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Aristide's elder son, Philip, hated his father for passing him over as successor to the family business, and for refusing to fund production of a screenplay he wrote for his wife, Magda, a fading theatre actress. Their children (Aristide's grandchildren) are Sophia, Eustace (a teenager affected by polio), and Josephine, a clever 12-year-old who knows everyone's business. Aristide had been the bullying and manipulative patriarch of the large and idiosyncratic Leonides family who all lived together on the family estate. He had died from a heart attack after his regular insulin injection – given by his wife Brenda – had been laced with eserine from his eye drops. Brenda is Aristide's second wife, a former casino dancer and much younger than her husband. Though the only Trump in the building on Saturday night was Lara, the presidential daughter-in-law recently named head of the Republican National Committee, the former president’s shadow was felt even in the absence of his distinct orange glow.
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His second wife is the indolent Brenda, decades his junior, suspected of having a clandestine love affair with Laurence, the grandchildren's tutor. After Aristide is poisoned by his own eye medicine (eserine), his granddaughter Sophia tells narrator and fiancé Charles Hayward that they cannot marry until the killer is apprehended. Charles's father, "The Old Man", is Assistant Commissioner of Scotland Yard, so Charles investigates from the inside along with assigned detective Chief Inspector Taverner.
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It all feels muddled in translation by people who clearly have reverence for Christie’s talents but don’t quite understand what makes her work sing. Her nanny prepares hot chocolate for her and dies after Josephine refuses it and she drinks it herself. Again, Josephine refuses, even when Charles warns her that she is in danger. Edith is diagnosed with a fatal illness, and is told she has only months to live. The younger son, Roger, is managing director of a major family business, but is a failure who has required multiple bail-outs. His domineering wife Clemency is a plant biologist with extensive knowledge of poisons.
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Glenn Close, Max Irons star in 'Crooked House' screening Aug. 26-31 - Verde Independent
Glenn Close, Max Irons star in 'Crooked House' screening Aug. 26-31.
Posted: Tue, 23 Aug 2022 07:00:00 GMT [source]
Hayward also bonds with 12-year-old Josephine (Honor Kneafsey), who says she knows everything that goes on in the house but also admits that she likes to make things up. With a Scotland Yard chief inspector (Terence Stamp) riding him, Hayward has precious little time to uncover the real killer. All the family members had motive and opportunity, none has an alibi; and each of them knew that Aristide's eye medicine was poisonous as he had told all the family after being asked by Josephine. According to the will, they all stand to gain a healthy bequest from the old man's estate. The servants do not get bequests but would lose their (increasing) annual wages or bonuses, so are not suspects.
She poisoned Nanny for encouraging Magda to send her to Switzerland, and also because Nanny called her a "silly little girl". She also included threats against Magda if her mother seriously considered sending her away. Miss de Haviland had discovered Josephine's notebook hidden in a dog kennel, and committed the murder-suicide car crash as she did not want Josephine to suffer in a prison or asylum if and when the police learned she was the murderer. Leonides had secretly personally rewritten (to the surprise of his lawyer Mr Gaitskill) his will to leave everything to Philip's daughter Sophia. He believed that she alone had the strength of character to assume his place as the head of the family.
A CNN poll of more than 900 registered voters released Sunday shows that, if the November election were held today, the former president would beat incumbent President Joe Biden by six points. That number grows to a nine-point spread when third-party candidates are included in the survey. Jody is directing her debut feature — a comically naff futuristic sci-fi romance called Metalstorm — with Tom in the lead role, and apparently wants her thwarted lover to be the stunt double. Colt Seavers (Ryan Gosling) is the stunt double of mega celebrity actor Tom Ryder (Aaron Taylor-Johnson); he's the beating heart of Tom's blockbuster movies, the best in the business. He's also in a casual situationship with cute camerawoman Jody Moreno (Emily Blunt), united by their shared love language of car doughnuts, and as happy as anyone can be in a job where you're routinely catapulted off great heights, burned and pummelled. Josephine killed her grandfather because he wouldn't pay for her ballet lessons; she then revelled in all the attention she received afterwards and planned her own assault with the marble doorstop as a way of diverting attention.
Josephine, who had been bragging that she knows the killer's identity, is found lying unconscious in the yard from a blow to the head from a marble doorstop. Charles discovers a cache of incriminating love letters from Brenda to Laurence, and the two are arrested. While they are in custody, the children's nanny dies after drinking a digitalis-laced cup of cocoa that had apparently been intended for Josephine. This over the top adaptation is not realistic, but it is great fun.
