Colombo - Ashes to ashes

 Well, not one of those that merit countless reruns, but not too bad. It’s only a bit boring at times, but i was nice to see the same face that portrayed Mr Finch in Agenda for Murder :)

My main problem with his one is that I don’t understand the logic of why he did what he did, other than it was necessary otherwise Colombo would not have been able to catch him…

What I liked though was seeing Colombo taking to the taxi-drivers and then making up some story about a cousin when talking to Prince; he’s always done that, but it was never so openly like this. I’ve always known that he lies constantly to his suspects, but it’s finally in the open :)

The story:

Verity Chandler is a tv journalist and is working on a new piece on a funeral home, but she also wants to confront Eric Prince personally. He’s the owner, and they’ve been lovers in the past, I think. She’s uncovered a very dirty secret on how he made so much money: years ago, when famous actress Dorothy Page died, he stole her very precious diamond necklace. She appears during the funeral of a war veteran and even kisses him leaving evident traces of lipstick so the woman working there (Prince’s assistant) uses her handkerchief to wipe it out, and then Verity confronts Prince with a photo of a house, Dorothy Page’s house, and tells him she will expose him in a few days time, so he kills her right there and then. After the funeral, he exchanges the bodies in the coffin, burning Verity and keeping the veteran frozen. He gives the ashes to the veteran’s rich widow who throws them over the Hollywood sign, even if it’s forbidden. Prince then puts Verity’s shoes and earrings in her house, near a desk with a glass smeared with lipstick, and then he writes something on her computer changing the date, to make it look like she was home in the evening.

It’s Verity’s secretary that insists the police must investigate because she’d never stay so many hours without answering her phone or contacting him, especially after he left her three messages.

I did not like this guy, this secretary was so annoying and so patronising towards Colombo; in a way he was right, something serious had really happened, but he was annoying nonetheless.

At first it does look like she had been home and then someone entered by force and kidnapped her, but then they discover that Verity’s puppy had been left alone for hours without food or water and he gets angry, and sure that nobody would have bought a puppy and then left him alone to starve like that.

The secretary knew Verity was going to the veteran’s funeral, so Colombo has a place to start. Prince says that he sometimes called her, when it was someone famous’ funeral, because it was all publicity for him, he even says that he called her to come for the veteran’s funeral. And yet, he mentions having another famous man’s funeral to organize but he did not call her for this. 

The assistant tells Colombo that Verity came in a taxi and gives him the handkerchief she used to wipe off the lipstick, so Colombo can see that it is not the same shade on the glass on her desk, clearly put there to make people think that she had been home.

Prince has another cremation, of a short man that died in an explosion, so there’s a small body in a sack, and Prince puts this Lerby together with the veteran’s body and burns them together, and puts all the ashes in the same urn. 

Talking to the taxi driver, Colombo realises that the picture is of a house in Sunset Boulevard that now belongs to a sheik, but it once belonged to actress Dorothy Page, and Colombo learns of the case of the missing diamond necklace. 

This is how it went: when Page died, she was sent to the funeral home with the necklace on her; somebody called right away, Prince denied having seen it and a search found nothing - because diamonds don’t burn, so he shoved them down her throat and took them after cremating her. He used the taxi driver’s help to sell it.

Colombo now has a problem, because there’s no body and no way to prove there ever was a murder. His only chance is to prove that there was a switch in bodies, that he burned Verity before the veteran… and he can do this because the war veteran had a metal plaque in him of a metal that won’t burn, so he gets hold of that urn and shakes it, and we clearly hear a noise, and Colombo shows us that there is a piece of metal inside, proving that the veteran’s ashes are in Lerby’s urn.

…It was important for the plot, of course, the only way… but it’s still silly to me that there was a switch ata all, he should havec burned both bodies at the same time, and kept only part of the ashes… it’s all a bit of nonsense in my opinion. 

This story is set in 1997, October I think. 

 

ITA scandali a Hollywood

Colombo - Rest in peace, Mrs Columbo

 This one wasn’t bad, although it was’t anything special either. Very interesting the first time for sure, a little less valuable as a rewatch.

Viviane Dimitri is so not in her right mind… years ago she loved Pete and he loved her to the point of stealing money from his clients to give her everything she wanted, but then the market went bad and he lost everything… she says he could have made it, the market was about to go up again and he’d have made the money he needed but he didn’t have the time because someone “called his boss and told him what he was doing”… when the client demanded his money back Pete killed him, and ‘a police lieutenant’ hunted him until he arrested him and Pete got a ten years sentence, but eight years in he got a heart attack and died.

Viviane sells houses, talking/convincing people to buy much more expensive houses than they inetnded to. She’s sure that her boss Charlie is the one who ratted out Pete, so she kills him, then she goes to dinner with married Leland during which she sneaks out to use Charlie’s bank card to get some money that she’ll put back in his wallet and back in his pants.

Colombo finds 400 dollars cash in Charlile’s pockets, it was money he won in a bet on a basket game. So Colombo soon explains to his young seargeant his own theory about that cash, great way to instruct the younger ones!

She wanted Colombo to be the one in charge of this case, and she made sure by calling the police station to ask for him, to be sure that he’d be back from his holiday. For security reasons cops’ addresses and phone numbers are not in the phone book.

Colombo eats his beloved chili with crackers as usual. 

28-29 years of marriage for Colombo. He says they never had children but they have each other, and that she’s always doing something…

Colombo knows from the start that Viviane did it, it’s quite obvious from the cash money, and also that she has left clues for who he has to suspect, so he makes her think he bought it to see what her true game is. He can’t find any proof at all. She insists on asking to meet Colombo’s wife, and when he mentions that he does not eat jam but that his wife loves it, she brings him some for her. 

Colombo tracks down Viviane’s old psychiatrist who of course can’t really tell him much about her, but I liked their meeting,, and he made it clear that not only in a case such as that a woman would choose to go after the wife of the man responsible for her husband’s death, but also that she wanted him to know the truth, wanted the satisfaction of him knowing.

So Colombo arranges for his sergeant to rush to him saying his wife is at the hospital… and then there’s Mrs Colombo’s funeral (the priest reminds me a lot of Filini ) and then Colombo asks Viviane to drive him home. He makes himself a slice of bread with the jam Viviane gave him and she watches him eating it. He fakes getting sick until she laughs at him and tells him everything, that she poisoned him and his wife and killed Charlie. At this point he says that it’s not his house but it’s the sergeant who lives there, and who has recorded her confession. His wife is alive and with just a small flu, he never gave her the jam, of course, but sent it to be analyzed immediately. He says he’s sorry for her pain but he took it rather personally that she wanted to kill both him and his wife.

We saw a picture on the piano, a double frame, one with Colombo and one with another woman that’s supposed to be his wife, but at the end of the episode, after the sergeant takes Viviane away, Colombo calls his wife to ask how she feels, and says that the picture is of her sister and she can now take it back, and also tells her that he wants her to have her picture taken because apparently she never had before, and he’s rather sweet, and ends the call with an “I love you too”.

Weird bit: when Colombo visits a ‘hotel’ that rents rooms for prostitutes and where people gamble, the guy at the reception reacts weirdly upon hearing that he’s the police: he says that ‘we gave it to your office’ and that all has ‘been taken care of’ and Colombo says that he didn’t come here for that… and from the guy’s face it looked a lot like he was talking about some sort of bribe… I mean these things happen for sure, but would Colombo not care at all? … Actually maybe not, he has quite an easy attitude about anything that isn’t his case…

ITA che fine ha fatto la signora Colombo?

Colombo - Undercover

 Well, I don’t really care about this story, but I do like that we see Colombo in quite a few different situations than we’re used to. Like, we see him at a murder scene in a very poor area, so he’s more loose and direct, none of all that fake humility he uses to soothe rich people; we see him undercover, we see him working at the police station (although not in his own office of course :lol:), we see him getting dress inside a car and then pretending to be a mafioso…all things that are surely part of his life but we usually don’t see in the other episodes.

These are the things I like of the episode, the scenes that show us our beloved character’s job and life and soul. 

The story is a little bit boring, unfortunately. Two men are found dead (and I’m actually not sure who killed them, at the end… did they kill each other?) and this starts an investigation on an old theft. While Colombo is discussing it with Brown, a man named Irvin Krutch comes in saying that he works for an insurance company that had to pay a lot of money when the robbery money were never found. It’s an old robbery, something like 2 million dollars, and the place where the money was hidden can only be found putting together the pieces of a photograph. Irvin shows them one, saying an old woman gave it to him along with the whole story. Colombo has one found at the murder scene, and one found in the house of the other victim. Colombo finds one by giving some money to an alcohol-loving woman (when the played the widow picked up and carried around by football players, she used to drink all the time as well :lol).

