The Peaky Blinders were a criminal gang based in Birmingham, England during the late 19th century and, to a lesser extent, in the early 20th. Allow me to impose a break from the insane reality of American electoral politics and invite you to take a fictitious trip back to Birmingham, England, 1919. The obvious heir to Coppola's Godfather epic, with a dash of DePalma's Scarface, mixed together with Soprano-style family values gone hopelessly and blissfully wrong, Peaky Blinders is easily one of the most entertaining, well crafted, expertly written long form series I've seen in a very long time! I'd forgotten there was a genre called "epic gangster family saga" - yet here it is, the brainchild of writer/director Steven Knight (Locke, Dirty Pretty Things, and - yes - the creator of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, but that's another story - 'Millionaire was his day job until the high end work took over). Playing the sociopathic...
Casual writings on classic and contemporary culture, American and otherwise.