(L-R) Maurizio Lombardi, Andrew Scott, Dakota Fanning, Eliot Sumner and Steven Zaillian attend the Premiere of Netflix's "Ripley" at The Egyptian Theatre Hollywood on April 03, 2024 in Los Angeles, California.

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Louis Hofmann playing the pretty gay lover of Freddie Miles was a delightful little nugget I didn’t know I needed

'There’s something rather extraordinary at the core of the new Netflix miniseries RIPLEY, based upon the famed 1955 novel The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith. It’s what drives antihero Thomas Ripley (Andrew Scott) to covet the lifestyle of the rich. It has less to do with any glamour and glitz, or even access to Italian villas, fine dining, and tailored clothing, and all to do with sheer relief. The relief that comes from never having to worry about money, the nagging to make more of it, or living the fear of losing it. When con artist Tom Ripley reaches his status of privilege and money, he achieves a zen-like calm, even if he’s achieved his goals via notorious means. It’s access, sure, to better living, finer accommodations, and designer clothes, but mostly it seems to be access to peace of mind that this thief has never known.

And that’s why filmmaker Steven Zaillian’s eight-episode miniseries is so strong. It strips away all the easy things for an audience to drool over in it and concentrates on motive. Why does Tom do what he does? The landscapes and fine wines are incidental. It’s what having money does to his headspace that is dramatized here with such cleverness.

The story remains the same from the book and previous filmed adaptations: Tom Ripley is asked by the wealthy Herbert Greenleaf (Kenneth Lonergan) to convince his prodigal son Dickie (Johnny Flynn) to return to NYC from Italy. But Tom’s introduction to Dickie’s leisurely lifestyle in the coastal city of Atrani turns out to be catnip for his former college classmate.

Still, this is a film about cons and crimes, not country splendor and that is why Zaillian shot his adaptation in black and white. He doesn’t want the camera lusting over sunny days, tanned torsos, and electric nightlife like director Anthony Minghella did with his lingering shots of such things in 1999’s THE TALENTED MR. RIPLEY. In Minghella’s film, everything was glamorous, especially bronzed playboy Dickie (Jude Law) and his leonine girlfriend Marge Sherwood (Gwyneth Paltrow). It was easy to see why the impressionable and naïve Tom (Matt Damon) would become so mesmerized. Heck, Damon all but played the character as a kid in a candy store, wanting to gorge himself on everything associated with the one percent.

Not Scott. He plays Tom as a desperate criminal who wants the calm that comes with a fat wallet. And Johnny Flynn and Dakota Fanning, playing Dickie and Marge this go-round, are hardly worth putting on a pedestal. As directed by Zaillain, their rich characters are dead-eyed, soulless zombies. These two world travelers are not bright, nor personable, and far from gorgeous. What they are, are the type of entitled rich kids who sleepwalk through their lives of privilege, so used to daddy’s money that they aren’t impressed by it one iota.

And wow, is this couple lacking in any discernible talent. Dickie wants to be a painter but his work is simply awful, while would-be writer Marge’s poems and prose are wholly mediocre, as are the bland photographs she’s taken during her time in Atrani. Tom likes them less as people and more as aspirational figures; those who never have to scrape and claw to survive. These two dullards just sit around their homes all day with nary a worry. It’s a state of bliss that Tom would love to know. So much so, that he’ll kill to experience it.

The black and white cinematography is Zaillien’s way of showcasing how Ripley delineates his “have and have not” sensibilities. It’s also there to underline the miniseries noir-ish tendencies as once murder enters the frame, the remainder of the series becomes a cat-and-mouse game between Ripley and an intrepid Italian detective ((Maurizio Lombardi) on his trail. The black-and-white palate is also there to underline that this is essentially a dark comedy. It’s pretty funny watching Tom have to continue his life of labor once he starts killing people as it takes a ton of effort to dispose of bodies and keep track of his ever-mounting series of lies. The poor bastard was already huffing and puffing enough as it was simply following Dickie up and down the various staircases they encountered through the winding streets of the city, and now homicide is really making him put in the work!

