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Big Bad Voodoo Lou posted:Have I got some great news for you! Wait, I meant The Handle. It has Parker being hired by the outfit to bankrupt a casino island on international waters that’s infringing on their Texas vice. It’s loving awesome.
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Dec 30, 2020 22:52
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 Black Widow (1987), dir. Bob Rafelson  Rafelson, who clearly has noir on his mind (in 1981 he remade The Postman Always Rings Twice) directs this neo-noir starring Debra Winger as a Justice Department agent obsessed with catching Theresa Russell, the titular femme fatale who, like the spider, is counterfeiting currency. Okay, no, obviously not. She's killing men.  Anyways, this film's reputation is somewhere between "fine" and "mediocre" (Ebert was not a fan and it's at 50% on Rotten Tomatoes) but I absolutely dig it. I do admittedly have a soft spot for '80s neo-noirs - the more '80s they are the better (I have watched and enjoyed the entirety of the first two seasons of Miami Vice, the quintessential neo-noir TV show, despite not being much of a TV guy) - and for movies with queer poo poo going on, and this movie checks both boxes. So, your mileage may vary.  The ending is a little weird - I'm still not sure entirely how I feel about it - and I suppose it could of course have been better (read: more queer) but I really like it. The inimitable James Hong is in it as a scuzzy private eye, and he gets to be on the receiving end of one of the my favorite bits of dialogue in a neo-noir (although it works better when you hear it than it does on the page), which I'll spoiler in case you want to discover it yourself: Mr. Shin, I'll tell you two things about me. I'm very rich, and I'm very wealthy.  For some reason I couldn't limit myself just to three images this time so here is a fourth.
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Dec 31, 2020 16:33
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 A Good Woman is Hard to Find (2019), dir. Abner Pastoll  Sarah Bolger stars as what may or may not be the titular good woman, a recent widow with two young children (4 and 6) in Belfast who gets drawn into the world of drug dealers in part because everyone except her insists her late husband was murdered because he was a drug dealer and in part for entirely unrelated reasons. Complications ensue, including rather bloody ones, which you know because the first shot of the movie is her covered in blood. We then flash back.  The flashback structure is of course a mainstay of many noirs, and it can be used to build tension, like here, where you know the movie is building towards blood. But I think it's rarely done well (the chief exceptions are the masterpieces, like Sunset Boulevard, which masterfully both constructs and undercuts the tension because the dude is loving dead) and that's the case here. Once you see the blood coming it's rather too obvious what's going to happen, which undercuts rather than supports the tension during that part of the movie, and it's totally not worth it, because it doesn't add much to the opening of the film. It almost seems like the director was trying to make sure nobody turned off the movie after 5 minutes, which, fair enough, but the rest suffers from it.  It's not an awful film. Bolger turns in a pretty great performance as a woman dealing with a lot of poo poo and the movie admirably lets her look a bit like poo poo too, which is a great break from Hollywood these days, where actors in basically every movie are routinely touched up with CGI to remove wrinkles and blemishes. (This is not a joke! Almost every big budget movie has VFX people whose job it is to stars more unrealistically gorgeous.) But the villain is too uninteresting (his two character traits are "sadistic" and "arrogant" which are not exactly innovative traits to give your gangster villain), and the movie puts too neat a bow on things. Serviceable but not a hit in my eyes.
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Jan 1, 2021 15:31
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 地球最後的夜晚 (Last Evenings On Earth)/Long Day's Journey Into Night (2018), dir. Bi Gan  Boy, the JPEG compression really does a number on this poor gorgeous film. Even the beautiful title card looks bad  Anyways, Huang Jue stars as a guy musing over past events in his life while also trying to solve a mystery in his hometown of Kaili, to which he has recently returned. One notable feature of the film is that one scene is in 3D, for which you put on 3D glasses. Obviously I didn't get to do that since I'm watching at home, and that's a real shame because I think the scene would've been even more stunning with the glasses. That hardly hurt the film, though. I think for a lot of people this is too far up its own artsy rear end in a top hat to succeed but like many others I eat this stuff up. It's slow, meditative, and gorgeous and it doesn't make a ton of sense even if you're able to follow the plot, which itself is tough because we jump between times and places and we get very little information.  It's a tone poem sort of a movie which plays things close to the chest, but for me at least it had enough meat on the bone to get at some serious emotional truths. I think this is the first out of this entire batch of noirs that has made me cry. Bi Gan has been on my radar since Kaili Blues which I heard good things about but which I haven't managed to watch yet, and I'm very much looking forward to the rest of his career.
