What a waste of my time!!!

People are voting emotionally.

Excellent and certainly provocative... If nothing else, the film is a real conversation starter.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

I've been trying to figure out why Miss Marple's mysteries tend to be sluggish while Hercule Poirot's are more engaging. Of course, Poirot himself is a more interesting and quirky character, what with his vanity, his gastronomic delicacy, his mustache wax. Poor Miss Marple has only her knitting, and not much of that.That aside, it occurs to me that Miss Marple is more often a passive but keen observer, giving advice. She doesn't do much. And the mystery is dependent on history. With Poirot -- and even in some of Agatha Christie's stories in which there is no obvious protagonist -- the conundrum is not so much "why" but "how"? How, for instance, can an inaccessible house wind up with ten dead people in it and no murderer to be found anywhere? "Sleeping Murder" boasts some fetching scenery. It's talky and dull but at least the talk goes on in some beautiful English gardens. You have never seen so many flowers, or so little action taking place among them.A blond, fair newly married young woman from New Zealand runs across a vacant house in Devonshire and talks her husband into buying it, but she soon begins to have flashbacks involving the house as it was a generation ago -- a hidden door behind the wallpaper, buried steps leading to the sea, a dead body at the bottom of the stairs.It takes the entire movie to unravel all the narrative threads, which I won't bother to describe because they take the plot into the byzantine. The thing could have been written by Dickens in a wanton mood. People stroll around in those gardens, everyone seems to know or have heard of everyone else, each contributes a bit to the story, characters come and go, and when the Big Reveal appears at the climax it comes as a complete surprise to those who have been driven to a mad frenzy like me. Miss Marple explains everything to the young couple. When Miss Marple began to lay out the threads, my clock read 24 minutes past the hour. She was finished at 25 minutes past the hour. Don't miss that final minute.

'Sleeping Murder' is one of the best of the BBC Hickson Marple adaptations in my opinion. It looks wonderful and has a top notch cast headed by the excellent Hickson herself as the elderly sleuth. The music is also particularly good and atmospheric - the bit where Gwenda comes across the 'poppies and cornflowers' wallpaper is fantastic with great crashing organ chords.This is much more faithful in style to the novel than the newer McEwen version. Geraldine Alexander is very appealing as Gwenda (though Sophia Myles is also superb for McEwen), the various suitors for Helen are well done and there's a brilliant cameo performance from Jean Anderson as the bossy Mrs Fane. Frederick Treves hams it up a bit as James Kennedy (his Scottish accent is pretty dreadful) and James Moulder-Brown is a bit wooden as Giles.Highly recommended and one of the best.

Mysteries of the past should be left alone; otherwise, they may awaken danger. Using that well-known idiom, Dame Agatha pens another whodunit, wherein a young married woman's infatuation with an old, stately English house translates into buried secrets and impending murder.Having already read Christie's novel and concluded that this story was not quite as good as some of her other works, I watched the BBC adaptation of "Sleeping Murder", not expecting a lot. The film, like the book, gets off to a slow, tedious start. The plot gets better as it plods along. Toward the end, Director John Davies injects some needed suspense. The screenplay is a bit talky. Acting is adequate. I especially like Joan Hickson as Jane Marple who delightfully meddles in the business of a newlywed couple, and who naturally is a step, or several steps, ahead of everyone else in solving the crime.The story is not dependent on majestic scenery or unusual visual perspective, so that cinematography is fairly unimportant. But sets are important here, and so the filmmakers have given adequate attention to production design and costumes. Overall, they have done a good job with a Christie story that is relatively weak, and thus rendered a film that is reasonably entertaining.

'Sleeping Murder' keeps rolling around on afternoon BBC television, and I have been drawn into the story twice so far. I don't like Miss Marple, so perhaps that is why I find this a decent story - I can't compare it to the books, and the world's oldest detective only crops up every now and again to explain the plot to the newlywed couple. I love the idea of Gwenda subconsciously buying a house from her past, and the details she uncovers, such as the pattern of the wallpaper in the cupboard and the steps in the garden. The history in the house, and the subsequent family tree research, had me hooked. The 'whodunnit' wasn't exactly taxing - just look for the most dubious character, battling with a bad case of pantomime villain - but the unravelling of the clues kept me interested (just about - at times this felt like an epic, instead of an installment of a detective series). The setting, period detail, and characters were all evocative of a storybook version of an era gone by. Perfect Sunday afternoon fodder.