DVD Tuesday A Detour into existential misery Edgar G Ulmers noir road movie is a trip down the highway to hellThe danger in shining a spotlight on a movie like Detour 1945 is that people will expect too much of the wrong things from it Which isnt to say I think Edgar G Ulmers nightmarish story of a cross-country drive into the heart of darkness is anything short of great Its haunted me for years and I can watch it over and over But Ive heard people complain that they couldnt get past the studio-bound sets and rear projection They never really bought into it because it didnt look real Id argue however that its air of unreality of disconnection from normal life is part of its greatness Ulmer took the liabilities of no money and a six-day shooting schedule and figured out a way to make them assets Detour has the feverish logic of a nightmare and features both a strikingly unlikable hero and a femme fatale whos nothing short of demonic C
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Last week it seemed that everything was conspiring to remind me of A Simple Plan seeing the trailer for the Coen brothers upcoming No Country for Old Men based on the Cormac McCarthy novel stumbling across Stephen Kings rave review of Scott B Smiths second novel The Ruins having an argument about what The Bible says is the root of all evil So rather than ignore the signs and portents its my DVD Tuesday pick Directed by Sam Raimi and based on Smiths debut novel A Simple Plan is a terrific example of what may be my favorite kind of thriller the kind where someone makes a mistake that snowballs until he or she has lost everyone and everything that matters and all efforts to make things right just make them worse Its the quintessential noir plot and while the poor put-upon victim of cruel fate seems fated to get trapped in some cosmic web the fact is he or she consistently masochistically it often seems makes exactly the wrong decision which transf
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