...
I think my subconscious has been trying to spare me. Much as I love Kevin Spacey, and I so do love Kevin Spacey, I don't think even he can presume upon Ian Richardson's exalted FU. It has taken me all this time to realize and absorb that the Netflix sensation everyone talks about is another Americanized remake of a British masterpiece. I should've recognized the possibility upon hearing the title, but instead I envisioned Spacey being a casino boss or a bankster in his new series.
I never read the books, which of itself is odd because I have spent three quarters of my life reading books at an heroic rate, at such a rate I suspect only speed readers and cheats can beat, so I don't know if Richardson's version shortchanged the protagonist in the books in any way. I loved the BBC version so much that I can't imagine he did anything but immortalize that fictional monster. I was mad for Francis Urquhart. I don't think it took me even an hour to realize I would kill anyone who tried to bust him... at least insofar as I could get into the scenes ex post facto to prevent it. I still hold a grudge against his wife.
He was so giddily horrific, so clever, that I found it completely believable that girls young enough to be his granddaughter would be lethally attracted to him, and I rubbed my hands together over the thought that the tabloid scum would get theirs... in spades. I was utterly devoted to the success of that glorious murderating fuck power junkie. He was gorgeous! Gorgeous.
I don't mind admitting it at all.
If there ever were a real one that good, I might not begrudge him either, but that's just the thing, there isn't one. There are plenty that awful, but none of them come with that creativity and zest and panache. They're all pulpy frauds who just get where they are by accident of birth or some sifter of statistical models hired by oligarchs to provide them with likely candidates.
Francis wasn't a coward. All the real ones are cowards.
...
Night before last I watched a bunch of movies on YouBube. I picked only movies with leads by my favorite actors. It was a pretty intense night. I kept finding bits in the movies that rang bells from my own life experience, would make me cry or laugh, my life colliding with their fiction. One of them was a Kevin Spacey movie, where he plays an ex-billionaire felon trying to get back in the game. It was a totally goofy movie, but I loved it because Kevin made that guy totally believable.
So it isn't that I don't think Kevin Spacey is up to the role. If anyone is, it's him. But they've made it American and that takes a boatload of nuance off it going in. I am afraid. I don't want to see Kevin Spacey fail... even if I can blame everyone else for it. I mean, just in this trailer I see his asides to the camera are not as good. Maybe they picked the wrong angle for them, or maybe they picked the wrong ones for the trailer, but already my apprehension seems to be borne out by these clips.
Still, I might not be able to continue giving this a miss now that I know it's happening, because, because I am still so faithful to Francis that I need to be sure I can protect him....
