Some writers are great at writing crime novels from the perspective of the detective, some are great at writing as the criminal, and then there are writers like Donald E. Westlake who had it all figured out. The latest publication of a classic Westlake novel from Titan Books’ Hard Case Crime imprint is from the vantage of a murderer who keeps getting wrapped deeper and deeper into his web of lies. The novel is A Travesty, a 1977 pile-on of crime references and tropes about a film critic trying to prove wrong the maxim “crime does not pay”–featured in a new 2-for-1 trade edition with the short story Ordo titledDouble Feature, and originally released together under the title Enough.
If you ever longed for the easygoing action movies from the 1970s like Smokey and the Bandit and Every Which Way But Loose, you may want to check out the new Netflix movie Spenser Confidential. Like those films it has the big screen leading actor in Mark Wahlberg(The Italian Job, Shooter, Ted), playing the familiar Robert P. Parker character Spenser, the amiable co-star with Winston Duke (Black Panther, Us) as partner Hawk, the mouthy lead actress in Iliza Shlesinger(Instant Family, Forever 31) as Spenser’s ex Cissy, the snarky elder voice in Alan Arkin(Argo, Gattaca, So I Married an Axe Murderer, Sesame Street) as Spenser and Hawk’s mentor, and even the cute animal friend presence via a friendly hound dog (that’s Pearl). And a cool ride (here, a primo 1984 Buick Riviera).
Just like with the big screen movie The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (reviewed here at borg), viewers should forget about what they’ve read in the novels or experienced in the 1980s TV series starring Robert Urich and Avery Brooks. This is a trademark Mark Wahlberg movie, and he’s in familiar territory–Boston–and Wahlberg’s own real-life stint in jail brings a certain authenticity to his performance as a tough guy with a big mouth who can hold is own against much bigger thugs, emerging from the slammer. Wahlberg’s character has bits of the roles he’s taken on in The Departed (cop), Shooter (strategist), The Italian Job (planner), The Perfect Storm (driven), 2 Guns (drugs), The Other Guys (buddy cop), even Ted (Bostonian), and the film comes from director Peter Berg, who audiences have seen team up with Wahlberg before in Mile 22, Patriots Day, Deepwater Horizon, and Lone Survivor.
Wahlberg’s ex-cop is a good guy who must act when he sees someone in trouble, which in turn gets him into trouble. The story in Spenser Confidentialis neither complex not action-packed. But Arkin and Shlesinger add some humor to what is very much an extended episode of early 1980s prime time television. It has the same quality that makes us keeping coming back for more in the reboot Magnum PI series and the new Stumptown series–actors we like, characters we like, and an easy mystery to solve.
Robert B. Parker′s crime-solving duo made famous by Robert Urich and Avery Brooks in Spenser for Hireis getting its first movie adaptation with the Netflix Studios release, Spenser Confidential. The film is billed as an action-comedy, and is based on Parker’s star characters from his 40 novels. Parker used other writers for some of the novels in the series, and this film is reportedly loosely based on the novel Wonderland, penned by Ace Atkins.
The wise-cracking Bostonian Spenser is not new territory for Mark Wahlberg, who will join director Peter Berg in their fifth film project together. In this first trailer, Wahlberg, the 2017 highest paid actor in the world, makes it hard to differentiate this from the roles he’s played in The Italian Job, The Departed, The Other Guys, Ted, Pain & Gain, Shooter, 2 Guns, Transformers: The Last Knight, and All the Money in the World. But like Tom Cruise and Dwayne Johnson, fans go to Wahlberg movies to see Wahlberg be Wahlberg.
Hawk will be played by Black Panther co-star Winston Duke. Spenser Confidentialco-stars Alan Arkin(Catch-22, Argo, Gattaca, So I Married an Axe Murderer, The Muppets), Iliza Shlesinger(Instant Family, Elder Millenial),Bokeem Woodbine (Spider-Man: Homecoming, Ghostbusters: Afterlife), and Post Malone (Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse).
Check out the first trailer for Spenser Confidential:
It’s that time of year again, time to take a look forward at what movies should be on your radar for 2019. Are you going to see them all? Heck no. These are the genre films we think borg readers will want to know about to make their own checklists for the coming year–and they are only the films we know about so far. We pulled 78 of the hundreds of films that have been finalized or are in varying stages of final production, slated for next year’s movie calendar.
