The Noir List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Project)

An ongoing project to survey the best films of individual decades, genres, and filmmakers.
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domino harvey
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Re: The Noir List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Project)

#701 Post by domino harvey » Wed Oct 03, 2018 1:25 pm

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Recent viewings, mostly duds edition

A Strange Adventure (William Witney 1956)
Robbers take a young pup and some errant government workers hostage as all hole up in a federal retreat for the winter in this very, very minor but not unenjoyable Republic noir. Jan Merlin does his best Richard Widmark impression here as the main baddie, but he like the rest of the component parts of the film come off as generic, store-brand versions of good noirs. Once TV started siphoning all the noir talent to smaller screens in the fifties, big screen noir suffered tremendously, and you can see clean-cut TV production-style all over this even if it was trying to present larger thrills for a theatrical audience.

A Woman’s Devotion (Paul Henreid 1956)
Lackadaisical Acapulco-set color noir with Ralph Meeker as a vet struggling with PTSD, which inconveniently manifests as some kind of woman-killing thing. This movie’s scenes are paced so poorly that it’s often oddly fascinating-- Henreid is about as gifted behind the camera as he is in front of it, ie not. Beyond the beautiful colors on Kino Lorber’s Blu-ray, which surely looks nice because no one has wanted another print made from the neg since it was released, this is just typical poverty row garbage with nothing of real value in it. Do not trust anyone who attempts to bolster this film up for presenting an early portrayal of “battle shock” without actually seeing what Meeker does with it.

Down Three Dark Streets (Arnold Laven 1954)
One of the many pro-G-man noirs, this one at least has a novel idea: rather than focus on one story, it shows how FBI agents are often juggling several cases simultaneously. Broderick Crawford is out to find the killer of his agent pal, and to find the murderer he must look into the three cases the agent was working on: an extortion plot involving Ruth Roman, an escaped gangster’s moll who may know where her boy is hiding, and a blind woman who is being terrorized by her husband’s thug cronies. Unfortunately all three stories remind us why noirs were called crime melodramas at the time, and “solution” to the mystery of who is trying to get Roman’s money is pretty easy to figure out given the suspect has a distinct voice, even when masked.

Five Miles to Midnight (Anatole Litvak 1963)
Sophia Loren’s abusive husband Anthony Perkins dies in a plane crash and she stands to receive big bucks from the flight insurance he purchased. One small snag though: He survived the crash and wants to hide out at their apartment until she claims the check, at which point he’ll finally leave her alone… or will he dot dot dot question mark. This is a thoroughly stupid movie, with three truly awful performances in descending order of badness by Loren, Perkins, and Gig Young. Loren is so, so, sooooooooo terrible in this, good God. By the time that last fifteen minutes come around and we’re being asked to sympathize with Loren’s disproportionate actions, I was amazed that for as much as I hated the film already, it somehow found a way to get worse.

Highway Dragnet (Nathan Juran 1954)
Richard Conte is wrongly accused of strangling a woman he was seen drinking with the previous night. He evades the cops and takes up with Joan Bennett and Wanda Hendrix in this cheapie notable, I guess, for featuring Roger Corman’s first on-screen credit for co-writing the script. The movie is standard issue b-string noir stuff with the world’s most obvious Real Culprit, but the film has one original idea in its finale, which is set in an abandoned house in the middle of a flood plane. It’s a visually striking locale, and even though the film doesn’t do much with it, it’s a nice touch.

I, Jane Doe (John H Auer 1948)
A woman shoots a man to death and refuses to give her name to the police. She is tried as Jane Doe and is sentenced to death. However, the victim’s widow decides to defend her in a retrial because, well, this is a stupid movie. Lots of flashbacks abound at this juncture. I could sympathize, as I also spent most of this movie thinking about anything else but the present.

Maigret tend un piege (Jean Delannoy 1958)
Jean Gabin unimaginatively embodies Georges Simenon’s popular detective Jules Maigret in an unnecessarily long movie about Maigret’s plot catch a Jack the Ripper-ish serial killer. Since at two hours the movie runs a good 45 minutes longer than any slim detective feature like this should, it allowed me more time to think about the plot, which is not a good thing. The movie belabors every step of the process and hinges on a detective following a completely unsuspicious woman and making a connection that no one could possibly have made without more evidence at the outset. For what is alleged to be a popular figure, I found Maigret as embodied by Gabin to be a complete bore, with no interesting beats whatsoever. It just looks like Gabin rolled out of bed after eating an entire Christmas ham before filming every one of his scenes— serious late-period Spencer Tracy vibes abound here. There’s a second film following Gabin as Maigret, and unless someone has a compelling argument for changing my mind, I suspect I’ll never see it.

the Man Who Cheated Himself (Felix E Feist 1950)
Policeman Lee J Cobb covers up a murder committed by his married girlfriend Jane Wyatt, only for his kid brother, a rookie detective, to figure it all out. The set up is creaky, but the movie is light and Cobb lucks out when the gun he thinks he safely ditched ends up being used in another murder, which is a novel complication. John Dall’s high school basketball team starter aww shucks-ness is put to good effect as the brother, and there’s a nice finale set at a familiar San Francisco landmark that is only marred by a truly lame conclusion. The lovely little last scene does its best to wash out the bad taste left by it, though. Enjoyable, slight, and certainly not worth the $40 Flicker Alley wants for it on Blu-ray.

the Man Who Died Twice (Joseph Kane 1958)
Mad props to this film for spoiling its twist in the title, but that’s about all the praise I can dole out for this inexplicably ‘Scope (nee Naturama) cheapie about the cop brother of a dead gangster who tries to sort through his brother’s affairs and finds, gasp, dope-dealing! Lots of square-jawed men in this one, to give you some idea of what I managed to come up with while searching for anything of value in this to report back on. [P]

the Wrong Guy (David Steinberg 1997)
Dave Foley plays a corporate idiot who discovers his murdered boss’ dead body and subsequently incriminates himself in an absurd fashion. He goes on the lam, not realizing that the actual murderer was filmed committing the act and in fact no one thinks Foley did it. That’s a funny idea, but the constant supply of functional idiocy it requires to sustain a narrative becomes tiring, especially when Foley abandons it to go for jokes that require slightly more self-awareness. The film is funny, and I chuckled quite a bit, but there are precious few big laughs. I think it’s because the movie hits every joke you could predict as soon as a given scenario is presented. What works best are the moments that, as in good sketch comedy, startle us with a fresh complications. Sadly there are only a few such bells rung here, like the character clearly modeled on Burl Ives in the Big Country, who gets a big laugh just from the ominous treatment given even to his name. The three credited writers all have their own unique baggage and public comic voice— Foley from the Kids in the Hall, David Anthony Higgins from Higgins Boys and Gruber, and Jay Kogen from the golden era Simpsons— and there is some fun to be had in identifying who wrote what joke, which isn’t as hard as you might think. This movie merits the lamest quasi-recommendation I can muster: I laughed, it was okay, I never need to see it again, and you probably wouldn’t be upset if you had to sit through it. Sold, right?

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jbeall
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Re: The Noir List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Project)

#702 Post by jbeall » Mon Nov 12, 2018 8:05 pm

'A pas de deux of sex and violence': a poet's guide to film noir
Robin Robertson wrote:These classic 40s and 50s movies – which seem like a distinctly American art form, like blues or jazz – were mostly not made by Americans but by emigres: Jewish directors and cinematographers who had fled Nazi Germany and ended up in Hollywood, bringing their expressionist aesthetic and their deep terrors to celluloid. These refugee artists were among the “huddled masses” that built America; the kind of people that are now, it seems, unwelcome.

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dustybooks
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Re: The Noir List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Project)

#703 Post by dustybooks » Tue Nov 13, 2018 1:44 pm

I feel downright ignorant but I just saw Gun Crazy for the first time a couple of nights ago and, while it seemed to owe a good bit to Lang's You Only Live Once, it's a perfect example of a film that cuts like a knife through every perception the general public may have of "old movies." The gunfire throughout felt like it was popping out of the screen at me, and I was watching on a laptop! Also fascinated to see John Dall in something besides Rope (and Spartacus); he's so much lower-key here that it serves to retroactively make his performance in the Hitchcock film even more interesting, because you know his melodramatic flair and smugness were completely intended as character traits. I thought his presentation of coexisting lust and fear in Gun Crazy was excellent. And those long takes! What a thrill.

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domino harvey
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Re: The Noir List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Project)

#704 Post by domino harvey » Wed Nov 14, 2018 1:56 pm

I looked him up after seeing your post and I was shocked at how few films Dall was in-- he lucked out that three of the handful of films he appeared in withstood the test of time and remain relatively well-seen. Haven't seen the Corn is Green yet, curious now to move it up since he earned an Oscar nom for his debut in it

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Re: The Noir List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Project)

#705 Post by HJackson » Sun Jul 21, 2019 3:21 pm

Went through the first volume of VCI’s Hammer noirs over the last few days. All the flicks are watchable but only Stolen Face is actually positively good - and that mostly rests on the off-the-wall premise and the fun Lizbeth Scott has with the role. There’s a smug face she pulls while indulging in a touch of klepto that is simply perfect. But even that one feels rushed, especially in the third act when the inevitable complication Henreid has to face emerges - rushed endings are a theme with these, which is the downside of the fun-sized runtimes.

The Hollywood stars add something I think, and it’s nice see more of Dane Clark. Peter Reynolds is interesting from the other side of the pond in Man Bait, as a kind of English Dan Duryea. Tony Wright is quite good in the physical sequences in Bad Blonde, but stinks to high heaven in the more dramatic scenes. That one has a great murder scene that feels like something from the late silent era though.

The star of the show though must be the crappy DVD menus, introduced by an elaborate and very 1990s computer generated video of a Prohibition era car driving down a rainy street and getting shot to pieces by a smirking babe with a tommy gun - which is a classic noir image, apparently. Richard M Roberts is fun with the brief intros to the films and again the production is lovably crappy, with his voice accompanied by a slideshow of publicity stills arranged with absolutely no regard for what is being said and with instructions like “cut here and I’ll go back” totally ignored and left in the track.

Certainly scratched an itch and at this value I’ll grab the other eight in the second set. All of these felt noir to me (wish I could translate Roberts’ reading of the word from the extras here in text form...) which doesn’t sound like the case with VCI’s Forgotten Noir series, which is a shame if true.

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Re: The Noir List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Project)

#706 Post by Finch » Tue Dec 31, 2019 10:14 pm

I watched The Scar/Hollow Triumph 1948 for the first time today, via Film Detective's upload of their Blu-Ray transfer to their Youtube Channel. I only remember Paul Henreid from Casablanca so it was nice to see him play a gangster on the run, and the film also hugely benefits from John Alton's cinematography and another no-nonsense performance from Joan Bennett (the second film of hers I've watched lately, after The Woman in the Window).

I appreciate that other people's mileage will vary with the, shall we say, too convenient plotting such as
SpoilerShow
none of Bartok's staff pick up on Muller's scar being on the wrong cheek, Muller getting too good at impersonating Bartok too quickly
and I would agree that the film doesn't exploit the full potential of the twist enough but the combination of Henreid, Bennett and Alton elevates the film for me above other noirs like, say, Kiss of Death, not least because The Scar has a bleak ending which to me, feels more natural to a noir.

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Re: The Noir List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Project)

#707 Post by therewillbeblus » Tue Oct 20, 2020 1:58 am

The Last Seduction: It's no wonder I was so enamored with this as a kid, since its pleasures are boldly outrageous to the degree where only a child can delve into the beautiful cruelty at face value without squinting to ensure what we're watching isn't just a well-drawn cartoon. Dahl proved that he understood noir with Red Rock West but here goes for broke by exaggerating the power of the femme fatale to render men impotent of intelligence at every corner. Berg is a sucker who desperately wants to think with his brain and heart but just cannot break from the magnetic pull, while the most reflexive scene involves Bill Nunn's fragile masculinity caving in a decision that earns the gold ribbon for quickest forfeit of self-preservation for the sake of ego put on film. The ease at which Pullman figures out what her alias is, the ease of persuasion against morality into rationalized deviance, it's all straight out of classic noir's magical spells of psychological allure.