At times, Scott’s performance recalls a jittery Anthony Perkins in his male ingenue days, but more often than not, his Tom is played close to the vest. Even when Dickie’s loutish friend Freddie (a scene-stealing Eliot Sumner) comes a calling, suspicious about why Dickie has disappeared, Scott’s Tom remains stone cold. And it’s darkly humorous how he returns a square, glass ashtray he weaponizes to its proper place on an end table. He adjusts it just so.

It’s always easy to vilify the rich, of course. and Hollywood has done it time and time again, from YOU CAN’T TAKE IT WITH YOU in 1938 to SALTBURN this past Christmas. RIPLEY may be the third filmed adaptation of Highsmith’s classic book but I think it’s the best of all of them due to its slyly subtle nastiness and emphasis on Tom’s truest motive. Class warfare has rarely been as apparent as it is here, seen in black and white by both Tom and Zaillian’s camera.'

Ripley (prod. Steven Zaillian).

Zallian's fresh but still cold-blooded take on Tom Ripley makes for an exciting remake. While the more methodical, episodic pace stretches certain plot contrivances about a man living double lives yet interacting with the same small pool of townspeople, Ripley makes the cat-and-mouse game of a con job with more than enough style and flair. There's an elegance to the strikingly pulpy European material.

Why Eliot Sumner is my current musical hyper fixation:

1. They have this smoky, androgynous singing voice that is so, so distinct and velvety and yummy

2. “After Dark” is a freaking BOP

3. I normally have no patience for long songs, but “Information” is over 7 minutes long and I didn’t notice until my 3rd or 4th listen

4. Non-binary rock royalty (their parents are Sting and Trudie Styler)

5. Bass player who sings, always hot

6. They did stunt horseback riding as a kid

7. Their cover of “White Rabbit” for 1899 is really freaking good

8. They covered “Creep” for the movie Filth and now I want them to do an entire album of Radiohead covers

Vaal - Love Reversed - Eliot Sumner’s electronica alias, new album on Bedouin

Love Reversed is a thrilling sophomore album by Vaal that will be released 4th November on Bedouin, with the single 'Song Zero‘ on 7th October. Eliot Sumner started producing electronic music under the guise of Vaal in 2012. The idea behind the moniker was to be anonymous and for the music to speak entirely for itself. ‘Matteo of Tale of Us got in touch after my second self release Cine. They signed me as a Life and Death and Afterlife artist. I worked with them for 5 years producing records such as Wander To Hell, Concor EP and Monument.‘ says Vaal on how they started to carve their way in electronic music. ‘I decided to start another label of my own, Pale Blue Dot and debuted my first album as Vaal named Nosferatu. The album was Mixmag’s album of the month in 2019 and the music video for song ‘Blue Eyes‘, directed by Sergei Rostropovich was very well received.‘ Love Reversed is a consistent cinematic journey. The album sees emotional depths underway layered with breaks and vocals brought to the front resulting in charged and on occasions laid back instrumental narrations. Love Reversed digs deep and uses its polarities to its functional benefit, calling forth both intensity and dreamy sonical restraint. The album picks up where Nosferatu left off. More noise, more guitars, and more emotions.

Song #81

I like the existential ideas in this song, it's very philosophical but also not? Idk, I just like it.

Él es un mentiroso de profesión… “Ripley”

Tom Ripley, un estafador que vive en Nueva York a principios de los sesenta, recibe una oferta interesante de un hombre adinerado: viajar a Italia para convencer a su hijo errante de volver a casa. La propuesta es el comienzo de una compleja trama de engaños, fraude y muerte.

Estreno: 4 de abril de 2024 en Netflix.

Basada en las exitosas novelas escritas por Patricia Highsmith, la serie cuenta con las actuaciones de Andrew Scott, Dakota Fanning, Johnny Flynn, Eliot Sumner, Maurizio Lombardi, Margherita Buy, John Malkovich, Kenneth Lonergan y Ann Cusack.

