Another lovely review for Knock Knock, Open Wide ,from the good folks at Booklist.
“Reading Sharpson’s latest (after When the Sparrow Falls, 2021) is like being grabbed unexpectedly. Readers know something feels terribly wrong but cannot get away from the horror and mystery of the story; it simply demands that they understand the truth and reach its conclusion.”
I almost didn’t write this review. I seriously toyed with the idea of putting Batman Begins off for another fortnight and devoting an entire post to the sheer insanity that was Warner’s near decade-long attempt to get a fifth Batman movie made after the neon coloured Chernobyl that was Batman and Robin.
This was right around the time I started following movie news and let me tell you, friends, listening to the proposals coming out of Warners in the late nineties was like having your ear pressed to a cell wall in a lunatic asylum.
Some of these proposed films, admittedly, do sound pretty interesting, like the Batman versus Superman movie starring Colin Farrell and Josh Hartnett, Darren Arronofsky’s Batman Year One or a version of Batman Beyond with Keanu Reeves as Terry McGinnis.
But the one thing that all these proposed movies have in common is that they really, really want you to know that they were going to be DARK. Black. Psychologically tortured. Darkness. No parents.
It’s honestly a little macabre how much they wanted you to know that Batman was going to have a thoroughly shitty time when this movie finally got made. Which is unfair. I mean, Batman didn’t decide to let Akiva Goldsman write the script for Batman and Robin, why should he have to suffer?
Thankfully, we were spared the spectacle of a sobbing, psychologically scarred emo Batman by the appointment of Christopher Nolan as director, a man who has no time for your puny human emotions.
So, here’s a little interesting factoid about me. If you ever meet someone from Ireland with the surname “Sharpson”, they are related to me. Like, immediately related. There are, at the time of writing, eight Sharpsons in the entire country. When I was growing up, there was my Dad, my three brothers, and me (my mother being a strong independent woman who refused to change her maiden name even for the sake of boosting the stats). That was it. My grandfather emigrated to Britain from Cyprus and then moved to Ireland in the fifties.
And, along the way, he anglicised his name to Sharpson, a name that had never existed in the country before then. So, we’re what you might call a rare breed.
Now, contrast that with my wife, whose family is as old as the hills, vast as the oceans and mad as lovely, lovely people. I say this not just as a way of banging out an intro to a review of a movie that I don’t really have much to say about other than “it’s good, I enjoyed it”, but to explain why the main character of Summer Wars, Kenji Koiso resonates with me.
unshavedmouse 