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All posts by Nick Kolakowski
Less is More When It Comes to Villains I’m coming around to the idea that the best way to kill a compelling villain isn’t bullets, fire, or magic—it’s giving them too much backstory. I was chatting the other day with a film producer about movie villains of the 1980s and 90s, Darth Vader and Hannibal Lecter in particular. How Vader was the icon of childhood nightmares, a black-hooded techno-reaper with a terrifying wheeze—and then the prequel trilogy revealed that, under his skull-like mask, he was nothing more than a whiny,Read More
Jordan Harper’s New Novel Really Is “A Violent Masterpiece” I’ve been reading Jordan Harper’s “A Violent Masterpiece,” and I’m calling it now: this is the best crime novel of the year. It’s a buzzing, screaming, bullet-quick plunge into the worst parts of Los Angeles. Rich people doing messy, evil things. Nightstalker journalists cruising the highways and byways. Black-bag PR and body cleanup. Serial killers and mercenaries. At first read, the staccato rhythms and the terminally damaged characters might remind you of a James Ellroy book, except “Masterpiece” feels more vitalRead More
‚The Black Dahlia‘ and Our Responsibility to the Past There’s an Anthony Bourdain quote I particularly love: Once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands. After finishing William J. Mann’s “Black Dahlia,” an exhaustive examination of L.A.’s arguably most famous murder case, my mind riffed on that quote: Once you’ve read about the real Elizabeth Short, you’ll never stop wanting to slap James Ellroy upside the head. If you’re a fan of true crume, chances are good you’re familiarRead More
“Man on Fire” is Next in Pop Culture’s Recycling Queue I first discovered A.J. Quinnell’s novel “Man on Fire” (1980) in the bathroom of Snowdonia, a bar in Astoria. Some wit had lined the shelves beside the sink with tattered, yellowed paperbacks from a bygone era, and I presumed customers were meant to help themselves. Like Mario Puzo’s “The Godfather” and Roderick Thorp’s “Nothing Lasts Forever” (adapted into “Die Hard”), “Man on Fire” is an example of a pulpy, largely forgettable novel that was eventually adapted into a memorable film.Read More
‚Cape Fear‘ and Pop Cultural Eternal Return Every generation gets the “Cape Fear” remake they deserve. The 1962 version of the film starred Robert Mitchum as Max Caddy, a psychotic ex-con on a rampage of revenge against the attorney (played by Gregory Peck) who put him in jail. Mitchum’s Cady is slimy, bitter, and increasingly dangerous as the movie progresses—he moves through its climactic setpiece with the tensed silence of an apex predator. He even fills the talky scenes with dark energy, helped in large part by director J. LeeRead More
“The Rip”: An Atypical Director Delivers a Typical Crime Thriller Is there any director more confounding than Joe Carnahan? His first film, “Narc” (2002), was a gritty thriller starring Jason Patric as an undercover cop suffering from PTSD after accidentally shooting a pregnant mom during an arrest; he’s paired with Ray Liotta as a bad lieutenant with a penchant for hurting suspects. With its grainy film stock and jerky handheld shots, it played like a grimier version of a 70s cop drama. But instead of playing out that thread andRead More
‘The Lowdown,’ Jim Thompson and the Ghosts of Noir Over on his most recent newsletter, critic and “punk whisperer” Jim Ruland makes an interesting assertion about crime fiction: “One my gripes against contemporary crime fiction is how conservative it is. All genre fiction is conservative in that it adheres to the conventions of the genre that set it apart from other forms of writing. Many contemporary writers take this as a cue to write conservatively, in other words to conform, reinforcing the tropes of crime, mystery, and suspense. This bores me.”Read More
How “Play Dirty” Did Richard Stark’s Parker Dirty I swear I never set out to write so much about Parker, the iconic thief who stomped his way through a whole bunch of Donald Westlake Richard Stark novels over the course of forty-odd years. Looking back, though, I realize I’ve written at least three essays about Parker for CrimeReads, along with various mentions in this column, in the Film Noir Foundation’s magazine, and so on. In any case, oops, I’m about to do it again, because I just sat through Shane Black’s “Play Dirty,”Read More
‘24’ and the Great Memory-Hole It’s funny how we’ve collectively memory-holed “24.” Fifteen years ago, the show—which followed the exploits of Jack Bauer, a counter-terrorism expert with deep-seated anger issues—was a ratings and awards juggernaut; but now, despite a regurgitative culture devoted to remaking old IP and pumping nostalgia for the shows and TV of yesteryear, it’s not even a blip on the radar. There are good reasons for this. The show was very much a reflection of a bad period in the American psyche, when the lingering trauma fromRead More
