Search Results for: hell is a city

Sicario, the myth of American innocence & the war on drugs

Posted on September 29, 2015 by Andrew Nette| 6 Comments

SicarioIn the mid-nineties, my brother and I drove all the way down the west coast of Mexico, stopped in Guatemala for a couple of weeks, then drove up Mexico’s eastern coast to Texas and onto Florida. Our time in Mexico was pretty much problem free (with the exception of the time we were pulled over by narcotics police at a check point on a remote stretch of road outside Cancun and my brother dissed one of the cops – but that’s another story). Indeed, the only instance in which we were threatened with genuine violence occurred not in Mexico but when gun was pulled on us in a bar in Miami. I struggled to reconcile my memories of Mexico as I watched Denis Villeneuve’s Sicario.

Sicario (warning, spoilers follow) opens with a group of police, led by Kate Macer (Emily Blunt) busting into a house in the outer suburbs of Phoenix, suspected of having links to one of the Mexican drug cartels. There they make a gruesome discover. Entombed in the plasterboard walls are numerous corpses, wrapped in plastic, the victims of cartel kidnapping and murder. No sooner have forensics arrived to start cataloguing the bodies, then a bomb goes off in the backyard, killing two of the officers.

Kate is called into a meeting with her superiors and a mysterious man called Graver (Josh Brolin) and asked whether she wants to volunteer for a new assignment.… Read more

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Posted in Crime fiction and film from Latin and Central America, Crime film, True crime

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The marathon man: 6 great roles of Roy Scheider

Posted on September 15, 2015 by Andrew Nette| 8 Comments

Scheider 1I’ve been a long time fan of American actor Roy Scheider. But it was only after a recent viewing of his performance in the Alan J Pakula’s 1971 film, Klute, I realised despite having seen and liked him in a number of films I knew very little about his overall career.

I recently reviewed Klute on this site here, so I won’t go into further detail about the film except to say that Scheider is great as Bree Daniel’s former pimp, Frank Ligourin. His is not a large role, just one or two short scenes, but his presence elevates the entire movie and gives it an additional layer of malevolence. That’s Scheider in every movie I’ve seen him in. He elevates and heightens what’s already present.

Scheider could act and had a great presence, his ropey, perpetually suntanned body and his slightly askew, angular face with the broken nose, a legacy of his time boxing in New Jersey’s Diamond Golden Gloves Competition.The first time I can remember seeing him was when my parents took me to see Steve Speilberg’s Jaws upon its release in 1975. That was probably his best-known role but it was just one among many. He got his start in television and gradually moved into the big screen.… Read more

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Posted in 1970s American crime films, 1980s American crime films, Gene Hackman, John Frankenheimer, Roy Scheider, Sidney Lumet, William Friedkin

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Small Town Noir: the possible book

Posted on August 18, 2015 by Andrew Nette| Leave a comment

Katie Payne Mug Shot

Vintage photographs are all the rage these days. Hell, vintage everything is big, it seems. There are some websites that do vintage images better than others. One site I stumbled accidentally across several years ago and which I have continued to visit on a regular basis is called Small Town Noir. It features old police mug shots from the former American industrial town of New Castle in Pennsylvania and the stories of behind them. What I like most about Small Town Noir is it’s just that. The person behind the site, a man called Diarmid Mogg, doesn’t post images of big time criminals in New York or Chicago. His subjects are ordinary people and he examines their hopes, dreams and frustrated plans, their small town crimes, and how these brought them to the attention of the police.

Now he’s trying to turn his website into a book and he needs people to pledge to buy it here. I reckon it’s a great idea and I’m going to support it. I thought other Pulp Curry readers might be interested in knowing more about Small Town Noir and when Diarmid asked whether I’d be prepared to help him publicise his project by doing an interview with him, I was more than happy to oblige.… Read more

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Posted in True crime, Vintage mug shots

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MIFF report back #2: Sunrise

Posted on August 4, 2015 by Andrew Nette| 2 Comments

Sunrise

A key question for me from Partho Sen-Gupta’s second feature film, Sunrise, which played as part of the 2015 Melbourne International Film Festival, is how does one make a gripping crime film out of a pervasive social problem like child trafficking? If this was indeed Sen-Gupta’s intention, I’m not sure he has entirely succeeded. That said, there is a lot to recommend it.

