Columbo

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cdnchris
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Columbo

#1 Post by cdnchris » Wed Dec 25, 2019 12:07 am

Nasir007 wrote:
Tue Dec 24, 2019 9:26 pm
I sampled Johnson's commentary.

[...]

1. Directly addressing my criticism of the reveal being so early in the film - Johnson seemed to say it was yet another subversion by him. He referenced a show called Columbo which I had never heard of. I read up about it and apparently they show you the crime and who does it first and then you follow the plot to see if and how they will be caught. Johnson then said that is what he had made in effect - that the film is actually a howcatchthem instead of whodunit. Interesting approaching and I give him props for wanting to subvert the genre but did not work for me. Only drained the intrigue out of the picture.
You've never heard of Columbo!?!?

Interestingly that was what came to mind at that point in the film. Part of the fun of the show was watching the bad guy try to cover their tracks, while Columbo annoyed the piss out of them. "Just one more thing..."

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Re: Knives Out (Rian Johnson, 2019)

#2 Post by domino harvey » Wed Dec 25, 2019 12:12 am

Columbo was great, though as a kid all the fun guest appearances by faded stars didn't mean anything to me. My family often quoted "One more thing" in Peter Falk-voice among ourselves growing up. I still remember his trick to make someone think he "chose" their number when asking someone to pick a number between 1 and 10, too!

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Re: Knives Out (Rian Johnson, 2019)

#3 Post by knives » Wed Dec 25, 2019 12:49 am

Columbo is definitely a real classic even if only for how exhausted Falk could look. A show anyone could get a kick out of.

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Knives Out (Rian Johnson, 2019)

#4 Post by MichaelB » Wed Dec 25, 2019 9:34 am

Because US film culture is so globally pervasive, Americans sometimes get noticeably bemused when they find out that the same isn’t necessarily true of their television - but until surprisingly recently it really wasn’t, with even blockbuster shows like Seinfeld relegated to a graveyard slot around midnight on BBC2 in the UK, and quite a bit else not crossing the Atlantic at all.

I remember some very confusing ads from the early 1980s for films starring Saturday Night Live alumni that basically recycled the US marketing, which was predicated in advance knowledge of who Steve Martin, Chevy Chase, Bill Murray et al were - and we’d never heard of them before. (And why would we have done?)

Then again, it cuts both ways - I was highly amused to see American friends of mine who’d just seen 24 Hour Party People bubbling with enthusiasm about this amazing new talent that they’d just discovered, but pretty much everyone in Britain had known him for a full decade already.

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Re: Knives Out (Rian Johnson, 2019)

#5 Post by Michael Kerpan » Wed Dec 25, 2019 10:16 am

Columbo makes an appearance in Wings of Desire. ;-)

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Re: Knives Out (Rian Johnson, 2019)

#6 Post by colinr0380 » Wed Dec 25, 2019 10:38 am

This is a whole tangential subject but at least in UK TV terms that would not have been the case for Columbo, as it seemed in perpetual rotation with Kojak, Murder She Wrote and 80s and 90s Perry Mason throughout the 1990s. The last really big US series that I remember getting a huge push from start to its very finish was Buffy The Vampire Slayer (with even its Angel spin off getting shown on another channel).

But yes, I only really know the Saturday Night Live stuff from the films various cast members made afterwards. Which made things like Coneheads seem rather inexplicable at the time! (I remember for a while thinking it was ripping off of the premise of the, actually far better, Meet The Applegates, when it probably was the other way around!). Yet it very much depends on the whims of the people buying stuff for television as I certainly remember in the 1980s staying the night and watching The Equalizer, Midnight Caller and L.A. Law with my neighbour when my parents were working night shifts! And Married With Children got a lot of airplay as did, um, The Cosby Show (I was more of a fan of Hangin' With Mr Cooper myself).

I wonder if that UK/US gap has widened a little bit in recent decades with the rise of Sky pilfering all the 'big shows' that at least for me made a mockery of following both Lost and The Sopranos, as they both left free to air, never to return. Mad Men suffered the same fate too when Sky did that contract to pick up all HBO content (which of course meant Game of Thrones has never touched free to air). The Wire was probably the one exception in the last decade and even that came to the BBC a decade late and tossed away in daily late night double bills in that same 11.30 p.m. post-Newsnight slot that Seinfeld (and The Larry David Show!) got thrown into.

