Sunday, March 29, 2009

Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö

Who?!?

Or Whö?!?

Or Oogly-Woogly and Woogly-Oogly, as I call them.

A wife and husband team that wrote some the best detective fiction I have ever read. In the classic locked-room format even though it is so much more than that.

An excoriating exposé of the "welfare" state during the inflationary 1970's; a searing portrait of police corruption in Sweden; and a depressing Scandinavian portait that things are not always what they seem; and a clear intellectual child of film noir.

It's all worth reading in as much as you can find translated. Worth reading "in order" although this is not quite strictly necessary unlike a lot of more contemporary detective fiction.

Partial RSS Feeds

If I can't see your entire post on the reader, and have to click on each post individually to get to your website, what's the freakin' point?

Dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb, dumb.

Tuesday, March 17, 2009

The Steel Remains

Richard Morgan became hands down my favorite sci-fi author on the basis of just his first novel, "Altered Carbon". The follow-ups were good, but not nearly as hard-hitting. "The Steel Remains" is the much-anticipated result of his effort to switch over to the fantasy genre. I think the only other fantasy book I've ever read was the Lord of the Rings, so I'm really no expert in the genre. "The Steel Remains" is good, but it's more like Morgan's second and later books than his first. Somewhere after that first book he started taking too long developing his characters' inner dialogs and flashbacks, and I simply have no patience for this. In real life you don't get to hear the inner dialog of the people around you. Ditto in good movies, voice-over narration being the crutch of the crappy director in my mind. So this book was good, competent, but nothing to write home about.

Sunday, March 15, 2009

Z

Unbearably thrilling political thriller. Hyper-kinetic editing. Blink and you miss.

All of the elements of the police procedural that are clichés today originate here. This is a flat-out masterpiece from Costa-Gavras. Just get over that it's set in Greece but everyone speaks French. It doesn't matter. As a denunciation of fascism, this is both hilarious and depressing.

And for film buffs, please note how the flashbacks are structured. Barely a few seconds, and yet they propel the film forward.

If you watch this at home, insist on a rule. No interruptions or pee breaks. You can't just stop a roller-coaster just because you have a pause button.

Oh, and over the closing credits, the translations lame out. They are hilariously spectacularly satiric in French, and just odd in English.

(The review is deliberately not talking about content. You are better off going into this movie without knowing anything.)