The acclaimed science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke was difficult to categorize. That's a compliment, but it also means much important critical work remains to be done.
Continue reading "Thoughts on Arthur C. Clarke" »
The mid-century mystery and science-fiction master Fredric Brown deserves much greater recognition, and his works should be brought back into print.
Continue reading "The Case for Fredric Brown" »
Could this be the start of a new trend toward greater optimism and positivity in the culture? HBO, for two decades the home of dark, unhappy, "edgy" TV series, is debuting a new show with a light touch.
Continue reading "HBO Lightens Up With New Detective Series" »
Fox TV comes up with two new drama series featuring troubled geniuses.
Continue reading "Fox Clones 'House' - Rather Successfully" »
Continue reading "The Light in "Dark" Fiction" »
American film critics detest violent movies—unless there's an antisocial message involved. TAC correspondent Mike D'Virgilio looks at critical reactions to violence in movies.
Continue reading "The Violent Hypocrisy of Mainstream Film Critics" »
Continue reading "Monk and God" »
Here's a preview of an article coming soon on another site. I've been working with the editor for a week to get this published, and an updated version will run eventually, but in the meantime here's a version that is timely because the season-ending of Prison Break will run on Fox tonight at 8 EST.Continue reading "A Defense of Pop Fiction" »
This Sunday night at 10 p.m EST, CBS attempts to bolster its writers-strike-depleted primetime lineup by bringing over a program from pay cable, Showtime's Dexter.
For those not familiar with the show, Dexter is a limited series based on the first in a series of novels about a Miami police forensic consultant whose expertise happens to be based in great part on the fact that he is a serial killer.
Continue reading "'Dexter' Comes to CBS" »
Sometimes meaningful cultural moments crop up in the most unexpected places.
One place you'll find them is on the Discovery Channel show Man vs. Wild (Friday nights at 9 EST). In each episode, Bear Grylls, a former British military commando and an expert on survival techniques, shows how to get through the worst wilderness conditions and find one's way back to civilization.
Continue reading "The Subtle Cross" »
Turner Classic Movies is presenting a documentary on filmmaker Val Lewton, produced and narrated by Martin Scorsese, tonight at 8 EST with a repeat presentation at midnight.
Lewton (b. Vladimir Ivan Leventon in Yalta, Russia) was a highly talented writer and producer whose atmospheric suspense and horror films of the 1940s for Hollywood's RKO studio are much admired by film critics and scholars and the more tasteful and well-informed of today's filmmakers.
Continue reading "Salute to Val Lewton" »
After the success of several tie-in novels featuring characters from the USA Network detective-comedy series Monk, written by TV mystery veteran Lee Goldberg, two more USA Network series will get the same treatment, according to an item on The Blog of the International Association of Media Tie-in Writers.
TV writer William Rabkin has agreed to write three original novels based on Psych, with the first going into print in January 2009, and Tod Goldberg will produce three books based on Burn Notice, with the first installment due out in July 2008, when the series' second season will begin on USA Network.
Continue reading "Tie-In Novels for 'Psych,' 'Burn Notice'" »
TAC Mystery Fiction Correspondent Mary Reed reviews a classic novel by English suspense writer "Sapper," now available for free online through Project Gutenberg Australia.
H. C. McNeile, aka "Sapper," is one of the most popular and most reviled of mystery-suspense writers.
Writing largely between the two World Wars, the former British military man brought an American-style hardboiled approach to British fiction with his popular character Bulldog Drummond, a wealthy, intrepid, honorable former military officer. The Drummond tales combined suspense, espionage, and detection, rather after the fashion of Leslie Charteris's Saint stories. The character also appeared in the movies and on television and radio.
Sapper also wrote straight detective novels, one of which is Ronald Standish, the item currently under review.
Sapper's books sold very well indeed, and readers enjoyed them immensely, but literary critics of later decades, especially since the 1960s, have criticized his books as representing an obsolete, politically damaging, and personally vile point of view—for the narratives frankly demonstrate that different types of people behave differently. This is a reality that contemporary thought (if it can be honored with that designation) would like to deny and ignore, consigning it to the ash heap through force of career destruction of those who dare to speak it.