What looks to top the list for most fanboys and fangirls? The last of the nine films in theStar Wars saga. Captain Marvel, Avengers: Endgame, and Spider-Man: Far From Home.Shazam!is DC’s contribution. Quentin Tarentino returns to movies to direct Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, and Martin Scorsese is back with an all-star cast in The Irishman (on Netflix). M. Night Shyamalan finishes his dark superhero trilogy with Glass. Arnold Schwarzenegger and Linda Hamilton return in Terminator. Jordan Peele is back with another horror film with Us.
Do you like sequels? This is your year. Another Men in Black, X-Men, Shaft, Happy Death Day, Lego Movie, Hellboy, John Wick, Kingsman, Jumanji, The Secret Life of Pets, How to Train Your Dragon, Fast and the Furious, Zombieland, Addams Family, Charlie’s Angels, Godzilla, Shaun the Sheep, Annabelle,and Stephen King’s It and Pet Sematary—Disney is trying to get you to move into your local theater with another Toy Story, Aladdin, Dumbo, Frozen, and Lion King–all in one year. Yep, lots and lots of sequels are coming.
Some films don’t have locked-in release dates yet. Amazon Prime and Netflix haven’t revealed dates for these 2019 releases:
Martin Scorcese’s The Irishman, a film about Jimmy Hoffa starring Robert DeNiro, Al Pacino, Joe Pesci, Harvey Keitel, Ray Romano, and Bobby Cannavale (Netflix)
The Kid, a Western biopic with Chris Pratt, Ethan Hawke, Dane DeHaan, and Vincent D’Onofrio (Netflix)
The Man Who Killed Hitler Then Bigfoot, starring Sam Elliott (Netflix)
6 Underground, a Michael Bay film starring Ryan Reynolds, Ben Hardy, Dave Franco, and Mélanie Laurent (Netflix)
The Last Thing He Wanted, Dee Rees directs Anne Hathaway, Ben Affleck, Willem Dafoe, and Toby Jones; journalist quits newspaper job to become an arms dealer for a covert government agency (Netflix)
The Laundromat, Steven Soderbergh directs Meryl Streep, Gary Oldman, Antonio Banderas, James Cromwell, about the Pentagon Papers (Netflix)
Radioactive, Rosamund Pike plays Marie Curie, with Anya Taylor-Joy (Amazon)
Some of these films will have revised release dates, or get pushed to 2020.
So grab your calendar and start making your plans–here are the movies you’ll want to see in 2019 (and many you might not):
January
Glass – Superhero, M. Night Shyamalan trilogy part 3, stars Bruce Willis, Samuel L. Jackson, James McAvoy; continues where Unbreakable and Split left off – January 18.
Serenity– Mystery/Thriller, stars Anne Hathaway, Jason Clarke, Djimon Hounsou, Jeremy Strong, Diane Lane; sorry, no relation to Firefly – January 25.
King of Thieves– Heist Comedy, stars Jim Broadbent, Tom Courtenay, Charlie Cox, Michael Gambon, and Ray Winstone – January 25.
In a year where we saw Hollywood market the worst titled movies to us–Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, and yes, Silver Linings Playbook, it’s probably no surprise the Oscar nominations were going to be strange this year. Like always there are really glaring oddities, and after a lot of speculation that we’d see more of the same with the new round of selections, Oscar again fell into its normal traps.
The key problems with the Academy Awards include the marketing barrage that occurs, productions pushing advertising to encourage votes, and even the desire to position the Oscars toward a new, younger audience that becomes evident in more popular than critical nominees. Over the course of several years of Oscars you see unmistakable patterns that develop and the Academy Awards nominations, if not by design then at least as a result, is its own club that favors past nominees over new entrants. Same old news this year and more yawns than excitement. So let’s see what they got right.
Argo for Seven Nominations. Argo was nominated for seven categories, including Best Picture, Supporting Actor (Alan Arkin), Adapted Screenplay, Film Editing, Original Score, Sound Editing, and Sound Mixing. So this is all fitting for such a brilliant film. But no nomination for director Ben Affleck? You look at his work on Argo compared to the ultimate films up for best director and you really have to shake your head.
