I'm going nuts here! I'm looking for the best bang for the buck in a 50" plasma HD TV. So far it looks like the Zenith at $2519 (Circuit City) is my best option. Any thoughts out there?

For everyone who hates Uwe Boll as much as me:

German horror director Uwe Boll is so fed up with receiving bad reviews from movie critics he is challenging his detractors to a filmed fight. Boll, whose movies Alone In The Dark and House Of The Dead are based on video games, says he will fly his critics to meet him and will then fight them in a boxing ring. The filmmaker is incensed by an online petition which has 13,327 signatures of people asking him to stop making movies. Boll, who has also invited Roger Avary and Quentin Tarantino to join his fight, plans to air the fights on the internet. He the plans to edit clips into his latest film Postal. Boll says, "I'm fed up with people slamming my films without seeing them. Many journalists make value judgments on my films based on the opinions of one or two thousand internet voices. Half of those opinions come from people who've never watched my films. If critics want to bring Uwe Boll down, here is their chance to physically bring him down and have the entire world watch them do it."

does anyone know when the new versions of nightworld and the tomb are being released?

[SIZE="3"]Not a great review for the anthology, but she sure likes Jack.[/SIZE]

Books of The Times | 'Thriller'
Pie Topped With Spleen, and Other Hard-Boiled Tales
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By JANET MASLIN
Published: June 22, 2006
International Thriller Writers Inc., an organization founded in 2004, has over 400 members whose combined sales figures add up to more than 1.6 billion books. Now this group has issued an anthology — with its title in raised letters and blood on its cover, of course — to illustrate what thriller writers do.

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Sue Solie Patterson
James Patterson

THRILLER
Stories to Keep You Up All Night
Edited by James Patterson

568 pages. Mira. $24.95.

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Forum: Book News and Reviews
On the evidence of "Thriller," one thing they do is dust the cobwebs off fragments and outtakes and package them as short stories. Another is direct those stories toward grisly, unmotivated violence, the ghastlier the better. A third is cook up tough-guy names for characters ("Major Frost Jorgenson") or for strings of books ("Recoil," "Recon," "Return"). Many also lay claim to attributes as interesting as those of their characters. "Thriller" illustrates that too.

One contributor, Raelynn Hillhouse, is a former Fulbright fellow who lives on the slopes of the Mauna Loa volcano. She "has not only faced the barrels of Kalashnikovs" but has also "run Cuban rum between East and West Berlin, smuggled jewels from the Soviet Union and forged Eastern bloc visas." Ms. Hillhouse's story, "Diplomatic Constraints," is comparably daring. It features a shotgun-packing Stella in the midst of real turmoil: a fierce attack on the American Embassy in Pakistan in 1979, two weeks after a similar, better-publicized event in Iran.

Although "Thriller" has been edited by James Patterson and blurbed by some of the genre's luminaries, its emphasis is not on well-known practitioners. Prolific as he is, Mr. Patterson hasn't supplied a story.

One of the few high-profile contributors is Lee Child, the best thriller writer of the moment, whose contribution comes from an early draft of an early novel and offers a brief but revealing glimpse of the author's character Jack Reacher. Mr. Child is also a contributor to the dueling anthology "Death Do Us Part," the Mystery Writers of America's book edited by Harlan Coben and due later this summer.

So thriller writing and mystery writing overlap. But how? The best answer "Thriller" offers is that if mysteries depend on deductive processes, thrillers care more about "bloated intestines strung across the ground like festive streamers," as James Rollins so enthusiastically puts it. Each of this book's stories is a build-up to deadly mayhem, which is often committed at the expense of reason. These tales would rather kill off the wrong man than not kill anybody at all.

For instance, one of the better entries here is Gregg Hurwitz's "Dirty Weather," which is set in a truck-stop restaurant in the dead of a Michigan winter and develops its characters well, at least for a few pages. The place is near a prison and is popular with guards; when a new guy shows up, he catches the eye of the proprietor's daughter. Then, trouble: "The door smashed open and a man with a gun charged them, screaming so loud flecks of saliva dotted the bar." Although this uproar ought to be sufficient, the story gratuitously leaves somebody to die in the snow.

Law enforcement figures are a major presence here. For instance, there is Alex Kava's Special Agent Maggie O'Dell, who thinks of apple pie as gory because she once saw "a perfect piece of apple pie with the victim's bloody spleen neatly arranged on top." Instead of treating this as a revelation about Maggie, Ms. Kava puts it on her story's second page and makes it a way of saying hello.

