Michael Caine’s latest movie, Harry Brown, is, according to the man himself, about the kind of man that Jack Carter might have been if he survived to a ripe old age.
I have no idea whether the film is any good or not, but it has done is get me thinking about Get Carter, one of the best damn crime flicks you’re ever likely to watch. And more surprising because of Caine.
It’s easy to forget sometimes just how damn good Michael Caine is. He’s so recognisable for being himself and he’s done so many bad movies that when he comes back at you with an incredible performance, you just sit there open mouthed.
Get Carter is one of those performances. It is literally iconic. You watch Caine and you think, “That man is cool.” And he is. In the best sense of the word. There is no posing for Carter. He exists and he does what he does. He is the UK equivalent of a man like Parker in the way that Caine plays him. His eyes are ice-cold, his expression unchanging and his determination absolute. Nothing will stand in his way.
What brought home the absolute brilliance of Caine’s performance was going to see Get Carter on stage at the Fringe a couple of years back. It was a good show, but what was interesting was to see how the lead interpreted the character of Jack Carter. On stage, he was bluster and anger and sheer rage. This character was heading towards his own doom. He was out of control. He created his own troubles and you could see it in every move he made.
It was a great and affecting performance, but what works so well with Caine is that you just don’t know what he’s going to do next or how he’s going to react. He is unreadable. All you know is that you don’t want to be on the wrong side of him. Say the wrong thing and there will be no warning. He will strike back. Fast, deadly and brutal. Beneath that cool exterior, the rage that the stage projected is bubbling up and threatening to explode, but Caine’s Carter keeps it so reeled in that when it is unleashed, you – and those around Carter – are shocked and horrified.
But it is interesting to think about the different ways in which characters are interpreted – not just in film, but in the minds of readers – and how that affects their actions. The Carter on stage went through a very similar (with some minor variations) journey to the character of Carter on film. And yet the emphasis was very different. The conclusions drawn were different. The Carter on stage was a thug, a loudmouth, a man filled with anger. The Carter on film is a bastard, through and through, self centred and yet curiously indifferent to the world around him if it stays out of his way. Were it not for the fact that his family are affected by the machinations of local criminal elements, Carter would just shrug his shoulders and walk on his way. He wouldn’t hurt anyone, wouldn’t even notice them. There is a beautiful scene where a fella Carter knows has been beat to shit. Its Carter’s fault. Carter offers some money to the fella because, well, its in part Carter’s fault this happened. The fella moans about his girlfriend is coming down from Liverpool, and what’s she gonna think when she sees him like this?
Caine, dismissvely throw the money, says, “Here, go get yourself a course in Karate” and walks. He doesn’t care. He’s giving the guy money because its Carter’s fault and he knows you have to take responsibility. But in his cold heart, he truly does not give a shit.
Carter is one of my favourite on screen tough guys. Truly, he’s the real deal. In fact, I’d go as far as to say that Get Carter is probably one of the most perfect British crime movies ever made. Not a false step in there.
And one of the coolest opening themes you’ll ever hear:
PS – you’ll notice I didn’t mention the Stallone interpretation of this character. There’s a very good reason for that. But if you want me to explain it, you’ll just hear a lot of bad-tempered swear words…
Friday, November 13, 2009
Thursday, November 12, 2009
Dirty Bits
by Dave White... well, sort of.
Sometimes I think he's making fun of me. Just a month or so after I spend an entire blog post teasing people blogging about writing a sex scene, my buddy Bryon Quetermous emails me asking if he can guest blog here.
And since I'm all out of controversial topics at the moment, I agreed to let him.
And what does he give me?
A blog about sex scenes.
The universe hates me.
Enjoy!
It pains me to admit that many of you out there may not know who I am.
Sure I'm no Stephen King, but there was a time where I blogged a lot,
published a lot of short stories online, and even had a hand in
publishing several of the fellows on the sidebar there through a
website I ran called DEMOLITION. But then I got married, had a couple
of kids, and suffered one of the worst bouts of writer's block I've
ever had. So I shut down the blog and DEMOLITION and stopped writing
short stories and basically disappeared.