Linda Fiorentino's perf is so good it's scary, quite literally scary, since she resembles an incarnation of some surface-level traits of a stereotypical, classically rude independent brazen city woman, who is manipulative enough to give off shades of realistic binding engagement and cinematic overstated artifice. Fiorentino creepily finds a middle ground of illogical seduction that is uncomfortably relatable now that I'm no longer that wide-eyed kid, with a few too many of these kinds of toxic relationships in my history. At the same time, the machinations are ridiculous, as are the characters, so we sit with skewed versions of the accessible that remind us just enough of the roots of sexual dynamics that expose deep wounds, yet different enough to accentuate their real-life absurdities and the joke that anything overly familiar is at least half-projection. The two men discussing defense mechanisms later trying to figure out this woman's plan, multiple steps behind even when granted extended full audience, is hilarious and tragic at once, since its a reinforcement of toxic masculine logic in 'other'ing the female, that's so pathetic they're trapped in directionless weakness. The grand plan is another sitdown of words, while she speaks with actions. The final gotcha moment is irritatingly pat to any sense of fair play- to character or narrative construction- but because the film is so unapologetically self-aware of its silly exploitation of power imbalances, it's disgustingly in step with the internal logic.

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domino harvey
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Re: The Noir List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Project)

#708 Post by domino harvey » Wed Nov 04, 2020 2:15 am

This year’s Noir City fest will be virtual and highlight international movies. Info here for the AFI Silver program run

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domino harvey
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Re: The Noir List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Project)

#709 Post by domino harvey » Thu Nov 26, 2020 3:33 pm

I'm not really sure it works enough as a whole to merit a recommendation, but Esther Williams' last film as a headliner, the Unguarded Moment (Harry Keller 1956), is one of the scuzziest, nastiest, and most deeply uncomfortable films I've ever seen come out of the studio era. It is also a fucking mess and filled with a protagonist who makes it very hard to not victim blame after she makes some incredibly poor choices in her downward spiral. Nevertheless, this is a movie in which teacher Esther Williams is raped (or nearly raped-- the coded presentation leaves some ambiguity) by a charismatic high school student who then turns everything around on her and gets her ostracized from the school via accusing her of predatorily pursuing him. The film then unbelievably positions itself to invite the audience to identify and sympathize with the rapist by showing the impact his misogynistic father has had on his worldview. The father is played by Edward Andrews, a name you probably don't recognize but he's one of those That Guys (I recognized him immediately as Babbitt from Elmer Gantry) and boy does he leave an impact here. This guy is maybe the most loathsome villain I've ever seen in a studio era film, and the movie pulls no punches in making his intense hatred of women a clear negative for a wide audience that was not necessarily ready to hear that. It's such a bold and disturbing character, especially the way he slavers over Williams and clearly struggles with his lust as he attempts to reconcile it to his worldview. If only he and his son (John Saxon, in his debut-- not sure Confused Rapist was the right vehicle to launch a would-be hearththrob, though, Universal) were in a better film, one where Williams didn't consistently do the things that make her look the most guilty to even reasonable friends on her side, or one in which the investigating police detective wasn't breathing down her neck and all but forcing matrimony on her via dangling his belief in her innocence alongside it. One longs for a film of this material that was better made, better written, and colored in throughout with the same bravura it exhibits towards its villain. And yet, it's a film worth seeing for the perversely fascinating Andrews' character, and it is def ripe for rediscovery in these #MeToo times.

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Re: The Noir List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Project)

#710 Post by swo17 » Thu Nov 26, 2020 3:49 pm

Whereas I instantly recognize him from his scuzzy role in Phenix City Story

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domino harvey
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Re: The Noir List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Project)

#711 Post by domino harvey » Thu Nov 26, 2020 4:00 pm

One additional fun fact about the film: Rosalind Russell has a story credit for it! I'm guessing she developed it for herself and was too old to play the Williams part by the time it got made (though it's impossible to imagine this film being made any earlier-- it already feels about ten years too soon for when it was made as it is)

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Re: The Noir List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Project)

#712 Post by therewillbeblus » Sun Feb 14, 2021 3:52 am

A few recent neo-noir viewings:

Shutter Island (revisit): This film has not aged well. I seem to recall a lot of stylish homages working to flesh out a psychological thriller that really understood how to manipulate the viewer into the unreliable narration of its surrogate. While Scorsese can occasionally succeed here, the film frequently stalls and continuously loses steam as it fails to achieve the dramatic weight or self-serious tones its striving for amidst the aesthetic playground. Honestly even those technical attributes feel cheap here - am I the only one who detected blue or green screen dissonance between actors and backgrounds, be them the ocean at the start or the nature in the rainstorm? The final flashback is grating and not because of its content, but the last scene earns the noir influences in its embrace of fatalism, even if none of this is executed with investment. John Cope's defense in the film's dedicated thread is excellent, and I wish I saw the film he did this time because this kind of validation for the pains and coping mechanisms of a subjective reality is my bread and butter, but unfortunately this stopped working at all by the last act and it was a chore to finish. Max Richter's On the Nature of Daylight, used prominently and optimally in Arrival, is featured in some of the film's best scenes though- like the Michelle Williams-to-ash fantasy early on. If only there were more moments like that.

U-Turn (revisit): Another film that was far worse than I remembered. Part of me appreciates the intentionally chaotic technique to mimic the instability of Penn's drifter as he attempts to bury his powerlessness towards personal troubles both outside and inside the foreign town he finds himself in, but the film's characters, motives, and narratives are too vapid to warrant credited interest for any effort to enhance its ideas. I get that Stone isn't trying to reinvent the wheel and is imbuing experimental style into the familiar, but this is an overlong and boring film, and unworthy of its bizarre shenanigans working to coat the hollow pulp under flashy tools of engagement. I did enjoy Phoenix continuously showing up as TNT, a silly pawn as one of many stupid Murphy's Law magnets of resistance serving to block Penn from actualizing a bridge to safe haven, and the final punchline of fate makes sense within the logic of the preceding exchanges between the outsider and this hellish community- since it hinges on the first encounter with the first townie and feels destined based on Penn's attitude more than cosmic force.

This World, then the Fireworks: I can understand why this was so poorly reviewed- it's more of a postmodern noir that emulates the iconography and narrative flourishes of the period while inserting seemingly every perverse thought noir writers had but weren't allowed to publish on the silver screen. Throw all that into a messy structure that bounces all over the place, including back in time and across current settings, to reflect trauma-informed, incestuous, and sociopathic internal logics we are asked to entertain while being unable to understand since these protagonists are warped beyond our psychological capabilities, and you have a wholly self-actualized work that doesn't care about our role beyond passerby. Thankfully Oblowitz and Gross also have no interest in trying to force this content on us via traditional methods of alignment, and we're encouraged to gravitate towards the absurdity with complete self-consciousness, observing the overlap of loony and nefarious without necessitating humanistic intimacy and instead opting for the affection for curiosity, which is more than enough to keep us glued. When Cassel says "murder' the audio big-band cue is so bombastic that right then and there the audience member will definitively know whether they're willing to get on this film's wavelength or not. I thought this was intermittently fun as hell, and smiled wide in that instant, as well as many others. I'm not sure if I'd call it a misjudged masterpiece, but well worth checking out.

Black Widow (Bob Rafelson, 1987): No one here seems to have written about this Black Widow despite its prominence on several top neo-noir lists from a quick google-search, but having now seen it I'm stumped why it's found on more than one rare corner of the internet, even if aspects of the structural choices are smart self-reflexive deconstructions of genre and the nature of viewership- though these are quite likely accidental. What's strange about this film is its narrative progresses relentlessly in plotted action and yet by the one-third mark, we should have engaged with enough material for a feature length movie already but it all feels empty, dull, and meaningless. Is this the point? Winger makes a statement to O'Quinn, right before the second act kicks in, about how nobody knows anyone or anything. The attitude behind this exclamation, and the ensuing action that allows us to graze the details of Russell and Winger a bit deeper yet still intentionally detached, communicates a bifurcation of paradoxical feelings in both banality and allure towards unknowability. In the first half, Winger is drawn to Russell but also purposefully aloof, much like the film has been thus far in treating her section of the narrative. Is this because we've seen this all before and Rafelson is as bored with louder noir conventions as the rest of us? Or is it that by establishing so much plot without stopping to absorb atmosphere or introduce enthusiasm for characters, we become sober to how integral characterization is to investment? We get our answer as this skeptical stance of Winger's and Rafelson's about the potential of bridging connection shatters once the two female leads are in the same space together, and we immediately detect empathy and intimacy- whether this is authentic or not hardly matters because it's a breath of fresh air, a reason to care, an alluring trait that will never get old while the banal conventions fail to immortalize in the same way. We become authentically connected to the energy traveling between players onscreen. Rafelson's choice to shift his film into a different kind of familiar territory is jarring in how exciting the film becomes next to the first half, and if this was an intentional trick it's a great one as it served the movie well, at least for a short while.

Unfortunately the rest of the film isn't worthy of those best neo-noir lists. The brevity of any mystery is quickly undone with more spoonfed information via scenes that make us objectively privy to expected motive and foreshadowing, slipping back into the stolid first act. We realize that the second act was only lightly thrilling because it was placed next to- and now sandwiched between- tiresome fluff. The ending is so stupid for so many reasons it's not even worth spoilertagging them. I'm all for giving rope to twists or gotcha moments in noir, but this is a new level of sloppy writing- as if turned in hastily at the deadline by a fifth grader.

Whispers in the Dark: Ethical therapy violations aside (and I don't mean the obvious ones, but moreso the dual relationship stuff) I thought this was pretty great. Not that the film has any interest in the realities of therapy of course, but strictly to use the Freudian psychodynamic model of repression and awakenings to insight in order to bridge the noir and erotic thriller genres (it doesn't exactly have a stake in portraying the ethics of any profession, come to think of it). Annabella Sciorra is great as our protagonist, who is a fleshed-out, relatable human being and I appreciated the film's willingness to treat therapists as imperfect and often in therapy themselves, in addition to exploring the countertransference in relating strongly to patients- even if these are naturally used to fit the genre's wilder deviations. This has a great cast too, full of wonderful parts for future stars- especially a few of her clients (so this is how Unger got her part in Crash!) and I admired how Sciorra weighed priorities in her own juncture between self-preservation and empathy for these clients once shit hit the fan. This is a film that meditates on the intricate psychology of a good person in the human services field when facing a crisis of their own, repurposing said complexity into clichés which work as narrative spaces to examine triggers for acute emotions.
SpoilerShow
I guessed the twist pretty early on, which accentuates the countertransference between therapist-client to the extreme, but at least it makes the ethical violation make sense!

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Re: The Noir List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Project)

#713 Post by therewillbeblus » Mon Feb 15, 2021 4:11 am

More neo-noirs:

The Late Show: I was with this movie for its first act, transplanting the physically deteriorating yet tough austerity of an aging Art Carney into the role of the typically younger but still wise-beyond-years noir hero, which should be perfect for the atmosphere of the neo-noir. However, the appeal is lost too fast, the script is lame and turns the already-irritating leads and side characters into head-slapping caricatures (the "I'm not going back to the hospital" speech alone ruins Carney's character), and I lost pretty much all interest by the halfway mark. Lily Tomlin is an awful sidekick- I get what the film is going for and some of her lines reveal fragments of decent ideas for how to repurpose the silly half of buddy-cop naivete into the cruelty of the noir milieu- but it's ultimately all for naught, and even when it does kinda work in the last act, the buildup from before still rings hollow. It might be cute for Carney to use ageism at the end to best the baddies in another, more definitively comedic exercise, but what an anticlimax- from the anti-twist of the culprits to the fizzle of action amidst the overexplanation.