One piece h finds by going undercover and exchanging information with a small thief or something. This Weinberg will also be found dead, and Colombo will be attacked in his hotel room. Hit on the head, our poor lieutenant. Miss Ferguson has another piece but she refuses to cooperate and then she’s found dead. Her partner gives Colombo her piece of the picture.

Most pieces are simply grey. The picture is in black and white and it mostly shows… grey. It will be revealed at the end that Irvin had two pieces but he kept his piece with the X marking the right place hidden. It was quite easy to suspect him, but at first it seems like he might have an alibi since a girl swears that she was with him all day and all night when Weinberg was killed, but then Colombo finds his proof: a parking meter with a coin with Irvin’s fingerprints, and it had been emptied recently so they have a specific time range when he could have put it there - and he had to put it there because cars could be towed away otherwise. After bein told this, and also that it involved murder, the girl tells the truth.

At the end, the cops recover the money hidden underwater, but Colombo is not really interested anymore after the puzzle has been solved.

ITA indagini ad incastro

Colombo - Murder: a self portrait

Well, this wasn’t too bad but it wasn’t good either, it’s quite in the middle, really nothing special though. The main character is very arrogant and full of himself, a famous painter, an artist who has three women and demands they get along so he can have whatever he wants whenever he wants. Really, this Max Barsini lives with his second wife Vanessa and his young model Julie and their nextdoor neighbour is his first wife Louise, and he wants them to have dinners together and everything.

It all changes when he finds out that she’s seeing again her old psychologist, only for personal reasons now. They have a relationship and she wants to leave and live with him. She vaguely mentions something that happened in the past but sh’s adamant that she’d never do anything against him, or to cause him trouble. God only knows why.

He decides to kill her and prepares well. He goes to Vito’s, it’s a bar with a small apartment upstairs where he used to live with Louise when they were younger and broke. Max says he’ll paint something for him that will attract people to his bar, but while he’s supposed to be there behind a big canvas painting, he’s actually sneaking out to reach the small beach where he knows he’ll find her. Louise always went swimming, and he starts with friendly words, to depart as friends… and then covers her mouth with the rag and the white spirit that he uses to clean the brushes. After she’s passed out, he carries her into the water where he drowns her. 

I’s supposed to look like an accident, but of course there are details, like the fact that she only had one contact lense in her eyes, the other one was in its box, so she was interrupted… and also the smudge of colour on her face. It wasn’t lipstick, it was oil paint, and a specific colour indeed, the one called Barsini red because he makes it himself, of course. And there’s lipstick traces on the rag.

When Max mentions doing a portrait, Colombo accepts with enthusiasm, so he has the perfect chance to spend time together to talk to him and they listen together to the recordings of Louise’s nightmares, three of them, a bit different but all three alluding of a man with a monocle that they knew years before. This Harry was Max’s agent when he was starting out, and not an honest one. More than once he sold someone’s art and never gave them the money. Colombo is sure that Max killed him, and probably buried him in Vito’s basement, but he can prove nothing about that. What he can prove is this murder, because of the colour and lipstick.

Colombo had also noticed that in the apartment where Max was supposed to have painted that last piece, the water was all mud, hadn’t been used in a long time, so he hadn’t used it to clean the brushes of the spirit, and also that there were no paint stains on the floor.

After a lot of shouting,because of course neither of them is happy with the situation, finally Vanessa and Julie actually talk to one another and decide to do something for their own sake instead of always for Max, so they both leave him.

Colombo’s portrait is quite nice :)

ITA autoritratto di un assassino

Colombo - Last salute to the Commodore

Unfortunately this was one of the most boring episodes of Columbo, I didn’t like it at all. I say unfortunately because it was different, meaning that for once we didn’t really know the culprit, and it had a final à-la-Poirot, where the detective gathers everyone to give his speech, sort of… but it didn’t go well. The whole episode was very boring, Colombo’s scenes were boring as well because all centered around nautical terms and stuff, and the final revelation was in part too out of the blue and in part sort of silly. 

When the Commodore dies, we see his son-in-law Clay taking things away, cleaning things and then hiding the body at sea, so that it might be thought of as an accident…

Colombo soon has the right idea, that Clay went from one place to the Commodore’s ship by swimming underwater so that nobody could see him, then pretended to be the Commodore going out at sea, then dumped the body there.

As soon as they know this, Clay is found dead.

There’s a lot of talking about ships and Colombo trying to understand all the new terms.

Then the solution:

Clay thought his wife had killed her father and since she’s always drunk she has no memory of what she did that night. It wasn’t her though. He tried to cover for her only because he wanted her to have her father’s inheritance so he could get his hands on it.

Apparently the Commodore wanted to marry young Lisa, and this was so out of the blue that when I saw that he wanted to give her name to a ship/boat/whatever, I thought she might have been his secret daughter or something, but no. They were in love and she loved him for what he was and did not want his money and never cared for it, so she’s not a suspect. I’m not sure how they can be sure of it or why this relationship matters anyway…

The Commodore’s brother’s son Swanny killed him, and Colombo’s only evidence seems to be that when Colombo made them hear ticking and said ‘the Commodore’s watch’ he was the only one that said “impossible!”, because he was the only one who knew it had broken during the murder.

That’s it. 

I’m not sure of how he killed him, or even why since the daughter is the heir.

I did not like this episode at all, all that ship-talking was boring to me that I don’t care, and maybe it’s boring to those who care too, since they probably already know it all already. 

There was very little investigation, nothing of the usual Colombo we know.

Colombo - Murder in Malibu

I liked this episode enough, it was the only one where you couldn’t be sure of who had done it until the end… well, you knew, but at the same time you didn’t for sure, while usually we see all the process and know every detail for sure.

The episode and the plot was interesting, but I didn’t much care for this Wayne character. Ok, being the murderer, it’s normal that he wasn’t very likable, but that’s the point. To everyone else in the story, he was.  All the women loved him! Not just two or three, all of them. Helen the insurance woman, the producer’s wife, the woman at the tennis place, Jess and Theresa and even Jess’s maid, all of them had a story with him, but there were more that lilked him a lot even if they didn’t have an affair with him, and I can’t see why. He was reasonably handsome, but really nothing so earth-shattering…

Anyway, the plot is: despite his many women, the one he asked to marry him was Theresa, a successful writer. At first she was unsure, but then during a tv interview, pressed by her fans, she admitted that she loved Wayne and wanted to marry him.

Next thing we know, Theresa calls Wayne at night and tells him that she hates him and will never marry him. Now, we saw that her sister jess had a private investigator gather information on Wayne so maybe they wanted us to believe that after learning something she called it off, but they also showed us the shadow of the woman speaking, and that wasn’t Theresa’s hair, or head… and it’s very easy to recognize her as soon as we see her… (well, in Italian it’s rather ridiculous because the two voices were so very different that it was impossible to mistake them, and it was absurd that Wayne did).

Wayne drives back immediately and ends up killing her. When she showed up, Jess, sister and literary agent who has always been a bit jealous of her pretty sister (apparently… she was different, more aggressive, a tough character, which may explain whileall the boys turned to her sister once they met her…) is openly hostile to Wayne.

It doesn’t take too long for them to butt heads, and it doesn’t take long for Wayne to sort of confess that he came home and found that Theresa had destroyed all his love letters and had read the investigator’s notes, and he says that he lost his mind and shot her with her own gun that he found there, or something like that. Before they can arrest him though, they learn that the shot to the heart with the gun he admits to using was not what killed her. She had been killed with a blow to the head, I think, or a shot to the head, something like that, but for sure the gun shot to the heart happened when she was already dead. He faints. Apparently he’s free to go, it’s not a crime to shoot a dead body…

Let’s see what I remember: Wayne lives with Theresa, as his own room there, full of pictures of his many adventures (climbing, fishing, skydiving, tennis) and Colombo wonders when he has time to earn his living, but he doesn’t reply, I’m not sure he actually does anything. Jess tells Colombo about the investigator so he can talk freely. Wayne said he arrived around 7, and on the way left a message on Helen’s machine saying he was going to see Theresa (knowing that her phone records the hour too). Some men doing cable repairs were there since 5.50am to 6.20 am if I remember right, and didn’t see any cars. After checking the phone records Colombo guesses the truth and Jess confesses she made the call, since Theresa wouldn’t do it. 

When Colombo busts him, it’s because he studied her lingerie, to the curious looks of everyone in sight. He was with Jess, having won her over simply with a kiss, when Colombo explains. When they found her, Theresa was wearing pretty lingerie but also white knee length socks that she only wore with slacks, that she used when she wanted to be comfortable, like around the house or while travelling on a plane.

