Word: pulp
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Charles Ardai was born too late. He's a dotcom success story--founder and CEO of Juno--but his first love was pulp fiction: those seamy, seedy, hard-boiled paperbacks from the 1940s and '50s, the kind with a hot broad and a cold, stiff drink on the cover. Ardai, 36, missed the great age of pulp, so after Juno merged with a competitor in 2001 and he had time and money to burn, he founded his own press, Hard Case Crime. Now he makes 'em like they used...
...about union politics, a flu epidemic, immigration, baseball, an Irish cop and a black fugitive in Boston in 1919? He's gone big and literary on us, and the results are part home run and part homework. But he hasn't forgotten where he came from: there's great pulp storytelling in here...
...been his prime by curling inside the legend of the Difficult Star, acquiring an odor as rowdy and unreliable. And since he wasn't a box office magnet, why take the chance? Bio stats on the Internet Movie Database synopsize Rourke's 90s: "Turned down Bruce Willis' role in Pulp Fiction ... Filmed a role in [Terrence Malick's] The Thin Red Line, that eventually got cut.... Walked off the set of Luck of the Draw when the producers refused to let him include his pet chihuahua in the movie." Instead, Rourke, who had been a serious amateur boxer...
...Presumably unable to afford clearances for pop songs, Mackenzie papered the soundtrack with rock and doo-wop numbers written by Anthony Hilder and performed by his group The Revels (one of whose songs, "Comanche," is played in Pulp Fiction.) All the dialogue from TV shows and movies, all the commercials and DJ patter, Mackenzie's team made that up too. Nearly four years after it was begun, the film had its premiere at the 1961 Venice Film Festival and was bought by a U.S. distributor, but it was licensed only in a 16mm version to schools and churches. It never...
...rethinking and transcending of a schlock source, The Dark Knight is up there with David Cronenberg's 1986 version of The Fly. It turns pulp into dark poetry. Just as that movie found metaphors of cancer, AIDS and death in the story of a man devolving into an insect, so this one plumbs the nature of identity. Who are we? Has Bruce lost himself in the myth of the hero? Is his Batman persona a mission or an affliction? Can crusading Dent live down the nickname (Two-Face) some rancorous cops have pinned on him? Only the Joker seems unconflicted...