Garcia-Rulfo, Manuel

Subterms

    Latest story

    150 Shares93 Views

    ‘Cross’ and ‘The Lincoln Lawyer’ Offer Different Spins on the Same Formula

    by

    Within the boundaries of the crime-solving genius genre, “Cross” represents the dark yin and “The Lincoln Lawyer” the bright yang.On the page, Alex Cross, the embittered psychologist created by James Patterson, leads his fellow fictional crime solver Mickey Haller, the flamboyant lawyer created by Michael Connelly, 32 novels to seven. On the small screen, the tables turn: The Haller series “The Lincoln Lawyer” debuted its third season last month on Netflix while the first season of “Cross,” announced nearly five years ago, finally arrives Thursday on Amazon Prime Video.But who’s counting? There appears to be endless space in the current marketplace for brilliant but wounded investigators, and Haller and Cross share an essential marker of the contemporary crime-drama hero. Their personal traumas — Cross’s loss of his parents and wife, Haller’s issues with his father and with addiction — generate much of the tension in their stories, reducing the need for real complexity of personality or the clever unraveling of mystery.Formulas can be executed in different ways, however, and the two shows provide radically different viewing experiences. Within the boundaries of the problematic-genius formula, “Cross” represents the dark yin and “The Lincoln Lawyer” the bright yang. “Cross” goes for self-consciously heavy, “The Lincoln Lawyer” for perilously light. Most significant, perhaps, “Cross” is out to sanctify its protagonist; “The Lincoln Lawyer,” while it provides Haller with a full allotment of anguish, never asks us to feel sorry for him.The creator of “Cross,” Ben Watkins, previously created the eccentric neo-noir “Hand of God,” also for Amazon. The penchants he demonstrated then for hair-raising imagery, and for throwing together tones and styles, carry through to the new show. Choosing not to base “Cross” on a specific Patterson novel (unlike film adaptations including “Kiss the Girls” and “Along Came a Spider”), Watkins frees himself to cook up a lurid but not very exciting stew of serial-killer horror, buddy-cop action, social-justice point-making and sentimentality.Cross, played by Aldis Hodge (“Leverage”), is a District of Columbia police detective with a Ph.D. in psychology. We meet him on the occasion of his wife’s murder, and for eight episodes the character shuttles between dour grief and bellowing anger; Hodge, usually a magnetic performer, settles on a glaring, unmediated intensity.The A plot, in which Cross investigates the murder of a defund-the-police activist, blossoms into a richly nonsensical “Silence of the Lambs”-style fantasia. Common sense is left far behind, in matters large and small; at one slap-your-forehead juncture, a cop yells, “He could be anywhere!” seconds after the killer escapes, while his car can still be heard in the near distance.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

    More stories

    • 113 Shares84 Views

      in Movies

      ‘Pedro Páramo’ Review: A Ghost Story Lacking in Spirit

      by

      In this grave adaptation of Juan Rulfo’s surreal novel, the living pray for salvation and the dead murmur regrets, but the filmmaking is oddly orthodox.The Mexican writer Juan Rulfo’s mystifying 1955 novel “Pedro Páramo” is, at least in the English-speaking world, most often invoked for its influence on Gabriel García Márquez. But admirers of the book (Susan Sontag famously among them) have long cited it as a masterpiece of spare surrealism.It is odd, then, that Netflix’s new adaptation, directed by the cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto, is a rather orthodox work. Where this rich, metaphysical text might have come alive in dreamlike abstraction, Prieto and his screenwriter, Mateo Gil, instead content themselves with a prestige Western on terra firma — grave, good-looking and uninspiring.The story opens as Juan Preciado (Tenoch Huerta Mejía), our narrator, treks to the vale hamlet of Comala in search of its cacique, Pedro Páramo (Manuel García-Rulfo). He arrives to find Pedro dead and the village deserted, save for murmuring specters. From there, the movie becomes nonlinear, restlessly flitting around in time to chronicle how decades of yearning, anguish and the Páramo family’s sins eroded Comala’s spirit. What emerges is a lugubrious and at times frightening ghost saga in which the living fear hell and the dead bemoan past injustices.Yet for all its sprawling, “Pedro Páramo” also has a lot of talking. There are countless scenes of Pedro giving orders; only some of his stooges doing his bidding. The women, helpless and subordinate, mostly listen, except for Dorotea (Giovanna Zacarías), doomed to die penniless and then, from the grave, assist Juan in voice-over. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but at over two hours, this visual adaptation of Rulfo’s only novel rambles without much to say.Pedro PáramoRated R for violence and visions. Running time: 2 hours 10 minutes. Watch on Netflix. More