Ed Gorman's Blog, page 156
June 20, 2012
Political columnist Howard Fineman reviews Prometheus
Prometheus Bound and GaggedPosted: 06/19/2012 6:45 pm May contain spoilers.WASHINGTON -- I didn't want to discard one of my only living heroes -- Ridley Scott -- but I had no choice after he crushed Charlize Theron with a giant flying turd.Actually, it's worse -- and less imaginative -- than that.In his preposterous, cynical movie, Prometheus, the brown turd in the sky is an alien spaceship full of poisonous glop. It is taking off from an alien planet for Earth when the good guys bring it down. The debris kills Theron, the ice queen villain and corporate shill who is probably an android but who cares because even if she is malware she looks terrific in her Spanks-tight onboard space wear.What the hell happened to Ridley Scott?I've been a reporter for forty years (thus, the few living heroes) and a science fiction fan for longer than that. I am religiously devoted to one of the greatest acts of cinematic imagination of all time, Scott's 1982 classic Blade Runner.He's made other great films as well -- Thelma and Louise and Gladiator being two of them -- and his company has shown class and taste in projects such as the CBS Television hit The Good Wife. Scott even made one of the best, and most influential, TV ads of all time, Apple's "1984" spot introducing the Macintosh computer to the world.So it was with great anticipation (and deliberate ignorance of the reviews) that I used three hours of vacation time today to see the 3D version of Prometheus at one of America's last great, old-fashioned, big theaters: the Uptown in DC.Sadly, it's the same theater in which I saw Blade Runner all those years ago. Little has changed, other than the popcorn tubs being twice as large.And Ridley Scott.Watching the movie, I decided that Scott himself must have been taken over by one of his alien creatures: a slimy one with the brains and breath of a greedy Hollywood schlockmeister whose only interest was in making a killing, selling popcorn and setting up a sequel.There is no other explanation. Scott was inhabited.Yes, as in his genuinely iconic films, there were nods to Scottian "Big Questions." In Gladiator, they concern the nature of heroism and leadership; in Blade Runner, they concern the blurring line between machine-made and human experience.This time, it was, "Where do we come from?" But the level of the discussion -- verbal and visual -- was so lazily and blandly presented as to be quickly lost as Scott resorted to livening things up with his old Alien shtick of snot-smeared tentacles bursting from bodies and inserting themselves into space helmets and bodily orifices.You quickly forget about, and never get an answer to, the question. It's not about "Where do we come from?" but "How do we get the fuck out of here!?"Maybe there was method in this mish-mash; you'll have to pay much more money and buy more popcorn to see sequels attempt a better answer. Scott is 74-years-old, but appears to be in good health, so it could be many more episodes before we get anywhere close to The Truth.I had at least hoped that the flick would be visually arresting. Scott can be the most intensively pictorial of directors. In hopes of being awed by his visually metaphorical skill, and his wondrous landscapes and set pieces, I was prepared to forgive him the stale plot, which is, roughly, that cave paintings discovered in the late 21st century give us a roadmap to the planet of our ancestors, where we realize that they long ago decided that we suck, hence the glop in the turd.But the spaceship and space "business" generally are derivative, right down to liquor the color of mouthwash, the scenery on the planet is as dull as rural Iceland (where it was filmed) and the cave of our ancestors looks like a basement full of discarded Halloween Batman suits.Oh, but wait: Our "engineer" ancestors who hid down there in the cave on that planet play the music of the spheres on an organ-like contraption that looks eerily like a giant, hard-plastic Whack-a-Mole!How cool is that?The Prometheus of Greek myth was the titan who stole fire -- and a love of science and the intellect -- from the gods of Olympus. If Ol' Pro' saw this eponymous film, he might keep the fire but give the rest back.
June 18, 2012
Pulp Heaven Delivered To Your Door - TALES FROM SUPER-SCIENCE FICTION
From PUBLISHER'S WEEKLY"Fans of old-fashioned science fiction will delightin this collection of stories from a relatively unknown 1950s pulp magazine . . .These stories, illustrated with artwork by pulp luminaries like Frank Kelly Freas and Ed Emshwiller, reveal the promise of many now-famous authors at the start of their careers."
TALES FROM SUPER-SCIENCE FICTION
400-page Hardcover
$32.00
Full-color endpapers
Original interior illustrations
Smythe-sewn w/full cloth binding
ORDER IT HERE!