Duplicity: Not really a neo-noir in spirit, but Gilroy cherrypicks his influences and repackages them into a convoluted rom-com spy film, that is admittedly more in line with the tone of Hitchcock's lighthearted espionage output than the fatalistic impulses of noir. This is a film that doesn't ask nicely but forces us to accept our position in playing catchup from the word Go, as we skip the seduction between two unknown characters and before we have time to muse about their complexions, we are immediately detoured into the most ludicrous credits sequence in recent memory, as Paul Giamatti and Tom Wilkinson go at it in what would be a five-star short film standing on its own. From there Gilroy waits until the halfway mark to provide some background information on these leads, and as an audience we're strictly planted in the position of aloof observers, never granted access to either's separate experience in the necessary full measures to be able to sift what is truth or lie when they're together. Only in the bedroom are we privy to any character alignment as a fusion of Owens' and Roberts' experience, feeding off the same energy of confused and skeptical and intrigued. This choice resigns the majority of excitement to the ordinary place where many of us can relate to the self-consciousness of vulnerably trying to express ourselves to and read a lover, as well as the games and tests that occur in private.

Gilroy allows the femme fatale to become her own character of equal dignity and worthy of love just as much as the individualist male, understanding that the allure in these noir archetypes has always been the commonalities in personalities shielding existential woes and sublimating them as willingness to find a flickering light of brief salvation in another lonely heart. Sure that light dissipates and they magnetically devolve into selfish action, but why can't they develop an authentic romance if they so choose to channel that personal fatal desire beyond introverted complacency? The mutual admission of "nobody trusts anybody" gifts both the kind of intimacy perhaps more femme fatale/disillusioned hero pairings could have had if they only lived in an era where they could openly communicate such psychological worldviews, made possible through the fortified sensitivity of millennium culture breaking down the expectation of tough exteriors. I really wish Gilroy would go back to directing his own original scripts; between this and the exceptional Michael Clayton- itself emulating the paranoid political thrillers of the 70s and besting most of them at their own game, updated into the aughts' No-Mans-Land of capitalist sociopathy reinforced by increasingly sterilized systemic barriers of cognitive dissonance- he's a major talent who must have plenty more tricks up his sleeves, as there are many more genres and styles game for recontextualizing. The scene where Denis O'Hare and Rick Worthy are listening to the audio of Owens' hard-boiled spitfire lines in a detached context is hilarious and smart in its disengaged assessment of the genre's artificial rugged antics.

Black Coal, Thin Ice: Well-made conventional noir in plot and tone that nevertheless functions unexceptionally with the pieces put together. I know Liao Fan won accolades for his role as the distraught traumatized detective, but Gwei Lun-mei steals every scene she's in as the questionable femme fatale, who regardless of whether she fits the archetype does not resign herself to it. She is a subtly complex character that earns the film's orbiting attention around her enigmatic core, only to find out that information gleaned doesn't change her spirit being one with any other broken soul.

After Dark, My Sweet: This is almost too fitting to the thematic and atmospheric qualities of noir, capturing the loneliness of its players and bolstering the yearning philosophy that one must be needed to be worthy, truly becoming a noir for our advanced world of further disconnect and even bleaker disillusionment. I love how paranoia sets in as sane behavior amongst the crazy, and how characters are trapped in elongated scenes stewing in the hazy moral space of relentless guilt and shame flip-flopping with greed and apathy. For these scenes to transform into sex or violence at random only adds to the destabilization of a sober path to finding identity or actualizing desire. Much like the previous film, the undefined, anthropologically-intricate femme fatale is the best part of this film thanks to Rachel Ward, though everyone is top-notch- from Patric's deranged antihero, who sways between a faded fugue state and manic tics, to Bruce Dern's wacky master planner, who gets excited by another's erratic behavior even when it puts him in jeopardy, to George Dickerson's closeted "mentor" to Patric, who embodies a walking ethical dilemma with equal parts lust, trust, loneliness, and professional duty. Watching his trajectory as he responds in body language and action, perpetually torn between his various impulses, is something to behold. It's a conscientiously masterful performance for a complicated character. The ending keeps us dancing on a jagged knife of disorder through the credits, permanently at a distance from truth except for the facts of isolation these people gravitate to even when physically together, thus making us one with them in the only area where there's no confusion for anyone.

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Re: The Noir List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Project)

#714 Post by nitin » Fri Feb 19, 2021 11:21 pm

Duplicity is surely more of a modern day spy movie satire (right down to some of the cutting and scoring) than a neo-noir? Love it though.

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Re: The Noir List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Project)

#715 Post by therewillbeblus » Fri Feb 19, 2021 11:28 pm

Definitely, which is why I started my writeup admitting that, but watching it between some neo-noirs did help me realize some of Gilroy's borrowings (perhaps more fairly, Hitchcock's pulls from noir for his stuff, that Gilroy is then pulling from) and I had fun with the opportunity to contextualize the film through the noir lens

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Re: The Noir List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Project)

#716 Post by domino harvey » Fri Oct 22, 2021 1:45 pm

This isn’t quite a full-throated recommendation because it’s a movie with a lot of problems, but I think fans of sprawling yet laid back modern noirs like Inherent Vice and Under the Silver Lake would really enjoy as I did They Only Kill Their Masters (James Goldstone 1972). This is one of the most unusually low key and chill small town detective movies I’ve ever seen, filmed with the wit of a television drama from the era but also imbued with a real charm in its casual existence. James Garner, who teeters between endearing smartass and asshole for the length of the film, is a barely checked in small town detective investigating a murder wrongly attributed to the dead owner’s pet Doberman, whom Garner eventually adopts. This thing is a who’s who of former Hollywood names who hadn’t worked in a while and as I recall the opening credits don’t actually spoil any of their appearances, so I recommend going in blind. I recognized everyone but one and was blown away in the end credits by the reveal that that was
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Tom Ewell— Jesus, how old was he when he made those Mansfield and Monroe comedies fifteen years prior?!
There’s a lot of unfunny patter that hold the film back (Garner trying to flirt with Katharine Ross: “I’m a faggot”), yet a lot of it works, especially that between Garner and a younger cop who seems to wordlessly understand his boss regardless of his own naïveté. I will say that while the film spectacularly bungles the reveal of the killer,
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I did remember seeing the killer in their initial blink and you missed it appearance, but it took me too long to connect on the reveal. How inept a filmmaker do you have to be to not give them any actual scenes before the “reveal” so they can even register for an audience beforehand?
the confusing anticlimax of it is just one more spiritual precursor to Inherent Vice

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Re: The Noir List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Project)

#717 Post by therewillbeblus » Sun Jun 26, 2022 2:37 am

Where the Truth Lies: Atom Egoyan's neo-noir masquerading as erotic thriller is far better than its reputation suggests, a labyrinthian Big Sleep-plotted head-scratcher that lends itself well to the auteur's themes without overstating them. I've read people declare this too didactic, but I don't see it. There's something relatively subtle about how disconnected the characters all are to their own version of reality, hiding in introverted fear of what may have happened, formed around a distrust of self as much as an irreparable alienation from others. There isn't faith in memory, behavioral capabilities to align with morality, or even a pulse on where their morals lie in relation to id drives. But these are quiet revelations taking place in the elisions of the loud shiny narrative movement and sex appeal, which serve as mirages of significance like a Russian doll holding the vulnerabilities underneath the principals' psyches and the film's intentions. So when we finally do discover the truth, its seemingly anticathartic conclusion is actually maybe the most ethereal cathartic surrender I've seen in a neo-noir, in a coda filled with poignancy that relays Egoyan's stapled interests by literally not saying what he knows cannot and should not be said in film grammar and real life to achieve any false closure. It's a brilliant meta-finish that could serve as a thesis of his entire career. Plus the film is so damn entertaining!

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Re: The Noir List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Project)

#718 Post by domino harvey » Sun Dec 18, 2022 10:44 pm

domino harvey wrote:
Wed Dec 27, 2017 1:52 am
Wicker Park (Paul McGuigan 2004) Josh Hartnett loses and maybe finds his one true love, and picks up a stalker who confusingly bears the name of the missing girl and lives in her apartment in the meantime. I haven’t seen the French original of this, but I doubt the implausibility here could survive any other film all that much better than here. The film has some too-slick visuals that are at least imaginative (and never more so than when Rose Byrne drops trou), and I liked how a stalking scene was set to a múm song of all things, but this is ultimately a film too enamored with its ostensible antagonist to let them do anything even remotely dramatic when cornered. How could a film with a premise this silly not at least take the narrative to its logical extreme and ruin everyone’s life?
Having now seen L'appartement, it's interesting that my main criticism of the remake (which, marginally, turns out to be the better movie!), namely that it didn't fuck everyone's life up in the end, is addressed fully and yet it makes for an even worse ending. Granted, L'appartement was already bad before that (for fuck's sake, someone should have told the director that they aren't late 60s-era Visconti, quit fucking zooming) but what is the purpose of being so willfully unfulfilling on a narrative level like this? Did we need three narratively unsatisfying threads to end so frayed? Also, huge MDRs @ the original's solution to helping the audience keep time periods apart: let's give the characters some of the worst, most disparate wigs imaginable! The only saving grace here is the bobbed Monica Bellucci in the early narrative thread looking every bit as beautiful as a human being can look (who knew she could even withstand and thrive being dressed in street casual wear?)

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Re: The Noir List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Project)

#719 Post by therewillbeblus » Fri Mar 03, 2023 11:31 pm

domino harvey wrote:
Mon Jun 06, 2016 3:06 pm
the Lady in the Car with Glasses and a Gun (Joann Sfar 2015) A 93 minute argument in favor of Freya Mavor being astonishingly beautiful, this remake (the original is unseen by me) is such a transparently trifling riff on the international cinema scene of the early 70s that style and aesthetics are required to go, as Pavement once put it, miles and miles. I already agreed with the film’s thesis re: Mavor before it even started, but there are worse ways to pass the time than what gets cooked up here. I was thankful that the narrative, in which a young woman makes a journey through several small towns she’s never visited only to be told by all the locals that she was just there the night before, didn’t resolve itself in a cheap answer (ie no, it isn’t all a dream), even if the eventual solution is quite ludicrous. Ultimately an empty film, but one I’d admittedly watch again.
therewillbeblus wrote:
Fri Jun 04, 2021 10:43 am
I've heard it's an almost identical remake, but I really can't believe that any modern adaptation would retain the surreal aesthetics, nor go to such audaciously irreverent lengths with the film's final act and aggressive narrative deflation that occurs in the closing moments
Finally got around to the remake, and unfortunately agree with my initial assumptions. The adaptation is mostly the same beat-for-beat plotting, though the gateway into the finale takes more active manipulation to get Dany to her destination, and (as expected) the 2015 film opts for an actual climax, which is surely smart in getting audiences into and out of their seats without asking for refunds (not that this ending is novel or exciting in any way, where the first one was at least an unexpectedly emasculating romp of anti-climax). Still, the first film only works as well as it does due to the objective framing of events casting doubt between us and our maybe-surrogate, creating the sensation of the decade transition of obfuscating reality even when the aesthetics aren't drenched in psychedelic signifiers. There's no doubt or curiosity here, where we're kept primarily in suffocating proximity to Freya Mavor, subjectively ogling her like a perfume commercial dressed in noir. Obviously domino still got something out of this, including the justified relief in its resolve, but I can't imagine anyone coming out of this movie feeling as thrilled as the original left me, because of how self-serious and co-regulatory it is with its smothering style - which is to say that this is all superficial stimulation-induction, whether we're enraptured with Mavor's beauty or responding to intrusive cues from the spatially-inept action. The 1970 original allowed for some ambiguity (i.e. we don't see what happened in the gas station bathroom, we don't know about the history of the two women, we sit puzzled watching her puzzled rather than puzzled 'as' her), and we tracked Samantha Eggar across some gorgeous sights and set piece back drops, while here it's all framed as muddled, handheld, and lite-psychological disorganization. Maybe that'll work for some, but it just felt exhausting and empty rather than provocatively mysterious and thematically zeitgeist-conscious. You do see a lot of Freya Mavor amping up her sex appeal though, and I have to imagine the pitch was 'Let's take a twisty film no one really cares about or remembers and use it as a vehicle to gaze at this star for 90 minutes'. Though time would've been better spent restoring and re-appreciating the value of the original.

