The San Diego Comic Con will have a True Noir panel this year. I won’t be in attendance – except by way of a pre-recorded video greeting – for various reasons, including the start of shooting my next indie film, Death by Fruitcake. But actors from the production will be present (names TBA) and director Robert Meyer Burnett will be on hand as will producer Mike Bawden.
If you’re at the con, you’ll get the first real preview of our fully immersive audio drama, True Noir: The Nathan Heller Casebooks, based on the first Heller novel, True Detective.
I’ve sat in on many recording sessions so far, via Zoom, and I believe about 80% of the recording is done, and I know director Rob Burnett is hard at work on the special effects and sound mix. Rob is doing a fantastic job. I can honestly say I’ve never been more excited about a project adapting my work, ever, and that includes the film of Road to Perdition and the HBO/Cinemax Quarry TV series.
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I had some very nice wishes from readers and friends of mine about my recent (brief) hospital stay. My cardioversion (in which I am jump-started like an old Buick to get my heart out of a-fib and back into regular rhythm) went very well. My recuperation has been minimal, and the hospital staff and my doctor were terrific.
So was my wife Barb, who was with me all the way (well, she had to leave while they were shocking me).
Two days later, I feel fine. Great, actually.
Thanks for your concern.
As a reward – a book giveaway next week!
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Heath Holland at Cereal at Midnight invited me on to discuss my ten favorite private eye movies. Take a look (but keep in mind these are presented not as the best but as my favorites…though the upper reachers of the list really are the best).
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I’ve been a steady moviegoer since grade school, and Barb and I, pre-Covid, pretty much went to one movie per week, even after the home video revolution. Since the pandemic, we go less frequently. But I remember what it was like in the ‘70s and ‘80s when you could see a movie and know you’d taken something great in.
Bonnie and Clyde (1967) changed my life. It rekindled my interest in true-crime-based movies and TV that had begun with The Untouchables TV series starring Robert Stack. I’d already been toying with the idea of writing a period private eye novel when Chinatown (1974) paved the way. It, too, changed my life. Dr. No and the Connery Bond movies that followed were similarly impactful, and some things I saw for the first time on TV – The Maltese Falcon (1941) and Kiss Me Deadly (1955) – certainly shaped me artistically. Add Gun Crazy (1950) to that list.
In the 1970s you never knew when something mind-blowing might greet you at the movie theater – from The Godfather showing how a crime novel could become an epic film to American Graffiti (1973) sending me back into rock ‘n’ roll after I thought I’d left being in a band behind me. This was an era where your weekend entertainment might include seeing for the first time The Exorcist, The French Connection, Dirty Harry, Point Blank, Get Carter, Jaws, Rocky, Star Wars, Rocky Horror Picture Show, Harold and Maude, and Phantom of the Paradise. This is not a definitive list, but it demonstrates movies that had an impact on me beyond the usual cinematic experience. I can easily say I have been influenced as much if not more by movies than even my beloved Hammett, Chandler, Cain and Spillane.
Robert Towne died last week. He joins the other giants who walked the earth and influenced little Allan Collins. So, of course, did Chester Gould, Al Capp and Will Eisner, moviemakers on the page.
And it didn’t stop with the ‘70s – the ‘80s were around the corner. You could settle down in your theater seat with your Coke and popcorn and Dots and, wham! There was Raiders of the Lost Arc or Road Warrior or Evil Dead II or Back to the Future or Robocop (with my pal Miguel Ferrer in it!).
And I’m just scratching the surface.
Seemed like every week or two or anyway once a month some movie would change your life – or anyway mine – out of nowhere. Not that the ‘90s were too shabby – Groundhog Day alone must be noted. And I’m not saying good stuff hasn’t appeared in the 2000’s.
But that experience of knowing you’d seen something life-changing, which was startlingly frequent in the ‘70s and ‘80s, hasn’t happened much in several decades, at least not to me.
Which brings me to Horizon: An America Saga (Chapter One). This is the first film I’ve seen in a long time that gave me that sort of feeling that something important had happened to me in the movie theater, and I don’t mean that just no babies were crying. No. This is the best film I’ve seen in ages (and only the first 1/4 of it is out there right now – with Part Two coming in August, and Part Three in production, although Part Four may be in danger because of the disappointing box office so far of Part One).
This is a sweeping (as we used to say) saga of the American west, going out of its way to tell a sprawling but coherent story of settlers, Native Americans, Old West towns, gunfighters, outlaws, families, wagon trains, the whole schmeer. Horizon is easy to follow, despite cutting back and forth between its four (as I count them) major story threads.
But it seems to confuse the poor little things under forty who can’t sit still long enough not to spill their popcorn. The complaint that Horizon is hard to follow – it isn’t, not at all – or that it’s slow – it isn’t, if somewhat leisurely at times, which is different – defeats the minds of the video-game damaged individuals who seem to dominate our multi-plex fare. The main complaint appears to be that there are just too many characters to keep track of, but also that there are too many story threads to weave in our brain-dead little consciousnesses, and where’s the action, anyway?…besides the opening attack by Indians on settlers and the closing attack of Whites on Indians that (rather brilliantly) bookend this first chapter. Of course, a viewer has to understand what the incredibly difficult, complicated partial subtitle “Chapter One” means.