I think in the wake of tabloid complaints of lots of material being bought in that the BBC in particular has made it a policy not to fill up schedules with American imported shows in order to create 'homegrown' content that justifies the licence fee more. Similar to the policy of seemingly dropping anything in black and white from being broadcast except on the rarest of occasions. So we're never going to see things go back to the way they were in the 90s with Buffy, The X-Files, Star Trek: TNG and DS9 (even Voyager, which got a whole Star Trek night devoted to the screening of its pilot episode!) and Murder One being actively promoted in primetime slots the way that they were, and definitely not on BBC1 at all (BBC2 still does a few things with Pose and those American Crime Story series on occasion. And BBC4 does the whole Ken Burns thing for the new series, but often edited down)

Channel 4 mostly has moved away from that too, probably having learnt its lesson after the previously mentioned Sopranos and Lost plunderings from Sky. Though it did itself pilfer The Simpsons from the BBC in the early 2000s and keeps that in really heavy rotation in primetime still (though still about five to six seasons behind the US), and it does also have that E4 channel to mostly ghettoise American import shows into instead (The Goldbergs and its spin off Schooled, Brooklyn Nine Nine, The Big Bang Theory, How I Met Your Mother, Gotham and recently all the Adult Swim shows and Star Trek: Discovery too), though even there it hides stuff away such as for instance the whole of the most recent series of Fear The Walking Dead being blown through with no promotion at all at 2 to 3 a.m. slots (!) on week days (!!) in the last fortnight.

That actually makes me think that The Simpsons is probably the best test for international ubiquity! I guess that exports everywhere still?
Last edited by colinr0380 on Thu Dec 26, 2019 3:33 pm, edited 2 times in total.

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Re: Knives Out (Rian Johnson, 2019)

#7 Post by knives » Wed Dec 25, 2019 11:54 am

MichaelB wrote:
Wed Dec 25, 2019 9:34 am
Because US film culture is so globally pervasive, Americans sometimes get noticeably bemused when they find out that the same isn’t necessarily true of their television - but until surprisingly recently it really wasn’t, with even blockbuster shows like Seinfeld relegated to a graveyard slot around midnight on BBC2 in the UK, and quite a bit else not crossing the Atlantic at all.

I remember some very confusing ads from the early 1980s for films starring Saturday Night Live alumni that basically recycled the US marketing, which was predicated in advance knowledge of who Steve Martin, Chevy Chase, Bill Murray et al were - and we’d never heard of them before. (And why would we have done?)

Then again, it cuts both ways - I was highly amused to see American friends of mine who’d just seen 24 Hour Party People bubbling with enthusiasm about this amazing new talent that they’d just discovered, but pretty much everyone in Britain had known him for a full decade already.
Chris is Canadian by birth, just to show it's not just Americans.

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Re: Columbo

#8 Post by domino harvey » Wed Dec 25, 2019 1:30 pm

It occurs to me that for all the comparisons to Sherlock Holmes, Law and Order: Criminal Intent is just as indebted to Columbo in how by the first act of each episode we already know who did it but the fun is watching Vincent D’Onofrio’s detective figure it out and then flamboyantly finagle a confession out of the killer using only his heightened wits

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Re: Knives Out (Rian Johnson, 2019)

#9 Post by cdnchris » Wed Dec 25, 2019 4:23 pm


knives wrote:Chris is Canadian by birth, just to show it's not just Americans.
I also have the same reaction when people here don't know what Monty Python or Coronation Street is. How can they not know!?

Though I'm never shocked when people haven't heard of Beachcombers, Red Green or The Littlest Hobo, probably meaning I have no faith in Canadian programming.

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Re: Columbo

#10 Post by domino harvey » Wed Dec 25, 2019 4:25 pm

Red Green aired on PBS in the states, that one I’ve seen!

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Re: Knives Out (Rian Johnson, 2019)

#11 Post by Jack Kubrick » Wed Dec 25, 2019 4:53 pm

cdnchris wrote:
Wed Dec 25, 2019 4:23 pm
knives wrote:Chris is Canadian by birth, just to show it's not just Americans.
I also have the same reaction when people here don't know what Monty Python or Coronation Street is. How can they not know!?
Monty Python are not household names in Canada? That seems to be one of the few British shows along with Doctor Who that has transcends into the American mainstream, doesn't hurt it spun off two very popular, often-quoted movies.


Seinfeld seems to struggle cross cultural barriers, where Friends is popular in every nation you travel. It's just as syndicated as The Simpsons in Europe. Might just be the New York humor of Seinfeld doesn't resonate with a European audience. though Woody Allen seems to have mainstream attraction in Europe that he doesn't get in the States and his humor derive from the same culture.