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Re: The Noir List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Project)

#720 Post by therewillbeblus » Sun Nov 05, 2023 5:58 pm

Some recent noir viewings:

The Unsuspected (Revisit): Only someone as skilled as Curtiz could pack so much plotting into such a lean economy of narrative propulsion, while also imbuing maximum style and allowing juicy character moments to exhale with pause and earn their drama. This is a very fun, twisty ride, bolstered by Rains exercising a spectacular brand of charm and duplicity, though I really enjoyed almost all the performances for intentionally sloping toward their exact right archetypes and remaining humans worth investing in simultaneously.

The Underworld Story: Dark-hearted socio-political exploration of manipulations across systems using the newsprint medium, and the factions of isolated casualties -of moral erosion to physical safety- caught within the gears. This kind of fierce deep-dive into psychological and sociological complexity reminds one of David Simon's ethos and approach to similarly gray yet urgently-diagnosed-as-problematic material in The Wire. I loved watching Duryea churn himself around in both familiarly-delicious and intriguingly fresh ways, given a meaty opportunity to thoroughly express all the shades of his emotional rainbow. The whole cast is terrific though: Howard Da Silva and Herbert Marshall, as men in power who are just offbeat enough to feel completely real, and Gale Storm and Mary Anderson, as the only two women engaged in a patriarchal world with equally-layered levels of desperate hysterics and exhaustion. The only new-to-me noir this round, and it's a winner.

The Big Sleep (Revisit): Feels a lot stiffer and less playful than it once did - the momentum particularly inhibited by dialogue that rehashes plot and character connections a bit too often. Outside of the superficials, the noir energy is sparsely spliced into the text and moments that provide it stand out - like Bogart commenting on Agnes' apathy toward Harry Jones, with a dash of pathos for this macro-worldview of amorality, before bringing it back to his selfish yet wise priorities by meeting the world where it's at. Still, this operates like the North by Northwest of the noir period - relentless movements through set pieces of systemic sludge - and it manages to achieve a sublime taste for incorporating so many digestible ideas and moods against the friction of an overwhelming narrative. If only the atmosphere felt just as overwhelming.. but it's hard to complain about a film that feels perfect under a multitude of conditions I crave from the medium. As a Noir this scores a lot lower than its five-star status as a Movie.

The Devil Thumbs a Ride (Revisit): Lean, mean noir-slash-playful, hangout movie - this one starts with a bang and barely stops, collecting colorful objects along the way as it moves towards a predetermined end. We're gifted a measured balance between the rush of relentless acute crises and a generous space to let characters yuck it up in idiosyncratic exchanges on a Wild Night Pitstop between steps in life. I decided to rewind the film and watched it again just to see if I missed any little details, and of course there were plenty more nuggets to appreciate. The style is deliberately relaxed until Feist needs to lock into action, and boy does he during that vacuum cleaner handoff and the nail-biting note-following that surrounds it.. only to unceremoniously lead to a subversively-unprompted brutal offscreen death. The film has it all in an hour.

Impact (Revisit): Already wrote this one up in the 40s thread, but it's the perfect film to follow up The Devil Thumbs a Ride - at nearly twice the length, this noir really breathes, more than any other I can think of offhand. It's refreshing to watch a character react to a stimulus in real time, and that's most of what happens here. Sometimes it's watching Donlevy's face process a series of complex emotions, and other times it's just an audaciously slowed attempt by Helen Walker to sneak, leisurely basking in the suspense on a simmer. Makes me wonder what De Palma would think of these tense moments in unexpected places.

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Re: The Noir List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Project)

#721 Post by therewillbeblus » Fri Nov 10, 2023 11:53 pm

Highway 301: I’m not usually a fan of the procedural 'docu'-noirs, but this one's a blast, diving nose-first into the cruelty of male-on-female intra-system dynamics while, somehow, never really delivering on its promise of de-romanticizing the gangster life! The film brazenly shows the excitement of the lifestyle many times over, restraining its caveats to the behind-closed-doors cold-bloodedness rather than its problems of public havoc. But for all the wonderfully anxious, claustrophobic interactions with molls (Stone's confident direction extends to the delicate balance between objective narrative and these intimate moments of secluded terror), it's the showstopping finale that elevates the film to greatness. The getaway seems primed for a diffused showdown, but then opens up into a set piece so impressively-shot that it seems a genre-best on a purely superficial level (since we haven't actually invested in any 'characters' whatsoever)... High recommendation for methodology and visual wit, but not if you're looking for an involving narrative.

The Sound of Fury (aka Try and Get Me!): Cy Endfield is a talent behind the camera, which makes this film's faults all the more frustrating. The dynamics between Bridges and Lovejoy, and Lovejoy and Katherine Locke, all work well, but there's no real buildup of tension within Lovejoy's own conscience that's communicated effectively to earn the heavy-melodrama infusions capped on. The prison siege is technically proficient and compelling as an isolated short, but it's sloppily sewn together with the preceding narrative, each part feeling eradicated and so I'm left shrugging at both sections. Bridges' self-actualized aura of unpredictability threatens to save the picture on several occasions, when our vacuous surrogate in Lovejoy is suddenly jolted from the complacency of his rationalized moral elasticity- Yet they're always bookended with a transition to the journalist or some other dull B-story that deflates this needed anxiety.

Mystery Street: Ample space devoted to the fine details of detective work and its Boston-Cape Cod locations don't help the actual narrative's intrigue, but do elevate the film's status as one appreciated on a level of process. I particularly enjoyed the generous time spent with forensics early on examining the skeleton, which felt more compelling when diving into attractive intel than during the snappy, more action-packed engagement with case leads that follows. The objective space of Sturges' operation leans in harder than the more aloof procedurals but also neglects opportunities to follow the Wrong Man, Conniving Coquette, et al. narrative strands to achieve a sense of absorbing subjective tension. It's rather cold and superfluous, outside of style and a few unique targets of affectionate attention. It's something like the kind of film noir David Fincher might've made if he was born a half-century earlier.

Act of Violence (Revisit): This masterpiece continues to grow richer every viewing. It would be a strong film if it were just leaning into the fatalistic consequences born in wartime crisis literally following a soldier into his post-war life. But this time, I was more entranced by Heflin's second-act breakdown, where his psyche drowns in the fatalism of 'choice' rather than simply trauma or guilt, creating an active nightmare in waking life around his pathetic agency. The conflict of self-preservation and collectivist ideology meet when Heflin becomes sober to the prognosis that his intrinsic self is 'weak' and his motivations can (scratch that - will) result in self-preservation over a higher morality, even in civilized turf when he no longer has a foreign-contextual excuse to rationalize his behavior. The scene where he's talking to himself -desperately trying to ascend a deterministic surrender to his character defects, culminating in a manic shriek and subsequent suicide attempt- is one of the most psychologically-effective in all of noir. His inability to complete suicide can even be read as the final straw of perceived failure for Heflin executing 'strength' to take responsibility for his actions and access a moral plane over selfish one. That moment, snowballed from the inception of the idea that his character is frail, impacts his shameful resolve to accept these defects as inflexible truths, and choice to live, even under the conditions of living that life under constant self-hatred.

Of course he swings the pendulum the other way once becoming literally-sober, but I'm not as charitable to the film's reading that Heflin accesses a moral conscience as inebriation fades. Instead, his movement presents as a reactionary impulse that's equally self-serving and acidic proof of Heflin's fragility. He couldn't make it more than a sober minute with this new revelation without running from it toward death. Now that he has finally adjusted his worldview, the selfish option is now suicide -not the sacrificial 'moral' one- but he deludes himself again to believe it is. Ryan's final lines and their delivery come off as a shrugged willingness to do a simple duty to close the circle of justice, not of relief, satisfaction, and certainly not respect. One of the more brutal, complex noir progressions, full-stop.

The Strange Affair of Uncle Harry: George Sanders plays against type as a meek shell of a man, while Geraldine Fitzgerald takes on his cool, charming but smarmy persona and wields it with subtle grace, amusingly directed at him most of all! I thought the shift in family dynamics with Ella Raines' introduction was handled realistically, within the clear-artificial structure of a Hollywood narrative, dialogue, etc. if brief, and the contentious ending didn't really bother me either. I like domino's reading of the last few minutes, but I think it works just as well as a subversion of noir's fatalism
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where, by actually pausing and reflecting on the overwhelming impulse to commit the deed that'll seal our fate, we can actually choose differently - and hey, waiting a tad allowed Raines to come right back into your arms (a strong campaign for self-regulation)! A silly contrived Hollywood ending, sure, but it's making a point that balks at the fatalism of noir, while maintaining all the elements that sting and validating them as struggles. Though if it takes simply dozing off and having a literal nightmare to stop someone, perhaps that's an antithetical reverse-commentary too: How pathetic we are, that we cannot actually stop ourselves with agency in the moment - we need to be physically 'put down' by higher forces to quiet our wills! [It's also interesting to think about this in the framework of our current culture that craves medication or some external aid to soften unbearably dysphoric psychological and somatic symptoms to promote optimal functioning.]
Union Station (Revisit): There's not much to say about this, other than it's as optimal a stellar old-fashioned crackerjack thriller as you can get. Though this viewing, the irregular pacing in the first act stuck out - namely how as soon as Holden gets involved, the steady flow accelerates to near-cartoonish limits until the case is in place for conflict. So many logical leaps are taken, the editing jumping past multiple steps in the process.. it plays so strange and out of step with the tone set around it. This idiosyncrasy supports the film's merits in two ways: It's an impressive maneuver by Rudolph Maté, cutting all the bullshit and just fast-forwarding through the 'boring' office deduction process so we can get back to slow-and-fast-burning the real action! And also, intertextually, Holden's insertion of himself into the objective narrative must feel this zippy to resonate. Such an abrasive sudden shift in energy works under either character's 'preferred narrative' of events: whether from Holden's perspective of himself as a grandiose hero on a mission to really see some action and be the center of a hot case, or from Nancy Olson's perception of him as an aggressive vehicle coercing her into a dangerous ride she didn't sign up for. This and other kinds of ridiculously self-serious interactions between the two amidst all the seedy, genuinely-serious stakes portrayed as such, reveal Olson's forced participation in the narrative is fantastical in a manner that's self-conscious to the filmmakers. Anyways, a curious element in an otherwise straightforwardly entertaining genre pic. Barry Fitzgerald steals scenes playing against type as a hard-nosed ethically-elastic police inspector, and there are at least a handful of set pieces that come off as genuinely novel and refreshingly surprising at each turn.

The Glass Wall: There’s a decent movie possible here, but unfortunately it leans into the most obvious contrivances and clichés a writer could conceive of at every turn of the narrative (I wouldn’t be surprised if this was written in a nail-biting all-nighter to be delivered by morning - or else! - reflecting the plot). So instead of taking a few risks that’d relay the stakes and seep the audience in a noir state of dis-ease like our protagonist, we get an apathetic programmer that is clearly fated for heroic catharsis by all principals’ vapid good-naturedness. I hate throwing this around as a critique, but I was so bored by every moment of this film. Vittorio Gassman does his best to come up with something out of nothing, but his efforts are doomed by the material - which is the most interesting and noir-ish piece of this four-piece child’s puzzle. It’s not a formal disaster or anything, but I hated the muscle-spasm sensation of how unstimulating this was while so clearly trying to be a temporally acute cocktail of anxious stimulation.

Tension: Fun, inventive little movie that's endearingly molded in the narrative skeleton and just general vibe of a sci-fi monster movie from its era, before transitioning into more straightforward noir in its less involving second half. I love how confidant side characters inspire the key devilish thoughts for our anti-hero and femme fatale so bluntly, telling them what they want to hear as a projection of their introverted or resentful psyches. Like the best of those campy cinematic cousins, the audience is invited to hold and switch diagnoses for him as sympathetic, pathetic, and dangerous on this emotionally-fueled journey of a 50s-era Joe Schmoe going postal from emasculation by trying on costumes of Buddy Love and Tom Ripley. Though the same complexity isn’t afforded to Audrey Totter, who might be the most damned femme fatale, essentially found guilty by the film for nearly turning a Nice Guy into a monster and then fulfilling the traditional genre role’s obligations by framing him instead! The sexual politics are particularly tough in that respect (not that one enters a film of this ilk anticipating progressive handwringing), but a modern reading filtered through our social context’s healthy skepticism in wake of Nice Guy exposures makes it an effective time capsule of patriarchal delusion - namely diffusion of responsibility by fragile male egos.