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Jan 2, 2021 16:43
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For more recent Chinese neo-noir you have the films of Diao Yi’nan, Black Coal, Thin Ice and The Wild Goose Lake, neither are as slow and methodical as Bi Gan's films, but they are still stylish and bleak police procedural, and it's only in these more pulp films that you can get a brief glimpse of life in China these days. The Wild Goose Lake even includes Bi Gan's uncle in a cameo! Bi's uncle is the main character of Kaili Blues and he's the singing karaoke gangster of Long Day's Journey Into Night, which gives me hope for a Bi Gan's Uncle Expanded Universe.
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Jan 2, 2021 19:37
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Yes, China is turning out much of the good neo-noir these days. Suzhou River, Purple Butterfly, A Touch of Sin, Ash is the Purest White, and some others too.
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Jan 3, 2021 03:09
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 Der amerikanische Soldat/The American Soldier (1970), dir. Rainer Werner Fassbinder  One of Fassbinder's very first films is this crazy noir starring Karl Scheydt as a German-American Vietnam vet back in Munich to do some crime. Half the people dress like it's the '40s (although maybe that's what Munich was like in the '70s), Scheydt is a monster who barely emotes, and a strange song (written by Fassbinder) keeps playing.  Even this early on, and with pretty limited resources, Fassbinder makes the film look quite gorgeous. It has some very evocative shots. Scheydt is maybe not the world's greatest actor and the script has a few rough notes but generally everything hums along extremely basically and bleakly, which is a great tone for a noir to hit.  The movie is languorous in parts, which worked quite well for me - often that helped ramp up tension. And the ending is absolutely insane which bumps the movie up a bit more in my estimation. It won't be for everyone but for my money this is an excellent throwback married to a few "great director in his earliest stages" leaps of faith which are always fun to gawk at. Don't confuse it with Der amerikanische Freund, the other great '70s neo-noir by a peerless German director, or The American, a 2010 neo-noir starring George Clooney which I also like a lot.
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Jan 3, 2021 16:23
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 Dressed to Kill (1980), dir. Brian De Palma  De Palma pulls out all the stops for this movie starring Angie Dickinson as a frustrated married woman who doesn't get enough dickin', son; Nancy Allen as a prostitute who crosses paths with Dickinson and who witnesses a murder, and Michael Caine as Dickinson's psychiatrist who gets drawn into the murder investigation.  It's a serviceable movie let down a bit by the "mystery" (such as it exists) but buoyed up quite a bit by De Palma's visual artistry (you can tell I like his split screen stuff, but there's a lot of other pretty stuff too, including a very shiny screw which made my jaw drop) and his lust, both the normal sort and the bloodlust sort, because this movie is super horny and violent even by De Palma standards.  There are some homages to Psycho, Dennis Franz playing what would basically be the world's laziest cop if Lucas Gridoux as Inspector Slimane in Pépé le Moko hadn't beaten him already, some rather unconvincing plot contrivances, a rote "let's explain the entire plot" scene near the end for some reason, and Keith Gordon as Angie Dickinson's son who is some kind of inventor. Lots of downsides and lots of upsides, basically. Overall a good movie.
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Jan 4, 2021 16:47
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 Cutter's Way (1981), dir. Ivan Passer  Jeff Bridges, looking hot has hell, is a boat salesman who is friends with John Heard, a Vietnam vet who came back from the war with some serious injuries both physical and mental, and Heard's wife Lisa Eichhorn. All of them are complete alcoholics and things become complicated when Bridges gets tied up in a murder investigation involving a rich guy.  There are a few false steps, like a finale which is maybe a bit too bombastic and Heard going for it kind of harder than is perhaps called for (although it worked for me), but overall this is an excellent neo-noir. The characters are believable and so their despair hits hard, and although the movie came out in '81, it's definitely got a '70s feel, with its underlying vibes of conspiracy theories plus class warfare and the counterculture both running on fumes with the end of the '60s and the anti-war movement.  For some reason it all takes place in Santa Barbara and it nails the place pretty well, for what that's worth. That puts it up there with the other filmson Wikipedia's list of films set in Santa Barbara, like Demolition Man (which does not nail Santa Barbara), 20th Century Women (which isn't really trying to), and It's Complicated (which is a movie about what all the rich assholes in this movie are doing while Jeff Bridges and his friends are busy with their lives).