Well I'm back and looking for new readers
(bryonquertermous.wordpress.com). This blog seemed as good a bridge as
any from my past life to the present so I appreciate the indulgence.
My post today is part discussion, part advice, and part shamless
self-promotion.
Occasionally Dave White and I will chat about blogs and some of the
topics that seem to always pop up in them. Two of the biggies are
always writing sex scenes and e-publishing vs. traditional publishing.
I'd like to touch on both of those topics today, but hopefully in a
less clichéd context. One of the hallmarks of my old blog self was a
healthy (and sometimes over indulgent) sense of the truth in my life.
I wrote about everything, including my love life. I wrote about dates
and crushes and misfires and unrequited love among my posts about
murder, mayhem, and musical theater. And they were some of my most
popular posts. But since I've been married that's fallen off. I don’t
have crushes, or dates, or misfires really, or at least none that I'm
willing to admit publicly. But the funny thing is, I seem to find
myself writing more about sex.
It started with an invitation to contribute to UNCAGE ME, the
follow-up anthology to the collection of dirty stories EXPLETIVE
DELETED edited by Jen Jordan. For this story I wanted to really let my
nasty side fly. So in the middle of the story I had the most explicit
sex scene I've ever written. And I didn’t need anybody to tell me how
to do it. Sadly, I didn’t use my imagination I just wrote from real
life. And it's received some raves from people who have read it. The
next two short stories I wrote after that both ended up having
explicit sex scenes in them as well, also drawn from real life. Now
obviously, I will run dry quite soon based on my limited experience,
but it was an interesting revelation about what I'm capable of.
This also led me to looking into the erotica publishing field as a
possible outlet for some of this stuff. What I found is one of the
most profitable and technologically advanced segments of the
publishing industry. I found publishers that mix print with electronic
publishing seamlessly. There were tiny publishers with amazing
distribution and dear god, the money. Publishers, writers, readers,
everybody is winning. It's the first time I've felt excited about the
state of publishing in a long time. I've got to believe crime fiction
will come around to this stuff eventually. But until then, I think
it's good for writers to be exposed outside of their standard genre
confines.
Discuss.
Sometimes I think he's making fun of me. Just a month or so after I spend an entire blog post teasing people blogging about writing a sex scene, my buddy Bryon Quetermous emails me asking if he can guest blog here.
And since I'm all out of controversial topics at the moment, I agreed to let him.
And what does he give me?
A blog about sex scenes.
The universe hates me.
Enjoy!
It pains me to admit that many of you out there may not know who I am.
Sure I'm no Stephen King, but there was a time where I blogged a lot,
published a lot of short stories online, and even had a hand in
publishing several of the fellows on the sidebar there through a
website I ran called DEMOLITION. But then I got married, had a couple
of kids, and suffered one of the worst bouts of writer's block I've
ever had. So I shut down the blog and DEMOLITION and stopped writing
short stories and basically disappeared.
Well I'm back and looking for new readers
(bryonquertermous.wordpress.com). This blog seemed as good a bridge as
any from my past life to the present so I appreciate the indulgence.
My post today is part discussion, part advice, and part shamless
self-promotion.
Occasionally Dave White and I will chat about blogs and some of the
topics that seem to always pop up in them. Two of the biggies are
always writing sex scenes and e-publishing vs. traditional publishing.
I'd like to touch on both of those topics today, but hopefully in a
less clichéd context. One of the hallmarks of my old blog self was a
healthy (and sometimes over indulgent) sense of the truth in my life.
I wrote about everything, including my love life. I wrote about dates
and crushes and misfires and unrequited love among my posts about
murder, mayhem, and musical theater. And they were some of my most
popular posts. But since I've been married that's fallen off. I don’t
have crushes, or dates, or misfires really, or at least none that I'm
willing to admit publicly. But the funny thing is, I seem to find
myself writing more about sex.
