The Big Sleep is a film I have found a very intense love for. The rotating cast of shadowy crooks and deceptive dames coupled with the roller-coaster plotting makes this classic movie endlessly entertaining. Bogart and Bacall are electrifying together and the supporting cast is equally captivating. Considering it’s over 60 years old, The Big Sleep
still works in a big bad way and feels fantastically modern. It’s as if the film is simply too fast and too entertaining to age. It was crafted by the hands of some of Hollywood’s finest artists at the time and oozes quality as a result. Most of all though, this movie is just pulpy, fearless, fun and really, really cool. -
Pictures and Noise [more inside]
posted by Trurl
on Apr 7, 2012 -
56 comments
After 25 years I revisited To Live and Die In L.A. (1985), William Friedkin's cynical, fatalistic, hardboiled and high-energy crime noir about corruption and survival in the city of no angels. The script is literate, the characters are believable, the performances are brutally honest, the unpredictable twists keep coming, the action never stops, and the car chase is shot for real without any fake process. (spoilers)
posted by Trurl
on Nov 4, 2011 -
60 comments
[Arthur Penn's
Night Moves]
does belong to a traditional, indeed obsolescent genre, but the distance it keeps from it (not an ironic or critical distance, just a distance) is such that genre-related expectations become irrelevant. Most of the time, the story line seems to meander aimlessly, taking in extraneous material, doubling back, going round in circles (the aimless is deceptive, a smoke screen obfuscating the complex, rigorous organization of an exceptionally well-structured script). The "mystery" aspect of the plot is dealt with in the most peculiar, topsy-turvy manner, withholding not the solution of the problem but the problem itself until the very end, when, in a dazzling visual tour de force, both are conjured up almost simultaneously. - Jean Pierre Coursodon
[more inside]
posted by Trurl
on Oct 1, 2011 -
19 comments
"To make off with hubby's fortune, yea, I think I heard of that happenin' once or twice around L.A. And… you want me to do what exactly?" He found the paper bag he'd brought his supper home in and got busy pretending to scribble notes on it, because straight-chick uniform, makeup supposed to look like no makeup or whatever, here came that old well-known hard-on Shasta was always good for sooner or later. Does it ever end, he wondered. Of course it does. It did. Thomas Pynchon's next novel, the 416-page
Inherent Vice, is
described by Penguin Press as "part noir, part psychedelic romp, all Thomas Pynchon — private eye Doc Sportello comes, occasionally, out of a marijuana haze to watch the end of an era as free love slips away and paranoia creeps in with the L.A. fog." While we wait for its August 4 publication, we can read
an essay on the dystopian musical he co-wrote at Cornell or watch
a clip of that movie they made of Gravity's Rainbow.
[more inside]
posted by Joe Beese
on Feb 6, 2009 -
76 comments
American audiences remember
Akira Kurosawa as the genius of the samurai epic, a past master who used the form both to revise and revive Western classics - Shakespeare with
Ran and
Throne of Blood, Dostoevsky with
Red Beard and
The Idiot, Gorky with
The Lower Depths - and to give splendid and ultimately immortal life to new archetypes, as in
The Seven Samurai, Rashomon, Yojimbo. But Kurosawa also made films of his own time. His
masterpiece, in fact, was the quiet story of a gray Japanese bureaucrat dying in post-war Tokyo, and of his attempt to do something of lasting good before he leaves. The film is
Ikiru ("To Live"; 1952).
[more inside]
posted by Iridic
on Jan 29, 2008 -
46 comments
"But, it's a post on film noir!" I told her. She jerked away from me like a startled fawn might, if I had a startled fawn and it jerked away from me. I knew that caving into my desires meant I might lose her. But I didn't care. I went out to the kitchen to make
coffee -- yards of coffee. Rich, strong, bitter, boiling hot, ruthless, depraved. I knew she'd be back.
[more inside]
posted by miss lynnster
on Jan 11, 2008 -
48 comments
For lovers of the hard-boiled crime story, life began with the black bird. It's a tale of greed and a wisecracking gumshoe. The femme fatale is a liar. The object of the hero's search is a statuette of a falcon.
Published exactly 75 years ago on Valentine's Day,
Dashiell Hammett's private-eye novel "
The Maltese Falcon"' immediately won critical acclaim. And
when it was made into a 1941 movie starring
Humphrey Bogart, Mary Astor, Sydney Greenstreet and Peter Lorre (and directed by a
rookie), Hammett's story found a
worldwide audience and his hero,
Sam Spade, became a household name.
Now, three-quarters of a century later,
that's still the case. More inside.
posted by matteo
on Feb 14, 2005 -
33 comments
