Tag Archives: crime

[REVIEW] Sleeping Dogs

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Sleeping DogsAt this point in the series’ history, it’s probably safe to say that nine out of ten people on the planet have played at least some of one of the Grand Theft Auto series. Every time one comes out, it sells like mad and garners almost universal praise. I started my journey with Grand Theft Auto III, as many did, and I’ve played through every iteration since, save the one they did for the Nintendo DS. Though I did hear that one was good.

Given that the Grand Theft Auto games are essentially a license to print money, it makes perfect sense that other game-design studios would want to get in on the action. This started relatively early, with such games as Driver, but probably the closest imitator was True Crime: Streets of LA, which essentially lifted the Grand Theft Auto template and rejiggered it for its own use.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Media has been imitating other media from the very beginning, be it orally told legends to blockbuster movies. The process is a little more obvious when it comes to video games, but only because video games are the new guy in town. What happens with them seems unique, even when it’s not.

The True Crime series spanned two releases and both were… okay. Though they tried to hit all the same beats as Grand Theft Auto, they were substandard in most cases. The games had their fans, but by and large people dismissed them as clones without much to recommend them. Better to just play a Grand Theft Auto game.

Having explored Los Angeles and then New York, the True Crime games decided to go exotic and they started in on True Crime: Hong Kong. This would be in development for a while until its publisher decided that it simply wasn’t good enough and pulled the plug. Japanese publisher SquareEnix swooped in at that point and saved the game — not a common thing, let me tell you — continuing its development and eventually releasing it in the form we have today: Sleeping Dogs.

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[REVIEW] Dead Man Down

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Dead Man DownI’ll freely cop to being a bad novelist in some respects. I’m a particularly bad crime novelist, in that I rarely read anything within my own genre. I do this for a couple of reasons: 1) because I find much crime fiction covering the same thematic ground as many, many novels and short stories before them and 2) because I’d much rather watch a movie than read a book. Any book.

I have said before that writers, in order to be writers, must read. And I do read. However I read significantly more slowly than I did when I was younger and I tend to choose material that I’m going to be able to breeze through easily, as opposed to stuff that causes me to work up a real lather of brain sweat. Hence the appearance of things like the MIA Hunter and Mack Bolan novels in my review queue.

When it comes to movies, on the other hand, I like a nuanced picture that challenges me or at least evokes more complex emotions. So it should come as no surprise that for much of its running time, I really enjoyed Dead Man Down, the English-language debut of Swedish director Niels Arden Oplev, whose primary claim to fame is that he directed the original film version of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Starring Colin Farrell and Noomi Rapace (the original girl with the dragon tattoo herself), Dead Man Down is a crime film with real drama and heart to it. So much so, in fact, that those looking for the trashy thrills so often associated with the crime genre will probably turn from it.

At first Dead Man Down seems deceptively simple. Colin Farrell plays Victor, an almost voiceless, emotionless gunman working for the oily Alphonse (Terrence Howard). Victor is good with a gun, but not so much with words, and he lives a sad, colorless life in his plain apartment, devoid of any real friendship save for that which he cultivates with another of Alphonse’s hoods, Darcy (Dominic Cooper).

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Dreamin’

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It would interest me to know about other authors’ dreams. I sometimes wonder if those people involved in the creative arts, which aren’t just limited to writers, have more vivid dreams than people who have more ordinary preoccupations. From what I gather, horror writers don’t tend to have worse nightmares than non-horror writers, so at least that much of my curiosity is dispelled, but I remain eager to know.

This morning I’m writing my daily blog post at 4:21am. I’ve been awake for about an hour, having gone to bed between eight and nine the previous evening. If you do the math, you’ll note that I did not get a full eight hours of sleep, which is something I’m sure is going to become a hardship as the day progresses. I’m the sort of guy for whom eight hours is the minimum amount of sleep necessary to plow through the day, with nine or ten being optimal. Call me a lazy slob if you want, but it’s my body that makes these demands and it has nothing to do with my industry or lack thereof.

Anyway, I was wakened by a dream. This happens to me occasionally. I dream fairly vividly every night, so this is nothing totally out of the ordinary, but sometimes I’ll have a dream that’s so disturbing that I will wake from it and not be able to shake it enough that I can get back to sleep in a reasonable amount of time. After a half hour or so of trying, I simply give up and get up and start my day on this sour note.

This dream was like many bad dreams I have, and centered around a home invasion. Now let me be clear that we have an extremely low crime rate where I live, even if two of the most crime-ridden cities in the nation are within an hour’s drive of my front door. The point is that my family and I are not under any greater risk of a home invasion than anyone else. But for whatever reason, I’ve come to fear this happening the more years go by.

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Reading the Swedes

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, by Stieg LarssonI’ve written about politics the last couple of days so it’s time I choose a different topic. If I could get off my rear end and actually watch the two DVDs I have from Netflix (I’ve been sitting on them for a month), that would mean a couple of new reviews, but until I do I have to come up with new, interesting things to talk about.

I could tell you about all the penis-enlargement spam I’ve been getting, but you don’t want to hear about that. Besides, if you want to know about comment spam, you can read my entry on the subject. It’s more interesting than it sounds, really.

Instead I think I’ll talk about Swedish crime fiction.

While practically everyone and their brother has read Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, I came to it late. I’m about 60 pages from the end, but I feel qualified to make a few observations about it ahead of a formal review. Unlike, say, Irish crime fiction, I actually have some prior acquaintance with the Swedish variety, having read several of Henning Mankell’s Wallander series. He’s still writing them, though I understand that the latest entry will be the last. And if you didn’t know, Stieg Larsson will not be writing anymore books on account of the fact that he’s dead.

When Larsson’s book first hit these shores, there was a lot of talk about the novel’s essential Swedishness. Some callbacks to Mankell were made, usually because Mankell is the only other Swedish author the writers of the pieces had read. I don’t fault them for this, as my experience with the Swedes is likewise limited. The problem I have is that I don’t really read anything in either author’s books that cry out “Sweden!” to me.

Maybe I’m not looking in the right place. Obviously the books are set in Sweden, involve Swedish characters and represent certain aspects of Swedish life — mostly references to currency, grocery and liquor stores, and the welfare state — but I don’t see anything that invokes the character of the Swedish landscape or other elements reviews have mentioned. Yes, it snows early on in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and it gets really cold, but it also gets really cold and snows in Minnesota.

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