Following by Christopher Nolan
following.
christopher nolan is AMAZING. this is SO hitchcock-ian. i love love love it. it is weird and not chronological and just so british. its great! very much in the style of memento but not nearly as awesome. very stylistic. very low budget. very clever. a very good film.
Christopher Nolan’s first Feature is an absolutely beautiful black & white film made for pennies. The script is so well written, so fully realized that when the end comes you’re angry that you didn’t see it coming that you just sit there in disbelief. It’s a great magic trick of a film, one that shows you -hrough a shakey cam and tracking shots- the seedy underbelly of London.
The Blonde (played ably by Lucy Russell) leads you on just long enough for you to fall for her, but never truly trust her. An absolute beautiful crime film that should be watched twice back-to-back.
Greg Rucka's Stumptown
Written by Greg Rucka
Drawn By Matthew Southworth
Coloured Lee Loughridge
I fall in love with losers.
Maybe it’s the curse of being a fan of crime fiction. You don’t often find winners in crime stories, they might start off the book freshed-pressed-like-a-million-bucks, but they won’t stay that way. Dex is a loser, but god damned if I wasn’t head over heels for her by the time she’s shot by page 4. I remember when this series was initially promoted – way back in ‘07 – and I first saw this ad:
I think I knew that she was going to be trouble, and I think I knew I’d love every second I’d get to spend with her.
Greg Rucka’s Stumptown – a return to the straight crime genre that he initially cut his teeth doing – owes a lot more to loser private eyes like Jim Rockford than it does to Brubaker’s Criminal series. Which is good, because as much as I’m enjoying the crime renaissance that’s going on in the comic book industry right now, I didn’t just want to read Rucka’s take on criminal. What Rucka does best is flesh out real characters and the semi-procedural world that they live in and how it effects them.
So what’s the jist? Stumptown is a pulpy PI story that follows down-on-her-luck gambler/private investigator Dex as she tries to balance gambling addictions and in turn a 17 thousand debt to the Confederated Tribes of the Wind Coast as well as her fledgling PI service and a brother with downs syndrom.
Some things work themselves out though, all Dex has to get out of that debt is locate Sue-Lynne’s (the head of the CTWC) granddaughter.
Of course, that’s not really the end of it, and in typical detective story fashion things are not as simple as they seem, and Dex finds herself not only threatened by a quasi-legitimate mob boss but stuff into the trunk of a car by two thugs and then shot twice in the chest.
I’d really be remiss if I neglected to talk about the art. Matt Southworth is an artist who’s ability to convey mood and atmosphere while not sacrificing storytelling is a joy to behold. It’d be easy to toss out Michael Lark or Sean Philips comparisons as his style is obviously similar to both, but he’s definitely a artist in his own right. This is my first exposure to his work, but I’m going to be honest when I say that I’ll be keeping a eye for whatever he gets up to.
All in all, I can’t help to express just how excited I am for the rest of this series, I’m looking forward to anything this team tosses at me, and from the looks of things, I can count on getting my heart broken.
You can check out a preview of this title here.
The people most affected by [the War on Drugs] are black and brown and poor. It’s the abandoned inner cores of our urban areas. And, as we said before, economically, we don’t need those people. The American economy doesn’t need them. So, as long as they stay in their ghettos, and they only kill each other, we’re willing to pay a police presence to keep them out of our America. And to let them fight over scraps, which is what the drug war effectively is.
David Simon (Do click. This discussion is incredible. Part II has fantastic insight into the collapse of newspapers.) (via syntheticpubes)
Robert Walker & Laura Elliot in Strangers on a Train (1951, dir. Alfred Hitchcock)
In one of Hitchcock’s most famous shots, Strangers on a Train’s pivotal murder is seen as reflected in a pair of glasses. Hitchcock & his director of photography, Robert Burks, achieved this effect by placing a concave mirror on the floor and having the actress, Laura Elliott, stand next to it as she simulated slowly falling dead to the floor. Elliot’s reflection in the concave mirror as she fell was filmed and the shot was then printed onto the lenses of the glasses (scene on youtube here).
Kirk Douglas in Ace in the Hole (1951, dir. Billy Wilder)
Billy Wilder’s Ace in the Hole almost requires an honorary expansion of the term film noir. There are no private eyes in seedy offices or femmes fatales lurking in the shadows of neon-lit doorways, no forces of evil arrayed against a relatively honorable hero. This emotional snake pit, the darkest of Wilder’s dark meditations on American folkways, takes place under the relentless sun of a flat New Mexican desert. The noir is interior—inside a mountain tunnel where a man is trapped and suffocating, and inside the mind of a reporter rotting from accumulated layers of self-induced moral grime.
The 1951 movie, fascinating in the sweep and savagery of its indictment, and a flop when it opened, points to the direction noir would take in the fifties, hiding in broad daylight in the films of Alfred Hitchcock, Nicholas Ray, Douglas Sirk. But if Hitchcock diabolically upended our expectations of the leading man, Wilder went much, much further. This satire of the media circus that would envelop us all goes beyond noir into saeva indignatio, and beyond Swift into something more intensely and disturbingly personal.
-Molly Haskell, Ace in the Hole: Noir in Broad Daylight