Robert Silverberg has assembled a collection of 14 stories from Super-Science Fiction. S-SF was launched during the sf boom of the mid-1950s. Paying a princely rate of 2 cents a word the magazine attracted fiction by Isaac Asimov, Robert Bloch, Harlan Ellison. James Gunn, Jack Vance, and Donald Westlake, and featured cover art by Frank Kelly Freas and Ed Emshwiller. Running for 18 bi-monthly issues (Dec ‘55 to Oct ‘59), the magazine eventually devolved into a publication capitalizing on the then-current craze of “monster” stories.
Editor Silverberg traces the genesis ofSuper-Science Fiction from it’s beginnings as an outlet for numerous colonization/expedition stories to its conclusion with such stories as “Creatures of the Green Slime,” “Beasts of Nightmare Horror” and “Vampires from Outer Space.”FULL COLOR ENDPAPERS
SAMPLE INTERIOR ARTWORK
Early readers' reviews from Library Thing can be found HERE .
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Sarah Weinman & Don Winslow on TV
June 17, 2012
The New Cinema Retro
Ed here: Flat out my favorite issue so far. The pieces on Elvis movies and the backgrounder on Night of the Following Days are definitive pieces of work.
HIGHLIGHTS OF ISSUE #23 INCLUDE:
• Coverage of the Bond in Motion exhibition in England- the largest single collection of original 007 vehicles ever displayed. We take you inside the gala press event that opened the exhibit.
• Dean Brierly analyzes the criminally underrated crime thriller The Night of the Following Daystarring Marlon Brando and Richard Boone
• Roland Schaefli pays tribute to the John Wayne-Howard Hawks adventure Hatari! and takes us on a visit to the African locations as they are today
• Tim Graves celebrates the excellent, but little-remembered psychic thriller Games starring James Caan and Katharine Ross.
• Adrian Smith examines the British sex films of the 60s and 70s- and how film companies battled the censors to sneak in as many "tits and bums" as possible
• Elvis on the Back Lot: Dean Sills looks back on The King's Hollywood hits- and how infrequently the exotic locations were actually filmed on location
• Raymond Benson looks at the best films of 1982
• Lee Pfeiffer takes a second look at the Italian Western A Minute To Pray, A Second to Diestarring Alex Cord and Robert Ryan
• Gareth Owen revisits the filming of The Slipper and the Rose at Pinewood Studios
• Dave Worrall looks at the films that depicted the legendary raid on Entebbe and takes us back in time to the filming of Disney's Candleshoe through unseen on-set photos
• Plus the latest DVD, soundtrack and film book reviews
PLEASE NOTE: This issue arrived three weeks late in the USA due to a transport snafu in the UK that we had no control over. We apologize for the delay.
CLICK HERE FOR SUBSCRIPTION INFORMATION. CLICK HERE TO SUBSCRIBE INSTANTLY THROUGH OUR EBAY STORE- AND SHOP FOR BACK ISSUES, TOO!
Posted by Cinema Retro in Magazine News on Thursday, June 7. 2012
June 15, 2012
Jeff Rutherford talks about Sad Jingo by Ron Dionne
by Jeff RutherfordSAD JINGO has a very long history with me, and I’m stunned that it’s finally published, and that I had a hand in publishing it.
In the mid-1990s after I moved to New York City, I ended up working in book publishing. First, I worked as a temp for 3 months at HarperCollins while an editorial assistant was having major surgery. I still remember reading manuscripts on the subway. The editor – Rick Horgan – had me read through some of his submissions as a first reader. After wading through a not-so-good mystery, he laughingly instructed me, “If it’s bad, you don’t have to read the whole manuscript.”
After my stint at HarperCollins, I ended up working for 3.5 years at the Denise Marcil Literary Agency, and I ended up agenting several authors and books. One of those books that I discovered and decided to agent was SAD JINGO. What’s SAD JINGO about?
Here’s the description:SAD JINGO is a modern noir set in the New York City jazz scene of the 1990s.Jingo Dalhousie — a frustrated piano player working as a janitor in his cousin’s Greenwich Village night club, a misfit, a man who is just not all there. The kind you can find on any NYC street corner. Jingo harbors impossible dreams of playing the piano like his idol, Thelonious Monk. When a blockbuster debut novel features a character with his own unusual name, Jingo believes it can’t be mere coincidence, and he decided to track down the author. If only he can meet her, and play for her, then maybe — just maybe — he’ll be able to finally free the music trapped inside his head. But unknown to Jingo, the author has a secret of her own that she is desperate to protect . . .
