What To Watch This Week
A Pair of Mysteries, Three Streaming Gems: Creepy October Part One, and a Famous Old Riddle
Dark Winds
Like all other genres – and a good deal of storytelling overall – detective stories follow certain patterns that have been established over the decades. But the fascinating thing about these patterns is not that they're limiting, but that they're adaptable. They can be stretched and played off and repurposed, given new meanings and contexts, all without ever being broken.
Dark Winds is an enjoyable, dark-toned detective story from AMC based on several novels from the 1970s by Tony Hillerman. It tells the story of a pair of Navajo cops, named Joe Leaphorn (Zahn McClarnon) and Jim Chee (Kiowa Gordon), who work for the tribal police on a reservation in Arizona. Both are college-educated and share an understanding of, as well as a certain distance from, their tribe's spiritual beliefs and rituals. This is key, because Dark Winds, like a good deal of Hillerman's work, revolves around mysticism, magic, and possible encounters with the other world.
The officers are also enmeshed in a complicated sociopolitical situation: they work for the Navajo Nation, which is at the same time a sovereign nation and under the auspices of the United States. This brings them into all kinds of conflict with the representatives from that other nation, and in particular the FBI.
What all of this adds up to is a classic detective set-up with a intriguing twist. Following the longstanding tradition, Leaphorn (who's the protagonist of Dark Winds, and meets Chee for the first time in it, although they both appear in numerous Hillerman novels) is an outsider. He's a bit curmudgeonly, doesn't quite fit into the various worlds he inhabits (which is one of the things that makes the classic detective successful), and in almost constant conflict with other authority figures. Sounds familiar, right? Sure, but here this formula is used to explore something that is vanishingly rare in the history of detective fiction before Hillerman: the Native American experience. The formula works perfectly in this setting, as it does in so many others, to explore issues of power, authority, and justice. And on top of this, it tells a cracking good yarn that's hard-edged without being overly so and just a touch creepy.
The set-up is also a classic one, with multiple initial mysteries that are woven together and finally revealed to be related. Some armed men rob an armored car in the opening, and flee via a helicopter onto the reservation, which brings the FBI to Leaphorn and his new deputy, Chee, for help. The cops have other problems on their hands though: a double-murder of Native Americans in a hotel, and a young pregnant girl who may be living in an abusive situation at home. So, in exchange for helping the FBI find the men in the helicopter, Leaphorn demands that they help him with forensics in the investigation of the killings.
Things spin out from there. As is so often the case with shows made from books, the plotting is tight and clean (novelists think in terms of finishing storylines, while many TV screenwriters think in terms of buying additional seasons by refusing to finish storylines, which is why the mystery plotting in the former is almost always better than in the latter.) The show was also shot on location in the southwest, so it has a strong sense of place, although for some inexplicable reason (or not inexplicable, because it's probably the budget) they decided to film some of the driving sequences with rear-projection exteriors, so when we're in the car with someone it frequently feels like we're back in a '50s movie, with painted landscapes sliding past.
Overall, the show works nicely. And Zahn McClarnon is particularly good as Leaphorn, creating a character that has real emotional depth, the requisite detective toughness, and also holds the camera, meaning that the viewer is drawn to watching him when he's on screen. Finally, and intelligently, the show only runs for six, one-hour episodes, so there's no attempt to pull things out past their natural length just to pad the ad revenue.
If you're a fellow traveler in the cult of mystery stories, as I am, Dark Winds should keep you entertained. Available on AMC+
The Lincoln Lawyer
If comparison viewing is your game, you could do worse than matching Dark Winds with The Lincoln Lawyer, a ten-episode series that's also based on a novel (The Brass Verdict by Michael Connelly, who also writes the Bosch novels), and is also in the "detective solves a mystery" genre.
The shows share numerous similarities. Our detective here is a lawyer instead of a cop, but he's still an outsider who has to fight against the forces of the establishment to see justice done. And both shows are anchored by strong lead performances; here the protagonist, named Mickey Haller, is played by the Mexican actor Manuel Garcia-Rulfo. For the first episode or two, this can seem like a jarring choice. Garcia-Rulfo plays it with an internality that can seem to minimize his character, and it takes a little while for his gentle charisma to come to the surface. But once it does, and the viewer gets their footing, his performance becomes the heart of the show.
And although there are a couple of sub-plots that don't come off as well, the central mystery here is a good one. Haller is just getting back into the legal game after some troubles of his own, and when another lawyer is killed, he leaves all of his cases to Haller. The trickiest of these involves a tech billionaire accused of murdering his wife; soon, Haller begins to suspect that the previous lawyer was killed because of his involvement in it.
Like Dark Winds, it's a nicely put together story. But where they differ is in their tone. The former is serious, maybe even a bit forbidding, while The Lincoln Lawyer is lighter, and brushes up against the sentimental.