2022: Infinite Storm

'Patricia Highsmith (1921-1995) was the author largely of books ubiquitously described as psychological thrillers, but the adjective is doing much more work than it usually does in such descriptions. The psychological depths tend to be far deeper than just a worry about being caught for assorted misdeeds. It’s no surprise that her works have proven appealing to all sorts of directors. When your first novel is adapted a year after publication by Alfred Hitchcock, you know you’re doing something right. Strangers on a Train is about much more than just a macabre plan. Wim Wenders’s The American Friend, Claude Chabrol’s The Cry of the Owl, and Todd Haynes’s Carol are all very good.

Tom Ripley is Highsmith’s best-known creation. Turning a Henry James plot into pulp fiction is not the sort of thing that’s usually advisable, but she did it extraordinarily well. The plot of The Ambassadors, an industrialist hiring a man to seek to induce her son to return to America from expat indolence, is cribbed here as a foundation. The James protagonist finds Europe much to his liking, as does Highsmith’s Ripley. When the European idyll is threatened, Ripley has a novel thought: Why not bump the young scion off and take his place?

This sounds like a preposterous plan to execute. And it is! That’s why it’s entirely engrossing. Her aim was, she wrote, “showing the unequivocal triumph of evil over good, and rejoicing in it. I shall make my readers rejoice in it, too.” Netflix‘s new series, Ripley, succeeds in replicating exactly this feat.

The trouble with prior screen adaptations of Highsmith’s Ripley stories has been that he’s always been made far too pleasant. If René Clément’s French language 1960 Purple Noon and Anthony Minghella’s star-studded 1999 The Talented Mr. Ripley are both credible adaptations in their own way, there’s something askew about both matinee idol Alain Delon or effortless everyman Matt Damon as Tom Ripley. Dennis Hopper and John Malkovich both had elements of the Ripley persona down in adaptations of later novels (Barry Pepper did not), but there still seemed to be elements of the portrait missing.

I’m sure I’m not the only reader to find the versatile con man who appears across five Highsmith novels initially repellent. He is not enthusiastic, loathing nearly all of the effort involved in his cons. And he is not loquacious or charismatic as we might expect from a grifter. In almost his very first deception at the start of The Talented Mr. Ripley (the subject of this adaptation), he himself notices the cracks in his crocodile grin: “When he looked into the mirror, he found that his face had turned down at the corners.” Most frauds will say nearly anything to wheedle their way into favor. Talk is normally very cheap when you have no regard for truth. Ripley can’t bring himself to muster more than the mildest of faint praise for execrable paintings by his main mark. Almost every decent person has told white lies with less hesitation.

Things are different in Ripley, the best adaptation of the novel to date, thanks in considerable part to the casting of Andrew Scott (familiar from a variety of things but most germane to this particular role as Moriarty in the BBC Sherlock series) as Ripley. Scott telegraphs unease and strain with great facility. Sometimes, he’s vaguely normally personable. At many other points, his strained effort seems entirely transparent. This sort of calibration captures in excellent fashion the frank distaste that Ripley feels for almost everyone in the source material, a difficult thing to pull off in a book largely composed of his own train of thought. He is terrifically bored by most of his targets and doesn’t work all that hard to conceal the fact. He succeeds somehow with most people. It’s reliably a surprise that only a few see through him.

If the promise of streaming television has been tarnished by countless long-winded series that have no idea how to pace themselves or end, this one makes excellent use of an eight-episode frame to tell the tale of the novel basically in full. Prior adaptations simply couldn’t do that within a feature film length. Purple Noon opens in media res. The Talented Mr. Ripley condenses a number of things. There are some minor emendations, most of which are actively good and almost all at least forgivable.

The book dedicates an enormous amount of time to Ripley’s scheming and improvising. His plans are usually not airtight. Much of the riveting character of the book is how easily he might be caught at almost any moment. A number of sequences whose dramatic tension is contained in their great length are presented in white knuckle effulgence here. Two very lengthy corpse disposals are engrossing. Conversations are lengthy, full of pregnant pauses. There’s even high drama wrought out of multiple bank scenes in which we find Tom feloniously drawing funds.

Steven Zaillian, who wrote the screenplays for Schindler’s List, The Gangs of New York, and The Irishman, provides an excellent script and credible direction. The work of cinematographer Robert Elswit (whose credits include There Will Be Blood) is great. Ripley’s early miserable life in New York is presented well. The tenements are squalid and subways sweltering. La Dolce Vita-era Italy looks all the more rapturous afterward, with shadows and light in various palazzi motivating almost anyone to murder. Locations across south Italy, Capri, and Venice are excellent.

