{"id":9906,"date":"2023-05-26T16:35:52","date_gmt":"2023-05-26T20:35:52","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=9906"},"modified":"2023-05-26T16:35:52","modified_gmt":"2023-05-26T20:35:52","slug":"the-show","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2023\/05\/26\/the-show\/","title":{"rendered":"The Show."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The Show<\/em> was doomed before it ever hit streaming. Scheduled for release in the fall of 2020, when theaters were closed, it has one of the least search-friendly titles you’ll find. The sort-of sequel to a little-seen collection of short films called Show Pieces<\/em>, this full-length film was written by Alan Moore (Watchmen<\/em>, V for Vendetta<\/em>) and stars Tom Burke as a mysterious man on a mysterious quest that turns out to be far, far more mysterious than he or any of us expected. It\u2019s weird and unbalanced and doesn\u2019t tie everything up in a neat little bow, but it is a blast. You can rent it on Amazon<\/a>, iTunes<\/a>, etc.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Burke plays Fletcher Dennis, a man who travels under many pseudonyms and arrives in Northampton in search of a man named James Mitchum who, it turns out, died the night before Dennis\u2019s arrival. Dennis is far more interested in an item that Mitchum was wearing than in the dead man himself, but his search for answers leads him to chat up a woman, Faith, who nearly died in the same hospital where Mitchum kicked it; hire a pair of preteen private investigators; talk to an amiably stupid bouncer from the nightclub where Mitchum was last seen; and eventually learn about a pair of long-dead comics who were one of the most popular acts in the UK for decades. While all this is happening, something is going on in his dreams and Faith\u2019s, where both of them appear to be going to the same nightclub, and Dennis learns more about the item he\u2019s searching for and the duplicitous man who\u2019s hired him to do it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Show<\/em> is wonderfully weird, trippy and madcap and clearly the work of a man unafraid to abide by normal plot conventions. It\u2019s a movie better experienced than pondered, especially since several things don\u2019t quite add up in the end \u2013 literally the end of the movie, for one \u2013 and others might make more sense if you\u2019ve seen some of the related shorts in Show Pieces<\/em>, which I have not. The film bounces gleefully across genres; when Dennis is talking to the two child detectives, the film goes black and white, and one of them narrates the action, out loud, to Dennis, as if he\u2019s not there and it\u2019s a noir film with a voice-over. (The two kids have the film\u2019s best sight gag as well.) Fletcher himself is a nod to the British comic strip character Dennis the Menace, wearing the latter\u2019s trademark jumper even though it\u2019s an anachronism, with Burke playing the character with a perfect combination of guile and bemusement.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It’s also consistently funny, from great one-liners (\u201cI see dead people.\u201d Pause. \u201cYou work in a hospital.\u201d) to running gags to visual humors and more. The dimwitted bouncer, Elton Carnaby, is the film\u2019s best running joke; he can never seem to make up his mind \u2013 if his first answer to a question is \u201cyes,\u201d you can be fairly sure the actual answer is \u201cno,\u201d and he\u2019ll get there eventually. Becky Cornelius (played by Ellie Bamber, who I think is going to be a huge star) lets a room to Dennis, and is about the most hilariously inept flirt you\u2019ll ever come across. The gags don\u2019t all land \u2013 the musician known as Herbert Sherbert, who dresses as a young Hitler, feels too obvious \u2013 but the sheer quantity of them and their placement all over the film, even in graphics and background shots (like the nod to Monty Python) make up for it. I\u2019m pretty sure I\u2019d catch even more of them if I watched the film a second time and paused to examine some of the flyers and newspaper headlines I didn\u2019t see the first time through.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It’s not going to be everyone\u2019s cup of tea, and I could see a criticism that The Show<\/em> isn\u2019t really about anything \u2013 but that\u2019s the nature of noir, or neo-noir, or perhaps we should just call this \u201chysterical noir\u201d and stop with the labels? It\u2019s just a fun story from a fertile, peripatetic mind. And I didn\u2019t even mention Alan Moore\u2019s own absolutely wonderful appearance in the second half of the film, with an utterly memorable hairstyle and a whole song and dance (okay, mostly song) number. I was hooked early on when it just seemed like a neo-noir film, but the sheer imagination of it all kept me on board till the ambiguous ending. Here\u2019s hoping Moore gets to create the follow-up series he wants to make.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Show was doomed before it ever hit streaming. Scheduled for release in the fall of 2020, when theaters were closed, it has one of the least search-friendly titles you’ll find. The sort-of sequel to a little-seen collection of short films called Show Pieces, this full-length film was written by Alan Moore (Watchmen, V for […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1261,161,215],"class_list":["post-9906","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-2021-movies","tag-highly-recommended","tag-movies","entry"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9906","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9906"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9906\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9907,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9906\/revisions\/9907"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9906"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9906"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9906"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}