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
Thomas Pynchon’s latest novel
Inherent Vice, is causing
quite a stir, and not just because all his novels cause a stir. It seems the author of epic novels of giant adenoids and invisible clockwork ducks has written a-
gasp-detective novel, which weighs in at an astoundingly reasonable 384 pages. Some have noted confusion among Pynchon aficionados at the author’s choice to work in such a genre. One writer has used the
opportunity to examine why supposed “literary” writers have turned to the crime genre with varying degrees of success, and at least one critic
seems genuinely put out by Pynchon’s creative choice.
posted by dortmunder
on Aug 3, 2009 -
97 comments
Editor Marty Halpern looks back at the career of George Alec Effinger (
part 1,
part 2,
part 3), a prolific author best known for his work set in the
Budayeen, a walled city in a future Islamic state, teeming with gangsters, hustlers and transsexual prostitutes, many of them habitual users of plug in personality modules. The noirish tone and exotic technology of the
Marîd Audran books (When Gravity Fails, A Fire In The Sun, The Exile Kiss) made Effinger one of the leading lights in the cyberpunk movie, and spawned a
videogame - a rare attempt at a graphical adventure from Infocom - and
an RPG setting. Sadly Effinger
faded from prominence after that, and he suffered from a number of health and financial setbacks before
passing away in 2002. His work has had somewhat of a resurgence in popularity of late, with the Marîd Audran books coming back into print in 2007, a long with a
collection containing The Wolves of Memory, Effinger's personal favourite amongst his novels.
posted by Artw
on Jun 9, 2009 -
32 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
"Officer Sean Devlin, Narcotics Strike Force, was working the morning shift. Undercover surveillance. The neighborhood? Tough as a threedollar steak. Devlin knew. Five years on the beat, nine months with the Strike Force. He’d made fifteen, twenty drug busts in the neighborhood." Dashiell Hammett? Raymond Chandler? Nope.
Chief Justice John Roberts (pdf).
posted by Knappster
on Nov 4, 2008 -
16 comments
Real L.A. Noir. (Video/audio auto-plays).
Los Angeles Times reporter Paul Lieberman has been chronicling the era of the LAPD Gangster Squad, a secret division of the department that tried to combat the mobs of Jack Dragna and Mickey Cohen in the 1940s and '50s. (Keep the cast of characters straight with
this handy chart.)
posted by Bookhouse
on Nov 1, 2008 -
9 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
Some of you may have seen the feature film
Brick; I thought it one of the best of the year and among the better debuts I've seen in a long time. Writer-Director Rian Johnson
offers up the shooting script and original novella for free on his site. Fun for fans of noir, high school flicks, or MeFites gaggle of screenwriters.
posted by dobbs
on Oct 2, 2006 -
29 comments
Madison Man is
no longer John Doe. If you read the article noting every occurrence of the word "Madison" and how each differs from the others you'll see why I find this nifty. (I think they'll eventually decide it was suicide.)
posted by davy
on Oct 19, 2005 -
17 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
bowling noir! exactly what it sounds like. i found this while googling for a succinct definition of film noir, and this was too funny to resist. dig the altered picture of rita hayworth and the music clip, man.
posted by pxe2000
on Apr 7, 2002 -
5 comments