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Jan 5, 2021 17:14
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 Kill Me Again (1989), dir. John Dahl  Val Kilmer stars as a private investigator who gets drawn into the lives of a couple crooks on the run from the mob after having stolen way more cash than they were planning on stealing. Michael Madsen is wasted as a violent sadistic criminal who does exactly what the world's laziest casting director hired him to do. Kilmer and his co-star Joanne Whalley-Kilmer (they later divorced) have a bit more to do: Kilmer gets to be a skeptical sad sack and Whalley-Kilmer gets a very meaty femme fatale role.  Ultimately, though, it's all quite rote, with few surprises and an ending that barely gets the blood pumping. If one of the world's worst movie posters doesn't convince you to see it, maybe something else will, but don't look to me, because aside from Whalley-Kilmer being an absolute smokeshow there's not a lot that sticks out in my mind.  It does a good enough job bringing life to the various parts of Nevada it takes place in, and it's not as if it's actively bad or offensively incompetent. I enjoyed it well enough. And it certainly hews to most of the classic noir tropes with nary a false note, so it gets some bonus points for being what basically amounts to a throwback to the '40s. But nostalgia only gets you so much and it doesn't even have any of those serious '80s vibes that I go loving nuts for, so it's hard to recommend it for anyone except someone looking to scrape the bottom of the barrel of acceptably fine neo-noirs. This is John Dahl's first film and his first crack at neo-noirs, a genre he clearly loves. He will next make the much better Red Rock West, starring Nicholas Cage, and Cage and Kilmer will later star together in another neo-noir, Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, which is pretty great itself.
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Jan 6, 2021 16:53
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TychoCelchuuu posted:
I love both those, and somehow I've never heard of Kill Me Again! I love your reviews, and I have to find and watch this now.
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Jan 6, 2021 20:50
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Yeah I’m not posting a whole lot but TychoCelchuuu you are doing great reviews here.
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Jan 6, 2021 21:50
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TychoCelchuuu posted:This is John Dahl's first film and his first crack at neo-noirs, a genre he clearly loves. He will next make the much better Red Rock West, starring Nicholas Cage, and Cage and Kilmer will later star together in another neo-noir, Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, which is pretty great itself. If you haven't seen The Last Seduction yet, make it a priority.
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Jan 7, 2021 15:57
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I'm glad people are enjoying the reviews! Mona Lisa (1986), dir. Neil Jordan  Bob Hoskins, apparently some kind of career criminal, has just gotten out of prison after 7 years. He gets a job from his old crime boss (Michael Caine) for whom he went to prison. That job: driving around Cathy Tyson, a high class prostitute. Complications ensue, as they always do.  I don't really know about the pacing of the film, which feels off in some places, and that also hurts the tone a bit, especially with the humor that is mixed in (some of which is centered around the friend Hoskins is staying with, played by Robbie Coltrane, who always has some scheme going with glowing neon green virgin Marys or plastic sculptures of spaghetti dinners). And I don't love the last 30 seconds. But everything else is very good or great. London's seedy underbelly has a starring role, all of the actors are doing a great job, and the film has enough realism to make the whole endeavor feel grounded and meaningful.  The best part is the extended climax, which is emotionally raw in its pathos, something the whole movie has been building up to in slight little slivers here and there. One big slice of it is Hoskins, who is definitely the standout and who does a good job walking a fine line in portraying a character who is dumb, but realistically dumb rather than movie dumb. He's been in jail for 7 years while the world has moved on, he's been thrust into a new job and social world he knows nothing about, and as you'd expect from a career criminal his emotional intelligence is not exactly what you want to have, and Hoskins nails that all. A pretty good neo-noir.