In Argo, the stakes could not be greater. It is 1979 and the American embassy in Iran is stormed by a vast street mob seeking to hold hostage 52 people in exchange for the return of the Shah of Iran, granted asylum in the United States and dying from cancer. For 444 days we waited and hoped for their release, and each day Walter Cronkite ended his news broadcast with the number of days they’d been held. It was the ultimate nightmare and the sporadic glimpses of the hostages being led away with white blindfolds made us all imagine what kind of terror they must each be going through, as Christmas 1979 and Christmas 1980 came and went, as back home we all went ahead with our lives every day. But Argo is not about the 52 hostages.
At the time the embassy was attacked, six Americans working in the embassy managed to escape and hide out in the home of the Canadian ambassador and his wife. Argo is the story of a completely illogical, unlikely, nearly impossible–even crazy–plan involving a mock sci-fi movie concocted to rescue them, and two friends back in the States who came together in 1980 to create a plan and convince President Carter to give the go-ahead to proceed with the mission.
The taking of the U.S. hostages in Iran is one of the earliest events I remember, and it was the stuff of nightmares. It was also the first big event I recall that started the daily newspaper counter, showing the days the hostages had been held. What we didn’t hear on television were the stories of other Americans who had not been kidnapped but were stuck in Iran.
Based on actual events, Argo is the story of the Canadian Caper, the name given to a joint covert operation held by the governments of Canada and the United States whereby Canada sheltered six U.S. nationals who avoided capture as part of the larger group of hostages held under Ayatollah Khomeini. Argo was the name of a fictional sci-fi movie concocted by CIA identity deception agent Tony Mendez. If all would work as planned, he would sneak into Tehran, bringing new identification and other materials to create the new identities, then march the six hostages out in plain sight to the airport.
Editor’s Note: Check out our full review of Argohere.
Scene from Argo–the movie within the movie.
As told by Joshuah Bearman in a 2007 Wired Magazine article, nothing less than a stunning collaboration of unlikely Hollywood and entertainment names converged to create the ruse: John Chambers, the Academy Award winning make-up artist for The Planet of the Apes, and Bob Sidell, the then Love Boat make-up artist who would go on to work on E.T., the Extra-Terrestrial. Luckily a foundering production was under way that they could step into, a Roger Zelazny novel adaptation that had already seen concept drawings done by none other than Marvel Comics’ legendary artist Jack Kirby. Chambers & Co. set up their offices in the facility just vacated by Michael Douglas, who had wrapped filming his own Oscar winner, The China Syndrome and began their work.
Several incredible stories have emerged from the international incidents of 1979 and 1980, not the least of which is the one-day presidential nominee Ross Perot, who led a successful rescue of employees of Electronic Data Systems from an Iran jail. Perot’s story was most famously told in Ken Follett’s On Wings of Eagles. Argo is another story of a similar effort. The first movie preview is just out, and looks fantastic:
The preview alone really reflects some nice cinematography, art design, retro costumes, and make-up. Will this be the big career defining next step for Ben Affleck?
Actual faked movie poster from the CIA concocted “film” Argo.
Affleck (Paycheck, The Sum of All Fears, Shakespeare in Love) directs and stars in the film, which is not surprisingly produced by George Clooney (the film has a lot of the look down from his movie Syriana), and Grant Heslov (Good Night, and Good Luck) and Affleck. Affleck plays Mendez along with an all-star cast: Alan Arkin (Catch 22, Gattaca, So I married an Axe Murderer, Edward Scissorhands), Bryan Cranston (Breaking Bad), John Goodman (Roseanne, The Big Lebowski, Always, Community, The Artist), Adrienne Barbeau (The Fog, Escape from New York, Deep Space Nine), Richard Kind (Spin City, Leverage, The Station Agent), and Tate Donovan (Memphis Belle, Magnum, P.I.).
Can anyone say Oscar contender? Argo hits theaters in October 2012.
. Argo is another story of a similar effort. The first movie preview is just out, and looks fantastic:
