Kevin Rush's Blog - Posts Tagged "books"

As I’ve matured, I’m still more likely to read a contemporary novel that’s going to be made into a film than to scour my local library for movie source material, especially when it’s a half-century-old bestseller that didn’t make the canon of my college English curriculum. But this summer I decided to change that. I decided to explore the novels that became movies, and what better place to start than two books Alfred Hitchcock used for his films.... Continue reading at https://kevinrush.us/2021/09/23/if-i-...

From The Petrified Forest to The Harder They Fall, Humphrey Bogart was the undisputed King of Film Noir. As Sam Spade and Philip Marlowe, Bogey set the tone for hard-boiled gumshoes navigating “the great wrong place” and surviving the intrigues of the deadly femme fatale. In Key Largo, he embodied the soul-dead weariness of a disillusioned crusader, who’d concluded the world was just too rotten to save. Bogart was so noir, he could shed the shadows and fog, defying the disinfecting powers of sunlight, to play betrayal, corruption and revenge on the picturesque streets of San Francisco. In Dark Passage, with the help of a fortuitous self-defenestration, and after the necessary extermination of underworld vermin no one would miss, Bogart extricates himself from peril and achieves one of the rare happy endings in a film that is nevertheless truly noir. Continue reading at https://kevinrush.us/2021/10/01/if-i-...

Twisted psychology and dark humor in The Talented Mr. Ripley and Fight Club. By Kevin Rush.

If you’ve ever gotten into a roommate situation you’ve regretted, you can probably appreciate this week’s two books. In each, a new acquaintance appears mysteriously, moves in and creates mayhem. Sure, there are plenty of bad iterations of this basic plot—I’m looking at you, Single White Female—but our featured authors masterfully elevate their tales with haunting portrayals of human psychology at the breaking point.
Continue reading at: https://kevinrush.us/2021/10/26/if-i-...

Boldly enigmatic, notoriously inscrutable, and featuring a grandiose fusion of classical music and cinematic images, Stanley Kubrick’s dazzling science fiction epic, 2001: A Space Odyssey has mesmerized and confounded audiences for decades. Released in 1968, 2001 was largely ignored at Oscar time. But today, the American Film Institute ranks it as the greatest science fiction film of all time.

2001 began as a collaboration between producer/director Kubrick and the famed sci-fi writer Arthur C. Clarke. The plot is drawn from Clarke’s 1951 short story, The Sentinel of Eternity...

Continue reading at... https://kevinrush.us/2021/11/16/if-i-...