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 Experiment in Terror (1962), dir. Blake Edwards  Ross Martin breaks into Lee Remick's house in San Francisco and threatens to kill her and her sister, Stefanie Powers, if she doesn't rob a bank for him. He also says if she calls the police he'll kill her. She more or less immediately calls the FBI and Glenn Ford is on the case. Anita Loo plays a woman involved with Martin. Also check out Clifton James in a small part as a police captain.  I liked it a decent amount. The opening is pretty terrifying, and after that it's kind of refreshing that Remick pretty much keeps her cool about as well as you can expect someone in a very difficult situation to do so. Ford's role is not super interesting but he's always competent so it's not that bad. Martin is definitely the standout. He brings a lot of life to the big old creep.  Probably the film didn't need to be two hours, but whatever. This is the second movie this year to shout out Quentin Tarantino. The Henry Mancini score is mostly fine but sometimes it goes a little off the rails and sounds like the music from a James Bond movie or something. 83/100
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Dec 4, 2022 12:47
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 乾いた花 / Kawaita hana (Pale Flower) (1962), dir. Masahiro Shinoda  Ryō Ikebe is a gang member who just got out of prison for having killed someone three years ago. While gambling he meets Mariko Kaga, a fellow gambling enthusiast. Some other miscellaneous people get involved, including Seiji Miyaguchi, one of the Yakuza bosses, who was also in Kuroi kawa from a few days ago.  Really, really good. It's rather low key: we cut from one scene to another and it turns out some key plot thing has happened offscreen. Half of the crucial stuff occurs like that. And there's not even much plot in the first place! The movie is mostly a meditation on nihilism and whether anything can make life worth living.  It also often looks great, and the score is an interesting energetic jazzy sort of thing. I wouldn't say the movie is overly intellectual or even particularly languid but compared to your typical noir or neo-noir its low key nature makes it stand out. Probably a good movie for a philosophy class on the meaning of life if you can get the kids to watch something in black and white. I hear the kids these days can barely stand something longer than a Tik Tok, let alone something without color. My brother, born in the '90s, won't watch any black and white movies! 88/100
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Dec 5, 2022 15:27
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 Night of the Iguana (1964), dir. John Huston  Richard Burton, an Episcopal priest, has a breakdown while preaching a sermon. Two years later he's a drunk tour guide in Mexico, shepharding a bus of Baptipst schoolteachers around. Grayson Hall, the lead schoolteacher of the trip, is responsible for Sue Lyon, a teenager sent along to get her away from her former boyfriend, and it gets messy because Lyon has fallen for Burton and he's not doing a great job of discouraging her. They end up at a hotel run by Ava Gardner, a friend of Burton, where Deborah Kerr is also staying with her extremely old grandfather Cyril Delevanti.  I didn't like this as much as I expected to. It has a lot of characteristics of plays turned into movies that I'm not thrilled with: characters describing things that happen onscreen, speeches that are two paragraphs two long because they're using words to say what a facial expression could say, a lot of broad behavior on the part of people while saying their lines or while reacting to someone else's lines, etc. Things also wrap up too prettily for my tastes.  Still, you can't really knock a Tennesse Williams script, and Burton is pretty good as a guy at the end of his rope. It doesn't take enough advantage of being filmed in Puerto Vallarta but it does look decent enough, and certainly there are iguanas, so that's nice. 76/100
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Dec 6, 2022 12:28
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A fun (?) little game: unless anything changes (and everything is subject to change) here are the years for the movies I have lined up for the rest of the month. See if you can guess any! These are in order from tomorrow's movies up through the end of the month and I guess there are a couple hints from the ordering - there are two departures from the otherwise chronological ordering. This is probably tough because "neo-noir" is kind of a nebulous category but whatever. 1964 1966 1969 1972 2016 1978 1979 1981 1984 1984 1987 1992 1997 1998 1999 2000 1944 2002 2003 2019 2022 2022 2022 2022 2022
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Dec 6, 2022 14:49
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TychoCelchuuu posted:A fun (?) little game: unless anything changes (and everything is subject to change) here are the years for the movies I have lined up for the rest of the month. See if you can guess any! These are in order from tomorrow's movies up through the end of the month and I guess there are a couple hints from the ordering - there are two departures from the otherwise chronological ordering. This is probably tough because "neo-noir" is kind of a nebulous category but whatever. A few guesses. Some of these years there are so many options, and I know you’ve seen a lot of stuff already…
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Dec 6, 2022 16:02
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Catching up: A Blueprint for Murder - 61 Niagara - 77 The Killer is Loose - 67 Black River - 88 Rusty Knife - 80 Pigs and Battleships - 84 Experiment in Terror - haven't seen Pale Flower - 77 Night of the Iguana - 76
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Dec 6, 2022 16:22
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DeimosRising posted:A few guesses. New list: 1964 1966 1969 1972 2016 1978 1979 1981 1984 1984 1987 - 1992 1997 1998 1999 2000 1944 2002 2003 2019 2022 - Emily the Criminal 2022 - 2022 2022 2022 FitFortDanga posted:Catching up: Another one you haven't seen! I'm on a roll. Although I guess once you get past the noirs and move into the neo-noirs there's less of a canon so it's more likely I'll have seen something you haven't. Interesting that you didn't love Night of the Iguana either.
