I have been getting emails about Dark City 2, so here is the lowdown: Xeus tells me that the book has gone through ten edits at this point, and they are going through it yet again with a fine-tooth comb.
With any luck, publication should take place at the end of September.
When Jason Bourne finally catches up with the man who ‘made’ him, it is something of an anti-climax. Stoop-shouldered, snowy-haired, and bespectacled, the father-figure he confronts is almost too ordinary to be a monster. Bourne is confused and anguished. “You told me I would be saving American lives.”
But the anti-climax works. It is so politically aware that I see people around me in the theater nodding.
Who is Jason Bourne?
He is a contemporary American tragedy; a man who questions nothing until trauma propels him into questioning everything. Stripped of memory, friends, and country, he becomes the ultimate outsider, scurrying across borders, where all soil is foreign soil.
It is this dynamic, taken to the extreme, that makes The Bourne Ultimatum such a superb conclusion to a remarkable trilogy. Clocking in at just under two hours, it is faster, grittier, and more liberal than any other recent blockbuster.
On the right, you have the blackest of black government operatives, tapping into CCTV cameras, zeroing in on cellphones, and ordering renditions and assassinations like takeaways. On the left, you have Jason Bourne, using only lateral thinking and keen observation to pick out threats from the crowd, before proceeding to outthink, outrun, and outfight them.
Filmed in a shaky, documentary-style, the cat-and-mouse games and hand-to-hand combat are vertigo-inducing. But they only serve to make Ultimatum suspenseful in a way that many other manhunts can only aspire to be.
The message? Dismiss patriotism. Think for yourself.
Highly recommended; so long as you are not a right-wing conservative.
This advertisement sparked off controversy when it aired in Belgium in 2005.
Watch it here.
The translated message is: “Don’t let war affect the lives of children.”
The Yangtze River dolphin, one of the world’s rarest mammals, is no more, a victim of China’s breakneck economic growth and competition for food with one of the world’s most common large mammals — human beings.
Read the full story here.
When I stepped into the airport’s arrival hall, I expected to see my family, but what I got instead was the police. Dressed in plainclothes, they peeled away from the crowd and zeroed in on me.
From the front.
From the left.
From the right.
Then, one of the officers jammed his foot against my baggage trolley, bringing it to a stop. “Selamat pulang ke Malaysia.” Welcome back to Malaysia.
Another flashed me his identification. “You are Mr Samuel Wu?”
I blinked, my throat feeling like a screw being tightened.
They belonged to the Special Branch.
Malaysia’s very own Gestapo.
Lying wouldn’t help, so I went with the truth. “Yes, I am, but—”
“You must come with us.”
They clutched my arms, pulling me away from the trolley, and hustling me towards the exit. My feet swam; everything was happening too fast. As I craned my neck, I saw the third officer taking hold of the trolley and pushing it along. All around us, people were staring, murmuring, pointing. Oh, God.
“Please, sir.” I turned to the officer on my right. “What is this about?”
He didn’t even look at me. “Quiet.”
I turned to the officer on my left. “Am I being arrested?”
“Quiet.”
The automatic doors at the exit swished open and I felt the full blast of the humidity outside. It was strong enough to make my head hurt, even though it was ten o’clock at night. I broke out in sweat and my shirt became glued to my skin.
Just beyond the taxi queue ahead, a Toyota SUV was waiting.
The two officers pressed me into the backseat and sandwiched me on either side, while the third tossed my luggage into the boot. When he was done, he got into the passenger seat up front.
He nodded at the driver. “Kita jalan sekarang.” We move now.
Apparently, I’m very wholesome:
Brent Ghelfi’s debut VOLK’S GAME is a dark and vigorous story.
The protagonist is Alexei Volkovoy—Volk for short—a survivor of Russia’s hideous war in Chechnya, now a gangster wearing a prosthetic foot.
When Volk is commissioned to steal a painting, he is faced with the devil’s alternative. Does he betray The General, a man from his military past? Or does he betray Maxim, the mafia kingpin?
Through Volk’s eyes, the grimness and absurdity of contemporary Russia is captured with all the precision of a scalpel. There is toughness, yes, but also sadness. It becomes clear that Russia’s cowboy capitalism is no less schizophrenic than communism was.
Read an excerpt here.
The latest International Thriller Writers newsletter interviews James Patterson. Here is an interesting bit:
Do you think movies have helped or harmed the thriller genre?
The movie business on the thriller/mystery side is terrible, just a total disaster. Just the worst.
They have forgotten what a thriller is supposed to do, which is to thrill. And they condescend to it, and they make everything a message movie now.
I thought in the past couple years the Bourne movies did a good job being thrillers, Red Eye did a good job, too, but for the most part I don’t go to the movies to be depressed. Derailed: nice book, awful movie.
[The studios] don’t get that it’s Friday night, and a lot of people have this four hour window to catch a movie and catch a meal. Life is hard, the week is hard. They just don’t want to be lectured at.
Then they wonder why people won’t go [to the movies] anymore. They think people don’t want to see thrillers.
They do want to see thrillers—but [the studios] are not doing thrillers. They’re doing lecture movies. There’s nothing profound; the deepest they get is half as deep as a good book on the same subject.
As long as they keep making awful thrillers, it will hurt the thriller [book] business. And it has.
Got this off Ted.
The results of the Bulwer-Lytton contest are out. It is a celebration of writing so awful, they should never be published.
Here is my personal favourite:
Agent 53986262.9 was strapped precariously to a giant Chinese firework, the fuse slowly shortening like a noodle getting slurped into someone’s pursed lips, and although he knew he was running out of time and still had no plan for escape, all he could think of was the song about the Muffin Man and how the word “polyurethane” made it sound like the material was made out of multiple urethras.
Allison Kelly
Great Falls, VA
Not even Robert Ludlum, at his most flowery, could have come out with that!
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