What is the human soul capable of when afflicted by ambition without talent? The haunting answer to that question echoes through the pages of SAD JINGO.
However, as much as I loved SAD JINGO, I just wasn’t successful selling the book. Dave Stern was working at Pocket Books at the time. He read SAD JINGO and enjoyed it. But it just wasn’t right for what he was publishing.
The most frustrating experience though was when Larry Ashmead, an acclaimed editor, read SAD JINGO and loved it. I still remember the two-page fax he sent on a Monday morning after he read SAD JINGO over the weekend. But, sadly, as acclaimed as Ashmead was, he couldn’t pull the trigger on buying the book for HarperCollins unless HarperCollins’ paperback division was equally enthused.
Unfortunately, they weren’t.
After I left book publishing for the PR biz, Ron Dionne the author of SAD JINGO, and I remained friends. He shelved SAD JINGO and worked on other novels and short stories. Some months, and probably some years, Ron stopped writing altogether.
After I started publishing eBooks, I immediately thought about Ron and SAD JINGO. And, after many, many years SAD JINGO is now available for the reading public. Of course, I encourage you to give it a try. It’s available today for Nook and Kindle. It will soon be available for iBookstore, and Kobo.
New Books: Murder of A Beauty Queen
Bill Crider Murder of a Beauty Shop Queen
When Ed Gorman asked me if I’d do a post about my latest book, naturally I said “yes.” After all, he promised me fame, fortune, and groupies. He also said that if I didn’t do it, he was going to send around a couple of guys with baseball bats. And not to play a quick game of pepper. So how could I refuse?
The Sheriff Dan Rhodes series started back in 1985 when Ruth Cavin visited the Houston MWA chapter and said she’d like to take a look at the manuscript. I was thrilled when she accepted the book, and I never dreamed that I’d be sitting here 27 years later writing about yet another book in the series. The first book, Too Late to Die, won the Anthony for best first novel, but even at that, I would never have thought I’d have a run like this.
There are a couple of things that people ask me about the series, and I’ll try to answer them here, just for fun. One is about the well-known “Cabot Cove Syndrome.” The setting of the books is a small Texas county with no major cities and no big towns. Yet people keep getting murdered there. Over the years, Sheriff Dan Rhodes has handled more murder cases than sheriffs in ten or twenty small counties. This seems to bother some readers. I can’t figure out why. Nobody seems to mind that Jack Reacher stumbles into big-time crime on the first page of every novel he’s in. I suppose it bothered people a bit that every woman Tavis McGee got involved with wound up dead, but it didn’t keep women from getting involved with him. I talked to an editor about things like this once upon a time, and he said, “It’s all a fantasy, Bill.” He was right. The world of the books reflects the real world in a lot of ways, but not necessarily in the mortality rate. The alarming number of deaths in Blacklin County doesn’t alarm me at all.
Another thing people want to know about is why I chose not to age my characters in real time. That’s something I didn’t really give much thought to. Some of my favorite protagonists are people who don’t age. Nero Wolfe and Archie, Spenser, Mike Hammer, Miss Marple, James Bond, Modesty Blaise, and on and on. They’re ageless, and that’s the way I thought it should be. Some characters do age, and that’s fine, too. Bill Pronzini’s done a great job of aging his nameless detective, for example, but Sheriff Rhodes is so far immune to age.
My characters didn’t change much, either, and they weren’t horribly scarred by episodes of death and torture. I greatly admire writers like Ken Bruen, who’s put Jack Taylor through so much hell on earth that Hell for eternity will seem like a picnic to him. But most of my books are a bit sunnier than that, although if you look beneath the surface, there might be a bit of darkness lurking. All those dead people, you know.
Anyway, to bring Nero Wolfe into it again, when I read a Nero Wolfe book, I want Wolfe to visit the orchids. I want him to wear the yellow pyjamas, to count beer bottle caps, to have Fritz prepare a great meal. I want Archie to go dancing with Lily Rowan and have her call him Escamillo. I like the familiar things those books and in other series, and I like them in mine, too.
