Quarantine Control #108: A Big Cat Tavern on the Nile

DC Staff | April 28, 2022 | Features, Movies, Television | No Comments

COVID-19? Absolutely still around even if we’re out of the pandemic phase, and it will remain around for some time if it isn’t for good. But we as a society are going to damn well try and pretend it won’t be, and will try to get back to “normal” despite the new variant coming around and others on the horizon. Will it work? Probably not, but that won’t stop the late-stage capitalism apparatus from forcing it.

Geoffrey Barnes

Death on the Nile (2022)
Source: HBO Max
Episodes: 1 movie

For whatever reason, the number of genuine murder mystery movies with solid budgets has fallen. There’s no telling precisely what’s responsible for it, between the sheer number of superhero movies releasing in theaters and the success that comes with them (which I’m not helping with since I enjoy some of them a little too much) or the movies going right to TV and streaming services. This alone was enough to applaud the existence of Death on the Nile, Kenneth Branagh’s adaptation of one among several Hercule Poirot mystery stories written by Agatha Christie. I can’t say I contributed to this by waiting to watch the movie on a streaming service following its short theatrical fun in February (I am not going back to the theater any time soon, sorry), but it’s certainly the kind of movie I’d like to see more examples of.

Death on the Nile is an adaptation of the 1937 Christie story of the same name that follows Poirot (Kenneth Branagh — who also directed), summoned to use his deductive skills to solve the surprising murder of an heiress on a cruise ship while on an Egyptian vacation. The actual murder doesn’t occur until around halfway into the film, enough time to establish its large cast of characters who could nearly all be potential murderers with motives. Even if it’s possible to guess who the murderer is before the reveal, the actual motives for it and the way in which the murder was pulled off are difficult to see coming for anyone who hasn’t read the story beforehand.

The movie occurs in the same year the original novel released in 1937, with the era faithfully recreated to the best of the filmmakers’ abilities. The locations look as they would for the early 20th century before the central characters depart on the cruise ship, all accompanied by music either released in the 1930s or close enough to the era that it wouldn’t take the viewer (most of which are unlikely to be alive during those years) out of the experience. There was no need to be as faithful with creating environmental shots around Egypt, the looks of which have changed little over the years. Even though it’s evident several locations are green screened upon looking closely, they still look good enough to be convincing.

I also enjoyed the acting talent involved, though several among them could easily prevent others from doing so. Branagh puts on a convincing-enough Belgian accent for the role of Poirot despite being British himself, the same one used for previous Christie story adaptation Murder on the Orient Express. This movie, in fact, has a significant number of fake accents, with Sophie Okonedo and Annette Bening sporting fake American and fake British accents as jazz singer Salome Otterbourne and painter Euphemia, respectively. But neither of them were distracting enough to take me out of the experience.

If there was one thing that could have come close to removing all sense of suspension of disbelief, it’s the other acting talent that helped this movie have one of the most cursed casts in recent memory. Armie Hammer (playing Simon Doyle) was credibly accused of sexual harassment and abuse. Gal Gadot (playing Linnet Ridgeway) has openly taken Israel’s side in its lopsided battle/genocide against the Palestinians, still happening despite the mass media losing interest. (Gadot also doesn’t event attempt a British accent despite playing a British socialite.) Letitia Wright (playing Rosalie Otterbourne) openly questioned the COVID-19 vaccine in a time when vaccine hesitation was high among Black communities. (There are still questions as to whether she was vaccinated or not during filming for Black Panther: Wakanda Forever.) Lastly, there’s Russel Brand (playing Windlesham) an open anti-vaxxer who hangs around a lot of right-wing circles.

Considering how large the cast is and how this was filmed before the pandemic, there were bound to be actors involved whose reputations have collapsed in the time since. But this is nonetheless quite an assembly. I also couldn’t go without mentioning this while giving my thoughts, given the sheer number of them. Enjoyment of this movie depends on whether you can tolerate these actors, who turn in passable performances at the very least. I’m surprised that I was able to overlook it, though Brand’s part being tiny helped, but I understand that not everyone can.

Mystery movies on par with Death on the Nile with a budget are rarer than they should be these days. Despite this movie’s box office results, similar to the other 20th Century Studios movies Disney released in theaters at either inopportune times or to minimal fanfare — though it makes sense as to why this movie received the treatment. These were unfortunate occurrences for Branagh, and here’s hoping he gets another chance with a third Poirot tale.

Joseph Daniels

When it comes to great tiger documentary material, not everything is created equal. This week’s entry in Quarantine Control’s Year of the Tiger is kind of dumb, and I have many problems with it.

Big Cat Games (2015)
Source: Disney+
Tiger content: Team Tiger

In 2015, National Geographic held a competition between three species of big cat with the aim being to see which was the best. I don’t know if this was intended to be released during an Olympic year, but they missed the Winter Olympics by a year and were a year too early for the Summer Olympics. As a result, it feels like this was just a competition show for no reason. Disney+ lists it under several categories, including Reality Shows and Game Show/Competitions, so it’s being lumped into the same genre as stuff like Survivor, Big Brother and Who Wants To Marry My Dad? on one side and Jeopardy!, Family Feud and Win Ben Stein’s Money on the other.

