Jack Reacher, The King Of Beatdowns,

Returns To Streaming December 15

It’s been 21 months since Prime Video dropped the first season of Reacher, and it will be 25 more days before we get to see Reacher 2 when it arrives on the streaming platform on December 15. To honor the occasion, entertainment reporter Joshua Rivera recently wrote in Polygon what fans have to look forward to. “When it comes to reluctantly handing out righteous beatdowns, there are few characters more satisfying to watch than Alan Ritchson’s Jack Reacher,” he says. “It’s really not more complicated than that. In Reacher, Alan Ritchson, a hilariously large man, gives a layered, believable portrayal of what it’s like to be a person for whom the world is but tissue paper, and who is polite enough to not remind people about it. In the pulp tradition, Jack Reacher is just trying to get from one place to another and does not want to get entangled in just about anything — but goddammit, he keeps stumbling across wrongdoing and he can’t just do nothing about it. Season 2, based on Lee Child’s novel Bad Luck and Trouble, looks like a more personal story for Reacher than season 1 (which was based on Child’s first Jack Reacher novel, Killing Floor), with a plot involving Reacher’s former team of Army investigators being hunted down by an unknown killer. If you haven’t seen the show yet, give it a shot: It really is quite satisfying to see bad people make the mistake, over and over again, of running into this brick wall of a dude.”

Was 1987 The Most Thrilling Year

In Hollywood Moviemaking?

Earlier this year BunzelGram ran a story that suggested the best year for timeless thrillers was 1974, a brief flicker in Hollywood history that brought us The Conversation, the Odessa File, Sugarland Express, Chinatown, Death Wish, and The Godfather II, among many others. Running with this theme, author Michael Ledwidge last week proposed in Crime Reads that 1987, in fact, was the single greatest year not just for thrillers, but for movies in general. “Here’s my thinking,” he wrote: “1987 didn’t have just one or two classics; it had dozens of them. Take a look at the classic thriller line-up from that year: Wall Street, Lethal Weapon, Fatal Attraction, The Untouchables, No Way Out, Full Metal Jacket, Robocop, Predator, A Prayer for the Dying, Less Than Zero, Suspect, and Someone To Watch Over Me. Why is this? Somewhere in that time frame, the artistic marriage of style and substance, of form and function, was perfectly balanced in a way that had not been seen previously and, with few exceptions, has not been seen since.” The thriller heroes of the late 80s—1987 in particular—offer the viewer real human beings just like us (think Mel Gibson in Lethal Weapon), Ledwidge says, so the fantasy of vicariously living through their exciting quests—feeling their human pains and human joys and human hopes and human triumphs—is more believable and therefore perhaps richer and more satisfying.

TRUE CRIME

Couple Arrested In 1988 Death Of

GA Girl Found Encased In Concrete

Almost 35 years after the disfigured remains of a 5-year-old girl were found in rural Georgia, investigators have identified the victim and arrested her mother and her mother’s live-in boyfriend. The remains of Kenyatta “KeKe” Odom, known for decades only as Baby Jane Doe, were found by road workers inside an old television cabinet and encased in concrete near Millwood in Ware County on Dec. 21, 1988. Kenyatta’s mother, 56-year-old Evelyn Odom, and 61-year-old Ulyster Sanders, were arrested Thursday in Albany, Georgia and charged with murder and aggravated battery, among other counts. A statement released by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation says that Odom and Sanders submerged parts of Kenyatta’s body in hot water, killing the girl and disfiguring her legs and feet. Medical examiners at the time declared the death a homicide but could not determine the cause of death or find evidence that would point to suspects. For decades, investigators attempted to identify Kenyatta’s remains through media coverage and forensic testing available at the time, and in 2022, they received a tip from the public after a news story aired about the anniversary of the child’s death. Speaking at a press conference last week, GBI Special Agent in Charge Jason Seacrist said a tipster thought she could identify the victim and a suspect, Odom, who’d claimed that Kenyatta had gone to live with her father.

Film Noir's Most Dangerous Women, From Stanwyck To Hayworth To Turner,

While some people may criticize current cinema for the domination of powerful male figures, women have a long history of commanding the screen with a ferocity to match today’s superheroes. As Matt Schimkowitz wrote for Indie Wire, “Throughout their time in Hollywood, femme fatales have epitomized both liberated onscreen women and misogynistic stereotypes. While it’s easy to discount the femme fatale as a defamatory archetype for women, these characters helped make female sexuality more commonplace in movie theaters, challenging the traditional gender roles of the 1930s, ‘40s, and ‘50s. More than that, they gave actresses active parts in the movies and empowered them to take matters into their own hands. It’s a 'trope' that lives on today, as the term femme fatale—French for 'fatal woman'—is an archetype that stretches back to ancient literature. It appears in all genres of movies, from such Oscar-nominated thrillers as Black Swan to cult-classics that include Brick and Fight Club, to Christopher Nolan’s blockbusters The Dark Knight Rises and Inception. The many sides of the femme fatale, from Barbara Stanwyck to Rita Hayworth to Kathleen Turner (pictured in Body Heat), are imprinted all over cinema, and with this in mind, Schimkowitz compiled this list of ten femme fatales that cannot be missed.

Family Recipes Live For Centuries

On Headstones Around The World

On a clear day at Nome City Cemetery in Alaska, you can watch planes take off over the Bering Sea. Within the field of white graves, you might also see a small black obelisk that shines brilliantly when it catches the sun. Getting closer, you’ll note an unmistakable symbol engraved near its base. It’s not a cross, nor a Star of David, but rather a tub of Cool Whip. The grave belongs to Bonnie Johnson, a mother and former flight attendant whose cookies always showed up at birthdays, holidays, and school events housed inside—you guessed it—Cool Whip containers. Her recipe is also etched into her gravestone, and as Sam O’Brien recently wrote for Atlas Obscura, Johnson’s memorial is not the only one of its kind. There are countless graves around the world marked with monuments inscribed with a cherished family recipe. In Seattle, a grandmother’s blueberry pie is immortalized on the side of a black bench. On an Israeli kibbutz, a father and professional baker’s famous yeast roll recipe is etched in Hebrew on white stone. In Upstate New York, a mother’s handwritten instructions on cooking chicken soup are carved into pink granite.

Coming March 19, 2024

BEYOND ALL DOUBT

It’s been a year since Cameron Kane’s wife Alison died in a fiery car crash. He and his seven-year-old daughter Sabrina are trying to start a new life when he brushes past the man who killed his wife a year ago, and who also died in the same horrific accident. The chance encounter quickly propels Cameron down a rabbit hole as he begins to question everything he knows about the events of that night. The further he digs, the more he becomes convinced that there’s a deeper conspiracy at play—one that quickly leads him to a complex tangle of devious schemes and murder. Cameron knows there’s no price he won’t pay for the truth, but as the deadly threats continue to mount, he realizes that price may be his very life…and that of his daughter. [By Reed Bunzel, writing as Hilton Reed. Published by Crooked Lane Books.]