I’m exaggerating a little, of course. Sheriff Rhodes has changed and aged, but only a little. The clues are there if you look for them. The familiar things in my books are used in different ways, too, but nothing changes radically. There’s a good reason for that, but I’ve gone on too long already.
Some of you eagle-eyed readers will have noticed by now that this post isn’t really about my new book. This means that to find out about it, you’ll have to buy it and read it. What a great idea! It’s MURDER OF A BEAUTY SHOP QUEEN, and it comes out in August. Be the first on your block to own one.
June 14, 2012
Forgotten Books: Blood Marks by Bill Crider
Amazon.com: Blood Marks eBook: Bill Crider: Kindle Store: He's smart, he's attractive, and he has a special vision: whenever he sees the blood marks on a woman--marks only he can see--he knows what he must do.
Kill her. Brutally. And not leave a trace of himself behind.
Nine women have died so far. And pretty Casey Buckner may be next. A young divorcee who's recently moved into an apartment complex near the Astrodome, Casey's already met three men in the building: a married accountant, a single writer, and a psychologist.
One of them is a serial killer. But which one...?
"...Not for gentle tastes, but a striking addition to the serial- killer subgenre--gory, repugnant, and gripping to its last ugly reverberation." - Kirkus Reviews
Ed here: I believe that time will judge this novel an enduring classic.It's rare to see a writer take a sub-genre as over-worked as the serial killer novel and make something completely new out of it. But Bill Crider has done that with Blood Marks. The milieu is working class Texas and the cast a group of realistic characters living believable lives and with the killer at work dying believable deaths. The writing is simple and forceful and evocative of its era and its social strata. And the remarks from the killer are as dazzling and deranged as any you'll find in the entire sub-genre. I'd put this on the same shelf as William Goldman's No Way To Treat A Lady--that much a slap in the face to wake you from the slumber inspired by all the otherhackneyed serial killer novels. A triumph.
June 12, 2012
Cast in Dark Waters Gorman-Piccirilli
This was written and published two years before Johnny Depp's Pirates of The Carribean in a Collector's Limited edition. Now it's on Cross Press--Kindle, Nook, Smashwords, etc.--FOR ONLY $2.99.
Here's a review by Mel Odom:
This jim-dandy little novella is just begging for a sequel, and I don’t want to be kept waiting. Cast in Dark Waters seems like it just came out of nowhere, but it has a history as a limited release hardcover book from Cemetery Dance. I missed it then, but I’m glad I caught up with it now.
This is old-school pulp writing, folks, and it reads like something that would have come from the typewriter of Robert E. Howard or one of his contemporaries. The story is set in the Caribbean in the 16th century and feels like a pirate movie from the heyday of when Hollywood did them big and did them right. I love the current Pirates of the Caribbean stuff that’s going on now, but I still remember watching Errol Flynn in The Sea Hawk and being blown away.
The opening of the story is immediately intriguing, but it’s the female sea captain, Crimson, that steps onto center stage and owns the show. She comes in swinging, too, in a wild bar brawl that is a sheer pleasure to read and made me feel all of ten years old again discovering the pulp stories that shaped me into the man I am now. Growing up in southeastern Oklahoma meant there was a lot of cowboys architecture in my male role models, but thanks to the reading material I had at hand there was a lot of pirates, private eyes, and science fiction as well.
The relationship Crimson has with her father (although no one dares suggest to either of them that they’re related) is at once absorbing. Tangled relationships are great fiction fodder, and the one between Crimson and Welsh is a great one.
But Gorman and Piccirilli don’t stop there. Crimson’s husband, Tyree, has gone missing on the island of Benbow, which is believed to be the home to nightmares and bloodsuckers. In this first story, we think we know what the truth is, but we don’t receive the final answer. And in that, the authors have us snared. I hope to see a sequel soon.
The seafaring action and the fights on the island are very well done. I felt like I was staying in step with Lady Crimson when she set sail and when she set foot on the island. The mythology of the things she’s hunting is very well laid out and I enjoyed the “almost knowing” everything that was involved. After all 16th century pirates don’t know everything we know these days.
The atmosphere is very well done and the Caribbean landscape and the lifestyle of a pirate are marked on every page. The authors did some good research and blend it seamlessly into their pirate-horror-adventure concoction.