‚She Rides Shotgun‘ and the Making of Legends Way back in 2006, David Milch, the writer and producer of the HBO show “Deadwood,” sat down for an interview with American Heritage. He explained how the show was meant as a deconstruction of the old cowboy mythos that had dominated popular culture for a chunk of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, particularly Western movies. Key quote: “I’ve never really understood or cared for the conventions of the Western. I always thought they had more to do with what the Hays OfficeRead More
Where is Storytelling Going? There’s a new podcast episode with Nic Pizzolatto, the creator of “True Detective,” that covers a lot about the writing process, the so-called Golden Age of Television, and noir. Your ability to stick around for the whole two hours will probably hinge on your affinity for masculine navel-gazing, but there was one segment in particular that caught my ear—when Pizzolatto goes big with a theory about how we absorb art. I’m block-quoting for your convenience: “What I think happens is that forms and mediums are replaced in theRead More
As a longtime fan of Neal Stephenson—nobody’s better at inserting long, absorbing asides about esoteric nonfiction topics into otherwise blisteringly paced novels—I was intrigued by his latest missive about artificial intelligence. Stephenson is one of those wizards with an uncanny ability to predict the future; for instance, his novel “Cryptonomicon,” which I devoured in high school, anticipated the rise of cryptocurrency by roughly ten years (although his fictional characters back their online currency with real gold as opposed to a principle of artificial scarcity). His other books have toyed with theRead More
White Lotus and the Gentle Art of Hating Your Protagonists I come here not to praise the most recent season of “White Lotus,” nor to bury it, but to dig a moment into its characters—specifically, how those characters violate one of the more facile “rules” of screenwriting that have always driven me slightly insane. If you’ve ever sat through any kind of Screenwriting 101 course, you know that instructors often insist you make a character sympathetic, or at least empathetic. Nobody will buy your script if they don’t like yourRead More
“Den of Thieves 2”: Stealing from the Best When “Den of Thieves” came out in 2018, it sparked a fair amount of debate among folks who enjoy watching crime movies. Some belittled the flick as “meathead ‘Heat,’” blatantly ripping off the Michael Mann playbook down to the electronica soundtrack and the intricate robberies, albeit with a heftier dose of macho posturing. Others defended it as flawed but entertaining, especially Gerard Butler’s willingness to chew every bit of available scenery as a crooked cop hunting down the heist crew led by PabloRead More
‘Where the Bones Lie’ and the Engine of California Noir I first arrived in Los Angeles on a magazine assignment. A firefighting plane had almost crashed while extinguishing a wildfire in the nearby hills, prompting a massive investigation, and my editor wanted me to write a story about the brave pilots who regularly risked their lives to fight infernos from the air. He kept telling me to read Norman Maclean’s “Young Men and Fire,” a brilliant book; I didn’t have the heart to tell him I’d plowed through it yearsRead More
David Lynch and the Beautiful Weirdness This isn’t something I’ve ever admitted to anyone, but David Lynch’s “Mulholland Drive” is the only time I walked out of a theater before the movie was over. Granted, there were extenuating circumstances. I hadn’t registered the movie’s runtime before heading in, and I had somewhere else I needed to be. The incongruous row of frat boys behind me kept cheering at odd moments, throwing off my concentration, and besides, I wasn’t in the right headspace at that time in my life to handleRead More
Alex Garland’s ‘Civil War’: Hint of Things to Come? A few weeks before the U.S. election, I opted to watch “Civil War,” Alex Garland’s film about the United States collapsing into yet another rebellion. Topical, obviously. Plus, I’ve always liked Garland, who’s adept at binding complicated, often highly abstract concepts into speedy, midbudget sci-fi spectaculars—I’m thinking of the quantum computing and the debate over free will at the heart of “Devs,” or the physics-bending bomb the size of Kansas in “Sunshine.” “Civil War” envisions the U.S. split into a handfulRead More
‘Salem’s Lot’ and the Horror of a Stephen King Adaptation I’m not sure what compelled me to click ‘Play’ on the latest adaptation of “Salem’s Lot,” especially when there’s so much else out there in the aether. Maybe it’s because I always feel the urge to cram in a few horror movies in October. Or maybe it’s because I have a sentimental attachment to Stephen King’s original novel, which I read at a formative age and treated as a guidebook of sorts when learning to write a suspenseful sequence. SpoilerRead More
