Ken and Robin Consume Media: High-Strung Reality Horror, French New Wave Fantastic Realism, and the Dawn of Canadian Art Forgery
August 7th, 2024 | Robin
Ken and Robin Consume Media is brought to you by the discriminating and good-looking backers of the Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff Patreon. Each week we provide capsule reviews of the books, movies, TV seasons and more we cram into our hyper-analytical sensoriums. Join the Patreon to help pick the items we’ll talk about in greater depth on a little podcast segment we like to call Tell Me More.
Recommended
The Creatures (Film, France, Agnes Varda, 1966) Staying in a seaside town after his reckless driving cost his pregnant wife (Catherine Deneuve) the use of her voice, a bluff science fiction writer (Michel Piccoli) discovers that a mysterious mood-altering device is affecting its residents. Quietly compelling blend of the fantastic with social realism achieves a tone so idiosyncratic it can only be described as Vardasian.—RDL
L.627 (Film, France, Bertrand Tavernier, 1992) Frustrated narcotics cop (Didier Bezace) keeps pursuing significant drug busts in a Paris police force plagued by incompetence, brutality, chronic underfunding and bureaucratic paralysis. Not a mystery or thriller but a naturalistic slice of life portrait of a man mired in, and compromised by, a system that has identified the wrong problem and is only trying to look like it’s sort of trying to solve it.—RDL
Possession (Film, France/Germany, Andrzej Żuławski, 1981) The psychic backwash from the marriage breakdown of an uptight spy (Sam Neill) and his emotionally disintegrating wife (Isabelle Adjani) destroys those around them, spawns monsters, and threatens reality itself. The relationship at the heart of this hysterically pitched reality horror is so agonizing that the eventual appearance of a slime-coated pupal abomination provides a note of relief. Be sure you’re watching the 2020 restoration, which fixes audio problems with the ADR that marred the previous digital print.—RDL
Good
The Great Canadian Art Fraud Case: The Group of Seven and Tom Thomson Forgeries (Nonfiction, Jon S. Dellandrea, 2022) A stolen box of ephemera once belonging to a forgotten Scots-Canadian painter puts the art collector author on the trail of an early sixties trial for flogging works bearing the forged signatures of iconic Canadian masters. Brings out the naivete of a suddenly blossoming art market and the brazenness of the gallerist and auctioneer who flooded it with sloppily disguised fakes.—RDL
The Vanished Elephant (Film, Peru, Javier Fuentes-León, 2014) Ex-cop crime writer (Salvador del Solar) investigates a mysterious stranger (Lucho Cáceres) posing as his detective protagonist and trying to frame him for a series of murders. Reality-bending neo-noir creates a Borgesian puzzle.—RDL
Ken and Robin were off at Gen Con but Robin had some reviews stockpiled.