Hence, reading books such as those by Sapper is a dangerous act and should be undertaken only by the bold. I recommend that you do so immediately.—STK
Continue reading "A Dangerous Mystery Writer" »
My favorite BBC programming has always been its mystery series, and the best of those are not the ones that mimic American programs but those that have the most British feel to them.
Unfortunately, the BBC has almost fully assimilated former Prime Minister Tony Blair's "Cool Britannia" notion, turning the government media service into a bastion of vulgar flash and nonsense designed to appeal to sex-addled teenagers of all ages.
Hence it's a happy day any time the BBC accidentally puts out one of its increasingly rare programs of intelligent and sensible entertainment. Life on Mars is just such a one and is not to be missed.
Continue reading "BBC's Excellent "Life on Mars"" »
Most movies, even those that seem rather mindless, actually do have some serious thematic content behind the action, comedy, romance, and other surface elements—as I have observed frequently on this site and elsewhere.
National Treasure: Book of Secrets initially seems very unusual in this respect: it appears to have no interesting thematic content whatsoever.
It's amazingly fluffy and superficial, and works as great, unserious Hollywood entertainment. It is thoroughly successful at that.
Nonetheless, there is some serious thematic content to the film, which we would do well to see.
Continue reading "The Unusual Appeal of "National Treasure: Book of Secrets"" »
New The American Culture correspondent Mike Long has put together a very contrarian and very good list of the best movies of the year for National Review Online, and he has been gracious enough to allow us to reprint it here in its entirety.
Contrary to most critics, Mike claims this was a good year for the movies. I agree. Another thing I strongly endorse about the article is that it does not succumb to political shibboleths of either left or right. That's our approach on The American Culture.
And there's more. In an exclusive for The American Culture, Mike informs us that since he wrote the article, he saw Sweeney Todd and would move it to number 4 on the list. Instead of altering the article, however, we're leaving it as is, so that you will not miss the number 10 movie, which is well worth seeing.
Here's Mike's "2007 at the Movies":
Continue reading "2007 at the Movies" »
In an essay provocatively called "The Slow and Agonizing Death of the Private Detective", crime novel fan and critic William Ahearn argues that private-eye detective fiction is dead:
That's an incendiary way of putting it, and I'm sure that devotees of contemporary private eye fiction will be scandalized by both the content of the claim and Ahearn's dogmatic expression of it.The private detective is as dead as a two-dollar steak and would somebody please get a shovel and bury the stiff.
However, in the main I agree with his statement and endorse its tone.
Continue reading "The Problem with Contemporary Detective Fiction" »
A classic type of literary and folk-tale character is the trickster, an individual who routinely and comically transgresses the boundaries of acceptable social behavior. From Br'er Rabbit to P. G. Wodehouse's Stanley Featherstonehaugh Ukridge and Uncle Fred to Bugs Bunny to The Joker of the "Batman" comics to Susan Vance in Bringing Up Baby to the con artists in Hustle, the trickster is a pre-moral or non-moral character whose schemes take ordinary people out of their comfortable existence and force them to react to unfamiliar, morally disorienting situations.
In so doing, this type of character both identifies the regnant social boundaries for us and causes us to think about whether the rules make sense.
This is an important process in a liberal society, as social boundaries should be based on common sense and the consequences that personal choices impose on society and individuals. As conditions change—due in great part to technological advances—we must alter our social mores and rules in order to reflect the different world in which we live.
Continue reading "The Value of the Trickster" »
As expected, the Will Smith-starring intellectual zombie film I Am Legend opened very strong at the U.S. box office last weekend, leading all films by a good measure in its opening weekend.
The film starring the well-liked Smith, whose movies consistently deliver his likeable personality and positive personal and religious values, grossed an impressive $77.2 million during its first weekend in theaters. That's $25 million more than any film in which he has starred has taken in during its opening weekend, and is a very strong performance indeed.
Finishing a surprising second was the CGI animated comedy film Alvin and the Chipmunks, selling a startling $45 million worth of tickets for the Fox studio. Fox was expecting the film to bring in about $20 million. The presence of Jason Lee (My Name Is Earl) as the Chipmunks' boss probably helped extend the film's appeal, though obviously the chipmunks must have been the big draw.