Her lingerie, though, really caught Colombo’s attention, and is the reason why he’s sure that it must have been a man, because no woman would make the same mistake. Wayne arrived early and killed her while she was asleep then he dressed her as if she was preparing to leave (she was supposed to leave forSeattle on a plane). In his plan he could have been back to play tennis and nobody would have noticed. Colombo  had the recorded message analized and apparently the noise that Wayne said was traffic was actually crows, and there were a lot annoying the cable guys while they worked…

Colombo says Wayne arrived very early and killed her, but then the cable guys arrived and he couldn’t leave without being seen, so he changed his plan and made that phone call, and then shot her heart. He figured that if he confessed and was proven ‘innocent’, as indeed happened, they would not look at him anymore, but Colombo is smarter than that. 

He says that someone dressed her, someone who knew her enough to know she would wear slacks and those white socks for the plane, and it could not have been a sister or a maid because no woman would put the panties on backwards. The picture of the body proves it because you can see the label on her right hip, but it should have been on the left, because they’re always on the left side…

Whn she gets it, Jess launches herself at Wayne, and I’d say she even assest one good punch :)

ITA omicidio a Malibu

Colombo - Death hits the jackpot

Quite nice, I liked it. Colombo was his usual nice self :) and the ending was nice, although a bit open to interpretation… 

So, the story is that Freddie is about to divorce his redheaded wife Nancy. Watching the tv he sees that he won the lottery, 30 millions (apparently only 24 after taxes… not too bad after all, if he was here he’d get much less…) and he doesn’t want to split it with her, so he asks for his uncle’s help.

Leon suggests taking the ticket and getting the money himself, and then giving it all back to him. Freddie insists on a 10% for him as a thank you, which would already be a lot of money totally legal and without doing anything, but he’s a greedy man indeed.

Nancy is his lover, and he wants all the money to himself. 

He tells nothing about the ticket being Freddie’s to anyone, obviously, his own wife is happy of the news and blissfully ignorant of all his schemes.

Leon throws a big costume party on Halloween, then he drives fully dresses as George IV to Freddie’s house where he hits him on the head and then drowns him in the bathtub, obviously going for the ‘accident’ scenario. 

Colombo notices many things, though. Freddie had a fake watch on his wrist, for example. Uncle Leon once gifted him a 3000$ watch, and Freddie probably sold it and got himself a 100$ watch -Leon touched it and watched it and never noticed… 2900$ well spent indeed… :-/

Colombo says that the fake watch (to Leon it’s cheap at 100$! It’s only cheap if you swim in money, ask Colombo if he’s ever had a 100$ watch!!!) is not waterproof and Freddie knewit so it’s weird that he kept it in the bathtub. 

Freddie had called Leon many times this last month, and if he was asking for money because he couldn’t pay rent, how come he had ordered an expensive car and had actually bought a box of champagne bottles? When Colombo sees the winning numbers on Freddie’s camera (he was a photographer) he understands who really won the money.

How Colombo busts the murderer: the George IV costume that Leon admits to wearing for the whole night of the party goes along with a pendant, all shiny, and the monkey (a chimp, not sure about the spelling) temporarily living in Freddie’s apartment loved to touch shiny, golden things, and that night she touched the pendant, so her fingerprints prove that Leon wore that costume in Freddie’s home, that night.

Colombo suspects Nancy too, of course, because that night someone pretended to be Freddie and called Leon’s home (she did).

When she arrives, called by the police, Colombo tells her that the money’s hers now, because it was Freddie’s and they never signedthe divorce papers. She’s all happy so petty Leon tells Colombo of her role as his accomplice. She doesn’t deny it, too busy being mad at him, a redheaded fury…

Well, here I guesss Colombo lied like he often does when it suits him, because there’s no way, that I can see, the money would go to Nancy. The lottery was officially won by Leon, he presented the ticket, so the money should now go to his wife. 

Leon - Rip Torn

Nancy - Jamie Rose  …  with that hair, that unfogettable head of red curls

Freddie - Gary Kroeger

Leon’s wife - Betsy Palmer

And Joey the chimp  (I wrote it correctly, good :D )

ITA misteriose impronte digitali

Colombo - Columbo goes to college

A nice episode, I liked it. We see Colombo giving a lecture, more or less, at a University, for the course of criminology of professor Rusk, and as he’s walking to his car with some of the students, they see the professor in a pool of blood, already dead. 

It was interesting. I liked that he told the kids of a previous episode, meaning of a past case that we also saw, when he took a chewing-gum from the bin to match it to a piece of  cheese (it was Agenda for Murder, s9e3).

The story is: Justin and Sooper are two rich kids who murder their professor because he wanted them kicked out of the university. Justin tells professor Rusk to meet his dad to talk (his dad is an important man, of course). It’s the same day Colombo’s there. Rusk goes out before he’s finished, and is shot as he reaches his car. The boys are still in class: they used a camera to watch, and the electronic key of the car to fire the gun. Somehow.

They took the second gun of the security guard - not much of a guard, really, but in his defence it’s just a university, and that’s a private parking lot, only for the teachers… and these two students because they give him free sport tickets.

The boys think that Colombo is useless, stupid, and often mock him, he even sees them mocking him. They think it’s all funny.

Their aim is to have Dominic, the guard’s brother, arrested because he has a criminal record. 

The shooting gets recorded by a neighbour whose satellite antenna caught the boys’ transmission, which finally gives Colombo the idea for how they did it. To bust them, he ‘lets them know’ he only needs Dominic’s car to search it to close the case. Cooper finds it and puts the gun in there. They’re so sure they were so clever, until Colombo reveals that it’s actually his wife’s car, and they were the only ones who thought it was Dominic’s. 

Robert Culp plays Justin’s father. This is the fourth Colombo episode for him, he’s played three murderers and a murderer’s father, quite the record :lol

ITA omicidio telecomandato

Colombo - No time to die

This is the only episode where nobody dies… well, until the end when they kill the villain. Still, up to that point he had only kidnapped the girl but our heroes arrive before he can touch her or otherwise hurt her.

As it often happens, what I liked most were the scenes with Colombo, I wasn’t too fond of everybody else.  It was nice seeing him in a smoking at his nephew’s wedding, not as a lieutenant but as an uncle.

The story is simple: his nephew Andy Parma, another detective, marries rich Melissa who recently started a career as a model. It’s all nice and happy, with Colombo dancing and laughing with the bride, until the newlyweds retreat to their room and he has a very loud shower, singing his lungs out :-/  and someone breaks in and takes her away. He calls Colombo and his other cop friends and they start investigating right away. 

Since it had to be someone waiting for Andy to be away and Melissa to be alone, they search for someone who was at the party but shouldn’t have been, someone nobody knows, stuff like that.

Colombo drives to photographer Alexìs house,, the one who ‘discovered’ Melissa and took lots of pictures  for a magazine who will dedicate a few pages to the event.

Colombo asks Andy, his two cop friends and Melissa’s father to point all the people they know and can therefore be discarded, then he sends three cops to check with the few singles who did they bring, and when it’s all over there’s only one young man not accounted for. 

Colombo also gets many depliants of vans to show a man in order to find out what van was used to take her away, and he finally realises it was an ambulance.

This Rudy guy is rather troubled and talks about his dead mother in a ‘psycho’ way. Honestly, it was the boring part of the episode. I don’t know if it was scary in any way back when it aired the first time, but it certainly isn’t to me.

He keeps her in a room with a mattress on the floor and little else, until he thinks it’s time that he ‘marries’ her, meaning that he says all the words and that’s enough for him, then they lay in the bed when our heroes finally arrive. It seemed to me like this Rudy guy wanted to eventually slid her throat, like his mother died, but as soon as he gets in Andy shoots him before he can do anything.

The only scene I didn’t like - other than Rudy talking about their love and their wedding - was at the end when they were to enter the house…slowly, one at a time… it probably was the right way but still I didn’t like how it was shown.

By magic of television, Melissa spends a long time pouring lots and lots of vinegar and even more oil on the door hinges to try and get out, and yet her light white silk nightgown is still perfect, like her hair despite her hands touching it a lot.

At least she tried to freed herself, it’s better than nothing, but then she ignored the kitchen and was completely frozen by the next room, like a shrine in her honor, with a video, pictures, a white bed and everything. I don’t get why she was so shocked, he had talked to her a lot about their love and their wedding, it was abundantly clear that he was obsessed with her.

The episode ends immediately after she’s saved, not a minute more.

Colombo drove in the night with a map on the wheel and a light to actually see it, when he was trying to find Alex’s house :lol:  *safetyprocedures*

Alex - Daniel Davis

cop Mulroney - Doug Savant

Andy Parma - Thomas Calabro

ITA non c’è tempo per morire

Colombo - Agenda for murder

 I liked this episode and the scene where Colombo tells a joke is memorable, those two men laughing out loud never fail to make me laugh :)

The story is : Oscar Finch is an important lawyer, his best friend McKay’s career is flying since governor Montgomery, who is running for President, wants him as his second, and Oscar would get an important position as well.

