Paul Tickell – Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry [+commentary] (2000)

Summary
A man uses the principles of double-entry bookkeeping to settle his accounts with society.

Letterboxd review by Chris Salt:
“Christie Malry was a simple person.”
BS Johnson’s novel is a marvellous thing, combining fiction, metafiction and a sprinkling of autobiography. It’s written specifically as a novel and takes advantage of all the novel’s trappings in telling its story, just as Alan Moore’s Watchmen did with the comics medium. Like Watchmen, the film adaptation was never going to live up to the source material. The question was how far short it was going to fall.

Not that far, it turns out. Some of the novel’s little intricacies are lost but, for the most part, Christie’s story works. Paul Tickell’s turn of the century Edgar Wrightisms sort of do for film what Johnson did in deconstructing the novel and the whole thing is brought up to date nicely. I had my concerns about Nick Moran in the title role but his blank, almost affectless performance captures the character perfectly.

What doesn’t work is the sequence of flashbacks to Da Vinci and Pacioli in Renaissance Italy. They form a mini-story that has no bearing on anything that I could discern, and they just kept jolting me out of the main story every time they popped up. The screenwriter explains them as an attempt to adapt the occasional Pacioli quote that cropped up in the novel but that’s just madness. Stephen King quotes Bob Dylan lyrics in his books but nobody crowbarred a Greenwich Village folk music subplot into Cujo.

1.19GB | 1h 31m | 768×576 | mkv

https://nitro.download/view/6FCC8B5017F51B5/Christie_Malry.mkv

Language:English
Subtitles:English hardcoded (for foreign parts)