Lucas Blogs About Books

Wow, they're right, day-for-night shooting is really obvious. So, what's this book's deal? Dashiell Hammett's The Dain Curse  is a pulpy detective novel (originally serialized) about his Continental Op character (who you may recognize from Red Harvest , the inspiration for Kurosawa's Yōjimbō , which Leone remade as A Fistful of Dollars ). The Op is a short, stout, middle-aged man who works, unsurprisingly, at the Continental Detective Agency. He's been hired by an insurance company to investigate a robbery at the home of a Mr. Leggett, a chemist whose work on removing impurities from glass has drawn the attention of a local jeweler who wants to see if the process might remove flaws from gemstones. And it just gets more convoluted from there. No surprise in a detective story really. There are actually three separate cases in this novel but as time goes on we get drawn into an elaborate plot involving jailbreaks, assumed identities, hallucinations, a cult, ...

Add caption So, what's this book's deal? Have you seen the 2006 anime adaptation directed by Satoshi Kon ? Is it possible for me not to have seen a movie you've seen? Well, doesn't the "Hypothetical Reader" conceit rrequire that you haven't read the books I have? Let's not examine that too closely. Yes, I've seen Paprika . Well, the novel isn't all that different. I mean, there are differences, but honestly, if you've seen the movie, I wouldn't say that reading the source material adds that much to the experience. Yeah, about the novel, this is theoretically a review of that and not an Oddaptations , right? Oh, right. So Yasutaka Tsutsui's Paprika  is a Philip K. Dickian sci-fi psychological thriller about a psychotherapist who is able to enter her patients' dreams. The therapist in question is Dr. Atsuko Chiba who's been using PT (psychotherapy) devices to treat patients since before the devices were legal...