Alberto Rey
Updated Monday, March 18, 2024-15:51
Agatha Christie Literature, Rewritten
One can play a cruel game while watching
Death and Stuff
: the game of guessing who were the actors initially proposed to play the characters in this series.
I can believe that Mandy Patinkin was the first choice for hers
, but I doubt that the original idea of the creators of this Disney+ fiction was to avoid at all costs that any other well-known face enter the filming set.
In
Death and Things
Patinkin rules.
And that's not necessarily a good thing.
I have no problem with a series being an
amalgamation of references, trends and specific requests from the network or platform that commissions it
.
That, done well, can lead to decent and worthy products (I don't plan to call them anything else).
Almost everything is made up and sometimes it is better to be honest and admit creative plagiarism than to try to sell as your own ideas that clearly belong to others.
There's nothing wrong with being inspired by
Agatha Christie
.
There's nothing wrong with taking inspiration from
The White Lotus
.
There's nothing wrong with being inspired by
A Crime Wrote
or
Daggers in the Back
, which in turn have no reason to apologize for creatively plagiarizing... Agatha Christie.
But
Death and Things
goes too far and barely has anything of its own.
Even
the aesthetics, strident and plasticized
, are indebted to the Christie adaptations with which Kenneth Brannagh has been attacking us since 2017. But he, who turns his obvious references into legally armored tributes, never denies that his template is the
all-star productions.
cast
of
Murder on the Orient Express
and
Death on the Nile
signed by Sidney Lumet in 1974 and John Guillermin in 1978. In his beautiful
This is how movies are made
, Lumet says that he was always clear that
Murder on the Orient Express
could not be a film realistic.
And that its impressive cast, one of the largest collection of Hollywood legends ever seen on screen, was the key to its success.
Mike Weiss, creator of
Death and Things
, has either not wanted to, has not known how, or has not been able to build his series around his actors and actresses.
Maybe he doesn't have the budget of
Daggers in the Back
(although
Death and Stuff
doesn't seem cheap
) or maybe he doesn't have the eye of Mike White, who knows how to see a star where others only see an actor or an actress.
In
Death and Things
there is no Daniel Craig capable of putting anything on his back, but neither is there a Sabrina Impacciatore who, to demonstrate her energy, needs to be in a series that helps her channel it.
Death and stuff
is not that series.
Only Mandy Patinkin
comes out alive from there
.
Because Mandy Patinkin comes out alive from anywhere.
And that's not necessarily a good thing.
Thank goodness Mike Weiss didn't have time to include Little Things from
Poor Creatures
in his series .
A colorful ocean liner
also appears in Emma Stone's film
.
Poor Creatures
is also on Disney+, by the way.
Don't let Mandy Patinkin know that I said this.