At least for its first, far superior half, this is primarily a silly yet engaging movie - all the more successful for approaching its material with enough self-consciousness to take full advantage of the potential therein (as opposed to the above film, that could've benefited from any choices that weren't straight down the bland middle). Those front-heavy twists and turns aren't necessarily novel, but each of them is brought about by a scene peppered with nifty details and singularities in expression that make them feel fresh. I don’t think the back end services the windup, though the places the attention is placed -curiously further away from its main character, whose development at this point has been completely stunted by relentless acts of emasculation- also works as an allegory for a man-made-monster or superhero losing his power and dissolving with excessive subjection to the death drive. It’s just mostly paint-by-numbers on the surface by this point, rushing to tie up strands neatly before hitting the 90-minute mark after spending ample time goofing off in pliant genre sandboxes.

Where Danger Lives (Revisit): The worst headache of all time turns a saintly doctor of sick children into a fugitive from justice. Mitchum encounters incessant narrative pivots deeper into doom once under the spell of Faith Domergue‘s manipulative Damsel in Distress, never achieving any catharsis as a savior of her well-being, not that his humble apathy was exactly looking for it. Watching accumulating stress can sometimes reveal great pleasures when communicated with wit and innovation on familiar terrain, and this is one of those instances where one man’s migraine is another’s magic. Exhilarating, constantly unpredictable A+ hijinks led by captivating performers - can’t ask for much more from a B-pitched noir stealthily designed to exceed expectations.

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Re: The Noir List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Project)

#722 Post by therewillbeblus » Wed Nov 15, 2023 2:21 pm

Stranger on the Third Floor: Slight early proto-noir that's comprised of relatively low-stakes, rote activity, elevated only by Lorre's creepy perf - particularly when awkwardly meshing with Margaret Tallichet's socially-intelligent ingenue anxiously entertaining his eccentricities in their tense walk that marks the finale. I enjoyed that sequence far more than any other showy or dramatic turn, and its crowning resolve is so anticlimactic that it feels like a conscious gag of deus ex machina. Regardless, this doesn't amount to much and I've already forgotten the movie preceding its end.

The Glass Cage: Wildly uneven investigative blackmail mystery traversing milieus of carnies and immigrants, strangely oscillating between effective ominous rhetoric and overly-pat responses from Ireland that shut down any chance to stew in that nebulous discomfort, which would be most welcome. Some scenes clarify events too swiftly, excising action (this could've excelled with just ten extra minutes of fat to flesh out the dynamics and details of its ostensibly-rich setting), while other obfuscate activity entirely, as the camera tumbles, leaving characters and a sense of visual space in out-of-focus fog. I don't really know what to make of these schizophrenic applications of style, nor the film itself when all strung-together - a weird but dull Hammer production.

Juke Girl: Surprisingly strong farm noir-melodrama, that starts off a curio as to what it's going to be, and quickly settles into an internal logic of tonal unpredictability - though one that finds a comfortable rhythm once you acclimate. There are dark shadows, interpersonally-alienating yet shared senses of powerless dread, jarring sequences of aggression and general agile reactivity - that are all the more unsettling because they contrast with the light, slowed farming life and nearly-classic melodramatic relationship dynamics surrounding them. And yet noir characteristics of gloom, greed, segregation, and war engulf and erode the strength of those systems. Transitions between bright, lax interplay and brutal escalations of violence tumble throughout at rates and times that are unprompted by the start of a scene or the one just prior. The progression of narrative is messy, scenes spilling into one another, bleeding rather than establishing a foundation - which reflexively presents the turbulence of the town’s disintegration itself! I love it. In a way, it's a bit of a primer for David Lynch's most straightforward darkness-within-externally-bright societies, though those are portrayed as less enmeshed in the film grammar.

The film's genre isn't really definable, but its lability of mood and activity -including the sensation of a bottomless 'noir-ish' potential for losing- feels truer to life than the average drama. Even the early pared-back scenes of romantic connection, and Reagan and Sheridan’s determined confidences therein, are subjugated to vulnerable expressions of surrender to disquietude. It's admirable how this film ascends the programmatic plot of being a designated player fighting the oppressive oligarch ruling a small town, primarily focusing on the possibilities for detailing scenes, communications, and staged action with raw novelty. I also enjoyed how Sheridan fits and transcends the femme fatale role in all the most charitable ways to boost her character’s worth. She has her cake and eats it too by serving as a disruptive but smart and calculating leader of collectivist moral charge, and then steps back into self-actualized individualism when she feels it’s time. Those moments feel closest to ‘femme fatale’ simply by the conflict with Reagan, but she comes across less as a deserter than an intelligent pragmatist who’s not going to be shamed or coerced by any man. When she brings her will back into the fold to rekindle alliance, it's on her terms.

Two of a Kind (Revisit): Maybe not my favorite (though close) but this is a perfectly constructed B-grade sleazefest earning all As with immaculately-conceived and executed sequences of smarmy deliciousness. It’s mean in a fun way, with little brutal touches sewn throughout (the thumb scene remains a favorite for how many moods and ideas are covered so densely around that squirm-inducing act), and only becomes funnier as we accumulate characters and start the plan of integration. The plot is revealed slowly, keeping us in a constant state of intrigue, and the film overdelivers on its promises pleasures each act, which are organized in brief, meaty packages that still permit hammy, comedic, hostile flourishes to breathe. Edmond O’Brien and Terry Moore are so wonderful together and apart, and elevate an already impenetrable script into high art by introducing camp as an asset - playfully leaning into the absurdity of the premise and broadly commenting on deceitful genre schemes alike.

Nadine (Revisit): I already wrote this up back when I just 'liked it' but fell in love with it this watch. In the midst of a noir binge, it’s a delightful romp and palette cleanser from monolithic destitution - Benton inebriates his film with the spirit of those loose, trashy mid-70s screwbally crime capers a la The Dion Brothers / The Gravy Train, only far more intentional about how it progresses narrative spillage, and controlled during more tense intimate scenes. Yet there’s a jubilant, slacker vibe to this slice of Southern Cool that invests us in the stakes but never aspired to be anything other than an infusion of gratifying character and narrative payoffs. It only helps that we get many little superfluous but hilarious idiosyncrasies spliced into the film rather than edited out (the halt in momentum for Torn to lament to Basinger that he’s “never killed a woman before” - but over a shared drink of mirrored defeatism, framing nonchalantly cordial deadpan comedy that lingers for maximum effect). All players contribute to creating a fine-sketched world, which carries a welcoming spirit of artistic prospect. The film even turns into a western at the end - communicating with directness but enthusiasm that, first and foremost, it’s here to play. Bridges and Basinger are game to match Torn’s boisterousness (though no one can top the name Buford Pope!) with lively, flexed characters that can tactfully embrace and depart from their stereotyped characterizations when it serves them and the film around them. Their ongoing verbal dances with one another show movement between rigid toxic impulses and provocative eccentricity, and it’s just wonderfully surprising and cathartic to watch all the way through its series of comic-suspense showdowns to the subversive screeches of punchlines that cap them off.

Somewhere in the Night (Revisit): There's cerainly a lot to say about this one thematically. An amnesiac is compelled to dig into his past transgressions, fulfilling the self-destructive fatalism of man's Sisyphean existential confinement. But the pleasures are so much more lyrically sensational - war literally changes a man returning to the homefront, stirring a Lynchian vibe. This has been pointed out already ad nauseam, but like that future-auteur's more narratively-congruent films, I was drawn into Mank's by a fusion between the disruption of stability inherent to this identity-driven anxiety and the twisty pleasures of the mystery propelling us further from and closer to various comforts: The safe havens possible in disregarding one's history and starting anew vs. the safe haven of knowing more about the tangible past, as if it'll resolve all intangible problems of disillusionment in the present. Wait 'til John Hodiak sees what it's like when he lifts his eyes to the world around him, beyond the envelopment of 'self'! Part II coming soon - though this has one of the more upbeat noir endings by allowing war to literally change a man into morality. The implications on the fluidity of 'self', and the violent intervention it requires to achieve that gift of straight-up invention- as seemingly the only option out of an immoral life - is subtextually disquieting. It may be an ostensibly "happy ending" for the duo, but the film is commenting on a fatalism of 'character' that stings. The Contes of the world who never got the 'opportunity' to get to see battle are doomed, but those who did, and got hurt badly enough, may have a chance back home.

Nightfall (Revisit): This isn't an exceptional noir in any meaningful way, but it stands out for its novel barren snowy locations and use of iconographic tools not typically seen in the genre, as well as effectively arrhythmic flashback structure. It's a weird noir - everything set in the past is interesting, and most of what we get in the present is forgettable, and you never really know what's going to prompt a transition to when or where. The finale kinda botches several opportunities for cathartic use of materials already capitalized on briefly in the flashback getaway at the very same place, but then that last brutal death forgives such indolences. Not essential viewing, but one I like to return to every few years for those few pronounced departures.

The Brasher Doubloon (Revisit): I believe I wrote something on this before too, which was probably negligible because there's not much to say: This is to The Big Sleep what Apology for Murder is to Double Indemnity - a low-budget cash-in on the 'bigger' film's presence in the zeitgeist. Though like the other film, this one is pretty great, certainly way better than it needs to be.. There's crackerjack dialogue, absurdly labile shifts in allegiances, shrugging off side characters based on suspicious behavior without giving them the dramatic exits they don't deserve, etc. My favorite attribute is all the Maltese Falcon plagiarism - the plot, specific scenes (the Lorre introduction is C+P'd) and femme fatale dynamics.. it's as if the film established itself as an homage to the Hawks, only to realize it had no real interest in actually paying tribute to that film after the greenhouse prelude, or even funnier, mixed up the two Bogie hits and emulated the wrong film entirely! Anyways, this is a blast of lean sleeper pastiche, and well worth seeking out if you're a fan (or critic!) of noir in Cool Mode.

Nocturne: Another low-rent noir infusing itself with a whole lotta craggy hard-boiledness to compensate for its source limitations. Not a complaint - this is an inconsistently entertaining ride, particularly successful through its casting of female bit players. From Myrna Dell at its outset onward, the film accrues an approving hammy-acidic flavor of potential femme fatales as a genre in-joke ruse - where the punchline is only seen in hindsight once the reveal occurs - but also diversifies its tone through light counterparts like Mabel Paige as Raft's eccentric mother. Though in the end, nothing of substance develops to make any mellow glee form a lasting impression - the closest it comes is during some geriatric roughhousing over a gun, quite amusing in isolation.

The Phenix City Story (Revisit): Aw man, I meant to rewatch Kansas City Confidential. Don't you hate it when you get your Karlsons mixed up? A bloated, didactic, docu-melodramatic waste of time plays even worse when you're expecting some middling but flavorsome heist fluff.

Scene of the Crime: Highly enjoyable cop drama, that refreshingly trades the allure of drawing a suspenseful mystery for an interest in authentic engagement between systems of persons mingled in a criminal justice case. At times reminiscent of modern cop/law shows’ grit, and others soaking in the smooth style and dialogue cultivated by the medium’s consciousness to its artifice, the characters and milieus are fleshed out and absorbing in ways that maintain the objectivity of docu-noirs without sacrificing the zeal. It’s kind of an organized version of the constantly-revolving noirs that find protagonists running through a series of endless but not-repeating spaces for encounters, except here it’s just a detective at work. Rarely does it feel like we return to the same location twice - for even when we do (the office, the car) it’s often with a different group, containing a different subject, sometimes a morphed tone, or even the shot set-up might be established in a new corner of the room, or close-up enough on characters to render the setting’s service obsolete. This gives the film a sense of relentless forward momentum, despite not necessarily describing it’s designed progression, and so the technique involves us through its swarm. I can understand this boring people -it’s not always stimulating, certainly if you’re detached from the specific details subtly enriching a scene. I wasn’t always invested, but it’s assuring to see a fun compromise reached in noirs clinically-agenda’d for the heat, and I was nodding along in step with it for probably at least an hour of its bulky-ish runtime.

