I’ve run across an interesting piece by Nathan Abrams, Professor of Film Studies at Bangor (UK) University, on The Conversation website (“a collaboration between editors and academics to provide informed news analysis and commentary”). The title sums it up nicely: “Mossad Agents Were Suave and Effective on Screen, Now They’re Ineffective Blunderers.” Abrams’ thesis: Mossad,…
Author's Note: I've updated the post to include the winners. Some predictions went well! Some, not so much. I'll be reacting in the comments, so join me there as we complain about everyone who was wronged! The 66th Primetime Emmy Awards will air this upcoming Monday, August 25, and I’m here to try and figure…
Okay, it's not much more than a teaser, but what it teases is pretty great. Read between the lines and put together the pieces of the puzzle—mystery fans should be good at that!—to find the clues to Season 3 of Showtime's Homeland. We gleaned the fact that Nicholas Brody, now on the run, seems to…
Deliciously complex, these characters are bad, sometimes even evil, but by showing us moments of goodness and their humanity we get sucked in to rooting for them. Don’t worry this isn’t a paper on the antihero in contemporary crime literature. It is a list of some of my favorite complicated fictional criminals. Tony Soprano, The…
Sometimes, less is more. But sometimes, there’s delirious pleasure in heaping more upon more. Like, for example, when you take a perfectly wonderful candy bar—a symphony itself of caramel, nougat, peanuts, and chocolate—and freeze it onto a stick, then dip the thing in batter and deep-fry it. On paper, even to a lover of sweets,…
Webster’s Dictionary defines the word “renegade” as an individual who rejects lawful or conventional behavior. Crime fiction no matter what medium—movies, TV, or books—is full of renegade characters who not only reject rules and ignore social norms, they routinely break the law, taking the concept of knight errant to a whole new level. Here are some…
Wow. Just…wow. There’s been a lot of grumbling among critics and fans that Homeland has jumped the shark this season, contorted its plot beyond reason or logic, but it’s hard to imagine even the worst critics not being satisfied by such a clever and fairly elegant resolution to its storyline thus far. Remember that duality…
The penultimate episode of the season splits its time between the show’s two modes of operation: high-octane action thriller and raw emotional relationship drama. I like both sides of Homeland (despite having to suspend disbelief a lot more when it comes to the action scenes), but pairing them in the same 60 minutes tends to…
If a tree falls in a forest, but doesn’t take any other trees down with it, does it really fall? Up until now, Brody’s status as a terrorist was somewhat iffy. An attempted terrorist? Sure, but when it counted, he didn’t pull the trigger. A murderer? Yes, but Tom and the tailor that he killed…
The hands-down best thing about this show is that you never know what new zig it will take just when you expected it to zag. We left off at the towering moment last week of Brody nabbed and coming face to face with Nazir on American soil. But the show doesn’t pick up exactly where…
