Word: milieu
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...Dante. Although she is happily married, Natalie is immediately attracted to her professor's radiance of mind. He pursues her, she capitulates only too willingly, and they begin a year-long series of passionate, clandestine meetings. In her first novel, Ellen Schwamm takes this conventional plot and Manhattan milieu and creates a fresh and elegant narrative...
...ambitious novel of four years ago, this is a well-made, soberly intended film. It contains some dialogue and situations that have more ironic wit than one expects to find in an essentially depressed, and depressing, context. The trouble is that the movie deals predictably with an ugly milieu (drug dealing) and with characters whom one cannot, in the end, even pity...
...essential mood, at once cynical, gloomy and absurdist, remained intact. As that film is available on TV and in memory's theater, there is no reason to try to duplicate it. There is absolutely no reason to rip Chandler's immortal gumshoe, Philip Marlowe, from his natural milieu, Los Angeles in its corrupt years as an emerging metropolis, and relocate him uneasily in, of all places, London...
...successful crime-mystery-suspense novel today, unlike a great deal of current fiction, must be skillfully plotted around a cast of credible, disparate, motivated characters; it almost invariably entails expert knowledge of a milieu or a profession; and it depends heavily on the author's familiarity with locale, which can range from the Arctic to the Sahara, Manhattan to the Mojave. Moreover, as Brian Garfield (Death Wish) argues in I, Witness, "the literature of crime and suspense can provoke images and questions of the most complex intellectual and emotional force; it can explore the most critical of ethical...
...movie, one could argue that the director has been defeated by transatlantic cultural jet lag. To some extent this is true. Much of the film's dialogue, which is ridden with whorehouse-fiction clichés, would never be tolerated by Malle were he working in a French milieu. The same goes for some of the actors, who seem to have been cast more on the basis of looks than ability. Still, the movie's major troubles cannot be explained away so easily, for at its heart there is a failure of will. While Malle...