It started with an invitation to contribute to UNCAGE ME, the
follow-up anthology to the collection of dirty stories EXPLETIVE
DELETED edited by Jen Jordan. For this story I wanted to really let my
nasty side fly. So in the middle of the story I had the most explicit
sex scene I've ever written. And I didn’t need anybody to tell me how
to do it. Sadly, I didn’t use my imagination I just wrote from real
life. And it's received some raves from people who have read it. The
next two short stories I wrote after that both ended up having
explicit sex scenes in them as well, also drawn from real life. Now
obviously, I will run dry quite soon based on my limited experience,
but it was an interesting revelation about what I'm capable of.
This also led me to looking into the erotica publishing field as a
possible outlet for some of this stuff. What I found is one of the
most profitable and technologically advanced segments of the
publishing industry. I found publishers that mix print with electronic
publishing seamlessly. There were tiny publishers with amazing
distribution and dear god, the money. Publishers, writers, readers,
everybody is winning. It's the first time I've felt excited about the
state of publishing in a long time. I've got to believe crime fiction
will come around to this stuff eventually. But until then, I think
it's good for writers to be exposed outside of their standard genre
confines.
Discuss.
Wednesday, November 11, 2009
My Waterloo
by
John McFetridge
This week I’m giving a reading at the Princess theatre in Waterloo, sponsored by Words Worth books, with Linwood Barclay and Robert Rotenberg. I’ve met both guys a few times and it should be fun.
Linwood Barclay was a columnist for the Toronto Star newspaper and wrote some non-fiction books, one a memoir called Last Resort about growing up at the summer resort his parents ran in Ontario, a political satire called Mike Harris Made me East My Dog (Harris was the very right-wing premiere of Ontario for eight years that felt like eighty) and Father Knows Zilch, about, well, the title says it all.
Linwood also wrote the Zack Walker series (Bad Move, Bad Guys, Lone Wolf and Stone Rain), which I really like. Zack Walker is a sci fi novelist who lives in the suburbs with his wife and kids and gets involved in murder mysteries. I like the attention to detail in the sci fi stuff (Star Trek models play an important plot point), the humour, the mysteries but most of all the family dynamic. In some ways these books are like the TV series Castle and come to think of it, they’d make a great TV series.
But then Linwood wrote a stand-alone thriller. I guess that’s the plan for just about everyone writing a first person detective series these days and I guess the reason why is because of what happened to Linwood: No Time For Goodbye was a huge, freakin’ international hit. USA, Canada, the UK, lots of countries I’ve never even heard of.
It’s a really good book. A teenage girl wakes up one morning to find her family has disappeared.
So, the flip side to the story we hear too often about the teenager going missing. From there the action picks up years later with the girl now grown and telling her story to a reality TV show. It’s smart and clever and like the Zack Walker books the family dynamic is the best part.
What’s weird is that Linwood has followed up that high-concept thriller with two more books in as many years that are just as good (clearly Linwood is buying the beers on our little outing here), Too Close to Home and the new one, Fear the Worst.
Robert Rotenberg was also involved in journalism as the editor of Passion, the english magazine of Paris and also T.O. The Magazine of Toronto. He was also a criminal lawyer in Toronto and all these experiences come into play in his debut novel, Old City Hall.
Old City Hall came out around the same time as my novel Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere and covers some of the same ground in Toronto (physically and thematically) and I’m not bitter at all that Old City Hall was universally acclaimed, a huge hit in hardcover and paperback in Canada and the USA and lots of other countries and has been sold to a bigtime producer to be turned into a TV series.
Not bitter at all.
Really, I just want to tell all those people (lots and lots of people) who bought Old City Hall that Everybody Knows... would make a nice accompaniment.