The narrative spine of Sunrise is fairly straightforward. Joshi is middle aged Inspector working in a poorly resourced unit of the Mumbai police. His life has been in tatters ever since a person or persons unknown kidnapped his young daughter, Aruna, in front of her school years ago. The crime has destroyed his wife’s sanity and threatens to do the same to him. Compounding his trauma is the fact that the unit he works in deals with other parents who have had similar experiences. Joshi and his colleagues are largely unable to help these people, usually because their resources and methods are no match for those of the criminals responsible for the disappearances.

Joshi spends his nights obsessively searching for Aruna. He thinks he sees her everywhere. One night he stumbles out of the torrential monsoon rain into a nightclub called Paradise. Through the crowd Joshi spies Aruna amongst a group of young girls dancing on stage.… Read more

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Posted in Crime fiction and film from India, Crime film, Melbourne International Film Festival, Neo Noir

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Presentations & talks

Posted on July 29, 2015 by Andrew Nette| Comments Off on Presentations & talks

The motorcycle: rebel in pop culture, Queensland Gallery of Modern Art, April 22, 2021

Writers Reading Panel, Mornington Peninsula Writers Festival, October 20, 2019

The Evil Touch, National Film and Sound Archive, Canberra, September 6, 2019

Pulp fiction and youth subculture, Latrobe City Literary Festival, Traralgon, May 27, 2019

Teenage Jungles and Notorious Women: James Holledge and the Influence of Tabloid News Culture on 1960s Australian Pulp, 2018 conference of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing, Sydney, July 7 – 12, 2018

‘An Explosive Novel of Strange Passions’: Horwitz Publications and Australia’s Pulp Modernism, 2018 Literary Studies Convention, Canberra, July 3 – 7, 2018

Participant: ‘Crime on the Streets: From Homicide to Jack Irish‘, Screening Melbourne Symposium, Melbourne, February 22-24, 2018

‘Down these mean streets: The depiction of Melbourne as a Noir city in Division 4′, Screening Melbourne Symposium, Melbourne, February 22-24, 2018

Introduction to the National Film and Sound Archive’s showing of Force of Evil, April 5, 2017

Introduction to Homicide episode 34, ‘Witch Hunt’, Monster Fest, 26, November, 2016

Low-Grade Transmissions From Hell: Revisiting the Lost Australian Horror Anthology The Evil Touch, Monster Fest, 25 November, 2016

Australian noir: the history of Australian pulp fiction publishing, NoirCon Philadelphia, October 28, 2016

Loose the Plot: adventures in storytelling, Melbourne Fringe Festival, September 17, 2016

Introduction to Cinema Apocalypse screening of Fernando Di Leo’s The Italian Connection, June 29, 2016

‘Partners in Crime: The role of the short story in crime fiction’, Newcastle Writers Festival, April 2, 2016

Co-presenter: ‘Procedural procedures – Tracing the development of three notable episodes of Crawford’s police dramas’, Australian Film Institute Research Collection 2015 Fellowship paper, RMIT Screen Cultures Lab, September 1, 2015

Participant: ‘From cosies to courtrooms’, Crime Fest, South Australian Writers Centre, June 27, 2015

Participant: ‘Building and sustaining a career’, Crime Fest, South Australian Writers Centre, June 27, 2015

Participant: Crawford Productions Homicide 50th anniversary event, Australian Film Institute Research Centre, October 20, 2014

‘Illustrated talk: pulp fiction’ Art, Innovation and Design Program, Melbourne Writers Festival, August 30, 2014

‘Is Game of Thrones any good?’,… Read more

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