Miss Otterbourne is right. I love to talk. I am vain, you see. I love people to hear me bring the solution to a crime and say, “See, how clever is Hercule Poirot!”
I really loved the latest Kenneth Branagh Agatha Christie movie - Death on the Nile. Branagh really shows another side to the famous detective Hercule Poirot that I haven’t seen before. Bravo!
my favourite thing about hercule poirot is that once he solved the murder he just makes everyone involved sit in a circle and dig shit about everyone before telling who’s the killer he’s like “i know we’re here because someone is dead but lemme tell you susan is the illegitimate child of paul and bethany is in love with her step brother. this had absolutly nothing to do with the killing but i thought yall should know tbh. now about the murder”
“It is the quietest and meekest people who are often capable of the most sudden and unexpected violences for the reason that when their control does snap, it goes entirely.”
I wasn’t able to use this data like I’d originally planned so I decided to just make it into a nice big diagram. All of the actors who won, were nominated for, or otherwise received Oscars and also appeared in films based on the works of Agatha Christie. (Easily the franchise that has attracted the most number of such actors).
@booksociety’s villains and antiheroes event: the murder of roger ackroyd
it is odd how, when you have a secret belief of your own which you do not wish to acknowledge, the voicing of it by someone else will rouse you to a fury of denial.
Review of Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot’s Christmas -
10 Word Review: Dysfunctional family’s patriarch is murdered in a locked room scenario!
Spoiler Free Review: I’m a huge fan of Agatha Christie and her Hercule Poirot novels, and this one is no exception! It’s a fantastically well plotted locked room mystery that had me guessing the whole time, and left me shocked and satisfied by the end! The cast of characters are all wonderfully odd and of course all have their own agenda. If you’re looking for a good old fashioned mystery, then you really can’t go wrong with this one!
On one hand, I am loathe to spend money on something as fleeting and useless as a tumblr post. On the other hand, I want to make everyone look at this picture of my cat:
The Kaiser Trainer was introduced in 1901-02, but clearly epic mustaches were around before then. A gentleman by the name of Carl Fredrik Holm from the 1800s had a crazy Hungarian mustache. And who could forget Nietzsche’s absolute unit of a handlebar!
The Kaiser Mustache Trainer would overcome every objectionable feature of a mustache with just five minutes a day, as the ad said in 1902:
“Use this wonderful trainer. Worn five minutes in the morning trains any mustache for all day to the shape desired, and permanently after using a few times, assuring comfort and improved appearance.
It will be found that nearly all gentlemen with nice and well-trained mustaches use one of these Kaiser Trainers.
It overcomes every objectionable feature of a mustache.”
agatha christie edit series ⇢ evil under the sun (1941)
‘It is romantic, yes,’ agreed Hercule Poirot. ‘It is peaceful. The sun shines. The sea is blue. But you forget, Miss Brewster, there is evil everywhere under the sun.’
The Emperor. Art by Sam Dow, from The Literary Tarot.
“The Emperor is a card of structure and authority - head over the heart, logic over emotion - making it a neat fit for Agatha Christie’s iconic detective, with his little grey cells and his neatly twirled mustache!
“The ankh is borrowed from the classic Emperor illustration, taking the place of the swan-topped walking stick from one of Poirot’s most memorable portrayals on screen. There’s a crime scene outline at his feet, and the train running through the background invokes Murder on the Orient Express, perhaps the most well-known story starring the character. Poirot himself sits regally in the center of the card, perfectly in control, putting the pieces together or perhaps already having cracked the case.” —Sam Dow
Through quirks of media mega-mergers and studios shunting movies to streaming during the pandemic, Kennth Branaugh has relased three films since 2020. Belfast is probably the universally agreed upon best and Artemis Fowl the worst. Death on the Nile is somewhere in the middle, un victim je pense, of a mediocre script adaptation and too-serious tone.
What happened to make this movie so bleh? I think Michael Green happened. Some of his changes from book to film are modern and inspired (the Otterbournes and the Schuylers); some are odd (the crew announcing “we’re going ashore” then not having that be significant? Flashbacks, really serious flashbacks, Poirot getting Hulk-angry.) These tonal choices are consistent with his and Branaugh’s adaptation of Murder on the Orient Express and I think they misfired in that adaptation as well.
The cast is … not bad. Agatha Christie’s work merits more context than I’m putting on it here, but the people caught up in a murder plot are usually rich, glamourous, and largly assholes. To that end, disliking anyone in the cast won’t necessarily negatively impact your viewing. But back to Christie for a moment: her characters frequently exhibit racist, xenophobic, sexist, greedy behavior. Sometimes we’re meant to see these as flaws and sometimes it’s Poirot’s benevolent sexism or something akin to the “period racism” tag on AO3. Christie definitely trucked in sterotypes we’d call racist and would apply them to characters of which we’re supposed to be suspicious. This is stripped out of this movie and that’s a good thing.
Despite the music being slightly less ponderous than Murder on the Orient Express (Patrick Doyle provides the music in both) the whole journey remains too serious. I don’t mean that murder isn’t serious but the prologue is Poirot’s flashback to WWI, a scene that I suppose only Branaugh’s staus saved from being cut. We witness Poirot’s emotional breakdown discussing love with Jacqueline and his impressive anger which makes him seem a little unhinged. I’d be unhinged in these cricumstances but he gets so worked up it undermines our confidence in the great detective.
What makes this worth the watch are the costumes and setting. Venture any farther upriver and you’re bound to be dissapointed.
