Question: How many films did Peter Sellers play a bad guy in? I mean, a dead serious villain, not a comical bumbling villain.
Answer: one. It's the British gangster film NEVER LET GO, from 1960. As a local thug in charge of a car theft and chop shop gang, Sellers is riveting. The film as a whole is excellent also. I wrote a piece about it for Criminal Element - you can read it here: NEVER LET GO.
I vaguely remember a George Carlin routine of awhile back where he did a funny riff on how Americans now have too many choices in everything they do and that this is one of the things that causes Americans so many problems. Yes, George, right you were.
Case in point: Netflix streaming.
It's a wonderful thing, Netflix streaming, but all the choices you have when you go to Netflix to choose something to watch can be a burden. More often than not, I go to Netflix on a weeknight. I've had a long and tiring day at work. Most nights, after the subway ride home, dinner, and putting my 8 year old to bed, I've fueled up with coffee and pushed myself to get some writing done. Now, let's say, it's about midnight and I have 90 minutes, no more, to spend relaxing and watching something because I have to get up at 6:15 to start the day (shower, get dressed, eat breakfast, bring the kid to school by subway, take the subway to work, etc, etc). So time is precious and I have to make a fast decision on what to watch. Choose a movie or TV episode of something, stream it, sit back, maybe have a late night drink, enjoy the movie or TV episode, then join my wife in bed (where, like a wise person, she's been sleeping for a couple of hours already). I can get in my fix of movie/tv episode watching and still bag a good 4 1/2 hours of sleep before work tomorrow. Not bad.
But here's where the problem starts. I go to Netflix on my computer and I can't decide what to watch. I had a particular movie in mind earlier perhaps, when I was wrapping up my writing for the night, but now I'm not sure I want to see that movie. Maybe I want to see a different movie. Or, no, a different movie than the first different movie I considered. Or the first episode of TV crime series from Denmark, but if I watch that episode that means I have to commit to the series for the foreseeable future, and do I really want to commit to a series when my viewing time is so limited? If I commit to a series, I won't be able to see any movies for a week or two.....
I sit there like this dithering, reading the summaries of this movie, that movie, this show, that show, and before I know it, a half hour has gone by, 45 minutes, and it's almost 1 AM. Now I don't have time for a movie. I'd be up till 2:30 at least if I watched a film. Even a TV episode would keep me up till two. Should I risk it? Go with 4 hours sleep or less? No, I've disciplined myself to get by on 4 1/2 to 5 hours sleep a night but if I go lower than that, I suffer the next day, feel actual pain in my joints (being 51 has some drawbacks) and have to fight to get through a day at work. Not worth it. Better not to watch anything. But I wanted to watch something. Tomorrow. You'll watch a movie tomorrow. Just don't spend so much time trying to decide from all the possible movies which specific movie to watch................
And so I go to bed feeling dissatisfied. I wanted to satiate my movie/TV hunger that night with something, and I did not. I failed not because of any outside difficulties, but because of my own paralysis in the face of so many choices.
Carlin, you were right............you (as he would say) motherfucker.
My friend John Shepphird, who I met at the 2012 Bouchercon convention in Cleveland, is a pretty accomplished guy. He's a writer and director of TV films including Jersey Shore Shark Attack and Chupacabra: Dark Seas for SyFy Channel. He also happens to be nominated this year for the Shamus Award in the Best P.I. Short Story category. The story is "Ghost Negligence", and it appeared in Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine, the 2012 July/Aug Double Issue. The story introduces reformed swindler Jack O'Shea hanging his PI shingle as a deception specialist. It's the first, I'm sure, in a series.
Even though John seems like quite a straightforward guy to me, his mystery fiction largely centers around "the art of deception" featuring con men (and women) and/or victims of fraud. Come to think of it, when I see him this year at Bouchercon, I may have to keep a closer eye on what he's doing. The Shamus winners will be announced at the PWA Banquet at Bouchercon in Albany, New York, on Friday, September 20.
Anyway, "Ghost Negligence" is a good story, full of surprises, and worth checking out. It's available now via an Alfred Hitchock Mystery Mag podcast. If you have a few minutes, give it a listen.......
The story's here:
Ghost Negligence Podcast
A couple of pics from Noir at the Bar V, held a few days ago at Shade Bar in Greenwich Village.
With Glenn Gray and Todd "Thuglit" Robinson hosting and a bunch of superb writers reading, the night was a blast.
