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We were flipping through the thumbnails on the ad-supported streaming service Tubi when my sweetie-wife, a lover of birds, noticed the title The Day of the Owl, and we stopped to investigate.

An Italian/French crime drama from 1968, the film intrigued us enough to start the stream, but on that evening Tubi’s service must have been pushed to its limit because the film stuttered and stopped. We decided to try again another night, and when we did it played perfectly.

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The Day of the Owl focuses on the new police captain, Bellodi (Franco Nero), recently transferred from Northern Italy to Sicily, and his investigation of an organized crime murder of a local contractor who refused to play along with the region’s rampant corruption. With witnesses who refuse to come forward and informants who work both sides of the conflict, Bellodi soon moves beyond acceptable police work in his attempt to link the murder to the local mafia leader Don Mariano (Lee J. Cobb).

One of the issues one can run into when discovering a film on Tubi is that the service does not always get the most pristine copies to stream, but this was not the case with The Day of the Owl. Image and sound were perfect, though I had the opinion that the sound mix had the foley track too loud; compared to some of the other foreign films we watched on the service, this was like having a Blu-ray in the player. Franco Nero looked fantastic: his intense blue eyes shone brightly, and he cut a fine figure in his uniform. This was also an exception in that the film was presented with its Italian language soundtrack and not dubbed, as is the case with the majority of the films on Tubi. This is not a story for anyone looking for simply good guys and a world where evil is always and easily vanquished, but for those who like more challenging plots, it is worth at least one watch.

The writing is sharp, with a biting sense of humor present throughout most of the film. Sardonic and cynical is the script, and while this movie was released in 1968, it has the tone and resolution of a movie from the deep, dark mid-70s.

Amazon/MGM

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Earlier this summer my sweetie-wife and I ventured to the local cinema and caught a screening of The Sheep Detectives, the latest feature film from Craig Mazin, the showrunner for both Chernobyl and The Last of Us. Mazin, before his pivot to prestige television for HBO, was known as a comedic writer, and the overwhelming success of Chernobyl drastically charted a new course for his career, but before fungal zombies and Soviet nuclear disasters there was an odd German novel, Glennkill, translated into English as Three Bags Full, where a flock of sheep must solve the murder of their shepherd. For more than a decade Mazin’s screenplay adaptation of this book bounced from production company to production company, never quite making it all the way to production, seemingly doomed to eventually become an episode of the podcast Greatest Movies Never Made, but eventually it did find its home, its magical journey ending with a cast that included Emma Thompson and Hugh Jackman along with a number of stars to voice the sheep.

While losing some of the novel’s darker aspects, The Sheep Detectives kept its core enchanting concept: a flock of sheep, with an understanding of humans that comes only from the detective novels their shepherd read to them each night, must against all odds untangle his mysterious death and bring the killer to justice. Along the way the sheep must confront the terrible truths that they have chosen to forget, hiding from the reality of both their lives and the people around them.

The script is sharp, funny, touching, and insightful. While there are a number of human characters, and not all of them simply stock mystery novel types, the focus remains fixed on the sheep and their relationships. Mazin, on the podcast he co-hosts with fellow screen-scribe John August, Scriptnotes, relays that working with producer Lindsey Doran taught him that in the end every story is about relationships, and this is visible in his screenplays for Chernobyl, The Last of Us, and The Sheep Detectives.

The film, having made its way from the big screen to streaming, is now beginning to arrive on the YouTube genre of ‘reactors’ where people who have never seen a film watch one and post edited videos of their reactions to various scenes. Nearly all of them that have ventured to watch The Sheep Detectivesexpected to encounter a light, frothy little movie that was not going to challenge them emotionally, and quite a few finished the film with many, many tear-soaked tissues. It is not a tragedy or a sad movie, but it is one that does not treat death as merely a plot contrivance, but something terrible and inevitable for us all.

The Sheep Detectives delivers on comedy and gags but also on heart and soul, and it is a film that is well worth the time invested in experiencing it. It is not for everyone. Some audience members may switch it off with completely dry eyes, but for those whom it does touch, that touch is meaningful.

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Sunday morning, after finally shaking off the effects of a two-day migraine attack that lasted from Thursday through Friday, my sweetie-wife and I caught an early morning screening of Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. I wish I could tell you how I really feel about this film, but I cannot because of its presentation.

First, a little background on my sweetie-wife’s and my moviegoing habits. Her hearing is fairly sensitive and as such she finds modern movies are played too loudly for her comfort. To combat this she brings a set of cushioned headphones to wear to cut down on the sounds of the film. Most of the time I do not, but the last movie we went to together, Supergirl, I too found the volume overly loud and uncomfortable. Due to that experience and knowing that Nolan has a penchant for making his sound mix loud, I brought along a pair for myself, just in case.

It was not enough.