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Dec 6, 2022 16:46
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 The Killers (1964), dir. Don Siegel  John Cassavetes is immediately killed in a very well-done, tense opening. The rest of the movie features Lee Marvin and Clu Galager, the eponymous killers, trying to figure out why they were hired to kill him. If this sounds familiar it's because, like the 1946 movie I covered two years ago, it's an adaptation of a Hemingway short story. Angie Dickinson and Ronald Reagan are eventually involved.  Pretty good. Cassavetes is fine as a broken sort of dude and Marvin is trying on the persona he'll eventually inhabit in the amazing Point Blank three years later. Reagan, in his last film role and only appearance as a giant shithead in his entire film career, is also fine. Galager is more of a standout, as he bounces off the walls and revels in violence while looking, acting, and sounding like Jimmy Stewart after sixteen whiskeys and twenty four cigarettes.  For a film crammed with flashbacks it has a decent energy and it's sometimes oozing with style. The music is by John Williams (credited as Johnny, in one of his first credits) except for a theme by Mancini which is as out of place as the occasional Manicini James Bondish riff in Experiment in Terror. There are some nice '60s sets like this hotel room (check out that carpet!) which helps offset the fact that even when they're ostensibly in Florida, it's obviously filmed in California. 82/100
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Dec 7, 2022 12:58
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 Harper (1966), dir. Don Siegel  Paul Newman, private detective, is hired by Lauren Bacall (whom we know quite well by now) to find her missing husband. Janet Leigh (from Act of Violence earlier this year) is back as Newman's wife. Also involved are Pamela Tiffin, daughter of the missing guy; Arthur Hill, the missing guy's lawyer; Julie Harris, who I guess plays piano or something; and Shelley Winters, whom you might've seen in one of many noirs like Cry of the City, A Double Life, Odds Agains Tomorrow (one of my favorites), He Ran All the Way, Larceny, The Raging Tide, etc.  I like this one a lot. Newman is impossibly magnetic as always, and although he's playing a guy who goofs around a bit, similar to the later Eliot Gould Marlowe in The Long Goodbye, he's never a complete joke, and the movie itself gets rather crazily dark by the end. The DoP is the legendary Conrad Hall and it often looks nice, and although it goes on for a while with the seemingly interminable twists and bonks on the head that a detective story often has, I never got bored. I could stare at Newman for hours!  There is a bird and some great '60s interiors, like this apartment. This has a sequel nine years later, The Drowning Pool, and you can watch 1998's Twilight, which also features Newman as a PI, and pretend it's the third in a trilogy. Newman is sometimes quite Bogart-esque in this, which is appropriate given Bacall's presence, and Robert Wagner sort of looks like John Hamm which I guess is neat. 86/100
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Dec 8, 2022 14:18
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Very cool! I've been meaning to see Harper, I'll bump that up the list. Hombre is another Newman from around then I've gotta see too, based on an Elmore Leonard book. I saw The Color of Money for the first time earlier this year, so drat cool. I love The Hustler, The Sting etc, anyhoo, drat that guy is cool.
