Paul Bates's Blog
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May.22.2013
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2005’s A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE is one of those rare films in which the whole is equal by the sum of its dazzling parts. The cast, featuring Viggo Mortensen, Maria Bello, Ed Harris, John Hurt and Ashton Holmes, is exemplary. The direction, editing, filming, timing is flawless. The story, adapted by...
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May.17.2013
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“I first met Dean not long after my wife and I split up. I had just gotten over a serious illness that I won't bother to talk about, except that it had something to do with the miserably weary split-up and my feeling that everything was dead. With the coming of Dean Moriarty began the part of my...
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May.11.2013
Getting published is a bear. Getting published by a reputable publisher is a hungry great white shark. Getting something of significance published by a reputable publisher is a ravenous T-rex.
Enter the independent (nee small) presses, those brave folks, usually without grants (...
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Apr.18.2013
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In 1983 and 1984 PBS aired six British gothic ghost stories under the collective banner “Shades of Darkness.” The tales take place from the early 19th century to the mid 20th century, and are based on short stories by Elizabeth Bowen, C.H.B. Kitchin, May Sinclair and Edith Wharton, with the latter...
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Feb.28.2013
“You see what you want to see,” says one of the demons to the protagonist near the climax, as inevitably someone does in most of Bergman’s amazing films. In this case, Max von Sydow, an artist, is about to encounter the ghost of the lover he cannot forget to the glee of the characters in the castle...
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Feb.08.2013
It’s always a pleasant surprise when a raft of critics/readers spot something one’s written or something in which one appears—in this case an open themed dark fiction anthology called FOR WHEN THE VEIL DROPS—and for the most part praise it.
My first novel, IMPRINT got its fair share of good...
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Jan.23.2013
You know you’ve made it big when, like Guillermo del Toro, you get top billing on the film poster when you're only the executive producer.You know you’ve made it big when the multiplex is playing two feature films in which you star, as Jessica Chastain has with MAMA and ZERO DARK THIRTY. Del Toro,...
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Jan.15.2013
As cinematography, ZERO DARK THIRTY delivers the goods by way of sidestepping tropes and clichés. Right from the opening darkness in which we listen to an audio montage of assorted emergency phone calls and news bites on 9/11/01—in lieu of revisiting the all too familiar images of jets...
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Dec.25.2012
You know you’ve done something outstanding when the critics pan you for two weeks then blatantly reverse themselves as they finally get with the program. Such was the case for the BBC’s 1976 “I Claudius” series which made up for its modest budget (scenes in the Coliseum were limited to views of the...
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Dec.16.2012
Jeremy Brett was the quintessential Sherlock Holmes, David Burke and Rosalie Williams were absolutely perfect as Dr. Watson and Mrs. Hudson in this first of six Grenada TV collections of the original tales. From the opening credits, an amazing slice of Victorian street life, to the final...
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Dec.13.2012
2004’s indie gem “Clean” was made on a shoestring (less than $10,000,) features stellar performances from everyone, especially stars Nick Nolte and Maggie Cheung, was nominated for the coveted Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Technical Grand Prize and Maggie Chung won Best...
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Dec.05.2012
Ligotti’s 1994 collection, NOCTUARY, has been reissued by Subterranean Press (2012.) This incarnation contains eight brooding short stories, an enlightening introduction by the author and twenty amazing flash fictions, tighter and darker than anything you might have recently read.
The...
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Dec.01.2012
Occasionally a commercially viable artist’s most definitive work is his least commercially acceptable, and often his least accessible. And so it may be for Louis Malle’s 1975 film, “Black Moon.”
The term black moon like its better known counterpart blue moon is a reference to an extra...
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Nov.27.2012
A drama-tragedy within a drama-tragedy, Melville’s 1969 classic film “Army of Shadows” is like a day-in-the-life of the French Resistance to the four year Nazi occupation without the romance, glitter, or myth making. Bad timing and French politics got it panned in France and kept it from getting...
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Nov.12.2012
Weighing in at slightly under three hours, the movie, like the book, tells six superficially unrelated tales, taking place from 1848 to 2321, and mixes them all together in no particular order, save that they begin and end at the same place and time.
The book uses the device of...
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About Paul
Paul L. Bates writes dark fiction, both short and long form. His work often crosses genre boundaries or ignores them altogether. Ever mindful of the surging wall of venal vacuity threatening to numb all our minds, crush all our spirits, his offerings,...
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