I’ve seen three terrific mystery/suspense films this year. The Secret In Their Eyes from Argentina, which won the academy award for best foreign language film, The Ghost Writer, a
European production made from the Robert Harris novel, and the Swedish made film,
The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, an outstanding movie that captures the essence
of Stieg Larsson’s novel while leaving out all the needless extraneous
information. Hollywood is making their own version starring Daniel Craig (James
Bond), but they’re going to have to really come up with something special to
outshine the Swedish version and especially Noomi Rapace’s outstanding
performance as the tech hacker Lisbeth Salander.


Here’s my question. Television is saturated with popular crime dramas and good crime movies are generally well received and successful. So why do we see so few Hollywood films being made from successful crime novels or original scripts. It’s not as if Hollywood can’t do it well. (See LA Confidential for example.) Instead, literate, mature audiences are continually subjected to comic book characters, computer generated graphics, and explosions that substitute for actual suspense. It's getting old.

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That's why God created cable TV. I could be wrong, but I think HBO is mentioned in one of the apocryphal books of the New Testament.
They are on TV.
Nothing beats a good crime drama, regardless of format.

I have my money on THE TOWN as being potentially worthwhile. Based on the Chuck Hogan novel Prince of Thieves. It's being talked up a fair bit currently; if it performs, we might start to see a few more projects like it get off the ground.

Other than that, there does seem to be some sort of Hollywood mandate to adapt as many Dennis Lehane novels as possible into major motion pictures. So there's always that.

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