The book's more effective writers are at least able to do this with economy. (From J. A. Konrath: "Bang bang and he was a paycheck for the coroner.") But there is plenty of overwriting here too. (From Heather Graham: "The wind railed with the sharpness of a banshee's shriek.") And some of it wouldn't get past a high school English teacher. (From M. Diane Vogt: "The night-light illuminated him enough that the camera would record perfectly.")

"Thriller" slows down for a couple of incongruous period pieces, like "The Double Dealer" by David Liss, with its 18th-century setting and emphasis on flatulence, or "The Tuesday Club," by Katherine Neville, featuring Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and other well-known Americans in Paris. ("One might be lonely in Paris, thought Abigail Adams with chagrin — but one could surely never be alone!")

The only dated stories of real interest are those that trace the thriller's evolution. "Success of a Mission," by Dennis Lynds, offers a glimpse of Arab-American relations circa 1968 and expertly deploys old-school espionage tricks like microfilm hidden in a piece of halvah.

The best of this book's contributors illustrate why quick thinking is more interesting than a thumb in the eye ("going all the way through the cornea, the meniscus, and into the brain," in the words of David Dun).

The most welcome discovery, for readers new to the thriller universe, is F. Paul Wilson's Repairman Jack. The character is enjoyably well drawn, and he's no James Bond: "Interlude at Duane's" centers on a robbery at a Duane Reade drugstore in New York and calls on Jack to outsmart the thieves with whatever he can find amid the merchandise. It's the rare story here that has a beginning, middle and ending, as well as some neat tricks in between.
Though many of its authors write books that move quickly, "Thriller" itself is surprisingly slow going. That's because each story's contrivances take getting used to. And the more far-fetched they are, the harder that is.

One moment the hook is drug-smuggling in Albania; at another it's the blackmailing of a plastic surgeon in Beverly Hills. Even the switch from Christopher Rice (secret homosexuality) to Christopher Reich (fine dining) is more difficult than it sounds.

I am taking the bus to work now and have a little extra time to read. I just finished rereading SIMS yesterday (even better the second time) and decided to reread Black Wind. I came across this early on today:


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On page 22 Matsuo talks about a blade forged from the metal of a sword given to the swordmaker by a wandering gaijin centuries ago. Was this a third sword owned by Glaeken or was this some other gaijin with a magical sword. Was this something planned for Nightworld but abandoned? Just curious.

I just received my free pass for the Los Angeles Film Festival from my sister who is on the selection commitee. I was hoping to see her new film "Walkout" with Edward James Olmos, but I hear there's still a lot of post-production left before its premiere in November to coincide with the anniversary of the East L.A. Moritorium, which led to the walkouts and riots of 1971. I'm also looking forward to seeing "Through a Scanner Darkly" and "Monster House." I'm also looking forward to seeing all the indies and experimental stuff. Sadly, there are only four horror flicks this year, and I think "Snoop Dogg's 'Hood of Horror' should be moved to the Premiere Presentation section, not the Indie Dark Wave section, so as to leave room for another real independent filmmaker.

AC

P.S. I remember seeing "Evil Dead" and meeting with Sam Raimi, his brother, Bruce Campbell, and other cast members at the Midnight Premiere of SR's first horror flick at my first L.A. Film Festival.

I looked forward to this movie as the "Twilight Zone-ish" plot intrigued me, sort of an alternate uninverse, time-travel story. Keenu is in 2004, and Sandra is in 2006. They correspond via the same location and mail-box (best part of the movie). Ultimately, it's a love story and works at that level. The TZ-ish plot, however, could have used a bit of tightening up, but it worked well enough for me to enjoy the love story angle. I mean, who wants to see a bunch of scientists investigating that spooky mailbox anyway? B+

AC

P.S. My brother saw it with me and compared it to "Somewhere in Time" with Christopher Reeves. I must now rent this movie and see for myself.

P.P.S. The average age of the crowd was about 60-70. Hmmm... Do I see a pattern developing here? Or is it just a matinee price thing?

http://www.gregvilk.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=18

How is this possible? He went to college for a few years? How does he not have a SS #?

Just wondering.

Anyone?

Greetings everyone,

I have not yet read Infernal and Harbingers, but reading the posts on this forum I got the impression that Harbingers might be the last "real" RJ book and it's only YA prequels from now on.

Please, oh please, tell me it's not true!

Kind Regards
gleeful

PS: Apologies in advance should I have gotten it all wrong.