Everything could be ruined by Frank Staplin. When Finch and McKay were young, they made a document disappear, saving Staplin from prison, and Staplin now wants Finch to do it again. Finch refuses and Staplin blackmails him with revealing that story. So Finch kills him in his house, making it look like suicide. Being a lawyer and therefore knowing about this stuff, he thinks of wearing gloves, and putting gun powder on Staplin’s hand, and leaving the fun where it should fall after the death but he also makes some mistakes. Some are not talked about, like when Finch presses Staplin’s fingers on it he only does it on the front, but nobody can take a neat piece of paper without touching its back…

But it’s no matter.

The mistake that matters the most to Colombo is this: when Finch shot Staplin, a drop of blood stained the floor, and when he finished to pu the scene as he wanted it, the gun ended up on top of the blood and yet didn’t get stained because the blood was dry. That screams of murder.

One thing Finch couldn’t know is that before opening the door for him, Staplin had just sent a fax to his wife with a handwritten joke on it; Finch told Colombo that Staplin sounded desperate when he called him, shortly before his death, and yet he had just sent a funny joke to his wife… the two things don’t match.

Finch left his car at his own parking lot, near his office, and walked to Staplin’s house. When he walked back, it rained a lot. In the morning, Colombo can see that under his car it’s dry and only there, and wet everywhere else. He hopes to get his suit from the laundry service, to prove he was out walking at that hour, but it gets cleaned by a zelous worker.

McKay gives Finch an alibi, and it really seems like Colombo can’t find any proof. Then, he takes a chewing-gum from Finch’s office bin, and his team succeeds in matching it to a piece of cheese on Stapliin’s desk, and to Finch’s dental records I guess, and it’s over for him. 

This Finch waas quite the character, always in a hurry to do something, starting his car with the turbo, so to speak, and thern there’s the joke. Colombo tells him Staplin’s joke, and Finch’s face is marble for a couple of seconds, then there’s a loud HAH! and then he starts laughing out loud, bent at the double, leaning on the car laughing, and I love that scene :lol

I really like Finch’s secretary, both the actress and the character, who gives Colombo a deodorant for the house to give his wife, who sends back a note of thanks. It’s weird to hear her say that she won’t accept his money for it because this is not from the office but it comes from her directly, she buys it herself… weird because it usually would be the opposite, like ‘since she took it from the office it gets lost in the many things needed and bought and she won’t lose any money by giviing it to him’ sort of thing. What a super honest woman :)

It’s sweet to see Colombo so awed by a fax machine :) but this episode has a rather weird solution, the teeth marks on the cheese… Colombo and the writers were proud enough of it to mention it in other episodes too, but really… what use is the chewing-gum? If it’s actually really possible, they’d need to match the cheese to Finch’s mental records, gotten from his dentist, or whatever. But the gum… if it has marks, it’s not from his front teeth! I don’t know but… I don’t care over much, I still like Colombo :)

Colombo - A bird in the hand

 A nice episode, I liked it. I liked the fact that the whole time I was waiting to see how could Colombo bust our murderer, Harold, and then he gets killed too. Nice twist a-la-psycho.

And I liked a lot this Dolores character, played by Tyne Daly.

The plot:

Harold is a compulsive gambler which means he is full of debts. His uncle Fred is rich, owner of a football team, but he’s tired of Haroldd’s debts, so Harold plans to kill him by placing a bomb in his car. In the morning though, he learns that Fred has been run over and is now dead. There’s police officers everywhere, there’s nothing he can do to get that bomb out of there. He even finds Colombo in the car! ‘Luckily’ Colombo never tried the engine :)

Fred’s funeral sees Harold stick to Dolores like glue because she’s the heir and he wants access to that money. She is not his aunt, he’s known her only five years and they’re occasional lovers, but now he seems to have a lot of competition :p she likes the company of all those football players :lol:

He tries to ‘win her back’ with lots of words, but when she refuses to give him 15000$ he changes his tune and blackmails her. This is when things change.

I had not thought about it because all the attention had been centered on Harold, but his words make sense,  when he accuses her of having killed Fred herself. The fact that she agrees to pay means she did it, and now she knows he’s  a threat so she kills him to shut him up. She tells Colombo that Harold called her that morning, scared because he was being threatened due to his many debts, so he wanted to run away but had no money, so she went to him with 1000$ and found him already dead. The policeman says a professional entered the house using a glass cutter (we saw Dolores putting one of those in her bag) and made noise knocking over the cat’s milk bowl (she also put milk in her bag), so Harold tried to reach for his gun but got killed first.

But Colombo sees many things the others just ignored :)

First of all: Harold was indeed a murderer because he didn’t say a word and let the old gardener try to move the car, so he got blown up. 

Colombo figures out how he attached the bomb to the car and that he left marks when he pushed himself below the car with his boots’ heels (it’s a funny scene when he goes to a car dealer with the same type of expensive cars and starts mumbling about where a bomb could be put, and after explaining he’s police he starts crawling underneath the car to study it personally, and people stop outside the window to look at him an when he notices he’s sitting there and smiling at them like a child ).

Colombo even shows Dolores a recording of Harold closing his eyes and averting his face right before the explosion, sign that he was expecting it.

Regarding Harold, he had 5000$ in his room, and wet socks inside his boots. This meant nothing to the other cops because it didn’t go along with their perfect, simple theory, so they just ignored it, but not Colombo. He does a proper investigation: Harold had been at a Casino all night, where he won the 5000 and had a haircut. This is important because Colombo saw Harold’s cowboy hat in Dolores’ house, and it contained freshly cut small hairs, meaning he had lefty it the same morning he was killed.

Busted.

ITA il gioco è fatto / asassinio per gioco

Ma - 2019

 This was not bad but also… not what I expected. It was more a psychological drama than a horror movie. There are a couple of horror scenes, nothing too much, and a little bit of thriller, just a little bit. The rest was character study, childhood trauma, and idiot teenage behaviour.

It’s so sad that this world keeps teaching kids that to be “an adult” they need to drink alcohol and have sex. Why all this rush to be adults, kids? This is your only chance to be a kid!

So, this film here is the story of a woman who could never forget the horrible humiliation of her high school, when Ben invited her to the janitor’s closet  and Mercedes told her how to suck him, and so she did it, in the dark, without even saying much at all I guess, or she would have noticed the voice ,because when it was over and they got out, she found out it was another boy in there with her, while Ben was now outside with the whole school laughing at her. Horrible, really. They were all cruel, but girl… I know very well everyone wants to fit in and have friends, but is it really worth it if you have to change yourself, or do whatever they tell you? Is that friendship? No. Often teenagers kid themselves into saying that they’re doing what they want, trying out new things… but if you never had any interest in drinking or smoking and only start  doing it because they convince you, isn’t that changing who you are to please others? 

Open your eyes, because adults spent their lives regretting that they’re not kids anymore, when yes they had someone telling them when to be home and had homework to do and could not drive (well, here they can’t, in the US they can), but they also had no responsibilities, had someone else take care of their laundry, cook their meals and bring money home… 

Back to the plot, Erica comes back to her hometown after her divorce with a 16 year old daughter, Maggie. At school she’s approached by Haley and invited in her group, so Maggie finds herself outside a liquor store asking people if they’ll go in and buy alcohol for them. She doesn’t drink or smoke, but she wants to be friends with them. Of course everybodys says no, until she asks Sue Ann. 

Sue Ann buys them what they want and then secretly sends the police after them - and they never suspect her… who else could know who they were and where they were?

So the next time sh buys alcohol for them, she tells them to hang out in her basement, so sh’ll check that they’re ok… and so they start hanging out there, going to her house for parties, to drink and smoke, and they call it fun.

When Maggie and Haley sneak upstairs to use her bathroom, Sue Ann - they call her Ma, one of them did it once and they kept doing it, for some reason… - she scares Maggie, who doesn’t want to go there anymore.

Still, she does and drinks something strange… she wakes up at home without her earrings. Now she really doesn’t want to hang out with Ma anymore, but Ma sends her and the others tons of messages, and then tells them that she has cancer and needs some friends… Andy’s mom died of cancer, and she apeals to their sympathy. Haley thinks Ma is stealing stuff from them because of the bracelet she was wearing, and Haley herself doesn’t have her grandma’s ring anymore. So Haley and Maggie sneak into the house to search, and only find Genie, a girl Maggie saw in school in a wheelchair, but now she’s standing. Ma is her mother, and is now keeping her home, giving her who knows what medicine saying that she’s sick; when Ma comes back, Genie urges tehm to get out.

They saw many pictures of them in Ma’s room, attached to the pictures of their parents. Maggie finds Ma at her own home talking to Erica about their dog - Sue Ann works at a dog clinic - and when she finds the dog bleeding she tells her mom not to call Sue Ann and explains what happened. Erica of course is very angry.