Or that something like the incredibly tense meeting on a hillside by Kevin Costner’s taciturn saddle tramp and a chatty psychopathic young outlaw doesn’t represent “action.”
Look, I’m kind of pissed off about this. Let me take a slight left (or maybe right) turn and discuss the inability of some younger audience members to deal with nuance, or with storytelling that is less than breakneck, much less dealing with a story that cuts between various threads of that story.
I have taken to watching a good deal of YouTube. I do this chiefly because the bite-size nature available means I don’t have to commit to a feature film after, say, 11 p.m. when midnight is my cut-off for getting enough sleep. (Old men who shout at clouds need their beddy bye.) This has been beneficial to me, because I have access to some YouTubers (I admit that sounds like a description of someone floundering in a water park) whose opinions and approach resonate with me – for example, Robert Meyer Burnett (now a collaborator of mine), Heath Holland of Cereal at Midnight, and Ken on Mid Level Media. These are presences on YouTube that understand the medium. They aren’t the only ones, but the vast majority of the film-centric YouTubers are guys with beards and baseball caps in their basement exuding the charisma of a chunk of cheese. These are not class acts like Greg Mrvich of Ballistic BBQ, extolling outdoor cooking, or Jon Townsend of Townsends, which focuses on cooking circa the Revolutionary War (great history buff stuff).
It’s the reviewers who are the worst. Unlike Rob or Heath or Ken, these reviewers know next to nothing about how films are made and/or the history of film. And a good number of the reviews of Horizon are a prime example – these supposed lovers of film are bored, and see no interaction between characters in the various story threads or thematic connection either. Unlike Rob, Heath or Ken, many of these reviewers (I should say “reviewers”) make no attempt to meet a film on its own terms.
For about ten years I was the movie reviewer at the now-defunct (and much missed) Mystery Scene Magazine. I stopped after I’d written, produced and directed my film Mommy (1994), because I now knew how hard it is to make a movie. I realized that even making a bad or mediocre movie takes an enormous effort (which is not to say that I consider any of my own movies bad or mediocre, nor do I claim them as masterpieces). After making a movie, I stopped writing a regular review column (though I later wrote a similar column for Asian Cult Cinema, also departed and much missed, but restricted myself to writing only positive reviews). I have backtracked somewhat and occasionally do write a bad review of a movie (as opposed to a bad movie review), but I do so only reluctantly. I always think of the scene in Tim Burton’s Ed Wood where Orson Welles and Wood commiserate in a booth at (I believe) Musso & Frank’s about their mutual movie-making frustrations.
Know-it-all’s in backwards ball caps, beards and parental basements have no business delivering movie criticism unless they have something worthwhile to share. “I was bored,” “I almost feel asleep,” “Too many stories, too many characters,” etc. And yet this is how Kevin Costner’s 21st Century How the West Was Won has been greeted by many YouTube reviewers and some paid critics writing for actual national publications.
This is an abysmal period for movies. It’s all about kowtowing to Woke notions and an audience that doesn’t read and never did, has been sedated (if admittedly having their motor skills honed) by video games, and judges films by the car chase or explosion or other examples of the dangling-keys-in-front-of-an-infant school of criticism.
This does not mean that I think you have no right to not like Horizon. There are legitimate complaints that can be intelligently made, even if I might disagree with them. But consider this: “I don’t like westerns,” one attractive Black female YouTube reviewer said before dismissing Horizon on the following basis: it’s a western. An extremely full of himself YouTube reviewer, sitting next to his giggling girl friend (who had not seen the movie), complained of the boring composition of shots in the film and let us know how smart he thinks he is. Meanwhile my (limited) filmmaker’s eye perceived that almost any carefully composed frame of Horizon could be a framed image on a wall. Mine, anyway.
Look, every asshole has an opinion and you know the rest. I may be as full of crap here as, well, the run-of-the-mill basement-bound YouTube reviewers. But for those of you who like my fiction enough to stop by here and listen to me bloviate, I urge you not to listen to the Horizon naysayers.
Give it a try, and if possible don’t wait for streaming – those who dismiss this film as something that should have been a TV mini-series are apparently numb to the Utah vistas Horizon generously shares.
Now this isn’t exactly a review of Horizon. For that, let me repeat what I recently posted on Amazon (in response to a one-star scathing and astoundingly stupid review of Horizon):
This is the opposite of everything the one-star review of it, posted early on, claimed. Its four storylines are rich with character and incident comprising a How the West Was Won for a 21st Century audience. The emphasis is on the hardships the settlers, soldiers and saddle tramps all endured, sometimes out of their naïveté or greed and other times in their lack of choice for options when bad experiences and bad behavior drove them west. It’s no coincidence that it opens with the Indigenous people (the People) slaughtering settlers sadistically and ends with Whites slaughtering Indigenous people just as sadistically. The scenery is awe-inspiring, the shots deceptively well-composed in their simplicity, and the stories compelling — I know this movie has received some bad and mixed reviewes, particularly by YouTube dullards, but these reviews only reflect the limitations of modern audiences to know how to receive a movie that takes its time telling its interwoven (and it is interwoven) tale. The idea that this is slow and nothing happens reflects the mentality of viewers dulled by the swift, poor storytelling so common on movie screens today. Don’t wait for the inevitable reassessment — see it now, on a big movie screen. Then own it on physical media. This is Godfather level entertainment.
M.A.C.
