The golden age of hyper-violent crime comedy

I watched Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (1998) and The Boondock Saints (1999) again this week. (Has it really been that long since the golden age of ultra-violent comic crime movies?)

As much as I hesitate to say anything good about anyone who married Madonna, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels (directed by Guy Ritchie) holds up better. The script is intelligently assembled, the story accommodates and makes good narrative use of its own quirkiness, and clever sound engineering makes the movie more than a highly kinetic music video.  I especially like the simple device by which the movie makes the crook protagonists more sympathetic than the competing gangs of crooks who surround and come into conflict with them.

The Boondock Saints? I'll tell you about that one tomorrow. For now, Willem Dafoe steals the movie as a brilliant eccentric, only to turn fritter away some of his gains when the movie suddenly can't figure out what to do with him. First he becomes merely eccentric, and then the script humanizes him, with disappointing results.

© Peter Rozovsky 2014

If you like X, you'll love Y

A colleague who knows I read crime fiction asked if I liked Guy Ritchie's slam-bang English gangster movies.

I did, I said, and I suggested that if he liked those movies, he might enjoy reading Allan Guthrie and Ken Bruen, his Brant and Roberts novels and his three collaborations with Jason Starr especially.

Then I thought, isn't this a fine way for authors and publishers to find new readers? Find out what people like to do, watch or think about, then suggest books to match. And you can help! Just fill in the blanks in this simple equation

If you like non-book X, you'll love book (or author) Y

Thanks, and have fun!

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

New Guy Ritchie movie honors Irish crime writer

Well, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was born in Edinburgh, but the Doyles were an Irish Catholic family, and Doyle's mother was Mary Foley.

OK, I admit that that was just a hook. I mentioned it because several minor characters in the new Guy Ritchie/Robert Downey Jr./Jude Law movie, Sherlock Holmes, speak with what sound to me like Irish accents. I eagerly anticipate a critique from the blogosphere's leading critic of Irish accents in movies.

More notable is a scene of Holmes fighting a bare-knuckles boxing match to the accompaniment of Luke Kelly and the Dubliners singing "Rocky Road to Dublin," even though the band members did not write the song, as the movie's credits say they did.

The film also makes interesting use of the vaunted Holmes logical method, alluding to it at the very beginning, and then having Holmes do so just a time or two later on. This lets Guy Ritchie do his action/special effects thing without getting bogged down in old-fashioned mannerisms.

What other contemporary touches does Ritchie bring? In the aforementioned fight scene, he turns Holmes' famed logical method into a kind of Zen-like meditation that will be familiar to a generation raised on latter-day, glossy martial-arts-influenced movies. And the central plot strand, more thriller than detective tale, has a steam-punk overtone.

Robert Downey's Sherlock Holmes is more dissipated than the typical Holmes, falling into a depressed funk and letting his room fall into an alarming state of disorder. (The emphasis on the dark side goes only so far, though. Holmes used cocaine, but probably could not be shown doing so in today's moral environment. See Smithsonian.com for interesting speculation on a possible literary source for the darker side of Sherlock Holmes. That source, too, is Irish.)

That's how Guy Ritchie updates Sherlock Holmes. How do other directors update old stories?

© Peter Rozovsky 2009