Guilty Pleasures

With the onslaught of winter weather The Weaver and I have been cocooning with various film and television offerings, escapism to be sure, but we’ve needed some this fall.

First up is Good Omens, a delightfully quirky take on Armageddon (it isn’t the end of the world) based on the book by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. It is only six one-hour episodes, suitable for either bingeing or savouring (British spelling for effect.) The leads, Michael Sheen and David Tennant as an angel and a demon, are exceptional. Available on Amazon Prime or DVD. We got our copy from the library for a dollar rental fee:



We actually went to the cineplex to see Knives Out, an updated Agatha Christie style whodunit with the decidedly non-James Bond Daniel Craig as a "Southern" sleuth who is hired by persons unknown to investigate the recent death of a popular mystery writer who has an extended family of would-be be heirs, all delightfully degenerate. This is a throwback to the big all-star cast murder mysteries of the past, nearly every character is portrayed by a name star (Christopher Plummer, Don Johnson, Jamie Lee Curtis, Toni Collette, Michael Shannon, Frank Oz) and each actor pushes their performance to the brink of caricature with plenty of clues and red herrings. But all this fun comes at a price: about $40 with popcorn and lemonade! This film will play out just as well on the home screen, so it might be worth waiting six months for it to come out on video or streaming:



Finally, there is the early aughts Brit-Cop show Inspector Lynley’s Mysteries:



These are pretty standard British murder mysteries; what sets them apart is the chemistry between the leads, blue-blood Thomas Lynley (Nathaniel Parker) and chippy working-class Sargent Barbra Havers (Sharon Small); the frisson generated between the two is always worth watching. These are being show on our local PBS station so our “cost of entry” was $0.