This last is also a result of the fact that The Lincoln Lawyer is produced by impresario David E. Kelly, who never met a melodramatic storyline he didn't like (which isn't to say that he makes bad things, because a lot of his output is really good – it's just emotionally laden, if you will).
Where this really shows is in The Lincoln Lawyer in the characters. Other than Haller and his wife (played by Neve Campbell), the people in this show tend to be broadly drawn, and often played for gentle comedic relief. Sometimes this works…and sometimes it doesn't. There's also just the slightest bit of "lesson-learning" and "homey-wisdom delivery" going on, which can slow things down a bit. But overall, it's a fun romp, and if you need an entertaining little diversion from the travails of life, you might enjoy it. Available on Netflix.
Three Streaming Gems: Creepy October Part One
October is here, which means that Halloween season is upon us. All month, I'll be recommending movies that bend towards this theme, even if they do it comedically or in the most bonkers way you can imagine. And speaking of bonkers, let's get things started out right…
The Visitor (1979, Giulio Paradisi)
It's exceedingly difficult to put into words the insanity, inanity, and majesty that inhabit The Visitor, so I'm not even really going to try. In lieu of a plot summary, I will say that it involves aliens, an attempt by the owner of a professional basketball team to resurrect Satan (who in this telling is an alien), killer falcons, a girl with telekinetic powers, god-like figures who live in another dimension, and about as much visual pyrotechnics as any film from the 1970s. It also stars John Huston, Mel Ferrer, Glenn Ford, Lance Henriksen, Sam Peckinpah, Franco Nero, and Shelley Winters. If you like B-movies in which the descriptor "over-the-top" doesn't even begin to do the job, and enjoy pondering questions like "How in the world can something so completely crazy also be so wildly entertaining?" then I promise that this is a movie for you. Available for free on Kanopy, Tubi, and on many other places.
The Haunting (1963, Robert Wise)
With virtually no "modern" horror techniques – no blood and gore, only one or two (albeit really good) jump scares, and minimal special effects – director Robert Wise crafted a masterpiece of fear and tension. Based on a novel by Shirley Jackson (probably more famous for her short story "The Lottery," which was a staple of high school English classes for many years), it tells the story of a doctor who recruits several people to visit a reputedly haunted house, in order to try to discover whether there's actually paranormal activity going on. The technical filmmaking is a treat, the relationships that develop between people (and whatever is in the house) and the pressure they put on the story are fantastic, and the whole thing is terrifying in the most entertaining way. If you're a fan of scares and have never seen this, it's time to rectify the situation. Available on Hulu.
The Wolf Man (1941, George Waggner)
If you're looking for a fun old film to set the mood for Halloween, why not check out The Wolf Man, one of the fabulous monster movies that Universal Pictures became famous for in the black and white era? It's not really a horror film in the way we think of them today, and might be better classified as an adventure, were it not for the strange, dark psychology that runs beneath the whole thing. The story involves a man (Lon Chaney, Jr.) who returns to his ancestral village and gets bitten by a werewolf, which results in the slow, emotionally devastating destruction of his life; alongside this, however, run a series of fascinating symbolic gallivantings and some twists that hearken back to stage-play tragedies. It's not going to make you scream with fright, but the combination of gothic tale-telling and Freudian undercurrents makes it a treat not to be missed. Available on Peacock and the Criterion Channel.
Bonus Content: A Famous Old Riddle
So three producers walk into a coffee shop in Los Angeles for a meeting. The tab for their drinks comes out to $30, and they each put in a $10 dollar bill. But after they've gone to their table and begun discussing the plans for their new Home Alone / Godzilla crossover, the barista realizes that they should have only been charged $25.
Said barista pulls five one-dollar bills out of the register and heads towards the table. On the way, he realizes that the the three producers aren't going to be able to split the $5 dollars evenly, so he puts two dollar bills in his pocket as a tip, and drops the other three bills at the table.
Here's the question. If each of the producers paid $9 for their coffee – the initial $10, minus the $1 that each of them got back – that adds up to $27. And there are two dollars in the barista's pocket, which makes the total $29. But they paid $30 at the start…so what happened to the extra dollar?
They didn't pay $9.00 for their coffee. If the bill came out to $25.00 then they paid $8.33 each. If the waiter pocketed two dollars, making the bill $28.00, then they each paid $9.33. $9.33 * 3 + $2.00 = $29.99. The real question is are they going to be complete assholes to the waiter for pocketing $0.66 from each of them. I suspect the kinds of producers that work on Home Alone/Godzilla crossovers very well might.
I've been curious about 'The Visitor' for a while, and I will definitely be checking it out asap. You had me at "an attempt by the owner of a professional basketball team to resurrect Satan". 'The Haunting' is one of films I have yet to see for absolutely no good reason whatsoever, so this is a good reminder.
I guess I don’t understand the riddle. The Barista “discovers” the bill for the 3 drinks should only be $25, yet further in you say “the bill was $9 per producer, or $27” total. One of those two statements are incorrect, so it’s not possible to figure this out.