Film Noir Love Continues
To demonstrate my love of film noir, I recently created and uploaded to YouTube a "movie" of stills, set to Bernard Herrmann's CAPE FEAR soundtrack. Hope you like.
August 13, 2008
July 30, 2008
Stanley Kubrick's Film Noir: THE KILLING
As part of my recent interest in (obsession with) film noir, I recently stumbled upon one of the best in the genre: THE KILLING. It's one of Stanley Kubrick's first films; he wrote the screenplay and directed it.
Long before Tarantino's Pulp Fiction, in THE KILLING (1951) Kubrick chops up a linear storyline, peppering the film with enticing snippets from the climatic scene, then going back in time to the planning of the caper. The way he maintains narrative drive by never taking you where you want to go—to the getaway—will leave you breathless.
I loved this film so much that I ripped the trailer off the DVD and uploaded it to YouTube. For your convenience, the trailer is offered below. Enjoy.
Trust me. If you like noir, or even if you just like good heist movies, you have to rent THE KILLING.
July 24, 2008
The Beauty of Film Noir
Over the past couple of weeks, I've been on a noir spree. It began when I saw Out of the Past with Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer. Confusing as f-ck, but it has some great lines in it. To wit,
Femme Fatale: I don't want to die!Detective: Neither do I baby, but if I have to die, I'll die last.
After the Mitchum flick, I reread James Cain's Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice, as well as re-watched the films. I bought two of my favorite films—Chinatown and Sweet Smell of Success—and a film noir collection with 10 movies in it. Of those, I hadn't seen four because they were so obscure: The Hitchiker, The Strange Love of Martha Ivers, Detour and one in which normally wholesome Mickey Rooney is transformed into a crazed lunatic—Quicksand.
Why do I love these films so? Let me count the ways.
I love the sharp and sassy dialogue. I love the deep shadows and high contrasts in the lighting. I love the economy of storytelling (Detour is only 67 minutes long!). I love that the stories teeter on the edge of melodrama. I love the sexy dames, the bitter broads. I love the tough guys and the rich crooks. I love the clothes—especially the hats. I love the inexpensive sets. I love the cars, the crimes, the comebacks.
But I think most of all, I love that if you freeze a good noir film, the frame is a piece of art in itself. As I understand it, this is because after the war (WWII), many German expressionist artists made their way to Hollywood and influenced the look of these films as directors and cinematographers.
On my office wall, I actually have framed stills from films that I love, including Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, Used Cars, Goldfinger, Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Natural, and The Empire Strikes Back. I know it's a little geeky, but it's my only geek vice, I swear.
Well, inspired by all of this noir stuff, I decided to do some screen captures from films I've enjoyed so I could show you what I mean by each frame being a piece of art. So, without futher ado, here are some stills from movies I've enjoyed. (In some cases, I've used someone else's still because I don't have it or it's better than my own.)
Robert Mitchum and Jane Greer in Out of the Past.
Peggy Cummins and John Dall in Gun Crazy.
Peggy Cummins's marvelous backside in Gun Crazy.
Tony Curtis and Burt Lancaster in Sweet Smell of Success.
Lana Turner and her legs in the original The Postman Always Rings Twice.
Barbara Stanwyck and Fred MacMurray in Double Indemnity.
The two of them almost caught by Edward G. Robinson.
Stanwyck and MacMurray in a famous scene in a grocery store.
A still from an unknown noir film.
A still from Fallen Angel. I love the composition of this shot.
The end scene in The Big Combo.
And if you're interested, here's a mini-"movie" of the above photos, set to theme from Cape Fear. It may take a moment to load, so be patient.
July 21, 2008
Why My Glutes Hurt, or Why You Shouldn't See 'The Dark Knight' Twice in Two Days
In case you didn't guess it from the title of this entry, I saw the new Batman movie twice over the weekend, and my ass, neck and lower back hurt because of it.
It wasn't the seats that caused my pain, nor was it where I was seated, nor was it just me. Alexas had similar complaints after seeing the film with me Friday afternoon.
We were leaving what I thought was a thoroughly enjoyable film, yet her face was pinched up.
"What's wrong?" I asked.
"My back hurts," she said. "I was tense through that entire thing."
"My ass hurts," I said.
"Why is that?"
"I think I know why..."
I went on to describe my theory, and mind you, it's just a theory.