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Re: Columbo

#12 Post by colinr0380 » Wed Dec 25, 2019 4:55 pm

The Littlest Hobo definitely got shown in the UK, usually in rotation with Skippy and Gentle Ben for a full spread of international heroic animals to contrast against the lazy British cats and dogs just lying snoozing on the sofa all day (I always wanted to know if the Littlest Hobo ever got on the balloon shown in the title sequence but it sadly never appeared in the episodes that I watched). Is it just me but have animals gotten lazier in recent years? Or maybe they just are holding out for better 'claws' in their contracts before agreeing to a new show. Maybe they were just waiting for the crossover team up event movie, decades before the Marvel Cinematic Universe? (Lassie would be the Iron Man of the gang, of course)

We did get Kids In The Hall too, but only very briefly in a late night slot. But it helped in preparing for that Brain Candy film!

___

On the subject of Columbo, I did like that the key to the success of that show was that it seemed to be trying to have its cake and eating it too in the way that it usually focused on the soon to be criminal on the way to doing something dastardly until Columbo shows up and suddenly the show shifts its attention, and affection, towards him instead! Its like it was giving the audience the thrill of being in the shoes of the baddie for a while but without having to face any of the consequences, as well as letting them share the sense of knowing whodunnit without actually having to have deduced anything for themselves! Plus later on with their privileged intimate knowledge of the bad guy's actions and motives the audience can feel affinity to Columbo's gifted investigator who almost preternaturally has deduced the truth and often is just toying with the bad guy until they blurt out their confession themselves. Along with, if they still wish to, a bit of a tingle of fear of being the baddie trying not to have their cover blown too!

That is all a bit different to the general structure of Murder, She Wrote say, which is more about the first section of the show being about the soon-to-be victim systematically pissing off as many people as possible in the shortest timeframe in which they are able, in order to have a moderate to large pool of suspects for Jessica Fletcher to go about investigating. Usually that involves the person who appears to have been the most wronged by the murdered party and therefore has had the most motive to kill (but who is fundamentally decent and usually someone that Jessica has had a nice encounter with in the initial scenes) being immediately taken off to prison by the police, quick to neatly close the book on the situation. Leaving Jessica to have to investigate by herself to find the person truly responsible, who almost always when they get found out and confronted readily admit their guilt and immediately disappear from the show so we never see what sentence they are given for their crimes!
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Re: Knives Out (Rian Johnson, 2019)

#13 Post by MichaelB » Wed Dec 25, 2019 5:35 pm

colinr0380 wrote:
Wed Dec 25, 2019 10:38 am
This is a whole tangential subject but at least in UK TV terms that would not have been the case for Columbo, as it seemed in perpetual rotation with Kojak, Murder She Wrote and 80s and 90s Perry Mason throughout the 1990s. The last really big US series that I remember getting a huge push from start to its very finish was Buffy The Vampire Slayer (with even its Angel spin off getting shown on another channel).
Oh yes, Columbo was certainly known in the UK, but my general point is that US television isn't anything like as ubiquitous as US cinema, and it's entirely believable that someone who's neither British nor American could live for several decades on this planet without having even heard of (much less ever watched) something that Americans would consider a basic staple.

In fact, it was only when I actually went to the US and saw its domestic TV in its native habitat that the weirdly choppy structure of American TV episodes finally made sense to me - although quite how anyone can watch a sitcom episode with more than one commercial break (and of course on the BBC it didn't have even that) and not want to stab themselves in the eyes with a blunt fork well before the end is quite beyond me.

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Re: Columbo

#14 Post by colinr0380 » Wed Dec 25, 2019 6:14 pm

On the advert breaks, I'm amazed at how many there are on American television (Not that I really watch much primetime Channel 4 programming anyway, but I did find that I could not really stand to watch any Channel 4 programmes when they moved, US-style, to adding in an extra commercial break often five minutes before the end of a programme, often involving a couple of minutes of ads, the final scene of whatever show and then the credits! While it is slightly different I would actually bracket that experience in with when my local library cut the book lending duration from a month to three weeks - it was just a small cut, but after being unable to adapt myself to the routine I just ended up never going back to the library again from that point just to avoid an unnecessary fine!). I remember that being pressed home to me in some of the Simpsons commentaries for an early episode where one of the jokes was that Homer was doing an uninterrupted scream for a full three minute commercial break before the show began again, but it was just a fade to black and then straight back up again in the BBC showing (and later DVD presentation), which rather muted the impact of that particular gag!