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Dec 8, 2022 14:58
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 Marlowe (1969), dir. Paul Bogart  James Garner is the titular Philip Marlowe, PI. Sharon Farrell hires him to find her brother, Roger Newman. The case ends up involving Gayle Hunnicutt, a sitcom star, her friend Rita Moreno, an exotic dancer, H.M. Wynant, a gangster, and a bunch of others, including Bruce Lee as a henchman and William Daniels (whom I know mostly as Mr. Feeny from Boy Meets World) as a TV executive.  Not my favorite, although it's okay I guess. Marlowe in this is too upstanding a dude, too uncorruptable and willing to put himself in danger for the sake of others, and too lacking in the sort of character he got when Bogart played him. The plot is bog-standard Raymond Chandler stuff: Marlowe goes to some place, talks to some people, maybe gets beat up, sometimes a dead body shows up, etc. Aside from Marlowe we don't really spend enough time with any of the other characters for them to really pop.  The highlights are probably Bruce Lee's brief appearances, in which he shows up and kicks the poo poo out of Marlowe's office, and Rita Moreno's striptease near the end, which is about as good as a striptease gets, I guess. The movie has its own theme song which is a fun little '60s ditty. This and yesterday's movie Harper both feature a scene where the protagonist enrages an evil henchman, causing them to make a mistake, by insinuating that the henchman is gay. 76/100
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Dec 9, 2022 12:54
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 Hickey & Boggs (1972), dir. Robert Culp  Robert Culp (who also directs) and Bill Cosby are private eyes in LA who are hired to find a missing woman and who end up involved in a criminal organization's efforts to recover money stolen from them. Rosalind Cash is Cosby's estranged wife, Robert Mandan is the head criminal, a bunch of people are various other things, and James Woods shows up in one of his earliest movie performances as a very harried police officer.  I like this one a lot. We're definitely in the 70s: things are quite gritty and grim, there's often no soundtrack, there are basically no good guys, etc. It's all rather violent and nihilistic, although once or twice a car blows up from being shot at which is kind of silly.  Unlike the past two movies, the only person who is accused of being gay in this one is Culp, but that's definitelyf alse because he's obsessed with a stripper who doesn't even like him. The hitmen (or at least two of the three) are definitely gay but, like, not in an evil way. It has one of the weirdest split diopter shots I've ever seen. Also at one point there is a mouse. I can't pick three shots so we get four. 87/100 
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Dec 10, 2022 12:12
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And now for a movie special in two ways. First, it's a rewatch. Second, it's out of order, chronologically. But it's set in 1977 so I figure it goes here. The Nice Guys (2016), dir. Shane Black  Russell Crowe is an LA private eye who can bascially only get work scaring off child predators. He gets drawn into a case involving a missing woman (Margart Qualley, sort of) which is being worked on by Ryan Gosling, another private eye, who has a precocious daughter Angourie Rice. Various other people end up involved, like Keith David, Jack Kilmer (Val Kilmer's son), etc.  I rewatched this because I love some Shane Black movies (Iron Man 3 is fantastic and Kiss Kiss Bang Bang is one of my favorite movies) and everyone says such great things about this but I wasn't huge on it when I first watched it. Frankly it went down a little bit in my estimation this second time. The pacing gets interrupted for some pointless jokes, it tries to do all sorts of cute narrative stuff which doesn't make sense and so which doesn't earn the payoff, the Shane Black formula is as obvious as ever, and it doesn't do a lot of great stuff with the period setting. I don't know if Crowe is sleepwalking through his performance, but the movie definitely doesn't give him a ton to do. The soundtrack choices are way too obvious too. September? A Horse With No Name? Rock and Roll All Nite? Get Down On It? The Pina Colada Song? Soooo basic.  That's not to say it sucks. It's admirably grim even though it's basically a comedy noir, Ryan Gosling is loving hilarious, and it looks decent enough. Most of the jokes land. I just wish I loved it half as much as most people seem to love it. This time around I noticed something I missed the first time, which is that Val Kilmer's character from Kiss Kiss Bang Bang shows up in a much younger version, albeit not played by his son, confusingly. 77/100
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Dec 11, 2022 13:47
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Huh? Who?