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Jan 7, 2021 16:47
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TychoCelchuuu posted:
Yeah, I remember that one sticking out well because John Heard went so hard. Some may view it as parodic but I viewed it as an excellent performance of someone who's become extremely disturbed: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O349wPQRFqI
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Jan 7, 2021 23:11
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Cutter's Way is fantastic and it's a lost gem of the New Hollywood. Fun Fact! Halfway through filming, camera operator Don Thorin got a call asking if he would be interested in reclassifying in the union as a director of photography and shooting his first feature with a first time director, some unknown bloke named Michael Mann and his quaint little movie Thief. Don approached Jordan Cronenweth (the DP of Cutter's Way, who would later go on the shoot Blade Runner) and asked him if he should do it but was thinking about turning it down because he didn't want to abandon Jordan and crew, especially since Jordan was suffering from Parkinson's disease that was misdiagnosed as multiple sclerosis. Jordan quickly slapped him upside the head and said "What? Are you loving crazy? Go do it, I'll be fine. This is a once in a lifetime opportunity and probably won't come around ever again." Don then left to shoot that insignificant movie and we never heard from Michael Mann or Don again. (I kid, Thief is loving fantastic and Don became an in-demand DP in Hollywood) VoodooXT fucked around with this message at 07:39 on Jan 8, 2021 |
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Jan 8, 2021 07:37
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TychoCelchuuu posted:I'm glad people are enjoying the reviews! Just wanted to second that these reviews are great, thank you!
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Jan 8, 2021 12:49
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 Angel Heart (1987), dir. Alan Parker  Mickey Rourke is a private eye in mid '50s New York City who is hired by a weirdo De Niro to track down a former crooner slash World War II vet who was committed to a mental hospital a while ago and who then disappeared. The case ends up involving a series of twists and turns, including a visit to Louisiana. A dog and a cat show up in the opening scene but not ever again, unfortunately.  This is a pretty strange one. Basically everything about the movie is excellent. Rourke turns in a good performance, as do all of the supporting actors; the period piece aspect is quite lovingly done ('50s New York looks stupendous); the soundtrack has some serious saxaphone; there are plenty of great lines and some pretty good humor; everything is gorgeously shot; etc. But: the story (based on a novel) is basically the dumbest poo poo ever. I guessed the ending about 10 seconds into the plot and "it's very predictable" is about the nicest thing you can say about it.  If you have brain damage or otherwise some way to keep from guessing where the movie is going, you might find the story more rewarding, or maybe you'll find it more interesting than I did (for my taste it's far too clichéed and completely without depth or really anything interesting to say at all). Otherwise, how you feel about the movie will turn on whether its many other merits outweigh what I think is its biggest flaw. For me the answer is absolutely yes. I enjoyed the movie quite a bit, buoyed in part by my enjoyment of period pieces and also the fact that I think Lisa Bonet (who plays one of the supporting roles) is really gorgeous here. But, your mileage may very. TychoCelchuuu fucked around with this message at 17:13 on Jan 8, 2021 |
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Jan 8, 2021 16:41
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I never really understood why De Niro gets praise for this movie. He's not really going very far out of his comfort zone and it's a pretty by the numbers portrayal of the type we've seen a hundred times before.
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Jan 8, 2021 16:42
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 Year of the Dragon (1985), dir. Michael Cimino  Mickey Rourke is back (two years earlier - I probably should've done these films in the opposite order) as the new police chief in New York's Chinatown, and he has an insane self-destructive desire to cut down on crime, rather than allow crime to go unchecked, which I guess has been the police policy in Chinatown up until now. If you think Rourke is a little young to be police chief, the movie agrees, which is why it gives him the exact same stupid looking grey side-hair that Bogart got in High Sierra and it's even worse here because the movie's in color. Anyways, Rourke ends up involved with Ariane, a reporter slash news personality, and John Lone, a Triad.  This movie sucks. It starts with this worrying notice and then proceeds to be super racist, and that's only the beginning. Ariane absolutely cannot act (she was just a model before this, and afterwards too, because nobody in their right minds would cast her in a movie after this), a problem only compounded by the dumb lines she and everyone else in this movie has to say. Perhaps intimating that 2+ hours of straight up racism wouldn't fly very well, Cimino sometimes has one character or another pause to give a monologue about racism that the Chinese have faced in America, typically capping it up with "I know you know this" or the other person saying "I know that" because the monologues are entirely for the sake of the audience despite making no sense in context. Cimino's addiction to grandeur means we get some impressive crowd scenes for no reason other than to give extras a lot of work, as the movie's scope really works against it rather than for it. Its only hope for strength is the story of this self-destructive cop but he has to be chief of loving police and everything's a goddamn production, which means it's constantly tipping into melodrama.  There's still some stuff I enjoyed, like the various '80s-rear end stuff: the '80s-rear end apartment with its 80's-rear end woman reclining in front of her 3 TVs with a glass of red wine and contemplating life in front of an 80s-rear end skyline, its 80's-rear end punks, etc. The actors who can act, like Rourke and Lone, do their best with what they're given. It looks nice sometimes, and Ariane is definitely pretty (Lone is saddled with a bad haircut, although nowhere near as bad as Rourke's grey). Mostly though it just leaves me with a bad taste in my mouth and my complete inability to find out where I've seen this loving guy before, if in fact I have. I can't even find him on the IMDB page!
