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James Ellroy thinks Skyfall better than the Wire


T.Rex-n-effeckx

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But the conversation soon veered into movies and TV, and dude has some strong opinions, staring with "Skyfall" which he says had some influence on his upcoming book. "...the book takes a theme I first got hip to thanks to 'Skyfall.' It’s f*cking brilliant and it’s the only profound James Bond movie," he said. "They’re usually boring and overlong; the books are boring and racist. The stories are shoddy and sloppily plotted. But 'Skyfall' is about the defence of the West, and that’s what the series is about."

Turning to television, Ellroy somewhat surprisingly reveals he likes the format — just not the popular TV shows everyone loves. "I like the form, in fact I love the form. I watch TV shows at a friend’s house most Friday nights. I think 'Deadwood' and 'Mad Men' were intermittently quite wonderful, but often shoddy and veered into incoherence. I saw one or two episodes of 'The Wire' and thought it was bullsh*t. Bad writing. And I have no sympathy for the underclass," Ellroy said

http://blogs.indiewire.com/theplaylist/james-ellroy-says-skyfall-is-f-cking-brilliant-and-profound-but-the-wire-is-bullsh-t-with-bad-writing-20140220

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What's even MORE interesting is how he got to talking about Skyfall:

 

 

What can you tell us about your new project, the second LA Quartet?

 
I’m about to finish the first volume, called Perfidia – my biggest book – which will be published in Britain this fall. The new quartet takes characters both fictional and real, major and minor, from the first quartet and the trilogy, but places them in LA during the Second World War. It’s the month of Pearl Harbor, 6-29 December 1941. It seamlessly takes the quartet and trilogy, adds four novels, and makes my oeuvre as a historical novelist one inextricable 11-novel whole. And although the story is very much about the injustice of the internment of the Japanese – most of them innocent – let me say, and this is very un-PC, the f*cking internment was not the Holocaust or the Soviet Gulag.
 
Will people disagree with that?
 
I don’t think they’d like my tone. But the book takes a theme I first got hip to thanks to Skyfall. It’s f*cking brilliant and it’s the only profound James Bond movie. They’re usually boring and overlong; the books are boring and racist. The stories are shoddy and sloppily plotted. But Skyfall is about the defence of the West, and that’s what the series is about. I also want to write an espionage trilogy set immediately after the Second World War called the Red Alert Trilogy. Churchill predicted the Iron Curtain and Soviet aggression, and thought we should go into Russia while they were weak after the Second World War. In hindsight, he was right.

So he starts talking about Japanese internment camps(Piranesi is right, he's trolling me) and then uses Skyfall to get the fuck out of talking about it more.

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Great writer, terrible person, no? But I'd have thought he had enough about him to know that pointing out someone else's (Ian Fleming's) racism doesn't automatically mean you can be as racist as you like because you 'know it's wrong'.

 

Saying "I have no sympathy for the Underclass" with reference to The Wire is code for "James Ellroy doesn't care about Black People", right?

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Great writer, terrible person, no? But I'd have thought he had enough about him to know that pointing out someone else's (Ian Fleming's) racism doesn't automatically mean you can be as racist as you like because you 'know it's wrong'.

 

Saying "I have no sympathy for the Underclass" with reference to The Wire is code for "James Ellroy doesn't care about Black People", right?

Sure, if you're retarded.

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