It's no secret that for years the U.S. military has been developing weapons based on low-frequency vibrations. Low-frequency sounds—particularly frequencies below the range of human hearing—have been shown to instill fear and discomfort in people. My theory is that the sound people with THE DARK KNIGHT are hip to this information and applied it liberally throughout the movie.
To get an idea of the effect THE DARK KNIGHT has on your body, do this: While sitting at your computer (as I presume you are now), tighten up your buttocks and tense your shoulders like you're a turtle pulling its head into its shell. Now, hold that position for two and a half hours.
In my own case, seeing the film twice in two days has made my ass so hard, I can bounce quarters on it.
The film is great fun, by the way, and if you need to work your glutes, I highly recommend it.
May 27, 2008
Dear George & Steven...What Were You Thinking?
My first experience with a "blockbuster" movie was Raiders of the Lost Ark, the original Indiana Jones movie. I was exactly 11 years old, and it was my first time waiting on a really long line by myself to see a film. I saw the film at the now defunct Dutchess Mall, and I remember saying to myself as the line inched forward, "This better be good."
It was.
Since then, I've watched it, beginning to end, at least 150 times. This past weekend, I went to see the new Indiana Jones movie, Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, hoping it would be good.
It wasn't.
Like Temple of Doom, another Indy movie that shouldn't have been made.
Initially, in the post-FX haze that accompanies such movies, I found myself defending the film, saying that while it wasn't this or that, it was entertaining. It was entertaining. But unfortunately, Lucas and Spielberg set the bar so high with films 1 & 3 that merely entertaining isn't good enough. Sh-t, Shoot 'Em Up was entertaining; but it still sucked.
Once the adrenaline rush wore off, however, I woke up yesterday morning wishing they hadn't made the film and knowing exactly why I hadn't liked it. Without spoiling the plot for you, I'd like to tell you exactly why Crystal Skull was bad and how it could have been better:
- First, the stakes were never high enough. In fact, it wasn't clear at all why the crystal skull was so important. What was needed was another short scene with Cate Blanchett's character in the U.S.S.R., conferring with Stalin on her experiments. Maybe show her engaging in a mind-reading/mind-control experiment and then explaining to Stalin what she could do with the crystal skull, and how they had to capture Indiana Jones (one of the world's experts) to find it. The bottom line is, I needed to be worried that the Soviets might actually capture the thing, and I never was. (By contrast, in Raiders it's literally a tug-of-war to the very end as to who will get the Ark.)
- The entire father-son and Indy-Marion subplot was hokey and contrived. More importantly, these things lowered Indiana Jones's lone wolf status, making him like every other American guy. Great. Now my last image of Jones is going to be him married to Marion and playing Daddy, not battling Nazis.
- There is a total lack of inevitability in the scenes in Crystal Skull. When you watch Raiders closely, one thing you see is the Aristotelean concept of inevitability in plot. Character Action A inevitably, inexorably leads to or causes Event B. In this new film, what you have instead are a pastiche of scenes that seem to have been created around set devices, traps, gimmicks and such—not because the previous scenes made them inevitable. Another film I felt this way about was the second Pirates of the Caribbean movie.
- The digital effects. I'm sorry, folks, but in what is supposed to be a live-action film, I can tell the difference. Digital effects are great with animated films like Bee Movie and the like. But in films that center around an action-based character getting himself in and out of jams, the digital stuff only draws attention to itself, jarring people like me out of the film. When you watch Raiders closely, you'll see there are only 2 shots in the entire film that look slightly fake—the Jeep-off-the-cliff shot and the melting-faces shot. But because everything else up to that point has been real, the eye forgives them.
A scene in Raiders where you see the virtues of live-action over digital effects is in the wide shot of the great dig at Tannis. Those guys wielding pickaxes in the background are flesh-and-blood people, not digitally rendered quasi-humans, cut and pasted 10,000 times into the frame and mindlessly performing the same actions. Each of those extras in Raiders brought a tiny bit of individualism to his little character; I can imagine that each of them invented a tiny backstory for their characters, explaining why they swung their pickaxes a certain way or shoveled out dirt. The result is a beautiful shot that looks real.
The main thing I don't understand is why Lucas and Spielberg felt compelled to make Crystal Skull at all. There's nothing particularly unique about the plot, and the legion of writers they went through to come up with a decent script shows in the final product, which is little more than two hours of interesting, humorous stunts. All I can say is, thank God they made Raiders. That film is a masterpiece and will, in my opinion, go down as one of the best movies ever made.