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Jan 9, 2021 15:36
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drat I need to see Year of the Dragon, I'd never heard of it even though of course I've seen and loved some of Cimino's other work. I mean, I know you're saying the movie sucks but your screenshots make me really want to see it. Your writeups are giving me a lot of options for exploring neo-noirs that I didn't know about before. And I think for me neo-noir is where it's at, the classic 40s stuff has been more hit and miss.
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Jan 9, 2021 16:47
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I bought Year of the Dragon in the last Warner Archive sale solely on its reputation as Michael Cimino being insanely racist towards Asians. (I'm Asian)
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Jan 9, 2021 23:03
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The reputation is deserved, if you ask me! After Dark, My Sweet (1990), dir. James Foley  Jason Patric (a former boxer) is a drifter with some kind of mental illness - happily, not the sort that makes him do inexplicable stuff to advance the plot. In fact apart from having some serious trouble getting his life together, he seems relatively normal. That's not much help when he wanders into town and gets involved with Rachel Ward, an alcoholic woman living alone on the dinky defunct date farm her deceased husband left her, and Bruce Dern, a scuzzy former cop with something planned.  We're inland a bit in California and the movie does a great job capturing the mood of that place, which basically "you really should be heading west because even if the coast is just as soulless it's at least got something going on." Patric, Ward, and Dern all turn in great performances full of nuance and mystery: nobody is ever really sure where anyone else stands and the actors do a great job portraying the complexity of the situation.  The ending does a plot thing I wish more films (especially more noirs and neo-noirs) did, because it gets me every time, and it got me here. The rest of the plot is also well-handled: for long stretches of the movie nothing much happens except brooding, characters bouncing off each other, tension building, and other great noir staples. The color palette is wonderful and the title is dope. And although I'm a little worried that I'm coming off like something of a lech in these reviews, so help me god Ward is so goddamn pretty in this movie. Patric gets close to hotness too but he spends almost all of the film in clothes he's been wearing since the '80s and they don't do him any favors. I enjoyed this one a lot. Perhaps will put you to sleep if you don't vibe with it, though.
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Jan 10, 2021 16:28
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 Who Killed Teddy Bear (1965), dir. Joseph Cates  Juliet Prowse is a bartender at a New York City dance club who is getting creepy phone calls at home from some guy. Jan Murray is a police detective who has a big interest in perverts, psychos, and creeps of various kinds and so he involves himself in the case. Stuff happens, including a teddy bear dying.  This is a nice twisted psychosexual neo-noir featuring New York City in the height of the '60s (check out the dancing and the fridge) and a bit of slightly flashy editing. It's very well-shot and generally well-acted. It has a bespoke theme song (co-written by Bob Gaudio of the Four Seasons) which is pretty good. And the poster is pretty cool (although Sal Mineo clearly gets first billing because he's famous, not because he's the lead). Lots of stuff to like here!  There's a somehat uncompelling side plot about Mineo's sister, who is mentally disabled from a fall as a child: the actor playing her is doing a little bit much, and the script doesn't do the character any favors either. And although it's a well-made movie, with plenty of tension, I think it could've stood to be even more tense, up to an insane degree. It could've handled it and benefited from it. I'm not a giant Hitchcock fan, but someone like him would've done well to get their hands on this and ramp things up from a 9 to an 11. Aside from those relatively minor quibbles, though, I enjoyed this quite a bit. I think it's set around the same time and place as the NYC episode of the latest streaming craze The Queen's Gambit so you might have fun imagining Benny from that show living in the basement below Prowse.
