About a decade ago I was tipped off to an odd, inscrutable film by a budding English director living in LA. Christopher Nolan's Memento, which starred Guy Pearce in an ill-fitting pale suit and bleached hair, knocked me out, and I spent an afternoon talking about movies, memory and fragmented narrative with the 30-year old director at his apartment near the LACMA while he played Radiohead's Kid A … [Read more...]
The Killer Inside Jim Thompson
WITH the film adaptation of Michael Winterbotton’s The Killer Inside Me opening in Los Angeles today, I turned to the author's biographer for insight into this very complicated pulp figure. If there is a better biography of an American writer than Robert Polito’s Savage Art, I’ve not read it. (The book won the National Book Critics Circle Award.)Polito’s book describes Thompson as a “profoundly … [Read more...]
The Killer Inside Casey Affleck
RECENTLY I spent some time with Casey Affleck, who appears in Michael Winterbottom's adaptation of the Jim Thompson noir novel, The Killer Inside Me.I don’t often write about actors – I’m not usually that curious about their inner worlds the way I am with novelists, musicians, or directors – but Casey Affleck is so strong, and so elusive, in his films that I welcomed the chance to sit down with … [Read more...]
The Return of LA Noir
ONE of LA's greatest exports has always been dread, and our signature writer is still, three quarters of a century later, noir novelist Raymond Chandler. And now, thanks to a new anthology, all that murder, deception and unpleasantness is back.A few years back, local mystery writer Denise Hamilton (The Last Embrace) and Brooklyn's Akashic Books put together a collection called Los Angeles Noir … [Read more...]
Martin Scorsese vs. "Shutter Island"
THIS winter in LA it has been raining, as we used to say in high school, like a mofo, and every times the heavens open I think of the upcoming Martin Scorsese film, Shutter Island. The film, which opens on Friday the 19th, is based on a novel by Dennis Lehane that is so gripping, so full of twists and turns, that it almost ruined a vacation last summer since I kept retreating to the basement to … [Read more...]
Robert Crais vs. LA Noir
TOMORROW is the release date for the new novel by Robert Crais, "The First Rule." Crime fiction aficionados know Crais as a deft, literate writer with a strong sense of place and of social history -- one of the great inheritors of Ross Macdonald in the world of West Coast noir.HERE is my profile of Crais, who is one of the best adjusted novelists I've ever spoken to -- someone who seems … [Read more...]
Ross MacDonald and California
Sometimes it's the outsiders who tell us the most. And Ross Macdonald, the Canadian-reared detective novelist who spent most of his career in and around Santa Barbara, wrote some of the most enduring private eye novels set in the Golden State as well as, between the lines, some of the best social history of the postwar period.HERE is my piece on the work and life of MacDonald (1915-'83), who would … [Read more...]
Thomas Pynchon as LA Writer
ONE of the highlights of the Guadalajara International Book Festival -- devoted this year to the literature of Los Angeles -- was a panel considering Thomas Pynchon's California Trilogy. This means "The Crying of Lot 49," his shortest and perhaps finest novel; "Vineland," set largely in Mendocino County and perhaps his slightest work; and "Inherent Vice," a neo-noir set in the South Bay at the end … [Read more...]
Amanda Knox and Italian Noir
THE strange case of Amanda Knox -- a cute American exchange student accused of killing her British roomate -- just took a yet stranger turn as she was convicted of the murder as part of a bizarre sex game. (She is sentenced to 26 years in prison; the family will appeal.)The fact that this took place in Perugia, the capital of the lovely and green Italian region of Umbria, known as the land of the … [Read more...]
Raymond Chandler’s Los Angeles
BOOKS on chandler's LA have become a kind of cottage industry. still, i'm enjoying a new book of photographs called "daylight noir: raymond chandler's imagined city." the book could be a companion volume to judith freeman's "the long embrace," which visited the dozens of SoCal locations in which the novelist lived with his elusive wife cissy, tho the aesthetic of "daylight noir" is starker and … [Read more...]