Here's the entire crew: Thomas Pluck, Gerald So, Charlie Stella, Glenn Gray, Suzanne Solomon, Jack Getze, Teel James Glenn, Big Daddy Thug, myself, Bradley Sands.
I heard a wonderful array of styles from all the writers, and it was great to meet a number of new people. The Patron Tequila I spent drinking as the night wore on didn't hurt either. That's my second Noir at the Bar at Shade in the past 3 months, and both have been the most enjoyable experiences.
I decided to give this book a try mainly because I was looking to read some noir stories set in California but not in LA. I wasn't familiar with Mike Monson's writing but liked the comments I saw about the collection on Amazon. It's a debut collection, taken from stories Monson has published over the years on various Internet sites, but it has the authority of a writer who's an old pro. Mike Monson writes in total control of his rough material. And make no mistake: these stories do not shy away from the bleak, the harsh, and the violent.
"Dirty noir" is how the author himself describes what he writes, and it is a
perfect way of describing it. At the same time, within the "dirty" tough world
he describes, there are subtle variations in tone and mood from story to story.
There is also a lot of dark humor and in the two days it took me to read this
book, I chuckled quite often. Some of the pieces are slices of terse realism
describing lives of economic and sexual desperation that reminded me of Raymond Carver - if Carver wrote
noir. And some are very brief, ruminations, observations, that brought to mind Lydia Davis, the master of the flash fiction form. There is also one, "Heritage Classic" that is a beautifully modulated study of male mid-life crisis. A 50ish year old man buys and starts riding a huge Harley in his effort to feel young again. Needless to say, bike riding on the road doesn't go as planned.
To sum it up, I really liked this collection, and I'm looking forward to the novella Mr. Monson says he has coming out later this year. In the meantime, take a trip to Modesto. Take a trip to a wedge of California that is most certainly not glamorous but is quite intriguing.
"The only performance that makes it, that makes it all the way, is the one that achieves madness."
Gangsters, rock stars, violence, mushrooms, lipstick - all mix and merge in the British film Performance (1970). Co-directed by Donald Cammell and Nicholas Roeg, starring Mick Jagger and James Fox, it's a unique movie that you'll never forget once you've seen it. I remember first seeing it many years ago in college, at a midnight campus show, and if I remember correctly, I think I was high and drunk at the time. The movie, which unwinds like a hallucination, stunned me. And I realized that I most certainly should not have taken anything before the movie to get buzzed. PERFORMANCE itself is an intoxicant. It is also, among other things, a great and unique gangster film, and I wrote about it for Criminal Element as part of my Gangster Cinema, British Style series.
You can check the piece out here: PERFORMANCE.
I shouldn't be surprised by the reaction, but a few days after its opening, I still find the predominantly negative reaction to ONLY GOD FORGVES irritating. I understand that it's a film that won't appeal to a large audience, but the ferocity of the hostility directed at the film is what galls me. You have so many critics and others out there who bemoan the sameness of Hollywood product and complain about the cookie cutter plots and mindlessness of your standard action movies and then something unusual like Nicolas Winding Refn's film comes along and people react like he created a crime against cinema. You have geniuses in various papers and online venues who've written as if Winding Refn meant to make a typical thriller, and
failed, or should have made a more conventional thriller, when that is
so obviously not what he had the slightest intention of doing. To state the obvious:
ONLY GOD FORGIVES is a dream movie.
It follows the rhythms and speed of the subconscious mind, the nocturnal mind, not the linear waking mind. Like David Lynch, for example, Winding Refn is one of those directors who has an ability to burrow deep into the recesses of the subconscious and come back with disturbing yet beautiful imagery. Everything about ONLY GOD FORGIVES, from the
languorous way it unfolds to the lack of logic
in the story to the over the top violence to the sleepwalking manner of
the actors, is dreamlike. Oneiric, to use an old film theory word. In fact, though it was advertised as a follow-up to DRIVE, a re-teaming, after all, of Ryan Gosling and Winding Refn, the whole tone and mood of the film is closer to his earlier VALHALLA
RISING, a very strange Viking saga. That Winding Refn dedicates the film, at the end, to Alejandro
Jodorowsky, should make it pretty clear what kind of film he wanted to
make. To my mind, it's a luscious, absurd, lurid, violent dream of a movie, and anyone with a sense of movie adventurousness should ignore the numbing drumbeat of the negative reviews and give it a try.
