Happy Thursday, everyone! Beautiful weather this week in Richmond, everything is blooming nicely and....Chicago had snow. But I was there last weekend for Easter and to see the family and I actually got around to some of my favorite stores back home. (Shout out to Reckless Records, especially; Plan 9 Music here in Richmond is also pretty fantastic and I was so happy to discover them.) So let's get into the first batch of things I found.
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Starting off with something I picked up at the Book Table in Oak Park, this is a book about Black horror cinema over the decades from a professor of communication studies at Northwestern and an entertainment journalist, both of whom were featured in the excellent documentary Horror Noire. Was I delighted to open it up and find a section on terrible hip-hip songs in horror movies? Absolutely. Because that means they're both serious about their subject and also that they have a sense of humor about it. I could not have bough it any faster after discovering that.
And seriously, do check out Horror Noire on Shudder or AMC+; it's an absolutely excellent piece of work.
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One of these days, I need to dig into the various books about the history of HBO and how it was a hotbed of the rise of prestige TV. And part of that will be finally watching all of Deadwood. Now that I own all three seasons, just in case their current president goes completely insane and removes it from HBOMax (no, like with the Sci-Fi channel I will not be using the new and deeply stupid name) I might finally dig in. I quite love that like the two seasons of Rome, these are hard cardboard boxes and feel just a little more substantial than usual.
Deadwood, for the moment, is still streaming on HBOMax.
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I was reminded recently of The Killing, Stanley Kubrick's 1956 film noir about a bunch of crooks conspiring to rob a racetrack. Kubrick apparently considered it to be his first mature film and I totally get that; it's a fantastic piece of work in maybe my favorite genre of films, the heist. (Really, give me a film festival of the 2002 Oceans Eleven and Logan Lucky and Rififi and The Bank Job; I love a movie about a bunch of people coming together to pull off a job with their various disparate skills.)
But one thing that makes this movie stand out? It's Elisha Cook Jr. He plays a little weasel of a character, desperate to show off that he's a real man to his wife (played wonderfully by Marie Windsor) and he can never quite pull it off. I think Kubrick's reputation as a cold and technical director is very, very overstated; he was a wonderful actor's director as well and I think this might be the single best performance in any Kubrick movie, even ahead of something like Tom Cruise in Eyes Wide Shut or Keir Dullea in 2001. His dismay and desperation is palpable in every frame.
The Killing is very available on Amazon Prime, Kanopy, Paramount+ and Hoopla. Also MGM Plus, which I'm not sure actually exists.
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That's it for this week! Next week, we return to I Feel (Un)Seen with 1942's Invisible Agent, with Peter Lorre!
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