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Dec 11, 2022 15:41
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Another comedy! The Cheap Detective (1978), dir. Robert Moore  Peter Falk is a Bogart-esque private eye in 1940s San Francisco. he gets drawn into a convoluted noir plot involving Madelie Kahn, Dom DeLuise, Louise Fletcher, Ann-Margert, Eileen Brennan, and a bunch of others.  This is a farce in the vein of a Zucker Abrahams Zucker movie. The plot is mostly a mashup of Casablanca and The Maltese Falcon, although references to other movies pop up sometimes. It starts out very promising aside from a pretty racist joke about Asians. Unfortunately the big laughs mostly die off after 15-30 minutes and the rest is kind of limp, if you ask me. Every once in a while something funny happens but I wouldn't put it among classics like Airplane or Top Secret!  The period setting is actually done pretty well, considering it's a comedy, so that's nice. And the very end is funny, so that's also nice. Other people seem to like this more than me, so maybe give it a try if you want a neo-noir comedy. 73/100
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Dec 12, 2022 13:26
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 Série noire (1978), dir. Alain Corneau  Patrick Dewaere is a door to door salesperson on the edges of Paris. He's married to Myriam Boyer. While trying to track down Andreas Katsulas, who owes him money, he runs across Jeanne Herviale, an old lady, and Marie Trintignant, her niece whom she basically prostitutes. Noir stuff ensues.  Pretty good. Dewaere brings a lot of character to the guy he plays, hitting the right mix of emotions and characteristics that the role calls for. Trintignant does a nice job with the tough role of a mostly silent person. The plot is simple but compelling and the ending is pretty great. There's no music aside from diegetic  It wouldn't be a French movie if it didn't have a nude teenager, so, congratulations France for keeping it real I guess. The protagonist and his wife live in a nice lovely apartment although it cleans up pretty well. 86/100
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Dec 13, 2022 14:53
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 Sharky's Machine (1981), dir. Burt Reynolds  Burt Reynolds directs and stars as the titular Sharky, a Atlanta police officer who gets demoted from narcotics to vice when he fucks up a bust. Vice is just supposed to be a boring job where he arrests hookers but along with his fellow vice officers Charles Durning, Brian Keith, and Bernie Casey, he finds himself involved in a big to-do featuring Vittoria Gassman, some kind of criminal; Earl Holliman, a candidate for governor; and Rachel Ward in her movie debut.  It's okay. There's a lot of good and a lot of bad, and although usually I can overlook the basd stuff in favor of the good, in this case it was about the time when some ninjas kicked the poo poo out of a drug dealer that I decided the balance of good vs. bad in this movie was a little lopsided. The good: Reynolds directs some performances in a sort of naturalistic sort of way, with overlapping dialogue and so on, and his own performance is pretty decent. Ward also jumps off the screen. The bad: general ridiculousness, including a car exploding from gunfire about 5 minutes in, the ninjas, etc.  I'm glad we're in the 80s because this is one of my favorite movie decades. We get (for instance) a very 80s apartment. Look at this dining room! There's a bit of neat helicopter photography and it's nice to see Atlanta standing in for Atlanta rather than Wakanda and Sokovia and Asgard and so on. I swear the area under the bridge or whatever is in the above picture also showed up in some Mission: Impossible movie but I dunno. 73/100
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Dec 14, 2022 12:02
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Rachel Ward is in the sadly overlooked Fortress, a cheapie Australian thriller film in the mid-80s (not the Christopher Lambert one!) that played relentlessly on HBO in the late 80s. She is a really good in it. In fact I don't think I've ever seen her do a bad job in anything. I haven't seen Sharky's Machine - I'll remedy that. Thanks Tycho!
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Dec 14, 2022 16:59
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We previously saw her in this thread in After Dark, My Sweet where I tried and failed not to perv out about how pretty she is.
