Footprints Volume 1: Iced Written by Joey Esposito Art by Jonathan Moore Mr. Foot is a sasquatch who lives among humans as a private investigator. His friends The Jersey Devil, The Lock Ness Monster, Le Chupacabra, and Megalodon all form a team of investigators meant to track down other oddities like themselves until …
Footprints: Bad Luck Charm Written by Joey Esposito Art by Jonathan Moore Published by Soup Dad Comics Two preternatural co-workers try to scam a Vegas Casino in 1962. A possible supernatural element to the Son of Sam case in the 70’s is explored. Someone or something is wrecking vintage race cars in present day. All …
You can practically see your breath from the moment you turn on White Night, the new title from OSome Studio. There is a dreamlike coldness to the game, one that is felt almost immediately as the player begins wandering the darkness of night in the aftermath of a shocking car accident.
Few creative types understand their collaborators’ work more than their own. Creative duos especially. Collaboration can be the most rewarding aspect of any artist’s career; it can also be frightening, tedious, and perhaps even frustrating. But every once in a while – be it film, music, visual art – a pair of collaborators come along …
In Mathieu Amalric’s The Blue Room, love is a corrosive agent, an arsenic-like poison that slowly works its way into your heart. Amalric writes, directs and stars in this contorted but calculated little flick with a dark beating heart, adapted from a slim novel by Georges Simenon. It depicts the prelude to and aftermath of a possible murder (eschewing the actual murder itself, leaving things gleefully ambiguous). Amalric plays Julien Gahyde, who’s suspected of killing his wife (Lea Drucker). Amalric’s real-life partner Stéphanie Cléau plays Julien’s mistress, Esther Despierre, whose sickly husband owns a pharmacy with his mother. Amalric displays admirable trust in his viewers; he doesn’t withhold information as much as he carefully feeds us certain contemplated bits that add up to a beautifully hazy whole.
In what sounds like a match made in heaven, famed filmmaker David Fincher and author James Ellroy are in the early stages of collaborating on a new show for HBO. The Playlist and /Film report that details on the project are scarce, but the show is said to be a 1950s set noir detective story. Fincher …
Matt Wagner’s noir style villain Grendel has returned, and penned by the man himself! Wagner, who has in recent years completed runs on Dynamite’s Zorro and Green Hornet series, brings his classic baddie back in time to the pulp-novel settings of 1930’s New York. Hunter Rose, Grendel’s alter ego, has added to his collection of rare artifacts an urn once in the possession of the vile Shaiwan Khan. Inside the urn is an ancient scroll that, when read aloud, sends Rose back to the 1930’s. Without missing a beat, Rose begins to set up shop in New York’s seedy underworld.
The procedural crime thriller, tales of murder investigation and corruption, a hallmark of hard boiled fiction from the 1970’s onwards, has tailed off. This is particularly frustrating when such a film emerges that should really have been a shot in the arm but was instead a bullet in the head. Step forward the hugely promising and ultimately disappointing Pride and Glory, a true Jekyll and Hyde.
Red City # Written by Daniel Corey Art by Mark Dos Santos Published by Image Comics I love film noir and all its attendant complexity and moral ambiguity. It’s a genre that places decent-but-flawed characters in tricky situations and forces them to deal with all of the difficult moral questions that can be found out …
There’s a much quoted line from David Fincher’s Seven, found in one of many notebooks scribbled by horrific serial killer John Doe, that reads: “Long is the way, and hard, that out of hell leads up to light”. The sentiment and association is very appropriate when musing on the visceral sledgehammer assault on emotions, morality and senses represented by David Peace’s Red Riding series, a sprawling nine year epic of neo-noir, adult fear and a simmering stew of all forms of human evil.
The Lady from Shanghai Written and directed by Orson Welles USA, 1947 Long before the likes of Brangelina dominated the Hollywood gossip columns, figures such as Hedda Hooper and Louella Parsons were the all-powerful industry matriarchs whose withering wit could make or break film careers. The tumultuous romance between Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth on …
The chronic, seemingly unsolvable Israeli/Palestinian conflict provides the perfect backdrop for narrative storytelling, as all the pieces are in place for a tense, personalized historical rendering. In fact, two other films this year have already addressed the issue: The Attack, from Lebanese director Ziad Douerir, and Zaytoun, from Israeli director Eran Riklis; each look at the personal toll caused by war. Inherently polemical discourse rarely makes much of an impact on the opposing side, and while bridge-gapping is sometime present in films dealing with this Middle Eastern crisis, it’s understandable when a more hardened approach is taken. Such is the case with Hany Abu-Assad’s Omar, a well-made Palestinian film that presents the experience with little interest in broaching peaceful dialogue
Narc Directed by Joe Carnahan Written by Joe Carnahan US, 2003 It’s a bitterly cold early morning in a slum neighborhood in Detroit, MI, but that doesn’t stop two men from braving the conditions in sparse clothing. They’re high as kites and running at full pelt anyway, plus they have more pertinent things of their …