Maggie owuld be ok with her mom’s order to never go there again, but Ma shows her that Andy - who is now Maggie’s boyfriend - is there with lots of other kids, drinking and dancing, so Maggie sneaks out, takes her mom’s car and goes there to confront him. Ma locks them in and chains them with collars.

Maggie is the only one not drugged, so she tried to get out from upstairs… the door wasn’t locked so she sneaked upstairs looking for Genie and instead she found Ben’s body on a bed, looking all bleed out, and then Ma finds her. 

Ma also killed Mercedes, ran her over, but nobody seems to have noticed yet…

At 7am Erica wakes up and when she realises that Maggie is not home she freaks out calls Stu her friend from work, and I guess also the police. All the kids in the basement are chained by the collar - how come there’s so few of them? There was a big party… she let everybody else go and kept only the kids she wanted? I guess so, they’re all related to those that more wronged her back then.

Ma uses her hot iron on a boy’s belly, he must be really out on drugs nnot to feel it. Then Ma sews Haley’s lips together, after hitting Ashley in the head with her iron, because the girl screamed and tried to run away. She paints Darrel’s face white, and then Andy wakes up and tries to play her… when she frees him from the chain and hugs him, he tells her he loves her and kisses her, but she calls him a liar and stabs him. 

A cop knocks at her door. He hears some noise made by Maggie but sees Genie in the wheelchair and is about to go away but then he hears Maggie screaming, so Ma shoots him dead.

Ma blames Genie for it, and forces her to help her drag the body inside. Ma goes back downstairs, takes some pictures with them, then hangs Maggie who can’t breathe. Genie screams to get her upstairs and then hits her and knocks her down, accidentally causing a fire - she knocked a candle.

Genie runs to free them from the chain, and they scream and bang on the basement door. Stu opens it and they all go out, but Ma got Genie. 

Genie calls for help but Erica keeps Maggie back. Sue Ann calls her weak, Erica apologises for what happened back then, for not stopping it.

Genie cries for Maggie’s help, so she grabs a knife and runs to stab Ma, freeing her. The house is burning, they all get out but not Ma, she goes upstairs to lie next to Ben on the bed, and stays there.

We see the firefighters are on their way, but the house is really burning, and not likely she’ll make it out alive.

That’s the end.

I think it was a mistake saying it’s a horror movie, because it’s not… well, not what I think of horror movies. It’s a psychological trauma film. But I guess it has to be labelled a horror movie since there’s fear and torture and deaths…

Sue Ann is Octavia Spencer

Maggie is Diana Silvers

Dr Brown is Allison Janney

Ben is Luke Evans

Mercedes is Missi Pyle

Stu is Dominic Burgess

Young Mercedes is Nicole Carpenter

 

Money monster - 2016

 It’s a bitter movie, of course, what else could it be when there’s money, greed and poverty involved?

Lee Gates, host of tv show Money Monster, talks about money and investments and stuff. Apparently an investment app had a glitch and many people lost money. 

It’s a live show, and who they thought was a delivery guy enters th stage with a gun pointed at Lee and has him wear a bomb jacket. He yells that it’s all rigged to steal people’s money, he blames Lee because he said the Ibis investment was the safest, really a safe bet, and the guy lost 60.000$, a lot for him, everything.

Globally, he says that the glitch, whatever it means, cost 800 millions.

Diane Lester should have appeared on the show, but when she heard that the guy was complaining about Ibis, she ran. She’s with Ibis too, but the boss Walt is flying somewhere.

The poor guy is Kyle (Lee’s face :lol: he knew the name already because Patti had already told him since the directs the show from  inside the studio, but he said “you don’t have to tell me your real nname, just how I can call you” and the guy: “call me Kyle” …)

Lee sends Ron there and Diana talks to Kyle. Money’s not enough now, he wants answers, an explanation, but she doesn’t know what caused the glitch. They’re all angry and not satisfied by her answers, she’s just a CCO or something  like that, like a pr person, but now she goes to find the answers.

Lee and Patti know they’re watched everywhere now, millions of people, so he tells everyone to buy Ibis so that its value will rise.

But he said “what’s my life worth?” because by doing it, they’d save him, and the price goes down…

The police brings Kyle’s pregnant girlfriend to talk to him, she should calm him down, but instead Moll starts swearing and yelling and insulting him, because he lost all their money, because he can’t use a screwdriver at home and now he built a bomb…

Diane finds the Korean guy who designed the program, which is all Maths, and he says that “it means there is no way that this algorithm could lose 800 millions in one afternoon, it is literally a mathematical impossibility”.

Whatever happened, it was human. Of course.

Walt the Ibis boss, has landed, and he lied to Diane about where he was. Walt tells her he’ll have to make a statement, and Diane calls Patti, even lets her know he was not in Geneva but in South Africa.

Whe they realize the police wants to shoot Lee to deactivate the bomb (wow) she tells Lee to move, and then he takes Kyle and a cameraman and tells him they’re going to get answers. While they’re walking on the street, Kyle reveals that it’s just clay, not a bomb, he wanted attention, not to kill everyone.

Yes he had a real gun, but he shot in the air and that’s it.

Well, he injures poor Ron working for them, but he didn’t want to.

Kyle and Lee get to talk to Walt, reveal the games he was playing, trying to corrupt a good man in South Africa who refused, thus making him lose money. Somehow.

Anyway, Kyle has him admit that it was  wrong thing to do, and then he takes his finger off the detonator, and the police shoot him. He knew it could happen, and he died.

Lenny the cameraman is interviewd like a hero, Patti and Lee are alive and still working together, and there will be “an investigation” on Ibis… and we know how those things usually go, right?

Rich people never really lose.

Lee Gates is George Clooney

Patty Fenn is Julia Roberts

Kyle Budwell is Jack O’Connell

Walt Camby is Dominic West

Diane Lester is Caitriona Balfe

Captain Powell is Giancarlo Esposito

Lenny is Lenny Venito

Molly is Emily Meade

ITA L’altra faccia del denaro

John Wick chapter 4 - 2023

I’ve seen and liked all the Wick movies, although the first was my fav, of course. This one wants to leave us with a bang, and the ending left me rather bitter for a moment… until I thought of John Wick and then I could see that this was the only freedom he could get, the only way he can be free and at peace. And he won. Which matters.

John wants his ring, his freedom. The Marquis has received by the 12 members of the Table full power to close Winston’s hotel. Meaning, the hotel is evacuated, then blown up. The Marquis says Winston has failed so he’s now excommunicated. And he kills his concierge Charon right in front of him. 

All this after John went to kill the Elder. Now John goes to the Osaka Continental because the Director is a friend. Koji and his daugter Akira run it. He puts friendship and his rules above the Table, and his hotel is excommunicated as well. He fights them, but a lot more of them arrive. All the hotel staff joins the fight, including Akira and John. They’re looking for him.

There’s also Caine, a blind assassin who tried to refuse but he has a daughter, Mia, so e accepts to protect her. He was friends with John once, but now they have to fight.

John escapes but Caine kills Koji. Now Mr Nobody and his dog are hired as well to kill John. Winston tells John about the Marquis and John wants to kill him,  but Winston says the right way is to challenge him officially and force him to free him. To be able to challenge him, he needs to be a part of a family again. Pyotr waas killed too because of what John did, so now John has to kill the man that killed Pyotr first. This big man is very hard to kill but once it’s done he’s again part of his Belarus family. 

As his second, Winston delivers the challenge to the Marquis. John and the Marquis meet to talk about it, about the rules. At dawn, with duel guns, to the death.

The Marquis names Caine to fight for him, threatening his daughter quite clearly. He also raises the reward for John’shead to 26 millions, if they kill him before dawn.

So, before dawn, he gets run over something like 4 times, he crashes his car, he’s hit and he jumps off a window, he’s shot at…  and of course he kills quite a lot of them. 

Mr Nobody raises his price to 40 millions, and so does the reward. 

Whey they get inside a building it starts looking like a videogame, clear one room then the next… and I was waiting for one scene and I got it. He fought Mr Nobody and was about to kill him but he saw that the Marquis’ man was about to kill the dog (Nobody’s dog), so instead John shot the man to save the dog and went away. Leaving Mr Nobody there with wide eyes.

The last two minutes, Caine helps him, and Mr Nobody too, briefly. At dawn, all three are there. John and Caine shoot twice, injuring each other, then the third shot. Caine shoots, John doesn’t, but he falls down. Badly hurt but alive, so the Marquis wants to finish him off. John has yet to shoot though, so he shoots the Marquis in the head. The Member of the Table that is present states that John is now free, that both Caine and his daughter are free, and Winston is good again and will have his hotel back.

John tellls Caine “you owe me one” and then he asks Winston “will  you take me home?”.

