-wife IRL - plays his shrewish wife here.  Yikes!  How much of these interactions are acting vs. re-enactments?

Skip this one.

Meet the Tiger

Simon Templar, a man who has been dubbed the saint on account of his initials (ST), arrived in the ocean-side city of Baycombe in England.  He was on the trail of a mysterious bank robber known as the Tiger.  The Saint was a gentleman adventurer, a man willing to skirt the law in order to bring the 'godless' to justice and perhaps get rich in the process.  Though Baycombe was a sleepy town with only a couple of automobiles (the story takes place in the 1920s), the Tiger and his cohorts - playfully called 'tiger cubs' by the Saint - have laid up here until the time is right to split the spoils.  The question becomes, who is in league with the Tiger and who is just an ordinary citizen.

Much of the tale involves the Saint having snarky conversations with the various suspects to see if something slips out.  Surprisingly, a good chunk of this is outsourced to the lovely and gracious Patricia Holm.  Patricia was orphaned and has lived either at schools or at her Aunt Agatha's house in Baycombe.  Every description of her aunt paints her as a man in drag, which later proves to be the case.  Yeah, that was a pretty weak part of the book.  Back to Patricia, she has such a large part in the book that she is the co-main character with Simon.

The Saint doesn't care for guns.  He is armed with a knife named Anna that is perfectly balanced for throwing.  The Saint has buckets of confidence, an unshakeable certainty in his inevitable success, and a generous portion of charm.  He also has a sidekick named Orace, a military man with a heavy accent, an imposing physique, and a limp.

Though it might have been unprecedented when published in the 1920s, the story feels very cliche.  The mystery of who was the tiger proved less difficult than hoped.  I had my suspect early and it proved to be the correct guess.  When revealed by the Saint in the climax, the Tiger was a disappointment.  What looked like it might have been clever maneuvering on his part was instead nothing but happenstance and, as it turned out, incompetence.

This Simon Templar is very different from the one played by Roger Moore on the long-running TV series.  Here, the Saint is out for a reward - the finder's fee for recovering the gold that the Tiger stole - rather than random do-gooderism.  Where Roger Moore disdained weapons in general and weekly resorted to fisticuffs, the literary Simon likes his knives.  I have no idea how Val Kilmer's Saint became a master of disguise.

The Saint is dangerously reckless throughout the book and only survives because the villains don't shoot him when they have the chance.  He pins his life on the timely arrival of allies or the intervention of fate on his behalf.  Oh, so reckless.  Sure, it dials the suspense and tension way up, but it also paints the Saint as foolhardy rather than courageous.  Just okay.  It has not aged as well as Ian Flemings Bond novels; read those instead.

The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1986)

A woman and her mother are murdered in a most grizzly manner in the Rue Morgue of Paris and the city is in a panic.  The Prefect of Police (Ian McShane) has arrested a bank employee, Adolphe Le Bon, who escorted the women home with a sack of 4,000 francs in gold.  As it happens, the man is engaged to Claire Dupin (Rebecca De Mornay) and her father is the famous retired Inspector Auguste Dupin (George C. Scott).  Auguste did not choose retirement; he was pushed out by the Prefect.  However, with his daughter's fiancée in jail, he is obligated to act.  With the help of Phillipe Huron (Val Kilmer), Dupin sets out to solve the insoluble crime.

Though the crime is faithful to the source material, everything else has changed.  C. Auguste Dupin was a young man who solved riddles and mysteries as a hobby; he was the original gentleman detective.  Furthermore, he was on good terms with the prefect who regularly called upon his services.  He had neither wife nor children but lived with another bachelor who served as his Watson.  Though the original story takes place around 1840, this version places it in the 1880s or 1890s; that's Sherlock Holmes' time period.  Of course, keeping with what is written would make for a short movie, so the added characters and conflicts serve a purpose.

Good popcorn fun.

Amazon Documentaries

Thomas Sowell: Common Sense in a Senseless World: Here is a documentary about Thomas Sowell, PhD economist who studied at Columbia, Harvard, and the University of Chicago.  Jason Riley outlines his career and interviews various friends and associates of Sowell.  As a longtime fan and avid reader of Thomas Sowell, I was already familiar with most of what the documentary covers.  This is a good primer for Sowell, but only scratches the surface.  There was not enough of Sowell himself in this documentary about him.  A search on YouTube will provide some great videos of Sowell covering a wide array of topics.  Recommended.

Val: The life and career of Val Kilmer, narrated by his son, Jack.  The story is told both in the present with a dramatically diminished Kilmer (he has survived throat cancer) and in the past through home movies.  Val had carried a video camera with him throughout his career and had captured a great deal of behind-the-scenes video, both on the sets of his movies and of his home life.  Val Kilmer has always seemed like the coolest of the cool, but his autobiography is one long tragedy interrupted by moments of joy.  At least, that is how the documentary paints it.  Well-made but depressing.  Proceed with caution.

Shatner in Space: On October 13, 2021, William Shatner, the original Captain Kirk, went to space on Blue Origin's New Shepard rocket.  Here is the background of how he met Jeff Bezos and then launched into space to become the oldest person ever (90) in space, surpassing the previous record holder, Wally Funk (82), who had flown on the first crewed New Shepard.  Shatner is astonishingly spry for a man his age and still mentally sharp.  He does not seem 90.  Though sometimes saccharine sweet and occasionally preachy about the environment, it is mostly fun and worthwhile.