Deadwood and Dashiell Hammett
by jaydro
Shoot, I meant to get this up before last weekend and I just plum forgot. I happened across the current issue of American Heritage (I loved that magazine and used to subscribe before I realized I had more copies stacked up waiting for me than I'd ever be able to read--I used to be a real magazine whore) and found an interesting interview with Deadwood creater/producer/writer David Milch (cool--and it's online, too!). The interview had an interesting sidebar (also there in the online version) about a novel I had forgotten about which apparently has influenced a lot of people: Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett. I must find this book, you see, because lately I've been on a bit of a binge of novels of that ilk....The article's other sidebar comparing Deadwood to Gunsmoke was interesting, too. I was never much of a fan of that show (I always preferred Bonanza), but I just happened to watch last night a 1966 episode guest-starring a chubby William Shatner along with (!) Ben Johnson and Timothy Carey. What a cast!
I haven't watched the new episode of Deadwood yet, and I actually just finished the last season not too long ago (I have to get in a certain mood to enjoy it).
On a related note, The Proposition is arriving in area theaters tomorrow, and I'm looking forward to venturing back into a theater to see it. For a while now I've been just not feeling that up for going out to see a movie--I think all I've seen this year have been Inside Man and V for Vendetta. I'm not sure what it is--friends too busy, lack of presentation quality, lack of overall film quality, lack of audience quality. Mainstream films I miss and finally get around to watching on HBO usually make me feel like I've wasted two hours of my life--case in point being two I watched yesterday: Flight of the Phoenix (which except for some cool visual and aural effects is completely unnecessary if you enjoyed the original) and The Secret Window (Depp was good but overall it had a been-there-seen-that feel).
|Link|6:03 PM
3 Comments:
I don't get HBO, so I've never seen Deadwood, but I'm going to rent the DVDs some day. I just read an article in Wild West magazine (I'm a Western history buff) on the real people of Deadwood.
I had to do a Google image search to find the HBO publicity picture I used in my post--they were hiding it a bit at their site. I wanted to use one in that series because they so impressed me with the way they practically bought up last week's issue of The Week (a great magazine, by the way)--fourteen pages of ads including the inside front and back covers and the back cover! Wow.
The Proposition is a pretty good show. It's one of the most self-consciously cinematic movies I've seen for a while, if that makes sense. Sometimes that's a bad thing (like with David Fincher films) but it works out well enough here.
I think it's maybe a bit more superficial than some of the raves have made it out to be, and I don't think it's a great film. But it's very effective in terms of mood, and its Aussie Outback setting is pretty great.
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