He’s really too badly hurt this time. After a few steps, he stops, sits, thinks of his wife and falls down.

The next scene, Winston is in front of his grave, the Bowery King is there with his dog (John’s dog). 

“Never thtought I’d see the day” he says.

John is buried next to his wife, with the words “loving husband” that he himself had chosen and told them both so.

John Wick is Keanu Reeves

the Bowerey King is Laurence Fishburne

Charon is Lance Reddick

Winston is Ian McShane

The Marquis is Bill Skarsgard

Caine is Donnie Yen

After the credits, Caine is finally going to his daughter, who he’s now finally free to approach, but Akira is walking towards him to kill him, since John didn’t. 

We don’t know how it goes… (but seeing things like this, she’ll kill him and walk away)

It also says: “in memory of Lance Reddick

The Thursday murder club - 2025

I liked this a lot, even if it was rather sad at times. The characters were all interesting, as was the story. The ending felt rather abrupt, a bit disconnected, rushed, but all in all it was a good film, and I’d watch more if they have the same cast. Very British. I liked it.

I must say that the solutions were a bit rushed, not really satisfying, but I liked that is starts with one but there are actually four murders with four different culprits.

I also didn’t appreciate Joyce’s vehement and rather rude phone call to her daughter to enlist her help. 

Basically they meet in the ‘puzzle room’ to work on cold cases… for fun, Id say, since they’re all old and retired. Elizabeth starts mysterious but it’s clear she worked in the spy business, and it turns out she was MI6. Ron was a Union leader, Ibrahim was a psychiatrist, and they live in this rich village for retired rich people. The three of them try to solve a cold case a week. They start on the case of poor Angela who was killed in the 70s, when cop Penny was young. All the male cops believed Angela’s boyfriend but Penny didn’t, and yet she always refused to work on that case while she was part of the club. She isn’t anymore because she’s in a coma.

They ask Joyce’s help, because she was once a nurse and can therefore provide medical knowledge.

This case will be sort of put on hold, though, because other two murders happen.

Short version: Ian and Tony owns the property. Ian now wants to send them all away and make apartments for rich people to make money. Tony doesn’t agree because his aunt resides there too.

Tonny is found dead in his own home, Joyce is thrilled to have a new case, to be actually involved in an ongoing investigation, so they manage to have their friend Donna, a cop they recently met, very much bored here because she used to work in London but here they have her fetch their coffee and nothing more. Elizabeth plots with her friends to have her working the case. 

At first the obvious suspect is Ian, because without Tony he could push forward his project, but Ron’s son is also a suspect for a little while. Ex boxer and now tv celebrity, Jason figured in a pictured with the victim but he has an alibi, he was with Ian’s wife and has pictures on his phone to prove it.

When Ian comes to confront the residents’ protest, he’s killed with an injection. 

Elizabeth talks to Bogdan, a man who would do almost anything to be able to send money to his old mother in Poland, and they’re quite friendly.

They also find out that Bobby Tanner, the third owner of the property and famous criminal, is still alive.

Bogdan calls Elizabeth when he finds a body on a grave… it clearly shouldn’t have been there, and it will be IDed as Angela’s boyfriend. 

Elizabeth and Donna find out that Tony and Bobby were together in their crimes: human trafficking, they bring immigrants in but then they take their passport away to own them in their power. 

It’s now clear that Bogdan killed Tony, and the first to know this is Stephen, Elizabeth’s husband who is slowly losing his mind, but still has good days, or good moments, and while alone with Bogdan he reveals that he knows, and Bogdan confesses that he did it, but accidentally, he never wanted to kill anyone, he only wanted to go back home because his mother is ill. 

Elizabeth runs home with her heart in her throat, terrified that Bogdan might kill Stephen too, but no, Bogdan didn’t put anything in his glass (or cup, whatever). He is arrested because Stephen always records everything, hehas a recorder with him and she knows it but Bogdan didn’t.

And now, Elizabeth walks into Penny’s room to talk to her husband because now she knows: Penny knew that Angela had been killed by her boyfriend, and also knew that he would get away with it, so she killed him. Her husband can’t do anything for her now that she’s in a coma, but he could try to protect her, so he wanted to stop Ian because Ian wanted to destroy the graveyard (there’s got to be a better word but I can’t think of what it is now) and the body would have come up. He didn’t know that Ian had told Bogdan to start working by himself while he kept the residents occupied in their protest, so that he could later say that the project had indeed started.

Now the poor man feels very down because he feels he failed at protect her, and it is clear that there’s only one remaining way to protect Penny. Elizabeth undestands but leaves, allowing him to inject both Penny and himself with the same thing he used on Ian.

The film ends wih the three friendds officially welcoming Joyce into their club by giving her the TMC necklace that used to be Penny’s. Then they suggests to Joyce’s daughter that she might buy the property so that nobody will be able to send them away, ever.

Helen Mirren is Elizabeth

Pierce Brosnan is Ron

Ben Kingsley is Ibrahim

Celia Imre is Joyce

David Tennant is Ian

Jonathan Pryce is Stephen

Richard E. Grant is Bobby Tanner

Naomi Ackie is Donna

ITA il club dei delitti del giovedì

Spectral - 2016

A sort of soldiers vs bad ghosts movie, made like a war movie,, and with a scientific explanation for everything happening and likewise scientific method to deal with it.

Not a bad film, but I didn’t care much for the finale. As it often happens with this kind of movies, the ending was a bit disappointing. 

I also didn’t much care for the female lead character, well, she was the only female unless you count the young girl they meet. It strongly feels like she’s in the movie only because they needed their female quota and nothing else, she doesn’t do anything really, what she says could be said by anyone… and of course she gets stuck with them even if she’s not a field agent or whatever, so she’s always there… well, she’s useful because she seems to be the only one who can understand the local language, there’s that at least.

There’s also the fact that it’s so simple for them to make whatever they need on the spot, like McGiver or the A-Team, but on a much bigger scale.  It really felt like too much.

So, there’s soldiers in some European Country, I think Moldova or Chech Republic or something (did they say it clearly? I don’t remember it), and some of them start dying in a weird way, and their special high-tech glasses show what appears to be ghost-like entities that attack the soldiers living him dead instantly, half frozen and half melted like with acid, or something like that.

The engineer who designed the glasses is Mark, and he’s called on the field to explain what it is. He can only see that they have human-like shapes, but to know more he has to do more research, mounting a camera on a tank - or whatever it was - and studying them more.

What the girl Fran says appears immediately to be absurd. Not sure on what ground she’s there, but anyway, she says the enemy is wearing some high-tech camouflage armory and she wants to retrieve one of those, which is nonesense if the men have died as they say they did.

Mark goes with a team. Only the soldiers go actually out, Mark stays in the car/tank/what-was-it as does Fran and a few others. Almost all the soldiers are killed by the almost-ghosts while Fran insists they should retrieve the new technology… one man survived the almost-ghosts the first time by hiding under a bathtub, but they take him away and he won’t survive the next attack.

The soldiers insist on shooting at those entities, but it’s clear it’s not doing anything, and so most of the soldiers die, and the remaining ones run to hide in a factory where they find two refugees, two children who are still alive because their father warded the place against the almost-ghosts using iron that they can’t trespass. 

They make huge bullets/bombs filled with iron to stop the almost-ghosts, and together they all walk out to reach a point where they might be rescued, but the base where they come from has been compromised so they go to another place, a safe-bunker or something, and join other soldiers and survivors there.

Some of their group die before getting there, included one of the two children, the young boy.

Mark had already modified his big high-tech camera so that everyone could see these entities without wearing glasses, so they could fight back, and then he talks to the young girl and asks her about his father, who had to know something if he knew about iron stopping them.

He figures out the science behind these things, something about the Bose-Einstein theory, so they all go towards the power plant that Mark is sure is at the head of everything that is happening. 

Now it’s the A-Team moment: somehow they have everything they need, how fortunate, and Mark is able to make them all big weapons designed against these spectrals. Really, in no time at all he has everything ready, just like that. 

They move and when they get to the power plant, there’s many many more spectrals there, and while the soldiers try to stop them, Mark and Fran go inside to look around and find out what happened.

They do find it, the big lab where scientists were creating these spectrals. They were studying some people (a lot of people) making perfect replicas of these people only in that ‘spectral substance’ , and they also linked these spectral so some part of those people… I mean, it ought to be the brain, but when Mark sconnects the machine, itjust goes poof, like a colored dust… 

Mark and Fran see that there are many more spectrals there that never got loose (they shouldn’t have been out and about, they were because some ‘cells’ were broken) and there is the very real threat that they might be soon, so they study a way to stop it, and quite conveniently Fran tells him what he needs to do, quite easily… 

Anyway, as soon as Mark manages to switch them all off, they all stop immediately, it’s over. Fran thinks for a moment that it might be interesting to study all that, but when Mark sees what remained of those people he had no doubt and proceeded to stop those machines right away - well, we see only a few, but we can guess that he moved along and deactivated every single one. Although there’s little doubt that they’ll want to study it all, but not Mark, he’s done with it all.

