The Clocks (2011)

One of my all time favorites.

It was OK. I don't see why everyone loves it so much. It wasn't very smart or deep or well-directed.

I think this is a new genre that they're all sort of working their way through it and haven't got all the kinks worked out yet but it's a genre that works for me.

While it is a pity that the story wasn't told with more visual finesse, this is trivial compared to our real-world problems. It takes a good movie to put that into perspective.

Hercule Poirot is approached by a friend, Lieutenant Colin Race of the Royal Navy, to help investigate a murder. Lt Race works in a secret base under Dover Castle. His colleague and girlfriend died while investigating a German spy ring and in his investigations of the ring he stumbles across a murder. A body has been found in the house of a blind woman, Ms Pebmarsh, but nobody, including the blind woman, knows his identity. Lt Race is convinced the murder is linked to the spy ring. The chief suspect is a typist, Sheila Webb, who discovered the body. The more Poirot delves, the murkier things seem.Interesting, intriguing story with some great twists and red herrings. Has the usual murder mystery element but adds a military and espionage angle, which makes things more interesting. Not perfect though. The best Poirots are the ones where you have enough information to work out the murderer yourself, if you think hard enough. This is one of those where you don't know enough - the backstory that informs the plot is hidden until the very end. Still quite interesting though.

This episode, while extremely well made technically (art direction, camera work, sound, etc.) and well acted, leaves a very bad taste in the mouth on several counts.Criminal mystery, or rather mysteries, are depended on coincidences to carry out, and are solved through coincidence.Poirot basically gets two girls to find the crucial evidence that unwittingly incriminates their father and only parent. That they can be made to search for evidence, and then can find it, are all by chance. In other words, it is solved quite by chance, in rather shoddy fashion, and not by "grey cells". But in spite of this evidence and its finding being key to solving the cases, all of this is barely on screen, compared to less important things and characters. Girls are not heard of again, after Poirot makes use of them.On top of that, Poirot and his friends, engage in simplistic moral posturing, that include actual speeches. Story and characters are morally complicated and they could have made a better episode wherein all the moral complexity is highlighted, if not explored. Noticeably camera do not focus on Poirot's reaction when blind lady points out, in reply to his speech about results of an occupied country, that Poirot will not be fighting the war to prevent occupation of a country. Remember, according to this series, he ran from his country to England in during WW1, while her sons died and she got blinded, while going out of England to fight in a war that started to protect his country. A thinking viewer, even with obvious desire of adapters not to focus on any of that, cannot but feel contempt for Poirot's moral blindness. To make major character coldly blind and hypocritical is a great idea, but then to ignore these characteristics is not.

I did this with the movie Se7en with Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman.The understanding of a killer is really very simplistic to say the least, and Se7en didn't fit, using the Deadly Sins as a reason to commit the crimes, but it relied too much on outside sources to progress his deeds, similar to BTK, but that one did a lot of meaningless fluff.So what do we have here with Clocks. First, remove the entire spy plot, as it is only connected in the corpse was put in the spy's apartment as obviously no one would think a blind woman committed the crime.So now, we want to get rid of the man who can identify the woman as not being the wife receiving the inheritance. In truth, wouldn't it have been easier to simply club him over the head and dump him in the river? Or at best, pay him off, as they ended up having to do with the actress anyway.The availability of the blind woman's apartment, I can follow, but with nosy neighbors (which was really kind of intended to be the focus of this story), a lot of the disguise (the laundry truck) now becomes obvious.So the boss lady disliked the young woman, so she decided to frame her for the crime by getting her to the apartment she has never been to before.Yes, this all unraveled once more, but it seems like once the old blind woman said she called no one to do dictation, that should have made the police suspicious as well.The criminals seemed to think, we'll just say I received the phone call, the old woman will say she called for no one and no one will believe the young girl.In truth, the clocks were a rather bad addition. They were found in the apartment and the old woman knew nothing about them. So why would the young girl take the silly clocks there if she intended on killing the man? What we are then left with is really clumsy killers, hardly worthy of Poirot's attention. it seemed more like the spy plot was added or included (by Christie, not by any filmmaker here, tho i've never read the books) to justify international detective Poirot's presence.There have been more fun mysteries with 'not seeming like it is' and 'not being told what we are seeing' and again, in truth, this one had that, with who the murdered man actually was.But then to strangle a girl in a phone booth and club the actress, again, wouldn't it have just been easier to pay off the guy, or club him over the head and throw him in the river? Criminals really don't put this much effort into framing someone into the crime. Just dump the body in the old lady's room and send no one there. Let the old girl explain who he is and how he got there, instead of putting a young girl who works for your business all into the mix.

A very faithful adaptation of the Clocks,with brilliant interpretations by Anna Massey as a very menacing,if sweet blind woman,Phil Daniels as a cockney cop in the Philip Jackson mold and Lesley Sharp as a snobbish and haughty secretary,is as usual wonderfully directed and written.The story is rich of hilarious characters(the Cat lady,the middle-aged couple à la George & Mildred) ,and it adds to the novel a spy subplot not too surprising and perhaps a bit old-fashioned,as if a spy melodrama from the 40s (say,The Spy in Black) would have been sewed together with a very modern and highly original whodunit.But the prologue in the Dover Castle underground HQ is so beautifully shot that it saves the too predictable solution of this minor part of the mystery (the mole discovered in the second half of the movie is so suspicious and conspicuous that even Hastings would have guessed the truth on first glance !).Nothing to complain instead with the major mystery,adapted and explained with a deft touch.(The clocks scene with the discovery of the murdered man is a joy in itself,a real masterpiece).Not the best outing of the season(the laurels go to the marvelous Tragedy) and not diabolically clever as the Mark Gatiss adaptations,but a sound,highly amusing adaptation of one of Dame Agatha's minor works