Now that we have a dedicated Columbo thread I think it would probably be important to highlight that episode of Columbo with John Cassavetes in, which perhaps shows an interesting symbiotic cross over between the television production and independent feature filmmaking scenes.

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Re: Knives Out (Rian Johnson, 2019)

#15 Post by The Fanciful Norwegian » Wed Dec 25, 2019 10:16 pm

Jack Kubrick wrote:
Wed Dec 25, 2019 4:53 pm
Seinfeld seems to struggle cross cultural barriers, where Friends is popular in every nation you travel. It's just as syndicated as The Simpsons in Europe. Might just be the New York humor of Seinfeld doesn't resonate with a European audience. though Woody Allen seems to have mainstream attraction in Europe that he doesn't get in the States and his humor derive from the same culture.
Friends is also popular in Asia, where The Simpsons is at best a cult item (even in Japan where the characters formerly hawked lemon soda).

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Re: Columbo

#16 Post by thirtyframesasecond » Thu Dec 26, 2019 9:37 am

Re: Murder She Wrote, the greatest curveball would've been that Jessica was the world's most successful serial killer and not only got away with every crime committed in her vicinity, but also that she wrote bestselling novels based on them.

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Re: Columbo

#17 Post by colinr0380 » Thu Dec 26, 2019 11:34 am

Like the main character from Basic Instinct!

That actually reminds me of the time in the early 90s when we went to visit my grandma and all played the Murder, She Wrote board game, which was a bit like Cludeo from what I remember. That had a gimmick of everyone having to leave the room then one by one going in and planning their moves in isolation, with one person being the killer. Unfortunately my grandma got the murderer card and not knowing the rules too well (honestly, none of us did!), proceeded to kill and then resurrect other characters until we figured out what the problem was!

That made the board game far more entertaining than it had any right to be, and really tied in with that meta idea above that you should never discount the unpredictable motives of a seemingly kindly elderly lady!

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Re: Columbo

#18 Post by therewillbeblus » Fri Mar 01, 2024 11:25 pm

Made my way through the KL set - it looks great on blu-ray, and as others have said, it's just about the most leisurely TV I've ever seen - perfect for when you're struggling to concentrate on much more, which is the state I've been in for more or less the last six months. The stimulating moments are practically simmers next to staple television thrills, but that's so fitting to the show and Falk's languid temperament that to escalate the drama wouldn't work (I do think the disclosures and (barely-)escalating affect shifts in Falk towards the end work well though - except for one or two occasions). I don't know if there are many episodes I'd consider great quality television, but I can see myself revisiting all of them, even the ones that were tough to get through (some of those 100-minute eps set in foreign countries..) and finding new things to like each time. Even some of the episodes I wasn't crazy about had fun guest stars or little bits - like all the Prisoner references packed into one of the McGoohan eps.

I can't fairly assess any kind of ranking, since the more I acclimated to its vibe, the more I realized why the earlier episodes were probably rated so much more highly than I felt without the proper context - so I have to go back - but I'll say my two favorite things (well, three, but the third is domino's remembrance stated upthread about the 'pick a number' trick, which is actually Santini's trick that Falk figures out and then plays out for the audience!) are the reveal in "Suitable for Framing", which is not only clever, but perhaps the most hilariously on-brand punchline the show conceived; and then "The Bye-Bye Sky High IQ Murder Case"'s economic pacing, Tati-esque details, brief humane sentiment, and surging tension across about fifteen minutes in the finale. But neither episode would be nearly as effective if watched as one's first, or even second Columbo episode - it's the context and contrast that makes the reveal great (even after just a handful), and that later, strangely-maligned, ridiculously-titled ep move to a rhythm just a tad quicker and more thrilling.

What's odder is that in doing a cursory search for Columbo episode rankings, the main impassioned blog also happens to single out these two things as their favorite (reveal, and episode, respectively) - and yet, going down the rest of their lists, we don't really see eye to eye on many key eps' value! We just hate and love a few of the same ones that are, apparently, not popular opinions.. weird. Anyways, a really wonderful series and the best blind-buy I've made in a while. The commentaries would've been cool, but this a great set, and bargain - even if you only want to revisit ten episodes (doubtful, but possible), they're all essentially feature-length films, so do the math next sale!

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