As soon as possible, he takes his stuff and goes back home.

General Orland - Bruce Greenwood

Mark - James Badge Dale

Fran - Emily Mortimer

 

I know what you did last summer - 1997

It’s not bad, if you take it for what it is, one of those movies where car windows are easily broken and pieces of glass don’t hurt, but most importantly where the villain can teleport, he can go everywhere and never be seen, he can enter female dorms, carry dead bodies around, walk around armed, deliver messages by hand, and nobody ever sees him or hears him.

That kind of story.

Plot:

Helen is elected Croaker Queen, they go the the beach to party. Helen plans to go to New York and become an actress and then marry Barry and live happily ever after. Julie will go to college in Boston, but hopes her relationship with Ray will survive the distance. Barry drinks a lot, he’s totally drunk so they don’t let him drive.Ray does, but Barry just can’t stop being an idiot and starts moving, being obnoxious, and he drops his bottle of whiskey making Ray lose his focus on the road. When they hit something, they stop and find a man covered in blood. Ray checks his pulse and thinks he’s dead, so Barry yells and yells until they stop talking about calling the police and start agreeing with his plan to get rid of the body so nobody will know and their lives will not be ruined. The boys carry him but Ray can’t bring himself to throw him into the water so Helen helps Barry. The man now moves and grabs Helen’s crown/tiara so Barry swims to get it back, and sees the man open his eyes. Still, he goes out, says nothing, and they act like the man’s dead and promise never to speak about it again. 

One year later, things are not as they had hoped before the ‘accident’. Helen is working in her family’s shop, run by her sister Elsa. Julie is at College but not doing well and Ray is a fisherman. Julie comes home to find a hand-delivered letter: “I know what you did last summer”.

She hurries to talk to Helen, and together they go to Barry’s house. He’s not any better than he ever was, no. Barry thinks it must be Max because that night he drove that way and saw them there. So Barry confronts him and leaves. The Fisherman with the hook kills Max (for whatever reason…) then he enters Helen’s house and cuts her hair during the night. And yet in the morning (after telling the other guys about it) she appears at the Parade with a new haircut, perfect as always.

Julie finds Max’s body and lots of alive crabs in the trunk of her car, but it’s all gone when Barry and Helen come to see. 

He was very quick in cleaning it all up…

Next, Barry is killed and Helen starts screaming because she saw it, but since there’s no body when the cop takes a look (no big body, no, but he didn’t notice the dripping blood… what a brilliant cop…) he does not believe her. He puts her in the police car and drives away, but stops for a man who appears to have trouble with his car. It’s the Fisherman, of course, and he kills the cop. 

Helen breaks the window with her feet, exits the car and runs. She reaches her shop and Elsa lets her in, but they’re very slow in closeing the back door, so he’s already inside and he kills Elsa. There’s a bit of escaping and running, but eventually he kills her too.

Julie at first thought that the Fisherman was David Egan, so she talked to his sister to find out if someone connected to him might be seeking revenge, but when she goes back to talk to Melissa, she realises that she was wrong. The Fisherman is Susie’s father. 

She died in a car accident and David felt responsible. Melissa thinks he killed himself because of it, but it’s almost certain that he was killed by Susie’s father too.

Now Julie tries to warn the others, but can’t find helen (of course not) so she goes to Ray. 

Ray never told them that he had gone to meet Melissa months ago, and now when Julie discovers it she gets the stupid idea that it’s all Ray’s doing, so she runs away and Ray goes after her. A man stops him and  tells her to go on his boat… and she does!!! 

Can you believe that???

She does!!!

And of course she finds pictures and newspaper bits that prove he’s the Fisherman. The boat is moving an it’s dark, yes, but she can see Ray and she has a murderer on the same boat, wouldn’t it be better to jump off the boat and swim away, as much underwater as possible, since she’s still close?

No, she stays on the boat, and Ray will join her, and it’s a long long battle. She also finds Barry and Helen’s bodies in the ice. But at the end Ray and Julie come out of it alive, talk to each other and resume their relationship, much lighter now that they know they never killed anybody (… still… oh well)

The police searches the boat but can only find his severed hand and the hook, but no bodies. So it’s no surprise that a year later she finds a message on her shower: “I still know” and then ‘someone’ attacks her.

It ends there, no more details, so it’s a very open ending, it could mean anything. 

Maybe he entered the girls dorm unnoticed or maybe she’s allucinating after such a traumatic experience, especially since the letter had already brought it all back… who knows…

Well, if you’ve watched the next movie, you know :-p

Characters - actors

Julie James is Jennifer Love Hewitt

Helen Shivers is Sarah Michelle Gellar

Barry Cox is Ryan Philippe

Ray Bronson is Freddie Prinze Jr

Max is Johnny Galecki

Benjmin Willis/Fisherman is Muse Watson

Elsa Shivers is Bridgette Wilson

Melissa Egan is Anne Heche

ITA So cosa hai fatto

Secret window - 2004

 First, I haven’t read the book, so I’ve no idea how it compares. Having sad that, the movie was not bad, the acting was good, but it lacked something…The revelation was too sudden, it was forced, in a way. I’ll explain better at the end.

The plot, so it’s clear what I mean:

We meet writer Mort Raney. Six months ago he caught his wife in a motel room with another man, Ted. Now they’re in the middle of a divorce. It’s not over yet only because he hasn’t signed the papers yet. 

He livesin an isolated house, and a man named Shooter comes to accuse him of having stolen his story, but changing the ending. The manuscript he leaves actually is pretty much word for word as his story Secret Window, about a man killing his wife who didn’t love him. Mort talks to the sheriff, then he hires Ken to investigate the matter. He’s scared of this man, and rightly so. Shooter killed his dog after all. Mort is sure he wrote that story and published it first, in a magazine, but to prove it he’d have to get the magazine from Amy’s house (where they used to live together). He drives there and we see that Amy’s going out and doesn’t see him. Next, he’s at home and Amy calls him to tell him that the house has been burned down. Mort now thinks that it’s all Ted’s plan against him, that he probably hired Shooter to harass him. So when Ted goes to him to demand that he signs the divorce papers, he refuses. 

Shooter wants to meet, but once there Mort sees that both Ken and Tom, a local man who saw  him talking to Shooter, have been killed. Mort faints, and then wakes up to Shooter saying that he did it with Mort’s screwdriver, so Mort gets rid of the bodies by pushing the car into the water. 

Now that the copy of the magazine at his old house has been destroyed, he has a new one delivered to him. He goes in town to get it, avoiding the sheriff, but at home he sees that his own story, and only his, has been ripped off the magazine. He thinks Shooter did it, but then he wonders how could he have done it, and he starts talking to himself, actually seeing himself, and then even Shooter appears out of thin air, saying that Mort created him. Now Mort remembers a time when he bough that hat and imagined a man from Mississippi wearing it. 

Tired of waitiing for him to sign those papers, Amy drives to his house to confront him, but when she arrives the house is a mess, and there’s the word Shooter everywhere, even carved on the walls, and then Mort reveals himself behind a door and she reads ‘shoot her’ behind him. He’s wearing that hat, and speaks like Shooter, and tells her that Mort is not here, he took the coward way out. Amy is scared now, he tries to grab her by the hair, and when she tries to run he stabs her leg.

Ted followed her, and now arrives in time to be killed by Mort under Amy’s eyes. She’s next.

Some time passes, and the sheriff pays him a visit to say that they all know what he did but can’t prove it, and he should at least stop going into town because people are not comfortable with him around…

We see thata the little ‘secret garden’ outside his ‘secret window’ there is now a small corn field - which explains all the cobs he has in his house now, eating it all the time. The camera starts to go under it so we can be sure that Amy and Ted’s bodies are buried there.

Mort now appears calmer and healthier than he was before, and replies that this ending is perfect.

Because of that ‘Mort is not here’ line we understand that Shooter is another personality of Mort, the one that deals with the killiings (the dog, Ken, Tom who of course saw Mort talking alone since Shooter was not real, plus Amy and Ted). 

The last line in Shooter’s book, saying that in time the wife’s death will be a mystery even to him, probably means that his mind will deal with it, maybe remove it from his consciousness. 

Intriguing story, yes.

The problem is how he found out, that scene of him talkiing to himself was boring, it should have been more involving, like: Mort2 trying to force him to accept the truth and Mort1 desperately denying it until Shooter’s arrival to confirm it all. That would have made the whole thing better.