Screenwriter Julian Fellowes has done far better (Gosford Park, Downton Abbey); Crooked House is just a lazy weekend in a big house with people no one would ever give a hoot about in real life. There are brief glimmers of flair and technique scattered throughout the film, such as an impressive performance by the young Honor Kneafsey as the mischievous Josephine and a well-blocked dinner scene that allows for amusing familial sniping. Yet, “Crooked House” is a bored and boring adaptation of a Christie tale that demands a stronger hand and a taste for mirth amidst the morbidity.
Edith de Haviland, Aristide's unmarried sister-in-law, is a brusque woman in her 70s who came to stay with him after his first wife's death to supervise his children's upbringing. Roger, the eldest son and Aristide's favourite, is a failure as a businessman. He has steered the catering business bestowed to him by his father to the brink of bankruptcy and he longs to live a simple life somewhere far away. Roger's wife Clemency, a scientist with austere and unsentimental tastes, has never been able to enjoy the wealth offered by her husband's family.
A majority of voters looking back on Trump’s time in office, 55%, say the 44th President’s first term was a success, a reversal of the numbers seen just after he left office. Meanwhile, a full 61% said that Biden’s presidency has been a failure, including 27% of Democratic voters polled. There were a few jabs at Biden, a “decent” man who Jost said reminds him of his beloved grandfather, a Staten Island firefighter. There were also some uneven one-liners about the press, but the press never laughs at itself, so it’s hard to know whether they were good or bad jokes.
Principal photography began in September 2016, and the film aired in the UK on Channel 5 on 17 December 2017. Both polls showed that adding independent candidates RFK Jr. and Cornel West and Green Party candidate Jill Stein to the mix only further complicates matters for Trump’s second try at a second term. Saturday Night Live comedian Colin Jost also took shots at Trump, riffing on the courtroom drawings of the former president from his hush-money trial. Biden poked fun at everything from his ongoing criminal trial (“You might call it stormy weather”) to his age (“I’m a grown man running against a 6 year old) to his floundering campaign fundraising, including a jab at the weird merch Trump has peddled this year. Before the speeches, the WHCA handed out its awards for excellence. The award for overall excellence went to Barak Ravid of Axios, Peter Baker of the New York Times received the print award for deadline reporting, and Tamara Keith of NPR received the broadcast award in the same category — all singled out for stories following Hamas’s Oct. 7 attack in Israel.
In CROOKED HOUSE, private eye Charles Hayward (Max Irons) is hired by a former lover, Sophia de Havilland (Stefanie Martini), to find out who killed her wealthy grandfather, Aristide Leonides. The house is filled with relatives, all of whom despised the old man and all of whom are suspects. Hayward investigates everyone, including Edith (Glenn Close), who hunts moles with a gun; Aristide's grown sons, Philip (Julian Sands) and Roger (Christian McKay); Philip's actress wife, Magda (Gillian Anderson); and the old man's second wife, a former Las Vegas dancer named Brenda (Christina Hendricks), who stands to inherit everything.
The party soldiered on, reinforcing a commitment to the role of a free press in a democracy, and many breathed a not-so-discreet sigh of relief when the crowd resumed in 2022 after the worst of the pandemic with Biden carrying the torch. With such an enticing cast, it’s tougher than one might think trying to divine which of these eccentrics might be responsible for the crime, and “Crooked House” keeps you guessing, right up to its shocking conclusion (of which Christie was especially proud, naming it a personal favorite among her extensive oeuvre). It’s not just the revelation of who poisoned Aristide that surprises but also the way in which the film delivers justice to his killer. This particular mystery won’t be spawning sequels, but it arrives at just the right time to satisfy those whose appetite for a delicious Christie mystery are seeking a truly diabolical twist. In any case, we need something to keep our eyes and imaginations occupied while the director trots out his cast of suspects, and together with DP Sebastian Winterø, Paquet-Brenner takes these relatively bland characters and stages them at dramatic angles in these positively breathtaking rooms. Whereas so many of Christie’s books have gone straight to the small screen, this stunning visual treatment is enough to make “Crooked House” feel worthy of a theatrical run (although in fact, the film debuted weeks earlier on-demand in the States).
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