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Dec 14, 2022 17:03
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Megaman's Jockstrap posted:Rachel Ward is in the sadly overlooked Fortress, a cheapie Australian thriller film in the mid-80s (not the Christopher Lambert one!) that played relentlessly on HBO in the late 80s. Not to be a party pooper here, but Sharky's Machine is terrible, and I gave it an enthusiastic chance. And it seems Tycho's review wasn't a big recommendation anyway. It's not even a neo-noir or anything, it's just your average shlocky bit of yarn. Done less well than you'd even expect. Everybody digs different stuff, but I'm just saying there's only so much time on earth, and I don't know why Sharky's Machine would be one you'd watch before some other 4000, at least if somebody warned you. So I'm gonna be that guy and say, hey, Sharky's Machine, that wasn't good. Lightheartedly, feel free to watch, I just felt responsible to say something. For comparison, coincidentally I did enjoy Fortress. For something along the lines of the era and shlocky vibe of Sharky's Machine that I actually did enjoy, I the Jury (82) is pretty fun. And can't go wrong with Sea of Love. Heavy Metal fucked around with this message at 22:52 on Dec 14, 2022 |
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Dec 14, 2022 22:49
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Sharky's Machine is the kind of film I'd want to die on a spacestation to.
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Dec 14, 2022 23:30
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Heavy Metal posted:It's not even a neo-noir or anything, it's just your average shlocky bit of yarn.
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Dec 15, 2022 05:06
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A prank? They list it on there as "Crime-Action-Police Detective Film", so that's probably all it takes. Everybody can make their own noir lines in this crazy town. It looks like an outlier to me since I think most of their 80s and 90s picks seem reasonable, but everyone has different takes. By whatever criteria they chose to include Sharky, you could include a lot more films than they did, some a better fit I think. A Better Tomorrow and The Killer would be cool inclusions for example. Heavy Metal fucked around with this message at 06:30 on Dec 15, 2022 |
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Dec 15, 2022 06:13
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Yeah well I say it's noir. Against All Odds (1981), dir. Taylor Hackford  Jeff Bridges is an LA football player whose shoulder injury leads to his getting fired from his team. He sort of half-accepts a job from James Woods, a bookie, to go find Woods's paramour, Rachel Ward, who stabbed him, but Woods isn't mad about that. Also interested in finding Woods are her stepfather, classic noir star Richard Widmark, and her mother, Jane Greer, who starred in Out of the Past, one of the greatest noirs of all time and also the movie that this one is a loose remake of.  I love this one. Lots of great actors, a plot grabbed from one of the great noirs, some fun Mexico locations (and some classic LA stuff too, like the Capitol Records building which shows up in a lot of the exterior shots), real estate intrigue, and an extremely 80s atmosphere, including cocaine, [ur=https://i.imgur.com/VH3EXD1.jpg]Kid Creole[/url] and the Coconuts, and synthy music.  There are two dogs; one who hangs out with Woods and the other an imposing Doberman who loves to growl. In the background of a scene there's a monkey I didn't get a shot of. 88/100
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Dec 15, 2022 11:44
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If Richard Widmark is in it you can call it noir.
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Dec 15, 2022 11:51
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TychoCelchuuu posted:
I watched The Drowning Pool this weekend. It's pretty good. Everyone was pretty well cast, I liked using Joanne Woodward (Newman's IRL wife) as the old flame. Melanie Griffith was in it, which led me to look up a couple of things. She was 17 when they filmed it, which I thought might be her first role. Looking it up, I was wrong. She was in a Gene Hackman movie called Night Moves when she was 16. The Hackman movie is another detective movie. And it's apparently great according to critics. IMDB Trivia posted:Melanie Griffith was 16 years old during filming. She had one brief nude scene and a second very extended nude scene.  I love Hackman, but not 100% sure on watching this now.
AFewBricksShy fucked around with this message at 13:25 on Dec 15, 2022 |
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Dec 15, 2022 13:17
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Night Moves is stupendous. One of the great neo-noirs. It's on both the Paste and Slate lists of top 100 noirs. The Griffith stuff is definitely skeevy though.