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Crime Wave (1954)
Vince Keenan recently posted commentary on a noir film called "Crime Wave" with Sterling Hayden and Gene Nelson as the stars. Hayden is the cop, Nelson the decent but vulnerable ex-con who's dragged back into crime by former associates. Before this plot was used by crime writers western writers did something like a thousand riffs on it.
But director Andre DeToth makes it work. Hayden's always been an interesting actor, which isn't to say that he's always good. He needs the right words to make a character come alive. He's not one of those actors who can take a nothing script and make something of it. And sometimes he's got a tin ear for the rythm of a line. But when he's on... Here, to me at least, the performance is good but needs more variety to be really memorable. But what Hayden lacked in words he always made up for in sheer presence. This guy could steal a scene just by leaning against the wall in the background. He was just one of those actors the camera automatically zeroed in on.
Vince notes that James Ellroy feels that this film is superior to Chinatown. Well, I'd sure like to have some of THAT weed. But it is a very exciting and visceral picture not so much because of the story but because of the way De Toth uses Los Angeles circa 1954. It's one of the few films I've ever seen where the city is also a true character, much as NYC is in The 87th books and Paris is in the Simenons. Ellroy claims that this film inspired some of his best work. And I can see that. This is Ellroy country for sure. The opening scene, an action set piece, is so vivid you almost break out in a sweat. And you're in the center of it, in a nowhere little gas station at night, with the big city rolling past you in every direction--and you nailed down in a tiny life and death drama that won't be worth more than an inch or two in tomorrow's newspaper. A scene with true ingenuity and power.
Well worth the money especially with Eddie Muller on the commentary track as well.
June 11, 2012
Come Back to the Screen, Harry Dean, Harry Dean
Posted by Susan Doll on June 11, 2012
Ed here: I got three letters off-line last night about The Black Panther story. For reasons I don't quite understand the people who wrote didn't think I was appropriately enthusiastic about the story. Not at all. I have the highest admiration for the writer and the story itself. I consider it a major piece about a little told tale of the 60s and 70s. Kate Coleman deserves great credit for writing the piece. Here's a look at Harry Dean Stanton, one of my favorites, from TCM's Movie Morlocks:
Though I am generally underwhelmed by comic-book blockbusters, Joss Whedon’s The Avengers rises above the other superhero films by style-less, no-name directors who tend to be mere pawns for studio execs. One of the movie’s assets is the appearance of notable character actors in small but meaningful roles. In past eras, character actors regularly filled out the casts of genre films, which helped make those movies that are formulaic in nature distinguishable and memorable. Sadly, contemporary Hollywood studios and filmmakers seldom use character actors to their best advantage, if at all.
In The Avengers, Powers Booth and Jerzy Skolimowski (also a writer and director) are recognizable in cameos, but a bonafide scene-stealing moment comes when Harry Dean Stanton encounters Bruce Banner just after he has created mayhem as the Hulk. Stanton plays a security guard in a sequence that Whedon wrote with the legendary character actor in mind. Stanton, who became a popular actor in the 1970s and 1980s, excels at playing wizened if quirky outsiders. The security guard’s casual acceptance of the nude Banner is a fitting reaction for Stanton’s type of character—a quirky individualist who has seen everything. His image informs his character, and those who recognize Stanton will get more out of the scene. The original scene was much longer as written, but ever-mindful of the studio execs, Whedon cut it down. He considers himself lucky that the studio let him keep the scene and that he was able to land Stanton for the role.
Stanton’s turn in The Avengers gave me cause to review the 86-year-old’s remarkable career and to ponder my favorite Harry Dean roles.
Born in Kentucky and raised in North Carolina, Stanton still retains a slight Southern accent—one of the many reasons I can’t resist his characters. After a stint in the navy as a ship’s cook, he tested into the Naval Air Corps. After three months at Case School of Applied Science in Cleveland, which was part of his training, he realized he was more interested in playing the drums than in being a pilot. He attended the University of Kentucky for three years, studying journalism and the radio arts. After his speech instructor cast him in a production of Pygmalion, Stanton knew he wanted to be an actor. He left college without looking back, noting in an interview forStopsmiling magazine that he “never wanted to finish any college or school. I started being rebellious at an early age. I didn’t like authority of any kind . . . . No bosses.” Small wonder he was so admired by the directors of the Film School Generation.
for the rest go here: http://moviemorlocks.com/2012/06/11/c...
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