It’s been ten years since Donald Westlake left us, and it’s a loss that’s still deeply felt for those of us with a taste for pure throwback noir novels. Westlake was the creator and author, under the pseudonym Richard Stark, of a series of novels featuring the enigmatic professional criminal …
The older I get, the less patience I have for so-bad-it’s-good culture. I get why it’s so appealing to the young — I’ve been there, kids, I understand! — but the closer I get to the eternal silence of the grave, the less willing I am to spend two hours …
I have drunk a thousand beers. A thousand beers have been drunk by me. Since I started keeping track in 2014, my drinking has encompassed a thousand beers. “The Man Who Has Drunk a Thousand Beers” is what they call me in fashionable quarters; some ruffians in low spots prefer …
Okay, let’s first get the obligatory Twitter joke out of the way: The Shape of Water is the best movie you’ll see all year about fish dicks. That was fun, wasn’t it? It feels good to laugh. Now, let’s move on to the actual review of Guillermo del Toro’s latest fantasia. Set …
Death, we are reminded every time someone dies*, comes in threes. A good truism; a strong truism; and most importantly, a truism that can be stated in less than five words, making sure it will lodge in our consciousness before we get bored and go off to play video games …
I’ve been defending the films of Spike Lee for a long, long, long time. I’m old enough to remember having very deep thoughts (well, as deep as could be expected for a 16-year-old suburban white kid) about the first incarnation of She’s Gotta Have It, his very first full-length feature film, and being fascinated …
In my last entry, about the massive betrayal of the American people to a handful of plutocrats via the passage of a license to loot posing as a tax reform bill, I caught a small amount of hell from Democrats, who wondered why I had harsh words for their party. …
The possibility of having to restate the profound and likely irreversible damage the new tax bill will inflict on this country exhausts me. There are only so many times you can say that America is involved in a one-sided class war and that the rich (all of the rich) are …
How do you solve a problem like Maria? Or, to put it in a less cryptic way, how do you say that the new Netflix Punisher series is probably the best Punisher adaptation, and arguably the best of the streaming service’s Marvel series, while acknowledging that these are both extremely high …
The curious economic logic of streaming services has had a pretty devastating effect on the availability of classic cinema. I’ve written before about how streaming media should have created a situation in which any movie of any kind from any era would be available for anyone to watch any time …
I used to have a little tradition around these parts — by which I mean this blog, which I’ve been maintaining in some form or another for a good fifteen years or more — where every Thanksgiving, I’d talk about the things I was thankful for. It’s not an original …
Noir means, of course, “black”; and it refers not only to the dark moods and bleak tone of American crime dramas of the ’40s and ’50s, but also to the impenetrable slabs of shadow that surround the violence and betrayal on screen. Much of what made noir what it is …
If you’d never seen Sunset Blvd. before — if you knew nothing about it, about its unique place in cinematic history, about the curious effect it had on both the public and the town it opened up like and old and ugly pornographic magazine — you’d be forgiven for wondering why it’s …
Noir is a hard thing to parody, because noir itself is so close to parody even in its purest form. We like to talk about it as a gritty, realistic form of cinema — and it is! At least, sort of. But in other ways, it’s so attenuated and abstracted, …
Before we get too much deeper into Noirvember, I’ve often been asked to provide a list of my all-time favorite noir films. This is painfully hard to do, because it’s like picking my favorite bastard child whose birth I had nothing to do with. It’s a lot of good movies, …
