Cliffhanger

Cliffhanger is considered a climbing classic, although it is reviled in climbing circles as being grossly inaccurate, and it's now available on Hulu. The only accurate-looking climbing in the movie is during the opening scene. The rest of the climbing basically consists of insane campus and dyno moves. In fact, I can't do a single move shown in the movie. The movie also features an insane bolt gun, that fires bolts (which, in real life, are a total pain in the ass to install) directly into rock. We wish! Even so, the movie's pretty fun. The bad guy sucks, but all the good guys are likable. I was impressed with the movie itself, which I watched spontaneously, but I'm becoming more and more critical the more I read about it...

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.

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.

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.)

The Barnes Foundation

This is the greatest museum of modern art that nobody has ever heard of.

Albert Barnes made a fortune in pharmaceuticals (preventing syphilis transmission between mother and child during childbirth, in case you were curious) and he dumped the entire fortune into art. His foundation owns 180+ paintings by Renoir, 69 Cézannes, and 60-odd Matisses.

And these are not minor Matisse paintings either. Each one is a major masterpiece. And Matisse painted a mural in the hall himself. In fact, this is possibly the greatest collection of Matisses anywhere in the world.

There are 800-odd paintings, and the total list of artists is like the whos-who of modern art (van Gogh, Picasso, Chirico, Klee, Modigliani, Monet, Manet, Seurat, Prendergast, Gauguin.)

It's in a remote suburb of Philly (for now - it's all very complicated - there's a lawsuit in the works.)

They keep an extraordinary tight control on the images so for now, you will just have to believe this review. Or buy their books. Or go there.

Hancock

What did the reviewers see in this? It was bad, atrociously bad. Not even make-fun-of-it bad. Just bad.

And you don't even get Will Smith naked! Nor the woman. Or a bad sex scene. So what was the point again?