It is now obvious that audiences do not want to see the controversial fantasy film The Golden Compass, as it took in only $8.8 million and finished third. The money total represents a vertiginous 66 percent drop from the film's already disappointing opening weekend total the week before. It is officially a disaster for New Line Cinema.
Continue reading ""Legend," "Chipmunks" Dominate Movie Box Office" »
A very good movie series that has been unjustly overlooked since the cultural cataclysm that began after World War II is MGM's late-1930s/early '40s series of films starring Lew Ayres as Dr. Kildare. It's a pity, as the series has much to offer even today.
Ayres, then a very young contract player at what was the top Hollywood studio at the time, portrays the title character with the right blend of earnestness and humor, and Lionel Barrymore is excellent as his crusty but ultimately sympathetic mentor, Dr. Gillespie. Laraine Day is likewise solid as hardworking Nurse Mary Lamont, who becomes Kildare's love interest.
Nearly all the entries in the series were helmed by the undistinguished MGM contract director Harold S. Bucquet, but they are quite competently produced, written, and directed.
Continue reading "The Dr. Kildare Films" »
It's rather startling how much of the culture is exploring moral issues in increasingly traditional terms. As is perhaps most evident in ABC's Dirty Sexy Money, an ever-more common approach among producers of TV fiction series is to take flamboyant story material and apply it to intensely moral ends. An important aspect of this trend, also highly evident in DSM, is the notion that the rich are a good deal more morally suspect than the middle classes.
Hence it should hardly surprise us that not one but two new shows on the CW this year are based on the premise that life among the wealthy in Manhattan is so bad that even self-imposed exile is better.
Interestingly, the point of both shows is that the moral weakness and decadence of the New York wealthy is what makes life there really rather miserable.
Continue reading "New TV Dramas Are Taking Moral Issues Seriously" »
This past weekend's movie box office tallies provided more evidence that U.S. audiences are tired of gloom and doom from the popular culture. Producer-writer-director-actor Tyler Perry's comedy Why Did I Get Married? led with $21.5 million in sales, displacing another comedy, The Game Plan, which came in a distant second by bringing in $11.5 million.
The George Clooney left-wing legal drama Michael Clayton and the Mark Wahlberg-Joaquin Phoenix crime drama We Own the Night tied for third with $11 million apiece in the preliminary reports.
The Farelly brothers film The Heartbreak Kid, starring Ben Stiller in a comedy depending on personal discomfort for its effects, fell to fifth in its second week, taking in $7.3 million, a very poor number in light of Stiller's proven box-office appeal—his last movie, the charming and amusing Night at the Museum, brought in well over $100 million in its first ten days.
Continue reading "Perry Buries Competition at Weekend Movie Box Office" »
Tonight at 8:00 EDT Turner Network Television is showing a very underrated movie from 1957, Curse of the Demon (also released as Night of the Demon), directed by Jacques Tourneur. It's based on a very fine horror story by M. R. James, "Casting the Runes."
James's metier was in creating horror stories that depended on strong characterization, a solid story with sensible motivation, great skill at conveying atmosphere and suspense, and some real intellectual power. He stayed away from sensational effects, and his stories were much more effective for it.
Continue reading "A Very Good Film Dealing with Devil Worship" »
Like Pushing Daisies (analyzed earlier on this site), the new CBS drama series Moonlight explores fairly heady ideas about what makes us human, specifically the relationship between flesh and spirit. Unlike the cheerful Daisies, Moonlight, created by movie producer Joel Silver, is another of the many dark dramas so common on TV today.
Mick St. John (Alex O'Loughlin) is a moralistic vampire who doesn't prey on "innocents" but instead kills only evil people whom he thinks deserve to die (so he says). Mick despises vampires who kill humans indiscriminately, and he helps people by working as a private investigator, using his heightened senses to solve the crimes.
The possibility of redemption is a strong impulse throughout the pilot episode, as Mick is torn between his will to live and his desire to live right.
That's a good and interesting theme to consider. Unfortunately, the scriptwriting, performances, and visual presentation are at a low level of sophistication, sticking to the modern comic-book/graphic-novel approach and never striking much contact with the real world. That makes it difficult for the viewer to experience the show as much more than an intellectual exercise—and comic books are hardly the best way to exercise the intellect.