Casting beyond Ripley himself is very strong. Johnny Flynn’s Dickie Greenleaf is a perfect, vaguely dim, but charismatic offspring of privilege. Maurizio Lombardi, perhaps familiar as a cardinal in The Young Pope, is a very strong inspector on the case. Playwright Kenneth Lonergan (who also co-wrote The Gangs of New York) is an ideal Herbert Greenleaf. The casting of Freddie Miles is one substantial deviation, here not the churlish porker of the novel (Philip Seymour Hoffman was about ideal) but rather an androgynous proto-Eurotrash wisp. Dakota Fanning’s Marge Sherwood, Dickie Greenleaf’s tedious paramour, is rendered more truly than any prior. She’s no stunning beauty but a rather average girl in “naive clothes” with “windblown hair and her general air of a Girl Scout.”

Now, Ripley is not exactly a fan of any women if Marge is particularly low on the list. Ripley is very deliberately rendered as sort of gay in the novel. He finds Dickie handsome and Marge repulsive. At a key juncture, he notes he “could have hit Dickie, sprung on him, or kissed him, or thrown him overboard.” This is not the range of options most people consider in a social dilemma, no matter their sexual orientation. Purple Noon basically omitted this element, while The Talented Mr. Ripley camped it up. Ripley replicates the novel’s deliberate ambiguity. He seems devoid of almost any active sexuality and likes almost no one, with exceptions for a handful of men.

What Ripley does like are the finer things in life. He thrills to travel, fine clothing, beautiful objects, and art. These things receive all sorts of close cinematic attention. There is a Hitchcockian cinematic focus on pens, an ashtray, and other talismans of the good life (that also might be used to kill).

Ripley contains a cameo from Malkovich (who portrayed Ripley in another earlier adaptation, Ripley’s Game) as a character from the next novel, and Zaillian optioned all five Ripley novels. Let’s hope that the viewers stream in, as it would be nice to see more of this Ripley.'

I Blame Coco - Control

Sounds That Have Been Made, EP 23: Eliot Sumner "dead Arms & Dead Legs"

Sounds That Have Been Made, EP 23: Eliot Sumner “dead Arms & Dead Legs”

The problem with the musical ambitions of children of immensely famous and/or influential musicians, is that you are essentially set for disappointment if you don’t set expectations properly. And that is to say, don’t set them at all. Not because children of musicians are destined to be disappointments, but because they have every right to forge whatever works for them; that path may not look…

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more music!!

i’ve had several people interested in what my music taste is, so I'm gonna continue my recommendations for y’all ;)

Your Bones by Of Monsters and Men

This album has been a huge influence on my life. I found it right at the start of the pandemic, and I’m so glad I did, because these songs have shaped so much of who I am and what I like today. It was my first exposure to indie folk, and has kept me coming back to the genre ever since. Your Bones is one of my all time favorite songs. Other favorites on this album include Mountain Sound, Sloom, From Finner, and of course Little Talks. If you haven’t heard of this album I politely demand you to drop everything and go listen to it right now :)))

Personal Lies by Djo

Switching gears a little, this album is a totally different genre than OMAM, but still just as good. Djo is an artist I don’t hear nearly enough about, and I wish that would change. He is absolutely fantastic at creating catchy beats and lyrics without it getting annoying - this is one of the few albums that I can listen to on loop without eventually getting tired of the repetition.

(also, if you didn’t know, Djo is Joe Keery’s band! So if you’re a fan of his acting give his music a try!!)

Information by Eliot Sumner

Eliot Sumner is a more recent discovery for me, and I’m so bummed that they only have this one album. Everything about it is just so incredibly well-done, from the lyrics to their delivery to the background, just everything! And their voice is so soothing to me for some reason. My favorites on this album are After Dark, Firewood, and Dead Arms & Dead Legs. Definitely check this one out if you like alternative/indie rock.

Please check these artists out if you have the time!! and I will for sure recommend more. I love music and I’m always happy to talk about it!