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Jan 11, 2021 17:06
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Another review of Angel Heart (from 2019) which popped up on my twitter timeline recently.
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Jan 12, 2021 08:25
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 Sun Don't Shine (2012), dir. Amy Seimetz  Kate Lyn Sheil and Kentucker Audley star as a couple on the run, or something. It's not a mystery for long but it is a mystery at the start of the movie and it's hard to say much without spoiling small things. They're near St. Petersburg, Florida. This is a mumblecore neo-noir so that's kind of fun.  Kate Lyn Sheil is playing the sort of character I often can't stand in movies, which is a woman who has a lot of trouble standing up for herself or really having any agency at all beyond liking a man, and it's compounded by her character also having one of those movie mental issues (or maybe a real life mental issue) which causes her to be basically as dumb as a loving doornail, which I also hate. So it's a testament to this movie that I actually like it a fair amount, since it's got two big humps to overcome.  The performances are good (if you're digging the whole mumblecore aesthetic) and the very bare-bones classic noir plot plays out in a spare, never overly-poignant manner. Florida is the worst state but it doesn't play much of a role here except that everyone is very hot and sweaty and Audley spends about a quarter of the movie shirtless and nobody seems to care. It looks like it was made for about $26 and it's on Amazon Prime if you're in the US. Can't recommend it unless you go for mumblecore, but if you do, this is a pretty fine neo-noir.
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Jan 12, 2021 16:52
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If you're doing neo-noirs, I remember liking Romeo is Bleeding a lot, but it's been years since I saw it.
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Jan 12, 2021 19:54
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AFewBricksShy posted:If you're doing neo-noirs, I remember liking Romeo is Bleeding a lot, but it's been years since I saw it.
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Jan 13, 2021 03:16
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 その男、凶暴につき/Violent Cop (1989), dir. Takeshi Kitano  Takeshi Kitano's first time as director stars him as the titular violent cop, a cop who is violent. His violent, cop-like ways lead to conflict with criminals, as one might expect, with violent results, as one might also expect.  Even though this is the first film he directed, his trademark style is mostly already there, which means we get a very effective, dark, meditative movie with a lead who is hard to sympathize with and even harder to turn away from. The plot is a little rote, but who really cares? Less forgivable is Maiko Kawakami's character, Kitano's sister, who has one of those loving movie mental illnesses that makes her kind of childlike or something. If you can't tell from my reviews already this sort of thing always bums me out.  The movie moves at a good clip throughout, with some wonderful standout scenes, but for me the ending is the real cherry on top. The whole film builds to a rather predictable conclusion but it still manages to throw in some surprises and keept he energy up throughout the final act, and the visuals in a few choice scenes near the end are great too. A nondescript warehouse never looked so compelling. A very good neo-noir! TychoCelchuuu fucked around with this message at 14:39 on Jan 14, 2021 |
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Jan 13, 2021 17:39
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 Bright Angel (1990), dir. Michael Fields  Dermot Mulroney stars as an aimless 18 year old Montana kid who lives to box, or at least he likes to box - it's not clear he's got much to live for, really. His parents are having marital trouble, his friend Benjamin Bratt is self-destructing from the sheer aimlessness of existence in Montana as a poor young Native American, and things get complicated when Lili Taylor shows up, almost as aimless as everyone else but with just enough of a direction to get things rolling.  Basically this is a masterpiece, I think. It's gorgeous, it's chock full of a ton of compellingly sketched bit characters (played by a ton of great character actors, like Bill Pullman, Sam Shepard, Delroy Lindo, Mary Kay Place, and Burt Young), and it's sparse, simple, and brutally honest. It's a hell of a hidden gem, too - only 507 ratings on IMDB and 135 viewers on Letterboxd, for instance. This is Fields's only feature film (although he directed some episodes of the excellent neo-noir TV show Veronica Mars) and the first of only two movies based on Richard Ford stories. (The second movie, Wildlife, is Paul Dano's directorial debut, and it's really great. It's not a neo-noir though.) I wish there were more of both!  I feel a little bad hyping it up so much since chances are I like it much more than most people. (That does seem to be the pattern with the ratings I see for it on IMDB and Letterboxd.) But even if you don't think it's stupendous like I do, it's hard to imagine someone being disappointed with it, as long as they know what they're getting going into it, which is a meandering, sparse neo-noir in the most boring parts of the Midwest. If that sounds like anything that could be compelling, this movie comes with my highest recommendation.
