The Double Hour


A first film by Guiseppe Capotondi, The Double Hour belongs to the genre of dubious memory thrillers perfected in Memento.  Part of the excitement of watching these films is sifting through the narrative red herrings, usual flashbacks or -forwards, that try to lead us astray.  The acting is uniformly good and the story has it's good points.  The tension in the film is mostly psychological   and Capotondi  is clever at building a sense of claustrophobic dread.  As I often find, to my ongoing dismay, the film loses it's rhythm somewhere after an hour.   I think the fault is in the script, which places too much of a burden on the film's romantic scheme.  The pace begins to drag and I wondered if I had missed a clue that would come back in a shocking ending.  No such luck.  Existential film disappointment continues.

French  movie & US version of The Killing


I enjoy swashbuckling, history and cleavage so I wandered out to see The Princess of Montpensier.    I can report that there's a shortage of breasts and swordplay.  The film has  a typically French preciousness without much sense of humor.  It's refined, it's about chaste love and it's oh so dull.


AMC's The Killing, a remake of a Danish mystery series, is sadly disappointing.  Not having seen the original, it's hard to say what was lost in translation.  The pacing is slow and the domestic and political  storylines that fill time between actual sleuthing are not compelling.   The show has a galling habit of dragging along and finally throwing in a twist before each ending.  
That bites.