Amidst all the witty dialogue, there's some hilariously-pat bald assertions - at one point Van Johnson basically tells his wife that her womanly weakness of unskilled emotional dysregulation has burdened him, causing his "fear" which is now impacting the case. As she profusely apologized, I was waiting for them to connect the full picture of dots, faulting the female population with all unsuccessfully convicted murders, but they decided to issue some restraint. I guess a middle-ground fusion like this can't issue many full measures.

Suspense: Is this a noir, or a dark ice skating musical? Who cares! I didn't particularly care for the story itself, but I can't think of a 'better' way to fuse two radically-opposed genres together. And it hardly matters - this is a tonal mixtape of cinematic comfort-food, where everyone brings their A game without ever trying to heap greater importance outside of sheer conceptual creativity. Though there are some juicy features that hold one's attention during thrilling moments on each bubble of the Venn diagram as well as the overlap, especially in its final minutes.

Non coupable: French comédie noire starring Michel Simon as a washed up alcoholic doctor who regains, and then surpasses (at least a healthy sense of basic) confidence into a narcissistic sense of superiority after successfully covering up an accidental homicide. A close psychological exploration would weigh this down with intrusive delusions, so the filmmakers wisely grace us with a darkly humorous behaviorist study instead. Simon is a man compensating for a career of self-doubt via twisted ‘sublimation’, under the sick conditions of the decaying world as he sees it - a society that can no longer be saved by his skills, but can be exploited for his benefit. As self-involved as he is, it’s established pretty early that Simon is a man of morals who’s been jaded by a cynical spell, prompted from combined self-destructive alcoholism and desensitized exposure to death in his practice. The liberation he gains from shedding the anchor of morality frames that soul as a subjective burden, and one not supported by his perception of his milieu. So it’s a noir rooted in myopic Impressionism we’re not invited into, but instead observe play out as conflicting objective tones: the jolly mid-life crisis committing crimes fitting the noir skeleton - until the last act when it starts to 'feel' more suspenseful from Jany Holt's vantage point, bordering on horror.

Ironies accumulate - Simon’s improved self-esteem helps him quit drinking, show up for work and others, etc. - at least until he starts off-ing people who bother him, having now suppressed that vital human asset to coexist with others that’s also been slowly killing him in isolation. The internal logic is deeply troubling: either slowly die alone or live without a conscience, but rather than resting in a depressive aura the film continually produces more jokes -
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Simon’s grandiosity is validated by the (selfishly) net-positive consequences he gains from his amoral deeds in repeatedly getting away with murder, only for him to remain dissatisfied by the withholding of direct social validation that he cannot possibly achieve without sacrificing that status of safety and self-regard: Another trap of malaise he cannot possibly outsmart to have his cake and eat it too.

The film works as a portrait of either objective of subjective bitter irony. If Simon is actually committing these crimes, receiving all the indirect feedback and yet not the harmonious gratification he craves, that craving for what the world cannot provide doesn't match his ostensible-ethos of meeting the world on its terms; but there's also a reading that it's all in his mind without shoving it down our throats. I don't think the film is optioning this interpretation intentionally - but just watching Simon read the newspaper articles that bluntly call his crimes the first that can be considered "perfect" -and having that not be enough- is a hilarious yet grim punchline.

There's a moment that would be cartoonish if it weren't totally in step with the film's fabric - the realization that he's been stuck inside his own world after setting the perfect trap for Holt, and then calling out her name in desperation for the intimacy he's forfeited. The subsequent attempt to bridge his world with the real one is blocked by the detectives who won't hear it - he's not invited back, even to join under a system of justice that would penalize him. He's simply considered too dim and cast aside once again. And the denouement is icing on the cake, or rocks piled on the grave, however you see it.
There’s something brilliant about the way the filmmakers engage with and subvert the genre’s constraints to deliver dry satirical payoffs, and I wonder if the Coen bros saw this early in their careers, given the similarities in broad tonal approach and general enthusiasm for faux-apatheistic taunting.

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Re: The Noir List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Project)

#723 Post by therewillbeblus » Thu Nov 23, 2023 3:39 am

The Thief: While not a le Carré adaptation itself, this film is proof that the oft-silent and solitary anxiety of a spy translates better on the written page. I wouldn't want a gimmick of only internal one-sided dialog either (unless topped with an ironic punchline vis-à-vis Fincher's The Killer), but the nonverbal exercise shoots itself in the foot with its commitment to silence. The self-seriousness isn't the problem, but there are times where omitting verbal cues feels like forced suppression, and throwing in some sparse language would more effectively communicate the realism of it all -especially as a signifier that accentuates the agony of introverted silence in between (e.g. a detail like the soldiers screaming when the tank runs over their foxhole in The Big Red One); for Milland's breakdown at the end isn't enough to make up for the lacking insinuations of anxiety. It's all a decent idea that's not formally poor, but still deposits a flavorless slog. It also feels like cheating to provide Milland's dream sequence, putting pieces together and relaying the prints for his final act, when the entire idea of the film has been to alienate us from intimate prompts in favor of a more behaviorist study.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers: Sci-fi invasion classic with heavy noirish overtones in style and narrative structure, at least in the first act as McCarthy and Wynter investigate the scattered pattern of conspiracy presented. It's intermittently engaging, but cops-out on the fatalism - Yes, the film gives us plenty of close-ups on McCarthy's traumatized face in the last act and ends on it for the final frame, in what can be read as a surrender meditated on with a sense of permanence - but only after he's believed and action has been sprung by the feds, with no indication that they, too, are doomed to a similar fate. The idea was bested by Kaufman and Ferrara, particularly in how that noir concept spread beyond the small community into the world at large, which signaled a more interesting theme: That we are much more insignificant and powerless than we'd like to believe. This one gets at the base of that idea - disrupting McCarthy from his smug status as the town's(/His World's) celebrated doctor- but doesn't take it far enough. The concurrent invasion devalues the egocentrism of My Community being the prime target of importance, and is key to the fatalistic sense of surrender these films are trying to create - wonderfully uttered by Meg Tilly in the most frightening version.

Tierra: Okay, so this is a gigantic stretch to categorize as neo-noir (and it's patently not capable of being devolved into such a genre), but I've been on a Julio Medem kick lately and he's the first artist in a long time whose work I just can't bring myself to write about - yet the noir concepts borrowed here stood out. There's a deliberately cryptic strategy in how Medem communicates how insane and chaotic one's relationship to feelings are, especially regarding personal identity, social engagement, and love, manifesting as the nebulous but enthralling potential of the world at large.. but Medem's inclusion of a femme fatale as Death(?) here is inspired, and upends expectations by remaining ambiguous in his attitude towards fatalism, which may be just as sublime as any other part of life to this heavily-disillusioned protagonist. The plot is, essentially: A man who may or may not be crazy engages with a milieu that may or may not contain mysterious and magical material, as love, lust, empathy, and animal magnetism swirl around ideas of fate and free will. So it's an Almodovarian heightened melodrama, neo-noir, magical realist romance, dark fantasy, etc. - but Medem seems to be recontextualizing the noir elements into something more spiritually and corporeally relevant; at least to modern audiences grappling with the challenge of expressing deep feelings with limited tools available.

Kansas City Confidential (Revisit): The first two-thirds of this are pretty great, especially the middle section where our disappointingly-uncharismatic protagonist hunts down leads. But once the elements are strung together for the finish, it all falls apart. Not because it's bathetic, per se, but the sincere heft, close-ups, and theatrical expressions afforded to those final interactions in the climactic set piece are obnoxious and unearned, with no space left for dramatic irony. There's an unevenness to this pic that doesn't appear to be part of its intended design, so we get a half-cocked web of Man-on-a-Mission narrative, with a few impressive highs and forgettable lows sewn in, ostensibly to satisfy a wider audience demographic. Unfortunately, that safe T-crossing reeks of insecurity, so the film ends on a note of softness after wearing the mask of a hard-boiled attitude for it’s stirring middle. Still recommended, and a film I'll probably continue to watch every few years for its simple pleasures of provocative games within a road-movie structure.

Dial 1119: Now this is what I'm talking about - a lean, sharp, astutely-conceived and detailed execution of tension, tactfully constructed as isolated moments of building discomfort strung together. Even if the endgame is laid out, the intra-narrative activity is full of small surprises - not twists, but a series of set pieces where the tone of insecurity and dread is milked to a witty conclusion, which then spills into the next one. I love how the chaotic but controlled economy -in how the edits stitch together a bunch of participants thrashing around in attempts to locate or best the unhinged asylum fugitive- mirror his own internal mental state: regulated composure, under a logic that's abnormal and objectively unstable in relation to the rest of the milieu. While most of these swift maneuvers occur in the first act, the calculated precision of how this all unfolds is way spicier and successful than The Thief's bland attempts at a similar build - and proof that imbuing a touch of unnerving POV shifts in familiar terrain can reshape the skeleton and its contents into a novel form. Thompson plays a good psychopath, leaning into the scary side of stoicism with a gleam in his eyes that denotes a kind of depersonalized catatonia. The group of patrons under siege are colorful - the always-reliable Leon Ames and histrionic Virginia Field in particular - and their attempts at swaying Thompson range from clever to absurd, but that also feels about right to an under-pressure situation.

The psychiatrist-patient dynamic threatens to undo a lot of the film's merits with its condensed explanatory didacticism (which also hints at familiar noir themes in disillusioned war vets returning, with the twist that a man in the Greatest Generation feeling inadequate for being disqualified from that experience produces the same kind of deranged displacement from his milieu as those who did serve and return!) but this also ends with a shockingly abrupt, violent silencing act, which effectively revokes that sentimental aim. And then everything just crackles from there - fast and messy and jolting enough to work in step with the general spirit of the film. Brutal, disquieting, yet wildly entertaining stuff.

Desperate: Mann concocts a wrong-man-on-the-run thriller with a deft, whetted approach that stings in all the right places. The script establishes characters well early on, and Mann shoots it all in a manner that reflects stakes, urgency, and thrills even in rare moments of calm. It's not a complex noir, but it is one of the more impressively eclectic - in such a short runtime, we're sucked into the innocence, the evil, personal morality in friction with systems, organic romanticism, and crafted horrors. The tonal diversity works to support the value of concerns threatened within the atmosphere: The lovers on the run, and their experiences with one another and the fellow innocents they encounter, are allowed to exist as exhibitions of why a moral life really matters; a 'sunny side' not covered enough in noirs to demonstrate what there is to lose. And the cruelty of Burr only exacerbates the need to desperately hold on to that romanticism. Brodie's emasculation is pervasive - he's objectively weaker than Burr, can barely protect his family without lying and running scared, and can't even succeed at getting the attention of civic officials with half-cocked moral impulses. His scattered, overwhelmed response to the insurance salesman near the end is amusingly communicated by Mann with humorously-rapid editing. The meeting is both thematically and narratively relevant, producing an act of despondent surrender to that emasculation that's practically elided by the forward momentum Mann rigorously upholds. Brodie's performance might appear steady, but the ways he copes with responsibility as ideologically-tied to masculinity fluctuates in response to stressors, and it's exhilarating to watch him attempt to exercise composure with a surging lability as he faces up against threats to his personhood.

Cornered: Decent-enough vengeful road trip with Dick Powell. The most interesting aspect of the film isn't its attempt at a 'Round-the-World convoluted plot, but how Powell seems to be playing his character straitlaced and confident like a wannabe-Bogart, yet Dmytryk directs and frames him as an average man with an odor of pathetic, that most men in noir worlds exude. This friction makes his performance feel all the more conflicted, withered, and real. Though it’s funny how strongly emphasized the effects of Powell’s triggers for shell-shock trauma were here, as if these intrusively-issued spells are the integral to understanding his character - when we actually empathize and get at his essence just about every minute outside of these. Not a memorable picture, but not a boring one either, even if it is way too long.

