For some reason the cell phones, and political discussion seemed out of place with the genre, the house and the detective. Are there still authors who make millions writing mystery novels in 2019? Also the surveillance footage on VCR threw me.
shareNope mystery novels aren’t written anymore that makes a ton of sense.
share"Also the surveillance footage on VCR threw me."
Old man in charge of security, of course he'd stick to tried and trusted methods. And VHS is very reliable.
Old man, sure I'll give you that. However, VHS is not reliable - it degrades over time, is susceptible to magnetic fields, and the machine will often chew tape (as he said). Eventually you have to replace the tapes, especially if you are repeatedly re-recording over the same ones-- where was this guy getting new VHS tapes over the past 10 - 20 years?
On another note I was shocked to see blank audio cassette tapes for sale a couple weeks ago at a convenience store - so maybe demand from hipsters explains this one.
I was disappointed it did not take place in England.
shareFor some reason the cell phones, and political discussion seemed out of place with the genre, the house and the detective.
I see what you are saying. However, to me the movie was still very classic by design, which was one of the reasons I liked it. So when something present-day came up it was jarring.
They also seemed to make a point of including references to the recent past: the classic old school southern detective, the VHS tape, the old BMW, the Murder She Wrote re-run.
The political discussion was definitely out of place and felt shoehorned in for no good reason. I almost didn't go see the film because of the reports on how political the film is. I did however decide to check it out and I was happy to find that, while there is a political aspect of the film, I didn't find it to be nearly as overbearing as some people are making it out to be. Still though, it would've been better for him to have just left that shit out and made a film that everyone an enjoy without reservation.
Regarding authors who still make millions writing mystery novels, I can't claim to have pay stubs on hand or anything, but certainly there are still successful mystery authors. It's not a dead genre or anything. Many of James Patterson's books are considered part of the mystery genre and he's perhaps the most financially successful author working today.
i think the idea of a widely loved popular mystery writer is a bit anachronistic, but it's the kind of call back to another time that i'm perfectly happy letting the movie have.
the class warfare elements are the only major things that didn't quite win me over in this film (other than a few plot details, some of which are being discussed in another thread here), but they weren't all that terribly heavy handed, certainly not compared to the way some people hit on that sort of thing with the subtlety of a sledgehammer.