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ClareR (5603 KP) rated Demon Copperhead in Books

Jan 21, 2023  
Demon Copperhead
Demon Copperhead
Barbara Kingsolver | 2022 | Contemporary, Fiction & Poetry
10
10.0 (2 Ratings)
Book Rating
This will be one of my very favourite books of 2022, without a shadow of a doubt.

Demon Copperhead is a modern retelling of David Copperfield, which I first read years ago. It’s always stayed with me though (as Dickens books have a habit of doing). Demon Copperhead feels more personal though. It’s not because of the setting, I’ve never been to Appalachia, I’ve never seen a trailer park in the flesh, and I’m certainly lucky enough to have never experienced the opioid crisis that’s very much still ongoing in the US.

Demon is our David, born in a trailer to a mother with an addiction that she desperately tries to control. His father is dead before he’s born. His mother makes some questionable decisions: one is that she marries Stone, a controlling bully, and the reason that Demon is taken into care.

There are so many links to David Copperfield, and I’m glad that I’d read Dickens novel first. But it really isn’t necessary at all. This is a truly magnificent novel in its own right.

Demon’s desperation and depression leaps off the page: his desperate need for love and approval, and his eventual descent into addiction were so terribly sad to read. I felt I built a connection with Demon and wanted more for him than society was willing to give. He was given to foster parents who weren’t vetted and were unsuitable. No-one cared enough to help him, and by the time they did, he was past being able to accept their help - he just didn’t think he deserved it.

But there is ultimately hope. There is the chance for Demon to live a good life.

I adored this book. I’m a big Barbara Kingsolver fan anyway, but this just confirmed that for me.
I’m hoping that this book will point more people towards her books. They’re in for a treat!
  
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Dave Eggers recommended The Landlord (1970) in Movies (curated)

 
The Landlord (1970)
The Landlord (1970)
1970 | Comedy, Romance
(0 Ratings)
Movie Favorite

"[Anything in Ashby’s] body of work is always recognizably him, but it’s pretty elastic. Like Being There is very different than Shampoo in a lot of ways. There’s a little bit of the surreal that can enter in, but at the same time, they’re very grounded and very of their time, and have a certain gritty feel to them. They’re not so clean. There’s a naturalism there that he marries with some very bold moves and even magical realism. [The Landlord] is this movie that not too many people have seen, didn’t have a big release originally, and it’s hard to find on DVD, and doesn’t have the reputation of Harold and Maude and Coming Home. But I kind of think it might be his best movie. Maybe it’s just because it’s so screamingly brave in a lot of ways, and it hits so many issues. There’s so few American movies that touch on class, and this just comes straight at you like a train, talking about class issues, race. [It’s about] this young man who’s born into privilege, struggling with his place. “He is to the manor born,” you know? He has money in his blood, and he can afford to go buy a building where people are living. Just a young man, Beau Bridges, and it’s probably my favorite thing I’ve ever seen Beau Bridges do, too. It’s sort of startling to see him in this role as the golden boy, and you can almost see Jeff Bridges playing it, too. And the fact that this white guy, automatically, just by the color of his skin and the place he was born and the family he was born into, has the ability to be responsible for the lives of all of these far less fortunate or privileged people. [He struggles] with that sense of responsibility and [tries] to reject it and give up that control, but [also] do right by these people. I don’t know, it’s so complex. But [Ashby’s] not afraid to have some very broad comic moments. You know, there’s a few people who can do it since. Like Alexander Payne or David O. Russell, a few other people whose work you can see owe a lot to Ashby."

Source
  
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Daniel Boyd (1066 KP) rated Bad Samaritan (2018) in Movies

Oct 3, 2018 (Updated Oct 3, 2018)  
Bad Samaritan (2018)
Bad Samaritan (2018)
2018 | Horror, Thriller
4
6.3 (13 Ratings)
Movie Rating Watch
David Tennant (0 more)
Tacky jump-scares (1 more)
Constantly asks you to accept huge leaps of logic
What A Waste
Bad Samaritan is a movie that I really should have liked. I am a huge fan of David Tennant, I love a decent thriller movie and the trailer for the movie teased an intriguing plot as well. Unfortunately, I didn't like much of it, in fact it really annoyed me how little I liked when watching this thing.

Let's start off with the cast. David Tennant is, - as he always is, - absolutely fantastic in this role. In any other better movie, he would be in with a shout for an award for this role, unfortunately he is surrounded by absolutely overwhelming amount of trash. Robert Sheehan does a serviceable job with what he has given, but some of the lines he delivers are just too forced and cheesy to be taken seriously. The actor playing his best friend is just playing a stereotypical nonchalant small time criminal. Kerry Condon plays the hostage that David Tennant is keeping in his house and she also does a decent enough job with the shoddy material she has been given to work with.

The only other positive that I can think of other than Tennant's performance, is the way that Tennant's character systematically ruins Sheehan's character's life. He makes him lose his job, he blackmails him via social media, he attacks his girlfriend and he wrecks his car. The way that this sequence played out reminded me of Frank Miller's Daredevil story Born Again, where Kingpin learns Daredevil's real identity and destroys his life piece by piece via the people he cares about. Don't get me wrong, it is done far better in Born Again and Born Again is a much better story overall than Bad Samaritan, but it was the only element of this movies plot that I liked other than what we already saw in the trailers.

Now that we have discussed the few positives that this movie has, let's go through everything else. First of all, I have never heard a more out-of-place, inappropriate score to go along with what is happening onscreen. It genuinely felt like a temp score that was put in preliminarily until the proper one was put in and then they just left it in and didn't bother going back to improve it.

Then there was the cheap jump-scares, Although they are mostly consigned to the first act in the movie, they are still far too frequent and totally unnecessary. The last one that I remember happening was so egregious, (when David Tennant was standing behind the detective outside the house,) it actually bordered on parody. There was no story justification for it whatsoever, why would this guy who is trying to appear normal and as if nothing is wrong, creep up behind a detective who is investigating him and just stand there like a creep to give him a fright? It makes absolutely no sense. To be honest, the movie is abundant with things that don't make any sense and you are almost constantly asked to make huge leaps of logic when watching it.

There's also the fact that this movie has no idea what it wants to be. Dean Devlin who directed this, also directed last year's Geostorm. Now Geostorm was a steaming pile of shit, but at least it knew what it wanted to be. The tone in Bad Samaritan is totally all over the place and doesn't work in any way or flow well at all. This movie also plays like a check-list of thriller movie clichés. Everything from cheesy flashbacks showing the villains messed up past to the detectives not believing the protagonist's claims even when he has photo evidence on his phone.

Overall, this film is a huge waste. David Tennant's fantastic performance that he puts in here as an unhinged, genuinely scary villain is wasted in this trash movie. The trailers showed us a potentially thrilling plot that could have really been exciting and engaging only to totally waste it on a flick full of mediocre production elements and a half baked storyline. The only reason that this scored 4 was because of Tennant's brilliant performance, if not for that, this movie would have scored a 2 at best.