TychoCelchuuu fucked around with this message at 13:57 on Dec 15, 2022 |
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Dec 15, 2022 13:55
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Rewatched Stroszek the other day and realized it's basically a neo-noir.
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Dec 15, 2022 16:42
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TychoCelchuuu posted:Yeah well I say it's noir. I'll read posts about any smoky mediocre 80s cop movie, I was just sharing my take on this one. Nobody leans on Sharky's Machine apparently.
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Dec 15, 2022 19:25
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TychoCelchuuu posted:Against All Odds (1981), dir. Taylor Hackford The film has the most memorable car race I've seen: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BYmgLO16ul0
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Dec 15, 2022 22:59
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 Mike's Murder (1984), dir. James Bridges  Debra Winger, whom we last saw in Black Widow two years ago, lives in LA. The movie is about her relationship with the titular Mike, Mark Keyloun, her on-again off-again boyfriend/gently caress buddy/"it's complicated" who gets loosely involved in the drug trade, resulting in his titular murder.  Very good. The movie takes a little while to get to the murder, and Keyloun is not my favorite, especially since you have to buy that Winger was into him enough for her to spend the rest of the movie having feelings about his death. But he's not too bad, and he plays the complexity of the character rather well, and anyways eventually he gets loving murdered and the rest of it is mostly Winger moping around, which is actually much better than it sounds. Especially if 80s LA is one of your favorite things to see on screen, which is the case for me.  It also helps that I think Debra Winger is extremely gorgeous, although I'm sorry to say it since I'm doing my best not to be a lech in these reviews. Also helping the film is that, like our last Winger film, it's an 80s neo-noir with queer undertones (although actually in this one they're overtones) so it really can't lose in my eyes. Bonus points for opening with one of my favorite production company logos, and for having this guy - that's how people dressed in the 80s it seems. Apparently the original cut of this movie was in reverse chronological order, which is very intriguing. Some people who have seen it report that it was better. I wonder if some day I'll ever get to see that. The original cut also had a different score, which must've been better than the one hastily cobbled together for the recut, which has basically one motif. There's a small dog. Since our last Winger film had four pictures I've decided to do that again here. 85/100 
TychoCelchuuu fucked around with this message at 12:54 on Dec 16, 2022 |
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Dec 16, 2022 12:51
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 The Bedroom Window (1987), dir. Curtis Hanson  Steve Guttenberg is having an affair with Isabelle Huppert, who is married to Guttenberg's boss, Paul Shenar. Huppert witnesses an assault on Elizabeth McGovern from Guttenberg's titular bedroom window, and Guttenberg comes forward as the witness so that nobody will find out Huppert was at his place. Obviously this turns out to be a terrible idea and complications ensue. Also we're in Baltimore.  I don't love it. For a decent chunk of the movie the sheer idiocy of the plan, and watching it play out in its predictably unworkable outcome, is kind of tedious. Around the halfway point or whatever the movie does start to get much more interesting, but it's still never great, mostly because Hupert (who is of course a great actor) isn't really doing a great job here, and neither is Guttenberg. McGovern is doing better but her character is kind of uninteresting. It's 80s enough for me not to hate it but I can't say it's winning any awards in the Noiries (the award show for noirs I just invented).  Wallace Shawn has a nice one-scene part where he plays a lawyer. He and Guttenberg were also in a movie together 33 years later, Rifkin's Festival, and that movie loving blows. One of the worst I've ever seen. There's a nice 80s apartment and a cool 80s Edgar Allen Poe themed bar so that's nice, although Guttenberg's got a swastika vase in the apartment so I'm not sure I can condone that. For the third movie in a row I'm thirsting over a woman - McGovern is very pretty in this, if you ask me! This is our last 80s movie so hopefully that's it from me for a while in terms of creepily leering at women. 72/100
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Dec 17, 2022 14:36
