• The Raven, a historical crime drama starring John Cusack as poet-author Edgar Allan Poe, also opens in theaters on Friday. Omnimystery News has the picture’s pretty enthralling trailer here.
• How’d you like to own the notorious Lizzie Borden’s 14-room Queen Anne Victorian home in Fall River, Massachusetts? Now’s your chance.
• Shotsmag Confidential repeats talk about how the film version of Lee Child’s 2005 novel, One Shot, starring the short Tom Cruise as Jack Reacher, may be retitled simply Reacher. That might better set it up as the start of a new cinema series.
• Daily Mirror blogger Larry Harnisch stopped by the Los Angeles Police Historical Society’s Black Dahlia exhibit recently to see what was available. “Not all of the material on display is terribly relevant--although the items on Woody Guthrie are worth a look if only to see who was considered a possible suspect,” Harnish writes. “However, some material adds to the portrait of Elizabeth Short and helps dispel the common myth that she ‘slept her way across Tinseltown until death gave her the fame that eluded her all her life.’” See more here.
• Pulp International offers a wonderful new collection of old paperback books that highlight “one of the time-honored motifs in pulp cover art--the woman fighting for her life.”
• Check out the Mulholland Books blog to read a pretty entertaining conversation between Nick Santora, author of the new novel Fifteen Digits, and Jimmi Simpson, who stars in the A&E TV series Breakout Kings, which Santora co-created with Matt Olmstead.
• Yahoo! Finance lists “eight products the Facebook generation will not buy.” Among those is e-mail, which is supposedly “too formal.” Harrumph. That’s one of the things I appreciate about e-mail, that it is merely one small electronic step up from letter-writing. I think informality is overrated. Call me old-fashioned ...
• Author and Rap Sheet contributor Mark Coggins’ new collection of humorous first-person essays, Prom Night and Other Man-made Disasters, is finally available.
• There’s a good piece in New York magazine about Republican presidential hopeful Willard “Mitt” Romney’s fast-progressing Etch-a-Sketch campaign. “In legal theory,” writes Jonathan Chait, “there exists something called a ‘libel-proof plaintiff,’ which is a figure of such low repute that he cannot claim any monetary damages for his reputation being smeared, on the premise that his reputation is tainted beyond repair. This seems to be the point Romney has reached on the question of consistency. The entire political world regards him as a pure creature of convenience. His supporters have simply calculated that Romney has boxed himself in to the point where he could not afford to betray them.”
• Hilary Davidson (
• As a member of the bearded set, this appealed to me greatly.
• And the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the British luxury liner Titanic may have passed, but my fascination with the subject still hasn’t gone away. So I was very interested to read in Galley Cat that recent talk about that long-ago tragedy has returned Walter Lord’s classic, 1955 non-fiction book on the subject, A Night to Remember, to the New York Times bestseller list. Meanwhile, Stephen Bowie writes in his Classic TV History Blog about the 1956 live-action TV adaptation of Lord’s book, which can now be watched on YouTube. That small-screen version featured appearances by Claude Rains as well as Patrick Macnee, who was not yet famous for his starring role in The Avengers. When I find a spare moment over the next few days, you can bet I’ll be watching that YouTube video.
1 comment:
Thanks for the mention, Jeff!
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