This is the second in a (long-delayed, alas!) series of posts chronicling the fortunes of Agatha Christie on film from 1974-1988. Spoilers are not only expected, but required, and I offer them with no apology. With the success of Murder on the Orient Express, it was only a matter of time before the cinema tried […]
Before I begin, an obvious warning: I will discuss spoilers here. Another obvious warning: this is a long piece and it goes into the brush at various points. My hope is that, in the end, it comes together into something reasonably cohesive—but that is, of course, up to the reader to decide. A third warning: […]
The following is an expansion of a Twitter-conversation the three authors–Ryan Holt, Evan Cogswell, and Nathanael Booth–had shortly after seeing Gone Girl. Spoilers should be assumed. Introduction: Expectations and First Impressions Ryan: David Fincher and I have not always gotten along. For me, The Game and The Social Network rank among the best films […]
At all events, perhaps no writer has ever wielded this terrific thought with greater terror than this same harmless Hawthorne. Still more: this black conceit pervades him, through and through. You may be witched by his sunlight,–transported by the bright gildings in the skies he builds over you;–but there is the blackness of darkness beyond; […]
This is the first in a series of posts chronicling the fortunes of Agatha Christie on film from 1974-1988. I have previously covered some of these movies elsewhere, but the content of these posts is entirely new and oriented in a different direction. Spoilers are not only expected, but required, and I offer them […]
I So CBS’s Elementary has been running for a while, and I keep meaning to catch up with it and give it a proper review—“this works,” “this doesn’t”—the whole nine yards. And yet, somehow, I can’t manage to keep up. I watched the pilot—sampled an episode or two—and yet, Thursday after Thursday passes and I […]
Reading is important and people don’t do it enough, again myself included. It does seem to me, holed up out here in my Tokyo bunker, that the affluent societies of the East and the West lack any form of direction or guidance, that we are simply spinning in a moral void. Where religion and government […]
Before continuing with my exploration of detective film (leaving, at last, Sherlock Holmes and moving on to more contemporaneous examples), I want to take a moment and re-iterate something that has been implicit in my posts here, but which might get lost in the shuffle when we narrow our focus to individual films. This post, […]
In most of these essays, I try to keep a pretense of critical distance. That is, I point out whatever loose sally of thought the movie in question inspires and then proceed from there, without venturing much comment on the quality of the movie itself. The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, however, must stand as […]