Universal Pictures

The Odyssey was far, far too loud and in particular the bass which played frequently and with such intensity that it obliterated from my mind and perception everything else in existence. My mind was too concerned with the discomfort of the soundtrack to ever slip away into that dream-like state where the characters and events on the screen took on their own form of reality. I was much more concerned about my seating than I was about any machinations or palace intrigue that took place in Ithaca. Thoughts of dealing with the bass that sliced through me like a phaser pushed from my attention any feelings I might have had for the character lost at sea or the poor doomed Trojans slaughtered in the night. I was present when The Odyssey was screened but I cannot truly say that I actually watched it with any real attention. In the film’s penultimate act, when a terrible storm batters Odysseus, I had to physically cover my eyes because the pounding the audience had suffered at the hands of the audio mixer pushed me once again toward a migraine and the flashes of lightning were simply unendurable.

I can report that The Odyssey does not drag, even during its nearly three-hour runtime; Nolan is too talented a filmmaker to let that happen, but his devotion to an overpowering soundtrack undermines what might have been an enjoyable feature.

So, next weekend, July 17th, is the release of Nolan’s next film, his adaptation of The Odyssey. A

Universal Picture

movie that has already drawn fire from idiots online who believe that true beauty can only be represented by fair skin, blonde hair, and sky-blue eyes and has reignited the, from what I can tell, unjust attacks on Emily Wilson’s translation of the epic. I can’t see this two-bit controversy causing any damage to a film by Christopher Nolan and creator who managed to make a lengthy feature that focused on testimony in bland little rooms into an award-winning and box office monster. No, The Odyssey will do just fine, and my sweetie-wife and I will be there Sunday morning to see it on its opening weekend, but it will be a test of endurance as the reported running time is a staggering two hours and fifty-two minutes.

Clearly Nolan cares as little for his audience’s bladder health as he did for their respiratory health when he pushed Tenet into theaters while the COVID pandemic, a pandemic that killed a million Americans, still burned hot. Because the studio, Warner Brothers, delayed the film’s theatrical release, from its original July 2020 until September of that same year, Nolan severed his relationship with them and has since camped his productions at Universal.

Three hours without an intermission is hardly in the same category as expecting people to flock into a confined space while an airborne disease burns its way through the population, but it is also a sign that the filmmaker has little regard for the comfort of their audience. AMC theaters will be a little unhappy because while I plan to see this film, I have adored most of Nolan’s projects (Following is dumb and Interstellar is an overly cynical derivation of 2001: A Space Odyssey.) I will not, for my own comfort, be purchasing any size of diet soda from the concession stand.

When Quentin Tarantino released his nearly three-hour feature, The Hateful Eight, an enjoyable but ultimately lacking film, he included a limited run of a ‘roadshow’ release where the film was presented with an intermission. Nolan isn’t even giving us that. It’s a large-format film and nearly three hours but without a break for the audience.

Nolan is a talented director and writer, someone willing to challenge audiences with complex plots presented usually in a non-linear fashion, but I wish to the gods that he did not also challenge our biology as well.

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Last week my sweetie-wife and I watched a Giallo that we streamed on the ad-supported service Tubi; the film in question was titled Ring of Death, a 1969 Italian crime/thriller, and not to be confused with the early 80s martial arts movie. The film can be found on IMDb as Detective Belli. But Tubi, in addition to frequent breaks for up to 5 commercials in a row, hid another reason why budget streaming isn’t always the best option.

Belli (Franco Nero) is a corrupt senior police officer in Rome who is drawn into a web of blackmail, extortion, infidelity, and murder when he takes on investigating a rich man’s son who has begun associating with people of low character. As is typical of the giallo genre this movie is lurid and darker than the American genre of film noir with few if any admirable or moral characters. Everyone has a secret, and everyone is willing to do terrible things to keep their secrets concealed.

We, my sweetie-wife and I, prefer whenever possible, to watch these films with the original Italian language track but Tubi, being an ad-supported service, caters to the lowest common denominator and nearly always only has the English language dub for their foreign films, particularly with the older ones. Still, Ring of Death Detective Belli boasted a dubbed track where most of the actors provided their own English language dialog and as such was far superior to the vast majority of dubbed versions.

That is until the particular failings of this apparently hastily assembled version made themselves plain.

Random scenes, for no discernable reason, suddenly presented themselves with the Italian language soundtrack but without any accompanying subtitling. These instances where we were subjected to Italian never lasted more than scene or two, and never as long of a reel, before just as randomly switching back to the English dub.

For the most part this was tolerable, the context of the scenes usually provided enough that we could guess as to what transpired but this all fell apart with the final, and most ironic, sequence for this fault to reveal itself. As with most mysteries and thrillers there comes to scene where the detective, having finally worked out all the twists and turns of the plot, lays it all out for the other characters and the audience in a lengthy spot of exposition and Ring of Death/Detective Belli was no different in this respect, just for us, it was presented in Italian without subtitles. While the solution was plain, in this case Belli was explaining to the culprit just how he worked it all out, all of the nuances were lost in a language neither of us spoke. I could recognize names of characters as they flew by the explanation but nothing more than that.

My sweetie-wife searched the county and city libraries for the film on disc so we might check it out but that proved fruitless.

Sometimes with the free streaming services you get exactly what you pay for.