Word: fiction
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...Killers Robert Siodmak, Don Siegel The Ernest Hemingway story, about two tough guys in a diner, is one of the most influential works in American lit; without it, no Pulp Fiction. The 1946 movie expands the action with a long flashback about the gangster's prey, a haunted boxer called Swede (Burt Lancaster in his first movie). The 1964 version has murderous Lee Marvin tangling with the even more venal Ronald Reagan (in his last movie). The set also includes a third film, a short by renegade Soviet auteur Andrei Tarkovsky...
...literary pursuits. Zapatista spokesman SUBCOMANDANTE MARCOS has co-written a noir mystery novel, The Uncomfortable Dead, with Spanish crime author Paco Ignacio Taibo II. The story of detectives investigating a government-backed murderer, due in U.S. bookstores next month, isn't the masked rebel's first stab at fiction. In 1999, Marcos, a former professor who travels with a pet rooster, wrote a children's book, Story of the Colors. His new work is an effort to raise awareness of the Zapatistas and cash for charity. Nice try. But he seems to be ignoring another cash cow. Nothing says back...
...Susan Sontag defined science fiction as "the imagination of disaster." Today, that definition could apply to international news - and not just in our imaginations. It's the anticipation of disaster. Moviemakers want to profit from our fears as well as our desires; that's their business. But they stick to fears of a smaller, more intimate kind: the serial killer with a knife, the snakes on a plane. They're reluctant to think about the Big Fear, because that fear is too close to the headlines, and about the current Big Villains, because that means Islamic extremists. In Hollywood today...
Since the film is, according to the production notes, “based on the true life events” of these men, it’s hard to say what actually happened and what’s Hollywood fiction, but the moment fireballs go whizzing past Jimeno’s face (against gravity, no less), I begin to wonder how many liberties Berloff took with her script...
...Ronald K.L. Collins and David M. Skover, a comprehensive, smartly written overview of Lenny's mixture of "black music, white powder and blue comedy" legal troubles; the book comes with a 74min. CD, narrated by Nat Hentoff and featuring many of Lenny's most notorious bits. In fiction, Jonathan Goldstein's Lenny Bruce is Dead is mum about its putative subject, but as a free-form monologue it's firmly in the Bruce tradition...