Word: sleuths
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Barker's business--danger, and itemized deductions. An accountant (Andy Richter) finds that his new strip-mall office comes with extras: the clientele of the previous tenant, a private dick. He takes on a case, awakening a stirring in his cream-filled soul, and opens a sideline as a sleuth. Richter (reteaming with Conan O'Brien, the show's co-creator) is charming as an Everyman dipping his toe into adventure, uttering G-rated curses ("Oh, Mother Hubbard!") and signaling his lane changes during 45-m.p.h. freeway chases. Fasten your seat belts; it's going to be a funny ride...
DIED. Iwao Takamoto, 81, Japanese-American animator who created the canine cartoon sleuth Scooby-Doo; in Los Angeles. Interned with his family in California during World War II, Takamoto first learned illustration from his fellow detainees. After the war, he apprenticed at Walt Disney Studios, where he worked on films that included Cinderella and Peter Pan. In 1961 he joined Hanna-Barbera, where he designed characters for Scooby-Doo (whose name Takamoto took from a scat line in the Frank Sinatra song Strangers in the Night) as well as for TV cartoons, including The Flintstones and The Jetsons...
Justice is murder for Dexter Morgan (Michael C. Hall), a part-time sleuth and--oh, yeah--serial killer who learned young to put his deadly urges to productive use by slaughtering only bad guys. Hall's composed, self-aware performance is flat-out stunning, and so is the treatment of this psychoprocedural's central idea: Is it a man's thoughts or his actions that make him good or evil...
...especially indebted to Anthony Shaffer's play and film Sleuth, in which the wily perpetrator revels in elaborate gamesmanship, with a soupcon of sadism and a killer of a kicker. The talking doll in Saw is a direct descendant of a toy that the Sleuth perp uses for malevolent effect. In a 2001 interview, Shaffer said he was inspired to write his mystery after taking part in one of Stephen Sondheim's maniacally elaborate treasure hunts. One clue directed players to a nearly deserted town near a lake. When they found the pertinent clue, a hand jutted...
...that Saw, let alone either of its sequels, is within hailing distance of a masterpiece. A mind game like this requires good actors to give it heft and plausibility. I'm not asking for today's equivalents of Laurence Olivier and Michael Caine, the stars of the Sleuth movie, but there's more to acting, even horror movie acting, than screaming in agony and shouting in rage. Whannel (who is charm personified when chatting about the film on the DVD featurette) and Elwes can't manage the crucial middle range of emotions the two men have to feel...