Kim Morgan; Maurice Broaddus

I'd never heard of Kim Morgan before. She still hasn't heard of me. But over the course of a few days I saw her name dropped on a few film sites so I thought I'd check her site out.

She's a good writer, a person with her own opinions and a way of integrating some of her own life into her essays on various movies. Here's a sample from her current post.

"Nicholas Ray's In a Lonely Place is one of the most heartbreaking love stories ever committed to film. It's certainly one of the most poignant pictures (violently poignant at times) within the canon of film noir, a genre haunted by doomed love.

"Noir love -- the kind that causes characters to throw that "Baby I don't care" caution to the wind -- is frequently a cynical fancy that won't survive the angst and ugliness inside the man or outside the world. Its happiness is typically intense, but brief. Love or lust often motivates action in noir, particularly via a femme fatale (as in Double Indemnity or Out of the Past). But it also holds up a mirror to myriad themes, largely existential, that hang over characters with profound malaise. Ray approaches the torments of Camus and Sartre with In a Lonely Place (1950) showing, not only the delicacy of true love, but the delicacy of creativity, violence, trust, and a person's own position in an often ugly, alienating world and the inner nausea it creates.

"So begins my video essay on Nicholas Ray's 1950 masterpiece In a Lonely Place, a movie I love and admire and one I understand better each each year I live in this often alienating city -- Los Angeles."

For the rest go here:
http://sunsetgun.typepad.com/

MAURICE BROADDUS

Several months ago a mutual friend asked me to read a story by Maurice Broaddus. He'd yet to sell anything. I really liked the story. Today our mutual friend e mailed me and said that Maurice just signed a three-book contract with HarperCollins. Congratulations, Maurice!