3 posts tagged “detective stories”
This is an outstanding movie. The dialogue is quick, crisp, and intelligent, and is thoroughly rooted in the film noire, hardboiled-detective tradition. The fact that it's set in a high school seems to be incidental at first, and I thought that with a few change it could have been cast with adults in the 40's.
As the story continues and the viewer has buy-in, more and more humor is also included, contrasting the seriousness of the topics and the dialogue with how seriously the characters take themselves.
This is one I need to own.
This is the second book of the Harry Dresden series by Jim Butcher. The first book, Stomfront, about the only openly practicing Wizard in Chicago - part hardboiled detective, part CSI analyst, part Harry Potter - blew me away, and I know that I will read every book in this series.
That being said, this book wasn't quite as good as the first. It had too many subplots and not as much of a coherent story arc as the first. Still, it was a very good read (or listen, since what I have is the audiobook read by James Marsters), and I am still eagerly looking forward to the next one.
We watched Chinatown tonight, from our Netflix list. This Roman Polanski/Jack Nicholson picture from 1974 is the epitome of hardboiled detective stories. Strix and I both noticed strong Alfred Hitchcock influences in the camera work, and the directing is top-notch. Nicholson's performance is outstanding, and in fact I said at one point while watching this that no one could have played this character except Nicholson. The movie seemed to have been made for him.
It's also in the IMDB top 250 list.
