Gold Digger: For Love or Money?

My wife and I binged Gold Digger (2019) over two nights on Acorn TV via Prime Video.  It's an excellent, atypical whodunnit - atypical because, well...

The story is about a 60-year-old woman romantically pursued by a good looking, well-spoken, apparently sweet and sensitive guy in his mid-30s.  The woman is divorced, and her kids are sure the guy wants to marry their mother for her money (at least most of them are; she is undeniably wealthy).  To make matters even more intriguing, her ex-husband, now living with her her former best-friend, lives within driving distance.  All of this takes in Devon, England.

Pretty compelling set-up, right?  One problem, though, is that the 60-year old, Julia Day, is played by Julia Ormond, 55, and still a lot more than passably attractive.  This has the effect of making Julia and Benjamin (played by Ben Barnes) less jarring together than maybe the people who made this series intended the two to be.  In fact, in many scenes they looked so good together that you pretty much forgot their age difference.  Come to think of it, maybe that's what the intention was all along.

I won't say anymore about the plot, because I don't want to spoil the shock and the fun.  What I will say is that this mini-series forthrightly poses the question of is it impossible for a guy in his 30s to lustfully love a woman of 60, or does he have an ulterior motive, and the narrative provides all kinds of twists and bumps in your viewing journey.

All of which is buoyed by the acting, which is consistently superb.  Ormand is outstanding in every scene, as is Barnes.  And my favorites in the supporting cast are Alex Jennings (as Ted, the ex-husband) who was non pareil in both Victoria and The Crown, and  Nikki Amuka-Bird (as his girlfriend, Marsha) whom I haven't seen before but steals almost every scene she is in and is a non-stop fountain of clever lines artfully delivered.

So ... see Gold Digger, ponder and enjoy.

 

Rememory: Hot and Cool Review

 I finally saw Rememory on Amazon Prime.  Or maybe I saw it a while ago, but forgot to review it.  As Todd, a middling-minor character in the movie aptly notes, "the mind forgets things for a reason".  No, Rememory wasn't that bad.  But it wasn't as good as it should have been, either.

As a science fiction film/psychological thriller about memory, it isn't in the same league with Total Recall (1990) or Memento (2000).  It's smaller and ultimately less important.  But it does have something going for it, in its story of a device that allows people to capture their memories, put them on the equivalent of a thumb drive, and see them again.  And it does have some good even memorable acting by Peter Dinklage of Game of Thrones and Julia Ormand of lots of superb movies.

The plot concerns who killed the memory device inventor, Gordon Dunn.   The investigator - private, not for hire, but private as in personal reasons - is Sam Bloom (Dinklage), who is working through his own terrible memories of driving with his brother into a car crash which killed him (his brother).  We don't learn who was in the other car until close to the end, and that's a big twist.

The meat of the movie, though, is routine, as Bloom eliminates suspects who pretty obviously didn't do the crime, meaning you can figure that out without a memory machine.  But the first twist - before the one close to the end - is good:  Dunn killed himself.  [Big spoiler follows]

And the big twist?  Dunn and his wife (Ormand) are also suffering from a memory of a tragedy, the loss of their daughter.  It turns out that she was killed in a car crash - the very crash in which Bloom's brother succumbed.   We learn this when Bloom is able to view a memory stick of his own memories of the crash.

At least, that seems to be the explanation.   Why Carolyn Dunn (Gordon's wife) didn't have that memory - she was in the passenger's seat of that other car, Gordon was driving, and their daughter was in the back seat - is not entirely clear or explained in the movie.  The explanation, rather than shown, is instead a logical supposition based on what we're told about the memory machine allowing people to not just record but delete and change their memories.  And/or, the trauma of the car crash caused them both to have amnesia of the crash.

Which is ok, as an example of the power of McLuhan's cool - the power of ambiguous presentations obliging our minds to fill in the details.  But for the purposes of this movie, I'd have preferred a little more explicit (hot, in McLuhan's terms) detail.   Anyway, if memory and science fiction are your cups or glasses of tea - hot or iced - see Rememory.

 
 about institutional more than personal memory:  The Plot to Save Socrates