A lavish, downright horny, and faithful whodunnit that also becomes a sort of thesis statement for the character of Poirot. Whether or not you need to dig into a legendary detective character like him is up for debate, but I think Branagh succeeds in his attempt to do so.
My VHS cover pull-quote: “I must also bemoan the obvious use of CGI for wide shots of the setting while praising the interior sets where we spend most of our time in the film. Everything is impeccably just so in each little room we inhabit with these characters, as if the interior sets were designed by the detective himself.”
“This is not a prayer, but a swan’s song, the blasphemy done with intention,”
A work of self-discovery that evolves into one of spellbinding self-affirmation. Mehalick brings the reader with him on a path of rich confrontations with himself, a deity, family, music, etc., each piece either reveling in the traditions of form to firmly convey his perspective or outright exploding those traditions in the utmost punk style. Any veil between writer and narrator in these pieces feels especially thin, too, allowing readers a sort of comfortable access to the writer as he accepts, affirms, and meditates on his individual queerness. While it is an achingly personal work, it is also universal in its reflections. Readers are sure to find a bit of themselves in these stout pages, no matter who they may be.
My back cover pull-quote, tattered and folded underneath the seat of an El Camino: “Mehalick begins where many of the Final Fantasy video games end, fighting/addressing a God. In a bold twist to the JRPG formula, Melissa Etheridge’s Seminal 1993 Album Made of Two Overlapping Triangles Instead of One starts with that confrontation between man and supposed creator and then goes from there. This is cross medium conversation and intersectional genre discourse at its finest.”
Nick Perilli 