E Y E W E A R, THE BLOG - FREEDOM MEANS BEING UNAFRAID TO WRITE WHAT YOU THINK

Cold Sweat turns 50 this year, and is a movie hardly anyone knows or loves. B-movie fetishists are a perverse lot, and I am one of them. I can genuinely revel in a well-made, odd, quirky, forgotten second-rate flick, with few if any pretensions, seeing it with great affection and respect for what it is; whereas many a pretentious, 'bigger picture' can leave me cold. Cold Sweat is actually, in its way, a great film, but because the director Terence Young has almost no auteurist-following, it's been neglected; the reviews it does get are perfunctory and mainly indifferent - it's seen, if at all now, as a toss-offed Charles Bronson actioner, one of the cheap Euro-trash movies he made as his violent vigilante career went supernova. It's out on DVD, and easy to find online. I'd recommend it to any fans of the crime/thriller genre, and, for the reasons I mention below, it is separately fascinating for being an example of how a film can gather incredible talent...

Is there a person over the age of 18 alive who hasn't seen Pulp Fiction - or some offshoot of its pop culture impact? Like exploding brain splatter, Pulp Fiction became the film hit of 1994, and is, arguably, the greatest American film of that decade - perhaps of all time (in a short list that includes Blue Velvet and Apocalypse Now and Taxi Driver , to be sure). A sort of sexier, even darker Touch of Evil for our time. Soundtrack to our twisted dreams Tarantino , despite or because of seeming to be a nerdy creep in "real life" is, in reel terms, a cinematic genius of B-thrills and Cannes insight - a rare balance.  Indeed, only a few other Western directors have ever managed to fuse art and thrills better or as well - Welles, Hitchcock, Spielberg, Scorsese  are peers. That poster!  That gimp scene! That watch monologue! That dance! That heroin! That soundtrack!  That amoral ultra-violence! I still remember seeing it with a friend.  When it ended...

I just completed my first real pulp thriller best-seller in years (I used to love Fontana paperbacks featuring parka'd men scrambling on ice floes with ice picks) - the penultimate Lee Child .  It is, at times, shockingly misogynistic, violent, and even borderline racist (or at least the main character is).  Edward Said would not have been amused, in the least.  Child is not the new Chandler , as some have claimed, but he might be a new sort of Spillane .  Jack Reacher has some intriguing characteristics.  A pity he seems to hold dimestore views about le monde Arabe - a far more complex and valuable cultural space than his post-911 worldview (or the one his creator cynically adopts to sell books to the airport everyreader) seems to admit.  I am breaking my promise not to blog over the Spring break - okay, will try to keep my mitts off this blog for a few days.