Agatha Christie’s life rivaled the mysteries she created
theintelligencer.com
theintelligencer.com
I find it fascinating that they did this series over a span of over 24 years, with the same lead actor (David Suchet, CBE) as Hercule Poirot throughout!
There is a behind the scenes interview with David Suchet reflecting upon the 24 year experience: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FX3ITew9Mpw
"And Then There Were None", which is one of Christie's most famous works not featuring Poirot, has been adapted by the BBC recently: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/And_Then_There_Were_None_(mini....
David Suchet is a national treasure, though. I wish he would be in more movies and shows.
What matters is how much content there is in the episode. People have gotten the idea from Peter Jackson's awful, awful Hobbit movies that pages of source material are a restriction on how much movie you can make. But the problem there was that the movies were terrible, not that The Hobbit was shorter than a three-book series. Shrek is a 90 minute movie based off of a children's book of just 1,150 words. Nobody ever complained about the quality of Shrek.
I have enjoyed by stories since I first came across them 40 years ago. I thought that Peter Jackson did an excellent job on retelling the story. In point of fact, retelling it in a way that keeps the essence but is a new variation.
When I first obtained my copy of Lord of the Rings (which I still have), I read it 11 times in 8 months. I still read it when I get the urge. I have found that Peter Jackson has quite a different imaging of the story of the story compared to my own imagining and no less entertaining.
I have had people complain about the "licence" he took in the retelling, about not being true to the original writing. However, a good story teller will add to and change a story to make it more effective for his telling. That is the essence of good story telling - how you choose to emphasise various elements.
A question to you: when did I say anything about The Lord of the Rings?
The Lord of the Rings movies are not the Hobbit movies at all, not being related to The Hobbit.
LOTR is a pretty good adaptation, a little bit too action oriented for my tastes but it is his adaption.
The hobbit just feels stretched and with too many gimmicky scenes, IMHO of course.
The strange part is that in some ways I like the hobbit better as a book.
tl;dr Guillermo del Toro was the original director with proper prep time and then Peter had to take over, without the prep time. He was winging it most of the time and making things up on the spot.
You can literally hear the above from his own mouth: https://youtu.be/SQkygZdZ_Vk
The Fellowship of the Ring is an excellent film, pretty consistently following the story while removing confusing elements like Tom Bombadil (some scenes, like the Moria stone troll fight, could have been a bit shorter, but overall it was really amazing).
The Two Towers started showing the early signs os Jackson's "interventionist" approach (which later culminated in the Hobbit films) with adding numerous elements like Aragorn's side trek and Gimli's and Legolas' banter -- but again, it overall added to the story without removing too much of it.
However, with The Return of the King he completely blew it, changing some important elements like Ents' motivations and, above all, the role of the Dead Men of Dunharrow. In the books, they're a formidable but reluctant force which has a strong but limited impact on the story -- they aid Aragorn's attack on the ships, scaring most of the Umbar's forces into drowning and allowing him to increase his army with the captives on the ships, but then he releases them and they never reach Pelennor.
In the film, they are turned to a deus ex machina which sweeps the battlefield and the streets of Minas Tirith, killing all the enemies and not touching the "good guys" (the book shows that the Dead Men scare everyone equally; the "good guys" survive because they are captive and chained to the ships, which probably needed a lot of cleaning afterwards). That scene reminded me of those commercials where a green goo destroys all the toilet bacteria in one powerful sweep -- in my opinion, that change totally destroyed the premise of the book and turned it from "The Return of the King" to "The Return of some Guy with Toilet Cleaner".
/rant
I cannot count how many times I've seen it, and I look forward to share it with any future family I may have
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miss_Marple_(TV_series)
When it comes to Poirot I suspect I'm biased, because I love Inspector Morse, both the original books and the excellent ITV adaptation:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inspector_Morse_(TV_series)
For some reason I started watching Morse before I'd heard of Poirot, and the two styles are very different. I guess I preferred the one I'd seen first! (Although Morse has better music, so that's a win!)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endeavour_(TV_series)
It is very, very, good.
I will second the sibling comment though; I really enjoyed watching Lewis.
Let's see, can I get it from iTunes? Nope, Apple only sells 7-13 in the U.S. too.
(Still waiting for the video rights holders to learn the same lesson the music rights holders eventually did: if you don't want people to pirate, make it easier to buy it than to steal it.)
“But derivative works and adaptations can't fully explain why Christie's work endures. A splendid biography by Laura Thompson, however, does. "Agatha Christie: A Mysterious Life" was published in Britain over a decade ago and took an inexplicable amount of time to cross the pond. Yet the timing is perfect because Thompson's thorough yet readable treatment of Christie's life, in combination with artful critical context on her work, arrives at the reason for her endurance..”
For a writer writing about a writer, in the Washington Post no less, one might expect quality beyond that of a high school essay. It’s just ironic because Christie was a great writer. I have yet to find literary criticism that’s actually well written. Perhaps it’s a theory, but it always seems that literary critics are really just failed real writers.
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
Murder on the Orient Express
Curtain
Can't tell you why without spoiling it though. You have to read them.
Haven't actually read Curtain, I will now immediately go buy it!
I read the book, but I did not really enjoyed it. But it was a long time ago, I might have been to Young. Or maybe it was the style, which was very different from what I was used to at the time (mostly Ellis Peters)
This is a fascinating book indeed.
In any case, greatest mystery novel of all time.
It stands apart from her other books by having no familiar characters and being completely sealed. A perfect idea, perfectly executed. I wonder if Nabokov ever read it.
I assume you mean Murder on the Orient Express? IMO, it was "OK." Perfectly serviceable and, had there not been an earlier film version, I'd have said it was perfectly fine if nothing outstanding. But I found basically nothing that I thought was better than the 70s version and a number of things that weren't as good. If I were to watch one, I'd watch the older version even today.
It's... OK, I guess. I'd recommend anyone who wants to see it read the book first. The twist is preserved, but in the film doesn't work quite as well.
The basic problem (for those who are curious) is that the book takes you there through a couple iterations of Poirot interviewing the passengers, and showing exactly how he teases out each little piece of information that finally causes the truth to pop out at the end. The film, constrained by running-time concerns, can't do that, so several things that are separate and gradual revelations in the book are part of one big reveal.
A lot of the fun of the book (for me, at least) is the series of small shocks as he goes through the initial set of interviews and comes away with nothing, then figures out the pieces of the puzzle, confronts other people with them in later interviews, and explains how he worked them out from previous clues. That gives the eventual solution of the murder an entirely different feel.
There's also the usual amount of gratuitous deviation from the source in adding a bit of action and fiddling with characters, which also detracts a bit. The worst of it is that the moment when Poirot's solution is finally confirmed -- which is done in the book with a wonderful single sentence uttered by one passenger -- was changed entirely and became much more cruel than the book, in a way that deviates from how Christie usually presents Poirot's character.
Murder on the Orient Express
Death on the Nile
Appointment with Death
Cat Among Pigeons
Bayard writes "revisionist readings" of popular mysteries, in which he exonerates the killers. He mixes in a fair amount of literary criticism. I have a hard time deciding how serious he is.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/10/watching/agatha-christie-...
The new movie is just.... meh. Poirot(the character) has been holywood-ized for the masses... lost all the charm for me.