Watching - September 2021

Ghosts (Season 3, 2021)

Ghosts has been a firm family favourite since Season 1, so we were happy to see another series. I think they're doing a superb job of slowly revealing the back stories of all the characters, while moving the overall story arc forward. Very funny in places and great fun overall.

Grosse Pointe Blank (1997)

An old favourite that I hadn't seen for years, and so was happily able to enjoy it all over again. John Cusack does himself, but very well, and Minnie Driver is cute - although it's not clear why she'd be so ready to get together with him again so quickly. The juxtaposition between the romcom aspects and the violence can be quite abrupt, but I suppose that's what makes it more unusual.

The Hunt For Red October (1990)

Classic cold war thriller that, Sean Connery's accent aside, seems very believable. Compared to the book, the plot is simpler and fewer of the motives are revealed, particularly about why the Russian captain decides to defect. It also has very little of the novel's gung-ho US patriotism, which is no loss. Instead of the sprawling sub-plots of the original then, we get a taut story that kept me interested. I'd never seen this before, despite having had it for ages.

Quiz Show (1994)

First thing that struck me: don't they all look so young? Yeah, I'm getting old, particularly since they are about the right age for the characters. Ralph Fiennes does a particularly good job of someone who has been tempted down a path he didn't really want (the real Charles Van Doren finally broke his silence in 2008); Hank Azaria (in the second film of his I've seen this month) and David Paymer are wonderfully sleazy TV execs; and I love Rob Morrow's Brookline accent (which I assume is authentic ¯\_(ツ)_/¯). Apparently the film strips a lot of detail from the real story of the 1950s quiz show scandals in the name of a clear narrative, but this does make for a compelling film.