From Secret window, secret garden by Stephen King

Mort Raney - Johnny Depp

Shooter - John Turturro

Amy - Maria Bello

Ted - Timothy Hutton

Ken - Charles S. Dutton

Sherriff Dave - Len Cariou

Advantageous - 2015

 This was weird. And the ending credits caught me by surprise, it didn’t seem finished at all… although after a bit I made peace with the surprise because yeah, it was over alright. What follows is normal everyday life, them trying to move on…

What I didn’t get was the emphasis they put on the ‘truth’ of the procedure… well, let’s start from the beginning.

Basically it’s a futuristic world, a city with huge skyscrapers, but also a lot of desperate women. Gwen does marketing for a company, but gets fired now because too old. Gwen has a daughter, Jules, and is desperate to get her a good chance in a world that doesn’t have jobs for women, especially after a certain age. So desperate she calls her mom for help but she refuses to ask her father, her mom asks him anyway, and he says no. So desperate, that after 13 years of distance she goes to her cousin Lily’s restaurant. She once slept with Han, Lily’s husband, and that’s why she stayed away all this time, but now she asks for help. Of course it’s such a bomb they need to think about it for a little while.

With no long-term prospects, needing money not only to live and eat but also for Jules’ education, she approaches her old company offering herself as human test. The last project she was working on: instead of invasive plastic surgery, the idea is to transfer her brain into another, younger body. With electrodes and stuff, not by opening the head as in Nightmare before Christmas. 

It’s never been done on a person, and Dave who cares for her tells her the truth, in a place where they can’t be overheard. The reality of this procedure is that it is not transferred, it is copied into another, empty brain, and once that’s done, the young brain will recover from the shock, the older brain won’t. Gwen will die, Gwen 2.0 will be just a copy. 

Still, she feels she has no choice since she can’t find a job. She warns Jules and does it. Gwen 2.0 has a lot of pain, as they said, and has to inject herself with medicine every day. She resumes her marketing job and secures a school for Jules, but she is not the Gwen she once was, and Jules can feel that. 

Gwen 2.0 doesn’t remember talking to Dave and doesn’t know about Gwen’s death until Dave explains it to her; this because Gwen 2.0 was about to distance herself from Jules, feeling like  Jules hated her, and Dave didn’t want it to be all in vain.

What Gwen did, all for Jules.

Jules guesses about Gwen’s deatah by herself, and they talk, and Gwen 2.0 also explains it to Lily and Han, who want to help. Lily cries for her cousin, but then decide they’ll be a part of their lilfe from now on. And that’s how it ends, with Lily, Han and their whole family - they have three boys - meeting Jules and Gwen 2.0 in a park. Gwen 2.0 goes on living because it’s what she can do, what she has to do, this is her life now. Jules lives with her because she’s the closest thing to her dear mother, a copy of her but it’s all that’s left, and it was Gwen’s choice, so Gwen 2.0 has no fault.

There’s talk of attacks from people protesting against this ‘progress’, we see like bombs in the distance, but it never gets more than that.

This life is making women sterile, and it’s also moving towards leaving all women at home, not working. 

The movie moves very slowly, because it’s not about actions, it’s about the women Jules hears crying, both the one in the apartment upstairs and the one downstairs, and eventually the one in her own home.

I want to note that Dave asked Gwen not to do it, that’s why he explained the truth to her, but she saw no other choice.

I liked the fact that Lily never hated Gwen. Gwen thought she would, because she slept with her husband, but Lily replies that he slept with her, meaning she’s not the only one to blame, not the only one at fault, and even if neither Lily or Han knew about the daughter, Lily knew about the two of them, and if her love could forgive Han, it could also forgive Gwen. I loved this bit because too often women are set against one another, but when there is an affair, it always involves two people, not just one.

Well, I understand that a copy is not the same as a transfer, because it’s like she’s not ‘all there’, a copy can miss something, but the fact that Gwen would die, that was pretty obvious, no revelation at all, of course she would if they put her brain elsewhere, that was obvious. Still, a copy not a tranfer, so what doesn’t get copied well is lost. 

I’d say Gwen’s daetah is more surprising because of the copy detail. A transfer would leave the first body with nothing, but a copy… why exactly does Gwen die? What is that her brain can’t cope with, since it’s all still there? Well, not really important. It’d be more important to know where does the young body come from. But I don’t know if they ever answer this…

Jacqueline Kim is Gwen Koh

Freya Adams is Gwen 2.0

Ken Yeong is Han

Jennifer Ehle is Isa Cryer

Jennifer Ikeda is Lily

James Urbaniak is Fisher

Last holiday - 2005

It’s a nice movie, although totally absurd an unrealistic, whre not only everything goes right but everybody loves her because she’s such a good person, so so true, and everyone is charmed by her… well, I see it as absurd now that I’ve known people and stuff, but I would have loved it when I was a teen and still thought everything was possible and that people were mostly nice and that good always wins and all that stuff.

It’s still nice after all, because she’s not just beautiful but her character is lovely. 

Georgia works in a store owned by a Mr Kragen, selling cookware; she’s in love with Sean who works there as well but doesn’t have the courage to tell him so she keeps buying stuff to talk to him. 

She loves cooking but then she gives all the stuff she makes to her kid neighbour. One day she hits her head at work, really badly, so Sean carries her unconscious body to the doctor who insists on a scan. The result is that she has a very rare tumor in her brain, and three weeks to live, four if lucky.

Of course she cries and despairs, thinks of all the things she denied herself, all the things she never did, and then she makes a choice. She quits her job, takes all her money and flies to a rich hotel where chef Didier works; she takes the Presidential Suite, like 3 or 4000 a night, buys  new clothes to fit in - of course, otherwise it wouldn’t work, nobody would talk to her, would even look at her if she looked poor.

And then, without effort, she attracts people to her: first she saw the senator in the lobby and understands now why he didn’t show at their church as he was supposed to. This generates a rumour that she knows him. Then she orders everything on the menu to miss nothing of what Didier created for the night. This makes him like her immediately. 

She defends the woman doing massages from the harsh words of Kragen’s lady friend, which makes all  the workers like her.

Incredibly, the girl doesn’t resent her for saying that her neck pain is due to her servicing Kragen, instead she starts talking and pouring her soul out, and of course Georgia has to point out that the man will  not leave his wife, because greedy men never do, they just want everything for themselves.

Georgia enjoys the luxuries, tries all kinds of massages, throws herself off the dam, chats with Didier like old friends, and everybody loves her.

They all went out gambling together, and she won a lot of money, like 100.000 or more, whatever, by playing the same number 17 again and again. So at the end she will still have money… then there’s Sean back home that forces Dr Gumpta to tell him about her, and then Georgia’s kid neighbour shows him her ‘book of possibilities’ which included their marriage, so he takes a plane and hurries to her.

Not even the snow blocking his taxi stops him, he keeps going on foot. 

Hard-hearetd Gunther accepts Kragen’s money to find out who she really is, so she looks through all her stuff, but when she finds Georgia’s farewell letter and realises she’s dying, she melts and is all for her now. She even gives Kragen his money back. Although I think she does mention that she works for him, so he makes inquiries on his own and finds out the truth.

He stands up during a dinner when they’re all together and says it in front of everybody. Of course she admits it, but she never intended to trick anyone, and also reveals the dying bit, explaining everything, so they’re all on her side and leave him alone at his table. 

Even his girl leaves him. 

But when she hears that he’s outside the window drinking, maybe thinking of jumping off, she goes to him, to talk.

During all this, Dr Gumpta happened to make more scans with that machine, and they came out all alike, so he realized that the machine wasn’ woking, it’s broken. He asked the kid where she might be and he tells him… in this case it’s a good thing, but this ki has no filter, he goes on telling everybody whatever they ask about her, and even what they don’t ask, like when he showed Sean the book.

The doctor sends a fax to the hotel explaining the truth.

Georgia talks to Kragen and then Sean arrives with a love speech, and then Gunther arrives with the fax, making everyone happy with the news that she’ll live.

Of course Sean and Georogia are together now, but after this experience she goes after her dream and opens a restaurant, and at the opening lots of people are there, including a tv chef she wanted to meet, and Didier and the senator, and her sister with her family, and they’re all there to cheer for her and support her.

During the credits, we see what happens to some of the characters, like: the doctor and Kragen both become monks, meditating. Her old boss dies in a car accident or something.

Georgia will marry Sean and they will parachute out a plane in their wedding outfits, or something like that. 

All in all a nice film, as unreal as a Disney movie, but pleasant to watch, just like a Disney movie.

Queen Latifah isGeorgia Byrd

LL Cool J is Sean Matthews

Timothy Hutton is Mattew Kragen

Gincarlo Esposito is Senator Dillings

Alicia Witt is Ms Burns

Gérard Depardieu is Chef Didier

Susan Kellerman is Ms Gunther

Ranjit Chowdhry is Dr Gumpta

ITA L’ultima vacanza