Armored Car Robbery: I'm glad this one was short, but it's frustrating whenever such a lean thriller leaves its viewers wanting in either the material or thrills departments. This just can't drudge up enough content to comprise an hour of runtime, and what it does bring is mostly the same 'ole contrivances we've seen over and over on both the cops' and criminals' sides. I think I've actually seen this before, but couldn't pick it out in a line-up even a day later, so I'll let it walk.

Backfire: Interesting set-up and promising cast are diluted by an unnecessarily-busy script of Russian doll flashback storytelling. There's a fair amount of potential in the pitch for a GI, with nurse in tow, to clear his buddy's name as all three cope with their individual traumas shaped by postwar ills. The underappreciated Virginia Mayo and always-reliable Edmond O'Brien are given underwritten parts, and some of the relationship dynamics tied together remain unconvincing while serving as key motivators for the labyrinthine plot. Still, when not drowning in its own stringy web of dull mystery, the proficient craft behind the camera allows most scenes that don't feel rushed to work, usually the more spacious present-day snooping bits.

Deadline at Dawn: One of the better post-blackout mystery noirs, far more involving than the lame Black Angel but without the thematic or formal wit of The Blue Gardenia. The careful script enriches the central couple's dynamic generously beyond where it needs to be, and Hayward in particular gives a nice range to her character that refuses to be pigeonholed to binary assessments of either aloof suspicion or intimately knowable ingénue, immediately when she enters into the mix. Williams's youthfully innocent persona is reminiscent of John Sweet in A Canterbury Tale, though not nearly as pronounced, and the film's best moments are in the playful detective work they engage in, which emulates the base of that film's fantastical spirit. The seemingly-random aid of an unexpectedly-resourceful cabbie/existential guardian Angel only complements the airy glee of this Nancy Drew-vibed genre entry that concurrently operates as romantic fairy tale, and keeps action propelled along at a steady pace while still allowing rest stops in detailed moments of blossoming chemistry. The film loses steam in its back half and could’ve used some trimming there (this would’ve fit the lean hour-long noir framework well) and the ending feels pretty dumb and tacked-on, but it’s not often that we get such approvingly light and entertaining fare in the darkness of noir, and this checks most boxes without sacrificing much style or acidic text.

No Orchids for Miss Blandish (Revisit): A messy, overstuffed -yet somehow still vacuous- piece of pulp fluff, that nevertheless delivers its designed pleasures in neat little packages for audiences willing to acclimate to its wavelength without asking too many questions. The film takes place in a world so far removed from any logic we may subscribe to, and then has the audacity to bar us from scoping its blueprints! I suspect that's because the filmmakers don't even know what to make of its ill-fitting contents: Impulsive, cruel shenanigans traded by persons who are superfluous in a milieu which reflectively cares as little about mankind, so their presences are treated as distinctive as the acts of violence perpetrated. I can get behind a Cormac McCarthy-ethos noir, though the pocket of twisted romance that's somehow birthed within this filthy vibe could not be any less convincing - but maybe that's how this world operates: Nothing has meaning or makes any rational sense, but everyone is taught to trust their instinctual drives, so lust brewing in an isolated kidnapping charade is diagnosed as love by both parties trapped there? I doubt I'll ever find a cohesive reading to better appreciate the film through, but the film doesn't invite it, so why exert the effort - It's an episodic domino effect of weird and curt activity, and I'll meet it on those terms every few years.

Johnny Eager: Robert Taylor's borderline-sociopathic lead is a peculiar vehicle to build a film around, given how slippery the film holds a consensus on his character, but that also opens up the possibilities of amoral surprise which makes for some fun mischievous interplay (i.e. the various stages of the fake murder-blackmail con-job). Like the previous film above, I feel like a world has been created without a pulse on its barometer for human constitution.. and so the Van Heflins of the world, who possess even a hint of emotional sensitivity, fit in even less than they would in ours and turn to drink and halfhearted one-liners about friendship as a tangible motto to hang the remnants of their tarnished hat on. Taylor's monotonous demeanor can taper rather than inspire engagement, and the batting avg of actual amusement isn't high enough for its liberal runtime - though the final shootout is a doozy of inventive and unexpected technical choices meshed with sharp brutality, and threatens to save the picture. I also experienced a weird viewing tic, where I kept noticing how good Lana Turner was at dramatizing whatever state her character was in, and yet the range was so full of stock-emotions that the character itself felt false. Like, she's doing a certain kind of scene better than most actresses in these noir roles every time, but there's something vapid about a person who spouts a grab bag of radical mood swings without enough connective tissue between them, and this created a kind of paradoxical effect that's absorbing and alienating. I delighted in that, even if it's just a 'me' thing.

The Man with a Cloak: Enjoyable Agatha Christie-type mystery peppered with juicy performances and a gothic ambiance taken as noir expressionism. I smiled at the pitch-perfect casting of Caron and Stanwyck as polarized versions of what a noir woman can be, and the whole escapade is executed with a similar kind of low-key digestibility as Knives Out where the flaws are excused by humble aspirations - well, relative to the self-conscious stretching of material inherent in these kinds of web-spins.

Pitfall (Revisit): Coarse melodrama spotlighting the nightmarish possibilities of following through on the gander towards exotic urban deviance from the safety of domesticity. Powell is a bored family man caught between two threats: one soft - the torpor of the nuclear system that desensitizes one into a fate of existential lobotomy; and the other loud - the stimulation of surprise found in crevices unexplored and morals undefined. There's something attractive about unfixed values from a rigid hierarchy, which fantastically permits such an ideologically-vacuumed vehicle to entertain id impulses, and de Doth methodically draws us into this spell through minute alterations in Powell's routine, the consequential bright lights escaping through his instinctual smile communicating so much without overstating anything. As others have already named, this is a film about men in personal crises using a woman as their target of hope against a lonely, consuming culture, but they're mostly oblivious to the lack of kinetic reciprocity occurring around this dream. All competing fantasies by competing men are laid out side by side, antithetical and emasculating to the dreamer - as de Toth refuses to grant greater value to any one preferred narrative than the others in an objective framework. Instead, they're painted as coercions to illusions, with the only difference being the type of aggression issues against Scott to allow the man to hold onto that mirage of catharsis.

The ease at which even the most socially-conservative, institutionally-devoted male can surrender his conditioned morals for a shiny object is definitively cynical, and while this is unquestionably a noir, it also executes the themes of domestic melodramas better than most classics not yet conceived of. De Toth's view of societal depression is translated by presenting us with a bunch of isolated souls trying to connect around contradictory delusionally-skewed ideas, with very real consequences and no awareness of the problem's root. There are two devastating moments that stand out here: The first is the optimal example of male delusion (so incredibly pessimistic for being the most honorable and least harmful of all the discharges of toxic masculinity on display): Powell's speech to his family about the trouble with the world being a lack of contentment with what one already has, spewed out just as he's concurrently acting as the poster-boy of that problem. And then his ability to evade the same outcomes as his peers, just by being slightly less pathetic rather than providing a revelatory or empathic act beyond self-serving mechanics is icing on the cake - as if detouring his id to tuck his son into bed makes him edge towards being a mensch at heart, with the Scott affair as an innocent vacation. So while de Toth ensures that objectively we see each man's narrative as equitably gross in their selfishness, he also derisively demonstrates that only through a manipulated and construed narrative path can Powell emerge the moral victor - reflexively mocking the Hollywood Code as he leans into its trappings.

The second devastating moment is when Scott visits Barr in prison, and he projects his jealous and accusatory narrative to summarize her psychology without her consent, to which she softly replies that 'it might not be true'. She isn't a femme fatale, but a desperate woman looking for any man to deserve her, with the bar set at the ground level of simply being believed -or, rather, leaving the door open that maybe, just maybe, she could be telling the truth. Without even a fraction of willingness to give her that benefit, well, she's fucked. And so are the men trying to fit the square pegs of their overbearing desires into round holes of practical limitations in other wills, variables sought for self-preservation, etc. The camera's magnetism towards Powell's narrative in the end is another formalist snub to Scott - devaluing her with the weapon of the medium. Powell gets to try again with his wife, and even if her mental state is fragile and potentially irreparable, at least he is welcomed back into his role of the breadwinner. The way he leans back, relieved, with the cheery score sending us off into the 'happy ending' of the picture, indicates no real lesson learned. Powell will return to a state of complacency, while his wife and Scott will continue to wrestle with their emotional tragedies independently. See you in the starring roles next decade, ladies.

The Red Squirrel (Revisit): Okay, so Medem really enjoys his application of noir devices, which are even more obvious here. A disillusioned protagonist spins webs of deceit to escape his old life, where he's been deterministically irrigated to consider death as his only way out; tricking an amnesiac woman into submitting to his idea of her, and then becoming agitated when she shows base signs of autonomy. His reactive accusation diagnosing her duplicity is cheekily rich, labeling her a femme fatale without ever spelling those words, and contributes to the larger subtextual commentary. This is actually an interesting double feature with Pitfall - though per usual, Medem transcends genre constraints to liberate his characters toward shared eccentric realities not conceivable to the isolated mind, and only possible when encountering the spiritual experience of novel love, however muddled the circumstances birthing it. Love is allowed to be messy and people are allowed to be flawed, because there's some kind of reciprocal acknowledgement of dignity and worth by the principals, actions of service divorced just a tad from pure selfishness. If relationships are games, and both participants want to provoke the other within the air of mystery present, why not - in fact, it's probably more honest to accept that inescapable enigmatic quality - as long as the overarching sense of safety is cultivated to authenticate play.

So the film is a weird, enthralling, candid tale of the boundless possibilities of passion, which rarely subscribes to a predictable or effable internal logic. Thank god for this medium to help erode those false, self-constructed barriers and enter an exclusive dimension to yield fruits previously invisible in our stringent public. Medem is the real deal - a melodramatic surrealist who evades the pitfalls of melodrama or surrealism with a gentle deftness, demanding untethered engagement from anchoring signifiers to achieve sublime in the elliptical. However, it's not lost on him that a noirish escapade attempting to get away with altering one's identity toward a preferred narrative, without the force of reality returning for a shoulder-tap unwinding the 'That Was Easy' button, is folly - even if it's a necessary step toward the humility required to reshape one's schema of what love can 'be'. Perhaps it's even a synonymous experience to losing one's memory and pushing through instinctive barriers to trust strangers in order to build it back again!

Murder, My Sweet (Revisit): An efficaciously literary noir that immediately establishes itself as a walking defense mechanism, rather than convincing brand of Cool. The hardboiled-ness of Powell et al’s demeanor and verbiage feels deliberately condensed into sharp attitudes that simplify information as a protective layer against the horror of displacement from one’s milieu, and perhaps in response to an irreversibly lost ethos binding humanity together. I love how, right off the bat, he muses on the separation between the outside world’s traffic and his ‘self’, as if the “silence of the office building” signifies both his superior resilience in and pathos of coping with this alienation. He sizes up people as concisely as possible - on an assignment to find a client’s love interest, he tries to "picture" the guy being in love, can't, and so he must not be! That’s all the rope he can afford to people in an apathetic world, where only currency -curbed by one’s sense of self-preservation, as needed- defines action.

The capitalist individualism is so nakedly portrayed (i.e. the argument between Powell and the lead detective about who helped who 'more' on a murder, for how quickly it devolves into a competition about who wants to end their workday to retire to a solitary existence and who hate humanity more than the other; b) after Powell and Shirley finally kiss, his first words are still selling himself - "I'm a pretty good kisser" - at probably the one time he doesn't need to, yet still feels compelled.. and then he goes off on a rant about his business plans and interactions instead of just kissing her again!) that I imagine this film has repelled many: The dismissed stiffness is often framed as deadpan theatrics (I’ve heard complaints about the absurdity of some performances' affect and thin characterizations, but it fits when these are all complex people disallowing themselves to be more than thin as a shield of persona, putting on performances for each other as they sell their pitch-of-the-moment to the crowd)- but even when it does hold that line, it’s obsessive focus on ‘process’ succeeds under the environmental conditions that the film wisely doesn’t attempt to puncture. I’d love to get a Fincher commentary, and wonder if this is a key noir he’s used to help shape his formal exercises borrowing noir conventions - plus this picture is a model of precise economy, though again, perhaps too much for some.