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Jan 14, 2021 14:41
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 Light Sleeper (1992), dir. Paul Schrader  Willem Defoe, looking like Willem Defoe, is a courier for a drug dealer (Susan Sarandon) in New York. It's a low level job for someone his age and it's going nowhere even faster because Sarandon is planning on closing up business soon so that she can start a cosmetics company instead. Defoe used to be addicted to everything but he's been clean for a couple years. Things start to get more complicated when, by chance, Defoe runs into Marianne Jost, whom he used to know.  Schrader can make pretty good neo-noirs and this is one of them. It's a nice New York story (set during a sanitation worker strike, so there are huge piles of trash everywhere), it has some moody introspection care of Defoe's narration via journals that he writes, and the plot bumps along pretty well. The various supporting characters are very compelling, from an ambiguously European man played by Victor Garber to a bit part featuring Sam Rockwell in one of his earliest roles.  I don't know what it's missing to go from pretty great to amazing - maybe Defoe's character just isn't interesting enough, or maybe the plot gets a little too close to melodrama (although the directing keeps things from tipping over the edge), or maybe it's something else I can't get my finger on. In any case, it's still pretty great in my eyes.
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Jan 15, 2021 14:52
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 One False Move (1992), dir. Carl Franklin  This is Billy Bob Thornton's acting debut, and he also co-wrote this film, starring him, Cynda Williams, and Michael Beach as criminals on the lam and Bill Paxton, Jim Metzler, and Earl Billings as the police out to catch them. The crime was in LA, which is where Metzler and Billings are from, but the criminals are heading to bumfuck nowhere Arkansas, where Paxton is the sheriff.  This is very good. There are flashes of brutality which lend an air of grimness to the proceedings and everyone is turning in great performances, especially Paxton as a small time sheriff with probably too much excitement over getting to work with big city cops. There's plenty of tension and a really good ending.  This is the first of two neo-noirs featuring Thornton and Paxton (the other is coming up next) and I think it's the lesser of the two, although not by very much. If I had to say what keeps it from being stupendous I guess it's that Paxton is the most interesting character and everyone else is a little one-note. They all do a great job with their roles (especially Williams) but I don't know if there's enough meat on those bones for my taste. Thornton, for instance, can do a lot more when he's given a lot more. I guess it was nice of him not to give the best role to himself?
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Jan 16, 2021 15:34
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https://www.criterionchannel.com/japanese-noir Criterion Channel has their Japanese Noir spotlight. Haven't watched Rusty Knife, Stakeout and Black River. The last one is a Kobayashi from Human Condition and Kwaidan fame, and it has my Oshima boy Fumio Watanabe and Kobayashi's regular Nakadai so it should be pretty good! Outside of the Kurasawa/Suzuki, which is probably the best known stuff some other essentials here are Shinoda's cool and gorgeous yakuza tale Pale Flower and Imamura's nasty-funny Pigs and Battleships. Not on this collection, but on the channel, is Imamura's earlier Endless Desire a fun noir about a group of sketchy idiots trying not to kill each other while digging a tunnel to a buried ww2 treasure underneath a town. The two non-Suzuki Jo Shishido's are good, just don't expect Suzuki good. Was cold on Zero Focus but if you like the wife detective genre give it a go. Not a big fan of Kurahara either but I do like Intimidation, mostly because it's a hour long, so it doesn't have time to waste, just a fun thriller with two B actors that you always see pop up in Japanese cinema from the 50-70's and worked with all the Greats, but never know their names, Ko Nishimura and Nobuo Kaneko.
