During the Tribeca Film Festival, I managed to catch a showing of Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame. Watching the preview, this film promised big set pieces, lots of fiery explosions, and awesome martial arts action. A film that has Chinese alternate history and features a detective worthy of Sherlock, a black market…
Once upon a time, in the long-distant past, movies were made from books. You remember that, right? Everyone would say, “Oh, sure, I saw the movie, but it was nowhere near as good as the book,” even if they didn’t necessarily believe it to be true, because that was conventional wisdom. (In fact, it still…
The classic period of film noir lasted from roughly 1940 to 1960. Roughly is the operative word here since the exact perimeters of the period have always been open for debate. I mark the beginning as Boris Ingster’s Stranger on the Third Floor (1940) and the end as the 1960 election of John F. Kennedy,…
About my relationships with fake people: I have good friends and bad friends. And worse friends. They fill different needs in my life – people to encourage me, people I’m glad to know but even gladder not to be, and people I end up not liking whatsoever. These are all people I have some connection…
If you're looking for an unsual and challenging career change, crime scene clean-up may be for you. But don't be as pathetically unprepared as the cleaners in this Before picture from the charming family-business movie Sunshine Cleaning, starring Amy Adams and Emily Blunt. On their first housecall, they look unsettled, and who knows what they're…
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One Director, Two Thrillers, Three Decades. . .and One Line of Dialogue. Two of my favorite movie thrillers are by the same director, a pair of films made thirty years apart. As a director, the late Sydney Pollack was known for such works as Out of Africa, The Way We Were, and Jeremiah Johnson. He…
Happy Friday the 13th! Ready for something weird? Check in for a psychiatric evaluation and check out some spreads from the latest issue of Batman: Odyssey #6. With anticipation already building up over the Dark Knight Rises, scheduled for July 2012 release, I can’t help but wonder what a movie based off of this issue would be like.…
While we've been discussing the Justified Season 2 finale, trying to stretch the juice of the season like the last drops in a canteen, via Deadline, we learn that while we await the return of everyone's favorite, complicated, preachy, white-supremacist Boyd Crowder, actor Walton Goggins will be crawling around inside another dark character. This time, he'll play a man suspected of sexual assault…
The muddied and unfinished manuscript of The First Man was found at the site of the car accident that killed Albert Camus. Perhaps this incomplete masterpiece left the world so existentially thirsty that it was woven into a trend in the world of crime fiction. Let's look at some that came before and after. . .…
When Mel Gibson slaps his dislocated shoulder back into place in any of the Lethal Weapon films ad nauseum, I always cringe. I don’t cringe because it’s painful, which I assure you it would be. But because, reducing a dislocation that way, a real person would inevitably fracture the humerus, the long bone of the…
