Watching the detectives, and other housekeeping notes

I’ve neg­lected to men­tion in this spot that I’m host­ing anoth­er film series at the cent­ral branch of the Brooklyn Public Library, this one a study of the cine­mat­ic private eye, entitled “Detectives: Good, Bad and Ugly,” and tonight I’ll be intro­du­cing Howard Hawks’ The Big Sleep at 6:30. Next Wednesday I’ll bring in anoth­er Marlowe, an under­rated one by my lights, Dick Powell in Murder My Sweet. As the series con­tin­ues we’ll take in both Hank Quinlan and Inspector Clouseau. Come by; the lib­rary has a recently updated DVD pro­jec­tion sys­tem, so it’ll look good, and there’ll be hope­fully lively words before and after. 

Over at RogerEbert.com, I’ve got exam­in­a­tions of the works of two very dif­fer­ent film­makers, on account of some new DVD box sets of their career high­lights: first, vintage-footage orches­trat­or Bill Morrison, and then, the deli­ri­ous anim­a­tion and per­ver­sion maes­tro Walerian Borowczyk. Check em out, as Joe Bob Briggs used to say.