Shortly into this, I realized I knew the entire context from books like When the Moon Turns to Blood (Leah Sottile's excellent work on the Vallow/Daybell child murders), reading I've done on the fringe Mormon overlap with right wing groups, and the experience of living in Utah (and driving through Idaho, Oregon, and Eastern Washington--it ain't all Seattle and Portland out there, guys).
I think my knowledge of all that and familiarity with the subcultures of the intermountain west really…
Time, opportunity, and will have not converged for me to watch this until now. I loved it (complete with Pacino's truly unhinged choices in some scenes) and miss this kind of movie. This era of De Niro is great. Not the young buck, not the old man.
It reminded me a bit of The Departed, as we see the parallel lives of the two crews--the cop crew and the crime crew--and how similar many of these men are to each other.
via Criterion
It was late, a rainy night. I walked into the bedroom and my husband had this going on the TV. I got into my pj's and sort of watched and sort of dozed. There were Russians. And a wire attached to a watch that made an awesome and terrifying weapon. Topher Grace had grown up. Richard Gere still looked good. Someone almost fell off of a library ladder. I don't know.
OH LOOK IT'S A MOVIE BASED ON A BOOK I WROTE
I saw this at an industry screening back in May, in a crowded theater at CAA, and it's very difficult to articulate the feelings of seeing a version of something you wrote embodied on the screen.
This has been in the works since the book came out 10 years ago, and Kyra Sedgwick never gave up on getting it made. Contrary to her original plan, she ended up directing…
