Detectives Beyond Borders talks movies on The Projection Booth

I'm a guest on Episode 243 of Mike White and Rob St. Mary's Projection Booth podcast, discussing Jean-Pierre Melville's splendid and seminal 1967 gangster movie Le Samouraï, starring Alain Delon, and Jim Jarmusch's Ghost Dog: Way of the Samurai.

The show is just as much fun as Mystery Science Theater 3000 but with more insight and fewer robots, and you can download it or listen to is at the Projection Booth website. When you're done, go back and listen to earlier episodes. I especially like Mike and Rob's discussion of The Limey.

© Peter Rozovsky 2015

Fantômas follow-up and a saga's story-telling

Mike White posts a link to "How to watch Fantômas and why."

And, in the department of proto-crime stories, comes this transition between sections of Kormak's Saga, an Icelandic saga set in the tenth century and likely composed during the thirteenth:

"Kormak hesitated.

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"There was a woman of evil character named Thordis ..."

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Here's an English translation of Kormak's Saga, though its rendering of the excerpt above is less suggestive of suspense and femmes fatales. And here's the saga in its original language, if your Icelandic is up to par.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

Pre-con recon at Noircon

#Noircon2010 starts Thursday evening, but a few of us got an early start Wednesday at a reading from Impossibly Funky: A Cashiers du Cinemart Collection.

I didn't know "Cashiers ... " during its incarnation as a movie and popular-culture 'zine, but I loved the reminiscences Mike White read of his days working at a big movie theater. And I got a great kick out of co-author Chris Cummins' discussion of Gremlins, its screenplay, and its weird novelization. I may yet turn out to be a geek after all.

Afterward, got a jump on Noircon socializing with fellow attendees including Anita Thompson, Ed Pettit, Duane Swierczynski, Dennis Tafoya and Scott Phillips.

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Also today, some good news from super-organizer Jon Jordan about Bouchercon 2011 in St. Louis: "The hotel assures me that the bar will be open to the legal limit each night as long as things don't get crazy. So as long as no one is dancing nude on the bar we should be good to go on that front."
See you in St. Louis!

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This is Detectives Beyond Borders' 1,500th post.

© Peter Rozovsky 2010