Powell plays a good Marlowe - mostly due to his innate tenderness barely hiding beneath the veneer of grit that helps create an identity of fortitude. Though it’s transparent that he used to be a much different, likely happier man, not too long ago, and I appreciated how passionate he could become with a bellowing voice (or nightmare-induced scream) to show those parts of his emotional identity amidst the orientation of a laconic, placid temperamental-mask. He does a few selfless-seeming things, but even the charity to Moose gave himself a boost of ego to be in a position to condescend. The dialog is properly pronounced with flair, but also elastically spun in interloping narration; the plot turns cause whiplash as airtight episodes exploding like bombs into the next spot we land; and the stylistic touches are handled with clever technical prowess that’s unobtrusive until there’s space to take off the leash and play around. Maybe this doesn’t live up to a pedestaled reputation, being one of the First Noirs and all.. but it’s a strong example of how to film a story enmeshed with mood, and not much other fat worth chewing on, which does fit the worldview after all. A reflexively superficial film, and intoxicating on those fumes.

Dragonwyck (Revisit): This one’s probably considered a noir by most for its aesthetics, and rightfully so, but it’s hard to shake the (incredibly relevant to the current zeitgeist) observation of how fatalistically weak a wealthy white man is to God’s Takebacksee of a male heir he put in little effort to create to begin with. I already wrote some thoughts on this element before, but Price’s self-protective philosophical determinism, applying the Moral Model of justice to explain his own wealth and prosperity (yet pitched away from his self and towards the negative, i.e. the handicapped as morally deserving of their maladies due to divine intervention) despite putting in no work to earn it, is a brilliant little touch - especially if we entertain his own bias as a formulation for the finale!

Amantes: If you rolled your eyes at the inclusion of Medem's genre-defying works in this post, you may direct yourself towards this more explicit qualifier from his Spanish peer, Vicente Aranda, although it's not nearly as good as the two more eclectic Medem masterpieces. This is even more brazenly engaging with eroticism and stars Victoria Abril and Maribel Verdú, so it's a bit puzzling how dull it feels in motion. Aranda is smart enough to cast Abril as not just the femme fatale, but the central figure of interest in the first half of this otherwise unspectacular neo-noir, and so we get some mileage out of her focal point conniving and emoting all over the place as Sanz' vapid protagonist falters at rousing the picture with any value from the not-so-'innocent' (more like pathetically naive and aimless) perspective. When Abril is offscreen, Verdú is on, and her arc is mildly amusing to watch in its early stages, before her character reverts back to One-Note Ball & Chain. The film's best scenes are when she's grappling with her antithetical religious morals and competitive desire to keep her man, unconsciously choosing to evolve to meet the amoral world on its terms in sleek noir tradition, which briefly makes her come off as a 'fatale' if only in the switch to a confident sensual attitude! But there can only be one - and watching obsessive-compulsive passion produce tragedy isn't nearly as exciting as it has been in countless other melodramas. The minute behavioral idiosyncrasies from the two female leads are the only reason to watch this, and even then it's not enough. For a movie all about sex, it's frustratingly insufficient at stimulating much feeling, neither deep nor cosmetic.

Lady in the Lake (Revisit): Although arguably bested in many ways by Dark Passage's bifurcated approach -which had the audacity to attempt to squeeze multiple framing devices, inclusive of both the subjective gimmick and a pivot to conventional objectivity, within the same picture- this POV noir is still excellent on its own terms, and manages to tonally separate itself from the Daves despite sharing genre DNA. Robert Montgomery shows off his directorial intellect by committing in full measures to a puckish reflexivity with noir material and its smarmy delights, as side characters are coerced into being sized up and down by Montgomery hiding behind a camera, and so by extension, us. It's a gift of omniscient pleasure to the audience fueled with different aspirations than Daves' film, for we yearn for the anxious reactivity of those caught in a conversation with Montgomery and his camera, rather than experiencing it ourselves as most noirs demand. This could've gone south only too easily, but Montgomery is fully aware of the possibilities and limitations of the medium and opts for a feather-light good time over Bogart's journey of hypervigilance, which is drenched in a cyclical pattern of being presented with threats and manipulating the environment with critical thinking skills to evade them on the lam. This one’s comfortable wearing pajamas in every scene. It’s also a Christmas movie with all the ironic iconography! - a joke, but rather fitting, as it would be a perfect flick to throw on in the background on Christmas morning. That might actually be the best way to describe its artfully campy temperament, and while I would never try to persuade anybody that it’s a better movie than Dark Passage, depending on my mood I may prefer its consistently gratifying treats.

Night and the City (Revisit): What is there to even say about a noir pitched as a rollercoaster of sensations that peak and dip, until you're riding the highs and lows of Desperation right with everyone else. I could fawn over each detail present in the mise en scene, visual style, and performances, but it would feel disrespectful to the spirit of the film, as all these elements and more don't stop moving for an instant; they swirl into a relentless exhibition of fatalistic reptilian impulses, a frenzied cesspool of losers. It's incredible how lovable this film is - that it's even possible for a man to enjoy watching his own nightmare unfold without a shred of glamour. Hell, the Safdies loved it so much they remade it, twice.

The Lady from Shanghai (Revisit): Guileful comedy in the skin of tragedy, worn so tightly that they become inseparable feelings. What starts out as a pretty straightforward series of comic bits transforms into a mood piece crafting a dark, bent vision of a dark, broken world; and then bends further into twisted humor now based on that recognition of, not just the death of a collective morality, but the death drive of that moral collective. Welles poetically differentiates the bookended comic tones across a sea or noir grammar - the first innocent and naive, and the final seasoned to death. Of all noirs, it’s the most beautifully horrifying because of how wonderfully bizarre it is - veneers of degrading ironies peeled back to reveal a progression of permanent dooms. Each dramatic lyric is undercut by a gag in some form - anything as obvious as a group of kids laughing at a romantic embrace, or as subtle as an insurance exchange after an abrasive car accident (which is surrounded by a similarly humorous formal tinkering with aesthetic transitions in a scene where one man cartoonishly cackles at another now trapped in unexpected absurdity but around a bitterly-framed, baldly unfunny deed) while other dramatic scenes are just shot weird as comedy against the alleged gravitas of the action (i.e. the fistfights during the escape being edited as slapstick, or Welles' narration in the funhouse when he gradually amps up the Irish accent to the point where it's overblown and the hamminess distracts from the content -where plot's mystery is literally solved, or the nonchalant sap assumption that he'll be cleared in the next chapter, because things tend to go well and expected for ya, huh?); a jarring indication of fatal distance from the material we were just suffocated with moments ago. Can anything be taken seriously, and if not, what will act as the foundation or supports in this world?

Diva (Revisit): I could name a bunch of reasons why this movie is so cool, but they'd all be spoilers for a work that wears its essence on its sleeve this proudly.

That might have to do it for this year

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Randall Maysin Again
Joined: Tue Dec 14, 2021 3:28 pm

Re: The Noir List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Project)

#724 Post by Randall Maysin Again » Sun Nov 26, 2023 5:04 pm

Harper (Jack Smight, 1966)--Don't know why this gets what not inconsiderable hate it does get, on this board or from Pauline Kael. For one thing, no Pauline Kael, it is quite well-made (perhaps she was just expressing her general disdain/bias towards Jack Smight, who certainly seems to have quite possibly never made another good film). Harper has my favorite Conrad L. Hall photography, crisp and fabulous, slightly garish yet elegent and eloquent colours, both vivid and slightly washed out as befits the California sunshine locale, with none of the tendency towards slimy lighting Hall often enough displays, as for example, disastrously in The Day of the Locust (nominated for an Academy Award lol!). The first half is more energetic and quite promising, the second half fine but a little bit too unsurprising. The film's number-one selling point for me, though, is Shelley Winters. She gets up to some wonderful Shelley hi-jinks, like, in the hotel bar with Paul Newman, the eager little noise she makes when drinks are brought to the table, or, soon after, berating the bar's bandleader for allegedly not being Mexican enough ("I know Mexicans and you're not a real Mexican!") because he doesn't know how to play "La Cucharacha" like she wants...!
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Her character's "arc", ending by being locked in a linen closet by Newman after he..rescues? Julie Haris from being tortured lol by Shelley and the other crooks, is also delightful.
Shelley is pretty good in this film, as is Janet Leigh (always an asset to a film) and Harris, whom I otherwise almost always find really annoying, and actually, that sexpot actress whose name I can't remember was also more than serviceable. I had assumed, based on my (very) partial exposure years and years ago to A Patch of Blue, that Shelley, despite being a force of nature, her great performances in Lolita and Next Stop, Greenwich Village were outliers and her other work was mostly crass, stupid self-display and idiot method acting, though she does seem to usually play goosey drunken twit characters anyway. Her role in this obviously isn't nearly as much of an opportunity as those films, but, still, I was wrong!

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therewillbeblus
Joined: Tue Dec 22, 2015 3:40 pm

Re: The Noir List Discussion and Suggestions (Genre Project)

#725 Post by therewillbeblus » Fri Dec 01, 2023 6:24 pm

D.O.A. (Revisits - 1949 and 1988): I decided to return to both the iconic noir and its offbeat reimagining, because both are such stupid films built around a strong creative writing prompt: Alive man walks into police station to report his own murder. What’s done with it unfortunately falters in both cases. The original has the (almost..) always-reliable Edmond O’Brien lifelessly reacting to plot developments nobody is invested in, frustratingly resigned to play the one-note chicken with its head cut off. The best moments of the film are tracking shots of him running around and flailing, because at least that’s a point of reference for honest relatability we can get behind. Any comment on the ‘twist’ is perplexing - it’s obvious who’s the culprit from the moment they appear onscreen through Deduction 101 - a clumsy answer to the question of “Wait, how did you know [information I never shared]” Yeah I can’t believe it was that guy either.

The remake is even more absurd but at least that means it’s more entertaining. While the original pitches a strong premise and then effortlessly kicks sand around until time at the park is done, the ‘88 version tries to hide its equally hollow and contrived plot with random murders and rogue characters intruding in on the narrative to shock. This briefly works as a slapdash emulation of Quaid’s own disorientation, but it’s also just poor filmmaking and writing. The movie never sustains the chaos implemented for long enough or in full enough measures to trick us or transform that cheap ammunition into Art, so we’re repeatedly let down. Of all films, it reminded me of Foul Play, another movie full of ideas that I found pleasant under younger conditions and now find extra disappointing for meandering around the potential for silly neo-noir theatrics that at least commit to their absurdity without folding mid-hand. Like the original, the twist is clear to anyone who’s watched a movie revolved around a mystery anticipating a twist, because it’s the unassuming but milieu-affiliated top-billed familiar face that just disappears for the bulk of the narrative.

These directors also have no idea how to shoot action scenes, and not in an accidentally-complimentary way that mimics a dazed state - it’s clearly trying to be riveting. Shoulda just stuck with the tonal absurdity of gluing body parts together and spilling into set pieces without skills or proactively-planned protective factors. If this was more like Into the Night - another deeply flawed 80s neo-noir that I unequivocally adore because of its commitment to its ideas, including soberly facing unresolved dysphoria without a solution, and self-consciously endorsing goofy scenarios because these fish-out-of-water noir expeditions are fucking nuts! - this could’ve had a fighting chance. But it just jumps around a lot, and never reveals a formal or thematic awareness we can attach ourselves to. Like, there’s some obvious intent to show how this horrifyingly fatalistic alternative path to Quaid’s complacency is the ironic ‘Seize Life’ option available - a brutally sick twist of the karmic knife - but there’s no follow through to hammer the nail into that irony, nor indication the filmmakers really considered the noir concepts available to them after that initial ‘Ha!’ diversion. Even amidst all the crazy turns, it never feels like we’re really invited on the adventure, and for a movie that’s all superficial ‘adventure’, that’s no bueno

Quaid’s laughter shrieking, “That’s what this was all about!” might be the one time we could bridge an alliance with his state, but the sincerity kicks back in, and, yeah. The remake is superior for simply trying harder and doing more, but all efforts are issued in the wrong directions so they’re still both bottom-of-the-barrel noirs

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