Word: thriller
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...Befitting a B-minus exploitation film, that steely speech is in the 30-sec. TV spot that sold Taken as a smart thriller and that will probably land the movie at No. 1 for the weekend. But if a movie's high points are a quick smack of carnage and a steely speech that everyone's already seen in the trailer, you know it must be January. That's the time of year when no film is bad enough to go direct to DVD, and studios dump their slag on a public eager to flee from all those high-minded...
...stranded his cast in dialogue scenes with lumpy rhythms and action choreography that has a low plausibility factor, I'd guess that Taken means to be a critique of a man as fascinated by his daughter's endangered purity as her predators are - and, by extension, of the thriller genre's obsessive hero. Back in the '70s, a cop film mined the similarities between the man with the badge and the criminal he hunted. That was The French Connection, whose wary sympathy for, and exposé of, the cop played by Gene Hackman won the movie an Oscar for Best...
...Harvard women’s tennis team opened up its spring season last Saturday with a down-to-the-wire thriller against Boston University. With the overall team score tied, 3-3, the final point came down to freshman Samantha Gridley’s match in the No. 5 singles position. The freshman dropped the first set, 7-6, but then forced a decisive final frame by taking the second set, 7-5. Despite a hard-fought battle, Gridley ultimately fell in the third-set tiebreaker. The defeat gave the Terriers a 4-3 victory over the Crimson. Although...
...world of The Associate is subtly distinct from our own reality. Take a look at a thriller like Daemon, by Daniel Suarez, a software consultant who actually understands how cutting-edge networks work. This is a book that's got the shock of the new, that's so fresh and well-informed that it's still covered in metal shavings and PVC dust. Reality is everywhere in Daemon, and it's exciting and scary. But who wants to be excited and scared all the time? The Associate is high-calorie comfort food, a thriller that doesn't actually thrill...
Daniel Suarez, a software consultant in Los Angeles, sent his techno-thriller Daemon to 48 literary agents. No go. So he self-published instead. Bit by bit, bloggers got behind Daemon. Eventually Penguin noticed and bought it and a sequel for a sum in the high six figures. "I really see a future in doing that," Suarez says, "where agencies would monitor the performance of self-published books, in a sort of Darwinian selection process, and see what bubbles to the surface. I think of it as crowd-sourcing the manuscript-submission process...