Critic John J. Miller has published a very informative interview with Robert E. Howard scholar Rusty Burke on National Review Online, which merits attention.
The excerpts below provide a good sense of why the underappreciated writer of the Conan the Barbarian stories deserves more consideration. Howard wrote for the pulps in a variety of genres, and modern-day readers are rediscovering his non-Conan writings and realizing that he was above all a master storyteller.
Particularly praiseworthy is Burke's emphasis on the importance of story in narrative fiction, which reflects criticisms made in the prior century by G. K. Chesterton, C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and other such luminaries:
Continue reading "Master Storyteller" »
Mystery critic Jon Breen, writing in The Weekly Standard, has offered the best capsule description of Dan Brown's megaselling novel The Da Vinci Code I've ever read. Noting that it is inaccurate to describe the book as a new kind of "thriller," Breen disposes of it as follows:
Dan Brown's novel works best as an old-fashioned clued detective puzzle, albeit an unusually badly written one.
Perfect.
The mixing of genres can be interesting when it works, but when it doesn't, it's usually a disaster.
The producers of the forthcoming CBS TV primetime series, Viva Laughlin, based on the BBC series Viva Blackpool, will see if they can avoid the shoals. The series will feature mystery-suspense plots augmented with musical-theater sequences, the network has revealed. USA Today explains:
Continue reading "Another Try at Genre-Bending" »
If you need any demonstration of the amazing cultural power of tweeners (young people exiting childhood and entering the early years of adolescence), the popularity of the Disney TV movie High School Musical should provide it. It was watched by millions on television, has sold well in DVD, and has spawned a cottage industry of associated paraphernalia including concert tours and CDs.
Last Friday night the sequel, High School Musical 2, kept the tweeners and their undoubtedly reluctant parents enthralled, setting a record for non-network TV viewership:
Continue reading ""High School Musical 2" Grabs Record Audience" »
J. K. Rowling, author of the mega-bestselling Harry Potter books, is writing a detective novel, according to the Sunday Times of London. AP reports:
The Sunday Times newspaper quoted Ian Rankin, a fellow author and neighbor of Rowling's, as saying the creator of the "Harry Potter" books is turning to crime fiction.
"My wife spotted her writing her Edinburgh criminal detective novel," the newspaper, which was available late Saturday, quoted Rankin as telling a reporter at an Edinburgh literary festival.
A mystery series selling in the hundreds of millions, as the Harry Potter series did, would certainly be good for the genre's overall popularity—but is exceedingly unlikely. However, Rowling's ability to bring imagination and some interesting ideas to genre fiction has been fully proven, and her effort could indeed be refreshing for a form of fiction that has become rather dreary in recent years.
Coincidentally timed to align with today's premiere of Live Free or Die Hard, the magazine Entertainment Weekly released its list of the greatest action movies of all time. Number one in the genre was Die Hard.
It's a fairly good and reasonable list, albeit tilted toward more recent films as these things usually are. I doubt, for example, that Spider-Man 2 and Kill Bill—Vol. 1 will make the list in future decades, even though they may be justified in making this one.
Some titles I'm glad to see included are Drunken Master II: Legend of Drunken Master (feat. Jackie Chan; I think Drunken Master is better, however), The Adventures of Robin Hood (though it's absolutely ridiculous that it's not number 1 or 2), Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Hard-Boiled (John Woo's highly influential film starring Chow Yun-Fat is an action film with heart and mind as well as the necessary amount of muscle) and Akira Kurosawa's The Seven Samurai (although I like his Hidden Fortress a good deal more).
Continue reading "Greatest Action Movies of All Time" »
Our friend Mike Tooney called our attention to the following passage in William K. Everson's book The Detective in Film in which the author discusses the four 1930s Nancy Drew films produced by Warner Brothers and starring Bonita Granville as the title character. It's a good capsule description of the series:Continue reading "The 1930s Nancy Drew Films" »
A new wave of movies aimed at young girls is coming, starting this Friday with the theatrical release of Nancy Drew. The director of that film, Andrew Fleming, points out that the recent preteen and teen culture presented models of behavior very different from that of the children at which they have been aimed and which most of their parents would endorse.