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   Split Second (1992), dir. Tony Maylam and Ian Sharp  It's 2008. Global warming has submerged London in about 6 inches of water and rats have taken over. Rutger Hauer is a completely insane homicide detective who lives on coffee with tons of sugar and chocolate. Hauer is hunting the serial killer who killed his partner years ago and also rips out hearts. Helping Hauer is Neil Duncan, his newly-assigned partner. Also in the movie are Kim Cattrall, Hauer's former lover who was also his partner's wife, and Pete Postlethwaite, who is some cop who doesn't like Hauer for some reason.  In addition to being a neo-noir this is a sci-fi movie, and a horror movie, a bit of a comedy, and an action movie. It's truly terrible. In fact it sucks so much that it ticks over (just barely) into "so bad it's good" territory for me. The score is trying its best to be Blade Runner plus The Terminator but it's nowhere near any of that. The production design is a lot of "make London dark and wet" and nothing really interesting. The plot makes zero sense and Hauer is only hamming it up half as often as you'd like, although he does ham it up a bit.  Hauer chain smokes cigars and he lights them with a blowtorch which is kind of funny. There's a sad attempt to rip off Blade Runner's exotic dancers which doesn't work. At one point Hauer screams at a dog, calling it a dickhead and accusing it of having seen the serial killer, which is great. Hauer's apartment is a huuuuge shithole and it's infested with pigeons which is pretty funny. And the morgue set looks nice. Still, basically it sucks. I don't think there are any Hauer superfans who want to watch all his stuff - he's been in too much poo poo for that - but maybe for a Cattrall superfan? Aside from that, I only recommend it to the "so bad it's good" enjoyers out there. It feels like something out of Garth Merenghi's Darkplace. 58/100 TychoCelchuuu fucked around with this message at 16:48 on Dec 18, 2022 |
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Dec 18, 2022 16:46
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 はなび/Hana-bi (Fireworks) (1997), dir. Takeshi Kitano  Takeshi Kitano is a former police officer whose partner Ren Osugi was partially paralyzed when he was shot by a criminal. Kitano's wife Kayoko Kishimoto has leukemia, and their daughter died a while ago. And that's just for starters. Dude's not having a great time.  As good as its reputation! This and Sonatine are Kitano's "sad guy mopes around" movies and this one has even less plot than Sonatine. It's mostly mood. The spareness is enhanced by Kitano's performance as a relatively expressionless guy, helped somewhat by the fact that he was in a motorcycle accident which partially paralyzed him.  It's hard to know what to talk about because it's such a spare movie. It has a nice soundtrack and although it rarely looks gorgeous, it always looks great. There are some cats which is great. 87/100
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Dec 19, 2022 13:33
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Nice, I mentioned Hana-bi in another thread, an all timer for me. Great movie
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Dec 19, 2022 23:07
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Just watched Double Indemnity and A Witness For The Prosecution. I loved both but Double Indemnity had been so hyped up it was almost impossible to live up to expectations and yet did. Up next: Suspicion and The Killing.
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Dec 20, 2022 15:45
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 Croupier (1998), dir. Mike Hodges  Clive Owen is an aspiring writer and titular croupier in London. He has a girlfriend, Gina McKee, and he also ends up involved with two other coupiers at his casino, Kate Hardie and Paul Reynolds, and a gambler, Alex Kingston. Sometimes he gets a phone call from his dad Nicholas Ball. Noir stuff happens.  Pretty good if you ask me. There's a narration by Owen which is slightly whatever but it makes a lot of sense as the voice of his character. The plot is pretty straightforward and minimal and it's more of a character study of Owen and how he bounces off of the people around him. There's a deep bleakness and nihilism running through the film but it never tips over into ridiculousness or anything.  We're very painfully in the 90s, what with Owen's terrible blonde hair and suspenders, lovely hat, etc. I mean just look at this getup. Eww. Luckily he goes back to black hair partway through the film. 83/100
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Dec 20, 2022 16:37
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TychoCelchuuu posted:
I remember seeing this in theaters when it came out and I liked it then, I should give it a rewatch sometime.
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Dec 20, 2022 19:30
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Any recommendations for Xmas/new year adjacent noir? Sunset Boulevard is the obvious one.
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Dec 20, 2022 22:03
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| # ? May 14, 2024 07:28 |
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Night of the Hunter and The Thin Man. For neo-noir I remember liking The Ice Harvest, but looking it up the reviews are not good.
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Dec 20, 2022 22:10
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