Paul wrote:
>Having read Raoul Whitfield's excellent short story
'Mistral' in the
>Pronzini/Adrian anthology Hard-boiled, I bought his
novel Green Ice
>recently. It's good stuff - a tight, fast story, with
a chaotic shoot-out
>climax. Definitely recommended. There was some talk
on this list a few
>months ago about a collection of his short stories
that's being planned.
>Looking forward to that one.
Me too. If we're referring to the same book, it's a
collection of Jo Gar stories. That is indeed good news.
And Mark added to my list of decent, recent crime
films:
>That last would be The Big Lebowski. I'd drop the
awful Payback and add
>a bunch of smaller films like Usual Suspects,
Palookaville, Underneath
>(recently saw its source Criss Cross, great Burt
Lancaster film), Bottle
>Rockets, La Haine, Last Seduction, The Set Up,
Phoenix, City of
>Industry, Thick As Thieves and the not as good, but
still appealing
>Suicide Kings (mainly for Christopher Walken's
performance), Romeo Is
>Bleeding and Deadfall, among many others. For all of
the complaining
>about Tarantino-wannabes (and a lot of bad
straight-to-cable films have
>been made in his wake, some starring him) he
certainly led to an
>increased market for crime films, many of which have
been good.
The only thing is that the original thread was about whether
the big studios were still making good intelligent crime
flicks or not. Hence my off-the-top-of-my-head list. Some
great flicks Mark mentioned, including quite a few I've never
seen -- and a few that don't ring any bells at all. But all
the ones Mark mentioned were (I think) smaller, mostly indy
affairs. I guess it's time to start hunting down some of
them...
>I'd drop the awful Payback ...
I dunno. I kind of liked PAYBACK. I enjoyed it far more than
POINT BLANK, which I found really disappointing after all the
years of buzz, here and elsewhere, more self-consciously arty
and filmy than actually entertaining. Maybe I just prefer
movies to films.
And actually, I liked Stallone in the little-seen COPLAND.
Maybe because he played against type. And the big showdown
was one of the more subtly-bizarro finales I've seen. Maybe
not a great film, but definitely worth catching.
--
Kevin Burton Smith The Thrilling Detective Web Site http://www.thrillingdetective.com
A new domain! The same old crap! Plus fiction from Tribe, Victor Gischler and Brian Evankovich. -- # To unsubscribe from the regular list, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to # majordomo@icomm.ca. This will not work for the digest version. # The web pages for the list are at http://www.miskatonic.org/rara-avis/ .
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