The LA Times reports the good news that this is about to change somewhat:
Continue reading "Movies for Good Girls" »
Do producers and TV networks have an obligation to their viewers?
Producers and networks are increasingly using long-term plotlines in order to keep viewers returning week after week. In shows such as 24, Lost, Desperate Housewives, Prison Break, and the like, a long-term, overarching plot line keeps moving the narrative forward as each episode resolves lesser elements of the story.
It's a great way to keep viewers interested in a show, and when done well, it gives a program the narrative drive of a Victorian novel by Wilkie Collins or Anthony Trollope.
But what happens when such a show gets canceled? Should viewers who have invested multiple hours in a program just be left hanging?
Continue reading "What TV Networks Owe Loyal Viewers" »
The Rev. Jerry Falwell, a televison evangelist and moral activist, died today at the age of 73.
Falwell was, of course, one of the great bugaboos of the Left for the past three decades, and he earned that distinction largely by having non-atheist and non-latitudinarian principles and sticking to them.
Falwell had failed to install the theocracy that leftists had long insisted he was intent on creating in the United States.
Although I disagree with some of his theological positions and many of his political statements, I acknowledge that Jerry Falwell tried to work correctly within the American system to effect positive change.
He founded an institution, Liberty University, that may well hae a greater and more lasting influence on American society than any of his political activities did.
Continue reading "The Politics of Jerry Falwell" »
.jpg "A typically gloomy image from Batman Begins movie")
[I ran across a DVD of the movie Batman Begins recently and was reminded of how representative it is of much of today's movie culture. So, for your enlightement and delectation, the following is reprinted from my review for Crux.]
What Batman Begins says most powerfully is how bad the earlier films in the series were—and how crippled by stylistic cliches today's Hollywood action films have become.
The best way to experience Batman is still to read the original DC comic books from years ago and watch the TV cartoon series. This one ain't bad, but they're the real thing.
Continue reading "Batman Begins . . . Again" »
Turner Classic Movies is featuring mystery films this month, on Tuesday and Wednesday nights, with an emphasis on various detective series. All showings will be entirely without commercial interruptions, as is TCM's custom.
Those who have had their fill of sensationalistic, ultraviolent, ugly, modern theatrical crime thrillers would do well to take a look at these films, which are mostly lower in production values but much stronger on logic, common sense, insights into human behavior, and what makes for good character.
Tomorrow night the series begins with two of the best films featuring hardboiled detectives. The 1941 film The Maltese Falcon (8 p.m. EST) was written and directed by John Huston and features Humphrey Bogart in the definitive private eye movie performance as Sam Spade. TCM follows that at 10 p.m. with an even better film, Howard Hawks's superb adaptation of The Big Sleep (1946), by Raymond Chandler.
Those two are must-sees. At midnight, iron-fisted Mike Hammer comes on the scene in Robert Aldrich's excellent 1955 film Kiss Me Deadly, followed by a poles-apart detective, Hercule Poirot, played by Albert Finney in a star-studded 1974 production featuring Sean Connery, Ingrid Bergman, and Lauren Bacall. After that, at 4:15 a.m., the DVRs will still be running, to record The Scarlet Clue, a minor but amusing Charlie Chan film from 1945—it features the woefully underappreciated comic brilliance of Mantan Moreland as Chan's driver, Birmingham Brown. Watch this one if only to see how much a great comic actor can do with seemingly ordinary material.
Wednesday night TCM turns to the greatest of all fictional detectives, Sherlock Holmes, as played by the actor who best inhabited the role, Basil Rathbone.
Even though nearly all of the Universal films starring Rathbone with Nigel Bruce as an amusing Watson are set during contemporary times, the World War II years, the films capture the spirit of the orignal stories, combining equal parts deduction and adventure.
The four films showing towmorrow night are good ones: Sherlock Holmes and the Secret Weapon, The Woman in Green, Sherlock Holmes in Terror by Night, and Sherlock Holmes in Dressed to Kill.
The Holmes films are followed, beginning at 1:00 a.m. EST, by four films starring Warren William as the Lone Wolf, Lewis Vance's reformed jewel thief who has turned to a life of fighting crime. I haven't seen any of the Lone Wolf films and am looking forward to doing so.