„Rebel Ridge“: Calmly Burn the Whole Thing Down Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: a righteous man rides into a corrupt town and cleanses it of sin. It’s Eastwood as the Man With No Name snarling You got a problem with my mule? and the Continental Op burning down Poisonville to save it and John Rambo blasting Main Street to kindling and… Yeah, you’ve heard it before. It’s a genre trope with the tread worn off. And that’s what makes “Rebel Ridge,” the new film by Jeremy Saulnier, so interesting:Read More
‘Monsieur Spade’ and the Faustian Bargain I’ve been reading Ed Simon’s “Devil’s Contract,” about the history of the Faustian bargain, while watching AMC’s six-episode mini-series “Monsieur Spade,” which transplants Dashiell Hammett’s Sam Spade to the South of France in the 1960s, and that combination has sparked a peculiar line of thought: the fictional private detective is a Faustian figure. Seen from that angle, the detective is something of an emissary, coming to collect on the devil’s behalf. Maybe you killed someone for a fortune, and even got away with it forRead More
Nick Kolakowski: John Woo is Remaking ‘The Killer.’ But Why? Directors don’t often remake their own movies. Off the top of my head, I can only think of Michael Haneke redoing “Funny Games” twenty years apart, Hitchcock giving “The Man Who Knew Too Much” a later-career revamp with a tweaked plot, and Takashi Shimizu directing both the Japanese and American versions of “The Grudge.” Such instances are few and far between, in other words. This isn’t suprising; given the effort it takes for even a powerful director to get aRead More
The Newest ‘Ripley’ Series is Stunning and Flawed Just last month, I was bemoaning a lack of “pure” noir series on American television. The main target of my ire was “Sugar,” an Apple TV series about a detective cruising the mean streets of Los Angeles after a missing girl—only for the plot to suddenly veer into science fiction, complete with space aliens. I almost tossed my TV controller across the room. However, the universe must have heard my complaints, because a few days later Netflix rolled out “Ripley,” a very expensive, eight-partRead More
‘Sugar’: Not the Neo-Noir Revival We Need Roughly a month ago—time gets a little slippery when you have a newborn—I was flicking through my streaming options on my iPad, intent on finding something to see me through the predawn hours. I stumbled upon “Sugar,” a new series on Apple TV+ starring the ever-reliable Colin Farrell as a private detective in Los Angeles. I was intrigued, of course. How often does a major studio (or a tech company playacting as a major studio) spend a substantial amount of money on aRead More
Moral Redemption in Noir: Is It Possible? The other night, I participated in a panel discussion hosted by Rock and a Hard Place Press, which produces one of my favorite crime-fiction magazines right now (along with some great anthologies). The topic was regret, memory, and the past in the context of film noir and crime fiction; I was joined by authors Chris Harding Thornton and Mike McHone, whose respective books you should definitely check out if you get the chance. Near the end of the session, the moderators (Stanton McCafferyRead More
What Makes Jack Reacher Tick? It took me a long time to warm up to Jack Reacher. When Lee Child published the first books in his long-running series about the gigantic brawler, I was still in high school and more focused on reading as many cerebral mysteries as I could find—locked-room murders and erudite detectives interested me more than fisticuffs. My opinion changed a decade later, when my job as a journalist necessitated I spend most of my time on the road, often trapped in airports large andRead More
‘True Detective: Night Country’ Tries to Make the Familiar into Something New As a series, “True Detective” has always been strongest when focused on characters instead of plot. For example, the chemistry between Matthew McConaughey (as haunted detective Rust Cohle) and Woody Harrelson (as ostensibly upstanding but deeply cracked detective Marty Hart) is what made the show’s first season so iconic; but ask a viewer to break down the actual story, and they’d probably mutter something about serial killers and corrupt families before trailing off into silence. It was aRead More
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STELLA'S VOICE
Stella Sinatras URknall
Stella liest. “Writers writing on writers“ – das klingt wie Dada, wie Gertrude Stein. Eliot Weinberger hat die Kategorie erfunden, oder gefunden, jedenfalls gibt es sie, yes, sagt Stella, yes yes. Julia Howe: „My voice formed from my life belongs to no one else.” Das Leben eines Avatars. Stella die Stimme, Stella die Pose – und nu? – Berühre mich, fordert D. Wie soll das genau gehen. Wo wir am Ende alle, etc. – Try-out. Stella die vorgeschickt wird. Die sucht und findet: die innere Leere. So still wie die Stille hinter den Geräuschen, die irgendetwas mit dem Weltall zu tun hat (vermutet Stella).
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