#marmalade ends up resorting to one of my most hated movie tropes

[cantsayidont]

Early-morning hater hours:

MARMALADE (2023): Fizzy Keir O'Donnell crime comedy-drama about a wide-eyed young hick (Joe Keery) telling his new jail cellmate (Aldis Hodge) about how his romance with a pink-haired wild child called Marmalade (Camila Morrone) became a crime spree. Familiar but very charming for its first 70 minutes, with a bright, poppy visual style and a vivid evocation of the feeling of falling for someone who pushes you out of your comfort zone in ways both good and bad, the film then loses the plot with a twist obviously inspired by the 1995 crime drama THE USUAL SUSPECTS, leading to a resolution that isn't nearly clever enough to make up for the loss of the story's original emotional core. A real disappointment after its enjoyable opening.

MONSIEUR SPADE (2024): Peculiar AMC/Canal+ co-production, set in 1963 and starring Clive Owen as Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade, now a retired but still cagey man of leisure living on the country estate of his late French wife (Chiara Mastroianni) in the rural town of Bozouls and acting in loco parentis for Teresa, the now-teenage daughter of Brigid O'Shaughnessey (Cara Bossom). Spade is drawn into a complex web of murder and conspiracy involving a mysterious young Algerian boy many people will kill to find, and who is somehow tied up with Teresa's errant father, Philippe Saint-Andre (Jonathan Zaccaï). Elliptical and very French, the show's sun-dappled atmosphere is pleasant, but the oblique way the story takes shape demands closer attention than it ever rewards, and the actual plot is both convoluted and unconvincing; at one point Spade aptly calls it "hokum." Furthermore, while the show is most enjoyable where it focuses on the hard-boiled American detective's uneasy integration into drowsy French rural life, it ultimately struggles to justify placing Spade so far outside his original milieu. It seems like creators Scott Frank and Tom Fontana wanted to create something approximating the Conan Doyle stories of a retired Sherlock Holmes keeping bees on the Sussex Downs, but Spade is really too thinly drawn a character for that, although Owen is better than one might expect. I also don't buy that Spade's exploits (at least vis-à-vis THE MALTESE FALCON) would make him world-famous like Poirot or Holmes.