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Jan 16, 2021 15:38
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Electronico6 posted:https://www.criterionchannel.com/japanese-noir  A Simple Plan (1998), dir. Sam Raimi  Billy Bob Thornton and Bill Paxton return as two of three men who find some money in the woods. Obviously, complications ensue. Bridget Fonda plays Paxton's wife and Brent Briscoe plays the third man. All of this takes place in winter in rural Minnesota.  As snowy neo-noirs go this is right up there with Fargo, if you ask me. Thornton and Paxton both do a tremendous job playing their characters (who are brothers) and the script alternates between great character moments and occurrences which escalate the tension, leading up to a really tense and fraught climax.  The movie touches on classic noir themes like greed, the American dream, ambition, deception, and so on. Raimi's direction is deft, and a dog is featured sometimes although I forgot to take any pictures. Highly recommended.
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Jan 17, 2021 13:02
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 The Salton Sea (2002), dir. D.J. Caruso  Val Kilmer is back, playing a meth head in LA who sometimes rats out drug dealers to the cops. Also apparently he is a trumpet player, who goes by another name? That at least is what he suggests in the opening scene, and the rest of the movie is dedicated to us figuring out who, exactly, he is, among other things.  This is a pretty big disappointment. A lot of the pieces of a good movie are here, not just in theory but actually in practice. Kilmer turns in about as good a performance as you can expect given the circumstances, as does Vincent D'Onofrio as a drug dealer and Peter Sarsgaard as Kilmer's meth head friend. There are some fun touches of humor and insanity and some effective moments of pathos, and the central identity question (although the movie isn't very interested in it) certainly animates Kilmer. The movie generally looks nice enough, too, although as you can see it suffers a wee bit from the orange and teal reality we find ourselves in circa 2002.  Unfortunately none of these nice things are enough to salvage the movie in the face of two central drawbacks. First, the tonal inconsistency here is so loving insane that it's as if it was directed by two people who wanted to sabotage the other. It's like if you took From Dusk 'til Dawn but swapped back and forth between scenes, and in a few memorable and execrable moments, within a scene. The emotional throughline of the story is completely undercut and frankly outright disrespected by the swings to humor and insanity, and the quirkiness comes across as in poor taste when it's smooshed up next to all the misery and feeling. So, that dooms the movie. Even worse, the plot gets pretty ridiculous in the last act, which doesn't help things at all. This isn't virulently racist or anything so I don't actively hate it, but it's about as mediocre as a movie can get without being completely irredeemable.
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Jan 18, 2021 15:47
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TychoCelchuuu posted:
Yeah, Billy Bob Thornton and Michael Beach had role limitations in this one. But I liked them because they had an authentic criminal dynamic. Lots of dangerous duos feature one smart guy and one underling/minion. e.g. Leonard Lake and Charles Ng https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonard_Lake
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Jan 19, 2021 00:36
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 Devil in a Blue Dress (1995), dir. Carl Franklin  Franklin, who directed One False Move, returns for this 1940s period piece neo-noir starring Denzel Washington as an out of work WWII veteran who gets drawn into the search for a missing white woman (Jennifer Beals). Various complications ensue.  This is a pretty good, quite straightforward period piece, basically pitched right down the line with few surprises. It has all the hallmarks of classic noirs and doesn't want to or bother trying to do anything too different. Perhaps the only thing that couldn't have been straight out of the '40s is the frank focus on race, although in principle nothing was stopping anyone from doing the same back then!  There are a few less than effective features, like the voicover, which is pretty perfunctory, and the general voice, which in a lot of places is sort of flat, whereas you really want noir dialogue to be sparkling and crackling with energy. The plot is also very uninteresting. But there are some standout good features too, like Don Cheadle's performance as Washington's somewhat unstable friend, Tom Sizemore's effective turn as a private eye, and some nice use of period music. Also, briefly, a cat. Overall, pretty good.
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Jan 19, 2021 15:46
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I thought Don Cheadle stole the show every scene he was in.
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Jan 19, 2021 15:48
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Cat Army
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Why there weren't like 4 Easy Rawlins movies following it is beyond me totally.
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Jan 19, 2021 16:05
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| # ? Apr 24, 2024 18:03 |
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HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:Why there weren't like 4 Easy Rawlins movies following it is beyond me totally. Yeah, it should have been a whole thing.
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Jan 19, 2021 21:40
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