Category Archives: 1990s American crime films

Roger Donaldson double feature: Sleeping Dogs (1977) and Smash Palace (1981)

To the degree that I was familiar with the film career of director Roger Donaldson, it was probably because he made what I would argue is one of the best American thrillers of the eighties, No Way Out (1987).

Donaldson actually had a pretty lengthy and productive directorial career after he decamped to Hollywood in the early 1980s from his native New Zealand: The Bounty (1984), Marie (1985), Cocktail (1988 – a terrible but successful film which gets a pass from me only because it features another Antipodean who was making his way in the US film industry in the 1980s, Bryan Brown), the psychological thriller, White Sands (1992), the wonderful hot garbage that was his 1994 remake of Jim Thompson’s The Getaway, with Alec Baldwin and Kim Basinger, and the better than average action sci fi film, Species (1995).

But over the weekend I finally caught up with the two New Zealand films that Donaldson cut his teeth on as a director and which got him noticed internationally, Sleeping Dogs (1977) and Smash Palace (1981). I don’t want to go into too much detail but having finally watched them I wanted to write a little about them, because both of them are excellent.

Sleeping Dogs was Donaldson’s first film and tells the story of a loner, simply known as Smith (a very young Sam Neill), who is estranged from his family and living in a remote part of the country when he is reluctantly swept up in an underground revolutionary movement that is fighting against a right-wing dictatorial government that has taken over New Zealand.… Read more

“Go. Sleep badly. Any questions, hesitate to call.” Projection Booth episode 463: Kiss Kiss Bang Bang

Okay everyone, time to stop watching Tiger King and get into to some quality popular culture.

Episode 463 of one my favourite film podcasts has just hit the airwaves and is on the 2005 crime film, Kiss Kiss Bang Bang. You can access the episode in full from the Projection Booth website at this link.

I join the hardest working man in podcasting, Projection Booth host, Mike White, and crime writer, Jedidiah Ayres, to discuss this deceptively complex piece of crime cinema. Mike also did an interview with the film’s director, Shane Black.

Among the things we cover in this show are the film’s myriad of pop culture references, everything from Sunset Boulevard (1950) to the long running Mike Shayne private investigator pulp series by Brett Halliday, its links to the work of Raymond Chandler, and what one of us (okay, it was me) termed ‘the Shane Black formula’ of film making and storytelling. We also give a lot of love to his other films, particularly the misanthropic delight of The Last Boy Scout (1991), and discuss Kiss Kiss Bang Bang’s metafictional elements. … Read more

Book review: Thailand’s Movie Theatres – Relics, Ruins and the Romance of Escape

I can’t remember when I first stumbled across Philip Jablon’s wonderful website chronicling the decline of the stand-alone movie theatre in Thailand, The Southeast Asia Movie Theatre Project. I think it was soon after I arrived back in Melbourne after a year in Cambodia, during which I spent my own fair share of time tracking down and photographing crumbling Khmer movie theatres (I also nearly broke my neck photographing the inside of an abandoned cinema in the Lao capital, Vientiane, but that’s another story).

My efforts, however, pale in comparison to Jablon’s painstaking work. His book, Thailand’s Movie Theatres: Relics, Ruins and the Romance of Escape, which emerged from his website, is a detailed, perceptive, beautifully rendered examination not only of the rise and fall of Thailand’s stand-alone cinema industry, but of a once powerful part of the country’s public culture which has now almost completely disappeared. As Jablon writes, ‘In Thailand, the standalone movie theatre represents a form of public entertainment that has all but slipped through the cracks of memory into the abyss of time.’

The first stand-alone cinema was established in Thailand in 1905. They proliferated rapidly, with the country boasting as many as 700 at the industry’s peak. Often established by local entrepreneurs, these movie theatres were usually a dynamic part of their community and deeply enmeshed in their economic and social life.… Read more

Nothing but one big shill #2

Yes, another post devoted  to shamelessly shilling my own stuff. Again.

Well, not just my own stuff.

First up, I was happy to learn that the anthology I contributed a story to, The Obama Inheritance: Fifteen Stories of Conspiracy Noir, published by the New York based independent publisher, Three Rooms Press, has just won the 2018 Anthony Award for best fiction anthology,

The Anthony Awards are literary awards for mystery writers presented at the annual Bouchercon World Mystery Convention in the US. They are named for Anthony Boucher (1911–1968), one of the founders of the Mystery Writers of America, and a pretty big deal.

The anthology contains fifteen stories of pulpy goodness, featuring robots, lizard people, vigilante killers and various other bizarre creations riffing off the conspiracy theories association with the Obama presidency (although I believe the current occupant of the White House also gets a nod), and was edited by one of the hardest working men in crime fiction, Gary Phillips, critically acclaimed author of mystery and graphic novels.

Anyway, if you have not already picked up the anthology, I reckon the news it has won an Anthony should be as good an incentive as you need to do so.

It features stories by a host of talented writers, including big guns such as Walter Mosley and Robert Silverberg.… Read more

Continental Crime: A YouTube reading

In late 2017, LA based author, Eric Beetner and I discussed doing a crime reading reading on YouTube to mark the release of novels we both had coming out earlier this year through the same publisher, Down and Out Books. The idea sort of grew from there to encompass an author either based in or who had written fiction from at least one country in continent on the earth (with the exception of Antartica).

In addition to myself reading from Gunshine State and Eric reading from his novel, Rum Runners, the list includes Matthew IdenSteph Broadribb, Mike NicolElka Ray and Claudia Piñeiro.

For reasons which are obvious in retrospect, but didn’t seem so at the time, putting this together was not as easy as we thought it would be and took a long longer than we planned. In particularly, my take home lesson is crime fiction from Latin and South American is really underexposed outside that region.

Anyway we decided to call our YouTube reading Continental Crime. Hopefully you find a new voice you like and get exposed to the wonderful world of reading books from different cultures. A big thanks to Eric’s editing skills for pulling the final product together.

Enjoy.

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