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Reviews
Agatha and the Curse of Ishtar (2019)
Distracted by Glottal Stops
It's all rather pedestrian. I found Max Mallowan's accent terrible - I'm pretty sure that in the 1920s people of his class did not drop their Ts.
On the other hand, Malta looks as lovely as ever.
Soundtrack (2019)
Good drama, disliked the songs
The first rule of musicals is that the songs must either drive the action forward or tell you something about the characters better than the spoken word.
This fails completely on the first count and mostly fails on the second: the music stops the action completely and the songs are too generic and rarely tell you anything that the (really good) acting doesn't. By the time I got to about episode 4 or 5 I was fast forwarding through the musical numbers to get on with the drama.
As a drama, I'm sorry the show was cancelled.
As a musical, it was a blessed relief.
Other than the music, I thoroughly enjoyed it. If it hadn't been on netflix with its ability to easily fast-forward, I would not have made it to the end of the series.
A Christmas Hero (2020)
Clunky
Started interestingly, and I could believe Welch as the repressed guy at the start, but I couldn't buy into his rages (I kept imagining the director offstage saying "Emote, darling, emote!). It was good as an advert for the air museum (which I googled while the movie was on), and if I'm ever back in Michigan (near Kalamazoo) I'll visit.