Because everyone else is doing it ...

Most Hated Movie: Dressed to Kill/Batman Begins
Movie I think is overrated: The Big Lebowski
Movie I love: Big Deal on Madonna Street
Favorite Horror: Freaks
Favorite Comedy: Annie Hall
Favorite Sci Fi Movie: Blade Runner
Favorite Super Hero Movie: Superman II
Favorite War Movie: Foreign Correspondent
Favorite Western: The Searchers
Favorite Japanese movie: Stray Dog

Favorite Italian movies: Amarcord/Big Deal on Madonna Street
Favorite French movie: Grand Illusion

Favorite Hindi musical heist-gone-wrong movie: Kaante
Favorite silent movie: The General
Childhood Favorite: The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (or one of those Sinbad movies, anyhow)
Favorite Franchise: I don’t like “franchises.”
Favorite Director: Alfred Hitchcock/Howard Hawks

Takashi Shimura

Favorite Actor: Takashi Shimura
Favorite Actress: Myrna Loy
Favorite genre/character actor: Elisha Cook Jr.
Most talented cinematic figures: Buster Keaton/Alfred Hitchcock
Favorite movie seen recently: Elevator to the Gallows
Favorite movie of all time: Trouble in Paradise
Special award: To Sight and Sound which, out of Citizen Kane fatigue, named Vertigo the best film of all time. Memory tells me that Vertigo, while a fine movie, is not even one of Hitchcock's three best.

© Peter Rozovsky 2017

A newspaper's list of international crime fiction

Not so terribly long ago, the Christian Science Monitor published a list of Top 7 detective series set in foreign locales. Here's the list:

1. The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series, by Alexander McCall Smith
2. Andrea Camilleri's novels about Salvo Montalbano.  
3. The Dr. Siri Paiboun series, by Colin Cotterill 
4. The Yashim the Eunuch series, by Jason Goodwin  
5. The Omar Yussef mysteries, by Matt Beynon Rees  
6. Qiu Xiaolong's Inspector Chen Cao novels set in Shanghai 
7. The Nayir Sharqi and Katya Hijazi novels, by Zoë Ferraris

 © Peter Rozovsky 2011

Whom have you read for the first time in 2010?

Here are the authors whose work I've read for the first time this year. (Hat tips to Jeff Pierce at the Rap Sheet and Brian Lindenmuth.) Whom have you read for the first time in 2010?

• Yishai Sarid

• Roger Smith

• Meshack Masondo

• Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö

• Olen Steinhauer

• Mike Hodges

• Ted Lewis

• Geoff McGeachin

• William McIlvanney

• Donna Moore

• Max Allan Collins

• Nicolas Bouvier

• Alix Bosco

• Vanda Symon

• Surender Mohan Pathak

• John McAllister

• Sam Millar

• Caryl Férey

• James McClure

• Tonino Benacquista

• Michael Moorcock

• Ed Brubaker

• Greg Rucka

• Colin Bateman

• Neil Cross

• Maurice Gee

• Lindy Kelly

• Stuart Neville

• Kevin McCarthy

• Alan Glynn

• Michael Stanley

• Lisa Brackmann

• James R. Benn

• Jassy Mackenzie

• Cara Black

• Christopher G. Moore

• Don Winslow

• Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre

© Peter Rozovsky 2010

From a whisper to a meme

Just when I thought memes had gone the way of non-Blu-Ray discs, here comes a new one that is easy, fun and almost painless: Brian Lindenmuth, of the you-should-read-it Observations from the Balcony blog, tagged me with one that asks readers to:

1) List the authors that were new to you this year, regardless of year of publication.
2) Bold-face the ones that were debuts (first novel, published in 2008).
3) Impose these conditions on others.

I like that. It's simple, and it brings back memories of some of the year's exciting crime-fiction discoveries. I'm not sure which were published in 2008, but here's the list of authors I've read for the first time this year:

Matt Rees
Giles Blunt
Steve Hockensmith
Jasper Fforde
Michael Pearce
Arthur Morrison
Michael Gilbert
Scott Phillips
Duane Swierczynski
Christa Faust
Vicki Hendricks
Leighton Gage
Timothy Hallinan
Sandra Ruttan
Robert Bloch
Mehmet Murat Somer
Megan Abbott
Brian McGilloway
Frank Gruber
Ian Sansom
J.F. Englert
Howard Engel
John McFetridge
Adrian McKinty
E.W. Hornung
Garbhan Downey
Flann O'Brien
Linda L. Richards
Henry Chang
John Lawton
Jason Aaron
Alan Moore
Deon Meyer
Amara Lakhous
Carlo Emilio Gadda
Jacques Chessex

I'll tag Whose role is it anyway?, Linda L. Richards, Past Continuous, Crime Scraps, and the polyblogal seanag, all of whose blogs you ought to read. If you're not on that list, feel free to reply anyway and let me know which authors you have read for the first time this year.

© Peter Rozovsky 2008