They do have a lot in common. Both books start with a dead body on the top floor. In Everybody Knows... the body comes falling off the roof onto the hood of a car in Parkdale and in Old City Hall the body is in the bathtub of a penthouse condo on the lake. Of course, the police get involved. Both books have a Jewish homicide detective which may or may not have to do with the fact that until he retired recently one of the Toronto police homicide detectives we saw on TV a lot was a Jewish guy. In Old City Hall it’s Ari Greene, a single guy who’s taking care of his widowed father, a Holocasut survivor, and in Everybody Knows... it’s Teddy Levine, a married guy I based loosely on an old friend of mine, Allan Levine (hey, at least I changed his first name).
Both books are ensemble stories with big casts that get into lots of different neighbourhoods in Toronto and Old City Hall even gets out of the city up to a ski hill and small towns. Robert’s experience as a criminal lawyer comes through in big and small ways. There’s a little thing I really liked where a cop meets with a guy who’s been planted as the cellmate of the suspected murderer to see if the guy will talk. When it’s time for the plant to return to jail he stubs out his half-smoked cigarette and slips it another another smoke into his sock. There’s great stuff like that all through the book.
In my introduction before the reading I’m going to say that when I started to write novels I didn’t realize I was writing crime novels – I was just writing about what was going on in my city. My books don’t have clues, there isn’t a single crime (much less a single murder) that drives the story and there isn’t much justice served in the end.
I was always worried that my books would fall through the cracks, niether fish nor fowl, that kind of thing, so I’ve been thrilled with the acceptance from the “mystery community” and I’m very happy to be sharing the bill with these guys.
Check 'em out:
Linwood Barclay
Robert Rotenberg
And if you're anywhere near Waterloo, Ontario then Words Worth Books looks pretty good.
One last thing. It's Remembrance Day in Canada and some other countries and Veterans Day in the USA. I'm going to take a couple of minutes at 11:00 to reflect. My Dad was in the Canadian navy from 1938-45, serving mostly on Corvettes taking convoys across the north Atlantic. He didn't talk about it much, told a few funny stories if the occasion called for it like the time he was constipated for days and guys on the ship had a betting line for when he'd, "get over it," but he didn't say much about the boat getting torpedoed out from under him, spending the night hanging onto debris and then a month in the hospital in Glasgow with pneumonia. One of his jobs during the war was dropping depth charges on U-Boats and it's trite to say he never got over the taking of lives, but he never did. My Dad died in 1985 at 65 and I have no doubt his service took years off his life.
It's also somewhat fitting that this day of Remembrance is happening around the same time we're seeing so much attention given to the 20th Anniversay of the fall of the Berlin Wall. I know my Dad would have been pretty happy to see that, and maybe especially to see Lech Walesa there for the celebrations. My Dad was also in a union for a long time (42 years) and he had a tremendous amount of respect for Walesa and the Solidarity movement.
John McFetridge
This week I’m giving a reading at the Princess theatre in Waterloo, sponsored by Words Worth books, with Linwood Barclay and Robert Rotenberg. I’ve met both guys a few times and it should be fun.
Linwood Barclay was a columnist for the Toronto Star newspaper and wrote some non-fiction books, one a memoir called Last Resort about growing up at the summer resort his parents ran in Ontario, a political satire called Mike Harris Made me East My Dog (Harris was the very right-wing premiere of Ontario for eight years that felt like eighty) and Father Knows Zilch, about, well, the title says it all.
Linwood also wrote the Zack Walker series (Bad Move, Bad Guys, Lone Wolf and Stone Rain), which I really like. Zack Walker is a sci fi novelist who lives in the suburbs with his wife and kids and gets involved in murder mysteries. I like the attention to detail in the sci fi stuff (Star Trek models play an important plot point), the humour, the mysteries but most of all the family dynamic. In some ways these books are like the TV series Castle and come to think of it, they’d make a great TV series.
But then Linwood wrote a stand-alone thriller. I guess that’s the plan for just about everyone writing a first person detective series these days and I guess the reason why is because of what happened to Linwood: No Time For Goodbye was a huge, freakin’ international hit. USA, Canada, the UK, lots of countries I’ve never even heard of.
It’s a really good book. A teenage girl wakes up one morning to find her family has disappeared.