Cheetahs, tigers and lions were represented in the Big Cat Games, meaning other species like leopards and jaguars were left out in the cold, so it wasn’t truly a competition between all big cats. At the very least, if they wanted to fully commit to this, they should’ve done an entire season of the show and crowned a winner at the end.

Instead, the three teams (which were unbalanced, by the way: three lions versus four cheetahs versus two tigers) competed in four different kinds of events and were scored based on their performance, with the team scoring the most points winning the entire competition.

One of the biggest problems I had with the competition was that not everyone competing was even interested in being there. In half of the events, Team Cheetah didn’t care at all, and even keeping their attention was a challenge in at least one other event. Team Lion weren’t interested in one of the same events Team Cheetah didn’t care about, so Team Tiger picked up some easy points merely by default.

The scoring also put so much of an emphasis on getting a win that a team earning two wins and two third place finishes would win over a team getting one win and three second place finishes.

In the end, I found the whole thing to be utterly stupid, even though (spoiler alert) Team Tiger won. I don’t really feel like these results were definitive, especially when it came to the performance of Team Cheetah, which I feel were severe underdogs in this competition. Would Team Lion and Team Tiger have faced stiffer competition from a Team Leopard? Who knows? Ever since making Big Cat Games, a second competition was never held, so apparently Team Tiger wins forever?

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Tangent Tavern (2021)
Source: YouTube, unfortunately
Episodes: Ongoing (Currently 17)

It’s been a little while since I last recommended a podcast, so here’s a pretty good one that I recently discovered, thanks to how much I enjoy their content already. Tangent Tavern is co-hosted by one of the current kings of MMORPG content on YouTube, Josh Strife Hayes, whose series Worst MMO Ever can be considered the spiritual sequel to ChaosD1’s MMO Grinder series. ChaosD1 ran out of content for his series, since it looked like he was trying to focus on free-to-play games which had some level of professionalism to them. He also occasionally did special episodes for massively popular games which weren’t free-to-play, like Final Fantasy XIV, but with a free and unlimited trial in place which now runs through two full games worth of content at this point, you could probably consider his Final Fantasy XIV episode a legitimate entry in MMO Grinder now instead of a special episode. I do kind of wish he’d had the time to reach level 50, since there used to be issues with level 50 content in the game which were all addressed within the last year or two, but which he would’ve had a field day with if he’d reached that far. He was optimistic at the end of his video about the game despite how critical he had been about the Final Fantasy series in general, but I’m willing to bet he would’ve quit the game if he’d made it to the level 50 content.

Josh Strife Hayes, however, has not placed any game quality restrictions on his Worst MMO Ever series, as long as they’ll boot up. If they run, they’re fair game. There are a ton of free-to-play games on Steam and on mobile which can be considered MMOs, so he has content he can put out for years. He doesn’t even have to do an episode on Final Fantasy XIV… and he likely won’t. It’s not hard to create an alt and check out what the current new player experience is in the game, but I highly doubt that he’s going to make an episode of Worst MMO Ever on the game when his love for it is so well known at this point. He might do it for a milestone episode or maybe an April 1st episode, but I don’t see him needing to make an episode otherwise. The highest profile he’s gotten at this point has been a recent episode on Tera, and now the game’s shutting down in a month, but that’s probably unrelated. Interestingly, you could bookend Tera’s lifespan with both the MMO Grinder episode that showed how the game was at the start of its life and the Worst MMO Ever episode that showed the game in its final days. RIP Tera, you’ll be missed by maybe twenty people.

Now I’m curious to see if I’d be person twenty one. Hmm.

Tangent Tavern is also hosted by Callum Upton, whom you might recognize as the guy who calls out scams on his YouTube channel and who recently rose to the challenge by showing up the CEO of Earth 2, Shane Isaac, who issued a challenge to Callum in an attempt to shut the YouTuber up and make him go away. Callum won the challenge, but Shane Isaac has been bending over backwards to discredit Callum’s win, rather than honour the conditions of the challenge and award Callum a $10,000 prize. It just goes to show how little honour Shane Isaac has.

Anyway, Tangent Tavern talks about various MMO-related content for about two or more hours per episode, and its two hosts are entertaining and charismatic enough to carry the show with a loose topic through those two hours. It’s like the YouTube equivalent of sitting down with friends and having a chat. The show is originally broadcast live and then uploaded to its own YouTube channel afterwards, so if the conversation ever drags, its hosts can look to the chat for inspiration. This is probably one of the best ways to create a podcast on the fly, to put two charismatic people who already know each other in front of a pair of microphones and have fans watch it and interact as it’s in the process of being recorded. This certainly isn’t the first podcast that records its episodes like this, but it’s probably one of the best I’ve seen.

If you’re looking for a good and insightful discussion into various MMO related topics hosted by people who actually do belong behind a microphone, you can’t go wrong with Tangent Tavern.

Sure, most mask mandates that were ever in place have been lifted and the few vaccine mandates ever enacted have largely disappeared. But it’s still best to be masked and vaccinated. There’s no telling how long we’ll have to do this — it could very well be for a long time yet. But it’s better than getting sick and infecting others.

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