>A recent one I liked was Mad Dog Time, which was way
out there. Jeff
>Goldblum plays a guy who makes his money through
showdowns with all
>contenders, while both are seated at desks, with their
guns in front of
>them. Gabriel Byrne has been running the biz, while
crime boss Richard
>Dreyfuss (Vic) has been in a sanitarium. The movie
starts the day
>before "Vic is geting out." Incidentally, Goldblum has
been with Vic's
>girl (Diane Lane) while he was away, after dumping her
sister, Ellen
>Barkin. Everyone in the movie is positioning
themselves to capitalize
>on whatever insanity occurs when Vic comes home. It is
set in this odd
>timeless time where various ideas of 20s, 50s and 60s
cool all co-exist.
>It's pretty wild and fun.
I saw that one! That was pretty weird, but a real hoot. Is it
possible it
had another title?
Actually, some of the best written hardboiled stuff I've seen
over the last
few years has been on television. An hour of Homicide is
generally better
than any three or four so called "noir" things out of
Hollywood. Don't know
how realistic it is, but it's certainly one of the bleaker
slices of crime
fiction I've seen. And a few of those straight-to-cable
things, filmed on a
budget of about two cases of beer and a pack of smokes, where
the writer,
director, producer, and the "third prostitute in the bar" all
have the same
last name, are fantastic.
Actually, forget about just hardboiled. Some of the very best
dramatic
writing is on TV these days, and not just on PBS (although
Prime Suspect is
really great).
And that's a great post on Adams, Mario...the few Carl
Wilcox's I've read
have all been excellent, but they're pretty hard to find
these days...does
he have a paperback publisher, or is he solely in hardcover
these days? And
John Lutz' Carver and Alo series seem to have disappeared
from the
paperback shelves lately (the only ones, alas, I can afford),
yet I know
they're still being published in hardcover....
And Eileen wants her leg back, please....
**************************************************
Kevin Smith
Back to school and time to hit the books...the comic books,
that is...
Private eyes and comics in this month's P.I. Poll on The
Thrilling
Detective Web Site
http://www.colba.net/~kvnsmith/thrillingdetective/
Now with fresh fiction monthly....
#
# To unsubscribe, say "unsubscribe rara-avis" to
majordomo@icomm.ca.
# The web pages for the list are at http://www.vex.net/~buff/rara-avis/.