So, the flip side to the story we hear too often about the teenager going missing. From there the action picks up years later with the girl now grown and telling her story to a reality TV show. It’s smart and clever and like the Zack Walker books the family dynamic is the best part.
What’s weird is that Linwood has followed up that high-concept thriller with two more books in as many years that are just as good (clearly Linwood is buying the beers on our little outing here), Too Close to Home and the new one, Fear the Worst.
Robert Rotenberg was also involved in journalism as the editor of Passion, the english magazine of Paris and also T.O. The Magazine of Toronto. He was also a criminal lawyer in Toronto and all these experiences come into play in his debut novel, Old City Hall.
Old City Hall came out around the same time as my novel Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere and covers some of the same ground in Toronto (physically and thematically) and I’m not bitter at all that Old City Hall was universally acclaimed, a huge hit in hardcover and paperback in Canada and the USA and lots of other countries and has been sold to a bigtime producer to be turned into a TV series.
Not bitter at all.
Really, I just want to tell all those people (lots and lots of people) who bought Old City Hall that Everybody Knows... would make a nice accompaniment.
They do have a lot in common. Both books start with a dead body on the top floor. In Everybody Knows... the body comes falling off the roof onto the hood of a car in Parkdale and in Old City Hall the body is in the bathtub of a penthouse condo on the lake. Of course, the police get involved. Both books have a Jewish homicide detective which may or may not have to do with the fact that until he retired recently one of the Toronto police homicide detectives we saw on TV a lot was a Jewish guy. In Old City Hall it’s Ari Greene, a single guy who’s taking care of his widowed father, a Holocasut survivor, and in Everybody Knows... it’s Teddy Levine, a married guy I based loosely on an old friend of mine, Allan Levine (hey, at least I changed his first name).
Both books are ensemble stories with big casts that get into lots of different neighbourhoods in Toronto and Old City Hall even gets out of the city up to a ski hill and small towns. Robert’s experience as a criminal lawyer comes through in big and small ways. There’s a little thing I really liked where a cop meets with a guy who’s been planted as the cellmate of the suspected murderer to see if the guy will talk. When it’s time for the plant to return to jail he stubs out his half-smoked cigarette and slips it another another smoke into his sock. There’s great stuff like that all through the book.
In my introduction before the reading I’m going to say that when I started to write novels I didn’t realize I was writing crime novels – I was just writing about what was going on in my city. My books don’t have clues, there isn’t a single crime (much less a single murder) that drives the story and there isn’t much justice served in the end.
I was always worried that my books would fall through the cracks, niether fish nor fowl, that kind of thing, so I’ve been thrilled with the acceptance from the “mystery community” and I’m very happy to be sharing the bill with these guys.
Check 'em out:
Linwood Barclay
Robert Rotenberg
And if you're anywhere near Waterloo, Ontario then Words Worth Books looks pretty good.
One last thing. It's Remembrance Day in Canada and some other countries and Veterans Day in the USA. I'm going to take a couple of minutes at 11:00 to reflect. My Dad was in the Canadian navy from 1938-45, serving mostly on Corvettes taking convoys across the north Atlantic. He didn't talk about it much, told a few funny stories if the occasion called for it like the time he was constipated for days and guys on the ship had a betting line for when he'd, "get over it," but he didn't say much about the boat getting torpedoed out from under him, spending the night hanging onto debris and then a month in the hospital in Glasgow with pneumonia. One of his jobs during the war was dropping depth charges on U-Boats and it's trite to say he never got over the taking of lives, but he never did. My Dad died in 1985 at 65 and I have no doubt his service took years off his life.
It's also somewhat fitting that this day of Remembrance is happening around the same time we're seeing so much attention given to the 20th Anniversay of the fall of the Berlin Wall. I know my Dad would have been pretty happy to see that, and maybe especially to see Lech Walesa there for the celebrations. My Dad was also in a union for a long time (42 years) and he had a tremendous amount of respect for Walesa and the Solidarity movement.
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