Ken and Robin Consume Media: The Vourdalak, They Cloned Tyrone, Reacher
April 1st, 2025 | 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.
The Pinnacle
Mother and a Guest (Film, South Korea, Shin Sang-ok, 1961) An irrepressible yet vulnerable six year old (Yeong-seon Jeon) who lives with her mom (Choi Eun-hie), grandmother and maid, all of them widows, does not understand the adult emotions stirred by the arrival of a male teacher (Kim Jin-kyu) as a lodger in their guest house. Often funny, sometimes strikingly poignant domestic drama, told with a deceptive simplicity that veers away from melodrama toward emotional realism. Features one of cinema’s greatest child performances. See kbelow for more on the star and director.—RDL
Recommended
Ant Colony (Comics, Michael DeForge, 2020) Anomic ants ponder wretched insect existence and their illicit desires as catastrophe looms over their colony. Obsessively drawn, bleakly comic fable of deterministic fatalism set in a Herrimanesque arthropod hellscape.—RDL
Close Your Eyes (Film, Spain, Victor Erice, 2023) An unsolved mysteries-style TV show inspires a novelist (Manolo Solo) to follow up on the fate of a renowned actor (Jose Coronado), whose disappearance from set a generation ago ended his second career as a movie director. Erice, returning to filmmaking after a 31 year absence, infuses his ambiguous narrative of identity and loss with a complex, absorbing simplicity—not to mention a surprising homage to Rio Bravo.—RDL
The Lovers & the Despot (Film, UK, Ross Adam & Robert Cannan, 2016) Documentary recounts the astounding story of top South Korean film director Shin Sang-ok and his star actress ex-wife Choi Eun-hie, who were separately kidnapped from Hong Kong in 1978 at the behest of North Korea’s Kim Jong-il, a frustrated cineaste who held them captive until they were willing to make movies for him. Illuminates the many stunning turns of a wrenching incident often treated in Western media as a surreal joke.—RDL
They Cloned Tyrone (Film, US, Juel Taylor, 2023) Aided by a motor mouthed, has-been pimp (Jamie Foxx) and a streetwalker who learned detective skills from her Nancy Drew collection (Teyonah Parris), a taciturn mid-level drug dealer (John Boyega) chases down eyewitness reports of his own murder. Hyper-verbal, hazily shot weird science mystery joins the satirically conscious horror cycle ushered in by Get Out.—RDL
The Vourdalak (Film, France, Adrien Beau, 2023) Lost and robbed in the 18th-century Balkans, French Marquis d’Urfe (Kacey Mottet Klein) shelters in the home of Gorcha, who has become a vampirish vourdalak. Undeniably effective adaptation of the Alexei Tolstoy novella aims more for “cringe horror” than real dread, although Beau’s decision to show the vourdalak’d Gorcha as a marionette pays big dividends in the uncanny.—KH
Good
Reacher Season 3 (Television, US, Amazon Prime, Nick Santora, 2025) Seeking to revenge himself on a connected sadist who got away, Reacher (Alan Ritchson) goes along with a rogue DEA operation targeting the sadist’s partner Zachary Beck (Anthony Michael Hall). Although this season finds an even more enormous foe to pit against Reacher, it suffers from Reacher being fundamentally reactive (and run by pinhead feds to boot) and from a dearth of Reacher whaling on guys. At least it’s a tighter story than Season 2, but America wants real Reacher.—KH
You Can’t Buy Everything (Film, US, Charles Reisner, 1934) Querulous, wealthy miser (May Robson) forces her dutiful son (William Bakewell) to follow in her footsteps, until he falls for the daughter (Jean Parker) of the ex-fiancee (Lewis Stone) she loathes with obsessive fervor. Domestic melodrama takes a rare focus on a mother-son relationship, drawing its matronly antihero with unexpected realism, even when Robson is overacting a little.—RDL
Okay
The Amateur (Film, Canada, Charles Jarrott, 1981) CIA cryptographer Charles Heller (John Savage) blackmails the Agency into sending him behind the Iron Curtain to kill the terrorists who murdered his fiancee. Christopher Plummer embraces the role of the Czech secret policeman on the other side, animating as best he can the back half of the movie. A few set pieces provide intermittent thrills, but this is perhaps best watched as a hairy period piece.—KH
Piaffe (Film, Germany, Ann Oren, 2023) Forced to take over work as a foley artist from her hospitalized sister, a withdrawn woman (Simone Bucio) grows a horse tail and enters into a fetishistic affair with a fern expert (Sebastian Rudolph.) Solemn, surreal magic realist fantasy shies away from resolution, with cryptic, hermetically sealed results.—RDL
